“Well, that depends. What are you looking for?”
“The trips to Galicia. His administrator said he came here regularly. They have to be in his calendar.”
“Every two months,” she answered, clearly expecting an angry reaction.
He liked Mei and knew she liked him. And she’d adored álvaro. Now that his initial anger and astonishment had subsided, he realized that in her place he also would have done anything álvaro asked. He was sure she was struggling, but he was still too resentful to admit he might eventually forgive her. He kept his voice neutral. “I don’t see anything in his calendar about that.”
“They’re listed as meetings with The Hero’s Works.”
The Hero’s Works was one of the agency’s principal clients. Manuel couldn’t remember exactly what they did. He had the vague idea it was something to do with chemistry, but the name was so bizarre that it had stuck in his memory. álvaro’s calendar confirmed that for the last few years, meetings with The Hero’s Works had been blocked out for two or three days every other month.
“So he took advantage of those meetings to travel?”
“Manuel, The Hero’s Works was álvaro’s. Its principal activity was processing, marketing, and exporting wine.”
“In other words . . . ?”
“He owned it.”
Manuel’s face burned with humiliation. The tears he had wanted to shed boiled away and disappeared.
The shower stall was so narrow he could hardly move. The thick plastic shower curtain with the pattern of squares was marked by a streak of mold along the bottom like a soiled hem. Manuel overcame his disgust long enough to wet it and push it against the wall, determined to counter its intrusive inertia and make it stick there to keep it away from his body. A powerful jet of water erupted from the showerhead and obliged him to contort himself to get completely wet. The stream was so forceful it battered his head, but he opened the tap all the way, shut his eyes, and let the hot water wash over his exhausted limbs. It hammered his shoulder like an invisible fist, a sensation that felt oddly comforting. His shoulders, hands, and legs throbbed painfully, and a constant burning sensation lurked behind his eyes and in his lower back.
He felt himself getting sick, and he knew only sheer rage kept him going. He felt it boiling slowly inside, distilling itself into bitterness as if through a fragile glass retort that reduced it to drops of pure poison destined to become the only food for his soul.
Rage was necessary. He needed it to keep him from fleeing, to resist the impulse to get in the car and just leave behind him this place and its lies, all the pain, and the idiotic pact he’d made with the deactivated officer who despised him and everything he represented.
The rest of the room was adequate enough. The towels and sheets were clean; the furnishings were spartan and old-fashioned; the wooden floorboards creaked in some places. One of the walls featured a door with a dead bolt that clearly led to the room next door and hinted of a justification for the cramped single iron-framed bed he found hateful. The overly soft mattress was so thin the boards of the bed frame beneath were visible in its contours. It was entirely too reminiscent of his childhood bed in his old aunt’s house, a place of sleeplessness and despair.
Just now it was covered by plastic bags of purchases he’d made before visiting police headquarters. Two double-breasted jackets; three pairs of pants; half a dozen each of shirts, socks, and underwear. He chose what to wear today and stowed the rest in the closet. He left on the nightstand the book he’d purchased at the shopping center. Normally he was a firm supporter of independent bookshops, but today he didn’t want to take a chance on being recognized by a clerk—he was in no mood to make small talk. He’d opted for the friendly smile of a teenager more likely to recognize someone from Dancing with the Stars. Disappointed with the selection and feeling too distracted for a novel or an essay, he’d gone through the shelves. In a fit of annoyance, he chose a book he was surprised to find there. He’d already read it, but as often happened when he was deep in his writing phase, it seemed a good idea to revisit something familiar. It was a special edition of works by Edgar Allan Poe that included The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Raven.
He’d bought something else as well. He’d placed it mechanically on the dark surface of the desk, the most logical place. He’d avoided looking at it as he arranged the garments and decided what to wear.
Two packets of paper and a package of ballpoint pens. That was the title he’d given one of his earliest articles, the only time he’d ever written about the process of literary creation.
Shortly after the publication of his first novel, as sales were approaching half a million copies, editors of a famous literary magazine persuaded him to describe his process, to evoke the laboratory of his alchemy and reveal his magic. Two packets of paper and a package of ballpoint pens—that’s how he’d summed up everything a writer needed in order to create a novel. He’d said it because he believed it, because he’d lived it. He knew that writing is driven by human necessity and erupts from the poverty of the soul, from an interior hunger and cold that can be tempered by writing, if only for a time. The criticism from his literary colleagues had been brutal. Who was this new arrival to offer them advice, this wannabe, this performing monkey with a typewriter? Wasn’t the very number of copies sold the irrefutable proof he was nothing but a producer of run-of-the-mill popular trash?
Many books and interviews later he’d perfected his technique with interviewers. He received them in a room with walls covered with bookshelves, a plate-glass table, light slanting through a transom window, white orchids, and silence. He wrapped his calling in a halo of revolting artificiality and extolled the worst of vices as aids to creativity: alcohol and drugs, violence, and dabbling in various abhorrent behaviors.
The truth was that he believed in the exultation of loneliness, inspiration born of misfortune, the pride of the scorned, and motivation encouraged by the sneers of others. All were powerful motivators and fonts of creativity. He also believed they were effective only if concealed. Those subterranean rivers of cool water or burning lava swept away everything within the writer. Revealing them would be as obscene to him as claiming that a well-lit office, a computer, or a PhD in literary criticism were sufficient in themselves to make anyone a writer.
He had to acknowledge that he’d always occupied the best room of their home and had been pampered like a sultan. He had a beautiful desk, excellent light, and orchids most of the time. And álvaro’s silent presence, reading while Manuel worked at his desk, had been his reassurance, the symbol of ideal perfection and happiness that sometimes distracted him and robbed him of inspiration when he looked up and took in their surroundings. But he also knew as well that those things were superficial.
As he lost himself in the blank whiteness of the writing paper, he wondered when he’d stopped paying attention. When had he forgotten that writing was engendered by pure misery, pain beyond words, and secrets dying inside? The essence of the magic of creation was suggesting them without ever revealing them, never allowing the nakedness of the soul to become a pornography of emotions.
He went to the desk in his unadorned room, feeling the warmth from the shower rapidly dissipating. The towel about him was becoming cool to the touch. He reached out and ran his fingertips across the silky surface of the wrapping of the packages of writing paper. Two packets of paper and a package of ballpoint pens, no more.