The Secret in Their Eyes

by Eduardo Sacheri

  He thinks about Irene. Why is it he’s thinking about her just now, right after thinking about his own death? Does he perhaps associate it with her? No. Completely the opposite. Irene attaches him to life. She’s like a debt he owes life, or a debt life owes him. He can’t die while he feels what he feels for Irene. It’s as though he couldn’t be so wasteful as to allow that love to disintegrate and turn to dust like his flesh and his bones.

  But he can’t unbury what’s in his heart, either. There’s no way. He’s thought and thought about it, but there isn’t any way. A letter? That method would at least offer the attraction of distance and thus a safeguard against the possibility of seeing her look incredulous—or worse, offended—or worse, sorry for him—as she reads his words. Presenting himself and speaking to her face to face doesn’t even figure among the options Chaparro considers. He thinks a “mature romance” sounds ridiculous, but declaring his love to a woman who’s been married for almost thirty years seems more than ridiculous; it seems offensive and degrading.

  Common sense, which Chaparro believes he can occasionally locate inside his skull, tells him there’s no reason to be so solemn, so categorical. What’s so inconceivable about starting a love affair with a married woman? He wouldn’t be the first or the last to do that. And so? And so that’s just it. But then again, what he has to say to her is not that he wants to have an affair with her. What he has to say to her, what he needs to say to her, and what at the same time he’d be horrified if she knew, is that he wants to be with her, forever, everywhere, and at every hour, or nearly, because he’s sunk into such a state of adoration that he can make no sense of life without her. But when his thoughts reach this point, Chaparro stops in discouragement, and in his mind’s eye, the Irene whom he imagines receiving his desperate confession adopts the same expression she does when he envisions her reading the letter that in any case he’s not going to write: surprise, or indignation, or pity.

  And after that, nothing. Because after the rejection, there will be no place anymore for even those brief moments he steals from her life, drinking coffee in her office, exchanging small talk with her, pretending he’s dropped in for nothing more or less than a simple chat between two colleagues—ex-colleagues—who always had a good working relationship. Irene seems to enjoy those sporadic encounters, but once he crosses the line, she’ll have no other choice than to ask him not to visit her again.

  All of a sudden, while he’s fixing himself some maté, Chaparro is seized by the same guilty desire he’s felt so often before, but he immediately quashes it. If Irene suddenly became a widow … couldn’t she fall in love with him? He has no assurance of such a thing. So it’s best to leave the poor engineer in peace, let him keep on enjoying his life and his wife, damn him.

  He puts the last typewritten page on the top of the pile and admires its thickness. Not bad for the first month of work. Or is it a month and a half? Maybe so. Thanks to this project, time passes more quickly. A recurring question nags at him: What’s he going to call his novel? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t have the slightest idea.

  Chaparro thinks he’s no good at titles. At first he considered giving each chapter a title, but he’s given up that particular notion. If he can’t conceive a name for the whole thing, he’s not very likely to come up with one for every chapter. He’s already written sixteen, and he’s got many more to go.

  He’s concerned about something else, too: the name under the title, his name, “Benjamín Miguel Chaparro.” He finds that it sounds somehow disagreeable. To begin with, didn’t his parents notice that the last syllable of his first name and the first syllable of his middle name make an unpleasant rhyme? Mín-mi. It’s frightful. And besides, at least two of his names have meanings beyond themselves, and that’s a problem. Take “Benjamín,” for example. In Spanish, a benjamín is a youngest son, like the Benjamin in the Bible; it’s a name not for an adult, but for a little boy, for the youngest of several brothers. Why was it given to him, an only son? And besides, it’s one thing to be a seven- or eight-year-old benjamín, and quite another to be a benjamín of sixty. Ridiculous. But that’s not all. Chaparro means “short and squat.” Calling a human being chaparro when he stands over six feet tall seems to be a contradiction in terms. A casual browser who comes across a book by “Benjamín Chaparro” (the cacophonous “Miguel” has to go) may well picture the author as a short, fat young boy. Or is that all just too convoluted? Won’t most people react more simply? Yes, but it could happen that at least some readers interpret the name literally. And then the author shows up, and the benjamín chaparro, the “stocky little kid,” turns out to be a big, bearish sexagenarian. Too absurd.

