The Buenos Aires Quintet

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  Now it’s Carvalho’s turn to cast a sarcastic eye in Alma’s direction: ‘She even knows where their island is.’

  It’s more nose-to-nose than head-to-head as Alma thrusts herself at Carvalho.

  ‘Listen here, you fat Spaniard. Either you shut up or I’m off. It’s far more simple than he makes out, Norman. Have you seen that pair who walk along Calle Florida dressed as Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday?’

  ‘I haven’t actually seen Buenos Aires for ages. I sleep every morning; in the afternoon I rehearse plays that are very rarely staged even though there must be eighty or ninety “alternative” theatres in Buenos Aires, and then at night I’m working.’

  ‘They’re either two mystics or two jokers. It doesn’t matter which. They preach a new world order.’

  ‘Just like Carlos Menem.’

  ‘They dress up as Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday. They preach a new world order based on equality. Not that I give a damn about that. They live in an old mansion near the Tigre delta – halfway between San Isidro and Tigre. They give refuge to beggars and the homeless. And Raúl goes there sometimes. Robinson told me he’s helping Raúl. Do you think it’s so stupid to want to follow that lead? Can’t you convince this mule of a shitty Spaniard here that I’m not a lying cretin?’

  Carvalho insists, grimly: ‘It’s a trap.’

  ‘Who’d lay a trap like that? Inspector Pascuali, who’s got less imagination than a worker bee? The Captain? Can you see his men dressed up as Robinson Crusoe? The fact is, I’ve arranged to go to the house, and I’ll go with or without you two.’

  Silverstein has calmed Carvalho down by putting his arm round his shoulders.

  ‘Of course we’ll come with you.’

  Carvalho spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness, and smiles as Norman tries to console him. ‘No-good women always get what they want from us.’

  Which just happens to be what Adriana Varela is singing about at that very moment:

  A no-good woman has cost you your life

  Said your momma, that saint in disguise

  A no-good woman has cost you your fortune

  Said your poppa, that great teller of lies.

  Before it was droopy blondes with a scowl

  Now, they’re skinny redheads in a thousand wigs;

  Before they were stuck-up tubs of lard

  Now they’re skeletons on the prowl

  But be they fat, thin or on the jive

  They’ll spit in your soup as soon as they arrive.

  The Marguerite Gautiers of a thousand poems

  Ended their days as tragic consumptives

  Or ripped off some poor louse

  Who loved them as they slit his throat

  Stuck like a prick in a whorehouse.

  Now they’re Misses from another planet

  From Cosmos, from Belgrano or from Misiones

  Top models strutting their naked stuff

  Designed by some pretentious creep

  Who’s buying and selling Buenos Aires cheap.

  A no-good woman has cost you your life

  Said your momma, that saint in disguise

  A no-good woman has cost you your fortune

  Said your poppa, that great teller of lies.

  And me, the no-good woman of this shack

  Can tell you ‘I’ve had it up to here

  With all the creeps who ask me to hurt them

  To get dear wifey off their back.

  Before it was droopy blondes with a scowl

  Now they ‘re skinny redheads in a thousand wigs

  Before they were stuck-up tubs of lardNow they’re skeletons on the prowl

  But be they fat, thin or on the floor

  They ‘11 spit in your soup as they go out the door.

  As if bowing to the inevitable, the key finds its way into the lock despite the Captain’s unusual hesitation. It’s only on the third attempt that the door opens, and he is faced with the evidence of his wife, sitting staring at the buzzing television screen, lost in herself, drunk, her eyes desperately wide open in an effort to show that the empty bottle on the table is nothing to do with her, that she hasn’t the faintest idea why her husband is saying to her: ‘Sometimes I think you don’t even get up to have a pee. Is my daughter back?’

  Still trying to stand on her imagined dignity and clear-headedness, his wife gestures up the stairs, but when the Captain starts to climb them, she starts to mutter, gradually more and more loudly: ‘You son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!’

  Muriel hears him tapping at her bedroom door and quickly hides what she was writing under a pile of books. Then she says: ‘Come in!’

