“I’ve never been with a jockey,” Sofía said.
The jockey looked at both of them, bowed almost imperceptibly, and swayed away, as if one of his legs was shorter than the other. His whip under his arm, his little body harmonious and stiff, he walked to the pump by the side of the house and wetted his hair down. While he was pumping the water, he looked at Little Monkey, sitting under a tree nearby.
“You beat me to it,” he said.
“You talk too much,” Little Monkey said, and they faced each other again. But it didn’t go any further than that because el Chino walked away. He went to the sorrel and spoke to him, petting him, as if he were trying to calm the horse down, when he was the one who was upset.
“I’ll say it’s okay, then,” the rancher from Luján said. “But I didn’t lose. Pay the bets, go on.” He looked at Ledesma. “We’ll go again whenever you want, just find me a neutral field. There are races in Cañuelas next month, if you want.”
“I thank you,” Ledesma said.
But Ledesma didn’t accept the rematch and they never raced again. They say the sisters tried to convince Old Man Belladona to buy the horse from Luján, including the jockey, because they wanted the race to be restaged, and that the Old Man refused—but those are only stories and conjectures.
March arrived and the sisters stopped going swimming at the pool in the Náutico. After this, Durán would wait for them at the bar of the hotel, or he’d say goodbye to them at the edge of town and walk to the lake, making a stop at Madariaga’s Tavern to have a gin. He was seen at the bar of the hotel almost every night, he kept up a tone of immediate confidence, of natural sympathy, but slowly he started growing more isolated. That’s when the versions of his motives for coming to town started changing, people would say that they’d seen him, or that he’d been seen, that he’d said something to them, or that someone had said something—and they’d lower their voices. He looked erratic, distracted, and he seemed comfortable only in the company of Yoshio, while the latter appeared to become his personal assistant, his cicerone and his guide. The Japanese night porter was leading him in an unexpected direction that no one entirely liked. They swam naked together in the lake during siesta time. Several times Yoshio was seen waiting for Durán on the edge of the water with a towel, and then drying Tony vigorously before serving him his afternoon snack on a tablecloth stretched out under the willows.
Sometimes they’d go out at dawn and fish at the lake, rent a boat and watch the sunrise as they cast their lines. Tony was born on an island in the Caribbean, and the interconnected lakes in the south of the province, with their peaceful banks and their islets with grazing cows, made him laugh. Still, he liked the empty landscape of the plains, beyond the gentle current of the water lapping on the reeds, as they saw it from the boat. Expanding fields, sunburnt grass, and occasionally a water spring between the groves and the roads.
By then the story had changed. No longer a Don Juan, no longer a fortune seeker who had come after two South American heiresses, he was now a new kind of traveler, an adventurer who trafficked in dirty money, a neutral smuggler who snuck dollars through customs using his North American passport and his elegant looks. He had a split personality, two faces, two backgrounds. It was impossible to reconcile the versions because the other, secret life attributed to him was always new and surprising. A seductive foreigner, an extrovert who revealed everything, but also a mysterious man with a dark side who fell for the Belladona sisters and got lost in the whirlwind that followed.
The whole town participated in fine-tuning and improving the stories. The motives and the point of view changed, but not the character. The events themselves hadn’t actually changed, only how they were being perceived. There were no new facts, only different interpretations.
“But that’s not why they killed him,” Madariaga said, and looked at the Inspector again in the mirror. Nervous, his riding crop in his hand, Croce was still pacing from one end of the tavern to the other.
The last light from the late March afternoon seeped in, sliced by the window grilles. Outside, the stretched-out fields dissolved like water in the dusk.
They spoke from late afternoon until midnight, sitting on the wicker chairs on the porch facing the back gardens. Every so often Sofía would get up and go into the house to refresh the ice or get another bottle of white wine, still talking from the kitchen, or as she went in or out the glass door, or when she leaned on the railing of the porch, before sitting down again, showing off her suntanned thighs, her bare feet in sandals with her red-painted toes—her long legs, fine ankles, perfect knees—which Emilio Renzi looked at in a daze as he followed the girl’s serious and ironic voice, coming and going in the evening—like a tune—only occasionally interrupting her with a comment, or to write a few words or a line in his black notebook, like someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and turns on a light to record on any available piece of paper a detail from a dream they have just had with the hope of remembering it in its entirety the next day.
Sofía had realized long ago that her family’s story seemed to belong to everyone, as if it were a mystery that the whole town knew and told over and over again, without ever managing to completely decipher. She had never worried about the different versions and alterations, because the various stories formed part of the myth that she and her sister, the Antigones (or was it the Iphigenias?) of the legend didn’t need to clarify—“to lower themselves to clarify,” as she said. But now, after the crime, amid all the confusion, it might be necessary to attempt to reconstruct—“or understand”—what had happened. Family stories are all alike, she said, the characters always repeat—there is always a reckless uncle; a woman in love who ends up a spinster; there is always someone who is mad, a recovering alcoholic, a cousin who likes to wear women’s clothing at parties; someone who fails, someone who succeeds; a suicide—but in this case what complicated everything was that their family story was superimposed with the story of the town.
“My grandfather founded the town,” she said disdainfully. “There was nothing here when he arrived, just the empty land. The English built the train station and put him in charge.”
Her grandfather was born in Italy and studied engineering and was a railroad technician, and when he arrived in Argentina they brought him out to the deserted plains and put him at the head of a branch line, a stop—a railroad crossing, really—in the middle of the pampas.
“And now sometimes I think,” she said later, “that if my grandfather hadn’t left Turin, Tony wouldn’t have died. Or even if we hadn’t met him in Atlantic City, or if he had stayed with his grandparents in Río Piedras, then they wouldn’t have killed him. What do you call that?”
“It’s called life,” Renzi said.
“Pshaw8!” she said. “Don’t be so corny. What’s wrong with you? They picked him out on purpose and killed him, on the exact day, at the exact hour. They didn’t have that many opportunities. Don’t you understand? You don’t get that many chances to kill a man like that.”
8 Sofía liked to use the onomatopoeias she always saw reading comics throughout her childhood.
The cleaning lady found Durán dead on the floor of his hotel room, stabbed in the chest. She heard the phone ringing inside and went in when no one picked up, thinking the room was empty. It was two in the afternoon.
Croce was drinking vermouth in the bar of the hotel with Saldías then, so he didn’t have to go anywhere to start the investigation.
“No one leaves the premises,” Croce said. “We’ll take their statements before they can go.”
The occasional guests, the travelers, and the long-term lodgers stood around in groups