72

ADRIANA

Saturday, November 3, 2012

T he police inspector knocked on the door to Iago’s office.

“Come in,” said Iago, walking over to the door and opening it for him.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were busy. If you prefer, I can wait outside,” he said prudently, catching sight of me.

“Don’t worry, she’s my wife. She was present at the time of the accident, and she’s already made a statement. You can speak freely. She’s fully informed about everything.”

“I understand,” replied the policeman, smoothing down the few hairs that were attempting to cover his baldness, in response to my presence. He seemed far too affable to be dedicating himself to such unpleasant matters. His chubby figure and the more-than-incipient belly visible under the tight white shirt of a white-collar worker reminded me of the monks on German beer labels.

“I see you’re making a satisfactory recovery from your fall,” he commented.

“I wish! I’m still feeling pain in organs I didn’t even know I had,” said Iago, pretending to move with difficulty. “Luckily, the tranquilizers they prescribed are very effective.”

“I’m pleased for you. So, what I came to tell you is that we’re going to wrap up the search for your brother’s body for today. The divers have poor visibility at this time of the day, so they’ve already pulled out. It’s been forty-eight hours since the accident, so the body ought to have emerged by now. We’ll come back tomorrow and continue. We’ll leave the area cordoned off. I realize it’s a nuisance for your staff to have to do without their parking space—”

“Don’t worry,” Iago interrupted him. “You carry on with your work. Do what you have to do.”

Iago made an effort to smile at the inspector. Anyone who didn’t know him well would think he was coping with the events of the Day of the Dead. He walked, he talked, and he moved like Iago del Castillo, but I knew it wasn’t him. He’d been replaced by an automaton, someone tough on the outside and empty on the inside. Iago used to say that longevos didn’t age, but it wasn’t true. I saw it happen: I saw how a few hours had added years. He seemed older than when I had met him. New wrinkles, fine and not very pronounced, but which hardened his expression, appeared on his face and never disappeared.

“There’s something else,” said the inspector, sitting down after waiting for an invitation to do so, which never arrived. “The crane has hauled up what’s left of your brother’s car. What should we do with it?”

“Send it to the scrapyard.”

“I thought the family might prefer to keep it for sentimental reasons. According to the technicians, it’s a fairly old vehicle, a unique machine. What I mean is, they could reconstruct it—”

“We’re not interested,” Iago cut in sharply. “If it’s not a problem, I’d be grateful if your men hauled it to the first scrapyard they can think of. If it’s not usual procedure, I’ll take care of it myself.”

“I’ll give the order right away. Don’t concern yourself about it,” the inspector replied with a deep sigh as he headed for the door. When he got there, he turned slowly to make his farewell. “The divers will be back first thing tomorrow morning.”

Iago waited a few minutes, listening until the sound of the solid policeman’s feet going down the stairs had disappeared.

“Let’s go,” he said, offering me his hand.

“Where might we be going?” I wanted to know.

“To the rock ledge. I want to see for myself how the rescue efforts are going.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” I asked, feeling a small shiver at the mere thought of returning to the place where Kyra had died just two days earlier.

“Listen, Dana, I know it will be hard, but the sooner we go back there, the better. That place is unique for us, and I want it to go on being unique despite what happened there. I don’t want us to be traumatized by it. Anyway, the more hours go by, the more worried I am that Nagorno’s damn body hasn’t appeared.”

“You think he survived?” I knew that, everything else aside, that was his greatest fear, but I wanted him to tell me himself.

“I don’t know. Any normal person would have died from the impact with the water, but Nagorno isn’t any normal person—far from it. But even if he had survived the collision, he would have had to swim to shore and climb the rock to get away, and none of us saw anyone, nor did the ambulance officers or the police when they arrived.”

“Iago, I’m sorry to behave like a mother, but you ought to be in hospital or in bed resting and recovering from your beating.”

The automaton clenched his jaw and kept walking, with barely a look in my direction. “Don’t do it; don’t act like a mother. I’m never going to listen to you when it comes to this sort of issue. I’ve spent the greater part of my life making my way through epochs where a person who was badly wounded kept on walking without resting.”

“Civilization brings with it privileges such as this one; don’t reject them. They’re called advances in the quality of life. You should try them for once.”

