Chapter Five
“TOWN OF COWARDS, TOWN OF SCOUNDRELS,” mutters Professor Gagliardi in the interview he finally granted me at his house on the outskirts of town, and within whose book-lined walls he has decided to shut himself away from life. “It’s no coincidence the first settlers were Indian-butchering milicos. The gringos came later, when the dirty work’d been done, my great-grandfather amongst them. But all in all they were real men and women, capable of sticking to their guns and seeing their rights were respected, of standing up to authority; not like this rotten rabble toiling and crawling out there. And they ask me why I’ve decided to take refuge within these walls. Give them the pleasure of turning their backs on me again, giving me the cold shoulder, the way they did with your father, and your grandmother? Can you believe, dear boy, that when I was removed from my post, when that gutless Scuppa came to me with his Benjamin I implore you to understand me, in this day and age, your stay at this institution … no one, not even my colleagues, not even my neighbours, who’d all been students of mine every last one of them, or parents of my current students, stuck up for me or at least expressed their sympathy? Do you know what they used to say? He always had been a bit of a communist that Gagliardi, that’s what they used to say. Because every twenty-fifth of June I used to talk about the Cry of Alcorta, because at one prize-giving ceremony I suggested the true foundation was when the entire town confronted Comandante Pedernera and paraded him through the streets naked. Do you know something dear boy?” the Professor asks me, pacing restlessly around the room as if in an imaginary classroom. “It doesn’t sadden me that they’ve welded the Comandante’s statue. He represents us a lot better than before the way he is now. What was once an authentic popular festival had all too long ago become a hollow ceremony, a self-indulgent show by farmers and shopkeepers of false nostalgia for a rebellious past that was never really theirs. It was highly appropriate that the last Malihuense to knock the Comandante off his horse was your dear grandmother. The rest of us had lost that right long ago. And I’ll tell you something else. When the flood looked as if it would wipe us off the map once and for all, I was secretly glad. I’d always thought what they did to your father and your dear grandmother was quite unforgivable. I asked myself what God was waiting for to wipe this Santa Fe Sodom off the face of the pampas. Which was why I wasn’t sorry when the waters came, despite the loss of some of the most prized volumes in my collection. Even so, it’s still one of the most complete libraries on the history of the province, as you can see. In better times I used to travel to Rosario regularly, and to Buenos Aires, where I’d buy in bulk at auction, or rummaging through the second-hand bookshops on the Avenida de Mayo or in the stalls in Parque Rivadavia … Luckily, not all the schools in the area shared the timorousness of our spineless principal, and I was able go on teaching in other towns until I retired. I haven’t much money now to go on buying books, but instead I’ve found the necessary time to read them and to write. I can dig up a copy of my two articles about the town if you’re interested, but you’ll have to be a little patient because as you can see …” While Professor Gagliardi, with faltering hands, rifles through the nearest pile of lever-arch files and folders, as high as the chair back they’re leaning against, I again run my eyes over the volumes packing the shelves — running vertically and horizontally from the water-warped parquet to the added rows that scrape the blotchy ceiling, beyond the last shelf. Books whose cardboard and paper time has turned yellowish and brittle, covers once green, red or orange turned to moss, ochre and terracotta — textures that from a distance suggest parchment, papyrus and old silk. Editions by Claridad, Calomino, Tor, Americalee, Anteo, Losada, Eudeba, Solar — the years of forced coexistence making their covers uniform and possibly their contents too: fierce polemics and oppositions undifferentiating themselves on their way to becoming that bland and indefinable thing some people call “period flavour”. Perhaps from so much reading Professor Gagliardi had ended up believing in history in the same way Don Quixote believed in literature. He now sets about another equally formidable pile, growls, talks to himself, scolds the papers he’s trying to find for refusing to appear. “One’s on the history of the fort, it was published in the minutes of the first congress on the history of the towns of the … The other one, the older one, on the etymology of the name Malihuel … I wanted to include a revision, for the time being it’s in manuscript form, if I manage to get it republished … Let me see, let me see, here it is I think … No, it isn’t here either.”
“YOU KNOW WHAT SHE USED TO SAY, our Delia, when she was asked about her son’s reputation? That he gave her a grandchild in every town,” Auntie Porota told me the other day. “Please, Delia’d say, they’re grandchildren of the ones who never taught their daughters how to get to the altar with their legs crossed. How’s it the boy’s fault if the young girls nowadays can’t behave any better than the chinitas. Oh good gracious me that Delia, terrible she was, woe betide you if crossed her, with that sharp tongue of hers, and they wonder why the lad turned out the way he did, like mother like son I say, don’t you agree Fefe?”
“THAT WOMAN WASN’T MY GRANDMOTHER,” I’d blurt out indignantly, choking on the pasta soup — Little Stars № 16—that Celia had brought me in bed. “My grandmother’s name is Emily Bullock de Echezarreta, she lives in Rosario and she welcomed me into her house—this house — every summer. The other one, three months of every year living three blocks away and not once, not once … She knew who I was, and she thought it was … amusing. Her son went from one town to the next knocking up young girls, wham bam thank you ma’am, and she thought it was funny! You heard what she used to say,” I inveigh from an imaginary pulpit.
“What they say she said Fefe,” Celia corrects me sweetly. “If you don’t learn to listen with your heart as well as your ears in this town, you’ll never understand. Darío was eighteen when he was courting with your Mamá, he was a boy. And I don’t for a minute think Delia knew that you … Your grandparents kept the secret very well, and I … I know I never told a soul. And if she did know, if Darío did tell her … She’d begun to change; over those days she changed more than a lot of people do all their lives. If they’d let her live, she’d’ve come to love you. In you she could’ve regained something of the son who’d been taken from her. After everything you’ve been told, can’t you see it couldn’t be otherwise? She’d be a totally different person now. But they didn’t give her time Fefe.”
“WHAT YOU HAVE TO BEAR IN MIND, dear boy, if you want to get to know the mentality of the man who killed your father,” Professor Gagliardi says to me, manoeuvring his open dressing gown through the piles and shelves of books that make his house a maze, “is that all his life he’d been nothing but a provincial policeman, whose experience in matters of murder went not much further than the odd working over that got out of hand, the unwitting heart patient victim who didn’t tell them about his condition before getting the picana, the successful crook who forgets to pay their cut and remembers in the hereafter. Neri belonged to the old school of concealment — covering your tracks, cooking the files, striking pacts with judges and coming to arrangements with lawyers. He thought you should at least keep up appearances. He was too naive then, as were most of us — he thought people’s natural reaction to an imminent crime would be to stop it, or report it. His need to lie paradoxically reveals his faith in people. It never entered his head that the perfect crime is precisely the one committed in the sight of everyone — because then there are no witnesses, only accomplices. His premise was correct — in a two-bit town like this you can’t waste a prominent inhabitant without everyone knowing: because it only takes one person to find out for everybody to know. He mistakenly concluded that, in the face of such vigilance, impunity wasn’t an option. Of course it wasn’t, as certain distorters of public opinion repeat ad nauseam, because the policemen of his generation had notions of morality, honesty or honour that were later lost; no, it was simply narrow-mindedness, intellectual laziness — a eureka moment, a Copernican revolution, the Superintendent was simply too old for. All he needed to arrive at the right solution was a leap, a flip of the imagination that stood logic on its head and set the clockwork going — the realisation that you can hold your tongue while talking out loud, that town gossip can work the other way round. That silence also travels by word of mouth.”