The Oxford Brotherhood by Guillermo Martinez

Author:Guillermo Martinez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

The evening had not yet set in and the air, suspended miraculously in the clear sky, had a warm and transparent quality about it. I decided to take a walk through University Park before returning to my room in the College. The tennis nets had been taken down on the grass courts and I crossed, with a touch of melancholy, over the lines painted with lime. In the far background, I noticed a few people sitting at the corners of the cricket field, waiting for the batsman’s turn. I walked a little further down a somewhat neglected path and arrived suddenly at a turn where the river came into view between unkempt, overgrown weeds. I followed the edge dotted with reeds, watching the calm, unfazed parade of a number of brown and metallic-green feathered ducks, when I suddenly heard a commotion, stifled cries and an unmistakable curse in Spanish. In a clearing by the river I saw a hefty man hitting a smaller one. The small man had fallen on his knees and was begging for mercy in English, covering his face as well as he could to shield it from the kicks and the blows. A girl not older than ten was trying to tear the furious man away, begging him, in Spanish, to stop, ‘Papá, no, please, Papá,’ without managing to prevent the man from attacking his victim. I guessed, by the child’s accent, that they were tourists from somewhere in Spain. I approached cautiously and saw to my astonishment that the kneeling man covered in blood was none other than Henry Haas. I took one step further until I was next to the aggressor and shouted at him in Spanish to stop. He stared at me, somewhat disconcerted, still blinded by hatred, but for a moment he interrupted the attack.

‘Do you really want to kill him?’ I asked. ‘Look how he’s bleeding.’

I knelt next to Haas and tried to stop the haemorrhage in his nose. One of his eyes was shut and bruised, and his nose looked as if it had been broken. He was bleeding from the mouth and there was an impressive red stain on his white shirt. I tried to help him get back on his feet but his knees were trembling so much that he wasn’t able to stand up. He whispered to me in English not to leave him.

‘I wouldn’t care if I did kill him,’ the man said. ‘The fewer of his kind in the world, the better.’

The child by his side was crying in anguish.

‘But Papá, I swear he wasn’t hurting me: he only wanted to give me a teddy bear and draw my picture.’

The man looked at his knuckles, which were grazed and stained with blood. He seemed slowly to recover his senses and bent down to hug his daughter. He pointed at Haas and then to a bag lying on the grass, from which the brown head of a teddy bear was visible.

‘I went to the toilet

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