Theodore tried to imagine this. All he could really imagine, or think, was that the police and the doctors had made a mistake. “As a layman, I can’t understand how the doctors can be absolutely sure he is lying. Suppose, for instance, he knew the flower vendor slightly and didn’t want to be remembered as buying two dozen carnations that evening. He would have had a little boy buy the flowers for him—just as he did!”
“Señor—it is the way he lies. Why didn’t he say that about the flowers? No, señor, he couldn’t think why he’d had the little boy buy them for him. He couldn’t put that much together. It wasn’t clear. One minute he said he bought the flowers himself, the next that he had a little boy buy them. The only thing that was clear was that he hadn’t bought the flowers at all! And the postcard, señor, don’t forget that. You remember how he looked when we showed it to him—first accusing one of your American friends of sending it, which may yet be true. Just a minute, Señor Schiebelhut! There is no doubt Ramón is not the murderer. One of the psychiatrists was trained at the Johns Hopkins Institute of North America. Such a man doesn’t make a mistake.” He waited for a sign from Theodore that he believed him.
Theodore did not make it. “Would it be possible for me to speak to this doctor?”
“Sí. He is going to be here for a couple of days, I think, then he goes back to a sanatorium in Guadalajara. His name is Vicente Rojas.” Sauzas looked in his wallet, pulled out a dozen papers and cards, and finally gave Theodore two telephone numbers and the name of the hotel at which Rojas was staying. “You should be able to get him at one of these places, but he is here on business and he is very busy.” Then Sauzas stood up. “I must be on my way. Many thanks for your co-operation today, señor. We—” He stopped to look at Inocenza, who was coming in, and he smiled and thanked her as she held his coat for him. “Adios, adiós,” Sauzas said to both of them, and Inocenza crossed the patio in front of him to open the iron gates.
Theodore stood in the living-room.
Inocenza came back smiling. “What did I say, señor? I never believed Ramón was guilty, did I?”
“No.”
“I’m so happy for him!” she said, still radiantly smiling. “He was simply out of his mind from grief!”
She looked happy as a child, not at all puzzled or troubled by what might have made Ramón confess in the first place. To Inocenza it would all somehow be a mistake of the policía. Her side—which was Ramón and himself and herself—had won.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Dr. Vicente Rojas looked at Theodore in a friendly way through round, black-rimmed glasses. “I can understand your doubt, Señor Schiebelhut. You would like to find who did it. But you may take my word—I would stake my reputation as a doctor that he did not.” He peered at Theodore again for a moment, then rather shyly cut a piece of papaw with his fork. He was about thirty, slender and dark-haired, with a large nose that projected from a lean, dry face.
Theodore conceded that the man looked intelligent, not the kind of man to make hasty judgments, but how much experience could one have as a psychiatrist at thirty or thirty-two at most?
“You are quite fond of Otero, are you not?”
Theodore picked up his black coffee. They were in the downstairs coffee-shop of the Hotel Francis on the Paseo de la Reforma. “Yes. We were very good friends.”
“He needs a good friend now,” Rojas remarked, looking down at the centre of the shiny black table, which resembled polished obsidian and reminded Theodore of a necklace that Lelia had often worn which had an oval obsidian pendant.
“His problems seem to be within himself.” Dr. Rojas was continuing. “He is much troubled by guilt, you know.” He moved his chair a little to let the man at the next table get out.
“But anybody who confesses to a crime he didn’t commit is in a way insane, isn’t he?”
Dr. Rojas gave a smile and a shrug. “It is certainly not normal. He does not fall into the category of the insane, quite. Other tests we gave he scored quite normally on. So this could be a temporary reaction to the shock of the murder—the murder of a woman he was in love with. And couldn’t marry besides.”
“Do you think that he is enacting something that he had thought of doing—” Theodore did not have to go on, because Rojas had seized upon it.
“Yes, very possibly. Not consciously thought of doing, but unconsciously. And he would like to take the blame above all. He feels so much guilt, you see, that nothing can assuage it! Nada, nada!”
