Land of Smoke

by Sara Gallardo

  Discreet and delicate just as the talks at the restaurant, but with the added nuance of the later hour, the dialogues ranged over any theme that occurred to them. They also avoided others, although not intentionally. The celebration of a winning racehorse years before or a commentary on a beautiful woman might come up, but this was the exception. Topics expressing the most intense ordinariness of being, such as the increases in prices, were treated with the grace of exceptional spirits. For that is what these men were.

  Chance had played no role in their gathering. The decanting process of life isolates the best of some human compounds over the years, in a kind of suspension in which a tincture of subtle elements is achieved. Whatever it is that saturates the streets of old cities with culture can also tint the substrate of souls. This compound loosens during a meeting of inveterate or chance loners, such as in a bar at night. Culture is the most appropriate word for it. When a bar possesses, besides the daily debris that the flow of life accumulates on its tables, that condensation, made up of two or three patrons duly provided with the just degree of renunciation, acceptance of fate and rebellion against vulgarity, which is often the result of holding on to a hermit’s vocation for many decades, the publican can be assured that a flickering light, the reddish, perplexed light of spirit, rises at night between the gloomy walls of his establishment, under the neon lighting.

  With some hermits in bars there are other underlying layers, such as meanness, envy and insults. But that was not the case here.

  Diogenes earned his living by drawing clock faces; his designs were highly polished. One afternoon he showed them to Frin, thereby earning his unconditional admiration. Diogenes was gentle, pink and somewhat bald, a native of Madrid who had arrived as a child with his struggling parents. There was one point he himself couldn’t understand: his success in love. He took advantage of it without reflecting on it too much. Frin saw astrological reasons for it. Diogenes smiled, interested.

  One hour of conversation or maybe two. With Moreiro, his brothers, Matías and Diogenes, partial combinations or all at the same time. Afterwards Frin left the bar to go home. A newt that has received its quota of air on a rock and dives into the salty green will feel a shiver of pleasure, swimming with free movements in the cold currents, at the unimaginable depths where he has chosen to live. He left the illuminated zone behind and entered his solitude, made echoless by the dark night.

  Dark night. A phrase that poorly describes a state that doesn’t even have the quality of night. Nothing lurks there, no light, no terror. A landscape without echoes, a kind of deprivation of the senses in which ears, palate, eyes, fingers and nose give no help. There are no signs. A corridor which isn’t even a corridor, devoid of walls and apparently leading nowhere. It’s not even dark, but merely opaque. The only path is to go on. But where?

  There he was.

  There are different kinds of people. Diggers, climbers, dreamers. Alberto Frin was the taut string of a trembling instrument. Related sounds triggered in him sympathetic vibrations, always excessive. A spiritual revelation could make him cry, alone, leaning on his worn door, from emotion, gratitude, admiration. Lightning bolts of the eternal expressed by a remote Arab, a piece of music, a paragraph in the newspaper or the expression of a profile glimpsed in the street constituted a very precise alphabet with an intensity that consumed him. His poems expressed no naive intuitions nor were they aesthetic paths. They referred to experiences of a reality hidden behind the visible; mystical, if one must give them a name. They contained mysterious references not understood by everyone. In that world of strange and supernatural sounds, afternoons of angst left him prostrate, and joys transfigured him. And periods when he felt crushed, irritable and furious and made him enigmatic.

  Nothing he could share. What could he explicitly tell the waiters at Pino’s, the fellow customers at Moreiro’s or the enthusiastic women who came into his bed and whom he saw off afterwards without much conversation? Tacit exchanges were hidden behind common acts.

  In the narrow world of local literature, his appearances produced unease and rage against what seemed untoward and misplaced. He lacked the gift of small talk. It would have seemed natural to see him open a window and leave, walking away on the air with his absorbed, magnetic and vulnerable look. Reduced to the ordinary life of ordinary mortals, like an insect with burnt antennae, he kept going to Moreiro’s bar.

  A stream. It sparkles on stones, resounds. A feature of the landscape brings it to a sudden halt. We see the litheness of the shimmering element, its wavelets pregnant with oxygen, flatten into a circular pool. Pool. It seems murky compared to the current that feeds it, that is itself. No observer can easily recognise the icy essence of mountain ranges in its transformation. What is free and pure takes on a murkiness that seems to stem from other lives, related to decomposition. Greenness begins to show in this environment devoid of the oxygen-delirium it carried on its way there.

  The water does not know what’s happening. It feels death within itself. Pullulating breeding takes advantage of the absence of the cold and pressure to set in, and the trapped water, halted and murky, accepts it. A film of unhappiness stretches over it, but it does not protest. Feeling death, it resigns itself to the absence of movement, the absence of wind, the absence of intoxication. It splashes softly against the edges and no one notes its suffering, its confusion.

  This is how Alberto Frin splashed against the shores, stones and plants which were Moreiro’s bar. In the times when he was a running stream, they had seen him entering, drinking and leaving, his facial features transfigured, his eyes bright as crystal, his step belonging to the air more than the pavement. Now, they felt the softness of his gentle splashing as he came to stay and talk about politics, chance, episodes of the Second World War.

  Once he recognised that Diogenes was also a loner, he told him of the existence of the chicory salad, which he considered one of the great discoveries of his time in the kitchen. He was surprised when he found that not only did Diogenes know about chicory, but he held it in contempt with all his soul. Frin’s hermit totalitarianism allowed for the possibility of discrepancy. He laughed. It was as if a coin had fallen in the piggy bank of his faith in humanity.

  When he left, his loneliness waited for him just as a car might for others: private, no longer splendid.

  He did not complain. But he felt his being was nothing more than one big question. He felt wonder at the silence of the universe, and felt his death in that silence. Insomnia, sadness, fatigue and, besides, a muting of the world. Humiliation, it might be said. The gods no longer let fall their feathers, poems, when they flew over him. He accepted this without drama. But he felt as if he was carrying an enormous burden.

  The other men at the bar noticed that the slenderness that had made him seem a stranger was changing to fuller lines. Without comment (men don’t get bogged down in the dirt that interests women) they admitted this as a sign of his likening to themselves, a mixing with their essences. This was an error too, and they knew it. The spring of a step, the tone of a reply, the illumination of his face showed them clearly at times that someone very different accompanied them. A group of country horses tied alongside a purebred racehorse notices without too much effort that they are not equal. Frin was a teaching or a warning for them. About what? About the mystery of the world, one might say. Yes, about the mystery of the world.

  Frin was a jewel, an honour and a gift. Not in an explicit way. But his ironies, striking definitions, and arbitrary and surprising judgements were like the diving of a marine bird that disappears from the world of reason and re-emerges with prey in its beak. It was invigorating for them. They did not suspect Frin’s sadness, his distress. He amazed them with his ability to laugh at another man’s wit, a display of innocence. They admired him without realising it, in a simple and everyday way. They were friends.

  It was a calm night.

  Matías had just understood a truth. Taking a break from the copy of Frankfurter Allgem
eine – a paper that Frin subscribed to and passed on to him – now folded next to his cup of coffee, he’d heard Diogenes crack a joke about his personality. It concerned a certain burnt-out light in Diogenes’ house. Matías had maintained through an entire year that it was a special case. In other words, he had no intention of fixing it.

  Frin, who had drunk a lot, looked at him in the strangest way and asked him a question. Through that question Matías understood the principle that constituted his root. To put it another way, he understood himself. He saw that the idleness he defended at the heart of poverty and the isolation he treasured were what made life livable. That was the very essence of himself. If he were to fix Diogenes’ light, he would begin to fix others’ as well, and that would be the death of him. He would die just as Don Emilio had died, when he hadn’t been able to play music on his albums or pass the time with addition and subtraction. He would die from suffocation, the absence of a vital element. Teresina would probably have died too, or lost her archangelic features, had she carried on the presumed obligation of living with her aged parents.

  Matías understood himself. He saw clearly who he was.

  He found peace.

  It was a quiet night. Moreiro the younger passed a cloth over the counter. A gentle young man, the father of three boys, he had been in jail for a year. Revenge of the police, whom he had charged for what they had drunk out of inexperience. ‘If there is a God,’ he said, ‘someone will pay. If there is not, patience.’ A year in the filth of the jail and he emerged as tender and merciful as he had entered.

  Then, in that stillness amidst the dialogue, a noise started. A din that filled the room from floor to ceiling, making it impossible to hear anything else. The sound of a shouting man. He was yelling at Moreiro the younger. The man was huge. He leaned on the bar.

  Frin swivelled round to look at him. He took Moreiro’s metal tray and slammed it on his table with a crashing Doomsday sound. The man turned.

  He looked at the three customers, who didn’t look at him. Diogenes was pink-faced, Frin’s hair stuck out as if blown in a stiff wind, Matías leaned with his nose over the coffee.

  ‘I know who did that…’ the man murmured, moving forward.

  He held out his arms for balance, opened and closed his hands.

  Something happened.

  Diogenes stood up, taking his chair along with him, and walked to the man. His slightly bald, tame head leaned over the raised chair. He clapped the legs of the chair against the man and used it to push him back. Something about him reminded you of those wasps that can drag a spider three times their size.

  He pushed him all the way to the pavement and then punched his face. Blood began to fall. Frin jumped out to the pavement and cleaned the blood from the man with his handkerchief, murmuring ‘There, there,’ like the tamer of a bear with a crushed paw.

  Then another man appeared, moving between the tables. He had a thin beard and a garland of rags tied to his hat. Stretching out his arms, he yelled, ‘Long live the nation!’

  He turned and left. At the door he made an obscene noise.

  ‘Long live the nation!’ he shouted again, and disappeared.

  A long round of laughter began. Moreiro the elder started, his blue eyes sparkling, and Diogenes followed, then Frin, leaning on the door with his back. Matías laughed, his chin shaking. Moreiro the younger laughed, wet with tears he’d never shown. The man who had yelled, his lapel streaming with blood, laughed with immense guffaws.

  Laughter woke up the windows, display cases and mirror, sweeping clean the entire bar and the souls of those in it.

  Then there was silence. Moreiro the elder uncorked a bottle of Spanish brandy.

  ‘On the house.’

  The younger brother lined up six new glasses, and they all drank, savouring, breathing in.

  At half past three Frin got up. ‘See you tomorrow,’ he said.

  On the pavement he found the air of the night. Also, the beginning of a poem.

  Resigned to the wasteland, he didn’t recognise it. He didn’t recognise it in the phrase that first suggested itself, then returned, a feather from the wing of the gods.

  He picked it up.

  Something was beginning.

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  Copyright

  Pushkin Press

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  Copyright © The Heirs of Sara Gallardo 2018

  English translation © Jessica Sequeira 2018

  Land of Smoke was first published as El país del humo in Argentina, 1977

  First published by Pushkin Press in 2018

  ISBN 13: 978 1 78227 404 9

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