Sometimes I even imagined what would have become of my life if I’d stayed in Buenos Aires. Maybe I would have patched things up with my ex-wife, maybe I finally would have won the favor of my upstairs neighbor, Margarita, but I surely would have kept on making the rounds, writing for literary supplements, having conversations with friends in La Paz bar.
It was possible to find connections, links, correlations, and parallels between one life and another, and that double bind protected me from the true memories. Sometimes messages I received from friends would bring me back to reality, though I never responded to them; they wrote me emails or left their voices recorded on the answering machine in my office, which they must have found in the university directory. “Che, Emilio, what are you up to? Give me a call, it’s Junior.” It was odd, why did he want to talk to me? I was surprised, but I wouldn’t answer. Several times I even got letters from certain friends—Anita, Gerardo, Germán—who resorted to the archaic method of sending mail by post to see if they’d get a response. But I never opened them. A few letters also came from Clara, my ex-wife, but I wrote back without opening them, imagining with total certainty the things she would be saying to me and knowing what she expected me to say, even though, by that stage, I was a stranger to her just as she was to me (in spite of the years we’d lived together).
A couple of times I called my mother, who lives in Canada with my brother and his family. I promised her that I’d come visit even though she and I both knew it would never happen, but still we said it, holding onto a ritual that consisted in expressing feelings now forgotten. The second time I called, I told her I’d met a woman had the same name as her. My mother laughed, and I think her response the same as Ida’s: it’s ridiculous, with so many women around. No one likes to have the same name as someone else, and even I get annoyed whenever I encounter some other Renzi among my acquaintances. “It can’t be,” she said, “I don’t like it,” and she changed the subject. “Your brother is doing very well, he bought a house on the beach, the kids are learning the flute and the violin, they started playing soccer in school, they’re always asking about you.”
4
As I was on my way to teach class and listened, in the hallway, to the soft buzzing of laughter and voices that you always hear before entering the classroom, I thought that the students must know everything I was thinking and that their network of informants and interpretations was impeccable. That laughter, was it aimed at me? I established connections between isolated incidents as if the impression that everything was connected was a sign of insight. That’s lunatic reasoning, I thought, as the afternoon light illuminated the hallways of the library where all the books in the world converged in one endless building, as in a story by Borges, another author for whom everything seems to have to do with everything else, the world responding to the diabolical logic of a raving deity.
That’s what I was doing when, in confirmation of my suspicions, Inspector O’Connor appeared one afternoon, accompanied by the same sallow-faced agent with Clippers sunglasses and straight hair who’d been with him the first time. They were waiting for me in the doorway to the seminar as if they wanted to broadcast that I was still presumed guilty. I didn’t like the way they were showing themselves to the students coming out of class, but that was their intention. Professor Brown’s case had been closed, O’Connor told me, I could move freely, but there were two matters they wanted to talk to me about. Then the man in dark glasses introduced himself to me as John Menéndez, special agent of the FBI. O’Connor looked at his notepad and revealed to me that they were, in fact, investigating a series of attacks in several different universities. Ida’s death seemed to be an accident, and they saw no evidence that it belonged to that series, but there were a couple of issues they wanted to clarify. It was their understanding that Ida had frequented the Hyatt Hotel. I know what those kinds of insinuations mean, so I said nothing and waited. Ida had gone to that hotel several times at the end of last year and also in January.
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“I was in Argentina during that period.”
Yes, they knew, but she hadn’t made any reference to those meetings or rendezvous?
“Not to me, at least.” I held back; were they aware that we’d been seeing each other but concealing the fact to see my reactions?
“We believe,” O’Connor said, “that she stayed at the hotel whenever she had to catch an early morning flight from Newark airport.”
“Was that all?”
“No, on the night of the accident, you didn’t hand anything to Professor Brown when you met her in the hallway?” The receptionist had seen us talking from her desk.
“Nothing,” I said. “We were at a meeting and she was indeed in the hallway when I left, but she was already carrying the mail she’d picked up from the department. Did they have a list of the letters she’d received?”
“We’re asking the questions,” Menéndez said in a low tone,
