On the relationship between translation and the novel, Piglia has said: “Habría que reflexionar sobre qué quiere decir leer mal; qué tipo de efecto puede producir una lectura que se desvía de lo que en principio pueden ser los sentidos dados del texto…La traducción es el espacio de los grandes intercambios y de las circulaciones secretas.” [We should think about what it means to mis-read. What kind of effect is produced by a reading that deviates from what may have been, at first, the assumed meanings of the text…Translation is the space of great exchanges and secret circulations.]
A space of great exchanges and secret circulations. An organic machine that reads in one language and writes in another. What’s in a name? What meanings and implications are hidden in the town where Croce and Renzi pursue their investigations? A paranoid fiction, full of potential. What is Target in the Night? I leave it to the reader.
Sergio Waisman
Kensington, MD, July 2015
PART I
1
Tony Durán was an adventurer and a professional gambler who saw his opportunity to win the big casino when he met the Belladona sisters. It was a ménage à trois that scandalized the town and stayed on everyone’s mind for months. He’d show up with one of the two sisters at the restaurant of the Plaza Hotel, but no one could ever tell with which because the twins were so alike that even their handwriting was indistinguishable. Tony was almost never seen with both at the same time; that was something he kept private. What really shocked everyone was the thought of the twins sleeping together. Not so much that they would share the same man, but that they would share each other.
Soon the rumors turned into stories and elaborate tales, and before long no one could talk about anything else. People went on about it throughout the day — in their homes, or at the Social Club, or at Madariaga’s Store and Tavern. Everyone had a detail to add, commenting as easily as if they were talking about the weather.
In that town, like in all the towns in the Province of Buenos Aires, more news was batted around in a single day than in any large city in a week. The difference between regional and national news was so vast that the residents could retain the illusion that they lived an interesting life. Durán had come to enrich that mythology, and his figure reached legendary heights long before the time of his death.
You could take Tony’s comings and goings through the town and draw a map from them. An outsider’s ramblings along the elevated sidewalks, his walks to the outskirts of the abandoned factory and the deserted fields. He deciphered the order and hierarchies of the place in short order. The dwellings and houses stand clearly divided according to the social level of the inhabitants. The territory seems to have been drawn by a snobbish cartographer. The wealthy live at the top of the hill, and in a circle of about eight blocks is the so-called historical center of town,1 which includes the square, the town hall, the church, and the main street with the stores and the two-story houses. Finally, sloping down on the other side of the railroad tracks, are the poorer neighborhoods where over half of the darker-skinned population lives and dies.
Tony’s popularity and the envy he aroused among the men could have led to anything. But in the end his downfall was simply a matter of chance, which is what had brought him here in the first place. It was incredible to see such an elegant mulatto in that town full of Basques and Piedmontese gauchos, a man who spoke Spanish with a Caribbean accent but looked as if he came from the province of Corrientes or from Paraguay, a mysterious foreigner lost in a lost town in the middle of the pampas.
“He was always happy,” Madariaga said, looking in the mirror at a man pacing nervously along the store’s stacked bottles, a riding whip in his hand. “And you, Inspector, will you have a gin?”
“Grappa, maybe. But never on duty,” Inspector Croce replied.
Tall, of indefinite age, with a red face and gray moustache and hair, Croce chewed pensively on an Avanti cigar as he paced back and forth, hitting the legs of the chairs with his riding whip. As if he were shooing away his own thoughts, crawling along the floor.
“How could no one have seen Durán that day?” Croce asked, and everyone in the country store looked at him silently, guiltily.
Then he said that he knew that everyone knew but that no one was talking, and that they were thinking up a bunch of lies and going round and round the obvious to try to find a fifth leg to the cat.
“I wonder where that expression comes from?” Croce said, stopping to think, intrigued. He got lost in the zigzag of his thoughts, flashing like lightning bugs at night. He smiled, and began pacing again. “Just like Tony,” he said, remembering. “An American who didn’t look like an American, but he was an American.”
Tony Durán was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His parents moved to Trenton when he was five years old, and he was raised in New Jersey as a typical American. The only thing he remembered from the island was that his grandfather was a gamecock breeder who used to take him to the fights on Sundays. He also remembered that the men would cover their pants with newspapers to protect their clothes from the spraying blood of the fighting cocks.
When he arrived and found a secret cockfighting ring in the town of Pila, and saw the country laborers wearing sandals and the little pygmy roosters strutting around in the sand, he laughed, saying that that’s not how it was done. But in the end he got excited about the suicidal fierceness of a Bataraz rooster that used its spurs like a lightweight boxer uses his hands to come out swinging. Quickly, deadly, ruthless, going straight for his rival’s death, his destruction, his end. When he saw the rooster, Durán started betting and got worked up about the cockfight, as if he were already one of us (one of us, as Tony himself would have said, in English).
“He wasn’t one of us, though, he was different, but that’s not why they killed him. They killed him because he looked like what we imagined that he had to be,” the Inspector said, as enigmatic as always, and as always a bit crazy. “He was nice,” he added, looking outside at the countryside. “I liked him,” the Inspector said, stopping in his tracks, near the window, leaning back against the wall, lost in his thoughts.
At the bar of the Plaza Hotel, in the afternoons, Durán would recount fragments from his childhood in Trenton, about his family’s gas station off of Route One. How his father got up before daybreak because someone had turned off the highway and was honking his horn, how you could hear laughter and jazz from the radio, how Tony looked out the window, half asleep, to see the expensive cars speeding by with happy blond women in ermine jackets in the back seats. A bright vision in the middle of the night confused — in his memory — with fragments from a black and white film. The images were secret and personal and didn’t belong to anyone. He didn’t even remember if the memories were his. Sometimes Croce felt the same about his own life.
“I’m from here,” the Inspector said all of a sudden, as if he had just woken up. “And I know all the cats around here, and I’ve never seen one with five legs, but I can imagine this young man’s life perfectly. He seemed to come from somewhere else,” Croce said calmly, “but there is nowhere else.” He looked at his young assistant, Saldías, who followed him everywhere and always agreed with him. “There is nowhere else, we’re all in the same boat.”
Durán was elegant and ambitious and so good at dancing the plena in the Dominican clubs of Spanish Harlem that he became the emcee of the Pelusa, a dancehall on East 122nd Street in Manhattan. This was in the mid 1960s, and he had just turned twenty. He climbed quickly because he was quick, because he was fun, because he was always willing and because he was loyal. Before long he was working the hotels in Long Island and the casinos in Atlantic City.