Far South

by David Enrique Spellman

  I saw the play three times: the first night I was convinced that I was seeing some kind of hilarious improvisation by a huge cast of seventeen actors. The dialogue was like fireworks going off; the actors were in constant movement. The second time I saw it I realized that it was not improvisation at all. It was all precision scripting and choreographic timing, and that made me feel even more exhilarated; even if I already knew all the twists in the plot; and on the third night there was a kind of pure rapture in the house. The cast just found some mysterious wavelength with the audience… and that made the drama terrifying… sublime. The euphoria of the performance left me high for three days. And I thought: if they’d produced that once, they could do it again. And I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to know how a company, the director, the writer, the actors, could bring an audience out of their everyday way of looking at the world and into a state that was quasi-religious, like some kind of medieval ecstasy. Or maybe like the ancient Greeks, like you read about, this catharsis. Do you understand, Juan Manuel?

  I had to meet this Gerardo Fischer.

  I told Mariela that I wanted to ask him about doing an acting workshop in Córdoba. What I really wanted was to join Gerardo’s theater company. I risked putting pressure on him to meet me right away. I said, ‘I have to leave the city within a few days,’ which was true, in a way, because I was only in Buenos Aires to see Mariela and Gerardo’s play which Carlos and Ramón had been raving about to me. So now I was raving about it, too.

  And Gerardo agreed to meet me. I was so excited. He told me that I was to go to the English Clock opposite Retiro Station, in Buenos Aires, on a specific bench with a small memorial plaque at 12:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, three days after the last performance.

  I said, ‘Okay.’

  So I took the subway to Retiro that day. I came out of the station and crossed the busy street. I found the bench. It was the middle of the day and there was no shade. The grass in front of the bench was dry and littered. The heat and humidity made me flushed and sweaty. I felt that I looked like a dog. My halter-top was stuck to my back. I kept shifting my bag from one shoulder to the other. This is not at all a very savory area of Buenos Aires.

  To get out of full view – and the heat – I went across the grass to stand against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree. I watched the summer travelers struggling with their baggage from the subway station in front of the station façade; or guarding their suitcases by the seedy coffee kiosks and the fruit juice bars. I kept an eye on the shantytown boys from Fort Apache who were hanging around the CD shops that blasted out cumbias villeras.

  You ever heard that stuff? This horrible scraping homemade sound that just files at your nerves. I hate it. And I dreaded the Apaches noticing me.

  Why hadn’t Gerardo picked a safer place for me to meet him? Some café in San Telmo or Belgrano, or down at the Puerto Madera waterfront where you’ve got security guards who keep the thieves and pickpockets and pimps away from the tourists? I thought: I’m standing around here looking like a prime victim. I was already beginning to resent Gerardo. He was ten minutes late. Not late if I was in a café, perhaps… but out there in the sun with these fucking animals staring at me…

  The play had left me ecstatic but this was not the state of mind I was in under that tree, opposite Retiro Station. I just was irritated, hot… I was certain that Gerardo chose this place to make me feel edgy, even terrorized.

  I thought: this guy is a psychopath. He’s playing some kind of mind game. He wouldn’t be the first theater director I’d met who enjoyed doing that.

  From the shade beneath the tree, I stared at each reasonably dressed man who I saw approaching the bench, willing him to be Gerardo. Then these two ragged Apaches, about fifty meters away, began to stare at me. They were younger than me, maybe sixteen, no more than eighteen, but you never know… a skinny one like a speed-freak in a Chicago Bulls shirt, Michael Jordan’s number 23; and a fat one who looked like he lived on burgers and fries. Maybe he was Peruvian. He was wearing a black t-shirt with some kind of heavy metal design on it. He scared me more. I reached into my bag for my dark glasses and slid them on so they couldn’t see if I was watching them or not. They made some comments to each other, then laughed and stared at me again. They began to walk in my direction, shuffling hip-hop style, you know, in these untied basketball shoes. The skinny one grabbed the crotch of his baggy silk shorts, and he was making a gang sign with his hand. In the next ten seconds, I had to decide whether to leave the shade of the tree and start walking toward the crowded part of the station to avoid a mugging; or to stay where I was and risk that the two would walk by with nothing worse than an obscene comment. I had a few hundred pesos in my purse. I didn’t want to lose that but it wasn’t worth getting hurt to protect it. I’d left my credit cards at Mariela’s house.

  The Apaches sensed I was nervous, and they were coming for me, I knew, so I came out from under the tree into the full sunlight and I walked directly at them. They hesitated as I closed in on them. They were right next to the bench where I was supposed to meet Gerardo. The fat one put a hand in the pocket of his shorts and the toe of my leather sandal caught the tarmac path. I stumbled. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I regained my balance and stared past the two kids and marched straight by them. The fat one turned off the path as I got close to him. He scuffed among the litter on the lawn. The skinny one leered at me, head twisted on his shoulders, lips pulled back from these incredibly white teeth.

  Then a tanned man in a dark linen suit and dark glasses darted across the busy street, dodging the cars. He was bald on top, his hair shaved quite short, gray. He had a trimmed gray beard. He was wearing an open-necked white shirt.

