Target in the Night

15

From a distance the building looks like a fortress, rectangular and dark. In recent months the Industrialist — as everyone here calls him — has reinforced the original structure with steel planks and wooden partitions, and he’s had two guard towers raised at the southeast and southwest corners of the factory. These turrets look over the plains that extend for thousands of kilometers toward Patagonia and the end of the continent. All the transoms, glass roofs, and windows are broken and haven’t been replaced because his enemies would simply break them again. The same goes for the outside lights, the bulbs of the street lamps, which someone has smashed by throwing rocks at them — except for a handful of the tallest lamps, still on that late afternoon, soft and yellow in the twilight. The outside walls are covered by torn, re-glued posters and political graffiti, all seemingly repeating the same slogan—Perón Returns. Written in different styles by a variety of groups, the posters all show the same smiling face ready as always to come back from anything, they all claim and celebrate the imminent return — or hope for return — of the General Juan Domingo Perón. Flocks of pigeons fly in and out of holes in the walls and the broken windows, and circle above the premises; below, stray dogs bark at each other, or lie in the shade under the trees along the broken sidewalks. Luca hasn’t been outside the factory in months, to avoid seeing the landscape and the decrepitude of the outside world. He remains indifferent to everything outside the plant. Echoes and threats reach him, still, voices and laughter and the sound of cars speeding by on the highway, near the fence, on the other side of the factory’s parking areas and loading zone.

After ringing the bell several times outside the locked, chained front iron door, and after leaning through a broken window and clapping their hands trying to get someone’s attention, they were finally received by Luca Belladona himself. Tall, polite, oddly dressed in very warm clothes for the time of year — with a large, black leather cardigan, a gray flannel pair of pants, a thick, leather jacket, and Patria boots — he asked them to come directly up to the main offices. They could visit the factory plant a little later, he told them. They walked down a gallery, where the enclosing glass was broken and dirty, and there were phrases and words drawn along the inside walls, too. Things Luca had written there, he explained, things he couldn’t afford to forget.

There was a layer of green covering the ground, in the interior courtyard, a smooth pampa of herbs as far as the eye could see. Luca would empty his mate and dump the herbs out the window from his study above. Or, sometimes, when he walked back and forth along the balconies, he’d change the herbs in his mate and dump the old ones into the interior opening of the building while he heated up water for a new one. Now he had a natural park with pigeons and sparrows fluttering above the green mantle.

His bedroom was upstairs, in the west wing of the building, close to one of the old meeting rooms, in a small space that used to be a filing room. It had a foldout bed, a small table, and several cupboards with papers and medicine bottles. Luca chose the room so he wouldn’t have far to go when he undertook his calculations and experiments. He could just stay in that wing of the factory, walk down the hallway, and go downstairs to his office. Sometimes, he told them all of a sudden, when he got out of bed and walked down the hallway in the morning, he’d write whatever dream he remembered on the wall, because dreams fade and are forgotten as easily as we breathe, so they have to be written wherever you are when you remember them. The death of his brother Lucio and his mother running away were the central themes that appeared — sometimes successively, other times alternatively — in the majority of his dreams. “They form a series,” he told them. “Series A,” he said, showing them a chart and several diagrams. When the dreams moved on to other subjects, he’d write them in another section, under a different key. “This is Series B,” he said. He repeated that in recent days he’d been dreaming mostly about his mother in Dublin and his dead brother.

There were phrases in ink on the walls, words underlined or circled, arrows relating “one word family” to another.

He called Series A The Process of Individualization, and Series B The Unexpected Enemy.

“Our mother couldn’t stand her children being more than three years old, as soon as they turned three, she abandoned them.” When his mother found out about Lucio’s death, she almost traveled back to Argentina, but they had dissuaded her. “She was desperate, apparently, which surprised us, because she’d abandoned our brother when he was three years old, and she abandoned us, too, when we turned three. Extraordinary, isn’t it?” he asked, the small crooked mutt looking up at him sideways, its tail wagging with tired enthusiasm.

It was extraordinary. When their mother had abandoned them, their father had gone out to the street with a hammer in his hand, wearing only an overcoat, and he’d started pounding on their mother’s car — which meant that he loved her. The townspeople had looked on from the sidewalk by the main road, as the Old Man climbed on the hood of the car like a madman and struck the car repeatedly with the hammer. He wanted to throw acid on her, he wanted to burn her face off, but he didn’t go that far. His wife had left him for a man whom his father considered better than him — besides, his father didn’t want to have problems with the police, everyone knew what the Old Man was involved in, starting with his wife, who left him because she didn’t want to be his accomplice, or be forced to denounce him.

“Pregnant with me,” Luca said, going back to the first person singular. “The other man raised me for three years after I was born, as if he was my father, and I don’t even remember him. Not even his face, just the voices I could hear from the stage, he was a theater director, you know? But eventually she left him, too, moved to Rosario, then to Ireland, and I had to go back to my family house, that’s how it was, legally, since I have the same last name as the man who claims to be my father.”

Then Luca told them that he’d been looking for a secretary that week, not a lawyer or a simple typist, but a secretary. In other words, someone who could write down what he was thinking and what he needed to dictate. He smiled at them, and Renzi confirmed again that Luca — like a Russian starets, or like peasants — spoke in the plural when referring to his projects, and in the singular when talking about his own life. On the other hand, he said that he (“we”) had accepted that he (“we”) would be appearing in court to request that the money that his father had sent from his mother’s inheritance be turned over to him. He had all the documents and records necessary to file the claim.

“We had to hire someone who could take dictation and type up the proofs that we’ll be taking to court to reclaim the money that belongs to us. We don’t want lawyers, we’ll file the lawsuit ourselves, under the law of the defense of inherited family patrimonies.”

Right away he started talking about Cueto, the prosecutor. According to Luca, Cueto had been the company’s trusted attorney in the past, only to betray and drive them into bankruptcy. Now Cueto wanted to use his political post — to which he had risen through raw ambition, under the umbrage of the current powers — to confiscate the plant and the land it was on. Their plan was to keep the factory and build what they called an experimental center for agricultural exhibitions, in collusion with the area’s Rural Society. But first they’d have to litigate in district court, in the provincial and national courts, and even in the international tribunals, because Luca was (“we are,” he said) willing to do whatever it took to keep the factory up and running. It was an island, as he saw it, in the middle of an ocean of peasants and ranchers who cared only about fattening their cows and pulling riches from a land so rich that any ol’ fool could toss a handful of seeds, stand back, and watch his profits grow.

He was excited about the possibility of getting out of his own field for once, and taking a trip into town to defend himself before the law. He walked around the room as he spoke, in a state of great unrest, imagining every step of his defense. He was certain that a secretary would help him expedite his ability to prepare the necessary documents.

So he placed an ad on X10 Rural Radio for two consecutive days, he told them, announcing the opening for a private secretary. Several men showed up from the countryside, hats in hand, calm, bowlegged, horse-riding men, their faces darkly tanned but their foreheads white at the line of their hat brim. They were muleteers, herdsmen, horse tamers, out of work because of the recent concentration of the large estancias that was driving small farmers, tenants, and seasonal laborers to search for new jobs. Honorable men, as they said, who’d understood the word secretary as someone who can keep a secret. They’d come and applied for the position, ready to swear, “if it came to it,” that they could keep as quiet as the grave. Because, naturally, “they knew our story and our misfortunes,” Luca explained. They risked coming to the factory and were willing not to say a single word that they weren’t authorized to say. In addition, of course, they’d also do the necessary work, as they told him, turning both ways, looking at the walls and windows, expecting to see the corral where the animals might be, or the land they’d be expected to farm.

Two others arrived and applied as tiger hunters. Puma hunters, actually. First one with scars on his face and hands. Then a short, chubby man with clear eyes, skin pockmarked like dried leather, and only one arm. Both said they could track and kill a puma without a firearm, using just a poncho and a knife — even the one-armed guy, the man without a left arm, who everyone called Lefty. If there were any pumas left to kill, that is, and to kill by hand, as these hunters had always done, heading out at dawn through the grasslands to track the fattened tigers that lived off of the calves from the large ranches. The hunters went to the estancias and the farms looking for work, offering their services. They showed up at the factory, wary and distrustful as a puma that’s gotten lost at night and finds itself, in the morning, walking on the cobblestones of a town’s main road, sullen and alone.

But that wasn’t it. He wasn’t looking for a puma hunter, or a foreman, or an axeman — none of the things you might need in an estancia. He was looking for a technical secretary, someone who knew the secrets of the written word, someone who could help him face the vicissitudes of the battle in which he saw himself implicated, the long war he was waging against the rough forces of the region.

“Because in our case,” Luca said, “we’re talking about an actual military campaign, we’ve secured victories and suffered defeats. Napoleon’s always been our main point of reference, basically because of his ability to react in the face of adversity. We’ve studied Napoleon’s campaigns in Russia, and have found more military genius there than in his victories. That’s right. There’s more military genius in Waterloo than in Austerlitz, because in Waterloo the army didn’t want to retreat. It didn’t want to retreat,” Luca repeated. “Napoleon opened the front to the left, and his reinforcement troops arrived ten minutes too late. This delay, caused by natural causes (large rains storms), was Napoleon’s greatest act of genius. Everyone studies that defeat, in every military academy, it’s worth more than any of his victories.”

Luca stopped and asked if they knew why crazy people, everywhere in the world, always saw themselves as Napoleon Bonaparte. Why, he asked, whenever someone needs to portray a madman, why do they draw someone with a hand tucked into his vest and a bicorn hat on his head? It was true, wasn’t it? A quick sketch of Napoleon, that was the universal way to draw a madman. Had anyone thought of that? Luca asked. I am Napoleon, the locus classicus of the classic madman. But, why?

“We’ll leave that one stewing,” he said with a sly look in his eye, and escorted them down the hallway and into his office. To return to the question of the secretary, which they had left “pending,” he said.

Although the main office was luxuriously furnished, it was much deteriorated, with a layer of gray dust on the leather chairs and the long mahogany tables, moisture marks on the carpets and walls, the windows all broken, and white splotches of pigeon shit on the floor. The birds — not just pigeons, but also sparrows, ovenbirds, chingolos, and even a carancho — would come in through the roof, land on the iron crossbeams along the roof of the factory, and fly in and out of the building, sometimes building nests in different places of the edifice — all apparently without being seen by the Industrialist, or at least without being considered of sufficient interest or importance to interrupt his actions, or his speeches.

Luca had to place another ad, this time on the Church radio station, he told them, the parish station actually, X8 Radio Pius XII. Several sacristans and members of the Catholic Action applied, as well as a few seminary students who needed to spend a period of time in civilian life. These latter revealed a certain indecision that Luca noticed right away, they were like children, willing to collaborate, charitable, but reluctant to move into the factory with the exclusive dedication that the Industrialist would’ve demanded of them. Until finally, after interviewing a number of applicants and fearing that he wouldn’t find anyone, a pale, young man showed up who immediately confessed that he’d left the priesthood before being ordained. He said that he’d come to doubt his faith and that he wanted to spend time in the secular scene, as his confessor, Father Luis, had advised him. These were his words. And there he was, dressed in black, wearing his white-banded collar (“clergyman”) to prove he still carried with him “the mark of God,” as he told him. Mister Schultz.

“That’s why we hired him, because we understood that Schultz was, or would be, the right man for our legal task. After all, is justice not based on belief and the written word, like religion? There’s legal fiction, just like there are sacred stories, and in both cases we believe only what’s told right.”

