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PHOTOS

–Child Mauricio, go to the Directorate.

The boy Mauricio Irigorri touched the teacher's ass, avoided the slap, and collected bets
at recess. He had beautiful handwriting, especially when he signed “Alberto Irigorri” under
the reprimands of the bulletins. Don Alberto did not pay attention to those details. He was
too busy selling off at fabulous prices a barbed wire warehouse that he began storing
during the Spanish War. Now the wire did not come from Europe because they used it for
something else there. “Thank God,” repeated Don Alberto, who at that time became
devout.

At the end of the year, Miss Reforzo got rid of Mauricio with all fours. (“That boy needs a
mother,” he commented.) He entered sixth grade wearing shorts and a mustache. The
sixth grader was a teacher and the boy Mauricio had to invent other games with
gunpowder, alarm clocks and dead animals. Perhaps he was ahead of his years and his
environment, and that is why he was not well understood.

“Don't hang out with him,” my father said.

I got together the same way.

–Eh, Black? –Mauricio proposed, looking at me from the corner of his eye.

–What if such a thing? –I protested.

–You have to have fun, Black. Life is short.

Mauricio stuck a wafer, the wafer said “God is love”, Mauricio stuck it on the condom
machine, in the “Roma” bathroom.
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He didn't want to enter the Normal School because it was a woman's thing. Don Alberto
sent him to the Azul commercial. He placed great hopes in him that no one shared.
Three months later he was back, praising the river and the little canyon in the park.
“There is also a lot of commerce,” he said by way of clarification.

That year I came to Buenos Aires. I wrote to him, he didn't answer me. In May I had a
letter from Estela. I'm knitting you a sweater, the cold weather has already started here.
Mom, she doesn't like aunts either, but this year there is no other choice, you are too
young to go to a boarding house. And is it true that you study Latin? Ah, Mauricio was
fired. I saw my sister's big eyelashes. Stele shading the letter. Women always loved
Mauricio.
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When his icing bottles began to run out, Don Alberto preferred not to have him as a
glass washer anymore. He became an apprentice typographer at La Tribuna. Around
that time.

THE PRESIDENT PERON METHOD WAS INAUGURATED

The governor attended

They kicked him out.

“Anyone makes a mistake,” said Mauricio.

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December and there I was at the end of the platform, pretending to be

distracted so as not to meet my father's gaze. He was a head ahead of me,
but that was no longer his measure, nor the long pants and the cigarette
dangling from his lip, but the gesture of rejection, conquest and invention with
which he tested the edge of the world and bounced back, always discovering
a new way of launching into the assault, like a revolver that exhausts its charge
and then shoots itself, the barrel, the drum and even the trigger, burned with
fury and excessiveness. Leaning on a post he looked at me and his left hand
waved gently at shoulder height in a kind of greeting.

My father finished speaking with the station master, and only when all the
suitcases were at my side and the little laborer was waiting for orders, did he
turn to me with his arms on his waist – a tall sunburnt figure, tall from his hat.
even his boots – and I didn't know if I should shake his hand or kiss him until
he brought out a slow metal smile from within and put his hand on my hair.

On the way to the truck, I passed Mauricio without looking at him.

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–They left the gate open: the bull escaped. The ostriches ran: this is how horses are
killed. Gringo things.

-It was me.

“Gringo bolichero stuff,” my father insisted, gently moving the tail of the whip like a large
index finger. I already told you.

“There is countryside everywhere,” Mauricio commented later.

But not a field with half a league of lagoon like that one, not the field where you walked
like a villager, with the reins loose, bouncing on the errand, with the shotgun in your
hand, coming out bloody from the cardales, shooting the coots, sinking to the point of
the fences in the mud.

Remember: the hill where the glyptodont appeared belly up, with its belly full of rained
water. Remember: the night when we found nothing but the reins in the fence and had
to return on foot through the reeds. Remember: the espinel full of taralilas.

Field like that? Where, Mauricio, where.

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Mauricio, at fifteen years old, is one meter seventy-five tall, is a bocce ball
champion in his father's warehouse, and sleeps with the maid. For a while it
seemed like he was going to dedicate himself to the guitar, but his true vocation is
the knucklebone.
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He waves a hand and leaves.

He turns a corner and leaves.

He jumps onto a freighter and leaves.

Smile:

–Bye, Black.

And it is swallowed by time, the earth, the great flood of memory. It circulates clandestinely in the
stories of the town and the family. “It's not bad, poor thing,” says my mother. “He has bad
luck.” (Women, always.) “Bad luck with the trick?” my father replies.

They have seen him on the side of General Pinto, working in the corn or sunflower harvests.

He wanted to be a boxer in Bahía Blanca, and a black man disfigured his face.

He wins a truck at the English pass, loses it at seven and a half.

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“He passed through the town – Estela writes to me – without greeting anyone. He
stopped with a red truck in front of 'Roma' and told everyone who went to talk to
him that they were wrong, that he didn't know them. He only spoke with the lame
Valentin, the shoeshine boy. Valentín says that he asked for you and no one else,
that he drank a bottle of beer and left. He came from the south, he was going to
Buenos Aires, the truck was loaded with bags, that's what Valentín says. Mom with
the flu, dad with a lot of work, next week there is a large shipment of property, in a
very bad mood he says that if things continue like this the cows will have to be
slaughtered in the field, that no one knows who he works for, and other things that
I can't repeat it, let's see if you write. So you got a scare in zoology? His little sister
told him: study the coelenterates. PS: You can imagine how Don Alberto was, he
is very old, I believe that those things are not done.”
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Between two points of a field there is a potential difference of one vol when
transporting a culon from one to the other puts the work of a yul into play.

Sieds, sieds, sieds, seyons, seyez, siéent. Imp.: Séyait, séyait, séyaient. Fut.:
Siéra, siéront. Subj. Pr.: Siée, siéent. Ger.: Séyant.

Lugones was born in 1874 in Río Seco and died in 1938 in Tigre. I was
disappointed.

Hey? Three valences, one free.

Sed nóstri milites data sign cum inféstis pílis procu... procucurríssent...

–Outstanding, Tolosa. What do you plan to follow?

–Law, sir.

–Politics, huh? Don't forget the muses. Our great politicians carry an inkwell in
their vest.
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10

“Remember who you are,” he said slowly, “and that all this is going to happen.” The city dies
without the countryside, and the countryside is ours. The countryside is like the sea, and the
rooms are anchored forever, like iron battleships. Other times they have wanted to sink us
and the countryside always swallowed them: lawless and bloodless upstarts, the wind of
history carries them away, because they have no roots. Now he insults us on the radio, but
he has to compare the wheat outside, because this year no one is going to plant. It lifts
people, but it doesn't lift cows. Cows don't understand speeches. The day of reason and
punishment will come, and then many will suffer. You have to prepare for that day.

In the corral, the yellow dust of the sheep rose like a prophecy. The dogs rested their
heraldic profile on the gates. My father threw the last card on the ground.

"Seven hundred and five," he said and the foreman nodded with a grim grimace.

My father's smile became as deep as the intimacy of the mountain, it spread to the fingers
with which he rolled a cigarette without looking, attentive to the present of the number and
the essence of the future.

“I'm happy with you,” he said, taking out a five-hundred bill from his jacket.
Here, go have fun.

I kept them, in the gallery I met Estela, it seems to me that there is no one to have fun with.

–I don't care at all –says Estela–. For my sake, let him burst – and go hide in his room.

Nobody wants to pronounce his name.

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eleven

The time of plums returned, and then the time of grapes, and the day of taking the train and
looking out the window at the lead gray mountain that grew in symmetrical levels, from acacias
to poplars and eucalyptus: roofs, turrets , a bridge.

He sailed, without moving, in time.

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12

Cá–da–grá–no–dea–ré–naes–un–ca–mí–no destiny

6 10 but

In-the-desert-––––––––– came

4 8 10

I don't like

Every grain of sand in the desert is true

It's a path, every–––––––– dead

6 10 port
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

4 8 10

–––––––––––––––each wave a port?

Dump
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13

“…that you send him a telegram before taking the train, so he will wait for you. Don't forget
that you have to enroll, and that there is no birth certificate here, so go to Uruguay Street
and ask for a duplicate. If you promise not to tell, he has a gift in store for you, the dark
one you liked; Roque has made him tame, he eats sugar from the hand. I put on a
surprised face. Mom, you don't like that pension, you should pick up all your things and
then take another one. That they don't feed you well and you're cold and that's not
company for you. I don't know how he knows all these things, maybe he makes them up.
The money doesn't matter, he says.
I don't know if you're going to get angry, but the verses you sent me seemed so nice that
I had them published in La Tribuna, and even though they only came out with your initials
(I didn't dare do anything else) everyone already knows it's you. Mom has learned them
by heart and says that they have a lot of 'philosophy' for your age, but what I like most is
that which says that life is difficult because it is full of paths that are all the same and you
don't know which one to take. , that's it, right?
Everyone is fine here, we had several strong frosts and the mountain is all bare, you can
see the sky between the branches. On July 9 there are races in Atucha, dad's chestnut
runs, there are already bets, let's see if you arrive on time.

”PS Guess who came.”

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14

...Mauricio, who had returned, who finally knew what he wanted, who had gone down
to the depths of himself (he said) and had broken himself into ten pieces and each
one a dragon, and what are you doing Black for so long, come on that wanking hand,
the things I have to tell you. He had stretched out an inch further, and with that thick
head of hair and long sideburns and deep-set black eyes, he looked like Facundo, or
a barber from a comic strip, or both at the same time, but more than anything Facundo
when he was studying me in silence, astute and spare, wondering what had remained
of me in all that time and to what extent he could count on me.

