At Close Quarters by Eugenio Fuentes Page A

but one day, talking about Gabriela, he told me her experience was the more painful, the wound deeper, more difficult to come to terms with. Because, in a way, he said, you can find a substitute for your partner, someone who might compensate for the person you’ve lost. But not for a son, a son can never be replaced. I asked him, jokingly, if he loved me more than my mother. He refused to compare us and simply answered that he had really loved her, but now he also loved Gabriela.’
    ‘How did he die, her son?’
    ‘In a terrible, absurd accident. He was fifteen. It seems it was the result of teenage bravado. He and two friends were walking down the street and started goading one of those dangerous dogs, a pit bull, I think, that was behind a fence. The owners were out, and the dog got furious and ended up jumping over the fence and attacking them. By the time the police got there and shot it, the boy was already dead.’
    ‘I see. Back to your father’s case, did you call Gabriela that morning to see if he was with her?’
    ‘I did, although I knew the previous night they hadn’t seen each other. They had both been at my place in the morning and I heard them say they wouldn’t meet that evening. Then my father left for work. And Gabriela and I went over to Samuel’s.’
    ‘Samuel?’
    ‘My boyfriend. The previous day he had invited Gabriela and me to his house to pick up some plants and cuttings he’d preparedfor us. He has a small garden, but a very pretty one. And in the evening I rang Gabriela to discuss how we’d arranged the plants. Samuel had been to her house to give her a hand. That’s how I also know my father did not go out with her that night.’
    ‘You were saying before that, by noon the following day, you started feeling something must be wrong,’ said Cupido, putting her narrative in order.
    ‘Yes, and I decided to go over to his house. I’ve got a set of keys. So I opened the door …’
    ‘Sorry to interrupt again.’
    ‘No, please.’
    ‘Has anyone else got a set of keys?’
    ‘Aurora, only Aurora.’
    ‘And she is?’
    ‘The cleaning lady. She has my complete trust. My father had hired her for both houses, as she’s Rosco’s wife, and Rosco is a street-sweeper form his neighbourhood. My father liked to know the people around him, needed to feel in control of his surroundings. I used to tell him it was a military obsession, seeing danger where there isn’t any. In any case, Aurora didn’t have her keys that day.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘Because I had them. She works two days a week for us, Mondays and Thursdays. First she cleans my father’s house, and when she’s done she comes to mine. It’s a good arrangement, because she organises herself and splits her time according to what she needs to do at one place or the other. That Monday she was at his house first and then came to mine. She keeps all the keys on the same key ring, and when she finished cleaning, she closed the door behind her and left them inside. She collected them the following Thursday. So no one could have used her keys on Monday afternoon to go into my father’s house.’
    ‘All right. Please go on.’
    ‘I was saying I opened the door and called out “Dad, Dad” because the house looked strange. Everything was tidy, but tootidy. Once in the living room I started noticing the details: the remote control was on top of the TV, where Aurora always leaves it, as if it hadn’t been touched the day before, and the cushions were perfectly arranged. I went into the kitchen and saw only one coffee cup in the sink. Just one cup, although the previous evening my father had had a visitor. And if he’d had dinner or breakfast at home, there should at least have been a plate, a knife. The door to the bedroom was open, and I could see the bed was made, not simply with the covers pulled up as he sometimes did when he was in a hurry. It seemed that he had spent the night out, hadn’t been back since the previous