If I Close My Eyes Now Read online

  But Paulo was a long way away. The pain had vanished. He didn’t feel ashamed or sad any more. He was roaming the streets of a fabulous city hidden in the depths of the African jungle, lined with sophisticated architecture, the walls made of precious materials that aroused all kinds of envy, centres of empire built thanks to highly advanced scientific knowledge, and inhabited by a race unlike any other in the world, and protected by proud warriors clothed in skins and armour studded with emeralds and rubies, brave soldiers who in the end would yield to the courage, nobility and fearlessness of the king of the jungle.

  ‘How many times was she stabbed?’

  Antonio’s voice brought Paulo back unwillingly to the room. He concentrated on a paragraph and flew back to the land of Onthar, where stood the ivory and gold towers of the lost cities of Cathne and Athne.

  ‘How many wounds did she have? Seven? Eight? People say there were more than twenty. How many were there?’

  Paulo tried to return to the city in which Tarzan had been thrown into an arena where, when the trumpets sounded, he would have to face the fearful giant Phobeg, in a combat in which the loser would have his throat cut, to the delight of the beautiful and perverse queen, Nemone.

  ‘How many stab wounds?’

  Tarzan freed himself from the ropes binding him and—

  Antonio snatched the book out of Paulo’s hands.

  ‘How many wounds?’

  ‘Give it me! Give me the book!’

  ‘How many? How many stab wounds?’

  Paulo tried in vain to reach the book his brother was holding in one hand above his head, while he fended him off with the other.

  ‘Give me the book! Give it to me!’

  ‘How many? First you have to tell me how many stab wounds she had.’

  ‘I didn’t count. Give me the book, Antonio!’

  ‘Tell me: how many? How many?’

  ‘I don’t know; I don’t remember, I don’t know.’

  ‘You were there; you saw. How many?’

  ‘The book, Antonio …’

  ‘How many? Tell me!’

  ‘Give—’

  The memory of the chopped-off breast and the sight of the raw red flesh smeared with mud and blood suddenly flashed through Paulo’s mind. He felt very weak. He collapsed on to the bed, and fell quiet. Dropped his head.

  Thinking it might be a trick, Antonio kept his eye on him for a few seconds, ready to react if he jumped up at him, keeping the book high above his head in his right hand. But Paulo just sat on the edge of the bed, head down, hiding his face. He didn’t move. His brother threw the book at him, and went to dress to go out.

  2

  Out on the Prowl

  Moonlight breaking

  On the shadows

  Of my solitude

  … Where are you going?

  Where was the voice coming from?

  Tell me if tonight

  You’re going out on the prowl

  The way she once did …

  Where did I first hear that song? he was to ask himself many years later. Was it a distant sound like it was now, and a man’s voice? Or was it a woman?

  Who can she be with … ?

  He remembered that the voice had sounded hesitant, quavering. Coming from a radio, or from a nearby record player. Someone listening to a disc. Or a cassette. Did cassettes exist in those days, in 1961? In that town? Who could own them? Not a workman. No one in that street could own a cassette player. Nor could his butcher father. Nobody in his street, that was for sure. Or perhaps it was possible. Perhaps there was easy credit and anyone with social security, or even without it, could buy a device with a radio and cassette player on the never-never. An engine driver, a metalworker or even a seamstress could possess whatever they wanted: the days of the illusion of easily reached abundance had begun. Or a tape recorder. Did they exist at the start of the 1960s? Someone I knew must have had a tape recorder with those two brown tapes turning, reproducing the words of that song: otherwise, how could I remember them now?

  Tell her that I love her,

  Tell her that I’m dying

  from waiting so long,

  Tell her to come home …

  Years later, he thought it must have been a gramophone. A radiogram. One of those that played heavy black records with round labels in the centre, and were kept in cardboard sleeves. Like the records Hanna Wizorek had. Perhaps it was a radiogram that was playing the song sung in Spanish. But back then we didn’t know Hanna Wizorek. And in my house there was no gramophone and no records. Nor in his. Would I even have recognized a song sung in Spanish?

  Night-time prowling

  isn’t good for her …

  All these years later, he began to doubt whether he had even heard the voice that now permeated his memories. Or did I add the music in memory of that night? Did I simply imagine that the woman whom we had only seen dead liked that Agustín Lara bolero? That I heard ‘Noche de Ronda’ on a phonograph, a radio-phonograph, or on a cassette player. Or did I learn later on that she sought consolation in sentimental songs like this one, laments for lost loves, nostalgic pleas?

  No.

  No.

  That night I had no idea what her life was like. I must have dreamed up the song later on. I heard the song later on. The song in Spanish, the voice in the night, it was all in my imagination, and … No. No. No. I’m sure of it: I heard it that night. A man’s voice, I think. It makes sense: a male voice. She left me, he sang. He was the one who regretted being abandoned. A male voice. I think. No, I’m certain. A deep male voice. The same day that we discovered her body.

  It can destroy you,

  It causes sorrow …

  The whistle echoed round the dimly lit street. Followed by an imitation of the call of the tinamou bird, repeated four times close to the row of silent, dark, identical houses. The employees of the Brazilian Central Railway went to bed early. A few hours later, noisy alarm clocks or still-drowsy wives would awaken them, and they would leave beneath a sky as dark as the one they had left the evening before, their stomachs lined with the coffee and bread and margarine they had eaten standing up in the kitchen, taking with them their thermos and tin lunch boxes prepared the night before, walking along paved streets damp from the morning mist that formed bright haloes round the still-lit iron street lamps, even before the night-workers in the textile factory had finished their shift.

  Paulo waited, leaning on his bike handlebars, next to the low wall outside one of these houses, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He was growing impatient, staring at the window of Eduardo’s bedroom. Minutes went by without any indication that he had managed to wake his friend.

  He repeated their secret sign, louder this time. A long whistle, then four calls. No luck again.

  The thin mist of April dawns drifted down from the dark mountains encircling the town. The wispy veil shifted above his head, occasionally clearing to show patches of starry sky.

  He propped his bike up and climbed over the wall, avoiding the gate that might creak and wake the adults. He crossed the garden in a few strides. The flowerbeds, planted in between narrow paths decorated with fragments of coloured tiles, were enclosed by cement borders whitewashed to keep off ants. The only tall plant, a rose bush that twined its way round an iron support like the spokes of a parasol, was probably left behind by the railway-worker’s family who had lived here before. In the two years she had been in the house, Eduardo’s mother had planted only small plants with feminine names that Paulo did not recognize, each one in a bed of similar colours and shapes, creating delicate clusters.

  The same careful organizing hand was obvious inside the house. Shiny furniture smelling of peroba oil, decorated with crocheted squares she herself had made. In the oven there was always something for Eduardo to eat, whenever he felt a pang of hunger. Curtains on the windows. Doors with proper latches. Lengths of cloth, paper patterns striped with chalk and unfinished outfits for clients folded and stacked on the Formica table besid
e the always oiled sewing machine. The smell of sweet sedge in the bedlinen. Floors waxed and polished every Saturday. A feeling of solidity and order that Paulo could sense but not properly define, as happened with so much all around him.

  He often thought he would like to live in a place like this: somewhere that was always clean, where someone would be waiting when he came home from school with a freshly cooked, still-hot meal, that he would eat sitting at the table while his mother or someone else asked him about what he had been taught that morning. In the afternoon, between attending to her customers, his mother would bring a piece of freshly baked cake to his bedroom, with a glass of milk. What would the smell of cake baked at home be like? What would warm cake baked at home taste like?

  Rubbish. He didn’t even like cake. He was free to eat or not to eat whatever food the cook left in the pans on their stove. He did his schoolwork and homework out of interest, and to learn new things. He had a bath whenever he felt like it: often in hot weather, rarely when it was cold. He changed or kept clothes on as he wished. If his mother were alive like Eduardo’s, he wouldn’t have the same freedom. Still less to come and go as he pleased. At any time. Or almost any time: he was not allowed to stay out late at night. But when his father and Antonio were sleeping at the brothel, he didn’t have to worry. Like tonight.

  Standing directly beneath the window he whistled and imitated the bird call once more. Once. Twice. As he was repeating the call for a third time, Eduardo appeared, in his blue-and-grey-striped pyjamas, done up to the neck.

  ‘What’s going on, Paulo? What time is it?’

  ‘After midnight.’

  ‘What’s the matter with your face?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It’s all puffy.’

  ‘I want to talk to you about something else.’

  ‘Did your father beat you again?’

  They whispered together. Paulo could not stay still. Ever since his talk with Antonio he had been on edge.

  ‘The dead woman’s husband confessed.’

  He said it again, as Eduardo looked on, unimpressed.

  ‘The husband. The dentist. He confessed.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’s been arrested.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He says it was him.’

  ‘I know that too. I heard my father talking about it with my mother.’

  ‘It’s not true.’

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The dentist is old and weak.’

  ‘But he killed her.’

  ‘How could he kill a big woman like her, Eduardo? You saw how big she was.’

  ‘He confessed.’

  ‘It wasn’t him.’

  ‘First he drugged her with something, then stabbed her.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘More than twelve times, my father said.’

  ‘Why did he take the body so far away?’

  A brief silence.

  ‘To the lake,’ Eduardo suggested, ‘because it was harder to find?’

  ‘If he was going to confess, why didn’t he leave it in the house?’

  ‘He only confessed later on. He felt remorse. He was nervous, so he carried the body away—’

  Paulo interrupted him:

  ‘How did he load such a heavy body into his car?’

  ‘Perhaps he dragged it? That’s it, he dragged it.’

  ‘Why didn’t he throw the body out before he reached the lake? Why didn’t he throw it down a bank? Or in a river? Why didn’t he throw it in the lake with a heavy weight attached so that it would sink and be eaten by the fish, and no one would ever find it, and he could have said that his wife vanished, that she ran away from home?’

  Eduardo’s replies were also questions:

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t have time? Perhaps she was too heavy to drag through the mud? Perhaps he had nothing he could tie to her?’ And he added, dismissively: ‘If he didn’t kill her, why did he confess?’

  Paulo, who had been going over the same question for hours alone in his bedroom, voiced his own doubts: didn’t she scream when she was being stabbed? Didn’t any neighbours hear the screams? Why didn’t she try to escape or call for help?

  Eduardo yawned. He could see the mist curling around the street behind Paulo, thought he was beginning to feel cold, and that he would like to get back into his warm bed as soon as possible. Paulo insisted.

  ‘Her hands were slashed, don’t you remember?’

  Eduardo wasn’t sure if he remembered that.

  ‘She must have been trying to grab the knife, Eduardo. She must have struggled not to die. She must have struggled. Everybody struggles to avoid being killed. And the dentist wasn’t strong enough to overpower her.’

  ‘What difference does it make? It’s past midnight, Paulo. We’ve got school early tomorrow morning. No, not tomorrow – today.’

  ‘It wasn’t the dentist who killed her. It wasn’t!’

  ‘But he confessed. That’s it. It’s over.’

  ‘Oh, it is, is it? Then tell me one thing: why did he cut her breast off, Eduardo? Why, Eduardo? Why did he cut it off, Eduardo?’

  They both fell silent. In the distance they heard the intermittent, scratchy sound of a radio, or phonograph. A deep baritone voice.

  Night-time prowling

  isn’t good for her …

  It can destroy you,

  It causes sorrow …

  The beam from Eduardo’s torch shone on the metal semicircle surrounding the head of the wooden statue of the saint. She was clutching a crucifix and two roses, one white, the other red. Carved with great care in the eighteenth century, painted in delicate and already faded colours, the image contrasted strongly with the gaudy tones and doll-like face of the statuette behind her, made in the second half of the twentieth century. To the right, the plaster figure of a young woman with long tresses was holding a bunch of lilies in her arms. Several other small statues stood on the oval jacaranda-wood table, flanked by two silver candlesticks holding tall candles.

  Paulo’s eyes strayed to the paintings of different sizes and shapes ranged above the table. They portrayed women and men with pious expressions on their faces. Some had wounds to their hands and feet. Others had haloes round their heads. Paulo recognized one of them: a bearded old man leaning on a staff who was crossing a river carrying on his shoulder a smiling young baby with golden curls and blue eyes. It was the same saint a driver friend of his father’s had hanging from his taxi’s rear-view mirror.

  ‘It’s St Christopher,’ he explained. ‘Carrying the infant Jesus.’

  ‘Not so loud,’ Eduardo warned him. ‘If anyone catches us here, we’re done for!’

  Paulo thought this was a bit unnecessary. He was sure nobody had seen them climb the wall behind the house, or get in through the bathroom shutters. There was no one in the streets at that late hour. Even if somebody did pass by the dentist’s house, they would not hear anything said behind its thick walls. In any case, he could not really control his voice, which was beginning to mix the gruffer tones of adolescence with the higher ones of childhood. He clicked his tongue in protest, but Eduardo ignored him, still gazing at the statues in amazement.

  ‘I’ve never seen so many.’

  ‘So many what?’

  ‘Male and female saints. And they’re so old. Look at that one. See how well made it is. Look at the nose, the hands, the detail of the fingernails. The crucifix signifies devotion to Jesus Christ.’

  Paulo did not know what the word ‘devotion’ meant.

  ‘It’s like love, only more so.’

  His reply meant nothing to Paulo.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s St Teresa. Her devotees are greeted with a shower of roses when they enter paradise.’

  This didn’t make sense either, but Paulo said nothing.

  ‘And the one with all that hair?’

  ‘St Maria Goretti. The li
lies are to show that she was pure.’

  ‘How do you know it means that?’

  ‘Everybody does.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘All Catholics do.’

  ‘My mother was a Catholic. My father isn’t interested in religion. Nobody makes me go to mass.’

  ‘Nor me. I go because I want to.’

  ‘You mean that when your mother and father go to church on Sunday they allow you not to go?’

  ‘I go because I want to.’

  ‘And I don’t go because I don’t want to.’

  Eduardo closed the discussion by pointing to the female saint with long hair.

  ‘That one had a film made about her.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one with the lilies. St Maria Goretti. Somebody tried to behave indecently towards her, she wouldn’t let him, and he stabbed her to death.’

  ‘That’s what must have happened to the dentist’s wife.’

  ‘But wasn’t she a whore?’

  ‘Oh yes, she was.’

  ‘And the dentist had the right to enjoy her. He was her husband.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So let’s continue with our investigation. Let’s look further. What’s that up there?’

  The beam of light picked out a tall piece of furniture against the back wall. It had two doors in the top half, with a drawer underneath. They opened the doors: one of them creaked. The light showed some charcoal-grey jackets, a couple of black coats and matching trousers, white formal shirts, black and navy-blue ties, white coats with the dentist’s initials embroidered on the pockets. In the drawer they found piles of underpants, vests and handkerchiefs, all of them white. Rolled up in one corner were several pairs of black socks.

  ‘It’s all men’s things,’ said Eduardo.

  ‘An old man’s things.’

  ‘And dentist’s clothes.’

  ‘This must be his bedroom.’

  ‘Their bedroom, Paulo. A husband and wife sleep together.’

  ‘Look over there: it’s a single bed.’

  ‘It must be the guest room,’ said Eduardo, glancing at the image of a crucified Christ over the bed. ‘Rich people have a spare room. The couple’s bedroom must be somewhere else.’