“Crochet,” she told me, “is one of the most efficient ways to calm the mind. Better than yoga. And it keeps your hands moving, just like making jewelry. My husband, who was an osteopath, used to always say that.”
That was how I found out she was the osteopath’s widow, and one of the oldest residents in Parque Chas. She had moved there as a newlywed in the forties.
We agreed I would take classes on Friday mornings and that I would start with a number five needle and some four-ply wool yarn.
When we said goodbye I saw a portrait of her deceased husband in the entrance hall. I stopped to look at it. He was an attractive man, with one of those seductive looks every woman feels is meant for her. I thought it likely that he must have had many female patients complaining of bone pain.
Franca stopped next to me. “He was a man with a lot of personality and a great gift of the gab.” She said it in a subdued tone, as if it were more of a reproach than something to celebrate.
A few days later, as I was leaving for the first lesson, I ran into Pedro, who had just bought some materials for the yard.
“I have to talk to you about something, Ms. Julia,” he intercepted me. Pedro seemed concerned, and I assumed it would be about money. But it wasn’t. “It’s about the bones I took to my nephew. They were not all dog bones,” he said, and then paused, as if he were giving me the opportunity to guess what he was about to say next.
They must have been cat bones, I thought to myself.
“My nephew said there were some human bones, almost a whole hand.”
“A hand?” I repeated like an idiot, trying to grasp what he was telling me.
“Odd, isn’t it?” he said, as he began carrying his tools out to the yard.
“Well, perhaps they were doing comparative studies . . .”
“Maybe,” replied Pedro, sounding somewhat unconvinced.
I felt uneasy with the information, and during the afternoon, while replying to some e-mails, I looked up hand bones on the Internet. Several X-ray images of bones appeared. Without the warmth of flesh, you could see them in all their animal rawness: cold and terrible tools for grasping. In short, said the article, the human hand has twenty-seven bones. Could the information from Pedro’s nephew be trustworthy? With so many bones, large and small, he could have been mistaken.
When I later told Andrés about it, he did not think much of it. Studying and comparing bones and organs is something quite customary among medical and veterinary students.
* * *
The first crochet class was very short, less than half an hour, because Franca had nearly lost her voice. She told me in whispers that she had worked as a high school teacher for more than twenty years, and since then, because of straining her voice so much, she frequently suffered from laryngitis. But she insisted I stay, and we practiced the chain stitch, the most basic crochet stitch.
While she instructed me she also knitted—looping the wool knots with a firmness that had a hypnotic effect. But her hands were perhaps her most noticeable feature: strong hands one could imagine handling blunter tools than a crochet needle.
“It’s important to make a plan of what you first want to crochet,” she recommended before I left. “That way you’ll be more eager to learn.”
I had intended to make an afghan with several color patches. I liked the idea.
“For a twin bed afghan, you’re going to need several hundred four-by-four squares.”
It was a long-term project. I left there a little discouraged with some strip chains and a shapeless little patch piece, along with the order to practice at home.
* * *
By the following Friday another neighbor had joined the group. Her name was Lidia, and she was forty-something.
“Julia’s new in the neighborhood,” Franca said, introducing me, her voice now recovered.
“Yes, I’m a few blocks from here, at the corner of Bucarest and Constantinopla.”
“Oh, I thought you’d bought one of the new apartments on Berna,” said Franca.
“No, we’re diagonally across from those apartments, in a house we’re remodeling.”
Franca stopped crocheting, and it seemed to me she grew pale. “Then you must be very close to the green house, Clarisa’s.” Her voice sounded accusatory.
“It was green, now it’s white,” I said defensively. “And I think Clarisa was Adriana Costa’s aunt. Did you know her?”
Franca got up from her seat and was silent for a moment. “Yes, of course I knew her,” she said eventually, and stood there hesitating as if she could not remember why she had gotten up. She finally went to the kitchen and brought out a tray with cookies that she set on the table next to us. “We were very close friends. But she died young. These are such sad subjects,” she sighed, and went back to concentrating on her crocheting.
A tense atmosphere set in. It dissolved little by little when Lidia told us her Seville orange tree was producing fruit, and very soon she would have us taste her famous jam.
* * *
By this time, spring was arriving in Parque Chas. Jasmines were blooming; true love knots were proliferating; the corner jacaranda was producing its perennial light-blue flowers and spreading its branches toward the house as if trying to embrace it. The neighborhood people were also spreading out, washing the sidewalks with buckets of water, walking their dogs, exchanging smiles as they passed.
One Saturday morning, we finally returned to the little room of horrors. We put on work gloves and began to take the useless objects out to a dumpster.
When we removed an old, bottomless, wicker rocking chair and two lounge chairs with broken pieces, a bag that looked like cement appeared against a corner.
Pedro came into the room, took a look, and said, “It’s quicklime.”
“It’s used as a disinfectant,” said Andrés.
“If you ask me, the old woman was using it to bury the dogs. You wrap them in quicklime so they won’t smell.”
