The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  I stared at the picture. And then I shuddered.

  Alberto laughed. “I told my mother you wouldn’t want to sleep with a picture of Ricardo beaming down at you.”

  Back in the living room, the other guests had gathered. There was Magda, Alicia’s middle daughter, a computer programmer. There was Magda’s husband, Luis, and their two young children, Paola and Natalia. And soon, there arrived Luis Pinto, Alicia’s husband, home from the flooring factory which had once belonged to Alberto Matias but which Luis and Alicia had managed to buy after they married. He came in apologizing for being late and, sinking his heavy frame down to a child’s height, hugged and kissed his granddaughters. I had expected Luis to be brusque, formidable. Ricardo, and even Alberto, had described him as a difficult, punitive parent. But there was no trace of severity in his treatment of his granddaughters. Perhaps he had softened. Or perhaps Ricardo and Alberto, locked into their resentment of him for having stolen away their mother, had provoked in him behaviors that were not natural to him.

  Luis produced for me the evidence that Dr. Rosenfeld had suggested I search for—a picture of Alicia during Ricardo’s formative years. Luis took it off the mantelpiece to show me how Alicia had looked at the time he first started living with her. I hadn’t asked to see such a picture. Not yet. But Luis was an uxorious husband. “This is me,” he said, pointing to a slim, energetic-looking youth holding hands with a curvaceous woman. “And this”—his voice filled with pride—“is Alicia.”

  As Dr. Rosenfeld had predicted, Alicia had indeed resembled the women Ricardo had admitted killing. Her hair, like theirs, was long, her body full, her smile expansive. And like them, each of them, she was beautiful in a natural, artless way.

  I saw a remnant of that beauty shortly when I went into the kitchen, to which Alicia’s granddaughters had retreated, for in their presence she was animated, exuberant. She was feeding them snacks when I entered, bananas and slices of bread to tide them over until dinner was ready, and soon she began setting them to work at drawing and coloring. She cleared space at the kitchen table, found them paper and crayons, helped them decide what to draw, and when they showed her their creations, profusely admired their little stick people, square houses, and great round suns. Later, when coloring palled, she turned her back on her pots for a while and began making the girls tiny origami vessels from folded scraps of paper, her face wreathed in smiles.

  Alicia’s mood remained cheerful throughout dinner. I gathered it was rare for her to have a visitor from abroad, and she had certainly fussed over the menu, made a soup, steak, several vegetable casseroles. But at ten-thirty, when Magda and her husband and the two little girls departed for home, Alicia’s gaiety faded swiftly. When she rose to clear the table, she moved slowly, and as she began gathering up dishes, her small body seemed to shrink, to fold in upon itself.

  “Let me help,” I offered.

  Alicia nodded, and I followed her into the kitchen with an armload of plates.

  Back and forth, back and forth we went, and then Alicia began washing the dishes. By hand, of course. She had no dishwasher, not even, she informed me, a proper clotheswasher, which was what she really wanted. The one she used was barely adequate. Had I seen it?

  I hadn’t, and she gestured over her shoulder at an alcove where she kept her washing machine. It was a small cylindrical tub, with a separate wringing-out machine that could be attached to it.

  “From the year one,” I said.

  “Seguro.”

  She was still rinsing dishes, and when I picked up a towel and said I’d help with the drying, she smiled at me gratefully. And then, despite her promise not to discuss Ricardo with me yet, she said, “I do get tired at this hour. And then I always get sad. I think of Cadi. I can’t help it. He is the great sadness of my life.”

  I heard more, much more, about that great sadness the following day when, rested, I sat down in the kitchen with Alicia to do a proper interview with her. She told me the story of her life, her girlhood on the paradisiacal island, her seduction by Alberto Matias, her affair with Luis. I had heard all this from Alberto, of course, but it was different hearing it from Alicia, whose descriptions were ornamented with poetic phrases and minor but telling details. The river that flowed past her island was so busy, she said, that it was “like a street.” Alberto Matias, she said, “carried pistols all the time.” But the biggest difference between her account of her life and Alberto’s account of it was that she was filled with chagrin about how it had worked out. “My biggest sin was to fall in love with Luis,” she said when she came to that part of her narrative. “I wasn’t a bad woman. And what I did was very common around here. But in our case, destiny gave us a bad hand, and the children were the ones who paid.”

