Target in the Night (27 page)

“
There's a traitor among us
,” the Industrialist told them, smiling. “That should be the basic operational sentence of every organization.” Luca gestured toward the street, toward the grafitti and posters on the walls outside the factory. “That's what happened to us, because there was a traitor inside our family business who took advantage of the family's well-being to
squeal
,” he said, again using a metaphor that revealed his origins, as was his habit. Or at least his birthplace.

Luca told them that there were two contradictory tendencies in the teachings of Christ—according to the seminary student—one in conflict with the other. On the one hand, we have the illiterate and dejected of the world, the fishermen, artisans, prostitutes, and poor peasants upon whom the Lord bestowed long and clear parables. For the meek He had not concepts or abstract ideas, but stories and anecdotes. In this line of teaching, arguments were made through narratives, with practical examples from everyday life, which were thus opposed to the intellectual generalizations and abstractions of the men of letters and the philistines, the eternal readers of sacred texts, the interpreters of the Book.
Was He literate? What did He write on the sand? An undecipherable mark, or an actual word? Did He have God's absolute knowledge and did He know all the libraries and all the writings, and was His memory infinite? Christ didn't forecast a good end for the priests and the rabbis and the erudite men at all. To the poor in spirit, rather, to the wretches of the earth, to the humble and the oppressed, was destined the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the other line, the idea was that only a small group of the initiated, an extreme minority, can lead us to the high and hidden truths. This initiated circle of conspirators, who share the great secret, however, act with the conviction that there's a traitor among them. They say what they say, they do what they do, knowing they're going to be betrayed. What is said can be interpreted in several different ways, even the traitor doesn't trust the explicit meaning, the traitor is not quite certain what he should or should not denounce. This is how we can understand how this young, Palestine preacher—a bit of a night owl, strange, who's abandoned His family and speaks to Himself and preaches in the desert; a healer, a fortune-teller, a layer of hands who in His opposition to the occupying Roman forces foretells of a future kingdom—all of a sudden proclaims that He is the Christ and Son of God (
You have proclaimed it
, he said). This theological-political version of the eccentric community, the seminary student said, according to Luca, was the classic structure of a secret sect that knows there's a traitor in its ranks, and protects itself by using a language suffused with hidden meanings.

On the other hand, they may have been a sect of mushroom eaters. This would explain why Christ withdraws to the desert and
visits with Satan. Those Palestine sects—the Essenes, say—ate hallucinatory mushrooms, they're at the base of all ancient religions. They walked around the desert hallucinating, speaking with God, hearing angels. One could think that the consecrated host was nothing other than the image of a mystical communion tying the initiated of the small group together, the seminarian added in an aside, Luca told them.
Eat, flesh of my flesh.

Mr. Schultz, Luca's secretary, was more apt to trust the second line of teachings. The tradition of a “convinced minority”: a nucleus of faithful, formed activists who are able to resist persecution and are united together by a forbidden substance—imaginary or not—with texts full of secret allusions and hermetic words, as opposed to a rural populism that speaks in the local Spanish with the conservative sentences of so-called popular knowledge. Everyone in small towns takes drugs, in the pampas of the Province of Buenos Aires or the pastures and farmlands of Palestine. It's the only way to survive the elements in the countryside, the seminary student said, according to Luca, adding that he knew as much because he'd heard all about it in the confessional. In the long run, everyone confessed that you couldn't live in the countryside without taking some kind of magical potion: mushrooms, distilled camphor, snuff, cannabis, cocaine, mate spiked with gin, yagé, cough syrup with codeine, Seconal, opium, nettle tea, laudanum, ether, heroine, dark pipe tobacco with Rue leaves, whatever you can get in the provinces. How else do you explain gauchesque poetry,
La Refalosa
by Hilario Ascasubi, the dialogues of Chano and Contrera by Bartolomé Hidalgo,
Anastasio el Pollo
by Estanislao del Campo? All those gauchos, high as a kite, speaking
in rhymed verses through the pampas …
That's the law of the land, the man on top does what he wants / The shadow of the tree and its milk is always a menace.
That's what town pharmacists are for, with their prescriptions and concoctions. Isn't the apothecary a key figure of rural life? A kind of general consultant for all ailments, always available, waiting in the doorway at night, ready to deal in milk of the cow and a range of banned products.

The seminary student and Luca understood each other right away, because Luca thought of the restructuring of the factory as if it were a Church in ruins that needed to be re-founded. In truth, the factory had been born from a small group (
my brother Lucio, my grandfather Bruno, and us
), and in those small groups there's always one person who turns away and sells his soul to the devil. Which is what happened with his older brother, the Oldest Belladona son, Lucio, who everyone called Bear. His half-brother, actually.

“He sold his soul to the devil, my brother, influenced by my father. He made a pact, he sold his shares to the investors, and we lost control of the firm. He did it in good faith, which is how all crimes are justified.”

Only after the
betrayal
, and after the night that Luca ran out half-crazy and had to hide away for a few days—isolated in the Estévez Estancia, in the middle of the countryside—only then was he able to stop thinking in traditional terms, and dedicate himself instead to building what he now called the objects of his imagination.

People accused him of being unreal,
²⁹
of not having his feet
on the ground. But he'd been thinking, the imaginary wasn't the same as the unreal. The imaginary was the possible, that which is not yet. This projection toward the future contained—at the same time—both what exists and what doesn't exist. Two poles that continually change places. And the imaginary was this changing of places. He'd been thinking.

