Nest in the Bones

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  “What did he confess to, the murder?”

  “Not so fast, my friend, just wait. Who said murder? The professor declared he had brought the locusts so the seamstresses could copy their wings. He wanted a fabric, not a white one like every bride wears, but a light green, diaphanous one, like the wings of those insects he called…what was the word? Orthopterans.”

  “Very good. So what was your conclusion then, officer?”

  “My conclusion? My conclusions!”

  The journalist again consulted his Longines, no longer hiding it, faced with the prospect of another song and dance, as indeed occurred:

  “One. The professor was involved in her death, though it was never proven, nor was much effort put into doing so, because what can a miserable little police department in the countryside do without the help of criminalistics, who never show their faces around these parts? Two. It was never discovered how the teacher died, nor will it ever be. The coroner didn’t wash his hands, I mean to say he didn’t abandon his obligation to put forward a hypothesis, but the one he came up with was useless. He said the locusts had eaten her from the inside out, entering through her nasal cavities or her mouth, which was open when she died. I’ve heard talk of killer wasps, but never of killer locusts. Anyway, it’s one thing for an insect to kill someone and another thing to eat them, especially if you recall that, as the coroner admitted, the locust is not a carnivorous beast. Three, putting the teacher’s death aside, I can assure you I have another conclusion, of even greater importance. Shall I tell you?”

  Before continuing, the officer asked the arrestee what time his watch showed, if he’d already passed the time limit he himself had set. The journalist responded with an almost, almost…so feebly that the narrator felt free to proceed.

  “I understand you’ve taken my account to be a fantasy and the death of the teacher to be magic, and it should be said, that part doesn’t correspond to the Indians’ recollections. But whether you admit it or not, you are listening to me with malice, and knowing that, I’ll go ahead and tell you the conclusion that has worried me the most, and I’ll save another one, in case you feel like killing an afternoon with me some other time before you return to where you’re from. I’d say you’ve been listening to me, and if you believe me, you’ll add things up and realize that this is, at the very least, the second invasion of locusts this village has had to endure. It must be two, right?”

  “True.”

  “Not counting the one in Egypt.”

  “What’s that have to do with anything?”

  “Listen, I don’t remember too well what I had to learn in school or in catechism. I’d have to ask the priest, but we don’t speak to each other. Regardless, I seem to recall that locusts were one of the seven plagues of Egypt, right? You must know. So from what I can tell, with or without Egypt – though Egypt would be good to include, just to make the accounting more serious – we have to face the fact that locusts, like every other plague, return. And as I see it, everything returns, except for us. When we die, just like the teacher, the jig is up.”

  “Conclusion?”

  “You’ve got to enjoy life, as long as you hold out. Without hurting anyone, understand?”

  It was almost night – not completely, because in the summertime, in the sky presiding over all those fields, the light, before emptying its heavy shadows over the land, wavers at the prospect of a total retreat, and lingers there, concentrated, in the moon and stars, which spread out as though inflamed with vibrant glimmers.

  It wasn’t night, and yet something inside his organism was ordering him to eat. At the door to the station was the photographer, who had drawn once more on the fund of saintly patience he exercised in the course of their association. For which reason the journalist, who took care of the money their company provided for travel expenses, proposed not the best restaurant, because the village didn’t have one, but simply finding nourishment suited to what they both were: a pair of hungry men.

  But after making short work of the cold cuts and beef empanadas, the photographer reasoned against ordering further dishes:

  “Tomorrow, we have to work.”

  Which the journalist took to mean, Tomorrow, we have to start working, and he saw it as fair counsel:

  “Truth is, instead of working, I’ve passed my day in leisure, as a prisoner.”

  As they had agreed to rise early, they set forth with the first gleams of daylight in search of their feature, hoping the locusts had not yet taken flight. They had calculated correctly.

