At Close Quarters (3 page)

‘So you own the house on the corner?’ she asked, as if the rest of the story was barely interesting.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s very pretty. I’ve often noticed the plants.’

‘The plants, yes. I have some free time and I find it relaxing to look after them. It’s not hard. Do you like plants?’

‘I do. But here in the flat, you know, I have no room. A few flowerpots on the terrace …’

‘If you like, you can drop by the house one day. I can give you a few seeds, perhaps some cuttings,’ he dared to suggest.

‘That’s very kind,’ she said, without suggesting she would take him up on the offer. ‘And thanks for the bracelet. Not everyone would have taken the trouble to give it back.’

‘Oh, no problem. On the contrary,’ he replied, surprised at how easy it all felt, how quickly he was loosening up.

‘The clasp is ruined,’ she suddenly said, putting the bracelet for a moment over her left wrist. ‘But if I change it, I’m sure …’

‘May I?’ he interrupted her, taking a look at the jewel and regretting not having thought of it before. ‘It’s very easy, actually; you just need to tighten up one of the links. If you like, I …’ he was about to say he could take it home and bring it back in a few minutes but she interrupted him, pointing to her flat.

‘Could you do it now?’

‘Yes, if you have a small pliers.’

‘Come on up,’ she said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘And I can make you some coffee to thank you. If you’re not in a hurry, that is.’

‘Work can wait.’

They took the lift to the second floor. It was a recently built flat, like everything else in that neighbourhood, medium-sized
and nice-looking, though Samuel got the impression that it was not fully decorated yet, that there was room on the walls awaiting the right painting, empty surfaces on the furniture lacking picture frames or books, pegs in the coat rack at the entrance without any clothes on them. It suddenly occurred to him that the emptiness was due to an absence of masculine objects. On a table he saw a framed photograph in which a man smiled next to her and the children, but he looked over fifty, and his attitude did not seem that of a partner but rather of a relative.

Marina took her son out of the stroller and put him in a playpen. From there the child, unconcerned at his mother’s absence, observed with curiosity Samuel’s not entirely convincing smiles. She presently came back with a toolbox.

‘He’s very calm,’ said Samuel.

‘Yes, he gets on well with everybody.’

As he straightened the open, twisted link, the smell of freshly made coffee wafted in from the kitchen. He had fixed the bracelet by the time she returned with a tray.

‘We’re having coffee and I don’t even know your name,’ she said. When she smiled, her upper lip rose almost excessively, up to the edge of the gums, and her cheeks stretched out slightly.

‘I’m Samuel.’

‘I’m …’

‘Marina,’ he interrupted, pointing to the small plaque of the bracelet.

‘Of course. Now we’re on a first-name basis. It’ll be easier.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Earlier you said work could wait. What’s work?’ she asked.

‘A small company that collects paper for recycling,’ he replied vaguely, as he suspected she wouldn’t be interested in that kind of subject. He would have preferred to hear about her, her children, the school bus the elder one took every morning, or for her to make a comment that explained why he had never seen a man by her side.

‘I don’t know a lot about that. But it sounds like environmentalism.’

‘It is too. But if it didn’t make any money …’ he trailed off. ‘I don’t think environmentalism would be reason enough to do it. Anyway, it’s simple: we leave some large boxes in offices, schools, colleges, printers’ offices and so on. Then, when they’re full of scrap paper we come round to empty them and we sell the
contents
to a processing plant. It’s a small business, with an office, three staff and a couple of vans.’

‘Is much paper thrown away?’

‘You wouldn’t believe how much.’

‘And you’re the boss?’

‘The owner,’ he gently corrected her.

‘I remember seeing those boxes you mention somewhere, but I never paused to think who was behind all that.’

‘Now you know. We’re behind it.’

‘I think I’ll look at them differently from now on.’

Her manners were a little flirtatious, but casually so, and he didn’t feel uncomfortable. He was shy, but her way of asking question after question, of showing an interest in things she didn’t know, led him to believe she was not aware of his shyness, or that, if she was, she didn’t mind. Marina’s confidence did not highlight his own deficiency in that department.

