“He knows everything,” Rigoberto assured her. “Arnillas is in touch with him and keeps him up to date. They speak every day, he told me.”
Dr. Claudio Arnillas, Ismael Carrera’s attorney for many years, was now Rigoberto’s intermediary with his former employer. According to him, Ismael and Armida were traveling through Europe and would return to Lima very soon. He assured him that the plans of Ismael Carrera’s sons to annul the marriage and have their father declared incompetent to head the insurance company on the grounds of incapacity and senile dementia were doomed to the most resounding failure. All Ismael had to do was appear and submit to the relevant medical and psychological tests, and their accusations would collapse.
“But then, I don’t understand why he doesn’t do that right now, Dr. Arnillas,” exclaimed Don Rigoberto. “For Ismael this scandal has to be even more painful than it is for us.”
“Do you know why?” explained Dr. Arnillas, adopting a Machiavellian expression and hooking his thumbs behind the psychedelic-colored suspenders holding up his trousers. “Because he wants the twins to keep spending what they don’t have: the money they must be borrowing all over the place to pay their army of shyster lawyers and the bribes they’re coughing up for the police and judges. It’s more than likely they’re being skinned alive, and he wants them completely ruined. Señor Carrera planned everything down to the smallest detail. Do you see?”
Don Rigoberto saw very clearly now that Ismael Carrera’s rancor toward the hyenas, from the day he discovered that in their eagerness to inherit everything they were waiting impatiently for his death, was unhealthy and irreversible. He never would have imagined the peaceable Ismael capable of a vengeful hatred of this magnitude, least of all toward his own children. Would Fonchito ever desire his death? And by the way, where was that boy?
“He went out with his friend Pezzuolo, I think to the movies,” Lucrecia said. “Haven’t you noticed that for the past few days he’s seemed better? As if he’d forgotten about Edilberto Torres.”
Yes, he hadn’t seen that mysterious character for more than a week. At least that’s what he’d told them, and Don Rigoberto had never caught his son in a lie.
“All of this wrecked the trip we’d planned so carefully,” Doña Lucrecia said with a sigh, suddenly becoming sad. “Spain, Italy, France. What a shame, Rigoberto. I’d been dreaming about it. And do you know why? It’s your fault, you kept telling me about it in that detailed, obsessive way. The places we’d visit, the museums, the concerts, the theaters, the restaurants. Well, what can you do except be patient.”
Rigoberto agreed. “We’ve only postponed it, my love,” he reassured her, kissing her hair. “Since we can’t go in the spring, we’ll go in the fall. A very nice time of year too, with the trees turning golden and the leaves carpeting the streets. For operas and concerts, it’s the best time of year.”
“Do you think this mess with the hyenas will be over by October?”
“They don’t have any money, and they’re spending the little they have trying to annul the marriage and have their father declared incompetent,” Rigoberto said. “They won’t succeed and they’ll be ruined. Do you know something? I never imagined that Ismael was capable of doing what he’s doing. First, marrying Armida. And second, planning so unforgiving a revenge against Miki and Escobita. It’s true that it’s impossible to know anyone else completely, people are unfathomable.”
They spent a long time talking as it grew dark and the lights in the city came on. They could no longer see the ocean, and the sky and the night were filled with lights that seemed like fireflies. Lucrecia told Rigoberto she’d read an essay Fonchito had written for school that had made an impression on her. She couldn’t get it out of her head.
“Did he show it to you himself?” Rigoberto asked pointedly. “Or were you snooping through his desk?”
“Well, it was right there, in plain sight, and it made me curious. That’s why I read it.”
“It’s not right for you to read his things without his permission and behind his back.” Rigoberto seemed to be reprimanding her.
“It left me thinking,” she continued, ignoring him. “It’s a half-philosophical, half-religious text. About liberty and evil.”
“Do you have it handy?” Rigoberto was interested. “I’d like to take a look at it too.”
“I made a copy for you, Mr. Nosy,” said Lucrecia. “I left it in your study.”
Don Rigoberto shut himself in with his books, records, and etchings to read Fonchito’s composition. “Liberty and Evil” was very short. It maintained that God, when He created man, probably had decided he wasn’t an automaton like plants and animals, whose lives were programmed from birth to death, but a creature endowed with free will, capable of deciding his actions on his own. This was how liberty was born. But this faculty with which man was endowed allowed human beings to choose evil, even, perhaps, to create it, doing things that contradicted all that emanated from God, and this represented the devil’s reason for being, the basis of his existence. Therefore evil was the child of liberty, a human creation. Which didn’t mean that liberty was evil in and of itself; no, it was a gift that had permitted great scientific and technical discoveries, social progress, the elimination of slavery and colonialism, the birth of human rights, etcetera. But it was also the origin of the terrible, never-ending cruelties and suffering that accompanied progress like its shadow.
Don Rigoberto was concerned. It occurred to him that all the ideas in the essay were somehow associated with the appearances of Edilberto Torres and his fits of weeping. Or was the essay the result of Fonchito’s conversation with Father O’Donovan? Had his son seen Pepín again? Just then Justiniana burst into his study, very excited. She’d come to tell him that the “newlywed” was on the phone.
“That’s what he said I should tell you, Don Rigoberto,” the girl explained. “‘Tell him the newlywed is calling, Justiniana.’”
“Ismael!” Don Rigoberto jumped up from his desk. “Hello? Hello? Is that you? Are you in Lima? When did you get back?”
“I haven’t returned yet, Rigoberto,” said a playful voice, which he recognized as belonging to his boss. “I’m calling from a place, but naturally I won’t say where it is, because a little bird told me your phone is bugged by you know who. A very beautiful place, so eat your heart out with envy.”
He burst into very joyful laughter and Rigoberto, alarmed, suddenly suspected that yes, his ex-boss and friend was in his dotage, hopelessly senile. Were the hyenas capable of paying one of those agencies to interfere with his phone? Impossible, the gray matter couldn’t take that in. Or perhaps it could.
“Well, well, what more could you wish for,” he replied. “Better for you, Ismael. I see that your honeymoon is going full speed ahead and you still have some wind left. I mean, at least you’re still alive. I’m glad, old man.”
“I’m in fine shape, Rigoberto. Let me tell you something: I’ve never felt better or happier than I have during this time. And that’s the truth.”
“Fantastic, then,” Rigoberto repeated. “Well, I don’t want to give you bad news, least of all by telephone. But I suppose you’re aware of what you’ve caused here and the trouble that’s raining down on us.”
“Claudio Arnillas keeps me up to date with plenty of details and sends me newspaper clippings. I enjoy reading that I’ve been kidnapped and am suffering from senile dementia. It seems you and Narciso have been complicit in my abduction, isn’t that right?” He burst into laughter again — long, loud, and very sarcastic.