Nine
As I left the café, I thought I was escaping, but outside, far from feeling free, I could still hear Luciana’s voice in my mind, begging me not to leave her alone, and feel her hands gripping my wrists. It was a cold night, at the start of a dark, dismal August, but I decided to go for a walk before heading home. Above all I wanted to think. Over and over I told myself I’d already done enough for Luciana and shouldn’t let myself be swept along by her madness. I wandered through emptying streets, the shops closed and rubbish strewn over the pavements. Now and then I passed cartoneros, silent, eyes lowered, hauling their handcarts to the railway station. The tide had ebbed from the city. All that remained was the rotten smell from torn rubbish bags and the sudden, occasional light from an empty bus as it rumbled by.
Did I really believe, as Luciana had accused, that Kloster was innocent? Episode by episode, I had believed that what he’d told me was true. But he had also appeared to be a player who was entirely in control, who could lie with the truth. What he’d told me might have been the truth, but it probably wasn’t the entire truth. And also, coldly considering the facts, all explanations (as Luciana had almost screamed at me) seemed to point to Kloster. Because if it wasn’t him, what else was there? A series of fantastic coincidences? Kloster had mentioned runs of bad luck. He’d made me feel small—I could still hear his contempt as he mocked me for having written a novel about chance without knowing that such things occurred. I came to a wide avenue and saw a bar frequented by taxi drivers that was still open. I went in and ordered coffee and toast. What exactly had Kloster said? That I should think of tossing a coin. A sequence of three heads or three tails in a row was not unusual. Chance too had tendencies. I found a quarter in my pocket, searched for my pen and spread a paper napkin on the table. I tossed the coin in the air ten times and wrote down the series of heads and tails using dashes and crosses. I tossed the coin another ten times and wrote out a second sequence beneath the first. I went on tossing the coin, with an increasingly deft movement of the thumb, and noted a few more series on the same napkin, one under the other, until the waiter brought my coffee and toast.
As I ate, I looked over the series, marked on the napkin like some strange code. What Kloster had said was true—amazingly true: there were sequences of three or more heads or tails in almost every line. I spread another napkin on the table and, seized by an impulse, I flipped the coin again, aiming to toss it a hundred times, noting the results tightly so that the entire sequence fitted on the one napkin. The coin slipped from my fingers a couple of times and the clatter made the waiter look round. The bar was empty now and I knew I ought to leave but the repetitive action seemed to have possessed my hand and I couldn’t stop. I wrote down the final symbol and looked over the sequence from the beginning, underlining any runs of the same sign. There were series of five, six, even seven of the same sign in a row. So was there, as Kloster had said mockingly, a bias to chance? Even the blind coin yearned for repetition, form, figure. As I tossed the coin more and more times the runs of repetitions grew longer. Perhaps there was even a statistical law that governed their length. And in that case were there other hidden forms, other kernels of causality, within chance? Other figures, other patterns invisible to me, in the sequence I’d just written down? Something that could even explain Luciana’s bad luck? I looked at the sequence again but it was still closed to me like some indecipherable handwriting. You should uphold the thesis of chance, Kloster had said. I felt something inside me falter, as if an essential, personal foundation, of which I hadn’t even been aware, was crumbling. I had withstood the criticism, in a review, that my novel The Random Men was calculating in its careful simulation of chance. But simply tossing a coin in the air had proved more devastating than any of these objections. A throw of the dice will never abolish chance, Mallarme might have said. And yet the napkin spread on the table had demolished for ever what I believed about chance. If you really believe in chance, you should believe in these runs, they should seem natural, you should accept them. This was what Kloster had meant, and it was only now that I fully understood. But at the same time—and this was perhaps the most disconcerting thing, the maddening detail—he, Kloster, didn’t seem to believe that Luciana’s getting tails several times in a row was just a run of bad luck. It was the theory that most favoured and suited him, yet he was sufficiently sure of his innocence, or impunity, to lean towards another possibility. But which one? Of this he had said nothing, merely hinting that it would be set out in his novel. But he had made that strange comparison of the sea to a god’s bath. Kloster, the fervent atheist whom I had admired, had spoken in almost religious terms more than once during our conversation. Could his daughter’s death have affected him that much? He who stops believing in chance starts to believe in God, I recalled. Was this how it was? Kloster now believed in God? Or had it all been carefully staged to convince a single spectator?
I called the waiter, paid my bill and left. It was past midnight and all you could see in the streets were beggars huddling on bits of cardboard, and foul-smelling piles of black rubbish bags. Now and then refuse lorries ground their metal jaws. I turned down a side street, and was irresistibly drawn to the sudden glow from a shop window. I moved closer and stopped. It was a large furniture store and inside, before my eyes, soundlessly, unbelievably, a fire was spreading. The rug at the entrance was already in flames, slowly writhing and undulating and seeming to rise from the floor. It was smoking and giving off sparks that quickly spread the fire to a coat stand and a coffee table by the door, the flames rising higher and higher. The coat stand suddenly collapsed in a shower of fire, touching the headboard of a double bed. Only then did I notice that the display was arranged as the ideal marital bedroom, complete with bedside tables and a baby’s cot. Suddenly the bedcover burst into savage flames. It all happened in the same dauntless silence, the roar of the fire sealed behind the window. I knew the glass might shatter at any moment, but couldn’t tear myself away from the hypnotic, dazzling spectacle. Everything writhed before me but still no alarm sounded, no one came, as if the fire was a message for me alone. The room, the cot, the little fake home—it was all disintegrating, transmuting. The furniture was now simply wood, an elemental material seeking only to submit, obey, feed the flames. The fire reared up, a single violent being, malevolent, gleaming, like a dragon twisting and changing form. Suddenly I heard the hysterical wail of a fire engine siren. I realised it was all about to end and tried to hold on to that final indecipherable, breathtaking image behind the glass. Attracted by the siren, the starving creatures of the night, staggering drunks and children who slept in subway entrances, now surrounded me. Above, windows were opening. Then came human voices, orders, a fierce jet of water, and the flames receded, leaving blackened walls. I walked away, not wanting to witness this other, much more depressing spectacle of the fire defeated.
It was very late when I got home. I still hadn’t packed for my trip but the flight to Salinas wasn’t till after midday so I decided to leave it for the morning. My sleep was heavy with confused images, layer upon layer in quick succession. Still asleep, on the edge of morning, I felt as if I was about to understand something: I simply had to read a succession of dashes and crosses. But I opened my eyes too soon, with that sense of both imminence and loss that accompanies images slipping away as you wake. It was nine o’clock. I started packing, and suddenly remembered the fire. I went down to have breakfast in a bar so as to read the paper, and searched for news of the fire. I didn’t expect to find anything as it was, all in all, a pretty minor matter and probably wouldn’t merit even a short article. But there it was on one of the inside pages, beneath the heading ‘As we went to press’. It was a very short item, headed ‘Fires’. First it mentioned another fire that had almost entirely destroyed another furniture store. It went on to say that there had been ‘two more very similar incidents’, in furniture stores in different parts of town. One of them was the fire I had seen, but the article simply
gave the location with no other details. The item mentioned that an initial investigation was being carried out to establish whether the fires had been started deliberately. And that was all: no conjectures, just a vague promise that the police were exploring several different avenues.
I folded the paper on the table and ordered another coffee. Three fires in three furniture stores in a single night. Beyond runs of heads or tails, this couldn’t be a coincidence. Something stirred in the depths of my memory, trying to rise to the surface. A face came back to me, vehement, mocking, firing out sentences and theories that only held up for a moment, like bubbles in the air, at a café table in the Calle Corrientes, behind the haughty smoke of his cigarette. I could see him again, with his beard and ponytail, surrounded by awed young faces, including my own.
