Twist Page 3

  “Una mano lava otra mano, dos manos lavan la cara.” One hand washes the other; two hands wash the face.

  “Los uniformes de diario no se llevan a casa, se lavan en el cuartel, ¿no conoce las reglas?” Regular uniforms are never taken home, they’re washed in the station, don’t you know the rules?

  But they’re all in civilian clothes. De paisano.

  The first car goes away. The second car goes away. Let’s envision the following: one of the obedient men, twelve years later, on holiday in Nerja, in the South, in a house with whitewashed walls. The sun burns the whitewash, and the obedient man goes momentarily blind while the comforting thrust of a gulp of brandy like molten lead tells him, never convincingly enough:

  “You did what you had to do.”

  The whitewashed wall will tell him:

  “You did what you had to do.”

  The torturer soon will have domestic concerns of a different ilk: his son’s joblessness, his wife’s diabetes, a tumor, alternate ways of looking at death, another prism.

  “Order, arms!”

  “Due obedience. These aren’t people, they’re scum; diligence, execution, a job like any other, a clean fight against the riffraff.”

  “Yes, commander.”

  “Attention!”

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

  Here.

  Thankfully nobody wants this buried treasure. Even those who buried it would have difficulty finding it again. With the rains and the dust of more than twenty years, even the brambles have changed place, allez hop! The lion draws circles and leaps, docile, when told to, then takes a few steps to return to the same position. Brambles leap in the same way given enough time, just like desert dunes at night. Fennel, lavender, and rosemary, yes, they’re still there. The heather and the sticky sap of pines. Plants are wise, wiser than humans, or at least more patient. Which is not very difficult, really. Some fallen branches imitate the tracks of an anarchic train in an abandoned station. It’s the first thing you see. Dry branches that look like the skull of some animal on a circle of stones. Your skull. The first thing you notice when you wipe the dust from your eyes is some femurs and hip bones covered in lime. You have to make a supreme effort not to assume that they belong to a calf. You find it hard to stand up, it’s difficult when you don’t have heels: the bones are not where they should be, and the wind whistles through your gaps. Since this white doesn’t look like the usual bone white, you decide to rearrange them on the ground before you leave, and to blow on them one by one to clean them, blowing away the lime, blowing away the ants that tickle your arms. You recognize a femur, but you’re not very good at anatomy and, although you place the tibiae, you have a feeling a rib is missing…Is there maybe a child in Nerja who is using your rib to rattle on his toy drum, pump-a-rum? One rib short, oh well. No big deal: you take one of the spare ones from the other side and reestablish balance, symmetry, which, on the other hand, is not really so important. A dog approaches. It looks at you, dribbling. You throw the spare rib at it: delighted, the dog catches it and scampers away to bury it in some secret place. You smile for the first time.

  Deliver thy bone unto the world.

  Despite these shortcomings, it seems to you that the lungs could survive inside the rib cage without falling to the ground. You crack your fingers until you produce a god-awful snap – “that’s a good start: I’ve only just stretched out and my first wish has come true” – and put them all back in place. You start to walk, self-sculptor, dragging your feet, trying to imprint yourself with a semblance of what you once were.

  The little bones in your hands were in good shape, it wasn’t necessary to rearrange the puzzle, thankfully. You take the skull in your hands. It’s not even that heavy. “Eyeless skull, do you look anything like me? Something smells rotten: don’t worry, heaven will direct it.” The Danish ghosts are very far away, like the holed cheeses of Denmark; oh, hang on, those are Swiss. Neutral cheeses with neutral holes.

  Are you there?

  Are you far?

  Are you in the bones?

  It’s not the same to be in the bones as to be pure bone.

  You’re in your bones again. In your skin. I wish I had a comb at hand. You can’t help that absurd, frivolous thought.

  Perhaps because you’re looking for a comb, unconsciously you look at the pit, and what do you see? Certainly not a comb; a broken mirror, a skull that is not yours burned by the quicklime, a jaw that looks dislocated, blackened teeth, a lot of bones out of place, which unlike you are asleep and lifeless. You touch him hoping for a sign, you caress his jaw hoping for a sign: a Braille of life.

