Now that I think about it, and now that I’m writing it down, I can see how profoundly cynical our attitude was. You would have thought we were in some kind of athletic contest. Not for a moment did we stop and think that if that telephone was ringing, whether five minutes before or five minutes after eight, it was because someone had just killed someone else. For us, it was simply a matter of office competition, and the loser had to bust his butt. We’d see which of us was the lucky one, which of us was cool. As things turned out, it was Romano. And although in those days I hadn’t yet come to loathe him—a period of time, not very long, was to pass before he started showing me what a despicable creature he was—I felt a burning desire to swat him across the head with the telephone. Instead of doing that, I assumed a look of exasperation, coughed to clear my throat, picked up the receiver, and solemnly said, “Examining magistrate’s court. Good morning.”
4
I went down the steps to Talcahuano Street, cursing my fate. In those days, I was still pondering my reasons—or rather, reproaching myself—for not having finished my law degree. On such occasions as this one, my reproaches sounded pretty convincing. I’m twenty-eight, I’d tell myself; had I completed my studies, I’d have ten years’ experience in the Judiciary, and I could already be the clerk in charge of some other court, instead of being stuck, bogged down, mired in that goddamned examining magistrate’s court as deputy clerk and chief administrative officer. And then, later, a prosecutor, why not? Or a public defender, just as good. Wasn’t I sick of watching as whole battalions of cretins started out from positions like mine and then moved up through the judicial ranks, making careers, climbing the ladder, taking off? I was, indeed I was.
My complaint ought to have a medical name. “Deputy Clerk’s Complex. Attributed to a judicial employee who, because he lacks a law degree, can rise no higher than deputy and chief administrator to a clerk and, although he exercises considerable power over secretaries, underlings, and interns, will never in his fucking life ascend beyond that position in the hierarchy and therefore grows thoroughly frustrated from seeing others, sometimes more capable than he but generally, and to an infinitely greater degree, assholes, pass him by like rockets on their way to jurisprudential stardom.” A pretty definition, worthy of being submitted to specialized legal journals, though they’d probably reject it because of that part about the guy’s “fucking life,” or because of that other part about “assholes,” or—most probably—because the editors of those publications are lawyers themselves.
Adalberto Rivadero, a deputy clerk who was my first boss when I started out as an intern, told me a supreme truth: “Look, Chaparrito. Courts are like islands; you can land on Tahiti or Alcatraz.” The old master gazed down at me from the height of his grizzled years, the same sad elevation that I have now attained, and his face clearly indicated that he felt more like an inhabitant of the latter island. “And another thing, kid,” he added, looking at me with the sorrow of one who knows he speaks the truth but knows also that the truth, in this case, is useless. “The island depends on the judge you get. If you get a nice guy, you’re saved. If you get a son of a bitch, things get complicated. But the worst are the assholes, Chaparro. Watch out for assholes, my boy. If you get an asshole, you’re screwed.”
As I went down the steps, trying to figure out which bus I should take, Adalberto Rivadero’s maxim—which deserves to be cast in letters of bronze and prominently displayed next to the blindfolded statue that stands in front of the Palace of Justice—was echoing inside my head. Because on May 30, 1968, I already knew I was screwed. I worked in an examining magistrate’s court, formerly well run, but now in the hands of an asshole. And an asshole of the worst kind: an asshole eager to make a rapid ascent. The asshole who believes he’s reached the apex of his possibilities tends to reduce his actions to a minimum. He senses, at least obscurely, that he’s an asshole. And if he thinks he’s at the peak of his career, he feels satisfied, and at the same time he’s afraid. He’s afraid others will see, simply by looking at him, that he’s an asshole. He’s afraid of screwing up in such an obvious way that others will notice, if they haven’t already, that he’s an asshole. And so he gives himself over to stasis. He reduces his movements to a minimum and lets life carry him along, and therefore the people in his employ can do their jobs in peace. They can even couple their knowledge and experience with his inertia and make him appear to be smart or, at least, a little less of an asshole.
But the asshole who wants to advance his career poses two difficulties. To begin with, he’s bursting with energy, filled with enthusiasm, abounding in initiatives, which flow from him as from a fountain and which he wishes to present to his superiors openly and frankly, so that they will realize what an undervalued diamond they hold in their hands, a man relegated to a position inferior to his moral and intellectual deserts. And this is where the second difficulty arises: this particular category of asshole compounds temerity with obliviousness. For if he cherishes the dream of advancement, it’s because he feels worthy of it, and he may even go so far as to consider himself unjustly treated by life and by his fellow men if they deny him the fulfillment of his intrinsically legitimate aspirations. That’s when the asshole’s obliviousness and drive make him dangerous. They raise him to the level of a threat, not so much to himself as to others—and, more specifically, to those others who are under his orders, one of whom, to take a random example, must abandon the warm hospitality of his office and betake himself to the scene of a crime. And it’s precisely for that reason that he leaves by the Talcahuano door and goes down the steps spewing a stream of expletives.
That was me, the victim, harboring deep in my heart the suspicion that the judge who wanted to play the diligent schoolboy before his superiors on the Appellate Court wasn’t the only asshole in this story, no, but that there was another asshole, who—because he was pusillanimous, or because it was convenient, or because he was distracted—had failed to complete his legal studies and as a consequence was never going to advance past deputy clerk, and who was therefore like a train up against one of those big wood-and-metal buffer stops, an unequivocal sign that tells you you’ve come this far but you’ll go no farther, my man. Shunted off, end of the line, that’s it. And from then on, he knew, he’d see a long parade of clerks, who would give him orders he’d have to obey, because the clerks, lawyers as they were, would be his superiors, and there would be a long parade of judges, too, who would give the clerks orders they would then pass on to him. I was complying with just such an order, according to which, whenever a homicide case came in while we were on duty, the deputy and chief administrator of the clerk’s office whose turn it was had to betake himself to the scene of the crime in order to oversee the work of the police.
Once and only once, trying not to seem arrogant, had I dared to consult my illustrious magistrate about the usefulness of such diligence, since the Federal Police were responsible for carrying out the first phase of the investigation. No matter, His Honor declared; that was the way he wanted it done. This was his entire response, and in the ensuing silence, I felt the special wretchedness of one who must not so much as allude to what everyone in the room knows, which in this case was that our new judge was an imbecile, and that the clerks weren’t going to say a word. The clerk of Section No. 18 hasn’t got the slightest intention of opposing the judge, I thought, because having discovered, and how, that his new boss is a first-class, black-belt asshole, the said clerk is preparing to bring to bear all the influence he can muster so that he can set sail for some other island, where calmer breezes blow. And as for Julio Carlos Pérez, I said to myself, your immediate superior, the clerk of Section No. 19—your section—he’s highly unlikely to notice that the judge is an asshole because he’s one as well, and to a superlative degree, and consequently, you are screwed. So what can you do? Nothing. You can’t do anything. Or you could, at most, make a novena to San Calixto and pray that the chief asshole may succeed in his ambitions and get a quic
k promotion to the Appellate Court, and perhaps, once he’s there, he’ll calm down, he’ll feel fulfilled, and he’ll pass into another category of asshole, accomplished, satisfied, peaceful, and contemplative, the kind that can be found occupying some of the most illustrious offices in the Palace of Justice.
But that hadn’t happened, and there I was. As I asked the vendor at a news kiosk which bus would take me to the corner of Niceto Vega Avenue and Bonpland Street, I started feeling sick in anticipation of the scene I was going to have to witness. I tried to buck up my courage, if only out of shame, telling myself that I couldn’t get weak in the knees in front of the crowd of cops who were sure to be milling around in that apartment, even though it would give me the creeping willies to see a corpse, a new corpse, a fresh corpse, a corpse produced not by the natural law of life and death but by the categorical and savage decision of a murderer who was on the loose somewhere nearby, and then I had my bus ticket out, making sure to keep it so I could get reimbursed for the expense when I got back, and since it would be a while before we reached the barrio of Palermo, I walked all the way to the rear of the bus and took a seat, still cursing myself between my teeth for not having had the drop of discipline, the ounce of fortitude, the dollop of willpower I would have needed to become a lawyer.
5
When I turned the corner and saw the first signs of the vain commotion the police display in such cases, my stomach began to churn. There were three patrol cars, an ambulance, and a dozen cops, coming and going with nothing to do but determined to keep on doing it. As I wasn’t inclined to give them the satisfaction of detecting my queasiness, I walked up to the group quickly, reaching for my rear trouser pocket. I held my credentials under the nose of the first officer who barred my path, declared without condescending to look at him that I was Deputy Clerk Chaparro of Examining Magistrate’s Court No. 41, and told him to take me to the officer in charge of the operation. The uniformed policeman acted according to a rule whose iron logic allowed him to follow his chosen path without undue difficulty: everyone who had one more stripe on his sleeve than he did must be obeyed; everyone who had one less stripe must be treated like dirt. Although I was totally unadorned by epaulets, my peremptory tone placed me in the first category, and so he saluted me awkwardly and asked me to follow him “into the interior.”
It was an old house divided up into several apartments, all of which opened onto a side corridor, ugly but tidy. Geraniums in flowerpots had been placed here and there in the hall in a failed effort to beautify it. Two or three times, we had to move to one side to avoid running into more policemen, all of whom had come out of the second-to-last apartment. I calculated that there must be more than twenty cops on the scene, and once again I was appalled by the morbid pleasure some people find in the contemplation of tragedy. Like train accidents, I thought. I was more or less accustomed to those, because I traveled on the Sarmiento Line every day, but I could never begin to understand the curious onlookers who would crowd around the stopped trains and peer between the wheels and the rails, hoping to glimpse the victim’s mutilated body and watch the firemen’s bloody work. Once, suspecting that what was actually bothering me was my own weakness, I forced myself to move closer to an accident site, but soon I was horrified beyond recovery, not so much by the atrocious spectacle of death as by the jubilant, festive expressions on the faces of many in the crowd. It was as if the accident were a free show put on for their enjoyment, or as if they had to take in every single detail of the scene so that they could describe it properly to their colleagues at work; they stared with unblinking eyes, engrossed, spellbound, their lips slightly parted in a half-smile. Well, as I crossed the threshold into that apartment, I was sure some of the men inside would be looking out from under the visors of their blue peaked caps with just such expressions on their faces.
The tidy living room I entered contained many decorative objects on the walls and bookshelves. The dining set in the small adjoining room, six chairs and a table crowded together into too narrow a space, had little to do with the small armchairs in the living room and no relationship whatsoever to the style of the decor. “Newlyweds,” I guessed. I walked a few steps toward the door that opened to the rest of the apartment, but my way was blocked almost at once by a wall of blue uniforms arranged in a semicircle. Not much brainwork was required to deduce that the corpse was lying in there. Some of the men were silent, others commented loudly to demonstrate their manliness in the face of death, but they all had their eyes fixed on the floor.
“I want to talk to the officer in charge, please,” I said; it didn’t sound like a request. I searched for the right tone, a little hard-edged, a little weary, to show this bunch of lazy gawkers that I represented a higher authority and they owed me a modicum of respect. My idea was to take the experience gained from the command/obedience tactic I’d used on the cop who blocked my way outside and apply the method at the group level. They turned around to look at me, and the voice of Police Inspector Báez responded from the other side of the room. A couple of the policemen stepped aside, and I could see Báez, sitting on the double bed.
It was still going to be hard to get to him, because the bed took up almost the whole room, and the body was lying on the floor next to the bed. I couldn’t see much more through the narrow passage the cops had made for me, but I figured that if I didn’t want to look soft, I would have to stop and contemplate the dead woman.
I knew it was a woman, because the policeman who’d made the call to the court at five after eight had told me—using the strange jargon the police seem to delight in—that the victim was “an unidentified young female.” Their supposedly neutral language, their conviction that they were speaking in forensic terms, occasionally struck me as funny, but in general I found it annoying. Why not just come out and say it? The victim was a young woman whose name we didn’t yet know and who seemed to be a little over twenty years old.
I guessed that she’d been beautiful, because despite the ugly bluish color her skin had taken on when she was strangled and the predictable distortion of her face, frozen into a grimace by horror and lack of oxygen, there was a majesty about that girl that not even a horrible death had been able to obliterate. I was disturbingly certain the place was crawling with so many policemen precisely because of that, because of her beauty, and because she was lying naked at the foot of the bed where she’d been flung, face up on the bright parquet floor; and I knew some of the men standing around her were thrilled to be able to gaze at her body with impunity.
Báez stood up and walked over to me, skirting the big bed. He shook my hand without smiling. I was sufficiently acquainted with him to know that he liked his work, but he didn’t enjoy the suffering from which his work usually arose. If he hadn’t thrown the blue crowd of curious cops out of the room, it was simply because he hadn’t registered their presence very clearly, or because he knew they were part of police folklore, or maybe a little of each. I asked him if the forensic team had arrived yet. Time would show me that I was never in my life going to meet a cop half so honest and clear-thinking as Alfredo Báez, but that morning, among the many things I didn’t know, I didn’t know that one, either, and so I took the liberty of becoming indignant about how little care he seemed to be taking to preserve the evidence at the scene of the crime. Had I been a little better acquainted with him, I’d have understood that what looked like indolence in Báez was, in fact, resigned fortitude at finding himself, once again, surrounded by a bunch of dimwits on a one-way trip to nowhere. Báez paged through his notebook and informed me of what he’d been able to determine so far.
“Her name’s Liliana Colotto. Twenty-three years old. Schoolteacher. Married since the beginning of last year to Ricardo Agustín Morales, teller at the Provincial Bank of Buenos Aires. The neighbor in the next apartment told us she heard screams at a quarter to eight this morning and looked through the peephole in her door. Since her apartment’s the last one, her front door’s not on the side, it’s on the
end, and so she can see down the whole length of the hall. She saw a young man come out of this apartment. A little guy. Black hair, she thinks, or maybe dark brown. At this point, she had to blather for a while about the distinction between black hair and dark brown hair. I guess the old bird doesn’t have much opportunity for conversation. Anyway, she said the husband left for work, as usual, very early in the morning, 7:10 or 7:15, and so it caught her attention when she heard sounds coming from next door sometime after that. When the man came out of this apartment, he didn’t shut the door behind him. So the old lady waited a few seconds until the street door closed and then stepped out into the hall. She called to the girl, but there was no answer.” Báez flipped over the last page. “That’s it. Well, except that she peeked through the door and saw the girl lying there, as you see—very still, the neighbor said—and then she called us.”
The Secret in Their Eyes Page 3
