“POLITICS DIDN’T ENTER INTO IT,” clarifies Clara Benoit, Don León’s daughter, in the half-finished ballroom-cum-bar of the new resort, down by the shores of the lagoon. “It was an excuse. Darío was killed because he was full of life, beautiful and didn’t give a damn. And it was the women who killed him, contrary to popular belief. Not, as rumour has it, the famous seduced and abandoned ones—no woman’s heart, in a body touched by his, could ever again beat against him. They couldn’t even feel jealousy, except maybe towards his mother. No, it was the others that were jealous of him, the ones he’d never touched. They were the ones who finished him off—a conspiracy of jilted hopefuls egging on a flock of imaginary cuckolds” —she breaks off for a minute, exhales smoke from her cigarette and through the broad windows her gaze loses itself in the heaving, leaden expanse of the lagoon, skirted on the horizon by a crooked brushstroke of distant trees. “Darío was the last good thing to happen to this town. That’s why they killed him. In a dead town the living only get in the way.”
“I CAN TELL YOU A THING OR TWO ABOUT ONTIVERO,” says Ortega, the owner of one of Malihuel’s two hotels, the one opposite the church on the other side of the square, the Malihuel Grand Hotel. “Ezcurra was having a relationship with his wife, you know … The police chief didn’t have to put himself out over Ontivero, he went to the station himself he did. The cuckold’s revenge, let’s call a spade a spade. Not that the Super’d take any notice of such a nobody, he should be grateful he saw him, but anyway, the bandwagon might’ve belonged to Rosas Paz as they say but quite a few grabbed the opportunity and jumped on didn’t they. I’d like to see what that rat says now, if he still has the face to say he had nothing to do with it that is. Don’t get me on about folk here … Have you talked to him?”
“Not yet,” I tell him, and to loosen his tongue a little more I grill him again about his hotel’s capacity to accommodate contingents of pensioners from Buenos Aires sent over by the imaginary firm I’ve just invented. They say all sorts about me in town now anyway.
“WELL, A FRIEND, I wouldn’t call him a friend …” Tararira, the video-club owner, qualifies my hasty assertion during a pause in the three series of bench presses I’m spotting him at his request. At the suggestion of Guido, who’s an assiduous regular, I’ve taken to spending my downtime in the Malihuel’s men’s gym. “I knew him right enough, we all know each other in these parts. But that’s as far as it went. And as for telling him, telling him … What was I going to tell him? I didn’t know a thing. Let all those good friends of his warn him. Why didn’t they go and tell him? Anyway, anyway, if Ezcurra’d been in my shoes I tell you, and me … I mean, if I’d been the target … D’you think he’d’ve stuck his neck out to warn me eh, think he wouldn’t look after his own arse first? Eh? And what about you? Eh? You were here too if I remember right. Why didn’t you warn him? ’Cause otherwise it looks like all of us here have to provide you with explanations but what about you eh? Yeah yeah. You were too young. And someone else was too old and someone else was too fat and someone else overslept and couldn’t make it. We’ve all got excuses. Anyway, listen, I got nothing against you, my folks were good friends of your grandparents and you probably came round to our house and all, but what are you doing here now? The subject was closed, we’d turned the page and all moved on with our lives, and now you keep banging on about it. Another twenty years and somebody always on and on about the same old thing bada-bing bada-boom? What’ve you got to do with any of this? What the hell does Ezcurra’s story matter to you eh?”
His bad blood makes me feel tempted to drop the hundred kilos of rusted weights on his chest, but because there’s a grain of truth in what he says, I restrict myself to surreptitiously pressing down on the bar every time I help him lower it, and even say come on, one more, last one, make the ten, while the veins on his face look increasingly like chitterlings and a number by Gilda fades out over the speakers and one by Las Karakaras starts up.
