In the night there was rain, lightning, thistles. They passed an empty station, the wind moved the casuarina trees. Three stations left, said Rosa. Then we’ll find people.
But they found dogs.
One pricked up its ears, they all pricked them up. They woke. They howled.
Tongues lolling in the wind, they ran behind the cart, they caught up with it.
Rosa lit a lamp beneath the cloak, threw it. It exploded and scorched a few noses. That bought them some time.
But soon the dogs reached them again. Panting could be heard. Nothing could be seen. Another lamp. In a confusion of yelps, the dogs withdrew. Ran faster.
The last lamp didn’t light; it was wet. Dog spittle sprinkled the cart now. Rosa lashed out with her whip. Grey hairs flew. She lashed again, but a set of jaws snatched the whip, which crunched like a wood chip.
Quick, quick. When lightning struck, the pelts could be seen; a tooth clinked against the iron edge; a howl of anxious hunger could be heard.
A milkmaid’s cloak flew at them through the air, heavy, reeking of cows. It was snapped up before landing and chewed up.
But the rails took a curve. Cutting across the field, the dogs arrived. Relentlessly they pursued on one side. The lantern cracks a black forehead, is smashed. The second cloak flies through the air. The cart almost flies too. Rosa takes off her skirt and covers her baby. Her underskirt is like a flag.
Oh, to fly.
A light in the station. There are people there, we are arriving. But the thistles have grown, they grow at every moment, they cross the rails, bring the cart to a halt. ‘Your case, throw it!’
With bare hands she pulls out thistles.
‘Let’s go!’
The dogs pause to fight over the white parcel thrown to them.
Run, run.
That light is the station. We’re almost there.
The dogs arrive first. One leaps. Fangs tear a shoe.
Now two shots are fired. Howling, they back away, tear away into the night. Two fall.
A locomotive splashes through the rain before coming to a stop. The blond young man jumps out, shotgun in hand. The stationmaster jumps out, the police jump out.
‘Love!’ shouts the stationmaster’s daughter. She grabs her attaché case. She falls into the young railwayman’s arms.
Love. They lock lips.
Rosa stoops. She is looking for her son.
He isn’t there.
THE TRAINS OF THE DEAD
THE FAST TRAIN to Bahía Blanca dragged down the son of the foreman in charge of the rail maintenance crew. He’d been a sad man since his wife’s death, and with this he gave himself over to drink.
The son spent a month as if asleep. When he returned home he wasn’t the same.
He was lame, but above all distracted.
He devoted himself to lighting small bonfires, adding fuel to them day and night.
At times he raised his arms and gave a shout.
One afternoon his father came back from the bar and began to cry. What was he doing with those fires, for heaven’s sake? They made the neighbours pity him.
‘At the hour of the accident,’ said the boy, ‘I saw the trains of the dead.’
They crossed like rays of lightning above the world. Some came and others went, rising and falling without direction or destination. In the windows he saw the faces of the dead in this world. Ashen faces bearing smiles, leaning faces. Faces held in place by suffocating bits of cloth, limp hands, coloured hair. Electricians, housewives, priests, presidents of companies. Dead in life. Cheekbones covered in bone-dust. Tossing to and fro.
He saw people he knew, neighbours.
In trains shining bright as ghosts risen from the swamp. Nodding their heads, curls pressed against the glass, they did not ask for help, did not want it. Under the permanent cover of night, trains without voice or whistle passed one another, without signals, without a pattern.
They crashed or followed one another for no reason, switching lines.
Nobody could hear or see them flying above the world.
His own pain was joy compared to the pain of those in the trains. He saw, and it was as if he touched, how the cold froze those travellers in place, just as it did those who go to sleep forever in the Andes. Within the ice floes, their eyes called without calling.
That’s why he had put out signals. For the trains of the dead.
EXILES
CRISTOFEROS
I DIDN’T KNOW what a sad continent I was inaugurating.
The way things are now, I deserved my end.
Have you ever paused to think about the rats, about me, shackled in the darkness?
The ocean I crossed three times as an admiral, I crossed back in stench and fever, as a prisoner.
Maybe today I know what my crime was. What a continent I inaugurated!
My dust, guarded by mounted giants, is honoured as that of a monarch in a peerless cathedral, Sevilla. Today tourists take a turn around it with a squeak of shoes, guide in hand, and when they discover my name they speak it aloud.
My name! Bearer of Christ!
The truth is that chance does not exist.
At the moment of my death (it will come to you too) the last words He spoke came to my mouth.
Did a final lock click into place?
Do you ever think of what I once was, one like yourselves, fond of certain things, inflamed by the thought of others, a mad scanner of the horizon?
We know the stories of those who, like me, sought something beyond themselves in those lands. Bolívar was turned in at night by his friends, wrists in shackles. Another died an old man, before a strange sea. (Yet another, in a land without oxygen, at death’s door in a room made of mud, was shot by someone sweating in terror.)
Consider – there is no such thing as chance – the effigy that a southern city raised in my honour.
