“YOU LEAVING FEFE?” Leticia asks me when she sees me getting my bag together.
“Yes. I’m taking the four am to Rosario, they leave every hour for Buenos Aires from there so I’m told. It’s the first one that passes isn’t it?”
“The La Verde bus? Yes. There’s another at five-thirty I think.”
“Two. But I’ve already bought my ticket for this one,” I reply, wrestling with the zipper.
“It’s really got to you about your granddad hasn’t it. Guido told me.”
“Yes. No,” I lie, I’m not sure with which word. “I miss home too. I rang from the terminal and when Guille answered I actually got a lump in my throat. And there’s such a hoo-hah here over this whole business, it’s all getting a bit much to be honest. I may come back later on, I don’t know. I need to stop and think for a bit. And I’ve found out everything I wanted to. I don’t want to talk to anyone else, I get the feeling I know what they’re going to say.”
“Are you stopping for dinner?”
“If that’s all right with you. We’ll have a send-off.”
She waits by the door a little longer out of politeness, and I’m about to tell her not to put herself out and to get on with her things when the tooting of a car horn makes us jump. Through the window we’re dazzled by the battery of full headlights from Guido’s Fiat Uno, who’s already walking in through the front door.
“Sayago’s shown up. The ex-cop,” he announces exultantly. “He’s waiting for us at the bar,” he says coming inside and he sees my bag on the bed. “Where are you going?” he asks me.
“I’m leaving. I decided a while ago,” I reply, stating the time.
“There’s still time then,” he says to me dragging my by the arm towards the door he left open when he came in. “We’ve got more than enough time till four in the morning.”
Interlude Two
DAILY LIFE IN MALIHUEL hasn’t changed radically since my last visit, so it isn’t hard to reconstruct what an average day would have been like, twenty years back. To be more illustrative let’s choose a weekday; to avoid being too abstract let’s say a Friday; and let’s put that Friday somewhere towards the end of February — Friday twenty-fifth February 1977. We can place our ideal observer high up at the top of the church spire, from where he would be able to observe everything — all four points of the compass — that goes on in the streets and, in less detail, at the lagoon’s beach resort; and for what’s hidden under the tops of the trees or in the interiors of the houses, imagination or memory should be enough, as this is an observer who has the essential rhythms of town life written on their body.
The day begins at night, as is the norm in towns in Argentina’s interior, even in summer. A light comes on — at the Trigo Limpio Bakery. A light goes out — at the police headquarters one dozy officer has replaced another sleeping officer and doesn’t want the light to keep him awake. Half a block away the drying fans of the pasta factory commence their non-stop drone, wafting their egg-and-flour breath onto the street. At 4.45 am — if it’s on time — the Los Cardales bus from the towns to the south swings onto Veinticinco de Mayo Avenue. These days it stops at the New Terminal, but twenty years ago it would have driven on for two more blocks, as far as the corner of Los Tocayos, where a shadowy figure gets off, its human form disappearing into the surrounding shadows never to be seen again. Forty minutes later the Chevallier from Bullock follows the same route and, when it sees no sign of a passenger standing on the corner, heads straight on down the Fuguet road, bound for Rosario. Impressions: a watery light spreading from the east, the air still, and cool for the last time in the day, the acoustic depth of the space measured in all directions by the crowing of cocks and echoed by the street lights, as sector after sector of the local grid clicks off. In the uncertain light the tarmacked streets are filled with the silent traffic of bicycles, mainly from the Colonia, converging on the open gates of the Tuttolomondo factory. Down the same street, from the lagoon, lurches the milkman’s trap, laden with dented, presumably full aluminium churns. In the gardens of each house it stops at, a covered jug has been waiting since the night before. The sky is criss-crossed by the shooting silhouettes of birds and everywhere the grass bends under the weight of the dew.