The Brooklyn Rail

The Suicides, recently published by NYRB Classics, completes Antonio di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation. The nameless narrator, living in an unspecified Latin American city, waits in expectation of existential crisis or epiphanic revelation. His editor puts three photos of suicides on his desk and the narrator concludes that each victim saw something revelatory before the end. He wants to venture to the heart of these tragedies, perhaps even see what they saw, and enlists the aid of a partner named Marcela in his investigation. His question to her, at the end of the excerpt you are about to read, is whether or not she is capable of photographing an earthquake—not the effects, not the people fleeing tremors, but the earthquake in itself. In many ways this is the core distinction in The Suicides as a whole: how do we apprehend a process without mistaking it for a thing, or a series of things? How do we comprehend any of the events in any of our lives, or in the lives of those we love, in a snapshot rather than as an accumulation of all the decisions that brought the person to that point? The particulars drop away and the reader is left with an odd amalgam of page turner and quiet meditation on the human condition, all delivered with the tone of a Godard film.

 

*

 

My father took his life on a Friday afternoon.

He was thirty-three.

I’ll be thirty-three the last Friday of next month.

Tía Constanza mentioned the coincidence, discreetly but tactlessly. I forgot all about it. Until today, when you might say it came looking for me.

At the agency, the boss said, “This could be your chance.”

Without asking permission, he put three photos on my desk and explained my task: to figure out what he’d noticed about them.

“What do you see?”

I took it he was hoping for a display of some exceptional deductive prowess. Leaning forward, I scrutinized the photos. Each showed a human body, fully clothed, lying on the ground. “I see that all three are dead,” I said.

“That’s not a particularly clever response.”

I could tell the biting tone was a warning. I needed to see better, and faster. I was annoyed but let it go; I must have sensed what I was starting to realize.

“One is a woman. The others are men,” I observed.

I took stock very slowly, as if making a considerable effort to understand. I went on, in no hurry, “She and this guy here both have their eyes open. Unlike the third one.”

The boss made a loud, impatient noise, turned, and started walking away.

I’m not exactly a comedian, I said to myself, and that was enough of that. Because he might decide that was enough, too. I said, “The two with open eyes seem to be staring into. . .”

The boss stopped. I did, too.

I felt I’d understood something. And that what I understood mattered.

“They’re staring . . . as if they were staring into themselves. But in horror.”

I didn’t need the grunt of approval he threw my way, or his subsequent silence, which gave the impression that one piece was still missing. Yes, there was a signal in my mind, a vague one. Until I declared, “They’re terrified. There’s terror in their eyes. But their mouths are grimacing in somber pleasure.”

I didn’t doubt I’d hit the mark and added something to his perception of the photos. That was done. The one thing I still needed to know, urgently, was my parting question.

“Were they murdered?”

“No. They killed themselves.”

This was to be the embryo of a series of articles. A formless embryo.

We talked about the series. A story about the two cases with the terrified eyes. We don’t know the story. Someone, a respectable person, a professional, provided the photos. This person can’t help, won’t tell us who these people are or who took the photos. Two cases aren’t enough for a series. But we need their story. It will have to be investigated. Our own inquiry. The police won’t work with us. We can try, but they won’t. They don’t release information on suicides. Publication can lead to contagion. Copycat suicides, an epidemic of suicides, a plague of suicides.

Why the introspective horror? Why the somber pleasure? On these points we’ll offer some generalized conclusion to create more material for more articles, and for the whole series if we confirm the generalization. Yes: It can’t just be the story of these two deaths, which are old news at this point. We need fresh cases. We’ll have to wait. For what? For more of them to happen. To see. No, it can’t wait, we’ve got two months, maximum. There’s a circular prepared already, offering the series to the dailies. We can sell it to thirty evening papers and three magazines that do color. You want it sensationalized? No! Serious. Our agency doesn’t sensationalize. Well, you said the evening papers . . .That was off the top of my head. For the magazines, you need color slides. Why are we only selling to the glossies? For the blood, so the red is visible. Otherwise it has to be marked with an arrow, explained in the caption: It gets lost. You’re right. Work with Marcela. Why Marcela? Remember the piece on the plane crash in the mountains. She takes risks. There are no risks in this story, we’re dealing with dead bodies here. Aren’t there? Well, I hope not. Who knows.

