Читать книгу The One Before - Juan José Saer - Страница 26

Gandia’s Bar

Don’t be fooled: the news that came out in the paper last week, in the police blotter, which says very clearly that the owner of a bar, named Gandia, was arrested, gives a false impression of the person in question. It’s true that, as it appears, he played cards for money behind the bar, and that in the rooms out back a girl from the neighborhood, one of the poorest in the city, received her clientele, from which Gandia made a small commission. But don’t be fooled, don’t be put off: It’s not Gandia that news is about, it’s someone else, someone I’ve met.

That they would have put him in jail makes me smile. What’s more, it’s not the first time this has happened. In this slum, Gandia’s bar is the hub of perdition, the vicinity of vice. It is an obligatory stop for any backsliding prole. And its owner, Gandia, son of a laborer or a farmer—I don’t really know—has rough, callused hands, weighs over 200 pounds and is always dirty and poorly shaven. He is one of those men whose sullenness is too childish to be offensive, frightening, or even convincing. One can see from afar that Gandia is tangled up in himself, perpetually absorbed in internal discord, for reasons surely even he doesn’t know, and what appears to others is the harshness radiating from that derangement, like that man whom one sometimes encounters fruitlessly trying to screw in, for hours, the same microscopic little screw, and who greets one in a huff.