The Hermit (10 page)

23

He drives around without picking up anyone and without replying to dispatch. He listens to the radio, and every time he hears the segment – each time in a shorter or slightly revised version – he hears Bernal’s voice instead of the newscaster’s. No one wants an unsolved case.

He parks for half an hour out near the new casino. They’ve blasted the rocks away and levelled the cement, but they still haven’t built beyond one storey. The entire city is talking about the venture. The entire island. In the beginning it was just a project to create a few new jobs. But gradually, as ambitions grew, the casino was viewed as a way to save all of Corralejo, the island, and the Canary Islands, creating stability, growth, and happiness. According to Alphonso Suárez, head of the new casino, it’s a visionary construction, Corralejo’s new beating heart. Erhard is more sceptical. They’ve discussed the casino since 1999. They’ve already spent more than 30 million euros, but no one knows on what.

There’s no one to be seen. He leans back in his seat, ready to take a nap, but each time the radio announcer starts talking, his thoughts begin to swirl. When the news comes on again, he reports to dispatch that he’s taking the rest of the day off, then turns off his sign.

He doesn’t drive home.

Instead he takes a route that leads him through Puerto del Rosario’s industrial district, with its shedlike pavilions, and the Selos Quarter, where everything seems closed but isn’t. He drives past Sport Fuerte’s exclusive mansions, and then purposefully around Guisguey. The swingers club here always attracts interesting people. When he sees one of the girls he knows, he brings the car to a halt and offers her a free ride. Several of the girls just laugh at him. But Angelina and Michelle and Bethany, three girls he’s driven multiple times, want to head into the city or up to Corralejo.

He asks them if any of the girls has been arrested recently. No, not that they’re aware. None of the girls has stopped working or gone on holiday? They haven’t noticed. Angelina names a few she hasn’t seen in some time, but they’ve probably just gone home or to Barcelona or taken ill, she thinks. None of them know of a 27-year-old.

He doesn’t ask directly, but Bethany coincidentally mentions that she’s heard about the boy found down at the beach. People are fucked up, she says. Erhard doesn’t say anything.

It’s a sad business. Though their lives are similar, the girls work alone, wandering the island in search of customers. Like a small travelling theatre where the production is the world’s oldest story, which never ends happily. When they sit in the car, they look like children in costumes. He thinks of Mette and Lene when they got dressed up. The older of the two with her makeup askew and her pale, thin legs sticking out of her mother’s slip. He doesn’t want to think about them now. Not in this connection. Absolutely not in this connection.

The third time he passes through Guisguey, a city consisting of an abandoned farm, a large house, and a former supermarket turned swingers’ club, he sees a new face. She’s clearly a junkie and a prostitute, and she’s in such wretched condition that Erhard almost doesn’t want her in his taxi. But he snaps on his indicator and slows beside her, letting her walk around to the open window. She thinks he’s a john, and she gives him a terrible smile, leaning towards him with a practised ease so he might see her breasts in a tattered pink bra.

– I’m not a customer, but I can drive you to Puerto. There’s probably more action down there. He expects her to protest. Many of the girls learn to be sceptical about those they accept rides with, but her pupils are mostly vacant, and she climbs in the passenger seat with robotic obedience.

It makes absolutely no sense to ask her about anything. She’s practically asleep, and he just drives her to Selos and decides to drop her off on the corner near the restaurant where many of the prostitutes gather to share fags and gossip about their johns. The newscast is on again. This time the segment is shorter, and Erhard guesses that next time the news comes on, there won’t be anything about the boy found on the beach.

He turns down Via Juan Carlos, the largest street in the Selos District, and the busiest. He searches for La Costa, which looks like an ordinary lunch restaurant with tables on the pavement. When he sees it, he parks and cautiously nudges the girl.

– Señorita, it’s time to get out now.

She glances around. – I don’t want to git out, I want to git t’ Guisguey.

– That’s where we were. You wanted to come downtown, remember?

She gives Erhard an irritated look. – I can’t ainymore today.

– Do you have somewhere to go?

– Guisguey. Got a bed there.

