“A FAREWELL PARTY?” I’d asked in astonishment the night before, though by that stage my credulity had been strained beyond breaking point. “Didn’t you say everyone condemned his actions?”
“The human memory moves in mysterious ways,” quipped Iturraspe, examining the flowering tip of his toothpick, tinted faintly with a watery red.
“It was at the Yacht Club,” added Licho. “I was taken on as an extra waiter, but there was no need. Half the tables were empty.”
“Ten,” specified Nene Larrieu. “When they went over to Neri’s to explain he answered It’s all right, don’t worry, you should all’ve stayed at home. You only need yourself to leave. His breath was already strong enough to knock you flat when he got there, and he downed three more bottles of red on top of that. When it came to the farewell speeches they had to pretend they couldn’t hear him chuckling to himself. Didn’t know where to put herself his missus didn’t.”
“Speeches too?” I sighed, and, before anyone could open their mouth, “No, I know, don’t say a word. My grandfather.”
“He wasn’t the only one”—Licho softened the blow. “He was joined by two or three others, each one more passionate than the last. Ease off boys, no need to roll out the red carpet, Nene was mouthing at them, and me I covered up the giggles with my empty tray. But Superintendent Neri—sorry, he was ex-Superintendent Neri by then—was wrong about one thing. Their warmth that night wasn’t hypocritical. They were genuinely glad he was leaving.”
“But he didn’t miss the opportunity for one last grand gesture, did he,” chirped Iturraspe, who’d set about applying the softened toothpick to his fingernails with greater precision. “Tell him Nene.”
“Well for a start,” began Malihuel’s infallible walking database, “the local movie house had been showing the classic western High Noon all week in a non-stop double bill with My Name Is Trinity. Who’s never dreamt at some point in their lives of throwing their badge into the dust, with the dignified contempt of Gary Cooper, at the feet of the cowardly townsfolk who didn’t deserve a sheriff like him?”
“Course out here provincial coppers don’t wear silver stars—maybe they do in Buenos Aires eh, you’re way ahead of us—so rummaging drunkenly through his pockets Malihuel’s ex-police chief ended up throwing down the only thing he could find—his Yacht Club membership card. While his gesture didn’t lack, how can I put it, clarity, it didn’t exactly bring the house down. And then that halfwit Casarico thought he’d dropped it ’cause he was so pissed and bent down to pick it up, so, as he couldn’t repeat the gesture, Neri stuffed it back in his jacket pocket and left. And he never got another opportunity after that did he. The day they actually left not even the dogs showed up to give them a send-off”—Iturraspe rounded off the anecdote.
I had one last question.
“No Rosas Paz wasn’t there,” Nene Larrieu replied. “Didn’t even bother replying as far as I know, and as a rule I do.”
“HOW SHOULD I KNOW WHAT IT WAS LIKE,” remarked Don León, shortly after joining us and ordering his first gin, “they must’ve loaded everything into the car and left. They’d sold most of the furniture a few weeks earlier and the house they were building never got off the ground as you know. What I do know is that a few days later their bitch appeared on the highway. Probably dumped it just after setting off, otherwise the dog’d never’ve been able to make it back, ’specially as it was limping on three legs by then. Well, I mean it must’ve been him because Doña Clota was completely devoted to the little thing, maybe he threatened to dump her too. Your pal Guido ended up adopting it, always was very dog-minded. How many’s he got now? Three isn’t it? counting the ones from the factory, that’s what I was telling you Licho. Well I think the gesture was crystal clear. I don’t know if you’ve heard but that bitch … Ah, course, it was your grandparents who … The gesture spoke volumes. He didn’t want anything from Malihuel. Even left his chinita behind, though Ariel Greco used her for a while, just for kicks. Mind you we weren’t going to make it difficult for him. Just as long as he got out here … He left us with Arielito Greco though. Now that man was a crook, even the cows had to cough up to get milked. He didn’t leave town till the flood forced him to and even the fleas had nothing to eat. The present one likes to live and let live. But you know what it’s like, with the cops. In Bombal for example, which is near here but policed by another headquarters, a little boy appeared dead, and everyone knows who did it, a first sergeant it is and a shirt-lifter to boot but the chiefs won’t hand him over, and nor will the judges. There’ve been something like six silent marches already. It was all on TV. Didn’t you see it in Buenos Aires? The police are insisting it was a tramp, so they go out on a raid after every march and so far the only thing all that marching’s done is to make tramps avoid Bombal like the plague. They’ll grind the marchers down in the end, they always do. For Ezcurrita? That’s a laugh. Are you serious? The only way to get the town marching for Ezcurra would’ve been to call a meeting of his creditors. We’d’ve filled the square then wouldn’t we,” said Don León seeking the approval his fellow townsmen have been reluctant to afford him of late. “It’s like that fable … well I can’t remember which one now, the thing is Ezcurra screwed everyone and then when he got into trouble nobody wanted to lift a finger to help him see. ’Sides, all that marching’s fairly recent as far as I can remember. You couldn’t get one over on the military, no way, they were the only ones marching. You know what it’s like, nowadays somebody loses a poodle and the whole town’s out on the streets with candles and photos. It’s the in thing now, but in those days you could forget about it. The military were capable of loading a whole march into the trucks. And Neri, what we heard is they headed back to the north of the province, which is where he was from, and set up a maxikiosk, can’t remember where, and that they both died in a crash on the highway. And … must’ve been somewhere around Vera I reckon. It was only a matter of time though. I mean, if he carried on drinking the way he did.”
