The next morning I was awakened by a call from the department. Could I please come to a meeting with the chair? The entire assembly of professors had gathered in the main office. There was an anxious, unsettled atmosphere. In a grave voice, Don D’Amato, who looked overweight and also overcome by the situation, summarized the official version of events, almost as if he were reading us a medical report.
Ida had left the parking garage, but the storm traffic alert diverted her from her usual route, and she decided to take Bayard Lane and skirt around the south side of town. No one saw anything, but it was there that everything happened. They found her car stopped at the end of Nassau Street, facing the slow traffic signal ordering the detour toward Route 609. Her seat belt was still fastened, but she was in a strange position, half-bent, with one arm outstretched and the hand scorched as if she’d been burned while searching for something on the floor. The crash—or whatever it was—had killed her. The burn on her right hand was the strangest piece of evidence in the case. No one saw anything, no one heard anything. Only the car alarm, which went on blaring for several long minutes because the police technicians didn’t want to alter any of the details crystallized in the moment of her death. But can you say “her death” when someone dies by accident? (“We all die by accident,” she would have said with irony.)
The news left me stunned. All I could see was the tic on Don’s face. A nervous blink that undercut his impassive air. A slight idiotic tremor in his right eyelid. Unreality is made out of details, and, as I tried to conceal my shock, I heard, like a kind of music, the slow progression of useless facts and explanations that always accompany unbearable things. In the car seat, to one side, there were several unopened letters. Was someone else there with her? Had someone attacked her and then fled? Or did she pass out and lose control of the car? The accident had taken place at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 14, because her watch was stopped at that time. The department’s receptionist had seen her come into the office to collect her mail and then take the elevator down.
It was necessary to inform the students. Classes would be suspended, but fortunately we had the respite of spring break. The evening newspapers and TV would spread the news, and a scandal was inevitable. He asked us for our discretion. No statements to reporters; he didn’t want the university to fall under the storm of a scandal. We must limit the facts to the Department of Modern Culture and Film Studies. The administration’s hypothesis, of course, was that it was an accident being investigated. He paused. It is my duty to notify you that the police will be coming to conduct interrogations this afternoon. We should expect the agents in our offices (especially those of us who were on the same floor as Professor Brown).
After a while, the dean of the faculty, Doctor Humphry from the Department of Physics, came in. He was honest and likable, and he had the obsession—or precaution—of photographing everyone who requested to see him. As a way to remember them, maybe, or so that he could make an exhibition of the portraits when he retired. He looked at people from the literature departments like a bunch of lunatics and eccentrics who were always bringing in foreign luminaries that no one could understand. He spoke now in the same way he would speak in committee meetings when he had to make budget cuts to the humanities programs. Subtly, he placed suspicion on the victim. What was that professor up to, that woman, that unmarried girl. Always surrounded by students. Her academic focus was extraordinary, but what did we know about her personal history. He asked for our cooperation in resuming classes after the break and maintaining calm. But he was the one who seemed nervous.
It was 11 a.m. when the two officers showed up in my office, and I welcomed them in pleasantly but with some apprehension. They didn’t accept my invitation to sit. They were polite (too polite, I would say, with the exasperating politeness that contains the most extreme violence). The two were identical except that one wore his hair very short and the other had it in the style of the time (covering his ears); both wore black suits, white shirts, and red neckties with tie clips, yet one seemed very handsome while the other looked like he was dressed up as a Bible salesman. The more handsome one—as I discovered later—was Special Agent Menéndez of the FBI, and the other, the one who spoke, introduced himself as Inspector O’Connor of the Central Police Department of New Jersey, in Trenton. My English made me feel hesitant and unconvincing. “From what I gather, Doctor Rinzai,” O’Connor said, anglicizing the pronunciation of my last name, “you are from Buenos Aires… invited here, from what I gather, by Doctor Brown. We have here some of the emails that the two of you exchanged.” Of course they had all of our emails at their disposal and had surely recorded our phone conversations and listened to the surviving messages on the answering machine. That wasn’t even open for debate. I nodded. Thank you for your cooperation, O’Connor said. I knew the genre well, first comes a series of questions, used for what’s known in that lingo as “greasing the wheel.” The police would make it clear that they knew everything about the interrogee’s life and that he or she had little room to elaborate on it. For him it seemed natural to be holding my private correspondence in his hands, but I stayed calm because we’d never written about anything other than our work.
“You were a friend of hers…”
Amigo, colega y admirador. It sounded better when I said it in English: “Friend, fellow, and fan.”
They were collecting information about an accident that troubled the authorities because there were no direct witnesses. It was a violent death, and they weren’t ruling out any theories. They showed me a photograph of the car. I realized at once that the notion of it being an accident was too broad and that the police had a much more conspiratorial theory about the matter. They were saying, tacitly, that it could have been a suicide or murder. O’Connor smiled before explaining that he was surprised to find that Dr. Brown appeared to rouse little sympathy among her colleagues. Had they been saying bad things about her? One day after her death? Of course, he didn’t explain anything, just introduced a piece of information that indicated some confidence in his conversation with me. Everything I’ve been able to tell you is extremely confidential, he told me (I was suspicious of the adverb). The FBI agent wandered around my office, looking at books and indifferently going through the notes and papers I had pinned on a bulletin board opposite my desk. He asked me if I knew of any contact (the noun startled me) of Professor Brown’s who might assist them in the investigation, though of course he did not explain what kind of relationship he was referring to, and of course I told him that I didn’t get involved with personal matters. He seemed disoriented, and I wasn’t going to let myself be intimidated; I was from Argentina and knew what it was like dealing with the police. But then the other one shifted direction.
“Professor,” he said, and took down my diploma, “I have information that you take walks around town in the early morning.”
“Sometimes I can’t sleep. But that is irrelevant and private.”
“It may be private, but it isn’t irrelevant,” said O’Connor. He looked at his notepad. “Nothing is irrelevant under these circumstances.”
They were simply putting me under a bit more pressure. I knew the style. After that he stopped writing down what I said and instead read through things he’d noted on his pad, asking questions, trying to get me to corroborate his information.
“And you often experience insomnia…” He looked at me and smiled. “I’m told,” he said, “that you suffer from certain… episodes… Your doctor in Buenos Aires”—he looked at his notes—“Dr. Ahrest, has confirmed this information.”
They’d called him on the phone. He tightened the screw and said that, based on his understanding, I might often wander close to Dr. Brown’s house. I explained to them that I lived on Markham Road, as he already knew, and Dr. Brown’s house was on Harrison Street, so if I went out for walks it was logical that I would sometimes pass in front of her house.
He didn’t say anything. He looked at his notes. He was a professional, and he made it clear to me that they knew everything I might want to hide and that eventually, he said, they could request that I be examined in order to verify the diagnosis about my incidents or alleged episodes of wandering. That appeared to be all, but they paused in the doorway before leaving.
“You travel to New York often.”
“Whenever I can.”
“And you stay at The Leo House…” O’Connor smiled and looked at his pad as if he needed it to remember. On the weekend of February 20th, he said, I’d made a reservation there but hadn’t stayed in the room. Did I have anything to explain? I stared at him without answering. Instinctively, I’d concealed the history of my meetings with Ida, but they’d obviously discovered that I spent that weekend with her. Had they also gone investigating at the Hyatt?
“Best if you don’t leave town for the next few days. We may need you,” he told me.
I sat down in front of the computer and opened my email, and there was a message announcing the memorial in the campus chapel.
Dear friends:
I write to share some very sad news. Ida Brown passed away earlier this week. There will be a memorial service this Thursday, 3/22, at 1:30 p.m. in the Presbyterian Church on campus.
Best,
Don D’Amato.
