The Engineer of Avellanea

[theshadow603]

Corrado Bianchi — January 1920

The river was the colour of milky coffee, and it went on for so long that Corrado began to doubt it was a river at all.

For two days the Ravenna had been steaming up the Río de la Plata, and for two days the passengers in third class had crowded the rails each morning, expecting land, and each morning found only the same brown water stretching to a horizon flat as a ruled line. A Calabrian woman with three children told anyone who would listen that the sailors had lied and the ship was still at sea. Her husband, ashamed, told her to be quiet. The children, who had been sick since Gibraltar, were too tired to care.

Corrado stood a little apart from them, as he had stood apart for the whole crossing, with his one good coat buttoned against a wind that was not cold at all. It was summer here. That was one of the things he had known before he came, and it still surprised him, the way a fact can sit in the mind for years and still astonish the body.

He was thirty-four years old. He had a cardboard suitcase with two shirts in it, a set of drawing instruments wrapped in oilcloth, a letter of introduction to a man in Barracas who might or might not still be alive, and eleven hundred lire sewn into the lining of his coat by his mother, who had wept and then, characteristically, scolded him for making her weep. He had a diploma from the Politecnico of Turin, which was worth nothing here, and a reputation in Turin as a clever, difficult young engineer who did not get on with his superiors, which was worth even less.

And he had the other thing.

He did not have a name for it. He had tried names over the years, privately, the way a man might try names for a child he was not sure he wanted. The library was the one he came back to most often, because that was how it felt: as though somewhere behind his eyes there were stacks of books that went back and back into darkness, more books than any building on earth could hold, and if he walked down the right aisle with the right question in his mind, he would find the answer already written in a hand that was not his own.

It had come to him slowly, in his twenties, so slowly that for a long time he had thought he was simply becoming a good engineer. A problem with a turbine governor at the Fiat works would trouble him for a day, and then, walking home along the Po in the evening, he would see it: not guess, not reason, but see, as clearly as he saw the river, the shape of the solution and three better solutions behind it, and behind those, faintly, machines he did not have words for. He had learned, painfully, to offer only the first solution. The second made men suspicious. The third made them afraid.

He had also learned, more painfully, that some aisles of the library were better left unwalked.

There was one in particular. He came upon it sometimes in dreams and sometimes, worse, in waking moments when his attention slipped: a long, cold corridor of thinking machines. Not engines. Not the clever clockwork of an adding machine or a loom. Minds. Patient, tireless, multiplying minds made by men and then no longer needing men, and behind them a silence so complete that it seemed to swallow centuries. He did not know whether it was a memory or a warning or a sickness of his own imagination. He only knew that when he stood at the mouth of that corridor, his hands went cold and he could not breathe, and he would turn away and walk quickly back toward the shelves of honest things: steel, steam, copper, glass, the slow work of human hands.

He had told no one. Not his mother, not the priest, not the girl in Moncalieri he had nearly married. A man who says he carries a library in his head is either a fool or a madman, and Italy in 1919 had enough of both.

So he had come to the end of the world, where no one knew him, to see what an honest engineer could build.

---

On the third morning the river changed. There were masts, first, a forest of them, and then low grey sheds and the smoke of a hundred chimneys, and then all at once the whole city rose up out of the water as if someone had lifted a lid: domes and towers, warehouses with English names, cranes, a cathedral, and along the shore a long line of brick and iron that the passengers learned to call the Dársena Norte.

The Calabrian woman began to cry again, this time differently.

The disembarkation took the whole of the day. There were doctors who looked at eyes and throats and lifted children's hair to search for lice. There were clerks who wrote names wrongly and refused to correct them. There were men in straw hats moving among the crowd, quietly offering work, rooms, money, women, passage onward to Rosario or Mendoza or the sheep country in the south, and Corrado watched them with the attention of a man watching a machine whose purpose he did not yet understand.

At the Hotel de Inmigrantes, a great white building like a barracks that smelled of carbolic and boiled beef, he was given a bed in a dormitory of two hundred men, a bowl of stew, and five days in which to find a living. He ate the stew. He lay awake on the bed listening to two hundred men breathe and murmur in a dozen dialects: Piedmontese and Genoese, Sicilian, Neapolitan, the soft Spanish of the Galicians, the hard consonants of Russian Jews, a single Englishman who snored like a pump. He thought: this is the raw material. Not steel. Not coal. These.

In the morning he walked out into the city.

It was bigger than Turin and less finished. The avenues were absurdly wide, built for a future that had not yet arrived, and along them ran electric trams so crowded that boys rode on the steps and the roofs. There were automobiles, more than he had expected, most of them American, and every few streets he saw one stopped at the kerb with its bonnet open and a man in shirtsleeves staring at its insides in despair. There were telephone wires strung in great black webs between the buildings. There were horses still, and carts, and in the poorer streets the conventillos, tenement houses built around narrow courtyards where whole families lived in single rooms and the washing hung like flags.