Luca told them the young secretary was in one of the offices now, organizing their correspondence and typing up the nighttime dictations, but that they’d be able to meet him soon. Luca needed a secretary who’d be trustworthy, a believer, a convert in a sense. He needed a fanatic, someone willing to serve a cause. He had a long conversation with the candidate, whom he finally selected, about the Catholic Church as a theological-political institution and as a spiritual mission.

In these times of disillusion and skepticism, with an absent God — the seminary student had told him — truth resides in the twelve apostles who saw Him when He was young and healthy, in full use of His faculties. One should believe in the New Testament because it was the only proof of the vision of the embodiment of God. In the beginning there were twelve apostles, the seminary student had said — and one traitor, we added. This made the seminary student blush, Luca told them, he was so young that the word traitor had some kind of sinful, sexual connotation for him. The idea of a small circle, of an exalted and loyal sect, except with a traitor infiltrated at its core, an informant who’s not foreign to the sect, but constitutes an essential part of its structure — this was the true organizational form of any small society. One must act knowing that there’s a traitor infiltrated in the ranks.

“Which is what we didn’t do when we organized the board (with twelve members) that went on to direct our factory. We stopped operating as a family business and became a corporation with a board. That was our first mistake. As soon as they stopped working solely within the confines of the family, my brother and father started to waver and lose confidence. Faced with a series of economic crises and the onslaught of the creditors, they succumbed to the siren song of that vulture Cueto, with that little perpetual smile of his, and his glass eye. The songs of sirens are always signs of risks to be avoided, the songs of sirens are always precautions warning us not to act, that’s why Ulysses put wax in his ears, to avoid hearing the maternal songs that warn us about life’s risks and dangers, the ones that paralyze us, destroy us. No one would ever do anything if they had to avoid all the unforeseen risks of their actions. That’s why Napoleon is the hero of all madmen and of all failures, because he took risks, like a gambler who bets everything on the cards he has, loses, and plays the next hand with the same courage and spirit as if he’d won. There’re no contingencies and there’s no chance, there’re only risks and conspiracies. Luck is operated from the shadows. We used to attribute our misfortunes to the wrath of the gods, then to the fatality of destiny, but now we know that in reality the only things we really have are conspiracies and secret maneuvers.

“There’s a traitor among us,” the Industrialist told them, smiling. “That should be the basic operational sentence of every organization.” Luca gestured toward the street, toward the grafitti and posters on the walls outside the factory. “That’s what happened to us, because there was a traitor inside our family business who took advantage of the family’s well-being to squeal,” he said, again using a metaphor that revealed his origins, as was his habit. Or at least his birthplace.

Luca told them that there were two contradictory tendencies in the teachings of Christ — according to the seminary student — one in conflict with the other. On the one hand, we have the illiterate and dejected of the world, the fishermen, artisans, prostitutes, and poor peasants upon whom the Lord bestowed long and clear parables. For the meek He had not concepts or abstract ideas, but stories and anecdotes. In this line of teaching, arguments were made through narratives, with practical examples from everyday life, which were thus opposed to the intellectual generalizations and abstractions of the men of letters and the philistines, the eternal readers of sacred texts, the interpreters of the Book. Was He literate? What did He write on the sand? An undecipherable mark, or an actual word? Did He have God’s absolute knowledge and did He know all the libraries and all the writings, and was His memory infinite? Christ didn’t forecast a good end for the priests and the rabbis and the erudite men at all. To the poor in spirit, rather, to the wretches of the earth, to the humble and the oppressed, was destined the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the other line, the idea was that only a small group of the initiated, an extreme minority, can lead us to the high and hidden truths. This initiated circle of conspirators, who share the great secret, however, act with the conviction that there’s a traitor among them. They say what they say, they do what they do, knowing they’re going to be betrayed. What is said can be interpreted in several different ways, even the traitor doesn’t trust the explicit meaning, the traitor is not quite certain what he should or should not denounce. This is how we can understand how this young, Palestine preacher — a bit of a night owl, strange, who’s abandoned His family and speaks to Himself and preaches in the desert; a healer, a fortune-teller, a layer of hands who in His opposition to the occupying Roman forces foretells of a future kingdom — all of a sudden proclaims that He is the Christ and Son of God (You have proclaimed it, he said). This theological-political version of the eccentric community, the seminary student said, according to Luca, was the classic structure of a secret sect that knows there’s a traitor in its ranks, and protects itself by using a language suffused with hidden meanings.

On the other hand, they may have been a sect of mushroom eaters. This would explain why Christ withdraws to the desert and visits with Satan. Those Palestine sects — the Essenes, say — ate hallucinatory mushrooms, they’re at the base of all ancient religions. They walked around the desert hallucinating, speaking with God, hearing angels. One could think that the consecrated host was nothing other than the image of a mystical communion tying the initiated of the small group together, the seminarian added in an aside, Luca told them. Eat, flesh of my flesh.

Mr. Schultz, Luca’s secretary, was more apt to trust the second line of teachings. The tradition of a “convinced minority”: a nucleus of faithful, formed activists who are able to resist persecution and are united together by a forbidden substance — imaginary or not — with texts full of secret allusions and hermetic words, as opposed to a rural populism that speaks in the local Spanish with the conservative sentences of so-called popular knowledge. Everyone in small towns takes drugs, in the pampas of the Province of Buenos Aires or the pastures and farmlands of Palestine. It’s the only way to survive the elements in the countryside, the seminary student said, according to Luca, adding that he knew as much because he’d heard all about it in the confessional. In the long run, everyone confessed that you couldn’t live in the countryside without taking some kind of magical potion: mushrooms, distilled camphor, snuff, cannabis, cocaine, mate spiked with gin, yagé, cough syrup with codeine, Seconal, opium, nettle tea, laudanum, ether, heroine, dark pipe tobacco with Rue leaves, whatever you can get in the provinces. How else do you explain gauchesque poetry, La Refalosa by Hilario Ascasubi, the dialogues of Chano and Contrera by Bartolomé Hidalgo, Anastasio el Pollo by Estanislao del Campo? All those gauchos, high as a kite, speaking in rhymed verses through the pampas … That’s the law of the land, the man on top does what he wants / The shadow of the tree and its milk is always a menace. That’s what town pharmacists are for, with their prescriptions and concoctions. Isn’t the apothecary a key figure of rural life? A kind of general consultant for all ailments, always available, waiting in the doorway at night, ready to deal in milk of the cow and a range of banned products.

The seminary student and Luca understood each other right away, because Luca thought of the restructuring of the factory as if it were a Church in ruins that needed to be re-founded. In truth, the factory had been born from a small group (my brother Lucio, my grandfather Bruno, and us), and in those small groups there’s always one person who turns away and sells his soul to the devil. Which is what happened with his older brother, the Oldest Belladona son, Lucio, who everyone called Bear. His half-brother, actually.

“He sold his soul to the devil, my brother, influenced by my father. He made a pact, he sold his shares to the investors, and we lost control of the firm. He did it in good faith, which is how all crimes are justified.”

Only after the betrayal, and after the night that Luca ran out half-crazy and had to hide away for a few days — isolated in the Estévez Estancia, in the middle of the countryside — only then was he able to stop thinking in traditional terms, and dedicate himself instead to building what he now called the objects of his imagination.

People accused him of being unreal,²⁹ of not having his feet on the ground. But he’d been thinking, the imaginary wasn’t the same as the unreal. The imaginary was the possible, that which is not yet. This projection toward the future contained — at the same time — both what exists and what doesn’t exist. Two poles that continually change places. And the imaginary was this changing of places. He’d been thinking.

From the window, in that room on the second floor, you could see the back gardens and the guesthouse where the mother lived. Old Man Belladona would be in one of the rooms downstairs with the nurse who took care of him. Renzi turned toward Sofía on the bed. She was sitting up, naked, smoking, leaning back against the headboard.

“And your sister?”

“She must be with the Vulture.”

“The Vulture?”

“She’s seeing Cueto again.”

“Man, that guy is everywhere.”

“She feels uneasy when she’s with him, uneasy, annoyed. But she goes out with him every time he calls.”

Cueto was arrogant, according to Sofía, super-adapted, calculating, and he gave the impression of being empty: an ice cube covered by a shell of social adaptation and success. He was always doing his best to compliment Ada, while she, for her part, never hid her disdain for him; she made fun of him in public and laughed at him, no one understood why she didn’t stop seeing him. Why she stayed with that man, as if she didn’t want to leave him.

“Cueto is the biggest hypocrite of all the hypocrites, a born charlatan, an opportunist. Ugh, yuck.”

Sofía was jealous. It was curious, strange.

“Ah… And that bothers you?”

“Do you have a sister? Do you?” Sofía asked, irritated. “Have you ever had a sister?”

Renzi looked at her, amused. She’d already asked him. He appreciated having a brother who was unbearable, because this had disillusioned him of the belief that family could be anything but a burden. He was surprised to see Sofía nested to her genealogical tree like a Greek immortelle.

“I have a brother, but he lives in Canada,” Renzi said.

He sat up on the bed next to her and began caressing her neck and the upper part of her back, in a gesture that had become a habit for him in his life with Julia. This time, too, Sofía seemed to calm down, with the caress that wasn’t for her, because she rested her head on Emilio’s chest and started murmuring.

“I can’t hear you,” Renzi said.

“She was just a girl when she first went with Cueto. It’s like he left his mark on her. She’s fixated on him. Fixated,” she repeated, as if the word were a chemical formula. “I wish I’d lost my virginity first, instead of her.”

“What?” Renzi said.

“He seduced her… But I didn’t let her get married, I took her away on a trip.”

“And the two of you came back with Tony.”

“Aha,” she said.

She’d gotten up, wrapped in the sheet, and was now at the marble night table chopping up the cocaine with a razor blade.

29 “More unreal, and more illusory, was the economy. Luca was shocked by the announcement made by U.S. President Richard Nixon, on the evening of August 15, 1971, regarding the end of the convertibility of dollars into gold — the Gold Exchange Standard created by the Genoa Conference of 1922. The decision was meant, according to Nixon, ‘To protect the country against speculators who have declared war on the dollar.’ From that moment on, according to Luca, everything had been ‘a cesspool’ and—he’d been thinking—financial speculation would soon start to predominate over material production. Bankers would impose their norms and abstract operations would dominate the economy” (Report by Mr. Schultz).

16

When he had his nervous breakdown, nearly a year ago, Luca went to hide out in a country house, where he spent the nights on the front porch — with a lantern as a nightlight, and the sounds of the crickets and the distant barking of the dogs until the singing of the roosters at the break of day — reading Carl Jung. He concluded that the process of individuation in his life was embodied or expressed in a universe that he was trying to unveil. He’d lost his way and was now jumping through a ploughed field looking for the road.

When his brother betrayed him, Luca wandered around the roads, aimless, lost. He’d shown up that afternoon at their company’s town offices without telling anyone he was coming, and had surprised his brother in an unannounced meeting with the new shareholders and Cueto, their factory’s lawyer. They wanted to hand majority control and decision-making power of the board over to the intruders. He feared, his brother, with the rise in the dollar, and with the government’s exchange policy, that they wouldn’t be able to pay off the debts they’d acquired in Cincinnati. That was where they had purchased the large power tools — a giant steel guillotine shear and an enormous folding machine — which they could see down below, on the floor of the factory, if they leaned over edge of the balcony where they were now walking.

When he saw Luca enter unexpectedly into the offices, Lucio smiled with that smile that had connected them for decades, an intimate expression between two inseparable brothers. They’d worked together their whole life, they understood each other without having to say a word — but in that moment everything changed. Luca had left to go to Córdoba to ask for an advance from the head offices of IKA-Renault, but he’d forgotten some papers and had come back to get them, when he walked into the secret meeting. Oh, evil. He realized right away what was going on. He didn’t speak to the intruders, didn’t even look at them. They were sitting calmly around the table in the conference room when Luca entered. They looked at him in silence. He felt that his throat was dry, burning with the dust from the road. “Let me explain,” Lucio said. “It’s for the best.” As if his brother had lost his head, or was under some kind of spell. On one side of the table, Cueto, the hyena, was smiling, but Luca only blew up when he saw that his brother was also smiling like that, blissfully. There’s nothing worse than a naïve idiot who does something wrong thinking that it’s for the best, and smiles, angelically, proud of himself and his good deeds. “I saw red everywhere,” Luca said. He charged toward his brother, who was tall as a tower, and knocked him out of his chair with one punch. Lucio didn’t defend himself, which only made Luca angrier. Luca finally stopped and left his brother on the ground. He didn’t want to disgrace himself. He walked out, his head spinning, his life in shambles. He understood that his father must have convinced Lucio, that he must have frightened him first and then forced him to listen to — and accept — Cueto’s advice.

The next thing he knew, Luca was in his car, driving down the highway, because driving always calmed him down, helped lull his mind. He eventually went to the Estévez Estancia, but he didn’t remember what happened between walking in on the meeting and pulling into the country house. Later they told him that Inspector Croce found him prowling outside their family house with a gun in his hand, looking for his father, but he didn’t remember any of that. He remembered only his car lights illuminating the fence of the Estévez residence, the caretaker opening the gate for him and letting him through, reminding him which road to take up to the house. He spent several days sitting on a wooden chair, on the porch, staring out at the countryside. He smoked, drank mate, looked at the road surrounded by the poplar trees, the gravel on the road, the birds flying in circles and, beyond, the empty pampas, always quiet. Vague voices reached him from the distance, strange words and screams, as if his enemies had found a way to drive him mad. A few white, liquid lightning bolts flashed in the sky, burning his eyes in the dark. He saw a storm building on the horizon, the heavy clouds, the animals running to take refuge under the trees, the endless rain, a thin blanket of wetness on the grass. His body seemed to suffer strange transformations. He started wondering what it would be like to be a woman. He couldn’t get the idea out of his head. What would it be like to be a woman at the moment of coitus? It was a very clear and crystalline thought, like the rain. As if he were lying on the ground, out in the country, and had started sinking into the mud, a viscous feeling on his skin, a warm moisture. Sometimes he’d fall asleep and wake up with the light of morning, find himself sitting on the wooden chair on the porch, not thinking anything at all, like a zombie in the middle of nowhere.

One evening, during those days on end that were all the same, in his breakdown in the country house, he went inside to look for a blanket and found a book that he’d never heard of. The only book he found and was able to read during all those days and days of isolation in the Estévez Estancia. A book he found in an old, country wardrobe, one of those with mirrors and tall doors — in which one hides as a child to listen to the conversation of the adults — while he was searching through the winter clothes. He saw the book all of a sudden, as if it were alive, as if it were kind of a vermin, as if someone had forgotten it there, for us, for him. Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung.

“Why was it there, who had left it? That doesn’t matter. When we read it, though, we discovered what we already knew, we found a message directed personally to us. Jung’s individuation process. What’s the purpose of an individual’s entire oneiric life? That’s what the Swiss Master had asked himself. Jung discovered that the dreams that a person dreams in his life all follow an order, which the Doctor called a dream plan. Dreams produce different scenes and images every night. People who aren’t very observant probably never realize that a common thread runs through their dreams. But if we observe our dreams carefully, Jung says, over a set period of time (one year, for example), and we write the dreams down and study the entire series, we’ll see that certain contents emerge, disappear, and come back again. These changes, according to Jung, can be accelerated if the dreamer’s conscious attitude is influenced by the proper interpretation of his dreams and their symbolic content.

This is what Luca found one night looking for a blanket in an old country wardrobe in the Estévez house, as if it were a personal revelation. He discovered Carl Jung by chance, and this is how he was able to understand and later forgive his brother. But not his father. His brother was possessed. Only someone who’s possessed can betray his brother and sell himself to strangers, and let them take over the family business. His father, on the hand, he was lucid, cynical, and calculating. In secret, for days and days, he had devised a trap — with Cueto, our legal advisor—to convince Lucio to sell his preferred stocks to the intruders and hand majority control over to them. In exchange for what? His brother committed the betrayal, terrified of the economic unknown. His father — on the other hand — thought like a man from the countryside who always goes in for a sure thing.

In his isolation, Luca understood the misfortune of men tied to the ground. He achieved what he called a certainty. The countryside had destroyed his family, they were unable to escape, as his mother had done, unable to run away from the empty plains. His older brother had known, for example, the happiness of having a mother.

“But before I was born,” Luca said, using the first person singular, “my mother was already fed up with country life, with family life, she’d started secretly seeing the theater director who she’d leave my father for, when I was in her belly. My mother abandoned my brother, who was three years old, left him playing out on the patio, and escaped with a man who I will not name, out of respect. She left with the theater director and with me inside of her, when I was born the two of them were living together. But later, when I too turned three, she abandoned me (like she had abandoned my brother) and moved to Rosario, to teach English for Toil & Chat, and then she moved back to Ireland, where she lives now. I always dream about her,” Luca added, later, “about my mother, the Irishwoman.”

Sometimes, in his dreams, he felt that a certain suprapersonal force was interfering in an active, constructive fashion, as if it were following a secret design. This was why he’d been able to build, in recent months, the objects of his thoughts as realities, and not just as concepts. To produce what he thought directly, thinking not just ideas, but real objects.

For example, a few objects that he’d designed and built in the last few months. There was nothing else like them, no previous models. The precise production of the objects of his thoughts that did not exist before being thought up. The exact opposite of the countryside, where everything exists naturally, where products are not products but a natural replica of previous objects, reproduced in the same manner, time and time again.³⁰ A field of wheat is a field of wheat. There’s nothing to do, except plough a little, pray for rain, or for the rain to stay away — the earth takes care of everything else. Same thing with the cows: they walk around, graze, sometimes they need to be dewormed, have someone make an incision if they get a grass obstruction, herd them to the corral. That’s all. Luca considered machines, instead, to be very delicate instruments. The machines were there to assist in bringing about new and unexpected objects, each more complex than the one before. He thought he could find, in his dreams, the steps necessary to carry on with the company. He walked ahead in the dark, looking for the configuration of a specific plan in the continuous series of his oneiric materials, as the Swiss Master called it. He liked the idea of them as materials — that one could work with them, as one works with stone, or chromium.

“What we write on the walls is the debris of memory. It’s never the dream exactly as we’ve dreamt it. It’s the remains, rather, like the wreckage and gears that survive a demolition. We’re using metaphors here, of course,” he said.

Often it was only an image. A woman in the water with a rubber bathing cap on her head. Sometimes it was a phrase: It was quite natural for Reyes to join our team in Oxford. He’d write these remains and later connect them to earlier dreams, as if they were all part of the same story, discontinuous fragments that needed to be put together. He always dreamt about his mother, he’d see her with her red hair, laughing, on the dirt patio facing the street — and he wasn’t satisfied until he could find a natural way to integrate all the images. It was intense work, taking up a large portion of every morning.

The writings on the walls were a tapestry of phrases connected with arrows and diagrams, certain words underlined or circled, connections established, with figures and sketches, and fragments of dialogue. As if a painter were working on the wall, trying to compose a mural — or a series of murals — by copying hieroglyphics in the dark. It looked like a comic strip, actually, a black-and-white cartoon, including dialogue balloons and drawings assembling a plot.

His hope, then, was to record all his dreams for a year to be able to finally intuit the direction of his life, and then act accordingly. A plan, the unexpected anticipation of what was to come. He’d understood, at last, that the expression it is written referred to the results of these recording operations and the interpretation of the materials supplied by personal archetypes and a collective unconscious. His dreams — he’d later confess — were hermetic anticipations of what was to come, the discontinuous elements of an oracle.

“As if the world were a spaceship and we were the only ones who could see the flashing lights and hear the sounds on the bridge and the conversations of the crew and the orders spoken by the pilots. As if only with our dreams could we discover the plans for the trip, and redirect the ship when it’s lost its way and is about to crash. We’re still using metaphors here,” he said. “A simile, but also a literal truth. Because we work with metaphors and analogies, with imagined worlds and with the concept of equal to, we look for equivalences in the absolute difference of the real. A discontinuous order, a perfect form. Knowledge is not the unveiling of a hidden essence, but a connection, a relationship, a similarity between visible objects. That’s why I,” he added, switching back to the first person singular again, “can only express myself with metaphors.”

For example, the observation deck, which was the opening from where you could see the lights of the bridge and hear the distant voices of the crewmembers. He wanted to transcribe what they said. Another reason why he needed a secretary, to help him copy everything down. And also why his table of interpretations was designed to read all of his dreams at the same time.

“Come, take a look,” he said.

“That’s why I got separated,” Renzi said.

“How strange.”

“Any explanation will do.”

“And what were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Writing a novel.”

“You don’t say.”

“A man meets a woman who believes she’s a machine.”

“And?”

“And nothing. That’s it.”

“The problem is always what you believe you experience, or what you believe you think,” Sofía said after a while. “That’s why one always needs help to be able to stand it all, a potion, some kind of miraculous concoction.”

“The power of life, not everyone can stand it.”

“Of course, there’s a crest, a narrow pass, you fall — Plop.”

“I completely agree.”

Renzi dozed off. The night lamp, covered with a silk scarf, gave off a softened reddish light.

“In two, no, in three years,” Sofía said, looking at and counting with the fingers of her hand, “I’m going to get pregnant. I’ll be really big. It’ll be interesting.” She was laughing. “I want to have a child who turns twenty-five in the year 2000.”

Luca took them to a small room next to the study — his workroom, as he called it³¹—which looked like a laboratory, with magnifying glasses and rulers and compasses and drafting tables and photographs from the different stages of the construction of multiple devices. On one of the desks, to the side, there was a cylinder with a number of small, brown, wooden tablets — like Venetian blinds, or the mechanical assembly of a series of small Egyptian tablets — each filled with handwriting tiny as fly legs. They were miniature blackboards, on which Luca wrote words and drew images, in different colored pencils, related to his dreams. “The dreams that have already been told are the ones that get transferred to the tablets, in miniature,” he said. The engraved plates could be moved by a series of nickel-plated gears, like the flapping of a bird’s wings. This made the words change places, allowing different readings of the phrases, at once simultaneous and successive. My mother in the river, her red hair tucked into a rubber bathing cap. “It was quite natural,” she said, “for Reyes to join our team in Oxford.” This was just one example of a preliminary interpretation. His mother, in Ireland: had she traveled to Oxford? And those Reyes, how should they be understood? As the kings, the reyes, or as the Reyes family? The question was: what does it mean to put different elements in relationship to each other and thus articulate and construct a possible meaning — and how should this be done?

This was the other filing room. Luca had decided to remove the filing cabinets, as he had done in the filing room upstairs, and placed a folding cot in place of the cabinets here, too, creating another resting place exactly like the one upstairs. Not only was it the same, Luca explained, it actually occupied the same, exact location, one on top of the other, in a perfect vertical axis.

