Silent Island Page 4

  Everybody looked at me.

  Another scene.

  I walked out the door, accelerated. I was running after him. The food had counteracted the alcohol, and I was back to my senses. The main street was crowded with people looking for fun. The hot air felt heavy and numbed my stomach. Traffic was dense, and I struggled to run among the people. I spotted his haircut in the distance and ran after him as fast as I could.

  We got to an adjacent street and he got into a taxi. I boarded another one and asked the driver to follow him.

  “Are you a policeman?” he asked, a scrawny man with a mustache, a Hawaiian shirt, and a pack of cigarettes in his shirt’s pocket.

  “No,” I replied. “But that man is shagging my wife.”

  That was the first thing that came to my mind.

  “Don’t say more. I’ve seen it all,” said the driver and pulled off his Ford Mondeo after the other taxi. “It’s none of my business, but you are not going to do anything crazy, are you?”

  “No, don’t worry,” I assured him. “I just want to scare him. Get to know where he lives, you know.”

  “I see,” said the driver, more calmly. “But don’t forget your wife is part of this too.”

  “We’re getting a divorce,” I explained, following the lead. I was having fun. “I just want to know where he lives. One shouldn’t be going around, breaking families, you know?”

  “I understand you, perfectly,” the man said. “You sound like a good man. If I were you, I’d cut off that prick’s tongue.”

  We followed them to the old railway station at the entrance of the city, went uphill, and turned right. We passed a TV station for Channel 9, and Hidalgo’s taxi slowed down.

  “It must be around here,” I said. “Make sure they don’t see us.”

  Hidalgo got out of the car, paid the driver, and entered through a gate. It was not his house. He lived elsewhere in the city.

  “Good luck,” the driver said.

  I paid him and got out of his car. I took out a crumpled cigarette and lit it while leaning against a car parked under the yellow streetlights along a deserted avenue. At a distance, I could hear the noise of the city and the metal shutter from a bar that was closing.

  Antonio, what have you gotten yourself into? I asked myself and finished my cigarette in front of that red-brick building.

  6

  When I opened my eyes, I felt like I had taken my skull out of the microwave. It was noon, the sunshine hit the door and part of my arm. It was burning my skin, which looked reddened. I had a crushing hangover, though the symptoms were atypical. I had overslept. Headaches had long been a thing of the past until today. But that day, I jumped out of bed and ran to the toilet to vomit everything I had ingested the night before. It was not until I went back to the bedroom that I realized that I had not come home alone. Or maybe I did. I could not remember anything that happened after that last cigarette.

  I went back to the bathroom, the furnishings were old, and its yellow tiles, elongated bathtub, and white plastic curtain showed some wear. The mirror was on the sink, which was the same color as the tub. My feet were standing on a violet bathroom carpet. I looked at my eyes in the mirror. They were red and dehydrated.

  I felt a slight shortness of breath, there inside, a feeling of despair and claustrophobia invaded me. So, I opened the windows in all the rooms, letting the noise and pollution in.

  My legs shivered like the thighs of a scared chicken.

  I took a look at my dwelling, especially my room. The apartment was an old eighty-square-meter lodging, including my room. The living room was small, and there was a slightly bigger guest room with an old dresser covered in dust, which displayed beer bottles and family photos. There also was a Tube Sanyo TV set and an uncomfortable but convenient sofa. Since I started working, I used the living room as my office and replaced my late aunt’s stretch table and crochet tablecloth with an elongated board that I had assembled myself.

  At that place, I unleashed my first writing, motivated by Hidalgo’s advice, and the need to find a substitute for alcohol. The drink had become a permanent companion ever since my friend disappeared from my life. It had always been there, but upon Hidalgo’s, Patricia’s, and everybody else’s departure, it was just Coltrane and alcohol. Coltrane never failed me either. It took me a while to realize that drinking and smoking did not help create a bond with my writing muse but an addiction. I was about to turn twenty-six, had a job as a journalist at a provincial newspaper, and was an alcoholic.

  When I got the news that the newspaper was going to merge with another newspaper by the same group — that would lead to layoffs and cutbacks — I sought inspiration and solace in alcohol. First, it was a few beers to fight the writer’s block; then, it became a daily ritual. And with that, my belly grew, and grew. I noticed it, both on the skin and on the face. Literature saved me for some a while. Then, I changed atmospheres and surroundings, and started meeting with other people who introduced me to soul and modernism. I started consuming other things and sleeping at doorways like a homeless person. I also grew a disheveled beard. I realized alcohol was not the problem, but I was. My constant desire to get carried away, get rid of boundaries, break loose from everything, and find culprits. I was fortunate that it was a very brief period of my history when I also had to deal with a breakup from the world where I belonged. When I turned twenty-seven, I was done with everything except beer.

  From that epoch, I only have a few memories left and a very old copy of Coltrane’s Blue Train album. Its case is worn out, damaged as though it had been used to make hundreds of lines on its surface. Patricia bought it for me, and it was the only present I kept from her. She never liked jazz. It was a birthday present. I know it was a second-hand copy, for she told me on an angry letter. Recalling that made me loathe her even more. Despite everything, even by accident, that was the best present ever. In my lifespan at least.

