Breathing Through the Wound

by Victor del Arbol

  She opened the armoire where Teo’s shirts and suits hung. Every so often she would take them to the same dry cleaners she had always used, and they’d return them freshly pressed. When his smell started to fade, she would bring out the aftershave Teo had used and lightly sprinkle the collars, cuffs, and sleeves so that when she opened the armoire it was as if her husband were coming out to greet her. She’d inhale the smell of his shirts and then exhale slowly, and her heart was thankful for that dance of the senses. Though never an elegant man, Teo was always meticulous and austere, almost English in his dress and footwear. He kept each pair of Italian loafers with its corresponding brush and polish.

  She still had a watch case with a few of his watches—none of them valuable or aesthetically striking—that matched his plain ties, scarves and handkerchiefs. It was all kept in perfect order—folded, unfolded and refolded. Maribel could while away many hours each morning absorbed in the task, but she didn’t mind. She had nothing to do but remember, fold and unfold, and pine.

  In the back of the armoire was a dark plastic bag that Maribel rarely dared to pull out, despite being unable to make herself get rid of its contents. It held the clothes her husband had been wearing the day his soulless killer had blown his brains out. The police had handed it over after the autopsy, and she’d refused to burn it or throw it away, unlike the coat she herself had been wearing that morning, which ended up with a hole shot through it and a black trail of gunpowder, but almost no blood. In the bag, she kept the pale blue shirt that he’d liked to wear on Sundays, when he went to the numismatic association. The collar was a bit thin, worn with use, and they’d often argued because it drove her to distraction to see him put it on. But Teo never wanted to get rid of it because ever since he acquired an aureus of Emperor Alejandro Severo coined in 223AD, it had become his lucky shirt. Embedded in it, like scars in the weave, were blood spatters, shards of his skull, particles of scalp and brain matter that had exploded with devastating violence when the shot was fired into his head.

  She’d also kept his corduroy jacket, its elbows worn thin, and his dark chinos. His clothes hadn’t even matched, the day that lunatic killed him. And that absurd thought had festered in Maribel’s brain, all those years. Like a stuck cog, her brain obsessed over it every time she decided, for whatever reason, to get out the bag and spread its contents on the bed.

  You didn’t even match, but you refused to listen to me. You’d become so irritable and distracted by your coins and things that you wouldn’t even let me pick out your clothes.

  Nearly fourteen years later, she still didn’t understand why some so-called happy people are punished in such unexpected, horrific ways. Who decided their destiny? God? Fate? And why her? Why her and not some other woman? She’d struggled all her life; she understood that life was a question of sacrifice, dedication, effort and tenacity, that it was rife with failures. Classical dance had made her suitably disciplined, but it had also taught her to expect some reward for all that discipline. And she’d hardly had time to enjoy it, just a few short years—“the most beautiful years,” said her romantic, optimist friends; “the most unrealiztic years,” said those not carried away by facile emotion. They couldn’t even have the child that she had so yearned for, and Teo also dreamed of. In the end, they’d adopted their son, and although Maribel had thrown herself body and soul into loving him, deep down it hurt her to know that her husband had never felt the boy was fully his.

  “I wish you could see him. He’s become a handsome young man, hardworking, smart, and so sensitive, but now he needs a father to help him through this confusing time.”

  Maribel didn’t feel she had the strength to battle the inevitable. Children grow up, they learn things about themselves, some of them erroneous, and then they leave—whether physically or not, they stop belonging to their parents. Children are temporary, they’re given only on loan, and sooner or later they have to be returned, given back to life itself. Lately, when Mr. Who looked at her, she felt a strange trepidation, as though her son were hoping for something from her, a sign, as though he wanted to tell her something but didn’t know how. And when she asked him, he’d put on a mask, act like the angel he’d always been, kiss her on the forehead and then leave, burdened by his sadness and his demons.

