“I come from Ayacucho but lived in Lima since I was a boy. I was transferred here a year ago.”
The pathologist laughed.
“From Lima to Ayacucho? You must have behaved very badly, Señor Chacaltana …” Then he cleared his throat. “If … you'll permit me to say so.”
The Associate District Prosecutor had never misbehaved. He had done nothing bad, he had done nothing good, he had never done anything not stipulated in the statutes of his institution.
“I requested the transfer. My mother is here, and I had not been back in twenty years. But now that there is no terrorism, everything is quiet, isn't it?”
The pathologist stopped in front of a door across from a room filled with women in labor in the obstetrics wing. He transferred the chocolate to his other hand and took a key out of his pocket.
“Quiet, of course.”
He opened the door and they went in. Posadas turned on the white neon lights, which blinked for a while before they went on. One of the bulbs continued to flicker intermittently. In the office was a table covered with a sheet. And beneath the sheet was a shape. Chacaltana gave a start. He prayed it was nothing but a table.
“I … only came to receive the relevant docu …”
“The certificate, yes.”
Dr. Posadas closed the door and walked to a desk. He began to rummage through papers.
“I thought it would be here … Just a moment, please …”
He continued rummaging. Chacaltana could not take his eyes off the sheet. The doctor noticed and asked:
“Have you seen it?”
“No! I … took the statement of the officers in charge.”
“The police? They didn't even see it.”
“What?”
“They told the owner of the place to put the body in a bag before they went in. I don't know what they could have said.”
“Ah.”
Posadas stopped rummaging through his papers for a moment. He turned to the prosecutor.
“You should see it.”
Chacaltana thought the proceedings were taking too long.
“I only need the rep …”
But the doctor walked to the table and lifted the veil. The burned body looked at them. It had clenched teeth but little else in that black mass was recognizable as being of human origin. It did not smell like a dead body. It smelled like kerosene lamps. The light flickered.
“They didn't leave us much to work with, huh?” Posadas smiled.
Chacaltana thought again about going to see his mother. He tried to recover his concentration. He wiped away perspiration. It was not the same perspiration as before. It was cold.
“Why is it kept in obstetrics?”
“Lack of space. Besides, it doesn't matter. The morgue doesn't have a refrigerator anymore. It broke down in the blackouts.”
“The blackouts ended years ago.”
“Not in our morgue.”
Posadas went back to the papers on his desk. Chacaltana walked around the table, trying to look elsewhere. The burning was irregular. Although the face still had certain characteristics of a face, the two legs had become a single dark extension. Toward the top of the remaining side were some twisted protuberances, like branches of a fossilized bush. Chacaltana felt a wave of nausea but tried to disguise something so unprofessional. Posadas stared at him with slanted, suspicious little eyes, like the eyes of a rat.
“Are you going to carry out the investigation? What about the military cops?”
“The gentlemen of the armed forces,” the prosecutor corrected, “have no reason to intervene. This case does not fall under military jurisdiction.”
Posadas seemed surprised to hear it. He said dryly:
“All cases fall under military jurisdiction.”
There was something challenging in Posadas's tone. Chacaltana attempted to assert his authority.
“We still need to verify the facts in the case. Technically, this may even turn out to be an accident …”
“An accident?”
He gave a dry laugh that made him cough and looked at the corpse as if to share the joke with him. He tossed the chocolate wrapper on the floor and took out a pack of cigarettes. He offered one to the prosecutor, who refused with a gesture. The pathologist lit a cigarette, exhaled the smoke with another cough, and said in a serious tone:
“A male apparently between forty and fifty years old. White — at least, whitish. Two days ago he was taller.”
The Associate District Prosecutor felt obliged to display professional distance. He felt cold. Tremulously he said:
“Any … clue as to the identity of the deceased?”
“There are no physical marks or personal effects left. If he was carrying his national ID, it must be in there.”
Chacaltana observed the body that seemed to dissolve as he looked at it. A black paste saturated his memory.
“Why do you discount an accident?”
Posadas seemed to be waiting for the question with indulgent pride, like a teacher with the dunce of the class. He left his desk, took up a position beside the table, and began to explain as he pointed at various parts of the body:
“First, he was doused with kerosene and set on fire. There are remains of fuel all over the body …”
“He might have perished in a fire. Someone was afraid to report it and hid the body. The campesinos tend to fear that the police …”
“But that wasn't enough,” Posadas continued, apparently not hearing him. “He was burned even more.”
He allowed the silence to heighten the dramatic effect of his words. His rat's eyes were waiting for Chacaltana's question:
“What do you mean more?”
“No one is left like this just because he's been set on fire, Señor Prosecutor. Tissues resist. Many people survive even total burns by fuel. Automobile accidents, forest fires … But this …”
He inhaled smoke and exhaled it over the table, at the height of the black face. The man lying there seemed to be smoking. The light flickered. The doctor concluded:
“I've never seen anybody so burned. I've never seen anything so burned.”
He went back to his papers without covering the deceased. The report he was looking for was under a lamp. He handed it to the prosecutor. It had chocolate smears at one corner of the page. Chacaltana glanced at it rapidly and verified that it did not have three copies, but he thought he could make them himself, it would not be a serious breach. He waved good-bye. He wanted to get out of there quickly.
“There's something else,” the pathologist stopped him. “Do you see this? These stubs like claws on the side? Those are fingers. They twist like that because of the heat. They're only on one side. In fact, if you observe carefully, the body looks unbalanced. At first glance it's difficult to see on a body in this condition, but the man was missing an arm.”
“A one-armed man.”
Chacaltana put the paper in his briefcase and closed it.
“No. He wasn't one-armed. At least not until Tuesday. There are traces of blood around the shoulder.”
“He was injured, perhaps?”
“Señor Prosecutor, his right arm was removed. They tore it out by the roots or cut it off with an ax, or maybe a saw. They went through bone and flesh from one side to the other. That isn't easy to do. It's as if a dragon attacked him.”
It was true. The part corresponding to the shoulder seemed sunken, as if there were no longer an articulation there, as if there were no longer anything to articulate. Chacaltana asked himself how they could have done it. Then he preferred not to ask himself more questions. The light flickered again. The prosecutor broke the silence:
“Well, I suppose all this is recorded in the report …”
“Everything. Including the matter of the forehead. Have you seen his forehead?”
Chacaltana tried to ask a question in order not to see the forehead. He tried to think of a subject. The physician did not take his eyes off him. Finally, he lied: