In terms of the influence of groundwaters, the directions of the run-off and the equipotential lines of the phreatic layer are indicated on Kreimer’s hydrographical map (1968). The convergence of the former and the close-packed lines indicate heavy drainage toward the central basin.
According to the bathymetry conducted in 1970, the maximum depth was 6m, and this measurement has remained constant along a 3,000m trench, approximately 2.5km N of the so-called Island Beach Resort (northern peninsula).
Elordi J & Jaimovich I La laguna Malihuel in
Estudios de geografía de la Provincia de Santa Fe
Various Authors Santa Fe GÆA 1973.
“HERE’LL DO, said the Super and Chacón and me thanked God and stowed the oars, we’d been rowing into a headwind, couldn’t move the day after, but the Super wouldn’t use the fire brigade’s rubber dinghy even if it did have an outboard motor. The moon was still up—he even made sure of that—and the sky was thick with stars, I dipped my hand in the water to wash the sweat off, it was warm I remember and if it hadn’t been for the luggage I’d of fancied a swim. A couple of officers I can’t remember who had spent the whole afternoon attaching bricks and bits of iron to him with wire till you could hardly pick him up, I can’t explain to you what he weighed nearly give myself a whatdoyoucallit a hernia I did, I ain’t saying not to take precautions but the bricks was over the top ’specially as someone else’d have to carry him afterwards … They put some sacking over him before they tied him up, he was not a pretty sight by then, looked like a big beef roulade, and with all the heaving and shoving the boat was rocking all over the place and the Super was swearing at us took three attempts to get him over the side it did, the last one nearly capsized us and we both fell backwards, me I cut my hand on the rusty wire had to have two stitches and a jab case it got infected look here I still got the scar and while we’re at it I’ll have another shot of caña to oil the gun. You still paying Buenos Aires or not? You ain’t telling me I let you down are you. Eh?”
My head hurts with the effort of remembering. Sunday the twenty-seventh they dumped him. I always went back to Buenos Aires at the beginning of March. But that left Monday the twenty-eighth. Was I in Malihuel that Monday? Did I have my usual last farewell dip in the lagoon? Maybe, if it rained that Monday, I can stop worrying. Any newspaper will tell me. The relief if it rained.
“Eh. What’s on yer mind.” Sayago’s voice bursts obscenely into my thoughts. “Or are you going to skimp now I’ve told you what you wanted to know?”
“Give him whatever he likes Nene. The last one,” I mutter through the grim cloud of my own drunken haze.
Sayago raises it enthusiastically to his lips, sipping the film that clings to the glass, his mouth a sucker filling the hole with its grey tongue meat. After hoovering up every last drop, he opens his mouth and his voice almost breaks:
“Probably reckon I been talking ’cause you stood me some fucking cañas eh? Been told you can have Carmen eating out of yer hand with a few shots? Eh?”
“Calm down Carmen,” intervenes Licho, who can obviously see it coming.
“Get yer fucking hands off me!” Sayago shakes an arm no one’s touched. “I may be called Carmen but I’m more of a man than the lot of you put together, this shitty city boy comes along and you’re all running around after him kissing his arse and saying sorry! Sorry for what? Can you tell me what the crap any of this is to you? You don’t fool me. I know why you’re here.”
I tense in my seat, while my eyes dart about looking for something I can cleave his head open with if necessary, but for now he’s content just to shout.
“Think you’re better than us don’t you Buenos Aires. But I’m a Sayago or didn’t you know? It was a Sayago as killed Musurana, the most famous bandit in the region! Now you come along asking questions but you know what? We’re the ones ask the questions here. I still got friends in the force. Think things have changed that much do you?”
I sit there and stare at him without answering, wondering how much longer I’m going to have to keep up a calm front. Meanwhile, Porfirio Dupuy, alerted by all the shouting, has emerged from his mysterious caverns and tells us if we’re going to have a fight to have one outside, Licho suddenly remembers something very important he should have done a year ago and disappears through a side door, and Iturraspe stands a little way back from the table in case the glass starts flying.
