29
My brother, lord of the country of apple trees, wanted an alliance with the great one. He pledged me as a wife. When I arrived he was hunting ostriches. He returned at night and left for war. Afterwards he wanted to see me.
He didn’t like me.
He went through the ceremony because of the alliance with the lord of the apple trees.
He never touched me.
I had no friends.
The witch asked me a favour: I listen to all the conversations for her, I spy on every tent.
I have been given nicknames. The kids lay traps at my feet. I receive a blow from a piece of rubble thrown at me.
And yet my mother used to tell me stories, she promised me happiness.
30
I dreamt: I lost a tooth.
What will I do without him, what will he do without me?
Wind has risen over the river.
What will he do without me, what will I do without him?
31
It was raining. And my face rained with tears. I felt sad to be the wife of an old king. It was night, under the blanket. Things are like this in autumn.
My daughter’s husband entered in the darkness. He’d been drinking. Maybe it was a mistake.
That was like coming into the light on a battlehorse. It was running. It was winning.
32
His father told him the day of the first combat:
‘Never let a woman matter to you more than war.’
His father told him the day of the first feast:
‘No woman carries you further than alcohol.’
His father told him the day of the first sacrifice:
‘To tie yourself to a woman is to distance yourself from the mystery.’
He got to know combat, alcohol, mystery. He told me: ‘They are three shadows next to your red skirt.’
33
I have seen a vision that is not a lie in the water of the well. I saw the king’s funeral. It won’t be long from now. His horse will go with him, covered in silver. His wives will stand in a row, waiting for their skulls to be broken. His favourite in the red dress will have the boy in her arms. He will be snatched from her at the same time she is killed. This is how I saw the funeral, with thirty-two wives. I escape tonight.
IN THE GARDEN
THE RATS
WHEN THE HOUSES were knocked down to make the 9 de Julio Avenue, thousands of rats had to look for a new life. They’d had years to prepare themselves. Between the construction of the centre of the avenue with its obelisk and the addition of the two ends, more than half a century passed. But no one can prepare for half a century.
One day work resumed.
I won’t even try to describe what that demolition was like. Earth piled up to the sky, people swallowed and chewed it. The first to fall were the ledges with their weeds. The rats fled.
There were too many scenes of desperation to count. Great suffering.
The afternoon a wet rat entered through the ventilation pipe of a tea house on Cerrito Street is just one case of many. A European lady – here on account of the war – threw it out on the pavement with one swipe of the umbrella. But let’s imagine: afterwards, on the pavement. Let’s imagine: before.
An enormous mother about to give birth entered the beauty salon on Santa Fe Street. The employees yelled and leapt up on the chairs. Thank goodness there were no clients, said the owner, they prefer to get up late. What a search through the dressing rooms, between make-up pots and tiny pink linen pillows. A company closed everything and threw in a lethal smoke. The sofa cover was unstitched. There she was, with all her young, all dead. No one heard about it because the salon owner, a French lady, knew what it was like to earn a living in a foreign country. No one learned about it.
In the north sector there was a male who had never formed a family. He was missing a tooth and was blind in one eye. It was said he couldn’t imagine what fear was. If the young admired him, and the old admitted belatedly he was right, the majority looked on him with suspicion. He knew blindfolded the block of hovels and palaces from Paraguay Street to Charcas Street; for months he fed himself in the basement of the Civil Registry. Liberty Square was a trifle for him. He had been through flowerbeds, the branches of the rubber tree and on the cement coverings. On certain evenings, he would climb over the electricity cables at the head of spellbound young ones, moving from tipa tree to tipa tree, from jacaranda to jacaranda. His dashes left a snow of flowers in their wake near the end of spring. He had arrived at the old market on Talcahuano Street where the local army repelled him, earning the bump across his head. That’s nothing. He had dared to reach the fair on Córdoba Street with the idea of amusing himself at the dance of the statue. It’s a dance around the marble Little Red Riding Hood which until yesterday decorated Lavalle Square. He could see it, just as I did, but it almost cost him his hide since he wanted to join in. People swore he came from the port, where every impertinence meets with applause. Others said he came by train from the silos of Santa Fe. No one attributed his presence to the peaceful procreations which took place in the last decades in the old houses. They may have been right.
One thing was certain. He had ventured to the Other Side at a time before the great rain. The Suipacha Street side. This really makes your hair stand on end.
In the time before the great rain, there were many cats on the flat rooftops around Suipacha. One mother constantly bore young. She spent hours watching the windows of the apartments, because an old man with light blue eyes and his nurse would toss meat down to her from a fourth floor. A kitten of hers fell one Sunday onto the patio of the fur shop. There, Jews with brown fingers cut furs on a table and argued at the top of their lungs. On Saturdays and Sundays the place was deserted. The little cat showed it had good lungs; the whole neighbourhood mobilised to restore peace.
Once in a while the terrible one would slowly cross. It’s a cat with an enormous head, also covered in scars. The sight of him paralysed the heart of even the most indifferent.
