The Hermit (25 page)

– Fine, he says.

He gazes out at the sea. Nothing changes. Not a cloud in the sky. Just the hypnotic flow of waves crashing against the shore at knee height, rising, and then slipping across the rocks only to dissipate against the cliffs. The sky is clear. The invisible winds wash everything away. Everything is pure blue. Everything is white. Like last year. And the year before that. It’s not as poetic as it sounds.

The telephone rings. Miza puts down her rag and goes to the kitchen to answer. As she listens to the caller, she switches on her computer screen and punches a few keys. Someone must be making a reservation. – We look forward to seeing you, Miza concludes, clicking around on the keyboard. She’s in her mid forties and seems like a natural on the computer.

Erhard scans the beach and the road, then stands. – I’ve been coming here for, what, five years?

Miza laughs. – More like ten.

– You’ve never asked me about anything but my work until today.

– No. Your personal life is none of my business.

– You’re a good person, Erhard says.

– Thank you, Señor Jørgensen. She reassembles the coffee machine and brews a pot of coffee. – We try.

He looks at the computer. It would probably only take her ten minutes to find the images, but it would take him several hours, days, to find them himself. There’s no reason to bother Petra’s daughter with this; she’s a computer expert, she would just laugh at him and think he’s even more old-fashioned than he appears. But asking Miza would be easy; she has been his acquaintance for many years, maybe even his friend. Even if they’ve mostly just exchanged pleasantries about the weather, coffee, football, and fishermen.

Miza’s face knots in concern. – What’s wrong?

– I’m trying to find a photograph.

She glances around as if he might’ve lost it in the cafe. – I haven’t seen anything here, if that’s what you mean.

He looks at her. – I’ll find it.

She laughs. Although her husband seems pretty stiff, she’s got a good sense of humour. – Aren’t you working today?

He nods.

He drives to Alto Blanco. Takes a bouquet of white roses with him. They cost seventeen euros. Flown over from the mainland. He parks on the gravel lot and walks up the long stairway, which feels as if it’s going downward. The hilltop offers a flat, white landscape, but also a knockout view. The dust of a prehistoric volcano has settled permanently over the spot, so everything is white as though sprinkled with flour all the way to the sea. A little church made of black slate stands in the centre of the hill. Rock-solid and inviting, it’s the church for the island’s elite. They like the colours and the view, which transform wedding photographs into perfume advertisements. There’s even a flagstone area for camera tripods, ten square metres, where the paparazzi can smoke cigarettes as they wait for the bride and groom and their celebrity friends to exit the church.

He’s never been inside. He pauses at the wide door and peers in, but it’s dark, and he approaches only after he hears some voices within. He’s early.

Inside, the shape is that of an octagon, practically ascetic. Ten raw wooden benches in the centre face a granite table. Above the table, a window is cut in the shape of a cross, self-illuminating and heartrendingly simple. Standing on the left side of the church, a choir of young boys wearing ugly yellow trainers below their black vestments silently button each other’s sleeves. Meanwhile, the priest is talking to a man in a black suit, who hurries out a side door when Erhard enters. One person is already seated up front, the girl who runs the boutique where Beatriz worked. She’s dressed in her smartest city outfit: a little hat with a veil and sunglasses, an ensemble befitting a rock star’s widow.

A few other girls soon arrive, clearly friends of the boutique, but no one Erhard recognizes. Affected by the atmosphere and the light and the choir, which has begun to sing, they greet each other politely. They’re all dapperly dressed, but one of the girls is wearing a very short skirt, which she tugs down. On the table, the altar, is an egg-shaped urn. The service is typically held before the cremation and with an open casket, but they chose not to do that here, so the ceremony will take place around the urn.

Now that he’s noticed the urn, it occupies the entire room.

Alina.

Because it’s actually her, of course. He hasn’t given her a thought since he switched her with Beatriz. Now he recalls that evening he saw her at the nightclub, the night she wound up in bed with that lead singer. How she lay there, her legs spread, and spoke to Erhard like the old fool he is. Completely indifferent and dumb and lewd all at once, so that all he could do was to fantasize about having his way with her, even if his entire nervous system screamed that she was a wretched harpy from whom he needed to keep his distance. Insolent, that’s the word for her.

