“Where could Emilia be?” she asked, forgetting all resentment. “I demand that someone go and look for her.”
“I’ll overlook the demand, so no one will accuse me of weakness,” conceded Atuel. “Perhaps Doctor Cornejo would like to accompany me …”
The urgent howling of the wind outside contrasted with the scant still air inside, where we were suffocating together, gathered around a steadfast lamp. The wait seemed interminable.
Finally, the men returned.
“We’ve looked everywhere,” affirmed Cornejo. “She has disappeared.”
Mary broke into a new crying jag. We decided to ready ourselves for a rescue mission. We all ran off to our respective rooms in search of overcoats. I also outfitted myself in a wool cap, a plaid jacket and fur-lined gloves. I wrapped a Scottish scarf about my neck. I did not forget the magic lantern.
I was already on my way out when I remembered my medicine kit. I removed a vial of Ruta foetida—the inspiration of a worldly man.
“Here, take this,” I said to Mary, when I returned to the dining room. “Give it to your sister, tomorrow.”
This calm declaration had a radical effect on Mary. Too radical, in my opinion: minutes later, as I was heading towards the hotel’s exit, I saw, against the whiteness of the wall, two shadows kissing. It was Atuel and Mary. But I wish to be clear: Atuel was resisting; Mary was besieging him passionately.
“What are we,” I murmured, “but skeletons kissed by the gods?” With a heavy soul I continued on my way. Something cried out in the dark. It was the boy. I had stumbled over him. He looked at me for a moment—what was in his expression: contempt, hatred, terror?—and then he fled.
Four men, struggling, scarcely managed to push open the door. We found ourselves out in the night. The wind tried to knock us to the ground and the sand whipped us in the face, blinding us.
“This is not letting up,” my cousin predicted.
We split up in search of the lost girl.
7
BY THE NEXT MORNING, MARY WAS DEAD. I was awakened shortly before eight by an unpleasant noise: it was Andrea calling me, asking for help. I turned on the light, jumped quickly out of bed, with a steady hand deposited the ten drops of arsenic onto the paper and transferred them to my tongue, wrapped myself in my purple robe de chambre, and opened the door. Andrea looked at me with weepy eyes, as if preparing to throw herself into my arms. I kept my hands resolutely in my pockets.
I soon learned what had happened. As I followed her through the halls of the hotel, my cousin told me that Emilia had just discovered her sister, dead. I extracted the information through a dense weft of sobs and whimpers.
I had a melancholy premonition. I thought of my promised vacation, my literary endeavors. I murmured, “Farewell, Petronius,” and delved into the room of the tragedy.
My first impression was a tender one: the lamp illuminating Emilia’s head against a row of books. She was crying soundlessly, and I seemed to detect a peacefulness in her beautiful face that I had not noticed before. On the table was a pile of manuscripts and proofs; a warm burst of sympathy throbbed in my chest. The dead girl was in the bed and, at first glance, appeared to be sleeping peacefully. I looked at her more closely: she displayed signs of strychnine poisoning.
Emilia asked, in a voice sobbing with hope, “Could it be an epileptic fit?”
I would have loved to have been able to answer in the affirmative. I allowed my silence to answer for me.
“A fainting spell?” asked Andrea.
Atuel entered the room. The others—from my cousin Esteban to the typist, even Manning and Cornejo—were crowded at the door.
I judged that the death had occurred within the last two hours. In response to Andrea’s question I said:
“She was poisoned.”
“I pay close attention to the food I serve my guests,” replied Andrea, offended. “If it had been something she ate, we would all be …”
“I am not saying that she ingested tainted food. She ingested poison.”
Doctor Cornejo entered the room, opened his arms and addressed me, impetuously:
“But Doctor, what are you suggesting? How dare you, in front of Miss Emilia …?”
I adjusted my glasses and gazed at Doctor Cornejo with impassive disdain. His affected courtesy, a mere pretext to interfere, was beginning to try my patience. Further, between his excitement and his gesticulating, he was panting like a gymnast. The room lacked air.
