If it's a question of needing you, I could stay in this office for the rest of my life. That's the answer Chaparro would give her, if he had enough nerve. Since he doesn't, he says aloud, "I'll come back someday soon, Irene."

She doesn't reply. Instead she rises from her seat, moves her face close to his, and gives him a big, loud kiss on his left cheek. Chaparro can feel the fullness of her lips, her hair gently brushing against his skin, the warmth of her body so close to his, and he inhales her fresh, wild fragrance, an accursed scent that goes directly to his brain, lodges in his memory, exacerbates his desire for her, and promises him three nights of insomnia, with their attendant days.

Archive.

Entering the General Archive always causes the same feelings in him. At first, a heavy sensation, as if he were descending into an enormous tomb. But then, once he's inside the mute, dark, dungeonlike s.p.a.ce and walking through the narrow aisles flanked by giant shelves crammed with bound dossiers, he feels a rare sense of security, of shelteredness.

A few steps ahead of him, the archivist who's serving as his guide leads him along. Chaparro thinks about how easy it is for us to detect the pa.s.sage of time in the physical decay of the people around us. He's known this man for ... how long has it been? Thirty years? The fellow's surely past retirement age. His left leg has a slight limp. At every step, the sole of his shoe makes a sound like sandpaper on the tiled floor. Why has he kept on working? Chaparro figures that to such a man, after so many years spent guarding a silent catacomb where doc.u.ment-stuffed shelves absorb all sounds, the outside world must seem like some sort of horrible, thunderous, ongoing explosion. Chaparro is rea.s.sured by the thought that his companion's not stuck in some prison, he's in a refuge.

They walk in the shadowy labyrinth long enough for Chaparro to become completely disoriented. Then the old archivist stops in front of a set of shelves exactly like the other thousand they've pa.s.sed and looks up for the first time. Until this point, he's advanced with his eyes straight ahead of him, occasionally turning left or right, moving with the cautious determination of a rat accustomed to the dark. Now he raises his arms to a shelf that looks to be out of his reach. Stretching his worn-out joints causes him to emit a very soft groan. He yanks at a bundle of dossiers identified by a five-digit number, seizes the bundle, and resumes his march. Chaparro follows him to the end of the aisle and turns left behind him. The other aisles are dimly lit; this one's almost dark, so dark that Chaparro stops to give his eyes a chance to adjust. He's afraid he'll end up lost amid towering shelves, as in a well surrounded by blackness. The archivist's footsteps keep fading and become inaudible, as if the old man has entered a foggy sea. After a few seconds, just as the sudden anxiety of solitude is about to take hold of him, Chaparro hears a distant click. The archivist has just turned on a small lamp, which stands on an otherwise bare table. A shabby chair completes the furnishings of the "reading corner" he's apparently getting ready for Chaparro, who's happy to escape the black hole of the stacks.

With two expert movements, his guide opens the bundle of dossiers. He puts the sisal cord aside so that he'll be able to retie the bundle after the visitor has finished with it. Then he pulls out the case file Chaparro has requested. It's in three volumes, each bound together with thin white string. The archivist makes a meticulous pile of the volumes on the wooden table and places the chair appropriately. "I'll leave you here," he says in a high, hoa.r.s.e voice, the voice of a man who's definitively entered old age. "When you're through, just leave things as they are. I'll put them back in order."

He starts to walk away and then stops and turns around, as if he's remembered something. "To get out, you have to advance diagonally," he said, accompanying his words with vague arm gestures. "Turn left at the first intersection, right at the next, then left again, and so on. If you hear noises, don't worry, it's the G.o.dd.a.m.ned rats. They're everywhere. We don't know what to do about them. Poison, traps, nothing works. Every day, I take out a bunch of dead rats, but every day there's more of them, not fewer. Anyway, they won't bother you. They don't like the light."

"Thanks," Chaparro replies, but the old man has already turned and vanished around a corner at the end of the aisle.

Seamster.

In the methodically sewn binding of the three volumes, Chaparro recognizes the expert hand of Pablo Sandoval, and as always when some little thing reminds him of Pablo Sandoval, Chaparro misses him. The best worker he ever had. Quick to learn, stupendously good at drafting official doc.u.ments, endowed with a prodigious memory. But wait a minute. He's just committed the same injustice he commits every time he recalls Sandoval; he's begun by evoking him as his best a.s.sistant ever, by praising him as a boss's dream. And that's wrong. Not that the memory is false. No question about it, Chaparro never had a coworker as good at what he did as Sandoval. But to do justice to the man, Chaparro must remember that he was a good friend who also happened to be an exceptional employee.

There was only one precaution Chaparro had to take when they were working together. At the end of the day, when Sandoval would gather up his things and leave with a "See you tomorrow," Chaparro would wait a few minutes and then stick his head out the window of the clerk's office. If he saw Sandoval crossing Tuc.u.man Street toward Cordoba Avenue, then everything was all right; his a.s.sistant was going home like a good man and a good husband. But if a few more minutes pa.s.sed and Sandoval didn't appear, Chaparro would prepare for the worst, because he could be sure his employee was on his way to the dives in the vicinity of Paseo Colon, with the irrevocable intention of drinking himself into a stupor. Chaparro would close the window and call up Sandoval's wife, Alejandra. He'd tell her that Pablo was going to be late, but that he, Benjamin, would get him home. She'd sigh, thank him, and hang up.

He'd continue working for a while, usually until well after nightfall. Then he'd leave the Palace of Justice by the security exit above Talcahuano Street and get a bite to eat in a cafe on Corrientes Avenue. Before midnight, he'd take a cab to the Bajo quarter and visit Sandoval's favorite bars, one by one, asking the driver to wait at each stop. When he finally located Sandoval, Chaparro would clap him on the shoulder, dig around in his pockets to see if he had enough money left to cover his last few drinks, and pony up the difference himself. Then he'd load him into the taxi and give the driver Sandoval's address. When they stopped at the door, Alejandra would come out, hurrying to pay the cabbie. Chaparro wouldn't insist on paying, because doing so would violate a tacit agreement between him and both Sandovals. Therefore he would limit himself to helping Pablo to the street door of his building, where his wife would take over, except for the times when her husband's state was too pathetic and Chaparro would be obliged to carry him all the way to his bed. Sandoval's wife would bid Chaparro good night with a wan smile and a "Thanks a lot."

The next day, Sandoval would miss work. But he'd return the day after that, with black rings under his eyes and a look of devastation. When Sandoval was in such a wretched state, Chaparro knew the man couldn't work as he usually did. He'd be useless, as if the alcohol had erased his memory centers and short-circuited his intelligence. At times like those, Chaparro would set his a.s.sistant to binding case files. Without a word, he'd put the white thread and the upholstery needle on Sandoval's desk. On his own, Sandoval would carry the equipment to a table near the shelves where loose case doc.u.ments were stacked and then go to work in a way that was a joy to see. With a surgeon's movements, an artist's grace, and the solemnity of an officiating priest, Sandoval gave the impression of a consummate bookbinder. When he finished with a case file, it was bound into one or more large tomes, each of which looked like a volume of an encyclopedia. At the end of three or four days, after the worst of his depression was over, Sandoval would approach Chaparro and, with a smile, return the needle and thread, as though discharging himself from rehabilitation.

He died early in the 1980s, while Chaparro was in San Salvador de Jujuy. The thought of embracing Sandoval's widow and paying his final respects to Sandoval himself was sufficient reason for Chaparro to spend his good pesos on plane fare, attend the funeral, and above all, put a two-day parenthesis around his fear of being killed by a band of murderers who, besides everything else, were gunning for the wrong target.

Now, nearly twenty years later, Chaparro forgets for a moment what he's come to do and pulls at the string that binds one of the big volumes. Then he releases the thin cord, having verified that it's got exactly the right degree of tension. It's as though Sandoval has left him this wordless message so that Chaparro will remember Pablo, too, as one of the actors in the story he's begun to write. Message received.

Chaparro smiles, thinking that Sandoval, with his subtle intelligence, would have appreciated the sequence of small details, the infinitesimal resurrection, the deserved homage rendered to him two decades later by his friend and boss, and the said boss's tangential, sidelong approach to that homage through a posthumous eulogy to his late a.s.sistant's virtues as a seamster.

Pages.

Chaparro grabs the first volume and pulls it closer to the lamplight. It contains two cover sheets, one on top of the other, both of thin cardboard. The second sheet displays black lettering made with a felt-tip pen: "Liliana Emma Colotto. Homicide," followed by information concerning the court. But the first cover sheet, the outer one, reads "Isidoro Antonio Gomez, first-degree murder, Penal Code Art. 80, par. 7." Chaparro opens the dossier and finds the same police reports, the same witnesses' statements, and the same forensic a.n.a.lyses he reviewed in August 1968, after he'd been ordered to declare the case inactive for want of a suspect and he'd decided instead to play a first-rate mug's game.

He flips through a few pages. Although he regrets it almost at once, he can't resist the impulse to look again at the photographs of the crime scene. Thirty years later, Liliana Emma Colotto de Morales is still sprawled on the bedroom floor, abandoned, helpless, with fixed, dead eyes and bluish marks on her throat. Chaparro feels the same shame he felt the day of the murder, because he remembers the lascivious stares of the policemen who stood around the corpse before Baez sent them packing, and he's not sure whether his shame has to do with those stares or with his own obscene desire to lose himself, too, in contemplating the splendid body that has just died.

He turns over the pages of the autopsy one by one, but he doesn't read or even skim them. He half-closes his eyes and concentrates on the musty smell the pages release into the archive's still air. They've been there more than twenty years, bound one on top of the other, and Chaparro can't help conjuring up an image that has entranced him ever since he was a child. He imagines that he himself is one of those pages. Anyone at all. He imagines himself waiting for years and years in the most utter darkness, squeezed between the previous and following pages, smooth and soft like them. If you're one of those pages, Chaparro thinks, the occasional footsteps that resound in the aisle at monthly or yearly intervals can't help you measure the pa.s.sage of time. They're barely sufficient for plumbing the terrifying depths of your solitude. All at once, without warning, without any signs that would allow you to prepare yourself for the coming upheaval, you feel a shock. Then another and another. As the uniform ma.s.s of paper that protects or imprisons you is moved from one place to another, you're disoriented by a sudden, gently rhythmic motion. Then movement stops again, but there's a sound of pages pa.s.sing from one side to the other, followed by the abrupt, blinding wound of light that means your turn-the turn of the page you are, of the page you've metamorphosed into-has come. You don't waste this chance to see the world again, even though, for you, the Creation is reduced to a face, a male face, the face of a mature man with graying hair, small eyes, and an aquiline nose who barely looks at you and immediately turns his head to the following page, the one that for years and years has been next to you, pressed against you, skin on skin, letters on letters. And then a hand moves across the surface to the far corner and lifts the next page and pulls it toward you, and page and hand blur at the exact moment when the light disappears, and you understand that another eternity of darkness and silence has begun.

When Chaparro imagines the sudden hope and catastrophic disappointment his hands are causing in each page as he leafs through the case file, he's overcome by an absurd feeling of pity. But when he reaches page 208, shortly after the beginning of the second volume, he stops; he's arrived at his destination.

It's a four-line court order, typed on his Remington. On this last point, he has no doubt: The e's are all raised a little above the line formed by the other letters, and the bellies of the a's are filled with ink, because the key was worn out.

The doc.u.ment records a court appearance, falsely dated in mid-August 1968, in which Ricardo Agustin Morales declares that he has information pertinent to solving the crime. A little farther down the page, an order signed by Judge Fortuna Lacalle orders the pet.i.tioner to give, under oath, the reasons for his a.s.sertion.

Page 209 presents Morales's sworn declaration, falsely dated in early September. In this statement, which is considerably longer than the other declarations, the name of Isidoro Antonio Gomez appears for the first time. On page 210, a new court order dated September 17 directs that official letters be sent to the Federal Police and to the police of Tuc.u.man Province, requesting them "to ascertain the domicile" of the said Gomez and "summon him to appear in court." All these doc.u.ments bear the signatures of the examining magistrate and his clerk. Judge Fortuna Lacalle's signature is enormous, pretentious, adorned with useless flourishes. Perez's is small and bland, like the clerk himself.

Chaparro consults his watch. His eyes feel irritated. The table lamp, shining alone in the midst of darkness, has troubled his vision. It's almost noon, and he knows the archivist is going to get nervous if he doesn't see him leave soon. It's unlikely that he'll quote these tedious legal doc.u.ments verbatim in his book, but they've helped to evoke the climate of those days. They've returned him to the sterile meetings he had with Morales to keep him from losing hope, or at least to inform him, gently and gradually, that the case was going nowhere for lack of a suspect. And they've recalled the unbearable heat of that h.e.l.lish summer.

Chaparro rises to his feet and puts the three volumes of the case in a single pile. He doesn't turn off the lamp, because he's afraid he'll get completely lost if he tries to make his way back through the dark stacks. He retraces his steps to the entrance, zigzagging in accordance with the archivist's directions. At one of the last turns, when he's almost out of the archive, Chaparro glimpses something that makes him jump. It's the old man, sitting on a chair in one of the narrow aisles, with his legs stretched out and his eyes fixed on the shelf in front of him. Chaparro feels the same icy apprehension that used to come over him during visits to his aunt Margaret, who was blind from birth. At the end of the visit, when night was falling, his aunt would accompany him to the door, turning out the lights along the way to be sure she wouldn't leave one on and "waste electricity for nothing." When the old lady told him good-bye and, a little absently, stretched out her face to receive his kiss on her cheek, little Benjamin would look over her shoulder and see that her apartment was in darkness. The image of his aunt in those pitch-black, endless rooms-eating dinner, for example, or feeling her way along the walls-would follow him all the way to the Floresta station and terrify him until he got on the train.

With a laconic "Good day," Chaparro bids farewell to the archivist and practically runs out of the archive. He goes back up to the ground floor of the Palace, and shortly thereafter he's descending the exterior stairs to Lacalle Street and rejoicing in his return to sundrenched, noisy Buenos Aires.

Three hours later, he's in his house in Castelar, and if some pa.s.serby were to walk down his street, he could hear the frenetic din of a typewriter and see Chaparro's silhouette through the window, bent over his desk, over his keyboard, banging out the paragraphs of what appears to be the second part of his story. But as it happens, no one hears or sees him. The street is deserted.

12.

I didn't dare tell him no, even though there was every reason to suspect that a terrible time was in store for me.

It was at our last meeting. Just as we were taking leave of each other, Morales surprised me by saying, "I'm going to get rid of the photographs."

I asked him why, but I had a feeling he was going to explain whether I asked him to or not. He said, "Because I can't stand to look at her face when she can't look back at me. But before I burn them, I'd like to share them with you. Maybe showing you the photos will be a good way to say good-bye to them."

I could have turned him down. I've always hated looking at photographs. But either I didn't have the necessary reflexes, or I was developing a tendency to let the boy have his way, or I was hindered by the same sudden awkwardness I've felt all my life at the prospect of rejecting a request. The one certain thing is that I accepted.

We agreed to meet again in three weeks. It was the beginning of December. The case had been in a box on a shelf since August, and sooner rather than later, I was going to find myself obliged to revive it, review it, and declare it officially dead; no one would be prosecuted. Although the prospect made me sick, the case, Morales, and I (so deep was my commitment in this mess) were all about to hit a concrete wall. Maybe that was why I agreed to look at the photos.

I left the court with no time to spare and quickly walked the block and a half to the bar where we always met. Morales had already taken possession of a large table, and with the calm concentration of a collector, he was taking photographs out of a shoe box and placing them in different piles. I approached him slowly. Looking over his shoulder, I could see his display of grievous memories.

The wooden floor creaked, and Morales turned around to look at me. He was wearing a pair of librarian's eyegla.s.ses and holding a pencil in his mouth. He made a face by way of greeting me and pointed to the seat across from him. When he did so, I noticed that the piles of pictures were turned toward my side of the table, as if we were at a trade fair and Morales wanted to guide me through his exhibit.

"I'm just about ready," he said, pulling a last handful of photos out of the box and starting to distribute them among the piles in front of me.

Every time he placed a photograph on a pile, he took the pencil from his mouth and marked one of the lines on a long, numbered list. There was no doubt that he was a guy who paid scrupulous attention to details. While he was checking off the last pictures, I noticed that his list went up to number 174, and I feared I was going to be very late for dinner. I reproached myself a little for not having called Marcela before I left the clerk's office. Finding a public telephone anywhere near the bar was going to be a royal pain, but I couldn't neglect to tell her I'd been delayed. Why throw another log on the frigid bonfire of our disagreements? It wasn't that we quarreled. No. I don't think we ever went so far as to quarrel. I was apparently the only one of us troubled by the increasing iciness of our relationship.

"I've put them in order for you. These here," he said, handing me the first pile of photos, "are pictures of Liliana when she was a little girl."

I noticed she was already lovely. Or did I see her like that because I clearly remembered the last images of her, the ones in which her beauty persisted, even in the midst of horror? The pictures of the little girl were cla.s.sics, typical of children's photos in those days. A selection of posed portraits, all taken inside a photographer's studio. No snapshots. Wearing her best clothes, with her hair most carefully combed. I imagined her parents making faces at her behind the photographer's back to provoke some shy smiles that probably turned confused after every blinding flash.

"These are of Liliana as a teenager. Her fifteenth birthday ... and stuff like that. Before she came to Buenos Aires, you know?"

"I didn't know your wife was from out of town. Are you from somewhere else, too?"

"No, I'm from here. I grew up in the suburbs, in Beccar. But Liliana's from Tuc.u.man Province. From the capital, San Miguel. She came here to live with a couple of her aunts a year or so after she got her teaching degree."

It was obvious that the family had bought a camera, because now there were many more pictures. On a riverbank, a group of girls in bathing suits, accompanied by a matron of indefinable age and rigorous aspect. Two girls-one of them Liliana-in white pinafores, carrying the Argentine flag. A small, s.h.a.ggy, white dog, playing with a girl who it goes without saying was Liliana.

The photographs of her fifteenth birthday, some of them printed in a larger format. Liliana, wearing a light dress and a double-stranded necklace, a bit garishly made up, with perhaps too much eye shadow. Pictures of her standing beside each table in the hall, with a different set of guests at every one: a group of venerable old folks, surely grandparents and grandaunts and -uncles; a group of girls, some of them familiar from the swim-suit snapshot by the river; a group of boys, each encased in a rented or borrowed suit; a gaggle of smaller girls and boys, perhaps nieces and nephews. Photographs of Liliana waltzing on the improvised dance floor in front of the tables, with her dad, her grandfather, and her brother, and then with a mult.i.tude of other boys, who were perhaps dazzled by the circ.u.mstance of being authorized, if only briefly, to place a hand on such a beauty's waist.

A picnic in a place difficult to identify. The Palermo barrio of Buenos Aires was a possibility, but Liliana looked sixteen, seventeen at the most, and so she must still have been in Tuc.u.man when the pictures were taken. A group of girls and boys, lounging on the gra.s.s near a river or stream.

"These are from after we got engaged," Morales explained as he handed over another pile, a small one this time. In an apologetic tone he added, "There aren't many. We were only engaged for a year."