We threw out chipped washbowls, syringes and metallic trays, piles of folders and papers, some still lifes, unstrung rackets . . . We worked until the room was completely clear. Only the closet remained.
“I’m leaving that to you,” said Andrés, concluding his participation.
I took a break, and afterward opened the closet doors wide. I was overwhelmed by a sickeningly sweet, old, moldy smell, which made me gag. I haphazardly stuffed clothes, handbags, and shoes into plastic bags, and I discovered a wooden box inlaid with what looked like mother-of-pearl. Intrigued, I took it into the kitchen. It looked like a jewelry box and was missing a leg. I tried to open it, but it was locked. Pedro, who was hanging around, took out his penknife and with the unexpected skill of a locksmith opened it with a single maneuver. I gave it a superficial look: boxes of slides, some letters and documents, a bundle of saints’ pictures, a small box with a sports medal and another with a silver charm shaped like a heart. Finally, at the bottom, covered with tissue paper, was a black-and-white photo. It was the portrait of a woman, and it was signed by the photographer, Annemarie Heinrich. I looked at it with curiosity. It must have been young Clarisa, the veterinarian aunt who loved dogs. She had long copper-colored hair, coiffed in the fashion of the time, with waves over her forehead. She had a wide mouth with an unpleasant grin, but her eyes, in contrast, were languid, like those of a romantic heroine. She wore a pearl necklace around her neck, which was thrown back provocatively. What was this beautiful woman doing among so much junk?
I imagined Adriana would like to keep some of these family memories, but when I spoke to her, she didn’t seem that excited. She was moving to the south soon, where she and her boyfriend planned to open a small hotel, and she still had millions of things to take care of. But, she said, if I did not mind, she would come by Sunday to see what it was about.
The following morning, I went out early for a walk. I had two months of freedom ahead of me. That aroused in me a summery mood, a desire to work out, take pictures, prepare exotic sala
ds . . . I stopped at the starry-eyed greengrocer on Torrent Street to buy fruit, and there I ran into Lidia, my crochet partner.
“How are your squares?” she asked me.
“Well, at least now they’re starting to look like squares.”
The greengrocer interrupted to show off a bunch of parsley, “more beautiful than a bride’s bouquet, ladies,” and we both laughed. Inspired by Lidia’s friendliness, I plucked up the courage to ask her about Franca.
“Have you known her long? She seemed to react strangely when I mentioned Clarisa.”
Lidia looked up with a resigned gesture, as if all mysteries came from above, then leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “A drama of passion.”
Franca and Clarisa had been close friends. Inseparable, she told me, until Clarisa began to see Brunner for some spinal cord ailment.
“He was an incorrigible womanizer, he chased her and chased her, until finally . . . Well, you can imagine.”
“And then?”
Lidia looked up at the sky again. She did not know much else, except that he, after a while, had disappeared. “He made them both suffer.”
“Did he run off with another woman?”
“There was talk about a Chilean patient, but he was never heard from again, as if he’d just disappeared off the face of the earth.”
That night when Andrés came home, I filled him in with the latest news.
“There’s something mysterious about that woman, isn’t there?”
“Flaubert said it: Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough. If you want more information, I suggest you go by Giacomo’s garage. You can leave him the car to have the oil changed.”
* * *
It was cloudy and windy early Sunday morning, but as time passed it began to clear up. When Adriana came over, around four in the afternoon, there were no more clouds in the sky. She looked very different from the pale, unkempt girl we had met some months earlier. She had cut her hair, was dressed in very fashionable, light clothes, and her eyes shone with enthusiasm, as if by freeing herself of the house she had finally been able to begin living her real life. She was surprised by the results of the renovation, by the light streaming in through the windows, by the new spaces. For a moment it seemed her eyes clouded over, as if transfixed by some existential revelation.
We had tea while she checked the contents of the jewelry box.
“She was beautiful,” Adriana said when she came to Clarisa’s photo. “When I was little, I thought she was a fairy.”
“She never married?”
“No, although she had many admirers. She was a stern woman. My mother was a little afraid of her. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Clarisa will get angry. I was forbidden to go into her office.”
When Adriana opened the little box with the silver heart, she was surprised. She lifted the charm and looked at it in the light. “She had it on a bracelet she never took off. And suddenly one day she no longer had it. She said she’d lost it.”
While Adriana finished her tea she flipped through the letters, the postcards, and other old documents, putting them back in the jewelry box in no particular order.
“I don’t want to keep any of these things,” she said. “Better to let go of the past, don’t you think?”
“Well, it depends,” I responded.
“Neither of them, not my aunt or my mother, was happy,” she said with regret. Perhaps the guilt of her incipient happiness now overwhelmed her. “I’ll take the photo and the medals, and I’d like you to throw out the rest. You can keep the jewelry box, if you like.”
She was getting up to leave when I asked her, “Did you ever meet Franca Brunner? I’m taking crochet lessons with her.”
“Of course I met her,” she replied right away. “She was Clarisa’s close friend. My mother couldn’t stand her. She’d say she was too possessive a friend. Too . . .” She hesitated, as if she could not find the right word, before finally concluding: “You never really get to know people, do you? Later they had a deadly falling out. They say it was a story of jealousy over her husband, the one who disappeared . . . Anyway, I was very young then.”
I watched her leave in a new pickup truck, suspecting we would never see each other again.
* * *
Monday morning, Andrés left me the car to have the oil changed, and I met Giacomo. He was tall and ungainly, with a huge nose and, just as Andrés had said, a torrent of words. Together with the dreamy-eyed greengrocer they would have made an unbeatable duo. As soon as I mentioned Franca, although he was already under the car to empty the crankcase, Giacomo stuck his head out from under the chassis and in that position, like a turtle turned upside down, began to tell me what he knew.
“According to my partner Paddy, she killed Brunner out of jealousy. And then they made up the story about him running away. Paddy was seeing him about his cartilage, so they were quite friendly with each other. Look,” he said, and pointed at me with a monkey wrench, “the Brunner woman reported him missing like a month after her husband’s disappearance. What took her so long?”
He raised the monkey wrench up high, as if about to deal a blow. “That gave her time to maneuver. Maybe she buried him in the yard, Paddy says, although he could never prove anything. They had only checked Brunner’s belongings once to see if they could find signs of his possible whereabouts.”
“And did they find anything?”
“Nothing. He was declared missing, years went by, and they closed the case.” Giacomo finished off the story with a long “Ssssss,” expressing the quintessential resigned forbearance of people in Buenos Aires.
* * *
I arrived earlier than usual at Franca’s for the next crochet class. I had asked her for some cuttings to transplant, and with that excuse I was able to accompany her to the backyard. She had a small but very well-tended garden, with hydrangea flower beds and dense shrubs against the walls. I observed how Franca uprooted an aloe vera cutting and another of Paraguayan jasmine. With those hands, I thought, she could very well have strangled a treacherous husband. She could easily have dug a hole and buried him.
A few minutes later Lidia arrived, as did Franca’s niece, who knitted dolls, caps, and wallets. I continued with my squares. I had learned to combine two colors and handle the chain stitches and different color strips. Franca and Lidia were doing something more important—a conic screen covered with a crochet knit that they would finish off with a fringe of imitation stones. Franca had spread out on our worktable a toolbox that fascinated me: it had pliers, a mini-drill, trays with small chains, a roll of black steel, curved wires called memory wires, hooks, large and small rings . . .
“I only have a few accessories left now, I haven’t done jewelry in a while,” she said modestly. I was hypnotized by the skill with which she handled the pliers: she would insert each colored stone onto a wire, and hang it from the screen edge, then close the wire with a perfect little curl. While she did so, rapidly moving her hand up and down, I noticed the bracelet on her wrist. There it was, tinkling against the pliers: a silver heart identical to the one I had found in Clarisa’s jewelry box.
I could hardly concentrate on my boring squares. I remembered Adriana’s rather enigmatic words. Perhaps Franca had killed Brunner. But not for the motives of passion Padeletti had imagined.
Before I left, I got up, intending to go to the bathroom. Franca pointed to the small corridor with three doors side by side. “The first one is my room,” she said, “the next one is the bathroom.”
The bathroom was white and tidy, with crocheted doilies covering the toilet and bidet. There was also a coat rack with shelves and a second door that must have led to the osteopath’s office. After washing my hands, moved by curiosity, I turned the door handle. The latch gave way and the door opened a few millimeters. In the darkness I thought I saw someone’s shadow crouched next to a desk. I covered my mouth not to scream. The door opened a few centimeters more and with a little light I began to unders
tand what I was looking at. The silhouette hovering over the desk was not a person: it was a demonstration skeleton. I could also see anatomy charts against the walls, a stretcher, bookshelves, and a metal filing cabinet. Everything looked intact, as if just tidied up. I had my cell phone in my pocket, so I couln’t resist my habit to document everything and took several quick photos, aiming a little randomly.
I closed the door to the doctor’s office trying not to make a noise. Luckily, Franca and Lidia were talking animatedly, and no one had noticed my indiscretion.
When I got home I had a slight headache and decided to take a shower to clear my head. While I sponged my arms, my elbows, my knees, I shuddered. I also had a skeleton inside. I could sense that other being, made up only of bones, parodying my daily movements.
* * *
That night, my headache was worse and I felt a little feverish, but in any case I insisted on showing Andrés my photos.
“I want you to meet your alter ego,” I told him.
Andrés looked at them distractedly while clearing the table.
The skeleton had its head down to one side; it must have had a piece of its frame broken, which gave it a melancholic and resigned air. The arms hung languidly at its sides and the hands . . . Oh my god! It was missing a hand!
Andrés approached and now looked more attentively. “It’s also missing ribs and both feet.” And with that didactic eagerness that I admired but also abhorred, he once more expounded on his theory of “arbitrary attention,” a variation of the old saying, Everything takes on the color of the glass through which you look at it—everyone interprets things through the filter of his or her own thoughts and obsessions.
Buenos Aires Noir Page 3
