Carlos Gamerro - An Open Secret

I’d spent my first day in Malihuel on a sentimental journey around the landmarks of my childhood. I soon realised nothing much had changed, aside from the predictable, almost inevitable marks of progress that had been passively absorbed from the outside world: the once non-existent bus terminal, the TV satellite dish next to the new telephone exchange, a couple of video clubs. Otherwise there was no difference in size or appearance, only in scale: what the perspective of childhood and memory had made vast and diffuse, taking on almost the proportions of a nebulous country, my arrival had replaced with the clear, condensed and crystalline — a miniature town in a snowstorm. As if I’d been looking at Malihuel across the years through a pair of field glasses and my arrival, instead of removing them, had put them on the wrong way round. The square, on one of whose sunlit benches I’d installed myself, stiff with cold, to smoke a cigarette, sported a miniature of the same unpainted playground rides, trees that looked the same having grown, the statue of motherhood, the polished bronze of its uncovered breast shining against its general verdigris, the statue of Comandante Pedernera that I was being told about by the part-time park-keeper, a man of indefinite years dressed in a fat blue jacket and parrot-green baseball cap, who’d been sweeping the sandstone paths, wet from the recent rainfall, with a palm leaf, and had come over to my bench to ask me if I was from Rosario or Fuguet and casually, with exquisite delicacy, if I had a cigarette.

“What’s that he’s holding?” I asked him in return. “A champagne cork?”

“That? It’s a thistle flower. These fields — the whole area — were thistle fields, thistles higher than a man on horseback back in the days of the Indians. Colonel Pedernera founded the farming colonies, after he wiped them out. What?”

“Who had him welded back on?”

“The mayor at the time. Don Rogelio it must’ve been. It was under him I started working for the Council. Later there was a plan to unweld him again, they were going to have some study or other done to see if they could get him off without ruining him, but the years passed and so did the mayors and the floods came and went and there he is. But people’d got used to him looking like that by then.”

“NOW THAT’S WHERE SHE DID overstep the mark if you don’t get on with people fine but with beliefs or what do you call them symbols I think you have to respect them, spitting at someone isn’t the same as spitting at the cross and our founder’s statue stands for all of us, like the watchtower, I always say the Tuttolomondos ought to put the watchtower on their pasta boxes it’s our only export after all but you try telling them you know how stubborn they are you could suggest it seeing as you’re such good friends pretend it’s your own idea all right I admit I did take part as a young girl but it’s like Carnival I mean just because the men dress up as women doesn’t mean they’re effeminate does it, nor does parading Don Urbano on the Virgin’s litter which incidentally with his legs open like that and no horse underneath honestly it looked like I won’t say any more and of course it didn’t show a lack of respect for authority, and besides I mean it was gleaming after the celebrations they say eggs and flour absorb the oxide and then washing it off in the lagoon water with all that iodine, tantamount to a purification it was, nowadays it looks so run-down, must’ve been twenty years since it last saw a cloth what do you expect when it’s all jobs for the boys at the Council you’re lucky if they bother to sweep the streets. I think that year was the first time we didn’t do it I don’t know why we didn’t agree not to but the day of the ceremony came it was supposed to be secret before to keep outsiders away but it’s ancient history now and anyway Fefe you’re one of us I can tell you it was always the third Sunday of March and that year goodness knows why the third Sunday came around and not even a parrot. I think we just forgot personally. But Delia didn’t. She must’ve been expecting us all to turn up, her of all people who’d never wanted to be part of things that were how can I put it a bit on the common side but this time she was the only one there, ah the ironies of life. And when she realised nobody’d come in sheer anger I tell you she grabbed poor Don Urbano by the foot and boom! she flipped him off his perch. The people living on the square say they heard the noise and came out to see thinking there’d been a crash. If you go and have a proper look you’ll see that there’s a faint line on his right arm below the elbow which is a crack he got when he fell. The strength desperation gives you I’m telling you it always took at least five men at the ceremony to get him off his horse and Delia did it on her own goodness me whenever I think how that woman must’ve felt,” says Auntie Porota while rolling into a tight ball the last yellowing strands of the undone cardie held by her sister’s reverent hands.

“I DON’T THINK THE TIME WAS RIPE EITHER,” opined Iturraspe when, taking advantage of Don León’s absence to urinate, I quiz him about the fate of the statue. “We tacitly decided to put the ceremony on ice till further notice in case the military took it the wrong way, they were so fond of festivals to do with the War against the Injuns and all that. But of course, after Delia’s sudden unsaddling of our founder, there was an act of redress right across the board. Well who do you expect, the mayor right? It was his duty to our beloved founder, hero of the holy war against the barbarian defeated again by his comrades in arms a hundred years later, saving the fatherland for the fifth time in its history — Professor Gagliardi and I tried to figure out his arithmetic but it just didn’t add up — well anyway by the time we finished clapping two operatives from the Council team — Topo Lencina was one, I can’t remember the other — whipped out their blowtorches and started welding away between Don Urbano Pedernera’s pants and the saddle of his horse-faced mule. As the double jet of sparks descended his trouser leg the gallant rider took up his final position of rest, high in the saddle, which he holds to this day, though some people think he leans to the right slightly, and one time, to put an end to the eternal debate, we went to the hardware store to find Don Alberto Fischer, who fetched his level and plumb line, and confirmed the slanting hypothesis, although the uprighters didn’t find the results conclusive.”

“ARE YOU SURE you don’t want anything else Fefe? I remember how much you liked coming here for your milk and cookies. Not even a glass of water? It’s from the tap, I don’t know if you’ve seen but we’ve got running water now. They found some out there by Rosas Paz. They’d been looking for it before out past your grandmother’s, but it was bad. Remember what it was like before, how bitter the lagoon water was? No use not even for watering it was. You had to water delicate plants like dahlias with water from the well. What a job! So many things have changed since you used to come here, so many people that have left, your grandmother, Clota whom we miss so much, like sisters we were the three of us, you don’t know how sad we were when we heard about the accident, the only consolation is that they went together, as I always say, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone to be left behind. Would I Chesi. I mean it was easier for us when the little ones were here, but now, well that’s why we moved in together, actually it was Chesi that moved in. I look at you now and I swear I can’t believe it, so grown-up, so tall, a war hero from the Malvinas and all, makes me feel all proud … What a silly billy your Auntie Porota is, someone of my years getting all … I always get a bit emotional at this time of the afternoon, especially in winter. Chesi doesn’t get like this so much, she has her knitting to keep her happy haven’t you Chesi? The cardie for your little boy’s nearly ready Fefe, now don’t tell me it doesn’t look a treat, and promise you’ll take a photo of him wearing it and send it to us. Oh and make sure his Mamá’s in it too, we’re dying to meet her. What did you say her name was? Well, after Delia moved to Rosario we never heard another thing about her. That as well, sometimes I get this pain … I’m not saying she didn’t have her reasons poor thing, she suffered a great deal over her son, but in all these years no visit, no letter, not even a phone call. A town she lived in all her life, where so many people loved her. But then she did always act as if she was doing us a favour living here didn’t she, always thought she was a cut above the rest of us in town and one fine day she just upped and left. That business over her son upset her it’s true, troubled her a great deal it did, and goodness knows she must’ve felt people here didn’t help her enough. Still she didn’t know how to make people help her either, first she sets the whole town against her, then she criticises it for deserting her. And anyway supposing if God forbid just thinking about it gives me a stabbing pain right here, but just supposing something had happened to my Leandrito, or to the son of forgive me Chesi it’s just an example don’t look at me like that, if anything’d happened to either of them do you think Delia would’ve lifted a finger to help us? People are no worse here than anywhere else, and I say, if you move every time you don’t like something about someone you’ll end up at the North Pole isn’t that right Fefe. There’ll always be things we don’t like and as I say if you want to leave you’re perfectly entitled, Argentina’s a big place and Rosario has its charms, who can deny it, although you wouldn’t get me out of my little town, not on your life, I’ve already got my little plot of Malihuel land next to Papá and Mamá, but Delia I don’t know breaking off all links like that, never visiting her parents’ grave again, uprooting herself out of spite and feeling not the least bit of nostalgia or curiosity. People you’ve known and seen almost every day of your life, not wanting to see them any more. You see Fefe the depth of that woman’s resentment. I couldn’t do it, I really couldn’t, even if they did the worst possible thing to me, the worst thing you can imagine, and I’ve had things done to me here in town mind, I could write you a list, to start with … The Darío business was hard, who’ll deny it, if anyone touched a hair on my Leandrito or my Beba’s heads … I don’t even want to think about it, worse than ten Delias I’d be so I would, but of course I brought them up to be decent and law-abiding and they never got into trouble. Because if you don’t bring them up properly and they turn out to be say burglars or bandits or even terrorists and get killed in a shoot-out ah well then it’s other people who are to blame. I sometimes ask myself you know especially when she was … Chesi tells me I shouldn’t but I still ask myself if we mightn’t’ve been a bit hard on Delia perhaps we didn’t do enough to help her or we judged her too harshly but anyway I’ve already told you what happened when we tried to get close to her she went almost crazy quite unhinged she was and to be honest we reached a point where we got fed up of her. As I say we’re each entitled to our own opinions, I’m very broad-minded and I respect other people’s opinions so I do, but you can’t say a whole town’s wrong and one person’s right. Because say let’s say what I reckon is that it was life and when life comes into it you feel the need to blame someone and if you can find someone to blame you feel a kind of relief don’t you. All right let’s say somebody did do something wrong in that business over Darío let’s say there was one person to blame in a way or maybe two. But it’s one thing to blame one or two people isn’t it and quite another Delia acting up like that because I don’t think that’s really the case there, you can’t go pointing the finger at a whole town like that now can you Fefe.”