Then I turned my attention to Lyra, who was lying motionless on the irregular rock floor. I assessed the situation and realized instantly she wasn’t breathing, and that fact brought Iago del Castillo to the fore.
I still don’t know which of my identities took over.
She’s in cardiorespiratory arrest. I proceed to cardiopulmonary resuscitation. One, I follow the line of her ribs until I locate the point of massage. Two, I open the airways, hyperextending the head by manipulating the forehead and chin. Three, I begin mouth-to-mouth: I seal the nose, turn my face sideways, and inhale twice. Four, I count with a rapid rhythm as I begin pressing on the thorax. And one, and two, and three, and four . . . and thirty. Two more inhalations.
Check.
Her thorax isn’t rising.
I continue.
Two inhalations. And one, and two, and three, and four . . . and thirty. It’s not rising. And one, and two, and three . . . Where’s Father? He can’t have drowned, too; I can’t lose all of them on this fateful day. Two inhalations; she’s still not moving. And one, and two, and three, and four . . . and thirty. Two inhalations. No change. Dana’s yelling something; I don’t understand her strange language. Concentrate. Two inhalations. And one, and two, and three, and four . . . Father will come; he hasn’t drowned. Father will come. Lyra will live.
When I looked out to sea again, my father was swimming to the edge of the rock, the expression of a broken man on his face. He hadn’t found his bastard. At that very moment Lyra began to cough dramatically, and I collapsed with relief.
She was alive.
I had once again fulfilled the promise I made to myself when she was born that I would keep her alive.
My father hoisted her over his shoulder and climbed up the rock face, and we followed after him. The ambulance didn’t take long to arrive; the crew stabilized her, put her on the gurney, and gave her oxygen.
And then, finally able to let go, I turned to Dana. We touched each other’s faces as if we were blind. We kissed despite the rusty taste of the blood that was trickling down my face. We hugged timelessly, as if there was no yesterday, today, or tomorrow. Just us.
And then it stopped. The trace on the cardiac machine monitoring Lyra stopped describing a sinuous curve and changed to a straight line, and then there was a beep from the machine I can still hear today. Her heart didn’t withstand it. And it wasn’t the impact from the fall. Lyra’s heart didn’t withstand the final revelation—about the family that kills its own members; about the psychopathic brother who sometimes protects and sometimes executes; about the indulgent father who overlooks everything; about the other brother who doesn’t solve anything.
It was over.
She’d had enough.
She didn’t want any more.
And I also know she wouldn’t have withstood one last, shameful, insidious revelation. The one I never dared allow her to glimpse for fear of losing her. That burden would remain forever lodged in my conscience.
My father got out of the ambulance, dropped to his knees and, oblivious to everything else, began to rock back and forth, as if that motion might console him. Apparently, we forgot we were surrounded by strangers, because Dana told me that Lür called his daughter by all the names she’d ever used: Lyra, Kyra, Dyra, Eyra, Byra, Myra, Cyra . . . He called her in a litany to which there was no response, except mine. Dana says that we both shouted out in a thousand different languages, and she once asked me if perhaps we used our primal one, my paternal language. And yes, I think we did. Something very primeval emerged from our mouths, and Dana was able to see the primitive man who had been silenced under endless layers of civilization. For the first time ever, an archaeologist of the twenty-first century was able to hear the language of prehistoric man.
They covered the body of that diminutive, two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old woman as if they were storing a garment that wasn’t going to be used again until next season. Lyra had people waiting for her in the great beyond. I wished for Teutates, the Protector, to accompany her to the same door through which, fifteen years earlier, her husband and two beloved children had gone.
The next day we had a mass said in their local parish church in order to satisfy the curiosity of the MAC staff, who came en masse, wanting to find out all the details regarding the gossip item of the year. The burial that followed was a small and private affair—only the three of us attended—so as to avoid the really uncomfortable questions like, why were we burying her in the same grave as a man who died years ago? Or, why was there no reference to Kyra del Castillo in the inscription, just a simple “Lyra”?
72
ADRIANA
Saturday, November 3, 2012
The police inspector knocked on the door to Iago’s office.
“Come in,” said Iago, walking over to the door and opening it for him.
“Oh, I didn’t know you were busy. If you prefer, I can wait outside,” he said prudently, catching sight of me.
“Don’t worry, she’s my wife. She was present at the time of the accident, and she’s already made a statement. You can speak freely. She’s fully informed about everything.”
“I understand,” replied the policeman, smoothing down the few hairs that were attempting to cover his baldness, in response to my presence. He seemed far too affable to be dedicating himself to such unpleasant matters. His chubby figure and the more-than-incipient belly visible under the tight white shirt of a white-collar worker reminded me of the monks on German beer labels.
“I see you’re making a satisfactory recovery from your fall,” he commented.
“I wish! I’m still feeling pain in organs I didn’t even know I had,” said Iago, pretending to move with difficulty. “Luckily, the tranquilizers they prescribed are very effective.”
“I’m pleased for you. So, what I came to tell you is that we’re going to wrap up the search for your brother’s body for today. The divers have poor visibility at this time of the day, so they’ve already pulled out. It’s been forty-eight hours since the accident, so the body ought to have emerged by now. We’ll come back tomorrow and continue. We’ll leave the area cordoned off. I realize it’s a nuisance for your staff to have to do without their parking space—”
“Don’t worry,” Iago interrupted him. “You carry on with your work. Do what you have to do.”
Iago made an effort to smile at the inspector. Anyone who didn’t know him well would think he was coping with the events of the Day of the Dead. He walked, he talked, and he moved like Iago del Castillo, but I knew it wasn’t him. He’d been replaced by an automaton, someone tough on the outside and empty on the inside. Iago used to say that longevos didn’t age, but it wasn’t true. I saw it happen: I saw how a few hours had added years. He seemed older than when I had met him. New wrinkles, fine and not very pronounced, but which hardened his expression, appeared on his face and never disappeared.
“There’s something else,” said the inspector, sitting down after waiting for an invitation to do so, which never arrived. “The crane has hauled up what’s left of your brother’s car. What should we do with it?”
“Send it to the scrapyard.”
“I thought the family might prefer to keep it for sentimental reasons. According to the technicians, it’s a fairly old vehicle, a unique machine. What I mean is, they could reconstruct it—”
“We’re not interested,” Iago cut in sharply. “If it’s not a problem, I’d be grateful if your men hauled it to the first scrapyard they can think of. If it’s not usual procedure, I’ll take care of it myself.”
“I’ll give the order right away. Don’t concern yourself about it,” the inspector replied with a deep sigh as he headed for the door. When he got there, he turned slowly to make his farewell. “The divers will be back first thing tomorrow morning.”
Iago waited a few minutes, listening until the sound of the solid po
liceman’s feet going down the stairs had disappeared.
“Let’s go,” he said, offering me his hand.
“Where might we be going?” I wanted to know.
“To the rock ledge. I want to see for myself how the rescue efforts are going.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” I asked, feeling a small shiver at the mere thought of returning to the place where Kyra had died just two days earlier.
“Listen, Dana, I know it will be hard, but the sooner we go back there, the better. That place is unique for us, and I want it to go on being unique despite what happened there. I don’t want us to be traumatized by it. Anyway, the more hours go by, the more worried I am that Nagorno’s damn body hasn’t appeared.”
“You think he survived?” I knew that, everything else aside, that was his greatest fear, but I wanted him to tell me himself.
“I don’t know. Any normal person would have died from the impact with the water, but Nagorno isn’t any normal person—far from it. But even if he had survived the collision, he would have had to swim to shore and climb the rock to get away, and none of us saw anyone, nor did the ambulance officers or the police when they arrived.”
“Iago, I’m sorry to behave like a mother, but you ought to be in hospital or in bed resting and recovering from your beating.”
The automaton clenched his jaw and kept walking, with barely a look in my direction. “Don’t do it; don’t act like a mother. I’m never going to listen to you when it comes to this sort of issue. I’ve spent the greater part of my life making my way through epochs where a person who was badly wounded kept on walking without resting.”
“Civilization brings with it privileges such as this one; don’t reject them. They’re called advances in the quality of life. You should try them for once.”
“As I’ve already told you, you should stop insisting,” he said, giving me a mechanical kiss and taking my hand. “In any case, you can keep trying for as long as you like, but you’ll get tired of it eventually. Let’s go.”
I followed him reluctantly. Of all of his arguments, the only one that convinced me was the one about not letting our rock ledge stop being a special place for us both.
When we had skirted the building and reached the parking lot, the police vans had already gone, but the police had cordoned off the area with yellow tape to dissuade onlookers from coming too close. I slipped under the tape, while Iago jumped over it. I thought about how much that movement would have hurt, but his face showed no sign of discomfort. We arrived at the lavender bush, which had been squashed and destroyed, because that was the spot where the two vehicles had gone over the edge.
“I don’t know what it is that Nagorno has against my plants,” I thought I heard Iago whisper.
“We’ll plant another one, don’t worry.”
“Absolutely.”
I took off my shoes, and we climbed down. The terrain hadn’t really changed that much. The rock we were climbing down showed traces of the impact of Iago’s car. But the tide had carried away the remains of the broken headlights and Kyra’s blood. Fortunately, nothing remained of the bloodstain I remembered. That was a relief.
“Iago, as far as what Jairo told me about what he did to you in Scythia—”
“I prefer not to talk about that. Maybe you’re giving it more importance than it had,” he said, staring out at the horizon.
“But your father never found out?”
“My father must never know,” he said sharply.
“Why?”
“Because that’s what I decided from the first night it happened.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“Your questions exhaust me. I’m just trying to keep going.”
“Yes, but—”
“You have to keep going, Adriana!” he shouted, without looking at me once. “You have to keep going. Just let it go, and let’s keep going.”
