Carlos Gamerro - An Open Secret

“So why did he take it out on Ezcurra?”

Don Ángel takes the floor:

“The feud between them went back a long way, maybe even to before Ezcurrita was born,” he explains as the women start serving dessert, a home-made flan with dulce de leche , which Celia’s good memory has prepared especially for me. “Ezcurrita’s grandfather, Don Alejandro Alvarado, used to buy the wheat crop off Don Manuel’s father — or was it Don Manuel’s grandfather? Can you remember Vicente? It makes no difference, the moment these fights between families start nobody remembers how … The Alvarados owned the mill over by the station. Errrm, let me see, till around nineteen thirty I reckon. Old man Alvarado got fed up of the anarchists always walking out on him and set fire to it. They can go to Alcorta and cry for all I care was the memorable phrase he came out with the next day. You could see the flames from here my father used to say. He always remembered that day because they had to get their flour from Toro Mocho after that. Old man Alvarado cashed in the insurance money and set up a convenience store … on the square on the side where the soda factory is today. Have you taken him to see it yet Mati? The mill I mean … Theeey’re the ones, where the steel-grey silos are. The whole lower part of the building — the brickwork — was salvaged from the old mill. If you look carefully you can still see the scorch marks. Apparently there were some wagons of grain too that belonged to Don Manuel parked right there on the tracks and one of the explosions from the blaze set light to them … Old man Alvarado couldn’t admit responsibility of course, he wasn’t about to go and tell everybody he’d torched the mill himself, and of course then it was open war. That, as far as anyone can tell, is where Don Manuel’s beef with old man Alvarado started. And with the grandson … I reckon it started when Ezcurrita took up as a journalist. Before that, I’ve no idea. It was just like Ezcurrita to take up journalism and set about savaging Don Manuel just for kicks,” says Don Ángel.

“EZCURRA, THAT’S RIGHT, poor lad. Making a film about his life are you? Oh, because I was told … I remember his newspaper articles well. Don Manuel Rosas Paz used to collect them and keep them in a binder he was more reluctant to show than the Church with the Turin Shroud,” some days later the bald skull of Malihuel’s pharmacist Don Mauro Mendonca will beam, greenish in the neon light from outside. They called me from the estancia once — urgent; I shut up shop there and then and drove the medicine over myself. My reward, once Don Manuel was back on his feet, was to see it. It was a legal double-ring binder, I can’t really remember if the covers were black or not, more of a blue colour I think, difficult to say after so many … I don’t seem to … of course of course. Right. The newspaper cuttings were stuck on card and kept in plastic envelopes to protect them. A quick glance through wasn’t enough, no — line by line I had to read them while he sat there the whole time watching me, frowning over his oxygen mask and wheezing. I clearly remember there being several blank pages at the end of the folder, in plastic envelopes too, awaiting any future articles. You’ll understand, he said to me when I closed it and handed it back to him, the boy leaves me no choice. If I don’t do something now it’ll be too late, he added, and I realised his haste had less to do with the blank pages than with the blue cylinders containing what was left of his life and with the intolerable idea of him going first and leaving the other to dance on his grave. What I want, he said to me on my way out, is to burn that folder and forget there was ever a time when anyone could even think that of me. He didn’t need to explain,” the pharmacist will explain, the green of his skull deepening as the rain starts to fall on the other side of the pharmacy window, “the prerequisite for him to carry out that private and perhaps melancholy auto-da-fé. I think deep down he may eventually have developed a fondness for the binder don’t you? I mean if you’d seen the precautions he took when he handled it. Perhaps he was disappointed the articles had stopped appearing, because it had been something like a year by then since poor Ezcurra had decided to toe the line and stop poking his nose into his business. Perhaps Rosas Paz decided to do something when he realised how futile it was to go on waiting. What? Errrm, I don’t know, he must just have burnt it, unless he asked to have it buried with him. The articles were from a newspaper that’s closed now, what was it called, let me see …”

“ La Chicharra ,” I’ll tell him, being in possession of them by then. “I managed to lay my hands on quite a few. Ezcurra had a special talent for headlines it seems.”

THERE’S A ROTTEN SMELL IN MALIHUEL

“WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?” I jubilantly ask Guido the evening he stops by with the gift after his pasta deliveries around the towns at our table in Los Tocayos, where, a few days after my arrival, I’m now one of the regulars.

“Toro Mocho,” he proudly replies. “Finished my deliveries early and thought I’d pop into the library. They didn’t have the complete collection but it should do for now. I’ll take you with me if you want to go yourself one day … Yeah, I only photocopied the pages about Malihuel. They were the ones Ezcurra wrote weren’t they Beto? Iturraspe nods and beckons to me with jutting chin to let him take a look. I hand him one of the identically headed pages at random—

LA CHICHARRA

A WAKE-UP CALL FOR THE COMMUNITY

“Is that Ezcurra?” I ask him.

I’m pointing at the signature at the foot of the daily leader—“ BROKEN CHAINS — A HORSEFLY TO GOAD THE FLANKS OF THE SLEEPING MULE OF MALIHUEL. ” Iturraspe nods with a nostalgic smile.

“Listen to this, listen,” I insist, including Nene Larrieu, who puts his cloth for polishing the glasses on the counter and walks over intrigued. “‘This pampas plutocrat, whose legendary family fortune has been built on the blood of Indians and Christians and the tears of orphans and widows, now wants to usurp one of the high seats of office to which this most fertile of provinces elevates its favourite sons. And what credit, what merit, what service to his country or his native soil does this self-proclaimed lakeside Pericles, this Lycurgus of the plains, this Santa Fe Solon set before us to show he is worthy of such an honour? The gallantry and punctiliousness of that Rosas Paz who paid a pound apiece for Indian ears, which his devoted great-grandson still keeps in a glass case in his study as a family relic? Who, moreover, does he suppose will support his hilarious candidature with their votes? The descendents of the proud gauchos banished to the frontier for the sole crime of wanting to work the land that this hypertrophied Orion wanted for his cattle? The grandchildren of immigrants, easily gulled in their new tongue, who naively accepted provisional deeds of ownership for land that, once rendered productive by the calluses of their hands and the sweat of their brows, would be wrested from them by the lawyers of our aspiring cereal Cicero? Santa Fe must indeed be saintly in its faith if we are willing to place the lofty fate of our province in his hands. Will the town of Malihuel, which legend and history have enshrined as the Fuenteovejuna of Santa Fe, consent to kissing the clay feet of this golden calf?’ Where did he get that style from?” I ask when I finish reading.

“Rosas Paz’s own speeches,” comes Iturraspe’s incisive reply, puncturing the rhetorical force of my question, “in the days when he was running for senator in the province. Listen to this one—‘obviate’ … ‘laudable’ … ‘moral prostration’ … ‘emolument’ … ‘sempiternal’!” he exclaims triumphantly. “I’d forgotten that one,” he smiles as if he’s just bumped into an old friend.