The Foreigners (26 page)

“I can't get a signal,” he said, after a few minutes of holding my computer up near the windows. “Have you spoken to Leonarda?”

I shook my head.

“Why don't you call her? Maybe she knows something. Maybe she's even seen him since.”

I got up and found my phone. Instinctively, I'd wanted to keep my distance from Leonarda. But I was determined to do what Gabriel told me. I called.

The phone rang and rang. No answer.

“No answer,” I said, putting it down.

In the meantime, Gabriel had received a call. “Okay, okay, I'm leaving in a minute,” he said, exasperated, to whomever it was.

“Listen,” he now said to me. “I have to do a delivery, out to the suburbs. Then I'll come back. It should take me a few hours, no more than that. Just try to relax. Anything could've happened. Maybe he went out of town. The guy travels a lot. He left some food rotting. Or the sewer system's out.”

Once he was gone, I tried Leonarda again. I called and called her. This had never happened, that I'd called this much and she hadn't answered. I interpreted it as a terrible sign. She'd been caught. Or worse, and more likely, she'd disappeared, was leaving me to shoulder all the blame.

I checked my watch. Only a half an hour had passed since Gabriel had left. There was no way in hell I could wait here for hours.

I decided to go over to Miguel's again. Action, I had to take action.

I took a taxi. Again, I pictured police cars crowded together outside The Palace of Pigeons. Again, they weren't there. I didn't recognize the doorman on duty. He was young, must've been new. I said I was going to see Miguel. The indoor pillars, the polished floor. Again, I rang the bell.

There was silence for a moment, then a sound. A moment later, Miguel opened the door.

“Oh!” I said. I flushed. I was stammering. I could never have predicted being so happy to see him. He was wearing shorts, socks. “Please excuse me,” he said. I knew he didn't like to be seen in shorts and socks. While this had struck me as ridiculous before, now it seemed touching. He returned a moment later, changed into long pants.

He bowed and invited me in.

“So—you're all right?” I asked, still stammering.

“Yes, of course.” He smiled. Was it a smirk? I didn't care, I was so relieved. “Would you like a drink?” he asked, though it was just twelve noon.

“Sure,” I said. A drink sounded good.

He was already heading toward the kitchen. I looked around. Even his house seemed dear to me in this moment. It had been tidied, everything in its place.

He returned with a bottle of grappa, two small glasses. He poured us each a glass and sat down at his desk chair.

“How's your research project going?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. “I'm actually just writing up my report.”

I took a sip of grappa. I couldn't tell if it was the drink or just relief, this feeling of pleasure infusing my limbs.

“And your book?” I asked. He was at work on a new book.

“Fine, fine.”

“Will you be traveling to the States soon?” I knew that he'd been invited to appear on a panel at the University of Texas, Austin.

“In a month's time.”

“How long will you stay?”

“Not so long. Two and a half weeks.”

He served us each another finger of grappa.

We talked about American writers, their propensity to drink, the tradition of alcohol in American letters. We talked about newspapers.

“I only read
The New York Times
for the sports,” he said.

It was the conversation we might have had in the beginning, if we'd met under different circumstances.

As he sat there sipping his drink, almost ostentatiously dignified, he had a kind of melancholy about him that made me think of death. Not imminent death—that had been mercifully avoided—but eventual, inevitable death. The creature dies in the end. The anxiety of this is what makes him behave in any kind of crazy way, to make himself forget, avoid the thought.

It hadn't been there at first, but now I caught a vague whiff of the strange, rotten smell. My horror must have exaggerated it the night before. Still it was there. The creature dies in the end. But this was not the end. Far from it. In fact, more than anything, he seemed amused.

I'm amusing him, I thought. And, gradually, as my relief wore off, I began to feel ridiculous.

From the start, it had been clear that I lacked their sophistication, their grandiose imagination. But now I felt confronted even more blatantly by my American earnestness. I had actually thought that we had killed him. I'd pictured being on trial, locked up for murder. I remembered the other times I'd gotten frightened or outraged in the course of our encounters, like that day I'd stood up and left in a panic. All at once, everything seemed clear to me. My credulity had been essential to their amusement. After the last incident, Leonarda had probably just returned and untied him. They'd had a drink, laughed.

Suddenly, I felt the need to leave. Again, we engaged in our peculiar bowing ritual at the door.

“I'm glad to see you looking so well,” I said.

“Likewise,” he answered.

 

 

A s soon as I was back on the street again, I called Leonarda. She picked up.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“On a secret journey,” she said. “To the heart of the U.S. security system.”

I didn't care what she was talking about. “Listen, I have to talk to you. Where are you?”

“In a car.” This was also new. She was never in a car. “I can be dropped off wherever you are. Where are you?”

“By the zoo.”

“Okay, I'll meet you in ten minutes in front of the zoo.”

I waited. The zoo entrance was on a large roundabout. The car, whoever's car it was, must have dropped her off on the far side. She came running across the street, an iPod in her ears.

“Listen,” I said,“I want you to tell me clearly. What the fuck was that whole thing with Miguel?”

“What whole thing?” she asked, pulling the iPod out of her ears.

“That whole . . . thing. I just had a total freak-out. I thought we'd killed him, left him to die, tied up there.”

“Oh—” She was covering her mouth with her hand, laughing. “You're adorable.”

