The Skating Rink (14 page)

Gaspar Heredia:

Caridad adapted pretty well to life at the campground

Caridad adapted pretty well to life at the campground, although it
was hard to tell at the start, because she rarely spoke, and I rarely asked her
a question. Rather than really sharing the tent, we took turns in it: when I was
getting ready for bed, she was waking up, and by the time I got up, she had
already gone to sleep. We only had one meal together, the morning meal—dinner
for me, breakfast for her—consisting of cheese, yogurt, fruit, boiled ham, and
whole wheat bread, a diet designed to put some color back into her cheeks,
although she remained reluctant to eat. If by chance we happened to be in the
campground bar at the same time, we’d usually have a beer together. We didn’t
talk much, but I soon discovered that she had the most disturbing voice I have
ever heard. It was intensely pleasurable to crawl into the tent and find her
smell clinging to the mess of clothes. It was even better to wake up and find
her a few steps away from the tent, sitting on the ground, reading by the light
of a gas lamp. The singer had told me about her ill health, but the only sign of
it I could see was frequent bleeding from the nose, which according to Caridad
was caused by the sun, no big deal. The worst thing was that sometimes she
didn’t notice until the blood started dripping from her chin, and, if you didn’t
know about her condition, it was a disquieting sight. When she got a nosebleed,
every two days or so, she’d hold a damp handkerchief against her nasal septum,
and lie on the ground face up beside the tent, waiting for it to stop. I
exploited those opportunities to talk with her as tactfully as I could. I would
start with the weather and end with her health. Naturally, whenever I suggested
we go see a doctor, she flatly refused. Caridad, as I later found out, hated
hospitals as much as she hated schools, police stations and old people’s homes.
I never saw her bleed from the mouth or spit blood, which led me to suspect that
Carmen had been mistaken or maybe, encouraged by my obvious interest, had
exaggerated her friend’s ills. I never found out whether Caridad had parents,
brothers, sisters or any other relatives. She kept her past sealed in the
strictest silence, which was surprising for someone who hadn’t even reached the
age of twenty. One day she ran into the boy with the motorbike in the campground
bar. I saw them before I got there, and rather than going up to them or walking
away, I watched from a distance. They spoke—the boy did, anyway, while Caridad
moved her lips from time to time—for about ten minutes. Two charged-up
batteries, I thought. Then they went their separate ways, like spaceships on
diverging trajectories, and the vibrant emptiness they left in the bar
threatened to swallow up the other clients. Another day, while we were having a
beer, the boy appeared and started talking. He was speaking Spanish but using
words that it seemed only he and Caridad could understand. Before leaving he
smiled at me in a way that could have meant anything. The next time I saw him
was at reception; he rode up on his bike, and said he wanted to talk to me. It
turned out he only wanted to thank me for what I had done for Caridad. She’s out
of her tree, he said, but she’s a good person. It was nighttime and the
motorbike was making quite a racket. I told him to switch off the motor and push
it to his tent, which he did. For many days, Caridad and I didn’t leave the
campground except to buy provisions. We didn’t plan it that way; it was just
that for different reasons neither of us felt like going out. I could have gone
on like that forever, but the boy with the motorbike took to visiting every
afternoon, coming straight to our tent without any kind of pretext. Still half
asleep, I’d hear him arrive and start up a conversation with Caridad, who by
that time, unless she’d gone to the bar, would be sitting outside the tent, with
a book, but not reading, just thinking. One afternoon the boy came with his
motorbike, and after talking in hushed voices for a couple of minutes, the pair
of them disappeared. I thought I wouldn’t see her again. When they came back, at
three or four in the morning, I was sitting beside the entrance barrier, and
Caridad greeted me with a nod. Two days later the boy left the campground and
Caridad stayed with me. At the time, El Carajillo told me, the town was in
turmoil, on edge. The embezzlement was bigger news than the crime at the Palacio
Benvingut, but I had no idea what was going on: I wasn’t buying newspapers or
listening to the radio, and I only watched TV now and then in the office. Remo
came to see me a few times. We did our best to make small talk, but it was
pretty hopeless. A sorry performance. We couldn’t even look each other in the
eye. It was only when he started going on and on about the old days in Mexico (I
just listened) that it got a bit more animated. Animated but sad. Just as well
we didn’t sink to reading our new poems. Though maybe that was because we didn’t
have any. One night I saw the fat guy on TV: he was being escorted by two
policemen from a car to a courtroom. He didn’t try to cover his face with his
jacket or his cuffed hands; on the contrary, he looked at the camera with a
curious, distant gaze, as if the whole business had nothing to do with him, as
if the killers and embezzlers were on the other side, well out of the camera’s
range. One night, while I was sleeping, Caridad came into the tent, got
undressed, and we made love, a bit like the guy on TV, as if it had nothing to
do with us, as if the real lovers were dead and buried. But it was the first
time and it was beautiful, and from then on we began to talk a bit more, not a
lot, but a bit more . . .

