Buenos Aires Noir

by Ernesto Mallo

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction

  How to Get Away with . . .

  The Dead Wife

  Inés Garland

  Belgrano R

  Crochet

  Inés Fernández Moreno

  Parque Chas

  Ex Officio

  Ariel Magnus

  Balvanera

  Fury of the Worm

  Alejandro Parisi

  Mataderos

  PART II: Crimes? Or Misdemeanors?

  A Face in the Crowd

  Pablo De Santis

  Caballito

  Orange Is a Pretty Color

  Verónica Abdala

  Chacarita

  Chameleon and the Lions

  Alejandro Soifer

  Palermo

  PART III: Imperfect Crimes

  The Golden Eleventh

  Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

  Barrio Parque

  Eternal Love

  Ernesto Mallo

  Barrio 11

  You’ve Spoken My Name

  Enzo Maqueira

  Almagro

  Three Rooms and a Patio

  Elsa Osorio

  Núñez

  PART IV: Revenge

  The Excluded

  Leandro Ávalos Blacha

  Recoleta

  Death and the Canoe

  Claudia Piñeiro

  San Telmo

  Feel the Burn

  María Inés Krimer

  Monte Castro

  About the Contributors

  Bonus Materials

  Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  Introduction

  On the Edge of Chaos

  Translated by John Washington amp; John Granger

  Buenos Aires is such an improbable city that it had to be founded twice. The first time, Pedro de Mendoza invested all the money he had stolen during the sacking of Rome to mount an extravagant expedition. He had hoped to discover a plant, supposedly growing in the Indies, that could cure his syphilis. The crusade was a disaster, thwarted by Alonso de Cabrera, who sold all their provisions to the highest bidder. When the settlers felt hunger, and the Querandí natives tightened a noose around their necks, they started supplementing their diet with boots, belts, and even some of their companions. Many of the two thousand men in that first expedition went on to other destinies; the two hundred or so who remained—and somehow survived the horrible conditions—had to be rescued.

  Later, to defend against pirates, the city was founded again as a fort and a customs office that imposed tight restrictions on trade as riches from the Potosí silver mine were whisked away on La Plata River. The inhabitants of the new Buenos Aires watched as boats loaded with slaves captured in West Africa sailed up the muddy water on the way to the mines, and boats loaded down with silver and other precious metals sailed back downriver from Potosí. The commerce immediately attracted smugglers, and in just a few years, Buenos Aires was supporting a robust illegal market with the usual crimes and criminals that accompany the endeavors of smugglers and city officials. The city soon overtook both Asunción and Lima in economic and strategic importance.

  These shaky and troubled beginnings have left their marks on the character and temperament of Buenos Aires. Its inhabitants display the mischief found on the edges of the law, the rush of a passing reflection, and a surprising capacity to adapt to new situations.

  The distinctive music of the city is the tango, the sensual dance par excellence—originally from the Candombe dance of African slaves, and later developed in brothels and bordellos. It is sex turned into song.

  Like all great cities, Buenos Aires is no stranger to unpredictable and disordered spurts of immigration, with people from all over the world coming in search of a better life, mixing in with the locals into the underground hierarchy: from the stickup man to the bank robber, from the drug trafficker to the white-collar swindler. Here the señorones live with the peons, the crème with the riffraff. The city is, as Enrique Santos Discépolo’s tango describes, an antique stall with jumbled piles of old and forgotten objects.

  Stravinsky and Don Bosco

  hand in hand with La Mignon,

  Don Chico and Napoleon,

  Carnera and San Martín.

  As through the dirty windows

  of the pawnshops:

  life itself, jumbled,

  and the Bible that cries

  on the hook beside the boiler . . .

  Buenos Aires: city of contrasts, contradictions; always on the edge of chaos; in love with its own disorder despite the crude, transitory violence, the lack of law and order, the ubiquitously hurled insult, the thunderous boom of traffic, and honking, hurled curses. Its inhabitants love/hate the city. In the language of the port-dwellers, irony is currency. The multimillionaires of Puerto Madero deal in this irony as fluently as the workers in the “misery cities,” which is what we call the poorest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. This shared language comes from the mansions and the shanties that are built side by side, separated by nothing but a single street or railroad track—contradiction within eyesight.

  In the stories that make up this volume we glimpse what Buenos Aires really is: distinctive points of view, as well as the narrative potential of a city that has reinvented itself many times over. This collection highlights the relations between the social and economic classes—from their tensions, from their cruelties, and also from their love. Deep inside, inhabitants of Buenos Aires live this contradiction.

  André Malraux called Buenos Aires the capital of an empire that never existed. This empire, which never existed historically, which was never a conquering force or a military or economic powerhouse, exists in the strength of its literature, born of necessity—born of the precarious nature of its politics and economy—and born of its irreverent capacity to survive.

  Ernesto Mallo

  Buenos Aires, Argentina

  August 2017

  PART I

  How to Get Away With . . .

  The Dead Wife

  by Inés Garland

  Belgrano R

  Translated by John Washington

  He told me that the green iron door that opened up to Superí Street would creak, that the big wooden door was jammed and that the hall would be dark and that I should leave the keys in a blue ceramic dish on the mahogany dresser against the wall. Then, he told me, I’d have to cross the living room to get to the garden, but little did I know—and never would I have imagined—that upon entering that house for the first time, despite all the instructions he had given me, I was crossing, irrevocably, the threshold of the world I knew and entering into another one.

  They were in the garden. Through the back window I could see them before they could see me. Pablo was talking with a glass of white wine in his hand, while his two children looked at him from across the table. His daughter had her elbows on the white tablecloth, and his son was reclined back in his chair, legs extended and crossed at the ankles. They were in the shade of a tall oak tree, and all around them, like the sea, the garden glimmered. They didn’t know that I had arrived, though Pablo must have been listening for my arrival. What had he told them about me? How did he explain us? That I was a friend, of course, who was going to spend the weekend with them. But how did he account for me spending the whole weekend with them? Because I lived in a tiny apartment in San Telmo? Because I was a lonely woman? Something that would make them feel generous, something that they could believe—he thought they were unable to take any more pain. I was going to have to go ou
t into the courtyard, I was going to have to greet them, pretend that I barely knew anything about them, give Pablo, as if we shared nothing but a passing professional relationship, a formal kiss on the cheek. I was going to have to lie. To lie day after day, from morning until night. I wasn’t ready to walk out there. So why had I agreed to come? Because I was like a slow-moving ship, and once I got going I couldn’t turn without advance notice. Because my love for Pablo shook me to my bones, and he wasn’t the type of man who was easy to refuse. It took me a long time to realize that I hadn’t been able to deny his invitation because—however confusedly, almost unconsciously—I felt that it was my responsibility to be there, to mourn with them, to be a witness to their loss.

  Pablo’s wife had been sick for less than a year. Until the very end she was convinced that she was going to recover. Ten days before she died, when she could barely stand up by herself and he had to carry her to the bathroom, he had found her in the garage, crouched down and tinkering with a bicycle pedal. He told me these stories in bed, after making love. He called her sometimes when we were together, and they fought on the phone about her nurse. His wife didn’t like the nurse, but Pablo didn’t want to fire her. They yelled at each other, or actually only he yelled; she was too weak to yell.

  “It won’t do you any good to cry,” he told her one night when we were walking to the theater. “Esther is staying no matter how much you scream and cry.”

  It was the only time that I actually said something. I told him that he shouldn’t make her cry either, and the word either lingered and wobbled in my head. What really made her cry was so enormous that the word either seemed entirely out of place. But I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t want to know the details of their discussion. I didn’t know why we were going to the theater, why I was with him, why I was witness to this fight in which Pablo’s voice had an edge to it that stung, as if it was me he was speaking to. Later, when he grabbed my hand during the play, I searched his face for a leftover sign of anger. I knew that he didn’t like it when he was contradicted, but his anger had seemed disproportionate to the situation, seemed to come from somewhere else, escaping in spite of his efforts. I didn’t think about this fight again until the afternoon when I found out who Esther really was.

  Pablo’s kids didn’t seem surprised when I walked out. The boy even stood to greet me, though it seemed to take a superhuman will to raise his sprawled-out body. Pablo served me wine, and without hesitation they included me in their conversation. They were talking about people I didn’t know, Pablo taking the time to explain: the marriages among his children’s friends. I can’t trace out how they ended up talking about their dead mother. I could probably say something vague like one thing led to another, but I think she was present the whole time, and finally someone—was it Pablo?—mentioned something that sparked the kids to start telling me anecdotes about their mother. Their anger unsettled me. But what did I know, I who still hadn’t suffered any loss, about the labryinths of pain.

  The boy told a story about when his mother tied his left arm to his body so that he would be forced to write with his right hand. None of them were familiar with the expression converted lefty. As if it were some sort of little quirk of his mother, he told about how she forced him to do his homework with his left hand tied behind his back while his sister and cousins were outside bouncing on the trampoline. His resentment was lightly masked, but in that resentment, or beneath it, there was, without knowing why, a pain that I felt almost as my own. The three of them were laughing, but I felt mournful until nightfall. Their mother was gone. She wasn’t nice to her children, the reasons didn’t matter.

  That night, in the room they assigned to me at the end of a hallway on the first floor, thinking of her kept me awake. I had seen her only once, in the street. I’d recognized her from the photos in Pablo’s office. She was tall and blond, with hair that seemed to trap the light of the sun. One of those women that people turn around to take another look at. She seemed distracted. Pablo had told me she didn’t like that people walked around on the streets with headphones on. And though I was somebody who listened to music in the streets, I felt I was more aware of my surroundings than she was. She looked angry. She was still healthy, or at least, at that point, she didn’t know that she was sick.

