Twist

by Harkaitz Cano

  Not that any of it softened the editor’s grumpy disposition; not a chance.

  Whether it was Cupid’s fault or not, Ines and Fede didn’t click well at work. Fortunately they realized it soon, before it shattered what they had into a thousand pieces. Astonishingly, instead of thanking him, Fede rang Lazkano to accuse him of being incapable of finding anyone suitable for the job. He had hit on something much more difficult than a secretary, something almost miraculous – someone who’d put up with him at home – but, despite that, the editor could only grumble and complain.

  “I need a reader…as soon as possible!”

  It was absurd to expect stubborn Fede to change at this point in his life. And anyway, Lazkano was aware that the editor had him by the short and curlies. He had to suck it up and take the rain of insults and scorn.

  “I’ll try to find someone else, but I’m not promising anything.”

  “Have you seen any tennis players? They told me that Rafa Nadal turned up last year,” asked Victor, scanning the room with his beaten-down ox eyes. Roger, on the other hand, was keeping one eye on the canapés and another on the slutty Madrileñas. Idoia, on the other hand, was trapped in a bubble she couldn’t quite burst, feeling uncomfortable in front of the intern Pilar, who would go quiet when she came by her side.

  “All I see here are Catholic fundamentalists from the Opus Dei. The sort who don’t play tennis.”

  “No, they tend to prefer paddle tennis,” Roger interjected.

  Idoia felt ridiculous in her dress. She didn’t want to dance. Pilar, however, was going from hand to hand, cheerfully dancing with some and chatting with others. It was obvious: they were the same person, but with different degrees of existential tiredness.

  The newspaper laid out a New Year’s Eve party for their workers every year. It was the first time that Pilar, Roger, Idoia, and Victor attended the event, at the insistence of the latter. Idoia immediately regretted accepting the invitation, but things weren’t good with Diego and any excuse that kept her from spending the holidays with him seemed good. Swallowing your boss’s grapes on New Year’s Eve was maybe taking it too far though, she had to admit.

  The newspaper’s headquarters, which had been remodeled that very year to add a large glass balcony, was in the very center of Madrid, an expensive whim in times of crisis. They had organized everything carefully in that grand American style, down to the speech from the director.

  “You must remember that last year we celebrated this party in the lobby…This year we are in the penthouse. You are free to draw your own conclusions, but know that the change is not due to our director suddenly becoming suicidal…”

  There were bursts of laughter from the crowd, some clapped, the alcohol was beginning to have an effect. The cava cocktails and maraschino cherries in them were setting Idoia’s teeth on edge.

  The dance music came back on after Julio Virado’s speech. Idoia saw Victor and Pilar talking animatedly with the director, and Roger in the company of two young pretty things that smiled nonstop. Her instinct told her that a conga was not far coming. Cool, they were all where they needed to be. All but her. It was time for a prudent retreat. She boarded the elevator, heading to the hotel. She was carrying the company’s present, a fountain pen without ink cartridges. Another significant detail. Everywhere you looked, fountain pens that you couldn’t write with, a sign of the times.

  Impossible not to notice the geometry of her nipples. Ines has generous breasts, if slightly droopy. Her nipples, however, what miraculous nipples. Fede had never seen pointier ones, and he knows that, quite likely, they are the last ones he’ll ever see: pointy and pointing right and left, each facing one direction, as if they were cross-eyed breasts creating two separate and distant vanishing points; impossible to focus on his bedroom duties while contemplating those two points. He raises his head slightly with the intention of checking how far those two vanishing points might reach; the left nipple points toward the window like an arrow’s head, toward the window and beyond, toward the horizon, passing through precisely the third street lamp on the road; he calculates that, if Ines’s nipple’s imagined vanishing point had a laser pointer, it would easily reach the police station on the other side of the road. And what about the right one? The right nipple’s vanishing point points exactly and irremissibly in the opposite direction, toward his own library. But, which book exactly does that vector point at? Fede guesses that it must be on the third shelf, although his eyes see only a blurry library these days; his illness started wreaking havoc quite a while ago: his field of vision and pigmentation are noticeably affected.

