from THE HUDSON REVIEW and DALKEY ARCHIVE
MORTES’S STORY
It was toward the end of September, when the drowsiness of autumn was beginning to make itself felt; the hours went by more slowly and time itself seemed to stagnate like the forlorn waters of the salt marshes around Tamoga.
“A traveling salesman,” said or thought absentmindedly all the bored men gathered in the station with nothing better to do as dusk fell and they saw first the enormous suitcase and then the short man comically veering from side to side in his efforts to drag it along the platform. “A dung beetle,” someone in the group joked, trying to breathe new life into their flagging conversation. They stared at the stranger for a few moments longer, but nobody could be bothered to add another comment. They watched the train disappear into the endless rain, feeling a twinge of disappointment, a nostalgia for times past.
That man, the stranger, perhaps never even knew himself why he had chosen this town. Or perhaps it was not he who had chosen it, but chance, fate, his lucky or unlucky star, one inevitability leading to another.
We learned afterward that he had agreed to meet a woman in the town, and that she—still young, almost beautiful, with the look of someone recently widowed—was his sister-in-law. We learned from Inspec
tor Cardona the stoiy of his flight, their crazy love affair. We also learned (she, the sister-in-law, allowed herself to be interrogated at length by the inspector; sad but serene, proud of her love, docile and disbelieving in the end, past caring about anything or anyone) that his name was Mortes and that he was a traveling salesman, that he was soon to be fifty, had a wife and five children, and a spotless past. Everything veiy ordinaiy and inoffensive, depressing. And yet it seemed that he, Mortes—the least mysterious man in the world—had come to our town to play out an apparently absurd little farce.
For us, for our curiosity, it all began one Tuesday in September at the start of autumn, the day he arrived. From the window of his secondclass compartment, Mortes would have gazed out at the rain-swept platform, the faded sign with the letters T and M almost completely worn away, so that it read A OGA. He would have been greeted by a jumble of clouds and roofs. Seeing this, he must have thought the town was gloomy enough for what he had in mind. It’s also likely that what persuaded him to get off the train at the last moment was weariness, boredom, the conviction that he had never been in this town before; the certainty that he would not be recognized, that he had never dragged his huge leather trunk through the streets of Tamoga or put on his professional smile in any of its stores or businesses. He must also have known and felt relieved that he had never leaned on any counter chatting to the inevitable old maid about ribbons and buttons with the restrained passion, the secretive air, of someone making an indecent proposal. It’s also likely he was attracted by the town’s location and the fact it was so close to the border (we came to suspect this later on, when the woman appeared), not to mention that from the start he thought he could rely on our stupidity and collective curiosity, our lack of foresight—although none of these suppositions help explain the end of this stoiy, if it can be said to have an end. It might also simply have been that he was crazy or scared. Or possibly he got caught up in his own game, the impossible lie he wanted to believe.
As I said, he, Mortes, arrived in Tamoga at the start of autumn on a sad, rainy day. Despite the fact that he was only among us for a few hours, he is still remembered with great relish, especially because of how his stoiy ended; many people swear not only to have seen him, but to have talked with him. He had the gift of metamorphosis, apparently, because each one of us remembers him differently—although it’s possible that all of our impressions were equally correct: happy, timid, forlorn, a joker, sneering, respectful, cynical, dull, likeable: he is all
those things in our accounts of him. In the end we re left with fascination, and the impossibility of telling his stoiy, because in this case the words are more concrete than the facts, and a stoiy is really only worth telling when words can’t exhaust its meaning. We’re also free to imagine and attribute multiple, contradictory, and obscure objectives to that rather short, rather skinny, rather ungainly stranger who chose Tamoga as the stage for his performance. Now Mortes is nothing more than words and a vague image already beginning to fade in our memory: a broad face with ill-defined features, dun-colored, as if made out of mud. His eyes were red-rimmed and his mouth a slash; his voice a nasal drawl that sometimes turned into a deep gurgling like the sound of water running through pipes. An unremarkable man who wore (not elegantly, but not shabbily either) a crumpled brown suit and a trench coat that was too big for him. That is how we see Mortes in our memory, and that is how Don Elio, the stationmaster, must have seen him that first afternoon.
