I
From the very first moment, the three of us believed we’d always known the man and would forevermore. We were drinking warm beer at a table in front of El Universal just as an end-of-summer night was setting in; the air around the banana trees became alert and the blusterous thunderclaps showed signs of approaching over the river.
“Over there,” Guiñazú whispered, leaning back in his wrought-iron chair. “Look, but not too much. At least don’t stare and, in any case, have the prudence to remain skeptical. If we look nonchalantly, it might last, they might not vanish, at some moment they might manage to sit down, order something from the waiter, drink, truly exist.”
We were sweaty and dazzled, our eyes turned toward the table in front of the door to the café. The girl was tiny and perfect; she was wearing a tight dress that was open at the neckline, over her stomach, and up her thigh. She looked very young and determined to be happy, incapable of closing her smile. I wagered she had a good heart, and I predicted episodes of sadness. With a cigarette in her wide and avid mouth, with one hand on her hair, she stopped next to the table and looked around.
“Let’s assume everything is in order,” Old Man Lanza said. “Too close to perfect to be a midget, too confident and demagogic to be a child dressed as a woman. She even looked over at us, maybe she’s blinded by the light. But her intentions are what matter.”
“You can keep looking,” Guiñazú said, “but don’t talk yet. Maybe they are precisely as we see them. Maybe it’s true that they’re in Santa María.”
The man had many mannerisms and all of them, restive and variable, worked together toward the goal of keeping him sharp, solid, unmistakable. He was young, thin, very tall; he was shy and insolent, dramatic and cheerful.
Indecision on the woman’s part; then she moved one hand to dismiss the tables on the sidewalk and their occupants, the commotion of the storm, the planet onto which she had just stepped lacking delicacy and surprises. He took one step forward to offer her a chair and help her sit down. He smiled at her, caressed her hair, then her hands, then lowered himself slowly until he touched his own chair with his grey trousers, very tight around the calves and ankles. With the same smile he used for the girl and had taught her to mimic, he turned to call to the waiter.
“A drop just fell,” Guiñazú said. “It’s been threatening to rain since dawn and now it decides to start. It’s going to erase this, dissolve what we were seeing and what we almost started to accept. Nobody will want to believe us.”
For a while, the man’s head was turned toward us, maybe looking at us. With the dark and glossy lock that shrunk his forehead, with the anomalous grey flannel suit on which the tailor had pinned a small hard rose, with his alert and hopeful indolence, with his alliance to life, which was older than he.
“But it just might be,” Guiñazú said, “that all the other inhabitants of Santa María will see them and be suspicious, or at least afraid and resentful, before the rain finally erases them. It just might be that somebody will walk by and feel them as strange, too beautiful and happy, and sound the alarm.”
When the waiter arrived, it took them some time to make up their minds; the man caressed the girl’s arms, patiently made suggestions, a master of time and sharing his mastery with her. He leaned over the table to kiss her on the eyelids.
“Now we are going to stop looking at them,” Guiñazú recommended.
I was listening to Old Man Lanza’s breathing, the cough provoked by every drag off his cigarette.
“The sensible thing is to forget about them, not be able to give anybody an explanation.”
The downpour started, and we remembered no longer hearing the thunderclaps over the river. The man took off his jacket and placed it around the girl’s shoulders, almost without needing to move, without ceasing to worship her and tell her with his smile that living is the only happiness possible. She tugged on the lapels and amused herself by looking at the quick dark stains that spread over the yellow silk shirt that the man had exposed to the rain shower.
The light of the U of “Universal” glowed in the dampness of the inscrutable and miserly rose stretching the jacket’s buttonhole. Without taking her eyes off her husband – I had just discovered the rings on their hands clasped on the table – she turned her head to brush her nose against the rose.
In the doorway where we had taken refuge, Old Man Lanza stopped coughing and told a joke about the knight of the rose, the Rosenkavalier. We broke out laughing, separated from the couple by the racket of the rain, believing that this term defined the young man and that we were starting to make his acquaintance.
II
Everything we were learning about them was of no interest to me until a month later, when the couple moved into Las Casuarinas.
We heard that they attended the dance at Club Progreso but not who’d invited them. One of us spent the whole night watching the girl dance, tiny and dressed in white, never forgetting, when she walked up to the long dark counter of the bar, where her husband was, talking to the oldest and most important customers, never forgetting to smile at him with such a tender, spontaneous, and steady glint in her eyes that it was impossible not to forgive her.
As for him, listless and tall, listless and delighted, once again listless and with the privilege of ubiquity, he danced only with the women who could tell him – even if they didn’t – about their husbands’ lack of understanding and their children’s selfishness, about other dance parties with waltzes, one-steps, and the final pericón, with lemonade and watered-down clericot.
He danced only with them and agreed to bend his tall body clothed in dark garments, his lovely head, his smile with no past or precautions, his confidence in eternal good fortune over daughters and single women for only a few seconds. And even this with merely polite and fleeting amusement. According to the observer, the virgins and young wives of Santa María, who in keeping with the abbreviated feminine lexicon had not yet begun to live and those who had stopped doing so prematurely and brooded, perplexed, over grudges and deceits, seemed to be there for no reason other than to unfailingly offer him a bridge between women and older men, between the dance floor and the uncomfortable bar stools in the shadows, where people sipped slowly and talked about wool and wheat. According to the observer.
