After a while a maid appeared, looking more like a nurse, and took Renzi into an elevator and up to the second floor. She left him by an open door that led into an enormous living room with barely any furniture. Toward the back Renzi saw a tall and imposing heavy man waiting for him, standing. This was Old-Man Cayetano Belladona, the Engineer.
“Bravo told me you wanted to see me,” Renzi said, after they sat on two oversized chairs placed against one of the walls.
“And Bravo told me that you wanted to see me. So the interest is mutual,” the Old Man laughed. “That doesn’t matter, what matters are the articles you’re publishing in that newspaper in the Capital. Anyone who reads them is going to think that our town is a war zone. You cite unnamed sources, and like any reporter who says his sources are confidential, this means you’re lying.”
“Can you cite that opinion?” Renzi asked.
“I don’t like those stories about my family,” the Old Man said, as if he hadn’t heard him. “Or your far-fetched theories about why Anthony brought that money.” He doesn’t beat around the bush, Renzi thought, taking out a cigarette. “You can’t smoke here,” the Old Man told him. “And this is not an interview, I just wanted to meet you. So don’t take any notes, and don’t record any part of what we say.”
“Right,” Renzi said. “A private conversation.”
“I’m a family man at a time when being a family man doesn’t mean anything anymore. I protect my right to privacy. I’m not a public person.” He spoke with extreme calm. “Journalists like you are destroying the little that we have left of solitude and isolation. You gossip and you slander. And you scream about freedom of the press, which for you just means the freedom to sell scandals and destroy reputations.”
“So, then?”
“Nothing. You asked to see me, and here you are,” he said, and pressed a button; a bell rang faintly somewhere in the house. “Would you like something to drink?”
“I was told that I could speak frankly with you.”
“You’re a friend of Croce’s, so you’re a friend of mine,” the Old Man said. “Even though we’ve been distanced for a while. He’s sick, they’ve told me.”
“Admitted to the madhouse.”
“Well, I barely leave here anymore.” The Old Man made a gesture that included the entire mansion. “In a sense, I’m admitted too and this, you could say, is my clinic. My wife and daughters live with me, but we could imagine that they have also been committed, and that they think that they’re my wife and daughters in the same way that I think that I own this place. Isn’t that right, Ada?” the Old Man said to the young woman who entered the room.
“Of course,” she said. “The people who help and serve us are actually nurses and orderlies who play along when we say that we belong to an old family that founded the town.”
“Perfect,” the Old Man said, as his daughter pulled up a low glass table on rubber wheels — with a bottle of Glenlivet and several tall, cut glasses — and started serving whiskey. “These country towns are closed in like chicken coops, isolated from everything, and people sometimes say a bunch of nonsense just because they’re bored. I’m sure you can imagine. And now that there’s been a crime, everyone’s going on about Tony, going round and round adding their bit to the story. I’d like to put an end to the merry-go-round. The best thing for my family is no news. You can write whatever you’d like, but I’d like you to know what we think.”
“Of course,” Renzi said, “but without quoting this conversation.”
“Would you like to serve yourself?” the Old Man said. “This is my daughter.”
The young woman smiled and settled into a chair in front of them. There was no ice; whiskey straight up, Italian style, Renzi thought. The girl was the young woman he’d seen in the Club, wearing a pair of jeans now and another thin blouse without a bra. She had a ring with a large emerald that she spun on her finger as if she were winding it up. She looked as if she was in a bad mood, or had just gotten out of bed, or was about to collapse, but without losing her sense of humor. Every once in a while a lock of hair would fall over her eyes like a curtain, blocking her sight for a moment, or the top button of her blouse would come undone, revealing her breasts (beautiful and tanned by the sun). When she raised an arm you could see the hair in her armpits (also Italian style). Everything seemed to be part of her style, or of her idea of elegance. All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence, she dropped the ring with the green stone in the whiskey glass.
“Frickin’, I say,” she said. “It’s swimming on me.”
Unflustered, she fished the ring out of the whiskey with her long fingers, and after cleaning it with her tongue — in a slow, circular motion that it took Renzi a while to forget — she put it back on her finger. As if what she was about to say was related to her action to save the emerald, she told him that she wanted to thank him for not mentioning the stupid stories circulating in town about the relationship between her sister, the deceased, and her. His discretion is what had made them think that Renzi’s intentions weren’t all bad, or at least that he didn’t intend to fall into the usual superstitions that people had in town. Country folk, she told him, get all excited (“horny”) telling perverse stories — which never actually take place the way people imagine. He must know, of course, that after undertaking much research attempting to identify the defining characteristics of the gaucho of the pampas, anthropologists had been unable to isolate any specific, identifying traits, other than those of being naturally selfish and believing in imaginary illnesses. The young woman referred to country towns as if she were speaking about another world that was not her own. But what most caught Renzi’s attention was that when she spoke she emphasized certain words, stretching out the vowels, as if she were counting the syllables in a line of poetry. It was one of those self-conscious, personal mannerisms that in some women constitutes the nature of their language, in the same way that a special timbre is always audible in blank verse — blank verse, Renzi said to himself in English — in the iambic pentameter of Elizabethan drama. The woman underscored certain archaic and very Argentine words in each phrase, as if sticking long pins into live butterflies, to show she was a country girl from a good family. Or as if she were having fun with that. Renzi got a bit lost in his internal digression about modes of speech. When he started paying attention again, the conversation had taken a different turn.
“The stories about Tony are all wrong, including the one about his death being the result of the crime of passion that everyone is talking about. We have nothing to say.” Daughter and father took turns speaking, complementing each other as if they were a duo. “Sometimes,” the Old Man said, “he used to come visit me at night. Let me tell you, he was an exile, he was forced to abandon his country, with his family, because he believed in Puerto Rican independence. His family had always supported Albizu Campos, they never considered themselves citizens of the United States. You know who Albizu is, right? He was a kind of Puerto Rican Perón.”