The Shadow of the Shadow (14 page)

MANTEROLA WAS ABOUT TO turn thirty-nine years old
in the hospital (La Iluminada, near the streetcar yards), in a room
he shared with a moribund construction worker and with the
sinking feeling that his leg was never going to be like it used
to be, that the bone was never going to mend properly, no
matter what the doctors told him.

Manterola is turning thirty-nine, and that sadness that comes
with all birthdays after thirty-five, with the first hours after giving
birth, with a man's meaningless victories and overwhelming defeats
floods over him.

Comes that birthday sadness, and crime reporters like this one
tend to go transcendental, to look back over their life as if it were
a drawerful of old debts, goals unmet, moribund illusions, wasted
loves.

He glanced at his bald reflection in a polished chrome tube
near the bed and took off his glasses to neutralize the effect. He
thought about the cigarettes he'd got stashed under his pillow,
and about the manuscript of a novel hidden under his pillow at
home. His reflection in the tube was satisfactorily neutralized in a
myopic blur, but the sadness stayed with him. A stubborn, sticky
sadness, with a good dose of self-pity and idiot melancholy mixed
in. A pair of tears rolled down Pioquinto Manterola's cheeks and,
with his gaze fixed on the opposite wall, he let them go.

"May I?" she said, already stepping through the door into the
room.

Manterola wiped his tears away unhurriedly and looked at
her: he had seen her twice before already and held her photo in his
hand. Dressed mostly in black, as before, she now wore a broad brimmed hat that surrounded her face and set off its brilliant
whiteness. A short necklace with a single emerald in its center
hung around her neck. She wore a tight-fitting long black skirt
that nearly touched the floor and a white blouse covered by a
knitted shawl embroidered in black.

"Where would you like me to put the flowers?" asked Margarita Herrera, the Widow Roldan. She picked up a glass and
filled it with water from a chipped washbasin. The flowers were a
half dozen sad-looking magnolias with fragrant open blooms. She
took her time arranging the flowers, her back to the journalist. He
watched her and she let herself be watched.

"And to what do I owe this visit?" asked Manterola, taking a
cigarette out from underneath his pillow. He couldn't think of a
better time to have a smoke.

"I told you we'd be seeing each other again," answered the
woman, turning to face him.

She glanced around for a place to sit and finally opted for the
bed, settling herself at the reporter's feet.

"The left side please," Manterola said quickly. "My right leg's
not quite better yet."

The woman did as he asked and, sitting down again, pointed
inquiringly at the silent figure in the other bed.

"They tell me he's dying. He's been in a coma for days, ever
since they brought him in here. A hod carrier who fell off the fifth
floor of a building. They say he's not going to wake up again."

The two of them looked at each other for several long seconds: Manterola trying to find in this woman the signs of another
woman he'd lost a long time ago; the Widow Roldan searching
for some opening into Pioquinto Manterola's soul, or maybe just
looking for some way to start the conversation.

"I know you're not going to believe me, sir, but I want you to
know I had absolutely nothing to do with what happened to you
and your friends," she said, getting right to the point. She let her
shawl slip partway off her shoulders.

"That sounds more like a confession than a denial, ma'am,"
answered the reporter. He wasn't about to give anything away
without getting something in return.

Margarita's eyes shone violet. Her whole face seemed to revolve
around those eyes and the intensity of her gaze.

"I don't know how much you know about me or my friends,
but I can assure you we had nothing to do with this.. .this attempt
on your life."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Absolutely. And I came to let you know, so there wouldn't be
any doubt. Now, I won't deny that there's been a certain amount
of friction. Or that on occasion your presence has been somewhat,
shall we say, inopportune. What I mean is that your interest in me
has caused a certain amount of suspicion among my friends, but
that's far from being a motive for murder..."

Manterola sat up in the bed and, without taking his eyes off
the violet sparks flashing in hers, reached out for her hand and
kissed it.

"We should have met several years ago, sir," said Margarita,
letting her eyes wander around the room until they settled stubbornly on the flowers, their sweet odor filling the air.

