Target in the Night (15 page)

She's putting me on, Renzi thought, she's spinning a yarn to hook me in.

“When she finally escaped forever from this damned country, as
she used to call it, she went back to Dublin, where she works now as a teacher. Every once in a while we get a letter, always addressed to her sons, written in a Spanish that gets stranger and stranger with time. No one has ever written back to her. Because her two sons have not forgiven her for abandoning them, and this served to unite them under a common sorrow. No son can forgive his mother for abandoning him. Fathers abandon their sons without any problems, they just leave and never see them again, but a woman can't do that, it's forbidden, that's why my sister and I, if we ever have children, we're going to abandon them. And they'll wave at us, standing in a square when they're small, the little kids, while we drive by in our cars with a different lover. How do you like that?”

She stopped, looked at Renzi with a smile glowing in her eyes, and served herself more wine. Then she went back to the living room and took a while. When she came back out, she was exhilarated, her eyes were shining, she was rubbing her tongue over her gums and balancing two plates with cheese and olives.

“In my family the men go crazy when they become fathers. Look at what happened to my old man: he could never get out from under his doubt. He was certain only of the paternity of my older brother, Lucio, he was the only one who obeyed his desires, except in his marriage.”

Only then did Renzi realize that Sofía was going inside more and more frequently. He followed her into the living room and saw her bent over a glass table.

“What do you have there?” Renzi asked.

“Sea salt,” she said, leaning forward, smiling, holding a rolled-up, one-peso bill to her nose.

“Well, well, will you look at the country girl,” Renzi said. “Can I have a line?”

15
   
“There are bogus societies that transport 30,000 tons of grain under the table per month. That is equivalent to 3,000 trucks. Just ten or twelve people can run such an operation. ‘Some juridical reports charge $30,000 to create such a society,' several sources stated to this reporter” (Renzi's article).

8

Bravo and Renzi left the newspaper offices and walked down the empty streets of the town. It was a stormy night; a warm wind was blowing from the plains. Renzi realized with disgust that he had stepped on a beetle, which made a dry crack as he crushed it under his shoe. Clouds of mosquitoes and moths flitted about the corner streetlights. After a while, a stray dog appeared in front of them, slightly deformed, its tail between its legs. A bit lame, it began to follow them with its crooked walk.

“That's the Inspector's dog, he leaves him untied and the mutt roams about all over town at night like a ghost.”

The dog stayed close for a while, but finally lay down at a doorstep along the way. The two men walked on, the wind rustling the branches in the trees and raising the dust in the street.

“Here we are, Emilio,” Brazo said. “This is the Club.”

They stood in front of a two-story house, French style but understated. A bronze plaque announced to anyone who went close enough to read the miniscule print that this was the Social Club, founded in 1910.

“Not just anyone can come in here,” Bravo said. “But you're with me, you can be my guest tonight.

“My work as the society page reporter consists of setting a high
bar and keeping people on one side separate from those on the other side. My readers can't come in here, so they have to read the paper. How to cross the line; or better yet, how to make the jump from one side to the other, that's what everyone wants to know. Durán, the deceased, a mulatto, a black man really—because out in the province there are no mulattos, you're either white or you're black. Anyway, Durán, black and all, was finally able to go in.”

By then the two of them had also entered the hall. Bravo greeted people he knew as they walked past the bar and took a seat at a table off to a side, near the windows, facing the gardens outside.

“Everyone is now saying that Tony had brought a bunch of money with him when he arrived. But nobody can explain why he brought it, or what he was waiting for. Americans can bring as much money into the country as they want to, they don't have to declare anything. The military set up the arrangement during the time of General Onganía,” Bravo told Renzi, as if he were sharing a personal secret. “Liquid capital, foreign investment, it's considered legal. Who covers the economy at
El Mundo
?”

“Ameztoy,” Renzi said. “According to him, Perón is controlled by European companies.”

Bravo looked at him, amazed.

“European?” he remarked. “But that's antediluvian, from the time of the ñaupa.” Like everyone in the province—as Renzi realized after his conversations and interviews from that day—Bravo used arcane words and out-of-date expressions deliberately to try to seem more genuinely from out in the country. “The freedom to move currency was imposed by the Americans as a condition
to bringing in foreign investment. Now it's used to deal money under the table to make deals on the harvests.”

“And that's what Durán was doing,” Renzi said. “Moving money.”

“I don't know, that's what people say. Don't go and cite me as a source, Emilio, I'm the town's social conscience. I say what everyone thinks but no one dares to say.” He paused. “Snobbery is the only way to survive in these places,” he added, and went on to explain why he was accepted in such a rarified atmosphere.

Bravo, at thirty, looked like an old man. It wasn't that he had aged prematurely, but that old age was part of his life, his face was covered with scars because he'd been in an automobile accident. He was an excellent tennis player as a youth, but his career was interrupted soon after he won a junior tournament at the Law Tennis Club in Viña del Mar, and he never recovered from his unfulfilled expectations. He had so much natural talent for tennis that people called him Stumpy—just like Carlos Gardel was called the Mute—and, like everyone with a natural talent, when he lost his gift—when he was no longer able to use his gift—he became a kind of spontaneous philosopher who looked at the world with the skepticism and clarity of Diogenes in the garbage can. He hadn't been able to accomplish anything with the gift he was given, except to win the final of that junior tournament in Chile over Alexis Olmedo, the Peruvian tennis player who'd go on to win Wimbledon years later. Bravo was forced to retire from the circuit before even entering it due to a strange lesion on his right hand that kept him from playing. That's when his decadence and old age began. He returned to his hometown, where his father,
a hacienda auctioneer, got him the position at the newspaper as the society page reporter—because he still had an aura about him of having played tennis on the
courts
at a time when only the upper classes played the white sport.

