5
I decided to spend the night in Bahía Blanca, in the same hotel as my murdered friend’s widow and daughter. We shared a frugal supper and said goodnight until the next morning, when we planned to return to Buenos Aires in Isabel’s car.
I felt depressed. I had lost my car because I had left a blond inside it while I went blithely off to have a pee. The local police had questioned me as if I had been a crime suspect rather than the owner of a car reporting its theft. To add insult to injury, they growled at me that the robbery had occurred outside their jurisdiction, in Carmen de Patagones, so all they could supply me with was an untidy report that a bulimic inspector took half an hour to type on a rusty Remington. He was more interested in his mate and telephone calls that had nothing to do with his police work. In fact, it seemed as though he used his hours on duty to run a numbers game: he took bets quite openly, and even discussed the merits of such lucky numbers as twenty-two or forty-eight with his clients.
When I called the insurance company, they told me the crime report was a start, but that at some point I would need to go down to Carmen de Patagones so that the “relevant authorities could give me an official confirmation of the theft.” I spent a good few moments cursing a system that washes its hands of anything that disappears, be it a car or a close friend. Typical, I thought, of a country that sends hundreds of cargo boats abroad piled high with food, yet allows more than half of its citizens to live off charity or scraps, with the age-old excuse that Argentina is a country that does not deserve what is happening to it, because we are a nation inevitably destined for greatness.
I went for a walk around the frozen streets of Bahía Blanca, half-hoping I might find my car parked on some corner or other. Luckily, just as I was about to freeze solid, I saw the universal neon sign with red lettering and a champagne glass flickering upward. Pro Nobis the place was called, and if you looked as carefully at the sign as you might at a Goya painting in the Prado, you could see that alternating with the glass were a pair of female thighs.
I went in, hoping to find a drink and a woman who would not overwhelm me with demands or confessions. As a young man I had always avoided dives like this, frequented by desperadoes and sailors stranded on dry land, who dug into the dark corners in search of the fools’ gold of their memories. Every lone wolf knows of long-haired women with perfect bodies who have betrayed them: the loss has remained with us for the rest of our lives, even though we are aware that if we met them again we would soon run into the same misunderstandings and contradictions, would yet love them as though they were the only ones for us, expose ourselves to ridicule, and believe for a while at least that what we cannot see or touch does not matter in the slightest.
“Get me a whisky, would you?” asked a redhead who came and sat beside me at the bar. The room’s red light made her look transparent, the closest thing to an angel you could find etched in the filigree of smoke swirling round the dark surroundings. The barman was a blond bear with the face of a Swedish actor signed up by Bergman who spent his free time making porno films so he could have sex without having to spout nonsense about God and the human condition between fucks. He looked at me as I might have looked at him if he had spoken Swedish when I told him to serve the girl a real whisky, that if she was thirsty she could have a glass of water, because I had no intention of paying for a glass of colored water when all I wanted to do was forget everything about the day I had just had.
“We can guarantee you’ll forget everything in here,” said the redhead. “And if after three glasses you start to cry, the fourth is on the house.”
“And just when I was thinking there was nothing new in advertising.”
“Do your zip up, darling. If anyone sees you like that they’ll think I did it, and there are house rules.”
Hearing her speak in that way confused me. She sounded more like a schoolmistress than just another woman I could spend some time with and never see again.
“You went red. Of course in this light it doesn’t show, but you went bright red.” She winked ostentatiously at the barman, and the two of them laughed. They must have been lovers, indulging in this kind of game to keep the nightly boredom at bay. She slid her hand onto my crotch and started fiddling with the zip and the little animal curled up inside. Poor thing, he did not even seem to realize the warm fingers caressing him were of the opposite sex.
Instinctively, I looked round the room. It was empty. Techno music was blaring out, strobe lights alternately blinded and dazzled, but there was nobody to enjoy them. I was the only customer in Pro Nobis, which must have been the only bar open at 2:00 in the morning in this southern port city. It was from here that the Argentine fleet threatened to leave to vanquish the British in the 1982 South Atlantic War, except that none of them ever weighed anchor.
With great relief, doubtless, the redhead realized I had not come into Pro Nobis for sex but to feel less alone, to share small talk or simply healing silence, despite the music and the lights that were an unavoidable part of the atmosphere for anyone who came here to escape the harsh emptiness of the early hours outside.
On the wall, a framed photo of the cruiser General Belgrano adorned with an anchor and a lifebuoy got us talking about the disaster when it was sunk by British pirates. The redhead told me she had a brother lying at the bottom of the south Atlantic. He was not yet twenty when the submarine Conqueror torpedoed them, on the direct orders of the British prime minister whose scorched-earth policies went on to inspire the “new” Peronism of ’90s Argentina. Today her brother would have been more than forty, and could well have been sitting at this same bar, making sure that his little sister (she was five years younger than him, she told me coquettishly) did not prostitute herself with the dirty old men who brought their moss-lined hulls into this particular berth.
“He could have been, he might have been, but he isn’t. Sometimes I see him coming in through that door over there,” she said. I gazed in the direction she was pointing, but all I could see were other girls, the barman and the dish-washer coming in and out.
“He comes in, sits down right where you are now, and bums a cigarette off me. He never bought his own, but smoked all kinds, and marihuana too—it was all the same to him. ‘Take care,’ he says when he comes to see me, ‘and try to find another job, because I don’t want a sister who’s a whore.’”
I had no doubt the redhead’s story was true, that her brother came in just as she said, spoke to her, then stayed for a while, smoking his borrowed cigarette without saying a word. And that she waited until he had left to avoid upsetting him by seeing her sell her body, a body firm now only in this half-light, her flesh gouged by the toothless night-sharks.
I sat watching her silently, just like her brother who never reached the Malvinas. I only left when the Swede said he was no longer serving, that the evening was over. It was not yet 3:00. The Pro Nobis sign clicked off above my head, the woman’s thighs frozen in the night.
I should never have left the hotel, I told myself. My words of wisdom proved prescient when two giants straight out of a body-building ad sprang from a car parked a few feet away and proceeded to wipe me from the map with a few well-aimed punches.
6
No way of knowing how long I was unconscious. It cannot have been for very long, because when I came round day had not dawned. I felt groggy and with a stomach pain that this once I could not blame on my chronic ulcer. I heard people speaking, but was afraid I might get another beating if I opened my eyes, so I clung stupidly to the hope that all this was a bad dream. When I began to tremble with cold I realized that it was not.
“Wrap this round you,” said a hoarse smoker’s voice. A leather jacket hit me on the head. More curious than fearful, I opened my eyes.
“Don’t worry, you’re with friends,” the same voice told me.
Before I could properly make out his features, I saw the glow of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I pulled the jacket round my shoulders.
&n
bsp; “The men who attacked you took your coat. They thought the beating was enough, but hoped you might freeze to death as well.”
“I don’t think they were muggers,” said another, reedy voice.
The first man was sitting opposite me. They had laid me on a bare bunk with only a blanket on top of its springs. The one with the reedy voice was speaking from the corridor on the far side of the bars, as though he was a visitor. When I tried to sit up, the pain in my stomach paralyzed me. My neighbor helped me with the jacket.
“Stay where you are for a while,” he told me. “The doctor is on his way. We had to wake him, he was out flat. We don’t get many emergencies around here,” he went on, as though to justify the doctor being asleep. “This is only a small town, there’s no dangerous violence like there is in Buenos Aires.”
I understood that what had happened to me was not dangerous, simply a demonstration of small-town high spirits.
They had not taken me to the infirmary, but had dumped my unconscious body in a cell. It was lit only by a fluorescent tube in the corridor. The man opposite me was big enough to have been one of my attackers, and the man outside could have been his companion, but it made no sense for them to have beaten me up before they brought me in. They could simply have arrested me: I usually do not resist polite requests to accompany people to a police station.
“I wonder what led a middle-class guy from Buenos Aires to leave his warm hotel room in the middle of the night and end up in a dump like Pro Nobis? What was he looking for?” my hoarse-voiced friend asked.
“Who are you?” I managed to stammer, as if he could ever have been anything else but a policeman.
“Inspector Ayala,” he replied, in a formal manner that took me by surprise. “And that’s Officer Rodríguez,” he said, pointing toward the man in the corridor.
I tried to draw breath, but the effort was a punishment.
“Don’t worry, the doctor will soon be here.”
“He must be cleaning his teeth,” came the voice from the corridor. “He’s obsessed. First of all he brushes them, flosses them one by one, and then gargles with mouthwash. It takes him at least half an hour.”
“If I were a woman, I’d have him lick my cunt,” said the man beside me. The two of them laughed so loudly at this that it sounded like a duet for two drunks, with a low and a high voice singing from very different scores.
“I spent all the money I had in Pro Nobis,” I said, feeling my empty pockets. “So why did they mug me?”
Inspector Ayala wiped away his dirty cackle like crumbs with a napkin.
“You should know,” he said drily.
“I’ve never been beaten up to thank me for something,” Rodríguez said.
I realized then that I was not in a cell because there was nowhere more comfortable to accommodate me.
“As far as I’m aware, I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m a single father. My daughter lives in Australia. Her mother abandoned her when she left me, so nobody is asking for any alimony.”
“Why did you come to Bahía Blanca?” Ayala wanted to know.
From out in the corridor, Rodríguez offered him a cigarette. Ayala asked if he had forgotten he had given up two months ago. He was finding it hard going, so why didn’t Rodríguez stop messing him around and just get on with poisoning his own lungs. Rodríguez shrugged and lit his cigarette, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye either for support or to keep tabs on me.
Ayala was still waiting for my reply.
“Am I being charged?”
He stood up and turned as if to leave the cell, asking Rodríguez if that wasn’t the doctor he could hear, parking his sky-blue Volkswagen outside the station. As Rodríguez was saying he did not think so, the inspector wheeled round, leaned down, and slapped me as hard as he could across my left cheek.
“That pain in your stomach is going to seem like an itch compared to this,” he said, knocking my head in the opposite direction with another blow.