They danced the last number together and lied stubbornly and in unison to bow out of dinner invitations. He kept bending, patient and restrained, over the aged hands he pressed but dared not kiss. He was young, lean, strong; he was everything it occurred to him to be, and he did not make mistakes.
During dinner, nobody asked who they were and who had invited them. One woman waited for silence to recall the coursage the girl wore on the left side of her white dress. The woman spoke parsimoniously, without giving her opinion, naming only the bird-of-paradise coursage fastened to the dress with a gold pin. Picked perhaps from a bush along some deserted street or from the garden of a boarding house, from the room or the hole where they were living right after they left the Victoria, and that none of us managed to discover.
III
Almost every night, Lanza, Guiñazú, and I talked about them at El Berna or El Universal, when Lanza had finished correcting the newspaper galleys and he came up to our table limping, slow, kindhearted, dying, and on top of the patches of sunlight that had fallen without wind from the tipu trees.
It was a humid summer, and I was on the verge of salvation, nearly accepting that old age had begun; but not yet. I would get together with Guiñazú, and we would talk about the city and the changes it had undergone, about heirs and illnesses, about droughts, betrayals, about the horrific speed with which strangers multiplied. I was waiting for old age, and maybe Guiñazú was waiting for wealth. But we never discussed the couple before the variable hour when Lanza would leave El Liberal. He would arrive, limping and ever thinner, stop coughing and cursing the editor and the entire race of Malabias, order a coffee as an aperitif, and clean his eyeglasses with his filthy handkerchief. In those days I looked at and listened to Lanza more than Guiñazú, trying to learn how to grow old. But it didn’t do any good; that and two other things can never be learned from others.
One of us, any one of us, would mention the couple, and the rest would contribute what we could, unconcerned whether it was a little or a lot, like true friends.
“They dance, they’re dancers, that can be ascertained, and it’s impossible to say anything else if we’ve sworn to tell only truths in order to discover or formulate the truth. But we haven’t sworn anything. So the lies that each of us might approach, as long as they are firsthand and align with the truth that the three of us suspect, will be useful and welcome. The Plaza Hotel is no longer modern and luxurious enough for them. I’m talking about foreigners in general, and I’m pleased that’s the case. As for them, they came on the ferry and went straight to the Victoria, two rooms with a bathroom and no board. We can imagine them in each others’ arms on the ferry (looking with interest and dislike, bracing themselves against the dangers of scorn and optimism) as soon as the boat began to keel over in the current in the middle of the river and turn toward Santa María. They calculated every meter of every building with more than one storey, they calculated the size of their field of operations, foresaw weak points and ambushes, assessed the intensity of one of our summer days at noon. They: he with his left arm almost entirely sheltering the body of that perfect midget, and she looking toward us like a pensive child, chewing on the petals of the rose that he had gotten off to buy for her at the dock in Salto. They, afterwards, riding toward the Victoria in the latest model taxi they could find in the noisy lineup at the landing, followed an hour later by the wagon loaded with their suitcases and a trunk. They carried a letter for Latorre’s fat, effete great-grandson; and they had to have known since the afternoon of the first day that we didn’t know him, that we weren’t interested, that we were trying to forget about him and segregate him out of the myth of Latorre, constructed with impatience, candor, and malice by three generations of nostalgic and aimless men. They learned, in any case, that the great-grandson was in Europe.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, with his quick precise smile. “It’s pleasant here, we can stay for a while.”
So they stayed, but not at the Victoria. They moved out of their two rooms with a bathroom, they hid successfully, and we were able to see them only at their one meal at night at the Plaza, at El Berna, or at one of the restaurants along the coast, so much cheaper and more picturesque. So it went, for a week or ten days, until the dance at the Club Progreso. And, then, right away, a pause during which we thought they were gone forever, when we described with some wit their arrival at another coastal city, confident and a bit vain, a bit complacent because of the monotonous regularity of their triumphs, where they would keep performing Life Will Always Be Beautiful, or The Sham of Perfect Love. But we never agreed on the name of the impresario, and I was determined to oppose all vulgar theories with a theological interpretation no more absurd than the end of this story.
The pause ended when we found out that they were living, or at least sleeping, in one of the small red-roofed houses on the beach, one of the dozen that Specht had purchased – at the price he wanted, but with cash – from Old Man Petrus, when the shipyard closed down, and we, the downhearted, began to say that no train would ever ride on the rails that had been laid over half the distance, one quarter then another quarter, between El Rosario and the shipyard at Puerto Astillero. They slept in the small house in Villa Petrus, from twelve midnight till nine in the morning. Specht’s chauffeur – at that time Specht was president of Club Progreso – took them and picked them up. We never found out where they ate breakfast; but they took their other three meals at Specht’s house, facing the old, circular plaza, or Brausen Plaza, or Founder’s Plaza.
We also learned that they never signed a lease for the house on the beach. Specht wasn’t interested in talking about his guests or in avoiding the subject. At the club he confirmed:
“Yes, they visit us daily. They entertain her. Since we don’t have children.”
