Lime's Photograph (22 page)

“Where’s my suitcase?” was all I said.

“Come. Let’s go into the garden,” he said. “The sun is beginning to die off a little. It’s rather sad for an old man – that yet another day has drawn to a close and there won’t be many left to count.”

He had opened all the windows and ventilation slats in the greenhouse, creating a bit of a breeze, but even so the heat and humidity were more intense than the baking oven outside. The scent of the flowers was sweet, but also rather cloying when mixed with the heavy smell of soil and compost. The spacious greenhouse was stocked with a variety of flowers, all of which were unfamiliar to me, miniature lemon and orange trees which Don Alfonzo cultivated, and in the middle there was a long chest which he used as a potting bench with all the paraphernalia necessary for the meticulous gardener. Don Alfonzo removed buckets and watering cans, trowels, some string and scissors, and then he removed the whole table-top and stood aside. At the bottom, next to a couple of empty buckets and a broken spade, I saw my suitcase, pretty as a picture, its combination lock glinting in the light.

“You’re stronger and your arms are longer. So please help yourself,” said Don Alfonzo.

I reached down and tugged at the solid metal suitcase. It was heavier than I remembered, or else I was still weak after my beating. At any rate my ribs hurt as I pulled it out and carried it over to the veranda. Don Alfonzo asked if I would stay for supper. Doña Carmen and her cohorts would soon have the house back in shape and then she could cook us a meal, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to be alone with my secrets.

“I don’t like it being here any more,” I said instead. “I’ll take it to my bank.”

“As you choose,” he said.

“They might come back.”

“It’s up to you,” he said simply, but I think he was a little disappointed. I realised that he was probably lonely in his quiet, solitary life and perhaps I was the only person he had left. He seemed to be perfectly content on his own, but maybe cultivating beautiful flowers and searching for tangible fragments of memory in the crumbled, forgotten trenches around Madrid was a way of compensating for human company.

I rang for a taxi, threw the suitcase onto the back seat along with a bag of spare clothes and then I got in next to my worldly goods and asked the driver to take me to Madrid. He was a local minicab owner who had driven me before, a stocky little Catalan who smoked black cigarettes as he switched between sports channels on the radio. There was a
supermercado
on the outskirts of the village, where we had often done the shopping for Don Alfonzo. I asked the driver to stop and I bought a bottle of vodka and six colas. I got in again, opened a cola, drank half and poured vodka into the can. The driver looked in the mirror, but he made no comment. What could he say? He knew that I always paid and tipped well, so if I wanted to mix cola and vodka in his taxi it was my own business. I rang the office on my mobile and asked for Oscar, but his secretary told me that he was playing golf, and should have finished with his 18 holes any minute. His club was virtually on the way, so I asked the driver to take me there first. He was rather pleased. It would be a good long trip. The fare meter ticked over merrily while I drank vodka and cola and felt it working on me, and I was disgusted with myself and at the same time didn’t give a damn.

Golf had become a very popular sport over the last ten years and
there were courses everywhere. A new one seemed to be laid out every day. Oscar had elbowed his way into one of the more prestigious clubs in the area, not the very grandest, but near enough, as I had gathered from his boasting. The clubhouse, with restaurant and bar, was an old château attached to a vineyard at the end of an avenue of erect cypress trees. It was almost unbearably white in the late, low sun that threw the first shafts of red across the tawny-coloured tiles on the sloping roof. It had bay windows and spires and was built from greyish-white stone. The outside terrace was crowded with people sitting on yellow wicker chairs at white tables under multicoloured parasols. They were drinking aperitifs after their 18 holes, still wearing their polo shirts, caps and strange, checked trousers, while they discussed bogey, birdie, par and handicap just as they had once discussed share prices and love affairs.

