The Skating Rink (10 page)

Remo Morán

The days that preceded the discovery of the body

The days that preceded the discovery of the body were undeniably
strange: freshly painted inside and out, and silent, as if we could somehow all
sense the imminence of a calamity. I remember during my second year in Z, the
body of a teenage girl, almost a child, was found in a vacant lot; she’d been
killed and raped. The killer was never found. Around that time there was a
series of murders, all fitting the same pattern; they began in Tarragona and
moved up the coast, leaving a trail of bodies (girls killed and raped, in that
order) all the way to Port Bou, as if the killer was a tourist on the way home,
but a very leisurely tourist, because a whole summer season elapsed between the
first and the last of the crimes. That was a good summer for business. We made
money, and there still wasn’t much competition. As you would expect, the police
found some of the culprits: screwed-up kids, office workers who had always led
quiet, irreproachable lives, a German truck driver, and even, in the most widely
publicized case, a policeman. But at least three of the crimes remained
unsolved, including the one in Z. I remember that on the day the body was
discovered (the girl, I mean, not the body I found), before I heard anything
about it, I felt that something bad had happened in the town. The streets were
luminous, as the streets of childhood sometimes seem in memory, and although we
were having a hot summer the morning was cool, and had the feel of something
freshly made, an impression that extended to the houses, the washed-down
sidewalks, and the faint but clearly recognizable sounds. Then I heard the news
and soon it was the topic of every conversation. The mystery, the sense of
suspended reality, gradually dissipated. In just the same way, the four or five
days before I found the body were atypical days, not a succession of fragments
and hours, but solid blocks dominated by a single unrelenting light: the will to
persist whatever the cost, unhearing, unseeing, without the slightest groan of
protest. The feeling was no doubt intensified by Nuria’s absence, which left me
dejected and anxious, and by the almost certain knowledge that, whatever I did,
my relationship with her was condemned to failure. I think it was only then that
I realized how much I had come to love her. But the realization didn’t help. On
the contrary. When I think of those afternoons now, it makes me laugh, but I
wasn’t laughing at the time, and even now, there’s often something strained
about my laughter. I listened to Loquillo, especially the sad songs, and hardly
left my room or the triangle formed by my room, the hotel bar and a bar near the
campground that was being run that season by a Dutch guy and a Spanish girl who
were friends of Alex’s. But drinking in a seaside town buzzing with tourists
isn’t really drinking. It only gives you a headache. I longed for the bars of
Barcelona or Mexico City, but I knew that those places, those perfect dives, had
vanished forever. And maybe that’s why, a couple of times, I went to the
campground looking for Gasparín. I never found him. The second time I went, the
receptionist informed me, though no one had asked her opinion, that my friend
was an odd boy (a boy!), and that as far as she could tell he hadn’t slept for a
couple of weeks. On more than one occasion she had gone to fetch him, so he
could give them a hand, since they were short-staffed on the day shift. But his
tent was always empty. She had only seen him about three times since he started
work, and that wasn’t normal. I tried to reassure her by explaining that he was
a poet; she replied that her boyfriend, the Peruvian, was a poet too, but he
didn’t behave like that. Like a zombie. I didn’t feel like arguing with her.
Especially when, examining her fingernails, she remarked that poetry was a waste
of time. She was right; on the planet of happy eunuchs and zombies, poetry is a
waste of time. These days she’s living with the Peruvian, and although I
couldn’t make it to the wedding, I sent them a state-of-the-art pressure cooker.