Students, aspiring intellectuals and writers, we all fought to sit near him, listening as he hurled quotations at us and demolished or elevated books with a single sentence—a strange talking machine, malevolent and sarcastic, who also, every so often, had sudden enduring flashes of insight. It was him I thought of first, rather than an arsonist in the most obvious sense. I seemed to hear him again: had it been in our usual bar or at the party to celebrate the only issue of the magazine? Someone had spoken of ephemeral art and street happenings: the stream of paint and Greco’s chalk circle around passers-by. Someone else mentioned subversive sculpture: the brick flung at the critic’s head. Then he had suggested setting fire to furniture stores. Weren’t they replicas of the perfect little bourgeois home? The marital bed, the baby’s cot, the big round table for family meals, the bookcases to be filled with and display the old culture. The reassuring coffee table in the living room. It was all there, he said, eyes shining mischievously, defiantly. If we wanted to be truly incendiary, there were all the furniture stores of Buenos Aires, waiting for the first match. It would be irresistible. Contagious. A city up in flames, in a single night. Fire, the ultimate, supreme artistic statement, the form to consume all forms.
But could it be him, so many years later? I knew it couldn’t: I’d bumped into him again in the street one day and been surprised to find him in a suit and tie. With barely concealed satisfaction, he said he worked for the Ministry of Culture. I had exaggerated my disbelief: he worked now? For the government? He smiled a little uncomfortably but then tried to return to the ways of the past. That was just it, he defended himself, it wasn’t work. It was almost a pension, given to him by the long-suffering taxpayers, the wonderful Peronist people of Argentina. After all, he was only following Duchamp’s dictum that the artist should make use of anything—inheritances, grants, private patronage (“And why not the Ministry of Culture?” he said with a wry look)—so as not to have to live by the sweat of his brow.
No, it couldn’t be him. But then another thing I’d heard him say in that distant past now came back to me: you shouldn’t write about what has been, but about what might have been. For the first time in years I felt I had a subject. There had been something providential about the fire of the night before, and the small item in the paper, the modest mystery of the furniture stores, was speaking to me secretly. I left the bar and, a little euphoric, went into a stationery shop and bought a thick hardcover notebook to take with me on the trip. After all, I’d have the mornings free in Salinas so I’d be able to do some writing: maybe I could get a new novel going. I went up to the flat to collect my bag. As soon as I opened the door I saw the red light on the answering machine blinking menacingly, as if it were a remotely activated weapon that could still hurt me. I pressed the button and heard Luciana’s voice. She sounded bewildered, desperate, her speech halting, as if she were having trouble threading sentences together. She’d spoken to her sister the night before and told her everything, but she’d sensed that Valentina didn’t—wouldn’t—believe her. She asked me, begged me, if I hadn’t yet left, to ring her. I looked at the clock and picked up my bag. I decided that her call had arrived too late, and I’d already set off for the airport.
∨ The Book of Murder ∧
Ten
As the plane soared over the river, reducing the city to a model, I felt, with the sudden lightness of flying, a weight lifting from me. Luciana’s story, the conversation with Kloster, even the fire, all appeared small and harmless now too, fading, disappearing into the distance as I left the city behind. I thought of Victorian novels in which the hero or heroine who has fallen in love inappropriately is sent abroad by the parents, a journey that never produces the desired result, only serving to test the strength of love across time and distance. But in my case I had to admit that something was subsiding, as if I really had escaped. When, an hour later, I caught sight for the first time of the small town, rising miraculously out of white desert, the buildings set out like dominoes on the cracked, dazzling expanse of salt flats, I genuinely felt I was a thousand miles away.
I submitted to the pleasant welcoming ritual. The dean and one of the professors from the literature department came to meet me at the airport. For my benefit, they took the scenic route back, along the Gran Salina. As we got into town, which looked like an abandoned film set with all the shops closed and streets deserted, they warned me that the siesta lasted until five. They dropped me off at the hotel and came back to collect me a couple of hours later to take me to my first class.
