Espinosa recalled his father’s saying that almost every case of longevity that was cited in the country was really a case of bad memory or of a dim notion of dates. Gauchos are apt to be ignorant of the year of their birth or of the name of the man who begot them.
In the whole house, there was apparently no other reading matter than a set of the Farm Journal, a handbook of veterinary medicine, a deluxe edition of the Uruguayan epic Tabaré, a History of Shorthorn Cattle in Argentina, a number of erotic or detective stories, and a recent novel called Don Segundo Sombra. Espinosa, trying in some way to bridge the inevitable after-dinner gap, read a couple of chapters of this novel to the Gutres, none of whom could read or write. Unfortunately, the foreman had been a cattle drover, and the doings of the hero, another cattle drover, failed to whet his interest. He said that the work was light, that drovers always traveled with a packhorse that carried everything they needed, and that, had he not been a drover, he would never have seen such far-flung places as the Laguna de Gómez, the town of Bragado, and the spread of the Núñez family in Chacabuco. There was a guitar in the kitchen; the ranch hands, before the time of the events I am describing, used to sit around in a circle. Someone would tune the instrument without ever getting around to playing it. This was known as a guitarfest.
Espinosa, who had grown a beard, began dallying in front of the mirror to study his new face, and he smiled to think how, back in Buenos Aires, he would bore his friends by telling them the story of the Salado flood. Strangely enough, he missed places he never frequented and never would: a comer of Cabrera Street on which there was a mailbox; one of the cement lions of a gateway on Jujuy Street, a few blocks from the Plaza del Once; an old barroom with a tiled floor, whose exact whereabouts he was unsure of. As for his brothers and his father, they would already have learned from Daniel that he was isolated—etymologically, the word was perfect—by the floodwaters.
Exploring the house, still hemmed in by the watery waste, Espinosa came across an English Bible. Among the blank pages at the end, the Guthries—such was their original name—had left a handwritten record of their lineage. They were natives of Inverness; had reached the New World, no doubt as common laborers, in the early part of the nineteenth century; and had intermarried with Indians. The chronicle broke off sometime during the eighteen-seventies, when they no longer knew how to write. After a few generations, they had forgotten English; their Spanish, at the time Espinosa knew them, gave them trouble. They lacked any religious faith, but there survived in their blood, like faint tracks, the rigid fanaticism of the Calvinist and the superstitions of the pampa Indian. Espinosa later told them of his find, but they barely took notice.
Leafing through the volume, his fingers opened it at the beginning of the Gospel according to St. Mark. As an exercise in translation, and maybe to find out whether the Gutres understood any of it, Espinosa decided to begin reading them that text after their evening meal. It surprised him that they listened attentively, absorbed. Maybe the gold letters on the cover lent the book authority. It’s still there in their blood, Espinosa thought. It also occurred to him that the generations of men, throughout recorded time, have always told and retold two stories—that of a lost ship which searches the Mediterranean seas for a dearly loved island, and that of a god who is crucified on Golgotha. Remembering his lessons in elocution from his schooldays in Ramos Mejía, Espinosa got to his feet when he came to the parables.
The Gutres took to bolting their barbecued meat and their sardines so as not to delay the Gospel. A pet lamb that the girl adorned with a small blue ribbon had injured itself on a strand of barbed wire. To stop the bleeding, the three had wanted to apply a cobweb to the wound, but Espinosa treated the animal with some pills. The gratitude that this treatment awakened in them took him aback. (Not trusting the Gutres at first, he’d hidden away in one of his books the two hundred and forty pesos he had brought with him.) Now, the owner of the place away, Espinosa took over and gave timid orders, which were immediately obeyed. The Gutres, as if lost without him, liked following him from room to room and along the gallery that ran around the house. While he read to them, he noticed that they were secretly stealing the crumbs he had dropped on the table. One evening, he caught them unawares, talking about him respectfully, in very few words.
