by Otto Penzler
“That’s their fortune?”
“No, my friend, that’s their fate.”
José Antonio sighs. “And me, what’s my fate?”
“Why, a fortune.” The old man grins. Then glancing at the ledger, he corrects himself. “A small fortune.”
“How much?”
“We’ll have to calculate that. It’s a percentage of the third level. Minus the fees, of course.”
“Fees?”
“Administrative fees. It’s all spelled out in the regulations.”
The assistant clerk computes the figures and presents his tally to the chief clerk, who examines the calculations before initialing them. Drawing a sheet of blue letterhead from a drawer, the old man copies the number, folds the page in half, and slides it across the desk to José Antonio.
Opening the blue sheet, he is surprised. Yes, it is more than he has ever had before, but he would not call it a fortune. He could buy a house with it, he guesses, a nice house, even here in the capital. If nothing changed, he could live a long time on it, for the rest of his life probably, in Bejucal. But the unimaginable riches promised on the placard in Doña Ananá’s cantina, they must have gone to someone else. Still, his prize is enough to do what he has come to do.
José Antonio nods and starts to slide the paper back across the desk, but the old man stops him. “You must sign it as a receipt. Diaz will take you downstairs to the bank for the money and the other paperwork.” The chief clerk stands and extends his hand. “I congratulate you, Señor López.”
José Antonio nods again.
“Just one more thing,” the chief clerk confides as if to save the man from an embarrassment. “It is the custom for a lottery winner like you to tip poor civil servants like us for this good fortune.”
“Is that in the regulations, too?”
“Regulations?” The old man laughs. “Ah, very good, señor. I see we understand each other.” He motions to his assistant. “Don’t worry. Diaz will advise you when you get downstairs.”
Despite Diaz’s advice to leave the money in an account at the bank, José Antonio insists on taking his winnings with him in the woven bag from San Ignacio Falls, which he emptied of his clothing last night for this very purpose. He also ignores the young man’s outraged remonstrations when the lottery winner declines to share a single peso of his wealth with the clerks of the Office of the National Lottery.
6
The young widow, cleaning beans for dinner at the kitchen table, listens sympathetically to José Antonio’s story. He does not mention the lottery winnings he has hidden in his room upstairs behind the cornice of the heavy armoire, nor does he describe Elena’s murder. But the woman learns he was orphaned of his mother and abandoned by his father at the age of five, raised by a great-aunt, and left to fend for himself after her death. He tells Señora Machado that he has come to Puerto Túrbido to track down his father and make peace with the old man.
The widow’s melancholy sigh, José Antonio understands, is not for him but for her own young son, Enrique, whom she pets each time the child tugs at her skirt from under the table where he plays with a wooden rabbit.
“But how am I to find him?” her boarder asks as she dotes on the boy.
The child has distracted her from their conversation. “Who?”
“My father.”
“You need a detective, Señor López. A professional. You must ask Dr. Hidalgo. He will know where to go. Tonight at dinner, ask him where.”
“It sounds as if you need a detective to find a detective.”
The woman’s laugh is soothing as water over stones.
Dr. Hidalgo, unfortunately, does not know any detectives, but one of his patients is a lawyer. The next morning, the lawyer recommends one of his clients, a former policeman recently released from prison. “A temper, yes, it’s true. But a more honest man you’ll never meet. In court, no excuses, no alibis. He stands up and tells the judge, ‘Sure I killed him. He was a pain in the ass.’ How do you like that? Right there in the courtroom. Luis Menéndez, that’s the man for you. Honest as the day is long.”
By the time José Antonio returns to the widow’s house at sunset, Menéndez has agreed to find Juan López. He is touched that a grown son would seek a father who abandoned the family. Between his old friends on the force and his new friends from prison, he is confident that he can track down the old man. It may cost a bit—“Everybody has one hand out,” the former police officer complains, shaking his head—but he has no doubt he’ll turn up the missing father.
His landlady greets José Antonio at the door. “What’s this?” she wonders, pointing to the stuffed blue crocodile in his hand.
“For your little fellow,” he explains shyly.
“Come.” She smiles, taking his arm. “Dinner is ready.”
As he lies in his bed after supper and Dr. Hidalgo’s stories about patients’ afflictions, he realizes it is finally in motion, the vengeance he has sworn. He throws off the covers, kneels on the worn rug, and repeats the vow he hasn’t uttered since his last night in Bejucal, praying before the picture of the Virgin while Maciza watched him from the bed.
Falling asleep, José Antonio rehearses the scene he has imagined night after night as far back as he can remember.
He knocks at the door. His father answers. He drives his knife into the man’s belly.
The one thing that changes, the one thing of which he remains uncertain, is what he should say as the blood pools beneath the figure dying at his feet. Should he declare, “I am the son of the woman you murdered”? Perhaps he should simply curse his father. Or should he say nothing, letting the old man die without explanation, without a word?
As always, he falls asleep without deciding.
When he next meets Menéndez, the detective has no firm leads but remains optimistic. “It’s only a matter of enough time,” the former policeman assures José Antonio, “and enough money.” Menéndez himself has scoured the last three years of records in the notarial archives but has found no reference to a Juan López of the right age and with the correct birthplace. When his client prompts him, he admits it would go faster if he could hire assistants to examine the bills of sale, the tax assessments, the census records.