“You’re all the same,” spews the not-so-ex-policeman. “When there’s any trouble you run screaming to us, Police! Police! and then when we’ve risked our necks you spit on us. And if at some point we ice someone you raise the ceiling, but if it’s one of our own you don’t give a monkey’s, not a monkey’s! It’s what you’re paid for you say. What do you know? Ever had to hold a dying comrade, try to cheer him up and lie to him that everything’s going to be all right when you know he’s on his way out, and then go and face his folks, his wife?”
“Yes,” I hiss through my teeth, but my interlocutor’s so wired he doesn’t realise I’ve answered his purely rhetorical question.
“Nobody who hasn’t been through it in the flesh has the right to question us about anything,” Corporal Sayago lets fly openly now, and at the expense of several more cackles manages to raise and swell his original slurring whine.
“If you want another drink just ask,” I breathe without looking at him. “There’s no need to shout.”
“I’ll shout all I like me! And you’ll give me another glass whether you like it or not!” he gets up from his chair and grabs the table with both hands as if to flip it over, but it’s really to steady himself. “You’re in my town now and if I tell you to buy me another drink you’ll buy me another drink get it? What’s up with the rest of you? You going to let some shitty city boy walk all over us just ’cause he’s got some money in his pocket! Come on, we’ll show him, come on! Think we’re afraid of you do you Buenos Aires? Afraid of you lot? Know what we do with puffed-up city boys here?”
He makes as if to unzip his flies, but his zipper gets stuck and, as he wrestles with it, one of the doors onto main street, the nearest one, bursts open and bounces back off the wall, and Sayago barely has time to look up before Guido’s on top of him heaving him by his hair to the floor in an arc and kicking him out into the street through the door Licho has been holding open as a precaution. Relieved at the prospect of a breath of fresh air, I go outside after them and am followed by Iturraspe and Nene Larrieu. His running shoes still undone, Guido kicks Sayago in the head, who, outlined against the battery of headlights on the Fiat Uno parked at right angles to the sidewalk with both its doors wide open, writhes on the ground like a slug with salt on its back. “May I?” I say to Guido, who hasn’t opened his vapour-clouded mouth except to breathe, and start laying into Sayago with my steel-capped shoes, connecting cleanly with his ribs as the cold clears my head a little, feeling the resistance of the bone yield after a few swings. Then suddenly I realise that, instead of helping me, Guido’s pulling on one arm and Nene Larrieu on the other, so I stop struggling. I’d’ve carried on till he was dead, I say to myself and for some reason the words calm me down.
Back inside, I buy us another round—minus the caña—to soothe our souls, and when I breathe in, deeper and deeper, my lungs fill completely. It’s a pleasant sensation. Our company—even Nene Larrieu, who, after calling Chacón to escort his ex-colleague to the little ward, breaks the habit of a lifetime and pours himself a neat gin, no ice—drink their drinks in silence.
“Good thing he never wanted to be a cop,” I remark after a while.
“That’s often the trouble with unbelieving converts,” Iturraspe points out. Out of deference to Guido I finish my drink as fast as I can and ride back with him in the car. Next morning, after a night of nightmares more vivid than the haze I wake up to, with the winter sun already high in the sky behind the raised blinds, I remember my return ticket to Buenos Aires, which this time I’ve quite forgotten to change.
