The Savage Detectives (55 page)

It was like sleeping, it was like dreaming, it was like rediscovering my true self: I was a giant. When I woke up I walked to my daughter's apartment ready to have a long father-daughter talk. It had probably been some time since I'd spoken with her, listened to her fears, her concerns, her doubts.
Pro peccato magno paulum supplicii satis est patri
. That night we had dinner at a nice restaurant on Calle Provenza and although we only talked about literature, the giant in me behaved just as I expected it to behave: it was elegant, agreeable, understanding, full of plans, in love with life. The next day I visited my younger daughter and took her to La Floresta, to a friend's house. The giant drove carefully and said funny things. When we parted my daughter gave me a kiss on the cheek.

It was just the beginning, but inside, on the burning life raft of my brain, I was already starting to feel the healing effects of my new attitude.
Homo totiens moritur quotiens emittit suos
. I loved my daughters, and I knew I'd been on the verge of losing them. Maybe, I thought, they've been too much alone, spent too much time with their mother, a docile woman given to carnal abandonment, and now the giant needs to make an appearance, demonstrate that he's alive and thinking of them, that's all. It was such a simple thing that I felt angry (or maybe just sorry) not to have done it before. Meanwhile, the giant's coming did more than help improve my rapport with my daughters. I began to notice a clear change in my daily dealings with clients at the firm: the giant wasn't afraid of anything, he was bold, he came up instantly with the most unexpected strategies, he could fearlessly navigate legal twists and turns with his eyes shut and without the least hesitation. And that's not to mention his dealings with the literary types. There the giant, I realized with true pleasure, was sublime, majestic, a towering mass of sounds and pronouncements, constant affirmation and negation, a fount of life.

I stopped spying on my daughter and her wretched lover.
Odero, si potero. Si non, invitus amabo
. And yet I let the full weight of my authority fall against Belano. I was at peace again. It was the best time of my life.

Now I think about the poems that I could have written and didn't and it makes me want to laugh and cry all at once. But back then, I wasn't thinking about the poems I could write: I was writing them, or I thought I was. Around that time I had a book out: I got one of the most respected publishing houses of the day to publish it for me. I covered all the costs, of course. They just printed the book and distributed it.
Quantum quisque sua nummorum servat in arca, tantum habet ei fidei
. The giant didn't worry about money. Instead, he made it flow, dispensed it, exercised his sovereignty over it fearlessly and unabashedly, just as a giant should.

Regarding money, naturally, I have indelible memories. Memories that glisten like a drunkard in the rain or a sick man in the rain. There was a time when my money was the object of jokes and ridicule, I know that.
Vilius argentum est auro, virtutibus aurum
. I know there was a time, at the beginning of my magazine's run, when my young collaborators mocked the source of my money. You pay poets, it was said, with the money you make from crooked businessmen, embezzlers, drug traffickers, murderers of women and children, money launderers, corrupt politicians. I never dignified this slander with a reply.
Plus augmentantur rumores, quando negantur
. Someone has to defend the murderers, the crooks, the men who want divorces and aren't prepared to surrender all their money to their wives; someone has to defend them. And my firm defended them all, and the giant absolved them and charged them a fair price. That's democracy, you fools, I told them, it's time you understood. For better or for worse. And instead of buying a yacht with the money I made, I started a literary magazine. And although I knew that the money troubled the consciences of some of the young poets of Barcelona and Madrid, when I had a free moment I would come up silently behind them and touch their backs with the tips of my fingers, which were perfectly manicured (no longer, since even my nails are ragged now), and I would whisper in their ears:
non olet
. It doesn't smell. The coins earned in the urinals of Barcelona and Madrid don't smell. The coins earned in the toilets of Zaragoza don't smell. The coins earned in the sewers of Bilbao don't smell. Or if they smell, they smell of money. They smell of what the giant dreams of doing with his money. Then the young poets would understand and nod, even if they didn't entirely follow what I was saying, even if they didn't comprehend every jot and tittle of the terrible, timeless lesson I'd meant to drum into their silly little heads. And if any of them failed to understand, which I doubt, they understood when they saw their pieces published, when they smelled the freshly printed pages, when they saw their names on the cover or in the table of contents. It was then that they got a whiff of what money really smells like: like power, like the gracious gesture of a giant. And then there were no more jokes and they all grew up and followed me.

