The Secret in Their Eyes (2 page)

I’m not sure about my reasons for recounting the story of Ricardo Morales after so many years. I can say that what happened to him has always aroused an obscure fascination in me; perhaps the man’s fate, a life destroyed by tragedy and grief, provided me with a chance to reflect on my own worst fears. I’ve often caught myself feeling a certain guilty joy at the disasters of others, as if the fact that horrible things happened to other people meant that my own life would be exempt from such tragedies, as if I’d get a kind of safe-conduct based on some obtuse law of probability: If such and such a catastrophe befalls Joe Blow, then it’s unlikely that it will also strike Joe’s acquaintances, among whom I count myself. It’s not as though I can boast of a life filled with success, but when I compare my misfortunes with what Morales suffered, I come out well ahead. In any case, it’s not my story I want to tell, it’s Morales’s story, or Isidoro Gómez’s, which is the same story but seen from the other side, or seen upside down, or something like that.

Although the morbid interest my subject arouses in me isn’t the only reason why I’m writing these pages, it
carries some weight and plays some part. But mostly, I suppose, I’m telling the story because I have time to tell it. A lot of time, too much time, so much time that the daily trifles whose sum is my life quickly dissolve into the monotonous nothingness that surrounds me. Being retired is worse than I’d imagined. I should have known it would be. Not because of anything I knew about retirement, but because things we fear generally turn out worse when they happen than when we imagined them. For years, I saw my older colleagues in the court bid farewell to their working days in the naive expectation of enjoying their newfound leisure. I saw them depart in triumph, each of them convinced that retirement would be the closest thing to paradise on earth. But disappointment would make quick work of them, and it wasn’t long before I saw them return in defeat. In two weeks, in three at the most, they had exhausted all the supposed pleasures they thought they’d been postponing during their years of routine and work. And for what? To drop by the court of an afternoon, as if by accident, just to chat or drink some coffee or even lend a hand with some moderately complicated case.

Because of that, because of the many, many times I’d found myself face to face with one of those guys whose retirement years were empty and therefore wretched, because of the many, many occasions when I’d looked into eyes imploring an impossible rescue, I swore a vow
never to fall so low when my turn came. There would be no useless time-wasting for me, no nostalgic visits to see how the kids in the office are doing, no pathetic spectacles put on to extract a few seconds’ worth of compassion from fortunate people still able to function.

So now I’ve been retired for two weeks, and I’ve already got time on my hands. It’s not that I can’t think of anything to do. I can think of a lot of things, but they all seem useless. Maybe the least useless is this one. For a few months, I can pretend to be a writer, as Silvia used to say when she still loved me. Actually, I’m mixing up two different periods and two distinct modes of address. When she still loved me, she’d talk confidently of my future as a writer, most probably a famous one. Later, when her love had wilted and died in the tedium of our marriage, she would say I just pretended to be a writer, and she’d say it with scathing contempt, speaking from the tower of irony she’d chosen to occupy, a fortification from which she liked to fire missiles at me. I can’t complain, because I’m sure I said equally evil things to her. How terrible that after ten years of marriage, what chiefly remains is the shameful inventory of the harm we did to each other. But at least it was possible to quarrel with Silvia. My first wife Marcela and I couldn’t even talk about my writing ambitions, or—come to think of it—about anything else. It hardly seems possible that I shared such large chunks of my life with two women of
whom I retain, not without difficulty, a handful of hazy memories. Then again, my blurry recollection is yet more proof (as if more were needed) that I’m getting old. I’ve survived two marriages just to find myself facing a good stretch of time alone, roaming the arid plateau of bachelorhood. Life is long, all things considered.

Anyway, I was never that serious about being a writer. Not when Silvia spoke the word admiringly, and not later, when she spat it at me sarcastically. I did have dreams (some dreams impose themselves on even the most skeptical hearts) that featured idyllic scenes of the writer at work in his study, preferably in front of a large window with a view of the sea, preferably in a dwelling built high on a rocky outcrop buffeted by wind and rain.

Evidently, the habit doesn’t make the monk, because even though I’ve transformed my living room into a prototypical working writer’s sanctuary—I’m sure there’s a better way of saying that—it hasn’t yet done the trick. I can affirm, however, that I’ve made things quite pleasant in here. Of course, I don’t have the sea and the storms, but I’ve got a well-ordered desk: on one side, a ream of typing paper, blank, almost new; on the other side, a notebook that contains no notes; in the center, the typewriter, an imposing olive-green Remington barely smaller than a tank and made of equally thick steel, or so my colleagues in the court used to joke, years ago.

