Chapter 17 south

The man who landed in Buenos Aires in 1871 was Johannes Dalman, pastor of the Evangelical Church; in 1939 one of his grandsons, Juan Dalman, was a The secretary of the Municipal Library in Rue de la Ville, who fancied himself an Argentinian with deep roots.His maternal grandfather, Francisco Flores of the Second Combat Infantry Regiment, was lanced to death by the Indians of Catril on the border of the province of Buenos Aires; Juan Dalmain (perhaps because of the Germanic blood) chose the ancestors of Romanticism, or the family line of the dead of Romanticism.Daguerreotype of an expressionless bearded man, an ancient sword, the joy and excitement of certain music, the habit of reciting some passages from Martin Fierro, the passing years, melancholy and solitude , contributing to his willing but never-exposed inferiority complex.Dahlman saved money and managed to hold on to an estate in the South that was once owned by the Flores family and was now a mere skeleton; he often recalled the sweet-gum trees and the big red house that had turned white. look like.Trivial affairs and occasional indifference kept him in the city.Year after year he was content to have the abstraction of a fortune, certain that his home on the Plains awaited his return. In late February 1939, something happened to him.

Destiny, which never admits mistakes, may be merciless to some small oversights.One afternoon, Dahlman bought a copy of Will's edition that was not in a complete set; he couldn't wait to see this new discovery, and hurried up the stairs without waiting for the elevator to come down; Is it a bat or a crow.The woman who opened the door for him had a horrified expression on her face. He reached out and touched his forehead, which was full of bright red blood.Who painted the window and forgot to close it, causing him to scratch his head.Dahlman went to bed at night and woke up in the early morning, and since then he has suffered from pain in his mouth.The high fever tortured him to death, and the illustrations in the book appeared frequently in his nightmares.Relatives and friends came to visit him, with unnatural smiles, and repeated that he looked good.Dahlmann listened to them with a sort of numbness, thinking that he was tormenting in hell and that they didn't know it, which was a wonder.Eight days passed, which seemed like eight centuries.One afternoon, the doctor who often visited him brought a strange doctor with him and sent him to a nursing home on Ecuador Street because he had to take X-rays for him.Dahlmann thought in the cab that he could finally sleep soundly in a room that wasn't his own.He was happy and talkative; in the sanatorium they stripped him naked, shaved his head, fixed him on a trundle with metal straps, made him dizzy from the bright lights, and auscultated him, a man in a mask Prick the needle in the arm.He woke up with a bandage on his head, feeling sick, lying in a small room at the bottom of a well, and in the days and nights after the operation, he realized that the pain before was not even Limbo.The ice cube in his mouth didn't feel cool at all.Dahlmann hated himself in those days; hated himself as a person, hated his need to defecate, hated being manipulated, hated the beard growing on his face.He steadfastly endured those extremely painful treatments, but when the doctor told him that he had suffered from sepsis and almost died, Dahlman mourned his fate and burst into tears.Physical pain and nightly insomnia or nightmares did not allow him to think of something so abstract as death.After a while, the doctor told him that he was beginning to improve, and that he would soon be able to go to the manor to recuperate.Incredibly, that day has come.

Real life loves symmetry and slight time shifts; Dahlmann took a cab to the sanatorium and is now taking a cab to the city of Constitucion.After the sweltering heat of summer, the coolness of early autumn seemed to symbolize his deliverance from the grasp of death and fever.The city at seven o'clock in the morning has not lost the air of old houses which the night has given him; the streets are like long halls, and the squares are like courtyards.Dahlmann recognized the city with bliss and a feeling of vertigo; before he could look around for a few seconds, he remembered the corners of the streets, the signs of the shops, the pristine city and Buenos Aires difference.In the yellow light of the morning, memories of the past came flooding back.

Everyone knows that side of Rivadavia is where the South begins.Dahlman used to say that it was not a convention, that you crossed that street and entered a more ancient and solid world.From among the new buildings in the carriage he looked for windows with iron bars, bells, vaults of gates, halls and friendly courtyards. In the hall of the station, he found that the train was still thirty minutes away.He suddenly remembered that in a cafe on Brazil Street (not far from Yrigoyen's house), there was a big cat that was petted like Shinto, who looked at the world coldly.He goes into the cafe.The cat is still there, but asleep.He asked for a cup of coffee, stirred it slowly with sugar, took a sip (he was forbidden to drink coffee in the nursing home), and stroked the cat's black fur, feeling that this contact was a bit unreal, as if there was a glass between him and the cat, because people live In the continuation of time and time, while the mysterious animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the moment.

The train stops next to the penultimate platform.Dahlmann walked through several carriages, one of which was almost empty.He put the suitcase on the luggage rack; after the train started, he opened it, and after a moment's hesitation, he took out the first volume.The book was intimately connected with his misfortune, and he took it out as a sign that misfortune had been written off, a smug challenge to a thwarted evil. The city on either side of the train was gradually becoming a sparsely-housed suburb; this view, and the gardens and country houses that followed, kept him from reading.As a matter of fact, Dahlmann didn't see much; no one would deny that the Lodestone Mountains and the goblins who swore to kill their benefactors were wonderful, but the bright mornings and the joys of life were even more wonderful.Happiness distracted him from paying attention to Scheherazade and her superfluous miracles; Dahlman closed the book, enjoying the moment of pleasure to the fullest.

Lunch (soup was served in polished metal bowls, as in distant childhood days away from the summer heat) was again a peaceful and pleasant treat. Tomorrow morning I will wake up at the manor, he thought, and he has the feeling of being two: the one who marches across the land of his country in autumn, and the other shut up in the sanatorium, enduring methodical mercy .He saw brick houses with peeling whitewash, wide and angular, watching trains pass endlessly by the railroad; he saw riders on dirt roads; he saw ditches and ponds and farms; he saw marble bright All these are accidental encounters, like a dream on the plain.He also feels that the trees and crops are familiar, but he can't name them, because his perceptual knowledge of the fields is far lower than his rational knowledge of longing.

