Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Translator’s Note
Two Ways
Bottling Poison
Code Violation
A Little Chat
Burning a Hole
Peace and Love
Heading Back
Investments
Maggot of a Doubt
Old Debts
The Contract
Hand in the Fire
Bluffing
Drawing a Blank
On a Merry-Go-Round
The Churning River
Like Cat and Dog
Riddles
Bird of Ill Omen
The Siege
The Lookout Cheats
A Drop of Water
Messages
Fantasy Fiction
Sweet Dreams
Supplies and Munitions
Back in Black
Underwater
The Red Whale
In a Civilised Fashion
Copyright
About the Book
As tense as a thriller, as vivid as an undercover documentary, Matías Néspolo’s bold and brilliant first novel takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride through a place of crime and deprivation. Set in Buenos Aires at the time of Argentina’s financial crash, and seen through the eyes of twenty-year-old Gringo, it tells the story of two boys on the cusp of adulthood who have no choice but to join the gang warfare that rules their community. At least, Gringo’s friend Chueco thinks they have no choice. He’s determined to prove himself hard enough to get into El Jetita’s gang, but smart enough to remain his own man. Gringo is more intelligent. He knows that gangs don’t work like that: you obey the leader or else. As the two get drawn ever deeper into a pitched battle between El Jetita and his rival Charly over control of the barrio’s drugs and prostitution, Gringo sees a life of love and loss pass before his eyes. A few days before, he was joking with Chueco about killing cats. Now, he’s fighting to save his skin.
Written in the street-slang of the slums, and full of fantastic characters from the sympathetic Gringo to the ruthless gang leader El Jetita or the grotesque bar owner Fat Farías, this is one of those novels that is about one place and every place. While its depiction of Buenos Aires rings vibrantly true in every detail, the barrio could be any place of urban deprivation where young men are pushed into a violence that, ultimately, will destroy them.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
ONE OF THE challenges in any translation is preserving a sense of place, affording the reader a glimpse of the foreign, of another life, another culture.
The Buenos Aires of Seven Ways to Kill a Cat is not simply a place, it is a patchwork of smells and tastes and especially sounds since Matías Néspolo does not describe this world but conjures it through dialogue, idiom and slang. Slang varies from country to country, from city to city, even from town to town. More than meaning, it has a music and an attitude; translating it, taming it can risk making what is alien too familiar.
In trying to capture the crackling energy of these voices, the vernacular of drugs and guns and sex, I felt there was a danger that these street kids from Buenos Aires might sound as though they were from south London (or east Baltimore), so I have chosen to keep elements of the original which I hope can be easily understood in context. Since I could not imagine Gringo addressing his friends as ‘mate’, ‘buddy’, ‘bro’ or ‘brah’, I borrowed from Spanish the many words for friend – socio (partner), loco (madman), viejo (old friend), compañero (comrade), pibe (kid) and the ubiquitous Argentinian interjection che (which can translate as ‘man’ or simply as ‘hey!’) which famously gave Ernesto Guevara his nickname.
Many characters in the book are also only ever referred to by their nicknames and these, too, I left unchanged, deciding that, on balance, more would be lost than gained by having characters called Bandy-legs (El Chueco), Blondie (Gringo), Babyface (El Jetita) and The Jellyfish (El Medusa).
Lastly, there are the cultural trappings that have no equivalents – foodstuffs like morcilla (a blood sausage utterly unlike black pudding), alfajores (chocolate-covered sandwich biscuits filled with quince jelly or caramel), to say nothing of the complex ritual of making and drinking mate (carefully prepared from bitter yerba buena leaves in a hollow gourd, often ornately carved and with a silver rim, and drunk through a bombilla – a long metal straw). Mate is not simply a drink like coffee or tea, but a crucial ritual of friendship and bonding.
The Buenos Aires where Gringo and his friends live is not the city of broad avenues, baroque cemeteries, the Casa Rosada and Tango, but one that visitors and indeed most porteños never see: neighbourhoods like Zavaleta to the south of the city, between shantytowns 21 and 24, where families live in makeshift shacks without water or electricity surrounded by crumbling buildings and new apartment blocks, areas blighted by poverty, petty crime and paco (a cheap cocaine paste like crack). But these are also places that crackle with extraordinary energy, with danger, with cumbia music and with hope. Welcome to the barrio.
