Es que los niños dan mucha faena. Those were the first words I heard en route from Barcelona to Córdoba, spoken by the woman in the row in front of me to another across the aisle, a new acquaintance. Children are hell to raise, don’t you forget it. Both ladies were over eighty, and as I kept listening despite myself, thanks to their mixture of deaf shouting and joyful emphasis on certain syllables, I learned little by little of their pasts working in the fields, their kids uninterested in such labor who had moved to cities, these kids’ ambivalence about wanting kids of their own and their wait for the right person or right time, unaware or unconcerned, as they were, about the foreshortening of life as one approaches death. Over the course of these narratives, which processed mere existence into experience, the women intimated their comprehension of those who opted for something different, or something easier, or something that provided an illusion of ease. As they sighed for other times, and as we sped through the provinces of Andalucía moving like a bullet through the grey-brown terrains of Tarragona and Valencia and Ciudad Real, the mood grew ever more contemplative. At last they fell silent, the way I already was, thinking of my task.
When I arrived, I got a second wind with the help of a cappuccino and tostado at La Despensa in the Plaza Corredera, then for a few hours entered into the gaping mouths of churches and mosques, sending photographs of rainy streets to people in other countries who I knew or wanted to know better, living vicariously through me or indifferent to me, possibly a little of both. I got a haircut from a woman with an angry voice, though she seemed to be good at heart and her seeming irritation was only the local accent, as I eventually came to realize; on the way out, she offered me a jelly fruit candy from a huge glass dome.
Why was I here in this city of flamenquín, jamón serrano wrapped in pork loin, meat rolled in more meat? If anyone asked, and no one did until you, my intention was to research the history of a legal dispute that occurred in 1949, when Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen visited Buenos Aires and famously disagreed with Argentine jurist Carlos Cossio about what the law should do and be. The panel turned into a heated conversation, and the event has now been memorialized through further panels and books of analysis. Supposedly Cossio was Kelsen’s disciple, but as the conversation went on, it became clear that their views fundamentally diverged. The audience that day was mixed, with supporters and detractors for each, indistinguishable on the surface. I was able to track down a list of attendees, most of whom were no longer living, as well as a transcription of the debate. But I wanted something else, as I’d have told anybody who asked. Of course I’d prepared a story. I wanted to find someone who was present and could describe the texture of what really happened in that auditorium, narrating the tension from their perspective and giving an account from not the stage but the floor. Only then would I know if my ideas about the path law had taken were fixed to reality, or wildly astray.
For Kelsen, the law dealt with not the world that actually exists, but the norms of what ought to be. Kelsen was a neo-Kantian who believed in a pure law based on a structured hierarchy of rules about how humans should behave, as opposed to the way they really do. He focused on the ideal human, not humans found in the real world. Extended to the global order, his philosophy would involve a kind of Christian cosmopolitanism by which everyone abides, which in practice depends on an international police force to assure compliance with good behavior. This European view rooted in ideologies of Roman empire left ambiguous the question of who would dictate and uphold such an order. Perhaps, said his critics, such a force would even come to resemble a terrorist network.
Cossio, on the other hand, wanted an egological law that was intersubjective and empirical. Juridical norms are not categorical, and law is constantly remade and reinvented in the process of existence. There is no set of transcendental norms. Cossio wanted to bring back the psychology and sociology that Kelsen would discard, so everything prohibited would now be juridically permitted. Rather than purify law, he would restore the grit to it, bring back the interpersonal element, underscore the complexity of human conduct. He would focus on the behavior of the accused and the judge — especially the latter. The vital commitment of the judge meant she had to live out the consequences of pronouncements which would double back on and define her fate, a notion pinned to a certain existentialist concept of authenticity. Cossio’s views, said his critics, approached literature in their ideas of personhood and their nuanced distinctions between inner essence and representation, with only the latter in view but the former a hidden presence.
