"Exactly. He's an upright guy, and he's got the necessary contacts to arrange your transfer. It was his idea, by the way," Baez added.

"Why?"

"I don't know. Or rather, I think it would be better if you got the explanation from him. He's expecting you."

"But the only solution is for me to run like a fugitive?" I couldn't resign myself to the idea that my life as I knew it was going to end overnight.

Baez gazed at me awhile, maybe hoping I'd get the picture myself. Then, seeing I wasn't going to, he explained: "Don't you know what the deal is, Benjamin? The only way to be sure Romano will stop f.u.c.king with you is to inform him of the truth. I can set up a meeting, if you want. But if we do that, I'll have to tell him that the guy who b.u.mped off his little friend wasn't you, it was Ricardo Morales." He paused for a bit before concluding. "If you want, that's what we'll do."

s.h.i.t, I thought. I can't do that. I just f.u.c.king can't. "You're right," I said. "Let's leave things as they are."

We said our good-byes without too much effusiveness. He wrote down the numbers of the buses I would have to take to get to Olivos. At that point, I was beyond worrying about the possibility of looking stupid, so I even went so far as to ask him what color each of the buses was.

It to ok me more than two hours to get there. By the time I did, another cold day in that awful winter was drawing to a close. Judge Aguirregaray's house was a pretty cottage with a front garden. I told myself that if I ever came back to Buenos Aires, I'd spring for another place in Castelar. No apartments in the city center for me.

The judge in person opened the door and immediately invited me into his study. I thought I heard, in the background, the sounds of children and kitchen activity. The idea that I might have come at an inconvenient time made me uncomfortable, and I told him so.

"Don't concern yourself about that, Chaparro. There's nothing to worry about on that score. But it seems to me the fewer people who see you, the better off you are."

I agreed. After showing me a large armchair, he offered me some coffee, which I declined. Then he began: "Baez has filled me in on all the details," he said, and I rejoiced, because the mere thought of having to repeat the entire story exhausted me. "What I don't know is how much you're going to like the solution we've come up with."

I tried to sound nonchalant when I ventured to say, "Jujuy."

"Jujuy," the judge confirmed. "Baez tells me this thug who's after you, this ..." "Romano."

"Romano, that's it. Baez says this Romano is after you because of a personal matter, a kind of private vendetta. Is that right?"

"Absolutely," I conceded. Obviously, Baez hadn't given Judge Aguirregaray "all the details." I noted that the policeman exercised prudence even with his friends, and I thanked him in my secret heart, for about the thousandth time.

"So he's siccing his own hoodlums on you, so to speak. I think it's safe to a.s.sume they don't have much in the way of logistics beyond their little group."

"A sort of suburban mafia," I said, trying to be funny.

"Something like that. Don't laugh-it's not a bad definition."

"Well, what's to be done, Your Honor?"

"Baez and I think what's to be done is we have to send you far enough away that Romano and his boys can't bother you, even if they discover where you are. So that's where Jujuy comes in. Because sooner or later, Romano's going to find out about your transfer, Chaparro. You know how long court secrets last downtown. The solution is to discourage him, to make going after you too complicated. "

He paused a moment, listening to the sound of a woman's footsteps in the hall until they turned into another room. Aguirregaray went to the door, delicately locked it, and returned to his chair. "My cousin's a federal judge in San Salvador de Jujuy," he went on. "I know that must sound like the ends of the earth to you. But Baez and I couldn't come up with a better alternative."

I remained silent, eager to hear about the countless advantages of moving to the f.u.c.king sticks to live and work.

"As you know, the federal courts are part of the National Judiciary, that is, they operate within our own structure. So what we're talking about is a simple relocation, a transfer. Your position, of course, will be the same."

"And it has to be in Jujuy," I said, trying not to sound finicky.

"You know, even though you may not think so, Jujuy offers some advantages. One is that you'll be 1,900 kilometers away from here, and it will be almost impossible for the bad guys to bother you. And if they still try to get to you, another advantage you'll have is my cousin."

I awaited further explanations on this point. Who was his cousin? Superman?

