It was about eleven o'clock one night; I had gone into the old-fashioned general-store-and-bar, which is now simply a bar, on the corner of Bolivar and Venezuela*. From a corner, the man hissed at me. He must have looked like a man one didn't want to cross, because I went at once towards him. He was sitting in a small table; I felt, inexplicably, that he had been sitting there for some time, before his empty glass. He was neither tall nor short; he looked like an honest craftsman, or perhaps an old-fashioned country fellow. His sparse mustache was grizzled. A bit stiff, as Porteños tend to be, he had not taken off his neck scarf*. He offered me a drink. I sat down and we chatted. All this happened in nineteen-thirty-something.
The man told me:
— You've heard of me, sir, though we've never met. But I do know you. I am Rosendo Juarez. Our late Paredes, no doubt, must have been who told you about me. That old man was something. He like to lie, not to deceive, more to be entertaining. Now, since you and I are here with nothing else on our hands, I'd like to tell you what really happened that night. The night the Yardmaster was murdered. You've put the story in a novel*, and I'm hardly qualified to judge that novel, but I want you to know the truth behind the lies you wrote.
He paused, as though to put his recollections in order, and then he began:
Things happen to a man, and a man only understands them as the years go by. What happened to me that night comes from afar. I was brought up in the neighborhood of the Maldonado,* out beyond Floresta. It was one big open sewage ditch back then, if you know what I mean, but fortunately they've run sewer lines in there now. I've always been of the opinion that nobody has the right to stand in the way of progress. We are all born whenever we can. It never occurred to me to find out the name of the father that begot me. Clementina Juárez, my mother, was a good honest woman that earned her living with her iron. If you were to ask me, I'd say she was from Entre Ríos or the Banda Oriental, what people now call Uruguay; be that as it may, she would always talk about her relatives over in Uruguay, in Concepción. For myself, I grew up the best I could. I learned to knife fight with the other boys, using a charred piece of stick. That was before we were all taken over by soccer, which back at that time was still just something the English did.
Anyway, while I was sitting in the bar one night, this fellow Garmendia started trying to pick a fight with me. I played deaf for a while, but the guy was feeling his liquor and wouldn't drop it. We finally took it outside; out on the sidewalk, he turned back a second, pushed the door open again a little, and announced:
— Not to worry, I'll be right back.
I had borrowed a knife. We walked down towards the stream, slowly, watching each other. He was a few years older than I was; he and I had practiced knife fighting together lots of times, and I had a feeling I was going to get gutted. I was walking down the right-hand side of the alley, him down the left. Suddenly, he tripped over some big chunks of cement that were lying there. The second Garmendia tripped I jumped on him, almost without thinking about it. I cut his cheek open with one slash, then we locked together. There was a second when anything could have happened, and then I stabbed him once, which was all it took. It was only a while later that I realized he'd left his mark on me. Some scratches. That night I learned that it isn't hard to kill a man, or to get killed yourself. The creek was rather empty; to keep the body from being found too soon, I half-hid it behind a brick kiln. I was so stunned I suppose I just stopped thinking, because I slipped off the ring Garmendia always wore and put it on. Then I straightened my hat and went back to the bar. I walked in as easy as you please and said:
— Looks like it's me that's come back.
I ordered a shot of brandy. To tell the truth, I needed it. That was when somebody pointed out the bloodstain.
That night I tossed and turned on my bunk all night; I didn't fall asleep till nearly dawn. About the time of early mass, two cops came looking for me. My mom, may she rest in peace, was crying and yelling. I was dragged off like a criminal. Two days and two nights I sat in that stinking cell. Nobody came to visit me, except for Luis Irala, a true friend if ever there was one. But they wouldn't let him see me. Then one morning the captain sent for me. He was sitting there in his chair; he didn't even look at me, but he did speak.
— So you put Garmendia out of his misery?
— If you say so.
— It's 'sir' to you. And we'll have no ducking or dodging, now. Here are the statements from the witnesses, and here's the ring that was found in your house. Just sign the confession and get this over with.
He dipped the pen in the inkwell and handed it to me.
— Let me think about this, captain.
— I'll give you twenty-four hours to think about it real good, in your cell. I won't rush you. But if you decide not to see things in a reasonable way, you'd best start getting used to the idea of a vacation down on Calle Las Heras.
