Where the Bird Sings Best (30 page)

The child stopped singing. Her mother removed the Tarot from her bosom and, card by card, burned it in the glowing coals, where the shoes’ remains were glowing like two red rubies. During the fire, they had recovered their original red.

“There will never be another like him, Sara Felicidad. His memory will accompany us forever. I’ll live alone only so that you can grow up well, but in reality what you see is a body moved by the tiniest part of my soul. The rest went with him. The woman who will marry again, have more children, get old, and die will be a different woman.”

Sara Felicidad witnessed the change to her mother’s face. Her skin, with its mother-of-pearl sheen, darkened; her nostrils became smaller, allowing only two needle-fine breaths of air to pass; from the edge of her lips toward her chin, fine wrinkles snaked along; and her eyes became covered by an invisible curtain that separated her from life. The Jashe of today was possessed by the Jashe of the future, a long-suffering, indifferent lady, her sensibility asleep, passing through the days like a ship with no navigator. Before submerging her daughter in that gray existence, she said, “I’m going to ask that as long as you are with me that you never sing again.”

In that moment, my mother was four years old. Tall, like her father, she looked ten. The same golden hair reached down to her waist, and her eyes were dark blue, translucent at the edges, each one as big as her mouth, they shined with millennial depth. Alejandro’s burning did not perturb her. On the contrary, it was an example of strength, enrichment of soul, treasure of beauty, fountain of joy. But Jashe’s request fell on her like a fatal lightning bolt, a threat that was not only moral but also organic. Her body fell in agony. To take away her singing was also to rip out her tongue, fill her heart with sand, burn her wealth of life in one blow. She had to defend herself. She had to mature in just a few minutes, establish around her innocence the armor of an adult. Down her legs ran a hot, thick, sticky liquid. Blood. At the age of four, she had her first menstruation. She ceased to be a child and became the protector of that semi-empty shell that her mother now was. Since she was forbidden to sing, she also stopped talking. But, absolute mistress of her interior world, she filled it with music. She ceaselessly repeated songs she knew and immediately invented others. She created for herself a symphony orchestra and composed her accompaniments. And that way, developing her mute voice more and more, she became an opera singer who dominated all registers. For years she was a performer as well as her own audience. That permanent interior singing bestowed on her a happiness that allowed her to survive in the sad world that was going to swallow a large part of her youth.

Jashe put the calcified bones of her husband into a cracker box, which she tossed into the Río de la Plata. She tied the box to a rubber ball so it would float until it became lost in the ocean. Then she worked one final week in the hat factory, and one Monday in the morning she went to ask help from the Jewish Colonization Association.

Aboard the
Weser
, Marla had told her that the Jewish immigrants, who had separate kitchen equipment and livestock so they could eat kosher food, were going to Argentina at the invitation of the Jewish Colonization Association, which had at its disposal more than almost five hundred thousand acres of land and maintained close ties with the highest spheres of both the provincial and the federal government. The purpose of this society was not to extract earnings from its enormous investments but to establish in the new country an ample and solid stratum of Jewish peasants who would, each of them, work their own land and derive from it a convenient living. Therefore, the JCA could easily give her a farm on the pampa. After all, she was still as Jewish as the others, and, despite the tremor that shook her body, she was able to farm a piece of land and get crops that would feed herself and her daughter.

To save the trolley fare, she walked with her daughter from the industrial outskirts to the center of Buenos Aires, twelve miles. They were exhausted when they reached a five-story building with a façade of white marble and no windows but with two enormous, light-blue columns on both sides of its entry gate, where a six-pointed star was shining. The haughty luxury of this palace curved Jashe’s shoulders and made her aware of the hunger biting her stomach. If something could get them out of misery, it was this institution. She nervously looked over at Sara Felicidad. She looked more Russian than anything else. She sighed in resignation. In any case, her husband’s name was written in the passports, and she could do nothing to hide the fact that she was the widow of a goy. She shook her stitched-up overcoat and did the same with her daughter’s, naively trying with a few pats to turn their rags into proper clothing.

