When I mentioned above my reaction to Mr. Sandoval's death, I did so in order to erase any suspicion you may have that I am so insolent as to consider every death so lightly. That is not at all the case; I hardly dare to consider my own that way. And to tell the truth, I cannot say that I am facing death as if it were something light but rather as something that heals, something that brings serenity at last. Upon rereading those last sentences, I fear I am going off on tangents and wearying you with my pointless ramblings. I have given you enough to tolerate, suddenly appearing out of oblivion and requesting a favor to boot, and now you must put up with digressions. Please forgive me, and let us return to the matter at hand. Earlier, I asked you to be so kind, should you not look upon my request favorably, as to destroy this letter and the other two letters that will follow it. Nevertheless, I would appeal to you to contact Dr. Padilla, a notary public here in Villegas, at some point during the next few weeks, because I have been so bold as to bequeath you my worldly goods, such as they are, in my will. I trust you will not take this as impertinence. I am not leaving you very much, except for the property on which I reside, which I should think would be worth a decent sum these days, as it includes almost seventy-five acres of good land, mostly fields.

He surprised me. I'd figured he was living in the capital or its suburbs, for he'd never struck me as the rural type. His generosity flattered me, although it also made me slightly uncomfortable; by that point, without even thinking of recompense, I'd already decided to help him.

There is, in addition, an automobile, well maintained but very old.

The white Fiat 1500. Memories never return alone-they always come in groups. The automobile's image came to my mind accompanied by a recollection of Baez and me sitting in the Rafael Castillo train station twenty years before, and my policeman friend telling me about the old folks in Villa Lugano who'd seen Morales load Gomez, unconscious but still alive, into the trunk of that car.

Apart from some old furniture I leave to your disposal, there is nothing more. Now, should I be able to count on your collaboration in putting my final affairs in order here in Villegas, I would implore you to make every possible effort to arrive at my house sometime on Sat.u.r.day the twenty-eighth. I hope this request does not seem like yet more presumption on my part. I might almost say that I make it for your sake, to forestall even greater inconvenience than the inconvenience I cannot help causing you already.

I thought I understood. It was dreadful, but very simple. Morales was going to kill himself, and he was asking me to come on Sat.u.r.day so that I wouldn't have to confront an even worse spectacle on Sunday or Monday. He didn't say so in the letter, but he'd obviously laid careful plans, including the detail that I would find it more convenient to get up there on a weekend than to request a few days off from the court. Could he possibly know that we were between sessions, and that my workload was therefore relatively light? I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd taken the trouble to find out about such things.

By this point, you will have guessed-at least in part-what you will find at my house. I beg you to forgive me. And I repeat, I will perfectly understand a negative response. Whatever your decision may be, I send you my warmest wishes, and I reiterate my deep grat.i.tude to you for all you did for us.

Ricardo Agustin Morales I finished reading the letter and put it back in its envelope. Several minutes pa.s.sed before I reacted. The secretary asked me what was wrong; I looked funny, she said. I gave her a few evasive replies. At that point, the clerk came out of his office. I availed myself of the opportunity to tell him I'd have to leave early to take my car to the shop for a checkup, because I was going to have to take a highway trip on Sat.u.r.day to attend to a personal matter. He said that wouldn't be a problem.

41.

Because I wanted to arrive before noon, I started driving at dawn. Morning seemed to me like the least creepy time of day to enter an empty house or, worse, a house where the remains of a man I'd known and liked awaited me.

The directions Morales had put in a postscript to his letter were simple and specific. I was to go past the exit to the town and continue on past the big YPF service station that would shortly appear on the right-hand side of the road. Four kilometers farther on, I would see three very tall silos on the left, and after going another kilometer, I was to turn off onto a paved local road, also on my left. After two more kilometers, the last, I would see a gate on my right between two tall-gra.s.s pastures.

