The town remained the same as always. In May, with the first low temperatures of fall, the streets seemed less hospitable, the dust swirled about on the corners, and the sky was bright, livid, as if it were made of glass. Nothing moved. The children weren’t heard playing, the women didn’t come out of their houses, the men smoked in the doorways, and the only sound that could be heard was the monotonous whirring of the station’s water tank. The fields were dry, so they started burning off parts of the pastures, the workers advanced in a line burning the weeds and the cuttings, tall waves of fire and smoke rose above the empty plains. Everyone seemed to be waiting for some kind of sign, the confirmation of one of those dark predictions sometimes announced by the old folk healer who lived alone in a shack on a hill. The gardener walked by at dawn, his cart filled with horse manure from the nearby army encampment; the girls strolled aimlessly through the square, sick with boredom; the young men played pool in the Náutico bar, or set up drag races on the road to the lake. The news from the factory was contradictory. Many said that activity in those weeks seemed to have picked up again, and that the lights in the plant’s garage were on all night long. Luca had started dictating a series of measures and regulations to Schultz for a report he intended to send to the World Bank and to the Argentine Industrial Union. He stayed up through the night walking the upper galleries of the factory, followed by his secretary Schultz.
“I have lived, attempted, and achieved so much that they had to carry out a certain violent chain of events to separate and distance me from my accomplishments. We were caught in a trap, through a series of tricks and ruses, not by doubt, but by certainty” (Dictated to Schultz).
“To attribute to the means of industrial production a pernicious action about effects is to recognize in them a moral potential. Do economic actions not create, in fact, a structure of feelings built on reactions and emotions? There is an economic sexuality that exceeds the conjugal norms needed for natural reproduction” (Dictated to Schultz).
“Men have always been used as mechanical instruments. In the old days, in the harvest season, farm workers used to sew steadily, using bale needles to close up the burlap sacks. They were incredibly fast at their sewing, they could produce more than thirty or thirty-five sacks per hectare. Once in a blue moon they’d have to scoop one of the laborers out of the platform. In the rush, he’d have sewn in the tip of his shirt and he’d be stuck to a sack. He’d be rolling on the ground like a fallen brother” (Dictated to Schultz).
“I’ve been thinking about the local weaving. String, knot, string, cross and knot, red, green, string and knot, string and knot. My grandmother Clara learned to knit the blankets they weave in the pampas, her fingers deformed from arthritis, they were like hooks or vine shoots — but with her fingernails painted! Very elegant. We recall Martin Fierro’s sentence: every gaucho you see / a tapestry of misfortunes. The mechanical spinning and weaving of fate! The local weaving penetrates to the marrow. Somewhere someone weaves, and we live woven, flowered in the weave, plotted in the plot. If I could go back even for an instant to the workshop with all the tapestries. The vision lasts only a second, then I fall into the brutal dream of reality. I have so many terrifying things to tell” (Dictated to Schultz).
“I’ve confirmed several times that my intelligence is like a diamond that can pierce pure glass. Economic, geographic, climactic, historical, social, and family determinations can, in very extraordinary occasions, be concentrated and embodied in a single individual. Such is my case” (Dictated to Schultz).
Schultz would get lost at times, he couldn’t follow Luca’s pace, he wrote what he thought he heard.42 Luca marched in long strides through the facilities, talking nonstop, he didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. He asked Schultz to write all his ideas down as he walked nervously from one end to the other, across the garage of the plant, by the large machines. Sometimes Rocha would follow him instead, he’d sub in for Schultz while the ex-seminary student slept on a cot, they took turns taking dictation.
“Soon I will not have anything else to say about the past, I will be able to talk about what we will do in the future. I will climb to the top and stop living in these plains, we too will reach the highest peaks. I will live in the future tense. What is to come, what is not yet — is that enough to live on?” Luca said as he walked along the balcony above the inner courtyard.
Even though he hadn’t slept in several nights, he still recorded his dreams.
Two lost cyclists from the Doble Bragado Race turn off the road and continue on, just the two of them, far from everything, in the middle of the deserted pampas, pedaling evenly toward the south on their light Legnano and Bianchi bicycles, leaning over their handlebars against the wind.
Some time later Renzi received a letter from Rosa Echeverry with sad news. She found herself with the “painful obligation” of having to inform him that Luca “had suffered an accident.” He’d been found dead on the floor of the factory’s garage. It seemed like such a well-planned suicide that everyone could believe — if they so chose — that he’d died by falling from the height of his viewing machine, where he was taking one of his usual measurements. This is how it was explained in the letter from Rosa, for whom Luca’s last gesture was yet additional proof of his goodness and his extreme politeness.
Luca had an extraordinary sense of himself and his own integrity. Life had tested him. In the end, when he finally got what he wanted, he’d failed. Perhaps the failure — the crack — was already there and it finally gave in because he couldn’t live with the memory of his own weakness. Yoshio’s shadow, the fragile Nikkei in jail, would return to him like a ghost whenever he tried to sleep. One fleeting flash in the night is enough to break a man, as if he were made of glass.
Once the priest accepted the version of the death as an accident — because suicides, like hobos and prostitutes, were buried outside the church graveyard — Luca was buried in the cemetery. The entire town attended the ceremony.
It was raining slightly that afternoon, one of those light, freezing drizzles that go on for days and days. The cortege went down the main street, up the so-called northern slope, and as far as the large gate of the old cemetery, with the black-covered horses of the funereal carriage trotting along rhythmically and a long line of cars following behind at walking pace.
The Belladona family vault was a sober structure imitating the Italian mausoleum in Turin that contained the remains of the officers who’d fought with Colonel Belladona in the Great War. Luca had made the worked bronze door, the light webbing above the small windows, and the hinges of the vault in the family workshop when his grandfather had died. The door opened with a soft sound; it was made of a transparent, eternal material. The tombstones for Bruno Belladona, Lucio, and now Luca seemed to condense the history of the family. They’d rest together. Only the males died. Old Man Belladona stepped forward, lofty, his face wet with the rain, and stood in front of the coffin. He’d buried his father, his oldest son, and now he was burying his second son. His two daughters took their place next to him; dressed in mourning like widows, standing arm in arm. His wife, who’d only left her “lair” three times — one for each of the three deaths in the family — wore dark sunglasses and gloves, and her shoes were dirty with the mud from the cemetery grounds. Cueto observed the scene from the back, standing under a tree, in a long, white raincoat.