by Linda Wolfe
And I want to sing
that little zamba of yesteryear,
that zamba I brought from the south.
Many of the other poems were about Ricardo and had been written during the years Alicia had longed to see him again. There was “Hijo,” son:
Yes, you were part of my body.
In my own soul,
Your small being.
I brought you into the world
And I loved your presence.
How can I resign myself
To not seeing you again.
And there was “Ricardito Amado,” beloved little Ricardo:
In this night full of stars
my thoughts fly
and take me to your side
where I look at how beautiful you are.
How very distant was that afternoon
when you left without returning.
Dear son, I always wait for you.
My eyes long to see you arrive.
Poor Alicia, I thought as I read this poem. Her long wait had ended, her eyes had seen her son arrive, but that arrival had hardly made her happy. Nothing did. Could. Not even the considerable accomplishments of her other children. Alberto was a rich and successful businessman. Alicita owned a farm. Magda was a computer expert. Susana was a medical doctor. No matter. Ricardo was a murderer, and Alicia, who had lived so long with denial, would never get over that now at long last irrefutable fact.
That afternoon, Alberto, no doubt feeling as touched by his mother’s predicament as I was, impulsively decided to make one of her wishes come true. He drove, with me, to an appliance store on one of Mendoza’s main streets. The shop was crammed with washing machines, many of them as antique-looking as the small cylindrical one with separate wringer that Alicia already owned. But a few resembled the standard American washing machine, sleek, waist-high, rectangular affairs that featured a damp-dry spin cycle. Alberto wanted one of these.
We examined them, assessing their dimensions and capacity, and with my advice Alberto finally settled on one of the smaller machines, for it had seemed to me that Alicia’s kitchen could hardly accommodate a larger one. Even so, the price was astronomical. “That’s one thousand one hundred twenty-four U.S. dollars,” the clerk told us. “But if you pay cash, you can have it for one thousand dollars.”
Alberto didn’t hesitate. “I’ll take it,” he said, peeling greenbacks from his wallet. “But on one condition. I want it delivered this afternoon.” To me, he explained, “I want to see my mother’s face when it comes, and who knows what time we’ll be over at the house tomorrow.”
This was true. I had called the two psychiatrists who had treated Ricardo, Dr. Ernesto Padin who had seen him when he was an adolescent, and Dr. Fernando Linares, who had seen him after he returned home last year. Linares had refused to meet with me but Padin had said he would call me tomorrow and give me an appointment sometime that day. When I’d told Alberto this, he’d begged to accompany me, and I had said he could, provided Padin had no objection.
“So?” Alberto was saying now to the appliance clerk, who was staring as if mesmerized at the greenbacks. “Is it a deal?”
“I think so,” the stunned clerk said. “I guess so.” A moment later, he called over the manager, and the manager promised immediate delivery.
Alberto wasn’t disappointed in the reaction his impetuous generosity produced. We went back to the house, and when the delivery men arrived, Alicia watched with confusion as they unwrapped their huge parcel. Then she said, “What is it?”
“Una máquina,” one of the men said. A washing machine.
“No.” Alicia shook her head and, as if when she had dreamed of owning a new washing machine, she had imagined one that would look just like the one she already had, insisted, “That’s not a washing machine. What is it?”
“It is a washing machine, Mamita,” Alberto gloated. “From me and Kim. Look. Look how it works.” He opened the lid, and Alicia peered suspiciously inside.
“It’s huge,” she said when she raised her head. “I don’t have enough laundry for it. I’ll have to do Magda’s, too.” And then Alicia gave one of her rare smiles, a mischievous smile, just like the one that sometimes lit up Alberto’s face. “And the neighbors’. I’ll have to do the neighbors’ laundry, too.”
Alberto and I went out to dinner that night at the home of a childhood friend of his, a prosperous man named Guillermo Villanueva, who owned both a busy cement factory and a fashionable ski resort. Guillermo and his wife, Beatriz, lived in an elegant section of Mendoza in a penthouse apartment overlooking a vast park. They sat us down on overstuffed couches, poured us several glasses of the excellent local champagne, and finally, at ten o’clock, directed us to the dining room for dinner—steak, of course, but this time, filet mignon.
Guillermo was aware that I was in Mendoza to do research about Ricardo. “It’s a puzzling case,” he said as he opened a numbered bottle of a ruby-colored Mendoza wine. “I knew Ricardo as a boy, and I cannot understand how he came to do the things he did.”
“Did you know him well?” I asked.
“No. I was Alberto’s friend. Ricardo was younger. A bit of a liar, but otherwise a nice enough kid. Quiet.”
“So much for outward appearances,” Beatriz commented. Then she said that like everyone else in Mendoza, she and Guillermo had followed every detail of Ricardo’s case, but that they had done so because they had a special interest in the case.
“Because Guillermo knew Ricardo as a child?” I asked.
“No,” Beatriz said. “Because Guillermo—”
“Because my sister,” Guillermo interrupted, “my sister Graciela, who will be joining us shortly for dessert, is best friends with the wife of Dr. Linares, the psychiatrist who treated Ricardo last year.”
I’d had a lot of champagne and wine by then, but I became alert in a second. “Is Graciela close with Dr. Linares, too?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“I’d been hoping to see Linares. But he wouldn’t agree to an interview.”
“Oh”—Guillermo waved a hand in the air—“Graciela will get him to see you.”
Not long afterward, Graciela arrived. A teacher of literature in a local college, she was interested in talking to me about writing and writers, and for a while we discussed Bellow and Updike, Borges and Cortázar. But after a time I let literature fall by the wayside and poured out to her my disappointment about coming all this way and not being able to see Linares. “I’ll speak to him,” Graciela promised. “No problem.”
Guillermo nodded approvingly. He was one of those hosts who not only want to wine and dine his guests royally, but see to all their needs.
Perhaps that was why, at around one in the morning when we finally launched in upon our dessert, Guillermo offered me a rare piece of information, one that I suppose Beatriz had almost revealed to me earlier. “You know,” he said, “I saw Ricardo here in Mendoza back in 1974 or 1975.”
“But he couldn’t have been here,” I at first discounted Guillermo’s claim. “The police were hunting for him. He’d never have come back here.”
“I saw him, I tell you,” Guillermo insisted. “I ran into him on the Avenida San Martin, and he told me he’d killed another woman. Not the one we all knew about, the one he’d been engaged to.”
I was astonished. “He just came out with such damning information?”
“Yes, that he’d killed another woman. In the United States.”
I found this exceedingly interesting for it reminded me of something Gorden McEwan had said, namely that his informant had reported that in a moment of braggadocio Ricardo had volunteered to him, too, that he’d killed a woman—in his case, Jacqui Bernard. Remembering, I shook my head and told the Villanuevas the story, remarking when I was done, “You’d think he’d keep things like that to himself. But apparently, he was proud of his killings.”
“Yes and no,” Guillermo said. “He may have been boasting, but his tone wasn’t boastful. It
was matter-of-fact. What he said to me, he said in such an ordinary tone of voice that I didn’t believe him. I thought it was one of his lies.”
“Did he say anything more?”
“No. Just that he was glad to be back. I took him to a cafe and bought him a cup of coffee.”
“Everyone was looking for him,” Alberto exclaimed. “The FBI, Interpol. And he went out with you for coffee?”
“Yes. I suppose, in retrospect, that he felt invisible.”
“Innocent,” Graciela, the literature teacher, said. “In the way Raskolnikov felt innocent. As if he had more of a right to life than the women he killed had.”
15
The very next day, I met with Dr. Linares. Graciela had kept her word and asked him to see me, and he had agreed, but requested that I bring both Graciela and Alberto along. “Why?” I’d asked Graciela. “Because,” she’d explained, “apparently, he had some difficulties with Ricardo’s family. They accused him of saying things to the press here that he never said. So he wants witnesses to his conversation with you.”
