Carlos looked out the window again and saw the organ grinder walking away, his instrument on his back. A little girl was pulling her dog’s leash, trying to get it to stop barking at the poor old man. There were no bullets out there, no persecutions, no deaths, he thought. Of course, the organ grinder was afraid that the dog might bite him, or that someone might assault him while passing through certain neighborhoods. He tried to remember being in a similar situation: the novel’s protagonist felt fear, seeing his own deformed reflection on that wall, gun in hand, the face of a killer. He picked the pen up off the floor. He’d been mistaken, he said to himself, as he sat back down at the desk: he didn’t want to write a detective novel; he wanted to write a mystery.
He’d decided to take a break from the novel, he told Elisa. They were lying together on his bed. His notebook was still open on the desk, the uncapped pen, the jar with what remained of the powdered juice. She was staring at a white canvas that hung on one wall, her back to her boyfriend, who was holding her. I need to take a step back from the plot so I can figure out who the characters are, he said; you’ll finally find out whether they’re flesh and bone or paper, she murmured. You were right, he added. That it’d be good to get to know the man, find someone who looks like the albino girl, talk to both of them. Elisa closed her eyes and took hold of Carlos’s elusive hand. They lay there in silence. From a neighbor’s house they heard the shouts of children playing. She looks like Violeta, Elisa said. Who?, he asked; the albino, the albino girl looks like your cousin’s friend whose name is Violeta, but Carlos had never seen her. Elisa got up, went out into the living room, and came back to the bed, holding a photograph between her fingers. She sat down next to Carlos and pointed out a figure dancing on the edge of the dance floor, near some tables. The girl was albino.
It was the final meeting of his detective fiction class. Carlos sat down in the back, near the aisle. The professor was trying to summarize what they’d covered that semester in a long monologue, replete with authors but lacking quotes or plotlines. The closed windows and door made the room’s air unbreathable; Carlos’s head began to nod with sleepiness. None of the students he knew were in attendance; there were only four people in that class, which was the last one of the semester. All of a sudden a hand touched him on the shoulder. Carlos jumped, surprised. Without completely waking up, he turned to see who it was and found the rows behind him empty. A pair of eyes backed away from the door, eyes belonging to a face he barely recognized and that he’d forget immediately. He stood up abruptly, bumped into a desk, someone timidly told him to be quiet. There was no one in the hallway. He went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and went back into the classroom just as the professor was talking about the error of making light of death, the state from which the story you tell is always a mystery.
Elisa opened the door to Carlos’s house with her copy of the key. Relieved, she found that her sketch was still on the table in the middle of the living room. As she was leaving, a letter that had been slipped under the door caught her attention. She looked for the mailman on the street but saw no one. Just seeing the name of the sender made her want to get out of there, but not before putting the envelope in her handbag. On the corner she ran into Alicia, Carlos’s cousin and housemate, and they talked about the weather while she racked her brain over and over, wondering if at some point she and her boyfriend had been together with Violeta, the girl who’d written the letter.
Carlos’s mother came into the bedroom and opened the curtains to wake him up. She told him he shouldn’t sleep so late and that she was on her way to the store. Putting on makeup in the bathroom, she asked him if he’d be staying for breakfast. Either way, he should stick around until she got back, because his father was at the office and Josefita shouldn’t be left alone.
Carlos got in the shower. Massaging shampoo into his scalp, he remembered a forgotten chapter that was saved on his parent’s computer: the protagonist is supposed to meet the albino girl at the ticket counter of a movie theater, but she stands him up. He heard the engine of his mother’s car fade away in the distance, and the insistent ringing of the telephone. Dressed now, he peeked into the living room and greeted Jose, who was talking to a friend on the phone, but she didn’t respond, as if she hadn’t seen him. He sat down in front of the computer to review the chapter and print it out. He’d never asked himself why the albino girl didn’t show up for the date. The protagonist, on the other hand, had an immediate hypothesis: she’d been kidnapped; the stalker had found her at last. There was no doubt, her message had indicated that particular theater, not another: the stalker had doubtlessly run into her randomly on some downtown street, let’s say the corner of Ahumada and Moneda, where people always sit and stare at the passersby as if searching for someone, and all because he’d insisted that they meet. Near the mouth of the metro he rested, fatigued, on one of the benches; he didn’t see anyone suspicious. He realized, looking at a clock on top of a post, that it was earlier than he’d thought. So, he said to himself, one of these people could be the one who abducted the albino girl; that old man flipping through the headlines of the afternoon paper, the kid eating French fries, the guy with the shopping bags and the sweaty face. But none of them fit the profile he imagined for the maniac, they weren’t suspicious faces; in fact, they were intimidated by his scrutinizing eyes, right then the clock on the corner read two minutes past seven. He went back to the theater—worried that the albino girl might already have come and decided to leave, disappointed that he wasn’t there—in vain: they weren’t going to meet that night, and he decided to go in and watch the movie. Fucking public clocks, you never know if they’re broken or on time.
His mother’s voice interrupted him. She was coming up the stairs, asking with feigned calm where Josefita was. In the living room watching TV, he suggested. His mother searched the house, top to bottom, calling to Josefita over and over, but the girl had disappeared. She was too old to be hiding, but not old enough to go out on a walk or to run off with a friend. None of the neighbors had seen her leave. When his mother came up to the second floor for the third time, swearing, asking him where Jose was, Carlos felt the weight of a hand on his shoulder again, like someone was watching him from the doorway. His little sister had been taken while he, lost in thought, read a chapter on the computer screen. He ran through the neighborhood’s surrounding blocks, but like always, the streets were nearly deserted. A nanny was monitoring some children in the plaza, a nurse was pushing an old man in a wheelchair, and a few dogs were sniffing around on a corner. In which of these tranquil apartments could Josefita be? How was it possible that she’d not overheard a single worried conversation, a single knock, a single shout? When he got home, his mother was waiting for him, smiling: his father had called while he was out to see if he should pick something up for lunch, and she’d told him desperately that Josefa was missing. His father had laughed, because more than an hour before, he’d come by to take her clothes shopping. He’d even parked, come inside, used the bathroom, yelled to Carlos that he was going out with Josefina and, without waiting for a response, they’d left.
Kneeling