Target in the Night (22 page)

They walked around the men's block, from one end to the other. Sirs, Croce dictated, I've returned to inform you that real estate speculation—but he stopped, because one of the other patients, the thin man with the pockmarked face, had stood up and come over and started walking with them, matching his step to Croce's. The other man also came over and followed their pace exactly, as if they were all marching together.

“Careful with this one,” the thin man said. “He's a cop.”

“He thinks he's a cop,” the fat man said. “He thinks he's a police inspector.”

“If he's an inspector, I'm Carlos Gardel.”

“The jockey murderer should have hung himself from a bonsai.”

“Exactly. Hanging like a little cake toy.”

Croce stopped next to a barred window and grabbed Renzi by the arm. The other two patients stopped with them and kept talking.

“Nature has forgotten us,” the fat man said.

“There is no nature anymore,” the thin man said.

“No nature? Don't exaggerate. We breathe, we lose our hair, our freshness.”

“Our teeth.”

“And if we hang ourselves?”

“But how can we hang ourselves? They took our shoelaces, they take away the sheets.”

“We can ask this young man for his belt.”

“Belts are too short.”

“I'll tie the belt around my neck and you can pull my legs.”

“And who would pull me?”

“True, a logical dilemma.”

“Sir,” the thin man said, looking at Renzi. “I'll buy a cigarette from you.”

“You can have one.”

“No, I'll buy it,” the thin man said, and handed him half a one-peso bill.

Immediately the fat man gave Renzi the other half of the bill for another cigarette. The two men stood to the side and began a different routine, one which they had apparently also repeated many times before. They took turns smoking their cigarettes, crossing their arms to hand their cigarette to the other's mouth. When the thin man blew out his smoke, the fat man would wait until he was done and then he would smoke and exhale, blowing rings. The two men smoked back and forth in this manner, without pausing, in a continuous chain. Hand, mouth, smoke, mouth, smoke, hand, mouth. They stood side by side and raised their hands to bring the cigarette to the mouth of the other, who would in turn smoke facing forward. The routine was repeated until the cigarettes were smoked down to their ends. They came back with the butts and sold them to Renzi, who returned each their half of the one-peso bill. With a few leftover crumbs of flour they had stashed in
an old cookie tin, they made a paste and stuck the two halves of the bill back together until they had the whole peso again. Then they each laid down on their bed, face up, motionless, their arms crossed and their eyes open.

Croce resumed speaking with Renzi, softly.

“They're brothers, they say they're brothers,” he said, nodding toward the two patients. “I live with them, here. They know who I am. Outside I would have been killed, like Tony was killed. I'm waiting to be transferred to Melchor Romero. My father died there. I used to go visit him, he'd tell me about a radio that had been installed inside his head somehow, On the inside of my skull, he used to say. Now I believe I can hear the same music.”

Renzi waited while Croce sat down again, facing the window.

“Listen carefully. Cueto wanted to redirect the money, the Old Man was right about that, but Luca didn't want anything to do with it, he doesn't even want to see his father, he almost killed him one night, he blames him for the collapse of the factory, the Old Man sold the shares and when Luca found out, he went over with a gun. He blames him for the collapse.” Croce suddenly grew quiet. “You better go now, I'm getting tired. Help me with this.” They stretched his mattress out and Croce lied down. “It's not bad, no one can mess with you in here.”

The thin man came over.

“Say, will you trade me this bill for a new one?” he asked, and handed Renzi the bill stuck together with the paste. Renzi handed him another one-peso bill and put away the repaired bill, with one half of Mitre's (or was it Belgrano's?) face upside down. The thin patient looked at the new bill, pleased.

“Let me buy a cigarette from you,” he said.

Renzi's pack was nearly empty, he only had three cigarettes left. The fat man came over. Each took a cigarette and they split the third one in half, carefully. Then they split the new one-peso bill in half and started smoking and passing the half-bill back and forth. Pass the half-bill, smoke, pass the half-bill, smoke. They did everything in a very neat manner, without any hesitation, following a perfect order. Croce, lying on his bed, had fallen asleep.

Renzi walked outside. It was almost nighttime, he had to hurry if he wanted to catch the last bus back to town. Croce seemed to have entrusted him with some kind of task, as if he always needed someone to help him think clearly. Someone neutral who could be sent into reality to gather facts and clues, from which he could later formulate his conclusions. He could come visit him every afternoon and discuss with him what he'd found in town, while Croce could make his deductions without having to leave the place. Renzi had read so many detective novels that he already knew how the mechanism worked. The detective always has someone with whom to discuss his theories. Now that Saldías was no longer around, Croce had fallen into a crisis, because when he was alone, his own thoughts were the end of him. He was always rebuilding a story that wasn't his. He doesn't have a private life and if he's given a private life, like now, he loses his mind. He goes out of his mind, Renzi heard himself say as he was getting on the bus heading back to town.

The houses on the outskirts were like all the houses in the low neighborhoods on the edge of any town or city. Handwritten signs, partially finished construction sites, kids playing ball, tropical
music sounding from the open windows, nearly antique cars barely crawling along, country folk galloping on horseback on the ditch along the cobblestone road, a cart with empty bottles and cans pushed by a woman.

When the bus entered the town, the landscape changed and became a mock-up of suburban life, a series of houses with yards out front, windows with security bars, trees on the sidewalks, packed dirt alleys. Finally, coming onto the main road, which was first cobblestoned and then paved, the two-storied houses, the entry hallways with the tall doors, the television antennas on the roofs and terraces. The center of town was also the same as that of other towns, with the central square, the church and the municipality building, the pedestrian block with the shops and the music stores and the small markets. This monotony, this endless repetition, was what the people who lived there probably liked.

Renzi imagined that he, too, could move to the country, dedicate himself to his writing. Take walks around town, go to the Madariaga Store and Tavern, wait for the newspapers that arrived on the afternoon train, leave his useless life behind, become somebody else. He was in a state of waiting, he felt that something was about to change. Maybe it was his own feeling, his false wish not to return to the routine of his life in Buenos Aires, to the novel he'd been writing for years without success, to his stupid job at El Mundo, writing reviews or going out into reality every once in a while on special assignment to investigate some crime or plague.

Night had fallen over the house. They were still sitting on the chairs, out on the back porch, mostly in the dark—except for a small lamp
behind them, in the living room—looking out over the peaceful back gardens and the lights beyond. After a while, Sofía got up and put a Moby Grape album on the turntable and started to move, dancing in place to “Changes.”

“I like Traffic, I like Cream, I like Love,” she said, and sat down again. “I love their band names and I love their music.”

“I love
Moby Dick
.”

“I'm sure you do. Take your books away from you and you'd be buck-naked. My mother's the same, the only time she's relaxed is when she's reading. As soon as she stops reading, she's a nervous mess.”

“Crazy when she doesn't read, not crazy when she reads.”

“See her over there? See that light across the yard?”

There was a guesthouse across the back gardens with two large, lit windows, through which one could see a woman, her white hair pulled back, reading and smoking on a leather armchair. She looked as if she were in another world. All of a sudden she took off her glasses, reached back with her right hand without looking to grab a blue book from a bookshelf out of sight. She put the page up against her face, then put her round glasses on again, settled back in the tall armchair, and kept reading.

“She reads all the time,” Renzi said.

“She's the reader,” Sofía said.

13

Renzi spent several days in the Municipal Archives going over documents and old newspapers. Every afternoon he'd go to the hall, cool and peaceful, while the rest of the town slept their siesta. Croce had given him several facts to look up, as if he'd assigned him a task that he couldn't do himself. The history of the Belladona family unfolded from the very origins of the place. Renzi was most impressed by the articles he read about the inauguration of the factory, in October 1961.

The director of the Archives helped him find what he was looking for, assisting him the moment she learned that the Inspector had sent him. Croce, according to her, withdrew to the asylum every so often to spend some time there, resting, she said, as if it were a resort in the mountains. The woman's name was Rosa Echeverry and she had a desk in the middle of the always-empty hall. She showed Renzi around the shelves, the boxes, and the old catalogues. She was blond and tall, wore a long dress, and used a walking stick with cheerful indifference. She'd been very beautiful and still moved with the confidence that beauty had granted her. It was surprising to see her limping, then, her kindness and happiness didn't seem to match the hardness of her pain-riddled hips. People in town said that she took morphine—small, greenish
glass vials that she had delivered from La Plata, and which she picked up every month at the Mantovani Pharmacy with a prescription from Doctor Fuentes. She cooked it up herself, apparently, first opening the vials with a small serrated knife that she kept especially for this purpose, then boiling the needles in the metal box with the syringe.

She lived on a second story in the same building were the Archives were housed, in a vast attic accessed by an internal staircase. Whenever Renzi turned to look at her, she always seemed to be working on crossword puzzles in old numbers of the magazine
Vea y Lea
, or watching the canary she'd put by the back window, which was allowed to come out of its cage and peck at the spines of the bound documents.

“There's not much to do here, the readers have been dying off,” she told him. “The advantage of this place is that it's more peaceful than the cemetery, even if the work is the same.”

Rosa had studied history in Buenos Aires and had started teaching in a school in the town of Pompeya, but she married an estancia auctioneer and came back to town with him. Soon afterward her husband died in an accident and she ended up buried in the Archives, where no one ever came to look for anything.

“Everyone thinks they remember what happened,” she said. “No one needs to find anything out from a place like this. We have a good library here, too,” she added. “But in the end, I'm the only reader in here, you know. I don't follow an alphabetical order, please don't confuse me with Sartre's Autodidact,” she boasted. “But I do have a system.” She read a lot of biographies and memory books.

Slowly, she told Renzi her story, and he felt that a certain
complicity was established between them from the beginning—a certain instant sympathy that sometimes arises between people who have just met—and that Rosa would help him find what he was looking for. People said that she was or had been Croce's lover, and that they'd sometimes spend weekends together. She invited Renzi to take a look about the place and took his arm as they walked under the awning and into the courtyard.

“One day, my dear, you're going to write a book about this town. Believe me, I know. A novel, a feature story, something you can sell to buy clothes for your kids and take a vacation with your wife. And when you do, you'll remember me, what I'm telling you. There was a family war here,” she said. The most interesting thing, according to Rosa, was that the battles were always personified by specific individuals, actual men and women with faces and names who didn't know they were fighting a war. Countrymen and women who thought they were simply involved in normal family disputes or arguments among neighbors. Argentina's political history moves on the ground while events happen above like a flock of swallows migrating in winter. The residents of the town represented and repeated old stories without knowing it. Now what they had to talk about was the whole affair of the lawsuit over Luca's firm. Tony's death seemed connected to the abandoned factory. Rosa spoke with a high, serene voice, like a schoolteacher, with a touch of irony, to let Renzi know that she didn't believe everything she was saying, but enough sincerity to give her work as town archivist significance.