Almost stepping on the hands of beggars and thieves, Medina entered the shadow of the arches of the Old Market of Santa María and stopped to remove his straw hat and rub his handkerchief over his forehead. Mustio, pale, the large cloth sign read: WRITTEN BY BRAUSEN . Whether or not he had left the key on the dashboard of the car, but it didn't matter. He snorted, glancing over his shoulder at the ragged, silenced, traitorous scoundrel.
As in all Saturday afternoons, the men sat in horseshoes, barefoot or in espadrilles, in hats, scratching their armpits or sticking their fingers in greasy paper packages or oil cans with leftover food. Some naked and swollen bellies of children vibrated avoiding the indolent bodies and fast slaps. Few aging women wove wool dyed in raging colors. Until the evening, Medina thought; "When the bands of boys and girls and motorcycles and daddy's cars that discovered the dirt on the market this year."
(To get drunk and dance asphyxiated in Barrientos's business or in that of the German, they with the reddish and checkered shirts and the hair of a dirty woman; they, the ones that will shine two or three summers to explode later and go out, they with their tight jeans and unbuttoned blouses. And when the dawn begins and some trucks from the Colony arrive loaded with fruit and vegetables, they will parade quickly to the sandy beaches of Villa Petrus to play the change of couples, a game with surprises Then, when the invaders laugh for no reason, the recumbent herd of vagrants and livelihoods will stretch in unison and will move and separate to take positions in the pens that the city offers them, without concert, without the need to make plans. and negotiate. Perhaps the women will disappear with the children or just take the children to sleep at the ranch and come back powdered - now to the plaza - with other dresses and hopes, to prowl, to wait Ar the settlers who come out drunk and out of the night. And tomorrow, Sunday, or when the painful lucidity of Monday arrives, the complaints will begin to fall to the department where the cell is a moth-eaten room that was once a bedroom, the complaints against strangers.)
He pocketed his handkerchief, put on his old-fashioned hat, and stared frankly at the worn-out, obliging smiles that had been kept turned toward him. He was in front of the market, under the white and angry sun, to perform a false, pious and useless act. He put a hand in the pocket of the detached jacket and watered the changing area where the children were running with runny nose with coins.
Leaning against his counter, Barrientos had seen him since the dusty Ford came to a smoking stop in the streetlight. Restless and resigned, he spied him getting out of the car, crossing the beginning of his siesta, moving carelessly and slowly through the sinuous line of sleepy bodies. Motionless, oscillating between an atavistic hatred and a dark, unspeakable sympathy, remembering his faults and translating them into fines, determined not to remove from a table the bottle of smuggled cane that he had brought to a client, he saw him stop in the shade, pass the handkerchief across his face, tossing a small pile of coins into the whirlwind of broken boys. He remembered his greatest guilt, hidden in the basement.
The son of a bitch, he thought without passion, professionally. «Two or three pesos. For what it costs him to bribe them. And God must feel, now, or at least clean of all sin, listening to the retired prostitutes who say "thank you, Mr. Commissioner" removing their tubes and covering their empty and saggy tits unnecessarily, and looking at their goodness reflected in their grateful faces of the guys who would gladly stick, and he knows, a little knife in the ribs. "
Barrientos saw him advance in the shadow, white, tall and skinny, ridiculous, meticulously dressed in white, with no more dark note than his tie, a little loose, hanging out of the jacket, and his face impassive and hard tanned by the Sun. She saw him stop again, a little hunched over, a little spread-legged, already in the damp and cool and smelly interior of the market, and look from one side to the other, with the quick, alert and ambitious glances of the trade he had chosen or he had to thank and accept.
He saw him, young and old, cordial and a friend of no one, measure the gloomy amplitude of the empty market with an arrogant nod, and then advance towards the counter where he, Barrientos, waited without moving, cunningly apathetic, framed by answers. the multi-colored plates of the beverage advertisement.
Medina discovered himself again, without saying hello or before doing so, and his bony face turned to the table, the only one occupied, where a small old man, freshly shaved, was holding a pipe bit and twisting his thumbs in front of the bottle of cane that had not paid border taxes.
Barrientos straightened up little by little and said smiling:
"Cheers, Commissioner.
She saw him run his hand through his hard, short, black hair. Then, as always - every Saturday night for months at the beginning, when Medina had just returned to Santa María and perhaps fell into the market clubs just for fun - as every time he saw Medina crush his hair with unconscious rage Anachronistically young and invincible and showing his white pointed teeth without joy, Barrientos hopelessly calculated what and how much there was in the commissioner of stranger to Santa María and all the men he had known.
"What is it going to be, Commissioner?" With gin, as always?
—No. I want that cane, with soda. He pointed with his jaw at the man with the extinguished pipe.
Barrientos went to the table and brought the bottle. After serving, Medina leaned over to look at the label and stroked it with his fingernail.
—It's free for me. But is it worth the risk?
"Okay," Barrientos said nonchalantly, tapping the cork with his palm. There are many clients and they pay it.
—Yes... The fags and the whores?
—Those too. But not only those.
"Do you think Santa María is a disgusting city?" Sometimes it occurs to me.
—I don't know, Commissioner. I don't have much to compare. For me it must be like all. Can I return the bottle to the table? There is no other.
Medina looked at his face for a while and said yes. He was left alone on the counter and it was like being alone in the empty market and being, for fun, alone in the world.
He cocked his head to look out into the street, the worm shifting next to the sun, without understandable object, sweaty, barely raising in the air toasted stiff as things, their rancorous and miserable smells. The inner face of the brick arch, unpainted and written, seemed to be lazily crumbling silently in the blue shadow. Then he looked at his straw hat on the counter and the face of Barrientos who had come back and waited, indifferent, bad-shaven, cheating.
"You haven't touched the glass, Commissioner," he said slowly. I forgot to offer you. I have a piece of ice.
Without looking, Medina reached out a hand and circled the precarious freshness of the glass. He examined the still eyes of the pen, dark and empty, staring, surrounded, in the gloom, by the static glitters of the bottles and the colorful promises of the little signs soiled by the flies. He found nothing and began to have fun, to indulge in the fury of failure.
"No need," he said. The soda is cold. He caught himself and sighed; He drank the glass in silence, without thirst, in small gulps. Flies were buzzing invisibly, the old smell of vegetables, blood, and fish began to ooze from the counters and cobblestones.
"Another, Commissioner?" Barrientos asked.
—No. Who is that?
Barrientos did not turn to the back of the man with the pipe who continued to pour himself cane, muttering, waving his thumbs. He kept looking at Medina, or, more precisely, without insolent revealing his staring eyes.
"I don't know," he said. I never knew what it's called. When he asks for credit, he writes down in the name of "the Englishman." Always pay, before ten. I think he takes a pension from the railroad. He doesn't mess with anyone.
—You're lucky. For not needing to.
"They are destinations," Barrientos said softly.
Medina smiled and sighed again. The feel of the game, the assurance of the customary victorious ending, this familiar terrain, marked by salvageable risks that he was happy to exaggerate.
"They are destinations," he repeated.
From somewhere, from behind the bottle rack, the optimistic advertisements, and Barrientos' hairy head, immobilized, waiting for something inevitable that he couldn't really care about, an old woman came out, walking without noise.
"Commissioner," he said. Medina showed her teeth and stroked the hard ends of her hair. She brought her mouth close to Barrientos's reclining head, who didn't want to move.
She had gray braids, bright, mocking eyes, dirty skin; she was more neglected than old. She murmured calmly, indifferent to the result of the long, interrupted, beggar sentence.
Barrientos said no, barely shaking his head. The eyes remained open to the hard profile of Medina that had bowed and now shone malicious and gleeful. Barrientos shook his head again and the woman slowly pulled away, as if afraid of hurting him. "Commissioner," he repeated in farewell.
When the woman was gone, Barrientos stepped away from the bottle rack and put his hands on the counter.
"Another one now?" You haven't come to visit us on Saturdays at noon for a long time, Commissioner. The dog is a little sick and she freaks out. He never had a child and cannot have one.
"Yes," Medina said, and turned her profile to look at him with joy and fury. Those things are understood. Bring two, please; with grape, I invite.
Barrientos stepped back, with a real look now, with a small disappointment that was quickly dissolving into other concerns. He brought the bottle and two tiny glasses.
"Cheers," he said, raising his glass.
Medina turned again toward the purple shadow of the brick arch, toward the fragment of the frieze of wretches that he could make out from the counter. Without helping with his eyes, he took the small sweet glass with two fingers and downed it in one gulp.
"And what can you do," he said. To meet them once a year, in the distribution of provisions that the normal hunger of a day is not enough to kill them, not counting the delayed famines of the last three hundred and sixty-five days. Gather them in the courtyard of the Detachment or, if they do not fit, in the square with the bronze maturrango that always threatens to trot and does not comply. Once a year, on the date of the meritorious police. And tell them, with the help of a priest, an ugly woman, a delegate from the governor, that it is not good to steal, live in common law, drink alcohol. That the package, which not everyone gets, wrapped in tissue paper with the colors of the flag and handed out smiling and without disgust by the ladies of the Alliance, should be enough to feed them throughout the year, until the next anniversary.
He had been playing with the glass as they talked, skewered like a thimble. He carefully placed him on the counter and regarded Barrientos with a sweet, almost childlike smile. But the other was looking for his eyes and understood:
"Where is he?" Medina asked, in the same ironic and saddened tone. I already lost as much time as I wanted. He picked up his hat from the damp and grimy counter and pulled it up to his eyes. Let's go.
Quickly, Barrientos looked at him with hatred, with contempt, with sadness. He put the bottle and glasses away and wiped his hands on a cloth; He came out from behind the counter and stopped suddenly, almost touching the Englishman's back.
—I gave him word that I would never say it to you.
—Yes, but he doesn't know what's good for him. So I have to think for him. Come on, said Medina; upright, white, he began to walk behind Barrientos.
They crossed the almost deserted pile of tables, they were stepping on a wide sticky area where the shadow was accumulating, where their feet clicked like tongues. Barrientos guided, swaying, his back slightly hunched, the silent protest and contempt showing only in his arrogant, immobile head, to a wall of planks that seemed to suddenly rise up. Over his shoulder, Medina grasped the fist he had raised to knock.
"Wait," he murmured. Do you calculate that he is drunk? I know how it gets. Barrientos shrugged; Medina made a detour and was feeling the seam of the door, the wire that seemed to hold it. It's okay. You better go.
Opened noiselessly over the darkness and the disgusting smell; Suddenly, the door moaned feminine and threatening to collapse. Someone rose to the left over a screech of wires that continued to oscillate, wasting away in silence. Medina waited a moment; then he kicked the door, which was to knock weakly against a board partition, and searched a pocket for matches.
"A friend, Medina," he communicated to the shadow with a laughing voice. An old and faithful friend who does not hold a grudge for slights.
Now I heard, above the trembling of the springs, a gasp of waiting, a breath whose violence they could not control. He scraped a match and held it lit. He could barely make out the skinny body leaning on his fists, the skinny face; I was looking for the key to the light fixture that hung low in the center of the cubicle.
"Well," Seoane said from the bed, her voice high and smooth, as if it had just been granted or returned and rehearsed to learn how to express something. Good.
Medina discovered the key, halfway between him and the man who turned into a gaping, weak, naked boy, as soon as the light filled the room with quiet fury.
Medina smiled sideways, dropped the match, and took one step forward without looking toward the bed. The back wall, if it existed, was covered up to the ceiling, very close, by empty bottle crates and others with empty bottles. On the floor, next to the head of the bed without a mattress, covered by a blue cloth, were two bottles, a glass, a candle, cigarettes, a pair of socks, a stack of newspapers. Taking care not to stain his suit, not rubbing, with slow and ostensible disgust, making an effort to offer his back to the bed, Medina arranged a drawer on the floor and covered it with some newspapers to sit on.
Cross-legged, his long body huddled, he took out a pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth; barely moving, he dropped the package against the boy's narrow chest, grasped the pile of gray clothing at the foot of the bed, and tossed it toward the flat blond belly. The thin old summer suit did not contain the weight of a weapon. After lighting his cigarette, he also threw the matchbox towards the other; after blowing out two clouds of smoke, he smiled again and then looked frankly, curious and waiting, at the sick and anguished profile that was swaying while the boy struggled with his pants.
"How long without seeing each other, years," Medina said, in a deep indolent voice that mocked herself at the last inflection of each sentence. Months nothing more, to tell the truth. But for two good friends the absence lengthens, time flies. Although I did not stop hearing from you. Perhaps I looked for them without realizing it, perhaps chance, good luck. It cannot be that two true friends separate completely. True friends are very rare.
"Well," the boy repeated. He had put on his trousers, and his head that was glistening with sweat, which was perspiring resolutely on his forehead, was panting against the wooden wall. He was sitting on the bed, his bare feet twitching shyly next to Medina's shiny shoes. The voice had learned to awkwardly express boredom, a pale cynicism.
—I found out that you had gone to the capital. It was not difficult to guess. Two thousand and fifty-one pesos - he recited - do not give much more. I mean I knew you had rented a car to take you further up from Puerto Astillero to the north, amazing cunning. There you took a boat of fruit bowls and continued up to El Rosario, to the railway station. From there to the Capital. I was knowing things before they happened, maybe before you had decided to do them. And I did not want to stop you, you know why. It's a problem. Perhaps because friendship is sacred and there are few true friends. Or because I was paralyzed by admiration for your intelligence, for your ability to muddle the tracks. It must be a gift, that one.
He had spoken as he watched the tip of the cigarette burn between two fingers, the almost straight lines of smoke rising in the sad, unbreathable air toward the heat of the lamp. From somewhere in the market came a chicken coop scandal; reluctant, slow, Medina went to the door to close it and protect the false night in the room. He sat back down and looked at the other who was smoking motionless, the cigarette hanging from his open mouth.
"I smoke and let's go," he suggested stammering, his head leaning against the wall.
Then, for the first time in the interview, Medina looked him straight ahead. With almost no beard, his face was smooth and white, his golden hair mussed, but not so young after all. It was not possible to put a finger on old age, touch a wrinkle, point out withered areas; but time, and more than he the frequenting of life, they contemplated Medina impudently from cold blue eyes, from a softened mouth.
"I'm not good for mercy," Medina warned. He leaned over to the bed and lit another cigarette.
"I don't think about pity," stammered the other, in amazement, with dispassionate insolence. I don't care about that, I don't care about anything. Nothing.
"Or almost," Medina corrected. He was looking with a smile at the black butt sticking out from under the crumpled cloth that the other had used as a pillow; He examined the trembling of the mouth, of the small hands crossed over the belly. You always cared about friendship. It must have been because of that, because of the feeling of the sacred, that you never sold the regulation pistol that you stole from me. For no other reason, I'm sure. Anyone in your place would have used it right away or sold it right away. And you also care about love, maybe you still care, love and wine, love or the need to become a dog or a bitch. Right?
The boy jumped up and was swinging on his spread legs; the concavity of the stomach, the restless ribs, threatened to brush on Medina's face. Without expression, the boy's face slowly contracted and he spat the cigarette at Medina's head, unable to touch it. The boy remained standing, moving his mouth, thinking without being able to say it, his eyes wide indifferent.
"No," Medina advised. Do not spit me. She looked longingly at him for a while and then got up. Almost without touching him, she reached out an open hand and made him sit on the bed. He took a step to the right and brought out a bottle of wine. Take a drink. It always feels good when you wake up.
She looked at him from above drinking thirsty, followed by distrust and hesitation; He looked at the narrowed eyes, the mouth that was sucking furiously from the neck, the two streaks of wine that ran down the skin of the neck, the tense possession and surrender. He sat back down and examined his linen suit, the sides of his white socks. The boy rested his mouth on the bottle and was breathing loudly while putting on a malicious smile. He tilted his head back and drank again, more slowly now, falling asleep.
"So it was," Medina's voice teased again lazily. He had stopped looking at the other, he was turned towards the door that was held by a miracle -. And after the Capital, after she got bored of being there, or failed, despite the hopes that the newspapers gave to all of us who were interested in her artistic career, and did not obtain the extension of the contract, or could not establish long-term relationships with none of the admirers who took her to dinner after the show. Soon after she accepted failure or thought that if she stayed in the Capital the time would come very soon when she would have to accept it. Immediately after she returned, with no memory of defeats, to Santa María, a week later, let's say, you went back into the city, into the wolf's mouth; transferring to the raft in Salto, with mustaches and dark glasses. They called me from there, but I couldn't do anything, not even go to the port to greet you or watch you, from afar, lower the ironing. Perhaps, again, amazement, envy, admiration for your intelligence have prevented me from moving. I knew all the time that you were in Santa María, hidden, unfindable. It was enough for me to know that she, your fake wife, Frieda or Margot if I may name her, continued to sing at the Casanova, or at the Central. I didn't want to look for you out of disgust.
The boy had finished dressing; sitting on the bed, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, he moved his fingers under his chin, trying to tie his tie. With a quick glance, Medina examined her patient half-smile, her face now a little flushed and anxious; dirty and misshapen shoes held the bottle not emptied.
- Out of disgust and out of pity; for a strange shame that I don't know if you can understand. Nor did I have, nor do I have, an obligation to look for you. Your debt to Santa María (the debt to me is something else) was no more than a 45 regulation pistol, Colt, one hundred and forty-three thousand zero, zero, seven that had brought me to Lavanda. As a souvenir, in homage to friendship, without bad intention. You stole it. Someday you were going to come back to return it. I gave myself my word and I was calm. I'm glad you kept my word. And I had no duty to look for you because forty-eight hours after your mysterious disappearance I returned the two thousand and fifty-one pesos. Today it would be easy for me to do it; when you left ten months ago it was very difficult.
The boy leaned over to lift the bottle; sprawled on the bed, he drank the rest in one gulp. He carefully put the bottle down, lit the damp cigarette he had held between his lips, and stood up.
"Well," he said. Everything is the same to me. Let's go. Nothing matters. Nothing.
Medina raised his head and blew his cigarette smoke, gently, towards the young and smooth face. He smiled, showed his teeth.
—Or almost. Everything is the same to you except for your Mrs. Seoane. All. Except for that poor dirty whore, Frieda Margot, if my lips are worth mentioning her. I don't think his luck changed; in name only. I would like to know (no questions asked) if you still prefer women. If you keep calling yourself Frieda. He gave a weak smile, suddenly tired, and spat on the ground in disgust. "It must be the heart, whatever the doctors say."
He got up slowly, flattened his cigarette against the floor and went, brushing the other with heaviness and provocation, to the head of the bed. With two fingers he separated the black pistol from the bags that formed the pillow. He hid it in a pocket.
"It's her. I don't need to look. One hundred and forty-three thousand, zero, zero, seven, ”he murmured, smiling. I knew you were going to return it.
—Well. Come on, "said the boy, with a tolerant face, getting bored. He dropped the cigarette from his mouth to the floor, rigid, without moving his head, his arms abandoned.
Medina slipped a hand under the bag and put a small pile of money on the bed.
—We're not going anywhere, nobody needs you. Today, thanks to you, even if you don't understand it, it's easy for me to get money. Buy yourself some clothes, move to a decent place and come see me. Or give Frieda a bouquet of orchids, invite her to dinner, pay her one night, get her to sing for you just "I'd rather you tell me." Although you may not be that rotten yet, although you may prefer that I not tell you.
