“YOU LEAVING FEFE?” Leticia asks me when she sees me getting my bag together.
“Yes. I’m taking the four am to Rosario, they leave every hour for Buenos Aires from there so I’m told. It’s the first one that passes isn’t it?”
“The La Verde bus? Yes. There’s another at five-thirty I think.”
“Two. But I’ve already bought my ticket for this one,” I reply, wrestling with the zipper.
“It’s really got to you about your granddad hasn’t it. Guido told me.”
“Yes. No,” I lie, I’m not sure with which word. “I miss home too. I rang from the terminal and when Guille answered I actually got a lump in my throat. And there’s such a hoo-hah here over this whole business, it’s all getting a bit much to be honest. I may come back later on, I don’t know. I need to stop and think for a bit. And I’ve found out everything I wanted to. I don’t want to talk to anyone else, I get the feeling I know what they’re going to say.”
“Are you stopping for dinner?”
“If that’s all right with you. We’ll have a send-off.”
She waits by the door a little longer out of politeness, and I’m about to tell her not to put herself out and to get on with her things when the tooting of a car horn makes us jump. Through the window we’re dazzled by the battery of full headlights from Guido’s Fiat Uno, who’s already walking in through the front door.
“Sayago’s shown up. The ex-cop,” he announces exultantly. “He’s waiting for us at the bar,” he says coming inside and he sees my bag on the bed. “Where are you going?” he asks me.
“I’m leaving. I decided a while ago,” I reply, stating the time.
“There’s still time then,” he says to me dragging my by the arm towards the door he left open when he came in. “We’ve got more than enough time till four in the morning.”
Interlude Two
DAILY LIFE IN MALIHUEL hasn’t changed radically since my last visit, so it isn’t hard to reconstruct what an average day would have been like, twenty years back. To be more illustrative let’s choose a weekday; to avoid being too abstract let’s say a Friday; and let’s put that Friday somewhere towards the end of February—Friday twenty-fifth February 1977. We can place our ideal observer high up at the top of the church spire, from where he would be able to observe everything—all four points of the compass—that goes on in the streets and, in less detail, at the lagoon’s beach resort; and for what’s hidden under the tops of the trees or in the interiors of the houses, imagination or memory should be enough, as this is an observer who has the essential rhythms of town life written on their body.
The day begins at night, as is the norm in towns in Argentina’s interior, even in summer. A light comes on—at the Trigo Limpio Bakery. A light goes out—at the police headquarters one dozy officer has replaced another sleeping officer and doesn’t want the light to keep him awake. Half a block away the drying fans of the pasta factory commence their non-stop drone, wafting their egg-and-flour breath onto the street. At 4.45 am—if it’s on time—the Los Cardales bus from the towns to the south swings onto Veinticinco de Mayo Avenue. These days it stops at the New Terminal, but twenty years ago it would have driven on for two more blocks, as far as the corner of Los Tocayos, where a shadowy figure gets off, its human form disappearing into the surrounding shadows never to be seen again. Forty minutes later the Chevallier from Bullock follows the same route and, when it sees no sign of a passenger standing on the corner, heads straight on down the Fuguet road, bound for Rosario. Impressions: a watery light spreading from the east, the air still, and cool for the last time in the day, the acoustic depth of the space measured in all directions by the crowing of cocks and echoed by the street lights, as sector after sector of the local grid clicks off. In the uncertain light the tarmacked streets are filled with the silent traffic of bicycles, mainly from the Colonia, converging on the open gates of the Tuttolomondo factory. Down the same street, from the lagoon, lurches the milkman’s trap, laden with dented, presumably full aluminium churns. In the gardens of each house it stops at, a covered jug has been waiting since the night before. The sky is criss-crossed by the shooting silhouettes of birds and everywhere the grass bends under the weight of the dew.
About seven, as the sun plucks the first rays off Comandante Pedernera’s bronze kepi, the La Capital truck from Rosario via Fuguet and the La Nación truck from Buenos Aires pull in at opposite ends of town. The first drops off the pile of newspapers outside the Casaricos’, the other at the hallway of the Dupuys, who will distribute it to whoever has ordered it. Fifteen minutes later the Central Alcorta bus arrives from its namesake, bound for Elordi and Toro Mocho; at most one dozy passenger gets off and steers their elongated shadow towards the houses, if they’re from town, or as far as a bench in the square to wait for the shops or offices to open if they aren’t.
