Benjamín Chaparro goes directly to the judge’s chambers. He doesn’t pass through his own clerk’s office or through the offices of Section No. 18. So agitated is he by the imminence of seeing Irene that he’s afraid everyone will notice how love-smitten he is. He knocks two times. Irene’s voice bids him enter. He thrusts his head inside with a gesture of involuntary timidity, the kind he hates himself for. A smile lights up her face when she sees him. “Come in, Benjamín,” she says. “Come on in.”
Chaparro steps in, feeling his temperature rise. Has his face turned red? The sight of her stuns him as much as it did the first time they met, but he tries to keep her from seeing that when he looks at her. She’s tall, with a narrow, fine-featured face. When she was younger, she was a little bony, but the years—and childbearing?—have added a slight, becoming roundness to her figure. They greet each other with a kiss on the cheek. Only when they sit down, one on either side of her big oak desk, does Chaparro release the breath he’s been holding since the instant before the kiss. Now he can breathe easy; since he hasn’t smelled it, it’s possible that her scent won’t keep him awake for the next two or three nights. A little embarrassed, as if they’ve caught each other doing something entertaining but reprehensible, they smile without talking. Chaparro draws out the moment before he speaks, because he sees her blush, and that makes him feel extremely happy. But when she looks into his eyes with an unspoken question that seems to penetrate all his alibis, he feels he’s lost the advantage. Better stick to the script, he thinks. So he states his request, and to justify it, he expands a bit on the subject of “his book.” He presents (becoming excited as he does so) a summary of the story, which she knows only superficially and by hearsay, that is, from remarks made by Chaparro himself and by other dinosaurs in the court. When he finishes, Irene gives him an amused look and asks, “Do you want me to make a call to the archive?”
“If you could … I’d like that,” Chaparro declares, swallowing saliva.
“It’s not a problem, Benjamín.” She frowns slightly. “But look, the people down there know you better than they know me.”
Shit, Chaparro thinks. Is his alibi so transparent? He says, “The problem is, the case is ancient history.” He’s running out of excuses.
“Yes, I know. You told me about it once. It came in after you had me promoted to the eleventh Court, right?”
Is there some second meaning behind that “you had me promoted”? If there is, Irene’s more perceptive than Chaparro would like to believe. In 1967, and more precisely in October of that year, when she’d been working as an intern for two weeks, and not long after he’d definitively abandoned his demand that she answer the telephone as God intended, Chaparro had dreamed about her. He woke up trembling. He was a married man, and at the time he was still doing his best to convince himself that his marriage with Marcela was a good one. He tried to forget the dream, but it recurred on each of the five following nights. The last time, the image of Irene was so vivid and the glow of her naked body so convincingly bright that Chaparro felt like weeping when he woke up and realized that none of it had really happened. That morning, he arrived at the court determined to purge the amorous feelings that were beginning to consume him. He telephoned all the colleagues he was on more or less friendly terms with and lauded the merits of an intern who was embarking on a career in the Judiciary, a law student who deserved a paid position. At the time, Chaparro was already a young man respected and well liked in the profession, and some months later, one of the colleagues he’d contacted called him back with the offer of an entry-level job “for the girl.” Chaparro broke the radio silence he’d been maintaining with the young woman and told her the good news. Irene appeared quite happy to hear it, and her joy hurt him a little. If it was so easy for her to go, that meant there was nothing in their clerk’s office she minded leaving. Nothing she’d miss. It made sense, he told himself. She was engaged to a young engineering student, a friend of one of her older brothers. Chaparro’s passion made him feel uncomfortable in front of Marcela, and knowing that his love was unrequited made him feel lonely as well as unfaithful. He told himself it was best to uproot a plant that put out no shoots and had no future.
Irene moved to her new office in March 1968, shortly before the Morales case came into his hands, and Chaparro lost sight of her. Things were like that in the courts. Someone who worked two floors down from you might as well be living in another dimension. Chaparro had no news of Irene until February 1976, when she reentered his life as the new clerk of his section: she’d obtained her law degree and been appointed to the post. Although Chaparro was a free man, having separated from Marcela several years previously, Irene’s return gave him no sort of opportunity to declare himself, even had he dared. When he saw her come through the door of the clerk’s office for the first time since 1968, she was preceded by a considerable, six-months-pregnant belly. Because he’d thought the way to spare himself the sting of knowing she had her own life—while his was being ruined—was to close his ears to any news of her, it was only then that Chaparro discovered she’d married her engineering student two years before. The young man was now an engineer, and she was expecting their firstborn.
When Irene returned from maternity leave, it was Chaparro who was gone. It surprised her to learn that her deputy clerk had accepted an open position in the Federal Court of San Salvador de Jujuy, up in the extreme northwest, fifteen hundred kilometers away, but she was given to understand, sotto voce, that Judge Aguirregaray in person had suggested the move to Benjamín. This information was conveyed in a baleful, conspiratorial tone that Irene, even though she wasn’t very knowledgeable about political matters, had no trouble interpreting: at some point during the cold winter of 1976, it had evidently become dangerous for Benjamín Chaparro to remain in Buenos Aires.
