THE TOWER OF SILENCE:
Epilogue:
(Music: Violin Concerto No.2 by Max Bruch: First movement)
(Location: Cabo Polonio, Uruguayan coast, a year and a half later)
-What do we have here? ... Oh, I see, I see! Another conch!
-Síiiiiiiiiiii! Yeah, Uncle Spencer!
Jack's little eyes shone like small coals stolen from the sea while Reid "mined" skillfully snails of his hair and ears.
The laughs were like a chorus of bells with foam, distant sirens and joyous shouts of fishermen.
-Now, let's go to prepare the books and copybooks, that you leave early morning to school.
Aaron was smoking,supported under the door into the small staircase that separated the house from the beach, while watching the sea..
It had been a brutal year, with time elapsing at breakneck speed, devouring hours and minutes, evaporating the days: the arrival in Buenos Aires, to settle in the department that Spencer had inherited; the contacts with distant relatives who put him in touch with the Hebrew school to enroll in it to Jack; the comings and goings to arrange the details of their future support; the wandering looking for a suitable location that would allow them to get away from the world..First, really,it was the trip to Ushuaia, looking for the distance of the Tierra del , the return to Buenos Aires, a city that had seemed wonderful to them, but also full of pitfalls. They could not forget that the one whose shadow they had suffered for so long was a regular visitor to the Southern capital: not in vain he had written not less than three books on criminological aspects in the stories of Borges, and a highly celebrated study on serial murderers of that country for them so far and strange..A sort of Paris city amid a fantasy, with a touch of expressionist haze ,some romantic Dickensian brushstrokes , and a smug air of Southern nonchalance .
Spencer loved Buenos Aires, but he also felt overwhelmed by it.
A tourist agency provided them with guidance on the Uruguayan coast, which contained a site without electricity, no gas, no cell signal, no internet, no cars, no clackson horns .. A fishing village with little tourism, quiet and reserved: Punta del Diablo in Cabo Polonio.
. Having rented the apartment in the neighbourhood of Palermo to a couple of friendly Germans, and after to manage the transfer of Jack to a boarding bilingual school in Montevideo, they left for the small neighbouring country, feeling that ,at last, they had found their place in the world.
They purchased (with the income from properties that Spencer received in inheritance that allowed them to live more comfortably, helped by the dollar exchange) a house by the beach, not very big, but comfortable, and an all-terrain vehicle( a Land Rover), to move easily from the village to the capital to pick up Jack in the summer, and to return him to the boarding school for the school year.
At that shred the world they still had, however, certain bonds of sociability.
The main character of the people was an old fisherman, an Englishman, former whaler and currently the only inhabitant of the lighthouse:people called him Don Welsey.
And ,so,Aaron had become, also "Don Aaron," and he did not disgust endless rounds of mate and gin, and the equally endless games of cards..
Don Welsey had approached them. when he heard, after a while, the native language, "but painfully misrepresented"("not even Irish!"). He immediately inferred that the odd couple of fellows,was a couple of Americans.
But Spencer was understood by him almost immediately ,overall after to have seen the young lad stopping by to recite the verses of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.:
"Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink .. "
In short: the inveterate distrust of the English man for their "children once spurious" was defeated once again, by the pen of a poet.
And by the mellifluous voice, yet almost childlike, of Spencer William Reid.: a voice that softly licked (but also cruelly remarked ) every word, as if they were made of the same oozing of the sea.
Reid was nearing almost thirty-three years old , and he had never been more almond coloured hair fell without any reservations to below his had put on some weight, so his corporal forms acquired full roundness :he was a beauty in the right point of ripeness, like a ripe fruit. Aaron, meanwhile, was showing clearly the marks of the premature ageing. He hid his almost fifty years behind the beard he wore on his face :it looked sharp and hieratic ,and also as a touch of carelessness, or perhaps it was pure patriarchal severity, while his hair fell also almost to his shoulders, and clearly reveal the threads of time at the temples (a detail that Spencer loved).
The Englishman used to come at night to play the guitar, to discuss things from the sea,to hear the old ballads recited by Spencer, and he was visibly moved by the verses of Ossian-McPherson, of Coleridge and Keats, Byron and Edgar Allan Poe.
