Truth is the daughter of time
Francis Bacon
In the freezing air, two men in facing seats were watching each other covertly without a word. They had just sat down, settling in for the length of the journey. The parting whistle distracted their attention, and both of them looked out to see the platform disappear into the distance. The older of the two began to talk … outside the night was drawing in . . .
– It’s always the same when I travel: it seems like life itself, this stream of images, gestures, colours and actions linked by a tuneless melody coming from by a mad musician. Many things in my life have gone by like the platform we’ve just left behind. I observed life as it went on … I came and went, as I do now, but I always stayed in the same place. You will ask yourself if I like travelling alone. I believe I do, I’ve always done so. My solitudes are wrapped around me, they devour me. They are all here with me, you can see them, you can even read their faces: my solitude as a man, my solitude as a lover, today’s solitude and yesterday’s. They accompany me unconditionally and make me realize what I might have been and have not been, what I am and will never be, what I have wished for and have lost. There are those who think my life was scripted for me. I don’t agree with them, and if at least most of it was, I’m sure that I myself have put my signature to the rest. Pedro Aráoz, unreserved friend of power, at your service. –
The younger man, a mix of black and white blood, was far away … his thoughts, his look, his body wove a thick wall of silence towards the old man, whom he never stopped watching… his thoughts went on and on …
Finally you’re here. You’re sitting opposite me, talking incessantly. I’m not listening to you, I’m watching, I know everything you’re saying as well as you… you don’t stop talking…Your destiny was determined long ago, your clarity doesn’t reach that far, but we all knew how you would end up … like all the men of the Aráoz family, who sooner or later meet those strange deaths. You, Pedro, a long-lived survivor, are not to be the exception, at the end of your destiny you find me asking you to settle your account. I’m watching you greedily, and my hatred is growing all the while.
– But, do you want me to tell my story? I always do, even though they don’t ask me… I’m a good story-teller, like all old lonely people who lose themselves in hours spent remembering the past… But I’ll make an exception with you: if you don’t want me to, I won’t tell you anything and we can travel in silence, but if you accept. . . Yes? I can see from your eyes that you are worried, anxious. Fine … I’ll tell you everything that comes to mind, let’s take advantage of these three hours that we have at our disposal before we get to the Capital. I think that a suitable episode would be the day when Senator Manuel Aráoz dropped out of history. It was a day like just like today: fine and bright, with a young sun breaking up the clay in Plaza de las Juntas, where the Senator had promised to take off in a hot-air balloon to start off his electoral campaign against the Meat Association. The "Gran Corporación", as it was called by its members, owners of the great butcheries, had put up as candidate for President yet another young military officer with Indios-looking features, who was overshadowed by the powerful figure of the Senator. I remember that the manholes in the square were giving off thin clouds of steam that covered the asphalt and in the distance created a blurry white wisp between the busy feet of the pedestrians. A light sea-breeze carried the scent of seaweed and molluscs… In our country, in the months prior to this event, people had had to put up with weather so unusual that it seemed that the tropics had been lowered to settle over the vast plantations of maize surrounding the city. The whole world seemed changed by this unusual weather. All over the city you could see domes where tiny green flowers were growing, as a result of the abundant rain …
You talk as you always do and I can’t listen… I remember you, old, far away, like metal… At times I could swear you weren’t human. You were the master and your skin wasn’t like others, your hands were the colour of flour, you feet were relaxed in your sandals, and your soul… no, you had no soul… you didn’t care about pain, you were a beast, you were such a ferocious beast that I can’t recognize the deformed face I see in front of me. Today I find you here, aged, impoverished, your breath smelling of vinegar, the same breath as when you came back from your drunken bouts and you had it in for the whole world just because it existed…
– As I was saying, young man, at the beginning the population ignored the green flowers, thinking they were part of the moss growing around the schools that had been closed for decades, to avoid superfluous expenditures. Then, since the proliferation of these flowers had taken on incredible dimensions, people began to use them, following the theories broadcast over the radio by a sort of guru who was convinced they had miraculous properties. The people needed leaders and the “great healer” was gifted with great charisma for all classes of society. He bathed naked in the green flowers during high society parties until one day, by accident, they found him molesting the Álzaga’s dog. That was the end for him. The "holy touch" was condemned and shut up in a prison-farm, where he was last seen, crazy with joy, skipping over the fields behind a sheep. Poor Gaudiño! He was a half-breed (a mixture of Indios and Black), as ugly as he was good. A bit perverted, poor thing, but good. If he’d had money everyone would have forgiven him, but his crime was serious since he was poor and coloured.
