Rosa showed him other figures and facts, leading him into the secrets of the conflict. But Renzi had the feeling that it wasn’t the papers or Rosa’s story that would permit him to understand what had happened, but the mere fact of being in town. The places were still there, nothing had changed, the town was like a stage set, even the attitudes seemed to repeat the story. “Right here, where we are now, is where everything started,” Rosa said, and made a gesture with her arms as if she were showing him the past.
The building of the Municipal Archives was Colonel Belladona’s old house when he founded the town and first built the train station. The English had sent him there because he was considered trustworthy, he came from Italy as a child and he, too, had a tragic story. “Like everyone, if you look at their life close enough,” she said. They called him Colonel because he had volunteered to fight in the Italian Army in the Great War and had been decorated and promoted.
The collection of documents in the library was very thorough, there was an archive of the history of the factory from the initial plans to the filing for bankruptcy. Luca took care of the factory archive himself, personally, he was always sending in announcements and documents so they would be saved, as if he’d already imagined what was going to happen.
“He trusts me,” Rosa said, a little later. “Because I’m part of the family, and he only trusts family, in spite of the catastrophe. My mother is Regina O’Connor’s sister, the boys’ mother, we’re first cousins.”
According to her, something was about to happen. The past was like a premonition. Nothing would be repeated, but what was about to happen — what Rosa imagined was about to happen — had been forecast. There was an air of imminence, like a storm you can see on the horizon.
All of a sudden she asked him to excuse her. She walked toward the back, where the birdcage was, with the canary outside the cage. She sat at a small desk near the staircase and, after using a benzene lighter to heat a metal container to boil the needles, and after cutting open a small vial with a small penknife, she raised her dress and gave herself an injection on her thigh, looking at Renzi with a peaceful smile.
“My mother sometimes forgets a book she’s reading on a chair out in the yard. She hardly ever goes outside, she always wears really dark glasses because she doesn’t actually like the sunlight, but still sometimes she’ll sit and read by the plants in the yard, in springtime when it’s especially nice, and when she reads she murmurs under her breath. I’ve never been able to tell if what she’s doing is repeating what she’s reading or if she’s speaking to herself in a low voice — like I do, too, sometimes — because her thoughts rise as they say to her lips, so maybe she’s speaking to herself, who knows, or maybe she’s humming some song, she’s always liked to sing, when I was a little girl I loved my mother’s voice, I’d hear it from the back of the house when she sang tangos, there’s nothing more beautiful or more moving than a young, lovely woman — like my mother — singing a tango by herself. Or maybe she’s praying, maybe she’s saying some prayer under her breath, asking for help when she reads. Whatever the case may be, she moves her lips when she reads and they stop moving when she stops reading,” Sofía said. “Sometimes she falls asleep and the book falls off of her lap, and when she wakes up she seems afraid and quickly goes back to ‘her lair,’ as my mother calls the place where she lives — and that’s when she forgets the book and doesn’t dare go back for it.”
“And what does she read?” Emilio asked.
“Novels,” Sofía said. “They arrive in large packages every month, my mother orders them on the telephone, she always reads everything by a writer she’s interested in. Everything by Giorgio Bassani, all Jane Austen, all Henry James, all Edith Wharton, all Jean Giono, all Carson McCullers, all Ivy Compton-Burnett, all David Goodis, all Aldous Huxley, all Alberto Moravia, all Thomas Mann, all Galdós. But she never reads novels by Argentine writers; she says those stories, she already knows.”
23 “I remember there were twelve horses per harvester, six bouncers tied to the front and six to the back. The horses knew the sound that the engine made when it was struggling against a tough row of wheat, when the throttle sped up, and they’d stop and wait until the sound of the engine would go back to normal, at which point they’d take off again of their own accord. As if the horses were living instruments” (Lucio Belladona).
24 The factory built so-called Concept Cars, automobiles designed as models to be later tested and line-produced. With an order from Chrysler, they formulated the prototype of the Valiant III. They built the Vans for Škoda Auto, new jeeps, sports cars. Many cars you see on the street today, they were the first to build them. They worked for the branches of Fiat and Kaiser Motors in Córdoba. Headquarters would send them the characteristics of the vehicle they wanted developed. They would conceptualize and build it, piece by piece. The engine, the frame, the upholstery, the windows, the wheels, the bodywork, the paint rectification and final adjustments, everything. Each car was valued somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000. It would take them six to eight months to build one. The cars could be driven out of the factory when finished.
25 The process is classic. An investment fund (a hedge fund) buys 51 % of the shares. Once the company is under their control, the board of directors votes a structural dividend over the capital to recover their initial investment. Technically, it is called the emptying out — or laundering — of a company (Wash and wear system).
26 “A little history. The first major enclosed commercial center, the Southdale Shopping Center, near Minneapolis (in the U.S.), was built in 1956. The Great Commercial Center consists of a vast, central area (the ‘mall’) and a large market at the far end of the gallery that anchors the Center. The Center offers everything ‘under one roof,’ allowing customers to shop regardless of the weather, always avoiding parking problems, and bringing clients together in one large, single space, with heating and air-conditioning, and many different locales to purchase quality products and brand names. The Center also becomes a recreational area for the entire family. The project scheduled to be built in our town, already presented to the military administrator, would be the first of its kind in Argentina” (El Pregón, August 2, 1971).
27 “The term carry trade refers to speculation of assets used to guarantee loans. The rescue mortgages have much higher interest rates than standard market rates, and the fees for the middlemen are notoriously high. In such cases, the loan might be sold two or three different times and form part of direct financial transactions through the purchase of bonds and assets securitization. The investment fund prevents the mortgage from being settled and overwrites the speculative interests to the initial loan. They do this without allowing for the possibility of paying off the mortgage, in the meantime speculating with the pay-off date. Many assets are thus transferred into the power of large financial entities” (El Cronista Comercial, February 3, 1971).
14
Old Man Belladona’s large house was on top of a hill, behind a eucalyptus grove. To get there, you had to walk up a path that wound through the trees. Renzi had hired a car in town; when he let him out at a turn in the road, near the path that led to the electric fence and the entrance gate, the driver told him how to walk up to the house. The large house had its name carved in wrought-iron lettering: Los Reyes. Before Renzi reached the fence, a security officer with a tired-looking face came out, communicated on a walkie-talkie with someone inside the house, and after a while opened the gate and let him in. Renzi waited in a large hall, with tall ceilings and windows facing the gardens, and paintings and photographs on the walls above leather couches, all of which made the place seem like the waiting room of a public building.