"He's a guy with pretty traditional ideas. You can imagine. You know how people can be in the provinces." I didn't know, but I was beginning to suspect. "And don't think he's a nice, agreeable sort. Nothing like it. He's almost repulsive, my cousin. And mean as a scorpion. But the main thing is that up there, he's an important, respected man, and all he has to do is to tell four or five key persons that you're in Jujuy under his protection, and then you won't have to worry, because not even the flies will bother you. And if anything unusual happens-say four strangers entering the province in a Ford Falcon without license plates-he'll find out about it at once. If a vicuna on the Cerro de los Siete Colores farts, my cousin's informed within a quarter of an hour. Do you understand what I'm getting at?"

"I think so," I said. Wonderful, I thought. I'm going to live on the frontier and work for a feudal lord, more or less. But at that moment the image of my wrecked apartment crossed my mind and tempered my presumptions. If I was going to be safe under this guy's protection, it might be a better idea for me to lose the haughty airs and go directly to wherever he was. I remembered the vicarious shame I'd felt years before, when Judge Batista couldn't find the courage to come down on Romano and backed away from that prisoner abuse case. I too was a coward. I too had reached the line I wouldn't cross.

While Judge Aguirregaray was seeing me to the door, I thanked him again. "Think nothing of it, Chaparro," he said. "One thing, though: come back to Buenos Aires as soon as you can. We don't have many deputy clerks like you."

It was as if his words had suddenly given me back the ident.i.ty I'd lost. I realized the worst thing about my eight days as a fugitive was that I'd stopped feeling like myself. "I'm very grateful to you," I said, energetically shaking his hand. "Good-bye."

I walked to the Olivos station. The trains on the Mitre Railroad were electric, like those on the Sarmiento Line, except that the Mitre trains were clean and almost empty, and they ran on time. But this moment of local envy showed me how much I missed Castelar. Do all those who are in flight from their past feel weighed down by nostalgia for it? In Retiro, I took the subway, got off near my rooming house, and walked the rest of the way.

"There's a guy waiting for you in your room," the desk clerk said to me as I pa.s.sed. My knees got weak. "He said you knew he was coming. He introduced himself as your bar a.s.sociate. Is that right?"

"Ah, yes, yes," I said, relaxing with a laugh that must have sounded excessive to the man behind the counter. Good old Sandoval-he never changed.

He was indeed waiting for me, comfortably stretched out on my bed. We embraced, and I went into the bathroom for a shower. Then we took that taxi, the one in which we barely spoke, to the bus stop in Ciudadela.

39.

Lamentably, Sandoval's final illness and death weren't sudden, and those of us who loved him had more than a year to get used to the idea. He himself took it with the same metaphysical sarcasm that he applied to everything. For whoever wished to listen (I mean among those close to him, because he was always restrained or even distant with outsiders), he declared that n.o.body had been clear-sighted enough to give proper credit to alcohol for its beneficial effects on his body, or to him for knowing enough to treat himself with it in such ferocious doses. It was obvious, he said, that this collapse, this shocking and irreversible physical decline, was due to his abstinence, which had broken the sacred equilibrium formerly produced in him by whiskey. He smiled when he said that, and those of us who'd always badgered him to stop drinking were grateful to be treated with such indulgence. Until the end, or almost, he kept working in the court.

During the last months of Sandoval's life, I spoke frequently with Alejandra-more than with him, to tell the truth. When I did have Sandoval on the line, we confined ourselves (because the high cost of long-distance calls froze us, or because as typical men we considered any outward show of our sorrow basically a sign of weakness) to brief exchanges of small talk, avoiding with expert precision any reference whatsoever that was either very personal or very heartfelt or very melancholy. I asked no questions about his illness; he asked none about my enforced exile in Jujuy. I suppose the impossibility of seeing each other's face as we mouthed conventionalities increased the stiffness of those conversations, but neither of us wanted them to stop.

And so I wasn't surprised when the secretary handed me the telephone one day, saying simply, "Long-distance operator," and through the echo and buzzing that provided the background for every long-distance communication in those days, Alejandra's voice reached me: at first controlled, then shattered by grief, and finally serene, perhaps even relieved.

That night I traveled in an airplane for the first time. The grief I felt had taken on a curious form. I'd had so much time to prepare myself for bad news concerning Sandoval that comparisons between what I was feeling and my previous speculations about what I would feel afflicted me more than the plain and simple grief of having lost my friend.

From high in the night sky, I looked down on Buenos Aires, which offered an imposing spectacle. When I arrived at the airport, I felt on my own account the same emotional distance I'd felt on learning of Sandoval's death. I wasn't afraid, or even nostalgic. Nor, after six years, was I happy to return. For an instant, a pang of guilt went through me: I hadn't informed my mother about my flying visit. I didn't wish either to prolong it or to sadden her by letting her know that I'd spent a day twenty kilometers from her house, as opposed to almost two thousand, and I hadn't gone to see her. It was better to wait until July, when she'd come to visit me, as she did every year.

The cab driver decided to edify me with a discourse whose object, I soon realized, was to explain why the British would never be able to reconquer the Malvinas with the wretched little fleet they'd just dispatched. I cut him off curtly: "Please don't talk to me. I need to rest." And in case my lack of interest made him suspect me of treason against our country, I added, "Besides, I'm Austrian."

He sank into silence. While he drove me to Palermo, certain memories came into focus. I was almost happy to realize that they were causing me pain, because my coldness during the preceding hours had frightened me. Perhaps that was why I found myself wondering what that p.r.i.c.k Romano was up to. Was he still eager to b.u.mp me off? This was no minor question-the response to it would determine whether or not I had to keep living in Jujuy-but I didn't know anyone who could answer it. Baez had died in 1980. I hadn't dared travel to Buenos Aires back then, even though four years had pa.s.sed since Morales's revenge and the attack I'd escaped by a hair. I did, however, write a long letter and send it to Baez's son, because I thought-and still think-that children should know their parents' true value. And beyond that, I was going to feel lost without Baez. That was the main reason why I planned to go from the airplane to the wake, from the wake to the burial, and from the burial back to the plane.

The wake was held not in Sandoval's house but in a funeral parlor. I've always hated the sterile spectacle of our funeral rites, ever since I was a boy. Those gauzy shrouds, the candles, the fearful stench of dead flowers-they all seemed to me like vain artifices devised by bored illusionists to dissemble the honest and appalling bluntness of death. And so I entered the funeral parlor without stopping in the small chamber where the casket lay. Alejandra was getting through the midnight hours by trying to fall asleep in an armchair. I think she was happy to see me. She cried a little and explained something that had to do with the last treatment her husband had undergone, when there was no hope for anything but an impossible miracle. It sounded to me like a story worn out from having been repeated all day long, but I didn't have the heart to interrupt her. When it seemed she'd finished, I ventured to speak: "Your husband was the best guy I ever knew."

She turned her eyes away from me and stared off to one side. She tried blinking several times, but there was nothing she could do to suppress her tears. Nevertheless, she was able to reply, "He loved you so much and admired you so much. I think he stopped drinking so you wouldn't be afraid for him when you weren't here to help him."

It was my turn to cry. We hugged each other in silence, finally able to ignore the false rituals of that place and honor the memory of her husband and my friend.

Afterward, she made me some coffee, and we talked a little about everything. As it was well past midnight, it was highly unlikely that any stray mourners would be coming in, at least not for the next several hours. Family members who hadn't yet done their duty could be expected to show up early the following morning, before the burial service. So Alejandra and I had time to talk. I spent a good while bringing her up to date on my exile in Jujuy; she wanted to know all about Silvia. Pablo had told Alejandra we'd moved in together, but her woman's curiosity required much more information than what Sandoval had been satisfied with in our letters and telephone chats. I began by telling her that Silvia was the younger sister of the clerk in a civil court in Jujuy and then went on to explain that in such a tiny milieu, Silvia and I couldn't help meeting; that she was very beautiful; that the aura I carried around with me in those distant lands, the aura of the mysterious political exile with the obscure past, had perhaps aided my conquest of her; and that I loved her very much. When I finished, I believed I'd said everything, but that was where Alejandra's interrogation began. I did what I could, without ever shaking off my surprise at the vast number of details one woman can wish to know about another. It was getting close to three when I finally persuaded her to go home and get some sleep. n.o.body was going to come at that hour, I said. I think she liked the idea of my remaining alone for a while with all we had left of her husband. And I think I too anxiously welcomed the prospect.

There weren't many people at the graveside. A few relatives, a couple of friends, several court colleagues. I didn't know some of them, and the sensation that I was among strangers struck me as perhaps the most convincing proof of my own exile. I took comfort in seeing the familiar faces of some old coworkers, with whom I exchanged greetings and friendly conversation. Fortuna Lacalle and Perez, our former bosses, were there as well. The retired judge had aged so much that his body seemed to be on the point of breaking into pieces, but his foolish face remained unscathed in the battle against the pa.s.sage of time. Perez was no longer a public defender; to the astonishment of all sensible men and women, he was now a judge on the sentencing court.

While the others were returning to their vehicles, I paused a moment to throw a handful of dirt onto the grave. I turned around to make sure there were no witnesses and saw that the rearguard of the departing group was made up of none other than our old clerk and our equally old judge. I picked up a big, wet clod of dirt and started breaking it into pieces. As I threw them, one by one, onto the little mound, I murmured a kind of prayer, a thoroughly profane prayer: "On the day when the a.s.sholes of the world throw a party, those two will welcome the others at the door, serve them refreshments, offer them cake, lead them in toasts, and wipe the crumbs from their lips."

When I was finished, I walked away smiling.

More Doubts.

"I haven't left out anything," Chaparro thinks as he returns home, carrying a bag of warm bread. How can it not be warm, seeing that they practically open the bakery for him?

He's starting to develop an old guy's habits. It exasperates him to notice them, as others might be disturbed by discovering wrinkles or gray hairs. Until his retirement, sleeping was a reward and a pleasure to which he abandoned himself without reserve and from which he emerged slowly and lazily; now the hours tick away as he lies there, wide awake. So when he's weary of flopping around in his bed and the first light coming through the shutters dazzles his eyes, he gets to his feet, dresses carefully-he's afraid of turning into one of those consummate geezers who go out wearing T-shirts, suspenders, and espadrilles-and walks a block to buy bread.

When he returns, he prepares mate and carries the calabash gourd to his desk, along with two small loaves, which he carefully sets on a plate to avoid scattering crumbs. It strikes him as mildly funny to consider that his two marriages produced, if nothing else, at least some refinement in his domestic habits.

When he sits down, he reads over the last completed section of his book, and as he progresses, he grows increasingly gloomy. For one thing, he's not sure it makes sense to keep those pages at all. Do they contribute to the story he's telling? If the story he's telling is Ricardo Morales's or Isidoro Gomez's, then the answer is no, the last section has nothing to do with them. But if the story he's telling is his own, the story of Benjamin Miguel Chaparro, then it's yes; his flying visit to Buenos Aires in May 1982 can't be excluded.

He falls to questioning himself again about which story he's writing, and he's a.s.sailed by fresh doubts as well as by old, reiterated ones. Because if he's writing a sort of autobiography, he's leaving out a slew of persons and circ.u.mstances that were very important in his life. As a case in point, what has he said about Silvia, who was his second wife? Little or nothing. He'd have to check, but it seems to him he's mentioned her only in his bothersome previous chapter, the one on Sandoval's death. But after all, what more could he add about Silvia? That they lived together for ten years, the last four of them in Buenos Aires? That she accompanied him when he dared to return to the capital at the end of 1983, when no one was afraid of the military regime and its henchmen anymore? That during those last four years, Silvia was the one who seemed to be in exile, far from her family, her friends, and the society she'd complained about when she lived in it, but which she'd begun to miss the very first day she arrived in Buenos Aires, a city she always found hostile and aggressive?

Chaparro himself helped her pack her bags, borrowed a car to take her to the airport, and then, with the scrupulous care of a notary, sent her whatever items of their mutual possessions she asked for, whenever she asked for them, from an electric toaster to the exquisite edition of Moby-d.i.c.k they'd bought together on an excursion to Salta.

Then they stopped talking to each other. Chaparro learned that she'd gotten remarried, but he never tried to find out much about the subject. It was around this time that he decided to have nothing more to do with women, that is, with women capable of mattering to him and, therefore, of causing him pain. It seemed so easy in the beginning that he told himself he'd made a wise decision. It had been a mistake to try to share his life with anyone, because in the end, he'd always regretted making the attempt. He'd lost Marcela through sheer boredom and Silvia by her own choice. He didn't want to keep on losing. It was better to withdraw from play. There would always be a woman close at hand, willing to offer him ephemeral pleasure in exchange for some of the same for herself. He's glad he moved to Castelar, as he'd so fervently desired to do before he was forced to leave for Jujuy. The house he's in, the house in which he sits writing his story, looking out into the garden every now and then and occasionally getting up to fix more mate, used to be his family home. Is he going to put that in a novel? It makes no sense. It's better to return to Morales and finish writing the few remaining pages. And after that?

