Across the broad dirt road stood the rail line and its sheds and station house. The villages on the plain liven up a little at the end of the afternoon, most of all on hot days when the sun, from which there isn’t, in the fields, any defense, declines to the west. The sprinkler truck waters the roads and damps down the dust so that when cars pass, or sulkies, or even bicycles or men on horseback, they aren’t forced to suffer a dust cloud. The grandfather, his eyes dim and absent, would watch the passage of the trains, cars, and people who sometimes stopped to greet him. Very infrequently, his eyes would light up, weakly, with a fleeting spark: he’d think he recognized an old friend in the driver’s seat of a passing car, but it would take him so long to raise his arm in greeting that when he managed to wave his hand a little, at a certain height, the car was already two blocks away. A pretty horse at a trot was also pleasurable for him, because he’d always liked horses; and it was also pleasant sometimes to watch the children who, after being washed and scrubbed by their mothers, their older sisters, or their aunts, went out to play, still chewing on enormous chunks of homemade bread slathered with butter, dusted with powdered sugar, and smeared with dulce de leche. But that was it. At first, he’d get up every so often and take a few steps along the uneven brick sidewalk, but toward the end he never moved from the chair. By the next fall, he started refusing food, and since he barely weighed fifty-two kilos, they had to hospitalize him and feed him through a tube. One cold morning he stopped breathing.
When he saw him in the coffin, shrunken by death and by his suit and shirt, oversized because of the illness — his uncle Enzo had shaved him and tied on a blue necktie with colored stripes, its bulging knot resting on his Adam’s apple, disproportionately large because of his thinness — Nula was able to observe, for several minutes, the discreet, blue tattoo on the back of his right hand, which covered his left hand, over his abdomen, consisting of three dots arranged in a horizontal line. It had always intrigued him, and though as a boy he’d asked his grandfather what they meant, he’d never gotten a satisfactory response, making it seem like one of those topics that, because of the evasive responses they get, children resignedly consider themselves unfit for. Many of the Arabs who visited his grandfather had similar discreet, blue tattoos on their hand, their wrist, or their forearm. Growing up, Nula had grown so used to seeing them that he ended up not noticing them. But seeing the tattoo on the back of his hand again, he had the confused sense that their location, and whatever reason he’d had for having them imprinted on his flesh, in death, those three blue dots, however enigmatically, betrayed an authentic need. He knew that those three dots were a sign, a message, but he couldn’t tell to whom they were directed. And although two or three years later, when he thought of them, he still believed that they were a custom of another time and place, archaic and mysterious, where ritual and taste favored those marks on the body, by strange mandate or simple habit, it was only much later — he was already married and had abandoned his philosophy studies in Rosario to earn his living selling wine in the city — that he realized what the tattoos signified. One night, he was watching a Monteverdi opera on television, The Return of Ulysses, and at the recognition scene, when Eurycleia, the old nurse, realizes that the beggar, from the scar on his thigh, is Ulysses, who has returned incognito to Ithaca, Nula, hitting the open palm of his left hand on the back of his right hand, shouted so unexpectedly that Diana, concentrating on the music, jumped. Nostoi! he practically screamed. And then, lowering his voice, as though in apology, I’ve been trying to remember that word for so long. They continued listening in silence, and, when the opera finished, Nula went to the library and returned with a copy of the Odyssey opened to the start of Book XIX. “Nostoi” means “the returns” in Greek, he said. They were a series of epics that recounted the return home of the Greek heroes who’d fought in the Trojan war. But almost all of them were lost; only the return of Ulysses survived, and a few loose fragments of the others. I’ve been trying to remember the word for days, because I felt like it had some connection to my grandfather’s life. And now I know why. First of all, because of Ulysses’s scar from a tusk wound he got when he was a boy, when he went boar hunting once with Autolycus, his grandfather, like my brother and I used to hunt with our grandfather Yusef. But it wasn’t just about him, about his childhood memories of his grandfather taking them out to the fields to shoot partridges and wild ducks, but rather about his grandfather, about the recognition of Ulysses by the scar on his thigh, and if he shouted suddenly it was because he finally understood the purpose of those blue tattoos, on their hands, on their wrists, on their forearms, and possibly on other parts of their bodies that weren’t publicly visible: those signs inscribed on their flesh anticipated the nostos, the return, which they assumed would be so far from the moment of departure that their bearer would return to his place of origin so disfigured by inclemency and disillusion, by the silence of distance and the contempt of time, by the frayed rags of experience and of being, their only conquest, that they thought it prudent to mark themselves with an indelible sign so that they could be recognized by those who’d seen them off, and who still awaited their return, patiently, in their homes or in Hades.
After his grandfather’s death, Nula took fewer trips to the town, though later, when he started medical school in Rosario, he would sometimes go up for the weekend. He didn’t need to catch the bus at the terminal, because his apartment was close to school, and the bus, before leaving the city, had to take several loops through the one-way streets near the terminal, and one of those loops passed right by his house. Sometimes he’d run into a family friend who recognized him, and other times he’d travel with his eldest cousin, who was studying to be a veterinarian — his youngest cousin was still at the Jesuit school — and who always told Nula that when they graduated they’d open a joint practice for gauchos: one of them would treat the horse while the other one examined the horseman. But, little by little, without knowing why, they grew apart, and when Nula dropped out of medical school and took up philosophy, they stopped seeing each other altogether.