With my back to the continent I mention, I look towards the sea. Behind me, invisible to my eyes, is the Star. A marble enclosure has been consecrated to a flame. According to the clauses, it should burn in perpetuity. But there is no flame. In this darkness, the employee who looks after the park where my statue stands has fashioned himself a den. His drunken shouts scare away the children who dare to peer in from the marble steps.
REFLECTION ON THE WATER
ELVIRA CABRINI. White hair. Eighty years old. The world for her was like a landscape reflected on gold water. Each thing trembled in the glory of its reflection.
It’s true that when she lost her only son she was consumed by despair. But the splendour of the world sustained her. And when she received the kisses of her last lover she could say, ‘Lady Sadness, I never knew you. I only knew your nobler brother, Pain.’
Every word is heard by someone.
One day she woke, and the reflection was no longer there. Only things remained. From that day on, she’d have to experience this new state.
The words of the flowers came to her. She understood them, since she recognised them from another time. They were like the words of past love. But now they remained silent, saying nothing to her.
She remembered one evening sitting in front of a lake. Through the scattered clouds, through the herons that had begun to grow sleepy, through the flights of wild ducks, a smear, a small flutter advanced over the water. She couldn’t stop looking. It was like a will-o’-the-wisp, but black, and grew larger as it came nearer. It was a boat, and in the boat stood a figure in a flowing dress. The dogs hadn’t barked. The dress ballooned in the wind. Elvira, who was like a queen, stood up. The lady arrived; she wore a big hat.
Sitting beside the visitor in one of the wicker armchairs on the veranda, Elvira watched intently trying to see her face, to no avail.
When the lady rose to leave, Elvira was unable to get up. Not one dog stirred. The lady moved away again in her boat over the lake, towards the landscape of clouds; the cry of a coypu came from the reeds.
Afterwards Elvira went into her house. She didn
’t see the baby chicks that had come off the visitor’s clothing. They entered through the grille of the windows, spread out through the rooms, hopped over the dogs, pecked away at hearts. They were black, diamond-beaked.
That had happened a number of years ago.
Now on her knees, her request was this: ‘Just once, before dying, grant me joy again.’
It was early evening. She blew out the lamp, wanting to sleep, but the fervour of her request continued to operate like a machine that keeps on humming. Late at night she lit the lamp again, and sat beside the window.
At dawn she heard the motor of an automobile. The dogs barked.
Elvira Cabrini saw a young man with a helmet in his hand on the patio, alongside a race car splattered with mud.
It was the third time that young man could have been champion of the world, and wasn’t. That afternoon was the third time. They say the heart is like a glass, and that when bitterness fills it to the brim, it overflows in tears. The young man left the city behind, racing over dirt paths and mud puddles. Headlights illuminated cow eyes, a hare, an owl. He braked far from everything, in the middle of night.
At that hour he saw a light turned on far away, Elvira’s light. He went towards it, and dawn arrived.
Elvira Cabrini saw him come in. She saw the most beautiful of gods eating bread and butter before her eyes. A man told her who he was, a boy told her of his pain. Blond hair stuck to his temples, his helmet rested on a chair.
Love burned within her once again.
While he was bathing she went for a walk. She looked at the low clouds like the bellies of marvellous birds brooding over the egg-shaped lake.
The world revealed itself to her once more.
He went to sleep a siesta in the guest room, and she crowned herself with flowers before the bedroom mirror. She looked blonde, just as she had when she was young.
She died, rosy, smiling, during that siesta.
STEAM IN THE MIRROR
‘TOKIO’ IS THE NAME of my neighbourhood dry cleaner’s. Sitting at a desk, its owner oversees the work. She hardly speaks Spanish. Amidst the steam her children listen to tangos on the radio.
The day they made me rector of the university I went to have my trousers ironed. The boys gave me a dressing gown while I waited.
Out of modesty, the mother left her post. She didn’t know I teach oriental languages. I could read, on the table, what she’d been writing:
Here you are
Mirror
Four years hidden under papers
A trace of beauty lingered on your waters.
Why didn’t you save it?
It’s worth something, I understood that afternoon, to be rector of the university, expert in oriental languages, owner of a single pair of trousers.
IN THE PUNA
WHEN YOU’RE TRANSFERRED to the Puna, think of me. I was transferred there to be headmaster of a school.
The Puna is a desert. People in the city like to listen to songs naming it. They don’t know oxygen isn’t breathed there, that water boils cold. Children often die on their way to school.
As far as the school goes, I’ve never compromised. As a teacher, my lessons were never based on rote learning. As director, I prohibited it. ‘I want students, not parrots,’ was my motto. Some teachers hated me; I treated them as idiots.
In the Puna life moves a different way. To be more precise: it doesn’t move.
Sometimes, reading beneath the lamp, I murmur, ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare…’ And beauty accompanies me.
When I get down from my mule, songs about dead lovers and the knight who cannot be named haunt me.
In bed, where I hardly sleep, I hear the three virtues named. I meditate on them: why are there three? Why these three? What are they?
Something, faint as a stroke of chalk on the blackboard, is inscribed within me. Partially erased, but not entirely.
