The Anarchist Detective (Max Cámara) (17 page)

His memories of that spring after his mother’s suicide were unclear. He’d been at school, his father at home most of the time. Perhaps he’d gone to the co-op as well. He couldn’t say. They’d simply carried on. The two of them alone in the flat, with neither Concha nor Ana at home with them now. There had been lots of takeway food, he seemed to remember, and cartons crushed in the corner of the kitchen waiting to be thrown out with the rubbish.

Then the summer came, and the removal of the school day took away the last remaining structure to their lives.

The talk of a holiday, of sleeping rough on the beach, came to nothing.

Meanwhile the flat became less and less inhabitable.

It felt as though his father hadn’t exchanged a word with him for weeks, perhaps since the beginning of August. He was continuously drunk, either crashing around the flat in occasional rages, or slumped in front of the TV, his eyes burning into the flashing blue screen. They ate bread, crisps, chocolate, stale breakfast cereals . . . Cámara hadn’t shat properly for days.

And then Hilario, his mysterious grandfather, had come. He didn’t ring, or knock. He’d got his own key from somewhere. This man he barely knew, with a kind, lived-in face, smiled at Cámara and told him to pack his things.

Cámara could hear him talking to his father in the living room as, confused but secretly relieved, he grabbed bundles of unwashed clothes and stuffed them into plastic bags. A couple of books as well – one on Greek myths that he’d read and reread since his mother had given it to him on his seventh birthday; another, a history of El Cid. Somehow he knew he might not be coming back for some time.

Down in the living room Hilario was still talking, but Ricardo remained silent. After a pause, footsteps approached his bedroom door and Hilario’s face appeared once more.

‘Time to go.’

And so began something new – a life with Hilario, in his flat on the other side of the city. And Pilar, his housekeeper, moving silently around them, like a shadow. He’d hated it at first: his so-called anarchist grandfather had been strict with him, enforcing mealtimes, bedtimes, study times. Later he understood how much he needed it; he’d become almost feral, eating and sleeping whenever the urge took him. A return to a disciplined life proved painful, and he raged against it, while longing for it at the same time.

‘You have to learn to control yourself, otherwise your instincts and desires will control you,’ Hilario told him. It was nonsense. So much for freedom and anarchy. But his grandfather didn’t see it that way.

Then somehow – and no one had been more surprised than him – he passed his retakes at the beginning of the new term. No need to redo the entire school year. It felt good, a relief, and while his moods moved violently in many directions, he knew Hilario was the one to thank. He hated him, but he needed him. He had to stay.

His father lasted three more months. Shortly before Christmas he was found by a neighbour in the same living-room chair, the television still on.

His heart had stopped beating.

He’d told Alicia some of this – the outline – when he’d arrived on her doorstep towards the beginning of the summer. But not all. The details weren’t always clear. But they were coming more into focus now, driving a wedge, taking him further away, further into himself.

THE CEMETERY WAS
divided into several sections, almost like neighbourhoods, with a central ‘square’, each one surrounded by high walls where coffins were placed in niches before being closed over with a metal plaque with a name and occasionally a small photograph, now curled and blanched in the light.

Cámara walked in, expecting to be the first visitor of the day, but already an elderly woman wearing a black skirt, black stockings and shoes, black woollen jacket pulled over her black blouse and a black scarf wrapped around the back of her short grey hair, was shuffling past the cypress trees. She had a yellow plastic shopping bag in one hand and a bunch of white flowers in the other.

He checked the time on his phone: he had a few minutes.

The path took him down the central avenue before narrowing and veering to the left. It was breezy, and he pulled his coat around him more tightly, hunching his shoulders against the cold of autumn.

Two, perhaps three years had passed since he’d last been here. Hilario had never been one for encouraging regular visits, but he wasn’t going to ban them either. Not that banning was something he did, but he’d made it clear that self-pity or wallowing in negative emotion of any kind was looked down on.

Remember, yes. But allow space for forgetting as well.

And so for a few years he’d come on All Saints Day, joining the thousands of other mourners placing flowers in the small metal vases in the niches. Hilario had joined him the first few times, silently to begin with, but then vocalising his criticism more until one year he refused to go. Enough time had passed, he said. The dead were gone, and lived with him every day. He didn’t need to make an annual show of caring. Besides, he found the commercialisation of dying, the florists and the expensive undertakers’ fees, obscene.

Cámara had gone on his own anyway, cursing, not caring, alone. He was about to turn eighteen; he didn’t need his grandfather with him in the first place.

And it was easy to forget, then, that Hilario himself grieved. They were members of his family, too.

Concepción Cámara Reyes
.

Concha’s niche was low down, on the first row, near the end of the red-brick wall. He’d brought flowers the last time he’d come, he felt sure, but they would have rotted long since. Perhaps someone had removed the dead stems from the vase for him. He’d seen that on occasion – a woman, usually, helping to maintain a niche that had nothing to do with her or her family, but out of a sense of respect, stepping in where others should be doing their duty. And perhaps with a view to keeping the niches around her own loved one’s tidy and clean.

Some bypassed the problem by placing plastic flowers in the vase instead. He could see why they did it, but even plastic flowers weathered badly, gathering dust and looking as old and unloved as the wilting petals of their less ersatz companions. So what could you do? Nothing, just leave the niche bare and unadorned? Or come more regularly and leave fresh blooms by a polished plaque, every week like the black-clad widows who regularly inhabited the place, living more with the dead than the living.

Hilario was right, perhaps. Only those left behind needed cemeteries. But you could choose how to grieve – or not.

He traced his fingers over her name, feeling the tiny ridges of the brass under his fingertips. Only his mother had called her Concepción; he, his father, everyone else, had used the shortened form. Sometimes he’d thought about changing the plaque: it would be more fitting to have ‘
Concha
’ written there. It had been one of the ideas that had come to him in late adolescence, part of his attempted move into adulthood when, comparing himself to his school friends, he realised that, parentless, he had a freedom to make decisions, an autonomy, that they couldn’t enjoy. Hilario wasn’t a parent – at most he was a guardian. Someone he could throw off and disregard with ease. Aged eighteen, nineteen, Cámara could do whatever he wanted, go anywhere.

But the plaque had stayed the same. In fact much had, despite what he told himself. Pinpointing what he didn’t like, what needed to go, was one thing; becoming and replacing were something else. Things only changed once he joined the police.

For a moment he wondered if he would ever come here again; there was a sense of terminality about it. And he thought about kissing the plaque. Farewell, you piece of metal covering a hole where something – barely anything – remains of the body my sister once lived in.

No matter – this truth, that truth: at that instant an emotional self needed to make contact, to kiss Concha goodbye.

He got back on to his feet. And thought of Alicia. She would be almost halfway to Madrid by now. He felt a strong urge to hold her, press her tight to him, to kiss her powerfully, completely. He’d been cold with her that morning. She was leaving, going back to Madrid, her home. She’d been here, seen him, a greater part of him – his world, his life, his Albacete. A place which, no matter how hard he tried, he never quite managed to leave.

Was he ashamed? The metropolitan journalist coming to terms with her lover’s provincial background? No, it wasn’t that. There was as much of that in her as there was in him. Valencia, her home town, could be as provincial as anywhere else in the country.

No, it was something else. They’d shared an intense experience – driving away from Pozoblanco, getting shot at – almost getting killed. There was no need to get overly dramatic – they’d both survived: you either died or you didn’t. But she’d seen that side of his existence – the violent side, the danger. The police side of him. And it was something he’d felt close to walking away from. Yet here it was, claiming him once again, like a tide pulling down on a drowning man. She’d seen it, lived through it with him for a brief moment, and then gone.

Could she still love him now?

He tried to look beyond the confusion kicked up inside him like dust, and see more clearly the link between them. She was there, with him, inside him, but would she stay? Would he himself end up pushing her away?

