But General Juan Galo de Lavalle marches on in silence, absorbed in the thoughts of a man who knows that death is approaching. The moment has come to draw up the balance sheet, to make an inventory of misfortunes, to pass in review the faces of the past. This is not the time for games or for looking at the mere outside world. That outside world scarcely exists now; soon it will be a dream that has ended. There now come forward in his mind the true, permanent, lasting faces, those that have remained forever and always in the most secret depths of his soul, guarded by a lock with seven keys. And his heart then confronts that worn face furrowed with deep wrinkles, that face that was once a lovely garden and is now overrun with weeds, nearly bone-dry, without a single flower. Yet he can see it again as that lovely garden, and recognize that summerhouse where they used to meet when they were still scarcely more than children; when disillusionment, unhappiness, and time had not yet wreaked their destruction; when those tender touches of their hands, those looks in their eyes announced the children that would come, as a flower announces fruits to come: “Dolores!” he murmurs, as a smile appears in his dead face like a just barely smoldering ember amid ashes that we poke aside in order to have one last little bit of warmth on a desolate mountainside.
And Damasita Boedo, who looks at him anxiously and intently, who almost hears him murmur that beloved name of long ago, turns her eyes away now and stares straight ahead, feeling the tears well up. They have arrived at the outskirts of Jujuy now: the dome and the church towers are already in sight. They have reached the quinta of Los Tapiales de Castañeda. Night has already fallen. Lavalle orders Pedernera to set up camp there. He himself will go into Jujuy with a small escort. He will look for a house in which to spend the night: he is ill, about to collapse from exhaustion and fever.
His comrades exchange glances: what is there to do? All this is madness and they might as well die in one way as in another.
He wandered about aimlessly, he went into little cafés in the port district that he had once gone the rounds of with Alejandra, and as he got drunker and drunker the world little by little lost its form and its solidity: he was dimly aware of shouts and laughter, piercing beams of light bore through his head, painted women embraced him, and then finally great masses of cottony red lead crushed him, pinning him to the ground. Helping himself along with the aid of his little improvised crutch he made his way across a vast swampy plain, amid filth and corpses, amid excrement and mire that might swallow him up and devour him, trying to step on firm ground, with eyes wide open so as to be able to move in that deep shadow toward that enigmatic, distant face, about a league away, level with the ground, like an infernal moon trying to light that repellent landscape crawling with worms, running with his little crutch toward the place where the face seemed to be waiting for him, and from which that summons was undoubtedly coming, running and stumbling across the plain, until suddenly, on rising to his feet, he saw the face there before him, close by, repulsive and tragic, as though he had been taken in from a distance by some perverse magic, and he screamed and sat up violently in the bed. “Calm down, child,” a woman was saying to him, holding him down by the arms. “Calm down now!”
Pedernera, lying on the ground on his saddle, suddenly sits up nervously: he thinks he has heard rifle shots. But perhaps it is only his imagination. He has tried in vain to sleep during this sinister night. Visions of blood and death torment him.
He rises to his feet, threads his way among his sleeping comrades, and goes over to the sentry. Yes, the sentry too has heard shots, far off in the distance, in the direction of the town. Pedernera awakens his comrades, he has a grim presentiment and thinks they ought to saddle up and keep on the alert. As they begin to follow Pedernera’s orders, two sharpshooters from Lavalle’s escort gallop up, shouting: “They’ve killed the general!”
He was trying to think, but his head was full of liquid lead and garbage. “It’ll go away, child, it’ll go away,” the woman was saying. His head ached as though it were a boiler full of gases under great pressure. As though through enormous old tangles of thick spider webs, he saw that he was in a strange room: opposite his bed he glimpsed Carlitos Gardel in a swallow-tailed coat and another photo, also in color, of Evita Perón, with a vase of flowers underneath it. He felt the woman’s hand on his forehead, as though she were seeing how feverish he was, as his grandmother used to do, countless years ago. He began to hear the sound of a Primus stove. The woman had left his bedside and was turning the pressure up, and the hissing of the stove grew louder and louder. He also heard the constant whimpering of a baby only a few months old, off to one side, but he didn’t have the strength to turn his head and look. He was again overcome by drowsiness, and dreamed the same dream a third time. The beggar was coming toward him, muttering unintelligible words; he put a bundle down on the ground, untied it, opened it, and displayed its contents; contents that Martín anxiously tried to make out. The beggar’s words were as despairingly indecipherable as those of a letter that one knows will have a decisive effect on our fate but that time and dampness have reduced to an illegible blur.