Enric Rosquelles:

I swear I didn’t kill her

I swear I didn’t kill her. I’d only seen her a couple of times in my
life; why would I want to kill her? It’s true that the old woman came to my
office and I gave her money, yes, you could even say she was blackmailing me,
but that’s no reason to kill anyone. I’m a Catalan and this is Catalonia, not
Chicago or Colombia. And with a
knife
as well! I have never attacked
anyone with a knife, not even in my dreams, and supposing, just supposing, that
I had—can you seriously imagine me stabbing her twenty times? Sorry, thirty-four
times, to be exact. Come on! And right in the middle of my skating rink! I might
as well have killed myself straight away if I’d done that, because I was always
going to be the prime suspect for a murder committed in the Palacio Benvingut.
And what could I possibly have to gain by killing the old woman? Nothing, only
grief, as if I didn’t have enough of that already. Since the day that wretched
woman died my life has been a nightmare. Everyone has turned their back on me.
They fired me and kicked me out of the party. No one wanted to hear my version
of the story. After all the help I gave her, Pilar is saying she’d had doubts
about me for some time. A barefaced lie. And the party secretary in Gerona is
saying he’d always thought there was something suspicious about me. Another lie.
Stupid lies, too! If it was so obvious what I was up to, and they knew, why
didn’t they do something before embezzlement and murder were committed? I’m
telling you: the reason they didn’t do anything is that they didn’t know or
suspect what was going on; they had no idea. The best thing for them to do now
would be keep their mouths shut and face up to their individual
responsibilities. Yes, I used public funds to build the skating rink at the
Palacio Benvingut, but I have documentation here to prove that the rink can pay
for itself within seven years, if it’s well run, not to mention the benefits to
the local athletic community and skaters from further afield, since there is no
adequate facility for winter sports anywhere in the region. And let me point
out, to those who think I’m making up excuses and justifications after the fact,
that’s a proper, regulation-size rink, 184 by 85 feet, the minimum size (the
maximum is 197 by 98). All we’d have to do is add a “decent and appropriate”
dressing room (as the regulations specify) and simple but comfortable seating,
and practically overnight Z would have a real treasure for years to come, the
envy of all the neighboring towns, every bit as good as any competition rink in
Europe. All right, so no one authorized me to spend public funds on a sports
facility. So I did it behind everyone’s back, especially behind the backs of the
communists and Convergencia i Unión. So my motivation was personal, I wanted to
win the favors of a skater. Does that mean I’m a madman, a megalomaniac, and
probably, though we’re still waiting for proof, a killer? I’m sorry to
disappoint you, but it isn’t true, I’m not a monster, just an enterprising,
tenacious administrator, and I acted in good faith. For example, the plans for
the rink didn’t cost a cent; I created them myself, drawing on the work of the
famous engineer Harold Petersson, the designer of Rome’s first skating rink,
built at the behest of Benito Mussolini in 1932. The refrigerator grille is my
own invention, although it was inspired by the energy-efficient grilles used by
the functionalist architects John F. Mitchell and James Brandon, who specialized
in sports facilities. I didn’t have to excavate: I filled in Benvingut’s old
swimming pool. I was able to buy most of the machinery at bargain prices from a
friend in Barcelona, an entrepreneur bankrupted by the influx of foreign firms.
To secure the services and the discretion of Z’s most notorious builder, all I
had to do was apply a little pressure (and he in turn applied pressure to his
laborers). No one will admit it now, but the operation was tightly run. I ask
you: who else could have managed a project like that, keeping it quiet and
spending so little money? People are throwing around figures of 20, 30 or even
40 million pesetas, but I can assure you that the sum I appropriated was a
fraction of that. Anyway, I know that no one can honestly stand up and say: I
could have done it better. Not that I’m trying to present myself as some kind of
moral example. I know I did something I shouldn’t have done. I know I made a
mistake. Pilar will probably lose the election because of me. I have brought the
party into disrepute. Without meaning to, I set loose the pack of wolves that is
after Nuria. I was the laughingstock of Spain for at least two nights, and the
laughingstock of Catalonia for a whole week. The most contemptible sport shows
on the airwaves have dragged my name through the mud. But to go on and call me a
murderer is an enormous jump. I swear I didn’t kill her; the night of the murder
I was at home, sleeping fitfully, tangled in nightmares and sheets damp with
sweat. Unfortunately my poor mother is a sound sleeper, so she cannot vouch for
me . . .