I asked the taxi to wait. My suitcase and bag were safe with him. He had his afternoon newspaper, his radio and cigarettes and promised not to leave the car. Every click of the meter made him happy. I looked for Oscar on the terrace, but couldn’t see him. His mobile was switched off. I remembered him telling me that it was a breach of etiquette to have your phone switched on while playing, so I knew he must still be out on the course, but darkness would fall soon, suddenly and quickly. I asked a waiter where the last holes were and he pointed across the vineyard’s old garden, having first sized up my battered face and inappropriate attire. I drained the cola can and threw it into a rubbish bin. Beyond the far end of the garden there was an impressive view across the course, which was pretty and undulating and strangely verdant in the parched landscape. Its heavily irrigated green made it look fake, as if the lush golf course was an alien construction in central Spain’s arid countryside where the sun scorched everything white. It was a big playground for adults who, in their modern pursuit of thrills, ignored the fact that they were playing on a course that used
the water consumption of a largish village simply to keep the grass succulent.

The flag marking the 18th hole was straight ahead. The first hint of an evening breeze stirred the pennant gently. Oscar came walking along with two other men. They were wearing checked trousers which came down to just below their knees, expensive plain-coloured polo shirts and baseball caps, and each pulled a trolley with a bag of clubs. Oscar refused to use a golf buggy. I liked that. I could see two white golf balls on the closely mown grass of the green, but Oscar stopped and I spotted his ball 20 metres or so out on the fairway.

Oscar took an iron from his bag, went over to the ball and took a couple of practise swings. I had been caddie for him on several occasions when we had been on work trips. I didn’t play, but golf courses are attractive and it was a good way of spending a couple of hours together, so I was familiar with the game and its rules and jargon. Oscar was an aggressive player who attacked the ball with woods and irons as though he were killing a menacing snake with a machete. I didn’t really understand why he was so fascinated by the game, he so often got furious with himself when he sliced the ball and it flew across the grass like a startled hare. He grumbled for days after I had compared him to a destroyer escorting a convoy across the Atlantic during the Second World War, zigzagging back and forth to avoid German submarines.

He was too aggressive this time as well. He tried to chip the ball onto the green with a short, sharp stroke, but he hit it too hard and it dashed past the hole like a mouse chased by a cat, and rolled down through a bunker behind the green before coming to rest not far from me, where I was standing behind a tree watching him. I could hear him swearing. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. I picked up the ball, as he stalked round the green on his long legs and came in among the cypresses. I stepped forward and held the ball out on the palm of my hand.

“Are you looking for this, Oscar?” I asked in English.

“Fuck you, Lime,” he said. “You know you’re not allowed to touch the ball.”

I threw it down at his feet.

“Just take the shot from there,” shouted one of the other players.

Oscar scrutinised me.

“What the hell do you think you look like?” he said.

“I ran into a couple of problems or three.”

“Begun diluting the cola again have we? Well Peter?” he said. He knew me far too well.

“There’s just something I’d like to ask you about,” I said.

“Gloria will kill you.”

“It won’t take up much of your time,” I said.

“You don’t have to make an appointment with me,” he said amiably. “We could always have a drink together, just like the old days.”

“We could indeed,” I answered.

“Gloria will flay us alive,” he said. He turned round, took up his position and, without a practise swing pitched the ball effortlessly in a gentle arc, out onto the green where it came to rest just half a metre from the hole. He gave me a satisfied look, and stomped off to get his putter, basking in the other players’ praise for his fine stroke.

Oscar settled up with his golfing friends, and after some painstaking arithmetic, he signed the scorecard and we went and sat at a table at the edge of the terrace. We had a beautiful view across the golf course, tinted red by the sun as the scorching day finally gave way to the mellow, pleasant evening warmth.

The waiter came across to us and Oscar looked at me quizzically.

“Two gin and tonics,” I said.

“She’ll kill you,” he said.

“It’s my business,” I said.

“OK, Peter. You’re an adult. Who got you into that state?”

I gave him a broad outline of what had happened, and a very brief sketch of my thoughts. I began to calm down and the restlessness in my body vanished as I drank the cool, fizzing drink with its tang of juniper and lemon. It was as if we had never been apart. It was hard to give up drinking; it was very easy to begin again. Oscar listened without too much interruption, other than to commend the efforts of our friends Tómas and his father and to curse the Irishmen.

“I’ve said it before. Stop playing amateur sleuth. Come back to work. Listen to your inner voice. Listen to what Amelia would have said. She would have told you to pull yourself together, live your life and do what you’re good at, taking photographs,” he said when I’d finished.

He was undoubtedly right, but that didn’t make it any easier.

“I miss them terribly, Oscar,” I said.