She timidly pushed the metal doors, whose hinges were so well greased that they opened wide. Not finding a living soul, mother and daughter wandered the gleaming stone corridor in this labyrinth decorated with pictures representing the life of Moses. Finally they entered a gigantic hall filled with silent men modestly dressed in peasant clothes, pale women with sad backs, and astonishingly thin children. Their fetid breath told Jashe that they, like her, had empty stomachs. They were all staring toward a barred little window, at which an elegant functionary with slicked-down hair, rings, and a gold bracelet arrived to observe them. He was as severe and immobile as a wax manikin.

One of the immigrants, a being who seemed to be thirty years old in his body and seventy in his face (because he was toothless), approached him to say in the hushed tones of despair: “Please allow me, Mr. Representative of our worthy association, to introduce myself: Moisés Latt, elected by chance to speak for the colony of Clara. Our penury is so great that we have come to ask you to communicate to Baroness Clara de Hirsch, widow of our benefactor, who has left us orphans with his premature decease, this letter, which I will now read to you:

Madam: With all our hearts we long to become a nation of farmers, as your husband dreamed. But help us to persist, so our children do not die of hunger and need before reaching that goal.”

The functionary opened the barred window; stuck out his pudgy hand; accepted the letter; and without saying a word, closed the window again and disappeared into the palace’s interior. After half an hour, a natty gentleman, looking rather like a banker, appeared at a high balcony and whispered, perhaps because raising his voice was unsuitable for his position, “The JCA has learned of your problems and will communicate this missive to the Baroness. For now, we can do nothing more. Return to your hearths, and if the Council decides to give you help once again, we will inform you. Now, please leave the hall quickly, because we have to wax it for Shabbat. Thank you.”

And making a slight bow of farewell, he stepped back until he disappeared. The settlers remained immobile, thinking over with difficulty, a situation hard for them to digest.

The toothless man smiled bitterly: “We’ve done all we can. We propose, and now may God dispose. It may be that this time He decides to stop punishing us for some old sin of which we have no memory.”

Dragging their feet, they began to make for the exit to the street. Seeing that the place was emptying out, Jashe ran to Moisés Latt and tugged at his sleeve. (Why did she choose him and not another of the hundred or so men who filled the hall? It was certainly not because he was handsome. That mouth, with its black, hard gums, like a crack in dry dirt; that head, shaved as if by knife slashes, which tossed left and right two huge ears with fleshy lobes covered with hair; that skin of a brownness tending toward watery chocolate did not constitute a very attractive combination. Nevertheless, she wanted to join with him for the rest of her life. He was the insignificant companion that answered the need of her worn-out heart.)

Moisés Latt was thankful, in the deep pit of his solitude, for that tug at his sleeve. He was the human version of an abandoned dog: an orphan, ugly, poor, toothless, a pariah. When he was ten, during a pogrom, a Cossack forced him to drink a bottle of poison. He was dying from spring until fall. Along with the autumn leaves fell his thirty-two teeth. He had to learn to speak all over again because his tongue, deprived of the barrier of incisors and canines, tended to fly out of his mouth along with a rain of saliva. His gums hardened until he was able to chew the small ration of hard meat allotted him by the community of Grodno, the place where he was born by means of a long cut that opened his dying mother’s belly. By clacking one gum against the other, he could imitate the sound of Spanish castanets. Thanks to that noise, highly celebrated by the cooks, he managed to double his meager ration of meat (and shrink his dignity a bit more). He was delighted that this lady had a daughter. He never aspired to have a wife but a mother—distant, absent, as dead in life as that small woman, young but aged, scum of an implacable society. He and she, remains of different shipwrecks, stuck on the same shore.

“I need your help, Moisés. My name is Jashe Trumper, widow of a goy. This is my daughter, Sara Felicidad. I am from Lodetz, Lithuania.”

“Jashe Trumper? Trumper? Oh, yes! On the ship that brought us there was a Shoske Trumper, married to a crippled Sephardi, César Higuera.”

“Oh! That’s my sister! Shoske in Argentina and married!”

“Married and lucky. The Jewish Association gave them good land in Entre Ríos.”

