“You have sunstroke,” Heredia said.
He recommended that I lie down. I took some aspirin. The housekeeper brought me a pitcher of orange juice and, on a plate, some slices of raw potato that she placed on my forehead because, according to her, they cure sunburn.
I drank the warm, sweetened orange juice that Eladio served me in a glass. A burning wind, like the wind of the desert, blew in through the window. I asked Eladio to close the blinds, the shutters, and the door, to let me sleep, but in the closed room the violent light persisted. I realized that I was feverish. Trembling, I got up to get some water. I went to the bathroom. I fainted on the tiles. Eladio and the housekeeper picked me up without my knowing it and helped me to bed.
A long hallway appeared at the end of my dream. The hallway of my school that led to a huge theater where the teachers gathered to give oral exams. The questions they asked me were easy, but I couldn’t answer them because my tongue was paralyzed. The public, in the galleries, began to whistle. Afterwards, a huge crowd came in through the doors, shouting, “We want to see the dead body!” They began breaking the chairs, the tables, and the books that I was studying. I saw myself in a mirror: huge drops of sweat were falling from my forehead and running down my cheeks. I woke up, my pillow soaked.
We were playing cards on the patio. I couldn’t concentrate on the game, thinking to myself: We can live with someone for days on end, sharing meals, excursions, conversations, coming to feel a deep intimacy, and yet not know that person at all: my friendship with Heredia proved it.
What were we playing? I think it was whist. I could see clearly how passion was destroying, devouring the soul of that young man, forcing him to scorn and abandon everything in life, to dissimulate and lie.
That was why Heredia ate so fast, pretended to have business with the neighbors, hastily sold the objects that had belonged to his grandparents; why he had abandoned his studies and shut himself away in the lonely countryside; why he insulted me; why he was unhappy and looked down on his father. It all made sense!
Heredia was nervous.
“Tomorrow at six,” he told me, once again showing his trust in me, “I have to meet María Gismondi at the shack with the rocking chair. She will arrive on horseback. Sometimes she rides to her cousins’ house where they’re teaching her to sew; to get there she has to cross the pasture by the shack. We will meet as if by accident at the hour of the siesta. I will leave my horse in the field and she will hide hers in the woods; there are many hiding places in those woods. We have everything planned. If they find her, she will say that she was gathering figs; if they find me, which is very unlikely, I will tell them that I was helping her gather figs.”
“What a wonderful place for a date!” I exclaimed, with an absurd tone, as if I were adulating him.
“It’s not what you think,” Heredia answered. “When you want to meet up with someone, the lonely countryside doesn’t exist. Not even nighttime gives refuge to lovers here. That burning desire one feels to be with a woman in the first moments of love—nature never wants that to be satisfied. One has to seek out the horrible siesta hour, ruined places lit up by the pitiless sun. If I could ask her to return to this house, like the other evening, that would be better.”
“The other evening?”
“Yes, the other evening, when I gave her the pictures and the medal.”
His answer surprised me. So María Gismondi had come to the ranch house, had come inside, and I hadn’t seen her? While I was mulling this over, I said, “I would like to see that shack again.”
“Let’s go,” said Heredia. “I’ll make use of the trip to find a place where I can hide with María.”
I left my horse tied to a post on the road. I crossed the barbed-wire fences and reached the shack. I told myself: To think that the day before, during our visit, I had imagined that we would only look for a hiding place for Heredia and his girlfriend. It was risky. I thought about all of the dangers it implied. What if Heredia came with the dogs? The dogs would surely find me. What if María Gismondi had the power of second sight so frequent among women? What if she suddenly told Heredia, “There’s someone here. I feel someone here.” What if Heredia, to calm her down, should look all around? What if he were to find me after a long search and kill me with a single bullet? But I remembered that Heredia didn’t have a revolver; he didn’t have firearms; how could he kill me? He would make me feel terribly ashamed if he struck my face with his whip. I approached the fig trees; I pulled off two figs and ate them.
