the airport. We made the usual promises, which we knew we wouldn’t keep. My return flight to Buenos Aires was delayed for almost three hours and by the time we took off it was very late at night. I slept for most of the journey, my head resting against the window, but just before landing, as the plane was beginning its descent over the city, I was woken by excited voices around me. The other passengers were looking out, pointing to something down below. I raised the blind and saw, amidst the city lights and rivers of traffic, what looked like the embers of two cigarettes, glowing red points at the base of columns of white smoke. They must have been dozens of blocks apart but from the plane they appeared to be almost side by side. I couldn’t quite believe it but it couldn’t be anything else: two fires at the same time. The novel I hadn’t had the energy to start during my trip seemed to be writing itself down there.
Eleven
I opened the door to my apartment and picked up the bills that lay on the mat. There were no messages on the answering machine, not even from Luciana. Had she left me in peace at last? Or maybe her silence had a more drastic significance: she no longer felt she could trust me; I’d let her down. She hadn’t managed to convince me, to convert me to her faith, and now she wanted nothing more to do with me. I pictured her shut up in her flat, alone with her obsession, taking refuge in her perfect, familiar circle of fears. I went to my bedroom, switched on the television and checked the news channels, but none seemed to be reporting the fires yet. At two in the morning, exhausted, I turned out the light and slept until almost midday.
When I woke up I went straight down to the bar to read the papers. There was little more coverage than a fortnight ago and I wondered if I was the only one who was interested in the fires. There had in fact been three: two fairly close together in the district of Flores, at more or less the same time (the ones I’d seen from the plane), and another a little later in Montserrat. Again, all three fires were in furniture stores, and they had all been started in the same simple but effective way, with petrol poured under the door and a match. At least now there was a suspect: several witnesses claimed to have seen a Chinese man with a canister of petrol riding away from the scene on a bicycle. I looked in another newspaper. Here too it mentioned a man with oriental features. A separate article made the link with the fires of a fortnight ago and ventured a theory: the man could be working for the Chinese Mafia, setting fire to uninsured furniture stores, thus bankrupting the owners, who had to sell their premises off cheaply to oriental supermarket chains. I laid aside the newspaper with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief. Once again, I thought, local colour had defeated me: what chance did my group of incendiary artists stand against a Chinese on a bicycle? I thought, with a flicker of resistance, that I shouldn’t let myself be cowed by Argentinian reality, that I should learn from the Master and overcome it, but mysteriously something inside me had given up as I read the articles.
The novel I’d planned to write now seemed silly and unsustainable and I wondered whether I shouldn’t abandon the whole idea.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of despondent lethargy, thinking of J much more often than I would have imagined. My kitchen cupboards and fridge were empty and as night fell I forced myself to go out and stock up for the week. When I got back I switched on the television again. This time the fires were in the news and the mysterious Chinese was the celebrity of the moment. On one channel they showed a rough identikit portrait and shots of the various burnt-out premises. On another they were interviewing the owners, who were shaking their heads sadly, pointing to smoke-blackened walls and furniture reduced to ashes. It all now seemed distant, unconnected to me, as if they were no longer my fires, as if reality had been skilfully manipulated to suit the cameras. I changed channels until I found a movie