Señora Naidath sighed deeply.
I found the woman’s tribulations diverting. While I tied my tie, I smiled to imagine her gigantic husband, a salt-and-pepper-haired Pole, with a cockatoo’s nose, shouting at Doña Rebeca.
Señor Josias Naidath was a Jew more generous than a Sobieski-era hetman.23 A strange man. He hated Jews so much it made him sick, and his grotesque anti-Semitism displayed itself in an elaborately obscene vocabulary. Of course, this was a generalised hatred rather than a dislike of anyone in particular.
Friends trying to get one over on him had cheated him many times before, but he didn’t want to believe this and in his house, to the despair of Señora Rebeca, one could always find fat badly-turned-out German immigrant adventurers, who stuffed themselves at his table with sauerkraut and sausages, and who laughed slobbery great laughs, rolling their inexpressive blue eyes.
The Jew looked after them until they found work, making use of the contacts he had as a painter and a freemason. Sometimes they robbed him; there was one scoundrel who disappeared over night from a house they were renovating, taking with him ladders, planks and cans of paint.
When Señor Naidath found out that the night watchman, his protégé, had run off like this, his cries reached up to heaven. He was like Thor in a fury… but he didn’t do anything.
His wife was the prototype of the sordid, avaricious Jewess.
I remember that when my sister was younger, she went to visit them in their house one day. She openly admired a beautiful heavily laden plum-tree and, understandably enough, wanted to taste its fruit, and asked shyly if she could have a plum.
And Señora Naidath reproached her:
‘Hijita… If you want to eat plums, you can buy all the plums you want in the market.’
‘Pour yourself some tea, Señora Naidath.’
The Jewess carried on with her lamenting narrative:
‘Then he shouted at me, and all the neighbours heard, Frau, he shouted at me: “You daughter of a Jewish butcher, Jewish pig, protecting your son all the time.” As if he weren’t Jewish, as if Maximito wasn’t his son too.’
But actually, Señora Naidath and her doltish son Maximito worked well together to cheat the Freemason and get money from him that they then spent on fripperies; theirs was a con game that Señor Naidath knew about and which it was enough merely to mention to get him to blow his top.
Maximito, the cause of these ridiculous quarrels, was a twenty-eight-year-old rogue, who was ashamed of being Jewish and of being a painter.
In order to hide his shameful condition, that of being a working man, he dressed himself up as a gentleman, wore spectacles and each night before going to bed rubbed glycerine into his hands.
I knew some juicy stories about his mischievous tricks.
Once he secretly collected some money a bar-owner owed his father. He was twenty years old and thought that he had a flair for music, so he spent the total on a magnificent gilded harp. Maximito explained, on his mother’s urging, that he had won some pesos as a part share in a lottery ticket, and Señor Naidath said nothing, but looked suspiciously at the harp, and the guilty couple trembled like Adam and Eve in Paradise under the gaze of Jehovah.
The days went by. Maximito played the harp and the old Jewess rejoiced. These things happen. Señora Rebeca told her friends that Maximito was a very promising harpist, and people, when they saw the harp in the corner of the dining room, agreed.
However, despite his generosity, Josias was at times a prudent man, and soon realised the scam by which magnanimous Maximito had become the owner of the harp.
And so, Señor Naidath, who was extremely strong, got on top of the situation and, as the Psalmist recommends, spoke little and did much.
It was Saturday, but Señor Josias didn’t give a damn for the precepts of Moses; by way of a prologue he gave his wife two kicks up the backside, then he grabbed Maximito by the shirt-collar and, after giving him a dusting-off, took him out into the street; as for the neighbours who had come out of doors in shirtsleeves and who were having a wonderful time with the ruckus, Señor Naidath threw the harp at their heads from an upstairs window.
This made life much happier for all concerned, and that’s why people said of the Jew that ‘Señor Naidath… he’s a good man.’
I finished sprucing myself up, and went out.
‘Well, goodbye, Frau, say hello to your husband and to Maximito from me.’
‘Aren’t you going to say thank you?’ my mother interrupted.
‘I already said it.’
The Hebrew woman raised her envious little eyes from the slices of buttered bread and weakly held out her hands. I could see that she was already wishing me failure in my venture.
I got to Palomar as it was getting dark.
When I asked the way, an old man who was sitting smoking on a bundle under the green light of the station, indicated to me, with an admirable economy of gesture, a way through the shadows.
I realised that I was dealing with a completely indifferent man; I didn’t want to abuse his reticence, so, knowing almost as much as before I’d asked his help, I said thank you and set off.
The old man called after me:
‘Hey, kid, you got ten centavos?’
I thought about not giving him anything, but I thought that if God existed then he could help me in my task if I helped the old man, and so, not without a certain hidden pain, I went over to give him a coin.
The raggedy man then became more explicit. He got up from his bundle and signalled a point in the darkness with a trembling arm:
‘Look, kid… Carry on, straight on and then the officers’ club is on the left.’
And so I walked.
The wind moved the dry leaves of the eucalyptus, and, striking the tree trunks and the high telegraph wires, whistled howlingly.
Crossing the muddy road, feeling my way along a wire fence, and moving as quickly as the terrain allowed, I reached the building which the old man had pointed out as the Club.
Uncertain, I stopped. Should I call? There was no soldier on guard duty in front of the door, behind the railings.
I went up three steps and then bravely, or so I thought, entered a narrow wooden corridor — the whole building was made out of wood — and stopped in front of the doorway of an oblong room with a table in the middle.
Around the table, three officers, one of them lying on a sofa by the sideboard, another with his elbows on the table, and a third with his feet up in the air, leaning his seatback against a wall, were making desultory conversation in front of five bottles of different colours.
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m here because of the advertisement, sir.’
‘The vacancies have been filled.’
I shot back, absolutely tranquil, filled with the serenity that comes after a piece of bad luck:
‘Goodness, that’s a shame, because I’m an inventor myself, I’d have been right at home here.’
‘And what have you invented? Come in, sit down,’ a captain said, sitting up on the sofa.