  That morning, Coltrane’s CD was not where it was supposed to be, which was the shelf in my room. That detail blew my mind and made me realize that I had had a visitor while I slept. I wanted to think that I had inadvertently moved it. I tried to lie to myself, but it did not work. The mere idea that someone walked next to me while I was deeply asleep made my hairs bristle.

  I walked out the building and found the disk on the floor, at the doorway. I went back to the apartment and had a look at the closet. They had rummaged through my underwear. Everything was crumpled and disorganized. My journalistic insight told me that that had been the work of more than one person. Perhaps a man and a woman. I was not sure. It did not make much sense that only one person did it. Whoever checked the bathroom made a tidy mess. They had at least had the decency of moving everything around without breaking anything. I wanted to interpret it as a ciphered message, an anonymous note, a concealed threat. The rest of the apartment was the same. There had been a party in my living room, and I had not been invited. A lump of helplessness grew larger and larger within my throat. I could not breathe. I needed air. I started feeling desperate.

  I sat on the uncomfortable sofa, that had been slashed with a knife. I put my hands on my face and started to cry. I did it because no one could see me, but the lament was brief. Crying in solitude felt even more devoid of dignity. Whimpering had always seemed to me like a lackluster, infamous, and pitiful gesture, a result of inadequacy and despair. The last reservoir of strength to ask life for a change when things do not go your way.

  Lamenting what happened is but a waste of time.

  The police stepping on my toes was arguably another loss.

  I wiped my tears with the back of my hand and examined my room thoroughly for hidden cameras. I checked the corners, the dirtiest nooks that I was not willing to clean up, and I found a small plastic camera. A digital video camera. It lacked any kind of connection. Had they forgotten it?

  Its memory was clean though.

  “This is a mistake, remember, it’s all a mistake,” I murmured in front of t
he mirror, spraying ice water on my face.

  I took a shower to help clear my thoughts and got dressed. I was on an empty stomach. I hastened my pace and went to the newsroom. Traffic was fluid, but it was noon, and rush hour was about to start. I arrived in the newsroom. Shouts blasted from Ortiz’s office.

  “What are you doing here?” a young man with wire glasses asked me.

  “Where is Ortiz?” I asked.

  “He’s in his office,” he said, getting up and reaching out to me. “My name is David, the new intern.”

  “What are you doing at my desk?” I asked angrily as I walked nearer. In the newsroom there was only Ramiro, who had walked into the restroom.

  “I don’t know,” said the young man insecurely. “I was told to use this computer.”

  “Get out!” I ordered him and moved his swivel chair to another side. I pulled the drawers open and took out a bunch of photographs and documents. “Don’t touch the computer. I’ll be using it.”

  “Are you Gabriel?” he asked enthusiastically. He reminded me of my younger self when I had just graduated college. And of all of my classmates too. He was the typical youngster who comes in from the faculty physically and emotionally unscarred. That is how they leave college, enamored with journalism, believing they are willing to take whatever shit it takes them to get a space in the papers. They are unaware until very late that there is nothing to envy in the work of their superiors’. In many cases, they do a far superior work. However, losers — and often the smartest too — decide to opt to teach at a place where they only have to confuse the next generations, indoctrinating or telling them of battles that never took place. The profession was over before I was born and had become a virus, an excuse like any other that some merciful people were determined to feed. “I read the news about you.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said while looking on the computer. I had to find the emails that I had exchanged with Hidalgo. I was certain that I would find something.

  “About the man who killed himself at the factory... “ the nerd said behind me. I wanted to push him against the wall and crush him shut for the rest of the morning. “They say, he was connected to Hidalgo, the rector. He was a friend of yours, right?”

  A lightning ran down my spine.

  “What did you say?” I said turning around suddenly.

  The young man got scared.

  “The article mentions your name.” He showed me a newspaper from the competition. “Are you a suspect?”

  “Shut the fuck up!” I shouted and grabbed the newspaper. “Will you?”

  The kid was right, but he listened to me and disappeared from my sight. Some smart guy had gone too far. On the front page, a photo of Antonio Hidalgo, rector of the University of Alicante in one of his last acts. On the other page, a picture of an apartment. It was not the same one where I had seen him hide the night before, but his own apartment.

  A stolen photograph, a suicide without a motive.

  Hidalgo had left, hanging himself from a rope.

  I kept silence for a few seconds, I could not believe what I read.

  Hidalgo was dead, a dry sausage.

  I could feel my pulse bulging the veins in my neck, and my heart on the throat.

  On the street the sound of blaring sirens, and elevator music.

  Alicante was a city where rats walked stealthily at night so as not to be heard from the sewers. Deceiving was an illusionist’s trick, and I lacked the talent for that.

  I took note of the reporter who had written the article.

  I jotted her name down on a slip of paper.

  Blanca Desastres. A funny last name, ominous in my native tongue, for the word Desastres translates as ‘Disasters’.

  Since I did not have much to do that late in the afternoon, I also jotted down the address where Hidalgo had taken his own life.

  I took my things and left the newsroom, slamming the door behind me and leaving my boss shouting on the phone.

