1

On a Saturday in May, 1953, two years before the events in Barracas, a tall, stoop-shouldered youngster was walking along one of the footpaths in the Parque Lezama.

He sat down on a bench, near the statue of Ceres, and remained there, doing nothing, lost in thought. “Like a boat drifting on a vast lake that is apparently calm yet agitated by currents far beneath the surface,” Bruno thought when, after the death of Alejandra, Martín recounted to him, in a confused and fragmentary way, some of the episodes connected with that story. And he not only thought this, but understood it—indeed he did!—since that seventeen-year-old Martín reminded him of his own forebear, the remote Bruno whom he glimpsed at times across a distance of thirty years, a nebulous territory enriched and devastated by love, disillusionment, and death. He had a melancholy image of him in that old park, with the dying afternoon light lingering on the modest statues, on the pensive bronze lions, on the paths covered with limp, dead leaves. At this hour when little murmurs begin to make themselves heard, when loud noises fade into the distance little by little, just as overloud conversations in the sickroom of a man fatally ill die away; and then the splash of the fountain, the footsteps of a man walking off, the chirping of birds endlessly stirring about trying to settle themselves comfortably in their nests, the distant shout of a child, become audible, bring with them a strange solemnity. A mysterious event takes place at this time: darkness falls. And everything is different: the trees, the benches, the pensioners lighting a little bonfire of dead leaves, a ship’s siren at Dársena Sur, the far-off echo of the city. That hour when everything enters upon a more profound, more enigmatic existence. And a more fearful one as well for the solitary beings who at that hour continue to sit, silent and pensive, on the benches of the plazas and parks of Buenos Aires.

Martín picked up a piece of a newspaper someone had thrown away, a piece in the shape of a country: a nonexistent but possible country. Mechanically he read the words referring to Suez, to tradesmen being sent off to prison in Villa Devoto, to what was described as Gheorghiu’s imminent arrival. On the other side, half spattered with mud, was a photograph: PERON VISITS THE TEATRO DISCEPOLO. Lower down was a news item reporting that a war veteran had hacked his wife and four other persons to death with an ax.

He threw the paper down: “Almost nothing ever happens,” Bruno was to say to him years later, “even when the plague ravages an entire region of India.” Once again, he saw his mother’s painted face saying: “You exist because I was careless.” Courage, yes, courage—that was what she had lacked. Otherwise he would have ended up in the sewer.

Sewer-mother.

“When all of a sudden,” Martín said, “I had the sensation that somebody was standing behind me looking at me.”

For a few seconds he sat there absolutely rigid: a tense, expectant rigidity, as when, in the darkness of one’s bedroom, one thinks one hears a suspicious creak. For he had felt this sensation on the nape of his neck many times before, but usually it was simply annoying or disagreeable; since (he explained) he had always considered himself ugly and ridiculous-looking; and the mere idea that someone might be studying him or simply observing him from behind his back bothered him; this was the reason why he always sat in the seat farthest to the rear in streetcars and buses, or entered a movie house only when the house lights had already been lowered. Whereas at that moment what he felt was something different. Something—he hesitated as though searching for the right word—something disquieting, something similar to that suspicious creak we hear, or think we hear, in the dead of night.

He made an effort to keep his eyes trained on the statue, but in reality he could no longer see it: his eyes were turned inward, as when we think of past things and try to reconstruct dim memories that require total concentration.

“Someone is trying to communicate with me,” he thought in agitation.

The sensation of feeling himself observed exacerbated, as always, his awareness of the things he was ashamed of: he saw himself as ugly, awkwardly proportioned, dull-witted. Even his seventeen years seemed grotesque to him.

“But what if all that isn’t true?” the girl who was at that moment behind his back was to say to him two years later; an enormous span of time—Bruno thought—because it was not measured in months or even in years, but rather, as is peculiar to this class of beings, in spiritual catastrophes and days of utter loneliness and inexpressible sadness; days that lengthen and become distorted, like shadowy phantoms on the walls of time. “If it’s in no way true,” and she scrutinized him the way a painter observes his model, drawing nervously on her eternal cigarette.

“Wait,” she said.

“You’re something besides just a nice kid,” she said.

“You’re an interesting young man who has real depth, and besides that you’re a physical type that’s extremely rare.”

“Yes, of course,” Martín agreed, smiling bitterly, as he thought “you see, I’m right,” because all that is the sort of thing people say when you’re not a nice kid, and all the rest really doesn’t matter.

“But wait, I tell you,” she answered in an irritated tone of voice. “You’re tall and have a very narrow build, like an El Greco figure.”

Martín grunted.

“Be quiet, I tell you,” she went on indignantly, like a learned scholar who is interrupted or distracted by trivialities at the very moment that he is just about to come up with the earnestly sought-for definitive formula. And again, drawing greedily on her cigarette, as was her habit when she was concentrating, she added with a furious frown:

“But, you know: it’s as though you’d suddenly changed your plan to be a Spanish ascetic, because your lips have gotten sensual. And what’s more, there are those melting, liquid eyes of yours. Be quiet, I know that everything I’m saying isn’t to your liking, but let me finish. I think women must find you attractive, despite what you imagine. Then too there’s your expression. A mixture of purity, melancholy, and repressed sensuality. But besides that … wait a minute … An anxiety in your eyes, below that forehead of yours that looks like a balcony jutting out. But I’m not certain that all that is what pleases me about you. I think it’s something else …. The fact that your spirit dominates your flesh, as though you were permanently standing at attention. Anyway, pleases may not be the right word; perhaps you surprise me, or astonish me, or irritate me, I don’t know …. Your spirit ruling over your body like an austere dictator.

“As though Pius XII were obliged to keep order in a brothel. Come on, don’t get angry—I know you’re an angelical being. Besides, as I’ve already said, I don’t know whether that’s what pleases me about you or whether it’s what I hate most.”

He tried his best to keep his eyes fixed on the statue. He said that at that moment he felt fear and fascination—fear of turning around and a fascinating desire to do just that. He remembered that once, standing at the very edge of the Devil’s Gorge in Humahuaca, contemplating the black abyss at his feet, an irresistible force had suddenly impelled him to leap to the other side. And at that moment something similar was happening to him: it was as though he felt impelled to leap across a dark abyss “to the other side of his existence.” And then that unconscious yet irresistible force made him turn his head.

After having caught no more than a glimpse of her, he immediately averted his eyes, his gaze coming to rest on the statue again. He was terrified by human beings: they seemed to him not only unpredictable, but above all perverse and filthy. Statues on the other hand brought him a quiet happiness; they belonged to a beautiful, clean, ordered world.

But it was impossible for him to see the statue: his eyes continued to retain the fleeting image of the unknown girl, the blue patch of her skirt, the black of her long straight hair, the paleness of her face, riveted on him. These were simply patches shaded in, as in a painter’s quick sketch, without a single detail that might indicate a specific age or a definite type. But he knew—he emphasized the word—that something extremely important had just happened in his life: not so much because of what he had seen, but because of the powerful message he had silently received.

“You’ve told me so many times, Bruno. That things don’t always happen, that things almost never happen. Someone swims across the Dardanelles, a man assumes the presidency in Austria, the plague ravages an entire region in India, and none of all that has any importance to a person. You yourself have told me that that’s horrible, but that’s the way it is. On the other hand, at that moment I had the distinct feeling that something had just happened. Something that would change my life.”

He could not say how long a time elapsed, but he remembered that after an interval that seemed extremely long to him he was aware that the girl was rising to her feet and going off. Then as she walked away he took a good look at her: she was tall, she was carrying a book in her left hand, and she was making her way along with a certain nervous energy. Without even being aware of what he was doing, Martín got up and began to walk in the same direction. But almost immediately, on realizing what was happening, and afraid that she might turn her head and see him behind her, following her, he halted. As he watched, he saw her walking uptown along the Calle Brasil toward Balcarce.

She soon disappeared from sight.

He slowly made his way back to his bench and sat down.

“But I was no longer the same person as before,” he said to Bruno. “And I never would be again.”

2

He was excited for days afterward. Because he knew he would see her again; he was certain she would return to the same spot.

During all that time he did nothing but think of the unknown girl, and each afternoon he went back and sat on that same bench, with the same mixed feelings of fear and hope.

Then one day, thinking that the whole thing had been utterly absurd, he decided to go to La Boca instead of hurrying yet again, like an idiot, to that bench in the Parque Lezama. And he had already gone as far as the Calle Almirante Brown when suddenly he began walking back toward the usual place; slowly at first, and as though hesitating out of timidity; and then faster and faster, finally breaking into a run, as though he were going to be late for a meeting at a time and place already agreed on.

Yes, she was there. He could see her in the distance walking toward him.

He halted, his heart pounding.

The girl walked toward him and when she reached his side she said to him:

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

Martín felt weak in the knees all of a sudden.

“For me?” he asked, his face reddening.

He didn’t dare look at her, but he was nonetheless aware that she was wearing a high-necked black sweater and a skirt that was also black, or perhaps very dark blue (he couldn’t be certain which, and in fact it was not at all important). It seemed to him that her eyes were black.

“Black eyes?” Bruno commented.

No, of course not: that had been his first impression. But when he saw her for the second time he was surprised to note that her eyes were dark green. Perhaps that first impression had been due to the dim light, or to the timidity that had prevented him from looking directly at her, or probably to both things at once. He was also able to observe, on meeting her this second time, that the long straight hair that he had thought was coal black in fact had reddish glints in it. Later on he filled in her portrait little by little: full lips and a large mouth, too large perhaps, with lines running downward from the corners, suggesting bitterness and disdain.

“Imagine explaining to me what Alejandra looks like, what her face is like, how the lines around her mouth are!” Bruno said to himself. And the thought came to him that it was precisely those disdainful lines and a certain dark gleam in her eyes that particularly distinguished Alejandra’s face from that of Georgina, whom he really loved. Because he now realized that it had been she whom he had loved, for when he had thought he was falling in love with Alejandra it was her mother that he had been seeking in her, like those medieval monks who endeavored to decipher the original text beneath the corrections and restorations and substitutions of one word for another. And this folly had been the cause of sad misunderstandings with Alejandra, since at times he had experienced the same sensation that one might feel on returning to one’s childhood home after many years’ absence, trying to open a door in the night, and finding oneself confronted by a wall. Alejandra’s face was almost the exact replica of Georgina’s of course: the same black hair with reddish glints framing it, the same gray-green eyes, the same large mouth, the same Mongolian cheekbones, the same pale matte skin. But that “almost” was unbearable, so subtle and so nearly imperceptible that it made the illusion all the more profound and all the more painful. For it is true that bones and flesh are not enough to constitute a face, he thought, and that is why it is infinitely less physical than the body: it is characterized by the look in the eyes, the expression of the mouth, the wrinkles, by all that conjunction of subtle attributes whereby the soul reveals itself by way of the flesh. This is the reason why, when somebody dies, his body is at that very instant suddenly transformed into something different, so different that we say “he doesn’t seem like the same person,” despite his having the same bones and the same envelope of flesh as a second before, a second before that mysterious moment when the soul abandons the body, which thereupon lies there as dead as a house when the beings who inhabit it, who above all suffered and loved each other in it, leave it forever. For it is not the walls, nor the roof, nor the floor that give a house its unique character, but rather those beings who bring it alive with their conversations, their laughter, their loves and hates; beings who impregnate the house with something immaterial yet profound, with something as far removed from the material as is the smile on a face, even though this something is expressed through the intermediary of physical objects such as carpets, books, or colors. For although the pictures we see on the walls, the colors in which the doors and windowframes have been painted, the figures in the carpets, the flowers in the rooms, the records and books are material objects (as lips and eyebrows are corporeal), they are nonetheless manifestations of the soul, since the soul is unable to manifest itself to our material eyes save by way of matter; and this is part of the soul’s fragility but at the same time one of its curious subtleties.

“What’s that you say?” Bruno asked.

“I came to see you,” Martín said, repeating what Alejandra had said.

She sat down on the grass. And Martín must have had a look of utter astonishment on his face because she added:

“Don’t you believe in telepathy? It would surprise me if you didn’t—you look to be exactly the type that does. When I saw you on the bench those other days, I was certain you’d eventually turn around. And wasn’t that what happened? Well, I was also sure you’d remember me this time.”

Martín said nothing. How many times scenes of this sort were to repeat themselves later: her reading his thoughts and him listening to her in silence! He had a distinct feeling that he knew her, that feeling of having seen someone in a previous life that we sometimes experience, a sensation that resembles reality as dream events resemble those of waking life. And much time was to go by before he would understand why Alejandra seemed in some vague way to be someone he already knew, and then Bruno smiled to himself again.

Martín looked at her in a daze: her black hair against her pale, matte skin, her tall angular body; there was something about her that was reminiscent of models who appear in fashion magazines, but at the same time she had about her a harshness, a hint of hidden depths not found in such women. Only rarely, indeed almost never, was he to see signs of a gentle side of her, of a sweetness considered to be characteristic of women and above all of mothers. Her smile was cruel and sarcastic, her laughter violent, like her movements and her temperament in general: “It was a great effort for me to learn to laugh,” she said to him one day, “but I never laugh inside.”

“Nonetheless,” Martín added, looking at Bruno with that sensual pleasure that lovers take in obliging others to recognize the attributes of the creature they love, “it’s quite true, isn’t it, that men—and even women—turn around to stare at her?”

And as Bruno nodded, smiling inwardly at this naive expression of pride, he reflected that indeed this was quite true, that everywhere and always Alejandra attracted men’s attention, and women’s too. For different reasons, however, because Alejandra could not bear women, she detested them, she maintained that they were a contemptible lot and insisted that she could be friends only with certain men; and women in turn detested her with the same intensity, though for reasons that were precisely the opposite of hers, a phenomenon that aroused in Alejandra little more than the most scornful indifference. Although surely they detested her without ceasing to admire in secret that face that Martín called exotic though, ironically, it was really quite typically Argentine, for this type of face is common in South American countries when the skin color and features of a white are conjoined with the high cheekbones and slanting eyes of the Indian. And those deep, troubled eyes, that large disdainful mouth, that mixture of feelings and contradictory passions that one sensed in Alejandra’s features (a mixture of anxiety and ennui, of violence and a sort of remoteness, of almost fierce sensuality and a kind of vague, profound loathing of her most intimate self) all conspired to give her a face impossible to forget.

Martín also said that even if nothing had ever happened between the two of them, even if he had been with her or talked with her only once, apropos of some triviality or other, he still would have been unable to forget her face all the rest of his life. And Bruno was of the opinion that this was quite true, for it was more than just a pretty face. Or better put, one could not be certain that she was pretty. It was something else about her. One had only to walk along the street with her for it to be evident that she was vastly attractive to men. She had a certain air about her, at once distracted and intense, as though she were thinking of something that was making her anxious or gazing deep within herself, and he was certain that anyone who chanced to meet her must surely have asked himself: who is this woman, what is she searching for, what is she thinking?

That first meeting was decisive for Martín. Until that moment women to him were either the pure and heroic virgins of legend, or superficial, frivolous beings, malicious gossip-mongers, selfish hypocrites, grasping deceivers. (“Like his own mother,” Bruno thought that Martín thought.) And then suddenly he found himself with a woman who fitted into neither of these two molds, molds that until that meeting he had believed were the only ones. For a long time he was deeply disturbed by this novelty, this unexpected type of woman who on the one hand seemed to possess some of the virtues of that heroic model that had so excited him in the books he read as an adolescent and on the other hand gave signs of that sensuality he believed to be characteristic of the sort of female he detested. And even after Alejandra was dead, even after having had such an intense relationship with her, he could not contrive to see into that great enigma with any degree of clarity; and he used to ask himself what he would have done at that second meeting had he been able to guess what she was like, what later events revealed her to be. Would he have fled?

Bruno looked at him in silence: “Yes, what would you have done?”

Martín stared intently at him in turn and then after a few seconds he said:

“I suffered so much on account of her that many times I was on the verge of suicide. Yet even if I had known beforehand everything that was to happen to me later, I would still have hastened to her side.”

“Naturally,” Bruno thought. Moreover, what other man, whether a mere youngster or a mature adult, foolish or wise, would not have done the same thing?

“She fascinated me like a dark abyss,” Martín added, “and if I was in despair it was precisely because I loved her and needed her. How can something to which we are indifferent plunge us into despair?”

He remained lost in thought for a long time and then returned to his obsession: stubbornly remembering (trying to remember) the moments spent with her, as lovers reread the old love letter that they keep in their pocket, when the creature who penned it has long since departed forever; and like such a letter, memories gradually aged and fell apart, entire sentences got lost in the folds of his soul, the ink grew fainter and fainter, and with it the beautiful, bewitching words that had created the magic spell. And then it was necessary to strain his memory as one strains one’s eyes and brings them closer to the folded and refolded paper that has turned yellow. Yes, yes, she had asked him where he lived, as she plucked a little weed and began to nibble on the stem (a fact he remembered clearly). And then she had asked him who he lived with. With his father, he answered. And after a moment’s hesitation, he had added that he also lived with his mother. “And what does your father do?” Alejandra had asked him then, a question he did not answer immediately, and then finally he replied that he was a painter. But on uttering the word painter his voice quavered just a bit, as though it were fragile, and he feared that his tone had attracted her attention, as though he were cautiously making his way across a glass roof. And Alejandra had doubtless noted something strange about that word, for she leaned toward him and looked at him closely.

“You’re blushing,” she remarked.

“Who, me?” Martín said.

And as always happens in such circumstances, his face grew redder still.

“What’s the matter?” she insisted, the little stem of the weed hanging from her lips.

“Nothing. Why do you ask?”

There was a moment’s silence, and then Alejandra lay down on her back on the grass again, nibbling at the little stem once more. And as Martín watched a battle between cruisers made of cotton in the sky overhead, she reflected that there was no reason for him to feel ashamed of his father’s failure.

A ship’s siren blew down at Dársena, and Martín thought “Coral Sea,” “Marquesas.” But he said:

“Alejandra’s an odd name.”

“And what about your mother?” she asked.

Martín sat down and began to pull up little tufts of grass. He found a little pebble and seemed to be studying it, like a geologist.

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“I asked about your mother.”

“My mother is a sewer,” Martín answered in a low voice.

Alejandra sat halfway up, leaning on one elbow and looking at him closely. Martín sat there in silence, still examining the little pebble, his jaws tightly clenched, thinking sewer, sewermother. And then he added:

“I’ve always been a bother to her. Ever since I was born.”

He felt as though fetid poison gases had been injected into his soul at thousands of pounds of pressure. Swelling more dangerously each year, it could no longer be contained inside his body and threatened at any moment to pour out a flood of filth from between the cracks.

“She keeps screaming ‘Why was I so careless!’ ”

As though all his mother’s garbage had been continually accumulating in his soul, under pressure, he thought, as Alejandra lay there leaning on one elbow and looking at him. And words like fetus, bath, creams, womb, abortion floated in his mind, like sticky, stinking refuse on stagnant, polluted waters. And then, as though talking to himself, he added that for a long time he had believed that his mother hadn’t nursed him for lack of milk, until one day she screamed at him that she hadn’t done so in order not to ruin the shape of her breasts and explained to him that she had done everything possible to abort herself, short of getting her womb scraped, and that she hadn’t done because she hated feeling pain as much as she adored eating caramels and chocolates, reading radio magazines, and listening to nice hummable tunes. Though she liked classical music and Viennese waltzes—and Prince Kalenderfn1 too, she said, who unfortunately wasn’t around any more. So Martín could imagine how happily she had greeted his birth, after having fought against having him for months, jumping rope like a boxer and punching herself in the belly, the reason why (his mother screamed at him in explanation) he’d turned out to be more or less defective from birth. Only a miracle had kept him from ending up in the sewer, she added.

He fell silent, examined the little pebble once more, and then flung it far away.

“That’s doubtless the reason why I always associate her with the word sewer when I think of her.”

He laughed that laugh of his again.

Alejandra looked at him, amazed that he still had the courage to laugh. But on seeing his tears she doubtless understood that what she had been hearing was not a laugh but rather (as Bruno maintained) that extraordinary sound that in certain human beings is produced on very rare occasions and that, because of the uncertainties of language perhaps, we persist in classifying as laughter or as weeping; for it is the result of a monstrous combination of facts that are sufficiently painful to produce weeping (and even disconsolate weeping) and of events grotesque enough to make the person want to transform those tears into laughter. There thus results a sort of terrible hybrid manifestation, perhaps the most terrible one a human being is capable of, and perhaps the one most difficult to offer any consolation for, in view of the complex mixture of feelings that provokes it. So that as a consequence we often experience in the face of it the same contradictory feeling as when we are confronted with certain hunchbacks or cripples. Martín’s sufferings had kept piling up one by one on his child’s back like a growing, disproportionate, grotesque burden, so that he constantly felt that he must move carefully and cautiously, proceeding with every step like an acrobat obliged to traverse an abyss on a tightrope while carrying on his back a bulky, stinking burden, tremendous loads of garbage and excrement, along with a pack of howling monkeys, and little jouncing, jeering tumblers, who as he concentrated all his attention on traversing the abyss, the black abyss of his existence, without falling, screamed hurtful things at him, mocked him, and set up an infernal clamor of insults and abuse up there on top of the load of garbage and excrement. A spectacle that (in his opinion) ought to awaken in those witnessing it a mixture of pain and enormous, monstrous hilarity, seeing how tragicomic it was; the reason he did not consider himself to be possessed of the right to abandon himself to pure and simple weeping, even in the face of a being such as Alejandra, a being he seemed to have been waiting a century for; yet on the other hand he thought he had the right, the almost professional right of a clown who has had the greatest possible misfortune overtake him, to convert that weeping into a wry grin. Nonetheless, as he had gone on confessing those few key words to Alejandra, he felt a sort of liberation and for an instant he thought that his grinning grimace might finally turn into a great, convulsive, tender fit of weeping as he fell into her arms, having managed to cross the abyss at last. And that is what he would have done, that is what he would have liked to do, for heaven’s sake, but he did not do so: all he did was bow his head very slightly and turn away to hide his tears.

3

But years later when Martín spoke with Bruno of that meeting, scarcely anything remained of it save disjointed phrases, the memory of an expression, of a caress, the melancholy siren of that unknown ship: like fragments of columns. And if any one sentence lingered in his memory, perhaps because of the surprise it had aroused in him, it was one she had uttered at that time, looking at him intently:

“You and I have something in common, something very important.”

Words that Martín heard with amazement, for what could he have in common with this prodigious creature?

Alejandra told him, finally, that she had to leave, but that some other time she would tell him many things, things—and this seemed even stranger to Martín—that she needed to tell him.

As they parted, she looked at him one more time, as though she were a doctor and he a patient, and added a few words that Martín was to remember forever after:

“Even though I think I shouldn’t ever see you again. But I’ll see you because I need you.”

The mere idea, the mere possibility that this girl might never see him again plunged him into despair. What did the reasons that Alejandra might have for not wanting to see him matter? What he wanted with a passion was to see her.

“Always, always,” he said fervently.

She smiled and answered:

“Yes, it’s because that’s the way you are that I need to see you.”

And Bruno thought that it would take Martín many years more to arrive at the probable meaning of those enigmatic words. And he also thought that if Martín had been older and more experienced at the time, words such as that, uttered by a girl of eighteen, would have left him dumbfounded. But they would also very soon have seemed natural to him, because she had been born mature, or had matured in her early childhood, at least in a certain sense; even though in other ways she gave the impression that she would never grow up: as though a little girl who still plays with dolls were at the same time capable of giving signs of the frightful wisdom of an old man; as though terrible events had precipitated her toward maturity and then toward death without her having had time to abandon the traits of childhood and adolescence once and for all.

On going their separate ways, after he had walked on a few steps he suddenly remembered or became aware that they had made no plans for meeting again. And turning around, he ran to Alejandra to tell her so.

“Don’t worry,” she answered. “I’ll always know how to find you.”

Without thinking those incredible words through and without daring to press the point, Martín turned away and walked off once more.

4

Following that meeting, he kept hoping day after day to see her again in the park. Then week after week. And finally, in despair now, month after month. What could have happened to her? Why didn’t she come? Could she be ill? He didn’t even know her name. The earth seemed to have swallowed her up. He reproached himself a thousand times for not even having asked her what her name was. He knew nothing about her. Such stupidity on his part was incomprehensible. He even reach the point of suspecting that the whole thing had been a hallucination or a dream. Hadn’t he fallen asleep on that bench in the Parque Lezama more than once? His dream might have been so vivid that it would later seem to be a real, lived experience. Then he dismissed this idea because he remembered that there had been two meetings. But then he reflected that this didn’t argue against the whole thing being a dream, since both meetings might have been episodes in a single dream. He had no material object belonging to her that would dispel his doubts, but in the end he convinced himself that all of it had indeed happened and that what was happening now was that he was merely being the idiot that he had always thought of himself as being.

In the beginning he was miserable, thinking of her night and day. He tried to draw her face, but it came out as no more than a hazy impression, since during the two meetings he had not dared look at her closely save at a few rare moments; hence his sketches were vague and lifeless, resembling many of his previous sketches in which he had drawn the ideal, legendary virgins who peopled his imaginary love-life. But though his drawings were vapid and ill-defined, his memory of the meeting was extremely vivid and he had the impression of having been with someone very strong, with very pronounced traits of character, someone as unhappy and as lonely as he himself was. Nevertheless the face was only a tenuous blur. And in the end the whole thing was more or less like a spiritualist séance, in which a dim, ghostly materialization suddenly gives clear, sharp taps on the table.

And when his hope was nearly exhausted, he remembered the two or three key phrases of their second meeting. “I think I shouldn’t ever see you again. But I’ll see you because I need you.” And that other one: “Don’t worry. I’ll always know how to find you.”

Phrases—Bruno thought—that Martín interpreted in the most favorable light possible, as a promise of certain happiness, without noticing, at the time at least, how self-centered they also were.

And it was true of course—Martín said he then thought—that she was a strange girl, and why should a creature of that sort see him a day or so later or the following week? Wasn’t it quite possible that weeks and even months might go by without her feeling the need to meet him? These reflections raised his spirits again. But later, in moments of depression, he would say to himself: “I’ll never see her again; she’s dead; perhaps she’s killed herself; she seemed desperate and anxious.” He remembered his own thoughts of suicide then. Why shouldn’t Alejandra not have experienced something similar? Hadn’t she in fact said that they resembled each other, that there was something profound that they had in common and that thus made them alike? Couldn’t an obsession with suicide be what she had been hinting at when she spoke of this resemblance between them? But then he reflected that even if she had wanted to kill herself she would have come looking for him before going through with it; not to have done so would have been a sort of trick on her part that seemed inconceivable to him.

How many desolate days he spent there on that park bench! The entire autumn went by and winter came. Winter ended, spring began (it appeared for a moment here and there, fleeting and frigid, like a person peeking out to see how things are going, and then, little by little, showing itself more forthrightly and for longer and longer periods of time) and slowly the sap in the trees began to run more warmly and energetically and leaves suddenly began to appear; and finally in a few weeks the last tag ends of winter retreated from the Parque Lezama toward other remote corners of the world.

The first hot spells of December came then. The jacaranda trees turned violet and the tipa trees were covered with orange blossoms. And then these flowers began to dry up and fall off, the leaves began to turn gold and blow away in the first autumn winds. And then—Martín said—he definitely lost all hope of ever seeing her again.

5

The “hope” of seeing her again (Bruno reflected with melancholy irony). And he also said to himself: aren’t all men’s hopes as grotesque as this one perhaps? For given the ways of the world, we place our hopes in events which bring us nothing but frustration and bitterness once they materialize—the reason why pessimists are recruited among former optimists, since in order to have a black picture of the world it is necessary to have previously believed in that world and its possibilities. And it is an even more curious and paradoxical fact that pessimists, once they have been disillusioned, are not constantly and systematically filled with despair, but rather seem prepared, in a manner of speaking, to renew their hope at each and every instant, although by virtue of a sort of metaphysical modesty they conceal this fact beneath their black envelope of men suffering from a universal bitterness—as though pessimism, in order to keep itself strong and ever-vigorous, needed from time to time the impetus provided by a new cruel disillusionment.

And hadn’t Martín himself (Bruno thought, looking at him there in front of him), a budding pessimist, as is only fitting for every very pure soul prepared to hope for Great Things from men in particular and from Humanity in general, hadn’t Martín himself already tried to commit suicide because of that sort of sewer his mother was? Didn’t this in itself reveal that he had hoped for something different, something incontrovertibly marvelous from that woman? But (and this was even more surprising) after this disaster hadn’t he again come to have faith in women on meeting Alejandra?

And now here he was, a little lost soul, one of many in this city of lost souls. For Buenos Aires was a city positively swarming with them, as was true of every gigantic, frightful latter-day Babylon.

What happens (he thought) is that one doesn’t notice them at first glance, either because a goodly number of them don’t appear to be lost souls, or because in many cases they go out of their way not to appear so. Then too, great numbers of beings who are merely pretending to be so further compound the problem, with the result that one ends up believing that there are no true lost souls.

Because if a man is missing both legs or both arms, we all know of course, or think we know, that such a man is helpless. And at that very instant such a man begins to be less so, because we have noticed him and pity him, we buy useless combs from him or colored photographs of Carlitos Gardel.fn2 Whereupon this mutilated man missing two legs or two arms ceases to be, either partially or totally, the sort of totally lost soul that we are thinking of, to the point that we come to experience a vague feeling of resentment, perhaps on account of the infinite number of absolutely lost souls who at that very instant (because they do not have the nerve or the sense of security or the aggressiveness of the peddlers of combs and colored photos) are suffering in silence and with supreme dignity their lot as authentic wretched creatures.

Those silent and solitary men, for instance, who ask nothing of anyone and speak with no one, sitting brooding on the benches of the great plazas and parks of the city: some of them old men (the most obviously helpless ones, to the point that they ought to prey on our minds less, for the same reason as the peddlers of combs), those old men with pensioners’ canes who watch the world pass by as though it were a memory, those old men who meditate and in their own way perhaps pose once again the great problems that powerful thinkers have posed regarding the overall meaning of existence, the whys and wherefores of everything: weddings, children, warships, political battles, money, kings, and horse or automobile races; those old men who stare into space or appear to watch the pigeons eating little grains of oats or corn, or the superactive sparrows, or the different types of birds in general that fly down onto the plaza or live in the trees of the great parks. By virtue of that notable attribute of independence and super-imposition possessed by the universe, as a banker makes ready to bring off the most formidable operation involving strong currencies that has ever been carried out successfully in the Rio de la Plata (incidentally scuttling Consortium X or fearsome Corporation Y), a bird, a hundred paces away from the Powerful Office, hops across the grass of the Parque Colón, searching here for some little bit of straw for its nest, some stray grain of wheat or rye, some little worm of nutritional interest to it or to its young; while in another even more insignificant stratum, and one in a way even farther removed from everything (not from the Great Banker but from the slender cane of the pensioner), tinier, more anonymous, more secret beings live an independent, and on occasion an extremely active, existence: worms, ants (not only the big black ones, but also the little red ones and others even smaller that are practically invisible) and enormous numbers of other more insignificant tiny creatures, of different colors and very different habits. All these beings live in different worlds that are foreign to each other, except when Great Catastrophes occur, when Men, armed with Fumigators and Shovels, undertake the Fight against the Ants (an absolutely useless fight, let it be said in passing, since it always ends with the triumph of the ants), or when Bankers unleash their Petroleum Wars; so that the infinite number of tiny creatures that until that moment lived on the vast greenswards or in the peaceful subworlds of the parks are wiped out by bombs and gases; while others that are more fortunate, those belonging to those species of worms that are invariably victorious, make hay while the sun shines and prosper with astounding rapidity, as meanwhile, up above, the Purveyors and Manufacturers of Armaments thrive.

But outside of such times of interchange and confusion, it seems a miracle that so many species of beings can be born, develop, and die in the same regions of the universe without being acquainted with each other, without either hating or esteeming each other; like those multiple telephone messages which, we are told, can be transmitted by a single cable without ever getting mixed up with each other or interfering with each other, thanks to ingenious mechanisms.

So (Bruno thought) we have, firstly, the men sitting pensively in the plazas and parks. Some of them look at the ground and take advantage of the myriad anonymous activities of the small creatures already mentioned to distract themselves for entire minutes and even hours: examining the ants, considering their various species, calculating what loads they are capable of transporting, noting how two or three of them collaborate on work that is unusually difficult, and so on. At times, using a little bit of straw or a dry branch of the sort that can readily be found on the ground in parks, these men amuse themselves by turning the ants aside from their frantic trajectories, getting one or another of the most confused ones to climb up the straw and then run to the tip of it, where, after cautious little acrobatic tricks, the creature turns back and runs to the other end, continuing these useless goings and comings until the solitary man tires of the game and out of pity, or more generally out of boredom, leaves the little straw on the ground, whereupon the ant hurries off in search of its comrades, holds a brief and agitated conversation with the first one it meets so as to explain its delay or so as to inform itself as to the General Progress of the Work in its absence, and then immediately resumes its task, joining once again the long, industrious Indian file. Meanwhile the solitary, pensive man returns to his general and somewhat erratic meditation, which does not fix his attention overmuch on any one thing: looking now at a tree, now at a child playing round about and remembering, thanks to this child, long-gone and now incredible days in the Black Forest or a narrow street in Pontevedra that descends toward the south, as his eyes grow a bit more cloudy, thus accentuating that tearful gleam that the eyes of oldsters have; we will never know if it is due to purely physiological causes or if in some way it is the consequence of memory, nostalgia, a feeling of frustration, or the idea of death, or of that vague but irresistible melancholy that the words THE END always arouse in us mortals at the conclusion of a story that has touched us by its mystery and sadness. Which is the same as saying the story of any man, for what human being exists whose story in the final analysis is neither sad nor mysterious?

But the men sitting pensively on the benches are not always old men or pensioners.

Sometimes they are relatively young men, individuals thirty or forty years old. And—a curious thing, worth pondering (Bruno thought)—the younger they are the more pathetic and helpless they seem. For what can be more frightful than the sight of a youngster sitting brooding on a bench in a public square, overwhelmed by his thoughts, silent and estranged from the world round about him? Sometimes the man or the youngster is a sailor; at other times he is perhaps an emigré who would like to return to his country and is unable to; many times they are beings who have been abandoned by the woman they love; others, beings who are out of step with life, or who have left home forever, or are brooding about their loneliness and their future. Or it may be a youngster like Martín himself, who is beginning to realize, to his horror, that the absolute does not exist.

Or he may also be a man who has lost his son and on returning from the cemetery finds himself alone and feels that his existence lacks all meaning now, reflecting that meanwhile there are men round about him who are laughing or are happy (even though they are so only momentarily), children who are playing in the park, right there (he can see them), while his own son now lies beneath the ground in a little coffin befitting the smallness of his body, which perhaps has finally ceased waging a desperate battle against a horrible, disproportionately powerful enemy. And the man sitting there pensively again ponders, or ponders for the first time, the overall meaning of the world, for he cannot understand why his child has had to die in such a way, why he has had to pay for some remote sin of others with such immense suffering, why his little heart has been overcome by asphyxia or paralysis, as he struggled helplessly, not knowing why, against the black shadows beginning to descend upon him.

And this man is indeed a true lost soul. And, curiously, he may not be poor, he may possibly even be rich, and he may even be the Great Banker who was planning the formidable Operation involving strong currencies, of which disdainful and ironic mention was made earlier. Disdain and irony that (as he now found it easy to understand) turned out, as always, to be excessive, and in the last analysis unjust. For when all is said and done, no man deserves disdain and irony, since sooner or later, with strong currencies or without, misfortunes come his way: the deaths of his children or his brothers and sisters, his own old age, and his own solitude in the face of death. And in the end he turns out to be more helpless than anybody else; for the very same reason that the man at arms who is surprised without his coat of mail is more defenseless than the humble man of peace who, because he has never had a coat of mail, never feels its lack.

6

It was certain fact that since the age of eleven he had never entered any of the rooms in the house, much less that little one that was something like his mother’s sanctuary: the place where, on climbing out of her bath, she spent her time listening to the soap operas on the radio and completing her toilette before going out. But what about his father? Martín had lost track of his habits in recent years and knew only that he spent his days shut up in his studio: in order to reach the bathroom it was not absolutely necessary to pass through his mother’s little room, but it was not impossible to reach the bathroom that way either. Was she perhaps trying to make sure that her spouse would see her there in her intimate sanctuary? Was it her merciless hatred of him that had caused her to conceive the idea of humiliating him to such a point?

Anything was possible.

On not hearing the radio turned on, Martín presumed that she was not in there, because it was utterly inconceivable that she would stay there in her little room amid silence.

In the half-light, the double monster on the divan thrashed restlessly, furiously.

He wandered about the neighborhood like a sleepwalker for a little over an hour. Then he went back up to his room and threw himself on the bed. He lay there staring at the ceiling and then his eyes swept the walls until they stopped at the illustration from Billiken that had been hanging there with thumbtacks in the corners since his childhood: Belgrano making his soldiers swear on the blue and white flag at the crossing of the Salado River.

The immaculate flag, he thought.fn3

And key words of his existence also came to mind: cold, cleanness, snow, solitude, Patagonia.

He thought of taking a boat, a train, but where would he get the money? Then suddenly he remembered the big truck that always parked in the garage near the Sola station; one day, magically, his eye had been caught by the lettering on it: PATAGONIA TRUCKING. Might they need a worker, a helper, anything?

“Sure, kid,” Bucich said, a dead cigar butt dangling from his mouth.

“I’ve got eighty-three pesos,” Martín said.

“Don’t be silly,” Bucich said, taking off his grease-spattered coveralls.

He looked like a circus giant, though a somewhat stoop-shouldered one with gray hair. A giant with the innocent expression of a child. Martín looked at the truck: on the side, in big letters, it said PATAGONIA TRUCKING, and at the back, in gilt letters, it said: MAMA, LOOK AT ME NOW.fn4

“Come on,” Bucich said, his dead cigar butt still dangling from his mouth.

On the wet, slippery pavement a milky, deliquescent red gleamed for a moment. It was immediately followed by a violet flash, only to be replaced once more by the milky red: CINZANO-AMERICANO GANCIA, CINZANO-AMERICANO GANCIA.

“It’s turning cold,” Bucich remarked.

Was it drizzling? No, it was a fog of very fine, impalpable, floating drops. The truck driver walked along in great strides at Martín’s side. He was straightforward and strong: the symbol, perhaps, of what Martín was looking for in that exodus to the south. He felt protected and abandoned himself to his thoughts. Here we are, Bucich said. CHICHIN’S. PIZZA, BEER, WINE, AND SPIRITS. How you doin’, fella? Bucich said to Chichín. How you doin’ yourself? Chichín replied, picking up the bottle of Llave gin. Make it two. This kid’s a pal of mine. Hiya, kid, the pleasure’s all mine, Chichín said. He was wearing a cap and red suspenders over a sunflower-colored shirt. How’s your mom doing? Bucich asked. So-so, Chichín said. Did they run the analysis on her? Yeah. And Chichín shrugged. You know how these things go. Going far away, the cold, clear south. Martín thought to himself. Jumping rope, everything except getting her womb scraped, like boxers, she even punched me in the belly, that’s why you turned out more or less defective of course, laughing rancorously and scornfully, I did everything, I wasn’t going to get my body all out of shape for you she said to him, and he must have been eleven or so. Where’s Tito? Bucich asked. He’ll be along any sec, Chichín said, and he decided to go live up in the garret. What’s the scoop about what happened Sunday? Bucich asked. How the hell should I know? Chichín answered in fury, I swear I don’t get upset any more as she went on listening to boleros, plucking her eyebrows, eating caramels, leaving sticky papers around everywhere, nothing gets me upset any more, Chichín was saying, absolutely nothing, I swear, a dirty, sticky world as he wiped a glass in silent fury and repeated absolutely nothing fleeing to a cold, crystalline world until finally he set the glass down, and looking Bucich straight in the eye he exclaimed losing on account of a lummox like that, as the truck driver blinked, considering the problem with all the attention due it and commenting No kidding: damn, as Martín kept hearing those boleros, feeling that atmosphere heavy with steam from the tub and the smell of deodorant creams, air that was hot and turbid, a hot bath, a hot body, a hot bed, a hot mother, bed-mother, basketbed, milky legs raised up like in a horrible circus more or less in the same way he’d come out of the sewer and then into the sewer or almost, as a skinny, nervous man came in who said how you doin’? and Chichín said here he is now, Humberto J. D’Arcángelo in person, hiya Puchito how you doin’?, the kid here’s a pal of mine pleased to meet you the pleasure is mine, he said. D’Arcángelo scrutinizing him with those little bird’s eyes, with that anxious expression that Martín was always to see on Tito’s face, as though he’d lost something very valuable and was looking everywhere for it, glancing all about quickly and worriedly, taking everything in.

“Go on. You tell him what happened.”

“That’s right—you miss out on everything tooling along out there in your truck, don’t you?”

“But I don’t get upset any more,” Chichín said yet again. “Nothing, not a single fuckin’ thing upsets me any more, I swear to you on the memory of my mother. An all-time loser like that though. I ask you. But tell this guy, go on, tell him.”

Humberto J. D’Arcángelo, commonly known as Tito, voiced his opinion on the subject frankly and forthrightly:

“Real garbage.”

And then he sat down at a table near the window, took out Crítica, which he always carried about folded to the sports page, slapped it down indignantly on the little table, and picking at his pitted teeth with the toothpick that was forever in his mouth, he gazed gloomily out at the Calle Pinzón. A short man with narrow shoulders, dressed in a threadbare suit, he seemed to be pondering the general fate of the world.

After a time, he directed his gaze toward the bar counter and said:

“This Sunday was a disaster. Boca lost like a bunch of utter idiots, San Lorenzo won, and even Tigre won. Can you tell me where the hell we’ll end up?”

He kept his eyes trained on his friends as though taking them as witnesses, and then he gazed out toward the street again and picking at his teeth he said:

“There’s no hope for this country.”

7

It can’t be, he thought, with his hand resting on the seabag, it can’t be. But there had been the cough, the cough and those creaking noises.

And years afterward, he also thought, remembering that moment: like solitary inhabitants of two islands that are close to each other, yet separated by unfathomable abysses. Realizing, years later, when his father was rotting in his grave, that that poor devil had suffered at least as much as he had and that from that nearby but unreachable island on which his father lived (on which he survived) he had perhaps at some time made a silent but pathetic gesture asking for his aid, or at least his understanding and his affection. But this he realized only after painful experiences, when it was too late, as almost always is the case. So at that point, in that premature present (as though time amused itself by presenting itself before it should, so as to arouse impressions as grotesque and rudimentary as those left by certain amateur theatrical groups who lack experience: Othellos who have not yet loved), in that present that should have been a future, his father was entering off-cue, coming up those stairs that for so many years he had never set foot on. And with his back to the door, Martín was aware that he was approaching as though he were an intruder: he heard his panting tubercular breath, his hesitant pause. And with deliberate cruelty, Martín pretended not to have noticed him. Of course, he’s read my note, he wants to keep me from going. But why? For years and years they had scarcely spoken to each other. He was torn between resentment and pity. His resentment impelled him not to look at his father, to ignore his entry into the room, and what was worse still, to make him understand that he was deliberately ignoring it. But he turned his head nonetheless. Yes, he turned it, and saw him as he had imagined him: clutching the banister with both hands, resting after his effort, with a lock of white hair fallen down over his forehead, his feverish, slightly bulging eyes, smiling feebly with that guilty expression that annoyed Martín so much, telling him “Twenty years ago, I had my studio up here,” glancing all around the garret then, with perhaps the same feeling that a traveler, old now and disillusioned, experiences upon returning to the village of his youth, after having met persons and journeyed through distant countries that had awakened his imagination and his desires in younger days. He walked over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, as though he did not feel he had the right to take up too much room or be too comfortable. And then he remained silent for quite some time, panting for breath, but as motionless as a lifeless statue. He said in a faint voice:

“There was a time when we were friends.”

His pensive eyes lit up, gazing into the distance.

“I remember once in the Parque Retiro …. You must have been … let’s see … four, perhaps five years old … that’s right … you were five … you wanted to go on the little electric cars by yourself, but I wouldn’t let you, I was afraid it would scare you when they bumped together.”

He laughed softly, nostalgically.

“Later, as we were returning home, you got onto a little merry-go-round in a vacant lot on the Calle Garay. I don’t know why, but I always see you in my mind’s eye from the back, just as you’d gone past me each time you circled round. The wind ruffled your little shirt, a little shirt with blue stripes. It was already dusk, the light was almost gone.”

He stood there pensively and then repeated, as though it were an important fact:

“That’s right, a little shirt with blue stripes. I remember it very well.”

Martín said nothing.

“At that time I thought that with the years we’d come to be pals, that we’d be able to have … a sort of friendship between us …”

He smiled again, that guilty little smile, as though that hope had been ridiculous, a hope of something he had no right to. As though he had committed a petty theft, taking advantage of Martín’s helplessness.

His son looked at him: he was sitting there with his elbows on his knees, all hunched over, gazing off into space.

“Yes … everything is different now …”

He picked up a pencil lying on the bed and examined it with a thoughtful expression.

“You mustn’t think I don’t understand you …. How could we be friends? You must forgive me, Martincito …”

“I have nothing to forgive you for.”

His harsh tone of voice contradicted the statement.

“You see? You hate me. And you mustn’t think I don’t understand you.”

Martín would have liked to answer: “It’s not true, I don’t hate you,” but the monstrously certain fact was that he did indeed hate him. And this hatred made him feel even more lonely and wretched. When he saw his mother paint her face and go out on the street humming some bolero, his hatred of her was extended to his father and finally came to be centered on him, as though he were the real object of it.

“I understand, of course, Martín, that you can’t be proud of a painter who’s a failure.”

Martín’s eyes filled with tears.

But they remained suspended in his enormous bitterness, like drops of oil in vinegar, without the two commingling. He shouted:

“Don’t say that, papa!”

His father looked at him, touched and surprised by his reaction.

Almost without realizing what he was saying, Martín shouted in a voice full of rancor:

“This is a disgusting country! The only ones who get ahead here are bastards!”

His father stared at him in silence. Then, shaking his head, he said:

“No, Martín, you mustn’t think that.”

He contemplated the pencil he was holding and after a moment’s pause, he concluded:

“We must be fair. I’m a miserable wretch, a real failure, and I deserve to be: I have neither talent nor the strength to keep going. That’s the truth.”

Martín began to retreat to his island again. The bathos of this scene made him feel ashamed and his father’s resignation was beginning to bring all his bitterness toward him to the surface once again.

The silence became so intense and oppressive that his father got up to leave. He had doubtless realized that Martín’s decision was irrevocable, that the abyss between them was too great, that absolutely nothing could be done to lessen that distance between them. He came over to Martín and clutched his arm with his right hand: he would have liked to embrace him, but how could he?

“Well, then …” he murmured.

Would Martín have said something affectionate to him at this point had he known that these were literally the very last words he would ever hear from his father?

Would we be so hard on human beings—Bruno used to say—if we truly realized that some day they will die and that nothing of what we have said to them can be taken back then?

Martín saw his father turn around then and retreat toward the stairway. And he also saw that, before he disappeared from sight, he turned and looked back one last time, with a look in his eyes that years after his father’s death, Martín would remember in despair.

And on hearing him cough as he was going down the stairs, Martín flung himself down on his bed and wept. It was hours later before he felt up to finishing packing his seabag. When he left the house at two that morning, he saw that there was a light still on in his father’s studio.

“There he is,” he thought. “Despite everything he’s alive, he’s still alive.”

He headed for the parking garage and the thought came to him that he ought to be experiencing a feeling of great liberation, but that was not how it was: a dull heaviness of heart kept him from feeling any such thing. He walked on, more and more slowly, and finally he halted altogether. What was it he really wanted?

8

“Before I saw her again many things happened … at home …. I didn’t want to live there any more, I thought of going off to Patagonia, I spoke with a truck driver named Bucich—haven’t I ever told you about Bucich? But in the wee hours of the morning that day, to make a long story short … well, in the end I didn’t go south. But I didn’t go back home either.”

He fell silent, remembering.

“I saw her again in the same place in the park, but not until February of 1955. I had gone there every time I possibly could. Yet I didn’t have the feeling that I would find her again just because I always waited there in that same place for her.”

“And why is that?”

Martín looked at Bruno and said:

“Because she wanted to find me.”

Bruno didn’t seem to understand.

“If she finally turned up there it was because she wanted to find you, you mean.”

“No, that’s not what I mean at all. She would have found me in any other place just as easily. Do you understand what I’m getting at? She knew where and how to find me if she wanted to. That’s what I mean. Waiting there for her, there on that bench, for so many months was one of my many naivetés.”

He sat there lost in thought and then he added, looking at Bruno as though seeking an explanation from him:

“For that very reason, because I believe she went looking for me with all her strength of will, deliberately, for that very reason I find it all the more inexplicable that later on … in much the same way …”

His eyes did not leave Bruno, who sat there with his gaze riveted on that emaciated, suffering face.

“Do you understand it?”

“Human beings aren’t logical,” Bruno replied. “Moreover, it seems fairly certain that the very same reason that led her to search for you also impelled her to …”

He was about to say “abandon you” when he stopped and said instead “go away.”

Martín stared at him for a moment more and then he again became lost in thought, saying nothing for quite some time. Then he explained how Alejandra had reappeared.

It was almost dark and there was no longer enough light to correct his proofs, so he had sat there leaning back against the bench looking at the trees. And all at once he had fallen fast asleep.

He dreamed that he was on an abandoned boat whose sails had been destroyed, heading up a great stream that appeared to be calm, though powerful and steeped in mystery. He was making his way upriver in the twilight. The countryside round about was dead still and deserted, but one was somehow aware that in the forest that rose up like a wall along the banks of the great river a secret life fraught with peril was pursuing its course. Then he was suddenly startled by a voice that appeared to be coming from the dense, dark jungle growth. He could not make out what it said, but he knew that it was addressing him, Martín. He tried to rise to his feet, but something prevented him from doing so. He struggled nonetheless to stand up because he could hear the remote, enigmatic voice calling to him more and more clearly, calling (as he now noticed) in anguished tones, as though it were the voice of someone in terrible danger and he, only he, were capable of coming to the rescue. He woke up trembling all over with anxiety and practically leaping off the bench.

It was she.

She had been shaking him and now she said to him, with her harsh laugh:

“Get up, you lazy bum.”

Frightened, frightened and disconcerted by the contrast between the terrified, anguished voice of the dream and that carefree Alejandra who was now there before him, he could not manage to get a single word out.

He saw her pick up several of the proof sheets that had fallen off the bench as he slept.

“The boss of the company isn’t Molinari, I’m certain of that,” she commented, laughing.

“What company?”

“The one that gives you this work to do, silly.”

“Its López and Company, the printers.”

“Whatever you say, but it’s certainly not Molinari.”

He didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. And as would happen many times with her, Alejandra didn’t bother to explain. He had felt—Martín commented—like a bad pupil in front of a sarcastic teacher.

He put the proof sheets back in the right order, and this mechanical task gave him time to overcome to a certain degree the emotion of this meeting that he had so anxiously awaited. And then too, as on many later occasions, his silence and his inability to carry on a conversation were compensated for by Alejandra, who always, or almost always, divined his thoughts.

She ruffled his hair with one hand, as adults do to children.

“I told you I’d see you again, remember? But I didn’t tell you when.”

Martín looked at her.

“Did I tell you by any chance that I’d see you again soon?”

“No.”

And so it was (Martín explained) that the whole terrible story began. Everything had been inexplicable. You never knew what would happen with her, and they met in places as absurd as the lobby of the Banco de Provincia or the Avellaneda bridge. And at any hour: at two in the morning sometimes. Everything was unexpected, nothing could be predicted or explained: neither her playful, joking moods nor her sudden rages nor those days when she never once opened her mouth from the time they met till she suddenly upped and left. Nor her prolonged disappearances. “And yet that was the most wonderful period of my life,” he added. But he knew it couldn’t last because the whole thing was hectic; it was—had he already said as much?—like a series of gas explosions on a stormy night. Although at times, very few times it is true, he did seem to have restful moments with her, as though she were someone suffering some illness and he a sanatorium or a place in the mountains to which she had betaken herself to lie in the sun in silence. At other times she gave the impression of being in torment, and it was as though he might be able to offer her water or some sort of remedy, something indispensable to her, so that she might return once again to that dark, wild realm in which she appeared to live her life.

“A realm I was never able to enter,” he concluded, his eyes staring into Bruno’s.

9

“Here it is,” she said.

One could smell the intense perfume of jasmine in flower. The iron grating was very old and half-covered with wisteria. The rusty door swung reluctantly on its hinges, creaking.

Puddles from the recent rain gleamed in the darkness. There was a light on in one room, but the silence seemed more like that of a house with no one living in it. They skirted an abandoned garden, choked with weeds, by way of a little path running along a gallery, supported by cast-iron columns, on one side of the house. The house was very old; its windows looked out on the gallery and still had their colonial bars over them; the huge flagstones were surely from that era too, for they felt sunken, worn, and broken.

A clarinet could be heard: a phrase with no musical structure, languid, disjointed, obsessive.

“What’s that?” Martín asked.

“Uncle Bebe, the madman,” Alejandra explained.

They went along a narrow walkway between very old trees (Martín could now smell the heavy fragrance of magnolias) and continued along a brick path that ended at a winding staircase.

“Watch your step. Follow me slowly.”

Martín stumbled over something: a garbage can or a wooden crate.

“Didn’t I tell you to watch your step? Wait.”

She stopped and lit a match, shielding it with one hand and bringing it over close to Martín.

“But Alejandra, isn’t there a light around? I mean … some sort of light in the patio?”

He heard her curt, nasty laugh.

“Lights? Come on, put your hands on my hips and follow me.”

“That’s fine for blind men.”

He felt Alejandra halt dead in her tracks as though paralyzed by an electric shock.

“What in the world is wrong, Alejandra?” Martín asked in alarm.

“Nothing,” she answered shortly, “but kindly do me the favor of never mentioning blind people to me again.”

Martín put his hands on her hips once more and followed her through the darkness. As they made their way, slowly and cautiously, up the metal stairway, broken in many places and shaky in others where it had rusted nearly through, he felt Alejandra’s body beneath his hands for the first time, so close and at the same time so remote and so mysterious. Something, a tremor, a hesitation betrayed that subtle sensation he was experiencing, whereupon she asked him what was wrong and he answered, sadly, “Nothing.” When they reached the top of the stairs, Alejandra said as she tried to open a rebellious lock: “This is the old Mirador.”

“Mirador?”

“Yes, at the beginning of the last century there were nothing but quintasfn5 hereabouts. The Olmoses, the Acevedos used to come here for weekends.”

She laughed.

“In the days, that is, when the Olmoses weren’t dying of hunger … and hadn’t gone mad.”

“The Acevedos?” Martín asked. “Which Acevedos? The one who was vice-president?”

“Yes, that branch of the family.”

Finally, after great effort, she managed to get the old door open. She reached up and turned on a light.

“Well,” Martín said, “there’s electricity here anyway. I thought perhaps all there was to light the house was candles.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions. Grandfather Pancho uses nothing but kerosene lanterns. He claims electric light is bad for people’s eyes.”

Martín’s gaze swept the room as though he were reconnoitering an area of Alejandra’s unknown soul. The ceiling was not finished off and the great wooden roof beams were visible. There was a divan covered with a poncho and a motley assortment of furniture that looked as though it had come straight off the floor of an auction house: of different periods and styles, but all in a sorry state and about to fall apart.

“Come on, you’d better sit on the bed. The chairs around here are dangerous.”

On one wall was an old-fashioned Venetian mirror, with a painting in the upper part. There were also a broken-down bureau and a chest of drawers. And there was an engraving or a lithograph pinned to the wall with thumbtacks at its four corners.

Alejandra hunted up an alcohol burner and started making coffee. As she waited for the water to heat she put a record on.

“Listen,” she said absently, staring up at the ceiling as she puffed on her cigarette.

Pathetic, tumultuous music filled the room.

Then suddenly she took the record off.

“Ouf,” she said, “I can’t bear to listen to it now.”

She went on preparing the coffee.

“When it was performed for the first time, Brahms himself was at the piano. Do you know what happened?”

“No.”

“They booed him. Do you have any idea what humanity is really like?”

“Well, maybe …”

“What do you mean, maybe!” Alejandra exclaimed. “In your opinion then there’s a possibility that humanity isn’t pure pig-shit?”

“But Brahms was part of humanity too …”

“Look, Martín,” she commented as she poured coffee into a cup, “men like that are the ones who suffer for the rest. And the rest are nothing but soccer fans, bastards, or idiots, see what I mean?”

She brought him the coffee.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, lost in thought. Then she put the record back on for a minute.

“Listen, just listen to that.”

They heard the opening measures of the first movement again.

“Do you realize, Martín, the quantity of suffering that there had to be in the world so that there would be music like that?”

As she took the record off again, she commented:

“Terrific.”

He remained lost in thought still, finishing his coffee. Then he put the cup down on the floor.

Suddenly amid the silence the sound of the clarinet came through the open window; it was as though a child were scribbling on paper.

“He’s crazy you say?”

“Don’t you realize? This is a family of crazy people. Do you know who lived up here in this garret for eighty years? Miss Escolástica. You know of course that once upon a time it was fashionable to have a member of the family who’d gone mad, shut up in some back room. Bebe is more a gentle madman, a sort of fuzzy-minded fool, and in any case nobody can do any harm with a clarinet. Escolástica was a gentle madwoman too. Do you know what happened to her? Come here.” She got up and went over to the lithograph pinned to the wall with four thumbtacks. “Look: these are the remains of Lavalle’s legion, in Humahuaca Valley.fn6 On this dapple gray charger is the general’s body. This is Colonel Pedernera. The one next to him is Pedro Echagüe. And this other man with a beard, on the right, is Colonel Acevedo. Bonifacio Acevedo, Grandpa Pancho’s great-uncle. We call Pancho grandfather, but he’s really my great-grandfather. This other one is Lieutenant Celedonio Olmos, Grandpa Pancho’s father, or in other words my great-great-grandfather. Bonifacio had to flee for his life to Montevideo. He married a Uruguayan girl there, an easterner, as grandfather puts it, whose name was Encarnación Flores, and that was where Escolástica was born. Now there’s a name for you! Before she was born, Bonifacio joined the Legion and never saw his daughter, because the campaign lasted two years and then, after Humahuaca, they crossed the border into Bolivia, where he stayed for several years; he was also in Chile for a time. In 1852, at the beginning of ’52, after thirteen years without seeing his wife, who lived here in this house, Major Bonifacio Acevedo, who was in Chile with other exiles, had had all he could take of sadness and came to Buenos Aires, disguised as a muleteer: people were saying that Rosas was about to fall from power from one moment to the next, that Urquiza would enter Buenos Aires amid fire and blood. But Bonifacio didn’t want to wait around for that to happen, so he took off from Chile by himself. Someone denounced him, of course, otherwise there’s no explanation. He arrived in Buenos Aires and the Mazorca caught him. They beheaded him and came by the house here; they knocked on the window and when somebody opened it they threw the head into the parlor. Encarnación died of the shock and Escolástica went mad. And a few days later Urquiza entered Buenos Aires! You must bear in mind that Escolástica had grown up hearing about her father and gazing at his portrait.”

She took a miniature, in color, out of a drawer of the commode.

“Here he is when he was a lieutenant of cuirassiers, during the Brazil campaign.”

His bright uniform, his youth, his grace contrasted with the bearded, ravaged face in the old lithograph.

“The Mazorca had gone on the rampage at the news of Urquiza’s uprising. Do you know what Escolástica did? Her mother fainted dead away, but Escolástica grabbed her father’s head and ran up here. She stayed locked up in this room with her father’s head from that year till her death in 1932.”

“In 1932!”

“Yes, 1932. She lived up here for eighty years, locked in with the head. Meals had to be brought up here to her and all her garbage taken down. She never went out and never felt any desire to. Another thing: with that cleverness that mad people have, she’d hidden her father’s head so no one would ever be able to find it and take it away. They could have found it, of course, if they’d really searched for it, but she would get frantic if they tried and there was no fooling her. ‘I have to get something out of the chest of drawers,’ they would say to her. But there was nothing doing. And nobody was ever able to get a thing out of the chest of drawers, or the bureau, or that leather trunk over there. And everything remained just the way it had been in 1852 till she died in 1932. Can you believe it?”

“It seems incredible.”

“It’s the absolute historical truth. I used to ask all sorts of questions myself: how did she eat? how did they clean the room? They brought her food up to her and managed to do at least a minimum of cleaning. Escolástica was a gentle madwoman and even talked normally about almost everything, with the exception of her father and the head. For the entire eighty years that she kept herself locked up here, for instance, she never spoke of her father as though he were dead. She spoke in the present. What I mean is, she spoke as if it were 1852 and she were twelve, and as if her father were in Chile and would be coming home any minute. She was a nice quiet old lady. But her life and even her turns of phrase had stopped in 1852; Rosas was still in power as far as she was concerned. When ‘that man’ falls from power, she would say, gesturing toward the outside world with her head, out there where there were electric streetcars and Yrigoyen was in office. It seems that her reality had vast gaps in it or perhaps it’s as if they too were under lock and key and she were taking roundabout ways, like a child, to avoid speaking of these things, as though if she didn’t speak of them they wouldn’t exist and therefore her father’s death wouldn’t exist either. She had erased everything having to do with Bonifacio’s beheading.”

“And what happened to the head?”

“Escolástica died in 1932 and they were finally able to search the major’s chest of drawers and the leather trunk. The head was wrapped in rags (apparently that old woman took it out every night and put it on the bureau and spent the hours looking at it or perhaps she slept with the head over there on top of it, like a flower vase). It was shrunken and mummified, of course. And that’s the way it still is.”

“What!”

“Of course—what do you expect happened to the head? What does one do with a head in a case like that?”

“Uh—I don’t know. The whole story is so mind-boggling I don’t have any idea.”

“And above all remember what sort of family mine is—the Olmoses, I mean, not the Acevedos.”

“What sort of family are they?”

“Do you still have to ask? Don’t you hear Uncle Bebe playing the clarinet? Don’t you see the sort of place we live in? Tell me, do you know anybody with a famous name in this country who lives in Barracas, smack in the middle of tenements and factories? That should tell you that nothing normal could happen to the head, apart from the fact that nothing that happens to a head that’s not attached to its corresponding body can possibly be normal in any case.”

“And so?”

“Well, it’s very simple: the head’s stayed here in the house.”

Martín gave a start.

“Don’t tell me that surprises you! What did you think could be done with it? Make a little coffin and hold a little funeral for it?”

Martín laughed nervously, but Alejandra’s manner remained grave and thoughtful.

“And where do you keep it?”

“Grandpa Pancho keeps it downstairs in a hat box. Would you like to see it?”

“Heavens no!” Martín exclaimed.

“What’s the matter with you? It’s a nice head and I can assure you it does me good to see it from time to time when I see all the trash that’s around these days. In those days at least men were real men, and they gambled their lives on what they believed in. I can tell you for a fact that almost all my family has been Unitarists, except Fernando and me.”

“Fernando? Who’s Fernando?”

Alejandra suddenly fell silent, as though she had said more than she should have.

Martín was surprised. He had the feeling that Alejandra had revealed something she hadn’t meant to. She had risen to her feet, gone over to the little table where she’d set up the alcohol burner, put more water on to boil, and lit a cigarette. Then she peered out the window.

“Come on,” she said, leaving the room.

Martín followed her. The night shadows were intense yet etched in bright moonlight. Alejandra walked over to the edge of the terrace and leaned over the balustrade.

“Once upon a time you could see ships arriving at Riachuelo from here,” she said.

“And who lives here now?”

“Here? Well, there’s practically nothing left of the house. In the old days it occupied a whole block. Then they began to sell parts of it off. The land where that factory and those sheds are all belonged to the quinta once upon a time. There are tenements here on this other side. All the back part of the house was also sold off. And this part that’s left is all mortgaged and any day now it’ll be going on the auction block.”

“And that doesn’t make you feel sad?”

Alejandra shrugged.

“I don’t know. Maybe I feel sorry for grandfather. He lives in the past and he’s going to die without realizing how this country’s changed. Do you have any idea what it’s like for that old man? What’s happening is that he hasn’t the slightest notion what shit is. And he has neither the time nor the ability to find out now. I don’t know if that’s better or worse for him. The other time they were about to sell the house off at auction I had to go see Molinari to get him to fix things.”

“Molinari?”

“Yes, a sort of mythological animal. As though a hog were the director of a corporation.”

Martín looked at Alejandra, who added with a smile:

“There’s a certain sort of tie between us. As you can well imagine, it would kill the old man if the place were put up for auction.”

“Your father you mean?”

“Of course not, silly: I mean my grandfather.”

“And your father isn’t worried about what might happen?”

Alejandra looked at him with an expression that could well have been the grimace of an explorer who is asked whether the automobile industry is very highly developed in the Amazon.

“Your father,” Martín said, pressing the point, as usual out of sheer timidity, feeling he’d said something stupid (although he didn’t know what) yet getting himself in deeper despite himself.

“My father never sets foot in this house,” Alejandra confined herself to saying in reply, in a tone of voice that was no longer the same.

Like those who are learning to ride a bicycle and are obliged to keep pedaling if they are not to fall off, and, most mysteriously, inevitably end up crashing into a tree or some other obstacle, Martín stubbornly pursued the subject:

“Does he live somewhere else?”

“I’ve just told you he doesn’t live here!”

Martín flushed.

Alejandra walked over to the other end of the terrace and remained there for a good while. Then she walked back and stood leaning over the balustrade alongside Martín.

“My mother died when I was five. And when I was eleven I found my father here with a woman. But I think now that he’d been sleeping with her for a long time before my mother died.”

With a laugh that appeared to be a normal one to the same degree that a hunchbacked criminal resembles a man sound in mind and body she added:

“In the same bed that I sleep in now.”

She lit a cigarette and in the flame of the lighter Martín could see on her face traces of her laugh of a moment before, the stinking corpse of the hunchback.

Then he saw, there in the darkness, the glow of Alejandra’s cigarette each time she inhaled deeply on it: she was smoking, sucking on it with intense, anxious greed.

“Then I ran away from home,” she said.

10

That freckle-faced little girl is Alejandra: she is eleven and her hair has reddish glints in it. She is a thin, pensive child, but a violently and cruelly pensive one, as though her thoughts were not abstract, but crazed, burning-hot serpents. It is that child who has remained intact in some obscure region of her self, and now the Alejandra who is eighteen, silent and attentive, trying not to frighten the apparition away, draws aside and observes it cautiously and curiously. It is a game she often plays when she reflects on her fate. But it is a difficult game, as subtle and as frustrating as spiritualists say materializations are: one has to know how to wait, how to be patient, how to concentrate intensely, closing one’s mind to all extraneous or frivolous thoughts. The shadow emerges little by little and one must encourage it by remaining absolutely silent and being very careful: the least little thing will cause it to withdraw, to disappear back into the region from which it was beginning to emerge. It is here now: it has come out and she can see herself with her reddish braids and her freckles, observing everything round about her with those mistrustful, hard-staring eyes, ready and waiting for fights and insults. Alejandra looks at her with those mixed feelings of tenderness and resentment we have toward younger brothers and sisters on whom we vent the wrath that we have for our own defects, screaming at them: “Stop biting your fingernails, you disgusting creature!”

“On the Calle Isabel la Católica there is a house in ruins. Or rather, there used to be a house there, because it was torn down a short time ago to make way for a refrigerator factory. It had stood empty for many years on account of a lawsuit or a disputed inheritance. I believe it belonged to the Miguenses, a quinta that at one time must have been very pretty, like this one. I remember that it had pale green walls, sea green, all peeling, as though they had leprosy. I was very excited and the idea of running away from home and hiding out in an abandoned house gave me a feeling of power, perhaps resembling the one that soldiers must have as they launch an attack, despite their fear or because such a feeling is the other side of the coin of fear. I’ve read that somewhere, haven’t you? I say this because I suffered from frightful night-terrors, so you can imagine what I thought might await me in an abandoned house. I used to go out of my head at night, I saw bandits entering my room with lanterns, or men from the Mazorca with bloody heads in their hands (Justina used to tell us tales about the Mazorca all the time), I fell into wells of blood. I’m not sure whether I was awake or asleep when I saw all those things; I think, though, that they were hallucinations, that I was awake when I saw them, because I remember them as clearly as though I were having them this minute. I would start screaming then, till Grandma Elena would come running and calm me little by little, because the bed would continue to shake for a long time as I shuddered from head to foot: they were anxiety attacks, really severe ones.

“So that planning what I was planning, to hide by night in a lonely house in ruins, was an act of madness. And I think now that I planned it so that my vengeance would be all the more terrible. I felt it was a beautiful act of revenge and would be all the more beautiful and terrible the more frightful the dangers I would be forced to confront, do you follow me? As though I thought, as perhaps I indeed did: ‘Let them see how much I’m suffering, and it’s all my father’s fault!’ It’s curious, but after that night my terror was transformed, in one fell swoop, into the fearlessness of a madman. Doesn’t that strike you as curious? What’s the explanation for a thing like that? It was a sort of mad arrogance, as I’ve told you, in the face of any danger, real or imaginary. It’s quite true that I’d always been bold, and on the vacations I spent at the country estate of the Carrascos, old maids who were friends of Grandma Elena’s, I had trained myself to be brave. I would run across the fields and gallop over them on a little mare they’d given me. I’d chosen her name myself and I liked it a lot: Scorn. I had a .22-caliber rifle to hunt with and a little single-bullet pistol. I was a good swimmer and despite all the warnings and all my promises I would swim out into the open sea and more than once I had to fight against the tide (I forgot to tell you that the estate of those tottering old spinsters was on the coast, near Miramar). And yet, despite all this, I still shook with fear in the face of imaginary monsters at night. Anyway, as I was saying, I decided to run away and hide in the house on the Calle Isabel la Católica. I waited for nightfall so as to scale the fence without being seen (the gate had a padlock on it). But someone must have seen me going over the fence, and even though at first he may not have thought it was anything to get excited about, since, as you can imagaine, more than one boy must have already done the same thing out of curiosity, when the news that I was missing spread through the neighborhood and the police were called in, the man doubtless remembered what he’d seen and told them. But if that’s what happened, it must have been many hours after I’d run away, because the police didn’t show up at the big empty house till eleven. So I had plenty of time to confront terror. Once I’d climbed over the fence, I went around to the back of the house, along the old driveway for carriages, amid weeds and old garbage cans, refuse and stinking dead cats or dogs. I forgot to tell you that I’d also taken along my flashlight, my little hunting knife, and the single-shot pistol that Grandpa Pancho had given me for my tenth birthday. As I was saying, I made my way around to the back of the house along the driveway. There was a gallery, like the one we have here. The windows that looked out on this gallery or covered walkway had shutters over them, but the shutters were rotted and some of them had almost fallen off or were full of holes. It may well have been that bums or hobos had used the house to sleep in overnight and even longer. And what was to prevent one or another of them from turning up that night to sleep there? I trained the beam of my flashlight over the windows and the doors at the back of the house and finally spied a door with shutters that had one panel missing. I pushed on the door and finally managed to force it open. It creaked as though it had been a very long time since it had last been opened, and at that instant the terrifying thought came to me that this was a sign that even bums didn’t dare take refuge in this ill-omened house. I hesitated for some time and finally decided it would be best not to enter the house; I made up my mind to spend the night in the gallery instead. But it was freezing cold, and after a while I realized that I was going to have to go inside and make a fire—I was sure I knew how to do that, because I’d seen it done in so many movies. I decided the kitchen would be the most suitable place because I could get a good bonfire going in there on the flagstone floor. I also hoped the fire would chase the rats away; the disgusting things have always turned my stomach. Like all the rest of the house, the kitchen was in ruins. I didn’t feel up to sleeping on the floor, even if I piled up straw for a bed, because I had the idea that rats could get at me more easily if I did. It seemed a better idea to bed down on top of the cookstove. It was an old-fashioned kitchen, similar to the one we have and the ones that can still be seen on certain ranches, with coal ovens and burners for simmering things all day. As for the rest of the house, I would explore it the next day: at that hour of the night I didn’t have the courage to go through all of it, and what was more there was no purpose in my doing so. My first task was to gather firewood in the garden, that is to say remains of wooden boxes, loose boards, straw, papers, fallen tree limbs and branches of a dead tree that I found. I made a fire of all this near the kitchen door so the inside of the room wouldn’t fill up with smoke. After a few trials the fire caught, and the moment I saw the flames in the midst of the darkness I felt warmed, both literally and figuratively. I immediately took my provisions out of my sack, sat myself down on a crate near the fire, and enjoyed every last bite of my meal of bread and butter and salami, followed by sweet-potato candy. When I finished it was just eight o’clock by my watch—was that all! I didn’t want to think about what awaited me during the long hours of the night.

“The police arrived at eleven. I don’t know, as I said, whether someone had seen a youngster climbing over the fence. It is just as likely that some neighbor had seen the light or the smoke from the bonfire I had made, or had noticed me moving back and forth there inside with my flashlight. In any event the police had arrived, and I must confess I was glad to see them. If I had had to spend the entire night there, when all the noises outside gradually fade away and you have the impression the whole city is sound asleep, I think I might have gone mad, what with the rats and the cats scurrying around, the wind howling, and the sounds that my imagination could easily lay to ghosts prowling about. So when the police arrived I was awake, huddled on top of the cookstove quaking with fear.

“I can’t describe the scene at home when they brought me back. Grandpa Pancho, poor thing, had tears in his eyes and kept asking me why I’d done such an insane thing. Grandma Elena scolded me and hugged me, both at the same time, hysterically. As for Aunt Teresa, my great-aunt really, who spent most of her time at wakes and in the sacristy, she kept screaming that they ought to send me straight off to the boarding school on the Avenida Montes de Oca. The family deliberations must have gone on far into the night, for I could hear them arguing downstairs in the parlor. The next morning I found out that Grandma Elena had finally sided with Aunt Teresa, more than anything, I think today, because she thought I might repeat my scandalous exploit at any moment; and then too, she knew I was very fond of Sister Teodolina. I refused, of course, to say one word about the entire matter, and locked myself in my room. But at heart the idea of leaving that house did not displease me: I supposed that in this way my father would be even more keenly aware of my vengeance.