Passed away: she had gone far away, moved on to a better life. In that moment I lost control and broke down. Oh yes… I stayed in my office. The light through the window. The books. Was it possible? I couldn’t imagine her injured body. Her scorched hand, the skin of her neck, oh yes, the swans in the night…
I locked my office, crossed the hallway, and went down the staircase that led to the Department of Classical Languages. The day was bright and sunny, one of those winter afternoons after a storm when the air seems to light up. I walked across campus toward the woods. I had to pass a few tennis courts with pretty girls dressed in white, wearing miniskirts and wool stockings. I don’t know if it’s possible to know (or claim to know) a woman after spending a few nights with her, but I did know Ida’s intensity, and that was everything. The will to go toward some place without thinking of the way back or the consequences. She would never be able to finish her projects; everything was suddenly cut short. She was so young, too, and that made it sadder still. There should be some mark to identify the ones who die before they can grow old. I sat down on a bench under an oak tree. Suddenly I recalled a movement of her hands, a tiny gesture, her fingers on the table, barely anything at all, her fingertips making a fragile, mechanical gesture when she was restless, and I was filled with pain and closed my eyes. She had very slender hands, I thought, and felt my tears freezing in the icy air. Was I crying? The kids playing tennis paused to look at me. Then they hit their racket strings against their fists, shouted a few times to work up their energy, and resumed the match. The yellow ball shot through the air, they moved with ease. How many years had it been since I’d cried? Overhead, a crow was perched like a dark sign on the branches, a black point in the transparent whiteness of the afternoon. And then the crow shook its wings, and the snowflakes falling softly on my face filled me with new spirit, as though rescuing me—or consoling me—in a day of grief. It was not Poe’s raven, it was Frost’s crow. It’s impossible to make sense of suffering, but the rhymes and the peaceful scansion of the verses as I began to recall them allowed me to breathe calmly once more.
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
I couldn’t think about her with words of my own. The snow / Has given my heart / A change of mood.
I left campus, going along the edge of the Mexican ghetto, which had once been a Black ghetto, and before that an Italian one and before that Irish. The houses are beautiful and traditional, with open verandas and large picture windows. Some older African American people still live there, but very few; most have left, and now there are Guatemalan, Dominican, and Puerto Rican immigrants living there too, and the local church even has its posters announcing services written in Spanish, and the hymns and prayers there are intoned with Mexican accents. Oh María, madre mía. I entered the chapel and knelt to pray. Hail Mary, full of grace. Three morena women, sitting on the wooden pews to one side, were reciting the rosary in low voices as if it was a funeral dirge. The Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women. The musical sound of the prayers calmed me. One of the women recited a fragment of the Hail Mary and the other two answered her in chorus. It had the same structure as a tragedy: a speaker and a chorus. What relationship did the rite of Mass have with the Eucharist and the tradition of Greek tragedy? That was the only way I could think, as though I were a man wounded in war, now unable to talk about himself. The altar was humble, a wooden Christ at the top and an embroidered white cloth over the iron table. I stood up and returned to the light of day.
A few meters away was Pelusa Travel, a Mexican company for wiring money to Central America where they sold long-distance phone cards and photos of Maradona at the 1986 World Cup. A young pachuco was talking to a girl. He was wearing baggy pants very far below the waist, black Clippers sunglasses, and a New York Yankees baseball cap, and she—with her hair up in a red Mohawk, dressed in cowboy boots and a yellow cloth cape, tied with a bow—was laughing in a lopsided way and making giggly remarks, and her soft tone reminded me of Ida’s voice. The first thing forgotten and lost after a person is gone is the sound of her voice, and that afternoon I called several times from the public phone just to listen to her voice on the answering machine. “It’s Ida Brown. We’re away right now and I can’t answer the phone. Leave a message or call again later.” I liked the plural and then the transition to first person (I can’t answer). The voice went on like that, and I wished I could program it with some phrase meant for me, a goodbye, a final greeting on the answering machine that would respond eternally to the calls of anyone who wanted her.
One afternoon, I remember, she was angry because they’d created a Latino Studies program dedicated to studying salsa music and ranchera song and Chicano graffiti, yet no one was concerned with the people who lived here, as if the things we taught had no relationship to real life. “My colleagues lecture on about Junot Díaz,” Ida said, “or about performances by the group La Raza, but once they leave class, the Greasers or the Spics or the Beaners are invisible. Latinos are lumped together with food and waste, they’re los grasientos, los grasas.” (“Mis grasitas,” I thought.) “They’re the ones who do everything around here, they work in the kitchens at French restaurants and in the basements at Irish pubs and outside at gas stations, they clean the bathrooms in the library and shovel snow off the streets in winter.” That’s what she said that day, I remember. “It’s Ida Brown. We’re away right now and I can’t answer the phone.” Clear, assertive, a warm voice I was beginning to forget.
