Collected Fictions (55 page)

It was always a source of chagrin to my mother that her sister would marry Juan Muraña, whom my mother considered a cold-blooded rogue, though
Florentina saw him as a "man of action." There were many versions of the fate that befell my uncle. There were those who claimed that one night when he'd been drinking he fell off the seat of his wagon as he turned the corner of Coronel and cracked his skull on the cobblestones. Some said the law was after him and he ran off to Uruguay. My mother, who could never bear her brother-in-law, never explained it to me. I was just a tyke, and I don't really even remember him.

Around the time of the Centennial,* we were living on Russell Alley. It was a long, narrow house we lived in, so while the front door was on Russell, the back door, which was always locked, was on San Salvador. My aunt, who was getting on in years and had become a little odd, lived in a bedroom in the attic. A skinny, bony woman she was, or so she seemed to me—tall, and miserly with her words. She was afraid of fresh air, never went outside, and she wouldn't let us come in her room; more than once I caught her stealing food and hiding it. Around the neighborhood, people would sometimes say that Muraña's death, or disappearance, had driven her insane. I always picture her dressed in black. She'd taken to talking to herself. The owner of our house was a man named Luchessi* who had a barbershop in Barracas.*My mother, who worked at home as a seamstress, was
having a hard time making ends meet. Though I didn't really understand it all, I would overhear certain whispered words:
justice of the peace, dispossession, eviction for nonpayment.
My mother suffered terribly; my aunt would stubbornly say that Juan would never let that wop* throw us out. She would recall the case—which she'd told us about dozens of times—of a scurrilous thug from the Southside who'd had the audacity to cast aspersions on her husband's courage. When Juan Muraña found out, he'd gone all the way to the other side of the city, found the man, settled the dispute with one thrust of his knife, and thrown the body in the Riachuelo. I can't say whether the story was true; the important thing at the time was that it had been told and believed.

I pictured myself sleeping in the archways on Calle Serrano, or begging, or standing on a corner with a basket of peaches. I half liked the idea of selling peaches—it would get me out of going to school.

I'm not certain how long all the worrying and anguish lasted. Your father, rest his soul, told us once that time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different. I didn't fully understand what he meant then, but the phrase stayed in my mind.

One night during this time, I had a dream that turned into a nightmare. It was a dream about my uncle Juan. I'd never known him, but in my dream he was a strong, muscular man with Indian features and a sparse mustache and long flowing hair. We were riding toward the south, through big quarries and stands of underbrush, but those quarries and stands of underbrush were also Calle Thames.* In my dream, the sun was high in the sky. Uncle Juan was dressed all in black. He stopped in a narrow pass, near some sort of scaffolding. He had his hand under his coat, over his heart—not like a man who's about to draw his weapon, but like one who's trying to hide it. He said to me, in a voice filled with sadness, "I've changed a great deal." Then he slowly pulled out his hand, and what I saw was a vulture's claw. I woke up screaming in the dark.

The next day my mother told me she was taking me with her to see Luchessi. I knew she was going to ask for more time; she was taking me along, I'm sure, so the landlord could see how pathetic she was.

She didn't say a word to her sister, who would never have allowed her to lower herself that way. I'd never been in Barracas; to my eyes there were more people, more traffic, and fewer vacant lots than where we lived. When we came to a certain corner, we saw policemen and a crowd in front of the number we were looking for. One man who lived there on the street was going from group to group, telling the story of how he'd been awakened at three in the morning by banging noises; he'd heard the door open and somebody step inside. Nobody had ever closed the door—at dawn Luchessi was found lying in the entryway, half dressed. He'd been stabbed repeatedly. He had lived alone; the police never found the culprit. Nothing had been stolen. Someone recalled that recently the deceased man had been losing his eye-sight. "His time had come," another person said in a voice of authority. That verdict, and the tone with which it was delivered, impressed me; as the years have gone by I've noticed that whenever someone dies, there's always some sententious soul who has the same revelation.

At the wake, somebody brought around coffee and I drank a cup. There was a wax dummy in the coffin instead of the dead man. I mentioned this fact to my mother; one of the mourners laughed and assured me that the figure dressed in black was indeed Sr. Luchessi. I stood there fascinated, staring at him. My mother had to take me by the arm and pull me away.

