The St Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires

by Eric Stener Carlson

  On second thought, maybe it wasn’t a river after all but a misshapen trident . . . A trident! That got me thinking of Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita in which he’d described how Perón’s enemies had used sorcery to bury Evita’s embalmed body (and several wax copies) throughout Buenos Aires. They’d taken a trident and placed it on a map of the city, trying to find the magic points of power, where the bodies could be hidden from Evita’s followers forever.

  With trembling fingers, I took out a sheet of onion paper and carefully traced the image of the trident. Then I pulled out a map of Buenos Aires, and I began to place the trident here and there, trying to see if the points would align and I could discover some secret hiding places. (Perhaps the locations of more copies of Lives of the Saints!)

  But, after an hour or so, I couldn’t find any pattern. I tried all the maps I had—maps of the sewers of Buenos Aires, maps of its cafés, maps of places described by Borges in his stories. In one last act of desperation, I took out an old tourist map of the subways . . . That was it!

  With the onion paper hovering on top of the old subway map, I saw the pattern for the first time! The three, parallel ‘rivers’ coincided almost exactly with the ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘D’ lines of the subway, and the fourth ‘river’ at their confluence, right around where the obelisk stands, was the ‘C’ line. Looking closer, I saw that the faint notch seemed to fall right at Bulnes station.

  My heart beat quickly, as I felt a wave of vindication flow through me. I had come across something important after all!

  But how was this possible? This map predated the subway by at least a century, maybe more. Its ancient lines were drawn long before the tunnels were excavated, long before the tracks were laid at Bulnes.

  What other explanation could there be but that Time was not a constant, that it could mix together, flow one way or the other?

  I made some annotations in my notebook, and then I carefully rolled up the map and hid it with the rest of the documents I’d collected in my search for Saint Perpetuus. Uneasy about going into the bedroom without Julieta there, I decided to sleep on the living room sofa. As I lay there in the darkness, I decided I needed to seek professional help.

  CHAPTER SIX

  As I dragged my heels up the huge, cement ramp of the National Library, I felt like a Roman conscript being forced up Massada. I wondered if those legionnaires two thousand years ago had felt as much dread as I did going up to meet Professor Pendleton that afternoon.

  This had to be the most worthless, badly-constructed, ugliest building in all of Buenos Aires. Its silhouette of bulbous windows, bizarre projections of cement and heavy, unyielding doors was like a tumour on the face of the city.

  For the longest time, this cement mausoleum didn’t even have any books, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a National Library. They’d closed down a number of collections overflowing from the Library of Congress, packed them up in boxes and left them rotting in some cellar, awaiting a shipping order to the new library that—for some inexplicable reason—was delayed for years.

  Of course, this didn’t stop the Library Organising Committee, in the mean time, from putting in a nice little café downstairs with a sunbathing garden and erecting life-size statues of Pope John Paul and Jorge Luis Borges on the beautifully-manicured lawns. But, as for books, there weren’t any.

  But my disgust with the library that day was matched only by my self-loathing. My relationship with Julieta was going from bad to worse to open warfare, and it was all my fault.

  When I was still working on my doctorate, even in the worst of times—when I felt trapped at work or penned in at home—I had a dream that kept me going. I’d finish my dissertation, become a professor, and then I’d spend more time with Julieta and my son.

  Now that I’d let my dissertation slide, that dream had fallen apart. On this particular Sunday, I was going to meet my old dissertation committee Chair, Professor Amadeus Alcibiades Pendleton. Going to see him again only underlined the fact that everything I’d worked so hard for had come crashing down about my ears. Even more than Julieta’s outbursts of rage, I dreaded Dr Pendleton’s quiet looks of disappointment. For he had believed in me, and, what’s worse, he still did.

  Good old Professor Pendleton was one of those classic Anglo-Argentines, most of whom faded away when India had had the audacity to sever itself from the Empire. His mother had been a concert pianist at the Royal Conservatory, with a weakness for composers with acute character flaws—thus, naming him Amadeus. His father had been a leading Classicist from Cambridge, with a penchant for the rotten eggs of Ancient Greece—hence, naming him Alcibiades.

