I remembered my last conversation with Morales, in the bar on Tucumán Street, and I ventured to disagree slightly with the policeman. I figured it was my turn to offer a hypothesis. “No,” I said. “I think he probably tied him up and waited for him to regain consciousness. The shooting would come later. If not, he wouldn’t have been able to savor his revenge.” All at once, a question occurred to me: “How about the hospitals in the area? Was any wounded patient admitted that day? Seriously wounded, I mean.”
“No. I did a thorough check.”
“Then Morales didn’t trust himself to leave the guy a cripple.” I recounted to Báez the relevant part of my last chat with the widower.
“Well … it’s not so easy,” Báez concluded. “It’s one thing to make plans while you’re lying in bed, staring at the ceiling because you can’t sleep. Carrying out the plan you’ve fantasized about is a completely different thing. Morales being a sensible, stable kid, he must have thought—I mean, once Gómez was in the trunk—Morales must have thought, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Maybe you’re right, maybe he waited for Gómez to wake up.”
“Go figure where he dumped the body,” I made bold to say.
A train stopped at our platform, but very few people got on or off. As evening advanced, inbound trains grew emptier and emptier.
“I don’t believe he dumped him,” Báez said, delicately correcting me in his turn. “He must have buried him very neatly, in a place where he won’t be found for two hundred years, not even by accident.”
An image flashed in my memory: Morales sitting at a table in the little bar, putting the photographs in strict numerical order and arranging them into chronologically organized piles. “That’s got to be it,” I concluded. “He must have planned the operation and chosen the site months ago.” I paused for a while and then spoke into the new silence. “Do you think he did right to kill him?”
A stray dog, skinny and dirty, came up to Báez and started sniffing his shoes. The policeman didn’t shoo the dog away, but when he moved his legs, it got frightened and ran off. “What do you think?” he answered.
“I think you’re dodging the question.”
Báez smiled. “I don’t know. You’d have to be in the kid’s place.”
Those seemed to be his last words on the subject. But then, after a long pause, he added, “I believe I would have done the same thing.”
I didn’t reply immediately. Then I concurred: “I believe I would have, too.”
37
A few hours later, Sandoval and I were sitting in a taxi, barely exchanging a word. It was as if what was about to happen made the two of us too sad to talk, and neither of us felt like pretending; he wasn’t going to act happy, and I wasn’t going to act convinced.
“Cross under the General Paz freeway,” Sandoval told the driver, “and drop us off at the long-distance bus stop.”
We got the bags out of the trunk, and I prepared to say my farewells. It was ten minutes before midnight. Sandoval stopped me. “No,” he said. “I’m waiting until you’re on the bus.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, go on. You’ve got to work tomorrow. How do you expect to get home if you don’t take this taxi? It’s the only one around.”
“Yeah, right, I’m going to abandon you in the middle of Ciudadela. No fucking chance.” He turned his back to me, spoke to the cab driver, and paid the fare.
We moved the bags and joined a small group of people, who it turned out were waiting for the same bus. “It comes from the south, from Avellaneda, and stops here,” Sandoval explained. “You’ll get to Jujuy tomorrow night.”
“Sounds like a lovely trip,” I said sourly.
In spite of everything, when the enormous, gleaming bus arrived and pulled up at the curb in front of us, I couldn’t help feeling a wave of childish excitement at the prospect of going on a long trip, the way I used to feel when I left on vacations with my parents. And so I was glad when Sandoval gave me my ticket and I saw that it bore the number 3: first seat on the right. We looked on as a driver wearing a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie shoved my bags all the way to the back of the luggage compartment after checking my ticket and discovering that I was bound for San Salvador de Jujuy. He put the bags belonging to passengers with tickets to Tucumán and Salta nearer the front. It was certainly true that I was fleeing to the farthest corner of Argentina. Sandoval and I had just stepped away when a loud click signaled that the driver had closed and latched the compartment.
