Cautiva

Watching a rather mediocre Argentinean film recently (which I will not bother to name) reminded me of a far superior production from the same southern land.  And the fact that the subject matter is sensitive material cannot be understated: a childhood classmate of mine was a refugee from the regime in question, and that was the sole repeated answer as to why he arrived here with only one parent.  You may have also heard of other popularizations of the Disappeared in song and film, and maybe felt a bit indifferent when you discovered the actual number of missing persons.  To the families of those made to vanish from God’s green earth, however, the number one is sufficient to elicit irreparable emotional and psychic harm, as well as a dire need for coming to terms with the past and its wickedness.  This film — one of, one supposes, many more revelations to come — becomes a cathartic necessity. 

The title translates as “captive,” feminine singular.  That prisoner is Cristina Quadri (Bárbara Lombardo), the sixteen−year−old daughter of a police officer (Osvaldo Santoro) and his wife, who leads the normal life of a privileged teenager in one of Buenos Aires’s residential areas.  Her dreary but prestigious Catholic school promotes piety and the uniformity of faith in a concerted effort to make all its children feel that they are sheltered by the Lord himself.  Or something to that effect.  Unlike her classmates, Cristina feels perfectly fine in her skin.  She is attractive and smart (otherwise, we fear she would have not made the cut as movie heroine), and compels us in that coy manner that seems to be uniquely a talent of certain younger women.  Such girls tend to drift through the first fifteen or twenty minutes of their starring roles distinguishing themselves from their peers, and Cautiva proves to be no exception.  Her friend Angélica uses up a few precious moments of the perfunctory introduction trying to make Cristina more like everyone else, which of course in terms of her inexperience and naïveté she is in many ways.  The stage is set for a very determined man (Hugo Arana), a judge no less, who whisks Cristina out of her classroom and life hitherto and informs her of something that may scare each of us some dark nights: her precise family origin.

What follows can only be expected, an expurgation of one existence in favor of a life stolen before consciousness kept notes of the events in its vicinity.  As a child, says Judge Barrenechea, Cristina belonged to someone else.  Her parents had the sensational opportunity of doing what so many around the world long to do, but few dare: standing in defiance of an oppressive and inhumane government.  And like the majority of these brave millions they targeted an enemy infinitely more adept at inflicting punishment and shame than they were.  So Cristina’s parents, activists in the latter half of the 1970s when a whole generation of open−minded Argentines was erased by organized and covert evil, were subjected to brutality.  As a result, Cristina was orphaned while still incapable of speech or independent movement; in fact her birth mother had given her another name, Sofia.  We know and are reminded of the persistence of so many children of the disappeared among the survivors of the purges that even a righteous crusader like Barrenechea, who hoots and pontificates unabashedly as the angel of vengeance, could never hope to find much less prosecute those responsible.  At least, he says to himself, I can tell the truth and set these children free.

And what of the “adoptive” parents?  How complicit must you have been (you were, after all, a law enforcement official in the heyday of the secret police) to receive the kickback of an entire human being left to be molded and educated only by you and your wife, who cannot have your own children?  That last question is not only mine, it is the angry query directed at the Quadris by the daughter they raised as their own child.  The question is addressed from a different viewpoint in an earlier and much more famous film, but here things evolve from the perspective of the child herself.  Cristina does not need to stand for such nonsense. Being of age, she can choose to forsake the only parents she has ever known, reclaim the name on her long−since−destroyed birth certificate and represent a symbolic denial of the theft of both identity and life that occurred only thirty years ago.  Yet how many children do you know that would willingly assume this thankless burden of responsibility?  What child is mature enough in spiritual strength to act as an example of redemption that has only signs and symbols to play with?  What would you or I have done in a similar situation and at a similar age? Perhaps exactly what Cristina ends up doing, which I cannot reveal. Whatever her choice, the one thing she will retain is the title of a captive forever beholden to the truth, as will the generations this truth continues to affect. That is not much, but sometimes the truth is small and cruel and completely unbearable.

