Breathing Through the Wound

by Victor del Arbol

  Behind the cloth partition could be heard distressed voices. Glancing underneath, Eduardo saw a leg hanging over the edge of a makeshift cot. It belonged to the body of a faceless man, who was still alive, moaning weakly. For several minutes, a doctor and emergency worker tried frantically to revive him. Someone brought a mask and oxygen tank. From where he stood, Eduardo could not see if the burn victim was reacting or not, but he thought all that pounding on the man’s chest must surely have broken a few ribs. Two nurses and two firefighters, their faces and helmets covered in soot, carried the stretcher out to the nearest ambulance. The police cleared the way, and then a wailing siren took off up the street in the opposite direction.

  Firefighters started spraying the antique dealer’s with foam, using high-pressure hoses. Police were evacuating the apartment building next door, hustling the residents into a safety zone. A few were complaining—some people will complain even if someone is trying to protect them—others crying, one or two carrying cages with parakeets or cats in their arms, and a dog barked rabidly at the sirens assaulting his sensitive canine ears. A few people were speaking to officers, who were taking notes in their little books.

  The fire had destroyed a good part of the building; apparently it had started in the basement. The piles of old clothes, furniture and paintings had fed the flames, which raged so quickly that only a few pieces had been saved. The firefighters now dragged what they could out through the doors and broken windows:a bronze sculpture of Marcus Aurelius with a singed face; a charred baroque crucifix; spoons, plates and vases; a Louis XIV armchair. All that rushing in and out seemed just like a house being looted during the revolution.

  Fifteen minutes later, the fire died down and the crowd lost interest. Only the most obstinate gawkers remained, perhaps those who derived secret pleasure from others” misfortune. By the time the fire fighters finished their work all that was left was a black stain on the building’s facade and the police security tape. Nothing new.

  Eduardo stepped back to pass by. His clothes were infused with smoke, and the daisies now looked sad and limp. That was when he saw Ibrahim standing among the few people still left, behind the security barrier, his head sticking out above the rest. He was watching the scene, impassive. Ibrahim turned and saw him. They exchanged a look. Eduardo began to wave, but dropped his arm mid-gesture. As though he hadn’t even seen him, Ibrahim withdrew and slipped off in the opposite direction.

  When Eduardo got home, news of the fire was already on the radio. Sitting in the building lobby with her fashion magazines, Graciela was listening to a transistor radio, an absent look on her face and a half-smoked cigarette between her fingers. The announcers were grave, saying all anyone could do was regret the passing of Dámaso Sebastián, aged seventy-two, who’d been owner of the antique dealer’s for more than forty years. According to witnesses, he had no family. Dámaso had died before making it to the Major Burns Unit at Hospital de la Paz—from smoke inhalation and the severity of his burns, most likely; they were awaiting results of the autopsy.

  “That was just around the corner. You can smell the smoke on my clothes,” Eduardo said by way of greeting, leaving the flowers on the lobby desk beside a packet wrapped in brown paper. “These are for your empty vase. I think Sara will like them.”

  Graciela’s eyes skipped disinterestedly over the flowers, but she fixed her gaze on him. She was smoking, trying to look calm, but her mouth was clamped down too hard on the cigarette and she was exhaling a steady stream of smoke through her nose.

  “Did you know I pay for sex? Or at least I did, once.”

  The question was so unexpected it was like a slap in the face; Eduardo felt it smack him right between the eyes.

  “I don’t think that’s anything I need to know, quite honestly.”

  Graciela put her cigarette out in the ashtray as if drowning it in a barrel of water.

  “Oh, of course. I forgot—you don’t need anything from me, or my daughter. You’re not interested in anything or anyone, really.”

  Eduardo felt taken aback by this hostility, which seemed to be coming out of nowhere. Graciela took the package off the counter and held it in her hands.

