The Secret in Their Eyes

by Eduardo Sacheri

  He sank into silence. While he drove me to Palermo, certain memories came into focus. I was almost happy to realize that they were causing me pain, because my coldness during the preceding hours had frightened me. Perhaps that was why I found myself wondering what that prick Romano was up to. Was he still eager to bump me off? This was no minor question—the response to it would determine whether or not I had to keep living in Jujuy—but I didn’t know anyone who could answer it. Báez had died in 1980. I hadn’t dared travel to Buenos Aires back then, even though four years had passed since Morales’s revenge and the attack I’d escaped by a hair. I did, however, write a long letter and send it to Báez’s son, because I thought—and still think—that children should know their parents’ true value. And beyond that, I was going to feel lost without Báez. That was the main reason why I planned to go from the airplane to the wake, from the wake to the burial, and from the burial back to the plane.

  The wake was held not in Sandoval’s house but in a funeral parlor. I’ve always hated the sterile spectacle of our funeral rites, ever since I was a boy. Those gauzy shrouds, the candles, the fearful stench of dead flowers—they all seemed to me like vain artifices devised by bored illusionists to dissemble the honest and appalling bluntness of death. And so I entered the funeral parlor without stopping in the small chamber where the casket lay. Alejandra was getting through the midnight hours by trying to fall asleep in an armchair. I think she was happy to see me. She cried a little and explained something that had to do with the last treatment her husband had undergone, when there was no hope for anything but an impossible miracle. It sounded to me like a story worn out from having been repeated all day long, but I didn’t have the heart to interrupt her. When it seemed she’d finished, I ventured to speak: “Your husband was the best guy I ever knew.”

  She turned her eyes away from me and stared off to one side. She tried blinking several times, but there was nothing she could do to suppress her tears. Nevertheless, she was able to reply, “He loved you so much and admired you so much. I think he stopped drinking so you wouldn’t be afraid for him when you weren’t here to help him.”

  It was my turn to cry. We hugged each other in silence, finally able to ignore the false rituals of that place and honor the memory of her husband and my friend.

  Afterward, she made me some coffee, and we talked a little about everything. As it was well past midnight, it was highly unlikely that any stray mourners would be coming in, at least not for the next several hours. Family members who hadn’t yet done their duty could be expected to show up early the following morning, before the burial service. So Alejandra and I had time to talk. I spent a good while bringing her up to date on my exile in Jujuy; she wanted to know all about Silvia. Pablo had told Alejandra we’d moved in together, but her woman’s curiosity required much more information than what Sandoval had been satisfied with in our letters and telephone chats. I began by telling her that Silvia was the younger sister of the clerk in a civil court in Jujuy and then went on to explain that in such a tiny milieu, Silvia and I couldn’t help meeting; that she was very beautiful; that the aura I carried around with me in those distant lands, the aura of the mysterious political exile with the obscure past, had perhaps aided my conquest of her; and that I loved her very much. When I finished, I believed I’d said everything, but that was where Alejandra’s interrogation began. I did what I could, without ever shaking off my surprise at the vast number of details one woman can wish to know about another. It was getting close to three when I finally persuaded her to go home and get some sleep. Nobody was going to come at that hour, I said. I think she liked the idea of my remaining alone for a while with all we had left of her husband. And I think I too anxiously welcomed the prospect.

  There weren’t many people at the graveside. A few relatives, a couple of friends, several court colleagues. I didn’t know some of them, and the sensation that I was among strangers struck me as perhaps the most convincing proof of my own exile. I took comfort in seeing the familiar faces of some old coworkers, with whom I exchanged greetings and friendly conversation. Fortuna Lacalle and Pérez, our former bosses, were there as well. The retired judge had aged so much that his body seemed to be on the point of breaking into pieces, but his foolish face remained unscathed in the battle against the passage of time. Pérez was no longer a public defender; to the astonishment of all sensible men and women, he was now a judge on the sentencing court.

