Robert Wilson - The Hidden Assassins

Consuelo knew where this was heading, though. Ricardo and Matias took care of themselves. It was Dario, her youngest at eight years old, who drew her in. She loved his face, his blond hair, his amber-coloured eyes, his perfect little mouth. It was in his room that she sat down in the middle of the floor, half a metre from his bed, looking into his untroubled features and easing herself into the uneasy state she craved. It started in her mouth, with the lips that had kissed his baby head. She drank it down her throat and felt the twinge in her breasts. It settled in her stomach, high up around the diaphragm, an ache that transmitted its pain from her viscera to the tingling surface of her skin. She scoffed at Alicia Aguado's questioning. What was wrong with such a love as this? Fernando Alanis sat in the intensive care unit of the Hospital de la Macarena. He watched his daughter's vital signs on the monitors. Grey numbers and green lines that told him good things, that she was capable of lighting up a machine, if not her father. His mind crashed and fell about like a hopeless drunk in a binfilled narrow alleyway. One moment it was gasping at the catastrophic destruction of the apartment building, the next it was buckling at the sight of four covered bodies outside the pre-school. He still couldn't quite believe what he had lost. Was this a mechanism of the mind that suspended things too unbearable to comprehend, almost to the point of a barely remembered nig htmare? He'd been told by people who'd survived bad falls from scaffolding that the rush of the ground coming to meet you was not so terrifying. The horror was in the eventual awakening. And with that he would lurch sickeningly forward to the bruised and battered face of his daughter, her oval mouth slack against the clear plastic concertina of tube. Everything inside him felt too big. His organs were jostled by the colossal inflation of hate and despair which had no direction, other than to make themselves as uncomfortable as possible. He went back to a time when his family and the building had been intact, but the thought of the third child he'd been proposing made him break down inside. He couldn't bear to take himself back to a state that would never exist again, he couldn't bear the notion of never seeing Gloria and Pedro again, he couldn't stomach the finality of that word 'never'.

He concentrated on his daughter's beating heart. The jumping line. Be-dum, be-dum, be-dum. The thready skip of the green fuse against the terminal blackness of the monitor made him rear back in his seat. It was all too fragile. Anything could happen in this life and did…and had. Perhaps the answer was to retreat into emptiness. Feel nothing. But that held its terror, too. The monstrous negativity of the black hole in space, sucking in all light. He breathed in. The air expanded his chest. He breathed out. His stomach wall relaxed. This, for the time being, was the only way to proceed. Ines lay where she had fallen. She hadn't moved since he'd left. Her body was a miasma of pain from the pummelling it had sustained from his hard, white knuckles. Nausea humped in her stomach. He'd punched her through her flailing hands; one of her fingers had been bent back. In an escalation of his fury he'd torn off his belt and lashed her, with the buckle digging into her buttocks and thighs. With each stroke he'd told her through clenched teeth: 'Never…speak…to my girlfriend…like that…ever again. Do you hear me? Never…again.' She'd rolled to the corner of the room to get away from him. He'd stood over her, breathing heavily, not so different from when he was sexually aroused. Their eyes met. He pointed his finger at her as if he might shoot her. She didn't pick up what he said. She'd taken in the purity of his hatred from his blank, basilisk eyes, the colourless lips and his red, swollen neck.

No sooner had he left the apartment than she started to rebuild her illusion. His anger was understandable. The whore had told him some nonsense and set him against her. That was the way these things worked. He was just fucking the whore, but she wanted more now. She wanted to be in the wife's shoes, on the wife's side of the bed, but she was just the whore so she had to play her little games. Ines hated the whore. A line came into her head from an old conversation with Javier: 'Most people are killed by people they know, because it is only they who are capable of arousing the passionate emotions that can lead to uncontrollable violence.' Ines knew Esteban. My God, did she know Esteban Calderon. She'd seen him gilded with the laurel wreath, and cringing like the village cur. That was why she could arouse such emotions in him. Only she. That old cliche holds true. Love and hate have the same source. He would love her again once that black bitch stopped meddling with his mind.

She raised herself on to all fours. The pain made her gasp. Blood dripped from her mouth. She must have bitten her tongue. She crawled up the bed to stand on her feet. She unzipped her dress and let it fall. Unhooking her bra was a torture, bending to slip off her panties nearly made her faint. She stood in front of the mirror. A massive bruise spread across her torso where he'd hit her that morning. Her chest ached through to her spine. A criss-cross of weals covered her buttocks and upper thighs, broken by punctured skin where the buckle had dug in. She put a finger to one of these marks and pressed. The pain was exquisite. Esteban, in that passionate moment, really had given her his fullest attention. Javier lay in the dark, with images from the late news still present in his mind: the demolished building under the surgical glare of the floodlights; the smashed plate-glass windows of a number of shops with Moroccan wares for sale; the fire brigade spraying a flaming apartment which had been fire-bombed by kids on the rampage; a cut, bruised and swollen-faced Moroccan boy, who'd been set upon by neo-Nazi thugs with clubs and chains; a butcher's selling halal meat with a car rammed through the metal blinds of the store front. Falcon shunted all the images out of his mind until all that was left was the ultimate remnant of terror-deep uncertainty.

He cast his mind back to before the bombing, looking for a clue amongst all those extraordinary emotions that might help him make sense of what was happening. His mind played tricks. Uncertainty had that effect. Human beings always believe that an event has been prefigured in some way. It's the necessary part of rediscovering the pattern. Mankind cannot bear too much chaos.

He had the illusion of the impenetrable darkness receding from him, like the endlessly expanding universe. This was the new certainty, the one that sent all the old narratives, with which we structured our lives, down into the black hole of human understanding. We have to be even stronger now that science has told us that time is unreliable, and even light behaves differently if you turn your back. It was a terrible irony that, just as science was pushing back the limits of our comprehension, religion, the greatest and oldest of human narratives, was fighting back. Was it because of resentment at being found on the discard pile of modern European life that religion was making a stand? Falcon closed his eyes and concentrated on relaxing each part of his body until, finally, he drifted away from the unanswerable questions and into a deep sleep. He was a man who had made up his mind and had a car arriving early to take him to the airport. The car, a black Mercedes with tinted windows, turned up at 6 a.m. with Pablo sitting in the back in a dark suit with an open-neck shirt.

'How did your talk with Yacoub go last night?' asked Pablo, as the car pulled away.

'Given that a bomb went off in Seville yesterday, he knows I'm not coming over on a social visit.'

'What did he say?'

'He was pleased that we were going to see each other, but he knows there's an ulterior motive.'