  After an illustrious career, he had retired (at least four times), but the University of Buenos Aires kept calling him back to give classes ad honorum, as none of the newly-minted professors could match his encyclopædic knowledge . . . or his dry wit. And now that books were finally installed in the National Library, this was where Professor Pendleton had also installed himself . . . permanently. For the past decade, he had been ensconced in the hemeroteca—the hermetically-sealed, special collections section in the basement—and anyone who was looking for him had to go down into its depths to find him there.

  I passed by the guard on the ground floor, blind and silent as the ferryman in front of the river Styx. I didn’t bother trying the elevators—which were permanently broken—and I shuffled down the bunker-like stairs to the hemeroteca. As I shouldered open the huge, double-paned glass door, there was a ‘whoosh’ as air from the outside suddenly rushed into the room, like breaking the seal of an ancient tomb.

  At one of the rectangular, wooden tables spread throughout the room, a group of college students was frantically scribbling notes out of old, bound copies of La Nación. At another, a teenaged boy was trying to feel up his girlfriend from under the table and trying his best not to get noticed by means of strategically-placed sweaters and notebooks. As I walked by, the girl quickly brushed her hair over her eyes, her face turning bright pink. It reminded me of Julieta back in the good old days, but she was never embarrassed by anything we did together, or regretful . . . two things I seemed to be more and more of lately.

  Finally, at the back of the room, in the farthest reaches of the hemeroteca, where the flickering fluorescent lighting barely reached, Professor Pendleton was sitting behind an enormous stack of manuscripts. Because of his pre-eminence—and his longevity—the librarians had agreed to let him break the rules. They’d pushed four of the tables together and let him request several documents at a time before returning them. As a result, he sat amongst a pile of books, monographs and newspapers leaning this way and that.

  Without looking up from the thick book he was finishing, he half-whispered, ‘Ernesto Sabato once said, “I can imagine a world without trees, without sun, but not without books.” What are three things wrong with that statement?’

  I sat down, smiling, leaning my elbows on the table. ‘First . . . without trees, you can’t make any more books—except, perhaps, out of papyrus—so your ideas will be trapped in the past. Second . . . a world without sun would make life on this planet unviable, so there wouldn’t be anyone left to read them. And third . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ he said, snapping his book shut and peering at me through his thick glasses.

  ‘And third,’ I paused, ‘It was Borges who said that, not Sabato.’

  ‘Very good,’ he beamed, his face collapsing into asymmetric folds of skin and wisps of white hair everywhere. ‘First determine whether the question itself isn’t flawed before trying to answer it. Now I see why you’re my favourite student.’

  I looked at him uneasily and felt a horrible lump in my throat developing. Then I looked down, pretending to be interested in a first-hand report from the Boer War that lay on the desk and asked, ‘Professor Pendleton, doesn’t being a student necessitate studying? I mean, I seem to have given that up far too long ago. I’m so sor . . .’

  ‘Mr Ibañez,’ he said, authoritatively,
‘I hope you haven’t come here to apologise about the status of your dissertation. We’ve discussed that already. As you well know, life takes us in directions we never imagined. Besides . . .’ his voice took on a kinder tone, ‘you don’t need a sheep skin hanging on the wall to prove you’re a philosopher. Being a connoisseur of the Good is reflected in the choices you make in life, how many friends you’ve made (and kept), the impact you’ve made on the people around you, how few jealousies you’ve allowed to rattle about your head and let destroy your love life. By the way . . . you still have a love life, don’t you? I don’t need to know all the details, you know, but at this age I have to live vicariously through someone.’

  ‘Yes . . . just barely though. I’m screwing that up as well.’

  ‘Nothing exciting at work?’ he asked, hopefully.

  ‘There rarely is,’ I replied.

  He coughed a deep, phlegm-filled cough and leaned forward, ‘Then let’s get to why you’ve come to visit me, because, by Zeus, you’re starting to depress me. Any more details of your personal life, and you’ll be making me wish I’d agreed to have tea at my sister’s house, spending the afternoon discussing goitre, arthritis and the first three signs of dementia.’

