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Chapter One

Three years had gone by since the night when Daniel killed Juliana, and on the telephone his voice sounded like someone else’s. As if nothing had happened, he called to invite me to lunch. As if lunch with him still meant going to a casually chosen restaurant or to his parents’ house, where we used to hang out, surrounded by shelves packed with books, manuscripts, notepads, and bundles of papers folded into quarters, and corbels stuffed with thousands of volumes with amber spines, cracked leather covers, and glistening dust jackets. As if visiting him still meant, like it did before, ascending that wrought iron spiral staircase toward the library-bedroom in which Daniel used to spend every waking hour of the day, day upon day, week after week, deciphering marginalia in tomes that no one reads anymore, having breakfast and lunch in his pajamas, putting his feet up on the desk, with a magnifying glass in his left hand and an expression of astonishment rippling across his face. Back then, it did not mean entering that awful place where they had interned him, or rather, where he had interned himself in order to escape an even more confining prison.

Daniel had been my closest friend since our early college days. We were inseparable during those now distant years, when our vocations were being decided and with them, our lives. I chose psychology, thereafter psycholinguistics, and barely had I left the department when I married an irresistible, elegant colleague who fell terminally ill and died two years later, leaving me alone in a house I no longer recognized, with a collection of letters from lovers who had given her more affection than I had—and afterward I no longer had the strength to build another relationship that would not decline into brevity and anonymity. Daniel, abstaining from juvenile engagements, was almost immediately seized by the study of history, books, and antiquities. He delved into a world of frantic and febrile readers who would consume tortuous volumes with the voracity of multi-cephalic beasts that spent their existence submerged in archives and hundred-year-old catalogues, or in meetings of bibliophile relic-traffickers, scholars who would purchase entire libraries from the widows of their dearest friends, paying derisory sums, in perpetual search for the coveted uncut tome that, once acquired, they could deflower with a pair of shears or with a blade in the obscurity of some dim den.

Daniel was younger than all of them—they were old enough to be his parents or grandparents—but for some reason they treated him as if he were an old Sherpa on some wilderness expedition into which they had accidentally, unfortunately or perhaps cunningly ventured while hiding certain objectives that none of them dared confess. One of them was Gálvez, a retired pettifogger who, then and for many years now, has divided his time between practicing ornithology and hunting incunabula and ecclesiastic archives, a solitary and despotic soul who obeyed only his own intuitions, Daniel’s silent admonitions, or the whims of his old maid of a daughter, his sole companion at home. Another of them, Mireaux, was the hunchbacked proprietor of a conservative tabloid—aristocratic in appearance, abounding with arithmetical phrases and intransigence, he as much as his paper—and this man possessed a high-pitched voice that seemed to squeak out of his nose or escape through the folds of corrugated skin that covered his throat. The third, Pastor, was an ex–nautical captain, older than Daniel but younger than the others, who had retired from the Navy years ago in order to dodge his transfer to the Red Zone—a destination that officers back then, though really not that long ago, understood as a deadly curse, if not a sentence to perpetual horror. Pastor moved in semicircles when he walked and, with his outstretched fingers, drew spherical flowering figures in the air as he spoke—that is, when he produced the whine of that dark and undulating voice of his, like the squirting of squid ink, which he proffered each time he wished to lay to rest his discrepancy with other people over a topic that had become the center of a dispute.

I never knew them very well, but my relationship with Daniel increased the frequency of our encounters. We shared a superficial friendship of short conversations and banal references, except for Mireaux, with whom my dealings were greater, because one of his nieces, who was aphasic and autistic, had been my patient for many years. The four of them—Daniel and Mireaux at first, and then Pastor and Gálvez—casually to start and then quite often visited the only bookstore of antiquities in the city they felt was deserving of their respect. They soon became regulars and, metonymically or maybe by metastasis, as Daniel joked, ended up shareholders, and then expanded the store, transforming it into an emporium of printed relics, engravings, charcoal drawings, nineteenth-century oil paintings, documents from the colonial era, the emancipation, the First Republic, which they acquired and sold or, so say certain unminded tongues, stealthily purloined from the humblest of provincial churches and decapitated chapels in the middle of nowhere, or which they purchased from needy debtors who were ignorant to the fact that between the papers and books of a recently deceased uncle, father, or grandfather was an unmistakable edition of such and such a volume from such and such a collection, which Daniel or Pastor or Gálvez or Mireaux, or perhaps all of them, had sought for years on end. Together, the four men became the principal proprietors of that bookstore, little by little emasculating the influence of the original owner, before ousting him once and for all. So it was that each proprietor added to the old catalogue what he was willing to volunteer from his private collection, and by the end of this operation, the four of them christened the new bookstore with the curious and amusing name by which they had come to call themselves: The Circle.

I was often tempted to enter that community of unforgivable bibliopaths, but I never did. I am, as I was then, a practical reader, dazzled only on occasion by Daniel’s findings and his passion. I always stayed close to him throughout the end of our boyhood and over the nearly two decades that he would spend building that legendary library that book dealers, intellectuals, and university professors spoke of with reverence and envy, in the way that initiates of a sect speak of the sanctuary inhabited by their mystical leader. Indeed, we had stayed close until the morning when I learned, not from him, but from the headlines of several newspapers at a newsstand downtown—this being three years ago—that Daniel had killed Juliana, his fiancée, stabbing her thirty-six times, supposedly in a fit of jealousy. He had tried to burn her body, then stuck her in the trunk of his car and left her there for hours. Then he had driven from the beach to the city, returning to his parents’ house, where they still lived, with the slashed cadaver in the trunk. He had tried to take his own life with a gunshot to the head, but was unsuccessful. Chance, it turns out, had decided that this very gun, stolen from the dresser at the house, should jam and thereby give his father time to rush toward his son and save his life with a clout to the back of his head.

I did not see him during the days that ensued. Defeated by a feeling of absurd and unjustifiable guilt, I did not dare attend the trial or visit him in prison; I did not speak with his parents or with his brother; never did I go near the psychiatric ward, a mere five blocks from my apartment, where the judge had ordered that he be interned, ruling him insane and keeping him out of prison in exchange for a secret payment which, nonetheless, half of the city gossiped about with the same certainty as they did theories about the motives of the crime: adultery, exploitation, an intricate incident between traffickers of archeological remains. Lies. And I had not heard his voice again until he asked me to have lunch with him that afternoon, and I, without enough time to come up with an excuse, said sure, I would be right over. At that moment it was impossible to imagine that my conversation with Daniel would be plagued with riddles and silences that would require me, for the purpose of quelling them, to transform into a detective from dusk to dawn and hit the streets to capture certain specters, delve deep into the well of a distant memory, and pursue, through the labyrinthine minds of loons, the fickle face of two or three ghosts. Edward Wightman crumbled the body of Christ to distribute it amongst the birds and they killed him: 1612. Gabriel Malagrida drove out the merchants from the coop and they killed him: 1761.