The Case of Lisandra P. (3 page)

Eva Maria opens her eyes once again. She looks at the four keys. One of which is a fake. Vittorio couldn't believe his eyes when he saw them on the other side of the table. On the right side of the table in this fucking visiting room. The keys to his apartment in Eva Maria's fingers. At last a flicker of hope. “All this because a kid was afraid of a kiss.” Vittorio had laughed. Too nervously. “You will help me, won't you? I didn't kill Lisandra, I could never have killed her, you have to believe me, Eva Maria, you're my only hope—what can I do locked up in this fucking cell? The cops have it in for me, they're convinced I killed Lisandra. At the crime scene they found a little porcelain cat, broken, just an innocuous little figurine, they noticed the collection on the shelf in the library, but they also found—evidence more compromising for me—a bottle of wine and two broken glasses on the floor: a tête-à-tête with my wife that turned ugly, it happens a lot, the evening starts out fine but ends badly, but no matter how I told them that those glasses could have been there for several days, that it didn't mean a thing, no matter how I tried to explain to them that we were not very tidy, they just said I wouldn't be the first man to get rid of his wife. Coming from them it's stating the obvious, a husband who kills his wife; it's routine, they lap it up, they laugh and say it's human nature, it's an
impulse, which, it's true, affects every man at least once in his life, but I let my emotions get the better of me, and yet I should know so well how to control them, hold them back, reason with them, I was a shame to my profession, they weren't very proud of me. I could hear them asking each other out loud what my motive was, why did I do it; there isn't a hint of uncertainty in their reasoning, there's nothing I can say, they don't believe me, they're not looking for Lisandra's murderer, they're looking to accuse me,
let's have a shrink for a change
, what a stroke of luck, it's too rare not to seize the opportunity, for once they're getting talked about in the papers, that's a change. Those cops are crazy but they are patient. I'm alone against the world; the distrustful way my lawyer looks at me is hardly reassuring, only this afternoon he told me that things weren't looking good; even he doesn't seem to believe I'm innocent—yet another unbelievable thing about this whole business anyway. Since my arrest, I've had the feeling that everything I'm struggling against is unbelievable. You're my only hope, along with the keys to my apartment, it's just what I needed. We have to find Lisandra's murderer, the cops won't look for him, but you, you can look, you'll help me, won't you? Do you agree?”

 • • • 

Eva Maria can no longer hear the sound of the bandoneon. Estéban must have gone out to his party. Eva Maria puts the keys on her desk. She looks at the cigarette wedged in its notch in the ashtray, a long straight gray tube of ash balancing in the air, frail with its vulnerability to change. Eva Maria thinks about the frailty of vulnerability to change. She wonders how much longer those particles will stay compacted together. She is careful not to move the desk. A sip of wine. Two sips. Eva Maria is thinking. Those investigators are absolute idiots—of course you can't recall that the person who sold you your ticket to the movie was a man—but in their book, the
arbitrary nature of memory is incriminating evidence; that's their point of view, their strategy, and all the rest is simply solitude on trial, which just means that you can never be alone, that you have to spend every single hour, every single moment in someone's company, if you want to be sure you have an alibi, just in case someday you are wrongfully accused, the way Vittorio is now. It's absurd, and impossible. Those investigators aren't looking any further than the ends of their noses; they reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. With them it's not reality that feeds statistics, it's statistics that make reality comply—but that's natural: since their profession brings them no reassurance from men, from human beings, they try to find reassurance in numbers. Some would call it professional conditioning, but Eva Maria thinks it's a sure path to judicial error. No, not every husband kills his wife. Eva Maria takes a sip of wine. It is as if the police are projecting their own fantasies, their own desire for murder, onto this type of drama. In any case, if she were the wife of one of those policemen, she'd be wary. Suspect Vittorio, granted, that was part of their job, but to condemn him before the fact was unacceptable. Numbers are there to be studied, not to serve as generalizations. It was as if, at the Center, she were to take specific data for definitive values: every volcano, every eruption has its own figures, but it stops there. Why can't we do the same with individuals? Simply because we identify with individuals; investigators, judges and jurors, and Sunday commentators do nothing more than project who they are onto the accused; from that point on, error is completely free to interfere. One should not identify with another man any more than one identifies with a volcano. And yet it's not hard to see that this man loved his wife. Eva Maria puts her glass down. The cigarette breaks in two; the long tube of ash has fallen. Eva Maria sighs. She has to get him out of there. She'll have to struggle on her own,
in a place where there is no room for numbers, where only intuition can hold sway, because before we are logical we are pure instinct, and she can tell Vittorio couldn't have killed his wife. It's like with volcanoes: every day you have to conduct a new investigation; every day when you have some new elements you have to make them speak, and you have to trust them, you have to try to interpret them. A man is like a volcano: you wait for him to reveal a bit more of himself each day. Eva Maria reaches for her eyeglasses. She opens a little black leather notebook. Hardbound. She looks for a blank page. She writes quickly.

door to the apartment open

loud music in the living room

window open in living room

chairs on the floor

lamp overturned

vase on the floor, broken

water spilled

figurine broken (porcelain cat)

wine bottle

two broken glasses

lying on her back

head to one side

icy forehead, trickle of blood

eyes open, puffy

Eva Maria closes her little black notebook. She stands up. Puts the keys in the pocket of her slacks. She's made up her mind. She will do what Vittorio asked. She shivers. With a touch of fear.

“Estéban? Estéban?”