  It took her a moment to hear the doorbell. When she finally did, she looked at the time, surprised. It was too early for her son to be coming home, and besides, he had his own keys and never rang the bell. Maybe it was those two old ladies again, the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to see her every afternoon, with their pamphlets and their proselytizing spirit, commendable but hopeless in her case. She pushed her wheelchair down the hall to the door, trying to think up an excuse that wouldn’t be offensive, so as to get them out of her hair as soon as possible.

  But when she opened the door she saw not the old ladies with their pious faces, not her son. The sorrowful man who stood looking at her from the hall was a ghost from the past. The face that had filled her nightmares for the past fourteen years.

  “Good morning, Señora. I’m Eduardo Quintana.”

  * * *

  —

  Soon it would be spring; you could feel it in the night air and see it the treetops, where early buds, still too weak to survive a late frost, were beginning to bloom. They were like Mei, a new bud that might not be able to bear another frost, thought Mr. Who.

  In the alley that led to the back of the building where he lived, a prostitute was working a john. She was one of Chang’s girls. They exchanged a look of recognition. Neither merited the other’s sympathy; each of them simply trafficked in other people’s sorrows, made them easier to bear, and carried on their way. That was the sort of people they were, he and the hooker. Lusterless shadows. The john was franticly groping her buttocks, shoving his tongue in her ear. The girl was still looking at Who. Come now, she seemed to be saying, don’t get sentimental. You’ve got your tragedy and I’ve got mine. It’s not like we’re in love. There are those who say hookers are just after easy money. Fools. They have no idea what they’re talking about, he thought. Imagining that that was the destiny Chang had written for Mei was driving him out of his mind.

  He walked into the house and took off his shoes in order not to make any noise. He saw the light on in Maribel’s room and went to see if she needed anything, but stopped halfway there, hearing her crying. Maribel always cried alone, and never in the dark. Mr. Who had grown up with that sadness since the time he was a child. He’d also learned that it was better to leave her alone.

  So he retraced his steps and went to his room.

  He took off his jacket and left it on the unmade bed. Then he sat down at the computer and opened the folder with the scanned photos he’d compiled of the one and only vacation the three of them had taken together—a surprise trip in the summer of 1991; he, Maribel and Teo had gone to Menorca. He’d planned to use the pictures to make a slideshow and set it to music. Maribel would be touched by his thoughtfulness.

  The trip had been unexpected. Teo never wanted to leave Madrid; at most he’d occasionally go to Toledo or Cáceres, never any farther than that. And yet he was the one who turned up one morning with the plane tickets.

  He remembered a ferry that had brought them to some of the island’s coves only accessible by sea. In the photos, his father’s glasses went over his eyebrows. He was half-smiling, twirling his moustache like a matinee idol. Maribel stood beside him. Between them, pressing up against their legs, a boy whose face was pale from the rocking of the boat. The sea frightened him. Leaning against the rail on the observation deck, he watched flocks of seagulls soaring over the frenzied crests of waves that kept crashing in the distance with a dull roar, one after the other.

  He must have been happy that summer, although that wasn’t exactly what he remembered. What he did remember were the days when he’d hear them arguing and catch them in the kitchen, composing their expressions with the
speed of those trained to conceal shortcomings.

  Four months later, Teo was dead and Maribel lay in the hospital with a broken spinal column.

  Mr. Who let his gaze drift, but suddenly his eyes froze on a spot behind the computer. Behind the wood-paneled wall was where Who kept his secrets hidden. And someone had moved a slat.

  * * *

  —

  Maribel was in her wheelchair beside the bed, stroking one of her tulle dance outfits—the last one she’d worn before her vertebrae had been broken. She stared at Who and her eyes were like glass, unbearably certain. She straightened in her wheelchair and, with a casual gesture, dropped the sheet from Eduardo’s file onto the bed, the one Who had stolen from Martina. On it was the photograph of his father’s killer, the man who had destroyed their lives for no reason.

  “How could you hide something like this from me?”