Through the broken roof of the shack there was a hole where I could spy. Climbing up would be hard but the spot on the roof was without a doubt the safest one. With great difficulty I succeeded in climbing up, using the broken parts of the wall as rungs; while doing so my handkerchief dropped to the ground. I was about to go down to retrieve it when I heard a horse’s gallop. I lay down on the roof.
Through a hole in the thatch I could see everything without being seen. Armando Heredia appeared; he dismounted, then released his horse. Had he forgotten about the precautions he had planned the day before? With the same absent attitude he had possessed when he leaned against the living-room chair in the ranch house, he now leaned on a log. Spying on someone who is alone is uncomfortable. I felt like climbing down and telling him in jest, “I was spying on you.” If it had been some other friend I would have done it; with Heredia, any spontaneous gesture was out of the question.
María Gismondi tarried. A heavy awful silence spread over everything. Not even the birds sang; the only sound, from time to time, was that of a hard eucalyptus seed falling to the earth. Heredia didn’t move. I was amazed by his absolute lack of uneasiness. To wait with such calm for a woman who didn’t come—that’s a sign of utmost indifference. Or did Heredia feign and dissimulate when he was alone, too?
A ray of sunlight fell on the place where I was hiding: the violent sun of three in the afternoon. I began to burn alive. I tried to protect my head with my hands, with some straw, with my arms, adopting bizarre positions. No doubt I made some noise. Heredia raised his head and looked for a moment in my direction. My heart beat violently; it seemed to me that it was beating so hard that the walls of the shack were shaking, falling down; it seemed to me as if it was not the wind but my heart that was moving the dark, broken rocking chair. Instant death seemed to me like the sweetest of destinies. But the movement of the sun behind the foliage put an end to my torture. The coolness of the shade revived me.
Why did Heredia continue in the same pose? Did I see his lips move slightly; did I hear his voice? I couldn’t be sure.
Time passed slowly. The sun gradually descended, shifting the shadows. My watch said that it was six in the afternoon. That was when Heredia mounted his horse and galloped off.
I suspected that Heredia was mad. I saw the first symptoms of this in his attitude, his lies, in the fact that María Gismondi never came to the dates he arranged.
“Why do you waste your time,” I dared to ask, “with such a silly girl? It’s almost as if you had fallen in love with an image.”
He looked at me indignantly. We were eating. He thrust his plate aside, banged his fist on the table, and answered, “Who is asking for your advice?”
“It’s not advice, it’s a reflection.”
“Your reflections don’t interest me.”
He rose from his seat and left the dining room.
I dreamt about Esquivel’s revolver. Later, with perplexity, I saw that the revolver was in Heredia’s room. If he didn’t shoot at targets, why had he taken the revolver? To kill me, or to kill the man who was coming to the ranch?
In the morning I went to the store in Cacharí. I bought a pack of cigarettes. The man who helped me was kind, slow, talkative. We talked about the weather: about the chances of rain, about the heat.
“Could you tell me where María Gismondi lives?” I asked him, intending to go by her house.
The man didn’t answer right away.
“María G
ismondi? What? Don’t you know? She died some time ago—four years at least.”
Terror spread through my body when I heard those words; terror and at the same time relief: María Gismondi wasn’t the girl I had fallen in love with.
Persuading myself that Heredia was mad turned out to be nearly impossible for me. Events had made our friendship all the more precious. What should I do? Try to save him. How? By writing to his father; maybe a doctor could come to his aid. Leaving for the city, abandoning him in that state—wouldn’t that be an act of cowardice? While thinking about these things I dreamt that I was carrying a letter to Cacharí, a letter that I had written to Mr. Heredia, telling him about his son’s state. I wanted to take the letter to the post office myself. When I dismounted across from the post office I ran into Heredia. He said to me brusquely, “Who is that letter for?”
“For my parents.”
