The Manual of Darkness (33 page)

‘Víctar,’ she says, trying to pronounce the name properly. ‘Víctar.’ She fails again.

She does not know what to think of this man, but she feels that
she can trust him. She dismisses curiosity, it is a bad investment. She isn’t being paid to ask questions. Or perhaps she is, she doesn’t know yet. Time to act, she thinks. Too much talking. But it is he who acts. His arms, like his voice, are warm and powerful. With no apparent effort, Víctor turns her on her side and hugs her from behind. Then he is still. They lie like this for some minutes, like two spoons forgotten at the back of a drawer. He buries his face in her neck, his nose in her hair. Now he really is smelling her. Maybe that’s all there is to it, thinks Irina. Maybe nothing is going to happen. She’s heard of punters who only want someone to hold while they sleep, a hug, or a chat. She wouldn’t mind.

This is clearly not the case with him, though. Irina quickly feels this between her legs, or more accurately between her buttocks, because it is here that Víctor slowly presses his erection, playful at first, almost tender, but then insistent, brusque. She should have expected it: no one asks for someone to come round at seven o’clock to take a nap. It’s better this way. Whatever is going to happen, let it happen quickly. Víctor slides one hand across her hip. Covers her belly with his other hand. He enters her. Irina cannot see his face. She slips a hand down between her legs and finds that Víctor has put on a condom, though she does not know how or when. She has only a moment to think about how strange this man’s hands are, the mysteriousness of his gestures. Well, she too has her tricks. She cups his testicles with her hand, not clutching, not even stroking them, simply lifting them slightly. A lot of men like this, but that is not why she is doing it. She does it so they come quickly. But it is not going to be so easy. Víctor moves her hand away and, for the first time since he penetrated her, he speaks:

‘No.’

This is all he says, speaking in a low voice but so close to Irina’s ear that she begins to realise how together they are, and though she tries to perform another trick to bring him off quickly, moving her pelvis in long, slow, distinct thrusts, he places his left hand firmly on her hip to stop her. His right hand under her body is folded back against her breasts, though he barely touches them, as though he wants only to cover them lest someone should see. Irina knows she is literally in his hands, that nothing that happens
from this point forward will be determined by her. Víctor moves his lips along her spine; from time to time he holds a piece of skin between his teeth, although he does not bite; it is as though he is keeping time, following the same rhythm she can feel in the steady pulse of his penis. It’s only blood, thinks Irina, blood pulsing to the beat of his heart. Yet it beats with the cold, clinical precision of a metronome. Almost without realising it, Irina makes the mistake of echoing this pulse in the muscles of her vagina, the way an audience’s feet sometimes tap to the rhythm of an orchestra. Other men have tried to bring her to orgasm, generally thrusting into her brutally as though this role reversal were the mark of a real man: the ability to make a whore come. This, Irina thinks, is not why she is here. It is important to know where she is and why.

She decides that she has had enough and fakes an orgasm. Or rather, she starts to fake it. Without overacting, without crying out, without pretending to shudder. She breathes heavily and purrs. Another mistake. Without moving his arm, Víctor pivots his hip, turns his body slightly and both of them are now lying on their backs: her on top, him below. Him inside her.

A lot of men have struggled to impress her with all sorts of gymnastic, sometimes impossible, positions which they’ve dreamt of or read about in a book. Nothing as simple as this, which Irina finds comical, naive, a little clumsy. Here they both are, staring at the ceiling. And this guy is so thin that if she moves, she might crush him. She quickly realises there is a reason for the move: it allows his hands greater freedom. With the fingers of his right hand he grasps her nipple. He does not rub it or press it or pinch it: he simply holds it firmly between his fingertips, perhaps pulls at it gently. With the fourth finger of his left hand he finds her clitoris.