We thought that Mrs. Specht, if she cared to, could give us the key to the couple, recommend definitions and adjectives. The ones we’d invented didn’t wholly convince us. They, she and he, were too young, fearsome, and happy for their fee and the future to consist of the compensation meted out to servants: room, board, and whatever pocket money that Mrs. Specht insisted they take without them asking for it.
This period might have lasted about twenty days. It was when summer was being overtaken by autumn, making room for a few vitreous skies at twilight, stiff and silent mid-days, flat and colorful leaves on the streets.
For those twenty days, the young man and the small woman came to the city every morning at nine o’clock in Specht’s car from the coolness of the beach to the lagging summer in the old plaza. We were able to see them – for me it was easy – smiling at the chauffeur, at the scent of leather in the car, at the streets and the waning morning bustle, at the trees in the plaza and the ones that peeked out over garden walls, at the iron and marble entryway of the house, at the maid and Mrs. Specht. Smiling afterwards, all day, the same smile of solidarity with the world, though hers less pure and convincing, with sheens and aspects that were just a bit misguided. And, in spite of everything, making themselves useful from morning till their return, inventing chores for themselves, repairing furniture, cleaning the piano keys, preparing in the kitchen one of the recipes he knew by heart or improvised. And they were useful, principally, in altering Mrs. Specht’s clothing and appearance, then celebrating those alterations with discreet and plausible admiration. They were useful in prolonging their evenings till Specht’s first yawn, agreeing with his immortal and disillusioned clichés, or simply listening eagerly to his autobiographical exploits. (She, not fully, of course; she, whispering with Mrs. Specht in a duet of background melodies – fashion, preserves, and misfortunes – that well suited the epic themes of masculine conversation.)
“Not the Rosenkavalier,” Lanza finally suggested, “but rather the chevalier servant. Said without scorn, probably. That remains to be seen.”
It was known that Specht threw them out nonviolently the morning after a party he gave at his house. As usual, the chauffeur arrived at the beach chalet that Sunday morning at nine; but instead of picking them up he handed them a letter, four or five decisive and polite lines written in the neat and unhurried penmanship of daybreak. He threw them out because they had gotten drunk; because he found the young man embracing Mrs. Specht; because they stole a set of silver spoons engraved with the coats of arms of Swiss cantons; because the tiny woman’s dress was indecent over her chest and one knee; because at the end of the party they danced together like sailors, like comics, like negroes, like prostitutes.
The last version could become true for Lanza. Very early one morning, after the newspaper and then El Berna, he saw them at one of the cafés on Caseros Street. A hot and humid night was beginning to end, and the door to the place was open, no plush curtain, no promises or tricks. He had stopped to light a cigarette, and saw them, alone on the dance floor, surrounded by the hybrid fascination of the few people still sitting at the tables, dancing any old dance, a rumble, a giddy romp, a mating ritual.
“Because that would, I’m certain, have a name that is merely a euphemism. Nor did it go beyond a tribal dance, a betrothal rite, the bride’s twists and turns to surround and trap the groom, the offer deferred to aggravate the demand. But this time, it was she who let herself go, a bit clumsy, her movements restricted, brushing her feet along the ground and not lifting them, swinging her ample and tiny body, pursuing the man with her patient and dazzling smile and the palms of her hands, which she had raised to protect herself and to plead. And he was the one dancing in a circle, swinging his hips as he came and went, pledging and withdrawing with his face and his feet. They danced like that because the others were there, but they danced only for themselves, in secret, protected from any intrusion. The young man’s shirt was open to his belly button; and all of us could see how happy he was to be sweating, a little drunk and in a trance, how happy he was to be watched and awaited.
IV
Then, for the first time and as predicted, they came to us. One day, mid morning, the man arrived at Guiñazú’s office, recently bathed and smelling of cologne, his fingers wrapped around a fifty-peso banknote folded the long way.
“I can’t afford any more, at least not in cash. Tell me if it’s enough to cover the price of a consultation.
“I told him to take a seat while I thought about the two of you, not certain it was he. I leaned back in my armchair and without answering I offered him a cup of coffee, requesting his permission to finish signing some papers. But when I sensed that my baseless antipathy could not be sustained and that curiosity as well as an almost impersonal form of envy were starting to replace it, when I admitted that what anybody would have called insolence or effrontery could be something else, extraordinary and almost magical because so rare, I understood without any doubt that my visitor was the man with the yellow shirt and the rose in his buttonhole whom we had seen that rainy night on the sidewalk in front of El Universal. What I mean, even if I persist in my animosity: a man congenitally convinced that the only thing that matters is to be alive and, therefore, is convinced that anything that allows him to live is important and good and worthy of being felt. I said, yes, for fifty pesos, the rate I charge my friends, I could tell him how long a sentence, give or take a few months, he could expect from the statutes, the tax authorities, and the courts. And, that one could attempt to have the sentence suspended. I wanted to listen to him and, above all, I wanted to take away from him the green banknote that he twisted distractedly between his fingers as if he were certain that all he had to do was show it to me.
“Finally, he unfolded the banknote and placed it on the desk; I put it in my wallet, and we talked for a few minutes about Santa María, landscapes and climate. He told me a story about the letter he had brought for Latorre and asked me if it was possible for him to stay at the beach chalet – he and she, of course, so young and expecting a child – in spite of his estrangement from Specht, in spite of there being nothing but what he called a verbal rental agreement.
“I thought it over and decided to tell him that it was; I slowly explained to him his rights, citing numbers and dates of laws, cases that established precedence. I recommended that he offer to deposit with the courts a reasonable sum in lieu of rent, and subpoena Specht for the execution of the existing contract, oral and de facto.
“I could see he was pleased with my words; he nodded with a pleasant half smile, as if he were listening to his favorite music, remote and well executed. He asked that I repeat one or two sentences, apologizing for not having understood. But that was all, unfortunately he showed no real enthusiasm or relief. Because when I called an end to the pause and told him in a sleepy voice that everything I said was strictly according to the law as it applied to this case, but that, in the dirty Santa María tradition, it would be enough for Specht to talk on the phone with the police chief so that he and his young wife, who was expecting their child, could be removed from the chalet to any spot two leagues beyond the boundaries of the city, he started to laugh and looked at me as if I were his friend and had just told him a memorable joke. He was so keen that I pulled out my wallet to give him back the fifty pesos. But he didn’t take the bait. He removed from the front pocket of his trousers a small gold watch that had at one point been called a chatelaine and lamented having other commitments and being uncertain if this transaction could one day turn into the dialogue of a real friendship. I shook his hand vigorously, suspecting I was indebted to him for things of greater importance than the fifty pesos I had just cheated him out of.”
V
Then they disappeared, were spotted in the company of tourists on Saturdays at the Club Comercial, once again nothing was known about them, and suddenly they were living at Las Casuarinas.
This time, very close to us and to scandal. Because Guiñazú was the lawyer of Doña Mina Fraga, owner of Las Casuarinas; I would go there on house calls when Dr. Ramírez was away from Santa María; and the previous winter Lanza had finished polishing an obituary titled, “Doña Herminia Fraga,” of precisely seven column centimeters, carping but ambiguous, that mainly alluded to the colonizing virtues of Doña Mina’s deceased father.
Close to scandal because Doña Mina, between puberty and her twentieth birthday, had escaped three times. She left with a ranch hand and Old Man Fraga brought her back with the help of the lash, according to the legend, which also throws in the death of her seducer, his secret burial, and a financial arrangement with the commissioner in 1911. She left, not with but in the wake of a circus magician, who was appropriately happy with his job and his wife. The police brought her back, at the insistence of the magician. She left, at the time of the almost revolution of 1916, with a veterinary medicine salesman, a mustachioed, foppish, and determined man, who had done some good business deals with Old Man Fraga. This was her longest absence, and she returned without being summoned or brought back.
At that time, Fraga was building Las Casuarinas, a mansion in the city, as a dowry for his daughter and because he was sick of living on the ranch. One heard chatter about the young woman’s religious crisis, her entering a convent, and an improbable priest who refused to approve the plan because he didn’t believe in Doña Mina’s sincerity. What’s certain is that Fraga, who claimed without boasting that he had never stepped foot in a church, had a chapel built at Las Casuarinas before the house was completed. And when Fraga died, the young woman rented out the ranch and all the land she’d inherited at the highest possible price, moved into Las Casuarinas, and turned the chapel into quarters for guests and gardeners. For forty years she went from one name to another, from Herminia to Doña Herminita and Doña Mina. She ended up old, alone, and with arteriosclerosis, neither defeated nor wistful.
There they were, then, the lovers who’d fallen upon us from the heavens one stormy afternoon. Settled, as if forever, into the chapel of Las Casuarinas, now performing day and night under the ideal conditions of décor, audience, and ticket sales, the play whose dress rehearsal they had held at Specht’s house.
Las Casuarinas is fairly far from the city, to the north, along the road that leads to the coast. They were seen there by Ferragut, the notary who worked with Guiñazú, one Sunday morning. The three of them and the dog.
“It had been raining at daybreak; a few hours of water and wind. By nine the air was clean and the earth was slightly damp, dark, and fragrant. I left the car at the top of the hill and saw them almost immediately, like in a small painting, the kind with wide gilded frames, motionless and surprising as I walked down toward them. He, in the background, wearing his blue gardener’s overalls, I would swear, custom tailored; on his knees in front of a rose bush, looking at it without touching it, offering a smile of proven efficacy against the ants and the aphids; surrounded, for the benefit of the creator of this painting, with the attributes of his circumstances: the shovel, the rake, the pruners, the lawnmower. The young woman was sitting on a mat, with a straw hat that almost touched her shoulders, her huge belly about to burst, her crossed legs covered by a large and colorful skirt, reading a magazine. And next to her, on a wicker chair with a sun shade, Doña Mina smiled at the glory of God’s morning, the disgusting and flatulent dog on her lap. Everybody was serene and gracious, each of them innocently playing their role in the recently created paradise of Las Casuarinas. I stopped, intimidated, at the wooden gate, knowing that I was unworthy and intrusive; but the old woman called to me and was already waving her hand and squinting to make me out. She was disguised in a sleeveless dress, open at the neckline. She introduced me to the young woman (“my own darling”), and when the man finished threatening the ants and walked over jauntily and armed with a smile, Doña Mina started to laugh affectedly, as if he had paid her a lewd compliment. Ricardo was the man’s name. He’d been scratching in the soil until he’d dirtied his fingernails, and now he was looking at them with concern but without losing confidence: ‘We are going to be able to save almost all of them, Doña Mina. As I told you, they planted them too close together. But it doesn’t matter.’ It didn’t matter, everything was easy; to bring withered rose bushes back to life or turn water into wine.”
