They remained quiet, looking at the horse, grazing out in the field. Near a spring, off to the side, an evil light appeared between the bushes, a bright phosphorescence that seemed to burn like a white flame in the plains. It was a lost soul, the sad presence of a spirit dragging its livid brightness along. The men watched in respectful silence.
“Must be him,” Hilario said.
“The skeleton of a gaucho,” the officer said in a low voice, from a distance.
“Just the bones of some animal,” Croce said.
They said their goodbyes and got back in the car. Renzi learned years later that the countryman Hilario Huergo, the horse tamer, had ended up in the twilight of his life working with el Chino’s horse, Tácito, in the Rivero Brothers Circus. Huergo the Gaucho, as he would then be known, came up with an extraordinary number, which they performed as the circus toured around the countryside. He’d mount the sorrel and they’d raise them up to the heights of the tent with a system of pulleys and harnesses, to make it look as if they were floating in the air. The animal’s legs rested on four iron discs covering only the rings of its hooves, and since the wires and the sheaves were painted black, it seemed as if the man was riding up to the sky on the back of the sorrel. When they got to the very top, everyone would look on in silence, and Huergo the Gaucho would whisper to the horse and look down into the darkness and the clear circle of sand on the ground below, small as a coin. Then they’d set off a round of colorful fireworks and up in the heights, dressed all in black, with a tall-brimmed hat and a pointed beard, Huergo would look like Lucifer himself riding on the majestic horse. They always did the same fantastic number, the same man who’d been a great broncobuster, motionless now on the sorrel, up above everything, with the wind flapping in the canvas of the tent — until one night some sparks from the fireworks hit the horse in the eye and the frightened animal reared up on its hind legs, and Huergo held on to the reins, knowing he wouldn’t be able to set the horse back down on the iron rings. Then, as if it were all part of the number, Huergo took off his hat and waved his arm up high, and he came flying down and crashed into the ring below. But this happened — rather: Renzi was told about it — many years later. That night, when they got back to town, Renzi noticed that Croce looked grief-stricken, as if he blamed himself for el Chino’s death. He’d made a number of decisions that had led to a series of events, which he hadn’t been able to predict. Croce was pensive on the way back, he spent the entire drive moving his lips, as if he were talking to himself, or arguing with someone, until finally they reached town, and Renzi said goodnight and got out at the hotel.
21 Ten years after the events narrated in this story, on the eve of the Malvinas War, Renzi saw in The Guardian that English soldiers were equipped with infrared glasses that allowed them to see in the dark and fire at targets in the night. As he read this, Renzi remembered that night in the country with the paralyzed rabbit in the beam of the searchlight from Croce’s car, and realized that the war was lost before it had begun.
11
The news that Croce had found Durán’s murderer, dead in a small house near Tapalqué, surprised everyone. It seemed like another of his acts of conjuration that lay at the foundation of his fame.
“The witnesses saw a small, short man go in and out of the room, slightly yellowish, and they thought it was Dazai,” Croce explained. He reconstructed the crime on a blackboard with maps and diagrams. This is the hallway, here’s the bathroom, this is where the witnesses saw him come out. He drew an X on the board. “The murderer’s name was Anselmo Arce, he was born in the District of Maldonado, he trained in the racetrack in Maroñas and made it as a jockey in La Plata, he was an excellent rider, very much valued. He raced in Palermo and in San Isidro, but he got in trouble and ended up racing country races in the Province. I have the letter, here, where he confesses what he did. He killed himself. He wasn’t murdered, we presume he committed suicide,” Croce concluded. “We’ve discovered that they used the hotel’s old service lift to lower the money. We found a fifty-dollar bill on the floor there. It was a crime for hire; the investigation remains open. What’s important, as always, is what happens after the crime is committed. The consequences are more important than the causes.” He seemed to know more than he was saying.