I care little about the Diccionario de la Real Academia ("dont chaque édition fait regretter la précédente," as Paul Grossac glumly remarked), and equally little about these tiresome dictionaries of Argentinisms. All of them—on both this side of the Atlantic and the other—tend to stress the differences between our Spanish and theirs, and thereby to disintegrate the language. I recall that when somebody or other scolded Roberto Arlt because he knew so little about Lunfardo, the putative language of the Buenos Aires underworld, he answered his critic in this way: "I was raised in Villa Luro, among thugs and bullies and poor people, and I really had very little time to study the way they talked."Lunfardo is, in fact, a literary put-on, a language invented by composers of tangos and writers of comedies for the stage and screen; the lowlifes and thugs themselves, those who lived in the tough, ragged outskirts of the city and who are supposed to have created it and used it in their daily lives, actually know nothing about it, except what phonograph records may have taught them.
I have set my stories at some distance in both time and space. Imagination has more freedom to work, that way. Today, in 1970, who can recall exactly what those outskirts of Palermo or Lomas were like at the end of the nineteenth century? Incredible as it may seem, there are certain punctilious men and women who act as a sort of "trivia police." They will note, for example, that Martín Fierro would have talked about a bag of bones, not a sack, and they will criticize (perhaps unfairly, perhaps not) the golden-pink coat of a certain horse famous in our literature.*
God save you, reader, from long forewords.—The quotation is from Quevedo, who (not to commit an anachronism that would have been caught sooner or later) never read the prefaces of Shaw.
J. L. B.
Buenos Aires, April 19, 1970
The Interloper
2 Reyes 1:26*
They say (though it seems unlikely) that Eduardo, the younger of the Nelson brothers, told the story in eighteen-ninety-something at the wake for Cristian, the elder, who had died of natural causes in the district of Morón. What is unquestionably true is that as the cups of mate went their rounds in the course of that long night when there was nothing else to do, somebody heard it from someone and later repeated it to Santiago Dabove, from whom I first heard it. I was told the story again, years later, in Turdera, where it had actually occurred. This second, somewhat less succinct version corroborated the essential details of Santiago's, with the small divergences and variations one always expects. I commit it to writing now because I believe it affords us (though I may of course be mistaken) a brief and tragic window on the sort of men that once fought their knife fights and lived their harsh lives in the tough neighborhoods on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. I will tell the story conscientiously, though I can foresee myself yielding to the literary temptation to heighten or insert the occasional small detail.
In Turdera they were known as the Nilsens. I was told by the parish priest that his predecessor recalled having seen, not without some surprise, a worn black-letter Bible in the house; on its last pages he had glimpsed handwritten names and dates. That black-bound volume was the only book they owned—its troubled chronicle of the Nilsens is now lost, as everything will one day be lost. The big ramshackle house (which is no longer standing) was of unplastered brick; from the entryway one could see a first interior patio of red tiles and another, farther back, of packed earth. Few people, however, entered that entryway; the Nilsens defended their solitude. They slept on cots in dilapidated and unfurnished bedrooms; their luxuries were horses, saddles, short-bladed daggers, flashy Saturday night clothes, and the alcohol that made them belligerent. I know that they were tall, with reddish hair—the blood of Denmark or Ireland (countries whose names they probably never heard) flowed in the veins of those two criollos.*The *… neighborhood was afraid of the Redheads, as they were called; it is not impossible that one or another killing had been their work. Once they had stood shoulder to shoulder and fought it out with the police. People say the younger brother had once traded words with Juan Iberra and not gone away with the worst of it—which according to those who knew about such things was saying a great deal. They were cattle drivers, teamsters, horse thieves, and sometime cardsharps. They had a reputation for tightfistedness, except when drinking and gambling made them generous. About their kinspeople, nothing is known even of where they came from. They owned an oxcart and a yoke of oxen.
Physically, they were unlike the toughs that gave Costa Brava*its reputation for lawlessness. That, and things we have no certain knowledge of, may help us understand how close they were. Having a falling-out with one of them was earning yourself two enemies.
The Nilsens were men who sought the pleasures of the flesh, but their romantic episodes had so far been on porches or in entryways or houses of ill repute. There was a good deal of talk, therefore, when Cristian carried Juliana Burgos home to live with him. The truth was, in doing so he had gained a servant, but it was also true that he lavished ghastly trinkets upon her and showed her off at parties—those shabby little tenement house parties where certain tango steps (the quebrada and the corte, for example) were considered indecent and weren't allowed, and where couples still danced "with a good bit of daylight between them," as the saying went. Juliana had almond eyes and dark skin; whenever someone looked at her she smiled. In a humble neighborhood, where work and neglect make women old before their time, she was not bad-looking.
At first, Eduardo lived with them. Then he went off to Arrecifes on some business, and on his return he brought a girl home with him, too; he had picked her up on the road. Within a few days he threw her out. He grew ever more sullen and bad-tempered; he would get drunk by himself in the corner general-store-and-bar and would not answer when someone spoke to him. He was in love with Cristian's woman. The neighborhood (which probably knew that before he himself did) sensed with secret and perfidious delight the latent rivalry that throbbed between the brothers.
One night, coming home late from a bout of drinking, Eduardo saw Cristian's black horse tied to the post at the front of the house. Cristian was sitting waiting for him in the patio; he was wearing his best clothes.
The woman was walking about the house with her mate in her hand.
"I'm going off to that bust over at Farias' place. There's Juliana—if you want her, use her."
His tone was half-peremptory, half-cordial. Eduardo stood for a moment looking at him; he didn't know what to do. Cristian stood up, said goodbye to Eduardo—not to Juliana, who was a mere thing—
mounted his horse, and rode off at an unhurried trot.
From that night onward, they shared her. No one will ever know the details of that sordid ménage, which outraged the neighborhood's sense of decency. The arrangement went well for a few weeks, but it couldn't last. Never, when the three of them were in the house, did the brothers speak Juliana's name, even to call her, but they looked for—and found—reasons to disagree. They bickered over the sale price of a load of skins, but it was something else they were really arguing about. Cristián's tendency was to raise his voice; Eduardo's, to fall silent. Without knowing it, they were jealous of each other. In those hard-bitten outskirts of the city, a man didn't say, nor was it said about him, that a woman mattered to him (beyond desire and ownership), but the two brothers were in fact in love. They felt humiliated by that, somehow.