On Heroes and Tombs
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, per
haps 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.