Ramón went about the housework, always keeping one eye on the conversation between his aunt and the Nolans. They gave Espie a photograph of Hayley, hoping she would give them a clue as to the whereabouts of their daughter. Espie revealed that their daughter was dead.
Mr. Nolan held his wife to him and let out a woeful wail. It was harsh, but better for them to hear the truth, Ramón supposed, than to conceal it.
Espie told them that Hayley’s body could be found in a forest, not too far from a large white manor. Did they know of such a large white manor? There was a manor nearby, they said.
“You’re not thinking of the right one,” Espie insisted. “Go farther west. This house is on a large plot of land. The murderer hid her under some leaves, knowing that no one would set foot on the estate until springtime when the residents would resume their annual hunt.”
Espie revealed to them that the man had not been quite as clever as he’d thought. In her mind she saw what appeared to be some small shiny item, which lay embedded near the stump of a large oak tree. The killer had been in a desperate hurry, and he’d tripped. As he fell, this little trinket slipped out of his pocket. What was it? A ring, perhaps? Or a lighter? They would have to find it as soon as they reached home, or some curious animal or bird would steal it from them for good.
“If you find that, justice will be done. But hurry. The murderer is enraged. He is ready to kill again.”
Perhaps it was a rifle cartridge, the little shiny trinket, Ramón surmised. They had computers in those places, and records of the people who owned guns, and which cartridges fit which model. If they found the cartridge, they would know who the culprit was.
Although the couple was utterly grief-stricken as they bade Espie goodbye, they had embarked on a new beginning. They had a strength of mind about them that had not been present when they first arrived.
Usually visitors would leave Espie vegetables or clothes, to show their gratitude. These two had left Belgian chocolates.
James Scorley was incensed. Fifty hours ago he had left his flat. London, Chicago, Miami, and Santa Cruz had not been on his list of places to visit, but he’d passed through every one of them during those past fifty hours. Now a fool in La Paz was trying to take him in because James was foreign: the fool thought he could get a lot of money out of him.
“I could buy the car for that price!” James barked.
The attendant shook his head and held out his hands, indicating he did not understand what James was saying. James hissed, but gave him the dollars. He had no choice. He was in a hurry.
“Don’t expect to get it back,” he muttered, having no intention of bothering with La Paz on the return journey. He’d dump the car on the way to Santa Cruz. He had an open ticket onward from there. He would go through Dallas, Amsterdam, and then home. Or perhaps he would stop for a while in Amsterdam.
The attendant ignored him, pleased to get the dollars. The vehicle he gave him was a black Yugo. One of the best cars on the lot, James decided with disdain.
It was a long, complicated trek he had ahead of him. He was not familiar with the route but had done his research, having had plenty of time during the first leg of his journey to contemplate the execution of his plan.
He hadn’t dared risk bringing a knife or a gun onto the plane unnecessarily. Any object had the potential to be a weapon, if he wanted to use it as such. The flight attendants had given him towels. These he would use to smother the old woman. They wouldn’t leave much of a trace on her throat. People would think she’d had a heart attack. She was old. She was weak and brittle. She was living in a remote area. There would be nobody to come to her aid. She was blind too. She didn’t stand a chance.
He had heard the news on television. Police had found the body of that Nolan tramp in the wood. The parents said in an interview that some “wise woman” in South America, of all places, had told them where their daughter could be found. Nonsense, some people said, but it startled James. What else had this contemptible woman said about the incident?
The police claimed to have a “fresh lead” that would help them catch the killer, that they were aware he was responsible for other crimes in the region. James knew that they often made statements of this nature in order to unsettle the perpetrator and to reassure the community until such time that they turned their minds to some other topic. Even so, he had better mute that ruinous tongue lest it give rise to any more “leads.”
“They’re looking for workers for the rescue services,” Ramón told Espie. “I’m planning to go down to the town tomorrow morning so they can interview me.”
“Good,” said Espie. “It would be better for you to find a steady job like that, in the town. I may not be long for this world, and you will probably leave this place once I’m gone.”
“What sort of talk is that?” Ramón asked her.
“Ah, only talk. I think you would make a fine officer.”
He looked at her curiously, but she said no more to him. Since she had given her blessing, he assumed it safe to go to town in the morning. Perhaps he would even succeed in getting the job.
“Will you be all right here alone the whole day? I don’t really need to go. I could get someone to stay with you, or you could come with me.’”
“I’ll be fine, Ramón, off you go to town tomorrow.”
James was sick of driving. He was sick of passing through rotten godforsaken shanties. He was sick of sitting in a stifling old car. He really was sick. But he was close. His heart pounded with a depraved excitement in the knowledge that he was fast approaching his destination.
He braked alongside a tired old woman sitting in a rocking chair on the wooden porch-front of a ramshackle house. She had a water basin beside her, filled with chontaduros. One at a time, she picked up a fruit, peeled it, and dropped it into a bowl.
James suspected that she might know where he could find the blind woman, assuming she herself was not the one he was after. He addressed her from the car. “Excuse me, I’m trying to find a woman.” The woman paused to direct her attention towards the stranger. “I’m looking for a particular woman,” he snickered. A thought struck him and he stopped laughing. “I hear that this woman is wise—she can speak with the dead. A friend of mine has died and I’d like to find out if she’s with the gods.”
For a moment neither of them spoke. Then the woman raised a finger and pointed further up the road.
“A bit further up,” she advised. “You will find people who can speak with the dead. They will put you on the right path.” Then silence. James remained uncertain about this peculiar character.
“What does her house look like?” he asked, trying to catch her out.
“Large,” she responded quite simply. “A red door.”
“Red, is it? Like the fruit in your hand?”
“Far redder.”
Ramón arrived home and let out a long sigh. He crossed over to his aunt who was sitting in the armchair. He kissed her forehead, but she didn’t stir. He peered at the basin of half-peeled palm fruits. Sitting back on his haunches, he took a good look at his aunt, at this blind woman.
“Tía,” Ramón called, laying a hand on her. She woke from her sleep and opened her eyes.
“Oh, Ramón. I needed that siesta.” Espie yawned. “How did it go?”
“I didn’t get the job,” said Ramón glumly. He yawned too. “They said that I’m too far from them up here, that my response in the event of an emergency would be too slow. They said to come back when we have better roads! Ha! That will be the day! How about you—did you have a good day?”
“Indeed I did. Now don’t you worry about that job. Is the bypass finished yet?”
“No.”
“You’ll get another year out of those industrial developers. They won’t finish it this season. The winds are changing.”
“We’ll stay here another year or so. Now, let me fix a bite of food for dinner and afterwards we’ll have chocolate.”
James continued
the upward climb. The road became narrower, if it could be called a road. A dirt track, rather, barely three meters wide. He kept as close to the left-hand side as he could possibly manage. The rocks on that side soared towards the heavens. On the passenger’s side was a sheer vertical cliff. At the bottom of the canyon he spotted a tiny stream.
He scowled. He had to be close to the old crone by now. The entire trek had been a real nuisance to him, a waste of both time and money. He drew on the rage that was burning inside him. He wanted to get worked up, to steep himself in tension; he needed to force up his blood pressure, needed the strength to embrace his horrible goal. His resolve grew as he drew nearer.
A thick blanket of fog obscured the view ahead. James drove even slower along the treacherous trail. He turned right and then left, right, and a sharp left again.
Peals of thunder roared in a deafening command and lightning scarred the once perfect sky. The long drought ended abruptly: rain cascaded down the chasm walls. Mud sloshed and oozed over the surface of the perilous path.
James veered right once more, and then he and the car skidded into the fatal abyss.
TRANSLATED FROM IRISH BY ABIGAIL MITCHELL
[ITALY]
GIULIO MOZZI
(AKA CARLO DALCIELO)
Carlo Doesn’t Know How to Read
Carlo (that’s me) doesn’t know how to read. He reads a great many books. When he reads these books, Carlo doesn’t remember a single word. All Carlo remembers from the books he reads is what he sees. When Carlo reads, he often shuts his eyes. Sometimes he falls asleep. When he sleeps, he sees things. When he wakes up, he goes back to reading. He doesn’t always start reading from the same place, because he doesn’t always remember the exact place he left off at when he fell asleep. Sometimes when Carlo sleeps, the book closes, or the pages turn, or the book falls off the armrest or the bed. With some books, Carlo hasn’t read even half the pages; others, he reads the same pages over and over. When he reads a page he’s read before, sometimes over and over, Carlo doesn’t recognize the words. Carlo doesn’t recognize the words because he doesn’t see them. If the page includes the word “door,” Carlo doesn’t see the word “door.” He sees a door. If the page includes the word “blue,” Carlo doesn’t see the word “blue.” He sees something blue. Every time Carlo rereads a page with the word “door,” the door Carlo sees is a new door. Every time Carlo rereads a page with the word “blue,” the blue things he sees are different shades of blue. When proper nouns show up on a page, names like “Mario,” “Raymond,” “Liz,” “Evelyn,” or “Alioa,” this is the only time Carlo doesn’t see anything at all.
