Behold Things Beautiful Read online

  “How do you know?”

  Flaco shrugged ambiguously. “You realize the files might be worthless.”

  “He killed himself for nothing? That’s…” Gabriel stammered, searching for the words.

  “Where’s Lalo Martín supposed to say he got them from?” Flaco noticed Alma walking towards them and went to embrace her.

  Gabriel wished she’d come over to embrace him, although nobody ever lingered to embrace a cemetery administrator. He’d observed Alma at the party, surreptitiously he’d thought, until Roma elbowed him. “Stop staring, Gabi. You’ll freak her out.” But he was grateful that Alma had invited him to her house. After two burials, a strong drink and company were preferable to waiting alone in his apartment for the next disaster.

  Still wearing her sleeveless black dress, Alma sat in the courtyard and stared into the night sky, too tired to contemplate moving. Xenia, also spent, had gone to bed, leaving every glass and plate to be washed in the morning. It seemed as if hundreds had come, many staying for hours. Hannelore’s students, their parents, all the musicians from the OSL, neighbours and friends, as well as acquaintances, nurses who had treated her mother at the clinic, shopkeepers who’d served her in their stores, the dentist’s receptionist, strangers compelled to share anecdotes and praise for her mother. Flaco and Roma had helped to deflect some of the well-meaning mourners. Hannelore would have laughed, “So typical of Luscano, they arrive late in droves and never leave.”

  The day circled in Alma’s thoughts, a spin of conversations and scenes, the ceremonies at the chapel and the cemetery. “You’ll thank me,” Hannelore had said, handing over her instructions a few days ago. She’d been right about everything, even the insistence, underlined three times, No eulogy! At some point she’d said, “I hate those summing-ups. Whitewashes or thrashings, they never truly represent the deceased.” Although she’d spared Alma the struggle of creating an appropriate text that would capture Hannelore’s essence, the impulse to record something remained. The few lines from Valéry were not enough.

  Hannelore’s life had been interesting but not easy. The child of immigrants in Argentina, exiled again during the Perón years, she’d observed Luscano with an outsider’s objective eye while participating in its essence, the music and art. What was it about Hannelore that inspired so many to come today? She’d been controversial and critical, but rather than taking offence, many had spoken of her authenticity and grace. For Alma, it was her mother’s courage that stood out, even during the last days of her life, as she railed against her imminent death. The same courage Flaco was counting on Alma having when he’d implored her to testify. That was the lifelong burden of being her mother’s daughter: not living up to expectations. Flaco hadn’t mentioned it again, but his eyes when he looked at her conveyed a pleading. He probably wasn’t aware of it himself, carefully avoiding the subject at his birthday party and again today. Alma could feel it and, for the sake of their friendship, would have to find the right words to explain how deeply she’d interred the horrors of La Cuarenta.

  The lights of a jet crossed the sky heading south towards Uruguay. All her plans when she’d first arrived, of going to Montevideo to research Delmira Agustini, of writing about the poet and her works, were diverted, first by her mother’s illness and, now, the daughterly duties that lay ahead — visiting the notary, closing bank accounts, notifying authorities. Her northern home seemed distant and fictional, trading places in her imagination with this reality. Luscano had ensnared her faster and more tightly than she’d anticipated.

  Part II

  Love, the night was tragic and sobbing

  When your golden key sang in my lock…

  From “The Intruder” by Delmira Agustini, El libro blanco (1907)

  10

  Certain lives, especially those of the feisty, the resisters, are best understood played out backwards. Begin with death, then follow the life as it coils, turning into itself, repeating and developing, complications giving way to clarity.

  Amor y muerte

  A winter day in Uruguay, a small country often considered dull by its neighbours, yields a windfall for the tabloids. Reporters work through the night and the capital wakes up to the headline, “Love and death! The ideal couple dead!”

  El Día spares no details. A front-page photo displays the poet lying in a pool of blood. She, murdered at twenty-seven and he, shot by his own hand at thirty. A tragic finale to the Reyes-Agustini love story. The pages of details thrill Montevideo out of its stodgy complacency.

