WHETHER he opened his mouth or not, people inevitably guessed the truth from the way he looked: Valentín Brumana was an idiot. He would say, “I’m going to marry a star.”
“Sure, he’s going to marry a star,” we would reply to make him suffer.
We enjoyed torturing him. We’d make him lie in a hammock, then we would tie the sides together so he couldn’t escape, and rock him back and forth until he got so dizzy he would close his eyes. We would make him ride the swing, rolling up the ropes on either side, then letting them go all at once while pushing him dizzily off into space. We didn’t let him taste the desserts we ate, but would rub candy or sticky sugar in his hair and make him cry. We put the toys he asked to borrow on top of a tall chest; to reach them he would climb unsteadily on a wobbly table with two chairs piled on each other, one of them a rocker.
When we discovered that Valentín Brumana, without making any show of it, was a sort of magician, we began to feel some respect for him, mixed with a little fear.
“Did you see your girlfriend tonight?” he would say to us. That evening we had met one of our girlfriends on the sly in a vacant lot. We were so precocious!
“Who are you hiding from?” he would ask us. It was the day we received our report cards, which were full of bad grades, and we were hiding because our father was looking for us to punish us, or, a thousand times worse, to give us a sermon.
“You’re sad, with a mournful face,” he would exclaim. He said it at the very moment we wanted to kill ourselves from sorrow, from a sorrow we concealed like our dates with our girlfriends.
Valentín Brumana’s life was full of excitement, not just because of what we did to him but also because of his intense activity. He had a pocket watch his uncle had given him. It was a real watch, not one made of chocolate or tin or plastic, as he really deserved, according to us; I think it was made of silver, and attached to the chain was a little medal of the Virgin of Luján. The sound the watch made, banging against the medal each time he took it out of his pocket, demanded respect, as long as we didn’t look at the watch’s owner, who made you laugh. A thousand times a day he would take the watch out of his pocket and say, “I have to go to work.” He would get up and abruptly leave the room; then he would come right back.
Nobody paid him any attention. They gave him old records, old magazines to amuse him.
When he worked as a scribe, he would use toilet paper, if that was all he could find, and pencils he carried in a broken briefcase; when he worked as an electrician, the same briefcase would be used as a toolbox to carry insulating tape and wire, which he would collect in the garbage; when he worked as a carpenter, his tools were a wash rack, a broken bench, and a hammer; when he worked as a photographer, I would lend him my camera, without film. Nevertheless, if anyone asked him, “Valentín, what are you going to be when you grow up?” he would answer, “A priest or a waiter.” “Why?” we would ask. “Because I like to clean silver.”
One day Valentín Brumana woke up with a fever. The doctors said, in their roundabout way, that he was going to die and that, considering what his life was like, perhaps that was for the best. He was there and heard those words without alarm, though they reverberated through the desolate house. The whole family, including us, his cousins, thought that Valentín Brumana made people happy because he was so different, and that when he was gone he would be irreplaceable.
Death didn’t keep us waiting long. She arrived the next morning: I’m convinced that Valentín in his agony saw her coming through the door to his room. The joy of greeting a loved one lit up his face, which usually only expressed indifference. He stretched out his arm and pointed a finger at her.
“Come,” he said. Then, looking at us out of the corner of his eye, he exclaimed, “How lovely she is!”
“Who? Who is lovely?” we asked him, with a daring that now strikes me as rude. We laughed, but our laughter could easily be confused with crying, tears pouring from our eyes.
“This lady,” he said, blushing.
The door opened. My cousin assures me that the lock was broken and the door always opened by itself, but I don’t believe her. Valentín sat up in bed and greeted an apparition we couldn’t see. It’s very clear that he saw her, that he touched the veil that hung over her shoulders, that she whispered some secret to him that we would never hear. Then something even more unusual happened: with great effort Valentín gave me the camera that had been on his bedside table, asking me to take a picture of them. He showed his companion how to pose.
“No, don’t sit like that,” he told her.
Or instead, in a whisper, almost inaudible, “The veil, the veil is hiding your face.”
Or instead, in an authoritarian tone, “Don’t look away.”
The whole family, and some of the servants, laughed loudly and raised the velvet drapes, so tall and heavy, so that more light could rush in; someone paced out the number of meters that separated the camera from Valentín to help focus the picture. Trembling, I focused on Valentín, who pointed to the place, more important than him and a little to the left, that needed to be in the picture: an empty space. I obeyed.
Soon thereafter I had the film developed. Of the six photographs, I thought they had given me one by mistake, one taken by some other amateur. Nonetheless, Pygmy, my pony, came out clear enough; Tapioca, Facundo’s puppy, did too; the baker bird’s nest was visible, if a bit dark and blurry; as for the one of Gilberta, in a bathing suit, well, it could have been entered in any photo contest, even today; and then the picture of the façade of the school could have been used as a photogravure in La Nación. I had shot all those pictures the same week.
At first I didn’t look too carefully at the blurry, unrecognizable photograph. Indignant, I went to the lab to protest, but they assured me they had not made a mistake and that it must have been some snapshot taken by one of my little brothers.
It was only later, after careful study, that I was able to make out the room, the furniture, and Valentín’s blurry face in the famous photograph. The central figure—clear, terribly clear—was that of a woman covered with veils and scapulars, already rather old, with big hungry eyes, who turned out to be the actress Pola Negri.