I appeal: Pedro would be much better, I’d rather work with a man. No. Marcela. It’s an order.

I don’t say so, but I think of Marcela as something of an oddity. She’s ascetic, or appears to be. She’s new at the agency, I hardly know her. We don’t like each other. I don’t like her. I’ve let that be known. Someone asked why. I said “She’s thirty or thirty-two.” Years old, I meant.

I exit the building, relieved. Summer sunlight blinds me. It blinds me and soon leaves my whole body sticky.

Here, along the sidewalk, comes a blouse with a lot going on inside. I might have something to say to that. Here’s another, cut low. I don’t say anything this time, either, there’s no use trying to start anything, they pass me by. But I do stare, and who knows what I look like because a middle-aged housewife is glaring at me reprovingly, trying to put me in my place.

I think about the series. I’ll have to see people who are irrelevant to me because they’re not the ones who did it— people who are forewarned, uncooperative. (Maybe Marcela will help me get through to them. In her own way, she’s bait, thirty years old.)

I set my foot on the shoeshine block.

And I’ll have to talk. To talk about it.

I think of Papá. I was like this boy here, the shoeshine boy, that size. I knew he’d died, but didn’t know how. I cried until my tears dried up, then fell asleep, then woke up, as the ceremony continued, the visitors whispered. Someone, maybe my mother, was railing against “Unjust Death!” I understood the part about injustice—which left us without him—but I couldn’t understand how Death crept into the house and took Papá. Because that morning he was alive, on his feet, as healthy as anybody else, and he died in the afternoon sunshine. And I thought Death was a sinister figure that dealt its blows in the dark of night.

What is death, I ask the boy shining my shoes.

He raises his brown eyes and considers me from below, surprised and intimidated, though he doesn’t stop polishing.

The question was way too abstract. I change tack, and smile, to connect with him. “Hasn’t anybody you know ever died? A neighbor, an uncle…”

The boy bends down over his work, concentrating, then says, “Yes. Papá.” I say nothing.

He observes me covertly, with curiosity; I can see he’s not rejecting me. I try—have I already started working on the piece?—to establish what he knows about the scope of death, where he thinks the person who dies is.

He answers that his father is in a niche. At first, his mother told him he’d gone on a trip. Now she says he’s in Heaven. He doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t believe in Heaven? Yes, he believes in Heaven, but that’s for good people, and his father used to hit his mother.

My day is weighed down with death. That’s enough for now. I duck into a movie theater where Alphaville is playing. I’ll work tomorrow.

Still, during the night, lying apart from Julia, though next to her, I think about what the shoeshine boy said and realize I never followed up on my initial question: What, for a child, is death?

I ask Julia to ask the students in her class about this. She’s alarmed, bewildered, defensive. I explain, calm her down.

The series, my work . . .

She refuses, obstinately. Says it’s not normal.

“So then, I’m not normal?” I ask, to fluster her.

I know perfectly well that wasn’t what she was saying.

I have breakfast with Mamá. It’s a habit, the only time we ever spend together.

She tells me she ran into her friend Mercedes, and Doña Mercedes told her, “I have no family, only a TV set.”

I object. “She has children and grandchildren. She lives with them.”

“Yes, but they leave her by herself. They come and go, eat dinner with the TV on.”

The reproach isn’t directed at me, though I can deduce the moral of the story.

The heat, gradually invading the day, affects me. Mamá notices. She lowers the blinds, offers the electric fan.

I believe Mamá is the only person who loves me.

“I’d like to live in a country with snow,” she says.

She’s always said that. In response, I’ve offered to take her on a winter vacation. Each year I suggest it again.

“This year we’ll go,” I repeat.

“Where?”

“To the snow.”

“Oh sí. Sí, hijo. We’ll go.”

Some mornings she’s against the idea and tells me I need to save up for a little car. “You need it for your work.”

This depresses me. Other people seem able to manage both: a car and snow.