“I CAN TELL YOU A THING OR TWO ABOUT ORTEGA,” says Ontivero, the owner of one of Malihuel’s two hotels, the one opposite the school on the other side of the square, the Las Delicias Hotel. “Ortega’s wife was still up to it in those days, a right slag she was, and Ezcurrita you’ll probably have heard if you’ve been asking around didn’t need asking twice when it came to totty. When the dog’s dead, the madness is done, the naive Ortega probably thought, as if by wiping the other one off the map he’d wipe away the stain on his reputation. I’m not saying that’s why, what police chief would look twice at him let’s face it, but you can bet your life that when Don Manuel whistled he was one of the ones as came running. I’d like to see his face when he’s asked. Have you spoken to him yet?”
“Yes,” I reply.
“And what did he say?”
“Same as you.”
Ontivero looks surprised.
“Well. Blow me. Well it was about time he came to terms with it. Ah well, each to his … So, tell me a bit more about these pensioners, let’s see …”
AT NIGHT, after I switch off the light, the voices won’t let me sleep. As if all their echoes were ringing together inside my skull, the voices I’ve heard during the day make themselves heard again, arguing ill-manneredly, interrupting each other, contradicting each other, each trying to drown the others out, trying to gain my approval, my attention, or just my ear. They’ve detached themselves from the bodies that anchored them and now run free through the overrun garden of my mind, forcing that crucial silence that precedes sleep further and further away. Through the wall I can hear the rhythmic jingling of Leticia and Guido’s bed, but, for all its vitality, the noise doesn’t move me or dispel the feeling that I’m lying in a tomb, condemned to listen to incessant murmurings from neighbouring vaults.
So I switch the light on again, get up and get dressed as stealthily as possible so as not to disturb my generous friends’ post-coital bliss, and checking to see I haven’t forgotten my cigarettes and lighter, I go out through the front door and pat the heads of the three dogs—Tuqui, Botita and Titán—who get up and wag their tails when they see me. One of the undeniable advantages of lodging on the outskirts of town is that you only have to cross the street to be out in open country. Beyond the fence post where I rest my lighter and cigarettes there is nothing but the shadows of groves of trees, more sensed than seen, and a horizon barely drawn by the beginning of the field of stars. The sounds, on the other hand, are unusually crisp and crystalline, as only the inimitable acoustics of a winter night in the country can make them: the lurchings of the dogs sniffing around excitedly in the patches of weeds, the whispering of the wind stirring the leaves of distant trees, the scattered and occasional crickets, the fleeting hoot of an invisible owl, perhaps one of the eternal pair from the church bell tower. Sharpening my ears I can make out the distant roar of a truck on the highway, the brief low of a cow startled from sleep, the panting of the dogs, my own breathing; and if, on merging with the background, they give way to the returning voices, I reinforce them with the crackle of the glowing tip of my hard-drawn cigarette or the twang of the wires tautened like guitar strings by the cold.
When they’ve occupied my head entirely and displaced the very last of the invading voices, it will be time to return my shivering body to the comforting warmth of the sheets.
“I WARNED HIM, course I warned him, it’d’ve been criminal not to, even with the risk involved. What I find hard to believe is nobody else did. This was his home town, a lot of the people who turned their backs on him had been friends of his father’s, they’d been to his christening, watched him play in the square, watched him grow up. And it was down to me—an outsider, a newcomer in town back then—to tell him,” says Berraja, shaking his head, the owner of the local love hotel, whose rooms—the beds with their lacquered bedheads and plastic-lined mattresses, the worn, red carpets, the odd compass rose made out of offcuts of mirrors, the posters of naked silhouettes against orange-crush sunsets—he wanted me to see before showing me i
nto his office. It’s a cold, rainy afternoon, and the surface of the lagoon is raised in little wave points, like gooseflesh, and, every time the wind shakes them, fat drops run down the windows of Berraja’s office and trace sinuous lines through the fine spray of drizzle. “But what else could I do, Ezcurra was a regular as you’ve probably heard,” he says with a wink from behind a lens of his glasses. “He was one of the first to adopt me when I came here. Put yourself in my shoes, an establishment like mine in a town like this in those days—those holier-than-thou women with nothing better to do, greed dressed up as local council and police morality, sermons in church for those as went, the very ones who’d head over here when they got out or ask me next day who was with who last night che. Ezcurra wasn’t bothered about any of that, just the opposite, and what I wonder today is of all those young girls who opened, well, let’s say their hearts to him not one, not even for those couple of hours of happiness they spent together, had the common decency to tell him? Or perhaps that’s precisely why—they may’ve been afraid Ezcurra’d let the cat out of the bag afterwards and go shooting his mouth off about who’d warned him? Or it may’ve been out of spite or revenge or morbid jealousy?”
