Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (2 page)

* * *

Lucas Zuriaga skipped supper and retired to his tight quarters, defeated by the coach’s decision.
What do I do now?
he asked himself.

I’m out on the streets.
When he got to his room he found his window ajar, and a black thief dressed in a denim shirt and cap entered his room followed by a Ukrainian having no eyebrows, a rat-gray sweatshirt, and a frayed hood. Lucas spun through the air and, on his first turn, kicked the thief who was leaping and, on his second, his foot went out the window and struck the albino. The first outlaw silently fell flat on his back and the other delinquent, who had reflexes to almost break his fall, got up quickly, without complaint. Not having the patience needed to go after the rats, Lucas leaned against the window.

              The burglars had not left. They stood still in the street for a moment, no more than six meters from his room, and noticed that lights in nearby houses were turning on. They calmly exchanged a few words and made a brief phone call with a huge ancient mobile phone as they brushed off the dust, muddy from the snow. Only then did they begin walking away at a normal pace with their chins held high.

             
What asses,
thought Lucas, observing them.
What nerve. Instead of running off, they stick around to
talk like they were shopping. You can barely recognize this neighborhood anymore. I should’ve gone after them and beaten the crap out of them
.

              He locked the window.

Chapter 2

Shadows in the Old Acacia

His small room had a high ceiling. It was cold and a few leaks had caused the beige paint to peal here and there. You could hear the wind whistling through the window slats the young man refused to caulk. Lucas liked to hear the elements outside and would close the door so the cold wouldn’t consume the rest of the house. There was no carpet on the wood inlaid floor. In one corner, he had a punching bag and, since it was close to the wall, there were multiple signs of it having been sorely punished. Lucas had drawn a number ‘three’ on the bag in elegant calligraphy—he’d already destroyed two with the intensity of his training. The young man slept on a metal bunk. A desk, a wheeled chair, and a case full of books were under his berth. The majority of the books were about war and all types of weapons. They spilled out of the bookcase and onto the floor in piles—books about World War II, the Hundred Years War, Alexander’s march to Persia, great generals, and great conquerors. There were technical books about combat and self-defense, firearms and cutting weapons, and fewer about the fall of great empires, self-control and an atlas of human anatomy. There were even a few works of poetry that he kept because they were the only thing he had from his biological parents. An old translation of Beowulf with his father’s notes in it of which he had only read a few pages, and others he had barely touched, like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and the first volume of Goethe’s Faust. It was in Beowulf with his victory over Grendel that he’d found the note about war he would never forget. “War. We discover it early but we rarely remember that. It is clear children exposed precociously to its most obscene suffocation never abandon that memory. But that is more an undesired visit of the phantoms populating the night than war as such. It has the same nature as crime, a misunderstood aggression at a tender age, arousing only fear and trauma.

              “True war is not that. It is not the confrontation between God’s Children and creatures of the dark. War is something of men and such a part of humanity that we find it difficult to accept that it could be absent from paradise. It is something that comes from within; it is a serious game using glory as an enticement, despite being mortal enought so that when it arrives there is no way back to the point of departure. You can return in body but you come back as another.

              “War emerges from our soul’s geometric center where masculinity’s subconscious tectonic plates meet. To brandish arms is only wind, a maelstrom agitated in the sphere of the visible, after the internal concussion of these continents far below the surface and permits the anti-empathetic delirium which dresses the other in the trappings of horror when our family, our dream or our city are in danger. And our city is almost always in danger.

              “Contrary to what the simple proffer, more than art, fire, agriculture or speech, war is what distinguishes us from animals. It is war that lays society’s foundations.”

              Wide and firm, the sealing-wax-red permanent ink descended the old book’s lateral margins. It was the only relic in which he felt his late father’s voice. “Passionately, I look at Lara’s peaceful and secure face. She is sleeping, and I know we are different,” he had written, making Lucas wish he were like his mother.

              Lucas had an imprecise visual memory of his biological parents. He vaguely remembered his father, very tall, picking him up by his arms and lifting him to the sky, saying, “Fly, airplane, fly.” He recalled grabbing his mother’s leg, on the floor with a soft, colorful rug and her combing his hair. He knew they were teachers in a high school and that they had many books. When he tried to remember their faces, his adoptive parents appeared. Their house had burned from top to bottom after the gas tank exploded. Not one single photo had been saved. Only he had survived.

