THERE ARE PLACES WHERE TO be a marqués is nothing special. Places where, oddly enough, that’s just what I can be.
“You cannot imagine what that was like, Becker.”
“I’m sorry—what was like?”
“To flee from Buenos Aires. Just when everything looked as if it was starting to work out, I suddenly had to get out of there in four days.”
“I or we? I thought you didn’t leave by yourself?”
“That’s not the point. The point is that it was so sudden, so unexpected.”
“I can imagine. It must have been very difficult.”
“It was. But the strangest thing about it is that if it hadn’t happened, I would have lived out my days as a small-time provincial swindler in that country of braggarts. See how things can happen, Newspaperman?”
At last I was a foreigner. It’s so easy, so comfortable to be a foreigner.
He’d only been in Paris a short while and already his face had changed. Not just because of the dummy monocle he wore in his right eye, not just because of the carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, or the hair worn slightly longer than usual to show that he wouldn’t be told what to do. Not just for the surprising ease with which he’d picked up the local language or the pleasure he took in using it. Not just because his height was no longer a disadvantage, nor for the casual disdain in his look, nor how easily he now closed some of his deals, nor how natural he now found it to handle women who years before would have terrified him. And not just because it meant something to be Argentine now—it was a passport he used judiciously but tirelessly, a way to open almost any door, because being an Argentine in Paris in those days was a guarantee of extravagant wealth. And not just because any mistake he made now was forgiven because he was Argentine, because to be Argentine now meant something and the French knew it and treated them with a new respect. No, the most surprising thing was that his face in the mirror now showed the calm that had recently come over him. “Calm”—there was no doubt that was the word. He had thought about it and concluded that this was the right word.
There was also fear, of course, and the thrill of launching what he rightly or wrongly considered to be great ventures, but that same thrill produced in him the calm of knowing that for once, for the first time, he was doing something worthy of notice. That he—Bollino, Juan María, Perrone, Bonaglia—was finally someone with a story worth telling, finally the person he was always meant to be: himself, though he was now so different. And it amazed him, above all, to be at the center of a story that no one would believe in its entirety—but perhaps that was the way of any story really worth telling.
I was amazed to be the hero of my own story.
Though there was nothing quite so dizzying as not knowing what would happen to me in the next year, two years, five years.
“At last, here I am, back in my own city.”
“But Valfierno, this is the first time you’ve ever been in Paris!”
“Oh, really, Chaudron? How can you be so sure?”
Sebastián de Anchorena is a master—he takes a fish knife and, very discreetly, he places one of those ridged swirls of butter one gets in the finer restaurants onto the sharp end of the knife and, with a lighter, gently melts the top of it. Then, carefully balancing the knob of butter on the knife, he takes the handle of the knife between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and the sharp point of the blade between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and holds the knife just in front of his middle, parallel to the floor. With an almost imperceptible movement that is nonetheless both swift and sure, he pushes the tip of the blade down and releases it suddenly so that the butter is propelled up to the ceiling with some force. I have seen him perform this feat various times and today is no different: the top of the butter, lightly melted, sticks to the ceiling and the butter hangs there menacingly until the room’s heat eventually melts it enough so that big drops of warm butter begin to rain down on whomever has the misfortune to find themselves below. Some of the other Argentine boys also do this, but as I’ve said, Sebastián is the master. Though I no longer envy him.
“See,” I say to him, “what an Argentino I am.”
“Of course, indeed, Señor Marqués. Bien sûr.”
And I know that this would just have killed me before. The antics of Sebastián and his friends are the essence of art for art’s sake, symbolic of those lives, completely free of concern, in which all that is important is to assert that the needs of common mortals don’t affect them, do not touch them. That people like them have no need of what either time or money can offer; the only truly elegant thing being to spend these and ask for nothing in return, without aims, without regrets. People who can devote their efforts and their whole futures to perfecting a completely unnecessary skill. Pure art.
They are aristocrats by an accident of birth, no more—just nature. I, on the other hand, built myself piece by piece. I, on the other hand, am indeed human.
But there were nights when he couldn’t sleep. Though he washed his face and undressed and got into bed and closed his eyes, resting his head against the pillow, always a little cool, his head sinking into the pillow, he would realize, as he sought sleep, that he wasn’t going to find it.
No, there were those nights when he knew long before trying that he would not sleep, that if on one of those nights he were to try, he would unleash an overwhelming torrent. He risked again being Bollino, Juan María, Perrone, Quique—any one of the dead. He risked the terror of getting up and going to stand in front of the mirror to see his own face, to convince himself of his face and his name, to tell himself that death could not reach him while he was still intoning each letter of his name, that as long as he was Valfierno nothing bad could happen to him, to tell himself that at last he was who he was but that he had to keep repeating it, sweating, in front of the mirror. This was what he risked.
And so on those nights he wouldn’t even try. He would comb his hair and wax his mustache, he would put on a good felt hat and go out to lose himself in cabarets and cafés where he would be just another gentleman on the prowl, where everyone would look at him with envy and respect, and where he could seek out a girl who could give him a few hours without sleep. Where he could be no one.
Sometimes my weakness frightened me. In my worst moments, it was my strength that I feared.
Feigning nonchalance, Sebastián launches the little swirl of butter. The knife is left quivering in his hands, the butter on the ceiling. Santiago and Ramón smirk quietly and bring their napkins up to their mouths, and we go on talking about the new show at the Opèra-Comique, the girls in the chorus, and their weekend at Château Longueville. The skill of Sebastián’s little trick has delighted me, too, but I no longer envy it. I have to pretend that I am one of them. For the moment I still have to pretend, although I know that now I am also doing something important, that I am going to give the world something to talk about. That if these boys knew—if I could tell them—they would envy me. Tomorrow night, if everything goes well, I’ll go and see that little cocotte I used to know from the Faux Chien, Valérie. Nothing special—she’s just one of many—but if all goes well and she gives me the information about her Italian friend, then I can get something big going. Finally, I’m going to do something important.
“In the end it wasn’t that difficult. It turns out there’s nothing easier than convincing someone who wants to be convinced. Look at you, for example—you accept my story without question.”
“You’re talking about me?”
“Who else, my Newspaperman, my indispensable Newspaperman.”