To my Auntie Haydée, that she never die.

A human life is a miserable rough draft, a meagre handful of sorrows which fit in a handful of lines. Yet now and then, just as there are whole years of a long and heavy darkness, a minute of a man’s life can be of a dazzling light. Señor Pelice had this minute and this light.

Few in this town remember him. Some, those of few words, believe he died of nothing other than old age. A death all depends, as does a life. It’s another life, just that, another way to exist, not a definitive per saecula, nothing absolute nor anything extravagant because it’s also to be, drawing the article mortis in this case. Meaning Señor Pelice still is. Death, for what it’s worth, is a small event, a sketch, half-seen between others.

The town wasn’t, as one imagines, like this at the beginning. It was a village once. The Rodríguez mill wasn’t there, and the Basile pasta factory didn’t look as it does today with its tall sign lit at the tip, but was built with timber seasoned and oiled, which is to say ready at any time to catch fire as it finally, spectacularly did, and it was after this, on the ashes, this other one appeared, of reinforced cement and a plumed sign; nor would you have found this statue of San Martín, even, riding serenely through the crowns of the trees, nor the white building of the decidedly ruling Municipality, not even the Avenida Alsina of smooth cement bannered on either side with signs. All this to say there’s another town beneath this one, and another, and again another with packed-earth walls which are yellow in the sun, and small dirt streets.

And along one of these streets comes Señor Pelice in calf-skin boots, his black gabardine and high-crown hat, making his quiet way, very much in person. Here he comes. And this was the minute and its light for Señor Pelice. Because it’s not the first time he sees the señorita Haydée in the doorway of her house, in Calle Saavedra, next door to the Renaissance tearoom on the corner of Pueyrredón and Saavedra, that once opulent building with its Mansard roof of herringbone style, skylights, ridge, weathercock, dormer window and chimney, and which blackens at dusk and floats as if a boat on the tall sky and she there, in the doorway, forever from now on, white and fragile, perfumed, a picture from a magazine, Haydée Lombardi, of dreams and music. Señor Pelice felt a tremor in his heart and he loved her from this instant. No word ever passed between them, but before that door from this day on he always doffed his Panama hat, at six in the evening in winter and at eight o’clock in summer, and she gave the merest tilt of the head and almost a smile. For Señor Pelice this instant of his life was his most luminous, which is close to exact because, as is known, Señor Pelice was the most renowned maker of fireworks in these parts. Who doesn’t remember, of course, the fountains, peonies, rockets and Catherine wheels he set off on San Donato’s Day, for instance, not to mention the consonant thunder-bombs which burst in processions and punctuations and were heard to Irala or Cucha-Cucha, according to the direction of the wind, and were the world itself exploding into bits?

The year of his encounter with the señorita Haydée, Señor Pelice brought to life his famous pyrrhic pieces of spectacular combustion for the festa of San Isidro Labrador, the town’s patron saint. These dancing items using fixed fireworks and producing their effect without spinning round, were easy to light using simple recourse to communication fuses. Maestro Pelice, on the other hand, a true creative artist and continuing and advancing the ardent studies of the Maestro Ruggieri, perfected these pyrrhic fireworks by alternating fixed elements with others which rotated, and which achieves an unmatched perfection if one considers that a rotational movement as such opposes a physical communication being established between them. The clever solution was based on a strong spindle placed horizontally on a solid wooden post and which served as an axis for all the elements, from the simplest to the most complicated, combining in an ingeniously tight composition fixed chrysanthemums, goose-feet, stars, rockets, windmill-sails and the marvellous free spurs of his own invention. Inspired by the winged figures of the señorita Haydée, Señor Pelice also came to make the deafening spiral framework, made up of rotating elements and a line of spears which ascend in a circle and form, when the firework rotates, a spiral of fre of enormous surprise and majestic conflagration, and which he set off on the night of July 9th, 1935. On the same night, in the house he inhabited on the outskirts of the town on the dirt road to Aguas Corrientes, after lighting a number of candles and lamps he had and distributing them throughout the house and even in the garden, Señor Pelice sat down at his roll-top bureau and after giving a long sigh as he scratched his head with the turkey-feather pen, he wrote in his handsome slanting hand of full curves and at the prescribed connective slant of 30º, the same he used to copy the formulae of the maestro Julio Rossignon, author of The New Manual of Fireworks and Gunpowder published by the bookshop of Ch. Bouret’s widow, his first letter to the señorita Haydée, inspired by a free reading of The Writing of Love: the Modern Style for Letters of Emotion and Passion. Because, to all appearances, he was some years the señorita’s senior, it seemed to him pertinent that he use as a model the letter written by a widower soliciting a relationship with a spinster, despite his not in any true sense being the widower of a wife, but rather a widower out of habit.

