If I Close My Eyes Now (5 page)

‘Which one?’

‘The one with the lilies. St Maria Goretti. Somebody tried to behave indecently towards her, she wouldn’t let him, and he stabbed her to death.’

‘That’s what must have happened to the dentist’s wife.’

‘But wasn’t she a whore?’

‘Oh yes, she was.’

‘And the dentist had the right to enjoy her. He was her husband.’

‘Yes.’

‘So let’s continue with our investigation. Let’s look further. What’s that up there?’

The beam of light picked out a tall piece of furniture against the back wall. It had two doors in the top half, with a drawer underneath. They opened the doors: one of them creaked. The light showed some charcoal-grey jackets, a couple of black coats and matching trousers, white formal shirts, black and navy-blue ties, white coats with the dentist’s initials embroidered on the pockets. In the drawer they found piles of underpants, vests and handkerchiefs, all of them white. Rolled up in one corner were several pairs of black socks.

‘It’s all men’s things,’ said Eduardo.

‘An old man’s things.’

‘And dentist’s clothes.’

‘This must be his bedroom.’

‘Their bedroom, Paulo. A husband and wife sleep together.’

‘Look over there: it’s a single bed.’

‘It must be the guest room,’ said Eduardo, glancing at the image of a crucified Christ over the bed. ‘Rich people have a spare room. The couple’s bedroom must be somewhere else.’

They went out. The torchlight guided them down the corridor and past the bathroom where they had climbed in. Up ahead was a small room lined with tiles. It contained only a dining table, two chairs, a stove and a gas canister.

In the opposite direction, the corridor led to the front of the house, where the dentist’s consulting-room was. It was separated from the rest of the house by aluminium screens and recently installed milky-coloured plastic tiles. A few feet before this, two closed doors stood opposite each other.

They tiptoed towards them.

The left-hand door was ajar. They pushed it and went in. It was filled with X-ray plates and photographic negatives hanging from strings. To one side, on a sink, stood two rectangular metal box trays, half filled with liquid. A sheet of dark plastic was floating in one of them. Eduardo picked it up, examined it in the torchlight, then held it out to Paulo: images of a tooth with a long root. Paulo dropped it back into the liquid.

At first the door to the room opposite seemed locked, but it yielded when Eduardo turned the porcelain doorknob and pushed hard. The torchlight fell on a dressing-table mirror, and they saw their own reflections: two young boys in a darkened house, searching for they had no idea what.

Most of the room was taken up with a wide double bed, covered with a green woven bedspread. Against the wall next to it stood an inlaid wooden chiffonier with rounded edges and several drawers. There was nothing on its marble top. No pictures of saints on the walls. Or crucifix above the bed. No pillows either.

Eduardo went over to the dressing table. He saw cosmetics, boxes of powder, sponges, bottles of nail polish. They were no different from the ones he knew from his mother’s dressing table, except for the colours: all the murdered woman’s lipsticks and polish were as bright red as a rotten guava.

He opened the four drawers carefully, one by one. He found a comb here, hairpins there, a hairbrush in another one, a manicure set, a couple of buttons, a pincushion with needles and pins sticking in it, a pair of scissors, a few coins. No revealing note, letter or message.

‘Shine the light over here, Eduardo.’

He turned, and pointed the torch. Paulo was holding several identical pieces of clothing he had just taken out of the bottom wardrobe drawer. He put one on his head. It looked like a double bonnet. He smiled, delighted with himself.

‘It’s a brassiere, Eduardo!’

‘Put it back.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re a dead woman’s clothes.’

‘Have you ever seen so many of them?’

‘Don’t go messing around.’

‘But aren’t we looking for clues?’

‘A brassiere isn’t a—’

He stopped. He raised his finger to his lips, urging Paulo to be quiet.

‘What?’

Eduardo repeated his signal. He pointed towards the corridor. There was a new, irregular-shaped patch of brightness.

The beam of light crossed the corridor ceiling, then the floor. Another torch. Someone else was in the house. He must be wearing rubber-soled shoes, because all they could hear was a creaking sound as the old floorboards were pressed down at regular intervals. Short, cautious steps.

‘Who—?’

Eduardo clasped his hand round Paulo’s mouth. The sound of footsteps continued along the corridor. The light from the other torch turned towards the room they had left earlier. The corridor was plunged back into darkness.

They heard the creak of the double wardrobe door, then the sound of coat-hangers being moved. Eduardo pointed his chin to indicate they should get out of there. He took the brassiere from Paulo and put it back in the drawer. As he was doing so, he spotted a rectangular box. He lifted it out, hesitating whether to open it or take it with them. Straightening up, Paulo knocked against it. The contents spilled on to the floor.

‘Condoms!’ exclaimed Paulo, recognizing the rubber sheaths his brother used. ‘Look how many there are!’

He bent down to pick some up, but Eduardo tugged on his sleeve and dragged him out of the room. In the bathroom, Paulo helped Eduardo through the shutters. Then he stood on the edge of the lavatory bowl, put one foot on the window-sill, leaned out and pushed his left shoulder between one strip of glass and the next, then his left leg: he squeezed out and was soon standing next to Eduardo in the garden.

They ran across the road and hid behind a rubbish bin.

They heard the cathedral bell. It pealed once. A silence. A second time. Silence.

‘Two in the morning! If my mother finds I’m not in bed she’s going to be worried.’

Paulo was hoping that the party with prostitutes, rum and laughter that he imagined his father and brother were enjoying would be even livelier than usual.

‘If my father gets back and finds I’m not at home, he’ll kill me.’

‘Why does he always beat you?’

‘It’s not always.’

