Target in the Night (23 page)

She saved newspapers, magazines, flyers, documents, and many family letters that people left over time. “I have, for example,
an archive with all of the town's anonymous letters.” It's the most important genre, she said, the annals of the worst slander of the Argentina pampas. They started the same day that the Archives were founded. You could write a history of the town just with those anonymous letters. New messages arrive all the time, they tell of intrigues, reveal secrets, and are written in the most diverse ways—with words cut out from newspapers and glued on notebook paper, or written in a shaky handwriting, probably with the opposite hand, to conceal things not worth concealing, or with old Underwood or Remington typewriters that skip a letter, or in letters printed as flyers in some small press somewhere in the Province. These documents were kept in brown boxes in a special section of the Archives, on their own shelf. She showed him the first one ever received—stuck to the door of the church on a Sunday in 1916—and read it out loud as if it were an edict.

Dear neighbors: The legislators of the Province are not defending the countryside. We must go and get them out of their houses and demand an explanation. It's easier to deceive a multitude than an individual. Sincerely, an Argentine

According to Rosa, Croce had taken up the tradition of writing anonymous letters to let people know he was dissatisfied with the turn of events and with the shady dealings of the prosecutor, Cueto. Like other times, whenever he was in the absolute minority, he had withdrawn to the local asylum and calmly begun sending his anonymous messages with his elaborate theories about events.

On several occasions Rosa had placed ads in the area newspapers
asking for people to donate their collections of family photographs to the Municipal Archives. She also arranged to acquire the archives from the English railroads, the sessions of the Rural Society, and the minutes from the Automobile Club containing the records of the construction of the roads and highways in the area.

“No one else cares about these ruins, it's just me,” she said, and showed him a series of well-organized and clearly-labeled boxes with negatives and developed photographs and old Kodak plates. “I've always been waiting for someone to come and dig through these remains, to give my work meaning.”

Several photographs, grouped in a series, showed various images of the area. Construction workers, white scarves tied with four knots on their heads, building an enormous house that would become the old quarters of the La Celeste Estancia; a photo of El Moderno Bar, with a side room used as a movie theater (Renzi was able to see the sign advertising the movie they were showing that day with a magnifying glass: Jacques Tourneur's
Nightfall
–
Al caer la noche
); a snapshot taken at harvest time with a row of laborers walking up a plank toward the freight cars with bags swung over their shoulders; several old photographs of the train station with silos, “bird-of-prey” grain augers, and waterwheels in full activity, and in the back a threshing machine pulled by horses; an image of the Madariaga Store and Tavern when it was just a cart outpost.

“If you look at the photographs, you'll see that the town hasn't really changed. It's gotten worst with time, but overall it's still the same. What happened is that the highway drove all the wealth westward. The factory, for example, is far from here, but the entire town lived off of the factory when the crops started losing their
yield. And that's why the firm is under dispute, because that land on the hill, near the highway—that land is worth a fortune.”

Renzi spent a few hours looking through the material. He was able to trace how the Belladona wealth had been amassed. In the middle of the modern history of the town was the business that Luca Belladona had built, with the help of his older brother, Lucio, under their father's condescending and skeptical eye. An unbelievable building of architectural rationalism, ten kilometers outside the town, in the hills, especially striking in the middle of the countryside, like a fortress in the desert.

“Luca designed it himself,” she said. “And you could already tell—or one should have already been able to tell—that he was in a different reality. He spent a fortune. It's an extraordinary building, so modern that many years later, amid the decadence and the paralysis, it still hasn't lost its strength. He drew up the plans, he spent months redoing parts of the windows and the gates because the angle of the hinges was off. It was the most modern car manufacturing factory in Argentina at the time, much more modernized than the Fiat plants in Córdoba, and Fiat in Córdoba was on the industry forefront.”

They had the photographs from the different stages of the building process. Renzi followed the process as if he were observing the construction of an imaginary city. First you could see the empty vastness of the plains, then the large holes in the ground, the concrete and iron base foundations, the great wooden structures, the glass galleries along the ground level, the abstract structure of the beams connecting the walls (which looked like a chest board from above), and finally the walled building, with the tall, sliding
doors and the endless wrought-iron railings.

Among the documents and newspaper articles, Renzi found a long statement by Lucio Belladona from the day of the inauguration of the plant. They had started from nothing, going around the countryside to repair agricultural machines during the harvests
²³
—the first mechanical threshing machines, the first steam combine reaper machines—and eventually set up a workshop behind their house. It was there that they started building racecars, working with light coupes, small and resistant, that competed on open highways and dirt roads throughout the provinces. It was the grand time of the Touring Car Racing Series, normal cars, customized, touched up by mechanics, with production engines—the first V8's, the 6-cylinder Cadillac's, the Betis cars—at the top of their power, the “spherical” fuel tanks always installed at the center of the automobile, the fenders like wings, the reinforced frames and aerodynamic body designs. Soon they became famous throughout the country, the Belladona brothers appeared in newspapers and the magazine
El Gráfico
with Marcos Ciani or with the Emiliozzi brothers, always next to the fastest cars. They moved up in the field of national mechanics (copy-adapt-graft-invent), becoming great innovators. In the mid-1960s they signed the first contract with Kaiser Motors in Córdoba to make prototypes for experimental cars.
²⁴

Renzi followed the storyline, he studied the newspaper clippings, the photographs, the smiles of the brothers working under the open hoods of the cars. In 1965 they traveled to the U.S. and, in Cincinnati, purchased very large guillotine shears and folding machines. Their situation became complicated by a sudden devaluation of the peso, from one day to the next the dollar in Argentina was worth twice as much as it used to be.

