When I Was Mortal (15 page)

The inspector showed me the photos which I merely glanced at. Apart from those showing the whole scene, there were a couple of close-ups of each corpse, what in the cinema is known as a close-medium shot. The woman’s breasts were definitively soft, shapely and provocative, but nonetheless soft, sight and touch become fused in the end, we men sometimes look at something as if we were touching it, and this can sometimes cause offence. Despite the screwed-up eyes and the look of pain you could see that she was pretty, although you can never be sure with a naked woman, you have to see her dressed as well, beaches are of little use in that respect. Her nostrils were flared, she had a small round chin and a long neck. I glanced only quickly at the six or seven photos, but I nevertheless asked Gómez Alday if I could have a copy of the close-up of the woman; he gave me a surprised, distrustful look, as if he had uncovered some abnormality in me.

“Why do you want it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, lost. And I really didn’t, it wasn’t that I wanted to study it any further just then, a blood-stained body, a wound, the thick eyelashes, the pained expression, the soft, dead breasts, it was hardly a pleasant sight. But I thought I would like to have it perhaps in order to look at it later, in a few years’ time, after all, apart from the murderer, she was the last person to have seen Dorta alive. And she had seen him at very close quarters. “It interests me.” It was a feeble, not to say, grotesque argument.

Gómez Alday gave me one of his scorching looks, it didn’t last long, his eyes immediately resumed their usual sleepy appearance. I thought he must be thinking that I was a man with macabre tastes, sick in the head, but perhaps he understood both my request and the desire, we did, after all, share the same kind of pride. He got up and said:

“This is confidential material, it would be completely against the rules for me to let you have a copy.” And as he was saying this, he placed the photo in the photocopier in his office. “But you might well have made a photocopy here in my absence, without my knowing, when I left the room for a moment.” And he held out the sheet of paper with the blurred, imperfect reproduction, but a reproduction nonetheless. It would only last a few years, photocopies always fade, you forget how pale they become.

Now two of those years have passed, and only in the months immediately after Dorta’s death did I continue thinking about that night, my sense of horror lasted rather longer than the delight and malice of the impatient press and forgetful television, there’s not much you can do when there’s no help, no new leads, and the media don’t even serve as a reminder. It wasn’t that I needed it personally, very few things fade in me: there isn’t a day when I don’t remember my childhood friend, there isn’t a day when, at some moment, for some reason, I don’t stop to think about him, you don’t cease depending on people for the accidental fact that you can’t see them any more. Sometimes I think that the fact is not only accidental, but insignificant, habit and the accumulated past are enough for the sense of their presence to prevail and thus never disappear, how could you not miss all of that. But it does eventually fade if you don’t get to the bottom of things, worse, it can colour what went before. You know about the ending, but it’s no longer in the foreground. It wasn’t like that in the first months, when nightmares overwhelm
sleep and the days all begin with the same insistent image, which seems like something imagined and nevertheless belongs to what actually happened, you realize it as you’re cleaning your teeth, while you’re shaving: “God, I’m an idiot, it really did happen.” I went over and over the conversation at our last supper together, and after a period spent endowing everything with significance, the razor edge of repetition made me see that nothing was significant. Dorta liked pretending to be an eccentric, but he did not believe in magic of any kind nor in any beyond-the-grave experiences, not even in chance, no more than I do, and I hardly believe in anything. I soon concluded, if indeed I had ever doubted it, that the story of the auction in London was purely anecdotal, the sort of thing that he liked to invent or do simply in order to tell people about it afterwards, me or others, the ignorant young men he idolized or his society ladies, knowing that they would be amused. The fact that he had bid for a magic ring belonging to that crazy demonologist Crowley proved it: it was so much more colourful to recount his struggle for that particular object than for an autographed letter belonging to Wilde or Dickens or Conan Doyle. A zebra. And yet he didn’t succeed in buying it, it would have been even more absurd if the joke had cost him an unexpectedly large sum of money. Perhaps the Germanic gentleman in the cowboy boots never even existed, pure imagination. And even if he had made off with the emerald: there was no question of dreaming up persecutions or sects, or Tutankhamen-type revenges or Fu Manchu-type plots, everything has its limits, even the inexplicable.