              His adoptive father, who loved hunting wild boars and firmly defended the idea that we were living in the eve of the apocalypse, was one of the firemen who had saved him. He said he’d fallen in love with Lucas as soon as he found that baby. His mother confirmed Lucas was a star fallen from the sky. Both had engaged in a years-long struggle to keep him. The omnipresent State, with its deceitful soft voice and its omnipotent police to enforce its will, his father had told him, had prowled around the one-story house for years because they had not abided by some article of the law despite the affection they had for the son God had offered them. Lucas feared neither people nor the creatures of the dark; he even sought them out to prove his own temper, but he never forgot the sensation of danger from the visits of the Soft Skinned Beast who camouflaged himself behind the first bush, whispering in his ear for years that he had a prize for him: the orphanage. The orphanage that terrorized him at night and caused him to harden his heart during the day. But his mother had been like a cat with her claws out, not letting anyone take her boy, threatening the Delicate and Lethal Beast who watched her while crunching numbers with blood, dread, weeping until the end of time. His father continued with the story repeated countless times, but of which the boy never tired. “The Duke,” “The Stiff Shirt,” among other names his father used to designate the State,
“
crunches numbers.”

       “When you meet it, never forget this, boy: it seems to follow a road traced on a map, but, no, none of that, the Stiff Shirt crunches numbers,”
his enigmatic adopted father had warned.

              He had no cousins, aunts, or uncles and had been raised as an only child until about eight years ago when his mother, who doctors had guaranteed would never have children, got pregnant with his brother Luís. Every day during his adolescence, he had imagined what his life would have been like if his old one hadn’t been incinerated. He felt guilty because of these thoughts; he adored his family, but if he had lived two lives, how good would it have been to experience growing up with his biological parents, his parents with books? Would he have gone to the beach in the Caribbean instead of near town? Would he have taken vacations away from home like his ex-girlfriend Joana? Would he have traveled to other countries like he so wanted? What would his parents by blood have expected of him? Would they have been disappointed? How could he have made them proud of him if they weren’t there? He had two fathers and two mothers. Ones he loved and knew. Lucas was thankful to them for everything. He couldn’t have his dead parents, so why, then, did this choosing between them torture him? Why didn’t he peacefully accept his immense luck in being plucked out of the fire by his father and out of the orphanage by his mother? And where did his beloved Luís, who imitated him in his smallest gestures, fit in if life’s currents had kept him with his blood family? How could he exist as little Luís’s neighbor, without knowing he had been his brother in that other life?

              He sat in the chair, crossed his arms on the desk and dropped his forehead down on them, looking at the floor.
Expelled from one life because of a fire and expelled from another, karate, MMA, because of rage.

              In the beginning, his coach had thought he was a diamond in the rough, destined to be successful sooner rather than later. Multiple Martial Arts, known as MMA, was a combat sport in which each athlete could dedicate himself to the discipline he was best at, even though combatants should master the minimum details of each type. Lucas didn’t want to invest in disciplines that implied immobilizing his opponent, like wrestling, Jiu-Jitsu, or Judo, since “a knockout is the only total victory.”
But he was so good at impact disciplines that he could be successful just with that. He preferred karate and was obsessed with his kimono’s perfection, which he ostentatiously straightened out in the middle of tournaments, showing disregard for his adversary. At home, Lucas had secretly practiced his casual expression and his gestures to quickly adjust his suit in the middle of a fight. He had even used a comb to recover his appearance as a clean warrior in the course of an attack, when his hair was knocked out of alignment. Direct expulsion, with no hesitation by the referee.

              His former karate coach had reminded him of the obvious: “They aren’t filming you; this isn’t a documentary about a samurai now fighting on the canvas or an anthology about a new Bruce Lee. This is
just
karate, boy,” he’d once told him, blind with fury because he’d used the word “just,” when karate itself was the maximum, the cream of the crop. But it later seemed to him that this student with a freshly-minted black belt who knew everything without ever having accepted being taught anything, was acting as if he were the peak of excellence and the master with his black fifth dan and his eclecticism of given proofs, was at ground level. Not that Lucas had ever uttered a derogatory word. It was the way he did what he did.

