One Life. David Lida

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СКАЧАТЬ the next twenty minutes I tried every which way to get something, anything, out of the poor guy. I asked each question five times with slight variations, offered him every option I could think of. If his answers weighed in at three syllables, it was a miracle. Finally, I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I just looked at him impassively, hoping the mirror of my face might inspire some memory.

      He could tell I was unsatisfied. He only shrugged. “¿Qué quieres que te diga?” he said. In this instance, it was only a figure of speech. But I had an answer prepared for him.

      “What do I want you to say, Juventino? You really want to know? Then here goes: I want you to tell me a story. And please, make it a horrible one. A tale of poverty and misery, of incest and abuse, of starvation and terror, of family violence so hair-raising and horrifying that anyone who listens to it will have nightmares forever. If you can include mental retardation, we’re off to the races.

      “It has to be a tragic Aristotelian narrative that corresponds to the fundamental order of the universe. There has to be a chain of cause and effect that begins the day Esperanza is born into wretchedness and has its inevitable climax at the moment she kills her baby. Which leads inexorably to her arrest, and for a denouement, the demonstration that she has been a saint in jail and is not only no longer a threat to society but a penitent and productive individual.

      “You following me, Juventino? Most importantly, make the story devastatingly sad. The grief, the gloom, the desolation have to be so overwhelming that they will bring even the hardest-hearted, most vengeful Louisiana district attorney to tears. It has to be so heartbreaking that, after hearing it, jurors would rather cut their own throats than send her to the gas chamber.”

      Of course I didn’t actually say any of that. I realized that Juventino had no story to tell, absolutely nothing to say about Esperanza or her family. Why should he? In half an hour, I tried to force him into what was probably more conversation than he’d had in the previous month. I asked him to reflect on things to which he’d never given a second’s thought, things that had nothing to do with his existence or survival. In Ojeras, Juventino plants and harvests corn and beans in season, and during the intervals between farmwork, he tries to lay a little cement or hang drywall. That is, if he’s not in California, Ohio, or North Carolina, hiding in the shadows while scrounging for any employment that will give him a little money to send home to his mother and sisters.

      “Juventino,” I said, “when I go home, I prepare memos for the lawyers about every conversation I’ve had with each person. I’m seeing a lot of people, and sometimes I realize I have forgotten something important. If that happens, would it be okay if I called you?”

      “Sure,” he said.

      “What’s your phone number?”

      We listened to the birds warble in the trees for a while. Finally, he said, “I don’t have a phone.”

      “You don’t have a phone at home?” He shook his head. “A cell phone?”

      “No.”

      “Okay,” I said. “What’s your address?”

      He pointed to the adobe house. “I live there.”

      I nodded. “What’s the name of this street?”

      Another long pause. “Mamá!” he called. “What’s the name of the street where we live?”

      The wobbly lady in the serape shrugged her shoulders. That they did not know the name of their street is not as insane as it sounds. In towns like Ojeras, people tend to identify addresses not by names or numbers, but with a little travelogue: “It’s down by the bakery,” or “It’s up where Lula’s grandmother lives,” or “It’s next door to where the gringo got bit by the dog.” It was the last house on the last street in the back of a one-burro town in the middle of nowhere. As they say here, donde el diablo perdió el poncho—where the devil lost his poncho. The street may not even have had a name. If there had been a sign, half the residents wouldn’t have been able to read it.

      “You can just say Ojeras,” said Juventino, “in the municipality of Puroaire, the state of Michoacán, in México.”

      It crossed my mind that all this might have been an elaborate put-on. That Juventino was holding out on me, malevolently playing stupid for whatever reason he had up his sleeve: mistrust, perversity, petty revenge against Marta or Esperanza. But I looked into his glazed-doughnut eyes and my gut told me he wasn’t clever or willful enough to withhold important information. He just didn’t have any. Sometimes a potential witness can be a huge disappointment, but it’s rarely their fault. They would help you if they could.

      I put a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for your help,” I said.

      “Para servirle,” he said.

      I put my notebook back in my knapsack, the pen in my pocket. I stood up to leave.

      “What did you say your name was?” asked Juventino.

      “Richard,” I said.

      “Can I ask you a question?” said Juventino.

      “As many as you like.”

      He scratched his belly. “Is she guilty?”

      People frequently ask me that. Most of the time, the answer is “hell, yes,” but I would never say so. “I honestly don’t know, Juventino,” I said. “I wasn’t there. There are a few things in this case that don’t make sense. For now, I’m just trying to convince the prosecutor not to kill her. If we get death off the table, then there will be other options.” Life without the possibility of parole, for example. Staring at metal bars and concrete walls forever, even if she lives to be two hundred.

      He nodded. “I don’t believe she killed the baby,” he said.

      I held my breath. You never know what little miracle they might have up their sleeves. “What makes you say that, Juventino?”

      He shrugged. “Because she’s good people,” he said.

      I limped back to the taxi. The driver put the car into gear and we began the trip back. There is always a moment of exhilaration looking out that flyspecked windshield as a town disappears and you hit the highway. It took two and a half hours to get here and would be another two and a half to get back. Plus an hour in Ojeras, another to write up the memo. Seven hours: seven hundred dollars. Not a bad day, if I didn’t get rabies.

       BAD COP, WORSE COP

      He is thick with solid muscle, a body so dense that Esperanza thinks he might burst out of his stiff sky-blue shirt like el increíble Hulk. Two days ago he told her his name was Shepherd. He leans toward her so his face is a couple of inches from hers. Veins pulsate at his temples: he may whisper or he may scream. She can smell the pharmaceutical cologne mixed with his sweat, the chemical grease with which he tames his wavy hair into submission, the tobacco on his breath. There are pocks and pores in his sallow skin, red veins in his hazel eyes. His right eyebrow twitches. He needs a shave.

      “How did you kill the baby?” he says. He speaks as if the question had occurred to him suddenly, as if he hadn’t asked her 162 times over the past forty-eight hours.

      Bobby, СКАЧАТЬ