Yoshio had locked himself in his room — terrified, according to what everyone said, distraught by the death of his friend — and would not answer the door.
“Let him be for now, until I need him,” Croce said. “He won’t go anywhere.”
Sofía seemed furious, she looked at Renzi with a strange smile. She said that Tony was crazy for Ada, maybe not in love, probably just horny for her, but that there were other reasons why he’d come to town. The stories that people told about the trio, about the games they had played or imagined, they had nothing to do with the crime, they were phantoms, fantasies that she could tell Emilio about some other time, if the opportunity arose, because she had nothing to hide, she wasn’t going to let a gaggle of old, resentful women tell her how she should live—“or with whom,” she added — she and her sister should go to bed with. Nor would they allow the prudish bastards of a small town, the fat, pious slobs who go straight from church to the Cross-Eyed Woman’s brothel — or vice versa — lecture them about proper behavior.
Country people lived in two separate realities, with two sets of morals, in two parallel worlds. On the one hand they dressed in English clothes and drove around the pampas in their pickup trucks waving at the laborers as if they were feudal lords, and on the other they got mixed up in all the dirty dealings and shady arrangements with the cattle auctioneers and exporters from the Capital. That’s why when Tony arrived people knew that there had to be another play involved, in addition to the sentimental story. Why would an American come all the way here if not to bring money for some kind of business?
“And they were right,” Sofía said, lighting a cigarette and smoking in silence for a while, the cigarette’s ember glowing in the afternoon dusk. “Tony had an errand to carry out, that’s why he came looking for us. Once he found us, he went with us to the casinos in Atlantic City, stayed in the luxury hotels, or in flea-ridden motels by the side of the road, we had fun living the life, while they finished arranging the affair with which they had entrusted him.”
“An errand?” Renzi asked. “What affair? Did he already know about that when he found you and your sister in the U.S.?”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “In December.”
“In December, that’s not possible. What do you mean in December? But your brother—”
“Maybe it was January, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, who cares? He was a gentleman, he never spoke out of turn, and he never lied to us. He only refused to go into certain details,” Sofía said, and resumed her litany, as if she were a child singing in a church choir. Renzi had a flash with that image, the little redheaded girl in church, singing in the choir, dressed in white … “And on top of everything, Tony was a mulatto. The fact that my sister and I were turned on by him scared the farmers around here to no end. You know they actually started calling him Zambo, like my father had anticipated.”
Tony’s death could not be understood without talking about the dark side of the family, especially Luca’s story, the other mother’s son, my half-brother, Sofía was saying. Renzi tried to get her to slow down. “Hold on, hold on,” Renzi said, but Sofía became irritated and continued, or went back to restart the story somewhere else.
“When the factory collapsed, my brother didn’t want to sell. I shouldn’t say that he ‘didn’t want to,’ it was more like he wasn’t able to. He couldn’t imagine the possibility of giving up, of giving in. Understand? Imagine a mathematician who discovers that two plus two is five, and to keep everyone from thinking that he’s crazy, he has to adapt the entire mathematical system to his formula. A system wherein two plus two, needless to say, is not five, or three — and he’s able to do it.” She served herself another glass of wine and added ice, and stayed still for a moment; then she turned to face Renzi, who looked like a cat, sitting on the couch. “You look like a cat,” she said, “plopped down on that couch like that. And I’ll tell you something else,” she continued. “That’s not what it was like, he’s not that abstract, imagine a swimming champion who drowns. Or better yet, picture a great marathon runner who’s in first place, only five hundred meters from the finish line, when something goes wrong, he gets a cramp that paralyzes him, but he keeps going, because he never thinks about giving up, no way whatsoever, until finally, when he crosses the line, it’s already nighttime and there’s no one else left in the stadium.”
“What? What stadium?” Renzi asks. “What cat? No more comparisons, please. Tell it straight, will you?”
“Don’t rush me, hold on. We have time, don’t we?” she said, and stood motionless for a moment, looking at the light coming in through the back window, from the other side of the patio, between the trees. “He realized,” she said after a pause, as if hearing a tune in the air again, “that everyone in town had plotted to get him out of the way. Two plus two is five, he thought, but no one knows it. And he was right.”
“He was right about what?”
“Yeah,” she said. “The inheritance from his mother. Understand?” she said, and looked at him. “Everything we have is inherited, that’s the curse.”
She’s delirious, Renzi thought, she’s the one who’s drunk. What was she talking about?
“We’ve spent our lives fighting over the inheritance, first my grandfather, then my father, now the two of us, the sisters. I always remember the wakes, the relatives arguing at the town’s funeral parlor while they cried over the deceased. It happened with my grandfather and with my brother Lucio, and it’s going to happen with my father, and with the two of us, too. The only one who kept his distance and didn’t accept any part of the bequest and made himself what he is, by himself, is my brother Luca. Because there is nothing to inherit except death and the land, and the land must not change hands, the land is the only thing of any value, as my father always says, and when my brother refused to accept what was his, that’s when all the conflicts started which led to Tony’s death.”
9 “Tony, you know I’m not looking for love anymore, not of any kind. I’ve passed my twenty-five summers, oh Lord, and I will not live with love again, nor with tenderness. I have looked for it, for love, yes, but the times that I’ve found it, it has gone poorly. You know that a girl at first believes everything she hears, men [illegible] a girl like me who is so naïve and has so much understanding. A man shows up with ‘I love you,’ he promises villas and castles, he hollers two or three times, and then, to hell with me. When I left Lalo, I was the biggest flirt, one tease after another and then I’d light it up, I was the worst. When an American came around I’d go crazy, Honey, Honey, he’d have me and the next day, it was like he didn’t even know me [the next page is missing].”