La intrusa

A short story ("The intruder") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

2 Kings, I, 26.

They say (which is improbable) that the story was told by Eduardo, the younger of the Nelsons, at the wake of Cristian, the elder, who died a natural death in the 1890s in the administrative area of Morón.  What we can say for certain is that someone heard it from someone else during that long, lost night between matés, and repeated it to Santiago Dabove, from whom I heard it.  Years later I was told the story again in Turdera, where it had taken place.  In short, this second, somewhat tidier version, confirmed Santiago's account – albeit with some small variations and divergences, which is to be expected.  I am writing it now because, if I am not mistaken, it contains the brief and tragic essence of these remote bordermen of yore.  Although I shall write with integrity, I foresee succumbing to the literary temptation of accentuating or adding a detail here and there. 

In Turdera they were called the Nilsens.  The parish priest told me that his predecessor remembered, not without some surprise, having espied in their family home a well-worn Bible bound in black with Gothic lettering; handwritten numbers and dates peppered the last pages.  It was the only book in the house – the hazard-ridden saga of the Nilsens, lost as everything would eventually be lost.  The sprawling house, which no longer exists, was of unfinished brick; from the hallway two patios split off, one in red tiles, the other of dirt.  Few, as it were, would enter there; the Nilsens closely guarded their solitude.  In the dismantled rooms they slept on cots.  Their luxuries were their horses, their harnesses, their short-bladed daggers, their lavish Saturday attire, and their trouble-making alcohol.  I know that they were tall with long, reddish hair.  Denmark or Ireland, of which they had never heard, coursed through the veins of these creoles.  The neighborhood feared The Redheads; it was not impossible that they might have had someone's death on their conscience.  One time, standing back to back, they brawled with the police.  It is said that the younger Nilson had an altercation with Juan Iberra and in the end was not the worse off of the two, which, in our understanding, is rather impressive.  They were herders, towers, rustlers, and sometimes cardsharps.  They were renowned as misers; only with drink and gambling did they become generous.  No one knew anything of their relatives or even where they came from.  They were the owners of a cart and a team of oxen.

Physically they differed from the usual breed that had lent its outlaw nickname to the Costa Brava.  This fact and what we don't know can help us understand how united they were.  To get along poorly with one of them was to anticipate having two enemies.

The Nilsens were rakes, but their amorous episodes had hitherto involved the hallway or their baleful house.  There was no lack of commentary, however, when Cristian went to live with Juliana Burgos.  It was true that in this way he was gaining a servant.  But it was no less certain that he plied her with awful knickknacks and showed her off on holidays, on those poor holidays in the slums where both the broken and the regal were banned and where, nevertheless, there was dancing and a lot of light.  Juliana had a dark complexion and almond-shaped eyes; someone only had to glance at her and she would smile.  She was not bad-looking amidst a modest neighborhood in which work and negligence conspired to wear women out. 

At the beginning Eduardo accompanied them.  Then he took a trip to Arrecifes for who knows what type of business; upon his return he brought home a girl he had picked up on the way back, and a few days later threw her out.  He became more surly; he got drunk only at the grocery store and didn't socialize with anyone.  He was in love with Cristian's woman.  The neighborhood, who perhaps knew this before he did, foresaw with treacherous happiness the latent rivalry of the brothers.

One night, coming back late from the corner, Eduardo espied Cristian's dark horse tethered to the fence.  His older brother was waiting for him on the patio in his best clothes; the woman was coming and going with maté in her hand.  Cristian said to Eduardo:

"I'm going out partying at the Farías' place.  Here you have Juliana; if you wish, make use of her."

His tone wavered somewhere between commanding and cordial.  Eduardo remained looking at him for a while; not knowing what to do, Cristian got up, bid farewell to Eduardo but not to Juliana, which was something, mounted the horse and, without rushing, set off on a trot. 