  Mr. Who tried to calm her, but Maribel rebuffed his attempts to take her hand, as though he were a leper. Her lips were trembling, and although she seemed to implore him with her gaze, her expression was hard.

  “I didn’t want to reopen old wounds.”

  “How long have you had this?”

  “The first time I saw him was by chance, in El Retiro park. He was sketching a woman. I recognized him by the photos you keep, the newspaper clippings from what happened. But I wasn’t sure, so I went back the next day, hoping I’d find him again so I could be positive. He was sitting on the same bench, like he was waiting for someone who never came. For weeks I went back to the same place and followed him. I watched him, tried to imagine what kind of man he was. There was no reason to do it, I didn’t have a plan, didn’t know what I’d do when the time came to confront him. One day I approached him in the metro. I sat beside him on the platform, watched him from up close, saw the scars on his wrists, the wrinkles on his skin, the gray in his hair. I smelled his body and heard his voice. I spoke to him, goaded him—provoked him, really. I wanted to see if he remembered me, if he remembered us, but he didn’t react. I’d pictured the scene so many times before—what I’d do, what I’d say. When the train came, I thought I’d shove him, push him under the tracks, and watch the wheels crush him. But the train pulled in and I stopped; I couldn’t do it. A few weeks later, I happened to meet a person. By chance, I found that piece of paper from his file: it explains everything.”

  Maribel threw her head back, as though an invisible hand were pulling her hair, and let out an unbearable wail.

  “Why?” she managed to ask, gazing at Who with a mixture of incredulity and shock.

  Mr. Who sat down on the foot of the bed.

  “Because I need to understand the man who killed us.”

  He used “us” because that’s how he felt it. Teo was not the only one who died that day; he might even have been the luckiest of the three because he’d died on the spot. But the two of them had had to keep dying a little more each day. From the time he was nine, there was no playing in the house, no laughter, no fresh air. Maribel withdrew from him; she did it gently, slowly, in the same way she withdrew from everything, turning her whole life into darkness—the same permanent darkness she kept in her bedroom. Love, true love, had ended before it began. Mr. Who had learned to take care of her in his own way. He smiled, and his smile was different from hers, because when his mother smiled it was nothing but a painted-on expression, while his was a smile of yearning. He longed to win her back, to regain her affection, the devotion he’d hardly had time to experience. But he never again felt her warmth, and little by little he’d descended into his own quiet world, tiptoeing around the house so as not to disturb her. Mr. Who stopped being a child, a teenager, lost his youth and became his invalid mother’s shadow.

  Maribel lifted his chin with her finger, forcing him to look into her eyes. Mr. Who averted his gaze, didn’t want to connect to the reality of that inquisitive look.

  “He was here. This morning.”

  Mr. Who’s face contorted completely.

  He wasn’t expecting that. He felt his throat go dry, the rage boiling up in his stomach. He pictured his mother for a moment, defenseless in her wheelchair, powerless in the presence of that man.

  “Here?” he asked, as if it would have made a difference had she met him in the supermarket, or turning a corner. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. He told me his name. We looked at each other for a while, and I closed the door on him. He didn’t knock again, but I know he stood there on the other side of the door for a long time. I could hear him. Then he left.”

  Maribel gazed around her bedroom. The bed, the armoire, the dresser, the display case with Teo’s coins, the calm air, the pretense that nothing had changed.

  “I want you to put an end to this, son. I don’t want to know that that man is still breathing the same air as us. I don’t want to know that he might come near me.”

  Mr. Who stood.

  “He won’t. I promise you.”

  FOURTEEN

  On the wooden countertop lay a newspaper whose front-page headlines told of a tragic fire in a nearby building. The doorwoman stopped reading when Guzmán walked in. She was middle-aged, and clearly hadn’t waxed her moustache in quite some time. After greeting Guzmán, she leaned on her broom with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, the filter stained with lipstick.

  “The antique dealer’s next door—do you know if they’re closed? No one’s answering the bell,” he said.

