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XIII
With bitters, hors d'oeuvres of cheese, and olives, we welcomed the commissioner Raimundo Aubry and Dr. Cecilio Montes, who worked for the police. Meanwhile Esteban, the chauffeur, two officers, and a man in a well-tended suit and black armbands -- the master of the rites, as they explained to me -- descended with the coffin to the basement.
 Very soon I was going to regret that cup of bitters which I myself served to Dr. Montes. I had not yet discovered that the additional cup had not altered my young colleagues state. He was drunk: he had arrived drunk.
Cecilio Montes was of middle stature and a delicate build. He had dark wavy hair, large eyes; his complexion was very white, very pale; his features fine, his nose straight. He wore a hunter's suit, well-cut, in a greenish cheviot, which had been of very good quality. The silk shirt was dirty. The overriding sense of his appearance was disarray, negligence, ruin -- a ruin which allowed one to glimpse a previous splendor. I wondered if such a personage, escaped from a Russian novel, was really here in our countryside: I have found unexpected comparisons between the Argentinian and Russian steppes, and between the souls of our peoples; I imagined the arrival of the young physician in Salinas, his faith in noble causes and civilization, and his gradual deterioration among the inevitable squalor and poverty of the people's lives. J'avais calais, mon Oblomov. I looked at him with complete sympathy.
He, on the other hand, seemed to lack even that rudimentary, minimal sympathy which invincibly unites from out of their solitude those who belong to the same fraternity or the same profession. He hardly responded to my words, and if he did reply, he did so indifferently or aggressively. I successfully reminded myself that Montes was drunk and that, on earlier occasions when that same spontaneous sympathy had drawn me near to my colleagues, I found only spirits withered by the superstitions of nineteenth-century scientific positivism.
Commissioner Aubry was a tall man, ruddy, his skin toasted by the sun and a perpetual expression of astonishment in his blue eyes. I want to pause over these because they were the man's principal feature. They were not inordinately large, nor of the sort called magnetic, acute or penetrating; but one would say that the entire life of the commissioner resonated in them and that he listened and thought through them. An interlocutor had only to begin to speak, and already the commissioner's eyes looked at him with such intense attention and expectation that the other's ideas lost their way, and his words decayed into stammers.
"Do not doubt it," I said gravely; "it is a case of strychnine poisoning."
"One has to see it himself, my esteemed colleague; one has to see it," said Montes. He turned his back to me and directed himself to the commissioner. "Take note: a suspicious attempt to impose a diagnosis."
"My good sir," I replied, choosing involuntarily an honorific as false as the situation, "if you were not drunk, you would not allow yourself to speak so senselessly."
"Some need not be drunk to speak senseless words," he answered.
I prepared myself to deliver a response which would dispose of the alcoholic when the commissioner stepped in.
"Gentlemen," he said, seeking me with those unavoidable eyes, "couldn't you take us now to the dead woman's room?"
With perfect composure I led them below. When we arrived at Mary's door, I opened it and stepped aside so that the commissioner could enter. Dr. Montes went in, holding his little cloth valise. Perhaps because of the associations that valise evoked, I murmured, "Mary's soul has no need of a midwife."
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