No One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi

  “So it was you who made love to Lorena?”

  Your face lit up joyfully. You laughed silently, staring at me, waiting for me to laugh as well or ask you for details. We men are aroused by lovemaking between women, and you were expecting me to ask why and how you seduced her, how you lured her to your secret corner, the same one perhaps as the one I had stumbled into … but before I could ask, you told me anyway.

  “We made love in your room at the Imperio Hotel in Bahía Blanca. The night porter gave us the key.”

  “Mónica was told Lorena came in with a man. Was the porter one of you as well?”

  “We don’t recruit service personnel, but in hotels they get paid like immigrant workers, so they try to make money on the side by allowing prostitutes in. When I gave him the equivalent of his Christmas bonus, the porter was happy to let us do whatever we liked. The Bahía Blanca police were ordered to keep you away that night you went and got drunk in the local dive. They did their work well, because you didn’t turn up until the next day.”

  “I was back before dawn, in fact,” I said, as if it mattered.

  Ayala and Rodríguez. So they had picked me up outside the bar on orders. Cervantes would never have written Don Quixote with those two as his main characters.

  “Who gave the order?”

  “A top mafia man in Puerto Belgrano. He controls all the white-slave traffic in the region. He makes his contacts internationally each year when he sails with the navy’s training ship. They say the whores in Jordan are especially hot.”

  You laughed openly, defying me, then like someone raising their champagne glass, you raised the rifle level with my face.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “There would be no point, Gotán. I am death.”

  “You tried it once before.”

  “Do you think I would have failed if that’s what I had wanted?”

  “The doctors told me it was because my heart is over to the right.”

  “You should never believe what doctors say.”

  And then, as I had guessed and feared it would, it all started to happen again. Mireya bent her knees slightly, and let the rifle drop gently on the floor, pushing it to one side with her foot.

  I did the same. I did not trust her, but thought I had no right to be more mistrustful than she was. That was the strange path we took, and although nothing was said or promised, it was written that nothing between us would come to an end if one of us was still alive.

  The two rifle butts bumped into each other, spinning round and then coming to a halt, each one pointing straight back at its owner.

  She straightened like a flower bathed in sunlight and early morning dew, and began to take her clothes off. I waited until she was naked to do the same. I had none of her arrogance, though: I felt like a befuddled old man, or humiliated like a prisoner forced to strip off in jail. Perhaps that really was my situation, and for the first time I felt afraid.

  “Did you take all your clothes off with her too?”

  She nodded.

  “And with you as well, the last time,” she said defiantly.

  The pain in my chest surged again, forcing me to hunch up.

  “Why did you leave me?”

  “Pain makes you look pathetic, Gotán. I left you because I have no idea who you are. A good tango dancer, a toilet salesman …”

  “Bathroom furniture in general: bidets, washbasins, fittings. But I’m not on a sales trip to Patagonia, I didn’t bring my leaflets or price list. Do you know who you are, which bosses you’re serving, Mireya?”

  The pain in my chest turned into a burning fire. Mireya standing there naked telling me not to call her Mireya, me saying I was not just a salesman, that I risked my life when necessary, that they could have put me through the meat grinder while I was making my clandestine attempt to save colleagues like Toto Lecuona.

  “Just so your school chums could gun him down. That treasurer of yours you screwed while I was sniffing round the roofless ranch like a timid mouse. If I had known it was you I would have peppered you both with bullets in bed—then we wouldn’t have been here like this today, and poor Toto would still be alive, instead of lying out there in the street with sand and brushwood blowing over him.”

  “That’s his fault, Gotán. He had instructions to finish you off, but instead he wanted to help you, to pay you back for the favor you did him that night in ’78. Like you, none of your friends have any ideology, only nostalgia.”

  She moved around the room on tiptoe, as though she were wearing high heels. Each step made her breasts quiver, and as she turned away I saw her firm, wonderful backside. She shook her head as she turned toward me again, her hair alternately covering and revealing her features, while her breasts seemed to grow firmer at the touch of her long tresses, as her pupils grew in the semidarkness. It was only when she whispered to me to come closer that I realized the wind had dropped. Closer, she begged me. Closer.

  I tried to concentrate on her hands. I was never very good at spotting conjurors’ sleight of hand: anything can grow from a closed fist, from the passing of the palm of a hand. Any trick of the light can lead to a string of handkerchiefs, a rabbit, a dove, a stiletto. She insisted she could have killed me if she had wanted to, that she told her “comrades” I was dead. That was why when they saw me arrive in the ghost town they stopped trusting her, and locked her up in this room on the top floor of the bar with no vowels.

  “Aren’t you going to come here?”

  She held out her arms. I took hold of her hands, feeling every pore, trying to discover betrayal in every cell of her skin. I asked her again why she had reacted the way she did when she found out I was a policeman. “What did you expect to find apart from ugliness?” I pleaded that night, my real face is not beautiful, running after her until she dived into a taxi. This ugly mess is my true face, the same as that of all the living dead who thought we were fighting for something, but we were merely scratching the surface, digging our own graves.