The prodigious memory of Spencer kept intact every line.
In the meantime,
Aaron looked at his lover with a quiet devotion, and got into the vapours of gin and black snuff, as if to grasp a dream in which he, Aaron, was the permanent spectator of a star, that,however, he could still caress with his hand .. although he knew it was hopelessly distant.
The summer came to an end, and with it, Jack vacations also ended.
The child had adapted perfectly (as all children!), when he was surrounded by new friends at school, and in the played football with the fishermen's children, spoke Spanish River Plate as any "botija"("jug": Uruguayans' name given to creatures), and Aaron swore he'd never seen him grow so happier and freer.
For that night Spencer had promised a party to dismiss the summer, around the campfire,on the beach, with magic numbers, costumes and dance.
Aaron smoked while watching the sea, wondering, once again, what kind of surprise could countain the box that Spencer had gathered at the port of Montevideo,on the last week.
He smiled, and assumed that Reid's pigeons would fly over the children's heads , like those that he had suddenly awaken in his soul that distant night in the north, when he,Spencer, surrendered to him..To him, to Aaron,whom, since the first moment he had seen Spencer's face, adored him in silence.
And nothing had changed, however..Aaron continued worshiping him in silence.
At night (except when it was Jack who was always sleeping with his father), when he was lying beside him, Spencer turned his head to the window that overlooked the sea, and Aaron, linking, hugged her waist from behind, in a delicate embrace, that he wanted be like a gesture of possession, and that was almost religious devotion.
It might seem a joke, but they never had sex again.
The relationship was now made of looks, of soft sporadic caresses , of words that rested unspoken, of immense (and intense) silences.
Once, while they were in bed and almost asleep both of them ,Spencer said:
-Aaron ... what will you do when I die?
-Don't even mention it., my life,please ...
-Well, no..but…but .. I am still curious…
-I shall die with you.
-You can't:you have a son.
-I suppose that when it happens he will be an adult, and have already made his life, and damn if he could want to hear about me ...
-Why do you despise yourself so much, Aaron?
The question was totally out of context, since it belonged to a time that both wanted desperately to forget.
Although not quite. Aaron was writing his memoirs, and Spencer wrote in a little black book which clearly did not want it to be read by anyone, not even for him.
-Do you know, Aaron. …you, who have served in Pakistan and Central Asia, which is a djaméh?
-A tower of silence- Aaron said, and felt a chill that was walking by his dorsal spine -A place to leave the dead.
-Exactly. It has been conceived or to allow raptors do the work that you can not trust to the purity of water, earth or fire.
-Is that what you want, when you die?
-No, Aaron, I want to be thrown into the sea. I was amking allusion of it simply because this will be the title of my book.
-How so?
-It's what we have experienced in the BAU, exactly what we have lived and the way how the spoils came left the corpses to the raptors..We attempted to do not contaminate anything with them, leaving the vultures do their job ,tearing eyes , tongue,… devouring and crushing with their picks ... and we waited for the bones will bleach in the ossuary; then we removed them and developed the corresponding case file.
He paused, and then turned, staring into the dark eyes of his lover:
-Do youou know, Aaron,that I enjoyed killing him? Do you know that I celebrated his death,like a mutual release? ... -He bit his lower lip- ... However .. And yet ... -he sighed- I had already killed people before.I remember even that I saved your life killing a man for the first time ,after to have received that formidable beating you gave to me, pretending your hatred and your annoyance to see yourself in the company of "an useless piece of nothing that only serves to whining and to ask for his nursing bottle ", as I remember you called me ... Of course I loved you since that day, I loved your mock insults, and even feared (but wanted!) that they were true..But that ... That was different:that was only a matter of work,a matter of duty..This ... was you know which was the last thing ... he ... told me before he died bled,like a dog? (because he bled immediately, as you came: Ididn't hit him in the chest, but in the belly ... on purpose). He said "I adore you and take you with me, for
"A man's character is his fate" –Spencer sighed again ... -And he died for what it was, like a poor miserable dog ,so old and sick, too cowardly even to be rabid.
