Southwesterly Wind

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  “Officer Espinosa. This is Detective Welber. He’s the one who called to arrange this meeting. There’s no children’s party. We’d like to talk to you. Since you, sir, don’t have a phone number or an address—or even a name, unless your name really is Hidalgo—this was the only way we had to speak with you.”

  “Are we under arrest?”

  “Not at all. We only want to speak with you. It could be back at the station, which is only half a block away, or it could be here, over a soft drink.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Someone has filed a complaint against you for fraud in the Fifth Precinct, near the Cancer Hospital, where you do shows. But that’s not what we’re interested in. We’d like to talk to you about a guy named Gabriel.”

  “Who?”

  “Gabriel. You did a psychic reading for him.”

  “Excuse me, Officer, but I don’t know anybody named Gabriel, and I don’t do shows like that. My partner and I do puppet and marionette shows, as you can see from the material we have in these bags. I work with children, not adults.”

  “We’re aware of that. We also know that, sometimes, you involuntarily have visions about some child present at a show.”

  “That can happen to anybody. They’re not intentional. I’ve never said I was psychic.”

  “I’m sure that’s true. Except in the case of Gabriel.”

  “I already said, I don’t know anybody named Gabriel.”

  “Why don’t we go inside and have a seat? Detective Welber, will you be so kind as to bring us some soft drinks? Yes, you probably don’t remember, sir. It was almost a year ago, at a birthday party in a restaurant not far from here. The guy’s name is Gabriel. He was turning twenty-nine. You told him that before he turned thirty he would kill somebody.”

  “Oh. That guy. I didn’t know his name was Gabriel. I’d never seen him before, and I’ve never seen him since. What’s the problem?”

  “Until now, nothing. Why did you predict that he would become a murderer?”

  “I didn’t say he’d become a murderer, I said he’d kill somebody. In war people kill each other, but that doesn’t make them murderers. Even you gentlemen from the police might sometimes be forced to kill someone, in a shootout with criminals, for example, but that doesn’t mean you’re considered murderers. Gabriel could be one of those cases. But that’s not the reason I did what I did. I wouldn’t even call it a psychic reading; I’d call it a provocation. I never thought that it would mess him up so much that I would be approached by two police officers on a Sunday afternoon.”

  “Maybe your reading worked.”

  “This is what happened. As I said, I’d never seen the guy before. I was in a restaurant waiting for Stella, my partner, so that we could have something to eat and then go home. At the next table there was a small birthday party going on, only a few people, and I figured out that the guy at the head of the table was the birthday boy. He didn’t seem very excited about the party, and of all the people there he spoke the softest, as if apologizing. Stella still hadn’t arrived, so I started watching the party. Our tables were right next to each other: one of the guys in the group was practically sitting next to me. When the guy caught my eye, I asked what they were celebrating. Our colleague’s birthday, the one at the head of the table. Waiter, bring a beer so our neighbor can join in. I said no thanks, I was waiting for somebody else, but congratulated the birthday boy. Next thing I knew a waiter put a glass of beer down on my table. From your neighbors, he said. I thanked them, and raised my glass to the birthday boy. He’s going to be a brilliant administrator, I said. The guy I’d been talking to looked surprised. How do you know he’s an administrator? he said. Obviously I didn’t know; I’d said administrator because he looked like someone who would be an administrator, since it seems like most people who work in offices are administering something or the other. Our friend is clairvoyant! he shouted to his colleagues. By then, two girls had arrived and were standing next to me, waiting to have chairs brought over. The guy said: Tell our friend’s fortune! As a birthday present. Come on! No skin off your back! Waiter, another beer for our friend! Just as a joke, I turned to one of the girls and said: What’s your friend like? Gabriel? they said. He’s a saint, he couldn’t hurt a fly. I sat wondering how somebody could be so inoffensive that they wouldn’t hurt a fly. So I agreed to tell his fortune. The table looked excited, shuffled their chairs so I could sit next to the guy. I started off with a few generic predictions, the kind of things you hear from gypsies, and I noticed that the guy was naive enough to believe anything I said. So I decided, as a birthday present, to shake him up a little and see if he would wake up, and I predicted that he’d kill somebody before his next birthday. Not as an accident, but deliberately. That’s when Stella arrived. I got up and left. I never saw the guy again. I hope he hasn’t killed anybody.”

  “Not yet, I hope. But his birthday is less than a month away.”

  “Sir, do you really think he’s going to kill somebody?”

  “You’re the one who made the prediction, sir.”

  “But it was a joke—I was just pulling his leg.”

  “Maybe it worked. Did you know the girl you asked about Gabriel before you told his fortune?”

  “I’d never seen her before.”

  “Neither of them?”

  “Neither of them.”

  “Do you know a girl named Olga?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, you’ll never meet her now.

  She’s dead.”

  “And what does that have to do with this?”

  “She was one of the girls there at the party.”

  “And she passed away?”

  “Well, passed away is a nice way of saying hit by an oncoming train.”

  Hidalgo didn’t say anything. Teenagers were chattering all around them. Rush hour at McDonald’s. It was time to turn the tables, and Espinosa thought it was a good moment to interrupt the meeting.