Now she’s dead. He’s the only one who truly knows whose ashes are in that urn. Even though it wasn’t his fault, she was in his custody when she died. And it’s by his hands that her death has concealed Beatriz’s survival. Undoubtedly, there would be other kinds of people in the church had this been Alina’s real funeral. Maybe it would be packed with the girls from Guisguey, or maybe it would be empty. She probably wouldn’t have been buried, perhaps not even cremated, but thrown into a grave scooped out by a Bobcat, just like the boy. Because no one knew Alina. Because no one would pay to see a whore laid to rest. So in a way, Alina got a taste of life in first class, what she’d always dreamed of. Sitting in the back row, he feels the entire building whirl. At the same time, the bells begin their rhythmic pealing.

Why the hell did she go up on the roof? What possessed her to climb up there? If she was so desperate, why didn’t she use all her energy to attack Erhard when he returned like she’d done the day before? When he left her she’d been angry, and yet they’d been working on a project together, and she’d asked him to get her charger. Why would she choose to jump from the roof?

Right when the bells stop chiming, the door bursts open, and Emanuel Palabras and a bizarre troupe of servants enter, filling the benches on the left side of the church. They’re all dressed in black except for Palabras, who looks like a parrot in a green and blue suit and a white narrow-brimmed fedora. It’s the first time Erhard has seen Emanuel beyond his property, and just as all the rumours would have it, he’s not alone. With him are men, including his guards and even his gardener, Abril, and his Maasai girls, all of whom serve as buffers between the real world and Palabras. All conversation goes through them.

The priest is standing with his back to the assembly, but when he turns towards the pews, he seems surprised by the sudden spike in attendance. He raises his hands in a friendly gesture of greeting. Then begins. In that moment, Erhard has never felt so powerful a need to hear something meaningful, something eloquent about life and death, about the porousness of humanity, about the eternal search for meaning and familiar faces, about the longing for connectedness and loving hands, about the little person that just wants to be loved and feel the warmth of a mother’s lips behind her ear, about the hot, throbbing limbs that long to be held and licked, about the many hours one waits and waits and waits before one dies and dies. And the priest opens his mouth and recites from the Bible, a long passage about a golden calf, a story that Erhard remembers as a drawing in a children’s book he once had with a tattered spine. An angel walks in front of us, the priest says, then asks it to guide Beatrizia Aurelia Colini. The choir sings. Erhard’s gaze shifts from the cross above the table with the egg-shaped urn to the grey floor, and he doesn’t look up until the bells once again chime and the priest is on his way towards the open door. The man in the suit walks behind him, a church servant, holding the urn in his white-gloved hands. The entire assemblage follows them. First Palabras and his retinue, then the shop manager and the girls, and finally Erhard. Hassib, the policeman, is standing near the exit; he’s in uniform and he’s studying Erhard’s face. Or at least that’s how it feels. Erhard greets him with a nod and walks past him, into the now pale light outside. The priest and the church servant continue along a path that veers around the back of the church and down the hill, until they come to a plateau and a place with flower pots filled with sprays of fresh red flowers. The procession halts next to a slate-grey wall with metal containers inscribed with white letters. The mausoleum. It’s regarded by many on the island as one of the most exclusive places to end one’s days. But despite the flowerpots with lilies and roses, despite the nameplates with silhouettes of the deceased and small angels, Erhard still thinks the mausoleum looks like an ordinary row of PO boxes.

The egg-shaped urn is placed in one of the containers, and before the lid is sealed, the priest says a few words in Latin and blesses the parishioners. This is followed by a moment’s silence, and the sea is all that can be heard. The breath of the waves. The high point of the service, Erhard thinks; finally, the painful point about the incontrovertibility of existence: our finiteness against the sea that roars on. Life as acts we can practise but once.

They head back to their cars.

The last thing he needs right now is to feel mortal. Or to meet the policeman’s eyes. He hustles until his knees ache, getting ahead of the boutique girls and up to the car park. But when he reaches his vehicle, one of the men from Palabras’s flock catches up to him. Señor Palabras would like to speak with him. Would Erhard please come with him? The man points at a gigantic Mercedes in the middle of the car park. Erhard follows him and waits a few minutes in the backseat. The interior is of beige leather with plenty of legroom, so much so that Erhard can’t touch the front seat with his feet, even when he stretches. Then Emanuel Palabras climbs in, along with two skinny Maasai girls. Charles, one of the guards, sits in the passenger seat. His right foot is in a cast.

– A sad day, Emanuel Palabras says.

– Yes, Erhard says.

– I can’t say I knew her, unfortunately. My son wasn’t one to show her off.

Erhard doesn’t understand that. In his experience, Raúl was proud of Beatriz. Maybe it was his father’s company Raúl didn’t seek out. He says nothing.

– I believe he’d grown tired of her, Palabras goes on.

– We’ve just come from her funeral, Erhard says. – Shouldn’t we let that sink in?

Emanuel Palabras grins. – Do you think time will change anything?

– If you have an opinion about their relationship, maybe today’s not the best day to share it. Respect the dead.

– Respect, yes. But not dishonesty. Dishonesty does no one any good.

– What are you trying to say?

– Don’t be offended, Piano Tuner. I’m the one who paid for this funeral. I won’t bring shame upon this girl. I’m just trying to understand my foolish son. Why has he acted this way?

– So you’ve heard that he left the country?

– Yes, my friends with the police like to talk.

My friends. It didn’t sound so nice coming from a man like Palabras.

– And you probably think he was the one who killed her? Just like all your police friends do?

– They don’t seem to think so any more. Thanks in part to you.

That’s news to Erhard. – Good, he says simply.

– I’ve explained to them that there’s no one in our family even capable of removing a dummy from a baby’s mouth. We’re lambs in God’s great game.

That’s probably carrying it a little too far. As far as Erhard’s aware, both Emanuel and Raúl have beaten up a fair share of people, more than an entire football team’s worth.

– God only knows, Erhard says, feeling Palabras’s eyes on him.

– But no more chatter about that. How are you doing?

Every alarm bell goes off in Erhard’s head. Emanuel Palabras has never asked him such a question.

– In spite of today’s funeral, my good friend’s disappearance, and an unfortunate decline in tourism and pianos on the island, I’d say it’s going swimmingly.

– Tourism? When the hell did that begin to concern you?

– It’s macroeconomics. When the tourists go elsewhere and the local economy goes bust, it means fewer taxi rides.

– You continually surprise me, Piano Tuner. I like it when people see the big picture. My son wasn’t that strong on such practical matters, but he certainly understood people. I may have been the one to discover you, but he was the one who saw your potential.

Now the alarm bells ring even louder. Compliments aren’t free when Palabras is doling them out. An offer is imminent.

– I’ve been here the entire time, Erhard says. Long before you discovered anything at all.

– You just suddenly appeared. Like a sea god from the water.

It sounds so stupid that Erhard laughs. Palabras laughs too, as do the two Maasai girls, even though they probably don’t understand a word of it. Or maybe they understand everything. It’s impossible to read their faces.

Erhard moves to open the door.

– Hey, Emanuel says, raising his hand. – Are you leaving?

– Are we done here?

– When do we meet again?

– The first Thursday of the month. As always.

– We should see each other more often.

– Why? Erhard smiles, but he asks the question in earnest.

– Look at us. We have much in common.

– Age and a weakness for expensive pianos are probably the only things we have in common.

–
Au contraire
. We’re cut of the same cloth.

Erhard doesn’t quite see it that way. – What is it you want?

– I want to hire you.

– To do what?

– You’re smart. I’m sure we can figure something out.

– I have a job. Two jobs.

Three if one counts taking care of Beatriz, he thinks, but he doesn’t say that out loud.

– But you can use the money, no?

– I manage.

– There will be other benefits.

Erhard regards Palabras intently. He doesn’t understand what he means by ‘other benefits’.

– I manage.

– The offer stands, says Palabras.