Collected Fictions

Pedro Salvadores

For Juan Murchison

I want to put in writing, perhaps for the first time, one of the strangest and saddest events in the history of my country. The best way to go about it, I believe, is to keep my own part in the telling of the story small, and to suppress all picturesque additions and speculative conjectures.

A man, a woman, and the vast shadow of a dictator* are the story's three protagonists. The man's name was Pedro Salvadores; my grandfather Acevedo was a witness to his existence, a few days or weeks after the Battle of Monte Caseros.*There may have been no real difference between Pedro Salvadores and the common run of mankind, but his fate, the years of it, made him unique. He was a gentleman much like the other gentlemen of his day, with a place in the city and some land (we may imagine) in the country; he was a member of the Unitarian party.* His wife's maiden name was Planes; they lived together on Calle Suipacha, not far from the corner of Temple.* The house in which the events took place was much like the others on the street: the front door, the vestibule, the inner door, the rooms, the shadowy depth of the patios. One night in 1842, Pedro Salvadores and his wife heard the dull sound of hoofbeats coming closer and closer up the dusty street, and the wild huzzahs and imprecations of the horses' riders. But this time the horsemen of the tyrant's posse* did not pass them by. The whooping and shouting became insistent banging on the door. Then, as the men were breaking down the door, Salvadores managed to push the dining table to one side, lift the rug, and hide himself in the cellar.

His wife moved the table back into place. The posse burst into the house; they had come to get Salvadores. His wife told them he'd fled—to Montevideo, she told them. They didn't believe her; they lashed her with their whips, smashed all the sky blue china,* and searched the house, but it never occurred to them to lift the rug. They left at midnight, vowing to return.

It is at this point that the story of Pedro Salvadores truly begins. He lived in that cellar for nine years. No matter how often we tell ourselves that years are made of days, and days of hours, and that nine years is an abstraction, an impossible sum, the story still horrifies and appalls. I suspect that in the darkness that his eyes learned to fathom, he came not to think of anything—not even his hatred or his danger. He was simply there, in the cellar. Now and again, echoes of that world he could not enter would reach him from above: his wife's footsteps as she went about her routine, the thump of the water pump and the pail, the pelting of rain in the patio. Every day, too, might be his last.

His wife gradually got rid of all the servants; they were capable of informing on them. She told her family that her husband was in Uruguay. She earned a living for the two of them by sewing for the army. In the course of time she had two children; her family, attributing the children to a lover, repudiated her. After the fall of the tyrant they got down on their knees to her and begged forgiveness.

What, who, was Pedro Salvadores? Was he imprisoned by terror, love, the invisible presence of Buenos Aires, or, in the final analysis, habit? To keep him from leaving her, his wife would give him vague news of conspiracies and victories. Perhaps he was a coward, and his wife faithfully hid from him that she knew that. I picture him in his cellar, perhaps without even an oil lamp, or a book. The darkness would draw him under, into sleep. He would dream, at first, of the dreadful night when the knife would seek the throat, or dream of open streets, or of the plains. Within a few years, he would be incapable of fleeing, and he would dream of the cellar. At first he was a hunted man, a man in danger; later ... we will never know—a quiet animal in its burrows, or some sort of obscure deity?

All this, until that summer day in 1852 when the dictator Rosas fled the country. It was then that the secret man emerged into the light of day; my grandfather actually spoke with him. Puffy, slack-muscled, and obese, Pedro Salvadores was the color of wax, and he spoke in a faint whisper. The government had confiscated his land; it was never returned to him. I believe he died in poverty.

We see the fate of Pedro Salvadores, like all things, as a symbol of something that we are just on the verge of understanding....