Antonio Hill - The Good Suicides

Looking away, so as not to give him what he wanted, she answered: “Sara. Loyal Sara. We can trust her. Sara is trustworthy …”

His blood turned cold as he recognized sentences he and Sílvia had used in the intimacy of the bedroom.

“You can hear everything, César. From Pol’s room you can hear everything and he doesn’t mind swapping with me for a night.” She laughed. “You can even hear your pathetic attempts at fucking.”

He pushed her backward again. Her head ricocheted off the white wall.

“You brute!”

César realized he’d hurt her. The impact had resonated through the empty apartment and, to his dismay, Emma’s eyes filled with tears.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Emma, this is more serious than you think … Please, tell me what you heard.”

“You hurt me.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“And what did you mean?”

They were dangerously close once again, and the scent of Emma was an addiction he found hard to resist. Just one kiss, one more. The last, he promised himself.

Their tongues caressed, licked each other; their lips collided at the same time César’s hands fell on her breasts. She separated their lips, just for an instant, to catch her breath. To moan, because she already knew these gasps aroused him.

He quelled the moan with another more voracious, furious kiss, and they both closed their eyes. Tongues seeking one another, hands burning. They forgot what they’d been discussing, where they were, who they were. They were just breathing, kissing, touching, smelling.

Not for a moment noticing that they weren’t alone.

Sílvia had come in a few minutes before, preoccupied by the threatening phone call she’d received after lunch. The same voice, the same financial demands. And while they spoke, Sílvia couldn’t get the image of Amanda, dead in a white bed, out of her mind. As soon as the phone call ended, she felt nauseated; she went to the company bathroom and vomited up her breakfast as well as lunch, then felt too sick to stay at work. In fact, she felt so ill that for a moment, finding that scene, she thought it was a product of her fever. It wasn’t. No dream was so real. It was César and Emma, in flesh and blood. About to fuck, kissing each other as no one had kissed her in years. So involved in the act that they hadn’t even seen or heard her, until Sílvia, unable to react any other way, started laughing. And it was that bitter, unnatural laugh that made the lovers stop. They remained in an embrace but immobile, refusing to open their eyes; keeping them closed a little longer, not to have to see. It was enough to hear that laugh, that rain of rusty nails that pinned them to the wall as if they were an erotic photo, a poster in bad taste that would shortly be taken down, torn in two and thrown in the garbage.

The journey back to Barcelona was more relaxed. It was influenced by the fact that they’d stopped to have a late lunch in a highway restaurant, and that Señora Vinyals’ tale opened up a whole series of possibilities, although few certainties. When they got back into the car it was already after five, and Héctor accelerated a little. He wanted to get back to the station in time to see Fort and find out firsthand if there was any news. Curiously, the animated conversation they’d kept up over lunch died as soon as he took the wheel. Lola was looking out of the window and he watched her from the corner of his eye. She’d cut her hair, but other than that she’d changed very little in those seven years. She’d always been attractive, although her style was in such contrast to Ruth’s that it begged the question how the same man could fall in love with two such different women.

“You’re the same.” His thought had been expressed aloud without his even noticing.

“Don’t believe it,” she replied, not looking away from the window. “Just seems so.”

“How are you? Now we have more than seven minutes to talk … Tell me, how are things?”

“I suppose they could be worse. And better too. In short, I’ve no complaints. And you?”

He lit a cigarette before answering; this time he didn’t ask permission to do so.

“Let’s just say I’ve been better and been worse as well,” he finally answered.

“I heard about Ruth. I’m sorry, truly.”

The mention of that name was a spell of silence, but this time it was Lola who broke it.

“I came to Barcelona to interview her. Shortly after you separated.”

Héctor was surprised.

“I didn’t know you did those kinds of articles.”

“Welcome to the profile of the new journalist,” she said sarcastically. “Or more accurately, as it states on my card: ‘Content Provider.’ Watch out-any day you’ll stop being an inspector and become an ‘Order Provider’ or something.” There was a trace of bitterness in her voice that she didn’t bother to conceal. “Everything has changed so much. And I fear there’s worse to come. Don’t you see it?” For the first time in a while, she turned toward him. “We’ve been living in a kind of limbo, Héctor, but this limbo won’t be the waiting room for heaven-”

“Have you become religious?” he joked.

“No! I don’t think my DNA would permit it; I must be immune to spirituality. Even the incense in shops that sell candles and buddhas makes me feel sick. No, I’m talking about a real hell: poverty, extremism, fear … Perhaps getting older is making me a pessimist, but nothing has any meaning in this country anymore: not the left, only so in name; not the right that calls itself moderate; not the banks that get more benefits than businesses.” She smiled. “Not the employers who send their employees to spend a few days in the country as if they are their children, as if they really matter. Too much fun, Héctor, too many lies we all believed because they were pleasant. Because they said what we wanted to hear.”

Lola was quiet for a moment or two and then took up the initial subject again.

“Like I said, I met Ruth. She was a charming woman. Throughout the whole interview I kept wondering if she knew about us or not, and I left without coming to a conclusion.”

“She knew,” said Héctor. “I told her. When-”

“When you left me. Say it. It’s been seven years, I’m not going to start crying.”

They were approaching Barcelona. The traffic became heavier and the feeling of intimacy was evaporating.

“We couldn’t go on as we were. It was becoming too … intense. If it’s any consolation, Ruth ended up leaving me.”

“It’s no consolation.” Lola’s voice was so serious, so sad, that Héctor took his eyes off the highway to turn toward her. “You know why? Not because I’m a saint, exactly. While preparing for the interview with Ruth I heard you had separated, she had another partner, and I knew you and I could never be together again without me feeling like an obligatory substitute. A replacement forced by events.”

Héctor took his hand off the wheel and sought hers. He couldn’t help it. Lola didn’t take hers away.

“Héctor-I left Barcelona, I got over us little by little; I forced myself to stop envying Ruth, to forget you.”

He wanted to kiss her. Park the car on some corner and embrace her. Go to her hotel and undress her slowly. Caress her until those seven years apart were erased. She looked him in the eyes and understood.

It came out softly, but firmly. “No nostalgic fucks, Héctor. They’re hideously depressing. There was a time when I wouldn’t have been able to refuse. But now I can. And you know why? Because there is only one truth and I don’t want to deceive myself. You had a choice and you made it. I lost and Ruth won. The match ended there.”

Had it been Martina or even Leire, they would have noticed that the boss was in a foul mood just from seeing him come in. But, logically, Roger Fort lacked feminine intuition and didn’t have a huge dose of the masculine equivalent either, so he waylaid Inspector Salgado as soon as he passed his desk.