Shantytown

III

If Maxi had been worried (though he never was, not even for a moment) that someone he knew might see him with the collectors, he could have set his mind at rest. None of his friends or acquaintances ever saw him. This, perhaps, was partly due to chance, which sometimes chooses the path of abstention and follows it all the way through the intricate labyrinth of possibilities, and partly due to one of those blind spots that are so typical of big-city life. Not that he had gone completely unnoticed: someone had seen and recognized him. Only one person, who told no one else. And there was a reason why it should have been this person in particular: he was a policeman.

As I said before, Maxi lived on the corner of Bonorino and Bonifacio. One hundred and fifty feet away, on Calle Bonorino, was Police Station 38, and that’s where Inspector Cabezas worked; he had been appointed to supervise the restructuring after the station had been taken over the previous year and all the senior officers dismissed (a judge had burst in one night, leading a special squad of judicial police, and discovered evidence that suspects were being tortured). Cabezas had completed that assignment a few months back but had continued to use the station, which was now functioning normally, as his personal headquarters. One night he saw Maxi hauling a collector’s cart and recognized him. He’d often seen the kid coming out of the building on the corner and been struck his physique. But he would have recognized him anyway; his memory for faces was prodigious.

Once his curiosity was aroused, Cabezas began to keep an eye on Maxi. Since he didn’t have to account for how he spent his time, he’d go out at night in his car, and was able to find Maxi without too much trouble. Cabezas would watch from a distance, sometimes parking for a while and sitting in the car, sometimes driving around the block, following the progress of the meathead and the scavengers. Before long he had more or less worked out Maxi’s routine. At first he assumed that the kid was helping a particular family but he soon realized his mistake, and that intrigued him even more. On several occasions he followed Maxi into the depths of Lower Flores, to the end of his route, where he said goodbye to the collectors and set off home. A couple of times, late in the afternoon, he sat in his car, waiting for Maxi to step out into the street, then tailed him at a safe distance, keeping out of sight, all the way to the point at which he finally turned back, three or four hours later. The time this took was not an issue. Cabezas didn’t do it every day; usually it was enough for him to catch a distant glimpse of Maxi, and see that he was still at it. Sometimes he let days and even whole weeks go by without checking, but then he returned to his observations. . And that was how he noticed Maxi getting closer to the shantytown. After the onset of winter, he would sometimes go to where Bonorino widened and wait for Maxi to stagger into view, at the end of his shift. One night he saw the boy actually go into the shantytown, which inflamed his curiosity and plunged him deep in thought.

Maxi and Inspector Cabezas were different in every way. In age, for a start. One was just beginning his adult life: he didn’t know what he would do with it, and was always reacting on the basis of that uncertainty. The other had passed the age of fifty and begun his decline: he knew exactly what he’d done with his life, and assumed that the fabric of a man’s destiny is woven by every one of his actions, no matter what his age. That assumption was the source of a deep misunderstanding, which was to have serious consequences. The gulf between the two men was evident in the forms of their respective enterprises, which although superposed were incompatible. Maxi’s was linear, an adventure open to improvisation, like a path disappearing into the distance. The inspector’s enterprise, by contrast, resembled the deciphering of a structure. Policemen, whether or not they are influenced by detective fiction, tend to see things as aspects of a “case.” As soon as Cabezas began to take an interest in Maxi’s comings and goings, they constituted a case in his mind. Which meant that nothing could be left unexplained, and each explanation would have to be linked to others, to form a system, which in turn would have to be connected to other systems, until the whole of society was covered.

This was not a purely intellectual problem. In fact, Inspector Cabezas was not an intellectual at all. If an explanation was difficult to find, or he couldn’t be bothered looking, he created one. That’s the way he was: a man of action, not a speculative thinker. And how do you “create” an explanation? By pressing on and improvising. In that respect his method did coincide with Maxi’s, but at a different level and with different objectives. To him, “the case of the generous giant” was completely inexplicable, which gave him the widest possible scope for action. He had to create an explanation out of nothing, as it were.

