An Open Secret E-Book

Carlos Gamerro

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 402

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Drawing on the legacy of Argentina's Dirty War, Carlos Gamerro's An Open Secret is a compelling postmodern thriller confronting guilt, complicity and the treachery of language itself. Dario Ezcurra is one of the thousands of Argentinians unlucky enough to be 'disappeared' by the military government-murdered by the local chief of police with the complicity of his friends and neighbours. Twenty years later, Fefe, a child at the time of the murder, returns to the town where Dario met his fate and attempts to discover how the community let such a crime happen. Lies, excuses and evasion ensue - desperate attempts to deny the guilty secret of which the whole community, even Fefe himself, is afraid. tTranslated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett, Carlos Gamerro's An Open Secret is published by Pushkin Press. 'Carlos Gamerro's An Open Secret ... has the makings of a classic' - The Economist 'An Open Secret is paced like a taut thriller that ... ultimately, rewards the reader ... Gamerro creates a vivid sense of how gossip can poison a small town' - The Independent 'An Open Secret digs away at the shallow graves of recent decades to find the pettiness, narrow-minds, and rivalries that motivated it'- Ben Bollig, The Guardian tCarlos Gamerro (b. 1962) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has published the novels Las Islas, El sueno del senor juez, El secreto y las voces, La aventura de los bustos de Eva and the book of short stories El libro de los afectos raros as well as numerous works of literary criticism. He also wrote the film script for the movie Tres de corazones (2007).

Leseprobe

CARLOS GAMERRO

AN OPEN SECRET

Translated by Ian Barnett in collaboration with the author

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

The English version of this novel is dedicated to the memory of Anthea Gibson (1941–2010), who made it happen.

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphChapter OneInterlude OneChapter TwoInterlude TwoChapter ThreeInterlude ThreeChapter FourInterlude FourChapter FiveEpilogueCopyright

AN OPEN SECRET

To speak is to lie— To live is to collaborate.

William S Burroughs

Chapter One

“A MURDER IN A SMALL TOWN.”

“Why here of all places?” asks Mati.

“It’s the only small town I know.”

“Is that why you’ve come back?”

“And to see you all.”

“So what’s it going to be? A film?” enquires Mati again.

“Or a book. Not sure yet,” I reply.

Don Ángel’s third call to table spares me from giving any further details:

“Dinner’s ready che! I know you’ve got some catching up to do but do it later.”

“Fefe I look at you and I swear I can’t believe you’re really here,” blurts Guido, who’s so far said next to nothing. “How many years has it been?”

I’m slow to answer because I’m hauling myself up from the sofa, whose springs my body has recognised with consummate ease, as I eye the souvenirs of trips to Europe and the Middle East that the current occupants of the house have never made, and rediscover the roughness of the old tiles under my feet—the furniture, the ornaments, the floors of the house that used to belong to my grandparents until their lifelong neighbours, the Tuttolomondos, bought it from them. “I’m back in Malihuel,” I say to myself in mild amazement. “Back in Malihuel.”

“’Bout twenty isn’t it?” I eventually reply.

“SO YOU WANT to write about Malihuel do you? Someone’s already written a hydrographic survey on the lagoon, donkeys’ years ago, ’bout roughly … When was it Nene?”

On the corner of the main street and the one variously known as Post Office, Phone Centre, Courts or Yacht Club Street stands the most traditional bar in Malihuel, Los Tocayos, whose current landlord, Don Porfirio Dupuy, is a direct descendent of one of the two Hipólitos that opened the original establishment. Three blue doors on the main street and two on the other provide access to a vast vertical expanse of sea-green walls, barely alleviated by their lining of varnished wood cladding, the framed photos of Don Porfirio’s pampered pups, the trophies from the Colón dog track and a Chinese imitation antique clock. The premises are L-shaped, with a billiard table and two Foosball tables at the far end of the long arm, and the bar tables in the short one and the elbow, evidently arranged around the one presided over night in night out by Don León Benoit.

“Nineteen seventy-three,” the waiter answers without hesitation.

“Nene’s our walking encyclopaedia, there’s only Professor Gagliardi knows more than he does. And there isn’t much in it mind. Is it something like that you’re going to write?” Don León asks.

“No,” I counter.

“He’s a real writer,” Guido sitting next to me sets him straight. “He writes stories, novels … Literature,” he adds, in a nutshell.

“Oh, we’ve got that here too. If it’s literature you’re interested in I imagine you’ll have read His Honour’s Dream, it’s set right here in Malihuel, tells the whole story of our foundation it does. No there’s a lot been written about this town believe you me, don’t write us off, the other towns hereabouts may be bigger but they don’t have our history. We’ve been here since colonial times you know. The lagoon’s right there on the very oldest maps. The Northern Frontier ran through here. Indian territory back then. We suffered several raids, and the civil wars to boot. There was a fort here razed to the ground by none other than General Lavalle himself, on his way north. We’ve got history to burn here. ‘A town of two centenaries,’ as the song goes. So it’s literature is it? I was told you were interested in geography or ecology, goodness knows why. Who was it told me Nene?”

“Licho.”

“See where idle chatter gets you? And there was I finding out about the chemical composition of the lagoon water, which as you know is highly medicinal. Is that any use?”

