All this went on until that summer day of 1852 when Rosas fled the country. It was only then that the secret man came out into the light of day; my grandfather spoke with him. Flabby, overweight, Salvadores was the color of wax and could not speak above a low voice. He never got back his confiscated lands; I think he died in poverty.
As with so many things, the fate of Pedro Salvadores strikes us as a symbol of something we are about to understand, but never quite do.
Rosendo’s Tale
It was about eleven o’clock at night; I had entered the old grocery store-bar (which today is just a plain bar) at the corner of Bolívar and Venezuela. From off on one side a man signaled me with a “psst.” There must have been something forceful in his manner because I heeded him at once. He was seated at one of the small tables in front of an empty glass, and I somehow felt he had been sitting there for a long time. Neither short nor tall, he had the appearance of a common working man or maybe an old farmhand. His thin moustache was graying. Fearful of his health, like most people in Buenos Aires, he had not taken off the scarf that draped his shoulders. He asked me to have a drink with him. I sat down and we chatted. All this took place sometime back in the early thirties. This is what the man told me.
You don’t know me except maybe by reputation, but I know who you are. I’m Rosendo Juárez. The late Paredes must have told you about me. The old man could pull the wool over people’s eyes and liked to stretch a point—not to cheat anybody, mind you, but just in fun. Well, seeing you and I have nothing better to do, I’m going to tell you exactly what happened that night. The night the Butcher got killed. You put all that down in a storybook, which I’m not equipped to pass judgment on, but I want you to know the truth about all that trumped-up stuff.
Things happen to you and it’s only years later you begin understanding them. What happened to me that night really had its start a long time back. I grew up in the neighborhood of the Maldonado, way out past Floresta. The Maldonado was just a ditch then, a kind of sewer, and it’s a good thing they’ve covered it over now. I’ve always been of the opinion that the march of progress can’t be held back—not by anybody. Anyway, a man’s born where he’s born. It never entered my head to find out who my father was. Clementina Juárez—that was my mother—was a decent woman who earned a living doing laundry. As far as I know, she was from Entre Ríos or Uruguay; anyhow, she always talked about her relatives from Concepción del Uruguay. I grew up like a weed. I first learned to handle a knife the way everyone else did, fencing with a charred stick. If you jabbed your man, it left a mark. Soccer hadn’t taken us over yet—it was still in the hands of the English.
One night at the corner bar a young guy named Garmendia began taunting me, trying to pick a fight. I played deaf, but this other guy, who’d had a few, kept it up. We stepped out. Then from the sidewalk he swung open the door and said back inside to the people, “Don’t anybody worry, I’ll be right back.”
I somehow got hold of a knife. We went off toward the brook, slow, our eyes on each other, He had a few years on me. We’d played at that fencing game a number of times together, and I had the feeling he was going to cut me up in ribbons. I went down the right-hand side of the road and he went down the left. He stumbled on some dry clods of mud. That moment was all I needed. I got the jump on him, almost without thinking, and opened a slice in his face. We got locked in a clinch, there was a minute when anything might have happened, and in the end I got my knife in and it was all over. Only later on did I find out I’d been cut up, too. But only a few scratches. That night I saw how easy it was to kill a man or to get killed. The water in the brook was pretty low; stalling for time, I half hid him behind one of the brick kilns. Fool that I was, I went and slipped off that fancy ring of his that he always wore with the nice stone in it. I put it on, I straightened my hat, and I went back to the bar. I walked in nonchalant, saying to them, “Looks like the one who came back was me.”
I asked for a shot of rum and, to tell the truth, I needed it bad. It was then somebody noticed the blood on my sleeve.
I spent that whole night tossing and turning on my cot, and it was almost light outside before I dropped off and slept. Late the next day two cops came looking for me. My mother (may she rest in peace) began shrieking. They herded me along just like I was some kind of criminal. Two nights and two days I had to wait there in the cooler. Nobody came to see me, either, outside of Luis Irala—a real friend—only they wouldn’t let him in. Then the third morning the police captain sent for me. He sat there in his chair, not even looking at me, and said, “So you’re the one who took care of Garmendia, are you?”