  She smiles back at the Captain’s affectionate gaze. Gets up and goes over and hugs and kisses him.

  ‘My little grizzly bear...’

  ‘Muriel, Muriel, do you think it’s right to call your father a grizzly bear?’

  ‘Well, if he is one, and he’s such a nice little one, then yes, it’s OK...’

  Apparently satisfied with this explanation, the Captain runs his eye over the books filling the bedroom.

  ‘Books, books. Real life is outside books, you know.’

  ‘But it always ends up in books. Everything that’s done – good or bad – finds its way into books in the end.’

  The Captain sits down. Now it is the posters on the walls that worry him. They are of rock stars like Kurt Cobain who mean nothing to him, Nelson Mandela, travel posters, especially to South Sea islands. He inspects them one by one.

  ‘Travel, yes, that’s a good idea. I have to talk to you, Muriel.’

  ‘About Mummy?’

  This briefly throws the Captain, but it is Muriel herself who sets him straight.

  ‘I know you don’t like talking about her, but she needs help. She’s drinking more and more. She’s completely cut off. She needs a doctor or a psychiatrist. She says some very odd things.’

  ‘What kind of odd things?’

  ‘She keeps insisting that one day she’s going to tell me something that’ll completely change our lives.’

  The Captain scarcely blinks.

  ‘She’s delirious. She either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know how to get help, that’s all. But anyway, it wasn’t your mother I wanted to talk to you about. Listen, Muriel, I heard that today a prophet, a joker, went to your faculty, preaching revolution.’

  ‘Peaceful revolution.’

  ‘There’s no such thing. I know you’re a healthy girl, with clear ideas, but you seem to be far too much into this abstract world of books: it’s useless faced with reality, it’s a world of myths and lies. How long is it since you’ve been to the club, to play tennis or swim? Sport clears away the cobwebs of the mind. I knew a lot of healthy kids from good families whose ideas got corrupted, and they ended up badly, fighting against the society that had created them.’

  ‘The subversives?’

  ‘Most of them weren’t bad kids, until they started reading the wrong books, got into bad company, swallowed communist propaganda. The time came when we had to defend ourselves against them, because they wanted to turn Argentina into a Marxist concentration camp.’

  ‘But they disappeared, didn’t they? So in the end they built their own concentration camp.’

  ‘They wanted to change our lives for no better reason than a few cents’ worth of ideology. But they didn’t all disappear. They’re still active – hidden, but still at work. Nowadays they wear an ecological flower, or follow liberation theology, or belong to an NGO. And the worst are university professors. A lot of them are ex-guerrilleros who kill now with their words. What are your lecturers like?’

  ‘Some are good, some are bad. But there’s one really excellent one, Alma Modotti. I really like her, though I don’t think she likes me.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Vibrations I get.
I don’t know. Sometimes I think the complete opposite, that she looks at me in a very special way. She demands more of me than of anyone else. But that’s good, isn’t it? Ever since I was a child, you’ve told me that teachers and parents should be very demanding, haven’t you, my little grizzly bear?’

  ‘Altofini & Carvalho. Partners in Crime.’ So they exist, or at least that’s what the stencilled words on the frosted glass of the office door say, and when it is opened, there’s the back of the head of someone telling his story. He is a man of around fifty, well dressed despite the anxious look on his face, with carefully dyed hair that makes the white of his sideburns stand out all the more.

  ‘So in short, the trouble was a no-good woman.’

  Carvalho tries to sum up without too much of a smile, helped by distance and by the desk Alma has bought in a junk rather than antique shop in one of the meaner streets on the fringes of San Telmo.

  ‘Yes, a no-good woman. And I’d like you, or you and your partner, to find her. My son was the least decisive person in the world, easily swayed, too kind-hearted for his own good. I’m sorry I couldn’t be with him more. I’m a widower. I work long hours in my undergarment business. The boy grew up on his own, and he didn’t always have the most suitable friends. My poor Octavio is a good person, but he’s changed since he met that slut. He’s become argumentative, aggressive, he always answers me back – although that’s a bit difficult, as we hardly ever speak. He tries to avoid me.’