My brother, who has a Fiat 1500, says, “Need a ride?” Mamá knows her daily ration of this son of hers is over. She’s sad about that, I can see, but my life is tied up in the streets.

My brother kisses his son and his daughter, and his second son, and his third son. The third is clutching a thoroughly mangled copy of issue 7 of Minotauro. I recognize it from what’s left of the cover. I give him a slap and take it away.

From the kitchen door, my sister-in-law says, “Mauricio!”— nothing more. She’s sounding the alarm to her husband, asking for help with that brother of his.

My brother exhibits restraint. He says, “Calm down.” Like a magistrate.

In the car, he doesn’t speak.

Some idiot cuts us off but suffers no consequences because Mauricio slams on the brakes just in time. He has every right to yell but doesn’t. I do.

I don’t usually yell at anyone except on Saturdays.

Marcela has the late-afternoon shift. I won’t be able to see her until four o’clock. I’m sure she doesn’t yet know she’ll be working with me.

Aceituno, the agency reporter assigned to police headquarters, can’t link the photos to any story he’s worked on. He circulates them in the reporters’ room and they come back around without having struck a chord in the experts’ memories.

Aceituno takes me to Forensics and leaves me with the chief of the unit.

I ask the chief to work with us on some information, for the agency. The agency can have all the information it wants, unless it has to do with a case a judge is about to rule on, a crime under special investigation, pedophilia, or suicide.

I haven’t mentioned the photos yet. I’m going to act as if I don’t know they fall into one of the off-limits categories.

Do I have time to see the in-house museum? Yes, I do.

What matters, in the end, is the elbow-rubbing.

We drink some coffee next to the severed head of a mafioso with three bullet holes in his face. It’s been in a glass case for thirty years. A special formula preserves the skin color.

He speaks of “judicial corpses” and I lay out the problem. If I’m in possession of a photograph of a judicial corpse—that is, a corpse found in circumstances that require the intervention of the police and the judiciary—but I don’t have a name or any other information, how can it be identified?

He mentions the missing persons archive, the protocols observed for all bodies that undergo an autopsy, the technicians’ visual memory, specific features that can narrow the field by revealing the gender, approximate age, season when the person died (by the clothing), surroundings they died in, and much more.

“Then it is possible?”

“Absolutely possible.”

At that, I pull out the photos and ask for identifications and histories.

He picks them up, looks at them, sets them down, and says, “These look like suicides.”

“They are suicides.”

He says, “Absolutely impossible.”

On our way out we go through the labs. There’s a girl in a white coat with very pale skin. She notices me. That’s something, at least.

I walk for a bit, looking for a restaurant with two characteristics: grilled fish and people I don’t know, who won’t talk to me about things I am fully aware of because they’re in all the newspapers and our opinions on them are formed by all the same magazines.

A tourist standing next to me as I look at a menu in a window asks where he can try some of the local cuisine. Then he changes his mind—maybe he guessed what I was thinking of for my lunch—and asks for directions to the aquarium. As he heads off, he thanks me, saying, “You people have a very nice city here.” To this compliment, I reply that he can’t say “you people” because I don’t have anything; the city doesn’t belong to me. He says, “Oh, you’re not from here either.” We may not have understood each other.

It’s the season. There are many tourists around and the lady tourists give everyone a lot to look at, which is exactly what they want, which is all very nice.

In fact, last night, again, I dreamed I was walking around naked.

At the agency I show the photos to the woman in charge of the archives. From long professional habit, her first impulse isn’t to look at them but to turn them over and look for the registry number and date of receipt or publication. There’s nothing there.

“These aren’t ours,” she lets me know, unnecessarily.

“Do you remember them, for any reason? Do they remind you of anything?”

Now she’s enjoying them.

“They’re fantastic!” she exclaims. She wants to know more. “Who are they? What happened to her? Raped?”

Next I pay a visit to Bibi, who’s busy ransacking a Polish magazine written in English. She’s the agency translator and for that reason, as well as for her unfailing and perfectly ordered memory, we call her Fichero—Card Catalogue.

I pull a chair over to the table where she’s sitting and do my best to appear friendly, starting with my face.

“May I trouble you for some assistance?”