Having finished the Gospel according to St. Mark, he wanted to read another of the three Gospels that remained, but the father asked him to repeat the one he had just read, so that they could understand it better. Espinosa felt that they were like children, to whom repetition is more pleasing than variations or novelty. That night—this is not to be wondered at—he dreamed of the Flood; the hammer blows of the building of the Ark woke him up, and he thought that perhaps they were thunder. In fact, the rain, which had let up, started again. The cold was bitter. The Gutres had told him that the storm had damaged the roof of the tool shed, and that they would show it to him when the beams were fixed. No longer a stranger now, he was treated by them with special attention, almost to the point of spoiling him. None of them liked coffee, but for him there was always a small cup into which they heaped sugar.
The new storm had broken out on a Tuesday. Thursday night, Espinosa was awakened by a soft knock at his door, which—just in case—he always kept locked. He got out of bed and opened it; there was the girl. In the dark he could hardly make her out, but by her footsteps he could tell she was barefoot, and moments later, in bed, that she must have come all the way from the other end of the house naked. She did not embrace him or speak a single word; she lay beside him, trembling. It was the first time she had known a man. When she left, she did not kiss him; Espinosa realized that he didn’t even know her name. For some reason that he did not want to pry into, he made up his mind that upon returning to Buenos Aires he would tell no one about what had taken place.
The next day began like the previous ones, except that the father spoke to Espinosa and asked him if Christ had let Himself be killed so as to save all other men on earth. Espinosa, who was a freethinker but who felt committed to what he had read to the Gutres, answered, “Yes, to save everyone from Hell.”
Gutre then asked, “What’s Hell?”
“A place under the ground where souls burn and burn.”
“And the Roman soldiers who hammered in the nails—were they saved, too?”
“Yes,” said Espinosa, whose theology was rather dim.
All along, he was afraid that the foreman might ask him about what had gone on the night before with his daughter. After lunch, they asked him to read the last chapters over again.
Espinosa slept a long nap that afternoon. It was a light sleep, disturbed by persistent hammering and by vague premonitions. Toward evening, he got up and went out onto the gallery. He said, as if thinking aloud, “The waters have dropped. It won’t be long now.”
“It won’t be long now,” Gutre repeated, like an echo.
The three had been following him. Bowing their knees to the stone pavement, they asked his blessing. Then they mocked at him, spat on him, and shoved him toward the back part of the house. The girl wept. Espinosa understood what awaited him on the other side of the door.
When they opened it, he saw a patch of sky. A bird sang out. A goldfinch, he thought. The shed was without a roof; they had pulled down the beams to make the cross.
The Unworthy Friend
Our image of the city is always slightly out of date. Cafés have degenerated into barrooms; old arched entranceways with their grilled inner gates, once giving us a glimpse of patios and of overhanging grapevines, are now dingy corridors that lead abruptly to an elevator. For years, in this way, I thought that in a certain block of Talcahuano Street I might still find the Buenos Aires Bookstore. But one morning I discovered its place had been taken by an antique shop, and I was told that don Santiago Fischbein, its owner, had died. Fischbein had been a heavyset, rather overweight man, whose features I now remember less than our long talks. In a quiet but firm way he had always been against Zi
onism, which he held would turn the Jew into a man like anyone else—tied down to a single tradition and a single homeland, and no longer enriched by strife and complexities. He’d been at work, he once told me, putting together a comprehensive anthology of the writings of Baruch Spinoza, freed of all that Euclidean apparatus, which, while lending to its strange system an illusory rigor, bogs the reader down. He would not sell me, but let me look at, a rare copy of Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata. At home I still have a few books on the Kabbalah by Ginsburg and by Waite which bear the seal of Fischbein’s shop.
One afternoon, when the two of us were alone, he confided a story to me about his early life, and I feel I can now set it down. As may be expected, I will alter one or two details. Here is what Fischbein said.