  Carvalho sniffs, he can smell roses, and realizes where it is coming from when Don Vito comes in. He’s perfumed like a bunch of roses. He’s also got a white handkerchief in his top pocket, his cufflinks and his tiepin are gleaming, and so are his gold tooth and his broad smile.

  ‘My associate and the owner of the firm: Don Vito Altofini, with a degree in criminology from the University of Buenos Aires.’

  At first Don Vito is a little surprised at his newly acquired academic title, but he quickly accepts it and goes one better.

  ‘A degree? How typically Spanish of you to underplay it. A doctorate, dear boy, a doctorate. And then there’s the Master in Criminology and a few other baubles from the MIT.’

  ‘So sorry, Don Vito, a doctorate in criminology, of course. We have before us a heartbreaking case. Because of a no-good woman, this gentleman’s son has disappeared.’

  Don Vito takes this in solemnly, but can’t help murmuring: ‘“A no-good woman cost him his life...” Everything that’s said in tangos is true! Carry on, dear sir, carry on. Only a father whose hair is turning white and who doesn’t know where his own children might be can understand what you are going through.’

  This speech visibly affects their client. He finds it hard to pick up the thread of his tale.

  ‘Thanks to that no-good woman, my son has become an enemy to me. And one day – I can see it as if it were happening right now – I arrived at my office and found all my closest associates with faces grim as death.’

  Carvalho explains to Don Vito.

  ‘Don Leonardo here is a leading manufacturer of fine ladies’ lingerie.’

  Don Vito puts on a thoughtful, knowledgeable look.

  ‘Ah, a woman’s true skin! An important writer once said: a man’s most profound attribute is his skin. And I would add: a woman’s most profound attribute is her underwear.’

  Carvalho invites Don Leonardo to continue.

  ‘Well, it was embezzlement. While I was away, my son used the powers I gave him in such cases to steal a million pesos from our accounts.’

  ‘A million before or after the 1984 devaluation?’

  Don Leonardo looks offended by Altofini’s estimation of him.

  ‘Would you be worried by the theft of a million 1984 pesos? Good God, that was worth nothing – it was a single note.’

  Don Leonardo ignores Don Vito’s appreciative whistle, and goes on with his story.

  ‘Now I think – what are a million pesos compared to my son’s life? I didn’t go to the police, but I asked the Davidson detective agency to find him.’

  Altofini lifts a hand to his forehead, then tries to cover his mouth with it, but the words come out regardless: ‘A big mistake, if you don’t mind me saying so! The Davidsons are incompetent. Whenever they come to a dead end, they always ring me for advice.’

  ‘I only wanted them to find my son before the police, and they did. He was in the Bahamas with that slut, that bloodsucker. I didn’t want the money back, I only wanted my son. I swear to you. May I be struck down on the spot if I’m not telling the truth. I told the detectives to let them know they were being watched. That’s the worst thing I could have done. She got scared and left him. He felt abandoned, and perhaps thought I despised him. He fled. Nobody knows where he’s gone. I’m afraid I’ll never see him again.’

  At that, he bursts into tears. Don Vito sheds a few tears of his own, and puts his hand on their client’s shoulder to comfort him. The distraught father soon recovers his composure.

  ‘Find the woman for me.’

  Carvalho rummages among his thoughts and asks what seems most urgent to him: ‘What for?’

  ‘I want you to introduce me to her – under a false name, of course. I want to uncover her vicious soul and do her as much harm as possible.’

  He is already well out of the office by the time Don Vito asks if it is ethical to find someone just so that a client can kill them.

  ‘That’s what he wants, isn’t it?’

  Carvalho shows him the advance Don Leonardo has given them. Don Vito still looks doubtful, but picks the cheque up and looks at the amount.

  ‘And this is just the advance? Well then, let’s look at the case from a professional point of view.’

  ‘My point of view is very direct and simple. We do our duty by finding the woman, and introducing her one way or another to our client. What he does then is his business.’

  Don Vito is amazed.

  ‘Why, you took the words right out of my mouth.’

