And later, things that are better avoided when occasional lovers want to continue being lovers: the risk of knowing the daily routines of the other, the habit of preparing simple meals together that freed up time for sex, the fact of helping her fold her clothes, of learning to open and close Belen’s jars and zippers, whispering things that made her laugh into her ear, it’s the New York Times’s special correspondent’s fault, of the words translated into his ear.
To know that risk, and to fall for it. The risk of the fall, and the certainty that you’ll have the chance to fall again.
When he read that they’d identified the bones of Soto and Zeberio in Cartagena, Rodrigo Mesa called Vargas immediately. But he didn’t pick up. Then, overwhelmed by impatience, he tried Fontecha directly.
Rodrigo Mesa’s was the last voice Fontecha wanted to hear in this world.
“Have you seen the papers?”
“They bring dogs sometimes too.”
“Dogs?”
“Yes, to train them.”
“Well, they can’t bring them anymore. No more dogs, no more motorbikes, no more tennis matches for a while. Is that clear?”
“Rodrigo…”
“Have you seen the papers?” he heard again.
Javier Fontecha didn’t need to unfold the newspaper to know what it said, although he’d read the news soon enough, diagonally, like someone who knows everything, only to check how much it departed from the version he’d already written in his mind, and, especially and above all, to make sure that his first name and family name didn’t appear anywhere.
They didn’t, but – the pathways of the mind are inscrutable – that didn’t make Javier Fontecha feel any calmer.
“I want a good attorney,” Rodrigo Mesa told him threateningly, “not someone like the clown I got the last time.”
“Not over the phone, Rodrigo…”
“Where should we meet then?”
As soon as he arrived home, Patricia noticed his pallor.
“Did something happen, Javier?”
Since they had declared the cease-fire over, Patricia paid more attention to her husband, his ins and outs, the unexpected things; she even paid more attention to the news on the radio. She always checked her clock when there was a TV nearby and turned the radio on every o’clock to listen to the first minute of the news, to make sure they hadn’t killed her husband or anyone else: a tsunami in Malaysia, an earthquake in Haiti, the labor agreement threatened, avian flu rampaging through Asia. “It’s okay, I’m sorry, but my body requires a sigh of relief.” Certainly: the diameter of the catastrophes that affect us is very limited, and it shrinks further with the passing of time. They haven’t killed Javier today either, or, at most, another day without an attack, she’d tell herself; and her heart – the functioning of which she knew so well, with its valves and its ischemias and rocky electrocardiograms – would return to its usual vital signs, her cell phone would no longer be a time bomb, it would stop feeling like a hand grenade in her pocket, ready to explode in her carrier’s hands, to become, once again, the usual message-carrying implement: a fun object with which to send and receive frivolous messages. She had a bad time every time she had to wait for Javier, especially when he attended public events, although deep down she knew that those occasions were really the safest; that they obliterated – “God, what kind of a verb is that?” – most of them early in the morning, when they expected it the least, because of some tiny error or some minimal relaxation of the security measures, bodyguards and all, with car bombs, “obliterate them like rats”; and she knew that little could be done, that all that would be left would be hearts torn to shreds, that it would be impossible to restart them afterward with a spark, that there was no replacement valve or special alloy metal that would revive them. Patricia was used to seeing blood in her job: transfusions, an unexpected spurt of blood, latex gloves, face masks and hospital coats that ended up in the garbage after the most complicated surgeries; only rarely patients would die in the operating room, hieratic masks impossible to revive, hard to detect aneurysms, miracles weren’t always possible. It was part of their profession: certain smells, certain images and certain gestures, precise and unerring, quite mechanical, from having repeated them over and over again. The unbelievable technological advances of the past few years had forced her to continuously learn new practices and new gestures – witness to this, in their home library and next to the pile of novels Javier liked, were the thick surgery manuals that filled the shelves, together with the articles on research carried out in the United States and Australia – but blood will always be blood, and she was used to the scalpel’s precise trace, to the predetermined cut, to feeling sternums with her fingertips. All that had nothing to do, however, with the possibility of finding her husband bleeding to death on the sidewalk. Although she had never confessed this to him, she thought about it often when Javier kissed her goodbye, his last kiss before leaving the house. They changed their schedules and daily routine, thanks to the fact that at least their children were in university or already married now – each had their own children from previous marriages, in another lifetime. They congratulated themselves on having had their children so soon, at least that way only they needed to swallow that bitter pill. A lesser evil. A lesser of a big, big evil, however.
“Did something happen, Javier?”
