“What's going on? What do you want?”
“I'm looking for Edith.”
“And do you think this is a decent hour? And do you think that's any way to ring a doorbell?”
“I'm sorry … I …”
I what? What could he say? He thought about saying the police were after him, or that he was with the police and chasing someone. The woman continued to watch him as he asked himself if it would not be better to run away from there too. Then the door opened. There was Edith, half asleep, wearing an undershirt, flannel bottoms, and flip-flops. Her hair was loose and shiny. Behind her was a staircase. Félix Chacaltana had never seen the interior of Edith's house when he had walked her home. It was an old, subdivided, three-story house where the same doorbell apparently was heard in all the apartments. He realized the old woman did not live with Edith when the young woman let him in and apologized to her. He heard her say he was her cousin who had just come from Andahuaylas for Holy Week. She promised it would not happen again. The woman did not reply. She simply pulled her head in from the window and back into her own life.
Félix and Edith went up to the third floor, to a tiny room with an electric hot plate in a corner. There was no bathroom and no refrigerator. Chacaltana supposed she shared those facilities with some neighbors, perhaps with the same old woman who had reprimanded him. He thought no more about it. As soon as she closed the door, still half asleep, he put his arms around the girl and held her very tight, as if he wanted to fuse with her. As they embraced, she felt the shape of the pistol against her body. She tried to pull away.
“What's happened to you? What's going on?”
Félix did not let Edith go. He clung to her for a long time before he realized that tears were falling from his eyes.
“Do you want a mate?”
He nodded. She heated the water on the hot plate while he kept holding her. She served the mate and sat down. She caressed his hair gently while he, on his knees, rested his head on her lap and clasped her around the waist, trembling.
“Don't you want to tell me what happened? Does it have to do with your work?”
Now not even images of fire and blows passed through the mind of Prosecutor Chacaltana. There was only a great void, a hungry darkness, the maw of nothingness closing over his head. He needed to talk. He needed to tell everything that had happened to him in the past month and a half. He needed to cry like a baby. He began to tell it all, urged on by the young woman's caresses. When the first light of dawn sifted through the small window in the room, he had finished his story. Edith's lap was warm and dry. Seconds later, as if a great weight had been lifted from him, he was asleep.
He woke at eight in the morning. He had not slept very long. And he could not sleep any more. He did not even think he could move. After the initial shock of not knowing where he was, he looked around Edith's small apartment. He was in the bed. His jacket and the holster were hanging from the only chair, and under that were his shoes, one beside the other, as orderly and unwrinkled as the other things Edith had touched. She was there too, standing across from him, taking off her undershirt and bottoms. She had gotten a dishpan of water from somewhere and was carefully washing her underarms and crotch, her neck and feet, in the still tenuous morning light.
“Good morning,” said the prosecutor.
When she heard him, she did her best to cover her body. Her right arm crossed her chest and her left hand covered her sex.
“Turn around,” she replied. “I have no place else to go in here.”
The prosecutor did not turn around. He smiled at her. She returned the smile. She had turned red.
“Turn around,” she insisted.
Sluggishly, the prosecutor turned around. He remained in that position for a few seconds until he turned back to her, not so sluggishly now. She covered herself again.
“If you don't behave, you won't come back. Remember you're my cousin.”
The prosecutor thought of the previous night. His head was teeming with fragments of his encounter with Father Quiroz in the basement, his arrival at Edith's house, the young woman's tender lap. He wanted to touch her. Take refuge in her.
“Come here,” he said. It sounded like an order.
“I have to go to work and I'm already late. My boss will be there because we're expecting a crowd. Don't move from here. Doña Dora is furious. She scolded me for twenty minutes when I went down for water.”
“Come here,” he repeated.
She wrapped a towel around her body and approached him. She touched his forehead and let him bring her hand slowly to his lips. He kissed her palm and the back of her hand. He put her hand gently into his mouth and sucked each one of her fingers.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Thank you for helping me,” he said. “I'll never forget it.”
She leaned over to kiss him. He took her by the waist and pulled her to the bed. She refused, first with her body and then with her voice, but then she let herself sink down.
“I have to go,” she reminded him, laughing.
He lay on top of her body and put his tongue in her mouth. He no longer felt like a little boy needing protection. On the contrary, he wanted to recover his adulthood. Show her that he could also be a protective man, a man. He kissed her neck, her shoulders, the back of her neck, where a few short black hairs escaped, like long down. She responded with kisses on his forehead and cheeks. She tried to move him to one side. He resisted.
“Don't go to work,” he said.
She laughed.
“Don't go.”
He wondered if they had discovered the body yet. Then he removed the thought from his mind. He needed something else, something besides so much death. He needed something with life. He was breathing heavily. Her mouth was partially open. He bit her lips.
“Ow!” Edith groaned. “Does your mama know you do those things?”
“She doesn't see us here.”
“She's always with you. That's the problem.”
The prosecutor became perturbed. He did not think this was the right context for talking about his mother. He replied:
“She likes you very much.” It seemed to him a delicate moment, one of those moments when important things are said. “She would not object if … if I married you.”
The color rose in Edith's cheeks. She seemed surprised.
“She?”
He smiled but did not receive a smile in return. This disconcerted him, it disconcerted him not to receive from people what he had planned. Smiles are repaid with smiles, that must be written down somewhere as a norm. She caressed his forehead and said words he did not expect.
“Listen, Félix … I love you very much but … the truth is … to marry you … I'd need for her not to be here.”
“What?”
“I understand your feelings. But I couldn't go to live in a house that belongs to another woman. Least of all one … who isn't really there.”
“She is there,” said the prosecutor. “Do you believe that only things you can see are there?”
She lowered her eyes.
“No, of course not. I'm going to get dressed.”
She stood. He tried to hold her back but failed. Something in the air had broken, and the prosecutor tried to put the pieces back together.
“Listen … You have to understand … I love you but … my mother … just now …”
He knew there were words caught in his throat, trying to get out, but it was not clear to him how to pull them free, he would have liked to scoop them out with a spoon. He had always been good with words, but he seemed incapable of summoning the exact ones to talk about what mattered to him most. And the worst thing was that right now he did not have the time of a functionary at his desk or a poet facing a sheet of paper. The words he needed should have burst directly from his heart, but his heart was dry.