She can’t be more than twenty-five or so. Her nose is frayed from some substance, and her arms in her sleeveless blouse are discoloured and red, the colour of squid. A battered body. She’s one of the unfortunates.

– I’ll drive you back, he says.

– Hey, she says and is about to shout at him, but then she falls back in her seat and fumbles in her little purse for a cigarette. Customers aren’t allowed to smoke in the car, but he rolls down all four windows and says nothing to her. She lights a cigarette and sucks smoke through the filter.

– Wha’ d’ya want? A blowjob?

– No, he says.

She smokes disinterestedly, then ashes so that the flakes swirl around the car.

– W’re are we?

– You’re on your way to Guisguey. I’m driving you, I’m helping you.

She falls asleep again with the cigarette between her fingers. He takes it from her and tosses it out the window. The trip takes ten or eleven minutes if one drives directly. But he takes the long way to let her rest. She’s fidgety in sleep, but her breathing grows deeper and deeper, and soon she sinks down onto the backseat. When they reach Guisguey, he leaves her be; he climbs out of the car, stretches, and crosses the street. The swingers’ club still looks like a supermarket with large glass windows and a long, well-lit sign in garish neon. But the windows have been painted red, and the sign now reads
Pleasure World
. It’s difficult to find the entrance. He’s driven a number of customers out here, but never watched them go inside. It’s not his style, this kind of place. It’s too businesslike for him, too social. Wandering around with a stiffy among other men who are younger, fitter, and hornier. Sex doesn’t need to be love, but it damn well better not be some kind of fish auction.

He walks back to his car. – Guisguey, he tells the girl. – Final stop, Guisguey. It makes him laugh.

She climbs out of the car, her eyes closed, but fumbles around for her purse and her cigarettes. – Thanks. You’re an angel, a true angel.

She’s so spaced-out that what she’s saying should seem like meaningless clichés. And yet there’s a sweetness to it that touches Erhard to the core. She stumbles across the street, and he follows her.

– Y’ can go home now, taxi’man. I’m ’kay.

He watches her. – Have you heard anything about one of the girls being arrested? Something about a baby?

– What, we can’t have kids now? She makes a face as if she’s laughing, but no sound emerges.

– Have you heard who it is?

– They didn’t arrest her, they bribed her with a thousand euro.

The girl’s on her way around the corner of the building.

Erhard goes after her. – Who? Who is it?

– Only because you’ve been so nice, she says.

He considers getting out his wallet and giving her 100 euros. Not only to get her to talk, but also to help her. And maybe to impress her a little.

– It’s Alina, Alinacita, the snobby bitch. She waves two fingers in goodbye and pulls on a doorknob that Erhard hadn’t noticed. Then she vanishes inside the building.

24

It’s dusk when he gets home.

He looks at the telephone in the corner, but there’s no sign that it’s rung. He drops his clothes into the laundry basket. He likes to do his laundry on Mondays. He makes dinner in his underwear, eats lamb goulash standing in the doorway, considers getting a beer at Guzman’s down Alejandro’s Trail, the little grocery that looks like it’s about to go belly up and has looked that way for years. But he’s got a bottle of red wine and pours himself a glass in a beer mug, then gulps it as if it can quench his thirst.

It’s dark now.

He boils water, then washes his clothes and hangs them on the line which runs from the house to a tall flagpole. The darkness presses against him. He shaves. Although he looks too proper when he shaves, like a real grandfather, completely smooth-faced, he still does so a few times each month. He irons a shirt, but it’s harder to find trousers; the two pairs that he likes to wear are still drying on the line. He tries on four old, ratty pairs, oil-stained and much too short. In the end he tugs on some shorts. The other cabbies don’t like it when he wears shorts. Shorts are for tourists. But he doesn’t care. He’ll wear whatever the hell he wants, including a pink shirt once in a while. He drinks red wine as he listens to Monk. He removes the finger from the shelf and holds it in the empty slot on his hand. It looks genuine only when he squints. Carefully he returns it to the plastic container, lays the container back on the shelf, then puts the books in place.

Soon the red wine is gone; he hurries to his car, then drives downtown before the alcohol makes him tipsy. A bottle of wine makes him drunk, but at this moment he can’t feel it.

He parks in the courtyard behind Oly’s Laundromat, where no one ever goes at night. The city’s got its own unique tumult, which he loves. A cacophony of music going on and off, people suddenly shouting, piercing machinery turned on in the middle of the night, then dying out as if it’s been choked in oil. He walks up the street to Greenbay Jazz bar and onto the little patio. The band for that evening is already on stage, testing its equipment. It’s the best time to arrive. The asynchronous horns and drumbeats give him gooseflesh; they’ve got a particularly experimental quality, as if he’s listening to a child’s first words. He orders a beer and takes his glass to the back corner of the bar.

Fifteen years ago, this was an exclusive jazz club with expensive drinks and table service. It attracted tourists, but the locals stayed away. Then the place got a new owner who kept the music, lowered the prices, and brought the locals in. The bar still tries to seem sophisticated and exotic, even though the clientele consists primarily of bankrupt directors, tourists with old tourist guides, and prostitutes trying to look like someone’s girlfriend.

Two women are seated on a white sofa out on the terrace and three men are up at the bar. It’s still early, only 10 p.m.

He always recognizes his customers’ faces. There must be something wrong with him. There should be so many faces that he forgets them, that they merge into one. But he remembers them all. He drove one of the women on the sofa six months ago, when she got a flat tyre and had to get to her sister’s wedding. The other woman was abandoned once, long ago, on a barren stretch just beyond Corralejo; she told him several times a friend had dropped her off, but Erhard doubted this. She’d stood waving a bouquet of flowers as he drove past on his way downtown. That was maybe four years ago.

The men are locals. He recognizes them without remembering what they do for a living or who they are. He’s driven them home a number of times, dangerous, charming drunkards who come here as early as possible to drink red wine, looking like people supposed to meet someone. They don’t want to sit at home, and they don’t fit in at Luz, the city’s shabbiest dive, or the Yellow Rooster, where trash collectors, demolition men, lorry drivers, masons, and taxi drivers fill each other up with cheap liquor and stories from the mainland. The three men just sit there trying to keep their balance on the white barstools, glancing towards the entrance every time new voices appear.

The band puts their instruments down and heads to the bar to wait. One can’t quite call them a band. They are four small, thin boys in tight-fitting black jeans and hats and fingerless gloves. One of them orders for the others, and they drink giant beers out of fat bottles. Erhard has never played in a band, but he’s always wanted to be in one: to sit in an old car together, to get all the equipment ready on stage, to smoke cigarettes while waiting for the show to begin. Then warm-ups and finally the sets, assuming you manage more than one, and afterward drinking beer and laughing without a care in the world, praising one another for things others hadn’t noticed.

Erhard’s father had taken him to his piano lessons. The piano instructor in Taastrup was a man with rolled-up sleeves by the name of Marius Tønnesen. His teaching method consisted of sitting in a plush chair and humming over his pupils’ attempts at playing the notes, and he didn’t comment or instruct, just smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, content, almost cheerful. After nineteen instructional hours, Erhard’s father decided to come watch a lesson, and he realized they were not producing the results that he’d hoped; he didn’t believe the teacher punished Erhard enough for striking the wrong keys. In the end he went straight up to his son and screamed that Erhard bloody well not pussyfoot around the goddamn keys. After that his father got on Tønnesen’s case, asking him to get his ass together, find the belt or something, teach the boy how to practice, because he wasn’t going to become a pianist playing cowboys and Indians. Following that day, Erhard’s father stopped paying for piano lessons. The next week, when Erhard showed up without money, Tønnesen said that he could have one final lesson, but that was it.

In one way it was his first lesson. Erhard discovered that he played better when he was angry. He suddenly played so energetically that Tønnesen got up from his chair, walked over, and stood observing Erhard’s fingers. All ten. My word, boy, he said excitedly, how angry you are at the piano. Erhard pounded every key. When the hour was up he was exhausted; he stood in the entranceway, broken and sweaty, as Tønnesen rummaged around in his office. Erhard was just about to leave when the teacher bounded out. I want you to have this. It was ‘Saxophone Colossus’ by Rollins from 1956. On the cover, near a gleaming lamp, sat Rollins behind his saxophone.