She went out to Esmeralda Street and came back carrying a white bundle. Then, in order to hurt her husband, who was insultingly singing a couplet at the door to the cave, she went to the kitchen and called Stinking God and me to her. Pale with fury, she gave me orders:
‘Take this table out, Silvio.’ Her eyes were greener than ever and there were two crimson patches on her cheeks. Without caring that the hem of her skirt would get dirty in the damp hovel, she bent over to gather the goods she would take with her.
Trying not to get stained with grease, I took the table — a board with four rotten legs — out of the room. This was where the wretched Stinking God prepared his witches’ brews.
The woman said:
‘Put it with the legs pointing upwards.’
I understood what she was thinking. She wanted to turn it into a barrow.
I was not wrong.
Stinking God used the broom to sweep a lot of cobwebs from the bottom of the table. And after wiping it clean with a cloth, the woman put down on the table a white bundle, the casseroles filled with plates, knives and forks, she tied the Primus stove to one leg of the table with a wire and, reddened by her efforts, said, as she surveyed the job nearly done:
‘That dog can go and eat in a hash joint.’
After he had finished arranging the packages, Stinking God, bent over the table, looked like a quadruped in a cap, and I, with my hands on my hips, was wondering where Don Gaetano was going to find our petty wages.
‘You, take the front.’
Stinking God, resigned, took hold of the board and so did I.
‘Go slow,’ the woman cried out cruelly.
We knocked over a pile of books as we walked past Don Gaetano.
‘Go on, you pig… go on,’ he said.
She gritted her teeth in fury.
‘Thief!.. The judge will come tomorrow.’ We went away in the pause between two threatening gestures.
It was seven o’clock in the evening and Lavalle Street was showing off its most Babylonian splendour. Through the plate-glass windows you could see that the cafés were crammed with customers; carefree dandies gathered in the entrances of the theatres and cinemas; and the windows of clothes shops — which displayed legs in sheer stockings hanging from nickel-plated bars — and those of jewellery stores and orthopaedic stores all showed by their opulence the cunning of the businessmen who used their spiffy goods to flatter the voluptuousness of the wealthy.
The crowd parted as we came by, as they did not want us to stain them with the dirt we were carrying.
Ashamed, I thought about the ridiculous figure I must be presenting; to crown my unfortunate situation, the plates and cutlery were making a scandalous noise, as if announcing my ignominy. People stopped to watch us go past, enjoying the spectacle. I didn’t look at anyone, I felt so humiliated, and, like the cruel fat woman who walked ahead of us and slowed us down, I endured the jokes that our appearance provoked.
Various cabs escorted us, their drivers offering us their services, but Doña María, deaf to them all, walked in front of the table, whose legs caught the light that came from the shop windows. In the end, the drivers gave up their pursuit.
Every now and then Stinking God would lift his bearded face towards me over his green scarf. Thick drops of sweat ran down his dirty cheeks, and in his sad eyes there shone a doglike despair.
We rested in Lavalle Plaza. Doña María made us put the improvised barrow down on the ground and scrupulously examined its load, reorganised the bundle and settled the casseroles, whose lids she secured in place with the four corners of a dishcloth.
Bootblacks and newspaper boys had surrounded us. The prudent presence of a policeman helped us avoid possible complications, and we went on our way again. Doña María was going to the house of one of her sisters who lived at Callao and Viamonte.
Sometimes she would turn her pale face, look at me, with a slight smile twisting her colourless lips, and say:
‘Are you tired, Silvio?’ Her smile would ease my shame; it was almost a caress that cheered my heart after the spectacle of her cruelty. ‘Are you tired, Silvio?’
‘No, Señora.’ The woman, turning away from me with a smile that reminded me of Enrique Irzubeta’s smile when he escaped from the police, continued her angry way.
Now we were going down lonely streets, scarcely lit, with burgeoning plantains by the pavements, tall buildings with beautiful façades and windows covered with opulent curtains.
We went past an open balcony.
A young man and a young woman were talking in the shadows; the sound of a piano came from the orange-lit room.
My heart contracted with envy and sadness.
I thought.
I thought that I would never be like them… I would never live in a beautiful house and have an aristocratic girlfriend.
My heart contracted with envy and sadness.
‘We’re nearly there,’ said the woman.
A deep sigh swelled our chests.
When Don Gaetano saw us coming back into the cave, he shouted, raising his arms cheerfully to the sky:
‘Let’s go and eat in the hotel, guys!.. Hey, you’d like that, Don Miguel? We’ll go there later. Shut the door, shut the door, strunzo.’
A marvellously childish smile altered Stinking God’s face.
Sometimes at night I would think of the beauty with which poets made the world shake, and my heart would flood with pain, like a mouth filling with a scream.
I thought of the parties they went to, the parties in the city, the parties in the city parks lit with torches bright as the sun in the flowering gardens, and my poverty fell from my hands.
I do not have words, I cannot find words, to ask for mercy.
My soul is desolate and ugly as a bare knee.
I am looking for a poem I cannot find, the poem sung by a body that has suddenly been peopled by despair, been given a thousand vast mouths, two thousand shouting lips.
Distant voices reach my ears, resplendent pyrotechnics, but I am here alone, as if held down to my world of misery by nine stakes.
Third floor, apartment 4, Charcas 1600. That was the address where I had to deliver the package of books.
These luxurious apartment blocks are strange and unique.
From the outside, with their harmonious lines of friezes that emphasise the sumptuousness of the proud and complicated cornices, with their wide windows protected by bent glass, they make the poor devils who look at them believe in similar refinements of luxury and power; on the inside, the polar darkness of their deep and lonely halls cools the spirits of anyone who loves wide open skies covered with cloudy Valhallas.
I stopped in front of the porter, an athletic fellow in a blue uniform who was reading a newspaper with an air of self-sufficiency.
He looked me over from head to toe like the guardian of some dread portal; then, happy to have reached the hypothetical conclusion that I was no thief, he allowed me to come in, with the sort of indulgence that could only have arisen from his proud blue cap with its gold frogging over the visor. All he said was:
‘The lift, over to the left.’
When I came out of the iron cage I found myself in a dark corridor with a low ceiling.
A polished lamp spread its dying light over the polished tiles.
The door to the apartment was a single unglassed panel, and its little round bronze lock made it look like the door to some gigantic steel safe.
I rang the bell, and a maid in a black uniform with a white apron showed me into a room papered in blue, with livid golden lilies.
Through the glass that was covered in moiré gauze came a clear blue light like that of a hospital. A piano, girlish touches, bronzes, vases: I looked at everything. Suddenly a most delicate perfume announced her presence: a side door opened and I found myself confronted by a woman with a childish face, thin ringlets hanging down her cheeks, and a generous décolleté. A cherry-coloured velveteen robe did not cover her little white-and-gold slippers.