Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (23 page)

 

There, near the lighthouse, is the old lady’s rundown dwelling. In years gone by, it had been very gay. The fishermen had had their celebrations there; the old man, who had been one of the first fishermen in Mar del Plata, was still alive. There was always, on those nights of revelry, the music of a guitar. But that was many years ago. Since then, the old lady has cried many a tear, and people no longer go to the house to laugh and dance as they once did.

Back then the best thing about the house, the prettiest thing on all that coast—saving, of course, the dawn that one savored there every day—was that fisherman’s daughter, the daughter, too, of old María, who today is a wrinkled, withered Magdalene, a grieving soul more bitter from the tears she’s shed than from the rigors of the sea. The girl was as healthy as a bright new apple, and there was no greater natural beauty in all the countryside around than hers.

When her father returned from his fishing, she would help him pull the nets up out of the waves; she would prepare the meals in the poor hut, and she was more the mother of the house than the mother herself. She was a strong, robust girl, and she had a lovely masculine strength about her; healthy, there was no wind off the ocean that didn’t bring her a gift from distant islands; rosy pink, her coral was the field on which the prettiest flowers of her blood blossomed; innocent and natural, a seagull. She was of an age—thirteen? fourteen? twenty? She might have been any of those, for pristine opulence manifested itself in that winning, lovely work of nature’s art.

A wondrous mass of hair, two frank eyes filled with innocent yet savage light, a bosom like a back-held wave, and a voice, a laughter that was free and thrilling, like the ocean-spray and the wind.

One spring came, at last, more tempestuous than any winter. The lovely seagull looked to the four points of the compass, as though trying to see from which direction something unknown was about to come.

“Daughter,” said old María, “something is not right with you—what might it be?” The seagull gave no reply. She was unquiet, pacing back and forth as though driven by some strange gust toward a place she knew not, did not want, yet inexorably went toward.

What had happened was as simple as a whitecap or a breath of air.

Who was the young man who had, in an instant, snared the free-spirited sea bird? Or was it she herself who sought the hand that was to snatch her up? Then it was summer. And no one ever found out whether it was a sailor or a gentleman from the city. All anyone knew was that the young woman—did I mention her name? her name was Sara—was about to have a child.

People say that she had a friend, a girl in the village, to whom she confided her dreams. And they say that Sara told this friend that she was going to go away—happily, she said—to Buenos Aires; that there was a man that loved her greatly, an elegant, gentle, well-positioned young man, of good family and some wealth. People say that, but no one will vow that this was true. What is true, though, indisputably, is that the little fisherwoman’s belly grew bigger day by day. The colors of the apple faded, the eyes filled with savage light grew sad from seeing so many things come and go that were not those things yearned after by the simple, rustic daughter of nature, beloved by the sea.

And just during those months, the father died—not drowned by the waves, on a fishing day, but rather spent by struggling against the salt wind and salt sea.

María, the mother, fell ill, became almost an invalid, and poor Sara became the only doer in that seaside hut.

Old María, people say, turned strange when she became bedridden. Her gray eyes, her gray hair, the movements and gestures of her thin arms showed that her miserable soul was in the throes of delirium.

Sara cooked the meals, Sara washed, Sara went to town to fetch what was needed. . . . And she always looked toward one spot on the road: she was always expecting someone to appear.

Until the day came when she, too, had to take to her bed, her sad, miserable bed, where a child was stillborn. . . . Born dead, or did the mother kill it?—for people say that on that day, the mother was heard howling at the wind like a she-wolf.

I urged the man of the sea who was telling me the story—which is perhaps a legend, and perhaps a simple tale—to go on, and this is more or less what he said:

“Yes, sir, it was a stormy night. I’m a neighbor of old María’s. When the husband was alive, I’d go to the parties, there in the house. We’d all sing, and dance . . . but since the old man died, there’ve been no more festivities. María got sick; Sara was like Providence itself. She’d been disgraced by then. While the child was coming, I’ve never seen a more bitter-looking face. María looked like she was going to die. She would walk up and down the shoreline, making us all sad. Oh, what grief in that house. Oh, what grief in those eyes!