He dozed off for a while, and what he saw in his dream was a train rumbling forward.The unbearable incandescent sun at twelve o'clock had turned yellow before evening, and would soon turn red again.The carriage was not the same either; not as it had been when Constitucion left the platform: plains and time ran through and changed its shape.The moving shadow of the carriage outside stretches toward the horizon.There are no signs of villages or people in the deserted land.Everything is boundless, but at the same time intimate and somewhat private in a sense.On the rough fields, sometimes there is nothing but a cow.The solitude was so complete, even hostile, that Dahlmann almost doubted that he was traveling not only south, but past time.The conductor interrupted his unreal reveries, and after looking at his ticket informed him that the train did not stop at the usual station, but at a station a little ahead, which Dahlmann barely recognized. (The man also explained that Dahlmann didn't want to understand, or even listen to, because he wasn't interested in how things went.)

The train came to a halt with difficulty, and the surroundings were almost a wilderness.On the other side of the tracks is the station, just a shed on the platform.There was no traffic near the station, but the station master thought that one might be found at a store a dozen blocks away. Dahlmann decided to go on foot as a little adventure.The sun had gone down, but the afterglow illuminated the deep and silent plain even more brilliantly before it was wiped out by the night.Dahlman walked slowly, inhaling the breath of clover ecstatically. He walked very slowly, not because he was afraid of being tired, but to prolong the joyful moment as much as possible.

The house of the grocery store was originally painted bright red, and after a long time, the color has faded so that it is not so dazzling.The crude architecture reminded him of a steel engraving, perhaps an illustration from an old edition of Paul and Virginia.Several horses were hitched to stakes.When Dahlmann entered, he thought the shopkeeper looked familiar; only later did he remember that there was an employee in the nursing home who looked like him.After hearing his situation, the shopkeeper said that he could take him in a four-wheeled carriage; in order to add something to the day and kill the time waiting for the carriage, Dahlmann decided to have dinner at the grocery store.

A few boys at a table were eating and drinking and making a lot of noise, but Dahlmann ignored them at first.A very old man was squatting on the floor with his back against the counter, as motionless as a thing.The long years have shrunk him, smoothed the corners, like a stone polished by running water or a proverb tempered by generations.He was dark, thin, and shriveled, as if out of time, in eternity.Dahlmann gazed with interest at his turban, tweed cloak, long loincloth, and pony-hide boots, and thought of his useless arguments with the northern lands or with the Entre Ríos, and imagined such a noble Except for the south, it is difficult to see Qiao people in other places.

Dahlmann sat down at a table by the window.The field outside was getting darker, but the fragrance and the sound of the field came through the iron bars.The innkeeper brought him sardines and then roast beef.Dahlmann drank several glasses of red wine with the food.He sipped the wine in boredom, and looked around lazily.A kerosene lamp hung from a beam; another table had three patrons: two who looked like handymen on a small estate;Dahlman suddenly felt something brushed against his face.Beside the thick glass, in the stripes of the tablecloth, was a ball of crumbs.That's what happened, but someone threw it at him on purpose. The people at the other table didn't seem to be paying attention to him.Dahlman wondered a little, when nothing happened, and turned on, as if to hide reality.A few minutes later, another ball hit him, and this time the hirelings laughed.Dahlmann said to himself that there was nothing to be surprised about, but that it would be absurd for him to be involved in a fight with strangers when he was recovering from a serious illness.He decided to leave, and as soon as he stood up, the shopkeeper came over and begged him in a panicked tone: "Mr Dahlmann, those lads are drunk, ignore them." Dahlman was not surprised that the shopkeeper could pronounce his last name, but felt that these excuses only made things worse.At first, the hired worker's provocation was only aimed at a stranger, and it could be said that he was no one; now it is aimed at him, his last name, and everyone knows the trouble.Pushing the shopkeeper aside, Dahlmann confronted the hirelings and asked them what they wanted to do. The gruff-looking man staggered to his feet.He was only a step away from Juan Dahlmen, but he cursed loudly, as if at a distance.He pretended to be drunk on purpose, and the affectation was an intolerable mockery.He was swearing and swearing, and he took out his long dagger and threw it up, caught it when it fell, and threatened Dahlmann to fight him.The innkeeper protested in a trembling voice that Dahlmann was unarmed.At this time, something unexpected happened. The old gaucho crouching dreamily in a corner (in whom Dahlmann saw the epitome of the South to which he belonged) threw a gleaming dagger at him, and landed right at his feet.It was as though southern ethos dictated that Dahlmann should accept the challenge.Dahlman bent down to pick up the dagger, two thoughts flashed in his mind.In the first place, this almost instinctive action made him desperate to fight.Secondly, the weapon in his clumsy hands, far from protecting him, gave reason to kill him.Like all men, he has played with knives in his life, but he only knows that when stabbing, the blade should go inward, and the knife should be picked from the bottom up.There's no way this is going to happen to me in a nursing home, he thought. "Let's go outside," the other said. They went out of the shop, and if Dahlmann had no hope, he at least had no fear.He thought as he stepped over the threshold, that first night in the sanatorium, when they put the needle in his arm, if he could have fought with a knife in the field and died in a fight, it would have been a relief to him, a blessing, a blessing. joy.He also thought that if he could choose or yearn for the way of his death at that time, this kind of death was exactly what he would choose or yearn for. Dahlman gripped the dagger he was not good at using, and walked towards the plain. The above is translated from "Fake Collection"