“As I’ve already told you, you should stop insisting,” he said, giving me a mechanical kiss and taking my hand. “In any case, you can keep trying for as long as you like, but you’ll get tired of it eventually. Let’s go.”

I followed him reluctantly. Of all of his arguments, the only one that convinced me was the one about not letting our rock ledge stop being a special place for us both.

When we had skirted the building and reached the parking lot, the police vans had already gone, but the police had cordoned off the area with yellow tape to dissuade onlookers from coming too close. I slipped under the tape, while Iago jumped over it. I thought about how much that movement would have hurt, but his face showed no sign of discomfort. We arrived at the lavender bush, which had been squashed and destroyed, because that was the spot where the two vehicles had gone over the edge.

“I don’t know what it is that Nagorno has against my plants,” I thought I heard Iago whisper.

“We’ll plant another one, don’t worry.”

“Absolutely.”

I took off my shoes, and we climbed down. The terrain hadn’t really changed that much. The rock we were climbing down showed traces of the impact of Iago’s car. But the tide had carried away the remains of the broken headlights and Kyra’s blood. Fortunately, nothing remained of the bloodstain I remembered. That was a relief.

“Iago, as far as what Jairo told me about what he did to you in Scythia—”

“I prefer not to talk about that. Maybe you’re giving it more importance than it had,” he said, staring out at the horizon.

“But your father never found out?”

“My father must never know,” he said sharply.

“Why?”

“Because that’s what I decided from the first night it happened.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Your questions exhaust me. I’m just trying to keep going.”

“Yes, but—”

“You have to keep going, Adriana!” he shouted, without looking at me once. “You have to keep going. Just let it go, and let’s keep going.”

But I ignored him. “No, Iago. I’m not going to let it go. If you want me to consider myself your wife, I need to hear what Nagorno did to you; I need to understand your relationship once and for all. It’s an important part of who you are. I don’t want you to hide it from me. It’s the same as me not telling you about the trauma of my mother’s death. You wouldn’t have known me completely; we’d be together, but I’d be keeping a large part of me hidden from you. Just once, Iago; tell me just once, and then we won’t talk about again.”

He closed his eyes and bit his lip. Even I will never know the enormous effort it cost him that day when he told me. He told me slowly and in great detail both what I wanted to hear and what I would never have wanted to hear, because those images have never left me. He gave me a cold, almost clinical description of what those beasts did to him for years, on the orders of his brother. I was on the point of vomiting several times, but I restrained myself. However, I had the sour aftertaste in my mouth all day.

I now think Iago would never have told me if it weren’t for the fact that, after the events of the Day of the Dead, all of us—the three of us who survived—were in a different state of consciousness those first few days. We weren’t dead, but we weren’t totally alive either. After he’d finished telling me, a dense silence followed, and the silent tears of a man with a broken spirit, and perhaps the sound of the waves hitting the rocks; I don’t know, I don’t remember.

We were about to go when we saw him.

First, something shapeless emerging, burgundy in color. It was the suit Jairo del Castillo had been wearing on the Day of the Dead—and a cycle that began the day of the Cantabrian Peoples exhibition was finally ending. Then, a few yards from us, rocked by the waves, Jairo’s entire body rose to the surface, forming a cross, with the face down in the water as if he were looking at the bottom of the sea. His body looked like a macabre X on a map marking a pirate’s buried treasure. Iago dove into the water headfirst and brought him back to the edge of the rock in four strokes. I held back my revulsion as I pulled on the wet sleeve of the velvet jacket to help him drag the body ashore. The skin, which had acquired a dark bluish-green color, was swollen and taut, distorting his features to the point where the head looked more like a ball than the human face it had once been. Even so, I recognized the black hair, which for once was floating freely, like a handful of seaweed, instead of being combed back, as it normally was.

Iago, soaking wet and exhausted, asked me for my phone and called the inspector, who arrived twenty minutes later and glared at us as if we’d committed an offense. Then I remembered that we had in fact committed at least one when we crossed the police cordon. But neither Iago nor I was the least bit concerned by a reproachful look.

The “immortal” Nagorno had died. Reality had changed again, another tower of beliefs had crumbled, and we were going to need some time to come to terms with this new present free of him.