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Authors: Eduardo Sacheri
Tags: Contemporary, Mystery
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doesn’t deserve. As for the sun … I don’t know. With the sun, everything seems too easy. Like in what’s-his-name’s movies … you know, the singer … Palito Ortega. It’s that fake innocence—I always find it exasperating. I think the sun gets too much good press. And that’s why it irritates me when it barges in on rainy days. It’s as though the damned thing just can’t stand to let those ofus who don’t worship it like idolaters enjoy an entire day without sunshine.”
By this point, I was staring at him, completely absorbed.
“I’ll tell you what I think is a perfect day,” Morales went on. He made a few small gestures with his hands, as if he were directing a film. “An early morning sky covered with storm clouds, a certain number of thunderclaps, and a good, steady rain all day long. I’m not talking about a heavy downpour, because the idiots who love the sun complain twice as much if the city fills up with water. No, I’m satisfied with a continuous, even rain that lasts into the night. Well into the night, in fact, so I can go to sleep to the sound of the drops coming down. And if we can get a few additional thunderclaps, so much the better.”
He fell silent for a minute, as if he were remembering such a night.
“But this,” he said, twisting his mouth into a grimace of disgust. “This is a rip-off.”
Morales remained turned away from me, looking out at the street with an expression of great disappointment on his face, and I was able to study his features for a long time. I tended to think that my work had made me immune to emotions, but this young guy, collapsed on his chair like a dismounted scarecrow and gazing glumly outside, had just expressed in words something I’d felt since childhood. That was the moment, I believe, whenI realized that Morales reminded me very much, maybe too much, of myself, or of the “self” I would have been if feigning strength and confidence had exhausted me, if I were weary of putting them on every morning when I woke up, like a suit, or—worse yet—like a disguise. I suppose that’s why I decided to help him in any way I could.
11
It was a day in late August, and I was sitting in my corner of the court offices, finishing the paperwork for a prison release.
Although I was well aware that the moment for removing the Morales file from the active docket was close at hand, I tried to postpone that step by employing the oldest and most futile method I knew: I put the case out of my mind. And therefore, because of my ineffective resistance and the ineluctable circumstances, my little games of denial and procrastination were brought to a halt, suddenly and punctually, when the moment arrived.
I noticed that Clerk Pérez was approaching with a case file in his hand. He dropped the dossier on the glass top of my desk, where it landed with a weak splat. Before he turned around and went back to his office, he said, “I’m leaving the Palermo murder with you so you can dismiss it.”
In the jargon of our profession, “leaving the murder with me” meant that he wanted me to write up a decision; Palermo was the barrio where the crime had beencommitted. Since we had no suspects, we couldn’t identify the case, as we usually did, by the defendants’ names; and when Pérez told me to “dismiss it,” he was referring to the precise nature of the decision he expected me to produce. With no positive leads after three months of investigation and with no evidence that would allow us to proceed in any direction, he was requesting that I write a recommendation to seal the file. End of the line. Goodbye to the case. A thousand times I’d written up such decisions or, for simpler cases, ordered my subordinates to do so. But I balked at this one, because as far as I was concerned, this case wasn’t about the Palermo murder, it was about the death of Ricardo Agustín Morales’s wife, and I’d resolved to help him as much as possible. And up to that moment,
By this point, I was staring at him, completely absorbed.
“I’ll tell you what I think is a perfect day,” Morales went on. He made a few small gestures with his hands, as if he were directing a film. “An early morning sky covered with storm clouds, a certain number of thunderclaps, and a good, steady rain all day long. I’m not talking about a heavy downpour, because the idiots who love the sun complain twice as much if the city fills up with water. No, I’m satisfied with a continuous, even rain that lasts into the night. Well into the night, in fact, so I can go to sleep to the sound of the drops coming down. And if we can get a few additional thunderclaps, so much the better.”
He fell silent for a minute, as if he were remembering such a night.
“But this,” he said, twisting his mouth into a grimace of disgust. “This is a rip-off.”
Morales remained turned away from me, looking out at the street with an expression of great disappointment on his face, and I was able to study his features for a long time. I tended to think that my work had made me immune to emotions, but this young guy, collapsed on his chair like a dismounted scarecrow and gazing glumly outside, had just expressed in words something I’d felt since childhood. That was the moment, I believe, whenI realized that Morales reminded me very much, maybe too much, of myself, or of the “self” I would have been if feigning strength and confidence had exhausted me, if I were weary of putting them on every morning when I woke up, like a suit, or—worse yet—like a disguise. I suppose that’s why I decided to help him in any way I could.
11
It was a day in late August, and I was sitting in my corner of the court offices, finishing the paperwork for a prison release.
Although I was well aware that the moment for removing the Morales file from the active docket was close at hand, I tried to postpone that step by employing the oldest and most futile method I knew: I put the case out of my mind. And therefore, because of my ineffective resistance and the ineluctable circumstances, my little games of denial and procrastination were brought to a halt, suddenly and punctually, when the moment arrived.
I noticed that Clerk Pérez was approaching with a case file in his hand. He dropped the dossier on the glass top of my desk, where it landed with a weak splat. Before he turned around and went back to his office, he said, “I’m leaving the Palermo murder with you so you can dismiss it.”
In the jargon of our profession, “leaving the murder with me” meant that he wanted me to write up a decision; Palermo was the barrio where the crime had beencommitted. Since we had no suspects, we couldn’t identify the case, as we usually did, by the defendants’ names; and when Pérez told me to “dismiss it,” he was referring to the precise nature of the decision he expected me to produce. With no positive leads after three months of investigation and with no evidence that would allow us to proceed in any direction, he was requesting that I write a recommendation to seal the file. End of the line. Goodbye to the case. A thousand times I’d written up such decisions or, for simpler cases, ordered my subordinates to do so. But I balked at this one, because as far as I was concerned, this case wasn’t about the Palermo murder, it was about the death of Ricardo Agustín Morales’s wife, and I’d resolved to help him as much as possible. And up to that moment,
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