The house attached to the lighthouse wasn’t so bad. The inside was a window on to minimalist decoration. A page in one of those magazines that tell you where to place the sofa and what colour to buy the curtains. On the outside, it retained its traditional charm, but the inside was all Andy Warhol (I’ve always had a weakness for Andy Warhol’s eccentric art). Its owner was Gothard’s schoolteacher. This four-eyes who’d studied in London and put down roots in the old house of his father, the island’s lighthouse keeper. The lighthouse didn’t work anymore. It was just an old emblem of the town in fairly good condition. Whenever a fleet of intruding ships approached the island, the lighthouse keeper would extinguish the beacon so the ships would lose track of their position. They would end up banging against the sharp rocks of the cliff. That was the general idea. The sea was never calm around Gothard. After that, the locals would walk down to the beach to retrieve the damaged ships’ cargo.
“I don’t know what you understand by thirty minutes, Gonçalves, but I can say I’ve had enough!”
“Boss… Thirty minutes… An hour… What does it matter? They’re still dead, aren’t they?”
“I won’t put up with this attitude anymore! I’ve overlooked it a hundred times. It seems you’re laughing at somebody, and I don’t like being laughed at. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“I won’t let you get away with it again. Next time, I’ll open proceedings!”
“Fair enough.” I didn’t give a damn about the proceedings, but I don’t blame the commissioner, I don’t make it easy for him. He was always going around with this asthma thingy in his shirt pocket. He had to take it every two hours, sometimes more frequently. His lungs were on the verge of retirement as a result of the compulsive doses of nicotine he took when he was a youth (and not such a youth). Add to that the fact he was a good eater and indulged a diet made up of meat and more meat. Rich, explosive dishes. He was an expert in a pig’s anatomy. His cholesterol level had reached red numbers. He didn’t care about this. “You have to die of something,” he would say. And then there was him. He had killed one of his daughters. The youngest. Sophie was thirteen. She was still a girl. No, I don’t blame the commissioner.
“Lúa will give you all the details. I suppose Pietre’s already told you, but it doesn’t look good. Ah! And watch out! The chancellor’s been hanging around, so careful what you say, remember this is Gothard.”
The boss put an arm around my shoulder and looked at me. I could read in his eyes, “I have to shout at you, it’s my job, but you know I’ll never open proceedings against you. Not you.” Or perhaps that was just my imagination. I don’t think so. The truth is the commissioner and I had spent many hours anchored to the counter of some bar. Alcohol made us lose consciousness on numerous nights (it still makes me lose consciousness). It was our way of forgetting about Anne Marie and little Sophie for a moment. I would end up weeping in the arms of a prostitute, paying her to take on the role of an impromptu psychologist. No sex. They would console me with a South American accent, and I would sleep in their arms, with tears in my eyes, until they told me my time was up and if I wished to continue, I would have to cough up. Business is business. The commissioner would stagger home, bumping into everything that got in his way. A photograph on the floor, a vase that smashed to pieces. Poor Rose, she would get out of bed to make tea for her husband, who was stuck in that November morning when the body of his daughter had been discovered in a street in the city of Beth.
The chancellor was Gothard’s mandarin. Something like a prime minister. He was elected every five years in a show of hands in the island’s main square, known as Wolf Tongue. Only men over the age of thirty could vote. That said, the vote was just an act. Pure theatre, so to speak. For as long as I can remember, the chancellorship of Gothard has been in the hands of the Faols. And the only candidate is a Faol.
It seems the Faols were the first family to inhabit Gothard – the island’s creators, its Adam and Eve – but the truth is they owned the old silver mine that lay beneath the cliff. All that’s left of the mine is tunnels and holes, but this didn’t stop them amassing a fortune that practically turned them into the island’s owners. Almost everything on Gothard belongs to the Faols.
I didn’t like having Aidan Faol clinging to my rear, emitting a catalogue of laws and customs through his twisted mouth. The chancellor got on my tits – I would have shot him in the forehead if they’d let me. I hate these landowners who create a whole kind of history around their surname in order to justify their possessions. I know what that all is. We have the same thing in Galataz. Landowners and local bosses, an unquestionable marriage: certified poverty.
The fact is the Beth police force hadn’t been able to lift a finger on Gothard without double-checking their movements with the chancellor. That all changed after the 1984 revolt. The Year of the Snake. The popular jury had sentenced a twelve-year-old boy to death for stabbing Brendo Cárthaig, one of the owners of Gothard’s bank. Brendo went to a better place (he’ll be burning in hell right now), and the sentence in Wolf Tongue square was unanimous. “Death.” In the face of that band of old, cadaverous vultures carefully perusing his every word and choice of syntax, the boy declared that the victim had taken him to an area of wasteland and sexually abused him. Repulsive, stomach-turning perversions. Poor lad.
Brendo Cárthaig had almost a hundred photographs of naked children in a folder hidden in one of the drawers of his desk. One of those drawers that can only be opened with a key. The thought of those photographs makes me nervous. Brings out the worst in me. The psychopath I carry inside, trapped between my ribs. The things I’d have done to that accursed banker. Stabbed to death? It was the best thing that could have happened to him.
The fact is the folder with the photographs wasn’t taken into account when it came to passing down sentence. At that time, the Beth police force had no influence on the island. The boy was sentenced to death by hanging because the old men on the jury understood the accusations against Brendo were false and therefore a lie. And lies on Gothard carry a heavy penalty. A very heavy penalty indeed. It just so happened, however, that Brendo Cárthaig was the brother of Siomha Faol, the chancellor’s wife. At some point in the past, an ancestor of the Cárthaigs had sold his daughter to some perverted Faol twenty or thirty years her senior. Trading in women as if they were sheep. Ever since, the Faols and the Cárthaigs had arranged marriages between their two families. One owned the silver mine, the other the island’s bank. An alliance that continues to this day. The things you can do with money. With power.
The parents of the boy who had been sentenced to death got in touch with the media in Beth. The news had hitherto unimaginable repercussions. The world fixed its gaze upon Gothard. The lunchtime news opened with images of Gothard from the air. Afternoon chats stopped disembowelling the lives of the famous for a moment and focused their attention instead on a boy who was destined for the gallows. The national government warned the chancellor not to carry out the sentence. And yet Gothard’s law is Gothard’s law, and the boy was hanged in Wolf Tongue square. That was just the beginning.
The government dispatched a diplomat to negotiate a new deal with the chancellor. The first condition was no more death sentences. That kind of law was obsolete at a time when freedom and democracy were making headway among ageing dictatorships.
The chancellor expelled the diplomat and proclaimed a Year of the Snake.
A Year of the Snake means that Gothard is on war alert. Nobody can enter or leave the island until further notice. Every family is equipped with weapons. The old cannons are loaded, and guardians are stationed in all four watchtowers at all times.
The red flags with their embroidered snakes only flew over the chancellor’s palace for a month. The government sent troops to the entrance to the bridge and blockaded the port. The inhabitants of Gothard do not live on air or rocks. The chancellor was forced to cede powers to the government. Gothard’s laws were no longer only Gothard’s.
There are no more death sentences or public hangings. The Beth police force deals with cases on the island, gathers evidence and passes it on to the popular jury. OK, the vultures still pronounce sentence, but they do this under the attentive gaze of the Beth police.
