One afternoon in the Lomas town plaza, Eduardo ran into Juan Iberra, who congratulated him on that beauty he'd found himself. It was then, I think, that Eduardo gave him a tongue-lashing. Nobody, in Eduardo's presence, was going to make Cristian the butt of such jokes.
The woman saw to the needs of both brothers with beastlike submissiveness, although she couldn't hide some preference for the younger, who had not refused to take part in the arrangement but hadn't initiated it, either.
One day, the brothers ordered Juliana to take two chairs out into the first patio and then make herself scarce; the two of them needed to talk. She was expecting a long talk, so she lay down for her siesta, but soon they called her back. They had her put everything she owned, even the rosary of glass beads and the little crucifix her mother had left her, in a sack. Without a word of explanation, they loaded her onto the oxcart and set off on a tedious and silent journey. It had rained; the roads were heavy, and it was sometime around five in the morning when they finally reached Morón. There, they woke up the madam of a whorehouse and offered to sell her Juliana. The deal was struck; Cristian took the money, and divided it later with Eduardo.
Back in Turdera, the Nilsens, who had been entangled in the thicket (which was also the routine) of that monstrous love, tried to take up their old life as men among men. They returned to their games of truco, their cockfights, their casual binges. They thought, once in a while, perhaps, that they were saved, but then, separately, they began to take unexplained (or over explained) absences. Shortly before the end of the year, Eduardo announced that he had business in the capital, and he rode away. When he had gone, Cristian took the road to Morón; there, tied to the hitching post of the house which the story would lead us to expect, was Eduardo's pinto. Cristian went in; Eduardo was inside, waiting his turn.
Cristian, it seems, said to him. "If we keep on this way much longer, we're going to wear out the horses.
Maybe we ought to have her where we can get at her."
He spoke to the madam, pulled some coins out of his purse, and they took Juliana away with them. She rode with Cristian; Eduardo put spurs to his palomino so he wouldn't have to see them.
They went back to the old arrangement. Their abominable solution had failed; both of them had given in to the temptation to cheat. Cain lurked about, but the love between the Nilsens was great (who can say what hard-ships and dangers they had shared!) and they chose to take their exasperation out on others: a stranger—the dogs—Juliana, who had introduced the seed of discord.
The month of March was nearing its close but the heat dragged on relentlessly. One Sunday (on Sunday people tended to call it a day early), Eduardo, who was coming home from the bar, saw that Cristian was yoking up the oxen.
"Come on,"Cristian said, "we've got to take some skins over to the Nigger's place. I've already loaded them up—we can go in the cool of the evening."
The Nigger's store lay a little south of the Nilsens' place, I believe: they took the Troop Road, then turned off onto a road that was not so heavily traveled. The countryside grew larger and larger as the night came on.
They were driving along beside a field covered in dried-out straw; Cristian threw out the cigar he had lighted and stopped the oxcart.
"Let's go to work, brother. The buzzards'll come in to clean up after us. I killed'er today. We'll leave'er here, her and her fancy clothes. She won't cause any more hurt."
Almost weeping, they embraced. Now they were linked by yet another bond: the woman grievously sacrificed, and the obligation to forget her.
Unworthy
The picture of the city that we carry in our mind is always slightly out of date. The café has degenerated into a bar; the vestibule that allowed us a glimpse of patio and grapevine is now a blurred hallway with an elevator down at the far end. Thus, for years I thought that a certain bookstore, the Librería Buenos Aires, would be awaiting me at a certain point along Calle Talcahuano, but then one morning I discovered that an antiques shop had taken the bookstore's place, and I was told that don Santiago Fischbein, the owner of the bookstore, had died. Fischbein had tended toward the obese; his features are not as clear in my memory as our long conversations are. Firmly yet coolly he would condemn Zionism—it would make the Jew an ordinary man, he said, tied like all other men to a single tradition and a single country, and bereft of the complexities and discords that now enrich him. I recall that he once told me that a new edition of the works of Baruch Spinoza was being prepared, which would banish all that Euclidean apparatus that makes Spinoza's work so difficult to read yet at the same time imparts an illusory sense of rigor to the fantastic theory. Fischbein showed me (though he refused to sell me) a curious copy of Rosenroth's Kabbala Denudata, but my library does contain some books by Ginsburg and Waite that bear Fischbein's seal.
One afternoon when the two of us were alone, he confided to me an episode of his life, and today I can tell it. I will change the occasional detail—as is only to be expected.
I am going to tell you about something (Fischbein began) that I have never told anyone before. My wife Ana doesn't know about this, nor do my closest friends. It happened so many years ago that it no longer feels like my own experience. Maybe you can use it for a story—no doubt you'll endow it with a knife fight or two. I don't know whether I've ever mentioned that I'm from Entre Ríos. I won't tell you that we were Jewish gauchos—there were never any Jewish gauchos. We were merchants and small farmers. I was born in Urdinarrain, which I only barely remember; when my parents came to Buenos Aires, to open a shop, I was just a little boy. The Maldonado* was a few blocks from us, and then came the empty lots.
Carlyle wrote that men need heroes. Grosso's History suggested that San Martin might be a fit object of worship, but all I ever saw in San Martin was a soldier who'd waged war in Chile and who'd now become a bronze statue and given his name to a plaza. Chance dealt me a very different hero, to the misfortune of us both: Francisco Ferrari. This is probably the first time you've ever heard of him.
Our neighborhood was not a bad one, the way Los Corrales and F J Bajo were said to be, but every corner grocery-store-and-bar had its gang of toughs. Ferrari hung out in the one at Triunvirato and Thames. That was where the incident happened that led me to be one of his followers. I'd gone in to buy some yerba for the mate. A stranger with long hair and a mustache came in and ordered a gin.
"Say"—Ferrari's voice was as smooth as silk—"didn't I see you last night at the dance at Juliana's?
Where're you from?"
"San Cristobal," the other man replied.
"Well, I'll tell you for your own good," Ferrari said to him, "you ought to stay up there. There are people in this neighborhood that are liable to give you a hard time."
The man from San Cristóbal left, mustache and all. He may have been no less a man than Ferrari, but he knew he was up against the whole gang.
From that afternoon on, Francisco Ferrari was the hero that my fifteen-year-old heart yearned for. He had black hair and was rather tall, good-looking—handsome in the style of those days. He always wore black. It was a second episode that actually brought us together. I was walking along with my mother and my aunt when we came upon some street toughs, and one of them said loudly to the others: