‘Wow.’
‘It’s incredible. I read all about it in The Citizen, one of the papers they publish over there.’
‘And now he’s in prison?’
‘In the dark, as he used to say… But guess how long his sentence actually is. He’s a minor, and his family knows people with influence.’
‘It’s strange: I can see Enrique having a great future.’
‘Yes. They didn’t call him The Faker for nothing.’
We fell silent. I remembered Enrique. In my mind I was back there with him, in the shack with the puppets. A sunbeam illuminated his thin, proud, adolescent profile.
In a hoarse voice, Lucio continued:
‘The struggle for life, che, some people change and some fall by the wayside; that’s life… But I’d better be off, my shift’s about to start… If you want to meet up, here’s my address.’ And he gave me a card.
When, after an extended goodbye, I found myself a long way away, alone in the brightly lit streets, I could still hear his hoarse voice ringing in my ears:
‘The struggle for life, che… some people change and some fall by the wayside… That’s life!’
Now I could approach the tradesmen with the air of an expert salesman, and with the certainty that my time of frustration was now over, because I had now ‘made a sale’; I quickly had a modest clientele made up of stallholders from the fair, pharmacists with whom I could talk about picric acid and suchlike, booksellers and two or three grocers, who were the least profitable and most given to haggling.
In order not to waste too much of my time I divided the areas of Caballito, Flores, Vélez Sarsfield and Villa Crespo into zones which I covered systematically once a week.
I got up extremely early and went to the predetermined area with large strides. From those days I remember a huge bright sky over horizons of small whitewashed houses, factories with red walls and, at the edges of the zones, greenery, cypresses and fruit trees round the white domes of the cemetery.
Of those flat suburban streets, miserable and dirty, sunstruck, with rubbish bins at the gates, with fat women, dirty and with their hair uncombed, chatting in doorways and every now and then calling out to their children and their dogs under the arch of the clearest, cleanest sky, I retain a cool, tall and beautiful memory.
My eyes avidly drank in the infinite, ecstatic serenity in that blue space.
Burning flames of hope and illusion wrapped my spirit and the happy inspiration towards honesty that sprouted within me was so great that I was unable to put it into words.
And the more captivated I was by the dome of the heavens, the more vile were the places where I did business. I remember…
Those suburban grocers’ shops, those butchers!
In the darkness a ray of sun lit up the red-black carcasses hanging from hooks and ropes near the tin-topped counters. The floor was covered with sawdust and there was a smell of lard in the air; whole black colonies of flies boiled on pieces of yellow fat, and the impassive butcher would saw at bones or tenderise chops with the back of his knife… and outside… outside was the morning sky, calm and exquisite, dropping from its blueness the infinite sweetness of spring.
As I walked around the only thing that concerned me was space, smooth as a piece of porcelain within its blue parameters, intensifying to a deep-sea colour at the zenith, the colour of a high placid sea, where my eyes imagined they could see little islands, ports, marble cities set in green woods and ships with flowering masts that slipped between the songs the sirens sang, out towards the furious cities of joy.
I walked around like this, affected by a delightful violence.
It was as if I heard the noise of some night-time party; fireworks above my head let down their green cascades of stars, the pot-bellied genii of the world laughed down on earth and monkeys juggled as goddesses laughed to hear the sound of a toad playing the flute.
With these strange noises playing in my ears, with such visions dancing before my eyes, I covered great distances without noticing.
I went into markets and spoke to the stall-keepers, I sold them more produce or argued with people who were unhappy with what they had got. They would take strips of paper that would have made good streamers out from under their counters and say:
‘What do you expect me to do with these little strips?’
I would reply:
‘Oh, the cut isn’t always going to be as large as a sail. There’s a bit of everything in the Lord’s vineyard.’
These specious explanations did not tend to satisfy the merchants, who would call their fellow tradesmen as witnesses and swear that they would not buy a kilo more of paper from me.
Then I would pretend to be extremely indignant, would let slip a few unchristian words and rush behind the counter and go through the pile of paper until I came up with pieces of paper that could with a little bit of imagination be used to make a shroud for a cow.
‘And this?… Why don’t you show me this? Do you think I’m going to pick out every sheet of paper by hand? Why don’t you buy special cut if it’s so important?’
This was how I argued with the butchers and the citizen fishmongers, crude, dull people who liked to have a good argument.
On spring mornings I also liked to wander through the tram-riven streets bedecked with the awnings of merchants. I liked the department stores with their dark interiors, the cheese shops that were like farms with enormous piles of butter on the shelves, the shops with multi-coloured vitrines and women seated next to the display cabinets looking at bright rolls of fabrics; the smell of paint in the ironmongers, and the smell of petroleum in the general stores, these mixed in my senses like the fragrant aroma of an extraordinary happiness, of a universal and perfumed party, of which I was destined to be the future narrator.
On the glorious October mornings I felt powerful, as all-encompassing as a god.
If I was tired and went into a milkbar to have a drink, the shadows and the décor would make me dream of an ineffable Alhambra and the enclosed gardens of distant Andalusia, I would see little fields at the foot of the sierra, and in the bottom of valleys the silver ribbon of little streams. A woman singing, accompanying herself with a guitar, and in my memory the old Andalusian cobbler would appear once again, saying:
‘Jothe, he wath more beautiful than a rothe.’
Love, piety, gratitude towards life, towards books, towards the world would zap the blue nerve of my soul.
It was not me, but the god within me, a god made from fragments of mountain, of woods, of sky and of memory.
When I had sold enough paper I would head back, and because the distance grew longer as I walked back across it, I kept myself happy by dreaming of absurd things, like inheriting seventy million pesos, things like that. My fantasies would evaporate when Monti would address me indignantly when I went into the office:
‘The butcher in Remedios Street has sent back the paper.’
‘Why?’
‘How should I know! He said he didn’t like it.’