The Discreet Hero (37 page)

“I heard the news about Miguel on the radio in Tumbes,” said Tiburcio, clearly confused. “I couldn’t believe it. I called the house a thousand times but nobody answered the phone. I don’t know how I managed to drive here. Do you think what the police say about my brother is true?”

Felícito was about to interrupt to say, “He isn’t your brother,” but stopped himself. Weren’t Miguel and Tiburcio brothers? Half brothers, maybe, but brothers.

“It might be a lie, I think they’re lies,” Tiburcio was saying now, upset, still on the floor, still holding his father’s arms. “The police might have forced a false confession out of him, beat him, tortured him. Everybody knows they do those things.”

“No, Tiburcio. It’s true,” said Felícito. “He was the spider. He planned all of it. He confessed because that woman, his accomplice, accused him. Now I’m going to ask you for a big favor, son. Let’s not talk about it anymore. Not ever again. Not about Miguel or the spider. For me, it’s as if your brother has ceased to exist. I mean, as if he’d never existed. I don’t want him mentioned in this house. Never again. You can do whatever you like. Go to see him, if you want. Bring him food, find him a lawyer, whatever. I don’t care. I don’t know what your mother will want to do. Just don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know. He’ll never be mentioned in my presence. I curse his name and that’s it. Now, help me up, Tiburcio. I don’t know why, but it’s as if my legs were suddenly rebelling.”

Tiburcio stood, and holding him by both arms, lifted him effortlessly.

“I’m going to ask you to come with me to the office,” said Felícito. “Life must go on. We have to get back to work and straighten out the company: It’s been through a rough time. The family’s not the only one suffering over this, son. Narihualá Transport is too. We have to get it moving again.”

“The street’s full of reporters,” Tiburcio cautioned him. “They were all over me when I arrived and wouldn’t let me pass. I almost got into a fight with one of them.”

“You’ll help keep those savages away from me, Tiburcio.” He looked into his son’s eyes and, giving his face a clumsy caress, sweetened his voice: “I’m grateful to you for not mentioning Mabel, son, or asking about that woman. You’re a good son, you know.”

He grasped the boy’s arm and walked with him toward the door. A clamor broke out as soon as he opened it, and the flashbulbs made him blink. “I have nothing to say, gentlemen, thank you very much,” he repeated two, three, ten times while, clutching Tiburcio’s arm, he struggled to make his way along Calle Arequipa, pursued, shoved, jostled by the swarm of reporters who kept interrupting one another and pushing microphones, cameras, notebooks, and pencils in his face. They asked questions he couldn’t understand. He kept repeating periodically, as if it were a refrain: “I have nothing to say, ladies, gentlemen, thank you very much.” They followed him to Narihualá Transport but couldn’t go in because the watchman slammed the heavy door in their faces. When he sat down at the board placed over two barrels that still served as his desk, Tiburcio handed him a glass of water.

“And that elegant lady named Armida, did you know her, Father?” his son asked. “Did you know my mama had a sister in Lima? She never told us about her.”

He shook his head and lifted a finger to his mouth. “A big mystery, Tiburcio. She came to hide here because it seems they’re hounding her in Lima and even want to kill her. You’d better forget about her and not tell anybody you saw her. We have enough problems without inheriting my sister-in-law’s too.”

It required a huge effort, but he began to work. To look over accounts, drafts, due dates, current expenditures, income, bills, payments to providers, collections. At the same time, at the back of his mind, he was formulating a plan of action for the days that followed. And after a while he began to feel better, to suspect that it was possible to win this extremely difficult battle. Suddenly he felt a powerful desire to listen to the warm, tender voice of Cecilia Barraza. Too bad he didn’t have any of her CDs at the office—songs like “Thistle or Ash,” “Innocent Love,” “Sweet Affection,” or “The Bull Kills”—or a machine to play them on. As soon as things improved, he’d buy one. After the fire damage had been repaired, on afternoons or nights when he stayed to work in the office, he’d put on a series of CDs by his favorite singer. He’d forget about everything and feel happy, or sad, always moved by the voice that could bring out in waltzes, handkerchief dances, polkas, vendors’ cries, all Peruvian music, the most delicate feelings hidden deep inside him.

