He wipes his hands on his white ochre-smeared apron and stares at me defiantly, hands on hips, through the curtain of sausages, black puddings, chitterlings and cuts of rump and flank.
“Evil tongues say evil things about Superintendent Neri I know, talk about kicking a man when he’s down. But my father may he rest in peace knew him well and I can assure you Malihuel’s never seen another police chief like him. But of course he—the man who kept law and order and brought all the crooks and troublemakers to book—gets stick for enforcing the law instead of taking backhanders; but cops these days all they care about is lining their own pockets so people just slip them a few pesos and they turn a blind eye. He didn’t consult my father ’cause he knew exactly what he’d say. I can still see him clear as day my old man, coming back from work, shouting from the kitchen sink where he was washing his hands, Looks like they’re finally going to get Ezcurra off our back, I don’t know who’d told him, makes no difference, everybody knew by then.”
Brancaloni looks at me with his globular eyes, two perfect discs of dull blue on turgid white, threatening to pop out of their sockets like the eyes of the two lambs hanging head-down on either side of him.
“That sonofabitch Ezcurra”—he launches into him again, kicking the twenty-year-old corpse as if it were still lying there on the ground—“that scumbag shat on half the town and nobody’d touch a hair on his head, laughed in our faces he did and not a peep, but my old man never took any shit and his son’s a chip off the old block, I swear if Ezcurra walked through that door now I’d smash his face in, like that I would, without a word to him, whack!” he exclaims and illustrates his point with a thud of fist on palm. He’s getting heated, and the real smell of quadruped blood and the imaginary smell of human blood have sent him into a frenzy like a shark in a documentary, and I’m beginning to wonder if it would be too risky to wait for him at closing time and follow him into the dark alleys of the Colonia where he lives and where I’ll stand a better chance of snapping his scrag with a discreet brick. “We could do with another Superintendent like Neri I tell you to clean out all the scum around town and I’d be first in line to hand him the list. Fuck could this town do with a clean-out. If there was one thing Neri got wrong it was that he didn’t go far enough. Greco the one who followed him did a bit better but didn’t give a toss about the town—all he wanted was to sell us out and hand the headquarters over to Toro Mocho where the big money was. And the ones today you can forget it. Go to the butcher’s on the next block, look at the cuts and if you can find any public-health labels I’ll give you a side of beef. Don’t even know what colour they are, one big illegal country carve-up it is. Think the cops care? Charge them the same as they charge me sir, side of beef a month, and me with all my books in order? I tell you sir,” he tells me with another swing of the pendulum between formality and informality, a common affliction of bullies with an inferiority complex, “there’s a lot of hypocrisy in this town. And anyone who tells the truth makes a lot of enemies, but that’s me for you, can’t change, chip off the old block I am, can’t keep my mouth shut, what can you do,” he concludes and before crossing the curtain of multicoloured strips with my little packet of T-bone steaks I cast a final glance at the unwholesome pink and grey marbling of the cow tongues on the steel tray, studded with tiny pointed cones and scraps of salivary gland adhering to their roots, whose mute dithyramb has in eloquent chorus accompanied their master’s voice.
“SUPERINTENDENT NERI LIKED chess. And in chess he had a fondness for exotic gambits,” Professor Gagliardi will tell me at one point of my last afternoon in Malihuel. “He’d rightly assumed that the procedure for picking someone up in a small town, where not even a hen can disappear without creating a stir, couldn’t be the same as his mentors had developed for the big city, or indeed for larger towns like Villa Constitución or Toro Mocho. Remember? Let’s say you were living in an apartment block. You’d always found the upstairs tenants a little odd. One night you heard screaming and shooting and the crunching of splitting wood and next morning when you ventured out from under your bed the concierge downstairs informed you your suspicions were well founded. Within a month the new neighbour had moved in, and because of the military moustache and his whatthehellyoulookingat expression you asked no more questions. And that’s if it happened in your building, because if it’d been in the one on the corner you’d never even’ve heard about it. No, after pondering the matter at length, Superintendent Neri’s twisted but obstinate brain came to the conclusion that that wasn’t viable here. In any other town in the county it’d’ve been a piece of cake, as the local police would point the finger at the Malihuel headquarters; but here in Malihuel there was no one to pass the buck to. What I can vouch for is that Neri tried his level best to get the Rosario Regiment to come and pick him up—he’d do the tailing for them and guarantee the area’d be police-free and they’d do the dirty work and take him far away, somewhere it couldn’t be pinned on him. But it was no use. They wanted him to do it, in person, with his own people. It wasn’t personal, that’s what it was like everywhere. A kind of blood pact, with other people’s blood of course. When the clean-up was complete and the claims started rolling in after the return of democracy, they wanted to make sure the fussy ones couldn’t hold their hands up, point the finger at others and say Wasn’t me.”
