Breathing Through the Wound

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Breathing Through the Wound Page 30

by Victor del Arbol


  Guzmán weighed up her determination with an expert eye. He saw Candela in the interrogation room that first time, standing before him, hands tied behind her back. You can break my back if you want. You’ll never get what I have inside. Guzmán didn’t know it at the time, but that was the start of his only failure and only triumph in life. What she had inside—her hopes and dreams and will to live—he never got.

  Before leaving, he handed Olsen’s widow a check far more generous than necessary. After all, Arthur was the one paying his expenses, and being generous with other people’s money was something that made him feel especially good.

  “Why so much?” she asked in wonder.

  Guzmán gave her an appreciative glance. He liked survivors. He liked her, no point in denying it.

  “Because I hope the money will encourage you to take a long trip to another part of the world. Maybe you can make a fresh start someplace where nobody will treat you like a bimbo.”

  * * *

  —

  Four days later, Guzmán was feeling like the outside world was somewhat indifferent, like it was keeping a prudent distance, one that varied according to the speed at which people moved. It occurred to him that he was but one tiny part of a greater whole, and that someone somewhere was watching his tiny insignificant life. Reality was a set of Russian nesting dolls—it could go on forever.

  Guzmán stopped to listen to a street musician playing Spanish guitar. He was a languid-looking young man, and played extraordinarily well. His guitar case lay open at his feet, a few coins and some CDs he’d recorded lay inside it. He could have been a consummate virtuoso who earned millions playing concerts in prestigious auditoriums all over the world, but people just kept walking by, no time to stop and listen.

  “Art can’t change a boorish soul, because humans are deaf, blind boors with no soul left to lose,” he murmured, dropping a few coins into the case. It wasn’t his line. It was Candela’s.

  In the distance stood the imposing granite and limestone Palacio de Oriente. Tourists were taking pictures at the fence surrounding the courtyard while the ceremonious changing of the Royal Guard was performed. Behind the palace were the winter gardens known as Campo del Moro, which had excellent views of the palace and the Manzanares River. Tree-lined walkways prophesied the inevitable arrival of spring. That morning the sun was shining, warm but not yet suffocating. Peacocks spread their feathers like rainbows in the fields, undisturbed by the passersby, some of whom stopped to snap photos.

  But not Dámaso. Nor did he stop to feed the pigeons drinking from the Conchas fountain, despite the fact that in his hand he clutched a bag of breadcrumbs he’d purchased at the little kiosk by the east entrance.

  Guzmán followed at a distance. Were it not for his constant turning to look behind him, Dámaso would have looked like what his appearance suggested—a retiree out taking a stroll on a Sunday morning, nothing to do but lose himself in nostalgia. Even his clothes seemed to confirm his harmlessness: light-colored shirt buttoned to the neck, knitted cardigan, gray trousers belted tightly and worn too high, rubber-soled shoes, eyeglasses hanging from a string around his neck, thin white hair slicked back, straight sideburns, closely shaved chin. The picture of a venerable grandfather—maybe a slightly unsociable one, but harmless at any rate.

  Seeing him walk into the public restrooms close to Caverna, an onlooker might think that maybe the man had prostate trouble, imagining that he went to the bathroom four, five, six times an hour, unable to squeeze out more than a few reddish drops with a grunt. A well-intentioned individual might have recommended he smoke less. He wheezed climbing the stairs to the restroom, his lungs like broken, leaky bellows. People on the steps who stood back to let him pass (Sunday mornings, people always try harder to be nice) might also have thought that the boy following him—no more than fifteen, covered in acne, wearing cartoonish glasses—was his grandson. Had anyone thought to compare them, they’d have realized that, quite obviously, any blood relation was improbable. The kid was too dark, his hair too curly, and his nose diametrically opposed to Dámaso’s. But people don’t think about these things when they see strangers. They don’t picture their lives, don’t ask questions about them. They have no reason to.

  Guzmán, however, was asking a lot of questions. One after the other, and he didn’t let them go. People in general didn’t interest him. But the subject of one of his investigations did.

