Nest in the Bones

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  No

  Dreams, more punctual than memories, came to tell me for the third time that the sky of her years of absence was closing.

  I began to feel the day like a melancholy, painful burden.

  I had to wait for night for the solitary commemoration and simple ritual of my worship of love.

  In the morning, they ordered me to go to a public office which has a yard out front and a fence of slender bars. While I waited for the paperwork to find its destination inside, I passed the time walking along the gravel path.

  A nun appeared, accompanied by a little girl with the awestruck look of a recently orphaned child cast into the world, and as she walked toward the building, her gaze settled on my eyes. We were close to each other, and I could make out her very fine peach fuzz and a small mole, light brown, also over her lip. She was young, and I don’t know if what her look stirred up was sorrow or nostalgia for affection, which was the same as not having it, because it was born at the wrong time.

  When the nun walked away, which happened just afterward, I watched her intensely. She responded to me with a clear stare, pure and distant. She stepped onto the sidewalk, paced alongside the fence, I walked past the street, and she left without turning her head.

  At night, I walked to the railway station. It might seem like a strange place for my offering. Ah, I am capable of building up my feelings in silence, and in solitude as well. But something is necessary to bring a memory into being, and what I had of her were those hands, which held onto mine as the train pulled away.

  On the night of the third anniversary, in the midst of the turbulent platforms, I couldn’t mutter that tender phrase that I have in mind for her now. Because to say it, in a fleeting – perhaps miraculous – state of purity, I’d have to concentrate and isolate all the strength of my emotion and my thought.

  I started up on the elevated bridge where the people pass over the trains from one platform to the other. The night was cool, and like a black box, the bridge seemed uninhabited. I scaled the three sets of stairs, and up top I found a woman posed as though waiting. Though I could have reached solitude on the other side of the bridge, it bothered me to come upon her, for it gave rise to that creeping intimation of desire in relation to women. And this wasn’t the moment to give in to everyday urges.

  I descended the three sets of stairs on the other side. I followed the second platform to where the rails cut it off.

  I went back. The woman had stayed in the same place. Despairing of finding the proper moment for my recollections, I closed my eyes and said her name very softly, “Amanda…,” and uttered the spiritual words I had chiseled in my mind for her. But even without watching what was going on around me, I got distracted, and failed to achieve the illusory communion I had enjoyed other times before.

  I started walking back. A man appeared, and a woman joined him. They came down before me and mingled with the other people in the world.

  Had it happened, had the mystery of evocation been lost?

  Oh, yes, it was diminishing inside me as I walked, returning myself to the city’s heart. Because after a few blocks, outside voices began to prevail. First came those of three women who had finished their shift in a restaurant kitchen, as they said. Two were talking and the third sang softly, for herself and herself alone. And I thought how the third, the one who was singing, was enjoying like no one else the good fortune of having finished a day’s labor.

  Then a friend recognized me. And spoke to me. And I spoke back.

  “How are you?”

  “Doing well.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “And you?”

  “Good.”

  That was all, because he took off running to catch the bus. But again, I was communicating with the others. Even in myself, I was going back to being like all the other men.

  At a kiosk, I bought caramels. They were for my sister’s children, though when I reached the house, I knew they’d be asleep. She was working, and the noise of the sewing machine was the only voice in the house that hadn’t died down. I laid them next to her hand.

  She stopped her sewing to greet me, and turned around to look at me with humility and gratitude. It hurt me that she thanked me for everything, even if only with her eyes. For two years now, we’ve been so alone, she and I, and the kids, that I could only define us as a small community brought together by need, and naturally inclined to each other by sentiment.

  “Are you tired?” she asked. I said, “Yeah,” and she repeated, “Yeah. You’re tired.” She said it with such a wounding tone, one that struck me as so wounded, that I felt her sheltering wing close over me.

  Then I knew I could talk with her about Amanda that night, because soon the nostalgia came back to me. And the nostalgia struggled with a measure of pride, the pride of being able to confess a love so muted and so destitute of a future. But I didn’t speak.

  Four days later, when I’d come back home for lunch, by the sewing machine, still at that hour, a letter with my name on it was waiting for me in the place I’d left the caramels.

  It was from Amanda, the first letter from Amanda that had made it into my hands in the entire time I had existed. It was from Amanda. There was no need to open it to know. Among my papers, I had a sheet of notebook paper with a school exercise she had lent me, and I never gave it back, because I was distracted, because I forgot it, because I don’t know why, because in my grammar school days it never occurred to me I’d end up loving her, and so much.

  “Dear friend…” Such a common opening, yet for me it wasn’t, because I was bursting with longings and ressentiments. She told me she had flunked out in the second-to-last year of her program. She had given up her studies to get married the autumn before.

  I knew it. I knew it all when it happened, and I didn’t find out from her.

  A friend came. He told me about our common friend, how she was seeing someone, and I listened as if her existence were the furthest thing from my interests. But I withdrew, as if home from a battle I had lost. That battle never happened, except inside me.

  For a time, amid the fog of the proximity of loss, I gave myself over to scheming. I cooked up plans to obstruct their matrimony. Never the simplest thing: telling her what was happening to me. This was a time when I still feared deep responsibilities.