The structure was based on real events: a rash of violence had broken out on the edge of that circular shantytown, known to the police as “the carousel.” And the incidents had taken place precisely where Calle Bonorino widened out, which was also where the police station had once stood, long before. Providing, as ever, for fugitives and delinquents, the drug trade had intensified, raising the level of violence in the shantytowns, partly because of the serious money involved, but also because of the psychological disturbances produced by the drugs themselves. The situation in “the carousel” was particularly acute. And of course (this is where the inspector’s procedure came in) it wasn’t one case but a myriad, all of them interrelated. For instance, the violent trouble spot that was causing anxiety in the neighborhood didn’t lie within the shantytown itself, where no one could be sure what was really going on, but outside, in its “vestibule.”

That autumn, the newspaper Clarín had published a letter that read as follows: “Over recent years, the residents of 1800 Avenida Bonorino, in Lower Flores, have been subjected to an escalation of violence, instigated by a mafia whose headquarters are situated in the neighboring agglomeration of temporary dwellings. Firearms and drugs have become a daily presence in what was, until recently, a quiet working-class neighborhood, where children played in the streets. Now we live behind closed doors, day and night, held hostage in our own homes by rampant lawlessness. On the fifteenth of March, in an incident that is yet to be clarified, this deplorable situation lead to a fatality: a shot fired by an assault weapon ended the life of a fifteen-year-old girl. She was an outstanding student, her parents’ pride and joy. She was my daughter. We are still waiting for an explanation; the culprits are still on the loose, terrorizing the local community; our family has been destroyed, and it is only a matter of time before this tragedy is repeated.” Like all the readers’ letters in the papers, it was signed, with an address (which was, predictably, 1800 Avenida Bonorino) and a National Identity Document number.

Inspector Cabezas had the cutting in his wallet, not because of its content — any number of such letters had been published — but because the signatory shared his surname: Cabezas. That, on its own, would not have been enough to make him cut the letter out and keep it, but the man’s first name — Ignacio — was the same as well. This was a truly amazing coincidence because neither name was especially common. The inspector would have been very surprised just to learn that there was another Ignacio Cabezas, but the fact that his namesake also lived in Lower Flores, on his patch, and had made himself known to the public in that way, was something he could never have imagined, and it was enough to suggest the existence of a mechanism in which he had a part to play, though what that part might be he didn’t know. He had been carrying the cutting around in his wallet for months, just in case, without showing it to anyone.

He had made no effort to meet the other Ignacio Cabezas, nor had he bothered to check the file on the killing because he knew what he would find. What interested him lay further afield, in the shantytown, which he had examined without, so far, discovering anything useful. Drugs were sold there in large quantities, everyone knew that, but no one knew how they came in and went out. It could have been done in a thousand ways. Long hours of surveillance, to which the inspector was accustomed, had revealed that buyers came at the oddest hours of the day or night, always in cars. They would pull up for a moment, ask something (what?), drive on again, and end up doing as many as ten full laps of the circular road that bounded the shantytown. It was extremely difficult to follow them without being noticed, especially at night, when there was no one else on the road, and it was brilliantly lit by the profusion of bulbs. The actual sales seemed to take place after dark; the daytime visits must have been exploratory. Cabezas was not the only one to have noticed; some of his colleagues had also been discreetly observing this activity, and they had come up with the apt and eloquent nickname, “the carousel.”

The moment finally came to make use of that newspaper cutting. Cabezas knew that the meathead had a sister because he had seen the whole family coming out of the building on the corner, next to the police station. And he knew (police: what don’t they know?) that the girl was mixed up with some bad sorts in the neighborhood. In fact, he had a more detailed picture of her than of her brother, who was a completely unknown quantity. So one day Cabezas followed her on foot, and waited until she was a fair way from home, in the middle of an empty block, before accosting her. He called out her name, and she turned around, alarmed. She was a pretty little blonde, with a sour look on her face. There was a chance that she’d recognize him; she might have seen him going into the station or coming out. But he decided to risk it because he knew how inattentive teenagers are, wrapped up in their own little worlds.

