Target in the Night (26 page)

There was a layer of green covering the ground, in the interior courtyard, a smooth pampa of herbs as far as the eye could see. Luca would empty his
mate
and dump the herbs out the window from his study above. Or, sometimes, when he walked back and forth along the balconies, he'd change the herbs in his
mate
and dump the old ones into the interior opening of the building while he heated up water for a new one. Now he had a natural park with pigeons and sparrows fluttering above the green mantle.

His bedroom was upstairs, in the west wing of the building, close to one of the old meeting rooms, in a small space that used
to be a filing room. It had a foldout bed, a small table, and several cupboards with papers and medicine bottles. Luca chose the room so he wouldn't have far to go when he undertook his calculations and experiments. He could just stay in that wing of the factory, walk down the hallway, and go downstairs to his office. Sometimes, he told them all of a sudden, when he got out of bed and walked down the hallway in the morning, he'd write whatever dream he remembered on the wall, because dreams fade and are forgotten as easily as we breathe, so they have to be written wherever you are when you remember them. The death of his brother Lucio and his mother running away were the central themes that appeared—sometimes successively, other times alternatively—in the majority of his dreams. “They form a series,” he told them. “Series A,” he said, showing them a chart and several diagrams. When the dreams moved on to other subjects, he'd write them in another section, under a different key. “This is Series B,” he said. He repeated that in recent days he'd been dreaming mostly about his mother in Dublin and his dead brother.

There were phrases in ink on the walls, words underlined or circled, arrows relating “one word family” to another.

He called Series A
The Process of Individualization
, and Series B
The Unexpected Enemy.

“Our mother couldn't stand her children being more than three years old, as soon as they turned three, she abandoned them.” When his mother found out about Lucio's death, she almost traveled back to Argentina, but they had dissuaded her. “She was desperate, apparently, which surprised us, because she'd abandoned our brother when he was three years old, and she abandoned us,
too, when we turned three. Extraordinary, isn't it?” he asked, the small crooked mutt looking up at him sideways, its tail wagging with tired enthusiasm.

It was extraordinary. When their mother had abandoned them, their father had gone out to the street with a hammer in his hand, wearing only an overcoat, and he'd started pounding on their mother's car—which meant that he
loved her.
The townspeople had looked on from the sidewalk by the main road, as the Old Man climbed on the hood of the car like a madman and struck the car repeatedly with the hammer. He wanted to throw acid on her, he wanted to burn her face off, but he didn't go that far. His wife had left him for a man whom his father considered better than him—besides, his father didn't want to have problems with the police, everyone knew what the Old Man was involved in, starting with his wife, who left him because she didn't want to be his accomplice, or be forced to denounce him.

“Pregnant with
me
,” Luca said, going back to the first person singular. “The other man raised me for three years after I was born, as if he was my father, and I don't even remember him. Not even his face, just the voices I could hear from the stage, he was a theater director, you know? But eventually she left him, too, moved to Rosario, then to Ireland, and I had to go back to my family house, that's how it was, legally, since I have the same last name as the man who claims to be my father.”

Then Luca told them that he'd been looking for a secretary that week, not a lawyer or a simple typist, but a secretary. In other words, someone who could write down what he was thinking and what he needed to dictate. He smiled at them, and Renzi
confirmed again that Luca—like a Russian
starets
, or like peasants—spoke in the plural when referring to his projects, and in the singular when talking about his own life. On the other hand, he said that he (“we”) had accepted that he (“we”) would be appearing in court to request that the money that his father had sent from his mother's inheritance be turned over to him. He had all the documents and records necessary to file the claim.

“We had to hire someone who could take dictation and type up the proofs that we'll be taking to court to reclaim the money that belongs to us. We don't want lawyers, we'll file the lawsuit ourselves, under the law of the defense of inherited family patrimonies.”

