On Heroes and Tombs

  Fernando did not answer, as the youngster, staring at him with his feverish eyes, put the embouchure of a flute or a clarinet to his mouth and began to play a sort of vague musical phrase. Fernando rummaged around in a dusty pile of magazines lying on the floor in one corner, apparently looking for something special, as heedless of my presence as though I were one of the people who lived in the house. Finally he removed from the pile an issue with the hero of “Winged Justice” on the cover. When I saw that he was about to leave, as though he’d forgotten altogether that I was there, I felt extremely uncomfortable: I couldn’t leave with him, as though I were a friend of his, since he hadn’t invited me into the house as his guest in the first place nor was he inviting me to leave with him now. Nor could I remain there in that room, especially in the company of that strange boy with the clarinet. For a moment I felt like the most wretched and ridiculous person in the world. Moreover, I realize today that at that moment Fernando was doing all this deliberately, out of sheer perversity.

  Hence when a red-headed girl appeared and smiled at me, I felt enormously relieved. Fernando left, with the magazine in his hand, smiling ironically, and I stood there looking at Georgina. She had changed a good deal; she was no longer the skinny kid I had known in Capitán Olmos at the time of Ana Maria’s death; she was fourteen or fifteen years old now and beginning to take on the appearance of the woman she would become, as the first quick, rough sketch of a painter gives hints of the final portrait of his subject. Perhaps because I couldn’t help noticing that her breasts were beginning to show underneath her sweater, I blushed and lowered my eyes.

  “He didn’t bring it,” Bebe said, clarinet in hand.

  “All right then, I’ll bring it,” she answered, in the tone of voice of a mother making a promise to her child that she has no intention of keeping.

  “When?” Bebe said, stubbornly pursuing the subject.

  “Soon.”

  “All right, but when exactly?”

  “Soon, I said, you’ll see. And now we’re going to go sit quietly and play our clarinet, all right?”

  She took him gently by the arm and led him into the next room, as she said to me: “You come too, Bruno,” I followed the two of them into the next room: it was no doubt the one where Bebe and Georgina slept, and was altogether different from Fernando’s room; though the furniture in it was just as old and broken down, there was something else there too, a delicate, feminine atmosphere.

  She led her brother over to a chair, sat him down in it, and said to him:

  “Now we’re going to stay here and play, aren’t we?”

  Then, like the mistress of a house who is ready to turn her attention to her visitors after having taken care of certain domestic details, she showed me her treasures: a hoop on which she was embroidering a handkerchief for her father, a big black doll she called Elvira, who slept with her at night, and a collection of photographs of movie actors and actresses, pinned to the wall with thumbtacks; Valentino in a sheik’s costume, Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson in The Ten Commandments, William Duncan, Pearl White. We discussed the good and bad points of each one of them and of the movies in which they had appeared, as Bebe repeated the same phrase as before on his clarinet. Valentino was by far her favorite, whereas I for my part preferred William Hart, though I conceded that Valentino was stupendous. As for the movies we liked best, I argued passionately in favor of The Sign of the Octopus, but Georgina said, and I admitted that she was right, that it was too terrifying; at the scariest moments she had had to look away.

  Bebe stopped playing and looked at us with his feverish eyes.

  “Play, Bebe,” she said mechanically, as she began stitching away at the handkerchief on the embroidery hoop.

  But Bebe continued to stare at me, not saying a word.

  “All right then, show Bruno your collection of soccer player cards,” she said.

  Bebe’s face lighted up and, laying the clarinet aside, he enthusiastically dragged a shoebox out from under his bed.

  “Show him your collection, Bebe,” she repeated gravely, without looking up from her embroidery hoop, in that mechanical way that mothers have of ordering their children about while absorbed in important household tasks.

  Bebe sat down beside me and showed me his treasure-trove.

  That was my first meeting with Georgina at her house: the two or three times I met her later were to surprise me, for in the presence of Fernando she turned into a defenseless creature. The odd thing is that I never got beyond those two rooms, that sort of suburb of the house (except for the terrifying experience in the Mirador, that I shall tell about later) and that my only contact with the people who lived in the house was with those three youngsters, those three creatures who were so dissimilar and so strange: an exquisite young girl, very sensitive and feminine, but dominated by an infernal being; a mentally retarded boy, or something of the sort, and a demon. As for the other people who lived in that house, I had heard occasional vague rumors about them, but the few times I was there it was not possible for me to see anything of what went on inside the four walls of the main wing, and my shyness of those days kept me from questioning Georgina (the only person I might have asked) as to what her parents, her aunt María Teresa, and her grandfather Pancho were like and what sort of life they lived. Apparently those three young people lived a life entirely apart in those two rooms, with Fernando in command.