This is precisely what attracted me. The romantic ambition I harboured was not to rewrite the history of writing or relive the history of living, but to retrace the history of law, to challenge the supposed firm architecture of structures and norms beneath the surface of history by examining specific crucial moments of which the Kelsen-Cossio debate would be one. Some of my leads proved elusive, but I did have firm details about two audience members. One was a criminal who was in jail or had been recently, not in the city but deep in the provinces. The other lived in the south of Spain, in Andalucía. As you already know, I finally contacted the second. She answered my long, florid email with a few spare and almost hostile sounding phrases that nevertheless agreed to an interview.
I had a few hours to snuff out before I made my way to her neighborhood. When the bookseller at El Laberinto (Ronda de Isasa, 4) saw me admiring a first edition of Rilke’s Historias del Buen Dios, translated by Marcos Altama, with its story dedicated to the law called “Cancion de la justicia”, he told me I needed to carry on my journey to Ronda. “Rilke lived there for two months and planned to kill himself, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. When he looked out at the mountains and the canyon and the beautiful Spanish fir trees, he fell in love with them, saying he had at last discovered the city of his dreams: “Everywhere I have sought the city of my dreams / and at last I have found it in Ronda.” The bookseller kindly gave me a booklet about tenderness by a Greek modernist, along with a few slim volumes by local poets. I began to read them with a glass of wine beside the Gualdalquivir, where I observed a man and a woman circle past two or three times, doing a poor job of disguising their true nature as undercover police. Finally the time came for our appointment in the flamenco bar.
It hadn’t been my intention to meet there, but when I chose the place I’d assumed it would be a café and nothing more. At first it was quiet, then out of nowhere live music struck up, performed by a man who sweated as he attacked his guitar, in a hoarse voice, with a tone halfway between Amaya and El Cigalá, belting out the lyrics to “Lágrimas negras”. He was genuinely crying, or seemed to be. Ay, and in his Guadalquivir the gypsies washed clothes, the children on the banks saw boats pass by, and all had the bittersweetness of lemon water. And although she, his beloved saint, had abandoned him, in dreams he showered her with blessings, and if he caressed her face she’d have to give him a kiss. Yes, I knew the song well, I’d listened to it many times, but the woman with me had really listened to it, as I now saw. Her eyes welled up, and when the man came around with his hat to collect coins, she hugged and thanked him effusively, to which he replied with a self-deprecating joke.
When he was gone she began to speak, quiet yet deliberate. At the beginning, her way of moving had been firm and professional, but now her voice took on a new softness, speaking as if from inside her story. As she drew into herself, she became more and more distant, until she didn’t seem to be talking to me anymore but to the corner where we found ourselves, quiet again after the performer’s departure, with faded posters and a lone buzzing fly . . .
I listened and faithfully recorded everything she said, further evidence for my historical account of the sunset of law’s empire. We drank glass after glass of wine as the sky went black outside, and although the Guadalquivir out the window a few metres away was now invisible, its presence remained a secret current. As a counterpart to this darkening, parts of her story came to light. “I don’t want to talk about the debate,” she said, “I want to talk about what came after. I left the auditorium a convinced Kelsenite, amazed by the beauty of his vision of the law that assumed a crystalline structure behind human relations and history. I myself was studying law at the time, though I spent many nights with friends talking and drinking wine, a bit like this but with the intensity of youth.
One night in a bar, I got more drunk than usual. I fell over, I shouted. The owners said I was making a scene and tried to kick me out, along with the boy there with me. I can’t explain it now, but I spat in thef bartender’s face. I shouldn’t have done it, but I did. A very unfeminine act that enraged him. To top it off, I grabbed a gold cat statue on the way out, the kind with a tiny waving paw, and flung it away somewhere into an empty plot. We weren’t careful and didn’t try to run away or hide our identities, and the next day we were quickly traced. Apparently the cat had illicit substances in its belly, something we hadn’t known. The case escalated and reached the administration of the law school, and threats were made saying I’d be kicked out of the institution. Other witnesses came forward, my enemies, claiming they’d seen me swipe a bread loaf or a book from an outdoor basket, the minor scandals of student years. The judge pardoned me, thank god.
The years went by and I matured, more or less, or at least I figured out how to put on the robes of seriousness. The disguise of a female professional. Skirt length and heel height and haircut and angle of eyeliner are important. It shouldn’t have to be this way, but it is, that’s the reality of the world. I advanced in my career, another costume, even if my inner obsessions lay elsewhere. I began to take on more political cases involving border disputes, violent conflicts, terrorism and civil disobedience, and one day she came before me, the judge who had once saved me. Now the burden was on me to judge her. Her case was complex. She’d been involved in a robbery that made my own case of belligerence and petty theft pale in significance. This was on the grand scale, a national bank heist gone wrong. In the midst of the confrontation, a police officer was killed, not by her but by one of her accomplices.
I looked into the eyes of this woman and recognized her, this judge who’d let me off so lightly. What hard times had led her to this state of affairs? Soon enough I found out: her parents had recently died, her partner had abandoned her, she’d lost her major source of income and got involved with anarchist elements who thought destroying the banking sector could reinitiate humanity . . . where I’d grown older and more mature, she’d grown more romantic in the simplest of ways. She had clearly suffered and had fallen in the world, as they say. I could see it in her eyes. There were all kinds of mitigating circumstances. But the decision came down to me as judge, and I made my choice. I gave her the harshest possible sentence, lasting decades. She was locked away.
After that, I began to see her everywhere, in the windows of every building, in the lights of every tower. All of them were her eyes, boring into me. I couldn’t bear it, so eventually I left that city and came to this one, which somehow makes me feel that I can return to a history before time itself. As if past and future don’t exist. This place moves according to other rhythms, ones some claim were brought to Spain from northern India. Why did I do it? The fact is, even though I left that auditorium after the Kelsen - Cossio debate firmly convinced by the universal application of norms, after that episode I was not so sure. The events rattled me. A judge can follow the rules and make decisions that are legally respectable, but all the same be driven by suspect motives that provoke horrifying outcomes. Sometimes I even wonder if she was right and there’s a degree to which illegality is necessary, a time when the legal, in order to adhere to the spirit of the law, requires a venture into the criminal.”
Here the woman stopped, and said she was done speaking. That there was nothing else to add. I myself had lots of questions, but held my tongue. My thoughts were confused, and after saying goodbye I walked on to the Bar Rafalete, with its long narrow windows draped in white curtains like wedding dresses, and its floor covered in Islamic designs. I ordered a vegetable risotto and glass of red wine to top off the drunkenness I already felt. What time was it? Around 10pm or so, I’d say, though I had stopped looking at the clock some time before, and by that point existed only in the time of music, beyond the law.
Good music makes you forget or find irrelevant everything outside a song. A couple entered with small children, a boy and a girl. They were growing up sophisticated, surrounded by wines, beers, cocktails and flirtations from a young age. This feels like a Latin American city, I thought a few minutes later. Some minutes after that, it occurred to me that I was paying for this meal with pieces of paper decorated in faded designs, which formed part of a supposed pure system with other pieces of paper, in a system controlled by nobody I could point a finger at, stab or hug. Again my glass was empty. When finally I stumbled into the night, I saw a woman with purple hair extracting money from a cashpoint. She had on a tanktop, miniskirt, fishnets and a fierce look. She had big eyes and interesting tattoos and a face that moved expressively as she mumbled an insult or mantra. “That’s a local celebrity,” a passing stranger said to me, for no reason I could discern. “Raquel Winchester. But careful, not every lamb is so innocent.” He vanished. I don’t know who he was, or if he was trying to give me a message I was incapable of understanding. I was tired, and thought about sitting on a bench for a while and even drifting off , but the warning put me on the alert. I started to walk more quickly, but a pair of strong arms was already folding around me. It was a man, and his embrace wasn’t one of love.