I think it was eleven o'clock when I got out of my car to open the gate. I drove through, stopped, and went back to close it. Then I followed what was essentially a gravel path for two or three kilometers, although perhaps I'm exaggerating the distance. The state of the road compelled me to drive slowly, and the high pastureland on both sides offered no points of reference. If Morales had wanted to preserve his privacy, he'd succeeded. Finally, the path ended in a fairly s.p.a.cious open area in front of a house. This was a simple, one-story building with tall grilled windows. A raised, bare gallery, with no flowerpots or chairs or anything else, ran around the house's entire perimeter. The Fiat was parked on one side, under the gallery. I didn't stop to examine it in detail, but it looked as impeccable as I remembered it.

I knew from Morales's letter that the property covered some seventy-five acres. To purchase it, I figured, the widower had needed to go into debt up to his ears. I vaguely remembered some allusion in his letter to his indebtedness. Then I remembered the money for Sandoval's widow, and I got the picture. Morales hadn't been able to help her in the period immediately following her husband's death, but now, fifteen years on, he'd evidently been able to settle his obligations. It seemed likely he'd accomplished his financial recovery by making great sacrifices. As an employee at a branch bank, he surely hadn't earned very much money, and that parcel of good land, I suspected, hadn't come cheap. The financial difficulties he'd ventured into in order to purchase the property explained the controlled but obvious deterioration of the building and the road leading to it.

I parked near the house and walked up to the front door, which Morales had left unlocked. As I opened it, a surge of childish hope suddenly welled up in me. "Morales!" I called loudly.

There was no response. I cursed under my breath, because I knew I was about to find him dead. I went farther into the room. Not much furniture, some well-stocked bookshelves, no decorations. Two shotguns hanging on the wall. I didn't get close enough to examine them-I've always felt nervous around firearms-but they looked cleaned, oiled, and ready for use. A carefully placed, thick envelope bearing the name of "Mrs. Sandoval" lay on a ceramic ashtray in the middle of the table. I stepped to the table and picked up the envelope. Since counting the money seemed indecent, I stuffed the envelope into the interior pocket of my jacket. In a hallway off the front room, there were two doors, one leading to the bathroom and the other to the kitchen. So where was the bedroom? I retraced my steps. I'd overlooked a closed door to one side of the bookcase. This one had to be the bedroom door. I opened it with my heart in my throat.

What I saw turned out to be less terrible than I'd imagined. The window shutters were open, and the sunlight came streaming in. Evidently, Morales had figured the bright daylight wouldn't disturb his sleep on that particular morning. There was no blood and no brains splattered against the headboard, which was the scene my fevered imagination had pictured from the moment I read the letter. The widower's body was barely visible, lying supine on the bed with the covers pulled up to his throat.

I'm not going to commit the stupidity of writing that he looked like a man asleep, because I've never understood people who could look at a corpse and make such an observation. As far as I'm concerned, dead people look dead, and Morales was no exception. Besides, his skin had taken on a decidedly bluish tinge. Did that have to do with the method of suicide he'd chosen? I didn't yet know the answer to that question, but I was sure he hadn't been dead long. I appreciated the delicate consideration evident in his attempt to spare me the most shocking signs of his corpse's decay, though I would certainly have been obliged to confront them had more time elapsed between his death and my arrival.

The bedroom was minimally furnished: a double wardrobe, a chest with a closed lid, a bare table, one straight-backed chair, and the single bed, and beside it a simple nightstand covered with various kinds of medications, disposable syringes, and bottles of some medicinal solution. I realized only then how difficult it must have been for that man to deal with his illness alone, with no one to help a.s.suage his suffering.

Because I'd begun by trying to take in the whole scene, or because thus far I'd been too cowardly to look at the body very closely, or because my eyes were more readily caught by the wedding photograph barely visible above the forest of medicine bottles, it took me some time to notice the long white envelope bound with a ribbon and hanging from the night table. On closer inspection, I saw that it was addressed to me. And in big letters, under my name: "PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU CALL THE POLICE."

42.

The guy never ceased to surprise me. Not even dead. What could he have to say to me in a second letter? I stepped backward, careful not to touch anything. All I needed was to be involved in a suspicious death. I told myself I had no reason to be worried; I was carrying the letter he'd sent to me at the court, and it ended with what was practically a plea to the authorities to charge no one with his death. I went back to the living room with the new letter in my hand and sat on the only armchair, close to the heater.

