Filled with emotion I touched a match to the fuse; a little dark flame leapt under the sun and suddenly a terrible report enveloped us in a nauseating cloud of white smoke. For an instant we were stricken dumb with wonder: it seemed that in that moment we had discovered a new continent, or had by sorcery been translated into the masters of the earth. Suddenly someone shouted:
‘Scram! The fuzz!’
There was not sufficient time to make a dignified retreat. Two policemen were coming towards us at full pelt, we hesitated… and suddenly with great leaps and bounds we fled, abandoning the bombard to the enemy.
Enrique’s parting words:
‘Che, if you need any scientific data, then I’ve got a collection of Around the World magazine at home and I can lend them to you.’
From that day forth up until the night of our greatest jeopardy, our friendship was like the friendship of Orestes and Pylades.3
Such a new picturesque world I discovered in the Irzubeta house!
Unforgettable people! Three men and two women, and the house governed by the mother, a woman the colour of salt and pepper, with small fish eyes and a large inquisitional nose, and the grandmother bent double, deaf, and blackened like a tree-trunk burnt in a fire.
With the exception of one absentee, who was the police officer, in that quiet cave everybody lay around unused, in sweet idleness, passing in their leisure time from the novels of Dumas to the comforting sleep of the siesta, and thence to amiable twilight gossip.
Their worries would spring up at the beginning of the month. At this point they would have to deter their creditors, sweet-talk the ‘Spanish bastards’,4 calming the excesses of the plebeians who tactlessly came right up to the outer door and shouted, asking to be paid for the goods which they had ingenuously handed over on credit.
The owner of the cave was a fat Alsatian, called Grenuillet. Rheumatic, neurasthenic and in his seventies, he eventually got used to the irregularities of the Irzubetas, who paid him his rent every now and then. Previously he had tried unsuccessfully to evict them, but the Irzubetas were related to long-established judges and other people of that type from the conservative party, which was how they knew themselves to be immoveable.
The Alsatian eventually resigned himself to waiting for regime change, and the flagrant shamelessness of these idlers reached the point where they would send Enrique to ask the landlord for free tickets to the Casino; his son worked there as a porter.
Ah! And what well-spiced remarks, what Christian reflections could be heard from the local gossips, who held their conclave in the neighbourhood butcher’s shop, and commented devoutly on their neighbours’ lives.
This is what the mother of an extremely ugly girl said in reference to one of the young Irzubetas, who had, in a fit of lust, displayed his private parts to the maiden:
‘Just you wait, I hope I don’t ever get my hands on him, because it’d be worse for him than if a train ran him over.’
This is what Hipólito’s mother said, a fat woman with an extremely white face who was always pregnant, as she grasped the butcher’s arm:
‘I advise you, Don Segundo, not to trust them an inch. They’ve squeezed so much out of us I can’t tell you.’
‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ the brawny man would grumble sternly, fencing with his enormous knife in and out of a lung.
Ah! And how happy the Irzubetas were. Ask the baker who had the cheek to complain about how far his creditors were in arrears; ask him to say it isn’t so.
This baker was complaining to one of the girls when he had the bad luck to be overheard by the police officer, who happened to be passing by the house.
The police officer, accustomed to settle all problems by judicious blows and knocks, and irritated by the insolence displayed in the fact that the baker wanted to be paid what he was owed, beat the man out of the house with his own fists. This was a salutary lesson in manners, and many people preferred not to demand payment. And so, this family’s life was cheerier than a one-act farce.
The maidens of the family, past twenty-six and not a boyfriend between them, enjoyed themselves with Chateaubriand, sank back into Lamartine and Cherbuliez. This led them to entertain the conviction that they were part of an intellectual ‘elite’, and it was this that in its turn led them to refer to poor people as riffraff.
The grocer who tried to get payment for his beans was riffraff; the shopkeeper from whom they had beggingly coaxed a few metres of lace was riffraff; riffraff too was the butcher who lost it when the ladies unwillingly called through his shutters that ‘next month we’ll pay you for sure’.
The three brothers, hairy and thin, tramps in all their glory, sunbathed throughout the day and when it got dark put on their suits and went off to cultivate love affairs among the dissolute women in the slum districts of town.
The two blessed and discontented old women squabbled at any moment over trifles, or, sitting with their daughters in the ancient hall, would spy on people through the curtains, or else they gossiped; as they were descended from an official who had served in Napoleon I’s army, I often heard them, from the penumbra that idealised those bloodless faces, dreaming their imperialist myths, evoking the stale splendours of nobility, while on the lonely pavement the lamplighter with his pole crowned by a violet flame lit the green gas lamp.
As they had no way to keep a maid, and also as no servant would have been able to support the goatish vigour of the three hairy louts and the bad humour of the irritable maidens and the whims of the toothy old witches, Enrique was the intermediary needed for the right functioning of that lame economic machinery, and so accustomed was he to ask for credit that his shamelessness was both unheard-of and exemplary. One can say in his praise that a bronze statue would show embarrassment more easily than his refined features.
Irzubeta would spend his long hours of free time in sketching, a skill at which he did not lack either invention or delicacy, which is a fine argument to show that there have always been good-for-nothings with aesthetic ability. As I had nothing to do, I was often in his house, a circumstance that did not please the old women, about whom I didn’t give a damn.
From my union with Enrique, from the long conversations we had about bandits and thieves, we developed a strange predisposition to commit acts of mischief ourselves, and an infinite desire to gain immortality as delinquents.
Enrique once said to me, apropos of the expulsion of some bandits, some ‘apaches’ who had emigrated from France to Buenos Aires, and whose case had been reported by Soiza Reilly in an article accompanied by eloquent photographs:
‘The President of the Republic has four “apaches” for his bodyguards.’
I laughed.
‘Stop pulling my leg.’
‘It’s true, I’m telling you, and they’re like this.’ And he opened his arms like a crucified man to give me some idea of the thoracic capacity of these dyed-in-the-wool thugs.
I don’t remember how, by what subtleties and casuistry, we managed to convince ourselves that robbery was a meritorious and beautiful act; but I do know that it was by mutual agreement that we decided to organise a gang of thieves, whose initial membership was ourselves alone.
Later we would see… And in order to kick off our activities in a befitting manner we decided to begin by ransacking abandoned houses. This is how we did it: