"Thanks, Chief. Really, thanks a lot. Seeing that it"s Sat.u.r.day ... you know?"
"So he had a cage inside the shed to keep his tools in?" asked the inspector, turning to the young officer. There wasn"t the slightest trace of alarm in his voice. He spoke of the shed as he might have spoken of anything else, out of a simple urge to keep silence from falling on the company.
"As I told you, sir. With two big fat locks on the door. People do weird things, huh?"
The inspector picked up his hat, which he"d left on the table in the living room. He looked around with the expression of a man who knows he won"t be visiting the place he"s looking at again. "That"s the truth," he said. "People do weird things."
There was no more conversation. They got into their vehicles and drove off; I followed them in my car. It wasn"t long before they were able to locate the medical examiner, who did them the favor of performing the autopsy that very night, and the judge gave them the green light to go ahead and close the case as quickly as possible.
Morales"s funeral took place on Monday morning. A fine, persistent rain that fell from daybreak to nightfall added an additional touch of melancholy to the proceedings. No ray of sunlight was visible all day long, and that seemed just right to me.
Rest.i.tution.
Now it"s done, Chaparro thinks. Now he"s really finished, and he has nothing more to add. Nothing that has to do with Morales or Gomez. Chaparro feels as though the story is definitively abandoning him now. He ponders a question: Are the lives of human beings who have ceased to exist prolonged in the lives of the other people who live on and remember them? However that may be, Chaparro feels that those two men"s lives are as good as concluded, because he"s sure that n.o.body except him remembers them.
The last traces of their pa.s.sage through the world have probably disappeared, or it won"t be long before they do. What are Morales"s last traces? Some doc.u.ments with his signature and seal in the archive of the Provincial Bank, Villegas branch. Gomez"s tracks must be even more faded: some fingerprint records, maybe, in the elephantine archives of Devoto Prison, along with an order of release dated May 25, 1973. Yet there"s something that has survived the two men and still unites them: the signatures they affixed to their judicial depositions, thirty years ago. Morales"s signature is on his statements, and Gomez signed his confession. All those doc.u.ments are collected with many others in a yellowing case folder, masterfully sewn together by the officer of the court Pablo Sandoval during one of his mighty hangovers. The bones of the two also remain: one skeleton lies in Villegas Cemetery and the other in an unmarked grave, in an open field, at the feet of a pair of oaks. But bones don"t talk.
This is the end of the story, Chaparro thinks. On the boundary line between those devastated lives and his. He has no wish to say anything in that regard; besides, he"s not sure that some parts of his own life haven"t found their way, against his express wishes, onto those pages, which are lying there in such a neat stack beside his Remington.
He lowers his eyes to the typescript and feels that the pages are questioning him, because he has to decide what to do with them. Try to get them published? Stick them in a drawer so that someone can find them after his death and face an identical predicament? In the final a.n.a.lysis, for whom has he written those pages?
He must also decide about the Remington. It"s his on loan; they didn"t give it to him. He has to return it. To the court. It"s federal property. Does it make any difference that the said prehistoric artifact isn"t worth anything to anyone except a retired deputy clerk who"s been banging on it for a year, playing the novelist? No, he still has to give it back, and then they can do whatever they want with it.
He has to carry the typewriter into the clerk"s office, greet all the people working there, pull up one of the wooden chairs to the bookshelves in the back, climb up on the chair, and hoist the heavy, ancient Remington onto the topmost shelf. Then, as part of his incurable mania for teaching the people in the office how to do their job, he"ll explain that they have to send an official letter to the administrative services, and they"ll come and pick up the machine. And then, after his lecture? Then he"ll make the rounds again, say his good-byes, and go home.
And what about Irene? Won"t she be offended if she learns he was there and didn"t drop in to say h.e.l.lo? Too bad, Chaparro says to himself, because no, he"s not going to drop in on her. He doesn"t have the nerve to tell her he adores her, and his former tolerance for the ache of stifled feelings has worn away.
He stands up and places a heavy dictionary on his typescript, lest a stray air current come and shuffle his memories. In the bathroom, he brushes his teeth and tends to his gray hair, perfuming it with lavender lotion and going over it with a little black comb.
Back in his bedroom, he hesitates: tie or open collar? He opts for the latter. He"s no longer the deputy clerk, after all. Now that he"s a writer-he misses no opportunity for self-mockery-he feels better in informal clothes and without grease in his hair. He looks at his watch. Will he be able to get a seat on an inbound train from Castelar so close to noon? He suspects he won"t, and he sure doesn"t want to stand up all the way, holding the typewriter. Nevertheless, he walks to the station, and there he finds that G.o.d has apparently taken pity on him: it"s five after eleven, and the last morning train to the center of town blessedly offers him a wide choice of empty seats. He sits on the right side so that he can amuse himself by watching the automobiles running along Rivadavia Avenue.
All at once, he gives a start. The train"s in rapid motion, hurtling along noisily between the lugubrious concrete walls that line the tracks from the Caballito station to Once. What has he been thinking about for the last half-hour? He can"t remember. Morales? Gomez? No. They"re at rest. Strikingly, now that he"s finally got the whole story down on paper, they no longer a.s.sail him or disturb him or berate him. So? he thinks. He gets off the train in Once station and feels a sudden urge to pa.s.s by the little cafe where he met Morales on two occasions back in the mists of time, partly because he"s curious to see if the place still exists. But when he steps out onto the sidewalk on Pueyrredon Avenue, he feels, once again, the strange confusion of having forgotten his intention. What was it? The cafe, of course, the little cafe in the station. He can have a look at it on his return trip, so no big deal, but he"s troubled by this incipient tendency to go blank, as if he were falling into sudden decrepitude.