The truth was that he’d never had a relationship like this before. Already in his mid-forties and it was strange to think that – you were expected to have had a wealth of experiences by that age, to be settling down, or coasting along. Yet his past was populated by women who had only ever seemed to penetrate his thoughts and emotions at the time, but who then had slipped away with greater ease than he had imagined. With one, perhaps two, he had even convinced himself that he had been in love. Yet once the relationships ended the pain of separation was no more than transitory, a process of – relatively swift – adaptation.

None of them had sunk into him like Alicia had.

Which, if he admitted it to himself, made him almost afraid.

He wasn’t certain which disturbed him most, however: the events at Pozoblanco, or Hilario’s story of the night before.

It had felt like a revelation; it was a revelation. His grandfather, the person he loved most in the world, had fought and killed for Hitler. The irony of it was almost absurd, were it not that he had done it trying to save his own father – and failing.

No self-pity – it had been the one message Hilario had managed to get through to him during those first years after he had moved in with him. And Cámara had kicked against it: he’d lost his sister, his mother and his father in less than a couple of years. He had a right to feel self-pity. Yet for all that time he never stopped to think that Hilario had lost a son, a granddaughter and a daughter-in-law. There was no space in Cámara’s own grief to allow for someone else’s. Besides, Hilario didn’t grieve – or didn’t show it. So it was easier to get angry with him.

Cámara had never known, however, that it wasn’t the first time his grandfather had lost close family members. Anyone looking at his life – father executed, granddaughter murdered, son dead from drink, daughter-in-law a suicide, wife dead from liver cancer – would think he had a curse on him.

Yet . . . he was Hilario. And now, not only was he a priapic marihuana-growing anarchist OAP, but gun-toting Blue Division infantryman and Siege of Leningrad veteran had to be added to complete the picture.

Was there any more?

The surprising thing was that none of this had changed Cámara’s opinion of him, or rather, he didn’t think any less of him. He’d been surprised, shocked by the story. But he himself had shot and killed another man, at the end of his last case, in Valencia. Not in anger, but to survive, and hoping to save others.

And he understood how much more Hilario understood him than he’d ever realised.

Even his being a policeman, a detective. There was a parallel there, of sorts, with Hilario joining the Blue Division. If you saw it from an anarchist perspective.

Was that why it had disturbed his grandfather so much, when he’d joined? Not for purely ideological reasons to do with tyranny and power, but because Hilario had seen something of himself in him?

Hilario had joined the Blue Division to save his father, and failed.

Cámara had joined the police to solve his sister’s murder, as though that might in some way bring her back from the dead.

Both in organisations of violence and authority trying to undo what will be done, or already has been done.

Both struggling against events, against a world that twists and kicks and bites with scarcely a warning.

Hilario’s solution was to choose to be the person he wanted to be, in the face of what life threw at him. He couldn’t control the world, the events that struck him, but there was one thing he could take decisions on – himself. He could be Hilario, and nothing could change that.

Cámara’s solution?

He had no idea. He’d only just identified the problem.

Two other niches demanded attention before he left. Ricardo Cámara Gutiérrez and Ana Reyes Albayzín lay side by side next to their daughter. It was a municipally controlled cemetery – suicides were allowed, although there had been grumblings at the time. Had his mother taken her life a few years earlier, before Franco had finally died, things would have been more complicated. There were no flowers for her or her husband, however. Cámara had placed some once, when he finally decided not to be angry with her any more. Or at least to try. Forgiveness was easy to talk about, even to understand and accept on an intellectual level. The problem was getting that to work its way through all of him, to forgive her with his emotions as well as his mind. He’d felt abandoned by her, that her sadness over Concha had taken precedence over her duty to him as a mother.

But he’d lost as well, like her. Not a grown child like Concha, but the promise of one. And it had struck him harder than he could have imagined at the time.

To forgive you needed to imagine. And imagination fed on experience.