  The insects still covered the trunks of the trees, and those laid out on the ground had remained there, heedless or practicing some morning gymnastics with the aim of getting into shape, the journalist thought, attributing human intentions to the frolicking little beasts which leapt nimbly on their elongated extremities.

  Then, while the photographer, absorbed in his work, amused himself urging them on – Pose, my pretties! What are you doing! Don’t look around, look at the camera! – the journalist brought his eyes close to those locusts still in the clutches of their nocturnal lethargy, hoping to confirm the similarity between the wings of the orthopteran insects and the lace the professor chose for the wedding gown in which he hoped the rural schoolteacher would marry him.

  The position of the newly born sun, piercing the cloudscape that sheathed its ascent, dispatched rays that brought the mass of locusts into view: their angular bodies, long, with four folded wings.

  Later, when the sun’s disc rose a bit higher, its beacon cast shadows from behind, and he could imagine that lace over the young flesh of that woman; and just as he could never know what struck her down, he would never delight in the sight of her face.

  He lost track of time, submerged in these divagations, while the creatures crawled closer together, and when they were a single mass, they took flight in perfect formation, temporarily blocking the view of the sky.

  Everything happened soundlessly, and the journalist asked himself if those airborne creatures’ silence masked a voice that humans couldn’t hear. How wonderful! he said, not quite knowing the source of his wonderment, perhaps still imagining those thousands of locusts had taken flight to form, before the blue canvas of the everyday sky, a Nile-green sky destined for a single day, like the green of that wedding dress.

  They photographed locusts sitting still, locusts busy eating, and locusts posted on stationary trains that couldn’t move forward without sliding off perilously and risking derailment. They photographed locusts up close and from afar, but from too far away was impossible, the camera couldn’t capture them. The photographer knowingly squandered his plates, aware of the loss of material incurred but wishing to catch sight of a locust’s mandibles as it chewed, while not certain whether locusts had mandibles.

  They photographed the stationmaster, the stalled trains’ engineers, the neighbors from the village, who offered opinions…

  They lunched on leaner rations than the evening before, rested a while in the beds in the pension, and when they left, the journalist told his colleague he was taking the road to the police station.

  “Again?” said the photographer, astonished.

  “My conversation with the officer was cut short. And he owes me some mate…”

  “Best if we be sincere: you got used to prison life.”

  The officer said he’d been waiting for him and showed him the kettle on the coals and the strong yerba mate he was brewing.

  He said if the journalist was looking to find out the professor’s fate after the death of his secret love, he would share with him the last part of the story.

  He doubted he would be believed, even supposing the journalist lent credence to what he’d heard before, because, he clarified, the professor’s conduct became even more perverse thereafter, not because he caused problems per se, but because he proposed something that struck the neighbors as extraordinarily strange.

  The professor knew he’d disappointed them before, promising pollinating insect
s and instead bringing locusts that loosed rack and ruin and the countryside, laying it waste before stopping one day and setting off in a dark cloud, doubtless to pillage crops and threaten men’s bread elsewhere, and so, he proclaimed he would procure them the blessing of water.

  They didn’t lack for water in the village or the fields, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy their longings to increase the arable land, and securing them more, and others of nature’s bounties, was the meat of his new proposition.

  He didn’t come back with a suitcase or trunk, but with a bearded character with a black head of hair trimmed to resemble a fakir at a fair. At first he kept him from the public eye, and even when he lowered his guard, he merely introduced the man as Garrick, neither mentioning details concerning him or praising whatever virtues he might possess. Nor did he speak again of his promise of water, and yet the population couldn’t help but see Garrick as a magician who would make it rain more than before, filling the ponds and lakes from which the canals snaked out to the thirsty fields.

  One day, when the time seemed right, the professor and Garrick set to work. They set up vertical wooden pillars, unfurled a canvas cloth, and raised a spacious tent.

  He summoned the population and tried to dispel doubts, telling all that Garrick was neither magician nor acrobat nor trapeze artist. He was an actor.

  Someone asked from the stands:

  “A comedian?”

  And the professor smiled by way of a response, but there was something ambiguous in his smile.

  The people took the professor at his word, keeping in mind how gruesomely he’d lost his beloved.

  The professor explained then that Garrick was a dramatic actor, although – a curious intuition from the man in the audience, he said – in England, he was renowned as one of the great artists of history for his ability to make others laugh.

  Perhaps, he clarified, the English had their reasons for cataloguing him as they had, but on coming to America, he had pursued his true vocation, that of the art of drama. And so, after passing through the big city theaters, in Buenos Aires, for example, he found he preferred the circus tent. Beneath it, he said, in the circle of sand, he had acted out gaucho sagas of love and courage, from Martín Fierro to Santos Vega and Hormiga Negra, the protagonists of which he’d known in real life and with some of whom, the last two, for example, he had even shared the stage.

  This announcement didn’t please the audience.

  There were murmurs, and some said to others that Santos Vega and the other gauchos were noble and capable of greater feats, facing off against an armed band or mouthing off to the devil while playing guitar. But that wasn’t what they wanted, what they wanted was water, and if not, if this was how things had to be, then the foreigner, the actor, could be an actor, but he’d best be a comic one.

  “Comic and otherwise,” said Garrick, with the visible approval of the professor, who had heard the murmurs and shared them with the artist.

  Garrick stepped away, then returned weighed down with masks and disguises, a whole array of clothing suited to clowns, jesters, mummers, acrobats, mimics, buffoons, and gagsters.

  But he left aside, ostentatiously, the contraptions for the masquerade, and devoted himself naturally and effortlessly to making them laugh, with stories, gags, wit, impersonations, much brilliance, and occasional grimaces, but tactful ones, without any sort of exaggeration.

  And the people reveled and laughed unrestrained, laughed until they cried.

  Their tears flowed together like a rivulet, which grew as it coursed through the town and emptied its current in the outskirts.

  And in that way, through the magic virtue of joyous tears, lakes, lagoons, and other deposits which, if they are large enough, are given the name mar chiquita, spread across the vastness of Spanish America.

  Madrid, winter of 1982

  Uncollected Stories

  Hands in the Night

  The man has come back to the big, mysterious city. It was his homeland, but after a period of absence, he feels like a stranger. By day he plunges into the maze of streets and the multiplicity of means of transport, confused and stymied in any attempt to arrive at any place in particular. By night, he wrangles with his insomnia in a borrowed room, lacking means to buy his own or rent one.

  Tonight, he’s overcome his fear of falling, of tripping on the sidewalks with their pavers upturned, as if they’d suffered a bombardment; he’s overcome the fear of bumping into the hooligans who wantonly rob passersby. An obsession compels him: held in a hand that waits to pass it to him somewhere in the undeciphered city. Aided by this improbable illusion, he has walked past the streets constantly rumbling with the clamor of cars in motion, arriving at the outskirts where an unseen dog howls, baneful and haunting.

  He can’t see why the beast isn’t in the open fields instead of behind the wall he’s just come upon, and all alone, he follows the linear structure, finding neither a single person on his path nor a single opening that might permit anyone to emerge or approach him.

  The man stays there, in the midst of the dreadful silence, startled by the bellows or cries of the big dog which he cannot describe as such, for he hasn’t seen it.

  The man walks and walks, endeavoring to reach the end of the wall, never getting past that band of stone or brick that hovers beside him, blocking his access to the plane he suspects lies beyond it. He imagines he’s arrived at the Great Wall of China and consoles himself with the thought of coming across some sentry box where a man will say a word and give him shelter. This guardian or watchman could be a soldier, he reflects, and armed, and instead of giving him his hand he may stab him with the bayonet on the tip of his rifle. The image makes him cringe, but doesn’t deter him from his mission of walking to the place where he knows a hand is waiting for him.

