Target in the Night (24 page)

“And what does she read?” Emilio asked.

“Novels,” Sofía said. “They arrive in large packages every month, my mother orders them on the telephone, she always reads everything by a writer she's interested in. Everything by Giorgio Bassani, all Jane Austen, all Henry James, all Edith Wharton, all Jean Giono, all Carson McCullers, all Ivy Compton-Burnett, all David Goodis, all Aldous Huxley, all Alberto Moravia, all Thomas Mann, all Galdós. But she never reads novels by Argentine writers; she says those stories, she already knows.”

23
   
“I remember there were twelve horses per harvester, six bouncers tied to the front and six to the back. The horses knew the sound that the engine made when it was struggling against a tough row of wheat, when the throttle sped up, and they'd stop and wait until the sound of the engine would go back to normal, at which point they'd take off again of their own accord. As if the horses were living instruments” (Lucio Belladona).

24
   
The factory built so-called
Concept Cars
, automobiles designed as models to be later tested and line-produced. With an order from Chrysler, they formulated the prototype of the Valiant III. They built the
Vans
for Škoda Auto, new jeeps, sports cars. Many cars you see on the street today, they were the first to build them. They worked for the branches of Fiat and Kaiser Motors in Córdoba. Headquarters would send them the characteristics of the vehicle they wanted developed. They would conceptualize and build it, piece by piece. The engine, the frame, the upholstery, the windows, the wheels, the bodywork, the paint rectification and final adjustments, everything. Each car was valued somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000. It would take them six to eight months to build one. The cars could be driven out of the factory when finished.

25
   
The process is classic. An investment fund (
a hedge fund
) buys 51% of the shares. Once the company is under their control, the board of directors votes a structural dividend over the capital to recover their initial investment. Technically, it is called the emptying out—or laundering—of a company (
Wash and wear system
).

26
   
“
A little history
. The first major enclosed commercial center, the Southdale Shopping Center, near Minneapolis (in the U.S.), was built in 1956. The Great Commercial Center consists of a vast, central area (the ‘mall') and a large market at the far end of the gallery that anchors the Center. The Center offers everything ‘under one roof,' allowing customers to shop regardless of the weather, always avoiding parking problems, and bringing clients together in one large, single space, with heating and air-conditioning, and many different locales to purchase quality products and brand names. The Center also becomes a recreational area for the entire family. The project scheduled to be built in our town, already presented to the military administrator, would be the first of its kind in Argentina” (
El Pregón
, August 2, 1971).

27
   
“The term
carry trade
refers to speculation of assets used to guarantee loans. The rescue mortgages have much higher interest rates than standard market rates, and the fees for the middlemen are notoriously high. In such cases, the loan might be sold two or three different times and form part of direct financial transactions through the purchase of bonds and assets securitization. The investment fund prevents the mortgage from being settled and overwrites the speculative interests to the initial loan. They do this without allowing for the possibility of paying off the mortgage, in the meantime speculating with the pay-off date. Many assets are thus transferred into the power of large financial entities” (
El Cronista Comercial
, February 3, 1971).

14

Old Man Belladona's large house was on top of a hill, behind a eucalyptus grove. To get there, you had to walk up a path that wound through the trees. Renzi had hired a car in town; when he let him out at a turn in the road, near the path that led to the electric fence and the entrance gate, the driver told him how to walk up to the house. The large house had its name carved in wrought-iron lettering: Los Reyes. Before Renzi reached the fence, a security officer with a tired-looking face came out, communicated on a walkie-talkie with someone inside the house, and after a while opened the gate and let him in. Renzi waited in a large hall, with tall ceilings and windows facing the gardens, and paintings and photographs on the walls above leather couches, all of which made the place seem like the waiting room of a public building.

After a while a maid appeared, looking more like a nurse, and took Renzi into an elevator and up to the second floor. She left him by an open door that led into an enormous living room with barely any furniture. Toward the back Renzi saw a tall and imposing heavy man waiting for him, standing. This was Old-Man Cayetano Belladona, the Engineer.

“Bravo told me you wanted to see me,” Renzi said, after they sat on two oversized chairs placed against one of the walls.

“And Bravo told me that you wanted to see me. So the interest is mutual,” the Old Man laughed. “That doesn't matter, what matters are the articles you're publishing in that newspaper in the Capital. Anyone who reads them is going to think that our town is a war zone. You cite unnamed sources, and like any reporter who says his sources are confidential, this means you're lying.”

“Can you cite that opinion?” Renzi asked.

“I don't like those stories about my family,” the Old Man said, as if he hadn't heard him. “Or your far-fetched theories about why Anthony brought that money.” He doesn't beat around the bush, Renzi thought, taking out a cigarette. “You can't smoke here,” the Old Man told him. “And this is not an interview, I just wanted to meet you. So don't take any notes, and don't record any part of what we say.”

“Right,” Renzi said. “A private conversation.”

“I'm a family man at a time when being a family man doesn't mean anything anymore. I protect my right to privacy. I'm not a public person.” He spoke with extreme calm. “Journalists like you are destroying the little that we have left of solitude and isolation. You gossip and you slander. And you scream about freedom of the press, which for you just means the freedom to sell scandals and destroy reputations.”

