Fiction. This novella, similar in content to its Argentine author's prize-winning SULTRY MOON (also available from SPD) details a crime spree, including multiple murders, undertaken by 'respectable' business man Alfredo Romero and his adulterous lover Griselda...It is narrated by Alfredo after he's been apprehended, [with] narrative intensity, velocity, and matter-of-fact black humor. A very accomplished work -- Kirkus Reviews. Translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger.

Mempo Giardinelli is an award-winning Argentine author and journalist. He has been a visiting professor or writer-in-residence at numerous universities in the U.S. and Europe. He is the author of several novels, including Sultry Moon, as well as short stories. Andrea G. Labinger is an emerita professor of Spanish at the University of La Verne, where she is a former founding director of the university's honors program. She lives in the Los Angeles area.

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Chapter One

I always knew that what I was doing was horrible, but I did it. Once I had launched myself over that ridge of hell, like a bowling ball picking up speed as it slips down the alley, I just couldn't stop. It didn't matter how many pins had to fly. The only thing that mattered was to keep on rolling.

A man who's about to turn fifty and who feels complete in the sense that he's done everything he's ever wanted to do and could, and who finds himself trapped between boredom and restlessness, has only two alternatives: either he begins to prepare for old age, satisfied with what he's done or frustrated by all the things he didn't manage to do; or else he fires off his last round and goes for all-or-nothing. I chose the second option. And Gris put me up to it. Reckless, that's what she is.

I'll tell you something: Resistencia is a town my mother used to call Peyton Place, after a very famous series made during the early years of TV, in black and white. The Devil's Cauldron -- I don't know if you remember it. Well, just like Peyton Place, Resistencia is a North American town, only one that ended up in the wrong part of the globe, surrounded by an impressive ring of poverty, like those the North Americans never let anyone see. Nothing ever happens there, until one day, everything happens. The heat drives us crazy, and that's the only explanation for the things that happen, when they happen. I don't understand what triggers it off, but one night -- because generally everything occurs at night -- we go nuts. You run out of money, or beer, or you get fed up with watching the same old crap on TV, and you feel like you've got to do something. Break something, knock everything down, yell at your neighbor, hit your wife, I don't know, something.

I was burned out, but I wasn't an unhappy man. Before turning fifty, I had already been divorced twice; my kids were in school -- one at the University of Buenos Aires and the other one at the National University of Córdoba -- and I lived alone in a very big house, the top floor of which had a nice apartment, a sort of enormous loft. On the ground floor, my mother, who was already an old lady, lived with her caretaker, Rosa, a sixtyish woman from Corrientes who was very sweet and efficient. Both of them were very religious and lived simple, peaceful lives, as virtuous as they were boring. I had a good job, independent, with a nice income, that allowed me to be what is smugly known in Resistencia as a good son. My only sin was my secret relationship with Gris. Who was married. Married to my best friend.

Don't give me any of that morality crap: everything was going along great, and for four years it was a perfect relationship. Griselda is a fantastic woman. Not only because she's beautiful, but also because there's no one else in this world you can have such a good time with: she has a quick, brilliant mind, and her sharpness is combined with refinement, charm, and an immense wisdom that both unnerves and fascinates me. And excuse me, but that's an explosive combination. Passionate and wild in bed, she was also tired of playing the role of the perfect middle-class Resistencia lady. By the time we first became lovers, she had already given up going to the Ikebana Club, she no longer participated in the Cancer Assistance League, and she had even stopped attending the Holy Trinity School Association meetings. She didn't want to waste any more time inventing activities for herself or asking permission or feeling guilty about anything anymore. What Gris wanted was to have fun, to enjoy life, to live in the fast lane, and to be loved. All the things good old Antonio couldn't give her.

We started almost by accident, exactly four years ago, but I'm not going to tell you how it all began. It's not necessary. Just believe me when I tell you it was sensational, exciting, and that never before in my life had I known a woman like that -- so ardent -- nor had I ever felt such passion. I had never surrendered myself to a woman as I did to her, and I'd never seen a woman so capable of such total surrender, such emotional completeness, I mean. We had known each other for a long time, at least ten years, and I don't think we'd ever had fantasies about one another. Because of social repression, or whatever it was, for a decade we had been almost desexualized towards one another. Until one day -- boom! -- something exploded, a bomb, and we entwined like vines beneath rubble, fused together like two metals in a cauldron.

Griselda was a few years my junior. Seven or eight -- I never knew -- because she always lied about her age, and she did it with absolute, incomparable charm. Lying naked in bed, she loved when I simply looked at her, slowly masturbating as she writhed around like a contortionist, as sensual as a goddess, while she dared me to exchange her for two twenty-year-olds. Then she would leap on top of me and run her tongue over my body, lingering on the most sensitive parts: my ribs, my armpits, my groin, my ears, and she would order me to hold still, and she possessed me with such elegance, a quality I would be incapable of describing. She mounted me, shifting her hips from side to side, in circles, and she loved it when I caressed her breasts gently; she adored it when I played with her plump nipples, nipples of a mother who has given life, and she closed her eyes and asked me to talk dirty to her, to insult her, to whisper softly that she was the filthiest whore in the whole Chaco. She was fantastic: she was alert to her own pleasure, but also to mine, and as I watched her smile of joy, it was like watching the Mona Lisa before she posed, like imagining the Virgin Mary as she nursed Jesus. And all of a sudden, she would shout at me to give her my milk, to give it all to her, to empty myself out completely in her, and she said she was water, she was the sea, look how she spilled over entirely, and she trembled and ordered me not to hold back, to tell her I loved her while licking her ear, and I did because it was true, because I loved her more than anyone else in the world, and besides, I love talking while I'm doing it, and I knew how it fascinated Griselda that I could make love and talk at the same time.

There's nothing else to say: we loved each other, and after our first meetings, for the first three or four months, when we had gotten over our guilt feelings, we began to tie the most profound bonds of love: the friend she also was, the adviser I also was, the endless talk about our children (her two girls are teenagers already, although they're younger than my kids), the town gossip that amused us so much, our mutual friends and their frustrations, the Nautical Club, the small provincial universe in which we moved. And, of course, we talked about our secret, which was our strength, because from the beginning, we had sworn to speak to no one, absolutely no one, of that relationship. The only thing we never spoke of, the name that was never pronounced, was, of course, Antonio's. Who, in addition to being my friend and her husband, was my partner in Northeastern Argentine Realty, Inc.

Naturally, he knew. At least, I was always convinced he knew. A woman like Griselda can fool an entire town, of course, but not her husband, especially if the husband isn't a fool. And Antonio was no fool. I never understood why he acted like that, but the truth is that he never made the slightest gesture, never asked her questions or showed any anger towards me. Never. He always accepted everything silently. He was a cuckold and he put up with it. That exasperated me and sometimes, enraged, I felt like telling him so, felt like shouting at him not to be such an asshole, that I was stealing his wife; I felt like shaking him and asking him why the hell he put up with it. The truth is I can't say exactly when he found out about us, but I knew that he knew. And Gris also knew that he knew. But we didn't talk about that.

What I'm telling you here is complete idiocy, utter degradation, I know. But I've resolved to tell these things exactly as they were. No holds barred and no pretense. Cards on the table, and all that. When we set that bowling ball in motion down the alley, it was all so explicit and clear that I still laugh at people's innocence. It doesn't even strike me as pathetic; it seems stupid to me. Because people here tend to believe what they shouldn't, and they swallow whatever bullshit they're fed. Urban stupidity is too widespread, too generalized, to let you feel sorry for them. That's a job for politicians or priests, those who always lie and promise things they don't know anything about. So, the most convenient thing to do, at least here, is to be obvious. Subtlety is too much for certain towns to handle. You can't feed caviar to chickens.

It happened that one afternoon, after making love and ending up as exhausted as if we'd completed the Tour de France, we were smoking a cigarette, and I said to her offhandedly, almost in jest:

"We ought to kill your husband."

And Griselda, without noticing the enormity of my words, as if the important thing was that I hadn't pronounced my friend's name, and without stopping to reproach me at all, not even surprised, simply said:

"And how would we do it?"