From the window, in that room on the second floor, you could see the back gardens and the guesthouse where the mother lived. Old Man Belladona would be in one of the rooms downstairs with the nurse who took care of him. Renzi turned toward Sofía on the bed. She was sitting up, naked, smoking, leaning back against the headboard.

“And your sister?”

“She must be with the Vulture.”

“The Vulture?”

“She's seeing Cueto again.”

“Man, that guy is everywhere.”

“She feels uneasy when she's with him, uneasy, annoyed. But she goes out with him every time he calls.”

Cueto was arrogant, according to Sofía, super-adapted, calculating, and he gave the impression of being empty: an ice cube covered by a shell of social adaptation and success. He was always doing his best to
compliment Ada, while she, for her part, never hid her disdain for him; she made fun of him in public and laughed at him, no one understood why she didn't stop seeing him. Why she stayed with that man, as if she didn't want to leave him.

“Cueto is the biggest hypocrite of all the hypocrites, a born charlatan, an opportunist. Ugh, yuck.”

Sofía was jealous. It was curious, strange.

“Ah… And that bothers you?”

“Do you have a sister? Do you?” Sofía asked, irritated. “Have you ever had a sister?”

Renzi looked at her, amused. She'd already asked him. He appreciated having a brother who was unbearable, because this had disillusioned him of the belief that family could be anything but a burden. He was surprised to see Sofía nested to her genealogical tree like a Greek immortelle.

“I have a brother, but he lives in Canada,” Renzi said.

He sat up on the bed next to her and began caressing her neck and the upper part of her back, in a gesture that had become a habit for him in his life with Julia. This time, too, Sofía seemed to calm down, with the caress that wasn't for her, because she rested her head on Emilio's chest and started murmuring.

“I can't hear you,” Renzi said.

“She was just a girl when she first went with Cueto. It's like he left his mark on her. She's fixated on him. Fixated,” she repeated, as if the word were a chemical formula. “I wish I'd lost my virginity first, instead of her.”

“What?” Renzi said.

“He seduced her… But I didn't let her get married, I took her away on a trip.”

“And the two of you came back with Tony.”

“Aha,” she said.

She'd gotten up, wrapped in the sheet, and was now at the marble night table chopping up the cocaine with a razor blade.

29
   
“More unreal, and more illusory, was the economy. Luca was shocked by the announcement made by U.S. President Richard Nixon, on the evening of August 15, 1971, regarding the end of the convertibility of dollars into gold—the
Gold Exchange Standard
created by the Genoa Conference of 1922. The decision was meant, according to Nixon, ‘To protect the country against speculators who have declared war on the dollar.' From that moment on, according to Luca, everything had been ‘a cesspool' and—
he'd been thinking
—financial speculation would soon start to predominate over material production. Bankers would impose their norms and abstract operations would dominate the economy” (Report by Mr. Schultz).

16

When he had his nervous breakdown, nearly a year ago, Luca went to hide out in a country house, where he spent the nights on the front porch—with a lantern as a nightlight, and the sounds of the crickets and the distant barking of the dogs until the singing of the roosters at the break of day—reading Carl Jung. He concluded that the
process of individuation
in his life was embodied or expressed in a universe that he was trying to unveil. He'd lost his way and was now jumping through a ploughed field looking for the road.

When his brother betrayed him, Luca wandered around the roads, aimless, lost. He'd shown up that afternoon at their company's town offices without telling anyone he was coming, and had surprised his brother in an unannounced meeting with the new shareholders and Cueto, their factory's lawyer. They wanted to hand majority control and decision-making power of the board over to the intruders. He feared, his brother, with the rise in the dollar, and with the government's exchange policy, that they wouldn't be able to pay off the debts they'd acquired in Cincinnati. That was where they had purchased the large power tools—a giant steel guillotine shear and an enormous folding machine—which they could see down below, on the floor of the factory, if they leaned over edge of the balcony where they were now walking.

When he saw Luca enter unexpectedly into the offices, Lucio smiled with that smile that had connected them for decades, an intimate expression between two inseparable brothers. They'd worked together their whole life, they understood each other without having to say a word—but in that moment everything changed. Luca had left to go to Córdoba to ask for an advance from the head offices of IKA-Renault, but he'd forgotten some papers and had come back to get them, when he walked into the secret meeting.
Oh, evil
. He realized right away what was going on. He didn't speak to the intruders, didn't even look at them. They were sitting calmly around the table in the conference room when Luca entered. They looked at him in silence. He felt that his throat was dry, burning with the dust from the road. “Let me explain,” Lucio said. “It's for the best.” As if his brother had lost his head, or was under some kind of spell. On one side of the table, Cueto, the hyena, was smiling, but Luca only blew up when he saw that his brother was also smiling like that, blissfully. There's nothing worse than a naïve idiot who does something wrong thinking that it's for the best, and smiles, angelically, proud of himself and his good deeds. “I saw red everywhere,” Luca said. He charged toward his brother, who was tall as a tower, and knocked him out of his chair with one punch. Lucio didn't defend himself, which only made Luca angrier. Luca finally stopped and left his brother on the ground. He didn't want to disgrace himself. He walked out, his head spinning, his life in shambles. He understood that his father must have convinced Lucio, that he must have frightened him first and then forced him to listen to—and accept—Cueto's advice.