Now it is Irina who says no. Or wants to say it. She thinks it three times, four, and bites her lip. Víctor moves inside her slowly. In and out. Irina tries to avoid it, clamps her vagina around his finger, trying to suck him in, to stop him, she wants him to stop, she clenches her thighs too, and her teeth. She is not going to let herself go, she doesn’t want to go. She thinks about Darius. It is a way of bringing herself back to reality. She plants her feet firmly on the bed, tenses her back, jerks her hips and manages to break
free of Víctor’s embrace; then she straddles him, her back to him and rides him hard and fast. She wants him to come. She needs him to come. She wants him to feel his heart heave into his mouth. They call it professional ethics: nothing to do with desire. After all, he has paid already, and given her a tip. Up and down, up and down. Like a frog, like a crazed kangaroo, she bucks and bucks on him, cursing his staying power until a pulsing jet from his glans tells her she has achieved her aim. She stops abruptly, still pressed against Víctor, surprised by the heat of the cum she feels inundating her in spite of the condom.

With a gentle movement, Víctor pulls out of her and, with a quick flick of his fingers, peels off the condom. Irina begins to understand. Or perhaps she does not understand, but she senses: from Víctor’s movements, his deftness, the things this man does with his hands. A magician’s hands. Still lying on his back, his voice somewhat drowsy, Víctor says goodbye.

‘Thanks, Irina. I’ll call you again. Your money is in the hall.’

‘No. You are paying me already.’ She is flustered, angry that she cannot conjugate verbs in this language she can barely pronounce. ‘You have paid me already,’ she corrects herself in a murmur.

‘No,’ Víctor says. ‘It’s on the dresser in the hall. You know the word “dresser”? In the hall.’

From the bedroom door, Irina manages to make out the rumpled bed, the damp stains on the sheets, the man half asleep. There is something familiar about the image, something domestic which unsettles her. She goes into the living room, dresses and puts on her shoes. She thinks about what she will make for dinner. Chicken. Grilled chicken for Darius, grilled chicken for Irina and then bed. She is exhausted and a little sore. She opens her purse and takes out the three banknotes. But they are not banknotes, they are blank pieces of paper. It’s not possible. She saw them with her own eyes, she could swear she counted them. A magician’s hands, she thinks again. On top of the dresser she finds €300 in fifty-euro notes, held together by the pen clip shaped like an arrow. The pen looks old, though not necessarily valuable. She holds the money in one hand and, with the other, she clicks the top. Several times. Click, click, click. She puts back one note and keeps the others, still staring at the Parker pen. She has never stolen anything in her
life. She’s not a thief, she’s a whore. And she doesn’t need it.

‘Not the pen,’ Víctor’s voice warns, just in case. ‘It belonged to my father.’

Irina suddenly feels an urgent need to be out of there. To be free of the shadowy scrutiny of this voice. She sets down the pen, turns and goes. The first thing she does as she leaves is hit the light switch on the landing, as though turning it on were some small act of revenge for she knows not what.

V
íctor wakes with a start, a powerful prickling in his right arm. He has heard somewhere that this is the first sign of a heart attack. Or is that the left arm? He sits up, puts his feet on the floor. It is an intense feeling running all the way from his elbow to his fingers, but it is only superficial. And it seems to be contagious, because when he brings his other hand up to scratch the itch, he feels a tingling all along his left arm. He cannot work out what it is, this prickling that is making his skin crawl; then he realises that it is literally crawling, an army of ants is marching across the sheets and up his arm, blindly drawn by the fructose in his semen, scavenging for dried specks on his fingers. He gets to his feet and stands there for a moment or two until he notices the same pins and needles in his right leg. First on his toes, his instep, around his ankle, then up his shin, as though an assault brigade is marching across his body to rescue the companions trapped on his arm.

He imagines how the feat began, the first ant, lost or perhaps curious, had discovered the source of food in the middle of the night, or perhaps at dawn, he doesn’t know, cannot tell how long the banquet has been going on. The first ant, rather than eating its fill, rushed back to the ant farm, conveying the news of its discovery to another, who passed it on to another and another, until hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ants became aware of the location and the biochemical composition of the spilled liquid. He imagines the hysteria that ensued in Martín Losa’s ant farm, the subterranean excitement unleashed, the collective voice announcing the presence of massive quantities of protein, amino acids, chlorides, phosphorus, lactic, citric and ascorbic acids, carbon dioxide,
acid phosphatase, hyaluronidase, phosphorylcholine, prostaglandin and fibrinolysin.