“Careful, he’ll try and rope you into the beach-resort business next,” Guido chimes in, and Don León smiles.

“The town’ll go back to living off the lagoon again one day, and then they’ll have to put up a statue of me right next to the Comandante’s. Now there’s a tale to be told, the one about the Comandante’s statue.”

“Right, sure,” I nod. “I had something more recent in mind though from the last I dunno twenty years at the outside,” I say, and then, sensing or imagining a buzz of alarm, I explain: “It’ll be a work of fiction though, right, not a document? I mean the town in my story’ll have lots in common with this one, the setting, the lagoon, that kind of thing, but …”

It wasn’t as easy to explain as I’d first thought.

“I’m even going to change the name so there won’t be any mix-ups, you know, people coming up to me afterwards saying no it isn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all … I’m going to change the name,” I repeat.

“Uh-huh,” Don León remarks. “And what are you going to call it if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Malihuel,” I reply. “The town in my story’s called Malihuel.”

“CRIMES HERE IN MALIHUEL as I can remember … Can you remember any Vicente?” Don Ángel asks his brother.

“There was that one case ages ago now, you weren’t even born,” Vicente replies. “That business at the Arana Hotel. Remember?”

“Do I. The number of times I must’ve heard it. You know how it goes don’t you Fefe?” Don Ángel asks me.

“Mamá used to make me check under her bed every night to make sure Señora Arana’s killer wasn’t there. In Buenos Aires as well!” I answer.

“Travelling fabric salesman he was, I met him once,” Vicente’s voice starts up but is overtaken by his brother’s.

“Don’t know about under but definitely on top. Most people reckoned the salesman was just the lover and it was the husband who …” He stabs the air with his knife. “Anyway they ended up pinning the dead wife on the guy. Two birds with one stone Arana killed. Closed the hotel not long after that and scarpered. You can still see the walls out in the Colonia opposite the station. You taken him to see it yet Mati?”

Don Ángel is sitting at the head of the table at the welcome dinner the Tuttolomondos have laid on for me. Naturally, I’ve been accorded one of the places of honour at his side; his elder brother Vicente, the other.

“We could drop by tomorrow afternoon if it dries up a bit,” answers my inseparable childhood friend, Mati, sitting next to me. The days I spend in Malihuel I’ll be staying at his house, which had belonged to his parents until they bought my grandparents’ house.

“The roads in the Colonia are impossible when it rains,” Don Ángel confirms. “Is it something like that you’re going to write Fefe?”

“Something like that,” I lie. “A crime novel I thought. I thought it would be a good idea to set it here in Malihuel. You know … crime committed in Malihuel, population three thousand, everyone knows everyone else, no outsiders in town that night. So the murderer’s got to be one of them. Everyone suspects everyone else. Or maybe it’s a conspiracy the whole town’s in on.”

“You’re unlikely to get anyone in this town in on anything,” quips Guido, philosophically buttering a roll and asking his brother with a nudge of the elbow and a flick of the eyebrows to pass the salt. Mati obliges with a growl.

“’Specially when there are people who can’t even get on with their own family don’t you reckon?” Don Ángel spears a last mouthful of pionono with his fork after speaking. Guido chews his buttered roll and shrugs.

“Can I get you another slice Fefe?” asks Celia, who’s been doing the second round of the table with a serving dish and a portion poised between spoon and fork. She smiles at me with her whole face—mouth, eyes and wrinkles—every time she looks at me or talks to me. She’s extremely happy to see, me that much is plain. I hadn’t noticed she was so fond of me as a boy. Or maybe I’d forgotten.

“Thanks, I’m fine for now.” I never was much one for pionono. That sickly sweet taste … “I’ll save myself for the spaghetti,” I add flatteringly. “Nearly twenty years I’ve waited for this moment. Never tasted pasta like it all these years.”

“And you never will either now the multinationals have bought up all the big factories. Ours is only still scraping by ’cause it’s so small,” nods Don Ángel gesturing with his fork at a spot on his empty plate, which his wife covers with the slice I’ve just turned down. “Pour Fefe another glass of wine will you Guido seeing as you always have it handy. So we haven’t got much for you to go on as you can see. It’s a quiet town this is, everyone knows everyone else. People’s doors are always unlocked, we leave our cars in the street with the keys in.”

“A hen goes missing around here and the whole town’s up in arms,” intervenes Mati and as nobody laughs at his quip I decide it must be more proverb than wit.

“Exactly,” I say. “A crime in a place like this would be far more dramatic. Nobody could ignore it.”

“SO WHY DID YOU CHOOSE US? I mean there are so many towns in the province,” Don León wants to know now.

“I used to come here as a boy,” I reply. “Every summer. That’s how Guido and I know each other.”

“He’s Echezarreta’s grandson,” Guido chimes in. “Poli’s son.”

“Echezarreta, your grandfather? Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I remember your grandfather well, I remember your mother too. The whole town was terribly upset at the news of her passing. She’d left as a young woman in in … When was it Nene?”

“Nineteensixtytwo,” I beat Nene to it. That was an easy one to remember. It was the year I was born.

“So, Echezarreta’s grandson eh? Well well. I’ve always said your grandfather was the best mayor this town’s ever had. Wretched luck his illness. He still had so much to offer. And your dear grandmother?”

“She moved to Rosario remember?” Guido asks him.

