He places the silencer on the gun and rams it into his belt. He takes out the spare wheel, which is under the box of weapons, and rolls it all the way down to the birches that loom over the edge of the reservoir. He rests the wheel against a tree, and walks back to the spot where the Portuguese and his trusted men are standing.
He shoots the improvised target three times, from an approximate distance of twenty meters. One shot after another. Steady pulse. The first two bullets go through the tire. The third deflates the inner tube, but impacts near the aluminum rim.
Pedro Vargas stares at the Portuguese with ire, rubs his fingerprints off the butt of the gun with his sleeve and hands over the weapon to the man with a double eyebrow.
“Star. You won’t find better guns. Can you do it then?”
The Portuguese stare at each other, they seem to be in doubt.
The man with the double eyebrow signs his agreement in a hoarse voice, grumbling:
“Okay. But we’ll need another spare wheel, just in case.”
Motherfucker, thinks Pedro Vargas to himself, but immediately feels for the medallion of the Holy Virgin of Vera Cruz inside his shirt, asks Her forgiveness, and decides to calm down.
He remembers Ivan Lendl, the Czech tennis player. He who knows how to control himself and never loses his temper. Slavic blood. He’d like some of that.
Ever since he made the decision of entering the primaries to become his party’s candidate, Fontecha was up to his neck in work. Thankfully he could count on Belen, his secretary.
Belen was a rara avis. She had a sort of aura. Was it just the energy of youth, in the eyes of a mature man? That was very possible, yes, but Fontecha wanted to believe that Belen’s aura was something more than an ephemeral biological springtime that would eventually wither away. He had to believe in something, didn’t he? She had just joined the party, spoke four languages fluently, and was at the top of her class at the University of Deusto. Her only defect was to have a degree in law, too ordinary a degree for such an outstanding person. Like the majority of people who studied in Deusto, she liked to specify that she’d studied “financial law,” as if somehow hoping to simultaneously draw maximum mileage out of her years of study and distinguish herself from the mediocre hordes of usual shysters. An elitist side? Was she a classist, perhaps? Maybe. After graduating with one of the ten best academic records of her year, she did a masters degree in journalism and was immediately hired as an assistant to the chief of communications of the Basque Autonomous Region. Until the primaries were over, she would be his right hand. Having found such an absolute jewel, Fontecha harbored hopes of their walking the long road ahead together.
They were very relaxed, it was cease-fire time again, and, since they’d learned that those periods of peace didn’t last forever, it was their duty to enjoy the interlude, to the point that they almost forgot the bodyguards that walked discreetly behind them at a distance of two hundred meters. A summer that lasts forever is no longer a summer.
“We have an interview. Local news, nothing much. The journalist’s name is Idoia Erro. She worked for the leftist Basque press in her youth, but she’s been in the Bilbao offices of El Mundo for a few years now.”
Fontecha’s memory wasn’t good, but bitterness is a very good fixative and that name was branded into his memory. Idoia Erro. The article that journalist had written about him was very present in his mind, as it had provoked an argument with Patricia. After so many years together, he never managed to get Patricia to stop buying El Mundo and start reading El País instead.
“You’ll have to clarify to the journalists that I am not exactly a cardiologist, but a cardiovascular surgeon…if this is how rigorous they are with all their news…”
“I assume that her idealization of the struggles of the past must have dissolved somewhat, but you’d better be careful, just in case.”
Pedro Vargas was an old-school man. Not only because he believed in God and divine punishment. But also because he believed in loyalty and revenge.
It was the pull of an old bond of loyalty that put him on the road to Palencia, with the oxygen tank as copilot; even though he had to take the mask to his nose and mouth every now and then, he knew he would arrive there safe and sound. The Virgin of Vera Cruz would carry him. He had an important meeting there, the kind that reassures one that they’ll reach their destination safe and sound. Before entering the freeway, he took a side road and stopped for a moment by the reservoir. The place had hardly changed. The birches were still standing there. Star bullet casings must still be buried somewhere there too. Without leaving the car, he moved over to the passenger seat and held the oxygen tank on his lap. He lowered the window, however, and breathed the air outside instead of resorting to the support of his oxygen tank. Contrary to his expectations, the clean air was not enough. He had to put the mask back on in a hurry, or risk asphyxiation.