A couple of months later – by then, the press were no longer interested and it was doubtful that the police would do anything more – a possibility occurred to me that was so obvious I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it before. I phoned Gómez Alday and told him I wanted to see him. He sounded bored and
tried to get me to tell him about my discovery over the phone, he was very pushed for time. I insisted and he arranged to see me in his office the following morning, ten minutes, he warned me, that was all the time he could spare for some hypothesis that would only further complicate his life. He also warned me that, whatever it was, he would treat it with scepticism, it all seemed perfectly clear to him, it simply wasn’t that easy to find the spear-thrower: there were a lot of fingerprints on the spear, doubtless mine as well, almost everyone who visited Dorta’s house had touched it or picked it up or brandished it for a moment when they saw it protruding from the umbrella stand in the hall. The inspector was sporting a healthy tan and more hair, I wasn’t sure whether he had taken advantage of the August break to have an implant or if it was just a more bouffant, artistic arrangement of his normal Roman coiffure. While I talked to him, his eyes remained opaque, like a sleeping animal whose pupils can be seen through its eyelids.

“Look, I don’t know much about what my friend got up to, he told me things sometimes, but never went into detail. But I can’t discount the possibility that he might have paid some of these boys he went with. Apparently some of them often pretended to be heterosexual, they would accept his offer just this once, or so they said, they took pains to make it absolutely clear that normally they only went with women. That night my friend might have taken a fancy to someone like that, and the guy might have said to him that either he got him a woman as well or there was nothing doing. I can just imagine my friend shoving the boy into a taxi and patiently trawling the Castellana. I think it might even have amused him, asking the boy what he thought of that one or this one, giving his own views as if they were two bosom buddies out on the town, a couple of cock-hounds on a Saturday night. Finally, they pick up the Cuban woman and the three of them go back to his place. The boy insists that Dorta screws her so that he
can watch, or something like that. My friend’s appetites are not unlimited, given his inclinations, but he lies back and lets the woman get on with it, just to please the boy and to get what he wants later on. The bloke gets hysterical when it’s his turn to perform, he gets violent, he grabs the spear, which had taken his fancy when he first came into the apartment, or perhaps they’d already brought it into the bedroom, at Dorta’s own suggestion, so that the boy could pose with it like a statue, Dorta liked playing games like that. And then the boy kills both of them, because he’s feeling trapped, even though he’d agreed to the whole thing. It must happen all the time, mustn’t it, people suddenly getting cold feet? They lose their nerve when they see that there’s no turning back. You must know of such cases. I’ve given it a lot of thought and it seems perfectly possible to me, it would explain a lot of things which otherwise just don’t fit.”

Gómez Alday’s eyes remained misty and lazy, but he spoke in a tone of irritation and scorn:

“A fine friend you are. What have you got against him, all you seem to do is to shovel more and more shit onto his corpse, honestly, the stories you dream up, you’re sick in the head you are,” he said. It wasn’t that I knew a lot about these matters, but the inspector had never heard of these perfectly run-of-the-mill nocturnal deals and practices. The demands that were made. His masculine pride must be of a purer sort than mine, I thought. “But it isn’t even any use to me as elaborate shit, you lack a certain piece of information that came to light a few days ago. Your friend did not, in fact, arrive home alone in a taxi, he was with the whore, and the two of them were already making a spectacle of themselves, according to the taxi driver, the woman had her tits out and your friend was egging her on. He came and told us this when he read about the murder and saw Dorta’s photo in the newspaper. So the spear-thrower must have arrived later on:
the pimp in pursuit of the whore or the wife, unless they were both, husband and pimp, wife and whore. Like I said before.”

“He might have been in the apartment already,” I said, stung by the unfairness of the reprimand. “When they failed to get it on, the guy probably forced my friend to go out hunting alone and bring him back a woman.”

“Oh yes, and I suppose your friend would have gone out to trawl the streets, leaving the guy alone in the apartment?”

I thought about that. Dorta was fearful and cautious. He might go a bit crazy one night, but not to the point of allowing some rent-boy to rip him off while he went in search of a woman.

“I suppose not,” I replied, exasperated. “I don’t know, perhaps he phoned the rent-boy and had him come over later, the small ads section in the newspapers is full of all kinds of different services at any time of day or night.”

Gómez Alday gave me another of his fulminating looks, but this time it was more out of impatience than anything else.

“So what was the woman there for, tell me that? Why would he have taken her home with him, eh? Why do you insist on trying to put all the blame on a queer. What have you got against them?”

“I’ve never had anything against them. My best friend was what you’ve just said, I mean he often got called that. If you don’t believe me, ask someone else, ask other writers, they’ll tell you, they love a good gossip. Ask in the gay dives, to use your term. I spent my whole life defending him.”