Frank Wynne
TWO WAYS
‘THERE’S SEVEN WAYS to kill a cat,’ Chueco says, stroking the animal Ernestina’s kid just brought him, and giving me a sly wink.
He cradles it in his left arm and strokes its head, leaning over like he’s trying to protect it, then jerks back as it lashes out. I hear a sound like a dead branch snapping and Chueco lifts the shuddering cat by the scruff of its neck. The head is lolling, the paws rigid. It stops moving.
‘But when it comes down to it, there’s only two ways,’ he goes on like he’s teaching a class. ‘In a civilised fashion, or like a fucking savage.’
‘Don’t tell me. That was savage?’ I say to wind him up.
‘No, viejo, that was civilised. This way the kitty doesn’t suffer because …’ He lets the sentence trail off and laughs. When he laughs, he screws up his face so he looks like an old woman in pain. He looks so ridiculous, I laugh too. Not much, just a bit. Just enough to convince myself this thing I’m staring at isn’t a cat any more. It’s food, a gift from God. I haven’t had meat in over a week and I’m fucking sick of cornmeal mush – I figure Chueco is too – or the weevil-infested rice we get free from a grocer up in Zavaleta and the plums we steal from the garden of the old Portuguese guy, Oliveira.
Chueco holds the cat by the hind legs so its head is hanging down. With a quick backhand flick of his knife, he slits its throat, and nudges a tin can under the head with his foot to collect the blood.
‘What the fuck are you going to do, make morcilla?’ I say.
‘What does it look like?’ he says. I don’t know if he’s taking the piss or if he’s really planning on using the blood to make black pudding, so I don’t say anything. I just watch him, let him get on with it.
With a deep slash, he slits the cat open and guts it. The entrails spill into the can. Chueco moves quickly, skilfully. He looks like a pro.
‘Now for the tricky bit,’ he says, jerking the tip of the blade at me, his eyes half closed.
He cuts off the tail and starts to cut around the paws, following the curve of the joint.
‘It’s a bit like stripping electric wire,’ he explains, ‘except it’s got fur obviously, and it’s thicker. Bit like Fat Farías’s finger.’
‘Fat Farías! There’s a lot of fucking meat on him … Why don’t we just butcher him?’ I’m joking, but Chueco gets a serious look and I see a gleam in those beady little eyes.
‘Forget butchering him! We should fleece the fat fucker of all that cash he’s got stashed away.’
‘What are you talking about? Farías hasn’t got two pesos to rub together, he’s as fuck
ed as everyone else round here. You know he’s in deep shit with his suppliers. If things don’t pick up, he’s not even going to have beer to sell in that dive of his.’
‘He’s in the shit because he’s a stingy fucker, forever crawling to God and the Holy Virgin Mary. I’m telling you, Gringo, Farías has a fat wad of cash stashed somewhere.’
‘Yeah, in the bank maybe,’ I’m about to say but I bite my tongue. Stupid fucking thing to say. Since the exchange rate tanked last September, nobody puts money in a bank. Anyone with serious cash gets it out of the country, but that wouldn’t include Farías, ‘El Gordo’. Most people who’ve got a little bit put aside just stuff it under the mattress.
While I’m thinking this, Chueco cuts along the inside of the cat’s hind paws, pulls the skin back like he’s peeling a salami, grips the two flaps and yanks hard, turning it inside out like a sock. The pelt now hangs from the front paws like a doll’s coat, the fur on the inside. Chueco cuts it away.
‘In-fucking-credible. Watch and learn, Gringo,’ he says, flinging the skin at my head. ‘You’re skinning the next one.’
I duck, but I don’t say anything. The skin flops to the ground about four feet away. When I turn, I see Ernestina’s kid, Quique, quietly creeping over to it. He prods it with a stick. The fur is just a ball of dirt and blood.