  While the others were returning to their vehicles, I paused a moment to throw a handful of dirt onto the grave. I turned around to make sure there were no witnesses and saw that the rearguard of the departing group was made up of none other than our old clerk and our equally old judge. I picked up a big, wet clod of dirt and started breaking it into pieces. As I threw them, one by one, onto the little mound, I murmured a kind of prayer, a thoroughly profane prayer: “On the day when the assholes of the world throw a party, those two will welcome the others at the door, serve them refreshments, offer them cake, lead them in toasts, and wipe the crumbs from their lips.”

  When I was finished, I walked away smiling.

  More Doubts

  “I haven’t left out anything,” Chaparro thinks as he returns home, carrying a bag of warm bread. How can it not be warm, seeing that they practically open the bakery for him?

  He’s starting to develop an old guy’s habits. It exasperates him to notice them, as others might be disturbed by discovering wrinkles or gray hairs. Until his retirement, sleeping was a reward and a pleasure to which he abandoned himself without reserve and from which he emerged slowly and lazily; now the hours tick away as he lies there, wide awake. So when he’s weary of flopping around in his bed and the first light coming through the shutters dazzles his eyes, he gets to his feet, dresses carefully—he’s afraid of turning into one of those consummate geezers who go out wearing T-shirts, suspenders, and espadrilles—and walks a block to buy bread.

  When he returns, he prepares maté and carries the calabash gourd to his desk, along with two small loaves, which he carefully sets on a plate to avoid scattering crumbs. It strikes him as mildly funny to consider that his two marriages produced, if nothing else, at least some refinement in his domestic habits.

  When he sits down, he reads over the last completed section of his book, and as he progresses, he grows increasingly gloomy. For one thing, he’s not sure it makes sense to keep those pages at all. Do they contribute to the story he’s telling? If the story he’s telling is Ricardo Morales’s or Isidoro Gómez’s, then the answer is no, the last section has nothing to do with them. But if the story he’s telling is his own, the story of Benjamín Miguel Chaparro, then it’s yes; his flying visit to Buenos Aires in May 1982 can’t be excluded.

  He falls to questioning himself again about which story he’s writing, and he’s assailed by fresh doubts as well as by old, reiterated ones. Because if he’s writing a sort of autobiography, he’s leaving out a slew of persons and circumstances that were very important in his life. As a case in point, what has he said about Silvia, who was his second wife? Little or nothing. He’d have to check, but it seems to him he’s mentioned her only in his bothersome previous chapter, the one on Sandoval’s death. But after all, what more could he add about Silvia? That they lived together for ten years, the last four of them in Buenos Aires? That she accompanied him when he dared to return to the capital at the end of 1983, when no one was afraid of the military regime and its henchmen anymore? That during those last four years, Silvia was the one who seemed to be in exile, far from her family, her friends, and the society she’d complained about when she lived in it, but which she’d begun to miss the very first day she arrived in Buenos Aires, a city she always found hostile and aggressive?

  Chaparro himself helped her pack her bags, borrowed a car to take her to the airport, and then, with the scrupulous care of a notary, sent her whatever items of their mutual possessions she asked for, whenever she asked for them, from an electric toaster to the ex
quisite edition of Moby-Dick they’d bought together on an excursion to Salta.

  Then they stopped talking to each other. Chaparro learned that she’d gotten remarried, but he never tried to find out much about the subject. It was around this time that he decided to have nothing more to do with women, that is, with women capable of mattering to him and, therefore, of causing him pain. It seemed so easy in the beginning that he told himself he’d made a wise decision. It had been a mistake to try to share his life with anyone, because in the end, he’d always regretted making the attempt. He’d lost Marcela through sheer boredom and Silvia by her own choice. He didn’t want to keep on losing. It was better to withdraw from play. There would always be a woman close at hand, willing to offer him ephemeral pleasure in exchange for some of the same for herself. He’s glad he moved to Castelar, as he’d so fervently desired to do before he was forced to leave for Jujuy. The house he’s in, the house in which he sits writing his story, looking out into the garden every now and then and occasionally getting up to fix more maté, used to be his family home. Is he going to put that in a novel? It makes no sense. It’s better to return to Morales and finish writing the few remaining pages. And after that?

