It was very light and warm. I could see myself strolling through an unknown hillside city similar to those lovely Italian Renaissance towns where houses cluster one above another to create strikingly beautiful urban mosaics. I was walking on a slope shaded by the crowns of huge magnolia trees when I suddenly found myself on the edge of a small plaza, three of whose sides formed a horizon of façades sheathed in green moss. These ramshackle, noble houses seemed to speak to each other in a language forged in an era when honor, dignity, or a man’s word perhaps constituted the marks of identity of mortals. They were conversing, I imagine, about past glories or loves defeated by decrepitude brought on by the passage of time. On the side of the plaza that wasn’t lined by houses, a huge wall kept the sea at bay. Waves surged tempestuously, crashed down on that supernatural parapet, and heaving waters sent foam eddying through the air to caress the edges of the flagstones on the opposite side of the plaza. Some men were enjoying a relaxed swim under the intense blue sun warming the sea. On the other side of the waves, in shadowy arcades, a few ancient shops were opening their doors to customers. A strange man with a book under his arm stood in the entrance to an elegant café, wearing a houndstooth check jacket. He looked vaguely familiar. I lumbered down to the plaza, striding toward where the man was waiting. I said something, I don’t remember what, perhaps I asked him for the time of day, and then became fascinated by the sea extending behind me, not realizing it couldn’t possibly exist. As absorbed as I was contemplating that wonder, I did still notice the way the foam the crashing waves created reshaped itself into eddies of words that threaded together on the parapet to form astounding texts that told the story of my life. Suddenly I wanted to plunge in; I was being dragged along by an irresistible force. Dazzled by the peaceful turbulence of the blue water, I stripped off my clothes, ready to dive in straight away and feeling extremely happy about the prospect. Then that man addressed me. “Don’t swim,” he said. “These are the Stygian waters that end men’s existence, that give the final full stop to their words.” I didn’t understand his warning, or preferred to ignore him, and threw myself headfirst into the depths of the abyss. That was when I woke up. I could still taste the saltiness of that strange liquid on my tongue. Blue as ink, it nevertheless tasted of rust, like human blood.
Blue on white, his shirt cuffs spilt out onto a marble-topped table in La Copa de Herrera, covering hands that Esteruelas rubbed together against the cold while he waited for One-Eyed to come. I wasn’t expecting to find him there; Slim hadn’t tipped me off about his possible presence. It was an evening, one of those very nocturnal January evenings when the moon is so white it looks like pure ice. As ordained by habit, I’d dropped by La Copa to review the day’s takings with Slim and to down a few shots of rough anisette before heading off to eat Trinitarian stew. When he saw me walk in, Esteruelas gave me an intrigued glance, as if dredging from the sewer of his memory a distant, lingering reminiscence of me. I went up to the bar and asked after Slim. “He’s not come yet,” Señor Antonio whispered in that hoarse tone cigarettes give a voice. “That fellow there has been waiting for him for at least half an hour and has smoked almost a whole packet of Ducados.” Esteruelas was still rudely staring at me, nastily focusing on my misshapen protuberances, dwelling on them with relish; he kept that up a good while, until he couldn’t resist it any longer and summoned me to his table with a contemptuous wave of his index finger, “Hey, dwarf, come here.” I went over, not really afraid but wary of any danger proximity to him might put me in. “Don’t I know you, Snow White?” he asked, arching his eyebrows in an unpleasant, know-all fashion. “I do know you, but you must tell me the wherefore and when.” “I worked as a dwarf in the Stéfano circus,” I answered honestly, my voice shaking in fear like a man who knows he is trapped, “you interrogated me seven or eight years ago in Burgos, but we’d met before that.” Esteruelas snarled obtusely and took a last drag on his cigarette through a gap between his teeth. The smoke poured out from deep in his nostrils. Then he started remembering. He recalled aloud the far-off arrest of Gurruchaga, made special mention of how he stank like a pig, and didn’t dally there but immediately went on to the more scabrous case of handsome Bustamente. Perhaps from the tone of his comments, I surmised that Esteruelas had known from the onset my betrayal was a fake, yet that hadn’t prevented him from taking an innocent man prisoner. What’s more, he’d derived great pleasure from not giving him the help he was due, because it allowed him to close down that murder case there and then, a feat you can bet brought him substantial kudos, and because he also enjoyed seeing others suffer unjustly. “It was brave of you to inform on him, Snow White, because that faggot swore he’d get you. He spent the whole night screaming at the cell walls that he’d live to see the day he’d kill you. It took a good beating to cool him down.” He went on to tell me he’d got twenty years and had refused to say anything in self-defense. Esteruelas’s statement was enough to ensure he was put away. He was abandoned to his fate, and that sounded strange, knowing Mr. Handsome, though it’s true some people change their attitude as life repeatedly mistreats them, or he might have had some other good reason to keep quiet. “Twenty years is no proper sentence for a self-confessed murderer. In other times, they’d have slammed him up against a wall and peppered him with bullets. Twenty years pass quickly enough. The judges took into consideration the dead man’s perversions, and that’s why they reduced his time inside as much as they could. There’s no God that can stop time, right, Snow White? It would have been better for you if they’d made a sieve out of him, because if twenty years fly by fast to begin with, you just wait and see what happens if they get the general amnesty everyone is calling for; as far as I’m concerned, the street will be flooded with rabble, and your skull will get the revenge bashing that faggot swore he’d give it.”