The Secret in Their Eyes

by Eduardo Sacheri

  Morales nodded. He said nothing, and for just that reason, I realized that he’d detected the confused urgency in my sudden requests and didn’t want to distract me by asking for an explanation. When I had the picnic pictures in my hands, I quickly selected two wide-angle shots that showed the entire group. A long minute passed.

  “What’s going on?” Morales inquired, daring to ask the question even as uncertainty choked his voice.

  I had separated the four chosen photographs from the others, and now I was going through the piles again, entirely concentrated on finding another shot of a certain face. In the end, two more pictures interested me, so I wound up holding six altogether. I shoved the other 168 aside rather brusquely. Maybe I should have explained myself to Morales or at least given him some indication that I’d heard his question. But my idea was so sudden, and at the same time such a gamble, that I was obscurely afraid it would vanish into thin air if I spoke it aloud. So, with a sweep of my arm, I cleared a spot on the table, nearly knocking the entire photo collection to the floor in the process, and then I placed in front of him, too hastily for good order, the six pictures that had struck my eye. At last, in lieu of answering his question, I asked him one: “Do you know this guy?”

  Morales stared at the photographs, obedient but puzzled. Never before that Friday afternoon had he paid any attention to those features, but he was condemned to see them in front of him forever, even when his eyes were closed. That was going to happen, but Morales didn’t know it yet, so he simply answered, “No.”

  I turned the photos toward me, trying not to blotch them with my fingers. In the two pictures from the picnic, a boy wearing a light-colored T-shirt, dark trousers, and sneakers, standing close to the extreme left of the group, offered the camera his profile: very pallid complexion, hooked nose, black, curly hair. Sitting almost in shadow at a table littered with plates, the remains of food, and half-empty bottles, the same kid gazed at a couple on the dance floor, and more precisely at Liliana, with her long, straight hair and somewhat too heavy makeup, waltzing in the foreground with an older gentleman. The other photograph from that same soiree gave a slightly better view of the kid; he held Liliana almost at arm’s length, his elbows rigid, as though both wanting and fearing to touch her, and fixed his eyes on the floor, not on her face, much less on her promising neckline.

  The fifth photograph had surely been taken in the living room of her home. In the center of the picture, the teaching diploma, held up to the camera with pride and a limitless smile by the same girl, namely Liliana, some years older. A group of friends (neighbors?) stood around the graduate, who was flanked by a man and a woman, no doubt the proud parents. And there was the same kid, now a young man, in this case on the right of the shot: the same curly black hair, the same nose, the identical hard expression on his face, his eyes turned not on the camera but on the girl, whose smile lit up the whole photograph.

  And then came the last and best picture of the lot (best because of the naked simplicity with which, from out of the frozen silence, it announced the truth that was growing into a certainty before my eyes). This shot showed the same young guy, turned almost completely away from the action (which consisted of the group gathered around the graduate as before, but without the diploma) and staring at a shelf on the wall beside him. On that shelf, almost level with his nose, was a framed photograph filled with the smiling face of the same girl, the said Liliana Emma Colotto. For the kid gazing at it in ecstatic contemplation, that portrait had an additional advantage: there on the shelf, Liliana was totally exposed, totally unaware, totally at his mercy. That was why he didn’t even notice that the photographer was taking another shot, and so all the friends, relatives, and neighbors looked at the camera except him, lost as he was in his silent worship, safe from the others’ eyes. He couldn’t know, obviously, that another guy, who would happen to be me, fifteen hundred kilometers away and several years later, would look at him looking at her, couldn’t know that I’d just found him out, almost by a miracle (if we think it’s good to discover the truth), or with fatal shrewdness (if we’d rather consider that the truth is not always the best harbor for our uncertainties), or through an unacceptable stroke of luck (if we limit ourselves to identifying the links in the delicate and apparently random chain of events).

