“Let’s be done with this once and for all.”
“You admitted it. You’re guilty.”
“And what if I did admit it? The present absolves us. Sometimes we do things, things that the future makes you guilty of. It’s not always fair, if you think about it.”
“You don’t have to excuse yourself with me. The courts will have their say, unless you’ve bought them off in advance, of course.”
“Do you mean to say that you won’t agree to the deal? You’re no angel, Lazkano…You passed as your own works that belonged to someone else…Do you think that you can redeem your guilt by making us the guilty party?”
“Did you bring it?”
“The folder? Only when the court case is over.”
“You’re irrelevant, Fontecha. You’re pathetic. Don’t you realize? You’ve nothing left to do…Your own party has abandoned you…I don’t know what I’m doing here with you. Nothing can bring back the dead. You can’t give back my friends that you killed.”
“Not your friends, no.”
“What then?”
“What, or who…?”
“I’ve nothing to say to you.”
“Are you familiar with the name Santos Herguera?”
Diego Lazkano reacts defensively. A stage and a set of actors he didn’t expect to see emerge before his eyes.
“Your father’s friend. His trusted doctor.”
“What does Herguera have to do with any of this?”
Little by little, Fontecha ceases to be a cardboard cutout. He speaks very slowly, as if he were giving the most important press conference of his life.
“There are people like this in all professions, Lazkano. People who are dark and perverse, good at going through the garbage, always ready to carry out all sorts of favors. That friend of your father’s, that Herguera, is one of the witnesses who’ll testify in Rodrigo Mesa’s defense.”
Lazkano is speechless.
“What a strange world, don’t you think? He will declare that the state the bones were in when they were found precludes anyone from establishing whether they were tortured or not; warn your attorney so that he takes it into account. They are flying Herguera in from Dallas, a researcher brought in from abroad always looks good…He owes favors to the party, apparently; don’t ask me, I don’t know why. Something to do with the children who disappeared during Franco’s dictatorship, who knows, maybe they’re only rumors. Fake death certificates, I don’t know what, exactly…”
“What are you trying to tell me, that I’m one of those stolen children?”
“No, that’s not it, Lazkano. Think for a moment. It wasn’t you who was stolen. Rather, they stole someone from you. How long has it been since you last saw your father?”
“My father died as a consequence of dementia.”
“Are you sure?”
Fontecha hands him an envelope.
“I’m not going to negotiate this, Lazkano. The case must continue, it’s all in the hands of God now…I’m tired of hiding things too. I want to know what it feels like to remove the mask, even though I know perfectly well that what’s underneath is just more masks.”
Diego opens the envelope. There’s a report about Gabriel Lazkano. Some black-and-white photos, quite overexposed, of a man watering a garden: he wears a hat in all of them, and sweats as if he’d never fully acclimatized to the place. If this man was really his father, Diego would end up looking like him in twenty-five years’ time.
“We have done a lot of research, as you can see. We’ve researched you and everyone around you.”
“It’s impossible…”
“He hasn’t changed very much, has he?”
“Who’s…? Where did you get these photos?”
“He’s in Mexico.”
“That’s not true…”
“Go for a visit, if you want: everything is there in the report. I know that I am not paying any debts off with this, but at least it’ll show you that things aren’t always what they seem. If you want the folder back, you know what you must not do.”
SUBMERGED WORLDS
PUBLIC TRANSPORT DOESN’T REACH THERE, at least not at this time of year. Maybe during the summer season, but that’s still a long way away. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to rent a car?” For the umpteenth time: no. Instead, he boards a bus at the airport in Puerto Vallarta, and then another to continue on his route. Having completely lost all sense of time, he sleeps in Mismaloya, unable to separate the hours he spends in dreams from the hours he spends awake; his periods of sleep mix with his periods of wakefulness, turning into one viscous, febrile paste. He blames the weather. They tell him that it’s six kilometers away, although he’d swear that they left Banderas Bay behind more than forty kilometers ago, if what the taximeter says is anything to go by. John Huston made a film there. “Are you here because of The Night of the Iguana?” they ask. He asks the taxi driver to drop him off at a circle, “the closest circle to the beach,” he specifies, although in the end he drops him off in one of the circles above the beach. He has to walk all the way down to the sand, and can’t help thinking how sweaty he’s going to be climbing up that steep hill on the way back. It looks like they hollowed out part of the rock some time ago so that the road could reach all the way down, the carved wall is flat and almost red, like sliced beef. There are steps that lead to the beach too. It’s the first time he’s going to see the Pacific Ocean properly, and for a moment it seems to him that he’s gone down the wrong path, because the steps are not exactly steps: they’re more like small stands that no one uses, covered in weeds and stubble. People probably reached the beach by car or motorbike. Or maybe they just don’t go there at all, there must be thousands of spots like that one all through the coastline. He thinks he sees a miniature replica of an Aztec tomb covered in brambles in a corner of the stands. Aztecs, here? An amphitheater? He must admit that he has no idea. But later on he sees a small hole and the penny drops: nothing to do with the Aztecs, the place is an abandoned minigolf course, with its little ramps and tiny arches, a minigolf course made out of minilabyrinths that the golf ball can easily negotiate. A failed tourist resort, he guesses, built who knows when or why. “The closest house to the beach,” they told him, and he’s chosen two or three intuitively.
