– They’re invisible forms, he added. But if we focus our will even slightly, they’ll become visible. Look closely into the shadows, and you’ll see it’s burgeoning with monstrous silhouettes.
The pipsqueak Bernini forced a nervous little laugh, trying to break the spell. But his laugh found no echo in the group. Instead, their wary eyes darted left and right, seeking in the night what they dared not find.
– Yes, said Adam Buenosayres. The devil is quick to answer any call. Nothing to it! All you need to do is invoke him in thought, and there he is!
– Hmm, Del Solar spluttered. The outskirts of Buenos Aires have a long tradition of witchcraft. Apparitions of both the Pig and the Widow are commonplace.50
At that point, Buenosayres had the bright idea of telling the ghost story he’d heard as a child from his grandfather Sebastián. It’s wintertime, one midnight in August. Grampa is sleeping the sleep of the just, out there in his cabin lost among hills and dales, when suddenly he wakes up to the sound of someone or something knocking at the window. Must be the wind, he thinks. He half sits up in his cot and listens. Now the noise is at the cabin door – an insistent tapping as though huge wings were beating at the door. Grampa lights his lamp and cries out: Who’s there? No answer, the wings just keep on beating. So he gets out of bed, takes the bar from the door, and opens it. Outside he finds a flock of enormous turkeys. Spreading their tails, they push past him and barge into the cabin. Now, Grandfather Sebastián has never seen such huge turkeys and he begins to suspect witchcraft, especially when the turkeys, making an infernal racket, crowd round and push him against the wall. So he grabs the bar and starts battering the turkeys with it. Far from backing off, they seem to revel in each blow. His hair standing on end, Grampa runs over and pulls out a silver-plated knife hidden under the head of the bed. He makes the sign of the cross by putting the blade over the sheath and shoves it at the beasts. What banshees! They all back away, screeching like old crones after a flogging. Grampa sees them pile out through the door and flee across the fields into the night like souls rounded up by the devil.
Gradually, as Adam’s tale unfolded, the group had tightened around the storyteller as they walked. Even Schultz, regretting he’d embarked them on such a dire demonology, was walking cheek by jowl with his comrades, anxiously peering into the shadows in spite of himself. Such was the state of the group’s morale when Buenosayres finished his yarn. Next, as if one ghost story weren’t enough, Samuel Tesler began to recount a gloomy tale of love and hate. It had taken place in his native land, Besarabia, vaguely remembered from childhood. It was about a woman and a man. She was as adorable as she was disdainful. He was a victim of unrequited love that had turned into implacable rancour. The two of them lived in the same house, separated by a wall. For no apparent reason, the young woman started showing symptoms of a rare disease. Every midnight her fever would come to a crisis, at the very same moment when, on the other side of the wall, three hammer blows were heard. Day after day, at the stroke of midnight, the hammer pounded three times on the wall, and the young woman’s condition worsened. For a month the young woman went on wasting away. Then, at the final blow of the hammer, she gave up the ghost. Several days later, the love-stricken man mysteriously disappeared. The police entered his room. On the wall separating his room from hers, the shape of a woman had been drawn in pencil. A nail had been driven deep into the figure’s heart. The hammer lay on the floor.
Samuel’s story, told in that place and at such an hour, was the last straw. The group had just come to the top of a hill. What happened there was as fast as it was inexplicable. Luis Pereda suddenly tripped over something massive. He went tumbling down the slope without so much as a shout. The others ran to help him, but before they got to the bottom where he lay, he got up and took to his heels at full speed.
– The Devil! he screamed. The Devil!
The explorers looked back to where Pereda had fallen. They could make out a dark bulk arising from the ground and raising two horns like those of an ox. Simultaneously, the silence of the night was broken by a long “mooooo.”51 The entire group, panic-stricken, took off after the fleeing Pereda, with Schultz in the lead, the very vanguard of terror. An accelerated fugue dragged them all indiscriminately across merciless terrain. As they fled, the night semed to unleash all its secret fury against them. Behind them, invisible arms reached out, straining to seize them in clawlike fingers. The napes of their necks prickled under the icy breath of the pursuers. Heathen war whoops, bestial panting, and burlesque snickers filled their ears. They bounded along, afraid that at any moment they might step on some repulsive shape slithering over the ground.
