LEANDRO
Leandro has infinite faces. How to describe one of his faces without destroying the others? This is why I return to him again.
In my mind, Leandro was walking beside me, through endless corridors, hallways, two courtyards; he climbed a flight of stairs and entered a room with me. The interns were smoking and drinking coffee. This mania for drinking coffee in every common room, Leandro thought, why don’t they drink something that’s better for me?
That day when he got angry at Mendiondo; their exchange is engraved in my memory.
“Bring me a coffee,” he said, annoyed. According to what he told me in endless detail, one of the young interns served him a cup of coffee from a coffeepot sitting over the flame of a heater. Leandro coughed at the first sip: “How disgusting. It tastes like a fly.”
“Have you ever eaten flies?” Mendiondo asked.
“Yes, when I was a kid, on a dare. Of course, I tore off the wings and tiny legs before I ate it.”
Urbino peered into the room, holding a covered pail. He took the cover off and pulled out a heart, held it under Raco’s nose, saying:
“Do you see that he had a lesion in the mitral valve?”
Leandro almost vomited, it was so awful. Waving him away as if waving away an insect, he shouted:
“Get the hell out of here!”
Urbino put his fingers inside the heart. Leandro protested:
“We’re eating.”
“The top dogs don’t like to talk about this,” said Urbino, brandishing the heart.
That label, which had so offended Leandro when he first became a doctor, now left him indifferent.
“And the bread, where did you put it?” he asked. “You’ve all eaten peacefully at home, and here I am starving.” From a drawer filled with papers, strings, and other things, Leandro took out a loaf of bread that was already hard. “A fine loaf of bread this is,” he exclaimed, “I wonder what dynasty it’s from.”
“You’ve always thrived on old relics,” Mendiondo answered. “Do you remember the dressmaker’s appendix?”
“I’ll never forget it. It looked like a leper’s penis,” replied Leandro, dunking the bread in the coffee. “I have to sop this up like a kid. I’d like to eat something sweet today: a chocolate bar, maybe. I have one here that the switchboard operator gave me,” he said, taking some chocolate out of his pocket. Removing the wrapper, he bit into it. He was always hungry.
“We’re not playing today?” said Ronco, who was the youngest, with chapped lips.
“I’ll bet on the guy in Room 10 for tonight,” Urbino answered, caressing his chin.
“I’m not inspired. I want you to do a handwriting analysis for me,” answered Leandro, showing him the folded pages.
Raco examined the pages, his hands trembling a bit. Apparently, he’d devoted himself to graphology and palm reading since childhood; to seduce women he would show off his talents by asking them for intimate letters, reading the lines on their hands so he could caress them, in passing, whenever possible.
“Hmmmm. … Not bad. Is she very young? Who is she?”
“I don’t know. I found it on the street.”
“So you want him to read the handwriting on a piece of trash?” said the bespectacled internist.
“What a jerk,” Raco protested.
“I find the handwriting interesting.”
“Introversion: the letters lean left,” decreed Raco, “closed vowels.”
“What does it mean?” Leandro asked.
“A person who rejects the influence of the outside world. So egocentric! Look at these flourishes in the shape of a hook. Narcissistic, aggressive.”
“Who the heck is she? Spit it out already,” said Mendiondo.
“I already told you, I found the pages on the street,” Leandro answered.
“You’ve always had the same quirks. Do you remember that time when you fell in love with a voice over the telephone? You masturbated to it. You’d decided it belonged to a divine being who was fifteen years old but perverse, and you were going to devote your life to her. After three months you got the girl who owned the angelical voice to meet you. She made a date with you in a café. When you saw her arrive you had a fit. She looked just like your cousin, with a glass eye. Her clothes, her words, her face were all completely nauseating. People called her Cutie Pie.”
Leandro told me that he took the pages as if he hadn’t heard a thing and put them away in his pocket, that he left the room and headed for the white, dreary, endless corridors of the hospital. He told me the scene so vividly that I still think I saw him climb the marble stairs. His footsteps reverberated as he crossed dark courtyards: he peered into the rooms. At that moment he said to himself: This profession is not for me, but what else would be better? What would be more interesting to me? Seeing people die horrifies me. Seeing cadavers disturbs me. The smell of the rooms of patients with contagious diseases nauseates me. And that unalterable place in my being where I fear contagion is growing. I would have to change my personality to keep doing this. In one of the darker corridors he heard a woman’s voice calling him by name. He looked everywhere to see where the voice was coming from. In one of the hallways he found the new shift nurse. She smelled of anise and had a gold tooth. Was she the new shift nurse that his cohorts found so enticing?
“Has a patient called for me?”
“The patients have never been so calm,” the nurse answered, holding a syringe in her gloved hand.
“But, are you sure? I clearly heard an anxious voice calling out my name when I got to that door,” said Leandro, pointing to a door that led to one of the operating rooms. “Maybe Irene called for me? Did she come in tonight?”
I drank in all that he confided to me. I hear his voice as if my brain were a recorder.
“It must be Miss Benzedrine,” the nurse said, winking at him and biting her lip. “You’re all the same: you always think someone is calling for you.”
The nurse was in love with him too. At that moment he embraced her so as not to look at her face.
The taste of sea spray is how clouds taste. It’s eight p.m. The sun has still not set. The sunset increases my anxiety. In any place at this hour I know that death exists: deaths, rather.
I wanted to sing the Brahms Requiem, but my voice cannot be heard. The wind censures my voice.
LEANDRO
For many years he was my obsession. It was as if he were several men. I see his face again. Leandro was handsome; some people said he was awful. His eyes were blue when he was confiding in me, blue like water when he’d make me suffer. Some days I noticed his teeth didn’t look as good as I had imagined them the day before. Ah, the power of a man’s voice! But I loved listening to him, even though or because he made me suffer. I can’t forget how he told about that visit to the antique shop. The owner was one of its foremost antiques. Mrs. Arévalo, with her blond wig, joined eyebrows, and tiny mouth, was awful.
Any pain or annoyance does me good because it distracts me, snatches me from the great void.
“There was a lot of furniture all piled up together,” he said, caressing me, “vanity tables without legs, a hodgepodge of objects, headless saints, old apothecary jars, clocks each marking a different time, chess pieces, music boxes, chandeliers, miniatures.”
He looked at all the objects Mr. Arévalo showed him. I remember the exact words he used. I knew the shop and I knew its owners.
“But what are you looking for?” Mr. Arévalo asked, showing him an old crystal dessert dish.
“A souvenir for my mother. It doesn’t have to be very expensive,” Leandro answered.
“Here are some chess pieces. Does your mother play chess? They are display pieces. Does your mother have a glass cabinet where she keeps figurines and china?”
“Our house is very modest,” Leandro mumbled.
“But even in the most modest houses they used to have cabinets. Your grandmother or great-grandmother didn’t have a display case?”
“If they had one, it’s not in my mother’s house.”
Mr. Arévalo was very tall and stooped when he walked. He had a woman’s voice and a dog’s face.
“Here you have a miniature and a candy dish,” said Mr. Arévalo, opening a display case and removing a few objects.
“I like to tell you afterward about everything that happens to me,” Leandro said to me.
Display cases are like the bottom of the sea. Why did I used to look at them so often? Did I have a premonition that some day I would be imprisoned in this water, as in a display case?
“How much is the candy dish?” he asked.
“A thousand pesos. Eight hundred for you.”
“That’s very expensive for me,” said Leandro, shaking his head.
“Then don’t ever go into antique shops,” said Mr. Arévalo.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
At that moment, Verónica entered the shop through an interior door, and at the same time two luxuriously dressed ladies came in through the front door. Mr. Arévalo greeted them very ceremoniously.
“Were you looking for something?” Verónica asked Leandro.
“I’m too poor for these things. And it’s almost my mother’s birthday,” replied Leandro.
“Didn’t my father show you the famous clock with seventeenth-century figurines?”
“But it must cost a lot.”
“I’ll show it to you for the sake of curiosity.”
While her father was attending to the ladies in the back of the shop, Verónica, with her silly face, was showing Leandro a strange clock and a little cage with a mechanical nightingale. You could see her legs all the way up to her bellybutton.
“What color are your eyes? The first day I saw you they seemed blue, but today, in the cold light these lamps give off, the blue has changed to violet, almost black. I’ve always paid attention to the eye color of people I’ve just met: the eyes and hands are the first thing I look at, what captivates me the most. Unless I know what the eyes and hands are like, I don’t really feel that I know a person.”
Why wasn’t I Verónica?!
“Do you like it?” said Verónica, showing him the clock.
“I prefer the mechanical nightingale.”
“I do too,” said Verónica, winding it up. The nightingale moved its wings and sang. The song mysteriously repeated itself, and, upon winding down, its tone seemed erratic and infernally natural.
Where could I have heard it? At the bottom of the sea there are no nightingales.
“Can we get together some day?” asked Leandro in a whisper, and, when he didn’t receive an answer, he persisted: “Where?”
“It’s complicated. At the sweet shop on the corner of Quintana and Junín.”
“What a slut,” I exclaimed. Leandro didn’t get angry.
“Across from La Recoleta?” said Leandro.
“Across from that huge rubber tree where they sell flowers for the dead.”
“La Biela café? What time?” asked Leandro.
“At five. That’s when I get off work.”
“Your father didn’t like me coming in here. I didn’t know these things were so expensive.”
“Everyone isn’t obligated to know the prices here,” said Verónica. “He’s not angry; it’s just his way. Look how he talks to those ladies.”
“Doesn’t seem like the same guy as before.”
“He always acts like that when he talks to the ladies: it’s one of his weaknesses, elegant ladies!”
What might mermaids be like? Horrible, beautiful, divine? I like to imagine them at night, but not now.
RODOLFA, NORAH, AND CEFERINA
Rodolfa, Norah, and Ceferina were women who worked at their sewing machines all day long; some of them were friends of mine.
Rodolfa was chubby and flabby, with a dreamy look in her eyes that could lead anyone down the garden path. Norah was dry, thin, and as angular as a man. Ceferina was tiny. Nobody liked her because she was a gossip.
The music on the radio was deafening in the crowded little dress shop. There were two manikins; some women ran the sewing machines; others, with two or three pins between their lips, pieced garments together with long strands of white thread. I was there when Gabriela came in eating a hunk of bread. You couldn’t tell if she was pulling the pieces off listlessly or ravenously.
“My mother isn’t here?” she asked abruptly.
“What about your boyfriend?” asked a woman, as if she hadn’t heard her. “Your boyfriend Cacho?” and, laughing, she added: “He’s a peach.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Gabriela answered.
“Oh, you’ve already moved on!” said another of the women, laughing raucously.
“Mother isn’t here?” Gabriela persisted.
“No, dear. She’s probably studying.”
“Where?” asked Gabriela in frustration.
The women looked at one another. One of them winked, the other put her hand on her stomach.
“She’s probably shopping,” said the eldest, rolling her eyes.
Gabriela left with me but stayed outside the door to listen. It was one of her habits. For her, the world she listened to and imagined on the other side of doors was the real world. The other was merely a performance. “The things I’ll hear today will be very important, maybe the most important things I’ve ever heard. My mother is a stranger. I have to find out who she is, what she does when she’s not with me. And these dressmaker friends of hers will reveal the secret to me,” poor Gabriela might have been thinking. The women inside continued talking.
“Imagine studying medicine while raising a daughter! When she was a little girl she looked like San Gabriel, she herself said so. She was born March 18th.”
“She wanders about with no supervision.”
“She doesn’t take care of her. Why did she even get married!”
“She makes sacrifices. She works all morning,” the youngest one dared to say. “And Gabriela is a devil.”
“Sacrifices?”
“Yes, even though it doesn’t seem like it,” the youngest one insisted, cutting a strand of thread with her teeth.
“She’s a shameless hussy.”
“She’s nuts. I barely ever talk to her. She has photos of her lover in her purse, and a small revolver.”
“No wonder Orlando jilted her.”
“I don’t want to hear about that guy: what a creep.”
“Apparently, she carries the revolver to defend herself from sexual assaults. I don’t know if it was the husband or the lover who gave it to her.”
Rodolfa, who often defended Irene, put the clothes on the table and left the room. She found Gabriela listening behind the door. She patted her on the head and walked away.
Gabriela crossed the street with me. I’ll rummage through the whole closet. I have to see the photograph, she thought. She entered the room. She opened the mirrored mahogany door of the armoire. On the lower shelves there were only shoes and piles of clothing. She climbed up on a chair to check out the upper shelves. She pulled things out and set them down on the chair where she was standing. I watched her. She found three purses, looked through them, and thought there was nothing in them, but in the black purse, in a side pocket with a zipper, she found a photo of a young man with straight hair and dark eyes. It was the photo of Leandro. She looked at it. She got down off the chair and, with loathing and excitement, went over to the window to see it better. She got back on the chair and found the little revolver. I took it out of her hands. I held it in mine, as if in a dream, caressing the cold barrel with my left hand. I put it back in its place. At that moment Irene arrived. She paused in the doorway and looked at us through the opening where the door stood slightly ajar. Then she rushed into the room.
“What are you doing?” she asked in an altered voice.
“I’m looking for something,” answered Gabriela, startled.
“How dare you.”
Gabriela, with the phot
ograph in her hand, looked straight at her, defiantly.
“Give me that,” said Irene, taking Gabriela by the arm.
Gabriela didn’t answer her. She didn’t have the slightest intention of returning the photograph. She pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling, like a martyr riddled with arrows. Irene hit her helplessly. They locked in a struggle. In her desperation to recover the photo, Irene dug her nails into Gabriela’s wrists, making her bleed. They rolled on the floor. I felt Irene’s heart beat through Gabriela’s breast; I felt the sweat from Gabriela’s hair on Irene’s breast. Without saying a word I left the room, ashamed.
Will I awaken the curiosity of the fish that rise to the surface? They come up at certain times and look at me, and I feel their fins brush against me. They think I’m the victim of a shipwreck.
ROBERTO RUSO
Roberto Ruso. A black child. The most beautiful little boy I ever knew. His ringlet curls and round face made him angelical. Leandro always had to tell me everything. That day he saw Roberto Ruso.
The children climbed on the horses and the lions. Three bears standing on their hind legs whirled on the roof of the carousal in the zoo. Leandro was waiting for Verónica, thinking that she had made a date with him in the most inconvenient and ridiculous place in Buenos Aires. He lit a cigarette and tried not to listen to the music. He went over to the llamas’ cage, then to the eagles’ cage. He was ashamed to be waiting. The date with Verónica had fallen through too many times for him to wait calmly for her now as if waiting for any old person. He bought some mints. Verónica arrived with a sketchpad and a pencil in her hand, as if she had been at the zoo all afternoon. When they shook hands they smiled, forgetting all the mix-ups. They sat on a bench near a bridge.
The Promise Page 5