Breathing Through the Wound Page 5

  Two feet could be seen sticking out from beneath the car. One was missing a shoe, a bare foot becoming soaked in the rain. The car had struck the person, crushing him between the bodywork and the shopfront. It was a young man, who was now attempting to say something as he stared at the driver being stretchered off to an ambulance—but all he managed was to spit bloody bubbles.

  A few meters from the scene, a city policeman knelt in the middle of a crosswalk over a small figure, lying face-up. The officer’s body blocked the view, making it impossible for onlookers to determine what the shape even was. From a distance it could have been a medium-sized dog. But no cop would give a dog mouth-to-mouth, or attempt desperately to restart its heart with cardiac massage. Several witnesses’ hands flew to their mouths in dismay when the officer, visibly distraught, finally gave up and called for a thermal rescue blanket with which to cover the body. A sudden gust of wind lifted the blanket for a moment, revealing the pale face—peaceful as could be, no signs of violence—of a girl barely six years old, who looked merely to be asleep.

  A medical team transferred the body of the trapped young man to an ambulance. On the ground were a brownish pool of blood, and a torn shoe.

  Someone asked if the boy’s condition was serious. He was dead, was the reply, like the girl.

  Both of them, dead.

  * * *

  —

  When Gloria received the news over the phone, she politely thanked the police, her voice not reflecting what she’d just been told, as if she hadn’t quite understood, but was afraid to ask for details. She remained seated on the edge of the bed, staring vacantly at the night-table phone before finally placing the receiver—its dial tone now buzzing—back in the cradle. Her gaze, stunned and disconcerted, came to rest on a fruit basket on the kitchen table, visible through the half-open bedroom door. She went to the window, perplexed because her entire body had suddenly begun trembling, because it was nearly impossible to remain standing, as if all at once her bones had suddenly shattered. She contemplated the pedestrianized street, the people walking up and down, the sounds of distant traffic, the overcast sky, the roofs shimmering in the rain. Just another day, like any other day. And suddenly everything pained her terribly. Absolutely everything.

  “Losing a child is like having a limb amputated, a vital part of you. It’s no longer there, but it keeps hurting as if it were still part of you. Like the somatic pain in your knee’s nerve endings; you feel it, even though they’re dead. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”

  Gloria measured the effect her words had on Eduardo, and allowed them to sink in, let him process what she’d said and then wither.

  Eduardo got the feeling that she was very far away, and that no matter what happened he’d never get much closer to her than he was right now. Two lonely people colliding for a brief moment, only to grow distant once more. Though it was absurd, the intuition saddened him.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Gloria closed her eyes, and when she opened them again it was as though an explosion had occurred inside her at that precise moment.

  “You’re sorry? Is that all you have to say, Eduardo?”

  “What else can I say?”

  Suddenly Gloria’s expression grew sharp as flint.

  “Honestly, I didn’t think I’d have to explain it to you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve done some investigating. You lost your wife and daughter fourteen years ago in a car accident, too. You and I are both living corpses. That’s why I asked you to come. That’s why I want to hire you to do a portrait, a portrait that only you can paint.”

  Eduardo grew pale and stroked the back of his neck.

  “Trying to do an honest portrait of a person who’s no longer here is like painting a landscape you remember from the past. It’s not the landscape, just a mirage distorted by memory.”

  Gloria went to another drawer and pulled out a newspaper clipping, from a financial paper, four years old. It showed the photo of a handsome executive with broad shoulders and a mass of red hair.

  “It’s not my son that I want you to paint. It’s his killer.”

  THREE

  Arthur had taped a photograph taken on his honeymoon beside the metal headboard of his prison-cell cot. A young couple in love, arm in arm, smiling with the glee exclusive to those who believed in the wiles of the heart, at a time when happiness was a world open to hope, to the future.

  The future: something that had ended before it ever arrived.

  Arthur at twenty-five—tall, determined, a mane of red hair whipping in the wind, his quartz-like eyes peeking out from beneath long wisps. And Andrea, nearly ten years older—though age had not yet erected a barrier between them—her head thrown back, laughing at something Arthur could no longer recall. He was funny back then, he knew how to make her laugh, feel good. She clung tightly to his arm to keep from falling over with the giddiness of what must have seemed to them both like a dream.

  The future: feelings that develop, atrophy, oscillate.

  Arthur wondered what feelings he might still have for his wife. That joyful snapshot told nothing of the secrets a lover hides from his beloved, the things he never shared with her. Not everything can be shared, there are always private worlds that no other human can penetrate. In the end, theirs was a relationship that survived by virtue of the periodic distances between them, and of silence. Without Aroha—the one thing that united them—their relationship had finally broken.

  In the background stood Algiers la blanche, the glimmering buildings of the Kasbah rising up, overlooking the sea. The Mediterranean, by contrast, looked almost indigo blue. Arthur missed the hibiscuses, the rose bushes, the magnolias of his house in Bab el Oued, with its whitewashed facade and wooden shutters painted blue. It was small and uncomfortable, but it had gorgeous views over part of the port, on a promontory, and out back there was a lovely spot by a eucalyptus where he spent hours just reading and writing poetry. Or not doing anything at all, simply leaning against the tree trunk for ages, absently gazing out. If someone interrupted him he’d turn with a jolt, a look so disconcerted and lonesome it was startling.