According to the advertisements, the flowers had the beneficial properties of slowing down balding, stopping smoking, arousing passion, helping to lose weight, and feeding twenty million people without work, a world record at that time, which the country was proud of. But in reality those cursed flowers made everybody go mad. So it happened that, crazed by the flowers, some public celebrities of the moment became fanatic idealists and led hundreds of the unemployed to the capital to demand reforms. As you see, an unheard of impertinence! A great uprising! To put a stop to the movement a plan called "The citizens’ national green flower harvest" was devised, which promised work for the unemployed masses with the aim – you see? – of distracting them for a while. Many of them died, as was to be expected, above all when they fell off roofs trying to pick the flowers without suitable equipment. So many deaths led to two consequences: the loss of the world record for the highest number of people unemployed, which greatly bothered the authorities, and the formation of mile-long queues of less courageous people, who sat around waiting for gusts of the Aurus wind that would blow the strange flowers down to the ground, where they could be gathered more easily. Still, teams were organized, but they weren’t able to clean the roofs of the huge quantity of flowers that were endlessly growing and spreading. I myself never managed to taste them, but I must say they were really very popular.
Getting back to the main point of my chat, the event that had been announced as "Aráoz’s flight" was spectacular, something at the same time completely real and also so incredible that, even after half a century, people still wonder about his mysterious disappearance and even if it really happened at all. An old man’s memory loses its grasp of facts. I can only clearly recall the details that directly involved me. I can’t quite remember where I was coming from that morning… but I’ll make an effort. It was January 2, 1943, a Thursday, I was riding my bicycle quickly along the main street that formed a ring around the Cathedral when I saw the sky grow dark behind the palms in Plaza de las Juntas and a curtain of endless blue night open up over my head … An enormous fire of black flames covered the sky, and for a few seconds every newborn fell dumb… Then there was a terrible gust of wind that knocked me down into the opening of one of the metropolitan lines leading into the square. When I regained consciousness, despite my bruises I managed to get back up the stairs to see that Aráoz had flown away, but no one had been able to see him, and no one even knew where he could be. Along with him, mysteriously enough, the green flowers had also disappeared.
You know, friend, now that I see you better you remind me of someone, but I can’t remember who. What did you say your name was? No, no, it doesn’t matter, don’t tell me, my memory is so weak that I’d be certain to forget right away. Let’s go on talking, if it doesn’t bother you. I think I still haven’t mentioned that the Senator and I had something in common. He was a highly seductive man, he’d succeeded in making his political career starting out from the ranks of the army. My mother, who was a very beautiful woman, gave birth to the Senator when she was very young, and she conceived me when she thought she couldn’t get pregnant again, after five years of waiting and considerable spiteful gossip. A feature of the Aráoz family was its fertility and prosperity in matters of progeny, battles and wealth. In the last century all our lands, spread throughout the north, had been won by my glorious great-great-grandfather, Don Camilo Aráoz. That famous old man was very astute, and with great tact he succeeded in concentrating the most important tobacco plantations in the country, until one afternoon, in the middle of the St. Bartholomew celebrations, a damned tiger took him when he was off his guard buried in a girl’s laces and put an end to his growing power. His talent for command was inherited by the Senator, as he was called by everyone in the family from the time he was a small child. He was the eldest son, the one destined to organize everything, the one destined to continue the work of the Aráoz family among so many ignorant and vulgar people… This was his duty to his family and his class … in spite of occasional rebellions.
It looks as though the words are going to spurt out of the mouth of the young man, but … he restrains himself…
…You’ve always been pathetic. As long as the era of the Senator lasted you lived in his shadow, and then you left like the greatest loser of all, crushed under the weight of your cross, alive but dead to living, covering yourself with gambling debts… living only on the surface of life…
And I ask myself who you really were? The person speaking now, a poor old man dying bit by bit with each passing day, talking about great events to hide his own insignificance, or maybe all these things and none of them. Your words are still like knife-blades for me …
– My mother, a brilliant businesswoman involved in the cereal trade, disapproved of the Senator associating with so many of the rabble, as he was doing at the time. Indeed, after the first green flowers had appeared, as a consequence of the baths he took, he had fallen in love with Zulema Pintos, a well-built black midwife who could command Manuel’s sighs with her eyelids. I had moved to the city for my studies, and so, serving as the family’s eyes and ears, I learned about the real plans of my brother, who had by then precipitated into madness and folly caused by love or by . . . witchcraft . .
Contrary to what everyone expected of him, the Senator was secretly organizing the collectivization of the land … what folly! Impossible to believe, isn’t it? Through the introduction of social laws that would have overturned the entire traditional social structure, favouring the "hands of work", as he called those lazy blacks! Though there’s no harm in them, of course. It could only be explained by the influence of a witch, of her voodoo magic and her damned flowers. For his entire life the Senator had been an open enemy of all such nonsense, and now that he was in his prime it was certainly not the right time for him to start raving.
