“YOU KNOW WHAT SHE USED TO SAY, our Delia, when she was asked about her son’s reputation? That he gave her a grandchild in every town,” Auntie Porota told me the other day. “Please, Delia’d say, they’re grandchildren of the ones who never taught their daughters how to get to the altar with their legs crossed. How’s it the boy’s fault if the young girls nowadays can’t behave any better than the chinitas. Oh good gracious me that Delia, terrible she was, woe betide you if crossed her, with that sharp tongue of hers, and they wonder why the lad turned out the way he did, like mother like son I say, don’t you agree Fefe?”
“THAT WOMAN WASN’T MY GRANDMOTHER,” I’d blurt out indignantly, choking on the pasta soup—Little Stars No 16—that Celia had brought me in bed. “My grandmother’s name is Emily Bullock de Echezarreta, she lives in Rosario and she welcomed me into her house—this house—every summer. The other one, three months of every year living three blocks away and not once, not once … She knew who I was, and she thought it was … amusing. Her son went from one town to the next knocking up young girls, wham bam thank you ma’am, and she thought it was funny! You heard what she used to say,” I inveigh from an imaginary pulpit.
“What they say she said Fefe,” Celia corrects me sweetly. “If you don’t learn to listen with your heart as well as your ears in this town, you’ll never understand. Darío was eighteen when he was courting with your Mamá, he was a boy. And I don’t for a minute think Delia knew that you … Your grandparents kept the secret very well, and I … I know I never told a soul. And if she did know, if Darío did tell her … She’d begun to change; over those days she changed more than a lot of people do all their lives. If they’d let her live, she’d’ve come to love you. In you she could’ve regained something of the son who’d been taken from her. After everything you’ve been told, can’t you see it couldn’t be otherwise? She’d be a totally different person now. But they didn’t give her time Fefe.”
“WHAT YOU HAVE TO BEAR IN MIND, dear boy, if you want to get to know the mentality of the man who killed your father,” Professor Gagliardi says to me, manoeuvring his open dressing gown through the piles and shelves of books that make his house a maze, “is that all his life he’d been nothing but a provincial policeman, whose experience in matters of murder went not much further than the odd working over that got out of hand, the unwitting heart patient victim who didn’t tell them about his condition before getting the picana, the successful crook who forgets to pay their cut and remembers in the hereafter. Neri belonged to the old school of concealment—covering your tracks, cooking the files, striking pacts with judges and coming to arrangements with lawyers. He thought you should at least keep up appearances. He was too naive then, as were most of us—he thought people’s natural reaction to an imminent crime would be to stop it, or report it. His need to lie paradoxically reveals his faith in people. It never entered his head that the perfect crime is precisely the one committed in the sight of everyone—because then there are no witnesses, only accomplices. His premise was correct—in a two-bit town like this you can’t waste a prominent inhabitant without everyone knowing: because it only takes one person to find out for everybody to know. He mistakenly concluded that, in the face of such vigilance, impunity wasn’t an option. Of course it wasn’t, as certain distorters of public opinion repeat ad nauseam, because the policemen of his generation had notions of morality, honesty or honour that were later lost; no, it was simply narrow-mindedness, intellectual laziness—a eureka moment, a Copernican revolution, the Superintendent was simply too old for. All he needed to arrive at the right solution was a leap, a flip of the imagination that stood logic on its head and set the clockwork going—the realisation that you can hold your tongue while talking out loud, that town gossip can work the other way round. That silence also travels by word of mouth.”
CELIA TAKES ANOTHER PHOTO from the box.
“And this must’ve been, let’s see hold on, I bought that sundress … Can’t be long after your mother left, that summer … Who knows maybe you’re in the photo too? It doesn’t bother you if I say it does it Fefe?”
In the photo are Celia and my mother, the former in a dress blown tight against her body by a wind the photo has captured for ever in sculptural folds; the second—Mamá—in a one-piece, navy-blue bathing costume with white bows and little flounces, which she was still wearing ten years later; and in the middle Darío Ezcurra, democratically embracing them both. Celia and Darío are looking at the camera, but Mamá only has eyes for him, for the almost condescending smile, for the boastful eyes of a kid staring the future fearlessly in the face because life is definitely female, for the bronzed chest and flat stomach above the scarlet trunks—the only thing in the photo (including the sky and the water of the unmistakeable lagoon) that hasn’t faded to the uniform sepia of old Kodacolors. I set it on the uneven stack forming at the side of my bed, documenting Ezcurra at his high-school graduation in an ill-cut suit that narrows his shoulders, dancing with a youthful, spellbound Clara Benoit; Ezcurra in black polo neck and brown jacket with a lean Batata Sacamata and an undyed Bermejo, posing by farming machinery and stands under construction, beneath a poster that reads EXPOTENC; Ezcurra blowing out the thirty—Celia specifies—candles in the reception room at the Yacht Club; Ezcurra and his Mamá, wrapped up warm for winter, having chocolate and churros at the bazaar on patron saint’s day; Ezcurra in bermudas and multicoloured polo shirt with Celia and the Don Ángel of my childhood keeping an eye on the sausages on the barbecue of the house that now belongs to Mati … Celia insists I keep them and I’m still too weak to argue—a meagre haul, something to show when I’m asked “What have you been up to in that town all this time … What did you say its name was?” What else? Or did the hope of winning the ultimate prize still nestle within me, secretly, ashamed to show itself? Ezcurra’s last words, before dying: “My son, my son” (yes, but which one?). A secret meeting, in Rosario, my Grandma Delia telling my Grandma Emily (perhaps in English for security’s sake): “We have to discuss our grandson’s future.” Wasn’t this what I was still hoping for, what I’d really come here to look for? Wasn’t it for this hope that I’d kept putting off my return?
