Target in the Night (16 page)

Renzi liked how Bravo told stories. It was clear he had told this one so many times, polishing it along the way, that it was now smooth as a pebble. Of course a story can always be improved, Renzi thought, absent-minded. Bravo, in the meantime, had gone on to something else, picking up again on the conjectures about Durán. He thought Tony had gotten close to the Belladona sisters to gain access to the Social Club. With them he could enter, alone they
would never have let him in.

“I would have liked to have warned Tony not to come around here,” Bravo said.
He uses the pluperfect of the subjunctive
, Renzi thought. He was so tired these were the kind of thoughts that popped into his head, thoughts once typical for him, when he was in college and he used to spend his time analyzing grammatical forms and verbal conjugations. Sometimes he wouldn't understand what people were telling him because he'd get distracted analyzing syntactical structures as if he were a philologist enraged by the distorted uses of contemporary language. Recently it had been happening less frequently to him. But sometimes, when he was with a woman and he liked her way of speaking, he'd suddenly want to sleep with her because he was so excited by her use of the perfect preterit indicative. As if the presence of the past in the present justified just about any passion. In this case, it was only his fatigue and the strangeness that he felt being in that town in the middle of nowhere. When he heard the noises around him from the bar again, he realized that Bravo was telling him the story of the Belladona family, a story that seemed like any other story of an Argentine family in the countryside, but more intense and crueler.

“I'm sick of this trash,” Bravo said all of a sudden, completely drunk by this point. “I want to move to the Capital. Do you think there'd be any work for me at
El Mundo
?”

“I don't recommend it.”

“I'm getting out of here, for sure. I can't stand it anymore. And I don't have much time left.”

“Why not?”

“I want to be in Buenos Aires when Perón returns.”

“You don't say,” Renzi said, waking up all of a sudden.

“Definitely. It's going to be a historic day.”

“Don't get so carried away,” Renzi said. He thought that Bravo wanted to be like Fabrizio, the character in
The Charterhouse of Parma
who went to Paris when he heard about Napoleon's return so he could be there to welcome the general home. When he finally goes to Paris, Fabrizio spends his time surrounded by a group of enthusiastic young men of a
seductive sweetness
who—a few days later, as Stendhal writes—steal all his money.

Then they saw Cueto walking toward them, a snooty little smile on his face.

“What do the rented consciences of our homeland have to say?”

“Join us?” Bravo asked.

Cueto had the dry, stringy, vaguely repulsive body of an older man who does a lot of exercise and maintains a kind of pathetic youthfulness.

“Just for a minute, sure,” Cueto said.

“Have you met Renzi?” Bravo asked.

“You write for
La Opinión
, right?”

“No…” Renzi said.

“Ah, then you're a failure…” Cueto flashed him a knowing smile and picked up the bottle of wine. He emptied a glass of water into the bucket of ice, served himself some wine, and offered to refill Renzi's glass.

“No, I better not have any more.”

“Don't ever stop drinking while you're still able to think that it's better if you don't have anymore, as my aunt Amanda used to say.” Cueto savored the wine. “First rate,” he said. “Alcohol is one
of the few simple pleasures we have left in modern life.” He looked around as he spoke, as if he were looking for someone he knew. There was something strange about his left eye, a fixed, bluish look, which made Renzi anxious. “There was an incredible news story yesterday, but of course you journalists never read the papers.”

Two young guerrilla women had killed a conscript at an air force base in Morón.
¹⁷
They had gotten out of a Peugeot and walked up to the sentry box, smiling at the guard, with a 45 hidden in a
Siete Días
magazine. When the young soldier refused to turn over his weapon, they shot him dead.

“He resisted, the paper said. Just imagine if he's going to resist? He must have said, Girls, what are you doing? Don't take my rifle, they'll throw me in jail. His name was Luis Ángel Medina. He could have been from the Province of Corrientes, who knows, a little dark conscript, they were fighting for him, the women, fighting on behalf of the dark oppressed of the world, but they went and killed this one.” He served himself another glass of wine. “They're cooked, both of them, they'll have to stay together from now on, right?” Cueto said. “Live in hiding in some farm in Temperley, stuffed in a hole, drinking
mate
, the two Trotskyites…”

“Okay,” Renzi said, so furious that he started speaking in too-loud a voice. “Inequality between men and women ends as soon as a woman takes up arms.” He went on, trying to be as pedantic
as possible in his alcoholized haze. “In traditional societies, the term
nobilis
, or
nobilitas
, indicated a free person. By definition this means the right to bear arms. What happens if women are the ones who bear arms?”

“Would you look at that,” Bravo said. “Everyone's a soldier! A soldier of Perón—”

“No, a soldier of the People's Revolutionary Army!” Cueto said. “They're the worst, first they go out and kill at random, then they put out a communiqué about the poor of the world.”

“Ethics is like love,” Renzi said. “If you live in the present, consequences don't matter. If you think about the past, it's because you've already lost your passion.”

“You should write these great nocturnal truths.”

“In reality,” Renzi said, “the greatest sacrifice is to abide with the second ethic.”
¹⁸

“The second ethic? Too much for me. Excuse me, my dear journalists, but it's getting late,” Cueto said, and started to get up.

“What we need is a female serial killer,” Renzi continued. “We don't have any women who kill men serially, without a motive, just because. There should be some.”

“For now, women only kill one husband at a time,” Cueto said, still looking around the room.

He had already washed his hands of them, he was fed up with their load of ridiculous abstractions. Cueto was sitting at the table with them, but he was essentially gone.

“I'm going, too, my friend,” Renzi said. “I traveled through the night to get here, I'm done in.”

Bravo walked with him through the night shadows of the town for a few blocks. They stopped at the edge of the main square.

“He wanted people to see him with Ada Belladona. I don't understand,” Renzi said.

“He's courting her, as they say around here. He used to be the attorney for the factory, the attorney for the Belladona family, actually. When the whole mess started between the two brothers, he split off. Now he's the public prosecutor. He'll go far.”

“There's something strange with the way he looks.”

“He has a glass eye, he lost it playing polo.” Bravo got in his car and leaned out the window. “Were you trying to get him to bite? He's a pretty dangerous guy, you know?”

“I've been wiping my ass with dangerous guys like that ever since I can remember.”

Bravo honked his horn to say goodbye, or as a sign of disapproval, and headed off toward the highway. He lived on the outskirts of town, in a residential neighborhood, up in the hills.

Renzi kept walking on his own, enjoying the cool evening. The municipal truck was watering down the empty streets, settling the dust. It smelled of wet earth, everything was peaceful and quiet. Many times, when he traveled long-distance by bus, he felt
like getting out in some town in the middle of the highway and just staying there. Now he was in one of those towns and he had a strange feeling, as if his life were suspended.

But his life was not suspended. When he reached his room and started taking off his clothes, the telephone rang. It was Julia from Buenos Aires.

“You need to stop, Emilio,” she said when he picked up the receiver. “Everyone's asking me about you. Where'd you go? I had to call the newspaper to locate you. Look at the hour. A letter arrived here for you, from your brother.”

Renzi tried to explain that he couldn't come by to pick up the letter because he was working in a small, lousy town in the province of Buenos Aires, but he realized that Julia didn't believe him. She hung up on him mid-sentence. She must have thought that he was lying to her, that he'd taken off and holed up with some chick in a hotel somewhere, he was sure of it.

Several friends had told him that she'd been saying that he was sinking. After his father's death, which he had no intention of re-opening, he had decided to separate from Julia. But he hadn't changed his address yet, and people were still looking for him at his ex's. He would've liked to have been like Swann, who in the end discovers that he's been consumed by his desire for a woman who wasn't truly worth it. But Renzi was still so connected to Julia that six months after leaving her, just hearing her voice was enough to make him feel lost again. He loved Julia much more than he had loved his father, but the comparison was ridiculous. For the moment he was trying not to make connections between unrelated events. If he could keep everything separate he would be okay.

He looked out the window in his room toward the square. On the street he saw the lame dog, walking crooked. It moved in short jumps, until it stopped under a corner streetlight. Bravo had said it was the Inspector's dog. Renzi saw the dog lift its leg to urinate and shake its yellow fur as if it were soaked. Renzi lowered the curtain and got in bed and dreamt he was attending Tony Durán's funeral in a cemetery in Newark. It was actually the cemetery in Adrogué, but it was in New Jersey and it had old tombstones and markings near the sidewalk on the other side of an iron fence. A group of solemn women and mulattos were saying their farewells. Renzi walked up to the open grave and saw the lead coffin, shining in the sun, being lowered into the earth. He picked up a handful of dirt and threw it in.

“Poor son of a bitch,” Renzi said in his dream.

When he woke up he remembered he had dreamed, but not the dream.

16
   
Soon after this, Ada bought herself a Triumph 220. Since then, she rides around town on her motorcycle all the time, scaring the locals and the birds in the corrals. The dogs run after her, barking as if possessed, chasing behind her on the motorcycle.

17
   
“Today the remains of the soldier Luis Ángel Medina were laid to rest in the cemetery of San Justo, having been shot to death yesterday by two women from an extremist commando group. It would have been Medina's last guard duty, since he was about to complete his military service and would have been discharged the following Friday. However, because of a routine assignment, he was destined to cover the post at which he met his death precisely on that fatal day” (
La Razón
, March 14, 1972).

18
   
In his notes for a book on Dostoevsky (1916), speaking about political crime, G. Lukács cites Bakhtin:
Murder is not allowed, murder is an absolute, unforgivable sin. He certainly cannot be, but he
must
be executed.
The authentic revolutionary, like the tragic hero, faces evil and accepts its consequences. Only a crime comitted by a man who knows resolutely and beyond all doubt that murder
cannot
be sanctioned, under any circumstance, is naturally moral. In this fashion Lukács distinguishes between the first—or Kantian—ethic, which outlines responsibilities according to the immediate needs of society, and the second ethic, which focuses on transcendence. Lukács cites Kierkegaard's
Fear and Trembling
on this point:
Direct contact with transcendence in life leads to crime, madness, and absurdity
(Note by Renzi).

9

Croce had a blurry photograph of an unknown man with an outstanding warrant published in the local newspapers, but no one really understood what was going on. Even Saldías started to express his doubts, timidly. The Scribe quickly went from blind admiration to concern to suspicion. Croce didn't pay any more attention to him and, instead, left him out of the loop, ordering him to dedicate his time to typing up a report with the new theories about the crime.