Dear Benjamin, If these pages are in your hands, that must mean you have done me the enormous favor of coming to my house; therefore, before I go on, I must express my grat.i.tude. Once again, as I have done on so many other occasions, I thank you. You are no doubt wondering about my reasons for writing you these lines. Let us go slowly, as is only proper when one person is obliged to give another news that could be, in a certain sense, disagreeable to him.

I started to get a funny feeling. Morales might be a stiff, but he was still making things happen.

Among the jumble of bottles and jars and other things on my night table, you will notice a used syringe with its needle in place. I beg you not to touch it, although my warning is probably unnecessary. I presume it will be quite evident at the autopsy that I injected myself with a ma.s.sive dose of morphine, and that was that. Then again, the medical examiner who performs the autopsy may have a terrible time singling out the drug he's looking for: I've had to dose myself with such a number and variety of medications in these past few months that my liver must look like a pharmacy. Well, that's his problem-I have sufficient concerns of my own.

This was pure Morales: his words and his suffering perfectly dissociated, a hint of irony, and a sincere melancholy that never dwindled into lame self-pity.

But again I digress, and I have yet to ask of you what I must ask of you. Before I do so, there are two things I want you to know. The first is that I am seeking to lay this charge on you only because my remaining strength is not sufficient to allow me to take care of the matter myself. I have left it undone to the last not out of neglect but out of principle. However, I overestimated my stamina. That is to say, I could have done it myself had I done it two or three months ago. But doing it then seemed wrong to me. I thought I should wait until the end; however, now that the end has come, my body is unable to make the effort.

Why did he need to be physically strong all of a sudden? He'd recently died, but what was he talking about?

The second thing is that I do not want you to feel obligated to do anything. If you find it impossible, so be it. Let the police handle it all. Because, to tell the truth, the request I have to make of you springs from a certain vanity, a ridiculous desire to preserve my good name. You pa.s.sed by the town without stopping, but in the next few hours, you will begin to meet people who may talk to you about me. I believe I am not mistaken in predicting that they will have placid, perhaps even warmhearted memories of my person. Bear in mind that I have lived out here in the country and worked in the town for twenty-three years. For reasons that you will soon discern, I insisted on remaining here throughout all that time and refused to be transferred to another branch of the bank. It was difficult, because my bosses frequently insisted on submitting my name for promotion. I was apparently considered an efficient employee, overall. As often as they insisted, I refused, trying not to seem discourteous or ungrateful. I am not going to lie to you: there is no one in town who can say he knows me well. I could not have close friends, nor did I want them. Nevertheless, I believe everyone-to varying degrees, of course-will remember me as a cordial, inoffensive misanthrope. And on this final pa.s.sage into nothingness (I wish I believed in something that would support me), I would like to think I will be amicably and benevolently remembered by the people I was in contact with out here during these many years.

Where was he going with all that? What was to stop me from showing this letter to the police? Were they so hard on suicides in Villegas? I restrained my habitual impatience as a reader, my tendency to bound ahead, for fear of missing something really important in one of those leaps.

I must ask you, my esteemed friend (please allow me to call you that, because it expresses the way I feel), to do me the enormous favor of going out to the shed. It stands about five hundred meters away from the house, at the back end of the field. In case of rain, you will find a pair of boots next to the kitchen door. Use them, because otherwise your shoes and trousers will be ruined.

I didn't understand; I didn't see the connection between Morales's request and his death.

Here my instructions end. Forgive me if I go no more deeply into the matter. Your intelligence absolves me from explaining further, and your honesty will, I trust, safeguard me from any ethical condemnation.

Sincerely yours, Ricardo Agustin Morales That was it? I turned the sheet of paper over, looking for a postscript, an explanation, a hint. There wasn't anything. I left the letter on the chair and walked into the kitchen. Through the window, I could see rows of fruit trees and on one side, near the house, a small vegetable garden. I went out the kitchen door and spotted the boots, which I didn't need on such a splendid day. In order to present in these pages the image of a thorough observer and careful a.n.a.lyzer, I suppose I should say that I was fully engaged in constructing, examining, and discarding hypotheses concerning what Morales had written in his second letter. But it wouldn't be true. What I thought, I thought afterward, when the questions (which I didn't even formulate as I walked among the lemon and orange trees) answered themselves.

