What We Become

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Buenos Aires is many cities,” he remarked. “Although basically it is two: the city of success and the city of failure.”

  Mecha Inzunza and Max had been lunching near La Ferroviaria, at a restaurant called El Puentecito, a fifteen-minute drive from the Caboto boardinghouse. Before that, stepping out of the Pierce-Arrow (the silent Petrossi was still driving, and not once did he look at Max in his rearview mirror), they had a drink at a bar near the railway station, leaning on the marble counter beneath a large photograph of the Barracas Football Club and a sign that said, Please refrain from drunk and disorderly behavior and don’t spit on the floor. She had a grenadine with sparkling water and he a Cora vermouth with a dash of Amer Picon, and as they sipped their drinks amid the inquisitive glances, they heard voices speaking in Spanish and Italian belonging to men with copper chains dangling from their waistcoats, who played cards, smoking and hawking as they deposited thick gobbets of phlegm in the spittoons. It was she who insisted that Max invite her to the modest restaurant where his father used to take the family on Sundays, the one he had told her about the night before. Once there, she seemed to enjoy the dish of ravioli and the barbecued meat washed down with a bottle of rough, heady wine from the Mendoza region that a lively Spanish waiter recommended.

  “I get ravenous when I make love,” she had said calmly.

  Exhausted accomplices, they gazed at each other lengthily during lunch, neither making any explicit reference to what had happened at the boardinghouse on Almirante Brown. Mecha was the epitome of calm (absolutely self-assured, Max noticed with astonishment) while he reflected about what it might mean for his own present and future. Those thoughts occupied him for the remainder of the meal, concealed behind the façade of his perfect manners. However, he was frequently distracted from his scheming, seized by an inner spasm at the fresh intense memory of her warm vibrant body, as she in turn peered at him over her raised glass. Pensive, as though observing with renewed curiosity the man in front of her.

  “I’d like to go for a stroll,” she said later in the car. “Along the Riachuelo.”

  She wanted to walk part of the way through the neighborhood around La Boca. She asked Petrossi to stop, and the two of them began walking on the north side of the Vuelta de Rocha, followed by the car which, with its silent chauffeur at the wheel, inched along on the left-hand side of the street. In the distance, beyond the black wooden hull and exposed timber frame of a half-submerged sailboat beside the shore (Max remembered playing there as a boy), they could see the imposing structure of the giant transporter bridge.

  “I brought you a present,” she said, placing a small package in Max’s hands. He undid the wrapping paper to find a long leather case with a wristwatch inside: a splendid Longines, with a square, gold face, Roman numerals, and a second hand.

  “Why?” he inquired.

  “A whim. I saw it in a shopwindow on Calle Florida and wondered how it would look on your wrist.”

  She helped him set the correct time, wind it up, and fasten it. Mecha said it looked attractive. It did indeed look extremely attractive on Max’s bronzed wrist, with its leather strap and gold buckle. An elegant watch that suited him. “Your hands were made to wear watches like that,” she added.

  “I don’t suppose this is the first time a woman has given you something.”

  He looked at her blankly, feigning indifference.

  “Possibly . . . I don’t remember.”

  “Of course you don’t. And I wouldn’t forgive you if you did.”

  There were cafés and bars near the shore, some of which had a seedy ambience by night. Beneath the brim of her cloche hat Mecha studied the men lounging in their shirtsleeves, vests, and caps, sitting at tables in doorways, or on benches in squares, where horse-driven carts and trucks were parked. It was in such places, Max had heard it said in his house years before, that you learned the philosophy of the different races: the melancholy Italians; suspicious Jews; brutish, brutal Germans; and stubborn Spaniards, intoxicated with envy and murderous pride.

  “They still step off the boats the way my father did,” he said. “Eager to fulfill their dreams. . . . Many fall by the wayside, rotting like those timber boats stranded in the swamp. They begin by sending money to the wives and children they have left behind in Asturias, Calabria, Poland. . . . In the end, life wears them down, and they fade away in the squalor of a tavern or a cheap brothel. Sitting at a table, alone, in front of a bottle that never asks questions.”

  Mecha was looking at four washerwomen walking toward them carrying enormous baskets of damp laundry, their faces prematurely aged, their hands raw from the soap and scrubbing brushes. Max could have given each of them a name and a story, for those hands and faces, or others identical to them, were part of his childhood.

  “The women have a better chance at life, the pretty ones, anyway,” he added. “For a while, at least. Before motherhood wears them out, if they are lucky. Or if they are unlucky, depending on how you look at it, and they become the theme of tango songs.”

  His last comment had made her turn to look at him with renewed interest.

  “Are there many prostitutes?”

  “Just imagine.” Max embraced the surroundings with a sweep of his hand. “A country of immigrants, most of them men. There are organizations that ship women over from Europe. . . . Some specialize in Russians, Romanians, and Poles. They buy them for two or three thousand pesos, and in less than a year make their money back.”

  He heard Mecha give a dry, humorless laugh.

  “How much would they pay for me?”

  He didn’t reply, and they walked on in silence for a while.

  “What do you want from the future, Max?”

  “To stay alive as long as possible, I suppose.” He shrugged, in earnest. “To have what I need.”

  “You won’t be young and handsome forever. What about your old age?”

  “I don’t think about it. I have plenty to keep me busy until then.”

  He gave her a sidelong glance. She was observing everything as she walked, mouth slightly open, almost marveling at the newness of what she saw. Like a hunter at the ready, Max concluded, as if she wanted to imprint each scene indelibly on her memory: the brick and timber houses, with their tin roofs painted red and green bordering a rusty railway track; the honeysuckle peeping out over the patio fences and walls with broken bottles along the top; the plane trees and ceiba trees whose crimson flowers daubed the street with color. She moved languidly, studying each detail with interest, yet as easy in her manner as she had been three hours earlier while strolling naked around Max’s room with the nonchalance of a queen in her bedchamber. The patch of sunlight from the window had silhouetted the flowing contours of her astonishingly supple body, casting a golden light on the soft, curly down between her thighs.

  “What about you?” Max asked. “You won’t be young and beautiful forever either.”

  “I have money. I had it before I married. . . . It’s old money now, at ease with itself.”

  There had been no hesitation in her reply, which was calm, objective. She underlined her words with a look of disdain. “You’d be surprised how much simpler things become when you have money.”

  He laughed out loud.

  “I think I might have some idea.”

  “No. I doubt you do.”

  They stood aside to let an ice vendor pass. He was bent double beneath the weight of the huge, dripping block on his back, cushioned by a scrap of rubber.

  “You’re right,” said Max. “It isn’t easy to put oneself in a rich man’s shoes.”

  “Armando and I aren’t rich. Simply well-off.”

  Max pondered the difference. They had paused next to a rail that ran alongside the path, following the Rocha bend in the river. Glancing behind him, he could see that the efficient Petrossi had stationed the car a little farther back.
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br />   “Why did you marry?”

  She was looking at the boats, the barges, and the gigantic structure of the transporter bridge.

  “Armando is a fascinating man . . . When I met him, he was already a successful composer. Life with him promised to be a whirlwind of excitement. Friends, concerts, travels . . . I would undoubtedly have experienced those things sooner or later. But he enabled me to do so much earlier than I expected. To leave home and to embrace life.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Why do you speak in the past tense?” Mecha went on looking at the bridge. “Anyway, it’s a strange question, coming from a man who dances in hotels and on transatlantic liners.”

  Max touched the sweatband of his hat, which now was dry. He put it back on his head, tipping the brim over his right eye.

  “Why me?”

  She had been watching his movements, as though studying every detail with interest. Approvingly. Hearing Max’s question, her eyes twinkled with amusement.

  “I knew you had a scar even before I saw it.”

  His bewilderment seemed to amuse her, and she suppressed a smile. An hour before, without questions or comments, Mecha had caressed that mark on his skin, pressing her lips to it, licking the drops of perspiration that made his chest glisten just above the scar the bullet had left when seven years ago he had climbed the hillside with his comrades, weaving between the rocks and shrubs as the dawn mist dissolved on that Day of the Dead.

  “There are men whose eyes and smiles contain something,” Mecha added after a moment, as if he deserved an explanation. “Men who carry ’round an invisible suitcase, filled with heavy things.”

  Now she was looking at his hat, the knot in his tie, the middle button of his jacket, done up. Appraisingly.

  “And also, you’re good-looking and easygoing. Devilishly handsome . . .”

  He didn’t know why she seemed to appreciate that he said nothing.

  “I like your coolheadedness, Max,” she went on. “So similar to mine, in some ways.”

  She stood gazing at him for a moment. Spellbound. Completely still. Then she lifted her hand to stroke his chin, apparently indifferent to whether Petrossi could see her from the car.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “I like the fact that there’s no way I can trust you.”

  She started walking again and Max followed, keeping level with her as he tried to assimilate all she had said. Trying hard to contain his bewilderment. They passed an old man turning the handle of an old Rinaldi barrel organ, which churned out “The Corn Cob” while the horse yoked to the cart released a copious stream of frothy urine onto the cobblestones.

  “Shall we go to La Ferroviaria again tomorrow?”

  “Certainly. If that’s what your husband wants.”

  Her tone sounded different. Almost frivolous.

  “I have seldom seen Armando so excited. . . . Last night, back at the hotel, he could talk of nothing else, and he stayed up very late, in his pajamas, unable to sleep, jotting things down, filling ashtrays, and humming. ‘That buffoon Ravel will be eating his bolero, on toast,’ he kept saying and chuckling. . . . He is terribly upset about the engagement tonight at the Teatro Colón. The League of Spanish Patriots, or some such, are holding a concert in his honor. And the evening will apparently finish with a tango show at a high-class cabaret called Les Folies Bergère. In full evening dress. Can you imagine anything more dreadful?”

  “Will you go with him?”

  “Naturally. You don’t imagine I would let him go there on his own, with all those perfumed she-wolves on the prowl.”

  They would meet tomorrow, she added a moment later. If Max had no other plans, they could send the car around to Almirante Brown, at about seven. Then go for a drink, at the Richmond, for example, and dine at a nice place downtown. She had heard about a smart new restaurant called Las Violetas, if she remembered correctly. And another at the top of a tower on Calle Florida, near Pasaje Güemes.

  “It isn’t necessary.” Max had no wish to meet Armando de Troeye on difficult territory or to engage in lengthy conversation with him. “I’ll meet you at the Palace and we’ll go straight to Barracas. . . . I have things to do downtown.”

  “It’s your turn to tango this time. With me.”

  “Of course.”

  They were about to cross the street when they heard a tram bell ring behind them, and they pulled up. It went by at full throttle, the trolley pole sliding below the electric cables slung between posts and buildings, long and green, empty, save for the driver and the uniformed ticket collector, who stared at them from the platform.

  “Your life is shrouded in mystery, Max. . . . That scar as well as everything else. Why you went to Paris and why you left.”

  An awkward topic, he thought. But perhaps she at least had a right to ask. Which she hadn’t up until then.

  “It’s no big secret. You’ve seen the scar. . . . Someone shot me in Africa.”

  She didn’t bat an eyelid. As though being shot were perfectly normal for a ballroom dancer.

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I was a soldier for a while, remember?”

  “I am sure there are soldiers in lots of places. But why there?”

  “I think I already mentioned it to you on the Cap Polonio. . . . It was after the slaughter at Annual, in Rif. They wanted revenge for the thousands who were slaughtered.”

  For a brief moment, Max wondered if it was possible to sum up in a few sentences complex ideas likes doubt, horror, death, and fear. Clearly not.

  “I thought I had killed a man,” he said at last, in a neutral tone, “so I enlisted in the Spanish Foreign Legion . . . Then I discovered he wasn’t dead, but by then it was too late.”

  “A fight?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Over a woman?”

  “Nothing so romantic. He owed me money.”

  “How much?”

  “Enough for me to stab him with his own knife.”

  He noticed her eyes gleam. With pleasure, perhaps. Max thought he knew that look from a few hours earlier.

  “Why the Foreign Legion?”

  He screwed up his eyes, recollecting the harsh sunlight in the streets and squares of Barcelona, afraid of running into a policeman, anxious at his own shadow, and the poster on a wall outside number nine, Prats de Molló: To those whom life has betrayed, who are out of work, who live aimlessly and without hope: Honor and pride.

  “They paid three pesetas a day,” he said briefly. “And a man who changes his identity is safe in the Legion.”

  Mecha opened her mouth again slightly. Avid as before. Curious.

  “That’s good. . . . You enlist and you become someone else?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You must have been very young.”

  “I lied about my age. They didn’t seem to care.”

  “I love the idea. Do they take women?”

  Afterward, she wanted to know about the rest of his life, and Max alluded briefly to a few of the steps that led him to the ballroom on the Cap Polonio. Oran, the Vieux Port in Marseille, the cheap cabarets in Paris.

  “Who was she?”

  “She?”

  “The lover who taught you how to tango.”

  “Why do you assume she was a lover and not a dance teacher?”

  “Some things are obvious, ways of dancing, for example. . . .”

  He remained silent for a while, mulling it over, then he lit a cigarette and spoke a little about Boske. The barest minimum. In Marseille he had met a Hungarian dancer, who had then taken him to Paris. She bought him a tuxedo and they performed as dance partners at Le Lapin Agile and other two-bit establishments. For a while.

  “Was she beautiful?”

  The tobacco smoke tasted bitter, and Max a
utomatically threw his cigarette into the oily waters of the Riachuelo.

  “Yes. For a while.”

  He refrained from telling her more, although the images rushed back into his mind: Boske’s splendid body, her black hair, bobbed in the style of Louise Brooks, her beautiful face smiling beneath straw or felt hats, amid the bustle of the Montparnasse cafés, where, with remarkable naïveté, she insisted class differences no longer existed. Always provocative and passionate in her slang-ridden Marseille accent and her gravelly voice, she was ready for anything. A dancer and occasional model, she would sit on the terrace of Le DÔme or La Closerie des Lilas on one of the wicker chairs in front of a café-crème or a glass of cheap gin, surrounded by American tourists, writers who never wrote, and painters who never painted. “Je danse et je pose,” she would declare for all to hear, as though peddling her body in search of paintbrushes and fame. She would breakfast at one in the afternoon (she and Max rarely went to bed before dawn) in her favorite place, Chez Rosalie, where she met her Hungarian and Polish friends who supplied her with vials of morphine. Casting a greedy, calculating eye about her for well-dressed men, women in jewelry, expensive fur coats, and luxurious automobiles cruising up and down the boulevard. Just as every night she would watch the customers at the second-rate cabaret where she and Max danced graceful tangos, she in silk and he in a white tie, or clinging Apache tangos, he wearing a striped shirt and she black stockings. Always waiting for the suitable face and the decisive word. For the opportunity that never came.

  “And what became of that woman?” Mecha asked.

  “She got left behind.”

  “How far behind?”

  He didn’t reply. Mecha continued to look at him, admiringly.

  “How did you move into high society?”

  Very slowly, Max was returning to Buenos Aires. His eyes once again contemplating the streets of La Boca converging on the little square, the banks of the Riachuelo, and the Avellaneda Bridge. Mecha’s face peering at him inquisitively, surprised, perhaps, by the tension in his own expression. Max blinked as if the bright daylight bothered him as much as the searing glare of Barcelona, Melilla, Oran, or Marseille. The glare of Buenos Aires stung his eyes, already dazzled by another more somber, ancient light, with Boske sprawled on their disheveled bed, her face to the wall. Her pale, naked back motionless in the gray shadows of a dawn as soiled as life itself. And Max, silently closing the door on that vision, as someone might furtively slide the lid over a casket.