Manuel Rivas - All Is Silence

The man was fat — ‘adipose’, Mara Doval would have said — but seemed to have been whittled down by the shade. He erased the map with his shoes. Then sought out the final embers of the setting sun on the sea.

‘I received two medical reports today. One bad: I have cancer. The other good: it’s progressing rapidly.’

He opened the door of his Dodge. Before leaving, he turned to Fins and remarked with an air of distance, ‘Don’t mistake confidence for compassion. If I’m telling you this, it’s not because of my soul. It’s because of you. Because I understand you haven’t sold yourself. Yet.’

He emerged slowly on to the road, let the car descend the hill in neutral. It was a long time before he switched on the lights.

From his hiding place, Fins had photographed all the cars leaving Quinta da Velha Saudade. With his zoom he’d managed to make out Montiglio. Then Mariscal with Carburo driving. After an interval in which the occupants of the cars had been strangers, mostly young, with a festive air, probably no more than guests, he’d focused on another familiar vehicle. The Alfa Romeo in which the lawyer Óscar Mendoza was travelling on his own. He’d seemed to wait far too long at the stop sign, even though there weren’t any other cars on the road. But finally he’d pulled off in the direction of the border.

The sun was about to go down. It didn’t bother his eyes any more. On the contrary, this emigrant beauty struck him as the best gift of the day.

Fins glanced at his watch. Thought about leaving, but something held him back. It wasn’t to do with the outside, but with his own mind, which had been influenced by the long wait in front of a gate that kept opening and closing. What was going on inside his mind wasn’t an absence on account of the petit mal , but the memory of an absence. What happened when an absence took place. Those moments of timelessness which were, however, extremely brief. He could see Leda with a serious expression, measuring time on the stopwatch of her fingers. This image merged with the first time he remembered seeing her. Of course he’d seen her before, when she was a girl, but this was the first time his eyes had focused on her presence to the exclusion of everything else, the day she painted her nails. She’d found a bottle in the sand, that way she had of walking as if excavating the ground. The container was small, conical, made of thick glass. In the palm of her hand, despite the coating of sand, her discovery had an animal appearance, a kind of alert immobility, a red ampoule which grew when she wet it and rubbed it with her thumb. That was when she placed her right foot on a rock, among limpets. Her foot was no longer a girl’s. It must have grown overnight. She opened the bottle brought by the sea and, using the brush in the lid, slowly painted her toenails.

‘It was eight seconds, Mrs Malpica,’ said Leda with reference to the absence.

Now she thought about it, the mother’s strange reticence, irrational anger whenever the girl turned up, may have had to do with the information in her hands. The fact that she was in on the secret. The intimacy of measuring the length of each absence.

‘Forget about it, girl,’ she said to Leda one day after Leda had told her about the absence he’d had in the School of Indians. ‘I don’t want everyone talking about it.’

Leda answered with that manner she had from another time: ‘For me it will be as if a stone fell into a well.’

The iron gate opened again, activated from the inside. Out came a car he failed to recognise. A surprising automobile that put all his motoring knowledge to the test. A very special BMW. He realised Delmiro Oliveira had a passion for the classics. From time to time he’d appeared in a Ford Falcon or an imposing Chrysler Imperial with whitewall tyres. Like the others, he was forced to stop in order to join the main road.

Fins focused on the driver. On Don Delmiro. Then on the passenger in dark glasses. He didn’t allow any idea, any emotion, to reach his finger. He clicked his camera. That’s right. In his imagination the enlarger was already projecting the image on Baryta paper. A work of art that would go down in history.

Next to Delmiro Oliveira, on board a BMW 501, a Barockengel, he had just photographed the Baroque Angel of motoring, Lieutenant Colonel Humberto Alisal.

A car on the road had been in an accident. And burned. A Portuguese National Republican Guard stood with an extinguisher, contemplating the heavy, bewildered billowing of smoke sedated by foam around the accident. The guard turned and gestured to Fins to carry on driving. What made him hold back was the sight of the blanket on the side of the road. He pulled over and went to have a look. A second guard, near the body, was writing something in a notebook that was too small for his hands and pen. Fins didn’t have to remove the blanket. The lawyer Óscar Mendoza’s head, with wide-open eyes, seemed to want to detach itself from the rest of his body. It hadn’t burned. The impact must have been so strong it flung him straight out through the windscreen. The blood from the wounds on his face had acquired the density of flies. Fins glanced at the tarmac. Couldn’t make out any skid marks. He considered the barest gesture of covering Mendoza’s face, but ignored his conscience and thought about his camera. The car. Getting away.

‘Did you know this man?’

‘No, I’ve never seen him before.’

‘Then, please, take your car out of here and let us get on with our work.’

CONS LIGHTHOUSE CAST its first circular beam over Noitía and the lights went on like candles in a line. The same beam passed its hand over the whitewall tyres of Mariscal’s Mercedes-Benz in the deserted mirador. The Old Man soon felt a second beam on his back, a noisy, piercing shaft. He knew who this was. He could paint a portrait of people by the way they drove.

Brinco’s was a face of impatient greed. Greed was OK. But not impatience. Job’s patience had been rewarded. It was a shame people didn’t read the Old Testament. Jehovah had given Job twice as much as he’d had before. Fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys.

He couldn’t fail to recognise the pilot by the way he braked and slammed the door. The noise disrupted his vision of the final red glow as the sun sank into the outer sea.

‘How was the funeral?’ asked Brinco.

‘I’ve seen better ones. The priest and the mariachis weren’t bad.’

Mariscal walked to the edge of the cliff and, without turning around, said, ‘Someone ran over Dead Man’s Hand’s wife this morning. The driver took off. They obviously meant to kill him. But the wife got in the way. Fell down dead on top of him.’

‘Poor woman, going before him!’

Mariscal ignored his comment. ‘More people are dying than we can cope with.’

‘Perhaps I should disappear for a while.’

He was relieved to hear this declaration. Stroked the small Astra.38 special on his chest to put it to sleep. Then turned around. ‘Go far away, son.’

‘Where to? The inferno?’

‘A little further, if you can.’

The light of the moon illuminated part of the map on the floor of the School of Indians. The rest was aged darkness. Leda and Fins inhabited the edge of the chiaroscuro.

‘Why didn’t you go with him? You should get out of here with your son. Anything could happen.’

‘He didn’t ask me.’

‘He’ll be arriving in Río about now. We’re going to keep track of him. I can pass you information. Just for you.’

Leda ignored his proposal. She was sure Brinco hadn’t boarded that flight from Porto. He’d have sent someone else in his place. Or vanished on the steps of the plane, in an airport worker’s luminous jacket. He’d done this before. She was the one who’d arranged to meet Fins in the School of Indians. She wanted to see if the bait on the hook worked. She didn’t regret it. It was a fitting tribute. To the bait.