“But you warned him,” I intervene.
“I told him, course I did, I told him to look after himself, that there were people in town who wished him ill, that he’d be better off going away for a while, far away, but he, you probably know what he was like from what you’ve been hearing, he got worse, dug his heels in, he said Tell … I can’t remember who he said, Tell whatsisname that if anyone’s going to have to leave town it’ll be him, and tell them from me to find someone else to tend to his horns, I’ve done my bit.” Berraja smiles as he recalls, and mumbles, “Real piece of work that Ezcurrita.”
“But you set him straight? You let him know the problem was with the police?”
Berraja’s initial hesitation gives me the answer his words try to correct.
“A nod’s as good as a wink,” he finally manages to articulate. “I didn’t spell it out to him, the name, if that’s what you’re getting at. But I was certain he’d understood at the time. Subsequent events proved I may’ve been mistaken, but then it was too late to correct my mistake. I did a fair bit, while his lifelong friends, his partners, his neighbours, even his relatives left him to his fate without so much as batting an eyelid. If Ezcurra’d been less pig-headed, less proud, less omnipotent, he’d’ve realised straight away. But there’s none so deaf as those that will not hear you know. Besides, they were both customers,” he adds unnecessarily.
“Both?” I ask.
“Ezcurra and the Superintendent. They’re both dead so I can permit myself the breach of confidence, though I can’t do the same about their partners of the fair sex you’ll understand,” he says in a winking tone, which fortunately his eye refrains from backing up. “What’s more, that week halfway through the week, they ran into each other here one night at the entrance—Ezcurra on his way out, the Super on his way in. I was a witness. You can just imagine, by that stage there was nobody who didn’t know what was afoot, not even Ezcurra, or so I thought, though I’d mistaken what was sheer foolishness for courage. The glances of the men who’d be victim and executioner crossed for a second, you could hear the toads croaking in the lagoon in the silence that ensued. Then Ezcurra acknowledged the Super with a nod and a half-sardonic smile and left with his bird on his arm. The Super left his—always the same one, methodical the Super was—and came over to the window. Does he know anything? he asked me with his eyebrows. Not from me I gave him to understand, shrugging my shoulders, and he believed me. I swear, for a moment there I was afraid he’d rumbled me, went weak at the knees I did, I can remember as if it was yesterday, soon as he’d gone after his chinita I had to sit down and have a couple of whiskies before I could carry on.”
“AND CLOTA, poor thing, so fond of God’s creatures she was, ’cause she couldn’t have children I say, well she did have one that died young she told Chesi and me once and they couldn’t have any more after that one or didn’t want any, I’m not sure, you know Fefe when there’s a misfortune like that you try to avoid the subject; and just imagine us asking her husband—a very helpful man the Superintendent was, but with secrets not just professional ones, wait I’ll tell you in a minute, he couldn’t keep that one from us, silent as the grave he was, and I reckon that that must’ve been why she was so fond of animals, full of cages the house was and a pair of little plovers loose in the garden and sometimes even a martineta which didn’t last her long see on account of the possums and you can’t keep them in the hen coop ’cause the hens’ll kill them her husband used to bring them back for her when he went hunting famous for his aim he was if he wanted to he’d kill them and if he didn’t he wouldn’t and take them back home as a present for his wife. But her favourite was the little dog she was given when they first moved to town, by … oh of course your grandparents what a scream Fefe I was about to say the Echezerretas as if you didn’t know them I’ll forget my head next but your Auntie Porota’s getting on,” my grandmother’s friend, whom I’ve always called Auntie, will say to me, and her sister Chesi will look up from her knitting and smile. “Adored that little dog she did, from being a puppy she’d make it talk like a person you know Mummy Mummy give me those ickle bonies from the barbie Clota’d pretend the little thing said what was it called Chesi and she’d take it out for walkies oh you know with little bows on and all dolled up because truth be told it was a lovely gesture of your grandparents’ but the little tyke didn’t have much of a pedigree to be honest and well that’s what I wanted to tell you her husband also had one of his own not much of a pedigree either I can tell you why would I beat about the bush Fefe dear we can call things by their names a bit of chinita fluff she was and to make matters worse she was so young coming out of school in her white pinafore, she must’ve been around fifteen then but she was still in sixth grade, didn’t have much up here, worked for me at one time she did and I had to send her back. So she’d come out of school and make straight for the headquarters, but that wasn’t enough for him, he had a room booked in that hotel on the highway, I don’t know if you saw it on your way into town … Can you imagine Fefe! A hotel room, and all for a chinita! And poor Clota, how couldn’t she have known, she was bound to. She played stupid poor thing. But then she wouldn’t’ve been the first, or the last, there are times that look, all sorts goes on in these towns we’d prefer not to know about.”