“By all means,” José Antonio agrees. “Hire whoever you need. The money doesn’t matter. The only thing I care about is finding my father.”
“I wish I had a son like you,” the detective sighs.
Each time Menéndez consults with Juan López’s son, the operation to find the old man grows. Now there are retired policemen in Guadajierno, in Santa Maria, even on the western islands who are working on the case. The lawyer was right; Menéndez is an honest man, always ready with a receipt for each expense José Antonio reimburses. Once, the detective comments on the ready cash his client provides. “My inheritance,” the man explains. “My mother’s money.” Satisfied, Menéndez does not bring up the subject again.
Señora Machado mentions the money, too, but indirectly, when she protests the many gifts her boarder has showered on young Enrique. She knows José Antonio does not work, and yet he does not seem a rich man.
“The money came too late in life to change me,” he stammers, looking down at his shuffling feet.
The widow thinks she has embarrassed him. “No, Señor López, don’t apologize. The poor would not hate the rich if they were all like you.”
José Antonio takes long walks but never exhausts the stones of the city, which stretch, it sometimes seems, all the way to the horizon. Aware of the looks his rough clothes draw, he begins to dress like a townsman. One afternoon, alone in the house with Señora Machado—“Alma,” she insists—he asks the woman how to knot the tie he has bought to go with his new collared shirt and linen jacket. The woman has very small shoulders, he notices, as she fiddles with the cloth around his throat. He thinks of the brown, muscled back of Maciza, of her broad shoulders. The man touches the young widow’s pale face, and she presses her cheek against his h
and.
From then on, they make love by daylight in his room after the other boarders have left for work and while the boy naps. Their discretion is useless, though. Neither can hide the tenderness for the other. Soon, the whole household accepts the arrangement. The Indian girl who helps with the cleaning never interrupts them when the door is closed. And as for the others, Dr. Hidalgo advises the aging roomers that it is physically unhealthy for a young woman, especially a young mother, to be—he chooses his word carefully here—alone. He approves of José Antonio not only for having taken his advice in the matter of the detective but also for listening attentively in the evenings to the stories about his practice.
One afternoon, Enrique runs into the parlor, where José Antonio reads the newspaper while Alma sips her tea. The child asks the name of a bird singing in the tree outside the window. When the man explains it is a canary, Enrique wonders, “But what is it singing about, Papá?” José Antonio glances at the child’s mother, who offers him a sad smile and nods her resignation to what she cannot change.
Now it has been six months since José Antonio first saw the steeples of the cathedral over the harbor. The reports have filtered in from all over the country, nearly fifty of them. A pickpocket in Aldorá reports a Juan López, a tobacconist, to Menéndez, but this López turns out to be an immigrant from Spain and ten years too young. Another Juan López is located on the coast in a fishing village; the age is right, but his right hand has been twisted into a deformed claw since his birth in, it is eventually confirmed, the same village where he still works in the icehouse. The detective counsels further patience.
But Menéndez mistakes his client for a man of the city. José Antonio has not been patient; he has been hunting his father as one hunts in the jungle. The man has seemed to the detective deferential, almost passive, perhaps even indifferent. Offered files to peruse, José Antonio thumbs through a few sheets, sighs, hands the folders back with a shrug. What the ex-policeman takes for boredom, though, is the stillness of a serpent as its cloven tongue tastes the scent in the breeze. Each morning José Antonio has sharpened his knife against the little whetstone he carries in his pocket. In the afternoon, with Alma still dozing amid the tangled sheets, he has eased the leather thong and sheath from the mahogany bedpost, slipped it over his head, and returned to the streets. Prowling until evening, he has sought his elusive quarry in strange neighborhoods, following unfamiliar streets to the slums on the outskirts of the city and beyond to the outlying shanties, tireless and keen as a jaguar trailing prey. And he has ended each day on his knees, promising the Virgin he will not fail.
By the end of the first year, Menéndez has reported to José Antonio on two hundred leads. None pans out. So the detective casts a wider net. Now his agents (as he begins to call them when he seeks payment for their services from his client) send dossiers on a Joaquim López in Plato Negro, a Juan Lopata in some mountain village ten kilometers from Titalpa, even an Englishman named John Loping, an engineer who is building a bridge in the Apulco Valley.
José Antonio still offers the same vow each night beside the bed in which he sleeps alone for the sake of propriety, but he begins to consider the possibility that his father never will be found. He himself has crisscrossed the city, pressing pesos into the palm of anyone who will listen to his story about the abandoned son seeking a lost parent. He has been blessed to God by hundreds of simple folk for his devotion to the old man. “If only my son . . .” one after another has complained to him, almost never finishing the sentence. But even in a great city like Puerto Túrbido, the stone streets eventually powder into muddy lanes, and the muddy lanes finally dissipate into fields that fringe the jungle. After a year of his long prowls through the capital, people begin to recognize him. There is no one left to whom he can tell his story. Maybe, he allows himself to think, the old man is dead.
