How what was? Martín wondered.
Sì, sì,” the old man said again, nodding his head as though agreeing with an invisible conversational partner.
And suddenly he said:
“I was a little boy like that bambino over there with the ball and my babbo would sing:
Quando la tromba sonaba alarma
co Garibaldi doviamo parti.fn1
He laughed, nodded his head several times, and repeated “Si, si …”
The ball came their way and almost hit the old man. Don Francisco made a vague threatening gesture with his knotty cane as the kids came running after the ball, picked it up, and went off making faces.
After a moment the old man said:
“We were climbing up the mondaña with the giovani from Cafaredda and sat us down to look at the mare. Eating roasted castagne, we were. Quiddo mare azule!”
Tito came out with the maté gourds and the kettle.
“He’s bending your ear about his village, that’s for sure,” he said to Martín. “Hey, papa, don’t bore the kid to death with all those tall tales of yours”—winking an eye at Martín and smiling roguishly.
The old man shook his head, his eyes gazing toward that distant land now left behind forever.
Tito smiled with gentle irony as he prepared the maté. And then, as though his father didn’t exist (and obviously he wasn’t even listening), he explained to Martín:
“He spends his days thinking about the village he was born in, you see.”
Tito turned to his father, shook his arm a little as though to wake him up, and asked him:
“Hey, pop! Would you like to see all that again? Before you die?”
The old man answered by nodding his head several times, still gazing off into the distance.
“If you had just a little pocketful of soldi, would you go back to Italy?”
The old man nodded again.
“If you could go back just for one minute, pop, just one little minute, even though you had to die the next minute, what would you say to that?”
The old man shook his head dejectedly, as though to say: Why even imagine such wondrous things?
And like someone who has demonstrated an important truth, Tito looked at Martín and remarked:
“Didn’t I tell you, kid?”
“Sì,” old Don Francisco murmured. “When Natale came round, they let ’em come down.”
Tito winked at Martín.
“They let who come down, pop?”
“The briganti.”
“You see. It’s always the same thing with him. Why did they let the bandits come down, pop?”
“Per andare a la santa misa. Due hore.”
He nodded his head, gazing off into the distance.
“Sì, they gave ’em two hours to go to Christmas mass. La notte de Natale. And i fusilli played the zampogna.”
“And what did the shepherds with the bagpipes sing, pop?”
“They sang:
La notte de Natale
è una festa principale
que nascio nostro Signore
a una povera mangiatura.fn2
“And was there lots of snow, pop?”
“Sì, sì … lots.”
And he sat there thinking his thoughts about that fabulous land. And Tito smiled at Martín with a look compounded of irony, sorrow, scepticism, and shyness.
“Didn’t I tell you? It’s always the same story.”
6
Many days went by without any signs of life from Alejandra, and finally he decided to phone her. He managed to spend a few moments with her in the bar on the corner of Esmeralda and Charcas, a meeting that left him in a worse frame of mind than before for some reason; she had spent all of the brief time they were together doing nothing but tell him horrible things about the women who came to the boutique.
Then the endless days went by once again, and again Martín screwed up his courage and phoned. Wanda answered and told him Alejandra wasn’t in just then, but she’d give her his message. But still there was no word from her.
Several times he was on the point of giving in to temptation and going round to the boutique. But he stopped himself from doing so in time, because he knew she would think he was interfering in her life and consequently (he thought) dropping by the boutique would drive her even farther away—just as (he told himself) the victim of shipwreck who is desperately thirsty as he drifts in his lifeboat must resist the temptation to drink salt water, because he knows that it will only make his thirst even more insatiable. No, of course he wouldn’t call her. Perhaps what was happening was that he had already interfered with her freedom too much, been too much of a burden on her; because his loneliness had driven him to throw himself, to fling himself on her. And perhaps if he gave her all the freedom she could possibly want things would again be as they had been in the very first days.
