I chose a compartment, and a few minutes later a woman and a very young girl sat down. They were carrying a basket and a bouquet of flowers wrapped in newspaper. I pretended to read my book as I watched my neighbors who, after carefully placing the flowers in the rack above, just as carefully opened the basket and took out of box of alfajores. While eating, they spoke in low voices; without a doubt they were speaking about me, because the girl, who was not as disagreeable as I had judged on my first impression, was looking at me out of the corner of her eye, with an imperceptible movement of her eyebrows as if asking a question.
The lady, leaning toward me and offering me an alfajor, said to me in a conspiratorial tone, “They have caramel. If I’m not mistaken, you are Jorge Maidana’s son.”
Unsure of myself, I accepted the alfajor. The lady didn’t wait for my answer.
“We were as close as brother and sister.” Wiping her lips with a paper napkin she continued, “Time, and somewhat unfavorable circumstances, sometimes separate childhood friends. You were just a boy; you surely don’t remember those days in Tandil, when we all got together for Carnival and Holy Week.”
In a maze of memories I saw the Tandil Hotel, painted green, with lots of little tables in the hallway, hammocks, huge boulders in the garden, shadows, the infinite sun of space, mixed with the indelible smell of perfumes sprayed during Carnival, incense, and the sad jasmine flowers: in that confused Eden, a lady dressed in a kimono covered with vines had initiated me in the forbidden ascent of some mountains.
I nodded.
“What beautiful memories!” the lady continued. “I was a newlywed. Your mother accompanied me to the carnival ball. In the afternoon, like two butterflies, we played tennis. We went together to the Stations of the Cross.”
The girl was looking at me. The lady was sighing slightly, waving a handkerchief, mopping her brow, and then, as if wishing to change the subject, asked, “Do you like reading? That’s what I’ve always said: on trips there’s nothing like taking a book. Are you going far?”
“To Cacharí,” I answered unenthusiastically.
“To my hometown! Cacharí, Cacharí, Cacharí.”
I looked at her with surprise. She went on, “Don’t you know the legend? Cacharí was a terrible Indian chief. Near the town he was killed by the army, a century ago. He fell wounded and for three days and nights cried, ‘Cacharí, Cacharí, Cacharí . . . here is Cacharí.’ Nobody dared approach the place where the Indian was dying. They say that even today when the wind blows at midnight in the winter you can hear Cacharí’s cry. Are you going for your vacation? By yourself? Can I ask where you’re staying?”
“The Swans Ranch.”
“But isn’t that rented out? Who’s there now?”
“Armando Heredia,” I answered impatiently.
The lady whispered the name several times and finally asked, “Armando Heredia, the father?”
“He is eighteen,” I answered, looking out the window.
“Is he already eighteen?”
I looked at her with hatred: first she asked me whether Armando Heredia was the father, then (in hopes of unnecessarily prolonging the conversation) she acted surprised by my saying that he was already eighteen.
“How time flies!” the lady sighed, once more, pressing the folds of her white muslin lapel against her voluminous breasts. “The Swans is a sad ranch. The house is abandoned and there are more bats than pieces of furniture. But it’s normal: a boy your age is not scared of things like that. It’s hopeless. I always hold that friends are like family. Parents may draw apart but their children will become close again. Is Armando Heredia a classmate of yours?”
“I don’t know him.”
“You don’t know him! They say the boy is somewhat crazy. They say that he blinded a horse because it didn’t obey him: he tied it to a post, hobbled it, then burned its eyes with Turkish cigarettes. But there’s no need to get carried away with such stories.”
I nodded my head. The girl was delicately tearing apart one of the alfajor wrappers. Her hands were thin; her fingers nervous. In her eyes there was a shy sad beauty that captivated me.
The train stopped and I took advantage of an opportune moment: I poked my head out of the window as if someone would be waiting for me, rushed off, climbed down, and walked a ways along the platform. The heat of the afternoon was at its most intense. I felt the burning sun on my head. In a corner, in the shade, four or five men were waiting as if hypnotized. A white cat was sleeping on a bench in the waiting room. When the train started again I heard the monotone of the insistent voice, “These trips in the summer are so long. I only go on them because I have to. I had to take Claudia to the eye doctor. She is going to get glasses.”
