The Return (7 page)

“But did he recognize you or not?”

“Of course he recognized me.
We smiled at each other from a distance
and then he believed the stuff you’d told him.”

“And what had I told him?
Come on, let’s hear it.”

“A whole heap of lies, as I found out when I went to see him.”

“You went to see him?”

“That night, after they transferred the other prisoners.
Belano was
left all on his own, with hours to go before the new lot arrived, and his
spirits were about as low as they could get.”

“Even the toughest guys lose it inside.”

“Well, he hadn’t broken down, either, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, but nearly.”

“Nearly, that’s true.
Also, a really weird thing happened to him.
I
think that’s why I remembered him tonight.”

“So what was this weird thing?”

“Well, it happened when he was incommunicado—you know how
it was in that station: all it meant was that you starved, because you could
send as many messages as you liked to people on the outside.
Anyway, Belano
was incommunicado, which meant that no one was bringing him any food, and he
had no soap, no toothbrush, and no blanket to wrap himself in at night.
And
after a few days, of course, he was dirty, unshaven, his clothes stank, you
know, the usual.
The thing is, once a day we used to take all the prisoners
to the bathroom, remember?”

“How could I forget?”

“And on the way to the bathroom there was a mirror, not in the
bathroom itself, but in a corridor that ran between the bathroom and the gym
where the political prisoners were kept, a tiny little mirror, near the records
office, you remember, don’t you?”

“I don’t remember that, compadre.”

“Well, there was this mirror, and all the political prisoners would
look at themselves in it.
We’d taken down the mirror in the showers, so no one
would get any stupid ideas, and this was the only chance they got to see how
well they’d shaved or how straight their part was, so they all had a look in it,
especially when they’d been allowed to shave or the one day of the week when
they got to take a shower.”

“OK, I get you, and since Belano was incommunicado he couldn’t even
shave or take a shower or anything.”

“Exactly, he didn’t have a razor, or a towel, or soap, or clean
clothes, and he never got to take a shower.”

“But I can’t remember him smelling really bad.”

“Everyone stank.
You could wash every day and still stink.
You stank,
too.”

“You leave me out of it, compadre, and watch that embankment.”

“Well, the thing is, when Belano was in the line with the prisoners,
he always avoided looking at himself in the mirror.
You see?
He turned away.
Whether he was going from the gym to the bathroom or from the bathroom back to
the gym, when he got to the corridor with the mirror, he looked the other
way.”

“He was afraid to look at himself.”

“Until one day, after finding out that his old schoolmates were there
to get him out of that fix, he felt up to it.
He’d been thinking about it all
night and all morning.
His luck had changed, so he decided to face the mirror
and see how he looked.”

“And what happened?”

“He didn’t recognize himself.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all; he didn’t recognize himself.
He told me so the night I
got a chance to talk with him.
I really wasn’t expecting him to come out with
that.
I’d gone to tell him not to get me wrong, I was really left-wing, I
had nothing to do with all the shit that was happening, but he came out with
this crap about the mirror and I didn’t know what to say.”

“And what did you say about me?”

“I didn’t say anything at all.
He did all the talking.
He said it was
a simple thing, it didn’t come as a shock at all, if you see what I mean.
He was
in the line, on the way to the bathroom, and as he passed the mirror, he turned
suddenly, looked at his face and saw someone else, but he wasn’t frightened, he
didn’t start shaking or get hysterical.
I guess you could say that by then,
knowing we were there at the station, he had no reason to get hysterical.
Anyway, he did what he needed to do in the bathroom, quietly, thinking about the
person he’d seen, thinking it over, but not making a big deal of it.
And when
they went back to the gym, he looked in the mirror again, and sure enough, he
said, it wasn’t him, it was someone else, and I said to him, What are you
saying, asshole?
What do you mean someone else?”

“That’s what I would have said, too.
What
did
he mean?”

“He said, Someone else.
And I said, Explain it to me.
And he said, A
different person, that’s all.”

