Naturally, the justice of the peace had been the first to earn that designation—when Sotelo, a land-owner as well as a judge, had finally married Elena out of love for their children. But all of us were included too in the effusions of the honey-tongued rascal.
II
Such are the characters taking part in the photographic affair which is the theme of this story.
As I said at the start, the news of the swindle that stung the judge hadn’t met with the slightest acceptance among us. Sotelo was suspicion and mistrust personified; and no matter how provincial he might feel on the Paseo de Julio in Buenos Aires, none of us could see in him the sort of stuff susceptible to any kind of deceit. Furthermore, we didn’t know the source of the rumor; it had surely come up from Posadas, like the news of his return and his sickness, which unfortunately was true.
I was the first of us to learn of it, as I was coming back home one morning with my hoe over my shoulder. As I crossed the highroad to the new port, a boy reined in his galloping white horse on the bridge to tell me that the justice of the peace had arrived the night before, on one of the steamboats that make the run to the Iguazú, and that they’d carried him off because he was very sick. And that he was going to notify the family so they could bring a cart to take him home.
“But what’s the matter with him?” I asked the boy.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “He can’t talk . . . there’s something wrong with his breathing . . .”
As sure as I was of Sotelo’s scant good will toward me, and that his vaunted illness was nothing but a common attack of asthma, I decided to go see him. So I saddled my horse, and in ten minutes was there.
At the new port of Iviraromí there’s a big new shed that serves as a yerba warehouse, and a run-down, unoccupied chalet that once was a grocery and boarding house. It’s empty now, and there’s nothing in its gloomy rooms but maybe a moldy carriage valance, and an old telephone on the floor.
In one of those rooms I found our judge lying on a cot, dressed but without a jacket. He was almost sitting up, with his shirt open and his false collar undone, though still fastened at the back. He was breathing the way an asthmatic breathes during a violent attack, which isn’t pleasing to behold. When he saw me his head shook on the pillow, he raised an arm that moved around disconcertedly, and then the other, which he brought to his mouth in a spasmodic gesture. But he couldn’t manage to tell me anything.
Aside from his facial features, from the inscrutable sunkenness of his eyes and the gritty leanness of his nose, something in particular caught my attention: his hands, half-emerging from his shirt-cuffs, blue-nailed and fleshless; the livid, locked-together fingers starting to curl up above the sheet.
I looked at him more carefully, and then I saw, I clearly realized that the judge’s moments were numbered; that he was dying, that at that very instant he was passing away. Immobile at the foot of the cot, I saw him grope for something on the sheet and, as if he couldn’t find it, sink his nails in slowly. I saw him open his mouth, gently move his head and fix his eyes with some amazement on one side of the roof, and there detain his gaze, now fixed on the sheet-metal roof for all eternity.
Dead! In the brief span of ten minutes I had left the house whistling, to console the pusillanimous judge who flushed his mouth with rum between toothaches and attacks of asthma, and was coming back with my eyes stony from the image of a man who had waited precisely for me to come to entrust me with the spectacle of his death.
I suffer acutely from scenes like that. As many times as I’ve been able to, I’ve avoided looking at corpses. A dead person for me is something very different from a mere body that’s just lost its life. It’s an alien thing, a substance horribly old, yellow, and inert, that horribly reminds us of someone we’ve known. So you’ll understand my displeasure before the gross and uncalled-for still-life with which the distrusting judge had honored me.
The rest of the morning I stayed home, listening to the come-and-go of galloping horses. When it was almost noon, I saw a flatbed cart go by, pulled by three mules at a good trot, and in it Elena and her father, standing up and bouncing around as they clung to the rail.
I still don’t know why the little Pole didn’t come down to see her dead husband sooner. Maybe her father arranged things that way, so as to do them in proper form: the trip down with the widow in the cart, and the return in the same vehicle with the dead man jiggling in the back. That way it didn’t cost so much.
This I could tell for sure when Fine-Heart, on the way back, had the cart stop at my place so he could get down and talk to me with his arms waving:
“Ah, señor! What a disaster! We never had a judge like him in Misiones. And he was a good man, really! What a fine heart he had! (¡Lindito corazón tenía!) And they’ve stripped him clean. Here in the port . . . He’s got no money, nothing.”
As his shifting glances avoided looking me straight in the eye, I understood the awful suspicion of the Polack, who rejected as we did the tale of the swindle in Buenos Aires, and thought that right in the port, before or after he was dead, his son-in-law had been robbed.
“Ah, señor!” he shook his head. “He had five hundred pesos on him. And what did he spend? Nothing, señor! He had a fine heart! And he brings back twenty pesos. How can that be?”
And now he fixed his gaze on my boots, so as not to raise it to my pants pockets, where his son-in-law’s money might be. As best I could I made him see it was impossible for me to have been the thief—simply because there wasn’t time—and the old crook went off talking to himself.
What’s left of this story is a ten-hour nightmare. The burial was to take place that same afternoon at sunset. A little before then Elena’s girl—her eldest—came to the house to ask me in her mother’s name if I would go and take a picture of the judge. I couldn’t manage to banish the image of the man letting his jaw drop and fixing his gaze in perpetuity on one side of the roof, so I’d have no doubt he couldn’t move anymore because he was dead. And now I was supposed to see him again, reconsider him, focus on him, and develop his image in my darkroom.
But how could I deny Elena the portrait of her husband, the only one she’d ever have of him?
I loaded the camera with two plates and set out for the house of the deceased. My one-eyed carpenter had built a coffin, just a straight, untapered box, and the judge was lying inside it, with not a half-inch of clearance at his head or at his feet, his green hands crossed forcibly over his chest.
The coffin had to be taken out of the very dim room of the courthouse and tilted to an almost vertical position in the hallway full of people, where two peones held it up at the head. So under the black cloth I had to immerse my overexcited nerves in that half-opened mouth, blacker toward the back than even death itself; in the jaw drawn back to the point of leaving a finger-width of space between the upper and lower teeth; in the eyes of murky glass under lashes looking sticky and swollen; in all the contortions of that cruel caricature of a man.
The afternoon was declining now and the coffin was nailed shut quickly. But not without our first seeing Elena come forcing her children up to the bier for them to kiss their father. The little boy resisted with terrible screams as he was dragged across the floor. The girl kissed her father—though she was held up and pushed from behind—but with such a fright before that awful thing they wanted her to regard as her father that today, if she’s still alive, she must remember it with just as great a dread.
I didn’t plan to go to the cemetery, but I did it for Elena. The poor girl was walking just behind the oxcart between her children, with one hand pulling along her boy, who yelled the whole way, and carrying her eight-month-old baby in the other arm. Since it was a long way and the oxen were almost trotting, she often shifted the baby from one dog-tired arm to the other, each time with the same hasty courage. In back of her Fine-Heart ran around amid the retinue whining to everyone about the robbery he assumed had taken place.
The coffin was lowered int
o the newly dug grave, full of huge ants that scurried up and down the walls. With handfuls of damp earth the townspeople shared in the shoveling of the burial crew, and there was even someone charitable enough to put a clump of dirt in the hands of the half-orphaned girl. But Elena, who was rocking her baby in a state of disarray, ran up in desperation to prevent what might follow:
“No, Elenita! Don’t throw dirt on your father!”
The sad ceremony came to an end, but not for me. I let the hours go by without making up my mind to go into the darkroom. Finally I did, around midnight I think. There was nothing out of the ordinary that would disturb a normal situation when one had calm nerves. It was just that I had to revive the already buried person I could see everywhere; I had to shut myself in with him, the two of us alone in profoundly concentrated darkness; I felt him emerging little by little before my eyes and half-opening his black mouth under my wet fingers; I had to tip him to and fro in the tray so he’d awake from under ground and be engraved before me on that other sensitized plate of my horror.
