Woes of the True Policeman

anything about it. At nine the door opened and Amalfitano appeared. He was wearing a black blazer, and his white hair, perhaps too long for a man of his age, was still wet. Before he closed the door he said something to someone inside the house and then he set off walking. Pancho let him get a head start and then he got out of the car and followed him. Amalfitano’s strides were long. In his right hand he was carrying a cheap briefcase and there were two books in the pocket of his blazer. He passed several people but didn’t say hello to any of them. When he got to the bus stop he stopped. Pancho walked on past and went into a store, some fifty yards away. He found a can of Nestlé evaporated milk, paid for it, took out his penknife, punctured the top in two places, and drank from it once he was back out in the street. He passed the bus stop again, but didn’t pause. Amalfitano was reading one of the books. Pancho walked to where he had left the Ford and started it. Then he headed down the street until he found the bus that Amalfitano was waiting for and followed it. When the bus got to the stop, Amalfitano was still there. He got on with some other people and the bus pulled away. At nine forty Amalfitano entered the university amid a stream of students. Pancho followed him into the philosophy department and spent a while chatting with a secretary. The secretary’s name was Estela and she liked to go out dancing on Saturday nights. She was twenty-eight and divorced. She believed in friendship and honesty.
    “Clearly you work in the philosophy department,” Pancho said.
    When he got back to Amalfitano’s house Rosa had already gone out. Pancho rang the doorbell for a while. Then he went back to the car and put on some music. He felt his eyes closing and he fell asleep. When he woke up it was past noon. He started the car and drove away. He spent the rest of the day at El Jacinto, a bar on Calle Nuevo León that catered to policemen. At seven he went to wait for Amalfitano at the entrance to the university.
    The next day Pancho arrived a little before nine. At nine fifteen a taxi stopped in front of the house and Amalfitano ran out. At nine thirty Rosa emerged and set off on foot toward Avenida Escandón. This time she was carrying a plastic bag full of videocassettes. When Rosa turned the corner Pancho got out of the car and headed for the house. Getting in was no problem.
    The house consisted of a living room with an open kitchen, two big bedrooms and one small one, which was used as a junk room, and a bathroom. Behind was a yard with no plants or flowers. Pancho spent a while poking around the bedrooms. He didn’t find anything of potential interest, except some letters from Barcelona. He sat in a chair by the living room window to read them. He didn’t read all of them. Then he spent a while in Rosa’s room. He liked the smell. He looked for pictures but all he could find were a few snapshots of a beautiful woman with her arms around a girl. Hanging in the closet were clothes that might have been a girl’s or a woman’s. Under the bed were a pair of plush Pluto slippers. He smelled them. They smelled good. Like the feet of someone young and healthy. When he put them back under the bed his heart seemed to leap into his throat. He knelt there, still, his face buried in the blankets, which also smelled good, of lavender, warmth. Then he got up and and decided he had seen all he wanted to see.

9
    That night Professor Isabel Aguilar was thinking about Amalfitano when he called on the phone. Though it was still early, she had already put on her pajamas and poured herself a whiskey, which she planned to drink while she read a novel that she had been wanting to read for a long time. She lived alone and in recent years she had even found a certain satisfaction in that. She didn’t miss being part of a couple. There hadn’t been many men in her life and almost every relationship had ended in disaster. Isabel Aguilar had been in love with a philosophy student who ended up turning to the occult sciences, a militant Trotskyite who also ended up turning to the occult sciences (and bodybuilding), a truck driver from Hermosillo who made fun of her love of reading and who only wanted to get her pregnant (and then run off, or so she suspected), and a Santa Teresa mechanic whose intellectual horizon was soccer matches and weekend drinking marathons, marathons to which she herself became addicted. The only real love of