  It hadn’t been hard to verify a few things about the antiquarian. People aren’t very careful with their past, especially if they think they’re safe. All he’d had to do was ph one a few old colleagues, people he knew from another time, another country—a country very different from the one he was in now. His old comrades from the Spanish police force, who’d had no qualms about coming to him when they wanted help fighting ETA refugees in Chile during the late eighties, now tried to dodge him. They told him in no uncertain terms that they wanted nothing to do with him. They had become commissioners, police chiefs, deputies; they had a lot to lose and little inclination to lose it. They used bullshit excuses, hiding behind their families and careers, making guilt-ridden proclamations—What we did back then was wrong—to cover their fear. None of the arseholes who’d hung up on him had lost more than him, but still he feigned compassion, understanding.

  He didn’t want to bother them, hadn’t emerged from the past to burst their piece-of-shit bubbles. All he wanted was a little information about a guy who didn’t add up. Why do you want to know? they asked suspiciously. Better not to ask; just keep up your charade, was his reply. Private matter. He worked alone now. Most of them knew he’d been expelled from the directorate over the music-teacher incident, maybe they could even guess that he hadn’t been allowed to leave Pinochet’s police force with a simple pat on the back. They didn’t want to know the details and looked away in horror when they saw his mangled hand. You should see what’s in my pants, Guzmán thought.

  One way or another, he’d managed to gather enough information about the respectable-looking old man now heading for the garden exit with the kid trailing close behind.

  If people were more observant, they’d have wondered why Dámaso bought a bag of bird food that he was now tossing into the bin, leaving the winged vermin to fight over the crumbs. Maybe someone would have picked up on the way the old man’s hand encircled the boy’s waist, fingers dropping dangerously close to his buttocks. Guzmán had no idea if he was married or widowed, if he had children or grandkids, if he planned to retire to a little house in the mountains when his antiques business dried up. But he did know that Dámaso Berenguer was many other things, in addition to antiquarian, or at least had been at some point in his life: black-marketeer, forger, launderer of huge sums of money, and pederast.

  That last one had gotten him into trouble with the law in the mid-nineties. In a bar one night, some customers had discovered him in the bathroom with a kid who, like the one now climbing into his car—a SEAT parked beside the fence—could have been his grandson. Except that his pants were down, and Dámaso was, quite literally, giving him an arse-licking. If the police hadn’t gotten him out of there, shoving and clubbing their way through, the customers would have flayed him alive. He served six months of a sentence, which was reduced to a fine.

  As he drove, following Dámaso’s car into an industrial area on the outskirts of Madrid, he thought of the stars in the Atacama desert, of Candela’s soft skin, slightly sour from sweat and lack of bathing, of the talks they’d had on a straw mattress on the floor of the cell where he was supposed to be interrogating her, not falling in love with her. Do you have kids? And her reply: No. What’s the point? I wouldn’t want them to suffer in this piece-of-shit world. She used the word shit a lot, and over the years Guzmán realized he’d picked it up and it had stuck—shit in his mouth and on his shoes.

  As Dámaso’s car turned, without signaling, at an exit for Las Cárdenas Industrial Park, he thought a
bout Bosco and his men; how, despite the horror Guzmán had been subjected to, his boss hadn’t wanted to kill him. He should have done it. If he had, he’d still be alive today; instead he had a widow and three orphans in Santiago. He could have witnessed the arrival of democracy, and a Spanish judge attempting to punish Pinochet while the ex-dictator paraded around the world pathetically feigning illness and senility. Never leave things half-done, Bosco used to say. And he was right. He’d found that out the night Guzmán showed up at his house and blew his brains out with a shotgun.

  Dámaso parked the blue SEAT, with its bumper sticker on the back window (Visit Cuenca!), near an industrial unit. Behind the fence, a dog chained to a cement pylon barked, baring its sharp yellow teeth. Old man and boy got out and walked into the grounds. Dámaso had a key and unlocked a gate in the fence. The dog’s barking became more frenzied as it jerked violently against the chain, straining to get at them. Guzmán was terrified of dogs; he froze in panic around them. It took all the courage he could muster to conquer his fear and, after a few minutes, finally force himself to get out of the car and jump the fence, Dámaso having locked the gate behind him. Pressing himself to the wall farthest from the dog, he approached the entrance, and the animal, despite its best efforts, was unable to reach him.

