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.”