Chapter 27 Antía
Antía
A comfortable silence fell between them as the rain drummed against the windowpanes. Antía was sitting next to him, close enough that, if he’d wanted to, he could have reached out and touched her.
“Tell me about yourself,” he murmured sleepily. The painkillers were starting to take effect, and he wanted to hear somebody else’s voice.
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me about your life. Who really is Antía Freire?”
“To be honest, there’s not much to tell.” She sounded faintly embarrassed. “I’m afraid my life will seem really boring compared to yours.”
“Try me.”
“Let’s see.” She sighed and unconsciously gathered her hair back in a graceful movement. “I was born in a hospital on the mainland, but I’ve lived on the island almost my whole life, except when I was at college.”
“Really? And what did you study?”
“Marketing and business management,” she replied, with a hint of pride.
“Really?” Roberto’s eyes grew wide. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
“Why not?” Antía replied brusquely but with a half smile. “Thought I was some island hick who barely knew how to read?”
“That’s not what I meant. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”
“I’m the first Freire to go to college. My family made a big effort to pay for it; I’ve always hoped to pay them back one day.”
“How?”
Antía sighed again. “I wanted to set up a hotel on the island, maybe with a small fleet of boats that would serve as a ferry service, to bring guests from the mainland. More or less what I do now with the rental properties but in a place I could call my own, something I’d built up from scratch.”
“Sounds like a great idea. Why didn’t you do it?”
There was a brief pause.
“I was very young, and a bit of an idiot, and I was in love with a guy who turned out not to be who I’d thought he was. I married him.”
“Oh dear.” Roberto propped himself up on his good arm. “Are you still together?”
Another pause, this time shorter. Antía shrugged. “Not anymore. He was a sailor. Still is.”
“That’s a hard life.”
“You don’t know the half of it. Do you know what they call the wives of sailors—sailors who spend months at sea?”
“Not a clue.”
“Grass widows.” She pronounced the words as if they had a bitter taste. “Women who only see their partners for three or four months a year, if that. Lonely women, who often have to run the household and bring up the kids on their own, with an absent husband.”
“Doesn’t sound like a great arrangement.”
“It wasn’t,” she replied. “And when he realized that Diego and I weren’t going to accept that kind of life, he wasn’t very happy . . . and I wasn’t very happy with his reaction.”
“Diego? What’s this got to do with your brother?” asked Roberto, surprised.
By way of response, she sighed and stared straight back at him. Roberto suddenly understood.
“Diego isn’t your brother!”
“No, he isn’t,” she replied, with the saddest smile he could imagine on a woman’s face. “Diego’s my son.”
Immediately, everything made sense. Antía’s protective attitude toward the boy. Her fierce, almost desperate reaction when she thought he’d killed Pampín. Their extraordinary physical resemblance.
“I don’t understand.” Roberto frowned. “Diego doesn’t know either?”
She lowered her gaze and shook her head slowly.
“Why don’t you tell him the truth?”
“It’s a long story. We realized he was different from other children a few weeks after he was born. My ex rejected him and, I quote, said, ‘A freak can’t be my son,’ before he disappeared.”
“What an asshole!” Roberto said.
“My mother didn’t want me to have to put up with people’s gossip, so we behaved as if the child were hers. It might seem crazy, but you can’t imagine how cruel people can be in a tiny place like this.”
“Do the Docampos know?”
“I’m sure they have their suspicions, but they can’t prove it. Diego and Helena were born on the mainland, a few days apart. Aunt and nephew became twins. I told you I married young.”
“What happened to your husband?”
“Nothing I feel like telling.” She shrugged. “Let’s just say that things ran their course. We’re divorced. It’s all in the past.”
“And what did you do after that?”
“I stayed on the island.” She tucked a lock of blond hair behind her ear. “My father had died in the speedboat accident, my mother was on her own with a baby girl, and Diego needed me. You’ve met him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“And your plans?”
“I had to put them on the back burner. Then things on the island changed, what with the national park and all that.” Her voice had grown quieter. “Now it’s out of the question, but we have to find a way of carrying on. That’s why I deal with the rental properties.”
Roberto digested what he had just heard. The challenges of living on the island were once more brought home to him.
“Have you never thought about leaving? Going to live somewhere else? Starting a new life from scratch?”
“Not without Diego.” She shook her head. “He needs me. And he needs a lot of extra support: specialist teachers, medical care, stuff that’s too expensive and I couldn’t afford on the mainland, even if I found a good job.”
“That’s why you hesitated when we opened the bundle and we counted the money,” Roberto ventured. “Even though you knew we shouldn’t keep it.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “For a second, I imagined that another life was possible. But you’ve seen what that damn money has led to.”
“And now here we are.”
“And now here we are,” she repeated.
They fell silent, both soaking in the feeling of intimacy.
Antía leaned back against the headboard, next to Roberto, who could sense the gentle heat of her body.
If it hadn’t been for the hell that was being unleashed all around them, it would have been the perfect moment.
Suddenly, his gaze came to a halt on the bookcase, and he smiled.
“Looks like you already knew who I was.” He pointed to a copy of The Fleeting Glance. “You never said.”
Antía blushed. “I didn’t want to come across like some crazy fan the first time we met. And now I’m dying of embarrassment.”
They both laughed.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said eventually. “And you could at least tell me if you liked it.”
“I loved it.” She stole a sideways glance at him. “You write really well.”
“Now I’m the one who’s blushing.”
“You’ve had such an interesting life.” Antía turned and looked straight at him. “You’ve traveled the world, been to exotic places, seen some terrible things, sure, but also had incredible experiences. After all that, I must seem really dull and boring.”