I responded dryly:
“The dilemma is clear: suicide or murder.”
My words made a profound impression. I went on:
“Nevertheless, clearly, I am not the doctor who will issue the death certificate … You should all try to convince him that this is a suicide.”
I myself could probably have been convinced of it rather quickly. But my words were the offspring of passion: it amused me to fluster Cornejo. Besides, with that plural—“you should all”—I was putting everyone present under suspicion for murder. I found this amusing as well.
“I’m afraid that Doctor Huberman is correct—” affirmed Atuel, and I remembered his shadow, and Mary’s. He went on:
“Here is the vial of drops that she took every morning; the stopper is on the floor … If the poison was hidden in there, we find ourselves faced with a crime.”
It was the last straw; we could no longer avoid involving the police. It occurred to me that, in the future, I might do better to control my impulses.
Doctor Cornejo declared:
“Do not forget that we are among gentlemen. I refuse to accept your conclusions.”
A scream, harrowing and primordial, interrupted my musings. Then I heard the sound of hurried steps, moving away from us.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Miguel,” came the reply.
The boy’s intemperate outburst seemed a reproach to us all, for having indulged in petty spite in the face of the undeniable miracle of death.
8
THE STORM HAD ABATED. WE SENT THE Rickenbacker to Salinas.
Emilia and Atuel had sat with the body throughout the morning. The rest of the guests discreetly took turns performing that sad duty. Andrea scarcely appeared in the room. The fact that someone had died in her hotel vexed her; to now have to receive the police and face an investigation was something that exceeded her limits of understanding and tolerance. She was careless in her interactions with Atuel and Emilia. She did not disguise her resentment when speaking of the deceased.
At eleven on the dot I approached the kitchen to ask Andrea to prepare my habitual broth with toast points. I was met with a disagreeable sight: Andrea was pale and a tremble in her jaw foretold the imminence of a sob. Barely hiding my impatience, I realized that a delay in the arrival of my soup was all but inevitable. I decided it would be prudent not to speak until it had been served.
While I am disposed to noting my cousin’s many faults, I must admit that she is an excellent cook. The soup she brought me was perhaps superior even to the one my two jovial dwarfs prepare for me at the office.
Straddling the carpenter’s bench with the tray in front of me, I resigned myself to listening to Andrea.
“I’m worried about Miguel,” she assured me, in a tone that seemed to suggest that the two of us alone were in possession of good sense and equanimity. “Those women forget that he is only a boy and they make no attempt to shield him from their arguments or carryings on with their boyfriends.”
The elderly typist passed fleetly by, a flyswatter in her hand. Presently, I heard the monotonous blows that the huntress unleashed upon the walls and furniture. Since the storm made opening the windows impossible, the hotel was full of flies. The atmosphere was oppressive.
“You are forgetting that one of ‘those women’ has died,” I said, picking up the conversation with Andrea.
It wasn’t only the soup that deserved high praise. The toast was outstanding.
“They’ll have driven him completely m
ad with all that. I’m worried, Humberto. Miguel has had a sad childhood. He’s anemic, poorly developed. He’s quite small for his age. He broods all the time. My brother thought that the ocean could bolster him up … He’s in his room crying. I would like you to go see him.”
My cousin’s cruelty toward the deceased should not have muddled my thinking; what she had said about the boy hit the nail on the head. First impressions leave an imprint on the soul that reverberates throughout one’s life. It is incumbent upon all men that this echo not be ominous. I could not forget, however, Miguel’s disagreeable attitude, eavesdropping on Emilia and Mary’s private quarrels.
I followed Andrea into the depths of the hotel, into a storage room full of trunks among which they had placed a bed for Miguel. While I groped along the walls, searching in vain for the light switch, Andrea lit a match. Then she lit the stub of a candle, stuck in a light-blue candlestick set atop one of the trunks.
The boy was not there.
