What We Become (55 page)

“Customers?”

“There are two individuals. Or there were. Two Italians. They're dead now . . . It's absurd, but sometimes I feel like I owe them something.”

“You can't owe them anything if they're dead.”

“No, of course not. Not directly. And yet . . .”

He screwed up his eyes, remembering those poor wretches. The rain falling outside, the drops of water trickling down the glass made the scene all the more melancholy. He glanced at his watch again.

“And what about us, Max? Do you owe me anything?”

“I'll see you again once things have calmed down.”

“I may not be here by then. They might exchange my husband for other prisoners. And there's more and more talk of another war in Europe . . . Everything could change soon. Disappear.”

“I have to go now,” he said.

“I don't know where I'll be when, as you say, things calm down. Or go wrong.”

Max had reached for the door handle. Suddenly he paused, as though leaving the car meant stepping into the void. He gave a shudder, feeling vulnerable. Exposed to loneliness and to the rain.

“I don't read much,” he said. “I prefer the cinema. I occasionally skim cheap novels when traveling or at hotels, the kind magazines publish. . . . But there's something I always remember. An adventurer whose motto was: ‘I live by my sword and my steed.' ”

Max tried to order his thoughts, searching for the right words to finish what he wanted to say. Mecha sat still, listening quietly.
Between the silences, only the patter of raindrops could be heard falling on the car. Gently, now. As though God were weeping.

“I feel a bit like that. I live by what I carry with me. By what I find along the way.”

“Everything has an ending,” she said softly.

“I don't know what that ending will be, but I know the beginning . . . I had few toys as a child, almost all of them made out of painted tin and empty matchboxes. Occasionally on a Sunday, my father would take me to a matinee at the Libertad cinema. Admission was thirty cents and they gave away sweets, and tickets for a raffle I never won. On the screen, with the piano accompaniment playing in the background, I saw starched, white-bib fronts, well-dressed men and beautiful women, automobiles, parties, and champagne glasses. . . .”

Max took his tortoiseshell cigarette case out of his pocket again, but didn't open it. He was content to play with the lid, running his fingers over the initials
MC
at the bottom, monogrammed in gold.

“I used to stand outside a cake shop in Calle California,” he went on, “looking through the window at the pastries, cakes, and tarts. . . . Or I'd play along the banks of the Riachuelo on my way to La Boca, watching the sailors disembark: men with tattooed arms, who had come from places I imagined were fascinating.”

He broke off almost abruptly, feeling awkward. It had just occurred to him that he could have gone on endlessly stringing together memories like this. He was aware, too, that he had never talked about himself so much to anyone. Not truthfully, not with genuine memories.

“Some men dream of leaving, and they do it. I was one of them.”

Mecha remained silent, listening as though fearful of cutting the slender thread of his confessions. Max gave a deep, almost pained sigh, and put away the cigarette case.

“Of course there's an ending, like you say. Only I don't know where mine is.”

He stopped looking at the lights and the blurred shapes outside, and, turning toward her, he kissed her spontaneously. Gently. On the lips. Mecha let him, without resisting the contact. A delicate, moist warmth that made the rainy landscape outside seem even bleaker to him. Afterward, when she moved her face away slightly, they remained close, gazing into each other's eyes.

“You don't have to leave,” she whispered. “There are a hundred places here . . . near me.”

He was the one who pulled away this time. Without taking his eyes off her.

“In my world,” he said, “everything is wonderfully simple: I am what the tips I hand out say I am. And if one identity turns bad or his luck runs out, the next day I take on another. I live off other people's credit, without any bitterness or any grand illusions.”

“Has it never occurred to you that I could change that?”

“Listen. A while ago, I was at a party, in a villa on the outskirts of Verona. Wealthy people. After dinner, at the behest of the owners, amid laughter, the guests began scratching the plaster off the walls with their coffee spoons to reveal the painted frescoes beneath. And as I watched, I thought how absurd everything was. How I could never feel like they did. With their silver coffee spoons and their paintings hidden beneath the plaster. And their laughter.”

He paused for a moment to wind down the window and inhale the moist air from outside. Among the billboards on the station walls, political posters from Action Française and Front Populaire had been pasted: ideological slogans vying with advertisements for lingerie, mouthwash, or the latest movie,
Abus de C
onfiance.

“When I see all those black, brown, red, or blue shirts, demanding affiliation to this or that group, I think that before the world belonged to the rich and now it will belong to the embittered. . . . I fall into neither category. Try as I might, I can't even feel bitter. And I certainly try.”

He looked at her once more. She was still listening to him, motionless. Solemn.

“I think that in today's world indifference is the only possible form of freedom,” Max concluded. “That's why I'll go on living by my sword and my steed.”

“Get out of the car.”

“Mecha . . . ”

She looked away.

“You'll miss your train.”

“I love you. I think. And yet love has nothing to do with all this.”

Mecha beat the steering wheel with both hands.

“Just go. Damn you.”

Max put on his hat and got out of the car, buttoning up his raincoat. He took his suitcase and travel bag out of the back and walked away without uttering a word or looking back, through the falling rain. He felt a piercing, grief-like sadness. A sort of premature nostalgia for everything he would long for later on. As he entered the station, he handed his luggage to a porter who led him through the crowd, toward the ticket office. Then he followed him until they reached the vaulted roof of iron and glass that covered the platforms. Just then, a locomotive came chugging into the station amid clouds of steam, dragging behind it a dozen dark blue carriages with a gold stripe beneath the windows bearing the words
Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits
. A metal plate on either side showed the route: Monaco-Marseille-Lyon-Paris. Max glanced around, on the lookout for any disquieting signs. Two gendarmes in dark uniforms were chatting outside the door to the waiting room. Everything looked calm, he thought, and no one seemed particularly interested in him. Although that was no guarantee.

