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

darkness, no switch to press, no door to open. He had immediately been surprised that the door to their apartment was unlocked. Lisandra always locked it when she was alone and she bolted it, too, even during the day; she was afraid, she always had been, even of the impossible—that someone would come in, and hide in a wardrobe or a closet and when night fell they would hurt her. Lisandra was so fearful, she was terrified of the night, as if suddenly it brought together all the conditions necessary for tragedy; if she was lost in thought and he came into the room to speak to her, she would look up with a start, she would stifle a cry. The first time he saw her, he was immediately struck by this vulnerability. It was true that she was crying but you don’t assume someone is fragile just because they are crying; you can be sad without being fragile. Lisandra would never have opened the door to a stranger, Vittorio was sure of that; she never opened thedoor when it rang, he always had to go—he teased her about it sometimes, they were so different in that respect, she would lock the door for any reason, and he dreamed of a world without doors. He never should have made fun of her; in the end Lisandra had been right to be afraid. Did she know instinctively how, one day, she would die? And what if we all knew instinctively, deep down, how, one day, death would come for us, and what if our neuroses were nothing to do with our past, the way we always think they are, but with our future, cries of alarm? The bus stops. There were no traces of breaking and entering, so Lisandra had opened the door, and Vittorio could not rid himself of a terrible thought, an intuition, the one lead he could envision: a patient. A patient—Lisandra was used to some of them coming and ringing late at night; it was rare but it did happen. Lisandra never opened the door when he wasn’t there, but that night perhaps the patient had insisted, he’d kept ringing, or
she
—after all, it isn’t only men who kill—and Lisandra had opened the door in the end, driven perhaps by the inevitability of Vittorio’s teasing; when he came home he would surely reproach her if she hadn’t opened the door. Vittorio found it hard to believe that it could be one of his patients, but he saw no other explanation. The junta’s violence was over, and he didn’t believe in the concept of a stranger coming to ring their door to kill Lisandra. At least the cops were right about that: murderers don’t appear out of nowhere to come and kill you for no reason, or only rarely, and nothing had been taken, he had to admit. He had gone all around the apartment with the policemen and apart from the mess in the living room everything looked normal, Vittorio had seen for himself, nothing had been stolen; the only undeniable thing was that there had been a struggle, and that must be why the music was so loud, to cover the noise, and the shouts, but what had caused the argument? Andthe nagging question, what if Lisandra had been raped; he was waiting anxiously for the results of the autopsy. The thought that someone might wish to harm her to the point of killing her seemed unthinkable, but perhaps she had served as a scapegoat; it was possible, after all—you can’t stop people venting their frustration and bitterness and hatred on others. In any case they must have really hated her to want to kill her, because it was no accident; you don’t open a window in the middle of winter for no good reason. What if it were transference, yes, a transference of emotions onto him, then onto her? If Lisandra had died because of him, he would never forgive himself. The bus stops. Eva Maria gets off.

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    she has counted them so many times, these steps, since she has
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    been coming here every Tuesday for over four