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  “They look pitiful, we can’t leave them like that: make them disappear.”

  “The fewer people who know about this, the better.”

  Even brambles have eyes. Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. But let’s not lose track. Where were we?

  Here. X marks the spot. They start to dig as if searching for treasure. No, I lie, they start to dig as if they know they won’t find any treasure. There are two of them, maybe three. They’re dressed normally – plainclothes – and it’s not easy to discern who ranks higher. The man who seems to be in charge does nothing but bark orders. They do what they do without thinking much about what they’re doing. Mechanically, but with the added stress of the shiver that might run up your spine when a dead man stares at the back of your neck. It’s the fear. It’s the rush. It’s the unease. The eyes of a corpse on the back of your neck. Even if the dead is well and truly dead, even if he is covered by a maroon blanket like a second skin, even if you can’t see his eyes. Even if they can’t see your eyes. There is no moon, thank God. It’s a balmy night, you can hear crickets and cicadas when the sound of shovels stops, when they stop digging into that neutral, cracked earth, covered in dust and dryness. They are armed Adams: apparently Adam was the first to dig holes in his garden, that’s why they say that if a shovel can be said to be a weapon, Adam perhaps was the first armed man. The fact is, there is no great difference between a gardener and a grave digger: both are Adam’s successors, both are armed beings. The obedient man’s back starts to get sweaty as he digs and digs, as he figures out the center of something every time the metallic tip pierces the earth, strike with thy rod as you pray to thy God: let there please not be rocks just here, for goodness’ sake. But, who is he praying to? To the night, he keeps praying to the night and to nocturnal beings.

  It’s cold, their teeth are sweating.

  The steam comes in and out of their mouths quickly. White in the night. Threads in the dark. Smoke in the shadows.

  It’s a starry night, but they are not looking for stars.

  The first job is to dig the hole. An appropriate hole. One that can host. One in which you fit to lie down to sleep. Or with bent knees, no need to overdo it. Besides, dusk shrinks us all somewhat, we are all one centimeter shorter at night, when we go to bed. Let the humility that night awards us help us make a smaller grave, so that the holes are lesser. And it is night, it ought to be night. A quick calculation, “We’d better not fall short, keep digging.” Now the obedient minions feel the weight of senseless work: “This motherfucker is making us sweat more than that fatso Mariluz.” A harlot known by all, apparently, that Mariluz. And the younger of the obedient men, Hernández, even though he doesn’t know her, laughs shamelessly so the others won’t think him queer. Adam’s heir starts off letting out a few loud cackles to make sure no one takes him for a faggot, who knows what crime he’ll end up committing. And there, right there, goes Hernández’s gardening vocation, if our armed friend ever had one.

  Do ghosts prefer southerly winds? Are Mediterranean ghosts calmer? They say that in Northern Europe ghosts are loud, horrifying, that their shrieks are more out of tune because of the cold. With Northern ghosts – Irish, Estonian, German, it’s easy to imagine them coming at you with a knife and no explanation. Mediterranean ghosts, however, are not as gloomy, it’s impossible to take them too seriously; even when they kill you, they do it in an incompetent way; Don Juan Tenorio and others like him are laughable, buffoonish, and sometimes it’s their own comedic candor that makes them all the more fearful; we’d risk our necks to bet that they’d rather dance to a tambourine than use a knife; Mediterranean ghosts sound like they’d be fun to have a few glasses of wine with. “Ghosts fervid for Frescuelo and María.” Is there a really frightening and serious ghost in Spanish literature? And in the Basque Country? Who are they? What are Basque ghosts like?

  Here?

  “The hole is ready, boss.”

  “Keep digging.”

  Twentieth century. Look. Halogen? What is that? Window light is either blue or yellowish, and lightbulbs burn out and you replace them and that’s that. How many elevatorless homes. Or rather, how many houses with narrow, single-door elevators. And our mother’s fears every time we climbed one: don’t get too close, she’d say, someone down the street had his arm amputated because it got trapped in the door as the elevator ascended. You can lose a hand, it might go too far and you may never get it back. Pedestrian area? What is that? Twentieth century. It trapped us, it did, the century, like mousetraps snare rodents: alive and inescapably. And just like the mouse in the mousetrap watches time pass, so we watch the twenty-first century, while the trap keeps us stuck in the twentieth. And it’s going to take a while.

  Cambalache, siglo veinte.

  “Keep digging.”

  “But, isn’t this enough?”

  “Keep digging, damn it! It needs to fit two!”

  Did they bring you wrapped in a brown blanket by any chance? It’s a maroonish color, there’s no doubt about it. Your blood coagulated such a long time ago, not a drop flows from you, other than the liquid that oozes from a solid, curdled scar. Like San Gennaro’s effigy in Naples, another Mediterranean saint or ghost, he cries tears of blood every so often too, that’s what devout Neapolitan Catholics claim at least. But no crimson tears emanate from your body. You don’t have a drop of life left in you. You are not there anymore. Not there. And neither there, nor there, nor there. Your family, however, would like to know where you are. X marks the spot. Many years will pass before they do, and your relatives will age as every wrinkle in their faces marks their anguish and their unknowing. The smell of fennel and heather and lavender shall remain, the tourists and the main roads will come closer, and the roads will get wider, and urban areas will sprawl, and there’ll be roundabouts. What were capillary veins are now main arteries and easy to prick: some say that roads are a means of getting the organs to communicate, something we didn’t have in the eighties…In the eighties the bull’s tail and the bull’s liver and the bull’s stomach and the bull’s heart and the bull’s eyes and the bull’s intestines only communicated through zigzagging capillaries, circulation was bad; each organ, each population, functioned independently; cars: two-tone Deux Chevaux (black and dark red) and (white) SEAT 600 and (cider-bottle colored) Minis and Citroën Dyan 6. In the eighties in radio programs the morning hosts greeted their listeners differently: “Sunny day all over the bull’s hide today, queridos listeners.” The queridos y queridas shtick came much later: back then la querida was someone bourgeois adulterers would install in an apartment.

  Cambalache, siglo veinte.

  As the years pass, nights will not be quite as dark anymore, in the nineties here and there you’ll see fluorescent lights in industrial naves of varying degrees of sophistication; judges and democratic forensic experts will turn up with their just-washed faces to dig you out of the grave with great technique and sumptuous professionalism, with Virginia instead of dark tobacco cigarettes in their pockets, or maybe not even that, just the tyranny of nicotine patches. “We know how to do this, don’t get in the way and let the professionals do their work.” They know how to pour salt on your wound with latex gloves. It is even possible that some of them are the same ghosts who buried you back in the day, volver, volver, y las nieves del tiempo blanquearon mi sien, that tango about returning “with the snow of time on your temples” (yours don’t need whitening, seeing as how they’re full of limescale). But let’s not get ahead of the wheel of time, oh what will be, will be, it will be years before any of that, none of us is as pompous a narrator as to claim omniscience, or absolute ownership of that wheel.

  For the time being AIDS is a new thing in Europe, in the United States they have started to whisper about it, and this year the European Parliament Commission formulated the first vague demand for research into the subject. When he bends down, one of the obedient men pricks a finger with a rosemary bush, he hasn’t been tested. We are in th
e twentieth century, stuck in the mousetrap with our vigilant mouse eyes; we live in the eighties, who hasn’t lost a friend to heroin; perhaps a few years from now the HIV virus will catch up with the obedient man, on his free night, after a sad fuck in a roadside brothel on the way to Miranda de Ebro, with a heroin addict prostitute born in Chueca – who knows, maybe it was Mariluz, oh light of my life! – he will die in eighteen months, suddenly, as if hit by lightning, with wrists like narrow emaciated chicken claws, “Hell, it’s so seldom I get it into a hot, wet pussy, no fucking way I’m covering my cock.” We wouldn’t like to be in his skin. He wouldn’t want to be either, if he knew every nook and cranny of it, but sometimes it is good for survival to put a second skin on your cock, just like it is also beneficial to protect our bodies with borrowed skin to avoid a descent into madness.