She took some dark glasses out and, after examining them, added, “She doesn’t want to use them. She says that she can’t see the words in the newspaper or the stairs, and that the weather looks stormy and sad through the dark glasses.”
The girl thrust her head back in a birdlike movement, revealing her round neck. Her eyes moved, restless, from one side to the other, staring absentmindedly at me. I thought that she was right to not want glasses. What would be left of her face without the brilliance of her glance? What would speak in her? If she had been covered with dark glasses I would never have dared to believe that she was looking at me.
I looked out of the window again. No lightning bolt, no sunset, no comet could justify my long contemplation of this lady. The countryside, fervently monotonous with its yellow and green grass, spread out with its repeated sheep, its horses and cows.
My traveling companions still had not allowed me to think. What would that remote ranch be like, its name that of a bird that only existed for me in the lakes of Palermo Park or the verses of Rubén Darío? What would Armando Heredia be like? When his father described him to me I felt some affection for that boy, so solitary and mysterious, whose indifference worried the entire family. This much was also true: I felt a mixture of admiration and repugnance toward him.
How the imagination can forge something from a name! While the clouds and the animals in the sunset passed by, I imagined him as tall, broad-shouldered, dark, cruel and sad, mannered and impolite, and always smelling of alcohol.
“How can a boy who graduated from school in Europe and was going to be a doctor, a boy with such talent for music, suddenly shut himself in an abandoned ranch, with the company of bats and frogs? Why has he secluded himself at that ranch? It’s not to study, or to cultivate the land, or to raise cattle,” my mother exclaimed one day, scandalized. But could it be that Armando Heredia was more sensible than the rest of his family? The tenant at the ranch had let him have the ranch house; no matter how small, why not enjoy the country property, since their financial situation did not allow them to go on vacation anywhere else?
Armando Heredia seemed to me to belong to the race of heroes (seeing a cloud I imagined his daring profile): he had not given in to his family’s rage. He had dared to give up everything for nothing. Nevertheless, I was not so sure that that nothing was really nothing.
In the windowpanes I saw the reflection of a cloud and the horizon that made the sun look squat and almost purple. I also saw my ruddy brow, thinking: I am a shameful ambassador, sent by my father’s friend. I am shy and not that sharp: What influence could I have on the humor of a boy that I’m only acquainted with through vague, contradictory bits of information? “All you have to do is to keep on studying,” Mr. Heredia had told me, while smoking a cigar in my father’s study. “Show him your friendship if you feel any. I believe in the usefulness of example: no advice could be better. I couldn’t ask you, no, I dare not ask you, to take advantage of a possible friendship, tearing out a secret from his heart in order to share it with me. I fear that the mystery of his hiding himself away has to do with a woman or a vice. I repeat: all you need to do, my friend, is to study and take advantage of the healthy air of the countryside. The house is abandoned, but for a boy your age that is not an i
nconvenience, it’s a source of entertainment.”
Through the window I admired an endless lagoon in which some sleepy flamingos were resting like flowers. I thought of the coolness of a swim and after staring at the monotony of the water I returned to the earlier thread of my thoughts. My father, who holds Mr. Heredia in high esteem as one of his closest childhood friends, seeing the possibility of a bond of friendship between his friend’s son and me as the means of regaining a relationship interrupted years ago by the inevitable circumstances of life, had recommended that I proceed with extreme care, behaving wisely and with my most subtle intelligence, so as to befriend Armando Heredia and be a positive influence on his difficult character. Such hopes were confusing to me.
If I didn’t like Armando Heredia, if he didn’t like me, how would I endure those two or three weeks of utter solitude in the countryside? At the very least, would there be a radio at the ranch, a bicycle, a horse?
