"You know what?" Sandoval said. He was inspired. "I'm actually not sure Judge Molinari made a good choice with that Dodge." Sandoval moved his hands as if uncertain how to present his dilemma. "You're a connoisseur, Your Honor, you know a lot about this ..." Sandoval stopped and then apparently decided to trust the judge's intellectual honesty and wisdom. "Which would you choose? A Dodge Coronado or a Ford Fairlane?"

You're a connoisseur, you know a lot about this, I repeated to myself. Sandoval was a genius. Fortuna Lacalle, in reality, didn't know a lot about anything: not automobiles, not the law, not anything else. But since one of the things he didn't know was that he didn't know anything, he enthusiastically launched into a disquisition, for the benefit of all present, on the innumerable virtues of the Ford Fairlane and the unpardonable drawbacks of the Dodge Coronado, thus demonstrating tangentially and as it were in pa.s.sing that Judge Molinari wasn't so perfect after all. He spoke for ten minutes and even made a drawing of-if I understood correctly-the linkage between the gear shift lever and the gearbox in both cars.

It was marvelous. By the time he stopped talking nonsense, Judge Fortuna had signed off on a doc.u.ment acknowledging receipt of the police report (drawn up by Baez, working against the clock, and sent to me that very morning), according to which the present whereabouts of Isidoro Antonio Gomez were unknown. Furthermore, the judge had put his name to a writ ordering that the request for an investigation into the subject's present place of residence remain in force, with a view to obtaining a statement from the said subject, and he'd also signed the new official letter to the Federal Police that followed the extension of the investigation. Sandoval, who was leaning against a bookshelf and pretending to be absorbed in His Honor's pa.s.sionate discourse, spotted my relieved expression and knew the mission had been accomplished. However, since he was a sensitive guy, he didn't want to cut Fortuna Lacalle's lecture short, and so he let the magistrate expound for another two or three minutes. Eventually, Sandoval thanked him for his time: "Well, Your Honor, I have work to finish, so I'll take my leave," and then, shaking his head from side to side in admiration, he added, "You sure know all there is to know about automobiles, Your Honor."

The judge shut his eyes and smiled with a look on his face that was supposed to express modest acknowledgment of the compliment. To make his muddle complete, I then laid another twenty or twenty-five insignificant doc.u.ments on the desk before him for his signature.

When Fortuna returned to his office, I collected all the proceedings I'd scattered around in different dossiers, ordered them correctly, and placed them in the Morales case file. Now they'd all been signed by the examining magistrate, but they needed to be countersigned by the clerk, and with him it wasn't possible to apply the same strategy. He and the judge were fools in equal measure, true, but I didn't want to press my luck that far. I decided to put my trust in Perez's basic nature: he was a pusillanimous fellow, and I was sure he'd go along uncomplainingly with any official piece of paper that bore his boss's signature. So that very afternoon I brought him the Morales case as well as the other twenty or so files whose latest decrees I'd just had Fortuna sign off on. I knew, of course, that there was a chance the clerk might catch on to my maneuver. What would so many proceedings, dated in a sequence going back several months, be doing in a dossier like that unless they were part of a maneuver conducted behind his back?

But for that eventuality, I had an ace up my sleeve. Should Clerk Perez go so far as to question my good faith, or should he suspect that there was something fishy about the bundle of fake doc.u.ments that Fortuna Lacalle had just signed, I was going to move directly to blackmail: I would declare my readiness to tell half the Judiciary how enviably a.s.siduous he was in his devotion to the public defender attached to Section No. 3 in the Federal Criminal and Correctional Court, a lady neither his legitimate spouse nor the affectionate mother of the two healthy lads enshrined in the photograph on his desk. Fortunately, that wasn't necessary. Without a complaint, he wrote his name after every "Before me" that appeared under the signature of Judge Fortuna Lacalle, the automotive expert. When it was over, I collapsed in my chair, exhausted from nervousness. Sandoval came up to me with a smile on his face and offered the philosophical reflection he employed only in exceptional and solemn circ.u.mstances: "As I have frequently maintained, my estimable friend Benjamin, 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."

First and Last Names.