  “I’d like you to leave your address and telephone with Detective Welber so that in the future we won’t have to go to this much trouble to get in touch with you.”

  Welber took down the information; they all got up, and a bunch of preteens rushed in to fill the vacated space. Once they were on the sidewalk, putting on their hoods and opening their umbrellas, Espinosa added:

  “I suppose Hidalgo is your stage name?”

  “You suppose wrong, Officer. It’s my real name. Goodbye.”

  The pair walked off. During the whole meeting, which had only lasted fifteen minutes, Stella hadn’t said a word, but neither had she missed a single nuance. The fine winter rain was still falling. The walk back to the Peixoto District, only three blocks away, plus the rain, was perfect for a good Sunday afternoon think.

  The lighter traffic of cars and people allowed him to walk in relative peace, despite the wet sidewalk and the occasional puddle.

  A few things intrigued Espinosa. The first was the Hidalgo couple, who didn’t seem at all like the kind of people who would do children’s puppet shows. His polite way of speaking, his perfect, even sophisticated use of the language, his impeccable clothes, and his elegant way of moving—he seemed destined to higher things than waving marionettes around fast-food restaurants. And Stella was a cute girl. The story Hidalgo told seemed too simple to be true, or to be entirely true.

  After taking his raincoat off in the hallway, he noticed he had two messages. One was a note from Alice telling him that Neighbor had been happy with their visit and that she’d meet him the next day at the usual time; the second, on the answering machine, was from Irene, asking him to give her a call.

  Espinosa waited for the echoes of his conversation with Hidalgo to quiet down before he rang Irene. Slowly, the image of the girl replaced the impression of the couple.

  “Espinosa, thanks so much for calling.”

  “Did something happen?”

  “No, nothing objective. Just a funny feeling … ne
rves, I think.”

  “What are you feeling?”

  “Nothing, just a female thing, I shouldn’t bore you with it. It’s probably ridiculous, but I get the feeling I’m being followed. I can’t identify anybody, it’s just a feeling, but after what happened to Olga I’m a little antsy.”

  “It’s understandable. You’re still recovering from the shock. That’s when all your ghosts come out, but in a few days they’ll go back to their old haunts. In any case, you should try not to go out alone for the next few days. Not that there’s anything to worry about really, but just to reassure yourself as long as you’re feeling this way.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing, but I thought I’d better tell you.”

  “You did the right thing. Would you feel better telling me about it over a beer?”

  “Do you always invite distressed citizens out for a beer?”

  “Only when you’re the citizen.”

  “Fine. Let’s meet at the same place.”

  “Great. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  There was a silence while they decided who was going to hang up first. They hung up simultaneously.

  It seemed to Espinosa that the years around forty were the most dangerous, in terms of dating. Close enough to thirty to still have romantic fantasies, close enough to fifty to have been made cynical by past mishaps. Espinosa hadn’t given up on romance, but he’d long since lost his illusions; his critical consciousness had grown sharper, and he knew that he had to watch himself carefully if he wanted to hope for anything like a happy marriage. He didn’t doubt the brilliance of sexual pleasure; he was, however, unsure about the combination of sexuality and marriage. And yet when he met a woman like Irene, he was bowled over by incredible, imaginary promises. Away from Irene, he was still conflicted enough to be able to consider himself rational. He’d never been a Casanova; women had always scared him as much as they attracted him. He was certain that men always lost their cool in romance. He’d have to deploy all of his wits to seduce Irene.

  Such were his thoughts as he walked to the Bar Lagoa. Unlike the first night, it was raining, and the mountains around the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas were covered with clouds; there was no moon or stars. When he entered the restaurant, Irene was waiting for him.

  “I live closer,” she said, to justify her earlier arrival.

  “I was here as soon as we hung up the phone, but my body took a while to catch up.”

  It seemed like a continuation of their first meeting. It was a different table, a different waiter, a different group of customers (on Sunday night it was usually filled with parents with small children), but there was still the odd simultaneous feeling of being both close to and far removed from Irene. She seemed to have come to the restaurant in the same clothes she’d been wearing at home, and Espinosa started to wonder whether her casual style wasn’t actually anything but; it was extremely captivating.

  The conversation didn’t take long to get around to Olga. Not the accident, but the living Olga, Irene’s college classmate and longtime friend.

  “It was friendship at first sight,” Irene said with a smile. “Every semester we took the same classes, sat next to each other, went out for drinks together, talked about life, boys…. We even lived together for almost a year, as soon as we got out of school.”

  “Did you ever fight about men?”

  “I didn’t even try; she got them all.”

  “But you’re much prettier.”

  “That’s what I think, too, but men were much more intrigued by her, and she was much more accommodating. Men were interested in me, but slept with her.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  “I’m not sure. Well, I’m not sure which was cause and which was effect, but at the time I was confused; I was scared of men and was only comfortable around women. Most of the men I was interested in turned out to be gay. Men scared me.”

  “Was Olga someone you were interested in?”

