Francisco—quite unintentionally—is telling me about his marriage to Leonor, but Justino, despite his radical distrust of all things human and, indeed, of the whole of divine creation—he’s the sort who hears a goldfinch singing at the window and rushes to close it because he thinks it’s the screech of a rat in heat—gathers his strength, sensing that now is the moment to begin to make light of the charges against the accused: you never know who you might be talking to; he’s probably noticed that I’ve only opened my mouth to defend Pedrós and this makes him uneasy. He must know that I’m a partner in Pedrós’s business. And naturally he knows about all the work I’ve done on his properties. As for my bankruptcy, he must be more than aware of that, how could he not know what everyone else knows? Besides, he has direct access to the intimate details of the Pedrós household, not through Tomás, but through her, through Amparo, who he criticizes—his usual strategy—simply in order to conceal their likely relationship; and, quite probably, because he’s a tad jealous, given that Amparo has vanished along with her husband and hasn’t stayed behind, waiting for him, despite the rumored separation of property. People have always said that there is or was something between them, and that some of her disappearances coincided with his business trips. At this point, the conversation—doubtless purely as a precaution—changes in tone. Justino says:
“I know Tomás well. He’s spent money because he had the money to spend, but above all because it suited him to do so. For every euro he’s squandered, he’s earned a hundred. He’s used it, let’s say, for PR purposes; that’s how he’s always earned his money, by sticking his nose into other people’s businesses and involving millionaires in his various projects. Why else would he invite a whole legion of old crocks onto his yacht? To get money out of them. Retirees who have chosen to end their days by the sea—Germans, French (the English out here don’t have yachts, they’re too low-class), and who everyone else ignores. They’re bored stiff here and feel sad because, in old age, they have finally come to the realization that money doesn’t bring happiness (as if old age were not a stupid addendum to life proper). He takes them out for a sail, provides them with a hammock on deck, serves them a plate of salted tuna when they’re on the high seas, a few toasted almonds for their very white false teeth to bite into, a little glass of wine (well, a little glass of wine never hurt anyone, it’s recommended by cardiologists, rheumatologists and endocrinologists), tries to make them feel comfortable, cared for, listens with interest to the problems they have with their children, grandchildren and daughters-in-law, and simply by listening he becomes the ideal son, grandson and son-in-law, they adopt him as the son they would like to have had (what son would ever treat them so well?), they spoil him as they wish their grandson would allow them to spoil him, they love him just as they would love a daughter-in-law if she was all she should be, the kind to prompt a few erotic dreams. He offers them the understanding and complicity they wish they received from their wives. The trouble is that now with the crisis, Pedrós’s yacht barely leaves its moorings because gas is so expensive. The banks aren’t giving out any more loans (now, they’re in the business of getting loans from the government) and going for a weekend sail beneath the blue Mediterranean sky costs a fortune what with the soaring price of gas, and so, he wasn’t even able to try to save himself by casting his net in the fishing ground of the elderly, though they wouldn’t have rescued him anyway, because it’s one thing to wheedle the occasional tip out of them or to ask for a helping hand when necessary, but quite another to stand before one of them and say, point-blank: Herr Müller, I need eight hundred and fifty thousand euros. What’s giving a bit of small change to their boy entertainer (a letter of reference for some new project, a “loan” of eight or ten thousand euros, a box of Moselle wine, even a Patek Philippe watch as a birthday gift)? That’s quite different from actually getting out your wallet and handing over a large wad of money. That’s a serious matter—requiring careful consideration, evaluation and expert advice. They may be capricious and old, but they’re not stupid—they’ll pay for a toy, but at a toy price. They’d been prepared to keep shelling out just enough to make sure the fun would continue, but not a euro more; they’ve made their investment (as people usually do), thinking of the profit they might make (opening doors locally). We’ve known for centuries that there is no such thing as a generous rich man, generous people tend to run aground in the stages preceding wealth, when, for a while, they point wildly back at the coast, but then they drown. Their corpses disappear forever, buried in the sea of the economy or the sea of life, which comes to the same thing. They die in poverty.”
