Robert Wilson - The Hidden Assassins

'So why are you fascinated by this man?' asked Aguado.

Tears again, which were combined with a strange sense of collapse, of things falling into each other and, just as the gravitational pull of all this inner crumpling seemed to be achieving a terminal velocity, she felt herself untethered, floating away from the person she thought herself to be. It seemed to be an extreme form of a phenomenon she referred to as an existential lurch: a sudden reflective moment, in which the question of what we are doing here on this planet spinning in the void seemed unanswerably huge. Normally it was over in a flash and she was back in the world, but this time it went on and she didn't know whether she was going to be able to get back. She leapt to her feet and held herself together in case she came apart.

'It's all right,' said Alicia, reaching out to her. 'It's all right, Consuelo. You're still here. Come and sit beside me again.'

The chair, the so-called lovers' chair, seemed more like a torturer's seat. A place where instruments would be inserted to reach unbearably painful clusters of nerves and tweak them to previously unexperienced levels of agony.

'I can't do this,' she heard herself saying. 'I can't do it.'

She fell into Alicia Aguado's arms. She needed the human touch to bring her back. She cried, and the worst of it was that she had no idea what her suffering was about. Alicia got her back into the chair. They sat, fingers intertwined, as if they were now, indeed, lovers.

'I was falling apart,' said Consuelo. 'I lost sight…I lost my sense of who I was. I felt like an astronaut, floating away from the mother ship. I was on the brink of madness.'

'And what precipitated that sensation?'

'Your question. I don't remember what it was. Were you asking about a friend, or my father, perhaps?'

'Maybe we've talked enough about what's troubling you,' said Aguado. 'Let's try to end this on a positive note. Tell me something that makes you happy.'

'My children make me happy.'

'If you remember, our last consultation was terminated by a discussion about how your children made you feel. You said…'

'I love them so much it hurts,' finished Consuelo.

'Let's think about a state of happiness that's free from pain.'

'I don't feel pain all the time. It's only when I see them sleeping.'

'And how often do you watch them sleeping?'

Consuelo realized that it had become a nightly ritual, watching the boys in their careless sleep was the high point of every day. That pain right in her middle had become something she relished.

'All right,' said Consuelo, carefully, 'let's try to remember a moment of pain-free happiness. That shouldn't be too difficult, should it, Alicia? I mean, here we are in the most beautiful city in Spain. Didn't somebody say: "To whom God loves, He gives a house in Seville"? God's love must come with half a million euros these days. Let me see…Do you ask all your patients this question?'

'Not all of them.'

'How many have been able to give you an answer?' asked Consuelo. 'I imagine psychologists meet a lot of unhappy people.'

'There's always something. People who love the country might think of the way the sunlight plays on water, or the wind in the grasses. City people might think of a painting they've seen, or a ballet, or just sitting in their favourite square.'

'I don't go to the country. I used to like art, but I lost…'

'Others remember a friendship, or an old flame.'

Their hands had come apart and Aguado's fingers were back on Consuelo's wrist.

'What are you thinking about now, for instance?' she asked.

'It's nothing,' said Consuelo.

'It's not nothing,' said Aguado. 'Whatever it is…hold on to it.' Ines had been sitting in the apartment for over an hour. It was some time after 9.30 p.m. She had tried to call Esteban but, as usual, his mobile was turned off. She was quite calm, although inside her head there seemed to be a wire pulled taut to vibrating point. She had been to see her doctor but had left just before she was due to be called. The doctor would want to examine her and she didn't want to be looked at, pried into.

The incident in the park with the mulatto bitch-whore kept intruding on her internal movie, forcing the film out of the gate and jamming her head with other images: the lividness of Esteban's face as it appeared under the bed and the twitching of his bare feet on the cold kitchen floor.

The kitchen was not a place for her to be. The hard edges of its granite work surfaces, the chill of the marble floor, the distorting mirrors of all the chrome were reminders of the morning's brutality. She hated that fascist kitchen. It made her think of the Guardia Civil in jackboots and their hard, black, shiny hats. She couldn't see a child in that kitchen.

She sat in the bedroom, feeling tiny on the huge and empty marital bed. The TV was off. There was too much talk about the bomb, too many images of the site, too much blood, gore, and shattered glass and lives. She looked at herself in the mirror, over the ordered hairbrushes and cufflink collections. A question danced in her brain: What the fuck has happened to me?

By 9.45 p.m. she couldn't bear it any longer and went outside. She thought she was walking aimlessly, but found herself drawn to the young people already beginning to gather in the warm night under the massive trees of the Plaza del Museo. Then, unaccountably, she was in Calle Bailen and standing in front of her ex-husband's house. The sight of it brought up a spike of envy. She could have had this house, or at least half of it, if it hadn't been for that bitch of a lawyer Javier had hired. It was she who'd found out that Ines had been fucking Esteban Calderon for months and had asked (to her face!) if she'd wanted all that tawdry stuff dragged through the courts. And look at her now. What a great move she'd made. Married to an abuser of women, who, when he wasn't sodomizing his wife, 'for purposes of contraception', was off with every unpaid whore who waggled her tits…Where had all this terrible language come from? Ines Conde de Tejada didn't use this sort of language. Why was her mind suddenly so full of filth?

But here she was, outside Javier's house. Her slim legs in her short skirt trembled. She carried on past the doors to the Hotel Colon and turned back. She had to see Javier. She had to tell him. Not that she'd been beaten. Not that she was sorry for what she had done. No, she didn't want to tell him anything. She just wanted to be near a man who had loved her, who had adored her.

As she hid in the darkness of the orange trees and prepared herself, the door opened and three men came out. They went to pick up a taxi outside the Hotel Colon. The door closed. Ines rang the bell. Falcon reopened the door and was stunned to see the oddly diminished figure of his ex-wife.

'Hola, Ines. Are you all right?'

'Hola, Javier.'

They kissed. He made way for her. They walked to the patio with Falcon thinking: She looks as small and thin as a child. He cleared away the remnants of the CNI party and returned with a bottle of manzanilla.

'I should have thought after a day like today you'd be exhausted,' she said. 'And yet here you are having people round for drinks.'

'It's been a long day,' said Falcon, thinking: What is this all about? 'How's Esteban holding up?'

'I haven't seen him.'

'He's probably still at the site. They're working a roster system through the night,' said Falcon. 'Are you all right, Ines?'

'You've asked me that already, Javier. Don't I look all right?'

'You're not worried about anything, are you?'

'Do I look worried?'

'No, just a little thin. Have you lost weight?'

'I keep myself in shape.'

It always bewildered Falcon, who was already running out of things to say to Ines, how he could ever have been obsessed by her. She struck him now as completely banal; an expert in chitchat, a beautiful presenter of received opinion, a snob and a bore. And yet before they married they'd had a passionate affair, with wild sexual encounters. The bronze boy in the fountain had fled from their excesses.