“YES, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED,” Don León would confirm. “Neri shot himself in the foot. And Señora Delia went sort of round the bend, but what do you expect? He’d just told her her son was dead.”
“AND RIGHT THERE to give you an idea she tells Neri he was lying right to his face, that she knew her son was locked up in the jailhouse and the Superintendent gives her his word he wasn’t at headquarters well you can’t say that wasn’t true and that must’ve been when Delia said that thing about his wife because the Superintendent got up on the spot and told her Señora you can say whatever you like to me but I repeat don’t go dragging my family into it and listen carefully would you believe Delia looks him up and down and spits out And what right have you got to have a family? just like that she came out with it what right have you got to have a family I mean I understand you can be blinded by hatred or pain but anyway it’s not the sort of thing you say that’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Must’ve been later I don’t know Chesi if you remember what your husband told us wasn’t it that Delia sort of clicked and says to him And if he’s dead where is he if my son’s dead I want you to give him to me she started screaming and if someone tried to calm her down she’d turn on them, and of course nobody was going to get her out of there by force, she was still Doña Delia de Ezcurra and they weren’t going to lay a finger on her so it was Armando who had to back down, and to cap it all he didn’t have the car and Delia followed him down the sidewalk screaming murderer at him in front of everybody luckily Dr Lugozzi had taken his and caught up with him and gave him a lift home right Chesi? There was no stopping Delia by then she was in the grips of a kind of frenzy wanting to find out what had happened, knocking on doors and sometimes not even knocking and walking straight inside as if they were hiding her son in there or stopping someone and asking them out of the blue as if everybody knew what did people know they didn’t know if he was dead or alive besides given the boy’s reputation a lot of people’d think he’d seen the creditors coming and turned tail there are still people today who claim he’s alive I don’t know who told me they saw him somewhere in Peyrano just imagine if it’s true the pointless suffering he caused his mother there are some things that just aren’t done there you go you’re right it was Casilda you’re becoming quite an expert on the life of the … it’s a book you’re going to write is it? And are people over there going to be interested in something that happened so many years ago in a little town in the provinces? You know better anyway as I was telling you she covered the town from house to house asking questions or for help first from how can I put it the VIPs who ran from her like the plague by then, ’specially when the patrol car started tailing her all day so you’d open the door to her and she’d start rabbiting on at you twenty to the dozen and raising her voice besides and while the patrol car crept slowly past behind her she couldn’t see it but of course you could and you were the one the policemen inside were looking at. It happened to your Uncle Rodolfo it did and he came in white as a sheet poor man and told me That woman isn’t to set foot in this house again don’t let me find out you’ve let her in when I’m not here if she wants to join her son at the bottom of the lagoon that’s her business and that’s what must have happened everywhere because she how can I put it started lowering her standards eventually she ended up ringing on the doorbells of the waiter at the bar, the school janitor, the butcher out in the Colonia, what do you make of it Fefe, a woman once so refined? So one day I couldn’t stand it any longer and I say to her, I said to Chesi Look Chesi, if they have to kill us let them kill us but things can’t go on like this. I’m going to see Delia come hell or high water and if you don’t want to come I’ll go on my own but I can’t sit idly by with my arms folded and she I remember it clear as day put down her knitting and went to fetch a headscarf and stood there handbag in hand all ready to go, just like that without a word, like a little soldier by the door remember Chesi?” asks Auntie Porota with sisterly affection, and Chesi nods before casting on to the next row.
“She doesn’t say much does she,” I remark.
“Chesi? She’s a bit sparing with her words.”
Her sister’s body shakes with laughter like a pile of bags wrapped in cloth. “But it doesn’t matter, you know, your Auntie Porota does enough talking for the pair of us.”
“EVERYTHING HAS A LIMIT,” Don León Benoit would assure me that night. “The Ezcurrita affair let’s let it go shall we, but Doña Delia was a well-loved, well-respected member of the community, Don Alejandro Alvarado’s daughter no less. Never in our lives would we have agreed to let the police lay a finger on her, Superintendent Neri didn’t even dare dream of it because he knew. He knew all along what the result of such a preposterous plan would be. Later on of course circumstances changed, Doña Delia was no longer the person she had been and some of the things she did might even be considered illegal. But by then Neri’s opinion cut no ice here any more.”
