5
Around that time, I received some unexpected news. After many days of effort and aggravation, Tancredo had managed to get the newspaper where he worked to choose him as their correspondent for the trial. I was surprised by the news, but I knew Tancredo, and I knew nothing was out of his reach. I myself had considered going at one point, returning to my island and following the twists and turns of this story that was starting to grow like a maze, guided by dark and serpentine forces. Modesty, timidity, or mere indifference had led me to desist. So, when I learned Tancredo would be there, I could only feel glad that my friend would be taking my place. While I was dining in Manhattan with an Italian girl I was getting to know in those days, I could be sure that my friend would be there, in the thick of the trial, representing me one way or another. So when we met for beers at the usual bar the day before his departure and he asked me what I thought about it all, I merely spoke of the strange models old Toledano built in his empty town, and I dropped a nihilist phrase: “Everyone does what they want.” I immediately revised my words, adding: “Everyone does what they can.” Then Tancredo started talking about the tower, about Sergeant Burgos, whom he planned to meet with soon, and about the various theories he was coming up with. I hardly listened. But I felt an image growing inside me—that of Giovanna sitting in her living room, talking to me of animals that played at camouflage in the jungle.
* * *
Two days later Tancredo’s first message came, outlining his theory of the tropical baroque. He said that Caribbean art and culture could be figured out quite easily if one understood a fundamental factor: the heat. The tropics were, by definition, entropic: heat led to movement, excess, sweat, baroque mischievousness. Then he went on to talk about the role of the mosquitoes within the tropical cosmology: mosquitoes were the true muses of the Caribbean, invisible but devilish. Where the Greeks had imagined an angel, where Lorca had seen his elf, Tancredo placed the furtive unease provoked by the mosquito. You had only to see, he said, a man doing battle with a mosquito: his movements, insane and excessive, make him look like he’s in a trance. I laughed as I read it, imagining my poor fat friend lost in the colonial alleyways, sweating like a pig, dressed in tourist garb in his little sun hat and well-ironed white guayabera. Still, I could only agree with his crazy theories—now that I thought about it, the Caribbean heat was the motor of my tropical joys.
The second message came three days later, written in a less playful tone. In it, Tancredo talked about his meeting with Sergeant Burgos. He described a terribly exhausted man destroyed by the idea, constant and obsessive, that his information had helped to jail a decent woman. The message went on to tell the story of the tower, the twenty-seventh floor, and the stuttering boy, Miguel Rivera. According to Tancredo, Burgos had become obsessed with Rivera’s sudden disappearance. Afraid he would return for revenge, Burgos couldn’t sleep at night, ate little, spoke even less. He’d become a shadow of the brave man he’d been. When he did sleep, a recurring dream tormented him: in a whirlwind of images, he saw the dark and messianic mural from the boy’s room, and he thought he heard the muffled voices of the children he’d seen on the screens of the stutterer’s computers. He’d get up sweaty, his heart pounding, sure that Rivera was after him. On nights like that he had no doubt: that boy was the true guilty party when it came to the misfortunes that were plaguing him. Convinced the only way to expel that demon was by confronting him, he spent days wandering around the tower, waiting for his enemy to one day deign to show his face. When nothing happened, he went to a bar, where he surrendered to rum as old boleros played on the jukebox. And that’s how he spent his hours, trying to escape the nightmares that stalked him. I read all that and couldn’t help thinking how Tancredo didn’t belong there. But an immediate rejoinder was inescapable: nor did the defendant belong there, nor the stuttering boy. If there was a story here, it was a disoriented and uncomfortable one of beings who were out of place.
