“THE TOWN PLAYBOY he was, Malihuel’s very own Isidoro Cañones. Boy did I know Darío well. We were at high school together till they threw him out that is in second or third grade I think, can you remember Vicente?”
His brother interrupts a fork of spaghetti halfway to his mouth and stares wordlessly at him over the rim of his glasses as if to remind him that none of the elder brothers, set to work by their father at the age of thirteen, have had any access to higher education.
“What about you Celia?” he shouts over to the other end of the table and gives me a wink. But I realise from his tone that the question’s barbed.
“What?”
“Fefe wants to know about Ezcurra. You got anything to tell him?”
Celia smiles with her mouth only. Her eyes on the other hand seem to express puzzlement or pain. The years had tamed Celia. When I was still a boy she was capable of throwing a fit worthy of a cornered animal, smashing the empty plates she couldn’t serve until Ángel arrived, shrieking I want to get out I can’t stand it any more I’m dying in this shit hole and nobody cares, and from my place as a guest I’d watch Guido and Mati out of the corner of my eye while they stared autistically at their glasses of Coke, waiting with bovine patience for the storm to pass, which was never very long as Celia had to sweep up and wash her face before the return of her husband, who now insists:
“It’s the women in town that remember him best. Half of them because he didn’t let them get to the altar as virgins, the other half because he did”—his guffaw finds an echo in the wan smiles of his brother and his son Mati, who now asks me:
“Do you think the house looks any different?”
I find the change of subject annoying so I try not to elaborate.
“Well we didn’t have this room for a start when my grandparents lived here,” I say referring to the gallery of wood and glass they’ve built where the old fig tree used to stand. Murderers, I think to myself. “Then there’s the pool. The rest’s pretty much the same isn’t it? Grandma left you all her furniture didn’t she?”
“Well she couldn’t very well have taken it all to Rosario.” Mati defends himself as if I’ve accused him of something.
Maybe it’s something in my tone of voice; we don’t seem to get along as well as we used to. Luckily, after spearing and bolting down two balls of spaghetti, his father picks up the thread:
“Now they really hated his guts. Your grandparents I mean. Ezcurra. They used to cross the street to avoid him.”
I’ve just forked in the last mouthful of spaghetti—Number Three Pasta Nests I was told when served—so I can’t answer straight away, but by the time I finish swallowing I’ve been overtaken by a vision of the past, the first of many—perhaps too many—I’ll experience during my stay in Malihuel. I’m walking along the shaded side of the street holding my grandmother’s hand, playing at jumping from one broken flag to another without stepping on the grass, when I suddenly find myself being dragged into the blinding sunlight on the other side. Walking towards us is a smartly dressed young man who, clearly amused at the situation, directs a sardonic smile at my grandmother and, from beneath his raised sunglasses, a conspiratorial wink at me. I look up at my grandmother’s face and it’s flushed with rage, paralysed between the urge to lash out and the glaring vow never again to direct another word to the man whose white-clad back now recedes nonchalantly into the shadows he’s just made his. And my grandfather, that or some other day, slamming his fist on the lunch table and choking on his bean stew spluttering “That sonofabitch! He’ll get what’s coming to him that sonofabitch will!”
“Fancy a little more Fefe?” Celia’s voice startles me from behind.
“No, thanks, I’m full,” I tell her. So that was Ezcurra. I’m getting something now, a picture at least.
“Still eat like a bird I see. I remember that so clearly. You never did use to eat much and always put lots of salt on your food. Remember Papá how much salt he put on everything?”
“Do I? We used to have to fill the salt cellar every time he came to dinner,” Don Ángel slaps me on the shoulder. “Fefe you sonofagun, we thought we’d never see you again!”
“The stuff life throws at you eh?” I mumble idiotically while Celia clears the table with the help of Guido’s wife, and Mati’s wife cleans up her children’s mess, the youngest of whom asks her for the nth time that night, “Who’s that Mamá?” and she gives him an answer I never quite catch.
“What about the other one?” I say.
“Which other one?” Don Ángel comes back.
“The one who had him killed … or run out of town,” I add out of deference to Mati, who’s just back from the bathroom. “Who was he?”
“Old Rosas Paz?” he asks me as he sits down. “Owned half the county he did. His heirs have carved it up now. Didn’t you see their town on your way here? It’s the stop before as you come in from Rosario. Rosas Paz it’s called, just like them.”
I nod and insist:
“So why did he take it out on Ezcurra?”
Don Ángel takes the floor:
“The feud between them went back a long way, maybe even to before Ezcurrita was born,” he explains as the women start serving dessert, a home-made flan with dulce de leche, which Celia’s good memory has prepared especially for me. “Ezcurrita’s grandfather, Don Alejandro Alvarado, used to buy the wheat crop off Don Manuel’s father—or was it Don Manuel’s grandfather? Can you remember Vicente? It makes no difference, the moment these fights between families start nobody remembers how … The Alvarados owned the mill over by the station. Errrm, let me see, till around nineteen thirty I reckon. Old man Alvarado got fed up of the anarchists always walking out on him and set fire to it. They can go to Alcorta and cry for all I care was the memorable phrase he came out with the next day. You could see the flames from here my father used to say. He always remembered that day because they had to get their flour from Toro Mocho after that. Old man Alvarado cashed in the insurance money and set up a convenience store … on the square on the side where the soda factory is today. Have you taken him to see it yet Mati? The mill I mean … Theeey’re the ones, where the steel-grey silos are. The whole lower part of the building—the brickwork—was salvaged from the old mill. If you look carefully you can still see the scorch marks. Apparently there were some wagons of grain too that belonged to Don Manuel parked right there on the tracks and one of the explosions from the blaze set light to them … Old man Alvarado couldn’t admit responsibility of course, he wasn’t about to go and tell everybody he’d torched the mill himself, and of course then it was open war. That, as far as anyone can tell, is where Don Manuel’s beef with old man Alvarado started. And with the grandson … I reckon it started when Ezcurrita took up as a journalist. Before that, I’ve no idea. It was just like Ezcurrita to take up journalism and set about savaging Don Manuel just for kicks,” says Don Ángel.
“EZCURRA, THAT’S RIGHT, poor lad. Making a film about his life are you? Oh, because I was told … I remember his newspaper articles well. Don Manuel Rosas Paz used to collect them and keep them in a binder he was more reluctant to show than the Church with the Turin Shroud,” some days later the bald skull of Malihuel’s pharmacist Don Mauro Mendonca will beam, greenish in the neon light from outside. They called me from the estancia once—urgent; I shut up shop there and then and drove the medicine over myself. My reward, once Don Manuel was back on his feet, was to see it. It was a legal double-ring binder, I can’t really remember if the covers were black or not, more of a blue colour I think, difficult to say after so many … I don’t seem to … of course of course. Right. The newspaper cuttings were stuck on card and kept in plastic envelopes to protect them. A quick glance through wasn’t enough, no—line by line I had to read them while he sat there the whole time watching me, frowning over his oxygen mask and wheezing. I clearly remember there being several blank pages at the end of the folder, in plastic envelopes too, awaiting any future articles. You’ll understand, he
said to me when I closed it and handed it back to him, the boy leaves me no choice. If I don’t do something now it’ll be too late, he added, and I realised his haste had less to do with the blank pages than with the blue cylinders containing what was left of his life and with the intolerable idea of him going first and leaving the other to dance on his grave. What I want, he said to me on my way out, is to burn that folder and forget there was ever a time when anyone could even think that of me. He didn’t need to explain,” the pharmacist will explain, the green of his skull deepening as the rain starts to fall on the other side of the pharmacy window, “the prerequisite for him to carry out that private and perhaps melancholy auto-da-fé. I think deep down he may eventually have developed a fondness for the binder don’t you? I mean if you’d seen the precautions he took when he handled it. Perhaps he was disappointed the articles had stopped appearing, because it had been something like a year by then since poor Ezcurra had decided to toe the line and stop poking his nose into his business. Perhaps Rosas Paz decided to do something when he realised how futile it was to go on waiting. What? Errrm, I don’t know, he must just have burnt it, unless he asked to have it buried with him. The articles were from a newspaper that’s closed now, what was it called, let me see …”
“La Chicharra,” I’ll tell him, being in possession of them by then. “I managed to lay my hands on quite a few. Ezcurra had a special talent for headlines it seems.”