“Excuse me,” Guiñazú said. “Did he know that you were the notary, that the old woman had called you, that there is such a thing as a will?”
“He knew, I’m sure he did. But that didn’t matter, either.”
“He did, he must be sure.”
“When the old woman handed the dying and crusty-eyed dog to the young woman, who kept pressing her buttocks into her heels, and groped blindly for the cane to stand up and accompany me to the house, the man jumped to her side, and bent over her to offer her his arm. They walked ahead of me, very slowly; he was explaining to her, as he thought it up, the idiosyncrasies of the unknown person who had planted the roses; she stopped to laugh, to pinch him, to dab her eyes with her handkerchief. In the office, the man handed her over to me already seated and requested my permission to continue his conversation with the ants.”
“Okay,” Guiñazú said, playing with his glass. “Maybe Santa María is right to denounce what is going on at Las Casuarinas. But if the money, instead of going to a country relative, falls to the amateur gardener and his female companion and the child who is not yet born…How long can the old woman live?” he asked me.
“Impossible to say. Two hours or five years, in my opinion. Since she took in guests, she no longer keeps to her diet. For better or for worse.”
“Yes,” Guiñazú continued, “they can help her.” He turned to Ferragut: “Does she have a lot of money? How much?”
“She has a lot of money,” Ferragut said.
“Thank you. Did she change her will that Sunday?”
“She confessed to me, because the whole time she was talking to me in a confessional tone, that it was the first time in her life that she really felt loved. That the pregnant midget was better to her than any real daughter imaginable, that the man was the best, most refined and understanding of men, and that if death came for her now, she, Doña Mina, would have the happiness of knowing that her disgusting, incontinent dog would be left in good hands.”
Lanza started laughing convulsively, choking, choking on gloomy sounds. He looked at our faces and lit a cigarette.
“We have little nourishment,” he said. “And everything is hereby deemed worthwhile. But this is an old story. It’s just that rarely, as far as I know, has it played out so perfectly. In the previous will, you say, she left her fortune to priests or relatives.”
“Relatives.”
“And this morning she changed her will.”
“And this morning she changed her will,” Ferragut replied.
VI
They lived at Las Casuarinas, exiled from Santa María and the world. But on certain days, once or twice a week, they drove to the city in the old woman’s wobbly Chevrolet to do the shopping.
Old-time residents could evoke the remote and brief existence of the brothel, the women’s Monday outings. In spite of the years, in spite of changes in fashion and demography, the city inhabitants continued to be the same. Timid and spoiled, forced to pass judgment in order to prop each other up, always judging out of envy or fear. (The most important thing to say about these people is that they lack spontaneity and joy; this can produce only lukewarm friendships, unfriendly drunkards, women who chase after security and are as identical and interchangeable as twins, swindled and lonely men. I’m talking about the people of Santa María; perhaps travelers have learned that human solidarity, under wretched circumstances, is a disappointing and astonishing truth.)
But the hesitant scorn with which the inhabitants viewed the couple who visited the cleanly swept and progressive city once or twice a week was of a different essence than the scorn they had shown years before in order to measure the steps, the stops, and the itineraries of the two or three women from the house on the coast, who played at going shopping on Monday afternoons for a few months. Because we all knew a few things about the listless and smiling young man and the miniature woman, who had learned to balance her growing belly on high heels, who strolled through the streets of the town center, not too slowly, leaning back, her neck resting on her husband’s open hand. We knew they were living off Doña Mina’s money; and it had been settled that, in this case, their sin was dirtier and unforgiveable. Perhaps because they were a couple and not only a man, and because the man was much too young, or because we found them both simpatico and they appeared not to know.
But we also knew that Doña Mina’s will had been changed; hence, when we saw them walk by, we added to our scorn a timid and calculated offer of friendship, of understanding and tolerance. Soon we would see how, whenever it became necessary.
What was seen sooner was Doña Mina’s birthday party. Guiñazú saw it for us.
They said – and rich old ladies, who were invited and sent their regrets, were saying it – that it was impossible for Doña Mina to have a birthday in March. They even offered to pull out moldy photographs, images saved from Doña Mina’s respectable childhood, where she had to be front and center, the only girl wearing a hat, in the unfinished garden of Las Casuarinas, at her own birthday party, surrounded by girls wearing furry caps and coats with lapels, collars, and fur braiding.