Searching through his papers I learned that the balloon flight was meant to win him a following in the provinces, preparing the final blow for the April elections. I reported back to my mother, giving the details of his political strategy. Her first reaction was to consult the tarot cards and runes, uniting her friends, among whom there were many astrologists, seers and magicians, with the purpose of keeping her son from making more mistakes and disobeying her orders. Among other things, so as not to leave anything to chance, she also met up with the members of the Corporation, and went to work to save the Senator from the claws of Zulema and her bastard son.
The following morning my mother called me and asked me to deliver a letter to my brother, precisely at noon of the day of the “flight”, just before the take-off. Aha! so -- you see? Now I can recall what was doing that morning: I was pedalling towards the square to deliver the letter to my brother when the eclipse came on, the greatest solar eclipse of the century, and it put out the celebrations. No one really knows what happened, though. When the turmoil died down and the light came back, the balloon and the Senator had disappeared from the face of the earth without a trace. I couldn’t really grasp what had happened, like the thousands of other people who were left stupefied and saddened. No one had seen or heard anything, but somehow the flight had taken place. The Civil Guard decided to get news of the whereabouts of the balloon and its passenger from the aviation authorities, but no pilot could find any trace of it. The search went on for months, and even my mother held secret meetings with her friends to find out where he could be found. All in vain. No one was ever able to track them down. His followers are still waiting for him, and think he can be found in a hideaway somewhere in the world, putting together the funds needed to pay for collectivization. But the truth is that before I could deliver the envelope containing the announcement of Zulema’s death, she had come from the beyond to find him and had carried him off… who knows where to… from where no magician friend of my mother’s has ever managed to make him return.
As for the bastard, he lived in the estancia for seven years. I myself had to take care of that job out of compassion, since he wasn’t even any good at minding the horses. He gave me a lot of trouble, and when I realized it was no use trying to be generous towards him, I left him in the country, where he surely must have died … he was weak, useless and undernourished. But… my friend, so far I’ve done all the talking without pausing. What do you have to say to me?
– It was exactly like that, just the way Signor Aráoz tells it… I can remember, too, and my memory isn’t weak, I carry it with me all the time…
– Excuse me, I like hearing your voice after such a long monologue now that we’ve almost arrived at our destination, but how do you know that’s the way it went? This is the first time I’ve told this story to someone who knows the whole truth… who are you… really?
–Me… who am I?… I am that child, the one you abandoned… The son of the Senator. My name is Sebastián Pintos…
A cold sweat gripped the old man’s forehead. It felt like he was being slapped by a hand hard as a rock, he looked up and down the aisle but there was no one who could help him. What he was hearing couldn’t be true…
– I know what you are thinking… but I myself am that truth. My mother was not at all a witch, and my father was not dragged into anything, nor had he gone mad. On the contrary, the last years of his life were his only salvation in a life full of farce and fears, comforts and lies. He had a good heart, silenced by the weight of his family, and the green flowers were the only thing that helped him to be reborn as a man, which is what you lost a long, long time ago, irremediably. He died like my mother, by the hand of the Corporation’s cops, who were paid by that bitch of your mother…And now, Signor Pedro Aràoz, it is time for me to collect his debts. Goodbye.
All at once there was the noise of brakes, along with a sudden, dull sound. The train stopped, and so did the heart of Pedro Aráoz.
Sebastián Pintos got off the train, steered clear of several suitcases and was lost in the crowd as he hurried away. With him he carried a heavy trunk, helped by two men. In the early morning breeze, a green flower fell from the brim of his hat.
The body of Pedro Aráoz was never found.
Viviana Silvia Piciulo was born in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1963. She graduated in History from the University of Buenos Aires and then taught Social History at the same university, while carrying out research on Italian immigration to Argentina with a grant from the C.N.R [National Research Council, tr.note]. In 1991 she won the essay competition "Il Viaggio e l'Avventura" (sponsored by the Italian Embassy in Buenos Aires and Alitalia), and in 1992 a scholarship from the Italian Foreign Ministry to study at the University of Bologna. In 1996 she won the short fiction prize promoted by the Cultural Secretary of the City of Buenos Aires. She has lived in Bologna since 1992, where she continues her studies and publications on the history of migration thanks to various grants and scholarships given by Italian foundations. Since 2001 she has carried out intercultural projects of animated literary texts through her association, "Specchio Lucente" [“Shining Mirror”], and has collaborated with various universities, schools and Italian NGOs.