“EZCURRA USED TO DO HER, know what I mean?” Sacamata junior asks Guido unnecessarily and winks at him. “That chinita of Neri’s, La Nena they used to call her. Got enough for the first one?” he asks his partner, Licho, who mutters, “They’re yours,” eyeing the only card on the table, my dodgy six of cups. “That’s the reason the only reason Neri whacked him. Mum’s the word,” he says and plays a knave of clubs. “That whole circus of the general inquiry was to hide his real motives,” he goes on and I make the most of the opportunity to give Guido the signal. To get our opponents to bite he opts to bait the hook in silence and make the first with a three of coins to distract them. “Rosas Paz’s request suited him down to the ground and if he played hard to get it was only to throw people off the scent. To the girl he … Call!” he abruptly orders his partner, who shakes his head.
“They’re loaded Batata,” he mutters sceptically. “They’re trying to draw us in.”
“Nah bag o’ nails, look what they played. Call I’m telling you,” he insists, and as a man resigned to his fate, Licho calls an envido that Sacamata and Guido promptly double and triple. “Thirty-three,” I say first, having led, and after the superfluous “They’re good,” Licho plays his three of swords to match my lead and rescue what’s left of the hand. Six beans slide my way over the table.
“They don’t lie but they are tricky,” Licho reflects philosophically, and Sacamata junior adds, “Don’t worry, we’ll get our own back in the second. What can they do to us with the seven of cups and wher
e was I oh yes if you don’t believe me,” he says to Guido, “explain that business about La Nena got off lightly she did with a man’s haircut, shorn for a whore she was and that’s as far as Neri went, after all anyone who’d stoop any lower for a chinita looks like a right berk,” he concludes, while I turn up the corner of the six of swords and give Guido the signal for the seven.
TO SEE IF I CAN LET OFF some of the accumulated anger that’s starting to blind me, I decide to go out running one afternoon with Guido along the edge of the lagoon. Charging into the wind, which is like a hand on my chest pushing me backwards, skipping over strips of tyre, rusty tin cans and dead caracaras littering the verge, I rattle out what’s been eating away at me before I run out of breath.
“I’m beginning to think,” I tell him, “they’re not far wrong—the people who say Neri—wanted to spare Ezcurra—He might’ve really—meant it—he might’ve really believed—that by telling everyone—they’d stop him—and in a way—he became the instrument—the executioner, but not the judge—of what the people wanted—that it was Malihuel, not him—that decided Ezcurra should die—and that afterwards” (I’ve got a pain in the pit of my stomach now) “they washed their hands—saddled him—with the blame” (I can’t draw a full breath) “they made him a scapegoat—and they bad-mouth—him—to cover up their tracks—and he—by killing Ezcurra—was only—complying with—the will—of the people?” I finish with a wheeze and pull up, panting, unable to go any further. Jogging on the spot, Guido offers to wait for me. We haven’t yet completed the first of the eight kilometres he normally covers. I tell him to go on alone, that I’d rather take advantage now that it isn’t too far to walk back, and once his energetic figure disappears round a wooded bend in the path I light up and smoke my cigarette leaning against a post, watching the waterbirds take off and land on the steel-grey waters of the lagoon.
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