43.

The vegetable garden had been tended with care. Seen from the back, the house looked to be in worse shape than it had seemed from the front. Maybe its owner had managed his meager finances in such a way as to project the image of a certain standard of living in case some visitor, whether invited or not, should show up. There was neither a clay oven nor a barbecue grill nor a table and chairs outside. It looked to me as though Morales didn't care about living the country life, even though he was out here in the boondocks. Clearly, he'd continued to be a city creature. He hadn't changed.

About fifty meters from the end of the fruit orchard, I could see a dense grove of leafy eucalyptus trees. I'm no good at calculating the age of trees, but I figured Morales had planted them when he got there. Had he said twenty-three years? That meant he'd come to Villegas in 1973, shortly after the amnesty.

The eucalypti seemed to form a thick curtain about two hundred meters long that cut obliquely across the field behind the house and garden. Later, I realized that the trees followed the route of the local paved road I'd turned off of but hid the road itself from view. Running from the end of the garden to the eucalyptus grove, a path was clearly visible, one of those trails worn bare by frequent comings and goings. Once I stepped into the eucalyptus curtain, the noonday light dimmed and became moist and shadowy. On the other side of the grove, I could clearly make out a shed. It appeared to be a building of impressive size, but it was hard for me to estimate its exact dimensions, because it stood two or three hundred meters beyond the grove, and actually, I wasn't very sure about the distances, either. I too am a city man, and I had no urban points of reference on which to base my guesses with any hope of accuracy. The shed had been erected on a little hillock, perhaps to avoid flooding, although the entire field looked pretty high and even rose gently toward the north, that is, on the other side of the paved road.

I walked toward the corrugated iron building. The sliding door was closed and locked with three gigantic padlocks. The keys to the padlocks were hanging on a hook on the outside of the door. This didn't seem like a very elaborate security system, putting the keys to the padlocks where anyone who came along had access to them. Could Morales have lost his chess player's instincts as he grew older?

The door squealed when I pushed it to one side, and the sunlight leaped violently into the dark interior. I looked inside. The closer I got to grasping what I was seeing, the weaker my knees felt, and a sensation of physical revulsion compelled me first to lean against the metal wall and finally to sit on the concrete floor.

The shed was pretty large, about ten meters wide by fifteen deep. Various metal objects stood against the wall: a folding aluminum stepladder, a portable machine that looked to me like a grinder, a few sets of shelves.

Actually, I saw all that later, a while after I collapsed on the floor. At first, as I sat there panting, I spent several minutes unable to take my eyes off the cell, the cell in the center of the shed. The cell was a square construction of thick iron bars extending from the floor to the ceiling, and on the front of the cell was a door with two separate locks but no handles, and down in one corner was another door, this one very little, like one of those used to pa.s.s food, utensils, and other small objects into and out of jail cells, and inside the cell in the shed, there was a washbasin and toilet in one corner, a table and chair in another, a bunk against the rear bars, and a body lying on the bunk, lying with its back to me on the bunk in the cell.

At that moment, I suppose, I felt horror, incredulity, apprehension, shock. But over and above everything else, I felt hugely surprised, ferociously surprised, and as I slowly began to grasp the implications of what I was looking at, I was forced to discard, to extirpate and destroy, everything I'd thought about Morales and his story for the past twenty years.

After some time had pa.s.sed and my legs felt capable of supporting me again, I got to my feet and walked around the square perimeter of the cell. When I reached the bunk, I fought back nausea and squatted down to get a look at the face of the man imprisoned behind those bars.

Isidoro Antonio Gomez's body had the same bluish tint as Morales's. Gomez was a little fatter than I remembered, of course older, with slightly graying hair, but for the rest, he didn't look much different from the way he'd looked twenty-five years before, when I took a statement from him in the clerk's office.

44.

I sat on the neatly mown gra.s.s of the hillock, not far from the shed.