I had taken the precaution of addressing the envelope to my father, with another envelope inside to be given to Mr. Heredia.
“Give it to me; I’ll take it to the post office; I have stamps with me.”
When I gave it to him I felt threatened by something that couldn’t be undone.
“This envelope has another envelope inside.”
“How do you know?”
“Its weight, its shape, everything suggests that. Open it immediately,” pointing the revolver at me. “I will kill you more easily than I would kill a dove.”
I opened the envelope, just as he said, and gave him the letter. As he read it, hatred darkened his face.
“I don’t want to soil the entryway to this house. Let’s go. We shouldn’t stay here.”
We returned to the ranch house. Heredia went in his room and I in mine. Immediately, I felt I must flee—but how? With what? No one was there. I looked for the horses and carriage; they weren’t in the corral. Running, I went into the woods and followed one of the paths at random. My intention was to find something that could take me away. Something bothered me as I ran; I felt my waist; I noticed that I had a knife with me. I had gotten pretty far from the house so I slowed down to a walk. I heard the gallop of a horse. I lay down on the ground, hiding in deep grass in hopes of not being seen. Heredia drew near, got down from his horse. I heard him talking to me in the familiar tone he used with his dogs, “Coward, I’ll teach you how to play dead.”
Then I heard the sound of a shot in the silence. I woke up with a start. But my dream continued with the post office in Cacharí. In the middle of the street was a dead dog covered with flies.
I couldn’t make up my mind; all possible courses of action seemed rash, uncertain. I was afraid of unconsciously plagiarizing my own dream. At times, I was inclined to go to Buenos Aires and would start to pack; other times, I pulled out pen and paper to write to Mr. Heredia. Every course of action seemed repellent to me, since Armando Heredia, despite his madness, had never ceased being my friend: one of my closest friends.
I was in my room, meditating on all of these things, when Eladio came in with a piece of paper in his hand. I carefully opened the folded paper. I read these words: I will be away for two days. Armando. What should I do? Take advantage of his absence to communicate with his father? Wait for his return?
I thought: Maybe he isn’t crazy. Maybe he wants to trick me. Maybe his girlfriend, to avoid getting caught and wanting to conceal her true name, had casually given the name of a dead girl. I imagined the awful letter I was about to write announcing Heredia’s madness; I imagined his father’s suffering, his arrival at the ranch house with a doctor, maybe with a nurse; my eternal shame before the world if Heredia didn’t turn out to be crazy; my sorrow if they were to strap a straitjacket on him to take him back to Buenos Aires, strangers staring at him in the station; the awful prison of the madhouse. I would be guilty of everything; my conscience would dictate a string of effects.
Heredia returned at sunset. He brought me a silver dagger as a gift. I thanked him: it was the object I most craved. The handle had my initials surrounded by golden flowers and a pattern of lines. I felt unworthy of the gift. I took the knife out of its sheath. Feeling as if the cold blade was pointing at my heart, I caressed it sadly and said, “In Buenos Aires I will use it to cut the pages of my books.”
“And here you will use it to kill someone?” Heredia asked.
“I don’t think so,” I answered. “I’m not attracted to María.”
I put the knife back in its sheath, fastened it to my belt, and touched it with joy. I had forgotten the terrible problem I needed to resolve.
We lit a bonfire on the patio. That night, lit up by the fire, our faces seemed like masks. I took advantage of a moment of conciliation and emotion: “Heredia, for several days I have been meaning to tell you something: the girl you are interested in isn’t named María Gismondi. María Gismondi died four years ago. No doubt from shyness or fear, so as not to give herself away, the girl told you that was her name.”
I spoke to him while looking at the fire, as if the flames could purify the meaning of my words. When I raised my eyes Heredia wasn’t there. Had he heard me? We end up thinking we are crazy when we suspect someone else of being crazy. I called Heredia. The door of his room was closed. He didn’t answer. I saw a rainbow at the end of the hallway. I thought, “And if I accepted her, if I became an accomplice to his madness, how would I be able to relate to him again? How could I save him?” I counted the number of flagstones in the hallway, pondering what to do. Write to Buenos Aires, leave, stay (accepting his madness as something normal); write, go, stay, write, go, stay; I paced the flagstones; the last one, which was broken, gave me the worst advice: Just wait.