“Course I remember, I was asking after her state of health.”

“She’s fine,” I answer. “I dropped in to say hello to her in Rosario on my way here. We hadn’t seen each other since Mamá’s funeral. She doesn’t get about much any more.”

“WASN’T THERE THAT case in the days I used to come here about some lad or other, what was his name, who had this problem with someone from town or some neighbouring town, I can’t really remember?” I take a pull of wine and blurt out without looking at anyone.

“Know of a case like that Mati?” asks Don Ángel archly.

“About a hundred,” his son replies with the same wry chuckle I used to find so winning. “If you can’t provide more details …” he says to me.

“They were both from the town’s older families; one, the older one, had estancias all over the area and they used to say he had the other one killed because he was—”

“Ezcurra,” Guido, laconic from chewing, finishes my sentence for me over the head of his brother, who snaps at him:

“It’s not certain he was killed.”

“No he just upped and buried himself in Villalba’s pigsty and pops out every now and then to light some candles for himself,” lunges Guido after swallowing.

“That’s for the miracle-loving spades that is. Maybe you go and ask him too,” his brother parries.

“Don’t start, che,” their father reprimands them from the head of the table, but Guido’s already turned around to explain to his grandfather what the argument’s about and the remark sails past him. After serving her grandchildren and daughters-in-law at the other end of the table, Celia finishes her waiting duties and sits down beside her father, who’s no doubt repeating to her what Guido’s just told him. In spite of coming from almost the other end of the long table, I can’t help noticing the intense, almost concerned gaze she casts in my direction.

“So who was he this Ezcurra?” I ask anyway.

“EZCURRITA, YES. Course I remember. From one of Malihuel’s highest families, the Alvarados, he was, and the Ezcurras of Rosario. High up a greasy pole they were in those days,” says old Don León with a cackle the others smile at out of politeness or approval, “’specially after his father went bankrupt, a good thing old man Alvarado had the measure of his son-in-law and left all his earthly goods to his daughter and grandson. Those two were a real pair. His mother with her frocks from Buenos Aires and her trips to Europe, and Ezcurrita may’ve been tied to her apron strings but in another way he took after his father, always some big business deal in the pipeline that was about to earn him a hatful and show us once and for all who he was, always about to take up some big post with his friend the governor or his uncle the deputy or his cousin the councillor—he lowered his expectations over the years—always about to leave this town of losers for good. Bye bye losers, he’d say every time he left, and when he came back not a peep. You saw him didn’t you Licho that time he gave us the finger from the Chevallier bus.”

“No not me,” the new arrival whistles through the bristles of his moustache and the gaps in his teeth. “It was you as told me.”

“There you go. A finger. Who hasn’t left Malihuel is what I’d like to know. Eh? But a good dog always comes when called, ain’t that the truth. And he always came back Ezcurra did, honking the horn of a new car in broad daylight if things’d gone well or more often than not skulking in the back of the Chevallier bus in the small hours when they hadn’t. We’d have him back at this table the next day sitting in the chair you’re sitting in now, cool as you like, shrugging off wisecracks and bumming cigarettes, coming out with things like You know, the pull of home … the old lady—and with a wink—my dear friends. Beto here was one of the gang, he can tell you better than me,” concludes Don León as his cellphone starts ringing.

“Los Jaimitos they used to call us”—Beto Iturraspe, a talkative, theatrical lad whose fifty plus years only show when tiredness or distraction slacken his youthful rictus, struggles to speak over the stentorian tones of Don León addressing his daughter—“and we liked the name, so it stuck. There were four of us—an ideal number for a hand of truco, the table at the current establishment and a night on the razz in the one car, either Bermejo’s Torino or Batata Sacamata’s Chevy Coupé—should be here any minute—orange it was, used to look after it a treat, I don’t know if you ever got to see it? Bermejo, Batata, Ezcurrita and me,” he muses wistfully, looking resignedly at the other three sides of said table, currently usurped by Guido and Licho and myself. “In the summer our days used to start after siesta, a couple of beers under the pines at the island bar, and when the heat let up, a stroll down the public beach to check out the birds and lay some plans for the night … Then we’d drop in here and Bermejo, who’d spent all afternoon getting the nightclub ready, would join up with us—”

“… The infamous Sucundún, corruptor of the Malihuel night,” I chime in. “The girls had to leave their virginity at the door from what I heard.”

“They used to get it back on their way out rest assured, apart from the odd one that forgot to visit the cloakroom,” ventures Iturraspe with a wink.

“What became of Bermejo? Is he still around?”

“Uh-uh”—Guido shakes his head. “He opened a new place in Fuguet where there are enough brothels to deflect the sanctimonious wrath of the female congregation.”

“After that we’d move on to the vermouth and play a few hands of truco, it depended, if there was no show on at the lagoon we’d keep going till dinner—the lagoon hotel, of course, where else. At weekends there was always a tango orchestra belting it out or a quartet that could do the odd rock number, or sometimes even a Charleston or jazz band from Rosario. By the small hours the four of us’d invariably be round at Bermejo’s sucking on our private bottles and the slags we’d picked up down by the lagoon and when there weren’t any going Bermejo’d always come up with a bit on the side to peck at. The first ray of daylight was the sign to leave whatever the night had washed up, in the weeds or the back seat, or if there was any money and the chick was worth it, the mirrored room at the Mochica Motel, and the Torino or the Chevy burning rubber at ninety or a ton ten with the windows down and the cool dawn air clearing our hangovers, waving back at the farmhands and foremen riding their horses to the only brothel in Fuguet or the two or three in Toro Mocho, where there was never any shortage of girls so well-behaved you never needed to argue the toss even over the money. Unless Ezcurrita was around that is. They’d fight to be with him then.”

“You remember”—the recent arrival Jaimito Batata Sacamata is bellowing and roaring with laughter—“the time Nori or Dori or Flori—Titín’s cousin from Elordi, the one as married Kyke Brofman—was waiting for us in the front seat and Ezcurrita, who’d never seen her before, got in the back, tapped her on the shoulder and went Hi gorgeous, and the bag turned round and grinned at him?”

“Don’t say a word. You forgot your make-up”—Iturraspe revives the deceased’s quip. “No there was nobody faster than him. And that time we all boned that Otamendi girl? We cut for it and the lucky bastard got to go first as usual and when he comes out he tells me to fetch the razor blades and there’s me going What are you talking about you pillock and when I go in the sonofabitch’d left her face down for me on purpose, brother her back was so hairy I had to flip her over to make sure she wasn’t a truck-driver!” sighs Iturraspe wiping the tears from his eyes with his index finger and there’s me smiling in agreement and Guido nodding and Nene Larrieu leaning on the counter with his tin tray handy and a face that says he’s heard it all before.

“THE TOWN PLAYBOY he was, Malihuel’s very own Isidoro Cañones. Boy did I know Darío well. We were at high school together till they threw him out that is in second or third grade I think, can you remember Vicente?”

His brother interrupts a fork of spaghetti halfway to his mouth and stares wordlessly at him over the rim of his glasses as if to remind him that none of the elder brothers, set to work by their father at the age of thirteen, have had any access to higher education.

“What about you Celia?” he shouts over to the other end of the table and gives me a wink. But I realise from his tone that the question’s barbed.

“What?”

“Fefe wants to know about Ezcurra. You got anything to tell him?”

Celia smiles with her mouth only. Her eyes on the other hand seem to express puzzlement or pain. The years had tamed Celia. When I was still a boy she was capable of throwing a fit worthy of a cornered animal, smashing the empty plates she couldn’t serve until Ángel arrived, shrieking I want to get out I can’t stand it any more I’m dying in this shit hole and nobody cares, and from my place as a guest I’d watch Guido and Mati out of the corner of my eye while they stared autistically at their glasses of Coke, waiting with bovine patience for the storm to pass, which was never very long as Celia had to sweep up and wash her face before the return of her husband, who now insists:

“It’s the women in town that remember him best. Half of them because he didn’t let them get to the altar as virgins, the other half because he did”—his guffaw finds an echo in the wan smiles of his brother and his son Mati, who now asks me:

“Do you think the house looks any different?”

I find the change of subject annoying so I try not to elaborate.

“Well we didn’t have this room for a start when my grandparents lived here,” I say referring to the gallery of wood and glass they’ve built where the old fig tree used to stand. Murderers, I think to myself. “Then there’s the pool. The rest’s pretty much the same isn’t it? Grandma left you all her furniture didn’t she?”

“Well she couldn’t very well have taken it all to Rosario.” Mati defends himself as if I’ve accused him of something.

Maybe it’s something in my tone of voice; we don’t seem to get along as well as we used to. Luckily, after spearing and bolting down two balls of spaghetti, his father picks up the thread:

“Now they really hated his guts. Your grandparents I mean. Ezcurra. They used to cross the street to avoid him.”

I’ve just forked in the last mouthful of spaghetti—Number Three Pasta Nests I was told when served—so I can’t answer straight away, but by the time I finish swallowing I’ve been overtaken by a vision of the past, the first of many—perhaps too many—I’ll experience during my stay in Malihuel. I’m walking along the shaded side of the street holding my grandmother’s hand, playing at jumping from one broken flag to another without stepping on the grass, when I suddenly find myself being dragged into the blinding sunlight on the other side. Walking towards us is a smartly dressed young man who, clearly amused at the situation, directs a sardonic smile at my grandmother and, from beneath his raised sunglasses, a conspiratorial wink at me. I look up at my grandmother’s face and it’s flushed with rage, paralysed between the urge to lash out and the glaring vow never again to direct another word to the man whose white-clad back now recedes nonchalantly into the shadows he’s just made his. And my grandfather, that or some other day, slamming his fist on the lunch table and choking on his bean stew spluttering “That sonofabitch! He’ll get what’s coming to him that sonofabitch will!”

“Fancy a little more Fefe?” Celia’s voice startles me from behind.

“No, thanks, I’m full,” I tell her. So that was Ezcurra. I’m getting something now, a picture at least.

“Still eat like a bird I see. I remember that so clearly. You never did use to eat much and always put lots of salt on your food. Remember Papá how much salt he put on everything?”

“Do I? We used to have to fill the salt cellar every time he came to dinner,” Don Ángel slaps me on the shoulder. “Fefe you sonofagun, we thought we’d never see you again!”

