Departing at Dawn

3 A World Within a World

9 3 A World Within a World Contrasting melodies could be heard around the barrio of Matadero, the melodies of many people arriving from other parts looking for work in Tucumán or just passing through because of the railroad, the markets, and the possibility of menial part-time jobs in machinery and manufacturing. The place Berta was leaving was a place to start over for other people, not because it was a good place, but simply because it seemed not as bad as what they were trying to leave behind. The Matadero slaughterhouse was fired up day and night, but by late afternoon, the chimney was spewing a bright fire that roared death and life. Livestock were headed to slaughter and workers to barely eke out a living. It was like a huge factory, an accepted hell, with the killers dressed in white from head to toe. The area was surrounded by shady money dealers and flanked by streets scarred by hundreds of carts waiting for the processed beef and the offal . . . carts that, as they traveled the bumps and curves, dripped tepid blood all over the neighborhood. There were eating places, butcher shops, blacksmiths, and general merchandise stores where rural people stocked up. 10 These were people who wore sandals and narrow-brimmed hats,whodrankwinebytheliter;hard,gruff,fun-lovingpeople who lived by the knife and horse or drove carts drawn by beasts with harnesses decked out with long leather ribbons, bejeweled with large tacks that gleamed in the early morning comings and goings or shone brightly in the midday sun that was so unhealthy for humans and animals. These people traveled from the first twinkle of a star to the first rays of dawn without complaining of the cold or the heat, a heat that could not be exaggerated. They came from the surrounding areas and from far away, bringing cattle and then carrying away the meat. They mingled with the coal carts coming from Santiago del Estero and the sugarcane carts that, in harvest season, spilled green cane that had been haphazardly and hastily loaded because of the clinging earth and the limited time set aside for milling; it was accepted that part of the cane, so wearily packed, would fall and rot along the roadways. Along with the laborers came farm workers, the owners of small farms, truck drivers, card and dice players, other gamesters ,vagrants,drunks,andallkindsofscoundrels.Somepeople seemed dark; others seemed light, because they lacked depth or complications, and their lives had already been sapped by the simple but precarious matter of day-to-day survival, which was no small matter. There were heavy smokers, who ate stews or empanadas at eight in the morning because for them that was already past midday, people with pasts full of deeds with knives, who didn’t notice the smell of blood because they lived in it. And camps of gypsies who periodically settled in the area; to the neighbors who let them have access to water, they gave 11 hope for travel, mystery, and gardens, because in the colorful blankets that they stretched over their tents and cars grew the only flowers in that whole vast brown neighborhood. It was a world within another world, ignored by the police , on the outskirts of the city. Farther in was the Bridge of Sighs, full of stories about suicide for love, ghost sweethearts, hangings, countless acts of revenge or debt settlement, deaths inspired by every possible motive; and from time to time the train that crossed over the bridge knocked off a little bit more of its railings. The neighborhood came to an end up on Juan B. Justo Avenue, where respectable Tucumán began, the part still known as “the pearl of the north.” There was a neighborhood of good houses, named Bishop Piedra Buena in honor of a proindependence priest, and the Salí River ran below, where the vegetation began to thin out until the desert took over at Santiago del Estero. The trains marked the hours of the day, and children watched for them coming in from the south and played on the tracks, in the shadow of so many tragedies. Passengers would gather at the windows of the cars moving very slowly as they approached the San Miguel station and stare at the locals, who would in turn stare back. The passengers were people from the south, or porteños (from Buenos...