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An Unimportant Murder in Buenos Aires
In one of the far suburbs of the sprawling city the old man, his thick hair a gleaming white against the evening sky, knelt before the small flower garden, gently crumbling the rich black soil in his callused hands. “Mother,” he called to his wife, “Come see the lilies before it gets too dark!”
The old woman, a little plump from lack of exercise but sweet-faced still, rolled her wheelchair across the planks carefully laid down for that purpose. She leaned forward to examine the great pink trumpets of the azucenas. “Ah, Henry,” she mused, “They are so lovely I almost hate to cut them to sell...”
The man rose slowly to his feet, brushing the soil from his knees. “They are what puts the food on our table,” he answered, then added with a smile, “But I’ll give you one for the table, if you like. We can spare one to brighten the kitchen a little."
His wife smiled back at him gently. “That would be nice, Henry. Just one, though…”
There was a clang from the front of the house as if someone had propelled the metal gate open with abrupt force. Startled at the sudden noise, the old couple turned their heads toward the sound as Rexie, the terrier, began his frantic warning bark to advise that strangers had appeared. There was a startled yelp as if someone had rudely kicked the little dog, and suddenly three beardless youths in blue jeans and dirty T-shirts entered the backyard, two of them banishing evil-bladed knives.
Maria,” the old man said quietly, “Don’t move. Don’t say anything.”
One of the two dark-haired intruders strode forward and seized Henry by the shoulder. “Okay, old man, where’s the money?”
With shaking hands Henry reached into his back pants pocket and extracted a battered leather billfold and extended it to his interrogator. The hooligan extracted the few pesos in the wallet and threw it to the ground. The robber with the greasy peroxide blonde hair reached forward and cuffed Henry across the back of the head. “We want the money you have hidden in the house,” he snarled. Ignoring Maria, the three pushed the trembling old man toward the back door. Frightened as she was, Maria rolled her chair behind the three and huddled against the screen door as she watched them take possession of the humble kitchen.
A robber pushed Henry into a straight chair, jerking off the old man’s belt to tie his hands. He struck the old man again, hard. “We’re not asking again, where is the money?” Bowing his head, Henry whispered, “I gave you all I had. That is nearly a week’s take from selling the flowers.”
“Search the house,” the blonde boy hissed. “I’ll make this old bastard talk!”
The other two quickly went through the house, opening drawers and throwing the meager contents to the floor. The taller one, tossing his head to keep his overlong hair out of his eyes, moved briskly into the bedroom that smelled of old people and poverty, where he seized the edge of the thin mattress, jerked it off the iron bed and cut it open with his knife. He hurriedly pawed through the dingy cotton stuffing as if expecting to find something, then gave up in disgust. “There’s nothing here,” he told his companion. “Billy was wrong!”
Their search was soon finished; the house had only three rooms. “Nothing, not a peso! No cell phone, no TV, nothing! They must have been hoarding money for years, where the hell is it?” With a practiced motion the blonde suddenly slit the lobe of Henry’s left ear and grinned as Henry began to bleed profusely. “You’re in for it, you old son-of-a-bitch,” he jeered, sliding the tip of his blade across Henry’s cheek for another and yet another blood-seeping cut.
Henry was seventy-three years old. He had worked long and hard tilling his patch of flowers to sell the blooms in season in the wooden stand by the gate so that he and Maria, childless, could survive. He was not frail, but he was no longer young, and he was stressed with frantic worry that Maria, bound as she was by arthritis to her wheelchair, might be hurt. The torture, the blows and innumerable cuts on his arms and legs continued until he fainted, uselessly protesting that there was no hidden money anywhere.
Finally, his brave heart could stand no more, and to the disgust of his interlocutors, he simply stopped breathing.
Pushing and shoving, the delinquents left, arguing between themselves. Maria cringed away from them, Rexie panting on her lap. She heard the tall skinny boy sneer, “Billy swore the two of them had a mattress full of money. Money, huh! All I found when I cut the mattress open was a bunch of cotton batting!”
Later, while the police came – the neighbors heard Maria shrieking for help and had called the authorities – the robbers met back at the shabby bar near the shanty town where they had gone to organize the robbery. Billy, a much-admired older man who had already served a prison term or two, entered, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip.
One of the dark-haired robbers complained indignantly, “Hey, Billy, what are you pulling? That old flower seller had exactly one hundred and thirty pesos and change on him! And when we tickled him a little, he keeled over dead!”
Billy took a puff on his cigarette and began to laugh. “You mean you OFFED the old guy? I thought it would be a good joke on you to send you to Henry’s house, I knew he was an old scrounge without two pesos to rub together -- and you killed him!” Still laughing and shaking his head, Billy went to the bar and ordered a beer, leaving the three juvenile assassins to ponder their wasted efforts.
The murder is on the books, of course, but the police have more important matters to attend. They know from Maria’s description that the robbers are probably underage and are well aware that the reformatories have revolving doors, as do the prisons. The members of the local drug cartels are shooting each other down in the streets of Rosario, and, well, Henry the flower-seller was not a very important citizen, then, was he? Already seventy-three years old – and Maria had taken Rexie and gone to live with her sister in La Plata.
Too bad it had to happen, but we live in dangerous times, was the general consensus.
Sue Littleton: Born September 25, 1932, in Abilene, Texas, poet Sue Littleton lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has published in various anthologies and literary magazines. She is one of the four founders in 1992 of the Austin (Texas) International Poetry Festival. Sue writes in both Spanish and English: she is an investigative and historical narrative poet and her bilingual epic poem, Corn Woman, Mujer Maíz, the history of corn , which in turn is the history of the great civilizations of the Americas at the time of the Conquest and before, is available in Kindle and soft-cover on Amazon, as well as her autobiographical collection of poems, The Ranch on the Pecos River.
Sue worked with David Roberts, British editor of ww.warpoetry.co.uk on an anthology of poems (Falklands War Poetry) by English veterans, Argentines and Sue herself concerning the Malvinas/Falklands War, which included translating Argentine poets to English and writing a series of 25 annotated poems. She is currently presenting the Spanish version of the anthology as La guerra de las Malvinas (The Malvinas War). Her latest bilingual book is The Little Snake Goddess of Crete, published by Botella al Mar, Uruguay, along with a collection of cat poems in English About Cats. The Poems of Istanbul, published in poetryrepairs, the on-line literary magazine, is being published in an illustrated, bilingual version by Botella al Mar, as well as Lord Byron’s Greece.
Email: Sue Littleton
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