Chaparro pulls the finished sheet out of the typewriter with sufficient force to free the page from the platen without tearing the paper and then rereads what he's just written, smiling at the last words. It's a pleasure for him to exercise his memory. He thought he'd totally forgotten what Sandoval said, the sentence at the end of the chapter about "the day when the a.s.sholes of the world throw a party," but now the words have risen to the surface, along with a whole string of other memories of Chaparro's past and of the people with whom he lived it.

He stands up and makes a characteristic gesture: using the index finger and thumb of his left hand, he takes hold of the bridge of his nose at the top, almost at the level of his eyes, and squeezes until he feels a twinge of pain. He got in the habit of doing this during his years in the court, when he'd rise from his chair after a long stretch of time spent bending over his desk, and now he repeats the movement here, in his house, after hours and hours of putting together the memories he's submerged in, both his own and those of others. Man's a predictable creature, Chaparro thinks, grossly and perpetually equal to himself. He's been making that gesture and many others he doesn't even notice for more than half his life, and he'll keep repeating it until he's lying in his grave.

He thinks about Irene. Why is it he's thinking about her just now, right after thinking about his own death? Does he perhaps a.s.sociate it with her? No. Completely the opposite. Irene attaches him to life. She's like a debt he owes life, or a debt life owes him. He can't die while he feels what he feels for Irene. It's as though he couldn't be so wasteful as to allow that love to disintegrate and turn to dust like his flesh and his bones.

But he can't unbury what's in his heart, either. There's no way. He's thought and thought about it, but there isn't any way. A letter? That method would at least offer the attraction of distance and thus a safeguard against the possibility of seeing her look incredulous-or worse, offended-or worse, sorry for him-as she reads his words. Presenting himself and speaking to her face to face doesn't even figure among the options Chaparro considers. He thinks a "mature romance" sounds ridiculous, but declaring his love to a woman who's been married for almost thirty years seems more than ridiculous; it seems offensive and degrading.

Common sense, which Chaparro believes he can occasionally locate inside his skull, tells him there's no reason to be so solemn, so categorical. What's so inconceivable about starting a love affair with a married woman? He wouldn't be the first or the last to do that. And so? And so that's just it. But then again, what he has to say to her is not that he wants to have an affair with her. What he has to say to her, what he needs to say to her, and what at the same time he'd be horrified if she knew, is that he wants to be with her, forever, everywhere, and at every hour, or nearly, because he's sunk into such a state of adoration that he can make no sense of life without her. But when his thoughts reach this point, Chaparro stops in discouragement, and in his mind's eye, the Irene whom he imagines receiving his desperate confession adopts the same expression she does when he envisions her reading the letter that in any case he's not going to write: surprise, or indignation, or pity.

And after that, nothing. Because after the rejection, there will be no place anymore for even those brief moments he steals from her life, drinking coffee in her office, exchanging small talk with her, pretending he's dropped in for nothing more or less than a simple chat between two colleagues-ex-colleagues-who always had a good working relationship. Irene seems to enjoy those sporadic encounters, but once he crosses the line, she'll have no other choice than to ask him not to visit her again.

All of a sudden, while he's fixing himself some mate, Chaparro is seized by the same guilty desire he's felt so often before, but he immediately quashes it. If Irene suddenly became a widow ... couldn't she fall in love with him? He has no a.s.surance of such a thing. So it's best to leave the poor engineer in peace, let him keep on enjoying his life and his wife, d.a.m.n him.

He puts the last typewritten page on the top of the pile and admires its thickness. Not bad for the first month of work. Or is it a month and a half? Maybe so. Thanks to this project, time pa.s.ses more quickly. A recurring question nags at him: What's he going to call his novel? He doesn't know. He doesn't have the slightest idea.

Chaparro thinks he's no good at t.i.tles. At first he considered giving each chapter a t.i.tle, but he's given up that particular notion. If he can't conceive a name for the whole thing, he's not very likely to come up with one for every chapter. He's already written sixteen, and he's got many more to go.

He's concerned about something else, too: the name under the t.i.tle, his name, "Benjamin Miguel Chaparro." He finds that it sounds somehow disagreeable. To begin with, didn't his parents notice that the last syllable of his first name and the first syllable of his middle name make an unpleasant rhyme? Min-mi. It's frightful. And besides, at least two of his names have meanings beyond themselves, and that's a problem. Take "Benjamin," for example. In Spanish, a benjamin is a youngest son, like the Benjamin in the Bible; it's a name not for an adult, but for a little boy, for the youngest of several brothers. Why was it given to him, an only son? And besides, it's one thing to be a seven- or eight-year-old benjamin, and quite another to be a benjamin of sixty. Ridiculous. But that's not all. Chaparro means "short and squat." Calling a human being chaparro when he stands over six feet tall seems to be a contradiction in terms. A casual browser who comes across a book by "Benjamin Chaparro" (the cacophonous "Miguel" has to go) may well picture the author as a short, fat young boy. Or is that all just too convoluted? Won't most people react more simply? Yes, but it could happen that at least some readers interpret the name literally. And then the author shows up, and the benjamin chaparro, the "stocky little kid," turns out to be a big, bearish s.e.xagenarian. Too absurd.

One solution might be to publish the novel under a pseudonym. The thought crosses his mind, but he rejects it immediately. No way. If he manages to publish the thing, and even if he has to pay for a cheap edition out of his own pocket, he wants his name, be it ever so ridiculous, to appear on the cover. He has a simple reason for wanting his name there: so that Irene can see it.

17.

After I'd put the official seals on the court order calling for an investigation into the current whereabouts of Isidoro Antonio Gomez, after I'd placed the dossier in the file cabinet reserved for cases with fugitive suspects and informed Morales of the good news, I felt quite satisfied with my valiant intervention and safe from the aftershocks of the tragedy. So much so that I returned to my daily routine as the even-tempered boss, the husband home at seven every evening, the nighttime newspaper reader, the competent Judiciary functionary, and almost forgot about the Morales case.

After a few months had gone by, however, my memory of the matter was unpleasantly refreshed. I had to give a deposition in the proceedings against Romano and the police lieutenant Sicora for illegal coercion and abuse of the two building workers. The statement itself was a formality, a question of confirming my original complaint and clearing up a few details. But I was surprised (and disgusted) when the person a.s.signed to take my deposition turned out to be a very low-level member of the office staff. This was a bad sign: the court seemed to be taking it for granted that the case was going to hit a wall and was therefore limiting itself to merely observing convention. What more did they need to put those two worthless b.a.s.t.a.r.ds on trial? They had my statement, the declarations of two policemen who'd been on duty at the station, and the medical examiner's report on the injuries the poor subjects had suffered. I decided to hope for the best, in spite of the misgivings that haunted me. The judge was Batista, who I thought was an honest guy, and whom I knew a little, since we'd worked together throughout the holiday period one January. Besides, as I've already said, my commitment to the case was no longer as ardent as it once had been.

Some time later, Batista himself summoned me to his office. He smiled as he received me and shook my hand warmly, and when we'd taken our seats, he told me that what he was about to say was absolutely confidential and asked me please not to divulge it, because both our jobs would be at stake. h.e.l.l and d.a.m.nation, I thought. What could be so serious? I guess the judge was uncomfortable, because after hesitating for a few moments, he spit out the whole thing as quickly as possible, as if he wanted to get rid of something annoying and distasteful, right away. Without mincing words, he informed me that orders had come down "from on high" (he completed the image by pointing an index finger toward the ceiling of his office, but I didn't know whether he meant the Appellate Court, the Supreme Court, or the government) requiring that investigation into the murder of Liliana Emma Colotto de Morales be indefinitely suspended and the case closed as unsolved. He added that he couldn't be much more explicit, but that apparently this young man, this ... Romano, my colleague, had a lot of clout in high places. When he said the part about "a lot of clout," Batista touched his left shoulder with two fingers of his right hand. He wasn't talking about the Appellate Court, or about the Supreme Court, either. His gesture unmistakably signified "high-ranking military officer." Suddenly, I remembered Romano's father-in-law, an infantry colonel, and I understood. How naive I'd been not to have taken that connection into account when I denounced Romano in the first place. What a dope. If I needed something to make me definitively disgusted with Ongania and his military regime, that was it.

"Do you want to hear some more?" Batista asked me.

I said yes, mostly because the judge clearly wanted to talk.

"I had to summon him to make a statement. You know that, right?" I nodded. "And as I'd been advised to do"-Batista looked up over his head-"I chose to take his deposition myself."

We're all cowards, I thought, it's just a question of who frightens us enough. When I'd ratified my earlier complaint, they'd given some entry-level kid with the face of a fifteen-year-old the task of taking my statement. In a matter involving the colonel's scoundrel of a son-in-law, the magistrate had taken the said son-in-law's statement himself, sweating with fear the whole time.

"You can't imagine, Chaparro," he said. "You can't imagine how this guy was strutting around. The att.i.tude he had. He came into my office as if he was doing me a favor, granting me a tiny portion of his infinitely precious time. When I began to ask him about the case, he couldn't wait to badmouth a variety of people. Not so much you, believe me. He mostly had it in for the two poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who were beaten up on his orders. They were Indians, they were thieves, they were crafty devils. They and all those like them should be killed and the borders closed. And so on. To tell you the truth, I didn't include in the written statement most of the atrocious things he said, or maybe not any, because if I had I would've been obliged to send him directly to jail for public incitement to crime. Just imagine."

At this juncture, the obvious question was, "So why didn't you do that, Your Honor?" But I didn't ask it. My stomach turned at the thought of that son of a b.i.t.c.h getting away with such rank malfeasance, but after all, I was idle and pusillanimous too, in my way.

"Anyway, when I asked him about the two workers, he denied any connection with what happened to them, and the matter rested there. I even went so far as to tell him that if the criminal case was sealed, then the internal complaint would very likely be quashed, and the Appellate Court would lift his suspension from work."

Wonderful, I thought, we'll be colleagues again.

"But to my surprise," Batista went on, "he was totally indifferent to being reinstated. He told me he didn't think he could go back to a desk job, not anymore. The time has come for action, he said, because the country's in danger, surrounded by enemies, atheists, communists, and I don't know what else. I cut his rant short, had him sign the statement, and sent him off. I had no desire to question him about his plans for the future."

The interview with Batista left a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt somehow implicated in the injustice done to some and the sinister impunity granted to others. But not even then did I imagine, however remotely, the consequences those events were going to have for the story I'm telling here, and for my own life.

"My own life." I read those words again and ask myself: What was my own life like in 1969? That was the year when Marcela proposed that we have a baby. She didn't ask me if I wanted a child. It was as if she extracted a corollary from what had been going on and then spoke it aloud: "We could have a baby," she said, one evening after dinner. We were watching the Channel 13 news. When I looked at her and saw she was serious, I got up and turned off the television, which I never thought provided an appropriate background to any conversation. But there was still something wrong. What was the problem with her? Why didn't I feel any enthusiasm for the idea of being a father? "We've been married four years now. And we'll be finished paying for the apartment next month," she added, seeing the look on my face.

Marcela's logic operated along a fixed trajectory, like a wrecking ball. We'd met at my cousin Elba's. Our engagement lasted two years. We spent our honeymoon in Mar del Plata. We had a home loan from the National Mortgage Bank, a one-bedroom apartment in Ramos Mejia, and pretty dishes from the Emporio de la Loza, the "China Emporium." The next step was the one she was proposing to me, if words spoken in such a watery tone could be considered a proposal. Of the two of us, I was the confused one. The reasonable one was her.

I could answer only with evasions. Marcela respected my position, however distant from hers. Whether she did so out of submissiveness or coldness or force of habit, I don't know. She relied on me to give her a straight answer eventually, when I felt like it. To this day, I'm plagued every now and then by the painful certainty that I lost my chance to have a child. I was on the point of writing "to live on in a child" or "to perpetuate myself." Is that what it means to have a child? I'm never going to know the answer to that. It's another of the questions I'll take with me, unanswered, to the grave.

18.

If I put off going home after I ran into Ricardo Morales on an August evening in 1969, it was mostly because I didn't want to have to respond to my wife's question (or proposal, or initiative, or whatever I should call it) on the subject of having a baby. I didn't know what to say to her, because I didn't know what to say to myself. When I left the court that day, I didn't go to the nearest stop for the 115 bus, which was on Talcahuano. I walked across Lavalle Square and sat down for a while under an enormous rubber tree, and when the cold started to get to me, I decided to go to the bus stop on Cordoba Avenue. I got to the Once railroad station around seven o'clock, a time of day when the sea of humanity was at high tide. This didn't worry me; I could use it as an excuse to wait for a train I could find a seat in, no matter how many I had to pa.s.s up.