"They screwed me over," he said later. Now everyone is happy. But I'll come and take
a photo of you.

-A picture? You're crazy.

"They didn't tell you," he murmured, surprised, and it seemed to me that inside he was
doing the math and wondering how it was that I didn't know the most notable fact in
the recent history of the town.

But he immediately grabbed my arm, made me cross the square, we walked along
Colón for a block, and almost in front of the City Hall he took out a key, opened a
metal curtain and pushed me inside a recently whitewashed business that immediately
started. to fill with lights, but they were not lights like all the businesses but white
spotlights and reflectors like mushrooms on the walls and ceiling. He sat me on a stool
against a rough canvas, and then I saw the camera, which looked like a movie camera
on a stand with wheels, and Mauricio hiding behind it, sticking his head out from the
right and then from the left, like a bird, twisting this spotlight and straightening that
one, and coming closer and putting his face in three-quarters profile at me, and then
his voice coming out from behind the device:

–Smile, idiot.

–But you –I exhaled–, do you know how to serve?

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“She knows,” said Mauricio. You press the shutter and bye.
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fifteen

Mauricio pressed the shutter and bye, I came out, with one side of my face in a gaseous state and my eyes like
glass in terror. This, in the new Mauritius language, was an “effect.” I know that some of its effects evaporated the
most notable and robust local personalities. But it was true: the people now accepted him, were happy with him,
ready to forget his mistakes as a boy. Don Alberto, who ultimately put up the money, displayed increasingly larger
and more satisfied portraits of himself in his warehouse. “Have you seen?” he seemed to say. Mauricio was a man,
he was the best photographer in town, it is also true that he was the only one, and I appeared before the enrollment
office with that photo of stupor that looks at me now from a worn notebook between stamps and national colors,
the great weapon of democracy, my father said mockingly, perhaps remembering the time when singing and the
resurrection of the dead made him a provincial senator back in the thirties.
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16

-You realize? I was living for nothing, running from one place to the other as if the world was
chasing me. Suddenly I would wake up in Esquel or Salta. I never knew what I was going to do
the next day. I felt very free, but it was false. It wasn't me who was moving.

-What was it?

Mauricio leans over the billiards, premeditating a catfish that he will later call a luxury.

–I don't know, a lump in my throat, something that pushed me, told me: “Raja, kid”, and the
next morning I got up early, left by bus, on foot, whatever. Once I left the most beautiful fat
woman in my life in bed, again, my only suitcase. But I wasn't crazy, you know.

-And now?

–Now it's different. Everything suited me well. Without that, who's to say, the old man wouldn't
buy me the studio. Now I am still, and the others move. –He looks at me out of the corner of
his eye, with the intention of an immutable ball pass on the cloth–.
Do you understand, Black?

It seems to me that I don't want to understand, that Mauricio is proposing something more
enormous than ever and while he says: "Raya" and hangs up the cue, I see that old expression
of looking for filth again, a longing thing that spreads from his nose.

–Come, let's have fun.

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17

The town ends quickly when you start walking. As we skirt the railroad shed, Mauricio tells
me: “They're whores, you know,” and it's too late to turn back. From the darkness comes
rasping music, a tree moves aside and a square, white spot appears, which is the door to
Doña Carmen's ranch. Mauricio enters stomping, someone says “Cayó piedra” and when I
pass, there is a second of indecision, but the dance continues.

Doña Carmen smokes in a corner and I hear her say to Mauricio: “Why do you bring this
asshole, then the mother and grandmother come to complain, I don't want trouble.” Mauricio
says: “I'll answer” and surrounds the old woman with revelry until Doña Carmen's bearded,
burnt face ends up opening into a toothless smile and she says to Rosa:

–Rosa, dance with the little doctor.

I dance with Rosa, who is the youngest of Doña Carmen's girls and is full of things that rustle
under her dress, but after a few drinks of gin or vermouth – because I no longer distinguish
– she ends up looking pretty to me, and then Mauricio dies. Laughing, he pushes us to a
room where there is a cot and closes the door from the outside. And while I do what I can
and Rosa helps me and I think: “So this was it,” I hear Mauricio's voice like in a dream saying:
“Shut up that mamao,” and then one of pineapples.

What they tell me the next day. The truck driver said:

–I was before.

And Mauricio:

–That mamao shut up.

But Mauricio had learned in Bahía Blanca with Negro.

So now I owe him things that are not forgiven.

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The next day my father doesn't talk to me.

“It was found out,” Estela says in my ear.