              Later he had been expelled from karate for lack of discipline and would take up boxing, thinking it had no house rules. That was a strange argument because Lucas was full of house rules. At least in the house he seemed to imagine himself to be in. So he took to boxing because
it was about knocking down dummies.
Lucas was an instant success, up to the day he bet he could get into all of Lisbon’s discos and went about, until the crack of dawn, entering a lot of them wearing a Hugo Boss overcoat and a Charlie Chaplin moustache, without saying so much as boo to the bouncers. Or rather, he told them, “Hold on there, young man, I just want to relieve myself”
with an improvised German accent, only to knock down dummies, like he said, all over Lisbon. He escaped the police rounds and went to Oporto, in the north, where he showed up speaking bad English, with a large red eagle on his chest, to knock over dominoes as he had baptized the security guards this go around. However, one of the most influential former boxers in the country recognized him and filed a complaint with the federation for disorderly conduct, killing his career before it had even begun.

              Still hot, after running all over Oporto looking for the Lisboan who had set the night ablaze and had escaped him by the skin of his teeth, the ex-boxer parked downtown near the river, in the company of the super dragon who headed security for Invicta’s discos, when Lucas recognized them. The pugilist was in his luxury convertible, smoking a cigarette and convincing his sidekick to call all of the discos—telling him that taking two shots at the street light was a bad idea—when Lucas came upon them quite by accident. He could have escaped them since he’d already done up four discos, but the combined sight of the expensive car and an abandoned construction ladder was irresistible. It looked like an oil painting on canvas with the Douro River in the background. It had already happened before he did it. He took his shoes off, tying the shoelaces to his belt. He opened the old wood ladder and put it on the ground quietly to get the hang of it and then climbed it, seeing that it did not squeak. Lucas then advanced to the rear of the shooting star with the ladder already open, placed it on the asphalt, and climbed to the top. He looked around. Two or three oafs, already drunk, but still trying, looked and pointed at him, laughing some seventy meters distant. Up on top, with his shoes swinging like revolvers, one on each side, he did what was written in the stars.

              It was a good thing that he tolerated the cold because the Douro, even in the summer, was ice cold. Still, the super dragon repeated that, shit, the bum would die that night and the ex-boxer insisted it wasn’t worth the hassle with the cops, that the Moor would be hunted down either this or some other night, when that warm uremic shower began from the ladder. Looking behind them, the vision of a Moor in Ribeira—posed like a viscount with his zipper open, up there, elegantly peeing on them from on high—was difficult for them to take. As our character reneged on his promise to never swim again, throwing himself into the river, either because he was nuts or because there was nothing nutty about him, by way of compensation they kicked the onlookers who, with beer in hand and not having perceived the elevated status of the two urinals, laughed spasmodically as if competing with one another.

              On the other hand, in the MMA, doing less damage typical of young men, there arose that problem of the diamond in the rough never backing down even one step from the second round on, of not hearing the break signal, of never accepting defeat by penalties, and always rare, looming larger with the confusion he unleashed at an event. He never accepted the end of a fight until victory was his and he only knew one type of victory.

              “Don’t be unyielding, Lucas. I’ve never seen unyielding champions because they lose everything on the way,” the coach told him.

              In truth, the coach had seen proud, pigheaded fighters who had a hard time accepting defeat until, finally, destiny gave him Lucas Zuriaga. There had to be another modality or another strategy in that modality where unpredictable stubbornness and explosive speed would cultivate in him the wings of triumph that gladiator from another time valued above all else. The chaos grew worse in the second assault. Lucas fought with people he didn’t know as if he were settling scores. You could read it in his eyes, dilated like a cat’s, in his skin’s pallor like that of a ghost, in his deranged face as if it were the bearer of some message about a tragedy when, seconds before, he would be fighting like a man but normally and just a few minutes before, he could even be pleasant and deferential. Whoever saw him outside of the gym would suspect nothing. “You just win, Lucas, you utterly win. And you’re able to leave just a memory when you lose,” the coach had told him, but it had no impact. For a long time, the coach believed that, if he let the savage blossom, he would become part of the sport’s annals. But the coach had now given up on him.