“I’m not trying to threaten you,” he began. “I was going to talk with your parents, but then I thought we could come to an understanding, just the two of us. I don’t want to upset them unnecessarily; I’m a father too, I know what it’s like. They don’t need to find out about anything, as long as you cooperate.”

“Me? How? Who are you?”

The viper inside her reared up, but she couldn’t hide the fact that she was nervous and afraid. “Gotcha, little whore,” thought Cabezas.

“Do you have a minute?”

“No, I’m in a hurry.”

“Here, read this,” he said, giving her the cutting. This was such a strange and unexpected move that she found it paradoxically reassuring. The gesture itself was utterly familiar: the streets were full of jobless people handing out flyers. Except that it wasn’t a flyer this time but a piece of newspaper. She looked at both sides and began to read. Although she maintained a neutral expression, Cabezas could tell, as he studied her face, that she knew what it was about and that her twisted little brain was getting to work. When he reckoned that she had reached the end, he pointed to the sender’s name, and with his other hand held out his identity card, so she could see that the names were the same.

“That’s right,” he said, putting the cutting and the card back into his pocket, “I’m the father. For months now, I’ve been carrying out my own investigation; I wasn’t going to hold my breath waiting for the police to do something. They’re incompetent and corrupt,” he added, to give his speech an authentic touch, which anyone who’d watched a bit of television could recognize. And to cover himself, in case she happened to see him entering or leaving the police station later on: “I go to Station 38 every day to see if there’s any news, but they never do anything. I’ve found out all sorts of things, though, making my own inquiries.” Here he paused and looked at her steadily. He could tell that she wanted to say, “And what’s all this got to do with me?” but she couldn’t because fear had paralyzed her lips.

“I know you used to see those layabouts from Commercial College Nine who went to the shantytown to buy proxidine. But don’t worry, I’m not going to tell on you; like I said, I don’t want to upset your parents unnecessarily. All I want is for you to help me find the bastards who killed my daughter. I quit my job so I could focus a hundred percent on finding them; it’s all I think about. .”

“I never went to buy anything! I don’t care who you tell!”

“I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m just asking you to have some compassion for a father in despair. Look, I know you didn’t go to the shantytown to score. But you knew those kids; you used to hang out with them. People can do what they like, as far as I’m concerned. We’re all free, and everyone wants drugs, that’s obvious. What I said in the letter, it’s not exactly true. I know my daughter was no saint, but that’s no reason to kill her, is it?”

His question produced the desired effect. She nodded remorsefully.

“I want you to find out how the dealing is done in the shantytown. That’s the only thing I haven’t worked out, and until I do, I won’t be able to unravel the mystery. I don’t want you to tell me what you already know. You go ask your friends, as if you wanted to buy some yourself. I know where you live and where you go to school, and all the rest, so I’ll be in touch. Remember this is a good deed you’re doing. You help me, and I’ll help you.”

With that, he left her. He didn’t think she’d be able to provide him with any useful information, though given the curious routes by which information circulates, who could tell? And anyhow, he was really after something else. He was happy with the way the conversation had gone. Next time, he’d be able to take it a bit further, and maybe he could even seduce her, while he was at it. Clearly, he was ignoring the old adage: “He who sleeps with children wakes up in a wet bed.”

Vanessa was dazed and not exactly sure where she was, as if she’d been magically transported to a foreign city and didn’t even know its name. Her little world was tottering. She started walking automatically, while her brain went into overdrive. But it was useless; she couldn’t think about anything. Or rather, there was just one thing she could think about; and she thought about it so intensely that it left no room for anything else: she had to find help. She was the kind of person who needs help all the time, for everything. And now more than ever before. Except that now her need, it seemed, had exceeded the bounds of the possible: she needed more help than heaven and earth could provide. And yet — so strange are the workings of the mind — the ideal person occurred to her immediately, someone who, five minutes earlier, could not have been further from her thoughts.