How long did that giddy career last? They never knew. Later, they only remembered suddenly topping a rise in the ground and seeing two or three street lamps emerge in the near distance.
– Lights! they shouted. Lights!
And they ran as fast as they could down the slope.
They had arrived.
Chapter 2
HERE LIES JUAN ROBLES, MUD-STOMPER
Adam Buenosayres, the astrologer Schultz, and Samuel Tesler were tarrying, deep in thought, in the chamber where the deceased lay in state. As men who have plumbed the ancient mystery of death, all three contemplated the mortal remains of the man who had been Juan Robles (a fine specimen of a criollo, if ever there was one). According to the neighbours, he’d kicked the bucket after fifty-nine years in an existence both happy and laborious. He’d whiled away his time on earth drifting from pulpería to pulpería, from siesta to siesta, watching his famous mares stomp mud for brick-making.1 And just now Juan Robles was looking quite ceremonious, stuffed into his wedding suit and stretched out full length in his black coffin with bronze handles.
Surrounding the coffin were six candlesticks, dripping wax, the flame at their tips gradually shrinking around the charred wicks. At the head of Juan Robles’s casket, a metal crucifix glinted in the scant candlelight, and the curved torso of the cross projected its terrible shadow onto the wall deep in the chamber. Four potted palm trees and a few flowers from the neighbouring garden decorated the funeral chapel. The lid of the casket had been propped against one wall like an ominous door waiting to close forever. The Three Crones, huddled in one corner of the room, had just stopped clucking to spy on those three strangers staring at the cadaver as though at something outlandish. In the opposite corner, the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law seemed to be sleeping, cocooned within their capacious black shawls.
It certainly wasn’t the mud-stomper’s mortal flesh, already cold, that attracted the strangers’ interest. The essential thing, in their view, was Juan Robles’s imperishable soul, recently detached from its earthly coil and launched into who knows what obscure regions. What regions? For the astrologer Schultz, initiate of Eastern mysteries, the question permitted only one answer, and he was explaining this to his friend Tesler in the grave voice appropriate to such a mournful occasion. If every individual born into this world had just died in some other world, he said, and if every individual who died here had just been born on another plane of cosmic existence, it obviously followed that Juan Robles, now dead on earth, was at that moment crying for the first time in another world, eagerly clinging once again to a maternal nipple, being swaddled in solicitous diapers, and provoking a new set of joys and worries. In what form? Under what new life conditions? There lay the great question! But Samuel Tesler, accustomed to a more colourful philosophy, repudiated that abstract mechanism of births and deaths; moreover, to imagine the deceased Juan Robles already in another world, bawling and pissing his diapers, was an Orientalist notion that he, for one, had a hard time swallowing. For his taste, what was wanted was a tribunal of souls with plenty of pomp and colour, presided over by straight-talking judges who could meticulously ferret the dirt out of a conscience, post mortem. In the opinion of the philosopher of Villa Crespo, the soul of Juan Robles had been brought by jackal-headed Anubis to the ineluctable scale of merit- and demerit-points
; the deceased’s heart would now be sitting on one side of the balance, while on the other side weighed the severe feather of the Law. What was Thot doing as he stood beside the weighing machine? Inclining his graceful ibis head, Thot was etching the exact weight of that heart on a little tablet.
Unfortunately, Schultz had never been able to stomach the sort of zoomorphic divinities his lugubrious interlocutor was referring to. To his mind, turning Thot into a dull bookkeeper was an act of lèse-majesté against the immortal gods, and weighing up the raw meat of Juan Robles’s heart was a gross display of butchery. In reality, his lugubrious interlocutor, being a Semite, tended more toward the ethical sense of things than to their metaphysical and profound meaning, because of racial influences causing him to see in every god a grotesque policeman.
– What about the Hebrew Kabbala? Samuel said acridly in refutation.
– That’s another kettle of fish, Schultz retorted.
