Del Solar and Pereda exchanged an eloquent look. The famous Son of the Police Chief! So the legend was true!
— Who were the White Spittoons? Bernini interrupted emotionally.
— Police officers, Rivera clarified. In those days they wore white helmets.
Del Solar had a few points to clear up.
— Wait a minute! he said. How did Pretty-Boy Nievas used to dress?
The taita was quiet as he seemed to search his memory.
— Yep, he said at last. Narrow grey trousers with black bands down the seams. And his sports jacket was a shit-standing-upper…
— What? Bernini burst out.
— It was a style of jacket kinda on the short side, Rivera explained. So, as a joke, we called it…
— Yes, yes, Del Solar interrupted impatiently. What else did the tirifilo wear?
— High-heeled ankle boots, a cheap scarf around his neck, and a beaver hat on his mop.
Del Solar and Pereda looked at each other again, feverish with the same enthusiasm. The description was accurate!
— Very good, Flores, my friend! Del Solar approved. So what went down with you and the pretty-boy?
— Nuthin, Flores answered. The lad took a notion to get fresh with my gal, according to what I heard. I asked her about it, in case she’d given him any encouragement. You know how skirts can be.
— Hmm! agreed Bernini, sounding like a man who’d been burned.
— But the gal was on the up-and-up, added Flores. So I waited for my chance.
— Where’d you mix it up with the tirifilo? asked Del Solar, giving his words a tough edge.
The taita hung back, tired and modest.
— It’s not worth telling, he said at last. He was a silly little compadrito.
— Tell us, Flores, Rivera asked him.
— Don’t play hard-to-get, said Juan José, quite absorbed in watching Balín try to bite his tail.
After considerable begging, the taita Flores gave in. He frowned, cleared his throat two or three times, and shot a sidelong glance at the group of mockers, who really were starting to get up his nose.
— Okay, he said. The fight took place at the dance the Froilán girls put on. People were dancing up a storm on the patio, and everything was fine ’til Pretty-Boy and his gang showed up. They’re all half sloshed, and the tirifilo barges in like he owns the place and shouts: “Clear the decks!” The music stops, the women’re all a-flutter, and the Froilán girls look at me scared.
— They knew what was coming! exclaimed Rivera.
— And did you go for him on the spot? asked Del Solar, drunk with courage.
The taita smiled placidly.
— I knew Pretty-Boy real good, he answered. And, of course, I cut him some slack. So the dance just started up again. As soon as they started playing “El Choclo,”10 I see the tirifilo trying to get my gal to dance, and I see, too, that she’s resisting. So, sitting right where I was, without getting up, I shout: “Listen, kiddo, that woman don’t dance!” The music stopped again, the couples separated. The tirifilo, he gets his dander up and shouts back: “We’ll see about that!”
— The kid had balls, Bernini ventured.
— All mouth, no action, like the chajá, muttered Rivera.
— And what did you do? asked Del Solar, looking the taita in the eyes.
— I got up real slow, Flores responded. I gave the pretty-boy the onceover from head to foot. Then I says, “Have it your way, then. My game is calling me!” and I start crossing the room. The women start squealing and the men are all worked up. But then the tirifilo pulls out a heater…
— A heater? exclaims Pereda, scandalized.
— He was real tough with a gun in his hand, assented the taita sadly. So he’s pointing the heater at me and he shouts, “One more step and I’ll shoot!”
— And you? asked Del Solar, knitting his brow.
— Me, I slip out my blade and walk towards the pretty-boy, drilling him through with my eyes. “Go ahead and shoot,” I says. “But don’t miss! Because if you go and miss, my blade here says you’re chopped liver!”
— He missed, I can just see it!
— Nope. Couldn’t even shoot, said Flores sorrowfully. As soon as my words were out, the tirifilo turned white as a sheet, and the revolver started shaking in his hand. I took it away, so he wouldn’t hurt himself.
— A pretty-boy! scoffed Del Solar.
— A silly little malevo, the taita declared indulgently. Did the women ever laugh!
The group fell silent in adulation. The three scholars stared at Flores as if they’d just discovered who he was.11 The lines hardened around the pesado Rivera’s mouth. The taita bowed his head as though overburdened by laurels. Only Juan José Robles seemed indifferent to the emotion of the moment, absorbed as he was in the antics of the puppy dog Balín, who was now playfully biting his shoe. But just then a brutish guffaw erupted from the circle of mockers; the criollistas came plummeting down from the heights of heroic inspiration and in unison turned to look angrily at the trouble-makers.
— Now they’ve got me mad! growled the taita, screwing up his mug threateningly.
Del Solar, on tenterhooks, tried to calm him down.
— Don’t pay any attention to them, he said. They’re completely shitfaced.
— This ain’t no speakeasy, insisted Flores. They’ve got me pissed off with all their laughing.
The pesado Rivera piped up in turn.
— Shhh! he ordered the mockers. You’re at a funeral wake!
At that point something outrageous happened. Franky Amundsen, obviously the ringleader of the dissident faction in the kitchen, turned to the pesado Rivera, held out his hand imperiously, and, eyes a-glint, slurred a thick-tongued order:
— Pash ’e bottle, pard’!
Utterly flummoxed by the sheer audacity of it, the pesado mechanically handed him the bottle and came to his senses only when Franky handed it back to him, after having generously refreshed his friends’ glasses. In a sublime gesture, the pesado filled his own glass and sent it down the hatch, perhaps wishing to drown the speck of rage already fermenting in his kidneys. That was arguably the moment when Rivera began to incubate in his mind the brilliant manoeuvre with the shoe, an act that was subsequently to put an end to the hostilities.
With the storm rumbling on the horizon, it’s time we took a look at the heterodox group in the kitchen, if only to get a faint idea as to what those inebriated intellectuals were getting up to, drunk as they were on something more than glory. What was the reason for the laughter? Could they, as innocent victims of the illustrious bottle, have been forgetting the norms of intellectual decorum? No, they were not the sort of men who hang their virtue in a noose from the sarmentous tree of Dionysus! On the contrary, in that sector there were a few men whose intelligence reached its zenith only after they’d achieved a goodly blood-alcohol coefficient. Such, for example, was Franky Amundsen, descendant of those Vikings who in bygone times used to drink themselves blotto with absolute dignity under the northern lights. So, too, Samuel Tesler, scion in a direct blood line of the wine grower Noah. And thus as well Adam Buenosayres, whose genealogical tree could well have been a grapevine, bearing in mind the crew of insatiable drinkers on both sides of his family who had preceded him in the sublime art of raising a glass. No less scholarly than their counterparts, these heresiarchs likewise observed, sorted out, and analyzed the stuff of life that chance put in their path. However, the observations they made about the storytelling taita Juan José Robles and the pesado Rivera were characterized by a scientific rigour and a philosophical universality that it would have been pointless to expect from the romantic emotion of the three criollista scholars.