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,4 but 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.
It was Yoshio who, one early February day at noon, handed Durán the envelope from the Belladona sisters inviting him to visit the family house. They had drawn a map for him on a sheet of notebook paper, circling the location of their mansion on the hill in red. Apparently he was invited to meet their father.
The large family house was up the slope in the old part of town, at the top of the hills looking over the low mountains, the lake, and the gray, endless countryside. Dressed in a white linen jacket and matching shoes, Durán walked up the steep road to the house in the middle of the afternoon.
But they had Durán come in through the back service door.
It was the maid’s mistake, she saw that Tony was a mulatto and thought that he was a ranch hand in disguise.
He walked through the kitchen, through the ironing room and the servants’ rooms, and into the parlor facing the gardens where Old Man Belladona was waiting for him, thin and frail like an old, embalmed monkey, his eyelids heavy, his legs knock-kneed. Durán very politely bowed and approached the Old Man, following the respectful customs used in the Spanish Caribbean. But that doesn’t work in the province of Buenos Aires, because only the servants treat gentlemen in that way here. The servants (Croce said) are the only ones who still use the aristocratic manners of the Spanish Colonies, they’ve been abandoned everywhere else. And it was those gentlemen who taught their servants the manners that they themselves had abandoned, as if depositing in those dark-skinned men the customs they no longer needed.
So Durán behaved, without realizing it, like a foreman, or a tenant, or a farmhand slowly and solemnly approaching his master.
Tony didn’t understand the relationships and hierarchies of the town. He didn’t understand that there were areas—the tiled paths in the center of the plaza, the shady sidewalk along the boulevard, the front pews of the church—where only the members of the old families could go. That there were places—the Social Club, the theater boxes, the restaurant at the Jockey Club—where you weren’t allowed to enter even if you had money.
People asked themselves, though, if Old Man Belladona wasn’t right to mistrust. To mistrust, and to show the arrogant foreigner from the beginning the rules of his class, of his house. The Old Man had probably wondered, as everyone wondered, how a mulatto who said he came from New York could show up in a place where the last black people had disappeared—or had dispersed until they blended completely into the landscape—fifty years earlier, without ever clearly explaining why he had come here, insinuating rather that he had come on some kind of secret mission. They said something to each other that afternoon, it came out later, the Old Man and Tony. It seems he had come with a message, or with an order, everything under wraps.
The
