Waves that break and die
plaintive at my feet…8
Watch! Reynoso whirls, his guiding arm around the bride’s waist. He makes his way among the spinning couples, crosses the entire patio, and sneaks her into the vestibule. Nobody has seen the subterfuge. Reynoso returns triumphant: “The newlyweds have left!” he shouts. “Oh, no!” protest the dancers. “You sly old fox, Reynoso.” Guitar, violin, and flute! Old man Reynoso, carried away, wants to cling to the hallucinatory images. But Zanetti’s voice breaks the spell, and old man Reynoso awakens with a start to find himself once more beside the rectangle of light projected onto the tiled patio from Juan’s funeral chapel.
— Death, Zanetti has said. Same thing for everyone. It’s the only justice there is in this world!
A single tear rolls down Reynoso’s cheek.
— That’s right, he agrees. No way around it.
Don José hands him the empty mate. Reynoso goes to refill it, but there’s no water left.
— Son of a beehive! exclaims the old man. We drank the kettle dry.
— Yep, Don José adds. Just like out on the range.
— I’m going to see if there’s more in the kitchen, says Reynoso.
Kettle in hand, he slowly ambles away.
— Lovely old guy, murmurs Don José turning toward the collector, who is lost in thought.
Zanetti says nothing, so Don José for a long while caresses the head of his little Pancho, the boy now wandering the outskirts of dreamland. From the geraniums over to the street door, there’s not a soul in sight. The Young Neighbour has flown the coop.
Reynoso could have gone in and out of the illustrious kitchen a hundred times, and the denizens of that Olympus would scarcely have noticed his venerable humanity. It was a narrow space built of wood and zinc, equipped with a two-burner, cast-iron stove. Lying in harmonious arrangement on a pine table covered by a red oilcloth were a heel of sausage still impaled on a fork, one bottle of caña quemada and another of anisette, a grimy coffee pot, and few squalid cups.
Though the mise-en-scène was humble, the actors were of magnificent stature. The whole criollo Parnassus was gathered there. (Eminent figures one and all, they were waiting patiently in the wings, in unjust anonymity, for the Homer who might plunge them into the delicious scandal of glory.) Juan José Robles, scratching the ears of the puppy dog called Balín, headed up the group of criollista divinities. On his left, the taita Flores, majestically seated upon an empty kerosene box, was the centre of attention; his audience was coaxing a story, episode by episode, out of the taita’s unfathomable modesty. To the right of Juan José was the melancholy effigy of the pesado Rivera, the heavy who served both as Flores’s bodyguard and as occasional cup-bearer at this feast; his generous hand flew to the bottle at the slighest indication that any of the heroes was going dry. Facing the three eminent figures just named, sat three engrossed souls: those of the pipsqueak Bernini, Del Solar, and Pereda. Reverentially hanging on the taita’s every word, the audience of three never took their eyes off him, except to exchange a look of appreciation each time Flores revealed a new facet of his intricate personality. The research project those scholars had been working on was no small beer. It’s well known that criollo bravery, once personified in the sublime gaucho Martín Fierro, had evolved into the semi-rural heroism of a Juan Moreira,9 to conclude in the urban bellicosity of the glorious lineage of malevos who flourished in Buenos Aires in the years just before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Now, according to Del Solar and his scholarly buddies, the taita Flores was the last in the line of classical malevos, a living document generously offering itself to be read hic et nunc. No wonder, then, that the criollista bards plied the taita with questions as if he were the Delphic Apollo in rope-soled sandals. No doubt about it, a subtle sense of smell would have picked up an aroma of legend wafting in the kitchen, over and above the one emanating from the garlic sausage.
But, alas! Not all was fervor and reverence in that Olympus: the naysayers, the mockers, the eternal agnostics constituted a third contingent, which included Adam Buenosayres, the astrologer Schultz, Samuel Tesler, and Franky Amundsen. An insolent mob, they couldn’t ask but had to continually shout for the bottle. When their poisonous tongues weren’t rustling like sibilant scorpions, they would explode into offensive laughter and interrupt the storyteller, disconcerting the three studious listeners, who sensed that catastrophe was imminent.
The taita Flores, aware of the ambience of veneration surrounding him, stopped talking yet again to turn a long face toward the group of mockers. Pereda attempted to save the situation:
— And were there a lot of people? he asked.
— A lil’ old hoe-down on the patio, Flores answered. The Froilán women-folk used to organize dances with a coupla kilos of mate and a demijohn of whatever was around.
— And how ’bout the Froilán broad, a good-looker or what? asked Bernini in his best underworld accent.
The taita lowered his eyes and spat out a splinter of the toothpick he’d been gnawing.
— She had the right stuff, he said at last. She had tango in her blood. When she really got into it, she used to cut figure eights that had the dance-floor sweatin’ sawdust.
— Wow! Pereda was ecstatic.
— And did they hit on her much in the ’hood? Del Solar threw out the barbed question.
The taita’s smile mixed menace and swagger.
— Maybe, he said. I didn’t see nuthin.
— You kiddin’ me? Rivera growled in adulation. Nobody came sniffing around the taita Flores’s nest.
— Sure, sure, Del Solar quickly admitted, seeing a malignant gleam in the taita’s eye.
For a long while, Juan José Robles had been stroking the ears of the puppy dog Balín, but now he broke his silence.
— What about the tirifilo Nievas, the pretty-boy? he drawled.
Flores’s face clouded over, and vexation glinted in his gaze, as if the name made his blood simmer with an old grudge.
— I was getting to that, snarled the taita. Yeah, Pretty-Boy Nievas.
— So, who was the tirifilo? asked Del Solar.
— Son of the police chief, Flores answered. A no-account twit. The punk had a taste for slumming it. He’d picked up a rep as a tough guy, just because two or three times, in brawls in Palermo, he’d had fisticuffs with his old man’s White Spittoons.