Remo Morán:

The newspapers and magazines made her famous

The newspapers and magazines made her famous throughout the country,
and they say the story even went international; her photo appeared in
sensationalist weeklies across Europe. They called her The Mystery Woman of the
Palacio Benvingut, The Ice Maiden, The Angel-Eyed Skater, The Spanish Object of
Desire, The Beauty who Rocked the Costa Brava. Not long after the news broke,
she was expelled from the Federation, which killed any hopes she might have had
of returning to competition skating. A Barcelona magazine offered her two
million pesetas for a naked photo shoot. Another one offered her half a million
for the complete story of what had happened at the Palacio Benvingut. Some said
that Enric Rosquelles was taking the rap for Nuria, but that accusation
didn’t stand up: according to the pathologists, the crime took place around
three in the morning, and Nuria was at home that night; her mother and
sister confirmed it. If that wasn’t enough to make her alibi watertight, a
friend of hers from X had spent the night at the apartment, for reasons
irrelevant to the case, and they had talked until after the estimated time
of death and slept in the same room. The friend stated unequivocally that
Nuria stayed in bed for the rest of the night. The hardest thing of all for
her was being debarred from the skating team; she wasn’t even allowed to
compete in the selection trials. Suddenly, just when everything
seemed to be going so well, the scholarships and the medals came to an end,
along with the hopes of more to come. While the story was still fresh, and the
media were still keen to interview her, especially the scandal-mongering
late-night sport shows, she took every opportunity to speak out against the
managers and trainers who had set themselves up as judges and arbitrarily shut
her out of what was, to her, far more than a profession. She claimed it was
unconstitutional and tried to defend herself, but it was futile. One night when
I was in the bar with Alex and a waiter, after all the clients had gone, I heard
her on the radio. That little transistor radio was like a ghost from another
planet, between a box of beers and the fridge. I shouldn’t have listened, it was
excruciating: the host manipulated her for twenty minutes, expertly violating
her privacy, cloaking his rapacity in concern. Nuria came back to Z a week
later. She was exhausted and there was something feverish in her eyes. She
didn’t want to be seen in restaurants or anywhere too busy, but she didn’t want
to stay home either. When I went to pick her up, I suggested we drive away from
the coast, and we ended up on back roads lined with old farm buildings converted
into open-air cafés. As we drove, she talked about Enric. She said she had
treated him badly: while the poor guy was moldering in prison, she was running
around, demanding her right to compete for a place on the Olympic team, but all
she’d been doing, in the end, was making a fool of herself. She felt terribly
selfish. She said she had always known that Enric was in love with her, but
she’d never really thought about it much. He never expressed his emotions; maybe
if he’d asked her to sleep with him, things would have worked out differently.
She told me she had been staying at a friend’s place in Barcelona and at the
start she’d been utterly miserable: she cried herself to sleep every night; she
had nightmares about the murdered woman; her head ached and her hands shook when
visitors came. One day she ran into her old boyfriend in the corridors of the
National Sports Institute, and he made a fool of himself. They slept together;
she left at midnight convinced she would never see him again. He was asleep and
didn’t even notice. She didn’t mention the meetings or the law suits she was
preparing, and I didn’t ask. She wanted to visit Enric in prison, and she was
looking for someone to go with her. I said I would, but the days went by and
Nuria didn’t bring it up again. She would turn up at the hotel at the usual
time, and we’d go straight up to my room and stay there until it began to get
dark. In bed she always talked about the Palacio Benvingut and the old woman.
One afternoon, as she was coming, she said I should buy it. I don’t have that
sort of money, I said. It’s a pity, she replied. If you had lots of money we
could leave this place forever. I’ve got enough money for that, I said, but by
then she had stopped listening. When we made love she was mostly quiet, but as
she approached her climax she’d begin to talk. The problem wasn’t so much that
Nuria talked while we were having sex, but that she always talked about the same
things: murder and skating. As if she was suffocating. The worst thing, though,
was that it started to rub off on me, and soon, as our rhythm accelerated, we’d
both launch into confessions and gruesome soliloquies full of groans and sheets
of ice scattered with old women, and only orgasm could shut us up. How did I
feel when I saw the old woman lying in a puddle of blood? Did I know that the
blade of a skate was only three millimeters wide and could be a lethal weapon?
Why had the old woman gone onto the ice? Was she fleeing from her killer? Did
she think the killer wouldn’t be able to follow her? Which of them slipped
first? Sometimes Nuria went on about Enric. Would he hate her? Was he thinking
of her? Was he suicidal? Was he was crazy? Had he killed the old woman? One
afternoon she asked me to sodomize her. As I was about to, she said that Enric
would have taken it up the ass in prison for sure. Imagining the fat guy, even
for an instant, was enough to put me off. One afternoon she told me she had
dreamed about the old woman’s blood. The blood on the ice formed a letter that
nobody had seen, not me or the police or anyone. What letter? A capital N.
Another afternoon, instead of getting undressed I suggested we take the car and
go see Enric in Gerona. Nuria refused and then began to cry. How could I have
been so dumb, she said, why didn’t I realize? Realize what? That Enric had built
the skating rink without council authorization? No, shouted Nuria, that no one
has ever loved me like Enric! He was my true love and I couldn’t see it. And she
kept coming up with variations on that theme until both of us were exhausted. I
soon realized, and I think Nuria did too, that we were heading for a dead end.
And yet we had never been so close, or wanted each other so
badly . . .