I step over to the window. It overlooks, as I’ve said, no stormy sea, but rather a tidy little yard, twelve by fifteen feet. I gaze out at the street. As usual, there’s not a soul in sight. Thirty years ago, these empty streets were full of people, young and old, but now the young people have gone away, and the old ones have gone inside. Like me. It may sound funny, but maybe there are several of us; our desks are thoroughly prepared, and we’re going to write a novel.

Deep down inside, I suspect that this page, which I’m resolutely filling with words, is going to wind up like its nineteen predecessors, crumpled into a ball and thrown into the opposite corner of the room, where there’s a wicker umbrella stand I inherited from I no longer know whom. After every false start, I yield to a lingering athletic impulse and try to toss my wadded rejections into that stand, with an elegant flick of the wrist and indifferent success. I get so excited when I score, and the small frustrations of my missed attempts increase my determination to such a degree, that I’m almost more interested in my next shot than in the remote possibility that this will be the page on which the story I allegedly intend to tell will at last begin. Sixty years old, and I’m clearly as far from being a writer as I am from playing basketball again.

For the past several days, I’ve sought to resolve certain questions crucial to my project. My plan was to start the
actual writing only after I found the answers, because I dreaded the exact situation I now find myself in: sitting in front of the typewriter and chasing my tail while the last vestiges of my resolve evaporate. Early on, I realized that I don’t have enough imagination to write a novel. My solution was to write without inventing anything, that is, to narrate a true story, to give an account of events to which I had been, although indirectly, a witness. And so I decided to tell the story of Ricardo Morales. I made this decision because of the reasons I gave at the beginning, because it’s a story that needs no additions from me, and because, since I know it’s true, I may dare to recount it all the way to the end. I won’t have to incur the shame of telling lies in order to fill in gaps or enhance the plot or persuade the reader not to chuck the book away after fifteen pages.

Having decided on a subject, I consider the first practical difficulty: What grammatical person am I going to write this thing in? When speaking of myself, should I say “I,” or should I say “Chaparro”? It makes me gloomy to think that this single obstacle suffices to dampen all my literary enthusiasm. What if I choose to tell my story in the third person? Maybe that would be the best choice, as I wouldn’t be tempted to make use of excessively personal impressions and experiences. I’m quite clear about that. I’m not trying to reach or provoke any kind of catharsis with this book, or (to be more exact) with this
embryo of a book; nevertheless, the first person feels more comfortable. That’s because I’m inexperienced, I suppose, but in any case, it feels more comfortable. And what do I do about the parts of the story I didn’t witness directly, those parts I can intuit, even though I have no certain knowledge of them? Do I include them in the story, just like the parts I know about for sure? Do I make them up from A to Z? Do I ignore them?

Let’s simplify things and go step by step. I’ll begin in the first person. That’s hard enough; I don’t need to go looking for more difficulties. And it will be better to tell what I know or presume to be true; otherwise, no one’s going to understand a fucking thing, including me. Another problem is my vocabulary; the word “fucking” jumps out of that last sentence like a neon light surrounded by darkness. Should I use everyday coarseness and crudeness? Should I eliminate such expressions from my written language? Ah, fuck it, too many questions—and there I go again. The only logical conclusion I can reach is that I’ve got a foul mouth.

And here’s something even worse: I’m going to write Morales’s story, that’s clear, but it means I have to begin at the beginning. And which beginning would that be? Although I think my narrative skills are pretty pedestrian, I’ve got enough discernment to see that the old “Once upon a time” formula isn’t going to work here. So what am I to do? Where’s the beginning? It’s not
that this story doesn’t have a beginning. The problem is that it has four or five possible beginnings, all of them distinct from one another. A young man kisses his wife good-bye at the door of their apartment, walks with her down the hall, kisses her again, and steps out into the street, on his way to work. Or two guys, dozing at a desk, jump at the sudden, strident ringing of a telephone. Or a young woman who’s just been awarded her school teaching degree poses for a group photo with other graduates. Or a judicial employee, namely me, thirty years after all those possible beginnings, receives a handwritten letter from an unlikely correspondent.

Which of these scenes am I going to use? All of them, probably; I’ll pick one to start with and insert the rest in the order that seems least risky, or maybe just as I go along. I’ve already dedicated several afternoons to this endeavor, but the prospect of failure no longer seems so devastating. After all, the more pages I reject, the more my long-range shot will improve.