  Once again, I began, ‘I’m sorr . . .’ but I stopped myself. ‘Look, it’s . . .’ I looked around, conspiratorially, but there was still only the group of college students scribbling away at the far table and the young couple who, by their movements, seemed to be unfastening something under the table. ‘It’s about the map I found . . . with the rivers.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you mentioned that on the phone. I’ve been able to gather some information on it. Actually, I’ve had half the library staff running around all day to meet my needs. (They seem to have an even more inflated impression of my own self-worth than I do.) But I didn’t want to let on to what I was looking for, so, in amongst the important pieces, I’ve been requesting materials on everything from the history of the steam engine to the origins of the postal system in Vatican City.’ He lifted a trembling hand towards me. ‘May I be so bold?’ he asked.

  Looking right and left, I pulled the map out of the folds of my shirt. (You would have thought we were spies from the Resistance, exchanging codes at some Vichy café.) He took it gently and unfolded it on an empty space amongst the piles. Then he took out a rectangular, oversized magnifying glass and examined it closely. For a while, all he mumbled was, ‘Yes, yes . . . oh, I see now . . .’

  After a few minutes of staring at that large eye blinking through the magnifying glass, streaked with red, the beginning signs of cataracts just now visible, I asked, ‘You see what, exactly?’

  Coming to himself, he said, ‘Yes, yes, well, that makes things clearer after all. Let’s see.’ He put down the map and the magnifying glass, and then, quite theatrically, he began to slowly put on, with a slight tremble, white, cotton gloves. In explanation, he smiled and said, ‘The ninnies at the front desk wouldn’t let me have it unless I promised to wear the gloves. Perspiration from the fingers, you know . . .’

  ‘Let you have what?’

  In response, he gingerly picked up what looked like a small, black Bible with a faint brush of gold along the pages. Now the look in Professor Pendleton’s eyes was different—sharp, young, masterful. He said, almost breathless with excitement, ‘This is the only surviving record of Fernando Luis don Bosco de Amado. He was a Jewish converso who served as Mendoza’s translator.’

  Pendleton saw the perplexed look on my face, and shook his head. ‘It’s no wonder you haven’t heard of him. His name has escaped all our history books, even Saban’s fine history of Argentine Jews. What I’ve found here,’ he tapped the book with one finger, ‘broadens Schmidl’s account, but I’ve often wondered about its authenticity.’ He paused and then stroked my map reflectively, ‘Until I saw your map.’

  Professor Pendleton continued, ‘Mendoza enlisted de Amado —his family name is a translation from the Arabic for ‘beloved’. You know what ignorant shits the conquistadores were . . . cutthroats, sodomites. And they had no idea what language the inhabitants of the Indies would speak, so they roped in de Amado, fluent in many of the Spanish dialects, Portuguese, Italian, German, English, Arabic, Latin, Greek, and, of course, Hebrew.’

  Professor Pendleton coughed deeply again, but in the grips of excitement, he waved it away. He said, almost breathlessly, ‘Now, this de Amado was an interesting character. He was a man of learning, a geologist, poet, diplomat. At the time of the Argentine conquest, his family had only recently converted to Christianity—after most of the de Amados were burned to death, along with other Jews for, ah-hem . . . having “caused” the Lisbon earthquake of 1531. Since his father’s spontaneous conversion—as he was being dragged to the bonfires—there always remained a doubt as to whether the de Amados were truly convinced of the Way, the Truth and the Light, or were judaizantes, maintaining the faith of Abraham in secret.