  It’s getting harder and harder to move because of the thrusts from Ines’s waist; the girl’s impetus has put a lock on his own, it looks like his Adam’s apple is about to tear up his neck and break it; the same thing is happening with the curved axis of his backbone, it could crumble any minute, and the girl’s right nipple, still pointing at the third shelf in his library, like an index finger, Christopher Columbus’s finger pointing to the Americas…there you have it, considers Fede, I was never able to separate pleasure and literature; would it be too adventurous to assert that the diagonal line drawn by that right nipple reaches perhaps the very corner inhabited by his valuable collection of Gallimard editions?

  Think of your Gallimard books to hold off ejaculating, hold it there, Fede…Vive la France! A French nipple, no doubt, of course! Gallimard, hourra! While he licks the breast with the tip of his tongue his mind fills with the rounded curve of the Claude Garamond font, unable to pinpoint what type of font exactly might that nipple resemble, what font and what typography, and immediately after he lets his head fall back while Ines rides him even harder, the black hole of the girl’s enormous open mouth a reminder of the dark future ahead of him. Awarding a certain French je ne sais quoi to Ines’s nipples only made him more excited. Two nipples and two contrasting vanishing points, comme il faut! One leads him diagonally to the police station, the other to his library, two opposing geometries leading to promiscuity; he feels that the woman riding him is being unfaithful to him with those unbridled breasts, such pleasure, a pleasure that allows Fede to be unfaithful in return. But it’s all in vain, being as he is in the thrusting grip of her pubis, and he comes inside her.

  Will she, later on, when he’s recovered his strength, let him rub his member against her breasts? As it turns out, she does, and Fede feverishly desires for one of those nipples to enter his penis, for that little tail end of a Frenchie breast to penetrate the cleft of his shaft, to push in and out, in and out, that’s what he really wants. But he doesn’t dare ask so much.

  Ines’s cross-eyed breasts simultaneously point to the police station and the corner of his library where his Gallimard collection sits, and to ask more than that at this incipient stage of their relationship would’ve been to ask too much.

  Lately the journalistic endeavor had evolved into the role of the anniversary collector. A hundred years since the birth of such and such a painter, fifty since this other one died, twenty-five since that scandal exploded…To observe the present with one eye while keeping the other on the past, that’s how Idoia understood her work. It’d been a long time since the sort of journalism that wasn’t about anniversaries and automatism existed beyond the realms of press conferences. Anniversaries were a good excuse for more or less meaty reportages, but when you’d been doing your work for more than twenty years and kept an infinity of folders filled to the rim with your own and others’ articles on Alfred Hitchcock, it became increasingly arduous to add something new, or even moderately sensible, to the existing narrative about the Master of Suspense. You could feel lazy, get a complex about being nothing but a rewriter. Like you were handling secondhand goods, recycling remnants, warming up previously frozen ready-meals in the microwave. Some anniversaries were celebrated yearly, with their attendant and tedious round of opinions voiced by the currently fashionable lowlifes; the remembrance of some events filled pages and pages. But, every year
that passed, the names of characters shrank, the passing of time is implacable and those important events were remembered only in the important anniversaries. Only the gold and diamond anniversaries of events and the dead were remembered. After a century, what anniversaries would we remember? The French Revolution? The liberation of Auschwitz? The attack on the twin towers? Which of the three would have more media repercussion among us? Which of those three events would be the first not to be celebrated?

  Press conferences were a whole other story, an invitation to the stables and to burying your snout in the trough, swallow whatever was thrown in there without asking what it was, digest all the bullshitty information however best you could to then spew it on the mock-up. That’s what’s come to be known as journalism.

