The next day, Sandoval would miss work. But he’d return the day after that, with black rings under his eyes and a look of devastation. When Sandoval was in such a wretched state, Chaparro knew the man couldn’t work as he usually did. He’d be useless, as if the alcohol had erased his memory centers and short-circuited his intelligence. At times like those, Chaparro would set his assistant to binding case files. Without a word, he’d put the white thread and the upholstery needle on Sandoval’s desk. On his own, Sandoval would carry the equipment to a table near the shelves where loose case documents were stacked and then go to work in a way that was a joy to see. With a surgeon’s movements, an artist’s grace, and the solemnity of an officiating priest, Sandoval gave the impression of a consummate bookbinder. When he finished with a case file, it was bound into one or more large tomes, each of which looked like a volume of an encyclopedia. At the end of three or four days, after the worst of his depression was over, Sandoval would approach Chaparro and, with a smile, return the needle and thread, as though discharging himself from rehabilitation.
He died early in the 1980s, while Chaparro was in San Salvador de Jujuy. The thought of embracing Sandoval’s widow and paying his final respects to Sandoval himself was sufficient reason for Chaparro to spend his good pesos on plane fare, attend the funeral, and above all, put a two-day parenthesis around his fear of being killed by a band of murderers who, besides everything else, were gunning for the wrong target.
Now, nearly twenty years later, Chaparro forgets for a moment what he’s come to do and pulls at the string that binds one of the big volumes. Then he releases the thin cord, having verified that it’s got exactly the right degree of tension. It’s as though Sandoval has left him this wordless message so that Chaparro will remember Pablo, too, as one of the actors in the story he’s begun to write. Message received.
Chaparro smiles, thinking that Sandoval, with his subtle intelligence, would have appreciated the sequence of small details, the infinitesimal resurrection, the deserved homage rendered to him two decades later by his friend and boss, and the said boss’s tangential, sidelong approach to that homage through a posthumous eulogy to his late assistant’s virtues as a seamster.
Pages
Chaparro grabs the first volume and pulls it closer to the lamplight. It contains two cover sheets, one on top of the other, both of thin cardboard. The second sheet displays black lettering made with a felt-tip pen: “Liliana Emma Colotto. Homicide,” followed by information concerning the court. But the first cover sheet, the outer one, reads “Isidoro Antonio Gómez, first-degree murder, Penal Code Art. 80, par. 7.” Chaparro opens the dossier and finds the same police reports, the same witnesses’ statements, and the same forensic analyses he reviewed in August 1968, after he’d been ordered to declare the case inactive for want of a suspect and he’d decided instead to play a first-rate mug’s game.
He flips through a few pages. Although he regrets it almost at once, he can’t resist the impulse to look again at the photographs of the crime scene. Thirty years later, Liliana Emma Colotto de Morales is still sprawled on the bedroom floor, abandoned, helpless, with fixed, dead eyes and bluish marks on her throat. Chaparro feels the same shame he felt the day of the murder, because he remembers the lascivious stares of the policemen who stood around the corpse before Báez sent them packing, and he’s not sure whether his shame has to do with those stares or with his own obscene desire to lose himself, too, in contemplating the splendid body that has just died.
