down several walls to make room for him, so Old Man Belladona could move from one end to the other, between his tables and desks, speaking to himself and spying out the window at the dead movement on the road beyond the gardens.
“They’re going to call you Sambo around here,” Old Man Belladona told him, smiling caustically. “There were a lot of blacks in the Río de la Plata area during colonial times, they even formed a battalion of mulattos and Negros, very determined, but they were all killed in the War of Independence. There were a few black gauchos, too, out on the frontier, but in the end they all went to live with the Indians. A few years back there were still a few blacks in the hills, but they’ve died off. They’re all gone now. I’ve heard there are a lot of ways of differentiating skin color in the Caribbean, but here the mulattos are all sambos.5 Do you understand, young man?”
Old Man Belladona was seventy years old, but he seemed so ancient that it made sense for him to refer to everyone in town as young. He had survived every catastrophe, he ruled over the dead, everything he touched disintegrated, he drove the men in the family away and stayed with his daughters—while his sons were exiled ten kilometers to the south, in the factory they built on the road to Rauch. Right away the Old Man told Tony Durán about the inheritance. He had divided up his possessions and ceded his property before dying, but that had been a mistake. Ever since it had been nothing but wars.
“I don’t have anything left,” Old Man Belladona said. “They started fighting, and they’ve nearly killed me.”
His daughters, he said, weren’t involved in the conflict, but his sons had gone about it as if they were fighting over a kingdom. (“I’m never coming back,” Luca had sworn. “I’ll never set foot in this house again.”)
“Something changed at that point, after that visit, and that conversation,” Madariaga said from behind the bar, to no one in particular, and without clarifying what the change had been.
It was around that time that people started to say that Durán was a carrier.6 That he had brought money, which wasn’t his, to buy crops under the table. People started saying that this was his business with Old Man Belladona. That the sisters were only a pretext.
Quite possibly, it wasn’t that rare, except that people who carried money under the table tended to be invisible. Men who looked like bankers and traveled with a fortune in dollars to avoid the Tax Office. There were a lot of stories about tax evasion and the trafficking of foreign currency. Where it was hidden, how it was carried, who had to be greased. But that’s not the point, it doesn’t matter where they hide the money, because they can’t be discovered if no one says anything. And who’s going to say anything if everyone’s in on it: the farmers, the ranchers, the auctioneers, the brokers who trade in grains, everyone at the silos who keeps prices down.
Madariaga looked at the Inspector in the mirror again. Croce paced nervously from one end of the tavern to the other, his riding crop in his hand, until he finally sat at one of the tables. Saldías, his assistant, ordered a bottle of wine and something to eat. Croce continued his monologue, as he always did when he was trying to solve a crime.
“Tony Durán came with money,” Croce said. “That’s why they killed him. They got him excited about the country races and the horse from Luján.”
“They didn’t need to get him excited, he was already excited before he got here,” Madariaga said, laughing.
Some people say that a country race was set up especially for him and that he became obsessed about it. But it would be more accurate to say that the horse race, which they had been preparing for months, was moved up so Tony could be there. And that some saw in this the hand of fate.
Tony quickly realized that there were several kinds of very good horses in the province, basically falling into three categories: the polo ponies, very extraordinary, bred mostly in the area of Venado Tuerto; the purebred locals, from the stud farms near the coast; and the short-distance racers, which are very fast, with great pickup, flashing bursts, nervous, used to running in pairs. There are no other horses—or races—like these anywhere else in the world.
Durán began to learn the history of the races in the area.7 Right away he realized there was more money at play here than at the Kentucky Derby. The farmers and the ranchers bet big, the laborers gamble their entire salary. The country races are set up with much anticipation, and people round up their money for the occasion. Some horses accumulate a kind of prestige, everyone knows that they have won so many races in such and such places. Then a challenge is made.
The town’s horse was a dapple gray that belonged to Payo Ledesma, a very good horse, retired, like a boxer who hangs up his gloves without ever having lost. A rancher from Luján with an undefeated sorrel had been trying to challenge him for some time. It seems at first Ledesma didn’t want to accept, but that he finally rose to the challenge, as they say, and accepted the call. Which is when someone looked over and got Tony involved. The other horse, the one from Luján, was named Tácito, and he had quite a history. Tácito was a purebred that had been injured and now couldn’t run more than three hundred meters at a time. He had started out in the racetrack in La Plata and had won in the Polla de Potrillos, but then one rainy Saturday afternoon, in the fifth race at San Isidro, he’d had an accident. On one of the turns he broke his left leg and was left damaged. He was the son of one of Embrujo’s sons. They wanted to put him out to pasture and just breed him, but the horse’s jockey—and trainer—stepped in and took care of him. Until, slowly, the horse was able to run again, damaged and all. Apparently they convinced the rancher in Luján to buy him and he had won every country race in which he had raced since. That was the story everyone told about him. The horse was truly impressive, a sorrel with white feet, surly and mean. He had ears only for his jockey, who spoke to him as if he were a person.
The horse was brought to town in an open pickup. When they let him out in the field the folks who had gathered watched from a respectful distance. A horse of great height, with a blanket on its back and one leg bandaged, spirited, surly, darting its wide eyes from fright or anger, like a true purebred.
“Yah,” Madariaga said. “Ledesma’s dapple gray against the undefeated sorrel from Luján. Something happened there.”
3 Tony’s older brother had died in Vietnam. The sun reflected off of his glasses as he was crossing a stream in the forest near the Mecong Delta, making him visible to a Vietcong sniper who killed him with a single shot—fired from such a distance that it went unheard. He died in battle, but his death was so unexpected and so peaceful that we thought he had died of a heart attack, said the condolence letter signed by Colonel Roger White, the ranting author in charge of writing these letters on behalf of the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam. The troops referred to Colonel White as the fucking poet. After the shot, the squad fell back into the rice fields, fearing an ambush. Tony’s brother was carried away by the current. They found him a week later, devoured by dogs and scavenger birds. Colonel White didn’t say anything about these circumstances in his condolence letter. As grace for his brother’s death, Tony wasn’t called up into the army. They didn’t want two dead brothers in the same family, even in a Puerto Rican family. His brother’s remains came back in a sealed, lead coffin. His mother was never certain that the body—buried in the military cemetery in Jersey City—was really her son’s.
4 The son of an officer of the Imperial Army who died hours before the signing of the Armistice, Dazai was born in Buenos Aires in 1946. Raised by his mother and his aunts, as a child he understood only feminine Japanese (onnarashii).
5 Sambos, mestizos of mixed Indian and black blood, were considered the lowest rung on the social ladder