Other people address her as tú, as if on intimate terms. But I use the formal usted when asking for her help. It’s not as if I’m currently “with” her. We don’t play the same sports, either, and I don’t spend all day kidding around, like the rest of them do.

“What’s this about?”

“Suicide.”

“Whose?”

“Wish I knew. . . Not mine, at least.”

“Ah sí.” Card Catalogue is off and running. “The Melanesian who threw himself out of a palm tree, and number 350 who jumped off the Eiffel Tower on March 12, 1967. Demosthenes and Marilyn Monroe, Stefan Zweig and his wife, Werther and Kirilov, Anna Karenina, Sappho, and the Mundugumor who sacrifices himself by going alone to the enemy island where the cannibal tribe will eat him. That kind of thing?”

“Exactly that kind of thing.”

“And also: 1963 in Vietnam, Buddhist monks in yellow robes, gasoline and a match; the unemployed warrior’s harakiri with a wooden sword—poor guy, there’s no war. And the gas oven for the housewife who doesn’t believe the doctor and knows that her stomachache is cancer. That too?”

“That too. And this.” I put the photos down in front of her.

Bibi takes a long look but it’s obvious she isn’t getting clear on much. I try to orient her with a quick summary so she can suggest where I should begin, at least as far as resolving the two cases goes. The Melanesia part will come in later.

Still, she’s working the problem, wants to know more about what we might glean from Forensics. I repeat that there’s no collaborating with them. “I have a friend,” Bibi tells me, and at that moment, Marcela enters silently and waits. Bibi makes a date with me. “Tomorrow night, at the bowling alley.”

I take the photos back from her, hand them to Marcela, and say “Vamos.”

I usher her downstairs to the café. While we’re in the elevator she’s studying the woman sprawled on her back.

We sit down and I place the photos on the table, facing me. She watches and waits, very serious. She has yet to greet me or say a single word.

I ask whether she knows what we’ve gotten ourselves into. A gesture: More or less.

As she examines one of them, she looks fresh (as if she’d just showered) and poised, and seems more acceptable. She’s not doing anything that makes me want to find fault with her. I ask whether she’d be able to photograph a quake.

She says yes. To make sure she grasps my meaning, I clarify, “An earthquake,” demonstrating the shaking with my hands.

She says yes again, seemingly undaunted by the challenge.

I insist. “The quake itself, not its effects and consequences: not people running or a collapsing wall or a toppled church spire.”

She confirms that she can, and I ask what she did during Monday’s earthquake. Did she take photos?

“I slept. Had no idea it was happening. I thought somebody was moving the bed.”

“Who could be moving your bed?” I inquire, maliciously. “An earthquake,” she answers, with no sign of annoyance.

Is she steamrolling me because I tried to shock her? In any case, I explain that the job we have to do—the series— “will be easier because the subjects are all prone and still.” She nods. “Yes.”

She points questioningly at the woman’s contradictory expression.

I explain that that’s our pretext. When she asks whether I chose to work with her, I say I don’t often take much initiative, but she does.

She says they don’t leave her time for that, they give orders and there’s always lots to do.

I ask what she’d like to be taking pictures of if she had extra time and film and she answers, “Purity.” I point out that purity is as fleeting and abstract as an earthquake.

She says, and people’s backs, too, because that’s what they’re most careless of, everyone thinks we only see what they want us to see—the carefully made-up eyes, the mustache, the Italian necktie, the expression of intelligence. I say that to my mind the back of the body is the least expressive part, and she agrees, and that it would be like taking photos of people who are fast asleep, though it’s probably not easy to sneak into bedrooms, especially when two people are sleeping together. Anyway, if what she wants is people who don’t care that they’re being photographed, she’ll have the ones in the series. And there, I tell her, we arrive back at something she may not like much, and I clarify that I didn’t request her for this job. I add, though there’s no need, that that doesn’t prevent us from working together.

Since she has no reaction to my polite acknowledgment, I tell her our first step is to figure out who the two faces belonged to. From the police we can expect nothing and our colleagues have said they don’t remember anything.

