But to return to the toy with the blind doll, which he showed us after dinner: there were two cranks on the platform, one on either side. Did it still work? My friend said it did, perfectly, he had taken it out of the glass case so we could “watch the show.” It was almost a hundred years old, made in France; he wound it up every once in a while — not often because he cherished it as one of the crown jewels of his collection — setting it in motion so it wouldn’t rust. There were basically two mechanisms that had to function at the same time, that’s why there were two cranks. One was for the music box; the other controlled the automatons. A spring-loaded button in front guaranteed simultaneity. He pressed it, then proceeded to turn both cranks. They were two very small bronze “butterflies,” which he turned with the skill acquired through a lot of practice. His thick, rough fingers seemed unsuitable for such tiny devices, but they managed without a hitch. His hands were swollen and looked worn — the hands of a bricklayer. He had once told me that if he ever committed a crime, he wouldn’t have to worry about leaving fingerprints because working with bricks and mortar had erased them. I noticed that my mother was following these manipulations only out of politeness and with poorly disguised impatience. It’s not that she was a stickler for decorum, but she might have felt a bit intimidated. With a collector’s typical lack of sensitivity, my friend would never notice that she was wholly indifferent to his toys, and his pictures, and his objects. Perhaps even more than indifferent. Mother found them inexplicable, useless (they were, eminently), and therefore unwholesome. I realized that the lighting, which had been decreasing throughout our dinner, contributed to this feeling. We had eaten by candlelight, but afterwards, while wandering through the showrooms, I saw that the whole house was dimly lit. A few standing lamps in the corners, others on small tables and shelves, cast shrouded glows through their shades. My mother, my whole family, had always lived in interiors brightly lit either with bare bulbs, the strongest they had in the shops, or fluorescent tubes. I sensed that she found this system of discreetly and artistically placing lamps around the rooms somewhat suspect, like some kind of questionable symbol of social class. My friend, who, unlike us, came from the coarsest stratum of the proletariat, had embarked on a long and gradual process of refinement thanks to his contact with rich clients, whose houses he’d built. His antiquarian passions had done the rest.
Also, he traveled. Not on cultural trips or to study, but something must have stuck from his visits to the Old World. Like so many Italian immigrants, he had returned to visit his family as soon as he had the means to do so. His parents, who’d brought him to Argentina when he was an infant, had left a lot of relatives behind in Naples. He first went back when he was quite young, shortly after his parents died, and then he returned many times, accumulating vast European experience, from which he never stopped extracting facts and stories to spice up his conversation. During our dinner — not to go too far afield — he regaled us with several odd anecdotes. One of them came up in connection with diseases (my mother had mentioned, I don’t remember apropos of what, a neighbor’s health problems): his Neapolitan cousins, and perhaps, he deduced, all lower-class Neapolitans, concealed illness as if it were something shameful. One of his visits coincided with one of his aunts having minor surgery. They devised thousands of tricks to conceal it from him, which turned out to be not so easy. The closed doors, the sudden silences, the absences, the obvious lies (these people were very naïve), the conversations that stopped short whenever he entered, intrigued him, and in his efforts to figure out what was going on, he reached the conclusion that the Mafia had something to do with it. What else would entail so much secrecy? They had to get him out of the house on the day of the operation, and they did so on the pretext of taking him to see a cactus exhibition nearby, though not too nearby because the excursion had to last all day. He drove with his cousin and his whole family. The children, trained in finessing the deception, spent the whole trip babbling on and on with feigned excitement about cacti, as if going to see them was the fulfillment of their deepest longings. He wasn’t, of course, particularly interested in cacti, and the whole time he was thinking about how he was taking part in a Mafia operation that would leave a string of dead bodies in its wake. Even so, the exhibition turned out to be interesting. He remembered one of the cacti, very small and shaped exactly like an armchair, with many spines: it was called “mother-in-law’s rest.”