  “This might interest you, though. Turns out the guy I paid to give it to me up the arse actually knows you. Knows where you live, knows your name, and of course he knows how my daughter and I feel about you. I doubt he knows what you feel for us, though of course that’s logical, since not even you know that.”

  Eduardo made no reply. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. He kept his eyes trained on the ends of Graciela’s collar; she was wearing a beige, long-sleeved shirt, and between the tips of her collar hung a religious pendant, which quivered when she breathed. He could see her chest swelling and falling with each heaving breath, and beneath her marbled shirt buttons, the outline of a breast—just one.

  Eduardo averted his eyes, concentrated instead on the daisies. Sara was right: empty vases are so sad.

  He turned to Graciela and gave her a candid look, with no shame or guilt. Forgiveness cures, that was what Martina had said. But Martina had no idea what things were really like; she was a nun, at her revolving hatch. All Eduardo felt was a deep sense of sadness, and he wasn’t even sure whether or not it was for himself. He thought about Sara and Graciela, about people like them who invented heroes to have someone to believe in, heroes who could reach out a hand and keep them from falling. Maybe they really did exist, but he wasn’t one of them. Nor had he pretended to be.

  “I’ve tried to tell you this several times, Graciela. I’m not the man you think I am. You invented your own version of me, as some sort of partner for you, as a father for Sara. But that man has only ever existed inside your head.”

  “My name is not Graciela!!!” she shouted above the volume of the transistor radio. And then for a second she fell silent, as though her words had betrayed her, but almost immediately she regained her composure. “Don’t you tell me what I’m thinking, what I feel, what I believe. You don’t know a thing. You’re so blind…”

  The two of them stared at each other in silence. Her lips were quivering and the tears in her eyes turned into gleaming mirrors that reflected a blurred outline of Eduardo.

  “I don’t want to put you or Sara in danger. I’ll pack my things and pay you the rest of the month’s rent. I can be out of here tomorrow.”

  Graciela shook her head, the anger dissipating, like the tail end of a storm heading off into the hills. And the gloomy halo of post-storm melancholy hung in the air, in a landscape still dripping with rain.

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” She held out the package she’d been holding in her hands. “The guy asked Sara to give you this, on behalf of Teodoro López Egea.”

  Eduardo examined the package as though it were some strange foreign object he couldn’t figure out how to open. When he looked up, Graciela was gazing toward the half-open apartment door. Sara stood in the doorway, her face and one sock-clad foot—a pink sock with little blue elephants—sticking out into the hall. The other was hidden behind the doorframe. She had one eye trained on him. Half her cat was peeking out, too. Something about her looked different. Words overheard can alter the way you see things. Neither Graciela nor Eduardo knew how much Sara had heard.

  “Go back inside, sweetheart,” Graciela said, with an urgent sweeping motion of her hands. As if that simple gesture might contain her daughter’s body and keep her from slipping out, like a wounded man trying to hold his guts in after stepping on a landmine.

  Before she disappeared, following behind her daughter, Graciela turned to Eduardo.

  “Take care of this, whatever it is.”

  Eduardo nodded. He wanted to tell her not to forget to put the flowers in the vase; they would lift Sara’s sadness a bit.

  * * *

  —

  The package contained a couple of very old hundred-peseta ban
knotes, bearing the impenetrable face of Francisco de Goya; and one thousand-peseta note, with the face of humanist Luis Vives. There were also several twenty-five-peseta bills, showing the politician Flórez Estrada. In total, thirteen hundred pesetas issued between 1944 and 1947. On first glance, there was nothing special about them. They were just old banknotes no longer in circulation, which might have held some significance for collectors—nothing of interest to him. But when he held them up to the light, he could see tiny stains, marks that seemed to suggest they had been in an explosion. There was also a note, written on a Post-it. A meeting place and time. He went straight to the refrigerator, but all he found was half a bottle of some very bad wine. Filling a glass, Eduardo drank it down without stopping for breath. And then he did it again, until his hands stopped shaking.

