AT THE END of every summer my grandmother and sometimes my friends—Guido, Mati, Vicentito—would take it in turns to carry my suitcase as far as the corner of the Los Tocayos Hotel-Bar, where the Chevallier bus to Rosario, with a connection to Buenos Aires, used to stop in the evenings. At the end of every side street was the ever-present horizon and over it a half-disc of sun would still be hanging. But by that time the entire town had poured out onto the streets, which still smouldered like embers from the fire of the afternoon. To me, the image of that last walk at twilight through the living streets best captures the peculiar, faltering happiness of those years. That must be why the images of Malihuel are fused in my memory into one quintessential one, identical to all yet to none of them—me walking through the streets of a town that comes to life in summer and catches fire at sundown.
If dawn—when the cool air and lemon-coloured light bring out the outlines and differences between one thing and another, and infuse the town’s early risers with energy—comes in answer to the dark dream of night, evening is a celebration of the end of the red-hot day, when life had to take refuge inside the houses, and the sun and the heat were the sole masters of the deserted streets. At siesta time everything hardens to withstand the sun—the buildings and the trees and even the flowers in the gardens seem to turn to stone, and grin and bear it. The town clenches like a fist, and waits.
Evening is the relaxation of all that pent-up tension. The doors and windows that were sealed against the light and heat are flung wide, releasing the breath held within; and the entire town spills unhurriedly out of its houses, softly, like a hand opening, to walk the sidewalks and streets, ride their bicycles, put their chairs out on the sidewalk, gather on every street corner, in shops and bars, to chat with neighbours. No one stays indoors at that time of day—all the life of Malihuel is out on the streets. As day recedes, the street lights catch fire—dimly, save in the two streets with mercury lamps—and the light of the houses spills yellow out of the open windows and doors, guiding passers-by from one to the other, like Chinese lanterns in a purple dusk. The town lights up as the surrounding fields darken, and it is never more beautiful or more fragile than the moment it seems to ripple over the plain, soft and evanescent like an alcohol flame in a half-lit room. Then, everything is fire—the houses are blue flames and the streets long flaming wicks, the trees torches, the vehicles embers, the people candles that move by themselves as if carried, and even the omnipresent dust, whipped up by the wind from the endless fields, becomes a smoky incense and softens the outlines, perfumed by successive passes of the sprinkler truck. Everything seems momentarily redeemed and justified by the grace of the light—as in Millet’s Angelus, the world is one. It’s nothing but an illusion of course—a hybrid of the magic of the light and the sentimentalism of the observer, who watches it now from the top of the coach that pulls inexorably away, and who could be forgiven for thinking, for a moment while the illusion lasts, that there is no better place on earth to live.