Tale Two (From ‘Three from Once’)
Published in Issue #1 Translated from Spanish by Sharon Wood subscribe to unlock the full storyIntroduction to the Three Tales
The three tales that follow are the result of a commission and a power cut. If it hadn’t been for that commission, maybe I would never have written them. If it hadn’t been for the power cut, there would have been eleven of them rather than just three. About three years ago now, Natan Berblum, a printer with a house in the Belgrano area and a shop in the Once district, called me up and told me he had had an idea. For Passover – three months off – instead of sending a card to a couple of dozen important clients in Miami, across Latin America and Argentina, he wanted to give them a book. Berblum printed tourist brochures for large travel firms, books and leaflets for various reformist synagogues, and the stationery for any number of conferences and congresses. He had an office in Miami and another in Venezuela. I had read in a newspaper article that he printed all the brochures for a tourist agency for gays. He had started out as a printer, but now he also owned the concession, amongst others, for one of the kiosks at the airport for Buenos Aires, Aeroparque. He also had interests in the distribution of books to the kiosks.
His voice was gruff, he had a cigar clamped between his lips. He had always been fat. He wanted me to write eleven stories about the district of Once (translator’s note: ‘Once’, as...
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