He read the letter a couple of times in the light cast by the oil lamp with its tall chimney and filmy light, his preferred, and which when he was drowsy woke him up with short, whispered splutters of its wick, as if it were muttering. He folded the letter with care, gave it a kiss with a tilt of his handlebar moustache, and placed it into a perfumed envelope. This night-time letter was followed by many others, written punctually once a week, but señor Pelice posted not one of them. He preferred using them to fill the thunder-bombs, which would now burst with a hollow sound, the noise a little muffed, though only he would be aware of this, scattering his words in a thousand pieces over the roofs of the town. A few pieces fell into the patio with its raised beds of flowers of the house of the señorita Haydée Lombardi, although unfortunately, on the day of the Bragado Dozen, when he’d set off a bomb to start that race, a charred fragment which read “My beloved Haydée” dropped with such ill will that it landed in the patio of the señora Haydée Bonsignore, and to be exact at the feet of señor Bonsignore, a man of quick temper, and he’d kicked up a hell of a fuss.

Señor Pelice continued just the same, punctually every afternoon, to pass by the house on Calle Saavedra and standing there as always was the señorita, each day a little paler, every day more delicate, almost transparent.

The señorita Haydée Lombardi died of sunstroke on May 8th 1946. That night señor Pelice wrote the single letter in all these years he would send:

My dear señorita,

In such special moments I wish to express to you my undying afection and the promise of my abiding companionship during that other passage of life on which you have begun and which I impose on myself as I write this.

I am, Madam, your faithful P.

Señor Pelice put the letter into the post box the following day and didn’t again set foot outside his house in all the days of life that were left him, with the exception each year of the evening of May 8th, when he would walk to the cemetery to place a perfumed envelope in the niche of the señorita and which at some point would be taken off by the wind or some curious hand, or be scorched and discoloured by time.

Coincidentally, people were at this time giving up noisy festivals, and a court decree called for their ending. In time the town’s inhabitants either took them as having died out or simply forgot them. The roads were now paved, various mills had been put up, the Rojas Express bus would take you to Buenos Aires and on top of the town of yellow earth walls another town had risen. The house on Calle Saavedra was converted into an estate agency, in its windows properties to buy and sell.

While all this was happening Señor Pelice was growing gently old behind the last earth wall, as a fire slowly dies in the hearth. As night drew in he lit all the candles and turned on all the lamps and fed some coloured fish he kept in an aquarium and were his only, silent, company. There was a thick-lipped gourami, two angel fish which had the appearance of stiff birds, a Siamese fighting-fish, a red-tailed black shark, various goldfish including a black-telescope with bulging eyes which looked as if they belonged to a cat, a nymph, a comet and two white kissing gouramis which hung in the water as if cut from paper. The twilight of evening came in through the French window which led to the garden, dressing the room in a golden light which palely lit the fish-tank. The fish drifted in the gilded water as if soft birds of a slow fight, travelling majestically between the branches of waterweed and Japanese painted fern. Señor Pelice leaned his head, now turning grey, against the glass and his thoughts moved just as slowly and gently as the little evening fish. Behind the yellow wall, which as the shadows fell was covered with snails, señor Pelice grew more swollen and wrinkled each year. He could go amongst the townsfolk now and pass by without being recognised. The town went on advancing, looked almost a provincial capital. Tall mercury lighting lit the main streets, the tarmac had reached Calle Magallanes on the outskirts, there were two traffic lights in the centre which skipped prettily from green to red and back again and left Señor Pelice puzzled as to what they really signified, imagining they were fixtures from the railway station. On the best plot in the town, the church of San Isidro, so proud, so visible from a distance with its spire aimed at the heavens from in amongst trees, had been emptied out inside, it didn’t now consist of that glittering altar with its gold-leaf columns and its sacred image, very fleshy for the context, of the blessed Santa María, all colour and sheen and vestures and her glass eyes, and the naked child, distinctly podgy round the middle, but was instead now a kind of sharpened-edged warehouse, whitewashed inside with a raised bench at one end. Left from other times, and by which he still recognised his church, were the great glass windows of white and purple piping which, depending on the behaviour of the sun at a certain hour, gave a blue tone to the air, the statuary and the people, and in which one morning he saw the señorita Haydée floating by, dressed in tulle which veiled her face and from the panels of which her hands blossomed as if of wax.

