Lime's Photograph (16 page)

I said no to all of it.

“They haven’t claimed responsibility. They usually do,” I said.

“Not if they’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“I’ll have a chat with Tómas. And a couple of the others. But you know them! We’re bound to end up just talking about the old days,” I said.

“Well then, at least take this with you. You’ve got to get back to living in the modern world,” said Oscar. He handed me my mobile phone and its charger. I hadn’t switched it on since the police confiscated it. Oscar had apparently brought it back to the office. I took it hesitantly.

“We’d like to be able to get hold of you,” said Gloria. “We care about you, Peter.”

Now they were getting sentimental again. I keyed in my PIN number and the telephone came to life, beeping peevishly. There were, of course, numerous messages via the answering service. I sat down and listened to them. A couple were from sources, a couple from business associates and more casual friends expressing their sympathy, and the last one, just before the tape had run out, was from Clara Hoffmann. Her cultivated, lilting voice, speaking the Danish I wasn’t used to hearing any more, came across clearly. There was a faint background noise, which could easily have come from below on the Plaza Santa Ana if she had rung from the balcony of the Hotel Victoria, and I tried to picture her as she had looked the day we went to the Cerveceria Alemana.

“Peter Lime. I am so terribly sorry to hear of your tragedy. I feel for you and send my deepest sympathy, even though words have little meaning at such a time. I’m returning to Denmark today. I won’t trouble you with my inquiries; however, I have to say that we are still interested in learning more about the woman and the man in the photograph. If you can help in any way – when the time is right for you, of course – if you want to get in touch with me, please ring me in Copenhagen. Otherwise, I’ll be getting back to you at some point. And again, I’m so sorry. More than words can say.”

She gave me two telephone numbers and, out of habit, I waved my hand in the air for a pen and wrote them down on a slip of paper which I stuffed in my pocket before clearing her message too.

“Who was that?” Gloria asked. I must have had a strange look on my face.

“Something I’d forgotten about. A woman from the National Security Service – Danish – who contacted me just before, yes, just before, you know. About a photograph from the past.”

“Oh right, that,” said Oscar.

“What are you talking about?” said Gloria.

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Presumably it’s lost like all the others,” said Oscar.

“It’ll probably be in the suitcase,” I said.

They looked at me again.

“What suitcase?” said Gloria.

“Nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”

Gloria became businesslike, putting on her lawyer’s voice, the cut-glass, sharp tone which loosened the stomachs of her male opponents in court.

“Have you got negatives and prints that have survived? Because if you have then I, as your lawyer, would like to know. We are in the middle of a massive action for compensation against the insurance
company. We’re basing it on the fact that you’ve lost your professional foundations, your professional assets, and that you should thus receive compensation. I’m not going to stand up in court, Peter, and plead your cause if the other side could suddenly pull valuable photographs out of the hat. The case rests on the fact that everything, and I mean everything, was lost in the fire. So what’s this all about?”

Oscar’s secretary stuck her head round the door.

“London,” was all she said and Oscar left the office, giving me a long, hard look.

“Out with it, Lime,” said Gloria.

“Over the years, I’ve put aside some negatives and prints and kept them separate from the rest.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Some people write diaries. My photographs are my diary. Some people collect stamps. I collect moments in time.”

“What kind of photographs?”

“Professional, personal, important, inconsequential, ugly, beautiful. My photographs.”

“You mean Lime’s photographs? The Jacqueline Kennedy negative, for instance?” she asked.

“For instance.”

“It won’t stand up in court. That one alone is worth a million. Where are they? I want them valued.”

“Out of the question.”

“Peter!”

“Forget it. It’s not important.”

“Where are they?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t matter!”

“You’re making things difficult, Peter.”

“Then drop the case.”

“Certainly not. We’ve got every chance to screw those arrogant men
in their tight-fisted insurance companies.”

It was the battle. It was the brawl. It was the chance to take arrogant men down a peg or two that motivated her, and not really the money at all. I didn’t say anything and we stood in awkward silence, which was unusual for us. Tobacco is a saviour, so we each lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away from one another, managing to break eye contact without making it too conspicuous, but Oscar could sense the tension in the air when he came back into the office.

“Well, well,” he said. “And which angel might have passed through here while I was out?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can tell you later,” said Gloria. “Go on your trip, Peter. We’ll talk again when you come home. Nothing will happen before October at the earliest, anyway. Go on your trip on that infernal machine of yours. Get the shit out of your system.”

