The Way Out

staying here to teach a bit longer. In California, a position was opening in the Creative Writing program at Berkeley. (“Faulkner and Fitzgerald drowned themselves in alcohol, I’ll drown myself in the university,” my friend, a poet from Santa Fe who taught in France, used to say.) In the next few days I decided to resume contact with my friends in Buenos Aires, especially Junior, whom I’d known since the days when we worked together at the newspaper El Mundo. He was still there, growing ever more cynical and bitter; he’d gone into exile in Mexico during the military era but then returned to Buenos Aires as though he’d never left, and they told me he’d gone to the newspaper office with a smug little smile and sat down at his desk as if he’d just been on leave for a few days. I found him strange when we spoke, more formal than usual—“what are you doing, Renzi, I called to give you the news from around here, but there’s never any news, just wicked lies, viejo, and you already know how time flies in countries on the path to development, and lucky you living in the heart of capitalism.” We joked around a bit, and the conversation left me with a strange sensation.

Around that time, I also spoke to my ex-wife (a phrase that infuriated her, of course). She was fine, living in the apartment in Congreso that still contained all of my books. We’d had some problems, the usual kind, the ones that all people have after living together for so many years, but both of us were more understanding now, and maybe that’s why I told her I was considering an offer from Berkeley to spend some time in California. There was a pause on the other end. “You wouldn’t want to come and stay with me,” I said. I heard a laugh, the laugh she had whenever she was furious. “But Emilio, what’s wrong with you, is your head up in the clouds, don’t you know that I’m living with Junior?” But how could that be, I didn’t know anything, not with that tarado, that halfwit. I was the last one to find out, obviously.

It meant that everything was going on just the same in Buenos Aires. I knew that merry-go-round well; endogamy was the only kind of autonomy enjoyed by Argentine literature. Clara had been married to Pepe Sanz, who was with me all the way through college in La Plata, and with whom I’d put together several magazines in the sixties; when he separated from Clara, Pepe married Junior’s ex-wife, and now Junior was with Clara. I felt this matter with Clara like a betrayal. Was Junior living in my house? Was he sleeping in my bed? Reading my edition of The Death of Virgil?

I left my office and went out into the street. Orion was still sitting on the bench under the trees, and I walked over to him. He was tracing smaller and smaller circles and squares on a piece of paper. While he made his drawings, I started talking to him about my problems. I wasn’t especially happy that Junior had gotten together with her, but what I really hated was the idea of him poking around among my books and papers. “Monsieur,” said Orion, “it’s better to have nothing.”

In the middle of June, when the academic year ended, the department held the traditional gathering prior to summer vacation. We met in Palmer House, a large Henry James-style mansion surrounded by gardens, its entrance on the corner where Ida had met with death. I went along the tree-lined paths, and the stone wall quickly blocked the traffic light and the curve from Nassau Street toward Bayard Lane. That was where her abandoned car had been found; I thought about how she must have stared at that wall before she died; cardiac arrest, that was the diagnosis, an attempted robbery or something she saw in the street had provoked the violent emotion that caused the heart attack. And her scorched hand? Maybe it was a spark from the electrical system, or the engine overheated. There was no sign of a bomb, they reported, although her mail was on the floor of the car. It was impossible to know if there was another letter that had been destroyed in the explosion. There was no trace left, no metal plate with the initials FC. The police version was another way to handle the imaginary reconstruction of one possible situation. The witnesses, the signs, the clues allowed it to be presumed an accident. As for the possibility of a bomb, there wasn’t sufficient evidence for the case to be described as an attack.

As I entered Palmer House I could hear the buzz of voices and laughter coming down from the meeting. The second-floor room was brightly lit and opened onto a glass terrace above the trees of the park. There were dishes of food on a central table and to one side a bar where drinks were being served. Everyone was talking at the same time while holding plates and cups and trying to eat as best they could, standing and leaning against the walls or sitting in the low, plush red armchairs that surrounded the room. I helped myself to a glass of white wine and a plate of smoked salmon and rice. My colleagues were there, and so were the graduate students. I saw Rachel and Mike but not John III. I went out onto the balcony, and D’Amato came over to talk, as if he’d been waiting for me. According to him, whoever wrote the manifesto wasn’t the same one who’d sent the bombs. “They’re two incompatible personalities,” he said. “Sending a bomb suggests a robotic mentality that identifies with clockwork mechanisms.” He knew it well, because in Korea they’d selected the groups that were tasked with arming and disarming mines and booby-trap bombs based on a variety of psychological and