El milagro secreto

A rendering of another fabulous tale ("The Secret Miracle") by Borges.  You can read the original here.

And God had him die for one hundred years
And later revived him and asked:
‘How long have you been here?’
And he responded: ‘One day or part of one day.’

                                                                                        The Koran, II, 261

On the night of the fourteenth of March 1939, in an apartment on Zeltnergasse in Prague, Jaromir Hladík, author of the unfinished tragedy The Enemies, of The Vindication of Eternity, and of an examination of the indirect Jewish sources of Jakob Boehme, dreamt of a long chess game.  It was not, however, a dispute between two individuals, but between two illustrious families; the match had been started many centuries ago; no one was able to name the forgotten prize, but it was rumored to be enormous and perhaps infinite; the pieces and the board were in a secret tower; Jaromir (in his dream) was the firstborn of one of the hostile families; in the clocks resounded the hour of the unpostponable game; the dreamer ran through the sands of a rainy desert and could not manage to recall the figures nor the rules of chess.  A rhythmic and unanimous noise, cut off by certain voices of command, rose from Zeltnergasse.  It was daybreak; the armored vanguards of the Third Reich were entering Prague.
   
On the nineteenth, the authorities received a denunciation; that same nineteenth, at dusk, Jaromir Hladík was arrested.  They led him to an aseptic, white jail on the shore opposite the Moldau.  He could not refute a single one of the Gestapo’s charges: his mother’s maiden name was Jaroslavski, his blood was Jewish, his study about Boehme was Judaizing, his signature was spreading the final census of a protest against the Anschluß.  In 1928, he had translated Sepher Yezirah for the publishing house Hermann Barsdorf; the effusive catalog of this publishing house had commercially exaggerated the renown of the translator; this catalog was leafed through by Julius Rothe, one of the bosses in whose hands Hladík’s fate lay.  There is no man, outside of his specialization, who is not credulous; two or three adjectives in Gothic lettering sufficed for Julius Rothe to admit Hladík’s preeminence and to argue that they condemn him to death, pour encourager les autres.  The day March 29th was fixed, at 9 a.m.  This delay (whose importance the reader will appreciate later) was owed to an administrative wish to act impersonally and deliberately, like vegetables and planets. 
   
Hladík’s first sentiment was that of sheer terror.  He thought that the gallows or decapitation would not frighten him, but being shot to death was intolerable.  In vain he repeated to himself that the pure and general act of dying was frightful, not the concrete circumstances.  Absurdly trying to exhaust all the variations, he never grew tired of imagining these circumstances.  He anticipated the process infinitely, from the sleepless dawn to the mysterious firing.  Before the day set by Julius Rothe, he died hundreds of deaths in courtyards whose forms and angles exhausted all geometry, machine-gunned by various soldiers, in a changing number which at times ended up quite far, other times very close.  In real terror (perhaps with real courage), he confronted these imaginary executions; each one lasted only a few seconds; the circle closed, Jaromir interminably returned to the tremulous eves of his death.  Later he mused that reality tended not to coincide with what one saw coming; with perverse logic, he inferred that to see a detail beforehand was to impede it from happening.  True to this feeble magic, he invented, so that they would not occur, atrocious features; naturally, he came to fear that these features would turn out to be prophetic.  Miserable in the night, he tried to convince himself of the fleeting substance of time.  He knew that this was all precipitating toward the white dawn of the day on the twenty-ninth; he reasoned aloud: today is the night of the twenty-second; during this night (and six more nights) I am invulnerable, immortal.  He thought that nights with dreams were deep, dark pools in which he could submerge.  Sometimes he longed for the actual firing, that it would redeem him, for worse or better, from his vain task of imagining.  On the twenty-eighth, when the last sunset reverberated in the metal bars, the image of his play The Enemies separated him from these abject considerations.
   