The general’s blood-soaked body is lying in the entryway. Damasita Boedo is kneeling at his side, holding him in her arms, weeping. Sergeant Sosa looks on like a child who has lost his mother in an earthquake.
Everyone is running about and shouting. No one has any idea what has happened. Where are the Federalists? Why didn’t they kill the others? Why didn’t they cut Lavalle’s head off?
“They don’t know who they killed in the night,” Frías says. “They were shooting in the dark.” “That’s true,” Pedernera thinks. They must make their escape before the Federalists realize what has happened. He raps out precise orders, the body is wrapped in the general’s cape and placed on his dapple gray charger, and they gallop off again to Los Tapiales de Castañeda, where the rest of the Legion is waiting.
Colonel Pedernera says: “Oribe has sworn to display the general’s head on the tip of a lance in the Plaza de la Victoria. That must never happen, comrades. We can reach the Bolivian border in seven days, and it is there that the remains of our leader will be laid to rest.”
He then divides his forces, orders a group of sharpshooters to cover the retreat of the rear guard, and they then begin the final march into exile.
He heard the child whimpering again. “All right, all right,” the mother said, continuing to help Martín drink the tea. Then when she was finished, she tucked him back in the bed and then went over to the other side of the room where the whimpering was coming from. She began to hum softly. Martín made an effort and turned his head sideways: the woman was leaning over something that he then saw was a wooden crate. “There, there,” she said, and began humming again. Hanging above the wooden crate serving as a cradle was a colored chromolithograph: Christ’s chest was split open as in a Testut anatomical chart and he was pointing to his heart with one finger. Underneath were several other little colored prints of saints. And nearby, on top of another wooden crate, was the Primus stove, with a teakettle on it. “There, there,” she repeated more and more softly and hummed in a singsong voice that gradually died away. Then everything was silent, but she waited a minute more, still bending over the baby, until she was certain that he was asleep. Then, trying not to make any noise, she came back over to Martín. “You dropped off to sleep,” she said to him with a smile. And then, leaning over him just a little and putting her callused hand on his forehead, she asked him: “Are you feeling better?” Martín nodded. He had slept three hours. His mind was beginning to be clearer. He looked at her: suffering and hard work, poverty and misfortune had not been able to erase the gentle, maternal expression from that woman’s face. “You went to pieces. So I told them to bring you here.” Martín’s face turned red and he tried to get up. But she stopped him. “Wait a minute, what’s your hurry?” Smiling sadly, she added: “You talked about lots of things, my boy.” “What things?” Martín asked, abashed. “Lots of things but it was hard to understan
d what they were all about,” the woman answered shyly, looking down at her skirt intently and touching it, as though examining an almost invisible tear in it. Her voice had that tone of gentle reproach that some mothers’ voices have. On raising her eyes she saw that Martín was looking at her with a pained, ironic expression. Perhaps she understood, for she said: “Me too … you mustn’t think …” She hesitated a moment. “But at least I have work here and I can keep the baby with me. It’s hard work, no question about that. But I have this little room and I can keep the baby. She examined the invisible tear and smoothed her skirt again. And then …” she said, without raising her eyes, “there are so many nice things in life.” She raised her eyes and again saw the ironic expression on Martín’s face. And again she spoke in that reproachful tone, mingled with pity and fear. “Without looking any farther, take me for example. Look at all the things I have.” Martín looked at the woman, seeing only her poverty and her loneliness in that awful hole. “I have the baby,” she went on stubbornly, “I have that old Victrola with some records of Gardel’s; don’t you think ‘Honeysuckle in Flower’ is pretty? And ‘The Little Path’? There’s nothing as beautiful as music, that’s for sure,” she commented with a dreamy air. She glanced at the tango-singer’s portrait in color: from eternity, dazzling in his swallow-tailed coat, Gardel seemed to be smiling down on her too. Then, turning to Martín, she went on with her inventory: “Then there are flowers, birds, dogs, all sorts of things …. It’s a shame the cat from the café ate my canary. It was such good company.” She hasn’t mentioned her husband, Martín thought, she doesn’t have a husband, or he’s died, or she’s had a man who’s deserted her. Almost exuberantly, she said: “It’s so beautiful to be alive! Just think, my boy: I’m only twenty-five and yet it already makes me sad to think I’m going to die some day.” Martín looked at her: he had taken her to be around forty. He closed his eyes, lost in thought. The woman doubtless assumed that he was feeling bad again because she came over to him and put her hand on his forehead. Martín again felt the touch of that callused hand and realized that once she had reassured herself, that hand was lingering a second more, clumsily but tenderly, in a shy little caress. He opened his eyes and said: “I think the tea has done me good.” The woman seemed to feel extraordinarily happy at that. Martín climbed out of the bed and sat down on the edge of it. “I’ll be leaving now,” he said. He felt very weak and very dizzy. “Do you feel all right?” she asked worriedly. “Perfectly all right. What’s your name?” “Hortensia Paz, at your service.” “And my name is Martín. Martín del Castillo.”
He took off a ring, a present from his grandmother, that he was wearing on his little finger. “I’d like to give you this ring.” The young woman blushed and refused to take it. “Didn’t you tell me that there are certain happinesses in life?” Martín asked. “If you accept this remembrance of me it will make me feel very happy. The one happiness I’ve had lately. Don’t you want to make me happy?” Hortensia was still hesitant. He put the ring in her hand and ran out of the room.
6
Dawn was breaking when he got back to his room. He opened the window. To the east the Kavanagh was beginning little by little to stand out against an ashen sky.
What was it Bruno had said one time? War might be absurd or wrong, but to the platoon one belongs to it is something absolute.
There was D’Arcángelo, for example. There was Hortensia.
Just one dog is enough.
The night is freezing and the moon casts a bright light on the great valley. The one hundred seventy-five men are bivouacking, listening anxiously for sounds from the south. The Río Grande meanders along, shining like mercury, an indifferent witness to battles, expeditions, massacres. Armies of the Inca, carvans of captives, columns of Spanish conquistadors who had my blood in their veins (Lieutenant Celedonio Olmos thinks) and who four hundred years later will live secretly in Alejandra’s blood (Martín thinks). Then cavalry troops of patriots driving the Spaniards back toward the north, then the Spaniards advancing toward the south once again, and the patriots driving them back once more. With lance and carbine, sword and knife, mutilating each other and slitting each other’s throats with the fury of brothers. Then nights of mineral silence in which the only sound to be heard is the murmur of the Río Grande, slowly but surely prevailing over the bloody—but ever so transitory!—battles between men. Until the battle cries again become tinged with red and entire towns flee to the lowlands, leveling everything, burning their houses and destroying their ranches, only to return later, once again, to the eternal land where they were born and knew suffering.
A hundred seventy-five men bivouack in the mineral night. And a muffled voice, barely touching the strings of a guitar sings:
Palomita blanca
que cruzas el valle,
vé a decir a todos
que ha muerto Lavalle
And when the new day dawns they continue their march northward.
Lieutenant Celedonio Olmos is now riding alongside Sergeant Aparicio Sosa, who gallops along without a word, lost in thought.
The lieutenant looks at him. For days he has been asking himself questions. In these last months his soul has withered like a delicate flower in a planetary cataclysm. But he has begun to understand, as this last retreat has come to be more and more absurd.