* * *
During those months, Tancredo’s messages gradually started to build up steam, producing a parallel story to the one I saw on the news. While the TV showed images of the prosecutor, an arrogant man with silvery hair and a false smile, Tancredo meticulously described the routines of the fifty-six families who lived in the tower. When the news scrutinized the last false story the defendant had fabricated, Tancredo described the rituals of the heroin addicts who lived on the tower’s upper floors. He had become obsessed with a twilight world that nevertheless obeyed the laws of the most basic everyday life. There, people slept, ate, read, coexisted as in any other place. Somehow Tancredo had managed to get the tower’s inhabitants to accept him, to the point where they included him in their private lives and, most important, shared their gossip with him. He told me in the third and fourth messages that he’d made friends with a barber named Gaspar, an old flirt who wore flowered shirts and whose barbershop was one of the tower’s main gathering points. There was a very simple reason for that: Gaspar had a TV in his shop. So every other day, when two o’clock rolled around, a bunch of old retirees and one or two young men crowded into the small space to watch the horse races. With all the finesse of the best charlatans, Gaspar claimed to have inside information from a contact at the track. Every morning at noon he made the same call, and after hanging up, he tried to sell the information to the other old men. Two hours later, when they saw their horses lagging behind, they berated the barber and stormed out, prepared to go on with their lives and never again believe the old man’s lies. Two days later, they’d repeat the whole scene of disenchantment.
Tancredo understood that few other places could offer so much information about the defendant. Over drinks he made friends with some retired jockeys, and he used those friendships to gain entrance into the lazy group that gathered every two days, like clockwork, in the shop. At first they treated him as just a well-informed gringo. They accepted him, in a fashion, thanks only to the tips he brought straight from the track. Gaspar in particular looked at him suspiciously, knowing that the fat gringo could take away half his business overnight. If the barber put up with him, it was more out of curiosity than anything else. He was intrigued by Tancredo’s story, his interest in the tower, his sun hat. Then, unexpectedly, he started to like him. He nicknamed Tancredo “Cano,” started to offer him coffee, introduced him to friends. He made room for him, so to speak, in the tower’s singular world. That’s how Tancredo started to find out what people said about Luxembourg: he listened silently to rumors about a possible romance with Rivera, about her unexpected arrival to the tower at the start of the decade, about the letters she occasionally mailed abroad. Nothing out of the ordinary: common stories that he’d already heard in his conversations with the sergeant. One day, however, he picked up on a detail that caught his attention: one of the old men mentioned that the gringa—as they called her—had gone every day to work in a little café. For almost a decade, said the old man, they’d seen her go down the stairs with her notebook in hand, headed for a café called La Esperanza. When Tancredo asked what she did there, no one could answer. “The same crazy stuff she did upstairs,” replied Gaspar.
That afternoon Tancredo refused the coffee the old man offered him three times, and he took his leave from the shop earlier than usual. He went down the three floors separating the barbershop from the street, and was about to leave when he saw Burgos wandering around the ground floor with a desperate and insomniac face. He thought about greeting him, but decided there would be time for that later. Mornings, he thought, always belong to the sleepless. He greeted the guard at the door, and when he crossed the street he asked in a small funeral parlor where he could find La Esperanza. An elderly man with white hair gave him directions, but not before warning him: “If I were you, with that gringo look of yours, I wouldn’t go in there. It’s dangerous.” Tancredo smiled, pleased. He left the funeral home, crossed two streets full of rubble, and after ten minutes he saw, at the end of a street teeming with stray dogs, a small establishment
whose sign read: L ESP RANZA. Keeping watch at the entrance, an old black man, skinny as a giraffe, smirked at him. Tancredo gritted his teeth and went in.