‘But I’ve seen you so often with a swollen face …’

‘It’s my fault.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I’m no good.’

‘What d’you mean, Paulo?’

‘I’m no good.’

‘I’ve never seen you do anything that—’

‘I think lots of bad things,’ Paulo interrupted him.

‘What things?’

‘Things. Ugly thoughts.’

‘Like what?’

Paulo fell silent.

‘You can tell me.’

‘There are times when I …’

He fell silent again.

‘Go on, Paulo.’

‘No, it’s nothing.’

‘You can tell me.’

Paulo wanted to say there were times when he longed to plunge a dagger into his father’s heart. To stab him. And twist the knife. To cut his throat and send all the blood spurting everywhere, like a pig. To stab him in the eye, to smash him on the head with a stone until everything was so destroyed that no one would know whose face it was; to sprinkle his bed with petrol and light a match, to set fire to the house and watch
him and Antonio burn until they were no more than two chunks of blackened meat; to shoot him in the mouth, to shoot him in both hands and feet, to cut off each finger, one by one, to cut off his nose, ears, lips, tongue, to cut off his penis and his balls. I think all the things my father knows I think, and he knows I have these thoughts because I’ve got tainted blood, I was born with it. It’s not like his or Antonio’s blood, I’ve got tainted blood like my mother’s family and he knows, because I’m no good and if I can’t drive those thoughts out of my head I’m capable of doing all that because I … because I have …

Perverse desires, he would have said if he had been able to understand the meaning of what he felt and what remained with him each time his father thrashed him. All he said was:

‘Things. Bad things. Angry thoughts.’

Eduardo couldn’t understand.

‘Why does your father treat you like that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Doesn’t he like you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But if you solve this crime, he will like you.’

‘Yes.’

‘He’ll be proud of you.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you prove it wasn’t the dentist who killed his wife, he’ll treat you differently, won’t he?’

Paulo said nothing. He was staring across the road, his attention focused on a figure who was opening the gate to
leave the dentist’s house and walking off in the opposite direction to them.

They followed.

Possibly because the surface was uneven, or because of the upward slope, the man was walking slowly along the middle of the road. Each time he came to the circle of light beneath a street lamp, they could make him out more clearly. Short. Thin. Wearing a loose jacket. White or greying hair.

If he looked back he would see two boys, one taller than the other, creeping along as close as possible to the walls of the century-old houses, trying to hide as much as possible in the shadows, like the detectives in the films they had seen. But the thin, short man in the jacket with white or greying hair kept on going, unconcerned. Was he out for a stroll? At that time of the morning?

He turned to the left, disappearing down an alley.

Eduardo and Paulo ran so as not to lose sight of him. They had no need to: he was still walking slowly, steadily.

He came out into the next paved street, which was also lined with solid houses from the mid-nineteenth century, built for the region’s coffee growers when they visited or came shopping in the city. When most of them were ruined by the freeing of the slaves, they had to sell their town houses, or their impoverished descendants turned them into their permanent homes, driven from their parents’ and grandparents’ estates by debts they owed to banks, or by newly arrived immigrants from Europe. Only a few of the original houses were still preserved. Most of them were disfigured by additions or changes: modern façades, rounded stones
replaced by the straight lines of bricks and cement, Portuguese tiles giving way to mortar and paint, pinewood window frames supplanted by aluminium, bevelled French glass panes by corrugated plastic newly made in the factories now multiplying in São Paulo. Two of the houses had caved in. A third one next to them had been demolished, and a two-storey, vaguely art-deco cinema had been built on the land.

The man came to a halt outside the cinema. He seemed to be reading the title written in capitals on the black wooden billboard that was hanging from a thick wire grille:
Shoot the Pianist
. The film shown the previous evening. As with many other cinemas in cities of the Brazilian interior in those days, the programming at the Cine Theatro Universo was changed daily, except at weekends. The films could be French, Italian, Mexican, Argentine, German, Japanese, American or locally made. The film to be shown the next night was advertised on a poster standing on an easel in the foyer behind the iron gates. It was a Brazilian film:
Um Candango na Belacap
, starring Ankito and Grande Otelo. Paulo thought the actors were really funny, though Eduardo preferred Oscarito. In the external showcases was a poster in red, with its title in English:
West Side Story
, and another one in black and white, in which the photo of a blonde woman in a fountain appeared beneath the name of Federico Fellini and three words:
La Dolce Vita
.

Paulo was behind Eduardo, and could not make out the features of the man they were following. That did not stop him announcing:

‘He’s a suspect.’

‘Why?’

‘Isn’t that what you say when somebody could be the killer?’

‘Yes, suspect is the word.’

‘Well, that’s what he is. Just look at him.’

‘He’s standing with his hands in his pockets, reading the film posters.’

‘If he’s not a suspect, what was he doing in the dentist’s house?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Hiding evidence of the crime! I bet he’s the real murderer.’

‘He’s as short as the dentist. And as thin.’

‘What if the two of them got together to murder her? While she was struggling with one, the other stabbed her.’

‘We didn’t see anything broken in the house. There was no sign of a struggle. We didn’t find any kind of evidence.’

‘Because the suspect turned up. We had to run off.’

‘If he’s a suspect, why is he so calm?’

‘So who is he then? And what was he doing in the dentist’s house?’

Paulo’s suspect turned, walked a few steps, and entered the square bearing the name of a local hero who was killed at the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy during the Second World War, but which the local inhabitants still insisted on calling simply the Top Garden Square. In the centre stood a bandstand built like a Chinese pagoda. The man with white or greying hair climbed the four steps up to it and leaned on the wrought-iron balustrade which imitated bamboo. He looked all round the garden, came down the steps again and sat on a bench.