Each of these ants carries a message in its antennae for Víctor. They are telling him who he is. Not just his semen, his whole being, every firing of his confused neurons. The one and only specific combination of chemical elements that make him who he is rather than anyone else, even if he wouldn’t recognise himself. It is written. His likeness is written on the sheets, across the floor, a moving trail blacker than any ink running from the bed to the formicarium, coming and going, a living, shifting, indecipherable calligraphy.

Now he begins to walk and he laughs, realising that he has never walked with such self-assurance, even when he could see, perhaps because his feet no long claim to take him anywhere, they are simply walking, or more accurately pacing, crushing this army, annihilating it with a precision a sighted person might envy. He moves like a tightrope walker, leaving almost no space between his steps, and not because he is afraid of falling, but because he is determined to give no quarter in this carnage. He places his foot on the floor and, exerting no pressure, waits until he can feel the ants tickling, then puts all his weight on his foot and turns, then takes another short step, until finally he reaches the ant farm; he knows that he has reached it from the swarming chaos. He lifts his knee, climbs over the glass on to the soil and tramples it furiously until he is exhausted.

He thinks about Martín Losa. He thinks about the irony: his father had never been able to show him the queen. But right now several drones are probably busy moving her, only he cannot see it. Obviously things are not the same now. Generations have passed by, secret, silent, blind, mute, capable of surviving on what scant minerals they can get from rainwater, plus the meagre crumbs that have fallen on the surface of the ant farm from time to time. If this were Saturday morning, if you were still a child stubbornly pressing your ear to the glass, you would hear a faint buzzing, a perfect example of collective stridulation, a dance in the darkness, the glandular secretions with which they congratulate each other for having survived, for never giving up on the hope that some day, if only through carelessness, someone would once more leave food
within reach. Go on stamping, but don’t forget that it is pointless. At the very moment you began this carnage, nature devoted itself to life; for every stamp it lays an egg where it cannot be reached.

Naked, he tramples the soil for more than fifteen minutes without for a moment feeling disgust or grief or rage, his mind possessed by a single idea. This is who I am, he is thinking. This is me, my feet carried me here, this is what I am doing. Trampling ants. I am a blind man who tramples ants.

The commotion beneath his feet begins to subside and Víctor stops for a moment. Alicia is coming. Was her name Alicia? They agreed on 9 a.m. He has no idea what time it is. It must be early, the sun does not feel very hot. He walks to the bathroom, turns on the radio and stands there, holding it, until the presenter announces it is twenty past seven. He gets into the shower. He scrubs himself with a sponge as though trying to wash away all the darkness that has built up on his skin over the past year. He rubs his feet gently. He sniffs himself. He can smell no trace of Irina. Irina smelled clean. He soaps and rinses himself three times. When he gets out, he tries to shave. The last time he tried, several months ago now, he cut himself so often that he decided not to try again. His beard is long, thick and unkempt and the blade is old. He is ripping out hair rather than shaving it off; after the fifth stroke, he gives up. The radio announces there is a little more than half an hour left before Alicia arrives and he still needs to get dressed. Maybe he should wear shoes today, but he has no idea where his shoes might be.

A
month ago, when they assigned her the case, Alicia cut out a photograph of Víctor Losa and stuck it on her fridge. The image is so familiar to her now that she can recreate it with her eyes closed. Ears slightly lopsided, though that might just be the photo. Large, white, even teeth. It’s hardly surprising that he opens his mouth wide when he smiles. A dimple in the left cheek. Perfectly clean shaven. She imagined Víctor puffing out his cheeks as he shaved so as not to miss a single hair. If they were friends, she would smooth his unruly eyebrows with her finger. If she had to choose a place to kiss him, she would choose his cheekbones. Or take his face in her hands and kiss his forehead. What a shame, she would say, what a shame. So handsome. And the finest magician in the world. What a fuck-up, Víctor Losa.