When his wrists did not hurt, the tips of his fingers, from the last knuckle onward, throbbed painfully. And when the nerves of his fingers slept, Roberto Wapinski felt the dull echo of an ache in his knee, a premonition of a rheumatic future that he would later blame on the poor insulation of his home, which permitted Andean gusts to pass through the walls of his third floor apartment just as the oil seeped through the semi-transparent plastic membrane that Guillermo Wong used to wrap the fried rice from his small chifa. It warmed Roberto and stained his shirts and as he walked toward the office of the doctor Illan Fascowich, hidden away on a quiet, tree-lined street two blocks from the Parque Almeida on what had been Avenue Diego Almagro until the neighborhood hooligans uprooted all of the street signs, he noticed an off-yellow imperfection on his white oxford shirt, the precise dimensions of Mount Pichincha. That was not a sign. Guillermo Wong communicated to me at a much later date that the stains on all of his customer's clothing were shaped in the landmark's likeness because of the particular viscosity of his preferred cooking oil. Still, Roberto did not know that, and it may explain his state of mind that morning.
Or it may not. Roberto was a man both fervently inclined to fish signs out of the murky waters in which he swam and enthusiastically dedicated to disregarding their meaning, a suspicious detective in other words, which is precisely what he was. Pichincha smoldered yellow on his shirt and Roberto muttered steadily to himself about one thing or another that was troubling him; a susurrus of syllables uninterrupted except, as a small embankment of rocks diverts a rushing brook, by those external stimuli which grab one by the shirt collar and demand attention: the cottony exhaust of the passing van, its carriage sagging badly, its appearance buoyed by a noxious yellow paint job, the epileptic gesticulations of the vagabond who claimed the park corner as the vestibule to his wooded abode.
The office itself was surrounded by an exterior wall of a bruised blue color, which beneath a tangle of upward crawling vines, themselves blossoming on the parapet into glass shards the translucent pink of a sunburn, took on a vascular quality, small veins running beneath the verdant surface. A lovely color pallet; arranged, no doubt, by an individual with more refined tastes than the doctor, thought Roberto. And because the gate opened electronically and the secretary ushered him into Fascowich's office so quickly, he had no time to let his thoughts settle elsewhere and he told Fascowich exactly that.
"Sergio Larrain." Fascowitch nodded. "The exterior walls of this building owe their colors to the author, a resident some decades ago. A fascinating story actually. He returned to the city from exile and no sooner had he seen to it that this home was refurbished then he was put under house arrest." The doctor opened a drawer and pulled out a manuscript which Roberto would later steal. "An incomplete piece of his fiction, entitled Irene, which had been secreted in the attic."
The flash in Roberto's eye was the biological expression of sudden interest, but he disguised it with admirable guile. We ask what piqued his curiosity and arrive at unsatisfying answers, but it relates to a bit of nonsense Roberto had passed to me not a week earlier. "What we observe is contingent upon what we know," and Roberto knew a little about quite a lot. It relates also to his profession, his particular (anachronistic is perhaps the better word) political sensibilities, and the tremors threatening the comity of a federalist state. And while that constellation of circumstances, worldly and personal, were caught in a web of attraction so loose as to be almost unrelated, one story from Roberto's childhood casts some light on it.
"How are you feeling?" The doctor asked before we slide with Roberto into reflection.
"Every morning I awake surprised that my body has not succumbed to temptation and simply come apart at its joints." Roberto sighed deeply. "And I begin perspiring the moment I step outside my door. These beads of sweat don't seem to be excreted from my corpulent body, doctor. I enter my office every day as if having just escaped a thunder storm, and then I leave every afternoon into an honest to God thunderstorm. A bit of climatological black magic."
The mountain was visible from the window hovering above the Fascowitch's head. Clouds were encircling it, as they did at that hour.
"You're hefty, Roberto," The doctor gestured for Wapinski to sit down, "but it's an incorporeal heft, a weighty character is what you've got." The doctor liked to bullshit Roberto and kiss his caboose at the same time.