But they didn’t take out the pictures or attend. In spite of the young man promising or, at least, doing everything possible. He ordered invitations on cream-colored paper with black embossed lettering (Lanza corrected the proofs). For three or four days they crisscrossed the city streets and the neighborhood roads in a Tilbury gig, mysteriously unearthed and now with new rubber tires, newly painted in dark green and faded black, and a gigantic statuesque horse – fat, asthmatic, a mill and plow animal, enraged, drooling, and on the verge of keeling over – now pulling the couple. And they went around in their invitation-distributor uniforms, sitting stiffly behind the beast’s round rear end, with their twin absentminded smiles and their idle whip.
“But they achieved nothing, or very little,” Guiñazú told us. “It occurs to me that maybe if he’d made himself seen and heard by each of the old ladies when he went to their houses to beg…The truth is, that Saturday they didn’t manage to attract anybody, neither man nor woman, who had the indisputable right to be mentioned on the society page of El Liberal. I arrived closer to nine than eight, and already there were people with bottles settled into the darkness of the garden. I climbed the staircase without really wanting to, or wanting to be finished with it quickly, inhaling the tenderness of burnt firewood at some nearby site, listening to music wafting outside, noble, thinned out, and proud music, which had not been made or played for me or any of the inhabitants of the house or garden.
“In the dimly lit foyer a dark-skinned woman wearing an apron and a cap towered over a pile of hats and women’s coats. I thought that they had dressed her up and placed her there for the purpose of announcing the names of the guests.
“First, by chance, because he was near the velvet and naphthalene curtain, I saw the man, the young man, the man with the rose in his buttonhole. Then I made my way through the dregs of society in their Sunday best and went to say hello to Doña Mina. She fit poorly in the recently reupholstered, spiral-legged armchair; she didn’t stop petting the snout of the foul-smelling hound. She wore lace on her hands and around her neckline. I uttered two pleasantries and took one step back; then I quickly saw the eyes, hers and those of the perfect midget, sitting on the rug, her head leaning on the armchair.
“The pregnant woman’s eyes had an expression of stupid sweetness, of unshakeable physical happiness.
“The old woman’s eyes looked at me, telling me something, confident that I was capable of discovering what it was, mocking my lack of comprehension and also anticipating what I might understand in error. Her eyes, establishing a moment of contemptuous complicity with me. As if I were a child; as if she were stripping in front of a blind man. Her still shining eyes, not resigned, trapped by time, sparking momentarily with her impersonal revenge amid the wrinkles and the sagging lids.
“The young man with the rose played records for another half hour. When he’d had enough or felt confident, he went to his pregnant midget, swept her off her feet, and they started to dance in the center of the room, encircled by the spontaneous retreat of the others, determined to live, to endure with joy, to dispense with concrete hopes. He, swaying indolently, his feet intertwining on the flattened, wine-stained rug; she, even slower, miraculously unaltered by her enormous belly that grew with each turn of the dance she knew by heart and could perform without a false step, deaf and blind.”
And that was all till the end, till the exasperated construction of the vegetal monument that lends interest to this story and deprives it of meaning. Nothing very important till the multicolored, luscious, and overwhelming pyre of unknown intent, burned in three days through the frost of May.
Lanza and Guiñazú had seen much more, had been, on two or three occasions, closer than I to the deceptive heart of the affair. But the futile revenge of going to Las Casuarinas at three in the morning fell to me; the young man coming to get me with his gigantic wheezy horse in the middle of the cold and blue night; he, helping me put on my coat with absent-minded good manners wholly devoid of insult; he, anticipating along the way – as he affectionately swore at the horse and paid excessive attention to the reins – the end we had foreseen and even wished for, out of the simple necessity for things to happen.
The nostrils of the snorting horse moved rhythmically under the moon, the hollow sound of its trot, ready to carry me anywhere. The young man was keeping his eyes on the deserted road, hoping to spot dangers and obstacles, his hands protected by thick old gloves, held unnecessarily far away from his body.
“Death,” he said. I looked at his rabid teeth; his overly well-wrought nose; his expression appropriate for an autumn night, for the cold we rode through, for me, for what he assumed he’d find at the house. “Agreed. But not fear, or respect or mystery. Disgust, indignation at the final injustice that simultaneously renders all previous injustices unimportant and unforgiveable. We were sleeping and were awoken by the bell; I had placed a bell next to her bed. She tried to smile and everything seemed fine, according to her wishes and with her permission, as always. But I’m sure she didn’t see us, her whole face waiting for a sound, a voice. Propped up on her pillows, hoping to hear something that we ourselves couldn’t tell her. And since the voice didn’t come, she started to move her head, to invent an unknown language in order to speak with some other, so rapidly that it was impossible to respond to her as she jumped ahead of the answers, defended herself against interruption. Personally, I think she was arguing with a childhood friend. And after about ten minutes of giddy mumblings it became clear that her friend, almost a child, was being defeated and that she, Doña Mina, was going to be left forever with the afternoon laden with jasmine and wisteria, with the man with slow curly eyelashes, a jacaranda walking stick under his arm. At least that’s what I understood, and I still believe it. We surrounded her with hot water bottles, we made her take some pills, I saddled the horse, and I came to get you. But it was death. You can only sign the certificate and request an autopsy tomorrow. Because all of Santa María is doomed to think that I poisoned her, or that we, my wife, the fetus, and I poisoned her for the inheritance. But, fortunately, as you will confirm when you cut her open, life is much more complicated.”
