Carlos Gamerro - An Open Secret

“SUPERINTENDENT NERI LIKED chess. And in chess he had a fondness for exotic gambits,” Professor Gagliardi will tell me at one point of my last afternoon in Malihuel. “He’d rightly assumed that the procedure for picking someone up in a small town, where not even a hen can disappear without creating a stir, couldn’t be the same as his mentors had developed for the big city, or indeed for larger towns like Villa Constitución or Toro Mocho. Remember? Let’s say you were living in an apartment block. You’d always found the upstairs tenants a little odd. One night you heard screaming and shooting and the crunching of splitting wood and next morning when you ventured out from under your bed the concierge downstairs informed you your suspicions were well founded. Within a month the new neighbour had moved in, and because of the military moustache and his whatthehellyoulookingat expression you asked no more questions. And that’s if it happened in your building, because if it’d been in the one on the corner you’d never even’ve heard about it. No, after pondering the matter at length, Superintendent Neri’s twisted but obstinate brain came to the conclusion that that wasn’t viable here. In any other town in the county it’d’ve been a piece of cake, as the local police would point the finger at the Malihuel headquarters; but here in Malihuel there was no one to pass the buck to. What I can vouch for is that Neri tried his level best to get the Rosario Regiment to come and pick him up — he’d do the tailing for them and guarantee the area’d be police-free and they’d do the dirty work and take him far away, somewhere it couldn’t be pinned on him. But it was no use. They wanted him to do it, in person, with his own people. It wasn’t personal, that’s what it was like everywhere. A kind of blood pact, with other people’s blood of course. When the clean-up was complete and the claims started rolling in after the return of democracy, they wanted to make sure the fussy ones couldn’t hold their hands up, point the finger at others and say Wasn’t me.”

MALIHUEL’S BARBER is an old-timer with neatly trimmed hair and a flaccid, harmlessly depraved expression, who answers to the vaguely incredible name of Eufemio. Seated in one of the two antique pedal chairs, I let him adjust the apron around my neck and say yes thanks to the manicurist’s fancy a coffee, with her outrageously turquoise apron and furious red hair, and number three to the old-timer’s question. “Of course I do, how couldn’t I? He always had his hair cut here,” he answers mine. “You’re? … Oh yes, I’ve heard something about you now you mention it. Is it for some magazine? I don’t know what I can tell you, we didn’t know each other any better than townies usually do, it’s impossible to be strangers in a small town as they say right? He came in for a trim a few days before, that much I can tell you. Nothing particular about his conversation — if he knew something or had been warned, he didn’t let it show. Except for one thing. He kept on about how this time he was back to stay. Unusual for him, he was always on the verge of leaving. It’s time to settle down Eufemio, he told me — that’s my name, Eufemio — while I was cutting his hair. Maybe I’ll get married, have a family, be someone here, he told me. It was like he’d found his place in the world, you know like in the film, and he wasn’t going anywhere”—Eufemio précises the deceased’s words as the clippers buzz across my cranium lifting clumps of tousled greying hair as they go. “I didn’t pay much attention at the time but in the days that followed, ’specially after what happened, his words took on another meaning and I realised what he’d been trying to tell me. He knew what was coming, he knew perfectly well. It isn’t true what people say about nobody warning him. How couldn’t he know with so many people — not all as some say, but a lot — in the know? Whatever people say, I’m certain he knew and decided to stay anyway and face the music. Perhaps in the knowledge that it was hopeless, but possessing a quiet fatalism that wasn’t devoid of heroism. He was hell-bent on staying in Malihuel, dead or alive, and that’s what happened. They couldn’t send him away so they had to kill him. He was no victim,” claims Eufemio, putting the finishing touches to my fringe. “In a way he had the last word.”

He swivels the chair round and shows me the short-back-and-sides in a hand mirror. The little mirror also catches the flame-haired manicurist’s enthusiastic look of approval in the vast wall mirror.

“EZCURRA’S ALIVE AND WELL and living in Casilda,” Licho’s voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. “I have it on good authority.” He turns his snout towards a mockingly attentive Iturraspe and says as if trumping him with the ace of swords, “Tonito. Know him? Saw him in Casilda he did. He’s married, looks like he finally settled down, and he’s got two children — boy of seven, girl of five. Works in a real-estate agency on that boulevard, Colón Boulevard, and Tonito was passing and spotted him through the window, but Ezcurrita had customers and stopped him in his tracks with a gesture. Tonito gave him a wave … and you know what he did? He winked back,” argues Licho, exaggeratedly shutting one eye to illustrate. “No, they’ll never catch Ezcurrita that easily I’ve always said so, always did his surname proud he did. You’d have an easier job catching an eel with soapy hands. All that malarkey about Don Manuel and the police was just a story he made up to dodge the creditors and start afresh somewhere else, wipe the slate clean. Fooled the lot of them he did, I know what I’m talking about, can you picture Ezcurrita sticking his head in the lion’s mouth on his own, being bamboozled, him of all people? He waited for the right moment and scarpered. Alive and well he is, I’ll bet you the shirt off my back. The Devil looks after his own,” he says and drains his glass of Fernet.

“What about the body?” Iturraspe asks.

“What body?” Licho says dumbly.

“The one the dogs dug up, out at old Villalba’s place. Who was that?”

“No idea. Ask El Peludo, he’ll be able to tell you.”

“The gravedigger,” Guido clarifies before I can ask.

“While you’re at it you can ask him,” Licho concludes, leaning over with a cigarette in his outstretched lips for Nene Larrieu to light, “why the north wall of the ossuary collapsed. There were stiffs to spare in those days. Got hold of a whatdoyoucallit an NN they did and gave him a name and surname. Ezcurra and Neri must have come to some arrangement, that whole circus of the inquiry was just a smokescreen.”

“I’M DISAPPOINTED,” I tell Guido and Leticia over dinner, “with people in Malihuel. When I was on the way here I was worried people wouldn’t want to talk, that they’d be wary of an outsider like me poking my nose in. Particularly when I started asking about Ezcurra. I rather hoped I’d get threats or warnings like ‘Leave town before sundown’, or that I’d come up against a wall of silence, or get dirty looks at the very least. Nothing. They’re all so helpful, so friendly, so willing to welcome me, to talk openly. I was expecting a conspiracy of silence not a conspiracy of chattiness. I must have watched too many movies right? Foreign movies. You don’t think it’s odd? Or do I have a gift for making people open up to me? Now I come to think of it it’s not the first time.”

“It’s winter, people get bored,” Leticia opines through a mouthful of № 12 Friar’s Sleeves Tuttolomondo tagliatelle. Guido swallows before adjusting his posture, a signal he has something juicy to add. Behind him a colourful television presenter hosts a brawl between tight-fisted housewives on The Price Is Right .