For months people talked about nothing else. Crimes were rare then; think of how much talk there was about the Longhair and Squealer and Chairmaker affair. The only person in Buenos Aires utterly unconcerned by the scandal was my aunt Florentina. With the insistence of old age, all she would say when the subject was brought up was, "I told you people that Juan would never stand for that wop putting us out in the street."

One day there was a terrible storm; it seemed as though the sky had opened and the clouds had burst.

Since I couldn't go to school, I started opening doors and drawers and cabinets, rummaging inside the way boys do, to see what secret treasures the house might hide. After a while I went up into the attic.

There was my aunt, sitting with her hands folded in her lap; I sensed that she wasn't even thinking. Her room smelled musty. In one corner stood the iron bed, with a rosary hanging on one of the bedposts; in another, the wooden wardrobe for her clothes. On one of the whitewashed walls there was a lithograph of the Virgen del Carmen. A candlestick sat on the nightstand.

"I know what brings you up here," my aunt said, without raising her eyes. "Your mother sent you. She can't get it through her head that it was Juan that saved us."

"Juan?" I managed to say. "Juan died over ten years ago."

"Juan is here," she said. "You want to see him?"

She opened the drawer of the nightstand and took out a dagger.

"Here he is," she said softly. "I knew he'd never leave me. There's never been a man like him on earth.

The wop never had a chance."

It was only then that I understood. That poor foolish, misdirected woman had murdered Luchessi.

Driven by hatred, madness—perhaps, who knows, even love—she had slipped out the back door, made her way through one street after another in the night, and come at last to the house. Then, with those big bony hands, she had plunged the dagger into his chest. The dagger was Muraña, it was the dead man that she went on loving.

I'll never know whether she told my mother. She died a short time before we were evicted.

That was the end of the story that Tràpani told me. I've never seen him again since. In the tale of that woman left all alone in the world, the woman who confuses her man, her tiger, with that cruel object he has bequeathed to her, the weapon of his bloody deeds, I believe one can make out a symbol, or many symbols. Juan Muraña was a man who walked my own familiar streets, who knew and did the things that men know and do, who one day tasted death, and who then became a knife. Now he is the memory of a knife. Tomorrow—oblivion, the common oblivion, forgotten.

On January 14, 1941, María Justina Rubio de Jáuregui would celebrate her hundredth birthday. She was the only living child of the soldiers who had fought the wars of independence.*

Colonel Mariano Rubio, her father, was what might without irony or disrespect be called a minor national hero. Born the son of provincial landowners in the parish of La Merced, Rubio was promoted to second lieutenant in the Army of the Andes and served at Chacabuco, at the defeat at Cancha Rayada, at Maipú, and, two years later, at Arequipa.*The story is told that on the eve of that action, he and José de Olavarría exchanged swords.* In early April of '23 there took place the famous Battle of Cerro Alto, which, since it was fought in the valley, is also called the Battle of Cerro Bermejo.*Always envious of our Argentine glories, the Venezuelans have attributed that victory to General Simón Bolívar, but the impartial observer, the
Argentine
historian, is not so easily taken in; he knows very well that the laurels won there belong to Colonel Mariano Rubio. It was Rubio, at the head of a regiment of Colombian hussars, who turned the tide of the uncertain battle waged with saber and lance, the battle that in turn prepared the way for the no less famous action at Ayacucho,* in which Rubio also fought, and indeed was wounded. In '27 he acquitted himself with courage at Ituzaingó,*where he served under the immediate command of Carlos Maria Alvear.*In spite of his kinship with Rosas,* Rubio was a Lavalle man,* a supporter of the Unitarian party, and he
dispersed the
montonero
insurgents* in an action that he always characterized as "taking a swipe at them with our sabers."

When the Unitarians were defeated, Rubio left Argentina for Uruguay. There, he married. During the course of the Great War he died in Montevideo, which was under siege by Oribe's White* army. He was just short of his forty-fourth birthday, which at that time was virtually old age. He was a friend of Florencio Varela's. It is entirely likely that he would never have got past the professors at the Military College, for he had been in battles but never taken a single course in warfare. He left two daughters; only María Justina, the younger, concerns us here.

