Obsession by Florencia Bonelli
“What have you got to be ashamed of?”
“Oh, Eze!” Matilde sobbed. “It’s so difficult to explain.” She bit her lip, wrung her hands and squirmed on the sofa. “I was hoping that he would never find out. Eliah is so perfect, so complete and whole. I, on the other hand…”
“You what?” Ezequiel asked angrily, and made her look at him, grabbing her by the chin. “You’re the most perfect person I know, Mat. I don’t give a shit if they took out everything you have down there. Nobody is more whole than you, do you understand me? And if that guy doesn’t inspire enough confidence in you to tell him that you can’t have children, it’s because he’s conceited.”
“No, he isn’t! I promise, Eze!”
“How were you planning on keeping it from him forever?”
Matilde hung her head and wept a little before speaking.
“When I went to the Congo, everything was going to end between us.”
“Was he going to take that lightly? I can’t stand him, but even I could see that he’s crazy about you.”
“No, I guess that it wasn’t going to be easy. But he would have had to understand that our paths were separating and for me my career is what’s most important.”
“Is that true, that your career is most important?”
Matilde’s eyes welled up as she affirmed, “He’s the most important thing, Eze. He’s the love of my life, my happiness, my savior, my everything. I’m never going to love another man like I love Eliah. But I could never tie him to me, or condemn him to a life with a woman who can’t give him children. I know that he wants them a lot.” She swept her hands over her eyes, dried her cheeks with the edge of her yellow shirt, cleared her throat and settled back, to the right, separated from Ezequiel. “Everything will be easier now, because although I love him more than life itself, I’m furious, I’m consumed by a rage I’ve never felt before. He told me that there was nothing between him and Celia. And it turns out that they’ve been lovers for years. The afternoon Eliah’s wife was killed in a car accident—looking for him so she could tell him she was pregnant!—he was in bed with my sister.”
“We never knew about that relationship,” Ezequiel admitted. “They must have been very cautious because he was married. And she was always on the arm of some model or famous actor, so nobody noticed.”
“Eze, I think Celia really loves him.”
“Your sister is a snake who doesn’t love anyone.”
Al-Saud left the Aston Martin badly parked by the doors of the George V and jumped out to go back to the offices on the eighth floor. Matilde had vanished, alone, without a bodyguard, and he couldn’t find her. She wasn’t in the apartment on Rue Toullier, she hadn’t gone back to the house on Elisée Reclus and he hadn’t seen her anywhere around there; he had just driven through all the neighboring streets. Juana was on the phone.
“Oh, Eze, finally! What the hell happened? Why aren’t you answering your cell phone?”
“I was consoling Mat.”
“She’s with you! Thank God!”
Relief flooded into Eliah’s body and made his legs and hands tremble. He approached the phone and tried to wrench it from Juana, but she stopped him, and with a gesture, told him to calm down.
“Give me to Mat, Ezequito.”
“She’s sleeping. It took a lot of effort to convince her to take a tranquilizer and lie down. She was very shaken up.”
“Yes, I can imagine.”
“She’s decided to live here until you guys go to the Congo. She doesn’t want to go back to Al-Saud’s house and she’s afraid to go to Enriqueta’s because of that guy following her. So she’ll stay here with me. And you’re coming here too.”
Juana hung up the call, and Al-Saud knew that if things had been bad, they were about to get worse.
“Did you speak to her?”
“No, she was sleeping. Ezequiel gave her a tranquilizer and sent her to bed. He says she’s doing really badly.”
“My God,” Al-Saud whispered. “Put on your coat and let’s go get her.”
“No, stud. Ezequiel said that Mat had decided to stay with him until we go to the Congo.”
“Absolutely not! She’s coming back to my house, it’s her home.”
“Stud, you know I’m always on your side, except for the mess you got yourself in with Celia, but I suppose that I don’t blame you. That one’s a spider who can trap anyone in her web. But it must have been so hard for Mat to hear that. You have to know that Celia hated Matilde ever since she was born, she was atrociously jealous of her. Matilde always felt as though she was to blame for Celia’s unhappiness, as if the fact that her father loved her more than her sisters was Mat’s fault. She suffered a lot from Aldo’s preference for her, and it ruined her relationship not just with her sisters but also with her mother. You know that she didn’t call on her birthday.”
Al-Saud’s heart was crying tears of blood. His sweet, tiny, pure, kindhearted Matilde had survived hatred, resentment and disdain from her own family, when in reality, they should have venerated her. He collapsed into a chair and put his head in his hands.
“Why didn’t she tell me she had suffered from cancer and can’t have children? Oh, just thinking about what she must have suffered…” Juana was moved to hear his voice crack.
“Yes, stud, she suffered a lot, did our Mat. But I already told you once, and you’ve seen that although she may look tiny and defenseless, she’s a lion inside.”
“I love her so much, Juana. I love her more than anything else in the world.”
