Zama

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  At midnight, an hour that might figure in her calculations— after all, she herself had once appointed it—I walked along the alley. Her window, like all those on the upper story, was entirely shuttered, without a chink through which the light of an encouraging signal might show.

  I tried the door to the street. It might as well have been cast in iron, so tightly was it locked.

  I installed myself at the foot of the crumbling house, but it was impossible to wait there with any degree of calm. A confusion of barking rang out from all sides, as if the dogs meant to sound the alarm.

  I had foreseen this outcome since that afternoon; it did not torment me. I chose to proceed out of sheer stubbornness, to prove to her that I was determined to assert myself decisively. I had warned her I would cause trouble and I intended to be true to my word. I looked around for a stone with some heft to it, and after patiently going through the motions several times, taking into account the projectile’s weight, the strength of my arm, and the distance to be covered, I threw it, and with absolute precision. It struck the window. Nothing broke. With a resounding thud, the stone fell back to earth.

  There was no indication that anyone in the house or the vicinity had paid the slightest attention.

  I left.

  •

  To make my disgust patent and elicit a new summons from Luciana, I let a day go by.

  The morning hours delivered themselves to the past without improving my prospects for the future, and by noon I’d begun to wonder whether, in their carelessness, the Gobernación’s clerks had simply neglected to deliver her message. Nor did an encouraging paper or person turn up at the home of my host. Then I gave in. It is not unbecoming for a man to give in to a woman.

  At the accustomed hour, I rapped on Luciana’s door—a calm “Here I am.” With a formality I had grown accustomed to, the cunumí asked me to wait in the street while she notified her mistress.

  She came back to announce that her mistress could not receive me.

  •

  It occurred to me that any passerby who recognized me would see, directly in front of my face, a pair of doors, tightly shut.

  I went to the tavern.

  It was thick with smoke and parishioners, this being the hour for aguardiente and unwatered wine.

  I took a bench alongside a very meagerly provided table where three old men drank in silence, softening thin slices of matambre between their almost toothless gums. One of them was crusty about the eyes. Another, seated next to me, sweated as if beneath hot sunlight. Intermittent streams flowed out of his hair and down his temples and forehead, tracking horizontal furrows into his sideburns before dripping through his sparse beard to his neck, then sliding down his wrinkles to disappear inside his clothes. Where the sweat beaded rather than streamed, it served, perhaps because of its convex shape, as a lens, and in its passage showed, appallingly enlarged, now a hair, now a black spot, now the redness of his irritated scalp. In one spot, wet from the passage of three or four drops, I could perceive in detail the black grime that adheres to a face that is never washed. Enlarged by that flowing, liquid lens, the filth seemed to move outward, as if emanating from him.

  Apparently it was my stomach that had perceived all of this most clearly. Growing agitated and convulsive, it abruptly disgorged something in protest that forced me to run out to the street, hand over my mouth, so as not to befoul the table.

  High-pitched titters reached my ears from various corners of the establishment.

  Ridicule continued to shove me along on my way.

  •

  On another afternoon, when the dominion of a sun that blazed straight into the very depths of my body was reaching its end, I prowled and paced, irresolute, before Luciana’s door, my paces growing shorter each time I passed it by.

  Better, I told myself, grasping any pretext, to wait for the night. She cannot send me into the garden if she receives me then.

  Another circuit and again I approached the door. Sounds issued through it from within. It opened, and a man walked out.

  Piñares. The name came to me with a start. But no: Bermúdez. It was Bermúdez from head to toe.

  And Bermúdez was not a man to resign himself to a virtuous love.

  •

  I was curled inside my mother’s womb, knees against my lips, and much inconvenienced by my hat and sword, which kept me from maintaining any stable position in that constricted and shifting space. Still, the wait was bearable, for in a short while I would be born. When the moment came and the convulsions were so strong that I began to slide out on my back, an individual in a glittering steel helmet appeared from who knows where and got ahead of me in the tunnel that led to the light. The enclosure’s inner walls grew still. There I was, left squeezed within them, until such time as a new opportunity might present itself.

  Clad in festive garb, all green velvet and gold embroidery, I was the guest of honor at a performance. A glittering crowd flowed through a doorway and disappeared without a sound. We crossed the threshold, and at that moment the presence of my host, who had taken my arm in a most cordial fashion, was extinguished. I went inside. I was alone before a stage. Facing the ruins of ancient private boxes, its wings, curtains, and other hangings were all collapsing beneath a slow accumulation of dust. The night was sealed up in silence; beneath the deathly lunar clarity I could see that the distant backdrop depicted an immobile battle. The painted horsemen and beasts heightened my solitude. I didn’t care to look at them. I could not leave. But they were irresistible. I turned to see and a horseman broke away from the rest, a horseman in a gleaming helmet who crossed the theater on his galloping mount in a torrent of sound. As he went past, he covered me in dirt.

  But in truth I never managed to fix Bermúdez in my mind. He did take on a certain form and substance at that moment in Luciana’s doorway, but before I’d taken my eyes off him he had already metamorphosed from subject to object. I deemed him no more than an object of Luciana’s love.

