The Schooldays of Jesus (15 page)

‘Alyosha, listen to me. We are coming back, David and I. We are coming at once. Leave the door unlocked. Goodbye.'

He has given up trying to keep dry. They ride to the Academy together, the boy sitting on the crossbar of the heavy old bicycle, peering out from under the yellow oilskin, shouting with pleasure and lifting his feet high as they plough through sheets of water. The traffic lights are not working, the streets are almost empty. On the town square the stallholders have long since packed up and gone home.

A car stands outside the entrance to the Academy. A child whom he recognizes as one of David's classmates sits in the back, his face pressed to the window, while his mother tries to lift a
suitcase into the trunk. He goes to her aid.

‘Thank you,' she says. ‘You are David's father, aren't you? I remember you from the concert. Shall we get out of the rain?'

He and she retreat to the entranceway, while David clambers into the car with his friend.

‘Terrible, isn't it?' says the woman, shaking the water from her hair. He recognizes her, remembers her name: Isabella. In her raincoat and high heels she is rather elegant, rather attractive. Her eyes are restless.

‘You mean the weather? Yes, I've never known rain like this before. It's like the end of the world.'

‘No, I meant the business of señora Arroyo. So unsettling for the children. It had such a good reputation, the Academy. Now I begin to wonder. What are your plans for David? Will you be keeping him here?'

‘I don't know. His mother and I need to talk. What exactly do you mean about señora Arroyo?'

‘Haven't you heard? They have broken up, the Arroyos, and she has decamped. I suppose one could have foreseen it, the younger woman and the older man. But in the middle of the term, with no warning to the parents. I don't see how the Academy can go on functioning. That is the disadvantage of these small operations—they depend so much on individuals. Well, we must be off. How are we going to separate the children? You must be proud of David. Such a clever boy, I hear.'

She raises the collar of her raincoat, braves the rain, raps on the window of the car. ‘Carlos! Carlito! We are leaving now! Goodbye, David. Maybe you can come and play one day
soon. We will give your parents a ring.' A quick wave and she drives off.

The doors to the studio stand open. As they mount the stairs they hear organ music, a swift bravura passage played over and over again. Alyosha is waiting for them, his face strained. ‘Is it still raining out there?' he says. ‘Come, David, give us a hug.'

‘Don't be sad, Alyosha,' says the boy. ‘They have gone to a new life.'

Alyosha gives him, Simón, a puzzled glance.

‘Dmitri and Ana Magdalena,' the boy patiently explains. ‘They have gone to a new life. They are going to be gypsies.'

‘I am totally confused, Alyosha,' says he, Simón. ‘I hear one story after another, and I don't know which to believe. It is imperative that I speak to señor Arroyo. Where is he?'

‘Señor Arroyo is playing,' says Alyosha.

‘So I hear. Nevertheless, may I speak to him?'

The quick, brilliant passage he had heard is now being woven together with a heavier passage in the bass that seems obscurely related to it. There is no sorrow in the music, no pensiveness, nothing to suggest that the musician has been abandoned by his beautiful young wife.

‘He has been at the keyboard since six this morning,' says Alyosha. ‘I don't think he wants to be interrupted.'

‘Very well, I have time, I will wait. Can you see to it that David puts on dry clothes? And may I use the telephone?'

He calls Modas Modernas. ‘This is Inés's friend Simón. Can someone please pass on a message to Inés in Novilla? Tell her there is a crisis at the Academy and she should come home without
delay…No, I don't have a number for her…Just say
a crisis at the Academy
, she will understand.'

He sits down and waits for Arroyo. If he were not so exasperated he might be able to enjoy the music, the ingenious way in which the man interweaves motifs, the harmonic surprises, the logic of his resolutions. A true musician, no doubt about that, consigned to the role of schoolteacher. No wonder he is disinclined to face irate parents.

Alyosha returns bearing a plastic bag containing the boy's wet clothes. ‘David is saying hello to the animals,' he reports.

Then the boy comes rushing in. ‘Alyosha! Simón!' he shouts. ‘I know where he is! I know where Dmitri is! Come!'

