He returned, afterward, to the town and resumed his routine work, but when Italy entered the war, in April or May of 1915, things rapidly became complicated. He lost contact with his wife, the letters did not arrive, the military censors registered all correspondence and, on top of that, worse still, he couldn’t send money to his wife; the money orders that he sent her would return rejected, the ties with Italy were severed.
My father and I had decided to save my grandfather’s archives. I was going to be in charge of organizing them, as my grandfather had left a bank account intended to provide me with a salary so that I could spend my time organizing his documents to eventually publish them and make them public. And so, on the very night of the wake in the Lasalle funeral home in Adrogué, at sunrise, only my father and I, unable to sleep, and half-intoxicated by the coffee we drank on and off and by the cigarettes we smoked one after another, decided not to sell the house and, if we rented it out, leased it, as my father said, to do the front only, leaving the rooms in the back, with the archive, free and available for the work of conserving my grandfather’s papers.
And there we were for hours afterward, my mother and I, sitting on the patio in the shadow under the vine, after my father had already gone and all the so-called mourners had retired as well, surely to celebrate because it was not they, this time, but my grandfather who had been called away. He, who would always say to his grandchildren and the kids in the family with a wicked smile, he said, surely no one will reveal the truth to you, how to live life intensely, because, my grandfather would say, they’re all dead, with permission, and he stressed the phrase with permission, and the children listened with a certain uncertain fear and without understanding all of the warning, perplexed, in front of that man, tall, clear-eyed, who said such strange things and spoke to them in a personal way, and of course none would forget that sentence, engraved into their minds like a riddle that they could only decipher with any clarity much later, once grown up and after having suffered sufficiently. My grandfather spoke like that, death and misfortune surrounding us. “Don’t forget that, kids,” he would say, without a trace of bitterness on his face; he spoke to us happily, like someone sharing good news. I remembered those things, said Renzi, and told them to my mother, because the day after the death of “a dear soul,” as they say, when the sun shines again and you feel pain from the loss and the hangover from the vigil night in your body, it is natural to speak of the person who is gone and remember him in order to keep him on this side, with anecdotes and sayings that, in a fragile way, keep him alive. And I remember how, when I dictated a version of the distant afternoon, remembering my grandfather, to my Mexican muse, María, the daughter of my colleague and friend Lucía, she started talking about a dog that the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of Mexico would bury with the dead so that the animal could guide them on their return to the land of the living. The dog was a Xoloitzcuintle, an extraordinary name, unpronounceable, a sacred dog, a sort of seeing-eye dog that guided spirits returning to life. And, as though I wanted some relief from the pain that overwhelmed me as I dictated the day after my grandfather’s death, in order to distract me, she quickly searched on the internet for an image of the guide dog, a bizarre animal, a mixture of cat and dog, similar to the Egyptian figures that you see on the pharaoh’s tombs. But, on that afternoon, my mother and I had no hope that my grandfather, so dear to us, would return, guided by some magical animal that would let him visit us and thus relieve us of the pain caused by his death. Maybe this was the reason that my mother, who was a narrator of great sensitivity, very attentive to conveying the emotions of the story she told, decided to create an anticlimax and bring me out of the sorrow caused by the death of my grandfather Emilio.
Afternoon was falling and they had lit the lights in the bar, even though outside, on the streets, the sun was still shining and a dying light burned in the city. Renzi paused, took a breath, and then resumed the story with new spirits. My father had already gone, had divorced my mother, so the two no longer spoke, avoided each other, as happens in such cases, when two people who have known each other intimately separate and try to forget. And so it was that my father left that day and my mother came to the family house and sat with me on the patio and revealed to me the secret that explained or, in any case, allowed a glimpse of the reason why my grandfather had fought in the Great War. He had another woman. Your grandfather sent his pregnant wife to Europe because he had a lover, had fallen in love with an upper-class criolla, the young daughter of a local rancher with whom he kept up a clandestine relationship for months. He could not get separated, did not want to get separated, and he imagined he could keep a lover, have two houses, two families, make a double life, as was fairly common out in the country at that time, but the girl, Matilde Aráoz, would not allow it, and, when she found out that your grandfather’s wife was pregnant, she summoned him; she was a determined woman and was not prepared to support the lies of your grandfather, who always promised her that he was going to get divorced, but, as is common in those cases, never did it. She did not want to see him, she swore at him; some people say that, one afternoon, when your grandfather came down the dirt road in his car, a shiny new Ford Model T, between the poplars, the girl, very calm and beautiful with her riding pants and tall boots, went as far as the cattle gate with a shotgun and told him that he could turn around because she was going to shoot him if he didn’t.
The afternoon was cool and my mother paused, amazed at the image of the girl walking toward the road and aiming a shotgun at him because she loves him and is not going to put up with new excuses or pretenses. She pushed him back from the other side of the gate and your grandfather turned around and went back home. It was then, my mother explained, on the route from the Aráoz ranch to the station near your grandfather Emilio’s town house, that he made the decision to send his wife to Europe. It is characteristic of the men in the family; they never make decisions, they don’t have the courage to do what they want to do, they try to keep all of their alternatives open, to put things off. Your grandfather was that way, and your father was the same, and you, too, Emilio, you’re the same way—indecisive, insecure, not in terms of what you think, but what you feel. You are all unable to let yourselves be led by the truest emotions. And so your grandfather thought that if he sent his wife to Italy he could continue the double position at the same time. Surely, he thought, I’ll see what happens to me with Matilde, and if that doesn’t work out, I can always bring back my wife, but if things are going well, I’ll leave her in Italy and let her relatives look after her. Like he could see it happening, my mother said. Driving the car, both hands clinging to the wheel, thinking about possible solutions and throwing away one after another until he discovered the possibility of deceiving both of them. Telling one that he had separated from his wife, who had already decided to return to Italy, and telling the other, with feeling and genuine expression, that his hope was for his first-born son to be born in the town of his birth, in Italy. A real idiot, like your father and like you, too, if you aren’t a little careful, Emilio.
My mother described the situation, and her condemnations and her invectives were given in the name of one of the story’s protagonists; she, Matilde, must surely have thought so, and my mother used free indirect discourse to speak with the voice of one of the characters in the story she told. She actually displaced herself that afternoon and suddenly went off and started recalling her brother Anselmo’s experience. A doctor, very well-liked, very sociable—he was at that time president of the social club where the town’s elite met; not just anyone could go there, and he was the president, the most prominent and visible figure in the place. But he quickly started to become reclusive, did not make himself visible, neglected his practice, stopped going to the hospital and attending the family’s social meetings and started talking to himself, murmuring that he was sick, that he had something wrong with his skin. My mother returned that afternoon to tell the story of the man who had retired, had guarded himsel
f because he thought he had some affliction on the skin of his face, which had turned him into a monster. The first sign of his illness or disease was that all of the mirrors, and even any surface that could reflect a face, vanished from the family house. In this way, all vestiges of the personal image that might have been found in the place were taken out, covered, or erased. I knew the story because my mother had told it to me already and I knew my uncle well; he always visited when he came to town for the summers, and he took me to the lake many times to swim. I loved him, and so one afternoon, a Sunday, I insisted on visiting him and went to the house and there he was, shut off, as they say, in one of the interior bedrooms, actually a whole wing of the residence; only my uncle’s trusted nurse could enter, serving as a link to reality, a kind of secretary, shall we say, who spoke in his name, attended to his matters, and sometimes, after consulting with my uncle, prescribed some medication for the nurses who insisted on still dealing with El Doctor, as they called him. The truth is that I went to see him one afternoon; I was fifteen and wanted to see him, and he received me. In fact, I was received by the nurse, a short man, thin and swarthy, with an Indian face, dressed in a white smock. He was called Estévez and had the name on a little plaque on the chest pocket of his nurse’s uniform. We crossed one room and then another and passed through a greenhouse and ended up at my uncle’s bedroom. A vast room, with large picture windows and high ceilings. My uncle was facing away, looking out at the patio, and when he turned around I saw that he concealed himself with a white cloth that completely covered his face. He held it up in front of himself with both hands. We had a trivial conversation, and he spoke to me in his usual jovial tone but never referred or alluded to the fact that he held up a white cloth in front of him with both hands, concealing his face. And so it was a rather strange conversation, because his voice came from behind a kind of private curtain that he held a certain distance from his face so as not to be seen by anyone. I was slightly inhibited by the sensation of speaking to a phantom or to a death mask, softly trembling with the afternoon breeze or the slight shaking of my uncle’s arms, already tired from holding up the cloth. As I left, Estévez, the nurse and secretary, told me, confidentially, that my uncle was taking a period of rest in his personal chambers.