“I know, stud, and she loves you, but what happened today devastated Mat, and if I know her at all, it will take a long time to fix what Celia broke. Take me to your house, please, so I can get some clothes for Mat and me. Spending a few days at Jean-Paul’s house will be the best thing for us.”
As they got closer to Avenue Charles Floquet, Al-Saud doubted his strength. He was afraid that he would break into Trégart’s house and drag Matilde out with him. Suzanne answered the door, and Al-Saud asked her to call Ezequiel. He had to wait on the sidewalk for a few minutes.
“What do you want?” Ezequiel asked sharply from the door of his building.
“How is she?”
“Bad. How do you think she is? Finding out that the man she loves is her sister’s lover…”
“Céline and I are not lovers. I haven’t touched another woman since I started my relationship with Matilde.”
Ezequiel shrugged. “What do you want?” he insisted.
“Listen to me carefully, Ezequiel. There’s someone out there that wants to hurt Matilde. He’s a very, very dangerous guy. She can’t leave the house without a bodyguard. The bodyguards I assigned to her will be here tomorrow morning. I’m asking you to convince her not to leave your house without them. I know you don’t like me and I understand, but this has nothing to do with our differences, only Matilde’s safety. Do I have your word of honor that you won’t let her go out without protection?”
“Yes, you have it. We don’t just have to protect her from that maniac, but also from Céline, who has a few screws loose, I can assure you.”
“Can I see her?”
“She’s sleeping. I don’t want to wake her up, because it was very hard for her to fall asleep. I had to give her a tranquilizer. She was destroyed.”
When he saw the pain in Al-Saud’s face, Ezequiel regretted having been so hard on him.
“I’ll come tomorrow to see her.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you. It’ll be a waste of time.”
Matilde woke up with a jolt. It took her a few seconds to identify the strange shadows around her. The memory of what she went through in the offices at the George V hit her. She was at Trégart’s place, Eliah and Celia were lovers, she would leave for the Congo and never see the love of her life again. But she had to admit that what anguished her the most was that Eliah knew that she wasn’t a woman in the true sense of the word and that she would never experience the magic of carrying a
Suzanne brought her breakfast on a tray at nine in the morning. Ezequiel walked behind the employee with a face that told her something bad was coming.
“Look, Mat,” he said, and tossed her a copy of the magazine Paris Match, which bounced off the duvet. “It was just published. Read page twenty-four. You’ll find it interesting.”
She recognized him immediately. The photograph of Eliah Al-Saud took up the whole page. They must have taken it on a very cold day, because he was wrapped in his camel hair coat, his hands jammed into his pockets; his head was leaning slightly forward. The frown that drew his thick, black eyebrows together gave him an ominous, threatening look. She passed her fingers along the image until the headline of the article caught her attention. “The Merchant of War.” She was afraid to read the body of the article, she didn’t want to know what she had wondered so many times in the house on Avenue Elisée Reclus. “These days they give themselves a patina of legitimacy by calling their enterprises ‘private military businesses.’ However, they’re nothing more than a company of mercenaries, expert soldiers, lethal weapons who sell their skills to the highest bidder.” Matilde read little snippets, and her heartbeat grew louder in her ears and in her neck, making her breath irregular and rapid.
“After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Western and Eastern societies started to call for disarmament and a decrease in defense budgets. Therefore, the market was suddenly flooded with highly qualified labor, above all from the former USSR. And so these ‘private military businesses’ were born. There are only a few on the market, they have a turnover of billions of dollars a year and are gaining more power and influence in the political world every day. In the secretive world of mercenaries, it is said that one man tops the list: Eliah Al-Saud, the president of Mercure Inc.”
Matilde dropped the magazine as though it had burned her and raised her eyes, looking for Ezequiel’s consolation. Implacable, he plucked it off the bed and read the article out loud from beginning to end. Matilde heard phrases such as like “arms trafficker,” “tax evader,” “violator of UN regulations,” but she didn’t completely grasp the meaning of what Ezequiel was reading. There were references to his time as a pilot for the French air force and his participation in the Gulf War. “He’s an excellent pilot and can fly any machine that flies, from a Mirage 2000 to a helicopter. His participation in the Gulf War won him many honors. Why, then, did he ask to be discharged from the air force, where a promising future beckoned? Some speculate that it was because of the prominent role he played in the bombing of a bunker in Baghdad, in the suburb of Amiriyah, in which he shot missiles guided by GBU-27 lasers that slipped in through the mouths of the ventilation system, reducing four hundred and eight women, children and adolescents to ashes.”
“No!” Matilde exclaimed. “He didn’t know that there were women and children there! I know that he didn’t!”
Matilde didn’t pay attention to any more of what Ezequiel read until a few paragraphs later. She didn’t hear his voice, but rather the conversation she and Eliah had had after making love the night of Francesca’s birthday. “Were you in any wars?” “Yes, I was in the war. But I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t have good memories of it.” She also remembered that hours before, in the room where she was playing with Shariar’s children, he had asked her to be the mother of his children…
“And while he was selling weapons to the Tamil Tigers, he was training the Sri Lankan army to destroy them. He devastated the guerrillas in Papua New Guinea and guards the perimeters of diamond mines in Sierra Leone, while his clients sack the natural resources of a country using child labor.”