Nailed to the wall was a page torn from El Gráfico with a photo of the Western Railway Soccer Team. On a newspaper spread out like a carpet over one of the trunks was an empty jar of hair gel, a comb, a toothbrush, and a pack of Barrilete cigarettes. The bed was unmade.
9
ANDREA ATTEMPTED TO ENLIST ME IN HER search for Miguel, but I managed to get free of her. I entered Mary’s room in time to prevent the typist—that excessively busy incarnation of Muscarius, the god who shooed flies from altars—from committing an irreparable error. Indeed, she had already put the papers that were on the table in order, and was preparing to tidy the nightstand.
“Don’t touch anything!” I shouted. “You are going to muddle the fingerprints.”
I gave Cornejo and Atuel a severe look. The latter seemed to be smiling with veiled slyness.
My words did not ruffle the typist. She clutched the flyswatter. Her eyes took on a contented sibylline luster.
“I told you something was going to happen,” she exclaimed. Then, whacking at the walls, she hurried off.
When the gong sounded Emilia said that she wasn’t going upstairs to have lunch. With more impertinence than gallantry, Cornejo insisted on taking her place.
“I sympathize with you, Emilia. But believe me, the rest of us also feel responsible in the face of such a terrible tragedy. Your nerves are shattered. You should eat. We’re all a little family here. As I am the eldest, I claim the honor of sitting with your sister.”
A typical example of false courtesy: to inconvenience everyone in order to be kind to one person. Had he consulted me? And yet, he was putting me in the position of having to offer myself as a mourner and go without lunch. Furthermore, he himself had suggested that Emilia should feel responsible for her sister’s death. It was only natural that she should want to spend a little time alone with her before the officials and the police arrived.
Atuel approached Emilia and spoke to her in a paternal tone:
“You should do whatever you want, Emilia.” He caressed her arm. “If you would like lunch, I will stay, of course. If not, tell me if you want me to stay with you, or if you want to be alone. Do just as you like.”
“The manner makes the man,” I thought. Atuel’s manner, like that of an overly debonair tango crooner, was beginning to exasperate me.
Emilia insisted on staying. I looked at her with the mixture of admiration and gratitude that men feel—sons of women, after all—toward the finest examples of the feminine spirit. As I was leaving, however, I noticed that in the midst of her pain Emilia had mustered the energy to change her clothes and powder her nose.
During lunch, the noise of the silverware and the drone of the flies were strangely pronounced. We spoke so little it made Manning seem almost chatty …
It is horrible to say it, but the members of our “little family” were eyeing one another with suspicion.
No one gave a thought to Miguel, except for Andrea. When we stood up, she took me aside.
“We haven’t found him,” she informed me. “Surely he’s crying in the boat. Or in the sand. Or down in the crab bogs. We’ll keep looking. When I have word, I’ll let you know.”
Why would she let me know? It irritated me that she would take me as an accomplice in these pseudo-maternal worries.
10
I FELT UNEXPECTEDLY CONTENT IN EMILIA’S company, and I venture to say that my presence didn’t displease her.
There we were in that enormous rambling hotel, shut in as though it were a boat on the bottom of the ocean, or, more exactly, a foundered submarine. I felt that the air was becoming distressingly thin. I was uncomfortable everywhere, and I wouldn’t be any more so in the dead girl’s room. Besides, to accompany Emilia was an act of mercy.
Time itself acted strangely in that house. Some hours flew by, while others crept, and when I looked at my watch just before entering Mary’s room, it was two in the afternoon. I would have guessed it was five o’clock.
We were alone in the room. Emilia asked me if I had known her sister well.
“No,” I said. “Only in my capacity as a doctor. She visited my office two or three times.” I added a kind lie: “I think she spoke of you on one occasion.”
“We loved each other very much,” Emilia commented. “Mary was so sweet to me … When my mother died, she took her place. Now she’s left me alone.”
“You have Atuel,” I suggested, hypocritically.
Involuntarily, I had witnessed the incident of the night before: I had seen Mary kissing him.