  “Don’t think,” you said. “Put your arms round me.”

  I relaxed my grip and slid my hands slowly and gently along your arms, still wary but already yielding to the pressure of desire I could feel in my body. “Only your stomach is flabby,” you said, your own hand seeking out my sex. Your fingers closed around its taut urgency. In the end Eros and Thanatos search each other out like neighborhood gangsters on every corner of the human condition. There is nothing we can do to separate them, to prevent the inevitable clash, the blind duel that is no more than a pretense, the fake death of the Messiah who, while everyone is crying over him, comes back to life without a word and like you tiptoes out of the back door or climbs out through the skylight and makes a beeline for heaven, from where he can look down on us.

  Anybody would be happy to die if they could guarantee an outcome like that.

  “And yet you’re scared,” you said, as if you could read my mind, that other ruined bar with no vowels or chimeras where a couple of ideas scratched themselves for fleas, as bored as the whores in this same room when the prospectors for easy gold realized their mistake and left them without customers. “Don’t think. If you feed your fear, it will only grow. Come closer, Gotán. Everything in your life is bringing you to me. You and I were born for this. I never stopped loving you.”

  My hands reached your shoulders. Your hand on my prick would bring it to its natural berth. You are that berth, but I know there is no solid ground, no shoreline, that it was just a word spoken far too long ago for me to believe you now, a word tossed into the void, with no possible echoes or resonance.

  Then there was the pain.

  I took hold of your hands, as if by wrapping mine round them you could not hurt me, as if by halting the magician there would be no more tricks, no more doves or knotted strings of colored handkerchiefs. But the pain was unbearable: my heart was not over to the right as the roly-poly doctor had said, it was where it should have been, but there was a stiletto shard still in it, tha
t same stiletto you had used on Lorena and Cordero. That was why you had put your weapon down, calling for an armistice that ended in this other pretense.

  “The doctor at Tres Arroyos did a good job,” you whispered in my ear. “He was one of us too. But don’t think, Gotán. Just fuck me, that’s what you and I were born for.”

  Terrified, I suspected my stiff prick was simply an anticipation of the rigor mortis of my whole body. You removed a hand and grasped me behind my back to pull me toward you, as if you wanted to penetrate me again, but this time with your entire body, to devour me so that our insides would merge and become one, howling their dismay in a single, androgynous being. I would have played along, Mireya, but for the tearing pain in my chest: nothing I had left to lose could be more important than you. This time, I hesitated. I could kill in cold blood, but looking in the mirror at my own death was suicidal, impossible. My rifle, though, was too far away, and seemed to be locked together with yours as desperately as the two of us were, steel and gunpowder strained to the limit.

  The only way out was an explosion. Almost unconscious, I slipped inside you. It was you in all your fury and ragged despair who opened yourself to me, tearing yourself to pieces. The groans when I reached orgasm were the groans of death. I ejaculated a trickle of blood which fell from my mouth onto your face.

  After that there was a long silence, as if my tomb had just been sealed. I did not have the strength to open my eyes, and was too frightened to confront my horror. Then I felt something moving, and it was not my body but yours freeing itself from me like someone throwing off a blanket because they are too hot.

  I can reconstruct what happened next because it is not hard to imagine.

  You got up, still full, in a vampire-like trance that must be a genetic trait in women like you, Mireya. A no less authentic or treacherous reply than any other to the painful questions of love.

  You picked up the Kalashnikov the G.R.O. had given you to help force your way into trade union headquarters or government offices if your coup had succeeded. You aimed at my head, still undecided whether finally to put an end to my agony. Farewells are impossible, Mireya. We do not want to admit that whatever we do we will end up as we began. Alone.

  “Ciao, Gotán.”

  Paralyzed by the pain in my chest, I closed my eyes. My voice, faint but steady in the rubble of my collapse, failed me. I wanted to thank you.

  7

  Later there were other voices happy to supply the details of what occurred between my brief absence and my stubborn return to those who think they are alive.

  “When we heard the shooting, I tried to convince Burgos it was time for us to join the assault on the Winter Palace,” Ayala said. He had read the history of the Russian Revolution in a weekly serial.

  But Burgos had still not worked out how to get the safety catch off his Czech rifle, “reconditioned”—that is to say disguised—in the military factory at Azul, in Buenos Aires province, before being shipped abroad again. He had cheerily lifted the rifle to his shoulder, though, and closed one eye to take aim. He must have chosen some target in his subconscious, because the bullet ignored the jammed safety catch and perforated the roof of the 4×4 in which he and Ayala were bringing up our rear.

  “You missed my head by that much,” Ayala said, holding up his thumb and forefinger as he stretched out his other hand and clipped the doctor round the ear.

  “We decided to make a detour round the town, to at least confuse them if they were lying in wait for us with heavy artillery,” Burgos said. He had got behind the wheel and hurtled off into the countryside, the 4×4 plowing through the swirling sand like a ship through fog.

  “We couldn’t see a thing, so when we came across a gunman armed to the teeth I thought it was one of those apparitions you sometimes get in the countryside, especially after you’ve eaten meat slaughtered by rustlers.”