But a more profound conviction (though it was one he could not have put into words) led him to believe that for human beings time never comes round again, that it is never again what it once was, and that when feelings change or deteriorate there is no miracle that can restore their initial quality: like a flag that gradually gets dirtier and dirtier and more and more worn (he had heard Bruno say). But his hope fought on, since (as Bruno thought) hope never gives up the struggle even though it is doomed to defeat, for the very reason that hope arises only in the midst of adversity and because of it. Could anyone else, later on, give her what he had given her? His affection, his understanding, his boundless love? But immediately the words “later on” made him feel even more downcast, for they brought to mind a future in which she would no longer be at his side, a future in which another—another!—would say words to her that resembled those that he had said to her, words that she had listened to with her eyes burning with fervor, at moments that now seemed unbelievable to him: eyes and moments that he had imagined would be his for all eternity, whose absolute, moving perfection would endure forever, like the beauty of a statue. And she and that Other whose face he could not even imagine would walk together through the same streets, visit the same places that she had gone to with Martín; while he would no longer exist for her, or would be little more than a fading memory, a figure vaguely evoking pity and affection, or perhaps annoyance or amusement. And then he forced himself to picture her in moments of passion, uttering the secret words that lovers say to each other in such moments, with the entire world and Martín too, Martín above all, terribly excluded, banished from that bedroom peopled only by their naked bodies and their moans. Then Martín would rush to a telephone, telling himself that all he need do to hear her voice was to dial six digits. But he would hang up before the call could go through, because he already had enough experience to realize that one can be at another’s side, hear and touch that person, and yet be separated by impassable walls; just as once we are dead our spirit can be near the one we loved and yet tormentingly isolated from that being by this invisible but impassable wall that forever keeps the dead from communing with the world of the living.
Many long days went by then.
Then finally he made up his mind to go to the boutique, even though he knew that the only thing that would be accomplished thereby would be to goad the wild beast that existed within Alejandra, that wild beast that detested any sort of intrusion. And even as he was saying to himself “No, I won’t go there,” he found himself heading directly toward the Calle Cerrito; and at the very moment that he arrived at the door of the boutique he was still repeating to himself with stubborn but useless vehemence: “I absolutely must not see her.”
A woman with malevolent-looking goggle-eyes, loaded with jewelry and wearing garish makeup, came out just then. Alejandra never seemed to be as far away from him as when she was with women like that: the wives or mistresses of corporation executives, prominent doctors, captains of industry. “And such conversations!” Alejandra often commented. “Conversations that can only be heard in fashionable boutiques like Wanda’s or at a wo
men’s hairdresser’s. Having dye jobs, sitting underneath Martian contraptions, with hair of every conceivable color dripping with liquid garbage, with mouths that look like sewer outlets, filthy holes in faces slathered with creams, out of which there inevitably come pouring out the same words and jokes; giving each other advice, letting all their rottenness show, telling what should and what should NOT be done with so-and-so. And all of it interlarded with talk of sicknesses, money, jewelry, clothes, tumors, cocktail parties, big bashes, abortions, company management, promotions, stocks, lovers who can or can’t get it up, divorces, betrayals, secretaries, and who’s cheating on whom.” Martín listened to her in amazement and then she burst out laughing, a laugh as sardonic as the scene she had just described. “But how can you bear all that? How can you work in such a place?” Martín stammered, ingenuous questions that she answered with one of her sarcastic grins: “Because basically, mark my words, basically all women, each and every last one of us, have a body and a uterus. And we’d best not forget it, and take a good look at those caricatures, the way beautiful women in medieval engravings can be seen contemplating a skull. And because curiously enough, in their own way those monsters are really quite honest and true to themselves, since the garbage that they are is too evident for them to be able to fool anybody.” No, Martín didn’t understand, and he was certain that Alejandra also had other thoughts on the matter.
And then he opened the door and went into the boutique. Alejandra looked surprised to see him, but after greeting him with a wave of her hand, she went on with what she was doing and told him to have a seat.