MALIHUEL’S BARBER is an old-timer with neatly trimmed hair and a flaccid, harmlessly depraved expression, who answers to the vaguely incredible name of Eufemio. Seated in one of the two antique pedal chairs, I let him adjust the apron around my neck and say yes thanks to the manicurist’s fancy a coffee, with her outrageously turquoise apron and furious red hair, and number three to the old-timer’s question. “Of course I do, how couldn’t I? He always had his hair cut here,” he answers mine. “You’re? … Oh yes, I’ve heard something about you now you mention it. Is it for some magazine? I don’t know what I can tell you, we didn’t know each other any better than townies usually do, it’s impossible to be strangers in a small town as they say right? He came in for a trim a few days before, that much I can tell you. Nothing particular about his conversation—if he knew something or had been warned, he didn’t let it show. Except for one thing. He kept on about how this time he was back to stay. Unusual for him, he was always on the verge of leaving. It’s time to settle down Eufemio, he told me—that’s my name, Eufemio—while I was cutting his hair. Maybe I’ll get married, have a family, be someone here, he told me. It was like he’d found his place in the world, you know like in the film, and he wasn’t going anywhere”—Eufemio précises the deceased’s words as the clippers buzz across my cranium lifting clumps of tousled greying hair as they go. “I didn’t pay much attention at the time but in the days that followed, ’specially after what happened, his words took on another meaning and I realised what he’d been trying to tell me. He knew what was coming, he knew perfectly well. It isn’t true what people say about nobody warning him. How couldn’t he know with so many people—not all as some say, but a lot—in the know? Whatever people say, I’m certain he knew and decided to stay anyway and face the music. Perhaps in the knowledge that it was hopeless, but possessing a quiet fatalism that wasn’t devoid of heroism. He was hell-bent on staying in Malihuel, dead or alive, and that’s what happened. They couldn’t send him away so they had to kill him. He was no victim,” claims Eufemio, putting the finishing touches to my fringe. “In a way he had the last word.”
He swivels the chair round and shows me the short-back-and-sides in a hand mirror. The little mirror also catches the flame-haired manicurist’s enthusiastic look of approval in the vast wall mirror.
“EZCURRA’S ALIVE AND WELL and living in Casilda,” Licho’s voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. “I have it on good authority.” He turns his snout towards a mockingly attentive Iturraspe and says as if trumping him with the ace of swords, “Tonito. Know him? Saw him in Casilda he did. He’s married, looks like he finally settled down, and he’s got two ch
ildren—boy of seven, girl of five. Works in a real-estate agency on that boulevard, Colón Boulevard, and Tonito was passing and spotted him through the window, but Ezcurrita had customers and stopped him in his tracks with a gesture. Tonito gave him a wave … and you know what he did? He winked back,” argues Licho, exaggeratedly shutting one eye to illustrate. “No, they’ll never catch Ezcurrita that easily I’ve always said so, always did his surname proud he did. You’d have an easier job catching an eel with soapy hands. All that malarkey about Don Manuel and the police was just a story he made up to dodge the creditors and start afresh somewhere else, wipe the slate clean. Fooled the lot of them he did, I know what I’m talking about, can you picture Ezcurrita sticking his head in the lion’s mouth on his own, being bamboozled, him of all people? He waited for the right moment and scarpered. Alive and well he is, I’ll bet you the shirt off my back. The Devil looks after his own,” he says and drains his glass of Fernet.
“What about the body?” Iturraspe asks.
“What body?” Licho says dumbly.
“The one the dogs dug up, out at old Villalba’s place. Who was that?”
“No idea. Ask El Peludo, he’ll be able to tell you.”
“The gravedigger,” Guido clarifies before I can ask.
“While you’re at it you can ask him,” Licho concludes, leaning over with a cigarette in his outstretched lips for Nene Larrieu to light, “why the north wall of the ossuary collapsed. There were stiffs to spare in those days. Got hold of a whatdoyoucallit an NN they did and gave him a name and surname. Ezcurra and Neri must have come to some arrangement, that whole circus of the inquiry was just a smokescreen.”
“I’M DISAPPOINTED,” I tell Guido and Leticia over dinner, “with people in Malihuel. When I was on the way here I was worried people wouldn’t want to talk, that they’d be wary of an outsider like me poking my nose in. Particularly when I started asking about Ezcurra. I rather hoped I’d get threats or warnings like ‘Leave town before sundown’, or that I’d come up against a wall of silence, or get dirty looks at the very least. Nothing. They’re all so helpful, so friendly, so willing to welcome me, to talk openly. I was expecting a conspiracy of silence not a conspiracy of chattiness. I must have watched too many movies right? Foreign movies. You don’t think it’s odd? Or do I have a gift for making people open up to me? Now I come to think of it it’s not the first time.”
“It’s winter, people get bored,” Leticia opines through a mouthful of No 12 Friar’s Sleeves Tuttolomondo tagliatelle. Guido swallows before adjusting his posture, a signal he has something juicy to add. Behind him a colourful television presenter hosts a brawl between tight-fisted housewives on The Price Is Right.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Guido tells me. “Bad-mouthing your neighbour’s an addiction in this town and all they see in you’s an ear. A tender little newborn virgin ear. The tongues start wagging when they see it coming, wriggling around in their mouths like mad. Can’t control themselves. So don’t go thinking they’re doing it to help you or even to ease their consciences. They’re doing it because it’s stronger than they are.”
ON THE CORNER of the telephone exchange—a building clad halfway up in imitation brickwork forming a clumsy tetris against the cement—the orange diving bell of the Entel phone box has been replaced by one of the new rectangular blue ones, but it’s too cold to talk out here, so I go inside and ask for a booth. Paula, my wife, asks me how I am, if I’m having a good time, when I plan on coming back, whether I miss her. Fine, yes, dunno, lots, I reply, and to my two-year-old son, who clamours for the phone with whoops of joy, I say soon, very soon. I hang up with a strange unease in my chest, somewhere between annoyance, hostility, perplexity and guilt, yet none of the above. With every passing day my current life, our shared daily routines, my work, the house we live in, our neighbourhood, the whole of Buenos Aires blurs and dims, and as if in some transfusion of reality, Malihuel grows in specific weight and density, hardening slowly, inexorably, like cement. Maybe there always was a life here for me, a parallel life running from one summer to the next while I was away, like a reflection of my other life—a faint, ghostly reflection, like the ones in shop or bus windows. A life that I might have lived had my mother not left Malihuel so young, and which, after nearly twenty years’ absence, must have faded to almost total transparency, like a vampire without blood; it must have given up all hope, when one day like any other it saw me get off the coach at the new terminal and leapt on me with all the greediness of so long a famine. I know there’s only one person I can share this peculiar uneasiness with and, in pessimistic resignation, dial the number of my friend Gloria. Miraculously she’s at home and delighted as always to hear my voice, asks me how I’m doing, if I’d found out everything I wanted to, who I’d been talking to and if I’d remembered to send her regards. Fine, no, several and yes, I twice told the truth and twice lied to even things out. She put the girls on and, guessing it was me, they fought over the receiver with that peculiar whooping of theirs, and I promised to bring them presents when I got back, counting on the inevitable hamper of Tuttolomondo Pasta that accompanied me in the luggage rack, every summer on my way back to Buenos Aires. The assistant whose open palm receives the shower of coins my call has cost can’t be much over twenty, although her glasses, her tight but dishevelled bun and her shapeless brown pullover add a few more years. Looking more closely I see five earrings studding her left earlobe, and a small blue butterfly tattooed between her thumb and index finger on the other hand. She half-heartedly answers my questions about the old location of the telephone exchange without deigning to make eye contact. Nor has she ever heard of my grandparents, nor predictably enough of the Ezcurras—mother or son. She’s from San Rafael in Mendoza and lives in the Colonia, where her father has been stationmaster since the privatisation of the railways. She doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know about Malihuel’s past, or much about its present either. The whole family dream of being moved on, anywhere, but she’s set a date—“Next year,” she finally looks up at me to say, “I’m twenty-one, and I’m going back to Mendoza if I have to hitch there. If we’d at least been given a house here in town,” she says apologetically. “When it rains a lot like now in winter I sometimes have to get off my bike and carry it with mud up to my ankles ’cause it’s impossible to pedal.” I hang around for as long as I can, waiting in vain for her to match my curiosity and ask something about me, so I ask her another question about her. Soledad, she answers.