In this way, when my mother told me the story, I was up to date on the matter and knew that a year or a year and a half later, my uncle, El Doctor, returned to his normal life, the sickness he imagined having passed, because, as my mother clarified in concluding the story, Anselmo’s face had no mark or symptom or disturbance that could have justified his refuge. He was perfectly well, my mother said that afternoon, but he felt that his face had transformed into a swollen and formless mass. He thought that, my mother said, or rather, she added, he believed that, and when someone believes something, it’s difficult to change their opinion; my mother neither judged nor explained my uncle’s behavior, only recounted the events, but that afternoon, on the patio under the vine, she told me his story as a way of speaking tangentially, changing the subject, which is what my grandfather Emilio must have done as a result of the pain he had caused two women and the changes he had suffered in his life by enlisting as a volunteer in the Italian Army and going to war, the fault of a history of poorly resolved love. As soon as he reached Italy at the end of 1915, my grandfather was sent to the front and could not get permission to see his family and meet his son, meaning my father, and he was in the Army until 1919, when the war ended, and he spent months in a military hospital, making reports about the soldiers affected by the trauma of war. Terrified men who ran to hide under the hospital furniture whenever they heard a loud noise or, sometimes, in some cases, not even that much—their own thoughts were enough to make them think they were back in the trenches, under constant bombardment, and they would set off running and throw themselves under a table with their hands over their ears and a heartbreaking groan on their lips.
A man goes to war for personal reasons, and he sets off on an epic for sentimental reasons. It is an extraordinary story. It sounded like the life of a romantic hero who achieves impossible feats and fights, over the course of years, for private and sentimental reasons. A new type of hero, the interior man, the impassioned and sentimental man who faces battle and is wounded by a bullet and returns to combat for the love of a woman. Of course, he concluded, we will never know whether that passionate feat was dedicated to his wife—that is to say, my grandmother Rosa—or was done as a tribute to or atonement for his Argentine lover, the beautiful Matilde Aráoz.
Renzi was silent, went a while without speaking, looking at the night now fallen over the city, and then he smiled. An extraordinary story, isn’t it, he said. A man who goes to war for emotional reasons. He turned silent again and then called a waiter, paid the bill, and we went out to the street. It was cool outside; the heat had left a trace, like a mist persisting on the walls, but the night air was agreeable and light. I transcribe my diaries without following any chronological order; that would be terrible, and very boring, he said. I travel through time, picking up the notebooks by chance, and sometimes I’ll be reading my life in 1964, and a short while later, I’m suddenly in the year 2000.
We went down Riobamba toward Santa Fe, and Renzi went on describing the experience of dictating his notebooks to an assistant, who copied them down as he read them. He could not write them all again—it would be impossible, there are pages and pages—but reading them aloud to a girl is something else; it felt like we were spying on the life of a stranger moving in circles through the city, or rather, moving back and forth, from one side to the other, lost in the life. We paused before crossing Santa Fe, waiting for the traffic light to change, and then Renzi spoke again to say that he would like to have a coffee at Filippo, on the corner of Callao. And once more he utilized that pause, standing at the counter of the bar, to put an epilogue on the story he had told that afternoon.
