Eduardo and Olga’s on-again-off-again friendship meant that it had all the quirks to be expected from such an unlikely relationship. They might argue, go weeks without seeing each other, and suddenly one day, one of them—normally Olga—would pick up the phone and call the other as if nothing had happened. The strange thing about this time was the place she’d asked him to meet her: inside a church, the Iglesia de San Sebastián.
Eduardo dropped onto a pew in the last row, from which he could see the altar lit by a candelabra full of votive candles all burning at different heights. An altar boy prepared the Book of the Gospels on the lectern, opened a silver tabernacle lying at the feet of a painted plaster Jesus, and placed the chalice and Eucharist on the altar. Mass would begin in a few minutes and Eduardo didn’t want to be there. His knee hurt like hell, but that was nothing compared to the pain of his anticlerical genes.
It didn’t take long for Olga to appear, making her way down a dark side-passage, the sound of her heels ringing out on the sacred stone floor. When she sat down next to Eduardo, the candlelight illuminated her face.
“What are we doing here?” Eduardo asked her.
Olga’s head was covered with a lovely, natural silk headscarf. No one covered their heads when they entered church anymore, but Eduardo found that it gave her face a beautiful symmetry.
“I come from time to time. It helps me think and be at peace with myself. Some people get that feeling on top of a mountain, or by the sea, or in cemeteries. To me, this is the place to clear my thoughts,” she replied, settling beside him on the pew. It was odd to see the way she pressed her knees modestly together, tugging down the hem of her skirt. Eduardo looked at her, perplexed.
“I’d never have pictured you in a place like this.”
Olga gave him an understanding smile.
“Madrid is full of people lost at sea, don’t you think? The waves of its invisible ocean hurl hundreds of desperate souls to its shores every day; they’re everywhere. This is like Noah’s ark to me. Besides, we all have something we need to be forgiven for, and here, that’s possible.”
Eduardo glanced at the pews. They were nearly empty, just a few people scattered here and there, almost all well over sixty. Maybe there really were thousands of souls out there lost at sea, but most of them were finding other rafts to cling to. Meanwhile, up at the altar a little drama was unfolding: the altar boy was shuffling from one side to the other with the as-yet unconsecrated wine in a sort of carafe, trying to make room so he wouldn’t collide with the priest, who was smoothing the white linen atop the altar, but instead he stumbled. Eduardo saw the whole thing happen in slow motion—the boy’s look of horror, the carafe falling to the floor, shattering, the wine splattering all over the altar. It lasted only a few seconds and almost no one even realized that it had happened, but Eduardo could read the priest’s lips and it looked to him as though the man had cursed the boy in Aramaic. Eduardo felt sorry for the boy, awkwardly endeavoring to clean up the shards of glass as quickly as he could.
He glanced at Olga with a look somewhere between alarm and resignation.
“I suppose I owe you an apology.”
“What for?”
“My stupid, cantankerous comment the other day—about you not being able to have kids. I was being a jerk. I know it’s a touchy subject for you.”
Olga nodded openly. She inhaled and gave him a wide grin.
“How’s the portrait going?”
This change of subject implied forgiveness, and Eduardo accepted it.
“I found the hotel where Arthur is staying, and I’ve jotted down a few things from a distance. Today, I’m going to try to get closer, make a sketch. I’ll keep you up to date.”
Olga kept quiet for a few seconds, trying to confirm the vague feeling she had that everything was changing between them because of that damned portrait.
“Honestly, I regret having gotten you involved in this. I suppose if I asked you to forget about it, you wouldn’t listen, would you?”
Eduardo regarded her with open curiosity. What was the matter with her? She was the one acting like a different person. In a way, he liked the change, it laid bare something clean, something authentic, but at the same time he wasn’t sure that that particular kind of purity was a good thing. He’d seen the same sort of poise and apparent serenity in people whose insides were being eaten away by worms.
“Why do you keep going back to that?”
Olga opened her handbag and placed a padded envelope on the bench between them.
“I have a friend in the police who told me a few things about Arthur.”
“Since when do you have friends on the police force? I thought you hated cops.”
“I hate cauliflower, too, but I eat it from time to time. The guy you’re planning to paint is not your average man. In fact, Arthur Fernández is a rather shady figure. He’s amassed one of the greatest fortunes in Europe, and everybody knows he’s a speculator, a man involved in high finance and the stock market. But how he managed to create that empire is still rather murky. They say he started out in drug trafficking, human trafficking, anything that sounds illegal. He was involved in several court cases but they’ve never been able to prove his involvement in the crimes beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Eduardo had opened the envelope. In it, he found photocopied dossiers, documents about the man’s companies, photos of Arthur in the company of some unsavory-looking characters apparently involved in high crime. He didn’t even recognize their names.
