— Get outta here! hollered Clotho, rushing toward them and brandishing her spindle like a lance.
The two scoundrels stood up to her, face to face, and without the slighest affectation let fly a pair of long, loud raspberries. Then they went merrily on their way. No one suspected that those childish hands would soon untie the loose knot of war! Clotho sat back down beside the little girls, who were already hatching a new game. Before taking up her work once more, she glanced casually to her right.
— Ah, it’s that young man, she murmured, her eyes glued to the passerby smiling at her from beneath a wide-brimmed hat.
The more she looked at him, the more he looked like Juan — the same facial expression and the same height. All that was missing were the tube trousers, his high heels, short jacket, silk scarf, and the wide-brimmed hat he was wearing in 1900, the year he died. And it wasn’t true that Juan was a hoodlum! Nothing but a vicious rumour. If he got knifed, it was because he was trying to separate the other two who’d pulled their blades, she was sure of it. Because her Juan was the best boy of all; never once did she hear him raise his voice. Old Lady Clotho had no more tears to cry, but all the same her eyes became moist, even as she did her best to smile back at the young man who was now quite close.
Adam Buenosayres calculated the moment when he should smile. He himself had given the old woman the name of one of the Fates, in reference to the never-absent spindle. She spun so tirelessly, so solemnly, that Adam wondered more than once if the old woman wasn’t spinning the destiny of the street, the fate of men.
“Maybe even mine,” he said to himself superstitiously.
So the smile he addressed to Clotho every time he saw her was almost a liturgical act. The old woman’s anxious eyes demanded it, and Adam made sure she got it, fearing that his smile might be the only food that nourished the Fate.
“One, two, three. Now!”
His smile hit the mark so perfectly that, as he passed her, he saw a beatific face on whose wrinkled chin sparkled a few crumbs of bread. The ring of little girls turned round and round as they sang:
Between Saint Peter and Saint John
they made a new boat.13
“Circular motion. Movement of the angel, the star, the soul. Children understand pure motion.”
Adam stopped in front of the corral belonging to Don Martín Arizmendi. The Basque was inhaling the mild smell of cows and looking at the pigeons asleep in the sun with their throats puffed out. That was peace.
Little did he know that childish hands were soon to loosen the easy knot of war!
— If he isn’t the Messiah, then who is he? asked Jabil belligerently.
Abdulla looked pensively at the glass of anis growing warm in his strong, sinewy hand.
— He too is a prophet, he answered. The last one before Mohammed, the true prophet of Allah.
— That’s what you guys say, Jabil refuted. But our sacred books…
— The Koran is a sacred book, too, replied Abdullah benevolently.
Abraham Abrameto, proprietor of La Flor de Esmirna, sat silent and morose, listening to them in apparent indifference. The three men were sitting round a table in the Café Izmir, and their conversation in the language of Syria blended with others of similar timbre in an atmosphere thick with anis and strong tobacco. By the window, a musician in a seeming trance plucked the strings of a black zither inlaid with mother-of-pearl. At the back, the half-drawn curtains allowed glimpses into a smoky room, in the centre of which, on a yellow carpet, stood a tall narghile, its four tubes leading to four smokers who remained invisible.
— According to our prophets, Abraham said, rousing himself, the Messiah will be a king like David or Solomon, not the son of a carpenter. Our Law…
But Jabil, the Christian, cut him off.
— Israelites! he groaned. You’ve betrayed your Law: the only law you guys know is profit!
— I close Saturdays, protested Abraham mildly.
— You guys crucified your Messiah! Jabil went on. You were waiting for an earthly king, and you’re still waiting. You want the realm of this world.
— I close Saturdays, repeated Abraham. I honour the Sabbath.
Finishing off his anis, Abdulla was about to defend again the splendour of the Crescent Moon, when sounds of war and the din of agitated multitudes could be heard coming from the street outside. The zither player went stone still, the Asian whispers stopped short, and an expectant silence prevailed in the room. The tumult outside grew louder. The café patrons stood up.
Don Jaime, the Andalusian barber, wanting to show off the object of his lengthy oral dissertation, left his well-lathered client and disappeared into the back of the shop. Out of the corner of his eye, another client watched him go. The Carter from the Hayloft, his shock of hair at the mercy of a taciturn assistant’s scissors, was sprawled in the other chair, where he fidgeted like a caged lion, bouncing his slipshod clog on the tip of his foot.
— What the hell’s all that racket! he growled between his teeth.
The sideburns trimmed, the taciturn assistant sighed:
— And the back?
— Cut’er square, grunted the Carter. Rounded, like.
While the Andalusian was gone, and with the shaving soap congealing on his neck, Adam Buenosayres picked out the details of the scene in the mirror. The barber shop was an ordinary space, its walls grimy and the ceiling speckled with fly droppings. It was meagrely furnished with two barber chairs in front of a long tarnished mirror, four Vienna chairs, plus a little table heaped with old issues of El Hogar, El Gráfico, and Mundo Argentino.14 That’s not counting the two colourful posters pinned up on the left wall, one exalting the tragic death of Carmen, the other celebrating the hearty toast of Cavalleria Rusticana.15
But before long Don Jaime was back, carrying a large white pigeon in both hands.
— Look at dis, he said, presenting it proudly.
— Why don’t you shove it up your arse, muttered the Carter to himself.
— Fine-looking bird! Adam commented.
— Now watch dis, said the Andalusian, sticking the bird’s beak between his lips.
Before the astonished Adam Buenosayres, the taciturn and indifferent assistant, and the sourpuss Carter choking with ill humour, the pigeon’s crop swelled voluptuously to a magnificent girth. But Don Jaime, perhaps noting excessive admiration in his client’s eyes, slipped out to the backroom and returned without the pigeon. Then, with vigorous strokes of the shaving brush, he worked the soap back up to a foamy lather on his client’s face, honed the razor on the strop, and shaved him in long swipes. As he worked, he kept up a running patter, garbling his words left and right, all the while dousing his client with a fine spray of saliva. He went on about pouter pigeons this, and thief pigeons that; his pigeon-house out back, the pigeon-house of Arizmendi the Basque; and the Basque ripping him off for some pigeons, so Jaime stealing just as many back from the Basque.
The Carter from the Hayloft, whose head was assuming incredible forms between the taciturn assistant’s hands, shifted and shuffled and squirmed as though he had ants in his pants. First he imagined hauling off and socking the Andalusian with a force that he reckoned should land him halfway across the street. Then he smiled, proud and bitter, on recalling that morning’s set-to. He’d got his horse and cart into a bit of bind, caught between the bitchin’ Lacroze streetcar and some rich bastard’s fancy French sports car. The rich boy, he had to brake real sudden, and so he starts mouthin’ off, actin’ real tough. But the Carter hopped down into the street and invited him to get out of the car and have it out. That’d be the day! Little Mr Fancypants puts the pedal to the metal and takes off cursing.