May 30, 1968, was the last time Ricardo Agustín Morales had breakfast with Liliana Colotto, and for the rest of his life he’d remember not only what their talk was about but also what they drank, what they ate, the color of her nightgown, and the lovely effect produced by a ray of sunlight that lit up her left cheek as she sat there in the kitchen. The first time Morales told me this, I assumed he was exaggerating, because I didn’t think he could really remember so many details. But I was wrong; I didn’t know him well enough yet, and I misjudged him. I didn’t yet know that Morales, who had the face of a confirmed idiot, was a man endowed with intelligence, memory, and a power of observation the likes of which I’d never encountered in my life before and would not encounter again. Morales’s faithful memory had a single focus: the guy remembered with an equal abundance of detail anything and everything that had to do with his wife.

Later, when Morales consented to talk to me about himself, I listened as he described what he once was: a bland, colorless fellow destined for a bland, colorless life. He showed no compassion for that fellow,
identifying his former self as the kind of guy who passes through family, schools, and jobs without leaving any trace in the consciousnesses of those around him. He’d never had anything special, nor anything good, and he’d always found that perfectly fair. And then he’d met Liliana, who was, to an enormous degree, both special and good. That was the reason why he remembered that morning so well, not because it was their last. He kept it in his memory just as he’d kept all the other mornings in the little over a year that had passed since their wedding. Afterward, when Morales described to me, in meticulous detail, everything that had happened at that last breakfast with Liliana, he didn’t go about it the way an ordinary person would. In general, people cobble together memories of their experiences from the hazy vestiges that have remained in their minds, or from fragments recalled from other, similar experiences, and with those vestiges and fragments they try to reconstruct circumstances or feelings they’ve lost forever. Not Morales. Because he felt that Liliana gave him happiness he wasn’t entitled to, happiness that had nothing to do with his life before he met her, and because the cosmos tends toward equilibrium, he knew he’d have to lose her sooner or later so that things could return to their proper order. All his memories of her were tinged with that sense of imminent disaster, of a catastrophe lying in wait around the corner.

He’d never stood out for any reason whatsoever. At school, in sports, and even within his family, he’d earned nothing but occasional words of praise for qualities that were basically trivial. But on November 16, 1966, he’d met Liliana, and that meeting had sufficed to change him and his life. With her, through her, thanks to her, he’d become different. When he first saw her coming through the bank’s revolving door, while he watched her ask the guard which window to use to make a deposit, and as she approached Number Four with short, firm steps, Morales had known that life would never be the same again. Clinging to the desperate certainty that his fate was in this woman’s hands, he’d dared to suppress his shyness, drawing her into conversation as he counted her money, smiling at her with his entire face, looking into her eyes and withstanding her gaze, and hoping aloud that she’d come back soon. After she left, he’d quickly checked the records to verify the name of the company whose account she’d deposited money into, and he’d even gone so far as to phone the company with some invented excuse in order to obtain a few details about the young woman.

Some time later, after they were officially engaged, Liliana had confessed to him that she’d liked his boldness, the methodical audacity of his pursuit, his refusal to take no for an answer, and that those were the reasons she’d finally decided to accept his invitations. When she
got to know him better, she said, when she’d come to know his essential shyness, his lack of confidence, his eternal shame, she’d arrived at a deeper understanding of how much courage it had taken for him to pursue her, and she considered that courage the best proof of his true love. Liliana said that a man capable of changing the way he is for the love of a woman is a man who deserves to have his love returned. Ricardo Morales didn’t forget this conversation, either, and he decided to stay that way forever and for her. He’d never felt himself worthy of anything, much less of such a woman. But he knew that he was going to make the most of the situation, for as long as he could—until midnight should come, and the spell would be broken, and everything would turn back into mice and rats and pumpkins.

For all these reasons, Morales would always remember that on May 30, 1968, Liliana was wearing a sea-green nightgown, and that she’d gathered up her hair into a simple bun, from which a few dark brown strands had escaped. He remembered that a sunbeam had entered the kitchen window obliquely and lighted up her left cheek with a glow that made her even more beautiful, and that they’d drunk tea with milk, and that they’d eaten buttered toast, and that they’d talked about which pieces of furniture should stay in the living room, and that he’d risen from the kitchen table and gone into the dining room to fetch the plans he’d been drawing up
for arranging the furniture in the most harmonious way possible, and that she’d laughed at his mania for drawing up plans for everything, and that she’d looked deep into his eyes and smiled and said he shouldn’t spend so much effort on their old furniture, poor thing, because sooner or later they’d have to convert the living room into a bedroom anyway, and that he, slow and distracted or rather beclouded in his adoration for this woman who’d come to him from another galaxy, hadn’t understood her allusion but had nevertheless managed to slip his arm around her waist and walk down the hall with her to the street door and kiss her slowly on the threshold and step out, waving his hand in good-bye, not knowing that it was forever.