Renzi listened as he ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. Everyone talked about the case, spinning different theories and reconstructing the events in their own way. The dining room was big, with tablecloths on the tables, floor lamps, all laid out in a traditional style. Renzi had published several articles supporting Croce’s position about the case, and the turn of events had confirmed his suspicions. He didn’t know what would happen next, he might have to return to Buenos Aires, he was being told by his newspaper that the story had lost interest. Renzi was thinking about this, eating a shepherd’s pie and slowly finishing off a bottle of El Vasquito wine, when he saw Cueto enter the room. After saying hello to several of the customers and receiving what appeared to be pats on the back and congratulations, he walked over to Renzi’s table. Cueto stood next to the table, without sitting, and spoke to him almost without looking at him, with his condescending and snobbish attitude.
“Still around here, Mr. Renzi.” He used the formal address to let him know that he came to talk to him about a serious matter. “The case is solved, there’s no need to keep going over it. It’ll be better for you if you leave, my friend.” He threatened him as if he were doing him a favor. “I don’t like what you write,” he told him, smiling.
“I don’t either,” Renzi said.
“Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.” He was speaking now with the careless, cold tone that thugs use in the movies — which, according to Renzi, had taught everyone in the countryside to sound worldly, like wise guys. “It’ll be better for you if you leave—”
“I was thinking about leaving, actually. But now I think I’ll stick around a few more days,” Renzi said.
“Don’t get cute with me. We know exactly who you are.”
“I’m going to quote this conversation.”
“As you wish,” Cueto smiled at him. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”
He walked toward the exit, stopped at another table to greet people there, and left the restaurant.
Renzi was surprised, Cueto had taken the trouble to come over and intimidate him, it was very strange. He went to the counter and asked to use the telephone.
“It’s like a UFO,” he explained to Benavídez, the newsroom secretary at El Mundo. “There’s a bag full of money, it’s really a weird story. I’m staying.”
“I can’t authorize that, Emilio.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Benavídez, I have a scoop here.”
“What scoop?”
“They’re putting the screw on me.”
“So?”
“Croce’s in the mental hospital, I’m going to see him tomorrow.”
It sounded confusing when he tried to explain it, so he asked to speak with his friend Junior, in charge of special investigations. After a few jokes and long explanations, Renzi convinced Junior to let him stay a few more days in the town. The decision was a good one, because all of a sudden the story changed — and so did his situation.
The light in the cell went out at midnight, but Yoshio couldn’t sleep. He was lying still on the mattress, trying to remember as precisely as possible every detail of the last day that he was free. He carefully reconstructed the events, from Thursday at noon, when he accompanied Tony to the barbershop, to the fatal moment on Friday afternoon with the loud knocks on his door when they came to arrest him. He could see Tony sitting on the nickel-plated chair, covered with a white towel, facing the mirror, and López lathering his face. The radio was on, “La oral deportiva” was playing, the broadcasters recapping the latest score lines, it must have been two o’clock. Yoshio realized that reconstructing every detail of that day would take him an entire day. Or maybe more. You need more time to remember than to live, he thought. For example, that last day, at six in the morning, he was sitting on one of the benches in the station and Tony was showing him a dance step that was very popular back in his country. The Crab Dance, it was called. With great agility, Tony would move backwards in his white shoes, keeping the rhythm, dancing backwards, his heels together, his hands on his knees. It had been a very happy moment. Tony moving to the beat of an imaginary song, leaning forward, his elbows out as if he were rowing, moving back elegantly. They were in the empty train station, dawn had already broken, the sky was very clear, blue, the tracks shone in the sun. And Tony smiled, a little agitated after his dance. They liked going to the station because it was usually deserted and they could imagine that they might take a train and go somewhere, anytime. All of a sudden, a dead bird fell on the platform. With a dry, muffled plop. Out of nowhere. From the immense empty sky. It was a very clear day, peaceful and white. The bird must have suffered a heart attack mid-flight and fallen dead on the ground. An ordinary bird. Not a hummingbird, which can fly in place in front of a flower, miraculously, flapping its wings in such a frenzy that they die, sometimes, because their heart fails them. Not a hummingbird, nor one of those featherless pigeons seen on the ground sometimes, the ones that take a while to die, opening their red beaks, their necks featherless, their eyes enormous as if they were the thirsty mouths of tiny Argentine babies. It was a chingolo, a rufous-collared sparrow, perhaps, or a cabecita negra, a hooded siskin, lying there dead, its body intact. The strangest thing was that a flock of similar birds started to circle overhead and squawk and fly lower and lower over the dead bird. The birds’ joint horror before one of their own species, dead. It was a premonition, maybe, his mother could read the future in the flight patterns of migratory birds, she’d move like a frightened sparrow, her small feet under her blue kimono. She’d go out to the patio and watch the swallows flying in triangle formation and announce what they could expect that winter.
Yoshio was unable to organize his memories in the order in which the events had occurred. The sound of the water in the pipes, the muffled complaints of the prisoners in the nearby cells. He had a nearly physical awareness of the tomb in which he was buried and of the anxious murmur of the dreams and nightmares of the hundreds of men sleeping between those walls. He could imagine the corridors, the barred doors, the different blocks. From the patio he could hear the strumming of a guitar and a voice singing a few lines. From the school of pain I have drawn my lessons / From the school of pain I have drawn my lessons…
Yoshio felt sick, he heard voices and singing because he’d suddenly stopped smoking opium. He remembered the pipe he’d calmly prepared and smoked, laying on his tatami that last morning. He’d fallen asleep to the quiet sweetness of the flame burning on the tip of the bamboo pipe. When you’re on the drug, giving it up seems easy, but when you’re sick with withdrawal, your entire body burns and you’ll do anything for it. Had he been able to reduce his whole life down to a single decision, it would be to quit the drug. He wasn’t an addict, but he couldn’t quit. He was afraid they’d tempt him by promising him a fix and forcing him to sign the confession that the Prosecutor had shown him several times. It was already written out, it said that he confessed to killing Durán. He was able to get codeine pills in the prison, he took them whenever he felt as if he were dying. It was like a burning, although the word didn’t do justice to the pain. He was obsessed with the thought that his father might think that his job at the hotel was a woman’s job, that he’d betrayed the traditions of his race. His father had died a hero. He, on the other hand, was lying in that pit, moaning because he did not have his opium. If he’d done his job dressed as a woman, he thought all of a sudden, maybe they wouldn’t have accused him and he wouldn’t be in jail now. He could see himself dressed in a blue kimono with red flowers, rice powder on his face, his eyebrows plucked, taking small, little steps as he slid down the hallways of the hotel.