The Secret in Their Eyes (22 page)

Lamentably, Sandoval’s final illness and death weren’t sudden, and those of us who loved him had more than a year to get used to the idea. He himself took it with the same metaphysical sarcasm that he applied to everything. For whoever wished to listen (I mean among those close to him, because he was always restrained or even distant with outsiders), he declared that nobody had been clear-sighted enough to give proper credit to alcohol for its beneficial effects on his body, or to him for knowing enough to treat himself with it in such ferocious doses. It was obvious, he said, that this collapse, this shocking and irreversible physical decline, was due to his abstinence, which had broken the sacred equilibrium formerly produced in him by whiskey. He smiled when he said that, and those of us who’d always badgered him to stop drinking were grateful to be treated with such indulgence. Until the end, or almost, he kept working in the court.

During the last months of Sandoval’s life, I spoke frequently with Alejandra—more than with him, to tell the truth. When I did have Sandoval on the line, we confined
ourselves (because the high cost of long-distance calls froze us, or because as typical men we considered any outward show of our sorrow basically a sign of weakness) to brief exchanges of small talk, avoiding with expert precision any reference whatsoever that was either very personal or very heartfelt or very melancholy. I asked no questions about his illness; he asked none about my enforced exile in Jujuy. I suppose the impossibility of seeing each other’s face as we mouthed conventionalities increased the stiffness of those conversations, but neither of us wanted them to stop.

And so I wasn’t surprised when the secretary handed me the telephone one day, saying simply, “Long-distance operator,” and through the echo and buzzing that provided the background for every long-distance communication in those days, Alejandra’s voice reached me: at first controlled, then shattered by grief, and finally serene, perhaps even relieved.

That night I traveled in an airplane for the first time. The grief I felt had taken on a curious form. I’d had so much time to prepare myself for bad news concerning Sandoval that comparisons between what I was feeling and my previous speculations about what I would feel afflicted me more than the plain and simple grief of having lost my friend.

From high in the night sky, I looked down on Buenos Aires, which offered an imposing spectacle. When
I arrived at the airport, I felt on my own account the same emotional distance I’d felt on learning of Sandoval’s death. I wasn’t afraid, or even nostalgic. Nor, after six years, was I happy to return. For an instant, a pang of guilt went through me: I hadn’t informed my mother about my flying visit. I didn’t wish either to prolong it or to sadden her by letting her know that I’d spent a day twenty kilometers from her house, as opposed to almost two thousand, and I hadn’t gone to see her. It was better to wait until July, when she’d come to visit me, as she did every year.

The cab driver decided to edify me with a discourse whose object, I soon realized, was to explain why the British would never be able to reconquer the Malvinas with the wretched little fleet they’d just dispatched. I cut him off curtly: “Please don’t talk to me. I need to rest.” And in case my lack of interest made him suspect me of treason against our country, I added, “Besides, I’m Austrian.”

He sank into silence. While he drove me to Palermo, certain memories came into focus. I was almost happy to realize that they were causing me pain, because my coldness during the preceding hours had frightened me. Perhaps that was why I found myself wondering what that prick Romano was up to. Was he still eager to bump me off? This was no minor question—the response to it would determine whether or not I had to keep living
in Jujuy—but I didn’t know anyone who could answer it. Báez had died in 1980. I hadn’t dared travel to Buenos Aires back then, even though four years had passed since Morales’s revenge and the attack I’d escaped by a hair. I did, however, write a long letter and send it to Báez’s son, because I thought—and still think—that children should know their parents’ true value. And beyond that, I was going to feel lost without Báez. That was the main reason why I planned to go from the airplane to the wake, from the wake to the burial, and from the burial back to the plane.