‘Give it a good wash and dry it in the sun,’ I tell him. ‘It’ll make a bag. Or give it to your baby sister for her doll.’
Quique stares at me, mouth open. The kid’s clueless. He picks up the skin, shakes it and, seeing the shape, starts giggling to himself, like when he was little and used to laugh at everything. These days, he comes up to my shoulder, but I still think of him as a kid.
Chueco keeps working away. With the point of the knife, he removes the lungs and tosses them into the can. Then he goes into the shack where he lives, comes out with a rag, wipes his hands and cleans the blade of the knife. He lights a cigarette, raises his eyebrows and looks at me questioningly.
I spark up a negro myself and look at the cat hanging from a nail on the wall. Without the skin it looks like rabbit – like hare, actually. I suddenly remember how Mamina, my grandmother, used to cook hare when I was a kid. Cousin Toni used to bring them round before he sold his shotgun. I can’t stop myself.
‘Why don’t we make a stew?’
‘Fuck, no! Slap it on a grill, flip it over and it’s done.’
‘Whatever you say, socio.’
‘We grill it,’ he says firmly. He likes to think he’s in charge. And I let him.
‘Fair enough, I’ll get a fire going.’
‘Yeah, you do that. Hey, kid?’ He turns to Quique who’s still standing, watching everything. ‘What the fuck you still doing here?’
‘Mamá said if there’s any left over could we have a bit for Sultán,’ he says, ‘because he’s always whining.’
‘A little something for the señora’s doggy?’ Chueco says, putting on a squeaky voice. ‘Sure!’ I don’t know why, but he can’t stand the sight of Ernestina.
‘Here, kid.’ He holds out the can of entrails. ‘You can have this.’
Quique shuffles away, the fur in one hand and the tin can in the other. His shoes are falling off, they’ve got no laces and they’re two sizes too big for him. I watch him leave as I squat down to put a match to some crumpled pieces of paper and add little bits of wood from an old drawer I’ve just smashed up.
‘You stingy fucking bastard,’ I say to Chueco. ‘Why didn’t you give him a bit of the meat?’
Chueco looks at me, clicks his tongue, takes a last drag on his cigarette then stubs it out.
‘If he wanted some, he should have asked instead of pissing about. He said he wanted dog food, so that’s what he got. Anyway, the offal is delicious. You can make a fantastic stew out of it.’
I keep working on the fire. I’m pretty sure Quique’s thing about his mamá needing to feed the dog was bullshit. The kid just wanted a bit of meat for himself. I don’t say this to Chueco, no point winding him up, but not saying anything winds him up anyway because he keeps trying to justify himself.
‘Besides, the kid’s a fucking freak. His mamá could have told him to go catch their own cat instead of taking ours. But oh no! Señora Ernestina doesn’t eat cat, the old bitch!’
‘Maybe he doesn’t know how to kill and butcher it.’
‘Well, he can learn, viejo, or he can go fuck himself.’
BOTTLING POISON
THE BEER’S WARM. Looks more like milkshake than beer – two parts foam to one part liquid. But I can’t face an argument, so I drink it anyway. Besides, Fat Farías is a stingy bastard. If I make him pull a fresh one with less foam, he’ll want me to shell out and I don’t have a peso.
Chueco comes in poker-faced and pale, swaggers over to my table and shouts, ‘Bottle of rotgut red, Gordo!’
He sits down and stares at me. Eyes wide. Blank. Expressionless. Fat Farías comes over carrying the bottle and a glass in the same hand. Chueco goes on.
‘Qué onda, Gringuito?’ He tilts his head and grins like a maniac. He makes like he’s chilled, but it’s forced. It’s all an act.
‘Fine, good …’ I say, giving him the same deranged grin. Let’s see what he says. He’s making me nervous. He blinks, keeping his eyes closed a split second longer than necessary. Chueco does that sometimes. It’s like a card player’s tic, it’s hard to spot but I notice it. I just don’t know what the fuck it means.
Farías plonks the glass down on the table with a bang, tilts the bottle, but before he pours, he barks, ‘That’ll be two pesos!’
‘Chill, Gordo,’ El Chueco says. ‘What’s with you?’ He’s trying to be sarcastic but he botches it. He’s harder than a rock.
‘First things first,’ Fat Farías says.
‘Fuck sake, don’t sweat it, just pour. It’s all cool.’
On the table next to the glass is a fifty-peso note. I don’t know where it came from.
Fat Farías picks it up and fills Chueco’s glass to the brim.
‘Leave the bottle,’ Chueco says, pulling a face, not even looking at him.
Fat Farías picks up on the snub.
‘Fuck you,’ he lets fly. ‘That’s all I need, another little runt trying to make like a gangster. Who did you rip off? Your mamá?’
‘Little bit of respect there, Gordo, wouldn’t want things to kick off …’
‘Who’s going to do the kicking? You, you legless little runt?’ Fat Farías chucks the change on the table and stomps back to the bar choking back a laugh with a cough.
‘Yeah, go ahead and laugh,’ Chueco mutters through his teeth. ‘You’ll be crying soon enough.’
He winks at me and knocks back the glass of wine. I’m not going to step into the firing line, so I just give him the same crazed grin he gave me when he showed up.
‘So, what’s been happening, Gringo?’
‘What the fuck is with you? Want to tell me where you got a fifty-peso note?’
‘Don’t sweat it, it’s snide. Relax, I’ll fill you in later.’
I finish my beer. Light a cigarette. Chueco holds up two fingers asking for the cigarette I didn’t offer. I tap the bottom of the pack, shake one out and grudgingly give it to him.
‘That’s better, compañero. No need to be tight with the merchandise.’
Chueco fills his glass again and pours some into my beer glass. The wine brings the beer foam from the bottom to the surface.
‘What the fuck you doing?’ I shout.
‘Don’t be such a punk bitch, just drink it,’ he says.
I’m pissed off by his tone, but he’s got a point – this stuff’s not rotgut, it’s fucking rat poison. Doesn’t matter if you mix it with beer or Coke or piss, it’s bitter as carob juice. What’s weird is the bottle’s legit, but I’m guessing it didn’t come with this cat’s piss in it. Explains why Fat Farías always uncorks wine at the bar before bringing it over.
I figure the fat fucker has a stash o
f cheap wine in his cellar – the shit that comes in twenty-litre barrels – and bottles it behind the bar. Not that I give a fuck if he wants to bottle his own wine. But the day Fat Farías tries to make the spirits go a bit further and gets his hand on the wrong kind of alcohol, he’ll probably fucking kill someone. I’m guessing he knows fuck all about chemistry. Not that I do, but I know the difference between the surgical alcohol you buy at the chemist and the alcohol fuel they sell in barrels down the hardware store. One gets you wasted, the other wastes you. Wouldn’t be the first time someone pulled a stunt like that in the barrio.
I’m thinking all this while I’m sipping my poison, and before I’ve even finished Chueco’s pouring me another. The fucker hasn’t said a word, and it doesn’t look like he’s going to any time soon.
‘Hey,’ I say, ‘that fat fucker’s riding for a fall –’
‘Finish the bottle with me. I’ve got a little business proposition for you.’
The minutes pass and still Chueco says nothing. Every now and then he glances back at the bar. Farías knows he’s doing it, but he obviously thinks he got one over on us because he’s got this big shit-eating grin. And whenever Chueco isn’t looking, he’s pointing and laughing with the other guys at the bar. Chueco’s got his back to them and he’s deep in his own shit, so he doesn’t notice and I’m not about to say anything. I don’t want him kicking off.
‘So, talk or I’m gone.’
Chueco drains his glass, glances round at the bar, then turns and stares out the window at the street. Finally, he leans back in his chair and looks at me.
‘Give us a cigarette before you go then. Probably for the best. You haven’t got the balls for what I’ve got planned.’
‘You calling me chickenshit?’ I say, and the urge to put my fist through his face makes me sound tense, which just makes me more furious because suddenly I realise it’s a set-up. Clever. But I’ve put myself out there now, I can’t back down.
‘I’m not calling anyone anything,’ he says soberly. ‘Just telling it like it is.’
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