As I was moving at a considerably slower pace than the other commuters, I shifted over to one side of the concourse to avoid being jostled. I walked along, hugging the storefronts of the cheesy shops that abounded in the station. I stopped to look at some handmade posters, many of them filled with orthographical horrors, I observed a couple of shoeshine boys, patient as Bedouins, and I noticed the severe grimaces on the faces of two wh.o.r.es who were starting their shift. You see many things when you're not going anywhere. And then I saw him.

Ricardo Agustin Morales was sitting on a high, round stool inside a little bar, with his hands in his lap and his eyes fixed on the throng of pa.s.sengers hurrying to make their trains. Would I have gone up to him if he hadn't spotted me first and raised his left hand a little in a sign of greeting? Probably not. As I've already said, once my conscience had been calmed and my judiciary self-esteem patched up by what I considered a bold maneuver carried out under the noses of the judge and the clerk, I'd gone back with no regrets to my simple, modest routines. Seeing Morales outside of any expected context-that is, anywhere but his branch of the Provincial Bank or the cafe on Tuc.u.man Street-gave me a start; I might even say I found it disconcerting.

But he'd seen me. He'd raised his hand and produced something that resembled a smile. So I went in, held out my hand, and took the stool next to him.

"How are you doing?" he said. "Long time no see."

Was there some reproach in that last bit, that "long time"? I protested-in my secret heart-such unfairness. Why should I have set up a meeting with him? To tell him that Gomez (who might have been an excellent young man, after all) had disappeared no one knew where, and that I'd done everything I could? I looked at him. No. He wasn't reproaching me for anything. Facing outward, his feet hooked under the rung of the stool, his eyes still, his coffee cup cold and empty on the counter behind him, he radiated the same aura of unyielding solitude as in almost all of our encounters.

"Oh, I'm getting along," I answered, in spite of my sense that he wasn't expecting a response. "How about you?" These colloquial formalities, empty but safe, provided a comfortable way to continue the conversation.

"Nothing new," he said. He blinked, twisted around a little, verified that he'd finished his coffee, and turned his back to the bar again. He glanced at the greasy-looking clock on the opposite wall. "Half an hour more and I'm through."

I saw that it was 7:30. What work was he doing that would be over at eight o'clock?

"That policeman was right," he said after a long silence. "He didn't go back to Tuc.u.man. My father-in-law is sure of that."

Morales spoke naturally, as if we were continuing an uninterrupted conversation, one of those where you don't have to name names because everybody knows who it is you're talking about. "That policeman" was Baez, "my father-in-law" was the father of his deceased wife, and the person who "didn't go back to Tuc.u.man" was Gomez.

"I'm here on Thursdays. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I'm in the Const.i.tution Square station. Tuesdays and Fridays, Retiro." Every now and then, as he spoke, his eyes followed a pa.s.serby. "That's my schedule this month. I'll change it in September. I change it every month."

A rasping voice came over the public address system, drawing out words and swallowing s's, to announce the imminent departure of the 7:40 express to Moron from Track 4. Although I had no intention of taking that train-I didn't want to stand up all the way-the final call seemed like an opportune excuse for me to begin my farewells. Morales's voice stopped me; once again, he plunged into his subject without preliminaries.

"The day he killed her, Liliana made me tea with lemon," he began. I noticed that he was using the verb "to kill" in the third person singular. There was no more "they killed her" or "she was killed," because now, in his mind, the murderer had a face and a name. "'Coffee's bad for you, you have to drink less of it,' she said. I told her she was right. I liked the way she fretted about me."

I suspected that I was going to miss not only the local to Castelar, due to depart in ten minutes, but also several later trains.

"Besides, if you had ever seen her ..." He stared intently at a short, young guy who was pa.s.sing in front of the bar but ruled him out immediately and looked around for another possibility. "Whenever my father watched a fashion show or a beauty contest on television, he'd say that the only way to tell whether those girls were really beautiful or not would be to see them when they got out of bed in the morning, without makeup. I never told her this, but the first thing I did when I woke up every morning was to look at her to see if the old man's theory held up. And do you know, he was right? At least when it came to Liliana."

The dreadful voice came through the loudspeakers again to announce the 7:55 train to Castelar, making all stops. I recalled the young woman's features, and I thought he wasn't exaggerating about her beauty. By then, I was just about guaranteed to get home extremely late, but I didn't feel like moving quite yet-at least, not until I could put a name to the emotion I felt, to the feeling that was steadily growing inside me. Compa.s.sion? Sorrow? No. It was something else, but I couldn't manage to identify it.

"You know what's the worst of all?"

I looked at him. I didn't know what to say.

"It's that I'm forgetting her."

His voice quavered. I didn't make the mistake of interrupting him.

"I think about her. I think and think about her, all day long. I wake up during the night remembering her, and I stay awake remembering her. But what's happening is that I tend to remember the same things. The same images. So what am I really remembering? Her, or the memory of her I've built up in the little more than a year that she's been dead?"

Poor guy. Why couldn't I get past that "poor guy" in my thoughts about him? It was a worthless label.

"I thought about killing myself, you know? Sometimes I get up in the morning and ask myself why the h.e.l.l I'm still alive."

At that point, I too was asking myself why I was still alive. How could I reply to him? And at the same time, how could I keep quiet after such a confession, in the face of such distress? I said the first-or only-thing that came to mind: "Maybe you're still alive so you can get your hands on the son of a b.i.t.c.h who killed her." Then I thought it over and felt obliged to add, as if distancing myself from his fanatical certainty, "Whether it's Gomez or somebody else."

Morales considered my response. Either automatically or methodically, he continued to look at the people pa.s.sing by on their way to the train platforms. After a while he answered me: "I think so. I think that's why."

We both fell silent. If these private stakeouts were what was keeping him alive, that was already a plus. In any case, however, his efforts were doomed to failure. If Gomez was innocent, he couldn't be blamed for anything. And if he was the murderer, it seemed to me very unlikely that we'd ever be able to arrest him. The guy knew he was being sought, and even if he was careless, it would be practically impossible to pick him out in that sea of people. Seen in this light, Ricardo Agustin Morales's stubborn trainstation vigils seemed touchingly naive.

I asked him, just to say something, "Do you still live in Palermo?"

"No. I still have the apartment, but I'm living in a rooming house in San Telmo. It's closer to my work and ... this," he added, as if he found it difficult to come up with a name for the extravagant hunt he was on.

I told him good-bye and a.s.sured him that I'd call him if there was any news. While we were shaking hands, he looked at the clock and saw that it was time for him to go, too. He took out a crumpled banknote and laid it on the bar. We went out together, but after a few steps he made it clear to me that he was going in the opposite direction. We shook hands again.

I walked to the platforms. At the entrance a guard punched my pa.s.s. Another train I could take was about to leave, this one an express to Flores, Liniers, and Moron, and then making all stops. There were no free seats, but I got on anyway. I'd decided that I had to get home as soon as possible. Although I wasn't completely sure, I thought I'd succeeded in identifying what I'd felt while I was listening to Morales.

It was envy. The love that man had known awakened enormous envy in me, an emotion beyond the pity I felt for him because his love had ended in tragedy. Clinging, not very gracefully, to one of the white hoops that hung over the aisle and swaying back and forth with the movements of the train, I knew I was going to walk home from the station and tell Marcela we had to talk and announce my decision to separate from her. She'd probably stare at me in surprise; I had no doubt that such a move would fall well outside the logical sequence of stages in the life she'd planned for herself. I was going to regret it, because I've never liked hurting other people, but I'd just come to the realization that I was hurting her more by staying with her.

When I got home, the table was set and Marcela was waiting for me. We talked until two in the morning. The next day, I put some things into a couple of suitcases and went looking for a rooming house. I took care, however, to avoid the neighborhood of San Telmo.

19.

More than two and a half years pa.s.sed from that day until Monday, April 23, 1972, at 4:45 in the afternoon, when the conductor Saturnino Petrucci hit the switch that closed the doors on the train departing from Track 2 of the Villa Luro station. Petrucci heard the whoosh and snap and saw the incredulous look on the face of a fat, matronly lady as the door slammed shut in front of her nose. Leaning half his body out of the car, the conductor caressed the b.u.t.ton with the lettering that read DEPARTURE SIGNAL, but he didn't press it; instead, he pressed the one marked OPEN. There was another pneumatic click, and all the doors in the train slid open again. Thrilled, the woman made a little skip from the platform to the car and sank down immediately into an empty seat.