“I DO APOLOGISE,” Professor Gagliardi says without looking at me, which he’s hardly done since we began our chat. If it weren’t for the additional cup and the sugar bowl, which, out of deference to my dislike of saccharine, he’s brought over to the chair that serves as a makeshift table, he might be talking to himself, and answering his own questions, “for not seeing you sooner. Had I known who you were, I would have opened the doors of my humble abode to you from day one, sparing you the gruelling task of rubbing shoulders with that filthy, lying rabble in your brave quest for the truth. I understand dear boy, there’s no need for you to explain, you were right to conceal your true identity, if they’d known you were Darío Ezcurra’s son, every door would have been slammed in your face. What’s more, this way you’ve been able to see for yourself that everything I’ve been telling you about the people of this town is true. Now, I’m glad you’re here. Because twenty years is too long to bear the weight of such a secret. Many times, fearing I’d take it with me to the grave, I’ve been on the brink of succumbing to the temptation … But to whom? Who in this town, was or is worthy of knowing the truth? Now, I’m glad I waited, now that you’re here in front of me, and through your own, I can remember the unmistakeable features of your unfortunate father, when he died he must have been around your … See dear boy? I’m seldom wrong. That’s why you came to me isn’t it? So that I’ll show you the key to the apparently inexplicable doings of Malihuel’s chief of police, who against all logic, against the deep-seated habits of his profession, even against his own interests … I know what no one knows, because I heard it from his own lips, in the only conversation we had after those terrible events, a few days before his departure, in the name of our old relationship, Benjamín, he had the audacity to say. I didn’t have the nerve to refuse. Ethics and l
et’s call it professional curiosity were at odds in me, and curiosity won. I also needed to know, needed it for myself, how a man I’d once trusted had been capable of such a thing; I wanted to know where I’d gone wrong. We met at Los Tocayos, at the table where we used to play chess and called ours. It was no more than two weeks since we’d last met, but it was enough time to have changed him irreversibly. He was no longer fit for anything other than setting up a kiosk and dying—which is what he eventually did—for keeping order among the shelves of chocolates and biscuits; a defeated body, barely sustained from morning till night by the habit of contempt and ill feeling, and the secret hope perhaps that some hapless robber would hold up his kiosk and force him to use the forty-five hidden under the cigarette cartons. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Colonel Carca, Demetrio Carca. There’s no reason you should: house-plunderer, kidnapper and blackmailer, torturer, rapist, serial killer, thief of babies and corpses—nothing special; just your run of the mill career soldier in those days. They were from the same town in the north, the Superintendent and he, they grew up and went to school together, and remained friends. He was the one who called the Superintendent from Rosario and demanded he indulge Rosas Paz. The Superintendent said it couldn’t be done—because of the people, the neighbours; the colonel, who was an old hand in these matters, said it’d be a piece of cake. All done in a joking, matey tone of voice, you know how they talk to each other, all comrades in arms: Go on, you fat wanker, shift your arse and pick him up for me will you, and the other, You think it’s as easy as that? If you’re the big man here, why don’t you come and do it? One thing led to another, and eventually to what the Superintendent ended up confessing to me that day.”
GUIDO’S mortally offended.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Don’t you trust me?”
I prop myself up slightly in bed and adjust my pillows. I could murder a cigarette.
“Maybe at first. I decided not to tell anyone, and I stuck to my plan. Then it got to be the other way round. I was frightened by your loyalty. At the first bad word against Darío Ezcurra, or Delia … If you’d known who they were to me, you’d have leapt to their defence, to my defence, you’d’ve given me away. Guido, a drunk who raised his voice to me, you broke three of his ribs. What more can I tell you?” He grumbles but then relents. Perhaps because it’s sincere my explanation seems to satisfy him.
“So when did you realise?” he asks.
“When Mamá died. I found a letter she’d started writing when I was going through her stuff. In her third-grade schoolgirl handwriting balanced precariously on the lines. Dear Darío, it began. I knew she’d gone on writing letters to the town, she sometimes even used to give me them to post, sealed of course—she never let me read them. Your grandmother’ll get angry she used to say, and I accepted the explanation without asking; even when she spoke about God He sounded like someone you had to obey because otherwise my grandparents’d get angry. The names never varied much—Emily, Celia, Darío … She spent over thirty years writing to a man who never replied, the last twenty because he was dead of course.”
Guido listens. It’s my turn to do the talking now.