  Back then, I was slave to the conviction that their marriage had something both terrible and inevitable about it.

  When I found out it had occurred, I consoled myself with the belief that the image of her as a girl, as a fiancée who hadn’t been mine, would go on belonging to me, forever.

  I dedicated to that credo the secret part of my heart, while paradoxically, in the home of my widowed sister, life turned me into a minor sort of godfather to the family.

  Nothing in the letter gave me the right to think it, but still, I thought: “Why couldn’t she help writing me?”

  I dug into my suspicions, in my letters I goaded her to confess, but she revealed nothing in words. Still, she never mentioned her husband, as if he didn’t exist, and if I sent off two letters per week, I got two from her in return, and if they were three, then the postman would bring me three, and her answer was so swift, so clearly written with my own words fresh in her mind, that what we had was now a living, breathing dialogue.

  And one exalted night I plucked an amorous truth from the place where my most guarded feelings lay tucked away. Written on paper, it seemed to belong to me no more, as if it were Amanda’s now. I put the paper in an envelope. I took it, that very night, to the main post office. I couldn’t give myself the chance to regret it.

  I waited three days, four, the normal period. I had to suffer all those instants that make up another day. The letter arrived, and I knew my declaration had provoked neither acceptance nor reproach.

  Then I begged. I begged her to tell me something, to give me a word, even one of condemnation or forgetting, to offer some solidity for my position on this earth, which depended so heavily on her.


  Three days later, an envelope arrived at my house with a small portrait: the figure that provoked in me a hidden, bloody battle with the enchantment of a costly ideal.

  Was that her answer? I refused to let hope disappear.

  Our dialogue lapsed, through my willfulness and silence, until I was sure I would be able to travel: permission from work, the necessary funds, the ticket bought, and the certainty of a date carved in stone.

  I asked her for nothing, I could require nothing of her. Just to wait for me, and not when I got off the train, where passengers cut such a lamentable figure; not in her home, and not somewhere secret; just for her to tell me, before my departure, in two lines, a time and a place.

  She waited for me in her city, on a path trimmed with trees tall as the poplar rows in my province, but thicker. When I arrived and set eyes on it, I was happy, feeling that for our vital occasion, the setting showed touches of grandeur.

  She was there on a still-empty terrace, with twenty or thirty café tables from the pastry shop where we were due to meet.

  With nothing between us, save a few empty tables that were easy to ignore, her presence became clear to me, sweet and grave. She greeted me without extravagance, as saints greet children on prayer cards, with the benevolence and peace of the sinless.

  How should I speak?, I asked myself as I felt my body move forward. How should I speak to that face, that stare? How should I choose my words, how should I think in words?

  She remained in her chair, and above the table I saw the sharp outlines of the serene torso and noble face of her welcome. Gently, a new feeling took hold of me, which forbid me from coming too close to her side, and made me collapse into the chair in front of her, with the table separating us. Twice I said her fated name: “Amanda…Amanda…,” and I took her hand, which was at rest atop the white marble.

  Oh, my God! How it moved her to see me so. In her eyes, a tear was born, so discreet, it clung to her eyelid. And I repeated her name, as though putting a name to my love. And she had to say my name, because it welled inside her, I know, because it crumbled in her mouth with a sob. And she said to me, oh, she said to me!, “My love,” and she sobbed.

  I leapt up from the chair, and when I reached her, she fell into my arms and said it, said it: “My love, my love…”

  But hers was the voice of one uttering the name a dearly beloved lost, and as I embraced her I wanted to ask, in desperation, why, until I felt her lower body twist away, marking an irreparable distance between us.

  Afterwards, we gave each other the most beautiful and saddest hour of my life. But without tears. When we said goodbye, I placed my hand over hers, while it lay on the marble of the table; I squeezed it tight, very tight, and we smiled, one to the other, with bitterness and bravery.

  from Decline and Angel (1958)

  Abandonment and Passivity

  A burst of light speckled the drawer of men’s clothes, but was immediately snuffed out. The light then shifted to the ladies’ clothes, which changed continents: from the dresser drawer to the suitcase, deprived of the silky tidiness they had known when they were freshly ironed. A luster, overlooked, withered and shrank on the bed. The one-piece swimsuit was stripped of the two-piece bikini’s company.

  When the door shut noisily, to announce the suitcase’s departure, the glass of water, still intact, pressed down the handwritten note, echoing, on the table’s esplanade, the vertical presence of a vase of excessively red artificial flowers, streaked with a tender pink that clashed with the furious hue surrounding it.

  But when the violence outside fell silent, the violence of the sun did too, and the pink veining faded, and the flowers turned to an unruly, impalpable blot, nestled in the sedate shadows. Then it was only the alarm clock that kept guard, waiting trivially for the light on the nightstand, for the order of various objects, perhaps their integrity, to change.

  Because all was passive – or mechanical, in the case of the clock – but ready to serve when the door opened once more.

  The glass, almost at once, casts its shadow, faint and translucent, as though rendered in water and glass; then it withdraws it slowly, and later on, but warily, unfurls it again, now in another direction.