  * * *

  As I headed to the place where Hidalgo bid this world farewell, I phoned some colleagues to brief me about Miss Desastres. My colleagues were but sources from other newspapers, merchants of information, people in whom I could not trust beyond the boundaries set by the profession. As mercenaries, none of them would hesitate to stab me behind my back in a dark alley behind a bar, with the meager purpose of getting an exclusive headline. That is how journalism works, with hard dealt blows and backstabbing in the form of calls or messages that coincidentally always arrive late and out of time. Bunch of jerks. One had to be tough, have little regard for others, and above all, be a failed egocentric. I had all of that, so I never understood why people found it shocking to see the reactions of other second-class journalists when they gave public statements. It was not hard to find the girl’s whereabouts. She did not work for El País, and as I had imagined, she did not live in the city, but reported for the national section. I wondered why such an important agency would have sent a rookie.

  Information was scarce but valuable. None of the people I talked to could give me more information about the girl other than her name and bad temper. She was a sack of flesh and viscera and was looking for trouble with the wrong person. Reporters sent from Madrid or Barcelona often thought that working in a province was a simple and monotonous task. And they were not necessarily wrong, but that implied that finding information in the province required that one be an avid greyhound. In the best of cases, the lack of newsworthy events invited to dig dirt on public figures, start witch hunts, and in the worst, to unleash creativity and fabricate stories to fill columns and editorials. Embellished stories about elderly women who jumped off a third floor. Russian mafia in Torrevieja, shootings in the street on a Friday afternoon. There we were, trying to live up, biting our nails off, drawing faces with words on Slavic passports written in Cyrillic letters. In the meantime, the cosmopolitan reporters that came from the big cities covered press conferences with their smartphones and filled half a page with a government plan that not even the Government themselves believed. Who cared about all that? I had not been long in the business, but Ortiz had taught me everything there was to it. That might have been the one reason why he had not kicked me out of the office. It happened in the best families too. He knew my strengths, and I knew his tenacity. I respected him, although he filled my head with manure most of the time. He was not a bad guy, but he had grown bitter and resentful.

  I was approaching one of the crossroads that met Calderón de la Barca street when I saw several Civilian Guard patrol cars. The police headquarters were nearby, but seeing so much activity in a summer day was not common. I followed the murmur and conversations of bypassers who walked to and from the fenced-in building. Many patrols were parked around the building. Photographers and other colleagues were there too, even a television crew from the local station.

  “Damn it,” I said. I knew many wondered about my whereabouts. The simple idea of showing up there like I did not know what I was getting into was horrific. I would get eaten alive by those hungry vultures. I could picture them taking notes of my very gulps. I felt suddenly overwhelmed.

  I lit a cigarette and began to think how I could access the apartment where Hidalgo had hanged himself. I could not vouch for him, but I found the whole matter incredibly strange. Why would he do it? He earned good money and was better off without me. He must have been involved in something serious, same as Rocamora. The city’s public image was going to deteriorate even further, especially after the corruption scandals that had come to light. A hanged rector and a journalist as a suspect. I would have loved to write a headline for the case had I not been neck-deep in it.

  I was leaning against a wall on the corner with one foot against the brick wall, listening to the repetitive sound of the pinball machine in the cafeteria behind me when a girl approached me.

  “Excuse me, do you have a lighter?” she asked. I looked at her with the corner of the eye under the green glasses of my frames. Long m
ilky-white legs. She had a good rack and dark eyes and hair. I had not seen pupils as black, nor a gaze as intense and wild as that girl’s in a long time. I took out my lighter and offered her some fire. She thanked me and then looked me in the eye. “Wait... no way — ”

  “Are you done? I said.

  “Are you Gabriel?” she asked both nervous and excitedly. “Gabriel Caballero?”

  “Who are you?” I asked startled.

  The girl looked around and figured out that an old cafeteria was not the right place to have this conversation.

  “It is you!” she confirmed. “I knew it. Everybody’s talking about you now.”

  I grabbed her by the arm and squeezed hard. She was wearing a white Metallica shirt with the cover of Ride the Lightning. Her skin was soft, but she was a bit scrawny.

  “Look,” I muttered while I held her tightly. “Why don’t you leave me alone and get out of here?”

  “Let go of me!” she said in a commanding voice. “Or I’ll scream, is that what you want?”

  I released her arm.

  “What do you want?” I asked. “You are wrong about me.”

  She pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of the back pocket of her jeans. She unfolded it. It was a black-and-white picture of me.

  “No,” she repeated. “I’m not wrong.”

  “Look, I’m waiting for someone, okay?” I explained at the time I put out my cigarette with my shoe. “So, leave me alone, go for a walk and take some sun. Look, the afternoon is really nice.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re going to tell me about Hidalgo.”

  I felt a python wrap around my stomach.

  “What did you say?”

  “I want to know everything. I’m investigating the case.”

  “Hold on,” I said and had a sudden realization. It was her. How had I been so blind? “It is you who’s written all that sensationalist bullshit?”

  “My name is Blanca,” she said, smiling.

  I stomped the cigarette butt several times.