“You get used to all kinds, especially at my age and this being a frontier station,” old Don Elio will have said. “But there must’ve been something wrong with that one—he wasn t quite right in the head. Look: he was on the quarter past seven train, which that day was almost on time. It always stops here for five minutes, that’s long enough. I rang the bell for it to leave and right across from me saw the man suddenly leap up from his seat and rush into the corridor with his trunk. He got off just as the train was pulling out. Because he was just absentminded, maybe? Well, listen: thirty seconds before, he had been staring calmly out of his compartment window. He looked at the people on the platform, at me, at the station, smoking as calmly as though he was going somewhere else, as if he wasn’t at all concerned that this station was Tamoga, though the big sign was there right in front of his nose. He heard the bell as if it was a call to Mass and then, at the veiy last moment, he was in a rush, jumping off the moving train with his trunk and everything. He almost killed himself. You should have seen him: standing there on the platform as if he had fallen from heaven, arms out wide like a scarecrow.”
In any event, he didn’t stand there like a statue for long. He headed for the main exit and walked out into the rain and blustery wind of Tamoga. The taxi drivers sitting bored in their cabs outside the station watched him cross the square without any hope of a fare. He waved the porters away too and dragged his trunk over to the coach parked under the plane trees. He sat with the other few passengers in the ramshackle
bus, staring blankly out at the rain and the square, the dripping trees, and the showy sign by the side of the main road proclaiming in red letters: WELCOME TO TAMOGA, until One-Armed Gomez, the conductor, appeared in front of him. According to Gomez, the stranger looked like he was convalescing or completely exhausted, as if he had been in a hospital or was returning from a long trip. The stranger dried his face with a handkerchief and patted his shoulders to shake off the raindrops. He asked how much a ticket was, and how far it was to town. He seemed relieved at the answers, as though he was in a hurry and the three kilometers were one less thing to worry about. He sat examining his ticket, as if the small pink piece of paper announcing Bus Service Tamoga/Station or Vice-Versa was an object of great interest. After a while, he raised his head:
“Perhaps you can help me ... Do you happen to know of a hotel without too many bedbugs or fleas?” he asked the conductor with a smile.
“I mentioned the London Hotel,” Gomez said. “I don’t know why, but I took a liking to him. Perhaps because he was different from the passengers I usually get. He put the coins in my left hand and made no fuss when he saw my stump. He seemed to find it quite natural that a conductor might have an arm or a leg missing, so long as he doesn’t let anyone get away without paying. After that he said thanks, pressed his face to the window, and stared out at the marshes the whole time until we got into town.”
He took a room at the London, wrote his name and all his details in the hotel register, putting up the whole time with Doha Milagros’s rude stare. As usual, she was sitting bolt upright on her wheelchair throne behind the counter, knitting. (In our sentimental way, some of us suspected that Dona Milagros opened the hotel not simply to show everyone in Tamoga how resilient and capable she was—that she was in no way an invalid and would never accept pity from anyone—but also in the secret hope that one day her husband would make a nostalgic leap back to Tamoga. He had abandoned her in the middle of their honeymoon when she had her accident; terrified at the thought of all that this implied—with no money or job, and unable to bear his wife’s temper a day longer, in a moment of panic and lucidity he must have glimpsed the inferno awaiting him. In those days they lived close to the Portuguese quarter, in a house belonging to one of Doha Milagros’s uncles. An old bachelor, he was miserly and eccentric. He had sworn to leave everything to his niece if she looked after him in his
last illness [like all old people, in his desire to go on living he must have promised himself a slow and difficult death], even though he steadfastly refused to give her a penny before then. Those were hard years. One morning like any other, her husband said good-bye in his usual unenthusiastic way, with his habitual forced smile: I m going down to the port. An English boat has arrived.” That was the last time Dona Milagros ever heard his voice. A short while later, the old man died, as if he had only been waiting for his.niece’s husband to abscond to close his eyes in peace. With the inheritance money, Dona Milagros decided to open a hotel, rejecting the advice of those who told her she should live off her income. Ever since, she has sat at all hours in the hotel lobby, keeping a curious and watchful eye on everything, held upright in her wheelchair by hope and an ancient premonition—if her husband should come back one day, he might come to stay in the London, foolishly attracted as many visitors were by the hotel’s cosmopolitan name, and unaware that the mummy-newlywed was lying in wait for him, knitting and unraveling her revenge—shamelessly studying everyone who comes to stay, trying to compare theii faces with the features already fading in the old images stored in her memory or, perhaps, simply trying to assess how capable they are of paying their bill.)
. So Mortes put up with Dona Milagros’s piercing stare, asked for a single room with a bathroom, and said he had no idea how long he would be staying in Tamoga. “One day, two, or maybe a week. It depends on how things go,” he said as he filled in the form. Or perhaps I’ll spend the rest of my life here,” he added, winking at the old woman, trying to make a joke, which she didn’t find funny.