When he left Narihualá Transport, it was late at night. No reporters were on the avenue; the watchman told him they’d grown tired of waiting and left a while back. Tiburcio had gone too, at Felícito’s insistence, more than an hour ago. He walked up Calle Arequipa; there were few people now, and he couldn’t look at anyone, keeping to the shadows so he wouldn’t be recognized. Fortunately, no one stopped him or started a conversation with him on the way. In the house, Armida and Gertrudis were already asleep, or at least he didn’t hear them. He went to the television room and put on some CDs, keeping the volume very low. And he stayed there for a couple of hours, sitting in the dark, distracted and moved; his worries didn’t leave him, but certainly they were somewhat alleviated by the songs intimately interpreted for him by Cecilia Barraza. Her voice was a balm, cool, limpid water into which he sank, body and soul, became clean and calm, felt joy; something sound, sweet, and optimistic rose from the deepest part of him. He tried not to think about Mabel, not to remember the intense, happy moments he’d spent with her over the past eight years, tried to recall only that she’d betrayed him, gone to bed with Miguel and conspired with him, sending the spider letters, faking a kidnapping, setting fire to his office. That was what he had to remember so the idea of never seeing her again wouldn’t be so bitter.

He got up very early next day, did qigong exercises, thinking of Lau the storekeeper as he usually did during this obligatory morning routine, ate breakfast, and left for the office before the late-rising reporters had arrived at the door of his house to continue the hunt. Josefita was already there and very happy to see him.

“It’s so good that you’ve come back to the office, Don Felícito,” she said, flattering him. “We were missing you around here.”

“I couldn’t keep taking a vacation,” he replied, removing his hat and jacket and sitting down at the board. “I’ve had enough scandals and foolishness, Josefita. Starting today, it’s back to work. That’s what I like, it’s what I’ve done all my life, and it’s what I’ll do from now on.”

He guessed that his secretary wanted to tell him something but hadn’t quite decided to yet. What had happened to Josefita? She looked different. More fixed up and made-up than usual, wearing eye-catching, flirtatious clothes. Little smiles and suspicious blushes passed over her face from time to time, and he thought she moved her hips a little more now when she walked.

“If you want to tell me a secret, I promise you I’m like the tomb, Josefita. And if it’s a romantic problem, you know you can cry on my shoulder.”

“It’s just that I don’t know what to do, Don Felícito.” She lowered her voice and blushed from head to toe. She brought her face close to her employer’s and whispered, her eyes as wide as an innocent girl’s, “You know, that police captain keeps calling me. Can you guess why? To ask me out, of course!”

“Captain Silva?” The trucker pretended to be surprised. “I suspected he was one of your conquests. Hey waddya think, Josefita!”

“So it seems, Don Felícito,” his secretary continued, affecting extreme modesty. “He pays me all kinds of compliments whenever he calls, you can’t imagine the things he says. That man is so fresh! You don’t know how embarrassed it makes me. Yes, yes, he wants to take me out. I don’t know what to do. What advice would you give me?”

“Well, I don’t know what to say, Josefita. Of course, I’m not surprised that you’ve made this conquest. You’re a very attractive woman.”

“But a little fat, Don Felícito,” she complained, pretending to pout. “Though according to what he said, that isn’t a problem for Captain Silva. He claimed he doesn’t like the starving girls in ads but does like well-padded women, like me.”

Felícito Yanaqué burst into laughter and she joined in. It was the first time the trucker had laughed like this since he’d heard the bad news.

“Have you found out at least if the captain’s married, Josefita?”

“He promised me he’s single and has no commitments. But who knows, men spend their whole lives telling women that story.”

“I’ll try to find out, leave it to me,” offered Felícito. “Meanwhile have a good time and enjoy life, you deserve it. Be happy, Josefita.”

He inspected the departure of the jitneys, buses, and vans, and the delivery of packages, and midmorning he left for the appointment he had with Dr. Hildebrando Castro Pozo in his tiny, crowded office on Calle Lima. He was the lawyer for his transport business and had taken care of all Felícito Yanaqué’s legal affairs for several years. He explained in detail what he had in mind, and Dr. Castro Pozo took notes on everything he said in his usual diminutive notebook, writing with a pencil as little as it was. He was a small, elegant man in his sixties, wearing a vest and tie, lively, energetic, amiable, concise, a modest but effective professional, not at all high-priced. His father had been a well-known fighter for social causes, a defender of peasants, who suffered through prison and exile and was the author of a book about indigenous communities that had made him famous. He’d been a deputy in Congress. When Felícito finished explaining what he wanted, Dr. Castro Pozo regarded him with satisfaction.