Francisco:
“A few days before he disappeared, Pedrós came to see me in tears. It’s not the over-spending, he said, as I know people are saying, but the lack of income that’s done me in. I swear to you on my daughter’s life, and she’s the person I love most in the world. I haven’t gone out on the town or been to a brothel or with anyone else in months. I swear. I spent money while I had it, when I could afford to spend. But now it’s all gone. Paying for materials, paying wages, paying for publicity, of course, but with no money coming in. You pay, but no one pays you, that’s the problem. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. I’m not the only one who’s been caught. Do you know how many local businesses have disappeared? Not closed, but simply vanished, gone: you go to the office to get your money, and the office isn’t there, I don’t just mean that the doors are closed, but you look through the window into an empty room, with papers and boxes strewn all over the floor, and when you try to find out who is (or was) the owner, no one knows. And the guy you dealt with, the one who signed the receipt, had no right to sign it, he wasn’t even an employee. That’s the worst thing. It’s as if you’ve been working with ghosts, phantoms from the other side. I’m not the only one bankrupt either, Tomás told me in tears. Fajardo’s, the building suppliers in Misent, has closed, and Magraner’s has fired half its staff and is about to close. I know this for a fact. And Sanchis, the furniture supplier and Vidal who used to sell blinds. And Ribes. And Pastor now does his own bricklaying when anyone asks, because he’s laid off all his men, more than fifty of them. And Fajardo’s has auctioned off all their material, for which they got a pittance (I mean, who’s going to want to buy building materials, machinery, a backhoe or a crane nowadays?), and they’ve paid what creditors they could and shut down. And Rodenas has gone back to Jaén or Ciudad Real to pick olives alongside Moroccans and Romanians and Poles, can you imagine, a developer working with immigrants, with scum, his poor chilblained fingers frozen on those icy Andalusian mornings.”
While Francisco is talking, all the while carefully avoiding my eyes—which means that, during that conversation, Pedrós must have mentioned me among the victims of this chain of disasters—I can’t help thinking that, if this were the jungle, we would be watching the lianas beginning to twine their way around the window frames of the closed shops, to climb the walls of abandoned apartment blocks, smothering the empty penthouse suites with their foliage and thick woody stems. A lost city, like in the adventure movies we enjoyed when we were kids. For days and days you hack your way through the jungle, then, suddenly, you stumble upon a vast city, all overgrown with leaves and scrub and full of temples, statues, buried treasure. The fantasies of Jules Verne and Salgari.
My friend concludes his speech:
“I don’t know how this is all going to end, Pedrós said, whether the country will emerge from the crisis or not, but what does it matter to you and me, Francisco? There’s no way out of our crisis, we know that. It’s like Carlos Gardel says in the song: Downhill all the way. He was feeling terribly low. I felt really sorry for him.”
Bernal:
“What did he mean ‘
our
crisis’? Is that what he said? Is he seventy years old, like you? He’s only about forty-four or forty-five. God, he’s a sly one. He really has a way with people, trying to draw them in. You and him, two retirees contemplating their final days together. As if he wasn’t already plotting some new deal. I bet he is. This bankruptcy business is probably just some new strategy or other and it’ll turn out that all they’ve impounded is pennies, because anything valuable is in Amparo’s name.”
Yep, everyone here is still talking about Pedrós, even though, as far as I know, they’re not among his creditors—although I’m not sure where he stands with Justino—and the suppliers he hasn’t paid will be talking about him for months, and so will the people who hated him and are pleased to see him go under, and the employees he fired and their poor families; and by the ones who’d have given anything to be invited to go for a sail on his yacht. That’s his lasting bit of fame. Better than nothing, I suppose. I may be doing my best not to mention him, but I think about him all the time. I may not be making any contribution to his long-term fame, but I do keep his memory alive. The people who talk are the ones who would’ve gladly paid a fortune to watch him go under, as well as those of us who did pay a fortune for him to watch us go under with him. I take my last sip of beer, listening to them discuss Tomás’ fall from grace, and think that I should be able to get at least a couple of hours’ sleep tonight. The alcohol’s doing me good. I glance at my watch, and Justino notices. He says: It’s after eight o’clock, Esteban, time for your Colombian girl’s shift to end. During the game, I drank a black coffee with a dash of brandy and two glasses of punch. Then, when we left the card table, and continued chatting at the bar, I’d had three glasses of beer, or was it four? More or less what I usually drink in the evening. I don’t know if that comfortable feeling that wraps itself around you when you leave the bar is thanks to the card games or the alcohol, but you leave the bar as if borne along, floating on a cotton-wool cloud. I consider suggesting to Francisco that we have a gin and tonic together, from one of those bottles of Bombay Sapphire or Citadelle that the bartender keeps especially for him.