The tiny woman, dressed in black, as if she had carried those splendid black garments in her suitcases in anticipation of that very night, had lit candles next to Doña Mina’s bewildered head, had spread a few precocious and pale violets around the foot of the bed and waited for us on her knees with her back turned, with her face in her hands on top of the cheap white bedspread, brought perhaps from the maid’s room.
They kept living in the house and, as Lanza would tell us at El Berna as he glanced over at Guiñazú’s face – more refined at that stage, craftier and more professional – nobody could throw them out until they read the will and it was shown that there was somebody with the right to throw them out, or that it was their right to leave after the place had been sold. Guiñazú agreed and smiled:
“There’s no rush. As executor of the will, I can wait three months before I file it with the court. Unless some relative with a reasonable claim appears. In the meantime, they’re still living in the house; and they’re that rare kind of people who fit in well anywhere, who improve or give meaning to places. We all agree. I’ve watched them come to shop every week, as usual, and I could even discover how they’ve managed things to be able to keep buying. But I didn’t talk to them. There’s no reason to rush things. Most likely they’ve taken the large drawing room at Las Casuarinas for themselves, and they’re turning it into a museum to honor Doña Mina. I believe they have enough dresses, hats, parasols, and bootees to illustrate that heroic life from the Paraguayan War to our present day. And maybe they’ve discovered bundles of letters, daguerreotypes and corsages, pills to enhance the bust, a carved marble fountain pen, and vials of aphrodisiacs. With those items, if they know how to use them, they will make it possible for any visitor to the museum to easily reconstruct Doña Mina’s personality, a source of pride to all of us, constrained as we are by history to the poverty of a single hero, Brausen the Founder. There’s nothing rushing us.”
(But I suspected that he was being rushed by the impure hope that the young man of the rose would pay another visit to his office to ask for the the will to be opened. That he was waiting for this so he could get even for the confusing enchantment wrought upon him by the young man on that morning he paid him a visit and fifty pesos for nothing.)
“There’s nothing rushing us,” Guiñazú continued, “and for the moment, to all appearances, there’s nothing rushing them, either. Because, for the people of Santa María, the tacit curse that had exiled Doña Mina’s personal filth from our collective filth half a century ago was left without cause or effect after the night of the wake. Since then, after the period of mourning had passed, the most discreet among us, the farmers and small businessmen, and even the families descended from the first wave of immigrants, began to love the couple freely, with all their desire to love. They began to offer them their houses and unlimited credit. Speculating on the will, of course, making prudent and bold investments in prestige and merchandise, betting on the couple. But, moreover, I insist, doing all of this with love. And they, the dancer, the Rosenkavalier and the pregnant virgin from Lilliput, show that they have risen to the heights of the new circumstances, the exact height of this high tide of affection, forbearance, and adulation that the city raises to draw them in. They buy only the bare minimum to eat and be happy, they buy white wool for the child and special biscuits for the dog. They are grateful for invitations and can’t accept them because they are in mourning. I imagine them alone in the large drawing room, with nobody to dance for, near the fire or surrounded by the first disorderly items of the museum. In exchange for listening to them, I would gladly return the fifty pesos in fees and would add to that another banknote. In exchange for listening to them, for knowing who they are and how we seem to them.”
Guiñazú didn’t say a word about the will, about the changes the old woman dictated to Ferragut, until the exact moment he felt like doing so. Perhaps he grew weary of waiting for a visit from the young man, for the tacit confession that would authorize him to pass judgment on him.
He felt the urge to do it one hot autumn noon. He ate lunch with us, placed on the window sill in El Berna the brown briefcase he’d bought before he graduated and that will always look brand new, as if it were made out of the hide of a young and still living animal, with no traces of litigations, courthouse corridors, accumulated dirt. He covered it with his hat and told us that he was filing the will with the court.
“May man’s justice be done,” he laughed. “I spent a lot of time, I amused myself imagining the clauses that divine justice could have dictated. Trying to guess what the will would have been if God had written it instead of Doña Mina. But when we think about God we think about ourselves. And the God that I can think of (I repeat, I dedicated a lot of time to the problem) would not have done things any better, as will soon be seen.”
We watched him walk toward the plaza and cross it hurriedly, upright and without slumping his shoulders, with the briefcase hanging from two fingers, confident of what he was doing under the strong yellow sun, confident that what he was taking to court, for us, for the whole city, was the best, what we had managed to deserve.
We started to find out the following day, quite early. We heard that Guiñazú drank coffee and cognac with the judge, for a while they spoke little and kept looking at each other, serious and sighing, as if Doña Mina had just died and as if her death mattered to them. The judge, Canabal, was a burly man, with cold bulging eyes, his voice nasal, and whom I, going a bit overboard, had forbidden from drinking alcohol since the end of the year. He shook his heavy head over the will, becoming more and more distraught as he turned each page with a single expert finger. Then he stood up, huffing, and walked with Guiñazú to the door.
“If we lose the harvest, as well, we’re going to have fun,” said one of the two.
“Now that they’re practically giving the wheat away to Brazil,” said the other.
But before the door had closed, Canabal started to laugh, a laugh without prologue composed entirely of mature guffaws.