* * *
La Esperanza was a dump. Tancredo understood that immediately, as soon as he saw the two young men who hissed at him from the corner. One had a dark bandana tied around his head, and the other, sitting on a small wooden chair, seemed not to care that a silver revolver peeked out above his belt, completely visible. They couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Tancredo immediately understood the warning he’d been given, but he wasn’t intimidated. He’d spend the mid-nineties in New Orleans, where he’d been to similar bars, in even worse situations. He knew how to handle himself. So when he heard another hiss, he raised his arms in a gesture of peace and clarified what he figured the two boys were worried about: he wasn’t a cop, just a dumb reporter who worked for a very small paper. The boys made some quick joke, showed him the gun that he’d already seen—seeming to want to annoy him more than scare him—and when they saw he didn’t waver, they asked his name. “My name is Tancredo, but in the tower they call me Cano,” he replied. “Cano? Like that guy there?” asked the boy with the bandana, holding back a smile. Tancredo looked where he was pointing and saw half a dozen photos of a fat albino man wearing sunglasses that made him look blind. Then he learned that the origin of his nickname was a local musician, pale and fat like him, probably also sweaty. “A salsa singer,” the boys said in unison, and he could only burst out laughing. To his surprise, the boys also saw the humor in the matter. More relaxed now, they asked him if he wanted to buy something. Tancredo explained his case: he told them of his friendship with Gaspar and the people in the tower, about his job as a journalist for a U.S. paper, the rumor he’d heard that the defendant had spent her afternoons there, in that café. “So it’s the crazy old lady’s story you’re interested in? Well, hell,” said the kid with the pistol. Then he gave a loud cry. The sound was unintelligible to Tancredo but it must have been a name, since a few seconds later, a massive man dressed in an apron and a white cap opened the door to what must have been the kitchen. “This gringo wants to talk about the crazy lady.” Without beating around the bush, a little annoyed at the interruption, the man asked if anyone wanted coffee. Three minutes later, sitting across from Tancredo with two mugs on the table between them, he started out by noting the coincidence: Viviana Luxembourg had also liked her coffee with a little milk. She’d ordered one every day, almost without interruption, for the past eight years, up until the day she was arrested.
That afternoon, while behind him customers entered, paid, and left with small packages, they talked about so many things that Tancredo, in his enthusiasm, wasn’t sure what it was exactly that made him feel he was on the verge of a revelation. Later, thinking back on the conversation, he managed only to reconstruct the gringa’s tedious routine. She had come into the café one afternoon, and returned every day thereafter. Every day it was the same: she ordered a coffee with milk and then began to read. Then, when she finished the first coffee, she’d ask for the domino set and spend a good half hour playing with it, configuring small towers and shapes, compositions that led nowhere. With a second cup of coffee before her, she would start to write in the same notebooks as always, in a microscopic and fragile handwriting that was like a private language. At four o’clock, she went back to reading. “Who knows what books she read. We didn’t care. She didn’t bother anyone, we didn’t bother her. We figured she was loony,” the cook said. Tempted more by curiosity than anything, Tancredo had asked if the defendant had ever bought drugs. The man didn’t seem to like the question, but he still answered, “Never, but sometimes, all the things she said, it seemed like she was on something.” Then he’d gone on to tell a story that the gringa had told him as a joke but that he hadn’t found at all funny, although it had remained etched in his mind like a riddle. The joke, as he told it to Tancredo, was about a writer of traditional detective novels who spent his whole life railing against experimental novelists, but when he died left behind an indecipherable work that drove the critics crazy, a piece that everyone tried to read in classic registers but that ended up defeating them every time. An experimental work, Tancredo understood, that turned a life into a simple postmortem joke. The idea, bizarre but strangely inspiring, that a whole life could be the prologue to a posthumous joke may have been what made him feel as though the moment of revelation was approaching.