"That's nothing we can't start to make up for now, Margarita.
Do you mind if I call you Margarita?" he said.

"That's what my friends call me."

Manterola remained upright in the bed despite the throbbing
pain that shot up his bad leg, holding on to the woman's hand and
obliging her to lean toward him to ease the tension between their
two bodies.

"You know what's the worst thing about being a reporter?" he
said. "It makes a man forget his own preconceived ideas just for
the sake of curiosity. The search for the truth takes the place of
everything else..."

"It's hard to know the truth..."

"The search for truth, or anything that looks like the truth, the best approximation, what each of us thinks might have happened...
You see, I accept alternatives..."

"I've got the feeling you're leading me into risky territory,
Senor Journalist."

"Your eyes have had me in risky territory for a while now,
Margarita."

Manterola was starting to enjoy this melodramatic dialogue,
reminiscent of the most tawdry newspaper serials. And he'd read
enough Dumas fils, Montepin, and Victor Hugo to be able to hold
up his end of the conversation without any trouble.

"I read your article. You didn't say who actually killed those
men who attacked you... Was it you?" she asked, taking away her
hand and drawing back slightly.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, but if I killed anyone it was pure
luck. Somehow I lost my glasses when the shooting started and I
just fired at the biggest thing I could see, which happened to be
the car they were driving... By the way, you do own an Exeter,
don't you?"

The widow stared at him intently. Then she glanced over at the
man in the next bed to assure herself he hadn't moved since she'd
gotten there. He lay motionless as before, his face to the wall, and
she let her shawl fall completely off her shoulders onto the bed.

The reporter's instincts were highly tuned from so many years
of working in out-of-the-ordinary situations, and that apparently
casual gesture was all he needed to realize that this woman was
about to undress in front of him.

And while the journalist was pulling that unlikely conclusion
out of thin air, several miles away in the village of Contreras, Tomas
Wong the Chinaman sat down to a plateful of eggs and chorizo
prepared for him by Rosa Lopez Chang.

The Chinaman lived in a miserable two-room shack, with
an outhouse he shared with his next-door neighbors. One room
was taken up by a bed, books, photographs, keepsakes, a table and
chair, maps on the wall, stacks of newspapers. The other room held his clothes, hung from an old sawed-off broom handle, another
slightly larger table, and the stove.

A certain intimacy had grown up between the two of them,
enough for them to share a bed but not enough to overcome
their mutual walls of silence. In his own reticent way, Tomas had
explained to Rosa the basic rules of the game: not to interrupt the
meetings of the anarchist affinity group that came together each
week in the house, overflowing into both rooms, and occupying
the three chairs, the table, the bed, finishing off his meager store
of coffee, and filling the whole place with a cloud of smoke. Not
to let herself be seen too much in public, in case her former
"owners" came looking for her. Not to feel that she owed anything,
especially not to feel that she owed anything to him. Rosa, who
was as prone to silence as Tomas himself, listened quietly to his
three recommendations and then suggested she be allowed to
use a corner of one of the rooms to prepare essences for sale to a
local perfumery, bringing in a little extra money to help out with
expenses. So far so good. Then there was the problem that there
was only one bed which the two of them had to share for four
hours every night. Tomas worked from 11 to 7 and they shared
the bed from 3 or 4 in the morning until about 7 a.m. when Rosa
got up.

It had nothing to do with a lack of imagination. Without
having had to work it out beforehand, they'd taken to sleeping in
shifts, and on separate halves of the bed, head to toe.' he problem
was more fundamental, more essentially pragmatic. A foot is
capable of provoking as much erotic attraction as a face, and Tomas
dreamed he was nibbling on Rosa's tiny toes. For several days now
they'd both slept poorly and little during the few hours when they
occupied the bed together.

While the journalist was busy thinking that any minute the
widow was going to start taking her clothes off in front of him,
and while Tomas thought lovingly about Rosa's toes, in nearby
Tacubaya, on the outskirts of town, the poet Fermin Valencia lay on his bed and listened ecstatically to the esoteric theories of
Celeste the Mysterious.

