He knocks at the door. His father answers. He drives his knife into the man’s belly.
The one thing that changes, the one thing of which he remains uncertain, is what he should say as the blood pools beneath the figure dying at his feet. Should he declare, “I am the son of the woman you murdered”? Perhaps he should simply curse his father. Or should he say nothing, letting the old man die without explanation, without a word?
As always, he falls asleep without deciding.
When he next meets Menéndez, the detective has no firm leads but remains optimistic. “It’s only a matter of enough time,” the former policeman assures José Antonio, “and enough money.” Menéndez himself has scoured the last three years of records in the notarial archives but has found no reference to a Juan López of the right age and with the correct birthplace. When his client prompts him, he admits it would go faster if he could hire assistants to examine the bills of sale, the tax assessments, the census records.
“By all means,” José Antonio agrees. “Hire whoever you need. The money doesn’t matter. The only thing I care about is finding my father.”
“I wish I had a son like you,” the detective sighs.
Each time Menéndez consults with Juan López’s son, the operation to find the old man grows. Now there are retired policemen in Guadajierno, in Santa Maria, even on the western islands who are working on the case. The lawyer was right; Menéndez is an honest man, always ready with a receipt for each expense José Antonio reimburses. Once, the detective comments on the ready cash his client provides. “My inheritance,” the man explains. “My mother’s money.” Satisfied, Menéndez does not bring up the subject again.
Señora Machado mentions the money, too, but indirectly, when she protests the many gifts her boarder has showered on young Enrique. She knows José Antonio does not work, and yet he does not seem a rich man.
“The money came too late in life to change me,” he stammers, looking down at his shuffling feet.
The widow thinks she has embarrassed him. “No, Señor López, don’t apologize. The poor would not hate the rich if they were all like you.”
José Antonio takes long walks but never exhausts the stones of the city, which stretch, it sometimes seems, all the way to the horizon. Aware of the looks his rough clothes draw, he begins to dress like a townsman. One afternoon, alone in the house with Señora Machado — “Alma,” she insists — he asks the woman how to knot the tie he has bought to go with his new collared shirt and linen jacket. The woman has very small shoulders, he notices, as she fiddles with the cloth around his throat. He thinks of the brown, muscled back of Maciza, of her broad shoulders. The man touches the young widow’s pale face, and she presses her cheek against his hand.
From then on, they make love by daylight in his room after the other boarders have left for work and while the boy naps. Their discretion is useless, though. Neither can hide the tenderness for the other. Soon, the whole household accepts the arrangement. The Indian girl who helps with the cleaning never interrupts them when the door is closed. And as for the others, Dr. Hidalgo advises the aging roomers that it is physically unhealthy for a young woman, especially a young mother, to be — he chooses his word carefully here — alone. He approves of José Antonio not only for having taken his advice in the matter of the detective but also for listening attentively in the evenings to the stories about his practice.
One afternoon, Enrique runs into the parlor, where José Antonio reads the newspaper while Alma sips her tea. The child asks the name of a bird singing in the tree outside the window. Wien the man explains it is a canary, Enrique wonders, “But what is it singing about, Papa?” José Antonio glances at the child’s mother, who offers him a sad smile and nods her resignation to what she cannot change.
Now it has been six months since José Antonio first saw the steeples of the cathedral over the harbor. The reports have filtered in from all over the country, nearly fifty of them. A pickpocket in Aldora reports a Juan López, a tobacconist, to Menéndez, but this López turns out to be an immigrant from Spain and ten years too young. Another Juan López is located on the coast in a fishing village; the age is right, but his right hand has been twisted into a deformed claw since his birth in, it is eventually confirmed, the same village where he still works in the icehouse. The detective counsels further patience.
But Menéndez mistakes his client for a man of the city. José Antonio has not been patient; he has been hunting his father as one hunts in the jungle. The man has seemed to the detective deferential, almost passive, perhaps even indifferent. Offered files to peruse, José Antonio thumbs through a few sheets, sighs, hands the folders back with a shrug. What the ex-policeman takes for boredom, though, is the stillness of a serpent as its cloven tongue tastes the scent in the breeze. Each morning José Antonio has sharpened his knife against the little whetstone he carries in his pocket. In the afternoon, with Alma still dozing amid the tangled sheets, he has eased the leather thong and sheath from the mahogany bedpost, slipped it over his head, and returned to the streets. Prowling until evening, he has sought his elusive quarry in strange neighborhoods, following unfamiliar streets to the slums on the outskirts of the city and beyond to the outlying shanties, tireless and keen as a jaguar trailing prey. And he has ended each day on his knees, promising the Virgin he will not fail.
By the end of the first year, Menéndez has reported to José Antonio on two hundred leads. None pans out. So the detective casts a wider net. Now his agents (as he begins to call them when he seeks payment for their services from his client) send dossiers on a Joaquim López in Plato Negro, a Juan Lopata in some mountain village ten kilometers from Titalpa, even an Englishman named John Loping, an engineer who is building a bridge in the Apulco Valley.
José Antonio still offers the same vow each night beside the bed in which he sleeps alone for the sake of propriety, but he begins to consider the possibility that his father never will be found. He himself has crisscrossed the city, pressing pesos into the palm of anyone who will listen to his story about the abandoned son seeking a lost parent. He has been blessed to God by hundreds of simple folk for his devotion to the old man. “If only my son...,” one after another has complained to him, almost never finishing the sentence. But even in a great city like Puerto Túrbido, the stone streets eventually powder into muddy lanes, and the muddy lanes finally dissipate into fields that fringe the jungle. After a year of his long prowls through the capital, people begin to recognize him. There is no one left to whom he can tell his story. Maybe, he allows himself to think, the old man is dead.
Though he will admit to no relief at the idea of laying his vengeance to rest, it does please him to think of opening a store with the money that remains, perhaps an ice cream parlor — a year ago, he didn’t even know frozen custard existed, but now he grows cranky if he misses his scoop of chocolate after his siesta. And it pleases him to think of Alma as his wife, Enrique as his son, himself as the master of the house.
He makes up his mind to propose to his landlady, to adopt her child. He even begins to plan the wedding. The man has discharged his duty to his mother, he insists to himself. What more could he have done? He tells Menéndez he has had enough, to cancel the search. But before he can offer the woman the ring he has purchased with his dwindling winnings, the detective visits one Sunday morning after Mass with the news that Juan López, the father of José Antonio, has been located.
7
“All this time and he was right here under our nose.” The detective shrugs. “And you know, we had him in our files since the beginning and didn’t even realize it. Can you imagine? Report number eight. But the birthdate was entered in reverse. Not 1854 but 1845. That’s how we missed him.”