Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

B

The third episode to mark Bea Langley’s life and put the finishing touches to the mold of her character takes place in New York. It is 1916, and Bea is a woman in her prime — with thirty-one springs behind her — who won’t change substantially, except for the degeneration of an already well-formed character. She has abandoned her husband — who, eaten by jealousy, refuses to give her a divorce — and her two offspring await, optimistically, the return of their mother in an English boarding school a few miles from Florence. The war is a frequent topic of conversation, and Richard Foret, of whom Beatrice still knows nothing, or not much, is crossing the Atlantic to New York on the liner in which, by chance, Trotsky is traveling into exile.

Bea is received with moderate enthusiasm by New Yorkers. Her exploits alongside the Futurists (the rumors of her affair with Marinetti) don’t soften any hearts since the general opinion is that Futurism is overvalued, just a boorish bustling of loudmouthed, hirsute people. And neither has Bea’s art had a positive impact: she is branded as a naïve painter, and the adjective is correct. Her poetry, by contrast, has better luck. Alfred Kreymborg, a dapper defender of free verse, invites her to contribute to his magazine, Others, and the poems published there are praised in circles she believes to be important, although their leading light, a young man with a pleonastic name, is, in fact, a small-town doctor from New Jersey: William Carlos Williams.

After being initially dazzled, Bea is, in a sense, disillusioned by New York. The people are pretentious or simply imbecilic, and no one has serious conversations about anything. They are all cynics, and erecting a wall of indifference between themselves and all things human is a fashion that coexists with the most ridiculous of hats. Her friend Heather, who has been in New York for a year, avoids her, offering risible excuses, and is only to be seen with a group of famous lesbians. Bea concentrates on her political writing, now more detailed and better argued than in her Italian period. In relation to her poetry, she is unaware that what she does can be justified so elegantly: the battle for free verse contributes to her theoretical redemption.

On an evening when Bea is returning to the apartment that also serves as her studio, having just left one of those salons where the dilettantes take great pains to shock by dressing like standard lamps, she is stopped by a down-and-out who brusquely asks her for money. Bea is accustomed to walking alone and has learned to avoid all manner of altercations. It is not unusual for men to follow her when they notice she lives by herself, and to make indecent proposals in the most sordid streets. But she is a tough woman and knows it is essential to keep smiling and reduce her aggressor to the size of a child, looking derisively at him; they usually leave her in peace.

This down-and-out, however, is persistent. A man of about fifty with a pockmarked face, dressed in stinking rags. He walks with a stoop, as if carrying a heavy load on his right shoulder, and has a long beard that does not completely hide the gauntness of his features. At some point he steps out in front of Bea, blocking her way. It is a narrow street, almost deserted at this twilight hour. Bea impatiently looks the undesirable in the eye and asks permission to pass. And then it happens: she recognizes the eyes and forehead of someone glimpsed in the past. She hesitates an instant longer, with time standing still around her, rummaging in her memory in search of such a face. When she finds it, she pales and her jaw drops in a gesture of surprise that will remain there for several days. The vagabond is none other than the murderer in that Piedmont station, the man who, fifteen years before, in a fit of spite, fired at a woman who was abandoning him in slow motion. Now Bea meets him again, on another continent and with a very different appearance, but it is undoubtedly the same person. She remembers in fine detail the pain on his face when the guards arrested him; under the gray beard, the man’s expression is now identical: he seems frozen in that instant, as if it were impossible to feel any new emotion after that last, definitive one.

While Bea is thinking about the strange trajectories life traces out, the man continues to try to wheedle some money out of her, claiming hunger, but he becomes increasingly desperate and his words of entreaty less sweet. The destitute man pulls a rusty knife from his tattered overcoat and waves it before Bea’s face. His movements become jerky and his voice, now shrill, demands that Beatrice give him everything she has, including her jewelry. But Bea stands motionless a few seconds longer. When aggression seems almost inevitable, when she becomes aware that the man is advancing on her, determined to get what he wants, Bea, in her most elegant British accent, pronounces the magic words: “You shot a woman in Italy fifteen years ago, in a train station.”

The effect is instantaneous: the vagabond’s expression suddenly changes. Starting in his neck — the tendons strained — a look of terror ascends his face and even seems to change the color of his uncombed hair. His right hand swells, and then opens with visible impotence, dropping the knife, which falls to the ground making much less noise than Bea would have supposed. The vagabond takes four steps back, his eyes wide open, then turns and runs.

At that moment, completely alone in the by then absolute darkness, Bea has a first inkling of the meaning of destiny.

A

The weeks passed. Having exhausted the list of nearby towns he was interested in driving to, Marcelo finally decided to visit the dreaded Nueva Francia. Out of prudence, he invited Velásquez to accompany him, but that weekend his friend had at last managed to arrange a meeting with his son, whom he was to pick up from the interstate bus terminal.

“You go, dude,” he said to Marcelo in a tone of sincere intimacy, “but be really careful over there. Nueva Francia isn’t exactly at its best right now. You’ll have to go through a whole heap of military checkpoints, so take your passport and university ID with you. If they see you’re a foreigner and a professor, they won’t search you as often. . unlike me. Even though the fucking sons of bitches know who I am, they make me empty my pockets every time. Oh, and don’t miss Los Insurgentes cantina — it’s the nearest thing Nueva Francia has to a tourist attraction.”

Marcelo took his friend’s recommendations on board and set out in his Renault at eleven in the morning with a bottle of water and several forms of identification, which he did indeed have to show the soldiers at the first checkpoint he came to, just over a mile from Los Girasoles. Other checkpoints followed the same pattern, and as he got closer to Nueva Francia, the sense of danger increased and the stony military gazes became more accusing, more difficult to avoid. At the fifth checkpoint, and despite the fact that his credentials gave him a certain advantage, they asked him to get out of the car and open the trunk. Marcelo, who was used to trusting the forces of law and order, was annoyed by the notion that the military was essentially bad. But everything pointed in that direction: these men spat, tended to be high-handed, and an emptiness in their eyes suggested sudden, gratuitous violence. At this last, fifth checkpoint, they asked him more precise questions, silently laughing at his answers and keeping their fingers on the triggers of their assault rifles.