I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before. Ana—my wife—doesn’t know a word about this, nor do any of my closest friends. These things took place so many years ago now that I sometimes feel they might have happened to another person. Maybe you can make some use of this as a story—which, of course, you’ll dress up with daggers. I wonder if I’ve already told you I was born in the Province of Entre Ríos. I can’t say we were Jewish gauchos—there never were any Jewish gauchos. We were shopkeepers and farmers.
Anyway, I was born in Urdinarrain, a town I can hardly remember anymore. I was very young when my parents moved to Buenos Aires to open up a shop. A few blocks away from where we lived was the Maldonado, and beyond that ditch were open lots.
Carlyle says that men need heroes to worship. Argentine schoolbooks tried getting me to worship San Martín, but in him I found little more than a soldier who’d fought his battles in other countries and who’s now only a bronze statue and the name of a square. Chance, however— unfortunately enough for the two of us—provided me with another kind of hero. This is probably the first time you’ve ever heard of him. His name was Francisco Ferrari.
Our neighborhood may not have been as tough as the Stockyards or the waterfront, but it had its share of hoodlums who hung out in the old saloons. Ferrari’s particular hangout was a place at the comer of Triunvirato and Thames. It was there the thing happened that brought me under his spell. I’d been sent around to the saloon to buy a small package of mate, when in walked a stranger with long hair and a moustache, and ordered a shot of gin. Ferrari said to him, mildly, “By the way, didn’t we see each other night before last dancing at Juliana’s? Where are you from?”
“From San Cristóbal,” the other man said.
“My advice,” Ferrari said, still gently, “is that you might find it healthier to keep away from here. This neighborhood’s full of people on the lookout for trouble.”
On the spot, the man from San Cristóbal turned tail—moustache and all. Maybe he was just as much a man as Ferrari was, but he knew others of the gang were around.
From that afternoon on, Francisco Ferrari was the hero my fifteen years were in search of. He was dark and stood straight and tall— good-looking in the style of the day. He always wore black. One day, a second episode brought us together. I was on the street with my mother and aunt, when we ran into a bunch of young toughs and one of them said loudly to the others:
“Old stuff. Let them by.”
I didn’t know what to do. At that moment, Ferrari stepped in. He had just left his house. He looked the ringleader straight in the eye and said, “If you’re out for fun, why not try having some with me?”
He kept staring them up and down, one after the other, and there wasn’t a word out of any of them. They knew all about him. Ferrari shrugged his shoulders, tipped his hat, and went on his way. But before starting off, he said to me, “If you have nothing else to do, drop in at the saloon later on.”
I was tongue-tied. “There’s a gentleman who demands respect for ladies,” my Aunt Sarah pronounced.
Coming to my rescue, my mother said, “I’d say more a hoodlum who wants no competition.”
I don’t really know how to explain this now. I’ve worked my way up, I own this shop—which I love—and I know my books; I enjoy friendships like ours, I have my wife and children, I belong to the Socialist Party, I’m a good Argentine and a good Jew. People look up to me. As you can see, I’m almost bald; in those days I was just a poor redheaded Jew-boy, living in a down-and-out neighborhood. Like all young men, of course, I tried hard to be the same as everyone else. Still, I was sneered at. To shake off the Jacob, I called myself Santiago, but just the same there was the Fischbein. We all begin taking on the idea others have of us. Feeling people despised me, I despised myself as well. At that time, and above all in that neighborhood, you had to be tough. I knew I was a coward. Women scared the daylights out of me, I was deeply ashamed of my inexperience with them, and I had no friends my own age.
That night I didn’t go around to the saloon. How I wish I never had! But the feeling grew on me that Ferrari’s invitation was something of an order, so the next Saturday, after dinner, I finally walked into the place.
Ferrari sat at the head of one of the tables.
I knew all the other men by sight. There were six or seven of them. Ferrari was the eldest, except for an old man who spoke little and wearily and whose name is the only one I have not forgotten—don Eliseo Amaro. The mark of a slash crossed his broad, flabby face. I found out afterward he’d spent some time in jail.
