The Foreign Girls

by Sergio Olguin

  Os passos vão pelas ruas

  Ninguém reparou na lua

  A vida sempre continua

  Eu não sei parar de te olhar

  Eu não sei parar de te olhar

  Não vou parar de te olhar

  Eu não me canso de olhar

  Footsteps go along the streets

  No one notices the moon

  Life always goes on

  I can’t stop looking at you

  I can’t stop looking at you

  I will not stop looking at you

  I never tire of looking

  And even though Verónica knew olhar meant “look” in Portuguese, to her it sounded like the Spanish llorar, “weep”, as if Seu Jorge were singing “I will never stop weeping.”

  5 The Others

  I

  If there was one thing that annoyed him, it was being compared to a policeman. Or called an old snooper or, worse, the residents’ slave. The doorman in a residential block wasn’t any of those things. His work was more like that of a psychologist or a psychiatrist. He had to maintain the mental health of the building – no easy task given how unhinged the occupants were. He had to transmit calm to them, make them feel that all those things worrying them (a persistent drip, the neighbour screaming next door, the beggars outside, the rising cost of cleaning) were not going to disrupt their lives. And he was a specialist in that, even if they didn’t realize it.

  Verónica was different, though. Ever since arriving at the building on the same day (she to live, he to work), coincidence had defined their relationship. And, just as a doctor or a psychologist has a favourite patient, there was no doubt his pet neighbour was the single girl on the second floor. He liked protecting her, making her feel safe in this building full of psychotic women, despicable men and diabolical children. He sorted out any problem that might arise in the apartment, from fixing the flush button on the lavatory to repairing a short circuit in the light under the kitchen cabinet. And she reciprocated with a special affection, betokened by a bottle of good wine on the anniversary of the day they both moved into the building and a generous tip at the end of the year, which she always handed to his wife because he refused to accept any money.

  He worried about what she got up to outside the building. Not with men, because he had seen her change boyfriends and lovers regularly, apparently without much drama. But with her work as a journalist. His feeling was that Verónica lived in constant danger. And he’d had an opportunity to confirm that fear: she had kept a witness in the investigation she was conducting hidden in her apartment and four hitmen had come to kill him. That day Verónica – who wasn’t at home – had managed to call him, Marcelo, the doorman, just in time to task him with saving the young man. And he had. Not very cleanly, it’s true, because he made the witness jump from the second floor – with all the risk that entailed – and he himself had been shot and nearly killed in the process. But then she had saved his life and the young man’s by driving over the four assassins. It had been the most terrifying experience of his life and he wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. From that moment he had been even more worried about Verónica. What new investigation was she involved in? What trouble would she get into next? Would he be able to help her again?

  To these questions one more should be added: did Marcelo have the hots for Verónica? Yes, of course, but he wasn’t about to do something stupid with one of the neighbours like he had back in the days when he was young and single. These days he was happy just to fantasize about them during sex with his wife. More than once he had imagined himself with Verónica. But as soon as he came, everything went back to how it was: his wife in their bed and Verónica on the second floor. Nothing better than clear-cut relationships.

  He was happy when he heard that Verónica was going on vacation. At least while she was having fun she couldn’t get into trouble. She told him she was going to travel through the north-east, that first she would stay at a cousin’s house in Tucumán and then cross three provinces before reaching La Quiaca.

  With Verónica away, he could concentrate on other matters relating to the building. Various residents had complained about the lack of security, which for them manifested itself in the presence of cartoneros, poor people who rummaged through the garbage looking for cardboard they could sell by the kilo; a group of adolescents who hung around on the corner; and supposedly an exhibitionist, whom only the madwoman in 5B had ever reported seeing. Marcelo had proposed installing security cameras.

  The residents, for all that they were very worried about security, weren’t prepared to spend money on cameras. He had explained the paradox to a red-headed lad who came to offer a surveillance service with monitored cameras at a very good price. Marcelo had asked him to leave his telephone number and the company’s details to pass on to the residents’ committee, but the redhead had given out his last card at a building round the corner. He didn’t want to jot down his details on a piece of paper because he said that wouldn’t be professional. He had promised to come by the next day to drop off a card, but never had. It’s often hard to get them printed that quickly.

  But the strangest visitor that day had been the person from a private mail company who came to leave a packet for Verónica Rosenthal. Marcelo had said she wasn’t at home, that the man should leave it with him. The mail delivery person insisted that the terms of their service required the item to be delivered in person. Marcelo thought that sounded ridiculous, so to take him down a peg or two he told him that, if he really wanted to hand it over personally, he was going to have to wait a long time because Verónica Rosenthal was on vacation. The guy asked him if he knew where, and something inside Marcelo clicked. Nobody from a postal service would start asking after the whereabouts of the person receiving a letter or package (which in this case appeared to be some books wrapped in brown paper). At that point he started asking questions and the guy gave a few evasive answers before practically sprinting off.

  Now Marcelo was worried. Perhaps the guy was a hired assassin and the package contained a bomb that would go off when Verónica opened it. He must check any delivery that came for her more carefully. And he would try to convince the neighbours of the virtues of installing security cameras. With any luck the ginger lad would return with his card and a budget so they could talk further.