“And it was one night when she went down to the sea, a stormy night. The lightning and thunder hadn’t started yet, but the seas were rough. Out in the distance, you could see something like cannon-bursts, but without any noise. The sky had not a star, no light up there at all, and the waves were treacherous, and angry. That’s the way the storms are in these seas of ours. That’s the way they begin. The lighthouse-keeper knows from the evening clouds what’s coming, as does the fisherman, and the sailor. And down here on earth, the ocean begins to look just like the clouds.

“The wind comes from one direction and then another. Then comes the lightning, and the thunder, and the lightning-bolts are striking all around, out on the dark water—which will have your boat in a minute if you let it. A night like that it was, sir.

“The old lady was bad sick. The baby was born and Sara turned crazy. What time it was born, nobody knows, but I think it must have been just about sunrise, because it was a little after that that I heard old María, out there yelling and screaming. I hadn’t been able to sleep, thinking about the storm, when I heard something like a scream in that house next door, in María’s little house there. I wonder what’s happening, I said, and seeing that those two women were over there alone, I got dressed, picked up my gun, and went over there, to the house. That was when I saw a figure like a dead person going off toward the ocean—it was a figure wrapped in a white sheet. The lightning flashes from the storm that was coming on lit up that whole ocean out there. The white thing walked out into the water, farther and farther out. . . . And then I got to the house, old María’s house, and I saw her, stumbling about from how weak she was, with her arms stretched out toward the white sheet, crying, moaning, crying, moaning. . . .

“ ‘Sara! . . .’

“The sick old lady had gotten up, and she was stretching out her thin, withered arms, and calling, although now weaker and weaker:

“ ‘Sara! Sara! . . .’

“The white figure kept walking out into the water, farther and farther out . . .

“I didn’t realize this until later; I didn’t realize because at first I was scared—truly scared, sir, I’ll tell you.

“ ‘Sara! . . .’ until the white figure disappeared into the water, in that storm that was coming on. I held onto the sick old lady, to keep her from going after her—she was delirious, and almost naked, out there in the cold of the night. We never found the body of that poor girl.”

THE BALE

Far out on the line, as though drawn by a blue pencil, that divided the ocean from the sky, the sun was going down, with its gold dust and its wisps of purplish cloud, like an immense disk of red-hot iron. The customs dock was beginning to grow quiet; the guards were making their rounds, their berets pulled down to their eyebrows. The huge arm of the crane stood immobile, the stevedores were heading back to their homes. The water was murmuring under the pier, and the wet salt breeze, which blows seaward as the night begins to fall, kept the nearby skiffs rocking and swaying on the water.

 

All the boatmen had already gone; the only one left was old Tío Lucas, who had sprained an ankle this morning when he was lifting a barrel onto a cart, but who, though limping, had worked all day long. He was sitting on a rock with his pipe in his mouth, and he was looking out sadly at the ocean.

“Eh, Tío Lucas! Taking a rest?”

“That I am, sir.”

And there began the chat—that pleasant, easygoing chat that I enjoy having with the strong, brave, rough men who live a life of fortifying labor, the life that gives good health, and strength to the muscles, and is nourished on beans and the frothy blood of life.

I had a particular fondness for this uncouth old man, and I listened to his stories with interest—they were all brief and to the point, like the unlettered man himself, but they came from the heart. Oh, so he’d been a soldier! So as a young man he’d been a soldier under Bulnes! So there was still resistance when the cavalry went into Miraflores! And he’s married, and he had a son, and . . .

And Tío Lucas interrupts me:

“Yes, sir—he died two years ago.”

Those eyes, small, bright under the hirsute gray eyebrows, threatened to overflow.

“How did he die, you say? At his work, trying to put food on the table for all of us—my wife, the little ones, and me, sir, for at the time I was not well.”

