Lime's Photograph (21 page)

Don Alfonzo looked at me and held out his hand in a formal greeting.

“You look like my house,” he said, and stepped aside.

Everything looked normal on the outside. Inside, all was chaos.

A uniformed Policía Nacional officer, in a short-sleeved shirt, with a heavy gun and baton hanging from his belt, was writing in a notebook, but it looked as though they were nearly finished. It was a
banality for the police, just another break-in among the thousands that took place every day. With unemployment running at 25 per cent and thousands upon thousands of junkies, homeless people and illegal immigrants, burglaries in and around Madrid were just as common as the hordes of flies in the August heat. The house looked as if a hurricane had blown through the rooms in the wake of desperate thieves’ search for cash or easily sold goods. Everything had been turned insideout, randomly but efficiently, with no attempt to cover their tracks. Drawers had been yanked out, cupboard doors ripped off, mattresses pulled off the beds, the kitchen cupboards emptied roughly onto the floor, clothes, CDs, books, knick-knacks and pictures strewn all over the floors. The same chaos reigned upstairs. Don Alfonzo was taking it calmly, but I could see the pallor and exhaustion under his fragile, old-man’s skin. Fortunately he had Doña Carmen. Other women would probably have wrung their hands, sighed and wailed, but she was of the generation that had been through a bit of everything. She was already armed with broom, bucket and cloth, and stood waiting impatiently for the police to leave so that she could get going. She had called in reinforcements from the neighbour, whose two sturdy daughters in pink smocks stood behind her, at the ready with vacuum cleaners, a tiny platoon of combat soldiers waiting for their sergeant’s order to launch a clearing-up offensive. Don Alfonzo had always had a talent for getting things done for him. I was just relieved that he hadn’t come to any harm.

One of the officers stayed by the door. Like the women, he scrutinised my battered face, but Don Alfonzo had simply told them that I was his son-in-law and I was staying with him for the time being. They were too polite to ask, but they probably recognised me from countless television features about the incident. The police stared discreetly, the women openly.

“We’re off now, Don Alfonzo,” said the officer by the door. “An
inspector will be along later, but the case seems clear-cut. They got in by forcing open the veranda door. So presumably it’s just another burglary.”

He handed Don Alfonzo a form.

“Here’s a copy of our preliminary report. For your insurance. You’d better start trying to see if anything’s missing.”

When the police had gone, we could see that Doña Carmen and her two cohorts were itching to get started on putting the señor’s house back into shape. Don Alfonzo fetched a beer and a cola from the fridge and headed towards the terrace.

“I’d rather have a beer,” I said.

He glanced at me, but didn’t say anything. Instead he put the red and white can back in the fridge and took out another beer.

We sat under the parasol. I was sweating in the oppressive heat, but Don Alfonzo in his white, short-sleeved polo shirt and light, summer trousers was his usual serene and cool self, appearing untroubled by the heat. The weak, pale-green, cold Aguila beer tasted bitter and refreshing and surprisingly different. It was my first beer for eight years and the taste was more singular than actually pleasant, like it had been when I first drank beer at a young age. I had got used to the sugary taste of cola. I downed half the bottle in one go and could feel the effect almost immediately. I liked it, yet at the same time I despised myself for my weakness. I pushed my thoughts from my mind and told Don Alfonzo about the last few days. I left nothing out, admitting that I didn’t know what I had told the three heavies, but it was obvious that I had mentioned his name and told them about the suitcase.

“Where on earth could they have heard about the existence of the suitcase, anyway?” I concluded.

He emptied the last of his beer and fetched two more.

“Who knows about it?” he asked.

“You, Oscar, Gloria …” I said and stopped short at the thought.

But he carried on regardless, in his subdued voice that made me keep my wits about me.

“You’re fooling yourself, Pedro. I’ve known of its existence for years. Even before you asked me to look after it.”

“Impossible,” I said.

His eyes held mine.

“Drunks have few secrets,” he said.

