Authors: Ricardo Piglia
She was working shifts in a night-club and came from across the River Negro. She wanted to save money and invest it in something for herself, in another part of the city, possibly near Mercado, where there were some decent bars, an area the queers didn't frequent, or any lowlife, none of the cheap negroes who came down from the slums on the Cerro. She liked Argentines because they were educated and because they had a distinguished accent. She, in her turn, had a very archaic manner of speaking, because she came from the interior, and because she said whatever came into her head. She was genuine. Or she seemed genuine, perhaps a little affected, but naturally so, as if she were a lady from an earlier epoch (as though she was playing at what that sort of lady might be like). Didn't he remember the outfits he saw as a child in the pages of the
Billiken
magazine? For sure she did, and she reeled off the titles: 'The Lion of France'; 'The Dutchwoman'; 'The Old Lady'. The youngster was a simple country girl, but she gave herself an air of grandeur, something at once authentic and theatrical, and which pleased him. The girl could have been a sister to him and, at one and the same time, a lost woman. He'd always wanted to have a sister, a young and beautiful woman, in whom he could confide and whom he would have been obliged to keep his body well away from. A woman his own age, lovely to see, with whom he'd be proud to be seen, without anyone needing to know she was his sister. He felt as much, and after a little while, told her as much, straight out.
'Your sister, you'd like me to be your sister?' the girl smiled in surprise, and the Kid roughly replied: 'Why? What's so funny about that?'
Like every guy who plays the man's role with their male partners (the girl was to explain later), the Kid was very touchy on the question of his masculinity.
The Kid was utterly fed up of going with bum boys. Every so often he got sick of it. At present he didn't want a single one of those boys circling the square to look at him, he'd known them under other circumstances, in a fleeting meeting, in toilets that stank of disinfectant, where monstrous acts were described and phrases of love were inscribed on the walls. There names were written up as if names of the gods, hearts were drawn with inartistic ardour, gigantic organs, depicted like sacred birds along the walls of the urinals in the stations and on the flip-up seats in the El Hindu cinema and in the cloakrooms of numerous clubs. He would suddenly feel the urge to humiliate himself, it came on like a sickness, or like grace descending, a breath in his heart, something you have no way of preventing. The same blind force which draws the person who experiences an irresistible desire to enter a church and make a confession. He would kneel in front of these unknown guys, bowing down (it would be better to say, or maybe he'd actually said so, added the girl) before them as though they were gods, knowing the whole time that the least false move, the faintest insinuation of a smile, of a joke, could lead him to kill them, that a mere false gesture was sufficient, one word too many, for them to die with an expression of shock and horror on their faces and a knife buried in their stomachs. They who stripped off their clothes, stock still like kings before him, had no idea of who he was, they never imagined, they were incapable of intuiting the risk they were running. The Kid might be powerful but he was kneeling there on the ground, nauseous from the smell of disinfectant, while some unknown pervert talked to him then paid him. Or was it he who paid? He could never clearly recall what he'd done the previous night, nor the night before last, during his escapades in the harbour bars and his pickups in the El Hindu cinema. He could only recall the irresistible pull that got him to his feet and out on to the street, it was like a euphoria, that left him incapable of thought (he told the girl, according to her later declaration), left him without any thoughts at all, vacant and free, tied to one idea alone. It's like looking for something under a white light and in the middle of the road. It's irresistible. Until afterwards, somewhat disoriented, as if emerging from a dream, he went back to the flat where Malito was waiting for him, and where everyone was waiting for Nando to help them across to Brazil, and whenever he arrived there the Gaucho was huddled in silent withdrawal, maybe he was furious, locked in what he called his 'filthy pad', in a corner, upstairs, at the top of the stairwell. But she didn't pass on any of this information (it was the Gaucho who did) because the girl thought the Kid was a smuggler who trafficked in English cashmere, who lived off the anthill that controlled contraband manufacturing, and who had his vices, like all the guys the girl had ever met since she came to the city.