He doesn’t see the words “Mario,” “Raymond,” “Liz,” “Evelyn,” or “Alioa,” and he doesn’t see anybody who might correspond to the words “Mario,” “Raymond,” “Liz,” “Evelyn,” or “Alioa”—not in the same way that a door—an ordinary door—might correspond to the word “door.” And so, every time a word like “Raymond,” for example, shows up in a book, Carlo doesn’t recognize—doesn’t see—that word, and so he sees things being done in a scene, but he doesn’t see who does them, and he doesn’t know—he can’t know—that the Raymond who does these things is the same Raymond—as indicated by the word “Raymond”—who appears in other scenes: so all that he, Carlo, knows how to do is imagine himself, Carlo, in that scene doing these things. To be more precise, what Carlo sees is a series of actions that frame a space, and using his imagination, he, Carlo, sets someone inside this space framed by actions, someone like himself, like Carlo, and so—you might say—that someone is Carlo. As a result of all this—that is, because Carlo doesn’t know how to read and reads a great many books and reads them in the way that’s been described—Carlo, every time he reads, sees himself inside this framed space. When he tells his friends about his experiences when he reads—because Carlo has some friends he likes to talk to about his experiences when he reads, hears, or sees—there comes a point when his friends always say, “Okay, so it’s like this, Carlo: you really identify with the story you’re reading.” When Carlo hears this, that is, every time he tells his friends about his experiences when he reads, he answers, “No, I don’t identify with the story. I can’t identify with a space that’s framed by a series of actions. The best I can do is see a space, a space where I fit, and stick myself inside.” When he tells his friends about his experiences when he reads, Carlo never mentions the words in the book—especially not the characters’ names, since he never remembers them, since he never sees them—instead, he talks about what he sees. What almost always happens, for Carlo, is that when he talks about what he sees when he reads a book, or sleeps on a book, he realizes, while he’s talking, that he remembers things, can see many more things in his
memory than he seemed to be able to remember before he started talking in the first place. When he tells his friends about a book (if the memory’s strong enough: if not, he gets confused, lost, and says, “I don’t remember anymore”), Carlo imagines himself reentering the space where he was the first time he read the book, and from there, within that space, the action going on around him, Carlo looks all over, looks at things, notes what’s there, what he didn’t notice before when he was reading, and he names these things, comes up with words—apparently, for Carlo, spoken words are completely from written words—and so as he sees these things, bit by bit, he realizes that they’re there. If his friends don’t interrupt—and sometimes they do interrupt, saying things like, “But I read that one—none of this was in the book!,” or, “But how can you give us a whole scene when there’s only one sentence about…”—but if his friends don’t interrupt, Carlo can go on for a half hour or more about what’s in the room—the furniture, the knickknacks, the doilies, the lamps, the curtains, the windows, the floor, the blank spot on the wall where a picture used to hang, the fingerprints on the glass of the small china hutch, the water stain in the corner over the door, the dent in the plaster from where the doorknob always hits it, that curl of dust just peeking out from under the sideboard, the crack in the base of the tiny porcelain statue on the sideboard, the stitching coming undone on the pocket of the tan raincoat thrown over the chair. Once, in a bookstore, there was a reading by one of Carlo’s favorite writers, and an influential critic introduced the writer, and then the man read a little from his book, and then, when the audience (barely anyone showed up, like always) was invited to ask questions, Carlo stood up and thanked the writer for the stitching coming undone, and he, Carlo, stood there talking in the tiny, nearly empty room about that stitching coming undone on the pocket of a raincoat that appeared in a scene in the book by this writer, one of Carlo’s favorites; and he, Carlo, spoke for so long that the critic finally interrupted him, thanked him, and pointed out that someone else in the audience might want to talk too, and that’s when