By half-past seven no dew is left, except at the bases of the thickest patches of weeds, and in the sun-warmed treetops the cicadas start up their tentative drone. Until then the town has just been stretching and yawning, but now it wakes up properly. Lots of people on foot, a few cars, the odd motorcycle fill the streets; a couple of weeks later and there’ll be more activity because the start of classes will add the gleaming white of school pinafores to the bright light of day. The two banks and two service stations open, a few businesses and all the public offices. A handful of cars from neighbouring towns pull up outside the Courts, the police headquarters or the all-purpose building that houses the Inland Revenue, the Civil Registry and the Justice of the Peace’s Office. The traffic is fluid because the number of people or vehicles is never large enough for queues or traffic jams to form. Delivery trucks arrive from neighbouring towns and Malihuel sends them its own in return, with the logo of the globe and the question “What kind of delicious pasta shall we eat today?” painted on the grooved metal sides of the trucks. An hour later all the shops are open, the cemetery, the telephone exchange—still called Entel in those days—and the Post Office. This is also the time when the hotel kitchens and dining rooms come to life, with tourists and townsfolk wanting an early breakfast to make the most of the day, which promises to be a bright one: the Malihuel Grand Hotel and the Las Delicias on the square, the Los Tocayos hotel-restaurant and above all the Lagoon Hotel, towards which the trucks and vans that have finished their deliveries in the Colonia and the town advance, along the causeway across the glittering water. The stationmaster opens up his office and waits for the freight train to pass through, and at the now abandoned power plant the nightwatchman sets off for home and sleep, after a few matés with the two daytime operators.
By around nine o’clock, when the metallic sawing of the cicadas thickens the air, the heat really has begun to kick in. The Clarín van arrives and drops off its bale of newspapers—the bulkiest—outside the kiosk-cum-photocopier’s on the corner opposite the Courts. Half-an-hour later, the mail van leaves one canvas sack on the opposite corner and picks up another. By that time the bicycle traffic is all children, who also bring the playground in the square to life. Today being the last Friday of Carnival, many of them are equipped with squeezy bottles and water bombs. In kitchens the length and breadth of town, mothers are washing up the breakfast things and beginning to fill polystyrene coolers with pop, sandwiches, tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs for a day out at the lagoon. On the basketball and tennis courts of the Yacht Club the chairman switches the swags of coloured light bulbs on and off to make sure everything’s in working order for the dance that night. A patrol car carrying arrests from other towns pulls up around the back of the police headquarters and toots its horn outside the jailhouse gates. Behind it, while it waits, an orange Chevy coupé chugs and lurches beetle-like down the tarmacked street, turns right at the corner and, after two more gruelling blocks, stops outside a house with a slate-inlaid façade overlooking the square. A figure gets out on the passenger side, shades his eyes from the glare of the sun with one hand and opens the door, without a key. Before
going inside he turns round and waves to the occupants of the car, one of whom is in the process of clambering from the back into the recently vacated front seat. The car pulls off with the door still open and one foot sticking out, and over the noise of the engine comes a confusion of intermingled laughter and swearing. The two doors—the car’s and the house’s—slam shut at the same instant.
It’s noon, and first the Banco Provincia then the Banco Nación close their doors to the public until the following Monday. An hour later the public offices will do the same; only the post office and the telephone exchange will reopen after siesta. This is the time when the relay stations in Rosario start broadcasting, and in the kitchens of those who have lunch at home television screens flicker into life to accompany the meal with their grey silhouettes and almost articulate static crackle. It’s still two years before colour TV and ten before the arrival of cable will lend some meaning—other than ostentation—to owning one. At other houses husbands and fathers park outside the door and get out to change, while the family loads up the car and youngsters riot in the back seat. After tactical stops at the butcher’s and the baker’s, they will join the swollen caravan of cars and even trucks from every town in this and neighbouring counties which converges on the causeway and advances single-file towards the lagoon’s two beach resorts. At 1.15 pm, when the Los Ranqueles coach bound for Rosario goes past, it will be fifteen minutes since the DRMCO grader paving the Belgrano Street section between Revoredo and Martínez has stopped work; its two operators take a break from the double reflection of sun and hot tar under the insubstantial shade of the olive trees that line the as yet non-existent commercial high school. Little by little the early din of Malihuel’s day dies away, except on the island in the lagoon, where the smoke of dozens of barbecues and the cries of children playing in the water or at Carnival amidst tables and cars rises heavenwards. In the dining room of the Lagoon Hotel most of the waiters wait patiently by the counter; only at night will things liven up.
By three in the afternoon it’s as if a flash plague had done away with all the inhabitants. The last bus from Central Alcorta bound for Toro Mocho has just passed through without stopping, and the streets are devoid of people and vehicles. They’re filled entirely by the sun, the heat and the thunderous singing of the cicadas, the only movement that of a rhinoceros bug lurching over the red-hot sand. The shade, which has been retreating over the course of the day, now crouches at the foot of the trees and in the interiors of the houses, holed up behind closed shutters. All life and movement has retreated to them—in one, a standing fan swings from one side to the other, its breath strafing bodies sprawled on sheets, separated to prevent sweating at the points of contact; in another one, glued together from head to toe, grunting and groaning in chorus to the creaking of the bed; on a cool-tiled patio children play their silent siesta games among the potted plants; in a darkened kitchen the doñas who can’t sleep for the heat switch on the television in resignation and wait for the half-past soap.
