Conflicting feelings assailed Juan José Robles as he left the kitchen. Hatred and tenderness, severity and mercy were duking it out in his unfathomable malevo heart as he thought about that lawless sister who was coming back, as always, to the smell of a corpse. The tumult in his soul brimmed over at last when he spied her standing at the street door. La Beba was waiting for him, stock still at the threshold, her eyes painfully wide open. Juan José slackened his pace, wanting to get his own head straight before facing the woman. But his slow gait looked to Babe Robles like the extremely deliberate and ominous advance of a judge.
There she stood in front of the big old family home. It looked inaccessible to her, closed, like a fist about to fall. Her heels felt scorched by the doorstep, as if the marble were made of live embers. Doors and windows flew open, it seemed to her, like mouths spewing curses. The neighbours on the patio and a few anonymous faces lurking in ambush studied her with surprise and hostility. Juan José, flanked by María Justa, seemed to become eternal on the long road to the door. La Beba tried to escape the opprobrium of so many gazes by raising hers aloft, only to see the sky stare down at her with a thousand hard eyes.
Bell, little bell,
laugh, laugh, don’t cry.12
Your story was fit for the lyrics of a tango, it blossomed in the intricate arpeggios of the bandoneón, became legendary in the plangent voices of malevos howling their melancholy to the fiery sunsets in the barrio Villa Ortúzar! Yesterday, your fifteen springtimes were a floral bouquet, your short little skirt and your sunlit braids set off wild conflagrations in the neighbourhood’s sensibility; coach drivers sighed for you as they headed evening-ward, a carnation in their ear and a brawl in their heart. Yesterday, at dances on the patio, at the hour when night seems to spring directly from the body of a guitar, the twinkle in your eye and the swing of your hips slowly unsheathed passion, lust, ferocity — daggers quick to jump at a challenge. Yesterday, your image lightened the dead hours of lumberyards, and haunted the silence of phantasmal general stores, when a hand of truco would suddenly die on the table, impaled by a listless ace of spades.13
It was the mad passion for Downtown, for the City at night when she sings her dangerous siren song! The neighbourhood you abandoned was like a desert. Two good souls there put away your fine cotton dresses and buried your childlike laugh at the foot of a fig tree that still weeps. What became of your life then, Cascabel, Cascabelito? You blindly swirled around cursèd lights that quickly burned your wings, in the sordid cabaret that at midnight stumbles like a drunk to the strains of a squeezebox and violins blacker than grief. Cascabel, Cascabelito! Now you are a chiffon flower (brilliant, yes, but without sap), an adornment for a day of luxury in the useless existence of magnates. Now, in the late afternoon of Florida Street, with your provocative gait, your satin rustle, the wake of your perfume, you make teenage boys tremble in anguish and you dig a painful spur into the morose secret of lonely men.
Tomorrow, when your springtime collapses like the architecture of a flower, when all eyes turn away from you and no one smiles, when happy nights turn their back on you and music kicks you out of its crazy domain, then will you go back to the suburb, on an afternoon smelling like stagnant water, and your steps echoing down the street will awaken memories, stir up ghosts. And when at last the rain descends from your eyes, a girl’s voice from some patio will sing:
Bell, little bell,
laugh, laugh, don’t cry.
Juan José came to a halt in front of La Beba and stood staring at her, perplexed, still trying to resolve his inner conflict. As thoughtful as ever, María Justa Robles had overtaken him, and her charitable arm was already around the waist of her guilty sister. The neighbourhood men on the patio watched the silent scene with bated breath, fearful of its outcome. Truth was, Juan José Robles, indecisive before the woman waiting with downcast eyes, didn’t know whether to clobber her one, just like that, or show her the door and send her back into the night she’d emerged from. But when he saw her so humiliated, so broken down and alone, his suburban heart began to melt like frost under the sun. And so when La Beba dared to look him in the face, Juan José Robles gave in and held out his hand with a simplicity that must surely have had the angels sobbing.14
— Come on in, then, he said softly. The old man’s over there.
A flash of the sublime shook the three neighbourhood men on the patio.
— Good, Ramírez approved. No matter what they say, that Juan José is a real man.
— The poor dear! murmured old man Reynoso.
— It’s not her fault, rebuked Zanetti. I blame Society!
Supported by brother and sister, La Beba walked into the funeral chamber. The first thing she saw was Doña Carmen’s wizened face. She was beside the casket with the rosary in her hand, extending the bridge of her kind smile.
— Doña Carmen! she sobbed, running to the old woman.
Doña Carmen received her with open arms and planted a firm kiss on her teary face.
— Yes, yes, my child, she soothed her. There there, my child, there there.
Next, the old woman took her by the hand and led her to the head of the coffin. Once there, La Beba stood still as a statue. She could not, would not, tear her eyes away from the face that had been extinguished forever. A thousand memories, both pleasant and shameful, tumbled through her mind, pushing and shoving and fighting with one another. At a given moment, her conscience quailed in panic before her sheer nakedness, and La Beba felt a sound, half cry, half sob, rising from her heart into her throat. But she choked it back by biting on her handkerchief, lest she importune the others with a fit of grief that for her was illicit. Not daring to console her sister in words, María Justa caressed her shoulders. Juan José looked away, perhaps to avoid betraying his own emotions. Meanwhile, Doña Carmen had rejoined her two friends.
— Poor soul! she said, indicating La Beba.
— Her repentance is sincere, Doña Martina admitted drily.
— What? grunted Doña Carmen, indignant at that obvious attempt to bargain her down. A heart of gold, Doña Martina, a heart of gold!
She was just getting launched on an eloquent panegyric to La Beba, when a sound from the other room cut her off in mid-sentence, tinged María Justa’s face with worry, and furrowed Juan José’s brow.
— Márgara! whispered Doña Carmen into the attentive ear of Doña Martina.
News of La Beba’s return and her presence in the funeral chamber had leaked into the other room, where the chorus, from the shadows, was watching every detail of Márgara’s portentous grief: sibilant threats, exhortations to clemency, rancorous proverbs and wise aphorisms, all boiled and bubbled in the patter of the chorus. Putting together bits and pieces from their buzz, Márgara had caught wind of something and suddenly sat bolt upright.
— Is she back? she asked the two neighbour ladies, staring at them with haggard eyes.
The Ladies in Red and in Blue dared not deny it, and lowered their brows under the terrible gaze. Their gesture told Márgara everything, and she started tearing at her hair.
— I don’t want her here! she screamed furiously.
— Calm down, calm down, suggested Doña Tecla.
But Márgara shook her tragic Gorgonian head.
— She killed my father! she yelled. I don’t want her here!