Ricardo Piglia - Target in the Night

Country people lived in two separate realities, with two sets of morals, in two parallel worlds. On the one hand they dressed in English clothes and drove around the pampas in their pickup trucks waving at the laborers as if they were feudal lords, and on the other they got mixed up in all the dirty dealings and shady arrangements with the cattle auctioneers and exporters from the Capital. That’s why when Tony arrived people knew that there had to be another play involved, in addition to the sentimental story. Why would an American come all the way here if not to bring money for some kind of business?

“And they were right,” Sofía said, lighting a cigarette and smoking in silence for a while, the cigarette’s ember glowing in the afternoon dusk. “Tony had an errand to carry out, that’s why he came looking for us. Once he found us, he went with us to the casinos in Atlantic City, stayed in the luxury hotels, or in flea-ridden motels by the side of the road, we had fun living the life, while they finished arranging the affair with which they had entrusted him.”

“An errand?” Renzi asked. “What affair? Did he already know about that when he found you and your sister in the U.S.?”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “In December.”

“In December, that’s not possible. What do you mean in December? But your brother—”

“Maybe it was January, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, who cares? He was a gentleman, he never spoke out of turn, and he never lied to us. He only refused to go into certain details,” Sofía said, and resumed her litany, as if she were a child singing in a church choir. Renzi had a flash with that image, the little redheaded girl in church, singing in the choir, dressed in white … “And on top of everything, Tony was a mulatto. The fact that my sister and I were turned on by him scared the farmers around here to no end. You know they actually started calling him Zambo, like my father had anticipated.”

Tony’s death could not be understood without talking about the dark side of the family, especially Luca’s story, the other mother’s son, my half-brother, Sofía was saying. Renzi tried to get her to slow down. “Hold on, hold on,” Renzi said, but Sofía became irritated and continued, or went back to restart the story somewhere else.

“When the factory collapsed, my brother didn’t want to sell. I shouldn’t say that he ‘didn’t want to,’ it was more like he wasn’t able to. He couldn’t imagine the possibility of giving up, of giving in. Understand? Imagine a mathematician who discovers that two plus two is five, and to keep everyone from thinking that he’s crazy, he has to adapt the entire mathematical system to his formula. A system wherein two plus two, needless to say, is not five, or three — and he’s able to do it.” She served herself another glass of wine and added ice, and stayed still for a moment; then she turned to face Renzi, who looked like a cat, sitting on the couch. “You look like a cat,” she said, “plopped down on that couch like that. And I’ll tell you something else,” she continued. “That’s not what it was like, he’s not that abstract, imagine a swimming champion who drowns. Or better yet, picture a great marathon runner who’s in first place, only five hundred meters from the finish line, when something goes wrong, he gets a cramp that paralyzes him, but he keeps going, because he never thinks about giving up, no way whatsoever, until finally, when he crosses the line, it’s already nighttime and there’s no one else left in the stadium.”

“What? What stadium?” Renzi asks. “What cat? No more comparisons, please. Tell it straight, will you?”

“Don’t rush me, hold on. We have time, don’t we?” she said, and stood motionless for a moment, looking at the light coming in through the back window, from the other side of the patio, between the trees. “He realized,” she said after a pause, as if hearing a tune in the air again, “that everyone in town had plotted to get him out of the way. Two plus two is five, he thought, but no one knows it. And he was right.”

“He was right about what?”

“Yeah,” she said. “The inheritance from his mother. Understand?” she said, and looked at him. “Everything we have is inherited, that’s the curse.”

She’s delirious, Renzi thought, she’s the one who’s drunk. What was she talking about?

“We’ve spent our lives fighting over the inheritance, first my grandfather, then my father, now the two of us, the sisters. I always remember the wakes, the relatives arguing at the town’s funeral parlor while they cried over the deceased. It happened with my grandfather and with my brother Lucio, and it’s going to happen with my father, and with the two of us, too. The only one who kept his distance and didn’t accept any part of the bequest and made himself what he is, by himself, is my brother Luca. Because there is nothing to inherit except death and the land, and the land must not change hands, the land is the only thing of any value, as my father always says, and when my brother refused to accept what was his, that’s when all the conflicts started which led to Tony’s death.”

9 “Tony, you know I’m not looking for love anymore, not of any kind. I’ve passed my twenty-five summers, oh Lord, and I will not live with love again, nor with tenderness. I have looked for it, for love, yes, but the times that I’ve found it, it has gone poorly. You know that a girl at first believes everything she hears, men [ illegible ] a girl like me who is so naïve and has so much understanding. A man shows up with ‘I love you,’ he promises villas and castles, he hollers two or three times, and then, to hell with me. When I left Lalo, I was the biggest flirt, one tease after another and then I’d light it up, I was the worst. When an American came around I’d go crazy, Honey, Honey , he’d have me and the next day, it was like he didn’t even know me [ the next page is missing ].”

Yoshio was in the small quarter where he lived, in a kind of oversized closet near the elevator shaft, facing the hotel’s inner courtyard. Pale, his eyes tearful, slight and thin like a porcelain doll, he was holding a small, lady’s embroidered handkerchief in his hand. When Croce and Saldías entered, he remained calm, as if the sorrow of Durán’s death was greater than his own misfortune. On one of the walls in his room there was a picture of Tony on the beach by the lake, half-dressed. Yoshio had it framed and had added a line in Japanese. It said, he told Croce, We are as our friends see us . On another wall there was a picture of the Emperor Hirohito on horseback reviewing the imperial troops.

The idea that someone might dislike him, that he might be criticized or looked down upon, was unbearable for Yoshio. That was the defining quality of his work. The only thing servants have, if they want to survive, is the acceptance of others. Yoshio was overwhelmed, he was going to have to leave town, he could not comprehend the consequences of what had happened. What does it mean to be accused of a crime? How can one bear to know that everyone thinks that you’re a criminal? The witnesses had condemned Yoshio. Many of them were his friends, but they were acting in good faith: they had seen him, they said, at the scene of the episode, at the time of the crime. There was no way for him to account for himself, accounting for himself would be the same as acknowledging his guilt. He knew the secrets of all the guests in the hotel. He was the night porter. But his discretion didn’t do him any good, because nothing can save a servant from suspicion when he falls into disgrace. A servant must be invisible, his visibility is his worst sentence.