But the Kid, in contrast (and he himself said as much), felt sane and safe with this girl, as if there were no possible danger in being around her, he only had to let himself be carried along by her for a while, far from the Blond Gaucho, the twin, and well away from the Crow, just for a while, like a normal sort of guy.
Meanwhile destiny had begun preparing its drama, weaving its intrigue, knotting off the last piece of wool (this was the youth's description when he wrote up the crime page for
El Mundo
), tying up all the loose threads of what those ancient Greeks were talking about when they said
muthos.
'I've got a place near here. Some of the boys in the cabaret lend it to me, and they're never around,' she told him.
The flat had two bedrooms and a lounge and was in utter chaos: unwashed dishes piled high in the kitchen, leftover dope and food dropped on the floor, the girl's clothes hanging out of an open suitcase. There were two beds in one room, and a sofa and a mattress lying on a board on the floor of the other.
'A woman comes and cleans, but only on Mondays.'
'Who uses the place? It's a tip,' said the Kid.
'It belongs to some friends from the club where I work, I've already told you that. They let me use it during the week and on Saturday nights I go back to the hostel.'
The Kid took a turn around the pad, looked through the windows that gave on to an inner courtyard, at the passage that gave on to a staircase.
'And upstairs, what's there?'
'Another apartment and a flat roof.' She searched behind the bed and came out with a 45 r.p.m. record. 'Do you happen to like Head and Body
...
'
'What are you, telepathic?
...
Of course I like them, better than the Rolling…'
'That's it,' she said. 'They're fab, brilliant.'
'When I was a child I was clairvoyant,' the Kid chuckled to himself. 'But I had a problem and it cost me my psychic power.'
She looked at him, amused, convinced the guy was having her on.
'An accident?'
'Well, not me exactly, some friends who were travelling with me in the car began to mess about. We were all drunk - I used to drink gin in those days
...
I ended up inside. And I stopped seeing what I'd seen as a child.'
'Drinking is rough, I prefer hash,' the girl replied and perched on the arm of a chair to roll a marijuana joint. She looked like a hippie, the Kid suddenly noticed. A Uruguayan hippie, with those long clothes and her little pigtails, and she also worked in a cabaret, that was too much.
'For example, as a boy I saw my Uncle Federico who'd died two years earlier and talked to him too.'
She looked seriously and attentively at him, preparing the joint with deft movements. He told her the story when they began to smoke, because it was like talking about a period of life he'd lost, he'd never spoken to anybody when he was young, from the earliest times to the dead times in which he'd begun repeatedly getting locked up.
'My Uncle Federico was a great guy, who went under two or three times, but he always came up again ahead. He lived in Tandil, and I'd go and visit and stay over with him. He had a garage, and he fixed Kaiser cars, he did well out of it, but then one afternoon his son was struck by an explosion in the fusion welding, a really stupid accident, as there was an exposed cable which short-circuited, and my uncle ended up watching his son die. From that moment on, my uncle let himself go, didn't want to see anyone, spent the entire day stretched out on his bed with the Venetian blinds down, smoking and drinking
mate
{11}
and pondering. He emptied out his
mate
on to some newspapers in the flat, and in the end there was a sort of green island of dried herbs in the middle of the bedroom, and he wouldn't let anyone come in, not even to open the curtains,' or so the Kid related, according to the girl some time later, 'and just kept saying that he'd get up the next day. I went to visit him one afternoon and he was still there, lying in bed with his face to the wall, without doing anything. "Hi, Kid, how're you doing, when did you get here?" he said, as usual. Then he stayed silent for a while. "I've no great wish to get up," he said. "Do me a favour, buy me a pack of Particulares Fuertes." And when I got to the door he called me back. "Kid," he said, "better still, buy me two packs, then I'll have some in stock."
