Target in the Night (11 page)

“They're tiny.”

“The strange thing is he didn't escape down the shaft of the service pulley. The witnesses saw him enter and leave the room through the door.”

“True,” Saldías said, and specified, in a bureaucratic tone, “he didn't use his physical particularities to assist him in the crime.”

Yoshio was delicate, fragile, he looked as if he were made of porcelain. Next to Durán, who was tall and mulatto, they made a very strange couple. Is beauty a moral trait? Maybe beautiful people have better character, they are more sincere, everyone trusts them, people want to touch them, see them, feel the tremor of their perfection. Besides, they were too different. Durán, with his Caribbean accent, seemed like he was always at a party. Yoshio, on the other hand, was laconic, furtive, very servile. The perfect servant.

“You saw that man's hands, right? Small and weak. What kind of pulse, what kind of heart, would he have to stab somebody like that? As if he'd been killed by a robot.”

“A doll,” Saldías says.

“A gaucho, good with a knife.”

Croce immediately deduced that the crime must have had an instigator. Once he discarded the theory that would have solved the case at once—in other words, a crime of passion—he realized that someone else had to be implicated. All crimes are crimes of passion, Croce said, except crimes for hire. There was a call from the factory, that was strange. Luca never speaks with anyone, and even less by telephone. He doesn't go out. He hates
the countryside, the quiet of the plains, the sleeping gauchos, the owners who never work and just sit under the eaves of their houses staring at the horizon, or let time pass in the shade of their balconies, go out to fuck the local girls in the shed between the bags of maize, play dice through the night. He hates them. Croce can see the tall, abandoned factory building with its rotating beacon light, as if it were an empty fortress.
The empty fortress
. It's not that he heard voices, the sentences simply reached him as if they were memories.
I know him as if he were my son
. Like lines written in the night. He knew very well what they meant, but not how they entered his head. Certainty is not the same as knowledge, he thought. It's the precondition for knowledge. General Grant's face was like a map, a footprint on the ground. A very scientific job. Grant, the butcher, with his kidskin glove.

“I'm going out for a bit,” Croce said all of a sudden. Saldías looked at him, a little afraid. “You stay and keep guard, we don't want those worthless bums to come and do anything outrageous.”

Luca had purchased some land outside the town, on the edge, in the deserted plains, a plot, as his father called it, and started building the factory there, as if it were the construction of a dream, a construction imagined in a dream. They had planned and discussed it when they were working in the workshop at the back of the house, in their grandfather Bruno's studio, and their grandfather had helped them, influenced by his European readings
¹¹
and his research into the design of the ideal factory.
Luca and Lucio used the workshop as if it were a laboratory for their technical entertainments, that's where they built their racing cars, that was their schooling, a rich-boy's hobby. Sofía seemed exhilarated by her own voice and by the quality of the legend.

“It took my father a while to understand. Because before, when they used to go out to the fields and work on the agricultural machines, he didn't have any problems with them, they'd follow the harvest about, spend long stretches of time out in the country, they'd come back dark as Indians, my mother would say, happy to have them outdoors for months, out with the harvesters and the baling machines, living the clash of two antagonistic worlds.”
¹²

Her father did not realize that the plague had arrived, that it was the end of Arcadia, that the pampas were changing forever, that the machinery was becoming more and more complex, that foreigners were buying up the land, that the owners of the estancias were sending their earnings to the island of Manhattan (“and to the financial paradise of the island of Formosa”). The Old Man wanted everything to stay the same, the Argentine pampas, the gauchos on horseback, even though he,
too, of course, had started to transfer his dividends abroad and to speculate with his investments, none of the landowners were born yesterday, they all had their advisors, brokers, stock transfer agents, they went wherever their capital took them—although they never stopped yearning for the peace of their homeland, the quiet pastoral customs, their paternal relationship with the workers.

“My father always wanted them to love him,” Sofía said, “he was tyrannical and arbitrary but he was proud of his sons, they were going to carry on the family name, as if the last name had a meaning unto itself, anyway, that was my grandfather's thinking and then my father's, they wanted their last name to go on, as if they belonged to the royal English family, that's what they're like here, they believe in all that, even though they're all dirty-footed gringos, descendents of Irish and Basque peasants who came here to dig ditches because the locals wouldn't do it, the foreigners were the only ones willing to roll up their sleeves and dig.
¹³
There was an English ditch-digger, she recited as if she were singing a bolero, who claimed to be from Inca-la-perra. They must have been Harriots or Heguys, digging ditches in the fields, now they act like aristocrats, they play polo in the estancias and flaunt last names that actually came from Irish peasants and rural Basques. Everyone here is a descendent of gringos, especially my family, but they all think alike and want the same things. My grandfather the colonel, for starters, boasted that he was from the north, from Piedmont, unbelievable, he looked down at the Italians from the south, who in turn looked down on the
Poles and the Russians.”