“The dog!” he shouted. “That sentence, so cynical and harsh, about love and the dog. How I long to see their faces! And I think I’m going to see them in this very office. They thought they’d bagged her and now…the dog and five hundred pesos!”
Guiñazú returned to the room and smiled silently. Canabal wiped his face with a grief-stricken handkerchief.
“Forgive me,” he grunted, “but never in my life, not even as an ambulance chaser, have I ever seen anything so comical. The dog and five hundred pesos.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Guiñazú said, tolerantly. “Ferragut is also impatient to see their faces, and it’s true, the whole thing seemed comical to me,” he continued, smiling, until he reached the window that opened onto the straight, narrow street, embellished by the humidity and the yellow light, above the infantile and dissolute music that crept up from the radio and record store. “But if we keep in mind that the deceased left behind a fortune…”
“Precisely,” Canabal said, and started laughing again.
“A fortune and some cousins and nieces who have maybe never seen her and almost certainly hated her, and several dozens of thousands of people nobody knows and who will have to be pursued with banns all over the country…If we take into account, Judge, that the couple was taking care of her and made her happy for months, and that she was certain (as we ourselves are, without any proof other than vilifying experience) that the couple were confident they would be the heirs. If we admit that the old woman thought about that when she called Ferragut to determine that the young man, the midget, and the fetus would receive in payment the subsequently revealed five hundred pesos, so they could be set for life against any economic difficulty…”
“But, Guiñazú…” said the judge, smelling the dry and sad perfume of his handkerchief. “That’s exactly why I was laughing. Therein lies the charm: in the coming together of all the things you have just listed.”
His eyes are colorless, Guiñazú thought. They merely shine and are convex; he could spend hours looking without blinking, with a rose leaf stuck to his cornea.
“But I don’t find it amusing anymore,” Guiñazú continued. “The story is too comical, too monstrously comical. So, I ended up taking it seriously, distrusting what appeared to be obvious. For example, and in parting, think about the dog; tell me tomorrow why she left it to him and not to the millionaire cousins.”
He closed the door dramatically and heard almost immediately Canabal’s burst of laughter, the slobbery questions he asked himself out loud to keep himself laughing.
We also learned that Guiñazú – who had stopped joining us at the café and at El Berna – visited Las Casuarinas the following day. We heard he drank tea in the garden with the couple, that he inspected the burlap and tin defenses against frost and ants set up around the rose bushes.
We learned, when Guiñazú wanted to talk about it, when winter arrived and Las Casuarinas was left abandoned and the inhabitants of Santa María forgot about the cold and the hail in order to talk about the confusing and immortal story of the will, we learned that on that humid autumn afternoon Guiñazú arranged for the official transfer of the dying and diarrhetic dog and the five one-hundred-peso bills.
Though the fact was that a long time ago we’d had no choice but to suspect that Guiñazú had transferred the dog and the money. We had to imagine him doing it on that same syrupy Sunday morning when someone came to tell us that the midget had settled in to wait among piles of suitcases and round hat boxes, her legs outstretched to make room for the eleven-month fetus and the matted, mucous-eyed dog on the staircase at the docks, in front of the ferry berth.
The dual transfer had to have been known about at the very moment that someone else came to tell us that the young man, since daybreak of that same day, whipping the horse for the sake of it, had been driving in the wobbly seat of Las Casuarinas’s gig through every neighborhood buying flowers. He had no preferences, paid out of pocket without asking questions, placed the bunches under the hood, said yes to a glass of vineta, then climbed back onto the coachman’s seat. He drove up and down dirt roads, stopped to open and close gates, forced the animal to gallop under the imperfect circle of the moon, around skinny dogs, flecked and invisible, faced headlights and suspicions, began to feel weak and penniless, hungry and sleepy, deprived of his initial faith and the memory of any purpose.
It was morning when the horse stopped, its head drooping, next to the cemetery wall. The young man took his hands off his knees to protect himself from the disgusting perfume of kilos of flowers that weighed down the cart, and started thinking about dames, death, dawns, all while he waited for the ringing of the bells that would open the gates of the cemetery.
Perhaps he bribed the caretaker with smiles and promises, with the exhaustion and blind desperation of his body and face, older now and with a longer nose. Or perhaps the caretaker had felt what we – Lanza, Guiñazú, and I – thought we knew: that those who love the gods too much die young. He must have smelled it, hesitantly, thrown off for a moment by the scent of the flowers. He must have touched it for a moment with his cane until he recognized it and treated it like a friend, like a guest.
Because they let him bring in the carriage, guide it by pulling on the steaming jawbone of the horse until it reached the columned vault with a black angel with broken wings and metal dates and exclamation marks.
Because they saw him on his feet and on his knees in the coachman’s seat, and then standing up on the swelling, black, and always damp earth, on the impetuous and irregular grass, constantly moving his arms, panting through a determined and exhausted grimace that exposed his teeth, as he haphazardly carried the recently cut flowers from the carriage to the grave, one bundle after another, without sparing a single petal or leaf, until he had returned the five hundred pesos, until he had raised an insolent and irregular mountain that expressed, for him and for the dead woman, what we could never know for certain.
1956