Woes of the True Policeman

arrive at the Amalfitano residence at the cocktail hour. Then they would go for a drive, never a very long one. Sometimes Isabel would take them to a place on the edge of town for a drink. Other times she saw Amalfitano alone, in the evenings, and they would go for a stroll or to the movies.
    When Amalfitano called and said that he wanted to see her, Isabel thought they would make a date for the following Saturday, so her astonishment was great when he said he wanted to see her that very night.
    “I’m in my pajamas,” said Isabel, accustomed to being the one who always visited Amalfitano.
    “I’m coming to your house,” said Amalfitano. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I need to talk to someone and I can’t do it over the phone.”
    Isabel downed the whiskey in a single gulp and then began to tidy up. She picked up some things in the living room, made the bed and straightened the bedroom, opened a few windows and aired out the house, closed the windows and sprayed a bit of Holiday Forever air freshener in the corners, then she splashed water on her face, put on a little makeup, and poured another whiskey.

10
    By Thursday Pancho could have delivered a full report on Amalfitano, but he didn’t.
    That morning he followed Rosa: he followed her along Avenida Sonora, followed her into a covered market where she did the shopping, and then followed her back to the house. It was noon before she appeared again. At twelve fifteen, one of the windows in the living room opened and he presumed that she was cleaning. Then he watched her go out into the yard, walk to the fence, bend down, and look for something. Then he watched her get up and head back to the house with surer steps. Muted pop music drifted on the breeze to the windows of his car. Then Rosa closed the window and all he could hear was the whisper of the sun falling on the pavement and the trees.
    At four in the afternoon Rosa went out again.
    He followed her on foot. Rosa walked at a good clip, in the same direction as always, toward Calle Sonora and then Avenida Revolución. She was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt. She had on low boots, with no heel.

11
    Padilla’s next letter was torrential. He began by saying that one night, drunk and high on pills, he had somehow ended up at a used-book store on Calle Aribau and suddenly, as if the book had leaped into his hands, he found himself with an old copy of J.M.G. Arcimboldi’s The Endless Rose , translated by Amalfitano. Your name in that tattered and precious volume!
    Arcimboldi, he said, had overnight become a fashionable author in Spain, where they were publishing or about to publish everything he’d written. Not a week went by without an article on the great French writer, or a profile of him. Even The Endless Rose (his third or fourth novel?)—a difficult and deceptive work despite its apparent simplicity, to the point that sometimes it seemed like a book for morons—was already in a second printing, when it had scarcely been out for a month. The new Spanish translation was by a writer from Navarra, suddenly revealed to be an expert—which he was, though he’d certainly kept it under wraps—on the Arcimboldean oeuvre. I prefer your translation, said Padilla, and every page that I reread makes me imagine you in that storm-tossed Buenos Aires, freighted with omens, where your innocence triumphed. Here Padilla gets it wrong again, thought Amalfitano, because even though the translation was for a Buenos Aires publishing house, he had done it while he was living in Mexico City. If I had translated Arcimboldi in Buenos Aires, he thought, I would be dead now.
    Of course, continued Padilla, he, too, had succumbed to the fashion for Arcimboldi and in a week he’d devoured the three novels in Spanish translation, plus another three in the original French that he’d found at the Librería Apollinaire on Calle Córcega, plus the controversial novella or long short story Riquer , which he’d read in Juli Montaner’s Catalan translation and which seemed to him a kind of long-winded Borges. In Barcelona there are those who say, said Padilla, that Arcimboldi is the perfect blend of Thomas Bernhard and Stevenson (old R.L., you heard me right), but he placed him somewhere nearer the unlikely intersection of Aloysius Bertrand and Perec and (brace yourself) Gide and the Robbe-Grillet of Project for a Revolution in New York . In any case, French to the hilt. Finally, he said that he was starting to get