From that moment on, the newspaper articles and the court archives started portraying Luca as a violent man, but the violence lay in the circumstances of his life rather than in the particularities of his character. He was the only man known in the town—or in the district, or in the whole province, for that matter, as Rosa clarified, with some irony—who had latched on to any kind of dream. Better yet, Luca was attached to a fixed idea, and his stubborn determination for that idea led to his catastrophe. People distrusted him. They considered his decision not to sell an attitude that explained all the misfortune that had befallen him. It explained, too, that he ended up isolated and alone in the deserted factory, like a ghost, never leaving or seeing anyone. He had endless confidence in his project. When it failed, or when he
was betrayed, he felt empty, as if he'd lost his soul.

The decline was not the result of a process or something that happened slowly over time, however, but an act of negative illumination. A single moment that changed everything. One night Luca arrived at their offices in the center of town unannounced and found his brother negotiating with a group of investors planning a takeover of the factory. They had prepared a contract to establish a corporation through public shares,
²⁵
everything behind Luca's back, because they were trying to assume control of the company. There were all sorts of clashes. The workers occupied the plant, demanding that the source of their jobs be maintained, but the State intervened in the conflict and decreed the closing. That's when Luca decided to take out a mortgage on the factory, to deal with the debt, refusing to negotiate and insisting that he would continue with his projects. Since then he has lived there, without seeing anyone, in a battle to the death with his father and the town leaders.

“Luca doesn't want to accept things as they are. I can understand that,” Rosa said. “But at a certain moment this became a problem for everyone, because the town was divided over the issue and anyone allied with Luca had to go into exile—let's just say it like that. And he was left alone, convinced that his father had tried to sink him.

“He resisted and kept control of the factory, which just about
stopped producing anything. He stayed there, in the half-empty plant, working on his machines, trying at all costs to save the property, which is worth millions. They want to expropriate the factory, subdivide the land and the premises into smaller plots, there's a lot of money at play, they have a project that's already been approved and announced in the papers.
²⁶
There are several lawsuits against him, but Luca fights on. The way I see it,” Rosa said, “Durán's death is connected to this affair. Why did he come here with so much money in dollars? Some say he came with the money to save the plant, others maintain that he came to bribe officials and use the money to buy the factory and throw Luca out. That's what they say.”

Renzi wrote the facts in his black notebook and, with Rosa's help, followed the trace of the carry trade in the finance company assets and the official balance of the money markets. The bonds circulated from one place to another and were traded on Wall Street. In this fashion, they reached an investment firm
²⁷
from Olavarría,
in which one of the main investors was Doctor Felipe Alzaga, an estancia owner in the area. Apparently they had purchased the bonds from the underwriting of the factory's mortgage and the decision was theirs to make. There was nothing illegal, Renzi was even able to record the information and all the numbers of the register of the investment fund at the branch office of Banco Provincia: Alas 1212.

Rosa showed him other figures and facts, leading him into the secrets of the conflict. But Renzi had the feeling that it wasn't the papers or Rosa's story that would permit him to understand what had happened, but the mere fact of being in town. The places were still there, nothing had changed, the town was like a stage set, even the attitudes seemed to repeat the story. “Right here, where we are now, is where everything started,” Rosa said, and made a gesture with her arms as if she were showing him the past.

The building of the Municipal Archives was Colonel Belladona's old house when he founded the town and first built the train station. The English had sent him there because he was considered trustworthy, he came from Italy as a child and he, too, had a tragic story. “Like everyone, if you look at their life close enough,” she said. They called him Colonel because he had volunteered to fight in the Italian Army in the Great War and had been decorated and promoted.

The collection of documents in the library was very thorough, there was an archive of the history of the factory from the initial
plans to the filing for bankruptcy. Luca took care of the factory archive himself, personally, he was always sending in announcements and documents so they would be saved, as if he'd already imagined what was going to happen.

“He trusts me,” Rosa said, a little later. “Because I'm part of the family, and he only trusts family, in spite of the catastrophe. My mother is Regina O'Connor's sister, the boys' mother, we're first cousins.”

According to her, something was about to happen. The past was like a premonition. Nothing would be repeated, but what was about to happen—what Rosa imagined was about to happen—had been forecast. There was an air of imminence, like a storm you can see on the horizon.

All of a sudden she asked him to excuse her. She walked toward the back, where the birdcage was, with the canary outside the cage. She sat at a small desk near the staircase and, after using a benzene lighter to heat a metal container to boil the needles, and after cutting open a small vial with a small penknife, she raised her dress and gave herself an injection on her thigh, looking at Renzi with a peaceful smile.

“My mother sometimes forgets a book she's reading on a chair out in the yard. She hardly ever goes outside, she always wears really dark glasses because she doesn't actually like the sunlight, but still sometimes she'll sit and read by the plants in the yard, in springtime when it's especially nice, and when she reads she murmurs under her breath. I've never been able to tell if what she's doing is repeating what she's reading or if she's speaking to herself in a low voice—like I do, too, sometimes—because
her thoughts rise as they say to her lips, so maybe she's speaking to herself, who knows, or maybe she's humming some song, she's always liked to sing, when I was a little girl I loved my mother's voice, I'd hear it from the back of the house when she sang tangos, there's nothing more beautiful or more moving than a young, lovely woman—like my mother—singing a tango by herself. Or maybe she's praying, maybe she's saying some prayer under her breath, asking for help when she reads. Whatever the case may be, she moves her lips when she reads and they stop moving when she stops reading,” Sofía said. “Sometimes she falls asleep and the book falls off of her lap, and when she wakes up she seems afraid and quickly goes back to ‘her lair,' as my mother calls the place where she lives—and that's when she forgets the book and doesn't dare go back for it.”