“Bummer” and “breeze”, you hear those words less and less, they sounded almost funny.
“Yes,” I said. “What happened, did you get fed up?” I asked, not expecting him to answer in the affirmative. In fact, he’d already told me what had happened, by the way he stopped to think before telling me the rest.
Loren put his hat back on and breathed hard out of those damp nostrils, as if he were gathering strength before doing something that required an effort. The brim of his hat covered his cold, grey eyes, his face was now just nose and lips, the nice lips that I would not kiss, there are no kisses on the mouth in porn movies.
“No, I lost my job. I failed. The princess slit her throat in the kitchen of her house three weeks ago, in the middle of the night, and I didn’t even hear her leave the bedroom, what do you think of that? I was left with no one to look after. A disaster, a complete disaster.” For a moment, I was seized by the thought that perhaps the actor Lorenzo was just acting in order to distract me and ease my nerves. I thought for a moment about my little girl, I’d left her with a neighbour. He stood up, paced round the room, at the same time hitching up his jeans. He stopped by the closed door through which we would soon have to pass. I thought he was going to punch it, but he didn’t. He just said irritably: “When are we going to bloody well get started, I haven’t got all day.”
BLOOD ON A SPEAR
For Luis Antonio de Villena
I SAID GOODBYE for ever to my best friend without knowing that I was, because the following night, after far too long a delay, he was found lying on his bed with a spear through his chest and with a strange woman by his side, also dead, but without the murder weapon impaled in her body, because the weapon was one and the same and they must have first stuck it in her, then pulled it out again in order to mingle her blood with that of my best friend. The lights were all on and the television too, and had doubtless remained so for the whole of that day, my friend’s first day without life or the world’s first day without his worldly presence in it after thirty-nine years, the light bulbs incongruous in the harsh morning sun and perhaps less so against the stormy afternoon sky, but Dorta would have hated all that waste. I don’t quite know who pays the bills for the dead.
He had a great bulge on his head from an earlier blow, it wasn’t just a swelling or, if it was, it encompassed the whole of his forehead, the skin tight over his elephantiasic cranium, as if he had become Frankensteinized in death, a small bald spot on his hairline that hadn’t been there before. That blow must have knocked him out, but it would seem that he didn’t entirely lose consciousness, because his eyes were open and he had his glasses on, although the man who had then stuck the spear in him might have put them on afterwards, as a joke, you don’t need glasses when you know for certain that you’re never going to see ever again: here you are, four-eyes, maybe these will help you find the road to hell more easily. He was wearing the bathrobe he always used as a dressing gown, he bought a new one every few months and this latest one was yellow, he should have avoided that colour, as bullfighters do. He had his slippers on, the rigid, hard-soled variety that Americans wear, a kind of moccasin cut low on the instep, with no embellishments and with a very flat heel, you feel safer if you can hear your own footsteps. His two bare legs emerged from amongst the folds of his bathrobe, and, although he was a hairy man, I saw that his shins were hairless, some people do lose the hair on their legs there from the constant rubbing of their trousers, or from their socks if they wear long socks, sports socks they call them, and he always wore them, I never once saw a strip of bare skin when he crossed his legs in public. Enough blood had flowed for enough hours — with the lights on and busy witnesses on the TV screen — to soak the bathrobe and the sheets and to ruin the wooden floor. The bed, with no bedspread on it because of the heat, had not been disturbed, the sheets hadn’t been turned down. He appeared pale in the photos, as all corpses do, with an unusual expression on his face, because he was a jolly man, always laughing and joking, and his face seemed serious, rather than terrorstruck or stupefied, with a look of bitterness, or perhaps — more surprising still — mere displeasure or annoyance, as if he had been obliged to do something not particularly momentous, but against his inclinations. Since dying always seems momentous to the person if he knows that he’s dying, one could not discount the possibility that they had stuck the spear in him while he was still stunned from the previous blow, so he wouldn’t have been aware of what was happening, and that might explain why he didn’t react when they plunged the weapon into the breast of the unknown woman and pulled it out again. The spear was his, brought back some years ago as a souvenir from a trip to Kenya which he had hated and from which he had returned complaining, as he usually did from trips abroad. I’d often seen it, planted nonchalantly in the umbrella stand, Dorta had always intended to hang it up somewhere, one of those ornaments that catch your fancy when you see it in someone else’s hands and which you like rather less when you get it home. Dorta didn’t collect such objects, but, from time to time, he gave in to a capricious impulse, especially in countries he knew he would never go back to. Those who disliked him saw a certain irony in the manner of his death, for he was very keen on pointed, metal walking sticks, of which he had quite a few. Not very original, rather pedantic.