“We sleep here, facing a specific direction, always facing the same direction. Like the gauchos who used to ride into the deserted plains and put their saddles in the direction they were supposed to be going, and sleep like that, too, to keep from getting lost in the middle of the countryside. To keep from losing their way, the direction of their route.” After many months of experimenting, Luca realized that it was essential for everything to be exactly the same when he slept at night, every night — even if he slept in different rooms in the factory, wherever his activities might leave him at the end of the day — so the dreams would continue repeating themselves without major alterations.

At that point, a man in overalls appeared, lean, very meticulous-looking. Luca introduced him as Rocha, his main assistant and mechanical technician. Rocha had been the leading machinist in the plant, and Luca had kept him on as his principal consultant. Rocha smoked, looking down, while Luca praised his skills as an artisan and his pinpoint accuracy in all technical calculations. Rocha was followed by Croce’s dog, the small mutt that came to visit him, as he said, and to which he spoke as if it were a person. The dog was the only living creature of whose existence Rocha seemed to take any notice, as if truly intrigued by it. The dog was twisted, crooked. It had some kind of strange ailment or injury that kept it from walking straight, making it lose its sense of direction. So Croce’s dog moved diagonally, as if an invisible wind kept him from walking in a straight line.

“This dog you see here,” Rocha said, “it comes up to the factory from town, it always walks crooked, it even goes around and around in circles when it gets disorientated. But still, somehow, it makes it all those kilometers from there to here in two or three days. It’ll stay with us for a while and then, just like that, one night it’ll leave and go back to Croce’s house.”

His older brother’s unexpected death, in an accident — Luca said all of a sudden — had actually saved the factory. Two months after the dispute, Lucio called him on the telephone, came to get him in his car, and was killed on the road. What is an accident? A malevolent byproduct of chance, a detour in the lineal continuity of time, an unforeseen intersection. One afternoon, standing in the same place where they were now, the telephone — which almost never rings — rang. Luca decided not to pick it up. He walked outside, but came back in again because it was raining (again!). In the meantime, Rocha, without anyone having asked him to do so, had picked up the telephone, as if it’d been a personal call. Rocha was so slow, so deliberate and tidy in everything he did, that Luca had time to walk out of the factory and walk back in, at which point Rocha was able to tell him that his brother was on the phone. He wanted to speak with him, Lucio, he wanted to tell Luca that he was coming by to pick him up in his new station wagon, so they could go get a beer at Madariaga’s Tavern.

Luca had been unable to foresee his older brother’s death because he hadn’t been able to fully interpret his dreams yet, but Lucio’s death was part of a logical line that he was trying to decipher with his Jungian-machine. The event was the result of an axial shift, and Luca was trying to understand the chain that had produced it. He could go back to the most remote times to identify the precise instant when it was produced, an imprecise succession of altered causes.

Luca couldn’t stop thinking about the moment right before his brother’s phone call.

“We stepped out,” he said. “We were here, where we are now, and we stepped out, but when we saw that it was raining we came back in to get a raincoat, and then my assistant, Rocha, a specialized lathe operator and the best machinist in the factory, told me that our brother was on the phone, and we stopped and went back to answer the call. We could’ve simply not answered, if we’d gone out and not come back in to get our raincoat.”

That night his brother had called him on a whim, he told him that he’d just thought of it, that he was coming by the factory to pick him up to go get a beer. Luca had stepped out when the telephone rang, but he came back in because of the rain. Rocha, who was about to hang up the telephone and had already told Lucio that Luca was out, saw Luca walk back in, and told him that his brother was on the line.

“Where were you?” Bear asked him.

“I went out to get the car, but I saw that it was raining and came back to get my coat.”

“I’m on my way to pick you up, let’s get a beer.”

They spoke as if everything was the same as always, as if their reconciliation was a done deal. They didn’t need to explain anything, they were brothers. It was the first time they’d see each other after the incident of the meeting with the investors in the company offices.

Lucio came to pick Luca up in the Mercedes Benz wagon that he’d purchased a few days earlier. It had an anti-radar system to help avoid speed traps. Lucio used the car to visit a girlfriend in Bernasconi, he could make the trip in three hours, get laid, and be back three hours later. “My kidneys, don’t get me started,” Bear said. Then he said that with the downpour it would be better to take the highway and get off at the Olavarría exit. Then, at the exit, on the roundabout, he got distracted.

“Listen, little brother,” Lucio started to say, turning his head to look at him. At that instant, at the bend of the road by the Larguía fields, a light shined on them, appearing brightly out of nowhere in the middle of the rain. It was the high beams of a semi. Lucio sped up, which saved Luca’s life, because instead of hitting them straight on, the truck grazed the rear of the station wagon. Lucio was crushed against the steering wheel. Luca was thrown from the car, but he landed safely in the mud by the side of the road.

“I remember it as if it were a photograph. I can’t forget the image of the light beaming on my brother’s face, he’d turned to look at me with an expression of understanding and happiness. It was 21:20 hours, 9:20 pm, my brother sped up and the truck only hit the back of the station wagon, we spun around and I was thrown out into the mud. After my brother was killed, I saw my father at the burial, that’s when he offered me the money from our family inheritance, he had deposited it in an undeclared account in the United States for us. My sister Sofía was the one who intervened so he’d give us the part of the inheritance that corresponds to us, from my mother. This is what we’re going to explain at the trial, even if it puts into doubt our father’s integrity. Anyway, everyone here knows that’s how it is, everyone deals in foreign currency.³² He agreed to send us what we needed to pay off the mortgage and recover the deed to the factory.”

Tony’s death was a confusing episode, but Luca was sure that Yoshio wasn’t the murderer. Luca shared Croce’s theories. He was sure that they’d cede the money to him without any problems as soon as he showed the court the papers and the certified withdrawal statements from Summit Bank.

“Let’s go downstairs and see the installations,” Luca said.

“My mother says that reading is thinking,” Sofía said. “Not that we read and then we think, but rather that we think something and then we read it in a book as if it were written by us, although it’s not written by us. Rather, someone in another country, in another place, in the past, writes it like a thought that hasn’t been thought yet, until, by chance, always by chance, we find the book that clearly expresses what had been, confusingly, not yet thought by us. Not every book, of course, but certain books are destined for us, certain books seem like objects of our own thoughts. A book for each one of us. To find it, there must be a series of accidentally interrelated events, until in the end you see the light you’re looking for, without even knowing you were looking for it. In my case it was the Me-Ti, or The Book of Changes. A book of maxims. I love the truth because I’m a woman. I trained with Grete Berlau, the great German photographer who studied in the Bauhaus, she used the Me-Ti as a photography manual. She came to the college because the Dean thought that an agricultural engineer should learn with pinpoint accuracy to distinguish the different kinds of grasses that grow on the estancias. ‘In the countrysides nobody sees a ting, therre’s no borrderrs therre.³³ To see you must cut. Photogrraphy is like trracking and raking.’ That’s how Grete spoke, with a heavy accent. I remember one time she put me and my sister together and took a series of photographs, and for the first time you could see how different we were. ‘You can only see what you have photogrraphed,’ Grete used to say. She was friends with Brecht, she’d lived with him in Denmark. They said she was the Lai-tu of the Me-Ti.³⁴

30 “Democritus, in Antiquity, already pointed out that: Mother earth, when made fruitful by nature, gives birth to harvests that serve as food for men and beasts. Because what comes from the earth must return to the earth, and what comes from the air must return to the air. Death does not destroy matter, it breaks up the union of its elements so they may be reborn in other forms. Very different from industry, etc…” (Report by Mr. Schultz).

31 “He works uninterrupted, for many hours on end, at night and in the afternoon, never allowing himself any slowdowns, with great effort, through great fatigue. He demonstrates unbreakable confidence in the ‘immensurable value’ of his work. He never lets himself be brought down by the difficulties and he never admits the possibility of failure for any of his endeavors. He does not accept the least bit of criticism, he has absolute confidence in the destiny in store for him. For these reasons, he does not care about recognition. ‘We are concerned with praise and recognition in the exact measure to which we are unsure about our work. But he who, like us, is sure — absolutely sure — of having produced a work of great value, has no reason whatsoever to care about recognition. Such a person, like us, will feel indifferent to all worldly glory’” (Report by Mr. Schultz).

32 “I am too curious and too clever and too proud to behave like a victim” (Dictated to Mr. Schultz).

33 “The pampas presents a privileged medium for photography because of the distances, its folding effects, and the intense plenitude lost in the non-space of visual deprivation” (Note by Grete Berlau).

34 Two years after the events recorded in this story, on January 15, 1974, Grete Berlau drank one or two cups of wine before going to bed, and there, lit a cigarette. There was a fire, and she suffocated in the burning room. She may have dozed off while she was smoking. “We have to do away with the habit of speaking about things that cannot be said by speaking,” was one of the sayings of Lai-tu that Brecht recorded in the Me-ti, or The Book of Changes.

17

They walked down the interior stairwell and into the main part of the factory, where they toured the industrial plant and were surprised by the elegance and spaciousness of the building.³⁵ The indoor garage was nearly two blocks in length, but it looked like a place that had been suddenly abandoned, right before some imminent disaster. A general paralysis had fallen over the steel accumulated there, much like a stroke leaves a man — who has drunk and fornicated and lived life to the fullest until the fatal instant when, from one second to the next, an attack immobilizes him forever — dry and lifeless.

Frozen assembly lines; a stretched-out section of upholstery with the dyed leather and the seats waiting on the floor; rims, wheels, stacked tires; a shed, its door and windows covered with canvases; inside the shed, metal sheets and cans of paint; tools and mechanical pieces, wheels, pulleys, and small measuring instruments on the floor of the garage; tires with Stepney wood crossbeams; Hutchinson pneumatics; a Stentor horn; an ingenious turbine to inflate tires, activated by the output from the exhaust pipe; a cigüeñal crankshaft with its strange bird-name; a long workbench with adjustable bench vices, optical apparatuses, and gauging devices. The feeling of sudden abandonment was like a cold draft coming off the walls. The steel guillotine shear and the Campbell automatic folding machine, both purchased in Cincinnati, were in perfect condition. Two partially assembled automobiles had been left elevated above the service pits in the middle of the garage. Everything seemed to be in a suspended state, as if an earthquake — or the gray, viscous lava of an erupting volcano — had frozen the factory during an average workday, at the precise moment of its freezing. April 12, 1971. The calendar with naked women from a tire shop in Avellaneda, the old wooden box radio plugged into the wall, the newspapers covering the broken glass windows: everything pointed to the exact moment when time had stopped. A blackboard hanging by a wire still had the call to assembly from the plant’s internal commission. There was no date on that, but it was from the time of the conflict. Fellow workers, there will be a general assembly tomorrow to discuss the situation of the company, the new conditions, and our battle plan.³⁶ The electric clock on the back wall had stopped at 10:40 (but was it am or pm?).

After a while they were able to discern the signs of Luca’s more current activity. Spherical and curved objects set up on the floor, like animals from a strange mechanical bestiary; a device with wheels, gears, and pulleys, which seemed recently finished, painted in bright red and white paint; a small bronze plate that read: The wheels of Samson and Delilah; the diagrams and plans for a monumental construction, fragmented in small, circular models, laid out on a drafting desk. A garage where one hundred workers were once employed, now occupied by a single man.

“We have resisted,” Luca said, then switched to the second person singular. “No one helps you,” he said. “They make everything difficult. You get taxed before you’ve even produced anything. This way, please.”

He wanted to show them the work to which he’d dedicated his recent efforts. He led them on a path between connecting rods, batteries, and stacked tires, through an alley formed by large containers, and to an opening near the back where they saw an enormous steel structure rising in the air. It was a conical construction, six meters tall, made of grooved steel, resting on four hydraulic legs, painted with a dark, brick-red antioxidant paint. It looked like a stratospheric device, a prehistoric pyramid, or like the prototype of a time machine, maybe. Luca called this unsettling conical contraption The Viewer.

You could only enter The Viewer from underneath, by sliding through the tubular legs. Inside, once you stood up, you found yourself in a triangular metal tent, tall and serene. The interior contained stairs, a glass elevator, stretched platforms, and small, grilled windows. The device culminated in a glass eye at the top, two meters in diameter, surrounded by metal corridors. It could be reached by climbing the spiral staircase that led up into the control room, with its large windows and rotating chairs. The view from the top was circular and magnificent. In one direction, according to Luca, you could see the entire celestial sphere. In the other, by using a mechanical arm to adjust a series of mirrors set up as square cells, you could also look out over the deserted pampas. In the distance, toward the south of the province, the moon reflected off of the surface of the lakes, in turn surrounded by flooded fields that formed an extended yellow vastness across the plains. Closer in were the sown fields, the animals scattered in the prairies, and the roads intersecting on the slopes near the large estancias. Finally, crowded at the foot of the hills like a sandbank, you could just make out the roofs of the tallest houses in town, the main street and square, and the railroad tracks.

In front of the chairs there was a board with electronic instruments to fine-tune the positioning of the mirrors and make slight oscillations to the pyramid. Luca had placed three Zenith television sets above the steel walls, attached by clamps, and he’d connected them with a complex network of cables and movable antennas. The screens, when they were turned on, were tuned to simultaneous channels. On them, you could follow three different images at the same time.

“We considered calling this machine The Nautilus, but it’s actually the replica of a spaceship, not a submarine. It’s an aerial machine; it produces changes in the perspective and viewpoint of what one comes to see. It’s a sign of the times: a stationary vehicle that brings the world to us, instead of us having to go to the world.”

It had taken him nearly a year to build the pyramid, all the instruments, and the accompanying guides. He took advantage of the technology available in the factory’s garage to fold the large sheets of metal. The seamless carapace of the machine, formed without any soldered joints, was the work of a watchmaker.

“It’s not finished yet. It’s not finished, I don’t think we’ll have it finished before winter.”

He was haunted by the idea that the factory might be confiscated the following month, when the mortgage payment was due. He had received a letter from the courts with a date for a reconciliation hearing, but he’d postponed it because he didn’t think that he was ready.

“We received the telegram inviting us to parley a week ago. They didn’t use that word exactly, but that was the meaning of it. They want us to sit down and negotiate, they want to discuss the fate of the confiscated funds. We’ll see what they propose. For the moment we’ve postponed the date. We didn’t write directly to the judge, but to his secretary. We sent him notice that our company needs more time and that we were requesting an extension. They send telegrams or cablegrams, we only write letters.” He paused. “Our father has interceded. My father has interceded, even though I didn’t ask for his help.”

“Do you know what this is?” Renzi asked, showing Sofía a piece of paper with the code Alas 1212 on it.

“Looks like an address.”

“A finance company.”

“At my brother Lucio’s funeral, my father decided that he was going to get the money to Luca, even though they weren’t speaking to each other.”

“And Tony brought it for him.”

“The funds belonged to the family, they were in an account that the Old Man had abroad, in dollars, he couldn’t transfer it legally. Or he didn’t want to.”

“He sold his soul to the devil.”

Lying sideways on the bed, propped up on her elbow, a hand on her face, Sofía started laughing.

“Achalay! Man, you live in the past.” She touched him with her bare foot. “I wish I could make such a deal with the devil, my little dove. You don’t know how quickly I’d take off. But what I’m offered is never that convincing.”

“My father helped me with the money, but I didn’t ask for it, he saw me at the cemetery, at Lucio’s funeral. I didn’t ask him for anything, I’d rather die first. He advanced me my inheritance, but I don’t want anything to do with him.” Luca started pacing around the garage as if he were alone. “No, I can’t ask my father for anything, ever.” He couldn’t ask the person responsible for all his misfortune for help. That’s why at first he hesitated, but there were larger issues at stake. He stopped his pacing. “While I’m able to keep the factory operational, my father can have his rationale and I can have mine, my father can have his reality and I mine, each separate. We will succeed. The money is legal, it was brought in surreptitiously, but that’s secondary, I can pay the back taxes and the fines to the Tax Office once the capital is acquired. If necessary, I have the official statements from my father and my sisters, and from my mother in Dublin, to prove that the money belongs to the family. It’s joint assets — and that’s how I’m going to pay off the mortgage. I’m one step away from finding a process for the lighting, my observatory needs just a few final touches. I can’t stop now.” He lit a cigarette and smoked, lost in his thoughts. “I don’t trust my father, he’s hiding something, I’m sure the prosecutor is working for him. If I’m not mistaken, this is why I have to be very clear. I don’t understand his reasons, my father’s, and he doesn’t understand the unfathomable humiliation that he subjects me to by having to accept that money to save the plant. The factory is my whole life.³⁷ This place is made with the stuff of dreams. With the stuff that dreams are made of. I must be true to this directive. I’m sure that my father wasn’t responsible for that young man’s death, Tony Durán. That’s why I’ve accepted what belongs to me, from my mother’s inheritance.”

This was going to be the basis for his case in the trial. The factory was his great work, it was already built and had proved its effectiveness, so why liquidate? Why make it dependent on loans? He thought these arguments would convince the court.

He was going to bet his life at the trial. Luca had a cause, a sense, and a reason to live — and this was all that mattered to him. This fixed idea kept him alive, he didn’t need anything else, just a little mate to make his hot, bitter infusion to have with some crackers, and occasionally to be able to pet Croce’s dog. He was absorbed in his own thoughts for a while, then said:

“We have to leave you now. We’re very busy, our secretary will see you out.” Barely waving goodbye, he headed to the staircase and climbed to the upper levels of the plant.

The secretary, a young man with a strange look about him, accompanied them to the front door. As they walked toward the exit he told them that he was worried about the trial, which was actually a reconciliation hearing. The offer from the prosecutor Cueto had arrived. Rather, Cueto had communicated to them that he had an offer about the money that Luca’s father had sent him through Durán.

“Luca didn’t want to open the envelope with the offer from the court. He says he prefers to go in with his own arguments, and not know those of his rival ahead of time.”

The secretary seemed alarmed, or maybe that was his normal demeanor. A bit detached, there was a strange, shy air about him. He walked down the corridor, a few steps behind them, and said his goodbyes at the door. When they crossed the street, Renzi looked back and saw the dark mass of the factory and a single light illuminating the windows of the upper rooms. Luca was looking down from behind the glass, smiling, pale as a specter, following them from the white above, in the middle of the night.

They heard noises from the entrance downstairs. Sofía sat up, motionless, anxious and alert.

“She’s here,” she said. “It’s her, Ada.”

They heard a door and then a few steps and a soft whistling, someone had entered whistling a melody. And nothing else, except for window shutters being closed in one of the rooms down at the end of the hallway.

Sofía looked at Emilio then, and moved closer to him.

“Do you want me to… I can call her…”

“Don’t be silly,” Renzi said, and embraced her. Her body temperature was incredible, soft skin and very warm, with beautiful freckles like a golden archipelago drifting down, disappearing into her red pubic bush.³⁸

“I was kidding, dummy,” she said, and kissed him. She finished getting dressed. “I’ll be right back, I want to see how Ada is doing.”

“Call me a taxi?”

“Really?” Sofía said.

35 Surface area covered: Main nave: 3,600 m². Underground level: 1,050 m². Offices: 514 m². Conference rooms: 307 m². Total surface covered: 5,501 m². Land for future expansion: 6,212.28 m². Total: 11,713.28 m².

36 There were meetings, marches, protests, but they didn’t get any support. The people from the countryside would come by on their horses to see the acts, they’d say hello by touching their hats with the tip of their riding crop, and ride on. “Gauchos don’t go on strike,” Rocha said. He’d been the delegate for the internal commission. “If they have a problem, at most they kill their boss, or they take off. They’re more self-sufficient than the Virgin.”

37 “Sometimes Luca hears the mocking laughter of a group of children. Are they laughing at him? He hates children, their voices, their metallic laugh, the little childish monsters. The neighbors are watching, they send their children to observe. His fate has been to be celibate, a true non-father, the anti-father, nothing natural, everything made, and thus rejected and persecuted” (Report by Mr. Schultz).

38 When she lay down on a white sheet on the grass to sunbathe, the chickens would always try to peck the freckles on her torso…

18

When Renzi went back to visit Croce at the asylum, he found him alone in his block. As he crossed the lawn, the fat man and the thin man, who’d been transferred to another section of the hospital, approached Renzi and asked him for cigarettes and money. Off to the side, sitting on a bench between the trees, he saw another of the admitted patients — a very gaunt man, with the face of a corpse, wearing a long, black overcoat — masturbating, looking up toward the women’s rooms on the other side of the gated fence. On the upper level of that building, Renzi thought he saw one of the women leaning out the window with her chest bare, making obscene gestures while the man watched her with a lost look in his eye, touching himself between the folds of his open coat. Did they pay for that? Renzi wondered.

“Yeah, they pay,” Croce said. “They send money or cigarettes to the girls so they’ll stick their tits out the windows upstairs.”

In the vast, empty room with the beds undone, Croce had set up a kind of desk using two old fruit crates. He sat, facing the window, taking notes.

“They left me alone. It’s better this way, so I can think and sleep in peace.”

He seemed calm. He’d put on his dark suit and was smoking his small cigar. His bag was all packed up. When Renzi told him that Luca had accepted the summons from the court, Croce smiled with the same mysterious look as always.

“That’s the news I was waiting for,” he said. “Now the matter will be settled.”

He jotted a few things in his notebook, behaving as if he were in his own office. Croce confused the noises he heard through the window — voices, murmurings, distant radios — with the sounds of the past. He thought the footsteps and the creaking noise in the corridor, on the other side of the door, were the footsteps and rubber wheels of the girl who came around the offices in town with the coffee cart. But when he got up he saw it was the nurse with the medicine, a white liquid in a small plastic cup that Croce drank in a single swig.

Renzi gave him a summary of his investigations at the Archives. He’d followed a series of clues in the newspapers and found that the transactions led to a ghost finance company from Olavarría that had purchased the factory’s mortgage to appropriate the assets. Apparently, the banking code or the legal name was Alas 1212.

“Alas? So Cueto is behind it.”

“The name that appears is that of a certain Alzaga.”

“Of course, that’s his partner.”

“This is what’s at stake,” Renzi said, showing him the cutout he’d found in the Archives. “They’re also speculating with the land. The Old Man is opposed.”

“Good,” Croce said.

Cueto, who was once the family lawyer, commandeered the operation to appropriate the shares for the new corporation. Everything was done under the table, which is why Luca blamed his father — with good reason, for the Old Man trusted Cueto and didn’t realize until some time later that Cueto was the black monk of the story. But now it seemed that the Old Man had distanced himself from Cueto.

“And the trial? Luca doesn’t know what’s in store for him.”