They follow the boy down the back stairs into the vast, dimly lit basement of the museum, past racks of scaffolding, past canvases stacked pell-mell against the walls, past a clutch of marble nudes roped together, until they come to a little cubicle in a corner, made of sheets of plywood nailed together in a slapdash way, roofless. ‘Dmitri!' the boy shouts, and beats on the door. ‘Alyosha is here, and Simón!'

There is no reply. Then he, Simón, notices the door to the cubicle is sealed with a padlock. ‘There is no one in there,' he says. ‘It is locked from the outside.'

‘He
is
there!' says the boy. ‘I can hear him! Dmitri!'

Alyosha drags one of the scaffolding panels across and leans it against a wall of the cubicle. He ascends, peers in, hastily descends.

Before anyone can stop him David has scaled the scaffolding too. At the top he visibly freezes. Alyosha climbs up and brings him down.

‘What is it?' asks he, Simón.

‘Ana Magdalena. Go. Take David with you. Call an ambulance. Say there has been an accident. Tell them to come quickly.' Then his legs buckle and he kneels on the floor. His face is pale. ‘Go, go, go!' he says.

Everything that follows happens in a rush. The ambulance arrives, then the police. The museum is cleared of visitors; a guard is placed at the entrance; the stairway to the basement is barred. With the two Arroyo boys and the remaining boarders in tow, Alyosha retreats to the top floor of the building. Of señor Arroyo there is no sign: the organ loft is empty.

He approaches one of the police officers. ‘May we leave?' he asks.

‘Who are you?'

‘We are the people who discovered…who discovered the body. My son David is a student here. He is very upset. I would like to take him home.'

‘I don't want to go home,' announces the boy. He has a set, stubborn look; the shock that had silenced him seems to have worn off. ‘I want to see Ana Magdalena.'

‘That is certainly not going to happen.'

A whistle sounds. Without a word the officer abandons them. At the same moment the boy takes off across the studio, running with his head down like a little bull. He, Simón, catches up with him only at the foot of the stairs, where two ambulancemen, bearing a stretcher draped in a white sheet, are trying to get past a knot of people. The sheet catches, uncovering for a moment the deceased señora Arroyo as far down as her naked bosom. The
left side of her face is blue, almost black. Her eyes are wide open. Her upper lip is drawn back in a snarl. Swiftly the ambulancemen replace the sheet.

A uniformed police officer takes the boy by the arm, restraining him. ‘Let me go!' he shouts, struggling to be free. ‘I want to save her!'

The police officer lifts him effortlessly into the air and holds him there, kicking. He, Simón, does not intervene, but waits until the stretcher has been lodged in the ambulance and the doors have slammed shut.

‘You can let him go now,' he says to the officer. ‘I will take over. He is my son. He is upset. She was his teacher.'

He has neither the energy nor the spirit to ride the bicycle. Side by side he and the boy trudge through the monotonous rain back to the cottage. ‘I'm getting wet again,' complains the boy. He drapes the oilskin over him.

They are greeted at the door by Bolívar, in his usual stately fashion. ‘Sit close to Bolívar,' he instructs the boy. ‘Let him warm you. Let him give you some of his heat.'

‘What is going to happen to Ana Magdalena?'

‘She will be at the hospital by now. I am not going to talk about it any further. It has been enough for one day.'

‘Did Dmitri kill her?'

‘I have no idea. I don't know how she died. Now, there is something I want you to tell me. That little room where we found her—was that the room where Dmitri took you to show you pictures of women?'

‘Yes.'

CHAPTER 12

THE NEXT day, the first day of clear skies after the big rains, Dmitri turns himself in. He presents himself at the front desk of police headquarters. ‘It was I,' he announces to the young woman behind the desk, and when she fails to understand produces the morning's newspaper and taps the headline ‘DEATH OF BALLERINA', with a photograph of Ana Magdalena, head and shoulders, beautiful in her rather icy way. ‘It was I who killed her,' he says. ‘I am the guilty one.'

In the hours that follow he writes for the police a full and detailed account of what happened: how, on a pretext, he persuaded Ana Magdalena to accompany him to the basement of the museum; how he forced himself on her and afterwards strangled her; how he locked the body in the cubicle; how for two days and two nights he wandered the streets of the city, indifferent to cold and rain, mad, he writes, though mad with what he does not say (with guilt? with grief?), until, coming upon the newspaper on a newsstand, with the photograph whose eyes, as he puts it, pierced him to the soul, he came to his senses and gave
himself up, ‘resolved to pay his debt'.