  II

  Whenever a famous writer or popular artist died, when a politician or party was implicated in a corruption scandal, when Messi won something or another Argentine athlete excelled, she breathed easy: it meant that edition’s cover story was not going to be for her. And she was quite sure the editors of Politics, Culture, Entertainment and Sports felt the same when the scales tipped towards some horrific crime, the discovery of a human trafficking gang or narco warfare, because in those cases responsibility for the week’s cover fell to her, Patricia Beltrán, editor of Society, the stand-out section of the weekly magazine Nuestro Tiempo. The other editors wouldn’t admit that Society was the most important section – it just had more pages. But they certainly found their lives complicated when Patricia was away and had to be replaced with the idiot from Culture (who reckoned himself a poet and edited accordingly) or the cretin from Entertainment (who thought journalism meant having famous friends who passed on gossip). Her vacation had passed all too quickly, though, and now here she was, in the weekly editorial meeting, with the editor-in-chief waiting for them to put forward brilliant ideas.

  “We’ve got nothing for the cover this week,” was his automatic opening sally, one that no longer alarmed the newsroom veterans. There was always something for the cover of the next issue. No magazine or newspaper had ever come out without a cover for lack of a lead story. That was something the younger editors didn’t take into account, so they got anxious when the editor made his catastrophic announcement.

  Patricia suggested opening with the fifty-kilo haul of cocaine discovered by Tucumán police on Provincial Route 305 in the vicinity of El Sunchal. The van had been coming from Bolivia on a
back road that ran parallel to Route 9. It had already travelled through two provinces (Jujuy and Salta) and it wasn’t clear whether the intended final destination was Tucumán or another province. So far, so good: this looked like nothing more than a successful police operation. But the case had other layers. Three people had been travelling in the van: a Bolivian from Santa Cruz de la Sierra wanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a Salteño named Arturo Posadas and a Tucumanian, Ignacio Sandoval. Posadas happened to be Chief Superintendent Posadas, head of Criminal Intelligence in Tartagal. And Sandoval was a deputy superintendent in the Tucumán police force, specializing in intelligence. It seemed that Route 25 was to have been kept clear for them but, as luck would have it, officers from the ecological division of the Tucumán police force were patrolling the area that day looking for poachers and animal traffickers. When they stopped the van to search it, they were expecting to find species at risk of extinction, not fifty kilos of cocaine. Posadas, as well as being a chief superintendent, was the son of a retired police officer who had risen to the rank of chief of the Salta provincial police at the beginning of the year 2000. All these links between the provinces looked suspicious to Patricia.

  The Télam news agency story didn’t have much more, but there was enough, all the same, to suspect a conspiracy of drug traffickers, police and doubtless also politicians.

  “We could send Kloster to Tucumán and put something together using agency pics. It would mean revisiting stuff we’ve already done on Bolivian drug traffickers,” Patricia said.

  “I see this more as a Politics story,” said Álex Vilna, the editor of Politics.

  “You mean do the story but run it in Politics rather than as a cover story?” asked the editor.

  “No, it could be a cover, but if there are politicians involved and links to high-ranking police, then I don’t see this in Society.”

  “Darling, it’s all yours,” Patricia said to him. “Send Kloster if you like – he’s got nothing to write this week – or send someone from your section.”

  “No, no. I was correspondent for a Tucumanian newspaper a few years ago and I’ve got good contacts there. I can go myself.”

  “Our expenses budget only covers coach trips,” the editor reminded him.

  “That’s fine, I’ll fly and pay the difference myself. I’ll ask González to give me a bit more travel allowance, and bingo.”

  “How about we play on the title of that Mercedes Sosa song about Tucumán, ‘The Garden of the Republic’, and call it ‘The Garden of the Narco Police’?” the editor suggested.

  Some nodded, while others expressed mild reservations to which nobody paid any attention. Everyone, apart from Vilna, was concentrating on their pitches, safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t have to deliver the cover story, or at least not that week.

  Patricia doubted Álex Vilna was going to turn in a good piece. He wasn’t the kind of investigative journalist able to convert his findings into a huge news story. But she preferred not to raise any objections. It didn’t look good to fight another section for a story and anyway, she had nobody to send there apart from Kloster. He wasn’t the world’s best writer – not the worst, either – but he would have given the story a bit more bite than Vilna.

  If Verónica had been in Buenos Aires, Patricia would have sent her to Tucumán. But her favourite writer was on vacation, and deservedly so. Verónica needed to get her teeth into a good investigative story, an article to lift her out of the apathy into which she had sunk after her work on the train mafia. She didn’t want Verónica to become what she was: a journalist who had lost her faith, an atheist of her profession, a respectable editor.

  III

  A hard day, a harder night. That was how she planned to start the email to Verónica after what should have been an unmemorable Saturday had, regrettably, become unforgettable.