The boy was stiff and deaf as a soldier, his face impassive and still young pointed towards the lamp that hung from the ceiling boards. Medina brushed past him again and stopped.
"Julian Seoane," he murmured, mocking. The other did not move his face; he was looking with wide, cold blue eyes at the row of crates with empty bottles that climbed the wall. Julián Seoane, ”Medina repeated, uselessly.
He still waited a moment: then, without moving his body, he struck the boy's raised jaw with his fist, heard the noise and saw him fall sprawled and still. He delicately placed the Girard-Perregaux watch that had been a birthday present on her left wrist.
Medina looked at his shoes before taking them off the desk, where they had rested between the pile of new, unopened newspapers and the empty beer bottle.
"If it's not the dust, it's the mud," he said quietly.
He opened a drawer, took out a yellow car-cleaning cloth, and bent over rubbing his shoes.
"Who knows where you're getting, Commissioner," Valle said, and laughed just once, with his usual laugh that never expressed joy, which was just an underline to the previous sentence.
"It's just that not everyone can live on the coast, boss," said Martín, sweetly, a little wry, smiling to explore.
The three men were in their shirtsleeves, slumped in their seats, briefly comforting themselves when the air from the small fan touched their sweaty faces. It was six in the afternoon, the time they normally met in Medina's room to discuss the few mysteries of Santa María's criminal life, or to talk about fishing, about good crimes that happened far away — an acceptable classic, Medina announced., of other people's women, of the weather, of the municipal events that marked the weak growth of the city on a daily basis.
"I get involved without choosing and I assure you from what I see that for years it will be easier to live on the coast than far away," Medina answered, putting the cloth away.
He went to the window and raised the curtain without looking at the square. He saw only the square, the yellowish, motionless beginning of twilight, the equivocal light that anticipated a storm.
Without turning around, broad and sweet, anxiously offering the fan his intellectual forehead, his curly hair, his perpetual expression of mild joyful suffering, Martín murmured:
—It's strange. What you counted, boss. That the guy got caught napping. With the corpse of the woman in the street.
"Come on," Valle said impatiently.
At the window, looking at the ocher triangle of the drawn curtain, Medina thought: «Strange is what he does not imagine, does not suspect: himself. May this cross between a lap dog and a fat spinster be the most capable man I have ever met in the police force, may she not drop a clue or drop it from memory until the file is sent to court, may she have never needed to hit a detainee, neither to make him confess nor to indulge himself or a personal justice or calm his nerves ». He slammed the curtain down without looking at the statue's horse's tail and slowly approached the desk.
"Come on," Valle repeated. The guy wasn't thinking of running away. A perverted criminal mind. He threw it off the balcony as if it killed a bed bug that would not let him sleep. Don't you think, Commissioner?
Medina dropped into the swivel chair and nodded at Valle's gaping mouth.
—That, Assistant Commissioner Martín. It must be as the official Valle tells it, medals and licenses hoarder, old client of orders of the day and parties in the yard for acts of daring in line of duty. That. The man was sick of hearing her grumble and just threw her off the balcony. He pushed her away without conscience of crime. He hesitated, laid an eye on the neck of the bottle; then he bared his teeth, impersonal hatred. Deputy Commissioner Martín, how long have you been married?
The three of them laughed and the heat seemed to subside. Medina saw Martín avert his eyes and pick up the leftovers of laughter with a childish trunk. He was determined to answer, apart, as always, from humor, from closed situations, from ridicule.
"Less than a year," he said calmly.
Medina lowered his head and fingered the pile of newspapers. He unfolded them loudly, unresponsive to the tired chatter of the other two. "He is right, he will always be more right than I am, not because of greater intelligence, because he believes and does not turn away."
"This, I was telling them," Medina said. Martín, I still haven't received permission to take a vacation. Hold on like me. I told them that the time may come when one gets fed up, like that, or knowing for weeks that one is fed up and refusing acceptance and outburst, fed up with opening a dirty, badly done, badly written, badly printed newspaper of the Capital, and read, almost exclusively, as a student reads textbooks, police chronicles. And one, that one, does it out of curiosity and love of work. Nothing more than that misery, although you look at it, love of work. I would like to make it a vocation, not for me anymore. But this crap written to dictation can't help me at all.
He raised the newspapers to throw them at the foot of the desk, greedily guarding the theatricality of the puzzled gesture because he had just discovered that he did not know who he was lying to.
Martín smiled without hostility, without looking at him. Above the soft, low noise of the newspapers on the floor the muffled bell of the telephone rang out.
"Well," said Valle, "it seems that even on the eve of vacation they leave him alone.
Medina leaned across the desk to pick up the phone. The voice of the mestizo telephone operator greeted and began to ring, high-pitched and insidious.
—He says he wants to see you on a personal matter. It's Barrientos, the one from the market, although he didn't give me the name. A friend. As if some dog didn't know him. I didn't tell him I was or wasn't.
"Well," Medina said. I was about to leave, but it doesn't matter. Did he come alone? Tell him to come up.
He looked at men as enemies; He looked, as he piled up papers without sitting down again, his different ways of gaining weight: stout Valle, his skeleton fatigued by the weight of flesh, mature and bald, done to everything without the need for questions, recognizing each event as a man of the that, at least, they had spoken to him. Smaller and rounder, white and younger, Martín, filled with caution, security and ambitions. «And also of patience, convinced that he will get everything he wants if life, death, gives him time, brick by brick, smile by smile, kind by profession and calculation. The important thing is not how much you suspect your wife; The amazing thing must be how much he accepts being suspicious, the exact dose that allows him not to recognize himself as a fool and cuckold and not to compromise his career, his relationships with me and her. »
The other two were now talking about smuggling; Valle was telling an incredible story and Martín nodded, smiling, soft and safe. It was dusk behind the window curtain, the stormy, yellow, violet night light would be hard and hollowed around the statue of the Founder, eating away from the rider's back, the horse's greenish haunches. There was a knock on the door, two spaced knocks, a resigned rage.
"Gentlemen," Medina said, "maybe you will come and explain something about smuggling. He gave them a mysterious smile for a while. You better leave me alone. And don't wait for me. Tonight Hector's turn to yawn. As soon as I dispatch this one, I'm going to the river.
He answered the greetings and saw them go out, pass the man who entered in mourning and wearing a Sunday dress at the door.
Barrientos approached the desk with a black hat, which he had never worn, hanging from one hand. At two or three meters, Medina saw the air of antipathy and stubbornness, then heard, repeated in his voice, the angry resignation of the knuckles against the door.
"Sit down," Medina said, "put your hat down. I could only offer you coffee; but not even that at this time. I can go to the market one night of these and invite him to whatever he wants.
He sat behind the desk, facing the square bust of the other, who had placed his hat on his thighs to take care of his hands. Medina put his feet up on the desk and sighed.
"There is a stormy sky," he said as if asking.
"Thanks, I don't want anything," Barrientos replied. You must know why I am coming.
—I don't know anything. There are friends who come just to visit me. Valle jokingly said when you left that you came to tell us something about the contraband. Whatever it is, I'm glad you came.
"Smuggling," Barrientos said slowly, examining the word. There are a lot of people, I suppose, who could tell more than me. I only have a bottle that I bought or was given as a gift. And they are there for the whole world to see.
Suddenly he seemed to tire and grow old, as if by walking in the hot afternoon towards the Detachment he had taken advantage of misfortune and it had just caught up with him now, lying open in the chair, with his new hat on his knees, his crooked bow black bothering her chin.
—It was a joke. How is the dog?
Barrientos drew a tired hand from his hat and raised it to push something away.
—That... Old man, it's a very old animal and it's been dying for years. He is the son for the woman. Understands? They all ask and pity and mock. I mean they don't understand and yet it's easy. It's always easy to understand when it comes to your own dog.
"I wasn't mocking, Barrientos," Medina said gently. Which breed is it? I never saw it.
"I know, I guess. You were not making fun of it, Commissioner; at least that way. It is a foxter. Now he is anything, he is fat, swollen, he does not move.
He smiled wearily, accepting misfortune as company, a habitual and bearable climate.
"Commissioner, you didn't call me." At least he didn't make me quote by word of mouth or make me deliver a note to come. You know what we are talking about. His men, two of them, had been standing guard since that Saturday and sometimes they would come to order a drink and ask questions. He gave them a drink and told them that yes, the boy was always in the little shed. After you came to visit him two or three days later, you went out and came back dressed from head to toe again. He was happy and that night he ate with us. Without getting drunk. A cute boy. I don't know if I'm old: I would have liked to have him as a son instead of the dog. But in the morning he came to wake me up, bought me some bottles that he paid for in cash and he was hiding all day and drunk. Well, when I saw him again, I don't know how many days passed, he was again as dirty and defeated as before. His men asked intelligently, without showing that they wanted to find out, and I told them the truth: that I was there in the little shed. Until yesterday, again tomorrow, he came to wake me up. It was four o'clock, there were no police. He wanted to kill himself, he was promising it to my wife and me, after killing I don't know who. It did not return. Since four yesterday. I thought this afternoon that it was better to come and tell him. For a reason, his men have been circling like flies since that Saturday when you went to see him and knocked him out. He raised a hand again to cough against her and said wearily, "Commissioner.
Medina loosened his chest muscles and smiled placidly, looking at the shine on the toes of his shoes.
"Yes? First he bought clothes, then he got drunk again, yesterday he announced suicide. I'm not interested. I thank you, as a friend, for coming to let me know. But I don't care what he does. Maybe it's good that he kills himself. He took his legs off the desk and smiled again, shrugging. I did everything that could be done. I knew him from Lavender. I thank you, Barrientos.
"That, nothing more," Barrientos said as he rose, his hat against his chest. I wanted to let you know just in case. Suddenly her mouth contracted and met Medina's eyes. Besides, Commissioner, I had to hit him yesterday morning. He ran wild with the landlady, she ignored him. But later he wanted to cure the dog by putting it in a barrel of water. I also left him asleep; I was careless and it disappeared. Actually, if I came to tell you it is because this time I am sure you will not return. And not just drunk; I was crazy, high.
—Okay, thanks, it doesn't matter. There is nothing to do, Barrientos. Now the boys are not going to come with questions.
He smiled and put a hand on the man's back. He walked to the window and saw that the storm was spreading irresolutely over the square plaza, over the gesture of the horseman erasing the shadow.
—If he came on foot, I'll take him to the market. Forget all that history. Neither you nor I were lucky.
The drizzle started as soon as they got into the car. There was still a bit of blue light in the sky, behind distant ledges and branches.
"It's a cloud," Barrientos said, "maybe it will pass right away.
—And it might rain all night. He waited for the old, patched engine to warm up. Every night or every morning when I go home, I have to think about that damn road they are leaving to spoil.
"Politics," Barrientos muttered.
Medina threw the car into the rain and circled the square. Approaching the market, they were crossing the part of the city they preferred, now illuminated by the first lights of the streets and businesses and the glow of the water.
The car ran slowly on the gray, slippery, poorly paved street; in the hot and humid night, in the insensitive beginning of summer's death. It turned smoothly in deserted corners where slanting rain illuminated the still pale areas of lantern lights. Barrientos was silent, clumsy and festering, with his great whiskers directed towards the mist of the glass; as far from Medina as possible, the big dirty and misshapen hands resting firmly one on each knee. The windshield wiper barely curtailed time and silence. The car ran prudently through that part of the city where the remains of wooded, dejected and mossy country houses, with solitary and stubborn symbols of wealth and pride, were being besieged and invaded by weeds or white, new, smooth-fronted trading houses. and the like or presumptuous new residences, with large unnecessary black-painted iron doors and unnecessary windows never opened, behind the monotonous metallic scrawl. Garage doors for the nouveau riche who kept cars in Shell's garage and entered their homes through modest, shameful openings, defended by cheap planks of wood.
"Look," Medina said. This side of town. When I was young in Santa María, when I had just arrived and until a year or more later, while I did not resign myself to having arrived to stay and when it was still possible for me to really walk alone, I wandered around this neighborhood. But now the car had entered General Latorre Avenue and was rolling effortlessly on the wet asphalt, pierced by the colored lights of the shops. It was like those chronicles of twenty-five years ago that El Liberal publishes. Did you ever read them? Well, reproduce what he published so many years ago, openings of something, parties, anything. It was like looking at the history of the city; and one could even touch it, guess right back and forth. The neighborhood, halfway between the coast and the railroad; and it is not known why the city began there. There is, you know, the Confederación café, which they say was a grocery store and that there was a Latorre dance in the months when Santa María was the capital. I would go to the Confederation and look from the windows at this much more interesting story for me of some rich who were replaced by others. Do you get me? That story goes on. I am talking about the new things and the businesses that are built on the land of the neighborhoods.
"I didn't listen to you, excuse me, the beginning," Barrientos said disinterestedly and sadly. I have things to think about, Commissioner. But I do understand that. I don't care about the rich in the city, or those who were rich and melted away, or those who came and came to drive them out. None of them really worked; perhaps, in some cases, parents or grandparents. I do not care about the dances of Latorre, nor the palace, on the island, nor the portraits that you have to see even in the soup. Here even newly arrived gringos speak of Latorre as God.
"True," Medina said, and stopped the car. They had left Avenida Latorre and were going down a poorly lit street that led almost to the market. It was a street of dirty houses and fronts with high old walls, with small doors on two or three stone steps; of poor and emaciated businesses, of beverage offices that some preserved the dwarf and crooked gallows of a palenque.
"Excuse me," he lied as he scanned the side street. I want to light a cigarette.
He raised the package and Barrientos shook his head and hand. Medina pushed the lighter off the dash and then brought the reddish white spiral line closer to the cigarette.
"And you don't believe, Barrientos," he said slowly, pretending to be busy sucking on a cigarette, "don't you believe that Latorre was God or almost?" Or maybe Brausen, more modern.
"As you think, Commissioner." The indignation, not entirely released, made his voice youthful and raised the quiver of his whiskers. Latorre was a son of a bitch, a thief, a brute gaucho, as were all of them. See the fortune he left behind, the leagues he was buying for pennies or arrogance while he fought for freedom and the country. See the list of those shot on a whim; and more than a hundred gauchos. They were all the same. Just send. He sighed and loosened his body for the first time during the journey. I am not saying this for you, but I am not saying this either. He was talking about how I understand that about the rich who leave and those who kick them out. I don't say anything about Brausen. If you lit up, Commissioner, I'd ask you to continue. The landlady, the dog, the business.
"Sure," Medina said. I had stayed to hear it.
He backed the car and jerked toward the center of the street. He had seen Julian Seoane's blond head leaning against the grimy glass of a warehouse window, twenty meters behind where he had stopped the car. «Nothing more, and for a second, than the uncombed hair and towards the eyes, the bearded profile, the shirt open and without a tie, a straight arm on the table, between two bottles. On the corner of Gerifalte and Cucha Cucha, in the turkish bowling alley; he must be drunk, dirty, stupid; It may even be that he lives there, the Turk has a shed for coal, potatoes and firewood; She did not go far from the market, at least she did not go near the Casanova, where she sings every night except Monday, between ten and one; You shouldn't have a penny left of the money I gave you. "
"That of those who go and those who come," Barrientos was saying; he ran a hand angrily over his mouth as if he had just drank and cleaned himself. Some throw others out. Sometimes with the elbows, sometimes without the need to approach. So they threw me out, or they threw my father out of the Colony. I understand that well, as I told you. Some come suddenly or little by little to take place and you have to leave. The difference with what he told me about the fifth houses in the neighborhood is that we worked. My father and my mother, at least; maybe you couldn't call what I did work. But I was helping and I was suffering since I could. I understand that, Commissioner. A car, one morning, loaded with junk that nobody wanted to buy or that one dares to sell because they serve to continue believing that there is a family, that there will continue to be a house, that we truly occupy a place in the world as people. You don't have to turn around, it's hardly raining now. Today, as I said, I have the same illusion with other trinkets; her, the dog that does not want to die, the concerns of the business, Commissioner.
"No," Medina said, "I'll take him to the door.
«Maybe he doesn't care about Frieda anymore, maybe she is just a pretext to live drunk and drugged. That would be less messy and also, where it matters, less serious. " He let Barrientos go down in front of the black and rainy arches of the Old Market; it was like having reached a night and unpopulated distance, on the edge of an abyss, a sea or a desert. Moisture negligently entered the car, fogging the windows and nickels.
—Thank you, Commissioner. He was bent over, holding the door open, his mustaches glossy from the drizzle, his eyes harassed and unforgiving.
"Wait," Medina said, and smiled at him as he reached into his pants pocket. I'd come in for a drink with you and the lady, but it's late. "What do you want me to absolve of?" You know, Barrientos, that I would never think of giving you... You know that I have never tipped you, the few times you let me pay. Please take this for the dog. I don't know, a treat, a remedy. He reached out and opened his fist with the bundled bills.
Illuminated by the pale glow of the car's dash, Barrientos met Medina's eyes and looked at them for a moment. Then he shook his head in disappointment and gave a narrow smile.
"There's no money that can do anything for the dog anymore, Commissioner." It is swollen to burst; it does not move, it pushes the food with its mouth and teeth, but it does not eat it. She only has to die, and then everything will be more difficult for her and me.
"Excuse me. It's a shame. I understand, ”Medina said, and pocketed the money.
"Thank you, Commissioner." Believe me, I would like to say from my heart "come whenever you want." But it is known; you are the commissioner and you can come even if you are not invited. He closed the door almost silently and quickly disappeared into the shadow of the arches.
Medina lit another cigarette and repeated, absentmindedly whispering an insult. He put the car in gear. «Commissioner of Santa María. That is to say, I could gather the little that I have left of goodness and a spirit of justice; what I have, and grows, and in appropriate circumstances would be infinite, of pity and disinterest. And it would never be enough, it could never amount to the conventional friendly gesture from one of them. The only bearable authority is that of God; and maybe not even for everyone. I, Medina, commissioner of Santa María. »
He pulled the car to the sidewalk, in front of the Turk's warehouse, and looked with curiosity and reluctance, through the confused glass and the thin rain, at Julian's head, now raised at an angle of longing and petulance, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. In front of him was also the Colorado.
«And now I'm going to get out of the car, I'm going to close —indifferent to the garúa, investigating the cloudiness of the sky— the door with a sharp, exact, decisive blow; I am going to take three steps, to climb a threshold, I am going to enter the Turk's bowling alley with a compassionate and appeasing smile, knowing that I am tall, broad and heavy, making the car keys dance around my index finger, recognizing the abrupt silence, the hasty Helpful greetings, mistrust, respect, and swiftly thoughtful whores, in the air smelling of basement, of damp earth and dirt. I will approach the table like a master and we will smile again. I'll spoil the moment for them, maybe the night; in any case, I will interrupt you. And yet, if Seoane happens to die one day, and since he was born to be forgiven, it is not impossible that they have reserved for him as a paradise to get drunk at the Turk, with the Colorado, twenty or thirty blocks from the Casanova —where she she will be singing "Prefiero que me di lo talas" leaning on the mahogany piano or where, at least, her photo will be on one side and the other of the grimy curtain at the entrance, her gigantic head, poorly colored, subject to oblique posters, on his nom de guerre, eternally initiating a smile with the corners of his mouth, his gaze prophesying, expertly and without error, the events of the night with an anticipation of two or three hours, under a warm and eternal drizzle—, at fifty or sixty blocks from the little house he rented next to the coast, close to mine, and where he will dance in the early morning, candid and confidential, with the Casanova's friends, while his friends open bottles and unpack food packages; where she will sleep with any man of whom she can only remember, if anything, the predilections. Maybe this is her paradise and I'm going to tear her out of it. »
He got out of the car under the drizzle, closed the door with a sharp bang, entered the mean light, the smell of the cellar and latrine of Chamún's business, smiling and turning the keys around a finger, indifferently measuring the sudden silence, the excitement of remote greetings, the next expectation surrounding the pool table.