Hladík had passed forty years of age.  Apart from some friendships and many habits, the problematic study of literature constituted his life; like every writer, he measured the virtues of others by what was done by them and asked that others measure him by what he glimpsed or outlined.  All the books he had given to the press infused him with utter remorse.  In his examinations of the oeuvres of Boehme, Abenesra, and Fludd, he had essentially taken part in mere application; in his translation of Sepher Yezirah, in negligence, fatigue, and conjecture.  The Vindication of Eternity he judged to be perhaps less deficient; the first volume recounts the diverse eternities that men have devised, from the motionless Parmenidean One to Hinton’s modifiable past; the second denied (with Francis Bradley) that all the deeds of the universe integrate a temporal series.  It argues that the number of man’s possible experiences is not infinite and one sole “repetition” would suffice to demonstrate that time is a fallacy ... Unfortunately, the arguments that demonstrate this fallacy are no less false; Hladík used to go over them again with a certain scornful perplexity.  He had also written a series of Expressionist poems; these, to the poet’s embarrassment, figured in an anthology of 1924, and no anthology after that failed to inherit them.  From all of this equivocal and languid past Hladík wanted to redeem himself with the play in verse The Enemies (Hladík praised verse because it impeded spectators from forgetting unreality, which is the condition of art). 
   
This play observed the unities of time, place and action; it took place in Hradčany, in the library of Baron de Roemerstadt, on one of the last late afternoons of the nineteenth century.  In the first scene of the first act, an unknown person visits Roemerstadt.  (A clock shows seven, the vehemence of the last sun exalts the crystals, air carries a piece of passionate and familiar Hungarian music).  After this visit, others follow; Roemerstadt does not know the persons who bother him, but he retains the discomforting impression of having seen them before, perhaps in a dream.  Everybody praises him lavishly, yet it is well known – first by the spectators, then later by the Baron himself – that they are secret enemies sworn to ruin him.  Roemerstadt succeeds in checking and eluding their complex intrigues; in dialogue, they refer to his fiancée Julia of Weidenau, and to a certain Jaroslav Kubin, who once importuned her with his love.  This one has now gone mad and believes himself to be Roemerstadt ... The dangers worsen; Roemerstadt, at the end of the second act, finds himself obliged to kill a conspirator.  Then the third, and last, act begins.  The incongruities gradually increase: actors return who appeared discarded from the plot; for a moment, the man that Roemerstadt killed returns.  Someone notices that it has not gotten dark: the clock shows seven, the western sun reverberates in the old crystals, the air carries a piece of passionate and familiar Hungarian music.  The first interlocutor appears and repeats the words he pronounced in the first scene of the first act.  Roemerstadt talks to him without astonishment; the spectator understands that Roemerstadt is the miserable Jaroslav Kubin.  The play has never taken place; it is the circular delirium that Kubin lives and relives interminably.
   
Hladík had never asked himself whether this tragicomedy of errors was trivial or admirable, rigorously exact or happenstance.  In the argument that I have sketched, he guessed the means more apt for hiding his defects and bringing out his happiness, the possibility of rescuing (symbolically) the basis of his life.  He had already finished the first act and one scene from the third; the oeuvre’s metrical character allowed him to examine it continually, rectifying the hexameters without looking at the manuscript.  He believed that two acts were still missing and that he was soon going to die.  In the darkness, he spoke to God: If I exist in any way, if I am not one of Your repetitions and errors, I exist as the author of The Enemies.  To come to the end of this play which can justify me and justify You, I require one more year.  Grant me these days, You who are the centuries and time.  It was the last night, the most atrocious, but ten minutes afterwards, sleep had washed over him like dark water.
   