“SO WE GO AND FETCH your grandmother and she says Do you think it’s wise and we say we do indeed she has great respect for you, she’ll listen to you, and you know your grandmother she didn’t get on with her at all but at a time like that I always say you have to put any pettiness to one side the way your grandmother did an example to us all that Delia couldn’t live up to when she opens the door to us we can’t believe what a mess she looks I swear it broke our hearts to see her and she looks at us with that faraway look and asks why we’ve come, what we’re doing here. And we have trouble persuading her to let us in but we sit down and she doesn’t offer us anything and her once such an attentive hostess with her fancy teas and her petits fours from Fuguet because she used to say the bakeries here in town weren’t up to much and then I can see she’s about to break down and I go over to her and take her by the hand and give it a pat Don’t get so worked up, you’re bound to get news soon you know Darío and that obviously touched something deep inside her she clung to my shoulder and began to cry inconsolably, you should’ve seen her it was obviously just what she needed to get it off her chest and Chesi and your grandmother came over too to comfort her there … there … and I can’t remember Chesi if it was you or me who says to Delia Please this has got to stop, you can’t go on like this think of your family and then she did react but not the way we expected, she stands up suddenly like this in a dressing gown I’d never seen her in before and posh shoes can you imagine what a clash I think she must have been drinking because she was unsteady on her feet and says to us What family! I haven’t got a family! You lot killed them! And for the three of us it was like a slap in the face Good Lord hand on heart Delia how can you say something like that we’re your friends you know you aren’t in your right mind and she says First you kill him and then you come to comfort me, as if we’d been the ones responsible, so there was clearly nothing to be done about it then she wouldn’t listen to reason a dreadful dreadful shame I tell you but the three of us got up to go and when we were outside on the sidewalk we turned round to say something to her but she was standing there like a statue in the doorway, and she says to us, listen because this one really takes the biscuit, she says to us The woman you came to see doesn’t exist any more, so you’d better not call again. Just like that she told us didn’t she Chesi. Can you imagine! She always had something … how can I put it … always had a flare for melodrama about her Delia did. But she went too far that time. The three of us and your grandmother had gone to see her with the best of intentions.”
“She suffered a lot,” I manage to say pathetically.
“Of course she did of course she did,” Auntie Porota concedes magnanimously. “That’s why we didn’t bear her any ill will. And the next day maybe on account of our visit it backfired on us the next day she goes and plants herself outside the door to the headquarters waiting for the chief of police and after that he used to drive straight in through the jailhouse gate, then Delia went off to the courts from which she’d also been banned, she used to pester Dr Carmona in particular
what sainted patience that woman had anyone else’d’ve had her arrested and Delia was now spending all day on the streets almost always hanging around the headquarters, there were times she’d fall asleep on a bench and the maid had to come and wake her up and take her home, they say she had to help her get bathed and dressed a saint that girl died in childbirth she did a few years later, here in the little ward in the arms of Dr Lugozzi who could do little for her, it was thanks to her poor thing that Delia wasn’t wandering the streets looking like death warmed up but anyway word’d already got out I don’t know who started calling her that they say it was the Superintendent himself but I don’t think so he was very well spoken but because of the upset he’d already taken to the bottle and so in a moment of exasperation you can understand it he may’ve called her a mad hag and the name stuck. Goodness me, life’s full of little surprises as I sometimes say. From being the snootiest woman in town to this, when even the kids coming out of school would go past the bench outside the headquarters and shout mad hag, mad hag, and then your grandfather, must’ve been at the Superintendent’s request, had the bench taken away and Delia sat on the kerb, leaning against that sentry box that’s always there.”
“AND THIS ONE TIME it was throwing it down and I knock on the door of the Superintendent’s office with some papers for him and as I don’t hear anything I open the door and find him sitting at his desk with a half-empty whisky bottle and his back to the window staring into space,” ex-policeman Carmen Sayago would also manage to tell us the night we broke three of his ribs, “and without looking up he goes and asks Is she still there? And I stick my head out of his office window and I can see Señora Delia sitting on her bench as usual drenched she was hair all over the place crazier than ever she looked and I go Yes Superintendent sir and he nods and doesn’t say a word and I go out as I came in and take the papers to Greco.”
“YOU KNOW WHO SENDS THEIR REGARDS Auntie Porota?” Taking advantage of a lull in the story, I smile and delay my answer to see if I’ll get the few seconds of improbable silence the pronunciation of her dear name deserves. “Gloria. Remember Gloria?”
“Which one, Gloria Caramuto? Saw her only this morning I did. She’s going gaga poor woman, can’t remember a thing. The other day she went into the bakery three times running—”
“No, no,” I wave my hands incompetently in the air. “Gloria who’s my age, a bit older, who lived two doors down from Babil’s …”
“Ahhh I know, you mean Yoli’s daughter. Yes I ran into her in Buenos Aires one time I went, don’t know how she found out I was there but she came to see me, with a Remember me Doña Porota? Easy game that one used to be, had a loose streak she did. Used to come in summer and go through two or three from here or the other towns and then go back to her boyfriend or boyfriends who knows in Buenos Aires, no bones broken. I always said she’d come to a bad end and that she did, what an upset for her parents, so right-minded they were, and she a guerrilla, and then she was nabbed and doesn’t she end up marrying or shacking up I’m not sure with some high-ranking officer? I’m telling you she’s easy that one is. No beating about the bush. And her daughters the poor things turned out retarded tell me it’s genetic you can or whatever you like but you’re not telling me all that sleeping around didn’t have anything to do with it. And then she drops in to see me with her How are you Doña Porota, remember me? And me, Course I do my love, how could I forget?”
