After being initially dazzled, Bea is, in a sense, disillusioned by New York. The people are pretentious or simply imbecilic, and no one has serious conversations about anything. They are all cynics, and erecting a wall of indifference between themselves and all things human is a fashion that coexists with the most ridiculous of hats. Her friend Heather, who has been in New York for a year, avoids her, offering risible excuses, and is only to be seen with a group of famous lesbians. Bea concentrates on her political writing, now more detailed and better argued than in her Italian period. In relation to her poetry, she is unaware that what she does can be justified so elegantly: the battle for free verse contributes to her theoretical redemption.
On an evening when Bea is returning to the apartment that also serves as her studio, having just left one of those salons where the dilettantes take great pains to shock by dressing like standard lamps, she is stopped by a down-and-out who brusquely asks her for money. Bea is accustomed to walking alone and has learned to avoid all manner of altercations. It is not unusual for men to follow her when they notice she lives by herself, and to make indecent proposals in the most sordid streets. But she is a tough woman and knows it is essential to keep smiling and reduce her aggressor to the size of a child, looking derisively at him; they usually leave her in peace.
This down-and-out, however, is persistent. A man of about fifty with a pockmarked face, dressed in stinking rags. He walks with a stoop, as if carrying a heavy load on his right shoulder, and has a long beard that does not completely hide the gauntness of his features. At some point he steps out in front of Bea, blocking her way. It is a narrow street, almost deserted at this twilight hour. Bea impatiently looks the undesirable in the eye and asks permission to pass. And then it happens: she recognizes the eyes and forehead of someone glimpsed in the past. She hesitates an instant longer, with time standing still around her, rummaging in her memory in search of such a face. When she finds it, she pales and her jaw drops in a gesture of surprise that will remain there for several days. The vagabond is none other than the murderer in that Piedmont station, the man who, fifteen years before, in a fit of spite, fired at a woman who was abandoning him in slow motion. Now Bea meets him again, on another continent and with a very different appearance, but it is undoubtedly the same person. She remembers in fine detail the pain on his face when the guards arrested him; under the gray beard, the man’s expression is now identicaclass="underline" he seems frozen in that instant, as if it were impossible to feel any new emotion after that last, definitive one.
While Bea is thinking about the strange trajectories life traces out, the man continues to try to wheedle some money out of her, claiming hunger, but he becomes increasingly desperate and his words of entreaty less sweet. The destitute man pulls a rusty knife from his tattered overcoat and waves it before Bea’s face. His movements become jerky and his voice, now shrill, demands that Beatrice give him everything she has, including her jewelry. But Bea stands motionless a few seconds longer. When aggression seems almost inevitable, when she becomes aware that the man is advancing on her, determined to get what he wants, Bea, in her most elegant British accent, pronounces the magic words: “You shot a woman in Italy fifteen years ago, in a train station.”
The effect is instantaneous: the vagabond’s expression suddenly changes. Starting in his neck — the tendons strained — a look of terror ascends his face and even seems to change the color of his uncombed hair. His right hand swells, and then opens with visible impotence, dropping the knife, which falls to the ground making much less noise than Bea would have supposed. The vagabond takes four steps back, his eyes wide open, then turns and runs.
At that moment, completely alone in the by then absolute darkness, Bea has a first inkling of the meaning of destiny.
A
The weeks passed. Having exhausted the list of nearby towns he was interested in driving to, Marcelo finally decided to visit the dreaded Nueva Francia. Out of prudence, he invited Velásquez to accompany him, but that weekend his friend had at last managed to arrange a meeting with his son, whom he was to pick up from the interstate bus terminal.
“You go, dude,” he said to Marcelo in a tone of sincere intimacy, “but be really careful over there. Nueva Francia isn’t exactly at its best right now. You’ll have to go through a whole heap of military checkpoints, so take your passport and university ID with you. If they see you’re a foreigner and a professor, they won’t search you as often. . unlike me. Even though the fucking sons of bitches know who I am, they make me empty my pockets every time. Oh, and don’t miss Los Insurgentes cantina — it’s the nearest thing Nueva Francia has to a tourist attraction.”
Marcelo took his friend’s recommendations on board and set out in his Renault at eleven in the morning with a bottle of water and several forms of identification, which he did indeed have to show the soldiers at the first checkpoint he came to, just over a mile from Los Girasoles. Other checkpoints followed the same pattern, and as he got closer to Nueva Francia, the sense of danger increased and the stony military gazes became more accusing, more difficult to avoid. At the fifth checkpoint, and despite the fact that his credentials gave him a certain advantage, they asked him to get out of the car and open the trunk. Marcelo, who was used to trusting the forces of law and order, was annoyed by the notion that the military was essentially bad. But everything pointed in that direction: these men spat, tended to be high-handed, and an emptiness in their eyes suggested sudden, gratuitous violence. At this last, fifth checkpoint, they asked him more precise questions, silently laughing at his answers and keeping their fingers on the triggers of their assault rifles.
When he saw Nueva Francia, Marcelo lost a little of the contempt he felt for Los Girasoles: this town was much worse. If the streets were dirty in Los Girasoles, and the road surface merged into the surrounding dirt every few yards, in Nueva Francia the inhabitants seemed to have been living in the same shit for the last thirty years, with the additional aggravation that a trickle of progress — the only one that had reached its dusty rurality — had provided them with the most up-to-date weapons, carried casually and proudly, not only by the people from the cartels, but even by the ordinary citizens, corrupted to the point of being unable to distinguish between one dead body and two hundred.
Marcelo parked the Renault on one side of the square. On a couple of benches, without even a single tree to relieve the harsh effects of the sun on their faces, two drunks were taking what looked to Marcelo like their last siesta. A policeman, standing in the corner, looking uncomfortable in a bulletproof vest and carrying a rusty rifle, was fanning himself with his blue uniform cap, sweating like a pig abandoned in the Sahara. As there was no one else in sight, Marcelo walked over to ask the policeman for directions.
“Excuse me, officer, do you know where Los Insurgentes cantina is?”
The policeman looked at him in surprise, as if he didn’t even remotely expect anyone around there to talk to him. He gave a long, noisy, mucus-filled sniff and then spat a green substance onto the asphalt. The sun would evaporate that phlegm in a few seconds, and both Marcelo and the policeman would begin to breathe it in if they stayed as they were, regarding each other from close proximity.