“And then you thought he’d gone crazy.”

“I don’t know what I thought, but to be honest, I was scared.”

“A Chilean?
Scared?”

“You think that’s so unusual?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s usual for you.”

“Whatever you say.
I realized straightaway that he wasn’t trying to
kid me.
I’d taken him to the little room beside the gym, and he started talking
about the mirror and the way they had to file past it every morning, and
suddenly I realized that all of it was true: him, me, our conversation.
And
since we weren’t in the gym, and since he’d been a student at our grand old alma
mater, it occurred to me that I could take him to the corridor where the mirror
was and say, Take another look, with me here beside you this time, take a good
calm look, and tell me if it isn’t the same old crazy Belano you see.”

“And did you say that?”

“Of course I did, but to be honest, the thought came a long time
before the words.
As if an eternity had passed between the idea popping into my
head and coming out in a comprehensible form.
A little eternity, to make things
worse.
Because if it had been a big or just a regular eternity, I wouldn’t have
realized, if you follow me, but as it was, I did realize, and that intensified
my fear.”

“But you went ahead anyway.”

“Of course I did; by then it was too late to turn back.
I said, We’re
going to do a test; let’s see if the same thing happens with me beside you, and
he looked at me warily, but he said, All right, if you insist, like he was doing
me a favor, when in fact I was the one doing him a favor, as usual.”

“So you went to the mirror?”

“We went to the mirror.
I was taking a big risk because you know what
would have happened if they’d caught me walking around the station with a
political prisoner at midnight.
And to help him calm down and be as objective as
possible, I offered him a smoke, so we stood there puffing away and it was only
when we’d crushed the butts on the ground that we headed off toward the
bathroom, and he was relaxed, I guess he was thinking it couldn’t get any worse
(which was bullshit, it could have been much, much worse), and I was kind of on
edge, listening for the slightest noise, the sound of a door shutting, but I was
careful not to let it show, and when we got to the mirror I said, Look at
yourself, and he looked at himself, he stood in front of the mirror and looked
at his face, he even ran a hand through his hair, which was really long, you
know, the way people wore it in ‘73,
and then he glanced aside, stepped away from the mirror and looked at the ground
for a while.”

“And?”

“That’s what I said, And?
Is it you or isn’t it?
And he looked into my
eyes and said: It’s someone else, compadre, that’s all there is to it.
I could
feel something inside me like a muscle or a nerve, I don’t know what it was, I
swear, but it was saying: Smile, asshole, smile, and yet however much the muscle
strained, I couldn’t smile, the best I could do was twitch, a spasm jerked my
cheek up, anyway, he noticed and stood there looking at me, and I ran a hand
over my face and gulped, because I was afraid again.”

“We’re almost there.”

“And then I had this idea.
I said to him: Listen, I’m going to look in
the mirror, and when I look at myself, you’re going to look at me then you’re
going to look at my reflection, and you’re going to realize it’s the same, the
problem is this filthy mirror and this filthy station and the bad lighting in
this corridor.
And he didn’t say anything, but I took that as a yes—he
could have objected—and I came up to the mirror and leaned forward with my
eyes shut.”

“You can see the lights already, compadre, we’re just about there,
take it easy.”

“Are you playing deaf, or what?
Didn’t you hear me?”

“Of course I heard you.
You had your eyes shut.”

“I stood in front of the mirror with my eyes shut.
And then I opened
them.
Maybe that’s normal for you: standing in front of a mirror with your eyes
shut.”

“Nothing seems normal to me any more, compadre.”

“Then I opened them, suddenly, I opened my eyes right up and
looked at myself and saw someone staring back at me wide-eyed, like he
was scared shitless, and behind him I saw a guy about twenty years old, but
he looked at least ten years older, a skinny guy with a beard and bags under
his eyes, looking at us over my shoulder, and to tell the truth, I couldn’t
be sure, I saw a swarm of faces, as if the mirror was broken, though I knew
perfectly well it wasn’t, and then Belano said, very softly, it was barely
more than a whisper, he said: Hey, Contreras, is there some kind of room
behind that wall?”