And there was nothing, he noticed, nothing at all, that Argentina made for itself. The trams were British. The rails were British. The automobiles were American, the electrical fittings German, the cement Belgian, the telephones Swedish, the ships Italian and British and Dutch. The city was a vast, handsome shop window, full of goods made elsewhere and paid for with wheat and beef and wool. When the war in Europe had cut the shipping lanes, he had read, the country had run short of everything from machine parts to matches.

He stood for a long time in the Plaza de Mayo, looking at the pink government house and the crowd of clerks and porters and messenger boys flowing around it, and he felt the library stir behind his eyes, not with any particular answer, but with a kind of hunger.

---

The letter of introduction was useless. The man in Barracas had died in the influenza of 1918, his widow said through a half-opened door, and his workshop had been sold to a Spaniard who made coffins. She looked at Corrado's diploma with polite incomprehension and closed the door.

He walked south, because the widow had said that south, across the Riachuelo, was where the factories were. The Riachuelo turned out to be a narrow, stinking creek choked with lighters and barges, its banks lined with meatpacking plants and tanneries and warehouses whose drains ran directly into the water. A swing bridge carried the traffic across it, and on the far side began Avellaneda: a flat, sprawling town of brick sheds, railway sidings, smoke, and mud, as ugly as anything he had ever seen, and humming with work.

He walked along the first street he came to, reading the signs. Herrería. Tornería. Fundición. Smithy, turnery, foundry. Most were small: a single room open to the street, a forge, a lathe driven by a belt from an overhead shaft, two or three men. Some were large, behind walls, with the names of British and Argentine companies on their gates. None of them, as far as he could tell, needed a clever, difficult engineer from Turin.

In the middle of the afternoon, when the heat lay on the street like a wet blanket, he stopped outside a workshop with a hand-painted sign that read Ferrero — Reparaciones Mecánicas. Inside, in the shade, a man of about his own age was lying on his back underneath a Ford truck, swearing steadily in Piedmontese.

Corrado had not heard his own dialect spoken by a stranger since Genoa. He stood in the doorway and listened, and some of the swearing was so specific, and so familiar, that he laughed out loud.

The man slid out from under the truck on a wheeled board. He was stocky, black-haired, with forearms like a stevedore's and a face so smeared with grease that only his eyes and teeth showed.

"You find something funny?"

"Your opinion of Mr. Ford's mother," said Corrado, in Piedmontese. "My uncle in Chieri used to say the same of the tax collector."

The man stared at him for a moment, then grinned. "Where are you from?"

"Turin."

"Asti. Aldo Ferrero." He wiped his hand on his trousers and held it out, then looked at it, thought better of it, and wiped it again. "You just off a boat?"

"Yesterday."

"Looking for work."

"Yes."

"Can you do anything?"

"I'm an engineer."

Aldo Ferrero laughed, not unkindly. "So is every second man on every boat. In Italy a man fixes a doorbell, he's an engineer." He jerked his head at the truck. "This belongs to a meat company. It stopped this morning on the Avenida Mitre with half a tonne of beef in the back, and if I don't get it running before the beef starts to smell, the meat company will stop paying me, and then I'll be looking for work too. So." He lay back down on the board. "If you're an engineer, tell me why it won't start."

Corrado set down his suitcase.

He did not touch the truck. He walked around it once, slowly, the way he had walked around the turbines at the Fiat works. He listened to the silence of it. He looked at the wiring, at the crusted terminals of the coil, at the place where someone had replaced a length of cable with wire of the wrong gauge and wound it with tape. He crouched and looked at the fuel line where it ran close to the exhaust. And as he looked, the library behind his eyes did what it always did, quietly and without drama: it opened, and he saw the truck the way a doctor sees an X-ray, every part and every fault laid out in a cool, pale light.

"Three things," he said. "The fuel is boiling in the line where it passes the exhaust, because someone moved the clip that held it away. So the carburettor is getting vapour, not petrol. That's why it stopped in the heat. Second, the coil terminal is corroded and the contact is poor, so even when the fuel is right, the spark is weak. Third, whoever spliced that cable used wire too thin for the current. It will start a fire one day. Probably soon."

Aldo Ferrero slid out from under the truck again and sat up. He looked at Corrado, then at the fuel line, then at the coil, then at the splice. He did not say anything for a while.

"How did you see the fuel line from there?" he said at last.

"I looked."

"I've been under it for two hours."

"You were looking at the engine," said Corrado. "The engine is fine."

They fixed it together, which took forty minutes. Corrado moved the clip and wrapped the line in asbestos cord from Aldo's stores. He cleaned the coil terminal with a file and a rag. He replaced the splice with proper cable and showed Aldo, without being asked, how to make a joint that would not loosen with vibration. When Aldo pressed the starter, the truck coughed twice and then ran, smoothly, filling the shed with blue smoke and the smell of hot oil, and Aldo whooped like a boy and slapped the bonnet.