He'd told me. The last time Morales and I saw each other, he'd told me, he'd said it after I practically suggested he get a pistol and take his revenge into his own hands. How had he answered? "Everything's very complicated," or something like that. No; it was "Things are never simple." That was what he'd said. I thought about Baez. Like me, he wouldn't have imagined that Morales would impose himself on events in this way. Sandoval wouldn't have, either. Who could imagine such a thing? Only Morales. n.o.body but Morales.

I stepped back into the shed to look for a shovel. I found one and held it in my hand as I walked around the building again, examining the surroundings. The curtain of eucalypti I'd pa.s.sed through on the way to the shed was, in reality, a great circle of trees with a perimeter of more than a thousand meters. The shed stood inside the circle, not in the center, but off to one side, probably because that location was least exposed to prying eyes. I tried to calculate how many trees Morales had planted in all, but I soon quit. I didn't have the least idea. But planting them had surely cost him months and months of labor, performed after he got home from the bank and on weekends. The construction of the shed had to have been carried out by professional builders, who were probably amazed by Morales's insistence on putting it up so far from the house, just as his neighbors no doubt found it strange that he left his property uncultivated for so many years, and just as the people of the town, starting with his colleagues at the bank, must have thought his behavior extremely odd, living in such isolation as he did, and being so disinclined as he was to receive visitors or partic.i.p.ate in any kind of social life. I remembered the request contained in his last letter. All of us, I suppose, need at least some form of affection. Despite his eccentricities, the people who knew Morales had little by little developed a strange bond with him, and the widower had wanted his memory to remain unsullied. That was why I was walking around his shed and carrying a shovel.

Scattered here and there on the sizable piece of land enclosed by the circle of eucalypti were several little stands or copses of other kinds of trees. One group included some poplars and two enormous oaks, which must have been standing there since long before Morales came. I stopped between them and took a good look around me. It didn't seem possible that I could be under any sort of observation. I planted the shovel and with one foot pressed it down into the earth. The ground wasn't too hard. I started digging.

45.

The police came, as well as a few curiosity seekers-very few, because fortunately I'd called to report my discovery during the siesta hour, and between that and the fact that a goodly number of potential gawkers had taken advantage of the perfect weather to go hunting or fishing, the news hadn't spread very widely. I didn't see any dismayed or incredulous faces. The officer who led the proceedings, a chief inspector in the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, knew Morales, and he wasn't the only one. Everyone there had seen him often for years and years, either here and there around town or standing behind the teller's window in the Villegas branch of the Provincial Bank. They'd also seen him getting sicker, and losing weight, and showing up more and more frequently at the clinic and the pharmacy.

"I didn't think it was that serious," said one of the bank employees who had arrived with the policemen.

"Oh, he was very sick, but he preferred not to go around talking about it," his colleague replied softly. There were also two older guys who looked like storekeepers. None of the civilians was very sure what to do, and all gazed at the house as though seeing it for the first time. Evidently, n.o.body present had ever laid eyes on it before.

As soon as I could, I gave the inspector the letter Morales had sent me at the court. The policeman sat down to read the letter in the same chair I'd sat in to read the other one, the one I'd carefully stowed in the bottom of my suitcase, which was in the trunk of my car. The officer had just about finished his perusal of Morales's missive when the ambulance arrived. One of the other policemen stepped out of the bedroom, carrying a transparent plastic bag that contained the syringe Morales had used to kill himself.

"What shall we do, Chief?"

"Gutierrez is through with the photos?"

"Sure is."

"Good. The ambulance guys are here, so go ahead and take away the body. No, wait a second." He turned to me. "Sir," he said, "are you-"

"Benjamin Chaparro," I said, introducing myself before he could finish. And since I didn't think it would be a bad idea to produce some sort of safe-conduct, I showed my credentials and added, "Deputy clerk of Examining Magistrate's Court No. 41, Criminal Division, in Buenos Aires."

"Had you and the deceased known each other for a long time, sir?" The inspector's tone had shifted slightly and now expressed more courtesy, more respect, and an inclination to submit. I greatly approved of the change.