Ignoring the sadness that had been planted in Aaron's face, or his own sadness, Spencer continued:
-I did everything as promised, however.I closed his eyes; I kissed him before being placed into the crematorium, and the ashes scattered in the Grand Bé.But it was then-Spencer lifted hisr long-tapered forefinger-, yes, it was then, when the ash started flying in the wind of that autumn ,so sad, so tragic, that I understood everything..I could hear Rossi sobbing,I foresaw,I felt his immense pain , when it was supposed he was enjoying a kind of triumph. And right there, facing the sea, I realised how much we had been manipulated by Gideon,who made us think and say what he wanted.;I realised how dreadful was the fact of to have been his personal automata, his puppets, his stooges, Aaron. He programmed us that we should be fit and able to wallow in excrement, in the dregs, in the most foul of the psyche ... of the human soul .While he didn't commit no crime either , I think he wanted,he needed the crimes , since each of them was used to show off his "infinite capacity of phenomenological knowledge as a researcher of evil. "
Reid took something from the nightstand :it was a little black book.
-My book is based entirely on his ,it shall be the most horrible book ever written.. But I do not care, I swear, Aaron, I do not care!.The world must know who we are, whom they entrusts their safety and tranquility, and from whom they derive the alleged "knowledge of the truth." This book contains the most terrible details of what I assume will be a candid autobiography (I believe) of Jason Gideon and the deranged universe created by him..If you talked toRossi that night, you know what I mean.
Aaron was going to say something, but Spencer stopped him:
-Wait, Aaron, let me finish, , the girls, you ... including myself, we did not deserve this!.We firmly believed in what we were doing; we were confident that we were free to think, to reason, to decide..But it was not so! Rossi was the only one who knew, and he did not say a word..But he did not tell us because he couldn't!. "He" …Gideon…was dominating everything,despite time, distance and all the possible differences .Rossi, in his strange way, loved him….and desperately..But,of course,. He couldn't stay at his side. ... "He"(Gideon) should want to swallow him; so Rossi walked away. '"He" used to swallow those who were with him, no matter was his way of love ...?. Maybe he thought it was something else ,and not love….Who can know!
Aaron's blood ran cold inside his reasoning was not at all typical of Reid was a sort of morbid voyeur, incisive and voracious, he was still empathetic, and always showing up some strange kind of mercy ,some sweetness,even when he tried about the most nasty details.
-Stop torturing yourself with that, and do not talk anymore about him, please, terrify me ... and ...
Spencer suddenly had hugged him, kissing him dispelled any hint ,any shadow of doubt:it was a kiss of sea salt with a sweet aftertaste of caramel and coffee.
And they never talked about it after that time, but Reid was still writing in the mysterious little black book.
….
The flames of the fire cut the deep blue sky, greeting the night, after an evening of purple and gold.
The shouts and chants glad the beach, and ... yes, indeed, they had flown pigeons, flapping on the astonished heads of the"botijas"( "jugs"): they barely knew nothing but the sea, boats and fishing nets, sand and the school in the village, with the slate and perhaps sad monotone voice of the old teacher.
All children wore a disguise: pirates, clowns, fairies, elves, animals ...
Spencer changed his clothes many times, always with his huge multicolour galley , and, when surprisingly a rabbit came out and ran away, all the children ran behind it.
Jack caught it and returned sweaty, happy, shouting:
-Look, Dad !My new pet!
-You shall not be able to have it with you at the boarding school, Jack, I think, -said Aaron
'-No, but you will care for it for when I come back in the winter holidays ..
Spencer had disappeared again, to wear the last costume of the night.
The old man Welsey, who had laughed like a child again, approached to Aaron and put a hand on his shoulder.
'-It's a pity that the Dutchman has lost the consider myself a hermit, but he won that kind ... away.
-Dutch? What Dutch?- Aaron asked, without much interest, but somewhat choppy.
-The man living in the miserable hovel placed downtown. He has the perfect type of the "rare one".He came about three months here, I think from Buenos Aires, and, although not a Dutchman by birth, everyone calls him so, because he wants to be called so.
Aaron did not ask anything more, and that was when Spencer made his triumphal appearance.
