Carlos Gamerro - An Open Secret

“I CAN TELL YOU A THING OR TWO ABOUT ONTIVERO,” says Ortega, the owner of one of Malihuel’s two hotels, the one opposite the church on the other side of the square, the Malihuel Grand Hotel. “Ezcurra was having a relationship with his wife, you know … The police chief didn’t have to put himself out over Ontivero, he went to the station himself he did. The cuckold’s revenge, let’s call a spade a spade. Not that the Super’d take any notice of such a nobody, he should be grateful he saw him, but anyway, the bandwagon might’ve belonged to Rosas Paz as they say but quite a few grabbed the opportunity and jumped on didn’t they. I’d like to see what that rat says now, if he still has the face to say he had nothing to do with it that is. Don’t get me on about folk here … Have you talked to him?”

“Not yet,” I tell him, and to loosen his tongue a little more I grill him again about his hotel’s capacity to accommodate contingents of pensioners from Buenos Aires sent over by the imaginary firm I’ve just invented. They say all sorts about me in town now anyway.

“WELL, A FRIEND, I wouldn’t call him a friend …” Tararira, the video-club owner, qualifies my hasty assertion during a pause in the three series of bench presses I’m spotting him at his request. At the suggestion of Guido, who’s an assiduous regular, I’ve taken to spending my downtime in the Malihuel’s men’s gym. “I knew him right enough, we all know each other in these parts. But that’s as far as it went. And as for telling him, telling him … What was I going to tell him? I didn’t know a thing. Let all those good friends of his warn him. Why didn’t they go and tell him? Anyway, anyway, if Ezcurra’d been in my shoes I tell you, and me … I mean, if I’d been the target … D’you think he’d’ve stuck his neck out to warn me eh, think he wouldn’t look after his own arse first? Eh? And what about you? Eh? You were here too if I remember right. Why didn’t you warn him? ’Cause otherwise it looks like all of us here have to provide you with explanations but what about you eh? Yeah yeah. You were too young. And someone else was too old and someone else was too fat and someone else overslept and couldn’t make it. We’ve all got excuses. Anyway, listen, I got nothing against you, my folks were good friends of your grandparents and you probably came round to our house and all, but what are you doing here now? The subject was closed, we’d turned the page and all moved on with our lives, and now you keep banging on about it. Another twenty years and somebody always on and on about the same old thing bada-bing bada-boom? What’ve you got to do with any of this? What the hell does Ezcurra’s story matter to you eh?”

His bad blood makes me feel tempted to drop the hundred kilos of rusted weights on his chest, but because there’s a grain of truth in what he says, I restrict myself to surreptitiously pressing down on the bar every time I help him lower it, and even say come on, one more, last one, make the ten, while the veins on his face look increasingly like chitterlings and a number by Gilda fades out over the speakers and one by Las Karakaras starts up.

“I CAN TELL YOU A THING OR TWO ABOUT ORTEGA,” says Ontivero, the owner of one of Malihuel’s two hotels, the one opposite the school on the other side of the square, the Las Delicias Hotel. “Ortega’s wife was still up to it in those days, a right slag she was, and Ezcurrita you’ll probably have heard if you’ve been asking around didn’t need asking twice when it came to totty. When the dog’s dead, the madness is done, the naive Ortega probably thought, as if by wiping the other one off the map he’d wipe away the stain on his reputation. I’m not saying that’s why, what police chief would look twice at him let’s face it, but you can bet your life that when Don Manuel whistled he was one of the ones as came running. I’d like to see his face when he’s asked. Have you spoken to him yet?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“And what did he say?”

“Same as you.”

Ontivero looks surprised.

“Well. Blow me. Well it was about time he came to terms with it. Ah well, each to his … So, tell me a bit more about these pensioners, let’s see …”

AT NIGHT, after I switch off the light, the voices won’t let me sleep. As if all their echoes were ringing together inside my skull, the voices I’ve heard during the day make themselves heard again, arguing ill-manneredly, interrupting each other, contradicting each other, each trying to drown the others out, trying to gain my approval, my attention, or just my ear. They’ve detached themselves from the bodies that anchored them and now run free through the overrun garden of my mind, forcing that crucial silence that precedes sleep further and further away. Through the wall I can hear the rhythmic jingling of Leticia and Guido’s bed, but, for all its vitality, the noise doesn’t move me or dispel the feeling that I’m lying in a tomb, condemned to listen to incessant murmurings from neighbouring vaults.

So I switch the light on again, get up and get dressed as stealthily as possible so as not to disturb my generous friends’ post-coital bliss, and checking to see I haven’t forgotten my cigarettes and lighter, I go out through the front door and pat the heads of the three dogs — Tuqui, Botita and Titán — who get up and wag their tails when they see me. One of the undeniable advantages of lodging on the outskirts of town is that you only have to cross the street to be out in open country. Beyond the fence post where I rest my lighter and cigarettes there is nothing but the shadows of groves of trees, more sensed than seen, and a horizon barely drawn by the beginning of the field of stars. The sounds, on the other hand, are unusually crisp and crystalline, as only the inimitable acoustics of a winter night in the country can make them: the lurchings of the dogs sniffing around excitedly in the patches of weeds, the whispering of the wind stirring the leaves of distant trees, the scattered and occasional crickets, the fleeting hoot of an invisible owl, perhaps one of the eternal pair from the church bell tower. Sharpening my ears I can make out the distant roar of a truck on the highway, the brief low of a cow startled from sleep, the panting of the dogs, my own breathing; and if, on merging with the background, they give way to the returning voices, I reinforce them with the crackle of the glowing tip of my hard-drawn cigarette or the twang of the wires tautened like guitar strings by the cold.

When they’ve occupied my head entirely and displaced the very last of the invading voices, it will be time to return my shivering body to the comforting warmth of the sheets.

“I WARNED HIM, course I warned him, it’d’ve been criminal not to, even with the risk involved. What I find hard to believe is nobody else did. This was his home town, a lot of the people who turned their backs on him had been friends of his father’s, they’d been to his christening, watched him play in the square, watched him grow up. And it was down to me — an outsider, a newcomer in town back then — to tell him,” says Berraja, shaking his head, the owner of the local love hotel, whose rooms — the beds with their lacquered bedheads and plastic-lined mattresses, the worn, red carpets, the odd compass rose made out of offcuts of mirrors, the posters of naked silhouettes against orange-crush sunsets — he wanted me to see before showing me into his office. It’s a cold, rainy afternoon, and the surface of the lagoon is raised in little wave points, like gooseflesh, and, every time the wind shakes them, fat drops run down the windows of Berraja’s office and trace sinuous lines through the fine spray of drizzle. “But what else could I do, Ezcurra was a regular as you’ve probably heard,” he says with a wink from behind a lens of his glasses. “He was one of the first to adopt me when I came here. Put yourself in my shoes, an establishment like mine in a town like this in those days — those holier-than-thou women with nothing better to do, greed dressed up as local council and police morality, sermons in church for those as went, the very ones who’d head over here when they got out or ask me next day who was with who last night che . Ezcurra wasn’t bothered about any of that, just the opposite, and what I wonder today is of all those young girls who opened, well, let’s say their hearts to him not one, not even for those couple of hours of happiness they spent together, had the common decency to tell him? Or perhaps that’s precisely why — they may’ve been afraid Ezcurra’d let the cat out of the bag afterwards and go shooting his mouth off about who’d warned him? Or it may’ve been out of spite or revenge or morbid jealousy?”