  At the Gobernación, I strove to distinguish him from the papers and furniture that were the appurtenances of his office and found it impossible to do so. To my eyes and mind he represented just one thing: the man who was capable of being loved.

  The idea bounced off him and rebounded upon me as a comparison: not I.

  There were, nevertheless, several ways to refute that thought and console myself: I had won the complete and proven love of my wife. I retained her faith and her affection.

  21

  The woman who was traveling from the Río de la Plata could only be Marta, nectar of my love.

  Two more months would pass before I knew it with certainty, two months during which I felt not the remotest desire even for a word from her. No one and nothing appealed to me, except food, of which I demanded more than I could pay for. I was always hungry and the innkeeper, rejoicing, whetted my gluttony.

  Then a fine brigantine whose presence alone was good news brought me a letter from Marta. Now fully aware of my penury, she no longer complained of her own situation but offered to sell our house and farm in order to send money. “Your career above all else, Diego,” she wrote.

  My eyes moist with gratitude and renewed tenderness, I kissed the paper where her generous hand had rested.

  The brigantine carried a small fortune, enough for the final payment of the Gobernador’s salary and the ten months’ wages that were due me.

  In my chambers, door locked, I spread the coins across the table and drew pathways through them. Each sector represented a debt repaid. I divided what was left into two equal parts: one for Marta and the other a reserve for my tin box.

  Almost two thousand pesos were destined for my distant home. That sum tallied up, I subtracted one hundred pesos to buy myself a horse, regally arrayed in the finest saddlery. Immediately I regretted it. I left the hundred pesos with Marta and took only eighty from my tin box, toward a more modest purchase.

  •

  The Gobernador said his last farewell on the
feast day of San Blas, the country’s patron saint. The evening before, he threw a ball for the city’s most prominent residents.

  I considered myself well armed for an encounter with Luciana. Marta’s understanding and sacrifice had steadied me: I owed nothing to anyone but Marta and felt myself capable of rigorous adherence to that stance.

  Then Luciana did not appear at the ball. I would postpone her banishment from my mind, I told myself, until I knew what had kept her away.

  She was prostrate, with stabbing pains in the head.

  •

  As this indisposition occurred sporadically, lasting no more than a day, I supposed—now with an acknowledged desire to see her— that she would attend the next day’s festivities in honor of San Blas.

  She did not.

  At the noonday banquet, the seat next to Honorio Piñares was empty.

  The fiesta in the town plaza that afternoon was to be reviewed from a dais by the authorities and their retinue. I longed for her to see me as much as I longed to see her, the two of us in close proximity amid all the dignitaries, with infinite opportunity to exchange gazes, observations, witticisms.

  Piñares’s conduct was rather different from what it would have been in the controlling presence of his wife. During the horse races, he came and went between the privileged few and the throng of common people, laying bets with merchants and low-ranking military men. Seeking reasons for hatred and contempt, I never took my eyes off him, but he did not give what I was looking for.

  The dance that followed the races was the most tedious portion of the program for those of us in the stands, since we could only watch. None of us withdrew, however, both out of respect for protocol and because a display of fireworks was promised afterward.

  Then, from afar, we saw head after head bending down toward ear after ear, so that the crowd seemed a wheat field rippled here and there by wind.

  A soldier pushed his way through to his commanding officer in the stands. In a low voice, the officer conveyed the news to the commander of the regiment. The commander of the regiment spoke to the Gobernador, who spoke to those beside him. The news now flowed from two sources: the people, at one end of the plaza, and the authorities, in the seats of honor.

  While the whole population had converged on the fiesta, leaving the city a hollow shell, Rita Gallegos Moyano was beaten and stripped of all her clothing, even the garments closest to the skin.

  An Indian woman found her crouching in a ditch. Rita begged for something to cover herself with. The destitute native had nothing to give her, only the rag she wore herself, but she agreed to go in search of some linen or other cloth that would serve the purpose.

  She knocked on several doors, but everyone was at the plaza. Finally she came upon an elderly servant who was still at home, but this old woman, reluctant to trust an Indian, would not agree to give her anything without her masters’ authorization. The servant went out to corroborate the story with her own eyes. Escorted by the intermediary, who was in no hurry, she reached the ditch, saw that there was in fact a white woman entirely naked within it, and though nothing she had on hand was quite what the unfortunate woman required, she tried to do as much as her intellect and integrity allowed.

  She went to look for her masters in the plaza, and when she had located them, asked whether she might be permitted to make use of a sheet. The odd request led her señora to demand an explanation, and the servant woman had no choice but to deliver one, and at the top of her lungs, to make herself heard amid the hubbub.

  The family came to the aid of the unknown young white woman and had her driven home. They did her a disservice, however, by not remaining silent. No sooner had Rita been settled in her bed at home by the few maids left there than word of her dishonor began to spread.

  The initial curiosity roused in the crowd by the serving woman’s shouted report presently intersected with other currents of information. Rita’s story was confirmed and expanded upon, with considerable assistance from imagination and poor taste.

