The Discreet Hero (26 page)

Captain Silva stopped talking for a moment to calmly light a cigarette. Unhurriedly, he exhaled a large mouthful of smoke that hung in the air and saturated the room with the biting odor of tobacco.

“You’ll probably say, Mabel, that the police aren’t interested in your private life, and you’d be right,” the chief continued, dropping his ash on the floor and adopting an air that was part philosophical, part bullying. “But what concerns us is not whether you have two or ten lovers, but that you’ve been crazy enough to conspire with one of them to extort Don Felícito Yanaqué, the poor old man who, besides everything else, really loves you. What an ungrateful girl you’ve turned out to be, Mabelita!”

“What a thing to say!” She was on her feet and now, quivering, indignant, she too raised her voice, as well as a fist. “I won’t say another word without a lawyer. Let me tell you, I know my rights. I…”

How stubborn Felícito was! Mabel never would have imagined that the old man was prepared to die rather than give money to the extortionists. He seemed so meek, so understanding, and then suddenly he displayed an iron will to all of Piura. The day after she was freed, she and Felícito had a long conversation. At one point Mabel unexpectedly asked him, point-blank, “If the kidnappers had said they’d kill me if you didn’t give them the money, would you have let them kill me?”

“Now you see it didn’t happen that way, love,” the trucker stammered, very uncomfortable.

“Answer me honestly, Felícito,” she insisted. “Would you have let them kill me?”

“And afterward I would’ve killed myself,” he conceded, his voice breaking and his expression so pathetic she took pity on him. “Forgive me, Mabel. But I’ll never pay an extortionist. Not even if they kill me or the thing I love most in this world, which is you.”

“But you told me yourself that all your colleagues in Piura do it,” Mabel replied.

“And lots of businessmen and entrepreneurs too, it seems,” Felícito acknowledged. “The truth is I learned that only now, through Vignolo. It’s their business. I’m not criticizing them. Each man knows what he’s doing and how to defend his interests. But I’m not like them, Mabel. I can’t do it. I can’t betray my father’s memory.”

And then the trucker, with tears in his eyes, began to talk about his father to a surprised Mabel. Never, in all the years they’d been together, had she heard him refer to his parent so emotionally. With feeling, with tenderness, just like when they were intimate in bed and he said sweet things to her as he caressed her. He’d been a very humble man, a sharecropper, a Chulucano from the countryside, and then, here in Piura, a porter, a municipal garbage collector. He never learned to read or write, he went barefoot most of his life, something you noticed when they left Chulucanas and came to the city so that Felícito could go to school. Then he had to wear shoes and you could see how strange it felt to him when he walked and how his feet hurt when he had them on. He wasn’t a man who showed his love by hugging and kissing his son, or saying those affectionate things parents say to their kids. He was severe, hard, even ready with his fists when he got angry. But he’d shown him he loved him by making him study, by dressing him and feeding him, even when he had nothing to put on his own back or in his own mouth, by sending him to a school for drivers so that Felícito could learn to drive and get his license. Thanks to that illiterate sharecropper, Narihualá Transport existed. His father might have been poor but he was a great man because of his upstanding spirit, because he never harmed anyone, or broke the law, or felt rancor toward the woman who abandoned him, leaving him with a newborn to bring up. If all of that about sin and evil and the next life was true, he had to be in heaven now. He didn’t even have time to do any evil, he spent his life working like a dog in the worst-paying jobs. Felícito remembered seeing him drop with fatigue at night. But even so, he never let anyone walk all over him. According to him, that was the difference between a man who was worth something and a man who was worth only a rag. That had been the advice he gave him before he died in a bed with no mattress in the Hospital Obrero: “Never let anybody walk all over you, son.” Felícito had followed the advice of the father who, because they had no money, he couldn’t even bury in a niche; he couldn’t stop them from tossing him into a common grave.

“Do you see, Mabel? It’s not the five hundred dollars the crooks are asking for. That’s not the point. If I give it to them, they’d be walking all over me, turning me into a rag. Tell me you understand, honey.”