That was Lola’s suggestion; we sometimes go shopping together for our son,
although it’s really an excuse for a coffee and a chat somewhere in downtown
Gerona. In the end it was better that I didn’t find Gasparín, because my reason
for wanting to see him was totally selfish: I wanted to talk, pour out my soul,
and reminisce, with a little help from a friend, about the golden streets we had
trodden together in the old days (the
good
old days), but in fact that was all just a way of skirting
around what was, for me, the real issue: Nuria transformed into a series of
images that had nothing to do with the girl I know. For my dark purposes a
sports aficionado would have been more useful, but the only person I could think
of was the barber, José, and he knew nothing about figure skating anyway. So in
the end I had no one to talk to, which was just as well; it forced me to let the
time go by in a more dignified manner. I think I said this already, but I’ll say
it again just in case: it wasn’t the first time I’d seen a corpse. It had
happened twice before. The first time was in Chile, in Concepción, the capital
of the south. I was looking out the big window of the gymnasium where I was
imprisoned along with about a hundred other people: it was a November night in
1973, the moon was full, and in the courtyard I saw a fat guy surrounded
by a ring of police detectives. They were all beating him with their fists,
their feet, and rubber truncheons. After a while, the fat guy stopped
protesting. Then he fell face down on the ground and it was only then
that I realized he was barefoot. One of the detectives lifted his head by
the hair and examined it for a moment. Another one said he must be dead. A
third remembered having heard something about the fat guy having heart
problems. They dragged him away by the feet. In the gymnasium just me and
one other prisoner had witnessed the scene; the rest were bundled up
sleeping wherever they could find a place, and the air was so thick with
snores and sighs I thought we were going to suffocate. I came across the
second dead body in Mexico, on the outskirts of Nogales, a city in the
north. I was traveling with two friends, in a car that belonged to one of
them, and we were going to meet two girls, who in the end never turned up.
Before we got to the meeting place, I got out to urinate and probably
wandered too far from the highway. The body was between two humps of
orange-colored earth, face up, arms outstretched, with a small hole in the
forehead, just above the nose; it looked like it could have been made by a
hole-punch, although it had in fact been made by a bullet, a .22. A faggot’s
gun, said one of my friends. The other friend was Gasparín; he took a look
at the body but didn’t say anything. Sometimes in the mornings, when I’m
having breakfast on my own, I think I would have loved to be a detective.
I’m pretty observant, and I can reason deductively, and I’m a keen reader of
crime fiction. If that’s any use . . . which it
isn’t . . . Anyway, as Hans Henny Jahn, I think, once wrote:
if you find a murder victim, better brace yourself, because the bodies will
soon be coming thick and fast . . .

Gaspar Heredia:

I watched Carmen and the Rookie from a distance

I watched Carmen and the Rookie from a distance: they were on the
beach, gesturing wildly, lunging at each other and dodging; their feints were
more like a hieroglyphic script than acts of aggression. Meanwhile, the
swimmers, ignoring their quarrel, were heading back to their hotels, leaving
them alone, enveloped in a veil of spray. Then, suddenly, Carmen left the beach
and set off along the Paseo. The Rookie turned around, and after a moment of
hesitation, sat down on the sand. From where I was, he looked like a dark mossy
rock that had turned up on the beach the night before. I didn’t stop for long.
Two hundred yards ahead of me, I could hear Carmen’s voice (it was impossible to
see her in the thick mass of tourists) singing, “I am a shepherdess in Arcadia.”
Mistakenly, I thought she had stopped and that if I kept walking, I was bound to
catch up with her. For a long time, guided only by her song, I followed Carmen
along the Paseo Marítimo, until I reached the Esplanade. Gradually I slowed my
pace to match hers, the leisurely pace of a queen returning to her castle. Now
she was singing, “I am a wounded thrush at the gates of Hell,” and in the faces
of the people coming the other way, in some of those faces at least, I could see
little sneers or empty smiles, flickers that bore unequivocal witness to
Carmen’s passage and her terrifying energy. I won’t go into the details of how I
shadowed her. It was more or less like the first time I followed Caridad. The
streets were different and the pace was slower, but the destination was the
same: the old mansion on the outskirts of Z. Carmen, as I noticed when we left
town and set off on the highway that runs alongside the sea, was drunk. She
would stop every ten paces and pull a bottle from her bag, then, a moment later,
after taking a swig or two, resume her increasingly erratic and unsteady
journey. I could hear her voice in snatches, carried by the evening breeze
curling around the rocks, emphatically intoning, “I am a bell in the snow,
tudum, tudum” almost as if it was a hymn. Just before reaching the mansion, I
let her get ahead and stopped to think. What was I doing there? Did I really
want to find Caridad, whatever the consequences might be? And if I did find her,
what would I say? Would I have the courage to explain what I felt for her? I
stayed there thinking for a good while, as cars sped recklessly around the bend
in the highway, heading for Z or Y. Finally I got up and walked down the private
road, still confused about what I wanted and what I felt. Curiosity was drawing
me on, the desire to see the skating rink again, and the vague sense that I had
to protect Caridad and the singer. As soon as I crossed the threshold of the
mansion, the sound of the “Fire Dance” put an end to my ruminations. From then
on it was like I was drugged. From then on the world was entirely transformed,
and my fears and suspicions shrank away, obliterated by the brilliant alliance
of desire and risk within those sturdy old walls. The fat guy was standing
beside the rink, holding a notebook and a fountain pen. The arrangement of the
packing cases had changed significantly since my last visit, so to get a good
view of the whole rink without being seen I had to creep along the wall toward
the generator. You’re losing energy, said the fat guy, barely moving his lips.
The skater appeared like a breath of air from a corner of the rink beyond my
field of vision and disappeared again immediately. There was something about
their imperturbable presence in that abandoned mansion that reminded me of
Carmen and the Rookie arguing on the beach. Did you hear me? said the fat guy.
You’re losing energy. The skater stopped on the edge of the rink, next to him,
and without moving, or rather moving only her hips and her pelvis, performed a
little dance that clearly had nothing to do with Manuel de Falla’s music. The
fat guy’s lips relaxed beatifically. After this brief interlude, the skater bent
down and resumed her exercises without saying a word. The fat guy turned his
attention back to his notebook: Well, well, he said after a while. Do you know
how much the folk dancing is going to cost this year? No, and I don’t care,
shouted the skater. The fat guy moved his head several times, nodding and
shaking, and in between the nods and shakes he pursed his lips as if he was
about to whistle or kiss someone on the cheek. I don’t know, there was something
about the guy that made him likeable. The rectangular rink seemed to be more
brightly illuminated than last time and the humming of the generator, or
generators, was louder, as if the machine was signaling that it had reached its
maximum capacity. What a stupid waste of money, murmured the fat guy. The girl
threw him a sidelong glance as she went past, then looked up at the beams from
which the spotlights were hanging, and closed her eyes. Skating blind, she
slowed down gradually, but also began to move in a more complex and confident
way. Each turn and shift of position had clearly been practiced many times over.
Finally she headed for the center of the rink, where she leaped up and span
around several times before landing precisely and skating away. Bravo, whispered
the fat guy. All I know about skating is what I learned from watching some
Holiday on Ice show in a bar, but what she was doing seemed perfect to me. The
skater continued with her eyes closed and tried to repeat the last manoeuvre.
But what should have been a stylized T figure, her body outstretched
horizontally, balanced on one vertical leg, as she sliced the rink into two
equal halves, became a tumble of legs and arms that finished with her lying face
up on the ice. Just then, at the opposite end of the rink, I saw Caridad’s
silhouette, hidden among the cases, like me. Have you hurt yourself? asked the
fat guy, who started to walk onto the ice but then stopped. No, said the girl
without trying to get up, her arms outstretched, her legs slightly apart and her
hair spread like a cushion between her head and the ice. From the look on her
face she didn’t seem to be in pain or even upset about messing up the routine.
But my attention was divided between the skater and the silhouette at the other
end of the rink, which, to my horror, for a moment resembled the shadow of a
huge, emaciated rat. Why don’t you get up? Are you OK? Standing on tiptoe at the
edge of the rink, the fat guy was clearly alarmed in the extreme. I’m fine,
really, you shouldn’t talk so much, it breaks my concentration, said the skater
flat out on the ice. Talk? I hardly said a thing, replied the fat guy. What
about those papers you were reading aloud? That’s for my work, Nuria, don’t be
so touchy, he whined, anyway, I wasn’t reading them out loud. Yes you were. A
few comments, maybe, that was all, come on Nuria, get up, you could damage your
back lying there, said the fat guy. Why? Because it’s very cold! Come here, help
me up, said the skater. What? The fat guy put on an apologetic smile. The girl
kept lying there quietly, waiting. Do you want me to help you? Don’t you feel
well? Have you hurt yourself, Nuria? The fat guy’s body teetered precariously on
the edge of the rink. There was something pendulum-like about him. Something
uncannily reminiscent of a clockwork mechanism. Down at the other end, Caridad’s
whole head was visible over the cases. Come and lie down beside me, it’s not
that cold, said the skater. What do you mean not that cold? I swear, said the
skater. The fat guy turned around. Caridad’s head disappeared immediately. Had
they seen her? Come on, stop playing around and get on with your training, said
the fat guy after scrutinizing the darkness. The skater didn’t answer. The spiky
hair of the girl with the knife appeared again over the tops of the boxes. I
figured the fat guy probably hadn’t seen her, although from the way he had
turned around, he was definitely expecting to find something behind him. Come
here, said the skater, don’t be afraid. You come here, replied the fat guy, in a
barely audible voice. Still looking up at the roof, the skater smiled broadly
and said, Chook chook chook. The fat guy heaved an exasperated sigh, walked
around the chair and sat in it with his back to the skater, pointedly facing the
rows of cases. Ignoring his body language, the girl sat up on the ice. What time
is it? The fat guy looked at his watch and said something I couldn’t hear. It’s
not a big deal, just a fall or two, you always exaggerate, said the skater.
Maybe, said the fat guy, with irritation and affection in his voice, but so do
you. Ever since I was a little girl, she confirmed. The fat guy stood up,
looking happy, and said, Listen, I’m not your trainer but I know that lying on
ice after skating has got to be bad for you. You’ve perspired and now you’re
getting cold. I know, I’m a silly girl, said the skater. I’m serious, Nuria,
said the fat guy. Then they were quiet for a moment, observing each other, the
girl in the middle of the rink, the fat guy perched on the cement edge,
balancing on tiptoe with his hands in his pockets. Suddenly the skater was
possessed by laughter. I’d like to see you skate, she sputtered between
convulsions. Her laughter was sudden and cold like the ice. Yes, very funny, I’d
fall over, said the fat guy. That’s what I was thinking, but you could take the
knocks, and I’d make you skate eight hours a day, until you fell asleep on your
skates. I don’t think you’d be that cruel, said the fat guy. What kind of dress
could you wear? I know, a blue one, with flounces—and I would be that cruel, you
don’t know me. The fat guy nodded and pretended to get angry, but now and then
let out a laugh, as if it had risen irrepressibly from deep inside. One day I’ll
skate, for you . . . he whispered. You couldn’t, said the skater.
I promise you I will, Nuria. The fat guy moved his left hand strangely, like a
sleepwalker or someone opening a door. Sitting on the ice, no longer laughing,
the skater observed him attentively, waiting for a declaration, but the fat guy
said nothing more. Suddenly the skater hiccuped. What was that? said the fat
guy, looking everywhere except the rink. Shit, I’ve got hiccups, said the
skater. You see, I warned you, why don’t you get up? It’s from laughing so much,
it’s your fault, said the skater. Come on, I’ll give you a glass of water and
it’ll go away, said the fat guy. That doesn’t work with me, you’re going to make
me drink it backwards, aren’t you? The fat guy looked at her admiringly. That
what my grandma used to do, I almost broke my teeth once. They waited for the
next hiccup in silence; even the “Fire Dance” seemed to be playing more quietly.
At the other end of the rink, Caridad’s silhouette rose above the cases until
her head and shoulders were dimly visible. She was thinner than she had been at
the campground, and the background of shadows and straight edges accentuated the
impression of thinness. The skater’s hiccup resonated in every corner. Well,
it’s always worked for me, said the fat guy. That’s because you’re so cautious,
you’d never bite the glass and break a tooth, said the skater. You just put your
lips on the edge, that’s all. Do you want to see my method? The fat guy remained
perfectly still, as if he had seen a lion in the middle of the rink, and then he
tried to shake his head to say no, but it was too late. She had already clicked
the blades of her skates together and was gliding over the ice towards him. When
she got there, he was waiting, tremulous and attentive, with an enormous towel.
You’re cold, he said, let me rub you a bit. Turn off the tape, said the skater.
The fat guy draped the towel over the girls’ shoulders and promptly obeyed her
order . . .