Alone in the Crowd

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

“You know what happened. You’re only asking me so that afterward I can’t say that you were the one who put the idea in my head.”

  “Even if that were my intention, it wouldn’t change the question. After all, the one who brought up a tyranny from the age of eleven was you, not me.”

  “I was about to turn twelve. You were about to turn thirteen. That difference of a year meant a lot, mainly because you were much taller than I was, which made the age difference seem even greater. That’s why I hung out with the younger kids. I really was younger. No matter what I did, we’d never be the same age, just like we’d never be the same height. But I wouldn’t have minded being younger if you accepted me as a friend in spite of that. I didn’t just want to play with you, I wanted to be your best friend. I dreamed about that. You were my idol. I wanted to be just like you. I paid attention to how you walked, talked, dressed. I spent hours in front of the mirror trying to be more like you. Of course it didn’t work. That idea made me grow apart from the other boys … or made them grow apart from me. You didn’t blow me off, you just didn’t pay any attention to me; you didn’t even notice me. So I started isolating myself. And I started to see that I was going to lose you and all my other friends. I started to try to rejoin the group—and everything was going fine. That’s when the girl died.”

  The silence that followed made the noise of a vacuum cleaner in a neighboring room, the voices of the staff in the hallway, the water in the shower of another room, the cars on the street sound all the louder. The world reemerged in the prolonged silence of Hugo Breno.

  “What happened to the girl?” Espinosa asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. I just know that she startled us.”

  “Who, the girl?”

  “Right.”

  “Startled you and who else?”

  “I don’t remember his name. It was one of your friends. He was somewhat friendly with me as well, but more with you. We’d agreed to go to the roof of the building where the girl lived. From there you could see the bedrooms of a few apartments. You could see people without their clothes on. I’d never seen that, but the boy said that from there he’d already seen a man and a woman naked. He said that he saw the two of them grabbing each other and that he could show me. So we went up to the roof, but when we got there the door was locked with a padlock, which only made me more curious. But without the key, there was no way to open the door. I was about to go back down when he took my arm and said that we hadn’t been able to see, but that he could show me how they did it. I said I didn’t want to. Seeing was one thing, doing was another. And I didn’t want to do it. I thought it was wrong. I was scared by his suggestion, even though I didn’t really understand what it was. But in a way he was my friend. He said everyone did that, that adults did … that it was cool. It didn’t matter that the door was locked, we could do it right there at the end of the stairs.

  “Of course I don’t remember if that was exactly what he said. I had suggested going down, but I returned to the landing next to the door. I still thought he wanted to do something wrong, but at the same time I was tempted by the idea of doing something that adults did that was forbidden for children. That’s when he told me that the older boys had already done it. I asked him which ones. He said all of them. I said what do you mean, all of them. And he repeated: All of them.

  “With the door closed, there was hardly any light on that last flight of stairs. I was scared, but he promised me that nobody ever came up there, only the watchman, and he was working in the building next door. To calm me down and convince me, he said that he could first show me how it went and then I could do the same thing to him. All I had to do was pull down my shorts and lean over the little wall. I was nervous and scared, but at the same time I was excited by the idea. I was so focused on what he was saying that I didn’t even realize that we were in a place where anyone in the building could show up. What I remember with extreme clarity is that when he was doing it to me, I looked toward the stairs and saw the girl, two steps below, looking at us in fright. I was terrified, pushed my friend away, and ran down the stairs. I don’t know which one of us knocked her over. Maybe it was me. I was the first one to run past her. We ran down the three flights and only once we were on the ground floor did he tell me that the girl had fallen down the stairs. We left the building without anyone seeing us. We swore that we would never tell anyone what had happened. Each of us went back to our houses, and I was very frightened. The next day, I found out that the girl had died when she fell.”

  Hugo Breno paused for a moment and then went on, in the same indifferent tone.

  “You might be wondering how I can still remember all of this, after so much time. But the impressive thing is not that I can still remember it but that I’ve never managed to forget it. My mother also found out about the death the next day. She asked if I knew her. She said that she’d heard that the girl wasn’t alone. She asked if I knew who might have been with her. I didn’t go back to the Peixoto District for a few days. I came straight back from school and stayed at home, or I went to play in the Rua Santa Margarida, behind my building, where my mother could see me from the service area of our apartment. After I hadn’t gone to the Peixoto District for a week, where I used to go every day, she started to doubt whether it was only that I was afraid to go back because of what had happened to the girl.

  “That’s when the interrogations started. For days on end, relentless. The questions came with all kinds of religious threats. That I was going to feel the anger of God, that if I didn’t expiate my sin I would go to hell. That it was no use lying because God could see and hear.… She used everything she’d heard at church. The only way to save myself, she said, was to confess the truth and get rid of my guilt. Out of exhaustion and fear, I ended up confessing that I might have knocked the girl over accidentally. From that point on, she started telling me that I was the murderer of an innocent little girl, and that both me and her, my mother, would have to expiate our guilt in front of God. I don’t have to say that I was doubly terrified. I thought that any minute now the cops could come knocking on my door, that my mother would turn me in, and that I would be arrested; and if that wasn’t enough, I felt permanently stalked by the punitive gaze of the Lord. I was only eleven. I didn’t have a father. I didn’t have any relatives I could go to. And I was afraid of priests, pastors, bishops—all kinds of clergy. As time went on, she started using emotional blackmail, intending to control my behavior and then my life.

