If Kloster and I had utterly failed to coincide, something separated us even more. When Kloster had done something unforgivable-have his first big success-the machinery of petty resentments in the literary world had cranked into action against him. What had once been a well-guarded secret, passed quietly with bewildered admiration amongst connoisseurs of the obscure, was now in full view, at the same democratic price as the work of any other Argentinian author, and, in the great wave of recognition, Kloster’s earlier novels reappeared. Ordinary readers in their thousands suddenly purchased those early books, which had once circulated like passwords among the cognoscenti. It could mean only one thing: Kloster couldn’t be as good as we’d thought and we had, quickly, to backtrack and shoot him down. To my shame, I was part of the firing squad, with an article full of irony about the writer I most admired. It had been just after Luciana stopped working for me and I was still feeling hurt at the thought-the conviction-that she’d gone back to him. And though almost ten years had passed and the article had appeared in an obscure journal that now no longer even existed, I was only too familiar with the tangled web of literary intrigue: someone had no doubt placed it in front of him at some stage, and if he’d read it, and was even half as vindictive as Luciana believed, he would not have forgiven me.
I couldn’t even contemplate phoning him and saying my name. He’d hang up before I could get a sentence out. I thought of increasingly crazy possibilities: turn up at his door, engineer a meeting in the street, give a false name and pretend to be a journalist. But even if I cleared the first hurdle, even if I managed to enter Kloster’s fortress of fame and we exchanged a few words, how on earth could I talk to him about Luciana, broach the real subject, without the conversation’s ending before it began? I fell asleep, annoyed with myself for having got into a mess that wasn’t mine and that I was desperate to get out of. Why did I say yes when everything inside me was saying no, I wondered again. We always treat women too well, as Queneau might have said. Even their ghosts, I thought in the oppressive darkness of my bedroom, unable to picture the face of the real Luciana from ten years ago.
I awoke the next day feeling as if I’d had a drunken night out but that, despite the hangover, my senses and my equanimity had been returned to me. In the warm, familiar sunlight coming through the window, I felt myself swing towards scepticism, and the suspicion that I’d been ensnared in a series of careful lies told by an apparition from the past. Desperate for caffeine, I went out to have breakfast in a bar, and as I reviewed Luciana’s story in search of contradictions and errors I realised, with that same lucid calm, that if I had now decided to doubt what I’d heard, it was mainly to get out of this ludicrous mission.
I didn’t have classes that Monday, but I had to go to El Bajo to collect the tickets for my flight on Wednesday to Salinas, where I was to give a postgraduate course at the Universidad del Oeste. The offices of one of the newspapers for which I’d once written reviews were also in El Bajo. I decided that before doing anything it would be worth consulting the archives to confirm the most salient facts, at least.
When I got to the old building by the river, I too felt like a ghost haunting a place that no longer existed. Like a cathedral under restoration, the façade was unrecognisable, hidden behind scaffolding. I searched for the entrance amongst temporary signs and boardwalks. Someone who had come outside to smoke greeted me from a distance without much surprise or enthusiasm; I returned the greeting automatically, not entirely sure who it was. Inside the receptionists were new, but the basement where the archives were kept was unchanged, as if it was too difficult to shift the past. I went down the stairs and again breathed in the smell of damp exuded by the peeling walls, and felt the sagging floorboards creak beneath my feet, betraying my presence. I was alone down there and assumed the librarian had gone for lunch. I searched the shelves myself. The first three deaths had taken place before newspapers were digitised but I soon found the box files containing the copies for each year. I almost missed the first item as it occupied only a tiny space at the bottom of a page. Headed ‘Lifeguard Drowns’, the article didn’t mention Luciana. It simply stated that the rescue operation had been unsuccessful, and that cold and exhaustion had caused the young lifeguard to suffer massive cramps, despite his being very fit. That was all, with no further details the following day. I supposed that no one in the resort wanted to publicise a drowning at the start of the season.
The item about her parents’ poisoning, on the other hand, near the end of the next box file, took up over half a page. There was a rather blurry photograph of a tree with some fungi beneath it, and a comparative diagram of Amanita phalloides and an edible mushroom. An arrow indicated where the volva had become detached, as Luciana had explained. The article mentioned that the couple had three children, but that none of them was with them at the house at the time. It didn’t give their names, and Luciana’s surname was so common that I wouldn’t have registered the item even if I’d read it back then. There was a slightly shorter article the following day, explaining that a search of the little wood had confirmed the presence of the poisonous species. It mentioned how spores could be carried considerable distances on the wind and warned of the dangers of amateur mushroom gathering.
I took the articles to the photocopier, and as I inserted coins and watched the beam of light pass over the pages I had the feeling that an idea, as yet unformed, was trying to emerge, like an elusive animal lurking-about to brush past, about to flee-in that silent basement. On impulse I returned to the rows of files and searched for reports of the fourth death. The progression here was in reverse: the story began with a tiny item lost in the Police Reports page, but then, as the political implications became apparent, it had taken up more and more space until it featured on the front page. I read the first day’s article, as yet without photographs. The killer had apparently been waiting for the doctor late at night, at the entrance to his building, and had held him up at gunpoint. Luciana’s brother hadn’t put up a fight, perhaps believing it was just a mugging. They’d gone up in the lift to his apartment. Neighbours had heard a terrible commotion and the doctor shouting. Someone had called the police. The door to the apartment was open and the man’s revolver was in plain view on a shelf, as if he’d put it down there as soon as he entered. The doctor’s body lay in the middle of the sitting room, his eyes gouged out and a huge wound on his neck, possibly caused by a bite. The police had found the killer on the roof of the building, his mouth smeared with blood. When they managed to unclench his fist they found he was gripping the doctor’s eyeballs, crushed to a pulp. In his statement he said he had wanted to throw them in his wife’s face before killing her.