  When once more outside in the sky, there are clouds and commotion like an underground demolition, the glass takes fright and turns to something clear, concise, and, if possible, tinged with blue.

  The alarm clock has gone dead.

  Sanctioned by inertia, a fly goes from sun to sun, from sun to sun, but only twice.

  The water turns cloudy in the glass and settles. Like a flower, a mosquito has swum across its surface, and now, inside, its larvae plumb the depths.

  But this tame sea is a deadly cradle, water empty of nourishment, and in the end, it sends the fragile flotsam to the surface.

  The atmosphere longs to loose its gathering weight upon the things, it is a threat to all the days, but it must not be feared.

  A stone, a vulgar stone from a ditch, without warning, without encouragement from its compeers, manages what its lesser familiars, the hailstones, white and ephemeral, could not achieve.

  It rends the windowpane’s chastity, bringing with it the air, which is freedom, though it loses its own, falling prisoner to the room.

  Stripped of the unity that helped make it stable, the windowpane breaks hastily loose, and drags its brother, who became a glass, on to his doom. It lays him low with its dead weight, and the shards intermingle amid the disordered expansion of the water, which doesn’t know what to do, startled free of its enclosure, and runs all over, particularly onto the paper, its once untouchable neighbor.

  The ink, which was cursive, turns painterly and envisages, in blue, bristles, puddles, stalagmites…

  From now on, the window resists nothing. It hurries the air along, lets the breeze blow the brittle paper, prematurely aged, off the table, then invites in the north wind, which knocks down the flowerpot and, as if that weren’t enough, flings dirt over it and its flowers.

  The light, which came only in daytime, and always through the window, returns one night, emanating from the filaments in the lamp in the midground. The objects, opaque under the dust, recover their volume and discreteness.

  One of the shoes stepping forth among them lands on the paper, as though to even out the rough spots, though all it does is get it dirty. And so, decrepit and muddy, the paper rises up, crepitating until brought near the glimmer of a pair of spectacles. It descends to the nightstand and there, bathed in a different light, this time from the resurrected bedside lamp, it quivers an interminable while before the round lenses. But it doesn’t submit. It is no longer a message.

  The purity of the sunlight triumphs over the tenuous yellow, past its prime, still drifting out of the two bulbs.

  The sunlight, a stern investigator, finds that everything is there. There’s less order: the quilt is wrinkled, the drawers are open…but everything is still there. A shirt is missing from the drawer of men’s clothes, and a kerchief and a pair of socks; but dirty, on top of a chair, lie another shirt, another kerchief, and another pair of socks.

  from The Affection of Dimwits (1961)

  The Horse in the Salt Flats

  August, 1924

  The plane moves evasively through the sky.

  When it passes over the ranches clustered around the station, the boys scatter and the men brace their legs to bear the tremors.

  It’s already on the other side, vanishing, level with the hill. The boys and their mothers look out, like after the rain falls. The men’s voices return:

  “Must be Zanni…the airman?”

  “Can’t be. Zanni’s taking a trip around the world.”

  “So, what, we’re not in the world?”

  “That’s right. But nobody knows it except for us.”

  Pedro Pascual listens and goes along with those who know best; it must be the airplane is going out to meet the king’s train.

  Umberto of Savoy, Prince of Piedm
ont, isn’t a king; but he will be, they say, when his father dies, because his father is a real king.

  That same afternoon, they say, the prince from Europe will be here, in this poor, sandy country.

  Pedro Pascual wants to see him so he can tell his wife. If only she were there. Pedro Pascual likes to share things with her, even if it’s just yerba mate or laughter. And he doesn’t like being alone, like a tagalong, for the visit, standing out in front of the yard. He’s not sullen; it’s just that he hasn’t settled in; the Mendozans laugh at his Córdoba accent.

  He takes refuge among the bundles of fodder. He works all that land, the boss’s land, and has to carry the feed baled in wire so the cows won’t go hungry. The hands that grasp and gather light on the plants they have mown along the way, which will serve as medicines for his home. Pearl-fruit, tabaquillo, burro tea, myrtle, vomitbush…He shifts and sorts the clumps and the mixture of fragrances brings back the feel of home, condensed inside an aromatic cup. But the thyme’s intensity overwhelms his sense of smell, and Pedro Pascual tries to compare it with something, but he doesn’t get it right until he thinks, convinced: This one is the king, because it brings fragrance to the land.

  That’s the king’s train? One little engine and a caboose spewing smoke? It can’t be, but the people say…

  Pedro Pascual ignores it. He’s being called by that sheaf of low, blue clouds covering the sky. He feels betrayed, as though they’d distracted him with a toy and called up the storm behind his back. But why all this displeasure and worry? Isn’t it water that the fields need? Sure, but…his field lies out past Toad Hill.

  The little engine blows its whistle when it leaves the station behind and to Pedro Pascual, it seems like it’s startled the clouds. They mill together, change course, open up, as though cracked, prodded by the formidable wind. The sun falls again on the brownish-gray sand and Pedro Pascual feels it light him up inside, because the cloud front looks like it’s retreated to take the water to where he needs it.