Twist

by Harkaitz Cano

  “Be good to me and tell me the truth, Lazkano: what did you think about the play?”

  As usual, Gloria’s call catches Lazkano profoundly asleep. But this time she’s not calling from Barcelona, but from Donostia.

  “I need your help.”

  “Are you on Aldamar Street?”

  “No, come to my father’s house.”

  Gloria is quite flustered since her father’s death. The subterfuge the old man had concocted had exasperated her, so obvious was his strategy: far from attracting his daughter from Barcelona to have her direct a theater play, he did it so that she would look after her much shrunken father, knowing that the leukemia he’d been diagnosed with would only let him live a few more months. Gloria’s anger was quickly substituted – just like her father had calculated – by pity and compassion, and they ended up sharing the five months he took to die. He didn’t make it to the premiere alive, but the actors did a rehearsal in full dress and performed exclusively for him.

  When Lazkano arrives, Gloria is very pale.

  In seeing that she’s emptying the house (a huge chaos, boxes and objects wrapped in brown paper everywhere), he thinks he can guess why she called him: Franco’s tapestry. Gloria wouldn’t have known what to do with that gigantic portrait, how to get rid of it, who to give it to without feeling ashamed. A three-meter-long and as many wide tapestry of a dictator wasn’t something that one could just discreetly dump by a garbage container around dusk.

  But Lazkano was mistaken.

  There’s no trace of Franco’s tapestry – so glaring, the void it leaves on the wall. Dodging through boxes, Gloria takes Diego to her father’s office. Once there, she leads him to a little chest resting on top of the open strongbox. The velvet lining of the chest denotes that its contents were valuable to its owner.

  “It was inside the strongbox.”

  Lazkano lifts the chest’s padded lid.

  The order of its contents follows a rigorous logic of alignment. Fetishes. Little objects that were billed to his name and sent to Gloria in Barcelona, little collector’s whims that his daughter had diligently brought home to her father for years without ever daring to even imagine what it was she was carrying. Nazi swastikas, medals from the SS, original, dated photographs of Franco and Mussolini. Fascist memorabilia. A black market of terror. Why not? Weren’t there magnificently organized networks for the exchange of pedophile materials? As a matter of fact, no one could actually say that the private, intimate use of such sinister objects could really hurt anyone, it only used a hurt that had ceased long ago to incite or to calm the unspeakable inclinations of sick minds. “Objects will survive us,” old Furmica had affirmed once.

  “What am I supposed to do with all this?”

  Gloria is paralyzed, which was quite hard to believe. Her father was a Franco supporter, he had never hidden it, Lazkano even thought it logical that his sickly fetishism would lead him to invest his savings in nostalgic Nazi trinkets, given that, as far as he was aware, he hadn’t bothered to hide his sympathy toward them during their after-dinner conversations. Wasn’t something like that to be expected? Why the shock? Why did Gloria find it so strange? He was a friend of Melitón Manzanas, for Christ’s sake!

  “Tell me: what am I supposed to do?”

  “What do I know…donate it to a museum…dump it in the garbage…”

  Lazkano, despite his sleepiness, notices that Gloria’s every last hair, her eyelashes even, stand up in horror. She’s terrified.

  “And the soap too?”

  Diego hadn’t noticed that soap. It’s a very somber-looking bar of soap, discreetly hidden under medals and photographs. It’s Lazkano who acts surprised now, who takes a moment to understand what’s happening. He takes it in his hands.

  “Soap?”

  “Jesus, can’t you see it?”

  It dawns on him suddenly: it’s one of those bars with the acronym RIF printed on its wrapping, one of the bars of soap that Rudolf Spanner allegedly made from the corpses of Jewish prisoners, a numbered bar, a limited edition, as if it were a book. According to what Lazkano had read, it was never completely proven that they used the corpses of people in concentration camps systematically for that purpose, for the mass production of human soap, but the traces left by Spanner were the most verifiable.

  “My father…he was a monster!”

  It was pointless to try to console her. Lazkano remains silent, he has no words, he can’t quite comprehend until he begins to understand…everything. That out there – on the Web, on the Internet – there are all sorts, there are people willing to grow rich out of the most ominous objects in the history of humanity, people who have decided to exploit the macabre reverse of whimsical souvenirs. Above the horror and the disgust, another, frivolous question rises: how much did Gloria’s father pay for that despicable bar of soap?

  Lazkano buys a small sack of rapid concrete, adds water, pours the mix on top of the Nazi memorabilia, the photographs, and the bar of soap. He waits a day then, until the block of cement is dry and compact. For the first time in his life, Lazkano damns the fact that he doesn’t own a car. He places the block of cement in a sports bag and a taxi takes him to the reservoir. He asks where he can hire a kayak. He’s afraid that the weight of what’s inside the sports bag might be excessive. He changes clothes and starts to row, departing from the shore bit by bit. It’s a bit misty and he can’t see anyone around. The reservoir is sufficiently big, but he doesn’t want any surprises: he wants to row to the very center, as if being in the center of something might help.