An hour later the heat has hardly abated but, as if in answer to some secret call, the streets begin to stretch and yawn. The doors of the post office, the factory and the bar open, a megaphoned Fiat 600 begins to drive around the square, stridently announcing the night’s shows down at the lagoon, towards which a last batch of bathers head off to soak up what’s left of the sun; the TV drama over, the church bell begins to ring, calling the señoras to five-o’clock Mass and, refilled over and over at the tank in the square, the sprinkler starts roaming the dirt streets, damping down the dust with its open flower of water dodged by boys on bikes and dogs (the first sprinkling evaporating so fast that one inhabitant sitting on a wicker chair on the sidewalk outside her house watches the earth suck up all the moisture and dry before her eyes as if in fast-forward) and the whole town is flooded with the scent of wet earth, which mingles with the honeysuckle, spikenard and jasmine as the shadows lengthen. On the dot of seven the cinema opens its doors for the one-and-only showing on sunny days (a matinee and a late show are added when it rains), welcoming the trickle of cinema-goers who have been killing time in the ice-cream parlour next door, only one of whom—a young man in bermudas and multicoloured polo shirt, carrying a two-flavour tub—walks against the tide and disappears around the corner of the Banco Provincia. The last intercity coach of the day—the 7.20 Chevallier to Rosario—goes past, and in the Council yard an employee uncouples the sprinkler tank from the tractor and couples up the tipper, Friday being trash day. A reddening sun closes in on the horizon and the singing of the cicadas has now given way to crickets and frogs; first one row of mercury lights, then another perpendicular to it, comes on in the two main streets, the axes of a grid immediately, if more faintly, completed by the light bulbs strung along the other streets and a few moving cars with their sidelights on. Outside their radius, on the closed highway, almost at the edge of the lagoon, a few young couples under cover of the shadows venture towards the Mochica, as does the occasional solitary kerb-crawler down by the tyre workshop to check out the highway whores. Out on the island the power plant shudders and jolts into life, and as it hums the filaments of hundreds of light bulbs glow, going in seconds from red to yellow to white until they disappear in the very light they generate. A bronze-torsoed bather in scarlet trunks steps into one of the cubicles dripping wet, emerges from it in bermudas and brightly coloured polo shirt, sits down at one of the low pine tables and orders a beer. A few families have already struck camp, fathers loading deckchairs into trunks, mothers washing dishes in brown water in concrete sinks, grandmothers towel in hand waiting for the kids to launch the last of their water bombs or take a last dip in the lagoon, while along the causeway the caravan forms of those who want to shower again and change for the nine-o’clock show. By then there’ll be clouds of moths and scarabs and other beetles around the spotlights that will turn the open-air stage into a living, crawling carpet beneath the feet of the artists who that night are Los Churrinches (a folk group from Salta), an unknown imitator from Buenos Aires—who, crippled or consumptive (opinions vary), will take the stage on crutches and perform on a chair—and last, before an audience, whose impatience borders on frenzy, no less than Sandro will take to the stage in a triumphant return to the town that gave him a standing ovation when he was a rising star and today has dressed up to fête him in the cradle of his fame and glory. Special buses arrive from Santa Fe and neighbouring provinces, and hoards of young girls with placards and posters ready to be unfurled at their idol’s imminent arrival anxiously scan the clouds gathering in the livid sky and pray for the rain to hold off until the concert’s over. It’s likely—only likely—that at this stage of the proceedings a young man in an impeccable cream suit with neatly slicked hair, appears in the hotel doorway, scans the gathered multitude with puzzled eyes and disappears again in the direction of the bar.
From this point on it’s impossible to say with any certainty what happens. The night may well be unique and so fall outside the scope of a description that, like this one, endeavours to keep to the merely habitual. The artists take the stage a little late, when the audience’s rhythmic clapping makes their presence unavoidable, Sandro keeps them waiting even longer and rumours about accidents on Route Eight or health problems gust around the sensitive surface of the crowd; Sandro does or does not arrive and the approaching storm does or does not drown out the girls squealing at the delirium of his show, and at eleven at night the waxing moon may no longer be seen behind the black thunderheads driven by the sudden wind across the sky. The Carnival dances go ahead regardless, the poshest in the function rooms of the hotel with the Boedo Dixie Orchestra, who can switch from a milonga to a foxtrot in the blink of an eye, and the dance for the youngest under the Yacht Club shed vibrating to the rhythms of the Los Machimbres quartet from Córdoba. The night owls end the day—technically now a new one—at Bermejo’s nightclub or queuing at the drive-in entrance to the Mochica or scattering to the neighbouring towns, and more than one ends up sleep
ing it off in a lay-by, where they eventually open their dazed and gluey eyes to the first light of day.
An Open Secret Page 10