  After that, nothing. Well, except for returning the typewriter to the court, to the goddamned court presided over by the Honorable Irene Hornos, may lightning strike her, because everything (distancing himself from women, occasionally getting close to one without any sort of serious commitment, living the life of a methodical widower in Castelar) had worked just fine for him until February 9, 1991, when the recently appointed Judge Hornos came through the door of the clerk’s office, returning after an absence of fifteen years.

  Chaparro had promised himself he wouldn’t let that minx drive him crazy again, because he was fine the way he was. And because he didn’t need a new and brutal disappointment, a new plague of insomnia, a new hole in his heart. It was on this account that he greeted her with a cool “How are you doing, Your Honor? It’s been a long time,” even though he saw her surprised look as she leaned toward him, advancing her cheek for a kiss, and she became confused; expecting familiarity, she found a wall four meters high, without a single crack, and she had to reply to it, “Fine, and yourself? It certainly has been a long time.” And then, because the situation made him angry or anxious or sad, or all three at once, Chaparro muttered some excuse about having left a pile of work unfinished on his desk and hurried away. He moved with sufficient speed to escape her perfume, the same scent as always, but he wasn’t fast enough to avoid hearing the usual responses to the usual questions, how’s your family, Irene, they’re well, the girls are too, thank God, and your husband, my husband’s fine, he works a lot but his health is great; may lightning strike him, too, that son of a thousand bitches, I beg his pardon because he’s not guilty of anything but marrying her, but still, it wasn’t right to do this to him, not now, not when he was doing so well, whether alone or occasionally, fleetingly, accompanied.

  From here on out, he knows, everything will lose its taste, or worse, everything will taste of Irene—the air and his morning toast; insomnia and the kisses of whatever other woman he happens upon—and so maybe he ought to apply for a transfer, but no, that wouldn’t do, because he’s not up for changing to another court and a new set of colleagues, so there’s no solution of any kind, except to be quiet, let time pass, ignore the fire in her eyes when they meet his, and turn his gaze well away from her neckline when someone approaches her from behind her desk with documents to be signed, and living like that is pure goddamned torture.

  No. He’s definitely not going to write a novel in which he’s the protagonist. He’s plenty sick of himself as it is, too sick to delight in contemplating his own navel. But he’s decided not to cut the chapter where Sandoval dies. Morales’s accursed story is woven together with his own life. Didn’t he spend seven years counting goats on the Andean Plateau because he got involved in that tragedy? He doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t grumble about that part of his past. But that’s precisely the reason why he’s going to leave everything he’s written intact.

  And there’s another question: Everything he’s written—what’s he going to do with it? The pages make a pretty pile on his desk, where before there was nothing but a ream of blank paper lying beside his Remington. He should give the completed manuscript to Irene. She likes it when he brings her his writings. In the last month and a half, not a week has passed when he hasn’t visited her with a couple of chapters in hand. Is it any good, his novel? She always praises it. Ah, let it be bad. Because if it’s good, her praising it means she likes his writing, period. But if it’s bad and she praises it anyway, it’s because she wants to please him. Chaparro suspects that the reason he writes is to give his work to her; he wants her to know something about him, to have something of his, to think about him, even if only while she’s reading. And suppose it’s bad and she praises it because she’s fond of him, nothing more? That’s to say, she may think what he writes repulsive, but she doesn’t want to wound him, not because she loves him, not in the way Chaparro wants her to love him, but because she has a soft spot for him as a comrade, as a former boss, as a current subordinate, as an abandoned dog that inspires pity, poor little thing.

