CELIA TAKES ANOTHER PHOTO from the box.
“And this must’ve been, let’s see hold on, I bought that sundress … Can’t be long after your mother left, that summer … Who knows maybe you’re in the photo too? It doesn’t bother you if I say it does it Fefe?”
In the photo are Celia and my mother, the former in a dress blown tight against her body by a wind the photo has captured for ever in sculptural folds; the second — Mamá—in a one-piece, navy-blue bathing costume with white bows and little flounces, which she was still wearing ten years later; and in the middle Darío Ezcurra, democratically embracing them both. Celia and Darío are looking at the camera, but Mamá only has eyes for him, for the almost condescending smile, for the boastful eyes of a kid staring the future fearlessly in the face because life is definitely female, for the bronzed chest and flat stomach above the scarlet trunks — the only thing in the photo (including the sky and the water of the unmistakeable lagoon) that hasn’t faded to the uniform sepia of old Kodacolors. I set it on the uneven stack forming at the side of my bed, documenting Ezcurra at his high-school graduation in an ill-cut suit that narrows his shoulders, dancing with a youthful, spellbound Clara Benoit; Ezcurra in black polo neck and brown jacket with a lean Batata Sacamata and an undyed Bermejo, posing by farming machinery and stands under construction, beneath a poster that reads EXPOTENC; Ezcurra blowing out the thirty — Celia specifies — candles in the reception room at the Yacht Club; Ezcurra and his Mamá, wrapped up warm for winter, having chocolate and churros at the bazaar on patron saint’s day; Ezcurra in bermudas and multicoloured polo shirt with Celia and the Don Ángel of my childhood keeping an eye on the sausages on the barbecue of the house that now belongs to Mati … Celia insists I keep them and I’m still too weak to argue — a meagre haul, something to show when I’m asked “What have you been up to in that town all this time … What did you say its name was?” What else? Or did the hope of winning the ultimate prize still nestle within me, secretly, ashamed to show itself? Ezcurra’s last words, before dying: “My son, my son” (yes, but which one?). A secret meeting, in Rosario, my Grandma Delia telling my Grandma Emily (perhaps in English for security’s sake): “We have to discuss our grandson’s future.” Wasn’t this what I was still hoping for, what I’d really come here to look for? Wasn’t it for this hope that I’d kept putting off my return?
“I DO APOLOGISE,” Professor Gagliardi says without looking at me, which he’s hardly done since we began our chat. If it weren’t for the additional cup and the sugar bowl, which, out of deference to my dislike of saccharine, he’s brought over to the chair that serves as a makeshift table, he might be talking to himself, and answering his own questions, “for not seeing you sooner. Had I known who you were, I would have opened the doors of my humble abode to you from day one, sparing you the gruelling task of rubbing shoulders with that filthy, lying rabble in your brave quest for the truth. I understand dear boy, there’s no need for you to explain, you were right to conceal your true identity, if they’d known you were Darío Ezcurra’s son, every door would have been slammed in your face. What’s more, this way you’ve been able to see for yourself that everything I’ve been telling you about the people of this town is true. Now, I’m glad you’re here. Because twenty years is too long to bear the weight of such a secret. Many times, fearing I’d take it with me to the grave, I’ve been on the brink of succumbing to the temptation … But to whom? Who in this town, was or is worthy of knowing the truth? Now, I’m glad I waited, now that you’re here in front of me, and through your own, I can remember the unmistakeable features of your unfortunate father, when he died he must have been around your … See dear boy? I’m seldom wrong. That’s why you came to me isn’t it? So that I’ll show you the key to the apparently inexplicable doings of Malihuel’s chief of police, who against all logic, against the deep-seated habits of his profession, even against his own interests … I know what no one knows, because I heard it from his own lips, in the only conversation we had after those terrible events, a few days before his departure, in the name of our old relationship, Benjamín, he had the audacity to say. I didn’t have the nerve to refuse. Ethics and let’s call it professional curiosity were at odds in me, and curiosity won. I also needed to know, needed it for myself, how a man I’d once trusted had been capable of such a thing; I wanted to know where I’d gone wrong. We met at Los Tocayos, at the table where we used to play chess and called ours. It was no more than two weeks since we’d last met, but it was enough time to have changed him irreversibly. He was no longer fit for anything other than setting up a kiosk and dying — which is what he eventually did — for keeping order among the shelves of chocolates and biscuits; a defeated body, barely sustained from morning till night by the habit of contempt and ill feeling, and the secret hope perhaps that some hapless robber would hold up his kiosk and force him to use the forty-five hidden under the cigarette cartons. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Colonel Carca, Demetrio Carca. There’s no reason you should: house-plunderer, kidnapper and blackmailer, torturer, rapist, serial killer, thief of babies and corpses — nothing special; just your run of the mill career soldier in those days. They were from the same town in the north, the Superintendent and he, they grew up and went to school together, and remained friends. He was the one who called the Superintendent from Rosario and demanded he indulge Rosas Paz. The Superintendent said it couldn’t be done — because of the people, the neighbours; the colonel, who was an old hand in these matters, said it’d be a piece of cake. All done in a joking, matey tone of voice, you know how they talk to each other, all comrades in arms: Go on, you fat wanker, shift your arse and pick him up for me will you, and the other, You think it’s as easy as that? If you’re the big man here, why don’t you come and do it? One thing led to another, and eventually to what the Superintendent ended up confessing to me that day.”
GUIDO’S mortally offended.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Don’t you trust me?”
I prop myself up slightly in bed and adjust my pillows. I could murder a cigarette.
“Maybe at first. I decided not to tell anyone, and I stuck to my plan. Then it got to be the other way round. I was frightened by your loyalty. At the first bad word against Darío Ezcurra, or Delia … If you’d known who they were to me, you’d have leapt to their defence, to my defence, you’d’ve given me away. Guido, a drunk who raised his voice to me, you broke three of his ribs. What more can I tell you?” He grumbles but then relents. Perhaps because it’s sincere my explanation seems to satisfy him.