This providential person was a maid who worked in the building directly opposite her apartment. Although they had never spoken, Vanessa knew that the girl lived in the shantytown and walked up from there every morning. She’d also seen her with one of those dangerous Bolivian drug dealers. The maid looked Bolivian too, and Vanessa might have been getting her mixed up because to her all Bolivians looked the same. Only someone in a state of high agitation would have resorted to such an unlikely source of help, but the girl was there, just across the street, and that was enough for Vanessa. She turned around and went straight back home; it was the ideal time to make contact. She’d be alone, and from the front window she’d be able to see if the maid was cleaning as usual. Maybe she’d be alone too, and they would be able to talk.

Vanessa went upstairs and rushed to the window. Across the street, the doors that opened onto the balconies were closed, but the curtains were open; she could see into the bedrooms: no one there. She went to the telephone and only then did she realize that she didn’t know the number. That didn’t matter. There was a way she could find out: her best friend lived in the same building. She called the friend, who wasn’t home, but her mother answered and gave Vanessa the surname of the people who owned the third-floor apartment. She searched frenetically in the phone book. Among all the entries for that name, there was one with the address 200 Bonorino. She called the number. A woman’s voice answered.

“I want to speak with the maid who’s working there,” she said.

“Who’s speaking?”

The accent was funny. It must have been her.

“It’s you, isn’t it?”

“Ma’am, yes.”

Vanessa heaved a sigh of relief, as if all her problems were over.

“Listen, I’m the girl who lives in the apartment on the third floor of the building opposite, I always see you in the window. You must have seen me.”

A silence.

“Hello!”

“Ma’am, yes. Who?”

“Opposite, directly opposite! I’m at the window now. Can you use the phone in one of the bedrooms. It’s very important. If you go to one of the bedrooms you’ll see me. I can see into the bedrooms from here.”

“Ma’am, yes.”

Another silence.

“Hello!”

Nothing. Had she understood? Vanessa fixed her gaze on the balconies. After an eternity, she saw the girl appear, as black as a cockroach, as small as a ten-year old, and pick up the phone from a bedside table.

“Ma’am, yes.”

“Hello! Here I am. Look straight ahead.” She opened the window with one hand and waved her arm desperately. “Can you see me? No, look this way! Outside!”

Vanessa saw her turn slowly, like a sleepwalker (or was it an effect of the distance?) and look all around.

“Can you see me? I live here, right opposite. Hello! Hello!” These hellos were accompanied by extravagant arm gestures.

“Ma’am, yes.”

“Don’t call me Ma’am, you’re not talking to my mom, it’s me. Can you see me now? Do you see where I am?”

“Ma’am. . yes.”

“Listen, what’s your name?”

“Ma’am, Adela.”

“Adela, my name’s Vanessa. I’ve been seeing you around for a while, and I know you live down near 1800 Bonorino.” She thought it would be tactless to say “in the shantytown.” “One time I saw you coming up from there with the fat man who used to hang out with the kids from Commercial College Nine.”

“Who? What man?”

“A short, fat guy. A man, or a boy, I don’t know.” As well as being unable to tell those people apart, she couldn’t tell what age they were. “He had a bright red jacket. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. That’s not what I wanted to tell you. I’m desperate. This guy just stopped me in the street: the father of the girl that got shot at 1800 Bonorino. He’s crazy! He wants to kill them all! I don’t know what to do. He’s after me, he knows where I live, he’s harassing me. If my parents find out, they’ll kill me. .”

She was out of control, sobbing and talking so quickly it was incomprehensible. Adelita seemed to be puzzled, with good

reason.

“But what do you want?”