Often, when he found himself at a party in front of extroverted, excited, radiant women, who attracted everyone’s attention with their wit and outgoingness, he felt suspicious, almost afraid of their expansiveness, and strangely vulnerable, as though he were out in the rain in spite of the waterproof ceilings. Perhaps that was why he still lived alone, because he was not skilful or daring enough to approach the kind of woman who might respond to a gesture from him, and he himself had not responded to those who approached him with too much familiarity, on occasion even with boldness. His complicated relationship with the feminine world could not be called a failure, but rather a tepid abstinence, and he knew he was of an age, thirty-six, when one is more risk-averse and finds it harder to deal with rejection. Once, someone had told him he was prematurely aged, but if that were true, he was sure he
had not acquired the defects and funny ways of old people, and he could still boast that his relatives and friends needed him. The fact that Irene had left him, on the other hand, had heightened his natural carefulness, and he now mistrusted any kind of
brashness
in other people’s looks or behaviour. He’d come to believe that being flamboyant is the same as being frivolous, and that vehemence by necessity courts danger – and although he wouldn’t have forbidden anything to others, he preferred to steer clear of both frivolity and danger. He was a calm man, perhaps excessively so, but one at peace with his character, and he was no longer
prepared
to lose this advantage, no matter how disquieting the yearnings of the heart might prove. He lived alone, to be sure, but was far from that point where loneliness turns into anxiety.

During the days that he had spied on Marina from the darkness of his study he had wondered what she might be like. He thought her very attractive, and liked the way she smiled when she said goodbye to her elder son, and how she walked on her way back home. Now, while he downed the last sip of coffee, he thanked chance for making her drop her bracelet, as this gave him the opportunity to get to know her.

‘I think I owe you a coffee. Drop by the house if you like. Anytime,’ he said, standing up. And thinking his invitation a bit too vague, he added: ‘Weekends I’m usually in.’

‘All right. I will,’ she said.

He stooped slightly to touch the child’s head, but the boy barely looked at him, engrossed as he was in an electronic device which emitted strangely high-pitched animal noises, as if it were a transmitter receiving calls from animals that were about to be put down in a slaughterhouse. Samuel said goodbye. As he walked back home to get the car and drive off to work, he went over the encounter. He seemed to have taken a step in the right direction, and one with enough momentum. It had all started well, slowly, and at the right moment. He hadn’t lost the sense of calm that made him feel comfortable, and nor had she suggested that, in order to seduce her, he had to turn into an adventurer overflowing
with anecdotes and wit who is also ready to run physical and
emotional
risks.

From an early age, Samuel had lived among old paper. His father amassed and sold cardboard in a plot in an alleyway near the city centre, where bales of it were piled until a truck came round to pick them up. His father did not actually collect the material in the street; those who needed the money did that at night,
rummaging
through rubbish bins and bringing their finds round in the morning. These were weighed on large, dark scales, and his father would pay instantly, with scrupulous accuracy, neither haggling nor bargaining. Samuel remembered some of the people who brought round small quantities of material: old timers who had accumulated newspapers for a month; children who collected cardboard and other materials – his father also bought copper, bulb holders, bottles – and got a few coins for the cinema;
shopkeepers
who kept packing materials and paid their staff a short holiday by selling them at the end of the year.

As with any activity that deals with waste, it was a bit of a dirty job, and not very lucrative at that, given the effort, the hours and the vast storage space required; but Samuel’s father, a world-weary, premature widower, didn’t know any other trade, and at least he earned enough for Samuel and his two brothers to live relatively well.

The biggest downside was the complete lack of prestige attached to the job. In a way, Samuel, being the owner’s son, was part of the business world. And the family did not collect paper or cardboard in the street, but limited themselves to purchasing what others brought them. But at school, and later in college, he had always been the son of the rag and bone man. Not that they called him that, but sometimes in a fight, or when a classmate wanted to mock him or insult him, the words would roll out of someone’s mouth: ‘Hey you, rag and bone boy,’ and he had to give in and accept it if the name-caller was older or more aggressive. That label made him weaker, more fragile, pushed him to try and be
kind to everyone, even his nasty classmates, as he was aware that, at the slightest sign of conflict, his opponents had a very effective weapon against him. He often wondered how that had
contributed
to his later shyness, his apathetic way of carrying himself, as though he were always on the defensive.

Now it all seemed forgotten. His father was dead, the old
warehouse
had been sold and knocked down to build flats, and he lived far from the city centre. Yet deep down he was still that spineless, insecure adolescent who tried to hide the family business. In fact, his own business was an extension of his father’s, even if adapted to modern times: nowadays no one took a load of old paper to be weighed on scales for a few coins in return. In any case, that was his occupation and his patrimony, and with that he intended to live in peace and comfort. As he drove, the more obscure details of his work vanished before the intense satisfaction of the half hour he’d spent with Marina.

He hadn’t left the house in uniform for over ten years, because that was what security regulations recommended – and he was
obsessive
about regulations – but also because the military leadership had restricted the presence of army personnel on the streets and among civilians, confining it to the barracks and only allowing uniforms outside on days of patriotic celebrations. In any case, he still found civilian clothes awkward, and would fumble for the pockets of his army jacket while wearing a coat, or would take an extra fraction of a second to recognise himself in the mirror of the vestibule without his greenish clothes on, or would step in a puddle on the pavement shod in moccasins and, only when the cold water soaked his foot, realise that he was not wearing the army boots he’d always liked so much, from the first time he put them on and felt the firm hold on his heel, making him walk more energetically and emphasising the strength of his legs. But today was an exception, and he was wearing a uniform because the importance of his meeting warranted it.

How he loved his job! To be an officer! An officer among
civilians
! Whenever he walked into a bank to withdraw cash, or into a shop to buy anything, his uniform turned him into the centre of attention and gave rise to admiration or negative responses, but never indifference. He was treated with courtesy and respect, too, of course, especially since the disappearance of the last residual Francoist cliques – fallen from favour even within the barracks – who had thought the army should take the place of the legislature,
because they didn’t accept that the first obligation of a soldier is not to write laws, or to seek supporters, or to indoctrinate people, but actually to obey the law as it stands.

Yet neither public esteem nor public rejection altered his conduct. Just as the former didn’t reassure him the latter didn’t alarm him; if anything, both tickled his pride. Pride, he knew, was his weakness and his obsession. He was positive that, if there was a cardinal virtue in a military man, it wasn’t courage,
strategic
intelligence, ambition or equitableness, but pride, and that all other qualities depended on it. He took pride in his name and surname, Camilo Olmedo, and in representing a lineage of
soldiers
that harked back to the first Carlist war; pride in his medals and unblemished professional record; pride in the fact that no one would be able to name a single country where Spanish troops had been deployed in recent years and where he hadn’t been present. And so he didn’t mean to do without pride; he would just validate it by doing his job well. Besides, that trait of his character had never been an obstacle in the path of his career. On the one hand, the sovereign peacefulness with which he embodied it separated him from boastful types, like Bramante, who mistook conceitedness for pride, and were constantly bragging about their muscles and courage; on the other, pride had helped him at difficult moments to alleviate feelings of insecurity such as those experienced by Ucha – to name only two of the colleagues whose criticisms he’d have to deal with over the next few hours.

He put on the peaked cap and looked in the mirror. Not bad: he was still young enough not to feel crushed under its weight. The peak shaded his eyes, but did not extinguish the two hard sparks, clean and devoid of malice, of his pupils. His thin lips and clenched jaw made him look more serious than he really was, and a large chin which refused to retreat bolstered the impression of inflexibility. He turned his head slightly to observe his profile and saw a calm, elegant man who still wondered how it was possible that three square metres of green cloth, a dozen golden buttons, some two-toned ribbons and tin stars wrapped and dotted around
his body had the power to predispose him to being punctual, daring and good at his job. Irrespective of his decision in a few weeks’ time – whether to continue on active service or ask to pass to the reserve – he would still wear his uniform one last time, even if he wouldn’t notice, as he would be dead. He had stipulated in his will that he wanted to be dressed in his uniform at the moment of entering into the eternity of nothingness, and he knew his
daughter
would carry out his wishes.

