Death Going Down

by María Angélica Bosco

  “I’d like to think it was suicide,” said Blasi. “That’s the most logical. Lahore is sure of it.”

  “It is the most logical. But logic has the inherent defect of being personal.”

  “According to Lahore, señora Eidinger was a friend of Soler’s and had been to visit him that night. Soler had given her a key to the main door but not his flat so as to avoid problems because he leads a, shall we say, carefree life. Not finding him at home, she left. When she got to the lobby she met him arriving home at that very moment. There had been jealousy between them and threats to end the relationship. They surely had a vicious argument and she ingested the cyanide.”

  “How? Where was she carrying it? Let’s suppose she had it in a capsule. Did Soler get her a glass of water so she could take it?”

  “She might have had it in a paper wrapper, just as they prepare powders in a pharmacy. All you have to do is put it on your tongue for it to take effect.”

  “Do you believe that’s what happened?”

  “It’s not in Soler’s nature to drive a woman crazy enough to take her own life. He’s too superficial.”

  “We must accept that there are women who don’t need any encouragement to stir up an atmosphere of tragedy.”

  They had crossed the avenue and were walking along a quiet, sunny suburban street between two rows of small houses whose windows were all shut fast. The homes of the discreet middle class.

  “There are the others,” said Ericourt, “who, like anyone involved in strange events, seem curious. But let’s not get ideas. A bit of limelight turns simple faults that common people easily forgive in one another into monstrous anomalies. Luchter is a hard-working and meticulous man, with no known vices. He’s lived in the apartment for three years and set up his surgery there. Frida Eidinger is not one of his patients. His nurse didn’t know her. He has fought hard to get where he is now, having travelled from Germany as a legitimate immigrant just before the start of the war. As for the Czerbós, general opinion pities Rita, who is subject to her brother’s despotism and miserliness. He came to Argentina in 1946, she followed him in 1947. Boris was a photographer in Hamburg until 1944. The Iñarras are the longest-standing residents along with Soler. They lived there when Don Agustín’s first wife was alive. Aurora Torres takes pleasure in telling the story of his second marriage to his daughter’s nursemaid…”

  Ericourt had stopped outside a pretty, English-style house, set back from the pavement, behind a small garden.

  “According to the caretakers,” cut in Blasi, “Don Agustín is one of those men who intoxicate themselves with charity so as to spread their beneficent wings over those around them.”

  “Don’t be so prejudiced against charity. This is Eidinger’s house,” said Ericourt, interrupting him.

  3

  A Home and a Victim

  The man who answered the door was tall and smartly dressed. His curly brown hair was beginning to thin at the temples, announcing a maturity that his slim figure would belie for many years yet. A wide mouth and sharp nose between small eyes lent his face an anxious, rat-like mobility.

  As he greeted the police officers, whose visit he had been expecting, Gustavo Eidinger showed more insecurity than hostility or mistrust. His wife’s mysterious death had put him in the difficult situation of having to carry out his husbandly duties and face the malevolent curiosity of neighbours, without a verdict that might clarify whether or not she had wronged him. He was a man given over to the torturous conflict of doubt.

  His furtive looks and nervous gestures (he was chewing the end of an unlit pipe that he passed repeatedly from one hand to the other) betrayed his unease. Santiago Ericourt, accepting his invitation, entered the small living room with Blasi behind him. The house had not lost the smart, impersonal coldness of a place only recently decorated. Perhaps the sole touch of warmth was provided by the photographs that stood on a side table, one of sunlight on branches and the other of Frida in Tyrolean dress.

  Gustavo Eidinger was closely following Ericourt’s roaming gaze when he noticed it coming to rest on the photo of his wife. Then he broke the silence that had settled over him and his guests since his words of greeting and invitation to enter the living room.

  “They’ve promised to hand the body over to me tomorrow. I’ve decided that the funeral will be a private affair straight from the morgue.”

  A wise plan. Any ceremony would be difficult to handle. He tried to speak naturally but his subdued tone slipped into one of humiliation.

  “It’ll be a while longer before they return the personal items from the laboratory,” said Ericourt.

  “I know. I’d like to have all this over with as soon as possible. I’ve been thinking about going away.”

  “Good idea.”

  Gustavo’s words revealed his overwhelming need to talk about Frida. Reluctant to stray from his memories, he sought to prolong her existence by constantly inserting her name into the conversation. The silence stretched out once more into minutes of reticent expectation, a silence between people attempting to set the course of a conversation.

  “So how can I help you?” Eidinger said at last, offering them cigarettes.

  “You’ll soon see more or less why we’ve come,” said the Superintendent. “I’m after some personal information that need not feature in the official investigation.”

  “I’ve already told you everything I know about my wife. I don’t think I can add much more.” Eidinger was not avoiding his gaze, but he was not helping the situation with his feigned calm, either.

  “There are, however, certain things that you can perhaps help us understand better,” Ericourt insisted.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as your state of mind on the night of the 23rd of August when you arrived home and didn’t find your wife waiting for you.”

  Eidinger held up the palms of his hands.