Nevertheless, I finished. When I went outside the unconfining night gave me the impression of a dawn full of reasons for living and hopes I had forgotten. A few steps away were banana plants laden with flowers, and drops were falling to earth from their huge leaves heavy with moisture. Farther away, across the bridge, the sunburned manioc was standing erect at last, now pearly with dew. Still farther off, in the valley that went down to the river, a dim haze enveloped the yerba plantation, and rose above the woods to mingle there below with the dense vapors that ascended from the tepid Paraná.
All this was very familiar to me, for it made up my real life. And I walked here and there waiting calmly for daylight, so as to begin that life again.
The Orange Distillers
The man appeared at noon one day, nobody knowing how or from where. He was seen in all the boliches of Iviraromí, drinking as we’d never seen anyone drink—Rivet and Juan Brown excepted. He was wearing baggy Paraguayan soldier’s pants, sandals with no socks, and a filthy white beret tilted over his eye. Aside from drinking, the man did nothing but sing praises to his cane—a knotty stick with no bark—which he held out to all the peones to get them to try to break it. One after another the laborers tested the miraculous cane on the stone tiles, and it really did withstand all blows. Its owner, leaning back against the counter with his legs crossed, smiled in satisfaction.
The next day the man was seen at the same time and in the same boliches, with his famous cane. Then he disappeared, till a month later, from the bar, we saw him moving along in the twilight among the Jesuit ruins, in the company of Rivet, the chemist. But this time we found out who he was.
Around 1900, the government of Paraguay employed a fair number of scientists from Europe—among them a few university professors, but many more experts in business and industry. To organize its hospitals, Paraguay solicited the services of Dr. Else, a brilliant young Swedish physician and biologist, who in that new country found a broad field for his great powers of action. In five years he provided the hospitals and their laboratories with a level of organization that in twenty years as many other professionals could not have attained.
Then his high spirits go numb. The distinguished scholar pays to the tropic land that heavy tribute which—as if in alcohol—consumes the active life of so many foreigners; and now collapse holds back no more. For fifteen or twenty years nothing is heard of him. Till we finally find him in Misiones, with his baggy soldier’s pants and tilted beret, displaying, as the only purpose of his life, verification by one and all of the endurance of his cane.
This is the man whose presence convinced the manco (the one-armed man, Luisser) to carry out the dream he’d cherished in recent months: the distillation of alcohol from oranges.
The manco, whom we’ve already met—along with Rivet—in another story, simultaneously held in his brain three projects for getting rich, and one or two for his amusement. He’d never had a penny, nor any personal asset, to say nothing of the arm he’d lost in Buenos Aires cranking a car. But with his one good arm, two boiled manioc roots, and his soldering iron under his stump, he considered himself the happiest man in the world.
“What do I need?” he used to say joyfully, waving his only arm.
His pride, to tell the truth, consisted of a more or less deep knowledge of all the arts and crafts, his ascetic sobriety, and two volumes of the Encyclopédie. Apart from this, from his eternal optimism and his soldering iron, he possessed nothing. But in contrast his poor head was a pot boiling with illusions, in which industrial inventions stewed more frantically than the manioc roots in his kettle. Since his means did not allow him to aspire to great things, he always planned small industries for local consumption, or else amazing contrivances for lifting water, by filtration, from the swamp of the Horqueta up to his house.
In the space of three years, the one-armed man had successively tried the making of cracked corn, always scarce in that locality; of tiles of pitch and iron-bearing sand; of nougat from peanuts, and honey from bees; of incense-tree resin by way of dry distillation; of glazed peelings of the orange-like apepú, the samples of which had crazed the contract laborers with sweet-toothed greed; of dye from the lapacho tree, precipitated by potash; and of essence oil of oranges, a project we found him absorbed in the study of when Else appeared on his horizon.
It must be noted that none of the prior industries had enriched their inventor, for the simple reason that they never got set up in proper form.