All of this comes out at the first hearing, which is held amid intense public interest, nothing so extravagant having occurred in Estrella within living memory. Señor Arroyo is not present at the hearing: he has bolted the doors of the Academy and will speak to no one. He, Simón, tries to attend, but the throng outside the tiny courtroom is packed so tight that he gives up. From the radio he learns that Dmitri has admitted his guilt and refused legal assistance, even though the magistrate has explained to him that this is neither the time nor the place to enter a plea. ‘I have done the worst thing in the world, I have killed the person I love,' he is reported to have said. ‘Lash me, hang me, break my bones.' From the courtroom he has been conveyed back to his cell, enduring on the way a barrage of gibes and insults from onlookers.

Responding to his call, Inés has returned from Novilla, accompanied by her elder brother, Diego. David moves back into the apartment with them. Since there are no classes to attend, he is free to play football with Diego all day. Diego, he reports, is ‘brilliant' at football.

He, Simón, meets Inés for lunch. They discuss what is to be done about David. ‘He seems his normal self, he seems to have got over the shock,' he tells her, ‘but I have my doubts. No child can be exposed to a sight like that and not suffer after-effects.'

‘He should never have gone to that Academy,' says Inés. ‘We should have hired a tutor, like I said. What a calamity those Arroyos have turned out to be!'

He demurs. ‘It was hardly señora Arroyo's fault that she was
murdered, or her husband's, for that matter. One can cross paths with a monster like Dmitri anywhere. To look on the positive side, at least David has learned a lesson about adults and where their passions can lead them.'

Inés sniffs. ‘Passions? Do you call rape and murder passions?'

‘No, rape and murder are crimes, but you cannot deny that Dmitri was driven to them by passion.'

‘So much the worse for passion,' says Inés. ‘If there were less passion around, the world would be a safer place.'

They are in a café across the street from Modas Modernas, with tables packed tightly together. Their neighbours, two well-dressed women who may well belong to Inés's clientele, have fallen silent and are listening in to what has begun to sound like a quarrel. Therefore he withholds what he had been about to say (
Passion
, he had been about to say—
what do you know about passion, Inés?
) and remarks instead: ‘Let us not stray into deep water. How is Diego? What does he think of Estrella? How long will he be staying? Is Stefano going to join you?'

No, he learns, Stefano will not be coming to Estrella. Stefano is entirely under the thumb of his girlfriend, who does not want him to leave her. As for Diego, he has not formed a favourable impression of Estrella. He calls it
atrasada
, backward; he cannot understand what Inés is doing here; he wants her to come back to Novilla with him.

‘And might you do that?' he asks. ‘Might you move back to Novilla? I need to know because where David goes I go.'

Inés does not reply, plays with her teaspoon.

‘What about the shop?' he says. ‘How will Claudia feel if you
suddenly abandon her?' He leans closer across the table. ‘Tell me honestly, Inés, are you still as devoted to David as ever?'

‘What do you mean,
Am I still devoted?
'

‘I mean, are you still the boy's mother? Do you still love him or are you growing away from him? Because, I must warn you, I cannot be both father and mother.'

Inés rises. ‘I have to get back to the shop,' she says.

The Academy of Singing is a very different place from the Academy of Dance. Housed in an elegant glass-fronted building, it is situated on a leafy square in the most expensive quarter of the town. He and David are ushered into the office of señora Montoya, the vice-principal, who greets them coolly. Following the closure of the Academy of Dance, she informs him, the Academy of Singing has received a small flood of applications from ex-students. David's name can be added to the list, but his prospects are not favourable: preference will be given to the applicants who have had formal instruction in music. Furthermore, he, Simón, should take note that fees at the Academy of Singing are considerably higher than at the Academy of Dance.

‘David took music lessons with señor Arroyo himself,' he says. ‘He has a good voice. Will you not give him a chance to prove himself? He excelled at dancing. He could excel at singing too.'