Shantytown

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The floating corpse was not yet cold when an impressive squad of new-model patrol cars came tearing out of the narrow part of Bonorino in single file and pulled up on the esplanade, with their sirens blaring in a raucous ostinato and their lights flashing relentlessly. The cars at the rear rushed forward in a final spurt of acceleration while the front-runners were already braking. They ended up forming a large semi-circle all pointing at the body. For a moment nothing moved, except for the lights spinning on the roofs of the cars. The rain went on lashing this urban plateau. It seemed to be running off the great dome of light over the shantytown to swell the black floodwaters converging on the corpse.

The first thing to move was the door of the car that had ended up in the middle. A moment later, the doors of all the other cars opened too. But no one got out. The doors stayed open, swinging on their hinges in empty space. If the door of the middle car had closed again, perhaps all the others would have followed suit. But it didn’t. A leg emerged. It was the leg of a woman: fat, short, but shapely. A stocking with a pearly sheen, a red leather shoe with a stiletto heel at least six inches high. Legs emerged from all the other cars, one per door, but these were men’s legs, in trousers of regulation blue, with feet encased in impeccably polished boots. All of the feet, like the first to emerge, hesitated for a moment in the air, thrust out almost horizontally, as if to say: “Shall I take the plunge?” In any case, they were drenched already; not just wet, but pummeled and wrung by the rain.

The little red shoe plunged into the water, followed by the matching shoe, and then, in a single fluid movement (it only took a couple of seconds, and yet it had a certain choreographic grandeur), there was a woman standing beside the car. It was the implacable and widely feared Judge Plaza. The rain renewed its attack on her. Policemen had stepped from each of the cars, all looking respectfully in the same direction as the judge.

She was an extraordinarily short woman and obese, aged somewhere between forty and fifty, with dyed-blond hair (it was naturally dark), and Indian or perhaps partly African features. Very confident, well-groomed, commanding and decisive. She had earned her reputation. She inspired fear. The tabloid journalists loved her, and so did their huge audience, who felt it was time for a tough and energetic justice, unhampered by wigs and precedents, ready to take to the streets and fight crime on its own turf.

A few die-hard liberals criticized Judge Plaza — under their breath, mind you, and among themselves in their ivory towers — for being a “media celebrity.” But that wouldn’t have stopped them approving of her if she hadn’t been so vulgar, so in tune with the bloodthirsty instincts of the masses. In fact they had a very good reason to approve of her, which was that she always chose her prey among the masses that had made her a star. And once she had chosen and the hunt was on, she was as fierce as a wild cat: relentless, vengeful, truly bad, of that you could be sure. There was no escape. The public cheered and cried out for more. It’s odd that it never occurred to those citizens, not even for a moment, as they sat in front of their televisions following the judge’s exploits, that one day she might target them. After all, anyone can end up looking suspicious, given the complexity of modern life in a big city, and she was not the sort of judge to bother with gathering evidence, or comparing witness statements, or giving guarantees; her specialty was destruction, annihilation, and the slightest suspicion or rumor was enough for her to go on. She was a woman to be feared, yet none of her fans was afraid of her. Maybe it was because of her status as a media personality. The villains she was after were personalities too, at least as soon as she was on the case, and the whole operation remained within the kingdom of images. Why would the viewers feel that this spectacle had anything to do with their physical reality? They might as well have believed that someone from the TV was going to call them and give them a huge cash prize or a car or a trip to the Caribbean. Nobody really expects that to happen. It’s often said that television has changed people’s lives, but the truth is that life has maintained its autonomy.

The water was almost up to her knees, which were closer to the ground than those of ordinary mortals. She started walking forward. Her men gathered around her. The judicial police officers under her command were an elite group: experienced, incorruptible, bound together by a samurai mysticism and a blind obedience to the judge, who rewarded their loyalty by providing them with the latest, most sophisticated arms and granting them an autonomy that they exploited to the full. According to the legend, each of the judge’s men had a thousand revolvers.

The corpse was floating at the vortex of the group’s collective attention, the judge’s having magnetized that of all her men. It was something more than attention. They had never seen her like this before, although they weren’t actually looking at her. The floating point in the dark water reflected everything.