  “Paid?” I asked. “Paid how?”

  “Well, Cadi,” she murmured. “He never forgave me. Do you know, a few days after he’d come home and told us all that he’d done, he came to me when I was alone in the kitchen and said to me, ‘Mami, why did you leave me? I loved you so much.’ And then he grabbed me, and he began shaking me. He shook me so hard that I was afraid he was going to kill me. And then he let go and he hit the wall so hard with his fist I thought he was going to break it.”

  “He has strong hands,” I muttered.

  “Yes, yes, I know. That’s just what he said afterward. ‘I have strong hands.’”

  She was weeping, tears gathering in the lashes of her deep-set eyes. Hoping to deflect her emotionality, I became businesslike, professional. “I’d like to ask you more about those first few days after he came home. Did he say he wanted to turn himself in? Did he say why?”

  My technique worked. She pulled herself together and began to talk about Ricardo’s return to Mendoza. It was a tale rich with maternal denial. “We hadn’t heard from Cadi in more than twenty years. I thought he was dead or else living in some jungle somewhere. I didn’t know about his killings—well, just about the first one. But he’d been engaged to that first girl, and I’d always figured that she must have been unfaithful and that’s why he killed her. That’s a terrible thing to do, but it’s not uncommon around here. But the other killings? No, I knew nothing about them. Sure, the police came here looking for him many times. But they didn’t say why they were looking for him. And sure, people told me there’d been articles in the papers saying that he’d killed again, but I didn’t think the articles could be true. What I thought was, just because he did that first killing, they’re accusing him of others.

  “Then, last year, Luis and I were sitting here in the house and the phone rang, and when Luis picked it up, a man who wouldn’t give his name asked to speak to me. Luis put me on, but the man still wouldn’t give his name. He just said, ‘You know me, but you haven’t spoken to me in a long time.’ I was annoyed, because we sometimes get nuisance calls, and so I handed the phone back to Luis, and he said, ‘Don’t bother us or I’m going to trace this call and they’re going to find you.’ And then the man said, ‘Please don’t hang up. Please let me speak to Señora Alicia again,’ and Luis put his hand over the receiver and said in a strange voice, ‘You’d better talk to this guy.’ Some sixth sense had told him it was Ricardo. And it was. He was phoning, he said, from Buenos Aires. And he was taking a bus to Mendoza and we should pick him up the next day at the bus terminal.”

  As Alicia was telling me this, Luis, who had been talking to Alberto in the living room, wandered into the kitchen and sat down alongside us. “He started with a lie to begin with,” Luis interrupted the account. “Later we learned that he was already in Mendoza when he called. But when he first called, he pretended he wasn’t—why I could never understand.”

  Alicia frowned at Luis and went on with her tale. “He told us how he would be dressed, in case we couldn’t recognize him, and the next day we went to the bus station.”

  “I was the one who went inside,” Luis said. “Even just what I’d heard so far worried me, so I took precautions. I made Alicia stay in the car, and I
went into the station. I had no trouble recognizing him. He was the same, only heavier and with less hair.”

  “He got into the back of the car with me,” Alicia continued, “and his first words to me were, ‘Mama, Mama, I thought you had died!’ And then he said he’d done a lot of bad things. But he didn’t say what. Just that his life was a misery, and he was sorry for all the bad things he’d done. We didn’t know what those things were until the next day, when he told us he’d killed four women.”

  “No, we didn’t know there were four killings until later, after he saw the lawyer,” Luis dissented. “When he started talking, at first he said he’d only committed two murders. Then he said there’d been a third one, too.”