“I find it hard to believe that you were his friend at all. Besides, I’ve already told you that I’m only interested in his last night, not in any other night. That’s the only thing that concerns me. Now, come on, get out of here.”

I went over to the door. I already had my hand on the door handle when I turned round and said:

“Who found the bodies? They found them at night didn’t
they, the following night? Who went up to the apartment? Why did anyone go up?”

“We did,” said Gómez Alday. “A man phoned, he said we’d find them there rotting like two dead animals, that’s what he said, two animals. Probably the husband got in a state thinking about his whore lying there with a great gaping wound in her and with no one knowing anything about it. He probably came over all sentimental again. He hung up immediately after giving us the address, he wasn’t much use.” The inspector spun his chair round and turned his back to me as if, with that response, he was bringing any dealings with me to a close. I saw the broad nape of his neck as he said again: “Get out.”

I stopped thinking about it, I assumed that the police would never clear the matter up. I stopped thinking about it for two years, until now, until one night when I’d arranged to have supper with another friend, Ruibérriz de Torres, not such an old friend as Dorta and very different, he always goes with women and they treat him well and he’s not in the least bit timid, still less resigned. He’s a complete scoundrel and I get on very well with him, although I know that one day he will make me the object of the same disloyalty with which he treats everyone, and that will be an end of our comradeship. He knows everything that’s happening in Madrid, he goes everywhere, he knows or can arrange to get to know anyone you care to mention, he’s a man of great resourcefulness, his only problem is that his criminal tendencies and his fraudulent desires are written all over his face.

We were having supper in La Ancha, on the summer terrace, sitting opposite each other, his head and body blocking my view of the table behind, a table I had no reason to be interested in until the woman sitting in the place occupied by Ruibérriz, that is, in the seat opposite mine, bent to the side to recover her napkin, snatched up by a sudden slight breeze. She leaned to
her left looking straight ahead, as we do when we pick up something that is within our reach and when we know exactly where it has fallen. Nevertheless, she tried and failed and that was why she had to feel for some seconds with her fingers, all the time looking straight at us, I mean straight at where we were, because I don’t think she was actually looking at anything. It was a matter of seconds – one, two, three and four; or five – long enough for me to see her face and her long neck tensed in that minimal effort of search and recovery – her tongue in one corner of her mouth – a very long neck, perhaps made longer by the effect of her low-cut summer dress, a small, round chin and flared nostrils, thick eyelashes and thin eyebrows as if they had been pencilled in, a full mouth and high cheekbones, and dark skin, whether naturally so or from the swimming pool or the beach it was difficult to say at first glance, although my first glance at someone may sometimes be like a caress, at others more like a glancing blow. Her hair was black and coiffed and curly, I saw a necklace or a chain, I noticed the rectangular neckline, a dress with shoulder straps, white like the dress, and heard the clink of bracelets. I barely noticed her eyes, or perhaps I just ignored them because I was used to not seeing them in the photograph, in which they were screwed up, tight closed in that grimace of pain, of someone who has died from a terrible wound. It’s true that, in summer, women look more alike than in winter and in spring, and still more to Europeans if they are or appear to be American, they all look the same to us, it happens a lot in summer, on certain nights we can’t tell them apart. But she really did look like her. I know that’s saying a lot, the resemblance between a flesh-and-blood woman in motion and a mere photocopy from the police station, between brilliant colours and murky black and white, between laughter and paralysis, between gleaming white teeth and some decayed molars that were never even seen,
only described, between a fully-clothed woman with no apparent money problems and an indigent, naked one, between a living woman and a dead one, between a low-cut summer dress and a wound in the chest, between a talkative tongue and the eternal silence of cracked lips, between open, smiling eyes and closed eyes. Yet she did look like her, so much so that I couldn’t take my eyes off her, I immediately shifted my chair to one side, to my right, and since, even like that, I could still only half-see her and then only intermittently – concealed by Ruibérriz and by her companion, both of whom kept moving – I simply changed places altogether on the pretext that the breeze was bothering me, and I went to sit – having moved my dessert plate as well as spoon, fork and glasses – to the left of my friend, in order to enjoy an unobstructed view and I then quite openly stared. Ruibérriz realized at once that something was going on, he doesn’t miss much, so I said to him, knowing that he would prove understanding about such an access of interest: