Part 21 (1/2)

”My advice to you is not to go looking for trouble because of what peo- ple might say, let alone because of a woman that doesn't love you anymore.”

”I couldn't care less about her,” he said. ”A man that thinks longer than five minutes running about a woman is no man, he's a pansy. And Casilda's heartless, anyway. The last night we spent together she told me I was get- ting old.”

”She was telling you the truth.”

”And it hurts, but it's beside the point-Rufino's the one I'm after now.”

”You want to be careful there,” I told him. ”I've seenRufinoin action, in theMerloelections. He's likegreased lightning.”

”You think I'm afraid ofRufino Aguilera?”

” I know you're not afraid of him, but think about it-one of two things will happen: either you kill him and you get sent off to stir, or he kills you and you get sent off toChacarita.”*

”One of two things. So tell me, what would you do in my place?”

”I don't know, but then I'm not exactly the best example to follow. I'm a guy that to get his backside out of jail has turned into a gorilla for the party.”

”I'm not planning to turn into a gorilla for the party, I'm planning to collect a debt a man owes me.”

”You mean you're going to stake your peace of mind on a stranger you've never met and a woman you don't even love anymore?”

But Luis Irala wasn't interested in hearing what I had to say, so he left. The next day we heard that he'd picked a fight withRufinoin some bar over inMoronand thatRufinohad killed him.

He went off to get killed, and he got himself killed right honorably, too-man to man. I'd done the best I could, I'd given him a friend's advice, but I still felt guilty.

A few days after the wake, I went to the c.o.c.kfights. I'd never been all that keen on c.o.c.kfights, but that Sunday, I'll tell you the truth, they made me sick. What in the world's wrong with those animals, I thought, that they tear each other to pieces this way, for no good reason?

The night of this story I'm telling you, the night of the end of the story, the boys and I had all gone to a dance over at the place that a black woman we calledLa Pardaran. Funny-all these years, and I still remember the flowered dress La Lujanera was wearing that night.... The party was out in the patio.

There was the usual drunk trying to pick a fight, but I made sure things went the way they were supposed to go. It was early, couldn't have been midnight yet, when the strangers showed up. One of them-they called him theYardmaster,and he was stabbed in the back and killed that very night, just the way you wrote it, sir-anyway, this one fellow bought a round of drinks for the house. By coincidence thisYardmasterand I were dead ringers for each other. He had something up his sleeve that night: he came up to me and started laying it on pretty thick-he was from up north, he said, and he'd been hearing about me. He couldn't say enough about my reputation. I let him talk, but I was beginning to suspect what was coming, He was. .h.i.tting the gin hard, too, and I figured it was to get his courage up- and sure enough, pretty soon he challenged me to a fight. That was when it happened-what n.o.body wants to understand. I looked at that swaggering drunk just spoiling for a fight, and it was like I was looking at myself in a mirror, and all of a sudden I was ashamed of myself. I wasn't afraid of him; if I had been, I might'vegone outside and fought him. I just stood there. This other guy, thisYardmaster,who by now had his face about this far from mine, raised his voice so everybody could hear him: ”You know what's wrong with you? You're yellow, that's what's wrong with you!”

”That may be,” I said. ”I can live with being called yellow. You can tell people you called me a son of a wh.o.r.e, too, and say I let you spit in my face. Now then, does that make you feel better?”

La Lujanera slipped her hand up my sleeve and pulled out the knife I al- ways carried there and slipped it into my hand. And to make sure I got the message, she also said,”Rosendo,I think you're needing this.”

Her eyes were blazing.

I dropped the knife and walked out-taking my time about it. People stepped back to make way for me. They couldn't believe their eyes. What did I care what they thought.

To get out of that life, I moved over to Uruguay and became an oxcart driver. Since I came back, I've made my place here. San Telmo* has always been a peaceful place to live.

The Encounter

ForSusanaBombai Those who read the news each morning do so simply to forget it again, or for the sake of the evening's conversation, and so it should surprise no one that people no longer remember, or remember as though in a dream, the once-famous and much-discussed case of Maneco Uriarte and a man named Duncan.

Of course the event took place in 1910, the year of the comet and the Centennial, and we have had and lost so many things since then-----The protagonists are dead now; those who were witness to the event swore an oath of solemn silence. I too raised my hand to swear, and I felt, with all the romantic seriousness of my nine or ten years, the gravity of that rite. I can't say whether the others noticed that I gave my word; I can't say whether they kept their own. However that may be, this is the story-with the inevitable changes that time, and good (or bad) literature, occasion.

That evening, my cousin Lafinur had taken me to anasado,one of those gatherings of men with the roasting of the fatted calf (or lamb, as it turned out to be), at a country place calledLos Laureles.I cannot describe the topography; we should picture a town in the north of the country- peaceful and shady, and sloping down gently toward the river-rather than some flat, sprawling city. The journey by train lasted long enough for me to find it boring, but childhood's time, as we all know, flows slowly. Dusk had begun to settle when we drove through the gate to the large country house. There, I sensed, were the ancient elemental things: the smell of the meat as it turned golden on the spit, the trees, the dogs, the dry branches, the fire that brings men together.

There were no more than a dozen guests, all adults. (The oldest, Idiscovered later, was not yet thirty.) They were learned, I soon realized, in sub- jects that to this day I am unworthy of: racehorses, tailoring, automobiles, notoriously expensive women. No one disturbed my shyness, no one paid any mind to me.

The lamb, prepared with slow skillfulness by one of the peons that worked on the estate, held us long in the dining room. The dates of the wines were discussed. There was a guitar; my cousin, I think I recall, sangElias Regules'La taperaandEl gauchoand a fewdecimasinLunfardo,*which wasde rigueurback then-versesabout a knife fight in one of those houses onCalle Junin.*Coffee was brought in, and cigars.

Not a word about heading back home. I felt, as Lugones once put it, ”the fear of the late- ness of the hour.” I couldn't bring myself to look at the clock. To hide the loneliness I felt at being a boy among men, I drank down, without much pleasure, a gla.s.s or two of wine. Suddenly, Uriarte loudly challenged Dun- can to a game of poker, just the two of them,mano a mano.Someone ob- jected that two-handed poker usually was a sorry sort of game, and suggested a table of four. Duncan was in favor of that, but Uriarte, with an obstinacy that I didn't understand (and didn't try to), insisted that it be just the two of them. Outside of truco(whose essential purpose is to fill time with verses and good-natured mischief) and the modest labyrinths of soli- taire, I have never cared much for cards. I slipped out of the room without anyone's noticing.

A big house that one has never been in before, its rooms in darkness (there was light only in the dining room), means more to a boy than an un- explored country to a traveler. Step by step I explored the house; I recall a billiard room, a conservatory with gla.s.s panes of rectangles and lozenges, a pair of rocking chairs, and a window from which there was aglimpse of a gazebo. In the dimness, I became lost; the owner of the house-whose name, after all these years, might have been Acevedo orAcebal-finally found me. Out of kindness, or, being a collector, out of vanity, he led me to a sort of museum case.

When he turned on the light, I saw that it contained knives of every shape and kind, knives made famous by the circ.u.mstances of their use. He told me he had a little place nearPergamino,and that he had gathered his collection over years of traveling back and forth through the province. He opened the case and without looking at the little show cards for each piece he recounted the knives' histories, which were always more or less the same, with differences of place and date. I asked if among his knives he had the dagger that had been carried byMoreira*(at that time the very archetype of thegaucho, as Martin Fierroand DonSegundo Som- bra*would later be). He had to admit he didn't, but he said he could show me one like it, with the same U-shaped cross guard. Angry voices inter- rupted him. He closed the case immediately; I followed him.

Uriarte was shouting that Duncan had been cheating. The others were standing around them. Duncan, Irecall, was taller than the others; he was a st.u.r.dy-looking, inexpressive man a bit heavy in the shoulders, and his hair was so blond that it was almost white. Maneco Uriarte was a man of many nervous gestures and quick movements; he was dark, with features that re- vealed, perhaps, some trace of Indian blood, and a spa.r.s.e, petulant mus- tache. Clearly, they were all drunk; I cannot say for certain whether there were two or three bottles scattered about on the floor or whether the cine-matographer's abuses have planted that false memory in my mind. Uriarte's cutting (and now obscene) insults never ceased. Duncan seemed not to hear him; finally he stood up, as though weary, and hit Uriarte, once, in the face. Uriarte screamed-from the floor where he now lay sprawling-that he was not going to tolerate such an affront, and he challenged Duncan to fight.

Duncan shook his head.

”To tell the truth, I'm afraid of you,” he added, by way of explanation.

A general burst of laughter greeted this.

”You're going to fight me, and now,” Uriarte replied, once more on his feet.

Someone, G.o.d forgive him, remarked that there was no lack of weapons.

I am not certain who opened thevitrine.Maneco Uriarte selected the longest and showiest knife, the one with the U-shaped cross guard; Duncan, almost as though any one of them would serve as well as any other, chose a wood-handled knife with the figure of a little tree on the blade. Someone said it was like Maneco to choose a sword. No one was surprised that Maneco's hand should be shaking at such a moment; everyone was sur- prised to see that Duncan's was.

Tradition demands that when men fight a duel, they not sully the house they are in, but go outside for their encounter. Half in sport, half serious, we went out into the humid night. I was not drunk from wine, but I was drunk from the adventure; I yearned for someone to be killed, so that I could tell about it later, and remember it. Perhaps just then the others were no more adult than 1.1 also felt that a whirlpool we seemed incapable of resistingwas pulling us down, and that we were about to be lost. No one really took Maneco's accusation seriously; everyone interpreted it as stemming from some old rivalry, tonight exacerbated by the wine.

We walked through the woods that lay out beyond the gazebo. Uriarte and Duncan were ahead of us; I thought it odd that they should watch each other the way they did, as though each feared a surprise move by the other. We came to a gra.s.sy patch.

”This place looks all right,” Duncan said with soft authority.

The two men stood in the center indecisively.

”Throw down that hardware-it just gets in the way. Wrestle each other down for real!” a voice shouted.

But by then the men were fighting. At first they fought clumsily, as though afraid of being wounded; at first they watched their opponent's blade, but then they watched his eyes. Uriarte had forgotten about his anger; Duncan, his indifference or disdain. Danger had transfigured them; it was now two men, not two boys, that were fighting. I had imagined a knife fight as a chaos of steel, but I was able to follow it, or almost follow it, as though it were a game of chess. Time, of course, has not failed both to exalt and to obscure whatI saw. I am not sure how long it lasted; there are events that cannot be held to ordinary measures of time.

As their forearms (with no ponchos wrapped around them for protec- tion) blocked the thrusts, their sleeves, soon cut to ribbons, grew darker and darker with their blood. It struck me that we'd been mistaken in a.s.suming they were unfamiliar with the knife. I began to see that the two men han- dled their weapons differently. The weapons were unequal; to overcome that disadvantage, Duncan tried to stay close to the other man, while Uri- arte drew away in order to make long, low thrusts.

”They're killing each other! Stop them!” cried the same voice that had mentioned the showcase.

No one summoned the courage to intervene. Uriarte had lost ground; Duncan then charged him. Their bodies were almost touching now. Uri-arte's blade sought Duncan's face. Abruptly it looked shorter; it had plunged into his chest. Duncan lay on the gra.s.s. It was then that he spoke, his voice barely audible: ”How strange. All this is like a dream.”

He did not close his eyes, he did not move, and I had seen one man kill another.