One night, while he was playing truco with the then justice of the peace, the judge found himself in a tough spot and made a try at cheating. Don Juan looked at his opponent without saying a word, and kept on playing. This encouraged the mestizo, and since chance continued favoring Don Juan, he tried to cheat again. Juan Brown took a glance at the cards and told the judge calmly:
“That’s the second time you cheated; deal the cards again.”
Effusive apologies from the half-breed, and then another relapse. In the same calm manner, Don Juan warned him:
“You keep on cheating; deal the cards again.”
Another night, during a chess game, Don Juan’s revolver fell to the floor and a shot went off. Brown picked up the revolver without a word and kept on playing, faced with the noisy remarks of his companions, every last one of whom thought that he’d been hit by the bullet. Not till the end of the game was it learned that the one who got the slug in his leg was Don Juan himself.
Brown lived alone in Tacuara-Mansión (so named because it was really built of tacuara bamboo, and for another scornful reason). Employed as his cook was a Hungarian with a very hard and open look, who seemed to eject his words in explosions through his teeth. He revered Don Juan, who for his part hardly ever spoke to him.
To round out his character: Not till many years later, when there was finally a piano in Iviraromí, did we come to know that Don Juan was a superb performer.
II
The most distinctive thing about Don Juan Brown, however, was the relationship he cultivated with Monsieur Rivet, known officially as Santiago-Guido-Luciano-María Rivet.
Rivet was a perfect ex-man, cast up to Iviraromí by the last big wave of his life. Having arrived in the country twenty years back, and later performed brilliantly as technical director of a distillery in Tucumán, he little by little reduced the scope of his intellectual pursuits, till he finally washed up in Iviraromí as a piece of human wreckage.
Nothing is known of his arrival there. One day at twilight, as we were sitting at the door of the bar, we saw him come out of the woods by the Jesuit ruins, in the company of Luisser—a one-armed mechanic, as poor as he was cheerful, who always said he didn’t lack a thing, despite the fact that he lacked an arm.
At that time the optimistic fellow was involved in the distillation of orange leaves, in the most original still you can imagine. Later we’ll come back to this phase of his life.1 For now we can say that in those moments of distilling fever the arrival of an industrial chemist of the stature of Rivet really fired up the fantasies of the poor one-armed man. He was the one who told us about Monsieur Rivet, and then introduced him one Saturday night in the bar, which from then on the chemist honored with his presence.
Monsieur Rivet was a very skinny little man, who on Sundays combed his hair into two greasy waves, one on each side of his forehead. In the middle of his beard, always unshaven but never long, his lips were constantly thrust forward in profound contempt for everyone, and in particular for the doctores—the “scholars”—of Iviraromí. The most careful test of dryers for yerba mate to be discussed in the bar would hardly extract anything from the chemist but contemptuous spitting, and broken bits of sentences:
“Tzsh! . . . Doctorcitos . . . They don’t know a thing . . . Tzsh! . . . Hogwash . . .”
From all or almost all points of view, our man was the exact opposite of the impassible Juan Brown. To say nothing of their relative corpulence: for never in any boliche of the Upper Paraná did anyone ever get to see a person with narrower shoulders, or one more rachitically thin, than Mosiú Rivet. Though we didn’t come to appreciate this fully till the Sunday night when the chemist made his entrance into the bar dressed in a brand-new little black suit, fit for an adolescent, which was tight in the back and legs even for him. But Rivet seemed to be proud of it, and only wore it on Saturday and Sunday nights.
III
The bar we’ve referred to was a little hotel for refreshing the tourists who came up to Iviraromí in the wintertime to visit the famous Jesuit ruins, and who after lunch continued on to the Iguazú or went back to Posadas. During the rest of the time the bar belonged to us. It served as the inevitable meeting place for those settlers with some modicum of culture in Iviraromí: seventeen in all. And, in that amalgam of frontiersmen by the forest, one of the major curiosities was the fact that all seventeen played chess, and well. So that sometimes their meetings would proceed in silence amid shoulders bent over five or six chessboards, between pairs of characters half of whom couldn’t finish signing their names without drying their hands two or three times.