“For you to fucking sort it out! I’m being harassed by a madman. . and I’ve got nothing to do with it! I’ve never even been there. I saw that fat guy once in my whole life. I don’t know who he is. You must know, that’s why I called you.”

“Ma’am, I don’t know. .”

“I want this to finish now! Now! I don’t want anything more to do with it.” She was losing control again, crying so much she couldn’t even speak. In the end they hung up.

Adelita stood there pensively. The lady of the house came into the bedroom.

“Who called you?”

“Ma’am, the girl who lives across the street: she’s crazy! She was staring at me through the window as she talked! There she is, can you see?” The lady turned and saw the girl, standing by the phone in the apartment opposite, weeping convulsively. Luckily, Vanessa didn’t look up and see how her secret had begun to spread as soon as it had left her mouth.

“But what’s wrong?” asked the lady. “Why did she call you?”

“Ma’am, she says that she’s being harassed by the father of that girl who was killed in my neighborhood.”

The lady looked horrified.

“When is this nightmare going to end? And does she know. .”

“Ma’am, no,” said Adelita, making an effort to compose her features because now she was beginning to feel upset. “She thinks I know the people who sell drugs. She said she saw me coming up the street with. .”

“With who?”

“I think she meant the Pastor. She mentioned that shiny red jacket he has.”

“Mmm. . and when did you come up with the Pastor?”

“One day, it only happened once; I ran into him on the way up. He was going to the police station, Ma’am; it’s the only time I’ve ever talked with him. He asked me if I lived in the neighborhood, if I believed in Jesus, and then he went on and on.”

“Typical,” remarked the lady, disdainfully. “It’s a wonder he didn’t ask where you work, and whether your employers believe in Jesus Christ, and what kind of car they have. .”

Adelita couldn’t stop herself smiling:

“Ma’am, I think he did.”

“I hope you didn’t tell him!” said the lady, laughing. “What a nosy little shit!” She stopped to think for a moment. “Life is so strange. You talk with a guy in the street just once; somebody sees you and assumes that you’re friends.”

“What a coincidence, Ma’am Élida. .”

It really was surprising. Not so much the business with the Pastor, a self-styled evangelical minister, who preached in the shantytown and extracted money from the gullible, but only as a cover for his real, paid job, as a police informant. The “coincidence” to which Adelita had referred, picking up on the word “nightmare,” used earlier by her employer, was that her boyfriend had been implicated in the death of that poor girl, and the following day, the sixteenth of March, he had disappeared. Nobody had seen him since. It wasn’t clear what had happened, what kind of accident had led to the firing of the fatal shot. Adelita was sure that her boyfriend was innocent, maybe just a witness, or not even that. But the fact was that he had vanished, without telling anyone where he was going: not his friends, not his parents (with whom he lived), not even her. He was a timid, gentle boy, incapable of hurting a fly, almost excessively childlike and shy. He’d probably been so disturbed by the death that he’d run away in a blind panic, with no idea where he was going. No shock should have lasted that long, but with him it was hard to tell; perhaps he was more fragile than Adelita had thought. She had cried and cried, and looked in all the places where she imagined he might be hiding; she kept visiting his parents at regular intervals to see if they had any news. But there was no sign of him. People from his village in Peru had told her that he hadn’t gone back there. The world was so big. i. .

They had been good together: they were outwardly similar, “made for each other,” but she had the energy and strength of character that he lacked. She was just what a boy like him would need, when he became a man: someone who’d always be there for him, supportive but inconspicuous. Over the weeks and months that followed his disappearance, Adelita had resigned herself to never seeing him again. She’d even found a new boyfriend and they’d gone dancing a couple of times before she decided that she didn’t really like him. Naturally she had told her employers everything. Mornings she looked after Madame Élida’s apartment, and afternoons she worked for one of Élida’s sisters-in-law, cleaning her home and business. Both women had offered support and advice, especially Élida, who was like a mother to her. Emerging now from a private daydream and returning to the topic of Vanessa, Élida said:

“I know her mother. We sometimes chat in the street and she’s told me about the trouble they’ve been having with that little brat. Next time I see her, I’ll tell her about the phone call, just so she knows.”

