The Secret in Their Eyes (18 page)

Báez and I hadn’t seen each other in two years, not since Judge Fortuna Lacalle’s delirium regarding his imminent appointment to the Appellate Court had subsided.

“All right, my friend. The information I’m about to give you isn’t to be repeated. These days, ever since they let all those guys go free, Devoto’s a real mess and dangerous to boot.”

I indicated my assent. I knew the policeman wasn’t going to waste time with references to the general chaos that both of us accepted as an essential aspect of the reality we were doomed to live in, mutually assuming that its complexity was beyond our understanding. Báez went on, “This seems to be more or less what went down. You all transferred Gómez to Devoto in June 1972, right? They put him in one of the prison barracks … I don’t know … let’s say it was Number 7. A few weeks later, our friend Gómez pulls a Gómez: he starts a fight in the barracks and almost gets himself killed. It seems he decided to act like a badass with the two least offensive guys in the barracks and got the shit kicked out of him.”

As I listened to Báez, I felt a certain pleasure at the thought that Gómez had suffered because he’d made a bad decision.

“But this Gómez apparently has a special guardian angel. Instead of getting stabbed, say, forty-five times and croaking on the floor of the shower room, he manages to give one of the guys attacking him a bad cut with his own knife. A big commotion ensues. The other prisoners are afraid their comrade’s going to bleed to death, so they call the guards, and the guards take away the wounded guy
and
Gómez. He’s not exactly unscathed, but he’s saved himself. And here we reach the first curious feature of this affair, because you know where the whole incident is reported, the fight, the injured inmates, the big ruckus? Nowhere. Two prisoners, Gómez and the other guy, are pretty badly hurt, but neither of them is taken to the hospital. They’re treated right there, in the prison infirmary. There’s not a single administrative report, and not one statement is taken, not from any guard and not from any inmate, either. What there is—the only thing there is in Gómez’s file—is an order of transfer to another barracks, dated two weeks later, when he’s released from the infirmary. You’re probably thinking, that’s only logical, because if he gets sent back to the barracks he was in before, they’ll make mincemeat out of him. Well, maybe so, maybe not. If he has to return to the barracks where they beat him up, maybe
he’s a lot less cocky when he gets there, and maybe he becomes somebody’s sweetheart for the sake of protection, and everything’s peaceful. In any case, it doesn’t go down like that. What winds up happening is he’s put in the barracks reserved for political prisoners. Now, this was the point where I really got confused. What relation could Gómez and his crime of passion have with militant leftists, with the FAR and the ERP and the Montoneros? And on top of that, political prisoners go before a special tribunal, they aren’t tried in ordinary criminal courts like the others, you follow me? Gómez’s case doesn’t have anything to do with that, I told myself.”

He paused to slosh around what was left of his coffee and swallow it in one gulp. The cup looked ridiculously small in his huge paw. I knew we’d eventually get to the heart of the matter. That was the difference between Báez and the other cops I knew: the others would have stopped their investigations right there, at the limit of the logical possibilities. Not Báez.

“All right,” he went on. “What I’ve told you so far was more or less easy to find out. From that point on, everything got more complicated. First of all, I know I mentioned the special tribunals, but I don’t know that much about them, I don’t have much contact with the antiguerrilla section. The guys doing that work have set up something like a separate clan. They strut around looking mysterious, if you know what I mean. Then, in
the second place, ever since the amnesty the other day, they’ve been tearing down the whole circus tent they put up, so for the time being, they’re out of work. And you know how it goes—in the middle of a big fucking mess like the one we’ve got, you can always find someone nostalgic and resentful who wants to tell you about the terrible shit that’s going on.”

He raised his hand to order another cup of coffee.

“Well. It seems the government set up a little intelligence center inside the prison. I’m confused about the details, and I don’t know if the unit was run by the secretary of intelligence or the Ministry of the Interior or the War Ministry. But it doesn’t make any difference, because the people involved in those kinds of operations come from all over, from many different departments. Anyway, they set up this little espionage thing inside the prison so they could keep an eye on the “cadres,” which is what they call the guerrillas. They were panicked by the thought that something like the breakout at Rawson Prison could happen there. You with me?”