He made sure all the documents pertaining to the report were in his briefcase. Then he put the small Star in the holster under his armpit and buttoned up his jacket. He always carried a gun. Although he had no intention of using it, it gave him a feeling of security and confidence, because even if a gun is not fired it could always well be.

Carrying a gun had become a habit during the three months he’d been stationed in Afghanistan, as part of NATO, in a
peacekeeping
mission that also worked towards the disarmament of extremist groups linked with Taliban guerrillas. Back there, a pistol on one’s hip was as necessary and natural as the boots, cap or trousers. And once in the habit of carrying a gun for protection, he felt more vulnerable without it than someone who’d never held one. Over the last few years, the Mediterranean coast had become the scene of terrorist attacks, and although he knew it was unlikely that someone dressed in trainers, jeans and a hoodie might attack him at close quarters, putting a bullet in the back of his head, he could not forget that his name had appeared on a list of
terrorists
’ targets after an interview he’d given some years previously, on his return from the Balkans. If he were the victim of an attack, it would probably involve explosives, and his gun would be useless, but neither did he forget that a colleague from the academy had been riddled with bullets in the garage of his house as he was parking his car, and that, perhaps he would have been able to defend himself if he’d had a gun.

His time in Afghanistan, his discipline, and his rigorous and efficient compliance with procedure had earned him a promotion
to major, and on returning home he enjoyed a solid prestige both among the rank and file and his superiors. In Madrid they had praised his firmness when dismantling installations, disarming guerrilla groups without humiliating them, and restructuring his own units. His reputation as a courageous, intelligent soldier had influenced his superiors’ decision to commission from him a report on the advisability and difficulty of closing down the San Marcial base. Abolishing obligatory military service, turning the army into a professional institution and introducing new technology had rendered obsolete the old idea of efficient, mighty armed forces. Squadrons, companies and battalions were no longer
discussed
so much as warfare technology. A country’s defence budget could no longer be wasted on dressing, feeding, housing,
disciplining
and instructing a host of recruits by making them do archaic exercises, more aesthetic than tactical, when they would hardly get the chance to engage in hand-to-hand combat. By necessity, the modern army based its power of deterrence on technology, not on the number of its troops; the function of the latter was a thing of the past, just as the cavalry had superseded the infantry and motored vehicles had superseded the cavalry.

He had been among the first to understand and accept that premise, often disagreeing with nostalgic colleagues from the old school, which was already in decline. Those fanciful, outdated ideas about the honour of old military families; the allegiance to a crown or an empire; the clicking of spurs on the marble floor of palaces; the swords forming arches outside a church when a soldier was united in holy matrimony; hierarchy and words of honour; recruits who never lie, even when they keep silent – that was all very well in films and novels which, indeed, he found moving as much as the next guy, but they had no place in the third millennium.

‘All right, all right,’ he had half-conceded in more than one argument with his colleagues. ‘A laser-guided bomb will never confer on the person who releases it the same prestige earned by a soldier who’s always right on target with his rifle; the clunky
clumsiness of a tank unit on the move will never become as
legendary
or as romantic as a cavalry charge; the general who relies on a satellite for a plan of attack will never attain the glory of the
old-time
leaders; a lieutenant equipped with GPS and a night visor will never look as elegant as an imperial cadet with his sabre and tall polished boots … But we’ll have to give up all those points of aesthetics if we want to be more efficient. It’s not the beauty of a regiment that wins wars,’ he concluded.

The report that he’d written in accordance with those
convictions
left no option but to close down the base in San Marcial. The city was not in a strategic location. Given that there was an airfield and a naval base a hundred kilometres to the south, and that a branch of the General Headquarters of the Third Military Region was situated a hundred kilometres to the north, its maintenance was superfluous as well as costly. The vast land it occupied on the outskirts of town would be very valuable on the real estate market, and its sale would bring considerable revenues to the coffers of the Ministry of Defence. It was neither strategically nor economically viable to preserve the place. It had to be closed down, and that was what he had written, citing numbers and arguments, for the eyes of his superiors in Madrid, who would ultimately take the decision.

The hardest problem would be to relocate the staff, who would be professionally affected and perhaps even personally offended by the closure. Olmedo knew all too well that, faced with an unpleasant demand, the first impulse of an official is to oppose it and lodge a complaint with the Administration that pays him; but although army men were no different, their particular sense of obedience and discipline would trump their reservations. The majority, used to transfers, would accept this one without putting up much resistance. And some would even benefit from it, as it would allow them to reach their desired destination.

But a certain sector was adamant against the closure. In the survey he had conducted, which was included in the report, two officers had strongly rejected it: Captain Bramante and Captain
Ucha. The old colonel, too, had voiced his opposition, even if less radically, and almost for sentimental reasons. Colonel Castroviejo regarded the barracks as his own creation and often referred to it as ‘my home’. He’d kept it running and improved it during the four decades he’d served there, and he expected that they would reward his service with the courtesy of postponing the final liquidation. He would probably be more painfully affected than anyone else if the base was closed down.

At times Olmedo suspected that the decision had already been taken in Madrid, and that his report was only a sheaf of papers they would barely read, a way to keep up appearances, to comply with administrative procedures while the certainty of the closure settled among the officers. By commissioning a report they designated a scapegoat. Everyone would see Olmedo as the one whose hand had pressed the button. In spite of his discretion, news of the commission had begun to spread a little after his return from Afghanistan, and soon he started feeling the hostility of those who were against change. He’d pretended not to notice the reproachful looks, and once he even heard someone say they wished he’d been blown up by one of those bombs the Taliban planted by the side of the road and detonated at the passage of military vehicles.

But he hadn’t been blown up, and this morning, in one hour and a half from now, he would conduct the last part of his job: the meeting with the bosses and officers where he would present the final conclusions of his analysis. Hence the uniform, for it would lend its presentation greater solemnity and authority.

Before going to the headquarters he had to drop by his
daughter’s
house, to get her to sign some bank documents, and Marina didn’t mind seeing him dressed like that. One the contrary, she always said that in uniform he looked younger, more handsome, and that it reminded her of when she was a child.

He went down to the garage, opened the gate with the remote control and started the car. Going out into the street as carefully as always, he saw Rosco, the road sweeper, cleaning the street with the large wire brush he always used. The effort showed in his face.

‘Good morning, Rosco,’ said Olmedo through the window.

‘Morning.’

‘Lots of work, right?’

‘Lots. These plane trees are always making a mess. In autumn, it’s the leaves. In spring, it’s the seed fluff blowing everywhere and clogging the drains. Too much work. Should cut them down.’

‘But the shade is nice,’ he said as he reached the street.

The clock in the car read half past nine. He had more than enough time – the meeting was not supposed to start until eleven, after the officers had given instructions for the daily routines. Fifteen minutes later he parked by his daughter’s building and went upstairs.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ said Marina with the smile that had returned to her face in the last few months, since she’d started seeing Samuel. She’d already taken her elder child to the bus stop, and the little one, in his playpen, was chewing on a biscuit as he watched cartoons on the TV. ‘Coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

When she returned with a tray he’d already laid the
application
to change the titleholder of an investment fund on the table. Two hundred thousand euros, while not a fortune that would allow anyone to retire, was a considerable sum nonetheless, which needed looking after and might tempt greedy people. Before leaving for Afghanistan he’d put everything under both their names, so that if anything should happen to him, Marina could have direct access to the money without paying any inheritance tax. Back then, she was still married to Jaime, and that piece of information was in the files at the bank and might pose a problem. He hadn’t taken action in the last year, but now that Marina was getting divorced he needed to become the sole titleholder once again. For a few months at least only he would have access to that fund.

‘Do you think it’s necessary?’ she asked, sitting beside him.