None of this now carried the day. He himself was no longer the Pelice of that time since no-one turned to greet him when he walked the middle of the nave with his Panama hat in his hand and to the cracking of his desiccated calf-skin boots. On the way home he went along Calle Saavedra and, sunk between the shine of two shop windows, he uncovered with difficulty the dark silhouette of the house, now bearing the affront of a sign above the door. With his hand raised as a shield, his eyes took in the invincible Mansard roof silhouetted against the brilliance of the mercury lights.

That night he wrote a long letter to the señorita Haydée letting her know of all the improvements made and of the high, cold lights which would have been sufficient to dull even the four-stream cascades, eleven metres in height with respectively twenty, sixteen, twelve and eight detonating cartridges, plus four more at the front end of the stick, which he’d put together for the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary and was his most colossal work of all.

It’s now November. During the perfumed night of Señor Pelice, now decidedly aged and for this reason insomniac, it’s hell on earth to get to sleep. He almost doesn’t sleep. He lies still on the folding-bed and towards dawn dozes off for a bit. During the long hours he takes a walk around the garden carrying an oil-lamp or he sits in the rocking chair and, propelled by the sweet breeze given off by the dew-moistened privet, his mind drifts like a balloon or a folded-paper bird and goes gliding above the old town with its yellow earth walls and dirt streets and so many things now vanished or hidden, unseen at first sight, and this is death, forgetting, darkness, sum and total, time and times, motionless distance.

In the early hours he took the lamp closer to the fish-tank and, painlessly now, confirmed the black-telescope goldfish, this slow, jet-black bird which had looked back at him through the glass with its great bulging eyes and with which he’d already come almost to an understanding, from one world to another, fish-human, fish-fish, was floating inert in one of the corners. When he’d first installed the tank there were twelve restless little fish but, untrained as he was in water science, an excess of food or alterations in the temperature or faults in the aeration and filtration had quickly reduced the batch. The first death was a catastrophe. Señor Pelice, once he’d completely assured himself it didn’t move even when it was pushed with a finger, extracted the body of the deceased with the tulle netting and placed it on a hortensia leaf in the middle of the bureau and, under the oil-lamp, kept vigil over it for hours. With a spoon he dug a hole at the foot of a Banana Shrub and there he buried the little fish. He hadn’t fully recovered from this terrible loss when a macropodus opercularis died, after first gasping at the surface and then curling up in the corner, its belly inflated. He interred it beneath the cherry-plum tree with its leaves of purple wings. In this way the fish continued to die one after another, the old man burying them at the foot of one plant, the foot of another. He laid the black-telescope beside his favourite tree, a Japanese jasmine of fleshy, semi-double flowers which opened punctually for the end of November and stirred in the night as if they were small white birds, pumping intense perfumed waves through the darkness to Señor Pelice on the folding bed or in the rocking chair, and who now almost doesn’t sleep. Now and then he reads, now and then he writes something, but most of the time he thinks. This, surely, is old age, an ever-wakeful memory.

He reconstructs the town of his childhood, mostly, mixing or rather putting together different times and people. They file past against a same earth wall or through the yellow half-light of Padre Doglia’s room, and who in pidgin-Spanish warns him against the temptations of this world as he puts on and takes off his French cap, always anxious at the presence of the devil whom he imagines to be a type of provincial superintendent in a red uniform; there’s old-man Ponce who talks to himself, Bimbo Marsiletti who waves his arms before an invisible band, Oreste Provenzano who holds up a string of lottery tickets, the Italians Minervino, Visiconti and Ciminelli who parade past in Indian file as in the procession for the Virgen de Carmen, and playing the bagpipes.

