She returns unhurriedly to the office. Waiting for the elevator, she notices a young man, about twenty-five, wearing an old suit and a tie whose design intrigues her: identical sky-blue faces screwed up in surprise against a background of watery green. Beside the young man, on the floor, is a suitcase of considerable dimensions. They say hello. The doors of the elevator open and both of them get in. Having examined her, the young man says that he sells socks, and that if she’s interested he can offer her a good deal. She says she’s not interested and then she thinks that it’s strange to find a sock salesman inside the building, especially at a time when most of the offices are closed. The sock salesman gets out first, at the third floor, where there’s an architect’s studio and the office of a legal firm. As he’s stepping out of the elevator, he raises his left hand and touches his forehead with the tips of his fingers. A salute, she thinks, and smiles at him. As the doors of the elevator close, he returns her smile.
When she gets back to the newspaper office, the only person there is a woman, sitting on a chair next to the window, smoking. The journalist goes to her desk, switches on her computer, and then walks over to the window. At this point the woman who’s smoking realizes she’s there and looks at her. The journalist sits on the windowsill and looks down into the street, which, unusually, makes her feel dizzy. Both of them are quiet for a few seconds. The woman who’s smoking asks the journalist if she’s OK. Fine, she says, I came back to finish the article about Calama. The smoking woman turns and looks out of the window at the river of cars flowing away from the city center, then half closes her eyes and laughs. I read something about it, she says. Complete shit, says the journalist. It was kind of funny, says the woman who’s smoking. I don’t get you, says the journalist. After thinking for a moment, the smoking woman says, Actually, it wasn’t funny at all, and looks out of the window at the traffic again. Then the journalist gets up and walks over to her desk. She has stories to file and she’s running late. She takes a walkman from a drawer and puts the headphones on. She gets to work. But after a while she takes the headphones off and turns on her chair. There’s something weird about all this, she says. The woman who’s smoking looks at her and asks her what she’s talking about. About the woman in Calama, she says. At that moment the silence in the newspaper office is absolute. Or so it seems. Not even the hum of the elevator.
She was twenty-seven and she was stabbed twenty-seven times. Too much of a coincidence. Why? says the smoking woman, stuff like that happens. It’s a lot of stab wounds, the journalist replies, but without much conviction. I’ve seen stranger things than that, says the woman who’s smoking. After a moment of silence she adds: And maybe that’s just a typo anyway. It could be, thinks the journalist. Is something bothering you? asks the smoking woman. The victim, the journalist replies. It could have been any of us. The woman who’s smoking looks at her with a raised eyebrow. It could have been me, says the journalist. No way — you’re nothing like her, says the smoking woman. I’m sleeping with two men like she was, says the journalist. The woman who’s smoking smiles and repeats: No way. Everyone’s against her, one way or another. Against who? The victim, of course. The smoking woman shrugs her shoulders. The reporters who cover stories like this are no better than the killers. Not all of them, says the woman who’s smoking, there are some really good ones. Most of them are useless barflies, murmurs the journalist. Not all of them, says the smoking woman. Twenty-seven years old, twenty-seven stab wounds, I’m not convinced. Anyhow, they might have got the victim’s age mixed up with the number of stab wounds. She had a nine-year-old kid, says the journalist, holding the headphones in her left hand and stroking them. The woman who’s smoking stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray beside the window and stands up. Let’s go, she says. No, I’m going to stay for a bit, says the journalist, and puts the headphones back on.
She’s listening to Delalande. Her back is hurting, but otherwise she feels fine and she’s keen to keep working. Out of the corner of her eye she watches the woman who was smoking lean over her desk and put something into her handbag. Soon she feels her colleague’s hand gently pressing her shoulder to say good-bye. She goes on working. After half an hour she gets up and goes to the newspaper’s archives (which are hardly ever consulted any more) and that’s when she sees him.
He’s standing there, just outside the open door, not daring to cross the threshold, looking at her with a half-smile on his face. She stifles a cry and asks him what he wants. It’s me, he says, the sock salesman. The suitcase is sitting at his feet. I know, she says, I don’t want to buy anything. I just wanted to have a little look around, he says. She examines him for a few seconds; she’s not frightened now but angry, and she senses that the presence of the young salesman is a sign of something important, but what that something is eludes her grasp. All she knows is that it’s important (or has some degree of importance) and that she’s no longer afraid. Haven’t you ever been in a newspaper office? she asks. I haven’t, actually, he says. Come in, she says. He hesitates or pretends to hesitate and then he picks up the suitcase and walks in. Are you a journalist? She nods. And what are you writing? She tells him she’s writing an article about a murder. The salesman puts the suitcase down again and his gaze wanders from table to table. Can I tell you something? She looks at him and her mind is blank. In the elevator, he says, it seemed to me that you were suffering for some reason. Me? she says. Yes, I thought you were suffering, although of course I don’t know why. Everyone suffers, she says, as if they were talking in general terms. Neither of them has taken a seat. He’s standing with his back to the door. She has retreated and is standing near the window. Both of them are frozen now, tensely upright, waiting. But when they speak, their voices have a false tone of familiarity.
