Ricardo Piglia - Target in the Night

On the other hand, they may have been a sect of mushroom eaters. This would explain why Christ withdraws to the desert and visits with Satan. Those Palestine sects — the Essenes, say — ate hallucinatory mushrooms, they’re at the base of all ancient religions. They walked around the desert hallucinating, speaking with God, hearing angels. One could think that the consecrated host was nothing other than the image of a mystical communion tying the initiated of the small group together, the seminarian added in an aside, Luca told them. Eat, flesh of my flesh.

Mr. Schultz, Luca’s secretary, was more apt to trust the second line of teachings. The tradition of a “convinced minority”: a nucleus of faithful, formed activists who are able to resist persecution and are united together by a forbidden substance — imaginary or not — with texts full of secret allusions and hermetic words, as opposed to a rural populism that speaks in the local Spanish with the conservative sentences of so-called popular knowledge. Everyone in small towns takes drugs, in the pampas of the Province of Buenos Aires or the pastures and farmlands of Palestine. It’s the only way to survive the elements in the countryside, the seminary student said, according to Luca, adding that he knew as much because he’d heard all about it in the confessional. In the long run, everyone confessed that you couldn’t live in the countryside without taking some kind of magical potion: mushrooms, distilled camphor, snuff, cannabis, cocaine, mate spiked with gin, yagé, cough syrup with codeine, Seconal, opium, nettle tea, laudanum, ether, heroine, dark pipe tobacco with Rue leaves, whatever you can get in the provinces. How else do you explain gauchesque poetry, La Refalosa by Hilario Ascasubi, the dialogues of Chano and Contrera by Bartolomé Hidalgo, Anastasio el Pollo by Estanislao del Campo? All those gauchos, high as a kite, speaking in rhymed verses through the pampas … That’s the law of the land, the man on top does what he wants / The shadow of the tree and its milk is always a menace. That’s what town pharmacists are for, with their prescriptions and concoctions. Isn’t the apothecary a key figure of rural life? A kind of general consultant for all ailments, always available, waiting in the doorway at night, ready to deal in milk of the cow and a range of banned products.

The seminary student and Luca understood each other right away, because Luca thought of the restructuring of the factory as if it were a Church in ruins that needed to be re-founded. In truth, the factory had been born from a small group ( my brother Lucio, my grandfather Bruno, and us ), and in those small groups there’s always one person who turns away and sells his soul to the devil. Which is what happened with his older brother, the Oldest Belladona son, Lucio, who everyone called Bear. His half-brother, actually.

“He sold his soul to the devil, my brother, influenced by my father. He made a pact, he sold his shares to the investors, and we lost control of the firm. He did it in good faith, which is how all crimes are justified.”

Only after the betrayal , and after the night that Luca ran out half-crazy and had to hide away for a few days — isolated in the Estévez Estancia, in the middle of the countryside — only then was he able to stop thinking in traditional terms, and dedicate himself instead to building what he now called the objects of his imagination.

People accused him of being unreal, 29of not having his feet on the ground. But he’d been thinking, the imaginary wasn’t the same as the unreal. The imaginary was the possible, that which is not yet. This projection toward the future contained — at the same time — both what exists and what doesn’t exist. Two poles that continually change places. And the imaginary was this changing of places. He’d been thinking.

From the window, in that room on the second floor, you could see the back gardens and the guesthouse where the mother lived. Old Man Belladona would be in one of the rooms downstairs with the nurse who took care of him. Renzi turned toward Sofía on the bed. She was sitting up, naked, smoking, leaning back against the headboard.

“And your sister?”

“She must be with the Vulture.”

“The Vulture?”

“She’s seeing Cueto again.”

“Man, that guy is everywhere.”

“She feels uneasy when she’s with him, uneasy, annoyed. But she goes out with him every time he calls.”

Cueto was arrogant, according to Sofía, super-adapted, calculating, and he gave the impression of being empty: an ice cube covered by a shell of social adaptation and success. He was always doing his best to compliment Ada, while she, for her part, never hid her disdain for him; she made fun of him in public and laughed at him, no one understood why she didn’t stop seeing him. Why she stayed with that man, as if she didn’t want to leave him.

“Cueto is the biggest hypocrite of all the hypocrites, a born charlatan, an opportunist. Ugh, yuck.”

Sofía was jealous. It was curious, strange.

“Ah… And that bothers you?”

“Do you have a sister? Do you?” Sofía asked, irritated. “Have you ever had a sister?”

Renzi looked at her, amused. She’d already asked him. He appreciated having a brother who was unbearable, because this had disillusioned him of the belief that family could be anything but a burden. He was surprised to see Sofía nested to her genealogical tree like a Greek immortelle.

“I have a brother, but he lives in Canada,” Renzi said.

He sat up on the bed next to her and began caressing her neck and the upper part of her back, in a gesture that had become a habit for him in his life with Julia. This time, too, Sofía seemed to calm down, with the caress that wasn’t for her, because she rested her head on Emilio’s chest and started murmuring.

“I can’t hear you,” Renzi said.

“She was just a girl when she first went with Cueto. It’s like he left his mark on her. She’s fixated on him. Fixated,” she repeated, as if the word were a chemical formula. “I wish I’d lost my virginity first, instead of her.”

“What?” Renzi said.

“He seduced her… But I didn’t let her get married, I took her away on a trip.”

“And the two of you came back with Tony.”

“Aha,” she said.

She’d gotten up, wrapped in the sheet, and was now at the marble night table chopping up the cocaine with a razor blade.

29 “More unreal, and more illusory, was the economy. Luca was shocked by the announcement made by U.S. President Richard Nixon, on the evening of August 15, 1971, regarding the end of the convertibility of dollars into gold — the Gold Exchange Standard created by the Genoa Conference of 1922. The decision was meant, according to Nixon, ‘To protect the country against speculators who have declared war on the dollar.’ From that moment on, according to Luca, everything had been ‘a cesspool’ and— he’d been thinking —financial speculation would soon start to predominate over material production. Bankers would impose their norms and abstract operations would dominate the economy” (Report by Mr. Schultz).

When he had his nervous breakdown, nearly a year ago, Luca went to hide out in a country house, where he spent the nights on the front porch — with a lantern as a nightlight, and the sounds of the crickets and the distant barking of the dogs until the singing of the roosters at the break of day — reading Carl Jung. He concluded that the process of individuation in his life was embodied or expressed in a universe that he was trying to unveil. He’d lost his way and was now jumping through a ploughed field looking for the road.