After this comes the detailed report from Alcides, one of Dona Milagros’s countless godsons. Enveloped in his customary black suit, funereal and anxious to please as ever, and with his fussy homosexual gestures and oozing the sickly-sweet rhetoric of a former seminarian, his head shining, perfumed, and pomaded, Alcides appeared in the lobby to take Mortes’s suitcase, after a half-hearted struggle, then lead the stranger to his room on the first floor.
“The suitcase was heavy, like it was full of books or lead, or had a dead body in it,” Alcides said in his exaggerated way.
“That’ll do; you can leave it on the bed,” Mortes told him.
He didn’t seem disappointed by the small, dark room situated at the rear of the hotel.
He pushed back the faded lace curtain and peered out. From this
height he could see the ground covered in puddles and piles of trash, and opposite, the warehouses and shacks where the Portuguese lived. Farther off were the bare, windswept hillsides, and the still, gray water lapping the horizon.
He walked around the room several times, carefully stuck his hand in the tear in the wallpaper, expecting to find a nest of bedbugs or something worse. Opening the wardrobe, he poked his head inside and with the back of his hand raised a sad arpeggio from the row of metal hangers. He continued his painstaking inspection: he went into the bathroom, pulled the lavatory chain, took a step back when he heard the water gushing ominously. He switched on the light, studied himself in the mirror for a few seconds, and rubbed his hands across his cheeks as if he needed to confirm he had several days’ growth of beard. Finally, he turned on both faucets in the washbasin.
There s no hot water, he said, with the look of someone who’s just discovered he’s been swindled.
“It only comes on in the mornings,” sighed Alcides, weary of repeating the same phrase for the past eight years.
Mortes returned to the bedroom and saw with satisfaction that it contained two wicker armchairs, a portable lamp on the bedside table, a big china ashtray, and a bottle of water covered with a glass. Perhaps he wanted to seem demanding, as though he was going to spend several days in Tamoga and wanted to choose someplace comfortable.
“Haberdashery or fabrics?” asked Alcides, eager to earn his tip.
Alarmed at the cigarette bum on the bedspread and the patch of damp on the wall that looked like an enormous crab about to plummet onto the pillow, Mortes took a few moments to respond.
“A bit of everything,” was his eventual unenthusiastic answer, aimed at the window or no one.
“I can give you information about the stores here,” Aclides suggested, anxious to get to the point.
“He didn’t seem interested,” Alcides was to complain afterwards. “He pushed the crumpled edge of the mg straight, and turned toward me with an upset, almost disgusted gesture, as if I was trying to involve him in some dirty business.
“‘Listen,’ I said to him confidentially. ‘Just listen. There are stores in this town that look veiy grand, look wonderful from the outside, and yet they’ve had the same stuff on show in their windows for half a century. I’m not exaggerating. How do they manage to survive? Don’t ask: nobody knows. We have shops in the center of town (yes, you’ll see
them right outside) with windows as big as this, and signs that read Sons of So and So, Inheritors of What’s His Name, House Founded in 1860, Latest Fashions from Paris, all very fancy. But if you go in, all you see is dust, fly droppings, and goods from the year zero, all of them motheaten or rotting away. They sell a few bits and pieces when the market is going and the country people from Paramos and Santa Cruz come into town, along with the fishermen from Providencia and Puerto Angra. But that’s about all. Believe me: they’re dead as doornails. You re wasting your time if you try to sell them anything novel or fashionable.’
“At this point I always pause for effect, with the salesmen passing through, before suggesting the names of shopkeepers who do have money and are interested in new products. But this had no effect on him, despite all my best efforts. He only grimaced, as though to say: well, what can you do . . .
“‘Thanks,’ he said, as if making excuses for himself. ‘Thanks, but I don’t need a guide ... I like to survey the field of battle first, to work out for myself where I might bomb or make a killing, if you follow me?
“What can you do with someone like that? By then I wasn’t worried about my tip; it was a matter of pride, of being annoyed by his condescension. That’s when I started to become suspicious. I’ve met more than enough salesmen, and all of them are curious, especially when they arrive in a town for the first time and don’t know a soul. Show me a single one of them who isn’t curious. Well, he immediately tried to make amends; he took a crumpled twenty-five peseta note out of his pocket, smoothed it and gave it to me with a smile.
“‘We’ll see in the morning,’ he said, dismissing me.
