A van arrives at top speed, turning at the corner so that it’s facing in the opposite direction. Forensics Department, it says on the doors and window. Two men get out, dressed in mixed attire, without insignias or badges but with epaulettes on their shoulders and the typical haircut of security agents. Two ordinary guys, the experts. From the back of the van they remove a series of pieces of equipment which they unfold at the entrance to the supermarket. They are building the crime scene. Instead of tape, which only serves to demarcate an area, they set up frames with grey canvas, at least two metres high, forcing us from now on to guess what is happening on the other side.
Next to the screen, a short woman is setting crates filled with fruit and vegetables, oranges, apples, tomatoes, aubergines and lettuces out on the pavement. She leans them against the wall, in the sun, I don’t know whether intending to take them elsewhere or because she’s been told to transfer the fresh produce section to the street for the duration of the investigation.
I forget about the dead body. I think about the purchases I can’t make, I turn round and almost bump into Mercedes, who’s just behind me, crouching. He smiles, hands raised, as if I were about to assault him, suddenly friendly. Could it be that he genuinely didn’t see me earlier? Poor boy, an idiot, he had nothing to do with it. He tells me he knew him well and moves his fingers in a quick arpeggio near his face which that I can’t interpret: Bit of a party guy, but a good lad, eh. He tells me about the Chinese mafia as he sucks his scraped knuckles, raw flesh: If they don’t stump up the cash, they squish them like flies. They’re worse than the Peruvians, he says, they don’t even love their own children. Mercedes’ gaze is fixed on an inaccessible plane, not clouded or lost so much as prismatic. And that split personality, I now realise, is what must strike fear into people, as Tosca says.
We say goodbye with a slight bow, like monks. At the kiosk opposite I buy a bag of fusilli and a packet of spring salad. I pay and, instead of my change, the girl gives me two banana-flavoured chewing gums. I cross the street and with one foot on the kerb I stop short, off balance, with the feeling of having solved a riddle. I even pull a face saying That’s it, I’ve got it, an expression I dedicate to myself even though I can’t see it. I piece together on one single page Herbert’s black eye and Mercedes’ skinned knuckles, I imagine the sequence that connects them. The blows. The beating. In front of the door I suppose I’m equidistant from both of them. I can picture the revolver with the long barrel and the comment about its shine, Sonia too, her muteness and self-denial, the nicknames, the Chemist, Paraguay, everyone’s dealer. It’s perfectly clear, there’s no mystery or revelation. And if not? What if it’s just one of those coincidences that grab our attention every so often to entertain us?
Another day of messages from Eloísa, to which I’m not going to respond. At the zoo, the birth of a couple of young giraffes causes a small revolution. Canetti says: If I was born again and could choose, I’d be a cat.
In the evening, after the injection, syringe in hand, I think about Tosca’s offer to let me have a proper bath. A hot bath. Really hot. To kill the heat, more heat, that’s what Jaime used to say in summer whenever I pointed out that he was wearing too many clothes. It would be my first bath in the building. Generally, I take a shower in the changing room when I finish work, or in Iris’s room when I go to see her. In our flat there’s a pipe, but the head is missing. I have a small washbasin, the size of Simón; sometimes I wash myself in bits. Filling it requires two buckets of cold water and a pan of hot if you want it to be more or less lukewarm. Canetti insists that I should buy myself one of those small electric boilers; he shows me in the window of an ironmonger on the avenue, he says they work really well.
I wait for Tosca to return from her trance and when she opens her very watery eyes, as if her tear ducts have reloaded with pain or emotion at the passing of the morphine, she arches her brows ever so slightly. She doesn’t understand what I’m doing there. Because almost always, especially recently, now that we know each other quite well, once the injection is done I put away the box of phials and leave in silence. I leave her alone with her balm. Not today. I gesture with my index fingers and say: Can I take a bath? In reality I don’t manage to say anything, I barely move my lips, in solidarity with those minutes of silent relief of hers, when the drug prevents her from formulating clear words. Whenever she can’t control her eagerness to talk, her voice becomes hoarse, scratchy, like an old dog’s. Tosca shakes her hand, it’s a Yes, but also a Get out of my sight.
I can’t see Benito, not in his corner of metal oddities, nor in the hall. I knock three times before I enter the bathroom, he isn’t there either. A pool of clean water sits in the bathtub, stagnant but transparent. I turn on the tap, the water comes out at dam-force, boiling. I regulate the temperature and undress. As the steam builds, I sit on the toilet to wait, the feet, my feet, seem strange to me even though I know them from memory, my nails too, growing long and unevenly.
I stick in a finger. It’s burning. A bit more cold, I mix it and step in. There’s no curtain, I realise too late. To begin with, for a while, I keep an eye on the door, sure it will open at any moment. But nothing happens and I relax. At the height of the built-in soap dish on the wall there is a row of tiles that aren’t yellow like the rest but have enamelled figures on them. Black and white birds repeated symmetrically. The black birds stand next to an empty cage, the white ones always appear behind bars. It’s like that all the way round, black free, white caged, black free, white caged. Around the tap there are two golden cages, one open, the other not. There are infinite interpretations. The first thing that occurs to me is that, thrown out into the world, the dark bird, previously a white dove, became tinged with the colour of corruption. But it could also be that the baby crow is taking shelter in its plumage to frighten away evil. As for the other, a symbol of virtue and peace, the most obvious possibility is that it maintains its whiteness thanks to being enclosed. You could also speculate that it is suffering a punishment for clinging to a false purity. A basic but universal moral would be that neither of the two, free or captive, strong or weak, candid or perverse, can avoid disappearing eventually. I don’t know. I begin to sweat.
I sink down to my neck, my eyes mist over, the birds become a muddle. Now I completely submerge myself and hold my breath listening to the thousand gastric noises from the pipework. I come up to the surface and start mildly, without shock, but enough to cause a spillage, when I see Benito holding the door handle, observing me from his broad height. Naturally, without meaning to, I cover my tits with my forearm. But he doesn’t turn a hair, he hasn’t come for that, to look at me, or else he has, but he’s hiding it well. He shows me a long metal screw and a rag, rust-stained like his hands. He says: Am I bothering you? I say: I’m just getting out. No, he says, rotating his massive head and I wonder how it must feel when he moves, this deformed deity. We stay like that for a couple of minutes, him, rubbing the screw, me, submerged, gradually forgetting about his presence. Benito doesn’t throw himself at me, nor does he unbutton his trousers to show me his cock, nor does he say goodbye when he leaves. As inoffensive as he is enormous.