Departing at Dawn

14 The Messenger

73 14 The Messenger When I saw the man knowntoeverybodyinVilla9deJulio asMr.ThousandFive,Isawmyhouse,mymotherandbrothers, and I think, even Atilio alive, my books on the kitchen table, and my mother’s knitting next to the pot of freshly brewed hot coffee. “So that my daughter won’t poison herself with artificial things,” she always said. The purpose of the coffee she made for me, like everything else, was to prepare me and help me fulfill the dream, my own dream and my mother’s dream, the one that according to her, all my female relatives—even my great grandmothers—had had. I would be a physician! This daughter would be important , would not have to depend on a man or anybody else, and would prove that it was possible to overcome all kinds of misfortune —her father’s death, their lack of income, inheritance, or important family name. She would do all this through sheer willpower and study. I saw Villa 9 de Julio’s smokestack, the slaughterhouse lit up from three in the morning, my Mercedes Sosa records, my guitar sheet music, my mother’s black frying pan that was always sticking so that she daily threatened to throw it out and 74 buy another. The day she actually did that, though, had never arrived, like so many others filled with promises she regularly made. I saw my book of stories, the one my father bought for me, with the tale about the stork that got mixed up and delivered the wolf pup to the sheep and the lamb to the wolves, and how each group loved their own baby and refused to exchange them when the nearsighted old stork tried to correct its error. I saw the neighbors at siesta time drinking mate underneath their rubber plant, that sweetest and most delicious mate, because they always added honey and pennyroyal, cedar, mint, and fresh grass that my childhood friend Sylvia prepared. I saw the church where my mother goes to the seven o’clock mass and cooks for people even more poor than we are, and where at the entrance is the only white oak tree I have ever seen, and where dogs are admitted for the mass dedicated to San Roque. I saw the street that becomes a thick mud hole after the hot, crashing rains. I saw my school and the caper spurge that grows beside the railway tracks and gives shade to a cross that marks where the train ran over a young boy, and to his mother who goes up there every afternoon out of her mind with guilt, because she hears the child calling her but cannot reach him before the train swallows him up. And, finally, I saw the photo of my graduation, my dreams and hopes set on getting ahead, and my mother holding in her hands the family treasure, my bachelor’s degree. But here in front of me was Mr. ThousandFive, dressed in his Sunday best that my mother made him wear when he went to church. Somebody had given him a dead man’s suit so my mother wouldn’t scold him for being scruffy. I im- 75 mediately knew what was up even before he greeted me with the words: “Berta, your mother sent me.” It was his whole appearance, the way he could not meet my gaze, his voice lower than before, his eyes redder and more watery, looking at the floor stones, that convinced me that nothing would ever be the same, that Tucumán would never again be some republic’s garden, and that my city, my neighborhood, the Villa, could no longer be called mine. All that was finished, like an era or age that comes to an abrupt halt. The road back was closed to me, I had lost everything that used to be mine, and I was no longer there and never would be. But the worst part was that at the same time I knew I could never erase that place from my heart and mind. I was and always would be a child from Villa, and my mother would always be a full-fledged Matadero woman. But I had been thrown out, like Atilio off the balcony, into a future facing nowhere—or everywhere in the world except Matadero in Villa 9 de Julio. “You must be tired, Mr. ThousandFive,” I said to him. “A guy who works...