Alone in the Crowd

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  “Do you remember if back then you thought it was an accident?”

  “It’s hard to say. It’s more than thirty years ago. Time mixes up your ideas.”

  “Do you remember having heard anything about the kids who played out in the square, any friends of hers?”

  “I don’t remember, Chief. They were kids.”

  Espinosa took leave of the watchman and crossed the square on his way back to the station, a bit uncomfortable about having given Onofre the impression that he was looking for someone responsible for the girl’s death among the children. Though he was.

  At the station, he called Irene back. A recording asked him to leave a message. He didn’t. He went back to the monotonous job of dealing with paperwork and the most serious cases sent up from the reception area. It was past four in the afternoon. Welber was getting ready to follow Hugo Breno; Ramiro had finished checking out Dona Laureta’s phone book. The next morning, it would be Ramiro’s turn to get a bicycle and follow Hugo Breno’s marathon down Copacabana Beach. Espinosa was still dealing with his paperwork when Irene called.

  “Hey, babe. Been missing you.”

  “Me too. Are you in Rio?”

  “I am. Vânia left. She went back to São Paulo this morning. She sends her regards and says she hopes you’ll forgive her for everything. She didn’t specify what ‘everything’ meant. Why don’t we have dinner somewhere nice?”

  “Good idea. Should I come get you at nine?”

  “Great. Kisses.”

  Human beings must be badly programmed, Espinosa thought, remembering the latest events involving Vânia, Irene, and himself. Unless Irene didn’t know about anything. At five, he went to the conference room, where all the policemen from the precinct were waiting for him.

  “Good afternoon. Let’s start off with the day’s news …”

  At nine, Espinosa got out of the taxi in front of Irene’s building. The temperature was pleasant and the weather stable. They decided to walk to the restaurant, only three blocks away.

  “What do you think Vânia meant by ‘forgive her for everything’?” Irene asked as they were walking.

  “I don’t know, she’s the one who said it.… Maybe for disappearing last weekend … for scaring us like that.… She must have talked to you about that.”

  “She did. And she really did feel guilty about it.”

  “Then that’s what it was.”

  “Exactly. And not for everything.”

  “I think she meant for everything she did that weekend.”

  “Right. Maybe.”

  “Unless she was referring to the night she came to my apartment.”

  Irene started. She looked at Espinosa with an ambiguous expression, part fright and indignation.

  “Come on, Irene. I wondered what you two were planning with that: testing me or testing Vânia. I think the first idea would be pretty naïve and old-fashioned. The second made more sense.”

  “Seems like you thought everything was quite natural.”

  “Not everything. Maybe it was exactly that everything that she was apologizing for. Of all the activities that can be interrupted, I think of coitus interruptus as one of the most unpleasant. Or was that also what you’d agreed to?”

  “Espinosa, you can’t be that cynical.”

  “Not cynical. Skeptical.”

  “Don’t mince words, Espinosa.”

  “I’m not. The skeptic is fundamentally a critic.”

  “And …?”

  “I didn’t go after Vânia. I didn’t call her. I didn’t act in any way that might have suggested that she could call me up at night and then ring my doorbell in the middle of the evening asking where the bed was. Vânia’s a gorgeous woman. I’m saying that to emphasize that it wasn’t just any woman who rang my doorbell. She knows perfectly well that she’s irresistible. What did you two expect? That I’d sit there telling her police adventure stories and then return her to you untouched at the end of the night?”

  “You think we planned this?”

  “Not all of it. That’s why she’s apologizing. She might have really been sincere when she ran out of my bed. That might have been the test.”

  “What test?”

  “To see if she could manage to sleep with a man. Maybe her first attempts were violent and traumatic, and that led to the idea of testing out a man she already knew who’d already been tested by you.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “Almost. But I managed to get a grip. Anyway, tell her I accept the apology.”

  They got to the restaurant. They stood outside for a while, looking at each other, not wondering about the restaurant but about whether they should still have dinner together.

  “Let’s not ruin our dinner,” Espinosa said. “We can keep talking while we eat. Today all I had was a sandwich. I’d hate to have to go back home alone without having eaten.”

  She didn’t object. Even if only because her expressions of surprise and near indignation didn’t seem real. Espinosa thought that Irene was more curious, to see where the conversation would lead, than actually upset. They went in. The restaurant looked comfortable, and people said the food was good. Even though it was nine-thirty on Friday night, there were still tables.

  As soon as they chose their drinks, they resumed the conversation—on his initiative.

  “I’m going to tell you what I think happened. You were always the one who emphasized that we were lovers, and not boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife. We like to be together. So that never excluded other encounters. I never asked you who you were going out with when you traveled, and you never asked me either. We didn’t promise fidelity, except to our own feelings for each other. So the possibility of our being interested in someone else sexually was part of our relationship. When Vânia propositioned me and I accepted, I didn’t feel that I was betraying you. I didn’t think I was putting our relationship at risk. Vânia is an extremely pretty and attractive woman, like you; the difference is that you and I go back almost a decade. So Vânia doesn’t represent a real threat to our relationship. I don’t know anything about her sex life, but I imagine that her experiences with men have been traumatic. I also imagine that for that reason she’s experimented sexually with women. I don’t think that’s a definitive choice, I think she’s trying to remake the idea she has of men after that supposed negative experience. I think I was part of that attempt to reconstruct herself, just like I think that the effort was planned by the two of you. And please don’t look so stunned, as if what I’m saying is coming straight out of the blue.”

