The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri Page B

news of Liliana’s death.
    “Yes, I know,” I replied, incapable of saying anything more precise. I supposed he was going to ask me if there had really been “a major breakthrough” in the case, or if it was true that “the murderers had been remanded into custody,” depending on which journalistic style
(Crónica? La Nación?)
that fool Romano had chosen to imitate while communicating his supposed scoop. But to my surprise, Morales contented himself with remaining very stiff, with his hands lightly resting on the counter and his eyes fixed on mine.
    That was worse than if he’d asked questions, because his silence struck me as the silence of a defenseless man convinced that nothing is going to turn out the way he’d dared to dream it would. Maybe that’s why I invited him to have coffee with me. I was aware that I was violating the most elemental rules of judicial asepsis. I soothed my conscience by telling myself I was doing it out of sympathy for his loss, or I wanted to make some kind of amends for Romano’s stupid haste.
    We went out the Tucumán Street door and into a fierce downpour that gusts of wind blew sideways. Water was rising in the street when we bounded across it. Morales followed me docilely as I went on, clinging to storefronts and dashing under awnings, trying to avoid getting too drenched. With the same meekness,or apathy, he let me lead him across Uruguay Street, into a bar, and to a table next to the front window. Making a brusque sign to the waiter, I ordered two coffees; Morales accepted his wordlessly. After that, we had nothing to do.
    “What lousy weather, huh?” I said, making an effort to climb out of the uncomfortable silence we’d sunk into.
    For a long time, Morales stared absently at the flooded sidewalk.
    “We sent for you,” I said—even though the word “we” tied me to that son of a bitch Romano—”but there’s something I have to tell you.”
    At this point, I got stuck again. How to begin? Maybe I should say,
We got your hopes up for nothing, please excuse us.
    “Don’t worry,” Morales said, finally turning to look at me with the slightest of smiles on his face. “You just told me.”
    I stared at him in confusion.
    “It was the ‘but,’” he continued by way of explanation. I opened my mouth to reply, even though I didn’t understand what the widower was trying to convey. Seeing me flail about like a drowning man, he went on: “The ‘but.’ You just said, ‘We sent for you, but.’ That’s enough. I get it. If you had said, ‘We sent for you, and,’ or ‘We sent for you,
because,’
that would have been different. You didn’t say that. You said ‘but.’”
    Morales turned his gaze back to the rain outside, and I supposed, incorrectly, that he’d finished.
    “It’s the shittiest word I know,” he said, and then he was off again, but I never for a minute thought we were having a conversation; it was an interior monologue he was speaking aloud out of pure distraction. “‘I love you, but …’; ‘That could be, but …’; ‘It’s not serious, but …’; ‘I tried, but …’ See what I mean? It’s a shitty word people use to annihilate what was, or could have been, but isn’t.”
    I looked at his profile as he watched the rain come down. I’d figured he was a simple young guy with narrow horizons whose world had just collapsed. But his words and the tone he spoke them in were those of a man acquainted with grief. He seemed like someone who’d always been prepared to suffer the hardest blows and endure the worst defeats.
    “That makes things a little simpler for me,” I said. Although I felt somewhat ashamed, I found in his knowing melancholy a way to escape from the odd sensation of guilt I was starting to feel.
    “Go on, I’m listening.” Morales shifted his chair in my direction, as if to facilitate focusing his entire attention on me, or as if he wanted to avoid being hypnotized by the rain again.
    I told him everything. I