Toward dawn, he dreamt that he had hidden himself in one of the naves of the library of the Clementinum.   A librarian with black eyeglasses asked him: What are you searching for?  Hladík answered him: I am searching for God.  The librarian said to him: God is one of the letters on one of the pages of the four hundred thousand volumes of the Clementinum.  My parents and their parents have searched for this letter; this searching has rendered me blind.  He removed his glasses and Hladík saw his eyes, which were dead.  A reader entered and gave an atlas back.  This atlas is useless, he said, and he gave it to Hladík.  The latter opened it at random.  He saw a map of India, a vertiginous map.  Suddenly sure, he touched one of the smallest letters.  A ubiquitous voice said to him: The time for your work has been granted.  Here Hladík woke up.
   
He remembered that man’s dreams belong to God and that Maimonides wrote that the words of a dream are divine when they are distinct and clear and when the person who says them cannot be seen.  He got dressed; two soldiers entered the cell and ordered him to follow them.
   
On the other side of the door Hladík had imagined a labyrinth of galleries, staircases and pavilions.  The reality was less rich: they descended to a back courtyard toward a sole iron staircase.  Various soldiers – some with their uniforms unbuttoned – were looking over and discussing a motorcycle.  The sergeant looked at the clock: it was eight forty-four.  He had to wait until it said nine.  Hladík, more insignificantly than unfortunately, felt that he was in a mound of firewood.  He noticed that the soldiers’ eyes avoided his own.  To alleviate the waiting, the sergeant handed him a cigarette.  Hladík did not smoke; he accepted it out of courtesy and humility.  As he lit it, he saw that his hands were shaking; the soldiers were speaking in a low voice as if he were already dead.  In vain he tried to remember the woman whose symbol was Julia of Weidenau ...
   
The squadron of soldiers mobilized and came to attention.  Hladík, his foot against the wall of the jail, awaited the firing.  Someone feared that the wall would remain stained with blood; so they ordered the criminal to advance a few steps.  Absurdly, Hladík recalled the preliminary vacillations of photographers.  A heavy drop of rain grazed one of Hladík’s temples and rolled down towards his cheek;  the sergeant shouted the final order.
   
The physical universe halted.
   
The weapons converged upon Hladík, but the men who were going to kill him were motionless.  The sergeant’s arm eternalized an unfinished gesture.  On a stone tile of the courtyard, a bee protected a fixed shadow.  The wind had ceased as in a painting.  Hladík attempted a scream, a syllable, a twist of one hand.  He understood that he was paralyzed.  Not even the most tenuous rumor of a hindered world was reaching him.  He thought: I am in hell, I am dead.  He thought: I am crazy.  He thought: time has stopped.  Then he reflected that, in such a case, his thoughts would also have stopped.  He wanted to put it to the test: he repeated (without moving his lips) Vergil’s mysterious fourth Eclogue.  He imagined that those soldiers who were already distant shared in his anguish; he yearned to communicate with them.  It astonished him not to feel any fatigue, nor even vertigo from his great immobility.  He slept, at the end of an undetermined time.   When he woke up, the world was still motionless and silent.  The drop of water was persisting on his cheek; in the courtyard, the shadow of the bee; the smoke of the cigarette which he had thrown away never stopped spreading.  Another “day” passed before Hladík understood.
   
He had asked God for an entire year to complete his work: His Omnipotence granted him one year.  God operated through a secret miracle: Germanic lead would kill him, at the determined hour; but in his mind, a year would pass between the order and its execution.  From perplexity he passed into stupor, from stupor into resignation, and from resignation to unexpected gratitude.
   
He had no other document at his disposal but his memory: the apprenticeship of each hexameter that he added gave him the fortunate vigor which those who risk or forget their ephemeral and vague paragraphs cannot suspect.  He did not work for posterity, nor even for God, of whose literary preferences he knew little.  Meticulous, motionless, secret, he made up in this time his old invisible labyrinth.  He redid the third act two times.  He erased the too obvious symbols: the repeated sounding of the clock and the music.  No circumstance bothered him.  He omitted, abbreviated, amplified: in some cases, he opted for the primitive version.  He came to love the courtyard and the jail; one of the faces in front of him modified his conception of the personage of Roemerstadt.  He discovered that the arduous cacophonies that so alarmed Flaubert were mere visual superstitions: the weaknesses and annoyances of the written, not the spoken word ... He brought his play to an end: and he managed to conclude it apart from a single epithet.  He found it; the drop of water slid down his cheek.  He began a mad scream, he moved his face, and the quadruple gunfire cut him down.           
   