  The unit looked empty. It must have been a warehouse, and there were still a few pallets with copper coils in one corner. Leaning against the wall was a large FOR SALE sign with the phone number of a real estate agent. An overhead crane spanned the entire ceiling, its hook hanging down in the middle from an enormous chain. There was dust and filth everywhere. On the right, a narrow staircase led up to a mezzanine with a prefab module that must have served as the firm’s offices when the place was in business. Through the frosted glass he could make out the silhouettes of Dámaso and his companion.

  Guzmán imagined what he’d find as he climbed the metallic stairs, not caring about the noise he made. Imagining is a way of predicting the future, both distant and immediate. He was unconcerned about the scene he was about to come upon. Or what would happen after that. Guzmán knew perfectly well. The future was his to invent.

  The flimsy door was buckled and in disrepair. It was broken in a few places and had a hole that looked to have been caused by a blow, maybe a fist. As if someone had taken out their rage with a gesture that probably did nothing but bruise their knuckles. Maybe whoever did it had been a worker at the old factory, unceremoniously fired from one day to the next. Or maybe it was somebody Dámaso had taken there before.

  The old man and the boy were pressed close together. Whatever it was they were doing seemed very private, just between the two of them, even though before Guzmán burst into the room they were alone and had nothing to hide or be ashamed of. Except maybe themselves. They both looked up at him in shock, and he found their expressions both tragic and comical. The kid didn’t move. He simply pulled back from the old man a few centimeters, enough to reveal his right hand clutching Dámaso’s pathetically erect penis. For a split second he held on to it, as though afraid it might fall into a void. For his part, the old man made a vague attempt to do up his zipper. A handkerchief stuck out of his back pocket; perhaps he’d been planning to wipe himself off when he finished.

  “Get out of here, kid,” Guzmán ordered, and the boy hesitated for a moment, looking to Dámaso for some sort of direction, a reason to refuse. But the old man was pale as wax and staring at the floor. Finally the hired hand left, carefully edging around Guzmán, who stood blocking almost the entire doorway with his body. They heard him race down the stairs as fast as he could.

  Dámaso put up no resistance, didn’t even try to justify himself. Didn’t ask a single question, say a single word.

  And yet still, Guzmán pulled an expandable baton from his pocket, whipped it through the air to assemble it, and whacked the old man on his right carotid, just between his jaw and clavicle. The blow was so violent that Dámaso collapsed like a sack of potatoes, unconscious. Guzmán could easily have managed without hitting him, at least at first, but he felt no regret. On his scale of values—a spiral staircase he climbed up and down as he saw fit—what he’d seen merited no compassion.

  * * *

  —

  He opened his eyes for a second but then closed them right away. The light bothered him. He could smell wet clothes, and the leather jacket hung over the back of a chair; he could sense an umbrella dripping and a muffled drumming sound far above his head. It must be raining outside. He heard Guzmán’s voice, very close to his face. His breath was sweet, like fruit-flavored gum. Strawberry, maybe.

  “How do you feel?”

  Dámaso tried to sit up, but the pain in his neck stopped him.

  “Easy, don’t try to move or you’ll hurt yourself,” Guzmán whispered, placing a hand on his chest.

  Dámaso touched his head. He had a small cut on his brow and some bruises. But the worst thing was the buzzing in his brain, the intense pain in his neck. His heart was beating too quickly, wildly.

  “You’re dazed from the blow,” Guzmán said, guessing the old man’s thoughts, approaching from behind, and placing an amicable hand on Dámaso’s shoulder. The old man saw his singed hand and amputated little finger. Guzmán appeared truly relieved that nothing worse had happened. His eyes were direct, straightforward, honest; he smiled with his mouth open wide, like a child watching a Christmas parade. And yet, there was something sinister about the way he puffed out his chest as he breathed.