He ponders the question as he heads for the number 115 bus stop. The typewriter seems to be getting heavier, even though he keeps changing hands. He doesn"t want to enter that cloud of confusion again. As a result, he pays his fare and takes a seat, thinking all the while about nothing so much as what it is exactly that he"s thinking about. It works for three or four blocks, but when the bus turns onto Corrientes Avenue, he loses the thread again. Good G.o.d, what mental recess has he stumbled into? Not even the lurching curve the bus makes when it leaves the avenue and turns onto Parana can bring him back to reality. It"s almost by chance that he manages to get off just before the driver closes the rear door.
He looks at himself in a storefront window. Benjamin Chaparro, standing on a narrow sidewalk. Tall, thin, gray-haired, sixty years old. In his left hand, he"s holding a typewriter from the Stone Age. What remains for him to do in life? Not his novel; he"s finished telling the story of those two dead men. Like all difficult decisions, the answer to his question slowly takes shape in his head.
His next step in life is to do what he"s been brooding over, without knowing that he was brooding over it, ever since he took the 11:05 train in Castelar, or ever since he borrowed the Remington eleven months previously, or ever since he told a new young intern how to answer the telephone three decades ago.
And therefore he finally goes into motion and climbs the big steps of the Lavalle Street entrance two at a time. He takes the elevator to the fifth floor and walks with long strides along the corridor with the diagonal checkerboard of black and white floor tiles.
He doesn"t drop into Clerk"s Office No. 19 to say h.e.l.lo. Not because he"s afraid the people there will notice how lovesick he is, but because for the first time he knows that today"s the day; today, without fail and without procrastination, he must go directly to her office and knock on the door; listen for her voice, telling him to come in; stand before her like a man before the woman he loves; ignore the trivial question she asks as she receives him with a smile; and pay, or collect, the outstanding debt that"s the only valid reason he can find to go on living. Because Chaparro needs to answer, once and for all, the question in that woman"s eyes.
Ituzaingo, September 2005.
Translator"s Note.
At the time of the novel, the Argentine judiciary was divided into two jurisdictions, investigative courts and sentencing courts. Judges-examining magistrates-presided over investigative courts, and every judge"s court comprised two clerk"s offices. A clerk employed about eight people, of whom the second in command was the deputy clerk and chief administrator, the position held by this novel"s protagonist, Benjamin Chaparro.
A period of great turbulence in Argentina culminated in the so-called Guerra Sucia, the Dirty War, which lasted from 1976 to 1983. During these years, the Argentine state was the chief sponsor of ma.s.sive and systematic political violence, whose victims included not only members of armed guerrilla groups such as the Montoneros, but also students, activists, trade unionists, teachers, journalists, and leftists in general. In such an unstable and dangerous environment, even the basically apolitical Chaparro is at risk. State terrorism in Argentina during the Dirty War resulted in the disappearance of at least 13,000 people; some estimates run as high as 30,000.
Author"s Note.
In February 1987, I started working as an office employee in the National First Instance Court, Criminal Sentencing Division, Section "Q," in Buenos Aires, the federal capital of Argentina. One morning, my more experienced colleagues related an old anecdote: as a result of the amnesty for political prisoners decreed by the Campora government in 1973, and under circ.u.mstances that had always remained in the most complete obscurity, an ordinary criminal who was being held in Devoto Prison was released by order of the court. He"d been charged with serious crimes, for which he was certain to receive an extremely long sentence; nevertheless, and without anyone ever knowing the reason why, he"d walked free that very day.
Some time later, I recalled that story and in my imagination added innumerable situations and details to it; although they were invented, they could function as plausible antecedents to and consequences of the unjust release of a convicted murderer.
Apart from that remembered anecdote, the story told in these pages is entirely fict.i.tious, as are all its characters. Actually, at the end of the 1960s, Clerk"s Offices Nos. 18 and 19 belonged to a sentencing court, not an examining magistrate"s court; moreover, there was no examining magistrate"s court in the capital that bore the number 41. As for the b.l.o.o.d.y Argentina of the 1970s, which occasionally appears as the background of the story narrated here, would that it were equally fict.i.tious, would that it, too, had never existed.
Be that as it may, these lines would be incomplete if I didn"t acknowledge, with great affection, the people who worked with me in Sentencing Court "Q," and especially my colleagues in Clerk"s Office No. 19: Juan Carlos Travieso, Evangelina Lasala, Jorge Riva, Edy Pichot, and Cristina Lara. I must also declare my profound grat.i.tude to Cristina Lara for her invaluable aid in providing me with a mult.i.tude of juridical and procedural details that were necessary to give the story solidity and verisimilitude. If I retain very pleasant memories of that period of my life, I owe them to all my former colleagues at the court.
E. S.
About the Author.
EDUARDO SACHERI was born in Buenos Aires in 1967. His first collection of short stories, Esperandolo a t.i.to y otros cuentos de futbol (Waiting for t.i.to and other soccer stories) was published in Spain in 2000 under the t.i.tle Traidores y otros cuentos (Traitors and other stories). Three other collections were published between 2001 and 2007, all of which have been best sellers in Argentina. His novel La pregunta de sus ojos has been sold into eight countries, and the film adaptation, The Secret in Their Eyes, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2010.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
About the Translator.
JOHN CULLEN is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Margaret Mazzantini"s Don"t Move, Yasmina Khadra"s Middle East Trilogy (The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, The Sirens of Baghdad), Christa Wolf"s Medea, and Manuel de Lope"s The Wrong Blood (Other Press). He lives in upstate New York.
end.