  One solution might be to publish the novel under a pseudonym. The thought crosses his mind, but he rejects it immediately. No way. If he manages to publish the thing, and even if he has to pay for a cheap edition out of his own pocket, he wants his name, be it ever so ridiculous, to appear on the cover. He has a simple reason for wanting his name there: so that Irene can see it.

  17

  After I’d put the official seals on the court order calling for an investigation into the current whereabouts of Isidoro Antonio Gómez, after I’d placed the dossier in the file cabinet reserved for cases with fugitive suspects and informed Morales of the good news, I felt quite satisfied with my valiant intervention and safe from the aftershocks of the tragedy. So much so that I returned to my daily routine as the even-tempered boss, the husband home at seven every evening, the nighttime newspaper reader, the competent Judiciary functionary, and almost forgot about the Morales case.

  After a few months had gone by, however, my memory of the matter was unpleasantly refreshed. I had to give a deposition in the proceedings against Romano and the police lieutenant Sicora for illegal coercion and abuse of the two building workers. The statement itself was a formality, a question of confirming my original complaint and clearing up a few details. But I was surprised (and disgusted) when the person assigned to take my deposition turned out to be a very low-level member of the office staff. This was a bad sign: the court seemed to be taking it for granted that the case was going to hit a wall and was therefore limiting itself to merely observing convention. What more did they need to put those two worthless bastards on trial? They had my statement, the declarations of two policemen who’d been on duty at the station, and the medical examiner’s report on the injuries the poor subjects had suffered. I decided to hope for the best, in spite of the misgivings that haunted me. The judge was Batista, who I thought was an honest guy, and whom I knew a little, since we’d worked together throughout the holiday period one January. Besides, as I’ve already said, my commitment to the case was no longer as ardent as it once had been.

  Some time later, Batista himself summoned me to his office. He smiled as he received me and shook my hand warmly, and when we’d taken our seats, he told me that what he was about to say was absolutely confidential and asked me please not to divulge it, because both our jobs would be at stake. Hell and damnation, I thought. What could be so serious? I guess the judge was uncomfortable, because after hesitating for a few moments, he spit out the whole thing as quickly as possible, as if he wanted to get rid of something annoying and distasteful, right away. Without mincing words, he informed me that orders had come down “from on high” (he completed the image by pointing an index finger toward the ceiling of his office, but I didn’t know whether he meant the Appellate Court, the Supreme Court, or the government) requiring that investigation into the murder of Liliana Emma Colotto de Morales be indefinitely suspended and the case closed as unsolved. He added that he couldn’t be much more explicit, but that apparently this young man, this … Romano, my colleague, had a lot of clout in high places. When he said the part about “a lot of clout,” Batista touched his left shoulder with two fingers of his right hand. He wasn’t talking about the Appellate Court, or about the Supreme Court, either. His gesture unmistakably signified “high-ranking military officer.” Suddenly, I r
emembered Romano’s father-in-law, an infantry colonel, and I understood. How naive I’d been not to have taken that connection into account when I denounced Romano in the first place. What a dope. If I needed something to make me definitively disgusted with Onganía and his military regime, that was it.

  “Do you want to hear some more?” Batista asked me.

  I said yes, mostly because the judge clearly wanted to talk.

  “I had to summon him to make a statement. You know that, right?” I nodded. “And as I’d been advised to do”—Batista looked up over his head—“I chose to take his deposition myself.”

  We’re all cowards, I thought, it’s just a question of who frightens us enough. When I’d ratified my earlier complaint, they’d given some entry-level kid with the face of a fifteen-year-old the task of taking my statement. In a matter involving the colonel’s scoundrel of a son-in-law, the magistrate had taken the said son-in-law’s statement himself, sweating with fear the whole time.

