Within a short time, most of the tables were empty and Momo came over to talk to us. The man you took the message to killed himself, I said immediately, just to see his reaction. He became nervous and said, I didn’t take it to him, there’s a bellhop who slips the messages under the doors, do you know why he did it? did he leave a note or anything? was it because of the message? who are you? I told him I was a friend of the dead man and a delegate at the conference, and asked him, could you describe the woman who left the message from her voice? Momo closed his eyes for a moment and said: I know enough about women to assume she’s thirty-five, single, an only child or maybe the eldest child. . Marta interrupted him, an only child or maybe the eldest child? how do you know that? It’s easy, replied Momo, she doesn’t hesitate, she has a naturally authoritarian manner; when I asked her to dictate the message she did it in a very sharp way, as if she was saying it to me: “We’ve found you.” I can still hear the words in my head, my God, I’m not surprised he killed himself, who was he, another delegate? Yes, I said, it’s strange that somebody should decide to do that so suddenly, after a success like the one he had with his talk in the morning. Momo shrugged and said, it’s sudden for us, but maybe not for him; by the way, I almost forgot to tell you that the woman had called before, three times, she seemed really desperate to speak to him; she even asked to have the call transferred to the restaurant, it’s strange, she had to speak to him as soon as possible but she didn’t want to leave her name; when I asked her she said, that’s all you need, write it down just as I say it, thank you, and hung up. What Momo was giving us was worth its weight in gold. I asked: how did you know it was a long-distance call if you didn’t look at the caller ID? She told me herself when she called the first time, she wanted me to know how urgent it was and she said: this is a long-distance call, please try to find him; you could look at the caller ID, which has a memory, but that’s confidential information and we aren’t authorized to give it out to guests.
Somebody called Momo and he excused himself. Marta said to me, do you still think somebody killed him? It’s a possibility, I said, that phrase “we’ve found you,” could be taken several ways: we’ve been looking for you, you’ve been running away, you owe us something, you have to pay, why did you do it, all that time ago, you betrayed us, you hid from us, all kinds of things. But the basic question is a simple one, who are “we”? Marta polished off her drink in one go and said, well, after hearing his story it seems pretty obvious that “we” are the people from that Ministry, don’t you think? maybe the guru didn’t die, maybe things were very different than the way Maturana told it. It’s possible, Marta, it’s very possible, the next thing we have to do is gain access to the caller ID and see the memory, the number must have been recorded. As we were about to leave, Momo came and said, I’ve just remembered something else: the guest in that room, the one who killed himself, called the operator twice during the afternoon and asked if there’d been any messages for him, and when he was told there hadn’t he insisted, not even any calls without a message? and I told, him, no sir, not even without a message, so it’s obvious the poor man knew they were looking for him and was expecting to hear from them.
Another notable thing happened that night.
As we were on our way out of the Bamboo, we heard a voice from an inside table, somebody calling out Marta’s name; she turned and cried: Bryndis! It was Bryndis Kiljan, the war correspondent for her newspaper in Iceland. When we were introduced, Bryndis said: I know and love your country, oh, Colombia! it has the most cruel and unnecessary war of any I’ve seen in the world and therefore the stupidest, I’m sorry if I say it as I see it. . If it wasn’t for the number of people killed, it would be laughable. She was with other journalists, they were drinking iced vodka. Bryndis had just come back from the front and was exhausted. She said: all I want to do is drink and cause a great scandal. They obviously had a lot to talk about, so I preferred to leave them to it and went back to the hotel.
The next day, I went to the switchboard operator’s office. At that hour the person on duty was an older man who looked at me with great reluctance when I asked to check the caller ID. I’m a delegate at the conference, I said, and I need to check something quickly, can I? The caller ID isn’t at the disposal of the guests, if you give me your room number I can tell you the source of the calls you’ve received, and I’ll send you a message about it, that’s all I can do. I thought to give him Maturana’s number, but the deception would be obvious immediately, he did not look stupid and he must have heard about what had happened the night before. The man was waiting for my answer, so I said, can you please check the calls from the United States, it’s code one, the person who was supposed to call didn’t know my room number, so that’s irrelevant, could you have a look yesterday between 19:00 and 20:00? I’ll be back in half an hour, thanks. As I got to the door he said, you don’t need to wait half an hour, at that hour there weren’t any calls from the United States, for you or anybody, is there anything else I can help you with?
I went to the coffee shop thinking: if the call was not from the United States, where the Ministry had been located, well, that was understandable, I would cross check this with Momo later. It was time to make a few notes. This was what I wrote:
The message (we’ve found you) raises one basic question: who are “we”? Hypothesis: Walter de la Salle and Miss Jessica. They are looking for José for a reason we don’t know, something he concealed in the story he told, because it may be assumed that the death, if it really was a suicide, was a way of escaping. If it wasn’t a suicide — which is what I think — then the death was a punishment. What had he done? This poses another question: how did Walter de la Salle escape the fire? What really happened at the Ministry? The fact that José Maturana used pseudonyms for his books reinforces the theory that he was running away. For all we know, he may have only ever used his real name at this conference, but why?
One thing that argues in favor of the suicide hypothesis is that in the story told by Maturana he himself said that he had already tried to kill himself at least once, using the same method of slashing his wrists in a hotel bathroom. It was something he carried inside him, it was on his mind.
As for the telephone call, what to make of it? If it didn’t come from the United States, where was it from? Anything’s possible, even that it came from inside the hotel. It’s also possible it wasn’t Walter but Jefferson, why not? Or that it was the detective, or a blackmailer, or simply somebody who has no connection with the Ministry. The fact is, I know very little about Maturana’s life. Do we ever know much about a life, even after it’s been well told?