  Being punished is pointless if you don’t know why you’re being punished. For thirteen long years—the whole time he’d been locked up—everything the psychiatrists and wardens had done was aimed at forcing him to accept that truth. That was what Martina wanted to do, too, when she claimed she was trying to help with his reinsertion. Strange word. It meant that, at some point, he’d been a part of the apparatus that rules us all. That before watching Elena and Tania die, he’d been a small cog in a machine—a machine that ran smoothly, without too much friction. When his family died, the cog had broken and set off a chain-reaction of horror—more deaths, more suffering, as useless as his own. He’d been unwilling to put his faith in the law, and that was unforgivable. More unforgiveable even than the tragedy he’d caused Teo, Maribel and their son—who were, after all, just more unimportant cogs in the machine, when it came right down to it. We can’t let individuals take justice into their own hands. That would lead to chaos; the whole societal apparatus would lose its raison d’etre, Martina had warned him.

  A lunatic kills for no reason, or for reasons totally incomprehensible to others. But he wasn’t one of those psychos he’d been incarcerated with in Huesca for thirteen years. Eduardo had acted in a fit of rage, a temporary outburst. That was another word his shrink loved scribbling in her notebook. He could be cured, she claimed. They could fix him, reinsert him like a shiny new object. All he had to do was keep his head down, forget the past, accept forgiveness.

  But the psychiatrist was wrong.

  * * *

  —

  It was seven a.m. and the park was deserted. The guard who opened the gate was stretching his limbs like a lion after a long nap. He regarded Mr. Who curiously, and his brain, foggy after an uncomfortable night’s sleep in the night watchman’s booth, couldn’t make out whether the figure was a man or a woman. Mr. Who walked slowly toward the Crystal Palace, passing the first early risers who’d come in their workout gear to jog around El Retiro park. The dog walkers—poo bags in hand—would arrive later, as would the newspaper vendors, delivery trucks, and police on horseback.

  The artificial lake looked like a Welsh lagoon, a light mist floating over its green-tinged surface.

  Eduardo was waiting on one of the benches on the south side with a vacant expression. He rubbed his wrists mechanically—first one, then the other—as though he’d just had handcuffs removed. Mr. Who watched for a long while, with a mixture of disappointment and resentment. He’d been awaiting the moment for so long, had prepared for it so thoroughly that now this downcast man in the bone-colored raincoat didn’t measure up to his expectations. He was furious not to feel the hatred that he’d assumed he would. Mr. Who had spent his whole life hating a shadow, and now he got the feeling that the shadow didn’t even belong to this man.

  Eduardo heard footsteps to his right and turned. When he saw Who, his sagging cheeks turned red. He wasn’t sure whether to stand or remain seated, and ended up doing an awkward movement halfway between the two, his butt hovering over the edge of the seat and one arm over the back of the bench. So, it’s you. Eduardo’s lips didn’t move, it was his face that spoke. He wasn’t surprised, not really. When Graciela described Who—“…he doesn’t look like a man or a woman; it’s like he’s split in two, half of each…”—Eduardo had thought almost instantly of the encounter he’d had months ago in the metro station with the young man who’d forgotten his Chinese cat. He’d remembered the unsettling feeling he’d gotten that he knew the kid, that their encounter had not been by chance.

  “You’ve grown,” was all he could think of to say. It was an idiotic statement given the circumstances—as if they were distant relations, as if he were an uncle seeing his nephew for the first time in fourteen years and discovering that the little brat was now a man in the prime of life.

  Who took a seat beside him. He was wearing a lightweight, knee-length trench coat with the collar turned up. He slipped his hands into his pockets and lowered his chin, shrugging. Who stared out at the rising mist over the lake. Through gently swirling wisps he could see the surface from time to time, the fish beneath it stirring up bubbles and gentle waves.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d actually come,” Who said, looking at him out of the corner of his eye, “but something told me you would. You know, I feel like I’ve known you since I was nine years old. I’ve dreamed of you every night.” He had a sad air about him, unthreatening. A sadness that detached him from the pain that had first caused it—a distant pain that had festered like a terminal disease you learn to live with.