Adam Buenosayres listened in silence to the polemic between his friends. In his mind the funereal scene, despite its garish reality, only prolonged the phantasmagorical series initiated that night by the group in their crossing of Saavedra. But Adam was sobering up now, the dense fumes of drunkenness breaking up enough that he could notice how profanatory was the tone of the argument between Samuel Tesler and the astrologer, standing as they were next to the black box, shaped like a ship, in which Juan Robles was sailing away. And furthermore, how striking was the absence of the soul in that vanquished body! Adam examined it where it lay: already the facial lineaments were sharpening, like the edges of a chunk of rock, the skin becoming clay-like, slick and opaque; a cold, earthy clamminess and a mineral silence seemed to waft up from that recently abandoned machine. Not ten hours ago had Juan Robles given up the ghost, and his body was already a mere clump of mud crumbling back into the earth it was made from, true to her plastic laws. “The soul’s instrument,” he thought. “It’s served its purpose and now the artisan throws it away before departing – a worn-out tool, all chipped and battered, spotted with bits of the earthy stuff it touched and worked throughout its days.” Adam looked again at the dead man’s face, tanned and hardened by the sun and the elements, then at the calloused hands, especially the fingernails – there were still traces of brick-making mud under them. An infinite pity invaded him; he felt the misery of that man as his own, and as everyone else’s too. And the soul? Samuel Tesler and the astrologer Schultz (two literary types, after all) insisted on dragging Juan Robles’s soul through every infernal twist and turn imaginable. But Adam trembled as he reflected on the fearful judgment awaiting the creature before his Creator. Through the alcoholic fog still clouding his awareness, he heard once again the admonitory drums beat within him, the eloquent resonance-chambers of his penitential night. “Not yet!” he cried within. “Don’t give in!” In spite of himself, he had raised his eyes to the bronze Crucifix, then looked away quickly. (Yes, a fish squirming on the hook, a fish no longer in the water nor yet in the hand of the fisherman.)
Just then, María Justa Robles entered, bearing coffee and little glasses of anisette on a tray held in both hands. Circumspect in her grief, María Justa went up to the three men who stood in vigil and silently offered them the tray.
– No, thank you, Schultz refused ceremoniously.
– Where are our friends? asked Adam.
– In the kitchen, she replied.
The three made polite gestures and went out to the yard, not without dedicating a final look at the deceased Juan Robles, wishing him god-speed. Then María Justa turned to the Three Crones lurking in their dark corner.
– Coffee? Anisette?
– Thank you, m’dear, murmured Doña Carmen, taking a cup from the tray.
– Ladies? María Justa invited Doña Consuelo and Doña Martina, who were hesitating.
– You’ve gone to so much trouble! whispered Doña Martina.
– You shouldn’t have! sighed Doña Consuelo.
Finally the two old women each took a cup of coffee. María Justa then approached the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law, who looked as if they were dozing, and offered them the tray. Three hands suddenly emerged rampant from amid the swaddling dark cloth, three hands or three claws that quickly snatched glasses of anisette and withdrew with their prey, sinking back down into the somber chaos of their shawls. María Justa, careful in her grief, put aside the load of drinks, picked up a pair of scissors, and went from one bronze candlestick to the next, trimming the curled wicks. One by one the flames shot up and chased the skittish shadows back into the four corners of the room. The Necrophile Sisters-in-Law, offended by the sudden excess of light, fled backward, like the shadows, and hid their faces in their shawls of mourning. At the same time the Crones’ faces were lit up: three faces amazingly unanimous in their expression of fateful tranquility. Then María Justa walked to the head of the coffin and contemplated the deceased for a long time. A single tear left her eye and rolled down her cheek. Then she picked up the tray and left the room, minimal and silent as ever.
The Three Crones, who hadn’t taken their eyes off María Justa for a second, turned and looked at one another.
– Poor thing! Doña Consuelo lamented softly.
– So humble, isn’t she just? whispered Doña Martina. Ever so thoughtful in her sorrow!
At this, Doña Carmen stopped blowing on her coffee and frowned.
– A pearl in the pigsty, like the saying goes, she said in a low growl. She’s one in a million! Carries the cross for the whole family. And what a family! Don’t deserve her, they don’t. Lord knows they ain’t worth her little finger!
Doña Martina and Doña Consuelo, curious, pricked up their ears. But Doña Carmen said nothing more and eyed the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law suspiciously.
