When I Was Mortal Read online

  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:

  “There’s a woman over there whom I find absolutely fascinating. I know it’s a lot to ask, but don’t turn round until I tell you. More than that, I must warn you that if she and the man she’s having supper with get up, I’m going to shoot off after them, and if not, I’ll wait however long it takes for them to finish and then do the same. If you want you can come with me, otherwise, you stay and we’ll settle up later.”

  Ruibérriz de Torres smoothed his hair flirtatiously. He had only to discover that there was an interesting woman in the vicinity for him to start oozing virility and getting terribly full of himself. Even though she couldn’t see him nor he her; all a bit animalesque really, his chest swelled beneath his polo shirt.

  “Is she that special?” he asked restlessly, dying to turn round. From then on it would be impossible to talk about anything else, and it was my fault, I couldn’t take my eyes off the woman.

  “You might not think so,” I said. “But I think she might be special to me, very special indeed.”

  Now I could see her companion in three-quarters profile, a man of about fifty who looked rich and rather coarse, if she was a prostitute, he was obviously inexperienced and didn’t know that you could get straight down to business, without the need for supper on a restaurant terrace. If she wasn’t, then it was justifiable, what would be less so was that the woman had agreed to go out with such an unattractive man, although I’ve always found the choices women make as regards their flirtations and their love affairs a complete mystery, sometimes, by my lights, a complete aberration. One thing was certain, they weren’t married or engaged or anything, I mean it was clear that they had not yet lain together, to use the old expression. The man was trying too hard to be pleasant and attentive: he was careful to keep filling her glass, he prattled on, recounting anecdotes or giving his opinions about things so as not to fall into the silence that discourages any contact, he lit cigarettes for her with a wind-proof fighter, like the ones you get in cars, Spanish men don’t go to all that trouble unless they want something, they don’t watch their manners.

  As I continued to look at her, my initial confidence began to wane, as always happens: certainty is follo
wed by doubt and uncertainty by ratification, usually only when it’s too late. I suppose that, as the minutes passed, the image of the living woman became superimposed on that of the dead woman, displacing or blurring it, thus allowing for less comparison, less similarity. She behaved like a woman of easy virtue, which didn’t mean that she was, as far as I was concerned, she couldn’t be, since, as far as I was concerned, she still lay beneath the desolation of the lights and the television left on all day and of the semen in her mouth – entirely unmerited – and the hole in her chest, which she had merited even less. I looked at her, I looked at her breasts, I looked at them out of habit and also because they were the part of the murdered woman I was most familiar with, aside from her face, I tried to get some sense of recognition, but it was impossible, they were covered by her bra and her dress, although I could glimpse her cleavage beneath her neckline which was neither sober nor exaggerated. I was suddenly gripped by the indecent thought that I had to see what those breasts were like, I was sure I would recognize them if I saw them uncovered. It would be no easy task, especially not that night, when her companion would have exactly the same intentions and would not want to surrender his place to me.

  Suddenly I smelled something, a sweet, cloying smell, an unmistakable aroma, I don’t know if it was a change in the direction of the wind that wafted it to me for the first time – the wind swinging round – or if it was the first clove-scented cigarette that had been smoked at the table next to ours, a different, better-quality cigarette to be smoked with the coffee or the liqueur, like someone treating themselves to a cigar. I glanced at the man’s hands, I saw his right hand, it was playing with the lighter. The woman had a cigarette in her left hand, and the man then raised his left arm in order to gesture to the waiter, asking for the bill, his hand was empty, therefore, at that moment, the exotic smell was coming from her, she was smoking an Indonesian Gudang Garam that crackles as it slowly burns down, I had had a packet myself two years before, Dorta’s final gift to me, and I had made it last, but not that long, a month after he’d given it to me it was finished, I smoked the last cigarette in his memory, well, each and every one of them really, I kept the empty red packet, “Smoking kills”, that’s what it says. How was it possible that she – if it was her – had made the cigarettes that my friend must also have given her that same night last so long. Two years, those “kretek” cigarettes would be dry as sawdust now, an open packet, yet they still gave off a pungent perfume.