An Open Secret

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An Open Secret Page 4

by Carlos Gamerro


  “The whole town hanging by a thread of spaghetti”—Iturraspe steps in in Guido’s stead.

  “So in a way Neri was thinking of the common good as well,” Don León pursues his dissertation. “I’m not justifying him, just explaining the circumstances, because as an outsider and twenty years after the event it’s easy to judge, but you had to be here to really understand. The Super himself told me it’s just the kind of excuse they’re looking for, saying no is like handing the headquarters to Toro Mocho on a platter, and if the headquarters goes the rest goes too. Malihuel can afford to lose one of its citizens but not one of its main sources of gainful employment. Maybe looking at it like that there’s a positive side to it right? It was a price that had to be paid. Ezcurra was a sacrifice for the good of all.”

  ONE NIGHT OVER A FEW WHISKIES Guido and I stop up late talking, mulling over football matches in the church field, summers at the lagoon, games of hide-and-seek at siesta time in the empty factory … He goes quiet at one point, looks me in the eye for barely the time it takes to blink, then fixes his gaze on his glass so intently it looks as if he’s speaking to it: “I never told anybody,” he begins, “maybe that’s why I can remember it all so clearly. I’d found the best place to hide, somewhere none of you lot would dare come looking for me, and I’d just got settled behind the stairs to the mezzanine when the door opened and in came Grandpa followed by this big guy. Only after they closed the door did I see it was the Superintendent. I huddled down afraid they’d hear my heart beating, you know how Grandpa’d get if he found me in his office. From my hiding place I could see his face in the lamplight—set lips, frowning eyebrows, clasped hands resting on the glass of his desk, and the other’s back, the triple roll of his neck against the edge of his suit, a hairy hand clutching a collection of pasta samples that he pretended to study while he waited for Grandpa to start talking. I told you to come at this time Superintendent, he said eventually with a gulp, so we won’t be disturbed. I hope you don’t mind the dark, we’ll be cooler in here. How can I help you? It’s a delicate matter, Neri began, choosing his words carefully, and fell silent again. I knew Grandpa’s face so well, I could see how hard he was trying to hide his concern. What is it pray tell, he said to him. One of the lads from the factory’s got himself into trouble. If it’s a matter of a few pesos to bail him out … The back of the Super’s neck said it wasn’t. He paused before saying Don Genaro, please. Can you see me coming all the way over here over something like that? To collect a few pennies? Please, Don Genaro. Over one of your workers? Actually I find it less upsetting that you take me for a bent cop than a lightweight, and Grandpa goes What then? Come on, spill the beans Superintendent. Listen Don Genaro, Neri said to him, you know the score. The Province’s new police chief is an artillery colonel, a hard man, what more can I say? And I saw Grandpa’s moustache quivering with the effort to control himself and a dark circle appeared around each eye. It’s about my boys, he eventually stumbled out. What did you come to tell me? That one of my boys is in trouble with the military? They’re family men all three of them, they’ve never been involved in politics or anything of the sort, they haven’t the time with all the work they’ve got on. What’s there to explain? They aren’t even students, there’s only one of them’s finished high school, and the Superintendent goes Settle down Don Genaro, it isn’t about your boys. Who is it about then? My wife? Grandpa burst out laughing in relief and sat there with his mouth open, smiling. Let’s get down to brass tacks Superintendent. Tell me what you’re here for. Don Genaro I wanted to ask you about the Ezcurra boy, you know him, Señora Delia’s son, the Superintendent said to him and Grandpa goes That’s why you woke me up from my siesta? To talk about Ezcurra? I don’t know what kind of a mess he’s got himself into now but I’ve never had anything to do with him. I used to have dealings with the father true enough but never with the son. Nor did my boys thank goodness. They’re up and working when he’s on his way to bed. Ezcurra’s grandfather used to sell us flour but that must be more than forty years ago. So? That’s exactly what I’ve come to talk to you about, the Superintendent said to him. You, sir, are one of the distinguished citizens of Malihuel, your family’s been here since last century, your factory feeds many a family … Indeed, and we own half the town too, Grandpa interrupted him. You’ve probably heard, what they don’t say is that we earned it all by hard graft. Don’t tell me my family history Superintendent, I’m afraid I know it better than you do. Where does Ezcurra come into all this? And the Superintendent says, As you’ve just pointed out he’s from an old-time Malihuel family as well. And before I take a decision I thought it wise to talk to people whose opinion might tilt the scales if it comes to it. However, I will have to ask you to act with the utmost discretion on this matter. What we say mustn’t go beyond these four walls,” Guido says the Superintendent said, and his eyes widen as if he’s still hiding behind the stairs, spying on the broad shoulders of the deliberately spoken policeman and his grandfather’s growing confusion through the gap between the wooden steps. “I’d have nothing to tell even if I felt like it Superintendent,” continues Guido in his grandfather’s words. “Was it Ezcurra asked you to come and talk to me? If there’s one thing everyone knows about me it’s that I don’t like beating about the bush. If he’s got something to ask me why doesn’t he come in person? Please, said Neri, raising both palms towards Grandpa, if there’s anyone who mustn’t find out it it’s him. Not even Don Manuel can find out, and Grandpa goes Oh Jesus you should’ve said so in the first place. Listen, you know what I think about the quarrel between those two? I don’t give a tinker’s is what I think. They can kill each other for all I care. Ezcurra senior was a serious hard-working man who had some bad luck that’s all, but his son’s a loose cannon. Spent all the money his grandfather left him, conned half the town, and then to cap it all he went for Don Manuel quite unprovoked. Now he’s in trouble. Well if he’s in trouble he had it coming. And all I’ve got to say about Don Manuel is he’ll be calling the shots in Malihuel the day the cows get the vote. If the people in this town spent half the time working as they do sticking their noses into other people’s business we’d be up there with Toro Mocho or Fuguet instead of being where we are, off the map, if it weren’t for my factory and your headquarters, he said without pausing and fell silent. So I have a free hand do I? the Superintendent asked. Grandpa stared hard at him for a good while before answering if you ask me … Listen Superintendent, I won’t get in your way. If you get in mine, if it’s about my boys or my employees then we’ll stop and talk. Otherwise what Ezcurra, Don Manuel and you want to do with your lives is your own business. When they left,” Guido tells me, “I came out of my hiding place and went back to find you lot, you were all still looking for me. I reckon it must have been the last time we played hide-and-seek in the factory. We were getting too old for it.”