  For a moment, I thought Morales would remain aloof from the mental rebellion that was consuming me. But when I managed to focus a minimal part of my attention on him, I noticed that he was rummaging around in his satchel like a diligent schoolboy. He took out a kind of album, with gilt vignettes on its cloth covers. He opened it. It held no photographs; the thin cardboard pages, separated by sheets of wax paper, were empty. It took me a while to realize that various marks slightly scored the smooth surface of every page, and then I understood that Morales had removed the photographs from the album before arranging them in piles and offering them to me. But what was he doing now? As persnickety as he was, I thought it unlikely he was searching for a misplaced photo. He was turning over every page, with the precise movements of someone who doesn’t want to make a mistake. The album was thick. He stopped on a page close to the end of the volume. There the divider, the sheet of wax paper, was filled with curvy marks drawn in what looked like India ink. At the bottom of the sheet, in a corner, there was a list, apparently of proper names.

  Morales raised his eyes to the photographs I’d just shown him. He chose one of the two from the picnic. Lifting up the marked sheet of wax paper, he slipped the photo under it. When the India ink marks perfectly matched the outlines of the figures in the picture, I understood. There was a number written in the space occupied by each figure. Morales laid his finger on the outline at a point under which, barely visible, was the image of Liliana’s eternal observer.

  “Nineteen,” he murmured.

  We both turned our eyes to the list of names.

  Morales read the heading: “ ‘Picnic at Rosita Calamaro’s country house, September 21, 1962.’ ” Then he ran his index finger down the list until he came to the line he was looking for. “Number 19: Isidoro Gómez.”

  13

  Although he’d already read it twice, once silently when he received it and then again aloud, Delfor Colotto decided to go over it one more time while his wife was out shopping, just to be sure he’d understood it right. He put on his glasses and sat in the rocking chair on the back porch. He read slowly so he wouldn’t have to move his lips, but still, if he’d been in front of the house, where anybody could see him, he would have felt uncomfortable.

  When he finished, he removed his spectacles and folded the letter along its original creases. The stationery was smooth and very white, unlike the skin of his hands, which resembled coarse sandpaper. He’d understood the letter, despite his initial fear that some of the words, elegantly handwritten in black ink on both sides of the page, could stump him. “Imperative” was the only one that had given him trouble. He’d had an idea of what it might mean, but he’d wanted to be sure, and so he’d picked up the dictionary the girl had left in the house, and that had done the trick: his son-in-law needed help—urgently, a lot, whatever it might take. He’d understood the rest of the letter with no trouble. At the end, his son-in-law had written, “I leave it in your hands,” because he was “certain that you’ll devise the best way to go about it.” And just here was the thorny problem that had kept Delfor Colotto on tenterhooks ever since the arrival of the letter, two days previously: What could that “best way” be?

  He got to his feet. The only thing he could accomplish by staying in the rocking chair would be to make himself more nervous. Maybe his plan wasn’t a good one, but he’d devised nothing else. His son-in-law should have been clearer in his letter. The older man felt the younger one hadn’t told him the whole truth. Did he consider him unworthy of his confidence? Or—worse—did he think he was an idiot because he hadn’t finished school? Don’t get worked up about it, Colotto told himself. Maybe his son-in-law hadn’t given him more details beca
use he hadn’t wanted to make him even more nervous. In that case, he’d had a point, because the little Delfor Colotto knew and the great deal he imagined were already driving him crazy, and he hadn’t slept a wink for two consecutive nights. More knowledge, or a confirmation of what he feared, might well be worse. Besides, he’d always been fond of his son-in-law, even though that “always” sounded a bit exaggerated, because how many times had he seen him? Three, four at the most? So he didn’t really know him, but hell, that wasn’t the young guy’s fault, after all.

  These thoughts gave him the impetus he needed. He went into the house and walked to the bedroom. On the back of the chair a shirt was hanging neatly. Colotto put it on over his undershirt, stuffed the shirttails into his trousers, and readjusted his belt buckle. Then he left the house and strolled to the corner, pausing briefly on the way to greet a couple of his neighbors, who were drinking maté on the sidewalk. Dusk was falling, December had let loose one of its infernal heat waves, and some people were trying to find a bit of fresh air outside.