  Who would want to be in their own skin if they knew themselves inside out, down to the last corner?

  But this is something only an omniscient narrator can know and do, and who wants to inhabit the skin of such a know-it-all? To each his own. It’s not good to know everything either.

  Vargas and Hernández open the door of the car, van, vehicle, and unfold the blanket without even thinking that that big item of bed linen they’re unfolding could very well be the bull’s hide, queridos listeners. Bueno, bonito, barato, Paisa. Good, beautiful, cheap. There are still few immigrants selling wares out of their blankets in Spain, the North Africans and Sub-Saharans prefer France; to tell the truth, the Basque language still hasn’t come up with the neologism etorkin to refer to the few immigrants who do sell watches and trinkets; we think they are a minority, that they are exotic, we are so naïve, singing songs like “Ze hurrun dago Kamerun,” Cameroon is so far away, and so far away too is the need to retell experiences in real time. Although during the floods of ’83 and due to the bursting riverbanks many births come early, the true wave, the African wave, is still to arrive: no one has heard the words patera or cayuco in relation to dinghies overflowing with immigrants. The enemy is at home and, in summer, it is still the gypsies who sell watermelons by the roadsides. Moroccans crisscross the bull’s hide in endless lines during the summer vacations, stopping in Hispania Una, Grande y Libre (Franco dixit) just long enough to pee and tiptoe around, as uninterested in the harsh surface of Castilla as the wheels of their old Citroën, Peugeot, or Renault with tottering piles of junk on their roof racks are in the asphalt. “Who are these people, Mom?” “Moroccans.” “Where are they going?” “Home.” “What are the Moroccans carrying on top of their cars?” “Televisions, rugs, radios, furniture, blankets.”

  “No, the blanket must disappear too. We can’t leave anything behind. Not even the smallest thing.”

  When they throw your corpse in the pit, your bones crack, collecting earth, dust, sand.

  That’s when the second vehicle arrives. The driver is not as dexterous: unconcerned about avoiding the brambles, he drives straight through them to reach the hole lit up by the headlights of the first vehicle. The headlights illuminate a rustic swimming pool filled with roots, a little earthly orifice. An empty swimming pool soaked in a cone of spilling yellow light. A tomb, quite a regular one, all things considered, and since digging at night can be complicated. The trapezium is not so crude after all. “Fantastic, fantastic. You’ve done a great job, guys.”

  “Big enough for two!”

  But, here is the first surprise, just like the femme fatale who must always appear at minute twelve of every Hollywood film, just like the blond chick the script – or the scriptwriter’s lack of talent – always demands.

  They bring another one in the second vehicle. You feel it as if you were in his skin. He was your friend. Your closest, a brother.

  He is on his knees, his eyes covered with scraps of cloth. The first bullet wasn’t enough. I’ll tell you about the second one quickly, it’s too painful. All right, let’s pretend I already did.

  They’ll bury you together, both of you now free of flesh and pain. Soon your bodies will be but ciphered bones. No messages arrive from your undecipherable corpses. You can’t say, for example: “It was kind of you to dig so deep, even though this insistence in reaching the crux of the question was purely a selfish impulse; it was so kind of you to bury my friend with me, together forever in an embrace of bones, always close, always brothers, thank you so much, we will never be able to repay, to settle, to cancel this debt. What you’ve done to us you won’t be able to repay, settle, or cancel either: let’s say on a Sunday afternoon, when you least expect it, when soccer-fueled radio screams recall other screams. We are at peace. The families – yours and ours – will have to fight the ghosts.” The future will have to fight the ghosts. They’ll bring dozens of Argentinean psychoanalysts by boat, Cambalache, siglo veinte, vibrante, bárbaro, they’ll have to fight the silence and the ghosts, vibrant, barbarian, twentieth-century tango-singing ghosts. Your sons and daughters will have to fight the ghosts. Fuck the future and the people of the future, the fucking future, have a blast and break a leg. Break a leg, modern policemen will learn to say in English-language academies like Home English. Mucha mierda, yes, that’s what actors say, mucha mierda. Lots of shit. On so many other occasions, some things are much easier said in another language, in another language y a mí como si te meten un yunque por el culo, etc. Yeah, shove an anvil up your ass, see if I care, Mariluz. What did you leave us? “What do you mean what did we leave you? You inherited our ghosts. Is that not enough, ingrates?” You can pretend that everything is as it ever was, you can swap neighborhoods, housemates, partners, emotional support and drainage, even cities, but old ghosts will appear when you expect them the least.

