In this story, thought Tancredo as he entered the tower, there are too many loose ends, too many orphan narratives: Burgos’s pilgrimage north, the stutterer’s enigmatic disappearance, the arbitrary doodles of Wallenda, the incomplete story of Esquilín’s discoveries. Then he corrected himself: all stories were necessarily incomplete, any story was covered by secrets in the end.
He’d gone to the tower to say goodbye. He spent the early-afternoon hours in Gaspar’s barbershop, and when it came time to leave, he announced that he wouldn’t be back. Then he walked to La Esperanza, ordered a coffee with milk, and started to read. He spent half an hour reading a book about marine algae and then, when exhaustion started to weasel in, he asked for the set of dominoes. He played for half an hour, and only then, when he saw that nothing new was happening, no revelation was appearing, he told the two boys of his departure. Ten minutes later, carrying a photograph of Cano, the old salsa singer, he looked at the tower and thought about going in one last time, but an unexpected sight held him back. On the stairs that led to the tower’s entrance, he recognized María José Pinillos. She was dressed as a clown; it seemed that alcohol had finally won out. He handed her ten dollars, and thought again about the man who spent his days at the beach with a metal detector, looking for lost treasure.
In one of the defendant’s notebooks, Esquilín found a paragraph that struck him as pertinent to the situation. There, among eschatological reflections, the defendant mentioned an anecdote that the lawyer thought was strangely illuminating, even though precisely what interested him was its lack of conclusion.
In the year 1646, a Jew by the name of Sabbatai Zevi, born in the city of İzmir, proclaimed himself the Messiah and prophesied that the end of days would come two years later, in 1648. The year came; the end didn’t. The strange thing about the story was, instead of outing him as a mere impostor, it was precisely his failure that made him famous. From then on, he was seen in public plazas, showered in honors, proclaiming himself the Messiah—unable, though, to predict the true end. A man living after the end of times, thought the lawyer.
How, then, to conclude? Perhaps, thought Tancredo, it was best to confine oneself to the pleasure of objective, brief facts. On September 17, after four hours of deliberation, Virginia McCallister, also known as Viviana Luxembourg, was sentenced to twenty years in prison, pending any new charges. The defendant didn’t cry when she heard the sentence.