“If they couldn’t find any proof against him, that means he’s innocent in the eyes of the law.”
“Innocence often depends too much on the lawyer’s fees, and he’s got the best. Did you know he was forced to flee from France when he was young? It seems he had a promising future as a poet and even published a well-received collection of poems. But one day, out of the blue, he beat up his mentor at the university—almost killed him, in fact—and then he disappeared, only to re-emerge as the successful impresario he is today. It’s an incredibly strange trajectory, don’t you think? Still, that’s not what worries me most.”
Olga told him to look at the last page of the report.
“I didn’t know he had a daughter.”
“She disappeared a few months before the accident Arthur caused near Oriente that killed our client’s son. Arthur tested positive for drugs and alcohol in the police report. Although it wasn’t the first time he’d been in that kind of trouble—he’d had his license revoked several times for speeding, reckless driving and traffic safety violations—I bet his lawyers used the extenuating circumstances in his favor, the anguish and depression Arthur has been suffering since his daughter vanished into thin air.”
Olga’s opinion of Arthur did not seem exactly compassionate. Her voice was full of exasperation, almost contempt.
“I don’t like you getting mixed up with that kind of person, Eduardo. You should let him and Gloria deal with their misery on their own.”
The priest rang the bell. Mass was about to begin. Eduardo glanced at the altar boy. He was as pale and stiff as a Vatican sculpture. The sight of the downcast little boy saddened him. They exchanged a quick look and Eduardo gave him a smile. Don’t worry; some things just don’t always work out, he attempted to communicate.
“I think I can handle it on my own.”
They walked out of the church, and there beneath the ceramic figure of Lope de Vega, Olga lit a cigarette and snatched off her headscarf with a nervous gesture. With that one move, the calm that had enshrouded her inside the sanctuary vanished. She was once more the same tense woman as always, the one who held her cigarette too tightly between her fingers, and constantly frowned as though upset or on the verge of hurling an insult.
“You said in there that you come here because we all have something to be forgiven for. So what is it you need to be forgiven for?”
Olga exhaled smoke, angrily.
“Did I say that? I must have been high from all the incense in there.”
Eduardo recalled the first time he saw her.
It was a few weeks after he was released from the hospital and he was still recovering from the accident. He’d started drinking heavily during that time, and had stopped taking care of himself. His father came to visit every once in awhile, bringing clean clothes that he bought at the flea market and which often didn’t fit since Eduardo was losing an alarming amount of weight—he wasn’t eating and hardly slept at all. All he did was drink and smoke, smoke and drink.
It must have been about that time that his father told him he’d been diagnosed with oesphageal cancer. Eduardo couldn’t remember, now, whether his father had been afraid, had said it calmly, or simply mentioned it in passing. He hadn’t wanted to add to his son’s sorrow and anguish over the deaths of Elena and Tania. He also couldn’t recall if the surgeon who operated on his father had mentioned that it wasn’t really worth doing, that the cancer had metastasized and spread very quickly to his liver and lungs. Perhaps he whispered that the man had maybe three months to live and the best thing would be to offer palliative care, administering morphine. No chemo. He robotically accompanied his father to his blood tests and biopsies. He’d wait for the nurse to call them, go in with him to the doctor’s office, and listen to what they were told without taking it in. Then he’d go home. He didn’t call his father, didn’t ask him how he was doing. He didn’t even know if he cared. Most likely, he now understood, he simply didn’t have room for any more pain. So he had blocked it out.
The day Olga had showed up at his door, Eduardo was weeping. Actually, by the time she’d knocked, he’d stopped and was simply sniffling like a kid who’d worn himself out crying. One by one, he had flipped through the records and dust jackets of his father’s jazz collection. Twenty minutes earlier his father had brought the whole collection over. “I want you to have them,” he’d said. All of them: Mildred Bailey, Barbara Lea, George Benson, Louis Armstrong, Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis…all his treasures. He’d left them in a cardboard box on the kitchen table, kissed his son, and departed. That was when Eduardo could no longer keep pretending that he didn’t know what he knew. Charlie Parker’s “All the Things You Are” was on the record player when the doorbell rang. At first Eduardo thought the girl on the other side of the door wasn’t real, that she was a hallucination, just another mirage. He wanted her to leave, wanted to get rid of her and keep losing himself in the sax and piano, sinking into that dark sea of bubbles where everything is hopeless. But the young woman rang insistently, so he finally opened the door.