“What do I need?” he repeated contentedly, wagging his stump. “Two hundred pesos. But where am I going to get them from?”
It was for the lack of those miserable pesos, of course, that his inventions failed to prosper. And everybody knows that it’s easier to find an extra arm than a ten-peso loan in Iviraromí. But the man never lost his optimism, and from his difficulties there sprouted new illusions, more crazy still, for new industrial projects.
The orange-essence operation, nevertheless, became a reality. It got established in a way as unexpected as the appearance of Else, and without our having seen the manco run around the yerba mate works any more than usual for the purpose. The one-armed man had no mechanical equipment except for five or six essential tools, aside from his soldering iron. Every last part of his machines came from someone’s house or another’s shed—like the blades of his Pelton wheel, for which he made use of all the old ladles and serving-spoons in town. He had to scurry around without a break after a length of pipe or a rusted sheet of galvanized metal, which he then would cut, twist, retwist, and solder, with his one good arm, the help of his stump, and his energetic, optimist’s confidence. Thus we know that his boiler-pump came from the piston of an old toy locomotive that he managed to win from its child owner by telling him a hundred times how he had lost his arm, and that the plates of the still (his still didn’t have a common coil-type cooler, but one in the grand style, with plates) were born of the pure zinc sheets from which a naturalist made drums to keep snakes in.
But what was most ingenious about his new facility was the press for extracting orange juice. It consisted of a barrel perforated with three-inch nails which revolved around a horizontal wooden shaft. Inside this hedgehog the oranges tumbled, bumped into the nails and came apart as they bounced around, till finally, transformed into a yellow pulp with oil floating on top, they went to the boiler.
The one good arm of the manco was worth a half-horsepower on the drum—even in the vertical sun of Misiones, and under the heavy black sailor’s undershirt that the one-armed man never abandoned even in the summer. But since the ridiculous toy pump required almost continuous attention, the distiller sought the help of an aficionado who, from the first days, had whiled away the hours observing the operation from afar, half-hidden behind a tree.
The name of this enthusiast was Malaquías Ruvidarte. He was a strapping youth of twenty—a Brazilian and perfectly black—whom we assumed to be a virgin (and he was), and who, having ri
dden his horse to Corpus one morning to get married, came back three days later in the dead of night, drunk and with two women astraddle behind him.
He lived with his grandmother in a very strange edifice, a conglomeration of compartments made of kerosene crates, which the black porter kept extending and modifying in accordance with the architectural innovations he noted in the three or four chalets being built at that time. With each new fashion Malaquías raised or added a wing to his edifice, but on a much smaller scale—so much so that in height the corridors of his chalet had a span of fifty centimeters, and through the doors a dog could hardly enter. But in this way the black man satisfied his artistic aspirations, deaf to the usual jokes.
An artist like this wasn’t the helper for two maniocs a day that the manco needed. Malaquias cranked the drum for a whole morning without saying a word, but in the afternoon did not return. And the next morning he was again installed behind the tree, watching.
Let’s sum up this phase: The manco got samples of essence oil of sweet and bitter oranges, which he managed to dispatch to Buenos Aires. From here they informed him that his essence couldn’t compete with the similar imported product, due to the high temperature at which it had been extracted; that only on the basis of new samples obtained by pressure could they deal with him, in view of the deficiencies of the distillation, etc., etc.
The manco didn’t lose heart over this.
“But that’s what I was saying!” he told us all gaily, catching his stump behind his back. “You can’t get anything by direct firing. And what am I going to do with no cash?”
Someone else, with more money and less intellectual range than the one-armed man, would have put out the fires of his still. But as he looked in melancholy at his patched-up machine, in which every working part had been replaced by another, substitute one, it suddenly occurred to the manco that that caustic yellowish mud that poured out of the drum could be used to make orange liquor. He wasn’t strong on fermentation, but he’d conquered greater difficulties in his life. Besides, Rivet would help him.
The Exiles and Other Stories Page 17