The colonel was born in Pinerolo, near Turin, in 1875, and he didn't know anything about his parents, or his parents' parents. One story even has it that his papers were falsified and that his real name was Expósito, that Belladona was just the word spoken by the doctor who held him in his arms when his mother died in childbirth in a hospital in Turin. “Belladona, belladonna!” the doctor had said, as if it were a requiem. And that's the name they registered him with. Baby Belladona. His own son, the first man in the family without a father. And they called him Bruno because he was dark and he looked African. No one knew how he arrived in the Province of Buenos Aires when he was ten years old, with a suitcase, by himself, and ended up in a boarding school for orphans run by the Company of Jesus in Bernaconi. Intelligent, passionate, he became a seminary student and lived like an ascetic, dedicating himself to his studies and his prayers. He could fast and remain silent for days on end; sometimes the sacristan would find him praying in the chapel by himself and would kneel down next to him as if he were a saint. He was always a fanatic, as if he were possessed, intractable. His discovery of science in his physics and botany classes, and his readings of remote, forbidden works from the Darwinian tradition in the monastery library, distracted him from his theology and distanced him—provisionally—from God. This was how he told it himself.

One afternoon he went to his confessor and expressed his desire to leave the seminary and attend the College of Exact and Natural Sciences at the university. Could a priest become an engineer? Only of souls, the priest answered, and refused his request. Bruno rejected his confessor's ban and kept appealing, but after the Head of the Company refused to respond to his petitions or receive him in person, he wrote anonymous
letters which he would leave under the pew in front of the altar. Finally, one rainy summer afternoon, he ran away from the monastery where he had lived half his life. He was twenty years old. With the little money he had saved, he rented a room in a boarding house on Medrano Street, in the neighborhood of Almagro, in Buenos Aires. His knowledge of Latin and European languages allowed him to survive, at first, as a secondary school teacher in an all-boys school on Rivadavia Street.

He was a brilliant engineering student, as if his true education had been in mechanics and mathematics instead of Thomism and theology. He published a series of notes on the influence of mechanical communications on modern civilization and a study on the laying of tracks in the province of Buenos Aires, and before completing his degree he was hired by the English—in 1904—to direct the works of the Southern Railroads. They put him in charge of the Rauch-Olavarría Branch Line and the foundation of the town at the intersection of the old, narrow gauge from the north and the English gauge that continued as far as Zapala, in Patagonia.

“My brother grew up with our grandfather, he learned everything from him. He was an orphan too, or a half-orphan, because his mother abandoned my father when she was pregnant with Luca, as well as her older son, and ran away with her lover. Women abandon their sons because they can't stand it when they start to look like their fathers,” Sofía laughed. “Who wants to be a mother when you're horny?” Smoking, the ember glowing in the dark was like her voice. “My father lives here, downstairs, he keeps us with him, and we take care of him because we know that he's been defeated on all counts. He never recovered from the psychotic decision that his wife made, according to him, to leave when she was pregnant and run away with a theatre company director who was in
town for a few months staging
Hamlet (
or was it
A Doll's House
?). To live with another and have the baby with another. Whose child was it? He was obsessed, my father. He made his wife's life impossible. One afternoon he went out looking for her and found her, but she locked herself up in her car, so he started pounding on the windows and yelling and insulting her, by the main square, with people gathering around, delighted, murmuring and nodding in approval. That's when his Irish wife left, she abandoned both sons, and erased her tracks. Around here the women run away, if they can.”

Luca was raised as a legitimate son and treated in the same manner as his brother, but he never forgave his father, the one who claimed to be his father, for this indulgence.

“My brother Luca always thought that he wasn't my father's son. He grew up sheltered by Grandfather Bruno, he'd follow him everywhere, like an abandoned puppy. But that's not why he finally confronted my father, that's not why. And that's also not why they killed Tony.”

10
   
The first Japanese immigrant arrives in Argentina in 1886, a certain Professor Seizo Itoh from the School of Agriculture in Sapporo. He takes up residence in the Province of Buenos Aires. In 1911, Seicho Arakaki is born, the first Argentine of Japanese origin (
Nikkei
). The last Argentine census (1969) records the presence of 23,185 Japanese and descendents.

11
   
Bruno Belladona was very influenced by the treatise
Field, Factories and Workshops
(1899) by Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, the great Russian geographer, anarchist, and free-thinker. Kropotkin proposed that the development of communications and the flexibility of electric energy should establish the basis of a manufacturing production decentralized into small, self-sufficient units, set up in isolated, rural areas, outside the conglomeration of large cities. He defended the production model of small workshops with their large potential for creative innovation, because the more delicate the technology, the greater the need for human initiative and individual skill.

12
   
“Once,” Sofía told him, “they took apart the engine of one of the first mechanical threshing machines and left the bolts and nuts to dry on the grass while they started looking at the blades. All of a sudden, a rhea came out of nowhere and ate the nuts shining in the sun. Gulp, gulp, went the rhea's throat as it swallowed several nuts and bolts. Then it started walking backwards, sideways, its eyes bulged out. They tried to lasso it, but it was impossible, it would run like a light, then stop and turn back toward them with such a crazy look, it seemed offended. Finally they had to chase down the ostrich in a car to recover the parts of the machine it had swallowed.”

13
   
In the old days, they used to separate the different estancias by digging ditches between them to prevent the cattle from one to cross over into the other. This work of digging trenches in the pampas was done by Basques and Irish immigrants. The local gauchos refused to do any kind of task that meant dismounting from their horses; they considered despicable any work that had to be done “on foot” (cf. John Lynch,
Massacre in the Pampas
).