“Poor man. It’s affecting him almost as much as me,” Emilia declared, and a noble splendor illuminated her face. “The three of us were very close.”
A profound feeling of discomfort came over me.
“Are you two getting married soon?” I asked out of mere curiosity.
“I think so. But this has been so unexpected … For the time being I only want to think of Mary, to take refuge in my memories of our childhood in Tres Arroyos.”
Experience has taught me that uncultured people, normally incapable of putting two words together, often utter poignant phrases when compelled by pain. I asked myself how well Humberto Huberman, with all his erudition, would acquit himself under similar circumstances.
“And now the police are coming,” Emilia continued. “The worst part is that I don’t even want to know the truth.” Tears streamed down her face. “After what’s happened I feel only a deep tenderness for Mary. I just can’t resign myself to them tormenting her with the autopsy.”
I thought this unreasonable, and I told her so quite frankly. “Sooner or later the decomposition process would do the same thing. But the truth matters to all of us, Emilia. Besides, Mary’s memory lives on. No one can take that away.”
The typist came in with a bouquet of wilting daisies. She laid it at the foot of the bed.
“They’re the only flowers in the hotel,” she said.
We watched her leave. Emilia might have murmured “thank you.” We could no longer speak.
To break the silence, I asked, “Where were you last night, when you went out?”
“I was close by,” she replied nervously. Hastily, she continued: “Leaning against one of the walls of the house. In that wind I couldn’t go any farther. I came back right away. Andrea opened the door for me. The rest of you had already left.”
The chairs creaked at our slightest movement. The physiological workings of our bodies took on a sudden preponderance. We sighed, we sneezed, we coughed.
For the first time in her life, Andrea arrived at an opportune moment. She appeared in the doorway and beckoned me.
Miguel had returned.
11
IN THE FLICKERING CANDLELIGHT, I WAS struck by Miguel’s waxy complexion, intense gaze and rodent-like face. I registered a dizzy sensation that felt both unusual and unpleasant: I had lost my composure. Indeed, ensconced in the dim light of the trunk room, Miguel seemed determined to defend his mystery. My nervous imagination produced images of cornered animals, sma
ll and fierce.
The boy looked me straight in the eye. Instinctively, I avoided his obstinate expression and, feigning calm, I busied myself inspecting the trunks, the nightstand, the rickety cot, the walls. I lingered on the photograph of the soccer team; I had a brilliant idea.
“I see, my little friend, that you are also a Western Railway fan.”
Not a flicker of simpatico illuminated Miguel’s face.
“Have you ever been to the Quilmes Athletic Club?” I added. “Did you see the spot where Eliseo Brown’s ball tore through the fence?”
Now Miguel smiled. Nevertheless, my knowledge of “the annals of soccer” had reached its limit. My next move in our dialogue would astutely combine the tactics of retreat and attack.
“Where did you spend the afternoon?” I asked casually. “You’re not afraid of the storm?”
I remembered the abandoned sailboat, and thinking that we might speak in nautical terms, I consulted my memories of Conrad. Miguel answered abruptly:
“I went to Paulino Rocha’s house.”
“Who is Paulino Rocha?”
Miguel was surprised.
“The pharmacist,” he explained.
I had regained my composure. I continued the interrogation.
“And what were you doing in the pharmacist’s house?”
“I went to ask him to teach me how to preserve seaweed.”
From beneath his cot, he pulled out a can of naphtha, with the rim crudely cut off. He tipped it toward me; some red and green strips floated in the liquid.
I now saw clearly into the soul of my small interlocutor. Little boys are the very incarnation of possibility. Miguel dabbled as a fisherman, a philatelist, a naturalist. A web of circumstances would determine—perhaps I would determine—if he would follow the easy meanderings of a collector or sportsman, or if he would venture out into the limitless avenues of science.
But I couldn’t permit myself these musings, fertile and opportune though they may have been; I had to forge ahead, tirelessly, with my investigation.