The Secret in Their Eyes Read Free Page B

correspondent.
    Which of these scenes am I going to use? All of them, probably; I’ll pick one to start with and insert the rest in the order that seems least risky, or maybe just as I go along. I’ve already dedicated several afternoons to this endeavor, but the prospect of failure no longer seems so devastating. After all, the more pages I reject, the more my long-range shot will improve.

2
    May 30, 1968, was the last time Ricardo Agustín Morales had breakfast with Liliana Colotto, and for the rest of his life he’d remember not only what their talk was about but also what they drank, what they ate, the color of her nightgown, and the lovely effect produced by a ray of sunlight that lit up her left cheek as she sat there in the kitchen. The first time Morales told me this, I assumed he was exaggerating, because I didn’t think he could really remember so many details. But I was wrong; I didn’t know him well enough yet, and I misjudged him. I didn’t yet know that Morales, who had the face of a confirmed idiot, was a man endowed with intelligence, memory, and a power of observation the likes of which I’d never encountered in my life before and would not encounter again. Morales’s faithful memory had a single focus: the guy remembered with an equal abundance of detail anything and everything that had to do with his wife.
    Later, when Morales consented to talk to me about himself, I listened as he described what he once was: a bland, colorless fellow destined for a bland, colorless life. He showed no compassion for that fellow,identifying his former self as the kind of guy who passes through family, schools, and jobs without leaving any trace in the consciousnesses of those around him. He’d never had anything special, nor anything good, and he’d always found that perfectly fair. And then he’d met Liliana, who was, to an enormous degree, both special and good. That was the reason why he remembered that morning so well, not because it was their last. He kept it in his memory just as he’d kept all the other mornings in the little over a year that had passed since their wedding. Afterward, when Morales described to me, in meticulous detail, everything that had happened at that last breakfast with Liliana, he didn’t go about it the way an ordinary person would. In general, people cobble together memories of their experiences from the hazy vestiges that have remained in their minds, or from fragments recalled from other, similar experiences, and with those vestiges and fragments they try to reconstruct circumstances or feelings they’ve lost forever. Not Morales. Because he felt that Liliana gave him happiness he wasn’t entitled to, happiness that had nothing to do with his life before he met her, and because the cosmos tends toward equilibrium, he knew he’d have to lose her sooner or later so that things could return to their proper order. All his memories of her were tinged with that sense of imminent disaster, of a catastrophe lying in wait around the corner.
    He’d never stood out for any reason whatsoever. At school, in sports, and even within his family, he’d earned nothing but occasional words of praise for qualities that were basically trivial. But on November 16, 1966, he’d met Liliana, and that meeting had sufficed to change him and his life. With her, through her, thanks to her, he’d become different. When he first saw her coming through the bank’s revolving door, while he watched her ask the guard which window to use to make a deposit, and as she approached Number Four with short, firm steps, Morales had known that life would never be the same again. Clinging to the desperate certainty that his fate was in this woman’s hands, he’d dared to suppress his shyness, drawing her into conversation as he counted her money, smiling at her with his entire face, looking into her eyes and withstanding her gaze, and hoping aloud that she’d come back soon. After she left, he’d quickly