“They’re not coming back, Peter. I know that sounds brutal, but it’s not meant like that. I’ve got only your best interests at heart. Work your way out of it, my friend. Come back to us. We’re your friends and we miss you.”

“There’s something I’ve got to straighten out first. Let’s just see the summer through.”

“OK. Besides, we’re shutting down soon. It’s too hot and everyone’s away anyway. But we want you back. In good shape. As audacious as usual.”

We sat there. The cicadas were singing and there was a pleasant, noisy chatter going on all around us. The Spanish are a vociferous people, but I liked that.

“Have I ever spoken with you about a suitcase full of Lime’s photographs?” I asked after a while.

“Gloria said something about it the other day. That you had set your best negatives and prints of some of your photographs aside. And that this was both good and not so good. Good because you’ve
saved some fine photographs. Not so good because it weakens her action for damages. She’d intended to milk the insurance company for every last peseta they’ve squirrelled away for a rainy day.”

“Have I ever talked to you about it?” I said.

“You mean have you ever blabbed when pissed in the old days? Is that what you mean?” he said brutally.

“Yes.”

He leant across the table.

“No. I heard about it for the first time the other day. You’ve talked about how you kept a box of old photographs in the loft, but I thought you meant photographs from your childhood. You know, the nostalgic shit we all lug around. But otherwise you’ve been damned orderly with your photographs. It’s always impressed me. Even when your life’s been total chaos, you’ve sorted, selected and catalogued your photographs in that fancy filing cabinet. Why do you ask?”

“About my photographs?”

“Yes, about your photographs.”

“I think that’s where the answer lies.”

“Peter. I don’t think there is an answer. Why torment yourself? Leave well alone. Come back to us. You’ve got many years to look forward to. We can’t bear seeing you so wretched.”

“You’re a good friend, Oscar.”

“Then listen to what I’m saying, damn it!”

“OK. After the summer.”

He looked like he was going to say more, but instead he sat back in his chair. And then, without really knowing where the idea came from, I said:

“You knew the girl in the photograph, didn’t you?”

He looked at me in surprise, but his eyes flickered.

“Which girl?”

“Cut it out, Oscar.”

“I thought I’d seen her before, but I can’t place her. It was 30 years ago”

“Why didn’t you say that you knew her?”

“I wasn’t sure I did.”

“But you do?”

“I think so. At least, she reminds me of someone. But what the hell … all the chicks looked the same in those days. No make-up and hairy armpits. Big mouths, bloody fanatical. That’s just how it was back then, man!”

“It’s still odd though, that we’d known the same woman before we even met each other. Don’t you think?”

“Not really. We might have thought that we revolutionaries were in the majority, but we were really a small band who were always bumping into one another at demonstrations, meetings and god knows what else. We gossiped about each other just like all groups do. It wasn’t exactly completely by chance that you and I met. It would have been more surprising if we hadn’t. Both working for the press. Both regulars at the same bars. Both members of the same international press association in Madrid. What’s so unusual about it?”

“Did you know the man in the photograph?” I asked.

He shook his head and emptied his glass.

“I’ve never seen him before,” he said, and I believed him. There was some truth in what he said. Over the years I had run into lots of people who I had known during the 1970s and who had been part of the revolutionary milieu which cut across all boundaries. Radical students from West Berlin’s Free University, American draft dodgers, writers and other budding young artists who wanted to try their luck in inexpensive Madrid which back then seemed to have it all, just as Prague was the place to be after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Major upheavals always attract the young and adventurous.

“It’s just a weird coincidence, Peter,” he said, and looked at his
watch. He asked if I would come home with him, so we could go out to dinner with Gloria, but I said no and refused a lift into the city. He walked away, exchanging greetings right and left, and I ordered another gin and tonic and drank it before getting the taxi to drive me to the Hotel Inglés in Calle Echégaray, just round the corner from Plaza Santa Ana. Maybe it was strange and masochistic to have chosen a hotel a few steps from the site of the fire, but it was a small family hotel with large rooms and I had often stayed there before I got my own flat. It was unassuming and it was in my neighbourhood, where I felt at home, and where I felt somehow that I had to make a fresh start if I was to prevent the desperate emptiness turning into a lethal depression that would lead to suicide.