“The fuckhead!
He’d seen too many movies!”

“And when I heard his voice it was like I woke up, but in reverse, and
instead of coming back to this side, I’d come out on the other side, where even
my own voice sounded strange.
No, I said, as far as I know, behind it there’s
just the yard.
The yard where the cells are?
he asked me.
Yes, I said, where the
regular prisoners are.
And then the son of a bitch said: Now I understand.
And
that completely flummoxed me, because, I mean, what was there to understand?
And
I said the first thing that came into my head: What the flying fuck do you
understand now?
But I said it softly, without raising my voice, so softly he
didn’t hear me, and I didn’t have the strength to repeat the question.
So I
looked in the mirror again and saw two old classmates, a
twenty-year-old cop with a loose tie, and a dirty-looking guy
with long hair and a beard, all skin and bone, and I thought: Jesus, we really
have fucked up, haven’t we, Contreras.
Then I put my hands on Belano’s shoulders
and led him back to the gym.
When we came to the door a thought crossed my mind:
I could take out my gun and shoot him right here; it would have been so easy,
all I had to do was aim and put a bullet through his head, I’ve always been a
good shot, even in the dark.
Then I could have come up with any old explanation.
But of course I didn’t do it.”

“Of course you didn’t.
We don’t do that sort of thing, compadre.”

“No, we don’t do that sort of thing.”

Cell Mates

We happened to be in prison in the same month of the same year,
although the prisons were thousands of miles apart.
Sofia was born in 1950 in
Bilbao.
She was dark, small and very pretty.
In November 1973, while I was a
prisoner in Chile, she was sent to jail in Aragon.

At the time she was getting her degree in science at the University of
Zaragoza, biology or chemistry, one or the other, and she went to jail with
almost all of her classmates.
On the fourth or fifth night we slept together, as
I was adopting a new position, she told me there was no point tiring myself out.
I like variety, I said.
If I fuck in the same position two nights in a row, I
become impotent.
Well, don’t do it for my sake, she said.
The room had a very
high ceiling, and the walls were painted red, the color of a desert at sunset.
She had painted them herself a few days after moving in.
It looked awful.
I’ve
made love every way there is, she said.
I don’t believe you, I replied.
Every
way there is?
That’s right, she said, and I was at a loss for words (maybe I was
embarrassed) but I believed her.

Later she told me, but this was quite a few days later, that she was
losing her mind.
She ate hardly anything, only instant mashed potatoes.
Once I
went into the kitchen and saw a plastic bag beside the refrigerator.
It was a
twenty-kilo bag of mashed potato flakes.
Is that all you eat?
I asked.
She
smiled and said yes—sometimes she ate other things, but mostly when she went out
to a bar or a restaurant.
At home it’s simpler just to have mashed potatoes, she
said.
That way there’s always something to eat.
She didn’t put milk in it, only
water, and she didn’t even wait for the water to boil.
She mixed the flakes with
warm water, she told me, because she hated milk.
I never saw her consume any
milk products; she said it was probably some kind of psychological problem that
went back to her childhood, something to do with her mother.
So when we were
both in the apartment at night, she would have her mashed potatoes, and
sometimes she would sit up late with me watching movies on TV.
We hardly talked.
She never argued.
At the time there was a Communist living in the apartment; he
was in his twenties, like us, and he and I used to get into long, pointless
arguments, but she never joined in, although I knew she was more on my side than
on his.
One day the Communist told me Sofia was hot and he was planning to fuck
her at the first opportunity.
Go ahead, I said.
Two or three nights later, while
I was watching a Bardem movie, I heard him go out into the passage and knock
discreetly on Sofia’s door.
They talked for a while and then the door closed and
the Communist was in there for a good two hours.