He turns over the pages of the autopsy one by one, but he doesn’t read or even skim them. He half-closes his eyes and concentrates on the musty smell the pages release into the archive’s still air. They’ve been there more than twenty years, bound one on top of the other, and Chaparro can’t help conjuring up an image that has entranced him ever since he was a child. He imagines that he himself is one of those pages. Anyone at all. He imagines himself waiting for years and years in the most utter darkness, squeezed between the previous and following pages, smooth and soft like them. If you’re one of those pages, Chaparro thinks, the occasional footsteps that resound in the aisle at monthly or yearly intervals can’t help you measure the passage of time. They’re barely sufficient for plumbing the terrifying depths of your solitude. All at once, without warning, without any signs that would allow you to prepare yourself for the coming upheaval, you feel a shock. Then another and another. As the uniform mass of paper that protects or imprisons you is moved from one place to another, you’re disoriented by a sudden, gently rhythmic motion. Then movement stops again, but there’s a sound of pages passing from one side to the other, followed by the abrupt, blinding wound of light that means your turn—the turn of the page you are, of the page you’ve metamorphosed into—has come. You don’t waste this chance to see the world again, even though, for you, the Creation is reduced to a face, a male face, the face of a mature man with graying hair, small eyes, and an aquiline nose who barely looks at you and immediately turns his head to the following page, the one that for years and years has been next to you, pressed against you, skin on skin, letters on letters. And then a hand moves across the surface to the far corner and lifts the next page and pulls it toward you, and page and hand blur at the exact moment when the light disappears, and you understand that another eternity of darkness and silence has begun.
When Chaparro imagines the sudden hope and catastrophic disappointment his hands are causing in each page as he leafs through the case file, he’s overcome by an absurd feeling of pity. But when he reaches page 208, shortly after the beginning of the second volume, he stops; he’s arrived at his destination.
It’s a four-line court order, typed on his Remington. On this last point, he has no doubt: The e’s are all raised a little above the line formed by the other letters, and the bellies of the a’s are filled with ink, because the key was worn out.
The document records a court appearance, falsely dated in mid-August 1968, in which Ricardo Agustín Morales declares that he has information pertinent to solving the crime. A little farther down the page, an order signed by Judge Fortuna Lacalle orders the petitioner to give, under oath, the reasons for his assertion.
Page 209 presents Morales’s sworn declaration, falsely dated in early September. In this statement, which is considerably longer than the other declarations, the name of Isidoro Antonio Gómez appears for the first time. On page 210, a new court order dated September 17 directs that official letters be sent to the Federal Police and to the police of Tucumán Province, requesting them “to ascertain the domicile” of the said Gómez and “summon him to appear in court.” All these documents bear the signatures of the examining magistrate and his clerk. Judge Fortuna Lacalle’s signature is enormous, pretentious, adorned with useless flourishes. Pérez’s is small and bland, like the clerk himself.
Chaparro consults his watch. His eyes feel irritated. The table lamp, shining alone in the midst of darkness, has troubled his vision. It’s almost noon, and he knows the archivist is going to get nervous if he doesn’t see him leave soon. It’s unlikely that he’ll quote these tedious legal documents verbatim in his book, but they’ve helped to evoke the climate of those days. They’ve returned him to the sterile meetings he had with Morales to keep him from losing hope, or at least to inform him, gently and gradually, that the case was going nowhere for lack of a suspect. And they’ve recalled the unbearable heat of that hellish summer.
Chaparro rises to his feet and puts the three volumes of the case in a single pile. He doesn’t turn off the lamp, because he’s afraid he’ll get completely lost if he tries to make his way back through the dark stacks. He retraces his steps to the entrance, zigzagging in accordance with the archivist’s directions. At one of the last turns, when he’s almost out of the archive, Chaparro glimpses something that makes him jump. It’s the old man, sitting on a chair in one of the narrow aisles, with his legs stretched out and his eyes fixed on the shelf in front of him. Chaparro feels the same icy apprehension
that used to come over him during visits to his aunt Margaret, who was blind from birth. At the end of the visit, when night was falling, his aunt would accompany him to the door, turning out the lights along the way to be sure she wouldn’t leave one on and “waste electricity for nothing.” When the old lady told him good-bye and, a little absently, stretched out her face to receive his kiss on her cheek, little Benjamín would look over her shoulder and see that her apartment was in darkness. The image of his aunt in those pitch-black, endless rooms—eating dinner, for example, or feeling her way along the walls—would follow him all the way to the Floresta station and terrify him until he got on the train.
With a laconic “Good day,” Chaparro bids farewell to the archivist and practically runs out of the archive. He goes back up to the ground floor of the Palace, and shortly thereafter he’s descending the exterior stairs to Lacalle Street and rejoicing in his return to sundrenched, noisy Buenos Aires.
