“A party in City Bell. And you killed Luciana off, how silly, she’s perfectly alive, still getting laid all the time.” She looked at him, seriously. “And now you write a bunch of poppycock for the paper.”
“I’ve never heard that word. Poppycock. Is it a compliment?”
Her eyes were a strange color, her pupils would suddenly expand and cover her irises.
“Give me a cigarette, will you?”
“And how is she?” Renzi asked. It’s what they had in common, he hung on to keep the conversation alive.
“I haven’t the faintest idea. And of course her name wasn’t Luciana, that’s what she told people because she didn’t like her real name.”
“Right, her name was Cecilia.”
“Her name is. But I haven’t seen her in years. She used to come here in the summer with her husband. One of those idiots who plays polo all the time, she wanted to study the philosophy of Simone Weil, can you imagine? And she also had some kind of adventure with you, I’m sure she told you she was going to leave her husband.”
“I loved her,” Emilio said. They remained quiet for a moment. She smiled at him. “What do you do?” he asked.
“I take care of my father.”
“Other than that?”
Sofía looked at him, but didn’t answer.
“Come on, let me show you where I live. We can talk a while longer.”
They walked down a hallway and came out on the other side of the house. An open back porch faced a lawn and gardens. On the other end of the yard there was a guesthouse with two large windows, lighted up.
“We can sit here,” Sofía said. “I’ll get some white wine.”
They had grown silent. A nocturnal butterfly flickered around the light with the same determination with which a thirsty animal approaches a puddle. Finally it hit against the lighted lamp and fell to the ground, partially singed. An orangish splash of dust burned for a moment in the air, then dissolved like water in water.
“In the summer I get very skinny,” Sofía said, looking at her arms. “I live outside. When I was a little girl I forced myself to sleep out in the fields with a blanket, under the stars, to see if I could overcome my fear of being out there. Because Ada didn’t want to, she’s afraid of insects, she prefers the winter.”
Sofía walked back and forth along the edge of the porch with a soft smile on her face, distant and peaceful. Like all very intelligent women who are also beautiful, Renzi thought, she considered her beauty to be annoying because it gave men the wrong idea about what she was really like. As if wanting to refute what he was thinking, Sofía stopped in front of him, grabbed his hand, and brought it to her chest.
“Tomorrow I’ll take you to meet my brother,” she said.
28 One of the most widely disseminated stories in the countryside, the legend has it that after the Campaign of the Desert, the State divided the lands taken from the Indians and distributed it to the officers using a method entirely in line with Argentine traditions. The individual would gallop as far as his horse could go, and the rider would be given the land he had managed to cover, galloping, without stopping. Commonly the soldiers would ride the Indians’ extraordinary horses, which could run for days on end, in long, smooth gallops, without tiring. If one keeps in mind the facts about the distribution of land in the country, it is difficult to believe the extension of that solitary ride. In 1914, half of the Argentine extension — the five provinces of the wet pampas — was occupied by gigantic estancias in the hands of very few owners. And nothing has changed since then. According to the latest estimates from the National Agricultural Census, in 1969: 124 million hectares, with 59.6 % of the total land in the hands of 1,260 owners (2.5 % of the total population).
PART II
15
From a distance the building looks like a fortress, rectangular and dark. In recent months the Industrialist — as everyone here calls him — has reinforced the original structure with steel planks and wooden partitions, and he’s had two guard towers raised at the southeast and southwest corners of the factory. These turrets look over the plains that extend for thousands of kilometers toward Patagonia and the end of the continent. All the transoms, glass roofs, and windows are broken and haven’t been replaced because his enemies would simply break them again. The same goes for the outside lights, the bulbs of the street lamps, which someone has smashed by throwing rocks at them — except for a handful of the tallest lamps, still on that late afternoon, soft and yellow in the twilight. The outside walls are covered by torn, re-glued posters and political graffiti, all seemingly repeating the same slogan—Perón Returns. Written in different styles by a variety of groups, the posters all show the same smiling face ready as always to come back from anything, they all claim and celebrate the imminent return — or hope for return — of the General Juan Domingo Perón. Flocks of pigeons fly in and out of holes in the walls and the broken windows, and circle above the premises; below, stray dogs bark at each other, or lie in the shade under the trees along the broken sidewalks. Luca hasn’t been outside the factory in months, to avoid seeing the landscape and the decrepitude of the outside world. He remains indifferent to everything outside the plant. Echoes and threats reach him, still, voices and laughter and the sound of cars speeding by on the highway, near the fence, on the other side of the factory’s parking areas and loading zone.
After ringing the bell several times outside the locked, chained front iron door, and after leaning through a broken window and clapping their hands trying to get someone’s attention, they were finally received by Luca Belladona himself. Tall, polite, oddly dressed in very warm clothes for the time of year — with a large, black leather cardigan, a gray flannel pair of pants, a thick, leather jacket, and Patria boots — he asked them to come directly up to the main offices. They could visit the factory plant a little later, he told them. They walked down a gallery, where the enclosing glass was broken and dirty, and there were phrases and words drawn along the inside walls, too. Things Luca had written there, he explained, things he couldn’t afford to forget.
There was a layer of green covering the ground, in the interior courtyard, a smooth pampa of herbs as far as the eye could see. Luca would empty his mate and dump the herbs out the window from his study above. Or, sometimes, when he walked back and forth along the balconies, he’d change the herbs in his mate and dump the old ones into the interior opening of the building while he heated up water for a new one. Now he had a natural park with pigeons and sparrows fluttering above the green mantle.
His bedroom was upstairs, in the west wing of the building, close to one of the old meeting rooms, in a small space that used to be a filing room. It had a foldout bed, a small table, and several cupboards with papers and medicine bottles. Luca chose the room so he wouldn’t have far to go when he undertook his calculations and experiments. He could just stay in that wing of the factory, walk down the hallway, and go downstairs to his office. Sometimes, he told them all of a sudden, when he got out of bed and walked down the hallway in the morning, he’d write whatever dream he remembered on the wall, because dreams fade and are forgotten as easily as we breathe, so they have to be written wherever you are when you remember them. The death of his brother Lucio and his mother running away were the central themes that appeared — sometimes successively, other times alternatively — in the majority of his dreams. “They form a series,” he told them. “Series A,” he said, showing them a chart and several diagrams. When the dreams moved on to other subjects, he’d write them in another section, under a different key. “This is Series B,” he said. He repeated that in recent days he’d been dreaming mostly about his mother in Dublin and his dead brother.