  “Won’t you come with me, Zeberio? Come out, my man! Wake up and let’s get going!”

  You grab him by the shoulders, wanting to wake him from his long sleep, but his clavicle breaks in two when you shake him, fragile as a thrush’s skeleton. When you try to link the joints back, an apple of plaster disintegrates in each one of your hands. You blow the dust away. You understand. He’s not coming. He’s given up. He doesn’t feel like living, taking revenge, laughing. You don’t even try to change your friend’s mind. Respect is owed to the dead who want to remain dead. Dead and asleep.

  You sigh. Life is a solitary job. Death too, apparently.

  You leave your friend behind and walk toward the turnoff, missing more than just a rib. Every now and then you look back. You’d like your friend to come with you, but he’s not following.

  Zeberio is staying in the pit forever: silent Zeberio, discreet Zeberio, crazy Zeberio, brother Zeberio.

  It’s night outside, or at least it ought to be. You leave behind a sign that says VALLE DE LA ESCOMBRERA 10 KM and stand next to another one that reads LA APARECIDA 4 KM; more than stand, you hang in there, with scarce hope that someone, unafraid of hitchhikers, might stop for you. Who knows, maybe a German family, a group of young hippies in a Volkswagen van packed to the rafters, driven by a hashish-loving woman with long hair and small but beautiful breasts. “Don’t they say it’s free to ask? Are there any hippies left after all this time? We should be in Europe by now, with all our rights and duties, right?” A shiver runs down your spine: what if you meet up with the people from then, Hernández, Vargas, those armed Adams without gardening vocations? No, some things only happen once in life, once in death. The Devil’s rows are not that crooked. It’d be such bad luck to bump into those obedient people after more than twenty years…No, you don’t think they’ll come back this way. The murderer doesn’t return to the scene of the crime. Because they lose the courage they had for an instant. Perhaps because they can’t conceive that they once possessed such courage.

  Isn’t it beautiful to be alive?

  But you’re not alive exactly: you’re dead and awake. It’s not the same. You hunger to see how things have changed, you want to see the world the way it is now, different. You want to bump into your friends, all aged. To laugh at their contradictions. It’s beautiful to be alive, of course it is, even if only to see how everything’s changed and gone to shit, it’s beautiful to return to life. Why shouldn’t the dead enjoy that privilege? It’s not fair. Certainly, this has nothing to do with what we deserve…You’re a bit naïve for a spirit from the beyond. And a bit of naïveté is not too bad, not even for ghosts. It passes with time.

  You manage to get rid of the last bit of insulating tape on your mouth. You’re thirsty. You could kiss anything, any cold metal, anything but silver, a piece of cloth, only to make sure that your lips are still in place.

  You feel dampness in your mouth. “Good. This is me, here are my crooked teeth.”

  In the far distance you can see the lights of a Shell gas station next to a hostel: Hostel Europa. Bad sign, you think, businesses are always named after what they don’t have: Eden Inn, Paradise Supermarket…Hostel Europa? Excusatio non petita…Therefore, we are not in Europe, it’s just a nominal matter. Maybe those dubbing actors with fairground-charlatan voices have
killed Europe. Disappointing, particularly for European humanists, if they weren’t all dead. Given a choice, you prefer the gas station to the hostel. Shell. You get out of one clam and into another. From pit to pit and then repeat. Along the way you leave a trail that looks like a line of chalk but is quicklime. Like a wolf does with urine, you mark your territory. You trace the lines and the limits of the playing field. An improvised soccer field on the beach. With quicklime. Before, only the quicklime was quick. Now you are too. Quickened. More or less. Dead but alive.

  You’ve a wound, red, on your eyebrow. You take a drop of blood to your lips. You smile. It’s a miracle: the Neapolitan Saint Gennaro cries again. The scent of rosemary tickles your nostrils with warm licks. You’ve returned to yourself, although you don’t quite dare to check your pulse, and, rather than turn your thoughts to yourself, you prefer to sharpen your ears, trying to discern the rumor of waves.

  Can’t discern anything.