  “I’m not stunned by what you just said, I’m stunned by the coldness with which you said it.”

  “What did you expect? For me to be happy about being a guinea pig in a therapeutic experiment planned by my lover and her friend? I might have felt honored, but that’s not what happened.”

  “There was no plan. There was no premeditation. There was a conversation … a hard one … in which she said that she didn’t think she’d ever have the luck to meet a man like you. And I answered that it wasn’t a question of luck but of decision. I think she understood that as a suggestion for what she did. I’m sorry.”

  Though the dinner passed without conflict, when they left the restaurant Irene asked Espinosa to walk her back to her place.

  9

  It was rare for Espinosa to wake up on a Saturday morning alone when Irene was in Rio. But it happened that morning. A legacy of the fire Vânia had set.

  At breakfast, the cries of the boys playing soccer in the square diverted his attention. He set aside the newspaper and pushed his rocking chair up to the French window. The game was taking place on a little paved fenced-off area. There were two teams of five players each, all teenagers, all playing with an intensity worthy of a World Cup final. Except for the pavement, the game was exactly like the ones he’d played decades before, with the same dedication and the same shouting; all that had changed was that today there was no dust being stirred up from t
he gravel. As if he were looking into a file, Espinosa superimposed upon that scene other equally important memories of his life in the neighborhood. That was when he had the idea to take out the photo albums from his childhood, started by his parents and continued by his grandmother. There were two of them: one of them with pictures from his first year of life and another covering the subsequent years, until his fifteenth birthday, when the register was interrupted. There were pictures of birthday parties and of Christmas dinners and from trips and outings. Espinosa was interested in pictures from two birthdays: his eleventh and twelfth, which were the two years that followed his parents’ deaths. The albums weren’t kept on the bookshelves, but in the room that had been his grandmother’s for nine years, and which, ever since she’d returned to her own apartment, had been used for storage. During the years they lived together, his grandmother celebrated his birthdays by having his neighborhood friends over for sandwiches, sodas, ice cream, and cake, and she recorded the events with the same camera that had belonged to her son. Despite the happiness with which she did so, she was not exactly a talented photographer (the possible reason for the interruption of the photographic records). The pictures Espinosa was looking for were in the album, but they were out of focus and blurry, and some had come loose. The group united around the table as the birthday boy blew out the candles on the cake was a smudgy shadow against the afternoon light. It was impossible even to recognize Espinosa himself, much less the others. But though the pictures didn’t preserve the images of Espinosa’s childhood friends, the albums clearly delineated two periods in his life: the pictures in which his parents were present and those in which they were absent.

  From the death of his parents, Espinosa’s thoughts turned to the death of the girl in the neighboring building. Two sad moments, the one closely following the other. The first was definitely indelible. The second, half-forgotten, returned now, forcing its way through his memory. He started to remember the girl’s face, ever so vaguely. He remembered her build more than anything: she was a little pudgy and had pigtails. Maybe a frightened look. He couldn’t be sure. Maybe the frightened look was his. He remembered his closer friends better. Slowly, the image of the boy that Hugo Breno had been was becoming clearer, or enriched with a detail here and there, but his inner life, what he was thinking, what he liked, remained a mystery to Espinosa. The boy also seemed to look scared. Espinosa thought that the fearful attributes he was assigning to the boy and the girl were a kind of shadow in his memory that loomed over them. There were happy moments playing soccer or riding their bikes; other moments were marked by sadness and fear.

  Why fear? What were they afraid of? Or maybe the right question would ask what Espinosa was scared of just then. It wasn’t exactly fear, he thought; it was the feeling of apprehension that precedes the discovery of something very intense. In the silence that comes before the scream, it’s not the cry that frightens us, it’s the silence.

  The soccer match was over. The players left the field to the younger boys and gathered around one of the park benches, discussing the game in shouts—much different from the whispered conversations in little groups decades before at that same place, about the death of the girl, as if they were revealing a secret.

  He returned to his newspaper, interrupted by the shouts of the boys. He read two or three pages without registering what he was reading. He got up and went back to the window to look out at the square, as if something had fallen onto the earth.

  It was midmorning. He put on some old pants, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt and went down to the street. He walked slowly around the square, distracted. Almost arriving back at the point of departure, he crossed the street and entered the side door of the building that gave onto Onofre’s room. Maybe he had Saturday off or maybe Onofre didn’t have anywhere to go on his free days. He found the watchman sharpening his plant shears.

  “Good morning, Mr. Onofre.”

  “Good morning, Chief.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt your work.”