  There’s hardly any wind and the kayak barely rocks. He stays like that for a moment, still, with the oar on his lap and his eyes closed. Afterward, without any kind of gesture or ceremony, he unzips the sports bag and takes the block of cement out, just that. He throws it in the water without giving it a second thought. The block sinks rapidly and immediately disappears from sight.

  How many people like him must have done something similar? Throw something uncomfortable into the water, hoping that it will never surface again.

  It occurs to him that the water that comes out of the taps in our houses is filled with spectra: he remembers his mother’s lock of white hair, how she deliberately blocked the sink once, just so she could ask for Diego’s help. Our ghosts and the ghosts we must inherit. Those who make us guilty and those who make us be born guilty.

  The water that comes out of the taps in our houses is filled with spectra and we drink those spectra and introduce them inside ourselves. How many like this one. Impossible to know. Spectra that we swallow and that turns us into spectra in turn. Transparent souls. Intermittent beings.

  “Can torture be sublimated through art? Can terror be overcome through art? And, if the answer is yes, who has the legitimacy to do so? The tortured? Or can the torturer redeem himself? The artist Gloria Furmica wanted to address these and other questions through Rats, her latest installation, which is guaranteed to be controversial.”

  “You’ve really raised dust now…”

  “Seeing as how it’s a carpet it makes perfect sense, don’t you think?”

  Having paid off her debt to Chekhov, Gloria decided to pause her career as a theater director for a while to return to the visual arts. Lazkano never dared ask her what had became of the enormous Franco tapestry, and he never knew where it’d ended up until the day her exhibition opened in the Koldo Mitxelena Cultural Center. Astonishingly, in the KM, next door to the post office, so close to the place where his father’s fraud had started so many years ago – “I came to the wrong place, Diego; I was convinced that the books were parcels that I needed to post.” The tapestry was inside a huge horizontal glass case, not hanging like a tapestry, but on the floor, like a carpet. An objet trouvé, Lazkano wasn’t sure what artists called those found objects that only needed to be recontextualized for their meaning to change and for them to become “works of art” in their own right. Franco’s portrait lay on the floor, fully spread, and on it, a dozen lit
tle mice joyfully gamboling and playing around. The glass case had a few holes with small tubes on the sides, which allowed visitors to give food and water to the rodents running around Franco’s face. The little transparent receptacles could be filled to taste, the trapdoors out of which the food flowed were strategically placed on different areas of the face and extremities of the dictator so that the visitor could lead the litter of mice toward whichever part of Franco’s anatomy they wanted, playing with the location where the trapdoors opened and where the wonders of mechanical engineering made the food fall. The interactivity was impressive.

  “What do you think?”

  “Isn’t it a bit sadistic?”

  “That was the intention.”

  “Did you talk to Animal Protection?”

  “Don’t be such a party pooper. I treat them like royalty.”

  “You treat them to dictators, more like…”

  “Only the best for my rats.”

  “Truth be told, Gloria, they are mice, not rats.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “My father was an exterminator, don’t forget. There is a difference, a big one: one thing is Rattus rattus and another…”

  “You’re always such a fusspot…What was I supposed to do? Start looking for rats in garbage cans?”

  “You didn’t…buy them, did you?”

  “Of course I did.”

  Diego Lazkano smiles. These artists, there’s no hope for them. He raises his glass of cava then.

  “We’re here to celebrate. The truth is, your installation is magnificent. Congratulations.”

  “You gave me the idea, actually: ‘donate it to a museum, dump it in the garbage,’ remember? And I told myself: why not both? My first idea was to leave the tapestry in the street, next to a dumpster and record people’s reactions with a hidden camera, show how it’s brought to the landfill, film the whole process of decomposition of the tapestry…But then I thought that it would be much more stimulating to do it live, in front of people.”

  “But the title, however, I think it could have been improved: why not The Mousetrap instead of Rats? It would have been a subtle homage to Agatha Christie.”

  “I didn’t want La Bella Ines to be offended.”

  “We all need to pay a toll.”

  They both laughed at the same time and clinked their glasses to take another sip, until an admirer took Gloria by the arm and dragged her to another area of the exhibition intending to introduce her to someone. She was in great demand. It was her big day.

  Rats wasn’t the only piece in the exhibition to generate controversy. Another piece, which she’d built from a front cover of a Penthouse magazine, got everyone talking too. There was a vintage porn actress on it, naked from the waist down, with her legs wide open, a kind of version of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World, only that, in this case, the model was contemplating her very bushy bush with curiosity. All that Gloria had done was to Photoshop a menstrual stain onto the original Penthouse model’s thighs, a stain in the shape of the seven Basque provinces. The title of the piece was Blood Loss.

  Without saying anything to Gloria and for the length of the exhibition, Diego visited every single week, spending time, mostly, contemplating Rats. In this way he was able to see that the little mice got chubbier, and that one of them had had a litter in the third week. As the days passed, Franco’s face became more and more diffuse and threadbare. Although the glass case was isolated, it inevitably stank a little, as a consequence of the abundant mouse poop and the decomposing bits of food spreading everywhere.