“I don’t know whether it was my entering the school, my friendship with Sister Teodolina, or the crisis I was going through, or all of these things together, but in any event I threw myself into religion with the same passion with which I swam or rode horseback: as though I were gambling my life. From that moment till I was fifteen. It was a sort of madness …” akin to the wild ardor with which she swam in the sea on stormy nights, as though she were swimming furiously in a great religious night, engulfed in dark shadows, fascinated by the great tempest raging within.

Father Antonio is there: he speaks of Christ’s Passion and fervently describes the suffering, the humiliation, and the bloody sacrifice of the Cross. Father Antonio is tall and bears an odd resemblance to her father. Alejandra weeps, silently at first and then her sobs grow violent and finally convulsive. She flees. The nuns run fearfully after her. She sees Sister Teodolina before her, consoling her, and then Father Antonio approaches and also tries to console her. The floor begins to move, as though she were on a boat. It heaves in waves like the sea, the room gets bigger and bigger, and then everything begins to turn round and round: slowly at first and then at dizzying speed. She is drenched with sweat. Father Antonio approaches, his hand is gigantic now, it draws closer to her cheek like a warm, loathsome bat. Then she collapses, felled by a great electrical discharge.

“What’s the matter, Alejandra?” Martín cried, hurrying to her side.

She had fallen to the floor and was lying there rigid, not breathing, her face turning purple, and then suddenly she went into convulsions.

“Alejandra! Alejandra!”

But she did not hear him, did not feel his arms: she groaned and bit her lips.

Then finally, like a storm at sea that dies down little by little, her moans came farther and farther apart, grew softer and softer and more and more plaintive, her convulsions gradually ceased, and finally she lay there limply, as though dead. Martín picked her up in his arms then, carried her to her room, and laid her down on the bed. After an hour or more she opened her eyes and looked about her, as though drunk. Then she sat up, passed her hands across her face as though trying to erase the traces of something and remained silent for a long time. She looked utterly exhausted.

Then she got up, looked about for some pills, and took them.

Martín watched her in consternation.

“Don’t make such a face. If you’re going to be a friend of mine you’ll have to get used to all this. It’s nothing serious.”

She searched about for a cigarette on the little night table and began to smoke. For a long time she rested quietly, saying nothing. Finally she asked:

“What was I talking about?”

Martín reminded her.

“I lose my memory, you know.”

She sat smoking pensively, and then said:

“Let’s go outdoors. I’d like to get a breath of air.”

They leaned out over the balustrade of the terrace.

“So I was telling you about running away that time.”

She dragged on her cigarette in silence.

“I would torture myself for days, analyzing my feelings, my reactions. After what had happened to me with Father Antonio I began a whole series of mortifications of the flesh: I knelt for hours on broken glass, I let burning wax from candles fall on my hands, I even cut my arm with a razor blade. And when Sister Teodolina, in tears, tried to get me to tell her why I had cut myself, I refused to explain. To tell the truth I didn’t know myself, and it seems to me I still don’t know. But Sister Teodolina told me I shouldn’t do those things, that such excesses were displeasing to God, that such behavior was proof of enormous satanic pride. As though I hadn’t known that all along! But all that was stronger, more incontrovertible than any logical argument. You can see where all that madness got me.”

She remained lost in thought.

“How curious,” she said after a time. “I try to remember what that year was like as it went by, and all I remember is separate, juxtaposed episodes. Does the same thing happen to you? Right now I can feel the passage of time, as though it were coursing through my veins, along with my blood, beating along with my pulse. But when I try to remember the past I don’t feel the same thing. I see separate scenes, as fixed and frozen as photographs.”

Her memory is made up of fragments of existence, ecstatic and eternal: time in fact does not flow between these fragments, and events that happened at very different times are related or connected to one another by strange sympathies and antipathies. Or at times they may rise to the surface of consciousness linked by absurd but powerful associations: a song, a joke, a common hatred. The thread that unites things for her now, that causes them to emerge one after another is a certain fierce search for something absolute, a certain perplexity, one that joins together words such as father, God, beach, sin, purity, sea, death.

“I see myself one summer day and hear Grandma Elena saying: ‘Alejandra has to go to the country, she must get out of here, she must be outdoors in the fresh air.’ Curious: I remember that at that moment Granny had a silver thimble on her finger.”

She laughed.

“Why are you laughing?” Martín said, intrigued.

“It’s not anything really, nothing of any importance. They sent me to the country to stay with the Carrascos, old ladies who were distant relations of Grandma Elena’s. I don’t know if I told you that she wasn’t an Olmos; her name was Lafitte. She was a very kind woman and married my grandfather Patricio, Don Pancho’s son. Someday I’ll tell you a bit about Grandfather Patricio, who’s dead now. Anyway, as I was saying, the Carrascos were second cousins of Grandma Elena’s. They were hidebound old maids who’d never changed; even their names were ridiculously old-fashioned: Ermelinda and Rosalinda. They were saints, and to tell the truth they mattered as little to me as a marble slab or a sewing table; I didn’t even hear them when they spoke. They were so innocent they’d have died of fright if they’d been able to read a single one of my thoughts. So I liked going to their country place: I had all the freedom I wanted and could gallop my little mare to the beach, because the old ladies’ estate went down to the ocean, a little to the south of Miramar. What’s more, I was eager to be by myself, to swim, to have a good run with the mare, to feel myself alone in the face of the immensity of nature, far from the crowded beaches where all the filthy people I hated so were piled one atop the other. I hadn’t seen Marcos Molina for a year and meeting up with him again was an intriguing prospect too. It had been such an important year! I wanted to share my new ideas with him, tell him about a marvelous plan I had, inspire in him the same ardent faith I possessed. My entire body was bursting with vitality; even though I’d always run half wild, that summer my energy was boundless, though I now sought entirely different outlets for it. I put Marcos through a lot that summer. He was fifteen, a year older than I was. He was a good sort, and very athletic. In fact I think he’ll make an excellent family man some day and he’s sure to end up president of a chapter of Acción Católica. You mustn’t get the idea he was a sissy; he was, rather, the sort people call a ‘nice boy,’ the kind of wishy-washy Catholic who believed every word he’d ever heard in catechism class; decent, rather naive, quiet. Imagine this now: the moment I arrive in the country I get my hands on him and begin to try to convince him we should go to China or the Amazon as soon as we’ve turned eighteen. As missionaries, see? That first day we rode far out along the beach, toward the south, on horseback. Other times we rode bicycles or walked for hours. And with long, fervent speeches, I tried to get him to understand the grandeur of an act such as I was proposing. I told him about Father Damien and his work with the lepers in Polynesia, I told him stories of missionaries in China and Africa, and nuns massacred by Indians in Matto Grosso. To me, the greatest joy I could possibly conceive of was to die a martyr’s death. I imagined the savages grabbing us, stripping me naked and tying me to a tree, aproaching with a sharp stone knife amid wild howls and dances, slitting my breast, and ripping out my bloody heart.”

Alejandra fell silent, relit her cigarette, and went on:

“Marcos was Catholic, but he heard me out each time without a word. And then one day he finally confessed to me that the sacrifices of missionaries who died and suffered martyrdom for the faith were undoubtedly admirable, but that he didn’t feel capable of following their example. It seemed to him, moreover, that one could serve God in a more modest way, by being a good person and not harming anybody. These words made me boil.

“ ‘You’re a coward!’ I shouted at him in fury.

“This scene, with slight variations, was repeated two or three times.

“He was mortified, humiliated. Whipping up my mare, I broke into a hard gallop and rode away, in a rage and full of scorn for that poor devil. But the next day I returned to the charge, more or less in the same vein. Even today I don’t understand why I was so stubborn, for Marcos awakened no sort of feelings of admiration in me. But one thing is certain: I was obsessed and gave him no rest.

“ ‘Alejandra,’ he said to me good-naturedly, putting one of his big paws on my shoulder, ‘stop preaching now and let’s go for a swim.’

“ ‘No! Wait a minute!’ I cried, as though he were trying to go back on a promise he’d made. And I began harping on the same subject all over again.

“Sometimes I talked to him of marriage.

“ ‘I’m never going to get married,’ I explained to him. ‘Or if I do marry, I’ll never have children.’

“He looked at me dumbfounded the first time I announced this to him.

“ ‘Do you know how you get babies?’ I asked.

“ ‘More or less,’ he answered, blushing.

“ ‘Well, if you know, you understand that it’s a filthy business.’

“I said these words to him firmly, almost angrily, as if it were one more argument in favor of my theory regarding missions and self-sacrifice.

“ ‘I’ll go but I have to have somebody to go with me, do you understand? I have to get married to someone, because otherwise they’ll get the police to search for me and I won’t be able to leave the country. That’s why I thought of marrying you. Look: I’m fourteen now and you’re fifteen. When I’m eighteen I’ll have finished school and we’ll get the permission of the juvenile court judge and get married. That way nobody can stop us from getting married. And if worse comes to worst, we’ll run away and then they’ll have to agree. And then we’ll go to China or the Amazon. How about it? But it’s understood: the only reason we get married is to be able to get out of the country without any fuss—not to have children, as I’ve already explained to you. We won’t ever have children. We’ll live together always, we’ll visit countries full of savages together, but we won’t ever touch each other. Isn’t that a marvelous idea?’

“He looked at me in stupefaction.

“ ‘We mustn’t flee from danger,’ I went on. ‘We must confront it and overcome it. I have temptations, naturally, but I’m strong and able to get the better of them. Can you imagine how nice it would be to live together for years and years, to sleep in the same bed, and maybe even see each other naked and rise above the temptation to touch each other and kiss each other?’

“Marcos looked at me in utter amazement.

“ ‘Everything you’re saying seems to me to be sheer madness,’ he said. ‘Besides, isn’t it God’s command that a husband and wife have children?’

“ ‘I’ll never have children, I tell you!” I cried. ‘And I warn you that you’ll never touch me, that nobody, nobody will ever touch me!’

“I felt a sudden explosion of hatred and began to strip naked.

“ ‘You’ll see now!’ I shouted, as though challenging him.

“I had read that the Chinese keep their women’s feet from growing by placing them in iron molds and that the Syrians, I think it is, deform their children’s heads by binding them tightly with bands of cloth. So when my breasts began to grow I cut a long strip from a sheet, a good three yards long: I wrapped it round and round my chest several times, cinching it cruelly tight. But my breasts kept on growing just the same, like those plants that spring up in the cracks of stones and finally split them apart. So once I’d taken off my blouse, my skirt, and my panties, I began to unwind the long strip of cloth. Marcos was horrified and couldn’t take his eyes off my body. He had the look of a bird fascinated by a serpent.

“When I had stripped naked, I lay down on the sand and challenged him.

“ ‘Come on, you strip naked now. Prove you’re a man!’

“ ‘Alejandra!’ he stammered, ‘What you’re doing is madness and a sin.’

“He repeated the word sin like a stutterer, several times, without taking his eyes off me, and I for my part kept shouting ‘you fairy’ at him, more and more scornfully, until finally, with clenched teeth and in a rage, he began to strip naked. When he was all undressed, however, his energy seemed to have drained away altogether, because he stood there paralyzed, looking at me in terror.

“ ‘Lie down here,’ I ordered.

“ ‘Alejandra, it’s madness and a sin.’

“ ‘Come on, lie down here!’ I repeated.

“He finally obeyed me.

“The two of us lay there on our backs on the hot sand next to each other, looking up at the sky. The silence was oppressive; you could hear the slap of the waves on the stones. Overhead, the gulls screamed and wheeled about us. I could hear Marcos’s labored breathing, as though he had just run a long race.

“ ‘You see how simple it is?’ I commented. ‘We could be like this all the time.’

“ ‘Never! Never!’ Marcos shouted, scrambling to his feet as though to flee from some terrible danger.

“He hurriedly dressed again, repeating: ‘Never, never! You’re mad, utterly mad!’

“I didn’t say anything but smiled smugly to myself. I felt all-powerful.

“And as though his words scarcely deserved a reply, all I said was:

“ ‘If you’d touched me I’d have killed you with my knife.’

“He stood there frozen with horror. Then suddenly he took off at a run, heading toward Miramar.

“I lay on my side and watched him disappear in the distance. Then I got up and ran into the water. I swam for a long time, feeling the salt water envelop my naked body. Every particle of my flesh seemed to vibrate with the spirit of the world.

“Marcos vanished from Piedras Negras for several days. I thought he was frightened or had perhaps taken sick. But a week later he timidly reappeared. I acted as though nothing had happened and we went for a walk, as we had so often in the past. Then all of a sudden I said to him:

“ ‘Well, Marcos, did you think about what I said about getting married?’

“He halted, looked at me gravely, and said to me in a firm voice:

“ ‘I’ll marry you, Alejandra. But it won’t be the way you say.’

“ ‘What’s that?’ I exclaimed. ‘What do you mean?’

“ ‘I’ll get married so as to have children, like everybody else.’

“I felt my eyes getting red, or else saw red. Before I realized what I was doing, I flung myself on Marcos. We fell to the ground, struggling. Even though Marcos was strong and a year older than I was, we fought as equals in the beginning, no doubt because my fury gave me added strength. I remember that all of a sudden I even managed to get him underneath me and knee him in the belly. My nose was bleeding, and we were growling like two mortal enemies. Struggling hard, Marcos finally managed to turn over, and a moment later he was on top of me. I felt his hands gripping me and twisting my arms like tongs. He gradually got the better of me and I felt his face coming closer and closer to mine until finally he kissed me.

“I bit his lips and he drew away, crying out in pain. He let go of me then and took off at a run.

“I got to my feet, but strangely enough I didn’t chase after him. I stood there petrified, watching him running off. I passed my hand across my mouth and rubbed my lips, as though trying to scrub dirt off them. And little by little I felt my fury rising in me again like water boiling in a pot. Then I took my clothes off and ran into the water. I swam for a long time, hours perhaps, leaving the beach far behind, venturing out into the open sea.

“I experienced a strange sensual pleasure as the waves lifted me. I felt at once powerful and alone, miserable and possessed by demons. I swam and swam till I felt my strength giving out, and then I began to stroke my way back to the beach.

“I lay resting on the beach for a long time, on my back in the burning sand, watching the seagulls soaring. Far overhead peaceful, motionless clouds made everything round about me seem absolutely calm as night fell, whereas my mind was a maelstrom agitated and rent by furious winds: looking inward, I seemed to see my consciousness as a little boat lashed by a storm.

“Night had fallen by the time I returned home, full of vague animosity toward everything, including myself. I felt possessed by criminal ideas. I hated one thing in particular: having felt pleasure during that fight and that kiss. Even after climbing into bed, lying on my back looking at the ceiling, I was still overcome by a vague sensation that left me trembling as though I had a fever. The curious thing is that I had almost no memory of Marcos as Marcos (in fact, as I’ve already told you, he seemed rather fatuous and dull to me and I had never felt any sort of admiration for him): what I felt, rather, was a confused sensation on my skin and in my blood, the memory of arms holding me tight, the memory of a weight pressing against my breasts and my thighs. I don’t know how to explain it to you, but it was as if two opposing forces were struggling within me, and this struggle, which I was at a loss to understand, tormented me and filled me with hatred. And this hatred seemed to be nourished by the same fever that made my skin quiver and was concentrated in the tips of my breasts.

“I couldn’t sleep. I looked at my watch: it was around midnight. Almost without being aware of what I was doing, I got dressed and climbed out the window of my room to the little garden below, as I had often done before. I don’t remember if I’ve already told you that the Carrasco sisters also had a little house right in Miramar, where they sometimes stayed for several weeks or spent their weekends. We were at that house at the time.

“I went over to Marcos’s house almost at a run (even though I had sworn to myself never to see him again).

“His room, on the upstairs floor, overlooked the street. I whistled, the way I usually did, and waited.

“He didn’t answer. I searched around in the street for a pebble, threw it through his open window, and whistled again. Finally he poked his head out and asked me in an anxious voice what was going on.

“ ‘Come downstairs,’ I said to him. ‘I want to talk to you.’

“I think that at that moment I still hadn’t realized I wanted to kill him, even though I had been foresighted enough to bring my little hunting knife along with me.

“ ‘I can’t, Alejandra,’ he answered. ‘My father’s angry enough as it is and if he hears me I’ll be in even more trouble.’

“ ‘If you don’t come down, you’ll be in far worse trouble still, because I’ll come up,’ I answered with calm, calculated spite.

“He hesitated for a moment, perhaps weighing the possible consequences for him if I carried out my threat to come upstairs, then told me to wait.

“Shortly thereafter he came down through the back door.

“I walked off down the street ahead of him.

“ ‘Where are you going?’ he asked in alarm. ‘What are you up to?’

“I didn’t answer and strode on till I reached a vacant lot half a block away from his house. He had followed along behind me as though I were dragging him along bodily.

“Then I suddenly turned around and said to him:

“ ‘Why did you kiss me today?’

“My voice, my attitude, something, I don’t know what, must have had its effect on him, because he could hardly get a word out.

“ ‘Answer me,’ I spat out at him.

“ ‘I apologize,’ he stammered. ‘I didn’t mean to ….’

“Perhaps he had caught a glimpse of the gleaming blade, perhaps it was merely the instinct for self-preservation, but at almost that same instant he threw himself on me and grabbed my right arm with his two hands, pressing down hard so as to make me drop the knife. He finally managed to wrench it out of my hand and fling it far away among the weeds. Weeping with rage I ran off and began searching for it, but it was absurd to hope I’d find it in the dark amid that tangle of weeds. I then ran down to the beach, possessed by the idea of swimming far out to sea and drowning myself. Marcos ran after me, perhaps suspecting what I was up to. Suddenly I felt him strike me behind the ear, and I lost consciousness. I found out later that he picked me up and carried me to the Carrascos’ house, leaving me on the doorstep and ringing the doorbell until he saw lights go on inside and heard someone coming to answer, at which point he fled. If you think about it, this may strike you at first as a cruel thing for Marcos to have done, since it was certain to cause an uproar. But what else could he have done? If he had stayed there, with me lying there passed out at his feet at twelve o’clock at night when the old ladies thought I was slumbering away, safe and sound, in my bed, can you imagine the fuss there would have been? Everything considered, he did the right thing. In any case you can imagine the scandal I created. When I came to, the two Carrasco sisters, the maid, and the cook were all there hovering over me, with cologne, with fans, and I don’t know what-all. They wept and wailed as though confronted with a terrible tragedy. They plied me with questions, they screamed at the top of their lungs, they crossed themselves, they exclaimed ‘God have mercy on us,’ they gave orders, and so on and so forth.

“It was a disaster.

“And as you can well imagine, I refused to explain one single thing.

“Grandma Elena came out from the city, all upset, and did her best to get me to tell her what was behind the whole affair. I developed a fever that lingered on nearly all summer.

“Toward the end of February I began getting up and around again.

“I had become more or less of a mute and would say nothing to anyone. I refused to go to church, since the very idea of confessing the thoughts that I’d been having horrified me.

“When we went back to Buenos Aires, Aunt Teresa (I don’t remember if I’ve already told you about this hysterical old woman who spent all her time going to wakes and masses and was forever talking about illnesses and treatments)—Aunt Teresa said, the minute she laid eyes on me:

“ ‘You’re the very picture of your father. You’ll be a fallen woman. I’m glad you’re not my daughter.’

“I left the room boiling with rage at that crazy old woman. But oddly enough, my most violent rage was aimed not at her but at my father, as though those words of my great-aunt’s had struck me first, then headed straight for my father and hit him like a boomerang, and then finally come back and hit me.

“I told Grandma Elena I wanted to go back to the boarding school, that I wouldn’t sleep even one more night in that house. She promised to have a word with Sister Teodolina so that some way might be found to admit me before the school year started. I don’t know what the two of them talked about, but in any event a way was found to take me in at the school then and there. That same night I knelt at my bedside and asked God to make my Aunt Teresa die. I asked this of Him with fierce fervor and repeated it every night for several months when I went to bed, and also during my long hours at prayer in the chapel. Meanwhile, despite all Sister Teodolina’s urging, I refused to go to confession: my rather clever idea was to see to it that Auntie died and then go to confession, because (I thought) if I confessed before she died I’d have to admit what I was up to and would be obliged to stop praying for her death.

“But Aunt Teresa didn’t kick off. On the contrary, when I came back home during vacations the old lady seemed to be in better shape than ever. I should explain that even though she spent her days complaining and downing pills of every color imaginable, she had an iron constitution. She talked continually of the sick and the dead. She would come into the dining room or the parlor and say triumphantly:

“ ‘Guess who died!’

“Or, commenting on the person’s death with mingled self-pride and irony:

“ ‘Inflammation of the liver indeed …. When I told them it was cancer! A six-pound tumor, no less.’

“Then she would run to the telephone to pass on the news with that typical fervor of hers when it came to announcing catastrophes. She would dial the number and without wasting a moment’s time she would blurt out the news, in telegraphic style so as to reach the maximum number of people in the shortest possible time (so that no one else would spread the word ahead of her). She would say ‘Josefina? Pipo cancer!’ and then repeat the same thing to María Rosa, Beba, Nini, María Magdalena, María Santísima. Anyway, as I was saying, when I saw that she continued to be the picture of health despite all my praying, I began to take my hatred out on God. It seemed as though He had tricked me, and feeling Him to be in some way on the side of my Aunt Teresa, that old, ill-natured, hysterical woman, He suddenly assumed in my eyes qualities similar to hers, and my hatred of her caught Him on the rebound, so to speak. All my religious passion seemed suddenly to have changed poles, from positive to negative, though at the same time remaining as strong as ever. Aunt Teresa had said that I was going to be a fallen woman and therefore God thought so too, and He not only thought it but surely wished it to be so. And so I began to plan my vengeance, and as though Marcos Molina were God’s representative on earth, I imagined what I would do with him the minute I got back to Miramar. Meanwhile I got a few minor tasks out of the way: I smashed the crucifix over my bed to smithereens, I threw religious prints down the john, and wiped my behind with my communion dress as though it were toilet paper and flung it in the trash can.

“I found out that the Molinas had already left for Miramar and persuaded Grandma Elena to telephone the old Carrasco sisters. I left the day after, arriving about dinner time, and was therefore obliged to go on out to the Carrasco sisters’ estate in the car that was waiting for me at the station and didn’t have a chance to see Marcos that day.

“I couldn’t sleep that night.”

The muggy heat is unbearable. The moon, nearly full, is surrounded by a yellowish halo like pus. The air is charged with electricity and not a leaf is stirring: everything presages a storm about to break. Alejandra tosses and turns in her bed, naked and suffocating, tense from the heat, the electricity in the air, and hatred. The moonlight is so bright that everything in the room is visible. Alejandra goes over to the window and looks at her watch to see what time it is: two in the morning. Then she looks outside: the countryside seems to be illuminated like a stage set showing a night scene; the silent, motionless woods seem to harbor great secrets, the air is saturated with an almost unbearable scent of jasmine and magnolias. The dogs are restless; they bark intermittently and their answers back and forth fade into the distance and then return again, in wave after wave. There is something unhealthy in that oppressive yellow light, something that seems radioactive and malevolent. Alejandra is having difficulty breathing and has the feeling that the room is stifling her. Then on a sudden irresistible impulse, she climbs out the window. She walks across the lawn and Milord the dog hears her and wags his tail. She feels the wet contact of the grass, at once soft and rough, beneath her bare feet. She heads toward the woods, and when she is far from the house she flings herself onto the grass, spread-eagling herself. The moon falls full on her naked body and she feels her skin quiver where it touches the grass. She lies there like that for a long time: it is as though she were drunk, her mind focused on nothing in particular. She feels her body burn and strokes her hips, her thighs, her belly. As her fingertips barely brush her breasts she feels as though her skin were cat’s fur, bristling and quivering all over.

“Early the next day I saddled the little mare and galloped to Miramar. I don’t know if I’ve told you that my meetings with Marcos were always secret ones, because his family couldn’t stand me and I felt the same way about them. His sisters, above all, were two little feather-brains whose highest aspiration was to marry polo players and appear as often as possible in Atlántida or El Hogar. Both Monica and Patricia detested me and ran and tattled on me the minute they saw me with their younger brother. So when I wanted to get in touch with him I would whistle under his window when I thought he might be home, or else leave a message with Lomónaco, the bath-attendant down at the beach. Marcos was out when I arrived at his house that day because he didn’t answer my whistles. So I went on down to the beach and asked Lomónaco if he’d seen him: he told me Marcos had gone to Dormy House and wouldn’t be back till late that afternoon. For a moment I thought of going in search of him, but I didn’t because Lomónaco told me he’d gone off with his sisters and some girls who were friends of his. There was nothing to do but wait for him, so I left a message for him to meet me at Piedras Negras at six P.M.

“I went back to the Carrascos’ in a foul mood.

“After taking a siesta I set out for Piedras Negras on the mare and waited for Marcos there.”

The storm that had been threatening since the day before had been building up all during the day: the air had turned into a heavy, sticky liquid, enormous clouds had gradually gathered toward the west throughout the morning and like a giant, silently boiling, had blanketed the entire sky during the afternoon. Lying in the shade of the pines, nervous and anxious, Alejandra feels the atmosphere becoming more and more charged by the minute with the electricity that precedes heavy storms.

“Impatient at Marcos’s delay, I grew more and more annoyed and irritated as the afternoon wore on. Then he finally turned up as it was getting dark, earlier than usual because of the huge black clouds moving in from the west.

“He arrived almost at a run and I thought: he’s afraid of the storm. I still wonder today why I vented all my hatred of God on that unfortunate wretch, when all the poor youngster really deserved was my contempt. I don’t know whether it was because he was the sort of stuffy Catholic who had always seemed to me to be typical of that entire breed, or whether it was because he was such a good, decent person that the injustice of treating him badly seemed to me to be all the more heady for that very reason. It may also have been because he had something purely animal about him that attracted me, something strictly physical, of course, but nonetheless it set my blood on fire.

“ ‘Alejandra,’ he said, ‘the storm’s about to break and I think we’d best get back to Miramar.’

“I turned over onto my side and looked up at him scornfully.

“ ‘You’ve just gotten here, you’ve just set eyes on me for the first time in ages, you haven’t even asked why I wanted to see you right away, and already you’re thinking about turning tail and running for home,’ I said.

“I sat up so as to get undressed.

“ ‘I’ve lots of things to talk to you about, but we’re going swimming first.’

“ ‘I’ve been in the water all day, Alejandra. Besides, look what’s coming,’ he said, pointing a finger toward the sky.

“ ‘It doesn’t matter. We’re going swimming anyway.’

“ ‘I don’t have a swimsuit with me.’

“ ‘A swimsuit?’ I said mockingly. ‘I don’t have one either.’

“I began to slip off my blue jeans.

“With a firmness I couldn’t help but notice, Marcos said:

“ ‘No, Alejandra, I’m leaving. I don’t have a suit and I won’t swim naked with you.’

“I had my jeans off now. But I stopped there and said in an innocent tone of voice, as though I didn’t understand:

“ ‘How come? Are you afraid to? What sort of Catholic are you if you have to keep your clothes on so you won’t commit a sin? Are you a different person when you’re naked?’

“And as I began taking off my panties, I added:

“ ‘I always thought you were a coward, a typical Catholic coward.’

“I knew that would turn the trick. Marcos, who had averted his eyes the moment I’d started taking off my panties, looked at me then, his face red with embarrassment and rage, and clenching his teeth, he began to undress.

“He’d grown a lot that year, his athlete’s body had filled out, his voice was a man’s voice now, having lost the ridiculous childish inflections it had still had the year before. He was only seventeen, but very strong and well-developed for his age. I for my part had given up my absurd habit of binding my breasts with the strip of sheet and they had had ample room to fill out; my hips had filled out too and I felt a powerful force in my body impelling me to do extraordinary things.

“Wanting to mortify him, I scrutinized every inch of his body once he was naked.

“ ‘Well, you aren’t the little brat you were last year, are you?’

“He had turned away in embarrassment and was standing almost with his back to me.

“ ‘You even shave now.’

“ ‘I don’t see anything wrong with shaving,’ he snapped angrily.

“ ‘Nobody said there was anything wrong with it. I merely remarked that I see you shave now.’

“Without answering me, and perhaps so as not to be obliged to look at my naked body and let me see his own nakedness, he ran down to the water, just as a flash of lightning illuminated the entire sky, like an explosion. Then, as though this detonation had been a signal, flashes of lightning and claps of thunder began to follow one upon the other. The leaden gray water had grown darker as the sea became rougher and rougher. The sky, entirely covered with the huge black clouds, was suddenly illuminated again and again, as though by a series of flashbulbs mounted on some immense camera going off.

“The first drops of rain began to fall on my tense, vibrant body. As the waves lashed furiously against the shore, I ran down to the water’s edge.

“We swam out to sea. The waves lifted me like a feather in a violent wind and I felt a marvelous sensation of strength—and of fragility at the same time. Marcos never left my side and I had no idea whether it was out of fear for himself or fear for me.

“Finally he shouted to me:

“ ‘Let’s go back, Alejandra! In a minute we won’t even be able to tell which way the beach is!’

“ ‘Always the prudent one, aren’t you?’ I shouted back at him.

“ ‘All right then, I’m going back by myself.’

“I didn’t answer. But it scarcely mattered, since it was impossible now to hear each other anyway. I began to swim back toward the beach. The clouds were pitch black now and rent with flashes of lightning, and the continuous thunderclaps seemed to have come rolling in from far off so as to burst just above our heads.

“We reached the beach and ran to the place where we had left our clothes, just as the storm finally broke in all its fury: a savage, icy pamperofn7 swept the strand as the rain began to come down in nearly horizontal torrents.

“It was impressive: alone, in the middle of a deserted beach, naked, feeling on our bodies that rain swept by a furious, violent wind, in that landscape shaken by thunder and illuminated by blinding flashes of lightning.

“Badly frightened, Marcos was trying to struggle back into his clothes. I lunged at him and tore his pants from his body.

“And pressing against him as we stood there, feeling his palpitating, muscular body against my breasts and belly, I began to kiss him, to bite his lips, his ears, to dig my fingernails into his back.

“He resisted me and we fought to the death. Each time he managed to tear his mouth away from mine he stammered unintelligible yet obviously desperate words, till finally I heard him cry:

“ ‘Let me go, Alejandra, let me go for the love of God! We’ll both go to Hell!’

“ ‘You utter imbecile!’ I shouted back. ‘There’s no such thing as Hell! It’s a story made up by priests to take in idiots like you! God doesn’t exist!’

“He struggled frantically and finally managed to push me away.

“A flash of lightning suddenly revealed the expression of sacred horror on his face. Staring wide-eyed with terror, as though he were living a nightmare, he shouted:

“ ‘You’re mad, Alejandra! Utterly mad! You’re possessed by the devil!’

“ ‘I don’t give a damn about Hell, you imbecile! I laugh at eternal punishment!’

“A terrible energy possessed me; I was overwhelmed at the same time by mingled feelings of cosmic force, hatred, and unutterable sadness. Laughing and weeping, flinging my arms open wide, with adolescent theatricality, I cried out again and again unto the heavens, challenging God to destroy me on the spot with His lightning bolts if He existed.”

Alejandra looks at Marcos’s naked body as he flees as fast as his legs can carry him, momentarily illuminated by the flashes of lightning, a ridiculous and touching sight; the thought occurs to her that she will never see him again.

The roar of the sea and the storm seem to be bringing down obscure and awesome threats of the Divinity upon her head.

11

They went back inside her room. Alejandra made her way over to her little night table with the lamp on it and took two red pills out of a tube. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed, and patting the place beside her with the palm of her left hand she said to Martín:

“Come sit down.”

As he did so she downed the two pills, without water. Then she lay down on the bed, with her knees tucked up, close to Martín.

“I must rest for a minute,” she explained, closing her eyes.

“Well, I’ll be going then,” Martín said.

“No, don’t go yet,” she murmured, as though she were about to drop off to sleep. “We’ll talk some more later … in a minute …”

And she began to breathe deeply, already asleep.

She had let her shoes fall to the floor and her bare feet were tucked up next to Martín. He was puzzled by the story Alejandra had told out on the terrace, and his mind was still in a whirl: everything was absurd, everything followed some plot that made no sense to him, and no matter what he did or didn’t do seemed all wrong.

What was he doing here? He felt stupid and clumsy, but for some reason that he could not contrive to understand, it would appear that she needed him. Hadn’t she come looking for him? Hadn’t she told him of her experiences with Marcos Molina? She had never told anyone else about them, he was certain of that, not a soul, a thought that made him feel both proud and perplexed. And she hadn’t wanted him to leave and had allowed herself to fall asleep at his side, that supreme gesture of trust that going to sleep at someone else’s side represents: like a warrior who has laid down his arms. There she was, defenseless yet mysterious and inaccessible. So close, yet separated from him by the weightless though dark and impenetrable wall of sleep.

Martín looked at her. She was lying on her back, breathing anxiously through her half-open mouth, her large, scornful, sensual mouth. Her long straight blue-black hair (with those reddish glints that indicated that this Alejandra was the same little red-headed girl she had been in her childhood, yet at the same time something so different, so different!) fanning out over the pillow set off her angular face, those features of hers that had the same clean, sharp edge, the same hardness as her spirit. He trembled, full of confused ideas that had never before crossed his mind. The lamp on the night table illuminated her relaxed body, her breasts clearly outlined beneath her clinging white blouse, and those long, beautiful, tucked-up legs that were touching him. He reached one of his hands out toward her, but before he could bring himself to place it on her body, he drew it back in fright. Then, after great hesitation, his hand went out toward her again and finally came to rest on her thigh. He allowed it to linger there for a long time, his heart pounding, as though he were committing a shameful theft, as though he were taking advantage of a warrior’s rest to steal a little souvenir. But then she turned over and he withdrew his hand. She drew her legs up again, raising her knees and curling up in a ball as though returning to the fetal position.

The deep silence was broken only by Alejandra’s restless breathing and a far-off ship’s siren sounding somewhere down at the docks.

I’ll never know her completely, he said to himself, as though the thought were a sudden, painful revelation.

She was there, within reach of his hand and his mouth. In a certain sense she was defenseless, yet how far away, how inaccessible she was! He sensed that vast abysses separated her from him (not only the abyss of sleep but others) and that in order to reach the center of her he would be forced to endure fearful trials, to make his way for many long days amid dark crevasses, through defiles fraught with peril, along the brink of erupting volcanoes, amid blinding flames and deep shadows. Never, he thought, never.

But she needs me, she’s chosen me, he also thought. In some way or other she had sought him out and chosen him, for some purpose that as yet he failed to understand. And she had told him things that he was certain she had never told anyone else, and he had the presentiment that she would tell him many others, more terrible and more beautiful still than those that she had already confessed to him. But he also felt that there would be others that never, absolutely never, would be revealed to him. And weren’t these mysterious, disquieting shadows the truest ones, the only really important ones? She had shuddered when he had mentioned the blind—why? The moment she had uttered the name Fernando she had regretted doing so—why?

The blind, he thought almost fearfully. The blind, the blind.

Night, childhood, shadows, shadows, terror and blood, blood, flesh and blood, dreams, abysses, unfathomable abysses, loneliness, loneliness, loneliness, we touch yet remain immeasurable distances apart, we touch yet we are alone. He was a child, beneath an immense dome, in the center of the dome, amid a terrifying silence, alone in that immense, gigantic universe.

And all at once he heard Alejandra stir, raising up and seemingly pushing something away from her with her hands. From her lips came unintelligible, violent, panting murmurs, until, as though forced to make a superhuman effort to get a single word out, she shouted “No, no!” and sat up all of a sudden.

“Alejandra!” Martín cried out to her, shaking her by the shoulders, trying to wrench her away from that nightmare.

But eyes wide open, she continued to groan, violently fighting off her enemy.

“Alejandra! Alejandra!” Martín called out again, shaking her by the shoulders.

Finally she seemed to rouse herself from her sleep as though climbing out of a very deep well, a dark well full of spider webs and bats.

“Ah,” she murmured in an exhausted voice.

She sat there in the bed for a long time, her head resting on her knees and her hands crossed over her drawn-up legs.

Then she climbed out of the bed, turned on the overhead light, lit a cigarette, and began to make coffee.

“I woke you because I realized you were having a nightmare,” Martín said, looking at her anxiously.

“I always have nightmares when I sleep,” she replied without turning round as she put the coffeepot on the alcohol burner.

When the coffee was ready she handed him a cupful, sat down on the edge of the bed, and drank hers, lost in thought.

Martín thought: Fernando. The blind.

“Except Fernando and me,” she had said. And although he knew Alejandra well enough to know he shouldn’t ask any questions about that name that she had immediately retreated from, an insane impulse kept taking him back again and again to that forbidden region, drawing him closer and closer to its perilous edge.

“And is your grandfather also a Unitarist?”

“I beg your pardon?” she said, her mind elsewhere.

“I asked if your grandfather is also a Unitarist.”

Alejandra turned her eyes toward him, looking somewhat taken aback.

“My grandfather? My grandfather’s dead.”

“What’s that? I thought you told me he was still alive.”

“No, no! My grandfather Patricio is dead. The one who’s still alive is my great-grandfather, Pancho—didn’t I explain all that to you?”

“Well, yes, I meant to say your great-grandfather Pancho—is he a Unitarist too? It’s amusing to me to think that there can still be Unitarists and Federalists here in this country.”

“You don’t realize that we lived all that here. In fact, just imagine: Grandpa Pancho is still living it—he was born just after Rosas’s downfall. He’s ninety-five years old—didn’t I tell you that?”

“Ninety-five?”

“He was born in 1858. The rest of us can just talk about Unitarists and Federalists, but he lived all that, do you see what I mean? Rosas was still alive when he was a little boy.”

“And does he remember things from those days?”

“He’s got a memory like an elephant. And what’s more he talks of nothing else, all day long, whenever he gets you within range. That’s only natural: it’s his only reality. All the rest doesn’t even exist.”

“I’d like to hear him some day.”

“I’ll show him to you right now.”

“What! You can’t mean it! It’s three in the morning!”

“Don’t be silly. You don’t understand that for grandpa there’s no such thing as three in the morning. He hardly ever sleeps. Or maybe he takes a little snooze at any and all hours of the day or night, for all I know …. But it’s at night that he has the most trouble sleeping, and he spends all his time with the lamp lit, thinking.”

“Thinking?”

“Well, who knows? … What can you know about what’s going on in the head of an old man who’s lying awake not able to sleep, an old man who’s almost a hundred years old? Maybe all he does is remember—how should I know? … They say that at that age all you do is remember …”

And then she added, with her dry laugh:

“I’m going to be very careful not to live that long.”

And heading toward the door of the room quite naturally, as though it were simply a question of a normal visit to normal people at a sensible hour, she said:

“Come on, I’ll show him to you now. Who knows—he may die tomorrow.”

She halted.

“Get your eyes accustomed to the dark a little and you can see your way down better.”

They leaned on the balustrade of the terrace for a time, looking at the sleeping city.

“Look at that light in the window in that little house,” Alejandra commented, pointing with her hand. “Lights like that in the night always overawe me: can it be a woman who’s about to give birth to a baby? Somebody who’s dying? Or maybe a poor student reading Marx? How mysterious the world is! It’s only superficial people who don’t see that. You chat with the watchman on the corner, you make him feel confident, and in a little while you discover that he too is a mystery.”

After a moment she said:

“Well then, let’s be off.”

12

They went downstairs and around the house along the gallery on the side until they reached a back door, under an arbor. Alejandra felt around with her hand and turned on a light. Martín saw an old kitchen that had all sorts of things piled up in it, as though it were moving day. This impression grew stronger as they went down a hallway. The thought occurred to him that in the successive divisions of this big old house no one had wanted to or known how to get rid of things: furniture with rickety legs, gilded armchairs without seats, a huge mirror leaning against a wall, a grandfather clock that had stopped running and had only one hand, console tables. As they entered the old man’s room, Martín was reminded of one of the auction houses in the Calle Maipú. One of the former parlors had become part of the old man’s bedroom, as though the rooms of the house had been shuffled together like a deck of cards. In the feeble light of a kerosene lantern, he saw an old man dozing in a wheelchair amid a jumble of furniture. The chair was placed in front of a window that looked out onto the street, as though to allow the grandfather to contemplate the world.

“He’s asleep,” Martín murmured in relief. “You’d best leave him be.”

“I’ve already told you—you never know if he’s really sleeping or not.”

She went over to the old man, leaned over him, and shook him a little.

“What, what?” the grandfather muttered, half opening his little eyes.

They were little green eyes, crisscrossed with red and black streaks, as though they were cracked, buried deep in their sockets, surrounded by the parchmentlike folds of a mummified, immortal face.

“Were you asleep, grandfather?” Alejandra shouted in his ear.

“What, what? Asleep, you say? No, my girl, I was just resting.”

“This is a friend of mine.”

The old man nodded his head with a sudden decelerating motion, like a weighted doll set to bobbing. He offered Martín a bony hand in which huge veins seemed to be trying to work their way out of skin as dry and transparent as the head of an old drum.

“Grandfather,” she shouted at him. “Tell him about Lieutenant Patrick.”

The weighted doll moved again.

“Ah, yes,” he muttered. “Patrick, that’s right, Patrick.”

“Don’t worry, it’s all the same story,” Alejandra said to Martín. “It’s the same every time, no matter what it is. He always ends up talking about the Legion, until he forgets and falls asleep.”

“Ah, yes, Lieutenant Patrick, that’s right.”

His little eyes grew teary.

“Elmtrees, son, Elmtrees. Lieutenant Patrick Elmtrees, of the famous 71st. Who would ever have thought he’d die in the Legion?”

Martín looked at Alejandra.

“Explain to him, grandfather, explain to him,” she shouted.

The old man cupped his enormous gnarled hand around his ear, leaning his head toward Alejandra. Underneath the mask of cracked parchment well on its way to death, what remained of a pensive, kindly human being seemed to be just barely surviving. The lower jaw hung down slightly, as though it no longer were strong enough to stay shut, revealing toothless gums.

“That’s right, Patrick.”

“Explain to him, grandfather.”

He lost himself in thought, looking back toward far-distant times.

“Olmos is the Spanish for Elmtrees. Because grandfather got tired of being called Elemetri, Elemetrio, Lemetrio, and even Captain Demetrio.”

He gave a sort of tremulous laugh, raising his hand to his mouth.

“That’s right, even Captain Demetrio. He was sick and tired of it. And he had taken on so many of the ways of the country that he didn’t like it when they called him the Englishman. And so he upped and changed his name to Olmos. The way the Islands took the name Isla and the Queenfaiths Reinafé. It rubbed him the wrong way—a sort of little laugh—. He was a man who got his dander up very easily, so that was a smart move, a very smart move, yessiree. And what’s more, this was his real country. He’d taken himself a wife here and his children were born here. And seeing him sitting on his South American horse with his silver-studded riding gear, not a soul would have suspected he was a foreigner. And even if anyone had suspected—again a little laugh—he wouldn’t have opened his trap because Don Patricio would have brought him low with one lash of his whip the minute the words were out—little laugh—Yessiree, Lieutenant Patrick Elmtrees. Who would ever have thought it? No, fate, is more complicated than a Turkish business deal. Who would ever have thought that his fate would be to die for the general?”

He suddenly appeared to be dozing, his breath wheezing slightly.

“General? What general?” Martín asked Alejandra.

“Lavalle.”

Martín didn’t understand at all: an English lieutenant serving under Lavalle? “When?”

“In the civil war, stupid.”fn8

One hundred seventy-five men, ragged and desperate, pursued by Oribe’s lancers, fleeing toward the north through the great valley, ever northward. Second Lieutenant Celedonio Olmos rode along thinking of his brother Panchito Olmos, dead in Quebracho Herrado. And with a growth of beard, miserable, ragged, and desperate, Colonel Bonifacio Acevedo too rode toward the north. And another hundred seventy-two now-unrecognizable men. And one woman. Fleeing night and day toward the north, toward the border.

The lower jaw hung down, quivering: “Uncle Panchito and grandfather, run through with lances in Quebracho Herrado,” he murmured, as though in assent.

“I don’t understand anything of all this,” Martín said.

“On June 27, 1806,” Alejandra told him, “the English were advancing through the streets of Buenos Aires. When I was this big—she put her hand down near the floor—grandfather told me the story a hundred and seventy-five times. The 9th Company brought up in the rear of the famous 71st.” (“Why famous?”) “I don’t know, but that’s what they always said. I think it had never been defeated, anywhere in the world. The 9th Company was advancing down the Calle de la Universidad.” (“Calle de la Universidad?”) “Of course, silly, the Calle Bolívar. I’m telling it to you the way grandfather does; I know it by heart. When they arrived at the corner of Nuestra Señora del Rosario, Venezuela for those who are backward, it happened.” (“What happened?”) “Keep your shirt on and I’ll tell you. They threw everything. From the roof-terraces, I mean: boiling oil, plates, bottles, pots, even furniture. They also shot bullets. They were all shooting: women, blacks, kids. And that was how he got wounded.” (“Who?”) “Lieutenant Patrick. On that corner was the house of Bonifacio Acevedo, grandfather’s grandfather, the brother of the man who was later General Cosme Acevedo.” (“The one the street is named after?”) “Yes, the one with the street named after him: that’s all we have left, street names. This Bonifacio Acevedo married Trinidad Arias, from Salta,” she went over to a wall and brought back a miniature, and in the light of the kerosene lantern, as the old man seemed to assent to something that had happened long ago and far away, with his jaw hanging down and his eyes closed, Martín saw the face of a pretty woman whose Mongolian features seemed to be the secret echo of Alejandra’s, an echo amid conversations between Englishmen and Spaniards. “And this woman had a whole bunch of kids, among them María de los Dolores and Bonifacio, who later was to be Colonel Bonifacio Acevedo, the man with the head.”

But Martín thought (and said) that he understood less and less as the story went on. What did Lieutenant Patrick have to do with this whole confused tale, and how had he died serving Lavalle?

“Wait, dummy, here comes the way it all fits together. Didn’t you hear grandfather say that life is more complicated than a Turkish business deal? Fate this time took the form of a ferocious big black, one of my great-great-grandfather’s slaves, a black named Benito. Because Fate doesn’t manifest itself in the abstract—sometimes it’s a slave’s knife and other times it’s the smile of an unmarried girl. Fate chooses its instruments, then it incarnates itself, and then the shit hits the fan. In this case it incarnated itself in Benito the black, who struck the lieutenant such an unlucky blow (from the point of view of the black) with a knife that Elmtrees was able to turn into Olmos and I was able to be born. My life, as they say, hung from just a thin thread and the situation was a very delicate one, because if the black hadn’t heard María de los Dolores’s shouts from the rooftop terrace, ordering him not to do the lieutenant in, the black would have liquidated him in due and proper form, as was his desire, but not that of Fate, because even though it had incarnated itself in Benito it didn’t think exactly the way he did, it had its little differences with him. That’s something that happens very often, because naturally Fate can’t choose the exact means suited to the people who are going to serve it as an instrument. Just as when you’re in a hurry to get to a certain place, when it’s a matter of life or death, you aren’t going to notice if the car has green upholstery or the horse has a tail you don’t particularly like. That’s why Fate is something that’s confused and a little ambiguous: it knows very well what it really wants, but the people who are its agents don’t know quite so much. Like those half-witted subalterns who never execute perfectly the orders given them. So Fate is obliged to act like President Sarmiento: doing things, even though they turn out badly, but nonetheless doing them. And lots of times it has to get its agents drunk or drive them out of their wits. And that’s why people say that someone was as though he were beside himself, that he didn’t know what he was doing, that he lost control. Naturally. Otherwise, instead of killing Desdemona or Caesar, heaven only knows what sort of silly clown act the person would pull. So, as I was explaining to you, at the moment that Benito was about to decree that I would never exist, María de los Dolores gave such a loud shout from up above on the terrace that the black stayed his hand. María de los Dolores. She was fourteen years old. She was pouring down boiling oil, but she shouted in time.”

“I don’t understand this part either; wasn’t it necessary to keep the English from winning?”

“You’re really mentally retarded: haven’t you ever head of a coup de foudre? That was precisely what happened, amid all the chaos. So you can see how Fate works. Benito the black obeyed his mistress’s orders reluctantly, but he dragged the young officer inside, as ordered by the grandmother of my great-grandfather Pancho. And then the women in the house gave him first aid while they waited for Dr. Argerich to come. They took off his uniform jacket. ‘But he’s just a child!’ Mistress Trinidad said in horror. ‘He can’t be a day over seventeen!’ she said. ‘How dreadful,’ they lamented as they washed him with clean water and cane alcohol and bandaged him with strips of sheets. Then they put him to bed. During the night he was delirious and kept saying words in English, as María de los Dolores, praying and weeping, changed his vinegar compresses. Because, as grandfather told me, the girl had fallen in love with the young foreigner and had already made up her mind to marry him. And you should know, grandfather said to me, that when a woman gets an idea like that in her head there’s no power on earth or in heaven that can stop her. So while the poor lieutenant was delirious and no doubt dreaming of his country, María de los Dolores had decided that that country had ceased to exist, and that Patrick’s descendants would be born in Argentina. Afterwards, when his mind became clearer, it turned out that he was none other than the nephew of General Beresford himself. And you can imagine the scene when Beresford came to the house and the moment when he kissed Mistress Trinidad’s hand.”

“One hundred seventy-five men,” the old man mumbled, nodding.

“And what’s that?”