  •

  I did not hear out the whole story—I could verify the details later, if that proved necessary. I simply asked my informant to tell me where Rita was and whether she’d been seriously harmed. My fraternal affection for her was reborn. I felt an urgent need to be at her side without delay.

  Fetching my horse would have been tortuous and time-consuming. I ran through the streets and saw that others, from all walks of life, were doing the same.

  A multitude of the curious had gathered in front of my host’s home in anticipation of a spectacle that was not to be. They were pleased, in any case, by their close proximity to the victim of so notorious an episode.

  I elbowed my way through them, muttering “Carrion” into my teeth.

  The door was finally opened to me after many insistent blows.

  Don Domingo was in the gallery with three of his daughters, all choked with sobs, attending to him, while mulattas and Negresses backed up their lamentations like a chorus. The old man inveighed against heaven for this dishonor. He lifted his arms, vowing vengeance.

  I thought Rita had died.

  But no. She was deepening her father’s despair by refusing to open her door, which she had barred. She declined, even under direst threat, to divulge the identity of her offender.

  The tumult grew louder. All the servants’ cries and wailings were only making matters worse, I judged. Summoning the energy the old man had failed to muster, I began ordering them away at the top of my lungs.

  This must have alerted Rita to my presence. From within her room she announced that I was the only one she would receive.

  Her father wanted to go in, too, but this was not allowed. I persuaded him with many reasonable words, and a hint of force, to leave it to me to convince his daughter to behave more sensibly.

  The room was dim. It took some effort to see the young woman, and then to comprehend the thrust of her statements. She had latched the door behind me and was at my feet imploring, “Vengeance, vengeance! Avenge me, Don Diego!”

  It was more than I could have foreseen. Her humiliation and her lacerating plea were overwhelming. My knees gave away. I fell to the floor.

  The two of us, one body against the other, felt our mutual warmth for an instant and held each other and gave in to our anguish. I wept over my disillusionments, my betrayals, and, finally, over the disgrace that had befallen this woman who was now comforting me in the midst of her own upheaval.

  Finally we regained control.

  Seated on the edge of the bed, between sobs, she told her story. She had beseeched Bermúdez to see her, but he had given her no opportunity to fling reproaches in his face. Amid the din of the fiesta, she approached him and demanded he come away with her and answer her questions. They had their quarrel in an empty alleyway. He made it known that he wanted a definitive break. He turned his back and she pursued him, pounding at his shoulders with her puny fists. Then she took a dagger from her belt, prepared to kill him. But Bermúdez gave her no chance even to raise the weapon. He twisted her wrist and spun her to the ground, hammering her with kicks. Then he stripped her of her clothes.

  Again Rita could not contain herself. Again she clamored for vengeance.

  I hesitated, without responding or seeking to calm her down. It wasn’t that I failed to share her outrage, but I suddenly feared that people might imagine there was some secret link between Rita and myself that compelled me to come to her defense. I was about to explain this, but she, interpreting my silence as a refusal, sought to convince me in the most appalling way: “I beg of you, Don Diego. Don’t make my father die at the hands of that loathsome man. Risk your own life, which is worth far less, for a woman’s good name.”

  I felt a red-hot pinprick deep within.

  I rose. Now was the time for weeping, not before. But I demanded serenity from my thoughts, firmness from my posture.

  Rita had fallen silent. She had yet to see the blood well out, had yet to know how broad and how de
ep was the wound she had made.

  I advanced to the door with measured steps. Only then did she become conscious of her insult. “Forgive me, forgive me,” she cried, trying to keep my hand from lifting the latch. It took very little effort to shake her off.

  Light streamed down my body, leaving her in shadow.

  Her father had ceased his gesticulations. He was waiting for me to speak, whether words of consolation or incitement to some brutal undertaking of honor and reprisal.

  “She has told me nothing. She knows nothing, remembers nothing,” I informed him.

  “What? How?”

  The old man had hoped for everything from me, from this conversation. He did not yet understand my refusal to help. I went on my way to the door. He caught up and tried to hold me back, giving feeble hops of rage that lifted him a hand’s width off the ground.

  He didn’t stop me.

  •

  I took a room at the inn.

  Bermúdez left his position and disappeared from the city.

  When his flight became known, Don Domingo Gallegos, alert to any sign that might betray the offender, deduced what his daughter had declined to acknowledge.

  The old man became a frenetic searcher. He examined every face at the inn and the tavern and visited the Oficial Mayor’s empty office every day. He would lurk for hours in the street where Bermúdez once lived, as if waiting for him to emerge. This aroused great and general compassion; it was well known that the lout had abandoned the city without any thought of returning.

  Someone brought back a story that Bermúdez had made his way to the Jesuit missions.

  Refusing all escort, Don Domingo mounted a meek bay horse and set out for the south, carrying no gear.

  There was no reason to imagine that the old man might return one day, or might ever reach his stated destination.

  •

  Luciana, who generally paraded her wardrobe about the city more assiduously than any other woman, had remained secluded in her house since shortly before San Blas’s day: a full three months, by my calculation. This did not seem to be a voluntary penitence. Her suffering head could not bear any sound and she’d made her home an island of silence.