From that night on they shared her.  It is possible that no one knew the details of this sordid union, which exceeded the decencies of the slums.

The arrangement went well for a few weeks, but it could not endure.  The brothers did not mention Juliana's name to one another, not even to call her, but instead looked for, and found, reasons so as to disagree.  They argued over the sale of some hides, but what they argued over was another matter.  Cristian tended to raise his voice as Eduardo remained silent.  Without knowing it, they were jealous of one another.  In a harsh suburb a man did not say – not even to himself – that a woman could matter to him beyond desire and possession, but both of them were in love.  For them, in a way, this was humiliating.

One evening, on Lomas square, Eduardo crossed paths with Juan Iberra, who congratulated him for having scored himself such an exquisite female.  It was then, I believe, that Eduardo laid into him.  No one could make fun of Cristian in front of his brother.  

The woman would wait for both of them with animal-like submissiveness; but she could not hide her preference for the younger brother, who had not refused to participate yet had also not made her available.
        
One day they ordered Juliana to bring two chairs to the first patio and not linger there because they had to talk.  She anticipated a long conversation and went to take a siesta, but soon thereafter they remembered her.  They made her pack a bag with everything she had, not forgetting the glass rosary and the crucifix that her mother had left her.  Without explaining a thing to her, they placed her in the coach and undertook a silent and tedious journey.  It had rained; the roads were very oppressive and it may have been around five in the morning when they reached Morón.  Here they sold her to the madam of a brothel.  The deal was already done; Cristian collected the amount and later divided it with his brother. 

In Turdera, the Nilsens, hitherto lost in the tangle (which was also a routine) of this monstrous love, wished to renew their old life of men among men.  They returned to their riggings, to their cockpit, to their casual binges.  Perhaps at some point they believed themselves saved; but they would incur, each for his own part, unjustified or extremely justified absences.  Just before the end of the year, the younger brother said that he had to go to the capital.  Cristian went to Morón; on the fence of the house we all know he found Eduardo's peach-colored horse.  He entered; inside the other brother was waiting his turn.  I believe Cristian said to him:

"If we keep this up, we are going to tire out the horses.  Better that we keep her with us."

He spoke with the madam, produced some coins from his belt, and they took her away.  Juliana went with Cristian; Eduardo spurred on his peach-colored horse so as not to have to look at them.

They returned to what has already been mentioned.  The infamous solution had failed; both of them had given in to the temptation of cheating.  Cain certainly wandered through these parts, but the affection between the Nilsens was very strong – who knew what rigors and perils they had shared! – and they preferred to vent their exasperation on outsiders.  On a stranger, on the dogs, on Juliana, who had brought them discord.           
 
The month of March was about to end and the heat was not letting up.  One Sunday (on Sundays people are supposed to come home early) Eduardo, returning from the grocery store, saw that Cristian was yoking the oxen.  Cristian said to him:

"Come, we have to leave a few hides at the Pardo's place.  I've already loaded them; let's take advantage of the fresh air."

The Pardo's business was, I believe, more to the south; they took the Camino de las tropas, the cattle route, then a detour.  The field was growing bigger with the night.   

They came upon a scrub-land; Cristian took out the cigarette he had lit and said, without the slightest haste:

"To work, brother.  The caracaras will help us afterwards.  Today I killed her.  May she remain here with her clothes and do no more damage."
        
They embraced, almost crying.  Now yet another shackle bound them together: the sad sacrifice of the woman and the obligation to forget her.    

Verlaine, "Circonspection"

A work ("Circumspection") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

So hold your breath, sit here, and take my hand
Beneath this giant tree where breezes die,
Beneath these branches grey so will we sigh,
Unequal in the moonlight's soft, pale band. 

While eyes and knees shall kiss, let us not move 
Or think, just dream. Then mimic in our way  
Brief happiness and love bound to decay,
As owls' wings our scalps so barely groove.

Let us expect no things. Restrained, discreet,
May both our souls persist in calm this sweet,
By our serene sun's fatal downward plod. 

Let us be mute amidst nocturnal peace. 
No good can come of thwarting nature's sleep,
O nature, that laconic, feral god.   

Das Ehepaar

A short story ("The married couple") by this German-language writer.  You can read the original here.

So bad is the general state of business affairs that every so often, when I have some spare time in the office, I visit clients personally and lug along the samples kit.  Among other stops I had planned for a long time now to go see N., with whom I had once been in constant contact over business matters – a connection that, for reasons unknown to me, had all but disappeared this past year.  There doesn't really need to be any actual reason for such disturbances; in the feeble relationships of today, often a trivial matter or a mood will be the determining factor.  By the same token, a trivial matter or a word can be enough to right the situation.  Yet it is a little burdensome to push one's way through to N.'s place; he was an older man, very ill of late, and if he couldn't gather all business matters together then he wouldn't do business anymore.   To speak with him one needed to go into his apartment and hope to coax out of him some sort of business transaction.

Nevertheless, yesterday at six in the evening I was on my way to his place; it was, admittedly, no longer the window for normal visiting hours, yet this was not a matter of societal norms but of those of a salesman.  I was in luck: N. was home.  He had just returned, as I was informed in the vestibule, from a stroll with his wife and was now in the room of his son who lay sick in bed.  I was asked to go in there as well.  First I hesitated; then I was overcome by my desire to finish with this exasperating visit as soon as possible.  Thus I let myself be taken, still in my coat and hat with the samples kit in my hand, through a dark room to a faintly lit room in which a small group had gathered.

Out of pure instinct my glance was first drawn to a business agent whom I knew all too well; in fact, he was to some degree my competition.  So he had crawled his way out here ahead of me!  He was comfortably seated by the invalid's bed as if he were the doctor.  He sat there so mighty in his beautifully open and baggy coat; his impertinence was peerless; the invalid might have come to a similar conclusion as he lay there, looking over at him now and then, his cheeks mildly red with fever.  Besides, the son was no longer a young man, he was approximately my age with a well-trimmed beard that had with his illness gotten wild and scruffy.  Old N., a large, wide-shouldered man who, to my great astonishment, had become gaunt, hunched over and unsure of himself because of his mounting grief, was still standing just as he had come, that is, in his fur coat, and was murmuring something to his son.  His wife, small and fragile but extremely lively – at least as far as N. was concerned, she hardly acknowledged the rest of us – was busy trying to help him take off his fur, a rather difficult task owing to the spouses' difference in size, but which eventually occurred.  Perhaps the real difficulty arose from the fact that N. was very impatient and restless with fidgety hands that immediately sought out an armchair, which his wife quickly pushed towards him once his fur had been removed.  She took the fur, under which she almost disappeared, and carried it out the room.

Now it seemed to me that my time had come or, rather, it had not come yet and would in fact never come.  If I wanted to do anything at all, I had to act immediately since I had the sense that the conditions and environment for a business talk could only get worse.  And sitting here endlessly, which seemed to be the agent's intention, was not my style, either; I did not wish to pay him any attention whatsoever.  So without further ado I began to plead my case.  I noticed, however, that N. really wanted to chat for a while with his son.  Unfortunately, once I've gotten worked up – and this happens rather quickly and happened in this sick room sooner than normal – I have the habit of getting up and pacing as I talk.  But as in one's own office furniture is well-placed, it is burdensome in someone's else apartment.  I could not control myself especially since I didn't have my usual cigarette.  Now, everyone has his bad habits, but in comparison to those of the agent I must praise my own.  What, for example, should one say about the fact that he now and then, sometimes quickly, but in any case quite unexpectedly, placed his hat – which was on his knee slipping slowly here and there – back on his head?  True, he would remove it again right away, as if it had been a mistake; but he had held it on his head for a moment and this was something he kept doing time and again.  Such a performance truly deserves to be called impermissible.  This did not disturb me; I kept pacing and was completely involved in my own affairs.  I looked past him.  There may be people whom this whole hat debacle could unnerve.  In any case, I not only eagerly ignored such a disturbance, I also did not look at anyone at all.  I saw what was happening but, to a certain extent, did not acknowledge it, provided there were no objections and I still had something to say.