The children chanted an endless "Oooooh!". While Aaron turned ,he froze to be suddenly paralysed: he could not believe what he was seeing.
That picture was silhouetted against the light of the huge fire under the dark sky saturated of stars and a moon almost ferocious ... No. .. it was not possible ... So ... that was the containing in that famous box ?
High boots style sixteenth century ;the tightest pants, made by black silk; a leather jacket of the same colour;a beautiful dark green shirt, with wide sleeves; a belt with silver buckle;a Spanish hat with feather plume, and one sword in his hand…
Spencer had darkened hair (maybe with ashes?), and he was wearing false mustache and looked like a gentleman of thirds in Spain ..
Seen against the light, although he was thinner and infinitely more beautiful, and his eyes, especially were powerfully different ... God !In the view backlit, he was like a parody of ...
Aaron would not stop screaming desperately .,,, but warned his terrible embarrassment,and he (anyone would have noticed, but nobody was looking) approached him, bottle of gin in hand:
-Is there something wrong, Don Aaron?
-No, nothing, nothing .. Please ... leave me alone ...
("And there, facing the sea, I realised how much we had been manipulated." ..)
("We were his robots, his automata, his puppets ...")
Aaron turned away from the group around children, walked to the lighthouse, and sat on a rock, his eyes lost in the dark waters of the Atlantic, smoking, with the bottle of gin at his side.
He was waiting….
….
After the party, Jack looked for his father, and not finding him among the people, he went to sleep at his good friend Diego's house, the son of the small store's owner .
They had many things to talk about, and then there was "Wonderland", the rabbit!
He was assured that his dad would pick him up the next day; also the good uncle Spencer (now disguised as a swordsman of novel) had given him permission.
-Maybe Dad has felt bad, because he has remembered mom, or that bad man who hurt him.. ... or "before" ...
Spencer asked Welsey by Aaron,quite worried. The Englishman said he had gone to the lighthouse for a while, but then headed to the other end of the village,totally drunk.
-Aaron ... we've worried about you..Your son, I, ... everyone in the town was worried about you. .. What has happened?
Aaron lifted up his eyes in mourning, and looked at him with a consuming hatred over the waters of that sea blackened night.
-Go, damn !-he said, biting the words, and in every word, each of the letters-Go, get out of my sight and my life! You won't manipulate me, like you did with the others!
-Too late. -it said a calm freezing voice behind him, in English-Too late, my dear Dr. Hotchner.
Aaron turned..Before him, it was the one which was called the Dutch, and that was just another ghost: tall, thin, wiry, with a shaggy gray beard that hid just
a face that was horribly familiar .Monstruosly familiar.
-Van Houten ...? ...
-The same who wears these clothes and shoes ,and who is wielding the weapon that shall kill you, my dear doctor.
The gray haze of alcohol gave way to the awareness of one unique certainty: that of knowing that he would die in that hidden place , killed by a ghost, manipulated by his own nightmares.
Reid stepped forward without fear:
-We are unarmed -he said-. It would be uneven, and you've always presumed to be a man of honour.
Van Houten pointed them (when not!),with a special 38 Eibar, similar as those both sadly already known,, .. ("but .. not that there were only two equal?")
That was almost lethal as anything else.
-Now you know the truth- Frank smiled -I was the one who sent those letters.I pretended ,I simulated those crimes, detail after detail, and appropriated them to make David Rossi receive them .. At this point in life, it is much easier to simulate than to commit. I had two powerful allies: the desire for revenge dictated by Rossi's love-hate-love and by his wounded and mocked pride ,and his meridional blood. I knew that, despite who he was, and despite his famous rationality so uncompromising, David Rossi would act, this time, impulsively.
There was a long pause that was summarized in an equally long sigh of weariness and hatred .Then,Frank continued:
-When – he chewed-speaking letters, syllabes, one by one, licking them - "I has disintegrated my bones, presumably in a barrel of acid," asccordingly to the FBI's ridiculous report…He.. ... Gideon…the beast! ... and I ... made a pact .A secret one..He would facilitate me a flight from the country if I promised,if I swore to do not bother all of you nevermore.I accepted…but I actually wanted something else…. I loved him, and I hatred him so much as I had loved,so he was my trophy,the sole prize I wanted !- he shouted -Many years ago (thirty five years ago!), that bastard left me to go away with the Italian, and then betrayed me haughtily, joining those ones who were destined to hunt , I swore to myself that it would take the finest vengeance .