  ‘For this reason, on his trip to the Americas, de Amado was not allowed any reading material other than a Bible,’ he stroked the book again, ‘other than this very Bible I hold in my hand. Moreover, he was forbidden from writing any account of what transpired, for fear he would distort the facts and lead other cristianos nuevos astray. In spite of this, de Amado managed to keep a sparse chronicle of his journey, making notations in Greek between the lines of the New Testament on holy days. He told his illiterate companions they were prayers dedicated to the Virgin Mary for having allowed him to join in this glorious mission to the New World. These “prayers” are, actually, fragments of criticism, caustic references to the Spaniards’ debauchery, and, upon occasion, a tally of the number of tongues they cut from caciques’ heads along the way. On more than one occasion, the Bible must have been taken from him, as you can tell from the filthy fingerprints smudged along the pages, still smelling of pig grease and charcoal after more than 400 years. But they were ignorant of the language he wrote, so they let him be . . .’

  Professor Pendleton then delicately opened the Bible and turned the thin, fragile pages. ‘Here, come closer, Mr Ibañez. This is the entry he made on Corpus Cristi day, the same day Schmidl noted in his journal the killing of the horse thieves . . . although with some rather interesting details our good Bavarian omitted.’

  As I peered over my mentor’s shoulder, I felt that old excitement building when I used to assist him in his research, and he gave me a slow but thorough translation from the original Greek.

  The book has since disappeared from the National Library, and the only record I have of it is from the pencilled notations I quickly made that afternoon. I’ve reproduced them as faithfully as I could below:

  Now the Christians are turning on each other. Today, they killed Ramón Fernandez, trussed him up like a pig and garrotted him . . . His face became so pale. Whoring, common, stupid like the other two, but not deserving of this. All of this for a horse?

  But by the G_d who cannot be named, there were worse things today.

  After dark, I visited the bodies to pray for them, which is more they did for my family when they torched them on the hoguera.

  But a group of men had arrived before me. From the shadows, I saw them cutting strips of flesh from the corpses. I instinctively put my hand on my sword to put a stop to their defilement, but then I thought that killing had been the worse crime today, and they’d been absolved of it by Mendoza.

  Among these men was Discépolo Fernandez. He cut a long swath of skin from his dead brother’s back. Skilfully, like the women in Flanders do with bolts of cloth, he rolled up the skin, picking off and eating little bits of meat that still clung to it. He put this into a sack and climbed over the wall of the fort with the others.

  I followed them through the woods. They paused at a clearing where the moon shone through. There, another Christian whom I did not recognise, was waiting, keeping guard over an Indian they had staked—four limbs—to the ground.

  The Christians knelt around the man. I assumed tha
t, although motionless, the Indian was still alive, because Fernandez bent his ear to him. Soon, Fernandez took out his dagger, with which I assumed he was going to murder the man. Instead, he began to cut something—some markings into the piece of his brother’s skin. From time to time, he grabbed the Indian’s hair and held his head close to his ear. He paused now and then to show this design to the Indian who seemed to faintly nod or shake his head. They continued like this for several minutes.

  At some point—it was deadly cold—they passed the skin around and held it close to their faces. Apparently satisfied, Fernandez rolled it up and put it carefully in his satchel.

  Then the men did things to the Son of Nature I dare not write, things the crusaders did to women of the city of Constantinople when they lay siege to it. During the whole time, I heard no words, just the faint groans of the Indian and the panting of the Christians. Just before they slit his throat, the Indian screamed, ‘Sallah mancha’ three times, which I took to mean ‘God bless the stain’, although this had no meaning for me at the time.

  I hurried back to the fort, before I would be missed. As I did, I promised myself I would punish this abomination and swore I would not permit Fernandez to make the journey back to Spain alive.

  Praise be to the one, true G_d, who is Good and Just and Wise. . . .

  Here, the journal entry trailed off, and there was no further entry after that.

  Professor Pendleton closed the Bible and gently set it down. He took off his gloves and wiped his hands and lips with a large, red, wrinkled handkerchief. Then he said in a hushed, church-like tone, ‘As far as I know, Fernandez never returned to Spain. In fact, like de Amado, he’s not listed in any other surviving log. The only mention I’ve ever come across was in the review of a short story that was to have appeared in Manuel Mujica Lainez’s first edition of Mysterious Buenos Aires. It was called “Into that Other Wilderness”, and it drew comparisons between Moses’ killing of the Egyptian slave-driver with de Amado’s killing of Fernandez and his flight across the pampas with the map.’