  “What could I do? I waited for Frida to come back so she could explain why she’d gone out at such an ungodly hour.”

  “Very reasonable,” said Ericourt approvingly, “but had anything like that happened before?”

  “Never,” Eidinger answered hurriedly. “At least as far as I knew.”

  “Did you often go out at night?”

  Eidinger hesitated.

  “To the Club once or twice a week.”

  “You never supposed that your wife might go out too?”

  “She was always at home when I got back.” Caught off-guard, he sounded sincere.

  “Was your relationship with your wife affectionate, of late?”

  Eidinger answered like a docile lad who folds under the weight of insinuations.

  “We’d had some arguments but not what I’d call serious ones. Frida’s character was as impulsive as mine.”

  “You hadn’t been married for very long, am I right?”

  “About a year and a half.”

  Ericourt half closed his eyes as if trying to remember something.

  “You married in Germany.”

  “We married by proxy,” Eidinger corrected him, “I met Frida in Zurich. She’d been living there since the end of the war. Frida was orphaned very young and spent periods with different relatives. She didn’t have a fixed address.”

  “Yours wasn’t a long engagement, then.”

  “No,” Eidinger admitted, somewhat embarrassed. “We hardly had time to get to know one another. Frida accepted my marriage proposal straight away—” He stopped himself and scrutinized his visitors’ faces, fearing his words might make him appear smug. “She was very eager to leave Europe,” he said by way of explanation.

  “Oh, yes? And why was that?”

  Eidinger looked at him in surprise. Did he really have to spell out something so simple?

  “She was afraid of another war. Like so many others she felt deeply wounded by what they’d just gone through.”

  “Why didn’t you marry before you came back, then?”

  “We arranged that I would ret
urn to Buenos Aires first to get the house ready. Frida preferred it that way. In her letters she told me she’d travel over as soon as possible. I must confess I sought that brief separation as a test.”

  “Do you still have the letters?”

  Gustavo seemed offended.

  “Of course. Frida kept them in her desk.”

  Really? How strange. You don’t give love letters back unless the relationship has ended. Why had she kept them instead of him? It was time for the thorny question.

  “Was yours a happy marriage, señor Eidinger?”

  His pause answered better than words. Happiness admits no doubt.

  “Well, deep down, yes, but daily life, you know…”

  “So, in other words, it was not.”

  Eidinger retreated in search of solid support for his married life.

  “That’s not what I meant to say. Don’t get me wrong. Frida and I didn’t know each other well. We had to get used to one another after we married, and we didn’t have long,” he concluded painfully.

  He had abandoned the good-natured attitude of earlier in their conversation and was now a man ready to bristle bad-temperedly in defence of his private life. This made him easier to attack.

  “How old was your wife, señor Eidinger?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “At that age a woman has a past. What can you tell us about that?”

  “Frida was very discreet,” the widower said, poking at the tobacco in his unlit pipe. “She didn’t talk about herself.”

  The living room door creaked slightly. In poked the whiskery, rectangular head of a fox terrier. The animal ran to Ericourt’s feet and began to lick his shoes.

  “Stop that, Muck!” Eidinger ordered. The dog raised its snout and ears then went back to doing just the same.

  “He’s Frida’s dog,” Eidinger explained. “He does that to anyone he sees for the first time.”

  Ericourt had stood up. Blasi patted the animal’s back affectionately.

  “Could you show us the letters you mentioned, señor Eidinger?”

  “Of course. They’re in Frida’s bedroom. Would you like to go with me or should I bring them down?”

  “We’ll follow you.” Ericourt shot a sidelong look at Blasi.

  The pretentious decor of señora Eidinger’s bedroom contrasted with the rest of the house. As if he ought to apologize for things that were not his responsibility, Eidinger explained that his wife had insisted on decorating the room that way. The walls were hung with finely striped, black-and-white paper. The furniture was made from white sycamore and the bed, a wide divan pushed against one of the walls, had a black satin cover. The dressing table was a simple stand under a rectangular mirror, and on it, carefully arranged, were an ivory-handled manicure set and a matching powder compact, eau de Cologne bottles and a lipstick case all made from glass and black enamel.

  On two small bedside tables stood a pair of standard lamps with white parchment shades, the bases of which were female torsos sculpted in ebony. The room’s centrepiece, however, given its size and colour, was a picture of the zodiac symbol for Scorpio that hung above the bed.

  Muck had followed them, and was rushing from one side to another looking for the presence that caused currents of cold and sorrow to circulate around the room. Entering that room, now abandoned once and for all, was like opening a box of memories.

  Ericourt pointed to the picture and turned to Eidinger.

  “Very interesting.”

  “Frida brought it with her from Switzerland. She frequently redecorated her room when she spent a lot of time in the same place, but she never got rid of the Scorpio picture. It was her star sign, she was born in November.”

  “I take it she believed in astrology.”

  “Absolutely. It was her religion.” Eidinger took a packet of letters out of a drawer. “Here’s what you asked for.”

  On the envelope was a name, nothing more: Gustavo.

  “May I take them?” Ericourt asked. With a brief glance he had checked there were no other papers in the drawer.