He paused, and pointed a finger at Reid:
-You know it well, truly, Dr. Reid?.-he laughed, with a sinister laughter whose blackness was darkest than the more voracious sea-You've known him,Gideon,, like me, ... 'biblically ... I mean ... carnally ... in the biblical sense ... right?
It was not enough to keep the tension of waiting in which one dies not once but ten, a hundred, a thousand times, but Frank wanted to increase further torture, using that confidential tone, perhaps intimate, to prolong the agony, perhaps indefinitely.
-No need to ponder the answer from you, Dr. Reid: I know it can be uncomfortable-he glanced at Aaron -.. But how it has not noticed by you( by a genius like you!),that everything he touched was destined to perish, inevitably, in a terrible and tragic way ? He carried the misfortune to any place where he was going: he betrayed my loyalty, because he was born doomed.
-That is fatalism-Reid said, in a tone that was the calmest in the world-He told me it , yes.. His sentence was exactly this: "I was born corrupt." And I said I was now I can see the truth, and you're right, Frank.,no doubt..
Aaron, despite the awfulness of the situation, felt that his whole being was filled with joy: Spencer was back to his usual self, trying to establish a current empathetic power with the monster, and he argued with him, pretending to be seduced by his words .
-I do not understand this at all- Spencer continued –Why Aaron, if the one involved in this story was I, myself?.
-The head is always responsible for what each member brings to -Frank Van Houten ,suddenly,he jumped:.
-Who killed him? You, Dr. Reid?
Spencer nodded, hesitated a moment, then said, gently:
-It was assisted suicide ... I….
The raucous laughter interrupted him:it was an animalistic laugh, which guessed a savage joy.
-Assisted suicide! Now they call it so! -he spat on the ground-I congratulate you, my dear .. You freed the world of one of its more vile slag..And,by the way… what happened to the Italian?-he laughed again-It was an .." unassisted suicide"?-he laughed harder.
-Hhe died of a ruptured aneurysm-third Aaron,approaching to him,very slowly.
-Did he suffer?.
-Probably he did not feel anything..He was sleeping ...
-No, no ... Him .. the monster ... Gideon…did he suffer?
-As wounded and cornered beasts do- Reid said, and his words were unusually cruel-He suffered worse than an animal does in the slaughterhouse.. He drank a mixture of poisons, and, as the effect was not as immediate as he expected ...
-You did help him..-interrupted Van Houten, happy-Good,very good…..but I had left him to suffer further.
-Do not think that I was not tempted to do it,too-Reid said, smiling.
-I would have let him die of cirrhosis, breaking himself in an outburst,as a balloon- Aaron interjected .
Van Houten could not stop smiling.
Go-go! I see you both finally knew what that bastard was doing with your lives,with your entire existences ... You fell on account of the way that he was manipulating everyone and everything-. he sighed –Good! Anyway, I can not let you live anymore.I'm so sorry , really, but nothing that he touched, used, loved, shaped, directed, inspired, etc, etc ... must be standing on the surface of earth..
Frank took away, just a few steps back, and pointed decidedly to the center ,and up:
-A single shot, doctor will not hurt too much ...
Distracted by his dialogue with Spencer, Van Houten did not see that Aaron, obeying an instinct perhaps inveterate, slowly let himself fall to the ground, crawling on the sand to catch his feet.
There was a shot ,that ended up in the air, because Aaron took Van Houten clinging to his ankles, dropped him, and perhaps remembering what he did not want to remember, launched a brutal flood of punches that did sprout a jet scarlet staining those untouched sands .A scarlet staining of violence and crime, certainly,was there ,in those sands, for the first time.
-Damn! –
shouted Van Houten, crazy-Damn!
Suddenly, Reid, who tried to separate them, while he was pointing Van Houten with the gun, but with a trembling hand,could hear footsteps and voices behind him.