“It’s the extent that I find hard to believe. The extent of the guilt.”
“Guilt is mostly below the surface—like an iceberg,” Dr. Rojas said, smiling, cutting more papaya. He never took a full meal in the evening, he had told Theodore, just some fruit or pastry and coffee, and he liked the fresh papaya here. It was a quarter to eight. Dr. Rojas had said he had an appointment at eight.
“So you think he will get over this, that it’s a temporary—attitude?”
“I believe so,” Dr. Rojas said, though without certainty. “He would benefit from some psychiatric treatments. Believe me, I tried to help him without his knowing what I was doing, señor.” Rojas smiled. “He resists everything which he considers ‘help’. It is a sad situation. And he is not the only person in the world with such an attitude. It’s because he’s only thirty that I have hope. Ordinarily, the religion can be of great assistance. But not when you let it burden the mind with more guilt, eh? The Catholic Church is the greatest psychiatrist of all, taken—taken properly. And yet the Pope recently found it necessary to tell the Catholics in Spain to practise less strictly, for their mental health.” Rojas’s eyes widened.
Theodore nodded. He had read Herbert Matthews on the same subject, and he wondered if that was also Dr. Rojas’s source of information.
“Oh, for the undisturbed it is fine,” Rojas went on, “even for the slightly disturbed. I have seen mental patients become increasingly fanatical, however, and that is not good. Don’t you agree? But let us hope Otero is not such a type. He is a man in love. His beloved is dead. Romeo was also disturbed when he thought Juliet was dead. If you remember, señor,” he added, smiling with pride at his erudition, “he killed himself.”
“Do you think Ramón is in danger of killing himself?”
Dr. Rojas appeared to consider this. “I do not see it at present, no. But I’m not omniscient. No, señor, if we had seen any immediate danger, we would not have permitted him to leave. Besides, the Catholic Church considers suicide a great sin, you know.”
Theodore looked at Rojas’s alert eyes and wondered what he could ask next, what would make it all definite and sure.
“Are you going to see Otero?” Dr. Rojas asked.
“I don’t know.”
Rojas was silent for a minute. “He bears some grudges against you, but they are superficial. It would help him if he could have a peaceful relationship with you.”
“Do you think he could? Now?”
“You could try. He might be resentful if you don’t believe his fantastic stories—for a while. But this is what we are counting on to go away. He is very stubborn and proud. It may slip into a pose, his attitude of guilt. But I am expecting he will grow strong enough to turn loose of it. He is not so disturbed that he can’t.” Dr. Rojas smiled confidently. “I am sorry, but I think I must be leaving you. I’m expecting a caller in the lobby.” He signaled for the bill.
Theodore insisted on paying, and thanked Dr. Rojas for his time. He started to ask where he might reach him in future, and then realized that he would never want to reach him in future, because he did not have that much confidence in him.
They parted cordially in the busy lobby of the hotel, amongst glittering counters of souvenirs and silver jewelry, and Theodore walked down the stairs and out on the sidewalk of the great avenue, which at this hour of late dusk, with the mildly chill breez
e blowing through the tall trees that bordered it, always reminded him of Paris on an evening in early spring. It was only six blocks or so to his house, and he decided to walk. While he had been talking to the psychiatrist, he had had an impulse to ring up Ramón and to be friendly. The impulse had vanished, and Theodore reproached himself for his naïveté, for hanging on the psychiatrist’s words as if they couldn’t possibly be wrong. He went over again what the newspapers had said. The psychiatrists’ opinions had simply been reported. No name had been given to Ramón’s aberrations. They had put them down to ‘emotional stress’.
Theodore reached his house and kept on walking. He walked around the corner, and stopped and stared at a display in a small shop that sold modern furniture. A starving orange-colored dog, a ghost of a dog, slunk along the side of the building and stopped when it came to Theodore, looking up with a beseeching expression, its feet braced to run. If there had been a food shop near-by, he would have bought the dog a meat sandwich, he thought. Theodore extended his hand, and the creature started and loped away with its tail between its legs. He hadn’t really been going to touch it, because he hadn’t wanted to. And he wouldn’t really have fed it, because he didn’t believe in prolonging the life of an unwanted dog in Mexico. It was only a matter of time until the dog picked up some poisoned food left especially for it in some public market. Yet he felt he had let the dog down, from the dog’s point of view, at least.
He walked on, feeling utterly depressed. If he could not get an answer from Sauzas or the psychiatrists that seemed satisfactory—or rather, if he did not accept their answers—he would have to find his own, he thought. He would have to make up his own mind. He would have to see Ramón, distasteful as that might be. Tomorrow, he decided, he would call Ramón. But not tonight.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Theodore had thought of taking Ramón a bottle of Strega, which he was very fond of, but decided not to bring any gift at all, lest Ramón take it as conciliatory, or worse, patronizing. He climbed the dreary stairway slowly, listening even on the third floor for Ramón’s voice among the voices and murmurs he heard from everywhere. Arturo was with Ramón again, and had answered the telephone when he called. “Yes, of course you can come! Please do!” Arturo had said hopefully, but there had been a dissenting mumble from Ramón in the background.
He knocked.
Footsteps came to the door, and Arturo opened it with a smile of greeting. “Welcome, Don Teodoro, welcome!” he said warmly, his round face with its usual two-day growth of beard full of joy at the sight of him.
Ramón got up from a chair. He was neatly dressed and shaven, as if he were about to go out. “Hello, Teo.”
“Hello, Ramón. Well, you are looking better.” He walked to Ramón and extended his hand.
Ramón shook it politely.
“He is better. He is tired, you know. But they didn’t hurt him this time. Not at all,” Arturo said, locking his short fingers together nervously.
Ramón looked only superficially better, Theodore saw. He was thinner, and there were hollows under his eyes. “Inocenza sends her greetings.”
Ramón said nothing.
“He has not been out. Not since yesterday,” Arturo said, putting away a broom in the kitchenette corner.
The room looked unusually clean and orderly.
“Damn, I forgot to bring your bird, Ramón! He’s doing very well, but I didn’t want you to think I’d stolen him from you.”
“You have my bird?” Ramón said, astonished. “I thought that janitor stole it!”
“Didn’t Sauzas tell you? I had it all the time.”
Ramón smiled dazedly and passed a hand over his hair. “The janitor here has the key. I thought he gave it to those kids—” Ramón gestured with a wave of his hand at the door. “Those kids in the house here.”
“No, Ramón. The bird is fine.” Theodore knew that the unwashed, unruly children in the house bothered Ramón, mainly because he pitied them. But they were always playing annoying pranks on Ramón and perhaps everyone in the house.
“You see, Ramón?” Arturo said, smiling, trying to coax as much pleasure as possible for Ramón out of the fact that his bird was still alive.
“You’re spending a lot of time here, Arturo,” Theodore remarked. “How is the shop these days?”
“Oh.” Arturo made an effacing gesture and smiled at both of them as if he did not want to talk about it.
The assistants came and went in Arturo’s shop, but they were all alike, good-for-nothings who worked with a tongue-in-cheek attitude and talked about their girl friends with each other all day long. Theodore had used to drop into the shop every now and then, and Ramón would always be at work on a chair or a table leg, and Arturo was usually reading a newspaper on an old sofa that someone had brought in years ago and never called for. Arturo could do masterly work, but as a master he did not like to work. He preferred to teach Ramón, which in fact he had done, starting from scratch, when Ramón had asked him for a job three or four years ago. Ramón had had nothing but perseverance, but this Arturo appreciated, and Theodore knew that Arturo wanted to leave his shop to Ramón when he died. It had been a curious choice of work for a young man as handsome and intelligent as Ramón, Theodore had often thought. Now he recognized a martyrdom in it that he had been unaware of before.
