It was very plain Lorena had not expected to see me there. Only a few hours earlier she had left me in a petrol station toilet three hundred kilometers away in the middle of the Patagonian desert, so how could she expect that the handsome fellow sitting at a restaurant table in Bahía Blanca would be Cárcano’s closest friend? It took a few seconds for the shock to sink in, and her companion was busy searching the restaurant for a free table, so that when she took him by the arm and whispered the news in his ear, he stared straight through me, then started pulling her toward the street door.
“Is that her?”
Isabel’s question went unanswered, because by then I was getting to my feet, furious, and bellowing through my nose like someone with chronic sinusitis. A waiter carrying aloft a tray laden with dishes got in my way, and by the time I was outside all I saw was a car with an official number plate and tinted windows speeding off the wrong way down the street, then turning the corner, also against the traffic. I stood there expecting to hear the crash as it rammed a vehicle coming the other way, but there was only a babble of klaxons. After that the treelined streets were as quiet as usual. Isabel came out of the restaurant and grabbed me by the arm. Again she wanted to know if it was Lorena, and why had she run off like that if she did not even know who we were. As we walked back to the table I had abandoned so abruptly, I had to explain what had happened the previous night.
“Then the man with her must have been the one who warned me Daddy was going to die,” she said, stretching out her hand as if asking me to pass the salt. I did so, not looking for any ulterior motive. “Put it down: it’s bad luck to hand it straight to someone.”
We have no way of anticipating when our everyday reality is about to disintegrate. There are always signs, of course, but how are we to spot them? A telephone call at midnight, an unexplained journey with a dead body at the end of it: this should be enough to alert even someone who is fast asleep, but we refuse to make connections.
My friendship with Edmundo Cárcano in no way required that I give my life for someone who had already lost theirs. Nor did it demand that I swear over his dead body that I would not rest until I had avenged him. He had not been killed in his Buenos Aires home in Villa Crespo while drinking mate tea with his petite bourgeoise wife of thirty years, but in his isolated beach chalet, possibly (to my great envy) as he was making love to a twenty-year-old whose loveliness would guarantee anyone she was with almost anything but a quiet old age.
“I can see he wasn’t in a position where anyone would feel sorry for him,” said his widow of a few hours when we met that afternoon in her hotel lobby. By now she was much calmer and more resigned. “But nobody deserves to be shot simply for giving in to temptation.”
She was looking down as she said this, putting me in the position of a priest hearing her confession rather than a friend.
“There isn’t going to be an investigation or anything.”
“I couldn’t care less now,” Mónica said.
“But his body should be in the morgue, not buried in the ground. He was your lifelong companion and my friend—”
“He betrayed me. He was unfaithful. And the sinner has to pay—although, as I said, I think he paid too high a price.”
I learned later from Isabel that for years her mother had belonged to an evangelical sect. One of those electronic churches where God appears on demand and collects his ten percent.
“Daddy’s adventures started in earnest when she had her menopause,” Isabel told me. “He went from being a typical office lover, a sad sack who falls for the woman at the desk opposite, to a roving Don Juan who came home late making the most ridiculous excuses. Since the Holy Catholic Church only offers punishment and penitence and no prospect of happiness, Mummy threw herself into the arms of those soul-stealers in search of a bit of relief.”
“I never saw Edmundo that way. He never boasted of his conquests. He was a reserved, rather gloomy man. Lorena must have performed a miracle if she rescued him from that.”
For a while at least he had looked jovial, with the exhausted but contented appearance of someone who spent his nights on the tiles. He was like one of those boxers who make a comeback in the ring: weary and flabby, but still with the courage of a true fighter. The crowds applaud them even if they get knocked out in the first round.
After all—and this is nothing new—love and death are the only stable couple I know.