The Skating Rink (5 page)

Enric Rosquelles:

I found a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter

I found a plumber, an electrician, and a carpenter, and put them to
work under the supervision of the only builder in Z I could trust, a ruthless
mean individual: the Palacio Benvingut project was up and running. I bled money
from stones; no one bothered to check on where the consignments or parts of
consignments were going. Suspicion is a way of life in this town but nobody
dared to suspect me. I didn’t lie, or not systematically. I managed to convince
Pilar and three councilors that my project would be good for the town. The
builder didn’t know the real purpose of the work (he was right-wing, very
right-wing, and I was always afraid he would try to blackmail me). Why did I use
him and not someone else? Anyone else would have talked, of course. I found the
design I was looking for in a library in Barcelona. I copied it patiently by
hand, until I understood how it all worked. Soon the workmen arrived and
electricity returned to the Palacio Benvingut. Then I publicly announced the
objectives and the extent of the restoration that had been undertaken, but in a
vague and low-key way, after all the project was still in its early stages. I
estimated that the work would take five years to complete, and foresaw that when
completed the facility would be of benefit to the following departments: Social
Services, Education, Fairs and Festivals, Culture, Health (!), Community
Affairs, Child Welfare, and Security (!). I’m sorry, I can’t help laughing. How
could they have swallowed everything I told them? It’s a testament to human
gullibility. The only person who said anything was some sad pencil-pusher from
Fairs and Festivals who asked me (without any malicious intent, as I have since
realized) if I was planning to build a nuclear shelter in the palace’s rock
foundations. I looked daggers at him and the poor man regretted having opened
his mouth. They were all so naïve and stupid! I achieved my goal in less than a
year. For the sake of appearances and because in the long term I really was
planning to open the palace to the public (even if no one believes me now), I
kept on a couple of unemployed men who worked from eight in the morning till two
in the afternoon, cleaning up the other wings of the building. They did almost
nothing, of course, and I knew it, but I let them be. From time to time, I sent
out a van loaded with paint or planks, or had the old ping-pong table from the
drop-in center moved to one of the salons in the palace, just to keep things
moving a bit. Pilar is clever, but even she didn’t suspect anything. The
communists and the Convergencia i Unión councilors thought it would win us votes
in the next elections. Now everyone’s saying the opposite, but at the time they
were swayed by my confidence; my willpower was irresistible. There seemed to be
no end to the pleasure coursing through every cell of my body. Pleasure blended
with fear, I admit, as if I had just been born. I had never felt better in my
life, that’s the truth. If ghosts exist, Benvingut’s ghost was by my
side . . .

Remo Morán:

