The Discreet Hero (6 page)

“I’m familiar with your case, Señor Yanaqué, the sergeant brought me up to date. I’ve already read the letter with spiders that they sent you. You may not remember, but we met at a Rotary Club lunch in the Piuran Center, a while ago now. There were some good carob syrup cocktails, as I recall.”

Without saying anything, Felícito deposited the letter on the checkerboard, disturbing the pieces. He felt that his rage had risen to his brain and almost kept him from thinking.

“Sit down before you have a heart attack, Señor Yanaqué,” the captain said mockingly, pointing to a chair. He chewed on the ends of his mustache and his tone was arrogant and provocative. “Oh, by the way, you forgot to say good evening. I’m Captain Silva, the chief of police, at your service.”

“Good evening,” Felícito said, his voice strangled by irritation. “They just sent me another letter. I demand an explanation, officers.”

The captain read the paper, bringing it closer to the lamp on his desk. Then he passed it to Sergeant Lituma, muttering, “Well, well, this is heating up.”

“I demand an explanation,” repeated Felícito, choking. “How did the gangsters know I came to the station to file a complaint about this anonymous letter?”

“In many ways, Señor Yanaqué.” Captain Silva shrugged, looking at him with pity. “Because they followed you here, for example. Because they know you and know you’re not a man who lets himself be extorted but goes to the police and complains. Or because somebody you told that you’d filed a complaint repeated it to somebody else. Or because, suddenly, we’re the ones who wrote the letters, the villains who want to extort you. That’s occurred to you, hasn’t it? That must be why you go around in such a bad mood, hey waddya think, as your fellow Piurans say.”

Felícito repressed his desire to tell him yes. At this moment he was angrier with the two officers than with whoever wrote the letters.

“You found it the same way, attached to your front door?”

His face burned as he replied, hiding his embarrassment.

“They attached it to the front door of a person I visit.”

Lituma and Captain Silva exchanged glances.

“This means, then, that they have a thorough knowledge of your life, Señor Yanaqué,” Captain Silva commented with malicious slowness. “These bastards even know who you visit. They’ve done a good job of intelligence, it seems. So we can deduce that they’re professionals, not amateurs.”

“And now what’s going to happen?” the trucker asked. His rage of a moment ago had been replaced by a feeling of sadness and impotence. What was happening to him was unfair, it was cruel. What were they punishing him for up there? Holy God, what crime had he committed?

“Now they’ll try to scare you to soften you up,” the captain explained as if he were chatting about how mild the night was. “To make you believe they’re powerful and untouchable. And pow! That’s where they’ll make their first mistake. Then we’ll begin to track them down. Patience, Señor Yanaqué. Though you may not believe it, things are going well.”

“That’s easy to say when you’re watching from the audience,” the trucker philosophized. “Not when you’re receiving threats that upset your life and turn it upside down. You want me to be patient while these outlaws plan something bad against me or my family to soften me up?”

“Bring Señor Yanaqué a glass of water, Lituma,” Captain Silva ordered the sergeant with his usual sarcasm. “I don’t want you to have a fainting fit, because then we’ll be accused of violating the human rights of a respectable Piuran businessman.”

This cop wasn’t joking, thought Felícito. Yes, he could have a heart attack and drop dead right here on this filthy floor covered with cigarette butts. A sad death in a police station, sick with frustration because some faceless, nameless sons of bitches were toying with him, drawing spiders. He recalled his father and was moved as he evoked his hard face: the lines like knife wounds, always serious, very dark, the bristly hair and toothless mouth of his progenitor. “What should I do, Father. I know, not let them walk all over me, not give them a cent of what I’ve earned honestly. But what other advice would you give if you were alive? Spend my time waiting for the next anonymous letter? This is making me a nervous wreck, Father.” Why had he always called him Father and never Papa? Not even in these secret dialogues with him did he dare to use the informal
tú.
Like his sons with him. Tiburcio and Miguel had never used
tú
with him. But they both did with their mother.

“Do you feel better, Señor Yanaqué?”

“Yes, thank you.” He took another sip from the glass of water the sergeant had brought him and stood up.

“Let us know about any new developments right away,” the captain urged him as a way of saying goodbye. “Trust us. Your case is ours now, Señor Yanaqué.”

The officer’s words sounded sarcastic to him. He left the station profoundly depressed. For the entire walk along Calle Arequipa to his house he moved slowly, close to the buildings. He had the disagreeable sensation that someone was following him, someone who liked to think he was demolishing Felícito bit by bit, plunging him into insecurity and uncertainty, a real cocksucker so sure that sooner or later he’d defeat him. “You’re wrong, motherfucker,” he murmured.

At the house, Gertrudis was surprised he’d come home so early. She asked whether the Truckers’ Association of Piura board of directors, of which Felícito was a member, had canceled their Friday-night dinner at Club Grau. Did Gertrudis know about Mabel? How could she not know? But in these eight years she’d never given the slightest hint that she did: not one complaint, not one scene, not one innuendo, not one insinuation. How could she not have heard rumors or gossip that he had a girlfriend? Wasn’t Piura a pretty small world? Everybody knew everybody’s business, especially what they did in bed. Maybe she knew and preferred to hide it to avoid trouble and just get along. But sometimes Felícito told himself no: Given the quiet life his wife led—no relatives, only leaving the house to go to Mass or novenas or rosaries in the cathedral—it really was possible she didn’t know a thing.

“I came home early because I don’t feel very well. I think I’m getting a cold.”

“Then you didn’t eat. Do you want me to fix you something? I’ll do it, Saturnina’s gone home.”

“No, I’m not hungry. I’ll watch television for a little while and go to bed. Anything new?”

“I had a letter from my sister Armida, in Lima. It seems she’s getting married.”

“Ah, that’s nice, we’ll have to send her a present.” Felícito didn’t even know Gertrudis had a sister in the capital. First he’d heard about it. He tried to remember. Could she be that little barefoot girl, very young, who ran around El Algarrobo boardinghouse where he met his wife? No, that kid was the daughter of a truck driver named Argimiro Trelles who’d lost his wife.

Gertrudis agreed and went off to her room. Ever since Miguel and Tiburcio had left to live on their own, Felícito and his wife had separate rooms. He saw her shapeless bulk disappearing in the small dark courtyard, around which the bedrooms, dining room, living room, and kitchen were located. He’d never loved her the way you love a woman, but he felt affection for her mixed with some pity, because even though she didn’t complain, Gertrudis must be very frustrated with a husband who was so cold and unloving. It couldn’t be otherwise in a marriage that wasn’t the result of falling in love but of a drunken spree and a fuck in the dark. Or, who knows. It was a subject that, in spite of doing everything he could to forget it, came to Felícito’s mind from time to time and ruined his day. Gertrudis was the daughter of the owner of El Algarrobo, a cheap boardinghouse on Calle Ramón Castilla in the area that back then was the poorest in El Chipe, where a good number of truck drivers would stay. Felícito had gone to bed with her a couple of times, almost without realizing it, on two nights of carousing and cane liquor. He did it because he could, because she was there and was a woman, not because he wanted the girl. Nobody wanted her. Who’d want a broad who was half cross-eyed, slovenly, and always smelled of garlic and onion? As a result of one of those two fucks without love and almost without desire, Gertrudis became pregnant. That, at least, is what she and her mother told Felícito. The owner of the boardinghouse, Doña Luzmila, whom the drivers called the Boss Lady, filed a complaint against him with the police. He had to go and make a statement and acknowledge before the police chief that he’d gone to bed with a minor. He agreed to marry her because it bothered his conscience that a child of his might be born without a father and because he believed the story. Afterward, when Miguelito was born, the doubts began. Was he really his son? He never got anything out of Gertrudis, of course, and he didn’t talk about it with Adelaida or anybody else. But for all these years he’d lived with the suspicion that he wasn’t. Because he wasn’t the only one who went to bed with the Boss Lady’s daughter during those little parties they had on Saturday nights at El Algarrobo. Miguel didn’t look anything like him; the boy had white skin and light eyes. Why did Gertrudis and her mother make him the one responsible? Maybe because he was single, a decent guy, hardworking, and because the Boss Lady wanted to marry off her daughter any way she could. Maybe Miguel’s real father was some white guy who was married or had a bad reputation. From time to time the question returned and ruined his mood. He never let anyone know about it, beginning with Miguel himself. He always treated him as if he were as much his son as Tiburcio. If he sent him into the army, it was to do him a favor, because the boy was leading a dissipated life. He’d never shown any preference for the younger son who was his spitting image: a Chulucano
cholo
from head to foot, with not a trace of white in his face or body.