– Did you see her just now? insisted Doña Martina. On the verge of tears, but she held back.
– She shouldn’t have, opined Doña Consuelo. Better to let go and get it off her chest.
Doña Carmen’s lips smiled sadly.
– She can’t, she observed. Just like her mother in every way, my dear departed comadre, God have mercy on her soul! I wore myself out trying to convince her, “Cry, m’love, it’ll do you good.” But, no, she wouldn’t shed so much as a tear. The parade went by inside, you might say.
– Yes, yes, purred Doña Martina. I’ve heard talk.
– She took it all to the grave with her! Doña Carmen concluded. Anyway, she’s better off than us now.
But Doña Consuelo was dying of curiosity.
– Bad life? she asked a in low voice.
– A dog’s life, muttered doña Carmen. If these four walls could talk!
– I’ve heard talk, Doña Martina purred again.
Then Doña Carmen, her tongue itching so badly she could stand it no longer, leaned toward her two neighbours and whispered something. It must have been something incredible, for Doña Consuelo’s mouth fell open, as if she couldn’t believe her ears.
– Him? she exclaimed finally, looking askance at the coffin.
– May God forgive him! affirmed Doña Carmen. He wasn’t what you’d call a nasty lot. But when a man’s on a bender . . .
– And with the same whip? Doña Consuelo asked, still dumbfounded.
– The very one he used on the mares, grumbled Doña Carmen. I seen ’m with these very eyes that’ll return to dust one day! And there was no talking to him, ’cause when he was in his cups, he was a holy terror and wouldn’t have listened to Christ on the cross.
– An outrage! sighed Doña Martina, clapping her eyes on Juan Robles’s casket.
Doña Carmen followed her gaze.
– Like I said, she went on, he wasn’t bad at heart. You should’ve seen him the next day when he sobered up. Eyes downcast, like the man was carrying a burden of remorse. Circling around his wife, wanting to say something but not knowing what. So he’d bring her a little something – a length of cloth, a pound of chocolate, some guayaba sweet. But she got away o
n him anyway! We held her wake in this very room.
– Very long ago? asked Doña Consuelo.
– Let’s see. Wait, now. María Justa would’ve been ten, if memory serves. Now she’s twenty-eight. Figure it out.
– Eighteen years ago, Doña Martina calculated.
– That’s right, Doña Carmen assented. I can still see her! Just before she died, she made me swear by the Virgin of Candlemas I’d take care of her kids, especially María Justa, my godchild. The neighbours can tell you whether I did my duty.
– Oh, Doña Carmen! the other two women protested in unison. Everyone in the neighbourhood agrees. You’ve been like a mother to María Justa.
– Yes, yes, Doña Carmen admitted, finishing off the cold dregs of her coffee. But what about the others?
Doña Consuelo and Doña Martina didn’t know what to say.
– Bad eggs, grumbled Doña Carmen. Ever since they were kids. Just think about it: their father out at the bars, drowning his sorrows in cane liquor or whatever, and the little brats bumming around in the streets all the blessèd day long. Forget about discipline! Pointless. They just laughed in my face!
– Hmm! commented Doña Martina and Doña Consuelo.
– With Juan José, it doesn’t matter, insisted Doña Carmen. After all, he’s a man, and it’s up to him look out for himself. But the little ladies . . . Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have taken it upon myself and paddled their bums with my slipper till they were red as tomatoes.
– Hmm! Doña Martina and Doña Consuelo intoned again, noncommital.
– But who was I? Doña Carmen argued. A Johnny-come-lately, like they say. And bein’ as the mother wasn’t there for them . . .
– Motherhood! Doña Martina and Doña Consuelo sighed in chorus.
Lost in memory, Doña Carmen muttered some unintelligible complaint.
– That’s how they turned out, she said at last. A real lot of gems! Phff! Juan José, he likes work, so long as it’s someone else doing it. Fritters away his day drinking mate. And at night, who know what he’s up to! Because he’s never short of shekels; they say he gambles, or worse. Márgara, she’s hopeless, a high-steeric, what with her fits and her endless aches and pains. And the Other One, the Other One!
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 26