On the sidewalk opposite, over the ghetto street on Witherspoon, you could see the cemetery, the graves nearly on the sidewalk, headstones from the Civil War era and others from earlier and even earlier still. Where have they gone, Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom, and Charley, he of weak will, he of strong arm, the clown, the drunkard, the fighter? That was what the headstones said, along with their dates (x–2–1798) and their photographs or engravings or daguerreotypes or drawings in cameos and little glass urns. Young faces, expressions of surprise, frozen smiles in white ovals behind glass and golden frames, alongside metal vases holding fresh flowers. Where have they gone, Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie, and Edith, she of tender heart, she of simple soul, the lively one, the proud one, the happy one? A tall man of serene bearing, wearing overalls and rubber boots, was sweeping away the snow and clearing off the graves with a round-toothed rake. I moved away like a specter in the muddy light that came down from the trees. Where has he gone, the violinist, Jones, who gambled with life at the age of ninety, his chest bared, defying the frost? (x–7–1912).
The clock with Roman numerals at the jewelers on the corner of Nassau and Witherspoon showed 4 p.m. on the dot. Students were walking along the streets, and the feeling of normalcy horrified me, as if I were the only person in the entire town who was upset. I couldn’t close my eyes for fear of what I might see. I obsessed over the empty hotel room where we would have met that night. She was dead, yet all the same… sexual desire breaks into life and invades it regardless of the situation. I’d never felt such intensity with anyone else. Was that it? I had lost her. And the hotel room that night? The illuminated mass of the Hyatt in the middle of the empty road.
It was night when I reached home, and the darkness felt like a somber cloth draped over the windows. I turned on the TV. They were auctioning off jewelry; only their hands and the trinkets were visible. People called in over the phone and made offers. At six thirty, the local news started. The screen showed Harrison Street and Ida’s house. A traffic accident caused the death of a distinguished professor… and just at that moment I sensed that someone was knocking on the glass. It was Nina, my Russian neighbor. She didn’t have TV and wanted to know what was going on with that young woman who died. She hadn’t spent much time with Ida but did know her. We watched the national news for a while. The reconstruction was more extensive there, and they were discussing the unknown elements of the investigation. The police were interrogating Professor Brown’s acquaintances. The preliminary conclusion was that it had been an accident, that the car was leaking gas and a spark had caused an explosion. However, some viewers were drawing a connection between this death and the strange attacks that had taken the lives of several scholars and academics in various parts of the country. The police weren’t ruling out any theory. I turned off the TV and got up to offer Nina a glass of wine.
“The police came to ask me about you. They’re only doing it because they want you to know they’re putting pressure on you. You didn’t kill her, did you, dear?” Nina said, smiling to relieve the tension.
I told her that I had a feeling I was in danger.
“Danger? What kind of danger?”
“If we could define it, there wouldn’t be any danger.”
She started to laugh, and suddenly, as if inspired by her calm and happiness, I told her the truth.
“I had an affair with her in New York, but we kept it secret. And I think the police know about it.”
“Someone saw you together, maybe on the train, and told them about it… They aren’t going to take you prisoner just because you slept with her. Maybe they were monitoring the phones, it wouldn’t have been difficult for them to trace your calls. The cops know everything about everyone, and they want you to know that they know everything.” She started to laugh animatedly. She was used to the strange reasoning that the police might use to explain away things that no one understood. She was born in Moscow in 1920 and left Russia at the end of 1938, shortly before her father was arrested. Because he was a great admirer of Asian art, he’d been sent by Stalin to a concentration camp, accused of being a spy for Japan.
Nina thought it might have been an attack that was made to seem like an accident. The KGB killed exiles and dissidents living abroad but fixed it so they would look like accidents. But who would want to kill her? At the Institute of Experimental Studies, a few different accounts about a series of assassinations inside universities had been circulating for months. A couple of weeks before, a letter bomb had killed a biologist at Yale. There was an atmosphere of fear, but nothing concrete was known. Evidently the FBI preferred for the news not to spread in order to avoid panic. The information on the TV news channels was vague. It may be, some have said, some are speculating. Nothing concrete.
She’d been talking for a while but noticed I was distracted and assumed that I needed some peace. “Come over whenever you want if you need to talk a bit,” she said, and smiled with a friendly gesture. She moved gracefully, with short little steps. Anything I might need; I already knew she was a widow and spent many hours alone, so it would be a pleasure to talk and have tea at her house anytime I wanted.