Saturnino Petrucci, the conductor-gray uniform, thick salt-and-pepper mustache, imposing belly-congratulated himself on not having stooped to the gratuitous cruelty of leaving the fat lady huffing on the platform. How could it even have occurred to him to pull such a rotten trick? The answer to that question was embarra.s.sing, but extremely clear. It had occurred to him as a way of taking revenge. Not on the fat woman, whom he didn't know, but on the world in general. He wanted revenge on the world because he blamed it for the nasty mood he'd been in since the afternoon of the previous day, a Sunday, to be exact. And the proximate cause of his spleen had been nothing more or less than the latest defeat suffered by his favorite soccer team, the Racing Club de Avellaneda. In other words, he'd been on the point of causing a poor woman great inconvenience because of soccer, because of futbol, that eternal source of joy and torment.

Petrucci felt like an idiot for being so bitter about a soccer team's performance, but feeling like an idiot did nothing to relieve the bitterness. Almost the opposite, in fact; feeling like an idiot only deepened his gloom. A great load of illegitimate, dirty, and undeserved grief was too much to bear for even such a broad-shouldered, diehard soccer fan as he was. Wouldn't they ever return, the golden years of his youth, when Racing practically grew tired of winning championships? He considered himself a patient, undemanding man. He didn't want to be like those unbearable River Plate supporters, who needed victory after victory to be satisfied. He would have been content with much less. But even "Jose's team," the team managed by Juan Jose Pizzuti, was starting to become a distant memory. How many years had it been since Cardenas's goal and the World Cup? Five. Five long years. Would another five pa.s.s without a championship for Racing? Or another ten? Good G.o.d. He didn't even want to think about it, as if the mere thought might attract the evil eye and more bad luck.

That Monday had begun with all the repercussions of the previous day's defeat: the newspaper headlines, the jokes in the stationmaster's office, the mocking looks from a couple of engineers. The black fury that had risen in him, slowly distilled and barely contained, had almost turned the fat lady into his victim. He looked out the window. He'd be on this train until the end of the line-the Once station-and then he'd return on the express. He exhaled through his teeth. He'd reached the level of serenity necessary to spare the woman his senseless revenge, but his foul mood persisted. He didn't want to go home in such a bad temper, because he was a good father and a good husband. He therefore opted to work out his anger in the most honest way he knew: by going after fare dodgers.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed his ticket punch out of his belt, called out, "Tickets, pa.s.ses, riding permits," in a singsong voice, drawing out the last syllables of the words, and turned to the comparatively few pa.s.sengers in the car with him. Experienced at his job, he gave all the men a quick once-over. Women rarely traveled without a ticket. There were only six or seven scattered males sitting in the green leatherette seats. Several of those pa.s.sengers reached for their pockets, but two stood up and began to walk down the aisle to the car behind them. In no hurry, the conductor punched a young mother's white-and-orange ticket; he didn't need to follow the fugitives with his eyes. A quick glance told him that one of them was wearing a sheepskin coat and the other, a short fellow with black hair, a blue jacket. The train was slowing down. Thanking an old man who showed him his pa.s.s, Petrucci made his way to the doors, inserted a key into the panel, pressed the OPEN b.u.t.ton, and stepped down onto the platform in the Floresta station. The only thing he had any interest in doing there was to locate the two deadbeat riders, who'd temporarily scuttled out of his sight. He spotted one of them right away: the guy in the sheepskin coat got off the train, played dumb, walked over to a tree, and leaned against it. Petrucci favored him with his indulgence. The punk had left his train, and that was enough for the conductor. But what about the other one, the little p.e.c.k.e.r in the blue jacket? Where was he? Petrucci felt the fury that had simmered inside him all day long boil up again. Was this twerp trying to be a wise guy? He didn't find the conductor's fierce aspect and obvious experience sufficiently intimidating? He felt safe simply because he'd moved to another car? In short, he was taking him for an a.s.shole? Perfect.

