40 A man in the country, riding a spirited colt in the plains at dawn, a splotch on the bright line of the horizon. In the distance, a gaucho drinking mate under the eaves of his country house. When the rider passes in front of the house, the country man at the house says hello. “Nice little morning,” the rider says. “I made it myself,” the other answers, adjusting the shawl on his shoulders.
41 “Chapter 10 of the novel “The Law-Writer,” is centered around the copyist Nemo (No One). Melville (who wrote “Bartleby” in November of 1853) probably read that chapter of the Dickens novel in April of that year, when it was first published in Harper’s magazine in New York. Dickens’s Bleak House which narrates the story of an endless trial and describes the world of the courts and its judges, was much admired by Kafka” (Note by Renzi).
19
The trial was an event. It was actually a hearing, not a trial. Still, everyone in town took it as a decisive event and referred to it as the lawsuit, the trial, the proceedings—depending on the point of view of the speaker — to indicate its transcendent nature. Like every transcendent occurrence, it was related — or so everyone thought — to justice and truth, but what was really at play behind these abstractions was the life of a man, the future of the region, and a handful of very specific, practical questions. You couldn’t say that there were two equal sides opposing each other, because the two opposing sides were not equal. And yet, one had the impression of attending an actual contest. On the streets of the town that day small groups of people commented time and again on the facts, as if all past history was to be decided in the lawsuit against Luca Belladona, or in the lawsuit that Luca Belladona had initiated against the municipality — depending on the point of view of the speaker. What was being litigated, apparently, was the $100,000 that Luca was seeking to reclaim. But plenty of other things were at stake, too, all of which became evident as soon as Cueto started to speak and the judge nodded along to every one of the Prosecutor’s statements.
The judge, the Honorable Gainza, was a justice of the peace; that is, a municipal functionary assigned to resolve local disputes. He sat on an elevated dais, at the front of the Misdemeanor Court of the Municipality, with a court clerk to his side. The prosecutor Cueto was at a table below, to the left. Sitting next to Cueto was Saldías, the new Chief of Police. At another table, to the right, was Luca Belladona, dressed in his Sunday best, with a gray shirt and a gray tie, very serious, with papers and folders in his hands, occasionally consulting with the ex-seminarian Schultz.
A lot of people were authorized to be present at the hearing. Madariaga was there, as well as Rosa Estévez, several estancia owners and auctioneers from the area, and even Cooke the Englishman, the owner of the horse at the center of the dispute. The Belladona sisters were there, but not their father. Everyone was smoking and talking at the same time, the windows in the room were open, and you could hear the rumble of the voices from those who hadn’t been able to get in and were crowded, instead, in the hallways and the neighboring courtrooms. Inspector Croce wasn’t there either, although he’d already signed himself out of the asylum and was living now above the Madariaga Store and Tavern in a small room that he was renting there. Croce thought that everything was already fixed, and he didn’t want his presence there to legitimize his rival, Cueto, who was certain to win the hand with his shady dealings. There weren’t very many women present; the five or six who were there stood out because of their self-assured attitude. One of them, a beautiful woman — Bimba, Lucio’s wife — sat impassively, haughty, behind her dark sunglasses.
Renzi walked in late and had to nudge his way into the room. When he finally settled in at a wooden bench near Bravo, his eyes met Luca’s. The Industrialist smiled at him calmly, as if he wanted to transmit his confidence to the few people there to support him. Renzi looked only at him the whole afternoon, because he thought that Luca needed to be supported by the presence of an outsider who truly believed in his words. In the course of the next two or three hours — Renzi didn’t know exactly how long he spent in the courtroom, although there was a clock hanging on the wall that rang every half hour, and it rang several times — Luca looked at Renzi every time he was in a difficult position, or when he’d made a good point in his arguments. As if Renzi were the only one who understood him precisely because he wasn’t from there.
The justice of the peace, of course, had already taken sides before the so-called reconciliation hearing started, as had most of the people there. Those who speak about reconciliation and dialogue are always the ones already holding the pan by the handle with the whole affair cooked up. That’s the truth. Renzi realized right away that there was an air of anticipated victory, and that Luca — with his clear eyes and the slow, calculated movements of someone who feels violence all around him — was lost before he began. The judge pointed at and ceded the floor to him. Luca wavered for a moment before speaking, as if hesitating, as if he couldn’t find the words to start. Finally he got up, stretched out his close-to-two-meter frame, and stood sideways to the court, looking directly at Cueto — because it was to Cueto to whom he was really speaking.
Luca looked like someone with a skin condition suddenly exposed to the sun. After so many months of living in the factory, the large courtroom, with all the people, gave him a kind of vertigo. Returning to town and appearing there, in front of everyone he hated and held responsible for his ruin, was the first affront he suffered that afternoon. He felt and looked like a fish out of water. Luca raised his hand to ask for silence, even though not even a fly was stirring. Cueto leaned toward Saldías, smiling and relaxed, and said something in a low voice, and the other smiled back. “Good, okay, friends,” Luca said, as if beginning a sermon. “We have come to ask for what is ours.” He didn’t speak directly about the money under dispute, but rather about the certainty that the gathering that day was a necessary procedure — an uncomfortable procedure, if one were to judge by his mistrustful attitude — for the factory to remain in the hands of those who’d built it. The money — which Luca didn’t talk about, and which belonged to his family, and which his father had decided to cede to him as an advance on his inheritance from his mother — was destined solely to pay off the mortgage that weighed upon his life like the sword of Damocles. They’d been threatened and attacked, they’d been surprised in their previous goodwill by the intruders who’d infiltrated and eventually taken over the company. But they’d resisted, which is why they were there that afternoon. He didn’t talk about his rights, he didn’t talk about what was at stake, he talked only about what he cared about: his insane project to continue by himself in the factory, building what he called his works, his inventions, and his illusion that they might leave him—“that they might leave us”—alone. He paused and there was a murmur, but it wasn’t clear if it was a murmur of approval or condemnation. Luca remained standing for a moment in front of the room, looking back and forth from his sisters to Cueto and Renzi, the only ones who seemed to understand what was happening. Luca spoke without raising his voice, with confidence and self-assuredness, without ever realizing the trap he was falling into. It was a catastrophic error — he rushed toward his own end without a thought, without seeing anything, blinded by his pride and his credulity. You could tell he was only chasing a dream, that he was chasing one dream after another, never knowing where the adventure would end, always certain it was the only thing he could do: defend his dream, which everyone thought was impossible. He said something along these lines, Luca did, as a conclusion. The Honorable Gainza — a cunning old judge who spent his nights playing dice in the clandestine casino near the coast — smiled at Luca condescendingly, and gave the last word to the Prosecutor.