  “I went cold when he talked to us about the murders,” Alicia broke in. “But I’m very strong. I listened to everything. I didn’t get hysterical. I contained myself, in order to give him strength.”

  “Strength for what?” I asked.

  “To turn himself in,” she replied.

  “Was it his idea?”

  “Oh, yes,” Alicia said. “From the very beginning, he wanted to turn himself in.”

  This time, she and Luis were in agreement. “Yes, yes,” Luis affirmed, “he wanted to turn himself in.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed them. Alberto had mentioned that Ricardo had hoped his family might find some way to hide him. But they said nothing about this and, remaining steadfastly loyal to their black sheep, insisted that surrender had been in his mind from the start. Still, from something Alicia said next, I gathered that other alternatives were considered, or at least discussed. “I wasn’t sure if surrendering himself was such a good idea,” she said. “But then I thought, what if he kills again? And I went against my heart and told him to give himself up. It was a terrible decision for a mother to make.”

  “I’m sure it was.”

  “It gives me a knot in my heart,” Alicia sighed. “But I felt that if he came forward, he could feel free within himself. And that if he felt free within himself, even if he was locked up, he would be as free as we are.”

  Even if he was locked up, he would be as free as we are. The sentiment was similar to the one that Kennedy at his first press conference had attributed to Ricardo: “He told me,” the lawyer had said, ‘I would rather have my body locked up and my mind free than my mind locked up and my body free.’ It was a very spiritual concept, and I now felt certain it had originated with the devout Alicia. I also felt certain that, just as Alberto had suggested, it was Alicia who had sparked in Ricardo the notion that assuming a penitent stance and pleading remorse might bring him some benefit, for she was going on, “After he confessed to all that he’d done, he said, ‘Mami, help me to turn myself in.’ I held his hand and told him that it’s very easy for a person who’s done nothing wrong to be good. The hard thing is to admit that you’ve done wrong and say, ‘I won’t do it again.’ And I talked to him about God.

  “It seemed to calm him. He said, ‘Teach me how to pray again.’ I gave him a Bible and we started praying. And I told him, ‘I admire your valor in coming here and telling the truth. And I know that if you are truly sorry for what you have done, God will forgive you.’

  “‘And you, Mama?’ he said. ‘Are you going to forgive me?’”

  “I said, ‘If you are truly sorry for what you did, I forgive you.’ And I hugged him.”

  Ricardo, both Alicia and Luis agreed, had been very alarming in the first days he was home. He had alternated between loquaciousness and sullenness, had paced up and down like a caged animal, and had sometimes smiled but more often grimaced, a hard expression forming in his eyes. Luis had been frightened of him, not so much for himself, but for Alicia, and for their youngest daughter, Susana, who was living at home while doing a medical residency at the local hospital. Luis put locks on the bedroom doors. He asked Magda and her children, as well as Alicita, the daughter he and Alicia had had before they married and who lived now on a farm in the countryside, to visit the house as often as they could. And he loaded his hunting rifle and slept with it beneath his pillow.

  But if he was afraid that Ricardo might harm his mother or Susana, Luis was also frightened by the mere fact of allowing his long-hunted stepson to stay in the family home. If Interpol discovered his presence, Luis feared, he and Alicia could be accused of harboring a criminal. As soon as Ricardo said he was certain he wanted to turn himself in, Luis took him to see a lawyer, his friend Mario Luquez, in the hopes that once he did so, the lawyer and not the family would be responsible for Ricardo.

  They visited Luquez one January afternoon. The lawyer made Luis sit in his waiting room while he talked to Ricardo alone, then he called Luis in and said that Ricardo had confessed to certain crimes that had been committed in Mexico and the United States, was prepared to turn himself in for them, but hoped that if he did, he would then be sent to a psychiatric hospital.

  To accomplish this, the lawyer said, it would be necessary for Ricardo to start seeing a psychiatrist. He made a recommendation, a man with whom he had worked in the past. And he warned Luis that he should drive Ricardo to and from his visits to the psychiatrist and see to it that he didn’t go off anywhere on his own, for if he did, he might be recognized and arrested before the lawyer could negotiate his surrender. If that happened, the family could be charged with harboring a criminal.