* * *
“Can you explain what that joke’s all about?” asked the man. Tancredo, perhaps in solidarity, perhaps out of simple condescension, told him that it didn’t make any sense to him either, that it was surely just madness. Then he asked a final question of the cook, who was now flanked by the two boys. He asked whether, during those years, they had ever asked the defendant why she’d decided to settle in Puerto Rico. During recent months the press had speculated a lot: from the most obvious hypothesis about the local climate, to conspiracy theories that posited the island as the center of operations for a broader criminal network. The man replied that in truth, he had no idea. The few times they’d talked about the island, it seemed to matter very little to her. Although, he added, she spoke perfect Spanish, a very neutral Spanish, as if she didn’t come from anywhere or as if she were trying to hide her origins. Then he seemed to recall a detail. He said that during the first year after she came to the tower, the gringa seemed obsessed with a specific event: the death, on March 22, 1978, of the famous tightrope walker Karl Wallenda. The distinguished patriarch of the world’s most famous family of trapeze artists had fallen to his death that day, victim of an unexpected storm that hit while he was walking the tightrope between two buildings in El Condado, the island’s most well-known tourist area. The gringa, the man went on, seeming to search his memory, didn’t talk about anything else in those days: she wanted to know the specific details, the local reaction, even hear the voice of the commentator who had been narrating the stunt. She spent long hours in the afternoon sketching identical drawings depicting the moment when his feet began to fail him, sketches of initial instability. Tancredo recognized the anecdote, he knew the story of Wallenda’s fall, but he didn’t know it had happened on the island. Listening to the story he thought, for a brief moment, that perhaps Gaspar and the old men in the barbershop were right: maybe the accused woman’s whims really did spring from an inexhaustible font of madness. The expression on the face of one of the boys interrupted his moment of doubt. “Hey, don’t we have one of those drawings around here somewhere?” asked the boy. Then the man got up from his chair, and after a few minutes, during which the only sounds came from drawers opening and closing, he came back from the kitchen with a drawing in hand. When Tancredo saw the series of drawings the man put before him, he felt a sharp and unexpected pain in his stomach, as if all this were some child’s cruel joke. He saw dozens of sketches in miniature. He looked at the first steps, sure and light, that gave way then to the first hesitations, then to a curved figure and then again—in a truly painful sequence—the tightrope walker’s free fall. Then he saw that the sequence of caricatures was not linear but cyclical, and that in the final boxes, the little figure that represented Wallenda returned to stand on the tightrope, to start his ordeal all over again. It made him think of the flipbooks that used to fascinate him when he was a boy, whose pages showed an animated scene: a figure throwing a basketball, a Mickey Mouse jumping on a trampoline, the frustrated attack of a rhinoceros. He even remembered one little book that showed the scene of a kiss. The childhood memory didn’t bring him any happiness or nostalgia; it only served to highlight the accused woman’s strange cruelty. “She was something crazy,” one of the boys repeated, and Tancredo merely agreed with a short nod. Five minutes later he was out of the café and headed back to the little hostel where he was staying during those weeks.
The hostel was called El Balcón del Mar, but it had no view of the sea. It was located in the university area of Río Piedras, a setting more urban than
beachy. He was surrounded by a strange mixture of student bohemia and local color that, in his third letter, he referred to as “a delicious hive.” That night he couldn’t sleep and went out barhopping. At one point, among the kids’ conversations, he heard a phrase that struck him as macabre but precise, appropriate for what he’d seen that day: “Hell is an incomprehensible sarcasm.” The phrase, vague as it was, calmed him. As long as words for the world’s malaise still existed, the world was viable. He fell asleep within the hour, the jukebox rhythms still echoing over his alcoholic exhaustion, convinced that he understood the defendant.
* * *
In his seventh letter, Tancredo told me about the image that plagued him throughout that night. Halfway between sleep and drunkenness, floating in the air like a half-drawn dream, a calendar date stood out. The numbers themselves were fuzzy, but in that swamp where awareness and oblivion struggled, he knew clearly that it was the date of Wallenda’s fall. “Even though I don’t remember it now,” wrote Tancredo, “it had to have been March 22, 1978, because ever since that night I can’t think about that date without feeling overwhelmed.” Then he went on to describe the way his mind—always hyperactive and sometimes antic—had come to associate the date with the moment Toledano’s family had disappeared. Unable to accept what he felt was clear evidence, I pictured the strange models old Toledano was building in a distant town and struggled inside over whether or not to tell Tancredo the man’s full story, beyond the bits and pieces I’d let slip in our conversations; I was convinced that for the first time my friend’s madness would carry him to the necessary conclusion. The urge for silence won out. Instead, I took out Giovanna’s file and rummaged through her notes like a retired detective, remembering her quick movements as she smoked, and toying all the while with that jade elephant that somehow brought me closer to her. Well into the night, the conclusion came to me: even farces have their consequences.
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