We stood to one side of the bus door and embraced. I started to walk up the steps, but I turned around suddenly to talk to him. “I want you to do something,” I said, not knowing how to begin. “Or rather, not to do something.”
“Don’t worry, Benjamín.” Sandoval seemed to have anticipated this dialogue. “How am I supposed to get loaded if I don’t have anyone to pay for my drinks and bring me home in a taxi?”
“Is that a promise?”
Sandoval smiled without taking his eyes off the pavement. “Come on, let’s not exaggerate,” he said. “You wouldn’t ask so much.”
“So long, Sandoval.”
“So long, Chaparro.”
Sometimes we men feel more secure if we treat those we love a little coldly. I took my seat and waved to him through the window. He raised a hand, smiled, and headed off to catch the 117 bus, which at that hour passed once in a blue moon.
38
ZÁRATE 18. As we headed north, it gave me an uncomfortable feeling, a sense of inferiority or helplessness, to think that all my possessions fit into the three suitcases in the luggage compartment. I hadn’t managed to salvage more than a couple of my favorite books, and I had almost nothing in the way of clothes. One of the bits of bad news that Sandoval had brought me at the rooming house was that most of my wardrobe had been slashed to ribbons, especially the shirts and the sports jackets.
I hadn’t told my mother good-bye. Or anybody at the court.
ROSARIO 45. The headlights tore through the darkness, occasionally lighting up signs like that, white letters and numbers on a green background. Were we already in Santa Fe province? How many kilometers was Rosario from the border with Buenos Aires province? If we’d already crossed the province line, I hadn’t noticed it.
I tried to sleep from time to time, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. The days in the rooming house had been a permanent, monotonous void in which time had stretched out like chewing gum. But so many things had happened in the course of the last day, and I had learned about so many others, that I felt as if time had passed from dead calm to whirlwind.
At the end of our meeting in the Rafael Castillo train station, Báez had given me the address of Judge Aguirregaray in Olivos, about twenty kilometers north of Buenos Aires. I asked Báez what the judge had to do with my case.
“That’s what I started to explain to you at the beginning,” Báez said. “And then I decided it would be best to leave it until the end.”
Then I remembered. “Jujuy?” I asked.
“Exactly. He’s an upright guy, and he’s got the necessary contacts to arrange your transfer. It was his idea, by the way,” Báez added.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Or rather, I think it would be better if you got the explanation from him. He’s expecting you.”
“But the only solution is for me to run like a fugitive?” I couldn’t resign myself to the idea that my life as I knew it was going to end overnight.
Báez gazed at me awhile, maybe hoping I’d get the picture myself. Then, seeing I wasn’t going to, he explained: “Don’t you know what the deal is, Benjamín? The only way to be sure Romano will stop fucking with you is to inform him of the truth. I can set up a meeting, if you want. But if we do that, I’ll have to tell him that the guy who bumped off his little friend wasn’t you, it was Ricardo Morales.” He paused for a bit before concluding. “If you want, that’s what we’ll do.”
Shit, I thought. I can’t do that. I just fucking can’t. �
�You’re right,” I said. “Let’s leave things as they are.”
We said our good-byes without too much effusiveness. He wrote down the numbers of the buses I would have to take to get to Olivos. At that point, I was beyond worrying about the possibility of looking stupid, so I even went so far as to ask him what color each of the buses was.
It took me more than two hours to get there. By the time I did, another cold day in that awful winter was drawing to a close. Judge Aguirregaray’s house was a pretty cottage with a front garden. I told myself that if I ever came back to Buenos Aires, I’d spring for another place in Castelar. No apartments in the city center for me.
The judge in person opened the door and immediately invited me into his study. I thought I heard, in the background, the sounds of children and kitchen activity. The idea that I might have come at an inconvenient time made me uncomfortable, and I told him so.
“Don’t concern yourself about that, Chaparro. There’s nothing to worry about on that score. But it seems to me the fewer people who see you, the better off you are.”