And then, as night fell, and the waves were mantled with sea mist, and the city turned on its lights, he put out his black pipe and tucked it behind his ear and sat on that rock that served us as a chair, and he stretched, and then he crossed his skinny yet muscular legs, his pants legs rolled up above his ankles, and he told me the story:

 

He was a good, honest young fellow, and very hard-working. They had wanted to send him to school from the time he was big enough, but the poor cannot be given leave to learn to read when there are hungry ones crying for food around the table.

Tío Lucas was married, and there were many children.

His wife was cursed with the poor people’s belly: fertility. There were, then, many mouths open for bread, many dirty little ragamuffins picking through the garbage, many thin bodies trembling with cold. Someone had to go out to get something to eat, and clothes for their backs, and to do that, work like a mule.

When the boy grew up, he helped his father. A neighbor, the blacksmith, took him in to teach him the trade, but since the boy was so weak, no more than skin and bones, and at the forge a fellow had to have his shoulder to the wheel, so to speak, the live-long day, the boy soon fell ill, and he returned to the family’s rundown little dwelling.

He was very ill indeed! But he didn’t die. He lived, despite the fact that they lived in conditions of utter human poverty—four old, ugly, ramshackle walls in a squalid street of lost women. The street stank at all hours of the day and night. It was lit at night by feeble streetlights, and behind many of its doors one could hear zithers and acordions, and the constant calls of procurers and madams, and the hullabaloo of sailors coming to the brothels, desperate from the chastity of long sea journeys, drinking themselves tipsy and yelling and kicking like the very damned. Yes, among the poorest of the poor, and in that infernal racket from the revelry of the fleshpots, the young fellow lived, and he was soon hale and hearty once more, and up and about.

And then he turned fifteen.

 

Tío Lucas, saving, scrimping, and sacrificing sometimes even the necessities of life, had managed to buy a little boat. He became a fisherman.

When dawn came, he would go down to the water with his strapping son, carrying the day’s fishing gear. One would row while the other baited the hooks. Then, singing the sad songs of the fishermen of those waters, and with the oar, dripping saltwater, triumphantly high, they would return to the shore in hopes of selling what they’d caught out there in the cool wind and the opacities of the fog.

If sales were good, they’d go out again in the evening.

One winter evening there was a storm. Out on the water, father and son, in the little boat, were pummeled by the madness of wave and wind. Catch and all were lost, but they had to look to saving their own skins. They struggled mightily to reach the beach. They were close—but a gust of wind pushed them against a rock, and the boat was smashed to pieces. They got out with no more than a few bruises, thank God! as Tío Lucas put it. After that, they both hired out as stevedores.

Yes, stevedores! On the big black, flat ships, they would hang from the shrieking chain that dangled like an iron serpent from the massive crane, which resembled nothing more than the hangman’s gibbet. They would stand and row in unison with the others. They would go out to the steamships with the customs lighter and come back in again. And they would call out
hiooeeep!
when they pushed the heavy crates and bundles over to the powerful hook that would lift them high off the deck, swinging like a pendulum. Yes, stevedores! the old man and the boy, the father and the son, both straddling a crate, both pushing and sweating, both earning their day’s wages, for them and for their beloved leeches back in the ramshackle rooms they all shared.

They would go off to work every day, wearing old clothes, their waists tied round with colorful bandannas, their feet clattering along in the rough-sewn, heavy shoes that they would remove when the work day began, throwing them off into some corner of the ship’s deck.

The day’s work would begin, the loading and unloading. The father was watchful:

“Careful, boy, you’ll crack your head there! That rope’ll take your hand off! Don’t bang your shins!” And in his own way, with the brusque words of an old laborer and a loving father he would teach, train, guide his son.

 

Until one day Tío Lucas couldn’t get out of bed, because his joints were swollen with rheumatism and his bones ached.

Oh, but medicine and food had to be bought, there was no getting around that!

“Son, off to work. Today’s Saturday, and it’s payday.”