  “You can’t imagine, Chaparro,” he said. “You can’t imagine how this guy was strutting around. The attitude he had. He came into my office as if he was doing me a favor, granting me a tiny portion of his infinitely precious time. When I began to ask him about the case, he couldn’t wait to badmouth a variety of people. Not so much you, believe me. He mostly had it in for the two poor bastards who were beaten up on his orders. They were Indians, they were thieves, they were crafty devils. They and all those like them should be killed and the borders closed. And so on. To tell you the truth, I didn’t include in the written statement most of the atrocious things he said, or maybe not any, because if I had I would’ve been obliged to send him directly to jail for public incitement to crime. Just imagine.”

  At this juncture, the obvious question was, “So why didn’t you do that, Your Honor?” But I didn’t ask it. My stomach turned at the thought of that son of a bitch getting away with such rank malfeasance, but after all, I was idle and pusillanimous too, in my way.

  “Anyway, when I asked him about the two workers, he denied any connection with what happened to them, and the matter rested there. I even went so far as to tell him that if the criminal case was sealed, then the internal complaint would very likely be quashed, and the Appellate Court would lift his suspension from work.”

  Wonderful, I thought, we’ll be colleagues again.

  “But to my surprise,” Batista went on, “he was totally indifferent to being reinstated. He told me he didn’t think he could go back to a desk job, not anymore. The time has come for action, he said, because the country’s in danger, surrounded by enemies, atheists, communists, and I don’t know what else. I cut his rant short, had him sign the statement, and sent him off. I had no desire to question him about his plans for the future.”

  The interview with Batista left a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt somehow implicated in the injustice done to some and the sinister impunity granted to others. But not even then did I imagine, however remotely, the consequences those events were going to have for the story I’m telling here, and for my own life.

  “My own life.” I read those words again and ask myself: What was my own life like in 1969? That was the year when Marcela proposed that we have a baby. She didn’t ask me if I wanted a child. It was as if she extracted a corollary from what had been going on and then spoke it aloud: “We could have a baby,” she said, one evening after dinner. We were watching the Channel 13 news. When I looked at her and saw she was serious, I got up and turned off the television, which I never thought provided an appropriate background to any conversation. But there was still something wrong. What was the problem with her? Why didn’t I feel any enthusiasm for the idea of being a father? “We’ve been married four years now. And we’ll be finished paying for the apartment next month,” she added, seeing the look on my face.

  Marcela’s logic operated along a fixed trajectory, like a wrecking ball. We’d met at my cousin Elba’s. Our engagement lasted two years. We spent our honeymoon in Mar del Plata. We had a home loan from the National Mortgage Bank, a one-bedroom apartment in Ramos Mejía, and pretty dishes from the Emporio de la Loza, the “China Emporium.” The next step was the one she was proposing to me, if words spoken in such a watery tone could be considered a proposal. Of the two of us, I was the confused one. The reasonable one was her.

  I could answer only with evasions. Marcela respected my position, however distant from hers. Whether she did so out of submissiveness or coldness or force of habit, I don’t know. She relied on me to give her a straight answer eventually, when I felt like it. To this day, I’m plagued every now and then by the painful certainty that I lost my chance to have a child. I was on the point of writing “to live on in a child” or “to perpetuate myself.” Is that what it means to have a child? I’m never going to know the answer to that. It’s another of the questions I’ll take with me, unanswered, to the grave.

  18

  If I put off going home after I ran into Ricardo Morales on an August evening in 1969, it was mostly because I didn’t want to have to respond to my wife’s question (or proposal, or initiative, or whatever I should call it) on the subject of having a baby. I didn’t know what to say to her, because I didn’t know what to say to myself. When I left the court that day, I didn’t go to the nearest stop for the 115 bus, which was on Talcahuano. I walked across Lavalle Square and sat down for a while under an enormous rubber tree, and when the cold started to get to me, I decided to go to the bus stop on Córdoba Avenue. I got to the Once railroad station around seven o’clock, a time of day when the sea of humanity was at high tide. This didn’t worry me; I could use it as an excuse to wait for a train I could find a seat in, no matter how many I had to pass up.

