Target in the Night Read Online Free Page A

the State under pretext of keeping internal prices stable. He taught his daughters his own moral code and let them do whatever they wanted, raising them as if they were boys.
    Ever since they were little the Belladona sisters were rebellious. They were audacious, they competed with each other all the time, with tenacity and delight, not to differentiate themselves, but to sharpen their symmetry and to learn to what extent they were really identical. They’d go out on horseback and explore the night like viscachas, in winter, in the frost-covered countryside. They’d go along the ravine and into the swampy ground crawling with black crabs. They’d bathe naked in the rough lake that gave its name to the town and hunt ducks with the double-barreled rifle their father bought them when they turned thirteen. They were very developed for their age, as they say, so no one was surprised when—almost overnight—they stopped going hunting and horseback riding and playing fútbol with the country laborers, to become young society ladies who sent out to have their identical clothes made in an English shop in the capital. With time they went to study agronomy at the university in La Plata, following the wish of their father, who wanted them in charge of the fields soon. People said that they were always together, that they passed their exams easily because they knew the countrysidebetter than their teachers, that they shared their boyfriends, and that they wrote their mother letters to recommend books and to ask her for money.
    Around that time the father suffered the accident that left him half paralyzed, so the sisters abandoned their studies and came back to town. There were several versions of what had happened to the old man. That his horse had thrown him when he was surprised by a swarm of locusts from the north, and that he spent the whole night lying in the middle of the field, his face covered with the insects and their razor-sharp legs. That he suffered some kind of stroke when he was screwing a Paraguayan at Bizca’s brothel and that the girl had saved his life, almost without realizing it, because she went on giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Or also, that one afternoon he discovered, or so people said, that someone very close to him had been poisoning him. He didn’t want to believe it might be one of his sons. Apparently, someone had been adding a few drops of the liquid used to kill ticks in the whiskey he drank at the end of every day, at dusk, on his flower-filled balcony. By the time they realized what it was, the poison had done part of its job, and from that point on the old man couldn’t walk anymore. In any case, before long the family was not seen around town anymore. The father because he stayed in his house and never went out; and the sisters because, after taking care of their father for a few months, they grew bored of being locked in and decided to go abroad.
    Unlike all their friends who were going to Europe, the sisters went to the United States. They spent time in California, then crossed the continent by train on a trip that took several weekswith long stops in various cities along the way, until they reached the East Coast around the beginning of the northern winter. They spent the trip staying in large hotels, gambling wherever they could along the way, living the life and playing the part of South American heiresses in search of adventure in the land of upstarts and the nouveau riche.
    This was the news about the Belladona sisters that reached town. The information arrived with the evening train that left the mail in large canvas bags on the station platform. It was Sosa, the post office agent, who reconstructed the itinerary of the young women from the postmarks on the envelopes addressed to their father. Complemented by the detailed stories of the travelers and businessmen who came to the bar of the Plaza Hotel to recount what was rumored about the twins among