  “It’s nothing, I’m just sharpening the shears—they’re the most important tool I have for taking care of the gardens. Are you off today too, sir?”

  “I am. But like you, I’m sharpening my tools.”

  The watchman looked at the policeman.

  “And once more, I need your help,” Espinosa continued.

  “Whatever I can do to help, sir.”

  “I need some information about the girl’s building.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why is the door to the roof locked? Was it always like that?”

  “It was already locked before the accident. We found out that the kids were going up there to play. It’s dangerous. The edge is very low. Besides, there’s the water tank. Some kid could have come up with the idea of looking through the trap door and fallen in. We thought it was better to lock the door.”

  “What did the kids do up there?”

  “I don’t know, sir. There’s not much room. The front half is covered, and the back is almost totally taken up by the water tank. There’s not much room left over.”

  “Had someone already surprised the kids up there?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “So how did anyone know they were playing up there?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Maybe someone in the building saw them go up there.”

  “The girl who died lived on the top floor. So it was easy for her to leave the apartment and go up there.”

  “That’s true, and she could only have been seen by someone who lived on the same floor. There’s only two apartments per floor.”

  “Are you sure that the door was locked before the accident?”

  “Absolutely. I put the padlock on there myself. The same one that’s there to this day.”

  “I’d like to go up there one more time. I’d also like to take the key to the roof.”

  “Of course, Chief.” The guard took two keys from his key ring. “Here you go. This is the key to the lobby and this is the one to the roof. When you’re done, just give me a shout.”

  Espinosa went out through the building’s front entrance and entered the next building. After going up the three stories, he went to the last flight of stairs, where the door led to the roof. He unlocked the padlock. It was a Yale, old and very tough. The door opened with a groan. Once he passed the landing, there were two steps down to the rooftop. It really was a small area, like a hallway surrounding the water tank on three sides. At most, on a hot night, a couple could go spend a few hours up there, if one of them had the key to the lock. He went out and locked the door. The only light came from a little window above the middle landing.

  Espinosa went down to it and sat on the floor, as he’d done the day before. And, sitting there, he looked at the last flight of stairs and asked the same question: What had the girl seen when she was going up that last flight? Something must have made her fall onto her back. A runaway dog? A cat? A big moth that flew out at her? It was possible, though unlikely in a building whose lobby door was always closed. The image of a large moth suddenly flying toward the daylight coming through the window could frighten children and adults, no matter how harmless the insect. And there were a lot of moths around here, because of the abundant vegetation on the surrounding hills. But the theory wasn’t very convincing. There wasn’t enough room for a moth to get in, just as there was no interior light, especially on the staircase, that would attract it. Another idea: people. The girl leaves the apartment, hears human noises, goes up without making a sound, and surprises and is surprised by someone. What would a person, adult or child, be doing hidden on that landing whose door was locked? Sex was the most likely answer. Adults wouldn’t have any reason to be having sex in such a limited space, accessible to passersby. And if adults were caught in the act, they’d try to hide or disguise what they were doing. More likely, it was kids, less careful and less experienced, as well as more likely to get scared.

  Once Espinosa accepted this hypothesis,
another thought followed: for that fact to become a threat that would make the girl try to flee or get pushed, it would have to be threatening to the people involved, children like her who, surprised and recognized, would have gotten scared and pushed her, only to flee afterward. It was terrible, but possible, Espinosa thought bitterly. He sat awhile longer on the stairs, trying to exorcise his inner demons. It was an aberration to try to impute to an eleven- or twelve-year-old child another child’s death. But that was what he was doing. And that horrified him. He couldn’t imagine the girl rolling down the stairs accidentally. In that case, she would have had scratches, purple marks on her limbs, and the newspaper had specifically mentioned the absence of wounds. The image he’d constructed of the scene had the girl being pushed and hitting her head directly on the edge of a stair. A strong, angry push, which could have been given by another child of the same age. And that was what was so horrifying. Not just the possibility of that having happened, but the fact that he, Espinosa, was thinking about that. He was pushing the girl. He got up and went to give the keys back to the watchman.

  Back in his apartment, Espinosa made another cup of coffee, put two pieces of bread in the toaster, and decided to restart his day. No more noise came from children playing and the newspaper was already halfway read, but even so he tried to act as if his day was just beginning. As he was doing so, an idea came to mind that he had to think about. Every time he remembered the child Hugo Breno trying to be friends with him in the Peixoto District, he felt a sense of strangeness and threat. And now he realized that it wasn’t the memory of only that boy that was connected with that negative feeling but all of the kids he knew around the time of the girl’s death. And that included himself. He felt something strange and threatening whenever he thought of the period marked by the girl’s death. And now, more clearly than before, he himself was present in the scene, seeing the girl being pushed from the top of the stairs.

  How had he managed to come up with such a clear picture? Was it the fruit of his imagination or a real memory? Whoever had pushed her, even without meaning to kill her, had killed her. And that threat hovered over all of them, no matter how much their memories had worked to distort the original event.