  As I was moving at a considerably slower pace than the other commuters, I shifted over to one side of the concourse to avoid being jostled. I walked along, hugging the storefronts of the cheesy shops that abounded in the station. I stopped to look at some handmade posters, many of them filled with orthographical horrors, I observed a couple of shoeshine boys, patient as Bedouins, and I noticed the severe grimaces on the faces of two whores who were starting their shift. You see many things when you’re not going anywhere. And then I saw him.

  Ricardo Agustín Morales was sitting on a high, round stool inside a little bar, with his hands in his lap and his eyes fixed on the throng of passengers hurrying to make their trains. Would I have gone up to him if he hadn’t spotted me first and raised his left hand a little in a sign of greeting? Probably not. As I’ve already said, once my conscience had been calmed and my judiciary self-esteem patched up by what I considered a bold maneuver carried out under the noses of the judge and the clerk, I’d gone back with no regrets to my simple, modest routines. Seeing Morales outside of any expected context—that is, anywhere but his branch of the Provincial Bank or the cafe on Tucumán Street—gave me a start; I might even say I found it disconcerting.

  But he’d seen me. He’d raised his hand and produced something that resembled a smile. So I went in, held out my hand, and took the stool next to him.

  “How are you doing?” he said. “Long time no see.”

  Was there some reproach in that last bit, that “long time”? I protested—in my secret heart—such unfairness. Why should I have set up a meeting with him? To tell him that Gómez (who might have been an excellent young man, after all) had disappeared no one knew where, and that I’d done everything I could? I looked at him. No. He wasn’t reproaching me for anything. Facing outward, his feet hooked under the rung of the stool, his eyes still, his coffee cup cold and empty on the counter behind him, he radiated the same aura of unyielding solitude as in almost all of our encounters.

  “Oh, I’m getting along,” I answered, in spite of my sense that he wasn’t expecting a response. “How about you?” These colloquial formalities, empty but safe, provided a comfortable way to continue the conversation.

  “Nothing new,” he said. He blinked, twisted around a little, verified that he’
d finished his coffee, and turned his back to the bar again. He glanced at the greasy-looking clock on the opposite wall. “Half an hour more and I’m through.”

  I saw that it was 7:30. What work was he doing that would be over at eight o’clock?

  “That policeman was right,” he said after a long silence. “He didn’t go back to Tucumán. My father-in-law is sure of that.”

  Morales spoke naturally, as if we were continuing an uninterrupted conversation, one of those where you don’t have to name names because everybody knows who it is you’re talking about. “That policeman” was Báez, “my father-in-law” was the father of his deceased wife, and the person who “didn’t go back to Tucumán” was Gómez.

  “I’m here on Thurs days. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I’m in the Constitution Square station. Tuesdays and Fridays, Retiro.” Every now and then, as he spoke, his eyes followed a passerby. “That’s my schedule this month. I’ll change it in September. I change it every month.”

  A rasping voice came over the public address system, drawing out words and swallowing s’s, to announce the imminent departure of the 7:40 express to Morón from Track 4. Although I had no intention of taking that train—I didn’t want to stand up all the way—the final call seemed like an opportune excuse for me to begin my farewells. Morales’s voice stopped me; once again, he plunged into his subject without preliminaries.

  “The day he killed her, Liliana made me tea with lemon,” he began. I noticed that he was using the verb “to kill” in the third person singular. There was no more “they killed her” or “she was killed,” because now, in his mind, the murderer had a face and a name. “ ‘Coffee’s bad for you, you have to drink less of it,’ she said. I told her she was right. I liked the way she fretted about me.”