At that moment a very odd creature entered the boutique.
“Mesdames,” he said, bowing with grotesquely exaggerated politeness.
He kissed Wanda’s hand, then Alejandra’s, and added:
“As the divine Popesco put it in L’habit vert: ‘I prostitute myself at your feet.’ ”
He then turned to Martín and inspected him as though he were a rare piece of furniture that he might be planning to acquire. Laughing, Alejandra introduced them from a distance.
“You look at me with astonishment and you have every reason in the world to do so, my young friend,” he said candidly. “I shall explain. I represent a whole made up of unexpected parts. For instance, when I haven’t yet opened my mouth, people who don’t know me think I must have a deep bass voice like Chaliapin’s, whereas in fact it’s falsetto. When I am sitting down, they presume that I’m small in stature, because I have an extremely short torso, and then when I stand up I turn out to be a giant. Seen from the front, I look slender, but when seen in profile I’m very stout.”
As he spoke, he demonstrated practically every one of his statements and to Martín’s stupefaction he realized that all of them were true.
“I belong to the Gillette category, according to Professor Assole’s famous classification. I have sharp features, a long nose that’s also sharp, and above all an enormous belly with a sharp edge to it, like those idols on Easter Island. It’s as though I’d grown up between two boards, do you realizefn3?”
Martín noticed that the two women were laughing, and they were to go on laughing the whole time that Bobby was in the shop, like background music in a film; imperceptibly at times, so as not to disturb his amusing flights of eloquence, and hilariously at other times, at certain high points, without this bothering him in the slightest. Martín looked at Alejandra with a pained expression. How he detested that face of hers, her boutique-face, the one that she seemed to put on deliberately in order to play her role in that frivolous world; a face that seemed to linger on once she found herself alone with him, its abominable features fading away only very slowly, as there gradually emerged one or another of the faces that belonged to him alone, a face he waited for as one awaits a beloved traveler amid a repulsive crowd. But as Bruno said, the word person means “mask,” and each of us has many masks: that of father, professor, lover …. But which one is the real one? And is there in fact one that is the real one? At certain moments Martín thought that the Alejandra that he was now seeing there before him, laughing at Bobby’s jokes, was not, could not be the same Alejandra that he knew, and above all could not be the more profound, the marvelous and fearsome Alejandra that he loved. But at other times (and as the weeks went by the more he began to be convinced of it), he was inclined to think, as Bruno did, that all these Alejandras were real and that that boutique-face was genuine too and in some way or other expressed a sort of reality inherent in Alejandra’s soul: a reality—and heaven only knew how many others there were!—that was foreign to him, that did not belong to him and never would. And then, when she came to him still bearing the faint traces of those other personalities, as though she had not had the time (or the desire?) to transform herself, Martín discovered—in a certain sarcastic grin on her lips, in a certain way of moving her hands, in a certain glint in her eyes—the lingering signs of a strange existence: like someone who has been around a garbage dump and still retains something of its foul stench in our presence. That was the thought in his mind as he heard Wanda say, without so much as a pause between bonbons:
“Tell us more about last night.”
A question that Bobby, laying a book that he had with him down on a table, answered in a few delicate, serene, well-chosen words:
“Pure shit, ma chère.”
The two women laughed uproariously, and when Wanda could speak again she asked with her Slavic syntax:
“How much you make on paper?”
“Five thousand seven hundred twenty-three pesos and fifty-seven centavos, plus a bonus at the end of the year and the tips the boss gives me when I go out to buy him cigarettes or shine his shoes.”
“Look, Bobby: why not leave paper and come here? We pay you thousand pesos more. Just to give us few laughs.”
“Sorry, old girl. Professional ethics prevent my doing so—if I left the rag, you see, it’d be Roberto J. Martorell who’d take over the drama reviews. And that would be a national disaster, my pet.”