Over the course of the following years, each of them received news of the other in fragments. Chaparro knew about Irene’s continuing climb up the professional ladder: public prosecutor in 1981, clerk of the Appellate Court a couple of years later. In her turn, she heard of his return to Buenos Aires in 1983, when the military dictatorship was in its death throes. He arrived accompanied by his wife, a woman from Jujuy whom he would later divorce. Throughout the decade of the 1980s, contact between Chaparro and Irene was scant, nothing more than a couple of fleeting conversations after chance meetings in the street. Irene found out that Chaparro’s wife, the woman from Jujuy, was named Silvia, and that they had no children. He learned that Irene was still married to her engineer and that they had three happy, growing little girls.
They met again a few years later, in 1992. Chaparro had gone through his second divorce some time previously, and he’d persuaded himself that it would be best for him to live out his days in prudent solitude. Apparently he wasn’t made for marriage. He was over fifty years old. Perhaps the time was right for him to give up women. He was prepared to do without them. What he was unprepared for was Judge Alberti’s retirement at the beginning of the year and the appointment of the new judge, who was none other than Irene.
When they met face to face, in the same office in which they were now sitting, the two had grinned at each other like battle-tested veterans surrounded by raw recruits. “We already know each other,” Irene said, smiling, and the twenty-five years standing like a protective barrier between Chaparro and the series of dreams that had shaken the foundations of his soul crumbled into dust, with nary a trace left behind. The woman had no right to activate that smile. But she still used “de Arcuri,” the engineer’s name, she was still married, and that was the kind of obstacle Chaparro was disinclined to try to overcome. Not at that point in his life, at least. So he greeted her with a firm handshake and an atrocious “How are you doing, Your Honor?” thus establishing a sensible distance between them. She accepted the boundary, and for the next two years, even though they saw each other eight or nine hours a day, five days a week, they treated each other with reserved courtesy.
Then, on an ordinary morning, without any preliminaries, Irene started addressing him with the informal vos. It was a Monday, and with the naturalness that marked all she did, she merely said to him, “Say, Benjamín, I need you to help me with the release request for the Zapatas. Could you?” Chaparro could. And they went on like that throughout the following years, until he announced his upcoming retirement. Had she been surprised to hear it? The inveterate optimist that lived inside Chaparro tried to suggest to him that a look of muted sorrow and poorly concealed astonishment had transformed Irene’s face. But there was no reason for surprise; he figured everybody in the court knew about his plans. So was she simply sad that he was leaving?
Whatever the answer might have been, Chaparro cut his meditations short. He asked himself—he couldn’t help it—whether it would be worth his while to confess the truth to the woman he loved, and his reply was no, no way, not possible. Wouldn’t declaring his love for her amount to acknowledging that he’d loved her for almost thirty years? Wouldn’t it be the same as confessing that he’d spent his life longing for her from afar? Never, he thought vehemently. They hadn’t really spent much time together over the course of all those years anyway, Chaparro told himself, but deep in his heart, he knew he’d never stopped loving her, and a combination of chance, common sense, and cowardice had always kept them apart. His silence was his; he owned it. If he spoke, he’d end up sunk in the swamp of her pity. He was determined to avoid such a plight, to avoid hearing anything that sounded like “Poor Benjamín, I didn’t know …” The mere thought clouded Chaparro’s vision with anger and shame. Let my love die with me, he inwardly declared, but don’t let it be spoiled.
“Benjamín? That’s the case you’re talking about, isn’t it?”
Chaparro jumps. Irene looks at him, smiling, questioning, and he wonders how long he’s been sitting there like an idiot. Actually, it can’t have been long. He’s so used to thinking on that topic, a source of both pleasure and pain, that at least he thinks about it rapidly. “Yes, yes,” he says. “That case.”
“All right, then, I’ll give them a call.”
Irene pauses a moment, holding his gaze, before looking up the archive’s number in her address book. When at last she lowers her eyes to the little book and the telephone, the knot in Chaparro’s gut relaxes. With her usual informality, she greets whoever answers the phone and asks to speak to the director. She has a smile on her lips, wide-open eyes, and the slightly absorbed expression of someone who’s talking to another person without seeing him. Since she’s turned toward the window with her face in profile, Chaparro can observe her as he pleases. Nevertheless, he restrains himself. He knows from experience that if he looks at her too long, the anguish of being unable to throw his arms around her and kiss her, meticulously and indefatigably, will overcome him. So, all things considered, he prefers to look in some other direction.
“There you go, Benjamín,” she says as she hangs up. “No problem. In the archive even the floor tiles know who you are.”
“Is that a compliment or a joke about my age, Your Honor?”
She turns serious. Only her eyes keep smiling, very slightly. “Can I assume you’re not going to show your face around here again until you need us for something else?”
If it’s a question of needing you, I could stay in this office for the rest of my life. That’s the answer Chaparro would give her, if he had enough nerve. Since he doesn’t, he says aloud, “I’ll come back someday soon, Irene.”
She doesn’t reply. Instead she rises from her seat, moves her face close to his, and gives him a big, loud kiss on his left cheek. Chaparro can feel the fullness of her lips, her hair gently brushing against his skin, the warmth of her body so close to his, and he inhales her fresh, wild fragrance, an accursed scent that goes directly to his brain, lodges in his memory, exacerbates his desire for her, and promises him three nights of insomnia, with their attendant days.