Welsey was there with some men of the village, among them the Commissioner Rí was was a big man, dark, with a thick mustache and a deep voice of thunder:
-Stop, stop! Police!-he shouted, pointing with his gun.
Welsey was carrying a torch, and his old Mauser, "as old and as deadly as what happened at Verdun", as he put it everyday.
Among several ones managed, finally, to separate the two men.
Aaron muttered imprecations, sobbing gasps, and Foyet's name escaped from his lips in a faint howl that went unnoticed by everyone, but not for Reid.
Van Houten, whose condition was lamentable, was easily policemen dragged him to the lonely precinct, that never had received more prisoners than some tourists' thieves ,occasionally , and that, for the first time, would be the subject of a special attention by all the media in Montevideo, Buenos Aires ... and even further.
-It's over, has been completed yet- Reid said, hugging, caressing him,. Hugging him against his chest, crying himself, and heedless of the prying eyes of the local villagers..
-You ... did you know?-asked Aaron.
-Yes, I knew.-Spencer replied- I could just see him once, while walking through the boundaries of the already know that I cannot forget .. I carry the curse or maybe the blessing ... to own an absolute Hyper eidetic memory..Then,I thought these damn clothes (cursed grace that makes me to be wearing them now!) would make him come out of hiding and decididely attack us .I needed to have good witnesses, so that, finally, this monster would go with his bones to , if he fell dead as the result of our reply, for to make everyone know that it had been in legitimate defense I had discussed this with Welsey previously Welsey was the one who was always lurking, covering us,and pointing him,only few feet from here,. all the time.
The Englishman approached to them..His expression was more serious than the usual.
-I had flown his head .said.-Like one more head as many as I flew in my life.
Aaron had noticed long time ago that Welsey was not who he said he was, but he never asked intended to do it: not now, not ever.
….
That very night, before dawn, Spencer Reid lit a bonfire and threw on the clothes; the little black book; a portfolio that consisted largely in ornithology catalogs, results of observation of birds,;three volumes of poetry; several photographs , and a bulky folder containing a detailed list of all cases that they had followed during their years at the BAU, beneath the shadow of the beast.
And, while the fire consumed paper, cardboard and cloth, throwing sparks in which Spencer could read the remnants of hatred, misery and vice that a damn day he,Gideon, had inject into his own heart, wrapped in fantastic after he cursed himself a again for giving in to the needs of the flesh, that day in Combourg, and, finally , he swore himself washing his awareness of the manner whatever to clean all traces of so much pain and so much crime.
…..
CODA: (Same scenario,twenty years later…)
(Paganini, Concerto no. 4 - Adagio flebile and with sentimento) -.
They have passed, more or less, about twenty years.
Jack is now a man, and lives in Buenos Aires, graduating as a civil engineer with all he is not living alone: has either a young boy ,a young physician,otherwise nice and friendly, with often he visits them, when their duties allow.
Aaron along well his almost seventy years, except for diabetes, which has left no light in his eyes.
Spencer, true to his promise, has become his guide.
Every night there are long walks on the beach, talking about the things of the day, about Jack and his boyfriend, about who are still around,and about those who left, involving themselves in the sea of nostalgia.
Tonight, however, is even more special.
There is a fire, and the heat of those flames thatAaron cannot see anymore still warms his face and hands, while Spencer caresses his hair, all white, and opens himself friendly to confidence.
-My life-Hotchner says-, you have sacrificed yourself for me.
-It was and it is a pleasure, is what I want: I've chosen.
-I can ask if you still love me? And... Whether you loved me ever since the beginning?
Spencer smiles, though he knows, of course, that Aaron can not see it..
-Since before.
-Before? ...-Aaron laughs, like a child-Then…since that beating?
-Before.
Then Spencer tenderly embraces him, resting his head on Aaron's chest.
-There is no time, are only you and I….since the beginning, and forever.
Spencer closes the embrace, a night bird rubs the seawater with its flight, surreptitiously, and the tide with its ineffable tongue licks the foam on the sand.
And it's then, just then, when the blind man's night ,suddenly, is populated with stars.
(END OF "THE TOWER OF SILENCE")
(Thanks for reading and commenting ...) (THANKS FOR READING AND COMMENT)