  “From that day on, that control-blackmail became part of my everyday existence and part of my relationship with my mother. The control wasn’t the same every year; its intensity varied, depending on factors that didn’t always have to do with me. Sometimes I thought she’d forgotten all about it, and then it would resume, as virulent as ever. In the last few years, my mother started up again about the great disgrace that had come over her, the guilt she bore for a crime she hadn’t committed, and so forth. That was when she met Dona Laureta and they became friends and confidantes. Not long afterward, my mother died. I felt an amazing relief; I thought the nightmare was over.

  “Then, at the seventh-day Mass, Dona Laureta came up to me in church and said that she was sad to have learned about a story—a secret, in fact—that my mother had entrusted to her. I looked at that woman without a word, trying to figure out where she was going with that. Dona Laureta said that my mother had told her that she was scared that I was plotting to kill her, and that she was sure that I would kill her soon, just like I’d killed that little girl in the Peixoto District.

  “I didn’t say a word, but I panicked. Not because she could have thought that about me, but because I realized that this woman was planning to extend the exploitation my mother had begun. That day, at Mass, she didn’t speak to me again. But then, the first time she went to the Caixa to get her pension, she told me through the window that she couldn’t bear the weight of those crimes on her conscience, that at the end of the day she wasn’t my mother and she didn�
��t have any reason to carry the moral and legal responsibility for that secret. The next month, she announced that she’d go to the police … unless I helped lighten the load of her guilt. And she suggested that her next pension payment be increased by twenty percent. To make the threat even more convincing, she added that she was ready to go to the police and reveal not only that I had killed my mother but that other crime I had committed when I was a boy. And she threatened to tell my superiors at the bank about my criminal history. The fear accumulated through all those years made me give in to the blackmail, and from that point on she started to receive a pension augmented by a personal contribution from me. Every time she did, she thanked me and made a discreet reference to her original threat.”

  At that point, Hugo Breno paused once more, got up, stretched his legs and his torso, massaged his neck, went out to the balcony, and looked out at the street. Espinosa took advantage of the pause and stretched his own body. He walked around the room, which wasn’t more than four or five paces wide, and went out to join Hugo on the balcony.

  “Do you want to order something to eat? A sandwich, some lunch …”

  “I’d like a sandwich, with orange juice and coffee.”

  Espinosa put through Hugo’s order and ordered a sandwich for himself, and while he was waiting for the lunch to arrive the conversation wandered off on an unrelated theme. Hugo Breno looked tired. Probably because of the tension of the story, though he hadn’t shown any emotion while telling it. Yet it was impossible for events such as those not to leave any impression on him, Espinosa thought. Unless it had all been so thoroughly exploited by his mother for so many years that she had stripped those events of their emotional resonance. Hugo Breno was a dry man. Emotionally dry.

  It didn’t take long for the sandwiches to arrive. Despite a certain inevitable awkwardness, they both ate with pleasure and in no great hurry. Once the coffee was finished, they went back to the chairs and took up the conversation where they’d left it.

  “How long did Dona Laureta’s blackmail last?”

  “From the time my mother died until her own death. A year, more or less.”

  “And you never met outside the bank, after your mother’s Mass?”

  “Never … until the afternoon of her death.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When she was in the bank that morning to get her pension, she said it was really hard for her to stand the idea that I had killed my mother and was still living in the same apartment where I’d lived with her. I said that the apartment belonged to both of us, and that now it was mine. She said that in the case of killing one’s mother the child doesn’t have the right to inherit, and that if I doubled my contribution she might be able to bear the pain a bit easier. I answered that I couldn’t do what she asked because that would be half of my salary, and I wouldn’t have enough to live on. So she said that if that was the case she would go that same afternoon to speak with the chief of the Twelfth Precinct. She made a point of saying that she’d go at five because she knew how late I got off and that way I could see how she really was going to go through with it.

  “As soon as I got off work I went out to see if she really was going to do it. I saw her on the corner, as if she was waiting for me. And I really did see her go into the station. So now it was my turn to wait on the corner. But when she came out less than ten minutes later, I noticed that she hadn’t managed to speak with the chief—who I knew was you. I wasn’t so worried about her turning me in. That was just her own craziness. But I knew that as soon as she told you, I would have to deal with all kinds of awkward situations, giving depositions in the presence of police officers and a lawyer. And after our meeting this Monday at the station in the presence of two other officers, I could see for myself how uncomfortable an investigation could have been. That’s why I suggested this meeting.

