“It seems to me that Cueto is always saying that things that appear to be different are really the same, while I’m interested in showing that things that appear to be the same are really different. I’ll teach them differences.19 See?” he asked. “It’s a duck, but if you look at it like this, instead, it’s a rabbit.” Croce drew the outline of the duck-rabbit. “What does it mean to see something such as it is? It’s not easy.” He looked down at the drawing he had sketched on the tablecloth. “A rabbit and a duck…
“Things are what we know them to be before we see them.” Renzi didn’t understand where the Inspector was going. “We see things according to how we interpret them. It’s called foresight: to know beforehand, to be forewarned.20 Out in the country, you follow the trail of a calf, you see the footprints on the dry earth, you know the animal is tired because the tracks are light, you orient yourself because the birds land to peck on the trail. You can’t just randomly look for footprints, the tracker must first know what he’s looking for: human, dog, puma. Then he can see. I’m like that too. You have to have a base first, only then can you can make inferences and deductions. That’s why you see what you know,” he pointed out, “and why you can’t see what you don’t know. Discovering something is seeing what no one else has perceived yet in another way. That’s the point.” Strange, Renzi thought, but he’s right. “On the other hand, if I don’t think of him as the criminal, his actions, his behavior, they don’t make sense.” He paused, thinking. “Understanding,” he said when he snapped out of it, “is not discovering facts, or extracting logical inferences, and even less constructing theories. Understanding is simply a matter of adopting the right point of view to perceive reality. A sick man doesn’t see the same world that a healthy man sees,” Croce said, losing himself in his thoughts again, but snapping right out of it this time. “A sad man doesn’t see the same world as a guy who’s happy. Likewise, a policeman doesn’t see the same reality as a journalist — begging your pardon,” he added, smiling. “I know reporters write with the solid intention of learning about the matter later.” He looked at him with a smile. Although he agreed, Renzi couldn’t respond, he had food in his mouth. “It’s like a game of chess, you have to wait for your opponent to make a move. Cueto wants to close the case, everyone in town wants the case to be closed, and I’m waiting for the evidence to break. I already have it, I know what happened, I saw it, but I can’t prove it yet. Look.” Renzi moved closer to see what Croce was looking at. It was a group of people on a horse in a photograph from the newspaper. Croce had circled the figure of a jockey. “You know what a simile is.”
Renzi looked at him.
“It’s all about distinguishing what something is from what it appears to be,” Croce continued. “Noticing something means stopping there, in front of it.” Croce stopped, as if he were waiting for something. The telephone rang then. Madariaga answered, looked at Croce, and made a cranking motion with his hand.
“A call from the police station in Tapalqué,” he said.
“Aha,” Croce said. “Good.” He got up and walked to the counter.
Renzi saw him nod his head yes, serious, and move his hand in the air as if the person on the telephone could see him.
“And when was this?
“Is there anyone with him?
“I’m on my way. Thanks, Leoni.”
Croce went up to the counter. “Add the dinner to my tab, my Basque friend,” he said to Madariaga, and started toward the exit. He stopped at the table where Renzi was still sitting.
“There’s been news. You can come along if you’d like.”
“Perfect. I’m taking this with me,” Renzi said, grabbing the paper with the drawing.
Night would have to finally fall before Sofía would clear up for him—“it’s an expression”—the story of her family, between their comings and goings to the mirror on the table in the living room with the white lines, which gave them both a few long minutes of exhilaration and clarity, of instant happiness, followed by a sort of dark grief which in the end Sofía valorized by saying that it was only during those moments of coming down—“in the comedown”—that it was possible to be sincere and tell the truth, leaning over the glass table with a rolled-up bill to snort the uncertain whiteness of the salt of life.
“My father,” Sofía said, “always thought that his sons would marry country girls from good families with good last names. He sent my brother Lucio to study engineering in La Plata, because that’s what he had done, and when he got there Lucio rented a room in a boarding house on Diagonal 80 which was run by a chronic student, a guy named Guerra. At the boarding house, on Fridays, they’d have this young woman come for the weekend, she rode over on a moped, the Vespa girl, they called her, she was really nice, an architecture student, living the life, as they say. Bimba, is the name she went by. A fun girl, she’d get there on Friday and stay through Sunday, she’d sleep with the six students who lived in the house, one at a time, of course, and sometimes she’d cook them meals or sit with them and drink mate, play cards, after doing them all.
“One afternoon, Lucio burned his hands in an explosion in the lab at the college and had to get his hands bandaged like a boxer, and Bimba took care of him, she looked after him, he couldn’t do anything on his own because of his hands. The following week, the next time she came back on Friday, she went straight to my brother’s room, changed his bandages, shaved and bathed him, spoon-fed him, and they chatted and had a great time. That same weekend Lucio asked her to stay with him, he offered to pay by himself what all the others paid together so that she would please not go with the others, but Bimba laughed and stroked his hair, she listened to his stories and his plans, and then she went off to bed with the other guys, in the other rooms, while Lucio suffered, lying on the bed, his bandaged hands in the air and his head full of horrible images. He’d go out to the patio, hear laughing, happy voices. They call Lucio ‘Bear’ because he’s enormous and because he always looks sad, or kind of spaced out. Ever since he was a little kid his problem was always his innocence, he was always gullible, too trusting and too good. That night, when Bimba was in bed with Guerra, where she continued her rounds after Lucio, my brother could hear them laughing in bed, and he lost it. He got up, enraged, his hands bandaged, he kicked Guerra’s door in and stormed into the room and knocked over the bedside table and the lamp that was on it. Guerra got up and started hitting Lucio, beating him — and my brother, as weak as he was, with his hands completely unusable, he fell to the ground right away and didn’t defend himself, and Guerra kept kicking and insulting him, he wanted to kill him. At that point, Bimba jumped on Guerra, naked, and started scratching and yelling at him to leave Lucio alone, until finally they had to call the police.” Sofía paused. “But the extraordinary thing,” she went on, “is that my brother quit college, he left everything and came back to town and married Bimba. He brought her home, he imposed her on the family and had kids with her, everyone knows that she used to be a working girl, and my mother is the only one who won’t speak with her, she’s always pretended that she was invisible, but no one else cares because Bimba is wonderful, she’s so much fun. My sister and I love her, she’s the one who taught us everything there is to know about life, and she’s the one who took care of Lucio during all these lean times and kept the house running with the few savings still remaining from the years of grandeur. My father liked her, too, she must have reminded him of the Irishwoman. Still, he was disappointed, he wanted his sons and his sons’ sons to be, as he said, country men, owners of estancias, men of influence and wealth, men with weight in local politics. He could have been a governor if he had wanted to, my father, but he never wanted to get into politics, he just wanted to control it from behind, and maybe what he imagined for his sons was a future as owners of large estancias, as senators or caudillos, but his sons went in a different direction — and Luca, after their confrontation over the factory, never wanted to see him or even step in this house ever again.”