“Brazilian truck-driver, drove one of those that look like locomotives, hit them head on like a fly-swatter. Had to peel them off the radiator like bugs,” added Iturraspe graphically enough.
“SO WHAT’S THAT?” Guido’d asked a few days earlier in the cab of his truck, which he’d come to pick me up in from the Cornelio Saavedra library in Toro Mocho, when I showed him the last stamp in my collection.
“Have a look,” I held out the photocopy to him.
“Oh yeah, and who’s going to drive, you?”
“‘Announcement,’” I read. “‘We the undersigned authorities and inhabitants of the town of Malihuel, capital of Coronel González County, Santa Fe Province, Argentina, hereby express our agreement and approval for the exemplary work of General Superintendent Armando J Neri at the head of the Eighth Regional Police Unit based therein, and wish him a prosperous and well-earned rest on the occasion of his forthcoming retirement. His providential actions at moments critical not only for the region but for the country as a whole, which can finally be put behind us, the unbreakable faith of his convictions and his distinguished sense of honour and duty are all deserving of praise and emulation. With his departure from the post, the town of Malihuel loses not only one of the best chiefs of police in its long history, but also a faithful friend, and just as we regret that he has, for valid personal reasons, reversed his initial decision to remain in our midst after his retirement, we would like to assure him that his stay in Malihuel will never be forgotten and that the gates of our beloved town will always be open to him and his family.’ Touching eh?” I remark after I’ve finished.
We’d stopped at the lights on the exit of Route Eight and Guido took the chance to grab the paper and give it a quick read, especially the signatures at the end.
“Your grandfather’s there,” I pointed out matter-of-factly.
“So’s yours,” he riposted.
I gave him my best withering smile. Guido shrugged his shoulders and pulled off.
“WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT we could even be proud of Doña Delia right?” Don León, who was on a rare third gin, and had evidently got hooked on the subject of marches, renewed his assault. “We ought to do something oughtn’t we, I don’t mean a statue but at least a plaque, a street name, I mean we’ve got more than enough streets to go round haven’t we, ’specially in the Colonia? I don’t mean for Ezcurrita see, because someone might get all het up about it, ’specially his creditors. But Doña Delia, she shouldn’t offend anybody by now. We should talk to the mayor about it right? at the next Neighbourhood Committee meeting. But I don’t know if there’ll be a quorum. What do you think?” Don León asked and sank into expectant silence.
My sidelong glance met with a heard-it-all-before scowl from Guido, who’d just arrived. Iturraspe gazed at the floor, and only when he realised no one else intended to did Licho decide to speak up:
“Right, yes. We ought to do something,” he ended up nodding after a few seconds of general silence.
“AND THAT ONE’S OUR FOUNDER, Colonel Urbano Pedernera, a hero of the Indian wars. At one time you could dismantle the statue, the rider and horse had been cast separately and once a year the people used to take Don Urbano down and parade him through the streets and down to the shore of the lagoon, where they’d scrub him and brush him and polish him till they got all the green off. My how he shone, like a trumpet in the morning sun he looked. Then they’d sit him back on his horse the wrong way round, and the next day us Council employees had to turn him the right way round again. You’ve no idea what he weighed! No, no, if there was anything in it, it was nothing more than a practical joke, the kind of stunt lads pull when they’ve had one too many, that’s all, nothing political as some people claim. It’s always been a peace-loving town this, people respect authority here. But there’s always somebody around to quibble and carp and this is how the two of them ended up as you can see. There’s the weld and the scorch marks from the blowtorch, between the colonel’s legs and the saddle. Plumber’s solder they used, I mean, it’s a crying shame, looks so ugly. And to make matters worse he’s not on straight! Weeell, let’s see. Must be fifteen years ago at least, no, longer, me I started working for the Council in …”
I’d spent my first day in Malihuel on a sentimental journey around the landmarks of my childhood. I soon realised nothing much had changed, aside from the predictable, almost inevitable marks of progress that had been passively absorbed from the outside world: the once non-existent bus terminal, the TV satellite dish next to the new telephone exchange, a couple of video clubs. Otherwise there was no difference in size or appearance, only in scale: what the perspective of childhood and memory had made vast and diffuse, taking on almost the proportions of a nebulous country, my arrival had replaced with the clear, condensed and crystalline—a miniature town in a snowstorm. As if I’d been looking at Malihuel across the years through a pair of field glasses and my arrival, instead of removing them, had put them on the wrong way round. The square, on one of whose sunlit benches I’d installed myself, stiff with cold, to smoke a cigarette, sported a miniature of the same unpainted playground rides, trees that looked the same having grown, the statue of motherhood, the polished bronze of its uncovered breast shining against its general verdigris, the statue of Comandante Pedernera that I was being told about by the part-time park-keeper, a man of indefinite years dressed in a fat blue jacket and parrot-green baseball cap, who’d been sweeping the sandstone paths, wet from the recent rainfall, with a palm leaf, and had come over to my bench to ask me if I was from Rosario or Fuguet and casually, with exquisite delicacy, if I had a cigarette.
“What’s that he’s holding?” I asked him in return. “A champagne cork?”
“That? It’s a thistle flower. These fields—the whole area—were thistle fields, thistles higher than a man on horseback back in the days of the Indians. Colonel Pedernera founded the farming colonies, after he wiped them out. What?”
“Who had him welded back on?”
“The mayor at the time. Don Rogelio it must’ve been. It was under him I started working for the Council. Later there was a plan to unweld him again, they were going to have some study or other done to see if they could get him off without ruining him, but the years passed and so did the mayors and the floods came and went and there he is. But people’d got used to him looking like that by then.”
“NOW THAT’S WHERE SHE DID overstep the mark if you don’t get on with people fine but with beliefs or what do you call them symbols I think you have to respect them, spitting at someone isn’t the same as spitting at the cross and our founder’s statue stands for all of us, like the watchtower, I always say the Tuttolomondos ought to put the watchtower on their pasta boxes it’s our only export after all but you try telling them you know how stubborn they are you could suggest it seeing as you’re such good friends pretend it’s your own idea all right I admit I did take part as a young girl but it’s like Carnival I mean just because the men dress up as women doesn’t mean they’re effeminate does it, nor does parading Don Urbano on the Virgin’s litter which incidentally with his legs open like that and no horse underneath honestly it looked like I won’t say any more and of course it didn’t show a lack of respect for authority, and besides I mean it was gleaming after the celebrations they say eggs and flour absorb the oxide and then washing it off in the lagoon water with all that iodine, tantamount to a purification it was, nowadays it looks so run-down, must’ve been twenty years since it last saw a cloth what do you expect when it’s all jobs for the boys at the Council you’re lucky if they bother to sweep the streets. I think that year was the first time we didn’t do it I don’t know why we didn’t agree not to but the day of the ceremony came it was supposed to be secret before to keep outsiders away but it’s ancient history now and anyway Fefe you’re one of us I can tell you it was always the third Sunday of March and that year goodness knows why the third Sunday came around and not even a parrot. I think we just forgot personally. But Delia didn’t. She must’ve been expecting us all to turn up, her of all people who’d never wanted to be part of things that were how can I put it a bit on the common side but this time she was the only one there, ah the ironies of life. And when she realised nobody’d come in sheer anger I tell you she grabbed poor Don Urbano by the foot and boom! she flipped him off his perch. The people living on the square say they heard the noise and came out to see thinking there’d been a crash. If you go and have a proper look you’ll see that there’s a faint line on his right arm below the elbow which is a crack he got when he fell. The strength desperation gives you I’m telling you it always took at least five men at the ceremony to get him off his horse and Delia did it on her own goodness me whenever I think how that woman must’ve felt,” says Auntie Porota while rolling into a tight ball the last yellowing strands of the undone cardie held by her sister’s reverent hands.
“I DON’T THINK THE TIME WAS RIPE EITHER,” opined Iturraspe when, taking advantage of Don León’s absence to urinate, I quiz him about the fate of the statue. “We tacitly decided to put the ceremony on ice till further notice in case the military took it the wrong way, they were so fond of festivals to do with the War against the Injuns and all that. But of course, after Delia’s sudden unsaddling of our founder, there was an act of redress right across the board. Well who do you expect, the mayor right? It was his duty to our beloved founder, hero of the holy war against the barbarian defeated again by his comrades in arms a hundred years later, saving the fatherland for the fifth time in its history—Professor Gagliardi and I tried to figure out his arithmetic but it just didn’t add up—well anyway by the time we finished clapping two operatives from the Council team—Topo Lencina was one, I can’t remember the other—whipped out their blowtorches and started welding away between Don Urbano Pedernera’s pants and the saddle of his horse-faced mule. As the double jet of sparks descended his trouser leg the gallant rider took up his final position of rest, high in the saddle, which he holds to
this day, though some people think he leans to the right slightly, and one time, to put an end to the eternal debate, we went to the hardware store to find Don Alberto Fischer, who fetched his level and plumb line, and confirmed the slanting hypothesis, although the uprighters didn’t find the results conclusive.”
“ARE YOU SURE you don’t want anything else Fefe? I remember how much you liked coming here for your milk and cookies. Not even a glass of water? It’s from the tap, I don’t know if you’ve seen but we’ve got running water now. They found some out there by Rosas Paz. They’d been looking for it before out past your grandmother’s, but it was bad. Remember what it was like before, how bitter the lagoon water was? No use not even for watering it was. You had to water delicate plants like dahlias with water from the well. What a job! So many things have changed since you used to come here, so many people that have left, your grandmother, Clota whom we miss so much, like sisters we were the three of us, you don’t know how sad we were when we heard about the accident, the only consolation is that they went together, as I always say, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone to be left behind. Would I Chesi. I mean it was easier for us when the little ones were here, but now, well that’s why we moved in together, actually it was Chesi that moved in. I look at you now and I swear I can’t believe it, so grown-up, so tall, a war hero from the Malvinas and all, makes me feel all proud … What a silly billy your Auntie Porota is, someone of my years getting all … I always get a bit emotional at this time of the afternoon, especially in winter. Chesi doesn’t get like this so much, she has her knitting to keep her happy haven’t you Chesi? The cardie for your little boy’s nearly ready Fefe, now don’t tell me it doesn’t look a treat, and promise you’ll take a photo of him wearing it and send it to us. Oh and make sure his Mamá’s in it too, we’re dying to meet her. What did you say her name was? Well, after Delia moved to Rosario we never heard another thing about her. That as well, sometimes I get this pain … I’m not saying she didn’t have her reasons poor thing, she suffered a great deal over her son, but in all these years no visit, no letter, not even a phone call. A town she lived in all her life, where so many people loved her. But then she did always act as if she was doing us a favour living here didn’t she, always thought she was a cut above the rest of us in town and one fine day she just upped and left. That business over her son upset her it’s true, troubled her a great deal it did, and goodness knows she must’ve felt people here didn’t help her enough. Still she didn’t know how to make people help her either, first she sets the whole town against her, then she criticises it for deserting her. And anyway supposing if God forbid just thinking about it gives me a stabbing pain right here, but just supposing something had happened to my Leandrito, or to the son of forgive me Chesi it’s just an example don’t look at me like that, if anything’d happened to either of them do you think Delia would’ve lifted a finger to help us? People are no worse here than anywhere else, and I say, if you move every time you don’t like something about someone you’ll end up at the North Pole isn’t that right Fefe. There’ll always be things we don’t like and as I say if you want to leave you’re perfectly entitled, Argentina’s a big place and Rosario has its charms, who can deny it, although you wouldn’t get me out of my little town, not on your life, I’ve already got my little plot of Malihuel land next to Papá and Mamá, but Delia I don’t know breaking off all links like that, never visiting her parents’ grave again, uprooting herself out of spite and feeling not the least bit of nostalgia or curiosity. People you’ve known and seen almost every day of your life, not wanting to see them any more. You see Fefe the depth of that woman’s resentment. I couldn’t do it, I really couldn’t, even if they did the worst possible thing to me, the worst thing you can imagine, and I’ve had things done to me here in town mind, I could write you a list, to start with … The Darío business was hard, who’ll deny it, if anyone touched a hair on my Leandrito or my Beba’s heads … I don’t even want to think about it, worse than ten Delias I’d be so I would, but of course I brought them up to be decent and law-abiding and they never got into trouble. Because if you don’t bring them up properly and they turn out to be say burglars or bandits or even terrorists and get killed in a shoot-out ah well then it’s other people who are to blame. I sometimes ask myself you know especially when she was … Chesi tells me I shouldn’t but I still ask myself if we mightn’t’ve been a bit hard on Delia perhaps we didn’t do enough to help her or we judged her too harshly but anyway I’ve already told you what happened when we tried to get close to her she went almost crazy quite unhinged she was and to be honest we reached a point where we got fed up of her. As I say we’re each entitled to our own opinions, I’m very broad-minded and I respect other people’s opinions so I do, but you can’t say a whole town’s wrong and one person’s right. Because say let’s say what I reckon is that it was life and when life comes into it you feel the need to blame someone and if you can find someone to blame you feel a kind of relief don’t you. All right let’s say somebody did do something wrong in that business over Darío let’s say there was one person to blame in a way or maybe two. But it’s one thing to blame one or two people isn’t it and quite another Delia acting up like that because I don’t think that’s really the case there, you can’t go pointing the finger at a whole town like that now can you Fefe.”
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