“The stuff life throws at you eh?” I mumble idiotically while Celia clears the table with the help of Guido’s wife, and Mati’s wife cleans up her children’s mess, the youngest of whom asks her for the nth time that night, “Who’s that Mamá?” and she gives him an answer I never quite catch.

“What about the other one?” I say.

“Which other one?” Don Ángel comes back.

“The one who had him killed … or run out of town,” I add out of deference to Mati, who’s just back from the bathroom. “Who was he?”

“Old Rosas Paz?” he asks me as he sits down. “Owned half the county he did. His heirs have carved it up now. Didn’t you see their town on your way here? It’s the stop before as you come in from Rosario. Rosas Paz it’s called, just like them.”

I nod and insist:

“So why did he take it out on Ezcurra?”

Don Ángel takes the floor:

“The feud between them went back a long way, maybe even to before Ezcurrita was born,” he explains as the women start serving dessert, a home-made flan with dulce de leche, which Celia’s good memory has prepared especially for me. “Ezcurrita’s grandfather, Don Alejandro Alvarado, used to buy the wheat crop off Don Manuel’s father—or was it Don Manuel’s grandfather? Can you remember Vicente? It makes no difference, the moment these fights between families start nobody remembers how … The Alvarados owned the mill over by the station. Errrm, let me see, till around nineteen thirty I reckon. Old man Alvarado got fed up of the anarchists always walking out on him and set fire to it. They can go to Alcorta and cry for all I care was the memorable phrase he came out with the next day. You could see the flames from here my father used to say. He always remembered that day because they had to get their flour from Toro Mocho after that. Old man Alvarado cashed in the insurance money and set up a convenience store … on the square on the side where the soda factory is today. Have you taken him to see it yet Mati? The mill I mean … Theeey’re the ones, where the steel-grey silos are. The whole lower part of the building—the brickwork—was salvaged from the old mill. If you look carefully you can still see the scorch marks. Apparently there were some wagons of grain too that belonged to Don Manuel parked right there on the tracks and one of the explosions from the blaze set light to them … Old man Alvarado couldn’t admit responsibility of course, he wasn’t about to go and tell everybody he’d torched the mill himself, and of course then it was open war. That, as far as anyone can tell, is where Don Manuel’s beef with old man Alvarado started. And with the grandson … I reckon it started when Ezcurrita took up as a journalist. Before that, I’ve no idea. It was just like Ezcurrita to take up journalism and set about savaging Don Manuel just for kicks,” says Don Ángel.

“EZCURRA, THAT’S RIGHT, poor lad. Making a film about his life are you? Oh, because I was told … I remember his newspaper articles well. Don Manuel Rosas Paz used to collect them and keep them in a binder he was more reluctant to show than the Church with the Turin Shroud,” some days later the bald skull of Malihuel’s pharmacist Don Mauro Mendonca will beam, greenish in the neon light from outside. They called me from the estancia once—urgent; I shut up shop there and then and drove the medicine over myself. My reward, once Don Manuel was back on his feet, was to see it. It was a legal double-ring binder, I can’t really remember if the covers were black or not, more of a blue colour I think, difficult to say after so many … I don’t seem to … of course of course. Right. The newspaper cuttings were stuck on card and kept in plastic envelopes to protect them. A quick glance through wasn’t enough, no—line by line I had to read them while he sat there the whole time watching me, frowning over his oxygen mask and wheezing. I clearly remember there being several blank pages at the end of the folder, in plastic envelopes too, awaiting any future articles. You’ll understand, he said to me when I closed it and handed it back to him, the boy leaves me no choice. If I don’t do something now it’ll be too late, he added, and I realised his haste had less to do with the blank pages than with the blue cylinders containing what was left of his life and with the intolerable idea of him going first and leaving the other to dance on his grave. What I want, he said to me on my way out, is to burn that folder and forget there was ever a time when anyone could even think that of me. He didn’t need to explain,” the pharmacist will explain, the green of his skull deepening as the rain starts to fall on the other side of the pharmacy window, “the prerequisite for him to carry out that private and perhaps melancholy auto-da-fé. I think deep down he may eventually have developed a fondness for the binder don’t you? I mean if you’d seen the precautions he took when he handled it. Perhaps he was disappointed the articles had stopped appearing, because it had been something like a year by then since poor Ezcurra had decided to toe the line and stop poking his nose into his business. Perhaps Rosas Paz decided to do something when he realised how futile it was to go on waiting. What? Errrm, I don’t know, he must just have burnt it, unless he asked to have it buried with him. The articles were from a newspaper that’s closed now, what was it called, let me see …”

“La Chicharra,” I’ll tell him, being in possession of them by then. “I managed to lay my hands on quite a few. Ezcurra had a special talent for headlines it seems.”

THERE’S A ROTTEN SMELL IN MALIHUEL

“WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?” I jubilantly ask Guido the evening he stops by with the gift after his pasta deliveries around the towns at our table in Los Tocayos, where, a few days after my arrival, I’m now one of the regulars.

“Toro Mocho,” he proudly replies. “Finished my deliveries early and thought I’d pop into the library. They didn’t have the complete collection but it should do for now. I’ll take you with me if you want to go yourself one day … Yeah, I only photocopied the pages about Malihuel. They were the ones Ezcurra wrote weren’t they Beto? Iturraspe nods and beckons to me with jutting chin to let him take a look. I hand him one of the identically headed pages at random—

LA CHICHARRAA WAKE-UP CALL FOR THE COMMUNITY

“Is that Ezcurra?” I ask him.

