write something equivalent to
Don Quijote: a satire of the detective novel. Imagine an
individual who has spent his life reading detective novels and who has come to believe
the crazy idea that the world functions like in a novel of Nicholas Blake, or Ellery Queen.
Imagine then, that this poor fool finally starts discovering crimes and starts acting in real
life, like a detective, in one of these novels. I think that could be something amusing,
tragic, symbolic, satirical, and beautiful.”
“Then, why don’t you do something like that?” Mimi asked, mockingly.
“For two reasons,” Hunter answered. “I am not Cervantes, and I suffer from laziness.”
“I thing the first reason would be enough,” Mimi insisted.
And after saying that, she unfortunately looked at me again:
“This man,” she said, pointing at Hunter with the corner of her mouth, “speaks against
detective novels because he is incapable of writing one, even if it were the most boring
novel in the world.”
“Give me a cigarette,” Hunter said, turning to his cousin. Then he said: “When are you
going to stop being so overstated? I the first place, I have not spoken against detective
novels; I just said that it would be possible to write something like Don Quijote in our
time of life. In the second place, you are mistaken about my incapacity with that type of
work. I once had a great idea for a detective novel.”
“Sans blague!” was all that Mimi said.
“Yes, that’s what I said. Just imagine: a man has a mother, a wife, and a child. One
night someone mysteriously kills the mother. The police investigations don’t come up
with anything. Some time later the wife is killed; the police still can’t find who did it.
Finally, the child is killed. The man is driven crazy, because he loved them all, especially
the child. Feeling desperate, he decides to try and solve it himself. With the same
methods used in a detective novel—inductive, deductive, analytical, synthetic, etc.—he
comes to the conclusion that a fourth person will be killed on the same day, at the same
time, in the same place. His conclusion is that the murderer will now kill him. On the
day, and at the exact time, the man goes to the place where the forth murder should occur
and waits for the murderer to arrive. But the murderer never comes. He reexamines his
deductions, thinking he may have picked the wrong place; no place is right; then he could
have chosen the wrong time; no the time is also right. Then, the horrible conclusion: the
murderer must already be there. In other words, he is the murderer who committed these
crimes, in a state of unconsciousness. The detective and the murderer are the same
person.”
“Too extravagant for my taste,” Mimi said. “And how does it end? Didn’t you say
there would be a fourth murder?”
“The conclusion is obvious: the man commits suicide,” Hunter said.
“It seems entertaining, but it’s one thing to tell a story like that, and another to write it
as a novel.”
“That’s true,” Hunter admitted calmly.
After that Mimi began to talk about a palm reader she had known in Mar del Plata, and
about a female clairvoyant. Hunter laughed, and Mimi was annoyed.
“You think it has to be something serious,” she said. “Her husband is a professor in
the Department of Engineering.”
They continued, talking about telepathy, and I was becoming desperate because Maria
did not appear. When I paid attention again, they were talking about the status of labor.
“What’s happening,” Mimi concluded, clenching her cigarette holder like a baton, “is
that people no longer want to work.”
Toward the end of the conversation I had a sudden insight that calmed my unexpected
sadness: I came to the conclusion that Mimi had arrived a short time ago, and that Maria
had not come down because she couldn’t stand the opinions ( which she had listened to
often enough) of Mimi and her cousin. But now that I remember it, that conclusion was
partly the consequence of something said by the driver who brought me to the farm
which, at the time, I hadn’t paid much attention to. It was something about a cousin of
the owner of the farm who had just arrived from Mar del Plata to have tea. That had to
be it: Maria was so disturbed by the unexpected arrival of that woman that she feigned an
illness, and locked herself in her bedroom. It was clear she couldn’t put up with people
like that. And the sadness I had felt dissipated with that realization and explained the
cause of my sad feelings. On arriving and the farm and finding out that Hunter and Mimi
were some frivolous hypocrites, the most superficial part of my soul cheered up because
it saw that there was no way that Hunter could be a threat to our relationship. But a
deeper level saddened, thinking (or rather, feeling), that Maria was a member of this
group of people and that, in some ways, she might have similar attributes.
XXVI
When we got up from the table to take a walk, I saw that Maria was walking toward us,
confirming my hypothesis: she had waited for this moment to join
us in order to avoid the
boring conversation at the table.
Each time Maria approached me in the middle of a group of other people, I thought:
“there is a secret link between me and this marvelous person,” and then when I thought
about my feelings, I realized that she had become indispensable to me (like someone one
encounters on a desert island). But then, after the fear of total aloneness had passed, she
had become a sort of luxury that filled me with pride, and it was in this second phase of
our relationship when difficulties began to occur. In the same way that someone who is
dying of hunger accepts something unconditionally and, once his most urgent needs are
satisfied, begins to complain constantly about its defects and disadvantages. In the last
few years I have seen immigrants, who come here with the humility of someone who has
been freed from a concentration camp and happily performed the most humiliating jobs.
But it is quite unusual when a man is not satisfied with having escaped torture and now is
able to live happily; that when he starts to enjoy this new sense of security, arrogance,
pride and vanity, which seemed to have been lost forever, come back again like animals
who fled after being frightened; and in some ways they reappear with greater petulance,
as if they were ashamed of having sunken so low. It is quite possible that in such
circumstances this man will commit acts of ingratitude and disregard.
Now that I am able to analyze my feelings with tranquility, I think there was something
like that in my relations with Maria, and I feel that in some way I am paying for the
stupidity of not having been satisfied with the part of Maria that saved me (momentarily)
from loneliness. This feeling of pride, this growing desire for total possession, should
have told me that I was going down the wrong road, assisted by vanity and arrogance.