  “Dámaso closes up shop before five o’clock. He won’t be back until Monday.” She exhaled smoke through the gaps in her teeth as she spoke.

  Guzmán feigned annoyance.

  “That’s too bad. I’ve got something he’s really interested in. You couldn’t tell me where he lives, could you?”

  She glanced at him with mistrust. Instinctively, she straightened her shoulders, clamped her teeth down on the cigarette, and then—sounding affronted—began enumerating her many chores and responsibilities: sweeping the staircase, taking out the garbage, seeing to the gas men who were coming to do an inspection. How did he expect her to keep track of where every shop owner on the street lived? And even if she did know, why should she tell him? People might think doorwomen talked too much, but she—and with a thumb, she jabbed her own chest emphatically—was not the type to sit at her desk all day reading Hello! or Lecturas. She spent her days working.

  Guzmán smiled. And behind the smile, he pondered how easy it would be to wring her little chicken neck with one hand.

  “I understand. I’ll come back on Monday when he opens.”

  He walked out onto the street with a sense of relief and sat down at an outdoor café, choosing a table where he could keep an eye on the lobby of the building and the antique dealer’s connected to it. Now all he had to do was wait.

  When he’d yet to touch his coffee, the doorwoman left the building and walked down the street, leaving a trail of cigarette smoke in her wake. Guzmán walked back to the building and pushed open the front door. The reception area was empty, inhabited only by the heavy sweetish smell of burning tobacco and the voices that carried through the elevator shaft. Music came from somewhere, a Chilean bolero that Guzmán recognized, by Lucho Gatica: “Contigo en la distancia,” it was called.

  There’s not a moment of the day

  I can stand to be far from you

  The music put him at rights with the world for a moment.

  The half-door to the woman’s cubicle was open. The newspaper no longer lay on the desk; now, instead, there was a note, scrawled in boxy, childlike letters: “Back in five minutes.” She’d left her broom to stand guard, leaning up against the wall. Guzmán slipped his hand behind the little door and undid the latch. Hanging from a corkboard on the wall were master keys to every unit. To make matters even easier, each one was labeled. He grabbed the one that said Dámaso’s place.

  A door beside the ele
vator led down to the antique shop. Once he’d gone through, Guzmán felt around for the light switch and turned on a fluorescent bulb. To the right stood the door into the shop. To the left, a partial staircase leading down to another closed door. Guzmán decided to investigate.

  The storeroom was sizable; everywhere were paintings, boxes of books, dressers, chairs, clocks, tapestries and other assorted items waiting to be cataloged.

  For a good while, Guzmán hunted around with no clear idea of what he was searching for. He knew from experience that people lie for one of two reasons: to hide something, or to invent something. In Dámaso’s case, it was clear that he was hiding something. It was just a matter of finding out what that was.

  Nothing he came across seemed particularly interesting. Stuff. Just silent stuff, that couldn’t answer his questions. Disappointed, Guzmán sat down on an old trunk with a floral pattern and antique metalwork; he took a slow look around. Sometimes it’s only when you stop looking that you actually see, when you stop searching and open yourself up to coincidence. In one corner was a collection of furniture whose arrangement caught his eye. Although at first glance the storeroom seemed chaotic, in fact it was not. The pieces were grouped by commonalities, whether period, or style, or function.

  In one area were the oldest pieces, Napoleonic-style furniture; in another were more baroque objects; in front of those, pieces from the seventies and eighties. But right in front of him, amid rows of paintings and coat stands, mirrors and a few hunting scenes, was an enormous travertine table, on top of a fake tiger-skin rug that was wrinkled around its legs—as though the table had been moved and had dragged the rug with it.

  Guzmán shifted objects out of his way to clear a path. Beneath the rug, he discovered a trap door. It took him several attempts and almost all his strength to move the table. Whatever it was underneath there, Dámaso had no way of getting to it without help; the table was far too heavy for someone his age to move alone. And judging by the cobwebs that stretched like chewing gum when he pulled up the hatch, he hadn’t used it in quite some time.