  While he’d been talking I’d been studying one of the old laminated plastic spaghetti catalogues that served as place mats. The specimens were classified with entomological rigour, yellow lettering on a blue background: Number Seven Hatchets, Number Twelve Friar’s Sleeves, Number Fourteen Gunshot, Number Fifteen Partridge Eyes, Number Twenty-Five Ave Maria, Number Thirty-One Pamperitos, Number Forty Argentinas alla Napoli. Above the list was a logo with a globe and a strand of spaghetti running around the equator. Over the North Pole ran a banner that reads “Round The World” and another under the South Pole that says “Tuttolomondo Spaghetti”.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” I eventually say, far more disconcerted than I’d anticipated. “Why did Neri go and ask your grandfather of all people?”

  Guido looks at me for a second, perplexed, before answering.

  “He didn’t just ask Grandpa,” he says. “I thought you knew. Neri did the rounds of the whole town before he made up his mind. House by house. To see if people agreed with him wasting Ezcurra.”

  Interlude One

  THE TOWN ITSELF is a square, ten blocks by
ten. Fewer than half show any trace of building, a sure sign that the town never managed to fill out the ground plan drawn up by its indifferent or overoptimistic surveyor; unlike other surrounding towns built on the same plan that ended up outgrowing it and imposing their own outlines on the pampas, Malihuel has never lived up to its map. The centre, as you might expect, is occupied by two blocks of humid, tree-filled square around which the main buildings are distributed: the two hotels, the local Council offices, the church, the Tuttolomondo pasta factory on the opposite corner and, as you go down Comandante Pedernera Street, the police headquarters, the primary school and the old cinema (nowadays a cultural centre). If the square is the centre of spiritual and public life, Veinticinco de Mayo Avenue is the main artery of Malihuel’s commercial life—spread along its length are Ferro & Brancaloni’s butcher’s, the concrete arcade of the new coach terminal, the supermarket, Sacamata’s Stores, Fischer’s Hardware, Mendonca’s Pharmacy, on opposite corners the Kawasaki Bar and the closed-for-refurbishment Makumba (the erstwhile Sucundún), the Los Tocayos hotel-bar and Chacón’s kiosk adjoining, the imposing armoured corner of the National Bank, and the two service stations (Shell and YPF). The rest is in the adjacent streets: two or three more general stores, butchers’ and kiosks, the corner of the Yacht Club with its basketball and tennis courts, Dr Alexander’s surgery, the barber’s, the ladies’ and men’s gyms, prudently separated, the post office, the courts on the same block as the police headquarters, the Indiana Jones Video Club and the satellite dishes of the cable station, the telephone exchange and Ye Olde Tuttolomondo Ice Cream Parlour next to the Banco Provincia on the corner, a low, brick building with a wooden door and bars on the windows from the days of mounted bandits. Two blocks from the square, towards the lagoon, stands the relic of an even more remote past—Malihuel’s watchtower, the cornerstone of at least one of the five vertices of the boat-shaped fort founded by the Viceroys on Ranquel Indian land. You only have to look at it to get a precise idea of what this corner of the world must have been like in those days—standing atop the platform the eyes of the lookout, if tall, would be at most five metres above ground-level; only a landscape drawn with a spirit level and absolutely devoid of even the slightest suggestion of a tree could be effectively guarded from a height lower than a two-storey house—which, as its inhabitants will often tell you, are nowhere to be found in Malihuel. It used to be possible to go up the church steeple and enjoy a vast three-sixty-degree panorama of the lagoon, the neighbouring towns and the surrounding countryside, but no one keeps count any more of how many years it has been since its only visitors are the parish priest, who can negotiate the crumbling stairs in the dark, and successive incarnations of a pair of large white owls. But it isn’t for the lack of sweeping vistas that the inhabitants of Malihuel languish; it is impossible to find a street corner from which you can escape the sight of open country in all four possible directions. (There are no streets in all of Malihuel that aren’t parallel or perpendicular—the Hispanic infatuation with the checkerboard saw the pampas as the perfect submissive body for the privileged exercise of its perversion.)

  With the exception of the eucalyptuses of the Colonia and the age-old specimens that give the square some shade, the trees lining the streets of Malihuel are spindle-trunked and stunted, apparently intimidated from growing any taller by the surrounding plain. But dotted anarchically here and there—one in the cemetery, several in assorted houses and gardens of the well-to-do, and a whole procession along the unbuilt dirt street that skirts the town out by the lagoon—rise the sturdy boles of Saharan palms, whose exotic crowns, silhouetted almost black against the feeble charm of a sunset sky, turn Malihuel into an oriental desert town. These and the relative age of its buildings lend Malihuel if not a measure of beauty then at least of poise.

  On the north-east side of downtown Malihuel are the new commercial high school, whose ugly concrete edges are unmellowed by the surrounding young olive trees, the identical white boxes of the Banco Hipotecario houses, and, after an isthmus occupied only by Malihuel’s second primary school (“the little school”), the Colonia, a rectangle five blocks by ten cut in two lengthwise by the train tracks and the station, within which you find a scattering of small dwellings, shacks, ruins (including those of two passenger hotels) and patches of waste ground.

