At Close Quarters (24 page)

‘Say it,’ she said in low voice, almost a whisper.

She was standing now and looking at him the way a calm, indolent, satisfied female feline would look at a male of the species that she has come across on her way to get some food – a male that may be bigger and stronger but does not unsettle her at all, as she’s sure that there are only three things in life worth fighting for, food, pleasure and territory, and knows that she can get all three whenever she desires.

‘What?’ asked Cupido, disconcerted.

‘That other question you asked before and you don’t dare to repeat, however much you want me to answer it.’

‘All right,’ said the detective. ‘All right. What are your secrets?’

‘I want my husband to leave. I want him to leave not just the city but also the country for a while, even if he’s going to fight in a war that’s not rightfully his,’ she explained. ‘He’s asked to be posted for five months in Afghanistan, with the same unit in which Olmedo served, as if he wanted to follow in his footsteps to learn what he knew … Colonel Castroviejo wrote a good report and they’ve accepted his application, but I’m anxious it might be turned down if he’s implicated in an investigation. And I want him to be far enough away, so when he tells me he’s coming back I’ll have time to get the house ready, and when he comes home he can see that everything is the way it used to be, and he believes no one has used or moved anything. It will do us both good to be apart for a while.’

‘There are other ways to achieve that.’

‘Of course! But I don’t want a divorce. Why complicate things, if complications can be avoided? It’s been quite hard for me to get to the point where I have a comfortable life. Why would I want to undo all that if with a little tweak now and again it can be so pleasant?’

The woman looked at him expecting not an answer but confirmation. Cupido was aware of her sensuality, of her grip on his desire. It wasn’t just beauty or physical splendour. Among the fine, smooth wrinkles around her eyes, which were now fixed on him, one could see the tempting gold vein of experience. A handful of women had looked at him the way she did now, without any need for words, only standing still in front of him, not drawing near but neither retreating, and Cupido knew that if he reached out he’d find no resistance. The austere life of the last few months and his instinct – which was more powerful than the tacit laws that he upheld in his work – pushed him a few centimetres forward without the woman moving back or looking away but
authorising
him to advance. It was only a moment. He then remembered the barely opened door and the room from which Alkalino was listening, and also remembered, still painfully, Lucía’s body. He stopped, feeling like a stranger to himself as he replied:

‘Of course. Why ask for complications?’

A smug, mocking smile quickly replaced her initial surprise at his rejection. Then her eyes registered not anger but
disappointment
as they seemed to say: ‘Oh, you don’t dare either. You haven’t got the guts to fight for the sweet gift I’m offering you. Oh, you don’t either. Get out of the way so I can leave.’

When Cupido returned to the living room after walking her to the lift, Alkalino was already sitting on the sofa, looking at the cigarette filter stained with lipstick.

‘For a few seconds there, my real concern was how to close the door without attracting her attention.’

‘You could have done it, her back was turned to you.’

‘Do you think she didn’t check which doors were open and which were closed when she came in?’

Cupido didn’t answer the question. Instead he said:

‘Were you so sure that I …?’

‘Not you. Her! Her ability to … I don’t know how she looked at you, but if her eyes suggested as much as her tone of voice …’

‘You’re exaggerating.’

‘I’m just jealous,’ he joked. ‘To think that such opportunities are offered precisely to someone who can afford to turn them down because he knows another will come along soon enough!’

Cupido gave him a friendly look: a small man, dark and talkative, who lived without aspiring to be admired, or loved, or valued, who only had the ambition to make himself heard; a guy with his face bronzed as wood even in the coldest days of winter, not very attractive to women, who had not fucked enough, and yet who exhibited no rancour or bitter puritanism towards those who, like the detective, had.

He picked up the plate with the cigarette butt and was making his way to the kitchen when he heard Alkalino say:

‘She’s one of those women who always win, no matter what the relationship or with whom, whether it’s with their husband, whom they will have chosen from the most docile and loyal suitors, or with a lover, who will be trivial and fun, and maybe a little difficult
once she tires of him and tells him with tears in her eyes that they can no longer see each other, as the guilt is killing her. Who teaches them these things?’

‘No one,’ answered Cupido, although he knew Alkalino was not asking him but only expressing his astonishment and perplexity out loud.

