The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri
Authors: Eduardo Sacheri
Tags: Contemporary, Mystery
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that another eternity of darkness and silence has begun.
When Chaparro imagines the sudden hope and catastrophic disappointment his hands are causing in each page as he leafs through the case file, he’s overcome by an absurd feeling of pity. But when he reaches page 208, shortly after the beginning of the second volume, he stops; he’s arrived at his destination.
It’s a four-line court order, typed on his Remington. On this last point, he has no doubt: The
e
’s are all raised a little above the line formed by the other letters, and the bellies of the
a
’s are filled with ink, because the key was worn out.
The document records a court appearance, falsely dated in mid-August 1968, in which Ricardo AgustínMorales declares that he has information pertinent to solving the crime. A little farther down the page, an order signed by Judge Fortuna Lacalle orders the petitioner to give, under oath, the reasons for his assertion.
Page 209 presents Morales’s sworn declaration, falsely dated in early September. In this statement, which is considerably longer than the other declarations, the name of Isidoro Antonio Gómez appears for the first time. On page 210, a new court order dated September 17 directs that official letters be sent to the Federal Police and to the police of Tucumán Province, requesting them “to ascertain the domicile” of the said Gómez and “summon him to appear in court.” All these documents bear the signatures of the examining magistrate and his clerk. Judge Fortuna Lacalle’s signature is enormous, pretentious, adorned with useless flourishes. Pérez’s is small and bland, like the clerk himself.
Chaparro consults his watch. His eyes feel irritated. The table lamp, shining alone in the midst of darkness, has troubled his vision. It’s almost noon, and he knows the archivist is going to get nervous if he doesn’t see him leave soon. It’s unlikely that he’ll quote these tedious legal documents verbatim in his book, but they’ve helped to evoke the climate of those days. They’ve returned him to the sterile meetings he had with Morales to keep him from losing hope, or at least to inform him, gently and gradually, that the case was going nowherefor lack of a suspect. And they’ve recalled the unbearable heat of that hellish summer.
Chaparro rises to his feet and puts the three volumes of the case in a single pile. He doesn’t turn off the lamp, because he’s afraid he’ll get completely lost if he tries to make his way back through the dark stacks. He retraces his steps to the entrance, zigzagging in accordance with the archivist’s directions. At one of the last turns, when he’s almost out of the archive, Chaparro glimpses something that makes him jump. It’s the old man, sitting on a chair in one of the narrow aisles, with his legs stretched out and his eyes fixed on the shelf in front of him. Chaparro feels the same icy apprehension that used to come over him during visits to his aunt Margaret, who was blind from birth. At the end of the visit, when night was falling, his aunt would accompany him to the door, turning out the lights along the way to be sure she wouldn’t leave one on and “waste electricity for nothing.” When the old lady told him good-bye and, a little absently, stretched out her face to receive his kiss on her cheek, little Benjamín would look over her shoulder and see that her apartment was in darkness. The image of his aunt in those pitch-black, endless rooms—eating dinner, for example, or feeling her way along the walls—would follow him all the way to the Floresta station and terrify him until he got on the train.
With a laconic “Good day,” Chaparro bids farewell to the archivist and practically runs out of the archive. He goes back up to the ground floor of the Palace, and shortly thereafter he’s descending the exterior stairs to Lacalle Street and rejoicing in his return to sundrenched, noisy Buenos Aires.
Three hours later, he’s in
When Chaparro imagines the sudden hope and catastrophic disappointment his hands are causing in each page as he leafs through the case file, he’s overcome by an absurd feeling of pity. But when he reaches page 208, shortly after the beginning of the second volume, he stops; he’s arrived at his destination.
It’s a four-line court order, typed on his Remington. On this last point, he has no doubt: The
e
’s are all raised a little above the line formed by the other letters, and the bellies of the
a
’s are filled with ink, because the key was worn out.
The document records a court appearance, falsely dated in mid-August 1968, in which Ricardo AgustínMorales declares that he has information pertinent to solving the crime. A little farther down the page, an order signed by Judge Fortuna Lacalle orders the petitioner to give, under oath, the reasons for his assertion.
Page 209 presents Morales’s sworn declaration, falsely dated in early September. In this statement, which is considerably longer than the other declarations, the name of Isidoro Antonio Gómez appears for the first time. On page 210, a new court order dated September 17 directs that official letters be sent to the Federal Police and to the police of Tucumán Province, requesting them “to ascertain the domicile” of the said Gómez and “summon him to appear in court.” All these documents bear the signatures of the examining magistrate and his clerk. Judge Fortuna Lacalle’s signature is enormous, pretentious, adorned with useless flourishes. Pérez’s is small and bland, like the clerk himself.
Chaparro consults his watch. His eyes feel irritated. The table lamp, shining alone in the midst of darkness, has troubled his vision. It’s almost noon, and he knows the archivist is going to get nervous if he doesn’t see him leave soon. It’s unlikely that he’ll quote these tedious legal documents verbatim in his book, but they’ve helped to evoke the climate of those days. They’ve returned him to the sterile meetings he had with Morales to keep him from losing hope, or at least to inform him, gently and gradually, that the case was going nowherefor lack of a suspect. And they’ve recalled the unbearable heat of that hellish summer.
Chaparro rises to his feet and puts the three volumes of the case in a single pile. He doesn’t turn off the lamp, because he’s afraid he’ll get completely lost if he tries to make his way back through the dark stacks. He retraces his steps to the entrance, zigzagging in accordance with the archivist’s directions. At one of the last turns, when he’s almost out of the archive, Chaparro glimpses something that makes him jump. It’s the old man, sitting on a chair in one of the narrow aisles, with his legs stretched out and his eyes fixed on the shelf in front of him. Chaparro feels the same icy apprehension that used to come over him during visits to his aunt Margaret, who was blind from birth. At the end of the visit, when night was falling, his aunt would accompany him to the door, turning out the lights along the way to be sure she wouldn’t leave one on and “waste electricity for nothing.” When the old lady told him good-bye and, a little absently, stretched out her face to receive his kiss on her cheek, little Benjamín would look over her shoulder and see that her apartment was in darkness. The image of his aunt in those pitch-black, endless rooms—eating dinner, for example, or feeling her way along the walls—would follow him all the way to the Floresta station and terrify him until he got on the train.
With a laconic “Good day,” Chaparro bids farewell to the archivist and practically runs out of the archive. He goes back up to the ground floor of the Palace, and shortly thereafter he’s descending the exterior stairs to Lacalle Street and rejoicing in his return to sundrenched, noisy Buenos Aires.
Three hours later, he’s in
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