Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Read Online Free PDF Page A

the seat like men. Boy, it galled me seeing that—it was as much as saying we weren’t even good enough to clip a lousy guitar. The thought that we were a bunch of nobodies really had me burned up, and I snatched the carnation from behind my ear and threw it in a puddle. I stood there a while staring at it, trying to take my mind off things. I wished it was already tomorrow—I wished that night were over. Then the next thing I knew there’s this elbow shoving me aside and it almost came like a relief. It was Rosendo— all by himself, slinking off.
    “You’re always getting in the way, kid,” he says to me half snarling. I couldn’t tell if he was just getting something off his chest or what. He disappeared in the dark toward the Maldonado. I never laid eyes on him again.
    I stood there looking at the things I’d seen all my life—the big wide sky, the river going on down there in its own blind way, a horse half asleep, the dirt roads, the kilns—and it came to me that in the middle of this ragweed and all these dump heaps and this whole stinking place, I’d grown up just another weed myself. What else was going to come out of this crap but us—lots of lip but soft inside, all talk but no standing up to anyone? Then I thought no, the worse the neighborhood the tougher it had to be. Crap? Back toward the dance hall the music was still going strong, and on the breeze came a smell of honeysuckle. Nice night, but so what? There were so many stars, some right on top of others, it made you dizzy just looking at them. I tried hard to tell myself that what happened meant nothing to me, but I just couldn’t get over Rosendo’s yellow streak and the newcomer’s plain guts. Real even managed to get hold of a woman for the night—for that night and a lot of nights and maybe forever, I thought, because La Lujanera was really something. God knows which way they headed. They couldn’t have wandered very far. By then the two of them were probably going at it in some ditch.
    When I got back, the dance was in full swing. I slipped into the crowd, quiet as I could, noticing that some of our boys had taken off and that the Northside bunch were dancing along with everyone else. There was no shoving, no rough stuff. Everybody was watching out and on good behavior. The music sounded sleepy, and the girls tangoing away with the outsiders didn’t have much to say.
    I was on the lookout for something, but not for what happened. Outside there were sounds of a woman crying and then that voice we all knew by then—but real low, almost too low, like somehow it didn’t belong to anyone anymore.
    “Go on in, you slut,” it was telling her—then more tears. After that the voice sounded desperate.
    “Open the door, you understand me? Open it, you lousy tramp. Open it, bitch.”
    At that point the shaky door opens and in comes La Lujanera, all alone. Just like someone’s herding her.
    “Must be a ghost out there behind her,” said the Redhead.
    “A dead man, friend.” It was the Butcher, and he staggers in, his face like a drunk’s, and in the space we opened up for him he takes a couple of reeling steps—tall, hardly seeing—then all at once goes down like a log. One of his friends rolled him over and fixed him a pillow with his scarf, but all this fussing only got him smeared with blood. We could see there was a big gash in his chest. The blood was welling up and blackening a bright red neckerchief I hadn’t noticed before because his scarf covered it. For first aid one of the women brought rum and some scorched rags. The man was in no shape to explain. La Lujanera looked at him in a daze, her arms hanging by her sides.
    There was one question on everyone’s face and finally she got out an answer. She said after leaving with the Butcher they went to a little field and at that point someone she didn’t know turned up and challenged him to fight and then gave him this stab. She swore she didn’t know who it was, but that it