18

Secretly Mauricio proposes something exorbitant: he wants to be an artist, dedicate himself to

Art. He, who has not been able to pass a year of high school, who only reads comics and furtive
"sexual education" books, who maintains a relationship with the world that is as superficial as it
is passionate, stands before the world and with a childish gesture of ferocity states that he wants
to complete the countless and terrible creation, and that with some photos taken in a small town
on the Southern Railway, in the Argentine Republic.

“You press the shutter and…” And? Let's know. He seemed so healthy, so settled, and now
something irreparable has crept inside him. An imperceptible interior movement, a spring that
moves, that discovers an opening and immediately closes it, but through that opening, that
carelessness of the soul, something insatiable and destructive enters... what is it?

–Mauricio, dear, what's wrong with you?

–Leave me, old man, you'll see. Wait until I get the hang of this and I swear to you that the whole
world starts living again, fresh, freshly made.

-What world? Those old women, those first communion girls who are going to get you to beat
them up with those tulles, that stupidity, those conscripts...

–That's what to live for, little boy, don't you realize? The world is here –palming the Rollei that
since then I always saw hanging on his chest–. It's a matter of seeing it. The field when the sun
rises, the guys in the bowling alley playing knuckleball, a new girl walking through the square,
all those things that if you don't grab them in some way, they will be gone forever.

–It's like grabbing water.

–And you don't write your verses? You come up with an idea that you like and you hold it so it
doesn't go away.
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–But what do you put? A mechanical artifact, that does not think, that does not choose.
It's like you said, you press the shutter release and the camera does the rest. There
can be no art in that.

It darkened.

"Take it as a joke," he said resentfully.

I was hurt. Suddenly he had the face he had when he was a child, when he threw
himself against something that rejected him, that stubborn and painful expression at
the same time.

"Show me something," I told him.

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19

It was the same lagoon in which we had fished and hunted, where we had bathed and he
had gotten lost in a boat, the same aquatic world of herons and otters, of reeds and cattails.

It was dusk, the emulsion had forever fixed those elusive reflections, the chiaroscuro of
twilight, the water and the wind, a little wave rose and remained petrified with no return, a
wigeon duck was never going to reach its nest in the grasslands, it was fixed like a cardinal
point, letter of an unknown alphabet, the black reeds in the backlight bowed like a choir, the
clouds stretched against the horizon seemed another vaster lagoon, perhaps

a sea.

It was a good photo, for being from an amateur. I tried to imagine how it would look
translated into sepia in the Sunday supplement of La Prensa with the title “The Prayer.” And
yet...

What worried me? I knew the place well. It had been taken from the hill they called the Hill,
in the Noria square. In that little entrance that led to the water on the left we used to go to
lantern with the laborers. On that distant islet a dead countryman once appeared.

I don't know why, that familiar place suddenly seemed unknown to me, a landscape from
which one does not return, because it is too late and one is too far away.
The darkness grows around by the second and the water becomes deeper and deeper. A
last place, a mirage of the heart, and death was written everywhere.

I saw Mauricio's anxious face.

-What's the matter? -said.

-Nothing. Is it the first one you released?

–Yes – proudly, now that he had surprised my interest–. Last year, with a Kodak box, so go
figure.
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I tried to figure it out, but I couldn't. I wanted to tell him to come back, to not set foot
there, to call it a night, but it was too absurd. We were in his brightly lit studio, and
the other photos he showed me were uniformly mediocre, pasty, pretentious.

What a trap, Mauricio, what a joke.

Isn't it like a head, a camera? A sleepless head, the gorgon that looks and paralyzes.
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twenty

Things to say to M.:

Art is an ordering that is not previously contained in its media.

In any case, if such an arrangement were artistic, the creator would be the creator of
the media.

Mr. Eastman is the true author of all the photos taken with a Kodak.

If the natural element cannot be subordinated or eliminated, there is no art, just as

there is no art in nature itself.

Why don't you dedicate yourself to the guitar, you played beautifully.

Aesthetic enjoyment is static.

Integritas, consonantia, tapirs.

Aristotle. Croce. Joyce.

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twenty-one

Mauricio:

I shit on Croché.

Mauricio:

No, old man, I'm already falling. Art is for you.

Mauricio:

If anyone can do it, it is no longer art.

Mauricio:

How do you want me to take it, Black.

Mauricio:

Don't worry, if I do it now just to morph, and to keep the old man happy.
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22

"General weakness, I'm going to prescribe a tonic," said Dr. Ríos, winking at me. The country
needs soldiers in the university as much as in the barracks. Times are coming, eh? Insufficient
perimeter, the notebook on the way out, say hello to your father. Let's see, the next bastard - the
line of naked men advanced a step.

Mauricio had a regiment in Neuquén, he had to leave the business in the hands of the apothecary
Ordóñez, who attended to him twice a week.

–A guy without imagination –he told me later–. He takes a photo of you as if it were an x-ray. A
traffic accident, that's a photo for him. The light hits you and bounces back. And the damage from
the accident, that's the photo the guy took of you. Man, I'm not going to put the effort to get one of
these carrots shot at me.