When you’re transferred to the Puna (no one can escape it), the voice of memory will nourish you.
You’ll regret ever having a headmaster like me, inimical to putting wheat in earth, bread of the exiled man.
JULIANO STAMPA
I WAS JULIANO STAMPA’S FRIEND until I was twenty years old. I was in love with his mother, she was in love with him.
The place where we studied had three balconies. We quickly learned how to look outside without leaning on our hands. There were roses on the sill.
An entire language flowed in from the park to that room. Like sailors in a sea of green we cast our view outward, then reeled it back in so we could study.
I felt fear, respect and admiration for Juliano. He was fierce and elegant, and never lied. His rages seemed to be a kind of lashing out. The intensity of his bad moods was unsettling.
I spent my time waiting for the moment his mother appeared. When she showed up, she would rush past to avoid us, out of sensitivity more than anything. She was just like a Hollywood actress with her sunny smile. Compassionate, musical, wary of animals. Extremely beautiful.
But that shyness, that fear of troubling anyone with her demeanour, exasperated him.
One afternoon, the rumbling of a car leaving for the station could be heard. Juliano’s angst increased. His father was arriving by that train. Later I ran into him under the majestic trees of the garden. An energetic man.
Every day at dawn he conferred with my father under those trees. They stretched out their arms, pointing here and there. My father wore a straw hat. He was the gardener.
The chimneys of the Stampa factories seemed to afflict Juliano with their blackness. He made drawings of hanged or martyred men. But he never talked badly of anyone. It was himself he disliked.
I always kept to myself the little I learned about him. We would go together to the city and separate at the station, Retiro or Palermo. I went to the law faculty and he studied administration, supposedly.
Most of the time he would go to the zoo. He spent hours before the cages, drawing animals during the hour for lessons. His tigers seemed to breathe.
Other times he went to his father’s factories, toured the plants, was presented to foremen. One night we drank too much, and he burst into tears.
When he was twenty he escaped. He wrote one letter from Montevideo, and another from Europe, asking to be forgiven. He gave no explanations.
In London I was able to see him.
He was a great clown.
His mother travelled regularly to see him. She couldn’t help clapping, though she was afraid he’d discover her in the last row. She was a widow, and now had a younger husband. It wasn’t me.
A.R.J.
THIS WAS THE LOT in store for me. Being feared did not free me, as I sometimes thought it might. Preparing myself did not make me prepared.
Someone by my side, spoon in hand, feigns patience.
And I was not a poet. No, I was not. No.
Prologues, conferences. What passion amidst papers. Truth is, I was moved when, one day, I saw my name in a newspaper.
Ridiculous, I am afraid, so fat, in love with beautiful young men.
I, who have been immortal in someone’s lap, had to put up with sarcasm and taxes.
Later, domestic love with someone uglier than me. (But, hadn’t I dreamt of Apollo?) Spoon in hand, eyes looking longingly out the window, domestic love prepared to fly. Hadn’t we cooked and got fat together? Hadn’t we sworn to ourselves that we’d lose weight? We’d joke at the scales.
The smell of books, a two-room apartment on Alsina Street. A neon sign blinded the view from the window. Was this life then? What about Greece and the blue sea? Illusions.
From today on, everything is yesterday.
Of the things I think about, imprisoned in the stone of paralysis, something pleases me, and I go over it again and again: tablecloths and cheap wine in certain restaurants. Some friends drink and cut cheese while waiting for their meal. They are hardly even my colleagues. A poet, a professor, not even that.
One, triumphant, c
arries my lost laurel in his pocket. My name comes up and someone gives the news. Terror brushes its wing against them, first in the form of disbelief, then mocking. A laugh, eyes wide open. (What awaits me? each one thinks.) Someone asks if it’s necessary to visit. No, they decide. No.
An imperfect form that desired to be perfect, an unhappy man who desired to be happy, soon I will erase myself.
I say: While in cities there remain tables with wine and tablecloths, and someone can make jokes about the breath of horror, I will be happy with the world. With this world, which I came to know despite myself.
AGNUS DEI
I, SISTER CATALINA, had to open the door to the sheep girl they brought her from the south. Pity struck me dumb.
They entrusted her to me. I rubbed her knees with oil – she couldn’t walk on her feet – to get her used to my smell. Usually I sing to the children of the asylum, but she didn’t understand any of the songs.
I tried to imagine her previous years as if they’d been mine. Open sky, land, fleece appeared in my memory. I cut the mass of caltrop that was her hair.
The other children looked up at my window when they went to play in the patio.
I slept with her, since she suffered. One room, one bed. They meant nothing to her.
Perhaps some had warned her: one night the Mother Superior caught me bleating.
‘I gave her to you to make her human,’ she said. ‘And you’re turning into a sheep?’
Oh yes, I wanted to say, but not fast enough.
I got in the habit of praying, ‘Lamb of God, have mercy.’
Mercy he did have. She never smiled. My triumph – a sad one – were her tears; once.
Then she died.
It was in September 1911.
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