“But he knows what he wants,” Croce said, and started elaborating a new hypothesis based on the information that Renzi had just brought him. Of course they wanted to keep the money from reaching Luca, but the crime was still an enigma. The Intrigue, Croce wrote on a piece of paper. The factory, a Center, the surrounding land, the speculation with the real estate. He sat still for a moment. “You have to be able to think like the enemy,” he said all of a sudden. “Someone who acts both like a mathematician and a poet, someone who follows a logical line but at the same time associates freely. A mind that builds syllogisms and metaphors. The same element enters into two different ways of thinking. We’re facing an intelligence without limits. What in one case might be a simile, in the other is an equivalence. Understanding a fact hinges on the possibility of seeing the connection. Nothing is worth anything in and of itself, everything is worth something in relationship to other factors, but we don’t know what the other factors are. Durán,” Croce said, and drew an ex on the paper, “a Puerto Rican from New Jersey, a U.S. citizen, meets the Belladona sisters in Atlantic City”—Croce drew two exes on the paper—“and comes here after them. Did the girls know or did they not know what was happening? That’s the first unknown. They have dodged the question, as if they were protecting someone. The jockey was the executor: he served as a substitute for another. They may have murdered Tony for no reason at all, just to keep anyone from investigating the real reason. A diversionary tactic.³⁹ They killed him to divert our attention elsewhere,” he said. They had the dead body, they had the suspects, but the motive was of a different order. This seemed to be the case. A diversionary tactic, he wrote, and handed the paper to Renzi.

Emilio looked at the piece of paper with the underlined phrases and the checks and exes, and understood that Croce wanted him to reach the same conclusions as he had. This way he could be certain that he’d hit right on target.

Croce found a repeating mechanism: the criminal tended to resemble the victim so as to erase his tracks.

“They leave a corpse to send a message. It’s the structure of the mafia: they use bodies as if they were words. And that’s how it was with Tony. They were trying to say something. We know the cause of Tony’s death, but what was the reason?” Croce remained quiet, looking at the bare trees through the window. “They didn’t have to kill him, poor Christ,” he said after a while.

He seemed nervous and tired. It was late afternoon and the block he was in was entirely in shadows now. They went outside to walk in the park of the asylum. Croce wanted to know if Luca was relaxed. He was betting everything on that lawsuit, he wished he could help him, but there was no way to help him.

“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “You can’t live without making enemies, you’d have to lock yourself in a room and never leave. Not move, not do anything. Everything is always more stupid and more incomprehensible than what one can deduce.”

He got lost in his thoughts. When Croce came back, he said he’d go return to his burrow and keep working. The walk was over. Renzi watched Croce head off toward his block. He walked in a nervous zigzag, swaying slightly, as if he were about to lose his balance. He stopped before he went in, turned around, raised his hand, and waved weakly in the distance.

Was that goodbye? Renzi didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t have much left. They were pressuring him at the newspaper to get back to Buenos Aires, they barely published his articles anymore, they thought the case was closed. Junior told him to stop fooling around and to come back to work on the literary pages. Kidding, Junior had proposed that Renzi put together a special on gauchesque literature — since he was already out in the country.

When he got back to the hotel, Renzi found the Belladona sisters sitting at a table in the lounge. He went to the bar, ordered a beer, and watched the twins reflected in the mirror behind the bottles. Ada was speaking excitedly, Sofía was agreeing, there was much intensity between them, too much … If it was a man. Every time he got himself in deep, Renzi remembered something he’d read. The line came from a story by Hemingway, “The Sea Change,” which Renzi had translated for his newspaper’s Culture section. If it was a man. Literature doesn’t change, you can always find what you are looking for there. Life, instead … But what was life? Two sisters in the bar of a provincial hotel. As if she were reading his thoughts, Sofía waved at him, smiling. Emilio raised his mug to toast in the air. Then Sofía sat up and called him over, a flare. Renzi left his glass on the bar and walked to their table.

“How’re the girls doing?”

“Sit down, have a drink with us,” Sofía said.

“No, I’m moving on.”

“You’re going back already?” Ada asked.

“I’m staying for the trial.”

“We’ll miss you,” Sofía said.

“What’s going to happen?” Emilio asked.

“Everything will work out. Everything always works out around here,” Ada said.

There was a silence.

“I wish I was a fortune-teller,” Emilio said. “So I could read your thoughts.”

“We take turns with our thoughts,” Ada said.

“Yes,” Sofía said. “When one of us thinks, the other rests.”

They kidded around for a while longer, told him some local jokes, fairly loopy,⁴⁰ until Renzi finally said goodnight and went up to his room.

He needed to work, organize his notes. Renzi was restless, scattered, he felt as if he’d never been with Sofía. I was inside her, he thought, a stupid thought. The thought of an idiot. “You screw a chick, she never forgives you,” Junior would say, with his little cynical and winning tone of voice. “Unconsciously, of course,” he’d clarify, opening his eyes wide, knowingly. “Look, Eve had the first orgasm in female history, after that everything went to hell. And Adam had to go off to work.” He’d had loads of women, Junior had, and to every one of them he’d explain his theory about the unconscious battle of the sexes.

After a while Emilio picked up the telephone and asked for his answering service in Buenos Aires. Nothing important. Amalia, the woman who cleaned his apartment, asked if she should keep going on Tuesdays and Thursdays even though he wasn’t there. A woman who didn’t leave her name had called and left a telephone number. Renzi did not bother to write it down. Who could it be? Maybe Nuty, the cashier from the Minimax supermarket around the corner from his house, with whom he’d gone out a couple of times. There were two messages from his brother Marcos, calling from Canada. He wanted to know, the woman from the answering service told Renzi, if he’d already emptied out the house in Mar del Plata and put it up for sale. He also wanted to know if it was true that Perón was coming back to Argentina.

“What did you say?” Renzi asked.

“Nothing.” The woman seemed to smile in the silence. “I only take messages, Mister Emilio.”

“Perfect,” Renzi said. “If my brother calls again, tell him that I haven’t checked my messages and that I’m not back in Buenos Aires yet.”

The family house on España Street had been left vacant for a few months after his father’s death. Renzi had traveled to Mar del Plata and gotten rid of the furniture and the clothes and the pictures on the walls. He’d boxed the books and put them in storage, he’d see what to do with them when the house was finally sold. There were also a lot of papers and photographs, and even a few letters Renzi had written his father when he was a student in La Plata. The only thing he took with him from the bookshelves was an old edition of Bleak House that his father had purchased in a used bookstore somewhere. Renzi had discovered — or he thought he’d discovered — a connection between one of the characters in the Dickens novel and Melville’s “Bartleby.” He thought he might be able to write an article about this and send it to Junior, along with the translation of the chapter from the Dickens novel, so his newspaper would leave him alone.⁴¹

Apparently his brother was going to cancel his trip. If he finally sold the house and they split the money, he’d get about thirty thousand dollars. With this money Renzi could quit the paper and live a while without working. Dedicate himself to finishing his novel. Isolated, without any distractions. Out in the country. The expiatory goat runs away to the deserted countryside. Straight to where the sun hides / inland I must ride. But living in the country was like living on the moon. The monotonous landscape, the chimango birds of prey circling above, the girls who amuse themselves.

39 Croce had intuitively understood the basic thought process. The evidence was known a priori, no empirical discovery could invalidate it. Croce called this method of deduction playing it by ear. And he wondered: Where’s the music when one plays it by ear?

40 A man in the country, riding a spirited colt in the plains at dawn, a splotch on the bright line of the horizon. In the distance, a gaucho drinking mate under the eaves of his country house. When the rider passes in front of the house, the country man at the house says hello. “Nice little morning,” the rider says. “I made it myself,” the other answers, adjusting the shawl on his shoulders.

41 “Chapter 10 of the novel “The Law-Writer,” is centered around the copyist Nemo (No One). Melville (who wrote “Bartleby” in November of 1853) probably read that chapter of the Dickens novel in April of that year, when it was first published in Harper’s magazine in New York. Dickens’s Bleak House which narrates the story of an endless trial and describes the world of the courts and its judges, was much admired by Kafka” (Note by Renzi).

19

The trial was an event. It was actually a hearing, not a trial. Still, everyone in town took it as a decisive event and referred to it as the lawsuit, the trial, the proceedings—depending on the point of view of the speaker — to indicate its transcendent nature. Like every transcendent occurrence, it was related — or so everyone thought — to justice and truth, but what was really at play behind these abstractions was the life of a man, the future of the region, and a handful of very specific, practical questions. You couldn’t say that there were two equal sides opposing each other, because the two opposing sides were not equal. And yet, one had the impression of attending an actual contest. On the streets of the town that day small groups of people commented time and again on the facts, as if all past history was to be decided in the lawsuit against Luca Belladona, or in the lawsuit that Luca Belladona had initiated against the municipality — depending on the point of view of the speaker. What was being litigated, apparently, was the $100,000 that Luca was seeking to reclaim. But plenty of other things were at stake, too, all of which became evident as soon as Cueto started to speak and the judge nodded along to every one of the Prosecutor’s statements.

The judge, the Honorable Gainza, was a justice of the peace; that is, a municipal functionary assigned to resolve local disputes. He sat on an elevated dais, at the front of the Misdemeanor Court of the Municipality, with a court clerk to his side. The prosecutor Cueto was at a table below, to the left. Sitting next to Cueto was Saldías, the new Chief of Police. At another table, to the right, was Luca Belladona, dressed in his Sunday best, with a gray shirt and a gray tie, very serious, with papers and folders in his hands, occasionally consulting with the ex-seminarian Schultz.

A lot of people were authorized to be present at the hearing. Madariaga was there, as well as Rosa Estévez, several estancia owners and auctioneers from the area, and even Cooke the Englishman, the owner of the horse at the center of the dispute. The Belladona sisters were there, but not their father. Everyone was smoking and talking at the same time, the windows in the room were open, and you could hear the rumble of the voices from those who hadn’t been able to get in and were crowded, instead, in the hallways and the neighboring courtrooms. Inspector Croce wasn’t there either, although he’d already signed himself out of the asylum and was living now above the Madariaga Store and Tavern in a small room that he was renting there. Croce thought that everything was already fixed, and he didn’t want his presence there to legitimize his rival, Cueto, who was certain to win the hand with his shady dealings. There weren’t very many women present; the five or six who were there stood out because of their self-assured attitude. One of them, a beautiful woman — Bimba, Lucio’s wife — sat impassively, haughty, behind her dark sunglasses.

Renzi walked in late and had to nudge his way into the room. When he finally settled in at a wooden bench near Bravo, his eyes met Luca’s. The Industrialist smiled at him calmly, as if he wanted to transmit his confidence to the few people there to support him. Renzi looked only at him the whole afternoon, because he thought that Luca needed to be supported by the presence of an outsider who truly believed in his words. In the course of the next two or three hours — Renzi didn’t know exactly how long he spent in the courtroom, although there was a clock hanging on the wall that rang every half hour, and it rang several times — Luca looked at Renzi every time he was in a difficult position, or when he’d made a good point in his arguments. As if Renzi were the only one who understood him precisely because he wasn’t from there.

The justice of the peace, of course, had already taken sides before the so-called reconciliation hearing started, as had most of the people there. Those who speak about reconciliation and dialogue are always the ones already holding the pan by the handle with the whole affair cooked up. That’s the truth. Renzi realized right away that there was an air of anticipated victory, and that Luca — with his clear eyes and the slow, calculated movements of someone who feels violence all around him — was lost before he began. The judge pointed at and ceded the floor to him. Luca wavered for a moment before speaking, as if hesitating, as if he couldn’t find the words to start. Finally he got up, stretched out his close-to-two-meter frame, and stood sideways to the court, looking directly at Cueto — because it was to Cueto to whom he was really speaking.