In late '53 the colonel's widow and her daughters took up residence in Buenos Aires. They did not recover the place in the country that the tyrant* had confiscated from them, but the memory of those lost leagues of land, which they had never seen, survived in the family for many years. At the age of seventeen María Justina married Dr. Bernardo Jáuregui, who, though a civilian, fought at Pavón and at Cepeda* and died in the exercise of his profession during the yellow fever epidemic.* He left one son and two daughters: Mariano, the firstborn, was a tax inspector whose desire to write the complete biography of the hero (a book he never completed, and perhaps never began to write) led him to frequent the National Library and the Archives. The elder daughter, Maria Elvira, married her cousin, one Saavedra, who was a clerk in the Ministry of Finance*; the second daughter, Julia, married a Sr.
Molinari, who though having an Italian surname was a professor of Latin and a very well-educated man.

I pass over grandchildren and great-grandchildren; let it suffice that the reader picture an honest and honorable family of somewhat fallen fortune, over which there presides an epic shade and the daughter who was born in exile.

They lived modestly in Palermo, not far from the Guadalupe Church; there, Mariano still recalls having seen, from a trolley car, a lake that was bordered by laborers' and farmers' houses built of unplastered brick rather than sheets of zinc; the poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then, as well.

The Rubios' residence was above the neighborhood dry goods store. The stairway at the side of the building was narrow; the railing on the right-hand side continued on to become one side of the dark vestibule, where there were a hall tree and a few chairs. The vestibule opened into the little parlor with its upholstered furnishings, the parlor into the dining room with its mahogany table and chairs and its china cabinet. The iron shutters (never opened, for fear of the glare of the sun) admitted a wan half-light. I recall the odor of things locked away. At the rear lay the bedrooms, the bath, a small patio with a washtub, and the maid's room. In the entire house the only books were a volume of Andrade, a monograph by the hero (with handwritten additions), and Montanery Simon's Hispano-American Dictionary, purchased because it could be paid for in installments and because of the little dictionary stand that came with it. The family lived on a small pension, which always arrived late, and also received rent from a piece of land (the sole remnant of the once-vast cattle ranch) in Lomas de Zamora. At the date of my story the elderly lady was living with Julia, who had been widowed, and one of Julia's sons. She still abominated Artigas, Rosas, and Urquiza.* World War I, which made her detest Germans (about whom she knew very little), was less real to her than the 1890 Revolution and the charge on Cerro Alto. Since 1932 her mind had been gradually growing dimmer; the best metaphors are the common ones, for they are the only true ones. She was, of course, a Catholic, which did not mean that she believed in a God Who Is Three yet One, or even in the immortality of the soul. She murmured prayers she did not understand and her fingers told her beads. Instead of the Paschal and Three Kings' Day celebrations that were the custom in Argentina, she had come to adopt Christmas, and to drink tea rather than
mate.
The words
Protestant, Jew, Mason, heretic,
and
atheist
were all synonymous to her, and all meaningless.

So long as she was able, she spoke not of Spaniards but of Goths, as her parents had. In 1910 she refused to believe that the Infanta, who after all was a princess, spoke, against all one's expectations, like a common Galician and not like an Argentine lady. It was at her son-in-law's wake that she was told this startling news by a rich relative (who had never set foot in the house though the family eagerly looked for mention of her in the social columns of the newspaper). The names the elderly lady called things by were always out of date: she spoke of the Calle de las Artes, the Calle del Temple, the Calle Buen Orden, the Calle de la Piedad, the Dos Calles Largas, the Plaza del Parque, and the Plaza de los Portones. What were affectations in other members of the family (who would say
Easterners
instead of
Uruguayans*
for instance) came naturally to the widow Jáuregui. She never left her house; she may never have suspected that with the years Buenos Aires had grown and changed. One's first memories are the most vivid ones; the city that the elderly lady saw in her mind's eye on the other side of the front door was no doubt a much earlier one than the city that existed at the time they'd had to move toward the outskirts; the oxen of the oxcarts must still have stood at rest in Plaza del Once,* and dead violets still have perfumed the country houses of Barracas.*
All I dream about now is dead men
was one of the last things she was heard to say. She was never stupid, but she had never, so far as I know, enjoyed the pleasures of the intellect; there remained to her the pleasures of memory, and then, forgetfulness. She was always generous. I recall her tranquil blue eyes and her smile. Who can say what tumult of passions (now lost but erstwhile burning brightly) there had been in that old woman who had once been so charming and well favored. Sensitive to plants, whose modest, silent life was so much like her own, she raised begonias in her room and touched the leaves she could not see. Until 1929, when she fell into her reverie, she would tell stories of historical events, but always with the same words and in the same order, as though they were the Paternoster, and I suspect that after a while they no longer corresponded to images in her mind. She had no marked preferences in food. She was, in a word, happy.