The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,43

that happened afterwards, that series of…of misfortunes, because the punishment I’d imagined for her was in principle very different.”

He fell silent, as if he couldn’t continue, or had said something he might regret later.

“But why punish Luciana for your daughter’s death? Wasn’t your wife to blame?”

“You don’t understand. As I said, Mercedes and I had a pact. And until that time we had respected it. Have you ever played Go?” he asked suddenly.

I shook my head.

“Sometimes the game reaches a point at which players are condemned to repeating the same moves indefinitely—the Ko position. Neither player can break the stalemate because if they make any other kind of move they lose the game immediately. That is what my days with Mercedes were like. We’d reached an equilibrium. A Ko position on which Pauli’s life depended. It was a question of time, until Pauli was grown. But Luciana’s letter destroyed everything.”

“You said that you imagined a punishment for her. What was it?”

“I just wanted her to remember. To remember, as I did, every day, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, that though she was alive my daughter was dead. I wanted her life to be stopped, as mine was, at that memory. It’s why I went to Villa Gesell that first summer. I knew she’d be there. I couldn’t bear the thought of her spending days in the sun while Pauli was for ever buried in the ground, in that little box where I’d had to leave her. I wanted Luciana to see me, day after day. This was my only plan for revenge. I never dreamed her boyfriend would be so stupid as to go for a swim that morning. I saw him disappear, from the promenade as I was leaving, but I just thought he’d swum out too far. I only found out he’d drowned when I went to have coffee as usual the next morning. I must say I was shocked by his death, but for a different reason. I’d always been an atheist, but I couldn’t help seeing symmetry, a sign from on high, in the coincidence: my daughter had drowned in the bath and that boy had also drowned, even though he was a lifeguard, as if a finger had pushed him under. And wasn’t the sea like a god’s bathtub? In an accidental but magical way—in the old sense of sympathetic magic—the primitive law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth had been observed. As she said to you, we now had one death each. But was this enough? Was the balance truly even? Suddenly the question I’d pondered in an abstract way a few months earlier was before me in real life. I decided to return to Buenos Aires to start a novel—the one I mentioned to you. I’ve been writing it very slowly, with breaks, alongside all the others, for the past ten years. How would one mete out punishment if one were God? We are not gods, but in his own pages every writer is a god. I’ve devoted myself to writing this secret novel at night. Page by page, it’s my way of praying. But that’s all I’ve done, all I’ve ever really done these past years. I haven’t seen Luciana again.”

“But she said she saw you at the cemetery the day of her parents’ funeral. Was it a coincidence that you were there that morning?”

“I’m there every morning. She’d have seen me any other day: I visit my daughter’s grave on my daily walk. And Luciana was the one who saw me. I didn’t find out about her parents’ death until later, when I received that letter, the letter in which she asked me to forgive her. She begged and pleaded, as if I were behind all her misfortunes. Or had the power to prevent them. From the construction of her sentences, I realised that she was already slightly disturbed. Even so, when her brother was murdered, she managed to get the police to believe her. She wanted to blame his murder on me as well. That policeman, Ramoneda, came to see me. He was very apologetic but said he had to follow up every lead, as the case had acquired great importance because of the scandal of the convicts’ being let out to commit robberies. He wanted to know if I’d corresponded with any of the inmates. I explained that, because my novels generally dealt with death and murder, people often