  Chaparro exclaims aloud, “That’s enough of this stupid fucking shit,” which in less coarse terms indicates that he must put an end to his meditations and get to work. He hears the whistling of the kettle and realizes that while he’s been absorbed in his flights of amorous fancy, the water for his maté has reached the temperature of an erupting volcano. Tossing the water, refilling the kettle, and waiting for it to reach the right temperature allow him to gather the strength of spirit he needs to start writing the final, definitive chapters of his story. Which ends in the middle of a field. In the shed with the big sliding door.

  After he pours the contents of the kettle into the thermos, a very thin column of vapor shows him that the water is now at the correct temperature, and Chaparro escapes from his distractions. In his mind, he’s traveled three years into the past, back to 1996, the year that marked the real end of the Morales story, twenty years after the false end in which all of them (Báez, Sandoval, Chaparro himself, and even that son of a bitch Romano) had naively believed.

  He leaves the thermos and the gourd with the maté on his desk and goes to the sideboard in the living room. He knows the letters are in the second drawer, each in its envelope. The paper isn’t yellow yet, because the letters aren’t so old. And even though he’s never reread them, he thinks he can remember them pretty exactly, almost verbatim, in fact. But as he doesn’t want to take a chance on distorting the truth he holds in his hands, he removes the letters from the drawer to take them to his desk. He plans to quote from them directly whenever he considers it necessary to do so.

  Why this obsession with exactness? he wonders. Just because, is his first reply. Because the truth, or Ricardo Morales’s own words, which in this case are the ultimate truth, lies in those letters, is his answer after a moment’s reflection. Because working this way, with documentary proof in hand, selecting what’s important and quoting from it, is the way I worked for forty years in the Judiciary, he adds. But that first response is also true.

  40

  September 26, 1996, was a Thursday like any other, except for the tumult coming from the streets. The first general strike against the government of Carlos Menem was to start at noon, and some members of the Judiciary union who had gathered on the steps of the Palace of Justice above Talcahuano Street were enlivening the scene by tossing the occasional firecracker. At ten o’clock the postman came with the mail. Actually, I presume he did, because my desk was far from the reception counter. One of the interns brought me an elongated, hand-addressed envelope. It bore no official seals and had been sent as certified mail. I stared at the thing, my curiosity piqued by what looked like a personal message amid the mass of communications between government departments that we were used to.

  Thus
distracted, I looked for my reading glasses until I realized I was wearing them. I didn’t recognize the handwriting. Had I ever seen that elegant, neat, upright cursive? Not that I recalled. What I did recall (even though I’d thought I’d never encounter it again) was the name of the sender: Ricardo Agustín Morales, resurrected after twenty years of distance and silence.

  Before opening the envelope, I looked again at the address. I was the addressee, all right: “Benjamín Miguel Chaparro, National First Instance Courts, Criminal Division, Examining Magistrate’s Court No. 41, Clerk’s Office No. 19.” How did Morales know his letter would reach me here? The untimely missive upset me a little, even though … what exactly was bothering me about it? I certainly didn’t hold him responsible for my desperate flight in 1976. It had always been clear to me that the one and only cause of my exile was that bastard Romano. Was I disturbed because Morales was writing me so many years later? No, not that either. I retained a friendly, almost affectionate memory of him. What was it, then? It took me a while before the scales fell from my eyes and I saw the real cause of my agitation. It was that I was so predictable, so monotonous, so like myself that a person could locate me in the same court and the same clerk’s office, doing the same job at the same desk, two decades after our last contact.

  It was a relatively long letter, postmarked in Villegas on September 21. So he’d left the capital. Had he been able to rebuild his life? Sincerely wishing that he had, I began to read.

  First of all, I beg your pardon for importuning you after such a long time.

  Chaparro paused and made a very simple calculation. It had been, in fact, a total of twenty years and a few months.