Nogueira looked at him in silence for several seconds and then turned his gaze away. “I’ve been sleeping in the baby’s room for the last six years.”
Manuel’s jaw dropped.
“I’ve been sleeping in Antía’s room since she turned two. Every night I have to rearrange the stuffed animals and the heart-shaped pillows and go to bed in her Minnie Mouse sheets.” His voice was resigned. “Or the Disney princess ones.”
Manuel was amazed and then amused. “But that’s . . .”
“Yes, it’s ridiculous. She doesn’t let me change anything there, because it’s our girl’s bedroom, but I’m not allowed back in ours. For years Antía has been sleeping on a cot in our room, and I’ve been in hers. It’s just another of the many ways she takes it out on me. You’ve seen the crap I eat there, right?”
Manuel had.
“She’s starving me to death,” he said with utmost seriousness.
Manuel would have laughed out loud if it hadn’t been for the man’s pathetic tone.
“You’ve seen how she can cook,” Nogueira continued. “Well, for the last six years I’ve had nothing but boiled greens. She fixes all sorts of things for her and the kids, dishes I love. Stews, cakes, and pies.” He sighed. “And I’m not allowed even a sniff.”
“But what you’re saying is . . . It’s your house, isn’t it? So you can eat whatever you want.”
Nogueira denied it. “Everything she buys, everything she cooks, she wraps up in yards and yards of that goddamn plastic food wrap. It’s easier to unwrap a mummy than to get a bite of food in my house. One thing in her favor: my dinner’s always ready when I get home. If you call that crap dinner.”
“Okay, Nogueira, I understand this is a sore spot, but I agree with your wife that you should pay attention to your health. I’ve seen you stuff yourself with enough cholesterol to choke a horse.”
Nogueira grinned. “That’s my revenge.”
“If so, your revenge will be the end of you. I really do think your wife is concerned for your health.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing, Manuel. She couldn’t care less. It’s just that she knows I love to eat and I adore her cooking. It’s one more way for her to torture me.”
“Surely you’re exaggerating.”
“And then there are the girls . . .”
Manuel gave him a grave look.
“I almost can’t believe the way they’ve been treating me since you turned up; but it’s because of you, Manuel. The respect and admiration they have for you makes them see me differently. But over the last six years the tension between Laura and me has affected my relationships with my daughters. Laura has turned them against me.”
Manuel started to protest.
“I’m not saying she fills their heads with nonsense. She never says a thing. But the girls see she doesn’t care for me, so they follow her example. They treat me with the same scorn as their mother. Xulia and I can scarcely stand one another; I can’t remember the last time she gave me a kiss, and we’re always arguing. Sometimes I think her mother spoils her just to get at me. Like that jerk at the table. I can’t stand the sight of him, Manuel, he drives me crazy. Sometimes I look at my wife and see she’s just as exasperated as I am, and if she puts up with him, it’s only because it infuriates me to see him in my place at the table with his nasty stuck-up little face.”
The policeman sighed and lit a cigarette. He smoked it there where he was, perched on the edge of the passenger seat with the car door open despite the night chill, turning to blow each exhalation of smoke into the open air. “What screws me over most of all is the fact that now I’m losing Antía,” he said mournfully. “She’s still a child, but women are like that. One of them senses the hostility felt by another and the rest join in. Even if they don’t know the cause of it.”
“Shit, Nogueira, I don’t know what terrible thing can be wrong, but I’m sure that you can resolve it if you really want to.”
The man had a completely defeated look. “There is no solution.”
“Were you unfaithful?” Manuel asked. “I’m referring to . . .”
“She doesn’t care about that. I already told you she doesn’t love me anymore. Maybe she doesn’t know for sure, but she’s no fool. She’s bound to suspect.”
Manuel considered Nogueira’s comments in silence for a few seconds. “So why do you think she stays? Look, Nogueira, Laura is an amazing woman. She’s clever, and she earns enough money not to have to put up with you if she doesn’t want to. Besides, she’s really good-looking, and she’d have no trouble getting another man.” Manuel didn’t miss the hard look the lieutenant gave him but he continued anyway. “And you’re claiming that she’s not sticking around to preserve your relationship with your daughters. So it seems to me that if she didn’t want to be with you, she’d have been out of there long ago.”
Nogueira glared at him.
“You know everything I’m saying is the simple truth,” Manuel insisted. “And it comes down to the fact that since she hasn’t left you, there must be something left to save.”
“You don’t know her. She hasn’t left me because she intends to make the rest of my life a living hell.”
“Then leave her; put an end to this torture once and for all. Give both of you a chance to be happy, even if it means you have to part.”
Nogueira rejected that with a smile, as if the very idea of separation were unthinkable. “No,” he answered. “Never.”
“But why? Why would anyone deliberately choose to be unhappy for the rest of his life?”
Nogueira threw his cigarette to the pavement, where it rebounded and traced a path of burning ash through the air. He turned to Manuel in a fury. “Because I deserve it,” he shouted. “I deserve it, you hear? Can you understand that? If she tells me to leave, I will, but until then I stay here and take it like a man.”
Manuel didn’t back down. “What did you do?”
Nogueira seized his lapels, and Manuel was sure the man was going to punch him. Their faces were inches apart.
“What did you do?”
Nogueira didn’t hit him. Instead he let go of Manuel’s jacket, put his face in his hands, and broke down. Hoarse, desperate sobs racked his body so violently they must have caused him physical pain. He pawed furiously at his eyes and the tears coursing down his cheeks, as if his grief made him loathe himself. He said something, but between the sobs and the hands muffling his words, Manuel couldn’t make it out.
“What?”
Nogueira said it again, through his tears. “I raped her.”
Manuel couldn’t believe it. “Nogueira, what did you say?” Startled and frightened, he desperately hoped he’d just misheard. Surely his ears were playing tricks on him.
The officer stifled his sobs. He rubbed his eyes angrily and turned so Manuel could see his face and his expression of tormented shame.
“I raped her,” he said distinctly. He leaned slowly forward from the waist as if in an act of contrition. “I forced myself on my wife, Manuel. I deserve to be in daily hell; whatever she wants to do to me, whatever punishment she dreams up for me, it won’t be enough to atone for what I did.”
Manuel couldn’t move. The horror of that confession held him paralyzed and blocked his thoughts, kept him from saying something, anything, and prevented him from reacting. “For the love of God!” he managed to murmur.
In his mind there arose the vivid image of Nogueira’s mother, barely thirty years old, injured and humiliated, begging her son not to tell.
“How could you? With what you’d seen as a child?”