  What was she wearing?

  A silk slip, can you imagine, in blue so pale that in the photograph it looks white and the blood black.

  Had they, you know, before?

  She was wearing nothing else.

  Whispers behind gloved hands, while to the bereaved family, respectful silence or murmured condolences.

  No one asks, who loved her and whom did she really love? No one asks, how could this creative force have lived among us and suffered without any of us knowing?

  She was beautiful, they agree, and gifted. All those languages, an autodidact who recited Verlaine and Baudelaire from memory, painted watercolours and acted in plays. A charmed life, an established family, success. A poet with three books published to critical acclaim, a prominent player in literary circles whose works were praised by the great Rubén Darío.

  Her wedding to Enrique Job Reyes had been celebrated by the elite of Montevideo. Why did she divorce him, then secretly meet with him? And why did he kill her? Don’t they know that given the opportunity, people choose the moment of their death? Usually night or early morning, the fewer witnesses the better. The sacred act requires privacy and a perfect alignment of stars. As for why, don’t they know it’s possible to die of sadness?

  ¡Prudencia!

  The voices of her relatives mingle with the buzzing of cicadas. In the Uruguayan countryside, she sits at a long table in the shade of an ancient palo borracho. A raven circles the tree. Lush vegetation droops with humidity. A sprig of yellow flowers falls onto the spongy grass. Muchachas come and go, bringing salads and pitchers of lemon slices floating in ice water. Delmira catalogues the images.

  Here in Villa Maria, the Agustini summer home in Sayago, she partakes of this Christmas Day tradition, an obligatory midday meal in the garden. Like most Uruguayan families of their class, the Agustinis summer outside the city for relief from the stifling heat. Delmira, more observer than participant, performs her role perfunctorily. The dutiful daughter smiles at her father, agrees with her mother, appears to listen to her brother’s insipid monologue, his face as red as the cabernet in his goblet. Estrangement has her fluctuating between reality and fantasy.

  Smoke drifts from the brick chimney across the terraced lawn. A shirtless asador attends to the barbecue. The muscles of his back contract as he prods the burning wood with a branding iron. Flor appears from the kitchen and crosses the lawn, her black braid swinging across her shadow. The muchacha hands the asador a glass of water, which he lifts to his lips, tendons working his brown neck as he swallows. The man returns the glass with a quick word, something provocative that elicits a smile. Flor glances up at her employers seated around the table and hurries back to the kitchen.

  After the coffee is served, Delmira rises. She kisses her father good-bye and, ignoring her mother’s admonitions, makes for the house to prepare her escape.

  As the carriage pulls out of the corridor of cypress trees, the rain pelts down in one of those sudden subtropical drenchings. The downpour makes muddy trenches of the road. The coachman whips the hindquarters of the horses. Inside the carriage, Delmira empathizes with the beasts, their struggle to plod through sheets of rain, to endure the tierra and its inhabitants. In this heat, she’s wearing an ankle-length dress, a corset, garters, stockings, shoes, gloves and a hat. Only the skin of her face and throat is free. Queasy from the heavy food, she considers unfa
stening the bindings and frills, dares only to unbutton her gloves, remove the hat and lift the crinoline to her knees. She turns to Flor, who’s staring at the line of ombú trees along the road, guarding the fields like warriors. “What’s his name?”

  “Who?” But Flor can’t pretend for long, not with her beloved Nena. “Amado.”

  Delmira laughs. “Is he true to his name?”

  “He’s a man, that’s all I know.” Flor closes her eyes, exhausted from serving the family through the fiestas. Her head falls against the velour seat cover and she folds her sturdy hands in her lap.

  Flor’s head rolls until it leans against Delmira’s shoulder for the rest of the bone-jolting journey into Montevideo. Delmira doesn’t mind the intimacy. It is Flor who taught her the facts of life, it is her daring that Delmira draws on to take the steps to file for divorce. But lately even Flor has warned, ¡prudencia! Convention limits the immunity Delmira can draw around herself.

  Imagine existing as a free spirit in the wrong time, an exile in your own country.

  Venganza de sangre

  Seven months later, Delmira Agustini lies dead on the floor next to the killer in his underclothes, their blood commingling on the floor.

  Just after six in the evening, Germán da Costa, the only other resident in the house at the time, is in his room reading when he hears four gunshots. He runs out of the house and returns with two policemen who break down the door of the room off the hallway. Germán da Costa identifies the man with the revolver in his hand as his friend, Enrique Job Reyes. He’s murmuring, “Delmira, Delmira.” An ambulance transports him to Hospital Maciel where he dies that night.

  Uruguay’s celebrated poet is pronounced dead immediately. In the rented room, the policemen establish that two bullets struck her — the first by the ear with an exit wound, the second lodged in the left side of her skull. A projectile embedded in the bloodied wall by a framed photograph of Delmira indicates that the killer’s first attempt at shooting himself went wild.

  Delmira’s father arrives by carriage and arranges for her body to be transported to the Agustini residence along with her blood-splattered belongings — the dress, velvet hat and small leather purse.

  Mística, asexual

  Delmira Agustini lies covered in black silk inside an open coffin the day after the murder. Visitors enter the bewildered hush of the family home with bouquets of junquillos and azucenas. A journalist from La Razón reports that the poet’s mouth appears mystical, asexual, unlike, he’s insinuating, her poetry or the death scene.

  The mother clutches a rosary, her thighs overflowing the narrow seat of her chair. Her life’s work dead, murdered by that low-life horse-trader. Señora Agustini, half German, half Argentine, who home-schooled her daughter, nurturing her talents, guiding her morality, cannot fathom how this tragedy has befallen her. What can be worse than outliving your child?

  The father hovers behind her, shaking hands with the well-wishers. He’s afraid of his wife and his son, Delmira’s older brother, their only child now. Antonio Luciano Agustini paces the living room. He is livid with anger at his sister, discerns the innuendo in the whisperings, the interviews and photographs, the morbid curiosity drawing strangers to the living room. In a few days, revenge has him packing her things into trunks. All her manuscripts and papers, her paintings and the infamous doll, mascot of the fake infantilism of her life at home, will be transported to Villa Maria and stored in the basement for forty years. Antonio will spend the rest of his life disavowing his sister and her scandalous behaviour.

  During the solemn velatorio in the living room, no one notices Flor in the kitchen. Grief for La Nena wells from her core as she arranges the lilies in the family’s crystal. Stem by stem, the flowers are trapped inside the vase and she weeps for the woman she raised, for the poet who read her the early drafts of her work. Flor, the only person in the household unable to read the poems, is the only one who understood them.

  Later, she climbs the stairs to help Señora Agustini dress for the cortège to the cemetery. From the bedroom, the women hear a commotion outside on Calle San José. They look out the window onto the procession of carriages and cars, the horse-drawn hearse with the coffin of Enrique Job Reyes proceeding slowly towards the Cementerio Central. Flor heaves the window open and screams, ¡Asesino!

  At four in the afternoon, Delmira’s coffin is brought to the same cemetery as her ex-husband’s. The poet herself was not religious, but her mother’s piety is unquestioned. As the priest delivers the benediction, the writers of Montevideo huddle together, silently reviewing their assumptions about her. The separation from Reyes so soon after the wedding led them to understand she never loved the man. Now it emerges she’s been meeting him in secret for months. These writers remain silent, claim they’re too shocked to deliver any words.

  The poet is spared a summing up, the predictable chronology with its absurd avoidance of the word “dead.” A eulogy says: this person was born on this date in this place, had this sort of childhood enhanced with memorable anecdotes, married this man, accomplished these things. None of it captures a person’s essence. What scars did she carry and what brought her to this specific death? Priests dissuade, even prohibit, the delivery of eulogies during funeral masses, aware that the most interesting depths of the dead are controversial and their secrets, blasphemous.

  The cemetery employees deliver the coffin to the morgue, laying it down next to Reyes’s. Two years will pass before she’s buried in the family tomb, plot 311. In 1992 her remains are relocated to the Panteón Nacional in an official ceremony.

