Ricardo Piglia - Target in the Night

“The Plaza is right over there,” the stationmaster said, pointing to the white building on the other side of the street.

He registered at the hotel as Anthony Durán, showing his U.S. passport and using his traveler’s checks to pay a month in advance. He said he had come for business, that he wanted to make some investments, that he was interested in Argentine horses. Everyone in town tried to figure out what type of business he might have with horses. They thought that maybe Durán was going to invest in the stud farms in the area. He said something vague about a polo player in Miami who wanted to buy ponies from the Heguy Ranch, and something about a trainer in Mississippi who was looking to race Argentine stallions. According to Durán, a show jumper named Moore had been here before him, leaving convinced of the quality of the horses bred in the pampas. That was the reason he gave when he first arrived. A few days later he started visiting the local corrals and checking out the colts and fillies grazing in the pastures.

At first it looked as if he had come to buy horses. Everyone became interested in him — the cattle auctioneers, the consignees, the breeders, the ranchers — thinking there was some kind of profit to be made. The gossip buzzed from one end of town to the other like a swarm of locusts.

“It took us a while,” Madariaga said, “to catch on to his connection to the Belladona sisters.”

Durán settled in at the hotel in a room on the third floor facing the plaza and asked to have a radio installed (a radio, not a television). He asked if there was anywhere in the area where he could get rum and frijoles, but he quickly got used to the local food in the hotel restaurant and to the Llave gin that he had sent up to his room every afternoon at five.

He spoke an archaic Spanish, full of unexpected idiomatic expressions ( copacetic, what’s the deal, in the thick of it ) and bewildering words in English or in ancient Spanish ( obstinacy, victor, frippery ). It wasn’t always possible to understand the words he used, or how he put sentences together, but his language was warm and soothing. Also, he’d buy drinks for anyone who listened to his stories. That was his moment of greatest esteem, and that’s how he started to circulate, to become known, to visit the most varied of places, and to become friends with the young men in town, regardless of their level on the social scale.

He was full of stories and anecdotes about that strange outside world that people in the area had only seen in the movies or on TV. He had lived in New York, a city without any of the ridiculous hierarchies of a small town in the province of Buenos Aires — or at least where they weren’t as visible. He always looked happy. Everyone who spoke to him or ran into him on the street felt important because of how he listened to them. How he agreed with them. One week after being in town, he had established a warm and sympathetic aura about him, and he became popular and well known even among people who hadn’t met him. 3

He had a certain ability to win over the men, and this seemed to draw the women to his side as well. They talked about him in the ladies room in the coffee shop, and in the halls of the Social Club, and in endless telephone conversations on summer afternoons. The women were the ones, of course, who started saying that Tony had actually come to town after the Belladona sisters.

Until finally, one afternoon, he walked into the bar of the Plaza Hotel with one of the two sisters — with Ada, they say. They sat at a table in a far corner and spent the afternoon talking and laughing softly. It caused an explosion, a show of joy and malice. That very night was the start of the hushed comments and the stories full of innuendos.

They were said to have checked in at the Inn on the road that leads to the town of Rauch. And that the sisters used to receive him in a small house of theirs, in the vicinity of the closed factory that stood like an abandoned monument some ten kilometers from town.

It was all rumors, provincial chatter, stories that only served to further elevate his prestige — and that of the sisters.

The Belladona sisters had always been ahead of their time, they were the precursors of everything interesting that happened in town: the first to wear miniskirts, the first not to wear bras, the first to smoke marijuana and take the pill. It was as if the sisters had decided that Durán was the right man to help them complete their education. An initiation story, then, like in those novels in which young social climbers conquer frigid duchesses. The sisters weren’t frigid, or duchesses, but Durán was a young social climber, a Caribbean Julien Sorel — as Nelson Bravo, the writer of the society pages for the local paper, eruditely put it.

At this point the men changed from looking at him with distant sympathy to treating him with blind admiration and calculated envy.

“He used to come here, peaceful as could be, and have a drink with one of the sisters. Because at first (people say) they didn’t let him into the Social Club. Those snobs are the worst, they like to keep everything hidden. Simple folks, instead, are more liberal,” Madariaga said, using the word in its old sense. “If they do something, they do it out in the light of day. Didn’t Don Cosme and his sister Margarita live together for over a year as a couple? And didn’t the two Jáuregui brothers share a woman they got in a brothel in Lobos? And didn’t that old guy Andrade get involved with a fifteen-year-old girl who was a pupil in a Carmelite convent?”

“Surely,” one of the patrons said.

“Of course if Durán had been a blond gringo everything would’ve been different,” Madariaga said.

“Surely,” the patron repeated.

“Surely, surely…Shirley got put in the clink,” Bravo said, sitting at a table near the window toward the back of the tavern. Stirring a spoonful of bicarbonate in a glass of soda water. For his heartburn.

Durán liked living in a hotel. He’d stay up all night, wandering the empty hallways while everyone slept. And sometimes he’d talk with the night concierge, who went around trying the doors at all hours, or took brief naps on the leather chairs in the large reception hall downstairs. Talking is a figure of speech, though, because the night porter was a Japanese man who smiled and said yes to everything, as if he didn’t understand Spanish. He was small and pale, slicked down, very servile, always wearing a bow tie and jacket. He came from the countryside, where his family ran a flower nursery. His name was Yoshio Dazai, 4but everyone in the hotel called him the Japo. Apparently, somehow, Yoshio was Durán’s main source of information. Yoshio was the one who told Durán the history of the town and the real story of Belladona’s abandoned factory. Many wondered how the Japanese porter had ended up living like a cat by night, shining a light on the hotel’s key cabinet with a small lantern, while his family grew flowers in a farm out in the country. Yoshio was friendly and delicate, very formal and very mannered. Quiet, with gentle, almond-shaped eyes, everyone thought the Japanese night porter powdered his face and that he went as far as applying a touch of rouge, a soft palette really, on his cheeks. He was very proud of his straight, jet-black hair, which he himself called raven’s wing . Yoshio became so fond of Durán that he followed him everywhere, as if he were his personal servant.

Sometimes, at daybreak, the two would come out of the hotel together and walk down the middle of the street, across town to the train station. They’d sit on a bench on the empty platform and watch the dawn express speed by. The train never stopped, it raced south toward Patagonia like a flash. Leaning against the lighted windows, the faces of the passengers behind the glass were like corpses at the morgue.