  Years later, around 1930, I met the others who lived in that house and today I realize that with such persons about anything that happened, or on the contrary did not happen, in the house on the Calle Río Cuarto was only to be expected. I believe I’ve already told you that all the Olmoses (with the exception, of course, of Fernando and his daughter, for reasons that I have already mentioned) suffered from a sort of total lack of a sense of reality, leaving one with the impression they in no way participated in the brute reality of the world around them. Becoming poorer and poorer, yet hitting on no sensible way of making money or at least of holding on to what remained of their patrimony, with no sense of proportion or of politics, living in a place that was the object of sarcastic and malicious comments on the part of their distant relations, more and more alienated from their own class, the Olmoses struck one as constituting the tag-end of an old family living amid the frenetic chaos of a cosmopolitan, commercial-minded, cruel, and implacable city. They still practiced, without even being aware of it naturally, the old Creole virtues that other families had thrown overboard like ballast so as not to go under: they were hospitable, generous, ingenuously patriarchal, unassumingly aristocratic. And perhaps the resentment their distant rich relatives felt toward them stemmed in part from the fact that these latter, by contrast, had not been wise enough to keep these virtues intact and had been caught up in the process of mercantilization and materialism that the country had begun to undergo at the turn of the century. And just as certain people suffering from guilt feelings conceive a hatred for those who are innocent, so the poor Olmoses, having naively and perhaps even absurdly isolated themselves in the old quinta in Barracas, were the target of their relatives’ resentment; because they stubbornly continued to live in a district of the city that was now plebeian rather than move on to Barrio Norte or San Isidro; because they continued to drink maté instead of tea; because they were poor as church mice, and because they had friendly relations with modest people who had no distinguished family background. If we add that none of all that was done as a deliberate affront by the Olmoses, and that all those virtues, which struck the other relatives as being shocking defects, were practiced simply and spontaneously without the slightest affectation, it is not at all difficult to understand why that family represented to me, as it did to others, a sad and touching symbol of a tradition that was disappearing forever in our country.

  I don’t know why, but on leaving the house that night, as I was about to shut the gate of the iron fence behind me, I looked back toward the Mirador. The window was dimly lighted, and I thought I caught a gl
impse of a woman peering out.

  I was of two minds about going back to the house again. Fernando’s presence put me off, but Georgina’s set me to dreaming and I was eager to see her again. I seemed to be torn between these two opposing forces and I couldn’t decide whether to go back or not. Then finally my desire to see Georgina again won out. During all this time I had been mulling things over in my mind, and when I went back I was determined to ask questions and if possible meet her parents. “Perhaps Fernando won’t be home,” I said to myself to help me screw up my courage. I supposed he must have friends or acquaintances, since I remembered his searching around for that copy of Tid-Bits and then leaving the house, which could only mean that he was going out to meet other youngsters; and although I already knew Fernando well enough to sense, even at my tender age, that he was not the sort to be able to keep friends, it was not impossible, on the other hand, that he had some other sort of relationship with boys his age. This conjecture of mine proved to be correct, for Georgina later reluctantly confessed to me that her cousin was the leader of a gang of boys inspired by movie serials such as The Mysteries of New York and The Clutching Hand, a gang that had its secret oaths, its brass knuckles, and suspect aims. As I look back on it today, that gang strikes me as more or less the dress rehearsal for the gang of thugs and armed bandits that he organized later, around 1930.

  I posted myself on the corner of Río Cuarto and Isabel la Católica at midday. I said to myself: “He may or may not go out of the house after lunch; if he does go out, even though it’s late, I’ll go in.”

  You can imagine how eager I was to see Georgina again when I tell you I waited there on that corner from one o’clock till seven that night. At that hour I finally saw Fernando leave the house, whereupon I ran down Isabel la Católica almost to the next corner, far enough away so that I could slip away in case he turned down that street, or go back to the house if I saw that he went directly up Río Cuarto. And that is what happened: he went straight up Río Cuarto. I then rushed back to the house.

  I am certain that Georgina was happy to see me. What was more, when I had been there before she had urged me to come back.

  I questioned her about her family. She told me things about her mother and her father, about her aunt María Teresa, who spent her days predicting illnesses and catastrophes, and about her grandfather Pancho.

  “The one who lives up above,” I said, because I had sensed that there was some sort of secret hidden “up above.”

  Georgina looked at me in surprise.

  “Up above?”

  “Yes, up in the Mirador.”

  “No, grandfather doesn’t live there,” she replied evasively.

  “But somebody lives there,” I said to her.

  I had the impression she didn’t want to answer me.

  “I thought I saw someone up there the other night.”

  “Escolástica lives up there,” she finally answered reluctantly.

  “Escolástica?” I said in surprise.

  “Yes. In the old days they used to give people names like that.”

  “But she never comes downstairs?”

  “No.”

  “Why is that?”

  She shrugged.

  I looked at her intently.

  “I seem to remember Fernando saying something,” I commented.

  “Saying something? What about? When?”

  “Something about a madwoman. When we were kids back in Capitán Olmos.”

  She blushed and bowed her head.

  “He told you that? He told you Escolástica was mad?”

  “No, he just mentioned something about a madwoman. Was she the one he meant?”

  “I don’t know if she’s mad. I’ve never spoken to her.”

  “You’ve never spoken to her?” I said, dumbfounded.

  “No, never.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I just told you: she never comes downstairs.”

  “But haven’t you ever gone up there?”

  “No. Never.”

  I continued to stare at her in amazement.

  “How old is she?”

  “Eighty-four.”

  “Is she your grandmother?”

  “No.”

  “Your great-grandmother?”

  “No.”

  “Well, who is she then?”

  “She’s my grandfather’s great-aunt. Major Acevedo’s daughter.”

  “And how long has she been living up there?”

  Georgina looked at me, knowing I wasn’t going to believe her.

  “Since 1853.”

  “Without ever coming downstairs?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged again.

  “I think it’s on account of the head.”

  “The head? What head?”

  “Her father’s head. Major Acevedo’s. They tossed it through the window.”

  “Through the window? Who did?”

  “The Mazorca. Then she grabbed up the head and ran.”

  “Grabbed the head and ran? Ran where?”

  “Up there, to the Mirador. And she never came down again.”

  “And that’s why she’s mad?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s mad. I’ve never been up there.”

  “And Fernando has never been up there either?”

  “No, Fernando’s been up there.”

  At that moment I saw, with fear and dismay, that Fernando was back. Whatever he had gone out to do had evidently taken him hardly any time at all.

  “Ah, you’ve come back,” was all he said to me as he looked me up and down with his piercing eyes, as though trying to discover what possible motives there might be behind this second visit of mine.

  From the moment that her cousin had entered the room, Georgina was a different person altogether. It may be that on my previous visit I had been too nervous to notice the change that came over her when Fernando was present. She suddenly turned very shy, stopped talking, and moved more awkwardly; and when she found herself obliged to answer a question of mine, she did so with a sidelong glance in her cousin’s direction. What was more, Fernando had stretched out on the bed and lay there watching us intently and biting his fingernails furiously. The situation was beginning to be very uncomfortable, when suddenly he suggested that now that he was there we should invent some sort of game because, he said, he was terribly bored. The look in his eyes, however, was not one of boredom, but rather something that I found myself unable to put a name to.

  Georgina looked at him fearfully, but then she bowed her head as though awaiting his verdict.

  Fernando sat up and appeared to be thinking hard about something, still watching us intently and biting his fingernails.

  “Where’s Bebe?” he finally asked.

  “He’s with mama.”

  “Go get him.”

  Obeying this peremptory command, Georgina went off to fetch him. The two of us remained there in the room without a word until she came back with Bebe, clutching his clarinet in his hand.

  Fernando explained the rules of the game: the three of them were to hide in different places in the two rooms or in the woodshed or in the garden (it was already dark out). I was to hunt for them and when I found one of them, recognize who it was without saying anything or asking any questions, just by touching the person’s face.

  “What for?” I asked, completely taken aback.

  “I’ll explain to you later. If you guess right, you’ll get a prize,” he said with a sarcastic little laugh.

  I was afraid he was making fun of me, as he used to do back in Capitán Olmos. But I was also afraid to refuse to go along with the game, because as always he would claim I was refusing out of sheer cowardice; he knew very well that invariably there was something about his games that was terrifying. But, I asked myself, how could there be anything terrifying about this particular game? It seemed more like a stupid joke, something calculated to make me end up
looking utterly ridiculous. I glanced at Georgina as though searching her face for some sign, some helpful hint. But Georgina was not the same person as before: her deathly pale face and her wide-eyed stare were evidence of a sort of fascination or fear or of both things at once.