– Shameless! Scandalous wench! And the kitchen still looks like a pigsty!
Whispers, murmurs! The three of them lying in wait inside the zaguán: the One-in-Blue, the One-in-White, the One-in-Green. Three fulsome young bodies, laid out across the cool porch tiles, O grace! And standing at the threshold, two adolescent girls overseeing the street with vulture eyes.
The One-in-White purrs softly into the avid ear of the One-in-Blue; and the One-in-Blue listens, breathless, mouth half open in an enigmatic smile, eyes lost in an enigmatic gaze. And the One-in-Green? Very grave, she has brought her golden head close to her two companions’ heads. The One-in-Green would like not to listen, but listens; she wishes and wishes not to listen, and she hears with her ears, with her eyes, with her trembling skin. She’s listening, the One-in-Green: whispers, murmurs!
With a start, the One-in-Blue sits up, eyebrows arched, pupils dilated.
– No! she exclaims, incredulous. It can’t be!
– No doubt about it, confirms the One-in-White with a deep, insinuating, significant look.
– What about her? asks the One-in-Blue, still not over her astonishment.
With her index finger the One-in-White beckons to the eager heads of her companions. Their lips move: whispers, murmurs. Suddenly the One-in-Blue, who hasn’t missed a word, raises her head and bursts into uncontrollable laughter, eyes half closed, mouth wide open revealing gums of coral, the white pinions of her teeth.
– Oh, oh! exclaims, laughs, sobs the One-in-Blue.
Still laughing, she falls back in slow motion, so that her skirt rolls back like a wave, revealing tanned knees and the troubling zone where her thighs begin. And still the skirt shrinks back!
– Ah, ah! moans the One-in-White as she half sits up.
She is shaken by a gust of laughter; she bends like a palm tree in the wind. The straps of her gown slide down over her shoulders to reveal a Hesperides of incalculable abundance. But the One-in-Green does not laugh: she has reclined on the tiles, her nostrils flaring as though she scented a region of fire.
What are the two adolescent girls up to? The two adolescents, upon hearing the explosion of laughter, have turned their eyes back toward the interior of the zaguán, toward that world still barred to them. Now they look at one another, as if wondering: they smile, enigmatic. Perhaps they guess! But their sharp eyes go back to scrutinizing the street, and suddenly their birdlike faces light up.
– The guy with the hat! they shout. The guy with the hat!
– Where? the One-in-Blue wants to know.
– Right here on the sidewalk.
Escaping La Hormiga de Oro, Adam Buenosayres tasted a mixture of shame and indignation. How long was he going to let himself get caught up in the subtle webs of female creatures? Just now, pompous as a peacock, he’d been contriving lofty concepts about life and death. And a few cute moves by Ruth were enough to bring the entire machinery of his speculations crashing down to the ground!
– But all the same, hell of a girl! If that old bag hadn’t stuck her nose in . . . And now, the nymphs in the zaguán. Careful, now!
Twenty metres up ahead was the opening of the zaguán with its red paving tiles. Heads up! Where were the nymphs? Suddenly Adam heard their hot whispers, their stifled laughter. Should he turn back or cross the street? Too late! The two adolescent girls standing guard at the entrance were already drilling four malignant eyes into him. They sensed his hesitation and smiled wickedly.
“Glare at them ferociously, they’ll bow their heads. Or stare at them lasciviously, and they’ll look away with a smile of tacit consent. The real danger is with the hidden nymphs.”
Adam Buenosayres forged ahead. Nearing the zaguán, he nailed the girls with a Gorgon stare. They backed away. The easy victory seemed to boost his daring, for when he got to the zaguán itself, he explored it with firm eyes. A single glance took in the cluster of women frolicking and on fire: the One-in-Blue, the One-in-Green, the One-in-White, semi-reclining, propping one another up, their heads together, mouths pressed against attentive ears, lips displaying the entire curvature of laughter, audacious forms being laid bare as dresses ebbed, eyelids drooped, nostrils flared. Whispers, murmurs! Moving on, he thought he could feel eyes biting him from behind; the women in the zaguán must have broken with their poses to poke their heads out and watch him go by. And he was right; a chorus of tremendous laughter filled his ears.