  “In the broad sense of the term.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We weren’t a couple; we lived together like sisters, even though I knew that wasn’t quite the way it was.”

  “And how did she see your relationship?”

  “I think she drifted away when she realized that I was on my way to being openly gay.”

  “And were you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “Really alone. In a way, we were enough for each other. When Olga decided to move back in with her parents, I felt really lonely. I missed our conversations, cooking together, wearing each other’s clothes…. I felt really lonely.”

  “And what happened after that?”

  “We didn’t see much of each other for a while; we needed time to let things calm down. After that, we started to see each other at least once a month, to keep in touch; we liked each other a lot. We were starting to grow closer again when she called me to talk about Gabriel.”

  “And do men still scare you?”

  “If you want to know if I’m a lesbian, the answer is no. I like men, but that doesn’t mean that men don’t still scare me.”

  “How come?”

  “For the same reason they’re scared of women: because they have dicks.”

  Espinosa was surprised by the answer. Not by the content, which he agreed with, but because of the way she said it. It hadn’t taken him long to realize that that was how Irene was: she didn’t beat around the bush, but neither was she trying to shock the person she was talking to.

  “I told you a little about myself,” she said, “but I still don’t know much about you.”

  “I got married when I was barely twenty years old and was separated before I reached thirty. Our marriage lasted long enough to allow my son to know life with a father and a mother, but not long enough for me to see him grow up; long before that, his mother moved to Washington, where they still live. We see each other at most once a year. It’s like trying to read a book when you’ve only got the titles of the chapters. I’ve lived on my own for more than ten years. Women too: I only know the chapter titles. The most consistent women in my life are my cleaning lady and now Alice, a thirteen-year-old neighbor who’s trying to convince me to get a dog in place of a partner, even though I know it’s not the same thing.”

  “As long as you realize it.”

  In the subway, Gabriel could still imagine Olga in one of the cars or standing on the platform; worse, he also imagined he saw his mother there too. But he didn’t want to get distracted. Olga was dead, and his mother was not a mortal threat. That left the Argentine. He started to consider the possibility of the Argentine as both persecutor and victim, but he concluded that he was more suited to the role of prophet than of executioner. He got out of the train and walked up the subway station stairs. He’d often taken that same walk with Olga at his side. When he tried to picture her on the train tracks, he saw her nude, a naked body sliced up by the wheels of the train. He would have preferred never to have seen her nude; he could no longer imagine her dressed. The office routine carried on unchanged, though the lack of Olga made the work environment less pleasant. Maybe he’d get used to it. For now, he was still half expecting her to peer over the wall of his cubicle. Perhaps with the passage of time, when somebody else appeared to take her place, that image of her would wash away completely.

  There was still one other thing that was bothering him: his mother. Her world had always been restricted to the apartment and the immediate surrounding area—the church, the supermarket, the pharmacy, all within a short walking distance. He didn’t quite get what she’d been up to lately, with her mysterious disappearances. In any case, he’d have to find out.

  It was uncomfortable to walk with a gun. At the office, when he swiveled in his rotating chair, the jacket swiveled with him, bumping mutely against the wall. He’d been prepared for it, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a little nervous. Nervousness had been in the air for the last few days; O
lga’s funeral was still fresh in everyone’s minds.

  At the end of the afternoon, he walked home from work. And, as always, his mother was waiting at the window and came to welcome him at the door.

  “How nice that you’ve come home early. We can have dinner together.”

  Gabriel was sure that something was up. He was more than an hour late. It used to be that she got worried after fifteen minutes and was tearing her hair out after half an hour. Equally odd was the fact that she wasn’t wearing a shawl on her shoulders, as if she’d just taken off her jacket. She warmed up the meal without complaint or direct questions. When they sat down to dinner, he noticed a fire in her eyes. She wasn’t interested in eating. Her eyes were glued on Gabriel, waiting for the right moment.

  “Son, I know your secret and I want to help you.”

  “My secret?”

  “Gabriel, I’m your mother. I brought you into this world. You once were part of my body, and you’re still a part of me. Your secrets are my secrets. If something is threatening you, it’s also threatening me.”

  She spoke with religious fervor, the only fervor in her life. But now it was completely legitimate: no longer attached to an abstract object, it was focused on something so concrete that she felt it more in her gut than in her soul.

  “What are you talking about, Mom?”

  “I’m talking about our cause.”

  “What cause, Mom? What the devil has got into you?”

  “There’s no devil in me, but he’s inside of you. Father Crisóstomo didn’t want to pay attention to me. He said that you needed to get married and start a family. He’s old, he doesn’t have the courage to take on the forces of evil, he thinks that prayer is enough to make evil disappear. Well, the faithful have been praying since the Church of Christ was founded, and evil keeps getting stronger and stronger. You can’t just pray against evil. You’ve got to fight it. And that’s what we’re going to do. Together.”

  She spoke with such passion that Gabriel had trouble making out everything she was saying; moreover, he had trouble grasping exactly where she was going with all this. What evil was she talking about? Did she think he was possessed by Satan? Why the reference to Father Crisóstomo?