Target in the Night by Ricardo Piglia

go out. He hatesthe countryside, the quiet of the plains, the sleeping gauchos, the owners who never work and just sit under the eaves of their houses staring at the horizon, or let time pass in the shade of their balconies, go out to fuck the local girls in the shed between the bags of maize, play dice through the night. He hates them. Croce can see the tall, abandoned factory building with its rotating beacon light, as if it were an empty fortress. The empty fortress . It’s not that he heard voices, the sentences simply reached him as if they were memories. I know him as if he were my son . Like lines written in the night. He knew very well what they meant, but not how they entered his head. Certainty is not the same as knowledge, he thought. It’s the precondition for knowledge. General Grant’s face was like a map, a footprint on the ground. A very scientific job. Grant, the butcher, with his kidskin glove.
    â€œI’m going out for a bit,” Croce said all of a sudden. Saldías looked at him, a little afraid. “You stay and keep guard, we don’t want those worthless bums to come and do anything outrageous.”
    Luca had purchased some land outside the town, on the edge, in the deserted plains, a plot, as his father called it, and started building the factory there, as if it were the construction of a dream, a construction imagined in a dream. They had planned and discussed it when they were working in the workshop at the back of the house, in their grandfather Bruno’s studio, and their grandfather had helped them, influenced by his European readings 11 and his research into the design of the ideal factory.Luca and Lucio used the workshop as if it were a laboratory for their technical entertainments, that’s where they built their racing cars, that was their schooling, a rich-boy’s hobby. Sofía seemed exhilarated by her own voice and by the quality of the legend.
    â€œIt took my father a while to understand. Because before, when they used to go out to the fields and work on the agricultural machines, he didn’t have any problems with them, they’d follow the harvest about, spend long stretches of time out in the country, they’d come back dark as Indians, my mother would say, happy to have them outdoors for months, out with the harvesters and the baling machines, living the clash of two antagonistic worlds.” 12
    Her father did not realize that the plague had arrived, that it was the end of Arcadia, that the pampas were changing forever, that the machinery was becoming more and more complex, that foreigners were buying up the land, that the owners of the estancias were sending their earnings to the island of Manhattan (“and to the financial paradise of the island of Formosa”). The Old Man wanted everything to stay the same, the Argentine pampas, the gauchos on horseback, even though he,too, of course, had started to transfer his dividends abroad and to speculate with his investments, none of the landowners were born yesterday, they all had their advisors, brokers, stock transfer agents, they went wherever their capital took them—although they never stopped yearning for the peace of their homeland, the quiet pastoral customs, their paternal relationship with the workers.
    â€œMy father always wanted them to love him,” Sofía said, “he was tyrannical and arbitrary but he was proud of his sons, they were going to carry on the family name, as if the last name had a meaning unto itself, anyway, that was my grandfather’s thinking and then my father’s, they wanted their last name to go on, as if they belonged to the royal English family, that’s what they’re like here, they believe in all that, even though they’re all dirty-footed gringos, descendents of Irish and Basque peasants who came here to dig ditches because the locals wouldn’t do it, the foreigners were the only ones willing to roll up their