Night fell, the sky emptied. I leaned my forehead on the cool glass: I felt feverish. There was a moment of joy when we saw the first llama and the first rhea lit up by the monstrous lights of the train. I read for a while. I felt as if I were alone and in a sense I was. My conversation partner had fallen asleep; the girl, leaning back in her seat with her eyes closed, was trying to imitate her. I saw that her mouth made the shape of a proud heart. I saw that she had a pinned a small pendant with blue stones onto her dress; the stones spelled out a name: María.
The lights were coming on when the train stopped at the Cacharí station. Armando Heredia was not waiting for me, but instead there was a ranch hand with a hoarse voice, his face hidden in the darkness, and the wreck of a carriage.
Dogs barked. In the darkness of a very large house, of mostly hallways and intertwined vines, Armando Heredia appeared, holding a kerosene lantern in his hand. Thanks to the circumstances our meeting was providentially natural. A gust blew out the lantern. We went into the kitchen to find another one. In the next room, the sour voice of a woman protested about the lantern wicks. They had all burned out that day. Armando Heredia took a gas lamp down from the ceiling and using that light led me down another hallway. We reached a long room; some of the floorboards had collapsed.
“This was the dining room,” Heredia told me, lighting up his own face with the lamp. “Everything here in this house was and is no longer, even the food,” he added, pointing out a platter with smoked meat and yellow lettuce leaves.
Some people we see for the first time suggest false memories—we think we’ve seen them before and have no doubt that they resemble other people whom we met at a café or a shop. Heredia wasn’t at all as I had imagined him, but he resembled someone I knew. I searched my memory for names, places; I associated him with a bookseller on Corrientes Street, with a math teacher. While I observed the movement of his lips, I lost all hope of figuring out the resemblance. I felt humiliated by my forgetfulness.
“If you want to go to your room before dinner, follow me.”
We traversed more hallways and came to a bedroom with a very low ceiling. The windows were of different sizes; the base of the furniture was carved with images of some kind of monster, with double mermaid tails—I could scarcely see the figures by the quivering light from the lamp on the night table.
“In this closet there is a hanger, the only one. It’s mine,” Heredia said, showing me the half-open closet door in the darkness. “Can you see the drips?”
With interest I inspected the darkness.
“These pots,” he continued, kicking one of them, “are intended not only to catch the water when it rains but also to produce sleeplessness and unexpected music. I can attest to the fact that each drop that falls in these pots makes a sound that is slightly different from the one before and the one after. I have heard more than five hundred different kinds of rain in this room.”
I thought of telling him, “You are very fond of music.” But instead I attentively asked, “Does it rain a lot?”
I washed my hands, took some things out of my suitcase, brushed my hair. Then we sat down to dinner in near darkness.
The merciless sun lit up the sky and a thick wooded area, the tops of the trees clearly coming into outline against the white clouds. A burning wind was blowing across the dry grass. That was the abandoned ranch. Above the roof of the house stretched a eucalyptus tree; some wildflowers grew on the roof. Vines devoured the doors, the eaves of the porches, the window railings. I had seen something similar in a film. A house full of spiderwebs, the doors falling off their hinges, with ghosts.
Except for Heredia I hadn’t seen anyone since my arrival. Breakfast, served in the kitchen at seven, was quite frugal. I tucked a bit of cracker and some sugar cubes in my pocket, and ate slowly.
The silence astonished me as if it were something completely new: it seemed oddly terrible and loud.
“It’s been a while since I’ve been in the countryside,” I exclaimed, as if responding to a question that no one had asked. “The air and sun bewilder me.”
Armando Heredia was walking beside me, kicking the grass. Three dogs were following us.
“Monotonous things are the hardest to get to know. We never pay enough attention to them because we think that they are always the same.”
“What is monotonous?”
“The countryside, solitude.”
We were uncomfortably silent.
“Why is this ranch called the Swans?” I asked, trying to escape the silence.
“Because of the swans in the lagoon,” he said, signaling with his whip toward the woods.
I felt as if I were blind: during the day, the intense light, and at night, the darkness, both obscured my vision.
“Did I tell you that everything has disappeared from this ranch?” he went on. “Everything except for the bats, the spiders, the reptiles, you, and me.”
At that very instant, as if illustrating the end of his sentence, a snake slipped through the grass. I jumped back. Heredia asked, “Are you scared?”
That phrase might have offended me, but everything seemed too unreal. I answered, “Everything that is slimy scares me: a fish, a toad, soap when it comes apart, any of those little frogs that come out when it rains.”
He offered me a cigarette. We stopped. While he was lighting a match and we protected the flame with our hands I observed him carefully. He was leaning against the trunk of a tree. I examined his black trousers, his worn leather belt, the bluish handkerchief around his neck, his serious, almost Greek profile (that reminded me of the illustrations of statues that fill Malet’s history textbook). Again I tried to associate his face with others, without luck.
“Could we go see the lagoon?” I asked. Afterward, I added with real curiosity, “And why aren’t there any swans? Did they all get killed by hunters?”
“Nobody hunts swans, but my maternal grandfather had them all killed. He thought they brought bad luck. Everyone in my family believes he was right. Death rectifies many things; in my grandfather’s case, it transformed his superstitions into noble, carefully considered attitudes, making his manias seem admirably consistent. My aunt Celina, the youngest of his daughters, who was in the habit of going to the lagoon with the grocer’s daughters, got gravely ill one December day. They said she had gone swimming in the lagoon; she came back home barefoot, her clothing soaked. For forty nights and forty days she trembled with fever in the iron bed where I sleep now, and no one at the time knew that in her delirium she saw the huge swans in the lagoon pecking on her head. “There they are again. They’re coming back,” Aunt Celina shouted. My grandfather asked her, “Who is coming back?” She answered, “The monsters.” “What monsters?” “The big ones with black heads.” Her illness lasted for two years. It took a while for my grandfather to figure out who the black-headed monsters were. When he found out he had all the swans killed. Not long after, Aunt Celina died of a heart attack. They say that around that time they found the last swan in the lagoon and that my grandfather strangled it with his le
ft hand. The whole story gave the ranch a bad reputation. My mother refused to come back. She adored Celina. My father, even though he has never spent more than a week here, feels a romantic connection to it. The tenant who rents the fields didn’t want the house. That’s understandable as his is better. The only ones who stayed here were the old servant, the woman who cooks for us and does the laundry; her husband, who was the oldest employee at the ranch and who has some sheep and some horses; and their grandson, Eladio Esquivel, who is twelve.”
“But are they all invisible?”
“If they were silent it would be better,” Heredia answered.
“I haven’t heard them.”
“Today they went to Tapalqué for a wedding. They will come back this evening. They prepared some soup for us—an inedible soup. We will roast some meat on the coals. There’s quince jam and cheese.”
The description of the lunch whetted my appetite. I took a bit of cracker from my pocket and ate it while looking at the symmetrical rows of trees.
I felt sleepy, sleepy and hungry. It was the burning hour of the siesta. I went into a sort of pantry that smelled of soap and yerba mate, where there were flies buzzing around. The shutters were closed. A cool pleasant breeze caressed my brow while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. On the floor, I saw two empty boxes and three bags: one, with uneven bulges, contained the crackers; another, in the shape of a pillow, was full of some sort of bran; the third was almost empty and held dried corn. On the shelves, in a corner, I saw some yellow soaps and a broom; in another corner, some quince jam in a jar and some more on a plate; on the far shelf, three bottles of dark wine, an old seltzer bottle, and a strange object that caught my attention. To see it clearly I climbed onto one of the boxes, then gently took it down. It was a blue porcelain vase with pink ferns in the shape of a basket; a cupid with its mouth open held the top in one hand and a garland of flowers in the other. At some friend’s house I had seen a vase with the same design, maybe in a cabinet or in a centerpiece. I left the repulsive object on the shelf; it was covered with spiderwebs and dust. I got down off the box and looked at the jam on the plate. I was hungry but I didn’t like quince jam. Resigned, I picked up the plate and devoured the jam.
Thus Were Their Faces Page 3