I met Nuria through the Z Environmental Group

I met Nuria through the Z Environmental Group, whose ten members, at
the most, usually met in cafés in winter and on the terraces of hotels or bars
in summer. They didn’t meet in August, because everyone was on vacation. Alex
knew some of the members, and so did a friend of Nuria’s, or something like
that. One night the Del Mar was the designated meeting place, and since I live
there, we were bound to see each other. Nuria was sitting by the window. Our
eyes met as I came out from behind the bar with a tray of beers, and from that
moment until Alex introduced me to the whole club, we couldn’t stop looking at
each other. I decided to stay and listen to them talking about the state of Z’s
beaches and gardens. Later I tagged along when they went to a disco in Y, where
some lunar or solar festival was being celebrated. Neither Nuria nor I had been
to one of these meetings before. As fate would have it, we came back from Y
together, with Alex and another guy, and one of them suggested we stop at a
cove, wade out into the water and wait for dawn. In the end only Nuria and I
went swimming; Alex was too drunk and stayed in the car, while the other guy
just sat on the sand with his legs crossed, meditating on dark forms or maybe
feasting his eyes on Nuria’s legs and the rest of her incredible body. Is it
possible to swim and talk at the same time? Yes, it is, of course it is. I have
to say I’m not in good physical shape; I smoke two packs a day and don’t
exercise, but that morning I followed Nuria two or three hundred yards out into
the sea, maybe even four hundred, or more, and I thought I wouldn’t be able to
make it back. Her hair got wet progressively, section by section, like the
sculpted hair of a statue, and when the sun began to rise, her head was the
brightest thing on that ominous sea that was sucking me down. When we were
splitting up, Lola had said to me: Get yourself a pretty girl, a daddy’s girl,
but hurry, before you get old. It’s not the cruelest parting shot I’ve heard.
Out there in the sea, convinced I was going to sink, I remembered Lola’s words,
and they hurt, because Nuria didn’t have a father, she couldn’t be a daddy’s
girl. We had spoken at the disco, but it was almost impossible to hear anything;
so I could say that we had our first real conversation in the sea, and the
feeling I had then, the conviction that I wouldn’t make it back to shore, the
intimation of death by drowning under a matte-blue sky, a sky that looked like a
lung in a tub of blue paint, persisted throughout all our subsequent
conversations. I returned to the shore on my back, very slowly, feeling Nuria’s
hands supporting my shoulders from time to time. As she was helping me, she
talked about the good things, the things she believed were worth fighting and
working for. I remember she mentioned a pool and the swimming lessons she had
taken at the age of five. They had paid off: she was a fantastic swimmer! By the
time we reached the shore, the sky had turned from blue to pink, the pink of an
enlightened butcher. That afternoon, taking a siesta as usual in my hotel room,
I dreamed of her hot-and-cold smile and woke up shouting. Three days later, at
lunchtime, she turned up at the Del Mar and sat down at my table. She had
already eaten, but accepted a coffee, without sugar, and left half of it. I soon
discovered that she was extremely particular about what she ate. She was five
foot seven inches tall, and weighed a hundred and twenty-one pounds. In the
morning she got up early and went running for half an hour to an hour; she
played tennis regularly, and had studied classical and modern dance. She didn’t
drink or smoke. She knew what proteins, minerals and vitamins each sort of food
contains, as well as its calorific value. She was in her freshman year at the
National Institute of Physical Education, although she added sadly that she
should have been a junior, but training and competitions had got in the way. It
took me quite a long time to find out what kind of training and competitions,
not for lack of interest on my part, on the contrary, but because she preferred
to talk about other things. We stayed at the table until the only people left in
the dining room were some old ladies dressed in white, who soon moved out onto
the terrace to crochet. When I had finished my vanilla ice cream (Nuria rejected
all the desserts on the menu with a smile), we went up to my room and made love.
We said goodbye at six in the evening. I went down with her to the street, where
she had left her shiny, chrome-plated racing bike. Before getting on, she tied
back her hair with a black ribbon and said she’d call me. All I could find to
say was that she could call whenever she liked, any time, day or night. I
probably sounded too eager. It made her uncomfortable and she looked away. I had
the impression she thought I was going too fast. Are you in love with me? Don’t
fall in love, don’t fall in love, she seemed to be trying to say to me. I felt
vulnerable and embarrassed like an adolescent . . .

Gaspar Heredia:

I got into the habit of walking around town

I got into the habit of walking around town in the vague hope of
running into Caridad. By then Z was already full of tourists and the streets
were buzzing all the time. El Carajillo soon realized that after we had
breakfast in a cantina near the campground, I was heading into town, instead of
going back to my tent to sleep. But I couldn’t find a trace of Caridad, and even
the old opera singer, who by all accounts earned her living in the street,
seemed to have disappeared. A few times I thought I heard her voice coming from
a terrace or an alley and ran to find her, but it would be some traveler singing
to pay her way, or Rocío Jurado on the radio. My routine began to change. I
worked from ten at night till eight in the morning and slept from midday to six
in the evening, although with the massive influx of tourists it wasn’t easy to
sleep. I went to bed later and later until my bedtime coincided with the
beginning of my shift. El Carajillo noticed the change, of course, and didn’t
mind if I neglected my watchman’s duties in order to catch up on sleep: I slept
in one of the leather armchairs in the office for one or two hours at a time,
and between naps I did rounds of the campground, inevitably ending up at the
place where Caridad’s tent had been pitched. I would sit down there under a pine
tree, beside the pétanque ground, with my flashlight switched off, and I could
see her blurry eyes and her angular silhouette disappearing towards the fence
and the headlights of the cars driving past outside. When you’re down like that,
reading poetry’s no help. Nor is getting drunk. Or crying. Or finding something
else to worry about. So I resumed my walks around Z with fresh vigor, and
rearranged my routine: I slept from nine in the morning till three in the
afternoon, and as soon as I woke up (hot, sweating and feeling like I’d been
buried) I would slip out, bypassing reception so they wouldn’t see me and give
me some chore (there were always plenty waiting to be done). Once outside I felt
free, and walked quickly down the avenue past the other campgrounds to the Paseo
Marítimo, and then into the historic center, where I had my breakfast in peace
while reading the paper. Right after that I would start looking for them,
supposing that Caridad and Carmen were still together, combing the neighborhoods
of Z from north to south, from east to west, always in vain, mumbling to myself
and remembering things it would have been better to forget, making plans,
imagining I was back in Mexico, enveloped in an unmistakably Mexican energy,
eventually concluding that both of them had left town. But one day, on the way
back to the campground I stopped on the esplanade beside the port, and saw her:
she was in the crowd that had gathered near the beach to watch a hang-gliding
competition. I recognized her immediately. I felt good in the pit of my stomach;
I wanted to go over and touch her back with my finger. But something warned me
not to, something I couldn’t pin down at the time. A semicircle of spectators,
all staring up into the sky, had gathered around the jury’s dais; I stayed on
the edge of the crowd. A red hang glider, the color of its sail matching the
sunset sky, took off from the hill overlooking the town; it glided down over the
slopes of the hill, then rose before reaching the fishing port, flew over the
yacht club, and seemed for a moment to be heading east over the sea. The pilot,
a dark, hunched figure, was barely visible because of the angle of the glider.
At the castle up on the hill, another competitor was already preparing for
take-off. I had never seen anything like it. Suddenly I felt absolutely at ease
among the growing shadows, which were gradually joining up to construct a real
darkness within the summer night. I could have passed for a tourist; in any
case, no one was paying me any attention. By this stage the red hang glider was
only a few yards from the circular target on the beach; there were a few shouts
of encouragement as he came in to land. Then the white hang glider pushed off
from the castle; the last competitor was a Frenchman, so the loudspeaker
informed us. Suddenly a breeze lifted him high above the launch ramp. Caridad
was wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt and black pants; like everyone else she
had turned her gaze from the pilot who was landing to the one who had just taken
off, who seemed to be having some trouble controlling his glider. Something
about Caridad, something about her back and her hair, triggered a familiar but
brief and almost imperceptible feeling of strangeness and danger. I could tell
from the applause that the pilot of the red hang glider had landed. I decided to
go a little closer. The three judges on the dais were looking at their watches
and cracking jokes; they were all very young. Along the esplanade, groups of
boys and girls were ceremoniously packing away the previous competitors’
equipment. A guy who I guessed was a pilot, though certainly not the one who had
just landed, was sitting on the sand, very near the water’s edge, with his hands
on his knees, hanging his head. Next to me someone remarked that the white hang
glider was coming in to land from the hill instead of from the sea. I thought I
could see signs of anxiety, and of pleasure, on the faces of the better informed
spectators. That was clearly not the right way to approach the strip of beach
where the judges were waiting. Up in the air, the pilot tried to steer his craft
toward the port so he could go out over the sea, but he was losing altitude and
couldn’t seem to correct his trajectory. I moved away from the crowd and tried
to find a place in the garden by the esplanade from which I could go on watching
Caridad. Children were playing among the hedges and flowerpots, oblivious to
what was happening on the beach; trios of old timers were sitting on the
benches, looking at the masts of the yachts, which rose over the top of the long
wall hiding the pier. Suddenly the white hang glider began to rise again, and
for a moment it hung directly above the swelling crowd, so people had to tip
their heads right back to see it. That white, inert object seemed to be climbing
higher and higher, as if it was enclosed in a tube of air. That was when Caridad
left the group of spectators. A man beside me, leading a little girl and boy by
the hand, pointed out that the pilot was kicking his legs; he was obviously
beyond caring about sporting decorum. I crossed the garden, heading for the
restaurants, against the tide of people coming the other way, who had settled up
hurriedly or even left their tables without paying; most of them were still
holding their glasses as they rushed to see the pilot hanging in the air,
although from where I was he could barely be glimpsed through the branches of