  Idoia was about to ask for a leave of absence, but when the newspaper requested a “flexible” special envoy, she decided to take a chance. It was after her mother died, right after she’d convinced herself that after her affair with Txema Santamaria, the photographer, it was going to be impossible to fix things with Diego. It would be a way of unmooring herself.

  Special envoys were a special breed. They experienced journalism in a completely different way, they felt their profession viscerally, they suffered and enjoyed the fragility and discomfort of reality and the precariousness of their schedules, and in exchange they relished a freedom they could never dream of while working in the newsroom. The special envoy abroad was someone who, in the end, took the responsibility of interpreting a whole country upon her shoulders; she chose the focus – be it liberal or conservative, neutral or colorful, for or against. The special envoy reconstructed and invented whole cities, even whole states…That’s where some war correspondents’ tendency to fantasize, to retell nonexistent battles, their conscious or unconscious literary leanings, came from, it was a direct consequence of belonging to that special breed they belonged to. Hence too, the paradox of left-leaning special envoys working in conservative media: some had requested the transfer voluntarily, others had been exiled to foreign countries.

  Idoia was sent to Paris. Soon she discovered that the political intrigues of the French country weren’t of much interest to her newspaper. They expected other kinds of news from her: movies being filmed, literary novelties, public spats between intellectuals. Nothing could make her happier. The new job she was supposed to carry out was a return to her origins, to the culture section, her natural terrain; soon she was harboring hopes, imagining how wonderful it would be to interview Houellebecq and Beigbeder and to attend the latest concerts, exhibitions, and fashion shows.

  She soon realizes, however, that the proposals she sends her boss in the culture section don’t interest him either. He accepts only one or two every week. This means that her wages – she’s paid per piece – do not meet the agreed minimum and she can hardly afford to pay her rent. Idoia is losing money in Paris. She tries to speak with the director, but Julio Virado never picks up the phone.

  Fede Epelde was alone in the office, without his assistant. This happened quite a bit before his problems with retinitis pigmentosa started, when he was still able to manage on his own. The face of the red-haired man who crossed the threshold seemed familiar to him. Had he seen him in the papers? On TV? He couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t a writer, no doubt about that. He had the face of a Viking. The familiarity he sensed may have had something to do with the rarity of his type, the flame-red hair, clipped short and showing a few gray hairs; such bristly hair, cut short like a rookie soldier’s, you couldn’t help but want to touch it. And, even though it’d been some time since he’d been the age of a rookie soldier, the man still exuded a perturbing military air.

  He wouldn’t be the first aspiring writer of a certain age to come to personally submit a manuscript to him, but he lacked the profile of an amateur writer. A frustrated writer who undertakes to write his memoirs halfway through his life? No, the red-haired man didn’t fit that profile.

  As well as his ruddy appearance, it was impossible not to notice the folder he carried under his arm. It was a very old folder by all accounts, a shade of salmon pink that the merciless passing of time or prolonged exposure to natural light had muted visibly. Maybe it was someone else’s manuscript, Fede wondered, one of those unexpectedly “found manuscripts” that fall into the hands of someone incapable of evaluating it who naïvely believes it may spark the interest of some publishing house or other. Rarely did a masterpiece appear in a forgotten drawer, but you never knew. Fede was a professional, above all.

  “Sit down, please.”

  The red-haired man sits, but when he does so he turns the chair slightly to face the wall so that he can keep watch on the door from his seat. Fede soon realizes what the gesture implies: sitting in front of him is someone who once belonged to an armed group. Old habits die hard.

  He leaves the salmon-pink folder on the table. He slides it across, pushing it toward Fede, as if intending to make him understand that the folder belongs to him and he doesn’t want it back.

  “Xabier Soto. Ring any bells?”

  “Xabier Soto…the same Xabier Soto as the one in the Soto and Zeberio case?”

  “The very same.”

  “This folder contains his writing?”

  “Indeed.”

  “I’ve heard he used to write theater plays…”

  “Mostly theater plays, among other things.”

  “We…we don’t publish theater plays.”