“We were together for two years,” I remark.
“What did I tell you? Eat you for breakfast that one will.”
“THE DEAD DON’T ASK FOR MUCH, they’re fine with two metres of earth, a few prayers from the heart not the lips, living flowers or knick-knacks, from home, that have absorbed a lot of love. They ask so little … But then again if they’re denied it they can be ruthless. The unburied dead have no peace and therefore give no respite, and Superintendent Neri must have wished he could rescue Ezcurrita’s physical body from the bottom of the lagoon and give him a Christian burial. But it was too late by then and there was nothing he could do but leave town. No one can live with an apparition,” Ña Agripina, the healer, explained to me the afternoon I went for tea at her smart little house in the FONAVI district. “And they wonder why the Superintendent took to the bottle. I tell you Fefe, do what you like in your life but never commit an irreparable outrage against a dead man, because that is the sin that Little King Jesus talked about, that’s the sin that has no forgiveness. If we need to cling on to anything in this dark world it’s the sleep that death will eventually bring, and to go on suffering afterwards is the greatest injustice, like life without rest. But the insomnia of the dead bears no comparison with that of the living. I don’t know if you’ve heard about Superintendent Neri’s accident, he ended up ploughing into a street light on his way back from the lagoon. They say it was the bottle but I know it was Ezcurrita who appeared to him running with water in the middle of the road, Neri himself told me the time he came to ask me for something to help him sleep. Desperate he was. And it wasn’t guilt that’d made him like that, he was a policeman and it wasn’t the first time he’d killed a helpless man. Guilt merely comes from within, it isn’t that powerful. I’m telling you these things because I can see you’ve spoken with the dead, more than once, so I can tell you that the tips of Superintendent Neri’s fingers blazed in the dark with the evil light, blue like gas flames. And the lagoon couldn’t abide what they did to it either. The drowned she sends back to shore, but poor Darío, they’d sunk him in her bosom … Water can’t abide the dead. It was inevitable. You saw what the flood was like, not even the church was spared. They say it was the rains, the roads, the incline. But I know—and I’m not the only one—that the lagoon spewed up the dead man we threw into it. And we haven’t had a beach resort since, except that jetty of Don León’s stranded in the middle of the bare field in the droughts and in the floods you have to dive to find it. Anyway, as for me, I lost the taste for dipping in it after that. Neri, he couldn’t resist the temptation to make us this parting gift—before he left he just had to spit in our lagoon. And the tormented soul of Delia’s son still roams the shore, searching for who knows what. People have seen him, late at night, even people from other towns, who never heard of him. Poor Darío. Who knows, now you’re here it may bring him a little peace, right? You have to take him something Fefe. It’ll be good for him.”
“Where,” I asked in a peculiar throaty voice that came from so deep it didn’t sound like my own.
“I’ll tell you.”
“AND BY THEN I THINK SO, she’d spend practically all day there on her bench, I don’t know if anybody took her anything to eat or drink the girl did didn’t she Chesi? and people didn’t want to go that way any more they’d go all the way round the block but there was no other route to school and of course the schoolkids were curious and used to ask what was wrong with Doña Delia and it must have been one of the parents I reckon who not really knowing what to tell them and meaning no harm must’ve said Darío left town without telling his Mamá and it’s broken her heart and she’s gone crazy don’t you ever go and do anything like that and the child must’ve repeated it to his schoolmates I remember hearing it at school from my students and after that some people started calling her poor Doña Delia and others the mad hag, I swear if there’s one thing I pray for to God who’s been so good to me just one more thing I’d ask him not to let me go downhill like that or like Gloria Caramuto who can only find her way around because the town’s so small and there’s always somebody to take her back her daughter’s heart’s constantly in her mouth it is poor thing a saint she is never a complaining word don’t even dream of suggesting she should put her mother in a home they’re building one here now near Majul’s I don’t know if you’ve seen it otherwise the nearest one’s in Fuguet, and that’s what Delia needed a son to take care of her course she only had one so as not to lose her figure so they say and look where that left her. Had it been up to me I’d’ve had ten but your Uncle R
odolfo wouldn’t hear of it two’s more than enough and of course I wasn’t going to have them on my own was I. That’s what Delia was short of children are a boon and a consolation they’d’ve stopped her with Mamá please the whole town’s talking, the things she used to do, on Sunday afternoons she’d go up to the relatives of the convicts who were the only ones who’d listen to her by that stage her of all people who’d been heard to say the jailhouse ought to be moved to the outskirts of town so we wouldn’t have to face that sorry spectacle every Sunday. Ah life eh? And there were some who started on about how the police ought to do something, how it was the chief ’s responsibility to right the wrong he’d committed, but let’s face it the Superintendent wasn’t up to righting wrongs any more, all he could do was leave town.
An Open Secret Page 18