“I was already out in the hall when I heard his nasal, world-weary voice once more:
“‘What’s there to do in a place like this in the evening or at night?’ he asked, clearing his throat and jigging about comically.
“Aha! I thought. So he was one of those who like to put a brave face on things. A proper night owl, I’m sure.
“‘This is a boring town,’ I said without bitterness, but not wanting to lie. ‘Though we do have three movie theaters. On Tuesdays only the Moderno is open. Today they’re showing a Spanish film: The Invincible A mada or something like that, I can’t remember exactly. We have too many bars and inns. On the weekends there are two dance halls. And then there’s the Terranova. It’s open eveiy night until dawn.’
“By now he was listening closely, trying to imagine from what I was saying how sad a coastal town can be after the summer season. I went
on listing the possibilities for amusement in Tamoga, thinking I was getting my revenge and that he was going to feel the depressing weight of the hours here, how long a night can be in this purgatory.
"There used to be several houses where you could have fun down by the river,’ I recalled, overcome by a sense of nostalgia. I remembered Matemo the eunuch when he came with his five eternal virgins, and the love lottery in the ruins of the old salted-fish factory. Those were the good times, when the mineral-loading bay was functioning.
But all that’s gone now,’ I told him, ‘and our only house of ill repute is the Terranova. You can listen to music there, dance, have a drink or two, and if you’re not too fussy, find some female company. You’ll at least always have the comfort of seeing other faces as bored as your own—and, if you’re lucky, you might make it back to the hotel with the memory of some not too horrible woman. Although I couldn’t guarantee that, I must say.’”
Later on, when everything was apparently over and done with. Inspector Cardona, who was a stickler for routine and always wanted to discover a logical sequence of events in matters that quite possibly had none, tried to reconstruct the stranger’s movements so that there would be no gaps in our knowledge of the short span of time that Mortes was among us.
He, Mortes, must have spent a couple of hours stretched out on the bed in his room (the imprint of his body on the bedspread was still there the next morning as proof that he had not spent the night in the London, but that, likewise, he wasn’t a ghost, and had really existed in Tamoga for a few hours at least), going over his regrets and his plans, getting drunk on dreams, cradling his fear as he listened to the sound of the rain on the windowpanes, perhaps thinking as he lay facing the wall: “I’m here in a town surrounded by the sea and I have no idea what I’m going to do.”
By the time he left the room he had probably already made up his mind, had understood (without rancor or regret) that he still had to perform the final act, had to show himself to his public, gather his strength so as not to have to be prompted, to take a bow as the curtain fell.
From the hotel Mortes must have gone directly to Prado’s restaurant on Avenida Portugal. Perhaps he was tempted by the yellow lettering that falsely claimed: Our Specialty: All Kinds of Seafood. Perhaps he was hungiy, or thought this was a reasonable time to have dinner and so pretend to be hungiy. “He ordered a salad, sirloin with fried pota
toes, fruit, and half a bottle of red,” Prado reported meticulously. “He ate in a hurry, gobbling it down. Between each mouthful he stared at the pinup girl with the big backside on the calendar opposite him. He paid without leaving a tip, and asked where he could find a pharmacy open at that time of night.”
He was seen in the town hall square, at the far end of town. He asked the night watchman which drugstore might still have a pharmacist on duty, and let himself be led to the street comer and then came to a halt beneath a metal sign reading “Rocha Phahnacy.” Before going in, he peered at both the windows and at the lighted interior.
Severino the pharmacy assistant attended him. “He asked me for some sleeping pills,” Severino said, “but first he wandered around the shelves, as if he was interested in all the pots with their gold lettering, or hadn’t yet decided what he was after. Then he came and stood with his hands on the glass counter, his head tilted to one side as though he was still undecided or was trying to remember something. He looked bored and in need of conversation. He asked for some pills that would make him sleep properly: like a dead man, he added, with a wry grin. I don’t think he often took sleeping tablets, because otherwise he would have asked for a particular brand. He offered me a cigarette and started to complain about the climate here. He said that by all rights the inhabitants of this region ought to have evolved gills by now, then asked how many pharmacies there were in town, and if people heie weie naive or trusting enough to believe in medicines and to see a doctor when they were dying. Jokingly, he asked me widi that sly grin he had twisting his lip—if in the provinces and in such a wet place as this there was much call for rubber goods, condoms and the like.”