“No one can imagine,” he said to Renzi, after they had a few drinks and entered the stage of frank confessions, “what it's like to have a talent for something and not be able to use it. Or at least to think that one has a talent for something and not be able to use it.”

“I know,” Renzi said. “When it comes to that, half of my friends (and I myself) suffer the same illness.”

“I can't play tennis anymore,” Bravo complained.

“Usually my friends have so much talent that they don't even need to do anything.”

“I understand,” Bravo said. “Can you imagine how big of snobs they are here, they think of me as one of their own because I trained with Rod Laver.” He paused, waiting for Renzi's smile. Bravo was rambling a bit, drinking the free whiskey he was served whenever he came to the Club. “Sometimes, when I need money,” he said all of a sudden, “I go and play
paleta
against country folk who don't know who I am, and I always win. There's nothing more different from a tennis court than the walls of a Basque
pelota
game, but the key is still to see the ball, and my eyesight is just fine. I could play left-handed, with my hands tied, and I'd still win. In Cañuelas I beat Utge,” he said, as if he had defeated Shakespeare in a poetry contest.

Bravo paused again, and went on, as if he felt the need to continue telling Renzi his secrets. He told him that sometimes he thought he could hear the crisp sound of a tennis ball catching
the line, but that so much time had passed since his experience on the courts that it would take him a while to identify the sound. A sound that to this day still moved him.

Renzi thought again that Bravo was ranting a bit, but he was used to it. It wasn't unusual for reporters to digress and ramble when they spoke to keep from saying anything. Personal secrets and false news, that was the genre.

“You can't imagine the deals the military are making before they leave,” Bravo said. “They're going to sell everything, even their tanks. Everyone here is sure that Perón is coming back and that the soldiers are going back to their barracks. They're making as many deals as they can before the tortilla is flipped over. Speaking of which, should we order something to eat? They make a Spanish tortilla here you just can't find in Buenos Aires.”

Bravo ordered another whiskey. Renzi was hungry, so he took Bravo's suggestion and ordered a Spanish tortilla and a bottle of wine.

“Which wine would you prefer, sir?” asked a waiter with the face of a bird, looking at Renzi with a strange mixture of distance and disdain.

“Bring me a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc,” Renzi said. “And a bucket of ice.”

“Of course, sir,” the waiter said, with the manners of an idiot who believed he was the son of Count Orlov.

Bravo lit a cigarette, and Renzi saw that his right hand shook. It was a little deformed, with an ugly protuberance at the wrist. Renzi thought that Bravo was using his right hand as if he were forcing himself to do so, as if he were still in physical therapy.
Renzi pictured the electrical machines, the metal clips and thin wires attached to the hand to stretch the nerves and the joints.

“Can you imagine being a society page reporter in a town like this? People tell you the news on the telephone before events occur, if you don't promise them you'll publish it, they don't do it. First they make sure it'll make the news, then the action happens,” Bravo said. “Everything is arranged in here, in the Club. That woman back there, at the round table, that's one of the Belladona sisters.”

Renzi saw a young redhead, tall and arrogant, leaning distractedly toward the man speaking next to her—one of those men whose heads look too small for their bodies, lending them a sinister appearance, as if their human torso ended at the face of a snake. It was the Prosecutor, Renzi recognized him from television. The young woman was speaking now, resting back in her chair, her left hand between her breasts, as if she were trying to keep warm. She's not wearing a bra, Renzi thought, the best little tits in the Argentine pampas. He saw her shake her head no, without smiling, and jot something down on a piece of paper. Then she said goodbye with a quick kiss on the cheek and walked toward the staircase leading downstairs, her gate confident and seductive.

“It started a while ago,” Bravo said, and began telling the story. “Cueto got one of the first Harley Davidsons in Argentina, and when he showed up in town with the machine, all Ada Belladona wanted was to get a ride on his motorcycle. He went out with her, gave her a ride around the main square, and immediately they had an accident. Ada broke a leg, Cueto came out unscathed. He always said that the key to driving a motorcycle was knowing
how to fall. That was his theory. The first thing an athlete does, he said, is learn how to fall. He asked her before she got on and she told him that she knew how to fall. But when the motorcycle grazed one of the flowerbeds on the edge of the square, the machine dragged the girl's leg along for nearly fifty meters. She wasn't left paralyzed by sheer chance, she had a cast from her hip to her toes. The work of an artist, I think they found a sculptor to do it. Aldo Bianchi or one of those, she used to say, showing off her cast, which ended in a kind of plaster sandal with the stylized form of a siren's tail. And she used it to lean on it like that. It was incredible, she was as crazy as Cueto was, that young woman, she loved to dance, and one summer night, they went to this place in Mar del Plata, Club Gambrinus. Inside, everyone asked her, What happened to you? Are you okay? She just said that her leg had been crushed by a horse and kept getting up to dance. She'd stick her white, bright leg into the ground, with that shape like the tail of a fish, and spin her body around and around the plaster cast. Like Captain Ahab.”
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