I have only a few teeth left, and most of them are rotten, but luckily I have never gone in for false ones. If I had, I would have lost them all with that second backhander. I cursed him as loudly as I could as my mouth filled with blood.
“Blue Volkswagen pulling up outside, Inspector,” said Rodríguez.
“If the doctor asks, tell him you fell over,” Ayala explained patiently. “You were beaten up in the street, and when you tried to stand, you fell against the curb.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“If you ever say that to me again, you’re a dead man. Our good doctor doesn’t have any scruples when it comes to signing death warrants. He wouldn’t be a forensic expert if he cared a great deal about living specimens.”
I believed him. I had no idea why I was so reluctant to answer their questions. There was nothing suspicious about why I had come all this way to Mediomundo, even if I had arrived to find a friend who had been shot and a young blond who had jumped into my car and then vanished along with it.
The doctor came in staring at the floor and did not say hello to anyone. He was a short, bald, plump man in his fifties. He was sweating, although inside the cell it was as cold as an ice box. His breath anesthetized me while he poked around my stomach with his stethoscope. When he pressed on my ribs, though, I howled with pain. He gave me a strip of gauze to wipe the blood from my mouth, and asked if I had lost any teeth. I said I had not, that I had a dentist who was perfectly capable of doing that for me.
“Did you see who it was?” he asked, keen to play the detective.
“I didn’t have time to open my eyes,” I said.
“This is a peaceful city. Violence comes from outside,” he said, handing me a prescription. “Take this for the pain. And make sure you rest. There could be internal injuries.”
He scribbled something else on his pad, then, as though prompted by Inspector Ayala, asked:
“What brought you to Bahía Blanca?”
“Nothing special. A dead friend.”
Ayala, who had stepped back to give the doctor room, nodded his approval. I briefly wondered whether the doctor might be Ayala’s ventriloquist’s dummy.
“What did he die of?”
“The usual. Shot at point-blank range.”
The doctor looked inquiringly at Ayala’s impassive face. The inspector did not disappoint him.
“His name was Cárcano. One of the bosses out at the C.P.F. oil company. Five thousand dollars a month in his pocket, plus bonuses.”
“His widow was right, the dirty old man spent it all on his fancy woman,” I said.
“Five thousand dollars a month! Not even the King of France earns that!” said Officer Rodríguez, consumed with envy in the corridor. “I earn eight hundred and risk my life dealing with all the garbage out on the streets. And when I retire I’ll get half that, dammit.”
“Yes, dammit for two reasons. Dammit for the pittance you get, and dammit because the King of Spain might earn that, but not the King of France, they got rid of him a long time ago,” the doctor said. Then he turned to me. “Go back to your hotel or wherever it is you’re staying and take a couple of days’ complete rest.”
Ayala seemed to agree with his advice. My face was still aching from the slaps he had given me, but I was warming to him. When he spoke, I changed my mind.
“I think twelve hours will be enough ‘rest.’ You could be on your way back to Buenos Aires tonight. I don’t think Bahía Blanca needs you any more.”
“I was intending to set off in a couple of hours, with Cárcano’s widow and daughter.”
The doctor put away his pad and stethoscope and said with a snort that he would not be held responsible if I died en route.
“When you woke me up I thought it was for something important.”
I left the police station with him. Nobody asked any more questions, or apologized for the beating, or for slapping me around in the cell. The roly-poly doctor was kind enough to drive me back to the hotel. I would never have found it, a
lthough it was no more than six blocks away. As I was getting out of his car he told me I really should get some rest, but if the inspector was telling me to leave, then it would be wise to do so. I thanked him for his advice. I could understand his position: it must be unpleasant having to cut open the body of someone you were talking to only a couple of hours earlier.
I got out and went into the hotel.
“Room number 347,” the receptionist reminded me. Day was almost dawning, and I had agreed to have breakfast at 8:00 with Mónica and Isabel before we set off for home. Exhausted, aching all over and still completely at a loss, I threw myself down on the bed without switching on the light. If I sleep on my back my own snores wake me up, so I turned on my left-hand side.
It is every man’s dream to find a beautiful, naked woman aged no more than twenty-five in bed beside him. What happens next depends on one’s condition and the circumstances. That morning (and from that moment on) my condition was not what it might have been, but there was still a little something there if sufficiently tempted. The circumstances however could not have been worse.
The naked woman was Lorena. She was dead.
7
One thing was clear. I was not going to be able to sit and have breakfast with Edmundo’s widow and daughter at 8:00 that morning. It was also clear that if I ran out of my room shouting there was a dead body in there I would be thrown head-first back in jail, and I would be questioned even less politely. And this time they would not bother to rouse the police doctor from his nice, warm bed.
I am always upset when young people die. It makes me wonder what I am doing still hanging around, pushing sixty and with a body and ideas that stink to high heaven, unable to instill hope in anyone. I am not even one of those metaphysical gurus that are everywhere these days, the sort who line their pockets writing books and giving talks where they tell you without a qualm that God is in all of us, when it is obvious even to the numbest of skulls that God is not even where he is meant to be, that no-one can find him: he has not even left a note with a clue as to why he has abandoned us like this.
No One Loves a Policeman Page 3