THE SCHOOL WAS NOT SO bad—the monks spoke almost in verse, addressed me formally, and hit me only when necessary—but it did not suit me. It was full of wild boys, bigger than I was, who disdained me. I was out of place among those brutes; later I learned that they were the sons of poor farmers who had sent them away to school to set them free from the pig muck, the frost on the hands, the days that began before daybreak. It did not suit me, and when I complained, my mother told me that I must get used to it, that I didn’t know how lucky I was to be at that school, that Don Manuel had been very good to us and that I must not complain again.
And I did not complain again, but would wait each week for Saturday, when she would come to take me out. We would walk through the city’s main square and she would ask me about school and tell me that she would do everything she could to see me educated, a gentleman. So that I would go far, she would say, always so that I would go far. And I think that even then, when she said go far, I thought literally of a different place, of going far away.
“Later, when I started to get a little older, I was embarrassed to walk in the street with my mother.”
“Why?”
“I told her that people looked at her too much. That her beauty was a little too garish. That her figure, her makeup—everything about her was too garish.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Let’s get one thing clear right now, Newspaperman. I’ve said exactly what I want to say. When I want to say something, I’ll say it.”
In the second half of the nineteenth century, in a place like Rosario, a woman like her attracts attention. Rosario has just officially been made a city, though it is really just a messy, overgrown port town trying to secure a future for itself.
The port grows, its main function being to export the grain that the region produces in such enormous quantities almost without meaning to, as if by sheer chance, and to receive the shiploads of poor emigrants who begin to arrive from European ports—especially the Italian ones—eager for everything they have left home to find. They prefer the relative harmlessness of this overgrown town to the seemingly more menacing, disdainful, and standoffish air of the country’s main port, Buenos Aires.
The town’s streets are made up of low houses with iron grilles over their windows, the occasional oil streetlamp, and mud. Around Rosario’s main plaza, with its town hall and half-finished church, a few of the streets have been cobbled. On some afternoons she strolls along them, seemingly unaware of how out of place she is there, how her presence detracts from the picture, complicates it.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the center of a town like Rosario, everyone has a role to play within a strict hierarchy. This is still the case, and will be for some years, until the invasion makes it impossible.
The priest has his role; the Governor, his functionaries and hangers-on, the Justice of the Peace, the top eight or ten newly minted grain barons, their various lawyers, the three or four doctors, all have theirs. Also a few newspapermen, possible candidates one day for Governor or a similar post, have their role, as do the old militia leaders who, having risen up against a distant tyrant twenty years earlier, had assured the growth of the town—they all have their place in those streets, as do their ladies, or what those gentlemen call ladies.
And as they have theirs, so, too, do the vendors of rolls and other street food available for dispensing with the occasional hunger, and the peddlers of hair combs and pretty trinkets, and the boys who wait around to help ladies carry home their purchases or get across a puddle. The stable hand, the blind old man, and the cripple at the church, the various other poor who help at the concert, and the few constables who watch over all of it—they all have their places. But she has no place there, on the cobblestone streets of the center of that town, and yet she continues to take her walks there.
She is large, like one of those barrels of cheap wine—young, with a lively smile on her careworn face and clear, penetrating eyes. Her blond hair, already going grey, is gathered up—and she is enormously fat.
She doesn’t wear her maid’s uniform on her walks—if she did, she would have her place. Instead she wears a skirt that was once black but is now grey and threadbare, a blouse that used to be white and is now also grey, and a red shawl on top.
She walks proudly, as if something about her warrants a look of respect or acknowledgment. As if something about her permits her to leave her role of servant to the richest man in the area to mingle on the cobblestone streets with the cream of the town. She walks, and they look at her—spitefully, indignantly they look at her—and she returns their looks. Always just two paces ahead or behind her walks her son, a boy of ten who looks younger, with thick black hair, delicately drawn features, his short pants frayed, eyes like hers, a patch on his shoes. The boy’s name is Juan María and he always walks a little behind or in front of his mother along those cobblestone streets, a little away from her.
Sometimes he escapes his mother’s gaze and ventures farther afield. Sometimes there’ll be a woman with an expensive coiffure carrying a parasol and wearing an imported shawl, and he’ll position himself a little behind or in front of her, as if he were her son. For a couple of minutes, until she notices, he walks as if he were with her and returns the greetings and smiles that the ladies, the gentlemen, the priest, the Governor, the judge, the lawyers, grain barons, journalists, and street vendors all offer up to the woman with the coiffure and in the same movement, to him, the boy, Juan María.
Until he’s discovered and escapes again. Sometimes it’s the woman with the coiffure who discovers him and says, “Go away, little brat, who do you think you are!” Other times it’s his mother who notices him gone and calls his name, looking for him, and when he appears says, “Bollino, what’s wrong? Bollino, my Bollino…”
I suppose I was a happy child until the day I realized that I had to be. Until I saw how my mother depended on each tiny detail of my happiness and then it seemed to me that, as the way to take care of my mother, it was far too fragile. After that, it was much more difficult to maintain this state that—as my mother’s attitude seemed to suggest—was always in danger of breaking.
“Do you think that we only care about things that are in danger of breaking?”
“Don’t be an ass, Newspaperman!”
On weekends I went back to my life, to the big French house, to my room, to Diego and Marianita. We were happy to see each other; I told them things about school and the brothers (and almost nothing about the other boys), and Diego showed me his books of drawings. He asked me if they were teaching me French and sometimes even spoke French words to me, and I pretended that I understood them, but Marianita would laugh and I’d realize I’d got it wrong. But I liked it because it was like before, and they called me Bollino like my mother, and I ate their food and it was like before. I liked it to be like before.
The boy’s name is Juan María, almost everyone calls him Juan María and he’s on the point of not being a boy anymore. It’s debatable: who can say that up to this point you’re a boy and then beyond that you’re something else? Borders, unless they are the borders of a country, tend be gradual. It’s not easy to cross a border like that—still harder to know when or even if you’ve crossed it. It’s a journey without clear boundaries. For a boy, the first shadows of a beard, sudden, unexpected slips of the voice, those new pimples, all mark the fact that he is no longer what he was and that he will never be again, as much as he might try. The boy spends years learning something he will have to learn again many times: that what he has just learned—to be a boy, to live like a boy—no longer serves him, for when he has finally mastered it, then he will have ceased to be one. Then he will learn to be something else, something different every time. A way of being that is always the same.
Señor Manuel de Baltiérrez is standing, his arms crossed over his impeccable shirtfront, his small blond wife to his right, his left foot tapping a rhythm on the floor. His voice when he speaks is low and contained, inspiring greater fear.
“You deceived us. You took advantage of our kindness, you tricked us. I don’t have much more to say to you. Tomorrow morning at dawn you will leave here, you and your unfortunate son, and I do not wish to see you ever again. Never again, understood?”
Facing him, just a few feet away, the fat woman is drowning in her maid’s uniform. Her lips are pressed together, her forehead gathered to prevent the tears from coming, and she struggles for words which, she knows, will not help her.
“Sir, it wasn’t me! I swear to you I didn’t do it, Don Manuel, it wasn’t me! Why would I do something like that?”
“Anunciata, don’t take me for a fool. You’ve done that for years now. It’s all over.”
“But, sir, please God!”
“Don’t bring the Lord into this, Anunciata. The necklace was in your room! Or are you going to tell me it wasn’t?”
The greyhound who’d been sleeping at Don Manuel’s feet gets up and takes a few steps toward the warmth of the fireplace, where the logs are crackling. Anunciata looks at the fire but finds nothing there.
“No, I know it was there, but I swear that it wasn’t me! Why would I do something like that? Where would I be better off than here? Where am I going to find a family that treats me as well as you?”
Now she does cry; Anunciata sobs. Don Manuel makes a gesture of disgust.
“Nowhere, I imagine. But we’re not talking about logic, Anunciata, but about cheats, miserable cheats like you. God knows what you must have in your head; I don’t care. I said tomorrow morning, and that’s all there is to say. I’m only sorry for your son.”
“Do you think she was capable of robbing him?”
“No, Newspaperman. How could you say that?”
“But the necklace was in your room?”
“Yes, of course it was in our room.”
“So?”
“Do I really to have to spell out everything?”