  The Colonia sprang up at the turn of the century and grew at the feverish pace of the railways, and with them, as the trains first stopped carrying passengers, then freight, it slowly flagged and faded. Two new developments have appeared on its dirt streets in recent times—the green-roofed, brick houses of the FONAVI housing estate and, separated from the station by a lush grove of eucalyptus, a round-roofed, corrugated-iron shed, which is home to the Spiritist Society and hub of the cult of Palmiro Raulí, the prophet of Malihuel, who draws pilgrims from all over Santa Fe and neighbouring provinces.

  To the north stand the brick-and-earth mounds of the Federal Shooting Range—now closed down—and the silos of the Bullock Cereal Company, which rise blinding and incongruous from the scorched brick walls of the old Alvarado mill.

  Three sets of tracks converge on Malihuel Station, which would make it one of the best connected in the country if the passenger trains still passed through. Perhaps because there is something palpably grand-sounding about them, the locals still use the old names for the branch lines: the Santa Fe Western Railway, which brought the first train from Rosario in 1886; the Great Southern Railway, which, as it advanced towards Río Cuarto in 1890, laced together the towns of Alcorta, Rosas Paz, Malihuel, Elordi and Toro Mocho; and the Argentine Central Railway, which connected Malihuel with Pergamino and Buenos Aires in 1894. The station itself is built in the omnipresent English style, with wrought-iron colonnades and swags of metal fleurs-de-lys along the cornices, a clock with no hands, huge and white like a full moon, and rooms higher than they are long. Of the original installations only the old postbox is still there (albeit painted yellow), leaning like the Tower of Pisa on its rusting base, where every year’s end the children of Malihuel post their letters to Father Christmas and the Three Wise Men.

  There are four paved roads that lead you out of Malihuel. After the concrete arch announcing your departure, Veinticinco de Mayo Street forks in two—eastbound it leads to Rosas Paz and Alcorta to join up with the Buenos Aires-Rosario expressway; southbound it breaks into a tight chicane that connects the triplet towns of Leopardi, Dupuy and Bullock before meeting the section of Route Eight that leads to Pergamino and Buenos Aires. Northbound is the road to Fuguet, which at the time of the great floods kept what was left of Malihuel in contact with the outside world, and westbound along Veinticinco de Mayo Street leads to the cemetery and the lagoon road, which, after skirting the new beach resorts (Benoit’s and the Yacht Club’s) and passing through Elordi, meets Route Eight on the section heading to Toro Mocho and Río Cuarto. An officially closed short cut skirting the lagoon allows truck-drivers to dodge the toll road between Bullock and Toro Mocho; facing each other on either side of the short cut are the Mochica Motel and the tyre-repair shop, which everyone in town knows simply as the “road whores’ place”. Strewn along the length of this byway—which has more potholes than tarmac—are the relics of Malihuel’s golden age: the beginning of the causeway that once led to the island beach resort, the ruins of the hotel rising out of the water like a fortress, the posts of the street lights for the plots that never were, the entangled skeletons of rusting farm machinery and decaying stands that still await the opening of Expotencia ’73. As in all small pampas towns there is so much space available that the new never has to replace the old; it is added on. So from the nineteenth-century watchtower to the yellow hulk of the old power plant, which fell into disuse when the high-voltage power lines arrived just over a decade ago, everything that has ever existed in Malihuel endures, as it does in the minds of the townsfolk, who make the stubborn exercise of memory part of their everyday sport. Malihuel is a permanent museum of itself, and its hist
ory—which barely features in the official records—persists, writ large on the surface of the earth in its obstinate calligraphy of twisted iron and concrete.

