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“It’s barely a whisper. To think that people give it back because they find the noise annoying! It’s a disgrace!”

Mom nodded, but she was thinking of a different disgrace. Dad was enthralled by the Brain — he was the only one who’d heard its music — while Mom was looking around and seemed more interested in what was happening in the theater. Thunderous laughter was coming from inside, shaking the whole building. It must have been a full house. Leonor Rinaldi, Tomás Simari, and their troupe were performing one of those vulgar, broad comedies that used to tour the provinces for years on end; people never seemed to tire of laughing at them. The secret, tremulous music supposedly emanating from the Brain could hardly compete with all the guffaws and stomping.

My mother, proud heir to a line of sophisticated music lovers, reciters, and tragedians, disdained those products of popular taste epitomized by Leonor Rinaldi. Indeed, she actively campaigned against them. The theater, for her, was disputed territory, a battlefield, because it was there that the classes of Pringles waged their cultural wars. Her brother directed an amateur dramatic society called The Two Masks, which was devoted to serious theater; the town’s other club, directed by Isolina Mariani, specialized in comedies of manners. All of Isolina Mariani’s devotees must have been in the stalls that night, keen to learn, admiring Leonor Rinaldi’s demagogic stagecraft, absorbing her mannerisms like an invigorating syrup.

Mom’s aversion was so extreme that on several occasions, when one of those popular companies was coming to town, she made us have dinner early, then drove us to the theater just as the play was about to start and parked the truck near the entrance (but not too close, choosing a place hidden in the shadows), so that she could check on who was going in. Usually there were no surprises: the audience was made up of poor people from the outer suburbs, “the great unwashed” as my mother used to call them, hardly worth a dismissive remark such as “What can you expect of ignorant fools like that?”

But occasionally there was someone “respectable” among them, and then she became zealous. She felt that her spying had been worthwhile, and that from now on she’d “know the score” when dealing with certain cultural hypocrites. Once, she went so far as to get out of the truck and rebuke a cultivated dentist who was climbing the steps of the theater with his daughters. She told him how disappointed she was to see him there. Wasn’t he ashamed to be supporting that vulgarity? And bringing his daughters! Was that his idea of education? Luckily, he didn’t take her too seriously. He replied, with a smile, that for him theater was sacred, even in its most debased forms, and that his primary objective was to expose his daughters to popular culture at its crudest in order to give them some perspective. Needless to say, his arguments made no impression on Mom.

Anyway. To return to the memorable evening of our encounter with the Musical Brain. We got into the truck and off we went. We had a yellow Ika pickup. Although the four of us could fit in the front, I usually sat in the back, in the open air, partly because I liked it, partly to keep the peace — I was always getting into noisy fights with my sister — but mainly so that I could spend some time with my good friend Geniol, the family dog. Geniol was very big and white, of indeterminate breed, and he had a large head (like the man in the Geniol ads, hence the name). We couldn’t leave him home alone because he howled and made such a racket the neighbors complained. But in the back of the truck he was well behaved.

There was also a more arcane reason why I liked to travel in the back: since I couldn’t hear what they were saying in front, it meant I didn’t know where we were going, and the itinerary would take on an unpredictable air of adventure. I knew where we were going when we set out, if I’d been paying attention, but as soon as Mom climbed into the truck she was bound to be overcome by a sudden curiosity and ask Dad to make a detour down one street or another so she could see a house, a store, a tree, or a sign. He was in the habit of humoring her, which meant that instead of going a few hundred yards in a straight line, we’d often end up driving five miles, following a tortuous, labyrinthine route. For my mother, who had never left Pringles, it was a way of expanding the town from within.

That night, all we had to do was turn the corner and go three blocks to our house. But we turned the other way, which didn’t surprise me. It was very cold, but there was no wind. The street lights at the intersections, suspended by four diagonal wires attached to the posts on the corners, were still. And, above us, the Milky Way was all lit up and full of winks. I settled Geniol on my legs and hugged him to my chest. He didn’t resist. His snow-white fur reflected the starlight. We continued straight ahead to the square and then took the boulevard. Sitting with my back against the cab, I could see the square tower of the city hall receding into the distance and I assumed that we were heading for the station, to satisfy one of Mom’s whims. The station was far away, and the mere supposition that we were going there made me drowsy. Geniol had already fallen asleep. A few blocks down the boulevard, the buildings began to thin out, giving way to big vacant lots taken over by mallows and thistles. Those mysterious plots belonged to no one. My eyes were beginning to close. .

Suddenly Geniol shook himself, jumped off my lap, went to one side of the truck and growled. His agitation startled and bewildered me. Struggling free of the muddle of sleep, I looked too, and understood why we’d made the detour, and why Dad was slowing down now, bringing the truck almost to a standstilclass="underline" we were passing the circus. My sister was leaning out the window in front and yelling in her half-articulate way, “César! The circus! The circus!” I knew, of course, that a circus had come to town; I’d seen the parades in the streets, and our parents had already promised to take us the following day. I stared, entranced. Points and lines of bright light showed through the canvas of the marquee, which seemed as big as a mountain, and the whole thing glowed with the light inside. A performance was under way: we could hear blaring music and the cries of the audience. The smell of the animals had made Geniol nervous. Behind the marquee, in the darkness, I thought I could see the silhouettes of elephants and camels moving among the wagons.

Many years later, I left Pringles, as young people with artistic or literary inclinations often leave small towns, hungry for the cultural offerings promised by the capital. And now, many years after that emigration, it strikes me that perhaps I was lured away by a mirage, because nights from my childhood in Pringles come back to me, each so vivid and manifold, that I can’t help wondering if I didn’t exchange riches for poverty. The night I am reconstructing is a good example: a book drive, a theatrical performance, and a circus, all at the same time. There was a range of options to choose from, and you had to choose. And yet there were capacity crowds everywhere. The circus was no exception. As we drove past the entrance, we had a brief glimpse of the boxes crammed with families and the stands groaning under the weight of the spectators. In the ring, the clowns had built a human pyramid, which came tumbling down, provoking roars of laughter. Almost everyone was at the circus. The inhabitants of Pringles must have thought it was the safest place.

Here an explanation is required. The circus had come to town three days earlier, and almost immediately the troupe had been rocked by a tremendous scandal. Among the attractions were three dwarfs. Two were men: twin brothers. The third, a woman, was married to one of the twins. This peculiar triangle apparently had a defect that made it unstable and led to the crisis that occurred in Pringles. The woman and her brother-in-law were lovers, and for some reason they had chosen our town as the place in which to make off with the savings of the cuckolded husband. We might never have been aware of this bizarre intrigue if it weren’t for the fact that a few hours after the disappearance of the lovers, the husband vanished too, along with a 9mm pistol and a box of bullets belonging to the owner of the circus. His intentions could not have been clearer. The police were notified immediately, in the hope of averting a tragedy. The witnesses (clowns, trapeze artists, and animal trainers) all agreed on how furious the husband had been when he found out, and how determined he was to exact a bloody revenge. His threats were taken seriously, because he was a violent little man, known for his destructive fits of rage. The weapon he had stolen was lethal at close and long range, and there was no need to know how to use it. The police mobilized all available manpower, and in spite of the circus authorities’ vehement insistence on discretion, the news got around. It was unavoidable, because the whereabouts of the runaways — that is, both the lovers and their pursuer — could be discovered only with the help of the public. At first, it seemed a simple task: the town was small and it was easy to give a clear description of the individuals in question, simply by using the word “dwarf.” Police officers were positioned at the railway station, the long-distance bus terminal, and the two roundabouts at opposite ends of the town, from which the outgoing roads diverged (they were unsealed at the time). These measures served only to confirm that the dwarfs were still in Pringles.