And that’s what I did. I placed the table next to the window that looked out over the road, watching the cars pass, below, like fireflies. Everything was so inseparable from Ida, from the memories of our nights together and our conversations, that I sometimes thought I could hear her voice, see her naked body against the mirror; these were the images that had followed me for weeks. I started by writing about the first time she called me, in December, when she tracked me down in Buenos Aires after a few days with no news from me.
At dawn I went surreptitiously back to town, driving along the freeway until the traffic circle on Washington Road with the same estranged feeling that I’d had when coming back from my meetings with Ida Brown. You can weave a spiderweb around yourself trying to justify your actions, yet it’s that web that finally smothers you in the end.
We had resumed courses in the middle of March after the week off following midterms. Everything remained in a strange unreality, as if Ida’s absence forced us to pretend that nothing was happening. A group of graduate students, driven by John III, had signed a letter addressed to the university’s authorities requesting clarifications about Professor Brown’s case, but they’d responded that everything was in the hands of the law and that the police had marked the case as closed, filed under “suspicious accidental death.” This meant that the investigation could be reopened if any new element came to the knowledge of the police, but it also insinuated that it might have been a suicide. The statement had outraged the students and the faculty as well. It was impossible to imagine Ida committing suicide, and I knew very well that this insinuation had nothing to do with the reality of the events. Several versions were circulating in the hallways, but today, by rereading my notes from that time, I realize it was Nina who first surmised what had actually happened. Only a few isolated notes in the newspapers could have allowed anyone to imagine that a series of strange incidents was taking place, and that Ida’s death might also be included among them.
From what she told me, a Yale professor, known for his research in molecular biology, had died under suspicious circumstances only a few weeks before. (What relationship could there be between that death and the accident of an English literature professor, an expert on Conrad?)
“Maybe professors were killing among themselves?” Nina said with irony. During her years in Russia, she’d learned the virtues of sarcasm. Nina knew the academic world well, and she considered it a jungle, more dangerous than the swamps of Vietnam. Very intelligent, very well-educated people dreaming of terrible vengeance in the night. She’d climbed all the ladders of a so-called academic career and knew the resentment and hatred that ran through university departments where professors must coexist for decades. What could have happened? We had to wait; the only certain piece of information available was that Professor Brown had picked up those letters from her mailbox. Was it possible to get a list of all the mail that arrived in the campus post office that day? “If we had that information,” said Nina, “we could find out who wrote to her, whose return addresses were on the letters.” Did she have a box in her hands, a package? Didn’t I remember? Maybe a parcel from UPS or FedEx? She was enthusiastic, developing conjectures and hypotheses that focused on the minutes after Ida left the meeting, entered the department office, had a conversation with the Graduate Studies receptionist, and saw me. What time was that? So, if the accident occurred at 7:00 p.m., everything had taken place within twenty minutes. “Often,” she said, “a time bomb will go off if something tears through the paper wrapped around the box or hollowed-out book it’s been set inside.”
Sometimes she lost heart. “What can one individual know,” Nina would say, “no matter how clever he or she might be? The complex weaving of deliberately distorted information, with versions and counter-versions, forms the dense space in which we imagine things that we cannot understand. It’s no longer gods that decide fate, it’s other forces that create the schemes to determine our fortunes in life, my dear. But don’t go believing there’s a hidden secret: everything is in plain sight.”
3
I’d cut my ties to Argentina as if nothing was left back there. Once in a while I did go to the library to read a back issue of one of the newspapers and find the lost tenor of my days in Buenos Aires. I’d look at what films were playing, what exhibitions were showing, I’d look at the weather report, at changes in the political situation, but all with an extreme indifference as though the things I read about were taking place in a remote past, and I was living in a distant, parallel time. A few months before the military coup, I’d resigned from my job at the newspaper, El Mundo, and then spent a couple of years shut away in an apartment on Calle Sarmiento, writing a novel that met with some modest success (the modest success that’s typical in Buenos Aires), but since then my life had been