Jaromir Hladík died on the twenty–ninth of March, at 9:02 in the morning.

This Craft of Verse

A marvelous writer once stated with regard to a lesser writer (I shall spare you both their identities) that "self-conscious eclectic literariness" was the genuine sign of postmodernism, that dreadful beast that has Grendeled our beautiful world.  That designation is only true by virtue of the inclusion of "self–conscious," the hallmark of the modern mind who thinks so much about himself that he either forgets that other people’s opinions may be superior to his, or so much about others’ opinions that he fails to see his own genius.  Another marvelous writer — at times, the most marvelous — had a lovely observation on this fact:

I think that one of the sins of modern literature is that it is too self–conscious.  For example, I think of French literature as being one of the great literatures in the world (I don’t suppose anyone could doubt this).  Yet I have been made to feel that French authors are generally too self–conscious.  A French writer begins by defining himself before he quite knows what he is going to write.  He says: What should (for example) a Catholic born in such–and–such province, and being a bit of a socialist, write?  Or: How should we write after the Second World War?  I suppose there are many people all over the world who labor under those illusory problems.

Far too many, but their number is no longer legion.  We are returning, little by little, to a world with values — eternal, moral values, the only type that resists all movements, waves, and so–called revolutions.  People are growing sick and tired of relativism, or hearing how whatever one throws on a defenseless canvas or page must be deemed equal to the great masterpieces of all our centuries.  What the proponents of the smears and bangs that compose modern “art” perhaps do not know is that there has been inferior stuff floating about in every century; there have been puppets and pantomimes and infantile attempts at significance that make anyone with a drachma of aesthetic taste shudder; but history has wisely chosen to obliterate them.  True art defies all these mindless categories and rises above them to a greater arena: that of the morally admirable.  And of all twentieth–century writers, perhaps no one is as morally admirable as Jorge Luis Borges.   

If you have never read Borges, this short collection of six lectures he gave from memory at this renowned institution of higher learning forty years ago will readily impart the bones and twigs of his fortress.  For those of us who read Borges every week, we get a rare opportunity at seeing himself present his ideas orally and, most interestingly, in English (Borges, owing to familial diversity, was bilingual from an early age).  Borges is obsessed — and all great writers are obsessed — with certain works, lines, authors, periods of language (Old Norse and Anglo–Saxon, for example) but not really with big, bland ideas, the fodder for the literary criticism he so shunned.  His lectures, he claims, are about poetry, but then he adds prose and verse are "all one."  He postulates some ideas about translation, a field in which he often exceeded the work he rendered into Spanish, then quickly retracts them.  He retracts any idea pursued to too great a length for the simple reason that he wishes it to remain a hint or suggestion and not to become an argument:

As I understand it, anything suggested is far more effective than anything laid down.  Perhaps the human mind has a tendency to deny a statement.  Remember what Emerson said: arguments convince nobody.  They convince nobody because they are arguments .... But when something is merely said or — better still — hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination.

This explanation, coupled with Borges’s admission that he does not write novels out of laziness (only half–true) and owing to novels’ inherent padding (movement from scene to scene, continuity, etc.), gives us the core belief of his world: that poetry, even poetry expressed in prose, remains the only way in which anything of any substance can be conveyed.  When we think back on our lives, we want our memories to be poetic, we want each last promise, farewell, or ecstasy to suggest more than it could say explicitly.  We want a world of hints, allegations, and mystery, because that way we remain at least partially undiscovered, still waiting for the perfect soul to understand us.  Like any good poem or novel waits patiently for its perfect reader.

Since these lectures are given from memory (Borges was almost completely blind at the time), there are repetitions that may lead the casual reader to think Borges the type of older gentlemen ensnared in a handful of trivial detail that he likes to inflict upon younger generations as his contribution to the world of Truth.  Borges surely loved detail and does have certain favorite themes and authors, but he was far too careful a speaker and interviewee to allow himself to get more than superficially embroiled in a dispute that could only be resolved in writing.  For the purpose of his talks, he limits himself to literary moments where he finds real poetic insight, including lines or phrases from Keats ("thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!"), the Ode of Brunanburh, Lugones, Chesterton, Stevenson, Carlyle, Frost (especially his pre–sleep miles), and an obscure quote ("a rose–red city, half as old as Time," referring to this city, one of the Seven New Wonders of the World) from an obscure writer whose name even Borges cannot recall.  An amazing fact if one believes the story that Borges still remembered in 1976 an eight–stanza poem recited to him by a Romanian refugee in 1916, although Borges himself never spoke Romanian.

The web of these notions (to borrow Stevenson’s metaphor) comprises what one thinks of when asked to define poetry, which Borges calls, very tentatively, "the expression of the beautiful through the medium of words artfully woven together."  He and his readers all know that this definition is insufficient because poetry defines itself by expanding its reach over what we find poetic.  Over time and many pages, we come to understand the difference between what is vulgar, platitudinous and morally indefensible, and what is just, poetic and moral.  Whether morality itself is inherently poetic may be a matter of scrutiny and perhaps even of taste, but as Borges warns all frivolous relativists: "if a reader thinks that you have a moral defect, there is no reason whatever why he should admire you or put up with you."  And not having any moral defect at all is the divine word itself, from poet or god, that he so worships.      

Emma Zunz

My rendition of the Borges classic.  You can read the original here.

While returning from the textile factory of Tarbuch and Loewenthal on the fourteenth of January, 1922, Emma Zunz found at the back of the entrance hall a letter dated in Brazil by which she knew her father had died.  The seal and the envelope fooled her at first; then she became discomfited by the unknown handwriting.  Nine or ten scribbled lines sought to fill up the page; Emma read that Señor Maier had ingested a strong dose of veronal by mistake and died on the third of the current month in the hospital in Bagé.  The letter was signed by a companion from her father’s boarding house, a certain Fein O’Fain of the Rio Grande, who could not have known that he was addressing the daughter of the deceased.

Emma let the paper fall.  Her first sentiment was indisposition in her stomach and knees; then she felt blind guilt, unreality, cold, fear; then she wanted it to be the next day already.  She understood  right afterward that this wish was useless because her father’s death was the only thing that had happened in the world and that would keep happening without end.  She retrieved the paper and went to her room.  She furtively guarded it in a drawer, as if, otherwise, it would meet other ends.   She had already started to see them loom; perhaps she was already as she would be.

In the growing darkness, Emma cried until the end of the day of the suicide of Manuel Maier, who was Emanuel Zunz in the old, happy days.  She remembered summer vacations on a small farm near Gualeguay, remembered (tried to remember) her mother, remembered the house in Lanús that they auctioned off, remembered the yellow lozenge panes of a window, remembered the prison sentence and the opprobrium, remembered the anonymous letters with the newspaper clipping on “the cashier’s embezzlement,” remembered (but this actually she never forgot) that her father, that last night, had sworn to her that the thief was Loewenthal.  Loewenthal, Aaron Loewenthal, previously the factory manager and now one of the owners.  Emma had guarded this secret since 1916.  She had revealed it to no one, not even to her best friend, Elsa Urstein.  Perhaps she was evading profane incredulity; perhaps she believed that her secret was a link between her and her absent father.  Loewenthal did not know that she knew; from this small fact Emma derived a feeling of power.

That night she did not sleep; and when the first light outlined the window’s rectangle, her plan had already been perfected.  She got that day, which to her seemed interminable, to be like the others.  In the factory, there were rumors of a strike; as always, Emma declared herself to be against all violence.  At six o’clock, she finished work and went with Elsa to a women’s club which had a gym and swimming pool.  They signed in; she had to spell and repeat her name and surname and pretend to enjoy the vulgar jokes which accompanied the review.  With Elsa and with the younger of the Kronfusses, she talked about which cinema they would go to on Sunday afternoon.  Then they spoke about boyfriends, with no one expecting Emma to speak.  She was going to be nineteen in April, but men still inspired almost pathological terror in her ... On returning, she made some tapioca soup and vegetables, ate early, went to bed and forced herself to sleep.  In this laborious and trivial way, Friday the fifteenth, the eve of the events, passed.

On Saturday, impatience woke her up.  Impatience, not inquietude, and the sole relief of being on that day, at an end.  She no longer had to plot and imagine: within a few hours, the simplicity of the events took over.  She read in La Prensa that the Nordstjärnan of Malmö was setting sail tonight from pier three; she phoned Loewenthal, insinuated that she desired to communicate (without the others’ knowing about it) something about the strike, and promised to pass by the office at nightfall.  Her voice was trembling; the trembling suited an informer.  No other memorable event occurred that morning.  Emma worked until twelve and fixed the details of a Sunday walk with Elsa and Perla Kronfuss.  After having lunch, she lay down and, eyes closed, recapitulated the plan she had plotted.  She thought that the last stage would be less horrible than the first and would doubtless provide the taste of victory and justice.  Suddenly, alarmed, she got up and ran over to the drawer of the dresser.  She opened it; under the picture of Milton Sills, where she had left it the night before, was the letter from Fain.  No one could have seen it.  She began to read it and ripped it up.

To relate with certain reality the events of that evening would be difficult and perhaps not right.  One attribute of the infernal is its unreality, an attribute that at once mitigates and aggravates its terrors.  How could one make an action credible when one did not believe who did it?  How can one recuperate this brief chaos which, today, the memory of Emma Zunz repudiates and confounds?  Emma lived by Almagro, on Liniers street; it is evident to us that she went to the port that evening.  Maybe in the infamous Paseo de Julio she saw herself multiplied in mirrors, revealed by lights, and undressed by hungry eyes; but it is more reasonable to conjecture that at first she strayed inadvertently towards the indifferent arcade ... She entered two or three bars and saw the routine and manners of other women.  Finally she spoke to the men from the Nordstjärnan.  She was afraid that one man, very young, would fill her with tenderness, so she opted for another, coarse and perhaps shorter than she was, for whom the pureness of the horror would not be mitigated.  The man led her to a doorway, then a turbid entrance hall, then a steep staircase, then a small room (which had a window with lozenge panes identical to those in the house in Lanús), then to a door which was locked.  The grave events were outside of time; and for that reason, the immediate past remains cut from the future; and for that reason, the parts that form the events do not seem consecutive.

At what time apart from this time, in what perplexing disorder of unconnected and atrocious sensations did Emma think but once of the death that motivated her sacrifice?  I am of the belief that she thought about it one time, and at this moment endangered her desperate proposition.  She thought (she could not but think) that her father had done the horrible thing to her mother which they were now doing to her.  She thought with faint astonishment and immediately took refuge in her vertigo.  The man, a Swede or a Finn, did not speak Spanish; he was a tool for Emma as she was for him, but she was serving joy and he justice.