It was like listening to the plot of a thriller, and Báez was an accomplished storyteller, but I still didn’t understand what all this had to do with Gómez, and vice versa. When I asked Báez that question, he said, “We’re getting there, my friend, we’re getting there. But if I don’t explain this first part, you won’t understand the rest. So the guy in charge of the intelligence operation in Devoto
Prison called himself Peralta. He tried to infiltrate some of his men into the political prisoners’ barracks. Risky thing to do, you had to be careful. It seems one or two of Peralta’s guys got fingered and returned to him as stiffs. Because of that, he had the bright idea of recruiting some ordinary prisoners for the job. Does that sound dangerous? It sure was, but not for him. In the worst case, one less prisoner. In the best, a direct eyewitness. It was almost like hooking up the damn ‘cadres’ to a microphone, you know? Like one of those little devices you see in spy movies. Are you following me? Gómez gets recruited while he’s in prison. None other than Peralta himself enlists him to do the spy work. And look, it wasn’t just him. It seems there were four or five of them in all, but I’m not sure.”

He paused for a moment while the waiter served us again.

“And this was where I had to ask myself why Gómez was picked to be one of the spies. That’s the question that bugged me. The rest, everything that came afterward, wasn’t so hard to figure out. Gómez must have carried out his assignment—after all, he’s a pretty bright guy, and cold as a statue when he’s not flying off the handle. A little gem like that doesn’t come along every day. All right, I don’t really know how much of a gem he was, but if he survived in that barracks until May, he must have been doing something right. Why not keep using him on the
outside? As for getting him out, that’s not a problem. No special procedure required, it just happens. The prisoners know there’s going to be an amnesty, and when they draw up the lists, they gladly include Gómez, with all the honors. And if they don’t, there’s still no problem, because Peralta’s people can just add his name. So in any case, he walks.”

Báez started to pay the check, but I stopped him and put some money on the table.

“But the real question goes back to before his release. What made this Peralta decide to employ Gómez? The first thing that caught his attention was the guy’s nerve, the way he went into the lion’s den practically doing the roaring himself. Secondly, as I said, it’s a free shot for Peralta; if things go bad, he loses nothing. And in the third place … are you ready for the best of all?”

Judging from the bitterness in the cop’s tone, “the best” was going to be, in fact, the worst.

“Here it is. If all the things I just told you weren’t enough to make the boss, Peralta, decide to use Gómez, once he asked for the particulars of the thug’s case and learned more about it, then he had no more doubts. Gómez became a top choice right away. The reason was there, Benjamín, there in the case file.”

Well, fuck,
I thought. Could what he was about to tell me be so bad he had to try to soften it by using my given name for the first time in his goddamn life?

“Using that kid was a brilliant way to fuck you over.”

His words absolutely confounded me. What could
I
have to do it? So far, Báez’s story had sounded logical. Depressing, but logical. But his last remark didn’t jibe with the rest, somehow. It was like a nightmare you don’t think is a nightmare at first and then it begins to turn into one at precisely the moment when it moves past the limits of logic and reason and becomes incomprehensible and disturbing.

“When I couldn’t find out anything more about Gómez, it occurred to me to try working from the other end, so I decided to check out his boss, the Peralta guy. It stood to reason that investigating a government intelligence operation inside a prison would be a little complicated, but actually it turned out to be not so hard. They’re still Argentines, after all, and if you scratch around a little, you realize everything’s cobbled together with wire. If it weren’t, Peralta’s description and his real name wouldn’t have been so easy to find out.”

The waiter picked up the money from the table and very slowly started to produce my change, as if trying to persuade me to let him have it as a tip. I dismissed him with a wave of my hand.

“It appears that he’s a person around your age, Chaparro. Bald, with a thick mustache—they say it’s like mine—and not very tall. He was skinny when he was younger, but now, I’m told, he’s moving toward obese.
And you know what? He worked in the Palace of Justice for several years. In an examining magistrate’s court. Have you guessed yet?”

It couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible.

“Yes, indeed. Think the worst, my friend. If you do, you’ll generally guess right. He worked with you in Examining Magistrate’s Court No. 41. He was the deputy clerk in the other clerk’s office until 1968, when he was indicted for illegal coercion and physical abuse of suspects in custody. Nothing came of the indictment, because it was quashed from above. The guy’s father-in-law seems to have carried a lot of weight—he was a colonel or a general or something like that—and he used it to get the guy a job in intelligence. Have you placed him yet? His name’s Romano.”

“No, it can’t be. What bad luck!” I said several minutes later, when I finally got over my fit of furious incredulity and accepted that what was happening was, in fact, happening.

Báez was looking at me, maybe waiting for me to let him have the two or three remaining pieces of the puzzle. I spoke about the two building workers and the brutal beating Sicora had given them, practically at Romano’s direction and under his orders. Báez listened to me with a mixture of surprise and curiosity, because he’d learned almost nothing about the matter at the time. He’d taken a few days off, days he’d had coming to him, and in his absence, Sicora and the other son of a bitch had handled things down at the police station. He wasn’t even sure that the police authorities had ever brought charges against Sicora, as I’d done against Romano in the Appellate Court. I corroborated Báez’s information about the indictment of my former colleague, namely that it had come to nothing. He asked me to wait a second, went to the back of the cafe, and talked for a few minutes on the public telephone. When he returned, he told me that
Sicora was dead. He’d died in a car crash on Highway 2 in 1971, so we wouldn’t be getting any further information from that source. He snorted and added, “Actually, we’re not going to get any further information from any source.”

That was the truth. With the amnesty in effect, there wasn’t any way of proceeding against Gómez. And getting involved with the Secretariat of Intelligence in order to prosecute Romano would be crazy and moreover useless. The two of them were untouchable.

It was all so ridiculous it almost made me feel like laughing, except that it was so evil it made me feel like crying. By bringing charges against Romano for illegal coercion and abuse, I’d given him a chance for a fabulous career—with the help of his fascist father-in-law—in the “Antisubversive Secret Service.” And in addition, heaven had granted the worthless bastard the opportunity to take revenge on me. He knew that case was mine, he knew I was trying to move it forward, and he figured that if he put the culprit under his protective wing, he’d eventually be able to place him beyond my reach for good. That’s what he’d done, and I hadn’t even noticed, not until it was unequivocally too late.

“Poor guy.”

Báez’s two words floated above the table for a second before they evaporated and silence returned. I didn’t reply, but I understood whom the policeman meant.
He wasn’t talking about Romano or Gómez or himself or me. He was talking about Ricardo Morales, who lost every time a hand was dealt, every time the dice were rolled, every time the wheel was spun. I tried to imagine his face when I told him the news. Should I go to see him at the bank, or should I make an appointment with him at the cafe where we’d met on previous occasions? The cafe sounded like a better idea. But in any case, how was I going to answer him when he asked me, “What can be done now?” Should I tell him the truth? Should I simply say, “Nothing”?

I dropped a cube of sugar into the coffee dregs at the bottom of my cup and entertained myself by watching the white lump slowly grow saturated and fall apart. “Poor guy,” I said as well. It was the only conclusion I could reach.

“If you don’t mind telling me, I’d like to know how it was that he got released,” Morales said, sounding as if nothing could hurt him anymore.

