Two days later I learned that there was a dice game outside of town. It was a clandestine game. I got a telephone call from the worker at the club who never spoke. He gave me the address and said the game started at ten. I would go two or three times a week and always lost. Never very large sums. Twenty, thirty thousand. My heart would start beating hard whenever I picked up the shaker and started to turn it over. Chaos was knocking against the leather sides, I knew, and it was chaos that rolled across the green felt in the shape of those two small cubes. Then the chaos would settle for a moment into a fleeting motionlessness, and then the hands of the worker, who never spoke, erased that moment when he gathered up the dice. It was like an insane force screaming suddenly and then returning to a vague sound. I thought about the dice when I looked at the clouds. They took on shapes that lasted a second, and then, suddenly, with an apparent slowness that confused the eye, they changed. I always lost. On April twenty-third, at midnight, in the rain, I took a taxi from the club, went home, and took out three ten-thousand-peso bills. I had already lost three. I went back in the same taxi. The city, through the windows of the taxi, dripping water, dissolved into a mass of gleaming patches. By April twenty-eighth, I had a hundred thousand pesos left, besides the sixty I was keeping for Delicia in the tea tin. On the twenty-ninth, at three in the afternoon, the club worker called me on the phone. He said that on May second there would be a clandestine baccarat game.
I asked if he was inviting me.
I am inviting you counselor, said the worker. But it’s a large game. Five people are coming in for it. With you it’ll be six.
I said I would go. But he didn’t hang up.
Then he said, I should tell you, counselor, that to play you’ll have to stake a hundred thousand.
How much? I said.
A hundred thousand, said the worker.
A hundred thousand? I said. Who’s going to stake the banco, Rockefeller?
The worker laughed.
Those are the conditions, counselor, he said. I’m very sorry, but those are my orders.
Give me the address, I said.
I can’t give it out over the phone, counselor, said the worker.
Come to my house, then, I said.
He arrived half an hour later and gave me the address. I told him to stay for coffee, and he sat down in an armchair in the study. It was two guys from the Rosario wholesale market, who were coming in specially for the game: one was called Capúa and the other Méndez. Then he named three others, from Esperanza. It’s a no-limit game, said the worker. The bets are for millions of pesos.
I asked about a guarantee as regards the police, and he said that without guarantees they wouldn’t have the game. But that in any case he would call me on the second to confirm. Then he was gone. He left an odor of cologne that I wouldn’t get rid of for the rest of the afternoon and the next day. Even after I opened the window it was still there. It felt like the whole house was saturated with it. I watched the rain through the window until Delicia brought me the mate. She had on one of my wife’s sweaters. It was fitting well now. She asked if I wasn’t planning to shave, and I said that it was possible that one of these days I would shave. Then she went to leave, and I said she should stay. She asked what for.
Just because I want you to stay, I said.
She stared at me and I had to look away. Then I started talking.
Delicia, I said. You know that gambling is my obsession. That if I can’t gamble, I can’t live. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but that’s how it is. I’ve been invited to a large baccarat game. With any luck, I could win millions of pesos. I have a few systems, and if they’re not perfect, my odds are as good as anyone else’s. It all depends on luck. So, from what I got with the mortgage, the last of what I have, there’s only a hundred thousand left. Unfortunately, to play in this game you have to stake at least a hundred thousand. That means I can’t show up with less than a hundred thousand, but it also means that if a hundred thousand is the minimum, that amount is just enough to get started. I think I need to take a hundred and fifty, or more. At best, anything I could get together from now till the second. And all I can get together between today and the second is the hundred thousand left from the mortgage. There’s also the sixty thousand in the tea tin. That’s yours. You don’t have any obligation to me. I want to borrow them from you. To be honest, if I lose them, it’s going to be very difficult to get them back. Impossible, practically. Here’s what could happen: they could take the house, sell it, and give me what’s left over. But before that could happen, lots of time will go by. Under those conditions, would you want to loan me the sixty thousand? Again, it would be pretty difficult to get them back to you if I lost.
I told you to keep it and use whatever you needed, said Delicia.
I stood up and kissed her forehead.
Little angel, I said. God love you.
So I waited for May second. It rained every day but the first of the month. And on the first, at around nine at night, it started again. I kept busy writing my eighth essay, Chic Young: A Modern Hero. I drew mostly from Blondie, but used a lot of material from Colonel Potterby and the Duchess as well. My thesis was that, bearing in mind the observations he had made about the daily life of the middle class, anyone else would have committed suicide, or at least would have chosen an easier form, the tragedy. As an epigraph I used what I had written a few days before about comedy and tragedy. I spent all of May first writing out a clean copy, and by the time it was dark out I felt euphoric. I asked Delicia if she wanted to eat out, and she said that was stupid, that it was raining and we could eat just as well in the kitchen, as usual, without taking the table into the courtyard. I was about to say that I hadn’t meant it like that, but it didn’t seem worth it. In any event, she was right.
After dinner I helped wash the dishes. When we finished, I took out the five decks of cards, shuffled them, wrote Delicia’s name and mine in the upper corner of a clean sheet of paper and separated them with a vertical line. For the rest of the night we guessed hands, and so accurately that long stretches of time would pass before we changed turns. Next thing we knew, it was morning, and we went to bed.
The next day I was woken up by knocking at the door. Delicia said there was someone asking for me. I guessed it was the worker from the game. I told her to have him wait in the study. I got dressed, washed my face, and went down. In the study I saw a fat man with gray-streaked hair. He had his back to me, and the skin on his neck was dark. When he heard me come in he turned. It was el Negro Lencina. For a second we just stared at each other.
You’ve gained weight, Negro, I said.
We shook hands.
Luisito killed his wife, said el Negro.
I sat down at the desk and offered him a seat on the leather couch. Then I asked if he wanted coffee, and he said no.
Alright, I said, looking at him. Luisito killed his wife. But Luisito who?
Luisito, said el Negro. Luisito Fiore.
Fiore? I said. When?
Last night, said el Negro, in Barrio Roma. Pumped two shots in her head. He’s totally crazy.
I insisted that he have coffee, and finally he agreed. I shouted to Delicia to bring some coffee. Then I sat back down behind the desk.
Two shots, I said. In the head.