by Sam Munson
I told her I would not relinquish it. She took out her baton. Don’t be an idiot, Mr. Pasternak, she said. I held the tooth. She struck my wrist with the baton once, lightly. My hand opened involuntarily and the tooth hit the puce tiles. Or: it struck eternity and its minor thump struck my tympanum. You were told to stay away, said Luxemburg. Her adjutants kept their eyes on me. I have no intention of leaving, I said. It’s not up to you, can’t you see that, you goddamn professors don’t fucking understand anything, said Luxemburg. Her adjutants nodded three nods. I said, again, that I was not going anywhere, that I demanded to see Dr. Mariategui, my academic sponsor, my colleague, and my valued friend. The last phrase I shouted. My scoured throat ached. Jesus fucking Christ, said Luxemburg. She readied her baton. A leather cord dangled from the butt, and to this cord was affixed a gold label. I am going to ask you once more, said Luxemburg. I did not speak. In the silence, intestinal rumblings (to this day I believe they came from the lackey). Fuck you, then, said Luxemburg, as she brought her baton down on my right shoulder. On the cord label I saw the words, the three words, the three modulated, florilegial, black, slanted, English words.
12.
My molar lay on the nightstand. Yellow-gray, at rest. The footboard whippets slept, reflected in the dressing mirror. When I touched my eyebrows, my fingers scraped against bands of gauze. To the extent that I was present anywhere I was present in my bedroom (Violeta’s), dusty and breezy.
Violeta herself sat at the desk, my useless papers rustling behind her back. She wore a pink oxford shirt and jeans; bare feet, darkly tanned. They dumped you on the sidewalk, she said. Then she held up two white slips of paper, grimy with writing. Dr. Mariategui left these, she said as she set them back down on the desk. The name stunned me, sickened me with hope. Then I remembered — she meant the Colegiales nephrologist, her old friend, and as she approached (and as her double appeared, stately and silent, in the dressing mirror) I read the name on the prescriptions: FELICIANO MARIATEGUI, D.M. Don’t try to speak or move too much just yet, she said, internal medicine is not his specialty but he told me you need rest. She went on as my excavated molar stared at me. I’ve heard about cases like this, but I never thought they’d do it to a foreigner. She must have found the tooth beside me on the sidewalk and placed it on the nightstand, I thought.
Her strong palm across my forehead. It landed there, rested there. Blunt morning light filled my open mouth. My tongue dead, heated, adhesive. In Violeta’s right hand a glass filled with water and ice (also more blunt sunlight). The cold liquid hurt my throat but I gulped it down in the amphibious manner so frequent with Homo sapiens. Violeta told me I should be very grateful to Dr. Mariategui, who’d come late last night. A house call, Mr. Pasternak, in an era when house calls are utterly obsolete. I apologized. I attempted to apologize, I should say. The nephrologist had packed the wound in my gum with gauze. Violeta, who had managed to decipher my dry groans, told me to save my apologies: The Department of Social Praxis really had been getting out of hand, there was no denying it.
I passed out again. When I woke, the sun was well past zenith. Almost down. No longer shining into my mouth. I managed to get up, though the raw socket in my gum pulsed at every step. I picked the gauze pads free from my eyebrows. They came away smeared with tacky blood, and tore out hair as well. A green bruise shone under my right eye; another one, blue, shone on my left shoulder. The orderly, faint marks of a boot tread had not yet faded from my sternum, and my testicles were still swollen. The stream of water striking them in the shower caused a pain so intense and exquisite that I almost came, even as I cursed and spat. My urine streaking into the drain had a pinkish tint. The foam that spattered the sink during my dental ablutions was likewise pink.
After the shower, I gathered my passport and address book, and lined up my shirts monastically in my suitcase. My edited conference papers I discarded in the metal wastebasket next to the desk; then I retrieved them and tore them into strips, arranged them in the bathroom sink, turned on the fan, and burned them. The greasy, sour smoke made me gasp, and these gasps resurrected my bodily pain. I coughed up fine-misted blood. Blood soaked the dressing in my molar hole, soaked and colored it completely. The smoke cloud lingered, quivered, above the sink. I closed the door to conceal it, as one might tenderly close a door to contain a tender odor. It nonetheless leaked autumnally into my room as I packed my socks and my books. Chulkov’s General Theory and the Apukhtin crushed my shirt collars, and then suitcase darkness crushed them, gravity crushed the closed suitcase, and God (who does not exist) crushed everything else.
I found Violeta in the living room, pouring water into the vase with two lilac stems, and told her I wanted to settle up. She led me to a small room off the kitchen, its door locked with two locks, and, at a narrow-legged black desk, using a black calculator that spat out white paper, she totaled my bill. It was much less than what it should have been, given her nightly rates. Perhaps her sense of dignity as a hotelier prevented her asking full price from a guest who had been arrested and beaten by the University police. We shook hands, hers still warm, still strong, and she asked if I intended to fly out that day. Yes, I said. I cannot recommend that, Mr. Pasternak, she answered, and then added that the airport was closed. For how long, I asked. Until tomorrow afternoon, most likely, she said, they made the announcement while you were asleep. My suitcase creaked, and with it my lungs. I asked when the next bus to Retiro Station left. A much better choice, Mr. Pasternak, she said, they mentioned nothing about trains. I knew where I wanted to go, to Chile, to Ana’s homeland. Getting there was simple. The Belgrano line took you right over the border. And there I could dig up her father — he lived, I remembered, in Antofagasta, once a copper-mining town — and contact the police of Chile, famous through the contemporary southern world for their incorruptibility. Yes, I would announce, I would announce her death . . . the term sickened me, but no other, nonperiphrastic term for death exists. Ana was dead, I assumed. I had already wept for her. And we never gave in to domestic theatrics. Reporting her death to any authority here was useless. But she retained Chilean citizenship, that I knew, and perhaps her onetime state might care enough — or at least despise its neighbor enough — to take notice.
On the bus to Retiro, the conductor looked at me over his shoulder. I saw his pitted cheeks and convict’s stubble. Isn’t everything possible, in the end? Even the black spire of Retiro station is possible. Only that spire is possible. Gallery lights, sulfur-yellow, poured forth from the upper facade. Students and pseudostudents leaned against the casemented bulwark facing Ramos Mejía. Around their necks nylon collars: black, green, blue-and-white checked, red, a few tangerine. Attached to the collars tin tags shaped like crossbones. These chimed at each student gesture, each student breath. In their numbers the tags could be heard above the taxis, the bass blares of bus horns. Two sets of steel bowls sat before the north and south entrance arches, in which marble-lit darkness gathered. Slicing this darkness: arms and legs. I kept my gaze on the dim cement as I crossed the pavement skirt and inhaled the powerful student smell — sweat, soap, and smoke. My raw eyebrows hurt and my bruises ached; I paused over each garbage can to empty my mouth of bloody spittle. But the security officers didn’t notice me, their sky-blue limbs went on slicing up facticities and shards. Despite their presence, the station appeared to be open and functional.
Within, the student smell overpowered the last remnants of coagulated blood in my nose and pharynx. Here they leaned against the walls, sat on the floor. Their shadows flickered near the short corridors leading to the restrooms. At the doors of shops, near the electronic ticket kiosks, and outside the currency exchange they formed knots of five and six and held empty metal bowls up to passersby, who threw change and paper money into them. The security officers did nothing to dislodge them. The students pulled out apitos, referee whistles, or small dog-shaped plastic toys (you pressed your lips to their tails) and blew short, shrill notes to greet eac
h officer as he or she passed. Other whistle-bearing students heard and responded. The blasts propagated themselves through the shallow nave of the original station building, which dates to the presidency of Victorino de la Plaza. The officers smiled faintly at the whistlers and passed onward; as I was spitting blood into a trash can the owner of a cart selling fried meat slabs tapped an officer’s shoulder, begged her to intervene. These fucking kids are driving me crazy, ma’am, he said. But she jerked away from his touch. The meat vendor suffered so-called state paralysis. Cartographic grease stains enriched his apron.
To reach the platform from which the Belgrano-line trains departed, I had to pass through the stone building pierced with whistles. All the stores and even the food-sellers had set out meat and water bowls. The disappointed fried-meat vendor was, in fact, beginning to lay fresh slabs down and to pour fresh water from a plastic bottle. He knelt by his bowls, head lowered, eyes almost shut. The vast doors leading to the platforms flamed up before me, filled with sunset, orange, reddish, umber — in general furnace-like. A raft of trains was boarding: the announcements rippled through and over each other, trains for Coronel Pringles, Mendoza, Tucumán. The granular human flow ramified. The students stayed where they were against walls and near doors. Security officers continued to amble and pace. My train was not due for another forty-six minutes.
Other travelers loped alongside me, hushed and polite, gazing at the dark floor tiles (as if measuring distances). As I (we) neared the doors, as the curved glass roofs above the platforms gleamed and the rail yards extended their extensibility, the stream thickened and hardened, slowed. Our progress stopped. The segmented glass glowed, in a chitinous fashion. Security officers trotted from traveler to traveler, asking soft-voiced questions. They followed no visible pattern, moving as the winds of the state blew them and wearing their blinding smiles. Dental smiles. No other kind is known to taxonomic science. A male officer leaned in to ask a woman in an indigo dress with white flowers standing near me: Is your destination domestic or foreign? She answered domestic, and the officer touched her elbow. The woman sped off, toward a widening group gathered near a newspaper kiosk. The officer’s nameplate read TUCHOLSKY. His face was long and ended in a roundish vertex like a rat’s. I readied myself for his question. But he did not ask it. He showed me his upper teeth — hypertrophied, again like a rat’s — and drifted away.
Tendrils budded from the domestic train group. The tendrils became thick trunks of their own. A vegetal process took place in metaphor. Also reality. Each trunk was a line; each line formed, I saw, according to destination: Coronel Pringles, Mendoza, Tucumán. At the head of each line an officer in sky blue. The travelers leaving Argentina were far fewer in number. I was one, an old man skillfully peeling an orange with his thumb — the rind came away in a single unbroken skein — was another, and a young family, all short, wide-shouldered, and black-haired, mother, father, and daughters, formed the third and last group. The security officer who took my initial information (her name plaque read MAUTHNER) handed me off to another officer (GIEHSE). Giehse wanted to know my destination country. I told her Chile. She held my passport up, to compare my photo with my face, and asked me what had happened. I answered with a brief lie. Two guys had beaten me up in Balvanera because they thought I was looking at their girlfriends, I said. I don’t blame you for leaving town, Giehse answered. I asked what the next step was, and if she thought I would make the next train. That is not up to me, Mr. Pasternak, said Giehse, you’ll have to speak to our exit visa section administrator. She pointed her impeccable finger (the sunset blazed through it) toward the far end of the concrete platform where the passengers would wait to embark. It was completely empty except for a line of brown notice boards and a sky-blue hexagonal shed at the northwestern tip.
The old man kept his eyes on his orange and the squat family glanced downward as I passed. They were bound for Bolivia, that’s what the wife told the officer questioning them, her voice low and measured. I looked behind me, at the everyday void, in which Giehse stood. I took one step back, then another, a third. I’d almost passed her, I was close enough to smell her grassy perfume, when she gripped my upper arm. Is there some problem, Mr. Pasternak, asked Giehse. I said that there was no problem, just that I thought I had forgotten my razor back at my hotel. And which hotel was that, said Giehse. La Veneziana, I said, I always stay there. I know the hotel, said Giehse, it’s a quality establishment. You don’t need to worry, you can let them know you left something and they’ll send it along to Chile. A line of officers now divided this section of the station from the central hall, questioning and directing departing passengers to the appropriate group, and the domestic travelers’ conclave knotted, swelled, darkened. I envied them and their Coronel Pringles, I envied them and their Tucumán. Mr. Pasternak, said Giehse, I’m afraid once you’ve reached this point you have to continue, otherwise we’ll need to process you all over again and you’ll miss your train. Her fingertips rustled against my windbreaker. Yes, the tones, the suave tones. I didn’t move. I watched the domestic travelers. Mr. Pasternak, said Giehse, is there some issue you’d like to tell me about?
