“WHAT SHALL I SAY ABOUT those years when nothing happened, when there was nothing to distinguish them except their numbers?”
“Perhaps the problem is thinking that nothing was happening. Something is always happening.”
“Oh, really? It’s clear that you were never Bonaglia, working for Don Simón in San José de Flores.”
We now know—we’re fairly sure that we know—that upon his release from the National Penitentiary, Bollino, Juan María Perrone, became Enrique Bonaglia. There was no particular reason, or if there was, he didn’t know it. There was just the feeling that he had to leave behind everything he’d been—whatever it was that he had been—up until that point. This was accompanied by the feeling—even more confusing—that there was nothing in front of him. And it’s difficult to know—there are too many possible reasons—why, for this next journey, he took the name of a father who was virtually a fake.
We know that he wandered through that strange city for several days without finding lodgings. It’s not clear just who directed him to Don Simón, but he seems to have been almost happy to be exiled in that way. There certainly wasn’t much else to encourage him, and it’s also true that he had little choice. Perhaps he didn’t think that he’d be able to leave prison behind overnight, but that he’d have to wean himself from it.
Don Simón Coutiño was a Galician in his fifties who had worked every day of his life since he was ten or eleven to be able to have this shop that sold fabric, wool, and thread next to the main plaza in San José de Flores. The shop did respectably well, though it was still quite modest. The porteña women of Buenos Aires who summered in the town would bring their linens in, and the local farmworkers, peasants, and maids made up the rest of the clientele.
Don Simón had just dismissed a man who worked for him, so when Enrique Bonaglia—twenty-four years old, with a clear attentive face, a smile still free of arrogance, and a certain intelligence—showed up and asked for the job, the shopkeeper saw no reason not to take him on. In fact, without wanting to say what it was, he saw a very good reason to do so.
He didn’t ask any questions. In those days in Buenos Aires, no one checked anyone’s stories. One more, one less—everyone was from somewhere else. To Enrique’s relief, the position required thirteen hours a day of work, six days a week, meager pay, the right to two meals a day, and the use of the little room at the back of the shop for himself. Enrique Bonaglia told himself this was a good way to stop his seeking, and by then, that was all he wanted.
It was very strange to be Bonaglia—some nights, it was terrifying. Bonaglia, my father’s name, being used for this: the refuge for a wretch no one was looking for, and who was looking for nothing.
Clients whisper. When they come into Don Simón’s shop, and especially when they leave, they whisper. Shopping is one of the few diversions for the farmhands and peasants and maids of San José de Flores. They also have the choice of going to Mass, or to a dance once in a while, a stroll through the plaza in the late afternoon, an occasional roast on Sundays, but shopping is the activity that brings them closest to their masters, allowing them for a moment to see themselves as similar. The town doesn’t offer much to buy, and so it is not uncommon to see them at the shop, looking for a spool of thread, twenty centimeters of lace edging, some yarn.
But the farmhands and peasants are not ones to whisper. They are still very much criollos—creoles—which involves a way of being based on a kind of silence. The farmhands and peasants only go to Don Simón’s shop when they can say that they were sent by their wives, or their bosses. Even then, they wear an air of distance, distraction.
On the other hand, the maids of the farm owners and their wives come eagerly, and they whisper. They ask each other—as they have many times—who this young man could be, so attentive and smart, though not that tall, who serves each of them as if she were the one woman in his life, but who looks delicately off into the distance when they each lower their eyes for him, or pout invitingly, or say something faintly provocative. Whenever they do that, the young Bonaglia seems to be in another world.
After a bit of this, Don Simón’s female customers console themselves, whispering that that boy simply can’t be that much of a man. And that if Don Simón took him on hoping to marry off his daughter, as many suspect, then he’s picked the wrong horse.
He says that he spent several years trying to learn just who he was, and that he still thought it was something he needed to learn. Or could learn.
Little Mercedes Coutiño is now past twenty-four, the age, according to godmothers, when a girl ceases to be a girl and instead gets dangerously close to becoming a spinster. Mercedes Coutiño is not exactly pretty. Who can really say, since, as we know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s the eye that is the most capricious, but the young lady meets none of beauty’s usual requirements. She does not have the fresh skin of a new rose, nor the litheness of a willow by the river, nor breasts rounded like ripe fruit, nor the grace of a gazelle. She has instead a round face, not unlike a muffin, a single, imposing eyebrow, and a short, rotund body. She is a woman in the wrong vessel, her subtle spirit a prisoner in coarse flesh.
This inadequacy has rendered her timid. When Enrique Bonaglia began working in her father’s shop, Mercedes feigned illness in order to spend the next two weeks in her own room on the top floor. Her mother had died years before. She was an only daughter and the only woman in the house, which she ran diligently, and her father hated—perhaps feared—the thought that they might be separated. Which is why he refused her utterly when, at eighteen, she told him that she wanted to become a teacher. No, he said: she was his only daughter. She was not to go off and do anything strange; she was to marry, and her husband would take over the running of the shop when Don Simón became too old. He never said, “When I die,” but always, “When I become too old.”
As was her duty, Mercedes accepted her father’s decision. So that when Enrique Bonaglia showed up, she became quite alarmed, shutting herself up for those two weeks, but then had no choice but to come out. Now, the two young people greet each other politely every day, avoid each other quietly, and try to find a way to live together without any intimacy.
“I see, Señorita, that your book is in French.”
“Yes. I don’t read French very well.”
“I could help you, if you like.”
“Do you know French?”
“Yes, well enough.”
“Where did you learn it?”
“Well, I spent a few years working on a ship and picked it up there.”
For some reason of his own that he has not yet fully understood, Enrique has vowed to himself that he will lie to her as little as possible. The very idea of this surprises him, and he asks himself why it should even have occurred to him. There are degrees: his vow includes everything to do with work and domestic life but it does not—cannot—include his past. He—Enrique Bonaglia—has no past. What doesn’t exist cannot be measured according to whether it is true or a lie. Though he would not yet put it like this, he is learning unconsciously about the prerogatives some men assume for themselves in writing about their pasts.
None of which gets in the way of his being a very good worker. Don Simón is delighted with his new charge and spends more and more time playing cards with his chums in Canedo’s café, long afternoons during which the two young people search for a way to be with each other; they do not find this easy. For a start, they are enveloped in the heady smell of the fabrics.
It’s understood that Enrique should be the one to attend to customers. Unless she is needed, Mercedes remains on the stool, where she embroiders or reads. When Enrique doesn’t know something, he asks her as respectfully as if she were the owner, otherwise, they might pass the entire day without speaking. To anyone else—to the whisperers, thinks Enrique—they look like an old married couple that had never been new.
The truth, he thinks, is simpler. (He is still permitting himself to think about the “truth.”) She had rebuffed, that one time, his thinly disguised offer to teach her French, and he does not wish to make any more overtures. Something in her makes him feel that he can’t talk to her about the silly, day-to-day things about the shop or the town’s gossip. To him she seems to be above all that; it would be rude to bother her with it. She deserves better than to have to trifle with such petty things, yet he can’t think of what else to say to her.
For her part, Mercedes does not think it proper to converse with a man with whom she has no formal relationship. Most afternoons, the silence is comfortable enough, but occasionally the tension spills over into surreptitious glances, meaningful coughs, an awareness of that heady smell. This is how their time passes.
“I promise, dear friend, that I will mend my ways. I don’t wish to keep on, as I have until now, lingering over each tiny bitterness that life delivers. I will enjoy the present, and the past shall always be the past. How right you are! How much happier we would all be if, instead of dwelling forever on our slights and ills, we worked to make our mediocre present bearable,” says the book.
Months go by before it occurs to Enrique to ask her what the book she is reading is about, though he thinks later that he must have wondered long before.
It’s a novel, she tells him, called The Sorrows of Young Werther, by a German writer named Goethe. Enrique is quiet for a moment and then asks her what it’s about. Mercedes blushes, and recounts the story of an ill-fated love. Enrique asks her some more questions, then finally plucks up the courage to ask if he can borrow one of her books. She says of course, and the next day she comes down to the shop with a book called Amalia. The light is dim, and Enrique can’t be sure, but as she hands it to him he believes he sees her color.
I became a reader. Ever since then—all these years. I might have seemed like some fellow, perfectly pleasant, a little bored, who served the customers in Don Simón Coutiño’s shop, who’d resigned himself early to Lord knows what, but that wasn’t who I was—I was a reader.
Just as I used to in the big house with Diego and Marianita and Don Manuel, I read.
Soon, the shop starts to seem to him like an accident, a trick of the eyes or of a world that wasn’t supposed to be there, in that space that was reserved for stories. Soon everything seems to him to be an accident or a confusion. Everything except for the stories he reads and the young lady who gives them to him and comments on them. She is now the only thing that seems real—her and the books, so alike.
Now, afternoons in the shop are perfect. Afternoons in particular, the hour of the siesta, when Don Simón goes off to play cards, when the customers stay away, when Enrique and Mercedes settle themselves to read. Mercedes in the room where the bills and accounts are kept, Enrique in the straw chair behind the counter. They can’t see each other; each knows the other is there, and from time to time Mercedes will get up and offer him a yerba maté, or he will wander over to say something to her. Most of the time, though, they read—each in a chair, not looking at one another. Enrique has the strange feeling that he is finally with someone. He believes—wants to believe; so many doubts—that it’s the same for her. He wonders how it must be for her, and how it is for him, too. He searches for the answers in the books and sometimes finds them.
“The man of whom I spoke yesterday—that happy madman—was secretary to Charlotte’s father, and the cause of his madness was an unseemly passion that he harbored for her. For years he kept his secret until finally, one day, the old judge learned the truth and threw him into the street. You will understand through these small, dry words,” says the book.
It was during one of those afternoons that I came to believe that I had finally discovered love. I’d like to know what it was I was reading then—I seem to remember a scene in which a man looks at a woman and suddenly sees her as elderly and thinks that he is the old man walking with her, trailing behind the parasol she carries. He looks at her again, no longer considering her so attractive, surveying her anew with disparaging eyes. When he then shuts them, he sees her again as an old woman, this time with no parasol, and himself beside her. He recognizes himself instantly, though he is stooped and wrinkled—something in his face comforts and soothes him. I remember that I then closed the book, stood up without a noise, and went over to watch her, without her seeing me. Mercedes was immersed in her book, and I understood.
I had a sudden flash of happiness, like a fire flaring up. I hadn’t had much experience with love. I’d found myself in jail very young; to say I hadn’t had much experience is really to say that I hadn’t had any. Marianita was a memory from another life. I had of course spent time in the brothels, but nothing more than that. This was as different from that as it could possibly be—this was love: a pure meeting of souls. This was a joining without impediments, unimaginably elevated from the impulses of the flesh. And I now knew—without my having to tell her or her telling me—that she shared this feeling, that without needing to say a word she felt the same for me.
Love has its rules. What each place and time refers to as love is in fact a set of rules that is recast over and over. Love has many meanings: serenity, chaos, a prize, a goal, the impossible, a basic right, a reason for being, an insurmountable wall, a blanket. You can only speak the word—presume love, discern love—when you know those rules and think your situation fits them. Enrique did not know them, but he devoted so many hours to their study that he began to believe that one day he would.
She didn’t exactly tell me, but yes—in the silent way she handed me my maté, the way she remarked on an author’s phrasing, or the fate of some poor character, or the beauty of a description, Merceditas was telling me how deeply we understood each other and what a privileged form of love we’d somehow known to build. We spoke to each other in the words of others; no one else could know what we were really saying. It was our own secret, one we hadn’t even needed to talk of, or give a name to: an infinite respect.
I would watch her. Sometimes I’d watch her for ages, without her noticing me—without her noticing me?—and it would delight me to see that nothing clouded that purity, that what I felt for her was not sullied by the flesh. She was not sullied by her flesh. Her teeth were prominent, she had a broad and curving forehead, her cheekbones stood out—her flesh did not hide the bones beneath. The flesh was not what mattered in that face, which was so honest, so close to the skull.
From time to time—once—I considered broaching the topic of our feelings, asking for her hand, holding her close, but I amazed myself with my ability to control these impulses. Any of these seemed like a betrayal—they would ruin everything in one animal moment. There was no doubt that we were so much more than that.
From time to time—more than once—those impulses of the flesh would come back to plague me. I was confused and disoriented, until I realized that she was not responsible for it. That it was just the freight I owed for my animal nature. And that it was easy to pay. Twice a month, on the first and third Sundays during the siesta hour, I would take the train to the center of town, and there I would spend half an hour in a room with the same stocky Calabrian woman in Doña Anunciación’s brothel, like someone who returns to his sunnier side upon completing an onerous task. The Calabrian woman was the complete opposite of Mercedes—extremely vulgar, a coarse mouth, a riot of flesh. She was the dark mass above which Mercedes’ bright soul shone. When I left the brothel—sated, content, without the least remorse—I would stroll about the center of town. Seeing the lively, hurrying crowds distressed me, and I would feel compassion and feel reaffirmed in the refuge I had chosen.
On those nights, I would return home—I called it my home now—brimming over as never before with love. She never asked me where I went; she trusted me, she never asked a thing. And if she had—if we had needed to reach out to one another with such murmurings, I’d have been able to tell her that what I did I did for her, so that our love could continue at its most pure. I knew that such perfection could not last forever—nothing good ever does—but both of us were intent on trying to have it last as long as possible, on having nothing change.
It was a very happy time, though the master Rousseau would call that a contradiction, the reward of happiness coming from making time beside the point, meaningless. I felt this: it required a real effort later—after what happened—to remember just how many years we spent living through that placid, moderated passion.
“Marqués, forgive my interruption, but did it ever occur to you that she simply did not attract you as a woman?”
“Of course it occurred to me, Newspaperman—I already said so. And I told myself I was wrong.”
“Do you still think so?”
“What are you saying? What would you like to hear, the story of my life or my opinion on the story of my life?”
It’s odd how easy it is to believe that things will always be as they are now. By always I mean for far longer than the longest time one lets oneself imagine. Into another time.
The morning that he first felt doubt was hard for him. Don Simón had risen in a foul mood—something that happened from time to time, and that almost always ended in drink—and shouted at him over something. It didn’t matter what, perhaps some yarn in the wrong drawer, a length of embroidery gone yellow in the sunlight, a speck of dust. It didn’t matter, but the shouting was severe. Enrique didn’t care—he viewed these outbreaks as a part of his job—but while the old man was shouting he thought he might have seen a little glow of pleasure in Mercedes’ eyes. That morning he felt his first doubts, and for days he was on the point of asking her about it. Luckily, as he thought later, he didn’t know what to ask. Because it could have spoiled everything. Surely that hint of light had been an illusion, a mirage, and surely his question would have ruined everything. Luckily, he didn’t ask, and he would always tell himself that in not asking he had really learned something.