I looked at him before responding; the boy continually surprised me. I kept thinking of him as a boy, I don’t know why, because that particular characterization no longer applied. Maybe it was just for the sake of convenience. I’d always thought of him as very young, ever since the first time I saw him, in the Capital branch of the Provincial Bank, where he worked. Back then, he was twenty-four, and clearly little more than a boy. But now, five years later, it was impossible to look at him that way. Not because his dirty blond hair was much thinner—which it was—or because people whom we don’t see very often seem more clearly marked by the passage of time, although that appears to be true as well. Morales was no longer young, even though he hadn’t yet reached thirty. On either side of his mouth, unremitting grief had dug deep furrows, which his precise blond mustache did nothing to conceal; his forehead, too, was indelibly scored. He’d always been skinny, but now his thinness
had become almost skeletal, as if not even eating could accommodate any desire, however slight, or procure him any pleasure, however brief. His cheekbones were prominent, his cheeks hollow, and his gray eyes deep-set, as though taking refuge. When I saw Morales sitting there in front of me on that June afternoon in 1973, I understood that the brevity or longevity of a human being’s life depends most of all on the amount of grief that person is obliged to bear. Time passes more slowly for those who suffer, and pain and anguish leave definitive marks on their skin.

As I’ve said, the young man surprised me. In the preceding days, I’d pondered whether I should summon him to the cafe or seek him out at his bank, but the memory of our first interview, when Báez and I had gone to tell him what we told him, had remained so vivid that I didn’t feel capable of devastating him again in the same way and in the same place. So I called him up and arranged to meet him in the cafe at 1400 Tucumán Street. I expected my call to surprise him. For one thing, we’d had no communication for nearly a year. What could the deputy clerk from the examining magistrate’s court be doing, calling him at his work? Wishing him a happy birthday? And why would we be meeting in that same bar? Morales knew perfectly well that it was going to take two or three years before the final verdict in the Gómez case could be handed down and the
dossier turned over to the sentencing court. If I wanted to fill him in on some minor detail of the case—the formal completion of the indictment or something like that—it wouldn’t make sense to arrange a face-to-face meeting. How would any normal person react to such an unexpected and mysterious telephone call? He’d request more information, solicit details, ask questions along the lines of Is it serious? or Can you tell me a little more, just so I can rest easy? Morales did none of that. He listened to me, hesitated a few seconds over whether he could leave work early the following day or would Thursday be better, spoke very briefly with a colleague, and then declared, “Tomorrow’s fine.” And now there we were, sitting at one of the tables in the back on a chilly Wednesday afternoon.

I’d decided to come to the point as soon as possible, so I said, right away, “I called because I have something serious to tell you, Morales.” How could I be so foolish as to feel guilty about what had happened? What did I have to do with the way things had turned out?

“If you called me here so you could tell me they released Gómez, don’t bother. I’m already informed.”

“What do you mean, ‘informed’?” was my ridiculous reaction. I found it uncanny and incredible that Morales already knew what I had planned, uselessly enough, to break to him. But I didn’t back off.

“Yes, I already know about it,” he reiterated.

I kept quiet then, but I longed to learn how he’d found out.

“It’s not such a mystery, Chaparro,” he added matter-of-factly. “A few days after the amnesty, a list of the released prisoners was published in the newspaper.”

“And what made you think that Gómez’s name could be on such a list?”

It was Morales’s turn to hesitate for a few moments before answering, as if the question had surprised him. Eventually he made an ironic face and spoke: “Do you want me to tell you the truth? I simply applied the existential principle that governs my life.”

I glanced at him quizzically.

“It’s my maxim: Everything that can go bad is going to go bad. And its corollary: Everything that seems to be going well will turn, sooner or later, to shit.”

Wasn’t that the first time Morales had allowed himself to use bad language in a conversation with me? Maybe that was a way for me to gauge the depth of his misfortune. I yielded to an absurd distraction: I imagined Morales’s parents addressing their son with raised index fingers and saying something like “Ricardito, no matter what happens, don’t ever use bad words. Not even if a bad, bad man rapes and strangles your wife and then goes free.” I reined in my imagination and refocused on his words. How could I argue with his axioms? I’d known him for five years, during which time many things had
happened to him, and they all appeared to demonstrate that he was thoroughly and incontestably right.

“But seriously,” Morales went on, “when you told me Gómez had been caught, and then when you said he’d given himself away and confessed his crime, I thought, ‘Well, all right, now at least that’s over; he’ll rot in prison.’ But after I got home, or after three or four days had passed, I asked myself, ‘So that’s it? Really? As easy as that?’ No. It seemed too simple, even after all the crap we’ve gone through in the last four years. So I asked a lawyer friend—maybe friend’s an exaggeration, let’s say acquaintance—to tell me what it meant to be handed a life sentence. When I heard that the guy could get out in twenty-five years, at the most, including whatever accessory sentence he might have received, even for an ‘indefinite period of time,’ I thought that was still pretty good. Obviously, a sentence of life in prison for Gómez would have been too much to expect, considering the way things usually went for me. But I got used to the idea of twenty-five years. I figured that was a whole lot of time, it was the maximum prison sentence you could get in Argentina, and I talked myself into being quite happy with it. Until I realized precisely
that,
that I was happy with it. ‘Look, Ricardo,’ I said. ‘If you imagine you’re satisfied, you’re dreaming, because any day now, you’re going to find out that not even what you’ve talked yourself into being satisfied with is going to happen.’ You see what I mean?”

I saw what he meant. His point of view was intolerably pessimistic. But he wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t in complete accordance with the facts.

“And so, when I found out that a whole bunch of political prisoners had been granted amnesty on May 25 and released from Devoto Prison, and when I went on to discover that none of them could be tried again for any of the crimes they were doing time for at the moment when they were amnestied, I asked myself the million-dollar question: ‘Say, Ricardo, as far as you’re concerned, how could the whole state of affairs with that son of a bitch Isidoro Antonio Gómez get worse?’ And my answer to myself was, ‘It could get worse if the man who raped and murdered your wife appeared in the lists of the prisoners who’ve been granted amnesty, even though he’s not a political prisoner and has nothing to do with politics.’ And you know what? Bingo! There he was!”

By the end of this rant, he was practically shouting. A couple of tears shimmered in his wide-open eyes. Then his face grew rigid again, and he looked out at the street. I did the same. It was only after a good while, and in the neutral tone of voice of a man who knows he’s beyond harm, not because he’s been saved from it but because he’s succumbed to it, that he said, “If you don’t mind telling me, I’d like to know how it was that he got released.” I told him what had happened just as Báez had related it to me. I also explained that Sandoval and I had
found out only when the official letter from the Penitentiary Service came, and I described Sandoval’s reaction, too. I’m not very sure why. I suppose I imagined that knowing how upset a couple of honest guys like Báez and Sandoval were might make Morales feel less abandoned by God, or by fate. When I finished, there was another long silence. The waiter brought the check to a nearby table, and I took the opportunity to order another coffee. When asked if he wanted another one as well, Morales shook his head.

I hesitated. I’d been deliberating about the next step, but I hadn’t managed to persuade myself to take it. But since I feared that it was now or never, I forged ahead. “It’s very difficult for me to tell you this, Morales,” I began stumblingly. “I mean, I … a man in my position … what I’m about to say isn’t something I’m even supposed to think about, but …” I went on, chasing my tail like a puppy. “I’m referring to the possibility that …”

“Better not say it. Stop right there. I know what you’re referring to.”

I hesitated again. Did he really understand what I meant?

“Let’s suppose you say, ‘Look, Morales, if I were you, I’d find him and put a bullet in him,’ and I listen to you and I go and do it. Wouldn’t you feel guilty?”

I didn’t reply.

“And bear in mind, when I say guilty, I don’t mean because the son of a bitch winds up dead. I think we agree he’s a worthless rat. What I mean is I believe you’d start feeling guilty for my sake. You understand me?”

I didn’t reply to that, either. I didn’t know what to say.

“It would be funny. Say I go and kill Gómez; two minutes later, I bet, I get put in jail for life. Do you have the slightest doubt about that?” He turned toward the door. A very young couple, a man and a woman, were coming in. “I don’t. No doubt at all.”

He gazed distractedly at the young people. They looked as though they hadn’t been together long; the electric pleasure of recently discovered love radiated from both of them. Was Morales envying them? Did they perhaps evoke for him his own past with Liliana Colotto?

