Sitting in the chaise longue, on that small balcony he built with the wood left over from the house, and which has become the most coveted spot, Fuseli lets the Folha de Sao Paulo drop out of his hands. He takes off his reading glasses and waits for his eyes to adjust to the distance. Soon the beach comes into focus: his woman is lying on a beach towel watching little Victoria build a sand castle with Sebastiao, Leila’s son. The waves, the deserted islet and behind, el mato de la serra that ends just a few yards from the sea at a rugged path of black rocks. Rain clouds rush across the sky. The cachoeira roars above the road. The Brazilian cantiga Leila is humming in the kitchen reaches him through the window as does the scent of the palm oil she uses to make her famous moqueca de camarao. He thinks that life has gotten good in this place. This love he has found is not sewn with the cloth of great passion but has instead been patiently, laboriously embroidered with threads of solitude, stitched with needles of companionship and held together with hooks and eyes of saudades. A tolerant and peaceful love that asks no questions and makes no demands, whose roots are sunk deep in daily life, that has never pretended to be anything more than this day-to-day existence, known to be temporary without this ever creating resentment, and that always had one mission above and beyond all else: to give little Victoria the happiness that he and his woman had been denied. That said, he never stops missing Buenos Aires. It’s a feeling — definitely worthy of a tango — that embarrasses him. He was never drawn to tango music, except the tangos duros of Discepolo, Borges’s milongas or the reas sung by Rivero, but even these, he could take only in homeopathic doses. He thinks the self-congratulatory conceit of the lyrics lacks all trace of modesty. He deplores the facile sentimentalism, the cheap sensationalism and retrograde moralizing, and, to make matters even worse, these are precisely the qualities touted with such pride as its highest virtues. Now, however, he often feels a stab of nostalgia that sounds very much like a bandoneon.
News from Buenos Aires is ambiguous. Alfonsin issues an order for the military commanders to be prosecuted. That photograph of the generals in civilian court — charges against them being read out by a bureaucrat in a grey suit and a bearded young man, treated like common criminals — brought home the fact that this was the first, perhaps the only measure any government has ever taken that has made him happy. But, in the best tradition of the Radical Party, what it wrote with one hand it tried to erase with the other when it passed the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, an attempt to give impunity to subordinates for the brutal acts they committed with their own hands. As a consequence, nobody was satisfied, neither those demanding justice nor the carapintadas, the military officers who’d staged an uprising against the fledgling democracy. There are constant rumours and fears of uprisings, conspiracies, bad omens. The President insists the house is in order, but he himself must have a hard time believing it. Fuseli’s dreams of returning make him want to believe it to be true.
The sky bursts open, releasing a torrent of heavy rain over the jungle, the sea and the beach. His woman gets up, calls to the children, and the three walk slowly back to the house. Here the rain is not an event to take refuge from but rather a fact of life that flows out of the sky with perfect ease. Like darkness. In the tropics night doesn’t fall gently but rather pours onto the scene, like a gigantic bucketful of black water, and although it happens every day it never fails to surprise.
He looks up at the mato, thinks about the amount of life that swarms in among the roots of the sambambaias, that flies, crawls and camouflages itself, that imitates well-trained birds on the heliconias or that treads softly like the oncillas through the leaves of the bananeiras, as big as elephant ears. All that throbbing of pure animality, that urgency to live and reproduce, to kill and die, the entire framework of instincts, scents that mark out territories, eyes like beams, sweet or frenetic howling. All that restiveness drenched with rain. This hot land teeming with thousands of sounds, where our simian ancestors still swing from the branches that, according to Fuseli, we never should have left.
Return. To where? To what? If he returns he’ll have to deal with getting a job. He has a difficult time imagining himself standing in front of a dissecting table, poking around inside cadavers to find the key to their demise, clues that would lead to a possible culprit or free an innocent suspect. Here, he has carved out a niche for himself, a place the locals have generously made available to him. Patients of all kinds come to his clinic, for he is the only doctor in a town without a hospital. In this place he has discovered the joys and the sorrows of working with bodies that are still alive. His work as a coroner was, in many ways, more relaxing. All he had to do was find out what the cadaver was trying to tell him before throwing it away. A dead body is nothing but a bunch of information to investigate, decode, order, systemize and record, but the subject himself is no longer anybody. It has no hopes, neither suffers nor desires anything, it has become an object, a thing already past its due date that is humbly initiating its process of decomposition, its return to the biosphere. It can be examined, studied, packed up and sent off to those who decide where it will go. His interaction with that dead flesh carries no commitment, responsibility or consequences, because its future is already beyond the realm of science. Because the dead force us to face our condition as beings subject to the laws of nature and our powerlessness over death, we are always so quick to hide them away in tombs, mausoleums and graves. They show us what we prefer not to see. The living, on the other hand, demand certainty; they want to be told that the inevitable moment to relinquish their suit of skin and bones has not yet arrived. They desire, feel, suffer; they place their fear, despair and pain, as well as their hopes, at their doctor’s feet; they make him the repository of secrets that will cure them or at least bring some relief. Hope is a fundamental component of the healing process, hence a doctor must act as if he knows, communicate confidence, give comfort and strength to fight against illness, even though the fact is that what he knows is a mere grain of sand in the vast desert of what he doesn’t.
This place is life, whereas Buenos Aires, for him and many others, is impregnated, contaminated with horror and death. His son is buried there — a wound that never heals or stops hurting. Lascano, his best friend, is there, lying in the street, gunned down like an animal by a military death squad. Through its cobbled streets and paved avenues echo the shouts of the tortured, the murdered, the young people thrown from aeroplanes into the sea and the cries of fathers, mothers, friends and lovers who will forever be missed. Return? To what? To whom? The murderers still walk around, enjoying their freedom and good health. When he thinks about his city, it seems like a place of perennial night, and its name, Buenos Aires, like a cruel joke.