Sofia had been married, though I didn’t find out until much later.
Her
husband had been a student at the University of Zaragoza too, and gone to prison
with the rest of them in November 1973.
When they finished their degrees they
moved to Barcelona and after a while they split up.
He was called Emilio and
they were still good friends.
Did you make love every way there is with Emilio?
No, but nearly, said Sofia.
She also said she was losing her mind and it was a
worry, especially if she was driving.
The other night it happened in Diagonal,
luckily there wasn’t much traffic.
Are you taking something?
Valium.
Lots and
lots of Valium.
Before we slept together, we went to the movies a couple of
times.
French movies, I think.
One was about a woman pirate; she goes to this
island where another woman pirate lives and they have a duel to the death with
swords.
The other one was set during World War Two; there was a guy who worked
for the Germans and for the Resistance at the same time.
After we started
sleeping together we kept going to the movies and, strangely, I can remember the
titles of the films we saw and the names of the directors, but nothing else
about them.
From the very first night Sofia made it perfectly clear that our
relationship wasn’t going to be serious.
I’m in love with someone else, she
said.
Our Communist comrade?
No, you don’t know him; he’s a teacher, like me.
She didn’t want to tell me his name just then.
Sometimes she spent the night
with him, but not very often, about once a fortnight.
We made love every night.
At first I tried to tire her out.
We would start at eleven and keep going until
four in the morning, but soon I realized there was no way of tiring out
Sofia.

At the time I used to hang out with anarchists and radical feminists
and the books I read were more or less influenced by the company I was keeping.
There was one by an Italian feminist, Carla something, called
Let’s Spit on
Hegel
.
One afternoon I lent it to Sofia.
Read it, I said, I thought it
was really good.
(Maybe I said she would get a lot out of it.) The next day
Sofia was in a very good mood; she gave me back the book and said that as
science fiction it wasn’t bad, but otherwise it sucked.
Only an Italian woman
could have written it, she declared.
What have you got against Italian women?
I
asked.
Did one abuse you when you were little or something?
She said no, but if
she was going to read that sort of thing, she preferred Valerie Solanas.
I was
surprised to learn that her favorite author was not a woman but an Englishman,
David Cooper, one of R.
D.
Laing’s associates.
I ended up reading Valerie
Solanas and David Cooper and even Laing (his sonnets).
One of the things that
impressed me most about Cooper was that during his time in Argentina (although
I’m not sure now whether Cooper was ever really in Argentina, maybe I’m getting
mixed up) he used hallucinogenic drugs to treat left-wing activists.
These were
people who were cracking up because they knew they could die at any moment,
people who might not have the experience of growing old in real life, but they
could have it with the drugs, and they got better.
Sofia used drugs too,
sometimes.
She took LSD and amphetamines and Rohypnol, pills to speed up and
pills to slow down and pills to steady her hands on the steering wheel.
I rarely
accepted the offer of a lift in her car.
We didn’t go out much, in fact.
I went
on with my life, she went on with hers, and at night, in her room or in mine,
our bodies locked in a relentless struggle that lasted till daybreak and left us
wrung out.

One afternoon Emilio came to see her and she introduced me to him.
He
was tall, he had a wonderful smile, and you could tell he was fond of Sofia.
His
girlfriend was called Nuria; she was Catalan and worked as a high school
teacher, like Emilio and Sofia.
You couldn’t have imagined two women more
different.
Nuria was blonde, blue-eyed, tall and rather plump.
Sofia had dark
hair and brown eyes so dark they seemed black; she was short and slim as a
marathon runner.
In spite of everything they seemed to be good friends.
As I
found out later on, it was Emilio who had ended the marriage, although the
separation had been amicable.
Sometimes, when we’d been sitting there for a long
time without talking, Nuria looked North American to me and Sofia looked
Vietnamese.
But Emilio just looked like Emilio, a chemistry or biology teacher
from Aragon, who’d been an anti-Franco activist and a political prisoner, a
decent sort of guy though not very interesting.
One night Sofia told me about
the man she was in love with.
He was called Juan and he was a member of the
Communist Party like our comrade.
He worked in the same school as her, so they
saw each other every day.
He was married and had a son.
So where do you do it?
In my car, said Sofia, or his.
We go out in our cars and follow each other
through the streets of Barcelona, sometimes all the way to Tibidabo or Sant
Cugat.
Sometimes we just park in a dark street and he gets into my car or I get
into his.
Not long after she told me this, Sofia got sick and had to stay in
bed.
At that stage there were only three of us in the apartment: Sofia, the
Communist and me.
The Communist was only around at night so I had to look after
Sofia and go to the pharmacy.
One night she said we should go traveling.
Where?
I asked.
Portugal, she said.
I liked the idea, so one morning we set off for
Portugal, hitchhiking.
(I thought we would go in her car but Sofia was scared of
driving.) It was a long and complicated trip.
We stopped in Zaragoza, where
Sofia still had her best friends, then at her sister’s place in Madrid, then in
Extremadura .
.
.