After that, nothing. Well, except for returning the typewriter to the court, to the G.o.dd.a.m.ned court presided over by the Honorable Irene Hornos, may lightning strike her, because everything (distancing himself from women, occasionally getting close to one without any sort of serious commitment, living the life of a methodical widower in Castelar) had worked just fine for him until February 9, 1991, when the recently appointed Judge Hornos came through the door of the clerk's office, returning after an absence of fifteen years.

Chaparro had promised himself he wouldn't let that minx drive him crazy again, because he was fine the way he was. And because he didn't need a new and brutal disappointment, a new plague of insomnia, a new hole in his heart. It was on this account that he greeted her with a cool "How are you doing, Your Honor? It's been a long time," even though he saw her surprised look as she leaned toward him, advancing her cheek for a kiss, and she became confused; expecting familiarity, she found a wall four meters high, without a single crack, and she had to reply to it, "Fine, and yourself? It certainly has been a long time." And then, because the situation made him angry or anxious or sad, or all three at once, Chaparro muttered some excuse about having left a pile of work unfinished on his desk and hurried away. He moved with sufficient speed to escape her perfume, the same scent as always, but he wasn't fast enough to avoid hearing the usual responses to the usual questions, how's your family, Irene, they're well, the girls are too, thank G.o.d, and your husband, my husband's fine, he works a lot but his health is great; may lightning strike him, too, that son of a thousand b.i.t.c.hes, I beg his pardon because he's not guilty of anything but marrying her, but still, it wasn't right to do this to him, not now, not when he was doing so well, whether alone or occasionally, fleetingly, accompanied.

From here on out, he knows, everything will lose its taste, or worse, everything will taste of Irene-the air and his morning toast; insomnia and the kisses of whatever other woman he happens upon-and so maybe he ought to apply for a transfer, but no, that wouldn't do, because he's not up for changing to another court and a new set of colleagues, so there's no solution of any kind, except to be quiet, let time pa.s.s, ignore the fire in her eyes when they meet his, and turn his gaze well away from her neckline when someone approaches her from behind her desk with doc.u.ments to be signed, and living like that is pure G.o.dd.a.m.ned torture.

No. He's definitely not going to write a novel in which he's the protagonist. He's plenty sick of himself as it is, too sick to delight in contemplating his own navel. But he's decided not to cut the chapter where Sandoval dies. Morales's accursed story is woven together with his own life. Didn't he spend seven years counting goats on the Andean Plateau because he got involved in that tragedy? He doesn't regret it. He doesn't grumble about that part of his past. But that's precisely the reason why he's going to leave everything he's written intact.

And there's another question: Everything he's written-what's he going to do with it? The pages make a pretty pile on his desk, where before there was nothing but a ream of blank paper lying beside his Remington. He should give the completed ma.n.u.script to Irene. She likes it when he brings her his writings. In the last month and a half, not a week has pa.s.sed when he hasn't visited her with a couple of chapters in hand. Is it any good, his novel? She always praises it. Ah, let it be bad. Because if it's good, her praising it means she likes his writing, period. But if it's bad and she praises it anyway, it's because she wants to please him. Chaparro suspects that the reason he writes is to give his work to her; he wants her to know something about him, to have something of his, to think about him, even if only while she's reading. And suppose it's bad and she praises it because she's fond of him, nothing more? That's to say, she may think what he writes repulsive, but she doesn't want to wound him, not because she loves him, not in the way Chaparro wants her to love him, but because she has a soft spot for him as a comrade, as a former boss, as a current subordinate, as an abandoned dog that inspires pity, poor little thing.

Chaparro exclaims aloud, "That's enough of this stupid f.u.c.king s.h.i.t," which in less coa.r.s.e terms indicates that he must put an end to his meditations and get to work. He hears the whistling of the kettle and realizes that while he's been absorbed in his flights of amorous fancy, the water for his mate has reached the temperature of an erupting volcano. Tossing the water, refilling the kettle, and waiting for it to reach the right temperature allow him to gather the strength of spirit he needs to start writing the final, definitive chapters of his story. Which ends in the middle of a field. In the shed with the big sliding door.