What murder are you working on? he asks. The murder of a woman, she says. He smiles. He has a nice smile, she thinks, although it makes him look older (he’s probably no more than twenty-five). It’s always women who get killed, he says, and gestures with his right hand in a way that she can’t interpret. As if she’d suddenly woken up, she realizes that she’s alone in the office with a stranger, at a time when the building is almost empty. A slight shudder sweeps through her body. He notices, and looks for a place to sit down, as if to reassure her. Seated, he looks even taller than he is. Tell me about it, he says. The request exasperates her. Wait till the issue comes out. No, tell me now, maybe I can make a suggestion, he says. You’re an expert on the subject, are you? she says. He looks at her without replying. She realizes she’s made a mistake and tries to correct it, but before she can say anything more, he tells her that he’s not an expert on murder. And why should I tell you about it? she says. Maybe you need to talk to someone. You could be right, she says. He smiles again. It was a woman who’d broken up with her husband, she says. Did the husband kill her? No. The husband has nothing to do with the crime. How come you’re so sure? Because they arrested the killer the same day, she says. Ah, I see, he says. She was twenty-seven, she broke up with her husband, then she had a boyfriend, she lived with him, a younger guy, twenty-four, then she split with this boyfriend and starting going out with another guy. Boyfriend A and boyfriend B, he says. If you like, she says, and suddenly she feels calm, tired and calm, as if a part of the imaginary struggle (whose rules remain opaque to her) was already over and done.
I’m guessing, says the sock salesman, that this woman was good-looking. Yes, she was a beautiful woman, and very young too. Well, not all that young, he says. So you think
a twenty-seven-year-old woman isn’t young? Come on, let’s be objective: young, sure, but not very young, he says. How old are you? Twenty-nine. I would have guessed twenty-five, she says. No, twenty-nine. He doesn’t ask her age. Did she work or did she live off her boyfriends? She was a secretary. This woman never lived off anyone. And she had a nine-year-old son. And who killed her, boyfriend A or boyfriend B? he asks. Who would you say? Boyfriend A, of course. She nods. Because he was jealous. Yes, she says. But do you think it was just because he was jealous? No, she says. Ah, so you see, we have the same theory, you and I, he says. She chooses not to reply and moves away from the window. I should switch on a light, he says. No, leave it, she says, pulling out a chair and sitting down. After a while, he says: And it’s getting you down, this story about a murder that happened a couple of months ago, I think it was. She looks at him and says nothing. Maybe you identify with the victim? Are you married? No, she says, but I’ve thought about her quite a bit. Are you married? No, me neither, he says, but I’ve lived with a few women. Do you think men have a problem with women who like sex? he asks. She looks away: beyond the windowpane night is enfolding the buildings. What she feels is a kind of claustrophobia. She got killed because she liked it, the journalist says without looking at him. She hears him say, Ah, and the tone of that ah is somewhere between irony and agony. She used to get up early, at a quarter past six every morning. She worked for a mining company in Calama, she was a secretary, and the stories in the papers say that her love life was a continual source of conflict. A continual source, he repeats, how poetic. Men kept falling in love with her, although she wasn’t classically beautiful, she says. Beauty’s relative, he says: There’s a kind of beauty for everyone. Do you think? she asks, and looks at him again, steadily. Yes I do, says the sock salesman, everyone: the ugly, the not-so-ugly, the average-looking and the beautiful. But just because the not-so-ugly seem desirable to the ugly, that doesn’t make them beautiful. So you get what I mean, he says. Yes, I get what you mean, she says ironically, but I don’t agree; beauty’s the same for everyone, like justice. Justice is the same for everyone? Don’t make me laugh, he says. In theory, at least. It’s all different in theory, he sighs, but let’s not argue; tell me more about your murdered secretary. Did you see the body? The body? No, I didn’t see it. I didn’t cover the story, I just wrote an article about the crime. So you didn’t go to the morgue in Calama? You didn’t see the victim or talk with the killer? She looks at him and smiles mysteriously. The killer, yeah, I talked with him, she says.
Well, that’s something, at least, he says. And? Nothing, she says, we talked, he told me he was sorry for what he’d done, he said he was crazy about the victim. Well put, he says. They met at the airport in Calama; he was a security guard, and she worked there for a while, as a receptionist. Before getting the job at the mine, says the sock salesman. In a mining company, she says. Same thing, he says. Well, not exactly. And how did he kill her? he asks. With a knife, she says. He stabbed her twenty-seven times. Don’t you think that’s strange? He looks down at the toes of his shoes for a few seconds. Then he looks at her again and says, What am I supposed to think is strange? The fact that she was twenty-seven and got stabbed twenty-seven times? Then a fury seizes her and she says, I’m in pretty much the same situation, so I guess I’m going to get killed one day too. She’s on the point of saying, And you’re the sad bastard who’s going to kill me, but she checks herself just in time. She’s shaking. But he can’t tell from where he’s sitting. To sum up: it’s her ex who kills her. The night of the murder she sleeps with the current boyfriend. The ex knows what’s going on. She’s told him and he’s been informed by others. Jealousy is eating him. He badgers and threatens her. But she pays him no attention; she’s decided to get on with her life. She’s met another man. They sleep together. That’s the key to the crime: by refusing to give anything up she signs her death warrant. Yes, says the sock salesman, now I understand. No, you don’t understand at all.