Ferrari sat me down at his left, making don Eliseo change places for me. I felt a bit uneasy, afraid Ferrari would mention what had happened on the street a few days before. But nothing of the kind took place. They talked of women, cards, elections, of a street singer who was about to show up but never did, of neighborhood affairs. At first, they seemed unwilling to accept me, then later—because it was what Ferrari wanted—they loosened up. In spite of their names, which for the most part were Italian, every one of them thought of himself (and thought of each other) as Argentine and even gaucho. Some of them owned or drove teams or were butchers at the slaughter yards, and having to deal with animals made them a lot like farm hands. My suspicion is that their one desire was to have played the outlaw Juan Moreira. They ended up calling me the Sheeny, but they didn’t mean it in a bad way. It was from them that I learned to smoke and do other things.
In a brothel on Junín Street, somebody asked me whether I wasn’t a friend of Francisco Ferrari’s. I told him I wasn’t, feeling that to have answered yes would have been bragging.
One night the police came into the saloon and frisked us. Two of the gang were taken into custody, but Ferrari was left alone. A couple of weeks later the same thing happened all over again; this second time they rounded up Ferrari, too. Under his belt he was carrying a knife. What happened was that he must have had a falling out with the political boss of our ward.
As I look back on Ferrari today, I see him as an unlucky young man who was filled with illusions and in the end was betrayed; but at the time, to me he was a god.
Friendship is no less a mystery than love or any other aspect of this confusion we call life. There have been times when I’ve felt the only thing without mystery is happiness, because happiness is an end in itself. The plain fact is that, for all his brass, Francisco Ferrari, the tough guy, wanted to be friends with someone as pitiful as me. I was sure he’d made a mistake, I was sure I was unworthy of his friendship, and I did my best to keep clear of him. But he wouldn’t let me. My anxiety over this was made even worse by my mother’s disapproval. She just couldn’t get used to the company I kept and went around aping, and referred to them as trash and scum. The point of what I’m telling you is my relationship with Ferrari, not the sordid facts, which I no longer feel sorry about. As long as any trace of remorse remains, guilt remains.
One night, the old man, who had again taken up his usual place beside Ferrari, was whispering back and forth in Ferrari’s ear. They were up to something. From the other end of the table, I thought I made out the name of Weidemann, a man who owned a textile mill out on the edge of the neighborhood. Soon after, without a
ny explanation, I was told to take a stroll around Weidemann’s factory and to have a good look at the gates. It was beginning to get dark when I crossed the Maldonado and cut through the freight yards. I remember the houses, which grew fewer and farther between, a clump of willows, and the empty lots. Weidemann’s was new, but it was lonely and somehow looked like a ruin; in my memory, its red brick gets mixed up with the sunset. The mill was surrounded by a tall fence. In addition to the front entrance, there were two big doors out back opening into the south side of the building.
I have to admit it took me some time to figure out what you’ve probably guessed already. I brought back my report, which was confirmed by one of the others, who had a sister working in the place. Then the plan was laid out. For the gang not to have shown up at the saloon on a Saturday night would have attracted attention, so Ferrari set the robbery for the following Friday. I was the one they picked for lookout. Meanwhile, it was best that we shouldn’t be seen together. When we were alone in the street—just Ferrari and myself—I asked him, “Are you sure you can trust me?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I know you’ll handle yourself like a man.”
That night and the following nights I slept well. Then, on Wednesday, I told my mother I was going downtown to see a new cowboy picture. I put on my best clothes and started out for Moreno Street. The trip on the streetcar was a long one. At police headquarters I was kept waiting, but finally one of the desk sergeants—a certain Eald or Alt—saw me. I told him I’d come about a confidential matter and he said I could speak without fear. I let him in on the gang’s plan. What surprised me was that Ferrari’s name meant nothing to him; but it was something else again when I mentioned don Eliseo.
“Ah,” he said. “He used to be one of the old Montevideo gang.”
He called in another man, who came from my part of town, and the two of them talked things over. The second officer asked me, with a certain scorn in his voice, “Have you come here with this information because you think of yourself as a good citizen?”
Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Page 36