  At the corner he turned right. “We’re practically on the same street,” he thought. And he felt uncomfortable, as though something had been put over on him. He stopped in front of a house just like his and just like all the others built according to the government’s plans for residential development. The little yard in front, the porch, the door flanked by two windows, the American-style asphalt roof. He clapped his hands. From behind the house a pair of dogs came running and barking into the front yard, only to be silenced almost completely by a female voice from inside the house. A rather small woman with white skin and light eyes came out onto the porch, drying her hands on the apron she wore over her skirt.

  “How are you doing, Mr. Colotto? What a surprise to see you over this way.”

  “Still here, Miss Clarisa. Hanging on.”

  The woman seemed uncertain as to how to continue the conversation. “And how’s your wife? I haven’t seen her around the neighborhood for a long time.”

  “She’s plugging along, you know, getting a little better.” The man scratched his head and frowned.

  The woman interpreted this gesture as a desire to change the subject, and therefore she raised her hand to open the little black door before she spoke again: “Come in, please, come in. Would you like some maté?”

  “No, thank you, Miss Clarisa, thanks a lot anyway.” He held up both hands, palms outward, as if softening his refusal. “I appreciate it, but this is just a quick visit. The truth is I was trying to locate your nephew Humberto.”

  “Ah …”

  “It’s for a job. The supervisor over in the municipal lumberyard asked me to do a little carpentry work on his house, see, and I might need an assistant, and so it occurred to me that maybe Humberto …”

  “It’s really too bad, Mr. Colotto, but it so happens Humberto’s gone to help my brother in the country, you know, out there around Simoca.”

  “Ah, right.” Colotto thought things were going too smoothly. The fact that the small talk perfectly suited his plans made him, if possible, even more nervous. “What a shame. The thing is, I don’t want to hire someone I don’t know, if you see what I mean.”

  “Oh, sure I do, Mr. Delfor, and I thank you for remembering him …”

  “Well, look, Miss Clarisa.” Now. It was now or never. “How about Isidoro? What’s he doing? Could he be interested in a temporary job?”

  “Noooo …” Her “no” was long, high-pitched, convinced, trusting, innocent. “Isidoro went to Buenos Aires almost a year ago, didn’t you know that? Well, not a year ago. A little less, to tell the truth. But when you miss somebody, it seems longer, you know how it is.”

  Colotto opened his eyes very wide, but he figured the woman would interpret that as simple surprise.

  “Let me see,” she went on. “We’re in the beginning of December …” She raised her hands to count on her fingers. “So he’s been gone around ten months. It was the end of March, you know. I mean, I thought you knew. Well, I guess I don’t go out very much, what with my rheumatism and all …”

  “Of course, Miss Clarisa, of course.” (Almost there, Delfor, he thought. Control yourself, for God’s sake, stay calm.) “But I had no idea. I imagined he was working somewhere around here.”

  “No. There wasn’t much work for him last summer. A few little odd jobs here and there. Nothing to speak of. Oh, I used to tell him he wasn’t trying very hard. It made him mad sometimes when I said that, but it was true. He’d stay shut up in his room all day, staring at the ceiling. He looked sick, he never went out. Never, not even to have fun with his friends. I’d ask him, what’s wrong, Isidorito, tell Mama what’s wrong with you, but who can figure kids out? He wouldn’t say a thing. And … well, he’s turned out to be just as reserved as his father, may he rest in peace, and you know, getting two words out of him was a real triumph. And so I let him be. He’d put on a long face and stalk around the house like a caged lion. Finally, one day he hit me with the news that he didn’t want to stay here anymore and he was going to Buenos Aires. It made me sad at first, you know—my baby, my only son, and so far away. But he looked so bad, so … it was like he was angry, you know? So in the end it seemed almost like a good idea for him to go away.”

  The woman wanted to go on talking, but standing up for so long made her joints ache and obliged her to keep shifting her weight from one leg to the other. She settled for leaning on the porch pillar. “Anyway, I’ll tell you something, Mr. Delfor. Every month, he sends me a money order. Every month. With that and my pension, I can get along really well, you know?”

  One more to go, Colotto thought. One more. He said, “That’s just great, Miss Clarisa. I’m happy for you. Look, the way things are these days, finding a full-time job so fast—”

  “Right, right,” the woman said, agreeing enthusiastically. “That’s exactly what I tell him. I say, you have to run and thank Our Lady of the Miracle, Isidorito. Well, but I call him Isidoro, because if I don’t he gets annoyed. A miracle, the way things are these days. He should be grateful. Because when he got there, he had a recommendation from my brother-in-law for a job in a print shop, but that didn’t work out. But then, soon afterward, in fact right away, he found a job on a construction site. Not only that, but it seems they’re building something really big, so the job’s going to last awhile.”

  “What a break! It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?” Colotto swallowed saliva.

  “I know, Mr. Colotto, I know! It’s just fantastic! An apartment building in the Caballito neighborhood, he said. Down there around … around Primera Junta, I think. Could that be right? Real close to that train, the sebway or whatever it is. The building’s going to have something like twenty floors.”

  The woman kept on talking, but Delfor Colotto missed most of the rest of her conversation, because he was trying to decide whether he should be happy or sad about what he’d just found out. He made an effort to concentrate on her words and save his evaluations for later. She was talking about going to Salta for the Miracle Fiesta if her rheumatism would allow it, because she was very devoted to the Blessed Virgin.

  “Well, all right, then, Miss Clarisa, I’ll be on my way.” Suddenly, he remembered his excuse for being there in the first place. “And if you hear about anybody who needs a temporary job … I mean someone you could recommend, of course.”

  “I’ll keep my ears open, Mr. Delfor. Now I have to tell you, I don’t get much news, stuck inside the way I am, but if I hear anything, I’ll let you know, and God bless you.”

  Delfor Colotto walked back home, bathed in the dim glow of the recently installed street lights. It was strange. Two years before, when he was president of the Development Association, he’d moved heaven and earth to get streetlights put up in this part of town. And now, he felt about street lighting the way he felt about almost everything else; he didn’t give a shit.

  He stepped into his house and looked at the clock. It was too late to go out to the phone booth. T
hat would have to wait until tomorrow morning. He heard the sound of pots and pans—his wife was busy in the kitchen. He decided not to tell her anything for the moment. As he walked to the bedroom, he took off his shirt. He hung it up again on the back of the chair, went back outside, and sat on the porch. There was a very slight breeze.

  14

  Ten days after the evening with Morales and his photographs, I made an appointment and went down to Homicide to meet Báez. When I opened the door to his office, he invited me in and offered me some coffee, which he sent one of his staff to get. As always happened when I spent time in his company, I let a feeling of respect for him get the better of me, even though I found such admiration uncomfortable.

  He was a large man, hard-featured, built like an armoire. He was—how many?—fifteen or twenty years older than me. It was hard to figure his age exactly, because he sported a thick mustache that would have made a teenager look old. I think the thing that aroused my admiration for him was the calm, direct way he exercised his authority. I’d often watched him moving among other policemen with the controlled self-confidence of a pontiff convinced of his right to command. And even though I’d been the deputy clerk of the court for a couple of years by then, I sensed that I would never in my life be able to give an order without my heart jumping into my throat. I don’t know what I was more afraid of: that the people under me would resent my directives, that they wouldn’t obey me, or that they’d do what I wanted and laugh behind my back, which was almost the most distressing possibility of all. Báez was surely untroubled by such cogitations.

  That afternoon, however, I felt I had a slight advantage over the man I admired so much. I was riding a wave of euphoria because of my hunch about the photographs. What had begun as not much more than an aesthetic observation had turned into a lead, the only one we had.