Though he will admit to no relief at the idea of laying his vengeance to rest, it does please him to think of opening a store with the money that remains, perhaps an ice cream parlor—a year ago, he didn’t even know frozen custard existed, but now he grows cranky if he misses his scoop of chocolate after his siesta. And it pleases him to think of Alma as his wife, Enrique as his son, himself as the master of the house.
He makes up his mind to propose to his landlady, to adopt her child. He even begins to plan the wedding. The man has discharged his duty to his mother, he insists to himself. What more could he have done? He tells Menéndez he has had enough, to cancel the search. But before he can offer the woman the ring he has purchased with his dwindling winnings, the detective visits one Sunday morning after Mass with the news that Juan López, the father of José Antonio, has been located.
7
“All this time and he was right here under our nose.” The detective shrugs. “And you know, we had him in our files since the beginning and didn’t even realize it. Can you imagine? Report number eight. But the birthdate was entered in reverse. Not 1854 but 1845. That’s how we missed him.”
José Antonio remembers the file from the very first group. He even asked Menéndez to take another look; it seemed a close match, number eight. But no, the detective had assured him at their next meeting, nvimber eight could not be his father. And then there were so many others to look at, the ex-convict had explained. He had a lead on a fellow in the south who met the description almost perfectly. It would cost a bit more to check it out, he had admitted, but he felt certain this was the Juan López they were seeking. When the fellow in the south turned out to be left-handed, Menéndez had seemed even more disappointed than José Antonio.
“So how did you find your mistake?”
“Fate, Señor López, divine intervention. I was boxing up the files after you told me to shut down the search, and the contents of number eight somehow slipped from my hand to the floor. There, next to each other on the tiles, were the copy of the subject’s birth certificate and the page of my notebook where I had recopied the date. Somehow, my eyes fell upon the discrepancy.”
José Antonio studies Menéndez. “You’ve checked it all out?”
“You won’t believe this. Your father is in an apartment, not ten blocks from here. He goes by another name—Juan Sánchez he calls himself—but that’s just his mother’s name he uses. It’s there on the birth certificate, the maiden name.”
“The whole time he was right here? In this neighborhood?”
“I tell you, señor, the world is a handkerchief.” The detective sighs. “He was clever, though. It was simple to go from Juan López y Sánchez to just Juan Sánchez. Nothing fancy, just a small thing, but now no one in this whole city knows who he really is. No one but you and me.” The detective smiles, permitting himself a professional’s pride in the job he has done. “I guess he must have been ashamed of abandoning his wife and child.”
As Menéndez passes his client the file, he lays a final reckoning on top of the manila folder. “The last reimbursements,” he explains. Then he clears his throat. “And, of course, I’ve added the bonus you promised in the beginning for actually finding your father.”
José Antonio suddenly understands the detective’s scheme with the disgust of a man who, emerging from the waist-deep muck of a swamp, discovers a swollen leech battening on his thigh. Menéndez has bled him dry. And he is absolutely certain the former policeman has known all along where the old man could be found.
“You’ll get what I owe you,” José Antonio promises, examining the bill, “when you take me to my father.”
The detective hesitates.
“Tonight at nine. Where shall we meet? The fountain at the great plaza?”
Menéndez, unhappy but anxious not to jeopardize the last of the money, repeats, “Tonight at nine, at the fountain.”
“Yes, my friend, tonight,” José Antonio assures him, ushering the man out of the house.
When Alma and her boarders sit down to their Sunday dinner an hour later, José Antonio watches the woman laughing at a joke. He regrets that today
is the Sabbath. Though the household will retire to their rooms for a siesta after the big meal, Alma will not slip into his bed while the others sleep this afternoon. She is ashamed to lie with him on a Sunday.
Alone in his room, having burned his father’s file in the little fireplace, José Antonio slowly draws his knife across the small whetstone, over and over again, as he loses himself in memories, some more recent than others.
Just before nine o’clock, the sheath of the knife invisible beneath his old shirt from Bejucal, Juan López’s son follows a flowered path to the great fountain at the center of the Plaza of the Peace of December the Third. As he approaches, rain that has threatened all day begins to fall, chasing the young couples, followed by stern old aunts, from the stone benches of the plaza to the cafés beneath the porticoes of the buildings surrounding the square. The drops, clapping like tiny hands against the water in the vast stone pool, remind José Antonio of home. He puts on the straw hat that hangs from a cord round his neck.
Menéndez is not late. “I almost didn’t recognize you, dressed like this. You look like one of those peones from the country.”
“It’s for my father. This is how he remembers me.”
The detective shrugs and leads his client down a quiet side street away from the plaza. The houses they pass have walls burnished with the brown clay of the earliest architecture of the capital. It is a kind of slum, this neighborhood people call the “old city.” The rain picks up.
Menéndez turns his collar against the shower. “Tell me, señor, why was it so important, finding the old man?”
“I promised my mother,” José Antonio explains, “never to forget my father.”
“A good woman,” the detective nods. Then he points. “There, across the street.”
The two men hurry into the hallway of the shabby building. The front door is jammed open with a wooden shim.