  La leona

  For decades following her death, tributes are published by authors whose motives are suspect. Are they cashing in on her fame to benefit their flagging careers? Or perhaps it takes time to make sense of an unusually violent death.

  In 1924, an Uruguayan writer reveals “How I knew Delmira Agustini.” In the article, Alberto Zum Felde quotes from the poet’s letters. “I feel so alone and isolated,” she wrote to him after he’d published a favourable review of her book. “Please come to visit me.” He finds her sitting on a sofa under a mirror. Long hair, small hands with rings on every finger, she’s wearing a pale silk dress. The mother chaperones from a chair in a corner of the living room. Zum Felde is transfixed by the poet’s beauty, revels in her purity, cannot fathom how this girl is capable of the eroticism in her poems. When he leaves, the mother accompanies him to the door. Delmira, she confides, is damaged by a crisis of sensitivity and tormented by her poetry. Zum Felde sees the poet as a beautiful lioness imprisoned in a domestic jail.

  A childhood friend reminisces in La Revue Mondiale in Paris. André Giot de Badet remembers Delmira sitting under an ombú tree practising French with him in the countryside. They commuted together in the ferrocarril to Montevideo where Delmira attended piano and painting lessons. De Badet maintains his disbelief in her tragic death although he left for France well before the poet married. Half of his memories are later discredited as inaccurate.

  Every decade, new recollections and opinions emerge. Delmira Agustini was a lyrical genius. She possessed a singular violence or a savage happiness, her poetry seeping into biography. In 1967, Zum Felde is again compelled to defend her chastity, writing that her eroticism was pure myth, a poetic invention. She was chaste, he swears, living in the protection of her parents’ guardianship.

  People cling to what they want to believe. Their memories reveal more about themselves than the deceased.

  Acto mágico

  Every day Delmira would write in her room until late afternoon. Then she would bring her poems to her father. In the evenings he would transcribe her disorderly script into his neat handwriting. From the first poem published in 1905 when Delmira was nineteen years old, Señor Agustini copied her lines of anguish, eroticism and imagined sexuality. So complete was his respect for his daughter’s vocation, the man never commented o
n her poems, blind to their audacity, oblivious to their collision with the morals of his puritan world and his wife’s strict piety.

  It is the writer’s curse to be judged on the printed word, phrases or stanzas imagined at some fixed point in time. The poet moves on, yet the words stick like filaments of a web. She’s elsewhere weaving a new creation and giant hands conspire to move her back, defining her according to the arduous moments in which she created a universe. She wrote this. It must be her.

  Throughout her life, Delmira repels this curse by maintaining she writes in a trance, that her poems emerge by sleight of hand in an act of magic. The writers and critics in her circle never probe her claims of sleights of hand and self-described magic. Delmira chose to propagate rather than dispel the systemic refusal to recognize that the painful process of revising and editing is intrinsic to artistic integrity.

  The poet’s self-propagated myth is finally unmasked in 1950. After the brother’s death, his wife sells Villa Maria. The new owner discovers the trunks of Delmira’s possessions and papers and donates them to a cultural institute in Montevideo. Researchers unearth the letters, manuscripts and lucid improvisations written on any available paper: sheet music, notebooks, envelopes and inside books. These scraps reveal the meticulous revisions Delmira made to her poems, the iterations and repetitions preceding the published works. This is the paper trail of truth.

  Bello gesto de libertad

  And the letters discovered in the trunks! Love and seduction playing out in her correspondence. Letters from the poet’s heart composed after an intense day of writing.

  Flor brings her tea and rests on the bed as they talk. Delmira has seen the men entering or leaving the muchacha’s room when the parents are in the country. Flor willingly satisfies her curiosity, tells of the touch of a man, when it feels right, when all the senses engage towards the ecstatic shiver of satisfaction. Delmira reads her drafts of the poems and Flor nods, says, “Yes, Nena, that’s how love is, all those things and maybe more. You’ll find out soon enough.”