“It’s finished for me,” he said abruptly, heading for the driver’s door and making it clear that he wasn’t going to allow Nogueira to drive.
When the lieutenant was buckled into the passenger seat, Manuel started the car and drove out onto the highway.
Nogueira didn’t shout, but he did raise his voice. “I told you that if we started nosing around in the past of the Mu?iz de Dávilas, lots of shit might come to light.”
In the rearview mirror Manuel saw Café curled up and quivering.
“I accepted that. What I don’t understand is the reason for this insane delight of yours. You can hardly hide your pleasure.”
“Insane?” Nogueira replied, indignant. “Listen! I’ve been as diplomatic as I know how to be. I brought you all this way and gave you a drink to deliver the news as gently as I could.”
“You, diplomatic?” Manuel said bitterly. “That’s a laugh!”
“Maybe you’d have liked it better if I told you in the roadhouse parking lot why your husband didn’t fuck the girl?”
“It would have seemed less like gloating than bringing me all the way out here to flaunt your two possibilities: either he was a drug addict or he went off with that . . . Don’t fuck with me! You’re enjoying this.”
Nogueira remained silent and didn’t say another word until Manuel pulled up to the policeman’s old BMW in the now unlit parking lot of the inn. When he did speak it was with the same icy calm as in their first encounters. “You should go back to As Grileiras. Talk to Herminia. She’s a gold mine of information, more than she knows. And it’d be terrific if you could take a look at álvaro’s room in the manor house. See what you can turn up: documents, drugs, receipts, restaurant bills, anything that can give us a clue about what he did, with who, and why.”
The officer got out. Before closing the door he leaned back in. “You’re right about some things. Maybe I do take an insane pleasure in the disgrace of those sons of bitches. But you don’t know everything. Just remember that. Maybe I’m not your friend—but I’m the closest thing to a friend you’ve got around here.” He closed the door, got into his car, and drove off.
Manuel leaned over the steering wheel in the darkness, feeling ridiculous. Like those times when you know you’re wrong and yet still persist, your face burning in shame and your heart pumping with adrenaline. For the second time that night he said the words that had once been his pride, then his grief, forever true, and now again his disgrace: “He was my husband.”
He looked out at the night with blind eyes, taking in the panorama of interior desolation. He realized at last that the place where he’d been hiding no longer offered any shelter. He’d single-handedly destroyed the redoubt where he’d taken refuge. He was the one who’d rejected the false consolation he’d imagined just hours before, when he’d sworn never to lie anymore. Yet he’d fled from the raw truth like a teenager refusing to see the flaws of his beloved. Is truth true for us only when it shows us what we were expecting to see? When revelation provides relief from the inimical advance of unknowing? And therefore, instead of being balm to our wounds, isn’t the unvarnished truth all the more devastating?
Like a patient Job not expecting an answer to a rhetorical question, he’d asked himself again and again in recent days who álvaro was. Tonight he’d received the answer as well as the implied punishment: He was my husband.
Tears burned his eyes. For the first time he let them flow, silent and so unceasing that they bathed his face, drenched his goatee, and dripped to the floor mat. Always before he’d repressed those tears and proudly refrained from weeping, but now his resources were exhausted.
He felt the gentle nudge of the dog’s nose against his arm. The creature had moved closer, and tiny rear legs scrabbled against his thigh. It pushed into the hollow of his folded arms and finally reached a place that until now had been invaded only by his despair. The dog fully entered the domain of his embrace. Helplessly he held Café tight, feeling the little dog’s heartbeat as he wept into the mutt’s rough fur. He had the impression that the bent edges of the old photo in his jacket were sinking like claws into his chest.
THE RAVEN
He woke suddenly, as if a cable holding him fastened to an anchor in the depths had given way. He rose like Lazarus to a room bathed in melancholy light from the window he’d forgotten to shutter the night before. The funereal white cast of the light was oppressive.
Manuel leaned back against the pillows, his shoulders aching with the miserable morning chill, and his nerves afflicted by an anguish known only by those who wake at dawn. His despairing look at the old iron radiator was rewarded with a hollow clanking as the heat came on. He had no idea what day it was and didn’t really care. He’d felt that same numb indifference every morning since his arrival. Café sprawled asleep at his side, apparently unaffected by the dawn chill that had slunk into his room like an unwelcome guest. The warmth of that little body was perceptible through the thin bedspread and lumpy wool blanket.
Headache and backache. He reached out, located the ibuprofen tablets on the bedside table, and choked two down without water, grateful to feel the pain of the effort. His hands were still cramped from the labor of the previous day, and each move brought sharp new pains in his leaden legs and stiff lower back. Physical suffering distracted him from the deeper pain he sensed drifting upward from the obscurity where it had been anchored. Unbound and unattached, that anguish rose like the ghost of a ship sunk long ago. Within his chest a heavy weight occupied the space where heart and lungs had been. Pain’s monstrous bulk, saturated with secrets of the abyss, pressed against his ribs and obstructed his breathing. He saw now there was nothing he could do. He had opened Pandora’s box, and its contents had dispersed the hope briefly encouraged by Café’s rheumy eyes, the vineyard workers’ trust in him, and the assurances of a prostitute. Hoping beyond hope, he’d imagined that in some remoteness not yet perceived, there might exist an explanation, a justification, a great grand heroic rationale that would explain and excuse the deception practiced on him, that would reveal to him everything had served some greater good.
He leaned forward to pet the dog and perceived the first faint emanation of warmth from the ancient radiator. The chill in the room had raised goose bumps on his naked shoulders. He picked up the phone and a moment later heard Daniel’s cheerful voice on the other end of the line.
“Good morning, Manuel! Ready to labor in the vineyards another day? Or are you planning to spend today in bed like some of the first-time harvesters?”
“I’m calling to let you know that I can’t participate today. Something’s come up I have to deal with, and there’s no way around it. I can’t come.”
He heard the disappointment in Daniel’s faraway voice. “This afternoon the local producers will be delivering everything they harvested during the weekend. It’d be a shame to miss out on the experience.”
The weight of the man’s disappointment induced him to make a half promise he might not be able to keep. “I’ll see if I can come by in late afternoon . . . but I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it.”
Daniel didn’t reply, perhaps because he heard in Manuel’s voice that something of significance was afoot. Manuel’s somber tone was enough to convince him it was something sufficiently weighty that it couldn’t be denied.