"Hello," Medina said.
Blinking, Seoane took the unlit cigarette out of her mouth and examined it strangely. The Colorado waved several times as if in agreement. Medina was almost certain that Seoane did not have the same suit that he had seen him wear in the market room: this was brown, narrow and dirty, with a tear above the left armpit. Seoane slowly reached out a hand for the matches and lit the cigarette, which she put back in her mouth. He made a face and motioned to offer a chair.
"Hello," he said, and raised a hand for silence while wrinkling his face.
Then he raised his other hand and struck one with the other to call. But Chamún was already smiling behind Medina's back.
"Same thing," Medina requested.
"Hi," Seoane repeated. I was waiting for you. I mean I'm always afraid of you showing up. Everywhere, even when I'm sleeping, like last time. It was the last one, right? Not afraid of blows. He shrugged his shoulders and his lean, bearded face moved across the table.
"Well," Medina said indolently. He took the glass that Chamún had brought and poured himself from the two bottles.
El Colorado emptied his glass and shook his head:
"Good evening," he said. see you.
"Chau," Seoane replied.
"Anything else, Commissioner?
—Nothing, leave me alone. Chamun walked away. Well, it was just a hit. And maybe he gave it without any real desire, just to keep a promise.
—It doesn't matter. Leoane gave a slow, distracted, cowardly smile and stroked her wet chin. It is wonderful. There is nothing in the world, on second thought, that can be compared to it. Just a moment. He raised his hand, a sulky face, and then smiled patiently and mysteriously. I do not know what time it is. And I do not care. You realize? Wait a minute, don't talk.
He put a few drops of vermouth in his glass and finished filling it with the square bottle of gin. He held the glass with a trembling hand at eye level as he gazed out at the landscape reflected in the wet, greasy window, still smiling. Then he pulled his body off the edge of the table by surprise and drank until the glass was empty. He spent a while with his eyes closed, waiting; He quietly left the glass next to the bottles, closer to Medina than to himself, and sighed furiously.
"Better? Medina asked in a low voice. He looked at the emaciated white face, where only small reddish areas under the temples gave way to youth and nobility. The long beard gave freshness and color to the mouth; the long copper sideburns curled along the earlobes; the innocent blue eyes regained their brilliance, their complicated joy, and they appreciated Medina's expression.
"Commissioner," Seoane hissed. That time, in the market, I was not drunk, but asleep. I said it doesn't matter. I am not afraid of blows. It's been a long time, months, that every night, you can say, I run into guys who feel insulted and hit me. No. I am afraid of sermons. I am afraid of the string of well-intentioned idiots that a friend can make me listen to, for example, one who speaks comfortably and stupidly from the outside. I don't want to offend you, Commissioner. I myself sometimes speak to myself from the outside; I give myself advice, I impose life plans on myself, I make fun of the truth. But it does not last long; usually lasts until I fall asleep. And when I wake up I remember with pity what I was saying to myself; I stop being divided, there is nothing of mine outside of me and I feel hopeless, myself, Julián Seoane, enduring again. Never happy, of course, and this forever. But better in any case than when I separate, I judge and advise myself. I said, I think it was wonderful and incomparable. This assurance of having reached the end, that I have nothing, neither now nor tomorrow. Absolutely nothing, ”he recited with a marveling smile, helping himself to the bottles again. Naked. They can't take anything from me apart from my life. And life is no more than this; so little, nothing.
"Yes," Medina said, glancing at the counter. You may be right; You may not get out of yourself, not a minute a day or minutes that don't count. Such a man will always be right. However, I am not resigned and now less than before. When we were friends you had many things that could be loved or admired. There were also things to respect. The most important thing, in short, because ultimately it is the most important thing, it was your intelligence. Mother of all virtues, although you look at it. He stopped, apologetic and affectionate, the three men standing at the back, separated from the Turk by the counter, were outlined hiding their attention, maneuvering with the billiard sticks.
—Okay, Commissioner. Something remains in my memory. I am not mocking, I am not interested in mocking. I will continue to drink. All I care about is that they leave me alone. But I can still hear.
—Thank you. He said that the most important thing was your intelligence. And the only thing that can make you stubborn is the verification that your intelligence is not missing or damaged. That is why I am determined to do my best.
—It's useless, Medina. We are different; everyone is different, I mean. And nobody understands anybody. And perhaps those who do not intend to understand understand more. But no one is better than anyone, Commissioner. All different, no one better. And do not be persistent in saving another. Only God, on a whim, could do it. And you… ”He smiled and was drinking slowly, carefully.
"God," Medina said. He emptied his glass and lit a cigarette. Now came the sound of the rain again; a train screamed twice and again came the leisurely murmur of summer water on the roofs and in the streets.
"And you," Seoane continued, "that I know of, never got past the commissioner.
Medina turned to him in surprise and for a time they looked at each other with a smile, the funny and challenging eyes of years ago.
"Well," Medina said later. May I ask?
—Yes. It's an opportunity, I have nothing to defend, I don't have to lie.
"Are you in Santa Maria for her?
—Yes.
"Do you see her?
—Never. Months ago. The last attempt was... a failure. I mean she used to throw me out. That night he made me kick out. I've been watching her sing at the Casanova. All that, everything you can imagine. They hadn't let me in there for a long time. But that night I had money and I was able to sit at a hidden table, against the wall, far away from the piano, from her. I got drunk, of course.
"What did she sing?" Medina asked with a big smile, holding up a finger. "I'd rather you tell me."
—Excellent. It was like that. He always told me everything. And I was believing, there at the table cornered in the shadow, that he was singing for me. That she knew that I was looking at her and listening. And at the same time I was sure that it was impossible for me to have entered the Casanova. He could also think that I had gone to the end of the world or shot myself. I promised him both many times. But, in any case, I convinced myself that he was singing for me and I paid I don't know how much for a car to take me to the beach house I had rented. I don't know if he still lives there. Sometimes I work, it's incredible, a few days in the port. And there is a lawsuit over a field that was or was not my mother's, a lawyer who hopes so and gives me money when I can move him. I mean that that night I had money and I went to wait for her with bottles and a bouquet of flowers that I stole with the help of the driver. A long time ago. He arrived at dawn with a guy and made me kick out. Old story. I'm here because I don't care living somewhere else and I like being close to her more. What else?
"Where are you living?
- Nowhere since you made me leave the market. Or you convinced me that it was better to leave. Barrientos doesn't love you and invited me to stay. On the other hand, nobody loves you. You may have noticed. I sleep anywhere, some nights right here, above the pool table, after they close. Sometimes I go to the Colorado ranch. Why? Another thing?
Medina raised his finger with the car keys and the Turk came out from behind the counter.
"How much?" This and the above, ”Medina asked.
"Nothing," Chamún was surprised, raising his napkin.
"No," Medina said. He put a bill on the table and looked at Seoane's mocking smile for a second. Copper. He yawned the change and tapped a bottle label. Nothing else. Since it is the same for you to be here or anywhere, we go home, or to Campisciano. One piece left over. You are not required to live there. When you want to sleep or eat. Also, my vacation will begin in a few weeks. We can fish and get bored together. I have bottles for a year. Yes, we are going to the coast.
"And all that in homage to my intelligence," Seoane muttered.
—Yes, mainly.
"And there will be no sermons?" Not many?
—No. One a week, maybe. When I get drunk too. Let's go?
—Wait. I want to tell you that yes, I'm going, that I don't care. And I don't want to be rude. I am now going to have the last drink in the suburban area of Santa María. But I want to tell you that I don't know for how long. Without obligation. I can't know if getting drunk there would make me as happy (well, that's a word) as doing it in one of these creepy clubs. If one day it stops raining, I will sunbathe on the beach. I don't know, it can never be known. I also need to tell you two things. Two. Part by part. One, that nobody loves you. I loved you when you were my father, when I needed one. Three things; let's go The second, now that I remember, is that you are dead. Frieda said that you were always playing at getting things done. Never for real.
"Margot?
—Excellent. Margot. Names are still less than words. That you were playing, he said, to eat, to have fun, to argue. I agreed. We said that the same thing happened with old people when they wanted to be nice to young people. We said it was fear of failure. But she, Margot, went further and discovered something else. He discovered that you could not be otherwise, that you were more than old, that you were dead. Now, we are always in the second thing, if the envy and resentment of an old man in front of the young is always fearsome, although despicable and sad to see, how horrible will the resentment and envy of a dead man be. This is what Frieda Margot said, and I agreed. She is very smart and you could also try to save her. I do not know what; but I think it won't take much to imagine. And it is said, Commissioner.
"Yes," Medina said. But it was three things.
—Three? The third is just that. The Salvation. The commissioner who wanted to be God.
"God," Medina said, getting up. It seems impossible, but it is easy. The difficulty is that if you start you must persist. Let's go?
—Yes. I don't care.
It was in the car, on the coastal road, in the gentle nighttime rain that Seoane coughed while smoking and talked about the gun.
—The Colt. One hundred and forty-three thousand something. Did you return it?
Medina grunted. Maybe he said yes; but he had it under his arm.
"It's funny," Seoane continued. Maybe you understand it or you can't. To understand it you need to have a past. And you don't have it, despite your age, despite the fact that many things have happened to you or you have been among them. He laughed, leaning forward, toward the twisting glow of the road. I brought a small bottle of brandy, I carry it in the same pocket in which I uselessly carried the pistol. Can I have a drink? Or two? Can I invite you?
"No," Medina said. I have better at home.
- Supposedly. That's why I'm going. Leoane drank from the flat bottle and laughed again. Two wonderful things, if you get used to it, if you can go on living. As I was saying; that nothing matters to me anymore.
—Oh yeah. Or almost nothing.
—And that one comes to accept that it is not possible to understand. Let him settle with what he understands without believing in that understanding.
"Yes," Medina said. Now comes the bad part of the road. None of the councilors live or have a home in Villa Petrus. Nothing matters and nothing is understood. And you continue to live or do something similar. And then? Because that's good to learn early. And living is also a good thing; the only possibility, in addition.
—I don't know. Leoane pocketed the bottle. He was talking about the gun. It is curious to think that now it will be in the holster of some provincial military. Now that gun... It had a meaning to me.
—With everything, things and people, the same thing happens. Was it not a question of regret for having stolen it from Lavanda? And on Frieda's apartment, no less.
—Never. It was safety and love. It was like life insurance, death insurance. It was enough for me to see and touch her; I could never go wrong.
"Not that," Medina said. But I can get you another one. As a toy.
He turned right and the car drove down a narrow mud road, hitting overhanging branches of willows. They went down into the rain, Medina guided the path, through the scent of earth and orange blossoms. They climbed the five wooden steps, and Medina pushed the hard, creaking door with his shoulder.
"The humidity," he said. He switched on the overhead light and the lamp in the corner of the table. He went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle and two glasses.
Seoane was in the center of the room, looking around, defending herself with a crooked smile.
"Few things changed," he said. That comforts the heart. And the bottle of cane, like a fat calf... Is it the same bottle that Barrientos buys contraband and sells in the market?
"The same," Medina said from the chair next to the dirty fireplace, with remains and odors of winter.
—But I don't pay for it. What else about the gun?
Seoane looked at him from the table, her glass in the air. He shrugged quickly and lifted a flushed, mocking face to drink.
"Nothing," he said. If you could understand what I said would be enough for you. If you could imagine and remember.
—I can and I refuse. It does not work. I like everything, I like to be happy with everything. This happens when one finds out in time, and truly learns, that nothing matters and that the possible understandings are infinite and insecure. I like to live. When one finds out in adolescence and stops, right there, being an adolescent, deceiving oneself and looking for shelters and protections. It is also good to find out in time of death. Matter of luck, of course; and a matter of instinct, too. You were thinking about the forty-five... I thought that in the Detachment's inventory of goods it is worth five hundred pesos, the price paid for it, for that and another one hundred twenty or two hundred twins, the day they bought it. And it's funny that five hundred pesos is still five hundred pesos. A robbery of five hundred. I thought about what five hundred pesos meant when you stole the gun. And I thought about what five hundred pesos means now. Maybe you have to spend that just to treat Frieda to a table at the Casanova and a meal in the early morning. I think that the absurd disproportion, now, between theft and what can be obtained with theft, gives the crime a comic air. Now it's about the man who stole for nothing, the one who made a mess just to invite the woman he wanted one night. Not for your happiness, not for any future longer than ten or twelve hours. So there is no crime; a friendly joke, innocence, almost. I think that if the five hundred pesos were what they were, everything would have changed. Perhaps you would not have escaped with the gun, or you would not have escaped. Because five hundred pesos of those would be enough for a trip, the raft and the train, in first class, two lunches and two dinners in the dining room and with the rest, five or a hundred pesos, you would not have been able to pay for a hotel room even for ninety minutes in the Capital. She does, of course. She did not count, nor would she count today with the five hundred pesos. Today it has millions. And then, perhaps, that tenth or twentieth version of the idyll would have lasted less or perhaps it would not have even started. Dirt, if anything, would have stained things before and you probably weren't now this curious, extraordinary shit in love with an ambidextrous whore.
Seoane was still drinking, sitting at the table, drowsy and lonely: the head with the hanging cigarette leaned towards the stifled murmur without desire of the rain in the window; An isochronous hand was scratching the coppery, dirty, tangled hair.
"Inflation as a deforming element of the tragedy," Medina said, yawning. Or revealing. Turn your theft into a simple childish prank. It makes incredible your undoubted, old, feeling of pride and courage, the one you had when you escaped with the woman and the Colt. It makes it impossible to take Julián Seoane seriously; to really believe in that abject blonde, poorly shaven and emaciated, coward, who plays drunk and desperate.
Seoane turned around smiling and waited as she blew the smoke against the label on the bottle. At the window and the roof the rain was losing force, it was hunched away.
"No more sermons, you promised, Commissioner," he finally said. I'm going to bed. I'm not going to hear more than one last sermon. It would be good, then, if you thought about it, that it is worth listening to and returning to the Turk's shed. I have not seen her in a long time; I'm talking about Frieda. Nor do I look for it. It would be possible, if you were to shut up, to stay here and start over or in another way.
—Yes. Medina leaned over to the fireplace and examined the thick soot stains on the bricks. You can always try and try again. Very few people matter to me or did me; that's why I have a habit of telling you the truth.
«What is the lie between him and me», Medina thought, «which forces me to continue loving him and to try to impose on him a happiness different from the one he now enjoys and which I insist on calling misfortune, and why do I insist on doing it? There is a lie, there is a falsified feeling; It's not about friendship, it's not just that I want to save him from the drunkenness and the drugs that Frieda gives him or sells him, I'm sure. Save him from humiliation and suffering. Actually, I've never really loved anyone. It is not possible, it is not possible to go beyond the need to act as a human being among others. There is something else, something stronger and cleaner than affection, than friendship and any form of love; I don't know what it is, but it must resemble dignity and pride. "
And maybe the boy would have thought the same. He had, on the other hand, a lot of time to think and get bored, to choose or accept an idea and ruminate on it sitting in the woods of the pier with the primitive fishing rod he had chosen, held indolently between his knees, disinterested in the fact that the fish were Whether they nailed the hook or not, indifferent to Medina's advice and ridicule. He went, half-naked, blackened by the sun, from the dock to the house to eat and sleep. He hardly drank a glass of wine at lunch and Medina could see, curious, without reassuring himself, how the boy was imitating, with increasing perfection, the Seoane he had seen for the first time, years before. The same placid, kindly cynical good humor, the same listless confidence, the same nervous quickness of movement and ideas.
He never left the house, or the grounds of the house or the strip of sand and scrub along the coast. He did not want to visit the city, he did not seem to remember that Frieda's chalet was about two hundred meters from the jetty with the paintwork where he sat fishing or lay in the sun or where he took a weak impulse to dive into the river that was dragging at the time. very little mud, which turned deep and translucent in the midday sun. He did not count projects and received without rejection or enthusiasm those that Medina invented to probe him. He smiled, showing his now whiter teeth as an excuse, asking for anecdotes, for the Detachment staff.
"He's still at the Casanova," Medina said one night. I want to go see her, maybe talk to her. But I'm tired, the city is becoming more and more important and it gives me more work; as soon as I can escape I come. Maybe the holidays start next week. We could go, take a freighter and go north. But my vacation has been for next week for a month. He continues there singing and as in the Colony they have just sold a harvest, always, every month the gringos sell a harvest of something, the cafeteria fills up. She still sings "I'd rather you tell me." I mean that the world you care about hasn't changed. The hit number, the big number, is still "I'd rather you tell me." Now she wears three dresses a night and no serious lover or friend is known. What else? Now they put up a luminous sign. I would like us to go one night. It's still early today, if you like. And they say that he bought or is about to buy the Casanova. Which means that you will be staying a long time in Santa Maria. Yes, it is true.
Seoane had heard him smiling, leaning back in his chair, smoking and with an attentive glow on his face, as if he expected to hear something that was not said.
"I wasn't at the Casanova," Medina completed. You may think that this whole test is just a prologue; that I went and spoke with her, that I brought her a message, a repentance, a request for forgiveness, a never, some never. »
—He says he doesn't have the money to buy it. But I know her, ”Seoane said after a while. His face was young and calm, leaning now over the mess of dinner on the table. Her hair was very long at the nape of her neck, stained from the summer. He took a cigarette slowly and was softening it between his fingers. Abruptly he smiled, turning to Medina. Although there are no limits for a woman. If it's a woman, I mean. But it is true that now he has millions.
"Okay," Medina said from the chair by the fireplace; She was looking at him with bored eyes, with a kind and foolish expression. I understand, they never definitely become this or that. But it seems that he does buy the Casanova. And now the light on the door alternates the name of the cafeteria with hers. In letters of the same height. We can get in the car and visit Santa María. I brought half a dozen bottles of Barrientos cane.
"I don't, I don't drink," Seoane said. I don't feel like going to town. I get bored. Here I get bored in a way that I like. I don't think I will buy the Casanova, even if I have the money. It's not her way of being. The weird thing is that you know so much without having been there.
—I haven't been, maybe I'll go tonight. Medina, with her legs on the arm of the chair, gazed, squinting, at the boy's bare brown back. He wanted to be nothing more than a voice, a challenge, a cautious provocation. But the police were there. The boys, Martín, Valle and Ruiz were there for several nights. The Enduro cutthroat had raided the motorboat service station in the harbor after killing the woman. He had bought a suit, shoes, a silk shirt, a tie. He had been asking for everything they could sell him at Ainsa's hair salon. A guy like that if he couldn't escape from Santa Maria, and we were pretty sure he hadn't, with fresh money, he had to end up drunk in one of the cafeterias. He ended up at the Casanova. A fat man under thirty, with a mustache, acting out of fear of not believing in himself. Well, he had slit a woman's throat. Not even that: what he had and used for years as his wife. So, waiting for him, the boys spent a few nights at the Casanova. They took him drunk and asking them for I do not know what recognition of an ancient and secret pact between men. They said yes. And in the morning he was still drunk and he cried while he explained to me, puzzled and almost bursting the new clothes that he had already had time to get dirty and wrinkle, which would already be stained with the yellowish sweat of fat people with fear. I had no need to go to the Casanova; but maybe I'll go tonight, also unnecessarily.
