Symbiosis - short story - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers

Literary Review, Fall, 1994 by Rodolfo J. Walsh, Jesse H. Lytle

IT'S A BIG COUNTRY," SAID COMMISSIONER LAURENZI. "You can't imagine the depth of mystery still locked inside. From La Quiaca to Puerto Madryn, I think, you can cross it by train. To get farther south you need an army or marine plane. It's thousands of kilometers. You see cultivated plains, deserts, cities, factories, people. But the secret heart of the people, you'll never understand. And only when it gives you a great shiver will you realize that there was something indecipherable, untraceable there.

"Look, I've spent thirty years getting to know the people, and it's like I'm just beginning. And that's frightening, because I'm a cop. Nobody's in a better position to see the extremes of misery and madness. What happens is you're also a human being--nothing more and sometimes a little less--your own miserable and mad side contaminated. The knack for observation, that professional "tic" ... bah, that only applies to the little things. Not to a person's soul, let's say. Or it replaces itself through other means, you know ... After a while we get tired, we let everything slide by us, we think we can bring the power lines anywhere we go. The lodestone and the iron filings--always the same concentric ellipses, the same passions, the same vices. With three or four words we explain it all: a crime, a rape, a suicide. You see, we want them to leave us alone. I pity you if you bring me a problem I can't resolve in simple terms: money, hate, fear. Because I am authority and law, and you can't clown with me. I can't stand, for instance, you sending me out to kill someone without a reasonable, concrete motive."

The commissioner, it appeared, was speaking in the historic present. He'd been retired for eight years.

"Thanks," I said nevertheless. "I'll keep it in mind."

"Well, that's what I think. It's among my eternal convictions, those that guide me almost automatically. But sooner or later, a man who moves among the muddy affairs in the smelly underworld is helping in the birth of something that is a monster. Listen: I'm not saying a thing, a physical being. It can be an idea, a feeling, some act that is aberrant in itself. It can be all this at once. One sees something arise that is scandalous for one's own intellect."

He paused for a moment and took the opportunity to increase the barometric pressure with the pungent smoke from his black cigarette. We were in the usual cafe, at the same table as always.

"Certain atmospheres," he concluded, studying the effect of his words with his sunken eyes, "generate monsters."

"I don't doubt it," I replied, ostentatiously fanning away the smoke. "But I'd like to know exactly what you are talking about."

"Take an assortment of passions," he said, "desires, fears, physical illnesses and mental breakdowns, and, from all that, something that didn't exist will inevitably emerge, something more abominable than all before it."

I smiled. The commissioner was showing a certain propensity for the extraordinary tonight.

"I'm speaking seriously," he insisted, "Have I told you how they had me as a loose cannon in every precinct around the country?"

"No."

"No," he repeated, "It would be too long. But believe me."

"Once," said Commissioner Laurenzi, "I stopped in a town in Santiago del Estero, about eighty kilometers from the capital. A small, dirty town with only one street, where the wind always blows in the same direction and never stops bringing the dust. There was no water. Sometimes they would go half a year without rain. When the train would arrive with the water tanks, women and children would form a tattered, resigned line up to it.

"Everything was the color of the earth: their faces, hands, houses. You could shut your doors and windows, but you couldn't keep the dust from invading. After two hours there was a layer of dust on the furniture, windows, clothes: a whitish film, almost imperceptible, but inexorable and triumphant. I think that with time it had an anemic influence. You felt like a doll full of some inert substance.

"The population was almost totally of Indian blood. On the outskirts there were a few factories. That meant that during the week all the people, minus the men, slept. You know what sleep is like in those interior towns. Heat, thirst, desire to do nothing, until the unexpected wonder of dusk arrives.

"On Sundays, the scene livened. The woodcutters showed up. For us, in the precinct, work got harder. There was friction, conflict. Or those interminable discussions in which two men, under the influence, in broad daylight, talk about everything and understand nothing, although they pretend to allow the rationale behind the other view so that they can refute it. Finally they defer to knives and then we show up--the police. And then the priest.

"But the next morning everything was dead again. Not a soul in the street, the doors shut, and the sun hot and relentless. Like an empty stage where every now and then the same scene is performed. Because that weekly animation was the unreal part. The truth was the other six days. The permanent reality was the other one.