The Book of Murder

Ten

As the plane soared over the river, reducing the city to a model, I felt, with the sudden lightness of flying, a weight lifting from me. Luciana’s story, the conversation with Kloster, even the fire, all appeared small and harmless now too, fading, disappearing into the distance as I left the city behind. I thought of Victorian novels in which the hero or heroine who has fallen in love inappropriately is sent abroad by the parents, a journey that never produces the desired result, only serving to test the strength of love across time and distance. But in my case I had to admit that something was subsiding, as if I really had escaped. When, an hour later, I caught sight for the first time of the small town, rising miraculously out of white desert, the buildings set out like dominoes on the cracked, dazzling expanse of salt flats, I genuinely felt I was a thousand miles away.
I submitted to the pleasant welcoming ritual. The dean and one of the professors from the literature department came to meet me at the airport. For my benefit, they took the scenic route back, along the Gran Salina. As we got into town, which looked like an abandoned film set with all the shops closed and streets deserted, they warned me that the siesta lasted until five. They dropped me off at the hotel and came back to collect me a couple of hours later to take me to my first class.
It was meant to be a series of postgraduate seminars, with me giving my usual course on avant-garde literature, but they probably hadn’t been able to recruit enough postgrad students so there were some undergraduates as well, there simply to listen. Amongst them, in the second row, I noticed a girl with large, earnest eyes, whom I couldn’t help staring at slightly longer than I should. It was a long time since I’d given a class to a whole roomful of students, but thankfully as soon as I picked up the chalk I was transformed: the words flowed and the eloquence I had thought lost for ever returned like a dog that still knew its master. As I reeled off statements, refutations, examples, I felt almost breathless with the euphoria of teaching. Certain theologians maintain that the act of praying can in itself lead to faith, like a quiet, mechanical reaction. In my case the familiar little rituals, the chalk on the board, the opening remarks and, I don’t deny it, the student’s interested attention, worked their magic once more, the lecture I’d given so many times before coming back to life and the old jokes getting a laugh. But halfway through the exposition, my happy self-confidence faltered and I hung for a moment over the abyss. I was explaining how John Cage had used the hexagrams of the I Ching when composing his piece Music of Changes. I’d drawn the figures of six stacked lines representing the notes, with their intensity and duration, and I was about to go over how the hexagrams were cast: by tossing the coins so that the six lines were determined by chance. But as I said the word ‘chance’, it was as if I had broken a seal and the sequence of heads and tails, the napkin covered in signs proving that chance too followed patterns, slid insidiously back into my mind. What is a loss of certainty like for a lifelong sceptic? It leaves you reeling and unable even to make the most trivial statement. From then on, until the end of the class, something strange and terrifying began to happen: every time I spoke, I felt that a mocking voice inside me was about to add ‘or not’ at the end of the sentence. Every time I explained something, the little voice wanted to burst out with ‘or quite the opposite’. If I was about to state some conclusion (and I made strenuous efforts to make my conclusions appear to stem from faultless reasoning) the voice wanted to jump in and add ‘but the opposite is equally valid’. Something had gone awry and signs of this inner conflict must have been apparent to my audience. My confidence evaporated, my pauses grew longer. My voice was faltering horribly and my palms were sweating. I glanced at my watch and saw with relief that I could bring the session to a close. I’d been on the brink of disaster, but hoped my audience would put it down to tiredness. Above all, I wondered what my student with the big eyes had thought. Absurdly, from the very start, I referred to her inwardly as ‘my student’, as if she were a gift, part of the welcome. I feared she might not be at the dinner that evening for academic staff, but fortunately she was in charge of some formalities relating to my stay, so while I was signing some papers for her we exchanged a few words and I persuaded her to attend. At the table, however, I wasn’t seated near her so had to make do with looking at her from afar during the meal.
I woke early the next morning and, heartened by the hotel breakfast, the sunlight streaming through the window and the sight of my brand new notebook, I decided to make a start on my novel about incendiary artists. Two hours later my optimism had disappeared and I decided to go for a walk around the town. I looked round the two or three department stores, entered and quickly left a depressing bookshop, wandered up and down the streets in the centre, and by lunchtime felt as if I knew the whole place and had exhausted all its possibilities in one walk. I took another walk during the siesta and, paradoxically, at that dead hour, with the streets empty, I found the town more interesting. I pictured thousands of people all horizontal, lying on their beds at the same time, but surely there must be exceptions. Where, I wondered, were the people who resisted the commandment to take a siesta? Crossing the main square and turning down a side street, I saw a neon sign, lit up in full daylight, and steps up to what must have once been a cinema. On a whim, I went through the swing doors to look inside: it was a huge gaming hall. There they were: people of all ages, but mainly middle-aged women, sat hypnotised, silent, on high chairs, mechanically feeding coins into slot machines. There were far more people than I would have expected and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the dean or one of the students there. I came back out on to the quiet streets and walked on. I saw another two or three similar halls, and they were all full of the faithful, as if during the siesta the whole town was engrossed in a Babylon lottery.