Luca looked like someone with a skin condition suddenly exposed to the sun. After so many months of living in the factory, the large courtroom, with all the people, gave him a kind of vertigo. Returning to town and appearing there, in front of everyone he hated and held responsible for his ruin, was the first affront he suffered that afternoon. He felt and looked like a fish out of water. Luca raised his hand to ask for silence, even though not even a fly was stirring. Cueto leaned toward Saldías, smiling and relaxed, and said something in a low voice, and the other smiled back. “Good, okay, friends,” Luca said, as if beginning a sermon. “We have come to ask for what is ours.” He didn’t speak directly about the money under dispute, but rather about the certainty that the gathering that day was a necessary procedure — an uncomfortable procedure, if one were to judge by his mistrustful attitude — for the factory to remain in the hands of those who’d built it. The money — which Luca didn’t talk about, and which belonged to his family, and which his father had decided to cede to him as an advance on his inheritance from his mother — was destined solely to pay off the mortgage that weighed upon his life like the sword of Damocles. They’d been threatened and attacked, they’d been surprised in their previous goodwill by the intruders who’d infiltrated and eventually taken over the company. But they’d resisted, which is why they were there that afternoon. He didn’t talk about his rights, he didn’t talk about what was at stake, he talked only about what he cared about: his insane project to continue by himself in the factory, building what he called his works, his inventions, and his illusion that they might leave him—“that they might leave us”—alone. He paused and there was a murmur, but it wasn’t clear if it was a murmur of approval or condemnation. Luca remained standing for a moment in front of the room, looking back and forth from his sisters to Cueto and Renzi, the only ones who seemed to understand what was happening. Luca spoke without raising his voice, with confidence and self-assuredness, without ever realizing the trap he was falling into. It was a catastrophic error — he rushed toward his own end without a thought, without seeing anything, blinded by his pride and his credulity. You could tell he was only chasing a dream, that he was chasing one dream after another, never knowing where the adventure would end, always certain it was the only thing he could do: defend his dream, which everyone thought was impossible. He said something along these lines, Luca did, as a conclusion. The Honorable Gainza — a cunning old judge who spent his nights playing dice in the clandestine casino near the coast — smiled at Luca condescendingly, and gave the last word to the Prosecutor.

Luca sat down and remained motionless for the next phase of the hearing, almost as if he weren’t there. He may even have closed his eyes — only the back of his head, upper back, and shoulders could be seen as he sat in the front row facing the judge now — and he was so still that, for a while at least, he seemed to be asleep.

There was silence, and then another murmur, and Cueto stood up, always smiling, with an expression of superiority and indifference on his face. He was tall, his skin looked splotchy, and he had a strange air about him, perhaps because his posture was at once arrogant and obsequious. Immediately he focused the attention of the matter on Durán’s murder. In order for the money to be reclaimed, the other case, the criminal proceedings, had to be settled. It was known that the murderer was Yoshio Dazai, it had been a classic crime of passion. Yoshio hadn’t confessed because when the crime is this obvious the murderer never confesses. They hadn’t found the murder weapon because the knife used to kill Durán was run-of-the-mill and could be found in almost any kitchen in the area. All the witnesses confirmed that they’d seen Yoshio enter the room at the time of the crime. Of course Yoshio knew about the existence of the money and had taken the bag to the storage room in the basement hoping to go back for it when everything calmed down. Cueto stopped and looked around. He had managed to change the topic of the session and refocus everyone’s attention by reminding them of the sordid story of the crime. The version of the events, as presented by Croce, was delirious and could be seen as evidence of the ex-Inspector’s dementia. That a jockey would dress up as a Japanese night porter and kill an unknown man to buy a horse was ridiculous. Everyone understood that Croce’s version was impossible. Even more ridiculous was the idea that a man would kill another man that he didn’t know, and that he would take only the money he supposedly needed to buy a horse, and that he would take the trouble to leave the rest of the money in the hotel storage room in the basement, instead of just leaving it in the same room where he’d committed the crime.

“The letter and the suicide might be true,” the prosecutor concluded. “But we’ve gotten used to reading letters of that kind thanks to the letters that Croce has been writing us in his nighttime deliriums.”

Cueto shifted the question at hand and articulated the actual dilemma with extreme judicial clarity. If Luca, in his role as plaintiff, would accept that Yoshio Dazai had killed Durán, the criminal proceedings could move forward, the murder case could be closed, and the money could be returned to its legitimate owner, Mister Belladona. If Luca didn’t sign on to this agreement and continued instead with his own suit, then the criminal case would remain open and the money would remain confiscated for years, since they would be unable to close the criminal case and the evidence couldn’t be removed from the court’s power while it remained open. It was perfect. Luca’s claim sealed the murder case because it presupposed that Durán had come to Argentina to bring him the money.

It took Luca a minute to understand. When he did, he looked stunned. He lowered his head and sat like that for a moment while the silence spread through the courtroom like a shadow. He’d thought that everything was going to be simple, but he realized that he’d fallen into a trap. He seemed crushed. Whatever decision he made, he was crushed. If he wanted to get the money, he’d have to help send an innocent man to jail, but if he told the truth, he’d lose the factory. He turned around and looked at his sisters, as if they were the only ones who could help him. Then, as if lost, he looked at Renzi — but Renzi looked away, because he thought that he wouldn’t have wanted to be in his place and that if he were in his place he wouldn’t have accepted the deal, he wouldn’t have agreed to lie and send an innocent man to jail for the rest of his life. But Renzi wasn’t him. Never had he seen anyone look as pale, never had he seen anyone take as long to speak, to say just one word: Okay. Once again a murmur ran through the room, but this one was different, as of confirmation or revenge. Luca’s left eye was twitching slightly and he fidgeted with his necktie as if it were the rope from which he was about to hang. But Yoshio was the one about to be condemned for a crime he hadn’t committed.

There was a big commotion when the session ended, an explosion of happiness. Cueto’s friends all got up to speak to each other. Ada joined the group, too, and Cueto took her by the arm and whispered something in her ear. The only one who approached Luca was Sofía, she stood in front of him and tried to cheer him up. The factory was saved. They hugged, she held him in her arms and spoke softly to him, as if she were trying to calm him down, and she went with him to the other room, where the judge was waiting for him to sign the papers.

Renzi stayed in his seat while everyone got up. Outside the courtroom, he saw Luca shuffling down the hallway, like a boxer who’s accepted winning the title in a fixed match. Not the boxer who’s forced to take a dive because he needs the money. Not — as usual — the humiliated, offended party who knows that he didn’t really lose even though someone has beaten him. No. Luca was like a boxer who’s retained his title as champion thanks to a racket — which only he and his rival know is a racket — and all he has now is the illusion that his dreams have finally come true, but at an unbearable cost. Luca moved as if he were extremely tired and could barely move. Sofía was the only one with him, walking next to him, without touching him. When they crossed the main hallway she said goodbye and left out a side door. Luca continued by himself to the door of the other room.

He’d been subjected to a trial like a tragic character without a choice. Anything he chose would have been his downfall, not for him but for his idea of justice. In the end, it was justice that had put him to the test, an abstract entity — with its rhetorical apparatuses and its imaginary constructions — which he’d had to confront that afternoon in April, until he capitulated. That is, until he accepted one of the two options he was offered. Luca Belladona, who’d always boasted of making clear decisions, unhindered by any doubts, supported by his self-assuredness and his fixed idea. He chose his work, we might say, over his life, and he paid a very high price, but his illusion remained intact to the end. He remained true to his precept, he’d been sunk, but he hadn’t defected. He was so proud and stubborn that it took him a while to realize that he’d fallen into a trap with no way out. By the time he realized what was happening, it was too late.

The townspeople watched him walk down the hallway in silence. They’d known him forever and were now at peace, they seemed magnanimous, because by doing what he’d done — after years and years of his impossible battle, held up by his demoniacal pride — the town had succeeded in getting him to capitulate. Now it could be said that Luca was like everyone else, or that everyone else was like him: now that Luca had revealed a weakness that he’d never revealed before. Renzi hurried to try to talk to him, but was unable to catch up and could only follow behind as they walked down the stairs leading outside. Then an incredible thing happened. When he came out onto the sidewalk, Croce’s mutt appeared, walking crookedly as always, but this time when he saw Luca walk out into the daylight, the dog rushed and started barking at him, baring his teeth as if to bite, with hatred, his yellow fur on end, his body tense. That barking was the only thing that Luca got that day.

20

The next day, when Renzi went back to the Madariaga Tavern, the atmosphere was somber. Croce was at his usual table by the window, wearing his dark suit and tie. That morning he’d gone to the prison in Dolores to visit Yoshio and give him the news, before the official word reached him, that his case had been closed with the consent of Luca Belladona. “Jail is a bad place to live,” Croce said. “But it’s the worst place in the world for a man like Yoshio to live.”

Croce seemed dejected. Luca was going to pay off the mortgage and save the factory, but the cost was too high. Croce was sure it would end poorly. He had an extraordinary ability to grasp the sense of events and anticipate their consequences, but he could do nothing to prevent them. When he tried, the only thing waiting for him was madness. Reality was his field of play, he could often see a series of events before they occurred and anticipate their outcome, but the only thing he could do to prove his theories and demonstrate that he was right was to let the events happen of their own accord. He had no influence over them.

“That’s why I’m no good as an inspector,” he said after a while. “I take events that have already occurred and imagine their consequences, but I can’t prevent them. What comes after a crime? More crime. Luca believes he’s condemned both Yoshio and me. If he hadn’t accepted Cueto’s offer, if he’d refused to help him close the case, I might have had a chance with Cueto.” Croce paused and looked at the plains through the bars of the window against which he always sat. The same motionless landscape that was, for him, the image of his life. “I blew it,” Croce added, “my version of the crime was no good for anyone.”

“And in the end, what’s the truth?”

Croce looked at Renzi with a resigned expression on his face and smiled with the same sparkle of tired irony that always burned in his eyes.

“You read too many detective novels, kid. If you only knew what things were really like. Order doesn’t always get restored, the crime doesn’t always get solved. There’s never any logic to it. We struggle to establish the causes and deduce the effects, but we’re never able to understand the entire network of the intrigue. We isolate facts, we stop in front of a few scenes, we question a handful of witnesses, but for the most part we move blindly in the dark. The closer you are to the target, the more you get tangled in a web without end. In detective novels the crimes are always solved, whether with elegance or with violence, so readers will be satisfied. Cueto has a tortured mind, he does strange things, he kills by proxy. He leaves loose strands behind on purpose. Why did he have them leave the bag with the money in the hotel’s storage room? Was Old Man Belladona involved? There are more unknowns than confirmed certainties.”

Croce sat still, staring out the window, lost in his thoughts.

“So you’re leaving,” he said after a while.

“I’m leaving.”

“You’re doing the right thing.”

“Better not say goodbye,” Renzi said.

“Who knows,” Croce said, referring either to his conclusions about Tony’s death, or Renzi’s eventual return to the town which he seemed to be leaving forever.

Croce got up ceremoniously and gave him a hug. Then he thumped down again in his chair and leaned over his notes and diagrams, distracted, as if Renzi were already gone.

While Croce keeps going, Cueto will never have peace, Renzi thought as he walked out into the street. The story goes on, it can go on, there are several possible conjectures, the story remains open and is only interrupted. The investigation has no end, the investigation cannot end. Someone should invent a new detective genre, paranoid fiction it could be called. Everyone is a suspect, everyone feels pursued. Instead of being an isolated individual, the criminal is a group with absolute power. No one understands what’s happening, the clues and testimonies contradict each other as if they changed with each interpretation, and all suspicions are kept open. The victim is the protagonist and center of the intrigue, instead of the detective hired to solve the case or the murderer hired to kill. Renzi thought along these lines as he walked — perhaps for the last time — down the dusty streets of the town.

