Breathing Through the Wound

by Victor del Arbol

  “Shitty weather. I thought the sun was always shining here,” he complained.

  The waiter smiled when he saw them, and Guzmán called him over. He was a man used to giving orders, and used to having them obeyed, pronto.

  Arthur ordered an espresso. Guzmán glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, smiled mockingly, and ordered a gin—double, with two ice cubes.

  The waiter was back in under a minute with their order.

  “A little early to start drinking.”

  Guzmán nodded, swirling his highball glass and observing the iridescent effect of the bar’s light on his ice.

  “It’s a little late for coffee, and I have trouble sleeping if I have too much caffeine. Jet lag doesn’t suit me,” he said, flashing a cynical smile.

  Guzmán, if that was his real name, looked like the kind of guy you see lurking drowsily in a corner, eating pistachios and boozing, his eyes never leaving the glass until the second he collapses onto the bar. He pulled out a pack of Chilean cigarettes and offered Arthur one.

  “They’re shit, but that’s all there was in my last city.”

  Arthur declined the invitation, and warned him that smoking was prohibited. Guzmán looked around and feigned disgust. He lit the cigarette and exhaled a puff of smoke, jutting his lower lip out like a springboard. His teeth were stained and his gum flitted back and forth on his tongue.

  “This country is pathetic. People think anything goes, think it’s all party-party-party and sangria,” he went on. “But things are going from bad to worse, it’s like the worst days of Prohibition.” He said it like he was some 1920s Chicago mobster.

  Without his umbrella as a shield, Arthur could study him carefully. Were his eyes hazel now, or was that just light from the bar, reflected in his irises, giving him a different expression? Arthur made a mental note that he’d have to ask Diana where she’d found this guy. He couldn’t have read more than a dozen books in his life but he was certainly shrewd, he had the shrewdness of a survivor. He was one of those men whose ugliness was somehow attractive, a guy whose appearance was carefully disheveled, the knot on his tie loosened. Guzmán kept his right hand in his pocket and Arthur heard the raspy sound of paper between his fingers. He got the feeling that the guy had been waiting to show him something, but at the same time maliciously holding back, delaying one minute after another. He seemed unaware of the passage of time. Reality, for him, was found in contemplating the liquid in his glass.

  Staring at the mutilated hand holding the highball, Arthur considered what Diana had told him about the man.

  “Diana told me about the…methods you use.”

  Guzmán flashed a sort of half-smile.

  “Reputations are bullshit. All legends lie, and mine is no exception. We all invent whatever truth best suits our needs. I’m not the monster you’ve heard about, but it works for me; it’s useful to have others think I am. In my line of work, nobody thinks you’re anybody if you haven’t eviscerated your best friend. Which, by the way, I have. But anyway, what do you care about the methods I use? I was asked to come, and here I am.”

  “Did Diana tell you what I want you to do?”

  Guzmán blew a long puff of smoke up at the ceiling and began flicking his lighter with his thumbnail, sparking the flint.

  “You want me to find your daughter.”

  “You think you can do it?”

  Guzmán shot him a condescending look. Rich guys like Arthur might be able to buy him, but they couldn’t fool him. He’d done his homework before accepting Diana’s proposition. Human beings are unpredictable, he thought. They’ll cling to anything—a hope, a memory, an object—and protect it with their lives if that’s what enables them to hold on to a shred of sanity amid the madness. He pulled an envelope from his pocket and slid it across the bar until it touched Arthur’s coffee cup.

  “The police report on your daughter’s disappearance. Bunch of amateurs, as was to be expected. According to what it says here, she disappeared about four years ago. She was a minor at the time, but she must be twenty-one by now, which means that, if I do find her, she could decide of her own free will that she wants nothing to do with her filthy rich parents. Still, it’s certainly true that the police didn’t exactly knuckle down in their search. When you want to find someone, you find them. But your daughter had run away before, isn’t that right? With a student from London she met at Heathrow, to Wales—that lasted three weeks; then at sixteen she escaped from the boarding school where you’d sent her to detox and went missing for four months, until her expense account ran dry; at seventeen she broke her riding instructor’s nose and disappeared for two months—off someplace in Portugal…et cetera. With a record like that, I’m not surprised the police didn’t have her down as a top priority.”

