Altofini goes to greet her. He takes her hand, kisses it and proclaims: ‘You’re an artist and a muse!’
Alma strikes the pose of a flattered queen and asks somewhat haughtily: ‘What are you playing at today?’
‘Jorge Luis Borges’ natural son and Boom Boom Peretti have engaged our services,’ Altofini tells her.
‘It’s strange, sometimes Borges looked like a blind boxer, and isn’t Peretti the intellectual boxer?’ she asks, looking towards Carvalho for an answer.
But Carvalho does not reply. Tongue-tied? Change in the moon? Lack of knowledge of the subject?
‘It’s not my day, week, month, or year,’ he explains.
‘How about the decade?’
‘Shit.’
‘My decade was the fifties to sixties: from fifty-five to sixty-five! That was Altofini on the crest of a wave, I had twenty fedoras, two top hats to go racing in, and half-a-dozen bowlers.’
Much to Altofini’s horror, these remarks send Alma into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. Carvalho picks up on it, and is soon reduced to a similar state. Soon both of them are weeping with laughter.
‘Can you imagine him in a bowler?’ Alma says.
‘And in two top hats, one on top of the other?’
Altofini is first perplexed, then full of hurt pride.
‘A true gentleman should always wear a hat.’
Altofini is still annoyed with Carvalho as they get into the car that is to take them to their meeting with Boom Boom Peretti. He gives monosyllabic directions about how they should get out of Buenos Aires.
‘South. Keep going south. Towards Mar del Plata. Boom Boom’s country house is between Dolores and Maipú.’
Altofini has put his hat on, as if to defy his critics. Carvalho shoots him a glance as they speed along.
‘You were quite right. With a hat on, you do look like a gentleman.’
‘Aha...you have to know how to wear one, that’s all. My family have always been great hat-wearers. My father, his father before him. And as for the women! My mother never ever went to any important occasion without her hat, and she had a hat for every occasion. Mamma!’ Dreamily nostalgic, Altofini adjusts his hat in the mirror of the car flap. ‘Don’t get carried away. You have to turn left at the next side road. This car of yours is a disgrace. When Argentina was a rich and civilized country, we had the finest and best-kept cars in the world. D’you know when I first realized how bad things had become? When I saw that people didn’t bother to fix the dents in their cars, or to whitewash their tyres.’
Their appointment takes them first of all to a private airfield. A light plane is circling to land. Eventually it does so, and once things have quietened down again, out steps Merletti. He’s followed by several men with flattened noses and scarred eyebrows, and then by a spectacular blond youth who walks down the four steps from the Fokker carefully studying his fingernails. The last to appear is Peretti. He stands at the top of the steps, body taut and powerful, as if emphasizing the distance between himself and all those who have already left the plane. On the runway, he whispers something to Merletti, who comes over to Carvalho and Altofini in their car.
‘The boss would rather talk to you at home. Follow our cars. If you lose us, remember it’s the Estancia Angostura, twenty kilometres before Maipú.’
They do not get lost, and succeed in following the procession of cars up to a mansion that looks as if it has been transferred stone by stone from the English home counties. Merletti is waiting for them with his sour poker-face. He looks at Altofini’s hat and cannot resist a sarcastic comment.
‘You’d better jam it on tight: the pampas wind could blow it away at any moment.’
Don Vito decides to take his hat off and hold it in both hands. They go into the hall, where in spite of the almost luxurious décor, the number of misplaced or forgotten objects conveys a sense of insecurity, as if the mansion were not inhabited by its real owners.
‘Boom Boom is expecting you. He couldn’t come to Buenos Aires, because his next fight is a hard one. It’s against Azpeitia, that brute of a Spaniard who only knows how to hold on and head-butt.’
‘He’s not a boxer, he’s a goat,’ Altofini confirms.
‘Yes, but he splits everyone’s eyebrows, and Peretti can’t bear to get his face cut.’
‘The face is the mirror of the soul, and therefore of boxing as one of the fine arts. The great master stylists have never had their faces cut. Look at Cassius Clay.’
‘He was called Mohammed Ali,’ Carvalho corrects him.
They cross the hall and go out into a central courtyard, almost a cloister, with a silent fountain in the middle. They skirt a myrtle hedge enclosing a majestic monkey-puzzle tree and head for a door leading to a gym. Peretti is already training with his sparring partners. His face is barely visible beneath his helmet, but there is a gleam of fierce determination in his eyes as he pummels his opponents. The young blond who was so worried about his nails is now risking damage to them as he pokes at a punchbag. His movements and blows are more a parody than an imitation of Peretti’s inside the ring. Much more impressive than his weak punches is the enormous tattoo that almost covers his entire left arm. Merletti bangs a gong. Peretti’s sparring partner drops his guard, but Peretti carries on punching furiously, and a right hook sends the other man sprawling. Peretti gradually realizes what he has done, and helps his partner to his feet. He apologizes. He takes his helmet off and once again becomes the ‘intellectual’ boxer the press is so proud of. He weighs up Carvalho and Altofini as Merletti brings them over. Merletti reluctantly makes the introductions.
‘Carvalho and Altofini, private detectives.’
Peretti points first to Carvalho, then to Altofini.
‘Carvalho? Altofini?’
‘Yes, you got it right.’
‘Those eagle eyes of yours,’ Altofini agrees.
‘It’s easy. I was told one of them is a Spaniard, and you walk like a Spaniard.’
‘How do Spaniards walk?’
‘With no rhythm. To a Spaniard, walking is the shortest path between two points.’
‘It’s a theory.’
‘A brilliant and true one,’ Altofini agrees.
‘Show them into the bar. I’ll be with you right away,’ Peretti orders Merletti.
He strides off, bouncing on the balls of his feet as if still in the ring. He is followed by the blond, tattooed youth, who has shown as little enthusiasm for the newcomers as he had for the punchbag. In the bar, Merletti serves them whisky from a smoked-crystal decanter.
‘Are you sure you don’t want ice and water?’
‘I’d like to see how good it is first,’ Carvalho replies.
They are interrupted by the voice and the presence of Peretti. The blond youth follows in his wake as ever.
‘The Spaniard must be a whisky connoisseur then. Drink it without water or ice. It’s a thirty-year-old Springbank. The people who gave it me said it was a decent one.’
‘If it’s a thirty-year-old Springbank, they weren’t lying. It’s excellent, and very expensive.’
‘You mean you’ve tried it before?’ Merletti asks sarcastically.
‘In my clients’ private planes they don’t serve anything else.’
Altofini stares down at his glass full of water, ice and thirty-year-old Springbank.
‘But a bit of water and ice helps you piss it out. It’s the only way to get rid of whisky. You have to have kidneys like Boom Boom or the Spaniard here to drink it on its own.’
Peretti has installed himself in an armchair, and dominates the room. He tilts his head in the direction of his companion.
‘Robert, my son.’
The blond youth nods briefly.
‘What do you mean, your son?’ Altofini wants to know. ‘You don’t look old enough! Did you adopt him?’
Carvalho tries to calm Don Vito’s impetuous curiosity, and Peretti cuts short the discussion.
‘He’s my son, and that’s that.’
Altofini is so eager to accept this that he is about to start speaking again, until Carvalho silences him with a stare.
‘Now I’d like to talk alone with our visitors,’ Peretti tells everyone.
Merletti and Robert leave. It takes some time for Peretti to feel comfortable with the new arrangement, but he gradually relaxes. He reaches into his sports jacket pocket and hands Carvalho a letter. The detective reads it without comment.
Dear Lorenzo. I’ve read about your success in the papers and occasionally I’ve gone to Luna Park to try to see you box, but the tickets are very expensive for someone like me. How well I remember those months when I was the young teacher and you the adolescent pupil, those days when we were happy, the two of us together, men twice over, as you used to say, and it makes me sad to see myself as I am, a ruin and an addict for every drug but nothing else, someone down on his luck in life and in his career, someone who fears he is destroying himself. I need your help. Not in the name of what we once were, but appealing to your qualities as a human being, of which I have so much evidence. Write to me at PO Box 3457.
I don’t have a fixed address.
LOAIZA
Peretti waits for Carvalho to say something. He nods when the detective asks for permission to show the letter to Altofini. To gain time, Carvalho pretends to wait for his partner to read it. When he finishes, Don Vito is obviously trying so hard to seem unaffected that his face takes on a comic cardboard rigidity.
‘Well?’ Peretti insists.
‘Did you reply to this letter?’
‘Yes. I must confess, I replied out of a mixture of compassion and fear. Compassion because I once admired Bruno Loaiza a lot, and fear because a person who lives sordidly behaves sordidly.’
‘Young teacher...adolescent pupil. What years are we talking about?’
‘It was at the end of the seventies. I was an oddball who was part of the world of junior amateur boxing, but at the same time I had enrolled at university. A lot of lecturers were missing: some were political prisoners, others had been wiped out, or were on the run. Of the few that had stayed, Bruno was one of the most brilliant, like a link with the intellectual splendour of the days before the military coup. He was as brilliant as he was careless about his seductions. He liked to play moral and sexual Russian roulette. He didn’t care who got the bullet. But I don’t hate him for it, I feel curious, curious about myself perhaps, about the curious and uncontrollable youth I once was.’
‘When did your relations end?’
‘The most intimate part only lasted one academic year. We used to meet as friends, but as his drug addiction got worse we saw each other less and less.’
‘Did you see him after you got the letter?’
‘No. I sent him money. On several occasions. The letters he sent me became increasingly bitter and demanding. Threatening.’
Peretti is expecting Carvalho to continue with his questions, but the detective says nothing and Altofini does not dare intervene.
‘Excuse me if I don’t show you the other letters. They would only make this dirtier, more disgusting, as if he were trying to spoil something that was almost beautiful. It was a youthful mistake. At university I wanted to be a boxer and a wise scholar at one and the same time. I enrolled in several subjects. I met Loaiza in philosophy – I already told you he was a stand-in lecturer, a promising poet, who said he was fascinated because in me he could see a real, complete man. You haven’t asked me, but I’m going to tell you so that it’s out in the open once and for all, to lay my cards on the table. For several months, we had a homosexual relationship.’
‘How many months exactly?’ Altofini asks.
‘Four months and seven and a half days, to be completely precise: not a second more, not a second less.’
‘The Greeks, Plato, Turkish wrestlers. No reason to feel ashamed,’ Altofini concedes.
‘I don’t feel ashamed or sorry for anything, but I can imagine exactly what might happen if the news gets out that I had homosexual relations when I was twenty. In this country you can throw your wife out of a window and they forgive you because you’re a macho man, but homosexuality is only tolerated in a few comedians. I need to bring Bruno Loaiza under control. To find him. Confront him. To put a stop to his threats. I’m not worried about money. I’m worried about the absurd, crazy logic of a drug addict.’
By the time they leave Peretti’s mansion, night has fallen. Carvalho drives in weary silence. Still wearing his hat, Altofini has also been silenced by all he has seen and heard. He turns it over in his mind, and after thirty kilometres or so leans over to Carvalho and makes an obscene gesture with two fingers of each hand.
‘So they fucked each other up the arse?’
‘Where else?’
‘Of course, of course. And how well that queer talks! How right my master Victor Hugo was when he said: “what is well-thought is well said / in words straight from the head”. Ah, the human condition! The more a man develops his body, the more he admires the body of another man, as Plato said.’
‘The Greek philosopher?’
‘No, Plato Carrasco, an ex-brother-in-law of mine who ran a gym down by Chacarita cemetery. He was a loyal Perónist. He wanted to improve the Argentine race.’