What was that stop at the reservoir about? There was nothing there anymore. Calm waters, perturbing thoughts. And, despite everything, that place meant a lot to him. It brought him lots of memories. It soothed him and it made him nervous. Beretta and Benelli.
He arrived in Quintanaluengos before nightfall. He found his brother pulling weeds. They hugged. He would have gladly told him: “You’re too old to be pulling weeds.”
“Why didn’t you warn me you were coming? How are you? Let me fix you something to eat…”
He told him politely that he didn’t have much of an appetite, but he wasn’t able to refuse a beautiful slice of melon.
“My son-in-law brought it just yesterday from Murcia. It’s perfectly ripe.”
Fresh and sweet: it’d been a long time since Vargas had taken such pleasure eating anything.
“Why didn’t you bring your son along? It’s crazy to have undertaken the journey on your own in your state. How long are you planning to stay?”
“In this world, do you mean?” Vargas was tempted to answer. But he didn’t come to see his brother very often, he didn’t want to be an asshole.
“You shouldn’t be driving. I’m alone until tomorrow afternoon. If you want, Nuria can take you home…”
Pedro Vargas said no.
“More melon?”
“Maybe tonight…”
“No melon at night: Por la mañana, oro; por la tarde, plata; y por la noche, mata.” The old Spanish refrain says that melon is gold in the morn, silver at noon, and deadly at night. “Don’t you remember our old man’s sayings?”
Old sayings, of course, Pedro Vargas knows a lot of those: Only a selected few, the finest, like in a drugstore. Como en botica.
“I remember many things about the old man. For example, why he became a civil guard.”
“So that everything is in its right place.”
“Exactly. So that everything is in the right place.” Don Emilio here, Don Emilio there, everyone knew Emilio Vargas and held him in great esteem; everyone called their father by his first name.
“Ours is a small town.”
“Small town, big hell.”
“He never shot once. Not even into the air.”
That was a stab in the back. They had never spoken about the matter face-to-face, but his brother knew something about the war in the North in the eighties. He didn’t agree with the methods they used. His son didn’t either; he was like his uncle in that regard. He felt an uneasy itch in realizing that no one in his family was ever able to put themselves in his shoes.
“I would say that our father…mistook being a civil guard with being a night watchman,” Pedro Vargas scoffed.
“You didn’t however.”
“When you were a child, didn’t you want to be like him? Never? When we were kids…what did it mean to you, to be a civil guard? They hadn’t yet invented the ‘northern syndrome’ back then.”
“But Franco died when you joined the corps, Pedro…you could have chosen a different life.”
“One like yours, you mean?”
He’s not able to say t
hat. His brother was never enthused with Pedro’s decision to become a civil guard. He was always involved in farming and farmers’ unions, and never felt tempted to leave Palencia, not even when it looked like his whole family might die of hunger. His cooperative went bankrupt twice, and on both occasions Pedro lent him money. Not to mention his daughter Nuria’s business studies.
“When I became a civil guard, do you think I was thinking of Franco?”
“You don’t regret it, then?”
“We each live our lives. We do what we can.”
They were both in agreement about those two last sentences. Either one of them could have been said by Pedro or his brother. But the lack of regret had different nuances for each of them.
Vargas went to pray to the Virgin of Vera Cruz three times. For a moment, he thought that her image looked like Ivan Lendl. That kind of thing happened to him every now and then, ever since he stopped taking medication for his mental illness. Fuck that. He was already stuffed to the gills with cancer drugs.
Don Gregorio received him with arms wide open. Pedro was generous back in the day, when the church bell fell and money was needed to buy a new one. That donation by Pedro Vargas had been anonymous. It was the money he’d had to spare after buying the house in Nerja. That was back in the eighties too, there wasn’t as much control as there is now for money seized in the war against drugs. Or for church bills and donations either, apparently. The taxation of the church was still mysterious nowadays, however. Even though the affluence of parishioners had declined quite a lot, in the end, the business that had suffered the least in the past few years was Don Gregorio’s. The priest didn’t take long to notice the oxygen tank on wheels that Vargas dragged along everywhere.