Now it was time for the love song. Either before or after visiting the pharmacy, Mortes went to the telephone exchange to call his sister-inlaw and get her to come to Tamoga. At first we doubted the story that Senorita Serena, the operator, gave us. (She’s completely senile and about to retire). We thought she was trying to sell us another of her fantasies, one of those incredible, grotesque rumors she gets into her head when she has one of her telephonic spiritualist sessions. You see, shortly after her sister died, Senorita Serena discovered that the dead— above all, friends and relatives of hers who had passed over—were trying to get in touch with her through the phone wires. Ever since, she’s lived for the lengthy monologues, the weird and wonderful snippets of news that the dead of Tamoga offer her. She was encouraged partly by superstition and popular beliefs, but above all by the parish
priest, Father Lozano, who once told his congregation in a memorable, moving sermon that he saw no reason why souls in purgatory shouldn’t have recourse to modem means of communication.
That was why we didn’t believe her. We thought it was another of her crazy ideas when she told us Mortes had been in the office that night, and had placed a long-distance call. “It was already veiy late, and I was saying my last prayers, though I don’t know the exact time, when I heard flip-flop, the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Then, ora pro nobis, he came in like a phantom, whiter than the wall and soaked right through, dripping from head to toe, his hair plastered down over his eyes. He was groping along with his hands out in front of him, his hands and amis were covered in mud. He was a real sight to see,” said Senorita Serena in her melodramatic style. “He could hardly speak, he made gurgling noises and sounded as though he was choking on every word. I thought he was a drunk who was going to throw up in front of me,” she added.
“Srreaally uuurgen,” he stammered. Later she, Senorita Serena, heard Mortes ask for someone to come and join him in Tamoga: “. . . ope you . . . com and . . . ook me in the eye and ... ell me . .. ace to . . . ace you don ... ove me,” he said, his voice echoing down the line. From the far end came a continuous sobbing and then a woman’s voice saying desperately, “Wait wait wait,” before the line went dead.
But all this was later confirmed by the woman (Mortes’s sister-in-law) when she came to Tamoga.
We also learned that he (Mortes) was in the Mezquita Cafe. At around ten, Barbosa, the waiter there, saw him cross the red earth courtyard, carefully stepping around the puddles, come to a halt to examine the deserted pergola with the chairs piled against the wall, uncertain or disoriented for a second or two, then push open the back door to the cafe and peer in at the almost completely empty room. At that moment the only customer was Dona Maria, from the old people’s home. As usual at that time of night, Barbosa was arguing with her, refusing to serve her the second drink she invariably ended up ordering. “What can I get you?” the barman asked him. Tired or distracted, Mortes stared at the old woman, at the waiter’s dirty white jacket, then at the row of bottles behind the bar. “I don’t know,” he said, leaning on the counter. “Yes, let me have a cognac and a glass of water,” he said eventually. At that point Dona Maria insisted, “Pour me another anisette,” pushing her empty glass to the edge of the bar. (She, the old woman from the home, receives a small pension every month. “My son
sends it to me,” she repeats proudly, to show us she isn’t on her own, that someone remembers her; but by mid-month the money has evaporated or gone down the drain, and then, every day, Barbosa serves hei a glass of anisette he knows he’ll never be paid for. It’s also likely that Dona Maria goes to the Mezquita not so much because she needs a drink, even if it is free, but for the pleasure and habit of arguing with the waiter, to see him refuse and then finally give in.)
“Another anisette,” the old woman squawked.
“I said no,” Barbosa told us. “I was annoyed she was taking advantage of the stranger being there, figuring I wasn’t going to argue or refuse her another drink in front of someone we didn’t know.”
At that point Mortes himself stepped in: “Serve her the anisette if that’s what she wants. I’ll pay.” Then Barbosa: “It’ll be bad for her. She’s already had a glass here, and I bet she had two or three moie on the way over.” Mortes: “Serve the lady.” He bowed his head toward her, either shyly or insolently, leaning forward to study her wrinkled, powdercaked face, her tiny, lifeless eyes, the mangy fox fur hanging from her bony shoulders. He acted the perfect, gallant gentleman. Then he turned back to the barman. “If we’re old enough, we get to the point where nothing is bad for us. Anything that lets us go on living is good for us, isn’t that right, my dear?” he said, head tilted to one side, his voice low. He leaned back against the bar and listened politely to the old woman’s chatter, as if he had already decided to court her.