“I DON�
�T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING HERE,” Clara Benoit had confessed to me with a vague sweep of the hand that might have included the freezing, empty dining room, the young eucalyptus wood outside the large windows—where one green and three blue tents have holed up till the end of the winter holidays—and the wrinkled surface of the lagoon, and beyond that who knows what vastnesses. “I mean look at this place, it’s depressing, I tell Papá to close up till summer but you know what he’s like, you must’ve got to know him well by now. Sorry,” she’d added. “You asked me about the church and there I go off at a tangent. Yes, I was there that afternoon. I went to see if Father Abeledo said anything about Darío. I don’t know why the others went but they did. There were a lot of people who never usually attended, I’ve seldom seen the church so full for an ordinary mass. What I remember most though was the silence. Pews creaking, shoes shuffling on the tiles, the occasional cough—but no one said a word. And to make matters worse the Father took longer than usual, which was quite a while. At the time I thought it was because he was preparing something special to say but apparently he was having one of his fits of depression … About Darío, of course. I don’t know what I was thinking of, the father’s words firiing us up and afterwards all of us leaving the church arm in arm, singing, behind Father Abeledo holding the cross on high, and marching on police headquarters. When I understood what he was saying I burst out crying. I couldn’t believe it of him and I couldn’t stop. Papá and Mamá, who was still alive back then, looked daggers at me and kept nudging me but there was nothing I could do and in the end I had to leave in the middle of the sermon, choking back the tears and everyone turning round and staring at me and already starting to whisper, nothing new, same as usual no doubt, it was no secret that for Darío I … You’d think by that stage they’d’ve got bored of talking about it. I mean twenty years is rather a lot. But they’re still singing the same tune aren’t they.”
“TRUTH BE TOLD I don’t know if it was the depression or a crisis of faith as people said or just the hots he had for that girl from Fuguet let’s call a spade a spade, he ended up leaving the priesthood and they must’ve got married I wouldn’t know and they lived in Córdoba for a while which was when we all lost track of them. And there were days when there was no getting him out of bed to say mass, we’d drilled the cleaning girl but there were times not even she could work the miracle and had to go knocking at your grandparents’ just next door or else at one of ours to give her a helping hand, I mean if he didn’t have the vocation what did he go and become a priest for in the first place so young and handsome he was when he arrived the girls wandered around in a daze over their new little priest and he started up that what do you call it the social work and the soup kitchens and the health schemes and girls who wouldn’t even speak to the darkies well maybe the maid or the gardener, and that was all, all of a sudden off visiting shacks and cooking for the darkie contingent all for a smile from Father Abeledo. But later I don’t know what can have happened whether it was that little tart from Fuguet or something else but he stopped bothering and gave up and we could count ourselves lucky if he made it for mass or weddings or christenings. I remember your christening, seems like yesterday, I was carrying Leandro see he’s only a wee bit younger than you are and it was dreadfully hot I had to sit down your grandmother kept everything in a little box ah the number of times we must’ve got it out even a cutting from the Toro Mocho paper with the news of yours she must have it with her in Rosario I suppose but what I don’t remember is whether your Mamá and Papá … but of course not, your Papá never visited the town did he. Your grandmother wasn’t one to say much and I didn’t want to bring the subject up you know what it’s like in-laws don’t exactly get along, me and my daughter-in-law for example every time I go and visit her she makes me feel so uncomfortable me I swear if it wasn’t for the children I wouldn’t give her the time of day but I’ll put up with anything for their sakes I’ve always been the tolerant sort now let me see it can’t have been Father Abeledo he was too young it must’ve been Father Campbell I think. Isn’t that right Chesi? It’ll be in that cutting of your grandmother’s, don’t forget to ask when you see her. You are stopping off in Rosario on your way back aren’t you? Weeell to tell you the truth I don’t know when it could’ve been do you remember Chesi? Whether that sermon of Father Abeledo’s was right at the time or later on? People still argue about what the Father meant, he was usually so clear, such a lovely speaker he was, and I don’t know if it was because of his depression that time or what it was but nobody understood a word of what he was saying, actually, on our way out we all looked at each other and I said to Chesi I said did you understand what he was on about no did you nor did I we even asked Yori’s lad who was the altar boy … che, what was the father talking about and he said I don’t know so there you are. Well I don’t know something about arms and eyes and he started on about bacteria and viruses and my brother-in-law said he should stick to theology ’cause he hasn’t a clue about medicine. Let’s see, must’ve been that Sunday as you say ’cause if I am sure of one thing it’s that Delia wasn’t there, she was in Rosario, she liked going there at weekends for the cinema and the theatre and sometimes her son’d go with her and sometimes he wouldn’t, I sometimes think that if he’d gone with her that weekend how much upset the town would’ve been spared, but anyway as I was saying as far as I know he didn’t mention Delia’s son some’ll say he did everybody takes what they want out of it ’specially that time, kept going on about viruses and bacteria he did I can’t see what it could’ve had to do with him unless the boy had the flu,” Aunt Porota will say, sitting in her living room during the long afternoon I’ll spend with her, and her sister Chesi will nod, smile and start a new row of the little waistcoat she’s decided to knit for my son Guille.
“IT’S GOING A BIT FAR to ask me to remember a sermon,” Iturraspe appeals to my common sense. “So take everything I say with a pinch of salt. But it doesn’t need much imagination anyway. It was along the lines of the body as a model of the ideal community. In a community of men the rulers are like the head, the police the watchful eyes, the Church the soul, the workers the hands, the women the heart, the poor the arsehole—no actually that’s my contribution—and if part of the body is damaged or suffers an incurable disease that threatens the health of the whole, it’s better to cut it off than to allow it to … It was clear as day he was talking about Ezcurra, that in some way he was justifying what they did. What isn’t clear is why.”
“Good thing he was a progressive priest,” I chime in not without irony. “Imagine if he’d been your run-of-the-mill career priest.”
“Exactly my point.” Licho begins to insinuate one of his ineffable theories. “Greco had his eye on the little priest and that sermon saved his neck. Someone must’ve warned him about what was coming just in time. Quick off the blocks the father was there.”
“That wasn’t it no,” intervenes Don León. “The only thing Father Abeledo cared about by that stage was leaving the priesthood and marrying that bit of all right from Fuguet. I met her and I don’t blame him. That sermon … it was his way of burning his boats. After that he couldn’t go on being a priest in his own eyes. Poor Father Abeledo, so naive, it backfired on him. His superiors were delighted. Thought they’d found someone irreplaceable, took him another six months to wriggle out.”
“CAME BACK A FEW YEARS AGO, with his wife and kids. They only stayed a couple of hours, on their way to the seaside on holiday they were and decided to drop in,” Leticia will tell me one night while she’s getting dinner ready. “Wanted to lay some flowers on Ezcurra’s grave. He looked quite astonished when he found out what he must’ve known all along.”
“THAT SUNDAY was the last Sunday of Carnival, and everybody was there early with one ear glued to the radio for the match,” says Guido, the last to arrive at the table in Los Tocayos.
“What match?” I ask innocently. From the way they look at me my question is obviously tantamount to football
ing sacrilege. Grave.
“Not really a significant game in itself, though some claim—rightly if you ask me—that it was the first in a long series of victories that, just over a year later, would culminate in Argentina winning our first World Cup,” says Iturraspe, affecting a pompous radio voice. “Argentina v Hungary at the Bombonera. What was the final score Nene?”
“Beat them 5-1—two from Luque, three from Bertoni.”
“A thrashing with goulash,” Iturraspe rounds up. “But that’s not why it’s a gold-star encounter in the annals of Argentinian football; it’s because it was the first time a young player donned the light-blue and white, one who, despite his tender years—barely sixteen at the time—was idol-worshipped by the loyal supporters of his club, Argentinos Juniors back then.”
“A minute after coming on for the forward, Luque, he slotted through a sublime pass to set up a goal for Houseman,” Nene Larrieu eulogises. I confine myself to pronouncing the sacred syllables with due devotion:
“Diego Armando Maradona,” I say. “Now I remember, yes. We listened to the game on the radio at your house,” I say to Guido. “I’d never’ve guessed it was the same weekend.”
“Happens to a lot of people. What between Sandro, the Carnival, the match,” enumerates Iturraspe, once again taciturn, “and the relief, or the resignation—call it what you like—that the damned dog’s day was finally over I don’t think anyone remembered.”
“Remembered what?” I ask.
An Open Secret Page 15