“In Borges’s case it’s art for art’s sake, pure literature. He himself would tell you so.”
“So much the worse for him.”
Rinaldini was angry now.
“Those charitable fantasies he weaves round about Judas betray a tendency toward softheadedness and cowardice. He retreats in the face of the supreme things, in the face of absolute goodness and absolute evil. As a result a liar today is not a liar: he’s a politician. There’s an elegant stratagem afoot here for saving the devil’s soul: Come on, we’re told, the devil isn’t as black as he’s painted.”
He looked at them as though seeking their considered opinion.
“In reality it’s the other way around: the devil is blacker than those people paint him. They’re not bad philosophers; what’s even worse for them is that they’re bad writers. Because they aren’t even aware of that capital psychological reality that Aristotle had already plainly seen. What Edgar Allan Poe called the imp of perversity. The great writers of the last century had already seen this with blinding clarity: from Blake to Dostoevski. But of course …”
He did not finish his sentence. He looked out the window for a moment and then finally said, with his subtle smile:
“So Judas is running around loose in Argentina …. The patron saint of the officials over at the Ministry of the Treasury, since he got money from sources that nobody else would ever have thought of. Nonetheless Judas, poor thing, never dreamed of governing. And it would appear that he’s now about to obtain, or has already obtained, government posts in our country. Ah well, whether or not he’s in the government, he still ends up hanging himself.”
Bruno then explained to Rinaldini the representations that he had made to Monsignor Gentile in his behalf. Rinaldini gestured with his hand as he smiled with a certain resigned, good-natured irony.
“Don’t let it upset you, Bassán. The bishops aren’t going to let me out of their sight. And as for Monsignor Gentile, who unfortunately is a relative of yours, he’d be better off reading the Gospel from time to time instead of getting all mixed up in church politics.”
They left.
And there he’ll stay, all alone, penniless, in his worn cassock, Martín thought.
13
There was no sign of Alejandra, and Martín took refuge in his work and in Bruno’s company. For him, these were times of thoughtful sadness: the days of chaotic, dark sadnesses had yet to arrive. It seemed the proper frame of mind for that Buenos Aires autumn, an autumn not only of dead leaves and gray skies and drizzling rain, but also of discomposure, of vague discontent. Everyone was mistrustful of everyone else, people spoke different languages, hearts did not beat as one (as happens during certain national wars, certain collective triumphs); there were two nations in the same country, and those nations were mortal enemies; they eyed each other grimly, there was rancor between them. And Martín, who felt lonely, asked himself questions about everything: about life and death, about love and the absolute, about his country, about man’s fate in general. But this was in no way pure philosophical reflection, for inevitably his thoughts went back to words of Alejandra’s and memories of her, memories revolving about her gray-green eyes, with her hostile and contradictory expression as a background. And suddenly it seemed as though it was Alejandra who was his native land, not that beautiful but conventional woman who serves as its symbolic representation. One’s native land was childhood and a mother, a home and tenderness; and Martín had not had that. He doubtless hoped to find in Alejandra in some measure, in some way, warmth and a mother; but she was a dark and turbulent territory shaken by earthquakes, swept by hurricanes. Everything was all mixed up in his anxious mind, as though he were suffering from vertigo, with everything revolving dizzily around the figure of Alejandra, even when he thought about Perón and Rosas, since in this girl who was the descendant of Unitarists and nonetheless a partisan of the Federalists, in this living, contradictory end product of Argentine history there seemed to be synthesized in his eyes everything that was chaotic and contentious, perverse and dissolute, equivocal and opaque. And then he would see poor Lavalle again, venturing into the silent and hostile territory of the provinces, puzzled and resentful, reflecting perhaps on the mystery of the people on the long freezing nights, wrapped in his sky blue cape, wordlessly looking at the ever-changing flames of the campfire.
And Bruno too, to whom Martín clung, on whom he fixed anxiously questioning eyes, seemed to be consumed by doubts, perpetually pondering the meaning of existence in general and the being or nonbeing of this obscure region of the world in which so many lived and suffered: he, Martín, Alejandra, and the millions of inhabitants of Buenos Aires who seemed to wander through the city as though in the midst of chaos, with no one knowing where the truth was, with no one believing firmly in anything; the oldsters like Don Pancho (Bruno thought) living in a dream of the past, the adventurers lining their pockets without a thought in the world about anything or anybody, and the old immigrants (they too) dreaming of another reality, a fantastic, far-off reality, old Don Francisco D’Arcángelo for instance, gazing off toward that land that was now forever unreachable and murmuring:
Addio patre e matre
Addio sorelli e fratelli.
Words that some immigrant-poet might have said, standing at the old man’s side as the ship drew away from the shores of Reggio or Paola, as those men and women, their eyes riveted on the mountains of what had once been Magna Graecia, looked back not so much with the eyes of their bodies (weak, uncertain, and in the end unable to see) as with the eyes of their souls, those eyes that continue to see those mountains and those chestnut trees across the seas and the years: haggard eyes staring fixedly, unable to be defeated by poverty or misfortunes, distance or old age. Eyes with which old D’Arcángelo (grotesquely decked out in his worn green bowler, like a caricatural and comic symbol of time and Frustration, at once docile and undaunted) saw his far-distant Calabria as Tito, sipping maté, looked at him with his sarcastic little eyes, thinking “Damn, if only I had some money.” So then (Martín thought, looking at Tito, who was looking at his father), what is Argentina? Questions that Bruno would often answer by telling him that Argentina was not only Rosas and Lavalle, gauchos and the pampas, but also—and how tragically!—old D’Arcángelo with his little green bowler and his far-off look, and his son Humberto J. D’Arcángelo, with his mixture of scepticism and tenderness, resentment against society and inexhaustible generosity, spontaneous sentimentality and analytical intelligence, chronic despair and anxious, undying hope of something. “We Argentines are pessimists (Bruno said) because we have great reserves of hopes and illusions, for in order to be a pessimist one has to have previously held out hopes for something. We are not a cynical people, though the country is full of cynics and fatcats; we are, rather, a tormented people, which is the precise opposite, for the cynic reconciles himself to everything and nothing matters to him. Everything matters to the Argentine however; he frets and fumes, turns bitter, protests, is consumed by rancor. The Argentine is unhappy with everything, including himself; he holds grudges, he is full of resentment, he is dramatic and violent. Yes, old D’Arcángelo’s nostalgia …,” Bruno said, as if to himself. “But it’s because everything here is nostalgic, because there must have been few countries in the world where this feeling has been experienced so repeatedly: by the first Spaniards, because they were homesick for their far-off homeland; then by the Indians, because they mourned for their lost freedom, the sense of life that had been theirs; later by the gauchos, displaced by foreign civilization, exiles in their own land, thinking back on the golden age of their wild and woolly independence; by the old Creole patricians, like Don Pancho, because they felt that the good old days of generosity and courtesy had turned into an age of pettiness and lies; and by the immigrants, finally, because they missed their old homeland, their ancient customs, their legends, their Christmases around the fire. How can one fail to understand old D’Arcángelo? For as we approach death we a
lso grow closer to the land, not to land in general, but to that little bit of land, that tiny (but so beloved, so sorely missed) corner of this earth where we spent our childhood, where we played our games and had our magic, the irrecoverable magic of our childhood that is lost forever. And then we remember a tree, the face of a friend, a dog, a dusty path in the heat of a summer afternoon, with its chirring of cicadas, a little brook. Things like that. Not big things, little things, very modest things, which nonetheless take on an unimaginable importance in that moment that precedes death, especially when in this country of immigrants the man who is going to die can fight death only through the memory, so tormentingly imperfect, so transparent and so insubstantial, of that tree or that little brook of his childhood, from which he is separated not only by the abysses of time but also by the vastness of a whole ocean. And so it is that we see many old men like Don Francisco D’Arcángelo, who say hardly a word and seem constantly to be looking far off into the distance, when in reality they are looking inside themselves, into the very depths of their memory. For memory is what resists time and its powers of destruction; it is something like the form that eternity may assume in this endless passage. And even though we (our consciousness, our feelings, our cruel experience) keep changing down through the years, even though our skin and our wrinkles become proof of and testimony to this passage, there is something in us, deep within us, there in very dark regions, clinging tooth and nail to childhood and the past, to our people and our homeland, to tradition and dreams, that seems to resist this tragic process: memory, the mysterious memory of ourselves, of what we are and what we were. (How appalling everything would be without it! Bruno thought to himself.) Those men who have lost it, as though in a terrible explosion that has utterly destroyed those profound regions, are nothing but frail, uncertain, frighteningly light leaves swept away by the furious, senseless wind of time.”
14
And then something that took him completely by surprise happened late one afternoon: as he was waiting for the trolley on the corner of Leandro Alem and Cangallo, when traffic stopped at the light he saw Alejandra with that man, in a Cadillac convertible.
The two of them spied him too and Alejandra paled.
Bordenave invited him to get in and Alejandra slid over to the middle of the seat.
“I found your friend waiting for the trolley too. What a coincidence! Where are you headed for?” Bordenave asked.
Martín explained that he was going home to his room in La Boca.
“Well, we’ll leave you off first then.”