He listened patiently, pretending to be interested and smiling pleasantly at everything she said, nodding slowly and reassuringly as she explained in a not altogether logical fashion that she was in the old age home to p re sene her independence: “My children live far away and want me to go and live with them. Just imagine, young man, me in their house: it wouldn’t be long before my daughters-in-law and I were at each other’s throats. No, no . . .” she said, giving the excuse she had repeated so often she had come to believe it herself, entirely taken in by the convincing way she told it: “I live alone to honor the memory of my husband, there wasn’t a man more in love in all the world. Many evenings after work he would say to me: Ma, let’s go and enjoy ourselves, and we’d go out to dance. He really loved Viennese waltzes and French champagne. He could dance and still drink his glass down, what he called the champagne waltz. That’s all there is for me, young man, the memoiy of my husband.”
At this Mortes inclined his head once more: “Madame, would you do
me the honor of accompanying me to the dance so that I can buy you a glass of champagne?”
He was a comedian, said Barbosa, scandalized. “Either he was making fun of her or he wasn’t right in the head.”
“He was a gentleman, the first gentleman to set foot in Tamoga,” the old woman retorted.
It is worth recalling Mortes’s brief, unreal appearance at the Terranova. He had the old woman, who by now was quite tipsy, on his arm, as he solemnly rounded off the final act in his farce of love and compassion. As he led her over to a table, he tried to make the sailors and whores show her some respect, then he called out firmly for a bottle of French champagne, although in the end he had to settle for one from Catalonia. He raised his glass in a toast to her, smiling through the smoke and ignoring the deafening noise of the music and laughter. He went up to the bar and whispered in the barman’s ear, slipping him a bank note while he was talking. Not wanting to look into the man’s alarmed face, Mortes asked him to take off the boring, vulgar chachacha and put on a waltz instead. It’s easy to say the words, but impossible to re-create the grotesque tenderness, the fantastical atmosphere of the scene. Slowly and considerately, Mortes led the old woman out onto the dance floor, gently put his arm round her waist, and began to move to the rhythm of the music. Clumsily at first, but increasingly lightfooted, aerial even, her feet hardly touching the floor, his partner let him guide her, allowed herself to be carried away by the music, an ecstatic smile on her face and her eyes tightly closed, in the amis of this serious, ceremonious, Chaplinesque man, who turned and turned ever more quickly while in the suffocating gloom of the Terranova the whores and other clients looked on in astonishment, defending themselves with laughter and admiration, nibbing their eyes and asking themselves if what they were seeing was real, if they would be able to tell the stoiy the next day when they had sobered up, if anyone would believe them.
That was all. This was the last that was seen of Mortes, although afterwards Dona Maria told her group of admiring, sighing old ladies that he had accompanied her to the door of the old age home and said by way of farewell: “Allow me to kiss you on the forehead, as though you were my mother or my first girlfriend, in memory of tonight.” And, after all that had gone before, we might well believe it—fundamentally, it wouldn’t be a lie, even if it never happened.
There’s nothing else now except to draw this incomplete story to its close. We heard nothing more about him, Mortes, until the woman, a blonde with a drawn, scared-looking face, came and asked after him at the London Hotel. She arrived on the same train as Mortes had done two days before, just in time to identify the body, the corpse covered in seaweed that had been washed up a few hours earlier on the beach at Puerto Angra. She accepted the news with great dignity but would not accept what Cardona the inspector told her about Mortes’s death. She said it was impossible that he would liave committed suicide now, precisely when he had told her to come to him, that they were going to live together. She seemed proud of his love, which was all she had left. She stared at his body stretched out on the marble slab in the morgue, then kissed his face, eaten away by crabs. She stroked the hair plastered down on his forehead, stared some more, kissed his empty eye sockets, pressed her lips to his ear and whispered something to him, then caressed him again until she felt the inspectors kind hand on her shoulder. She turned to face him and said in her proud, terse way: “It must have been an accident, Inspector. There’s no other explanation.”
Possibly there is no other explanation, or we could accept several, really—any one will do. Possibly the ambiguous hypothesis Doctor Rey the pathologist put forward is the most plausible:
. “This man could have committed suicide or had an accident, slipping and falling into the water. I don’t know. Either way could have accounted for his drowning,” Doctor Rey told the inspector in his concise manner. “What I do know is that he was condemned to die: he had lung cancer. I don’t know if he knew this or had come to suspect it, even though it seems logical to suppose he had. Perhaps that’s why he came to Tamoga (don’t pay too much attention to what I’m saying, Inspector). Recause, though it may be hard to live in this town of Tamoga, it’s a better place than anywhere to come and die.”
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