ZÁRATE 18. As we headed north, it gave me an uncomfortable feeling, a sense of inferiority or helplessness, to think that all my possessions fit into the three suitcases in the luggage compartment. I hadn’t managed to salvage more than a couple of my favorite books, and I had almost nothing in the way of clothes. One of the bits of bad news that Sandoval had brought me at the rooming house was that most of my wardrobe had been slashed to ribbons, especially the shirts and the sports jackets.
I hadn’t told my mother good-bye. Or anybody at the court.
ROSARIO 45. The headlights tore through the darkness, occasionally lighting up signs like that, white letters and numbers on a green background. Were we already in Santa Fe province? How many kilometers was Rosario from the border with Buenos Aires province? If we’d already crossed the province line, I hadn’t noticed it.
I tried to sleep from time to time, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. The days in the rooming house had been a permanent, monotonous void in which time had stretched out like chewing gum. But so many things had happened in the course of the last day, and I had learned about so many others, that I felt as if time had passed from dead calm to whirlwind.
At the end of our meeting in the Rafael Castillo train station, Báez had given me the address of Judge Aguirregaray in Olivos, about twenty kilometers north of Buenos Aires. I asked Báez what the judge had to do with my case.
“That’s what I started to explain to you at the beginning,” Báez said. “And then I decided it would be best to leave it until the end.”
Then I remembered. “Jujuy?” I asked.
“Exactly. He’s an upright guy, and he’s got the necessary contacts to arrange your transfer. It was his idea, by the way,” Báez added.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Or rather, I think it would be better if you got the explanation from him. He’s expecting you.”
“But the only solution is for me to run like a fugitive?” I couldn’t resign myself to the idea that my life as I knew it was going to end overnight.
Báez gazed at me awhile, maybe hoping I’d get the picture myself. Then, seeing I wasn’t going to, he explained: “Don’t you know what the deal is, Benjamín? The only way to be sure Romano will stop fucking with you is to inform him of the truth. I can set up a meeting, if you want. But if we do that, I’ll have to tell him that the guy who bumped off his little friend wasn’t you, it was Ricardo Morales.” He paused for a bit before concluding. “If you want, that’s what we’ll do.”
Shit, I thought. I can’t do that. I just fucking can’t. “You’re right,” I said. “Let’s leave things as they are.”
We said our good-byes without too much effusiveness. He wrote down the numbers of the buses I would have to take to get to Olivos. At that point, I was beyond worrying about the possibility of looking stupid, so I even went so far as to ask him what color each of the buses was.
It took me more than two hours to get there. By the time I did, another cold day in that awful winter was drawing to a close. Judge Aguirregaray’s house was a pretty cottage with a front garden. I told myself that if I ever came back to Buenos Aires, I’d spring for another place in Castelar. No apartments in the city center for me.
The judge in person opened the door and immediately invited me into his study. I thought I heard, in the background, the sounds of children and kitchen activity. The idea that I might have come at an inconvenient time made me uncomfortable, and I told him so.
“Don’t concern yourself about that, Chaparro. There’s nothing to worry about on that score. But it seems to me the fewer people who see you, the better off you are.”
I agreed. After showing me a large armchair, he offered me some coffee, which I declined. Then he began: “Báez has filled me in on all the details,” he said, and I rejoiced, because the mere thought of having to repeat the entire story exhausted me. “What I don’t know is how much you’re going to like the solution we’ve come up with.”
I tried to sound nonchalant when I ventured to say, “Jujuy.”
“Jujuy,” the judge confirmed. “Báez tells me this thug who’s after you, this …”
“Romano.”
“Romano, that’s it. Báez says this Romano is after you because of a personal matter, a kind of private vendetta. Is that right?”
“Absolutely,” I conceded. Obviously, Báez hadn’t given Judge Aguirregaray “all the details.” I noted that the policeman exercised prudence even with his friends, and I thanked him in my secret heart, for about the thousandth time.
“So he’s siccing his own hoodlums on you, so to speak. I think it’s safe to assume they don’t have much in the way of logistics beyond their little group.”
