The woman explained that the fazenda of Belsito was the most beautiful fazenda in that land. An avenue of orange trees led to the house at the top of a hill, and from there, from the house, you could see the ocean.
“Uribe said that he had nothing to bet that was worth Belsito. And he placed his cards on the table. Then the Count said that he could always bet the pharmacy, and then he began to laugh like a lunatic, and some of those who were there began to laugh with him. Uribe smiled.
He still had a hand over his cards. As if to say goodbye to them. The Count became serious again, leaned forward, across the table, looked Uribe in the eye, and said to him:
“‘You have a lovely child, though.’
“Uribe didn’t understand right away. He felt all those eyes upon him, and he couldn’t think. The Count simpli-fied the situation.
“‘Belsito against your daughter, Uribe. It’s an honest offer.’
“And on the table, right under Uribe’s nose, he placed his five cards, face down.
“Uribe stared, without touching them.
“He said something in a whisper, but no one could ever tell me what it was.
“Then he pushed his cards toward the Count, sliding them across the table.
“The Count came and got me that same night. He did something unpredictable. He waited sixteen months, and when I was fourteen he married me. I gave him three sons.”
“…”
“Men are difficult to understand. The Count, before that night, had seen me only once. He was sitting in the café and I was crossing the square. He had asked someone:
“‘Who is that girl?’
“And they told him.”
Outside it had started raining again, and the café had filled up. One had to speak loudly to be understood. Or sit closer. The man said to the woman that she had an odd way of talking: she seemed to be telling the story of someone else’s life.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s as if nothing matters to you.”
The woman said that, on the contrary, everything mattered to her, too much. She said that she felt nostalgic for every single thing that had happened to her. But she said it in a hard voice, without melancholy. Then the man was silent, looking at the people around them.
He thought of Salinas. He had been found dead in his bed one morning, two years after that business of Roca.
Something with his heart, they said. Then a rumor came out that his doctor had poisoned him, a little every day, slowly, for months. A slow agony. Horrifying. The matter was investigated but nothing came of it. The doctor’s name was Astarte. He had made a little money, during the war, with a preparation that cured fevers and infections.
He had invented it himself, with the help of a pharmacist.
The preparation was called Botrin. The pharmacist was called Ricardo Uribe. At the time he worked in the capital. When the war was over he had had some trouble with the police. First they found his name on the list of sup-pliers for the hospital of the Hyena, then someone came forward and said he had seen him working there. But many also said that he was a good man. He presented himself to the investigators and explained everything, and when they let him go he took his things and went away to a small town buried in the countryside, in the south. He bought a pharmacy there, and resumed his profession.
He lived alone with a small daughter he called Dulce. He said the mother had died many years earlier. Everyone believed him.
Thus he hid Nina, the surviving daughter of Manuel Roca.
The man looked around without seeing anything. He was in his thoughts.
The savagery of children, he was thinking.
We have turned over the earth so violently that we have reawakened the savagery of children.
He looked back at the woman. She was looking at him.
He heard her voice saying:
“Is it true that they called you Tito?”
The man nodded yes.
“Had you ever met my father before?”
“…”
“…”
“I knew who he was.”
“Is it true that you were the first to shoot him?”
The man shook his head.
“What difference does it make…”
“You were twenty. You were the youngest. You had been fighting for only a year. El Gurre treated you like a son.”
Then the woman asked if he remembered.
The man stared at her. And only in that instant, finally, did he see again, in her face, the face of that child, lying there, impeccable and right, perfect. He saw those eyes in these, and that extraordinary strength in the calm of this tired beauty. The child: she had turned and looked at him. The child: now she was there. How dizzying time can be. Where am I? the man wondered. Here or there?
Have I ever been in a moment that was not this one?
The man said that he remembered. That he had done nothing else, for years, but remember everything.
“For years I asked myself what I ought to do. But the truth is that I never was able to tell anyone. I never told anyone that you were there, that night. You may not believe it, but it’s so. At first, obviously, I didn’t say anything because I was afraid. But time passed, and it became something else. No one thought about the war anymore. People wanted to look ahead, they no longer cared about what had happened. It all seemed to be buried forever. I began to think that it was better to forget everything. Let it go.
At a certain point, however, it emerged that Roca’s daughter was alive, she was hidden somewhere, in a village in the south. I didn’t know what to think. It seemed to me incredible that she had come out of that inferno alive, but with children you can never say. Finally someone saw the girl and swore that it was really her. So I realized that I would never be free of that night. Neither I nor the others. Naturally I began to ask myself what she might have seen and heard. And if she could remember my face.
Who can know what happens in the mind of a child, con-fronted by something like that. Adults have a memory, and a sense of justice, and often they have a taste for revenge. But a child? For a while I convinced myself that nothing would happen. But then Salinas died. In that strange way.”
The woman was listening to him, motionless.
He asked if she wanted him to go on.
“Go on,” she said.
“It came out that Uribe had something to do with it.”
The woman looked at him without expression. Her lips were half closed.
“It may have been a coincidence, but certainly it was odd. Little by little everyone was persuaded that the child knew something. It’s difficult to understand now, but those were strange times. The country was going forward, beyond the war, at an incredible speed, forgetting everything. But there was a whole world that had never emerged from the war, and was unable to fit in with that happy land. I was one of those. We all were. For us nothing had ended. And that child was a danger. We talked about it a lot. The fact is that the death of Salinas didn’t go down with anyone. So finally it was decided that some-how the child should be eliminated. I know it seems madness, but in reality it was all very logicaclass="underline" terrible, and logical. They decided to eliminate her and charged the Count of Torrelavid to do it.”
The man paused. He looked at his hands. It was as if he were putting his memories in order.
“He was a man who had been a double agent for the whole war. He worked for them, but he was one of us. He went to Uribe and asked him if he would rather spend his life in jail for the murder of Salinas or vanish into nothing and leave him the child. Uribe was a coward. He had only to stay quiet, and no court would have succeeded in con-victing him. But he was afraid, and he fled. He left the child to the Count and fled. He died ten years later, in some godforsaken village on the other side of the border.