bullpen at the finca and whitewashed it to a solid white cube in the burnt umber landscape. He’d photographed it. It had something of the simplicity of a great work of art.
‘I’ve never remembered that all the way through,’ he said. ‘I always used to stop before I got to her receding heels.’
‘And you know now, Javier, don’t you, that it wasn’t your fault that she didn’t come back?’
‘There’s a question.’
‘What question?’
He thought for a long time and shook his head.
‘You know it wasn’t your fault,’ she said.
He nodded.
‘Do you know what you’ve done this evening, Javier?’
‘I suppose you’d say that I’ve relived a moment.’
‘And seen it in its normal light,’ she said. ‘That’s how the process works. If we deny things that are painful to us they don’t go away. We only hide from them. You’ve just had the first success in the biggest investigation of your life.’
He drove back to Calle Bailen oddly refreshed, as if he’d been out running and sweated all the toxins from his body. He parked and walked through the silent, dark house until he reached the patio at its centre and its limpid pupil of black shining water. He turned the light on beneath the arched and pillared cloister. His hands shook as he entered the study. His eyes floated over the desk, the scattered photographs and the portrait of his mother and her children. He went to the old grey filing cabinet, unlocked it and took out a brown buff file from under the letter ‘I’. He sat at his desk with the file, knowing that he would take the next step, beating back the guilt. He took out the fifteen black-and-white prints and laid them face down on the desk. He asked himself in the glass of the picture on the wall: ‘How new are you?’
He turned over the first photograph. Ines lay face down, naked, on a silk sheet on the bed. She was looking back at him, resting her head on her fist. Her hair was all over. Falcon closed his eyes as the pain eased into him. He turned to the next photograph, opened his eyes. His neck shook with tension. Swallowing became impossible. Ines was propped up on the pillows, naked again apart from a piece of silk around her shoulders. She was looking at the camera with a deep sexual intent. Her thighs were spread wide, revealing her shaved sex. He was standing behind the camera in the same state. The wonderful excitement as they’d shaved each other, the giggling at their trembling hands. There’d been nothing perverse about it. The joy was in the innocence of it. The brilliance of that day came back to him. The torrid heat of that big fat afternoon, the cracks of intense light around the shutters brightening the dimness of the room so that they could see each other in the mirror. The privacy of the two of them alone in the big house, so that when they were too hot he’d picked her up and, still connected, walked downstairs, her thighs clenched around his waist, ankles locked, heels riding the tops of his buttocks. He’d stepped into the eye of the fountain and sank into the cool water.
It was so unbearable that he had to put away the file and lock the cabinet. He looked at the grey metal repository of his memory. Alicia was right. You could not lock things away. You could not obsessively order them, package them, file them under ‘I and hope to confine them to their place. No amount of order could stop the mind’s inclination to leak. This was why desperate people blew their brains out. The only sure way to stop the leaking was to destroy the reservoir for ever.
That question came to him again. It still had no form. He didn’t quite believe what Alicia had said he’d achieved tonight. He had
Just after 1 a.m. a taxi stopped at the junction of Calle San Vicente and Calle Alfonso XII. Ines got out and waited on the pavement. Calderon paid the driver from the back of the cab. Falcon came out from under the trees, his hair wet, and stood in the shadows of the kiosk on the plaza.
Calderon took Ines by the hand. She was staring up and down the street and across the plaza. They turned and walked up Calle San Vicente. Falcon loped across the square in a crouching run and found the shadows on the opposite side of the street to the lovers. He walked behind the cars parked on the pavement. They stopped. Calderon took out his keys. Ines turned and her eyes found him paralysed between a car and the wall of a building. He ducked and ran for the nearest doorway where he stood, back up against the wall, pressing himself flat into the darkness, heart and lungs fighting like a sack of wild animals. Ines told Calderon to go up. Her heels stabbed the street and stopped by the pavement close to him.
‘I know you’re there,’ she said.
The blood thundered in his ears.
‘This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you, Javier.’
He squeezed his eyes shut, the child about to be found out, punished.
‘Your face keeps coming out of the night,’ she said. ‘You’re following me and I won’t put up with it. You’ve destroyed my life once and I won’t let you do it again. This is a warning. If I see you again, I will go straight to the courts and apply for a restraining order. Do you understand that? I will humiliate you as you did me.’
The spiky heels backed away and then returned, this time a little closer.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered. ‘Do you know how much I hate you? Are you listening, Javier? I am going upstairs now and Esteban is going to take me to his bed. Did you hear that? He does things to me that you could never even dream of.’