By midnight the bar was deserted, except for those days when Don Juan had spent all morning and all afternoon leaning on the counters of all the boliches in Iviraromí. Then he was unshakable. Those were bad nights for the barman, for Brown had the soundest head in the region. Propped up against the drinks-counter, he watched the hours go by one after the other, without moving or hearing the barman, who in order to get Don Juan to leave would go outside every few minutes to predict rain.
Since Monsieur Rivet had proved that he too could hold his liquor, soon the ex-chemist and the ex-engineer began to meet in frequent drinking bouts. Let it not be thought, however, that this common aim and end in life had produced the slightest trace of friendship between them. Don Juan, after a “Good evening” more suggested than spoken, would ignore his companion completely. And Rivet in turn did not restrain, for the sake of Juan Brown, the contempt he felt for the doctores of Iviraromí, among whom he of course included Don Juan. They would spend the night together and alone, and sometimes continued all morning in the first boliche to open its doors; but without even looking at each other.
These odd sessions became more common about halfway through the winter when Rivet’s partner started making orange alcohol, under the direction of the chemist. Once this enterprise had ended in the catastrophe we describe in another story, Rivet went to the bar every night, in his slim little black suit. And since Don Juan at that time was on one of his worst benders, they both had opportunities to stage fantastic confrontations, till they came to the last of them, which was the decisive one.
IV
For the foregoing reasons, and the obvious profits he earned thereby, the bar-owner went sleepless at night, with nothing to do but look after the glasses of the two drinkers, and refill the alcohol lamp. And you can be sure it was cold on those raw June nights. As a result the bolichero gave up one night, and after entrusting the rest of the demijohn of rum to Juan Brown’s integrity, he went to bed. Needless to say it was Brown alone who assumed responsibility for the dual expenditures.
So Don Juan and Monsieur Rivet were left by themselves at one o’clock in the morning, Brown in his usual place, stoned and impassive as always, and the chemist pacing around excitedly with his brow in a sweat—while outside a bitter frost was settling in.
For two hours there were no surprises; but as it struck three the demijohn went dry. They both noticed it, and for a long while Don Juan’s bulging and lifeless eyes were fixed on the void in front of him. Finally, half turning, he took a glance at the empty demijohn, then resumed his pose behind it. Another long while elapsed, and again he turned to look at the container. Seizing it at last, he held it upside down above the metal counter. Nothing: not a drop.
An attack of dipsomania can be turned aside however you like, except by the abrupt withdrawal of the drug. From time to time, and at the very doors of the bar, the strident crowing of a rooster split the air, causing Brown to wheeze and Rivet to break the rhythm of his pacing. In the end the rooster drove the chemist into a string of woolly jeers against the doctorcitos. At first Don Juan didn’t pay the slightest attention to his convulsive babbling; but faced with the constant “Hogwash . . . they don’t know a thing . . .” of the ex-chemist, he turned his heavy-lidded eyes in his direction, and said:
“And what do you know?”
Rivet, at a trot and drooling spit, then launched into the same
sort of invective against Don Juan, who followed him stubbornly with his eyes. Finally he looked away and snorted:
“Goddamned Frenchman . . .”
Their situation, however, was becoming intolerable. Juan Brown’s gaze, which had been fixed on the lamp for a while, finally fell sideways onto his companion:
“You who know about everything, industrialist . . . Is carburated alcohol drinkable?”
Alcohol! The mere word stifled Rivet’s annoyance like a breath of fire. Looking at the lamp, he stammered:
“Carburated? . . . Tzsh! . . . Hogwash . . . Benzines . . . Piridines . . . Tzsh! . . . You can drink it.”
That was enough. The drinkers lit a candle, poured the alcohol into the demijohn through its own stinking funnel, and both came back to life.
Carburated alcohol is no drink for human beings. When they’d emptied the demijohn down to the last drop, Don Juan, for the first time in his life, lost his impassible composure and fell—tumbled like an elephant into his chair. Rivet was sweating to the very locks of his hair, and couldn’t detach himself from the rail of the billiard table.
