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“Did you go back to the beach during that time? Did you see Kloster again?”
“I did, but not immediately. I stayed in my room, crying. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Ramiro had looked a
“So was that all? You didn’t speak to Ramiro’s parents?”
“I did. I went to see them as soon as I got back. But I’d gone over and over it in my mind and had gradually accepted that it couldn’t be anything other than a terrible accident. What could I have said to them? That out of a desire for revenge, for having been sued for a few thousand pesos, Kloster had somehow engineered Ramiro’s death? I mean, I hadn’t seen anything more than an accident, and when I spoke to them they were already resigned to it, and even a little embarrassed that Ramiro had been so reckless. His mother had always been very religious: she was a member of the same church as my father. She spoke of the peace that follows grief, when you finally accept someone’s death. As I left their house I too experienced a strange sense of calm, for the first time in ages. I felt that whatever Kloster had wanted he’d undoubtedly achieved it, and that our respective tragedies had made us quits. That with Ramiro’s death, however sinister it might seem, some sort of balance had been restored. One death each. I tried to forget the whole business and for a few months my life almost went back to normal. I think I would even have forgotten about Kloster had it not been for the fact that his name was in the papers more and more often and his books seemed to be in all the shop windows.
“A year passed. December came and I felt I didn’t want to spend the holidays in Gesell as usual. I thought the sea and the beach would bring back too many bad memories, so I stayed in Buenos Aires. The rest of the family left just after Christmas and I spent the time preparing for another exam. So I wouldn’t forget, I put a note in my diary to phone my parents on their a
She fell silent, as if a hidden cog in her memory had come to a halt. She stared at the cup she’d placed to one side and, as she bowed her head, the tears fell silently, as if she’d only just held them back till then. When she looked up again, teardrops still clung to her lashes. Embarrassed, she wiped them away quickly with the back of her hand.
“I rang at ten. My mother answered the phone. She sounded happy, in a good mood. She’d made her mushroom pie, and she and my father had had di
She fell silent again, as if her thoughts were once more far away.
“Could your mother have made a mistake when she picked the mushrooms?”
She shook her head hopelessly. “That was what I found hardest to believe. She always went to the same spot to pick them and there had never been any poisonous species there. She had a mushroom guide and she’d shown us the pictures and taught us to recognise the different kinds, but never, in all the summers we spent there, did we see a single poisonous specimen. That’s why she even let Valentina accompany her. There was an investigation immediately, which said that it was an accident, regrettable, but not unprecedented. Woods without toxic species can easily become contaminated from one season to the next. Each fungus has thousands of spores and a gust of wind is all that’s needed to spread them quite a distance. And this species of Amanita is particularly difficult to distinguish from edible species, even for people who are quite experienced. The only visible difference is the volva, a white swollen sac at the base of the stem. But the mushroom can often come away from the base, or else the volva can be buried, or concealed by leaf litter. After my parents’ death, some were actually found in the wood. They were almost hidden, and an inexperienced mushroomer could have been fooled. According to the report it had been silly to allow a child of Valentina’s age to go mushroom picking. They thought that it was probably Valentina who gathered the poisonous fungi without noticing the volva and that my mother didn’t recognise them once they’d been detached from the base.”
“But what was your hypothesis?”
“Kloster. It was him again. He’d reappeared, when I thought it was all over. I knew it as soon as I got Bruno’s call. When he mentioned the name of the fungus, I felt that if I opened my mouth I would just start screaming. Because it was me who had given Kloster the idea.”
“You gave him the idea? What do you mean?”
“From time to time, during the year I worked for him, he had me cut out and keep police reports from the newspaper that interested him for one reason or another. Once he made me cut out an article about a grandmother who’d accidentally cooked poisonous fungi for herself and her granddaughter. They both died in agony a few hours later. What attracted his attention was that the grandmother considered herself an authority on wild mushrooms. He said that experts were often also the most careless, and when devising murders for his novels he was always interested in this-the mistakes made by such experts. In the article it mentioned in passing that the poisonous fungi were of that very same variety, Amanita phalloides. I explained to him why it was so easy to mistake them for edible mushrooms. I even drew him a picture, with the cap, the stem, the ring and the volva. I told him about other less well-known but dangerous types. I was proud to display my knowledge. He was surprised and asked me how I knew all this, so I told him…I told him everything: how my mother had taught all three of us, showing us the pictures from her book. The little wood behind the house at Villa Gesell. The mushroom pie on their wedding a