Free Water-Blue Eyes by Domingo Villar

surrounded by some thirty graves, though most tombs were housed in sepulchres or nichos, deep recesses in the cemetery walls, which had four levels and looked a bit like a honeycomb. Most of these had flowers – some wilted and some fresh – and the odd lit candle. The nichos in one of the walls were all empty, as if reminding the visitor of his destiny.
    The policemen stayed behind the mausoleum, not too near the cortège. They could hear the mother’s wails as the gravedigger, atop a ladder, sealed off the tomb in the wall with cement. He smoothed out the mix again and again, as if he wanted to prove his sepulchral expertise. Each lick of the trowel wrenched a new cry from the mother, who refused to abandon her son there. The man applied so many coats that Caldas had to restrain himself from shouting at him to finish up. He wondered whether the man would do it as slowly on a rainy day.

    It was not a large cortège. On a rough calculation, Leo would have said forty people. The mother and other women, neighbours or relatives of the deceased, were at the front. Some of the townsmen, who had stayed smoking outside the church during the memorial, had now approached the tomb. The children must be Luis Reigosa’s pupils: the inspector had seen a van parked outside, which had a sticker from the Vigo conservatory.
    The bohemian-looking group couldn’t be from the area. Caldas thought they must be Reigosa’s fellow jazz players. Their city ways stuck out a mile. A man with red hair, as tall as Estévez, stood out. The inspector had written down the names of the musicians on a piece of paper: Arthur O’Neal and Iria Ledo. Yes, that ginger guy had to be O’Neal.
    Nor did the solitary man with the shock of white hair seem to be from the village. Dressed in an immaculate dark suit, he kept a little apart from the rest. He stood with his head bowed and his face in his hands as the sunlight danced on his hair. The inspector had the impression the man was crying. Tears did not sit well with the spring sun.
    Caldas thought he had seldom seen such a head of white hair. In most cases it is peppered with grey or yellow, but not in this one.
    Rafael Estévez was waiting at the back. He’d sought the cool of the shade near the wall of the mausoleum. He whispered to Caldas to come and join him there.
    ‘What is it?’ Caldas whispered back.
    ‘Read this tombstone, inspector.’
    Caldas read the epitaph graven in marble: Here lies Andrés Lema Couto, who died on 23 July at sea, and whom the sea sent back to me for burial on 4 August 1981. Your grateful wife will always be with you.
    ‘Is she thanking the sea for taking her husband?’ asked Estévez.
    ‘No, she’s grateful because it gave him back.’
    ‘But it gave him back dead,’ replied Estévez in dismay.
    ‘People who live by the sea know the risks, Rafa. They know one can die any day. The sense of unease is not caused by death, but by not having a body to bury. When a boat goes down and the drowned don’t surface, their families remain on the shore mourning ghosts. This man’s wife has her husband, even if he’s here at the cemetery. The wives of the disappeared have no one. They turn into widows who look at the sea every day wondering about their loved ones. And so every day, without answers.’
    ‘When you put it that way…’
    Inspector Caldas went back to the other side of the mausoleum . The gravedigger had put down the trowel and climbed down the ladder, pleased at having done his bit in the funerary rite. The stone plaque would not come up for a few days yet, not until the stonemason delivered it, but the coffin had been put away and the mother could now leave.
    But first everyone offered her their condolences. The children , standing in a line, stepped ahead one by one and kissed her. One of the little ones even managed to raise a fleeting smile on her face.
    The policemen saw her go past as she was leaving, arm in arm with one of the townswomen, her face