He went back to the hotel and packed his bag. The days he’d spent in the countryside had taught him to be less naïve. It wasn’t true that the city was the place for experiences. The plains had geological layers of extraordinary events that returned to the surface with the blowing of the southern winds. The evil light of the unburied shimmers in the air like a poisonous fog. Renzi lit a cigarette and smoked, gazing out the window over the main square. Then he looked around the room to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything, and went downstairs to settle his bill.

The train station was quiet, the train would arrive soon. Renzi sat on the bench, under the shade of the casuarina trees. All of a sudden he saw a car pull over out in the street and Sofía get out.

“I wish I could go with you to Buenos Aires.”

“So come.”

“I can’t leave my sister,” she said.

“You can’t, or you don’t want to?”

“I can’t and I don’t want to,” she said, and stroked his face. “Come on, my little dove, don’t start trying to give me advice.”

She was never going to leave. Sofía was like all the people Renzi had met in town, they were always on the verge of leaving the countryside and running away to the city. They always said they were suffocating in the plains, but in the end they were never going to leave — and they knew it.

She was worried about Luca. She’d gone to visit him, he seemed relaxed, concentrating on his inventions and his projects, and yet he couldn’t stop going back over and over to the deal he’d made with Cueto. “It was the only thing I could do,” he told her, but he seemed withdrawn. He’d spent the whole night wandering around the factory with the strange feeling that now that he’d finally gotten what he’d always hoped for, his resolve had left him. “I can’t sleep,” he’d told her. “I’m tired all the time.”

The train arrived. In the loud commotion of the passengers getting on the train, laughing and saying their farewells, the two of them kissed and Emilio placed a gold charm with the figure of a rose engraved on it in her hand. It was a gift. She held it up to her forehead, it was the only kind of rose that didn’t wither…

When the train started, Sofía walked along the window, until she finally stopped, gorgeous in the middle of the platform, her red hair on her shoulders and a peaceful smile on her face, illuminated by the afternoon sun. Beautiful, young, unforgettable, and — in essence — another woman’s woman.

As he traveled, Renzi looked out at the countryside, at the quiet of the plains, the last houses, the men on horseback riding alongside the train. A group of kids ran along the embankment, barefoot, flashing obscene gestures at the travelers. Renzi was tired, the monotonous jolting of the train made him sleepy. He remembered the beginning of a novel (it wasn’t the beginning, but it could’ve been the beginning): “Who loved not his sister’s body but some concept of Compson honor.” And he started translating: Quien no amaba el cuerpo de su hermana sino cierto concepto de honor…But he stopped and rewrote the line. Quien no amaba el cuerpo de su hermana sino cierta imagen de sí misma: “Who loved not his sister’s body but some concept of herself.” He fell asleep and heard confusing words. He saw the figure of a large wooden bird in the country with a caterpillar on its beak. Was there such a thing as incest between sisters? He saw the shop window of a gunsmith. His mother wearing a parka on a freezing street in Ontario. And if it had been one of them? Sitting on his foldout bed in the asylum, Croce had asked him: “How tall are you?” And: “There’s an obvious solution, and a false solution, and finally a third solution,” Croce had said. Renzi woke up, startled. The pampas were still the same, endless and gray. He’d dreamt about Croce and also — his mother? There was snow in the dream. As the afternoon grew darker, the reflection of Emilio’s face on the train’s window became more and more clear.

The town remained the same as always. In May, with the first low temperatures of fall, the streets seemed less hospitable, the dust swirled about on the corners, and the sky was bright, livid, as if it were made of glass. Nothing moved. The children weren’t heard playing, the women didn’t come out of their houses, the men smoked in the doorways, and the only sound that could be heard was the monotonous whirring of the station’s water tank. The fields were dry, so they started burning off parts of the pastures, the workers advanced in a line burning the weeds and the cuttings, tall waves of fire and smoke rose above the empty plains. Everyone seemed to be waiting for some kind of sign, the confirmation of one of those dark predictions sometimes announced by the old folk healer who lived alone in a shack on a hill. The gardener walked by at dawn, his cart filled with horse manure from the nearby army encampment; the girls strolled aimlessly through the square, sick with boredom; the young men played pool in the Náutico bar, or set up drag races on the road to the lake. The news from the factory was contradictory. Many said that activity in those weeks seemed to have picked up again, and that the lights in the plant’s garage were on all night long. Luca had started dictating a series of measures and regulations to Schultz for a report he intended to send to the World Bank and to the Argentine Industrial Union. He stayed up through the night walking the upper galleries of the factory, followed by his secretary Schultz.

“I have lived, attempted, and achieved so much that they had to carry out a certain violent chain of events to separate and distance me from my accomplishments. We were caught in a trap, through a series of tricks and ruses, not by doubt, but by certainty” (Dictated to Schultz).

“To attribute to the means of industrial production a pernicious action about effects is to recognize in them a moral potential. Do economic actions not create, in fact, a structure of feelings built on reactions and emotions? There is an economic sexuality that exceeds the conjugal norms needed for natural reproduction” (Dictated to Schultz).

“Men have always been used as mechanical instruments. In the old days, in the harvest season, farm workers used to sew steadily, using bale needles to close up the burlap sacks. They were incredibly fast at their sewing, they could produce more than thirty or thirty-five sacks per hectare. Once in a blue moon they’d have to scoop one of the laborers out of the platform. In the rush, he’d have sewn in the tip of his shirt and he’d be stuck to a sack. He’d be rolling on the ground like a fallen brother” (Dictated to Schultz).

“I’ve been thinking about the local weaving. String, knot, string, cross and knot, red, green, string and knot, string and knot. My grandmother Clara learned to knit the blankets they weave in the pampas, her fingers deformed from arthritis, they were like hooks or vine shoots — but with her fingernails painted! Very elegant. We recall Martin Fierro’s sentence: every gaucho you see / a tapestry of misfortunes. The mechanical spinning and weaving of fate! The local weaving penetrates to the marrow. Somewhere someone weaves, and we live woven, flowered in the weave, plotted in the plot. If I could go back even for an instant to the workshop with all the tapestries. The vision lasts only a second, then I fall into the brutal dream of reality. I have so many terrifying things to tell” (Dictated to Schultz).

“I’ve confirmed several times that my intelligence is like a diamond that can pierce pure glass. Economic, geographic, climactic, historical, social, and family determinations can, in very extraordinary occasions, be concentrated and embodied in a single individual. Such is my case” (Dictated to Schultz).

Schultz would get lost at times, he couldn’t follow Luca’s pace, he wrote what he thought he heard.⁴² Luca marched in long strides through the facilities, talking nonstop, he didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. He asked Schultz to write all his ideas down as he walked nervously from one end to the other, across the garage of the plant, by the large machines. Sometimes Rocha would follow him instead, he’d sub in for Schultz while the ex-seminary student slept on a cot, they took turns taking dictation.

“Soon I will not have anything else to say about the past, I will be able to talk about what we will do in the future. I will climb to the top and stop living in these plains, we too will reach the highest peaks. I will live in the future tense. What is to come, what is not yet — is that enough to live on?” Luca said as he walked along the balcony above the inner courtyard.

Even though he hadn’t slept in several nights, he still recorded his dreams.

Two lost cyclists from the Doble Bragado Race turn off the road and continue on, just the two of them, far from everything, in the middle of the deserted pampas, pedaling evenly toward the south on their light Legnano and Bianchi bicycles, leaning over their handlebars against the wind.

Some time later Renzi received a letter from Rosa Echeverry with sad news. She found herself with the “painful obligation” of having to inform him that Luca “had suffered an accident.” He’d been found dead on the floor of the factory’s garage. It seemed like such a well-planned suicide that everyone could believe — if they so chose — that he’d died by falling from the height of his viewing machine, where he was taking one of his usual measurements. This is how it was explained in the letter from Rosa, for whom Luca’s last gesture was yet additional proof of his goodness and his extreme politeness.

Luca had an extraordinary sense of himself and his own integrity. Life had tested him. In the end, when he finally got what he wanted, he’d failed. Perhaps the failure — the crack — was already there and it finally gave in because he couldn’t live with the memory of his own weakness. Yoshio’s shadow, the fragile Nikkei in jail, would return to him like a ghost whenever he tried to sleep. One fleeting flash in the night is enough to break a man, as if he were made of glass.

Once the priest accepted the version of the death as an accident — because suicides, like hobos and prostitutes, were buried outside the church graveyard — Luca was buried in the cemetery. The entire town attended the ceremony.

It was raining slightly that afternoon, one of those light, freezing drizzles that go on for days and days. The cortege went down the main street, up the so-called northern slope, and as far as the large gate of the old cemetery, with the black-covered horses of the funereal carriage trotting along rhythmically and a long line of cars following behind at walking pace.

The Belladona family vault was a sober structure imitating the Italian mausoleum in Turin that contained the remains of the officers who’d fought with Colonel Belladona in the Great War. Luca had made the worked bronze door, the light webbing above the small windows, and the hinges of the vault in the family workshop when his grandfather had died. The door opened with a soft sound; it was made of a transparent, eternal material. The tombstones for Bruno Belladona, Lucio, and now Luca seemed to condense the history of the family. They’d rest together. Only the males died. Old Man Belladona stepped forward, lofty, his face wet with the rain, and stood in front of the coffin. He’d buried his father, his oldest son, and now he was burying his second son. His two daughters took their place next to him; dressed in mourning like widows, standing arm in arm. His wife, who’d only left her “lair” three times — one for each of the three deaths in the family — wore dark sunglasses and gloves, and her shoes were dirty with the mud from the cemetery grounds. Cueto observed the scene from the back, standing under a tree, in a long, white raincoat.

The ex-seminary student approached the sisters and asked permission to say a few words. Wearing all black, pale and fragile, he seemed the most appropriate person there to bid farewell to the remains of the man who’d been his mentor, and for whom he’d been a confidant.

“Death is a terrifying experience,” the ex-seminary student said. “It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those — those able to turn to them — from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the ‘ineluctable need for truth,’ without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds.”

He opened his Bible and announced that he would now read from the Gospel of John, 18:37.

“And Jesus said: For this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice. To which Pontius Pilate answered: What is truth? Of what truth do you speak? After he said this, he turned to the judges and the priests and said: I find no crime in this man.” Schultz looked up from the book. “Luca lived in the truth and in the search for the truth, he was not a religious man but he was a man who knew how to live religiously. The question of our time has its origins in Pilate’s answer. This question implicitly supports the sad relativism of a culture that ignores the presence of the truth. Luca lived a good life, we should say farewell to him knowing that he was enlightened by his illusions of reaching meaning through his works. He rose to the height of those illusions and gave his life to them. We should all be grateful for his persistence in the realization of his dreams and for his disdain of the false lights of the world. His work was done with the stuff that dreams are made of.”

Croce attended the ceremony but stayed in his car, without getting out, and although no one saw him, everyone knew he was there. Smoking, nervous, his hair graying, the traces of his “suspected dementia” burned in his clear eyes. Everyone eventually left the cemetery, and in the end Croce was the last one there, the murmur of the drizzle on his car’s roof and the rain falling monotonously on the road and the tombstones. When night fell on the plains and the darkness too became like the drizzle, a beam of light flashed in front of him. The circular brightness of the light pulsed back and forth, like a white ghost amid the shadows. Then, all of a sudden, it went out, and there was just the darkness.

42 “The flash of lightning that illuminated my life with a neat zigzag has been eclipsed” (Dictated to Schultz).