The wake was held not in Sandoval’s house but in a funeral parlor. I’ve always hated the sterile spectacle of our funeral rites, ever since I was a boy. Those gauzy shrouds, the candles, the fearful stench of dead flowers—they all seemed to me like vain artifices devised by bored illusionists to dissemble the honest and appalling bluntness of death. And so I entered the funeral parlor without stopping in the small chamber where the casket lay. Alejandra was getting through the midnight hours by trying to fall asleep in an armchair. I think she was happy to see me. She cried a little and explained something that had to do with the last treatment her husband had undergone, when there was no hope for anything but an impossible miracle. It sounded to me like a story worn out from having been repeated all day long, but I didn’t have the heart to interrupt her. When it seemed
she’d finished, I ventured to speak: “Your husband was the best guy I ever knew.”

She turned her eyes away from me and stared off to one side. She tried blinking several times, but there was nothing she could do to suppress her tears. Nevertheless, she was able to reply, “He loved you so much and admired you so much. I think he stopped drinking so you wouldn’t be afraid for him when you weren’t here to help him.”

It was my turn to cry. We hugged each other in silence, finally able to ignore the false rituals of that place and honor the memory of her husband and my friend.

Afterward, she made me some coffee, and we talked a little about everything. As it was well past midnight, it was highly unlikely that any stray mourners would be coming in, at least not for the next several hours. Family members who hadn’t yet done their duty could be expected to show up early the following morning, before the burial service. So Alejandra and I had time to talk. I spent a good while bringing her up to date on my exile in Jujuy; she wanted to know all about Silvia. Pablo had told Alejandra we’d moved in together, but her woman’s curiosity required much more information than what Sandoval had been satisfied with in our letters and telephone chats. I began by telling her that Silvia was the younger sister of the clerk in a civil court in Jujuy and then went on to explain that in such a tiny
milieu, Silvia and I couldn’t help meeting; that she was very beautiful; that the aura I carried around with me in those distant lands, the aura of the mysterious political exile with the obscure past, had perhaps aided my conquest of her; and that I loved her very much. When I finished, I believed I’d said everything, but that was where Alejandra’s interrogation began. I did what I could, without ever shaking off my surprise at the vast number of details one woman can wish to know about another. It was getting close to three when I finally persuaded her to go home and get some sleep. Nobody was going to come at that hour, I said. I think she liked the idea of my remaining alone for a while with all we had left of her husband. And I think I too anxiously welcomed the prospect.

There weren’t many people at the graveside. A few relatives, a couple of friends, several court colleagues. I didn’t know some of them, and the sensation that I was among strangers struck me as perhaps the most convincing proof of my own exile. I took comfort in seeing the familiar faces of some old coworkers, with whom I exchanged greetings and friendly conversation. Fortuna Lacalle and Pérez, our former bosses, were there as well. The retired judge had aged so much that his body seemed to be on the point of breaking into pieces, but his foolish face remained unscathed in the battle against the passage of time. Pérez was no longer a public defender; to
the astonishment of all sensible men and women, he was now a judge on the sentencing court.

While the others were returning to their vehicles, I paused a moment to throw a handful of dirt onto the grave. I turned around to make sure there were no witnesses and saw that the rearguard of the departing group was made up of none other than our old clerk and our equally old judge. I picked up a big, wet clod of dirt and started breaking it into pieces. As I threw them, one by one, onto the little mound, I murmured a kind of prayer, a thoroughly profane prayer: “On the day when the assholes of the world throw a party, those two will welcome the others at the door, serve them refreshments, offer them cake, lead them in toasts, and wipe the crumbs from their lips.”

When I was finished, I walked away smiling.

“I
haven’t left out anything,” Chaparro thinks as he returns home, carrying a bag of warm bread. How can it not be warm, seeing that they practically open the bakery for him?

He’s starting to develop an old guy’s habits. It exasperates him to notice them, as others might be disturbed by discovering wrinkles or gray hairs. Until his retirement, sleeping was a reward and a pleasure to which he abandoned himself without reserve and from which he emerged slowly and lazily; now the hours tick away as he lies there, wide awake. So when he’s weary of flopping around in his bed and the first light coming through the shutters dazzles his eyes, he gets to his feet, dresses carefully—he’s afraid of turning into one of those consummate geezers who go out wearing T-shirts, suspenders, and espadrilles—and walks a block to buy bread.

When he returns, he prepares maté and carries the calabash gourd to his desk, along with two small loaves, which he carefully sets on a plate to avoid scattering crumbs. It strikes him as mildly funny to consider that
his two marriages produced, if nothing else, at least some refinement in his domestic habits.

When he sits down, he reads over the last completed section of his book, and as he progresses, he grows increasingly gloomy. For one thing, he’s not sure it makes sense to keep those pages at all. Do they contribute to the story he’s telling? If the story he’s telling is Ricardo Morales’s or Isidoro Gómez’s, then the answer is no, the last section has nothing to do with them. But if the story he’s telling is his own, the story of Benjamín Miguel Chaparro, then it’s yes; his flying visit to Buenos Aires in May 1982 can’t be excluded.

He falls to questioning himself again about which story he’s writing, and he’s assailed by fresh doubts as well as by old, reiterated ones. Because if he’s writing a sort of autobiography, he’s leaving out a slew of persons and circumstances that were very important in his life. As a case in point, what has he said about Silvia, who was his second wife? Little or nothing. He’d have to check, but it seems to him he’s mentioned her only in his bothersome previous chapter, the one on Sandoval’s death. But after all, what more could he add about Silvia? That they lived together for ten years, the last four of them in Buenos Aires? That she accompanied him when he dared to return to the capital at the end of 1983, when no one was afraid of the military regime and its henchmen anymore? That during those last four years, Silvia
was the one who seemed to be in exile, far from her family, her friends, and the society she’d complained about when she lived in it, but which she’d begun to miss the very first day she arrived in Buenos Aires, a city she always found hostile and aggressive?

Chaparro himself helped her pack her bags, borrowed a car to take her to the airport, and then, with the scrupulous care of a notary, sent her whatever items of their mutual possessions she asked for, whenever she asked for them, from an electric toaster to the exquisite edition of
Moby-Dick
they’d bought together on an excursion to Salta.

Then they stopped talking to each other. Chaparro learned that she’d gotten remarried, but he never tried to find out much about the subject. It was around this time that he decided to have nothing more to do with women, that is, with women capable of mattering to him and, therefore, of causing him pain. It seemed so easy in the beginning that he told himself he’d made a wise decision. It had been a mistake to try to share his life with anyone, because in the end, he’d always regretted making the attempt. He’d lost Marcela through sheer boredom and Silvia by her own choice. He didn’t want to keep on losing. It was better to withdraw from play. There would always be a woman close at hand, willing to offer him ephemeral pleasure in exchange for some of the same for herself. He’s glad he moved to Castelar,
as he’d so fervently desired to do before he was forced to leave for Jujuy. The house he’s in, the house in which he sits writing his story, looking out into the garden every now and then and occasionally getting up to fix more maté, used to be his family home. Is he going to put that in a novel? It makes no sense. It’s better to return to Morales and finish writing the few remaining pages. And after that?

After that, nothing. Well, except for returning the typewriter to the court, to the goddamned court presided over by the Honorable Irene Hornos, may lightning strike her, because everything (distancing himself from women, occasionally getting close to one without any sort of serious commitment, living the life of a methodical widower in Castelar) had worked just fine for him until February 9, 1991, when the recently appointed Judge Hornos came through the door of the clerk’s office, returning after an absence of fifteen years.

Chaparro had promised himself he wouldn’t let that minx drive him crazy again, because he was fine the way he was. And because he didn’t need a new and brutal disappointment, a new plague of insomnia, a new hole in his heart. It was on this account that he greeted her with a cool “How are you doing, Your Honor? It’s been a long time,” even though he saw her surprised look as she leaned toward him, advancing her cheek for a kiss, and she became confused; expecting familiarity, she
found a wall four meters high, without a single crack, and she had to reply to it, “Fine, and yourself? It certainly has been a long time.” And then, because the situation made him angry or anxious or sad, or all three at once, Chaparro muttered some excuse about having left a pile of work unfinished on his desk and hurried away. He moved with sufficient speed to escape her perfume, the same scent as always, but he wasn’t fast enough to avoid hearing the usual responses to the usual questions, how’s your family, Irene, they’re well, the girls are too, thank God, and your husband, my husband’s fine, he works a lot but his health is great; may lightning strike him, too, that son of a thousand bitches, I beg his pardon because he’s not guilty of anything but marrying her, but still, it wasn’t right to do this to him, not now, not when he was doing so well, whether alone or occasionally, fleetingly, accompanied.

From here on out, he knows, everything will lose its taste, or worse, everything will taste of Irene—the air and his morning toast; insomnia and the kisses of whatever other woman he happens upon—and so maybe he ought to apply for a transfer, but no, that wouldn’t do, because he’s not up for changing to another court and a new set of colleagues, so there’s no solution of any kind, except to be quiet, let time pass, ignore the fire in her eyes when they meet his, and turn his gaze well away from her neckline when someone approaches her from
behind her desk with documents to be signed, and living like that is pure goddamned torture.

No. He’s definitely not going to write a novel in which he’s the protagonist. He’s plenty sick of himself as it is, too sick to delight in contemplating his own navel. But he’s decided not to cut the chapter where Sandoval dies. Morales’s accursed story is woven together with his own life. Didn’t he spend seven years counting goats on the Andean Plateau because he got involved in that tragedy? He doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t grumble about that part of his past. But that’s precisely the reason why he’s going to leave everything he’s written intact.

And there’s another question: Everything he’s written—what’s he going to do with it? The pages make a pretty pile on his desk, where before there was nothing but a ream of blank paper lying beside his Remington. He should give the completed manuscript to Irene. She likes it when he brings her his writings. In the last month and a half, not a week has passed when he hasn’t visited her with a couple of chapters in hand. Is it any good, his novel? She always praises it. Ah, let it be bad. Because if it’s good, her praising it means she likes his writing, period. But if it’s bad and she praises it anyway, it’s because she wants to please him. Chaparro suspects that the reason he writes is to give his work to her; he wants her to know something about him, to have something of his, to think about him, even if only while she’s
reading. And suppose it’s bad and she praises it because she’s fond of him, nothing more? That’s to say, she may think what he writes repulsive, but she doesn’t want to wound him, not because she loves him, not in the way Chaparro wants her to love him, but because she has a soft spot for him as a comrade, as a former boss, as a current subordinate, as an abandoned dog that inspires pity, poor little thing.

Chaparro exclaims aloud, “That’s enough of this stupid fucking shit,” which in less coarse terms indicates that he must put an end to his meditations and get to work. He hears the whistling of the kettle and realizes that while he’s been absorbed in his flights of amorous fancy, the water for his maté has reached the temperature of an erupting volcano. Tossing the water, refilling the kettle, and waiting for it to reach the right temperature allow him to gather the strength of spirit he needs to start writing the final, definitive chapters of his story. Which ends in the middle of a field. In the shed with the big sliding door.

After he pours the contents of the kettle into the thermos, a very thin column of vapor shows him that the water is now at the correct temperature, and Chaparro escapes from his distractions. In his mind, he’s traveled three years into the past, back to 1996, the year that marked the real end of the Morales story, twenty years after the false end in which all of them (Báez, Sandoval,
Chaparro himself, and even that son of a bitch Romano) had naively believed.

He leaves the thermos and the gourd with the maté on his desk and goes to the sideboard in the living room. He knows the letters are in the second drawer, each in its envelope. The paper isn’t yellow yet, because the letters aren’t so old. And even though he’s never reread them, he thinks he can remember them pretty exactly, almost verbatim, in fact. But as he doesn’t want to take a chance on distorting the truth he holds in his hands, he removes the letters from the drawer to take them to his desk. He plans to quote from them directly whenever he considers it necessary to do so.

Why this obsession with exactness?
he wonders.
Just because,
is his first reply.
Because the truth, or Ricardo Morales’s own words, which in this case are the ultimate truth, lies in those letters,
is his answer after a moment’s reflection.
Because working this way, with documentary proof in hand, selecting what’s important and quoting from it, is the way I worked for forty years in the Judiciary,
he adds.
But that first response is also true.