“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 yelclass="underline"
— 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.