I agreed. After showing me a large armchair, he offered me some coffee, which I declined. Then he began: “Báez has filled me in on all the details,” he said, and I rejoiced, because the mere thought of having to repeat the entire story exhausted me. “What I don’t know is how much you’re going to like the solution we’ve come up with.”
I tried to sound nonchalant when I ventured to say, “Jujuy.”
“Jujuy,” the judge confirmed. “Báez tells me this thug who’s after you, this …”
“Romano.”
“Romano, that’s it. Báez says this Romano is after you because of a personal matter, a kind of private vendetta. Is that right?”
“Absolutely,” I conceded. Obviously, Báez hadn’t given Judge Aguirregaray “all the details.” I noted that the policeman exercised prudence even with his friends, and I thanked him in my secret heart, for about the thousandth time.
“So he’s siccing his own hoodlums on you, so to speak. I think it’s safe to assume they don’t have much in the way of logistics beyond their little group.”
“A sort of suburban mafia,” I said, trying to be funny.
“Something like that. Don’t laugh—it’s not a bad definition.”
“Well, what’s to be done, Your Honor?”
“Báez and I think what’s to be done is we have to send you far enough away that Romano and his boys can’t bother you, even if they discover where you are. So that’s where Jujuy comes in. Because sooner or later, Romano’s going to find out about your transfer, Chaparro. You know how long court secrets last downtown. The solution is to discourage him, to make going after you too complicated.”
He paused a moment, listening to the sound of a woman’s footsteps in the hall until they turned into another room. Aguirregaray went to the door, delicately locked it, and returned to his chair. “My cousin’s a federal judge in San Salvador de Jujuy,” he went on. “I know that must sound like the ends of the earth to you. But Báez and I couldn’t come up with a better alternative.”
I remained silent, eager to hear about the countless advantages of moving to the fucking sticks to live and work.
“As you know, the federal courts are part of the National Judiciary, that is, they operate within our own structure. So what we’re talking about is a simple relocation, a transfer. Your position, of course, will be the same.”
“And it has to be in Jujuy,” I said, trying not to sound finicky.
“You know, even though you may not think so, Jujuy offers some advantages. One is that you’ll be 1,900 kilometers away from here, and it will be almost impossible for the bad guys to bother you. And if they still try to get to you, another advantage you’ll have is my cousin.”
I awaited further explanations on this point. Who was his cousin? Superman?
“He’s a guy with pretty traditional ideas. You can imagine. You know how people can be in the provinces.” I didn’t know, but I was beginning to suspect. “And don’t think he’s a nice, agreeable sort. Nothing like it. He’s almost repulsive, my cousin. And mean as a scorpion. But the main thing is that up there, he’s an important, respected man, and all he has to do is to tell four or five key persons that you’re in Jujuy under his protection, and then you won’t have to worry, because not even the flies will bother you. And if anything unusual happens—say four strangers entering the province in a Ford Falcon without license plates—he’ll find out about it at once. If a vicuña on the Cerro de los Siete Colores farts, my cousin’s informed within a quarter of an hour. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”
“I think so,” I said. Wonderful, I thought. I’m going to live on the frontier and work for a feudal lord, more or less. But at that moment the image of my wrecked apartment crossed my mind and tempered my presumptions. If I was going to be safe under this guy’s protection, it might be a better idea for me to lose the haughty airs and go directly to wherever he was. I remembered the vicarious shame I’d felt years before, when Judge Batista couldn’t find the courage to come down on Romano and backed away from that prisoner abuse case. I too was a coward. I too had reached the line I wouldn’t cross.
While Judge Aguirregaray was seeing me to the door, I thanked him again. “Think nothing of it, Chaparro,” he said. “One thing, though: come back to Buenos Aires as soon as you can. We don’t have many deputy clerks like you.”