  Chapter Two

  IN WINTER, the tearoom of the Malihuel Yacht Club is a cold, depressing place, with barely a few white Formica tables streaked with grey, surrounded by black tube chairs upholstered in red plastic, huddled in the centre of the room. The high, livid walls display an ancient calendar, courtesy of Ferro & Brancaloni Butcher’s of Veinticinco de Mayo and López, the snow of which has been yellowed by the years; a sepia photograph tinted with essential colours (green for the treetops, blue for the water, yellow for the buildings, red for the roofs), showing the island’s beach resort in its glory days, a black-on-dayglo poster announcing the participation of Las Karakaras (“All the Way from Córdoba!”), La Sonora Malihuense and Diógenes “El Lagunero” Aulicino at last carnival’s dances. Don Eugenio Casarico, the Yacht Club president back then, today merely the owner of the franchise for the tearoom, tells me of the carnivals of twenty years ago. “Those carnivals at the lagoon,” he reminisces, “tourists’d come from all over the province and from neighbouring provinces, like the beaches of Mar del Plata the lagoon’s were, you should’ve seen it at night,” he tells me, and once again I don’t remind him I did. “Your grandfather was always a friend of the Club, as well as a life member and, going through some old papers a few days ago I found his membership card of all things in a drawer, which we’d never got around to giving him; the previous mayor on the other hand had declared war on us, he and his Council said the Club was a bastion of unfair anachronistic privilege that deepened the social injustices at the heart of our community, I mean it’s not as if it’s the Jockey Club or anything, you can see for yourself how modest our facilities are, even the milkman was a member, and that lad Ezcurra in his leaders calling for the people to ‘tear down the wire!’ and ‘get their feet wet on the wild side’, the shower of arriviste brats, as if the Club hadn’t been founded by their fathers and they hadn’t been members since birth, sheer demagoguery like everything in those days, the ‘Montonero Council’ they called it, all that ‘for the people what is the people’s’ palaver but, as far as I know, they were never seen rubbing shoulders with the spades down at the public beach resort, which was bare as a bone scorched by the sun, and only the stunted willows for shade, the Council had to replant them come the start of every season because none ever made it to the end of the season. That’s what we had the wire fencing put up for, the lagoon’s ours and we wanted a bit of peace and quiet to enjoy it. Don’t think that’s why I bore him a grudge, I’ve always ridden any wrongs with my head held high, which is why when Superintendent Neri came to see me I put all grudges and personal interests aside and begged him, pleaded with him to reconsider his decision—already final mind—which he’d only made public to scratch a consensual itch. I even offered to talk to Rosas Paz myself, whom I sympathised with from a certain point of view, to smooth things over, at least enough to dissuade him from a course of action he might come to regret, but the Superintendent objected—if Don Manuel gets wind of it it could make things worse, his military friends may take measures that wouldn’t benefit either side. Far be it from me, Superintendent sir,” says Don Eugenio he said in that conversation with no witnesses, the highlights of which he now offers up to my good faith, “far be it from me to dictate to you how to go about your duties, but wouldn’t it be enough to give the boy a fright, something to make him see the error of his ways? Especially seeing as he’s calmed down since the new authorities took over, well, anyway, perhaps just a warning … A fright Casarico? What did you have in mind?” Don Eugenio tells me Superintendent Neri replied a little snidely. “Shall I send Officer Rama over in a sheet to sneak up on him and go boo? We’re not curing his hiccups Casarico, we’re trying to find a solution to a problem, a permanent solution. What I want to know exactly is whether I have your backing or not”—and Don Eugenio goes quiet after repeating the words from twenty years ago and runs a trembling hand over his leathery pate, his vaguely bulging eyes reliving either the humiliation or the fear, I can’t tell which. Feeling awkward I get up from the table to study a wall covered in framed photographs, most of them so old it’s difficult to tell from their general sepia uniformity which ones were once black-and-white and which colour. One in particular draws my attention—it shows one of the tables in the bar, around which four men are playing a hand of truco, apparent from the distribution of the cards and the white beans and the victorious smile worn by my grandfather in the foreground as he shows the seven of coins he’s about to win the hand with for himself and his partner. Their opponents, also half standing, hold up their cards to the camera, shielding them from the other players. They aren’t hard to recognise: a Don León with undyed hair, my present company and my grandfather’s partner, the only one who isn’t showing his cards—his broad, seated figure stares out at me with eyes of unfathomable pitch.

 

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