  Arthur straightened on his stool and eyed Guzmán severely. He placed his coffee cup in its saucer atop a dried ring of spilled coffee.

  “That’s why you’re here, to find her and bring her home, bring her back to me.”

  Guzmán glanced around for an ashtray. Not finding one, he dropped his butt into his glass and raised a finger, ordering another.

  “I’m good, my friend, but I’m not the Wizard of Oz. It’s been four years.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  Guzmán barked out a short laugh like he’d just heard a private joke.

  “Looking for a white rabbit?”

  The waiter returned with a fresh drink. He looked uneasy, cleared his throat and informed Guzmán that smoking was prohibited. Guzmán nodded very slowly, his eyes boring into the waiter until the man blinked, stammered an apology and departed.

  “I can find her, but I’m expensive—very expensive. And first I need to know how far you’re willing to go. I don’t like leaving things unfinished.”

  “As far as necessary. I don’t care if you have to go to hell and back to find her,” he replied vehemently, staring at Guzmán’s butchered hand.

  Guzmán adopted a skeptical expression. He could imagine the idiots that this desperate father had wasted a fortune on: manipulators, unscrupulous smartasses, schemers, peddling smoke and mirrors, spurred on by their own greed. But he wasn’t like that. He didn’t stop—at anything—until he achieved what he’d set out to do.

  “That might be very far, my friend. You’d be surprised how many people out there demand an answer, and when you give it to them, they can’t handle it. See, people’s blood runs cold fast, and I need to know that’s not going to happen in this case; otherwise, I’ll go back to where I came from. It’s important for us all to be rowing in the same direction, and even better if we do it with equal effort.”

  “I want my daughter back. There’s nothing else to be said.”

  Guzmán paused briefly to take a sip. He smacked his lips and nodded decisively. They had an agreement, then.

  “We could start with you: I heard you had quite an ugly accident. Killed a boy and a little girl.”

  Diana’s words echoed in his head once more. Guzmán was a door he couldn’t close whenever he felt like it, once that door was open. He shook the voice from his head.

  “That’s totally unrelated, and besides, it’s none of your business.”

  Guzmán shook his head slowly back and forth.

  “Everything is related, we’re all connected—butterfly effect and all that shit, haven’t you heard? Besides, from here on out, until I find your little girl, everything that affects you is my business. So: give me your version of what happened.”

  Arthur remained pensive. Then he raised a hand and ordered a beer.

  “I think I’ll have one of your cigarettes after all.”

  Guzmán held one out to him.

  “…By the way, isn’t Tagger a Jewish name?”

  SEVEN

  El Español was a one-of-a-kind instrument, a Stradivarius built between 1682 and
1687. It had been in the Tagger family for over a hundred years, if you added up the different periods in which the violin had been in their possession. At the end of the Second World War it had been lost, and remained so until Gloria A. Tagger managed to recover it, restoring it to the family estate almost by coincidence. And now, suddenly, she was relinquishing it, in exchange for an unknown sum of money, to the Palacio Real’s royal Stradivarius collection. Gloria didn’t need the money, so no one could understand why she had made the decision to never again play the amazing, unique instrument, a violin that her grandfather, her father, and she herself had spent large chunks of their lives attempting to locate.