But I noticed that N. was hardly receptive at all.  His hands lay on the armrests and he turned them in discomfort back and forth, not looking at me and instead senselessly seeking something in the emptiness of his surroundings.  His face looked so uninvolved, as if no sound of my talk was getting through to him, perhaps not even a feeling of my presence.  All this behavior, which was offensive and inspired little hope, was clear to me, yet I kept on talking as if I still foresaw that, through my words, through my advantageous offers – and here I frightened myself with the concessions I was making, concessions that no one had asked for – I could ultimately bring everything back into balance.   It did give me a certain pleasure that the agent, as I noticed in passing, finally left his hat alone and crossed his arms against his chest.  My actions, which had been partially directed at him, seemed to have thrown a large wrench into his plans.  And I would have gone on speaking in the feeling of happiness that this gave me if the son, whom admittedly I had hitherto ignored as a sort of secondary personage, hadn't suddenly sat up halfway in bed and brought me to silence by waving his fist menacingly.  He clearly wanted to say something, to show something, but he didn't have the strength.  I initially imputed this to febrile delirium; but then, after I accidentally cast my eyes upon old N. again, I understood it better.   

With open, glassy, swollen eyes that had but minutes left on them, N. was sitting there, trembling and bent forward as if someone had hit him or was holding him by the neck.  His lower lip, even his entire lower jaw with his gums now very exposed, drooped down uncontrollably, and his whole face had gone to pieces.  He was still breathing, if heavily, then as if liberated he fell back against the seat and closed his eyes.  The expression of some kind of huge strain passed over his face.  Then it was over.  I quickly leapt to his side and gripped his lifeless, cold hand, which gave me the chills.  There was no pulse.  So that was it, it was over.  He was, of course, an old man.  May our deaths not come any harder.  But now there was so much that had to be done!  And what was I to do in my haste?  I looked around for help, but his son had pulled the covers over his head and one could hear him sobbing his heart out.  The agent, as cold as a frog, sat unmoving in his seat two steps away from N., but clearly determined to do nothing at all and just let the time run down.  It was left to me, therefore, to do something, right away to do the hardest thing, namely to inform his wife in some bearable way – in a way that did not exist in this world – of the news.  And already I heard the bustling, shuffling steps from the neighboring room.           

She had brought – she was still in her street clothes as she had had no time to change – a oven-warmed nightshirt that she wanted her husband to wear.  "He's fallen asleep," she said, smiling and shaking her head, when she found us all very quiet.  And with the endless trust of the innocent she took up the same hand that I had just held with unwillingness and dread, kissed it with that playfulness unique to a married couple and – how could the three of us have looked on! – N. started.  He yawned loudly and let her put the shirt on him, tolerating with an annoyed and ironic expression the tender reprimands of his wife regarding his overexertion during that far too lengthy stroll they had just taken.  On the contrary, he told us, he had fallen asleep somewhat out of boredom.  Then, so as not to get cold on his way to the other room, he lay down temporarily next to his son in bed.  Next to the son's feet his wife rapidly brought over two cushions for him to rest his head.  After what had just happened I no longer found anything odd about all this.  Now he asked for the evening paper, and took it up without the slightest consideration for his guests.  But he didn't read it yet; he only cast his glance here and there on the page and said to us with an astoundingly sharp, business-like look some rather unpleasant things about our offers, while he with his free hand immediately began to make dismissive gestures.  His tongue-clicking indicated the bad taste in his mouth with which our business posturings had left him.  The agent could not abstain from making a few inappropriate remarks; in his vulgar sense of things he even believed that, after what happened here, some kind of compensation should be made, but in his way of doing things this of course was the least effective ploy of all.  I quickly bid farewell and was almost thankful to the agent.  Without his presence I would not have had the decisiveness to leave so soon.

In the vestibule I once again encountered Mrs. N.  One look at her meager shape and I said to myself that she reminded me a bit of my own mother.  And as she was standing there silently I said to her: "Whatever one may say, she was able to do miracles.  What we had destroyed here she was able to make good again.  I lost her when I was still a child."  On purpose I had spoken with exaggerated slowness and clearness since I suspected that the old woman was hard of hearing.  But she was completely deaf, since she asked in a non sequitur: "And what about my husband's appearance?"  I also noticed that she had exchanged a few words of parting with the agent.  I wanted to think that she otherwise would have been more trusting.

Then I went down the stairs.  The descent was harder than the ascent had been and even it wasn't easy.  Oh, how many failed business ventures there are and what a burden we must continue to bear!

St. Thomas Aquinas

Look at the world and you will see two currents, like tides peeling off in opposite directions.  On one side, science and selfishness have decided that we are nothing but mammals and have informed us that we should plan accordingly.  On the other, those who believe in their religion to the point of hating all others have assembled themselves by the millions, often in dedicated resistance to the smug atheist nonsense that masquerades as enlightenment but is simply everlasting darkness.  But both of these streams are sad and mistaken.  They are mistaken because life is neither a link on a billion-year chain of death nor death's eager anticipation; they are sad because something inside of them, a squeak or voice however faint, occasionally speaks to them about the positive acceptance of life.  Not the acceptance of life of the Superman who, in his puerile fantasies, hates God for his fate like a teenager hates acne and awkwardness and champions a life of defiance.  But acceptance of life in its unending beauty and the knowledge that it is but a precursor.  And there was no one who valued life and its aftermath more than the subject of this book.

How much is really known of Aquinas's life we will not be able to gauge from Chesterton's work.  That is to say, while the book is nominally a biography, it is more properly termed an essay.  What we can say with assuredness that it isn't is a hagiography.  The subject may involve, at times, one brilliant man's earthly existence that was relatively short, even by the tempered expectations of the thirteenth century.  But it certainly does not involve the theology of that man.  Catholic saints, as Chesterton points out in his habitually careful apologetics, tend to have exactly the same type of theology:

Because St. Thomas was a unique and striking philosopher, it is almost unavoidable that this book should be merely, or mainly, a sketch of his philosophy.  It cannot be, and does not pretend to be, a sketch of his theology.  But this is because the theology of a saint is simply the theism of a saint; or rather the theism of all saints.  It is less individual, but it is much more intense.

Without contradicting Chesterton – something I am obliged to do on the very rarest of occasions – I wonder whether this is really true.   I wonder whether a saint who is taught the ways of the Cross probably in his earliest youth, who augments his faith like armor in clashes with jackal-like sceptics and blasphemers, who is confronted with the sins of his Church – which are legion because the Church is made of men – truly sees the most important facet of his life in precisely or almost precisely the way all saints are said to have seen it at all times.  As questionable as this assertion may be, it is the method by which we may sunder theology, which requires a great deal of background explanation that would devour such a slim tome, from philosophy, which, as we know, can even reveal itself on a parchment inside a baked cookie.  Thus if we examine Saint Thomas's philosophy we may get a sense of why people devote years to this work (I have read much of it, but am no completist); and yet we note the title of the Summa, one of man's greatest triumphs of thought and faith, and replace it on the shelf with Tillich, Augustine, and Duns Scotus.  There is also the small matter of the life of Aquinas, the life he would so love, the daily existence brimming with privileges that he forsook (he was a not-distant cousin of none other than this Emperor), and the taciturn pensiveness that would earn him the nickname, "The Dumb Ox."  It seems impossible to cleave this life from either his theology or philosophy; they form, in their neat little way, a trinity of their own, although Aquinas would not agree with such an asseveration as much as not bother to consider it for too long.  In fact, he did bother to consider many things for too long.  But one thing which was under constant consideration was the splendor of God's green earth, blue sky and upright, rational mammals who, for better or worse, thought themselves created in His own image.  And so we have, according to Chesterton, Aquinas's most relevant accomplishment as far as the average person is concerned: that reason, unadulterated and ecstatic reason, can be trusted.

Reason remains a wicked word, because for the man of learning it is a shibboleth and for the man of experience it is a barrier.  Philosophy, we have heard so many times and not incorrectly, is a luxury of the rich.  Reason is not what propels the everyday man on his everyday routine; in many ways, what propels him is faith, but that observation has produced its own library of apologists.  What Aquinas did was move away from the abstraction of religion and move towards the concretization of religion, specifically, of a Catholic God.  If the senses are from God, then there is no reason to doubt them, for the world which they relay is as real as Heaven and the Crucifixion and Hell.  But what sensing something means has befuddled philosophers from the very beginning.  Aquinas makes things radically simple:

Our first sense of fact is a fact; [one] cannot go back on it without falsehood.  But when we come to look at the fact or facts, as we know them, we observe that they have a rather queer character; which has made many moderns grow strangely and restlessly sceptical about them.  For instance they are largely in a state of change, from being one thing to being another; or their qualities are relative to other things; or they appear to move incessantly; or they appear to vanish entirely .... There is no doubt about the being of being, even if it does sometimes look like becoming; that is because what we see is not the fullness of being .... Most thinkers, on realizing the apparent mutability of being, have really forgotten their own realization of the being, and believed only in the mutability .... While they describe a change which is really a change in nothing, [Aquinas] describes a changelessness which includes the changes of everything.  Things change because they are not complete; but their reality can only be explained as part of something that is complete.  It is God.

At first glance, the last seventeen words may seem like gigantic leaps from the steady logic of the sentences preceding; upon rereading the entire passage, greater sense emerges; but as is often the case with the tenets of genius, the truth of these statements becomes upon reflection well-nigh undeniable.  I cannot say whether atheists and other sceptics who study science for a dozen years and conclude that protons and neutrons and black holes and red dwarfs must be the handiwork of chance because everything is chance – including, therefore, their own conclusions – really think of a Christian god as an "old king" (to use Chesterton's phrasing).  An old king that sits, in his falsehood, in the corner of a shallow sky that now we all know stretches towards infinity, and deludes us in his non-existence.  Aquinas's lifelong insistence upon arguing on his opponent's terms is fine if the opponent is knowledgeable but wrong.  But we are facing a situation in which the opponent is both ignorant and wrong.  God, if He exists, is everything ("the alpha and omega" seems inappropriate and miniscule) and we play by the rules He has installed.  He is not the same as a planet or a lost continent or a loch-dwelling creature – such are the terms, inter alia, of the scientist.  He is or He isn't; and reason continually whispers to billions of people that He most certainly is.

Aquinas died suddenly and young.  Like Chesterton he was a big and tall man, and a cursory inspection of him – never mind that he was a monk and thus wholly uninterested in his personal appearance – would have judged him an oaf.  The moniker the Dumb Ox, along with the Schoolman, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, and Doctor Universalis, suggests that the impression of Thomas the man has been refracted necessarily through sympathetic and unsympathetic historians, but also through the vivacity of his ideas.  I understand Aquinas in a very different way from how I understand Kant and Bergson – in my opinion, the three greatest philosophical geniuses of the last two millennia – but since all three of them are, with the odd dark passage, perfectly lucid, they sit enshrined in the pantheon of my mind.  Kant gave us morality (our future); Bergson gave us memory (our past); and Aquinas, in his unusual path, gave us sensation, perception, life itself, our present.  And our past, present and future, along with Something much more profound and terrifying, are the beginning.  But they and that Something are not the end. 