  The journey along the wall lasts so long that the man starts to think there is nothing behind it, nothing promising at least, though his conjecture is belied by the barking, for if there is a dog, then presumably, a human being, master or executioner, is with him.

  Without rescinding its shadow, without permitting the least infiltration of light, whether from the sky or along the surface of the ground, the night follows its course, stretching on longer than what might be thought normal.

  The man feels an irritation, like an itch on his chin and cheek. He brings a hand to those parts of his face and finds his beard has grown. How long, how many nights has he spent walking, besieged by that hound, bloodthirsty, or so it seems, which would have pounced to destroy him, had it not been for the wall?

  He questions the tension making his chest tremble, and he grasps at another theory: there is nothing to fear, there is nothing behind the wall, no living beings nor beings of any other sort, the world ends beyond that barrier; but that is no comfort, either: if the barrier fell, abstractly or materially, with an intolerable bang, the man – he thinks – would run up against the shell of the universe or if not, a surface empty and barren, like the crust of the moon.

  The perspective of a solitude so vast torments him and smothers him with fear.

  But over and over, he returns, as to a kindly hope, to his intention when he began his walk: to find the hand outstretched to him, the lost loner in the night.

  He advances obstinately, ignoring his fears, weighed down by the likely danger, the nature of which he still doesn’t know.

  He has faith, a dark and indecipherable faith, that regardless of the risk, it may be benevolent. But he has to find the hand, the fraternal hand that welcomes him, only then will he have passed the test.

  Now the hungry void is behind him, the one that called him as though to devour him, the immense black emptiness behind or alongside the surrounding wall, which has, in the meantime, ceased to be a barrier, and is now like an orange peel, a twisted strip of rind. Inside, it protects or cushions what resemble monuments, more than one of them, more than ten.

  He goes over to look more closely, and finds they have doors. On this door, and
indeed, on the one further off, hangs a heavy knocker which, looking closely, betrays the form of a hand. He is tempted to lift it from the bottom and let it drop to test its weight. Then the hand vanishes: it is now a dangling serpent with an upraised head.

  Then the hand manages to capture it in its grasp. The hand is a ruse, a deadly instrument. And to overcome terror and misfortune, he must ignore it. Just when he’s due to pound the door with the knocker, he suspects it to represent vengeance against him, but he knows he is innocent, and must maintain his composure.

  He takes the knocker, which is heavy, and his hand hurries down, with a muffled but powerful sound of bronze banging against the door. He knocks, and the dull sound is like a magic invocation: the lights open up, and the wall that obstructed his vision vanishes. The man recognizes the Calle Junín, close to Las Heras, where the cars and buses are passing at this late hour.

  Joyous – somewhat – he sees he’s been saved, admits that his fear made him panic and led him astray, that there neither was nor is a Great Wall of China, that the serpent hasn’t bitten him, and all he has to do is take a few steps to reach the corner of Las Heras and take the number sixty.

  Premature Wait

  I’m the master of my time, and that’s saying quite a bit, and would indeed be worth something if my continual waits were not the masters of my time.

  Yesterday I waited for the mailman, and if that has ensnared me in complex and absorbing proceedings, I am happy because, if in a muddled way, I have clarified something that allows me to define myself to myself.

  I waited for the mailman from very early, with an anxiety my chest showed through my shirt, as was evident to the entire family. I need to permit myself a minimum of aloofness, even with those close to me, as concerns my most secret hopes. It’s not selfishness or dim pertinacity, it’s simply the terror of being deceived by expectation and thus of deceiving those who expect things of me. And so my heart’s treachery made me uncomfortable at home, and I had to wait in the door leading to the street; then, soon after, I moved to the corner, to avoid my indiscreet neighbors; and lastly, I wound up at the post office, where the mailman was due to emerge on his route toward my house. He left through that very door, surprising me, as I had no idea what time he went out. But, whether from unkindness or because he doesn’t know me, he had nothing for me but an indifferent glance.