At Close Quarters (28 page)

I mumbled something about going to the toilet and went out of his study. I knew he kept that gun with a silencer in his night table: I’d seen it one day and told him he should find a better hiding
place. I went back to the study with it. Your father was writing something on a piece of paper and didn’t raise his head until I was in front of the desk.

It all happened very quickly, effortlessly; I felt weightless,
unaffected
by the law of gravity. But I needed to complete the other half of the job before anyone came in to stop me on hearing the shot, improbable though that was: it didn’t make a loud pop as when you open a bottle of champagne, but a quiet one as when you open an old, tired wine, sour like the smell of powder. I put the barrel of the gun in my mouth, determined to end it all. It was burning hot, as if I had put a match in my mouth, and I think it was the instinctive reflex of taking it out of my mouth and waiting for a minute that brought on the fear and made me put off until today what should have ended right then. Because that’s all it was, a fear of pain, as if I had used up all my courage in the first shot.

Your father had started writing something on one of his cards, perhaps believing that I’d leave without giving him a chance to speak, or perhaps searching for the right words. ‘Forgive me.’ I understood that the words gave me back my life, it was like a document that saved me, a safe-conduct; I didn’t need to wait for the barrel to cool down, because he’d opened the door and was ordering me to leave. I only had to wipe off my fingerprints and put the gun in his hands for the meaning and the intended recipient of those two words to change in the eyes of whoever found the note.

I didn’t touch it. I left it on the desk, in front of him, and a few minutes later I left in silence. No one saw me.

Later I waited and grew restless and you found the body. And later still appeared the detective who, I sensed, would end up finding out the truth: you cannot invite a country person to your country house and not expect him to feel the earth and notice what grows in it. But I wasn’t particularly afraid of the detective; I was only curious to see how long he would take to reach the truth by firmly yet gently asking questions that a regular police officer would shout at you. I was not afraid of him, and neither was I scared when another source of irritation – I don’t want to call it
a problem – presented itself in the person of the street sweeper in Camilo’s street, something that barely merits a mention. I was confident they would give me enough time to plan my departure.

I’d thought of swimming into the sea until I exhausted myself. The sea would give back my body. It had always seemed to me the proper place to die, and the agony is short-lived. Now, however, I’ve found a better way of disappearing forever, without photographs and witnesses. I don’t feel like putting up with curious, hateful or pitiful gazes, and the thought of explaining to a police officer or a judge something they’d never understand feels infinitely boring. You, though, deserve an explanation, hence my writing to you. You, Samuel and perhaps the detective. To understand what I did and am about to do one needs a modicum of pity, and I hope that you have some left in you, in spite of the sorrow caused by your father’s death.

Don’t blame Samuel. If he’s guilty of anything, it’s of having liked you so much that it wasn’t enough for him to see you a few minutes a day through a window; he wanted to have a picture of you. That’s surely why he took those photographs. Or perhaps he was afraid you would disappear and nothing would remain of you. Find out, ask him before judging him. Perhaps now you don’t realise it, but after all the terrible things you’ve had to go through, you may need him more than he needs you.

Don’t hate me, please, although you have good reason to. Hatred will only make you suffer, and it cannot hurt me. I’m going to a place where I’ll be immune to everything and where time doesn’t count. Up here it’s just me and my sorrows, and nothing can separate us. Only when I go down will my sorrow disappear. Down there I’ll do no more harm. It won’t take much of an effort. It’s not hard to die when everyone you’ve loved is dead already.

I’ll leave through the garage. The detective won’t be able to stop me. When he grows impatient and finds a way in, I’ll be gone.

Time to leave. Forgive me. I couldn’t forgive your father in time. Goodbye,

Gabriela

‘You say you’ve read the letter?’

‘Yes, Marina gave it to me.’

‘She did? After dismissing you from the case?’

‘Well, yes. First she listened to the whole story although she reproached me for it: “Why, why did you have to carry on when I told you I didn’t want to know anything else? Why?”’

‘I see her point,’ said Alkalino. ‘She’d hired you to find an answer, but this wasn’t the answer she expected you to find.’

‘No, she’d never imagined that precisely Gabriela … She repeated she would have preferred not to know, that sometimes ignorance is bliss.’

‘And that’s why she gave you the letter, so she cannot read it again.’

‘That, and because Gabriela named me as its third reader, and because she’s learned a lesson from Samuel.’

‘What lesson?’