Olga was, at that time, very young—practically still a minor. She turned up in mud-caked hiking boots and a soaking wet khaki-colored duffel coat. Her hair was bright orange and her eyelashes matted with a thick layer of mascara, the water dripping down her cheeks, leaving jet-black trails. Her breasts were small, like little potatoes, and she was anxiously rubbing her palms together the way heroin addicts do when they’ve gone too long without a fix. But Olga wasn’t a junkie looking for spare change, and she wasn’t asking him to show solidarity to some pretend cause, by signing up for something, so she could bankroll a vice. She introduced herself quickly and said she’d heard his story on the radio, heard about Elena and Tania dying four months earlier. She said she lived very close to the place where the accident had occurred and she’d seen something, something that she had to tell him about.
Eduardo asked her in. Olga looked shiftily around the apartment, the records strewn across the table. She accepted the coffee Eduardo offered her but didn’t touch it; instead she spent the whole time smoking and tapping her ash onto the saucer. At first she had trouble speaking, and took her time getting around to it, instead mentioning that she’d seen some of Eduardo’s canvases in a gallery that she neglected to name. Disturbing but deep, those were her words. Perhaps what she should have said was that they were deep because they were disturbing. She also asked him why his portrait subjects were anonymous. Because that’s what they were, anonymous, he replied. No one knows their names. Names are excuses, inventions we use to hide behind. She said she understood. Eduardo didn’t believe her. She was too young, and besides, she wasn’t there to talk about his paintings. She also said she was studying art history and that she was planning to go into the art business, into selling paintings. He didn’t believe that, either.
She sighed, taking her time: sometimes she liked to go down to the stream to swim. In the summer it was a pleasant place to be, far from the eyes of nosy neighbors. “In small towns,” she explained, “people frown on the idea of women swimming in the nude.” She was obviously one of “the women” in that comment, and it made Eduardo uncomfortable, and struck him as unnecessary. He was about to say as much, but she spoke first, returning to what had brought her to his door to begin with. And all the while Charlie Parker floated through the apartment, though neither of them paid any attention.
Olga told him that, a few minutes before the accident, she saw a dark-colored SUV go by. It stuck with her because it was driving too fast, as if the driver either knew the road to the stream well, or was crazy. But she didn’t really think about it until two minutes later, when she heard a tremendous crash. There was a really sharp curve there and if you didn’t know about it, it would be easy to drive off the road.
When she got to the stream she saw Eduardo’s car, overturned, the wheels spinning up in the air and, a few meters away, a girl’s body. She looked, then, at the SUV, stopped atop the embankment with the driver’s door open. The driver rushed down the slope to the girl’s side and leaned over her. He shouted something, running around her body in circles a few times as if he didn’t know what to do. And that was when Olga realized what was about to happen. She could tell it because suddenly the man stopped holding his head and moaning. He stood very still, looking toward the overturned car, and then looked around, making sure nobody had seen him. After climbing back up the embankment he picked something up—she couldn’t see what but she imagined it was car parts or bits of broken glass—and sped off.
“I was the one who called the ambulance.”
In addition to that, she’d done something else, too, she explained, taking out a wrinkled sheet of paper that had been ripped out of a spiral notebook: she’d written down the SUV’s license plate.
Eduardo paled. He didn’t know what time it was but suddenly the temperature dropped. He looked down at the paper as though it contained a secret formula, and then asked her why she’d decided to come to tell him something like that four months after the fact. Olga responded that at first she thought it best not to get mixed up in the whole thing. She didn’t like cops and had no intention of testifying in court or doing any of the things she imagined were required of a witness.
“I told the police I didn’t see anything, but I can’t keep hiding what I know. Whatever you decide to do about it, that’s up to you. I’ve cleared my conscience, but if you tell the cops I told you, I’ll deny it. I don’t want any trouble.”
And just like that, a life changes. Suddenly someone appears out of nowhere and rips it apart. And nothing can ever be the same as it was a minute prior. When Olga entered his life, Eduardo was like a meteorite speeding toward the void—and when he collided with her, his course altered and he began heading toward a different sort of abyss. Her revelation didn’t solve anything. All it did was push him a little further into the darkness, toward a deeper, blacker state.
Perhaps he himself should have gone to the police the moment she left. Maybe that would have changed something; maybe it would have changed everything. But he didn’t.