"I'm going to sleep," Seoane said. I'd like you to find out if she bought or plans to buy. I'd bet not.
Medina did not go to Casanova that night. And he also thought it was another test to bring an album the following Saturday with "Prefiero que me di lo talas" sung in English by Dina Shore and get drunk after dinner and play the album over and over with drunken tenacity, until dawn, until Seoane got bored of hearing him and making jokes, and got up stretching to go to sleep.
"I don't remember anymore," he said. But I'm sure she sings it better. Or in another way, with an intention that I like better. It would be curious if you fell in love with her, that you became abject and drunk, that I had to invent plans to save you.
But Medina had not returned to the Casanova, he had not seen Frieda. Why? He thought. «I don't love him and it's been so many years that I can't love anyone. The more liberated I see him from the need for that whore, the less he interests me, the more common and replaceable I feel. Saving him from that misfortune was a whim, an obsession that has nothing to do with what I know about myself. And, after all, he was cured because he wanted to, without my help, because the illusion of love and need was mysteriously exhausted. Next week we will go upriver and when I can convince him to leave Santa Maria for good I will no longer have an interest in him. It was not him that mattered to me, but his unhappiness, his slavery. '
And perhaps Seoane would have thought of the same things during the days he lived on the coast, in the lonely hours when he squatted asleep after throwing the hook with the bloodless piece of meat into the water. Because there was the night when he accepted a glass of the smuggled cane, nothing more than one, and cut off any conversation to say with impetus, with a sound that seemed to have been rehearsed long ago, that he knew more about Medina than Medina about him; that Medina knew nothing and he knew everything.
—We talked about this already and more than once, I don't remember how many years ago. You've always wanted a child, probably since the first time you slept with a woman. You said it, I remember. What you felt above a woman was so important, so unrelated to any other type of experience possible, that you needed to make it eternal, or lasting, or palpable, with a child. I never understood that; I cannot understand it, at least, in a man. I never wanted to have a child. With Frieda less than with anyone. And this is true although it is also true that Frieda was the only woman I had apart from the prostitutes in the ports. Neither did she want to have it. We loved each other too much to need and not even accept that something was added. But you always needed a son. Maybe not just because of everything I said: eternity, duration, the act of love made concrete and occupying a place in space. Growing, too. Perhaps you also need a son to justify your stay over a woman, to apologize and make you forgive. Whose? That is another problem. I am better, after all and before, because I admit I do not understand anything and I admit all the possibilities that I do not understand. Perhaps this virtue (deep down, the indifference that you think you have and even confuse with understanding and tolerance; the indifference that you are not capable of having), that virtue has developed in the afternoons on the pier, where it is impossible for me avoid visits and talks from that pig, your neighbor, called Mister Rey. He comes wading bridges, or in the motor boat, always fat and asleep, always dressed in white and with the freshness of the shower and the after-nap shave. At any time. And from the confused talk, from the terrifying stench of the barely stinking horror that comes to me from the late intelligence of Mr. Rey, I was able to separate two jewels of wisdom. First, it takes many different types to create a world, my friend. Second: God has strange pensioners, my friend. I'm sorry I can't say it with your accent, with your shortness of breath. But, in any case, I believe in those two pillars of Mr. Rey's philosophy; And I stick to my faith We weren't talking about it. We were talking about your old woman, perhaps a congenital need for a child and the bad luck that prevented you from having one. So, since you met me, or long before, you wanted to pretend that I was your son. No love, really: the pleasure of dominion, the poor prideful satisfaction of imposing destinies and contacts. No deductions, actually: you made me understand it many times, you confessed it unintentionally.
And all this pile of phrases said without alcohol, without vehemence, without the shadow of a desire for revenge. It was on a Saturday in late January and Medina had a promise to start his vacation the following Saturday.
"That might be true," he said, smiling as he walked to the bottle of cane on the table. I was never interested in analyzing Medina, knowing about Medina; I let him live and I help him. I try to do the same with others. Without needing Mr. Rey, I have learned not to look at myself. I am simply; I am in the world and I do things. In this case, in the last chapter of this case, it occurred to me that you were too smart to be fair to the price of annihilation you were paying. He emptied the glass, put it gently on the table and approached Seoane, who was looking at him from the moon in the open window with an expression of tame rebellion, with an incredulous smile. He moved closer until he could tap her cheek gently. What you said tonight, whether or not it is true, serves at least to show that it was worth the effort. Everything we know, you and me, shows that that bitch is not worth anyone paying any price. That bitch, I said. He waited a moment, breathing in the slow air that came from the river and the lemon trees, not taking his gaze from the bright, clear eyes that remained empty, hardly curious, hardly insolent. And when you want to go...
"I don't want to leave," Seoane said slowly, shaking her head in the dim blue glow. At least when I leave it won't be for her. But it is unfair to insult her and it is also useless. I know her. No one but me knows her.
—I'm glad. Yes, it always happens that way. On second thought, it corresponds that I ask for your forgiveness. I believed that...
Seoane raised her shoulders and a hand. The refreshed face seemed to thin, ironic and wise.
—I talked a lot. There is no more to say. I go to shore to look at the hooks and then to bed. Good night.
And the next morning, with the sun already high, when Medina went to look for the car in the bower, he could see the boy sitting on the edge of the pier, almost naked, wide and thin, holding the reed above the water of fishing, useless and curved.
A black barge was heaving up the river; At the beginning of the invisible heat, to the right, the engine of Mr. Rey's boat was purring.
That morning, Medina got up late in the little house on the coast where Gurisa, who had returned from Colón, was yawning for breakfast. The day was warm and calm; Medina advanced along the pasture path without haste, cursing without speaking the Detachment, Santa María, the returns and their uselessness.
In front of Mr. Wright's house, with the door not properly closed, he heard groans and long and stuttering complaints, spoken in the already wasted language of the coach. He listened for a moment and then slowly opened and stepped into the yellow light. He waited a moment, listening to the noises: in the geometric red shadows, in the smell of cellar and dead air, in the curve of concrete steps. There was a cot; drawers and bottles against the walls, a desk surrounded by bow-legged chairs with cushioned seats. He was looking at the white shoes and pants, the sitting fat body, the childish and repentant expression of the big round face.
"Boss," Mr. Wright muttered, shaking his head, making a hen-protesting laugh.
Alone, sprawled and sweating in the chair as if this were a consciously accomplished task, with a drooping violet eyelid, with a short swollen nose, with a pink, split, smiling mouth, Mr. Wright welcomed him by swinging over the creak of the seat. Next to some books stacked on the table were his panama hat, a bouquet of jasmine, a bottle and a glass.
—How to escape the eye and the arm of the law. Not in the stinking depth of this catacomb. I am willing to confess, without pressure. He narrowed his good eye to look up the ladder over Medina's shoulder and then between his legs. He laughed again, slowly making his noise of dawn and chicken coop; He took a drink from the glass and pushed away the tiny white hands. I have no other chalice to offer you, boss. Neither syphilis nor dental cavities, for many years. The cane is legitimate; I don't know if he paid taxes. The piping voice seemed to laugh under the impassivity of the small blue eyes, between sighs and suppressed coughs.
Medina lit a cigarette and went to sit on the desk.
—Good morning. It passed and I heard. What battle was he in?
Mr. Wright scooped up the handkerchief from the fly and changed hands to wipe away perspiration.
"Did she send it, boss?" Preceding the question, the laugh-like grumble, the stupid and scared expression, confidential.
"No one told me anything. I heard bad words and walked in.
"The line of duty," the fat man said with a shudder. But there is nothing here. And I've been getting my asthma worse for hours in this pigsty. Have a drink, please. I didn't even stand up to greet him. But it's a hundred and twenty kilos, boss, on this dressing table. The round pink face grew serious, a little enraged, puffed up to blow. He filled his glass and took a sip, handed the glass to Medina and watched him drink with furious attention. Real cane, boss. He began to laugh and cough, kneading the handkerchief between his palms. Then he abruptly turned serious and looked straight ahead, his brows furrowing. What do you want me to tell you, boss.
—Tell me what battle you were in. Medina set the glass on the table near the left arm of the huge, drunken, white-clad man. He lifted the bouquet of jasmine tied with a stem and ran it over his mouth and nose. "I can choose, any memory, and impose on it this white perfume like a violent light that makes it show every last wrinkle."
"Ah," Mr. Wright said. I am not complaining because I have nothing to complain about. Only for that; I like to complain and I confess it. I confess everything. She laughed again and touched her little round, wounded mouth with the handkerchief, holding it with both hands. Chief. Do you know who hit me?
"No," Medina said. He must have been a brave man, if anything. - «But what do I remember that I care? The last true perfume of flowers is that of the room where Teresa was dead and invisible and the flowers had been given by strangers. " He dropped the jasmine on the table and filled the glass with a smile to put it on the handkerchief held by the fat, gasping man.
"They love me and they hate me," Mr. Wright said, shaking his head quickly to counter the objections. I do nothing, I live on retirement and some coupons. They love me because I am a fat man with a good mood. I am no one's rival. I don't personally know anyone who hates me, but they must hate me. People are like that, boss.
«It's summer», Medina thought, separated from the summer by the fresh air smelling of years abducted from the room, «summer. The repeated exposure of faded hopes, the naive and cunning incitement to choose belief for three months. And how one says that not out of habit and lucidity without being for that reason or more sane than the one who accepts and mixes. »
—A fat, single gringo who could have grandchildren, a railroad retiree, who feels happy without shame. Boss, ”Mr. Wright said, looking at him in brief desperation, clucking again. They can only hate me because they realize that I am happy; Besides, I tell everyone. As I was telling you, the heat woke me up at dawn and I spent a while on the pier playing with the dogs and laughing because the morning had become for me. I shaved and took a bath, got in the boat and went to visit him, but everything was closed. He brought him dozens of jasmine for his mistress and I was clapping my hands on his dock and on the way until he came smiling, with a cane on his shoulder, dressed in his bathing pants, half asleep and without washing. Then he went to look for a bottle and we stayed on the dock under the willows, with the hooks in the water for pure play, because I explained to him that with the current last night we were not going to catch a weapon or a yellow catfish. And we talked about the river, Europe and Santa María, and we talked about places to get drunk and be with women until we reached the Casanova, which he said indifferently, he had never set foot. And speaking we come to her, the landlady, Frieda. And lazily, moving the rod out of the water out of habit, sure I wasn't going to catch anything, I told him what Frieda was like and how much it cost in species. Although sometimes it has not cost me anything, or nothing that had to be paid at the time. And when it seemed to me that they had eaten the bait I started to pick up the line and he shouted as if laughing: «Stop, fat man; do me a favor, stop. I got up and saw that he was waiting for me with a laughing but determined face, almost naked, his arms dangling, firming himself over and over on the muscles of his legs. I asked him raising his hands and he started hitting me. I think I fell on the dock and no one was there when I was able to get up to ask for an explanation. I was washing my face (he locked himself in Frieda's house) and when I got tired of waiting I got on the boat. They are lovers, everyone knows it. But it is not a justification. That's it, boss.
"Yes," Medina said. Before leaving the table, she was smelling the jasmine. It doesn't matter.
He felt that something had reached maturity and rot as he walked towards the stairs; that he had been gulping down the same thing for years and now needed to throw it up.
"Good morning, Mr. Rey. As always, on the pier, any morning.
He remembered Mr. Wright at his feet, with his laugh that trembled like a respectful dove coo.
Campisciano thought he should bring the news in person. But this was a busy night at the restaurant; He decided that one of the waiters would run to the Commandery.
He was a small and skinny boy, an emigrant from the Swiss colony who trotted through the streets repeating almost aloud the message he had to convey and which he could not quite understand.
He had just put on the white coat of his office that seemed to prolong the brightness of the day in the calm Sanmarian evening, without lights.
The soldier guarding the door — wearing slippers, with both hands resting on the hole in the Mauser — shook his head impatiently and ordered:
—Pass.
Shrugged, the boy went into the hallway until he reached what was called the commissioner's office. Big and dirty, with damp walls and tattered wallpaper, it told his story as a former living room for a wealthy family. Days of receipt, adorned women who mixed perfumes sold by Barthé, the tea table in the center, with the always brand new set of china and the great cake prepared by the hostess. And the incessant chatter: abortions and adulteries, true or not, evil predictions, the cost of food, fashion news and knitting.
He saw Medina sitting at the table that served as his desk, his uniform jacket unbuttoned and a flickering lantern hanging from the ceiling. Invisible to the waiter, men were speaking to the right. He waited a while and faintly clapped his palms.
"Come in," Medina said without looking at the door.
He entered slowly and carefully, bowed. Then he saw the men who had spoken and two chickens lying on the ground, their legs tied. One of the men was a soldier in long pants, a jacket that had been used as a uniform, and a revolver on his belt. The other was thin and dirty, dressed in oversized clothes, with shoes of different shapes and colors; the open toes yawned or begged for food. He wore a mourning scarf around his neck.
"You go again," Medina stated with feigned dismay.
"We have to live, Commissioner," said the man with the handkerchief in a voice very high for his body.
—Live. And why do you have to live?
The man looked at him in surprise, opening the dark eyes that he had managed to protect from dirt, misfortune, his own life. He straightened the shrunken body:
"Not me, Commissioner." I mean, the family.
—I already know. For two hens, Barrientos or the Italian, they give you a demijohn of that wine they call the country and it burns your guts. It also helps to forget the hunger of the family.
The waiter stood still, bewildered, calculating the passage of time, feeling the danger of not being back at the restaurant before it opened for dinner.
Medina wielded a pencil as a scepter and asked:
—Which is the fattest?
The man pushed the gray hen with his right yellow shoe.
—Okay. Take the other one. And give me a vacation for a month; I don't like to see your face or feel the smell. Lightweight, do me a favor.
The other one jumped up, crouched nimbly, and again stood upright with the skinny, flapping chicken held by its legs.
"Thank you, Commissioner." If you give me a door...
Medina rang a hoarse bell and the man disappeared. Medina pointed with the pencil at the soldier in the long pants and then at the fat hen.
"Yours, Hector," she said.
The corporal - he kept his genets - smiled simulating a protest.
—But Commissioner...
—It's an order. I have a carnival dress for you, I owe you two salaries. Next time you'll get the skinny chicken.
When he was left alone in front of Medina, the waiter felt the message slip through his head.
—Speak. What other kind of scam did your employer come up with?
—He says to tell you that there is a banquet tonight. Friends of hers. The German lady was drunk with a friend. The banquet is for you. But you don't have to go.
After the waiter left and resumed his career, Medina summarized or translated:
“Frieda had ordered a meal for midnight. Five or six women who knew him from Lavanda. The guest of honor was he, Medina; but they didn't want to see it. There would be, yes, a chair at the head that no one was going to occupy. And all of them would have to talk about Commissioner Medina. Bad talking, because the joke was Frieda's invention, drunk and high. And Don Aldo Campisciano would collect the six covers while he told him, just in case, what the female sextet was preparing. "
Shortly before midnight Medina went through the vestiges of the Plaza, infected now by the generous smell of Italian cuisine. He entered the humidity of corridors deformed by recent masonry, he went through easy and useless labyrinths.
They were not the remains of a city devastated by the troops of an invader. It was woodworm, poverty, the ironic inheritance of a generation lost in cars with no memory, in nothingness.
Traces remained: the dust on top of a leather chair, cornered and lame; lime-stained mirrors inlaid in cream wood; little plaster roses scattered, messy, on the walls. Guided by oregano and garlic, he arrived at the restaurant.
At nine o'clock he had called Díaz Gray.
"Nights, doctor. Sure, Medina, the one with the golden voice. No deaths for now. Ask him for a favor. I am encouraged because I know that you sleep when the sparrows start to bother. A favor. A witness who can give testimony. Be at Campisciano's at around twelve. It's true, when I think of the cave I still call it the Plaza. It will be old age. Thanks, doctor.
Medina crossed in front of the boisterous table of the three women. There was no more left. Almost without looking, he saluted and went to the end of the room where he curled up, with his back to the wall, on a solitary little table. He ordered a bottle of Presidente and two glasses. He was in profile to the womanhood and, drinking slowly and smoking, he began to wait for Díaz Gray. "Only three and I thought, I thought I remembered that there in the south I had made many more."
Díaz Gray came in talking to Seoane; they stopped for a moment, and then the boy went to join the women. The doctor, despite the warm night, wore a hat (Stetson, sure, Medina thought) and uncovered himself to greet the table that Frieda presided over. Medina received him with a big smile as he looked at the doctor's skinny face, the dark circles, the sparse blond and white hair.
Sure, he thought, Petrus's daughter, more than twenty years apart; although she is silly, so skinny, she seems anemic and a stick; but with women you never know before. If they gave me a hundred dollars for every time I was wrong. "
They talked about the heat, the ferry, the decline of the Plaza.
"Everything in this city," said the doctor, his voice dull and softened. We suffer from dermatitis, every day a piece of skin falls off, or a memory. Or also a cornice. Every day we feel more alone, like in exile. And every day the gringos of the Colonia buy a new piece of the city. There is hardly a business left that is not owned by them. The same Campisciano, despite his surname, is nothing more than a delegate of them. Sometimes I think they gave or loaned him the money to buy the Plaza. And so that it was destroying and disfiguring it with partitions. Today it is a boarding house. This very room, if you remember what it was like.
—I know. I live here. I have a room with a bathroom and a window. When I'm not at the beach house.
—Yes, everything is sad. I'm not going to play poker at the club anymore. There's no one left of my time, of our time, I mean. I wait for the dream in my house. Solitaires and chess games.
(And a shot of fifina every now and then, Medina thought, ironic and impassive.)
—I am already determined to die here. Even if it's not out of obligation, ”Díaz Gray smiled. But you. You who managed to get rid of God or the devil. In all honesty, I don't understand why he came back. Unless the famous love of dirt attracted him.
Medina leaned back, always looking into the doctor's eyes.
"Yes," he said in a cautious voice. I escaped in a boat and returned in another. Commissioner of Santa María. I came to visit, to review. At least that's what he believed. Later I found out that I had some things to do. Without much conviction, of course. Nothing ever happens here.
He returned his body to the edge of the table and while he refilled the glasses he heard the noise of the phrases and the laughter of the three neighboring women; Seoane was also speaking. He had a stroke of fury and downed his cane in one gulp. Then he smiled again and was friendly. No, I haven't asked him yet; He is, with all the cons, the most decent guy in Santa Maria. I don't want you to believe that my invitation was not disinterested. "
—We haven't seen each other for a while. I forgot to congratulate you on your wedding.
—Thank you. Diaz Gray extended a mocking smile. Excuse me. Almost a year ago. All the congratulators thought that I was marrying the hypothetical millions of old Petrus and the nothing hypothetical house-palace on pilasters, free of mortgages. But I was in love with Angélica Inés since I was a little girl. And since she is not and will never be an adult, I am still in love. Later, Brausen's mysterious help, which also does not exist, won the lawsuit over the railway. Now we have millions in currency that is worth little. And we don't need them. I would say, lying, that I am confiding. But the truth is that I do not hide my weakly wicked love from anyone, nor the millions that came later.
Medina nodded his head and thoughtfully stirring the liquid in the glass.
"Thanks for the trust, doctor," he murmured in a wakeful tone. I'm a friend. And also, a friend who understands and respects. That is why I tell him, as a friendship, that sometime I will talk to him about money and a project. But don't think about anything commercial, I'm not going to set up a business to compete with the gringos. It is not about buying and selling. It is not about winning anything. It is the opposite. That is why it may be that you help, only a person like you. And I swear to you that I am not flattering you.
He raised his head to look at Frieda's face, who had approached almost pushing the small table with her thighs. The Paraguayan cane danced in the glasses for a second and then quieted down.
"Sorry, doctor," he said, smiling. I didn't want to disturb him. But like the commissioner, my friend, he decided to settle in the dining room without being invited. The Command must have a good espionage service.
"Would you like to sit with us?" Diaz Gray offered. We were talking about Santa María. We said that nothing ever happens here.
"It's true," Medina said. We spoke in peace. But there is no problem that you, you, add yourself to the conversation.
Frieda, who had not closed her smile, now directed it to Medina.
"Oh," he said; the smile was forming, at the tips, falls of mockery and contempt. He dragged a chair and sat down; She was wearing a black dress with shiny edges in the pleats. Medina observed that there were no pearls; just a brooch, on the chest, with a black drawing, difficult to understand, which was repeated on the bracelet and the ring.
«Before, lesbians used bangles to be distinguished by brothers and to drive away men. Now, I'm out of style, this must be what they use. A goddess of Gomorrah, the shield of Bilitis. »
"Oh," he said. Just a little while, I'm very well educated; especially since relatives, guardians, executors, accountants were called to the afterlife. No more mean and late turns. Now everything is mine. Also, thanks to Brausen, the shame of knowing that I breathed in Santa María and that I slept with whoever I wanted is over. This includes you, Commissioner, even though our illegal marriage happened in Lavender.
"And wherever you want," Medina said, with a superior and rude tone.
"Am I over? Diaz Gray asked softly, with the affectionate expression of a grandfather.
"It's her," Medina said, and handed Frieda his full glass.
She drank, then raised her lips in disgust.
—This is ordinary and burns. They always told me that the police lived richly through bribery. And they invited like rich people.
—Absolutely true. In Lavanda I lived for a long time at the expense of a very beautiful woman who sometimes said she loved me. This was a kickback. He even put up with poor Juanina who, as I'm seeing, you could import her. But I don't like the game with Gurisa. Gurisa for me. For the others Olga. Here, unfortunately, he could only bribe Campisciano. And there is no other hope than credit and price reduction.
"Stay, doctor," Frieda said.
—Perfect. I had cited him as a witness to such foreseeable stupidity. Women and the boy Seoane.
Suddenly Díaz Gray stopped being a grandfather. He straightened in his chair and said in a diagnostic voice:
—Everyone here apologizes for bothering. I'm going to do it without excusing myself. That boy has already gone to the bathroom three times to come back happy as he thinks or feels, with bright eyes. I see him move hardened. He is drunk and also doped. You, Medina, must know where cocaine is found in Santa María.
Medina spoke with a parody of a Commander in Chief.
—You have it in your office.
—The indispensable and perhaps less.
—Thank you. I have to know how it enters. At the very least, I'd like to save the boy.
He leaned back in his chair and after a while shook his head. He was looking at the air when he said, as if reciting:
—Two places. One of them is. Perhaps, doctor, you shouldn't have asked me. Without looking at Frieda, she spoke happily, "And now, with your permission, I'm going to take Gurisa away.
"Several books ago I could have told you interesting things about alkaloids," the doctor said, raising a hand. Not now.
"Yes, I knew something," Medina commented, standing up. Actually, he thought, they can all die dripping drugs into their ears. Who cares? »
Gurisa saw his sign and approached.
"Doctor," Medina asked, saying goodbye. You know a guy they call the Colorado? I've seen him hanging around here. And they told me something.
"Oh, old story. We were in a house on the sand for a while. Strange guy. Makes this many pages. Hundreds.
And they continued to advance, unknowingly, through the wine of the first mass, the struggle for daily bread, ignorance and stupidity.
They advanced happily, distracted, almost without hesitation; so innocent, relaxed or rigid, towards the final pit, and the last word. So confident, ordinary, quiet, reciters, morons.
The well awaited them with no real hope or interest. They walked happily, some leaning on others; some remained lonely and smiling, talking to themselves in low voices. In general, they discussed plans and spoke of the future and the future of their children, and of the small and great revolutions that they held in books kept under their arms. One of them was gesturing with his hands while others were discussing memories and their lovers and withered flowers bearing the same name.
And there was the night, another Saturday, when Medina stopped the small asthmatic car two blocks from the Casanova and went up the sloping street, smelling the air with concern and surprise, as if he had just finished discover the summer trail.
I had been traveling during the week to Enduro and El Rosario; that afternoon he had driven the Enduro cutthroat to El Rosario jail. Without handcuffing him, visibly keeping the pistol in the envelope on the door, excited by the unbearable heat of the dry January afternoon, by contempt, by a confused hatred that ignored the murdered woman.
The fat man slumped to his right in the car seat was sweating and stinking. This is the phosphoric smell of chilled anguish, similar to fear, but different in its lack of sharpness and aggressiveness. There is another type of perfect crime, also impossible. A victim who only inspired respect and a little pity. A corpse without blood stains or with well-distributed stains that barely underlined death and violence. The woman hung from the bed, and her short, stiff hair could scratch the floor if there was room for new markings. Fat, though not as fat as he, infected with this poor devil's fat as with a venereal disease. Legs spread and bent to kick in the dirty, threadbare stockings she would call champagne color, one bent from below the knee and dropped, misshapen, over the ankle; the other stretched almost to split, held by a knotted elastic. Faceless, it was erased by the crusts of blood that surrounded the only beauty that perhaps it ever had, the blue eyes of a lamb, open furiously to absorb the life of the pitiful room, of the daily traces of existence, of the concentrated heat from weeks or months on the tin roof, from the light that destroyed the defenses of the rags in the two windows. He killed her at eight in the morning and despite all the confessions he made and does, neither he nor anyone else will ever know why. »
Medina drove through the ups and downs of the narrow, gray highway, intense in all the landscapes it crossed, sparsely populated by huge shaking trucks, by swaying carts, by sulkies with trotting horses. The car was moving away from the coolness of the river and moving along taut fences, between dry fields, between distant cows, skinny and immobile. The fat man was pleased to lend his body to bumps, he stroked the dampness of his mustaches with an index finger. Sometimes she would sigh and sum up with boyfriend amazement her thirty years of experience:
—That's just that.
Every half hour, Medina lit a cigarette and passed him another and the car lighter. He tried not to touch her fingers. He drove with one arm drawn back, his narrow, angry eyes fixed on the trembling strip of the road. Among the mountains of the Gradin field, where the road dips and curves, the man asked permission to go down.
"The boys' beer," he explained; the small and barely visible mouth tried to make a sentence and an apologetic smile.
From the car, anxiously scratching the lid of the briefcase of the door where he had kept the pistol, Medina watched him swing away, stiff, wider and shorter with each step, approaching his shadow to those of the trees that were beginning to become long and bluish.
When they arrived at dusk on the banks of the stench of tanneries that surrounds El Rosario, the fat man coughed and said:
—That's just the thing. Like ten years without having a yes or a no. He never gave me motive. And the reasons I brought them from outside or I invented them, unfair. The cane, perhaps. But no: I am cured. It occurred to me that she had slept with Tabárez and she made a laugh, but in her eyes I thought I had the evidence.
"Shit," Medina said lazily. I've heard it many times already.
«He killed her at eight in the morning and was looking at her or walking around the room, plugging her throat with sticks wrapped in rags. And he had to walk around drunk and naked, rattling his buttocks, fat enough to laugh. "
He handed it over, they flattered him for having brought him alone and without handcuffs, they invited him to get drunk and eat, they gave him an after-dinner, as a prize that they had not wanted to waste or diminish by granting it before, the right to take a vacation from the day choose.
"Thank you," he said, sure you were doing him a favor. From this moment. Nothing happens in Santa Maria. Some theft, some horse that crosses a wire, some boy that drowns on Sunday, drunkenness and scandal, but few are the drunks who kill. I'm happy because they say there is a lot of fishing. I'm happy for Martín, who will be able to play commissioner for a fortnight.
He escaped from the restaurant lying that he had some things to solve in Santa María, thinking of starting his vacation right away, with a woman he could get right there, in El Rosario. He went into a couple of cafes and in the second he chose a skinny woman who was smiling at him from the counter with a reddish hairstyle that gave her smile a resemblance to Teresa's.
"What are you doing, black... Cheers," she said, and drank half of the honeyed glass.
The youthful teeth were shown again, and Medina examined the drawing of the half-open mouth, the colors of the gleams of the coppery hair that covered the ears.
«A resemblance, barely irreconstructable, weakening by the minute. A resemblance like the ones I invent to the masks she uses to look at me in dreams from the other side of death. »
—What's your name?
—Maruja.
"Okay," Medina conceded. I have to be in Santa Maria before midnight. You can have another drink, you can cash it without taking it.
She made a quick cheery smile shaking her head and looked alike again for a second; maybe not to her, maybe just to Teresa's state of mind, to the moments when she raised her chin, to the voice with which she said: "Since we're at the dance...".
"I'm going to have another one," the woman murmured, putting her face close to the table, with no possibility of repentance and confession.
"Not me," Medina said. Maruja. Now the woman with the disinterested face was nothing more than a skinny blonde whore, sticking a slow, impudent, officious tongue into the thick green drink. Maruja. He called the waiter and paid and laughed to make himself forgive for the ghost of Teresa. “Of a truer and more similar color is Frieda's hair, as I recall. But also more similar for its difference is the hair of half a dozen women who are waiting for me at the Casanova tonight. Exactly there. »
Still naked, she put the two bills in her wallet, took out a round mirror and was painting herself. Then she smiled as she adjusted the folds of the blouse.
"Rubbish," he said shyly and smiling.
Without sleep and without memory, Medina crossed the hot and dusty night back to Santa María, repeated in the shadow the easy curves of the road, the descents and ascents. It was a quarter past twelve when he got out of the car two blocks from the Casanova and climbed up Calle América with his nostrils open, with a benevolent and sustained fury, gazing at the summer with narrowed eyes and entering it.
The sign, «Casanova», with the last two letters off, with that almost violet blue, at once resigned and infuriating, of the samples of the funeral parlors, flickered sickly and whispering like a trapped firefly, vertical, to the narrow and damp sidewalk. They had made a tiny stained glass window, dug a glass-protected hole in the wall to store and display two expensive drink bottles, perhaps empty, and the big picture of Frieda. Loosening his tie, energetic and irritated, Medina gazed for a moment at the diagonal face within the golden frame, the white hair tied above the nape and the eyelids that threatened to cover the desolation of the gaze, the mouth a bit tragic, a bit mocking. "It's the same. There are women like that: in ten years there may be ten different women, if one has the patience to remain curious; but they remain hopelessly the same person. They can change the eyes, the mouth, the nose; what remains unchanged is the way, the style in which these things combine to form a face. »
He pushed the new greenish plush away from the curtain and did not look at the fat black man dressed in red, who smiled down at him and murmured a welcome that ended with the word commissar . He walked in the shadows toward the lighted circular area where a man played the piano and another accompanied him indolently on drums. He paused at the edge, suddenly aware that he was wearing his hat, his hands in his pockets, with long, proprietary strides. He uncovered himself and walked to the right, on the edge of the luminous circle, without stepping on it. He selected a table against the wall and waited for the music to end to look around the room. He lit a cigarette and leaned over the woman's face, turned toward him.
Then, from the circular white silence that now surrounded voices and soft laughter, came the groom's white dinner jacket and the descending, servile voice.
—As always, right?
"Yes," Medina said. I haven't been here for so long that the usual is going to be a surprise. But I don't want to be alone.
"I'm going to see, Commissioner." It's a bit late.
—It's Casanova, it's Saturday, it's summer.
The pianist began to play with a single finger, slowly, searching for the crystal-sounding keys. There was a woman standing by the piano and the man supported his huge mulatto head with one hand. Beyond the circle of light a woman was singing, drunk, moved, making a mistake, a Spanish warrior march. Despite the hour, the smells began to be breathed in at dawn, the air was thin and defenseless.
"As always," said the waiter. He put the glass down and opened the bottles and served with a friendly and triumphant air. There are none here. But I sent Sevilla to ask about Trini.
—The name doesn't matter. Gin and ginger ale. Is Frieda no longer singing?
—I don't think so, Commissioner. He stopped singing a minute before you arrived.
"" I'd rather you tell me "?
—He had to repeat it. Keep liking it.
—Trini, then, if possible.
—Right away.
Now the mulatto was playing a bolero, and the placid, fifty-year-old fat man who had been beating the drum of the drums with one or two small metal filament dusters, was scratching the lowest strings of a huge guitar and accompanied with his head and a foot. The woman in the back sang sleepily; the clarity of the sounds, the bouncing and multiplying echoes anticipated the dawn. Medina drank and made the matchbox dance. "I can spend tonight without a woman, or tonight a woman is not worth the price of putting up with the talk, the perfumes, the same presence before and after."
He saw her coming, advancing, moving, skewing in the other gloom, the one at the counter, the one that was separated from his by the white circle of light that contained the pair of musicians and half of each privileged table. He saw her silver hair and the narrow black dress, recognized — in another distance, years — the calm movements of the head, that slow raising of the hands, the prolonged immobility in supplication and waiting. He saw her, from behind, making her head fall backwards exaggeratedly, laugh with the bartender and keep this laugh also for the washbasin that appeared behind the counter. Leaning against a column, fat and off-white, the waiter seemed to have given up looking for Trini.
Frieda turned; there was only one other thing left to do, he could not imagine new excuses or delays. He turned toward the ring of light that the probability of dawn had shrunk, toward the burly pianist and the phlegmatic, round, aged drummer. He turned with what was left of the forced laugh he had directed at the bartender and the apprentice; her elbows were leaning on the counter and her black breasts stood out under the lights of the gold chain around her neck and the smile that didn't want to die. He said something and the waiter indolently slid his back on the column to look into Medina's shadow with interest and apology. He pretended to stretch as he repeated the order to the musicians. The mulatto squeezed his ribs with his elbows and began to play on the mute; the fat old man, overcoming his reluctance, began to dust off the "I'd rather you tell me" patch.
Medina leaned slowly, carefully, against the wall and smiled at the woman for a second, as equals. Then he put out his cigarette and let her come, he saw her move her body away from the counter, go through the gloom, distant or innocent, walk with steps of false clumsiness through the disk of light and exhausted music, enter this half-protective shadow. He watched her stop and grow, he was sure he had guessed her smile before looking at her.
"Good evening, Medina," she said; He barely rested his hands on the blue tablecloth, to show them, to offer peace.
"Yes," Medina said. Sit down, please.
She leaned in as she picked up her skirt, giving her face an expression of patience and disappointment.
The waiter filled Medina's cup. The musicians squeezed out the last notes of "I'd rather you tell me," they waited for a yawn time and began to play the same thing, again, with prudence and respect, knowing that they could be forced to continue until noon.
"You," Medina said.
—No. I already sang and I already drank. Enough for today.
—Better. He shook his glass to mix the drinks, and desire and contempt lazily crept up to touch her diaphragm.
She watched a movement in the front door and then imperiously turned to the piano; the mulatto was now playing, very softly, "I'd rather you tell me."
"Me," she said. Why did I come to sit at this table. And what about Seoane. And why, and especially how, did I buy the Casanova or am about to buy it. And why Seoane is a poor boy. And why I never had a child. And why did you arrive tonight carrying the world ahead of you, and why would I waste my time answering any questions. But say, Commissioner.
Medina drank calmly and slowly, taking dozens of seconds, as if he were alone at the table and alone at the Casanova; he lit a cigarette and began to smoke. He turned toward the woman, toward the place where the woman could not be denied, through the smoke, a weary smile and sigh.
"Something's wrong," he said sweetly, envying the rich, husky voice of the mulatto pianist who was now speaking in English on the piano keys. Something happens for you to come sit with me and talk so much not to say anything; To propose themes, unfold them for him to choose. You are needing something for you to come visit me instead of frowning from afar. You can ask and we will see, I will try to see. Some difficulty with the purchase of the business, or a bit of hysteria that was hidden and growing until this summer night, or some plan of friendship and reconciliation. Speaks. I didn't invite you to my table. Why did you come?
He spoke without looking at her and without hatred, having fun, thinking lazily about Seoane, about the trip with the fat cutthroat, how good it would be to be really alone in the dead midnight of summer, to hear the scattered notes and bass, sonorous, hollow, endless without seeing or remembering the musicians. Suddenly, he saw her shrug her shoulders and not bother to smile to express disdain or strength. He saw the gentle noble curve of his nose, the undeniable intelligence of his eyes, the polite, patient, mocking gesture with which his lips moved for a moment.
"What? He insisted, leaning over his glass; it was anger that was now mixing with desire.
"Nothing, boss," she said. At least none of that. It is true that we agreed, stupidly and without having said it, that it was better not to speak to each other. It's true that I came to your table without you inviting me. But don't worry, pay the house. I don't want to ask you for anything that looks like a favor. Just...
Medina looked at her, and as he moved his body to lean against the wall of reeds and photographs and cross his legs, he was frankly accepting her wish. She wasn't inviting him; the cold and handsome face, almost manly when he chose defiant looks, swayed slightly, austere and sad. But he preferred to be unfair, he preferred loyalty, not to himself, but to old resolutions. «She would, of course, like to force me to knock her down and, above all, to see me determined to seduce her, to see me reject my own objections and those that she would launch, one after another, each time weaker and expressed with increasing force. She would like, and she is searching, and that is why she came to my table, she would like to feel my fury and my abandonment on her body, to feel me apart from Seoane, allied to her or at least neutral. »
"I don't think you came to my table out of sympathy." At one time I was a friend of Seoane, I was the friend, the only one, and little or much the father. He was responsible, I understand. Then, when things started to go wrong, when I had to convince him that you were all that you are and, also, Seoane's misfortune, I hated you and I would have liked to know you dead. What happens...
Frieda smiled as if she had heard a compliment, beckoned to the waiter, and was whispering along the flabby cheek that the man was approaching her.
«Could it be, why couldn't it be? Go to bathe tomorrow with Seoane and while we dry ourselves on the dock planks, tell her that I slept with her and suppress her friendship and love with one sentence, and be free of this imbecile subjection that has lasted for years. It could be. »
"What happens, what you don't know is happening," he said as the waiter placed the drinks on the table, "is that one does not dare to carry friendship to the end. With love it is done, one is capable of doing it, perhaps because we all know that love can have an end and friendship cannot. If it were possible to be friends to the end, I would have crushed you long ago. Or at least it would have been my job.
She stopped looking at her invincible, maternal smile and mixed the two drinks. A group of five shyly entered, paused to argue in low voices, then moved purposefully toward a table near the piano, beyond the circle of white light. The music went from whisper to passion; anyone could see, behind him, the white teeth of the pianist, the applied patience of the drummer.
"I attended to the customers," Medina said. And tell me why you wanted to talk to me. I'm sleepy. And since you forbade the waiter to go looking for me, I don't know which female from Sevilla...