‘That you should not keep anything that might do you harm. That it’s best to delete all documents, souvenirs or images which make us feel unclean or stoke up hatred. It doesn’t matter if they’re on paper, on a computer or simply in our memory. Here,’ he said. He took an envelope with Marina’s name on it out of his pocket. Inside were five sheets of paper written on both sides in handwriting less unsteady than he would have thought. He gave the letter to Alkalino. ‘The judge has seen it, and it’s a closed case. Read it before I burn it.’

‘No!’ he shouted. With a collector’s passion, he kept many documents from Cupido’s investigations.

‘I promised her.’

‘To burn it?’

‘Yes.’

‘In that case …’

Alkalino started attentively, slowly reading the letter, as if he wanted to memorise it, moving his lips or raising his eyebrows when he was surprised by a comment or a thought.

‘The poor, unhappy murderess!’ he exclaimed after several minutes, when he finished reading and carefully folded the pages and put them back in the envelope. His hard, small dark eyes were wet with pity for the stupid, tragic human race. The passionate, alcoholic man of yesterday had turned into a moralist and a sceptic. ‘The poor, unhappy murderess, who was so wrong that she thought her desire to die allowed her to kill!’

‘Well, at least she was happy during those fifteen years when the boy was alive,’ said Cupido.

‘Fifteen years! But I don’t know if so little time can make up for all the pain that came later,’ he said.

‘Maybe it can,’ replied Cupido after thinking for a few seconds of his dead brother, who was always in his mother’s thoughts. ‘Perhaps a man would rather not have a child that will die at the age of fifteen, but maybe a woman’s instinct is different.’

‘Why did she write “up here”?’ asked Alkalino.

‘Because she had already decided how to disappear, at the bottom of the earth, sixty metres underground in a volframium mine. And her body, next to a broken urn and the ring that Olmedo had bought her, would never had been found if a hunter hadn’t seen her throw herself in.’

‘For once no one will be sentenced.’

‘No, she sentenced herself. The note Olmedo had started writing only delayed the ruling a few weeks.’

‘But Olmedo didn’t write that to save her.’

‘No, but he wasn’t lying either. Someone writing his last word
doesn’t lie. He was sincerely sorry. But we’d wrongly interpreted what he was sorry about and who he was addressing,’ Cupido explained. Then he went quiet for a few seconds, and doubted whether that was really the truth, so he added: ‘Unless he heard her going into the bedroom, opening the drawer of the night table, and guessed what would happen and felt so much love and remorse that he wanted to fool everybody …’

‘But we’ll never know that.’

‘No, we’ll never know.’

‘Do you think Marina will ever forget Samuel’s photos?’

‘I think he’ll try to have those photographs forgotten.’

‘He’ll manage. She’ll end up …’

‘It’ll be hard for him too.’

‘Do you think?’

‘Yes, he may find it harder than Marina to forget all the damage they’ve caused.’

‘But it all ends peacefully.’

‘Everyone will need some time,’ said Cupido, who, as always at the end of an investigation, felt confused, exhausted, empty, and pessimistic. Once again he’d solved a difficult case, but once again he didn’t have the impression that he’d achieved a complete, clean, benign victory. The bad thing about victory in his line of work was that he got it at the expense of someone else’s pain. There was no sense of final triumph.

‘The purpose of civilisation is to curb people’s natural impulses,’ he heard Alkalino say. ‘We know there will always be someone who feels hatred, or spite, or a desire for revenge, but that won’t amount to anything if they don’t act on it. We know it and yet we are always too late to prevent it.’

‘You’re right. We’re never on time. What did you call her before? Ah, yes, the poor unhappy murderess!’

‘But there’s nothing else you can do. You did your job even after they fired you. Your work is done.’

‘Done? In this job, you’re never done.’

EUGENIO FUENTES
was born in Montehermoso, Cáceres, Spain. His novels include
The Battles of Breda, The Birth of Cupid
(winner of the San Fernando Luis Berenguer International Fiction Prize),
So Many Lies
(winner of the Extramadura Creative Novel Award),
Blood of the Angels, The Pianist’s Hands
and
Depths of the Forest,
which won the Alba/Prensa Canaria Prize in 1999.

MARTIN SCHIFINO
is a freelance writer and translator. His translations include Domingo Villar’s
Water-Blue Eyes
, Eugenio Fuentes’s The Pianist’s Hands and Luis Leante’s
See How Much I Love You.
He lives in Buenos Aires.