“Not at all. It’s just that . . .”
“What?”
“My life isn’t so great. Being a reporter wasn’t as interesting as you might think,” he explained.
“One dirty, ramshackle hotel after another—if I was lucky—never too long in the same place, almost always surrounded by poverty and suffering. I’ve seen enough death and destruction for several lifetimes, and I thought I’d left it behind .
. . until I got here and everything went sideways. ”
“So that’s why you gave up being a correspondent,” Antía said. “That’s why you decided to become a writer. To leave that life behind.”
“More or less.” His chest felt tight. His dark secret smiled at him, mockingly, inside his head. “There’s something else.”
“What?”
Roberto opened his mouth, but not a sound came out. There were things he had only ever told his therapist and Carmen Gavín. No one else. He couldn’t.
But suddenly he realized that he wanted Antía to know. That this was the right time, the right place, and the right person. And if he couldn’t say it now, right now, he might never be able to say it. He needed to share his story with her.
“I’m going to tell you something that almost nobody else knows,” he began hesitantly.
“Don’t worry, I’m good at keeping secrets.”
There was a second of silence, a final moment of doubt that was overcome by a sigh.
“Do you know where the Gulf of Sidra is?” he finally asked, his voice tight.
“Somewhere in North Africa, off the coast of Libya, right?” she hazarded.
“Four years ago, I was there, covering the Libyan civil war,” he began. “One of those long-running conflicts that the world has forgotten but where people are still dying on a daily basis. I was in a town called Ras Lanuf when I met a group of people who’d hired a boat to cross to southern Italy.”
“Fleeing from the war?”
“Some of them. But most of them had reached Libya by traveling halfway across Africa on foot. They were desperate, exhausted, and hungry. God knows what they’d done to reach Ras Lanuf and get a passage on that boat. I decided to go with them.”
“On a boat operated by people smugglers?” Antía’s eyes opened wide.
“That’s right. I thought it would be a great story, and if we came across an Italian patrol ship, my presence on board would make everything easier. I’d help them.”
She listened, rapt.
“We set off on a cloudy, moonless night so we wouldn’t be seen.
” Roberto’s voice had fallen to a whisper as his secret emerged.
“We were on this wooden boat that was falling to pieces, with a couple of wheezy outboard motors and a bunch of fuel drums to get us to Lampedusa. There was room for fifteen people, at most. The traffickers had squeezed fifty of us on board.”
“Jesus Christ . . . !”
“More than half of them were young women who’d been through the most horrific experiences. All of them had been raped at least twice along the way. But out of everyone on the boat, I was the most scared . . . maybe because the other passengers didn’t know how dangerous the crossing was.”
“And what happened?”
“Three hours after we set off, one of the motors broke down.” Roberto swallowed.
“Two hours later, the other one failed, too, and so we were adrift, in a sea that was getting rougher by the minute. With power, we could have gotten out of there, but with our motors gone, the waves ended up capsizing the boat.”
“Oh, Roberto . . .” Antía took his hand, but he didn’t even notice. His mind was far away.
“Fifty people in the water, out in the Mediterranean, in the middle of the night.” His voice faltered.
“Can you imagine the noise that fifty people make when they’re drowning in pitch darkness?
The cries of panic, of terror? I won’t forget it for the rest of my life. I have bad dreams almost every night.”
Roberto shuddered. “I spent the next few hours clinging to an empty fuel drum, buffeted by the waves, floating in the darkness.” His voice had fallen to a whisper. “And that wasn’t the worst bit.”
He paused, feeling for the words, not knowing quite how to express the last part.
“I had to . . . I had to fight two migrants for possession of that drum. It was too small and it could only keep one person afloat. I hit them, kicked them . . . I don’t know.
I don’t remember it properly.” He stopped for a moment, his eyes full of tears.
“The following morning, I was alive and they weren’t.
They drowned. It was my doing. I killed them. ”
“That’s not true,” Antía protested. “You didn’t have any choice. Your life was at stake.”
“Maybe.” He gave a weary shrug. “But it’s been with me ever since.
I don’t know how long I spent adrift. Dawn was breaking when I was picked up by a patrol boat that brought me ashore.
Since then, I’ve been terrified of the sea.
As soon as I got out of the hospital, I knew my days as a reporter were over.
And that never again, for any reason whatsoever, would I hurt anyone. ”
“Shh, Roberto, it’s okay.” Antía leaned toward him and wrapped him in her arms as he began to sob.
His chest heaved as he let out a deep groan, the sound of a deadweight finally being released. His tears, a mixture of sorrow and relief, fell on Antía’s shoulder. After a while, he dried his cheeks with the back of his hand, and looked into her eyes.
“Now you know who I am,” he said in a shaky voice. “You know what I’ve done.”
“You did what you had to do to survive,” she answered, holding his face between her hands. “Like we do on the island. Like I did. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I just want a quiet life, that’s all,” he mumbled. “I just want to be happy.”
“To be happy,” she echoed. “I’d settle for that.”
They fell silent. Nothing else existed, not the island, not the quarrels or the money or the murder. The only thing that mattered was the moment, the bubble of their emotions. But just then, the bedroom door burst open.
“Antía!” Diego stood on the threshold, panting. “You’re here! Thank God I found you!”
They both sat bolt upright on the bed, like a pair of teenagers caught in the act. Even so, the connection still flowed between them. Anyone else would have realized that something was going on, but Diego was too preoccupied . . . and, anyway, he was Diego.
“What’s up?” Antía asked, blushing slightly as she composed herself. “What’s so urgent?”
“It’s Helena.” Diego swallowed, and they realized that he was really worried. “She’s disappeared. Nobody knows where she is.”