Antonio Hill - The Good Suicides

“Señorita Castro-”

“Agent Castro, if you don’t mind!”

“Don’t raise your voice to me. I’ve been very patient with you, but now you’re going too far. Let me remind you that you are investigating my daughter’s disappearance, not her birth. And I doubt that, thirty-nine years apart, there is any link between the two events.”

Leire was going to answer, but just then Abel decided to enter the conversation and did so in a painful way, almost as if he were protesting.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “I think so. This time he moved more forcefully …”

“Why don’t you do yourself a favor? Go home, have your baby. Honestly, I tell you this as a mother: nothing is more important. When he is born, everything that seems important now will simply fade away. You’ll think only about caring for him, feeding him. Protecting him.”

“I know,” said Leire. Her voice was trembling. “I’ll take care of him, feed him, protect him-but I won’t lie to him. I won’t invent a romantic story about his father, or the relationship I have with him. Maybe we won’t be the perfect family, but we won’t pretend to be. My son will know the truth.”

“The truth!” Montserrat Martorell made a gesture of annoyance. “Young people have an obsession with it that’s almost naive. Do you think the world could work on the basis of truth? I’ll tell you something, Agent Castro: honesty is an overrated concept these days. And there are others that lamentably have lost their force, like loyalty, obedience. Respect for rules that have functioned, for better or worse, for years. No, Agent Castro, it’s not the truth that sustains the world. Think about it.”

“I think the world to which you’re referring no longer exists,” Leire replied, almost sadly.

“No?” she asked with an ironic smile. “Look around you. Do you think the people on the street, normal people, know the whole truth? There are things to which normal people, like you or I, cannot have access. That’s how it is, how it’s always been, however much people now think they have a right to know. If you take it on another, smaller scale, you’ll see that it also applies in refuges, in families … When you have your son you’ll realize that the truth isn’t important if it is at odds with other values like security, protection. And like it or not, you’ll have to decide for him. For that you’re his mother: to plot a safe path for him and avoid him suffering.”

Leire began to feel queasy again, but that woman’s last words made her think of something else.

“Is that what you did with Patricia? Move her away from the road you had planned for Ruth?”

Señora Martorell held her gaze, not blinking.

“I just told her to leave my daughter alone. She was smothering her. We mothers always notice these things. I spoke to Ruth, I put a little pressure on her and in the end she told me everything. She was so frightened, so confused … She didn’t know her own feelings, inclinations. My duty was to protect her.”

“Protect her from Patricia?” She couldn’t help the note of sarcasm in her voice.

“Protect her from something she wasn’t yet ready to face. And of which she wasn’t even fully aware.” She paused before adding, “It takes courage to be different in this life, Señorita Castro. My only aim was to avoid Ruth suffering. So, before Patricia left, I had a chat with her, alone.”

Leire imagined this woman, imposing in old age; she must have been intimidating as an offended mother. And Patricia would have felt betrayed, even ashamed in those years. She could almost see her after facing Señora Martorell, driving home alone …

“Didn’t you feel bad afterward?” It was hard to believe, it seemed impossible, that this woman in front of her felt not a trace of remorse. “When did you hear about the accident?”

Montserrat Martorell straightened up and answered in a frozen, emphatic voice: “My feelings are absolutely none of your business, Agent Castro.”

No, they’re not, thought Leire. She almost preferred not to know.

“You’re right. I have no right to ask you that, but I have the right to tell you something. Maybe you already know or maybe not, but at least from now on you can’t hide behind ignorance.”

And Leire told her about the stolen babies, the Hogar de la Concepción and Sr Amparo; she spoke about the possibility that Ruth’s mother hadn’t handed over her daughter voluntarily, that they would have deceived her by saying she was dead or taken her from her arms. That her husband’s donation was payment in exchange for a newborn.

Señora Martorell listened attentively, not interrupting her. When she finished her account, Leire was very tired and wanted to leave. Her apartment with suicidal tiles and blocked pipes suddenly seemed like the best home in the world.

“You are very pale,” Señora Martorell told her. “I think I’ll call a taxi to take you home. And … believe me, Agent Castro, because I say it for your good and that of your child: stop raking over a past that, even if it were true, won’t help us find Ruth. Focus on the future. Best for you and for everyone.”

Leire would have liked to answer that justice consisted of that, but she didn’t have the strength to do it. She simply looked at her, trying to communicate her incomprehension of this manner of seeing things. The woman didn’t appear to take it personally. Apathetic, Leire rose, took the piece of paper where Ruth’s father’s donation was recorded and went to the door without saying anything else. She would wait for the taxi outside.

She longed to get home, shut herself inside and forget about this world. Perhaps it wasn’t deliberately cruel, but it was certainly deeply inhuman.

The clock on the nightstand indicated that it was only six a.m. and Leire turned over in bed. She had no reason to be awake so early. She closed her eyes and tried to get to sleep, as if it were something she could force by will. When she finally gave up and stopped lying in bed, a quarter of an hour had passed. Enough time to know it was better to get up although it was still almost night.

She went from the bed to the sofa, strangely without appetite for breakfast, and for a while she awaited movement from Abel. It finally happened and she breathed easily. She’d become accustomed to noticing it and when she didn’t she was overcome by a horrible fear.

Facing her, on the table, were the photos of Ruth, her file and the tape with the recording of Dr. Omar’s clinic. She didn’t feel up to watching it again and suddenly she realized that she was beginning to feel unable to continue with the case. It was upsetting her too much, invading her consciousness, making her uneasy. This can’t go on, she told herself. And slowly, assuming that for the first time she was giving up on a case before exhausting all the possibilities, she collected everything into the same envelope Martina Andreu had given her. After a moment’s hesitation, she left the donation document out. She’d give it to Inspector Salgado, who could do as he wished with it.

She had decided: she would give everything back to Sergeant Andreu, telling her she was too tired to continue investigating. She would speak to Héctor Salgado and communicate all the details clouding his ex-wife’s birth. And then she’d concentrate on waiting for Abel to be born, with no shocks or distressing conversations like the one she’d had with Ruth’s mother.

But memory played by its own rules, and Ruth’s face, just as it appeared in the photo, kept reappearing. Ruth, perhaps adopted without knowing it. Manipulated by her mother until she had the courage to decide for herself. How would Ruth have felt when she heard about Patricia’s fatal accident? Like the character in Breathless , she’d been frightened by her own feelings and, in a way, had betrayed her friend to her mother. For Señora Martorell it had all ended there, but not for her daughter.