Since the señorita Haydée left he’s had the habit of hanging a hurricane lamp in the centre of the garden. The wind makes it sway around and stirs the thick shadows which move laboriously from place to place. Its orange light is similar to the milky translucence of the fish-tank. And in this submarine light he sees at the end of a small branch the appearance of the macropodus opercularis or the red-tailed black shark or the scatophagus argus, or the pair of puntius arulius which died in unison. They wave as if flowers or birds or teardrops, almost transparent, seafaring types. On this November night the black-telescope goldfish will surely bloom, black bird veiled in black, at the summit of the Japanese jasmine.

On December 8th, Day of the Immaculate Conception, señor Pelice heard from his bed the chiming of the bells announcing the solemn mass of the first communion with the oil-lamp still burning on the chair at his side. He thought of the cement virgin the Daughters of Mary had erected in the atrium of the church and which he would have seen last with its face and hands painted the colour of flesh, and of the lines of children with armbands and tunics crossing the plaza and who would at this moment be entering the pointed doorway through which one could see the altar overflowing with light. But his swollen body wouldn’t obey the impulse. His arms were numbed and his legs stiff. It was only late in the afternoon, dragging himself across the floor, that he’d been able to feed the fish. Angelita Alori, who came twice a week to clean the house, found him the following day lying on the brick floor and settled him on the folding bed for his last hours. As he was also suffering from bladder problems, Angelita prepared him a radish stew with coriander and a handful of watercress leaves, sweetening the result with barley-sugar. She gave him a cup so as to draw out the urine and associated humours, consulting a priest for reinforcement. Señor Pelice’s bladder function improved but the overall picture was largely unchanged since he couldn’t move himself to discharge its contents, Angelita having to help in effecting this, her face turned away. On January 8th, punctual, señor Pelice set off on his final journey in his gabardine, his Panama hat and his calf-skin boots at the exact hour of the blossoming of the fish on the branches. According to Angelita, who put it on record, he died a good death, unfussy, and was buried formally, with neither mourning nor witness, in the simple earth.

However, and bearing in mind the señor Pelice who is no more, I wonder: which is it, which is the real town of Chacabuco, which holds sway? This town now distinguished by its advances, or that other town of the yellow earth walls and dirt streets, in which the sprinkler-lorry used to put down the dust at twilight, where everything was older and simpler yet more gentle, where it was enough to turn your head to see at the end of the street the first countryside houses and where, at this moment, Señor Pelice is soberly approaching along Calle Saavedra. He stops before the Lombardi home, now half-sunken in shadow, takes off his Panama hat and greets the señorita Haydée who says, for the frst time, in her bird-like voice:

It’s going to be a hot year, don’t you think?

The sun’s hot for November, señor Pelice responds obliquely.

Where are you off to so decidedly?

To the Prado fields, says señor Pelice rashly, the fair and dance grounds being the first things that came into his head.

A very fine idea. I’d love to go there myself! trilled the señorita.

Señor Pelice offers her his arm and with a laugh the señorita Haydée leaves her doorway and links arms with the master of firework fabrication. The two figures move away into the distance between the yellow walls and the plumes of shadow on their way to the Prado Español while the perfumed night descends over the town.

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Haroldo Conti (1925-1976) was born in small-town Buenos Aires province and lived most of his adult years in the Argentine capital. Under the influences of his childhood and the weekends he spent with the dense natural world in the islands of the Paraná Delta, his fictions give witness to the nobility of ordinary human lives and the significant force of environment. As a figure much politicised since his death (Conti was detained and murdered by the military junta and appears in the list of the permanently disappeared), the literary quality of his books, stories and journalism has received less attention than it merits.

Jon Lindsay Miles lives in rural southern Spain. Publishing as Immigrant Press, he has made translations from two of Haroldo Conti’s four novels and from a personal selection of his stories, from which “Perfumed Night” is taken. He has also published a fictional biography of Conti, Letters from the River, and is on the move to Colombia in search of a corner in which to set up a butterfly farm (as well as to bump into a new translation project).