The Case of Lisandra P. Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t mean a thing, no matter how I tried to explain to them that we were not very tidy, they just said I wouldn’t be the first man to get rid of his wife. Coming from them it’s stating the obvious, a husband who kills his wife; it’s routine, they lap it up, they laugh and say it’s human nature, it’s animpulse, which, it’s true, affects every man at least once in his life, but I let my emotions get the better of me, and yet I should know so well how to control them, hold them back, reason with them, I was a shame to my profession, they weren’t very proud of me. I could hear them asking each other out loud what my motive was, why did I do it; there isn’t a hint of uncertainty in their reasoning, there’s nothing I can say, they don’t believe me, they’re not looking for Lisandra’s murderer, they’re looking to accuse me,
let’s have a shrink for a change
, what a stroke of luck, it’s too rare not to seize the opportunity, for once they’re getting talked about in the papers, that’s a change. Those cops are crazy but they are patient. I’m alone against the world; the distrustful way my lawyer looks at me is hardly reassuring, only this afternoon he told me that things weren’t looking good; even he doesn’t seem to believe I’m innocent—yet another unbelievable thing about this whole business anyway. Since my arrest, I’ve had the feeling that everything I’m struggling against is unbelievable. You’re my only hope, along with the keys to my apartment, it’s just what I needed. We have to find Lisandra’s murderer, the cops won’t look for him, but you, you can look, you’ll help me, won’t you? Do you agree?”
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    Eva Maria can no longer hear the sound of the bandoneon. Estéban must have gone out to his party. Eva Maria puts the keys on her desk. She looks at the cigarette wedged in its notch in the ashtray, a long straight gray tube of ash balancing in the air, frail with its vulnerability to change. Eva Maria thinks about the frailty of vulnerability to change. She wonders how much longer those particles will stay compacted together. She is careful not to move the desk. A sip of wine. Two sips. Eva Maria is thinking. Those investigators are absolute idiots—of course you can’t recall that the person who sold you your ticket to the movie was a man—but in their book, thearbitrary nature of memory is incriminating evidence; that’s their point of view, their strategy, and all the rest is simply solitude on trial, which just means that you can never be alone, that you have to spend every single hour, every single moment in someone’s company, if you want to be sure you have an alibi, just in case someday you are wrongfully accused, the way Vittorio is now. It’s absurd, and impossible. Those investigators aren’t looking any further than the ends of their noses; they reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. With them it’s not reality that feeds statistics, it’s statistics that make reality comply—but that’s natural: since their profession brings them no reassurance from men, from human beings, they try to find reassurance in numbers. Some would call it professional conditioning, but Eva Maria thinks it’s a sure path to judicial error. No, not every husband kills his wife. Eva Maria takes a sip of wine. It is as if the police are projecting their own fantasies, their own desire for murder, onto this type of drama. In any case, if she were the wife of one of those policemen, she’d be wary. Suspect Vittorio, granted, that was part of their job, but to condemn him before the fact was unacceptable. Numbers are there to be studied, not to serve as generalizations. It was as if, at the Center, she were to take specific data for definitive values: every volcano, every eruption has its own