“It is some time since I have felt any pity towards him. I feel repulsed by his ability to put on an act and drag others into playing along. I ask myself why we have such fear of violence. Violence is as healthy as the electric discharges in the atmosphere. It is much worse to go on living a fiction as we do, breathing the foul air of a swamp. How else could we call the supposed tolerance that unites us?
“There was a time when the word ‘morning’ held the fresh taste of freedom for me. Now it means nothing. Nothing can free me from myself. I tried it and failed.
“There is no use deceiving myself. I am a cowardly woman and my supposed freedom is a new form of cowardice. Everything scares me, he knows that. He must know the truth. Why does he not say anything? His silence makes him more contemptible in my eyes.
“Since last night I feel my life does not belong to me, as if I were a puppet whose strings everyone pulls as they please. I think the sympathy that drew me to Rita was a way of justifying myself. It is strange. However, people cannot bear to see their shortcomings in others.
“He knew. What he has tried to do is monstrous. Why am I so surprised? How could I have expected more from someone capable of taking pretence to such a degree of perfection? I envy Betty her ability to see the world with open eyes. At least she knows how to face up to her life.
“My God! Now I know why you have punished me. I have sinned against love, against sincerity, I lied when you gave me the strength to be truthful, you gave me the sense to renounce deception and I took refuge in it like the weak do. Sins against the spirit do not ever deserve pardon in your eyes, Lord.”
The telephone was ringing insistently. Ericourt lifted the receiver. It was Blasi. His attempts to find Emilio Villalba had so far proved fruitless.
“Who’s that?”
“The lad from the laundry. He was in the Czerbós’s apartment.” Blasi paused. “I found out he installed something or other at the Iñarras’s place.”
“Oh, yes!”
Ericourt was drawing geometric figures on a piece of paper.
“Can you hear me, sir? I’ve arranged to meet his roommates.”
“Fine. Leave that. I’ve got another job for you. Come back here.”
He hung up. He took his private folder out of one of the desk drawers. Idly leafing through, he ran his gaze over the different headings written in capitals: AGUSTÍN IÑARRA, GABRIELA DE IÑARRA, BEATRIZ IÑARRA, RITA CZERBÓ, BORIS CZERBÓ (crossed out), ADOLFO LUCHTER, GUSTAVO EIDINGER, FRANCISCO SOLER.
He slowly wrote another name on a blank sheet. He made sure the letters matched the handwriting of the previous ones: EMILIO VILLALBA.
He picked up the telephone and dialled an internal line.
“Sergeant Portela? Did the Magistrate send señorita Iñarra home? Did someone go with her? Perfect.”
With a satisfied sigh he leant back in his chair. While he waited for Blasi to arrive he passed the time writing a few lines on the sheet he had just added to the report.
The shadow slipped into the Czerbós’s kitchen. Rita was in her bedroom at the end of the hall, and the footsteps, although stealthy, rang out in the silence of her fear. Her hands desperately grasped the covers.
“He’s back,” she murmured in a strained voice. The words stuck in her throat and seemed to tighten around her chest like an iron ring. “They’re back… they’ll always come back…”
From the dark, empty space came faces contorted by torture. Faces that had one day smiled at her in her home far away in Germany, but had then been disfigured by death before disappearing forever from the world of the living. Rita trembled under the blankets.
“They’ll always come back, Boris… I’m scared… I can’t make them go away.”
The footsteps had stopped. Rita fixed her eyes on the double-locked door.
She heard the click of a kitchen window catch. Fear vibrated in the air around her, and with it, the sound of a body sliding carefully through the darkness. The fear then intensified, paralysing her.
“Boris… I love you so much… you’ve been the only one for me… Boris…”
With her senses alert, waiting for the cloud of agony that would confuse all those images with that of pleasure, Rita repeated the name that had given her life meaning.
“Boris…”
She heard the distant creak of a window.
Rita then felt the iron ring split into lacerating, destructive barbs, like hooks in a torture chamber that swelled in her throat and tore a scream from her. Rita burst into semiconscious, hysterical sobs that convulsed her body.
She got out of bed and opened the door. Her teary eyes fixed on the door to Boris’s empty room. With her plaits hanging down her back and her face bathed in tears, she looked very like a little girl who goes to her brother’s room at night to say sorry for having made him angry that afternoon.
Yet behind the door there was nothing but darkness and silence. Rita didn’t dare turn on the light. Boris’s face was not there. That face, full of satisfaction when he made her scream by pulling her hair or sticking a pin into an insect, had disappeared from that room and that home forever.
“Boris, where are you?”
Rita went into the deserted kitchen, where the mysterious presence that had woken her filled the air with traces of fear. She went out into the service hallway. The black space of the courtyard drew her like the abyss of a dream. Arms trailed down the walls like long snakes, calling her. They were the same arms that used to grasp and grip her when she went to bed with her heart in tatters, having guessed from Boris’s silence that the following day another of her friends would know the horror of betrayal.
She climbed onto a kitchen stool that was pushed against the wall, under the window. She leant out. From the kitchen window on the fourth floor, a rope dangled in the air like the questions she would never dare ask herself. The rope hung as far as the Iñarras’s apartment.
What was life, after all? The fear of suffering? The fear of nothingness? Where was that nothingness? In Boris’s eyes, which no amount of betrayal could ever fill? In the eyes of her victims? In her own inability to form a soul?
The others surely knew already. The others were those dead people, and Boris’s persecution had opened the door to their knowledge. They knew because they had made the leap in space and time. Boris pushed them when he led them into the torture chamber and tore out their secrets. But his dead had not made him more powerful in life or stronger in spirit.
Yes, that black pit had to have a bottom. It was not possible to swing endlessly like the rope hanging from the window. In the Iñarras’s kitchen, the shadow moved dimly and silently.
Rita felt the rope’s pendulum movement hammering in her temples. She pressed her head with both hands and closed her eyes. The image of the dark pit expanded, then a bright spot appeared in that limitless shadow.
The cold wind of the winter night bathed her cheeks.
“Where are you, Boris?”
Her body rocked for a moment on the parapet and fell with a dry snap like the violent slam of a door. The rope quivered in the air. In the immediate silence before the building awoke, a hand emerged from the window of Soler’s apartment and untied the rope.
Ferruccio Blasi entered Ericourt’s office. The morning light picked out the yellowish sheen the sleepless night had left on the faces of the Inspector and his assistant. Blasi was carrying a bundle of papers.