As you might imagine, I didn't understand what he meant.
— If you decide to come around, you'll just be in for a few days. I'll let you go and Nicolás Paredes has already promised me he'll fix it for you.
It took ten days. I'd almost given up hope when they finally remembered me. I signed what they put in front of me to sign and one of the cops took me over to Calle Cabrera*.
There were horses tied to the hitching post, and standing out on the porch and all inside the place there were more people than a Saturday night at the whorehouse. It looked like a party committee headquarters. Don Nicolás, who was sipping mate, finally called me over. As calm as you please, he told me he was going to send me out to Morón, where they were setting up for the elections. He told me to look up a certain Mr. Laferrer; he'd try me out, he said. The letter I was to take was written by a kid in black that wrote poems* about tenement houses and riffraff, topics illustrous people would not be interested in. Anyway, I thanked Paredes for the favor, and I left. The cop wasn't glued to me by the time I left.
So it all turned out for the best. Providence knows what it's doing. Garmendia's killing, which at first had got me in such hot water, was now opening doors for me. Of course the cops had me over a barrel — if I didn't work out, if I didn't toe the line for the party, I'd be hauled in again. But I'd got some heart back, and I had faith in myself.
Mr. Laferrer warned me right off that I was going to have to walk the straight and narrow with him, but if I did, he said, he might make me his bodyguard. The work I did for 'em was all anyone could ask. In Morón, and later on in the neighborhood too, I gradually won my bosses' trust. The police and the party gradually spread the word that I was a man to be reckoned with; I was an important cog in the wheels of the elections in Buenos Aires, and out in the province too. Elections were fierce back then; I won't bore you, sir, with this or that story of bloodshed. I did all I could to make life hard on the radicals, though to this day they're still riding on Alem's coattails. But, as I say, there was no man that didn't show me respect. I got myself a woman, La Lujanera, and a handsome copper sorrel. For years I pretended to be some kind of Moreira*—who in his day was probably imitating some other stage show gaucho. I played a lot of cards and drank a lot of absinthe.
We old folks talk and talk and talk, but I'm coming to what wanted to tell you. I don't know if I already mentioned Luis Irala to you. A true friend, the likes of which you'll not often find. He was getting on in years when I knew him, and he'd never been afraid of hard work; for some reason he took a liking to me. He'd never set foot in a committee room—he earned his living carpentering. He didn't stick his nose in anybody else's business, and he didn't let anybody stick their nose in his. One morning he came to see me.
— I guess you've heard Casilda left me. Rufino Aguilera is the man that took her from me.
I'd had dealings with that particular individual in Morón. I told him:
— I know Rufino. I'd have to say that of all the Aguileras, he's the least disgusting.
— Disgusting or not, I've got a bone to pick with him.
I thought for a minute.
— Nobody takes anything away from anybody. If Casilda has left you, it's because it's Rufino she wants, and she doesn't care for you.
— But what'll people say? That I'm yellow?
— My advice to you is not to go looking for trouble because of what people might say, let alone because of a woman that doesn't love you anymore.
— I couldn't care less about her. A man that thinks longer than five minutes running about a woman is no man, he's a pansy. And Casilda's heartless, anyway. The last night we spent together she told me I was getting old.
— She was telling you the truth.
— Truth hurts, but it's beside the point. Rufino is the one I'm after now.
— You want to be careful there. I've seen Rufino in action, in the Merlo elections. He's like greased lightning.
— You think I'm afraid of Rufino Aguilera?
— I know you're not afraid of him, but think about it. One of two things will happen: either you kill him and you get sent off to stir, or he kills you and you get sent off to Chacarita*.
— One of two things. So, tell me, what would you do in my place?
— I don't know, but then I'm not exactly the best example to follow. I'm a guy that, to get his backside out of jail, has turned into a gorilla for the party.
— I'm not planning to turn into a gorilla for the party, I'm planning to collect a debt a man owes me.
— You mean you're going to stake your peace of mind on a stranger you've never met and a woman you don't even love anymore?
But Luis Irala wasn't interested in hearing what I had to say, so he left. The next day we heard that he had picked a fight with Rufino in some bar over in Morón and that Rufino had killed him.