“No, Chaparro,” he said, finally picking up the thread again. “Nothing’s so simple. Because aside from …” Morales seemed to be having difficulty finding the words he wanted, but it also seemed that he’d thought the matter over again and again. “Let’s suppose I kill him. Do I gain anything? Do I settle anything?”

After a pause I said, “Maybe you get your revenge.”

What would I do in his shoes? I genuinely didn’t know. But the fundamental reason why I didn’t know was that I’d never felt for any woman what Ricardo Morales felt for his deceased wife. Or perhaps I had, but for a woman
I don’t intend to say a word about in these pages. Perhaps if I’d thought about her, about this other woman—my only secret worthy of the name—I would actually have been able to comprehend Morales’s love for his wife. I’m sure I would have been capable of anything for her sake, for the one I loved. Then again, she’d never belonged to me the way Morales and his wife had possessed each other, so my story wasn’t really comparable to his. His wife had been real, palpable, his own, and she’d been wrenched from him. And because the thought of that was so horrific, I reiterated what I’d said: “Maybe killing him would be vengeance for you.”

Morales maintained his silence. He reached into the pocket of his sports coat and pulled out a pack of Jockey Longs and a bronze cigarette lighter. He must have noticed my surprise at seeing him smoke. “I’m a man who makes decisions slowly,” he said with a slight smile. “You didn’t know I was a smoker, right? Before I met Liliana, I used to smoke like a chimney. I gave it up for her. How can a man light a cigarette if the woman he loves asks him not to, for their sake and the sake of the children she wants to have with him?” He emitted the choked snort that was his version of laughing. “As you’ll agree, it doesn’t make much sense for me to keep my lungs clean now, does it? I’m smoking like a vampire, just like before. Assuming, of course, that vampires smoke a lot.
Anyway, until today, I hadn’t started doing it in public again, I didn’t dare smoke in front of anyone. You’re the first. Take it as a sign of friendship.” Once again, I made no reply.

“And as for killing him … what do you want me to say? It seems too easy, doesn’t it? I had a lot of time to think about that over the years, with all the hours I spent looking for him in train stations. Suppose I’d found him—what would I have done? Shot him full of holes? Too easy. Too fast. How much pain can a guy feel after someone’s emptied a revolver into his chest? Not much, I think.”

“At least that’s something.”

Why did my side of our conversation feature arguments that sounded so stupid, so meager?

“It’s something, but very little. Too little. Now, if you can guarantee that I shoot him four times and don’t kill him but leave him a bedridden paraplegic and he lives to be ninety, then I’m all for it.”

Something in his tone sounded false, as if he were a man unaccustomed to exercising cruelty, not even hypothetical, purely verbal cruelty, but still he wanted to impress me in his new role as Morales the sadist.

“But let’s go back to my maxim, Chaparro,” he said. “Most likely, I’d send him to hell—presuming it exists—with my first shot and miss him entirely with the other three. And then I’d be sent to jail for life (it goes without
saying, I wouldn’t get any probation) and live past ninety. Gómez gets off easy, he’s free from everything before he hits the ground, and I’m in the joint for half a century, envying his luck. No, seriously. Dying can be too easy a path to take, believe me. Things are never simple.”

He stubbed out what was left of his cigarette and, with automatic movements, lit another one, the last one in his pack.

“That’s why I thought prison, all things considered, was the best possible outcome. All right, it wasn’t going to be for life. It wasn’t going to be for fifty years. But thirty years or so, the idea of him pissing in a prison cell for thirty consecutive years—that didn’t seem so deplorable, don’t you agree? But …” He gave a resigned sigh. “That didn’t happen either. And look, it wasn’t the ideal punishment, we’re in agreement on that. It was, at most, the best possible one, given the circumstances. And here’s where the corollary of my maxim comes in. Since sooner or later, everything has to turn into shit, God moved a couple of pieces and let that son of a bitch get away scot-free.”