Woes of the True Policeman

Rosa Amalfitano discovered that her father slept with men a month after she arrived in Santa Teresa, and the discovery worked on her like a stimulant. What a bitter pill! she said to herself, unconsciously quoting the heroine of a Bioy Casares story that she was reading. Then she began to tremble like a leaf and hours later, at last, she was able to cry. Earlier, Amalfitano had bought a TV set and video player in which she had shown no interest. From that day on, as if under an evil spell, Rosa stopped reading books and began to go through two or even three movies a day. Amalfitano, who tried to speak freely with his daughter on any subject, had done his best to warn her. In a long and chaotic conversation before they left for Mexico, using an allegory that even he didn’t understand and logic that later struck him as weak at best and idiotic at worst, he tried to explain to her that sexual tastes aren’t fixed, or at least not necessarily. At the root of his argument was an attempt to console himself-and also, hypothetically, his daughter-by reasoning that if the Eastern Bloc could crumble, so, too, could his thus far unequivocal heterosexuality, as if the two phenomena were linked or as if one were the logical consequence of the other. A kind of domino effect on the plane of affective inclinations, though an odd one, since Amalfitano was always critical of actual socialism. But Rosa literally didn’t hear him, being distractable by nature and used to her father’s long soliloquies, so that she had to discover for herself the activities to which he devoted himself while she was in school when one afternoon she returned earlier than usual. And though Amalfitano realized in horror that his daughter had seen him, and Rosa knew that he knew, they never discussed it. That same night, Amalfitano tried to explain who Castillo was, what had happened in Barcelona, what was happening inside of him, but Rosa was categorical. About this there could be no discussion. Saddened, Amalfitano obeyed and as the days went by, in his own way, he forgot or liked to think he had forgotten the incident. Rosa couldn’t.

For a few nights she had nightmares in which she was sure she was dying. She stopped eating and for a few days she ran a temperature. She felt betrayed: by her father and by the world in general. Everything disgusted her. Then she began to dream again about her mother, who had died of cancer eight years before. She dreamed that Edith Lieberman was walking the dusty streets of Santa Teresa and that she, behind the wheel of a black Ford Falcon, was rolling along behind. Her mother looked the way she did in her photographs: dressed up, though in outmoded finery. In her dream Rosa was afraid that her mother would head to the house and discover her father in bed with that boy, but Edith Lieberman’s steps led her straight to the cemetery.

The Santa Teresa cemetery was big and as white as homemade yogurt. Rosa thought that her mother would get lost in its labyrinthine streets, flanked by twenty-foot walls of neglected niches, but her mother seemed to know the place better than she did and without difficulty she came to a little square where water taps and the statue of the bullfighter Celestino Arraya rose.

They’ve turned me out of my grave, the dead woman announced flatly, and Rosa understood. Finding himself in financial and bureaucratic straits, Amalfitano hadn’t been able to cremate his wife’s body and had been forced to rent a niche in the working-class cemetery of Rio de Janeiro. Before he was able to pay the first installment, Amalfitano had left Brazil with his daughter, harried by the police, creditors, and colleagues accusing him of various heterodoxies. And Edith Lieberman’s remains? Father and daughter were well aware of what had befallen them and had resigned themselves to it. Debtors were fated to end up in a potter’s field. Sometimes Rosa dreamed of an imaginary Brazil divided into two self-contained parts: the jungle and the potter’s field. The jungle teemed with copulating people and animals. The potter’s field was like an empty opera house. Both led down a long tunnel to the ossuary. She usually woke up crying despite the fact that it didn’t bother her at all to know that her mother’s remains lay scattered together with the bones of countless anonymous Brazilians. Like her father, Rosa was an atheist, and as an atheist she believed that she shouldn’t care where a person was buried.

“I’ve been turned from my grave like an old homeless woman,” whispered her mother in the dream.

“It doesn’t matter, Mama, you’ll be freer that way.”

“I have nothing of my own anymore. I live in squalor and chaos. I asked to be cremated, my ashes scattered over the Danube, but your father is a fickle soul who doesn’t know how to keep his word.”

“I knew nothing about any of that.”

“Never mind, dearest. At last my soul is about to achieve concentric happiness.”

“Concentric happiness?”

“Yes, classic generosity.”

“What does that mean, Mama?”