I ask her to make copies of the photos and tell her we’re going to show them to everybody, “the waiter, the three aviators, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée, my tía

Constanza, Carlos Gardel, Marcela’s boyfriend.” She shoots me a warning glance.

I think I did it on purpose, the mention of a boyfriend, to see if she has one. I’m going to be working with her for two months, who knows what might happen . . .

Half an hour later I’m watching Omicron: The Fiery Creature from Planet Ultra.

Afterward I meet up with Julia.

She greets me with a sheaf of pages torn from school notebooks that she flings at me as if to separate herself from contact with them.

I glimpse what this is about and feign surprise, adopting an expression of tender reconciliation as I gather up the pages without looking at them. It doesn’t work. She’s boiling over.

I let her indulge in her anger and pick up the top page. “Topic: Death.” I rifle through the rest. The handwriting changes, the topic remains the same.

I read: “Bobby’s death. I cried a lot, a lot. We buried him under a tree and I take him food and water.”

(No mention of who Bobby was, but it must have been the family dog, and the student imagines he’s still alive or some part of him is.)

Another: “A truck had its wheel stuck in the acequia. The man with the iron bar was working hard to lift the axle. He let go of the lever, took a few steps back, fell backward as if he were sitting down into a chair, and stayed like that with his back against the wall. He was very pale and they told us to get away from there.”

(This one has no concept of death but recognizes the sight of a dead man.)

Another: “The padre cura says there are three kinds of dead people: those in Paradise, those in Purgatory, and those in Hell, where it’s very hot, even more than here in summertime and more than in Africa. I think I’m going to like Paradise: It’s like recess. It would also be nice if it were like Africa and there were a pool to swim in.”

Another: “Death must be a lady who lives near my house. She has a lot of filthy cats. She’s old, she’s dirty, and she’s bad. That’s why she lives alone. Nobody loves her.”

(Death is a person.)

Disappointed, I stop reading. Still, I’m rather grateful and say, “You decided to help me—”

“I’ll lose my job! When the inspector sees what I asked them to write.”

I’m annoyed. “Why would he have to see this?’

I look back down at the stack of papers and read: “Rosita’s brother, who was in high school, was sick, and died. During siesta, Rosita called and asked if I wanted to see him. I wanted to but said what if they see us? She said there’s nobody here, it’s hot. We stood on a chair and looked at him through the glass he had over his face. I think he was sleeping. This is a secret between Rosita and me.” (Sees death as akin to sleep.)

Julia sighs. I pause. This is a warning: If I don’t start paying attention to her she’ll start crying. But she shouldn’t claim to be my victim. I won’t let her rub my face in what she did. I’d rather explain to her about last night. Maybe persuade her to see things my way.

“Men,” I tell her, “want the woman to obey. They have bosses, the business owners who order them around all day. They come home and need to vent; they want to be the one in charge for a change. I obey. I have bosses. I answer to an owner. Even so, I’m not interested in having anyone obey me. I don’t expect that. When I asked you to help me, with your kids at school, I didn’t mean to give you an order. . .Come on, don’t contradict me. Other times, yes; this time, no.”

“Why not this time?” And, despite everything, she’s sobbing.

I hesitate, I don’t let her pain upset me, I take my time. After a while I say, “Because apparently I have a passionate interest in this question.”

(Though, in general, I never feel passionate about anything.)

Julia, seeing herself displaced once more, gives up. “That’s enough for today.”

She leaves. I make no move to stop her.

She’s forgotten the pages from the school notebooks.

I read: “My little brother, el Bebe, killed himself. I loved him very much but I don’t miss him because he didn’t know how to talk or walk or anything even though he was almost six months old. He and my other brother, the one that’s alive, were born together, they were twins. My mamá says she usually nursed one of them first and then the other, and the first is the one who survived because she put him on the left side. When it was the other one’s turn, el Bebe’s, he didn’t want to suck and he stopped drinking milk and died of starvation. That was because she didn’t attend to him first, my mamá says, but when she figured it out it was too late.

The doctor said el Bebe committed suicide and Papá said it was a big disgrace, but that he was used to it, other people in the family had killed themselves, too. I heard them saying this, they didn’t tell me.”