“If that’s what you say,” I answered.
“You call me sir. And don’t get funny or try beating around the bush. Here are the sworn statements of witnesses and the ring that was found in your house. Just sign this confession and get it over with.”
He dipped the pen in the inkwell and handed it to me.
“Let me do some thinking, Captain sir,” I came out with.
“I’ll give you twenty-four hours where you can do some hard thinking—in the cooler. I’m not going to rush you. If you don’t care to see reason, you can get used to the idea of a little vacation up on Las Heras—the penitentiary.”
As you can probably imagine, I didn’t understand.
“Look,” he said, “if you come around, all you’ll get is a few days. Then I’ll let you go, and don Nicolás Paredes has already given me his word he’ll straighten things out for you.”
Actually, it was ten days. Then at last they remembered me. I signed what they wanted, and one of the two cops took me around to Paredes’ house on Cabrera Street.
Horses were tied to the hitching post, and in the entranceway and inside the place there were more people than around a whorehouse. It looked to me like the party headquarters. Don Nicolás, who was sipping his maté, finally got around to me. Taking his good time, he told me he was sending me out to Morón, where they were getting ready for the elections. He was putting me in touch with Mr. Laferrer, who would try me out. He had the letter written by some kid all dressed in black, who, from what I heard, made up poems about tenements and filth—stuff that no refined public would dream of reading. I thanked Paredes for the favor and left. When I got to the corner, the cop wasn’t tailing me any more.
Providence knows what it’s up to; everything had turned out for the best. Garmendia’s death, which at first had caused me a lot of worry, now opened things up for me. Of course, the law had me in the palm of their hands. If I was no use to the party they’d clap me back inside, but I felt pretty good and was counting on myself.
Mr. Laferrer warned me I was going to have to walk the straight and narrow with him, and said if I did I might even become his bodyguard. I came through with what was expected of me. In Morón, and later on in my part of town, I earned the trust of my bosses. The cops and the party kept on building up my reputation as a tough guy. I turned out to be pretty good at organizing the vote around the polls here in the capital and out in the province. I won’t take up your time going into details about brawls and bloodletting, but let me tell you, in those days elections were lively affairs. I could never stand the Radicals, who down to this day are still hanging onto the beard of their chief Alem. There wasn’t a soul around who didn’t hold me in respect. I got hold of a woman, La Lujanera, and a fine-looking sorrel. For years I tried to live up to the part of the outlaw Moreira, who, in his time—the way I figure it—was probably trying to play the part of some other gaucho outlaw. I took to cards and absinthe.
An old man has a way of rambling on and on, but now I’m coming to the part I want you to hear. I wonder if I’ve already mentioned Luis Irala. The kind of friend you don’t find every day. Irala was a man already well along in years. He never was afraid of work, and he took a liking to me. In his whole life he never had anything to do with politics. He was a carpenter by trade. He never caused anyone trouble and never allowed
anyone to cause him trouble. One morning he came to see me and he said, “Of course, you’ve heard by now that Casilda’s left me. Rufino Aguilera took her away from me.”
I’d known that customer around Morón. I answered, “Yes, I know all about him. Of all the Aguileras, he’s the least rotten.”
“Rotten or not, now he’ll have to reckon with me.”
I thought that over for a while and told him, “Nobody takes anything away from anybody. If Casilda left you, it’s because she cares for Rufino and you mean nothing to her.”
“And what are people going to say? That I’m a coward?”
“My advice is don’t get yourself mixed up in gossip about what people might say or about a woman who has no use for you.”
“It’s not her I’m worried about. A man who thinks five minutes straight about a woman is no man, he’s a queer. Casilda has no heart. The last night we spent together she told me I wasn’t as young as I used to be.”