  ‘Besides, I know who the woman is.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘No, I knew her from before. I had a similar case in Barcelona. Exactly the same, in fact. A father trying to find the no-good woman who had led his son astray. The only difference was that the boy had killed himself. In that case, the woman was called Beatriz, Beatriz Maluendas. But I bet you it’s the same one.’

  Alma, Carvalho and Silverstein are standing in silence, as if hypnotized by the waters of the river. Silverstein is skimming stones across it, like a child fascinated by the relation between depth and distance. Carvalho turns and surveys the mansion behind a wall smothered in ivy, honeysuckle and wistaria. It’s a French-style house that has kept some of its former splendour, and stands out prominently among the other houses of San Isidro, near the Yacht Club. There is a wrought-iron gate topped with Cesar Borgia’s slogan: ‘Either Caesar or Nothing’. They go over to the gate. Alma rings a bell, but there is no sound. Carvalho pushes the gate open and they step into a garden that had once been carefully tended and still boasts statues, footpaths and hedges that no one has taken the trouble to repair or cut back. But they are not unwelcome intruders – Friday is waiting for them at the front door.

  ‘We blacks open the door better than anyone else.’

  ‘You’re very pale for a black man.’

  The other man does not respond to Carvalho’s sarcasm, but leads them in with mincing, effeminate steps. They follow his swaying backside through the neglected house, empty of furniture, and with marks on the walls where paintings have been saved from the general shipwreck. Other alabaster statues have not been so fortunate. They emerge into a large living-room that looks like a cushion warehouse. Dozens are heaped together so that Robinson can play his flute sitting on top of them, and the rest are scattered about and occupied by the full range of social outcasts: adolescents with AIDS, battered old women with dri
nk-crazed eyes, ‘flycatching’ madmen. In what was once an elegant fireplace, something is cooking in a large copper pot. Every so often one or other of the beggars goes over and fills his or her bowl. Robinson pauses in his recital: ‘Friday, fetch them large, clean cushions will you?’

  Friday throws three cushions in front of the new arrivals. Alma and Norman settle on them, but Carvalho remains standing.

  ‘Don’t you have a chair?’

  ‘The last one we had is being burnt in the fireplace. We ought to prune the trees in the garden, but who could do that?’

  ‘I don’t like sitting on cushions. I prefer to stand up.’

  ‘If you do that, you’ll block the flow of your spirit.’

  ‘Standing or seated, my spirit’s been blocked since I was born.’

  Robinson stares at him, but also notices that Alma is studying the catalogue of human misery in the room and seems disappointed.

  ‘I was hoping – we were hoping – to find Raúl.’

  ‘Raúl knows you’re here. He’ll come if he wants to. I can give you his message anyway. It’s easy enough. He still doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he thinks I can help him find out. If I decide to help him find his soul, then he’ll find his soul. If I decide to help him find his daughter, then he’ll find his daughter. It’s all the same to him.’

  Robinson gestures to them to follow him. He leads the way up a noble pink marble staircase, followed by Friday, then Alma, Silverstein and Carvalho in the rear. There are hardly any doors left on the first floor.

  ‘We’ve burnt all the doors. Doors shouldn’t exist – they’re a bourgeois invention. There were no doors in noble savages’ houses.’

  A room used as a library. Alma is impressed by the number and quality of books lining the walls. Her words of praise amuse Robinson.

  ‘I bought them by the yard many years ago. It’s only now I’m reading them, bit by bit. This is Raúl’s favourite spot. Are you comfortable? You’ll see that although from the outside the house looks French, inside it’s pure English. I’m one of those anglophile Argentines for whom the Malvinas war came as such a wrench. I used to play cricket at the Hurlingham, with tea, toast and jam at five o’clock. The bars I frequented were the Dickens Pub, the John Bull, the Fox Hunt café; I was a subscriber to the Buenos Aires Herald. Well there you are, now I’ve told you my secret, and I’ve shown you my den, Robinson’s cabin. Perhaps it’ll help you understand my parable about the Malvinas. Parable or metaphor. Raúl says that really I’m a utopian socialist, and that if I got the chance I’d fill the world with phalansteries.’