  National Heritage specialists opened the case with great care, their hands gloved. Despite various certificates of authenticity and documentation that had already been analyzed by experts, they had to conduct additional certification assessments. A Stradivarius was an almost liturgical object—more, in fact, it was almost alchemical, and that was how they treated it. The quality of sound it produced was considered unique, although X-rays and tests conducted on the varnishes covering its surface revealed it had not always been treated with the same loving care. The violin had undergone great alterations and modifications since its manufacture: at different points in time, the neck, frets and strings had been changed, and it had been periodically revarnished. The only thing that remained intact—though scarred, as tests revealed—was its maple-wood body. In a way, that violin, soon to be taken off in an armored car to a display case in the Palacio Real, was like a map charting the most tumultuous decades of the ever-mysterious and little-known Tagger family, which had produced no less than three great soloists.

  As the experts worked—under the attentive gaze of both a notary and a lawyer for the state’s insurance company—Gloria’s eyes drifted to an old framed photo of a young man in a German interwar uniform. He looked Prussian, humorless; his face was serious, he probably smelled of pipe tobacco, and he had straight white teeth—quite a luxury at the time. Gyula A. Tagger was her great-grandfather.

  “Not many people know this, but I’ve got Balkan blood—Jewish, to boot. And the funniest thing is, Hungarian Jews are largely descended from Spain’s Jews, the Sephardi, who were expelled by Queen Isabel in the fifteenth century.”

  “It’s very odd that your great-grandfather served in the German army,” said Eduardo, who was with her that morning. Gloria had wanted him there to witness the transfer, and though he didn’t understand why, he knew it was important to her and so agreed without demanding an explanation.

  Gloria seemed to hesitate before continuing.

  “It is, yes. He denied his ancestry, like the Marranos in medieval Spain under the Catholic Monarchs, and like all converts was the harshest of executioners when it came to his own people. He changed his first and last name, invented a new background to explain his past—and had he been able to, I bet he would have changed his blood, too. Legally, the violin belonged to him, and I can only imagine he’d be twisting his Prussian whiskers right now to see what’s being done to it.

  “The Taggers hail from Lake Balaton in Hungary’s Transdanubia. By the time I was born, in 1968, the story of my great-grandfather and El Español was already hazy. Like my father, I was born in Madrid, and it wasn’t until I turned twenty, and the Hungarian government invited us to the Budapest Orchestra’s centenary commemoration, that I learned the details of my Hungarian, Jewish, and Nazi past.”

  That association seemed to amuse her, but the truth was that it did not. Gloria stepped back from the table where workers were poring over violin parts like forensics experts.

  “The first thing my father did when we landed in Budapest was take me to visit my grandfather’s grave. I remember it was late afternoon, near the lake; the spa with medicinal waters there was closed, the pier empty. Families who had come from Budapest to bathe were returning to the various guesthouses dotted throughout the surrounding vineyards, in the shade of the majestic Bakony Mountains. There was a gentle breeze blowing, rocking the little boats tied there. At the time, my father had just turned forty-five. I remember him sitting at the wharf, gazing out at the reddish clouds reflected in the lake’s surface, seeming unaware of the passage of time. He was on the pier’s wet wooden planks, swinging his bare feet back and forth. You could see the north shore—with swampy areas where tall reeds and cane grew—and the roofs of the village houses, mostly thatch. ‘This is where it all began,’ he said, giving me a strange look. I think that was the day, there on Lake Balaton, when he first told me the story of my great-grandfather Gyula, his son—my grandfather—and our violin.”

  Gloria walked over to the display cabinet, where all that was left was the Stradivarius’ cushioned rack. She smiled as she recalled that afternoon, sitting on a deserted pier with her father, listening—entranced—as he told the story of her ancestors. It was, for many reasons, an unforgettable trip.

  “In the early forties the Hungarian army, allied with Hitler, suffered a large number of casualties on the Russian front, and since the balance was slowly tipping in favor of the Allies, the Hungarian government entered conversations to negotiate a separate peace. Despite the fact that negotiations were secret, everyone knew about them, and the German presence was increasingly aggressive. It was only a matter of time before they formally invaded the country, so most people’s anti-German sentiments were on the rise. My great-grandfather Gyula, however, ordered my grandfather and great aunts to minister to wounded German soldiers at their home. It wasn’t unusual to see Germans at their house, convalescing or on leave. Some had incredibly disfigured faces, others were covered in burns or missing limbs. My grandfather, influenced by his own father’s ideals, couldn’t help but feel sorry for those young blond men who at one time, not long before, had been living happily in their German cities with their wives, their girlfriends, their kids.”