One of the judge’s most famous and frequently misunderstood declarations was that her only aim in life was to bequeath to the world, at the end of her brief sojourn, something it had not possessed before. It sounded like a throwaway line, the kind of thing that people trot out when they’re stuck for something to say, but it was more subtle than that. For a start, it’s not so simple to bring something new into the world: it’s a bit like bringing a rock back from the moon, except that these days the moon is really a part of the world. And she wasn’t referring to a combination of pre-existing elements or a rearrangement, but to something really new, a new element, which could enter into old combinations, if anyone so desired. This was a strange ambition for a judge: justice is like a zero-sum game; you could say that its mission, the essence of what it does, is to transform a situation without affecting the overall number of elements. Adding something new is more like what art does.

On the other hand, no one could have been surprised by the judge’s evocation of life’s brevity. She wasn’t old (around fifty and well preserved), but she was at the center of the action, right in the line of fire. Hundreds of criminals were out to get her, and whatever precautions are taken in such a case, they are never sufficient. At that fateful moment, on the flooded esplanade, a thought occurred simultaneously to each of her men: “They’ll have to kill us all to get to her.” And yet, at the same time, they knew that someone, inconceivably, had breached the protective wall.

The lightning was intensifying. The storm had not abated; on the contrary. Wild shudders ran back and forth over the surface of the water, and the floating corpse danced, as if on a short-circuiting electric bed, arching and writhing like a sleeper in the grip of a horrible nightmare.

“To leave something new and different in the world, after my brief residence, something to enrich the lives of those to come. .” Yes, but to do that, wouldn’t she have to die? And wasn’t death the destruction of everything, the new as well as the old? The judge’s aspiration associated the old with the individual, while the new was seen as a legacy to the species as a whole, which meant that death, when it came, would be something positive.

But death, in this case, had arrived ahead of time, nobody really understood how. . And precisely because they didn’t understand, they knew that a revelation was imminent. Just at that moment the television crews arrived, and the news girls, followed by cameramen, came rushing and splashing up to the judge, who had begun to walk toward the corpse, stiffly upright as if in a trance.

Thanks to some miracle of communication, the event had already been “deciphered” by the time the ad hoc retinue reached the dead man’s feet, and big red phosphorescent letters appeared on the television screens, over the images from the live coverage: JUDGE PLAZA’S SON MURDERED or MURDER VICTIM JUDGE’S SON, or something like that. This was a real news story, sensational and surprising, especially since until that moment no one had even suspected that the judge had a son, or that she had been married. It had been assumed, in fact, that she had no family or friends, or any kind of private life: she slept on a sofa in her office at the courthouse, never took a day off or a vacation; it was inconceivable that she might be subject to commonplace emotions or enmeshed in conventional relationships. And now, suddenly. . an amazing turn of the screw had confirmed her superhuman capacity to generate news, this time with a revelation that went “straight to the heart”: she was a mother, a mother facing the ultimate loss, the loss of her only child.

The news girls thrust their microphones at her mouth, shouting barely audible questions over the roar of the storm. The rain, falling more heavily than ever, bounced off the big black foam covers of the mikes, and splashed in the judge’s face, which was white as chalk. The cameramen kept turning from the judge to the corpse and back, and the glaring spotlights attached to their cameras made shadows dance on the water.

Any creature equipped with a rudimentary cerebral cortex would have been able to deduce the inner workings of the crime. But the news girls didn’t operate like that. It’s not that they were stupid (not that stupid anyway), but in their work, for the truth to count as true it had to emerge laboriously from a background of error. There was a logic to it as well: they had to get everything wrong to keep people talking and thereby justify their role. That was why they asked:

“Did your son, the Pastor, have a real religious vocation, or was he using it as a cover for dealing drugs?”

“How could he have sunk so low? Where did you go wrong, Judge Plaza?”

“Were you aware of your son’s illegal activities?”

“Who do you suspect, Judge Plaza?”

The questions were calculated to provoke a declaration. Such was the violence of the rain that as soon as the judge opened her mouth, it filled with water. But she spat it out vigorously and shouted:

“He wasn’t a drug dealer! He wasn’t a Pastor! He wasn’t anything like that! He was my son! He was helping me with the investigation, in spite of the risks. He was brave and audacious and he was prepared to lay down his life to protect the community. He was the first to fall because he was in the front line.”