“Be nice, Bobby. Tell about last night,” Wanda wheedled.
“I’ve told you: pure shit. Unspeakably vulgar.”
“Yes, of course, silly. But tell us details. About Cristina especially.
“Ah, la femme! Wanda, you’re the perfect Weininger woman. Bonbons, prostitution, gossip-mongering. I adore you.”
“Weininger?” Wanda asked. “Who’s that?”
“Your delivery is perfect, absolutely perfect. Bravo!” Bobby said. “I adore you.”
“Come on, be nice. Tell about Cristina.”
“The poor dear. She kept wringing her hands like Francesca Bertini in one of those films the kids shown in their cine-clubs. But the chap who played the part of the writer came straight from his job at the Ministry of Commerce.”
“Why, do you know him?”
“No, but I’m certain of it. A functionary who’s worn to a nub, the poor bastard. It’s plain to see he’s frightfully concerned about some problem or other at work, getting himself pensioned off at half pay or something of the sort. A little short fat man who’d just left his paperwork on his desk and come to the theater pour jouer l’écrivain. I can’t tell you how touching I found him: positively senile.”
At that moment a woman entered the boutique. Martín, who felt as though he were in the midst of a grotesque dream, was vaguely aware that he was being introduced to her. When he realized that it was Cristina, the very same woman that Bobby had just been talking about, and when he saw how effusively Bobby greeted her, he flushed. Bobby bowed to her and said:
“You look positively ravissante, darling.”
Feeling the material of her dress, he added:
“Absolutely divine. And that shade of lilac goes so well with your coiffure.”
Cristina gave a shy, fearful smile: she never knew whether she should believe him or not. She didn’t dare ask him his opinion of the play, but Bobby proceeded to offer it to her anyway:
“Stupendous, C
ristina! And what a prodigious effort, you poor things, what with all that racket coming from next door …. By the way, what is all that next door anyway?”
“A dance hall,” Cristina replied warily.
“Ah, of course …. How dreadful! Just as you got to the hardest parts, they kept breaking into a mambo. And to top it all off they apparently had a tuba. Unspeakably vulgar.”
Martín saw Alejandra hurry into the other room, almost at a run. Wanda went on working, with her back turned to Bobby and Cristina, but her body shook all over in a silent fit of laughter. Bobby went on imperturbably:
“There ought to be a law against tubas, don’t you think so, Cristina? What an utterly uncivilized instrument! And of course you had to shriek like savages, you poor dears, in order for people to hear you. Awfully hard for you, wasn’t it? Especially that chap playing the part of the famous writer. What’s his name? Tonazzi?”
“Tonelli.”
“Ah, yes, Tonelli. The poor devil. Not somebody you’d think of as having the physique du rôle, would you say? And having to fight it out with the tuba all evening on top of everything else. What a prodigious effort! The public has no idea what that means, Wanda. And what’s more, Cristina, it strikes me as a very good idea to have cast somebody like that in the role, somebody who doesn’t look the least bit like a writer, who looks more like a functionary about to be pensioned off. When they put on O’Neill’s Rope at Telón, for instance, the sailor looked exactly like a real sailor. Very clever: that way everybody knew right away that he was supposed to be a sailor. Though I must say that the minute the fellow began to talk, or to mumble rather (because nobody could understand a word he said), he was so indescribably awful that even though he looked just like a sailor he didn’t seem like one at all: he might have been a street sweeper, a construction worker, a café waiter. But a sailor? Jamais! And why the devil do you suppose it is, Cristina, that amateur theatrical companies invariably go in for O’Neill? How awful for the poor man! But then O’Neill always did have the worst sort of luck; beginning with his father and his Oedipus complex. And then here in Buenos Aires, having to work as a stevedore down at the docks lugging huge sacks around. And now with all the amateur groups everywhere in the world putting his plays on.” He spread his great long arms, as though to embrace this universal conglomerate, and with a look of genuine sadness on his face he added: