“Crazy when she doesn’t read, not crazy when she reads.”
“See her over there? See that light across the yard?”
There was a guesthouse across the back gardens with two large, lit windows, through which one could see a woman, her white hair pulled back, reading and smoking on a leather armchair. She looked as if she were in another world. All of a sudden she took off her glasses, reached back with her right hand without looking to grab a blue book from a bookshelf out of sight. She put the page up against her face, then put her round glasses on again, settled back in the tall armchair, and kept reading.
“She reads all the time,” Renzi said.
“She’s the reader,” Sofía said.
13
Renzi spent several days in the Municipal Archives going over documents and old newspapers. Every afternoon he’d go to the hall, cool and peaceful, while the rest of the town slept their siesta. Croce had given him several facts to look up, as if he’d assigned him a task that he couldn’t do himself. The history of the Belladona family unfolded from the very origins of the place. Renzi was most impressed by the articles he read about the inauguration of the factory, in October 1961.
The director of the Archives helped him find what he was looking for, assisting him the moment she learned that the Inspector had sent him. Croce, according to her, withdrew to the asylum every so often to spend some time there, resting, she said, as if it were a resort in the mountains. The woman’s name was Rosa Echeverry and she had a desk in the middle of the always-empty hall. She showed Renzi around the shelves, the boxes, and the old catalogues. She was blond and tall, wore a long dress, and used a walking stick with cheerful indifference. She’d been very beautiful and still moved with the confidence that beauty had granted her. It was surprising to see her limping, then, her kindness and happiness didn’t seem to match the hardness of her pain-riddled hips. People in town said that she took morphine — small, greenish glass vials that she had delivered from La Plata, and which she picked up every month at the Mantovani Pharmacy with a prescription from Doctor Fuentes. She cooked it up herself, apparently, first opening the vials with a small serrated knife that she kept especially for this purpose, then boiling the needles in the metal box with the syringe.
She lived on a second story in the same building were the Archives were housed, in a vast attic accessed by an internal staircase. Whenever Renzi turned to look at her, she always seemed to be working on crossword puzzles in old numbers of the magazine Vea y Lea, or watching the canary she’d put by the back window, which was allowed to come out of its cage and peck at the spines of the bound documents.
“There’s not much to do here, the readers have been dying off,” she told him. “The advantage of this place is that it’s more peaceful than the cemetery, even if the work is the same.”
Rosa had studied history in Buenos Aires and had started teaching in a school in the town of Pompeya, but she married an estancia auctioneer and came back to town with him. Soon afterward her husband died in an accident and she ended up buried in the Archives, where no one ever came to look for anything.
“Everyone thinks they remember what happened,” she said. “No one needs to find anything out from a place like this. We have a good library here, too,” she added. “But in the end, I’m the only reader in here, you know. I don’t follow an alphabetical order, please don’t confuse me with Sartre’s Autodidact,” she boasted. “But I do have a system.” She read a lot of biographies and memory books.
Slowly, she told Renzi her story, and he felt that a certain complicity was established between them from the beginning — a certain instant sympathy that sometimes arises between people who have just met — and that Rosa would help him find what he was looking for. People said that she was or had been Croce’s lover, and that they’d sometimes spend weekends together. She invited Renzi to take a look about the place and took his arm as they walked under the awning and into the courtyard.
“One day, my dear, you’re going to write a book about this town. Believe me, I know. A novel, a feature story, something you can sell to buy clothes for your kids and take a vacation with your wife. And when you do, you’ll remember me, what I’m telling you. There was a family war here,” she said. The most interesting thing, according to Rosa, was that the battles were always personified by specific individuals, actual men and women with faces and names who didn’t know they were fighting a war. Countrymen and women who thought they were simply involved in normal family disputes or arguments among neighbors. Argentina’s political history moves on the ground while events happen above like a flock of swallows migrating in winter. The residents of the town represented and repeated old stories without knowing it. Now what they had to talk about was the whole affair of the lawsuit over Luca’s firm. Tony’s death seemed connected to the abandoned factory. Rosa spoke with a high, serene voice, like a schoolteacher, with a touch of irony, to let Renzi know that she didn’t believe everything she was saying, but enough sincerity to give her work as town archivist significance.
She saved newspapers, magazines, flyers, documents, and many family letters that people left over time. “I have, for example, an archive with all of the town’s anonymous letters.” It’s the most important genre, she said, the annals of the worst slander of the Argentina pampas. They started the same day that the Archives were founded. You could write a history of the town just with those anonymous letters. New messages arrive all the time, they tell of intrigues, reveal secrets, and are written in the most diverse ways — with words cut out from newspapers and glued on notebook paper, or written in a shaky handwriting, probably with the opposite hand, to conceal things not worth concealing, or with old Underwood or Remington typewriters that skip a letter, or in letters printed as flyers in some small press somewhere in the Province. These documents were kept in brown boxes in a special section of the Archives, on their own shelf. She showed him the first one ever received — stuck to the door of the church on a Sunday in 1916—and read it out loud as if it were an edict.
Dear neighbors: The legislators of the Province are not defending the countryside. We must go and get them out of their houses and demand an explanation. It’s easier to deceive a multitude than an individual. Sincerely, an Argentine
According to Rosa, Croce had taken up the tradition of writing anonymous letters to let people know he was dissatisfied with the turn of events and with the shady dealings of the prosecutor, Cueto. Like other times, whenever he was in the absolute minority, he had withdrawn to the local asylum and calmly begun sending his anonymous messages with his elaborate theories about events.
On several occasions Rosa had placed ads in the area newspapers asking for people to donate their collections of family photographs to the Municipal Archives. She also arranged to acquire the archives from the English railroads, the sessions of the Rural Society, and the minutes from the Automobile Club containing the records of the construction of the roads and highways in the area.
“No one else cares about these ruins, it’s just me,” she said, and showed him a series of well-organized and clearly-labeled boxes with negatives and developed photographs and old Kodak plates. “I’ve always been waiting for someone to come and dig through these remains, to give my work meaning.”
Several photographs, grouped in a series, showed various images of the area. Construction workers, white scarves tied with four knots on their heads, building an enormous house that would become the old quarters of the La Celeste Estancia; a photo of El Moderno Bar, with a side room used as a movie theater (Renzi was able to see the sign advertising the movie they were showing that day with a magnifying glass: Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall — Al caer la noche); a snapshot taken at harvest time with a row of laborers walking up a plank toward the freight cars with bags swung over their shoulders; several old photographs of the train station with silos, “bird-of-prey” grain augers, and waterwheels in full activity, and in the back a threshing machine pulled by horses; an image of the Madariaga Store and Tavern when it was just a cart outpost.