I remembered a phrase I had read in a book: “What is true is like God, not revealing itself immediately but construed through its many manifestations.”
I tried to have another conversation with Heredia. The night was comfortable, quiet; we were smoking and the rings of smoke seemed to soften my uneasiness. “I’ve often asked myself, What was the name of that girl who rode the train with me from Buenos Aires? Her companion called her Claudia, but she had a broach made of fake rubies that spelled ‘María.’ ”
“It’s such a common name. What could it mean?”
“That the first name a girl assumes when she doesn’t want to give her real one is María.”
“So what?”
“So I think the girl on the train called Claudia pretended her name was María to whomever gave her the broach.”
A blaze of madness illuminated Heredia’s eyes.
“And so I’m the person who gave the girl that broach?”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Don’t be absurd! I’ve seen María Gismondi’s portrait and the two don’t look at all alike. Perhaps they each pretend to be María because they don’t want to use their real names.”
I spoke persuasively, without looking at the change taking over Heredia’s face, though I could imagine it anyway. The madness beginning in the backs of his eyes, making his mouth contract, his cheeks sink, his forehead shrivel, his hands twist. I had to continue talking because words protected me from a terrifying silence. I went on, “People in the countryside are full of prejudices. That’s why girls who live in such towns feel obligated to do strange things. When they have a boyfriend they assume the names of dead people without a second thought.”
When I looked at Heredia, I saw the expression of terror in his eyes for the first time. Like a wounded animal, he fled from my side. His fear intensified mine.
Beyond the darkness, among the leaves of the trees, a shadow could barely be seen, an eye, a lock of hair. He was hiding, hunting for me in the plants, in the hallways, in the rooms of the house.
I couldn’t lock myself in: all the keys to the house had been lost. I finally decided to write to Mr. Heredia. In a corner of my room, in almost total darkness, I began my letter:
Dear Mr. Heredia:
Your ranch house is very beautiful and large; in it I have spent some of the happiest days
of my life, along with some of the most terrible, but I am of no importance right now. I want to express both my gratitude to you for having given me the chance to stay in such a place, and my sorrow in having to tell you about your son’s condition. I am too disturbed to write a considered, clear letter, but trust that you will understand my words.
After having lived here for a month (which seems like years) with your son, without discovering in him any abnormality of character, save occasional violent outbursts like those of any young man; after having confirmed that he doesn’t drink, nor frequent prostitutes, I have discovered evidence of madness in his behavior, in his actions, in his speech. I can scarcely believe it: Armando is in love with a woman who died four years ago; he has dates with her, speaks to her, imagines that he sees her, and yet he is always alone. He knows that I have found out and he hates me for it. If I don’t communicate all this to you now, I would be afraid of never having sufficient strength of will to do so later—I would fear madness myself.
In a few days a friend of yours is coming to the ranch. Perhaps he can help us.
Sincerely yours,
Luis Maidana
I carefully tucked the letter in my pocket.
The heat of the day slowly declined. Night fell with its countless stars. I went into town to post my letter. The post office was closed and I didn’t have any stamps. I remembered that it was Sunday. Four or five boys next door were building a house. They were trying to carry a huge sack full of stones onto the steps of the entryway. I stopped to watch them. It seemed like a task that exceeded their strength. I felt indignant at the people who had ordered them to do it. I sat down on a pile of sand to smoke a cigarette. I was tired. A few moments later a woman appeared, disheveled and furious, who dispersed the boys with her screams. Then I realized that the job which had made such a deep impression on me was actually a game, a game that deserved to be punished.
Thus Were Their Faces Page 7