  Eduardo nodded, intrigued by the story Gloria told.

  “The war was hard on everyone,” he said, recalling his own grandfather, who had fought to defend the Alcázar of Toledo during the Spanish Civil War while his very own brother fought to attack it.

  Gloria gave a little smile.

  “But even in wartime, young people have a great will to live. In 1943, my grandfather was a promising young man, a brilliant cellist with the first Orchestra of Budapest. His father—my great-grandfather—had previously been one of Chancellor Bismarck’s musicians and played El Español for the Nazi high command, including Göring and Himmler in Berlin, before the war. No one had a clue that his impeccable musical and military records hid a distant Jewish past; he’d taken every precaution to ensure that all traces were erased, and they only came to light far later. Because of that, his son was exempt from joining the ranks and enjoyed special privileges as a musician.”

  Gloria went to the window and, with two fingers, pulled the curtain back slightly to peek out. The throng of journalists was still out there, armed with tripods, cameras and mikes, awaiting the Secretary of Culture who was set to give a joint press conference. The handing over of the violin to National Heritage was newsworthy enough for politicians to make the drive out to the house to be photographed.

  “Tell me something, Eduardo. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have had different parents? To have been born in Tripoli, say, rather than Madrid? Your whole life, everything you are, might have been different, just by virtue of your father or grandfather having chosen a different life partner. That single decision marks every generation thereafter, don’t you think?”

  Eduardo had never even considered such a thing. Coming out of the blue like that, the question was just too complex to be answered with a pat response. In any event, Gloria wasn’t expecting him to answer. She was thinking out loud.

  “As I said, on that trip, my father took me to visit my grandfather’s grave. But he also took me there to show me something else: beside his grave was not, as you might imagine, my grandm
other’s grave. My grandfather was widowed many years before he died, and though I never met my grandmother I knew her name. Carmen de los Desmayos was her name, and she was born in Aldea del Campo, Cáceres, in 1920, where she was buried in the church cemetery when she died. But the gravestone my father showed me next to my grandfather’s belonged to a woman named Álenka W.T., who was born in Budapest in 1924 and died in an undetermined location on the Romanian border in 1944. My father crouched down and stroked the moss on the ground that had grown in the space between their graves, close enough for them to hold hands underground.”

  The housekeeper walked in, wiping her hands on her apron. She stood for a moment, focusing on the workers’ progress, failing to see why they felt the need to wrap the violin in a chamois, as if it were a baby that might catch cold. Then she approached Gloria and whispered something—something Eduardo overheard, although he wished he hadn’t. Someone named Guzmán was on the phone, wanting to speak to her. He claimed to be a Chilean reporter, hoping to interview her before his return to Santiago. Gloria considered for a moment. Then she told the housekeeper to get his number and set up a time for them to meet the following day.

  “What were we talking about?”

  “Your grandfather and his mysterious graveside companion.”

  Gloria picked up where she’d left off.

  “Alejandra—Álek—was the great love of my grandfather’s life until he met my grandmother. And judging by his decision to be posthumously laid out beside her, I’d say for the rest his life. My father knew, at some point my grandfather must have come clean to him—perhaps after my grandmother died, maybe because he was an only child and therefore the only one who could ensure that his wish to be buried with her be carried out. Apparently she was a very pretty girl, joyful and carefree. Time stood still for her; she lived in her own world, a world with no wars, schedules, obligations or conventions. Maybe that’s why my grandfather loved her so much, because she was like a bird that flew wherever her little wings wanted to take her. A celestial soul.”