Loving someone means not throwing in their faces the sudden changes of direction and switching of vital coordinates we’ve undergone for them; how often have relationships been ruined by a blowout of reproaches: “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t mind, but you, you don’t realize that if it weren’t for you…I said no because of you, I stopped going because of you, I gave it up for you and the kids, don’t you realize?” To love someone – Patricia often thinks – is never confessing to them that you gave up the after-work conversations you used to enjoy so much, that you have abandoned the beer you used to drink with neurologists and the chief plastic surgeon from the polyclinic. Why? To reach the car before seven, and not at seven fifteen, because you want to hear the seven o’clock news on the radio, sitting in your newly purchased car, surrounded by the smell of leather seats. And to love is also to pray when you are not a person of faith, while you stare at your cell phone as if it were an oracle, hoping not to hear your husband’s name being mentioned in the news.
“Did something happen, Javier?”
“I love him; I loved him and I got into the habit of living with him; later the habit gained weight and the love lost it; but you can love a habit too, right?” So much literature, so much fiction, so much cheap psychoanalysis has been written as a result of that simple equation: how to coordinate habit and hormones, how to blend reason and passion into one without self-annihilation, how to accept the battles that are fought and lost within oneself, and keep walking down the street with dignity and your head held high, with a look and an attitude we might have found ridiculous in ourselves a few years ago.
“Did something happen, Javier?”
Habit has given her that, the ability to read Javier’s face as if it were the palm of her own hand; it happens every year and it’s the only thing that comes with the passing of time we are thankful for: there comes a point when all the types of people and faces we know, we’ve seen somewhere else before, in someone else’s features. Nothing seems new and, from a certain point onward, it’s even relaxing that there is nothing new, thought Patricia, and that’s why I know that my husband’s pallor means something, and I’m worried and want to know what it means, because he’s alive, here, and with me, and because the goodbye kiss he gave me this morning – I didn’t know it then, but I do now – wasn’t the last one.
Javier told her that no, there was nothing to worry about, but Patricia knew that it wasn’t true and that Javier would end up confessing.
“I’ve something to tell you, Patricia.”
“She needed six stitches, but your wife is all right.”
“Thank you so much, but…
she’s not my wife, actually, we work together.”
The doctor stared at him from above the rim of his glasses, which seemed to be a low prescription for nearsightedness.
“How did she injure herself?”
“We were fucking like crazy, you should have heard her screams. This woman makes me feel twenty years younger.”
“She slipped and fell backward, and hit the bedside table.” He realized then that he hadn’t agreed on a version of events with Belen. That he didn’t know what she’d told the doctor. He panicked. The hemorrhage was considerable, he’d made an ice pack and put it on the back of her neck and they ran to the ER without thinking of anything else.
The doctor didn’t say anything and wrote something down on a notebook he was carrying.
“In these kinds of cases…we have to write a report, as you well know.”
“As you well know.”
Of course he knew. Javier Fontecha tried to ensure his voice wasn’t trembling too much.
“I understand.”
Fontecha would have never imagined, when they brought forward the law against domestic violence, that it would affect him like that one day.
“You can visit her if you want, we’ve given her painkillers. It doesn’t look like she has any blood clots, but it’s better that she spend the night here.”
Poor Belen felt guilty, as guilty as if it’d been her who designed the sharp edge of her bedside table.
“Are you all right?”
“My skin feels very tight, but it’s not painful. They had to cut quite a chunk of my hair to sew the stitches more easily. I…I don’t know what to say, Javi. I’m so sorry…”
That face like a frightened squirrel. He wanted to approach the subject with tact, but Fontecha was too worried.
“The doctors…did they ask you what happened?”
“I told them the truth…in other words…that I was cleaning and hit my head on the wardrobe…”
“On the wardrobe?”
Suddenly he realized it was no joke; the damage that stupidity could cost Fontecha was greater than he’d anticipated.
“Did they ask you too? What did you tell them?”
Fontecha did a mental comparison of Belen’s and his versions of events: “She slipped and fell backward”; “I was cleaning and hit my head…”; it wasn’t the same, but they could be complementary versions. Although one of them had said “bedside table” and the other, “wardrobe.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“What were we thinking about, Javi? You shouldn’t have come inside the hospital with me…if this causes you trouble, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Rest up and let the wound heal, forget everything else.”
Javier Fontecha didn’t know how to say goodbye. He would have kissed her on the lips, but there were nurses around. The doctor could come in at any moment too. He squeezed her hand, caressing all her fingers with his thumb. Belen answered by gripping his thumb hard.
“They’ll send you home tomorrow morning, it’s nothing.”
Belen took Fontecha’s hand to her lips.
“I love you, Javier. Go home now, before things get even more complicated.”
“I love you, go home.” His lover spoke the first three words; the last two, his secretary.
