R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

I stepped aside, I sank to the ground, I rolled in the soft and yielding dirt, water cooling me, washing the sweat from my skin, and when I stood I was black. I knelt, I cupped my hands, and from the rivulets that danced between the clumps of undergrowth I scooped a handful of liquid darkness. Against my face it felt smooth and forgiving, blending away the edges, the seams, the junctures between sound and silence, shadow and light, and when I ran my fingers back through my hair, feeling the mud on my scalp, I saw that I had indeed become something all-seeing, sensual and sublime.

Moving then, on the balls of my feet, stepping lightly, gathering speed, and soon I was running breathless and windswept through the trees, dancing between the trunks of moss-clothed trees, leaves against my face, against my skin. A ghost, a spectre, a haunting.

From the heart of this land, from the boundaries and limits I went like a wraith, my skin blended with nature so perfectly I was unseen. I was silent, and it seemed that I existed only in my own mind.

For miles it seemed, slipping through the night, the rain, the silence, until I came to a fence that ran as far as my eyes could see both left and right. I stepped back, and then with one stride I vaulted it, landing on bended knees on the other side, rain glancing off my sweated shoulders, leaning once again to refresh my face in the pools that had gathered.

I recognized myself as the creature who had surfaced from the swamps a thousand years before, who had padded silently into a motel room, who exorcised the sin from pale, weak bodies.

Poetry in motion, blessed and beautiful.

I assumed right of possession over my own imagination, my own faith and belief, and I saw that I could become anything I desired, and anything I desired I could have.

I believed that they were still alive – my wife and my daughter. I believed that they were somewhere waiting for me, and it was only a matter of time before we would be reunited.

I believed these things with all my soul, for to believe otherwise would have caused me to lose my mind. It ran like a wheel from beginning to end, back to inception again, and like a thread from a spindle it would draw us all together once more.

On the way back to the house I found a dog sleeping beneath a tree at the side of the road. With my bare hands I strangled it, and then carried its limp body to the edge of the woods and hurled it into the darkness.

I kneeled in the dirt and cried until there was nothing left inside.

Back inside the walls of the house, I stood motionless outside the door of Victor’s room. I could hear him breathing, hear him murmuring as he slept, and I closed my eyes and prayed to a God I knew could not exist that he would survive these things.

I returned to my room; I lay on my bed; I closed my eyes.

I slept like the dead, for that – at least within – was what I had become.

Of these things – these thoughts and feelings – I said nothing to Victor. He was a bright child; eight years old, eyes wide for the world and all it had to offer. Mrs Vivó taught him well, even committing to his memory the basics of Spanish and the history of his grandfather’s homeland. I watched as a man apart. I loved the child, loved him more than life itself, but there was something always in his eyes, something that told me he believed me responsible for the death of his mother and his sister. Perhaps it was my imagination, perhaps a projection of my own guilt, but each time I looked at him I could recognize his loneliness and confusion. He had lost his family in the same way I had, through the brutal actions of brutal men, and had I not taken such a path, had I been a man of learning and culture, had people like Fabio Calligaris and Don Alessandro not been part of my life, then none of these things would have happened.

One day he spoke to me of God. He asked me if I believed.

I smiled, I pulled him close, I pressed my face against his hair and I told him the truth.

‘Some people believe in God, Victor, and some do not.’

‘And you? Do you believe in God, Daddy?’

I was quiet for a time. ‘I believe that there is something out there, but I cannot be sure what it is.’

‘Claudia believes in God… she prays every day before lessons, and then again before she leaves.’

‘It is good for people to have faith. Faith helps people make their way through life without fear.’

‘Fear of what?’

I sighed. ‘Fear of men, of the things that men can do.’

‘Like the men that killed Mommy and Lucia?’

I felt a tightness in my throat. It was difficult to breathe. Incipient tears stung my eyes. ‘Yes, Victor, like the men who killed Mommy and Lucia.’

‘Do you have faith, Daddy?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘In what? What do you have faith in?’

‘In you, Victor. I have faith in you. Faith as well that one day we will see Mommy and Lucia again.’

‘Will that be soon?’

I shook my head. ‘No Victor, it will not be soon, but they will wait for us.’

‘I want to pray, Daddy. I want to pray with Claudia… for you and for Mommy and Lucia, and that we will see them again soon. Is that okay?’

I pulled him closer. ‘Yes Victor, that is okay. You pray with Claudia and have faith in these things.’

‘And what will happen to the men who killed them?’

‘Perhaps God will make them hurt too,’ I said.

‘He will… yes, he will,’ Victor said, and then he was quiet, and I laid him down on the bed, and I curled up beside him until his breathing slowed and he was asleep.

I did not need to work. The money that I brought with me would have kept us in comfort for a considerable time, but I was restless before long, agitated easily, and I understood this to be an indication that I could not exist without some purpose.

During the day, while Claudia was seeing to Victor, I would walk out among the people of La Habana Vieja . I would listen to them, watch them as they went about their business, trying to find something that would interest me. On the corner of Bernaza and Muralla I found an old-fashioned store that specialized in cigars and antique books. Here I would spend time talking with the owner, a man in his seventies by the name of Raúl Brito, and he spoke of the revolucion , of the days when Batista was in power, and the fact that on two occasions he had spoken with Castro himself.

Raúl was a man of education and literature, and though he had at first begun his business dealing only in fine tobaccos and cigars, it was not long before he started to bring his own books to work in order to have something to occupy his mind. Customers would come, they would show interest in his reading, and soon he started to trade also in these. The store, known only as Brito’s, became a gathering place for the elders of La Habana Vieja , and here they would smoke their cigars, buy and sell and read their books, and occupy their hours away from home.

I frequented Brito’s more and more often, until there came a day in June of that year, a day no more than a week after Victor’s ninth birthday, that Raúl asked me if I would be interested in managing the store once he had retired.

‘I am seventy-four next month,’ he said, and he leaned on a stack of battered leatherbound volumes that looked barely able to stand his weight. ‘I will be seventy-four, and as each week passes I wonder if I can manage to make it down here again.’ He smiled, the creases around his eyes causing them to almost disappear into the origami warmth of his face. ‘You are a good man, Ernesto Perez, a man of character, and I believe it would suit you to settle here and make your business.’

I did not give Raúl Brito an answer that day, nor the next. I did not give him an answer until August, and then I told him I would be willing to manage the store, but I believed we should enact a partnership, that the name of the store should stay the same, and I should pay him a partnership fee to buy into the business.