A hundred seventy-five men galloping along furiously for seven days on account of a corpse.
“Oribe will never get the head,” Sergeant Sosa has said to him. And thus, amid the ruins of those towers of his, the adolescent lieutenant was beginning to glimpse another, resplendent and indestructible. Only one. But one worth living and dying for.
A new day was slowly being born in the city of Buenos Aires, a day like any other of the countless ones that have been born since man has been man.
From his window Martín saw a little boy running about with the morning papers, in order to keep warm perhaps, or perhaps because with a job like that one has to keep on the move. A stray dog, not much different from Bonito, was pawing through a garbage can. A young woman who looked a bit like Hortensia was walking down the street on her way to work.
He also thought about Bucich, in his Mack with the trailer.
So he put his things in the seabag and went down the rickety stairs.
7
It was drizzling; the night was cold. In furious gusts, a desolate wind drove before it the papers in the street and the dead leaves that had gradually fallen, leaving the branches of the trees stripped bare.
They were making the final preparations out in front of the shed. “The canvas,” Bucich said from behind his dead cigar stump. “It may rain hard, you know.” They tied down the rigging, leaning one foot on the truck, pulling hard. Workers passed by, some of them talking together and cracking jokes, others walking along in silence with their heads down. “Pull, kid,” Bucich said. Then they went into the bar: men in blue coveralls and leather coats, wearing high boots or ankle-boots, were talking together in loud voices, drinking coffee and gin, eating enormous sandwiches, passing on tips on road conditions, trading news about other truckers: Skinny, the Guy from Entre Rios, Gonzalito. They gave Bucich big hearty slaps on the back of his leather jacket, they addressed him affectionately as “Old Cigar Stump” and “you hairy old bastard,” and he smiled but didn’t say a word. And then after finishing his sausage and his cup of black coffee, he said to Martín: “Let’s go, kid. Time to shove off,” and leaving the bar he climbed into the cabin of the Mack and started the engine, turned on the parking lights, and began moving off toward the Avellaneda bridge, beginning the endless journey to the south, crossing first, in the freezing-cold, rainy dawn, those districts of the city that brought back so many memories to Martín; then, after crossing the Riachuelo, the industrial zones on the outskirts of the city, and then little by little heading down the broader highway toward the southeast; and then after the intersection with the highway from La Plata, heading straight south, on that National 3 that
runs all the way down to the very tip of the world, there where Martín imagined everything to be white and frozen, that tip that curved toward the Antarctic, swept by the winds of Patagonia, inhospitable but pure and clean. Last Hope Bay, Useless Bay, Port Hunger, Desolation Island, names that he had contemplated all through the years, ever since his childhood there in his room in the attic, during many an endless hour of sadness and loneliness; names that suggested a far-distant, deserted country, but a clean and hard and very pure one, places not yet sullied by men and above all by women.
Martín asked Bucich if he knew Patagonia well and with a kindly, ironic smile the latter replied: “Yep, I sure do.”
“I was born in ’01, kid. And you might say that I’ve been running around Patagonia ever since I stopped crawling on all fours. My old man was a sailor, see, and somebody on the ship told him about the south, about the gold mines. And the minute he heard that the old man shipped out on a freighter that was going from Buenos Aires to Puerto Madryn. And there he met an Englishman, Esteve, who had also come down to prospect for gold. So the two of them traveled farther on south together. Whatever way they could find: on horseback, in a cart, in a canoe. And my father finally ended up in Lago Viema, near Fisroy. That’s where I was born.”
“And your mother?”
“He met her down there, a Chilean, Albina Rojas.”
Martín looked at him, fascinated. Bucich was smiling thoughtfully to himself, keeping his eyes on the road the while, with the usual dead cigar stuck in his mouth. Martín asked him if it was very cold down there.
“Depends. In winter it can get down to thirty below on the Celsius scale, especially out on the open plain between Lago Argentino and Río Gallegos. But in summer the weather’s nice.”