It was as if his words had suddenly given me back the identity I’d lost. I realized the worst thing about my eight days as a fugitive was that I’d stopped feeling like myself. “I’m very grateful to you,” I said, energetically shaking his hand. “Good-bye.”
I walked to the Olivos station. The trains on the Mitre Railroad were electric, like those on the Sarmiento Line, except that the Mitre trains were clean and almost empty, and they ran on time. But this moment of local envy showed me how much I missed Castelar. Do all those who are in flight from their past feel weighed down by nostalgia for it? In Retiro, I took the subway, got off near my rooming house, and walked the rest of the way.
“There’s a guy waiting for you in your room,” the desk clerk said to me as I passed. My knees got weak. “He said you knew he was coming. He introduced himself as your bar associate. Is that right?”
“Ah, yes, yes,” I said, relaxing with a laugh that must have sounded excessive to the man behind the counter. Good old Sandoval—he never changed.
He was indeed waiting for me, comfortably stretched out on my bed. We embraced, and I went into the bathroom for a shower. Then we took that taxi, the one in which we barely spoke, to the bus stop in Ciudadela.
39
Lamentably, Sandoval’s final illness and death weren’t sudden, and those of us who loved him had more than a year to get used to the idea. He himself took it with the same metaphysical sarcasm that he applied to everything. For whoever wished to listen (I mean among those close to him, because he was always restrained or even distant with outsiders), he declared that nobody had been clear-sighted enough to give proper credit to alcohol for its beneficial effects on his body, or to him for knowing enough to treat himself with it in such ferocious doses. It was obvious, he said, that this collapse, this shocking and irreversible physical decline, was due to his abstinence, which had broken the sacred equilibrium formerly produced in him by whiskey. He smiled when he said that, and those of us who’d always badgered him to stop drinking were grateful to be treated with such indulgence. Until the end, or almost, he kept working in the court.
During the last months of Sandoval’s life, I spoke frequently with Alejandra—more than with him, to tell the truth. When I did have Sandoval on the line, we confined ourselves (because the high cost of long-distance calls froze us, or because as typical men we considered any outward show of our sorrow basically a sign of weakness) to brief exchanges of small talk, avoiding with expert precision any reference whatsoever that was either very personal or very heartfelt or very melancholy. I asked no
questions about his illness; he asked none about my enforced exile in Jujuy. I suppose the impossibility of seeing each other’s face as we mouthed conventionalities increased the stiffness of those conversations, but neither of us wanted them to stop.
And so I wasn’t surprised when the secretary handed me the telephone one day, saying simply, “Long-distance operator,” and through the echo and buzzing that provided the background for every long-distance communication in those days, Alejandra’s voice reached me: at first controlled, then shattered by grief, and finally serene, perhaps even relieved.
That night I traveled in an airplane for the first time. The grief I felt had taken on a curious form. I’d had so much time to prepare myself for bad news concerning Sandoval that comparisons between what I was feeling and my previous speculations about what I would feel afflicted me more than the plain and simple grief of having lost my friend.
From high in the night sky, I looked down on Buenos Aires, which offered an imposing spectacle. When I arrived at the airport, I felt on my own account the same emotional distance I’d felt on learning of Sandoval’s death. I wasn’t afraid, or even nostalgic. Nor, after six years, was I happy to return. For an instant, a pang of guilt went through me: I hadn’t informed my mother about my flying visit. I didn’t wish either to prolong it or to sadden her by letting her know that I’d spent a day twenty kilometers from her house, as opposed to almost two thousand, and I hadn’t gone to see her. It was better to wait until July, when she’d come to visit me, as she did every year.
The cab driver decided to edify me with a discourse whose object, I soon realized, was to explain why the British would never be able to reconquer the Malvinas with the wretched little fleet they’d just dispatched. I cut him off curtly: “Please don’t talk to me. I need to rest.” And in case my lack of interest made him suspect me of treason against our country, I added, “Besides, I’m Austrian.”
The Secret in Their Eyes Page 22