Southwesterly Wind

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  “Mom, I’m not possessed by the devil. That doesn’t exist. I’m just having a few problems, but everything is going to be fine.”

  “You don’t have to try to calm me down. I’m not fragile and I’m not stupid, and I know what I’m talking about. Evil doesn’t need to be measurable or spread fire on the wind: it can appear in all sorts of forms. I know that you’re fighting it, but you haven’t been able to defeat it. It’s hard, it’s very hard. You can’t get rid of it, you think it’s one thing and you think it’s another, and the power of temptation is limitless.”

  Gabriel immediately thought of Olga inviting him into the hotel, stripping until she was totally naked, helping him take his clothes off, and then his impotence and flight. She hadn’t hesitated an instant; she’d known exactly what she was doing.

  “Mom—”

  “You don’t need to say anything, son. I just want you to know that from now on we’re in this together, your cause is our cause.” She got up and cleared the table, putting the dishes in the sink without noticing that neither had eaten a bite.

  “I forgot to tell you. Someone named Espinosa called. He asked you to call him back. A new friend?”

  Gabriel still had his jacket on. The weight of the revolver made a bulge in his pocket, but his mother hadn’t noticed. She also hadn’t noticed that he hadn’t shaved all weekend. Neither of them mentioned Olga’s brutal death. Little comments—on the undercooked beans, the badly ironed shirt, the broken light bulb in the lamp in the living room—disappeared. Events of the last week, small and large, were placed in parentheses, in suspension.

  The revolver was still weighing down his pocket. He would rest it on the table while his mother was doing the dishes.

  “How did Dad die?”

  Dona Alzira slowed down, moving her hands almost imperceptibly in the sink. She answered without turning her face toward him.

  “A heart attack, son, I’ve already told you many times.”

  “At home or on the street?”

  “At home. I’ve told you that as well.”

  “Was he asleep when he died?”

  “No. In the shower.”

  “Was I home?”

  “You were, but you didn’t see your father dead. Only afterward, when he was already in his coffin.”

  After three days of unbroken fog, Tuesday dawned rainlessly. Places in the shade suffered because of a lack of sun, but in Rio de Janeiro people need cloudy days to counterbalance the long sequences of bright, clear days. The sun still wasn’t warm enough to dry off the sidewalks and park benches, and the sandy soil of the little park was still wet; mothers and nannies were careful with their children’s clothes.

  Espinosa was walking unhurriedly toward the station when he heard his name. He immediately recognized the voice. Alice ran up to him, trying to keep her backpack on, which was bouncing up and down as she ran. When he leaned over to give her a kiss on the cheek, he noticed immediately that something was wrong.

  “What is it? Why do you look so sad?”

  “Neighbor.”

  “What about him?”

  “Nothing, he’s fine, but my parents said I can’t take care of a dog that’s not mine, that sometimes I don’t even realize what I’m doing myself, so how can I take care of another dog? Besides, I was going to have the key to your apartment, and that would be even more of a responsibility, and I don’t know …”

  “They’re right.”

  “Why? What difference does it make if I walk one dog or two?”

  “About the same difference it makes if you go out with one boy or two—and I don’t mean that your boyfriends bark and wag their tails.”

  “Espinosa, I’m serious.”

  “I am too. Besides, they’re right about your having a key to my apartment.”

  They weren’t walking arm in arm, as they usually did. Alice needed both her arms to gesture, and sometimes she walked backward in front of Espinosa so that she could look into his eyes while they discussed the situation. By the time they got to the station, she was about to cry.

  “Let’s not end the discussion here,” he said. “Neighbor still hasn’t been weaned; we’ve got plenty of time to talk it all over. Don’t start your day off on a sad note. Have a good day at school.”

  Alice received his good-bye kiss with cheeks wet from tears. Espinosa didn’t want her to suffer because of him. But he knew that by her age a human being had already accumulated enough grief for several Greek tragedies.

  In his office, before he even took off his jacket, the phone rang. It was Gabriel.

  “Good morning, Officer. I got your message, but I didn’t get home until late last night, so I couldn’t call you until now.”

  “Are you still walking home?”

  “It does me some good.”

  “I’ve got news for you.”

  “Really?”

  “We found the Argentine. I saw him on Sunday afternoon.”

  “You found him?”

  “You didn’t just make him up. He exists. You might have simply overstated the importance of his predictions.”

  “So he confirmed what he said?”

  Espinosa summed up the conversation, underlining the reason that had led the Argentine to make his prediction.

  “As you can see, it wasn’t anything more than a joke in bad taste. If you want to, we can arrange a meeting with him to clear up the misunderstanding…. Gabriel, are you there? … Gabriel …”

  “I don’t want to talk to him. Anything—but a joke? The damage is done. A joke … I can’t accept that…. Now there’s nothing else I can do….” He seemed shaken.

  “Gabriel, where are you talking to me from?”

  “Work.”

  “Wait for me at the entrance to your building in fifteen minutes.”

  The building wasn’t too far from the station. He shouldn’t have said fifteen minutes; he should have told him to come down right away. He reached the door before the fifteen minutes were up. Gabriel was already waiting for him.

  “You don’t look too good.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping well. What did the Argentine tell you, sir?”

  “We didn’t talk for long. His wife was there too.”

  “Did he come to the station?”

  “Let’s talk somewhere else. There are too many people around here.”

  The building where Gabriel worked was on the Avenida Copacabana, not far from the Avenida Atlântica. They took the first cross street and walked toward the beach. They didn’t talk on the way. As they turned onto the Avenida Atlântica, the vision of the great blue sea in front of them shocked them out of their silence. Espinosa spoke first. He told Gabriel how they’d found the Argentine by talking to the Cancer Hospital’s director of children’s activities, and about the strategy they’d used to lure him to the fast-food place. Then he related the conversation, leaving out a few details and emphasizing what Hidalgo had said about the prediction’s being nothing more than a provocation, a bad joke. While he was listening to Espinosa, Gabriel’s legs shook, and he looked around; he kept putting his right hand into his coat pocket. When Espinosa finished the story, Gabriel’s eyes were red.

  “Officer, what hurts me the most is that he said that it was a joke. I’ve spent a year in hell. Nothing makes sense to me anymore. My house, my job, my friends, my plans—everything, absolutely everything has lost its meaning for me. And now the guy says it was only a joke, a provocation? It doesn’t make any difference now. The damage is done. If he wanted to provoke me, he’s done it. It doesn’t do me any good to say it was a joke. The joke came true.”

  “Why are you saying that? Did you kill someone?”

  “Because he caused me real suffering. To say that it was only a joke—that doesn’t make the suffering of the last year go away, and it doesn’t give me back the year I’ve lost. When you’ve spent months and months, day after day, thinking about what he called his joke, the joke becomes real.”

  “You don’t think
you’d feel better if you talked to him?”

  “Thanks, Officer. But as I said, the damage is done. I thank you for being so patient with me, and for trying to help me. We’d better leave it here. I’ve got to get back to work. There’s no longer any reason for me to bother you.”

  Espinosa watched him walk away and vanish into the crowds. Gabriel no longer seemed to be a helpless kid, but neither had he become a real man. He’d just become an anomaly. The officer turned around to face the sea. There was a little wind and the waves were tall; there were only a few people on the sand and nobody in the water. He sat for a while looking out at the ocean.

  “Provocation … a joke … People aren’t toys. You’d have to be a psychopath to play with somebody else’s life like that. A guy who plays with other people’s souls needs to be punished. How can I be sure it was a joke? He could have said that just to get the officer off his back. A guy comes out of nowhere, makes a terrible prediction, disappears for a whole year without a trace, and then shows up well dressed, snobby, superior, saying that it was only a joke, and the officer expects me to believe it?”

  “It was a disguise, son.”

  “A disguise of what, Mom?”

  “Of the Prince of Darkness.”

  “Mom, there you go again.”

  His conversation with Espinosa had pushed him into a state of emotional suspension. He felt like someone had sucked out all his blood. Now he could think, however, without being overtaken by emotion. For the first time in several days, he’d taken public transport home. The bus. He still didn’t feel quite ready for the subway. The conversation that he was having with his mother around the small kitchen table was like an uninterrupted continuation of their talk the night before.

  “Your description sounds exactly like one of his disguises. He often appears as an elegant, attractive, seductive person.”

  “Mom, please, he’s a psychopath, a pervert, not the devil.”

  “You can call him whatever you like, but I’m telling you he is in the service of evil, and he always appears in a misleading, captivating guise. He plays with your faith and makes you think that he’s telling the truth.”

  “You’ve been talking to Father Crisóstomo too much.”

  “Father Crisóstomo is weak; he’s got the faith of comfortable people.”

  Gabriel was really shaken by his mother’s transformation. He’d never thought of her as weak or submissive, but she’d never revealed this side of herself, as a warrior ready to attack an enemy she herself said had a thousand faces. He wondered if she wasn’t actually in the throes of a religious delirium.

  “Mom, we can’t just eliminate the Argentine! He didn’t do anything.”

  “What do you mean he didn’t do anything? Can’t you see that his prediction was true? You could very well kill someone before your next birthday, and that person might be you.”

  “I’m not planning on killing myself.”

  “Great. Then let’s make sure that nobody else can kill you either.”

  They hadn’t finished their dinner yet; the conversation had taken up all their energy. Both were looking at their plates as if hoping to find a solution there. They finished eating in silence, and Dona Alzira got up to do the dishes.

  “Beware of woman,” she said when her son started moving toward his room. “Of all of the forms Satan takes, she is the most powerful.”

  Gabriel didn’t fall asleep immediately; he lay in bed with his room lit up by the streetlights, which shone in through the small glass windowpanes. The conversation with his mother had made him feel better than he had in a long time. He knew it would pass, that it wouldn’t even last until the morning, but it still felt nice. He put his revolver under the mattress and took off his clothes to get ready for bed. That was when the image of Olga naked in the hotel room burst into his mind. He got an erection. Now it was too late. I should have gotten hard in the hotel room, with Olga. Now there’s nothing I can do about it; she’s gone. She had it coming to her. He masturbated, thinking of Olga’s naked body. Then he masturbated again, this time thinking of Olga’s naked body spread out on the railroad tracks.

  Espinosa didn’t want Olga’s case moved to his precinct; he would rather the Nineteenth Precinct handle the investigation. On the other hand, he knew things that his colleagues in Tijuca didn’t: for them, the girl’s death on the subway tracks was an isolated event, without ramifications for any other fact or person. The case hadn’t awakened any media attention, and the transportation authority didn’t want the news to sound sensational. Everything seemed to indicate that the girl’s fall had been an accident, and the case was moving smoothly toward the files. Espinosa wasn’t interested in the procedures in the Tijuca precinct; he wanted to get to the bottom of the girl’s death. He didn’t believe it had been an accident; suicide was even less plausible. That left murder, and Irene was the only one who believed that—she not only believed it, she claimed to know who had done it. He had to take into account the fact that the only person who claimed it had been a murder had a long-standing, close relationship with the victim, a relationship that had been broken off and was just being resumed just when Olga died. One thing, though, seemed to make sense: the series of events connecting Gabriel, Hidalgo, and Stella had nothing to do with those involving Gabriel, Olga, and Irene. The only point of intersection was Gabriel—a fact not to be dismissed lightly.

  “Welber, I want the Argentine and the woman here tomorrow, preferably before noon. Present it as an invitation; don’t sound intimidating. If he declines, put it to him more persuasively.”

  “The girl too?”

  “Absolutely. Don’t be fooled by her silence; she’s as much of an operator as he is. I also want you to do me a favor. It’s not official. I want you to follow Gabriel when he gets off work. At least today and tomorrow. Be careful, since he knows you.”

  The next step in his plan was to leave a message on Irene’s answering machine, the reply to which he received only that night, in his apartment.

  “So, want to go out for some more beer?” Irene asked immediately.

  “Unfortunately not, at least not tonight.”

  “Are you ever not working?”

  “I don’t work as much as you think. I wasn’t working on the nights we went out together.”

  “It’s just as well, because I wasn’t either.”

  Espinosa still hadn’t gotten used to Irene’s responses.

  “Would you be bothered if I asked you some questions over the phone?”

  “I’d rather it be personally, but if I don’t have a choice, then fine. What do you want to know?”

  “What Olga said about Gabriel.”

  “Not much. She said she worked with him, that he was a nice guy, good-looking and charming, communicative, at least with her, that he was the only guy in the company she’d sleep with, but that he was really shy and had a widowed, very controlling mother; but that in spite of that she’d still go to bed with him.”

  “And did she?”

  “I don’t think so. She would have mentioned it to me.”

  “Was there anything between you and him?”

  “Besides hate at first sight?”

  “Was there?”

  “He certainly hated me. I think he even fought with Olga over me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he hated me, I’m telling you. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I think he didn’t like that Olga brought me along to our meeting at the station.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “He thought I was distracting your attention away from him. Which was true. I was sitting there thinking how ridiculous it all was.”

  “Did he ever say anything to you?”

  “Not a word.”

  “What you said about him causing Olga’s death—was that based on anything concrete, or was it due to emotional shock?”

  “I don’t have any evidence for it, but it’s not baseless. Come on, Espinosa. We both know that she didn’t
kill herself. And we know that the possibility of an accident is highly improbable. So that leaves murder. Everybody knows somebody who at one time or another has wished that they were dead. If someone dies, all you have to do is find those people and check their alibis. In the case of Olga, Gabriel, at least, met all the conditions.”

  “As for the conditions, I agree with you, but there’s still no motive. From what he told me, he had every reason to want her alive.”

  “Except frustration.”

  “What?”

  “Because of his absolute certainty that he couldn’t have her as a woman.”

  “Why are you saying that? Did she say something about that?”

  “No. Pure feminine intuition. The only thing she said was that he was really timid sexually, that even though she’d dropped lots of hints, he’d never tried anything, not even holding her hand.”

  “If everyone who was shy about sex turned into a murderer—”

  “Doesn’t the saying go, People kill for two reasons, sex and money?”

  “More or less.”

  “Well, sweetie, he doesn’t have either.”

  “Next time, I’m taking my bike. I walked almost three hours.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. He’s a wanderer. He seems to be heading in the general direction of his house, but he doesn’t go straight there; he doesn’t seem to worry if he gets there or not. Sometimes he retraces his steps for no apparent reason; he walks in circles, he crosses the street, and then crosses back to the other side for no reason; basically, the way he walks is crazy, and it takes him more than three hours to cover a distance that would take a normal person less than an hour. He didn’t stop anywhere, he didn’t meet anyone, he didn’t call anybody on the phone, he didn’t pause for water, coffee, to go to the bathroom, anything. Two things attracted my attention. One was that he rarely took his right hand out of his jacket pocket, and the few times he did, I noticed that the pocket was weighed down by something that I would bet my next paycheck was a gun. And at several points he seemed to be crying. One more thing: I could put a whole battalion behind him and he wouldn’t catch on.”