  “But to get back to the story: after she left the station, I followed her. I was sure she’d go back to the station, I just didn’t know if it would be that same afternoon or the next day. I ended up betting that she’d go home first to drop off her groceries, and then go back to the station. That’s exactly what she did. On her way back, she stopped at a traffic light, waiting to cross the street. There were plenty of people around; that’s a busy corner. People were pressed up against one another and she was standing next to the curb. I decided to give her a little scare. Just to let her know that I could pressure her, too. I didn’t have any intention of hurting her. I got right up next to her ear and said in a gruff voice: ‘Did your payment arrive?’ As soon as she turned her face and saw me, she jumped forward. I didn’t even touch her.”

  There was a silence that lasted a minute, or only a few seconds, but that felt very long to Espinosa.

  “That’s what I wanted to say,” Hugo Breno concluded.

  Silence once again. On Hugo Breno’s part, the silence seemed definitive. For Espinosa, that silence could cover the last thirty-two years. They got up and stood facing each other for a few seconds.

  “Shall we go down?” Espinosa asked.

  Welber and Ramiro had obeyed the boss’s orders not to go near the hotel. They’d decided to stay on a park bench—far enough away to obey the chief’s orders, but close enough to intervene, if necessary—with a good view of the entrance to the hotel. They saw Espinosa and Hugo Breno come down the street toward the square and say their farewells on the corner. Welber and Ramiro went around the block and managed to get to the station one minute before Espinosa, in time to answer the call he made as soon as he went into his office.

  Espinosa wanted to report the dialogue while it was still fresh in his memory. He couldn’t reproduce it literally, but he wanted to recount at least what his interlocutor had said. The two listened attentively. Even summed up, it was a long story. Certain passages couldn’t be condensed without losing their meaning. The chief spoke without pausing, and neither of them asked questions. Only when the story was over did Welber look at Ramiro; then the two of them asked almost simultaneously:

  “And now?”

  “What do you think we can do?”

  “Indict him for homicide,” Welber ventured.

  “On what grounds? The crime of whispering into an old lady’s ear? And even if that were a crime, what proof do we have that it actually happened?”

  “He confessed.”

  “Confessed where? At the station? With witnesses? In the presence of a lawyer? Or in a hotel room, without witnesses, in an informal conversation with a policeman who had been his childhood friend? Nothing he said to me can be proven. And of course he’s not going to tell the same story he told me if invited to depose. We wouldn’t even manage to wrap up the investigation. And even if we did, no judge would accept it. It wouldn’t even go to court.”

  “Chief, he confessed to pushing the girl and he practically confessed that he killed or let his mother die, and he confessed to provoking the death of Dona Laureta. We can’t do anything?”

  “He didn’t provoke Dona Laureta’s death,” Espinosa said. “There was no intent and he couldn’t predict that the woman would leap forward; and he didn’t confess that he killed his mother or that he let her die; she had a heart attack. As for the death of the girl, he doesn’t even know if he was the one who pushed her.”

  “We—”

  “We can’t do anything.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “I don’t think he’s going to do anything more than keep on wandering through crowds. That is, if he can stand carrying around the guilt about the girl’s death for much longer. And he no longer has his mother to share that guilt with him. We don’t have anything material to incriminate him. So we can close this case, a case we never opened.”

  Only after the meeting with Welber and Ramiro did Espinosa notice a piece of paper underneath a stapler. It was a message from Irene, and it had been there since lunchtime: “Dona Irene called twice. She wanted to let you know that she’s going to São Paulo today and will be back Monday night.
”

  14

  The weekend put the Hugo Breno case on hold. Deep down, Espinosa didn’t believe that the private confession on Friday had wrapped things up. He thought it brought more of a pause than a definitive end to the events that had been opened up since Dona Laureta’s death. It really wasn’t a single series of events so much as two or three different intersecting incidents, but the question of Hugo Breno’s involvement had been closed, even if there were a few ambiguities left over that needed to be cleared up. Espinosa knew that each event could be interpreted in several different ways, and that every one of these interpretations was, in and of itself, a different event. That was why Hugo Breno would always carry with him the weight of at least two deaths, one from his childhood and one from adulthood, both of which had their attendant interpretations. Perhaps neither was intentional, which could attenuate his guilt, even though they were real deaths—and nothing could attenuate that.

  Saturday morning and afternoon were dedicated to organizing his apartment and choosing in what order to read the books that had piled up on the little table next to his rocking chair. He decided that maintaining his apartment wouldn’t have to involve performing all the electrical, plumbing, and carpentry repairs that he’d planned to do; all he had to do was wash the dishes that had accumulated in the sink, take out the trash, and put his dirty clothes in the wash. He’d leave the maid to do the job of sweeping the floor and dusting the furniture, since one of his most stable relationships was with her (perhaps because he saw her only once a week … like Irene). At the end of the afternoon, he went out to buy some ingredients to augment his evening meal. On Sunday, his domestic program extended throughout the day, and included a meal ordered in. He missed Irene, but that would be made up for when she got back from São Paulo the next day.

  As soon as he got up on Monday, he took a shower. He was making breakfast when the phone rang. He immediately thought it was Irene, saying she was getting in that afternoon, and he picked up happily. It was Ramiro, saying that Dona Adélia, Laureta’s friend, with whom he’d chatted twice, had been found dead in her apartment, in the hotel where she lived.