  Maybe one or two kilometers ahead, who knows. Valle de la Escombrera. La Aparecida. Waves. Waves. Shock waves. It’s too soon to give up, you’ve only started.

  No comb then. No sign of your thick glasses. But you see well all the same. Better than ever. And simultaneous to your surprise, you spontaneously decide to smooth down your hair with your hand in a gesture of happy vanity, and consider that courteousness and vanity are not – not at all – the most insignificant features of the living. But an intermittent absence diffuses the presence of your body, and you’re not sure if what your fingers touched are your old locks of hair, or just the warm Cartagena air.

  There is no doubt: you’re in your skin again. And no one is going to deny that. Just like night ought to be night, just like the sea ought to be covered in blue, you ought to be in your skin.

  FIRST DIFFUSIONS

  IDOIA ERRO HAS BEEN at the receiving end of many jokes because of her green Mini Cooper, which has helped her develop great reflexes: “Your car is civil-guard green”; “Laugh on, but they never stop me”; “it’s just like a box of After Eights”; “I don’t like minty men.” She is good at verbal ping-pong, she wouldn’t have otherwise risen through the ranks so quickly to become editor in chief of the culture section of the Egin newspaper. That is precisely the newspaper Diego Lazkano carries, folded, on his lap. It reads REAGAN RELAUNCHES HIS PROPAGANDA OFFENSIVE AGAINST THE USSR, although the main front-page photograph is of one of a considerable-sized demonstration against the destruction of local businesses that took place in front of the church of Ororeta.

  “Nervous?”

  “Just a bit.”

  They stopped dating three months ago and Diego, due perhaps to the sizzle of attraction abandoned lovers sometimes retain, finds Idoia more beautiful than ever. She wears a pixie cut but not like those women who, wanting to be free of the tyranny of looking after their tresses, find vindication in the pragmatic kind of freedom short hair provides; hers is a far more sophisticated look: a curl fixed upward, hair cut short with great styling, shorn selectively by expert scissors. Diego remembers how, when Idoia used to sit on his lap, he’d grab her hair to gently pull her head sideways and kiss her neck. Although it’s short now, there’s still enough to justify that same gesture. He’s succumbing to the persistent fantasy of ex-lovers, of course. How to control an intermittent passion that seeks to reignite a past that reason froze and stored away? Don’t go there, Diego, he tells himself. But it’s impossible. And the truth is that, yes, Diego used to pull Idoia’s hair to kiss her, but only because she’d done it to him first. He must confess. Idoia taught him everything he knows about women, and now that the lesson is over, she has left him alone to test his knowledge on others; “there, love, that’s enough.” Because Idoia didn’t want a stable relationship, Diego has the painful sensation of having been thrown not just off the bed, but overboard. Besides, Idoia is two years older than him, which seems an insurmountable distance when you’ve just turned nineteen. It’s not always the case but, in being with her again this time, he relives the pain of the breakup. The thought that he’ll no longer be able to sleep with Idoia in her pixie cut makes him feel something that is not quite a lover’s sadness but, rather, the sadness of a sentimental collector.

  “When does it start?”

  “In Basque at eight p.m., and in Spanish at ten p.m.”

  “Baizea! Two shows in one day? You’re all crazy, Diego.”

  Baizea, how he loves the way she says yeah right, the way she speaks, in and out of bed. Around the time he started sleeping with Idoia, he was stunned by the controlled violence of her sex: how she’d give in to her own excitement and give herself over completely – he wasn’t sure to whom – and ride along as she grabbed his hair as if he were a horse; and how he too dared take firm hold of her hair for the first time and contemplate her neck before biting it; because, no matter what they say, it isn’t all sweetness and caresses in bed, not everything needs to be tender, although it’s important to keep a watchful eye on every gesture that departs from tenderness. Never before has he seen the earrings she is wearing on those tiny lobes he wants to bite. Stabbed by the vision of the ear wires, he feels a prick of jealousy in some indeterminate place between his lungs and his stomach. Doesn’t she wear the ones I gave her anymore?