All except Arturo Belano, and he didn't follow me for the simple reason that he wasn't called.
Sequitur superbos ultor a tergo deus
. And everyone who had followed me embarked on a career in the world of letters or cemented a career already begun but still in its infancy, except for Arturo Belano, who buried himself in a world where everything stank, where everything stank of shit and urine and rot and poverty and sickness, a world where the stink was suffocating and numbing, and where the only thing that didn't stink was my daughter's body. And I didn't lift a finger to put an end to their unnatural relationship, but I bided my time. And one day I discovered (don't ask me how because I've forgotten) that even my daughter, my beautiful older daughter, had begun to smell to that wretched ex-watchman of the Castroverde campground. Her mouth had begun to smell. The smell worked its way into the walls of the apartment where the wretched ex-watchman of the Castroverde campground was living. And my daughter, whose hygiene I refuse to let anyone question, brushed her teeth constantly: when she got up, at midmorning, after lunch, at four in the afternoon, at seven, after dinner, before she went to bed, but there was no way to get rid of the smell, there was no way to eliminate or hide the smell that the watchman scented or sniffed like a cornered animal, and although my daughter rinsed her mouth with Listerine between brushings, the smell persisted. It would go away for a moment only to appear again when it was least expected: at four in the morning, in the watchman's big castaway bed, when he would turn to my daughter in his sleep and screw her. It was an unbearable smell that chipped away at his patience and tact, the smell of money, the smell of poetry, maybe even the smell of love.

My poor daughter. It's my wisdom teeth, she said. My poor daughter. It's my last wisdom tooth coming in. That's why my mouth smells, she would protest, when faced with the increasing coolness of the ex-watchman of the Castroverde campground. Her wisdom tooth!
Numquam aliud natura, aliud sapientia dicit
. One night I invited her to have dinner with me. Just you, I said, although by then she and Belano hardly ever saw each other, but I made it plain: just you, sweetheart. We talked until three in the morning. I talked about the path the giant was blazing, the path that led to real literature. She talked about her wisdom tooth, about the new words that the emerging wisdom tooth was depositing on her tongue. At a literary meeting a little later, almost casually and as if in passing, my daughter informed me that she'd broken things off with Belano, and that after thinking about it carefully, she couldn't take a favorable view of his future inclusion on the magazine's eminent team of reviewers.
Non aetate verum ingenio apiscitur sapientia
.

Innocent darling! At that moment I would have loved to tell her that Belano was never part of the team, which could be seen just by looking through the last ten issues of the magazine. But I didn't say anything. The giant embraced her and forgave her. Life went on.
Urget diem nox et dies noctem
. Julien Sorel was dead.

Around this time, months after Arturo Belano had left our lives for good, I had a dream, and in my dream I heard once again the howl that had emerged from the mouth of the pit at the Castroverde campground.
In se semper armatus Furor
, as Seneca says. I woke up trembling. It was four in the morning, I remember, and instead of going back to sleep, I went to look for the Pío Baroja story "The Chasm" in my library, without quite knowing why. I read it twice before the sun came up, the first time slowly, still lost in the fog of sleep, and the second time at top speed, returning to certain passages that struck me as highly revealing and that I hadn't quite understood. With tears in my eyes, I tried to read it for a third time, but exhaustion overcame the giant and I fell asleep on a chair in the library.