Sometimes I feel bad for having told you,” Olga said, staring at the sidewalk of Calle Atocha.
They’d taken a leisurely stroll and were now standing in front of the Centro Ruso, the Russian center of science and culture. A thuggish-looking guy was leaning against its metal gate, hands in his gray overcoat, watching the passersby. He didn’t exactly look like a museum guide.
“You were only trying to help me,” Eduardo consoled her. That had happened thirteen years ago; it was absurd to try to rationalize it now, to seek solace. And yet there Olga was, determined to justify herself.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions…Would you at least seriously consider forgetting about the damned portrait? I can get you a better gig, I’m sure.”
They went to say goodbye and Eduardo offered his cheek, but Olga instead kissed him full on the lips. She didn’t know why, it was just an impulse. It wasn’t a real kiss, but on feeling the contact of her lips, Eduardo’s lips went as hard as the mouth of a cave.
That night, lying in bed in the dark, Olga felt ridiculous. Conjuring the image of herself swooping in to give Eduardo a kiss was so embarrassing that she cringed, and recalling what she’d said to him irked her. She’d told Eduardo too much. Luckily, it was clear that he had no idea the number of different lives Olga had lived, all accumulated inside herself. He was too blind, too navel-gazing and focused on his own pain to notice anything around him. Maybe it was better that way, she said to herself, stroking the scar on her inner thigh beneath her pajamas. The reminder of an old tattoo, one that it had cost her dearly to get rid of.
That scar was the path that once led her to a cobblestone street at midnight. The address scribbled on a scrap of paper turned out to be a basement. The place was sordid, dark, tense. She was a scrawny girl, accustomed to bearing the heavy load of her life without so much as a sigh, but she was only sixteen, and she was terrified.
The woman who took her coat seemed high, smiling with a mouth that drooped grotesquely, as though her makeup had melted down her face.
“Fun nights, but sad mornings, eh?” She led her to a small room. In the center was a cot on wheels, and a gooseneck lamp that cast a harsh, intense light. On a cart with Formica shelves was a selection of surgical tools, all lined up. The woman tried to comfort her, stroking her shoulder, but the touch of her hand only increased Olga’s trembling. The woman told her to take off her dress and panties. It was all going to be quick and painless. She promised.
“OK, young lady, let’s get that out of you, and then you can go back to your life as though nothing happened.” But the whole procedure was horrific, long, solemn and very painful. There were complications from the start—she said she was only going to aspirate; Olga was only three months’ along, after all. But the woman tore her insides up. She could have died there, and sometimes Olga thought maybe it would have been better if she had. She refused to look at the thing the woman showed her before tossing it into the bin.
“You’re going to be fine. But you need to get to a hospital—a real one.”
She didn’t. She left, feeling with each step as though she was dying. She had trouble keeping her balance and only managed to get back by leaning on the alley wall for support.
She couldn’t say a word at home. Her mother would never have believed that one of her boyfriends had seduced her daughter and gotten her pregnant. That couldn’t happen to her.
Olga’s father had died when she was three. A civil servant who worked in the prisons, he spent his weekends worrying about the lottery—perhaps fretting about money, which they never seemed to have enough of—and about his sudden headaches, which the social services doctor could not explain and which altered his moods, making him more and more bitter. He didn’t make Olga’s mother miserable—but nor did he make her happy. He was simply a shadow, slipping through her fingers without leaving any physical trace.
From the time she was a little girl, Olga learned to make do with an outward appearance of normalcy, with the life everyone else truly had and her family could not renounce. But in private her father was withdrawn, living in his own secluded little corner, emerging only from time to time in pajamas and robe, dragging his slippers, a glass of water in one hand, sitting down to watch the news and falling asleep within ten minutes. And her mother watched from a distance, a look of repulsion on her face. She could hardly remember hearing any stories about what her father had been like, what they used to do, or how her parents had met, and her mother had never said a single word that shed light on what her own feelings for the man might have been.
Her mother never spoke about her feelings in public; the only chinks in her armor that allowed a glimpse into her inner life came out when she was drunk or—after her father died—when she brought home a new boyfriend. Her mother was pretty, far prettier than the men she brought home deserved. But it was so easy to fall into despondency, as though hers were a life not intended to prosper, as though the effort that growing older required was one that responded not to a concrete objective but to mere coincidence and the submission of its protagonist. Some people are like that. They find no purpose in life, they don’t ask anything of anyone, except to keep eking out their petty existence with no major upsets.
