The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman (25 page)

And at once he placed a hundred-euro note on the table in payment for such a delicacy. Then he took Soleá by the hand—she felt his rough skin on her fingers—bade goodbye to Señá Candela and, with the packet under his arm, went out into the street, where Agustín was waiting for them to leave so he could shut the door and call it quits for the day.

“How far are we from the sea?” asked Atticus when he was back behind the wheel of the truck.

“About an hour's drive,
Míster Crasman
,” Soleá replied.

“Then we can still get there in time to see the sunset,” said Atticus with a smile.

CHAPTER 39

T
he beach was no more than a little crescent-shaped patch of sand sandwiched between a reef and an old ruined fort. They sat as if at the theater. Their screen was the horizon, the scene was the sun disappearing in the distance: an orange spot sinking into the black ocean. The only audience was Soleá, covered in goose bumps, and Atticus at her side, barefoot, his trousers rolled up to his shins, white skin, open shirt, closed eyes.

He moved his hand toward Soleá's arm—what could there have been in Señá Candela's tea?—and then upward, slowly stroking her skin with his pale fingers, up to her shoulder, up to her neck, up to her hairline on the dark side of the moon. He wound his fingers in her hair, drew spirals in the air.

When Soleá felt Atticus's hand creeping up her, she was tempted to stop him. But when she saw that his eyes were closed, she suddenly felt sorry for him and let him carry on in silence, blindly—if only to see what happened, where his hand would go next. Down her back, to her waist, then over her hip to the hollow of her belly button. Then his hand opened and came to rest warmly on her stomach.

Then came his mouth—what could there have been in Candela's tea?
She felt him bite her lips. His tongue tasted hers, and Soleá opened up completely—
what
could there have been in Candela's tea?—just as a watermelon splits open when hit, incapable of concealing its red, juicy, sweet fruit inside that hard, dull shell any longer.

Atticus was very experienced. Soleá was not. She hadn't yet understood what her hair was for, or why her breasts were the shape of cupped hands, or how her mysteries fitted into the paths that he was moving along. Now you have to throw your head back and I kiss your neck, now to one side and I bite you gently on the earlobe, and now you let me help you lie back on the sand, that's it, slowly, so you don't break into a thousand pieces and disappear into the ground beneath us.

Atticus drew his lips away from Soleá's mouth to confess that he had wanted her since the very moment he fell under the spell of her blue eyes, that when he was at her side the heat suffocated him, that he couldn't look at her without his soul aching, and that she was so evasive, flighty, and mysterious that he didn't have a clue what she felt. He got the impression that Soleá felt something for him too, but even so, she was trying to avoid him, as if she was scared of him. What am I to you, Soleá? A heartless fiend ready to throw you and your friends out on the street in order to save my father's business some money? Is that how you see me, Soleá? Or is it just that you don't like me, you don't like my clumsy hands, my awful accent, the way I am with you, laying everything bare? Because if there's something about me you don't like, Soleá, whatever it is, I can change it. I'll learn to play the guitar, I'll eat ham and pretend it's delicious, I'll share my secrets with your whole family, I'll live in a cave if that's what you want, or get drunk on wine with fizzy pop, or watch a bullfight without
looking disgusted (it'll be fine, I'll just think of something else), I'll grow old in Granada, sit on a bench, watch the cars go by, anything, so long as you, Soleá, want to be by my side and have a cup of tea with me.

She sat up. She lifted a hand to her mouth. She wiped her red lips. She looked at him. Her blue eyes had become as black as olives, Candela's herbal tea was sloshing around her belly and Atticus's hand was still resting on her stomach.

“Look,
Míster Crasman
,” she said. “Why should I lie to you anymore? I tricked you into coming here, with that story about García Lorca's poems, so you wouldn't close the magazine. That's all.

“I call Berta every night, I tell her what's happened during the day, I tell her you haven't asked about the poems, in fact you seem to have forgotten about them, and Berta breathes a sigh of relief, and she tells the others that, at least for now, they can carry on with their lives. She says, ‘Thank you, Soleá, for the sacrifice you, your mother, and your grandmother are making,' and I reply that it's not such a big deal, you're a good man and I feel bad for lying to you. But you see,
Míster Crasman
, I'm twenty-five years old, I've got my life ahead of me, and I can find another job or move back home, but Berta and Asunción, the poor things, what are they going to do at their age? Or María, with three kids and a useless husband? Or Gaby, who's married to the kind of painter who never sells a painting, however much she tries to convince herself otherwise? The four of them barely scrape by with what they earn at the magazine.

“It was my idea. It's not that the poems don't exist, they do. But it wasn't García Lorca who wrote them,
Míster Crasman
, it was Granny Remedios, an uneducated woman. And she keeps
them in the attic with her sewing machine and old bits of junk, because they're worthless, they're scribbles, that's all. You can go now. I've told you the secret, you can close the magazine quite happily and go back to England and forget about me and all of this. I'm so sorry that you got your hopes up about me; you don't deserve to have it broken to you like this. I didn't mean to hurt you,
Míster Crasman
, that's the absolute truth. The only truth among all these lies.”

Then she got up, shook the sand from her dress, and slowly walked the short distance to Arcángel's truck, started it up, and vanished.

Atticus was frozen still. Cold ran down his spine. Bare feet, open shirt, and a broken heart.

Darkness fell on him and he didn't want to push it away. The only sensible thing he did that sleepless night was to take his cell phone, his last link to the rest of humanity, out of the back pocket of his trousers and hurl it into the waves with all his rower's strength, to be lost in the depths of the sea.

CHAPTER 40

D
ecember 15 was a cold, cloudy Friday, the kind of day you wish was a Saturday so you could spend all morning in bed. Asunción arrived at the office at nine o'clock sharp, carrying a flask of hot chocolate and two paper cones of
churros.
She hung her coat on the hook behind the door and sat down to wait for Gaby to arrive and join her in getting drunk on sugar and grease, her drugs of choice at such an early hour, on such a grim day, and with such a painful, empty stomach.

She thought Gaby would probably be a while yet. She and Livingstone had made up the day before and, according to what Gaby had said over the phone, they were going to take things easy from now on. She no longer had the same urgency to become a mother, thanks to Franklin's cuddles and his confession that he had never really wanted to go back to Argentina, he only said so because they were having such trouble conceiving a baby. He had sobbed as he admitted this, and Gaby thought she had never seen a more helpless child than her husband. Now nothing could upset her. Not even the problems at
Librarte
or the unremitting arrival of her period every twenty-eight days. She said she felt as calm as can be and couldn't stop grinning like a Cheshire cat.

A couple of hours earlier, when it was still dark, the phone had rung on Asunción's bedside table, waking her up and giving her the fright of her life, followed by terrible news, which caused her to burst into a flood of tears. Berta had brought her up to speed with the tale of César Barbosa's serial abuses, in which María had turned out to be the unwilling accomplice and the rest of them the innocent victims. The inevitable result was the demise of the magazine. Now, while she waited for Gaby to say goodbye to Franklin at the door, Asunción tried to find the words to break the bad news to her in the nicest way possible.

She didn't have time to rehearse her speech. Gaby arrived at nine thirty, humming, bounding up the stairs two by two; she unbuttoned her red coat before starting to search the labyrinthine depths of her bag for her office keys, took off her orange scarf, her blue hat, her green gloves. She shed her colorful woolen skin. She opened the door and was shocked to find Asunción waiting for her with breakfast laid out on the photocopier, calculated that there were more than a dozen
churros
each, and understood that something bad was up.

“Come on, Gaby, have some of these, come into the warmth, have a seat here,” said Asunción, pointing to the rocking chair that she had dragged in from Berta's office, which now took up most of the free space between the desks and the bookshelf.

“This can't be to celebrate me and Franklin making up. Something's happened, right?”

“Yes, love, it has. Something awful.” Asunción couldn't stop the tears welling up in her eyes again. She downed her hot chocolate and left the empty cup on her mouse pad.

Gaby did as she was told. She sat down and clung for dear life
to the arms of the rocking chair, as if it were a raft in the middle of the ocean.

“Do you remember César Barbosa?”

“The Pirate.”

“The very same. Well, it turns out that he and María have been seeing each other for about a year now.”

“Bloody hell, so María's lover is Barbosa!”

“Look, Gaby, I couldn't name a bigger son of a bitch than Barbosa if you paid me. It turns out that last January, by mistake, he got paid twice for an invoice and María called him to ask for the money back. So he, the crafty thing, realized that María was the only one who'd noticed the double payment. He invited her out to dinner a couple of times, seduced her—you know, with that stubble, the tattoo, the motorbike, and the bad-guy look—and bit by bit he got her to tell him how the
Librarte
accounts worked. María explained that Berta signed the invoices and gave them to her, she made a copy for our records and sent the original to England, so they could pay out from the central office. I don't know if you knew that that's the way it's always been:
Librarte
only has a tiny amount in the bank and everything else, our wages and all that, is paid for from London.”