The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri Read Free Book Online

boy—his body collapsed on a rickety little bench, his small eyes fixed on the blue flame burning on the stove, his hands pressed against his temples, his tightly knotted tie hanging down between his open legs like a plumb line—I imagined myself in his place, in the plight of a broken man whose life was over, and the image horrified me.
    Morales’s drifting eyes had come to a stop on the flame he’d lit five minutes previously, intending to fix himself some maté, right before our brutal irruption into his life. And I thought I understood what was going through his mind as he gave monosyllabic answers to Báez’s methodical questions. The young man couldn’t focus on exactly what time it had been when he’d left for work that morning, nor could he remember precisely how many people might have the keys to his apartment or whether he’d seen anyone who looked suspicious hanging around his building. It seemed to me most likely that he was taking a mental inventory of everything he’d just lost.
    His wife wouldn’t accompany him to do the shopping that afternoon, or any other, nor would she ever again offer him her alabaster body, nor bear his children, nor grow old at his side, nor walk with him on Punta Mogotesbeach, nor laugh until she cried at some especially funny episode of
The Three Stooges
on Channel 13. Back then, I didn’t know these details (which Morales consented to reveal to me only after some time had passed), but it was evident from the young man’s anguished face that his future had just been blown into rubble.
    When Báez asked him if he had any enemies, I couldn’t help feeling, deep down inside, an urge to burst into sarcastic laughter. Unless there was someone Morales had given the wrong change to or whose electric bill he’d forgotten to stamp PAID, who could hold anything against this guy? He shook his head without emphasis and impassively turned his eyes back to the burner’s blue flame.
    As the minutes passed and Báez’s questions went into details that neither Morales nor I cared about, I watched his expression grow more and more vacant. His features gradually relaxed, and the tears and sweat that had dampened his skin at the start dried up definitively. It was as if Morales—once he’d cooled off, once he was empty of emotions and feelings, once the dust cloud had settled on the ruins of his life—could perceive what his future would be like, what he had to look forward to, and as if he’d realized that yes, beyond the shadow of a doubt, his future was nothing.

8
    “It’s solved, Benjamín. Case closed.”
    Pedro Romano said this to me with an air of triumph, leaning his elbows on my desk and waving a piece of paper with some typewritten names on it under my nose. He’d just hung up the telephone. I’d watched his side of a long conversation in which vociferous exclamations (so that no one could doubt the importance of what he was working on) had alternated with long speeches delivered in a conspiratorial whisper. In my initial distraction, I’d wondered why the hell he’d come to my section to use the telephone instead of staying in his own. Then I saw Judge Fortuna talking to Clerk Pérez in his office, and things became clear: Romano was trying to show off. Since I considered myself a compassionate fellow, and since I was, naturally, in the most absolute ignorance as to all the consequences the events of that day were going to have in the years to come, I found Romano’s efforts to dazzle our superiors more amusing than annoying. I wasn’t tickled so much by the way he was striving to call attention to himself as by the moral and intellectual qualities of the superior forwhom he wanted to stand out. That someone would play the model employee before a judge might have seemed to me like fairly pathetic behavior, but that he’d do it without realizing that the judge in question was an idiot of the first magnitude who wouldn’t even notice the performance left me