And Roberto would never deign to turn the doctors lips away. "So you say because of these haggard looking cheeks, these eyes that recede into my face like I was built of quicksand!" His eyes, in fact, shone. Too, vanity dripped off of Roberto like sweat. But it didn't stick, anodyne that it was for a temperament prone to brooding. "When I was young-when I was young, my nose broke and left me with a handsome, aquiline face-still handsome today but eroding, my features becoming less discernible. I possess now one of those unrecognizable faces, made smoother by weather. What was I saying?
"I wouldn't venture to guess."
"Yes. When I was young and my father had not yet become frail, perhaps the five years before the last ten years of his life, he would wake in the middle of the night and work, hunched over his study, energetically scratching proposals for a geologic research station in the Yasuni jungle to a national assembly that would never convene, until my sister also would wake and howl for a bit of attention and a glass of warm milk. After she quieted, I walked the streets of Suecia intrigued as I was by the transfiguration of the familiar under a sky that did not used to be so polluted by light and fluorocarbons as it is now."
The doctor sat attentively, his head tilted at an angle such that the diminishing sunlight from the window at his back struck his bald pate, and rather than reflecting off of its mottled surface, affected the remains of his rust colored mane, stray kinks of hair, with a glow. As an interrogator's tip, Roberto once told me that if you shine a light on a mirror, the whole room gets hot. I assumed Roberto meant that the interrogator was the lamp, illuminating an otherwise implacable suspect. He corrected me:
"Dope. A suspect sizes you up as a countervailing force, a negotiator in a dialectical struggle for the right to dictate the terms of the past; too much work. Let him arrange the facts as he desires, clearly, coldly to begin with. Make him stare at his deceit as the inconsistencies mount until your ears are dark and pink. Then his will be too"
Which is why the doctor's head was on fire, apparently. That hair was at odds with the facts at hand.
"A generation prior to your childhood, the city was just turning on its first lights." The doctor observed, "My uncle used to tell me about the installation of the first traffic light in the Plaza; there were no cars on the streets for months afterward but the children riding bikes enjoyed adhering to the signals."
Roberto shook his head, shaggy and in need of a comb and squinted his eyes as if a bit of dust or a lash had become lodged in one of them, but actually because he felt tears welling up, possibly because he was considering his own lost childhood or perhaps because he was thinking of that unruly mutt he had cared for that had died after a car struck it on Paseo Villafranca a few weeks earlier. And then he continued,
"On those nights when I stepped out into the streets, I shut the gate quietly behind myself and then cleaved to the shadows, as a spy would, or as children in all parts of the world imagine a spy would. And mostly the cobbled avenues would be empty because the radio reports were full of grim news of separatist bombings or assassination plots and static like the station was under assault as it released its broadcasts.
Still, I would wander about with no particular concern. It is true that had my father not been so engrossed in his labors and noticed my absence, his anxiety would have been mine as well, but as things stood, he didn't notice and I trailed specters imaginary or otherwise and let none pursue me.
This was the regular course of events. But why then was I so thrilled to see the silhouette of a man walking along Victoria. And so frantic to avoid losing his trail when he disappeared in an unnamed alley and emerged onto Barrios. Because of his gait I suppose, loping along with a purpose borne of some deeply felt concern, and because of his attire, a three piece suit and a smart top hat, wrapped around, as it was, a body that was all arms and legs. In other words, a man who had no business being out at that hour. Or to put it more precisely, a man who had business to conduct, but quietly, and only at that hour. Perhaps this was why I dispensed with my own practiced form of espionage and simply dashed behind this quickly moving apparition until he heard the footfall of my moccasins on stone and turned his neck to find its source. But again, one can't be sure if it was me he was looking for at all. Only moments later where I had only been able to see the one man, there were three and there was also a knife, which, glinting in moonlight, entered the first's chest. And then, as if the blood running down his lapels had uncorked an electrical impulse, a flare rose into the night the color of a tangerine and suddenly I was no longer in shadow but in plain sight, shining under a citrus sun even, and visible to two assassins and a man dying or already dead."