During the great rain all the rooftops flooded with water; there were weeds like the arms of drowning men on the pale swell. The female cat and her kitten, all grown now, withstood it for weeks with ears furrowed.
Each rooftop was like a pool. One day they were gone.
Those were the regions where the explorer had ventured. They say he once saw the terrible one up close. With cats he had a system; to leap over them, shrieking at their noses. It may well be that he did not know fear. How could he have done all that, otherwise? Just imagine, how? No surprise he was missing a tooth.
In the catastrophe of the demolition many prejudices were left aside. Some rats decided to resort to the one they used to look at askance. Just ask the lady with the umbrella, the owner of the beauty salon, the fur sellers on the patio what kind of tragic compromises are accepted in bad times.
The rats moved forward with an agonising shudder. The hollow houses startled them when knocked down.
Had he talked about a refuge? He had. A temporary but suitable shelter for families with small young. Nearby in which direction? In the worst. Towards Suipacha Street. For a bitter moment they suspected that the loner was mocking them. The one with no family and no heart was mocking those incapacitated by love. To carry their young towards Suipacha was like offering strings of sweets to the cats.
The explorer was not mocking them. The bad area had undergone changes. Two bars and a Chinese restaurant had opened up. Fat, potbellied, sleepy cats were bred in those depths. They had little to do with the terrible one, the mother, the yellow one, the one-eyed, the champion. He wasn’t joking but he didn’t give many explanations either. It was a matter of believing or not believing.
They had to believe. They had to go out, trembling, the rosy young in a line, clinging to the rubble, curling up, bellies beating against the ground. If there were any dead? There were. Entire families. The explorer had anticipated it. Beneath the cars green eyes lay in wait. The news of the exodus had spread. Horror
once again, shrieks and devastation. It was a question of believing or not believing.
He led them onward. They ran, pressing themselves against the wall. A bark was heard, and they rushed into a pile of boards. Shadows and anguish. They were entering. They had arrived.
But it was difficult. Goodbye hallways, basements, ledges of abundance, galleries of freedom. Goodbye calm. The noises of the day meant sleep was hardly a rest. The men yelled, hammered away, and there was a saw that seemed like the voice of the end. When the sun set, silence arrived. The builders got dressed and left. The night watchman entered his cabin, lit a water heater and sat down to drink maté. He shared his food with the dog. It was important because the dog ate well, so he slept well too.
Meanwhile the demolition progressed. Blocks of houses turned into dunes of rubble. The dunes went away in trucks. Zones of yellow dust remained, lifted into the sky when there was wind. And doors, shutters, windows and balcony railings were put up for sale.
In the neighbourhood, the presence of rats that had fled from the old houses was noticed all of a sudden. After some time it was more than noticed.
They had multiplied. No one could avoid it, them least of all. The building had been constructed slowly, and gave them time to get comfortable. They flourished. They lost the evasive air of the first days. They got organised. They began to consider their hours of leisure, exercise, hunting as a right. They didn’t realise there were too many of them.
But they were too many. At night they ran through the scaffolding, they chased one another through the half-built stairs, where light bulbs stained with whitewash shone. They had taken the habit of exploring the walls of the neighbouring buildings, and little by little got used to stopping on the windowsills of the first, second, fourth, eighth floor, of climbing up the telephone cables. Their shrieks were heard suddenly on a ledge. There were people who never opened their blinds again. There were some who regretted not fixing a broken glass in time.
Stories began to circulate. Christmas Eve, the young mother leaves the table set. When she comes back from midnight mass she finds the tree fallen, jasmines strewn about, the turkey nibbled away. Isn’t this called making oneself hated?
The great hatred against the rats crystallised. It was time for New Year to arrive. You can’t also think about rats during New Year’s celebrations. Windows, blinds get opened. Sometimes the river decides to send the city a breeze that lets it sleep. Those not resigned to losing it slept with the window open.
The rats took over the houses. They settled behind the cupboards and underneath the stoves. Everything was food for them. Even the television cables, even the drainage pipes of the washing machine.
Then the war began.
The sale of poisons rose overnight. The garbage men protested since no one likes to find a corpse in the trash can, even less so if it’s a rat. The grocer on Juncal Street preferred to buy a cat. You must have seen it watch the passing cars, sweeping the pavement with its prey’s tail. The owners of fat cats stopped feeding them.
People started looking in the telephone directories for the address of the municipal offices named anti-rodent, as if otters and hares also figured in their plans. The poorest went early or in the evening, the richest sent their maids. Lines were so long that bureaucratic procedures seemed to dissolve. But the claimants looked at one another with relief, like someone who discovers there are other people sick with the same embarrassing illness. And they talked about the rats. They talked against the rats.
The battle was in close order formation. Traps, poison, gas, cats, even ferrets. The houses transformed into ambushes, the streets into extermination camps.
The rats felt cornered.
Here begins what I am going to tell. They say it started on the floor where they once forgot to replace a kitchen window. The young mother with the young father and children went for a change of air to the seaside. The mother-in-law stayed behind, with her grey-hair bun. The neighbours saw her go to mass at six o’ clock with shawl and missal. Someone noticed she was walking in a strange way, as if holding back a hurry, a trot. When summer was over someone asked about the young people’s return, and received a surprising reply. No matter which reply. But when he leaned forward to listen to it, he thought he noticed something like whiskers, the bun like a coiled grey tail under the shawl.
The newspaper vendor also changed. He seemed to grow thinner, he started wearing a beret, and instead of yelling out the news preferred to wait for clients, hiding his face behind a magazine.
The doorman of the new building was next. At night he seemed to come out calmly, but in the day, how many buzzes were needed to make him appear, trembling, tiny red eyes, on the verge of escaping? Let’s not even talk about the grocery boy. It was, as they say, overnight. He made himself a hat from a rag and started to wear an enormous apron. He didn’t get angry at the taunts. ‘One must take care of clothes,’ he laughed, in a slightly high-pitched voice.
One of the priests of the church of Las Victorias took to spending the day holed up in the confessional. They say that, forced to give a sermon, he had a kind of tantrum and was never seen again.
The warden of Liberty Square was glimpsed early one morning by a group of boys coming back from a dance. He ran around the statue of Don Adolfo Alsina giving shrieks of pleasure.
The neighbourhood changed.
Go down to the grocery store to buy a hundred grams of ham. You have to wait. Suddenly, wearing a dress of light-blue silk and a small hat – look at her, leaning over her wallet. She is old. The cat looks at her. She hurries up, grabs her purchase, leaves brushing the walls.
Pay attention, it’s Sunday. The car is shining. The father comes out, the children come out, the mother comes out. They emerge in a line, as if remembering dangers. Wearing suits that are too new. Carrying food parcels. Impatient, not looking at anyone. Come on, this car, get started, get started, there they go.
They still prefer to be in a group; that’s natural. Some get together at the tea house at around five o’clock, others come out of the church, others have learned to play bridge. Many are mad about cinema. They go to non-stop features and see the same story five times. Others, calmer, nibble on a newspaper while seated on a bench in the square. There are even some who start talking about pension rights.
They still look a bit dodgy as they go about, a bit sullen. But all will be fixed.
It will be fixed. It’s a question of habit.
PERPLEXITIES
AS FAR AS FAMILY GOES, she was both lucky and unlucky. She came from a line of hunting dogs. She heard talks about great feats. That zeal, those souls. All so excessive.
The first illusion was that: family. The second was her beauty. Nobody thought her less than magnificent.
And she was futile.
She felt at ease with the dogs and bitches of the inner garden. The most banal. Surrounded by such feeble personalities, something like the sounding of a remote battalion began to call her. The kind heard among the hunters in her family. And she seemed, she felt, superior to the commoners.
She returned to her own kind, to the outer garden. The call that pounded in their blood now seemed in poor taste. Foreign. She cried when she was alone. She believed herself a dethroned queen.
Maybe she was just weak. Like so many.
BUT ON THE ISLAND!
A CAT ESCAPED from a house full of ornaments. He spent his first few days under a car. At night, hunger and passion made him go out. He avoided fights, ate little, felt weak. When the car left he had to look for another hiding place.
Embarrassed, he found himself eating the meat an old lady brought him wrapped in paper. Until she heard the mocking of a female cat watching him from a tree.
She taught him more than any other in the world. She wasn’t young, or pretty. But she was graceful. They spent the days walking through an endless park. Trees of all species, some so big one couldn’t even imagine climbing them.
His first hunt was a wounded dove crossin
g the street, fluttering its wings. The blow and the blood made him understand. He ate everything, even the feathers.
Afterwards he learned how to slink through the branches, take nests by surprise, even hunt rats. That’s not to say he wasn’t comfortable visiting garbage cans.
One night they entered the zoological garden. He’d never imagined anything like this. He looked into cage after cage, keeping out of reach of beaks and claws. The eagles. The monkeys. He walked along the foul smelling shore where seals slept.
One night he arrived at the lion pit.
Sparse grass covered the hill where families slept.
All else ended for him. He lived for the lions.
Sometimes he arrived later, sometimes earlier. But he never missed the words of the patriarch.
Born free, with scars around his nose, the patriarch spoke every night.
And every night his family members climbed, roaring sideways, towards the tree. The males with manes that fluttered like grasslands. The females put their pups to sleep before going out. They lay down one after the other, the young in the last row.
The cat waited. His hair stood on end. A shadow would have been enough to make him shriek.
In that tongue, words burned, bonfires on a black field.
He didn’t understand. They were coups. Places. Laws. Lions that left memories to be handed down from lion to lion as long as the species lives on, free or unhappy. Sands, naps. Watches. Tastes, blood, smoking blood. Leaps, from bushes. Battles. Defeats. Loves. She-lion heroines. Massacred pups. Revenges. The cat felt as if the strange water of a river filled with fish he could not catch was running by him. He dreamt of those fishes, those words. One day he woke up knowing the language.
The patriarch fell silent. A muffled thunder of roars followed. The sheer fact of being lions passed from soul to soul those nights. Tails whipped flanks.
Land of Smoke Page 8