Posadas, Carmen: Little Indiscretions

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Nestor Chaffino, a pointy-moustachioed pastry chef who was privy to too many secrets, found himself standing in the dark at 4:00 in the morning among the frozen carcasses in Ernesto Teldi's 1980-s model Westinghouse cool room, the door having swung shut behind him with a click and, oddly enough, a laugh. At twenty degrees below zero, Nestor didn't manage to live until morning, when a Häagen Dazs-seeking employee finally opened the door, but he did have time to come to an imperfect understanding of the circumstances of his death. The fortune teller he had seen two weeks before had given him enough information to figure out some of it.

In Little Indiscretions Carmen Posadas pieces together the coincidences and peccadilloes that surrounded Nestor's demise--not his own failings, as he was a discreet confidant, and a loyal friend, and he ran a clean kitchen, but those of his acquaintances: from his friend Carlos's love affair with a picturesque woman to the skeletons in the Teldis' separate bedroom closets to the unwelcome longings of widower Serafin Tous.

Posadas's story is a good one, and the reader is eager, nearing the end, to discover which--if any--of the indiscretions uncovered in its course has culminated in Nestor's death by freezing. But I found the solution to Nestor's puzzle, the reason, finally, that the freezer door closed behind him, hard to believe. The story was also more difficult to follow than it might have been because the author tells it in disconnected chunks, going backward in time from Nestor's death, then forward, and incorporating memories of much older, yet still haunting, events.