“Enough, Ezequiel! I don’t want to hear any more!”
“Fine, calm down. I wanted you to read it to convince you that you got rid of an unscrupulous son of a bitch.”
Matilde buried her face in the pillow and burst into tears. Juana came into the bedroom yawning, in pajamas.
“What’s going on, Matita?” she said, lying down next to her friend.
“This is what’s going on,” Ezequiel intervened and handed her the Paris Match.
After reading the article, Juana concluded that what had been broken the previous afternoon had been ground to dust by this article. There’s no more hope for the stud. Who wrote this shit? She looked for the journalist’s name. Whoever you are, you can go to hell, Lars Meijer!
He stayed in the Aston Martin until he saw her leave the institute, cross the sidewalk very quickly and get into Jean-Paul’s Audi, which was driven by his chauffeur. For the stretch between the Lycée des Langues Vivantes and the Audi, Matilde was flanked by Diana and Markov, whom she greeted with a timid smile. Ezequiel went to pick them up twice, and Matilde let him put his arm around her shoulders and lead her to the Porsche 911. Matilde never looked up at the Aston Martin parked a few feet away, although she knew he was there, watching her, yearning for her, loving her, and that he didn’t approach her because he didn’t want to bother her. That was what Juana had advised him.
What would he have done without Juana, his great ally? Thanks to her he had daily news of Matilde, because though Diana and Markov saw her and followed her in their car, they couldn’t say too much to him. From Juana he knew that she was subdued like a wet cat, that she wasn’t eating much—this drove him mad with worry—that she caught her crying alone and she tried to hide it. He wasn’t in a much better state. He slept badly without her in his bed and he had lost pleasure in everything. The house was missing something essential, as if the roof had flown away. In what had been close to a month and half of cohabitation, Matilde had completely taken over him and his house, which, before her, he had kept from every other woman because it had been his refuge. Now he understood that Matilde was his refuge and that without her, his life became gray and empty of meaning.
On Friday, March 27, a week after the encounter with Céline at the George V, Juana and he had lunch in the same restaurant on the Champs-Élysées where Matilde had given him the little jar of dulce de leche. Juana saw that he had rings under his eyes and looked haggard.
“Oh, stud. You don’t know how sorry I am about this whole mess.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Everything happened at once. That idiot Celia’s little number and then the article in Paris Match.”
“What does Matilde say about that, the Paris Match thing?”
“Nothing. The truth is that she isn’t talking much.”
“Is she eating more?” Juana shook her head. “Please, Juana, you have to do something to make sure she eats.”
“Don’t worry. Ezequiel is on it. When they gave her the chemo and she didn’t want to eat because everything sickened her, it was Ezequiel who sat by her side and got food into her mouth by making her laugh. He was the only one who could get her to manage a few bites. He’s doing the same thing now.”
“My God. Matilde…” His voice was strangled and he looked away so Juana wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes.
“And you, stud, how are
“Juana, I never thought I would say anything as cheesy as what I’m about to say to you, but I can’t live without her.”
“I know. And it’s not cheesy, Eliah. When you love someone as much as you two love each other, you start to form one body. Without one part, that body can’t live. But tell me about you. What have you been doing during the day?”
Al-Saud thought about the times he had put up with the scenes Céline made in the lobby of the George V, when she slipped in without the guards seeing her, or on the sidewalk, or even at the door of his family house on Avenue Foch. Fortunately, she didn’t know about the house on Avenue Elisée Reclus. Sick of battling with this crazy woman and frightened that she would hurt Matilde, he called her agent, Jean-Paul Trégart, and threatened him: either she changed her ways or a juicy piece of gossip about her nearly two-month stay in a detox clinic would show up in the editorial rooms of the country’s magazines. The day before, Trégart had called to inform him that Céline would be going to Milan for a long while.
Al-Saud also thought about the many meetings he had had in Dr. Lafrange’s law firm to plan the lawsuit against the weekly Paris Match and Lars Meijer. They would get a few million francs out of those bastards and make them publish a retraction or his name wasn’t Eliah Aymán Al-Saud. The article was very provocative and tendentious. It was ambiguous in certain passages such as its mention of the tragedy in Amiriyah, when it suggested that Al-Saud ended his career as a pilot because he had bombed the bunker full of women and children; the reader might assume that after Eliah had destroyed the place on his own initiative, the air force had kicked him out when, in reality, the opposite had happened. Only one man could have provided Meijer with certain information from his past as a member of L’Agence: Nigel Taylor. That son of a bitch would pay as well. By revealing the information, the little swine had violated the oath of silence taken upon entering the ranks of L’Agence.