  Arthur was not an easy man to understand. He had a permanently helpless air, as though having been the youngest of four siblings left to fend for themselves—no one worrying about them or playing with them—had scarred him. His thick wild hair, including red eyebrows and the hint of beard peeking out on his chin, he’d inherited from his father, a man he barely remembered. But his father’s looks—he was almost the spitting image, in fact—were not the only thing he’d inherited from the man. He’d gotten his character, too.

  Arthur was a pied-noir, a European born in Algeria just a few months before the Évian Accords, under which De Gaulle granted Algeria independence from France and put the National Liberation Front in power. His father—a Frenchman of Spanish origin—had seen it as an unforgivable betrayal. Arthur’s grandparents had moved to France in mid-1938, fleeing Franco’s army when the Second Spanish Republic fell. And Luis Fernández, his father, had been born in Algiers, where he celebrated the liberation of Paris with a French flag in one hand and a Spanish flag in the other. His father had had the privilege of being the first to reach the Champs-Élysées, in a tank called the “Guadalajara,” manned entirely by Spaniards.

  Years later, as a lieutenant with General Massu’s paratroopers, he’d been on the front line in the Battle of Algiers in 1956 and 1957—a dirty guerrilla war in which the National Liberation Front carried out terrorist attacks on civilians and military alike, and General Massu and his men responded in kind, meting out torture and summary executions that forever changed his father’s character. When De Gaulle handed over the “province” (for his father, as for many French, Algeria was not seen as a protectorate like Morocco but another province of the Fifth Republic), Lieutenant Fernández joined the OAS insurr
ectionists, went underground and fought for General Salan.

  Arthur recalled his childhood, running barefoot through the labyrinthine streets of the Kasbah, past the three clock towers, the fruit stands and stalls of Triad market, and the doorways of the Palace of the Dey; his escapades in and around the old artificial port where merchants flew French flags and supplied the city each day. Everyplace he went, despite the fact that he had been born in an independent Algeria, the OAS’s initials could be seen, and for years it was not uncommon to see a mule, loaded with explosives, blow up in the middle of a crowded area; for a seemingly random pedestrian to be murdered right in Plaza de los Mártires, a bullet to the back of the head, by dissidents—militiamen like his father, or one of the Corsican hired-assassins or mafia men employed by the government to get rid of the much-feared barbouzes. Arthur recalled seeing a civil servant killed in a drive-by shooting, machine-gunned down on his way back from the main post office, lying in a heap by the minaret of Jamaa el Jedid mosque. Before he died, the man had used his own blood to write on the mosque’s immaculately white wall: France will never abandon her children. Maybe France would not, but Arthur’s father had, leaving his family defenseless and destitute. In 1964, when Arthur was barely two years old, his father was arrested by police and extradited to France to serve a prison sentence, convicted of terrorism.

  Arthur never saw him again.

  Years later, on honeymoon with Andrea, back at the old house in Bab el Oued, Arthur visited that mosque. Algiers had changed a lot—the port had grown, the old town of Kouba had been swallowed up with the city’s expansion, and everywhere he looked, residential communities, villas, and new homes had sprung up. His old neighborhood went from the Kasbah to beyond the river port, and although some of the old colonial style remained, most of its charm had been lost once it became the capital’s most chouchouté, or upmarket, neighborhood. The mosque had undergone renovations, the boulevard was now full of lush floral arrangements, fountains and tall palm trees. Other graffiti—recent graffiti, which workers rushed to cover with a thick layer of whitewash—had superseded the civil servant’s blood, on the wall of the mosque. The enemy was no longer the OAS but Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or any another terrorist group. The names and the blood splattered on the wall changed, but Algeria was still bleeding, as always.

  At the same time, though, it was a country full of opportunities for those who knew how to take advantage of them—and he’d known exactly how to do it.

  Arthur had gotten rich in the oil and gas industry. Algiers was now a city of entrepreneurs, five-star hotels, and the Lycée Français; friends sent their kids to Turkish schools, Egyptian schools, Saudi schools; nightlife was teeming with private cabarets and clubs whose doors were guarded by off-duty policemen who earned extra income by moonlighting as bodyguards or part-time chauffeurs; there were private beaches at Club de Pins and the Moretti. There were huge receptions full of important men asking Arthur for favors, women trying to seduce him, and lots of riding around in convertibles. A place to get caught up in it all, to have fun.