‘Who’s taught them to look at people that way?’ Alkalino went on. ‘They know full well how to look past you as if they didn’t see you, aware that the best way to prolong desire is to delay gratification. And they know when to look at you for only a second, which is enough for you never to forget them. How come they know what we take so long to learn, so long that when we find out we’re too old for that knowledge to be of any use?’

The detective didn’t answer. He went into the kitchen and dropped the ash into the bin.

Before leaving the office he inhaled deeply, blew out the smoke and took another drag until the cigarette burned his lips. He threw the butt into the water-filled ashtray and put this away. With the window open, the smell would disappear by the time he returned from the delivery room.

He was tired; it had been a long night. The last operation had finished half an hour before: a teenager who had had his tongue pierced the day before. The pain had awakened him in the middle of the night, and his parents, who didn’t know about the piercing, were terrified. They’d brought the boy in to casualty with his tongue so swollen that it barely fit in his mouth. He was very nervous and refused to open it for a local anaesthetic to be injected with a small syringe before the operation. It wasn’t the first time a thing like that had happened, and Beltrán had learned how to deal with patients unable to conceal their panic when they saw him approach with a needle in his hand. He managed to persuade him and to calm his parents, who were more horrified about the child’s decision to have his tongue pierced than by the consequences of the infection.

Carmen, the maternity ward nurse, approached him in the corridor:

‘I was coming to get you. One of the patients is ready.’

‘Let’s go then.’

The girl, who was very young, was lying on the gurney, and when she saw him come in her swollen lips tightened into a smile of relief. She was very thin and her big round belly stood out as
something alien to the rest of her body. Beside her, a corpulent, older man, waited with an expression of concern and fatigue.

As Beltrán put on his gloves he said to the man:

‘I have to ask you to leave for a minute. Later, if you wish, you can come back in.’

The man did not need to have the instructions repeated. He gave the girl a quick kiss and left without saying anything.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Perla.’

‘First time?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right, Perla, don’t worry. We’re going to take away the pain. I’d like you to sit up, lift your robe up to your waist and bend forwards.’

Helped by Carmen, the girl obeyed silently and he prepared the catheter. When he turned round, she was already presenting her docile, naked back to him, bending forward as far as her belly permitted. Her vertebrae showed clearly under the thin, lean skin of the back. With great care, he located the right place between the lumbar vertebrae.

‘Now be still, don’t move.’

He gently inserted the needle and made sure it was secure before applying the first dose. The girl, after some initial fear caused by the cold drops, would start feeling better as the pain lifted. He made her lie back again while Carmen put a pair of thick woollen socks on her feet. A moment later, a new contraction tensed her whole body. He waited for it to pass and placed his hand on her sweaty forehead, while saying:

‘The next one won’t hurt. And the baby won’t suffer,’ he explained, smiling naturally.

‘Thanks,’ the girl replied, squeezing his hand.

He adjusted the catheter to let the right dose through, told Carmen he’d be back in a moment (she could call him if she needed him), and left the delivery room. The fat man was sitting outside on a chair, but didn’t ask Beltrán if he could go in now.

Back in his office he lit another cigarette and watched the smoke quickly ascend as he thought, with something akin to
tenderness
, of the fragile, slender girl who was waiting to be dilated enough. A few times, with irascible or hostile patients, he could barely contain the temptation to reduce their dose as he thought: ‘Let them suffer. They don’t deserve for me to calm their pain, the resources we spend on them. If I reduce their dose a little, there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m administering justice. Doctor God. Let them suffer a little for having gorged themselves on food and drink, producing so much fat, so much unnecessary flesh, for having forced their livers to filter all that shit they stuffed themselves with, for having tired out their hearts which pumped their soured blood through their veins hardened by cholesterol. Let them suffer now if they couldn’t help themselves before.’ He was of the opinion that, in a country so prone to hypochondria, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to reduce the budget devoted to
reducing
pain. The number of ill people, operations and hospital beds would decrease in no time if a small wart was excised without anaesthetics and people had to pay for the prescription drugs they demanded, only to let them expire in a cabinet already full of medicine. If he were put in charge, they would soon see how the enormous public health deficit would decrease, how they would all disappear, those hypochondriacs who went for a check-up every month; who were admitted to casualty with symptoms they exaggerated so that their blood pressure would be taken, their cholesterol analysed, their blood sugar measured; who would familiarly lie down on gurneys and take off their contact lenses and dentures, as if preparing for a facelift; and who, after costly lab tests which were however free to them, demanded that their pain be taken away, without stopping to think that he, the man who controlled it, had his own reasons to suffer and yet no one cared about his affliction or offered consolation.

He would make all of them pay or go away, all the ones who had brought their illnesses on themselves – their emphysemas, cirrhoses, their beastly halitosis. He would only offer the miracle
of anaesthetics to those who felt pain through no fault of their own: children, cancer patients and blameless accident victims, all the woman in labour like that thin girl who had squeezed his hand a few minutes before. He couldn’t understand why it had taken so long for the widespread use of the epidural in childbirth, when no one had a cavity cleaned any more without a small injection. Perhaps it was because of blind obedience to the biblical injunction which punished with suffering an act that resulted from happiness and aimed at happiness.

When he heard the knock on his door, his instinct was to put out the cigarette at once and hide the ashtray, but he then refrained: after all, he was in his own office.

‘Come in,’ he said.

The door opened and he was surprised to see the detective who investigated Olmedo’s death.

‘Yes?’

He didn’t ask him to sit down, but Cupido took one of the two chairs in front of the desk.

‘Are you here to see a doctor?’ Beltrán asked him, mustering all the strength of mind he was capable of. ‘Because I thought I had answered all your questions.’

‘In a way, I am.’

‘I don’t treat people. I only take the pain away. It’s my colleagues who treat them.’

‘They wouldn’t be able to if you didn’t do your job well.’

Beltrán twisted his mouth into a smile that didn’t reach his murky brown eyes.

‘In a way, it’s not unlike what you try to do yourself, is it? Calm those who hire you and let others take action.’

‘In a way,’ agreed Cupido. ‘But your job is no doubt a lot more important than mine.’

Beltrán looked at him distrustfully, as if seeing sarcasm where Cupido had not intended it.

‘Few people have seen as much pain as I have,’ he explained as he passed the tip of the cigarette along the border of the ashtray.
‘And everyone tries to avoid it, even if that means harming others.’

‘That’s what you did, isn’t it? You went to Olmedo’s flat that evening to do exactly that, take away his pain.’

‘Olmedo’s flat?’ he echoed, avoiding the question. He was sitting still, seemingly calm, though his feet moved under the table.

‘Yes, you left the hospital for an hour. You were seen leaving, driving off in your car and returning an hour later. Enough time to do what you needed to do.’

‘Who told you that?’

Cupido hesitated for a moment, but eventually said:

‘One of the nurses.’

‘Ah, one of the nurses. Carmen,’ he guessed. ‘I saw her spying on me through the window. Carmen! Doctors are taught to keep things from their patients, but none of us has ever managed to keep the slightest secret from our nurses,’ he added with resigned sarcasm, as if given such a witness it was useless to keep denying anything.

‘She doesn’t remember the exact time, but she knows the patient gave birth at ten thirty and you left about two hours before that.’

‘It’s true, I went out. But that doesn’t mean I went to Olmedo’s.’

‘No, it doesn’t. But if so far you’ve claimed you’d been here all along, it’s because outside you haven’t got a better alibi. You’d get into trouble if they find you absented yourself from work when there was a patient who might need your help at any moment. A woman about to give birth. A baby. You know how touchy people are about that subject … And what with your track record!’

‘I didn’t see him,’ he said after a while, in the same hoarse, restrained monotone as before, trying to conceal that his breathing had not become shallower, that he did not fear the threat. ‘Didn’t manage to,’ he qualified. ‘I went to his house and parked the car in the street, near the entrance. I lit a cigarette as I turned over in my mind the words I wanted to say to him.’

‘What words?’

‘About pain. Deep down, it’s always about pain.’

‘And did you find them?’

‘What?’

‘The right words.’

‘No. You don’t ever find the ones you’re looking for,’ he said as he put out the butt that had burned down to the filter. He appeared to be lamenting the fact that it had consumed itself too soon. Then he added: ‘The perfect words that will silence your enemy.’

‘What were you planning to tell Olmedo?’

Beltrán looked at him for a couple of seconds, his lustreless eyes fixed beyond Cupido’s face, like those of a blind man.

‘I was going to beg him to leave me in peace,’ he explained in a slower, hoarser voice than before, the voice not only of a lifelong smoker but of someone who knows he’ll never quit.

‘Had he threatened you again?’

‘Again? No. Olmedo did not need to renew a threat for anyone to feel it was still valid. He’d made it four years ago and nothing had changed.’

‘And so, why were you there to remind him?’

‘Remind him? No, that would be like reminding a wolf or a snake that they need to bite an enemy when they come across it. He had reminded
me
a few days before. I almost bumped into him in the canteen of the hospital. I was wearing my white coat. He stood still, staring at me for a few seconds, first in the eyes, and then at my badge, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing and needed to confirm I had gone back to work.’

‘And?’

‘Four years ago he swore he’d never allow it.’

‘But time passed, and you served your sentence.’

‘That meant nothing to Olmedo. The day of the ruling he called me at home to tell me that, whatever the judge said, he would make it his personal mission to ensure I never worked again as a doctor. I chose to interpret it as a furious reaction in a moment of sorrow, it was still soon after the accident. But I never forgot his threat. And that day, when I saw him there …’

‘But, legally,’ insisted Cupido, ‘you had nothing to be afraid of. You’d paid for all that.’

‘More than my fair share. And I was legally protected, true, but not professionally. Do you know how difficult it is to bounce back in this profession? Almost impossible. Everyone points the finger at you at the slightest problem, and everyone will remember that, once, someone who went into the operating theatre thinking they would come out healthier, or more beautiful, or in less pain, left as a … as a … Olmedo could perfectly stir things up, go to the newspapers, write letters to the director of the hospital … Precisely now, when things are starting to go well.’

‘Is that what you were going to explain to him?’

‘Yes. When we met at the canteen he was not alone. He was with a woman and the way he acted, pulling back her chair, ordering for her, seemed to indicate they were a couple … or at least that he would like for them to be a couple. I even thought that if he was with her perhaps he’d started to forget, though I only thought about that later, when I came back home that night. At the canteen, Olmedo looked at me with the same spite as ever.’

‘Did he say anything to you?’

‘No, but neither was it necessary. The way he looked at me was enough.’

‘So why did you go to see him the following day?’ insisted Cupido. ‘Why repeat something that …?’

‘The woman intervened,’ said Beltrán.

He opened the top drawer of the desk, took out the pack of cigarettes, got one out and left the pack in front of him, as if he reckoned there was no point in putting it away, as he’d need it in a few minutes. He brought the cigarette to his lips, lit it and blew the smoke through his teeth.

‘“Camilo” was the only word the woman said, placing a hand on his forearm.

‘To calm him?’

‘To calm, with just one word, a man who wasn’t easy to calm. I guess she understood who I was by reading my badge. Olmedo must have told her he’d been married, and that a doctor, during a simple procedure …’ he went quiet and looked towards the
window, almost oblivious to the detective, blowing out bluish-grey smoke. ‘That night I thought things over and came to the conclusion that the woman, whoever she was, might be of help to me.’

‘What made you think that?’

‘The way she looked … her attitude. A woman in her early fifties, tall, still beautiful, whom a man would like to hold in his arms if it wasn’t because he would fear that … that …’

‘What?’

‘That perhaps she wouldn’t even notice you were holding her. I observed her during those minutes at the canteen. She seemed to be lost in her own world, in which there didn’t seem to be many pleasant things. Olmedo had his back turned, but I could tell he was talking about me, because she looked at me several times as she gently shook her head.’

‘And because of her attitude you went to see Olmedo?’

‘Yes, because there was no hatred in her eyes but a kind of curiosity which I’d call, I don’t know, compassionate. And I didn’t want to carry on feeling anxious about the possibility that Olmedo might come and harass me. If I had to confront him, the sooner the better. And so I remembered the woman’s gaze, mustered all the courage I had and decided to go and see him to beg him for a little peace. I didn’t expect him to accept that his wife’s death had been a fortuitous accident. I didn’t expect him to tell me: “All right, you’ve made a mistake, but you’ve paid for it. It’s over now, it’s been forgotten. No hard feelings.” I was only going to beg him not to stop me being a doctor after all these years.’