“If you look at the photographs, you’ll see that the town hasn’t really changed. It’s gotten worst with time, but overall it’s still the same. What happened is that the highway drove all the wealth westward. The factory, for example, is far from here, but the entire town lived off of the factory when the crops started losing their yield. And that’s why the firm is under dispute, because that land on the hill, near the highway — that land is worth a fortune.”
Renzi spent a few hours looking through the material. He was able to trace how the Belladona wealth had been amassed. In the middle of the modern history of the town was the business that Luca Belladona had built, with the help of his older brother, Lucio, under their father’s condescending and skeptical eye. An unbelievable building of architectural rationalism, ten kilometers outside the town, in the hills, especially striking in the middle of the countryside, like a fortress in the desert.
“Luca designed it himself,” she said. “And you could already tell — or one should have already been able to tell — that he was in a different reality. He spent a fortune. It’s an extraordinary building, so modern that many years later, amid the decadence and the paralysis, it still hasn’t lost its strength. He drew up the plans, he spent months redoing parts of the windows and the gates because the angle of the hinges was off. It was the most modern car manufacturing factory in Argentina at the time, much more modernized than the Fiat plants in Córdoba, and Fiat in Córdoba was on the industry forefront.”
They had the photographs from the different stages of the building process. Renzi followed the process as if he were observing the construction of an imaginary city. First you could see the empty vastness of the plains, then the large holes in the ground, the concrete and iron base foundations, the great wooden structures, the glass galleries along the ground level, the abstract structure of the beams connecting the walls (which looked like a chest board from above), and finally the walled building, with the tall, sliding doors and the endless wrought-iron railings.
Among the documents and newspaper articles, Renzi found a long statement by Lucio Belladona from the day of the inauguration of the plant. They had started from nothing, going around the countryside to repair agricultural machines during the harvests23—the first mechanical threshing machines, the first steam combine reaper machines — and eventually set up a workshop behind their house. It was there that they started building racecars, working with light coupes, small and resistant, that competed on open highways and dirt roads throughout the provinces. It was the grand time of the Touring Car Racing Series, normal cars, customized, touched up by mechanics, with production engines — the first V8’s, the 6-cylinder Cadillac’s, the Betis cars — at the top of their power, the “spherical” fuel tanks always installed at the center of the automobile, the fenders like wings, the reinforced frames and aerodynamic body designs. Soon they became famous throughout the country, the Belladona brothers appeared in newspapers and the magazine El Gráfico with Marcos Ciani or with the Emiliozzi brothers, always next to the fastest cars. They moved up in the field of national mechanics (copy-adapt-graft-invent), becoming great innovators. In the mid-1960s they signed the first contract with Kaiser Motors in Córdoba to make prototypes for experimental cars.24
Renzi followed the storyline, he studied the newspaper clippings, the photographs, the smiles of the brothers working under the open hoods of the cars. In 1965 they traveled to the U.S. and, in Cincinnati, purchased very large guillotine shears and folding machines. Their situation became complicated by a sudden devaluation of the peso, from one day to the next the dollar in Argentina was worth twice as much as it used to be.
From that moment on, the newspaper articles and the court archives started portraying Luca as a violent man, but the violence lay in the circumstances of his life rather than in the particularities of his character. He was the only man known in the town — or in the district, or in the whole province, for that matter, as Rosa clarified, with some irony — who had latched on to any kind of dream. Better yet, Luca was attached to a fixed idea, and his stubborn determination for that idea led to his catastrophe. People distrusted him. They considered his decision not to sell an attitude that explained all the misfortune that had befallen him. It explained, too, that he ended up isolated and alone in the deserted factory, like a ghost, never leaving or seeing anyone. He had endless confidence in his project. When it failed, or when he was betrayed, he felt empty, as if he’d lost his soul.
The decline was not the result of a process or something that happened slowly over time, however, but an act of negative illumination. A single moment that changed everything. One night Luca arrived at their offices in the center of town unannounced and found his brother negotiating with a group of investors planning a takeover of the factory. They had prepared a contract to establish a corporation through public shares,25 everything behind Luca’s back, because they were trying to assume control of the company. There were all sorts of clashes. The workers occupied the plant, demanding that the source of their jobs be maintained, but the State intervened in the conflict and decreed the closing. That’s when Luca decided to take out a mortgage on the factory, to deal with the debt, refusing to negotiate and insisting that he would continue with his projects. Since then he has lived there, without seeing anyone, in a battle to the death with his father and the town leaders.
“Luca doesn’t want to accept things as they are. I can understand that,” Rosa said. “But at a certain moment this became a problem for everyone, because the town was divided over the issue and anyone allied with Luca had to go into exile — let’s just say it like that. And he was left alone, convinced that his father had tried to sink him.
“He resisted and kept control of the factory, which just about stopped producing anything. He stayed there, in the half-empty plant, working on his machines, trying at all costs to save the property, which is worth millions. They want to expropriate the factory, subdivide the land and the premises into smaller plots, there’s a lot of money at play, they have a project that’s already been approved and announced in the papers.26 There are several lawsuits against him, but Luca fights on. The way I see it,” Rosa said, “Durán’s death is connected to this affair. Why did he come here with so much money in dollars? Some say he came with the money to save the plant, others maintain that he came to bribe officials and use the money to buy the factory and throw Luca out. That’s what they say.”
Renzi wrote the facts in his black notebook and, with Rosa’s help, followed the trace of the carry trade in the finance company assets and the official balance of the money markets. The bonds circulated from one place to another and were traded on Wall Street. In this fashion, they reached an investment firm27 from Olavarría, in which one of the main investors was Doctor Felipe Alzaga, an estancia owner in the area. Apparently they had purchased the bonds from the underwriting of the factory’s mortgage and the decision was theirs to make. There was nothing illegal, Renzi was even able to record the information and all the numbers of the register of the investment fund at the branch office of Banco Provincia: Alas 1212.