“Okay, Leonarda, stop with that.” I looked away. The elephants behind us were making noises.

“Should we go take a look at them?” Leonarda asked, craning her neck to see the elephants.

“No,” I answered. “Listen, I just went to see him, Miguel, to check, make sure he was okay. Now I feel like you were both laughing at me that whole time. There was nothing genuine—”

She interrupted me. “Oh, yes, it was genuine. It was beautiful, the way the whole plan unfolded.” She sounded rapturous. She also sounded like she was talking about something in the distant past.

I insisted on a question I had asked before. “And what was I in that plan?”

“You were perfect.”

“What do you mean, I was the perfect plaything?” I said it angrily, bitterly.

“No, no. You were always perfect.” Now she even looked like she had tears in her eyes. “You didn't disappoint me. That rarely happens.”

 

 

I went home and lay down on the floor, those words ringing in my mind. I hadn't disappointed her, whatever that meant. It was certainly a mixed compliment, but one that I felt too bewildered at the moment to understand. Later, I would have to go through and rethink everything. But now I needed to rest. I lay there, heart jumping, blood coursing in my veins, alive, unquestionably alive, if entirely unmoored.

Six months later, I was in the Boedo neighborhood again. I passed under a eucalyptus tree, tore some leaves off, crushed them, smelled them. Water was running out from under a closed door. I walked by, backed up, looked again. It rippled out onto the sidewalk, clear water. Thoughts or things I'd heard would float through my brain. We are living in the torrential present, water running under a door.

I had decided to stay on. The botanist had written me. He wanted me to do some research for him about the Argentine water hyacinth, one of the most notorious invasive plant species on the planet. Its reach was wide. It was currently causing major havoc in waterways in Africa, Asia and Australia, as well as the southern United States. A new effort was being launched to find a biological control agent to stem its growth. I could be part of it. He'd hooked me up with a lab.

“Good,” Gabriel had said when I told him. “Further study of the natives.” He flashed his demon smile.

“What about you?” I asked. “How are you doing?”

“Okay, though a weird thing's happening. I'm just not that interested in sex these days.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I mean, I have a meeting with a client and then I just don't feel like going. I've been thinking about medicine. I want to start studying again.”

I smiled. “‘Eros is life'?” I asked.

“Yeah, well, I'm beginning to think maybe it's just a part of life.”

Isolde had stopped working at the beauty parlor, moved in with Hernán and was expecting a child. I had just been out to see Vera. The territory on the far side of the river where the beauty parlor was had historically been considered outside the law. If you got in trouble in Buenos Aires, you could always gather your belongings, cross the bridge and disappear there. But when I arrived at the hairdresser's, it was Vera who had gone.

“She just picked up the other day and got on a bus,” the owner, Juana, said. “She didn't tell anyone where she was going.”

As I got waxed and had my toes done by a new woman, I kept returning to an image of Vera, sitting there alone on the bus. What could she be thinking? Her children had grown. She was setting out again on her own, writing for herself a secret history. In that moment, this history of hers seemed as precious to me as the histories of any of the great conquerors or queens.

Now I was on my way to an opening. It was in an upstairs gallery, a new place. Up ahead I saw figures I recognized, surely also on their way there. Downstairs from the gallery, the woman with the red hair and tilted head was locking her bike up to a tree. The steps inside were steep.

A little while later, I was ready to leave. I'd looked at the photos, had a few glasses of wine out on the terrace, talked to some people. Then I saw her, Leonarda, in a new guise, her hair up bouffant style. She had her glasses on and a deep fuchsia Sophia Loren–style dress. I hadn't seen her for over four months, though I'd heard that she'd gotten married to the famous, shy hacker and had started singing cabaret. I had been planning on dropping by one of her shows.

She was talking to the skydiver we'd met that time together at the nerd bar, the hacker, her new husband, standing on her other side. I looked closely at the hacker. Was he prey? Her hand was placed sweetly on his arm. Had she actually fallen in love? It was certainly possible. The one dependable thing about her was that she would change.

I had come up a few paces behind them with every intention of saying hello, but found myself pausing for a second to listen.

“I guess you're too evolved for that, right?” the skydiver was saying. “You've evolved so far into the future?”

Leonarda looked at him. “I'm not evolved. I
am
the future. I'm, like, post-human.”

A moment later, out on the street again, for no discernible reason, I felt myself invaded by a strange sort of happiness.

The sensitized streetlamps going on one by one. I walked along. Sometimes the street names were placed on the corners of the buildings, sometimes not. A dog paused, arched its back. There was graffiti on the walls. “To choose is to age.” Who said that? Who cares? I pictured myself taking a right, then a left, then a right again.

 

I'm grateful to readers Mary Gordan, Jin Auh, Alfredo Grieco, Jane Brodie, Bliss Broyard, Wendy Gosselin, Aoibheann Sweeney and Sarah McGrath; to the following people for conversations that helped illuminate the book, Nadia Tomchyshyna, Mauricio Corbalán, Ryan Tracy, Silke Bayer, Fundación Start, Marisela La Grave, Heather Goodwind, Luis Pérez, Samuel Arrues; to Yaddo and the Dora Maar House for artistic sanctuary; and, above all, to Martín Sivak.

Also by Maxine Swann