“By the way, she did know the woman she condemned was after her now, years later.” He said that from the front seat of the car, and I didn’t say anything because the cloth was already crammed in my mouth. “The singer tipped her off. Anyway, she figured it out. She knew the importance of the debate as well as you, that if it could be reconstructed it would explain her court decisions and everything in her life to date.”
You know I’ve given you all these details not voluntarily, but out of compulsion. Even so, their very irrelevance proves I wasn’t the one who killed her. Her corpse was found in that bar, I know, but I wasn’t its author. It’s true I considered it. She said she adhered to the law, but she interpreted it against its spirit. From my cell I made arrangements, which took a long time, many years. But at last I managed it. She didn’t know that I’d been released, or didn’t want to know. Or maybe she knew and accepted anyway, thinking there was no reason to postpone the inevitable.
My plan was to reach Platform 4, the train to Sevilla, where I’d walk on the banks of Triana, listen to the music of Los Delincuentes, catch the football match between Valencia and Betis drinking Cruzcampo, and give someone a pink carnation on Sant Jordi. I’d get there in a few hours and rest for a while after the deed. But I never carried it out. I never acted, never made it to Sevilla. Why did I spare her? Talking to her, I realized a person can change. Reliability has to do with regular, uniform behavior, but her actions didn’t fit that description. My own reaction wasn’t foreseeable either. A legal fiction is an assertion accepted as true for legal purposes, though it may be untrue or unproven, a kind of common sense or common law. And reliability is the very greatest legal fiction. In the absence of evidence otherwise, the assumption is that, just as older people die before younger ones, most people are reasonable. That we do what is in our self-interest and say what we mean and pursue our stated aims to their ends. That behavior is more or less predictable across a life. That we remain the same person as we move across space and time. And that because of this, there is a law and a set of norms that apply to everybody. The law is seductive in its promise of order and justice, but these assumptions of stability are deeply troubling. Truth is, we’d both diverged from expectation. I’d begun to doubt my own hate, nurtured over years in that prison. In my head I’d imagined coming here so many times, building up castles from my lack of hard facts, from our brush in the courtroom, from newspaper articles and hearsay and information telephoned to me by detectives. In time my idea grew and expanded so much it took the place of reality. A stain that seeped into everything, implacable.
It shocked me to find her so different from expectation. Don’t think I’m saying this to delay things. It’s all equally relevant, or irrelevant. I know there are too many extraneous details scribbled here I could have cut to adhere to the framework of a perfect, ordered narrative. But this is lived experience. I don’t know which detail altered my conduct and emotion, and in the end, changed my view. She’d been a Kelsenite, I a Cossio supporter. Somehow I think we ended up respecting one another. She was free now, and I was free.
No, of course not. She is dead now, and I’m captive. I thought I’d make her apologize then finish her off, but listening to her words, I was surprised to find — I forgave her. I thought I was free, but my last rigid belief was precisely this hate for an exponent of pure law. To get rid of that was the true freedom. You won’t forgive me though, will be able to do with me as you like. What evidence can I martial? I’d been prepared to extract her remorse by any means necessary, so her voluntary contrition was a mere shortcut, albeit a relief. Is it possible that she killed herself and laid the blame at my door as a final masterstroke? I’d never do the same, confess to a stranger just like that.
It’s only under duress you’ve drawn these words from me. And the worst fiction of all, the one that tomorrow the newspapers will no doubt trumpet, is law in its purity convinced me to say this. Have it your way. Here is my voluntary admission. My statement. I swear that everything said and written is true. Maybe she anticipated this. Maybe she saw the way her actions from years ago had created these effects. Maybe she now found her love for pure law strange, just as those women on the train no longer identified with the needs and desires of the children who came from their bodies, though they still loved them. Maybe she did what Rilke could not at Ronda, knowing that even if I hesitated to act, others would not. Maybe, yes, that’s why she gave me that gift of such enormous and impure love, her story with those black tears.