Why? Martín wondered, his mind in a daze. That word “first” was to give rise to anxious questions in his mind.
“No,” Alejandra said. “I’ll get out first. Right here, on the Avenida de Mayo.”
Bordenave looked at her in astonishment; or at least it seemed so to Martín when he thought about this meeting later, noting to himself that Bordenave’s astonishment was in itself astonishing.
When Alejandra got out, Martín asked her if she would like him to see her home. She replied that she was in a tearing hurry and it would be best for them to see each other some other time. But just as she was about to walk away, she hesitated, turned around, and told him to meet her at the Jockey Club the following day, at 6 P.M.
Bordenave remained silent and almost sullen all during the rest of the drive to La Boca, as Martín tried to analyze this curious meeting. Yes, it was possible that this man had run into Alejandra by chance. Hadn’t he himself met her by chance? Nor was it anything out of the ordinary if, on recognizing her standing there on the street, he had offered her a ride, given his urbane manners. None of this was really surprising. What was surprising was that Alejandra had accepted the ride. But on the other hand, why had Bordenave been surprised when she had said she’d get out at the Avenida de Mayo? That reaction on his part might indicate that they were together because they had arranged to meet, not because they had met accidentally, and she had decided to get out of the car first as though to prove to Martín that there was nothing between her and this individual save a chance meeting; a decision that had doubtless so surprised Bordenave that he had made that revealing gesture despite himself. Martín felt that something was crumbling to ruins in his mind, but he tried his best not to let his desperation get the better of him, and forcing himself to think clearly he went on analyzing the sequence of events that had taken place. With a certain relief, the thought crossed his mind then that Bordenave’s surprise might have another explanation: on getting into the car Alejandra had perhaps told him that she was on her way home, to the house in Barracas (and the fact that they had been heading south along Leandro Alem seemed to be proof that Bordenave had offered her a ride home), but thinking that Martín might suspect something if she remained with Bordenave after he, Martín, got out of the car in La Boca, Alejandra had decided to get out at the Avenida de Mayo; and Bordenave had been taken aback by that sudden contradictory resolve on her part. That was all well and good, but why had Bordenave been so sullen and out of sorts after that? No doubt because he had made up his mind to flirt with Alejandra once they were alone and his plans had been thwarted by her decision to get out at the Avenida de Mayo. One thing still preyed on Martín’s mind however: why had Alejandra refused to allow him to see her home? Wouldn’t she simply meet Bordenave later, at the place they had undoubtedly been headed for? There was one reassuring detail nonetheless: how could Alejandra have met Bordenave except by chance? She didn’t know him, she didn’t know where he lived, and Bordenave didn’t even know what Alejandra’s name was.
And yet a vague troubled feeling impelled him to go back and analyze that first meeting with Bordenave that had seemed so trivial but that now, in the light of this new meeting, suddenly took on extraordinary importance. Years after Alejandra’s death he had become absolutely certain of what at this moment was scarcely more than an insidious spark of suspicion: Bordenave had had something to do with Alejandra’s sudden impulse to send him to see Molinari after the meeting with Bordenave in the Plaza. The events that led to her suicide and his final conversation with Bordenave were one day to reveal to him the role that this man had played in that tragedy. And when, years later, he broached the subject in a conversation with Bruno, he couldn’t help commenting ironically on the apparently trivial fact that it had been he, Martín, who had brought Bordenave into Alejandra’s life. And he was to recall once again, in maniacally minute detail, everything that had happened at that first interview with Bordenave in the Plaza, that banal meeting that would have totally disappeared into the void of meaningless happenings if events at the end had not thrown an unexpected and appalling light on that forgotten manuscript, so to speak.
But for the moment Martín had no way of arriving at these ultimate implications of that episode. As he went over that meeting in the Plaza in his mind he remembered that at the moment that he had introduced Bordenave to Alejandra a fleeting gleam had appeared in her eyes, a gleam that had preceded the unbending attitude she had displayed all the rest of the afternoon. Although it was quite possible (Bruno thought) that this detail was a false memory, the fruit of that retrospective lucidity that catastrophes bring us, or that we believe that they bring, as when we say “I remember now that I heard a suspicious-sounding noise,” when in reality that noise is a detail that our imagination adds to the bare concrete facts dredged up by our memory, a way in which the present habitually influences the past by modifying it, enriching it, and distorting it by virtue of supposed premonitory signs.