I got the feeling Sofia was visiting all her ex-lovers.
I got the
feeling she was saying goodbye to them one by one, but not in a calm or resigned
sort of way.
When we made love she seemed absent at first, as if it had nothing
to do with her, but after a while she let herself go and ended up coming over
and over.
Then she started crying and I asked her why.
Because I’m such an
animal; even though I’m miles away, I can’t help coming.
Don’t be so hard on
yourself, I said, and we went on making love.
Her face wet with tears was
delicious to kiss.
Her whole body burned and flexed like a red-hot piece of
metal, but her tears were only lukewarm and, as they ran down her neck, as I
spread them on her nipples, they turned ice-cold.
A month later we were back in
Barcelona.
Sofia hardly ate a thing all day.
She went back to her diet of
instant mashed potatoes and decided not to leave the apartment.
One night I came
home and found her with a girl I didn’t know; another time it was Emilio and
Nuria, who looked at me as if I were to blame for the state she was in.
I felt
bad but said nothing and shut myself in my room.
I tried to read, but I could
hear them.
Shocked exclamations, reprimands, advice.
Sofia didn’t say a thing.
A
week later she was given four months’ sick leave.
The government doctor was an
old friend from Zaragoza.
I thought we’d be able to spend more time together,
but little by little we drifted apart.
Some nights she didn’t come home.
I
remember staying up very late, watching TV and waiting for her.
Sometimes the
Communist kept me company.
I had nothing to do, so I set about tidying up the
apartment: sweeping, mopping, dusting.
The Communist was very impressed, but one
day he had to go too and I was left all on my own.

By then Sofia had become a ghost; she appeared without a sound, shut
herself in her room or the bathroom and disappeared again after a few hours.
One
night we ran into each other on the stairs, I was going up and she was coming
down, and the only thing I could think of asking was if she had a new lover.
I
regretted it straightaway, but it was too late.
I can’t remember what she said.
In the good old days, five of us had lived in that huge apartment; now it was
just me and the mice.
Sometimes I imagined Sofia in a prison cell in Zaragoza,
back in November 1973, and me, in the southern hemisphere, locked up too, for a
few decisive days, and though I realized that this fact or coincidence had to be
significant, I couldn’t work out what it meant.
I’ve never been any good at
analogies.
One night, when I came home, I found a note saying goodbye and some
money on the kitchen table.
At first I went on living as if Sofia was still
there.
I can’t remember exactly how long I waited for her.
I think the
electricity got cut off.
After that I moved to another apartment.

It was a long time before I saw her again.
She was walking down Las
Ramblas, looking lost.
We stood there, the cold seeping into our bones, talking
about things that meant nothing to her or to me.
Walk me home, she said.
She was
living near El Borne, in a building that was falling down it was so old.
The
staircase was narrow and creaked with every step we took.
We climbed up to the
door of her apartment, on the top floor.
To my surprise, she didn’t let me in.
I
should have asked her what was going on, but I left without saying anything; if
that’s what she wanted, it was up to her.