Target in the Night (33 page)

20

The next day, when Renzi went back to the Madariaga Tavern, the atmosphere was somber. Croce was at his usual table by the window, wearing his dark suit and tie. That morning he'd gone to the prison in Dolores to visit Yoshio and give him the news, before the official word reached him, that his case had been closed with the consent of Luca Belladona. “Jail is a bad place to live,” Croce said. “But it's the worst place in the world for a man like Yoshio to live.”

Croce seemed dejected. Luca was going to pay off the mortgage and save the factory, but the cost was too high. Croce was sure it would end poorly. He had an extraordinary ability to grasp the sense of events and anticipate their consequences, but he could do nothing to prevent them. When he tried, the only thing waiting for him was madness. Reality was his field of play, he could often see a series of events before they occurred and anticipate their outcome, but the only thing he could do to prove his theories and demonstrate that he was right was to let the events happen of their own accord. He had no influence over them.

“That's why I'm no good as an inspector,” he said after a while. “I take events that have already occurred and imagine their consequences, but I can't prevent them. What comes after a crime? More crime. Luca believes he's condemned both Yoshio and me.
If he hadn't accepted Cueto's offer, if he'd refused to help him close the case, I might have had a chance with Cueto.” Croce paused and looked at the plains through the bars of the window against which he always sat. The same motionless landscape that was, for him, the image of his life. “I blew it,” Croce added, “my version of the crime was no good for anyone.”

“And in the end, what's the truth?”

Croce looked at Renzi with a resigned expression on his face and smiled with the same sparkle of tired irony that always burned in his eyes.

“You read too many detective novels, kid. If you only knew what things were really like. Order doesn't always get restored, the crime doesn't always get solved. There's never any logic to it. We struggle to establish the causes and deduce the effects, but we're never able to understand the entire network of the intrigue. We isolate facts, we stop in front of a few scenes, we question a handful of witnesses, but for the most part we move blindly in the dark. The closer you are to the target, the more you get tangled in a web without end. In detective novels the crimes are always solved, whether with elegance or with violence, so readers will be satisfied. Cueto has a tortured mind, he does strange things, he kills by proxy. He leaves loose strands behind on purpose. Why did he have them leave the bag with the money in the hotel's storage room? Was Old Man Belladona involved? There are more unknowns than confirmed certainties.”

Croce sat still, staring out the window, lost in his thoughts.

“So you're leaving,” he said after a while.

“I'm leaving.”

“You're doing the right thing.”

“Better not say goodbye,” Renzi said.

“Who knows,” Croce said, referring either to his conclusions about Tony's death, or Renzi's eventual return to the town which he seemed to be leaving forever.

Croce got up ceremoniously and gave him a hug. Then he thumped down again in his chair and leaned over his notes and diagrams, distracted, as if Renzi were already gone.

While Croce keeps going, Cueto will never have peace, Renzi thought as he walked out into the street. The story goes on, it can go on, there are several possible conjectures, the story remains open and is only interrupted. The investigation has no end, the investigation cannot end. Someone should invent a new detective genre,
paranoid fiction
it could be called. Everyone is a suspect, everyone feels pursued. Instead of being an isolated individual, the criminal is a group with absolute power. No one understands what's happening, the clues and testimonies contradict each other as if they changed with each interpretation, and all suspicions are kept open. The victim is the protagonist and center of the intrigue, instead of the detective hired to solve the case or the murderer hired to kill. Renzi thought along these lines as he walked—perhaps for the last time—down the dusty streets of the town.

He went back to the hotel and packed his bag. The days he'd spent in the countryside had taught him to be less naïve. It wasn't true that the city was the place for experiences. The plains had geological layers of extraordinary events that returned to the surface with the blowing of the southern winds. The evil light of the unburied shimmers in the air like a poisonous fog. Renzi lit
a cigarette and smoked, gazing out the window over the main square. Then he looked around the room to make sure he wasn't forgetting anything, and went downstairs to settle his bill.

The train station was quiet, the train would arrive soon. Renzi sat on the bench, under the shade of the casuarina trees. All of a sudden he saw a car pull over out in the street and Sofía get out.

“I wish I could go with you to Buenos Aires.”

“So come.”

“I can't leave my sister,” she said.

“You can't, or you don't want to?”

“I can't and I don't want to,” she said, and stroked his face. “Come on, my little dove, don't start trying to give me advice.”

She was never going to leave. Sofía was like all the people Renzi had met in town, they were always on the verge of leaving the countryside and running away to the city. They always said they were suffocating in the plains, but in the end they were never going to leave—and they knew it.

She was worried about Luca. She'd gone to visit him, he seemed relaxed, concentrating on his inventions and his projects, and yet he couldn't stop going back over and over to the deal he'd made with Cueto. “It was the only thing I could do,” he told her, but he seemed withdrawn. He'd spent the whole night wandering around the factory with the strange feeling that now that he'd finally gotten what he'd always hoped for, his resolve had left him. “I can't sleep,” he'd told her. “I'm tired all the time.”

The train arrived. In the loud commotion of the passengers getting on the train, laughing and saying their farewells, the two of them kissed and Emilio placed a gold charm with the figure
of a rose engraved on it in her hand. It was a gift. She held it up to her forehead, it was the only kind of rose that didn't wither…

When the train started, Sofía walked along the window, until she finally stopped, gorgeous in the middle of the platform, her red hair on her shoulders and a peaceful smile on her face, illuminated by the afternoon sun. Beautiful, young, unforgettable, and—in essence—another woman's woman.

