There were phrases in ink on the walls, words underlined or circled, arrows relating “one word family” to another.
He called Series A The Process of Individualization, and Series B The Unexpected Enemy.
“Our mother couldn’t stand her children being more than three years old, as soon as they turned three, she abandoned them.” When his mother found out about Lucio’s death, she almost traveled back to Argentina, but they had dissuaded her. “She was desperate, apparently, which surprised us, because she’d abandoned our brother when he was three years old, and she abandoned us, too, when we turned three. Extraordinary, isn’t it?” he asked, the small crooked mutt looking up at him sideways, its tail wagging with tired enthusiasm.
It was extraordinary. When their mother had abandoned them, their father had gone out to the street with a hammer in his hand, wearing only an overcoat, and he’d started pounding on their mother’s car — which meant that he loved her. The townspeople had looked on from the sidewalk by the main road, as the Old Man climbed on the hood of the car like a madman and struck the car repeatedly with the hammer. He wanted to throw acid on her, he wanted to burn her face off, but he didn’t go that far. His wife had left him for a man whom his father considered better than him — besides, his father didn’t want to have problems with the police, everyone knew what the Old Man was involved in, starting with his wife, who left him because she didn’t want to be his accomplice, or be forced to denounce him.
“Pregnant with me,” Luca said, going back to the first person singular. “The other man raised me for three years after I was born, as if he was my father, and I don’t even remember him. Not even his face, just the voices I could hear from the stage, he was a theater director, you know? But eventually she left him, too, moved to Rosario, then to Ireland, and I had to go back to my family house, that’s how it was, legally, since I have the same last name as the man who claims to be my father.”
Then Luca told them that he’d been looking for a secretary that week, not a lawyer or a simple typist, but a secretary. In other words, someone who could write down what he was thinking and what he needed to dictate. He smiled at them, and Renzi confirmed again that Luca — like a Russian starets, or like peasants — spoke in the plural when referring to his projects, and in the singular when talking about his own life. On the other hand, he said that he (“we”) had accepted that he (“we”) would be appearing in court to request that the money that his father had sent from his mother’s inheritance be turned over to him. He had all the documents and records necessary to file the claim.
“We had to hire someone who could take dictation and type up the proofs that we’ll be taking to court to reclaim the money that belongs to us. We don’t want lawyers, we’ll file the lawsuit ourselves, under the law of the defense of inherited family patrimonies.”
Right away he started talking about Cueto, the prosecutor. According to Luca, Cueto had been the company’s trusted attorney in the past, only to betray and drive them into bankruptcy. Now Cueto wanted to use his political post — to which he had risen through raw ambition, under the umbrage of the current powers — to confiscate the plant and the land it was on. Their plan was to keep the factory and build what they called an experimental center for agricultural exhibitions, in collusion with the area’s Rural Society. But first they’d have to litigate in district court, in the provincial and national courts, and even in the international tribunals, because Luca was (“we are,” he said) willing to do whatever it took to keep the factory up and running. It was an island, as he saw it, in the middle of an ocean of peasants and ranchers who cared only about fattening their cows and pulling riches from a land so rich that any ol’ fool could toss a handful of seeds, stand back, and watch his profits grow.
He was excited about the possibility of getting out of his own field for once, and taking a trip into town to defend himself before the law. He walked around the room as he spoke, in a state of great unrest, imagining every step of his defense. He was certain that a secretary would help him expedite his ability to prepare the necessary documents.
So he placed an ad on X10 Rural Radio for two consecutive days, he told them, announcing the opening for a private secretary. Several men showed up from the countryside, hats in hand, calm, bowlegged, horse-riding men, their faces darkly tanned but their foreheads white at the line of their hat brim. They were muleteers, herdsmen, horse tamers, out of work because of the recent concentration of the large estancias that was driving small farmers, tenants, and seasonal laborers to search for new jobs. Honorable men, as they said, who’d understood the word secretary as someone who can keep a secret. They’d come and applied for the position, ready to swear, “if it came to it,” that they could keep as quiet as the grave. Because, naturally, “they knew our story and our misfortunes,” Luca explained. They risked coming to the factory and were willing not to say a single word that they weren’t authorized to say. In addition, of course, they’d also do the necessary work, as they told him, turning both ways, looking at the walls and windows, expecting to see the corral where the animals might be, or the land they’d be expected to farm.
Two others arrived and applied as tiger hunters. Puma hunters, actually. First one with scars on his face and hands. Then a short, chubby man with clear eyes, skin pockmarked like dried leather, and only one arm. Both said they could track and kill a puma without a firearm, using just a poncho and a knife — even the one-armed guy, the man without a left arm, who everyone called Lefty. If there were any pumas left to kill, that is, and to kill by hand, as these hunters had always done, heading out at dawn through the grasslands to track the fattened tigers that lived off of the calves from the large ranches. The hunters went to the estancias and the farms looking for work, offering their services. They showed up at the factory, wary and distrustful as a puma that’s gotten lost at night and finds itself, in the morning, walking on the cobblestones of a town’s main road, sullen and alone.
But that wasn’t it. He wasn’t looking for a puma hunter, or a foreman, or an axeman — none of the things you might need in an estancia. He was looking for a technical secretary, someone who knew the secrets of the written word, someone who could help him face the vicissitudes of the battle in which he saw himself implicated, the long war he was waging against the rough forces of the region.
“Because in our case,” Luca said, “we’re talking about an actual military campaign, we’ve secured victories and suffered defeats. Napoleon’s always been our main point of reference, basically because of his ability to react in the face of adversity. We’ve studied Napoleon’s campaigns in Russia, and have found more military genius there than in his victories. That’s right. There’s more military genius in Waterloo than in Austerlitz, because in Waterloo the army didn’t want to retreat. It didn’t want to retreat,” Luca repeated. “Napoleon opened the front to the left, and his reinforcement troops arrived ten minutes too late. This delay, caused by natural causes (large rains storms), was Napoleon’s greatest act of genius. Everyone studies that defeat, in every military academy, it’s worth more than any of his victories.”