“Of course it’s feasible, Don Felícito,” he exclaimed, toying with his tiny pencil. “But let me study the matter calmly and give you all the legal twists and turns so we can move forward without taking any risks. I’ll need a couple of days at most. Do you know something? What you want to do fully confirms what I’ve always thought about you.”

“And what have you thought about me, Dr. Castro Pozo?”

“That you’re an ethical man, Don Felícito. Ethical down to the soles of your feet. One of the few I’ve known, in fact.”

What could that mean, “an ethical man”? Intrigued, Felícito told himself he’d have to buy a dictionary one of these days. He was always hearing words whose meaning he didn’t know. And it embarrassed him to go around asking people what they meant. He went to his house for lunch. Even though he found the reporters stationed there, he didn’t even stop to tell them he wouldn’t give any interviews. He walked around them, greeting them with a nod, not answering the questions they asked him, moving quickly.

After lunch, Armida asked to talk to him alone for a moment. But to Felícito’s surprise, when he and his sister-in-law withdrew to the television room, Gertrudis, once again cloistered in stubborn silence, followed them. She sat down in one of the armchairs and remained there for the duration of the long conversation Armida and the trucker had, listening, not interrupting them even once.

“It must seem strange to you that since I arrived, I’ve been wearing the same dress,” his sister-in-law began in the most trivial way.

“If you want me to be frank, Armida, everything about this seems strange to me, let alone that you haven’t changed your dress. To begin with, your showing up this way, out of the blue. Gertrudis and I have been married for I don’t know how many years, and until a few days ago I don’t think she ever told me you even existed. Can you think of anything stranger than that?”

“I haven’t changed my clothes because I don’t have anything else to wear,” his sister-in-law continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “I left Lima with what I had on my back. I tried one of Gertrudis’s dresses, but I was swimming in it. Well, I ought to begin this story at the beginning.”

“Explain at least one thing to me,” Felícito asked her. “Because Gertrudis, as you must have seen, has become mute and will never explain it to me. Are you full sisters?”

Armida shifted in her seat, disconcerted, not knowing how to answer. She looked for help to Gertrudis, who remained silent, folded in on herself, like one of those mollusks with odd names sold in the Central Market by fishwives. Her expression was one of total apathy, as if nothing she heard had anything to do with her, but she didn’t take her eyes off either one of them.

“We don’t know,” Armida said finally, gesturing toward her sister with her chin. “We’ve talked a lot about it these past three days.”

“Ah, in other words, Gertrudis talks to you. You’re luckier than I am.”

“We have the same mother, that’s the only thing we know for sure,” Armida declared, slowly regaining her self-control. “She’s a few years older than me. But neither one of us remembers our father. Maybe he was the same man. Maybe not. There’s nobody left to ask, Felícito. As far back as we can remember, the Boss Lady—that’s what they called my mama, do you remember?—didn’t have a husband.”

“Did you live in El Algarrobo too?”

“Until I was fifteen,” Armida said. “It wasn’t a boardinghouse yet, just a wayside inn for mule drivers in the middle of the sandy tract. When I was fifteen I went to Lima to find a job. It wasn’t easy. I went through some hard times, worse than you can imagine. But Gertrudis and I never lost touch. I wrote to her sometimes, though she answered only once in a blue moon. She never liked writing letters. The fact is, Gertrudis only spent two or three years in school. I was luckier and finished elementary school. The Boss Lady made sure I went to school, but she put Gertrudis to work in the boardinghouse very early.”

Felícito turned to his wife.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me you had a sister,” he said.

But she kept looking at him as if she were looking through water and didn’t respond.

“I’ll tell you why, Felícito,” Armida intervened. “Gertrudis was ashamed, she didn’t want you to find out her sister was working in Lima as a maid. Especially after she married you and became respectable.”

“You were a domestic servant?” the trucker said in surprise, looking at his sister-in-law’s dress.