Fontecha gave her one last kiss on the forehead, and, like an arrow, the memory of that woman’s naked body crossed his mind, how they’d embraced two hours before, the savage sex in her bed; he remembered how, because of his demented desire to hold her in his arms and watch her breasts bounce in front of him, he’d made Belen turn around so she’d ride on top of him, changing positions over and over again without it ever slipping out, and how Belen, in the last gasps of her orgasm, had thrown her head back and accidentally hit the corner of the bedside table. Fontecha got frightened. Belen lost consciousness for a few seconds.
He took the hospital elevator and headed to the street. He felt that everyone recognized him. But there was no reason why they should: he was just an ordinary citizen, things happened to him too. Maybe he was feeling paranoid, maybe people were surprised that a politician such as him could go around without a security detail. “She slipped and fell backward,” “I was cleaning and hit my head…” Beyond the matter of guilt, Fontecha tries to evaluate the impact that hospital visit might have on his political career. He tries to persuade himself that it’s not so bad, but is irritated by the tendency of events to go awry just when you think you’ve everything under control. Fortunately, no one had seen Fontecha enter Belen’s house, or leave it; he was careful to take the elevator up straight from the garage.
And, despite that, one could never be completely sure.
His candidacy to the primaries hung by a thread: Fontecha had to declare in the Soto and Zeberio case. The party, however, publicly offered him unconditional support. Three days before news of his summons was made public, Patricia moved to her parents’. From one day to the next, the life he’d been living until then began to disintegrate.
What was it that Patricia couldn’t forgive? That he’d taken part in the dirty war? That he hid this from her? That he confessed all of it too late? Did she expect him to deny everything, would that have been better? Fontecha had always considered Patricia the woman of his life, but in the past few months everything had become a little relative: he had Belen now, who, even though she didn’t drink bottles of Pauillac that cost the monthly wages of a mileurista, was in possession of an impetuous aura and had a respect and a consideration for politics and politicians that Patricia lacked; and, what’s more important, she believed in his innocence. He had intended to leave Patricia sooner rather than later, and the fact that she’d initiated the move only made things easier. Javier Fontecha opened a bottle that his wife kept for special occasions and decided to invite Belen to his home.
“My wife is away, you can sleep over.”
Belen was reluctant at the beginning, but accepted in the end. “Patricia is on a work trip, in Bordeaux,” the fact that she was far away made Belen feel safe.
Javier Fontecha had thought everything through: he’d let a few weeks pass before confessing to Belen that he had spoken to Patricia about their relationship and that they’d both agreed to separate. She would see that he was a gentleman who was willing to leave everything for her.
Belen arrived at Fontecha’s house exhausted, almost an hour late. She didn’t apologize for her tardiness.
“I’ve just been with the party’s attorneys.”
Fontecha was surprised.
“I thought the meeting was tomorrow.”
“We’re trying to get ahead of the work.”
“Is there anything new I should be aware of?”
“They want you to step out of the primaries.”
“What? No way! That’d be an admission of guilt!”
“It isn’t that: you’ll deny everything during the trial, of course. You didn’t know anything and they acted of their own volition. You’ll have the best lawyers. The key to everything is Trota’s funeral: you’ll declare that you were the only one to speak to Rodrigo Mesa that day. Mesa has been told already…”
“And can’t Rodrigo Mesa take care of everything? It was him and Vargas, after all, who…”
“That’s what we tried at the beginning, but they have too much evidence that links you to Rodrigo Mesa…can’t you see? Too many loose threads…They have recordings, Vargas’s confession…And then there’s that guy, Diego Lazkano…”
“He must have some weak spot…There must be more than one way to attack him.”
“We’re investigating him in depth…But he identified the palazzo, El Cerro, in the preliminary investigation…I’m sorry, Javier…”
“I don’t believe it…I…Are they going to leave me on my own? You too? They want me to eat this whole thing up on my own? I’ll go to jail!”
“Don’t think the worst. And, if that came to be, you know that we’ll all be with you…”
“
If this comes to light, it’s the end of everything, Belen! Don’t you realize?”
“I will be with you, we’ll prepare the trial down to the last detail. You won’t go to jail. But you’ll have to get out of the picture for a while.”
“Why did the party publicly support me, then?”
“Because they are hoping that you’ll make the decision to retire.”
“And if I don’t accept? And if I decide to tell the truth? That I was only following orders, that I felt coerced, that they alleged ‘reasons of state,’ that they blackmailed me? If they won’t let me be candidate, I care very little for anything else…I complied with the years of banishment in Europe…”
“Javi…”
“What? They are asking too much of me…Forget the party for a moment, speak to me as a friend: don’t you think I should tell the truth? If I have to go to jail, I won’t go on my own! Let everything be known, so be it! If the higher-ups are involved too, they’ll pardon us sooner!”
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