I turned to face the blue shed, and Giehse released my arm. You have nothing to worry about vis-à-vis your possessions, Mr. Pasternak, she said as I walked, continuing past her into the warming emptiness. The metal and glass vaults covered most of this platform, but my destination lay on the exposed section, at the extreme end. I was the only traveler on the Belgrano line, it seemed; no one had been processed before me. My footsteps scraped against the porous, faintly blue concrete of the platform. The sun fragmented on the shining roofs of the shantytown spreading eastward from the bus parking lot across Mugica, spreading and taking root beneath the Arturo Illia overpass. Radios and speakers blared there as well, but not the strains of the Dog Symphony, I noted: soccer announcers, droning old songs from Mexico, advertisements for soap and the lottery. This mild cacophony went unheard by any security officers. None stood with me on the platform. The Department knew none would be required, that all the travelers would conduct themselves like obedient lackeys from that point onward; they would march across the concrete, enter the dark shed, and kneel (even if they remained standing).
I made my way toward the blue kiosk. At first it looked empty, so I dawdled, I watched the other travelers, I smelled the air — lilac, iron, and rotting trash — and I listened to the creaking of my suitcase. The kiosk was not empty. A human or allegedly human figure stood within, perfectly motionless and erect. A stooped man, I saw, wearing a white shirt, the collars and cuffs grayed by clerical grime. His clean naked scalp, ivory with age, defied the whiteness of the shirt as well; his hexagon within the kiosk was empty except for his wheeled stool and a sky-blue safe the size of a North American mailbox. I approached him, suitcase sighing (like the breath in my lungs). I crossed the wooden threshold (also sky blue). He asked for my passport, and his molars flashed.
As the security officer had done before him, he held it up, looked from it to my face, looked from the digestive pupil of the state to the digestive octagon, and then said: You look like you’ve lost weight, Mr. Pasternak. He asked me my destination, and after I told him, he asked why on earth I wanted to go to Chile. A smile, as ivory as his pate, appeared as I babbled out an answer in earnest: I had always wanted to see the famous town Antofagasta, I said, due to my great amateur interest in copper mining, the town’s historical industry. Sweat burned in my scabbed eyebrows, and the clerk released a dusty laugh or curt belch. You do not strike me as the type to be interested in historical main industries, said the clerk. I assured him I was, that while I had come to Buenos Aires for a conference I had a strong personal interest in all historical industries, especially copper mining. The clerk stroked his sternum (above the heart) with a placatory hand, which resembled an inflated sterile glove. I started to assure him again that I was a lover of industry, but he interrupted me: One moment, Mr. Pasternak.
He t
urned and opened the safe with three deft movements of his swollen hand and tossed my passport into the thick darkness it contained. I objected, but the clerk repeated his injunction: One moment, sir. He shut the safe. On the wooden lip that served as his clerical counter were two objects, a (sky-blue) telephone and a dense-looking registry (bound in sky-blue leather). Each page frail enough to mildly transluce as he turned it with a licked, leaden finger. Human voices rose and fell in the warm, scented evening. No train had yet arrived but this did not disturb the general, jovial calm of the other travelers, those standing on the platforms to the west, beyond the clerical hexagon containing Pasternak and dust motes. Here too the Department had placed no barriers to burgher behavior. Here too they counted on innate lackeyism to keep travelers from deviating, from violating procedure. And the insult, well, it pierced me more and more, crushed and insulted me more and more. I was swaying, now, my eyes on the endless kiosk floor tiling, my pupils twitching as they counted off: one, two, three.
The clerk finished leafing through the registry. He glanced up at me and fell into a swift, azure silence, an azure silence in which he glanced at the sky-blue phone on the lip of his kiosk. Stay where you are, please, he said in his dry, precise voice, I will return your document once we have finished here. You understand that I need to contact my superiors, said the clerk. And the void glared from his mouth, cloaking his molars. The clerk cried out in pleasure as he located the entry in the register he had been seeking. His grayish hand settled on the blue, curved receiver. He lifted it, showing me once more his vacuous, mephitically twinkling mouth.