Historia romana

A work ("Roman story")  by this Argentine man of letters.  You can read the original in this collection.

Every morning at half past ten I would leave the Hotel Gassion; my neighbors came from the Hotel de France.  In the Boulevard des Pyrénées, on separate benches in front of the same mountains, one reading Daisy Miller, others reviewing their homework, we would warm ourselves in the sun.  My neighbors were five girls and a governess.  Anyone who looked at the girls distractedly could have taken them for a series of specimens (of different sizes, of different ages that ranged from nine to nineteen) of the same person: submissive, blonde, tall and slim, with gray eyes and a blue uniform.  Of the governess – an elderly, ill-tempered woman – I have but a vague memory.

The regulars at the Sporting Bar informed me that the girls were my compatriots; that their father, "an American of Béarnese blood," had a ranch and a vast fortune in Buenos Aires; and that now the family was in Pau so as to receive an inheritance. 

One morning I came out of the hotel at ten o'clock.  A little while later the eldest of the sisters appeared and asked me whether she could share my bench.  We immediately struck up conversation.

"My name is Phyllis," she said.

"Do you like Pau?"  I asked.

"It bores me just as much as the ranch does.  So does the live I lead ... With Mademoiselle breathing down our necks, who could have any fun?  Don't think that it was always like this.  My parents are crazy: either they leave me completely to my own devices or they watch me night and day.  In July I was in Rome alone, at the house of some Italian girls whom I had met in Puente del Inca.  You're a writer, aren't you?"

"How did you know?"

"In Pau one knows everything.  Do you want me to tell you what happened to me in Rome?  You'll find it amusing.  Here comes Mademoiselle with the girls.  I'll see you tonight in the casino."

It was not a girl I met up with that evening, but a charming woman who took me by the arm and threw her head back laughing.  I exclaimed:

"How you've changed!"

"Do not think like that," she said.  "If they discover that I escaped, they'll kill me and lock me up.  Do you want me to tell you about my Roman love affairs?"

The golden Phyllis, virginal in look with the squawks of a bird, informed me that one of the Papal Gentlemen – I saw him in a signed photo, almost fat in his impeccable white coat – had asked for her hand in marriage.  The scene took place in a restaurant in Rome, and I do not remember the response the girl gave, but I do recall that she offended the maître d'hôtel by asking for a beefsteak.

"It's Friday," said the Gentleman.

"I know," Phyllis replied.

"So how dare you eat meat?!"

"I'm Argentine and in my country we don't observe the fast all year round."

"We're in Rome, I'm a Papal Gentleman and here we most certainly do observe the fast every Friday of the year."

"I will never again eat meat on a Friday.  But I've already ordered it and I don't want to annoy the waiter by telling him not to bother bringing it out."

"You'd prefer to make me sad."

("I didn't want to admit," Phyllis told me, "that I was hungry.")

They brought the beefsteak, a tempting beefsteak, and Phyllis with gestures of irritated resignation did not touch it, leaving it on its plate.

Her beau asked:

"And now why won't you eat it?"

"Because I don't want to make you sad," she replied.

"Now that you've ordered it, eat it," he conceded disdainfully.

Phyllis did not wait for him to insist.  Still angry, but with both haste and pleasure, she devoured the beefsteak.  Her beau exclaimed in a pained voice:

"I would never expected a blow like that."

"What blow?"

"You're still making fun of me.  That you would eat that meat and hurt my feelings."

"You told me to eat it."

"I wanted to test you and now I'm disappointed," the Gentleman observed.

Nevertheless, a few days later he took her to the beaches of Ostia.  It was very hot,  and in the middle of the afternoon the Gentleman admitted:

"You make me uncomfortable.  Although it pains me to say it, I cannot be silent: I desire you."

