It was hard not to feel vindictive toward Rafael for having fallen from the sky at such an inopportune time. Once the warmth of the hug faded, the best I could do was to soften my vindictiveness with selected childhood memories, deliberately played over and over. This behavior modification exercise produced a semblance of kindness that Rafael mistook for the real thing. Luckily. He had learned about wines at his masters’ table, so I brought up half a dozen good bottles from the cellar. It was almost four thirty. Before going back to my bedroom lookout, I gave Rafael several blank notebooks and the Judge’s Mont Blanc pen. “Write your story,” I said. He looked at the writing materials with suspicion. Was he paranoiac? Did he think I was trying to extract a confession from him? I could be part of the presidential cabal. I could have phoned the authorities from the kitchen. I would not trust me if I were him. For the first time ever, I was afraid of Rafael. He had never lifted a finger against me or anyone else, as far as I knew. He was more the doormat type. But he would not have risen as high if he was not, in some way, a fighter. Besides, insanity makes people superhumanly strong, and he was not entirely sane. That coup story was a madman’s fantasy. Dumping a container full of political enemies in the Atlantic was a cheesy remake of Pinochet’s discharging them from a plane into the Pacific (a less costly option). True, the inconceivable had become ordinary. I could not tell which articles of our yo-yo Constitution were suspended at the moment. Years ago, the first time it happened, the country roared, or so the already tattered media said. Even I, still a child, sneered. Now no one cared. No one was keeping the score. A coup? In Aracnida, the Beautiful, nothing was too grotesque anymore to be true.
“You could write a letter to your children,” I said ingratiatingly, promising to deliver it. How many promises had I made already, none of which I seriously considered keeping? Rafael asked me to swear by my mother’s ashes to do it. He became agitated when I tried to weasel out of that. So I was forced to look him in the eyes and reluctantly swear on my mother’s memory to hand the letter to his daughter and son. Do broken promises have any consequences for the dead on whom you swear in vain? I didn’t think so, although I would not have been surprised if St. Augustine had a different opinion. He was a vindictive fellow himself. I decided to check the Confessions, and do whatever had to be done to lift the burden off their souls. I was, and still am, a cautious unbeliever.
Back in my room, I took a lightning-fast shower and changed my underwear and shirt. My travails since Rafael’s arrival had left me smelling sour. Through the binoculars, I saw a rabbit hopping across the driveway as it looped down the hill. The rabbit stood in the middle of the road, my advance lookout, the first that would hear and see McCabe’s car coming up the hill. I had cleaned and oiled a Mauser Gewehr 98. It was the only rifle in the Judge’s collection that was specifically made for war. The other seven were all antique hunting shotguns, even if humans were often killed with them, the earliest being an 1866 Winchester Henry Iron Frame Rifle. The Gewehr 98 had a glorious history. It was the German army’s standard rifle between 1898 and 1935. It killed or wounded Rupert Brooks, Apollinaire, and hundreds of thousands of others in World War I. I would have never used a hunting rifle: McCabe was not an animal, but all too human, a sublime woman, fit only for the company of poets and heroes. Honor, purity, and cleanliness were owed her. If I had had the guts, I would have chosen a sword; but I am a coward. I do not mind acknowledging it. On the contrary, my cowardice enhances my accomplishments. Never did someone do more with so little, morally speaking.
The rabbit was now a grey smudge on the road. The Mauser was back in the Judge’s gun cabinet, first from the left. It was loaded with the only two bullets I had found, one in each of its twin chambers. The second bullet was there in the unlikely event the first one missed, or did not finish the job. I did not want McCabe to suffer. The key to the cabinet was in the right pocket of my jacket. Target practice with the Judge’s rifle had been out of the question: too noisy, too risky to try buying bullets online, let alone in person. I was not concerned anymore about my future; I just did not want to be stopped from doing what I had to do. So, I had practiced my movements with the unloaded gun until I could do them with my eyes closed. Every day I slashed a few seconds from the sequence of unlocking the cabinet door, grabbing the Mauser, loading it, pointing at her forehead, and shooting. I would drive a bullet into her forehead, right above the nose, while she was sitting at the dinner table, between dessert and coffee. I would approach her from behind and to the right, call her name, and when she turned her head to look at me, I would pull the trigger. At such close range, about ten feet, I could not miss. I was a pretty good shot; I grew up shooting rabbits with Ezequiel, which my mother stewed and we all ate, except for Rafael. Even now, when I had not shot at a living creature in twenty years, my hands did not shake. I had been an avid carnival shooter in New York City, a provider of ugly stuffed animals to embarrassed dates. That had kept me sharp.
The flight from Chicago had arrived on time at one o’clock. Airport information would not tell me if McCabe was on board. It was six o’clock now. Five hours to drive the 180 miles from the state capital airport to the Judge’s house on a secured military expressway? Not impossible, but like Rafael’s operetta coup, unlikely. Even then, I did not doubt McCabe would come. That was my only certainty. Everything else, even the roundness of the earth, could be questioned. The dilemma was whether I should start roasting the venison at once, even if McCabe had not arrived. My faith in McCabe’s arrival, however absolute, lacked a precise time frame. I peered into the dark with the binoculars, not expecting to see anything, but to help myself think. My brain worked better when my eyes were focused on the light grey landscape turning into charcoal grey and then black velvet. I would start cooking the venison at 6:30 p.m. sharp. The outside lights went on, circling the house in gold. I again aired McCabe’s room and turned on the lights throughout the house, which now glowed with Christmas warmth. After removing a few tired flowers from the vases, I put the venison in the oven, at a slightly lower temperature, anticipating a longer cooking time than the recipe called for. To give McCabe time to get home.
At seven o’clock I went to see how Rafael was doing. The kitchen had a door that opened to the outside, and another opening onto a covered hallway leading to the cellar and the garage. The maid’s room could only be reached through the garage. It was unlikely that any noise in that room would be heard in the house. McCabe would never know we were not alone. On the other hand, Rafael could be screaming his head off in there without me hearing anything from the house. The boy I had grown up with would never go mad or kill himself. But the man with the Patek Philippe watch who talked about coups and containers was more opaque. I rapped softly on his door. When he did not answer, I went in. I did not see him at first. The room was in shadows. He had moved the chest of drawers away from the door and the only window, and was writing on it by the light of the table lamp, his back against the wall. That might prolong his life by ten seconds if his presumed killers came through the door, twenty if through the window, provided they did not first throw in a grenade, as they always do in the movies. He did not lift his head from the notebook or stop his hand, which was flying over the paper. I envied him. I wished it were my hand on that paper. But I had been marooned on a white sheet of paper for a long time, long before the loss of nouns and verbs made denial impossible, marooned from the moment “Benbassa” had won me that Blue Ribbon almost forty years ago. Perhaps it was Benbassa’s curse that had shaped my life, the punishment for pretending to be a writer. Benbassa’s curse, and not McCabe, even if I sensed an undercurrent between the two.