Manuel Rivas - All Is Silence

‘The guy’s crazy!’

‘That bastard’s going to kill himself and us!’

The use of their weapons would only make matters worse. The officer orders an immediate about-turn. The speedboat glances past. Just enough time for Fins to aim his camera. And shoot the flash. A trembling, violent exchange of looks.

It was Brinco, yes, steering the Sira III .

HE USED TO take her there himself. To Bellissima. The hair salon. The name had been his idea. He would take her to work every day. And go and fetch her. He hadn’t changed, God damn it, those loudmouths always holding forth. Swiss accounts. Tax havens. Then the rumours got published in the press: money has no homeland. Well, that’s right. Statu quo . The point is Guadalupe, his wife, didn’t want him to take her any more. She drove herself. Though the car was one he’d bought. A present. A safe vehicle. Listen, girl, you spend half your time with your head in the clouds. A 2002 turbo. A palindrome.

She was sitting down, her feet bare. Her assistant, Mónica, was giving her a pedicure. You could see the two of them got on well. It was still early in the morning, a day like any other, and there weren’t any customers. So they were using the time to make themselves look pretty. Quite right. A hairdresser needed to look like a superstar. Or so he thought. They were married. She’d abandoned the canning factory and he’d asked her one day, ‘Listen, Guadalupe, what do you want?’ She had answered, ‘I want to have a trade.’

‘Wouldn’t a business be better?’

‘A business might be better, but I want to have a trade.’

There were tangos playing on the cassette player. Guadalupe’s nails. ‘Tinta roja’ sung by Goyeneche the Pole. It should be fairly straightforward.

‘Go out for a while, would you, girl?’ he said to Mónica.

No, it wasn’t a lack of trust. But today he preferred to be alone with Guadalupe. He never forgot an anniversary.

‘“Red ink in yesterday’s grey…” How well you used to sing tangos! Remember? The factory foreman shouting, “Sing! All of you, sing!” So you wouldn’t put mussels in your mouths. “Sing! Sing!” How pathetic!’

He gave her a jewellery box.

‘Well, aren’t you going to open it? Go on then…’

Guadalupe opened it. Inside was a diamond ring. She closed the box. A little smile. A painful smile. Something was something. A diamond, a tear, etc., etc.

‘Our silver wedding anniversary. Twenty-five years. Who’d have thought it?’

He looked at her feet again. Her feet always turned him on. Whenever he mentioned this, there were always idiots who laughed. Well, if they didn’t understand, he wasn’t going to explain. The two most erotic things in the world? The feet. First the left foot. And then the right.

‘You’ve wonderful feet. I’ve always been crazy about your feet.’

He was able to touch them. Pass his hand along the instep. Curve the curve. A stroke of bad luck. He didn’t know when it happened. When the wind kicked up. She realised he was seeing more than one woman. Or did she?

She got up and put on her sandals. ‘Do you need something?’

‘A few calls. Just a few calls.’

They weren’t so few. Mariscal passed her a ream of handwritten sheets, with numbers and messages. Those things that sounded so absurd to her. Which she read automatically.

‘If you want, we could have dinner somewhere tonight. Some shellfish. Some invertebrates!’

Guadalupe turned to look at him, that itching of the eyes, and took an age to say, ‘I don’t feel so well. But thanks for thinking of me.’

‘Listen, girl. Don’t be hard on me. I’ve only got three or four haircuts left. Maybe less. Do you think I should dye my grey hair? You women are lucky. One day you’re blonde, the next you’re dark. I like you more with black hair. Because of your skin. You always were a bit swarthy. But we men… If I turn up looking blond all of a sudden, I lose my authority. And I was blond, you know. More than blond. I was downright golden, like the setting of the sun. My hair on fire. Like that guy Oliveira introduced to me. Remember? The guy from the PIDE. Mr Arcada. The Legate. Dead Man’s Hand. Along came a gust of wind and disturbed his wig. The ugly ones are always the vainest. The worse the wood, the more it grows. So along came this wind and shifted his hairpiece, and there went his authority. Oh, I don’t know. He consumes everything, dirty money, weapons, drugs, and still he gives us that sermon about authority, sacred ground. Bloody hell! The twenty-fifth of April, if they’d left it to him, there wouldn’t have been a carnation revolution or any other kind. A few cannon blasts in the Terreiro do Paço, a few more in the Carmo, when Captain Salgueiro was there with his megaphone, and things would soon have gone back to normal. I said to him, “ Velis nolis , Mr Arcada. People have to eat, to have shoes on their feet, not to get beaten, if they’re going to be happy, have money in their pockets. If people are fed and in possession of some cash, if they have liquidity, that’s good for business. That’s my philosophy, Mr Legate. I like knocking these leeches around. Half the country out working abroad and all day long holding forth about the motherland and empire. That’s slandering the communist enemy! Listen, everywhere goes up and down, but I know something about emigration. Half of Galicia is on the outside.”

‘Then I thought about it. Did a U-turn. This guy was a bastard, but he was our bastard. So there and then I came out with a laudation for Salazar and Franco, the two pillars of Western civilisation. Shame about their successors. Marcelo Caetano, a coward. The ones here, traitors. He said the PIDE hadn’t been so into torture as other political police forces, such as the Spanish force, to give an obvious example. “I was a Viriathus,” he declared. “Nineteen years of age and I left as a volunteer, like thousands of others, to give those reds a beating. I was an out-and-out Crusader. But what I saw, to tell you the truth, made me afraid. A colleague said to me, ‘This is dangerous land, Nuno.’ And he was right. God was nowhere to be seen. So, being practical, I replied, ‘What happened happened.’ But he stayed firm. What the PIDE did to detainees was cause them a certain ‘absence of comfort’. That was the term. Well, I was taken aback. Torment? No. Absence of comfort.” I liked that expression. I took note. Shame I wasn’t around to give it to Lame for his dictionary. “Look what I have here, Basilio. What do you make of this one? ‘Absence of comfort’.” “What does that mean?” “It means torture, Basilio, torture.”

‘Well, this enlightened bastard, Dead Man’s Hand, I have to admit it, was equally refined when it came down to business. Though we got off to a bad start. After the Portuguese revolution, the captains of April, carnations and all that, he escaped to Galicia and took up with another crowd. That was back in 1974, Franco was still alive and the idea was to provoke a squabble between Spain and Portugal. I know because I was one of the people involved. It was a line of business, or so I thought. Weapons were always an option, but things didn’t go well and they had to be sold on the cheap. Then, when Cinderello turned his attention to the new life, he ended up showing a talent for business. His experience, old contacts, stuff like that, was pretty useful. And the hairpiece fitted. He looked quite different, to tell the truth. I remember all of that. I’m worried about memory. Everybody complains about their memory. I’m worried I remember too much. I get caught up on names, recollections. And from time to time, that’s an absence of comfort.’

Mutatis mutandis , he looked away from Guadalupe Brancana. Felt his presence had lost its triumphal air. In the end said, ‘This is the one I need an urgent response for. You can send it via Mónica.’ Guadalupe nodded. Mariscal opened the door. Stood still for a moment on the border. One of his favourites was playing, ‘Garúa’. That tango about the rain. The two of them were young enough to dance tangos. They didn’t care about the murmuring gaze. Then he thought, in relation to himself, that a man could improve himself. He hummed along to the music on the cassette. ‘The wind brings a strange lament…’ Looked one way and then the other, as he always did. Without turning around, let the door close behind him. And since there was no one in sight, either to the left or to the right, he spat on the pavement.