It was meant to be a series of postgraduate seminars, with me giving my usual course on avant-garde literature, but they probably hadn’t been able to recruit enough postgrad students so there were some undergraduates as well, there simply to listen. Amongst them, in the second row, I noticed a girl with large, earnest eyes, whom I couldn’t help staring at slightly longer than I should. It was a long time since I’d given a class to a whole roomful of students, but thankfully as soon as I picked up the chalk I was transformed: the words flowed and the eloquence I had thought lost for ever returned like a dog that still knew its master. As I reeled off statements, refutations, examples, I felt almost breathless with the euphoria of teaching. Certain theologians maintain that the act of praying can in itself lead to faith, like a quiet, mechanical reaction. In my case the familiar little rituals, the chalk on the board, the opening remarks and, I don’t deny it, the student’s interested attention, worked their magic once more, the lecture I’d given so many times before coming back to life and the old jokes getting a laugh. But halfway through the exposition, my happy self-confidence faltered and I hung for a moment over the abyss. I was explaining how John Cage had used the hexagrams of the I Ching when composing his piece Music of Changes. I’d drawn the figures of six stacked lines representing the notes, with their intensity and duration, and I was about to go over how the hexagrams were cast: by tossing the coins so that the six lines were determined by chance. But as I said the word ‘chance’, it was as if I had broken a seal and the sequence of heads and tails, the napkin covered in signs proving that chance too followed patterns, slid insidiously back into my mind. What is a loss of certainty like for a lifelong sceptic? It leaves you reeling and unable even to make the most trivial statement. From then on, until the end of the class, something strange and terrifying began to happen: every time I spoke, I felt that a mocking voice inside me was about to add ‘or not’ at the end of the sentence. Every time I explained something, the little voice wanted to burst out with ‘or quite the opposite’. If I was about to state some conclusion (and I made strenuous efforts to make my conclusions appear to stem from faultless reasoning) the voice wanted to jump in and add ‘but the opposite is equally valid’. Something had gone awry and signs of this inner conflict must have been apparent to my audience. My confidence evaporated, my pauses grew longer. My voice was faltering horribly and my palms were sweating. I glanced at my watch and saw with relief that I could bring the session to a close. I’d been on the brink of disaster, but hoped my audience would put it down to tiredness. Above all, I wondered what my student with the big eyes had thought. Absurdly, from the very start, I referred to her inwardly as ‘my stude
nt’, as if she were a gift, part of the welcome. I feared she might not be at the dinner that evening for academic staff, but fortunately she was in charge of some formalities relating to my stay, so while I was signing some papers for her we exchanged a few words and I persuaded her to attend. At the table, however, I wasn’t seated near her so had to make do with looking at her from afar during the meal.
I woke early the next morning and, heartened by the hotel breakfast, the sunlight streaming through the window and the sight of my brand new notebook, I decided to make a start on my novel about incendiary artists. Two hours later my optimism had disappeared and I decided to go for a walk around the town. I looked round the two or three department stores, entered and quickly left a depressing bookshop, wandered up and down the streets in the centre, and by lunchtime felt as if I knew the whole place and had exhausted all its possibilities in one walk. I took another walk during the siesta and, paradoxically, at that dead hour, with the streets empty, I found the town more interesting. I pictured thousands of people all horizontal, lying on their beds at the same time, but surely there must be exceptions. Where, I wondered, were the people who resisted the commandment to take a siesta? Crossing the main square and turning down a side street, I saw a neon sign, lit up in full daylight, and steps up to what must have once been a cinema. On a whim, I went through the swing doors to look inside: it was a huge gaming hall. There they were: people of all ages, but mainly middle-aged women, sat hypnotised, silent, on high chairs, mechanically feeding coins into slot machines. There were far more people than I would have expected and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the dean or one of the students there. I came back out on to the quiet streets and walked on. I saw another two or three similar halls, and they were all full of the faithful, as if during the siesta the whole town was engrossed in a Babylon lottery.
The Book of Murder Page 12
