"Ugly?"
"Horrible. Which was why I wanted to make you pretty again, so I swept you up in my arms and carried you to the bed and we screwed for over an hour."
"I don't remember."
"Being in bed?"
"Being ugly."
She remembered perfectly, of course. She had waked up early, with the first gray light. Roosters crowing at daybreak. The voice of the muezzin in the minaret. The tick-tock of the clock on the night table. Unable to get back to sleep, she had watched the light gradually grow brighter, more golden, on the ceiling, with Santiago asleep on his stomach, his hair tousled, half his face sunk into the pillow, the rough shadow of his beard grazing her shoulder. His heavy breathing and his almost perfect motionlessness, so like death. And the sudden panic that made her jump out of bed, go to the bathroom, turn on the faucet, and splash water on her face over and over again, while the face looking out at her from the mirror resembled that woman with wet hair who had stared back at her the day the phone rang in Culia-can. And then Santiago reflected behind her, his eyes swollen with sleep, naked like her, embracing her before he carried her back to bed to make love between the wrinkled sheets that smelled of them both, of semen, and of the warmth of entwined bodies. And then the ghosts fading away into the new order once again, with the shadow of the dirty dawn-there was nothing in the world as dirty as that undecided lead-gray light just before dawn-that the sunlight, now streaming in through the shutters, was banishing once more to the underground.
"With you, sometimes, I feel like I'm a little outside, you know?" Santiago was gazing out at the blue ocean, the waves rising and falling, splashing among the rocks-an experienced look, almost technical. "I've got you all controlled and then-bam!-all of a sudden you seem to go off somewhere."
"To Morocco."
"Stop it. I told you that's over."
Again the smile that erased everything else. Handsome as hell, she thought again, bien padre. Fucking smuggling hijo de su puta madre.
"You seem far away sometimes, too," she said. "God knows where you are, but it's fucking far."
"That's different. There are things that worry me… I mean things now. But you're different."
He didn't say anything else for a while. He seemed to be searching for an idea that was hard to pin down. Or express.
"You…" he said at last, "it's that there are things that were there before I met you."
They walked on a little farther before returning to the arch. The old kebab man was cleaning off the table. He and Teresa smiled at one another.
"You never tell me anything about Mexico," Santiago said.
She leaned on him as she put on her shoes. "There's not much to tell," she replied."… Some guy fucks over another guy because of drugs or a few pesos, or because he says you're a Communist, or a hurricane comes and everybody gets fucked."
"I was talking about you."
"I'm Sinaloan. A little wounded in my self-esteem lately. But stubborn as hell."
"What else?"
"That's it. I don't ask you questions about your life. I don't even know whether you're married."
"I'm not." He waggled his finger, negative, before her eyes. "And it pisses me off that you've never asked till now."
"I'm not asking. I'm just saying what I don't know. That was the deal." "What deal? I don't recall any deal."
"No stupid questions. You come, I'm there. You leave, I stay."
"What about the future?"
"We'll talk about the future when it gets here."
"Why do you sleep with me?"
"Who else is there?"
"Why me?"
She halted before him, hands on her hips, as though she were about to sing him a ranchera.
"Because you're a good-looking guy," she said, appraising him, her eyes traveling up and down him slowly, appreciatively. "Because you've got green eyes, a great ass, strong arms… Because you're an hijo de la chingada without being totally fucking selfish. Because you can be hard and sweet at the same time… That enough?" She could feel the muscles in her face grow tense, without her realizing it. "And because you look like somebody I once knew."
Santiago looked at her. An awkward expression on his face now, naturally. The flattered expression had gone, and she could predict what he was about to say.
"I don't like the idea of you remembering another man."
Fucking Gallego, she thought. Pinches honibres de mierda. So easy, all of them, and such assholes. She had to end this conversation.
"Jesus Christ. I didn't say I remember another man. I said you looked like somebody."
"And you don't want to know why I sleep with you?" "Besides my usefulness at Dris Larbi's parties?" "Besides that."
"Because you have a great time in my dark little cave down there. And because sometimes you feel alone."
She watched him run his hand through his hair, confused. Then he took her by the arm.
"What if I slept with other women? Would you care?"
She pulled her arm away gently, until she felt free again. "I'm sure you sleep with other women." "In Melilla?"
"No. Not that I know of. Not here."
"Say you love me."
"Orale. I love you."
"That's not true "
"What do you care? I love you."
I
t was not hard for me to trace the life of Santiago Fisterra. Before I went to Melilla, I supplemented the Algeciras police report with another document, a very detailed Customs report that had dates and places, including Fisterra's birth in O Grove, a fishing village on a tidal inlet, the Ria de Arosa. Which is how I learned that when he met Teresa, Fisterra had just turned thirty-two. His was a classic case: He had shipped on fishing boats starting at age fourteen, and after military service in the navy had worked for the amos do fume, which in Galician is the "tobacco bosses," the capos of the smuggling rings that operated in the Galician rias-Charlines, Sito Minanco, the Pernas brothers. Three years before he met Teresa, the Customs report had him in Villagarcia as the owner of a speedboat working for the Pedrusquinos, a well-known clan of tobacco smugglers who were then expanding into Moroccan hashish.
At that point, Fisterra was a hired man, so much per run; his work consisted of piloting speedboats that offloaded tobacco and drugs from mother ships and fishing boats sitting just outside Spanish waters, taking advantage of the complicated geography of the Galician coastline. That led to dangerous duels with the coast guard, Customs, and the Guardia Civil. On one of those incursions, when he was eluding pursuit by a turbocraft by making tight zigzags through the mussel barges just off the island of Cortegada, Fisterra or his copilot-a young man from Ferrola named Lalo Veiga-turned a spotlight on their pursuers in the middle of a maneuver, and the Customs men crashed into a barge. Result: One dead.
The police reports gave only a rough outline of what happened, so I fruitlessly dialed several telephone numbers until Manuel Rivas, a writer friend of mine who happened to be Galician and happened to live in the area-he had a house on the Costa de la Muerte-made a couple more calls and confirmed the episode. What Rivas told me was that no one could actually prove that Fisterra had a hand in the incident, but the local Customs officers, who were as tough as the smugglers-they'd been raised in the same small towns and sailed on the same boats-swore to send him to the bottom at the first opportunity. An eye for an eye.
That had been enough to make Fisterra and Veiga leave the Rias Bajas in search of less insalubrious air: Algeciras, in the shadow of the Rock of Gibraltar, with its Mediterranean sun and blue waters. And there, profiting from the permissive British laws, the two Galicians registered, through a third party, a powerful speedboat twenty-four feet long and packing a Yamaha PRO six-cylinder engine that put out 225 horsepower, tweaked to 250, on which they made runs between the colony, Morocco, and the Spanish coast.
"Back then," Manolo Cespedes explained to me in Melilla, after I'd seen Dris Larbi, "cocaine was still for the super-rich. Most of the illegal trafficking consisted of moving Gibraltar tobacco and Moroccan hashish: two harvests and twenty-five hundred tons of cannabis illegally exported to Europe every year… And all of it came through here, of course. Still does."