The driver from the meat company came at five, took his truck, and paid in coins. Aldo counted them twice, then pushed half across the bench to Corrado.

"No," said Corrado. "It's your shop."

"It's my shop," Aldo agreed. "But it was your eyes." He pushed the coins further. "Take them, or I'll be insulted, and when a man from Asti is insulted it lasts three generations."

Corrado took them.

---

They ate that evening at a fonda by the bridge, where the owner was Genoese and the wine was rough and black and cost almost nothing. Aldo talked. He had come over in 1912, he said, with a brother who had gone on to the sugar country in Tucumán and died of fever. He had worked at the British railway workshops at Remedios de Escalada for five years, learning everything there was to learn about steam locomotives and some things, he said darkly, about the English, and then he had saved enough to rent the shed and set up for himself. He fixed trucks, pumps, lathes, bicycles, sewing machines, anything with a moving part. He was busy every day and poor every night, because his customers were poor too, and half of them paid in promises.

"There's money here," he said, tearing bread. "You can feel it. Look at this place. Every factory, every truck, every pump on every estancia, every tram, all of it comes from England or America or Germany, and when it breaks, nobody knows how to fix it, and when it wears out, you can't get the parts for six months. A man who could make things here instead of fixing them..." He shrugged. "But you need capital, and the capital is all in land and cattle, and the men with the capital don't trust anyone who works with his hands. So."

"So," said Corrado.

He was looking past Aldo's shoulder, out through the open door of the fonda, at the bridge. A tram was crossing it, lit from inside, a box of yellow light full of tired faces swaying over the black water. Beyond it, on the city side, the electric lights of Buenos Aires were coming on, street by street, as some unseen engineer in some unseen station threw the switches. British switches. British dynamos, probably, burning British coal shipped six thousand miles.

In the library, without his asking, an aisle had lit up. He could see down it a long way. He saw small things first, the things a man with a shed and a lathe and a friend from Asti could make: parts for trucks, pumps, simple electric motors. Then, behind them, other things: valves of glass with glowing filaments, the kind that were just beginning to carry voices through the air in Europe and America; small engines that would run on crude oil and light a village; lines of copper running out across the flat brown land to towns that had never seen an electric lamp. And behind those, far down the aisle, so far that they were only shapes in the half-dark, things that made his heart beat faster and his mouth go dry: great structures of steel standing on cold plains, columns of fire, and something small and bright falling up, and up, and up.

He put his glass down carefully, because his hand was not quite steady.

"You all right?" said Aldo.

"Yes," said Corrado. "Tired. The boat."

"You've got a bed?"

"At the immigrants' hotel. Four more nights."

Aldo considered him for a while, chewing. "There's a cot in the back of the shop," he said. "It's hot and there are rats, but the rats are Argentine rats and they keep to themselves. You can sleep there if you want. I can't pay you. But if you can do what you did today, every day, then in a month maybe I can pay you, and in a year..." He grinned his black-faced grin. "In a year, who knows. Maybe we'll be engineers."

"Maybe," said Corrado.

They shook hands on it, there in the fonda, over the bread and the black wine. Neither of them thought it was anything very important. Neither of them would have believed, if someone had told them, what that handshake would one day hold up.

---

He slept badly that first night on the cot behind the shop. The heat did not break. The rats, Argentine or not, did not keep entirely to themselves. Somewhere on the Riachuelo a ship's horn sounded at intervals, long and mournful, and the smell of the meatpacking plants came in through the cracks in the wall, sweet and rotten.

At about three in the morning he gave up, put on his trousers, and went out into the yard.

The sky over Avellaneda was enormous and strange. He had read about it, of course; he had read about everything. But reading was not the same as standing under it. The stars were wrong. The familiar shapes he had grown up with were gone or upside down, and in their place hung constellations whose names he knew only from books: the Southern Cross, tilted on its side above the rooftops; the two pale smudges of the Magellanic Clouds; the great blazing river of the Milky Way, so bright here, so far from the smoke of Europe, that it seemed almost to cast a shadow.

The moon was down. He found that he was glad of it, without knowing why.

He stood in the yard for a long time with his hands in his pockets. He thought about his mother in her kitchen in Turin, about the girl in Moncalieri, about the cold corridor of thinking machines that waited at the back of his mind and that he had promised himself, a long time ago, never to walk down. He thought about the Calabrian woman weeping at the rail when the city rose out of the water. He thought about the trams and the dynamos and the British switches, and the men in shirtsleeves staring hopelessly into the bonnets of American cars.

Honest things, he told himself. Steel and copper and glass. Things a man can build with his hands and understand with his head. Start there. Start small. Tell no one.

Behind him, in the shed, Aldo Ferrero snored like a pump.

Corrado went back inside, lay down on the cot, and slept until the meat company's trucks began to grind past in the grey light of morning, and the first customer of the day was banging on the shutter with a broken water pump and no money to pay.