  Robocop turned out to be Rodríguez, our Sancho Panza presumed lost in the arms of the police museum spider.

  “Love is luggage in transit,” Sancho said with a hint of melancholy. His only similarities to Schwarzenegger were his lantern jaw and an unshakeable fascism that left him invulnerable even to a tragic love affair. “As soon as I split up with her, I called Inspector Ayala: ‘I’m once again at your command,’ I told him. She used the idea of me joining the federal police as bait to seduce me, but I can’t get on with Buenos Aires women, even if they’re the same rank as me. ‘You smell like a farm laborer,’ she told me the first time we fucked. When she compared me to an inspector from the capital who wore Paco Rabanne perfume, I realized that even if I did join the National Shame I would always be a bumpkin, the sort of lumpen from the provinces they send in to shoot other lumpen in the shanty towns, not to fight crime, but to try to get us to wipe each other out.”

  “I ordered Rodríguez to follow us,” Ayala said. “I didn’t really trust your friend Lecuona. Nor you either, mind. But I had to get to the bottom of all these crimes, and when the serial killer handed himself in I was at a loss.”

  Ayala had managed to steal to steal Burgos’ car keys, so Rodríguez was able to follow us from Buenos Aires to Piedranegra in the V.W. When the doctor saw Rodríguez standing there like a centaur in the middle of the desert next to his beloved vehicle, he thought the time had come for him to give up not only drink but his post as forensic expert too, although everything seemed far too real to be simply a case of delirium tremens.

  The bond forged between them from having served together in the police priesthood and sharing so much shit in their provincial town meant they wasted no time debating what to do. Instead, the three of them advanced on the ghost town like a troop of cavalry, entering the other end of the street from Toto and me. Burgos demonstrated that he would have made an expert tank driver, while Ayala and Rodríguez fired out of the back of the 4×4 at anything that moved—“Which wasn’t a lot,” Rodríguez admitted. “We shot more at tumbleweed and birds stunned by the wind than we did at the enemy.”

  The defense of Piedranegra could not compare to the siege of Stalingrad or Madrid. Not even to that of the Malvinas, where starving young conscripts with medieval weapons faced a N.A.T.O. country’s army. Half a dozen gunmen posted on the town roofs quickly decided discretion was the better part of valor, and sped off in a half-track they had inherited from the Argentine military.

  It was enough thereafter for the three musketeers to reach the bar with no vowels, even if they had to pass the disagreeable spectacle of Toto face down in the dust, the involuntary donor of his old, weary blood to an earth than can never get enough.

  “By the time we arrived, the mysterious lady with the dagger had disappeared,” Burgos took up the narrative. He had stayed in their vehicle while Ayala and Rodríguez shot their way into the bar. “As seems to have become a habit, they found you half-dead and carried you out to the car.”

  At this point I instinctively felt my body for signs of bullet wounds. It gave me a tender jolt to realize that Mireya had left without shooting me. Perhaps she had the wild idea we could do it all again.

  “On the outskirts of Piedranegra there are some old mineworks,” Rodríguez said. “I discovered them because I came cross-country to get here. That V.W. of yours is a tank, Doctor.”

  Burgos closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as if he could hear the creaks and groans from his beloved car’s long-suffering shock absorbers, but he did not interrupt Rodríguez’s tale.

  “I told Inspector Ayala what I had found. We headed straight there, reckoning that the best place in the world to hide one or more prisoners would be an abandoned mine.”

  “And what happened?” I asked with the faintest of voices, still struggling with the incessant pain in my chest.

  Ayala and Rodríguez exchanged glances like experienced hustlers. Burgos, who had been driving the 4×4 at walking pace along a dry river bottom, drove it up an incline and came to a halt. Fifty meters away, I could see the entrance to the mine.

  “Nothing happen
ed,” Ayala said.

  “But it’s going to,” Rodríguez said. He was used to closing sentences and doors for his superior.

  8

  The only living thing we are likely to meet if we enter the mouth and penetrate the innards of a fetid body are worms.

  “I want to go in alone,” I said.

  Toto was dead, and I was about to follow him, so it made no sense for the other three to risk their lives.

  In the event, the other three accepted my suggestion without demur—which did not exactly please me either. They were to wait half an hour, and if I did not reappear, they would set off in search of reinforcements, although by this stage it would probably be impossible to get anyone to stir themselves for something that was swiftly vanishing into thin air like another conjuring trick.

  “Do your best not to die,” was Ayala’s laconic advice.

  Weak from loss of blood and in so much pain I could hardly breathe, the Kalashnikov weighed like an artillery shell in my arms. For a moment, and perhaps due to the sense of distance which those about to pass on are said to experience, I saw myself advancing through the desert like an explorer contracted by the Discovery Channel to find evidence of a lost civilization.

  I stopped seeing myself this way, and in fact as soon as I entered the tunnel, I stopped seeing at all.

  The first conclusion I came to when I found myself in complete darkness was that this had never been a mine. That was why the British boat never arrived, and why the prospectors had left empty-handed.