"The truth is we had, although we hadn't seen each other for years. Not since he came to live here." I hesitated, unsure whether it would be advisable to say what was on the tip of my tongue, but then I went ahead: "We were friends in Buenos Aires." No we weren't, I said to myself. But if we weren't friends, what were we? I didn't have an answer to that one.

"I understand. Would you mind stepping into the bedroom with me? It's so we can have another witness to the removal of the body."

"Lead the way."

They'd taken the covers off him. He was wearing a pair of striped pajamas, cut in an old-fashioned style. It was a useless thought, but the image of Liliana Emma Colotto de Morales flashed into my mind, and I remembered how similar rites had been performed around her corpse, rites in which I'd played an involuntary part. This time, there were fewer of us standing around, and our number included no tight little group of curious onlookers particularly interested in contemplating the deceased.

The policeman had removed the bottles and jars from the night table and set them aside as evidence for examination. On the now bare table, the framed photograph of Morales and his wife, dressed in their wedding finery, was much more visible. Where had I seen that picture before? In the cafe on Tuc.u.man Street, where Morales showed me his photos, in the proper order, before he destroyed them? No. I'd seen it in the bedroom of their apartment, a few steps from Liliana Colotto's corpse, almost thirty years ago. I was surprised, as I'd often been before, at the iron patience that objects deploy in order to survive us. I believe that was the first time I'd ever imagined Morales and his wife together and alive, drinking coffee in their kitchen, chatting and smiling at each other; and life seemed to me unbearably cruel and hostile. It was also the first and last time that the thought of the young couple brought tears to my eyes.

We followed the stretcher out of the house to the ambulance in a tiny, spontaneous procession. The ambulance left, and then the cars that Morales's colleagues and the two older fellows had come in drove off as well. When they were out of sight, the inspector turned to me and said, "You're going back to Buenos Aires today, I suppose?"

"Actually, I think I'm going to stay over until tomorrow, or maybe Monday. I'll be available if you need me, Inspector."

"Ah, terrific!" The news seemed to make him happy, because it saved him from asking me to stay over himself. "In any case, there's nothing for you to worry about.

I'll talk to the doctor who does our forensic tests later today. I'll call the judge, too. He's a nice guy, the judge, Urbide by name. I don't know if you know him." I shook my head.

"Well, it doesn't matter. The case is as clear as can be."

"I suppose it is," I said, confirming his a.s.sessment, which I was happy to hear. At that moment, the sound of voices calling to the inspector came from behind the house. I hadn't noticed the pair of cops who'd gone out back and checked the shed.

"Nothing of consequence to report, sir," said one of them, who was wearing the insignia of a subofficer. I suspected he was speaking so formally because he'd learned that the stranger (namely me) was a man with legal expertise. "It's a large shed containing various tools and old furniture."

"All right."

"It's strange, though, Inspector," the second cop chimed in. He was young and black-haired, and he looked as though he'd just graduated from the police academy. "This guy must have been really afraid of being robbed. The door of the shed's loaded with padlocks. But you know what the strangest thing is?"

"No, what?"

"There's a big cage in there where he kept the most valuable tools and stuff. A gasoline-powered lawn mower, a grinding machine, a couple of scythes, some pretty high-quality power drills. Looks to me like he was afraid someone would steal them."

"Well, if all the local cops are klutzes like you, he was right. Things don't seem all that safe here," the inspector said, teasing the youngster. He was a novice, but not so new as to fail to recognize that he had to shut up and take the joke.

We walked back to the house. The two policemen hadn't said anything about the washbasin and the toilet they must surely have found against one of the walls, in the corner next to the metal shelves. Inside the cell, I'd covered the supply and drain pipes with earth up to the level of the concrete floor. I relaxed when I saw that the police weren't at all suspicious; they had no idea what had gone on there. That wasn't surprising, because who could have imagined it?

"Vallejos," the inspector called. "I want you to stay on duty out here in case the judge decides to drop by today or tomorrow."

Vallejos looked at his superior with disgust practically written on his face. The inspector seemed to take pity on him. "All right, good enough," he said. "Let's do this: I'll call the judge, and if he gives me the go-ahead, I'll call you on the radio and you can go home. How's that sound?"