I’m pointing at the signature at the foot of the daily leader—“BROKEN CHAINS—A HORSEFLY TO GOAD THE FLANKS OF THE SLEEPING MULE OF MALIHUEL.” Iturraspe nods with a nostalgic smile.

“Listen to this, listen,” I insist, including Nene Larrieu, who puts his cloth for polishing the glasses on the counter and walks over intrigued. “‘This pampas plutocrat, whose legendary family fortune has been built on the blood of Indians and Christians and the tears of orphans and widows, now wants to usurp one of the high seats of office to which this most fertile of provinces elevates its favourite sons. And what credit, what merit, what service to his country or his native soil does this self-proclaimed lakeside Pericles, this Lycurgus of the plains, this Santa Fe Solon set before us to show he is worthy of such an honour? The gallantry and punctiliousness of that Rosas Paz who paid a pound apiece for Indian ears, which his devoted great-grandson still keeps in a glass case in his study as a family relic? Who, moreover, does he suppose will support his hilarious candidature with their votes? The descendents of the proud gauchos banished to the frontier for the sole crime of wanting to work the land that this hypertrophied Orion wanted for his cattle? The grandchildren of immigrants, easily gulled in their new tongue, who naively accepted provisional deeds of ownership for land that, once rendered productive by the calluses of their hands and the sweat of their brows, would be wrested from them by the lawyers of our aspiring cereal Cicero? Santa Fe must indeed be saintly in its faith if we are willing to place the lofty fate of our province in his hands. Will the town of Malihuel, which legend and history have enshrined as the Fuenteovejuna of Santa Fe, consent to kissing the clay feet of this golden calf?’ Where did he get that style from?” I ask when I finish reading.

“Rosas Paz’s own speeches,” comes Iturraspe’s incisive reply, puncturing the rhetorical force of my question, “in the days when he was running for senator in the province. Listen to this one—‘obviate’ … ‘laudable’ … ‘moral prostration’ … ‘emolument’ … ‘sempiternal’!” he exclaims triumphantly. “I’d forgotten that one,” he smiles as if he’s just bumped into an old friend.

“What about this?” I ask incredulous in my mirth: “‘Are we in need of a new Christ to visit Malihuel, scourge in hand, cast out the merchants from the temple and lash new stripes into the hides of these ruthless pampas tigers …’”

“Oh now that one bears the hallmarks of Professor Gagliardi,” pronounces Iturraspe. “He used to lend Ezcurra the odd hand with the articles. We all did actually. We’d meet up here say and put words in his pen. That bit about the lakeside Pericles was mine, for example. Used to split our sides laughing I swear. We never thought it would end so badly.”

Unable to stop I read on:

“‘In these days of quick capitulation and shameful moral surrender, one man stands erect, immune to the corrosive gilding of corruption. And that moral fortitude, neither consumed nor undermined, let it be called “quixotic” by the self-righteous revellers in self-seeking lucre, a herd of bimanous pachyderms, quick of tooth and castrated of conscience …’ Are you telling me someone could have taken this seriously enough to have its author wasted?” I finally exclaim.

“If there was one thing old Rosas Paz didn’t have,” Iturraspe replies, less cheerfully this time, “it was a sense of humour.”

THAT NIGHT I’D HAVE TIME to read through the rest of the cuttings. The anachronistic anarchist rhetoric of the early articles lasted a few more months and would occasionally resurface, but it was becoming more and more obvious that Ezcurra had found a new style, albeit not of his own making. It was still broadly in the same spirit; it was the diction and the emphases of certain turns of phrase that had changed spectacularly. Rosas Paz had become an “exploiter”, an “oligarch”, a “sepoy”, a “traitor”, an “imperialist”, and his victims, the “suffering people”, the “working class”, the “shirtless”, the “poor” and the “proletarians”. Ezcurrita was learning a new language and, like children or foreigners, in his enthusiasm he sometimes applied words haphazardly to all kinds of situations and objects. Then suddenly, nothing. In his last year working for the paper: National School No 7 Celebrates Golden Jubilee—Malihuel Girl Named Provincial Honey Queen—Outstanding Performance From Two Messenger Pigeons—A Circus Worth Seeing. Toeing the line. The dates said it all; the only unfathomable thing was that, after putting up with all those weighty allegations, Rosas Paz should’ve wanted to do away with him when he was only writing about basketball tournaments and school shows. I put down the wad of articles at my bedside and lie there staring at the shelf of their cuddly toys in the children’s room, where I’ve been lodged, forcing them out to camp in the living room. Through the wall I can hear Mati and his wife locked in an argument that their confinement and the need to keep it down make all the bitterer and more exasperated. I can’t hear the words but I know I’m the cause.

“WHEN THINGS STARTED GETTING UGLY,” Don Ángel continues between mouthfuls of flan and dulce de leche, “I don’t know if they’d been tightening up on Ezcurrita at the paper or what but he certainly learnt from his mistakes and as far as I can remember he never picked on Rosas Paz again. Tried to stop before all hell broke loose. But it was too late by then wasn’t it. The damage had been done. Know what it reminds me of?”

