Target in the Night. Ricardo Piglia
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they got in a brothel in Lobos? And didn’t that old guy Andrade get involved with a fifteen-year-old girl who was a pupil in a Carmelite convent?”
“Surely,” one of the patrons said.
“Of course if Durán had been a blond gringo everything would’ve been different,” Madariaga said.
“Surely,” the patron repeated.
“Surely, surely…Shirley got put in the clink,” Bravo said, sitting at a table near the window toward the back of the tavern. Stirring a spoonful of bicarbonate in a glass of soda water. For his heartburn.
Durán liked living in a hotel. He’d stay up all night, wandering the empty hallways while everyone slept. And sometimes he’d talk with the night concierge, who went around trying the doors at all hours, or took brief naps on the leather chairs in the large reception hall downstairs. Talking is a figure of speech, though, because the night porter was a Japanese man who smiled and said yes to everything, as if he didn’t understand Spanish. He was small and pale, slicked down, very servile, always wearing a bow tie and jacket. He came from the countryside, where his family ran a flower nursery. His name was Yoshio Dazai,4 but everyone in the hotel called him the Japo. Apparently, somehow, Yoshio was Durán’s main source of information. Yoshio was the one who told Durán the history of the town and the real story of Belladona’s abandoned factory. Many wondered how the Japanese porter had ended up living like a cat by night, shining a light on the hotel’s key cabinet with a small lantern, while his family grew flowers in a farm out in the country. Yoshio was friendly and delicate, very formal and very mannered. Quiet, with gentle, almond-shaped eyes, everyone thought the Japanese night porter powdered his face and that he went as far as applying a touch of rouge, a soft palette really, on his cheeks. He was very proud of his straight, jet-black hair, which he himself called raven’s wing. Yoshio became so fond of Durán that he followed him everywhere, as if he were his personal servant.
Sometimes, at daybreak, the two would come out of the hotel together and walk down the middle of the street, across town to the train station. They’d sit on a bench on the empty platform and watch the dawn express speed by. The train never stopped, it raced south toward Patagonia like a flash. Leaning against the lighted windows, the faces of the passengers behind the glass were like corpses at the morgue.
It was Yoshio who, one early February day at noon, handed Durán the envelope from the Belladona sisters inviting him to visit the family house. They had drawn a map for him on a sheet of notebook paper, circling the location of their mansion on the hill in red. Apparently he was invited to meet their father.
The large family house was up the slope in the old part of town, at the top of the hills looking over the low mountains, the lake, and the gray, endless countryside. Dressed in a white linen jacket and matching shoes, Durán walked up the steep road to the house in the middle of the afternoon.
But they had Durán come in through the back service door.
It was the maid’s mistake, she saw that Tony was a mulatto and thought that he was a ranch hand in disguise.
He walked through the kitchen, through the ironing room and the servants’ rooms, and into the parlor facing the gardens where Old Man Belladona was waiting for him, thin and frail like an old, embalmed monkey, his eyelids heavy, his legs knock-kneed. Durán very politely bowed and approached the Old Man, following the respectful customs used in the Spanish Caribbean. But that doesn’t work in the province of Buenos Aires, because only the servants treat gentlemen in that way here. The servants (Croce said) are the only ones who still use the aristocratic manners of the Spanish Colonies, they’ve been abandoned everywhere else. And it was those gentlemen who taught their servants the manners that they themselves had abandoned, as if depositing in those dark-skinned men the customs they no longer needed.
So Durán behaved, without realizing it, like a foreman, or a tenant, or a farmhand slowly and solemnly approaching his master.
Tony didn’t understand the relationships and hierarchies of the town. He didn’t understand that there were areas—the tiled paths in the center of the plaza, the shady sidewalk along the boulevard, the front pews of the church—where only the members of the old families could go. That there were places—the Social Club, the theater boxes, the restaurant at the Jockey Club—where you weren’t allowed to enter even if you had money.
People asked themselves, though, if Old Man Belladona wasn’t right to mistrust. To mistrust, and to show the arrogant foreigner from the beginning the rules of his class, of his house. The Old Man had probably wondered, as everyone wondered, how a mulatto who said he came from New York could show up in a place where the last black people had disappeared—or had dispersed until they blended completely into the landscape—fifty years earlier, without ever clearly explaining why he had come here, insinuating rather that he had come on some kind of secret mission. They said something to each other that afternoon, it came out later, the Old Man and Tony. It seems he had come with a message, or with an order, everything under wraps.
The Old Man lived in a spacious parlor that looked like a racquetball court. They had knocked down several walls to make room for him, so Old Man Belladona could move from one end to the other, between his tables and desks, speaking to himself and spying out the window at the dead movement on the road beyond the gardens.
“They’re going to call you Sambo around here,” Old Man Belladona told him, smiling caustically. “There were a lot of blacks in the Río de la Plata area during colonial times, they even formed a battalion of mulattos and Negros, very determined, but they were all killed in the War of Independence. There were a few black gauchos, too, out on the frontier, but in the end they all went to live with the Indians. A few years back there were still a few blacks in the hills, but they’ve died off. They’re all gone now. I’ve heard there are a lot of ways of differentiating skin color in the Caribbean, but here the mulattos are all sambos.5 Do you understand, young man?”
Old Man Belladona was seventy years old, but he seemed so ancient that it made sense for him to refer to everyone in town as young. He had survived every catastrophe, he ruled over the dead, everything he touched disintegrated, he drove the men in the family away and stayed with his daughters—while his sons were exiled ten kilometers to the south, in the factory they built on the road to Rauch. Right away the Old Man told Tony Durán about the inheritance. He had divided up his possessions and ceded his property before dying, but that had been a mistake. Ever since it had been nothing but wars.
“I don’t have anything left,” Old Man Belladona said. “They started fighting, and they’ve nearly killed me.”
His daughters, he said, weren’t involved in the conflict, but his sons had gone about it as if they were fighting over a kingdom. (“I’m never coming back,” Luca had sworn. “I’ll never set foot in this house again.”)
“Something changed at that point, after that visit, and that conversation,” Madariaga said from behind the bar, to no one in particular, and without clarifying what the change had been.
It was around that time that people started to say that Durán was a carrier.6 That he had brought money, which wasn’t his, to buy crops under the table. People started saying that this was his business with Old Man Belladona. That the sisters were only a pretext.
Quite possibly, it wasn’t that rare, except that people who carried money under the table tended to be invisible. Men who looked like bankers and traveled with a fortune in dollars to avoid the Tax Office. There were a lot of stories about tax evasion and the trafficking of foreign currency. Where it was hidden, how it was carried, who had to be greased. But that’s not the point, it doesn’t matter where they hide the money, because they can’t be discovered if no one says anything. And who’s going to say anything if everyone’s in on it: the farmers, the ranchers, the auctioneers, the brokers who trade in grains, everyone at the silos who keeps prices down.
Madariaga looked at the Inspector in the mirror again. Croce paced nervously from one end of the tavern to the other, his riding crop in his hand, until he finally sat at one of the tables. Saldías, his assistant, ordered a bottle