He went off to get killed, and he got himself killed honorably — man to man. I had given him a friend's advice, but I still felt guilty.
A few days after the wake, I went to the cockfights. I had never been all that keen on cockfights, but that Sunday, to tell you the truth, they made me sick. What in the world is wrong with those animals, I thought, that they tear each other to pieces this way, for no good reason?
The night of my story, the night of the end my the story, the boys and I had all gone to a dance over at the place that a black woman we called La Parda ran. Funny — all these years, and only now I remember the flowered dress La Lujanera was wearing that night. The party was out in the patio. There was the usual drunk trying to pick a fight, but I made sure things went the way they were supposed to go. It couldn't even have been midnight when the strangers showed up. One of them, called the Yardmaster by the others and who was stabbed in the back and killed that very night, bought a round of drinks for the house. By coincidence this Yardmaster and I were dead ringers for each other. He had something up his sleeve that night: he came up to me and started laying it on pretty thick—he was from up north, he said, and he'd been hearing about me. He couldn't say enough about my reputation. I let him talk, but I was beginning to suspect what was coming. He was hitting the gin hard, too, and I figured it was to get his courage up. Sure enough, pretty soon he challenged me to a fight. That was when it happene what nobody wants to understand. I looked at that swaggering drunk and it was like I was looking at a mirror, and all of a sudden I was ashamed of myself. I wasn't afraid of him; had I been afraid, I might've gone outside and fought him. I just stood there. This other guy, this Yardmaster, who by now had his face about this far from mine, raised his voice so everybody could hear him:
— You know what's wrong with you? You're yellow, that's what's wrong with you!
— That may be. I can live with being called yellow. You can tell people you called me a son of a whore, too, and say I let you spit in my face. Now then, does that make you feel better?
La Lujanera slipped her hand up my sleeve, pulled out the knife I always carried there, and slipped it into my hand. To make sure I got the message, she added:
— Rosendo, I think you're needing this.
I dropped the knife and walked out — taking my time about it. People stepped back to make way for me. They couldn't believe their eyes. What did I care what they thought.
To get out of that life, I moved over to Uruguay and became an oxcart driver. Since I came back, I've made my place here. San Telmo* has always been a peaceful place to live.
Endnotes
The corner of Bolivar and Venezuela: Now in the center of the city, near the Plaza de Mayo, and about two blocks from the National Library, where Borges was the director. Thus the narrator ("Borges") is entering a place he would probably have been known to frequent (in "Guayaquil," the narrator says that "everyone knows" that he lives on Calle Chile, which also is but a block or so distant); the impression the man gives, of having been sitting at the table a good while, reinforces the impression that he'd been waiting for "Borges." But this area, some six blocks south of Rivadavia, the street "where the Southside began," also marks more or less the northern boundary of the neighborhood known as San Telmo, where Rosendo Juarez says he himself lives.
His neck scarf: Here Rosendo Juarez is wearing the tough guy's equivalent of a tie, the chalina, a scarf worn much like an ascot, doubled over, the jacket buttoned up tight to make a large "bloom" under the chin. This garb marks a certain "type" of character.
"You've put the story in a novel": Here "the man sitting at the table," Rosendo Juarez, is referring to what was once perhaps Borges' most famous story, "Man on Pink Corner," in A Universal History of Iniquity, though he calls it a novel rather than a story.
Neighborhood of the Maldonado: The Maldonado was the creek marking the northern boundary of the city of Buenos Aires around the turn of the century; Rosendo Juarez' words about the creek are true and mark the story as being told many years after the fact. The neighborhood itself would have been Palermo.
Calle Cabrera: In Palermo, a street in a rough neighborhood not far from the center of the city.
A kid in black that wrote poems: Probably Evaristo Carriego, JLB's neighbor in Palermo who was the first to make poetry about the "riffraff "—the knife fighters and petty toughs—of the slums. JLB wrote a volume of essays dedicated to Carriego.
Chacarita: one of the city's two large cemeteries; La Recoleta was where the elite buried their dead, so Chacarita was the graveyard of the "commoners."
San Telmo: One of the city's oldest districts, it was a famously rough neighborhood by the time of the story's telling.