Early the next morning, before going out, I took the goldfinch up to the roof terrace and opened the cage door. The bird hesitated for a few moments: initially, just sticking its head out, fluffing its feathers several times as if preparing to take flight, then turned round and went back into the cage to peck at the seeds in the feeder; after a while, it again hopped over to the open door and, this time, it barely paused before fluttering over to the rail, where it remained perched and hesitant for a few more seconds. It turned its head nervously this way and that, repeatedly glancing across at the cage door, moving its head as if an elastic spring had gone wrong. And then, it flew off, slipping away into the faint morning mist softened with dawn light, growing smaller and smaller until it merged with the blue of the sky. My eyes filled with tears as I watched it vanish, and I felt a strange mixture of feelings: while it was beautiful to see the bird flying free, I felt very sad to lose it. And a knot formed in my throat to think that the goldfinch would not escape disaster either. Unaccustomed to finding its own food, to defending itself against any tiny enemies it might meet, it would have great difficulty surviving. And yet it was beautiful to watch it plunging into that diaphanous winter sky: the slight morning haze, the bird’s precise flight, the fragile light of the rising sun misting the blue with gold. The whole episode provided an illusion of freedom, of untarnished joy. We human beings also go out into the world with certain handicaps.
Again my eyes fill with tears—I feel like crying. I bring my fist down hard on the steering wheel (watch out for the airbag, a blow like that might trigger it), before opening the door of the Toyota to make enough room for putting on the wellingtons I left on the floor in front of the passenger seat. While I’m putting them on, I again imagine the bird growing smaller and smaller until it’s lost from view. Liliana’s face: you know, I had that warm feeling you get when happiness is about to arrive, as if something’s about to happen, a kind of inner hustle and bustle, like someone tidying the house for some important visitor—putting things in their proper places, dusting the furniture and cleaning the windows, while, from the kitchen, comes the smell of a special meal being prepared. Now it’s Álvaro on the other side of the desk in the office: You might have warned me. Do you really think I knew this was how things would end? The conflicting feelings are evident in his moist eyes. I taught Álvaro to hunt and fish at the lagoon—about forty years ago—just as my uncle had taught me. Yes: in the mid-seventies—Álvaro is a keen worker, who does all the jobs at the workshop to perfection. Despite the paternal ghost hovering over us, we establish a kind of friendship. I’m just back from my most recent escapade, and he’s the same as when I left—my father’s loyal son. Sometimes he comes with me on a Saturday morning, we have lunch together and I teach him how to handle the rifle and he’s surprised at all the things I know about the lagoon: as you see, time debases everything, erases it, what can I say? Álvaro and me like two brothers, if only we had been, I wish things had turned out differently between us, of course I do, and for you too, although you can’t really complain, you’ve had a steady job without too much responsibility, a house, a family. What I regret most of all is that things didn’t turn out differently for me—if only, rather than spending decades feeling that everything was just temporary, and then realizing too late that life is nearly over and things have never gone as we expected, and that they’re beyond our control, yes, if only, if only . . . It’s his eyes, the glint in his eyes that I see in the glow of the sunrise. The bird growing smaller and smaller, becoming one with that same glow. Álvaro’s eyes. The glint in his eyes, the tiny spark that lights up the pupil, surrounded now by a wash of blood. The pupil floats in that reddish liquid, just as the sun did a few moments ago, as it emerged from the sea: a red ring floating above a pool of blood. Why am I surprised to find that Álvaro hates or despises me? I don’t like my own father, and yet I’ve spent my whole life with him. Álvaro came with me on dozens of days like today, when you can breathe in the clean winter air. The two of us alone under the clear sky, walking through this luminous space, the light outlining every object, emphasizing every shape, making each one stand out against the landscape like a paper cut-out: after the first autumn rains, the heavy air of the lagoon grows thinner, and the putrefying smell of the stagnant water is replaced by another more vegetable odor, the odor of fresh, new-born vegetables. That’s what I can smell now, like a stimulant, a tonic that helps me walk more energetically, swing my arms higher, more