In town, nobody knew anything; nobody had seen or heard anything, no disturbance, no suspicious movement, no shouting, nothing. At the station they listened to them politely, even diligently; the new captain — the previous one had been killed a few years before, and the station was no longer such a dangerous place — took their report seriously and started making inquiries, but after forty-eight hours the investigation hadn’t turned up a single lead or a single witness or achieved a single result. Héctor and Tomatis decided to go to police headquarters, to the courthouse, and to the federal police offices in the city. But they didn’t learn anything definitive there either. In the best cases they received evasive responses, and in the worst, veiled threats. They knew that if Elisa and El Gato had in fact been kidnapped they had to act quickly; the longer they delayed the less chance there was that they’d ever be seen again. Ultimately, a kidnapping was the only plausible theory, because it was more than obvious that they hadn’t fled, that there hadn’t been an accident — the car was still parked out front when Simone discovered their disappearance, and Héctor, who had another key, drove it back to the city — not a car accident or any other kind: they never went canoeing or walking through town, where they were never seen except when they were out shopping. So Héctor and Tomatis decided to file a report at the federal police station knowing that the people who took the report were convinced from the beginning that it was a waste of time, that if Elisa and El Gato had really been kidnapped by the army or the police their simulacra of legal action wouldn’t produce a single result. They did everything they could, and because Héctor had a verbal altercation with an army official, fearing that he’d get arrested or worse — at that time, anything was possible — Tomatis calmed him down, took him home, and asked him not to get involved any more. Another possibility had occurred to him, a way to find out something or, if they had been kidnapped by the military, to obtain their release. Héctor accepted: in the end, there wasn’t anything left to do.
The possibility that Tomatis was thinking of was to speak to Mario Brando, whom he knew was married to the daughter of a general and whose brother-in-law was General Ponce, the right arm of General Negri, captain of the military district, whom everyone knew was directly responsible for all clandestine activity in the area, every kidnapping, every assassination, every raid, and every seizure. It was said that Negri liked to participate, personally, in the bloodiest and most sordid activities, in solidarity with the troops, a rumor that he often bragged about. He’d said publicly several times that, to strip the tree of subversion to its roots one has to dig broadly and deeply, and he was prepared to clear every inch of ground down to the last blade of grass in order to complete his task.
Brando and Tomatis had detested each other for years, but their interactions maintained a veneer of civility. Brando hated Washington and all his friends, among whom Tomatis was one of the closest. Tomatis was a long-time editor of La Región’s literary supplement, where neither he nor his friends hardly ever published, and Brando, who was an assiduous contributor, couldn’t afford to make an enemy of him. Tomatis was obligated to read his submissions before sending them to the print shop, and sometimes even when the proofs arrived, if there wasn’t anyone else there to read them, and he felt a malevolent glee publishing them because they seemed to make plain their author’s mediocrity, not realizing that the public to which they were directed may not have had the capacity to perceive it. Ever since he’d first heard of him, when he was seventeen or eighteen, Tomatis had considered Brando an impostor: to him, his bourgeois lifestyle and his avant-garde pretensions seemed irreconcilable, not to mention the happy accident, Tomatis thought, that his beloved precisionism attempted to combine poetry with science, the only intellectual activity that the comfortable bourgeoisie respected, because it was a way to make money, to increase their longevity, and to substitute a salaried worker for a cheaper machine. Tomatis and Brando lived in different worlds: they had different readers, different relationships with institutions, with enemies, and with allies, both literary and political. And while they moved in different circles and their ways of conceiving and practicing the literary profession were mutually opposed, there were a series of common spaces — the literary supplement of La Región, for instance — where inevitably, however much they ignored each other the rest of the time, like fragments of expanding material, their trajectories pushing them always farther apart, sometimes relatively, in the present moment, trying to avoid a collision, trying as much as possible, with icy deference, to disregard the other, their paths crossed.
And so Tomatis, playing, as they say, his last card, decided to go and see him. The possibility was dubious and, Tomatis thought, possibly dangerous. He was in the midst of the most miserable years of his life: the world was falling apart around him, his marriage was a shipwreck, and, every night, he tried to swim away from the wreckage, the misery, and the fury. He still had the strength to go to the paper, but soon he would stop that too, first for a short while, and eventually forever. And so he went to the publisher’s office and, without explaining his reasons, asked him to arrange a meeting with Brando, and when the publisher didn’t act surprised he figured he already knew what they were but chose to disregard them, less from politeness than from a sense of caution. Soon enough, the publisher called him over the internal system and told him that Brando would be waiting for him at his house in Guadalupe at eight. The speed of the response intrigued him. Had Brando also guessed what would make Tomatis would put aside his reticence and decide to speak with him, or had the publisher, with his talent for finding a compromise even in the most irreconcilably contradictory situations, mistakenly let something slip about the reasons for Tomatis’s visit, maybe suggesting, without specifying anything, that the paper was preparing a special supplement and that Tomatis wanted to ask him personally for a submission? For years, with the hatred and humiliation as poignant as ever (and even now, as he’s telling the story in the Amigos del Vino bar), Tomatis wondered how he could have been crazy enough to speak to Brando, but would immediately reconcile himself to the certainty that, because it was the last chance they had to see Elisa and Gato again, not trying to see him would have been even worse. And so at eight on the dot he was ringing the doorbell at the house of Brando.
It was his father’s house, built in the twenties from the wealth of the pasta factory, two or three blocks from the beach. The well-kept house was on a corner, but withdrawn behind a garden that occupied at least a quarter of a block. After his father’s death, Brando had moved in. A light came on in the threshold and a uniformed servant opened the door, but rather than take him inside the house guided him through the trees to a sort of cubical pavilion topped with a semispherical cupola, constructed in an open space in the garden, and whose function Tomatis guessed immediately. It was Brando’s office, in which he’d built his amateur observatory: every so often La Región published an article or an interview in which Brando described his astronomical observations with such insight that Tomatis once commented that Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo — not a festive, happy bunch in the least — must have been doubled over with laughter in their graves.