Santiago's Way

  Javier steps out of the ring we had formed around my father. ‘If I meet the Kid with the Candle,’ Javier babbles hopelessly, ‘I know I’ll die.’ Then he holds out his hand for the money my father is pulling from his pocket and disappears, his knees quaking, out of the door that leads to the stairs.

  Who could I turn to in this moment of desperation? To Mina? Floating in mid air, a sketchy outline at best by night and day, shaded in only by the smile of the twilight? Mina who had nothing to do with the objective world? Mina who responded intuitively to my body, my adrenaline and my blood when it boiled? Mina as blue as outer space? Mina the laughing one? Eyeless Mina who still knew where to tread? Mina disconcerted by the complexities of the adult mind? Mina who was all warm embrace and patience? Tell me, will Javier make it back? Mina is unfamiliar with stairs, with light bulbs and candles, but she senses the vibration of my nerves and she breathes a breath of security on to me. Mina offers me peace. But Mina brings no understanding, and, as I lie in bed, I cling to the back of my sister Lilia. I start to scratch it.

  Suddenly screams ring out. My heart misses a beat and then starts to race.

  I am sitting on my bed. I want to wake Lilia up but I cannot move. Again the screams. They are not coming from Javier. They belong to the Kid with the Candle. No. No. They are my father’s. He calls out, he begs for mercy. He shouts out who he is. Then come the sounds of blows and more screams, this time in a younger voice, from the stairwell. I weep. I call for my mother. No answer. Only absence.

  At last I can move. I am wearing flannel pyjamas. I reach the door handle and open the door. I am dying of fear, and Mina tells me, ‘Use your eyes and you will see.’

  So I open them. I see my father stretched out on the sofa in the living-room. My mother is pressing raw steak to his face. My brother, Javier, still carrying a heavy stick in his hand, stands beside them, his head bowed, sobbing.

  The next photo comes from Javier’s album. While I was scratching Lilia’s back to get her to teach me the secret of the ‘Our Father’ that would make the Kid with the Candle disappear, Javier had gone down the staircase without incident. He reached the store and asked for the beers for my father. So far, no problem. On his return, while he was climbing the first curve of the winding staircase, he saw a flickering light coming towards him. It was undoubtedly a candle, the flame on its wick trembling in the night air. Armed with a branch he had found lying in the garden, he bided his time until the Kid with the Candle came within striking distance. It was too late when he realized that he had clubbed his own father, wrapped in a sheet and carrying a candle.

  I used a cigarette lighter to illuminate the spooky staircase in the San Lorenzo lodging-house. With a courage supplied by my memory of Javier, I went down the narrow stairs that had scarcely room for my size-four shoes. There were fifteen stairs at most. I found myself in front of another small door, just like the one above. I tried to open it, but it was locked. I assumed it opened on to the kitchen on the third floor. Maybe there was somebody on the other side of the door right now, wondering where it led. If I ever made a friend on the third floor we could use this staircase to see each other in secret.

  But that day never arrived. It isn’t easy to make friends when you’re beset by a Santiago fanatically concerned with mental health. He begs me not to get involved with others. But we’ve always been sociable, I tell him. Right! The way you were with poor Martha in primary school!

  ‘That was before you came into my life.’

  ‘And your pal in the Faculty of Engineering?’

  It’s obvious that Santiago and I have different ideas about friendship. After a whole year here in Spain I am still solitary. That night, after discovering that the stairs led only to a locked door, I went back up to my closet-room to get my wine. I poured out two drinks in plastic cups. I crept through the darkness of the lodging-house where I’d slept, only a few hours before, next to the seven other women. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness before I could pick up Adriana’s bed. I went up to her with the wine in my hands. ‘Adriana?’ I whispered.

  No reply.

  ‘Adriana!’ I insisted.

  Immediately screams pierced the night air, as puzzling to me as those from the stairs haunted by the Kid with the Candle. Adriana was peering at me through the gloom and screaming in panic. To her way of thinking she was being menaced by a satanic shadow. I decided to race back to my closet-room, but it was too late. Several of the other women had switched on their bedside lamps.

  Every single one of them testified against me in front of Maria de las Angustias. They swore I’d tried to attack Adriana in the dark of the night. According to them, I had scissors in one hand and in the other something they could not identify, but, without a doubt, it was a sharp pointed object.

  I found myself once again confronted by the gypsy-dark eyes of the owner of the lodging-house. Utterly convinced that I would establish my innocence, I showed her the two cups of wine. I explained things to her while Santiago darted around my brain hysterically, yelling, ‘I told you so, I told you so!’ I had only come to make peace, I pleaded. I’d come to ask forgiveness.

  ‘At a quarter to one in the morning?’

  What did the time matter? If we all were to ask pardon for our errors the world would be free of hatred, and what would the time of day matter?