“They’re laughing at my hat. Ergo, they’re not laughing at me. That old rascal Alcibiades!”
But the gaggle of girls had stirred up in him a dark elation.
“Devilishly pretty, and strong! Armed for combat: line of redoubt, parabolic fortress, bastions of curves and angles. Ready for offence or defence. And graceful as colts. A yearning to stroke their sleek necks, or give them a thrashing.”
A dark exaltation, desire for triumphal violence. In short . . . Adam frowned: he’d just noticed the Flor del Barrio,11 and at the same moment Juancho and Yuyito, who were cautiously manoeuvring in her direction with a mischievous expression on their childish faces.
“Those brats are up to no good,” he said to himself.
Decked out and heavily made up as usual, the Flor del Barrio stood in her doorway, facing down the street in the same direction as always, showing no other sign of life than the feverish activity of her eyes. He would find her standing like this at any time, in any season, peering eternally at the same point. The bride waiting in ambush, perhaps, a terrible image of waiting. So, too, did the men on the street see her, never getting to the bottom of her mystery, maybe not even noticing the presence of an enigma in those unhinged womanly eyes, never wondering what absent love, what stranger might arrive through that sector of the street watched over so agonizingly by the Flor del Barrio.
Yuyito and Juancho were now close to the woman.
– Flor del Barrio, isn’t Luis on his way? they asked, laughing. Flor del Barrio, where’s Luis?
The woman appeared not to have noticed them at all. Yuyito darted closer and lifted her flowered skirt a bit.
– Doggone little brats! Adam rebuked them. How ’bout I fetch each of you a clout!
Cool as a cucumber, Yuyito stared at him attentively. Turning to his buddy, he posed the following question in a singsong voice:
– Who kicked the butcher’s cat?
– The guy in the goofy hat! Juancho sang in serene reply.12
The two of them took off up the street. Watching them flee, Adam had no idea that their childish hands were soon to untie the easy knot of war. He’d crossed Murillo Street and was now walking along blackened walls, amid pestilential wagons, all belonging to the Universal Tannery. The workers of the third shift were stretched out on the ground, sleeping heavily with their caps under the nape of their necks, waiting for the wail of the siren that would soon call them back to work. Adam stole quietly among the sleeping bodies and observed their half-open mouths, their wheezing chests, and their hands scattered here and there like discarded tools.
“Penitential flesh. They can’t hear, the way I do, the subtle, tempting voices. They’re too broken. Broken and worthy: a terrible dignity! Whereas I . . .”
Among the bodies, old Pipo lay asleep beside a large draught horse whose head was also nodding as he snoozed. Pipo was the local drunk, illustrious for his habit of stripping down right in the street and dancing naked as a satyr, to the consternation of the neighbourhood wives and the hilarity of the local hoods. Adam stopped and bent over to chase away a fly that had landed on Pipo’s nose. The old man woke up and, with a vague smile, got to his feet.
– Good afternoon, Pipo! Adam greeted him. I’d have thought you’d be over in Precinct 21.
– ’Cuzza Saturday? guffawed Pipo. By Jesus! No. Saturday, I tie one on, sleep it off in the jug, and they let me out Sunday.
They were walking together toward the tannery gate, and Adam thought about him with sympathy. A sabbatical bender, was Pipo’s: his moment of exultation and freedom.
> – Do you always drink at Don Nicola’s?
– Ecco, Pipo assented.
– His famous plonk, said Adam sarcastically.
– Pure grape wine, by Jesus!
The old man’s hand went to his bony throat.
– But it scratches, you know?
– Ah, the wine of good old Italy! Adam sighed, watching Pipo out of the corner of his eye.