But I ignored him. “No, Iago. I’m not going to let it go. If you want me to consider myself your wife, I need to hear what Nagorno did to you; I need to understand your relationship once and for all. It’s an important part of who you are. I don’t want you to hide it from me. It’s the same as me not telling you about the trauma of my mother’s death. You wouldn’t have known me completely; we’d be together, but I’d be keeping a large part of me hidden from you. Just once, Iago; tell me just once, and then we won’t talk about again.”
He closed his eyes and bit his lip. Even I will never know the enormous effort it cost him that day when he told me. He told me slowly and in great detail both what I wanted to hear and what I would never have wanted to hear, because those images have never left me. He gave me a cold, almost clinical description of what those beasts did to him for years, on the orders of his brother. I was on the point of vomiting several times, but I restrained myself. However, I had the sour aftertaste in my mouth all day.
I now think Iago would never have told me if it weren’t for the fact that, after the events of the Day of the Dead, all of us—the three of us who survived—were in a different state of consciousness those first few days. We weren’t dead, but we weren’t totally alive either. After he’d finished telling me, a dense silence followed, and the silent tears of a man with a broken spirit, and perhaps the sound of the waves hitting the rocks; I don’t know, I don’t remember.
We were about to go when we saw him.
First, something shapeless emerging, burgundy in color. It was the suit Jairo del Castillo had been wearing on the Day of the Dead—and a cycle that began the day of the Cantabrian Peoples exhibition was finally ending. Then, a few yards from us, rocked by the waves, Jairo’s entire body rose to the surface, forming a cross, with the face down in the water as if he were looking at the bottom of the sea. His body looked like a macabre X on a map marking a pirate’s buried treasure. Iago dove into the water headfirst and brought him back to the edge of the rock in four strokes. I held back my revulsion as I pulled on the wet sleeve of the velvet jacket to help him drag the body ashore. The skin, which had acquired a dark bluish-green color, was swollen and taut, distorting his features to the point where the head looked more like a ball than the human face it had once been. Even so, I recognized the black hair, which for once was floating freely, like a handful of seaweed, instead of being combed back, as it normally was.
Iago, soaking wet and exhausted, asked me for my phone and called the inspector, who arrived twenty minutes later and glared at us as if we’d committed an offense. Then I remembered that we had in fact committed at least one when we crossed the police cordon. But neither Iago nor I was the least bit concerned by a reproachful look.
The “immortal” Nagorno had died. Reality had changed again, another tower of beliefs had crumbled, and we were going to need some time to come to terms with this new present free of him.
73
ADRIANA
Monday, November 5, 2012
We arrived at the Alisal Crematorium, just past the Port of Santander, early in the morning. It was a spotless gray sterile building, as only those sorts of places can be. A bad feeling that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck had been with me since I’d crossed the threshold of the building with the two remaining del Castillo brothers. They were both wearing form-fitting black suits and ties. They were both serious and had barely exchanged four words between them, but when their acquaintances started to arrive to offer condolences, both Héctor and Iago assumed their genial masks and attended to everyone who approached them. I was happy to become invisible and took advantage of the moment to leave the building for a while to get some fresh air.
It was a cold, dark day.
I didn’t care.
Moments later a tune I recognized startled me. I looked at the screen on my phone and saw a name the phone hadn’t registered for some time.
“How are things, Dana?” asked the
voice of my cousin on the other end of the line.
It was complicated to summarize how I was feeling. It was hard to decide in a fraction of a second what I could and couldn’t tell him, so I opted for the standard reply.
“I’m fine. I’m glad you finally called. How are you?”
“How am I? Well, I don’t know how you should feel when your ex-wife is devastated by the death of the man who broke up your marriage! I don’t know, Dana. I’m worried. Elisa’s behaving very erratically. How do you find her?”
“She hasn’t spoken to me since the day she was unfaithful to you. In fact, her favorite pastime at the museum since then has been to turn all the staff against me.”
“You don’t say! She’s gone over to the dark side.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m sorry you’ve been affected like this,” he muttered in a low voice. Was I wrong, or did he sound more mature?
“I’m sorry, too.”
“Do you know the latest? She’s left our house. She’s rented a smaller apartment in Santander. Can you believe it? She’s going mad decorating it, as if there weren’t enough expenses with the kids. Anyway—”
“Marcos, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I’m looking at your ex coming into the crematorium right now, and I’ve got to go. I’m glad you called. We’ll catch up soon, okay?”
“Yes, of course, we’ll talk again soon,” he said, sending me a kiss, and he hung up.
I saw Elisa coming toward me wearing a pair of black-framed sunglasses that were too big for her face. She was dressed from head to toe in a tight-fitting black outfit, as if she were the widow of some Sicilian mafia boss. Luckily, she walked right past me, lifting her head in a gesture of disdain. Jairo’s funeral was to start shortly, and the cremation was scheduled for an hour later, but I had no intention of staying to say good-bye to my mother’s murderer.