  ‘Look, Maria, we think differently in the night, not the same as in the day. The moon has a powerful influence on us. Yes, it’s weighed down with old bitternesses, and that’s why it’s sterile. Everybody knows that. But, all the same, its light brushes against us gently. The sun, on the other hand, overloads us with information. We do our best to understand it, but the bloody thing just dazzles us. But the moon, the night, the stars, they’re the best time to be truly humane, especially when it’s a matter of making discoveries about God and the universe, the dimensions and all that sort of stuff. That’s why they get out their telescopes at night.’

  ‘This wine or the other?’ I finally managed to say, when she and I got back to my room.

  ‘This one,’ she answered distantly, as if she were winding up for a sermon.

  ‘I’m sorry you have to sit on my bed, but there’s no space here for a chair.’

  ‘So you’re not happy with your room?’

  ‘No, no, Maria. It’s a fine room. I just love it. By the way, did you ever notice those stairs over there?’

  ‘Yes. They lead down to the third floor.’

  ‘Is that all? I was imagining a load of secret passages ...’

  She didn’t let me finish. Between sips of wine she jotted down a number on the back of a business card and said in a horribly maternal tone, ‘This is the best I can do for you.’ She passed me the card. It was the phone number of a psychiatrist. ‘You’ve been here for over a year. You hardly ever go out. You don’t talk to anybody. You drink far too much. I wouldn’t know who to call if you had an accident. Vicenta tells me that somebody called Cuco calls you almost every day. He’s some relative, she says.’

  15

  Refugio ‘Cuco’Vidal. I had told Vicenta, the only person authorized to answer the phone, to say to anyone asking for me that I had died, left town, been declared insane or anything else she liked. So Vicenta wouldn’t have talked to him. She had merely assumed he was a relative.

  I had met Refugio in a bar, the Double Diamond, one Saturday night.

  My bones were aching from lying in bed so much. Santiago had been bashing holes in my brain, skidding around on toboggans of blood.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ he had wanted to know. ‘We don’t belong in a dump like this.’

  ‘You didn’t say that when Maria put me there. You said it was a lovely place.’

  ‘I don’t mean your bedroom. I mean this whole crappy lodging-house.’

  He stabbed me with something sharp on my head, and I felt a searing pain.

  ‘You see? It hurts, doesn’t it? You’re developing a hole in your head. What’s worse is it isn�
��t marked on my maps. I get dizzy just peering into it. I’ve lost a lot of photos and plans down there. Now I’m sure we’ll never make it to Japan. Five letters, T-o-k-y-o, just fell into it.’

  ‘We can’t go anywhere. We have no money. We’re not even in good physical shape. We’ve no energy, no enthusiasm.’

  ‘Oh, it’s enthusiasm you want, is it? No problem. I just press a button here and your life picks up speed. See?’

  He made me jump out of bed and cross over to the mirror.

  How long had it been since I’d taken a good look at myself? I’d put on six or seven pounds, my skin was yellower than ever and I had deep bags under my eyes, violet-tinted around the edges and greenish in the grooves. My mouth was turned down. My lips had lost the cute little mounds that Vicente had loved to nibble. I had lost several molars recently. My tongue was striped with bands of yellow and white. My hair, however, had retained its abundance and its lustre. My eyes, too, were still the same, although I had to squeeze them hard to get them to focus on my reflection in the mirror. Santiago kept yacking on about the dangers of the void I had unearthed.

  ‘I’ve a feeling something’s slipping away,’ he complained.

  ‘As long as it’s only those sacks of photos you chucked out in the square.’

  ‘No. It’s something far worse. There’s some saliva that’s starting to dribble out. It stings me. It makes me flinch. It sidelines me.’

  I scrambled around in my mind for some photo I could use to compare situations. Meanwhile I was changing my clothes. I dabbed on deodorant and a lemony lotion. I combed my hair. I outlined my eyes with eye-shadow and pinched my lips to bring back some of their pouting fullness.

  ‘I’m telling you this hole is not on my maps. And I know it’s all because of your lifestyle.’ He then added in a sing-song, infantile voice, ‘From work to bed, from bed to kitchen, from kitchen to bed, from bed to wardrobe to get your booze, from booze to bed, from bed to work, from work ...’

  I ignored him. I went through several changes of clothes before I was satisfied with my appearance. Once again I looked like a 23-year-old woman, poured into my tight jeans, with a navy-blue blouse. My chestnut hair hung half-way down my back.

  Santiago continued his whine. ‘I just know you’re going to do something stupid. That stinging saliva is rising again. You’re in real danger of going to a bar. That’s where we’re heading, isn’t it? That’s where you’re going to lose control. Then we’ll be coming back with gaps in our memory, black holes, after trips to God-knows-where. Haven’t I told you before what your dreams are like when you drink too much?’

  He then played one of his old tricks, and hundreds of images came tumbling down like hammers hitting glass. He managed to make me dizzy just at the moment I was going down the steps outside the building.

  But a few minutes later I was opening the door of the Double Diamond bar. Blaring music, shrieking laughter and strong drink. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a beer for starters. I observed the crowd. The bartender told me a couple of jokes, and I pretended to laugh at them. I was in the middle of laughing when Refugio – ‘Cuco’ – Vidal appeared. He had come over to pick up drinks for his friends who were seated at a small, round table.