“A sort of suburban mafia,” I said, trying to be funny.
“Something like that. Don’t laugh—it’s not a bad definition.”
“Well, what’s to be done, Your Honor?”
“Báez and I think what’s to be done is we have to send you far enough away that Romano and his boys can’t bother you, even if they discover where you are. So that’s where Jujuy comes in. Because sooner or later, Romano’s going to find out about your transfer, Chaparro. You know how long court secrets last downtown. The solution is to discourage him, to make going after you too complicated.”
He paused a moment, listening to the sound of a woman’s footsteps in the hall until they turned into another room. Aguirregaray went to the door, delicately locked it, and returned to his chair. “My cousin’s a federal judge in San Salvador de Jujuy,” he went on. “I know that must sound like the ends of the earth to you. But Báez and I couldn’t come up with a better alternative.”
I remained silent, eager to hear about the countless advantages of moving to the fucking sticks to live and work.
“As you know, the federal courts are part of the National Judiciary, that is, they operate within our own structure. So what we’re talking about is a simple relocation, a transfer. Your position, of course, will be the same.”
“And it has to be in Jujuy,” I said, trying not to sound finicky.
“You know, even though you may not think so, Jujuy offers some advantages. One is that you’ll be 1,900 kilometers away from here, and it will be almost impossible for the bad guys to bother you. And if they still try to get to you, another advantage you’ll have is my cousin.”
I awaited further explanations on this point. Who was his cousin? Superman?
“He’s a guy with pretty traditional ideas. You can imagine. You know how people can be in the provinces.” I didn’t know, but I was beginning to suspect. “And don’t think he’s a nice, agreeable sort. Nothing like it. He’s almost repulsive, my cousin. And mean as a scorpion. But the main thing is that up there, he’s an important, respected man, and all he has to do is to tell four or five key persons that you’re in Jujuy under his protection, and then you won’t have to worry, because not even the flies will bother you. And if anything unusual happens—say four strangers entering the province in a Ford Falcon without license plates—he’ll find out about it at once. If a vicuña on the Cerro de los Siete Colores farts, my cousin’s informed within a quarter of an hour. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”
“I think so,” I said. Wonderful, I thought. I’m going to live on the frontier and work for a feudal lord, more or less. But at that moment the image of my wrecked apartment crossed my mind and tempered my presumptions. If I was going to be safe under this guy’s protection, it might be a better idea for me to lose the haughty airs and go directly to wherever he was. I remembered the vicarious shame I’d felt years before, when Judge Batista couldn’t find the courage to come down on Romano and backed away from that prisoner abuse case. I too was a coward. I too had reached the line I wouldn’t cross.
While Judge Aguirregaray was seeing me to the door, I thanked him again. “Think nothing of it, Chaparro,” he said. “One thing, though: come back to Buenos Aires as soon as you can. We don’t have many deputy clerks like you.”
It was as if his words had suddenly given me back the identity I’d lost. I realized the worst thing about my eight days as a fugitive was that I’d stopped feeling like myself. “I’m very grateful to you,” I said, energetically shaking his hand. “Good-bye.”
I walked to the Olivos station. The trains on the Mitre Railroad were electric, like those on the Sarmiento Line, except that the Mitre trains were clean and almost empty, and they ran on time. But this moment of local envy showed me how much I missed Castelar. Do all those who are in flight from their past feel weighed down by nostalgia for it? In Retiro, I took the subway, got off near my rooming house, and walked the rest of the way.
“There’s a guy waiting for you in your room,” the desk clerk said to me as I passed. My knees got weak. “He said you knew he was coming. He introduced himself as your bar associate. Is that right?”
“Ah, yes, yes,” I said, relaxing with a laugh that must have sounded excessive to the man behind the counter. Good old Sandoval—he never changed.
He was indeed waiting for me, comfortably stretched out on my bed. We embraced, and I went into the bathroom for a shower. Then we took that taxi, the one in which we barely spoke, to the bus stop in Ciudadela.