Ordóñez laughed:

–A photographer is a hairdresser, an apothecary, let's see if the hairdresser or I can become

artists.
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23

regimental photographer, don't laugh, it's not a joke, you don't know how they gave it
to me at the beginning, because they've had guys like me together since the War of
Independence. I spent the first two months going in and out of the dungeon until Roli
saved me one day when they sent me to clean the eldest's garden, which was clean
as a board, not a weed was left over or missing. This is how they screw you, they
order you something that is already done, and if you think about it it seems like you
are crazy. Or else they put you at one end of the sentinel camp in the desert and tell
you that you cannot moth-eaten and that if the enemy appears you have to shoot him,
but what an enemy, old man, if there has never been an enemy there, and you pass
the time. night thinking I'm an idiot. Until one day I woke up and said to myself, I'm
going to screw these guys, and I introduce myself to the lieutenant, My lieutenant, I
want to learn to read, and the guy says, But you didn't know how to read? One day I
saw you reading the newspaper. , and I tell him I was looking at the joke figures, and
the guy says Why are you just introducing yourself now, and I tell him Because I was
embarrassed, my lieutenant. So I entered the illiterate class, every night they came to
take me out of the dungeon to go to class and I could stretch my legs and when I
remembered I was the one having fun. You know what dish, let them show you again,
I felt small, eme ele o, lo, and I was dying of laughter.
Black, inside, of course, and at first I played hard to get, I couldn't learn to read “globe”
even though the lieutenant drew a globe on the blackboard as big as a house, and I
read turnip, and when the guy got upset he made me He fesa and asked him, But
isn't that what you drew a turnip?, and the other dots were pissing with laughter. But
then it was nice because I started to get excited about reading and I read better every
day. I was three lengths ahead of the other greasers, the lieutenant was excited, he
used me as an example and told them, Look at this guy who was tougher than
everyone and almost reads straight, but what was he telling you? Ah, the oldest's
weeds, he was sitting in that garden thinking what he could do, and he was about to
take out a pine tree from one end to put it at another end, when his daughter
appeared, a twelve-year-old girl who was a pudding, and she didn't. I know what he
gave me that I told him. Wait a minute, I'm going to look for the camera and take you
out. I had a roll and the one that came out the most beautiful I enlarged in the town
and gave it to the major, who was so happy, and from that day on I have been the
official photographer of the regiment. A chub that I show you, this one on horseback
is the biggest, no, the one on top, and these are the fat guys shoveling snow, one sixteen by the ref
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It's the donkey Domitila, a five hundred second, kicking a fat guy, and these are Indians.
They charge you ten mangoes for each pose, twenty if it's a mine, look at those tits,
look at the pores on the Indian's face, and they don't let you get more than three or
four because they think they'll wear themselves out and that if you stretch them too
much they end up in ghosts . Look, but look, I'm coming to meet you here, Negro, so
you're going to see the old people, I was on leave there, accompany me to the platform
because mine leaves earlier, yes, for Zapala.
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24

Wake:

How lucky, but I knew that you were going to get an A, and just in case I made a
promise to the Virgin. You don't believe in those things, but look how it helped.
Dad says that Private is the most difficult and that now your path is open and that
you are going to be the youngest lawyer in the family. The same as always, I
hardly go out, this month I went to a dance at the club, but you can't go in there
since they changed the Commission. Too many “people” go, you know. Do you
know who got married? Your fifth grade teacher, the fat Reforzó, married the
butcher. They offered me the position, but Dad didn't want it, he says he pays my
salary. Of course, it wasn't about that, but he doesn't want to compromise on
anything since the last elections. You don't greet the mayor, they cross paths
when they see each other. It's been months since I had to go to Buenos Aires to
buy a clipper and a Caterpillar, but I always put it off; He doesn't want to read the
newspapers or turn on the radio so as not to hear the one I told you about. Of
course, now many people come from there to consult it, and they spend hours
talking at the desk, they don't let us women get involved. Your friend M. returned
a week ago and immediately had a fight with Ordóñez. We went to the movies
one night, and all he did was talk to me about military service; Later he wanted to
take me to the studio and show me the photos he took, but I didn't go because it
was late. PS Mom insists that you take a getaway for her birthday. Another: burn
this letter, just in case.
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25

Paulina who burns down the town.

In the morning when she passes by on her way to school with that way of walking that has never
been seen here, the shopkeepers look out of the doors and the ladies who go to the market hit
her with their eyes.

In the afternoon he crosses the square diagonally like a quick knife cutting an air hurt by thick
gazes and intentions that break in the gate of Grijera's widow where he has a boarding house
and unapproachable refuge.

This is how it spreads in the iconography of the bathrooms of Rome and Australia.