the trees. Then I saw her again: she was standing with her back to the sea,
looking at the front of a restaurant, very quietly, as if she had no intention
of crossing the street. Was she waiting for someone? And what was that under her
shirt, sticking up from her belt? When Caridad rushed toward the Paseo and
disappeared into a side street, I knew without a doubt (or rather with a shudder
and a clenching in my gut) that what she had under her shirt was a knife. I set
off after her just as the pilot came spinning down out of control, falling
toward the beach and the screaming spectators. I didn’t look back. I
crossed the Paseo and went down a narrow street lined with apartment
buildings. A group of middle-aged French tourists, all dressed up for a
party, came out of a gateway and for a moment I thought I had lost her. But
when I got to the corner, there she was, standing in front of a video-game
arcade. All I could do was stop and wait. An ambulance with its siren
wailing went past a few yards away, for the pilot, no doubt. Was he dead? Or
seriously injured? Without warning, or any sign that she had seen me,
Caridad set off again, but kept stopping in front of every shop, even at the
doors of restaurants, of which there were fewer as we went away from the
beach. I have to admit it occurred to me that I might be following a mugger.
Withdrawal symptoms, desperate theft. If an assault was committed, I’d be in
a delicate position. They’d have to suspect me of complicity. I
thought about my papers—my nonexistent papers—and wondered what I could
invent for the police. Twenty yards away, Caridad stopped a passerby, asked him
the time (he looked at her as if she was from another planet), then turned left,
heading for the fishermen’s wharf. But well before that, when she got to the
Paseo de la Maestranza, she stopped and sat down on the seawall. That posture,
with her legs hanging down and her back hunched, made the shape of the knife
more obvious. But with night coming on, the color of her shirt would help to
keep it hidden. I snuck in between some boats that were being repaired and lit a
cigarette; I had no idea what time it was, but I felt relaxed. From my hideout I
could watch her at my leisure, without risk: she seemed terribly sad, like a
tree that had suddenly sprouted from the seawall, a mystery of nature. And yet,
when some precise spring-loaded mechanism set her in motion again, that
impression disappeared, leaving only a trace like a blurred photo and one thing
for sure: solitude. Caridad went back the way she had come, but on the opposite
sidewalk this time, weaving through the café tables, sometimes going into the
places that were busy and too brightly lit, with a leisurely elastic rhythm that
revealed strength and a dancer’s resolve at odds with the extreme slenderness of
her limbs. I almost lost her on one of those terraces; she went in while I
stayed outside, hidden by the menu board, and suddenly I saw Remo Morán, who was
sitting at one of the tables with two very suntanned guys. I felt trapped; I
should have been at work by then, and Remo’s gaze reared up like ectoplasm and
hit me between the eyes, or that’s how it felt, but in fact it was a sleeper’s
or a dreamer’s gaze—he didn’t seem to be listening to the suntanned guys, and at
the time I thought, Either he’s critically ill or he’s very happy. Anyway, I
turned around, crossed the Paseo and waited in the gardens. Soon it began to
drizzle. When Caridad came out of the restaurant, there was something different
about her step; it was longer and more decisive, as if the stroll was over and
now she was in a hurry. I followed her without hesitation (but hadn’t anyone in
the restaurant noticed that she was carrying a knife?) and we began to leave the
bright lights of the center behind us. We went through the fishermen’s
neighborhood, climbed a steep street lined with terraced houses, at the end of
which was a dirty, modern, four-storey school, with that unfinished look that
schools always have, and then, beyond the last buildings, we set out on the
highway that runs around the coves, heading for Y. From time to time headlights
lit up Caridad’s shrunken silhouette, pressing on relentlessly. Twice I heard
men’s voices yelling from cars, but they didn’t stop. Maybe they saw me. Maybe
they saw Caridad and were scared. Only the wind in the trees stayed with us
until the end. We walked a long way. At each bend in the road, the sea appeared,
streaked with a milky brightness, the sea with its clouds and its rocks, lapping
the sandy beaches of Z. When she reached the third cove, Caridad left the
highway and turned off onto a dirt road. It had stopped raining and the mansion
was visible from a distance. I tripped over something and fell down. Caridad
stopped for a few moments at the iron gate, before opening it and disappearing.
I picked myself up carefully; my legs were shaking. There were no lights shining
in the house to suggest that it was occupied. The iron gate had remained ajar.
Peering in, I could barely make out the remains of an enormous garden, a
half-ruined fountain and weeds growing everywhere. A paved path led to a kind of
dilapidated porch on various levels. There I discovered that the front door was
also open, and I thought I heard a sound, a very faint sound of music that could
only have been coming from inside the mansion. That was what I concluded as I
stood there on the porch like a rain-wet statue, with my left hand resting on
the door frame and my right hand cupped to my ear, before finally deciding to go
in. The hall, or what I presumed was a hall, empty except for some boxes piled
up in a corner, led to a glass door. When my eyes had adjusted to the darkness,
I proceeded with caution, trying to make as little noise as possible. When I
opened the glass door, I could hear the music clearly. A few paces further on,
the corridor branched. I chose to go left. On one side of the passage there were
doors, but although they were open, the rooms were utterly black. There was some
light in the passage itself, coming in through a long window on the other side,
running right along the wall and looking into an interior courtyard, which
seemed to be at a much lower level than the front garden. The passage finally
opened out into a circular room like the cockpit of an impossible submarine,
from which one stairway led up to the floor above and another led down to the
sunken garden. That was where the music was coming from. So down I went. The
floor was marble and the walls were decorated with plaster reliefs, which
neglect had rendered indecipherable. Something moved in the weeds. A rat, maybe.
But my attention was now focused on a double door. The music was coming through
it along with a freezing draft that dried the sweat on my face in an instant.
Behind that door, illuminated by four spotlights hanging from huge beams, a girl
was skating on an ice rink . . .