  Eduardo took from his pocket the bills Who had given to Sara. They were carefully folded into a wad, and he placed it on the bench between them.

  “There was no reason to threaten Graciela and Sara. I went to see your mother, and I knew sooner or later you’d turn up. I’d have come regardless. Whatever this is, I accept it—I’m tired of carrying around this burden.”

  Mr. Who tried to judge Eduardo’s sincerity, but he couldn’t. Did the man know he was there to kill him? Did he know he was planning to use a little .22-calibre pistol hidden in one of his pockets? He must have guessed, surely. But he didn’t look like he was afraid, and it couldn’t be because he thought he’d be able to talk Who out of it. In fact, deep down, he seemed to long for it.

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt them. I’m not like that. I’m not like you.” Who stood, looked out over the lake. He shook his head and then nodded toward Eduardo. “Have you ever felt like a tree with no roots? That’s what I’ve felt like for as long as I can remember.”

  Eduardo avoided making eye contact, glanced away from the sun that was reflected in Who’s eyes. The spite gleaming in those eyes was like a firefly trapped under a dark glass. He focused instead on the algae floating on the water’s surface, swishing gently back and forth like little snakes, over by the cypress tree where his and Elena’s names were carved into the bark. He wanted to tell the kid that he understood—if you have no ground in which to plant your roots, you’re nothing. His ground had been his family, and without them Eduardo was nothing but a hollow trunk, rotting from the inside out, waiting for a storm to split him in two.

  He knew what Who was planning to do. He’d guessed it the moment he saw the kid’s hand reach into his coat pocket. He’d glimpsed the wooden butt of the gun that Who’s hand now gripped. Do it, he thought. Let’s get this over with. But instinctively he recoiled. No one wants to die—not even those who think they do.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Who said. It wasn’t an order but the acceptance of something both of them seemed to find inevitable.

  Eduardo nodded. He got up and glanced at the bulge in Who’s pocket. There was nobody around. In the distance, a few people were jogging, way down the gravel path behind them. No one who could come to help.

  “Are you going to shoot me in the back?”

  Mr. Who didn’t reply. He gave a lukewarm smile that seemed at odds with his frame of mind, as though his lips had grown accustomed to the movement no matter what the circumstances. Then a gust of wind ruffled his black hair, and the smile vanished like a cloud. He jutted his chin out, indicating that Ed
uardo should walk.

  Eduardo took one step, then another, and curiously his knee didn’t hurt. In fact, nothing hurt. He looked at the ground, at his shoes—slightly worn on the toe—at the ants already tunneling and forming the little cones that led to their nest; at a dry leaf fluttering erratically; at a desiccated pile of dog shit.

  “I’ve been watching you for months. You don’t act like a psychopath or a lunatic. So why did you do it?”

  “Your father caused the accident that killed my family. He let my daughter die. She’d have been one year older than you now, if she were alive. He left her to bleed to death by the side of a creek.”

  He no longer heard Who’s footsteps on the gravel behind him and turned his head to look back. Who had stopped dead. He looked disconcerted, helpless, and for a moment, amid the haze of memories both lived and reinvented, Eduardo caught a glimpse of the same little terrified boy wearing a cap and scarf that he’d almost killed. Suddenly it dawned on him that the kid hadn’t known. No one had ever explained to him why it had all happened.

  “You’re lying. Teo would never have done anything like that.”

  Eduardo turned to face him. He felt sorry for the boy, a lone reed as out of place as he himself was, equally lonely and as wounded by something that never should have happened, but did.

  “You’re lying,” Who repeated, and his voice sounded like a howl in the midst of a tempest.

  But Eduardo wasn’t lying.