He needn’t have made such a stipulation. He said nothing damaging to Ricardo, nothing that, as far as I could tell, violated patient-doctor confidentiality. Indeed, he was as restrained—and as theoretical—as a psychiatric textbook. “You understand,” he said when he shook my hand in greeting, “I will reveal no secrets. I will talk about patients like Ricardo. That is all I will do.”
That was out in the waiting room, a tiny alcove with so few seats that Graciela had to perch on an end table. Inside his office, a dimly lit room dominated by a blackboard and an elevated desk, he announced, “I know it is customary to term someone like Ricardo a sociopath or psychopath. But according to German psychiatry, which I find far more devoted to fine discriminations of symptoms than your American psychiatry, an interesting percentage of psychopathic personalities are brain-damaged. I believe this may be the case with Ricardo.” And at this, Linares, a chunky man with salt-and-pepper hair and a little mustache and beard, seated himself behind the thronelike desk, motioned the rest of us to take places on a low Naugahyde couch, and began to lecture us about one of the latest developments in the field of psychiatry—the search for the physiological cause of psychopathy.
“What makes a psychopath?” he said. “Why should someone grow up without a conscience? Without sympathy? It cannot just be rearing. It must be a brain abnormality. There is research that is beginning to show this. There are brilliant doctors who even as we speak are finding the sources of violent behavior in brain lesions, temporal-lobe epilepsy, ictal phenomena in the limbic system.”
Alberto and Graciela looked stunned and uncomprehending, perhaps because Linares was talking in English, but more likely, since both of them knew English quite well, because he was being so technical. I, however, understood perfectly what Linares was talking about. My husband, who had for years done research in neuropsychology, had often told me about the search for the neurological cause of violence. But what my husband had said was that the search was still in its squalling infancy and not likely for decades to influence the legal determination of sanity. Linares had a different view, a belief in an imminent and happy future that would any day now explain the biological nature of criminality and allow felons to plead not guilty by virtue of their unfortunate biology. “Ricardo is a sick man,” he said, waxing exuberant. “Can anyone who knows what he did deny this? No! Therefore, his lawyers in America must get psychiatrists who will look for his brain damage. Then, when they find it, and I am certain it will be found, he will not need to be in a prison but can go to a mental hospital.”
It was hard to get a word in edgewise, but I tried: “I don’t know that even if a neuropsychiatrist found some brain abnormality, it would count for much in a court of law. Not in the United States. Have you had repeat murderers here in Argentina who have been able to win an insanity defense on the basis of an irregular CAT scan?”
“I don’t know,” Linares huffed. “I am not a forensic psychiatrist. I attend neurotic and depressed patients primarily. But I have done a lot of reading in this area, and I believe that Ricardo must have a neurological lesion.”
All this time I had been wondering what the blackboard was for, but now I found out, for he stood up, drew two large overlapping chalk circles on the board, and labeled one of them “neurological disease” and the other “psychopathic personality.” Then he raised his chalk, looked meaningfully at the three of us, and drew a thick line through the circles to separate them. “In time to come, we will not lump these two together,” he said exhaling. “In time to come, they will be separate phenomena.”
Linares was so passionate about his notions that for a moment—was it possible?—I found myself feeling sorry for Ricardo. He must have sat here in this office, I thought, listened to the enthusiastic Dr. Linares, and himself come to believe that if he turned himself in, he would as a matter of course be sent not to a prison but to a psychiatric hospital. That would have pleased him, for he knew the ropes in American psychiatric hospitals, had once managed to escape from one. But if Ricardo had cynically wanted to be in a hospital, Linares’s reasons for wanting to see him in one were not cynical. He viewed a medical setting as the proper place for Ricardo because he sincerely believed that extreme behavior like Ricardo’s was a medical problem, physiological in origin and therefore potentially responsive to some as yet unknown treatment and cure.
Such beliefs are idealistic, but they are vastly comforting to criminals and their families. Indeed, for a moment, even the pragmatic Alberto seemed inclined to sign on for the hunt for the elusive physical origin of violence. “Could violence be caused by tuberculosis?” he suddenly asked. “When he was little, Ricardo had tuberculosis.”