I was glad to hear it. I didn't want to seem uncaring, but I did want to get that ordeal over as soon as possible, and there were lots of pictures to go. I was feeling the same mixed reaction I always felt when looking at photographs: sincere curiosity, a genuine interest in the lives hinted at in the glossy, eternally silent prints, but also a deep melancholy, a sense of loss, of incurable nostalgia, of a vanished paradise behind those minuscule instants, arrived from the past like naive stowaways. So, with a great many images still left to see, I could already feel melancholy weighing me down. I reached for one of the piles Morales hadn't yet handed me, as if a deviation from the sequence he'd laid out would somehow give me back my freedom, which, in any case, wasn't useful for very much.

"Those are from when Liliana got her teaching diploma," Morales explained. There was no trace of resentment in his voice for what I'd feared he might take as an impertinence. "After that, she spent a year teaching in Tuc.u.man, and then she came to Buenos Aires."

These were more recent photographs, and the women's hairdos, the men's jacket lapels, the knots in their ties all conveyed a sense of "not long ago" that I found less nostalgic. It was obvious that the girl's family liked to celebrate things. There was always the well-laden table, a decoration of some kind on the wall proclaiming the event, and a great many chairs set out so that the mult.i.tude of friends, family members, and neighbors who were present at every such occasion had a place to sit down.

I don't know why I noticed what I noticed. I imagine it was because I've always liked looking at things a little sidelong, focusing on the background instead of the foreground. I stopped turning over the photographs in the stack I was holding and gazed for a long time at the one I'd come to. It showed an exultant Liliana, wearing a light, simple dress, probably a summer dress, standing in the middle of a circle of young boys and girls and showing them her diploma.

I looked up at Morales: "Would you pa.s.s me the pictures from her fifteenth birthday again?" I tried to make the request sound casual.

Morales did as I asked, even though he gave me a somewhat surprised glance as he handed me the photographs. It was a matter of a few moments to find the ones I wanted: two pictures from the dancing. One showed Liliana posing with a fat, bald, smiling gentleman, probably an uncle; in the other, her partner was a boy whose face was only partly visible, because he was staring grimly at the floor. I put the two pictures on top of the pile, which I then set down next to the graduation photos.

"Now, could you please find me the shots from a picnic you showed me earlier? Taken in a kind of park, with a lot of trees. Do you know the ones I mean?"

Morales nodded. He said nothing, and for just that reason, I realized that he'd detected the confused urgency in my sudden requests and didn't want to distract me by asking for an explanation. When I had the picnic pictures in my hands, I quickly selected two wide-angle shots that showed the entire group. A long minute pa.s.sed.

"What's going on?" Morales inquired, daring to ask the question even as uncertainty choked his voice.

I had separated the four chosen photographs from the others, and now I was going through the piles again, entirely concentrated on finding another shot of a certain face. In the end, two more pictures interested me, so I wound up holding six altogether. I shoved the other 168 aside rather brusquely. Maybe I should have explained myself to Morales or at least given him some indication that I'd heard his question. But my idea was so sudden, and at the same time such a gamble, that I was obscurely afraid it would vanish into thin air if I spoke it aloud. So, with a sweep of my arm, I cleared a spot on the table, nearly knocking the entire photo collection to the floor in the process, and then I placed in front of him, too hastily for good order, the six pictures that had struck my eye. At last, in lieu of answering his question, I asked him one: "Do you know this guy?"

Morales stared at the photographs, obedient but puzzled. Never before that Friday afternoon had he paid any attention to those features, but he was condemned to see them in front of him forever, even when his eyes were closed. That was going to happen, but Morales didn't know it yet, so he simply answered, "No."

I turned the photos toward me, trying not to blotch them with my fingers. In the two pictures from the picnic, a boy wearing a light-colored T-shirt, dark trousers, and sneakers, standing close to the extreme left of the group, offered the camera his profile: very pallid complexion, hooked nose, black, curly hair. Sitting almost in shadow at a table littered with plates, the remains of food, and half-empty bottles, the same kid gazed at a couple on the dance floor, and more precisely at Liliana, with her long, straight hair and somewhat too heavy makeup, waltzing in the foreground with an older gentleman. The other photograph from that same soiree gave a slightly better view of the kid; he held Liliana almost at arm's length, his elbows rigid, as though both wanting and fearing to touch her, and fixed his eyes on the floor, not on her face, much less on her promising neckline.

The fifth photograph had surely been taken in the living room of her home. In the center of the picture, the teaching diploma, held up to the camera with pride and a limitless smile by the same girl, namely Liliana, some years older. A group of friends (neighbors?) stood around the graduate, who was flanked by a man and a woman, no doubt the proud parents. And there was the same kid, now a young man, in this case on the right of the shot: the same curly black hair, the same nose, the identical hard expression on his face, his eyes turned not on the camera but on the girl, whose smile lit up the whole photograph.

And then came the last and best picture of the lot (best because of the naked simplicity with which, from out of the frozen silence, it announced the truth that was growing into a certainty before my eyes). This shot showed the same young guy, turned almost completely away from the action (which consisted of the group gathered around the graduate as before, but without the diploma) and staring at a shelf on the wall beside him. On that shelf, almost level with his nose, was a framed photograph filled with the smiling face of the same girl, the said Liliana Emma Colotto. For the kid gazing at it in ecstatic contemplation, that portrait had an additional advantage: there on the shelf, Liliana was totally exposed, totally unaware, totally at his mercy. That was why he didn't even notice that the photographer was taking another shot, and so all the friends, relatives, and neighbors looked at the camera except him, lost as he was in his silent worship, safe from the others' eyes. He couldn't know, obviously, that another guy, who would happen to be me, fifteen hundred kilometers away and several years later, would look at him looking at her, couldn't know that I'd just found him out, almost by a miracle (if we think it's good to discover the truth), or with fatal shrewdness (if we'd rather consider that the truth is not always the best harbor for our uncertainties), or through an unacceptable stroke of luck (if we limit ourselves to identifying the links in the delicate and apparently random chain of events).

For a moment, I thought Morales would remain aloof from the mental rebellion that was consuming me. But when I managed to focus a minimal part of my attention on him, I noticed that he was rummaging around in his satchel like a diligent schoolboy. He took out a kind of alb.u.m, with gilt vignettes on its cloth covers. He opened it. It held no photographs; the thin cardboard pages, separated by sheets of wax paper, were empty. It took me a while to realize that various marks slightly scored the smooth surface of every page, and then I understood that Morales had removed the photographs from the alb.u.m before arranging them in piles and offering them to me. But what was he doing now? As persnickety as he was, I thought it unlikely he was searching for a misplaced photo. He was turning over every page, with the precise movements of someone who doesn't want to make a mistake. The alb.u.m was thick. He stopped on a page close to the end of the volume. There the divider, the sheet of wax paper, was filled with curvy marks drawn in what looked like India ink. At the bottom of the sheet, in a corner, there was a list, apparently of proper names.

Morales raised his eyes to the photographs I'd just shown him. He chose one of the two from the picnic. Lifting up the marked sheet of wax paper, he slipped the photo under it. When the India ink marks perfectly matched the outlines of the figures in the picture, I understood. There was a number written in the s.p.a.ce occupied by each figure. Morales laid his finger on the outline at a point under which, barely visible, was the image of Liliana's eternal observer.

"Nineteen," he murmured.

We both turned our eyes to the list of names.

Morales read the heading: "'Picnic at Rosita Calamaro's country house, September 21, 1962.'" Then he ran his index finger down the list until he came to the line he was looking for. "Number 19: Isidoro Gomez."

13.

Although he'd already read it twice, once silently when he received it and then again aloud, Delfor Colotto decided to go over it one more time while his wife was out shopping, just to be sure he'd understood it right. He put on his gla.s.ses and sat in the rocking chair on the back porch. He read slowly so he wouldn't have to move his lips, but still, if he'd been in front of the house, where anybody could see him, he would have felt uncomfortable.

When he finished, he removed his spectacles and folded the letter along its original creases. The stationery was smooth and very white, unlike the skin of his hands, which resembled coa.r.s.e sandpaper. He'd understood the letter, despite his initial fear that some of the words, elegantly handwritten in black ink on both sides of the page, could stump him. "Imperative" was the only one that had given him trouble. He'd had an idea of what it might mean, but he'd wanted to be sure, and so he'd picked up the dictionary the girl had left in the house, and that had done the trick: his son-in-law needed help-urgently, a lot, whatever it might take. He'd understood the rest of the letter with no trouble. At the end, his son-in-law had written, "I leave it in your hands," because he was "certain that you'll devise the best way to go ab out it." And just here was the th.o.r.n.y problem that had kept Delfor Colotto on tenterhooks ever since the arrival of the letter, two days previously: What could that "best way" be?

He got to his feet. The only thing he could accomplish by staying in the rocking chair would be to make himself more nervous. Maybe his plan wasn't a good one, but he'd devised nothing else. His son-in-law should have been clearer in his letter. The older man felt the younger one hadn't told him the whole truth. Did he consider him unworthy of his confidence? Or-worse-did he think he was an idiot because he hadn't finished school? Don't get worked up about it, Colotto told himself. Maybe his son-in-law hadn't given him more details because he hadn't wanted to make him even more nervous. In that case, he'd had a point, because the little Delfor Colotto knew and the great deal he imagined were already driving him crazy, and he hadn't slept a wink for two consecutive nights. More knowledge, or a confirmation of what he feared, might well be worse. Besides, he'd always been fond of his son-in-law, even though that "always" sounded a bit exaggerated, because how many times had he seen him? Three, four at the most? So he didn't really know him, but h.e.l.l, that wasn't the young guy's fault, after all.

These thoughts gave him the impetus he needed. He went into the house and walked to the bedroom. On the back of the chair a shirt was hanging neatly. Colotto put it on over his undershirt, stuffed the shirttails into his trousers, and readjusted his belt buckle. Then he left the house and strolled to the corner, pausing briefly on the way to greet a couple of his neighbors, who were drinking mate on the sidewalk. Dusk was falling, December had let loose one of its infernal heat waves, and some people were trying to find a bit of fresh air outside.

At the corner he turned right. "We're practically on the same street," he thought. And he felt uncomfortable, as though something had been put over on him. He stopped in front of a house just like his and just like all the others built according to the government's plans for residential development. The little yard in front, the porch, the door flanked by two windows, the American-style asphalt roof. He clapped his hands. From behind the house a pair of dogs came running and barking into the front yard, only to be silenced almost completely by a female voice from inside the house. A rather small woman with white skin and light eyes came out onto the porch, drying her hands on the ap.r.o.n she wore over her skirt.

"How are you doing, Mr. Colotto? What a surprise to see you over this way."

"Still here, Miss Clarisa. Hanging on."

The woman seemed uncertain as to how to continue the conversation. "And how's your wife? I haven't seen her around the neighborhood for a long time."

"She's plugging along, you know, getting a little better." The man scratched his head and frowned.

The woman interpreted this gesture as a desire to change the subject, and therefore she raised her hand to open the little black door before she spoke again: "Come in, please, come in. Would you like some mate?"

"No, thank you, Miss Clarisa, thanks a lot anyway." He held up both hands, palms outward, as if softening his refusal. "I appreciate it, but this is just a quick visit. The truth is I was trying to locate your nephew Humberto."

"Ah ..."

"It's for a job. The supervisor over in the munic.i.p.al lumberyard asked me to do a little carpentry work on his house, see, and I might need an a.s.sistant, and so it occurred to me that maybe Humberto ..."

"It's really too bad, Mr. Colotto, but it so happens Humberto's gone to help my brother in the country, you know, out there around Simoca."

"Ah, right." Colotto thought things were going too smoothly. The fact that the small talk perfectly suited his plans made him, if possible, even more nervous. "What a shame. The thing is, I don't want to hire someone I don't know, if you see what I mean."

"Oh, sure I do, Mr. Delfor, and I thank you for remembering him ..."