A traveler said he knew her in Pehuajó, and the others laughed.

On Sundays they sanctify the mass: because of it the parishioner grows.

The boldest fifth graders accept coins to carry useless messages. The mothers cannot explain
why they have gone to look for her elsewhere:

–There are so many prepared girls in the town, who are now watching their boyfriends and the
mayor's son Bonomi no longer knows if he loves Dr. Pascuzi's daughter, but the mayor's
Chevrolet usually appears as if by chance, morning and afternoon, in front at the school gates.

–It's not that big of a deal –says Mauricio–, nice legs, a nice butt and a profile with a lot of future,
but there's nothing in here. The other day I took her out dancing, we weren't talking about
anything, maybe she's shy. What do you think? I didn't dare to get my hands on him, since he's
not from here.
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26

Mother:

Estela doesn't decide to write to you, very reluctant, I don't know what's wrong with her.
Maybe he should have accepted the grade they offered him at school, but your father didn't want to.
I think that a season in Buenos Aires would do him good. Maybe you can convince her. There
is news in the town, I don't know if you met that girl who took the degree instead of Estela?
Well, “they say” that he is with M. What do you tell me? In May or June we will go there, your
father wants to change the car.
The last Herefords sold well, now there are nothing but clumps in the entire field, which is
going well, it's a shame they can't find anyone to work. The union tried to get him in and he
got them out, but there are days when he doesn't eat, he's so angry. Until when, right?
Everyone is very happy with your exams, I hope you continue like this. PS Write to Estela,
that girl is sad.
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27

–Madness, man, I didn't think it was going to catch me like that. You know what happens to
me, that I look at her and everything turns that turquoise color, that living porcelain that she
has in her eyes. Then look at that nose and the line of the neck, imagine that backlit profile
looking at the horizon. Don't laugh, salt me. Now I have to grab the machine again, but
seriously, because this is just what I was looking for, with this I cure myself of so much
trouble that one has to remove. It's like doing it again, you realize, line by line, always the
same but different. I want to get it from everywhere, from above, below and inside. And what
a body, Negro, you know what, I don't even want to think about it. No, at first I thought she
was stupid, but after you talk to her for a while, you realize. He knows everything, even
French, but look how lucky he is, and to top it all off he has money.

–You were never interested in money.

-Silver? –my father mutters that night in the dining room–. The family has a ranch house on
the Lobos side, mortgaged to the roots of the last willow tree. Why do you think they send
her to work?

My mother's gaze pours out in successive, protective waves over Estela's bowed head,
concentrated on the soup.
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28

Behind a grove of trees and to the left the little artificial lake that they had to make
for the cross-eyed marble Diana so that it wouldn't be stained with tar and the light
spilled everywhere like pollen. Mauricio has his face slightly tilted back, with a
thoughtful smile, somewhere between virile and tender, dominant and protective,
while he puts his arm around Paulina's waist, at least thirty centimeters apart,
although she tilts her head towards his shoulder, and so it seems closer. The fingers
of that hand grip it tightly, but one can guess that they are confined to that strict
parallel, that single horizon, and that up and down there is a zone that is currently
impregnable, where any impetus, momentary or calculated, crashes, while Mauricio
does not have the apothecary Ordóñez take that other great photo where he will
appear a little more rigid and much more determined dressed in blue or black, and
at his side a large white butterfly that smiles between tulle a definitive smile of love
and perplexity.
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29

“...Dr. Jacinto Tolosa (h), son of the well-known neighbor and landowner, who
tonight will be entertained at the headquarters of the Social Club with the double
and fortunate occasion of the completion of his university studies and the publication
of his first book of poems (Photo: Mauricio.)''
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30

–No, dear, stand there. That, along with your vi..., your father, Thank you. No, wait for
me, another toast. One piece, one piece, I'll take you out with Paulina. Dancing, yes,
they all come out hard. Hold it tight, melon, don't despise it. Mind you, not so much,
hahaha, that's right, my brother. You don't know how happy I am. Black, I'm happy.
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31

I was waiting for this day. Sometimes I thought I was going to die without seeing
him. Now we will have to put a little order. That man ruined people, there is no
morality, no respect or anything. I am old, but you have a place to occupy, a line to
follow. You're going to change parties because ours died. Many years of fighting,
of wear and tear. That's going to give you an aura at the start, people like it when
their children confront their parents, as long as it's respectful, that's clear. When
you talk about outdated values, they are going to think you are referring to me, put
a little feeling into that. In two years I can get you a provincial deputy, without
rushing, because those in a hurry are going to burn out.
Remember that the ball is kicked in Buenos Aires, but the foot rests here.
You have to know the people, the farmers, the couplers, the commission agents,
solve their problems and disputes, get prisoners out. Don't pay attention to what
party the prisoners belong to. We are going to open a studio for you in town, I have
already discussed it. Ah, tell Major Ferriño that I sent him the Mausers there, we
didn't have to use them around here. Tell him that I am not going to be a
commissioner, but that I recommend Dr. Gomara. He is and will be your partner in
the study. Don't tell him that. I'll wait for him for dinner tomorrow, tell him. Another
thing, start looking at those lease contracts the guy gave them, I haven't wanted to
look at them in all these years, but it would be good for me to vacate those paintings.
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32

Suddenly you became so strange again, it seemed like you weren't going to be able to rest anymore,
your gaze went inward, you had like an asthma, a gasp, you were walking against the grain of time, you
wanted to arrive earlier, take a leap and be yourself. only next Monday or in a year.

You looked at the sun with anger, at the order, at the counters, at the forms, you were sweating in winter,
you had like a white gash on your forehead, where they slapped you in Bahia, a wedge, you went back
to look for filth, you hit a drunk, “The “Hand there” you said to a landowner and you took him out holding
his balls.

The brides and the cadets turned yellow in the window, the neon bled, the plates became blurred, the
lenses rotted like sick eyes, the worm of the world swam in the buckets, every straight line was corrupted
and you touched your head .

–I don't sleep, Negro, I don't know what's wrong with me, I don't sleep, I don't eat, I don't shit.

One morning two old women and a communicant were waiting for you, but you didn't open the door, you
had a hairy father and at that time old Carmen was curing you with brine for the kicks they all gave you.
Ordóñez made a little sign that said:
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33

VACATION

Now it is she who is in front of me and says:

–You, who know him so much.

And in the mid-morning light, which enters exactly and obliquely through the window of my
study, a micrometric tear trembles without falling on each row of eyelashes, as if placed with a
brush on the orderly, moving desolation of the face that was never so Beautiful, Paulina, and
what do you want me to do?

“...your daughter Estela's liaison with Dr. Pedro Gomara will participate in the parish church and
will receive you....”

–Kiss me hard –says Estela– and wish me luck. Kiss me hard and wish me luck. Strong, good
luck –he cries.

My mother's hat covers the world.

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3. 4

He came back saying. We must burn all the ships, you have seen, the short ones
were buzzing like bees. But, Mauricio, what ships are you going to burn here, for that
you need a stage, a sea.

"Don't carry me, Black," he said, remote and dark as the night. Don't blame me, we
were friends since we were kids, look carefully, I'm screwed. I was wrong to come
back, now, understand me, that time when I started the business. Before, people
thought I was sick, they saw me running from one place to another, it would have to
keep happening, I have a julep that I'm dying. Maybe it all comes from that time I fell
when I was an idiot and hit the back of my head and no one saw what was happening
inside. You saw how I couldn't sit still, but you don't know why. It's just that suddenly I
felt the urge to scream and run, I felt an acid in my lungs, for myself I would have
continued running to La Quiaca. Until I took that photo and calmed down, I thought
that maybe there was a way out, that I had a look, you know, and that that was my
look, and the old man gave me the deal. I wanted to give them something back, to
show, I don't know what I'm telling you, but to show the world in little squares of paper,
so that they would stop to look at it like me and see that it wasn't that simple, that it
had its way and no one was seeing it. Then you came and convinced me that it
wasn't, but you didn't convince me at all because she came and grabbed the thing
again, or maybe it was when I was doing the trick and I took out the oldest's little girl,
I don't know if you remember. But Paulina thinks the same as you, just like Ordóñez,
just like the old man, but what happens, Negro, what happens, is that I can't stay still
in front of what I see, I have to do something, and everyone tells me no, suddenly I
feel like I'm tied, and even things go against you, the negatives get scratched, the
light doesn't work, don't laugh, I tell you that the light doesn't work like before, it
doesn't walk in a straight line , she dumps things like a sticky liquid, she is tired of
walking and nothing contains her, the world is rotten and in dreams I fall apart into
little pieces and give off a bad smell as if I were dead. They all screwed me over,
that's what happens. You, the old man and Paulina.

I dragged him to Ordóñez's, who wanted to give him bromide. Mauricio thought it was
a joke.
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35

Pauline:

a] Now we do nothing but fight, sometimes I think he hates me.

b] At first he was so different, it was nice to look at him because he was full of joy.

c] The misfortune is that I love him. In March we were going to buy the furniture.

d] There are things that a woman cannot tolerate. It's one thing to be liberal, I think I'm not
a prude.

e] He wanted to photograph me naked.

f] I don't know why I tell you these things. I'm alone in the town, you are the only friend I
have.
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36

Open a lens at night and the stars impress on the plate their perfect orbits, equal
to those of millions of other plates, neither the nova, nor the comet, nor the
collapse of constellations, what are you doing there, dying of cold? Leave me,
Black, don't mess with me.