I CAN'T READ
This story is about four people. Two children, Lautaro and Pascual, a woman, Andrea, and another child, named Carlos. It’s also about Chile, and, in a way, about Latin America in general.
When my son Lautaro was eight years old, he made friends with Pascual, who was four at the time. A friendship between children of such different ages is unusual, and maybe it was entirely due to the fact that when they met, in November 1998, Lautaro hadn’t seen or played with another child for days on end, because Carolina and I had been trundling him around all over the place, much to his disgruntlement. It was Carolina’s first trip to Chile and my first trip back since leaving in January 1974.
So when Lautaro met Pascual they immediately became friends.
I think it was when we went to have dinner with Pascual’s parents. The second time they met was when Alexandra, Pascual’s mother, took Carolina and Lautaro to a swimming pool. I didn’t go. And the boys might have seen each other again later on. So twice, or three times at the most.
The swimming pool was in the foothills of the Cordillera and, according to Carolina, the water was icy cold and neither she nor Alexandra went in. But Pascual and Lautaro did, and they had a great time.
A strange thing happened (one of the many strange things that will happen in this story and carry it and perhaps turn out to be what it’s really about): when they got to the swimming pool, Lautaro asked Carolina if he could have a pee. She, of course, said yes, and then Lautaro went to the edge of the pool, pulled down his trunks a bit and peed into the water. That night, Carolina said that she’d been embarrassed, not for Lautaro, but because of what Alexandra might have thought. The fact is Lautaro had never done anything like that before. The swimming pool wasn’t really busy, but there were a few people, and my son is not some wild boy who pees wherever he feels like it. It was very strange, Carolina said that night: the enormous Cordillera looming behind the swimming pool as if it were waiting, the laughter and the muted voices of the adults, oblivious to Lautaro’s surprising urination, and Lautaro himself, wearing only his swimming trunks, peeing onto the blue surface of the water. What happened next? I asked. Well, she got up from where she was sunbathing, walked over to our son, and took him to the bathroom. It was like he was under hypnosis, said Carolina. Then he felt ashamed and didn’t want to get into the pool, where Pascual was already splashing around, though after a while he forgot all about it and went in. But Carolina didn’t. Alexandra asked if it was because of the pee, and Carolina said it was because of the cold, which was the truth.
I’d met Alexandra at the airport, a few minutes after stepping off the plane. It was almost a quarter of a century since I’d been in Chile. I’d been invited by Paula magazine, as one of the judges for their short story competition, and when we got through customs and immigration, Alexandra was there waiting for us, along with some people I didn’t know. When she said her name, Alexandra Edwards, I asked her if she was the daughter of Jorge Edwards, the writer, and she looked at me, frowned slightly, as if considering how to reply, then said no. I’m the daughter of the photographer, she explained a little while later. By that stage I was already one of her admirers. I have to say it’s not hard to admire her, because she’s very pretty. But it wasn’t her physical beauty that impressed me; it was something else, a side of her that I’ve gradually come to know and will probably never know completely, and yet I know it well enough to be sure that we’ll always be friends. We’d arrived in the morning, and that afternoon, I remember, I had lunch with the
rest of the judges, and I had to make a speech, and Alexandra was there, on the other side of the table, laughing with her eyes, which is something that Chilean women often do, or that’s how it seemed to me at the time, a mistaken impression that must have been due to finding myself back in the country after so many years away; women everywhere laugh with their eyes, all the time, and men do too occasionally, and sometimes it’s actually happening, and sometimes we only think it is, that silent laughter, which reminds me of Andrea, who is one of the main characters in this story, Andrea and Lautaro and Pascual and Carlitos, but I still hadn’t met Andrea, or Pascual, and I’d never even heard of Carlitos, although the fortunate day was drawing near, as someone might have said — myself, perhaps, in January 1974.
Anyway, in spite of the age difference, Lautaro and Pascual became friends, and maybe it was there at the swimming pool perched in the foothills of the Cordillera that their friendship was cemented, after the peeing incident. When Carolina told me, I couldn’t believe it: Lautaro urinating, not in the pool, underwater, as almost all kids do, but from the edge, for everyone to see.
That night, however, I fell asleep and dreamed of my son in that landscape, which had once been mine, the landscape of my twentieth year, and I came to understand a part of what he must have felt. If I’d been killed in Chile, at the end of 1973 or the beginning of 1974, he wouldn’t have been born, I thought, and the act of urinating from the edge of the swimming pool — as if he were asleep or had suddenly been overtaken by a dream — was a physical way of acknowledging that fact and its shadow: having been born and being in a world that might have existed without him.