That evening I had dinner alone after the class and decided to take a last stroll. There were only a couple of bars open after eleven. In the window of one of them, near the hotel, two prostitutes who were too old and shiny smiled as I passed. By the third night, as I turned out the light in the now familiar room, I had the feeling I was trapped inside a video game and already knew all the locations for the coming levels: the small desk in my hotel room with the still-empty notebook lying open on it, the couple of department stores, the dispiriting bookshop, the gaming halls that were strangely full at siesta time, the solitary cinema, the seminar room at the university, the two bars open late at night. As hero, the missions I had before me were: possibly writing the first chapter of my novel; striking it lucky at the slot machines; sleeping with my student. The dangers that lay ahead: finding I was addicted to gambling; contracting an embarrassing disease if I took up the prostitutes’ offer; a minor scandal at the university if I was indiscreet with my student.
Over the next few days the impulse with which I’d deluded myself when buying the notebook gradually wore off. Even the memory of the fire was no longer so vivid or troubling. At this remove, it seemed almost silly, its only consequence a few bits of burnt furniture. I followed the news in the Buenos Aires papers from the computer in the hotel lobby, but the arsonist seemed to be taking a break as well. I did make an effort with my student, but by the end of the week I’d given up on this too. I realised I was almost the same age as Kloster had been ten years ago, and that there was much the same age gap between me and this girl as there had been between him and Luciana. I wondered bitterly if my student had thought, or said to her friends in the same shocked tone as Luciana, that I was old enough to be her father. Still, I had the unexpectedly good idea of putting up a sign outside my small office at the university noting the times when students could consult me. She was the only one who came, bravely alone. And you could say that my luck changed—literally—overnight. Afterwards, she told me she’d decided to make a move because she’d realised that time was running out, as I would only be there another week. As on other trips, I reflected that nothing serves the outsider as well as having a fixed departure date. Of my second week in Salinas I remember only her naked body, her face, her captivating eyes. And though I had already put the entire breadth of the country between Luciana’s story and me, I felt even further away from it that week, in that utterly remote world, at the blind, selfish distance that separates the happy from the unhappy.
In fact, I thought of Luciana only once more during that time. One afternoon, J (whom I still call ‘my student”) was standing in front of the mirror after a shower. As she bent her head and swept her hair to one side to comb it, the sight of her long, bare neck reminded me suddenly of Luciana, as if by a mysterious act of compassion time had restored a fragment of the past to me, luminous and intact. I’d had these impossible encounters before, walking around Buenos Aires, or on trips away, in all sorts of places: faces from the past seeming to appear suddenly, as if to test me, at the age they once were but could no longer be. I’d dismissed it as one more consequence of getting older: the entire human race had started to look strangely familiar. But this time the impression was much more vivid, as if Luciana’s neck, the neck I’d stared at so amorously day after day, really did exist once more, smooth and vibrant, flesh and bone, part of another’s body. I stretched out a trembling, tentative hand and touched the back of her head. J turned for me to kiss her and the illusion vanished.
Two days later it was all over. I gave the students their final grades, packed my bag, including the still-blank notebook, and let J drive me to the airport. We made the usual promises, which we knew we wouldn’t keep. My return flight to Buenos Aires was delayed for almost three hours and by the time we took off it was very late at night. I slept for most of the journey, my head resting against the window, but just before landing, as the plane was beginning its descent over the city, I was woken by excited voices around me. The other passengers were looking out, pointing to something down below. I raised the blind and saw, amidst the city lights and rivers of traffic, what looked like the embers of two cigarettes, glowing red points at the base of columns of white smoke. They must have been dozens of blocks apart but from the plane they appeared to be almost side by side. I couldn’t quite believe it but it couldn’t be anything else: two fires at the same time. The novel I hadn’t had the energy to start during my trip seemed to be writing itself down there.