“It’s affected your lungs, am I right?”
Vargas had decided that he wouldn’t have one more puncture, X-ray, or scan. His last visits to the doctors had only confirmed that new territories had been conquered by metastasis. He had lost the battle but, unfortunately, he couldn’t, like a marshal, order the retreat of the men under his command and abandon the battlefield. The Star, the Beretta, the Benelli semiautomatics were of no use here. Because the battlefield was his own body. It was too easy to think that the expansion of that crab he carried in his organism was a consequence of all the bad deeds of his life: God’s punishment, Soto and Zeberio rotting his entrails, two tiny young men, two skeletons spreading poison around his intestines and lungs. No, things weren’t that simple, but the human mind sometimes operates in such simple ways…
Vargas was dumbstruck when, as he was asking the doctor to up his morphine dosage, he heard his wife’s words:
“This is torture.”
The truth always comes out, in the end.
Vargas told the priest about those days in October 1983, but not like he’d done before, the way someone tells himself “you did what you had to do,” but in a completely different way. The way he remembered it, without forgetting any details, without taking the trouble to justify himself. In a way he had never told himself the story, surprised by the easy way in which words and sentences got together and came out of his mouth. He repeated Rodrigo Mesa’s words to him too, without mentioning his name.
“They look pitiful, we can’t leave them like that: make them disappear.”
Every now and then he’d take the oxygen mask to his mouth and absorb one more gulp of air from the tank, which was truthfully a kind of storeroom of last gasps that offered no certainty as to when the last gasp might arrive. The countdown had started. The last gasp might be more than one. How far were the days when he used to be able to play five tennis sets without breaking a sweat. All that pretend McEnroe fury: the ball was in, close, very close.
The priest listened to his story, and both stayed silent for a while.
“These things you’re telling me are terrible, Varguitas.”
He took the mask to his face, although this time it wasn’t because his lungs were begging for air. He took the mask to his face, not as a carrier of oxygen, but as a mask of disguise.
Telling terrible stories to compassionate priests. What was it that made that possible at the turn of the twenty-first century? The answer was very simple: consciously or not, whoever goes to confession knows that no institution has committed more atrocities than the church. It is much easier to narrate your barbaric deeds to those who’ve committed similar ones, safe in the knowledge that the institution you face is much more bloodthirsty than yours will ever be. Why hadn’t people realized that yet? The savagery they indulged in, the Inquisition, the dictatorships; these aspects made up the church’s largest chunk of moral capital: its way of functioning was cryptic and opaque, that’s why it still attracted dubious, dark people and their testimonies. They made business out of secrets. It had the pull of dark holes. The moment the church became a transparent, democratic institution, its power would disappear.
Vargas was calm, at peace. He felt relieved, kneeling down in the wooden confessional. It was too hot outside, but there, in the coolness, his lungs didn’t demand the oxygen mask as often. He could have stayed there all afternoon, in the half-light, awaiting his sentence. He was slightly curious, in truth: so many years had passed since his last confession, he hadn’t “truthfully” confessed in the longest time – Beretta and Benelli – and he didn’t know if the priest would tell him ego te absolvo, or if he would just bless him with his hand. He had no idea what sort of penitence the compassionate priest would think up for him; he didn’t even know if he would take pity on him, seeing him in such a deplorable state.
Vargas remembered his honeymoon to Italy, how during the visit to Milan’s Duomo they were astonished to see, inside the enormous cathedral, dozens of confessionals lined up next to one another, each one more elegant than the last. You could take your confession in dozens of different languages. That was a true multilingual secret processor. Next to all the small confessionals they saw a bigger one: penitenza maggiore. Vargas and his wife joked about what grave sin they’d need to commit in order to go in.
Now he knew it.