"...I'm talking about inner fortheth. All around uth. You get
it?... Do you believe in magnetithm? It'th a thientific fact," Celeste
explained to him. She was a different sort of poem, this woman.
About thirty years old, speaking with a lisp, slightly cross-eyed,
red hair, overflowing breasts (the right one a little bigger than the
left, the poet wondered, or was it just a question of perspective?),
a superb pair of legs. A run in her right stocking captivated the
poet's attention. He nodded his head vehemently as she spoke,
lying across his bed on top of the complete works of Voltaire,
smoking a cigarette.

"It'th abtholutely thientific. Electric waveth connecting
your mind with mine. It all dependth on whothe energy ith
thtrongetht."

The woman had appeared unexpectedly at his door, smiling,
dragging her lilac-colored shawl over the dust-covered chairs,
scattered papers, dirty glasses, finally dropping it over a washbasin
filled with tequila the poet had used to disinfect a cut on his leg
where he'd been hit by falling glass the night of the gunfight.

She'd introduced herself as Madame Thuareth and, after confirming that her host was in fact the poet Fermin Valencia, she'd
started in with her story about mysterious electric forces.

"And that'th only part of it.There'th other fortheth that neither
of uth will ever be aware of. Do you believe in God?"

The poet shook his head.

"But thertainly you believe in natural fortheth?"

The poet shook his head, trying to look serious, blowing smoke
up at the ceiling.

"In thienthe? Do you believe in thientific thinking?"

the poet shook his head again. He looked at her suspiciously.

"Don't you believe in anything at all? What a thilly quethtion...
everybody believth in thomething."

"You've got a run in your stocking, ma'am," the poet said, tracing his index finger softly along the inside of her leg.

He almost thought he could see her leg vibrate slightly under
his touch, and wondered if maybe there wasn't something to all
this talk about magnetic fortheth after all.

The woman giggled, inching away from the poet's probing
finger and brushing back a curl of red hair that had fallen flirtatiously across her face.

Pioquinto Manterola glanced cautiously at the dying hod
carrier and confirmed that the man continued his slow slide away
from life, eyes glued to the wall seeing nothing, lightless eyes, he
thought, looking out onto the other side. Reassured, he returned
his attention to the widow, who sat mechanically unbuttoning her
blouse, her eyes on his face and her smile blooming like the flowers
in the vase. A smile whose tremendous beauty-the inkslinger told
himself-accustomed as he was in his line of work to making this
sort of appraisal-contained a certain aftertaste of cruelty.

"Tomas, we could sleep together, you know. I mean really
together, instead of hiding from each other in the same bed...
Even if there were two beds here I'd say the same thing...," said
Rosa, looking straight at the Chinaman chewing slowly on his
eggs and sausage.

"Look into my eyeth," Celeste ordered the poet. "Look deep
into my eyeth. You will thee a lake, the blue thea."

But the widow Margarita's eyes were violet and her skin under
her white blouse was even whiter still.

"Ale you sule?"

"A thtitl, calm othean of blue water, with jutht the thoft
rocking of the waveth."

"What about your friend there in the other bed?" asked
Margarita, demonstrating that she was not only cold but cautious,
too.

"Maybe a pair of theagulls floating over the water, thwaying
back and forth in the air," murmured the hypnotist.

"Maybe we should get anothel bed."

"You feel thleepy, a thoft thleepineth, a power moving into
your body..."

"He's been lying there like that in a coma for days, looking
at the wall. He never moves. They say it's only a matter of hours
now...

"You mean two beds?"

"Are you feeling thleepy now?"

"No, just one, a biggel one."

"How's your leg?" asked the widow, letting her black skirt
fall to the floor and revealing a pair of long legs in smoky silk
stockings, the latest in German fashion judging from the girlie
magazines that arrived occasionally by steamship from Hamburg.

"Very thleepy. You are feeling very thleepy."

"Speaking of legs..." said the journalist, who couldn't pass up
a chance to mix life and art, "you've got a pretty nice pair there
yourself, Margarita."