“You’re just speaking hypothetically, though, aren’t you?”
“Of course. She could very well have committed suicide. We’ve lost the possibility of cross-examining her in front of her son. With her death, the deposition seems reinforced, which is very convenient for Gabriel.”
“What do you think really happened?”
“What I think is pretty far-fetched for a police investigation.”
Espinosa stared out at the sea for a few seconds, seemingly captured by the beauty of the scene, and then looked back at Irene.
“Let’s do a little exercise. There’s no proof, or even any hint, that backs up what I’m saying—it’s only speculation. When Gabriel came to see me the first time, he was honestly feeling threatened by the Chilean’s prediction. He wasn’t playing with me or acting in bad faith—he genuinely believed he would kill someone before his next birthday. We were the ones who couldn’t understand that as truth. Instead of focusing on Gabriel, we zeroed in on the Chilean, about how he was a fraud, a charlatan, all that; but the real question wasn’t whether he was telling the truth. It was whether Gabriel was telling the truth. The only reason for someone to be so terrified about a barroom fortune-teller’s prophecy is if it was on the mark. But Gabriel himself thought the idea of his killing someone was absurd. How could we make that absurdity make sense? The answer, I think, is that Gabriel was feeling guilty for a murder he’d already committed. What the fortune-teller said was true; he just got the time frame wrong: future instead of past. Gabriel had directly or indirectly caused the death of someone, long ago. What the Chilean did was reactivate that crime. That’s why Gabriel’s terror was legitimate.”
“But … who did Gabriel kill?”
“His father.”
“His father?”
“Right.”
“Jesus, Espinosa, I know you said that you let your imagination run wild. Can you tell me how he killed his father?”
“Closing the door.”
“What?”
“Closing the bathroom door.”
“I don’t get it.”
“As I said, it’s just an imaginary exercise. It might have happened something like this: it was winter, and the house they lived in was old and didn’t have a separate shower; it just had a bathtub with a hand-held nozzle and a gas water heater. A plastic curtain around the tub completed the scene. Dona Alzira’s husband liked to take full baths, a habit he’d probably acquired in the hotels he frequented with less religious women. Dona Alzira turned on the hot water, prepared his bath, and closed the window. Maybe on a similar occasion Gabriel had heard his mother’s critical comments about his father’s bath habit. Then one of two things could have happened. First, Dona Alzira could have said that she was going to the supermarket while her husband was in the bath. On her way out, she could have asked her son to close the bathroom door so that he wouldn’t get cold. What she didn’t say was that the heater was as old as the house, and that the exhaust pipe was blocked. Or, second possibility, the mother leaves without saying anything and Gabriel simply closes the bathroom door to avoid seeing his father, because he associates the bathtub with the times his father’s cheated on his mother. In both versions, death by carbon monoxide poisoning is almost certain. That happened a few days before Gabriel’s tenth birthday.”
“You really are nuts.”
“No more than most people.”
“And who killed Olga and the Chilean?”
“Probably Gabriel, but I don’t dismiss the possibility of the mother having killed Olga; she was resentful, and she viewed women as a form of evil.”
“And what about what happened to me?”
“Probably just a smoke screen—too much of a pantomime to be relevant.”
“Is all this what you really think happened, or is it just a fantasy?”
“Some of the details might not be exactly right, but I think that’s more or less it. Now it doesn’t matter; there’s no way to prove it. Dona Alzira’s testimony and death put an end to the story. If we find the gun under the dead guy, that will simply confirm what she said. Even if the autopsy reveals an abnormal dosage of sleeping pills in her bloodstream, it won’t be considered suspicious—it seems normal that a suicide would want to suffer as little as possible when she turns on the gas. So I think that’s the end of the story. One thing, though, is sure: if I’m right, the Chilean’s prediction came true. Today is Gabriel’s birthday.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“For now, nothing. After a while, I think he’ll get in touch with me. I can’t imagine him all by himself in that gray, dark apartment, living with the truth behind those deaths, without going crazy. I don’t know what will come first: the confession or the madness.”
Even though it was Saturday afternoon, the beach was deserted and there were few people walking on the sidewalk that ran along the sand. A wide window ran across the front of the restaurant, shielding them from the powerful southwesterly wind, which had been blowing for two days now. The greenish-gray sea and sky contrasted with the white foam thrown up by the wind; the ragged clouds let flashes of sunlight glance off the water.
Also by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza
The Silence of the Rain
December Heat
A Window in Copacabana
SOUTHWESTERLY WIND. Copyright © 1999 by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza. Translation copyright © 2004 by Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Garcia-Roza, L. A. (Luiz Alfredo)
[Vento sudoeste. English]
Southwesterly wind / Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza ; translated by Benjamin Moser.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-42454-X
EAN 978-0312-42454-1
I. Title.
PQ9698.17.A745
869.3’42—dc21 2003056638
First published in Brazil under the title Vento sudoeste by Companhia das Letras, São Paulo
First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company
eISBN 9781466850323
Southwesterly Wind Page 19