  “If you could read them here… There aren’t many, since Frida didn’t write very often. I’d rather not part with them.”

  He must have given them back to his wife reluctantly, now they were his again. The small victories of death.

  “My secretary speaks German. He can read them.”

  Ericourt held the packet out to Blasi.

  “Gustavo,” he began to read out loud. “I feel like the happiest woman in the world to know I shall soon be there, in your country. I want to be there so much that now the mountains bear down on me like a cage. I wander through the landscape we so enjoyed together ‘with eyes rendered heavy by a mournful regret for vanished illusions’ like in ‘Gypsies Travelling’.” Blasi stumbled over the words, and his pauses and corrections stripped the reading of any emotion. “I feel troubled by how lonely my life has become since I have been dreaming of our home in peaceful Villa Devoto, which now holds for me the same charm I once found in the Swiss lakes…”

  Then the tone of the letter shifted.

  “…I went to see my cousin Carlos to ask him to represent you at the ceremony. I have all the documents now. It will be funny to make my vows to him. But I am not sentimental and I can do without a traditional wedding, holding my fiancé’s hand and gazing into each other’s eyes as we say ‘I do.’

  “I shall see you soon, Gustavo. It will be so sweet to live together all that way away. ‘To love at will, love and feel in the country that resembles you!’ Your Frida.”

  The next letter had been written during the journey. Frida described how happy she was to be aboard the ship that would bring her to Buenos Aires. She shared details about the weather and very little about the passengers, since she gave the impression of being a discreet girl who talked with her fellow travellers as little as possible “to avoid their questions”. She asked Gustavo to tell her about the changes he was making to the house and ended abruptly by mentioning the long hours she was spending on deck, looking over the water, her heart “distracted at times from its own clamouring by the sound of this plaint, wild and untamable”.

  “That’s Baudelaire, from his poem ‘Man and the Sea’, explained Gustavo modestly. “All the quotes in the letters are from Baudelaire.”

  “A favourite poet of hers?”

  “I imagine she had Baudelaire’s poems to hand at the time. Frida was very straightforward.”

  Blasi was skimming through the third letter.

  “She refers to some photographs here, señor Eidinger.”

  “Ah, yes,” Eidinger said very seriously.

  “Read it out,” Ericourt ordered.

  “I have done as you wished and brought with me the fewest possible keepsakes. You said you wanted nothing of my past, but I have not been able to part with my beloved Scorpio or some of my favourite photographs. I do not believe you will object to having at home the Frida from a while ago, before you knew me. It would be very silly to argue over that, my dear. Silly and unworthy of our reasonable love.”

  Gustavo was chewing the end of his unlit pipe.

  “Nonsense between fiancés,” he explained. “Retrospective jealously. Frida found that sort of thing amusing.”

  “Could you show me the photographs if you still have them?”

  “Of course. They’re in my studio. I wanted to enlarge them. Frida was right to bring them. They’re all I have left of her now.”

  Once again the painful aftermath of death, the definitive abandonment made clear.

  What Gustavo called his studio was up in the eaves, an attic room normally used for storage. It had been equipped to serve as a dark room. The window was boarded up with only a rhomboidal opening to let light in, which could be covered up with a specially shaped block of wood.

  The photos of Frida were on the table, three in total. She wore the same stereotypical smile in all of them. In one she was wearing a swimsuit that showed off her attractive curves. The second wa
s a portrait. The kindest comment one could make about the third was that it had surely been taken in a nudist camp. Her husband’s misgivings were made sufficiently clear.

  Blasi smiled to himself as he considered how the puritanical Ericourt would react. The photo had to have come from some “student body”. In the background you could make out the emblem on a building. Surely the group’s insignia.

  The three men returned to the ground floor in silence. Muck ran down at Blasi’s heels.

  “He’s taken a liking to you, poor thing,” commented Eidinger.

  An idea formed in Blasi’s mind.

  “If you do go away, who will you leave him with?”

  Eidinger shook his head.

  “There’s no one I could leave him with. Frida didn’t make any friends here.”

  Blasi bent down to pat Muck.

  “In that case, leave him with me. The poor thing seems very sad.”

  “I must admit I don’t know how to handle him.”

  “Why don’t you let me take him now as a trial run? If he gets used to me then later on you can leave him with me for good.”

  Eidinger seemed to consider it.

  “Why not? Let’s give it a try,” he said eventually. He went off to look for a collar and lead. Muck did not object to having them put on. Ericourt observed the scene with amusement, as if it caused no delay.

  “Oh, tell me one more thing!” he exclaimed, once Eidinger had buckled the collar. “Where did you meet Czerbó?”

  Eidinger straightened up and fixed his skittish eyes on Ericourt.

  “Rita Czerbó came from Europe on the same boat as Frida.”

  “Czerbó said he knew you.”

  “That’s true. We met through business. He must have told you that I bought material from him for my photographs. That’s my hobby. I have a lot of time to spend on it. I live off my private income.”

  Once again, he seemed to be trying to over-explain things. Childish behaviour.

  “Good day, señor Eidinger,” said Ericourt as he turned to go. “We may call on you again.”