“Ma’am. .” said Adelita in a murmur and went back to her work, but now she was weeping silently. An old wound had reopened. It was possible, even probable, that her boyfriend, Alfredo, had used the opportunity provided by the crime and his vague association with it to get away from her. He wouldn’t have had the courage to take that step under normal circumstances, but fate had provided him with an easy way out. He really was shy and awkward; he didn’t know how to talk to girls. Somehow he’d plucked up the courage to start a conversation with her, but maybe that was just because she was ugly and insignificant. . He was good looking, though, and in the end he must have realized that he could do better; but because of his shyness and inexperience, he couldn’t find a way to break it off. Maybe that was what had happened. Deep down Adelita suspected as much, and it hurt.

That’s how she was: unassuming, serious, responsible, conscientious. She kept no secrets from anyone, and yet her life was surrounded by mystery. Nobody can tell what lives in the heart of a girl like her. Poor and small as she was, she had her own personal genie, not the standard guardian angel that other people believe in, but a supernatural masculine being of extraordinary proportions, who accompanied her everywhere, protecting her twenty-four hours a day, always wide awake even when she was sleeping. Nothing like those effeminate angels: a giant at least twenty yards tall, with a powerful chest ten yards wide. When he stretched out his arms he was the size of an enormous tree. How could any man approach her, once he had noticed that presence? Which showed how blind that ridiculous “Pastor” was. A wonder the giant hadn’t smacked him dead on the spot. Not that men were forbidden, as long as they didn’t have ulterior motives. She wasn’t planning to be left on the shelf. On the contrary. The plan was to find love.

While all this was happening on the third floor, up on the fifth, a girl called Jessica came home, and was told by her mother that Vanessa, her friend from across the street, had called to find out the surname of the people who lived downstairs. This plunged Jessica into a turmoil of speculation. She knew what a scheming piece of work Vanessa was (they’d fallen out, and it was extremely surprising that she’d called). Something fishy was going on, and Jessica resolved to find out what.

Cabezas would have been surprised to learn that the effects of his Machiavellian initiative were spreading like the proverbial wildfire. He was blinkered: he couldn’t see beyond the structure and its realization. This limitation had worked for him so far, and he had come to believe that it always would. His mistake was thinking that a battle is fought at a single point in space. That is not the case. A battle always covers a large area, and none of the participants can take it in at a glance, not even retrospectively. Nobody can grasp the whole, mainly because in reality there is no whole to be grasped.

Something similar applies to time. The inspector’s error in that regard was a little more justifiable, since, as a policeman, he was supposed to be “an agent of justice” and in that capacity he had to believe that his work was underpinned by a transcendent rationale.

How mistaken he was! If God intervened in earthly justice, crimes would be punished straight away. And that could only happen if it had been happening all along, in which case human beings would have adjusted their behavior accordingly. People would refrain from robbing and killing just as they get out of the way of a speeding bus: they would do it automatically because the species would have incorporated the knowledge that the consequences were automatic and fatal. In other words, it wouldn’t be strictly speaking a matter of deliberation and choice. But in the world as we know it, God waits. When moral rather than physical laws are operating, time has to pass between the act and its consequences. And in that lapse of time other things happen.

In the case at hand, someone was presumably responsible for the death of the young woman, and time had passed without the culprit receiving any punishment. That lapse of time was not empty: time never is, nor can it be. And the strangest thing is that what happens in the meantime is odd and unexpected too — that is, the intervening events occur in a fortuitous order; sometimes the effects even come before the causes. . But since time is defined by an orderly causal chain of events, if cause and effect change places, it’s as if time were abolished. (Here it should be mentioned that the “Pastor,” whom Maxi’s sister had mistaken for a drug boss, had chosen the imminent End of the World as the theme for his preaching that year.)