“A CHIHUAHUA YAPPING at a Great Dane through the railings.” Don León hands me the same version shortly after he and Licho join the table, order a Ferroquina and flick through the sheaf of photocopies. “And now the gate’s open the little pooch stops yapping and reckons it’s not too late. Should’ve stopped sooner. Yes, course I remember, Don Manuel loved to repeat it. He even had a saying, how did it go? Something about dogs and days …”

“Every dog has its day,” I throw in. “It’s an English saying.”

“Must have picked it up from your great-grandfather. And you know what Don Manuel used to say then? He’s had his day to bark, now I want my day to bite. And he was right in a way, can’t say he wasn’t. Ezcurrita was the cock o’ the walk as long as he thought he was safe, but as soon as the boot was on the other foot he clammed up, not another peep. But Don Manuel was left seeing red and wanted blood. Ezcurra got that wrong, dead wrong. He took patience for weakness. I mean Don Manuel could have sent a couple of heavies anytime to a nightclub to knock him about and pass it off as a drunken brawl or smash up the printing press in Toro Mocho but he never did. What Don Manuel wanted was for everyone to know he was right. What he wanted was justice. A public example. It was a matter of honour. His good name had been besmirched and the stains could only be removed with blood. Had these been other times he’d’ve challenged him to a duel but Don Manuel had a very fine almost exquisite sense of ridicule and he wasn’t about to become the town laughing stock. He wore the judges down trying to file a lawsuit, libel and slander I suppose, appearing in person when his lawyers came back empty-handed. He especially targeted Dr Carmona, wouldn’t give her a moment’s peace,” he says and breaks off in annoyance to answer his cellphone, which has been clamouring for his attention from his jacket pocket for several sentences. “Just got here,” he says into the phone, “wait for me, don’t know, another hour or so,” he says fending off what’s apparently a demand from a woman who, seeing as he’s a widower, can only be his daughter, then starts discussing building work on the beach resort as we all patiently sit there, knowing he wouldn’t want us to carry on without him.

“BETWEEN YOU ME and the gatepost I can tell you Don Manuel wasn’t the only one that wanted to pay Ezcurra back,” Guido will confide to me one night after dinner at his house, one of the identical prefabs on the Banco Hipotecario block, located as far away from his parents’ place as the town allows—a mere seven blocks at most. I’ll move in there at his invitation recommending the beneficial effects of childless solitude on my work, a suggestion Mati and his wife would second with nodding enthusiasm. Guido’s wife Leticia will offer me coffee, I’ll accept and Guido will go on with his tale: “There was a society, Don León and Casarico were in it for sure, and the Chief of Police too they say, and … Carving up tourist plots down on the shores of the lagoon, where Don León’s got his resort now, on that little fringe of woodland the floods didn’t get. Ezcurra was flogging that dead horse Expotencia to them and they bought it hook line and sinker. Remember Expotencia?” Nodding, I’ll pull a stapled sheaf of photocopies out of my folder, heftier now than at its last public appearance.

We all have the good fortune to be present at the birth of one of the most promising stages in the history of our nation, a stage in which the former colony is finally beginning to develop into Argentina Potencia, the world power we all long for. At last the dark days of surrender and corruption are coming to an end. Now begins a radiant time of justice and prosperity, of which Malihuel, the demographic, economic and geographical hub of Argentina, must be a part. Separated from Buenos Aires by three hundred and twenty-three kilometres of smoothest tarmac, and from Rosario by one hundred and twenty kilometres of magnificent highway, Malihuel is a beautiful town nestling on one of the banks of the lagoon of the same name—that giant pupil at our country’s heart that was witness in bygone days to the excesses of the unbridled savage and today sports the robes of loftiest civilisation, and the solidest, most shining creations of the restless and eternal human mind. There, by its dreaming shores, a valiant chieftain, lord of our wide open pampas, fought the last battle in defence of his native soil, falling to defeat by the bamboos that spat fire wielded by the white man, uniformed and disciplined in laws that he—a free bird—knew nothing of. But his example lives on, as does that of the heroic gauchos that followed him, figureheads of the struggle for independence. Today, after more than a century and a half, that struggle is about to end in victory. That is why Malihuel, the administrative centre of Coronel González County—the richest of the richest farming region on the face of the earth—has a duty to lead this great march into the future. And so Expotencia was born. Expotencia, the greatest open-air expo in the country—farming machinery in action. Expotencia—a unique showcase for the breakthroughs of today and the promises of tomorrow: cutting-edge irrigation systems, seedbed plots and agrochemicals, cattle shows and competitions, demonstration dairies, intensive cropping, latest-model machinery in action, technical lectures and a full agribusiness, stockbreeding and agroproduct technology portfolio. Over fifty stands, two hundred lovely lady-promoters, twenty telephone lines, a press room, musical numbers, a Provincial Soya Queen Contest … All this and more at Expotencia ’73! Santa Fe’s leading farming and industrial show. Expotencia—yet another attraction to the 45,000 hectares of salt, iodised and curative waters, the golden sands filled with happy laughter and the lapping of waves, the modern ballrooms where social life is free to blossom and flourish, the hard-fought yet harmonious sporting competitions, the internationally renowned shows by artists and musicians … these are the attractions that have made Malihuel Argentina’s foremost inland beach resort, visited year in year out by an endless stream, over half a million strong in the summer months. This is when Expotencia ’73 will open up its doors—an event your grandchildren will one day celebrate as the dawning of a new age. The year 2000 will find us united or downtrodden. And if we are to find union and avoid division, now’s the time to start. If you believe in Malihuel and in Argentina, don’t miss the boat. Sign up for Expotencia ’73!”

“Where did you get that from,” Leticia will ask me intrigued.

“Clara Benoit,” I’ll answer.

“Ah, the famous lagoon files.”

“Reckon it had anything to do with it?” I’ll return to Guido.

“When you look at it Ezcurra lost just as much money as they did if not more. This is what happened. He’d brought some people over from Santa Fe who were going to make the blessed flood canal we’d been promised since the colonial days—one day they threw a party at the Yacht Club and everything to celebrate the project going through. And there it is, still approved. Without the canal to control the floods there were no plots and Ezcurra promised to speed up work on the canal if they came in on Expotencia. So in the end the guys from Santa Fe turned out to be involved with the Montoneros or something like that and lasted all of two seconds in the provincial government, the whole Expotencia thing collapsed and on top of losing everything and being up to his eyeballs in debt Ezcurra ended up being tarred as the town lefty. He wanted to rub shoulders with the town’s big cheeses and wound up … I’m not saying his partners in town wanted his blood the way Don Manuel did. But when the chips were down they weren’t going to bend over backwards to save him were they.”

“SORRY, I’M AFRAID I’m not convinced the articles had anything to do with it. Don Manuel wasn’t one for wasting powder on chimangos,” pipes Licho after Don León hangs up, running a polite finger over the pile of photocopies on the table. “But Don Rosas Paz did have two granddaughters of courting age that’s for sure—one, Elvira, ended up marrying a French agronomist with BO; the other, María Luisa—Pipina they called her—was left on the shelf. They were always coming into town whenever there was show at the lagoon—anything to get away from the estancia—and knowing our dear Darío’s reputation …”

“Nice theory,” rasps Iturraspe, “if it wasn’t for the fact they were both so ugly just looking at them was enough to make a bull a bullock, and for that at least we have to give the deceased his due—he had good taste. The thing is,” he says to me as he turns round, “everyone’s got their theory but actually nobody really knows why Rosas Paz had it in for Ezcurra.”

“Be that as it may,” Don León now goes on, who ever since Licho’s interruption has been looking daggers at the table in indignant silence, “Don Manuel decided to speed things up. He was dying, or at least he thought he was. Pulmonary emphyteusis he had and had to go everywhere with a nurse and a blue cylinder. Used to call it the “heir-scarer”. Even went out hunting he did—he’d plant the nurse and the blue cylinder in the back of his pick-up and shoot anything with legs, wings or fins that moved, edible or not, anyway he couldn’t touch any of it on account of his diet and what the farmhands didn’t take was left for the dogs … partridges, martinetas, ducks, hares, armadillos, caracaras, herons, lizards, possums, plovers, owls …” Don León interrupts himself to wet his lips in his second Ferroquina.

“Chimangos?” I ask giving Licho a wry sidelong glance.

“Chimangos too. In the country if it ain’t got horns it’s a pest, he liked to say. Anyway duelling had gone out of fashion, quiet revenge wasn’t his style and there was no joy to be had from the legal system. So that left the police.”

“MALIHUEL POLICE HEADQUARTERS,” says Don Ángel referring to the building less than a block away that, together with the courts, occupies an entire block, “is in charge of all the police stations in the county including the ones in Toro Mocho.”

“One of the privileges we have as the oldest town in the area,” adds his brother Vicente with a smile, taking a sip of after-dinner coffee. “This is where they lock up all the lags.”

“When they lock them up that is. The police chiefs are appointed in Santa Fe and are generally from thereabouts. They don’t stay long, a year or two, and they’re sent off to thieve somewhere else so the area can recover. Like crop rotation,” chuckles Don Ángel at his own joke. “That’s what I’m telling you, Superintendent Neri was different.”

“That’s what my grandfather always used to say,” I impinge. “That he was a different breed of policeman. ‘The finest police chief in Malihuel’s history.’ Was he really that good?”

Don Ángel and Vicente glance at each other to see who’ll answer:

“Don’t know about the other towns see, that’d be asking too much. But we’re quite certain he didn’t lay a finger on Malihuel,” answers Don Ángel for both of them. “Don’t shit where you eat right? He was a sort of local Robin Hood Neri was. Stole from the rich towns and gave to the poor ones,” he chuckles again.

“Most police chiefs are just passing through”—Vicente completes his brother’s thought. “They don’t hobnob with the local population and get out as soon as they can. There are those as prefer a police station in Toro Mocho to the headquarters here. But not Neri. Actually I reckon he’d grown rather fond of us,” he ventures and glances at his brother.

“He was more devoted to the town that’s for sure. It was his last destination and he’d decided to stick around with his wife when he retired. Had no children did they Vicente? They’d started work on the house and everything, two storeys it was going to be, the first in town. Don’t know if you noticed it when you used to come, on the right as you come up the lagoon road. You can see the foundations clear as anything. You should take him to see it Mati if he’s so interested in the story. Why not go tomorrow now you’re here?”