Phyllis replied that if he did not possess her this very evening, they would never see each other again.  The nobleman fell to his knees, kissed her hand and, almost crying, said that she should not allow herself to have such evil thoughts; that very soon they would get married; and that very soon she would be a princess.  Phyllis then explained to him that she was Argentine and in her country nobility didn't mean a thing; that in Buenos Aires or in any part of the country she was a person from a very well-known and, what is more, a very rich family; that her parents had ranches and that, on the other hand, a European nobleman was a rather suspicious item.  Despite her loving him and her not doubting the purity of his sentiments, she could not hide her innermost conviction that he was planning a marriage of convenience ... All this occurred in the train that took them back to Rome amidst a crowd who filled both seat and aisle.  A crowd who was chewing on sandwiches and who seemed very close during this sultry twilight hour.

When they arrived, Phyllis asked her beau where he was planning on taking her and the courtier mumbled in vague phrases mixing together names of restaurants and cinemas.  Phyllis implacably repeated her threat: make her his or never see her again.  Her beau then began to explain that, in Rome, there was no such place to go.

"There are no hotels for couples," he said, somewhere between proudly and desperately.

"And you don't have an apartment?"

"An apartment to bring girls back home?  No one in Rome has such a place.  One would have to be very rich.  I've been told that before the war ..."

"Take me somewhere," Phyllis insisted, adding in the Argentine dialect: "that's why you're (sos) a man."

The two then wandered endlessly through the streets.  When Phyllis saw a prostitute on a corner, she had her solution.  She said:

"Let's go to this woman's place."

"Impossible to talk to her," her beau got defensive.  "We can't approach her together.  And I can't leave you alone and approach her myself."

"So then I'll talk to her."

Her beau tried to dissuade her, repeating: "How am I supposed to take you to the apartment of a lady of the night?"  He tried other arguments: "How are we going to spoil our first night of lovemaking with the sordid quarters of a woman of ill repute?"  Not looking at him and with a curt tone, Phyllis asked once more, again in the Argentine familiar:

"Are you (vos) going or am I?"

The Papal courtier finally made up his mind.  He spoke with the woman and the three of them walked over to her place.  They did not walk all together.  The woman walked, alone, a few meters ahead of them.  The idea that he could be seen with a prostitute terrified him; but Phyllis couldn't have cared less whether or not anyone saw her.

As street prostitution is forbidden in Rome, every time that a policeman approached, the Gentleman became extremely anxious.  Although they were not walking with the woman, he wanted to run away and tried to force Phyllis to follow him.  What would he have said had they arrested him – him, a Papal Gentleman – for cavorting with prostitutes?  Phyllis explained to him that they were not walking with the prostitute  and that, precisely because he was a Papal Gentleman, they would not dare arrest him.  Many times did they lose sight of the woman during this journey through the narrow alleyways of Ancient Rome; many times did the Gentleman declare with relief that they had lost her for good; and many times did Phyllis force him to go look for her.  They always found her again.  And after navigating a dark, narrow, and malodorous labyrinth, they arrived at the place.  The walls of the woman's room were covered in religious picture cards; atop a small night stand was a considerable pile of statues of saints; and the bars of the bed frame were stuck all over with faded wreathes from the most recent Palm Sunday.  The Gentleman stated that these witnesses made the task which lay before them much harder for him.  In the adjoining kitchen the woman was frying something and manifested her impatience with thumps of the saucepan.

"The poor thing needs the room for other clients," Phyllis explained, perhaps superfluously.

Yet her beau did nothing but tremble and sweat.  Phyllis repeated her ultimatum; at long last, the man fulfilled his debt as best he could and declared Phyllis a woman of adamantine.  By the time they bid farewell to the mistress of the house, the mistress had regained her manners.  She wished them much happiness and, indicating with a circular gesture all the pictures and statues around them, Heaven's blessing.