Both sons had inherited from their grandfather Bruno a country mistrust and a taste for machines. They started working in his company at a very early age. “My grandfather,” Sofía said, “when he retired from the railroad, he was a representative for Massey Harris. They expanded the workshop behind the house, on Mitra Street. That’s how it all began. You must have heard the legend of the neighborhood chicken coop…”
“Yes,” Renzi said, “they welded at night, with the blowpipe, and the chickens from next door watched the whole time, dazzled by the light, maddened and drunk, their eyes like gold coins in the dark. They’d jump around, the chickens, clucking, stunned by the whiteness of the welding machine, as if an electric sun had come out at night…”
“Drugged,” Sofía said. “Cluck, cluck. The chickens doped by the glare, when they put a corrugated fence up to keep in the glow from the welding blowpipe, the chickens became desperate, they’d climb the wire of the coop looking for the whiteness, they had withdrawal symptoms. I remember seeing that light when I was a girl, too, crisp as glass. We used to go to the workshop all the time, we lived with the machines, Ada and I. My brothers made us the most extraordinary toys that any girl has ever had, dolls that could walk on their own, or dance as if they were alive, with gears and wires connected to a tape recorder, dolls that talked in Argentine slang, they’d make them look like showgirls, which would drive our my mother crazy. Once they made me a Wonder Woman that could fly, she’d circle above the patio like a bird, I’d guide her with a fishing reel, I could make her go around in the air, red and white, with stars and stripes, so beautiful I could barely breathe. My sister and I adored our brothers, we followed them everywhere, they used to take us to the dances with them (my sister with Lucio, me with Luca), my sister and I wearing high heels and make-up, pretending we were a couple of night girls from town out with our boyfriends, we’d go to the dances in the area, the neighborhood clubs, the dance floor they set up on the paleta courts with the colorful lights and a band on a platform playing tropical music, until our mother intervened and ended the party right then and there — that party anyway.”
19 “I’ll teach you differences” (King Lear, I.4).
20 Suppose we show the image to someone in the country, Croce said. He says: “It’s a duck,” and then, all of a sudden: “Oh, it’s a rabbit.” He’s recognized it as a rabbit. He’s had an experience of recognition. Likewise, if someone sees me walking down the street, they’ll say: “Ah, it’s Croce.” But one doesn’t always have an experience of recognition. The experience occurs at the moment of changing from duck to rabbit, and vice versa. I call this method seeing-as. Its goal is to change the aspect under which certain things are seen. This seeing-as is not part of perception. It’s like seeing, but it’s also not like seeing.
10
They headed out of town in Croce’s car, at midnight, on a side road that bordered the district line, toward Tapalqué. They drove across the countryside, avoiding the fences and the still animals. The moon was occasionally covered by the clouds, so Croce would use the searchlight attached to his side of the car, a bright bulb with a handle that could be adjusted by hand. All of a sudden, in the illuminated circle, they saw a rabbit, paralyzed by fear, white, motionless — like an apparition in the middle of the dark. Caught in the light beam, it was a target in the night21 that they quickly left behind. They drove for several hours, bumping along because of the pits in the road, staring at the silver lines of the wire fences under the stars. Finally, turning off at a wooded path, they saw a glow from the lighted window of a country house in the distance. By the time they reached the source and were getting close to the small house, dawn was starting to break on the horizon, turning everything a pinkish hue. Renzi got out and opened the gate so the car could enter and go down a narrow road surrounded by bushes. A peasant was sitting on a bench under the house eaves, drinking mate. A patrol officer was dozing off nearby, leaning back against a tree.
The sorrel was in the field next to the house, covered with a plaid blanket, and one of its legs was bandaged. The man on the bench was the horse’s keeper, an ex-broncobuster named Huergo or Uergo, Hilario Huergo. A dark gaucho, tall and thin, he smoked and smoked as he watched the two men approach.
“How do you do, Don Croce?”
“Cheers, Hilario,” Croce said. “So, what happened here?”
“A misfortune,” he spoke, and smoked. “He asked me to come,” he said. “When I got here he had already done it.” He kept smoking. “Yeah,” he said, pensively. “In his religion it’s allowed.”
“No, you’re not allowed to kill,” Croce said.
“Have respect for him, Inspector. He was a good person. He had the one misfortune. No one feels pity for the guilty,” he stated after a while.
Croce paced back and forth. Like always, he was postponing the moment when he would have to go in and see a dead body. He peeked in and came back out.
“He said something to you about the American,” Croce said.
“He left a letter, I haven’t opened it. It’s where he put it, by the window.”
The house had a packed, dirt floor and was lit by a dim lamp, fading with the light of dawn. There was a stove to one side, unlit. On the other side, lying on a foldout bed under a woven blanket, was el Chino Arce. On a mat next to the deceased, Hilario had put a few weeds in a pitcher. A country wake, Renzi thought. A locust jumped out of the pitcher, rubbed its eyes with its antennas, and jumped on el Chino’s yellowish face. Renzi shooed it away with his handkerchief, and the insect hopped off toward the stove. In the dead man’s hands, as if it were a holy card, Hilario had placed a photograph of the jockey sitting on his horse on the runway before a race at the track in La Plata.
“He used a shotgun. He was so short he was able to lean the barrel against his mouth and shoot standing up,” Hilario said, with a strong country accent. The shotgun was off to one side, resting carefully against the leather seat of a small stool.
They uncovered the dead man and saw that he was wearing country trousers, a flowered shirt, and a scarf around his neck. He was a yellow gaucho, all dressed up, his right foot bare with a gunpowder burn on its big toe. They could have killed him and made it look like a suicide, with the shotgun and all, Croce thought. Maybe he was choked, he added in his thoughts, but when he removed the scarf from the dead man’s neck, Croce saw that there were no marks there, except for the shot on the roof of his mouth where his brains had been blown out. That was probably why Hilario had put a scarf there, to cover the site of the wound.
“He killed himself there,” Hilario said, “standing next to his little foldout bed, and I fixed him up. He wasn’t a Christian, you know, that’s why I covered the Virgin.”