As he traveled, Renzi looked out at the countryside, at the quiet of the plains, the last houses, the men on horseback riding alongside the train. A group of kids ran along the embankment, barefoot, flashing obscene gestures at the travelers. Renzi was tired, the monotonous jolting of the train made him sleepy. He remembered the beginning of a novel (it wasn't the beginning, but it could've been the beginning): “Who loved not his sister's body but some concept of Compson honor.” And he started translating:
Quien no amaba el cuerpo de su hermana sino cierto concepto de honor
…But he stopped and rewrote the line.
Quien no amaba el cuerpo de su hermana sino cierta imagen de sí misma
: “Who loved not his sister's body but some concept of herself.” He fell asleep and heard confusing words. He saw the figure of a large wooden bird in the country with a caterpillar on its beak. Was there such a thing as incest between sisters? He saw the shop window of a gunsmith. His mother wearing a parka on a freezing street in Ontario. And if it had been one of them? Sitting on his foldout bed in the asylum, Croce had asked him: “How tall are you?” And: “There's an obvious solution, and a false solution, and finally a third solution,” Croce had said. Renzi woke up, startled. The pampas were still the same, endless and gray. He'd dreamt about
Croce and also—his mother? There was snow in the dream. As the afternoon grew darker, the reflection of Emilio's face on the train's window became more and more clear.

The town remained the same as always. In May, with the first low temperatures of fall, the streets seemed less hospitable, the dust swirled about on the corners, and the sky was bright, livid, as if it were made of glass. Nothing moved. The children weren't heard playing, the women didn't come out of their houses, the men smoked in the doorways, and the only sound that could be heard was the monotonous whirring of the station's water tank. The fields were dry, so they started burning off parts of the pastures, the workers advanced in a line burning the weeds and the cuttings, tall waves of fire and smoke rose above the empty plains. Everyone seemed to be waiting for some kind of sign, the confirmation of one of those dark predictions sometimes announced by the old folk healer who lived alone in a shack on a hill. The gardener walked by at dawn, his cart filled with horse manure from the nearby army encampment; the girls strolled aimlessly through the square, sick with boredom; the young men played pool in the Náutico bar, or set up drag races on the road to the lake. The news from the factory was contradictory. Many said that activity in those weeks seemed to have picked up again, and that the lights in the plant's garage were on all night long. Luca had started dictating a series of measures and regulations to Schultz for a report he intended to send to the World Bank and to the Argentine Industrial Union. He stayed up through the night walking the upper galleries of the factory, followed by his secretary Schultz.

“I have lived, attempted, and achieved
so much
that they had to carry out a certain violent chain of events to separate and distance me from my accomplishments. We were caught in a trap, through a series of tricks and ruses, not by doubt, but by certainty” (Dictated to Schultz).

“To attribute to the means of industrial production a pernicious action about
effects
is to recognize in them a
moral potential.
Do economic actions not create, in fact, a structure of feelings built on reactions and emotions? There is an economic sexuality that exceeds the conjugal norms needed for natural reproduction” (Dictated to Schultz).

“Men have always been used as mechanical instruments. In the old days, in the harvest season, farm workers used to sew steadily, using bale needles to close up the burlap sacks. They were incredibly fast at their sewing, they could produce more than thirty or thirty-five sacks per hectare. Once in a blue moon they'd have to scoop one of the laborers out of the platform. In the rush, he'd have sewn in the tip of his shirt and he'd be stuck to a sack. He'd be rolling on the ground like a fallen brother” (Dictated to Schultz).

“I've been thinking about the local weaving. String, knot, string, cross and knot, red, green, string and knot, string and knot. My grandmother Clara learned to knit the blankets they weave in the pampas, her fingers deformed from arthritis, they were like hooks or vine shoots—but with her fingernails painted! Very elegant. We recall Martin Fierro's sentence:
every gaucho you see / a tapestry of misfortunes
. The mechanical spinning and weaving of fate! The local weaving penetrates to the marrow. Somewhere someone
weaves, and we live woven, flowered in the weave, plotted in the plot. If I could go back even for an instant to the workshop with all the tapestries. The vision lasts only a second, then I fall into the brutal dream of reality. I have so many terrifying things to tell” (Dictated to Schultz).

“I've confirmed several times that my intelligence is like a diamond that can pierce pure glass. Economic, geographic, climactic, historical, social, and family determinations can, in very extraordinary occasions, be concentrated and embodied in a single individual. Such is my case” (Dictated to Schultz).

Schultz would get lost at times, he couldn't follow Luca's pace, he wrote what he thought he heard.
⁴²
Luca marched in long strides through the facilities, talking nonstop, he didn't want to be alone with his thoughts. He asked Schultz to write all his ideas down as he walked nervously from one end to the other, across the garage of the plant, by the large machines. Sometimes Rocha would follow him instead, he'd sub in for Schultz while the ex-seminary student slept on a cot, they took turns taking dictation.

“Soon I will not have anything else to say about the past, I will be able to talk about what we will do in the future. I will climb to the top and stop living in these plains, we too will reach the highest peaks. I will live in the future tense. What is to come, what is not yet—is that enough to live on?” Luca said as he walked along the balcony above the inner courtyard.

Even though he hadn't slept in several nights, he still recorded his dreams.

Two lost cyclists from the Doble Bragado Race turn off the road and continue on, just the two of them, far from everything, in the middle of the deserted pampas, pedaling evenly toward the south on their light Legnano and Bianchi bicycles, leaning over their handlebars against the wind.

Some time later Renzi received a letter from Rosa Echeverry with sad news. She found herself with the “painful obligation” of having to inform him that Luca “had suffered an accident.” He'd been found dead on the floor of the factory's garage. It seemed like such a well-planned suicide that everyone could believe—if they so chose—that he'd died by falling from the height of his viewing machine, where he was taking one of his usual measurements. This is how it was explained in the letter from Rosa, for whom Luca's last gesture was yet additional proof of his goodness and his extreme politeness.