  To Arthur’s cellmate, however, it was a very different city. Ibrahim listened incredulously to Arthur talk about the wonders of Algiers. He was Algerian, too, and that prompted a degree of complicity between them, but Ibrahim had been born in Annaba, a world apart from the executives of Algiers. The city he knew was one of industrial blight that had expanded, devouring old towns and neighborhoods while simultaneously allowing centuries-old homes in the historic center to be torn down, forsaken to the will of speculators while the rich moved out to the suburbs of El Sahel. A sad city, chaotic and at the same time nostalgic. But also the city of bouqalate, a sort of game in which girls recited improvised verses in a call-and-response—and of chaabi music, of old men in Dar el Djirane exchanging proverbs as a game. Ibrahim’s father had been one of the greatest living Turkish ney reed-flute players. His fame throughout the Arab world had once rivaled that of any Western pop star. Sometimes, from their cell in the afternoons, they could hear the ney—the most important component of Mevlevi Sufi sacred music—being played, in recordings that filled the silent hall with their sound, bringing heartrending tears to the eyes of even the hardest man in prison.

  From amid that mishmash of contradictions, the two men had formed something akin to a friendship. Arthur did not belong in jail. He was just passing through, and that was obvious in everything he did and said on the inside. He knew the rules, and obeyed them always, but he made no attempt to curry favor with the guards or other prisoners. Diana, the person he most trusted, was on the outside, working hard for his release; it was simply a question of holding out a little longer and not getting himself into trouble. The lawyer she’d hired for the appeal had told him that a pardon would be granted in a matter of weeks. It wasn’t long, but after three seemingly endless years, each additional minute seemed like an eternity.

  Ibrahim was his only form of support. An old scar ran the length of the man’s entire face, splitting his left eye in two and giving him a terrifying look completely at odds with his demeanor, which was always discreet, impeccable. Ibrahim was one of the few men who, rather than fear, commanded the inmates’ respect. Arthur admired him. And as long as they didn’t discuss politics, Ibrahim protected him from the other prisoners. He didn’t ask for anything in exchange, he did it for a reason only he could comprehend.

  “You need to get back to your wife,” he’d respond laconically whenever Arthur asked him why he helped him so much.

  Still, Ibrahim’s domain was not extensive enough to keep Arthur safe from all evil.

  * * *

  —

  In the cafeteria that night, Ibrahim barely lifted his head from his plate. They were having zucchini soup, and a dish made of some sort of fowl in thick, flavorful sauce. Arthur ate heartily, but Ibrahim drank only water, watching in disgust as the other prisoners at the table wiped their plates clean.

  “You haven’t said a word, and haven’t even tasted your food. What’s going on inside your head?” Arthur asked.

  Ibrahim smiled faintly, exposing a rotted, gaping hole in his gums between two yellowed teeth whose days looked numbered. He had the teeth of a pirate and didn’t often smile; when he did, he looked doubly fearsome.

  “The older one gets, the less one eats, sleeps and, worst of all, lives. Music is the only form of pleasure left to the old, and even that drifts slowly from our grasp.”

  Despite his words, Ibrahim was far from the helpless, pathetic figure he pretended to be. Though nearing sixty, he was agile, sinewy, his body hard as bamboo. No one knew much about him, but there were plenty of rumors and stories that people neither bothered to corroborate nor disprove; of course that served only to increase the air of mystery surrounding him. He was seen as easygoing, had no vices, was almost ascetic in fact; and on the prison yard, he mixed little with the other inmates, never getting into trouble. Nevertheless, Arthur had seen him fight in the showers. A younger prisoner had once tried to stab him with a homemade blade after some dispute over prison code.

  Perhaps the young man had taken offense at a slight or a look, something that would hardly have registered on the outside—but in prison everything was overstated, extreme. More than likely the kid was trying to move up the ladder by challenging Ibrahim, who was both respected and also old, and that may have made him seem like easy prey. It didn’t take long for the kid to see that it was a fatal mistake: Ibrahim disarmed him with his bare hands with astonishing ease, downing the guy with a sharp knee to the balls, and then smashed his face repeatedly into the cement floor until all those present saw several of the poor man’s teeth go flying. Ibrahim could easily have killed him in cold blood, on the spot—and if he didn’t, it wasn’t because someone had stepped in to intervene, but because he simply decided not to.

  That night in the dining room, Ibrahim was only half-listening to Arthur. The rest of his attention was divided among the people and o
bjects surrounding him; he looked a bit like a prowler with no clear objective. Suddenly he struggled to his feet, resting his hands on his knees. He tottered unstably and Arthur thought he was about to lose his balance, but he managed to straighten out. Ibrahim liked to pretend he was defenseless.

  “You better get ready; the Armenian’s here,” he said under his breath, leaning over Arthur’s ear. His breath stank of rotting gums.

  Arthur shot a quick glance to the other side of the cafeteria.

  “There are a lot of them.”

  Ibrahim nodded. He took a quick count of the men before him and calculated that their chances of making it out of the small dining room unscathed were slim indeed, if the Armenian’s thugs decided to attack. Inconspicuously, he reached down to touch the familiar grip of the handmade blade he’d fashioned in his cell, the one he kept—always—tucked inside his pants. It wasn’t much, but maybe if he managed to really slice up the first few, the others would retreat, giving them a chance to escape. He knew how to use a knife. Knew the way you had to twist the handle, making circular motions in order to lacerate the flesh without tearing it too much. Knew it because he’d experimented on his own skin. His memories of childhood were filled with the screams to prove it. Remembering those cries, his muscles flexed, preparing for the fight.