Mabel hadn’t really understood, but hearing him say those things made an impression on her. Only now, after being with him for so long, did she realize that behind his insignificant appearance—a little man, so thin, so small—Felícito had a cast-iron character and a bulletproof will. It was true, he’d let himself be killed before he gave in.

“Sit down and shut up,” the officer ordered and Mabel shut up and dropped back into her seat, defeated. “You don’t need a lawyer
yet
. You’re not arrested
yet
. We’re not questioning you
yet
. This is a friendly, confidential conversation, I already told you that. And it would be better for you to get that into your head once and for all. So let me talk, Mabelita, and listen to what I’m going to say very carefully.”

But before he continued, he took another long drag of his cigarette and expelled the smoke slowly, making rings. “He wants to make me suffer, that’s why he came,” thought Mabel. She felt weak and exhausted, as if at any moment she might fall asleep. In the armchair, leaning forward slightly, as if he didn’t want to miss a syllable of what his boss was saying, Sergeant Lituma didn’t speak or move. And he didn’t take his eyes off him for a second.

“There are various charges and they’re serious,” the captain went on, looking into her eyes as if he wanted to hypnotize her. “You tried to make us believe you’d been kidnapped but it was all a farce, cooked up by you and your pal to coerce Don Felícito, the gentleman who’s dying of love for you. It didn’t work out because you weren’t counting on this man’s determination to refuse to be extorted. To soften him up, you even set fire to Narihualá Transport on Avenida Sánchez Cerro. But that didn’t work out either.”

“I set fire to it? Is that what you’re accusing me of? Being an arsonist too?” Mabel protested, trying in vain to stand again, but weakness or the captain’s belligerent gaze and aggressive expression stopped her. She dropped back into the chair, shrinking into herself and crossing her arms. Now she was not only sleepy, she felt warm as well and began to perspire. She felt her hands begin to drip with sweat and fear. “So I was the one who set fire to Narihualá Transport?”

“We have some other details, but these are the most serious charges as far as you’re concerned,” said the captain, calmly turning to his subordinate. “Let’s see, Sergeant, inform the señora of the crimes she could be tried for and the sentences she might receive.”

Lituma became animated, shifted in his seat, wet his lips with his tongue, took a paper out of his shirt pocket, unfolded it, cleared his throat, and read like a pupil reciting a lesson for his teacher.

“Unlawful association for the purpose of committing a criminal act in a kidnapping scheme and sending anonymous letters and extortion threats. Unlawful association for the purpose of destroying a commercial site with explosives, with the aggravating circumstance of putting at risk the houses, businesses, and persons in the area. Active participation in a false kidnapping for the purpose of frightening and coercing a businessman into paying protection. Dissimulation, duplicity, and deception before the authorities during their investigation into the false kidnapping.” He put the paper back in his pocket and added: “These would be the principal charges against the señora, Captain. The prosecutor might add other, less serious ones, like the clandestine practice of prostitution.”

“And how high could the penalty go if the señora is convicted, Lituma?” the captain asked, his mocking eyes fixed on Mabel.

“Eight to ten years in prison,” the sergeant replied. “It would depend on the aggravating and extenuating circumstances, naturally.”

“You’re trying to scare me, but you’ve made a mistake,” murmured Mabel, making an enormous effort to get her tongue, as dry and harsh as an iguana’s, to form words. “I won’t answer any of those lies without a lawyer present.”

“Nobody’s asking you questions
yet
,” Captain Silva said ironically. “For now, the only thing you’re being asked to do is listen. Understood, Mabelita?”

He kept looking at her with a leer that forced her to lower her eyes. Disheartened, defeated, she nodded.

As a result of nerves, fear, and the idea that with every step she took she’d have an invisible pair of cops on her tail, she didn’t leave the house for five days. She went out only to run to the Chinese store on the corner to buy a few things, to the laundry, and to the bank. She hurried back to close herself in with her worries and tortured thoughts. On the sixth day she couldn’t stand any more. Living this way was like being in prison, and Mabel wasn’t made for confinement. She needed to be out, see the sky, smell, hear, walk in the city, listen to the bustle of men and women, hear the donkeys braying and the dogs barking. She wasn’t and would never be a cloistered nun. She called her friend Zoila and suggested they go to the movies, the late-afternoon show.

