“WHAT HAPPENED? What exactly happened?” I kept asking the table, which Batata Sacamata had joined now that Don León had stumped off in his enthusiasm to outline his proposal to the Neighbourhood Committee.
“There are several versions,” Licho started again.
“I’m fed up of versions,” I insisted. “Did they kill her or didn’t they?”
Guido, who hadn’t said anything until then, intervened.
“Yes Fefe. Greco killed her, or had her killed.”
“How can you be so sure?” objected Batata Sacamata. “You there were you?”
“Come on,” insisted Guido. “The whole town knows it was Greco. He didn’t dare to do it here, so he waited till she moved to Rosario.”
“The whole town knows, the whole town knows. You all think you know everything around here. Want to know the truth? Nobody had the faintest what was going on inside. A what do you call it a bunker the headquarters always was. Another world. Like it was in a different town,” Sacamata insisted. I ignore him.
“How did he do it?” I ask my friend.
“Don’t know, obviously nobody’s going to admit it, but everybody knows that people from here in town went to Greco and asked him to sort out the problem with Delia. ’Specially after the statue episode. And Greco told them, you get her to move to Rosario and don’t worry about the rest, I’ll take care of it, he told them.”
“So how did they do it?”
“In her younger days before she got married she used to have a boyfriend in the military, who must’ve risen to say colonel by then. They persuaded her to go and look him up and talk to him. Mamá told me, ’cause she bumped into Delia who’d got her hopes up again with the idea, all dressed up and made up she was and couldn’t stop talking about her boyfriend and how he’d kept on calling her and writing to her and just by announcing herself she’d sort out the problem over Darío in a jiffy, that was the word she used, a jiffy. What a fool she’d been to waste her time in this little town, talking to ignorant storekeepers and policemen. They’d be bound to treat her properly in Rosario. She left in her car, a beige Renault 12, that very afternoon. No one knows if she made it to Rosario. She was never heard of again. Or her car. Just once, years later by that time, one of her brothers Eduardo showed up, who lives in Villa María in Córdoba. He came about the inheritance, to pick up some papers that were still here, and about the house.”
“Which house is it?” I asked.
“You don’t know? That beautiful one facing the square. The mansion with a huge front garden and the slate façade.”
“Oh I know the one, sure”—I finally made the connection and then, “Did he end up with it?”
The question was addressed to everyone, but once again it was Guido who replied.
“The house? No, Greco did. He sold it after the flood. Old Widower Gius lives there now, he owns land south of the lagoon. If you want to see it we can go, he’s a really nice old guy.”
PREDICTABLY ENOUGH, by dinner time of the day I’d spent with Auntie Porota and Auntie Chesi, after a shower that hadn’t helped to revive me, I found myself with aching bones and joints, a sore throat when I swallowed the Tuttolomondos’ pasta—Dafratti Number Thirty-Eight—which tasted of putty with flour-paste sauce and chopped plastic, and an infinite weariness that called to mind my eminently forgettable exploits of four years ago. Leticia gave me a cup of tea with aspirin, and when my fever rose to thirty-nine she called Dr Alexander, who diagnosed flu, prescribed antibiotics which I’d refuse to take, and set out his theory about the terrorist attack on the Colonel’s statue to his captive audience of one. (“A woman could never have done it on her own. Physically impossible. During the traditional festivities it took at least eight strong men to blah blah … That woman had outside help. It’s easy to guess who from. Her son’s partners in crime, who were plotting vengeance on our town …”). The following day, after getting my return ticket changed yet again—I’d lost count of the number of times—and calling home to let them know, Guido and Leticia moved me to Celia’s, as they’d be out all day and wouldn’t be able to look after me, and besides they’d want to go back to fucking in peace by now, they must have forgotten what it was like. I must have spent a couple of days in a constant stupor streaked with apathetic nightmares, through which stalked listless demons repeating I mean nobody any harm and I don’t mean to be unkind and let’s call a spade a spade. I awoke, or rather opened my eyes again to the world around me—which to the alarm of my fevered brain turned out to be the bedroom I slept in as a boy at my grandmother’s, hardly any different—with Celia stroking my matted hair and the inexplicably compassionate gaze of her big dark eyes over her sad, crumpled smile. She arranges the pillows for me so I can sit up a little.
“Do you know?” I ask her, and seeing her nod, “How long?”
“Always Fefe,” she answers. “I was very fond of your Mamá, and she told me … everything, I think. Ever since you arrived I wondered how long you could go without saying anything. You can’t stand it anymore can you Fefe.”
She’s right. I shake my head, incapable of speech, incapable of holding back the tears spilling from my eyes.
Interlude Four
THE CLEARLY ABORIGINAL NAME ‘Malihuel’ has always had overtones of mystery and beauty in a region where all other towns bear Creole or foreign names, as if Malihuel had been the only one to emerge out of the land, rather than be imposed upon it from above. And yet the precise origin and even potential significance of this place name have given rise to the most wide-ranging disputes and conjectures without—so far—the veil of the mystery having been lifted [ … ]
The oldest documentary reference to the place name ‘Malihuel’ comes in a concession of land belonging to Gerónimo Luis Cabrera and occupied by the Choncancharagua tribe, running “inland across the Pampas as far as Malihuel” and “thence from Malihuel ten leagues north to India Vieja” [ … ]
The thesis regarding the Araucano origins of the toponym has been supported by most authors to have studied the topic, albeit with differing interpretations of the details.
a) Some have adopted the view attributed to Félix de Azara, for whom MALIHUEL may mean ‘Malin’s place’, from the suffix ‘hue’, meaning a place or region, and ‘Mali’ or ‘Malin’, the name of a supposed chief who may in the remote past have established his village hereabouts [ … ]
b) Another Araucanist thesis suggests that the first element of the word might have been ‘Meli’, or ‘four’, the ‘e’ of which may have switched to an ‘a’—by no means a repellent idea; the precise pronunciation of the ‘a’ in Araucano may have had a sound intermediate between the two vowels, as it can have in other languages, such as English. From this have emerged explanations that place the geographical above the historical: Melinhuinkul, or ‘four hillocks’; Melico, or ‘four watering holes’; and even Melicohue, ‘four lagoons’.(1) The four hillocks incidentally, are conspicuous by their absence from the surrounding area; and, even in the most extreme of droughts, there is no record that the one lagoon has ever broken into four.
c) In my search for a word that, by corruption in its assimilation into the phonetics of Castilian, has lead to the elusive word ‘Mali’, I came across one in the dictionary of J M de Rosas(2) that did not figure in most of the dictionaries I had previously consulted: namely, the word ‘Malin’, which properly means ‘stone’, ‘pebble’ or ‘flint’; esp. cutting-or sharp-edged, such as an arrowhead, say. Hence MALINHUE, meaning a ‘place or region of flint’, from which MALIHUEL may have derived for obvious phonetic reasons. [ … ]
Without the slightest spirit of scientific rigour, but merely as a wry wink at the sometimes tortuous paths that lead to our destination by means of chance, it is worth noting that this meaning of the original name of the place, first revealed by myself here, Pedernal, or ‘place of flint’, seems in some way to herald or prefigure the name of the man who would become the town’s founder, Colonel Urbano Pedernera. [ … ] In Gagl
iardi, B, MALIHUEL: etimología de un topónimo santafesino. Cámara de Diputados de la Prov. de Santa Fe, Offprint of Homenaje al IV Centenario de la Fund. de Santa Fe, 1973.
1993 POSTSCRIPT:(3) Twenty years on, I am compelled to denounce my own thesis, which had met with widespread approval due perhaps more to my colleagues’ intellectual sloth and negligence than to any intrinsic merit of its own. It is understandable that an ‘n’ may have vanished in its passage through so many mouths, but that the final ‘l’ should have appeared by the grace of the Holy Ghost is unacceptable from any point of view that claims scientific status. Perhaps blinded by the naive parochialism of the times, I never paid heed to the term HUELE or HUELDE, which P J Venom’s dictionary of 1966 provides as meaning ‘ill-fated’ or ‘unfortunate’. We inevitably return, then, to the idea of the prefix meli-, meaning ‘four’, which, coupled with ‘huele’ would give MELIHUELE–MELIHUEL–MALIHUEL: meaning ‘four unfortunate wretches’, where ‘four’ has a generic rather than a strictly numerical value of scarcity or poverty, as in the Spanish expressions ‘four crazy cats’, ‘four poor devils’, etc. Of all the hypotheses put forward, this one is not only the most linguistically viable, but also the only one that can be verified empirically. I am still searching for the flints of my earlier hypothesis; however, the prophetic nature of the word with which the legitimate occupants of these lands for ever branded the moral standards of those who would later usurp them brooks no reply. In conclusion, I am now in a position to state the definitive etymology of the place name, ‘Malihuel’: MELIHUELE–MALIHUEL: ‘four crazy cats’, ‘four poor devils’—a paltry collection of pathetic and/or contemptible individuals.
* * *
1) P Hux Meinnado: La Capital newspaper. Rosario, 25/05/1970. Quoting Stieben Enrique: Toponimia Araucana. p. 104. La Pampa. 1966.
2) Rosas, Juan Manuel de: Gramática y Diccionario de la lengua Pampa. Suarez Caviglia & Stieben. Ediciones Albatros. 1947.
3) Author’s note: This postscript does not feature in any of the editions of Prof. Gagliardi’s noted study and, therefore, makes its appearance in printed form for the first time here. It appears in an addendum in his own handwriting at the end of the revised version, which, shortly before his regrettable passing, he was about to send to press.
Chapter Five
“TOWN OF COWARDS, TOWN OF SCOUNDRELS,” mutters Professor Gagliardi in the interview he finally granted me at his house on the outskirts of town, and within whose book-lined walls he has decided to shut himself away from life. “It’s no coincidence the first settlers were Indian-butchering milicos. The gringos came later, when the dirty work’d been done, my great-grandfather amongst them. But all in all they were real men and women, capable of sticking to their guns and seeing their rights were respected, of standing up to authority; not like this rotten rabble toiling and crawling out there. And they ask me why I’ve decided to take refuge within these walls. Give them the pleasure of turning their backs on me again, giving me the cold shoulder, the way they did with your father, and your grandmother? Can you believe, dear boy, that when I was removed from my post, when that gutless Scuppa came to me with his Benjamin I implore you to understand me, in this day and age, your stay at this institution … no one, not even my colleagues, not even my neighbours, who’d all been students of mine every last one of them, or parents of my current students, stuck up for me or at least expressed their sympathy? Do you know what they used to say? He always had been a bit of a communist that Gagliardi, that’s what they used to say. Because every twenty-fifth of June I used to talk about the Cry of Alcorta, because at one prize-giving ceremony I suggested the true foundation was when the entire town confronted Comandante Pedernera and paraded him through the streets naked. Do you know something dear boy?” the Professor asks me, pacing restlessly around the room as if in an imaginary classroom. “It doesn’t sadden me that they’ve welded the Comandante’s statue. He represents us a lot better than before the way he is now. What was once an authentic popular festival had all too long ago become a hollow ceremony, a self-indulgent show by farmers and shopkeepers of false nostalgia for a rebellious past that was never really theirs. It was highly appropriate that the last Malihuense to knock the Comandante off his horse was your dear grandmother. The rest of us had lost that right long ago. And I’ll tell you something else. When the flood looked as if it would wipe us off the map once and for all, I was secretly glad. I’d always thought what they did to your father and your dear grandmother was quite unforgivable. I asked myself what God was waiting for to wipe this Santa Fe Sodom off the face of the pampas. Which was why I wasn’t sorry when the waters came, despite the loss of some of the most prized volumes in my collection. Even so, it’s still one of the most complete libraries on the history of the province, as you can see. In better times I used to travel to Rosario regularly, and to Buenos Aires, where I’d buy in bulk at auction, or rummaging through the second-hand bookshops on the Avenida de Mayo or in the stalls in Parque Rivadavia … Luckily, not all the schools in the area shared the timorousness of our spineless principal, and I was able go on teaching in other towns until I retired. I haven’t much money now to go on buying books, but instead I’ve found the necessary time to read them and to write. I can dig up a copy of my two articles about the town if you’re interested, but you’ll have to be a little patient because as you can see …” While Professor Gagliardi, with faltering hands, rifles through the nearest pile of lever-arch files and folders, as high as the chair back they’re leaning against, I again run my eyes over the volumes packing the shelves—running vertically and horizontally from the water-warped parquet to the added rows that scrape the blotchy ceiling, beyond the last shelf. Books whose cardboard and paper time has turned yellowish and brittle, covers once green, red or orange turned to moss, ochre and terracotta—textures that from a distance suggest parchment, papyrus and old silk. Editions by Claridad, Calomino, Tor, Americalee, Anteo, Losada, Eudeba, Solar—the years of forced coexistence making their covers uniform and possibly their contents too: fierce polemics and oppositions undifferentiating themselves on their way to becoming that bland and indefinable thing some people call “period flavour”. Perhaps from so much reading Professor Gagliardi had ended up believing in history in the same way Don Quixote believed in literature. He now sets about another equally formidable pile, growls, talks to himself, scolds the papers he’s trying to find for refusing to appear. “One’s on the history of the fort, it was published in the minutes of the first congress on the history of the towns of the … The other one, the older one, on the etymology of the name Malihuel … I wanted to include a revision, for the time being it’s in manuscript form, if I manage to get it republished … Let me see, let me see, here it is I think … No, it isn’t here either.”
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