"Yes," Frieda agreed, with enthusiasm and melancholy, as if she were listening to music more nostalgic and distant than that of the piano and the beats of the drums. I told the waiter not to go because I wanted to talk to you. In addition, Sevilla has permission to close at three. You can go find anything you want there, Commissioner. Here we are decent; the police only allow us to open until one.
"I don't know," Medina murmured. I am not concerned with the corruption of Santa Maria, I am only interested in mine. You wanted to talk to me. I asked and we will see. I know you are at this table to ask me for something. I know women as if I had given birth to them; If I no longer have a twenty-year-old body, that is why, for having given birth to them all. Speak up.
"Yes, Commissioner," she said humbly; and it could be said that the mockery was only in the metallic whiteness of the reflections of the hair, in the astonishingly short fingers that raised the glass until it was empty. Do you know that we are neighbors? We are a bit far away, but the mud street has the same name.
"Speak," Medina repeated. I can take; Even though I'm falling asleep I suppose that Seoane knows that we are neighbors, that each of his drunkenness knows by heart and blindly knows the way to your house. The poor guy.
—No, neither. I didn't come to ask you for something, nor does Seoane ever come to my house. You - the two women and the three men who had come to sit at the table next to the piano after pausing by the front door to hold a murmured council after traversing too bold and too fast a long space of linoleum and empty tables, they had thrown their heads back and laughed, playing who held the blind laugh the longest to the ceiling where a dome of leaves, indefinable fruits, and taut, arched reeds of India had been painted with bad perspective; and they had brought in their hair and on their clothes the warmth and soft humidity of the summer dawn, memories and promises of summer that spread through the depopulated and sleepy place together with the exaggerated vulgarity of their laughter; the pair of musicians insisted on the low notes to raise a swaying wall against the trembling of the strained air from the street that indifferently announced the end of Saturday night, the vulnerability of forgetfulness and impetus—, you, who have given birth to us to all women, you will die without knowing for sure if a woman enjoyed you or made you believe it, without knowing if your child is yours, without even knowing why they lie to you or if the woman who lies to you even knows why she is doing it.
He hardened his face, turned hissing to the piano and the musicians who began to play "Bolero de la Jungle"; He looked towards the table of five and when he brought his face closer to Medina he showed a deliberate and mysterious smile.
"I didn't want to ask you any favors, Commissioner." Just ask yourself a question. I plan to buy the Casanova. You now hate me; If you're against me, I can't go far I wanted to ask you: do I buy or am I going?
«It's funny, it's fine. The same face, the same way of not deciding to smile and not looking at me, the same heavy and bearable fatality in the swollen eyelids, and an identical style in distributing towards the corners of the mouth memories of childhood and puberty that it supposes moving. That was how he looked at me when we were alone in Lavanda. Then maybe he would sleep with me to weld his union with Seoane, with Seoane's world. Tonight I would do it — if not for an old, almost unconscious whim — to separate myself from Seoane, to convince myself that she is the one who is right, so that it is impossible for me not to agree with her. "
"Go on," Medina said, and moaned the cigarette in the glass. You better go if you can get Seoane not to track you down. But if you decide to buy this shy brothel and stay, you will not have more fines than what you deserve. On the other hand, there is a man who has a much dirtier borrachería than this one in the Old Market. It's called Barrientos. He has an old wife, he has an old dog; or is it the woman who has a dog. Both you and I, it occurs to me, and you especially, we would have to thank him for having a drink with him and for the privilege of shaking hands. And yet, I don't even allow him to give me a glass from the merchant to the police. So the house does not pay. So if you really have nothing to ask me, go check the cash register and send me the waiter.
She moved her shoulders again and smiled patiently, as more mature than he, calmly guessing each of the experiences that Medina had undergone.
"Pa," he said, getting up, "since you seem to like it." I asked you a question and you didn't answer. I already knew that I can stay or go. We are still neighbors; Maybe you'll regret it and come visit me and tell me if I should stay or go. You know? She seemed to lean over to get a better look at him and bring her smile closer; Without taking her eyes off, different from Teresa, but comparable in the distracted way in which she made herself necessary, tall with small, hard breasts, she scratched the packet of cigarettes with her long nails. Pretending to lean against the green curtain, the black dwarf tried not to fall asleep, his back turned to the slow, cool wind that came insistently from the river, at the end of the provincial night in shame. You know? He was smoking with the already damp and stained cigarette hanging from his lips, accompanying the music with his hand and the gold lighter. I will do what you tell me. Leave or stay. Whatever you can say to me; like flipping a coin. But, in any case, I swear to you, Seoane hasn't seen me for months; And if I left, he wouldn't know where.
"I'm glad," Medina said. Tell the waiter to come, please.
«And he's living with her, if you can say living, drunk and high all day. Although Frieda might wake him up when she gets back from business. »
She barely inclined a slightly different smile on the table, with the mystery diluted in mockery and patience.
"Good evening, boss," he said aloud, and the two musicians were suddenly silent.
"I can take you. Tonight I sleep on the coast because I have some things to fix. I leave Gurisa at the Plaza because I am leaving at dawn. Fifteen days in the Capital.
"I have my car," Frieda replied. The trip in company can make you forget or remember. Even in one of those, we are friends again. And since there is a moon I'm going to wash my head in the river. Sweet water. It will be again.
Medina, almost without moving, looked at her neck, buttocks and ankles. “But just as I cannot understand my joy, others cannot kill it and not even see it. Maybe stop by the Detachment right now and say goodbye (hear Martin's oiled voice, I feel him slapping me on the back with the comic solemnity that gives style to our relationships, praise me boss) and pretend to be interested in some new track on smuggling, in some drunk asleep, some desperate wretch. Or maybe I'll leave it for tomorrow and go sit on the dock with a bottle now, my legs dangling on the edge of the summer night that we will think is endless, above the black and almost deserted river. I may feel soft and lazy and silently ask for an account for the promised things, which don't matter because it doesn't matter whether they are in the past or in the future. "
The waiter raised the bill and counted the change. The drums and piano sounded spaced and low.
"Yes? Said Medina.
The waiter had put away his wallet and was waving his arms towards the ceiling and towards the green curtain where the dwarf kept his watch, hopeless, at the humid night. Then he bowed, still shaking his head, prolonging his admiration for the joke that Medina hadn't told.
"He's not a house keeper," he explained. They, the musicians, contract with the dwarf. If there is no work for the dwarf, there is no contract.
—But why is it mandatory to hire the dwarf? Asked Medina. Is he the son of the drums or the piano?
"We don't know," said the waiter sadly. I think the dwarf is the drummer's brother, but I can't assure you. They love him very much, but hardly speak to him. They take care of him, the best food is for the dwarf and every Saturday, when they finish, they let him get drunk. They go to Bavaria, which now never closes. Thanks a lot, boss.
The waiter walked swinging until he was leaning on a column near the table occupied by the three men and the two women. One of them sang again, ignoring the music: she had a pure voice, alien to her dry and spiteful face, to her manly hairstyle. The song, very old, alluded to things that she had only sensed in the year she learned to sing it and that she had never experienced. It wasn't love, it was more or less, it was myself, Medina thought, stalling. «And sometimes Teresa believed that it was the lack of love, she could not understand the delight with which I was abandoning myself and was enjoying and extending the prologues, she could not understand that desiring her I made her undress and I lingered drinking and smoking, looking at her secretly, talking to her about serious and silly things because when he opened his mouth he breathed better. She did not understand it and was suspicious, she felt annoyed and immodest. But it wasn't love; it was, as now, the pleasure of prolonging the wait for the few important assurances that life gives me. »
The woman stopped singing and the other shouted "very brave" while the men laughed, clapping their hands. Medina turned, looking at the smiles of the two musicians, the table full of colors at the edge of the white circle of light on the floor, the group of three at the counter doing accounts by the cash register.
«I haven't seen him in months. And he has it hidden, drunk, drugged, at hand, dominated, next to the latrine of the house, snoring on his back on a cot, swallowing with his mouth open the smell of confinement and ammonia. »
He got up and put on his hat; He walked toward the door, the greenish plush, the dwarf laboriously turning his round smiling head. He stopped and went back to the table, waving his arms past, his hat on the back of his neck, holding back the enthusiasm of his eyes, in front of the now calm musicians, next to the table of five full of bottles, in front of Frieda climbing on a stool who smoked with a numb face, with a long, clear mouthpiece.
Medina did not know when Seoane was born. But long ago, a lonely, horizontal and lonely night in his bedroom in the former Plaza, bored, hearing the insistence of the rain in the distance, with a bottle of Presidente cane and a carton of black cigarettes, bronchial scrapers, he remembered the infallible recipe and gave birth to the boy in the cold of a dawn in the colony: July 16. She had seen him so blond that she managed to convince herself that he was not her son. His name was still Julián, María Seoane was his mother's name; but the father was a Swiss gringo. It was nice to give Seoane a childhood for her birthday.
He was born, then, in July in the Colony, twenty years ago, on a (mysterious) night surrounded by a (mysterious) landscape populated by (mysterious) beings. He couldn't know, really, more. They later transmitted to him - the mother, with the sweet and superior air of someone who invents stories - attenuated versions of urgencies and terrors, words that alluded to prayers, help, resignations and a calm, a virile and still asexual acceptance. They were, they and the beings that inhabited the landscape, immigrants, pioneers, colonizers, misers and raptors; women could also give birth and breastfeed; but hardly anything else important differentiated them. The days of others, separated, not truly lived, like bricks that were piled up to build. The legend placed on top of fear and learned patience, on top of the resounding race of a tílburi driven by an already old doctor, a moonlight easy to imagine with exactitude, and approximate but already dead, almost invisible. Another kind of moon, incomprehensible and fantastic people moving mechanically and clumsily in that variable landscape of twenty years ago, frozen and destroyed forever by time and blind, comical human activity.
So sometimes the huge bloody bed, the light from the kerosene lamp, the candles in front of the pictures on the mantel that cut through three walls of the room was enough; and he being born from his mother with dizzying softness. Sometimes the old doctor trembled helping, in others he continued trotting under the dying moon without ever arriving in time.
Afterwards, the father hitting the Santa María Civil Registry desk with the handle of the rebenque, so sure and stubborn that he saved himself from violence, so sure of fighting for the truth, or, at least, for an isolated and invincible truth, that did not show to be moved when he folded in four the paper in which they recognized his right to name Julius and not Julian the son who had come to testify.
Later, another nothing, a happy, warm and credible assumption, a few years that ended in the discovery of rites and laws, of an elderly and taciturn father, skinny and straight, never wrong, with a scant handful of beard that It was gray, and from a broad, disappointed mother, now placid and smelling of cheap perfume.
Later, the instinctive alliance and forever with the woman; and not aggressive but simple defense; and against or before the world, people or animals, the heat and the wind, the sadness, the indefinable threat of a few hours: not against the very tall and contained man, bearded, and the world of obligations that he imposed in silence every afternoon when he returned from the field: long but moving with the ridiculously short steps that suited the little boots, the canes almost hidden by the white panties that would look immaculate again in the morning. The foreign and embroidered vest, the mourning collar.
Afterwards, the more frivolous complicity in disobediences that the smiling woman concealed or suggested: the sweets, the naps, the hours lost in the chicken coop and the rabbit hutch, the velvet suits and secretly sewn lace, used fleetingly in loneliness. Laughter and suffocating kisses, the oppressive and protective beauty of women: their ally, their happiness.
Afterward — though he may never have known it — the combat started when six of the twenties were about to expire. The traps and the frank fight to prevent the silent man with the gray beard from carrying the child one day in the charret or in the newly bought truck - with the indispensable details that would complete the horror of separation: a brand new suitcase, a basket with fruit, a couple of chickens with their legs tied - to go up the road to Santa María without haste, to cross the town without stopping or curiosity that was giving birth at that time a house a day, and to deliver everything at the end of the afternoon, after four or six hours of travel, to the superior of the college of Jesuits of Colón. The pretexts, the calculated cries, the theatrical and restrained suffocation in which the thick and dark braids, younger now than the woman, stopped, of their own accord, from circling the head, fell and unfolded. And the mornings when the child, bewildered and healthy, was put to bed and the woman confined herself to the room, restless, with a spirited smile, ready to cry whatever was necessary.
Until the man with the little white beard said one night after lunch: "Tomorrow"; and the woman bribed a peon to bring her the old doctor and managed to wait for him in the grove of crooked and young trees that had just been planted from the front door of the house to the path of clods or mud. And she also bribed the old doctor, the same one who had or had not attended her delivery, depending on how the false memory became infatuated. Until she, that same night, went up to the attic and quietly stirred the sad things, the little stories that filled the trunks, and was able to find a European and yellow document, a title that vaguely authorized her to educate children.
"But not in Spanish," said shortly after dawn, at breakfast, the tall skinny man, the man who had named the boy Julius and therefore believed he had a right over him.
She smiled. The man with the white beard had not thrown the paper into the fireplace. She brought the coffee to the table and crossed her arms over her still hard breasts.
—The boys, the things, everything is the same always and everywhere.
She accompanied the man who could have been her father, smiled motherly at him when he turned his head before kicking the horse back.
Then, the punctual farce of every day and here are the memories limited to the winter afternoon falls: the translucent porcelain lamp on the red plush folder with thick es and gold clovers Maria's slow and smiling voice — sometimes she spoke with her eyes closed and it was as if she were telling a dream in disbelief — the smell of alhucema warmed on her cleavage. The farce quickly put together, with more speed, calm and verisimilitude as they got used to the crime. The voice of the sparrows pretending to go crazy in the sky and the garden, fearful of the night as if it were the first, looking for a tree. The games, the costumes and the stories ended. She matured without suffering, she became the only female on earth as her large hips, girlish ankles, moved away towards the window. He would put his forehead to the glass, perhaps the tip of his short nose, and forget the child for a moment, he would sink into the purity of being without memory or foreboding.
Afterward, I would draw the curtains down onto the orange finale of another short and confusing day; he lit the lamp, he distributed the notebooks, the books, his hands with rings on top of the calmed blood of the folder. The man with the small white beard was announced by parting voices and the horse's hooves. He passed by them without wanting to look, saw the woman's smile, and went into the bedroom to change.
Later, the afternoon that was different in its end without anything announcing it, the afternoon at ten years of the improbable trip of the old doctor in the carriage under the light of the moon that might have existed, the afternoon in which the tall, skinny, stiff man arrived at the usual time, this time in the charret, accompanied by a not very fat priest, not very convincing.
The dinner in which the priest participated after the hasty Benedict and which he encouraged with stories and jokes, excessively for the other three, who were unhappily accustomed to silent meals. And when the tablecloth was taken away and the coffee was brought, the priest wanted to know what the boy had learned since the day she dusted off the absurd title of letters, in the heading, Gothic. The man with the barbicha smoked his rustic pipe, patient, determined not to declare his prejudices. The woman listened blushing and with tears, as if the humiliation corresponded to the child. Furious, unearthing old motives of revenge for the sudden betrayal, for the years in which the old man had allowed her, he had instigated her with indifference and silence to play the comedy of teaching, of the transfer of knowledge that she could not give, that perhaps he had and forgot easily and smiling at the things that count in life. Not out of delicacy, but because she did not care about partial victories, the man older than her did not comment after taking the priest to the Seminary and returning around midnight. He lay down next to her without listening to the sly justifications and fell asleep with the loud, personal snoring of always after kissing her on the forehead.
"I'm taking him to the Seminary on Monday," the old man said at another breakfast. At the window, in the ajar door that pierced the restlessness of the dogs, perhaps in the same gloomy room, smelling of smoke and threadbare plush, it was already autumn, expert and calm. Clothes must be prepared.
He finished eating the skinny meat and silently sucked the mate, showing her that he wasn't listening even though she came and went without saying anything. From the door, surrounded by the long white cuzcos, he half turned his head; He had already kissed her, he had already finished with her until noon or evening, because now he was wiring.
—The Seminar for liking you. Because for me I take it to the field tomorrow. All you have to do is know how to write and keep accounts.
He, the child, preferred without saying it the Seminar, friends, surprises and mistakes. But she didn't speak of choice. He only affirmed, hiding and showing him the tears, having him that afternoon on his knees, that he, right? He never wanted to be separated from his mother. Then she led him to the attic, to the confusion of dust and cobwebs, of suitcases and trunks turned years ago and definitely into furniture that would no longer travel.
From the door that met almost with the sloping ceiling stopped by the humidity and the probable smell of rat filth, he saw the woman bend down and become sleek and young next to the trunks of convex heavy lids, protected by strapping brown, moldy. He saw her open them and turn towards him for a moment, impetuous and without interest, her head that had recovered the shine of tears and of a smile never seen by the child or the old man. The gentle, golden sun shone through the single, dirty glass to precisely spread over the pinned braids, the whiteness of the back, the patent leather shoes curved against the floor.
"Like me," she said in an indifferent, cautious and cunning voice as if approaching a bird. But she was motionless over the echo of the squeak of the painfully open trunk and she was holding up a pink girl's dress, with bows and lace: "Like me when I was that girl and a party came.
He let himself be dressed ashamed and without protesting and even pretended to dance in a semicircle with some defeated high-heeled shoes in front of the woman who had sat on the trunk and now without crying she sang incomprehensible words and beat her hands to the beat and drowsy.
Then came the early morning when they ripped him out of bed and got excited about the men's boots and peasant suit. In the large room, he added his silence to the stillness without promises of the father and both were served, impartially, by the woman who moved accepting old age, the crash against the wall, the lack of love for the future.
Then the work on the farm began, the discovery of a world of which he had been deprived, of which until then he had known nothing but echoes, reflections, empty forms - or absurdly filled ones - despite having it held by his side, surrounding him. He hated transplantation and failures at first and exaggerated his need for comfort. He did not say a cultured word in front of the old man; he sought his mother's eyes and nothing was easier to find or more difficult to avoid; they looked at each other and were summoned. She was escaping from the huge bed complaining and perhaps already eternal; he moved away from the never-interrupted snoring, it could be said, during the exact eight hours of sleep, and he left the child's room open to continue listening to them and to be able to calmly mix his tears with the son's. She, at least, did not hate the old man, did not hold him responsible for the boy's sufferings, the early winter starts, the falls from the horse, the sleeve absorbed and torn by a thresher. He kissed and healed bruises; He was learning to look straight ahead, to accept that he should only hate life, the passing of the years, the diversity of destinies.
So the boy's change couldn't take her by surprise. He knew something was happening long before he realized it himself, just before he could discover the change looming over the boy's body and movements. It must have been the end of the second year; one used to say that the father paid him half the salary of a laborer; With a dark resentment that was renewed when he saw the dirty bills counted at the dinner table on the last day of each month, the boy received the money and did not keep it, he simply slipped it into the clay piggy bank, he deleted it.
And it wasn't that he had stopped pleading with his eyes for nocturnal visits. The facts seemed to remain the same and she did not want to think further, she refused to imagine possible events other than everyday ones. Something was happening, he could not know what it was and he was on guard. The boy was about twelve years old and had grown a lot but he was still weak, languid and beautiful. And there must have been a short stage, an instant, a flash between the moment she suspected the change and the moment much later when she began to see it. An instant, a flash of lightning in which she understood everything, as if she smelled it with what was left of her female, with what was feminine so painstakingly spent in her thirty-two years; like a pain.
I was prepared for this and for everything; to bear it, because he could no longer plan more than solutions, consolations, passive remedies. So when he saw the change later, he recognized both an animal and ancient thing and some of its cautious predictions.