“It’s possible,” Linares said. “I don’t recall reading anything about tuberculosis and violence, but it’s possible that there have been studies. I could look the matter up for you, but it would be a lot of work, take me a great deal of time.”
At the mention of work, Alberto’s interest subsided. “No, no, I was just wondering.”
Linares looked disappointed. He was a true scholar, one who would have relished collecting research, however irrelevant to Ricardo’s future it might have been.
The air had turned chilly and a stiff wind was blowing when Graciela, Alberto, and I left Linares’s office. “The zonda,” Graciela said. “We’d better make tracks.” Like most Mendozans, she was afraid of the desert windstorm that frequently visited the city, sweeping paper and leaves through the streets, ripping the branches from trees, and depositing clouds of stinging dust that were said to be laden with disease. But the storm was just gathering force. Graciela took a moment to ask whether I could come to dinner at her house on the weekend, and only after I said, yes, I’d love to, hugged me and darted into her car.
I got into Alberto’s. My next appointment was with Dr. Ernesto Padin, the doctor who had been on the staff of the psychiatric hospital to which Ricardo had—famously—committed himself when he was but an adolescent, and I had obtained Padin’s permission to bring Alberto along.
Padin’s waiting room was, if anything, smaller than Linares’s. But it was jammed, so packed with people that although it had lots of chairs, there weren’t enough to go around, and Alberto had to stand up until one became vacant. Argentina has a plethora of psychiatrists and psychiatric patients. Indeed, as the distinguished Latin American journalist Alma Guillermoprieto has observed, visiting a psychoanalyst four times a week is one of the country’s most cherished rituals. Still, no matter how many psychiatrists Argentina has, there aren’t enough to go around—or at least, that was the feeling I had sitting in Padin’s crowded antechamber. But at last a receptionist, apologizing vociferously for the delay, beckoned us into the consulting room.
It was a tiny, cell-like space with a small desk, a few small chairs, and no couch—Padin was not a psychoanalyst but an eclectic practitioner of his profession. A tall man with sparkling obsidian eyes, he gree
ted us warmly and said to Alberto, “I believe you were in the military when I knew your brother.”
“I was. And I never got straight just exactly what happened to Ricardo at the hospital. Which was why I wanted to come along with Linda.”
“No problem,” Padin said. “I can understand your interest.”
“Do you remember Ricardo?” I asked when we were all seated.
“I never forgot him. His case was most unusual.”
“Is he a schizophrenic?” Alberto interrupted, though I had warned him to let me ask the questions. “He says that when he was at the hospital here, you diagnosed him as a schizophrenic.”
The doctor laughed. “Yes, he would say that.” Then he leaned forward on his desk, his dark eyes flashing, and said, “Your brother did not have a psychosis. He had psicopatia. One of his characteristics was that he always told lies, made up complicated stories. And these stories had one thing in common—they were designed to bring him some kind of benefit. So I am sure that if he has said he was schizophrenic, he imagined that that, too, would bring him a benefit.”
Which of course was true. Ricardo had hoped, at the time he turned himself in and claimed a history of schizophrenia, to be confined in a mental hospital. I started to say this to Padin, but he was going on, “As a matter of fact, when I heard that Ricardo had killed lots of people, I at first doubted that it could be true. I believed he might be saying even this in order to obtain some sort of benefit.”
“What kind of benefit could come out of saying one had killed several people?” I asked, puzzled.
“Fame. Attention. Money. I am not saying these were Ricardo’s motives. Just that given how he used to behave, it was a thought that crossed my mind.”
Padin then told us how Ricardo used to behave. And what he told us was so reminiscent of the behavior of the adult Ricardo that Alberto and I kept nodding our heads to his words. “Ricardo came to El Sause, the Mendoza psychiatric hospital, when he was around seventeen or eighteen. I was a young man then, a recent graduate of medical school. But I can give you Ricardo’s diagnosis with calm and confidence because it was not mine alone. The case was so special that those of us who examined Ricardo filmed our interviews with him and presented his case before the entire hospital staff. It was studied and discussed by professors at the university, and the diagnosis was confirmed by them. Psychopathy.