They looked at each other, openly, without trying to dissimulate their intentions. Sara Felicidad discreetly moved a few steps away.

“Let’s go and work with them, Moisés. We’ll get married. I’ll give you children, God willing, and we’ll finally live quiet lives. My sister will get us out of this misery.”

“Yes, Jashe. Thank you. Come with me to Clara, so I can liquidate the little I have, and then I’ll go with you to your brother-in-law and his wife.”

They left the other settlers sitting in the street next to the iron gate, where they embarked on a hunger strike to demand return tickets to their countries of origin, and went to the waiting room at Retiro Station to sleep. At 5:00 a.m. they squeezed onto a train carrying Italian immigrants to work on the plantations in Tucumán. The cars were packed with miserable people. Each one had received from the Immigration Committee a half-pound of bread and a pound of dried meat for a trip that would last two nights and two and a half days. Digging around in his underpants, Moisés found a wrinkled banknote that allowed him to buy two rolls and a small goat cheese from a blind woman carrying a basket.

It was very cold, and an icy wind blew. Crowded together on wooden benches in rows, they were being ground to pieces by the bouncing train. They were kept from sleeping by a continuous coughing, along with the watery noise of the workers’ mouths as they spent hours chewing the bread and the insipid meat without swallowing it so the tiny amount of food would seem to calm their hunger. With a bland smile taking up half his face, Moisés Latt divided the cheese in half, one piece for Jashe and the other for Sara Felicidad, and he gave them the rolls. “Eat and don’t worry about me. I’m never hungry, perhaps for lack of teeth.”

Secretly swallowing his saliva, he made the two women eat. When they’d devoured even the tiniest crumbs, he covered them with his huge cape and, shivering, watched them sleep. Nevertheless, in his chest, despite the cold, he felt an agreeable tingle. He would never again be alone in the world: finally he had a family. Seeing the girl’s bluish toes poking through her worn-out shoes, he took off his socks, shook out the dirt, and devotedly put them on her. He then picked up the wrinkled bread wrappers and covered up his own feet before putting his boots back on. He lit a cigarette butt he kept with another three in a little tin box and, taking a short puff, let time pass.

A fly landed on his hand. He didn’t shoo it away. He let it walk around and suck as much as it wanted. Then he slowly opened the window, stuck out his arm, and waited for the wind to blow it off. He was very fond of those animals, because they were his only toys when he was a boy. He would open his pockets wide and put a few grains of sugar inside so they’d fill up with flies. He moved and walked with extreme care so he wouldn’t hurt the insects. When he thought about the sweets that children with parents ate, he would skillfully pat his trousers to scare his little friends, who would fly out of his pockets like a buzzing black cloud, making him smile again. He smoked half of his fourth butt and finally fell asleep.

In Tucumán, a squad of police woke everyone by banging their nightsticks on the sides of the cars. Not wanting to hear explanations, they forced Moisés, Jashe, and Sara Felicidad to get out along with the workers. From a carriage pulled by two horses, a government employee, loudmouthed and despotic, ordered them to follow him. They all pitched their belongings onto their shoulders and were forced to walk almost two miles to the Immigrants’ Hotel. The Tucumán natives frowned as they walked by, and the children, amid perverse sneers, shouted, “Gringo bastards!”

At the “hotel,” actually an empty barn, they could throw themselves on the ground to rest. No one was allowed to go outside. They were prisoners. Moisés opened his tin can and offered a guard the half butt he still had left, at the same time that he tried to explain that he and the women with him hadn’t been contracted by any company and that they were traveling on the train on their own toward Clara. The soldier spit into the can, ruining the butt, and slapped Moisés so hard he fell among the workers having their siesta on the dusty floorboards.

No one brought them food or water. In the afternoon, they opened the door and began to load the workers onto some flat open carriages. There were thirty passengers standing on each platform shoved against one another in a terrible fashion. It was raining, a fine drizzle. They passed a loaf of bread to each one and drove them off, soaking wet, to a distant farm. Dying of thirst, the travelers stuck out their tongues to drink the water falling from the sky.