They say that, in the end, truth always comes out. But most of the times it happens too late, when there is no use to it. So it was like the melon: por la mañana, oro; por la tarde, plata; y por la noche, mata.
They say that truth always ends up coming out, and that, generally, it does so because the person who’s been hiding it for years confesses; the secret is revealed because the person who’s kept it wants to reveal it, and not because of the arduous research of the person who’s been digging after it, but because the person in possession of the secret no longer wants to be its keeper. We give ourselves away, after all. Most detective novels are based on a falsehood, therefore. They are not credible at all. A spontaneous confession is always more important than rational inquiry.
“Their families should know where their bones are,” the priest whispered to him, and Vargas understood he’d heard his penitence.
What drove Fontecha to start that relationship? Had he, though, started it? Did Belen? It wasn’t easy to explain what’d happened.
The long work hours they’d spent together, the nights away from home, in the same hotel but in different rooms…and also, especially, those intimate moments that occurred during the long hours in each other’s company; long, boring hours, neutral and flavorless, devoid of any intention of slipping into a physical or sentimental relationship; moments that unexpectedly brought their professional relationship into the private sphere. One of the stories he told himself – a lie, therefore, in all likelihood – was about the time the special correspondent from The New York Times interviewed him. The interview was long, although when it came to writing the article the journalist only awarded him four lines; Belen was his translator. She didn’t just translate his words; like interpreters do, she whispered the interviewer’s juicy questions in his ear, as she sat next to him on the sofa. That closeness, the girl’s thigh pressed hard against his, her lips in his ear, the murmur of her voice,
that’s what ended up hypnotizing him.
Fontecha thought he could spend all the hours in the world like that, like those horse whisperers, he as the horse and Belen as the whisperer. He was excited by having her so close, her perfume of white petals, the scent of the moisturizing lotion she put on her face. He was nervous before the interview, and surprised when Belen sat so close, not only their thighs and waists touching, but also their shoulders, without qualms. As the girl moved her hands while explaining the questions, Fontecha stared at her fingers intermittently, trying to avoid looking into her eyes all the time – as this made him even more nervous. He wanted to let her know that she had his attention, that he understood the questions, yes, but what Fontecha really wanted was to hold those hands, to caress them, to fuse into that fine skin, that soft fabric. Everything was very professional, just professional, pure professionalism, an impersonal exercise in simultaneous translation; they only spoke of politics, of Basque society, of the passion of Basque nationalists and Fontecha’s critical perspective on that passion; and, despite that, Fontecha hoped the questioning would never end: “Ask me long questions, please, I want to keep hearing Belen translate into my ear.”
Once the interview in the hotel lobby was over, they spoke about it in a room they were sharing at last; about how Fontecha’s pulse quickened just by thinking that she could probably see his ear hair as she translated the questions, about how Belen was worried that her breath might be disagreeable to Fontecha, “as if ears were noses in disguise, capable of sensing smells…” Eventually, after the heterotopia of hotels, the day came to visit Belen’s house, a huge step, of the vertigo-inducing kind; they went in through the garage, fearing someone might see them, very late at night; but no one saw them, and they felt safe in each other’s arms, a clandestine hideout, a refuge. And her house was a simple house, very domestic, the house of someone who’s just stopped being a student and doesn’t have enough money yet to be entrapped by designer furniture – apparently, wages in the communications section of the party weren’t very generous. Ikea furniture and mugs, nothing to do with financial law: here was normal, everyday Belen, echoing the clothes she wore, in a loft-like attic space, a bohemian space, even, it could be said, and the tenderness she inspired in him as he watched her apologize over and over, shyly, about her place being quite tiny, not much for Fontecha, “my place is very very normal,” how many times she must have repeated that apology, not knowing that Fontecha probably felt more comfortable there than in his own home, that it helped him relive the intermittent memories of his student days, that her place rejuvenated him almost as much as the velvet of her skin, that he got goose bumps watching Belen ride him, hold his penis and caress it as if it were hers, transformed suddenly into an impossible transvestite, “It’s been years since anyone masturbated me.”
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