His mother, a couple years after his grandfather’s death, wrote in a letter to Emilio about Matilde, the young woman his grandfather had loved and for whom, in a sense, he had gone to war. It was the criolla girl, in short, who troubled him and forced him to make the decision, at once heroic and foolish, to go to a war, one that would completely turn his head; he would return delirious, half-insane, obsessed with the experience of being the messenger who gave a family the letter announcing the death of a son, a brother, or a husband who had died on the front. He had to write these letters by hand, with his elegant writing, that of the student of a Jesuit school, where he had been educated, where he had spent interminable afternoons doing calligraphy exercises, rather, copying pages and pages using different types of writing, sometimes Gothic and sometimes cursive, so that his letters were written with great elegance; he expressed himself with great rhetorical skill, treating each letter as though it were personal, not a bureaucratic or superficial message, but rather a letter, brief but heartfelt, announcing the terrible news. He also had to send them the soldier’s personal effects and even the half-written letters found in the soldier’s rucksack. That work deranged him, Renzi said, looking at his face in the mirror along the bar.
In that letter, his mother had said that she knew the whereabouts of Matilde Aráoz, the woman his grandfather had loved. And, one afternoon, Renzi went to visit the girl, who by then was already an old woman and was institutionalized, or rather, lived in a rest home on the outskirts of the city; his mother had noted down the precise details for the address of the house where the girl was settled, waiting for the end. Emilio had recorded the visit in his diary of May 1972, and, that night in the bar, he retold the encounter with the same emotion as the first time.
It was, said Renzi, far off in one of those petits hôtels, or large mansions, in a type of garden that abound in the northern part of the city, close to the river. The woman was disoriented, without any memory; she was very beautiful, and age had refined her features, and in her eyes burned the same passionate light that had dazzled his grandfather Emilio. She sat in
a woven rocking chair and moved rhythmically and spoke in a delightful and happy tone, and her monologue was both foolish and very beautiful. She seemed to live inside of a specific day from the past, a day she recalled in full detail. One day in the countryside, at sunrise, a group of her father’s friends—young people from the town and two English girls recently arrived, whom they had brought along to go around the ranch—had gone out on horseback, and they had camped in a grove of trees near the lake and laid out a red gingham tablecloth, on which they set out sandwiches, pastries, and crystal glasses; they had brought two bottles of white wine, which they put in the clear water of the lake near the bank to chill. Renzi listened to all this, but the woman ignored or confused him, he thought, with the doctor or with a ranch hand who was there with her, in the country, in her youth. And so, every now and then, the woman gave orders to Emilio, asking him, for example, to go and get the hat she had left on a post of a corral where they had let the horses loose. It is fairly common for someone who has lost the notion of time and space, as a result of age, to reconstruct a day of life as a refuge and to recall it with total precision, in such a way that in order to remember it, or rather, in order to live through it again, they require an entire day. What they recall lasts twenty-four hours, and it therefore occupies the space of the present day, which lasts as long as the day being remembered, which, on the other hand, Renzi clarified, is repeated endlessly, never ceasing, and seems akin to happiness, because the day being remembered is a beautiful or perfect day from their life that survives and orbits eternally in the unreason of extreme age. And so, she was content, was entertained, happy, going back to live an unforgettable day from her youth. But then something happened that Renzi recalled with astonishment, and also with horror. He realized that, inside that afternoon in the country, they were waiting for the girl’s suitor, who was going to arrive late, directly from the station; Renzi managed to understand it from what the woman was saying aloud, conversing with absent and long-dead others. And suddenly Matilde heard the noise of the Ford T’s engine as it came down the road from above and parked by the edge of the lake. And she asked them to comb her hair and paint her lips, told her friends that she had not brought a mirror and they had to help her prepare herself for the rendezvous with the man who had come in the car. And Renzi saw her smile excitedly, seeing him for the first time, as though she had never seen him before, because she moved toward him and took his hand and said, Emilio, how you make yourself wait, my dear, and then, in an intimate whisper, with her mouth very close to his face she said, I will kiss your body, my love. And then Emilio understood that the woman had confused him with his grandfather, and the likeness was so strong that the girl managed to think that, on this empty day of her old age, the young body of her lover could have appeared. I realized, he said, that she had taken me for him because we were so alike and that I was, or seemed to be, the same as he had been at my age, when he and the girl were in love.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Page 43