“WE NEVER THOUGHT HE’D DO IT, ’specially when he started his enquiries,” Don Casiano Molina, the owner of the Shell franchise, tells me as his employee replenishes the gas I’ve used over the last few days in Leticia’s Fiat Uno. As word of my almost all-consuming interest in the Ezcurra case has spread through the streets of Malihuel like wildfire, I find people increasingly launch into well-rehearsed speeches after I’ve barely opened my mouth. Sometimes they bring up the subject before I even ask. “If Neri’d wanted to, we reasoned, he’d’ve kept the biggest secret and later confronted us with a fait accompli. All that idle chatter threw us off the scent. We all thought his bark was worse than his bite, least I did. I still think Superintendent Neri’s hand was forced by circumstance even now and I still have my doubts about him doing it. If you ask me I reckon Subsuperintendent Greco acted off his own bat and that, faced with the fait accompli, Neri was forced to take the reins so that word wouldn’t get out a subordinate had gone over his head like that. Neri was a different kind of policeman,” rattles the prattling head of Don Casiano, and for the nth time I’m subjected to the irrefutable evidence of the foundations of Neri’s future house, the freshly painted headquarters, the selective honesty with which the Superintendent courted Malihuel’s tradespeople.
“EVERY CLOUD HAS A SILVER LINING,” someone or other said to me in one of the countless conversations. “If the Ezcurra business hadn’t happened we’d never have got Neri off our backs, we’d still have him as mayor, the people would have v
oted him in, believe you me, aren’t you fed up of hearing about his honesty, his uprightness, his authority, his love for Malihuel? Poor Ezcurra, I know it’s no consolation, but he actually took a weight off our shoulders.”
“I DON’T BOTHER ANYBODY and nobody bothers me,” is all Don Porfirio Dupuy, the spectral landlord of Los Tocayos, has to offer when I ask him one afternoon we’re alone in the bar.
“NO ONE ASKED MY PERMISSION,” says Eduardo Rufus, the owner of La Bonita, the largest slice of the carve-up of the mythical estancia with its own horizon, named La Catalina in honour of my great-grandmother, Señora Kathleen Doyle de Bullock, on his way through Malihuel. He’s agreed to meet me out of deference to Don Brendan Bullock’s memory, for whom his father worked as an administrator. He’s very pleasant to me and insists I’ll be welcome at La Bonita whenever I feel like it. But on the subject of Ezcurra I can’t get anything more out of him than that first phrase. He’s very talkative about everything else though. “Things weren’t that good around here; a lot of land got salt-logged in the floods and to clean it up … We picked up a bit again with the soya but Rosas Paz’s heirs … I always said to them, whoever puts their money in cows loses, but they wouldn’t listen to me and La Bonita just went on growing with the land they kept selling to me. Would you credit it, they wanted to do up the estancia for tourists, it’s all the rage these days you know, they put new rooms in the estancia house and a swimming pool, spent a bomb they did and what for, who’s going to come out here, tourism for spades is all we’ve got, for Benoit’s beach resort. Course they’ll drive brand-new imported four-by-fours in what little land they have left. Me I’d rather stick to my old Rastrojero and have more land to drive around in.”
An Open Secret Page 6