A melancholy Carvalho is studying the market stalls, surprised at the names of the cuts of meat, at how few fish there are. Alma watches him staring thoughtfully at what’s on offer: topside, sirloin, rumpsteak, offal. She goes up to him and accepts his silent contemplation until finally he speaks: ‘One day you’ll have to come to Barcelona, and I’ll take you to the Boquería market. Spain is full of wonderful markets. In Galicia there are fish markets that look like underwater cathedrals.’
‘You’re obviously in full nostalgic denial mode. How do you fight against it? Do you always come to markets?’
‘First of all, a crime. Then a market. That’s where I come in.’
‘What crime are you talking about?’
Carvalho invites her to look around.
‘We’re surrounded by dead bodies: cattle, lamb, fish, lettuces, turnips, celery. Someone ended their lives so we can eat them.’
‘So butchers and stallholders are murderers?’
‘Murderers or their accomplices. Nobody is innocent.’
Suddenly Alma sees the women selling their wares as accomplices to a crime. She stares at all the victims, especially the whole fish on slabs, imagines their quiet or thrashing deaths. Closes her eyes.
‘How horrible! If you look at it like that, we’re in a cemetery.’
‘But these are the dead without burial. Their burial is here and here.’
He points to his head and stomach.
‘I’ll never eat animals again.’
‘But is it any better to kill plants? Have you seen the face of a stick of celery when it’s pulled from the ground? Some botanists say plants scream when they die.’
Alma stares at Carvalho as though he is the messenger of death.
‘Did you come here to give yourself a fright?’
‘I was already scared. Font y Rius has been playing games again, and he’s brought Raúl back into the eye of the storm.’
They walk back to Carvalho’s apartment, his bag full of death, his head full of plans for cooking.
‘It’s only by cooking that we can disguise tragedy and horror.’
Alma describes the talk she had with Font y Rius, but Carvalho seems uninterested in anything to do with Raúl. He is staring at the rain drizzling outside the windows. Alma is sitting opposite him with a mate gourd in her hands. Carvalho is cupping a glass of whisky on the rocks, amazed at the persistence of this Argentine monsoon.
‘It’s done n
othing but rain for weeks. It reminds me of the rains in Ranchipur. I’m so old I can remember the version of The Day the Rains Came with Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power. Have you any idea who Myrna Loy was? I wonder what the weather’s like in Barcelona?’
‘The sooner you find Raúl, the sooner you’ll be able to go home. You’re like ET. Home! Home!’
‘Font y Rius is off his head. He would be a psychiatrist, wouldn’t he? But what about my cousin? Why is he playing Russian roulette like this? And who told you you would find me in the market?’
‘Don Vito. He was very pleased that cretin asked you for help. That son of a bitch who passes himself off as Borges’ son.’
‘None of my clients are sons of bitches.’
‘Well, he is. He’s trying to destroy the old man’s reputation, to tarnish his image.’
‘Why are you so worried about the image of a reactionary like him? He made short shrift of you revolutionaries, and applauded the dirty war.’
‘Who didn’t applaud the dirty war? Even some of our own comrades did. We said: let them come and get us! That way they’ll show the true nature of this fascist regime.’
‘Arrogance in arms.’
‘If we were arrogant, what was the system? Anyway, within fifty years Borges will be read just as a writer, not as an ideologue. Who nowadays is bothered by the fact that Virgil was Octavius Augustus’ arselicker? Or that Defoe was a miserable police informer, or Verlaine a poor wretch?’
‘I never got as far as Virgil. I’ve only read Jules Verne.’
‘That’s a lie. And just because you pretend you’re not cultured, that’s no reason to try to do down Borges. To do down his memory is to humiliate all of us who need it. We need at least to believe in the magic of our creators.’
Carvalho takes Alma by the arm, to try to calm her down.
‘That’s enough, I believe you. But my job is my job. D’you say all this kind of thing in your university classes?’
‘I said exactly the same this morning to my students. I’ve only got a few truths and a few rights left, but one of them is to choose my own brand of cultural necrophagy.’
The Buenos Aires Quintet Page 27