Right away he started talking about Cueto, the prosecutor. According to Luca, Cueto had been the company's
trusted
attorney in the past, only to betray and drive them into bankruptcy. Now Cueto wanted to use his political post—to which he had risen through raw ambition, under the umbrage of the current powers—to confiscate the plant and the land it was on. Their plan was to keep the factory and build what they called an experimental center for agricultural exhibitions, in collusion with the area's Rural Society. But first they'd have to litigate in district court, in the provincial and national courts, and even in the international tribunals, because Luca was (“we are,” he said) willing to do whatever it took to keep the factory up and running. It was an island, as he saw it, in the middle of an ocean of peasants and ranchers who cared only about fattening their cows and pulling riches from a land so rich that any ol' fool could toss a handful of seeds, stand back, and watch his profits grow.

He was excited about the possibility of
getting out
of his own field for once, and taking a trip into town to defend himself before the law. He walked around the room as he spoke, in a state of great unrest, imagining every step of his defense. He was certain that a secretary would help him expedite his ability to prepare the necessary documents.

So he placed an ad on
X
10 Rural Radio for two consecutive days, he told them, announcing the opening for a private secretary. Several men showed up from the countryside, hats in hand, calm, bowlegged, horse-riding men, their faces darkly tanned but their foreheads white at the line of their hat brim. They were muleteers, herdsmen, horse tamers, out of work because of the recent concentration of the large estancias that was driving small farmers, tenants, and seasonal laborers to search for new jobs. Honorable men, as they said, who'd understood the word secretary as someone who can keep a secret. They'd come and applied for the position, ready to swear, “if it came to it,” that they could keep as quiet as the grave. Because, naturally, “they knew our story and our misfortunes,” Luca explained. They risked coming to the factory and were willing not to say a single word that they weren't authorized to say. In addition, of course, they'd also do the necessary work, as they told him, turning both ways, looking at the walls and windows, expecting to see the corral where the animals might be, or the land they'd be expected to farm.

Two others arrived and applied as tiger hunters. Puma hunters, actually. First one with scars on his face and hands. Then a short, chubby man with clear eyes, skin pockmarked like dried leather, and only one arm. Both said they could track and kill a puma
without a firearm, using just a poncho and a knife—even the one-armed guy, the man without a left arm, who everyone called Lefty. If there were any pumas left to kill, that is, and to kill by hand, as these hunters had always done, heading out at dawn through the grasslands to track the fattened tigers that lived off of the calves from the large ranches. The hunters went to the estancias and the farms looking for work, offering their services. They showed up at the factory, wary and distrustful as a puma that's gotten lost at night and finds itself, in the morning, walking on the cobblestones of a town's main road, sullen and alone.

But that wasn't it. He wasn't looking for a puma hunter, or a foreman, or an axeman—none of the things you might need in an estancia. He was looking for a technical secretary, someone who knew the secrets of the written word, someone who could help him face the vicissitudes of the battle in which he saw himself implicated, the long war he was waging against the rough forces of the region.

“Because in our case,” Luca said, “we're talking about an actual military campaign, we've secured victories and suffered defeats. Napoleon's always been our main point of reference, basically because of his ability to react in the face of adversity. We've studied Napoleon's campaigns in Russia, and have found more military genius there than in his victories. That's right. There's more military genius in Waterloo than in Austerlitz, because in Waterloo the army didn't want to retreat.
It didn't want to retreat
,” Luca repeated. “Napoleon opened the front to the left, and his reinforcement troops arrived ten minutes too late. This delay, caused by natural causes (large rains storms), was Napoleon's greatest act of genius.
Everyone studies that defeat, in every military academy, it's worth more than any of his victories.”

Luca stopped and asked if they knew why crazy people, everywhere in the world, always saw themselves as Napoleon Bonaparte. Why, he asked, whenever someone needs to portray a madman, why do they draw someone with a hand tucked into his vest and a bicorn hat on his head? It was true, wasn't it? A quick sketch of Napoleon, that was the universal way to draw a madman. Had anyone thought of that? Luca asked. I am Napoleon, the
locus classicus
of the classic madman. But, why?