I felt myself blush, like an adolescent boy caught looking at the schoolmistress’s breasts. He was right. I could recall boisterous conversations in the small hours, me bragging about my well-hidden suitcase, my life insurance. What I had never told anyone was that it was my private diary, that I considered it to be a Pandora’s box, that once I opened it, it could never be closed again, and all its secrets would escape. That it was part of my superstition, my atheist’s shrine, which couldn’t be explained rationally. It was my mystical fifth dimension in a godless world. A talisman which worked like a rabbit’s foot in my pocket.

I remembered that Gloria had seemed astonished when she heard that I had hidden some of my photographs. So she couldn’t have known of its existence earlier, could she? Had Oscar? Oscar and I had spent so much time together that it would stand to reason I had talked to him about it at some point when drunk. But sitting there in the scented, scorching garden it struck me that I hadn’t done that at all. I had bragged to strangers, especially women I wanted to get into bed, but I had never bragged to Gloria and Oscar. We knew each other too well. We couldn’t pretend. We wouldn’t pretend. We didn’t have any secrets from one another, or so we thought, and therefore they were the very people from whom I had kept a secret. But not from Don Alfonzo – unless he had heard about it somewhere else. Unless it was because I had been under surveillance.

“Was I kept under surveillance in the old days?” I asked.

He looked at me with his wise, melancholy eyes. He hated disclosing secrets, even today.

“We kept all potential risks under surveillance.”

“Was I one?”

“You were left-wing and mixed with left-wing elements.”

“Elements?”

“Elements is a better word than others that were used.”

It suddenly dawned on me.

“You checked me out when Amelia and I got serious?”

“I did what any responsible father would do with regard to his only child.”

“And that was?”

“To take a thorough look at my future son-in-law.”

“Not a very pretty sight at the time.”

He smiled again and surprised me by placing his dry, delicate hand on top of mine.

“Pedro. Sometimes in my greenhouse I see an orchid that looks like a straggly weed, but underneath I can see the beginnings of a flower, perhaps not of extravagant beauty, but still with a strength which I, with love and care, can nurture.”

“Yes, yes, that’s all very well, father-in-law,” I said. I never used the term.

“You turned out to be a good son-in-law.”

“And you gave me a going-over with a fine-tooth comb and heard about what I’d said, among other things, about my suitcase. You found that although I might be a drunk, I was neither communist nor poor.”

“I found that ultimately you were suitable for Amelia.”

“And if you hadn’t?”

Now he laughed out loud.

“Then my love-struck, headstrong daughter would have taken you anyway. Even then the old days were long over.”

“Yes. The old days are gone,” I said.

We sat in silence with our memories. There was nothing to say. We had said it a hundred times before. It all came rushing back.

“Did they get it? The suitcase?” I said instead.

“No. They didn’t get it.”

“Where is it? Where are my photographs?”

“We’ll get back to that,” he said.

The vacuum cleaners started up inside the house and we could hear rattling and splashing, clinking and clattering as the three women cleared up and threw out and put things away. Doña Carmen’s high-pitched voice barked orders at the two young girls and we could picture them jumping-to. Pleasant and yet nerve-jangling domesticity.

“It keeps coming back to the Minister,” I said. “It’s not the Basques. I’m convinced of that. So who is it? And why? The Minister? The photographs have been printed. The photographs of him and the Italian woman are in the hands of editors all over the world. So why is he still after me? And I’d reckoned on doing a deal with him. So why should he order a break-in at my home? And kill my wife and child? It doesn’t make sense, and yet …”

I stopped short. A shadow had passed over the old man’s face when I had mentioned his daughter and grandchild, and I felt the familiar, acute grief jabbing at my heart too. The deep sense of loss that was unbearable, more physically painful than all my bruises.

“Revenge, maybe,” said Don Alfonzo. “Maybe a case of good old revenge taken by a proud Latin man whose honour you have tarnished.”

I couldn’t help smiling at his old-fashioned words.

“Don Alfonzo. Spain is a modern nation. The old days are gone, you said so yourself. It’s not Sicily after all.”