  They were in the basement of Dámaso’s storeroom, in his private theater. Dámaso’s heart skipped a beat when he realized that Guzmán had been carelessly rifling through tapes, handling rolls of film. The idiot didn’t realize how valuable the items he was mishandling were. It seemed pointless to ask him what they were both doing there and how he’d found the place. And yet he did it anyway.

  “You have no right to do this. What I do in my private life is my business. If you want to report me, go ahead. But you can’t do this,” he protested.

  Guzmán nodded. It was true, he had no right to do this. But that didn’t change things. If anything, it clarified them. Having or lacking the right to do something, what was just or unjust, legal or illegal…All just words, abstract concepts that weren’t much good at a time like this. He got a chair and dragged it over, sat backwards on it, arms resting on the back, facing Dámaso. For a full minute he said nothing. Just stared. He wanted to make the man feel the full fear of the wait. Make him wonder: What now? What’s going to happen?

  “Nice little setup you got down here. This place is better-hidden than a nuclear fallout shelter. All this just to watch Charlie Chaplin videos with your little friends? Hard to believe, I got to say. Even more so knowing your record.”

  “It’s none of your business. Nothing illegal goes on here.”

  “Seriously? Then why did you lie to me?”

  Dámaso swallowed. If this man had been a police officer maybe he could have hoped for things to turn out for the better. But he wasn’t, and that terrified him.

  “This is for people who want to keep their privacy. I don’t know who you are or what you’re looking for, but you’re making a very big mistake. You’re going to find yourself in some serious trouble.”

  Dámaso tried to sound confident, but his voice trembled. And his defiance collapsed entirely when Guzmán reached out a hand—that atrophied hunk of flesh and wrinkled skin—and removed Dámaso’s glasses. Without the magnified lenses, his tiny little mouse eyes looked petrified.

  “Don’t get defensive, old man. I just want to talk. We can try to be civilized.”

  “What do you want? Money? Are you trying to blackmail me? You’re barking up the wrong tree. I don’t have a single euro.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. I’m not here to talk about your sick little perversions. I couldn’t care less who you’re fucking up the arse. I’ve got questions, and I want answers. End of s
tory. Very easy if you cooperate, so there’s no need to resist. I don’t like to see others suffer needlessly—I’m going soft in my old age, you know?”

  “What questions?”

  “First: the day Magnus Olsen killed himself, he got a ph one call. There was a message on his answering machine. Were you the one who called him?”

  “I told you, I hardly new Olsen. I didn’t call him.”

  Guzmán flexed his shoulders and, before Dámaso had time to react, punched him in the mouth, splitting his lip and throwing him back in his chair, though Guzmán reached out an arm to steady him just in time. Strangely, he was quite gentle, as though Dámaso were a frail old man who’d stumbled in the street and he a kind soul who’d come to his aid. The effect was disconcerting.

  “You’re not taking the easy route, Dámaso. You’re heading down a dead-end street. Don’t worry about what you think I know. Don’t try to gauge what you should or shouldn’t say, what you think I want to hear. That’s a very common mistake. Believe me, my friend. I’ve got a lot of experience. Focus on what you know and own up, give it up voluntarily or I’ll have to wrench it from you. Was the voice on the answering machine yours?”

  Dámaso nodded slowly.

  “Much better. Now, tell me about the recording you demanded to have back in that message. Thinking about the boy who was greasing your rod a little while ago, it occurs to me that it’s probably not a Harold Lloyd flick, am I right?”

  Dámaso didn’t take his eyes off Guzmán’s fist. He could taste the blood oozing through his gums, feel it filling the gaps between his teeth, making him gag.

  “I’m a collector of special movies. Unique films that can’t be found anywhere else. I repeat, nothing illegal. But what you’re doing is a serious crime. Magnus Olsen was part of the film club; I lent him a very old movie and he was taking too long to return it, so I called to demand that he give it back.”

 

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