“Poppa wanted to get away from his family,” she said.
“But Isabel was his only daughter, and therefore his favorite.”
She smiled a wan smile.
“We have to get out of here.”
She walked back toward me. I wondered how long it had taken her to seduce her “Poppa.” Two months, two weeks, two days, two hours, two minutes? She could have broken her record with me if the body had not been lying there still so fresh in its pool of blood, and Edmundo’s eyes were not staring so intently at us, fixed at the moment of his death.
Half an hour later we were speeding down Route 3 on our way to nowhere. Lorena warned me not to call Isabel or anyone else from my mobile.
“They trace all the calls,” she said. “They’ll be onto us before you hang up.”
“If I’m not at the funeral tomorrow, she’s going to feel even worse than she does now.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them: the look the blond gave me said it all—finding my dead body next to Poppa’s would be no comfort to his daughter either. I did not do much better when I asked who it was who was tracing the calls.
“If I knew that, we wouldn’t have been caught by surprise in such an isolated spot, playing the happy couple,” she said. She lit a cigarette, drew on it as if it were a condemned prisoner’s last, then passed it to me. The filter tip was sticky with fragrant lipstick.
“It’s not so disastrous to die happy.”
“Poppa didn’t have many friends,” she said. “People he could trust, I mean,” she added, disturbed by what I had said.
“Who was with him when he called me last night? Who does the money that he wasn’t going to keep belong to?”
A blond silence, smoke drifting up between the windscreen and me, the straight line of the road disappearing ahead like the sides of a triangle whose apex we were traveling toward at 140 kilometers per hour. She did not know who he was with: she had gone on to Bahía Blanca on her own, and come back alone.
“My cousin is in hospital there. She’s in intensive care. Her parents both died in a car accident; my cousin survived, but she’s paralyzed down one side of her body, and the rest of her doesn’t know what’s happened yet.”
I gave an involuntary shudder. Lorena might be beautiful, but she could be a twenty-year-old Fate who spelled the end for any amorous, comfortably off old man who came within reach. She was making a big mistake with me, though. She obviously had no idea how uncomfortably off I was.
I did not believe a word of her story.
“We could turn off to Bahía,” I said. “The city’s only five kilometers from here.”
At this, she dropped a delicate white hand on the steering wheel. I was forced to hold on as tightly as I could, then had to pull hard to straighten up to avoid the truck hurtling toward us, horn blaring, on his side of the road. I could imagine the curses he was screaming to himself in his lonely cabin.
“So where are we headed?” I said as we sped on past the turning to the city. “Why can’t we go into Bahía Blanca, for Chrissake?”
She said nothing, and I relented. That was my second big mistake of the night.
Three more hours driving and we were leaving Viedma behind. At this time of the morning it was a ghost city, and the whole day through it would be the small, insignificant capital of Rio Negro province, a place to which an ex-president with grandiose ideas once announced that he was going to transfer the capital of Argentina. There must be so little oxygen in the stratospheres of power that the politicians’ neurones stop working. They come up with ideas that even an astronaut lost in space would realize were the product of their delirium or the junk food they are given in their ration pills.
I asked once more who the money belonged to, and where we were going, but this time Lorena was fast asleep. When she was awake she scarcely looked the twenty-four she claimed to be, but lying there asleep she was Nabokov’s heroine updated for the twenty-first century.
I stopped to fill the car with adulterated petrol—served by an attendant who looked as if he had come back from the grave. Sunken-cheeked and silent, all he managed to grunt was the price. When I handed him a hundred peso note, he gave it straight back.
“If you’ve no change, you’ll have to stay here until someone who has turns up,” he said with all the grim authority of a prison warder. He wiped his hands on a filthy rag and spat his phlegm onto the ground. “It’s damn cold out in this desert. Come inside and have a mate.”
I suspected that, apart from a thermos of hot water and the mate, and perhaps a packet of crackers, in his lair he was probably hiding a loaded shotgun, just itching to fire at the first client who used the excuse of having no change to drive off without paying. I bowed to the inevitable: the girl was sound asleep, and I had no urgent wish to carry on with a journey to the uttermost south.
“I’m going to the toilet,” I said. “No sugar with my mate.”
In the broken mirror, lit by an anemic bulb, I hardly recognized the face staring back at me.
I thought of my cat Félix Jesús and the disappointment on his round, battered face when he got back and discovered I was not in the apartment. The only comfort he and I have is that we occasionally coincide, and can rub against each other like Aladdin’s lamp and rouse early morning genies to make us feel less alone.
When finally I emerged from the toilet, my car and the girl had disappeared.
“Two men pulled up in a Ford Fiesta,” the ghoulish attendant said. “One of them stayed in the driving seat; the other got into your car. He drove off with the girl, with the Fiesta as escort. Anything to do with you?”
“The car was mine. The girl was a friend’s.”
“Ah,” said the attendant. He offered me a frothy, bitter mate with crackers.
3
Everything has its positive side. Pessimists say the world is going to end tomorrow or the day after; optimists insist it is born anew each day when we wake up alive. The sum of biological processes the earth is made up of are blithely uninterested in this sterile debate. The same nonsense gets created and recreated while poets wander about like scalded cats, skulking from their former loves so they can write about them.
The positive side to the fact that Lorena had been abducted in my car was that two hours later I was on board a Skania traveling up from Patagonia with a load of sheep, was able to jump down at the outskirts of Bahía Blanca at 9:00 in the morning, and arrived on time for my friend’s funeral. I did not tell either Mónica, his distraught wife, or Isabel about my nighttime excursion with Lorena. That would only have fueled their hatred, and this, as everyone knows, is the enemy of consolation and not to be recommended in the peace of a cemetery.
The topic came up anyway, because Mónica could not get it out of her mind that if “that little tart” had not appeared in Edmundo’s life the two of them would by now be on that trip of a lifetime in Europe.
“He was never a philanderer. I don’t understand it,” she sobbed. A couple of paces behind her, Isabel was waiting for the chance to tell me what she had found out about the funny business her father had been involved in. “He was never unfaithful,” Mónica cried. “Never a hair on his clothes that wasn’t his; never any lipstick or perfume that wasn’t mine.”
I envied my friend his widow’s poor memory. As I put my arms round her so that she could let it all out, I recalled the nights Edmundo had turned up at my apartment because Mónica had thrown him out after discovering passionate love letters to him, or telephone numbers scribbled on paper napkins which were answered, when she rang them, by sleepy, sensual voices.
“The old goat,” was Isabel’s version when the two of us were alone together. “He used to drive her mad, but he had that knack of making us feel sorry for him which meant we all loved him despite his weaknesses. I thought that with his prostate problems he had changed his ways, that he would actually keep his word and give Mummy a peaceful old age, take her to see some of the world he had become so disenchanted with. How
wrong can one be?”
“I suppose he wanted to play his last card, but by then he was already a loser. Why was he killed?”
We had arranged to meet at midday at a restaurant in the center of Bahía Blanca. Exhausted by the journey and her distress, Mónica had stayed in their hotel. This might be the only chance Isabel had to share her discoveries and her theories with me.
“He made a very big mistake when he fell in love this time.”
“We always make mistakes. Otherwise it wouldn’t be love, it would be convenience.”
“I found these papers in his desk.”
Isabel took a folded brown envelope from her bag and put it on the table next to the bottle of mineral water. I opened it uneasily: after the night I had spent, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know about any of my friend’s little schemes. I would much rather have taken a bus back to Buenos Aires that same day, got home, shut myself in with Félix Jesús and taken a delicious, replenishing siesta.
If only I had.
“They’re about the research my father and his group of assistants were doing,” Isabel said when she saw me staring at a swirl of numbers and equations all over a hand-written report I could make nothing of, partly on account of the handwriting and partly because the technical stuff was beyond me.
“I know they were working on methods to change sunflowers into petrol or something like that,” I said.
“It was maize,” Isabel corrected me with a smile. “But a lot of people are doing similar research. In fact, they’ve already been successful in several countries. They call it bio-fuel. It’s an interesting development, but it’s not going to make the sheikhs paupers. Not in the near future, anyway.”
Having discarded Al-Qaeda and the possibility that Edmundo and his friends’ research might damage O.P.E.C.’s interests as the reasons for his demise, Isabel focused her anger on Lorena and her not inconsiderable charms.
“She used to call him at all hours of the day and night. I don’t think Daddy ever seriously considered leaving Mummy, but it got so that it was impossible for them to be together. He would answer the phone in bed and beg the little tart to hang up, while beside him Mummy was crying her eyes out and could not understand why, yet again, when they were of an age to be looking after grandchildren, her husband’s wanderlust was pushing her to do something she hated doing.”
“Throwing him out.”
That was what she did, and this time it was forever, or so she said. And that was how it turned out, because a bullet fired at point-blank prevented Edmundo from coming back from wherever his lust had taken him.
“But it was three months from his leaving home to when he was shot,” Isabel said. “If you had your glasses on, you’d see there’s a telephone number in among all those figures and equations.”
My prosthesis for myopia had been in the glove compartment of the car stolen by whoever had abducted the blond. I told Isabel it had been taken the night before, but did not go into detail. I had more than enough to worry about with my own confusion and the sneaking feeling that if we stuck our noses into the reasons behind the murder we would be venturing into very dangerous territory.
“I called the number,” Isabel said. “Daddy wasn’t coming back, Mummy was worried what might have happened to him. Think about it, after all those years together, hate soon goes out of the window. All that remains are the shared memories, the need to have him near if only to curse him. It was the tart who answered. I recognized her voice: it was the same I had heard so many times, the same brazen insolence: ‘Let him be,’ she said. ‘Your Dad has the right to be happy.’ What d’you think of that, Gotán?”
Edmundo’s family knew me by the nickname I had acquired forty years earlier at secondary school. I was into rock music, played an electric guitar and sang like Tanguito, but the words to the dreadful songs I wrote were pure Buenos Aires slang, so I got to be called Gotán, back slang for “tango.”
“Gotán thinks lots of things,” I said, using Maradona’s absurd third person. “He believes some of them, understands a few more, and feels sorry about a lot he doesn’t grasp at all. We all have the right to be happy: the tart was right there. Perhaps poor Edmundo really did fall in love.”
Isabel leaned back in her chair, asked me to fill her glass with mineral water, then raised it in a toast, possibly to lost happiness. She admitted her father might have left home convinced he had finally found what he had been looking for all his life. But that was not the point, she said.
“Less than half an hour later, I reckon, my phone rang. A man’s voice told me Daddy was going to die.”
I could not suppress a shudder. Even though the threat had already been carried out, I could not help seeing Edmundo on his back in a pool of his own blood.
“What makes you think the tart was linked to the murderer?”
“I can trace calls,” Isabel said. “The number the man rang from to tell me my father was a marked man was the same one I dialed to hear her voice and her words of advice. The same one that’s written on one of those sheets of paper you can’t see because you’re so short-sighted.”
“Talking of coincidences, chance, or destiny written on a wall somewhere, prepare to be amazed,” I told her, looking over her shoulder toward the door of the packed restaurant.
The woman standing in the doorway was one of those who affect observers like an Arab walking into the Pentagon with a brown-paper package under his arm. Although Isabel had never met her, the little tart was reflected in my pale, unhinged face as clearly as in a mirror.
4
It was very plain Lorena had not expected to see me there. Only a few hours earlier she had left me in a petrol station toilet three hundred kilometers away in the middle of the Patagonian desert, so how could she expect that the handsome fellow sitting at a restaurant table in Bahía Blanca would be Cárcano’s closest friend? It took a few seconds for the shock to sink in, and her companion was busy searching the restaurant for a free table, so that when she took him by the arm and whispered the news in his ear, he stared straight through me, then started pulling her toward the street door.
“Is that her?”
Isabel’s question went unanswered, because by then I was getting to my feet, furious, and bellowing through my nose like someone with chronic sinusitis. A waiter carrying aloft a tray laden with dishes got in my way, and by the time I was outside all I saw was a car with an official number plate and tinted windows speeding off the wrong way down the street, then turning the corner, also against the traffic. I stood there expecting to hear the crash as it rammed a vehicle coming the other way, but there was only a babble of klaxons. After that the treelined streets were as quiet as usual. Isabel came out of the restaurant and grabbed me by the arm. Again she wanted to know if it was Lorena, and why had she run off like that if she did not even know who we were. As we walked back to the table I had abandoned so abruptly, I had to explain what had happened the previous night.
“Then the man with her must have been the one who warned me Daddy was going to die,” she said, stretching out her hand as if asking me to pass the salt. I did so, not looking for any ulterior motive. “Put it down: it’s bad luck to hand it straight to someone.”
We have no way of anticipating when our everyday reality is about to disintegrate. There are always signs, of course, but how are we to spot them? A telephone call at midnight, an unexplained journey with a dead body at the end of it: this should be enough to alert even someone who is fast asleep, but we refuse to make connections.
My friendship with Edmundo Cárcano in no way required that I give my life for someone who had already lost theirs. Nor did it demand that I swear over his dead body that I would not rest until I had avenged him. He had not been killed in his Buenos Aires home in Villa Crespo while drinking mate tea with his petite bourgeoise wife of thirty years, but in his isolated beach chalet, possibly (to my great envy) as he was making love to a twenty-year-old whose loveliness would guarantee anyone she was with almost a
nything but a quiet old age.
“I can see he wasn’t in a position where anyone would feel sorry for him,” said his widow of a few hours when we met that afternoon in her hotel lobby. By now she was much calmer and more resigned. “But nobody deserves to be shot simply for giving in to temptation.”
She was looking down as she said this, putting me in the position of a priest hearing her confession rather than a friend.
“There isn’t going to be an investigation or anything.”
“I couldn’t care less now,” Mónica said.
“But his body should be in the morgue, not buried in the ground. He was your lifelong companion and my friend—”
“He betrayed me. He was unfaithful. And the sinner has to pay—although, as I said, I think he paid too high a price.”
I learned later from Isabel that for years her mother had belonged to an evangelical sect. One of those electronic churches where God appears on demand and collects his ten percent.
“Daddy’s adventures started in earnest when she had her menopause,” Isabel told me. “He went from being a typical office lover, a sad sack who falls for the woman at the desk opposite, to a roving Don Juan who came home late making the most ridiculous excuses. Since the Holy Catholic Church only offers punishment and penitence and no prospect of happiness, Mummy threw herself into the arms of those soul-stealers in search of a bit of relief.”
“I never saw Edmundo that way. He never boasted of his conquests. He was a reserved, rather gloomy man. Lorena must have performed a miracle if she rescued him from that.”
For a while at least he had looked jovial, with the exhausted but contented appearance of someone who spent his nights on the tiles. He was like one of those boxers who make a comeback in the ring: weary and flabby, but still with the courage of a true fighter. The crowds applaud them even if they get knocked out in the first round.
After all—and this is nothing new—love and death are the only stable couple I know.
No One Loves a Policeman Page 2