“Pedro. There is still a great deal of the Sicilian or the Moor in the Spanish male’s psyche. And this man has the means. If they can send
out clandestine groups to execute Basque terrorists, then they can also take revenge on a foreign photographer who has insulted a señor’s personal honour, wrecked his home life, damaged the government and degraded Spain.”

“Is that what it is? Is that what you’ve found out over the last couple of days?”

“No. That was my starting point. I’m an old man from a vanished era as you say, so to me it also made moral sense. I wanted to understand the incentive even though I condemn it. Perhaps I was a good investigator in the Caudillo’s days because I always tried to understand the offender’s incentive, his motives, and by thinking like them I often succeeded in thwarting plots against the security of the State.”

“So you don’t think it’s that?”

“I know it isn’t.”

“Then what is it?”

“The terrorist was right when he said that the answer is to be found in one of your photographs. Let me put it a different way. We have asked the wrong questions because we have focused our attention on the present instead of the past. Because our shared distress is here in the present, we have assumed that the cause is to be found in life as it is now, but is that the case?”

“I’ve no idea what it’s about,” I said, and lit yet another cigarette.

“I don’t know either, but every investigation is a matter of elimination – in order, if one is lucky and resourceful, to reach the truth of the matter. You have eliminated the Basque terrorists. I have eliminated the government, the State.”

“Then we’re back to square one?” I asked despondently.

“On the contrary. We’ve come an incredibly long way in a very short time.”

“So what now?”

He got up and went into the house and came back with a blue ticket
to the Las Ventas bullring for the following Sunday. He brought a cola for me and a soft drink for himself. I would rather have had a beer, but I had too much respect for him to say anything. Or perhaps it was because I saw Amelia reflected in his eyes. I looked at the ticket. It was an ordinary
corrida
. The names of the
cuadrilla
were unfamiliar. In my youthful infatuation with Hemingway and the dream of Spain, I had once been an aficionado and knew the bulls and the bullfighters but for many years now the game with death in the afternoon sun had left me cold. Amelia, like the majority of well-educated Spaniards, found the whole business archaic, repulsive and barbaric, but there were large sums of money involved and it was still mostly Spaniards who filled the arena during the season.

“During the third bull the seat next to you will be taken by a man of your age. He’ll be carrying the
El Pais
Sunday supplement. Listen to what he has to say,” Don Alfonzo said.

“Who is he?”

“Let’s say that he works for the State. Let’s say that he was once my apprentice. Let’s say he has some information that only he can tell you. Let’s say that he can take us a step forward on the long path of elimination.”

“Why so furtive?”

“Because he is bound by his professional pledge of silence. He’s settling a debt that has been on the books accumulating interest for some years. He has access to the archives, but this particular archive doesn’t formally exist. The new democracy declared publicly that it should be shredded, but it wasn’t, it was just locked away from all but a select few. It’s an archive like your suitcase. It contains stories and photographs from the past, and there are many people who don’t want it opened because they fear what it would bring to light.”

“Why?”

“The past has a habit of catching up with people when it’s most
unwelcome, when what has been and gone looks incomprehensible and meaningless in the modern world. Because what once made sense doesn’t necessarily make the same sense today. When we have enough distance from the last 50 years, there’s an archive that can shed light on Spain’s turbulent history. The secret agreements that Franco entered into with the USA in the name of anti-communism. He was guaranteed survival, whereas Hitler and Mussolini fell, and America got its military bases and a southern bulwark against Bolshevism. The dirty war against those people who would overthrow the state. The King’s role in the attempted coup of 1981. The military’s innermost thoughts when the Caudillo passed away. Portraits of people who have visited our country over the years and stayed here.”

He was a cryptic old man, but it was in his blood. All those years in the dark corridors of the secret service had destroyed his ability to be straightforward about anything. Information was like a pension. You must use the funds sparingly and not all at once, in case the good Lord should let you live on for years. It was not to be scattered freely, but piece by piece. Information was not for common ownership, but for an inner circle that survived by exchanging secrets. That was how he saw it and nothing would change his mind. He had spent too many years in a war on an invisible front where secrets existed for others to seek to uncover and then hide again.