Eva Maria opens the door to the bedroom. Estéban has already left. The hook where he hangs his bicycle is empty. He has taken his bandoneon. In the corridor, she calls out again. No one. Eva Maria shrugs. Out again, until the crack of dawn. She puts on her black coat. Wraps her scarf around her neck. The white stands out against the black. Her gaze lands on the kitchen table. Her dinner is waiting for her. She adjusts her gloves. Black, too. Estéban prepared a plate for her. He covered it, to keep it from getting cold. Even covered, the plate must be cold by now. Everything eventually goes cold, even volcanoes. Eva Maria goes into the kitchen. She opens the cupboard. Pours herself a glass of wine. She drinks it down in one go. Switches the lights off behind her. It's cold out. Eva Maria lifts her white scarf to cover her hair. She hasn't been out at night for months. She takes the bus. She watches the lights go by through the window; it's pretty in its way, the lights at night, so quiet. She feels the keys in the pocket of her pants. She thinks about the young man, pictures him again gesturing briefly, there, to his adolescent lips. She wonders if he finally found the resolve to kiss his girlfriend, she wonders if it went well. Her gaze lingers on each passing lamppost. She
remembers her first kiss. It did not go well. She smiles all the same. You always smile when you remember your first kiss—when it was granted willingly. The movement of her lips creases a few wrinkles around her eyes. Her white scarf brushes against her cheeks. A neon light flashes. What a shock it must have been for those two, after all, seeing that body, when they were still children, thinking about nothing more than the possibility of a kiss. “And when we got closer we saw it was a woman, wearing a nice dress.” Vittorio hadn't mentioned it. Eva Maria takes out her little notebook. To her previous notes she adds,

wearing a nice dress

The bus stops. Eva Maria is startled. Two more stops. She draws nearer to the door. She thinks about Vittorio. It must be completely dark in his cell, and there is no way to break that darkness, no switch to press, no door to open. He had immediately been surprised that the door to their apartment was unlocked. Lisandra always locked it when she was alone and she bolted it, too, even during the day; she was afraid, she always had been, even of the impossible—that someone would come in, and hide in a wardrobe or a closet and when night fell they would hurt her. Lisandra was so fearful, she was terrified of the night, as if suddenly it brought together all the conditions necessary for tragedy; if she was lost in thought and he came into the room to speak to her, she would look up with a start, she would stifle a cry. The first time he saw her, he was immediately struck by this vulnerability. It was true that she was crying but you don't assume someone is fragile just because they are crying; you can be sad without being fragile. Lisandra would never have opened the door to a stranger, Vittorio was sure of that; she never opened the
door when it rang, he always had to go—he teased her about it sometimes, they were so different in that respect, she would lock the door for any reason, and he dreamed of a world without doors. He never should have made fun of her; in the end Lisandra had been right to be afraid. Did she know instinctively how, one day, she would die? And what if we all knew instinctively, deep down, how, one day, death would come for us, and what if our neuroses were nothing to do with our past, the way we always think they are, but with our future, cries of alarm? The bus stops. There were no traces of breaking and entering, so Lisandra had opened the door, and Vittorio could not rid himself of a terrible thought, an intuition, the one lead he could envision: a patient. A patient—Lisandra was used to some of them coming and ringing late at night; it was rare but it did happen. Lisandra never opened the door when he wasn't there, but that night perhaps the patient had insisted, he'd kept ringing, or
she
—after all, it isn't only men who kill—and Lisandra had opened the door in the end, driven perhaps by the inevitability of Vittorio's teasing; when he came home he would surely reproach her if she hadn't opened the door. Vittorio found it hard to believe that it could be one of his patients, but he saw no other explanation. The junta's violence was over, and he didn't believe in the concept of a stranger coming to ring their door to kill Lisandra. At least the cops were right about that: murderers don't appear out of nowhere to come and kill you for no reason, or only rarely, and nothing had been taken, he had to admit. He had gone all around the apartment with the policemen and apart from the mess in the living room everything looked normal, Vittorio had seen for himself, nothing had been stolen; the only undeniable thing was that there had been a struggle, and that must be why the music was so loud, to cover the noise, and the shouts, but what had caused the argument? And
the nagging question, what if Lisandra had been raped; he was waiting anxiously for the results of the autopsy. The thought that someone might wish to harm her to the point of killing her seemed unthinkable, but perhaps she had served as a scapegoat; it was possible, after all—you can't stop people venting their frustration and bitterness and hatred on others. In any case they must have really hated her to want to kill her, because it was no accident; you don't open a window in the middle of winter for no good reason. What if it were transference, yes, a transference of emotions onto him, then onto her? If Lisandra had died because of him, he would never forgive himself. The bus stops. Eva Maria gets off.

one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve

she has counted them so many times, these steps, since she has

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been coming here every Tuesday for over four years it must be

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the equivalent of climbing the Copahue volcano or even the

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Payun Matru she hopes she's not doing something stupid Estéban

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kept saying you have to get help Mama you have to get help I've

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heard about someone who's supposed to be good go and see him

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Mama go and see him please do it for me she hopes she's not doing

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something stupid

Eva Maria stumbles.

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Vittorio was the right one she could tell straightaway his questions

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his answers and even their silences their disagreements she always

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felt at ease with him he was never inane or arrogant and never

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insidious when she felt like laughing it was a desire to laugh along

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with him not a petty desire to make fun of him or his interpretations

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the way she had with others that flash that said deep down you

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really don't get it do you man you're way off the mark and you

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won't see me again Vittorio always knew exactly and he taught her

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to see things from another angle a good angle it's strange she

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always counts the steps going up but never going down she hopes

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she's not doing something stupid