Queen of the South - Страница 18

"I'm leaving tonight," Santiago said.

It was the sixth time they had been together. Teresa counted a few seconds before she looked at him, and she nodded as she did. "Where?"

"Doesn't matter where." He looked at her gravely, assuming it was bad news for her. "It's a job."

Teresa knew what the job was. It was on the other side of the border, because she herself had seen to what would be there. They had the word of Abdelkader Chaib-the colonel's secret bank account in Gibraltar had just gotten a little bigger-that there'd be no problems with the shipment. Santiago had been in his room in the Hotel Anfora for eight days, waiting for word, with Lalo Veiga watching the boat in a cove on the Moroccan coast, near Punta Bermeja. Waiting for the cargo. And now word had come.

"When will you be back?"

"I don't know. A week at the outside."

Teresa nodded slightly again, as though a week was about right for what he had to do. She would have made the same gesture if he had said a day, or a month.

"The dark of the moon is coming," he noted.

Maybe that's why I'm sitting here with you. The new moon is coming and you've got a job, and it's like I've been sentenced to play the same role all over. The question is whether I want to play it again or not. Whether it's good for me or not.

"I want you to be faithful to me," he-or his smile-said.

She looked at him as if returning from someplace far away. So far away that she had to make an effort to understand what the fuck he was talking about.

"I'll try," she said at last, when she understood.

"Teresa."

"What."

"You don't have to stay here."

He looked her straight in the eye, almost faithful. All of them looked you straight in the eye, almost faithful. Even when they lied, or made promises they were never going to keep, even if they didn't know it.

"Bullshit. We've talked about that."

She had opened her purse and was looking for her cigarettes and lighter. Bisontes. Harsh, unfiltered cigarettes, which she had gotten used to almost accidentally; there were no Faros in Melilla. She lit one, and Santiago kept looking at her the same way.

"I don't like your job," he said after a while.

"Oh, I love yours."

It sounded like the reproach it was, and there were many things said in four words. He looked away. "What I meant was that you don't need that Moor."

"But you need other Moors… and you need me," she said.

She remembered without wanting to. Colonel Abdelkader Chaib was about fifty, and not a bad sort. Just ambitious and egotistical like any man, and as reasonable as any intelligent one. He could also, when he wanted to, be polite and friendly. He had treated Teresa very courteously, never demanding more than she had planned to give him, and without confusing her with the woman she wasn't. He kept his eye on business and respected the limits. Respected them to a certain point.

"Never again," he said.

"Of course."

"I swear. I've thought about it a lot. Never again."

He was still frowning, and she half turned away. Dris Larbi was on the other side of the plaza, on the corner at the Fisherman's Retreat, with a cold one in his hand, watching the people and cars pass by. Or the two of them. She saw him raise the bottle, greeting her, and she responded by bobbing her head.

"Dris is a good man," she said, turning back to Santiago. "He respects me and he pays me."

"He's a pimp and a cabron and a Moor."

"And I'm a puta Indian cabrona."

He said nothing, and she smoked silently, ill humored now, listening to the murmur of the sea. Santiago toyed with the metal skewers on the plastic plate, crossing and uncrossing them. He had strong, harsh, dark-skinned hands, which she knew well. He was wearing the cheap, reliable waterproof wristwatch he always wore-no gold, no chains, no rings. The light reflecting off the whitewashed walls of the plaza gilded the hairs on his forearm, over the tattoo. And made his eyes brighter.

"You can come with me," he said at last. "It's nice in Algeciras We'd

see each other every day. Far from this."

"I don't know if I want to see you every day."

"You're a strange girl. I didn't know Mexican girls were like that."

"I don't know what Mexican girls are like. I know what I'm like." She thought about it. "Well, some days I think I know."

She threw the cigarette down and crushed it under her shoe. Then she turned to see whether Dris Larbi was still at the bar across the plaza. He wasn't. She stood up and said she'd like to take a walk. Still seated, while he dug in his back pocket for money, Santiago stared at her, but his expression was different now. He was smiling. He always knew when to smile, to make the dark clouds pass and her mood brighten. To make her mood brighten, or make her do other things. Abdelkader Chaib included.

"Jesus, Teresa."

"What?"

"Sometimes you look like a teenager, and I like that." He stood up, leaving a few coins on the table. "I mean when I watch you walk, you know, and all that. You swing your ass, you turn, and I'd eat you alive if I could… and those tits."

"What about them?"

Santiago tilted his head, trying to find a good definition. "They're pretty," he said, seriously. "The best tits in Melilla." "Hijole! That's the way a Spaniard pays a compliment?" "I wouldn't know." He waited for her to stop laughing. "That's what came into my head." "Just that?"

"No. Also that I like the way you talk. Or don't talk. It makes me… I don't know… lots of things. One of the things it makes me is… maybe the word is tender.'"

"Okay. I'm glad you sometimes forget my tits and get all tender."

"I don't have to forget anything. Your tits and me being tender are compatible."

She took off her shoes and they started walking through the dirty sand, and then among the big rocks at the water's edge, under the walls of ocher stone through whose loopholes protruded the barrels of rusty cannons. In the distance rose the blue-gray silhouette of Cabo Tres Forcas. From time to time the spray wet their feet. Santiago was walking with his hands in his pockets, pausing now and then to make sure that Teresa didn't slip on the moss-covered wet rocks.

"Other times," he added suddenly, as if he hadn't stopped thinking about it, "I look at you and all of a sudden you look older, a lot older… Like this morning."

"What happened this morning?"

"Well, I woke up and you were in the bathroom, and I got up to look at you and I saw you standing in front of the mirror, splashing water on your face, and you were looking at yourself like you were having a hard time recognizing yourself. And you had the face of an old woman."

"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."