Petrucci closed the doors, activated the departure signal, waited for the train to start moving, and released the door he'd blocked with his foot. Then, sensing that it would be a good idea for him to have his hands free, he put away his ticket punch and the key to the door control panel. He began to walk through the car, swaying slightly from the effects of inertia. When he got to the next car, a glance sufficed to tell him that the object of his search wasn't in it. Petrucci went on to the car after that one, but the blue jacket wasn't there, either. The conductor smiled. The idiot had parked his sorry a.s.s in the last car. The door screeched as Petrucci flung it open, and there he was: sitting on the left, the picture of innocence, and looking out the window as if nothing at all was going on. Thrusting out his chest and swinging his shoulders, Petrucci walked down the aisle to him. He stopped beside the young man's seat and murmured gravely, "Ticket. "

Why did this dumba.s.s insist on acting like he, Saturnino Petrucci, was the imbecile? Who did he think he was fooling with that surprised look, that sudden start, that pantomime, I'm looking in this pocket, I'm looking in this other one, I'm acting upset because I can't find the thing, I'm clicking my tongue to show I'm worried? Did he think the conductor hadn't seen him run out of the fourth car before they stopped at Floresta?

"I'm sorry, sir, I can't find it."

Sir, my a.s.s, Petrucci thought. He gazed at the young man tenderly and said to him, in the tone of a stern father, "I'm going to have to fine you, little buddy."

And then something happened. Well, right, things always happen. In this instance, "something happened" means that the subsequent conduct of one of the persons involved in the dispute had significant consequences for the story the author of this book is trying to tell. The young man rose to his feet, drew himself up, frowned, looked the conductor in the eyes, and said, "Then you better fine your mama, you fat s.h.i.t, because I don't have a f.u.c.king penny."

Petrucci was surprised, but his surprise came wrapped in joy. The kid was a gift from heaven. Racing Club, his glorious team, had gone down to defeat yesterday. His colleagues had spent a good part of today making fun of his sorrow. But this impertinent, foul-mouthed young man was giving him the possibility of unleashing the dark feelings that had been growing in him. He raised an arm and placed it firmly on the kid's shoulder. "Don't act smart. You're going to get off the train with me in Flores, young midget, and then we'll see how smart you are about paying the fine."

"The only midget here is your d.i.c.k, larda.s.s." The boy was looking at him furiously. Later, Petrucci would say he was caught off guard, which was not at all true. The conductor guessed, perceived, almost wished that the kid would start a ruckus. But the blow the little s.h.i.t dealt him was so swift and so well aimed that it landed unblocked, flush on his nose, and blinded him for an instant. The kid shook his hand a little, as if he'd hurt it; later, the doctors would diagnose a metacarpal fracture. He twisted himself slightly in order to get into the aisle and elude the conductor's voluminous body. But when he'd just about escaped, he felt a brutish hand seize the collar of his blue jacket and spin him around deftly, so that he was facing the near window. Then another hand grabbed him from behind, by the belt, and both hands lifted him clear of the floor. As the final step in the sequence, the hands slung him against the aluminum frame of the window, which shattered into fragments under the impact of his forehead. He was a st.u.r.dy kid. Although stunned, he remained upright, and now he was free of the conductor's grasp. He turned toward him and put up his fists, ready to fight. Maybe if the man in the gray uniform had been somewhat lighter, or if he hadn't belonged to the boxing federation in his youth, or if Racing had won the previous afternoon, the fare-dodging lad would have suffered no further damage in their scuffle. But as none of those was the case, he first received a violent right uppercut in the pit of his stomach that bent him in half, and then a straight right to the jaw that left him dazed. For dessert, Petrucci served him a left hook under the ribs that made tears spring from his eyes.

At that moment, the train stopped. Happy and proud, Petrucci accepted the applause of the small crowd that had gathered since the stop in Floresta. He turned the key in the panel to open the doors and exited with the deadbeat rider, practically pulling him off the train by the hair. Petrucci walked him to the police post that was almost at the other end of the platform. A few curious people stuck their heads out of the doors along the way as they saw the conductor pa.s.s, driving the stunned young man ahead of him. Petrucci spotted the duty sergeant, greeted him with a nod, and gave him a succinct account of what had just occurred. The sergeant took the kid into custody.

"Here's what we'll do," the policeman said, after cuffing his prisoner to a heavy wooden chair. "I'll send him over to the station to check for prior arrests. He probably doesn't have any, but I want to f.u.c.k with him for a while. He's got to learn to show some respect, the little piece of s.h.i.t."

"Sounds good," Petrucci said, touching his nose for the first time. It was seriously starting to hurt.