Ramón was standing by his bed, watching him, his handsome head erect. On the low table at the head of the bed lay Ramón’s old gilt-edged black Bible.
“I’m glad to hear that you weren’t treated badly, Ramón,” Theodore said.
“Oh, not in the least,” Ramón said, with subtle sarcasm.
“I phoned several times to find out what was happening.”
Ramón’s eyes flinched. “Well—they just don’t believe me.”
Theodore wondered whether to tell Ramón that he had seen one of the psychiatrists. He decided against it. He glanced at Arturo, who was looking at him with a puzzled anxiety. From down the hall came the sound of the toilet being flushed. Theodore turned slightly, and was met by the grey wall just four feet from Ramón’s single window. “What are your plans, Ramón?” Theodore asked, turning again. “Are you going back to work soon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe I’m keeping you, Ramón. Were you going out?” Theodore asked.
“Oh no, not at all!” Arturo said. “Sit down, Don Teodoro. Sit down, if you please.”
Theodore sat down on the bed, but felt at once depressed by the surroundings and the atmosphere and wished he were standing again. “And how are your daughter and granddaughter, Don Arturo?”
“Very well, thank you. Uh—the little one is cutting her first tooth!” Arturo put a forefinger up to his own teeth. Then he straightened and pulled his waistcoat down. “Well, I must be going. No, no, you are not running me off, Don Teodoro. I’m supposed to see a customer at twelve o’clock, and it’s nearly that now.”
Ramón seemed about to protest, then accepted it with resignation —though Theodore was not sure he was not going to announce his leaving with Arturo until he said good-bye at the door and closed it after the man.
“I’m glad you have such a good friend,” Theodore said, with a smile.
Ramón looked at him blankly.
“Don’t you appreciate friends, Ramón?”
“You were not my friend when you thought I had killed her.”
“Well, Ramón—how could I have been? Would you have been my friend if you thought I had done it?”
“No.”
“Well, then. I apologize, Ramón. We were both distraught. How could we not have been?”
Ramón only looked at him disappointedly.
Was this the time? Theodore could not imagine progressing with Ramón if he postponed it. “I don’t believe you’re the murderer, Ramón. I believe you may think you a
re—to that extent I believe you. I talked with one of the doctors last night. Dr. Rojas.”
“Rojas,” Ramón murmured, smiling. He crushed out the little cigarette that he had just lighted.
Theodore watched him as he walked slowly around the room. Ramón’s walk seemed different, the way his hands hunt at his sides, the way he held his head, somewhat higher than usual. “Well, Ramón, what do you intend to do?”
Ramón continued to walk slowly. “Why do you worry about me? Don’t trouble yourself. The city’ll be the same, the people the same, the buildings, the policía, as if nothing has happened. You’ll be the same—but I didn’t expect it of you, Teo, that you’d be the same affectionate, kind, naïve Teo—whom I have to protect from a peddler selling bogus silver jewelry on the street!” Ramón finished, laughing.
Theodore smiled, too.
Ramón sat down on his bed.
“I worry about you because I like you, and you are my friend, Ramón.”
Ramón looked at him and said calmly: “But I killed her—and I’m not your friend anymore.”
Theodore did not move. He felt an alarming power of convincing in Ramón, an insidious thing, like being swayed from an entrenched position by a good argument. And suppose he had done it? In that moment of passion and rage that was supposed to extenuate a crime? Would it be possible to forgive him through understanding him? Theodore wanted to forgive him, in the abstract. But now he simply did not know what to think about Ramón. He did not feel sure about one thing or the other. Theodore went to the head of Ramón’s bed and picked up his Bible. He held it out towards Ramón, who had jumped up. “If I asked you to swear that you killed her—would you swear it, Ramón?”
Ramón looked at the Bible and said: “That’s not the kind of thing you swear on a Bible!”
“But would you?”
“I swear it. I don’t want to touch the Bible, but I swear it,” Ramón said.