It lurks behind the benches in the square, in the keyhole, in the darkness of the
nightclubs, it extends along the parallel lines of the trains, the vertical lines of
the reed, it crouches like a jaguar, a tightrope walker in the lanterns, a bat in the
bell tower, looking for the moment when night turns into day, the cobblestone
into a firefly, desire into endless hatred, as if he wanted to stop the world and
number it, heal the great wound of time through which men bleed, corruption
that drips from every look, let no one move, the Little Bird will come out.

Mauricio, who was the king of fun. Now they call him: the Fool.
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37

Your Honor must also take into account that at the expiration of the unconstitutional
and arbitrarily extended contracts, wow, how hot those fields were in optimal
operating conditions, a situation that no longer exists since the carelessness of the
tenants would have to open the window in ten years of illegitimate occupation
dropped the improvements introduced, limiting itself to the comfortable usufruct of
the land without rotating the crops or using anything or using pesticides or fertilizers
nice night to be working here the old man could put air conditioning on me now I
have to also put on the lost profits the social function of the earth no that's what the
other guy said, what a fuss they're making out there.

The feverish clicking of heels stops, now there is a knock on the door, a voice
moans to please open it and when I close the latch it is Paulina, terrified and
undone, with her dress torn, who falls into my arms.

“Closure,” he says in a whisper. He wants to kill me.

I take her to the couch and since I can't see her cry, I kiss her in the eyes, and then
on the mouth, while Mauricio kicks the door in the night yelling at me to get out until
he finally gets tired and sits on the sidewalk where he laughs at times. At times he
sings an incomprehensible drunken song.
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38

It was the Bibiloni couple who, upon leaving the Select, headed down Colón and
saw, first of all, the smoke coming out of the grocery store.

Mauricio and the flames that licked the stained glass window. The film had been
bad and the public secretly enjoyed that supernumerary spectacle. Immediately it
was seen that it was a robust fire, sure of its intentions, with dozens of arms that
appeared in unexpected greetings through the skylights or threw large handfuls of
orange splendor into the sky of the terrace. Commissioner Barraza came to study
the situation and someone armed his arm with an axe.
That allowed the door to be turned, but not to enter; see some of what was happening
inside, but not prevent it. Cameras and tripods liquefied, rolls of film exploded in
fiery impromptus, blatant faces ended up refusing on the negatives and, as La
Tribuna said the next day, seven years of the graphic history of the town that
Mauricio symbolically killed were lost there (explanation of Dr. Pascuzi).

When I passed by in the car with Paulina, the volunteer firefighters were squeezing
three garden hoses that launched three arcs of pee on the proliferating mythological
demon that played between the collapsed beams its uncontrollable game of see-
saw, of outbursts and absorptions, of sudden runs towards the street. that kept away
the most curious. Nothing could be done. I hugged Paulina who was looking
fascinated and took her to the room. My mother gave her valerian tea and put her to
bed in Estela's room.
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39

Now it is my father's voice that sounds in the early gallery, calm but louder, sharper
than usual, speaking to the man on horseback who shouts and gesticulates. I get
up, I dress almost blindly and when I come out and see the sallow and now pale
face of Roque who, with his whip, points to his back, far away, I think I already know
everything that has happened.

My father starts the truck, leaves a door open where I run up, and on the way we
are separated by a silence greater than the field. Half an hour later we are on the
Hill, and on the shore of the lagoon Roque's children and wife surround something
fallen, which is Mauricio with a hole in his head and a revolver in his hand.

Attentive and fixed on its three metal legs stuck in the sand, the Rollei shines in the
morning sun and the lagoon is summarized in a blue eye.

“I could have chosen another place,” says my father.

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40

It is the same lagoon in which we had fished and hunted, where we had bathed
and you got lost in a boat, the same place where we went to flashlight with the
laborers and you found a glyptodont. Only now dawn is coming and everything is
smooth and calm, the water still and the streaks of the sun between the clouds.

What I don't know, Mauricio, is why you are laughing and what you are doing with
the revolver; Why have you put a string attached to the trigger that goes to the
camera shutter where I try to get in to see what you are doing and what is that
thing that erases the side of your temple.

The laboratory says that the negative is defective and that the copy could not be
improved. But I think that you looked for that effect and that for some reason you
took that trouble with the tweeter who turns around a pole and shoots both things
at the same time. A vulgar trick, even if it makes you laugh.

I told you where that path led but you didn't want to listen to me. I think I did
everything I could for you and that this decision you made is not the best way to
thank me. But you will know why you did it.
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41

“...Miss Paulina Rivas and Dr. Jacinto Tolosa (h), whose marriage was
blessed yesterday in the local parish. The happy couple will move away from
our environment, to which they are linked by so many pleasant memories, to
settle in the district of Lobos, where the young lawyer will continue to put the
gifts of energy and patriotism that characterize his father. (Photo: Ordóñez.)”