  The next few weeks were hellish. Ricardo had to make regular visits to both the lawyer and the psychiatrist, but frequently he objected to being escorted. Luis, who had taken to hiding Ricardo in the back of his truck when he drove him to his appointments, tried to reason with him, and sometimes it worked, but sometimes Ricardo rebelled, insisted on walking home and doing so all by himself; Luis would nervously trail him at a distance. Ricardo also seemed incapable of getting it through his head that he was not to talk to anyone. One day he demanded that Luis take him to a bookstore, and at the store he got into a chatty conversation with another shopper. After a few minutes the man said to Ricardo that he thought they’d met once before at a disco, but he couldn’t remember his name. Luis, who had been standing a few feet away and listening to the conversation, hurried over and whisked Ricardo out of the store.

  But this close call was nothing compared to other problems that Ricardo continually created for the family. He refused to follow the proscription the psychiatrist, who had begun giving him anti-agitation medication, had insisted on: no alcohol. At meals, he would demand wine, and only Susana, who was herself a doctor, was able to argue him out of his craving. And worse, one day Ricardo demanded that Luis find him a woman. Luis went into a panic and called the psychiatrist, who gave Ricardo an injection that would control his sexual appetite.

  Luis felt so stressed by Ricardo’s presence that he wasn’t surprised when, several weeks after his errant stepson had returned home, he felt pains in his chest. “I got involved too much,” he said. “And I was trying to do everything myself. I had a heart attack.”

  He was hospitalized for five days, and those days were horrifying to him, not just because he had nearly died, but because he was away from home, no longer able to supervise Ricardo. But nothing untoward happened in his absence, and soon after he returned home, weak but on the mend, the lawyer concluded the arrangements for Ricardo’s surrender in the United States. At once, Alberto was summoned from the United States to deliver Ricardo into the hands of Michael Kennedy, and right after his arrival, he departed with Ricardo in tow and the family’s ordeal was over. “I feel good now,” Luis said, explaining all he’d been through. “Good in my health. And good about Ricardo, too. Because I think I did the right thing. If I had let him go free and he had killed someone else, it would have been on my conscience.”

  We broke for lunch soon after I heard the story of Luis’s heart attack. Alberto had gone out, but he returned and we sat down to another elaborate meal. During it, Alicia talked wistfully about the future. “I still want in the years left to me to do a lot of things. I would like to see Ricardo�
��s kids. I would like to have an automatic washing machine. And I would like to have my poems published.”

  “Your poems?” I said. “I didn’t know you wrote poetry.”

  “Oh, I do. I even took a writing course and got a diploma. I’ll show it to you.”

  “I’d rather see your poems. I’d love to see your poems.”

  Alicia rose, went into her bedroom, and returned with several small notebooks filled with handwritten stanzas. Seeing them, I thought of the poetry Ricardo had years ago written for Judith Becker. Poems of seduction. But Alicia’s poems were different, were filled, just as she was, with an overarching melancholy.

  The first poem I looked at was called “Pampeana,” which Alicia translated for me as “a zamba, a dance from the pampas.” Traigo esta zamba lejana, it began, zamba que viene del sur, en las llanuras pampeanas, zambita querida, de me juventud. In English, it reads:

  I bring this distant zamba,

  a zamba that comes from the south

  in the plains of the pampas,

  the dear little zamba

  of my youth.

  The guitars lulled me,

  the ombu tree saw my birth

  the lark sang to me,

  and I grew like the ostrich

  running over those fields.

  Thus was my youth.

  When I have sorrows,

  I feel like singing

  and making flowers out of my grief

  in order not to cry.

  I feel like singing to the wind

  of the pampas

  asking it to take my pain away.

  And when on clear nights

  I see the Southern Cross shine,

  I remember my mother singing

  the dear little zamba

  of my youth.