Gertrudis had been hardworking and self-sacrificing during the difficult years. And afterward too, when Felícito had opened Narihualá Transport and things got better. Even though they had a nice house, a servant, and dependable income, she still lived with the austerity of the years when they were poor. She never asked for money for anything personal, only food and other daily expenses. From time to time he had to insist that she buy herself shoes or a new dress. But even though she did, she always wore flip-flops and a robe that looked like a cassock. When had she become so religious? She wasn’t like that in the beginning. It seemed to him that over the years Gertrudis had turned into a piece of furniture, that she’d stopped being a living person. They spent entire days not exchanging a word except for good morning and good night. His wife had no women friends, she didn’t pay visits or receive them, she didn’t even go to see her children when they let days go by without coming to see her. Tiburcio and Miguel dropped by the house occasionally, always for birthdays and Christmas, and whenever they did she was affectionate with them, but except for these occasions, she didn’t seem to have much interest in her sons either. Once in a while Felícito suggested going to the movies, taking a walk along the seawall, or listening to the Sunday band concert on the Plaza de Armas after noon Mass. She agreed docilely, but these were excursions during which they barely said a word, and Gertrudis seemed impatient to get back to the house, to sit in her rocking chair at the edge of the small courtyard, beside the radio or the television, inevitably tuning in to religious programs. As far as Felícito could recall, he’d never had an argument or a disagreement with this woman who always yielded to his will with total submission.

He stayed in the living room for a while, listening to the news. Crimes, muggings, kidnappings, the usual. One of the news items made his hair stand on end. The announcer said that a new method for stealing cars was becoming popular with thieves in Lima. They took advantage of a red light to throw a live rat inside a car driven by a woman. Overcome by fear and revulsion, she’d let go of the wheel and bolt out of the vehicle, screaming. Then the thieves would take it, very calmly. A live rat on their skirts, how indecent! Television poisoned people with so much blood and filth. Usually, instead of the news, he’d put on a Cecilia Barraza record. But now he anxiously followed the commentary of this newscaster on
24 Horas
, who stated that crime was on the rise all over the country. “You’re telling me,” he thought.

He went to bed at about eleven, and even though he fell asleep immediately, no doubt because of the intense emotions of the day, he woke at two in the morning. He could barely close his eyes again. He was assaulted by fears, a sensation of catastrophe, and, most of all, the bitterness of feeling useless and impotent in the face of what was happening to him. When he did doze off, his head seethed with images of diseases, accidents, and misfortunes. He had a nightmare about spiders.

He got up at six. Next to his bed, watching himself in the mirror, he did qigong exercises, thinking, as usual, about his teacher, the storekeeper Lau. The posture of the tree that sways forward and back, from left to right and around, moved by the wind. With his feet planted firmly on the floor, trying to empty his mind, he swayed, looking for his center. Looking for his center. Not losing his center. Raising his arms and lowering them very slowly, a very light drizzle that fell from the sky, refreshing his body and his soul, calming his nerves and his muscles. Keeping the sky and the earth in their place and not allowing them to join, with his arms—one raised, stopping the sky, the other lowered, holding down the earth—and then, massaging his arms, his face, his kidneys, his legs to get rid of the tensions stagnating everywhere in his body. Parting the waters with his hands and bringing them together again. Warming the lumbar region with gentle, slow massage. Opening his arms the way a butterfly spreads its wings. At first the extraordinary slowness of the movements, the slow-motion breathing that was meant to keep the air passing to every corner of the organism, made him impatient, but over the years he’d grown accustomed to it. Now he understood that in this slowness lay the benefit brought to his body and spirit by the delicate, deep inhalation and exhalation, the movements with which, by raising one hand and extending the other against the ground, his knees slightly bent, he kept the stars in place in the firmament and averted the apocalypse. When, at the end, he closed his eyes and remained motionless for a few minutes, his hands clasped as if in prayer, half an hour had gone by. Now the clear, white light of a Piuran dawn was coming through the windows.