Once she was alone, Emma did not immediately open her eyes.  On the lamp table was the money the man had left.  Emma got to her feet and ripped up the money as she had ripped up the letter.  Ripping up money is an impiety, like throwing out bread; Emma repented as soon as she did it.  An act of arrogance and on that day ... Fear got lost in her body’s sadness, in her disgust.  Her disgust and her sadness  were paralyzing her, but Emma rose slowly and proceeded to get dressed.  No bright colors remained in the room; the last dusk was becoming worse.  Emma managed to leave without anyone’s notice; at the corner, she boarded a train on the Lacroze line which was heading west.  Following her plan, she chose the seat all the way at the front so that they could not see her face.  Perhaps it consoled her to affirm, in the insipid hustle and bustle of the streets, that what happened had not contaminated matters.  She traveled through deteriorating and opaque neighborhoods at once seen and forgotten and got off at one of the turnings of Warnes.  Paradoxically, her fatigue came to be a strength since it forced her to concentrate on the details of the affair and conceal its background and its end.

Aaron Loewenthal was, according to everybody, a serious and reliable man; but his few intimates knew him as greedy.  He lived upstairs in the factory, alone.  It was set up in a run–down area for fear of thieves; he kept a large dog in the factory’s courtyard and in the drawer of his desk, everybody knew, a revolver.  Last year he had cried with much decorum over his wife’s unexpected death (a Gauss who bore a good dowry!), but money was his true passion.  To his personal embarrassment, he was less talented at making it than keeping it.  He was very religious, believing himself to have a secret pact with the Lord which excused him from acting good in exchange for orations and prayers.  Bald, corpulent, in mourning garb, with steamed–up glasses and a blond beard, he stood by the window expecting the confidential report of worker Zunz.

He saw her push the gate (which he had left half–open on purpose) and cross the dark courtyard.  He saw her give a small start when the still–fastened dog barked.  Emma’s lips were moving like those of someone praying in a low voice; tired, they repeated the sentence which Señor Loewenthal would hear before dying.

Things did not happen the way Emma Zunz had foreseen them.  Since yesterday’s early morning she had dreamt of many things, holding the firm revolver, forcing that miserable man to confess his miserable guilt, and explaining that intrepid stratagem that would allow Divine Justice to triumph over the justice of men (not by fear but by being an instrument of Justice, she did not wish to be punished).  One bullet in the middle of the chest would then seal Loewenthal’s fate.  But the events did not occur thus.   

Before Aaron Loewenthal, more than the urgency of avenging her father, Emma felt the urgency of punishing the outrage she had suffered because of him.  She could not but kill him after this meticulous disgrace.  Nor did she have the time to spare for theatrics.  Seated and shy, she asked Loewenthal for forgiveness and invoked (as an informer) the obligations of loyalty, mentioned certain names, said she understood others and cut herself off as if fear had won out.  She managed to make Loewenthal leave for a glass of water.  When he, incredulous but indulgent of such a fuss, returned from the dining room, Emma had already taken the heavy revolver from the drawer.  She squeezed the trigger twice.  His considerable body collapsed as if the explosions and the smoke had ripped him up; the glass of water broke; his face showed both fear and anger; the face’s mouth insulted her in Spanish and in Yiddish.  The bad words did not cease; Emma had to fire another time.  In the courtyard, the tethered dog broke out in barking, and an effusion of sudden blood remained on the obscene lips and stained his beard and clothes.  Emma began the accusation she had prepared (“I have avenged my father and they will not be able to punish me...”), but she did not finish because Señor Loewenthal was dead.  She never knew whether he was able to understand.

The mounting barks reminded her, however, that she could not rest.  She disarranged the couch, unbuttoned the cadaver’s jacket, removed his bespattered glasses and left them on top of the file cabinet.  Then she took the phone and repeated what she would repeat so many times, with these and other words:  Something unbelievable has happened ... Señor Loewenthal made me come by with the strike as a pretext ... He took advantage of me and I killed him.

As it were, the story was unbelievable, but it prevailed upon everyone because it was substantially true.  Emma Zunz’s tone was real, her decency was real, her hate was real.  And the outrage which she had suffered was also real: only the circumstances, the time, and one or two names were false.