the writer (one of Carlo’s favorites), looking embarrassed but also a little annoyed, told Carlo, “Look, I really don’t remember anything about any stitching coming undone. Besides, I don’t see what’s so interesting about it anyway.” This was the event that spurred Carlo to find himself some friends so they could share their experiences with reading, and it was during these discussions (usually held in the small back room in the bar by the Poggio Rusco train station, where the friends—a few from Poggio Rusco, a few from surrounding towns—could find some peace and quiet) that Carlo realized, while they talked, that he really couldn’t read—he could only see—and while his friends could read, could look at books and read them, read the words, words like “door” and “blue,” even proper nouns like “Raymond” and “Evelyn”—while his friends could do all this—they really couldn’t see. “When you talk about a book,” one friend told him, “it’s like you’re talking about a dream. And it’s always hard to tell with dreams if you’re describing what you saw or if the act of trying to describe a dream has set your imagination o in a new direction so that now you’re actually adding new things to what you remember, things you’re dreaming
up right there on the spot, even if you don’t know that’s what you’re doing, until everything’s mixed up, and you can’t keep what you remember from the dream and what you’ve invented around the dream straight, and you wander around inside your vision of the dream—or book, in your case, Carloand it’s not like you’re wandering around inside a memory, it’s like you’re exploring an entirely new place full of entirely new things.” That’s it exactly, Carlo answered. And from that time on, Carlo (who for years had kept a Dream Diary where he didn’t describe the dreams he had the night before—he didn’t describe them because he didn’t remember them: Carlo’s the type who never remembers dreams—instead he’d describe what his body was like when he first woke up, and what his bed was like—pillow, sheets, blankets—in those moments right after he rolled himself out of bed), he, Carlo, decided to keep a Reading Diary where he’d jot down what he just experienced while reading, not in words—he doesn’t see them—
but in drawings. And sometimes, when he’s with his friends at the bar by the Poggio Rusco station, Carlo shows them his Reading Diary, and his friends laugh a little, but they find it moving, too, when they see how Carlo reads—Carlo, who doesn’t know how to read—and how he takes these books and turns them into sequences of scenes, and the elements from a book keep coming back—the doors, the blue things, the shirts, the telephones, the men playing cards, the fish coming up from the water then falling back, the lit windows, the rain, the cars with their headlights on at dusk—and there’s no question that these are always the same things, the things that make up the story, the objects and things that motivate the action going on in the story; and yet they’re never really the exact same things: a door’s a door but never the same door; an evening’s an evening but never the same evening; a kitchen table’s a kitchen table but never the same kitchen table; a fork next to a plate’s a fork next to a plate but never the same fork next to a plate. And even Carlo, his friends realize, when they meet for one of their evenings at the bar by the Poggio Rusco station, even Carlo’s not the same exact Carlo; no, he’s really not the same Carlo; he’s always a Carlo but never the same Carlo; he’s always recognizable as Carlo—the Carlo they all know—but every time, before they recognize him, before they perk up and say, “Ciao, Carlo,” or say to one another, “Here he is, here comes Carlo,” they hesitate, aren’t quite sure—they recognize him and they don’t recognize him—and it’s only through (but this is in just a fraction of a second) some gesture from Carlo, something he’ll say, or some distinctive piece of clothing he’s wearing that his friends finally come to recognize that what’s in front of them, what’s walking to their table, is what they’ve always called “Carlo” it’s only then, after this—different Carlo joins them at their table and finally fills his empty space, the space that was empty before and that Carlo’s friends had been maneuvering around, it’s only then that his friends are able to say “Carlo,” and give this object a name, and through the name, “Carlo,” they can tie this object, Carlo, to all the Carlos that through all the weeks and months and years now they’ve called “Carlo” every time. And it’s through this recognition, through this name, “Carlo,” that Carlo’s not some stranger for them; he’s not some apparition who’s appeared between the tables and the men playing cards; he’s a friend of theirs, he’s Carlo, and they know him well, have talked with him a thousand times, and they love him, really love him, because Carlo, eccentric and confused Carlo, Carlo with his head in the clouds, is always Carlo, the Carlo who gets their imaginations going, and without him, without Carlo, they, his friends, would only have words and names in the lives they’re so attached to, and never any visions.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 17