(Summary of the penultimate episode: Plones, Borgovo and Pacheco discover that the double evil, Pachaco, has arrived in Miramar. But instead of the fleeing widow, he is accompanied by a gorgeous thirty-year-old woman. They promise to decipher the riddle of the double or die trying).
The three stooges were supported by Miramar. They passed Mickey’s Bakery, stoically avoiding the pancakes, went to the Nursery, trudged along the paved walkway, past the archway and the Afterlife encampments, to strategize. Apparently Najón, the detective specializing in doubles, had sent an encrypted email to Borgovo: in the Mar del Plata casino, a croupier had the antidote.
– An antidote to doubles? – Pacheco insisted suspiciously – Luck?
“He doesn’t detail,” Borgovo clarified. But a croupier doesn’t determine your luck: he just observes it. It must be something else.
-Where is the widow Estela? Pacheco suddenly wondered, worried. In the hustle and bustle of resolving the initial entelequia – the unexpected appearance of a subject equal to Pacheco, who deliberately defamed him with his mere behavior – perhaps they hadn’t sufficiently noticed the absence of a lady, lifelong companion in the hall, that he could go through circumstances unimaginably worse than harmful imitation: imprisonment or death.
“I fear we may see a solution to this concern,” said Plones, the meteorological expert.
Pacheco and Borgovo stopped on the spot, in the middle of the pier. A salt-faced, gray-haired fisherman, petrified by the wind, had just pulled a sea bass from the sea. His colleagues weren’t distracted, there were no celebrations or envious glances. A teenager, tanned by the sun, casual spectator of this game of chance against the waves and the depths, tried his first cigarette.
“The thirty-year-old is the widow Estela,” Plones amazed the other two henchmen. The existence of a double that erodes our already painful relationship with the world is not an everyday occurrence. I waited for the facts to prevail, and now I have no doubts: we are facing the wizard Fechor.
“But why should he pick on me?” Pacheco asked.
They got stuck in deep and silent reflection. The human voice had succumbed to the measured rhythm of the breeze and the crashing of the water against itself, forgotten by every bank.
It took so long to come to a conclusion that in the meantime the teenager put out his cigarette, borrowed a cane and took out a walker.
-We are the last three exponents of a universe in ruins – Pacheco replied: the tail uncovered by a screenwriter, which concludes the final episode of a comic strip-. Fechor, Pachaco, as he calls himself, must have known that he would unite all three of us in this effort. He wanted to defeat us in every way: the three of us together. And the three of us did nothing but comfort him. We don’t function as a group; that was his main trump card. Only the individual, the imitated himself, can neutralize it.
Borgovo and Plones nodded. But Pacheco and Borgovo waited for Plones’ resolution on the disappearance of the widow Estela.
-The magician Fechor, on this occasion Pachaco -explained Plones-, provisional cartoonist of May 5th (circumstances and events, even the passage of time, adapt to his purposes, depending on the identity he assumes), offers the widow Estela withdraws thirty years of age in exchange for a summer romance. After that, she will resume her documentary age. Fechor knows how to choose the one who was more beautiful in her youth. But something of real age remains in the rejuvenated lady – it’s not for Fechor or the person involved to decide. Only possibilities.
“That neither the croupier nor Najón thinks about it,” said Borgovo. Nor Fekhor. Perhaps the fishermen know how to handle it.
They emerged from the dock with some ideas, just as de Gaulle had had a certain idea of France: without certainties, but with direction and meaning. Quite the opposite of the case, meandering enemy of men of good will.
Pacheco’s furtive introduction into the corridor of tent 52, at the Sol de Miramar spa, in front of his double, in turn watched over by the yearning thirty-year-old Estela (who, in an act of infatuation, hadn’t taken the precaution of changing her name ( it wasn’t enough for her to be young and beautiful, she wanted to be her), it was as unexpected, both for the villain and for his partner, as the arrival of a tsunami.
Pacheco kindly challenged (kindness was fundamental in that open-air fight) to risk everything on a single ball of the rula: if Pachaco won, Pacheco never again. If Pacheco won, Pachaco / Fechor would break his spell (he never addressed him again, a true enemy of the three minions).
Since Pacheco was affable and direct, a smiling Pachaco accepted.
That night, in the Mar del Plata casino – the terracotta and beige exterior walls retained their legendary pigments even in the dark – Pacheco and Pachaco faced each other in tails. In the surrounding tables of perdition – baccarat, mus, bridge, poker, jackpot -, the ghosts of Isidoro and Cachorra levitated ethereal and invisible, an intemperate colonel Cañones (a) “Carcamán” who intruded into the persecuting structures of his nephew; the ghosts of Charly Menditegui and the Apulian “ninth”. But the imperceptible tour of the planet threatened to interrupt that duel between the two veterans, putting their very existence at risk.
They shook their right hands in a gesture of pact, accepting the consequences. Pachaco has disappeared. The microscopic dart of similar curare that Najón had provided them -through the croupier-, inserted harmlessly into Pacheco’s palm (this poison was harmless to the original subject) worked instantly. The three stooges had decided to win the game biblically: “By deception: thus you will make war”. For once, perhaps the only time, like the use of tails, they had defeated chance and his ally Fechor.
———————————- .————— ——————-
Pacheco discovered that the indifference of the residents in the corridor of tent 47 of the Bristol de Mar del Plata was not due to confusing him with the double: quite the opposite. They had preferred Pachaco and had stopped talking to him because they preferred the copy. That’s how the human race worked, the Three Stooges speculated.
After the battle, Plones and Borgovo returned to the capital in different buses. The Mar del Plata corridor continued to give Pacheco a cold shoulder, neighbors angry at his triumph. Sometimes, the hidden screenwriter felt that the real one was Pachaco. He went into exile in Miramar for the rest of the summer. The widow, disoriented by the abandonment of Pachaco / Fechor, remained in tent 52 of the Sol baths, unaware of her fate, clinging to that place as a guarantee of her new-found youth.
Pacheco saw the possibility and the romance began. The only consolation for an ontological defeat, the only antidote against humanity: the destiny of man and woman. What would be the part of the widow frozen in time?, he wondered.
END
(Here ends the story of The case of the carp 47)
POS
Source: Clarin