“Which car, sir?” the porter with his luggage asked.

“Number two.”

He climbed aboard the train, handed his ticket to the conductor together with a one-hundred-franc note (a surefire way of winning
the man over for the entire journey), and while the conductor was doffing his cap and bowing from the waist, he gave another twenty to the luggage porter.

“Thank you, sir.”

“No, my friend. Thank you.”

As he entered the compartment, he closed the door and pulled the curtain back, just far enough to be able to take another look at the platform. The two gendarmes hadn't moved and were still chatting, and he saw nothing to alarm him. People were saying their farewells and climbing aboard the train. There was a group of nuns fluttering their handkerchiefs, and an attractive woman embracing a man outside a carriage door. Max lit a cigarette and leaned back in his seat. When the train started to move, he looked up at the suitcase on the luggage rail. He thought about the letters hidden inside the lining. And about how he would stay alive and a free man until he disposed of them. Mecha Inzunza had already vanished from his memory.

Pain, Max realizes, sooner or later reaches a saturation point where intensity is no longer important. Where being hit twenty times is the same as being hit forty times. From that point on, what hurts are the breaks between blows, not each fresh blow, but the moments when your tormentor stops what he is doing to take a breather. When the numbed flesh relaxes and feels the pain inflicted upon it. The sum of all the previous blows.

“The book, Max . . . Where's the book?”

The man with the ginger mustache and the hands that resemble tentacles is talking, but his voice sounds distorted and muffled to Max, because his head is wrapped in a wet towel, making it difficult for him to breathe, even as it muffles his cries, absorbs some of the impact of the blows, and leaves no visible marks or bruising on his body, which is now tied to the chair. The rest of the blows
are directed at his stomach and abdomen, exposed by the posture the ligatures have forced him to adopt. They are meted out both by the man with lank hair and the one in the black leather jacket. He knows it's them, because from time to time they remove the towel, and through the mist of his throbbing eyes filled with tears he sees them next to him, rubbing their knuckles, while the other man watches seated.

“The book. Where is it?”

They have just taken the towel off his head. Max gulps air into his bruised lungs, despite each breath stinging as if his skin were flayed. His blurry eyes finally manage to focus on the man with the ginger mustache.

“The book,” the man says again. “Tell us where it is, and let's be done with this.”

“I know . . . nothing . . . about any . . . book.”

On his own initiative, under no orders from anyone and as a personal contribution to the procedure, the man in the black leather jacket suddenly punches Max in the groin. Max writhes beneath the ropes as this new pain radiates out into his thighs and chest. He wants to curl up, but that's impossible because his legs, chest, and arms are tied to the chair. A cold sweat breaks out over his whole body, and a few seconds later, for the third time since this started, he vomits bile, which dribbles down his chin onto his shirt. The man who hit him looks at him in disgust and turns toward the man with the ginger mustache, awaiting further instructions.

“The book, Max.”

Still gasping for breath, Max shakes his head.

“Well, well.” There is a hint of mocking admiration in the Russian's voice. “The old man is playing tough guy . . . at his age.”

Another blow in the same place. A fresh spasm causes Max to writhe once more, as though something sharp were piercing his innards. And then, after a few seconds of intense pain, he loses control and cries out: a short, savage cry that brings him some
relief. This time he retches without producing any vomit. Max sits with his head lolling on his chest, breathing unevenly and painfully. Shivering because of the sweat that seems to be freezing beneath his damp clothing, in every pore of his body.

“The book . . . Where is it?”

Max lifts his head, slightly. His heartbeat is erratic, with long pauses, followed by violent palpitations. He is convinced he is going to die in the next few minutes, and is surprised at his own indifference. His numb resignation. He never imagined it like this, he reflects in a moment of clarity. Letting himself go, punch-drunk, like allowing the current to drag you away into the night. But this is how it will be. Or so it seems. With all that pain and weariness wracking his body, it feels more like a promise of relief than anything else. Rest, at last. A long, final sleep.

“Where's the book, Max?”

Another blow, to the chest this time, followed by a explosion of pain that seems to crush his spine. Once more he is seized by violent retching, but there is nothing left to come out of his mouth. He urinates freely, wetting his trousers, with an intense stinging sensation that makes him howl. His head feels like it's splitting, and there is scarcely space for any coherent images among his jumbled thoughts. All he can make out with his blurred vision are white deserts, blinding flashes of light, vast surfaces undulating like heavy mercury. The void, perhaps. Or nothingness. Sometimes, into this nothingness old images of Mecha Inzunza appear, random fragments from his past, strange sounds. The one he hears the most is that of the three ivory balls clicking against each other on a billiard table: a soft, monotonous, almost pleasant sound that brings Max a strange kind of peace. Which inspires him with the necessary strength to raise his chin and look straight into the steely eyes of the man sitting opposite him.

“I hid it . . . up your mother's . . . cunt.”

With that last word, he spits at the man with the ginger mus
tache. A pathetic string of bloody sputum that misses its target and dribbles to the floor between his own knees. The man with the ginger mustache contemplates the spittle on the floor with a look of displeasure.