“Güero Juan? Señor Bicho lives right over there as you come into the beach.”
Señor Bicho. Mr. Bug. The Bug Outer. The Bug Offer. Sir Insect. Mr. Infect. It’s surprising how appropriate some nicknames can be, Lazkano thinks, amazed. He scrutinizes the cute little gardens made of cacti and pebbles, as if rocks and vegetation could give away the clues that revealed the hideout of evil Mr. Bug.
A green lawn tended to with care, with more dedication than the others surrounding it. Reeds in front of windows to shield the house from the world outside. A perfect refuge that doesn’t look like a fortress. A man wearing a straw hat, shorts, and flip-flops waters a rosebush. As he focuses on the whitewashed wall, Diego notices a gigantic fly stuck to it, red eyed and with parallel blue and black stripes running down its back, the same colors as the jersey of Turin’s Juventus team. Even flies are more elegant here, he thinks.
A visual ability test: Would you be able to recognize your father from the back and from his way of tending the garden? Although many years have passed since he last saw him, it doesn’t take Diego long to recognize him, because of the mechanical way in which he shakes the hose, as if he were a human sprinkler. He used to spread weed killer on the vegetable patch like that, when he was still just a kid.
He takes his time observing his father. There are several chairs upside down on a table on the patio: he’s about to sand them down. The scratching sound of sandpaper on wood is almost hypnotic. Diego is moved when he notices that his father has kept his old ability for DIY intact. As if he’d forgotten to water something, he puts aside the sandpaper and returns to the hose.
Diego Lazkano is suddenly overwhelmed by an irrational impulse to turn around and flee.
<
br /> But to disappear, that would be unexcusable. He wouldn’t be able to forgive himself. No, I am not like my father.
Lazkano thinks of the people they disappeared. He held those disappeared in his memory for many long years: every dawn, every dusk, when he slept with a woman, when he wrote, when he dreamed, they were always there; it was the disappeared who interrupted his working days, his days off, his Sunday rest; they appeared unannounced as he reached peak orgasm, during his masturbatory sessions, in any corner, everywhere, whenever he debated with himself while trying to pick a bottle from the supermarket shelves. He couldn’t afford to disappear like that, of his own volition, just because. How could he do something like that? Soto and Zeberio, his two disappeared, tormented him enough as it was, and his father later on, him too, after he left without a trace, not an inevitable disappearance as he now knows, not because of senile dementia as he made them all believe, but in spite of his family and without a speck of a care for the hurt and abandonment he would be inflicting on them, breaking all ties to evaporate, to vanish from their lives and start again. It was monstrous behavior.
What should he call his father? Should he approach with a plain “Good afternoon, aita”, as if nothing had happened? Which name or nickname, which polite form of address should he use?
Mr. Bug? Güero Juan?
No, nothing like that.
The green hose’s flow is interrupted, although at no point does Diego notice his father closing the water tap.
Up until the last moment, he doesn’t know what words will be coming out of his mouth.
“It’s true, then.”
His father takes a moment before turning around. The time he needs to compose his face into an expression of fake surprise? Maybe he’s been waiting for that visit since day one. More than waiting for it, secretly wishing for it. There is no greater fear for a fugitive than the fear of never being looked for, the fear of never ever being chased after, or found.
“Diego…!”
Diego wants to appear inexpressive, indifferent, reproach him coldly, severely, and although it takes a superhuman effort to overcome his fury, he does it. His father doesn’t make a gesture to approach. He’s still holding the hose in his hand, five or six meters of lawn separate them. Diego is surprised not to see a dog.
“I should finish you right here, in your paradisiacal lawn.”
“I would deserve that, I don’t deny it.”
“How could you do what you did?”
“Sit down, please, I beg you, let me look at you…You still look so young…Would you like something to drink? How is Josune?”
Diego hadn’t noticed the name of the house until that moment: Casa Morel.
“Do you know why I chose this house? Because of Bioy Casares’s book, La invención de Morel.”
“Do you honestly think I’ve come here to talk to you about literature?”
“What else is there in life? I read you said that in an interview I saw online a long time ago…It was something like that, more or less.”
“Is this some sort of joke?”
“Life is an infinite joke.”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes.”
“Whatever you say…”
“Couldn’t you’ve gone about it some other way?”
“I thought my way of going about it was quite…original.”
“Original? Is that really the best way of describing what you did?”
“You tell me, you’re the writer.”
“Ama, Josune, me…Do you think we’re characters in some cheap novel?”
“I’ll give the novel mention a pass, because I know how important fiction is for you. But I can’t forgive that cheap comment. Where do you think your vocation to write comes from?”
“Not from you. You’re clearly more of an actor. You’re an impostor, a fraud. And a son of a bitch.”
“Hold it there, Diego: I’m still your father, I didn’t raise you to speak like that. The key here is that we both carry storytelling in the blood.”