He saw that in the almost silent meals something was incorporated into the child's respect and fear for the old man. It was a hot night and she was approaching from the kitchen to the table, preceding the mulatto maid, when she heard the old man, while skillfully cutting a large loaf in the air, saying to her, kindly, absentmindedly, as if to himself:
—Very brave the zaina. But we are going to tame it.
And he saw that the child, dazzled and hesitant, allowed himself to be trapped by the magic of the plural and smiled at the father who was not looking at him. She saw him smile without parting his lips, slightly puffing them out, in a wise and sufficient gesture, learned from some peon. She understood: it's okay to show your teeth to women; but between men, between partners, this is enough.
He didn't want to risk looking into her eyes until the chamomile teapot was brought in to top off the meals. He did not find them then; he saw what he had sensed and smelled: the boy's dirty, blond head made grave by meditation and keeping secrets; the eyebrows, much darker than the hair, almost united, the mouth with a foreign firmness and above it the sheen of sweat and the shy shadows of the first mustache.
He finally found, in the after-dinner table, the deliberate plea of the child's eyes, fulfilling the duty or pious act of summoning her. That night she did not visit him. She stayed on her bed, face up next to the snoring, crying without despair, imagining the appearance of her own face in the remote light of the summer moon, trying without grimacing to resist the tickling of tears, determined not to think, watching until dawn the irregular strokes of the mill.
Later he realized that he was incapable of resentment and remembered what he had always known, from the impressive and unspoken first family council when she reached puberty and the reluctance, the curious eyes, the rigid tenderness allowed him to intuit that he was She had made it unclean and sacred, while a gigantic and grim uncle, or great-uncle, read the Bible aloud, with long pauses, and her mother and her mother's sisters-in-law added ruffles to their girl's dresses. He remembered that he had been born for blind and stupid waiting, for a short summer, for a series of specific disappointments with which it was necessary to build a life.
He was incapable, therefore, due to the early warning, of prolonging the resentment and, above all, of suffering it. But from the day after the memory, he united in his active and respectful indifference the boy and the old man. She did not seek the boy's eyes any more, she observed them with long curiosity each time she had to stumble upon them looking at her with the spent childish plea.
Drunk, Medina heard blows of hail that were pushing him towards the clumsiness of sleep and, a little earlier, the noise of the bottle spinning on the ground.
Leaning against the windowsill the increasing fatigue of his legs, Medina kept the binoculars fixed on the light of Frieda's house and on the crooked muddy alley that whitened the newly risen moon. The moon climbed like a gas-depleted balloon, rapidly losing its orange color.
He rested when the quadrangular light from the woman's door jumped over the street for a moment and then he saw her silhouette, in a bathing suit, pass through the warm dawn and lazily walk to the water's edge. He watched her lean on the trunk of a willow tree, and after a while came the sound of her plunge. Medina left the binoculars on the table, sat on the bed, and decided to wait, not knowing how long, fearful of rushing or being late. He could count, think of an ascending ladder of numbers, a thousand numbers, two thousand.
«I'm waiting out of sheer idiotic superstition. Anytime I decide to go I will be greeted with a false and joyous welcome. A little cry and a laugh and some nickname from the past, bedroom and bed. But here I am, immobile, waiting for everything to adjust, for the moment of my arrival to coincide exactly with the one I have imagined, with which I am playing and repeating as if it had already been, as if it were a question of maneuvering with a memory not very old, a little faded but still clear, made with the light already seen and preserving its angles and roundness. »
Medina got up, smiling because he was trembling; another waited, and stepped out into the white blaze without worrying that his footsteps would crush clods and dying leaves. He walked pacing in the calm heat, without haste, without hesitation. And he discovered that everything was a perfect reproduction of the invented memory.
Frieda, recognized the body and the favorite position, was lying on the ground, face down, without a visible head, perpendicular to the edge of the stream that whispered running slowly to swell the river. Medina whistled to muffle the surprise, he said good night although the dawn could not delay and he let himself fall until he was next to her, also looking at the water and its broken moon.
"Nervous," Medina confessed. He began to make out the jars, the bathing cap, the towel.
—I wouldn't be nervous. I am no longer interested in the Capital. The voice seemed to come from the water; the woman rinsed her short hair, over and over again.
"I guess," Medina said. You will not have good memories of Margot's trip. I'm not saying this to annoy you. It just happens that I can't quite understand why you went, why it occurred to you that you knew how to sing. Well, at least thinking about the competition out there. And why did you take Seoane, who doesn't wear skirts. Unless you are changing. It wouldn't be bad on a night like this.
—Always gross, always without understanding anything. If I took the little one, it was pure pity.
—Yes. You couldn't sleep thinking that he didn't live drunk and drug-free. Hard or soft?
"Idiot," Frieda murmured, lifting her head from the water and shaking it as if denying something enraged. It splattered the man's mocking face.
"No," he said. I do not care anymore. At one time I thought the drug issue had something to do with your nightclub or cabaret, or whatever. I also suspected poor Barreiro. But now I'm leaving and everything is behind me and I may find a way not to return. In the Capital you might find some opportunities. Medina, private detective. How does it sound?
—How? Just like one of those jobs that I and Quinteros made so you wouldn't starve. And also, very little, to humiliate you. It was your fault: you didn't like being my keep.
—Yes, it was all very complicated. But there is one thing I must be thankful for. In Lavanda I could always paint, bad or good, pure academy. Here in Santa María, it is impossible to imagine a curator with an easel.
She was drying her head with the towel. Then he leaned over to look at the moon. And with his hair sticking with moisture, he showed for a moment the face of an ephebo, a homosexual adolescent that Medina had known years before. «That mixture of defiant sweetness and toughness born of pride. The mouth so thin and straight, the nose finishing off, almost without curves, the expression of pride, of false coldness, as his as a habit, a mania. »
—Nervous as if he had never been to the Capital. Also why sleep if the ferry leaves at five.
He put his right hand on the arched vertebrae and slid it under the brief fabric of the bikini.
"Quiet, comisarito," she dragged, childish and smiling, her contralto voice.
Medina's relations with the Colorado had been similar to those spring days, hazy sky, sun covered by clouds to suddenly shine furiously for a few moments.
"I don't know why the hell you insist on these interviews in your office," El Colorado was saying. It is dangerous and you compromise.
El Colorado's shoulders were slumped, as if bent on building a premature hump; He spoke showing the edges of tiny teeth, like a child's.
—It's for the best. People think I'm stopping you for loitering.
"And the money?" Said the Colorado. We need a lot.
—I know, it will come. So you can keep living for now. —Medina put down a couple of bills, two Brausens, echoes of a fake laugh, and backed away until her back was against the wall.
Other times Medina detached himself from the wall where it seemed to have been embedded for a few minutes and advanced towards the insolence of the Colorado on the relic desk, damaged and dirty, to order:
—Signatures.
El Colorado was getting up with a tired smile and was enjoying it. Medina took his seat and the other took a few languid steps to face him.
"Like how much?" Asked the commissioner idly. He was thinking of the packages of foreign paper money that he had hidden in his room where Plaza was and in his little house on the beach. I was thinking of the history of Rome, of London, of San Francisco.
El Colorado answered with another question:
"How long has it been since I brought you a quote? He added, "Even the luxuries were listed.
"That's why. The budget, I have it in my portfolio, it's fine. The Meteorological Institute, the electric tower, the telephones. It seems too much to me. Okay, I'm not saying, on paper it looks perfect. But I think of a budget for the poor, for us. If sometimes a cigarette or a radio in bad condition is enough. How much?
"But I want to," argued the Colorado, balancing a smile with two fanatical points shining in his eyes, "I want to ensure my innocence. You put the money, it is true, but the one who is playing is me.
Medina bargained to cover himself, to protect his innocence, he too, this particular innocence —or fear— among many others of a different nature that he would have been losing with indifference or joy in so many days lived, in so many contacts with people already forgotten or present again in moments of memory and melancholy.
Also - and there were interviews at secret hours in the little house on the beach, so close to Frieda's - could Colorado, half drunk with the transparent Paraguayan cane, adopt an attitude of a wise interviewee.
Then he would shed the wind rose, speak of suitable materials and helpers, of other rebels and traitors. All this tinged with remembrances of triumphal and complete feats, of others that had not been so. He spoke of surprises, of imponderable negatives, of almost incredible escapades, of blows given and received, with an abundance of the former. And he repeated: it is not to praise me. And he repeated names of places (because he had traveled through Spanish America) as if they were names of battles already forever inscribed in history.
At a certain point in the bottle, I would stop saying to count in the third person: "Then the Colorado realized that things would not be as easy as he had thought." Or: "El Colorado stayed hidden and immobile for three hours."
"I don't want things to start with the ranches, the tin and cardboard kennels," Medina always insisted, inexorably.
—I already explained. It seems to talk to walls. It has to be this way for a hundred reasons that I told you. Either we start like this or there is nothing to do. Maybe the Colorado is wasting time in Santa Maria. Better, I think, that he try his luck in the Colony. Or that it goes much further. This matter is already too much discussed.
—It's that those unfortunates are not to blame for anything.
"Like you and the Colorado, Commissioner." All, rich and poor, are the same filth. And note that maybe they win. Maybe Brausen has them build palaces.
From the window open to the sun and midday heat, Díaz Gray threw a handful of birdseed against the battle of pigeons and sparrows on the terrace.
Motionless in the large armchair, Medina inventoried objects: a life preserver with illegible letters on the wooden wall, a huge compass underneath, a shiny and freshly painted steering wheel. Two slender oars crossed each other attached to the fireplace still black from last winter's fires. "Some of what old Petrus saved from the shipwreck."
Díaz Gray came back rubbing his hands and sat down at the desk again.
"There was little I could do, Commissioner." This has to be an official interview. In the ranches, for so many years, I saw many drunks gutted, women beaten to death, children like skeletons with big belly, also dead. Sometimes the neighbors called me, barefoot brats came to clap my hands. When I was an official coroner, eighty rupees a month, the Task Force jeep would come to pick me up or they would give me orders over the phone. You have to remember it.
"Sure," Medina said. The jeep had to be sold.
Díaz Gray, with the light on his back, looked older and tired, a patient with a slow and angry voice. He wasn't looking into Medina's eyes, he seemed to search the surface of the desk in vain for something non-existent.
—You know the whole story better than I do. You were in the Capital but you had to return at once and your remaining people will have informed you of all the details, all the horrors. You know the hospital is over. Dr. Rius fought desperately to keep it, at least part of it. He failed and left, I don't know where. Today it is an asylum for old Swiss from the Colony. They serve each other. I think there are still some nurses, or something similar. I went to visit him a while ago and now I have to go back. When you want to interrupt and ask. But I want to relieve myself by confessing everything, as if it were my fault. Everything I had to go through, what I had no choice but to see.
—Sure. I am here to hear it. Perhaps, without knowing it, he will tell me something new, something that may be useful to me.
"It's possible," said the doctor. In the beginning of this abomination, Martin came to wake me up. Between seven and eight in the morning. It came in the car that you left. Do not forget this about the car because I will remember it for a long time. Martín rang the bell or, rather, stayed leaning on it until the maid decided to get up and open the door. We were all sleeping. I got my face wet, had two cups of coffee and got out, got in the car. As we ran, Martín told me that that girl friend of yours, Olga, had found Frieda dead by the stream.
—Yes. Is detained. I call her Gurisa.
—And Frieda was Frieda von Kliestein. His girl said he went to the beach house to fix it. And that in passing he saw Frieda's body. The body was now face up (Olga had discovered it backwards) and one of her beasts, Valle, had sat on it to help her vomit the water. That's what the animal told me.
—Yes, as brutes they are brutes. But good people deep down. And I have few left. They prefer to go to the harvest.
—Some stay over there. But this does not matter. The beast in the belly or chest. And with a serious, important face, sure that I, as a doctor, would congratulate him.
Reaching out his left arm, he retrieved a paper knife from the confusion on the desk; After a while he barely smiled and shook his head, affirming without conviction, doubting the story that Medina already knew.
—The rest; unbelievable, as invented by a maddened sadist. There are, you know, sadists who pass for normal. We went into the little house to call the judge and there was the boy, lying on a bed, dressed, almost dead, drugged. Sure, I had brought the classic black briefcase and gave him a shot of coramine. A small risk, because I did not know what I had taken.
"Yes," Medina said, "I have that one in custody too." For now, he says he doesn't remember the night.
"Well, it doesn't matter. At least so far. Judge. And that son of a bad mother must be called usía. Now he lives in a large house in Colonia. And he didn't even answer the phone. It must have been nine or close by now; but he was still in bed and couldn't be bothered to answer us. Martin spoke, I spoke. Any. He sent word that he authorized the transfer of the body but not to the new hospital that the gringos have there. That the thing had to stay in Santa María. The thing was Frieda. Now the nightmare begins; I'd rather believe that it wouldn't have happened if it didn't coincide with your vacation. He continued without looking into Medina's eyes; sometimes he went to the colorful tie bought in the Capital, other times he raised himself to the commissioner's freshly combed hair. Because Martín says that before taking Frieda we must photograph her. From at least three angles, and unfortunately his camera is broken. I have three at home, or, better still, they belong to my wife. But I don't want to participate in that bullshit and I keep quiet. To improve it, without a doubt, because Martín secrets with one of the beasts and it jumps up, bows, and shoots for the city in the car that you left at the ferry station. There we stood, the rest, surrounding and looking at the body of Frieda von Kliestein, the towel, the soap dish, bottles of women. And the sun was already rising through and over the giant willow, already beginning to climb up his damp legs, perhaps from the dew of the grass that, so late, continued to evaporate. And the boy in there, a motionless heap on the bed. Me, listening to so many foolish things that made me think about why Brausen distributed without discriminating the use of the word; also looking at the cyanosis on the lips and the dried blood on the woman's nose. And so on until the comical beginning of madness. We heard the car coming into overdrive scorching the tires in the sand. The beast had brought that poor old lame man who walks around the square offering to take pictures of couples with his machine on a tripod. The ornate chamber almost covered by gray and yellow postcards. And the old man, trembling, almost whiter than the dead woman, limped in a sweat and was finally able to get the three angles Martin had talked about. This was the beginning of the end on the beach. I forgot to tell you that the USia also ordered one, listen carefully, an immediate autopsy. And the only one who could do it was me and I had no obligation whatsoever, nor the assurance that what I reported, in this case a simple individual, would or would not be added to the file. Nor if it would have any legal value. But I accepted because there was no other doctor in what they called the jurisdiction of Santa Maria. And, also, because he was very curious. Now, the only appropriate place was our nursing home.
"Excuse me," Medina said in a clear voice, "have you calculated the time of death, doctor?" I just got the telegram I took a plane.
"Just looking at her?" No, I calculated it later. But that data does not appear in the report. Because of the incidents that will allow me to continue counting. I can tell that the stomach was full of water, as were the lungs, and no one could tell what time I had eaten that night. I follow; It seems necessary to me that you listen to what you could not see. Imagine the journey. Martín and I in the car with the woman and she is still semi-hardened, one leg sticking out like a tree branch through one of the windows. Finally, sick with heat, we reached the nursing home. Most, I suppose of the old and the crazy, because there were also, were in the yellow grass garden. One had opened a huge book on a chair. With thick glasses, bending over until he believed that he was reading by nose, he was setting a trembling beat and everyone was out of tune shouting German songs that must be religious. Almost in rags, the canvas uniforms, barefoot or with espadrilles, malnourished or swollen. Old, very old, linked to life by some invisible cord. These should be or have been the peons of the Colony, the poor who were no longer good for anything other than begging. I think that's where Mersault's mother died, although it's impossible. And it is so; Those wretches must have arrived in the first immigration; as poor relatives or servants to everything.
»Martín, I think I told you, he was wearing a uniform; He must wear it like pajamas, I never saw him cross the city in a Christian outfit. He got out of the car, they saw the uniform, Martin advancing and the song ended. They all stiffened, staring at the gate, some mouth gaping and fixed. Martín was talking, I don't know in what language, with the choir director. A very tall blond man who was once athletic and who was shaking his head, to affirm, to deny, who then directed a semicircular look at the immobile old men and finally decided to follow the authority and approach the gate, the car that had a wheel on the sidewalk. I don't know if Martín's words had prepared him or not. What I remember is that the man looked at Frieda, then to the sides, as if he wanted to save himself from a trap, he shouted: "Dead", and wanted to cover his eyes with his long arms. Behind, in the background, next to the steps, an incomprehensible murmur that grew when the man of horror began to run, kicking up dust, stumbling against nothing, against the terror that he was pushing with his strides. When Martín wanted to return to the house, the shouting stunned me and the poor devils climbed up the stairs, entered the asylum and closed the heavy door with a bang that for a few seconds continued to sound in the heat. Against the door Martin, lonely, hitting with his knuckles and elbow, ordering, threatening, cursing the inner silence that the old men and the cretins opposed. Finally he decided to resign, seized the big black book, which was a German Bible with songs and staves on the final pages, and returned to the car.
—Yes; I have it in the Detachment.
—We both wondered aloud: "Where are we going now," and then we sat in silence for a while, looking at the radiator and the vibration of the sun.
»I always believed that this ossuary was mixed, a short waiting room for men and women. But we didn't see a female, no witch. They would be inside, I thought, preparing the food or shuffling the cots or bunks. Or perhaps the ritual that of the songs was limited to men. The gringos have things like that.
"Yes," Medina said; He shifted in his seat until he took out his pack of cigarettes and lit one. The matter was at school. "While blowing the smoke away.
"At school," Diaz Gray agreed; He stood up to reach into the library for a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. Sorry, but I don't have water here.
—No need, doctor.
They drank in silence, in small sips, in an attentive attitude, as if they were absorbed in the confusing and defiant songs of the birds in the garden.
"At school," Diaz Gray continued. Martín proposed it and I thought the heat had driven him crazy. But he insisted. Apart from the church it is the only place where we can find a large table. The one in the dining room; It's actually a few small tables, but they can be put together. I explain to the director.
»When we got to the school, I made a turn around it and got the car, with a lot of work, between trees and bushes. Afterwards I thought it was the clumsiest way to hide the car. I waited, peering at Frieda's corpse from time to time, and then I resolved to move him and was able to leave him, not sitting but entirely inside the car. Meanwhile Martín spoke, interminable and invisible, with the principal and the teachers. At last he left the building and searched without calling me. He had managed to convince the women and they gave a party to the children. We hope they were leaving, dozens and dozens, smaller and larger, with the half dozen women in the back talking among themselves, waving their arms and mouths unanimously, stopping from time to time on the brick-dust lane to better argue.
»When the three of us were alone, Martín went to prepare the stage. This time it didn't take long and between the two of us we took Frieda to bed on the large table made of four small tables. I opened the briefcase looking for the scalpel, cotton, compresses. I wasn't forewarned, so I hadn't brought a saw or scissors or tweezers.
»“ We need a saw ”, I told Martín wanting to resign, to abandon everything. Let the devil take care of it.
»" There must be in the shed. " And it came out.
»I raised the scalpel to stick it in the suprasternal hollow right where you have the knot of the tie, a little above the edge of the clavicles. Then I saw the child who had entered silently and was standing at the feet of the dead woman. She was motionless like me, like her, with her white tunic and the big blue bow of the bow around her neck. In the left armpit, books and notebooks. He wasn't looking at Frieda's hard breasts, he wasn't interested in her flattened, winey nipples. He was six or seven years old, blond and very pale, his mouth parted. Fascinated, sick. Slowly he reached out his free arm until he touched the surprise of pubic hair. And there she rested, soft and protective, her hand as if she were caressing a bird and she was afraid of hurting or frightening it.
"Get out," Martín shouted from the door, vibrating the blade of a large rusty saw, good for cutting trees.
»And that's it, Commissioner. She drowned, I think they beat her and put her head in the water for a long time. There are no signs of the coup. A bruise on the nape, the hand that held her, and two on the back. In my opinion the marks of two knees. And maybe he died between five or seven in the morning. If you like my calculation... Your girl found out around eight. Now he was staring into the commissioner's eyes.
—Olga Aramburu.
—The dampness of the stream, the shade of the tree, the dew, the sun. It cannot be assured. But at seven it is already broad daylight. Ah, no trace of rape. Although I'm sure it was a man. And maybe an acquaintance or friend to let you get so close at that time.
Medina got up and went to pick up his hat, muttering, "Thank you."
"Wait a minute, Commissioner," Diaz Gray said. For that charity you wanted to do. There, in that dark closet, in the first drawer there are a few bills. Take what you need.
Medina opened the drawer, almost full of Brausens of ten, twenty and one hundred.
What they kept calling Detachment since the real one, so white at the beginning of the story, with Brausen's red and black colors on the flag challenging and humiliating any shade of blue or gray that the hemisphere showed of the Sanmarian sky.
And that now it was a great house abandoned due to the danger of ruin and that some of these days that we are living with permission from the highest authorities will be bought by one of the new very rich in the Colony to tear it down and raise another exotic palace to our white and white architecture, inherited from the Hispanic founders.
The church and the statue in the middle of the square will be saved, where the horse threatens to march south while the rider, tirelessly, points the way with a naked sword.
In the new and so old building of the Detachment the flag is still raised and lowered, already faded by suns and rains, for the time that some believed immobile, not yet turned into rags, but torn by raging and very isolated storms that they were battles without gunpowder. The black is now navy blue, the red a hot pink. And there is no cornet to greet and revere her when the sun rises, when the sun descends.
Medina, sitting in his shirt sleeves and rubbing the sweat with his handkerchief, in the room that was once a respect room for tea with visitors, finished listening to Martín's report.
—Okay. Nothing that serves us.
—He just says no, that he was sleeping, drunk and high, says Díaz Gray, and that he didn't find out about anything until the boys woke him up with buckets of water.
- Buckets of water and blows. They could have killed him. And so we were left without a statement and with nothing. We cannot deliver him to the Capital accused of sleeping. Let him rest for half an hour and continue. Then it's my turn.
"As you say," Martin said uncomfortably. Hopefully I'm lucky.
—It's not a matter of luck. Besides, you also have to rest. He hasn't gone to bed for many hours. Please tell Héctor to bring the beer and glasses. A good drink won't hurt you. Oh, and where is the woman?
—In the big kitchen. There is no other place to put it. We put the straw chair for him. You know, Commissioner, that we are still without furniture, despite the thousand orders we have placed.
—I know. I'm going to have a glass and immediately question her. Although I know her. He has neither face nor strength nor intelligence to kill like this. Nor is any reason. But take it out; that sits on the bench in the pasture that we call a garden. There is no fear that it will escape.
Héctor brought the bottle and two glasses.
"Excuse me," he said, and set the glass on the sliding-top desk that would never run.
"Three," Medina ordered. Or is it that they have changed you?
Héctor smiled and moved away the patched uniform, the blows from the cracked boots.
While waiting, Medina said to Martín: «Rest, man», and turned his head to look at three in the afternoon in the window without curtains or blinds, the distant tops of the eucalyptus trees, their toasted and immobile leaves.
Martín had sat down, his face wasted and surrounded by a beard darker than his blond, well-groomed hair, lustrous with glitter; he wiped the sweat off his forehead by dragging two fingers many times.
Hector returned and then the three men raised their glasses and said: "Cheers."
"And to think that the refrigerator is still not working," Medina commented, as if thinking aloud.
"I did everything possible," Martin said. I have an electrician cousin, but he's not in Santa María, I don't know where he's going.
"He will be working in some civilized place," Medina assured.
The girl, Olga, Gurisa, was gathering small wild flowers with petals hard and sharp like cardboard.
"Those aren't flowers," Medina said quietly. I can't kiss you, or even look into your eyes; They are cemetery flowers and we already have enough of that.
"Was it him?
—You don't know, he doesn't want to talk. But the one who has to question is me. And I can't think of asking you anything.
—What's my fault for the damn chance I ran into Frieda.
"First," Medina said, pushing her toward the bench and sat next to the childlike woman in shock. First, why did you have to stop by at eight in the morning.
—But if you had told me, before you left...
—It doesn't matter, I don't remember. We have to talk a lot, repeat that we love each other without ever saying it. Although everyone knows it. Don't forget this is a police questioning. Very serious, very long. I have to learn what I know by heart. But said by you. Why at eight in the morning. This is how it begins. What time do you usually wake up?
—I don't have a fixed schedule. It all depends on the night before. If we're playing late, you and me...
"No," Medina interrupted. No tutelage with the commissioner.
She raised her hands to press a small laugh; then slowly he lowered them and averted his eyes from Medina's scowling face. He stared out at the distant, flat land with small islands of parched grass, beyond the loose wires that marked a boundary of the Detachment. With happy eyes he was reciting:
"Yes, Commissioner." I must have been playing in the Plaza apartment until around midnight with the commissioner, ”he lied. And the commissioner told me that he was leaving for the Capital on the ferry at five in the morning. The commissioner asked me, he is always good when he asks for or needs something, he asked me to take a walk around the little house on the coast to put some order and sweep up if necessary. If I, as a woman, thought it was necessary. And he also had to see if the pictures painted secretly by the commissioner, and always at dawn, with artificial light, were all inside the locked closet. I already gave him back the key to the house and also the key to the closet. And I could see that there was a large painting, painted on cardboard, that represented a gigantic wave, made all with pieces of different whiteness. Whiteness of paper, milk, skin. Never in this river was there, no one can have seen a wave like that. So I thought that the commissioner had imagined it or that it was a memory of another country, another river or a sea that I never saw.
He swallowed and tilted a slightly saddened face towards Medina.
"Still?
Medina looked at his wristwatch:
—A little more and the charade is over. When you saw Frieda, how did you know she was dead? In his first statement there is no evidence that he has knowledge of medicine.
"Ah," she said, and trembled against Medina's shoulder. I already said it and I get sick every time I remember. I see her again, still, as if she had never made a move. The head stuck in the water, the neck seemed broken and no bubbles rose.
—Convinced. Very smart. He smiled as if speaking to a child who had gotten the right answer; He kept his smile, lit a cigarette and asked nonchalantly, "If I was face down and almost naked, how could you know it was Frieda?
"Yes," she murmured. That woman was always stronger than me. And still dead she still has it. I never knew who you were jealous of, actually. But I'm not your Juanina, the one who told you that it was enough to feel the smell of a woman to die of disgust. And you believed it.
"No," Medina said in a muffled voice. It is true that I really wanted, almost had to believe him. At that time, at least.
"I never told you and I'm not going to tell you now unless you swear this won't appear in the summary or anywhere. That you are not going to tell anyone. It has nothing to do with death.
Medina lowered his head.
"I swear," he said. But whatever it is, I don't understand why you didn't tell me. After all, there were many moments between us when we believed we were one person. At least I believed it and you told me it was true.
—It's true and now I'll explain. What happened was that for months, Juanina and Seoane lived in Frieda's house. And I sometimes saw them in the stream or in the Casanova, and I'm not entirely stupid and I realized what was happening.
—What an amazing thing could happen? Why didn't you ever tell me about it?
—Because there are many Medinas. Because I didn't know how you were going to react. You could have done something silly. And that matter had nothing to do with us and I prayed every night that the three of them were disappearing from your memory, from your interest.
"Yes, and at least one..." Medina began to say and immediately regretted his stupidity.
—Bah, for that it doesn't matter if she's dead or alive. For your memory, your hatred and perhaps your spite. Juanina returned to Lavanda more than a month ago. He gave me a message for you. Laughing, he told me that he was going to visit an aunt.
—I understand.
—And she told me, as cynical as ever, that everything that can happen at Frieda's house had happened. And he added that this time there was no danger of pregnancy. Of course: he went to visit your friend Díaz Gray many times. None of this matters. I want to know what they did with Frieda after the carnage. With what's left of Frieda.
—He's in the Capital.
—In this heat.
Martín appeared at the beginning of the shadow at the corner of the building. He was worse than before, more tired, skinnier.
"My commissioner," he yelled.
Medina got to his feet, slowly at first, with a single jerk later. He understood something indefinable and urgent.
"Take this woman back to her cell. Well, to the kitchen, it doesn't matter. I got something very important from the interrogation.
Martín whistled and Héctor appeared.
"Take the detainee to her cell," Martín ordered.
When the couple disappeared, Martín stood firm, bowed, measured the stature of the commissioner with his eyes.
"Rest and talk," he barked.
—The detainee, the biggest suspect. Dead in my judgment, when I returned to the cell.
The cell was a room that had no other furniture than a bed with a bare, caked mattress and a chair with a high, straight back; Papers with drawings of pink and gold prostitutes peeled off slowly, sure of the final triumph, from the four walls. A small window still fringed with globs of Disney characters suggested the shadow of a nursery memory, of children playing with dolls, lead soldiers, balls, and colored cubes in capital letters; Children maybe already dead, maybe breathing but also already dead with their gray bellies and mustaches, their self-esteem and their pale, recurring belief in the afterlife or in the eternity they were going through.
Influenced perhaps by all this improbable, Medina blasphemed at Brausen in four words and did not want to bend over but look very low at the body on the cramped ground, so placid in its fetus position, the knees almost touching the dirt of a T-shirt that it was white, the head lowered looking for the chest, the fists clenched without strength, the hinted smile of expectation before the birth and the life to begin.
"Undoubtedly dead," Martín said, piercing the silence and the thoughts so contradictory, so fleeting and diverse. Dead when I returned to question him, according to verbal orders. I immediately called Dr. Díaz Grey's home, but no one answered. Despite the fact that five or six people live there, counting the servitude.
"As if we weren't servants," Medina thought. Then he said, unintentionally:
—Why the hell will the dead die? He corrected himself, "Did they remove everything from his clothes, belt, shoelaces?
"Everything," Martin said. I can bring you the package right away. But, Commissioner, he didn't die of any of that. Just look at his face, he did not hang himself or cut himself.
—Yes, he's at peace. I've never seen him like this before. But how did heroin, coca, whatever drug get in here?
"You didn't inject yourself, Commissioner." There you can see the papers. There are seven, not counting the ones he can hide under his body.
They looked at each other without enthusiasm, each in their own dissimulation.
"And how did you get in?" No one came to visit you and I will not distrust you.
"If you want my opinion, Commissioner, it was brought in by the same bugger.
—You told me that they had searched it, that nothing was left between the clothes.
They heard with surprise the braking of a car, big, heavy. They walked slowly to the room they called an office or office. They waited, Medina sitting at the desk, Martin standing, both looking at the door still full of sun.
Light and hard, showing in the eyes and the bones of the face its resolution of eternity, a body made a brief shadow at the entrance of the Detachment. He advanced almost smiling and said definitively: "Medina, Martín."
—I am whatever you want, but for now I am the judge, the one the credulous have to call Usía. And the U , capital letter.
The stranger took a few steps while the others nodded and distrusted, until he grabbed a chair in the corner and sat on it, facing Medina.
"You speak, Commissioner," Martín said.
And Medina spoke slowly, searching for words.
—Mr Judge. A couple of days ago we called him, Sergeant Martín called at his home in Colonia. We called him desperately because the reason was desperate.
—Yes. And someone answered that Santa Maria was not in my jurisdiction. But it does not matter; now it is, by my decree. Now Santa María is once again a region of Usía, although it cannot be known for how long. And who was desperate to begin with?
He looked only at Medina and he understood and remembered that he hated that man, without ever having seen him, from the beginning of his life, perhaps from before he was born. But this was not a person-to-person hatred; it was like hatred of an inescapable thing, it was hatred of all the sufferings - mixed like one wave with another, big or small - that childhood, the first woman, the obligatory beginning of maturity had brought him. As if that man had made his old hopes weak and almost unbelievable, as if he had insisted on curbing his impulses, his rebellions, as if he had worked tirelessly to limit him to being a policeman from a forgotten town, as if he, the man barely mocking and Dressed in black, despite the heat of the summer, he would have led him, tenacious and patient, until his encounter with two dead that he, the man in dark, had foreseen and ordered for a long time.
Now they were face to face and Medina remembered the elusive image of someone seen or read, a man perhaps an office colleague who was not smiling; a bored-faced man who greeted with monosyllables, infusing them with an imprecise vibration of affection, an impersonal mockery.
"I spoke to the door," said the judge, smiling thoughtfully in the silence. Well, no one is desperate. Or, at least, it isn't anymore now. And the door told me that there was a dead man, although not, it seems, another murder. In any case, an incredible figure for Santa María. Can I, can we see the second body?
Standing, Medina waited for the judge to hold out his hand. But the man walked with Martín, without really waiting for him to guide him, as if he knew the house very well, until he reached the room with the bed, the chair and the dead man.
Medina was placed near the door; Now a little sun was coming in through the overheated window and he was moving around the stained floor, trying to touch Seoane, Julián, whose police card had a capicúa number, an announcement of good luck and gave him as born in the Colony, twenty years before.
"Move it," the judge told Martín. The body was indecisive for a moment on its back, its washed blue knees high, with twin patches, and then it fell to the opposite side. Nothing interrupted the peaceful sleep of the tanned face. A small white paper now appeared on the ground. It had been hidden under the left arm. The judge bent down to pick it up; he seemed to have done so without bending his knees. He read it, passed it on to Medina and Medina looked at it for a long time, as if it were an enigma, before passing it on to Martín.
"With that," said the judge, and pointed to a pencil stub next to the dead man's shoe.
"I don't understand," Martin almost protested, as if it were a trick of the judge. We took everything he had on him before we locked him up.
"Yes," the judge smiled tolerantly. Everything but that and this and this.
He was pointing to the white papers whose wrinkles showed that they had been used as an envelope. They do not see? Jeans with oversized sleeves. I could have made a move with just that.
Medina was thinking of the trembling letters of the message, of the hand that had lied before falling, of the equivocal and terrible purpose that the confession had provoked.
Son of a bad mother, don't worry anymore, I killed Frieda.
Julián Seoane
"I was right," Martin said. I suspected it from the beginning. But there was no way to get a word out of him.
The judge took the paper from him without violence and gave it to Medina.
"Put it on the file, Sheriff." It's a nice finishing touch. Then he sends it to me. And a report of everything acted. Since the woman appears in the stream to this. He pointed to the paper and the body of the boy now lazily licked by the sun. The body is sent to the Colón hospital. It seems to me to read: overdose of any crap. With one exception, perhaps, all these so- called junkies would have to end up like this, and the sooner the better. Dr. Díaz Gray does not want to know any more about these things. I was with him all morning, with the phone off the hook so that no one would disturb. We talk about so many things; It was like a history of the city. I don't remember how old he is. But I still love him like he's my son. A faithful son.
In the little house on the coast, flanked at a long distance by Mr. Wright's and the largest one that was Frieda's, Medina was lit up with a paunchy and heavy kerosene lamp.
He was sitting on the bed and the Colorado was pacing with his head down, his hands in his pants pockets. It seemed to bounce nonviolently from wall to wall.
"And now?" Asked Medina. Is it enough or not?
The Colorado stopped and put its face close to the lamplight. Freckles broke out on her face.
"That's not why," he said after a while. It's hard to understand.
"Difficult to explain," corrected the commissioner. We have all night. I listen.
The Colorado looked at the short stacks of brausens arranged on the table. The bills were also reddish.
"Tell me what's wrong," Medina insisted. Not enough money? It's all I could get. There's no more. And I did it by telling the truth.
"Did you tell the truth?" He is mad. Who did he tell? I was sure I could trust. He advanced, uselessly, towards the bed; Medina smiled at him with a little pity.
—I was telling the truth. I just said that it was a cleaning operation. Beneficial for all. Now it's up to you. Tell me what's wrong, tell me if there's enough money there.
El Colorado lit a cigarette and sat on the table, pushing the stacks of bills with his buttocks.
—Listen to me as if I were in confession. And try to understand. There is money left for what we are going to do. Or we want. Or what I'm going to do. I'm not going to keep anything. The ferry or bus or train ticket. What happens to me is that I thought and wanted this for so long that now that it can be, which is for sure, I feel sick and weak; what they call depression.
—Have a few shots of cane and you'll feel better. Something similar happens to me too. But it's at the beginning, then it happens.
—And now I also think about the wind. As we burst with heat, Santa Rosa is approaching with its storm. It cannot delay. But who can guess which way the wind will blow?
For three nights, like a maiden shepherdess awaiting the Divine Apparition or the never heard sound of Voces, Medina awaited the resounding arrival of Santa Rosa behind her window in the Plaza. I was waiting for her in the shadows because in the afternoon she had only seen lightning dissolved in daylight, heard very distant thunder, and because it is at night that great dreams come true.
Before Gurisa fell asleep and happy with the double portion of seconal served by Medina that she took without knowing it. They had made love, her with her natural mixture of naivety and perversion; he with a surprising virility that seemed, each time, alien and morbid.
She breathing in the shadow of the bed, he glued to the unchanging landscape of the window.
On the third night, remote rewards finally arrived. The loud and sarcastic lightning bolts and thunderbolts, the copious and short rain, an untethered wind that pushed trees from left to right and danced for a moment, hurriedly and without respect, around the statue in the square, basement, horse and rider.
Fearful of illusions, fearful of almost certain disappointment, Medina went into the bathroom to put on a spicy and warm robe. His little-used uniform was in the closet and his holster hung. She put the heavy and annoying weapon in the pocket of her robe and managed to keep quiet as she paced the room to stand again by the blackness of the window. He could only make out the clarity of some puddles in the street reflecting the weak light from the hotel's advertisement.
He was trying, uselessly, to see the time, to measure the passing of the minutes on his wristwatch. Time passed — and he felt it on his shoulders, in the sweat on his chest — without leaving traces, without allowing anyone to grasp and measure it. Suddenly, a new ache of fatigue in the hamstrings and a warning of clarity, so slight and distant in the left end of the city.
The west, Medina thought, cannot be an early dawn. And I said no to that place. "
Gurisa shifted on the big bed and muttered incomprehensibly and angrily; immediately the faint sound of his infantile breathing returned.
The light, always on the left, began to move and grow. Already very high it was advancing over the city, violently pushing aside the nocturnal shadow, bending down a little to rise again, now, with a noise of large fabrics that shook the wind.
Medina felt his face lit up and the heat rising on the glass, almost unbearable. He trembled without resisting, victim of a strange fear, of the always disappointing end of the adventure. "I wanted this for years, this is what I came back for."
He heard the pop of a window in the place of the apartment they called the kitchen. Gun in hand, he approached the bed. He felt the almost irresistible need to kiss Gurisa, but he was afraid to wake her up before the screaming that was beginning to come from the street, the hotel, the roof and the sky.
Madrid, February 23, 1979