A Necessary Action Read Free

have kept you waiting.’
    Willi Mohr stared at him with clear blue eyes and shook the man’s hand mechanically.
    So this was Sergeant Tornilla, the man with a lisping voice, the man who was to interrogate him, after letting him wait for ten hours. Middle-height, slightly plump, brown eyes, moustache, military cap with tassels, well filled to the fore, white shirt, strap diagonally across his chest, cheeks smooth from his razor, white teeth, well-manicured nails, well-brushed, faultless, straight out of the book of instructions. A nob. A blown-up gasbag.
    Thought Willi Mohr.
    Sergeant Tornilla walked round the desk and pulled the rickety bench a bit nearer. He smiled even more broadly and made an exaggeratedly polite gesture towards it.
    ‘This,’ he said jokingly, ‘is the accused’s bench.’
    He articulated very clearly.
    They sat down opposite each other. The man in the armchair went on smiling. He had his elbows on the desk and slowly pressed first his fingertips and then his whole hands together. As if he had happened to think of something important, he suddenly parted them, got out a cigarette packet from somewhere behind the ancient manual telephone and held it out. Bisonte, Spanish Monopoly cigarettes of American type.
    Not so bad, but unjustifiably expensive. Snob cigarettes, thought Willi Mohr.
    He took one and almost before he had had time to put it to his lips, the other man had stretched across the desk and lit his lighter.
    Willi Mohr inhaled the smoke. It stung and hurt his throat.
    Sergeant Tornilla turned his lighter upside-down and said genially:
    ‘Austrian. Contraband—even in the police …’
    He put it away, again pressed his fingers together and smiled. Willi Mohr noted that the man had never taken his eyes off him since he had come into the room.
    Sergeant Tornilla went on smiling. It was quiet in the room for at least thirty seconds. Then he exploded into a long stream of words, speaking in a low voice, intensely, with a much more marked lisp than before.
    ‘Verstehe kein Wort,’ said Willi Mohr.
    It was true. He had quite literally not understood a single word.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sergeant Tornilla, ‘I was forgetting you were a foreigner.’
    He turned a leather-covered frame so that his visitor could see the three oval portraits, a fat woman with a fan and an elaborately embroidered shawl and two small boys in sailor suits.
    ‘My family,’ he said proudly. ‘My wife and my two sons. They’re eleven and nine now, both born after the war.’ He paused for a moment and raised his right forefinger as if replying to a question that had never been put.
    ‘No, not here. In Huelva. My wife and I, our families come from Huelva. These photographs weren’t taken here, nor in Huelva. In Badajoz. Duty, you see. One is often moved. My sonswere seven on these photos. Both were photographed at their first communion, Juan and Antonio.’
    He pointed at the photographs, one after the other, and repeated, as if he were learning a lesson by heart:
    ‘Juan … Antonio … They go to school here now. When they’re older perhaps we’ll be moved to a bigger town—with better schools.’
    He offered another Bisonte, lit it and went on talking.
    Willi Mohr felt as if in some way he was unable to resist this man on the other side of the desk, neither his flow of words nor his unwavering eyes. He was tired and dirty and ill at ease, painfully conscious of the fact that he had not washed for a long time, that his trousers were stiff with turpentine and spots of paint and that his faded brown shirt was impregnated with dried sweat, that his fair hair was dirty and dishevelled and wild, and that despite his long thin body he would feel small if this man in uniform got up.
    And he was hungry too.
    ‘… this is a district where there is always plenty of time. There’s a saying here which says that one is waiting for the boat. There’s a lot to that, much more than you would at first think. You go