“So, then?”

“Nothing. You asked to see me, and here you are,” he said, and pressed a button; a bell rang faintly somewhere in the house. “Would you like something to drink?”

“I was told that I could speak frankly with you.”

“You're a friend of Croce's, so you're a friend of mine,” the Old
Man said. “Even though we've been distanced for a while. He's sick, they've told me.”

“Admitted to the madhouse.”

“Well, I barely leave here anymore.” The Old Man made a gesture that included the entire mansion. “In a sense, I'm admitted too and this, you could say, is my clinic. My wife and daughters live with me, but we could imagine that they have also been committed, and that they think that they're my wife and daughters in the same way that I think that I own this place. Isn't that right, Ada?” the Old Man said to the young woman who entered the room.

“Of course,” she said. “The people who help and serve us are actually nurses and orderlies who play along when we say that we belong to an old family that founded the town.”

“Perfect,” the Old Man said, as his daughter pulled up a low glass table on rubber wheels—with a bottle of Glenlivet and several tall, cut glasses—and started serving whiskey. “These country towns are closed in like chicken coops, isolated from everything, and people sometimes say a bunch of nonsense just because they're bored. I'm sure you can imagine. And now that there's been a crime, everyone's going on about Tony, going round and round adding their bit to the story. I'd like to put an end to the merry-go-round. The best thing for my family is no news. You can write whatever you'd like, but I'd like you to know what we think.”

“Of course,” Renzi said, “but without quoting this conversation.”

“Would you like to serve yourself?” the Old Man said. “This is my daughter.”

The young woman smiled and settled into a chair in front of them.
There was no ice; whiskey straight up, Italian style, Renzi thought. The girl was the young woman he'd seen in the Club, wearing a pair of jeans now and another thin blouse without a bra. She had a ring with a large emerald that she spun on her finger as if she were winding it up. She looked as if she was in a bad mood, or had just gotten out of bed, or was about to collapse, but without losing her sense of humor. Every once in a while a lock of hair would fall over her eyes like a curtain, blocking her sight for a moment, or the top button of her blouse would come undone, revealing her breasts (beautiful and tanned by the sun). When she raised an arm you could see the hair in her armpits (also Italian style). Everything seemed to be part of her style, or of her idea of elegance. All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence, she dropped the ring with the green stone in the whiskey glass.

“Frickin', I say,” she said. “It's swimming on me.”

Unflustered, she fished the ring out of the whiskey with her long fingers, and after cleaning it with her tongue—in a slow, circular motion that it took Renzi a while to forget—she put it back on her finger. As if what she was about to say was related to her action to save the emerald, she told him that she wanted to thank him for not mentioning the stupid stories circulating in town about the relationship between her sister, the deceased, and her. His discretion is what had made them think that Renzi's intentions weren't all bad, or at least that he didn't intend to fall into the usual superstitions that people had in town. Country folk, she told him, get all excited (“horny”) telling perverse stories—which never actually take place the way people imagine. He must know, of course, that after undertaking much research
attempting to identify the defining characteristics of the gaucho of the pampas, anthropologists had been unable to isolate any specific, identifying traits, other than those of being naturally selfish and believing in imaginary illnesses. The young woman referred to country towns as if she were speaking about another world that was not her own. But what most caught Renzi's attention was that when she spoke she emphasized certain words, stretching out the vowels, as if she were counting the syllables in a line of poetry. It was one of those self-conscious, personal mannerisms that in some women constitutes the nature of their language, in the same way that a special timbre is always audible in blank verse—blank verse, Renzi said to himself in English—in the iambic pentameter of Elizabethan drama. The woman underscored certain archaic and very Argentine words in each phrase, as if sticking long pins into live butterflies, to show she was a country girl from a good family. Or as if she were having fun with that. Renzi got a bit lost in his internal digression about modes of speech. When he started paying attention again, the conversation had taken a different turn.

“The stories about Tony are all wrong, including the one about his death being the result of the crime of passion that everyone is talking about. We have nothing to say.” Daughter and father took turns speaking, complementing each other as if they were a duo. “Sometimes,” the Old Man said, “he used to come visit me at night. Let me tell you, he was an exile, he was forced to abandon his country, with his family, because he believed in Puerto Rican independence. His family had always supported Albizu Campos, they never considered themselves citizens of the United States. You know who Albizu is, right? He was a kind of Puerto Rican Perón.”

“Better than Perón.”

“It's no great merit to be better than Perón,” the girl said, to her father's pleasure.

“Of course, it's like saying that someone sings better than Ataúlfo Gómez.”

“He was a nationalist leader in Puerto Rico who confronted the United States.”

“And he wasn't from the military.”

“He was an intellectual who studied at Harvard.”

“Even though he was a mulatto. The illegitimate son of a black laundress and a white land owner.”

The father and daughter were having fun, as if Renzi wasn't there, or as if they were putting on a show for him. So he could see how a traditional family interacts, except there was something strange about the game, a couple's understanding between father and daughter that seemed a bit overacted.