“Did he have time to tell you what he had found out, Judge Plaza?”

“Everything! Everything! Now I’m the target. But it won’t be so easy to kill me! From here on out, we’re calling the shots, and he is the one who will have to die.”

“Who, Judge Plaza? Do you know who was responsible?”

The judge hesitated almost imperceptibly, but quickly recovered her composure, and her voice became more guttural:

“It was a man well known to the police, a corrupt officer: Deputy Inspector Cabezas, from Station 38. It all goes through him, and we’ve had him under surveillance for some time. Up until now, I’ve treated him with respect because he’s a father too. When his daughter died, I knew that the loss would eat away at him and sooner or later he’d slip up. Now he has made a fatal mistake, and we’ll get him before the night is out, before it stops raining. He’s cornered.”

“Is he dangerous? Is he extremely dangerous? Will he kill again?”

“The man’s a wild animal, he’s desperate, and he’s kidnapped two innocent teenagers!”

Then the judge broke down and bowed her head, seized by an uncontrollable fit of weeping. The cameramen stepped back to get her body into the frame, and the shadows rearranged themselves. The news girls withdrew their microphones because everything had been said, and they knew that the headlines would be coming up on the screens: CORRUPT POLICEMAN FATHER OF MURDERED GIRL. COUNTDOWN TO REVENGE. ALL WILL DIE.

The pause provided an opportunity for the obligatory shift to the other breaking story: the rain. The record for precipitation was about to be broken, and all the mobile news teams that the TV channels had sent out around the city were equipped with portable gauges made of transparent plastic, marked off in inches. The hourly rainfall had exceeded sixteen inches already, and was climbing to unprecedented levels. All the stations had diagrams in the corner of the screen showing the water level in the gauges rising in real time. In a city as large as Buenos Aires, rainfall is often heavier in certain areas than in others, and at that moment, by a curious coincidence, the heaviest falls were occurring on the esplanade at the end of Calle Bonorino. The news girls made the most of this, especially since the record for the volume of water that had fallen on the capital would be broken in a few minutes’ time. Nature happened to be making history at precisely the point in space and time where this particular story was unfolding.

And there was blood in the water. The blood of a son. A single drop. As in the most potent homeopathic remedies, one drop was enough to alter the chemical and philosophical composition of that nocturnal Styx. The water took on a shadowy pink overtone, visible only to the mind’s eye in the prevailing blackness.

Certain incidental shots elicited other reflections, albeit in an unconscious or subliminal way, particularly the ones that showed the judge standing in the rain without an umbrella or any kind of protection. Except in the movies, no one stands out in a downpour like that, as if they hadn’t noticed; it’s a basic human reflex to seek shelter. Therefore she wasn’t human. The story was taking a new turn.

The TV channels were in a frenzy. They had found photos of Cabezas in their digital archives and they were alternating them with the live images. For some reason his face was horribly distorted by the electronic medium, becoming more grotesque with every passing second. It must have been because they hadn’t yet been able to find real photos and were making do with artist’s impressions. Meanwhile the archives kept providing images: an identity photo of Cynthia Cabezas; shots from her funeral, with the girls from Misericordia, and her parents in tears. And then, all of a sudden: old photos of Cabezas and Judge Plaza at some night spot, looking young, holding glasses of champagne; the Pastor preaching to a congregation; the judge with her son in her arms, when he was just a few months old; Cynthia as a little girl on the beach with her parents. . And the night, the rain, the city seen from helicopters — all the channels had sent one out — an ocean of confusion, from which the ghostly face of Cabezas reemerged, grimacing, it seemed. . A birthday party ten years ago, with Cynthia and the child who would grow up to be the Pastor at the head of the table, wearing paper hats. . It was the theme of life’s brevity again, but in the world of images this time. And it was taken to an extreme by the fantasy that was hovering over the viewers at that moment: an intergalactic traveler arrives in a strange world without any kind of protection (what protection could he have?). The environmental conditions are totally hostile to life: he’s doomed, obviously; he’s going to die in a few tenths of a second; you could say he’s as good as dead. . And yet, for the time being, he’s alive, arriving in the world, in the world’s horrific reality. And “the time being” is all there is.