Three hours later, he’s in his house in Castelar, and if some passerby were to walk down his street, he could hear the frenetic din of a typewriter and see Chaparro’s silhouette through the window, bent over his desk, over his keyboard, banging out the paragraphs of what appears to be the second part of his story. But as it happens, no one hears or sees him. The street is deserted.
12
I didn’t dare tell him no, even though there was every reason to suspect that a terrible time was in store for me.
It was at our last meeting. Just as we were taking leave of each other, Morales surprised me by saying, “I’m going to get rid of the photographs.”
I asked him why, but I had a feeling he was going to explain whether I asked him to or not. He said, “Because I can’t stand to look at her face when she can’t look back at me. But before I burn them, I’d like to share them with you. Maybe showing you the photos will be a good way to say good-bye to them.”
I could have turned him down. I’ve always hated looking at photographs. But either I didn’t have the necessary reflexes, or I was developing a tendency to let the boy have his way, or I was hindered by the same sudden awkwardness I’ve felt all my life at the prospect of rejecting a request. The one certain thing is that I accepted.
We agreed to meet again in three weeks. It was the beginning of December. The case had been in a box on a shelf since August, and sooner rather than later, I was going to find myself obliged to revive it, review it, and declare it officially dead; no one would be prosecuted. Although the prospect made me sick, the case, Morales, and I (so deep was my commitment in this mess) were all about to hit a concrete wall. Maybe that was why I agreed to look at the photos.
I left the court with no time to spare and quickly walked the block and a half to the bar where we always met. Morales had already taken possession of a large table, and with the calm concentration of a collector, he was taking photographs out of a shoe box and placing them in different piles. I approached him slowly. Looking over his shoulder, I could see his display of grievous memories.
The wooden floor creaked, and Morales turned around to look at me. He was wearing a pair of librarian’s eyeglasses and holding a pencil in his mouth. He made a face by way of greeting me and pointed to the seat across from him. When he did so, I noticed that the piles of pictures were turned toward my side of the table, as if we were at a trade fair and Morales wanted to guide me through his exhibit.
“I’m just about ready,” he said, pulling a last handful of photos out of the box and starting to distribute them among the piles in front of me.
Every time he placed a photograph on a pile, he took the pencil from his mouth and marked one of the lines on a long, numbered list. There was no doubt that he was a guy who paid scrupulous attention to details. While he was checking off the last pictures, I noticed that his list went up to number 174, and I feared I was going to be very late for dinner. I reproached myself a little for not having called Marcela before I left the clerk’s office. Finding a public telephone anywhere near the bar was going to be a royal pain, but I couldn’t neglect to tell her I’d been delayed. Why throw another log on the frigid bonfire of our disagreements? It wasn’t that we quarreled. No. I don’t think we ever went so far as to quarrel. I was apparently the only one of us troubled by the increasing iciness of our relationship.
“I’ve put them in order for you. These here,” he said, handing me the first pile of photos, “are pictures of Liliana when she was a little girl.”
I noticed she was already lovely. Or did I see her like that because I clearly remembered the last images of her, the ones in which her beauty persisted, even in the midst of horror? The pictures of the little girl were classics, typical of children’s photos in those days. A selection of posed portraits, all taken inside a photographer’s studio. No snapshots. Wearing her best clothes, with her hair most carefully combed. I imagined her parents making faces at her behind the photographer’s back to provoke some shy smiles that probably turned confused after every blinding flash.
“These are of Liliana as a teenager. Her fifteenth birthday … and stuff like that. Before she came to Buenos Aires, you know?”
“I didn’t know your wife was from out of town. Are you from somewhere else, too?”
“No, I’m from here. I grew up in the suburbs, in Bec-car. But Liliana’s from Tucumán Province. From the capital, San Miguel. She came here to live with a couple of her aunts a year or so after she got her teaching degree.”
It was obvious that the family had bought a camera, because now there were many more pictures. On a riverbank, a group of girls in bathing suits, accompanied by a matron of indefinable age and rigorous aspect. Two girls—one of them Liliana—in white pinafores, carrying the Argentine flag. A small, shaggy, white dog, playing with a girl who it goes without saying was Liliana.
The photographs of her fifteenth birthday, some of them printed in a larger format. Liliana, wearing a light dress and a double-stranded necklace, a bit garishly made up, with perhaps too much eye shadow. Pictures of her standing beside each table in the hall, with a different set of guests at every one: a group of venerable old folks, surely grandparents and grandaunts and -uncles; a group of girls, some of them familiar from the swimsuit snapshot by the river; a group of boys, each encased in a rented or borrowed suit; a gaggle of smaller girls and boys, perhaps nieces and nephews. Photographs of Liliana waltzing on the improvised dance floor in front of the tables, with her dad, her grandfather, and her brother, and then with a multitude of other boys, who were perhaps dazzled by the circumstance of being authorized, if only briefly, to place a hand on such a beauty’s waist.
A picnic in a place difficult to identify. The Palermo barrio of Buenos Aires was a possibility, but Liliana looked sixteen, seventeen at the most, and so she must still have been in Tucumán when the pictures were taken. A group of girls and boys, lounging on the grass near a river or stream.
“These are from after we got engaged,” Morales explained as he handed over another pile, a small one this time. In an apologetic tone he added, “There aren’t many. We were only engaged for a year.”
I was glad to hear it. I didn’t want to seem uncaring, but I did want to get that ordeal over as soon as possible, and there were lots of pictures to go. I was feeling the same mixed reaction I always felt when looking at photographs: sincere curiosity, a genuine interest in the lives hinted at in the glossy, eternally silent prints, but also a deep melancholy, a sense of loss, of incurable nostalgia, of a vanished paradise behind those minuscule instants, arrived from the past like naive stowaways. So, with a great many images still left to see, I could already feel melancholy weighing me down. I reached for one of the piles Morales hadn’t yet handed me, as if a deviation from the sequence he’d laid out would somehow give me back my freedom, which, in any case, wasn’t useful for very much.
“Those are from when Liliana got her teaching diploma,” Morales explained. There was no trace of resentment in his voice for what I’d feared he might take as an impertinen
ce. “After that, she spent a year teaching in Tucumán, and then she came to Buenos Aires.”
These were more recent photographs, and the women’s hairdos, the men’s jacket lapels, the knots in their ties all conveyed a sense of “not long ago” that I found less nostalgic. It was obvious that the girl’s family liked to celebrate things. There was always the well-laden table, a decoration of some kind on the wall proclaiming the event, and a great many chairs set out so that the multitude of friends, family members, and neighbors who were present at every such occasion had a place to sit down.
I don’t know why I noticed what I noticed. I imagine it was because I’ve always liked looking at things a little sidelong, focusing on the background instead of the foreground. I stopped turning over the photographs in the stack I was holding and gazed for a long time at the one I’d come to. It showed an exultant Liliana, wearing a light, simple dress, probably a summer dress, standing in the middle of a circle of young boys and girls and showing them her diploma.
I looked up at Morales: “Would you pass me the pictures from her fifteenth birthday again?” I tried to make the request sound casual.
Morales did as I asked, even though he gave me a somewhat surprised glance as he handed me the photographs. It was a matter of a few moments to find the ones I wanted: two pictures from the dancing. One showed Liliana posing with a fat, bald, smiling gentleman, probably an uncle; in the other, her partner was a boy whose face was only partly visible, because he was staring grimly at the floor. I put the two pictures on top of the pile, which I then set down next to the graduation photos.
“Now, could you please find me the shots from a picnic you showed me earlier? Taken in a kind of park, with a lot of trees. Do you know the ones I mean?”
The Secret in Their Eyes Page 8