  Lying there in the darkness, I listened to the noises of the house, the creaking of wood, a shutter flapping somewhere, the steps of someone who must have gone—as the noise stopped—to close the shutter. The room smelled of wood, and I could hear the sounds of cars passing outside on Superí Street, the bell of a distant train station, and the train, moments later, passing over the bridge. The image of her crouched down in the garage to fix a bicycle pedal wouldn’t leave my mind. Pablo had told me that she weighed less than ninety pounds at that point. My friends had tried to convince me not to see him in those months, but he told me that he couldn’t weather it, that was how he said it, that he couldn’t weather the storm without me, and so I stayed by his side. I even fantasized about visiting her, that she would leave me her husband and children like an inheritance. She had almost twenty years on me, and she was dying. She hated me. Pablo told me so when I asked about her.

  I was drifting off to sleep when the door opened and someone walked into the room and then, very carefully, closed the door. I sat up in bed and switched on the light. Pablo reached and turned it off and then put his hand over my mouth. He had an urgency to him that I didn’t recognize. He kissed me, violently, lay down on top of me, and pinned my arms down. His legs pushed themselves between my own and, without giving me time to undress, he entered me and began to thrust, his insteps pushing against the soles of my feet. After finishing he jumped up like a cat and, running his fingers into my hair, made a fist and kissed me again, a hard kiss, almost knocking into my teeth.

  “See you tomorrow,” he whispered. And then he left.

  I felt along the walls of the hallway toward the bathroom. My body was in shock; I needed a moment to regain my equilibrium. On the way to the bathroom, I could hear somebody sobbing behind one of the closed bedroom doors.

  * * *

  That week I was offered a new job in an English bookstore on the corner of Conde and Echeverría, just three blocks from Pablo’s house. I needed to stop working with Pablo, and I’d cast out so many lines to so many people that I was never able to track down who had landed the job for me. The person who interviewed me couldn’t even tell me. The commute from San Telmo was long, but I needed the work, and selling books sounded wonderful. I already knew the bookstore and loved its particular smell—of soap, paper, and wood—and loved its English art books, cookbooks, baby books, the islands with towers of novels, and the shelves of poetry. Lydia, my work partner, kindly took me under her wing, showing me the ropes, the quirks of the place, everything I needed to know to get started. The rest I’d learn as the days ran by.

  My first customer was a woman dressed in blue hospital scrubs and tennis shoes. There was something fierce in her eyes; she had strong hands and a hard, sensual face. If I’d had more experience as a bookseller I would have been able to recognize that this woman wasn’t going to buy anything. She asked lots of questions, but mostly just stared at me. I thought I was imagining things, though, after she’d left, Lydia confirmed my suspicions.

  “She’s a strange woman,” she explained. “Lives across the street but she never bought a book here. I don’t even think she speaks English.”

  Lydia’s parents were from England, and I thought her comment sounded a little snobby, but it was true that the woman had referred to books only by pointing, or pulling one off the shelf—never speaking a single word of English.

  “Maybe she’s more interested in you than in the books,” Lydia said.

  This thought didn’t make it any easier for me, especially when the woman started coming in on a daily basis. Sometimes she came in the morning, other times in the afternoon, just before closing. She didn’t buy anything, but she made laps in the aisles, takin
g books off the shelves and then stashing them wherever she happened to be. I always had the impression that she was watching me. One afternoon she stood outside in front of the store for almost an hour, talking on the phone and looking in through the window, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, laughing, playing with her hair, letting it fall to her neck, where it would lightly caress the line of her clavicle that peeked out just above the collar of her scrubs. There was something so sensual in her movements. From inside the store I couldn’t tell where she was looking exactly, but without really knowing why, I tried to avoid her gaze.

  “When you hide, she looks for you,” Lydia told me.

  That was the day we started calling her the nurse. Sometimes, when I was working in the back, Lydia would pop in to say that the nurse had come in to toy with me, and I’d stay out of sight until I knew she was gone. I’d see her coming and going from the building across the street at random hours, and Lydia, who would occasionally take a break at the tea house on the same block, would see her sitting at one of the sidewalk tables or, if it was raining, sitting inside and talking on the phone, with a teapot in front of her. She always seemed to be on her phone.

  Pablo also started to stop by every day, at random hours. He’d buy books so the boss wouldn’t suspect anything, but he’d also do things that made me uncomfortable. He’d come up behind me when I was checking the price of a book he’d asked about and he’d lean against me, taking advantage of the islands of books that would conceal us from the waist down. He’d grab me by the hips, or would put a hand between my legs or, if we were standing in some back aisle, he’d force them apart and caress me, while pretending to scan book titles. I struggled between feeling aroused and feeling appalled. I liked Pablo a lot; he blinded me, just like a deer is blinded by the headlights of an oncoming car.

  One afternoon in the bookstore, Pablo came up behind me and cornered me against the storefront window, pretending to ask something about an art book, when the nurse appeared on the other side of the glass. Although I couldn’t see Pablo’s face behind me, I had the impression that he and the nurse were looking at each other. He cupped his hand between my legs and started to rub against me. I pushed away from him. It was only a moment, but I lost my breath.