  “You deserved it, you chose your own fate.”

  “Live with that, fucker.”

  “Live with that here.”

  “Amen.”

  But the job isn’t done. We don’t know whose idea the quicklime was. Vargas, Hernández, they call each other by their last names, even though the lieutenant colonel has expressly forbidden them from doing so. Leaves no trace, it’s clean, burns through everything. Not even dogs would be able to find them.

  Not even dogs.

  Afterward the dust and the years can do what needs doing. A blank slate.

  “Soto, you don’t know what you’re going to become yet, do you? Want me to tell you? I don’t think you’ll like it. Oh yeah, you do? Okay, Soto, you asked for it. Initially and like all martyrs you’ll become adrenaline for the people. And later, like all martyrs, you’ll become anesthesia for the people. Mentioning formaldehyde is perhaps too cruel, and anyway, in a few short years they’ll put the word people itself in formaldehyde. Why do I say that? Because the word people will lose its meaning, my dear friend, cher ami, querido amigo. They’ll treat it like an ugly tubercle, yes, don’t look so surprised, don’t look at me that way…I shouldn’t explain too many things to you at once, right? I should shut up…People – I’ll use that word for now – get used to things. As I was saying, like all martyrs, at the beginning you’ll be the people’s adrenaline, and later you’ll become the anesthesia of that ugly tubercle called people. Adrenaline in the first instance, a symbol of injustice, because you’ll be the common thread of many outbursts. Because weddings bring weddings, and funerals, more funerals. Later on, anesthesia, because too many people for too many years will find too many things on your skin. Adrenaline and anesthesia, maybe both at the same time. When people are short of strength, they’ll dip their heads into your unknown grave, into your pond, and they’ll swim in that bath, that pool of hatred and fervor of yours. ‘Well, yes, what our boys did wasn’t good, but look at what they did to Soto and Zeberio…have you forgotten? Didn’t you love them?’ People won’t forget, and people won’t forgive.”

  The first door slams shut, then the passenger’s. Slam. They switch their flashlights off before getting into the cars. The second car and the obedient men inside of it, both in their behavior and their demeanor, are but a shadow of the first. Every
thing we do has been done by somebody else before. Wherever you go, someone has been there before.

  The obedient men are silent inside the cars. Windows closed, deaf to the crickets and the cicadas. Someone starts to get nervous. Silence is a rat that gnaws at our conscience.

  “Christ, someone put the radio on! This is like a funeral!”

  Or: “Cigarette, anyone?” Back then people had no qualms about smoking inside cars. Twentieth century, siglo veinte, cambalache. That mousetrap. None of them smokes, but they’re in no position to reject the cigarettes offered to them, given that they come from Vargas, Hernández, and many others, obedient men here to bury two dead. Three fireflies and smoke, car windows closed. Each engrossed in his thoughts. All dying to wash their hands. Random Freudian thoughts leaping from the transcendental to the quotidian: they are human, of course they are human, too human, they have just left death behind, and one of the policemen’s brains demands a glass of Anís del Mono aniseed liquor and a bar of Lagarto soap (lizard, lagarto); another counts how many days since he got laid, since he rammed it into something warm (sin meterla en caliente); the third one contemplates his son’s fever and the slim chances of his wife being awake upon his return, and whether she’d get angry if he woke her and took her from behind, to feel in his skin again, fuck her with her clothes on, push her panties aside and feel the friction of cotton on his cock. Will they wash their hands at the station, or each in his own home? Will they all wash them twice? Take turns? Will they sniff their fingers before they place their hands under the tap? Will they know that they need to sing “Happy Birthday” three times as they wash to get rid of all the bacteria?