  Diego forces himself to remember the hateful pact he and Idoia made together – “we can be friends, right?” – and to dispel the weakness that threatens to betray him, he pushes a tape into the cassette player. As if the silence inside the car were to blame. Idoia clears her throat above the crackle of the beginning of the tape.

  “Your article on Dario Fo…”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s not going to come out next week, we’re short of space and would need to cut it down too much. Is that all right?”

  “I’m in no hurry.”

  No hurry, none whatsoever. How could he. In that relationship, Diego Lazkano was never “Sitting Bull,” but rather “He Who Waits.” Her meetings went on, there were always last-minute changes, unexpected events. Such was the life of the editor in chief of a newspaper’s culture section. More responsibility, more work hours, and a symbolic raise. In any case, Lazkano accepts, almost happily, that to wait for someone you love is part of the deal, convinced that the experience of absence underscores presence in a way that enhances the time spent together, making it glow and exist more intensely. In love, and not only in love, we must learn to enjoy the time prior to the preamble. Perhaps life is not much more than that, in the end: a series of preambles that lead nowhere. A series of moments prior to the preambles. A building of shambolic architecture. No matter how much we scratch the itch, there is never enough relief.

  Lazkano recognizes Silvio Rodríguez’s voice, although he’s not familiar with the song.

  “Silvio?”

  Idoia nods. Then shifts gears and goes quiet, looking out the window; she is not uncomfortable but realizes a moment of discomfort is in the cards. What do you call that moment when, just before feeling uncomfortable, when you know you’re going to be uncomfortable? So many words need to be invented still.

  “¿Te molesta mi amor?” asks Silvio. Does my love bother you? It’s not a Silvio Rodríguez tape, but a mixed tape of love songs someone has made especially for her. Next comes the Scorpions’ “No One Like You.”

  “They’re selected songs,” Idoia says.

  Selected songs, of course. Selected by whom – better not to ask. The same guy who got her the earrings recorded the mixed tape, no doubt. Although Idoia is really into art, she’s not very good with music. Lazkano feels that this anonymous guy keeps throwing darts at that indeterminate space between his lungs and his stomach; he can’t help glancing at the glove department. In the Afga-branded orange case of the cassette – the only one among the road maps – he sees some unknown person’s clumsy handwriting; it’s a man’s hand, no doubt. Lazkano feels helpless. It used to be me who made her mixed tapes. And as a matter of fact he too has just bought the Scorpions’ Blackout LP, and the last tim
e he played it he actually thought that Idoia would enjoy listening to “No One Like You” in her Mini. But it’s too late now: he’s been replaced. Someone got ahead of him, not just as a lover, but also as a purveyor of music. Diego realizes – the pathways of the mind are incomprehensible – that the second fact hurts as much as, if not more than, the first.

  “Good luck.”

  She says “good luck,” but what Lazkano hears is that other line: “We can be friends, right?”

  “Aren’t you coming to the show?”

  “I have to go back to work, maybe this weekend…”

  “Call me, I’ll leave tickets for you under your name.”

  Diego swallows his pride and adds: “I’ll leave two tickets.”

  Idoia nods and Diego closes the Mini’s door on the boulevard, in front of the traffic lights by the Barandiaran Café. He feels as if someone had sucked the life force out of him. Lacking the strength to ask for a pick-me-up at the café, he walks past the Pequeño Casino and heads toward the Antzoki Zaharra Theater. Gloria shouts at him:

  “Where on earth have you been, you? No, don’t tell me: I’d rather not know…You’re all going to end up in jail…You’re the only one who’s not dressed yet…”

  The protagonist, Ana Etxarri, deep in her voice exercises, approaches Lazkano mimicking a duck, with her fingers splayed in front of her mouth, as if to say “ignore her big mouth, it’s opening night and she’s nervous.” Tonight Kepa Zeberio will be in charge of the lights.

  Xabier Soto is there too, visibly excited. One of his librettos is getting staged for the first time.

  “I was beginning to think we were going to have to replace you, primo…”

  No more substitutions, please. I just have a small role in this one but only I can play it.

  They don’t have any understudies, of course. When one of the actors gets sick, someone else in the company plays the part. And anyone could play Diego Lazkano’s part actually, as he only has three or four lines.