When I woke up, at nine in the morning, all my bones hurt and I'd shrunk at least ten inches. I took a shower, grabbed Don Pío's book, and left for the office. There,
nil sine magno vita labore dedit mortalibus
, after taking care of a few urgent matters, I gave orders that no one disturb me and immersed myself once more in the desolation of "The Chasm." When I finished I closed my eyes and thought about the men's fear. Why didn't anyone climb down to rescue the boy? I asked myself. Why was his own grandfather afraid? I asked. If they thought he was dead, why didn't someone go down to look for his little body, damn it? I asked. Then I closed the book and paced around my office like a caged lion, until I couldn't stand it anymore, and I threw myself on the sofa, curled up as tight as I could, and let my lawyer's tears, poet's tears, and giant's tears flow all at once, mingling in streams of burning magma that instead of calming me pushed me toward the mouth of the pit, toward the gaping crevice, a crevice that I could see with increasing clarity, despite my tears (which cast a veil over the things in my office), and I associated this crevice-I don't know why, since it didn't suit my mood-with a toothless mouth, a mouth full of teeth, a fixed smile, a young girl's gaping sex, an eye watching me from the depths of the earth. The eye was, in some dark sense, innocent, since I knew that it thought no one could see it as long as it couldn't see anyone-absurdly, since it was inevitable that as it kept watch, giants or ex-giants like me were watching it too. I don't know how long I lay there like that. Then I got up, went into the bathroom to wash my face, and told my secretary to cancel all my appointments for the day.

The next few weeks I lived as if in a dream. I did everything correctly, as I always had, but I was no longer living in my own skin. Instead I was watching myself from the outside,
facies tua computat annos
, pitying myself, criticizing myself in the harshest terms, mocking my ridiculous propriety, the manners and empty phrases that I knew wouldn't get me anywhere.

I soon understood how vain all my ambitions had been, the ambitions that trundled the golden labyrinth of the law as well as those I set spinning along the edge of the edge of the cliff of literature.
Interdum lacrimae pondera vocis habent
. I realized what Arturo Belano had known from the moment he saw me: I was a terrible poet.

At least things still functioned when it came to love, I mean I could still get it up, but I'd almost lost my taste for sex: I didn't like to see myself fucking, I didn't like to see myself moving on top of the defenseless body of the woman whom I was seeing at the time (poor innocent soul!). Soon I managed to shake her off. Gradually I began to prefer strangers, girls I picked up in bars or all-night clubs and whom I could confuse, at least at first, with the shameless display of my old giant's powers. Some, I'm sorry to say, could have been my daughters. More than once I came to this realization in situ, which troubled me greatly and made me want to go running outside howling and leaping, though out of respect for the neighbors, I never did. In any case,
amor odit inertes
, I slept with women and made them happy (the gifts I had once lavished on young poets I began to give to wayward girls) and their happiness pushed back the onset of my unhappiness, which came when it was time to sleep and dream, or dream that I was dreaming, about the cries that came from the maw of a chasm in a Galicia that was itself like the maw of a savage beast, a gigantic green mouth open painfully wide under a sky in flames, the sky of a scorched world, a world charred by a World War III that never was or at least never was in my lifetime, and sometimes the wolf was maimed in Galicia, but other times the backdrop of its martyrdom was the Basque country, Asturias, Aragon, even Andalusia! and in my dream, I remember, I would take refuge in Barcelona, a civilized city, but even in Barcelona the wolf howled and writhed in madness and the sky was rent and nothing could be put right.

Who was torturing me?

I asked myself this question more than once.

Who was making the wolf howl morning and night, when I fell exhausted into bed or some unfamiliar armchair?

Insperata accidunt magis saepe quam quae spes
, I said to myself.

I thought it was the giant.

For a while, I tried to sleep without sleeping. Close just one eye. Sneak down the backstreets of sleep. But great efforts only brought me to the lip of the chasm,
nemo in sese tentat descendere
, and there I would stop and listen: my own snoring in restless sleep, the far-off noises drifting in on the breeze from the street, muffled sounds from the past, the senseless words of the terrified campers, the sound of the footsteps of those who circled the chasm not knowing what to do, the voices announcing the arrival of reinforcements from the campground, a mother weeping (sometimes it was my own mother!), my daughter's garbled words, the sound of the rocks that fell like little guillotine blades when the watchman went down after the boy.

One day I decided to look for Belano. I did it for my own sake, for the sake of my health. The eighties, which had been such a disastrous decade for his continent, seemed to have swallowed him up without a trace. From time to time poets of the right age or nationality, poets who might have known where he lived or what he was doing, would come by the magazine's offices, but the truth is that as time went by his name was blotted out.
Nihil est annis velocius
. When I brought him up with my daughter, I got an address in Ampurdán and a reproachful look. The address belonged to a house where no one had lived for a long time. One particularly desperate night I even called the Castroverde campground. It had closed.