The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri Page B

posed portraits, all taken inside a photographer’s studio. No snapshots. Wearing her best clothes, with her hair most carefully combed. I imagined her parents making faces at her behind the photographer’s back to provoke some shy smiles that probably turned confused after every blinding flash.
    “These are of Liliana as a teenager. Her fifteenthbirthday … and stuff like that. Before she came to Buenos Aires, you know?”
    “I didn’t know your wife was from out of town. Are you from somewhere else, too?”
    “No, I’m from here. I grew up in the suburbs, in Beccar. But Liliana’s from Tucumán Province. From the capital, San Miguel. She came here to live with a couple of her aunts a year or so after she got her teaching degree.”
    It was obvious that the family had bought a camera, because now there were many more pictures. On a riverbank, a group of girls in bathing suits, accompanied by a matron of indefinable age and rigorous aspect. Two girls—one of them Liliana—in white pinafores, carrying the Argentine flag. A small, shaggy, white dog, playing with a girl who it goes without saying was Liliana.
    The photographs of her fifteenth birthday, some of them printed in a larger format. Liliana, wearing a light dress and a double-stranded necklace, a bit garishly made up, with perhaps too much eye shadow. Pictures of her standing beside each table in the hall, with a different set of guests at every one: a group of venerable old folks, surely grandparents and grandaunts and -uncles; a group of girls, some of them familiar from the swim-suit snapshot by the river; a group of boys, each encased in a rented or borrowed suit; a gaggle of smaller girls andboys, perhaps nieces and nephews. Photographs of Liliana waltzing on the improvised dance floor in front of the tables, with her dad, her grandfather, and her brother, and then with a multitude of other boys, who were perhaps dazzled by the circumstance of being authorized, if only briefly, to place a hand on such a beauty’s waist.
    A picnic in a place difficult to identify. The Palermo barrio of Buenos Aires was a possibility, but Liliana looked sixteen, seventeen at the most, and so she must still have been in Tucumán when the pictures were taken. A group of girls and boys, lounging on the grass near a river or stream.
    “These are from after we got engaged,” Morales explained as he handed over another pile, a small one this time. In an apologetic tone he added, “There aren’t many. We were only engaged for a year.”
    I was glad to hear it. I didn’t want to seem uncaring, but I did want to get that ordeal over as soon as possible, and there were lots of pictures to go. I was feeling the same mixed reaction I always felt when looking at photographs: sincere curiosity, a genuine interest in the lives hinted at in the glossy, eternally silent prints, but also a deep melancholy, a sense of loss, of incurable nostalgia, of a vanished paradise behind those minuscule instants, arrived from the past like naive stowaways. So, with a great many images still left to see, I could already feel melancholy weighing me down. I reached for one of the piles Moraleshadn’t yet handed me, as if a deviation from the sequence he’d laid out would somehow give me back my freedom, which, in any case, wasn’t useful for very much.
    “Those are from when Liliana got her teaching diploma,” Morales explained. There was no trace of resentment in his voice for what I’d feared he might take as an impertinence. “After that, she spent a year teaching in Tucumán, and then she came to Buenos Aires.”
    These were more recent photographs, and the women’s hairdos, the men’s jacket lapels, the knots in their ties all conveyed a sense of “not long ago” that I found less nostalgic. It was obvious that the girl’s family liked to celebrate things. There was always the well-laden table, a decoration of some kind on the wall proclaiming the event, and a great many chairs set