vigorously, take longer, faster strides, step more firmly; for a moment, I look like a man determinedly going in search of what he wants. I advance along the path: the only sound is the whispering of the reeds as I part them, the soft murmur as they swish against my shoulders or brush against my knapsack as they fall back, the monotonous sucking noise of each boot lifting up from the squelching mud. The cawing of a crow, the fluttering of the coots: they jump out almost between my feet, I frighten them and they startle me too when I hear the beating of their wings, the whirr of the air. The dog races, mesmerized, after those fluttering wings, then stops at the edge of the water and turns to watch two ducks taking off. He barks. These noises shatter the glassy air; the splashing of some creature launching into the water: a frog, a toad, a rat; the barking of the dog amplified by the glass dome of the sky. I walk and feel as if I were immersing myself in a world apart, inhabited by other beings and ruled by other laws. Like my father, I feel a sudden desire to stay here forever. Like him, I am a divided being when I leave this labyrinth for the outside world. The dog runs excitedly up to me, overtakes me, then comes trotting back, wagging his tail; he stops, jumps up and puts his front paws on my belly. Filled with emotion, I stroke him, rubbing his head and back. Our guilt is going to take away your innocence, little dog. The wind has dropped, and the silence is almost painful, a warning of the great silence to come, the silence that will fill everything. On some winter days, the north winds bring with them the hum of traffic from the nearby main road or—more loudly from the highway—cars and trucks passing incessantly, a sound amplified beneath the wintry dome of the sky—noises which, on the other hand, the summer mists seem to swallow up the way blotting paper or a sponge absorbs liquids. Not today, there’s no wind today, no noise, not a breath. The welcome knife of the cold wind stopped. I move with a sense that I’m walking along its motionless blade. I’ve parked my SUV further up, because I want to enjoy the walk, but my contemplation of the landscape, my thoughts, are not a distraction from my goal, I know now how far I’ll be able to drive with the Toyota, I’ve calculated the width of the half-overgrown path, the state of the surface, I’ve checked that I’ll be able to drive the car up to the point where the water blocks the path, the bend in the lake, the kidney-shaped pool that, in the summer months, is cut off from the rest of the marsh: for years, my uncle and I used it as a pantry, a natural fish farm, which, tomorrow, will find its nutrients further enriched with meat to nourish its watery inhabitants, at the same time contaminating or poisoning the little spring my uncle showed me I could drink from; once again, good and evil all mixed up together. This was where I baited my first hook, cast my line and caught a couple of tiny fish (I can’t remember what they were, mullet or tench, I imagine) that my grandmother cooked for supper that evening. A stew of potatoes, garlic, sweet peppers and a bay leaf. The fish are for the boy, because he caught them. On the way home, it began to rain and we had to take shelter in the ruined building where we had left the bike. When we saw that the rain showed no signs of stopping and the sky was growing ever darker, my uncle decided to get on the bike, with me sitting on the crossbar with his waterproof cape covering me, head and all, and the rain drumming on the fabric and me inside as if in a glasshouse; I can still feel the warmth of my uncle’s body and the plip-plop of the ever larger raindrops on the cape. In these days of heavy autumn rain, or during winter, you can hear the roar of the waves even in the marshes, because the waters of the sea swell the lagoon, reaching up into the mouths of the river and the drainage canals, and then the mirror of the lake shatters into a thousand pieces, which, like droplets of molten metal, shift and jostle nervously, constantly changing shape and position. The lagoon comes alive, everything moves: the water, the reeds, the shrubs, everything. I’ve seen it dozens of times, but my memories focus on that one afternoon when the sky suddenly grew dark, and the day turned into a strange night bathed in a pale light that seemed to spring from the surface of the water. Light emanated from the leaves, the reeds, from the vegetation on the banks, an inverted light cast upward into the great, black clouds, like a photographic negative. My uncle holds my hand as we walk through that nightmare landscape as far as the ruined warehouse where he left his bike. I hear the rain hammering down on the roof tiles and see the ghostly light, like an optical illusion, on the brick wall nearest the entrance, which suddenly glows intensely red, highlighting the rough surface.