THERE’S A ROTTEN SMELL IN MALIHUEL
“WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?” I jubilantly ask Guido the evening he stops by with the gift after his pasta deliveries around the towns at our table in Los Tocayos, where, a few days after my arrival, I’m now one of the regulars.
“Toro Mocho,” he proudly replies. “Finished my deliveries early and thought I’d pop into the library. They didn’t have the complete collection but it should do for now. I’ll take you with me if you want to go yourself one day … Yeah, I only photocopied the pages about Malihuel. They were the ones Ezcurra wrote weren’t they Beto? Iturraspe nods and beckons to me with jutting chin to let him take a look. I hand him one of the identically headed pages at random—
LA CHICHARRA
A WAKE-UP CALL FOR THE COMMUNITY
“Is that Ezcurra?” I ask him.
I’m pointing at the signature at the foot of the daily leader—“BROKEN CHAINS—A HORSEFLY TO GOAD THE FLANKS OF THE SLEEPING MULE OF MALIHUEL.” Iturraspe nods with a nostalgic smile.
“Listen to this, listen,” I insist, including Nene Larrieu, who puts his cloth for polishing the glasses on the counter and walks over intrigued. “‘This pampas plutocrat, whose legendary family fortune has been built on the blood of Indians and Christians and the tears of orphans and widows, now wants to usurp one of the high seats of office to which this most fertile of provinces elevates its favourite sons. And what credit, what merit, what service to his country or his native soil does this self-proclaimed lakeside Pericles, this Lycurgus of the plains, this Santa Fe Solon set before us to show he is worthy of such an honour? The gallantry and punctiliousness of that Rosas Paz who paid a pound apiece for Indian ears, which his devoted great-grandson still keeps in a glass case in his study as a family relic? Who, moreover, does he suppose will support his hilarious candidature with their votes? The descendents of the proud gauchos banished to the frontier for the sole crime of wanting to work the land that this hypertrophied Orion wanted for his cattle? The grandchildren of immigrants, easily gulled in their new tongue, who naively accepted provisional deeds of ownership for land that, once rendered productive by the calluses of their hands and the sweat of their brows, would be wrested from them by the lawyers of our aspiring cereal Cicero? Santa Fe must indeed be saintly in its faith if we are willing to place the lofty fate of our province in his hands. Will the town of Malihuel, which legend and history have enshrined as the Fuenteovejuna of Santa Fe, consent to kissing the clay feet of this golden calf?’ Where did he get that style from?” I ask when I finish reading.
“Rosas Paz’s own speeches,” comes Iturraspe’s incisive reply, puncturing the rhetorical force of my question, “in the days when he was running for senator in the province. Listen to this one—‘obviate’ … ‘laudable’ … ‘moral prostration’ … ‘emolument’ … ‘sempiternal’!” he exclaims triumphantly. “I’d forgotten that one,” he smiles as if he’s just bumped into an old friend.
“What about this?” I ask incredulous in my mirth: “‘Are we in need of a new Christ to visit Malihuel, scourge in hand, cast out the merchants from the temple and lash new stripes into the hides of these ruthless pampas tigers …’”
“Oh now that one bears the hallmarks of Professor Gagliardi,” pronounces Iturraspe. “He used to lend Ezcurra the odd hand with the articles. We all did actually. We’d meet up here say and put words in his pen. That bit about the lakeside Pericles was mine, for example. Used to split our sides laughing I swear. We never thought it would end so badly.”
Unable to stop I read on:
“‘In these days of quick capitulation and shameful moral surrender, one man stands erect, immune to the corrosive gilding of corruption. And that moral fortitude, neither consumed nor undermined, let it be called “quixotic” by the self-righteous revellers in self-seeking lucre, a herd of bimanous pachyderms, quick of tooth and castrated of conscience …’ Are you telling me someone could have taken this seriously enough to have its author wasted?” I finally exclaim.
“If there was one thing old Rosas Paz didn’t have,” Iturraspe replies, less cheerfully this time, “it was a sense of humour.”
THAT NIGHT I’D HAVE TIME to read through the rest of the cuttings. The anachronistic anarchist rhetoric of the early articles lasted a few more months and would occasionally resurface, but it was becoming more and more obvious that Ezcurra had found a new style, albeit not of his own making. It was still broadly in the same spirit; it was the diction and the emphases of certain turns of phrase that had changed spectacularly. Rosas Paz had become an “exploiter”, an “oligarch”, a “sepoy”, a “traitor”, an “imperialist”, and his victims, the “suffering people”, the “working class”, the “shirtless”, the “poor” and the “proletarians”. Ezcurrita was learning a new language and, like children or foreigners, in his enthusiasm he sometimes applied words haphazardly to all kinds of situations and objects. Then suddenly, nothing. In his last year working for the paper: National School No 7 Celebrates Golden Jubilee—Malihuel Girl Named Provincial Honey Queen—Outstanding Performance From Two Messenger Pigeons—A Circus Worth Seeing. Toeing the line. The dates said it all; the only unfathomable thing was that, after putting up with all those weighty allegations, Rosas Paz should’ve wanted to do away with him when he was only writing about basketball tournaments and school shows. I put down the wad of articles at my bedside and lie there staring at the shelf of their cuddly toys in the children’s room, where I’ve been lodged, forcing them out to camp in the living room. Through the wall I can hear Mati and his wife locked in an argument that their confinement and the need to keep it down make all the bitterer and more exasperated. I can’t hear the words but I know I’m the cause.
“WHEN THINGS STARTED GETTING UGLY,” Don Ángel continues between mouthfuls of flan and dulce de leche, “I don’t know if they’d been tightening up on Ezcurrita at the paper or what but he certainly learnt from his mistakes and as far as I can remember he never picked on Rosas Paz again. Tried to stop before all hell broke loose. But it was too late by then wasn’t it. The damage had been done. Know what it reminds me of?”
“A CHIHUAHUA YAPPING at a Great Dane through the railings.” Don León hands me the same version shortly after he and Licho join the table, order a Ferroquina and flick through the sheaf of photocopies. “And now the gate’s open the little pooch stops yapping and reckons it’s not too late. Should’ve stopped sooner. Yes, course I remember, Don Manuel loved to repeat it. He even had a saying, how did it go? Something about dogs and days …”
; “Every dog has its day,” I throw in. “It’s an English saying.”
“Must have picked it up from your great-grandfather. And you know what Don Manuel used to say then? He’s had his day to bark, now I want my day to bite. And he was right in a way, can’t say he wasn’t. Ezcurrita was the cock o’ the walk as long as he thought he was safe, but as soon as the boot was on the other foot he clammed up, not another peep. But Don Manuel was left seeing red and wanted blood. Ezcurra got that wrong, dead wrong. He took patience for weakness. I mean Don Manuel could have sent a couple of heavies anytime to a nightclub to knock him about and pass it off as a drunken brawl or smash up the printing press in Toro Mocho but he never did. What Don Manuel wanted was for everyone to know he was right. What he wanted was justice. A public example. It was a matter of honour. His good name had been besmirched and the stains could only be removed with blood. Had these been other times he’d’ve challenged him to a duel but Don Manuel had a very fine almost exquisite sense of ridicule and he wasn’t about to become the town laughing stock. He wore the judges down trying to file a lawsuit, libel and slander I suppose, appearing in person when his lawyers came back empty-handed. He especially targeted Dr Carmona, wouldn’t give her a moment’s peace,” he says and breaks off in annoyance to answer his cellphone, which has been clamouring for his attention from his jacket pocket for several sentences. “Just got here,” he says into the phone, “wait for me, don’t know, another hour or so,” he says fending off what’s apparently a demand from a woman who, seeing as he’s a widower, can only be his daughter, then starts discussing building work on the beach resort as we all patiently sit there, knowing he wouldn’t want us to carry on without him.
An Open Secret Page 2