The old man said nothing and gave no sign of any memory at all. Of the man who had immigrated, all that remained was a machine: a faithful mechanism that got drunk every Saturday. In silence they arrived at the gate; the old man waved goodbye and entered the tannery. Adam Buenosayres, meditative, approached the enormous gateway where the wagons came and went. A foul, greenish liquid slithered between the cobblestones. The stench of rotten grease and rancid skins wafted out from the tannery. Adam sucked in his breath and hurried through the pestilential zone, covering the forty metres or so to Padilla Street.
Seated on her bench, Old Lady Clotho had just finished munching a crust of bread. She watched benignly as the little girls nearby played the game of Angel and Devil. The Angel went up to the group and called out with all the heavenly gravity she could muster:
– Knock, knock!
– Who’s there? the other girls asked in chorus.
– The Angel.
– What do you want?
– A flower.
– What flower?
– The rose.
Detaching herself from the group, the lucky rose went off with the Angel, while the girl playing the Devil approached and, trying to sound scary, called out:
– Knock, knock!
– Who’s there?
– The Devil.
– What do you want?
– A flower.
– What flower?
– The carnation.
The sad little carnation left the group, and the Devil took her away amid the laughter of all those predestined flowers. Then the Angel came back:
– Knock, knock!
– Who’s there?
– The Angel.
– What do you want?
– A flower . . .
Old Lady Clotho looked away, adjusted the nickel-framed spectacles on her nose, took up her spindle along with a wad of woollen fleece she’d left on the doorstep, and fervently went back to work. Her nimble fingers twisted strands together and drew out the thread, all the while turning the spindle. As she spun the mass of fleece, she was also spinning the stuff of her reflections: the cold season was drawing near, and there were nine children to look after.
– Sweaters for the ones going to school, said Clotho from her mental list. Socks for the little ones, booties and bonnets for the ones that’ll come this winter. Yes, the poor mothers are already going around with their bellies up to their chins.
All this work was being prepared in Clotho’s fingers and in her imagination. It was her way of returning the kindness of those good souls who helped her out, who paid the rent for her tiny room and made sure she didn’t go without the bread of God or a cup of soup.
Without interrupting her work, Old Lady Clotho saw the young man at the corner pasting up a poster with bright red letters.
“Another speech!” she thought, smiling tolerantly with lips still speckled with crumbs of bread.
For it was Old Lady Clotho’s wont, of an evening, to approach groups of people gathered at a street corner around a fiery orator. Their harsh words and fanatical gestures railed against everything and everyone – against order and disorder, against justice and injustice, against peace and against war. Clotho always listened with a smile:
– Santa Madonna! What are those fools shouting about? What are they scared of? Haven’t they understood yet that this world is a hopeless mess ever since Adam and Eve in Paradise did that dirty thing behind God’s back?
She would go back to her room, light her kerosene lamp, sit with her elbows on her rickety table and leaf through her yellowing Bible with the large print. She’d brought it all the way from Italy, heroically saving it through thick and thin, along with the picture of Our Lady of Loreto, still in its original brass frame and keeping watch over the head of her bed. Despite her murky vision, but helped by the night silence, Clotho would read the Old Testament stories about God’s patience and men’s folly: tales of love and hate, praiseworthy virtue and appalling vice, patriarchal joys and the gnashing of teeth, earthquakes and floods, plagues and massacres. All this streamed before her eyes, just like the moving pictures she’d once seen at the Rivoli cinema on Triunvirato Street – Doña Carmen had invited her, the Spanish woman who lived at the end of the hall. Thinking about these things, she would slowly close the fearsome book and say to herself that surely the world had always been sheer bedlam and would be until Judgment Day, and the orators on the corner could shout themselves blue in the face. Moreover (and this conviction only deepened with time), life slipped away like a dream and resolved into a parade of images so fleeting she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Then Clotho would recall her own life. Her childhood, hard but happy – oh, yes!– in the countryside of the Piemonte. Her wedding in the church in the mountains. And suddenly that strange sea voyage: they were cruelly ripped out of the earth and left with their roots to wither in the wind. (Santa Madonna! Why? What for?) They got off the boat in Buenos Aires, then came forty-five years of toil with her unruly sons (wrong-headed, the poor dears!), washing clothes from dawn till dusk, her old man growing grey up on the scaffolding. One by one they died, or left, until all were gone. Flesh and gestures one used to love, or that once caused pain: they slipped through one’s fingers, just like that, as easily as a fistful of sand. Yes, it was all like a dream! Old Lady Clotho had no more tears to weep and she had become reserved, skeptical because of the way things change and change. It wasn’t indifference, just caution, perhaps wisdom. But she also glimpsed something that never changed. At the end of early mass, she would shuffle up to the communion rail of San Bernardo; when the officiating priest raised the white wafer, all poverty and strife seemed to melt away around her, and something eternal moved in, something that had been, was, and ever would be one with itself.
