Target in the Night (29 page)

At that point, a man in overalls appeared, lean, very meticulous-looking. Luca introduced him as Rocha, his main assistant and mechanical technician. Rocha had been the leading machinist in the plant, and Luca had kept him on as his principal consultant. Rocha smoked, looking down, while Luca praised his skills as an artisan and his pinpoint accuracy in all technical calculations. Rocha was followed by Croce's dog, the small mutt that came to visit him, as he said, and to which he spoke as if it were a person.
The dog was the only living creature of whose existence Rocha seemed to take any notice, as if truly intrigued by it. The dog was twisted, crooked. It had some kind of strange ailment or injury that kept it from walking straight, making it lose its sense of direction. So Croce's dog moved diagonally, as if an invisible wind kept him from walking in a straight line.

“This dog you see here,” Rocha said, “it comes up to the factory from town, it always walks crooked, it even goes around and around in circles when it gets disorientated. But still, somehow, it makes it all those kilometers from there to here in two or three days. It'll stay with us for a while and then, just like that, one night it'll leave and go back to Croce's house.”

His older brother's unexpected death, in an accident—Luca said all of a sudden—had actually saved the factory. Two months after the dispute, Lucio called him on the telephone, came to get him in his car, and was killed on the road. What is an accident? A malevolent byproduct of chance, a detour in the lineal continuity of time, an unforeseen intersection. One afternoon, standing in the same place where they were now, the telephone—which almost never rings—rang. Luca decided not to pick it up. He walked outside, but came back in again because it was raining (again!). In the meantime, Rocha, without anyone having asked him to do so, had picked up the telephone, as if it'd been a personal call. Rocha was so slow, so deliberate and tidy in everything he did, that Luca had time to walk out of the factory and walk back in, at which point Rocha was able to tell him that his brother was on the phone. He wanted to speak with him, Lucio, he wanted to tell Luca that he was coming by to pick him up in his new
station wagon, so they could go get a beer at Madariaga's Tavern.

Luca had been unable to foresee his older brother's death because he hadn't been able to fully interpret his dreams yet, but Lucio's death was part of a logical line that he was trying to decipher with his Jungian-machine. The event was the result of an axial shift, and Luca was trying to understand the chain that had produced it. He could go back to the most remote times to identify the precise instant when it was produced, an imprecise succession of altered causes.

Luca couldn't stop thinking about the moment right before his brother's phone call.

“We stepped out,” he said. “We were here, where we are now, and we stepped out, but when we saw that it was raining we came back in to get a raincoat, and then my assistant, Rocha, a specialized lathe operator and the best machinist in the factory, told me that our brother was on the phone, and we stopped and went back to answer the call. We could've simply not answered, if we'd gone out and not come back in to get our raincoat.”

That night his brother had called him on a whim, he told him that he'd just thought of it, that he was coming by the factory to pick him up to go get a beer. Luca had stepped out when the telephone rang, but he came back in because of the rain. Rocha, who was about to hang up the telephone and had already told Lucio that Luca was out, saw Luca walk back in, and told him that his brother was on the line.

“Where were you?” Bear asked him.

“I went out to get the car, but I saw that it was raining and came back to get my coat.”

“I'm on my way to pick you up, let's get a beer.”

They spoke as if everything was the same as always, as if their reconciliation was a done deal. They didn't need to explain anything, they were brothers. It was the first time they'd see each other after the incident of the meeting with the investors in the company offices.

Lucio came to pick Luca up in the Mercedes Benz wagon that he'd purchased a few days earlier. It had an anti-radar system to help avoid speed traps. Lucio used the car to visit a girlfriend in Bernasconi, he could make the trip in three hours, get laid, and be back three hours later. “My kidneys, don't get me started,” Bear said. Then he said that with the downpour it would be better to take the highway and get off at the Olavarría exit. Then, at the exit, on the roundabout, he got distracted.

“Listen, little brother,” Lucio started to say, turning his head to look at him. At that instant, at the bend of the road by the Larguía fields, a light shined on them, appearing brightly out of nowhere in the middle of the rain. It was the high beams of a semi. Lucio sped up, which saved Luca's life, because instead of hitting them straight on, the truck grazed the rear of the station wagon. Lucio was crushed against the steering wheel. Luca was thrown from the car, but he landed safely in the mud by the side of the road.

“I remember it as if it were a photograph. I can't forget the image of the light beaming on my brother's face, he'd turned to look at me with an expression of understanding and happiness. It was 21:20 hours, 9:20 pm, my brother sped up and the truck only hit the back of the station wagon, we spun around and I was thrown out into the mud. After my brother was killed,
I saw my father at the burial, that's when he offered me the money from our family inheritance, he had deposited it in an undeclared account in the United States for us. My sister Sofía was the one who intervened so he'd give us the part of the inheritance that corresponds to us, from my mother. This is what we're going to explain at the trial, even if it puts into doubt our father's integrity. Anyway, everyone here knows that's how it is, everyone deals in foreign currency.
³²
He agreed to send us what we needed to pay off the mortgage and recover the deed to the factory.”

Tony's death was a confusing episode, but Luca was sure that Yoshio wasn't the murderer. Luca shared Croce's theories. He was sure that they'd cede the money to him without any problems as soon as he showed the court the papers and the certified withdrawal statements from Summit Bank.

“Let's go downstairs and see the installations,” Luca said.

“My mother says that reading is thinking,” Sofía said. “Not that we read and then we think, but rather that we think something and then we read it in a book as if it were written by us, although it's not written by us. Rather, someone in another country, in another place, in the past, writes it like a thought that hasn't been thought yet, until, by chance, always by chance, we find the book that clearly expresses what had been, confusingly, not yet thought by us. Not every book, of course, but certain books are destined for us, certain books seem like objects of our own thoughts. A book for each one of us. To find it, there must be a series of accidentally interrelated events, until in the end you see the light you're looking for, without
even knowing you were looking for it. In my case it was the
Me-Ti
, or
The Book of Changes
. A book of maxims. I love the truth because I'm a woman. I trained with Grete Berlau, the great German photographer who studied in the Bauhaus, she used the
Me-Ti
as a photography manual. She came to the college because the Dean thought that an agricultural engineer should learn with pinpoint accuracy to distinguish the different kinds of grasses that grow on the estancias. ‘In the countrysides nobody sees a ting, therre's no borrderrs therre.
³³
To see you must cut. Photogrraphy is like trracking and raking.' That's how Grete spoke, with a heavy accent. I remember one time she put me and my sister together and took a series of photographs, and for the first time you could see how different we were. ‘You can only see what you have photogrraphed,' Grete used to say. She was friends with Brecht, she'd lived with him in Denmark. They said she was the Lai-tu of the
Me-Ti.
³⁴

30
   
“Democritus, in Antiquity, already pointed out that:
Mother earth, when made fruitful by nature, gives birth to harvests that serve as food for men and beasts. Because what comes from the earth must return to the earth, and what comes from the air must return to the air. Death does not destroy matter, it breaks up the union of its elements so they may be reborn in other forms. Very different from industry, etc…
” (Report by Mr. Schultz).

31
   
“He works uninterrupted, for many hours on end, at night and in the afternoon, never allowing himself any slowdowns, with great effort, through great fatigue. He demonstrates unbreakable confidence in the ‘immensurable value' of his work. He never lets himself be brought down by the difficulties and he never admits the possibility of failure for any of his endeavors. He does not accept the least bit of criticism, he has absolute confidence in the destiny in store for him. For these reasons, he does not care about recognition. ‘We are concerned with praise and recognition in the
exact measure
to which we are unsure about our work. But he who, like us, is sure—absolutely sure—of having produced a work of great value, has no reason whatsoever to care about recognition. Such a person, like us, will feel indifferent to all worldly glory'” (Report by Mr. Schultz).

32
   
“I am too curious and too clever and too proud to behave like a victim” (Dictated to Mr. Schultz).

33
   
“The pampas presents a privileged medium for photography because of the distances, its folding effects, and the intense plenitude lost in the non-space of visual deprivation” (Note by Grete Berlau).

34
   
Two years after the events recorded in this story, on January 15, 1974, Grete Berlau drank one or two cups of wine before going to bed, and there, lit a cigarette. There was a fire, and she suffocated in the burning room. She may have dozed off while she was smoking. “We have to do away with the habit of speaking about things that cannot be said by speaking,” was one of the sayings of Lai-tu that Brecht recorded in the
Me-ti
, or
The Book of Changes
.

17

They walked down the interior stairwell and into the main part of the factory, where they toured the industrial plant and were surprised by the elegance and spaciousness of the building.
³⁵
The indoor garage was nearly two blocks in length, but it looked like a place that had been suddenly abandoned, right before some imminent disaster. A general paralysis had fallen over the steel accumulated there, much like a stroke leaves a man—who has drunk and fornicated and lived life to the fullest until the fatal instant when, from one second to the next, an attack immobilizes him forever—dry and lifeless.

Frozen assembly lines; a stretched-out section of upholstery with the dyed leather and the seats waiting on the floor; rims, wheels, stacked tires; a shed, its door and windows covered with canvases; inside the shed, metal sheets and cans of paint; tools and mechanical pieces, wheels, pulleys, and small measuring instruments on the floor of the garage; tires with Stepney wood crossbeams; Hutchinson pneumatics; a Stentor horn; an ingenious turbine to inflate tires, activated by the output from the
exhaust pipe; a
cigüeñal
crankshaft with its strange bird-name; a long workbench with adjustable bench vices, optical apparatuses, and gauging devices. The feeling of sudden abandonment was like a cold draft coming off the walls. The steel guillotine shear and the Campbell automatic folding machine, both purchased in Cincinnati, were in perfect condition. Two partially assembled automobiles had been left elevated above the service pits in the middle of the garage. Everything seemed to be in a suspended state, as if an earthquake—or the gray, viscous lava of an erupting volcano—had frozen the factory during an average workday, at the precise moment of its freezing.
April 12, 1971
. The calendar with naked women from a tire shop in Avellaneda, the old wooden box radio plugged into the wall, the newspapers covering the broken glass windows: everything pointed to the exact moment when time had stopped. A blackboard hanging by a wire still had the call to assembly from the plant's internal commission. There was no date on that, but it was from the time of the conflict.
Fellow workers, there will be a general assembly tomorrow to discuss the situation of the company, the new conditions, and our battle plan.
³⁶
The electric clock on the back wall had stopped at 10:40 (but was it am or pm?).