The motto of my youth had been to live in third person, but now I was losing myself in the abject turmoil of personal memories. “Best if I just take a shower and sit down to do some work,” I said, and realized that I was talking out loud, and not only was I talking to myself but I was also staring at myself in the bathroom mirror as I spoke. A clown, naked, exhausted. The shower had a lever that you pulled to the right for hot water and left for cold water, but I had trouble getting the temperature just right, and sometimes it scorched me and other times it felt like freezing rain, so I stepped out of the tub and dried off briskly as though playing the role of a vigorous man rubbing himself with his towel in front of the bathroom mirror. I was a bit shaken, no doubt about that. I changed clothes, because clean clothes always make me feel better. Soft socks, ironed underpants, impeccable shirts. The woman who came to clean my house twice a week was an “illegal” as they call them here; she’d crossed the river illegally, without papers. She’s from Mexico, her name is Encarnación, and she says that living here “in the North” is like being inside a gold cage. Her parents lived in Oaxaca, and she would return to her hometown for Christmas and then cross back secretly. Sometimes she came over with a coyote, and once she’d entered through California. She was always thinking about the police from Immigrations and talked about “la Migra” as if it was a ragged witch with a crafty eye that wouldn’t leave her in peace. One afternoon she came in crying because the boss—la gringa—from the house where she worked every day had humiliated her in front of “other people.” She dried away her tears with the palm of her hand; she was a woman of uncertain age, she could be twenty-four or forty-two depending on her expression, and after drying away her tears she seemed to have recovered and said that she had her pride too, and with a smile she opened her work smock to show me the T-shirt she wore underneath, with Che Guevara’s face embroidered on the cloth in the old style of popular images or the shining stars of Mexican Lucha Libre. She stood there for an instant, that tiny little woman of uncertain age, with a face like an Aztec statue and the image of Guevara under her work shirt. She said that the T-shirt was handmade by factory workers in Monterrey, and a friend who worked at a gas station in Lawrenceville had given it to her.
I remembered this story because I too needed the courage to endure what was to come. I had to keep going, had to cry in secret, to erase the cyclical progression of images: Ida’s car, cordoned off by yellow security tape on the corner of Bayard Lane, close to the outer wall around Palmer House, which I’d seen on TV. The way she entered a room; her slight gesture as she opened her overcoat to reveal what she was wearing that night. I had to stop thinking, I thought, and I started to translate that Robert Frost poem into Spanish to see if the rhythm of the verses could help me to breathe. Frost was frozen, icy, a chill in the bones, cold as stone, cold as marble, cold as death. Frost was also fragile, brittle, cracking, delicate, a shattering icecap, invisible. Dust of snow becomes copo de nieve or cristal de nieve, because polvo de hielo doesn’t sound right, cristal de nieve, diamante en polvo, agujas de nieve, a snow crystal, little crystals of snow, a frozen mist, Polvo de nieve. The way a crow, el modo, la forma en que el cuervo, El modo en que un cuervo / Shook down on me, hizo caer en mí, dejó caer sobre mí, Sacudió sobre mí / The dust of snow, El polvo de nieve / From a hemlock tree, desde ese árbol, desde el abeto, Desde un abeto // Has given my heart, le dio a mi corazón, le infundió al corazón, Le ha infundido a mi corazón / A change of mood, un cambio de ánimo, otro ánimo, Un nuevo ánimo / And saved some part, y rescató, salvó una parte, Salvando una parte / Of a day I had rued, de un día triste, un día apenado, De un día de pesar. Maybe in Spanish it could work better in third person. Los copos de nieve que un cuervo sacudió, desde lo alto del árbol, llovieron sobre él, y le infundieron un nuevo impulso a su corazón, aunque su vida estaba en ruinas, The snowflakes that a crow shook loose, from the top of a tree, rained down upon him, instilling in his heart a new impulse, though his life was in ruins.