Oscar seemed to want to say more, but Gloria’s look silenced him, and they went through the ritual, saying that all three of us should go out for lunch, and that they could clear their diaries. But I released them from their torment, letting them go to one of their American-style power lunches or perhaps a rendezvous with a lover, while I drove in the midday heat to the Danish Embassy, where I picked up my new passport, and then home to say goodbye to Don Alfonzo. Madrid suddenly felt like a straitjacket that threatened to suffocate me. The buildings leant in over the congested streets like gravestones, as if they were about to topple, making my head swim.

Gloria and Oscar had seen me out with cheerful talk of holiday plans. Madrid’s unbearable August was knocking on the door. Gloria wanted to go to her beloved London. Oscar wanted to spend a couple of weeks playing golf in cool Ireland and then meet up with Gloria in London. I sort of promised to join them at some point. Business and pleasure. If we were going to meet in London, we might as well check up on our British operation which, like everything else Gloria
and Oscar touched, purred like a fat cat skimming off the cream. But I got the feeling that what they really wanted more than anything was to have their old friend Peter Lime back, and for the incident never to have happened, or at least be forgotten.

Don Alfonzo wasn’t home. He had left a note saying he had gone to the city and anticipated staying in a hotel for a couple of days while he looked over our case, he wrote, and he wished me good luck on my trip. He had put one of his most beautiful orchids in a small blue glass vase next to the note. I understood, because while he knew that I found no comfort in visiting the cemetery, he was encouraging me to say goodbye.

I often forgot to eat, but Doña Carmen had made a salad with serrano ham that I ate in the shade on the veranda while I watched the shimmering heat over the mountains. I felt empty and miserable, as usual, and I missed my wife and my child with a force and pain that was physical, and which I wouldn’t have imagined possible. I missed them constantly. Day and night. At regular intervals the monster raised its head with a force so painful that I thought I would go out of my mind.

I made some coffee and then packed a rucksack with a change of clothes and strapped it onto the motorbike. The air vibrated with the droning buzz of the grasshoppers. The smell of dust and tomato plants and a gentle coolness drifted across from Don Alfonzo’s garden, which he had undoubtedly watered before he left. I locked up the house, swung my leg over the Honda and drove slowly to the cemetery, the orchid resting in my lap.

The white crosses and tall marble headstones were beginning to redden in the early evening sun. We had chosen a simple stone with their names and their two decisive dates: birth and death. And that was all. Don Alfonzo’s orchid was on the right. I put mine to the left of his and then rested on one knee for a while, wishing with all my heart that
I could pray or weep, but nothing ever came. There were no voices, no God, no revelation, no transfiguration, no inner conversation with the bereaved. There was just a gnawing guilt and a smouldering, irrational rage at them for leaving me, for leaving me alone and lonely. It should have been rage directed at their murderers, but that wasn’t how I felt that day.

I followed the traffic round Madrid and opened the throttle when I reached the old main road north. I chose it in preference to the motorway. It was as familiar as an old glove. I had driven along it hundreds of times. As photojournalist on my way to the big Basque demonstrations for autonomy at the end of the 1970s, and with Amelia and Maria Luisa on our way to the holiday cottage near San Sebastián.

Evening fell, and the sun sank on my left in a profusion of reds which crept down over the mountains and across the plain in a slow red tide. It was always a thrilling and strange feeling to leave a big Spanish city and get out into the countryside. In the middle of Madrid you could forget that Spain is a big empty country where the horizon is constantly pulled further and further into the distance and ends in mountains or undulating hills and parched fields. The traffic thinned out. It consisted mainly of small cars and reeking, old lorries whose drivers didn’t want to pay the motorway tolls, but the Honda purred its way past them in smooth curves. The sun set, and I felt an increasingly pleasant, cool wind on my face as the blush of the sun turned into a deep crimson fire, making me feel as if I was driving through an ocean of blood.