“The Legion. He keeps thinking about the same things all the time: either his childhood or the Legion. I’ll go on with the story. Beresford thanked them for what they’d done for the boy and it was decided that he would stay there in the house till he’d recovered completely. And so, as the English forces occupied Buenos Aires, Patrick came to be a friend of the family, which wasn’t all that easy when you think of it, since everyone, including my family, hated the occupation. But the worst part began with the reconquest: there were great scenes with weeping and all the rest. Patrick naturally rejoined his army unit again and was obliged to fight against us. And when the English were forced to surrender, Patrick felt both great happiness and great sadness. Many of those who had been defeated asked to stay here and were interned. Patrick, of course, wanted to stay and they interned him at La Horqueta ranch, one of my family’s estates, near Pergamino. That was in 1807. A year later he and María de los Dolores were married and lived happily ever after. Don Bonifacio gave him part of the family holdings as a present, and Patricio began the task of converting himself into Elemetri, Elemetrio, Don Demetrio, Lieutenant Demetrio, and then suddenly Olmos. And it was a thrashing for anyone who called him English or Demetrio.”

“It would have been better if they’d killed him in Quebracho Herrado,” the old man murmured.

Martín looked at Alejandra again.

“He means Colonel Acevedo, do you understand? If they’d killed him in Quebracho Herrado they wouldn’t have beheaded him here, at the very moment that he was hoping to see his wife and daughter again.”

“It would have been better if they’d killed me in Quebracho Herrado,” Colonel Bonifacio Acevedo thinks as he flees northward, but for another reason, for reasons he thinks are horrible (the desperate march, the despair, the misery, the total defeat), though they are infinitely less horrible than those he was to have twelve years later, at the moment he felt the knife at his throat, there in front of his house.

Martín saw Alejandra go over to the glass case, and cried out in terror. But saying “don’t be such a sissy,” she took out the box, took the cover off, and showed him the colonel’s head, as Martín hid his eyes. She laughed harshly and put it away again.

“In Quebracho Herrado,” the old man murmured, nodding.

“So,” Alejandra explained, “once again I owed my birth to a miracle.”

Because if they had killed Second Lieutenant Celedonio Olmos in Quebracho Herrado, as they had killed his brother and his father, or if they had beheaded him in front of the house, as they had Colonel Acevedo, she would not have been born, and at this moment she would not be there in that room, remembering that past. And shouting in her grandfather’s ear, “tell him about the head,” and announcing to Martín that she had to leave and disappearing before he could even try to follow her (perhaps because he felt utterly confused), she left him alone with the old man, who kept repeating “the head, that’s right, the head,” bobbing like a weighted doll. Then his lower jaw moved and hung there quivering for a few moments, as his lips mumbled something unintelligible (perhaps he was making a mental resumé, like children about to be called on to recite their lesson) and finally he said: “The Mazorca, that’s right, they threw the head right inside the house, through the parlor window. They dismounted with great bursts of laughter and joyous shouts, they came over to the window and yelled ‘watermelons, ma’am, nice fresh watermelons!’ And then they opened the window and threw in Uncle Bonifacio’s bloody head. It would have been better if they’d killed him in Quebracho Herrado too, the way they killed Panchito and grandfather Patricio, I do believe that.” Something that Colonel Acevedo also thought as he fled northward through the Humahuaca Valley, with one hundred seventy-four comrades (and one woman), pursued by the enemy, in tatters, defeated and overcome with sadness, not knowing that he was to live twelve long years more, in distant lands, waiting for the moment when he would see his wife and daughter again.

“They shouted ‘nice fresh watermelons!’ and it was the head, young man. And poor Encarnación fell into a dead faint when she saw it, and in fact never came to and died a few hours later. And poor Escolástica, who was a little eleven-year-old girl, went clean out of her mind. That’s right.”

And nodding his head, he began to doze off, as Martín stood there paralyzed by a strange silent terror, in the middle of that nearly dark room, with that old man a hundred years old, with the head of Colonel Acevedo in the box, with the madman who might very well be prowling round about. The best thing to do is to leave, he thought. But the fear of meeting up with the madman paralyzed him. And then he told himself that it would be better to wait for Alejandra to come back, that she wouldn’t be long, that she couldn’t be long, since she knew that there was nothing he could do with that old man. He felt as though he had gradually entered a strangely calm nightmare in which everything was unreal and absurd. From the walls the gentleman painted by Prilidiano Pueyrredón and the lady with the big curved comb in her hair seemed to be watching him. The souls of warriors, of conquistadors, of madmen, of municipal councilors and priests seemed to fill the room with their invisible presence and murmur quietly among themselves: stories of conquest, battles, attacks with lances and beheadings.

“One hundred seventy-five men.”

Martín looked at the old man: his lower jaw nodded, hanging down, quivering.

“One hundred seventy-five men, yessiree.”

And one woman. But the old man does not know this, or does not want to know it. This is all that is left of the proud Legion, after eight hundred leagues of retreat and defeat, of two years of disillusionment and death. A column of one hundred seventy-five mute, miserable men (and one woman) galloping northward, ever northward. Will they never reach the border? Does Bolivia exist, there beyond this endless valley? The October sun beats down and rots the general’s body. The cold of night freezes the pus, arrests the army of worms. And then it is daylight again, with the rear guard firing at their pursuers, with the threat of Oribe’s lancers.

The smell, the frightful smell, of the general’s rotten body.

The voice, singing now in the silence of the night:

Palomita blanca

que cruzas el valle,

vé a decir a todos,

que ha muerto Lavalle.fn9

“Hornos abandoned them, confound him. He said ‘I’m going to join Paz’s army.’ And he left them, and Major Ocampo did too. Confound him. And Lavalle saw them going off with their men, toward the east, in a cloud of dust. And my father said the general seemed to have tears in his eyes as he watched the two squadrons going off. He had one hundred seventy-five men left.”

The old man sat there pensively, still nodding his head.

“The blacks were fond of Hornos, very fond of him. And papa finally ended up receiving him. He came here to the quinta and they drank matéfn10 together, and shared memories of what had happened during the campaign.”

His head nodded, his jaw fell, and he murmured something about Major Hornos and Colonel Pedernera. Then he suddenly said no more. Was he perhaps sleeping? Perhaps there flowed through him that silent, latent life, close to eternity, that flows through lizards during the long winter months.

Pedernera thinks: twenty-five years of campaigns, of battles, of victories and defeats. But in those days we knew why we were fighting. We were fighting for the freedom of the continent, for the Great Fatherland. But now … So much blood has been shed on American soil, we have seen so many desperate afternoons, we have heard so many battle cries between brothers …. And now Oribe is at our heels, ready to behead us, to run us through with lances, to exterminate us—didn’t he fight with me in the Army of the Andes? Brave, tough General Oribe. Where is truth? How marvelous those days were! How dashing Lavalle was in his uniform of a major of grenadiers when we entered Lima! Everything was clearer then, everything was beautiful, like the uniform we wore …

“I’m certain of one thing, young feller: there were many fights in our family because of Rosas, and the separation of the two branches, especially in the family of Juan Batista Acevedo, goes back to those days.”

He coughed, appeared to be about to fall asleep, but suddenly spoke up again:

“Because people may say anything they like about Lavalle, son, but no man of good faith can deny his integrity, his honesty, his gentlemanliness, his unselfishness. Yessiree.”

I have fought in one hundred five battles for the freedom of this continent. I fought in the fields of Chile under the command of General San Martín. I then fought against the imperial forces in Brazilian territory. And then later, in those two years of misfortune, through the length and breadth of our poor country. I may have committed great errors, the greatest of them all the execution of Dorrego by firing squad. But who is master of the truth? I know nothing, except that this cruel land is my land and that it was here that I was obliged to fight and die. My body is rotting on my cavalry charger, but that is all I know.

“Yessiree,” the old man said, coughing and clearing his throat, as though lost in thought, with his teary eyes, repeating “yessiree” several times, moving his head as though nodding at an invisible conversational partner.

Lost in thought, with teary eyes. Looking toward reality, toward the only reality.

A reality organized in accordance with very strange laws.

“It was around ’32, the way my father told it, yes, ’32, that’s right. Because I can tell you one thing for sure: the business of improving cattle had its pros and its cons. It was Miller the Englishman who began. The gringo Miller, an excellent sort. A hard worker and thrifty like all Scots, it’s true. A tightwad, to put it more clearly (a little laugh and repeated coughs). Not like those of us who were born here in this country, who are too open-handed, and that’s why we’re where we are (coughs). Don Juan Miller had married Dolores Balbastro. A lady with lots of spunk—there was many a time that she took charge of the defense of the ranch against Indian bands, and she handled a rifle like a man. Like grandma, who was also mighty handy with fire-arms. They were tough women, my boy, and of course it was the hard life they had to lead that made them so, more or less. What was I talking about?”

“About Miller the Englishman.”

“About Miller the Englishman, that’s right. Everybody was talking about him and the famous Tarquino.”

He began laughing again and coughing, and daubed clumsily at his teary eyes with a handkerchief.

“What was I talking to you about?”

“About pedigreed bulls, sir.”

“Ah, yes, bulls.”

He coughed and nodded his head for a moment. Then he said:

“Evaristo’s family never forgave us. Never. Not even when the Mazorca beheaded my uncle. There’s no getting around it, our family was divided on account of the tyrant Rosas. I could tell you about a thousand things that happened around that time, in ’40 especially, when they beheaded a young man named Iranzuaga, the fiancé of one Isabelita Ortiz, who was a relative of ours on one side of her family. Nobody had a peaceful night’s sleep in those days. And you can imagine all the worries in my parents’ house, what with my mother being all alone after papa joined the Legion. And my grandfather, Don Patricio, had gone off too—did I tell you the story of Don Patricio?—and my great-uncle Bonifacio and Uncle Panchito. So the only one left on the estanciafn11 was Uncle Saturnino, who was the youngest one, just a lad. And all the rest were women. Every last one of them women.”

He wiped his teary eyes with the handkerchief again, coughed, nodded his head, and seemed to drop off to sleep. But suddenly he said:

“Sixty leagues. And with Oribe’s men close on their heels. And my father said the October sun was terribly hot. The general was rotting very fast, and nobody could stand the smell after two days’ gallop. And they still had forty leagues to go before they reached the border. Five days and forty leagues more. Just to save Lavalle’s bones and his head. For that one reason, son. Because they were doomed and there was nothing else left to do: no war against Rosas, nothing. They would cut the head off the corpse and send it to Rosas on the tip of a lance, in order to dishonor him. With a placard that said: ‘This is the head of the savage, of the filthy, of the loathsome Unitarist dog Lavalle.’ So they had to save the general’s body at all costs, by crossing the border into Bolivia, shooting their way out as they fled for seven days. Sixty leagues of frantic retreat, almost without stopping to rest.”

I am Major Alejandro Danel, son of Major Danel, of the Napoleonic Army. I can still remember when he returned with the Grande Armée, in the garden of the Tuileries or on the Champs-Elysées, on horseback. I can still see him followed by his escort of Mamelukes, with their legendary curved sabers. And later, when France was finally no longer the land of Liberty and I dreamed of fighting for oppressed peoples, I embarked for these territories, along with Bruiz, Viel, Bardel, Brandsen, and Rauch, who had fought at Napoleon’s side. Heaven preserve us—how much time has gone by, how many battles, how many victories and defeats, how many deaths, and how much bloodshed! That afternoon in 1825 when I met Lavalle and he seemed to me to be an imperial eagle, at the head of his regiment of cuirassiers. And then I marched off with him to the Brazilian war, and when he fell at Yerbal I picked him up and with my men brought him through eighty leagues of rivers and mountains, pursued by the enemy, as we are now … and I never once left his side …. And now, after eight hundred leagues of sadness, I am marching alongside his rotted body, toward nothingness ….

He seemed to wake up again and said:

“Some things I’ve seen myself, others I heard from papa, but above all from mama, because papa was a quiet man and seldom said much. So that when General Hornos or Colonel Ocampo came to drink maté and reminisce about the old days and the Legion, papa would just listen and say from time to time: ‘That’s something, isn’t it?’ or ‘That’s the way things are, old friend.’ ”

He nodded again and dozed off for a moment, but very soon awakened again and said:

“Some day I’ll tell you the curious story of my grandfather, whose name wasn’t Olmos but Elmtrees, who arrived in this country as a lieutenant in the English army at the time of the invasions. It’s a curious story, believe me” (laughing and coughing).

He nodded and suddenly began to snore.

Martín looked toward the door again, but there was not a sound to be heard. Where was Alejandra? What was she doing in her room? The thought also came to him that if he hadn’t left already it was so as not to leave the old man alone, though the latter couldn’t even hear him and perhaps didn’t even see him: the old man was merely going on with his mysterious subterranean existence, paying no attention to him or to anyone living at present, isolated as he was by the years, by deafness and bad eyesight, but above all by the memory of the past that interposed itself like a dark wall of dreams, living in the bottom of a well, remembering blacks, cavalcades, beheadings, and happenings in the Legion. No, that wasn’t true: he hadn’t stayed out of consideration for the old man, but rather because he was as though paralyzed by a sort of terror at traversing those regions of reality in which the grandfather, the madman, and even Alejandra herself seemed to live. A mysterious, mad territory, as absurd and tenuous as dreams, as frightening as dreams. Nonetheless he got up from the chair to which he seemed to have been nailed and with cautious footsteps began to move away from the old man, amid the jumble of furniture mindful of an auction house, with the watchful eyes of the ancestors on the walls staring down at him, his own eyes never leaving the box in the glass case. He finally managed to make his way over to the door and stood there in front of it, not daring to open it. He moved closer and put his ear to the crack: he had the impression that the madman was on the other side, waiting, clarinet in hand, for him to come out. He thought he could even hear him breathing. Then in terror he slowly made his way back to his chair and sat down again.

“Just thirty-five leagues more,” the old man suddenly muttered.

Yes, there are thirty-five leagues left to go. Three days’ journey at full gallop through the great valley, with the swollen corpse that stinks for yards around, distilling the horrible liquids of putrefaction. On and on, with a few sharpshooters in the rear guard. From Jujuy to Huacalera, twenty-four leagues. Only thirty-five leagues more, they say, so as to keep up their courage. Only four, perhaps five days’ journey more, if they are lucky.

In the silent night the hoofbeats of the phantom cavalry can be heard. Heading ever northward.

“Because in the valley the sun beats down, young feller, because this is very high country and the air is very pure. So that after two days’ journey the body had swelled up and you could smell the stink for yards around, my father said, and on the third day they had to strip the flesh off it, that’s what.”

Colonel Pedernera orders them to halt and confers with his comrades: the body is decomposing, the stench is frightful. They will strip the flesh off it and keep the bones. And the heart too, someone says. But above all the head: Oribe will never have the head, he will never be able to dishonor the general.

Who is willing to do the deed? Who is able to do it?

Colonel Alejandro Danel will do it.

They then take the general’s stinking body down from the horse. They place it on the bank of the Huacalera River, as the Colonel kneels alongside it and takes out his field knife. He contemplates the naked, deformed body of his leader through his tears. The battle-hardened men standing about in a circle also look at it, stolid and pensive, their eyes too dimmed by tears.

Then he slowly sinks the knife into the rotten flesh.

He nodded his head and said:

“Later on he was mayor, until the Federalists came to power. What was I talking to you about?”

“About his leaving the mayoralty, sir.” (Who?)

“That’s right, the mayoralty. He left it when the Federalists came to power, that’s right. And he used to say to whoever would listen to him, perhaps so that his words would reach Don Juan Manuel, that what with cows and Indians he had more than enough trouble on his hands and didn’t have time for politics (a little laugh). But the Restorer, who was no dummy—nosiree!—never believed that (little laughs). He wasn’t fooled for a minute, because my grandfather found out that Don Juan Manuel was sending letters to the mayor of La Horqueta telling him not to take his eyes off the Englishman Olmos (laughs and coughs) because he’d had word that he was conspiring with other landowners of Salto and Pergamino. That crafty devil wasn’t taken in one bit, how could he have been, a lynx like him! Because grandfather had in fact been going around palavering with the others, as everybody could plainly see when General Lavalle disembarked in San Pedro, in August of ’40. Grandfather presented himself there with his cavalry and his two oldest sons: Celedonio, my father, who was eighteen then, and Uncle Panchito, who was a year older. A disastrous campaign, that one in ’forty! Grandfather held out in Quebracho Herrado till they were down to the last cannon ball, covering Lavalle’s retreat. He could have saved his skin and gotten out, but he didn’t. And when all was lost, he shot the very last cannon ball he had left and surrendered to Oribe’s troops. When he was told of the death of Panchito, the son he loved the best, all he said was: ‘At least the general was saved.’ And that was how my grandfather Don Patricio Olmos ended his life in this country.”

The old man nodded, murmuring “Armistron, that’s right, Armistron,” and then suddenly fell into a deep sleep.

13

Martín waited, time went by, and the old man did not wake up. He thought he’d really fallen asleep now, and so, little by little, trying not to make noise, he got up and began walking toward the door that Alejandra had left by. He was terrified, because dawn had broken already and the first light of day was already illuminating Don Pancho’s room. He thought that he might run into Uncle Bebe, or that old Justina, the servant, might be up. And if so, what would he say to them?

“I came last night with Alejandra,” he would tell them.

Then the thought occurred to him that in this house nothing could possibly attract people’s attention, and that therefore he had no reason to fear that there would be some unpleasant scene. Except, perhaps, if he bumped into the madman, Uncle Bebe.

He heard, or thought he heard, a creaking noise, the sound of footsteps, in the hallway outside the door. With his hand on the doorknob and his heart pounding, he waited in silence. A train whistled far off in the distance. He put his ear to the door and listened anxiously: there wasn’t a sound. He was about to open the door when again he heard a faint creaking noise, unmistakable this time: footsteps, cautious ones with pauses in between them, as though someone were slowly creeping closer and closer to that same door on the other side of it.

“The madman,” Martín thought in a panic, and for a moment he withdrew his ear from the door, fearing that it might suddenly be jerked open from the other side and he’d be discovered in that compromising position.

He stood there a long time, unable to make up his mind what to do: on the one hand he was afraid to open the door since he might then find himself face to face with the madman; on the other hand, as he looked back across the room to where Don Pancho was sleeping, he feared the old man would wake up and seek him out.

But then he thought that perhaps it would be best if the old man were to wake up, because then if the madman came into the room the old man could explain. Or perhaps one didn’t have to give the madman any sort of explanation.

He remembered that Alejandra had told him that he was a peaceable madman, who did nothing but play the clarinet: eternally repeating, rather, a sort of tootle. But did they let him wander about loose in the house? Or was he shut up in one of the rooms, the way Escolástica had been, this being the custom in these old family mansions?

He spent some time absorbed in these thoughts, still listening.

As he heard nothing more, he put his ear to the door again, calmer this time, listening intently so as to make out the slightest sound or the slightest suspicious creaking noise: but he couldn’t hear a thing now.

He began to turn the doorknob very slowly: it was just above one of those huge old-fashioned locks with keys a good half a foot long. The doorknob seemed to make a terrible noise as it turned. And the thought came to him that if the madman were anywhere about he couldn’t help but hear it and be on his guard. But what else was there to do at this point? Since opening the door was now practically a fait accompli, he screwed up his courage and flung it wide open.

He very nearly screamed.

Standing there, hieratically, in front of him was the madman: a man past forty, with a beard many days old and disheveled hair, dressed in threadbare clothes, without a tie. He was wearing a sports coat that at one time had been navy blue and gray flannel trousers. His shirt was unbuttoned and his whole attire was wrinkled and dirty. His right hand was hanging down along his side, and in it was the famous clarinet. His face was the self-absorbed, emaciated countenance with staring, hallucinated eyes so common in those who are mad; it was a pinched, angular face with the gray green eyes of the Olmoses and a pronounced aquiline nose, but his head was enormous and elongated like a dirigible.

Paralyzed with fear, Martín was unable to get a single word out.

The madman stood there staring at him for some time in silence and then turned around without a word, his body waggling slightly, in a way reminiscent of the slow contortions of youngsters in a street band, but barely perceptible, and walked off down the passageway toward the inside of the house, doubtless heading for his room.

Martín made off in the opposite direction almost at a run, toward the courtyard that was now flooded with the light of the dawning day.

An aged Indian woman was doing laundry in a stone basin. “Justina,” Martín thought, giving another start.

“Good morning,” he said, doing his best to appear cool and collected, as though his presence there at that hour were quite normal.

The old woman answered not a word. “Perhaps she’s deaf, like Don Pancho,” Martín thought.

Her mysterious, inscrutable Indian gaze nonetheless followed him for several seconds that seemed endless to Martín. Then she went on with her washing.

Martín, who had halted in his tracks in a moment of indecision, realized that he ought to act as though nothing were out of the ordinary, so he headed as casually as possible for the winding staircase leading up to the Mirador.

He reached the door at the top of the stairs and knocked.

After a few moments, not having received any answer, he knocked again. There was no response this time either. Then putting his mouth to the crack between the door and the doorframe, he called out “Alejandra!” in a loud voice. But time went by and there was no answer.

He decided then that the best thing to do would be to leave. But instead he found himself walking toward the window of the Mirador. When he reached it he saw that the curtains had not been drawn. He looked inside and tried to spy Alejandra in the semi-darkness. But when his eyes had adjusted to the dim light there inside, he discovered, to his surprise, that she was not in the room.

For a moment he couldn’t move or think a coherent thought. Then he headed for the stairway and began to make his way carefully down it, as he tried to set his thoughts in order.

He crossed the back patio, went around the old house by way of the abandoned side garden, and finally found himself out on the street.

He walked hesitantly down the sidewalk toward Montes de Oca, intending to take the bus there. But after walking along for a moment, he stopped and looked back toward the Olmoses’ house. He was still all confused and unable to decide exactly what he should do.

He took a few steps back toward the house and then halted again. He looked toward the rusty iron gate as though he were expecting something. What? In the light of day the house looked even more ridiculous than by night, as a ghost is more absurd in broad daylight, for with its cracked and peeling walls, the weeds overrunning the garden, its rusted iron grille at the entrance and its front door practically falling off, it stood out in even more violent contrast to the factories and smokestacks looming up behind it.

Martín’s eyes finally came to rest on the Mirador: towering above the house, it seemed to him to be as lonely and mysterious as Alejandra herself. Good heavens! he said to himself, what have I gotten myself into?

In the light of day, the night that he had spent in that house seemed like a dream to him now: the old man who appeared to be practically immortal; Major Acevedo’s head inside the hatbox; the mad uncle with his clarinet and his wild eyes; the ancient Indian woman, deaf or indifferent to everything to the point that she had not even bothered to ask who he was and what a stranger like him was doing coming out of the bedrooms and then going up to the Mirador; the story of Captain Elmtrees; the incredible tale of Escolástica and her madness; and above all, Alejandra herself.

He began slowly to think things through: it was impossible to get on a bus at Montes de Oca; the transition would be too much of a shock. So he decided instead to walk down Isabel la Católica to Martín García; the old street would allow him to put all his conflicting thoughts in order little by little.

What most intrigued him and preoccupied him was Alejandra’s absence. Where could she have spent the night? Had she taken him to see the grandfather in order to get rid of him? No, because if that had been her intention all she would have had to do was let him leave when he had wanted to after hearing her story about Marcos Molina, the scene on the beach, and missions to convert the Indians in the Amazon. Why hadn’t she let him go home after that?

But it might be that everything was unpredictable even to her. Perhaps she had taken it into her head to go off somewhere while he was with Don Pancho. But in that case why hadn’t she told him so? In the final analysis, her way of going about things mattered little. What did matter was that she had not spent the night in her Mirador. It was only natural, therefore, to presume that she had had somewhere else to spend it. And frequently stayed overnight there, wherever it was, since there was no reason to think that anything out of the ordinary had occurred the night before.

Or had she simply gone wandering about the streets?

Yes, yes, he thought, suddenly relieved: no doubt she had gone out walking around the neighborhood, so as to be able to think, so as to clear her head. That was how she was: unpredictable and tormented, strange, capable of wandering about lonely suburban streets in the middle of the night. Why not? Hadn’t they met in a park? Didn’t she often return to those park benches where they had met for the first time?

Yes, all this was quite possible.

He walked along for several blocks, his mind at ease now. Then suddenly he remembered two things that had attracted his attention at a certain point and that now began to prey on his mind once more: Fernando, that name that she had uttered just once, only to immediately regret having done so, it seemed to him; and the violent reaction that she had had when he had happened to refer to blind people. What was her connection with blind people? It was something important, he was certain, because it had been as though she were suddenly paralyzed with fear. Could the mysterious Fernando be blind? And in any event, who was this Fernando whose name she appeared to be unwilling to utter, overcome by that sort of awe which causes certain peoples to avoid uttering the name of their divinity?

He began to think once again, sadly, that he was separated from her by dark abysses and doubtless always would be.

But then, he thought with renewed hope, why had she come to him in the park? And hadn’t she said that she needed him, that they had something very important in common?

He hesitantly walked on a few steps more, and then, halting and looking down at the pavement as though questioning himself, he said to himself: but why should she need me?

He felt a dizzying love for Alejandra. She on the other hand felt no such thing for him, he thought sadly. And even if she needed him, her feeling toward him was not the same as his toward her.

His mind was in a whirl.

14

For many days he had no news of her. He went prowling round the house in Barracas and several times kept watch from afar on the rusty gate in the iron fence.

His discouragement reached its low point the day he lost his job at the printing company: there wouldn’t be any work available for a while, they had told him. But he knew very well that the real reason for letting him go was altogether different.

15

He hadn’t gone there consciously: but there he was, standing outside the big window looking out on the Calle Pinzón, thinking he might faint at any moment from hunger. The word PIZZA seemed to bypass his brain; instead it was his stomach that reacted directly, as with Pavlov’s dogs. If only Bucich were there inside. But still he didn’t dare go in. Anyway, Bucich was bound to be in the south; heaven only knew when he’d be back. Chichín was there inside, with his cap and his colored suspenders, and Humberto J. D’Arcángelo, better known as Tito, with his toothpick stuck in his mouth like a cigarette and Crítica rolled up in his right hand, “distinguishing marks,” so to speak, since only a vulgar fraud could pretend to be Humberto J. D’Arcángelo without the toothpick in his mouth and Crítica rolled up in his right hand. There was something birdlike about him, with his sharp hooked nose and his little eyes set wide apart on the two sides of a flat, bony face. As terribly nervous and restless as always: picking at his teeth, straightening his threadbare tie, his prominent Adam’s apple continually bobbing up and down.

Martín looked at him in fascination until Tito caught sight of him and with his infallible memory recognized him immediately. And signaling to him with the rolled-up Crítica, like a traffic policeman, he motioned him to come in, sat him down, and ordered him a Cinzano with bitters. As he unfolded the paper, which was open to the sports page, he tapped on it with his skinny hand, and leaning over to Martín across the little marble table, with the toothpick shifting about on his lower lip, he said to him: Do you know how much they paid for this guy? At this question, a scared expression came over Martín’s face, as though he were a pupil who didn’t know his lesson, and although his lips moved he couldn’t manage to get a single word out, as D’Arcángelo, his little eyes gleaming with indignation, with his Adam’s apple stuck in the middle of his throat, awaited the reply: with a sarcastic smile, a bitter irony before the fact as he awaited the inevitable wrong guess not only on the part of the youngster but on the part of anybody with five cents’ worth of brains. But luckily, as Tito’s Adam’s apple remained momentarily stuck, Chichín arrived with the bottles. Then turning his sharp face toward him, tapping the sports page with the back of his bony hand, Tito said to him: Come on, Chichín, tell me, just take a guess, how much did they pay for that broken-down cripple of a Cincotta?, and as Chichín served the Cinzanos he answered: How should I know? five hundred, maybe?, to which Tito replied ha, smiling a bitter twisted, yet happy smile (because it demonstrated that he, Humberto J. D’Arcángelo, was somebody really in the know). Then after folding Crítica up again, like a professor who puts the apparatus back in the case after the demonstration, he said Eight hundred thou, and after a silence befitting such an enormity, he added: And now just try and tell me we’re not all batty in this country. He kept his eyes fixed on Chichín, as though searching for the slightest sign of disagreement and everything remained frozen in place for a few seconds: D’Arcángelo’s Adam’s apple, his ironic little eyes, Martín’s attentive expression, and Chichín with his cap and his red suspenders, holding the bottle of vermouth in the air.

The strange snapshot lasted perhaps one or two seconds. Then Tito squirted soda water into the vermouth, took a few sips, and fell into a gloomy silence, staring out the window at the Calle Pinzón, as he usually did at such moments: an abstract gaze and in a manner of speaking an entirely symbolic one, since in no case would it condescend to take in external facts as they really were. Then he went back to his favorite subject of conversation: There was no more soccer these days. What could you expect of players if they were bought and sold? His gaze grew dreamy and he began to hark back, once more, to the Golden Age of the game, when he was a lad “this high.” And as Martín, out of sheer timidity, drank the vermouth that after two days without eating he knew would have a terrible effect on him, Humberto J. D’Arcángelo said to him: You’ve got to sock dough away, kid, take it from me. It’s the one law of life: make yourself a pile, even if you have to raffle off your heart, as he straightened his worn tie and pulled at the sleeves of his threadbare jacket, a suit and tie that were ample proof that he, Humberto J. D’Arcángelo, represented the categorical denial of his own philosophy. And as out of sheer kindness he urged the youngster to finish the vermouth, he talked to him of the old days, and it soon seemed to Martín as though the conversation were taking place on the high seas, for he was feeling queasier and queasier.

And D’Arcángelo sat there lost in thought, chewing on his toothpick and looking out at the Calle Pinzón.

“Those were the days,” he murmured to himself.

He straightened his tie, tugged on the sleeves of his suitcoat, and turned toward Martín with a bitter look on his face, like someone coming back to hard reality, and tapping on the newspaper he said: Eight hundred thou for a lousy no-good like that. That’s how it is in this world. With his little eyes gleaming with indignation, he straightened his worn tie. And then, pointing vertically with his index finger, as though he were referring to the table, he added: People in this country have got to wake up. And looking at the youngsters who had gathered round but addressing Martín symbolically (as Martín began to see Alejandra sleeping before his eyes, as in a vague poetic dream), brandishing the newspaper that he’d rolled up again, he added: You read the paper and find about about a shady deal. And maybe you go on dreaming about the moon or reading those books of yours. And then, straightening his tie, he looked with wrathful eyes at the Calle Pinzón. Turning around after a brief instant of (raging) philosophical meditation, he added: You go ahead and study, make an Edison of yourself, invent the telegraph or be a Christian priest and take yourself off to Africa like that old German with the big handlebar moustache, sacrifice yourself for humanity, sweat bullets, and you’ll see how they crucify you and how others end up rolling in dough. Haven’t you ever noticed that the real heroes of humanity always end up poor and forgotten? None of that for me, thanks, and directing his furious gaze toward the Calle Pinzón once again, he straightened his worn tie and tugged on the threadbare sleeves of his suit jacket and the youngsters laughed or said Ah, come on, do we have to listen to bullshit from you too, and Martín, in his lethargy, again saw Alejandra lying all curled up fast asleep before his eyes, breathing raggedly through her half-open mouth, her large, scornful, sensual mouth. And he could see her long straight hair, blue black with reddish glints, spread out on the pillow framing her angular face, the features that had the same harshness as her tormented spirit. And her body, her long, abandoned body, her breasts beneath the clinging white blouse, and those beautiful long legs curled up touching him. Yes, there she was, within reach of his hand and his mouth, in a certain way defenseless, but how far away, how inaccessible!

“Never,” he said to himself bitterly and almost aloud, as somebody shouted Perón’s doing the right thing and all those oligarchs ought to be strung up together in the Plaza Mayo, “never,” yet she had chosen him, but what for, in heaven’s name, what for? Because he would never know her most intimate secrets, he was quite certain, and once more the words blind and Fernando came to his mind as one of the youngsters put a coin in the Wurlitzer and they began to sing “Los Plateros.” Then D’Arcángelo exploded, and grabbing Martín by one arm he said to him: Let’s clear out, my boy. A person can’t stand it any more even here at Chichín’s. What’s this country coming to with all these clowns shattering your eardrums with their damned foxtrots?

16

The cool wind cleared Martín’s head. D’Arcángelo went on muttering and it took some time for him to calm down. Then he asked Martín where he worked. Martín replied shamefacedly that he was out of work. D’Arcángelo looked at him.

“Have you been out of work long?”

“Yes, a fair time.”

“Do you have a family?”

“No.”

“Where do you live?”

Martín didn’t answer immediately: his face was red, but luckily (he thought) it was dark. D’Arcángelo looked at him intently once again.

“To tell the truth …” Martín murmured.

“What’s that?”

“Ah … I had to give up a furnished room I had …”

“And where are you sleeping now?”

Embarrassed, Martín stammered that he slept most anywhere he could find. And as though to make light of the fact, he added:

“Luckily the weather hasn’t turned cold yet.”

Tito halted in his tracks and looked at him in the light of a street lamp.

“Do you at least have money to eat on?”

Martín didn’t answer. Then D’Arcángelo burst out:

“Why in the world didn’t you say something? Me rambling on and on about great soccer players and you sitting there nibbling on the free appetizers. Damn!”

D’Arcángelo took him to a cheap restaurant and as they ate, he looked at Martín thoughtfully.

When they had finished they left the restaurant, and as D’Arcángelo straightened his tie he said to Martín:

“Don’t worry, my boy. We’re going to my place now. And we’ll see what happens after that.”

They entered an old building that in days gone by had been the coach-house of some splendid mansion.

“My old man was a coachman, you know, till some ten years or so ago. But he’s got rheumatism now and can’t get around any more. And who’s going to hire a coach these days anyway? My old man’s one of the many victims of urban progress. All he had left was his health, and now that’s gone.”

The coach-house was now partly a tenement and partly stables: one could hear cries, conversations, and several radios blaring at once, amid a strong odor of manure. One could hear the sound of horses’ hoofs pawing. In the old coach-stalls were several delivery vans and a small truck.

They walked to the back of the place.

17

He waited for several days in vain. But finally Chichín motioned to him to come in and handed him an envelope. He opened it with trembling fingers and unfolded the letter. All it said, in Alejandra’s huge, uneven, shaky handwriting, was that she’d be waiting for him at six o’clock.

A few minutes before six he was sitting on the park bench, restless but happy, thinking that now he had someone to tell his troubles to. And someone like Alejandra—it was as incongruous as though a beggar were to discover Morgan’s treasure trove.

He ran toward her like a child, and told her what had happened at the printer’s.

“You mentioned somebody named Molinari to me,” Martín said. “I think you said he was head of a big corporation.”

Alejandra raised her eyes toward him, arching her eyebrows in surprise.

“Molinari? I spoke to you of Molinari?”

“Yes you did, right here, when you found me asleep on this very bench, remember? You said to me: ‘You surely don’t work for Molinari,’ remember?”

“I may have.”

“Is he a friend of yours?”

Alejandra looked at him with a sarcastic smile.

“Did I say he was a friend of mine?”

But Martín was too hopeful at that moment to attribute any hidden meaning to the expression on her face.

“What do you think?” he said, doggedly pursuing the subject. “Do you think there’s a chance he might give me work?”

She looked at him the way doctors size up recruits reporting for military service.

“I know how to type, I can draft letters, correct proofs …”

“One of tomorrow’s winners, eh?”

Martín’s face turned red.

“But do you have any idea what it’s like to work in a big company? With a time clock and all that?”

Martín took out his white penknife, opened its smallest blade, and then closed it again, with his head bowed.

“I have no false pride. If I can’t work in the office I can work in the shop, or as a day laborer.”

Alejandra looked at his threadbare suit and his worn shoes.

When Martín finally raised his eyes, he saw that she had a very serious expression on her face and was frowning.

“What’s the matter? Would it be hard for you to arrange?”

She shook her head, then said:

“Anyway, don’t worry, we’ll find some solution.”

She got up from the bench.

“Come on. Let’s walk around for a while, I have a terrible stomach ache.”

“Stomach ache?”

“Yes, it hurts lots of times. It must be an ulcer.”

They walked to the bar on the corner of Brasil and Balcarce. Alejandra asked for a glass of water at the counter, took a small bottle out of her handbag and poured a few drops out of it into the glass.

“What’s that?”

“Laudanum.”

They walked through the park again.

“Let’s go down to Dársena for a while,” Alejandra said.

They walked down Almirante Brown, turned down Arzobispo Espinosa and Pedro de Mendoza and finally came to a Swedish freighter that was taking on cargo.

Alejandra sat down on one of the tall crates that had come from Sweden, looking toward the river, and Martín sat down on a lower one, as though he felt himself to be merely a humble vassal in the presence of this princess. And both gazed at the great tawny river.

“Have you realized that we have lots of things in common?” she asked.

And Martín thought: Can this be possible? And though he was quite sure that both of them enjoyed looking out across the river, he thought that this was a mere detail compared to all the other differences that separated the two of them, a detail that no one could take seriously, least of all Alejandra herself. Any more than one could take seriously the form in which she had just smilingly phrased her question: like grown-ups suddenly having themselves democratically photographed in the street alongside a worker or a nursemaid, smiling condescendingly. Although it was also possible that that phrase was a key to the truth, and that the fact that both of them were eagerly looking out across the river was a secret formula making them allies for much more important endeavors. But how to know what she was really thinking? And looking at her sitting up there on the crate, he felt nervous, like a person watching a beloved tightrope walker performing at extremely dangerous heights at which no one can come to his aid. He looked at her, an ambiguous, disturbing figure, as the breeze ruffled her straight blue black hair, and outlined her pointed breasts set rather far apart. He watched her smoking a cigarette with a far-off look in her eyes. The wind-swept landscape seemed to be enveloped in a quiet melancholy now, as though the winds had died down and a dense fog lay over it.

“How nice it would be if one could go far away,” she suddenly remarked. “If one could go far away from this filthy city.”

It pained Martín to hear that impersonal verb form: if one could go away.

“Would you go away?” he asked in a choked voice.

Without looking at him, almost completely absorbed in her own thoughts, she answered:

“Yes, I’d like it a lot if I could go away. To some far-off place, a place where I didn’t know anybody at all. To an island maybe, one of those islands that must still exist out there somewhere.”

Martín lowered his head and began to scratch at the crate with his penknife as his eyes scanned the words THIS SIDE UP. Alejandra turned her gaze toward him, and after watching him for a moment, she asked if something was the matter, and as he continued to scratch the wood and look at the words THIS SIDE UP he answered that nothing was wrong, but Alejandra continued to look at him, not seeing him, lost in thought. Neither of them spoke for some time, as it grew darker and the dockside fell silent: the cranes had stopped working and the stevedores and porters were beginning to wend their way homeward or toward the bars along the dockside.

“Let’s go to the Moscow,” Alejandra said then.

“To the Moscow?”

“Yes, in the Calle Independencia.”

“But isn’t it terribly expensive?”

Alejandra laughed.

“It’s a neighborhood bistro. Furthermore, Vanya’s a friend of mine.”

The door of the place was closed.

“There’s nobody here,” Martín remarked.

“Shaddup,” was all Alejandra said, imitating American movies, and knocked on the door.

After a while a man in shirtsleeves came and let them in: he had straight white hair and a kind, refined face with a permanent melancholy smile. A nervous tic was making his cheek twitch, up near his eye.

“Ivan Petrovich,” Alejandra said, holding out her hand to him.

The man raised it to his lips, bowing slightly.

They sat down next to a window looking out on the Paseo Colón. The place was dimly lighted, with just one feeble little lamp next to the cash register, where a short, plump butterball of a woman with a Slavic face was drinking maté.

“I have Polish vodka,” Vanya said. “They delivered it to me yesterday—a boat from Poland came in.”

As he went off to get them some, Alejandra commented:

“He’s a great guy, but the fat woman—and she pointed toward the cash register—is a vicious bitch. She’s trying to get Vanya put away in an asylum so the place will be all hers.”

“Vanya? Didn’t you call him Ivan Petrovich?”

“Vanya is the diminutive of Ivan, dummy. Everybody calls him Vanya, but I call him Ivan Petrovich—it makes him feel as though he’s in Russia. And besides, I think it’s a charming name.”

“And why should he be put away in an asylum?”

“He’s a morphine addict and has attacks when he can’t get the stuff. And that’s when the fat woman sees her chance to get what she can while the getting’s good.”

Vanya brought the vodka, and as he was serving it he said to them:

“Record player works fine. I have Brahms’s violin concerto—shall I play it? It’s Heifetz, no less.”

When he left the table, Alejandra commented:

“You see? He’s generosity itself. He used to be a violinist at the Colón but it’s pitiful to hear him play now. And yet he offers you a violin concerto, with Heifetz playing.”

She pointed, calling his attention to the walls: Cossacks galloping into a village, Byzantine churches with golden domes, gypsies. The whole scene was clumsily painted and the effect was dismal.

“I sometimes think he’d like to go back. One day he said to me: ‘Don’t you think that, everything considered, Stalin is a great man?’ And he added that in a certain way he was another Peter the Great and that when everything was said and done, what he was aiming at was the grandeur of Russia. But he said all this in a low murmur, casting continual glances in the fat woman’s direction. I think she can read his lips.”

From a distance, as though not wanting to bother the young couple, Vanya was going through an elaborate pantomime, pointing to the record player, as though praising Heifetz’s performance. And as Alejandra nodded with a smile, she said to Martín:

“The world is nothing but filth.”

Martín reacted violently.

“No, Alejandra! There are all sorts of nice things in the world!”

She looked at him, thinking perhaps of his poverty, his mother, his loneliness. And still he was capable of finding the world full of marvelous things! An ironic smile superimposed itself on her original expression of tenderness, causing the latter to contract, as though it were an acid applied to a very delicate skin.

“What are they?” she asked.

“There are so many of them, Alejandra!” Martín exclaimed, taking one of her hands and clasping it to his breast. “That music … a man like Vanya … and most of all you, Alejandra … you …”

“Really now, I can’t help thinking you haven’t ever got past childhood, you dimwit.”

She sat there for a moment, her mind elsewhere, took a sip of vodka, and then went on:

“Yes, you’re right of course. There are beautiful things in this world … there’s no doubt of that …”

And then, turning toward him, she added in a bitter tone of voice:

“But I’m garbage, Martín, do you hear? You mustn’t have any illusions about me.”

Martín clasped one of Alejandra’s hands in his, raised it to his lips and kept it there, kissing it fervently.

“No, Alejandra! Why do you say such a dreadful thing? I know that’s not true. Everything you’ve said about Vanya and lots of other things I’ve heard you say prove that isn’t true.”

His eyes had filled with tears.

“All right, never mind, it’s not worth getting upset about,” Alejandra said.

Martín leaned his head on Alejandra’s breast and nothing in the world mattered now. Looking out the window he could see night descending on Buenos Aires, enhancing his feeling that he was safe and sound here in this refuge, this hidden corner of the implacable city. A question he had never asked anyone (whom could he have asked?) welled up from within him, a question with the clean-cut, shiny edges of a coin that has never been circulated, that millions of anonymous dirty hands have not yet worn thin, deteriorated, and debased:

“Do you love me?”

She appeared to hesitate for an instant, but then she answered:

“Yes, I love you. I love you a lot.”

Martín felt magically isolated from the cruel reality of the outside world, as happens in the theater (he thought years later) during the space of time that we are living the world shown onstage, while outside the painful sharp edges of the everyday universe await, the things that will inevitably strike us with brute force the moment the footlights go out and the spell is broken. And just as in the theater the outside world at certain moments manages to reach us there inside, though in an attenuated state, in the form of distant sounds (a car horn honking, a newsboy’s shout, a traffic policeman’s whistle), so too there reached his consciousness, like disturbing little whispers, small facts, certain phrases that clouded the magic and left cracks in it: those words that she had uttered down at the dockside, those words that left him feeling terribly excluded (“I’d like it a lot if I could go away from this filthy city”), and the phrase that she had just uttered (“I’m garbage; you mustn’t have any illusions about me”), words that throbbed like a slight, dull pain in his mind, words that as he sat there with his head leaning on Alejandra’s breast, giving himself over to the marvelous happiness of the instant, swarmed like ants in a deeper, more insidious region of his soul, exchanging whispers back and forth with other enigmatic words: the blind, Fernando, Molinari. But it doesn’t matter, he said to himself obstinately—it doesn’t matter, pressing his head against her warm breasts and caressing her hands, as though he would thus be able to ensure that the magic spell would last.

“But how much do you love me?” he asked childishly.

“A lot—I just told you that.”

Nonetheless her tone of voice seemed distant, and raising his head he looked at her and could see that it was as though her mind were distracted, as though her attention were now focused on something that was not there with him but elsewhere, somewhere far off and unknown.

“What are you thinking about?”

She didn’t answer, as though she hadn’t heard.

Then Martín repeated the question, squeezing her arm as though to bring her back to reality.

And she said then that she wasn’t thinking about anything: nothing in particular anyway.

Martín was to experience this sort of absence on her part many times: her eyes wide open and even going on doing this or that, yet at the same time a total stranger to herself, as though she were being manipulated by some remote force.

Suddenly, glancing over at Vanya, she said:

“I like people who are failures. Don’t you?”

He sat there thinking that singular statement over.

“There’s always something vulgar and horrible about success,” she added.

After a moment’s silence, she went on:

“Whatever would become of this country if everyone were a success! I don’t even want to think about it. The fact that so many people are failures helps save us somewhat. Aren’t you hungry?”

“Yes.”

She got up from the table and went over to say goodbye to Vanya. When she returned, her face flushed, Martín confessed to her that he was flat broke. She burst out laughing, opened her purse, and took out two hundred pesos.

“Here, take this. When you need more, just tell me.”

Embarrassed, Martín tried to refuse the money, whereupon Alejandra looked at him in amazement.

“Are you crazy? Or are you one of those petty bourgeois who think a man shouldn’t take money from a woman?”

When they had finished dinner, they headed for Barracas. After crossing the Parque Lezama in silence, they started down Hernandarias.

“Do you know the story of the Enchanted City of Patagonia?” Alejandra asked.

“I’ve heard a little about it, not much.”

“Some day I’ll show you papers that are still in that leather trunk of Major Acevedo’s. Papers about this guy.”

“This guy? What guy?”

Alejandra pointed to the street sign.

“Hernandarias.”

“Papers in your house? How does that happen?”

“Papers, names of streets. That’s all we have left. Hernandarias was an ancestor of the Acevedos. In 1550 he headed the expedition in search of the Enchanted City.”

They walked along for a time in silence and then Alejandra recited:

Ahí está Buenos Aires. El tiempo que a los hombres

trae el amor o el oro, a mí apenas me deja

esta rosa apagada, esta vana madeja

de calles que repiten los pretéritos nombres

de mi sangre: Laprida, Cabrera, Soler, Suárez …

Nombres en que retumban ya secretas las dianas,

las repúblicas, los caballos y las mañanas,

las felices victorias, las muertes militares …fn12

She fell silent again for several blocks, and then suddenly she asked:

“Do you hear bells ringing?”

Martín listened intently and answered no.

“What’s all this about bells ringing?” he asked, intrigued.

“Nothing; it’s just that I sometimes hear bells that are real and at other times I hear bells that aren’t.”

She laughed and added:

“Speaking of churches, I had a strange dream last night. I was in a cathedral, one in total darkness almost, and I was having to walk forward carefully so as not to push people in front of me aside. I couldn’t see a thing, but I had the impression that the nave was jammed with people. With great difficulty I finally managed to work my way up close to the priest preaching in the pulpit. I wasn’t able to hear what he was saying, even though I was very close now, and the worst thing about it was that I was certain that he was addressing me. I could hear a sort of vague murmur, as though he were speaking over a bad phone connection, and this made me more and more anxious. I opened my eyes wide, trying to see the expression on his face at least. And to my horror I saw that he didn’t have a face, his face was just smooth skin, and there was no hair on his head. At that moment the bells began to ring, tolling slowly at first and then gradually they began to peal louder and louder, till finally they were clanging furiously and I woke up. And the curious thing is that right there in the dream, standing with my hands over my ears, I kept saying, as though the very thought horrified me: ‘They’re the bells of Santa Lucía, the church I went to when I was little.’ ”

There was a pensive look on her face.

“I wonder what that can possibly mean,” she said then. “Don’t you think dreams have a meaning?”

“A psychoanalytic interpretation, you mean?”

“No, no. Well, that too, why not? But dreams are mysterious, and mankind has been reading meaning into them for thousands of years.”

Then she gave the same strange laugh that had come from her lips a moment before. It was not a healthy or calm laugh, but a nervous, anxious one.

“I always dream. Of fire, of birds, of swamps that I’m sinking into or panthers that are clawing me to bits, of snakes. But fire especially. In the end, there’s always fire. Don’t you think there’s something uncanny, something sacred about fire?”

They were almost there. In the distance Martín could already see the big old house with its Mirador up above: the ghostly remains of a world that no longer existed.

They entered the gate, went through the garden, and walked around to the back of the house: the madman’s absurd but tranquil tootling on the clarinet could be heard.

“Does he play all the time?” Martín asked.

“Just about. But after a while you don’t even notice.”

“Did you know that I saw him the other night as I was leaving? He was listening behind the door.”

“Yes, he’s in the habit of doing that.”

They climbed up the winding staircase and Martín again felt the magic of that terrace in the summer night. Anything could happen in that atmosphere that seemed to be situated both outside of time and outside of space.

They went inside the Mirador and Alejandra said:

“Sit on the bed. The chairs here are dangerous, as you know.”

As Martín sat down, she flung her purse down and put water on to boil. Then she put a record on: the dramatic chords of the concertina began to take on the configuration of a somber melody.

“Listen: The words are tremendous.”

Yo quiero morir contigo,

sin confesión y sin Dios,

crucificado en mi pena,

como abrazado a un rencor.fn13

After they had drunk the coffee they went out onto the terrace and leaned over the balustrade. The sound of the clarinet could be heard from below. The night was pitch black and stifling.

“Bruno always says that unfortunately our lives are lived in the form of a rough draft. A writer can always revise something that’s not perfect or simply toss the whole thing into the wastebasket. Not life: there’s no way to correct or clean up or throw away what’s already been lived. Do you realize how awful that is?”

“Who’s Bruno?”

“A friend.”

“What does he do?”

“Nothing; he’s a contemplative sort, though he claims he’s merely pathologically apathetic. I think he does write though. But he’s never shown anybody what he’s done and I don’t imagine he’ll ever publish anything.”

“And what does he live on?”

“His father owns a flour mill in Capitán Olmos. That’s how we came to know each other; he was a very good friend of my mother’s. I think he was in love with her,” she added with a laugh.

“What was your mother like?”

“They say she was like me—physically I mean. I hardly remember her. I was only five when she died, you see. Her name was Georgina.”

“Why did you say she was like you physically?”

“I meant we looked like each other, that’s all. Because in other ways I’m very different. According to what Bruno tells me, she was a gentle, feminine, sensitive, quiet person.”

“So who is it you resemble? Your father?”

Alejandra was silent. Then, stepping away from Martín, she said in a tone of voice that was no longer the same, a harsh, choked voice:

“Who, me? I don’t know. Maybe I’m the incarnation of one of those demons who are Satan’s familiars.”

She unbuttoned the two top buttons of her blouse and shook the little lapels of it with her two hands as though she were trying to give herself more air. Panting slightly, she went over to the window, took several deep breaths, and after a while seemed to calm down.

“I was just joking,” she said as she sat down on the edge of the bed as usual, making room for Martín alongside her.

“Turn the light out,” she said then. “It bothers me terribly sometimes; it makes my eyes burn.”

“Would you like me to leave? Do you want to sleep?” Martín asked.

“No, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Stay, if it doesn’t bore you to just sit here, not talking. I’ll lie down for a while and you can stay right here.”

“I think it would be better if I left and let you get some rest.”

With an edge of irritation in her voice, Alejandra answered:

“Can’t you see I want you to stay? Turn out the night light too.”

Martín got up and turned out the night light and then sat down again alongside her, with his mind churning, completely puzzled and overcome with shyness and diffidence. Why did Alejandra need him? He for his part thought of himself as a useless, dull-witted sort who could do nothing but listen to her and admire her. It was she who was the strong one, the powerful one; what kind of help could he possibly be to her?

“What are you sitting there muttering?” Alejandra asked, shaking him by the arm as though to summon him back to reality.

“Muttering? Nothing.”

“Well, thinking then. You’re certainly thinking something, you idiot.”

Martín was reluctant to share his thoughts with her, but he supposed that as usual she’d eventually guess what they were anyway.

“I was thinking … that … why in the world would you need me?”

“Why not?”

“I’m nobody …. You, on the other hand, are a strong person, you have very definite ideas, you’re courageous …. You could defend yourself against a whole tribe of cannibals all by yourself.”

He heard her laugh. Then she said:

“I don’t know the answer myself. But I sought you out because I need you, because you … Anyway, what’s the use of racking our brains?”

“And yet just today, down at the dockside, you said you’d gladly go to some far-off island—isn’t that what you said?” Martín answered with a trace of bitterness in his voice.

“So what?”

“You said that you’d go, not that we’d go.”

Alejandra laughed again.

Martín took one of her hands in his and asked her in an anxious voice:

“Would you take me with you?”

She appeared to be thinking it over: Martín could not make out her features.

“Yes … I think so …. But I don’t see why you’d find such a prospect pleasing.”

“Why not?” Martín asked in a hurt voice.

“Because I can’t bear to have anybody with me all the time and because I’d hurt you a lot, a whole lot,” she answered gravely.

“Don’t you love me?”

“Oh, Martín … don’t start bringing up questions like that again …”

“Well then, it’s because you don’t love me.”

“Of course I do, silly. But I’d hurt you for the pure and simple reason that I love you, don’t you understand? You don’t hurt people you feel indifferent toward. But the word love, Martín, covers such a lot of territory …. You love a paramour, a dog, a friend …”

“And what about me?” Martín asked, trembling. “What am I to you? A paramour, a dog, a friend?”

“I’ve told you I needed you—isn’t that enough for you?”

Martín fell silent: the derisive phantoms that had been prowling about in the distance drew closer: the name Fernando, the phrase always remember that I’m garbage, her absence from her room that first night. And he thought, sadly and bitterly: “Never, never.” His eyes filled with tears and his head bent forward as though the weight of those thoughts had made it double over.

Alejandra raised her hand to his face and felt his eyes with the tips of her fingers.

“I thought as much. Come here.”

She put one arm round him and held him close.

“Let’s see if he’s going to be a good boy now,” she said, the way one speaks to a child. “I’ve already said that I need him and love him a lot, what else does he want?”

She put her lips to his cheek and gave him a kiss. Martín felt a shiver run through his whole body.

Embracing Alejandra violently, feeling her warm body next to his, he began, as though an invincible power had overcome him, to kiss her face, her eyes, her cheeks, her hair, finally seeking out that large, full-lipped mouth he could feel next to his. For a fleeting instant he was aware that Alejandra was trying to avoid his kiss: her whole body seemed to grow hard and rigid and her arms pushed him away for a moment. Then she suddenly melted and a frenzy seemed to take possession of her. And then something happened that terrified Martín: he felt her hands grip his arms as though they were claws and tear his flesh, as at the same time she pushed him away and sat up.

“No!” she shouted, getting to her feet and running to the window.

Martín was terrified and did not dare approach her. He could see her standing there, breathing in great gulps of night air as though she were suffocating, her hair in wild disorder, her breast heaving, her hands clutching the window recess, her arms taut. With a violent tug she ripped her blouse open with both hands, tearing the buttons off, fell to the floor, and lay there rigid. Her face slowly turned purple, and then suddenly her body began to heave convulsively. In a panic, Martín had no idea how to deal with her, what to do for her. When he saw that she was falling, he ran to her and took her in his arms and tried to quiet her. But Alejandra saw and heard nothing: she writhed and moaned, her eyes wide open and delirious. It occurred to Martín that all he could do was carry her over to the bed. He did so and little by little he saw to his relief that she was calming down and that her moans were gradually becoming softer and softer.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, in utter confusion and terror, Martín could see her naked breasts in the gaping neck of the blouse. The thought crossed his mind that in some way he, Martín, was indeed necessary to this tormented, suffering creature. Then he closed Alejandra’s blouse and waited. Little by little her breathing grew quieter and more regular, her eyes had closed now, and she seemed to be asleep. More than an hour went by in this way, and then, opening her eyes and looking at him, she asked for a drink of water. He held her up with one arm and gave her some.

“Turn out that light,” she said.

Martín obeyed and sat down alongside her again.

“Martín,” Alejandra said in a faint voice, “I’m very, very tired, I’d like to sleep, but don’t go away. You can sleep here, next to me.”

He took off his shoes and lay down at her side.

“You’re a saint,” she said, curling up next to him.

Martín felt her suddenly drop off to sleep, as he tried to put his chaotic thoughts more or less in order. But his mind was in such turmoil and his thought processes so incoherent or contradictory that little by little he was overcome by an irresistible drowsiness and the very pleasant sensation (despite everything) of being at the side of the woman he loved.

But something kept him from dropping off to sleep, and gradually he grew more and more anxious.

It was as if the prince, he thought, journeying through vast, lonely regions, had at last found himself before the cavern where the beauty is sleeping, guarded by the dragon. And as if, moreover, he had become aware that the dragon was not a menacing creature there at her side watching over her, as we imagine him in the myths of our childhood, but instead, and much more frighteningly, a creature inside of her: as if she were a dragon-princess, an unfathomable monster, at once chaste and breathing fire, at once innocent and revolting: an absolutely pure-hearted child in a communion dress, possessed by the nightmares of a reptile or a bat.

And the mysterious winds that seemed to be blowing out of the dark cavern of the dragon-princess shook his soul and rent it apart; all his conceptions of things were shattered to bits and hopelessly jumbled together; his body shuddered from head to foot with complex sensations. His mother (he thought), his mother, flesh and filth, a hot moist bath, a dark mass of hair and odors, a repugnant manure of skin and warm lips. But (he was trying to impose order on his chaos) he had divided love into filthy flesh and purest sentiment; into purest sentiment and repugnant, sordid sex that he must reject, even though (or because) his instincts so often rebelled, recoiling from their very rebellion with the same horror with which he suddenly discovered his filthy bed-mother’s features on his own face. As though his bed-mother, a treacherous, crawling thing, managed to cross the huge moats that he kept desperately digging each day in order to defend his tower; like an implacable viper, she returned each night, appearing in the tower like a fetid phantom as he defended himself with his clean, sharp-edged sword. And what in the name of heaven was happening with Alejandra? What ambiguous sentiment was now throwing all his defenses into confusion? The flesh was suddenly beginning to appear to him to be spirit, and his love for her was turning into flesh, into burning desire for her skin and her damp, dark dragon-princess cavern. But in heaven’s name why did she appear to defend this cavern with fiery blasts and the furious cries of a wounded dragon? “I mustn’t think,” he said to himself, pressing hard on his temples, trying to keep from thinking as he might try to keep from breathing, doing his best to quiet the tumult in his head. And then, his mind clean and blank now, if only for an instant, he thought with painful clarity BUT THERE ON THE BEACH WITH MARCOS MOLINA, IT WASN’T LIKE THIS. FOR SHE LOVED HIM AND DESIRED HIM AND KISSED HIM WILDLY. So that it was he, Martín, whom she rejected. He gave in to his tension once again, and once again those winds swept through his mind, like a furious storm, as he felt her there at his side, writhing, moaning, murmuring unintelligible words. “I always have nightmares in my sleep,” she had said.

Martín sat there on the edge of the bed and looked at her: in the moonlight he could scrutinize her face agitated by that other storm, the one within her, the one he never (absolutely never) would know. As though amid mud and excrement, amid shadows there grew a delicate white rose. And the strangest thing of all was that he loved this equivocal monster: dragonprincess, mudrose, childbat, that same chaste, warm, and perhaps corrupt being shuddering there at his side, next to his skin, tormented by heaven only knew what terrible nightmares. And what was most upsetting of all was that though he accepted her as being that, she seemed not to want to accept him: it was as though the little girl in white (amid the mud, surrounded by hordes of bats, filthy, slimy bats) had cried out to him for help, moaning, and at the same time had rejected him, pushing him away from that dark realm with violent gestures. Yes: the princess was writhing and moaning. From desolate regions in darkest shadow she was calling to him, Martín. But he, a poor, hopelessly confused youngster, separated from her by unbridgeable abysses, was unable to make his way to her.

There was nothing he could do, then, but gaze at her anxiously from this side of those abysses and wait.

“No, no!” Alejandra exclaimed, thrusting her hands out in front of her as though to push something away. Then finally she awoke and the scene that Martín had already gone through that first night was repeated: he calming her, calling her by name; and she, in some far-off place, emerging little by little from a deep abyss swarming with bats and covered with spider webs.

Sitting up in bed, hunched over her bent legs, her head resting on her knees, Alejandra came to little by little. After a time she looked at Martín and said to him:

“I hope you’ve gotten used to it by now.”

In reply, Martín tried to stroke her face with his hand.

“Don’t touch me!” she exclaimed, drawing away.

She got up out of bed and said:

“I’m going to take a bath. I’ll be back.”

“What took you so long?” he asked when she finally reappeared.

“I was terribly dirty.”

She lit a cigarette and lay down alongside him.

Martín looked at her: he could never tell when she was joking.

“I’m not joking, silly; I mean it.”

Martín said nothing: he simply sat there, as though paralyzed by his doubts, his confused thoughts and feelings. Frowning, he gazed up at the ceiling and tried to order his thoughts.

“What are you thinking about?”

He did not reply immediately.

“About everything and nothing, Alejandra …. To tell you the truth …”

“Don’t you know what you’re thinking about?”

“I don’t know anything …. Ever since I met you I’ve been living in the midst of utter confusion. I have no idea what I think or feel …. I haven’t the slightest notion what to do at any time …. Just now when you woke up and I tried to caress you … And before you went to sleep … When …”

He fell silent and Alejandra said nothing. Neither of them spoke for a long time. The only sound in the room was Alejandra’s breath as she took deep, avid drags on her cigarette.

“You aren’t saying a word,” Martín commented bitterly.

“I already told you that I love you, that I love you a lot.”

“What was it you dreamed just now?” Martín asked in a gloomy tone of voice.

“Why do you want to know? It’s not even worth talking about.”

“You see? You have a world of your own that’s unknown to me—how can you say you love me?”

“But I do love you, Martín.”

“Sure. You love me the way you would a little kid.”

She did not answer.

“You see!” Martín said bitterly. “You see!”

“No, silly, that’s not it at all …. I’m thinking …. Things aren’t clear at all for me either …. But I love you, I need you, I’m absolutely certain of that …”

“You wouldn’t let me kiss you. You wouldn’t even let me touch you a minute ago.”

“Good heavens! Can’t you see I’m sick, that I’m suffering terribly? You can’t imagine the nightmare I just had …”

“Was that why you went and took a bath?” Martín asked sarcastically.

“Yes: I took a bath on account of the nightmare.”

“Can nightmares be washed away by water?”

“Yes, Martín, with water and a little detergent.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that what I’m saying is anything to be laughed at.”

“I’m not laughing, my boy. Or maybe I’m laughing at myself, at my ridiculous notion that I can get my soul clean with soap and water. If you could only see how furiously I scrub myself!”

“That’s a crazy idea.”

“Naturally.”

Alejandra sat up, stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the night table and lay down again.

“I’m young and inexperienced, Alejandra. I’ve little doubt that you find me terribly stupid and backward. But I keep wondering nonetheless: if you don’t like me to touch you and kiss you on the mouth, why is it you asked me to stay and sleep here in this bed with you? That seems to me a cruel thing for you to do. Or is it another experiment, like the one with Marcos Molina?”

“No, Martín, it’s not an experiment at all. I didn’t love Marcos Molina—I can see that clearly now. But with you it’s different. And it’s really strange—something I can’t even explain to myself: suddenly I need to have you close, to have you next to me, to feel the warmth of your body beside me, the touch of your hand.”

“But without my really kissing you.”

Alejandra hesitated a moment before going on.

“Look, Martín, there are lots of things about me, about … The thing is, I just don’t know …. Maybe because I’m very fond of you … do you understand?”

“No.”

“No, of course you don’t …. I can’t even explain it to myself very well.”

“Won’t I ever be able to kiss you, won’t I ever be able to touch your body?” Martín asked, with childish, almost comical bitterness.

He saw her raise her hands to her head and press it between them as though her temples ached. Then she lit a cigarette and without a word went over to the window, remaining there until she had finished it. Then she came back to the bed, sat down, gave Martín a long, searching look, and began to undress.

Almost in terror, like someone who is witness to an act that he has long awaited but that he realizes is also in some way vaguely horrifying once it is actually about to come to pass, Martín saw her body begin to emerge little by little from the darkness. On his feet now, he contemplated in the moonlight her slender waist that a single arm could easily encircle; her wide hips, her high, pointed breasts set far apart, quivering as she moved; her long straight hair fanning out over her shoulders now. Her face was grave, almost tragic, marked by a bitter, dry-eyed despair so intense it was almost electric.

Curiously, Martín’s eyes had filled with tears and he was shivering, as though suffering an attack of fever. He saw her as an antique amphora, a tall, beautiful amphora of trembling flesh; flesh that at the same time appeared to him to be suffused by an ardent desire for communion, for as Bruno said, one of the tragic frailties of the spirit, yet one of its most profound subtleties, was that it was impossible for it to exist save through the intermediary of the flesh.

The outside world had ceased to exist for Martín, and now the magic circle isolated him, to the point of vertigo, from that terrible city, from its miseries and its ugliness, from the millions of men and women and children in it—talking, suffering, quarreling, hating, eating. Through the fantastic powers of love all that was abolished; nothing existed save that body of Alejandra’s waiting at his side, a body that one day would die and be corrupted, but at this moment was immortal and incorruptible, as though the spirit that inhabited it were communicating to its flesh the attributes of its eternity. The pounding of his heart demonstrated to him, Martín, that he was ascending to a height never before attained, a summit where the air was completely pure but electric, a lofty mountain perhaps surrounded by a highly charged atmosphere, to immeasurable heights towering far above the dark and pestilential swamps in which he had previously heard grotesque, filthy beasts splashing.

And Bruno (not Martín, of course), Bruno thought that at that moment Alejandra uttered a silent but dramatic, perhaps tragic, prayer.

And he too—Bruno—would think immediately thereafter that that supplication had gone unheard.

18

When Martin awoke, the first morning light was already entering the room.

Alejandra was not lying beside him. He sat up in bed anxiously and saw that she was leaning on the windowsill, pensively looking out.

“Alejandra,” he said lovingly.

She turned around with an expression that seemed to reveal a brooding, anxious sadness, as though melancholy thoughts were preying on her mind.

She came over to the bed and sat down.

“Have you been up long?”

“Quite a while. But I often get up during the night.”

“Last night too?” Martín asked in amazement.

“Of course.”

“How come I didn’t hear you?”

Alejandra bowed her head, looked away, and with a frown, as though to emphasize her preoccupation, was about to say something, but in the end said nothing.

Martín looked at her sadly, and although he did not exactly understand the reason for her melancholy, it seemed to him he could perceive the distant sound of it, a vague, mysterious sound.

“Alejandra …” he said, looking at her fervently. “You …”

She turned and looked at Martín then, with an ambiguous expression on her face, and said:

“I what?”

And without waiting for his pointless reply, she went over to the night table, searched about for her cigarettes, and walked back over to the window.

Martín’s eyes followed her anxiously. He feared that, as in children’s fairy tales, the palace that had magically arisen in the night would disappear without a sound in the light of dawn. Some vague presentiment told him that that harsh creature he was so afraid of was about to reappear. And when Alejandra turned toward him again after a moment, he realized that the enchanted palace had returned to the realm of nothingness.

“I told you I’m garbage, Martín. Don’t forget that I warned you.”

She turned away again and looked out the window, continuing to smoke in silence.

Martín felt ridiculous. He had pulled the sheet up over himself on noticing her cold, hard expression and he told himself he ought to get dressed before she looked at him again. Trying not to make noise, he sat down on the edge of the bed and began putting his clothes on, without taking his eyes off the window and dreading the moment when Alejandra would turn around. And once he was all dressed, he waited.

“Are you through dressing?” she asked, as though she had known all the time what Martín was doing.

“Yes.”

“Well, leave me here alone then.”

19

That night Martín had a dream: in the midst of a crowd, a beggar whose face it was impossible for him to see approached him, took his bundle off his shoulder, put it down on the ground, untied the knots, opened it, and laid its contents out before Martín. Then the beggar raised his eyes and murmured something unintelligible.

In and of itself, there was nothing terrible about the dream: the beggar was simply a beggar, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about his gestures. Martín nonetheless awoke in the grip of a terrible anxiety, as though everything in the dream were the tragic symbol of something beyond his understanding; as though he had been handed a letter of crucial importance, and on opening it he had found the words in it indecipherable, disfigured, and effaced by time, dampness, and the folds in the paper.

20

When, years later, Martín tried to discover the key to his relations with Alejandra, among the things he related to Bruno was the fact that, despite her violent changes of mood, he had been happy for several weeks. Bruno raised his eyebrows and horizontal furrows visibly crossed his forehead when he heard such an unexpected word uttered in connection with anything having to do with Alejandra, and since Martín understood that little tacit commentary of Bruno’s, he added, a moment’s reflection:

“Or rather: almost happy. But immensely so.”

Because the word happiness, in fact, was not an appropriate one for anything in any way related to Alejandra; yet for all of that it had been something, a feeling, or a state of mind, that came closer to what is commonly called happiness than anything else, even though it never reached the point of being absolute and perfect happiness (and hence the “almost”), in view of the uncertainty and the insecurity of everything having to do with Alejandra. And it had been something that had attained what might be called the utmost heights (and hence that “immensely”), heights on which Martín had felt that majesty and that purity, that sensation of fervent silence and solitary ecstasy that mountain climbers experience on the loftiest peaks.

Bruno looked at him thoughtfully, leaning his chin on his fist.

“And what about Alejandra?” he asked. “Was she happy too?”

A question marked, even if involuntarily, by an almost imperceptible, affectionate note of irony, similar to that which might be attached to the question: “Everything going well at your house as usual?” addressed to a member of the family of one of those specialists from Texas who are experts at putting out oil field fires. A question whose subtly incredulous overtones Martín may not have noticed, but whose formulation in precisely those words gave him pause, as though he had not previously given any serious thought to the matter one way or another. So that after a moment’s silence, he answered (already disturbed by Bruno’s doubt, which had rapidly though wordlessly communicated itself to his own mind):

“Well … maybe … during that period …”

And Martín sat there pondering what measure of happiness Alejandra might have felt, or at least manifested: in a smile, a song, a few words. Meanwhile Bruno said to himself: Well, why not? What is happiness, after all? And why wouldn’t she have felt happy with that youngster, at any rate at those moments when she had won a victory over herself, during that period when she was forcing her body and her mind to do fierce battle so as to free herself from demons? With his head resting on one fist, he continued to look at Martín, trying to understand Alejandra a little better through Martín’s sadness, his hopes even after everything was over, his fervor; with the same melancholy attentiveness (Bruno thought) thanks to which one more or less finds that a distant and mysterious country that one has once visited with passion is suddenly brought to life again through the accounts of other travelers, even though one’s own journey through that country has been along other paths, in other times.

And the same thing happened as almost always occurs when opinions are exchanged and a certain common ground is arrived at in which neither party’s opinion has the rigidity and the dogmatic quality displayed at the beginning of the discussion: while Bruno ended up conceding that Alejandra might well have felt some type or some measure of happiness, Martín, for his part, reexamining memories (an expression, a grimace, a sarcastic laugh) came to the conclusion that even during those few weeks Alejandra had not been happy. How otherwise to explain her frightful collapse later? Didn’t that collapse mean that within her tormented spirit a terrible battle had continued to be waged between those demons that he knew existed, but that he more or less put out of his mind, as though in this purely magical way be were capable of doing away with them altogether? And not only did he recall words freighted with meaning that had attracted his attention from the very beginning (the blind, Fernando), but also gestures and sarcastic remarks about third parties such as Molinari, silences and moments of reticence, and above all that alienation in which she appeared to live for days on end, periods during which Martín was convinced that her mind was elsewhere, and during which her body remained as abandoned as those of savages when their soul has been torn out of them by witchcraft and wanders about in unknown regions. And he also recalled her abrupt changes of mood, her accesses of raging fury, and her dreams of which she had occasionally given him a vague and troubled account. Nonetheless he still believed that in that period Alejandra had loved him intensely and had had moments of tranquility or of peace if not of happiness; for he remembered beautiful, calm afternoons that they had spent together, the silly, affectionate phrases that couples exchange at such times, the little gestures of tenderness and the friendly jokes. And in any case she had been like one of those combatants who come back from the front, wounded and battered, bled white and nearly helpless, and who little by little come back to life, in quiet, serene days spent at the side of those who care for them and restore them to health.

He passed on some of these thoughts to Bruno, and Bruno sat there pondering the matter, not really persuaded that it had been that way either, or at least not that way entirely. And as Martín looked at him, waiting for a reply, Bruno growled something unintelligible, words as unclear as his thoughts.

Martín did not see things clearly either, and in truth he was never able to explain to himself why the progress that Alejandra had seemingly made had assumed the form or developed along the lines that it had, even though he felt more and more inclined to believe that Alejandra never emerged completely from the chaos in which she had been living before he met her, despite the fact that she had managed to have calm moments; but those dark forces at work within her had never abandoned her, and had again exploded in all their fury toward the end, as though once she had exhausted her capacity to fight back and once she had realized her failure, her desperation had reappeared with redoubled violence.

Martín opened his penknife and allowed his memory to wander back over that period that now seemed extremely remote to him. His memory was like an old, nearly blind man who, cane in hand, goes feeling his way along paths of yesteryear that are now overgrown with weeds. A landscape transformed by time, by calamities and tempests. Had he, Martín, been happy? No, what an absurdity to think so. There had been, rather, a succession of ecstatic moments and catastrophic ones. And he remembered once again that dawn in the Mirador, hearing as he was finishing getting dressed that terrible phrase of Alejandra’s: “Well, leave me here alone then.” And after that walking down the Calle Isabel la Católica like an automaton, completely bewildered and upset. And then the days that followed, days when he was out of work, lonely days waiting for some favorable sign from Alejandra, other moments of vast exhilaration, and then disillusionment and pain again. Yes, he was like a maidservant who each night was taken to the enchanted palace, only to awaken each morning in the palace pigsty.