“Maybe she was telling you the truth.”
“That’s what hurts. What matters to me now is Rufino.”
“Be careful there. I’ve seen Rufino in action around the polls in Merlo. He’s a flash with a knife.”
“You think I’m afraid of him?”
“I know you’re not afraid of him, but think it over. One of two things—if you kill him, you get put away; if he kills you, you go six feet under.”
“Maybe so. What would you do in my shoes?”
“I don’t know, but my own life isn’t exactly a model. I’m only a guy who became a party strong-arm man trying to cheat a jail sentence.”
“I’m not going to the strong-arm guy for any party, I’m only out to settle a debt.”
“So you’re going to risk your peace and quiet for a man you don’t know and a woman you don’t love any more?”
He wouldn’t hear me out. He just left. The next day the news came that he challenged Rufino in a saloon in Morón, and Rufino killed him. He was out to kill, and he got killed—but a fair fight, man to man. I’d given him my honest advice as a friend, but somehow I felt guilty just the same.
A few days after the wake, I went to a cockfight. I’d never been very big on cockfights, and that Sunday, to tell the truth, I had all I could do to stomach the thing. What is it in these animals, I kept thinking, that makes them gouge each other’s eyes like that?
The night of my story, the night of the end of my story, I had told the boys I’d show up at Blackie’s for the dance. So many years ago now, and that dress with the flowers my woman was wearing still comes back to me. The party was out in the backyard. Of course, there was the usual drunk or two trying to raise hell, but I took good care to see that things went off the way they ought to. It wasn’t twelve yet when these strangers put in an appearance. One of them— the one they called the Butcher and who got himself stabbed in the back that same night—stood us all to a round of drinks. The odd thing was that the two of us looked a lot alike. Something was in the air; he drew up to me and began praising me up and down. He said he was from the Northside, where he’d heard a thing or two about me. I let him go on, but I was already sizing him up. He wasn’t letting the gin alone, either, maybe to work up his courage, and finally he came out and asked me to fight. Then something happened that nobody ever understood. In that big loudmouth I saw myself, the same as in a mirror, and it made me feel ashamed. I wasn’t scared; maybe if I’d been scared I’d have fought with him. I just stood there as if nothing happened. This other guy, with his face just inches away from mine, began shouting so everyone could hear, “The trouble is you’re nothing but a coward.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “I’m not afraid of being taken for a coward. If it makes you feel good, why don’t you say you’ve called me a son of a bitch, too, and that I’ve let you spit all over me. Now—are you any happier?”
La Lujanera took out the knife I always carried in my vest lining and, burning up inside, she shoved it into my hand. To clinch it, she said, “Rosendo, I think you’re going to need this.”
I let it drop and walked out, but not hurrying. The boys made way for me. They were stunned. What did it matter to me what they thought.
To make a clean break with that life, I took off for Uruguay, where I found myself work as a teamster. Since coming back to Buenos Aires I’ve settled around here. San Telmo always was a respectable neighborhood.
An Auto-
Biographical
Essay
With Norman Thomas
di Giovanni
An Auto-
Biographical
Essay
Family and Childhood
I cannot tell whether my first memories go back to the eastern or to the western bank of the muddy, slow-moving Río de la Plata—to Montevideo, where we spent long, lazy holidays in the villa of my uncle Francisco Haedo, or to Buenos Aires. I was born there, in the very heart of that city, in 1899, on Tucumán Street, between Suipacha and Esmeralda, in a small, unassuming house belonging to my maternal grandparents. Like most of the houses of that day, it had a flat roof; a long, arched entranceway, called a zaguán; a cistern, where we got our water; and two patios. We must have moved out to the suburb of Palermo quite soon, because there I have my first memories of another house with two patios, a garden with a tall windmill pump, and, on the other side of the garden, an empty lot. Palermo at that time—the Palermo where we lived, Serrano and Guatemala—was on the shabby northern outskirts of town, and many people, ashamed of saying they lived there, spoke in a dim way of living on the Northside. We lived in one of the few two-story homes on our street; the rest of the neighborhood was made up of low houses and vacant lots. I have often spoken of this area as a slum, but I do not quite mean that in the American sense of the word. In Palermo lived shabby, genteel people as well as more undesirable sorts. There was also a Palermo of hoodlums, called compadritos, famed for their knife fights, but this Palermo was only later to capture my imagination, since we did our best—our successful best—to ignore it. Unlike our neighbor Evaristo Carriego, however, who was the first Argentine poet to explore the literary possibilities that lay there at hand. As for myself, I was hardly aware of the existence of compadritos, since I lived essentially indoors.