  Cuco was a pint-sized Spaniard, dark-skinned and excessively thin. He smoked non-stop and had a permanent wheeze. He must have been around forty. He asked me if I was alone. I told him I was waiting for a friend. It wasn’t a total lie. Sometimes women from the third floor, who for some reason were generally younger than those on the fourth, used to gather in this bar and invite me to join their chattering group. I used to pull up a chair, but I never contributed more than the occasional smile. So it wasn’t beyond possibility that they could show up at any moment.

  I didn’t keep count of the beers I drank. Cuco reappeared at my side and pointed out that my friend hadn’t arrived.

  ‘You’re very pretty, you know,’ he said.

  Despite the drunkenness and all, Santiago always had a considered riposte in his armoury for just such chat-up lines. But I was thinking how terrible I had looked in the mirror of the lodging-house.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘You should have seen me a couple of hours ago.’

  Santiago protested that this was not one of our well-rehearsed responses.

  ‘But anyway,’ I added quickly, ‘thanks for the compliment.’

  Santiago managed a sigh of approval.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink?’

  ‘A beer.’

  By now Cuco had noticed that my accent was not Spanish.

  ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t like to say much, do you?’

  I took a swig of the beer and looked at him closely. The only attractive thing about him was the far-away look in his sad eyes.

  ‘No, but I do like to have sex.’

  Santiago hit the roof of one of his caves, exploding with fury. This remark defied every plan of his, lacked any vestige of his treasured elegance. I drank some more of the beer and drowned his rage in it.

  Cuco paid my bill, said goodbye to his friends and led me outside, slipping his arm around my waist.

  His car smelt new. I told him I was hungry. Cuco drove away slowly, as if we were long-time lovers without any haste. He took me to a stylish restaurant where the waiters knew him by name.

  Since my time with Vicente, I had not eaten in a place with such a splendid menu. I ordered a glass of red wine, cream of artichoke soup, a spinach salad and a New York steak. Cuco gave me a tender look. He ordered only the artichoke soup.

  We were eating the soup when he started to vomit. He had the delicacy to mask his mouth with his napkin and managed to vomit into the plate without attracting the waiters’ attention. He made hardly any noise. He just jerked back and forth and gave a few soft moans. My reaction was to feel an urge to vomit, too, out of disgust. I jumped up from the table and dashed to the bathroom.

  Santiago grabbed me there. ‘Revolting! Ugh! How can anyone vomit soup into soup? It isn’t enough for this bloke to be ugly, but he has to vomit over his food? We’re really slumming it here tonight and no mistake!’

  Stay cool, I told myself, while I retched up two spoonfuls of soup and lots of beers. Vomiting the excess of alcohol led directly to the emergence of Santiago at his most lucid.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

  I gathered all my forces against him. I was thinking about that New York steak.

  ‘Just listen to his cough. He’s going to infect us. He’s got something seriously wrong with him. One look at him tells you he’s a walking plague.’

  I left the bathroom. Cuco was smoking and drinking. A noble-hearted waiter had removed the plate with the vomit. The spinach and the meat arrived. Cuco gave me more tender looks.

  ‘Carry on,’ he said.

  But I could not. As soon as I cut into the steak Santiago rose up in protest, and the thought of Cuco’s spasms and the soup plate brimming with vomit overcame my drunken will to indulge myself.

  ‘Wine. I’d like more wine, please.’

  A bottle of the best Rioja arrived at the table.

  We chatted. It turned out he was another engineer. He was from Catalonia and was building a new line of the Madrid Metro. While Santiago swung back and forth between mortal fear and blistering rage, I told Cuco I was from Colombia. I was studying for a master’s degree in literature. We talked about various authors. We kept on drinking; he hardly anything, I lots.

  We left the restaurant arm in arm and went back to his place. He started up the jacuzzi. He put on some music, and we danced. We got into the tub of hot water naked. Undressed, he looked like a Jewish prisoner from a concentration camp. His body was stunted and covered in small sores, some of them scabbed over, others bleeding. He smiled all the time.

  ‘Grotesque!’ was the comment I got from Santiago. In a surly, disdainful voice he was reciting an endless catalogue of the vilest epithets for my lover all
the time I was kissing him. As we headed towards the bed Santiago brandished the photo of the cat.

  It is the year before my suicide attempt, and I am sitting at home in a battered armchair staring into the void. A horrible stink catches my attention. I look around to see where it is coming from. A cat is hiding behind the chair. From the rim of one of its eyes maggots of all sizes are wriggling their way out; from the other tears. It gives me goose-bumps just to look at it, but I do not run away. On the contrary. My only thought is to get it out of the house before my father finds it and batters it with his boots. As I get closer to the cat I see it has another maggoty wound under its chin.

  The cat just sits there. Maggots are crawling all over its body and then back into the exposed flesh. I feel a sense of horror, and shivers run up my back. A car has hit the cat at some time. Then somebody has stoned it, and now it is not far from its grave. I want to pick the cat up, but the maggots on its sides stop me.