The last boyfriend was a guy whose train had left the station. He was about fifty—perhaps younger but that was how old he looked. He’d turn up at her mother’s door in a wrinkled twill suit, his shirts sometimes missing a button at his stomach, as though the fabric couldn’t take the onslaught of his belly. He had long curly sideburns and a little Hitler moustache that covered his top lip, which drooped down on the right as though he were paralyzed. In his right hand he held a box of Lola cigarettes, with a lit one between his yellow-stained, ragged-nailed index and middle fingers. His clothes were messy and his black boots caked with mud. In the beginning, he looked at Olga indifferently, like an inevitable presence not worth bothering to contemplate. He seldom smiled and when he did, it seemed like someone was trying to force him but he couldn’t quite manage it.
But, in time, his look evolved, without her mother noticing.
Though she couldn’t recall the month, she knew it was a Wednesday. Wednesday was the day the supermarket delivered their weekly groceries. Olga remembered the shiny handlebars of the bicycle leaning against the door, its worn brown seat, and the boy unloading wicker baskets filled to the brim. Her mother’s boyfriend was sitting across from her, staring at her intently. The room was in semi-darkness and the cool air contrasted with the suffocating, maddening, white heat coming in from outside. Slowly, he stood and approached Olga; he pulled her to his mouth by the neck, firmly but not violently.
That was the first time, but then came others, many others. Strictly speaking, you couldn’t say he forced her, not violently at least. The truth was, Olga allowed herself to be taken, as if in a narcotic dream in which nothing mattered because she had no free will, no power to change anything or stop anything, as if with each kiss the man were injecting her with poison from his tongue, paralysing her.
And without realizing it, she fell in love. A married man, thirty years older, who was also her mother’s lover. She was so stupid that she actually got his name tattooed on her inner thigh, and she would have done far more than tattoo a pathetic symbol on her skin for that man. For months, she shared him with her mother without her mother suspecting. She found excuses to ph one him, even though it wasn’t always him who answered; sometimes it was his wife or a little boy. She put up with humiliations, came running like a little dog in heat to any fleapit he wanted to meet her at for a quick fuck, and dug her nails into her own flesh whenever she heard her mother orgasm with him inside her on the other side of the wall.
And then that hallucinogenic trip abruptly ended. One morning, he’d arranged to meet her at some run-down rooming house, off the road to Villaverde.
Olga had decided she’d give him the news after making love, as they smoked a cigarette in bed. But she, the man’s real wife, burst into the room—and it was as if with that invasion her whole fantasy world came crashing down in a thousand pieces, like an airplane cabin suddenly losing pressure. They shouted. But no one can shout and actually communicate at the same time—it all just descends into chaos.
For a few minutes, Olga had truly believed that her youth would win out, that she’d win the fight, he’d stand up to his wife, tell her the same things he’d whispered to her dozens of times between the sheets. But he caved. In fact, he didn’t even put up a fight. He simply left Olga, just like that, flicked her off as though she were a disgusting bug clinging to his marital bliss.
“We’re going to have a baby!” Olga cried.
It shouldn’t have come out like that, she was expecting to be met with the same warmth and rhythm that accompanied them at night, hip to hip, so she could say: “Leave your wife, leave my mother. We’re a family now,” as if that baby were a bond that now made them inseparable. But her cry—desperate, animal-like—was the only thing she had left, the only hope she had of holding on to him.
He looked at her with the horror of a rotten old man. And in that look, in that tenth of a second, Olga realized her tremendous error. She realized that capital-L Love does not exist, that men are selfish and weak. She realized that she would deplore the man whose name was tattooed on her skin as passionately as she’d loved him a minute earlier.
He left them, her and her mother, just like that, shooed them out of his life the way you do an annoying insect interrupting your siesta, with a wave of the hand. And that was the end of romantic weekends, of uncomfortable but exciting lovemaking in the back of a car, of promises, poems, gifts, and phone calls at midnight; that was the end of tattoos and complicit glances.
And when her mother, drunk and lost, called out to him at night, sniffling, not understanding why he’d suddenly abandoned her, Olga glared at her and hated the world.
No, there was no way Eduardo suspected anything like that. He always looked at her with the impatience of a man obliged to explain the obvious. And the obvious was that Olga was frightened.
She half-closed her eyes and pictured a naked defenseless body, dead, there on the dirty floor of her room. Her adolescence, butchered.
How absurd, how pathetic a dead, naked human can seem. How useless, how futile that sort of redemption turns out to be.