'That was the last time I saw Uncle Federico alive,' said the Kid and took a long, deep drag of his spliff and smelt the acrid smoke, first in his throat and then at the bottom of his lungs, 'because he died within the week, and from then on he began appearing to me with monotonous regularity.' He gave a belly laugh, as though he'd cracked a particularly funny joke. He couldn't stop giggling and the girl started to join in while they passed the joint back and forth. 'It was really weird, because he was dead, and I could see him plainly, stood there in front of me, knowing he was dead, but this didn't seem to matter at all. At this time I must have been more or less the same age as Cholito when he died, some sixteen or seventeen years old, so that was why he appeared to me, no doubt, as if I were his son. If I came up close, say at a distance from here to the wall (when I saw him of course I knew it was a hallucination, but I saw him just as well as I'm seeing you), he'd be smoking a cigarette, and saying nothing to me. He smiled. Even when I spoke to him, he didn't hear, he just stayed put, smoking, partly hunched over, the ash forever on the point of dropping off the end of his cigarette. All he did was smile.' He suddenly started laughing, the Kid did, realizing how much he'd related to the girl. 'It was a ghost
...
And it appeared to me. I've never told anyone, but it's the truth.'
'I know,' she said, handing him the spliff. 'That's what I meant when I said there was something about you I found disconcerting. I mean you look as if you come from around here, but your spirit comes from somewhere else
...
' Hash, because it turned out to be hash rather than marijuana, made her speak slowly, as though she chose each word very carefully. 'What are you doing on this side of the River?'
'I'm passing through. On my way to Mexico
...
I've a friend living in Guanajuato
...
Poor thing
...
' he said, with nobody particular in mind. Could he be thinking of the Uruguayan girl or of his friend, the Queen, who'd gone to live in Guanajuato because he was sick of living in the capital? He'd also been thinking of his mother, of course, she was a poor thing, who by now must be aware that he was being hunted by the police, along with the rest of the world. 'My mother wanted me to study architecture. She wanted to have a son who created houses, because my dad ran a construction business.'
Smoking made him melancholy, it was always the same, it made him sad and made him relax, both at the same time, he felt slow and lucid.
'Me too, I'm passing through
...
I left home. Wait, I'd almost forgotten,' said the girl and quickly held out to him the butt of her joint clamped in a pair of eyebrow tweezers, then fell to her knees and started rummaging under the bed.
From somewhere way underneath she pulled out a Winco player and put a record on the turntable. It was a record with two sides by Head and Body (the tunes were 'Parallel Lives' and 'Brave Captain' and the girl had been listening to them for months on end, the entire time, without letting up, always the same, first one and then the other side until they'd both become scratched).
'Shall we play it?'
'Of course
...
' said the Kid.
'It's the only record I have,' said the girl.
'Parallel Lives' began playing at full blast, and they moved their bodies to the rhythm and smoked the marijuana spliff down so low they burned their lips on the butt. They could hear the throbbing music through the cheap record-player, it vibrated just as obsessively, and the two began to chorus in English along with the rock and roll.
I spent all my money in a Mexican whorehouse
Across the street from a Catholic church.
And if I can find a book of matches
I'm goin' to burn this hotel down
...
He and the girl sang along together, in descant, in a rough sort of English, copying the phonetics of the music with alternately merry and angry yelps.
When the record finished, the Kid sat down on the rumpled bed beside her and took her hand (which was very cold) and pressed it to himself with a sensation of strangeness and loss. Then he closed his eyes.
'Kid,' she said, speaking in a muddled manner but with great emotion, as though she were uttering profound truths. 'I know the scene only too well. You need to pretend that nothing matters to you at all and carry on in there with all those to whom nothing really does matter at all, or you'll drown in it all.'
He looked at her, waiting for what was to come, and she propped herself on one elbow and then, after a long pause, kissed him on the mouth. The girl had a confused and passionate way of speaking which he liked, as if she wanted to give the impression of being more serious and intellectual than she was, using words he couldn't follow at all.
'You're searching for something unknown and so you end up falling into despair,' she said and then hummed the next tune ('Brave Captain') by Head and Body which rang out forcefully, like a harder and fiercer version of the life they were leading.