  “Are you sure? It turns out that you have published this…Is it possible, Epelde jauna, to publish someone involuntarily?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Read these texts, you’ll find them very, very familiar. What you do afterward is up to you.”

  “I’m sorry but…you…where did you find these papers, this folder?”

  “These are carbon copies. Back then everything was made in duplicate. Diego Lazkano has the originals. You publish his books, right, if I’m not mistaken…”

  Julio Virado is overconfident and the way he speaks reflects this, always.

  “So you want to return home. Your adventure hasn’t lasted very long, has it? You haven’t even allowed yourself a period of adaptation…why don’t you stick with it for a bit longer?”

  “I’m not comfortable, I haven’t found my place here, the milieu…I don’t know.”

  “You must realize that your post is covered by someone else. We gave a six-month contract to…what was your intern’s name?”

  “Pilar.”

  “You wouldn’t want us to fire her, would you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “We’ll find a solution: and chin up, woman, I can hear through the phone how low you are. I’ve good news for you: Victor is relocating to Madrid.”

  “Victor Irigoien?”

  “The best sports journalist of the Cantabrian coastline.”

  The words cornisa Cantábrica make her want to puke. Cantabrian coastline. Asshole.

  “We’ll need to fill his post.”

  “Sports?”

  “It is what it is, time to cinch our belts…you know this better than I do.”

  “Don’t I know it, you’ve cinched my belt for sure, you bastards, but around my neck!” She thinks it, but she doesn’t say it.

  “Female sports commentators are all the rage. Before, sports were a man’s world, but things have changed and it’s all much more fun now. Do you like sports?”

  “I don’t like soccer that much, to be honest.”

  “It’s not all soccer, though, is it, Idoia: there’s cycling, track and field, tennis…There must be something you like…Victor will be here in fifteen days, you’ve two weeks to bring yourself up to date.”

  “And the radio?”

  “You’ll keep collaborating: we need a commentator there too.”

  Idoia swallows some saliva. She tries to detect traces of cruelty among the slight crackling sounds that distort the phone line, a click of the tongue, some indication that Virado is sadi
stically twisting the receiver’s cable. It feels like the director is acting, like he isn’t alone in his office and the guest audience is laughing behind her back.

  “Will I have to broadcast the matches?”

  “No, we have that covered for now…Would you like to, though?”

  “No, not especially.”

  “That’s okay. Take the rest of the week off; we’ll be waiting for you in Bilbao on Monday.”

  The rest of the week is not much. It’s Friday evening. Even though it’s more expensive, she takes the high-speed that goes to Hendaia on Saturday morning.

  Diego Lazkano would like to be a salmon. To swim against the current, stop the arrow of time, take a step back and, why not, regret things. To take that folder and leave it where it was. To never have picked it up. To never have opened it up. How could he not have considered that Xabier Soto made duplicates of everything?

  “To live his life…You had no right to do that.”

  “Why not? I haven’t lived his life, that’s not true; as a matter of fact I’ve used his notations, his drafts, his dreams, nothing more than that, Fede…”

  “Nothing more? No less! Do you think that’s not much?”

  “I took those sketches as a starting point to create my own works, I’ve transformed his…”

  “Transformed? Sketches? You’ve taken a theater play and turned it into a novel, call that transforming a sketch?”

  “That was an exception, most of his ideas were just notations, they were lacking development…”

  “You’ve padded out his short stories and turned them into novels…You owe him your success! You owe it to Soto! All of it!”

  “It’s not exactly like that and you know it.”

  “I’ve read every sheet, every page, one by one, and there are whole paragraphs you’ve copied from beginning to end, verbatim…but what am I saying…whole paragraphs? Pages and pages! Only the weakest parts are attributable to you…or did you copy them from someone else? No, those passages seem yours: they’re useless! I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed comparing the manuscripts page by page…Given the care I’ve taken to go through it all, I could be an expert witness should a judge call upon me.”