“Let’s go,” said Don Juan, pulling along the resisting Rivet. Brown managed to cinch his horse and to hoist the chemist onto its croup, and at four in the morning they left the bar, at the walking gait of Brown’s stallion, which was capable of trotting with 100 kilos in the saddle, and thus could easily walk with a load of 140.
The night, here very cold and clear, must have been already veiled in fog in the basin of the mountain streams. Indeed, as soon as they got within sight of the valley of the Yabebirí, they could see the mist—lying all along the river since earlier that day—rise up the skirt of the mountain range, unraveling into shreds. Still farther down, the tepid woods must have been already white with steamy haze.
What happened was this: the travelers stumbled suddenly into the underbrush, when they should already have been at Tacuara-Mansión. The tired-out horse resisted leaving the place. Don Juan changed direction, and a while later they had the woods in front of them again.
“We’re lost,” thought Don Juan, his teeth chattering in spite of himself, for even though the closed-in fog prevented a freeze, the cold was no less biting. He took another heading, this time relying on his horse. Under his astrakhan jacket, Brown could tell he was soaking in icy sweat. The chemist, more severely traumatized, was bouncing around behind him, totally unconscious.
The underbrush made them stop again. With that Don Juan decided he’d done everything possible to reach his house. So right where he was he tied his horse to the first tree and lay down at the foot of it, stretching Rivet out beside him. Visibly shrunken, the chemist had drawn up his knees to his chest and was trembling incessantly. He took up no more space than a child, and a thin one at that. Don Juan looked at him for a moment and, shrugging his shoulders a bit, took off the saddle blanket he’d thrown over himself and used it to cover Rivet. That done, he stretched out on his back on the icy grass.
When he came to, the sun was already very high. And there was his house, just ten meters away.
What had happened was very simple: not for a moment had they gone astray the night before. The horse had stopped the first time—and every time—by the big tree in front of Tacuara-Mansión, which the fog and the lamp alcohol had prevented its owner from seeing. The seemingly endless marches and countermarches had been confined to simple rings around the familiar tree.
In any case, they had just been discovered by Don Juan’s Hungarian. Between the two of them they carried Monsieur Rivet to the hut, in the same shivering child’s posture in which he’d died. As for Juan Brown, he lay sleepless for a long time—and despite the hot-water crocks—as he stubbornly calculated, facing his cedar dividing wall, the number of boards they would need for his drinking-partner’s coffin.
And the next morning the neighbor-ladies on the stony road by the Yabebirí heard from a distance, and then saw go by, the bouncy little sturdy-wheeled cart—followed hurriedly by the one-armed man—which was carrying off the remains of the deceased chemist.
V
In a bad way despite his enormous stamina, Don Juan didn’t leave Tacuara-Mansión for ten days. Still he wasn’t spared a visitor who went to find out what had happened, under the pretext of consoling Don Juan and singing hallelujahs for the distinguished chemist who’d passed away.
Don Juan let him talk without interrupting. Finally, in the face of renewed praises of the intellectual exiled in the wilds who had just died, Don Juan shrugged his shoulders:
“Lousy gringo . . . ,” he muttered, looking the other way.
And this was all there was to the funeral oration for Monsieur Rivet.
Note
1 “The Orange-Distillers,” below.
The Darkroom
One rainy night at the bar by the ruins we got the news that our justice of the peace, on a trip to Buenos Aires, had been the victim of a confidence game, and that he was coming back very ill.
Both pieces of news surprised us, because there never set foot in Misiones a more distrusting fellow than our judge, and we had never taken his asthma seriously, nor the frequent toothache he treated with a mouthwash of brandy which he never spit out. Swindle him? We’d have to see that.
In the story about the half-liter of carburated alcohol drunk by Don Juan Brown and his partner Rivet, I’ve already reported the incident at the card table and the part played in it by the justice of the peace.