“And see what, honey?” asked Zoila.

“Anything, whatever they’re showing,” Mabel answered. “I need to see people, talk a little bit. I’m suffocating here.”

They met in front of Los Portales, on the Plaza de Armas. They had lunch at El Chalán, and went into the multiplex at the Centro Comercial Open Plaza, next to the Universidad de Piura. They saw a fairly graphic movie with nudity. Zoila, who pretended to be very proper, crossed herself when there were sex scenes. She was shameless; in her personal life she was a real libertine, changed partners every other day, and even bragged about it: “As long as your body holds out, you have to use it, baby.” She wasn’t especially pretty, but she had a good body and nice taste in clothes. Because of that and her uninhibited ways, she was successful with men. When they left the theater, she suggested they have something to eat at her house, but Mabel said no, she didn’t want to go back to Castilla alone when it was late.

She took a taxi, and as the old jalopy plunged into the half-darkened neighborhood, Mabel told herself that, after all, it was lucky the police had kept the kidnapping from the press. They thought this would confuse the extortionists and make it easier to catch them. But she was convinced that at any moment the news would reach the papers, radio, and television. What would her life turn into if that scandal broke? Maybe the best thing would be to listen to Felícito and leave Piura for a while. Why not go to Trujillo? They said it was big, modern, lively, with a nice beach and colonial houses and parks. And that the Marinera Dance Competition held there every summer was worth seeing. Were those two cops in plain clothes following her in a car or on a motorcycle? She looked through the rear and side windows and didn’t see any vehicles. Probably her protection was a lie. You had to be a half-wit to believe the cops’ promises.

She got out of the taxi, paid, and walked the twenty-some paces from the corner to her house down the center of an empty street, even though at almost all the neighboring doors and windows the dim lights of the neighborhood flickered. She could make out the silhouettes of people inside. She had her door key ready. She opened the door, went in, and when she reached out her hand to the light switch, she felt another hand in the way, blocking her and covering her mouth, stifling her scream as a man’s body pressed against hers and a well-known voice whispered in her ear, “It’s me, don’t be scared.”

“What are you doing here?” Mabel protested, trembling. She thought she’d collapse onto the floor if he weren’t holding her up. “Have you gone crazy, you asshole? Have you gone crazy?”

“I needed to fuck you,” said Miguel, and Mabel felt his feverish lips on her ear, her neck, eager, avid, his strong arms squeezing her and his hands touching her everywhere.

“Stupid pig, imbecile, vulgar filthy moron,” she protested, defending herself, furious. She was dizzy with indignation and fear. “Don’t you know the police are watching the house? Don’t you know what can happen to us on account of you, you dirty idiot?”

“Nobody saw me come in, the cop is in the dive on the corner drinking coffee, nobody was on the street.” Miguel kept embracing her, kissing her, pressing her body against his, rubbing against her. “Come on, let’s go to bed, I’ll fuck you and leave. Come on, baby.”

“You dumb, miserable dog, how do you have the nerve to come here, you’re out of your mind.” They were in the dark and, furious and frightened, she was trying to resist and push him away, at the same time feeling that in spite of her rage, her body was beginning to give in. “Don’t you realize that you’re ruining my life, damn you? And ruining your own too, you bastard.”

“I swear nobody saw me come in, I was very careful,” he repeated, pulling at her clothes to try to undress her. “Come on, come on. I want you, I’m hungry for you, I want to make you cry out, I love you.”

Finally she stopped defending herself. Still in the dark, fed up, exhausted, she allowed him to undress her and throw her down on the bed, and for a few minutes she abandoned herself to pleasure. Could that be called pleasure? It was, in any case, something very different from what she’d felt at other times. Tense, on edge, sad. Not even at the height of her excitement, when she was about to come, could she get the images of Felícito, the police who questioned her at the station house, the scandal that would explode if the news reached the press, out of her head.

“Now go, and don’t set foot in this house again until all of this is over,” she ordered when she felt Miguel release her and fall back onto the bed. “If your father finds out because of this crazy thing you did tonight, I’ll get back at you. I swear it’ll be bad. I swear you’ll regret it the rest of your life, Miguel.”