  The skin-and-bones Apache in the Chicago Bulls shirt ran toward his fatboy friend and slapped him across the back of the head. He ran backward singing some Cumbia rap lyrics but I couldn’t catch the words. Fatboy gave his friend the finger. They were ignoring me now. The man in the linen suit didn’t seem to notice them. He stopped in front of the designated bench and I reached it a few seconds after him.

  ‘Ana?’ he said.

  He wasn’t what I’d expected at all. I hadn’t seen him during or after the performances of The Mercy Burlesques. I had expected someone taller, younger, a little less formally dressed. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark glasses.

  ‘Gerardo?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. The train was delayed from Tigre.’

  He offered his hand and I took it and he leaned forward and the sides of our dark glasses clacked against each other as we kissed on the cheek.

  ‘Let’s get a taxi,’ he said. ‘We can have lunch together. Las Violetas. Do you know it?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I have breakfast there with my mother sometimes, if I’m down from the Sierras on a weekend.’

  ‘I like the edginess of stations,’ he said.

  Fuck you, I thought. I might have been raped, or robbed or stabbed.

  I tried to read him. Was he saying this by way of apology? I didn’t think so. He had a naivety about him… he was ingenuous somehow. I was tempted to think him stupid but he was too alert, too present in his body. He navigated us through the levels of noise and confusion and bustle as we approached the taxi rank in front of the station. I’m from out of town. I’d been told that some of the cab drivers, if not all, are connected with the Mafia. I didn’t want to be kidnapped. Did Gerardo know what he was doing? Was this just a calculated risk? A gamble? Was he doing this to keep me frightened? I was really pissed off with him. What kind of situation was this to have a first meeting with a woman you don’t know? I was not long out of college for Christ’s sake. What was he playing at? Was he so ignorant of what went down on the streets of Buenos Aires? Gerardo opened the door of a radio cab. Did he choose the precise cab and driver that he wanted by some instinct? Or was he leaving this all to chance? How could he know which was safe and which not? He must know the city bett
er than I did. I felt like such a bumpkin.

  Gerardo told the driver to take us to the junction of Medrano and Rivadavia and to take the Avenida Córdoba route and not to go across town. Gerardo was reciting a kind of ritual liturgy to tell the driver that he wasn’t a tourist but a resident; or at least someone who knew the city well enough to find his way around. The driver hardly even glanced into his mirror at us. This made me a little more at ease with Gerardo and with the taxi driver.

  ‘So you saw The Mercy Burlesques?’ Gerardo said.

  ‘I saw it three times,’ I said.

  ‘Three?’ he said.

  ‘It got better every night,’ I said.

  ‘Saturday was the best,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what happened. They all just found it that night, everything dropped away. They were brilliant. All of them.’

  ‘Nothing to do with you?’ I said.

  I couldn’t see his eyes behind the mirrored lenses.

  ‘All I can do is set them up,’ he said. ‘Rehearsals, suggestions… I mean you just have to work with what you’ve got… but it’s the actors eventually, isn’t it? It’s their show.’

  ‘What do you give them, then?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing much,’ he said.

  He was silent for a minute as the cab turned left off Avenida Córdoba and onto Medrano.

  ‘You’ve got to help them to get the ego out of the way,’ Gerardo said. ‘There’s the text, yes, I did write that, but they have to deliver on it. If you look, the words are quite ordinary, disjointed. Normal conversation, really. They know what to do. We’ve been working together for years.’

  Oh, I thought: ‘Working together for years.’

  The words punctured the balloon of everything I’d fantasized. How could I possibly get into such a long established group where no one has to say a word to find out exactly what it is that makes the ensemble work?

  ‘They know what you want,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose they do,’ he said. ‘But they don’t always get it right. There’s no predicting it, is there? One night everything just zings. The next night it might be a great performance but there isn’t that breakthrough that leaves you affected for days.’

  ‘For days, yes,’ I said. ‘Saturday was amazing.’

  His dark glasses were off now, waving in his right hand next to the window, the legs uncrossed. His eyes, I saw, are a bright green, his head and shoulders leaned in just a touch toward me.

  ‘It’s a mystery,’ he said and he laughed; he sat back then, relaxed, and his hands lowered again onto the seat, his left hand close to my right.

  ‘I love it,’ Gerardo said, ‘if it happens when the critics come to see a piece… they experience it and they can’t deny it… least of all explain it… and if they’re not complete bastards they give the show a great review. And we’ve had a lot of great reviews, so I know.’

  He couldn’t suppress the smile. He raised a hand. The green eyes disappeared behind the dark glasses again. He folded his arms as if he was trying to hold back his uncontrollable pride.

  ‘We’ve had some bad ones, too,’ he said.

  ‘Reviews?’ I said.

  The cab pulled up on the corner of Medrano and Rivadavia. The facade of Las Violetas is all marble columns and plate glass windows and gilt moldings. The white-coated waiters let us choose a table for ourselves in the dining area, beneath the big staircase. The café was relatively empty. A waiter brought the menu and the wine list. My mother and I usually sat on the other side of the café near all the pastries in the glass cases.

  ‘Did you see that documentary film about Macedonio Fernandez,’ Gerardo said, ‘the one that Ricardo Piglia presented?’

  ‘Yes, yes I saw that,’ I said.

  I remembered some shots through the window of Piglia at one of the tables here. Macedonio was a big influence on Borges. He lived in an apartment near here, above a boxing gym on Rivadavia. I remembered some scenes from the documentary: the waterways of Tigre where Macedonio had his anarchist commune; but my memory of the whole film was vague. I hoped Gerardo didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘So many layers of the city,’ Gerardo said. ‘We’re here now, Piglia here a few years ago, something that we witnessed on a screen in a cinema, now in our memories. And the memories of the times you sat here with your mother eating pastries and drinking coffee. And Macedonio sitting here before the place fell into ruin. And then it gets refurbished like this… as if the ruin never happened.’

  He’s so ingenuous, I thought, not a trace of irony. Maybe I was wrong about that.

  The waiter arrived to take our order. Gerardo had ravioli and a half-bottle of Cabernet. I ordered fish and a bottle of mineral water. ‘You’re Porteña?’ Gerardo asked.

  ‘Cordobesa,’ I said. ‘My mother lives here now with her second husband. I live in a kind of artists’ colony in the Sierras, near Ciudad Azul.’

  ‘An artists’ colony, like a commune?’ he said.

  ‘We have a theater there,’ I said. ‘I do mime and modern dance. Sometimes drama.’

  ‘How long have you been there?’ he asked.

  ‘Three years,’ I said. ‘We have painters, writers, a psychologist. I have a house there. Or studio. Just a little shack really.’

  ‘And the theater?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, big enough,’ I said. ‘A good space… about six people in the company.’

  ‘A writer… director?’ he asked.

  ‘Three of us develop the pieces,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I do the choreography.’

  ‘And you perform where?’ he asked.

  ‘There, at the colony,’ I said, ‘but also here. From time to time.’

  ‘When next?’ he said.

  ‘Maybe in March,’ I said, ‘when the weather’s a little cooler.’

  ‘I’ll come to see you,’ he said, ‘your next piece. You’ll let me know, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but I want to ask you something.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what I really wanted to ask, I couldn’t ask him if I might audition for his company, so I said, ‘Will you come and do a workshop with us in the Sierras? Do you have the time?’

  He leaned forward over the table, elbows down, fingers clenched under his chin. I saw him reflected in the mirror of the mahogany bar behind him.

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded once. ‘Okay, I’ll come.’

  I felt a real thrill. He reached for the linen napkin. I reached out and squeezed his hand. He closed his fingers around mine. How old was he? A lot older than me? Fifty maybe… maybe more?

  ‘What do those tattoos mean?’ he said.

  His fingertip slid above the shapes of the letters on my forearm.

  You know sometimes it’s such a drag when people ask you about your tattoos but not this time with him. I’d forgive him anything.

  I pointed to the letters one by one.

  ‘This one means essence,’ I said, ‘this one is nature, and this one is energy.’

  ‘Essence… nature… and energy.’

  He said it slow.

  ‘I like that,’ he said.

  He didn’t ask me any more because the waiter arrived. I was glad. I didn’t want to get into a philosophical discussion with him about East and West… mysticism… nothing like that. People are always so clueless about it. Always asking me if it helps me in some way, as if I’m some kind of emotional cripple. It’s how I see the world… it’s that simple… but I didn’t want to talk about any of that, right at that moment. I wanted… I don’t know exactly what I wanted… something to do with Gerardo coming to the colony… something about him touching my forearm.

  The waiter poured a glass of mineral water for me. Then he uncorked the half-bottle of Cabernet. Gerardo went through the ritual of tasting it. I was sure that he found me attractive… but he was a being a gentleman, a bit uptight to tell the truth.

  I thought: maybe it’s the age difference.

  I thought:
Maybe he’s got some English blood. An Anglophile. Like Borges. He’s probably old enough to be my father but that hasn’t stopped other men making passes at me. I rather liked his hesitancy. But I didn’t want anything stupid to happen that might make it seem as if I was trying to seduce him so that he’d give me what it was that I really wanted. That would be so clumsy. Even if he had no idea what I really wanted. Not yet, anyway.

  A workshop. He’d agreed to do it. That way I thought we could get to know each other. I thought, maybe he’ll want me in his company if he likes the way I work. Anyway, I’d got him to come to Córdoba. That’s how it all started for me…

  Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez

  January 11th 2006

  Hours: 21:00 to 21:30

  My cell phone rang at about nine pm. I picked up. It was Carlos. He knew who I was. We’d talked a lot back when I’d done the investigation into the Arenas robbery.

  ‘I got your message,’ Carlos said.

  ‘Thanks for calling,’ I said.

  Ana propped her head up on her hand, pulled the duvet around her body. I slid my legs out of the bed, pulled some duvet into my lap and leaned over my knees.