I drove through the gentle, warm darkness, stopping only when I needed to fill up the tank. Driving at night is a journey in stillness, with the monotonous rumbling of the motor in your ears, and a loneliness shared with pale, young men in hushed petrol stations, wordlessly pushing coffee across the counter. If one wasn’t preoccupied with one’s own wretched life, one could invent all sorts of tales from their monosyllabic replies to a request for coffee, a soft drink, or 18 litres of high-octane petrol. Perhaps they were here in the solitude of the night because they had gone through a divorce, couldn’t find any other job, couldn’t sleep, had a broken heart. But I didn’t think about them. I just drove on. I became one with the Honda. It hummed between my legs, first sending my buttocks to sleep and then making them ache. I put on my helmet after midnight when the starry night sky began to absorb the warmth of the earth. My only company were the belching old lorries, a holiday-maker who had got lost, speeding north with snorkel and beach towels in the back window, and a few other solitary night travellers who for God knows what reason chose the old, free main road instead of the anonymous, deserted and efficient motorway. I was exhausted and therefore extra vigilant, and I was actually sorry when, 20 kilometres or so before San Sebastián, I had to turn off the main road and the motorbike carried me up and
up along the gently curving mountain road to my and Amelia’s little refuge. The journey was the most important thing, movement. The destination was rather a disappointment.

The house was bathed in a morning haze, as if we had said goodbye to it together only a week before. The mountains in the distance arched massively like the backs of elephants in the glimmering dawn. Our house was up on a ridge, but the green hills were more reminiscent of Austrian summer pasture. It was an old stone house that had once belonged to a medium-sized Basque sheep farm, but the times had taken their toll on both the farmer and his life’s work. I had bought it in a fit of passion at the beginning of the 1980s, but had never done anything to it. Amelia fell for it on sight, at a time when I still wasn’t quite sure that she loved me. She came from the town and therefore loved the countryside. I came from the countryside and loved the anonymity and rhythm of big cities.

She had left the solid, rectangular outer walls of grey-beige Basque granite standing, but had ripped out most of the interior; only the old kitchen range had been allowed to remain. Then she had rebuilt the inside and created a home, with an open-plan kitchen as the natural focal point and enough rooms to put up 20 people. Running water was installed, electricity and heating, but everything was kept in rustic, natural materials. Oscar had said it was the kind of house every Madrid architect dreamt of showing off in
Hola
or some other magazine, and we were happy in it. We had created it together. It was up in the hills and you looked down through the valley to the Bay of Biscay, the mountains behind providing shelter when the winds came from that direction. It had two storeys and a generous cellar for wine and cheese. But when just the three of us were staying, we used only the ground floor and lived more or less in the kitchen, the reassuring presence of the big black range radiating warmth in the cold Basque winter or the unreliable summer when the heat of the
sun was smothered by a chilly mist if the wind brought in a sea fog from the Atlantic.

I was worn out as I drove the last few hundred metres up to the house, the gravel crunching loudly under the tyres. The neighbouring house, where a Basque sheep farmer called Arregui lived, was a couple of kilometres further on up the mountain. In defiance of every EU resolution, regulation and efficiency measure, he went on tending his sheep, made his cheese from their milk, cured meat and made enough to live on. He would have earned more if he let the whole place lie fallow and rented out his farmhouse to summer holidaymakers, but sheep had been his way of life for 60 years, along with the Basque cause, and he would die for them both. He had started as a shepherd at the age of ten and that same year one of his uncles had been shot in a clash with the Guardia Civil. Sheep and nationalism went hand in hand for him. I sent him an envelope every month, money for watching over the house, making sure there was dry firewood and keeping robbers away. He would have done it without payment, but I got him to take it by saying that I could claim it against tax and thereby cheat the central authorities out of a bit of revenue. He saw it as being free for me and expensive for the Castilians, and so he was happy. He was Catholic, a conservative and ardent Basque nationalist and spoke Spanish only when absolutely necessary. But since I was a foreigner, and he’d fallen for Amelia and later for Maria Luisa in a big way, he accepted that we would never learn Basque. He was an anachronism in modern-day Europe – a dinosaur who still, despite his years, lifted boulders, split logs and played
pelota
with bare fists at the annual summer contests. His elder son had been garrotted in 1972 by the state authorities under Franco. His other son, Tómas, who had become my friend, spent three years on death row before the amnesty of 1977. His daughter, the youngest child, was serving a life sentence in a prison south of Seville, convicted for the murder of a captain in the Guardia
Civil five years earlier. Arregui thought that he had bred good Basque children who had done him credit. It was hardly surprising that the Basque issue continued unresolved.