After he pours the contents of the kettle into the thermos, a very thin column of vapor shows him that the water is now at the correct temperature, and Chaparro escapes from his distractions. In his mind, he's traveled three years into the past, back to 1996, the year that marked the real end of the Morales story, twenty years after the false end in which all of them (Baez, Sandoval, Chaparro himself, and even that son of a b.i.t.c.h Romano) had naively believed.

He leaves the thermos and the gourd with the mate on his desk and goes to the sideboard in the living room. He knows the letters are in the second drawer, each in its envelope. The paper isn't yellow yet, because the letters aren't so old. And even though he's never reread them, he thinks he can remember them pretty exactly, almost verbatim, in fact. But as he doesn't want to take a chance on distorting the truth he holds in his hands, he removes the letters from the drawer to take them to his desk. He plans to quote from them directly whenever he considers it necessary to do so.

Why this obsession with exactness? he wonders. Just because, is his first reply. Because the truth, or Ricardo Morales's own words, which in this case are the ultimate truth, lies in those letters, is his answer after a moment's reflection. Because working this way, with doc.u.mentary proof in hand, selecting what's important and quoting from it, is the way I worked for forty years in the Judiciary, he adds. But that first response is also true.

40.

September 26, 1996, was a Thursday like any other, except for the tumult coming from the streets. The first general strike against the government of Carlos Menem was to start at noon, and some members of the Judiciary union who had gathered on the steps of the Palace of Justice above Talcahuano Street were enlivening the scene by tossing the occasional firecracker. At ten o'clock the postman came with the mail. Actually, I presume he did, because my desk was far from the reception counter. One of the interns brought me an elongated, hand-addressed envelope. It bore no official seals and had been sent as certified mail. I stared at the thing, my curiosity piqued by what looked like a personal message amid the ma.s.s of communications between government departments that we were used to.

Thus distracted, I looked for my reading gla.s.ses until I realized I was wearing them. I didn't recognize the handwriting. Had I ever seen that elegant, neat, upright cursive? Not that I recalled. What I did recall (even though I'd thought I'd never encounter it again) was the name of the sender: Ricardo Agustin Morales, resurrected after twenty years of distance and silence.

Before opening the envelope, I looked again at the address. I was the addressee, all right: "Benjamin Miguel Chaparro, National First Instance Courts, Criminal Division, Examining Magistrate's Court No. 41, Clerk's Office No. 19." How did Morales know his letter would reach me here? The untimely missive upset me a little, even though ... what exactly was bothering me about it? I certainly didn't hold him responsible for my desperate flight in 1976. It had always been clear to me that the one and only cause of my exile was that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Romano. Was I disturbed because Morales was writing me so many years later? No, not that either. I retained a friendly, almost affectionate memory of him. What was it, then? It took me a while before the scales fell from my eyes and I saw the real cause of my agitation. It was that I was so predictable, so monotonous, so like myself that a person could locate me in the same court and the same clerk's office, doing the same job at the same desk, two decades after our last contact.

It was a relatively long letter, postmarked in Villegas on September 21. So he'd left the capital. Had he been able to rebuild his life? Sincerely wishing that he had, I began to read.

First of all, I beg your pardon for importuning you after such a long time.

Chaparro paused and made a very simple calculation. It had been, in fact, a total of twenty years and a few months.

If I have not written to you in all these years, the overriding reason was my fear of creating even more problems for you than I had already caused. I learned of your move to San Salvador de Jujuy a few months after it took place, when I communicated with your court by telephone. Although I did not inquire into the reasons for your departure, I was not long in deducing that my actions must have been responsible for it.

A young office worker came and asked me a stupid question. In a loud voice, I announced to him and everyone else that I didn't want to be interrupted for a while.

If I am bothering you at this point in time, so many years later, it is because I find myself obliged to accept the offer you made to me at our last meeting, when you gave me an account of the circ.u.mstances that had led to the release of Isidoro Gomez.

That name again, I thought. Had Morales neither heard nor spoken it for many years, like me? Or had he never really managed to get it out of his head?

On that occasion, you told me if there was ever any moment when I thought you could help me, I should not hesitate to call on you. Will you consider it audacious of me to take you up on that offer now? I ask that question mindful of the enormous sacrifice I imposed upon you, involuntarily, when you had to go away in 1976. I doubt whether this is any consolation, but I swear to you that I spent many long days seeking a way to liberate you from such a misfortune.