“How could you…? You…”
“I felt miserable, I led a bland life, an insubstantial life, I wanted to start over, and for your mother to have a new life too.”
“So it was an act of generosity? Is that it?”
“Depending on how you look at it, yes, you could say that. Being selfish is a way of being generous with oneself. And I want to think that in this case I wasn’t just generous with myself, but with others too.”
“There’s such a thing as divorce!”
“Paperwork, courthouses, drama, vaudeville…Divorce is a sticky thing, Diego: it looks like you’re starting over, but the stickiness of the issue follows you around. I wanted something more drastic.”
“Drama and vaudeville? Paperwork? Courthouses? You didn’t save us from any of that! Do you want to hear stories about paperwork? How many petitions do you think we filled in? How many visits do you think we made to the morgue, to hospitals? Do you know you’re legally dead…?”
“That was my intention.”
“Have you ever considered how much you made our mother suffer?”
“She might have suffered, but she also felt relief, admit it. I’m certain that she is happier now. I made sure to follow up on her, my conscience wouldn’t leave me in peace otherwise. Her relief is also my own.”
“Relief? She’s got cancer…Not to mention the years she’s been high on Valium…”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You’ve thoroughly lost your mind if you really think that dementia is a lesser drama than divorce.”
“You won’t deny that it’s more definite: believe me, it’s possible to start anew. I’ve done it.”
“That woman Angeles, from Eivissa, was she real? Was any of that true?”
“Think like a true writer, Diego: her name was Angeles but she wasn’t from Eivissa, but from Formentera. That story only lasted so long, afterward I came to Mexico on my own. We depart from the truth, but only so much. If we departed too much, we’d be found out, and if we didn’t depart enough, the same. We must find the right, the perfect, measure. Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ is a good example.”
“No me jodas, you fucker; what, you do creative writing workshops now?”
“I imagine they must have told you everything in town: I still work as an exterminator. But yes, you’d be surprised to see what a voracious reader I have become…By the way, you haven’t published anything in a long time…”
“Is that what concerns you? Must I believe that you keep a library back there, one that includes my books? You’re pathetic: all we need now is for you to ask me to sign your copies.”
“I was going to.”
“And to whom should I address the dedication, according to you?”
“What do you think of ‘to my old friend?’”
“‘To my old motherfucker’ would be closer to the truth.”
“Whatever you say, I have no intention of arguing. I’ll agree with you on everything and afterward you’ll leave me alone.”
“Do you really think you’re in a position to impose your deal and your conditions?”
“It was only a proposal. I’m willing to hear yours.”
“And your wife, where is she?”
“What makes you think I have one?”
Gabriel Lazkano noticed quickly. Some women’s clothes were hanging out to dry next to a rosebush. A minuscule bikini, brightly colored. It’d look ridiculous on anyone beyond their forties.
“Do you really want to meet her?”
“Is she the one in the photograph?”
“The woman in the photograph was a flight attendant I met in Amsterdam. Angeles, I told you about her…Tight skirt, beautiful legs. A one-night whim. She stayed in Formentera…You’re losing the plot, my son, it’s understandable, not everyone can withstand this heat.”
“I should strangle you with my own hands. Asphyxiate you. It would be easy.”
“Why would you do t
hat? Think about it: you can kill me or reveal the truth. Will that make your mother suffer less? Will Josune suffer less? You? Will you suffer less? Who wants to know the truth, Diego? Truth is ugly…Live your life and relish the fact that you have fewer chances than you thought of developing dementia thirty years hence…”
“Dr. Herguera…?”
“He owed me a favor. It’s always good to have friends who owe you things. Be honest with me: aren’t you happy for your old man? Margaritas and tequila, torrents of sunshine…Even though I still do things that aren’t common for a man my age, time moves very slowly here. People will call anything retirement: I wanted a true and thorough retirement.”
“‘I came to the wrong place, Diego; I was convinced that the books were parcels that I needed to post…that pantomime in the post office, looking like a beaten-down dog…you lied to me.’”
“I played the part.”
“All those things you said to our mother, how could you be so vile?”
“Admit it: deep down you liked my being so sincere, so uninhibited, so horny, a perfect satyr…I’ve even read some of my lines in your books: ‘When will you let me come all over your tits, Angelines?’”
Diego Lazkano clenches his fist and, after regressing many years to gather momentum, punches his father on the nose. His father falls like a sack, landing on the garden table, which breaks under his weight. His nose starts to bleed.
“Damn it! You broke my nose…”
“What are you complaining about? That way no one will be able to identify you.”
“All right, little fellow, I probably deserved that…Now, go. That’s the deal.”
“I’m going to report you.”
“You won’t do that…”
“I’m going to the police.”
“You won’t dare.”
“Really? I’m going to go to the police, to the courthouse if necessary, I won’t stop until you’re destroyed.”
“You won’t do that: you’ve never been keen on the police. Are you going to change your dealings with them now? Isn’t it a bit…late? That would be a radical change indeed, son, way beyond starting anew. Besides, what police are you talking about, Diego? If the Mexican police is what you have in mind, you’re crazier than I thought…”
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