Martín tried to remember what Bordenave had said, word for word, at that meeting, but there was nothing important, as least as far as his own problem was concerned. Then Bordenave had said that those Italians—meaning the two men he had left sitting at a nearby table, whom he had pointed to with a rather cynical jerk of his head in their direction—were all alike: they all claimed they were engineers, lawyers, knight-commanders. But in fact they were such scoundrels one always ought to carry a gun around them. An
d Martín remembered that meanwhile, without so much as looking at Bordenave, Alejandra, in a foul mood all of a sudden, had occupied herself by making intricate sketches on a paper napkin. The first word they utter (Bordenave had gone on) is corruzione, and then you have to remind them that those wretches that the Italians had sent over to Africa to fight the English had had their tin cans of tanks fall apart on them on the roads. Wops like that didn’t know which way was up. They could never do anything right: they greased the palms of people they shouldn’t have, and didn’t slip one lousy peso to people they should have, to make a long story short. So that when they came around to see him he couldn’t help laughing right in their faces. What, they hadn’t contacted Bevilacqua yet? To needle them he stressed the fact that that was an Italian name and that (despite its being translatable as “Drinkwater”) the man in question in fact drank much stronger stuff. And he had added, he said: “Since you’re Italian, you can appreciate the joke,” but they didn’t find it at all funny, just as he had expected. Little ways of getting back at them, what the hell. What business did they have coming on so strong with their holier-than-thou act here in this country? … Furthermore, as he also had had to point out to them, if their moral sensibilities were all that delicate, how come they played along with the game? A person who accepted a bribe had as dirty hands as a person who offered one. Martín looked at him dumbfounded. After Alejandra’s death, when he went over each one of the scenes at which she had been present, he concluded that at that moment Bordenave had been talking strictly for Alejandra’s benefit, a fact that Martín found astonishing, since he was unable to understand how Bordenave could be trying to seduce her by coming out with things like that. Bordenave had started in on politicians then: they were all corrupt. He wasn’t referring, of course, just to the Peronistas: he was talking about all of them in general, the councilors in ’36, the Palomar affair, the shady business in the Coordination Department. In short, there was no end to their dirty deals. As for industrialists (Martín thought of Molinari), they bitched but they’d never made as much money as they were raking in these days, even though they spouted all sorts of nonsense about corruption, about not being able to import so much as a needle for a loom without slipping somebody a bribe, about workers who sometimes were willing to work and sometimes not. In short, the usual song and dance. But when, he kept asking himself, when had industry made such colossal fortunes as in the last few years? They’d put washing machines in tenements even. And there wasn’t a single little Peronista housewife who didn’t have her electric mixer. The military? From the rank of colonel on up, with a few honorable exceptions, a few madmen who still believed in the fatherland, all of them had been bought off with permissions to buy foreign cars and speculate in foreign currencies. Workers? The only thing that interested them was living high off the hog, getting their bonus at the end of the year, gambling on whether River or Boca Juniors would win the championship, collecting their fat unemployment checks when they were laid off—another national industry!—getting their paid vacations and a holiday on Saint Perón’s Day. Laughing, Bordenave had commented: “The only thing they’re lacking in order to be bourgeois is a little bit of capital.” Then stirring the ice in his whisky with his index finger, he had added: “Belly-stuffers, nothing more nor less than belly-stuffers, every last one of them.” Once bills were laid on the table, nothing was denied anybody in this country. If a person had a fortune, even though he was an out-and-out bandit, people fawned on him, he was automatically a gentleman of the old school. In a word: it was no use fretting and fuming in this country, everything was rotten to the core, and nothing could be done about anything. Foreigners had prostituted the country and this was no longer the nation that had brought freedom to Chile and Peru. Today it was a nation of the filthy rich, of cowards, of Neopolitan gamblers, of scoundrels, of international adventurers, like those two over there, of swindlers and soccer fans. And at that point Bordenave had risen to his feet and held out his hand, telling Martín not to worry, that D’Arcángelo wouldn’t be put out on the street. When Martín and Alejandra had left the Plaza, they crossed the street and sat down on a bench overlooking the river. He could recall each one of Alejandra’s gestures when he had asked her what sort of person she thought Bordenave was. She had lit a cigarette, and in the match flame he could see that her face was set in a hard, somber expression. “What sort do you suppose? An Argentine of course.” And then she had fallen silent and everything about her attitude indicated that that was going to be her final word on the subject. At that moment the only thing that Martín was aware of was the fact that Bordenave’s appearance on the scene had disturbed her inner peace, like a snake gliding into a well of crystal clear water from which one is about to drink. Then Alejandra had said that she had a headache and would rather go home and go to bed. And just as they were about to bid each other goodbye, in front of the iron gate on the Calle Río Cuarto, she had said to him, with a nasty edge in her voice, that she would have a word with Molinari, but that he shouldn’t get his hopes up.