I wondered about Ricardo Morales's present appearance and tried to imagine the face behind those words of his. Although I made a mighty effort, I couldn't age him; in my imagination, he continued to be the tall, fair-haired boy with the little mustache, the slow gestures, and the frozen expression whom I'd met almost thirty years before. Did he still dress the same way? His style in clothes had had nothing in common with the fashions young people his age were wearing at the beginning of the 1970s. I figured his look hadn't changed, and I noted that his way of expressing himself in writing sounded old-fashioned, too.

Obviously, I never found a means of extricating you from your difficulties, even though I was glad to hear, some years ago, that you had returned to your position in the same court as before.

He didn't say how he knew that, but I could figure it out: Morales must have telephoned the court every now and again, asking about me, until they told him I'd come back. But why hadn't he wanted to talk to me? Why had he been satisfied with knowing I'd returned? Why had he waited until now to call on me? And what was he calling on me to do? I read further.

Needless to say, if you bear me a grudge for the way I altered your life-again, without any intention of doing so-I believe you have every right to tear up these lines and forget them, whether now or when you have finished reading them. In the next few days, you will receive two more letters identical to this one. I beg you not to take this iteration as obnoxious insistence on my part: I am proceeding in this manner out of fear that my letter may go astray. The first copy I send you will be dated Monday the twenty-third, and the second Tuesday the twenty-fourth; they will both be certified as well. If you receive and read this one, the original, I respectfully ask that you destroy the two copies.

I don't know why-well, actually, I do-the image of Morales sitting in the little cafe at the entrance to the Once railroad station came into my mind. The same meticulousness, the identical obstinacy. I felt a little sad.

Sometimes life takes strange paths to resolve our enigmas. Forgive me if I indulge in some clumsy philosophizing here. Perhaps I may have told you already that as a young man, I was a confirmed smoker, until Liliana convinced me that I was doing myself harm and I immediately stopped smoking.

Liliana Emma Colotto de Morales. That name was recorded in my memory, but very dimly. Of course, she'd been a part of my life only fleetingly, during the year following her death. After that, she was fused in my memory with Morales, her husband, and Gomez, her murderer. And now she was back, brought by the man who loved her most.

After her death, as if performing an act of spite, or worse, as if that act of spite could do any possible good, I started smoking again, and as time pa.s.sed, I smoked more and more. Well, two packs a day have put an end to my good health and my resistance, but paradoxically, they may have solved my final dilemma in advance.

Poor guy, I thought. On top of everything else, he's going to die of cancer. Whenever I learn that someone has died or is about to die, I rapidly calculate his age, as if youth and the injustice of death were directly proportional, and as if my indignation at early deaths were worth anything. This time was no exception: by my reckoning, Morales must have been around fifty-five.

It would be trivial to tell you that the prospect of death worries me. Neither a lot nor a little, as it turns out. Perhaps, if you carefully consider my situation, you may concur with my view that death will come as a relief. I trust you will not be offended if I offer you my condolences on the pa.s.sing of your friend, Mr. Sandoval. I read about it on the obituary page of La Nacion. You cannot imagine how his death grieved me. In his case, too, I could find no way of repaying what he did for me, or for Liliana and me, which amounts to the same thing. For reasons that I shall explain farther on (unless you first decide that this extremely long letter is an abuse of your patience and stop reading), it is impossible for me to absent myself from my place of residence for lengthy periods of time. Therefore I missed Mr. Sandoval's funeral, but I was able to get to Chacarita Cemetery some months after his death and pay him a very modest tribute. At that time, I should have liked to provide his widow with some kind of financial a.s.sistance, something more tangible and useful than my respects, but I had contracted certain large debts that greatly compromised my financial situation. Now, however, things are different. If you are willing to do me this favor (I should say, if you are willing to add this favor to the great quant.i.ty of favors I intend to ask for, all disguised as one), I shall ask you to see that Mrs. Sandoval receives a sum of money that I have laid aside and which I am honored to offer her as a demonstration of my grat.i.tude to the memory of her husband.

He was marvelous, this Morales. I saw Alejandra about once every leap year, but he expected me to show up at her house with a wad of dough consigned to her by an anonymous avenger who felt indebted to her husband, dead these fourteen years. Did time not pa.s.s for the man? Did he live in an eternal present, where each thin, transparent day blended into the one before? I gave up, knowing I'd agree to deliver to Sandoval's widow whatever money Morales proposed to send her.