“It’s a simple story actually. Ezcurra was banging the village idiot. An idiot and a virgin at twenty-two. Screwed her regularly he did, couldn’t be easier, till he began to notice she was putting on weight around the waistline. When my grandparents noticed too they dragged her into the car and never stopped till they got to Buenos Aires, where they found her a place at Don Alberto’s, a friend of the family who owed my grandfather more favours than he could pay back in a lifetime. He agreed to give me his surname, and I grew up calling him Papá. Mamá and I lived in one of the apartments down the corridor from Don Alberto’s which they rented out; Don Alberto lived in the house at the front with his real children and his wife. Anyway he treated Mamá and me like his own children, and received the money my grandparents sent for our expenses. Mamá was banned from ever going back to town in case she let the cat out of the bag, and me every summer when I arrived they briefed me about what I was supposed to say. And when I got back Mamá’d drive me crazy, asking me to tell her about everyone, every detail of what had changed, what was the same. I can’t say it was bad, growing up with her, but it was strange. She was more like a sister than a mother. An idiot sister. She liked to read Mafalda but didn’t get most of the jokes. I’d watch her, concentrating, scanning the bubbles, following the words with her finger and moulding them letter by letter with her lips. When she realised I was there she’d look up and smile and ask me will you explain for me Fefe? After Felipe, her favourite character was Guille. I’ve only just realised, it’s my son’s name too. It’s a pity, she couldn’t enjoy him more—she’d’ve made a great grandmother. They were difficult the last few months, because she didn’t understand. It hurts Fefe! My belly hurts! She’d clutch it and weep like a little girl—it was the cancer that killed her. A few weeks after the funeral, when I found the letter, I decided I’d gone long enough without knowing. My first attempt failed, as you know—the night before I left I couldn’t get a wink of sleep and by the morning I was running a temperature of nearly forty. My second attempt was a success—I went to Rosario and put my grandmother between the letter and the deep blue sea for starters. I hadn’t seen much of her over the last few years—after I got back from the Malvinas my life was erratic to say the least—and the woman I remembered as being impenetrable as a closed convent wall had become a doddery little old lady, all smiles, and I didn’t have to twist her arm to get her to come clean. I can see clearly now that my grandparents’d never been that formidable, except in Mamá’s and my impressionable imaginations. They’d had her late in life, and when they realised she’d turned out … The only daughter of a couple of tired old folk choking on the anger of not being able to show their hatred of Ezcurra publicly—and Ezcurra, aware of this, revelled in it all the more—no room left in their hearts for any other feeling for the man who was after all … She’s one of those who thinks Ezcurra isn’t dead my grandmother—she needs him alive the better to indulge her anger and grief. For her the crafty devil’s living in Brazil with a black woman and coffee-coloured kids—any day now, she assured me again at the terminal in Rosario when I went to take the coach that brought me here, he’ll be back in town to visit, with Garotos for everyone, end of story.
“IT WAS A BET,” says the Professor.
“A what?” I ask.
“A bet between the Superintendent and the colonel. According to the Superintendent, it was the other’s idea and he accepted because he was certain of winning. They both promised not to cheat, gave their words of honour—the Superintendent to carry out his duty if, as the colonel contended, it turned out to be a piece of cake; the colonel to shelve the whole affair if the Superintendent found that the town’s inhabitants refused to cooperate. And his subordinate, Greco—although the Superintendent had no idea—was to be the secret referee and make sure fair play was observed. So the terms of the contest were formalised. I don’t need to tell you how it turned out,” says Professor Gagliardi, as the afternoon light dissolves amongst the books in his room. “That’s why the Superintendent was so dejected at our last meeting. The town had failed him, we’d made him lose the bet. He’d had faith in this town, with its stories of struggle and resistance—and we’d let him down. We hadn’t lived up to our own legend. Worse still, we’d made him look bad. His friend, the colonel, took the mickey on the phone now. That’s why he’d decided to leave he told me. He spoke softly, staring into space. As if he’d lost his faith not just in Malihuel but humanity. The Superintendent, I realised that day, had survived his whole life on a strange kind of faith—the faith that others, people, were better than he was. A convenient kind of faith that exempted him from any personal responsibility. You should all’ve stopped me was his way of answering the reproach. The Superintendent was an idealist at heart, and there’s no more desperate cynicism than that of a failed idealist. It was an odd situ
ation, no doubt about it. For a while Malihuel became the theatre of a curious human experiment conducted rather cack-handedly by its chief of police. But the results are plain to see. You can make the equation as complex as you like, all imaginable variants can be included, but the result will always be the same—Ezcurra dead at the bottom of the lagoon.” The professor, a greying shadow in the half light, approaches the lamp, which he switches on with sharp tug on the thin chain of tiny bronze globes. The entire room spins and folds in on itself, then organises itself around the new centre of the gleaming lampshade. My feet have frozen inside my shoes with the immobility and the cold, which the quartz heater is incapable of keeping at bay. “He was a contemptible man the Superintendent, in the most precise meaning of the word. He approached people for what was worst in them, and he always found what he’d gone looking for. The dead part of the heart, where all the meanness, baseness, laid down by the years is stored, that’s what he spoke to—and of course his words always found a sympathetic ear.”
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