The Accidental Biography of a Love Affair
by João Tordo
Published 2014 by Penguin Random House
translated by Jethro Soutar
Together we killed the wild boar. We didn’t mean to kill it. The animal ran straight into our path, courting disaster, ruining the car bumper and projecting fragments of itself into the air, errant satellites orbiting around the suns of the car headlights. The mammal’s symmetrical face exploded in blood; it seemed to look right at us a split-second before impact, begging for mercy. Everything froze in the silence of the AP-9. To my side, Saldaña Paris was still for a moment, processing what had happened, the reason for the sudden braking. Then he turned to look at me, as if expecting an explanation as to why that creature had shot out into the road, like a comet tearing through the night sky.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, his glasses wonky from the collision. “It would have been impossible to brake in time. The animal wanted to die.”
The police agreed there was not much I could have done. Two officers turned up in reflective vests, diverted the traffic with lights and cones, then dragged the wild boar onto the hard shoulder. It was autumn and the forest smelled of pond and sea water: I thought we must be near Arousa island; stagnant waters in the woods and tidal erosion of the cliffs. Saldaña Paris knelt down to look at the wild boar. He remained like that for some time and there was a sense of ceremony to his pose; a look of commiseration, but also detachment. It was as if that inexplicable death had left us orphaned.
“Do you want to keep the beast?” one of the policemen asked. “You’re joking?” I replied.
“Well, now you’ve run over it, you might as well eat it.” “We’ll bury it in the forest,” answered Saldaña Paris.
“Great idea,” said the second policeman. “Why not get a priest to come and read the last rites too?”
One of the officers was from Pontevedra, where we lived, the other was from Vilanova de Arousa. They told us to wait in the back of the police car while they called someone to come and remove the dead animal. My car would have to be towed away: puffs of smoke were coming from the bonnet.
On the way to the police station, we stared out of the windows into the unforgiving cold, the menacing shadows of the forest. We couldn’t believe it: we so nearly weren’t on that road, at that time, on that Sunday night; we so nearly wouldn’t have run over that wild boar. And Saldaña Paris so nearly wouldn’t have started talking about things he’d kept to himself until then.
We sat on a bench at the police station in Caldas de Reis, the nearest village to where the collision had taken place, waiting for formal procedures to run their course. The incident occurred at kilometre 110 on the AP-9; we’d covered just over a third of our journey to Compostela. I normally did this trip on a Monday, on my own, before sunrise, for I taught in the English Language and Literature department at the university and classes started at nine in the morning. But that Sunday afternoon Saldaña Paris had called me, agitated, sounding as if he were having an anger and a panic attack at the same time; he couldn’t breathe, his voice was shrill and swirling. We met up, we talked, I tried in vain to calm him down. I was afraid of leaving him on his own, and so – though also because life seemed terribly monotonous to me at the time – I suggested we go to Santiago de Compostela right there and then: we could eat and drink until late, then stay the night at a guest house run by a friend of mine. I saw in his big blue eyes, distorted by his thick-lensed glasses, how much the idea appealed to him – or at least how much it roused him from his stupor. And then we ran over the wild boar. That stupid wild boar that ran out into the middle of the road, interrupting the syncopated rhythm of its life. The life of a wild boar is so very different to the lives of men and yet we felt our lives had been interrupted too, though we were still alive, though that police station in the back of the Galician beyond was not purgatory, at least not yet. While we waited for someone to come and talk to us – we had to give statements, I had to find out about my car – Saldaña Paris started talking, and he ended up making the strangest request I’d ever heard.
He asked me to read. Not that it’s strange for one man to ask another man to read, least of all when we’re talking about a poet and a university lecturer. It’s natural we’d exchange books, it’s to be expected that our lives, or our concerns, would be similar. But what he asked me to read was not a book by some author or other; it wasn’t a novel or an essay, a groundbreaking new work or the undiscovered manuscript of a talented young writer. What he asked me to read was a sort of requiem, a text left to him by a woman who’d died, to whom he’d been married for five years.
I was unaware of this fact – that he’d been married – even though we’d known each other for several months, ever since he’d come to live in Pontevedra. He, a man from Mexico City, a monstrosity of twenty five million souls, coming to live in Pontevedra, a town of eighty thousand inhabitants. I’ve never been to Mexico, but when he told me about his city I had the strange impression I’d been there in dreams: in those dreams, I found myself in his house (his imagined house), a second floor flat on a quiet street where the branches of orange tree scraped against the veranda railings. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to the deafening sound of Saldaña Paris’ nervous fingers hammering away at the keys of an old typewriter. I’d lift my head off the pillow and see him at the end of the room, bare-chested, dripping with sweat, bottom lip drooping, eyes bulging, and he’d say to me: I’ve almost finished. I’d wake up afterwards asking myself what the dream meant. Unable to come up with an answer, I’d forgot it, as we tend to do when day breaks and we find ourselves tangled up once more in reality’s comforting web.
That night at the police station, Saldaña Paris told me he’d got married in London and had lived there with his wife. Later on, she would spend eighteen hours in Mexico City, probably less time than I’d been there in dreams. I asked him if she was English and he said no; she was Portuguese, born in Lisbon.
“Ah, well Lisbon I do know,” I said. “I’ve been there several times.”
“I haven’t,” he replied.
A fat policeman ignored us from behind a desk. His chair had seen better days and he’d taken off his heavy boots, placing them beside the desk where they’d spend the night like two black porcelain cats. The image of a dead animal is nothing like the presence of a dead animal. There is depth to presence, depth of smell and touch: the way in which the deteriorating body turns the colour of a rat; the way the fur suddenly slackens, like a sail on a boat in fair weather. Death is like fair weather, at least for an animal, and perhaps Saldaña Paris sensed this. Perhaps the wild boar’s death started him, in his delicate state – a man with his nerves exposed – out of his slumber. Maybe it made him think of another time, a time he’d tried hard to forget, and of a woman who was part of that time, the way a keel is part of a boat. And without the keel, the boat will sink.
That night he ran through a few details of his relationship with Teresa (as I learned she was called). They met in 1998 on a train bound for Barcelona; they fell for each other immediately; they spent several weeks together in a hostel on Carrer del Duc, making love and talking about European cinema, as he tried to work out what the mysterious thing was that was happening to him; when they parted, Miguel fell into a great despair, the like of which he’d never experienced – Teresa had gone and he felt his whole world had gone with her, that he was on his own in the blackest of black holes. He told me all of this in one burst, his eyes bulging, his short hair standing on end, his forehead shining under the police station strip lights.
Why was he telling me all this, I wondered? And why was he telling me now, as we sat uncomfortably on a narrow bench leaning against a cold wall? What leads a person to keep a secret for so long only to pour it out suddenly, haphazardly, as if controlled by some invisible trigger? He rounded things off by telling me this: Teresa had died in Galicia; she’d died just under a year ago, of a terminal cancer; he’d only learned of her death three months previously when, amongst her things, someone had found several books belonging to him, his name inscribed on the insides, along with a manuscript in an envelope addressed to him. One day he received a call from Santiago de Compostela – the voice was looking for Saldaña Paris, who had returned to Mexico to live a cursed existence, or non-existence; a dead man seeking a place amongst the living, like a drop of rain sliding down the outside of a closed window, trying to get in. A phone call from a Galician librarian, saying: Teresa has died. And she left you something.
It was this something – this manuscript, which he’d taken out of the envelope but couldn’t bring himself to look at, for it was infected with poisonous love and echoes of the past – that he wanted me to read.