If I Close My Eyes Now Read Online Free PDF

face?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘It’s all puffy.’
    ‘I want to talk to you about something else.’
    ‘Did your father beat you again?’
    They whispered together. Paulo could not stay still. Ever since his talk with Antonio he had been on edge.
    ‘The dead woman’s husband confessed.’
    He said it again, as Eduardo looked on, unimpressed.
    ‘The husband. The dentist. He confessed.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘He’s been arrested.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘He says it was him.’
    ‘I know that too. I heard my father talking about it with my mother.’
    ‘It’s not true.’
    ‘Who says so?’
    ‘It can’t be.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘The dentist is old and weak.’
    ‘But he killed her.’
    ‘How could he kill a big woman like her, Eduardo? You saw how big she was.’
    ‘He confessed.’
    ‘It wasn’t him.’
    ‘First he drugged her with something, then stabbed her.’
    ‘I doubt it.’
    ‘More than twelve times, my father said.’
    ‘Why did he take the body so far away?’
    A brief silence.
    ‘To the lake,’ Eduardo suggested, ‘because it was harder to find?’
    ‘If he was going to confess, why didn’t he leave it in the house?’
    ‘He only confessed later on. He felt remorse. He was nervous, so he carried the body away—’
    Paulo interrupted him:
    ‘How did he load such a heavy body into his car?’
    ‘Perhaps he dragged it? That’s it, he dragged it.’
    ‘Why didn’t he throw the body out before he reached the lake? Why didn’t he throw it down a bank? Or in a river? Why didn’t he throw it in the lake with a heavy weight attached so that it would sink and be eaten by the fish, and no one wouldever find it, and he could have said that his wife vanished, that she ran away from home?’
    Eduardo’s replies were also questions:
    ‘Perhaps he didn’t have time? Perhaps she was too heavy to drag through the mud? Perhaps he had nothing he could tie to her?’ And he added, dismissively: ‘If he didn’t kill her, why did he confess?’
    Paulo, who had been going over the same question for hours alone in his bedroom, voiced his own doubts: didn’t she scream when she was being stabbed? Didn’t any neighbours hear the screams? Why didn’t she try to escape or call for help?
    Eduardo yawned. He could see the mist curling around the street behind Paulo, thought he was beginning to feel cold, and that he would like to get back into his warm bed as soon as possible. Paulo insisted.
    ‘Her hands were slashed, don’t you remember?’
    Eduardo wasn’t sure if he remembered that.
    ‘She must have been trying to grab the knife, Eduardo. She must have struggled not to die. She must have struggled. Everybody struggles to avoid being killed. And the dentist wasn’t strong enough to overpower her.’
    ‘What difference does it make? It’s past midnight, Paulo. We’ve got school early tomorrow morning. No, not tomorrow – today.’
    ‘It wasn’t the dentist who killed her. It wasn’t!’
    ‘But he confessed. That’s it. It’s over.’
    ‘Oh, it is, is it? Then tell me one thing: why did he cut her breast off, Eduardo? Why, Eduardo? Why did he cut it off, Eduardo?’
    They both fell silent. In the distance they heard the intermittent, scratchy sound of a radio, or phonograph. A deep baritone voice.
    Night-time prowling
isn’t good for her …
It can destroy you,
It causes sorrow …

    The beam from Eduardo’s torch shone on the metal semicircle surrounding the head of the wooden statue of the saint. She was clutching a crucifix and two roses, one white, the other red. Carved with great care in the eighteenth century, painted in delicate and already faded colours, the image contrasted strongly with the gaudy tones and doll-like face of the statuette behind her, made in the second half of the twentieth century. To the right, the plaster figure of a young woman with long tresses was holding a bunch of lilies in her arms. Several other small statues stood on the oval jacaranda-wood table, flanked