An ear-splitting screech took her from her thoughts. Clotho looked up to see where the ruckus was coming from. Spindle in hand, she stood up to yell:
– Degenerates! Bandits!
After gathering all their flowers, the Devil and the Angel, each heading up her legion, had begun the battle that brings the game to an end. But, oh my word! Two authentic devils, Yuyito and Juancho, had infiltrated the innocent flock and were having a whale of a time pinching the girls.
– Get outta here! hollered Clotho, rushing toward them and brandishing her spindle like a lance.
The two scoundrels stood up to her, face to face, and without the slighest affectation let fly a pair of long, loud raspberries. Then they went merrily on their way. No one suspected that those childish hands would soon untie the loose knot of war! Clotho sat back down beside the little girls, who were already hatching a new game. Before taking up her work once more, she glanced casually to her right.
– Ah, it’s that young man, she murmured, her eyes glued to the passerby smiling at her from beneath a wide-brimmed hat.
The more she looked at him, the more he looked like Juan – the same facial expression and the same height. All that was missing were the tube trousers, his high heels, short jacket, silk scarf, and the wide-brimmed hat he was wearing in 1900, the year he died. And it wasn’t true that Juan was a hoodlum! Nothing but a vicious rumour. If he got knifed, it was because he was trying to separate the other two who’d pulled their blades, she was sure of it. Because her Juan was the best boy of all; never once did she hear him raise his voice. Old Lady Clotho had no more tears to cry, but all the same her eyes became moist, even as she did her best to smile back at the young man who was now quite close.
Adam Buenosayres calculated the moment when he should smile. He himself had given the old wom
an the name of one of the Fates, in reference to the never-absent spindle. She spun so tirelessly, so solemnly, that Adam wondered more than once if the old woman wasn’t spinning the destiny of the street, the fate of men.
“Maybe even mine,” he said to himself superstitiously.
So the smile he addressed to Clotho every time he saw her was almost a liturgical act. The old woman’s anxious eyes demanded it, and Adam made sure she got it, fearing that his smile might be the only food that nourished the Fate.
“One, two, three. Now!”
His smile hit the mark so perfectly that, as he passed her, he saw a beatific face on whose wrinkled chin sparkled a few crumbs of bread. The ring of little girls turned round and round as they sang:
Between Saint Peter and Saint John
they made a new boat.13
“Circular motion. Movement of the angel, the star, the soul. Children understand pure motion.”
Adam stopped in front of the corral belonging to Don Martín Arizmendi. The Basque was inhaling the mild smell of cows and looking at the pigeons asleep in the sun with their throats puffed out. That was peace.
Little did he know that childish hands were soon to loosen the easy knot of war!
– If he isn’t the Messiah, then who is he? asked Jabil belligerently.
Abdulla looked pensively at the glass of anis growing warm in his strong, sinewy hand.
– He too is a prophet, he answered. The last one before Mohammed, the true prophet of Allah.
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 13