  Once he was able to rescue Gloria from the claws of her many admirers, he interrogated her about the future of that installation once the exhibition was over.

  “The Artium Museum has bought it…do you want to know how much they paid?”

  “Tell me that it’s more at least than the going price for those paintings Napoleon the horse did.”

  “A fair bit more. What would you say if I told you that I’d be able to finance my next theatrical production with what they’re going to pay me?”

  “I’d say you’ve become a star?”

  But Diego couldn’t help but think of more questions. Diego always had more questions. Were the mice included in the price of the installation? Would the museum be in charge of substituting them when they died? Or was she just selling the idea, the concept itself? Was all that specified in the contract? What would happen to the original carpet?

  “Look, I want to introduce you to a friend of my father’s: Roberto, Diego…Diego, Roberto…”

  The color suddenly drains from Diego’s face.

  “Maybe his face is familiar to you? He took part in the Chekhov play.”

  Vengerovich.

  “I don’t mean to kill him, just injure him…Thou shalt not kill…Why kill? Murder is so…Injure him, hit him and beat him up enough so he’ll remember for the rest of his life.”

  Life offers him a second opportunity. There you have it, it’s now or never.

  They shake hands. He hasn’t recognized me, Lazkano tells himself. How can he trust fate so blindly? Did he feel so safe, so untouchable, so immune, just because he’d covered his face with a hood? Hadn’t it occurred to him that someone might recognize his voice?

  “Break something, disfigure him…How much will that cost me? Shh…Someone’s coming…Let’s walk a bit farther…”

  “How do you do,” are the first words his torturer addresses to him when they are introduced.

  How do you do. You’ve no fucking idea.

  Yellowing gums due to nicotine abuse, porcelain implants in his mouth. Groomed and straight-backed all the same. Lazkano feels a mad need to take his shirt off, as if the word chibato, snitch, were still on his shoulder. Why did you let your colleague make that spelling mistake, Fabian?

  But Lazkano doesn’t move an inch; instead, he starts to take little sips from one of the two glasses of wine his torturer has dexterously fished from the tray a server was carrying and charmingly offered to him.

  He decides to ask him about the exhibition.

  “What did you think about Rats?”

  Roberto doesn’t feel uncomfortable at all.

  “Oh, you know, modern art and I…I’m just too old to understand such things.”

  “But, did you like it? Some people found it excessive.”

  “I’m not objective enough in this. This must stay between us” – he says lowering his voice – “but I just know too much about that tapestry.”

  Lazkano decides to play along. He doesn’t need to feign surprise. More than what he is confessing, he’s surprised by the act of confession itself.

  “Really?”

  “Her father, rest in peace, was a fervent admirer of the Generalísimo Franco…didn’t you know?”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Times were different, it’s pointless to try to raise hell about it now.”

  “Do you mean to say that Gloria tried to carry out a kind of…exorcism with this, maybe?”

  “It’s possible. But, without the financial help of her Franquista father she would have never made inroads in the world of art. That’s the paradox of most great artists: almost all of them come from wealthy families.”

  He’s not wrong about that, Lazkano agrees.

  “These provocative works of art may have their point, although I personally don’t see it. Given a choice, I prefer Tiziano.”

  This Roberto guy seemed quite sensible. My torturer, he forced himself to rectify. He couldn’t let the occasion pass. Not this time. Not again. Things couldn’t end like this. He had to say something.

  “You…you’ve never felt that temptation?”

  “What temptation? To carry out an exorcism?”

  “Yes…I mean, I don’t know, there may be something from your past you may be ashamed of, something you did or you were a part of, something that circumstances forced you to do and that you now regret…”

  “Nothing like that, than
k God.”

  “You are lucky.”

  Diego’s voice trembles for an instant, and he wonders whether he’ll have the strength to keep going. He does.

  “And, tell me, do you wonder if Fabian ever regretted what he did?”

  Roberto’s face changes completely. He’s on the defensive now, expectant, but not afraid. The policeman he carries inside rises to the surface.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” Lazkano places his left hand on the man’s right shoulder while still holding the glass of wine in the other.

  The trembling shifts: it now settles into Roberto’s throat.

  “No…I’m sorry, I don’t recall…”

  Maybe what he said was true. It only made it worse. It showed how many had gone through his hands.

  “And if I mentioned the Boger swing? Would that help your memory?”

  Roberto-Fabian-Vengerovich swallowed saliva.

  “I think…I think you mistake me for someone else…”

  Diego raises his glass, a toast that is not a toast. He stares into his eyes, until Roberto can’t sustain his look anymore. Afterward he says goodbye to Gloria and leaves the exhibition, in conflict with his lungs, at peace with himself. His chest is a sewing machine now, all heartbeat, but Diego knows well that there are no wounds this sewing machine can possibly stitch.