The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,55

faithful, as if during the siesta the whole town was engrossed in a Babylon lottery.

That evening I had dinner alone after the class and decided to take a last stroll. There were only a couple of bars open after eleven. In the window of one of them, near the hotel, two prostitutes who were too old and shiny smiled as I passed. By the third night, as I turned out the light in the now familiar room, I had the feeling I was trapped inside a video game and already knew all the locations for the coming levels: the small desk in my hotel room with the still-empty notebook lying open on it, the couple of department stores, the dispiriting bookshop, the gaming halls that were strangely full at siesta time, the solitary cinema, the seminar room at the university, the two bars open late at night. As hero, the missions I had before me were: possibly writing the first chapter of my novel; striking it lucky at the slot machines; sleeping with my student. The dangers that lay ahead: finding I was addicted to gambling; contracting an embarrassing disease if I took up the prostitutes’ offer; a minor scandal at the university if I was indiscreet with my student.

Over the next few days the impulse with which I’d deluded myself when buying the notebook gradually wore off. Even the memory of the fire was no longer so vivid or troubling. At this remove, it seemed almost silly, its only consequence a few bits of burnt furniture. I followed the news in the Buenos Aires papers from the computer in the hotel lobby, but the arsonist seemed to be taking a break as well. I did make an effort with my student, but by the end of the week I’d given up on this too. I realised I was almost the same age as Kloster had been ten years ago, and that there was much the same age gap between me and this girl as there had been between him and Luciana. I wondered bitterly if my student had thought, or said to her friends in the same shocked tone as Luciana, that I was old enough to be her father. Still, I had the unexpectedly good idea of putting up a sign outside my small office at the university noting the times when students could consult me. She was the only one who came, bravely alone. And you could say that my luck changed—literally—overnight. Afterwards, she told me she’d decided to make a move because she’d realised that time was running out, as I would only be there another week. As on other trips, I reflected that nothing serves the outsider as well as having a fixed departure date. Of my second week in Salinas I remember only her naked body, her face, her captivating eyes. And though I had already put the entire breadth of the country between Luciana’s story and me, I felt even further away from it that week, in that utterly remote world, at the blind, selfish distance that separates the happy from the unhappy.

In fact, I thought of Luciana only once more during that time. One afternoon, J (whom I still call ‘my student”) was standing in front of the mirror after a shower. As she bent her head and swept her hair to one side to comb it, the sight of her long, bare neck reminded me suddenly of Luciana, as if by a mysterious act of compassion time had restored a fragment of the past to me, luminous and intact. I’d had these impossible encounters before, walking around Buenos Aires, or on trips away, in all sorts of places: faces from the past seeming to appear suddenly, as if to test me, at the age they once were but could no longer be. I’d dismissed it as one more consequence of getting older: the entire human race had started to look strangely familiar. But this time the impression was much more vivid, as if Luciana’s neck, the neck I’d stared at so amorously day after day, really did exist once more, smooth and vibrant, flesh and bone, part of another’s body. I stretched out a trembling, tentative hand and touched the back of her head. J turned for me to kiss her and the illusion vanished.

Two days later it was all over. I gave the students their final grades, packed my bag, including the still-blank notebook, and let J drive me to