The name of this functionary was Malaquias Sotelo. He was a stubby Indian with a very short neck, the nape of which seemed to resist his straightening up his head. He had a strong jaw and a forehead so low that his hair, short and stiff as wire, sprouted in a blue line two finger-widths above his thick eyebrows. Below were two sunken little eyes that looked out with perpetual suspicion, especially when they were drowned in distress by his asthma. Then his eyes turned from side to side with the panting apprehension of a trapped animal, and it was a pleasure to avoid looking at him on such occasions.
Beyond this manifestation of his native soul, he was a fellow incapable of squandering a penny on anything whatsoever, and very strong-willed.
From the time he was a boy he’d been a police trooper in rural Corrientes. The surge of restlessness that blows like a north wind upon the destinies of those who live in frontier regions drove him to abruptly abandon this job for that of doorkeeper at the superior court in Posadas. There, sitting in the entranceway, he learned all by himself to read from La Nación and La Prensa. Not everyone failed to guess the aspirations of that quiet little Indian, and a decade later we find him in charge of the peace court in Iviraromí.
He had a fair amount of learning acquired on the sly, quite a bit more than he showed, and recently he’d bought the multivolume World History of Cesare Cantú. But this we didn’t find out till later, due to the secrecy with which he hid his ambition to become a “doctor” from the sneers it would surely arouse.
On horseback (nobody ever saw him walk two blocks) he was the best-dressed guy in town. But in his but he always went around barefoot, and toward evening would read by the edge of the highroad in a rocking chair, wearing leather moccasins he made himself, with no socks. He had a few leatherworking tools, and dreamed of getting a shoemaker’s sewing machine.
My acquaintance with the judge dated from when I’d just arrived in the region and he came to my shop one afternoon, to ask me—at the very end of the ceremonious visit—if I knew a process that was faster than tannin and less burning than bichromate, for tanning carpincho leather (his moccasins).
Deep down, the man didn’t like me much, or at least distrusted me. And this I suppose stemmed from a certain banquet with which the aristocrats of the region—yerba planters, public officials, and bolicheros—celebrated a national holiday, shortly after my arrival, in the square amid the Jesuit ruins, viewed and surrounded by a thousand poor devils and excited children—a banquet I didn’t attend but did observe quite thoroughly, in the company of a on
e-eyed carpenter who one black night had poked out his eye by sneezing into a barbed-wire fence with too much liquor in him, and a Brazilian hunter, an old and withdrawn beast of the woods who, after looking askance at my bicycle for three months straight, had ended up muttering in Portuguese:
“Horse made out of sticks . . .”
My undistinguished company and the work clothes I usually wore, and didn’t take off for the holiday—this latter fact especially—were no doubt the cause of the suspicion the justice of the peace could never shed concerning me.
He’d recently gotten married to Elena Pilsudski, a young Polish girl who’d been his companion for eight years, and who sewed their children’s clothes with her husband’s leatherworker’s thread. She worked like a farmhand from dawn to dusk (the judge had a good eye), and distrusted all visitors, whom she watched with a wild and open look, not very different from that of her heifers, who hardly ran faster than their owner when she flew after them at daybreak, with her skirt at her waist and her thighs exposed, through the tall and water-soaked esparto grass.
There was one more person in the family, though only now and then did he honor Iviraromí with his presence: Don Estanislao Pilsudski, Sotelo’s father-in-law.
This man was a Pole whose stringy beard clung to the angles of his skinny face, who always wore new boots and was dressed in a long black coat like a caftan. He was constantly smiling, and quick to anticipate the opinion of the humblest person who might speak to him; this being how you could tell he was an old fox. During his stay among us he never missed a night at the bar, arriving always with a different walking stick if the weather was good, and with his umbrella if it was raining. He would make the rounds of the gaming tables, stopping a long while at each one so as to please everybody; or stand by the billiard table with his hands under his coat behind him, rocking back and forth and approving every shot, whether it was a miscue or not. We called him Fine-Heart because that was his usual way of referring to someone’s good character.
The Exiles and Other Stories Page 16