“We'll leave that one stewing,” he said with a sly look in his eye, and escorted them down the hallway and into his office. To return to the question of the secretary, which they had left “pending,” he said.

Although the main office was luxuriously furnished, it was much deteriorated, with a layer of gray dust on the leather chairs and the long mahogany tables, moisture marks on the carpets and walls, the windows all broken, and white splotches of pigeon shit on the floor. The birds—not just pigeons, but also sparrows, ovenbirds, chingolos, and even a carancho—would come in through the roof, land on the iron crossbeams along the roof of the factory, and fly in and out of the building, sometimes building nests in different places of the edifice—all apparently without being seen by the Industrialist, or at least without being considered of sufficient interest or importance to interrupt his actions, or his speeches.

Luca had to place another ad, this time on the Church radio station, he told them, the parish station actually,
X
8 Radio Pius
XII
.
Several sacristans and members of the Catholic Action applied, as well as a few seminary students who needed to spend a period of time in civilian life. These latter revealed a certain indecision that Luca noticed right away, they were like children, willing to collaborate, charitable, but reluctant to move into the factory with the exclusive dedication that the Industrialist would've demanded of them. Until finally, after interviewing a number of applicants and fearing that he wouldn't find anyone, a pale, young man showed up who immediately confessed that he'd left the priesthood before being ordained. He said that he'd come to doubt his faith and that he wanted to spend time in the secular scene, as his confessor, Father Luis, had advised him. These were his words. And there he was, dressed in black, wearing his white-banded collar (“clergyman”) to prove he still carried with him “the mark of God,” as he told him. Mister Schultz.

“That's why we hired him, because we understood that Schultz was, or would be, the right man for our legal task. After all, is justice not based on belief and the written word, like religion? There's legal fiction, just like there are sacred stories, and in both cases we believe only what's told right.”

Luca told them the young secretary was in one of the offices now, organizing their correspondence and typing up the nighttime dictations, but that they'd be able to meet him soon. Luca needed a secretary who'd be trustworthy, a believer, a convert in a sense. He needed a fanatic, someone willing to serve a cause. He had a long conversation with the candidate, whom he finally selected, about the Catholic Church as a theological-political institution and as a spiritual mission.

In these times of disillusion and skepticism, with an absent God—the seminary student had told him—truth resides in the twelve apostles who saw Him when He was young and healthy, in full use of His faculties. One should believe in the New Testament because it was the only proof of the vision of the embodiment of God. In the beginning there were twelve apostles, the seminary student had said—and
one traitor
, we added. This made the seminary student blush, Luca told them, he was so young that the word
traitor
had some kind of sinful, sexual connotation for him. The idea of a small circle, of an exalted and loyal sect,
except
with a traitor infiltrated at its core, an informant who's not foreign to the sect, but constitutes an
essential
part of its structure—this was the true organizational form of any small society. One must act knowing that there's a traitor infiltrated in the ranks.

“Which is what we
didn't
do when we organized the board (with twelve members) that went on to direct our factory. We stopped operating as a family business and became a corporation with a board. That was our first mistake. As soon as they stopped working solely within the confines of the family, my brother and father started to waver and lose confidence. Faced with a series of economic crises and the onslaught of the creditors, they succumbed to the siren song of that vulture Cueto, with that little perpetual smile of his, and his glass eye. The songs of sirens are always signs of risks to be avoided, the songs of sirens are always precautions warning us not to act, that's why Ulysses put wax in his ears, to avoid hearing the
maternal
songs that warn us about life's risks and dangers, the ones that paralyze us, destroy us. No one would ever do anything if they had to avoid all the
unforeseen risks of their actions. That's why Napoleon is the hero of all madmen and of all failures, because he took risks, like a gambler who bets everything on the cards he has, loses, and plays the next hand with the same courage and spirit as if he'd won. There're no contingencies and there's no chance, there're only risks and conspiracies. Luck is operated from the shadows. We used to attribute our misfortunes to the wrath of the gods, then to the fatality of destiny, but now we know that in reality the only things we really have are conspiracies and secret maneuvers.