My father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, worked as a lawyer. He was a philosophical anarchist—a disciple of Spencer— and also a teacher of psychology at the Normal School for Modern Languages, where he gave his course in English, using as his text William James’s shorter book of psychology. My father’s English came from the fact that his mother, Frances Haslam, was born in Staffordshire of Northumbrian stock. A rather unlikely set of circumstances brought her to South America. Fanny Haslam’s elder sister married an Italian-Jewish engineer named Jorge Suárez, who brought the first horse-drawn tramcars to Argentina, where he and his wife settled and sent for Fanny. I remember an anecdote concerning this venture. Suárez was a guest at General Urquiza’s “palace” in Entre Ríos, and very improvidently won his first game of cards with the General, who was the stern dictator of that province and not above throat-cutting. When the game was over, Suárez was told by alarmed fellow-guests that if he wanted the license to run his tramcars in the province, it was expected of him to lose a certain amount of gold coins each night. Urquiza was such a poor player that Suárez had a great deal of trouble losing the appointed sums.
It was in Paraná, the capital city of Entre Ríos, that Fanny Haslam met Colonel Francisco Borges. This was in 1870 or 1871, during the siege of the city by the montoneros, or gaucho militia, of Ricardo López Jordán. Borges, riding at the head of his regiment, commanded the troops defending the city. Fanny Haslam saw him from the flat roof of her house; that very night a ball was given to celebrate the arrival of the government relief forces. Fanny and the Colonel met, danced, fell in love, and eventually married.
My father was the younger of two sons. He had been born in Entre Ríos and used to explain to my grandmother, a respectable English
lady, that he wasn’t really an Entrerriano, since “I was begotten on the pampa.” My grandmother would say, with English reserve, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” My father’s words, of course, were true, since my grandfather was, in the early 1870’s, Commander-in-Chief of the northern and western frontiers of the Province of Buenos Aires. As a child, I heard many stories from Fanny Haslam about frontier life in those days. One of these I set down in my “Story of the Warrior and the Captive.” My grandmother had spoken with a number of Indian chieftains, whose rather uncouth names were, I think, Simón Coliqueo, Catriel, Pincén, and Namuncurá. In 1874, during one of our civil wars, my grandfather, Colonel Borges, met his death. He was forty-one at the time. In the complicated circumstances surrounding his defeat at the battle of La Verde, he rode out slowly on horseback, wearing a white poncho and followed by ten or twelve of his men, toward the enemy lines, where he was struck by two Remington bullets. This was the first time Remington rifles were used in the Argentine, and it tickles my fancy to think that the firm that shaves me every morning bears the same name as the one that killed my grandfather.
Fanny Haslam was a great reader. When she was over eighty, people used to say, in order to be nice to her, that nowadays there were no writers who could vie with Dickens and Thackeray. My grandmother would answer, “On the whole, I rather prefer Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells.” When she died, at the age of ninety, in 1935, she called us to her side and said, in English (her Spanish was fluent but poor), in her thin voice, “I am only an old woman dying very, very slowly. There is nothing remarkable or interesting about this.” She could see no reason whatever why the whole household should be upset, and she apologized for taking so long to die.
Collected Stories Page 13