  That Saturday had started early, with a call from her ex to say he was down with a bad case of flu (man flu, no doubt) and wasn’t going to be able to take Juanfra that weekend. As if she had ever sent the kid over to his house because she had so-called flu! At any rate, Juanfra was older now and, even if he didn’t know how to cook himself a meal, he did know how to go to the door and pay for a delivery. And it wasn’t as if her stupid ex had known about her plans. That Saturday Paula happened to have a lot of things lined up.

  Better calm herself down: a restorative shower, an espresso for her and a milky coffee for Juanfra with pastries from La Barcelona. And then start making new arrangements. She was supposed to be meeting Luciano for dinner at 10 p.m. She could bring that forward a couple of hours, take Luciano to a McDonald’s and then get down to business. She didn’t want to frighten him off. Luciano was so sweet. Practically a boy, only twenty-three. She could even get him in to look after Juanfra some time – although, thinking about it, Juanfra was probably more sensible than Luciano.

  She read Verónica’s email again. It was the second one she had sent since she went away. Paula didn’t fully grasp what had happened with the European girls after Verónica’s fling with the Norwegian. If she went solely on what she read, she would think Verónica was having a whale of a time hopping from one bed to the next, from a Norwegian woman to some promising young single from the Argentine north. But Paula had learned years ago not to go on her friend’s words alone. Her work as a journalist had taught Vero to disguise her feelings and conceal facts. And, reading between the lines, it looked as though she wasn’t having such a good time. Paula should address this in her next email, tell her to relax, let the others go to hell, give her heart a rest. Verónica was like one of those boxers who want to get back in the ring a month after being knocked out, with broken bones and head still spinning.

  Writing all that was going to take time. Better put it off until tomorrow. At lunchtime there was a birthday celebration for Pili, their Spanish friend who lived in Buenos Aires now. By rights, Paula and her other friends should hate Pili, who had got herself a husband within six months of arriving from Galicia while the others had been on the romantic battlefield for decades, with mostly unhappy results. In any case, she and the other girls, plus a few friends Paula didn’t know, were going to meet at Pili’s house to eat pulpo a feira, a Galician octopus dish Pili was planning to prepare herself.

  How Pili managed to write her blog, tweet every two minutes, go to all the private views, cook, look after a three-year-old and keep herself more or less presentable and reasonably awake, was something Paula could not begin to understand. She understood better when she arrived at her friend’s house and discovered that the pulpo a feira had passed on to a better place, or rather another day, and been replaced with takeaway empanadas because Pili felt “fiaca” at the prospect of cooking. Pili had very quickly absorbed the concept of extreme apathy conveyed by that singularly Argentine word.

  The second surprise of the day was that she didn’t know, or had forgotten, that the party was a family affair. Pili’s husband was there and, even though the women had come without their partners (the few who could boast one), those who had children had brought them, while Paula had left poor little Juanfra on his own, eating two burgers on a plate with mashed potato which he had to warm through in the microwave.

  To make things worse, all the mothers had small children, including babies just a few months old, and they were at that stage (which Paula had got past years ago) of talking only about their children, their amazing accomplishments and minor ailments. It was worse for the women there who had no children, not to mention those who didn’t want any. What with the hysterical laughter of some woman she didn’t know, Pili’s husband’s monkey chuckle, the children’s shrieking, a baby crying and the sweetcorn empanadas (the only kind left), Paula’s best option was to take refuge in her glass of wine, but only after she had called Juanfra and established that he had eaten everything and not set fire to the apartment or anything like that.

  But things were about to get even worse: by the time the coffee (filter, not espresso
) came out, the women who didn’t have children – whether by choice or for want of a partner – had retreated to the sun room, the perfect haven on a breezy day at the end of summer. The women without children began to roll joints. Quietly scandalized, Paula waited for the reaction of the women with children, since the smell of weed was clearly detectable in the living room. To her surprise, some of the mothers left their children running about or in another mother’s arms and went off to have a smoke. Paula found such behaviour appalling, more befitting adolescents than a group of women who were all over thirty. When one mother returned, stoned, to the living room and started loudly trumpeting about whatever her baby was doing (nothing, basically), Paula decided it was time to leave. She had the perfect excuse: she had to work. Because that evening, to top it all off, she had to be at a lecture given by a very fashionable French writer published by the imprint for which she did publicity and who’d had the terrible bad manners to come to Buenos Aires only for the weekend, meaning she had to work on a Saturday.

  She went back to her apartment. Checked her son was alive. Juanfra told her she smelled horrible. Luckily he was still too young at ten to recognize the smell of marijuana, unlike the idiot taxi driver who had brought her home.

  Paula changed clothes and set off to the theatre where the Frenchman was giving his talk, “Eroticism and transgression: from literature to life”. The tickets had been distributed in advance and all the seats were full. A large number had been reserved for the press, all keen to hear from an international speaker. Since she was the one who knew all the journalists, and since everyone from the imprint was chatting with the guests, she had to stay at the door. A man she didn’t recognize approached her, claiming to work for an obscure magazine. He didn’t have an invitation. Since she was charged with door duty, she explained politely to him that he couldn’t come in. The man insisted, brandishing a press pass that looked more fake than a two-dollar bill. Paula said “no” to him in the same tone she used for her son when he was being a pain.