I threw myself down on the bed. I suddenly remembered what I’d gone through when my father died. The things I’d done when he died. The opera singer who lost her voice. A change of mood. I hoped I wouldn’t be lying awake all night. I hope that dealer calls me again, I thought. Dust / sniff. The hotel room, the curtains down. Men in dark suits showing their credentials at the reception desk, asking questions. The room is reserved. I needed an alibi. Who doesn’t need one? It was almost midnight according to the illuminated numbers of the clock on the nightstand; I was freezing, as if underwater. At the bottom of the sea, as gamblers say when they’ve lost everything. Was there a casino in the hotel? Ida, standing on the corner in her gray overcoat, smoking, I could see her thighs as she moved. I couldn’t hope, couldn’t sleep. I went down to get my car from the garage; the streets were deserted, a ghost town, just one police officer patrolling in the tiny car they use to monitor traffic infractions. I soon left him behind and, after a few detours, got on the highway toward New York. A desolate landscape, the distant lights of a bar, an illuminated billboard on the side of the road, a Taquitos Restaurant, an empty security booth, not a single car on the way. Exit Route One, turn after a mile and go over the bridge to Holland Park and then down to hotel parking. I had the room reservation number and typed number 341 into the parking control pad and the bar rose to let me enter. The garage ascended in circles, and I finally parked on the side of the third level between two white lines that had my room number printed on the wall.
At the reception desk, a man in black checks my reservation, looks at my ID without interest, and gives me a key, not a magnetic card this time. I ask the bartender if he can have a bottle of whiskey sent up to my room. The room isn’t the same as last time, it seems older or statelier, with red velvet curtains over the windows. Walls decorated with hunting scenes, nondescript furniture, an air-conditioned tomb. A TV, a safe with a keypad, a minibar with mini bottles, a king-size mattress, a red bedspread. Everything is always in the same place. It seems as though the architects employ a common layout so that regular customers can get their bearings and find the bathroom or the light switch in the dark. The bellboy brings me the whiskey with two glasses. “Are you by yourself? Buddy,” he says, and I don’t like his air of confidence, “we have an escort service.” I give him twenty dollars and he gives me a phone number. A woman with a cautious voice answers me. What would you like? she says. “Whatever’s available,” I say. They’re all available. “A blonde,” I say. We have photos online, you can choose, I’ll give you the password. “No need,” I say, “just a blonde.” Justine. “What?” Justa, her name is Justa. “Whatever her name is, I’ll be expecting her.”
There is a sound of water inside the walls of the room, as though the heating is running at full blast in the pipes. The bell rings a short while later. The woman is platinum blonde and dressed in black, with high heels. Vaguely Asian features, a spray of white in her hair. “I’m Justa, the Blonde. Thank you for choosing me,” she says, and caresses my mouth with her fingers as though tracing my lips. She speaks in a nasal, childish voice. She has dark, beautiful eyes, one of her eyes is alive, the other is sterile and her right hand seems to be made of white metal and she keeps covering it up with the sleeve of her silk blouse, which is missing a button at the cuff. She wouldn’t have taken so long if she hadn’t had so much trouble finding the exit on the freeway, she says. She used the pluperfect subjunctive, and her syntax was odd because that verb form exists in Spanish but not in English. (Does it exist in Spanish but not English?) I thought it would only get worse if we kept talking. Then she went to the bathroom to “freshen up,” which she said in a way I found ridiculous and sublime. I’d never paid a woman before. I could tell them that I’d come here looking for a sweetheart at the hotel and that I’d also gone for the same reason the two times before. It would be an alibi like any other. I feel lonely, I could tell them, I’m a foreigner. I come from Buenos Aires. But they already know that. The heat was making me drowsy. The bathroom door opened, and the girl stood in the doorway, under the harsh light, naked except for high heels. “Do you like me?” she asked, in Spanish. She had a red scar on her stomach, and her pubic hair was shaved. I stood up and moved toward her. There was a crow on the dresser, alive. It had its beak nestled under its wing, keeping one eye fixed on me… It was 5:03 a.m. on the illuminated clock. At least I can dream, I thought, and awoke, lying faceup in bed, sweating. Had I been able to dream about her? I couldn’t remember the dream, only fragments, Room 341, a blonde woman. What was she doing there? The dream had erased itself, but the feeling that remained was one of squalor and fear. I went over to the window, the sun was rising. At the far end of the garden next door I saw Nina looking after her plants, the haze of her breath like a fog in the transparent air. I sensed that behind me, inside the room, on top of the table at the back, the crow was lifting its wings.