The Foreigners

by Maxine Swann

  “Would you?” I asked.

  “Sure, but my cell phone’s out of juice.”

  “You can call from downstairs,” I said.

  “I’m Gabriel, by the way,” he said. I put out my hand. He looked surprised and shook it. “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “The States.”

  “Oh, really? We can speak English if you like,” he said. “I could try. The terrible thing is I can’t make jokes in English.” He smiled.

  When he smiled, his nose wrinkled up and his teeth showed suddenly, altering his face completely. He looked like a demon, as if there were a demon inside him peeking out its head. Then the smile disappeared just as quickly and the serene mournful expression settled on his face again. He had shadows under his eyes, like the shadows children have.

  We entered my apartment. “Oh, wow, this is a weird place,” he said. He was walking down the checkered hall. “Cool. Weird.” We circled through the kitchen—I checked the water again, just in the off shot—then went into the living room.

  “Here, the phone’s here,” I said.

  “This is a guy I know, not that well, he’s a client, a plumber and an electrician. He can tell us.”

  He called the guy, whose name was Hugo.

  I went back into the kitchen and fiddled with the faucet.

  Gabriel got off the phone. “Okay, he says first to check the tank—you did that—and then to check all the valves, here in the apartment and up on the roof. They have to be open, which means to the left counterclockwise.” We went around the apartment, looking. I found two valves in the bathroom, another in the kitchen below the sink, all apparently open.

  “Okay, now let’s check up on the roof,” Gabriel said. This time we took the elevator.

  “Do you give English classes?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I’m just starting.”

  “Maybe I’ll take English classes from you.”

  “Really? Great. Why do you want to learn English?” I asked.

  He switched to English hesitantly, moving his hands. “For work, for my work,” he said.

  We were on the roof again, walking across it. The stain looked smaller, as if it had dried somewhat in the sun.

  “What do you do?”

  He returned to Spanish. “Well, I was studying medicine, to be a doctor, but then when the crash came, I had to stop and find a job. I’ve been mostly working as a messenger, you know, for a company that delivers things. They give you one of those little bikes.” We had arrived at the water tank. “Okay, now Hugo said there should be a valve around here, just below by the pump.”

  I climbed up on the ledge of the water tank again. It was still filling, I could hear. Below on the pipe that led to the pump was a valve of a different kind, like a lever. It was up, vertical. I put it down, horizontal, and waited. But you couldn’t really tell if anything was happening.

  I looked at Gabriel and shrugged.

  “I guess we just have to go check downstairs again,” he said.

  We crossed the stain again and headed for the door.

  Back in the apartment, I turned on the water in the sink. Nothing.

  “Let me call Hugo again.”

  I began to feel that I’d never have water again. I heard him talking on the phone. “Okay . . . Yeah . . . Yeah . . . There’s a hose coming out of the pipe. Yeah, there is . . . Okay . . . Yeah.”

  He got off the phone. “Let’s go back up. He says that what we did is right, to put that valve horizontal. The other thing is there may be air in the pipes. He says we have to go up and open that hose and let the water run out.”

  We left the apartment again and took the elevator up.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s what I was saying,” Gabriel said. “What I was actually thinking was that I could use English for my other work.”

  “What’s your other work?” I asked.

  “As a ‘gigolo.’ ‘Gigolo,’ right?” He said the word in English.

  “‘Gigolo’?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

  “Yeah.” He looked at me and laughed.“It’s something very new.”

  “Wait, what do you mean, ‘gigolo’ like prostitute?”

  He nodded.

  We crossed to where the hose was and he opened the valve. A little bit of water came out.

  “I think it will increase appeal, if I speak English. Some clients are foreign.”

  I was trying to understand. “This is with men?” I asked. “Your clients are men?”

  “Yeah, men. I love men. That’s the terrible thing.”

  A moment later, the hose sputtered, jerked and then the water came streaming out. It darkened the roof where the stain was, spreading liberally to form a little pool.

  “We have to let it run,” Gabriel said. We watched it together. “Yeah, the gigolo is good. The gigolo works,” he said.

  I felt a bit shy about discussing this subject with a stranger, but I also had a lot of questions. “Do you do it for the money?” I asked.

  “No, no, it’s not really for the money, though the money’s great. Plus you get benefits, like free dinners. The other day I got a new CD, the Tori Amos one. But it’s more than that. It makes me feel better. When I’m doing it, I feel good, very confident.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess the beautiful thing is that it annihilates the whole problem of desire.”

  “It does?” I felt confused.

  “Yeah, it’s perfect. Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s desire that’s painful, very, very painful. This way you can have sex without suffering all that pain.”

  We turned the hose off.

  “And the clients you see here are which clients?”

  “The prostitute ones. It’s a friend of mine’s uncle’s place. I don’t have to pay, that’s why.”

  “Is Hugo a john?”

  “Yeah, yeah, he is, actually.”

  As he was talking, we headed back downstairs. Once inside the apartment, I checked the water. It jerked, spurted and then came out smoothly.

  “Yea!” Gabriel said.

  He turned to me. “What about you? What are you doing here?” he asked.

  I told him about my divorce and how I’d started fainting. It seemed like intimate information, but not so intimate after what he’d told me.

  “Did they check for epilepsy?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I was in the hospital, they checked for everything. They ended up saying that it was psychological.”

  “Like a little death.”

  “Exactly. The last time it happened I really thought I’d died. A friend of mine suggested that I get away. That’s how I ended up here.”

  He looked at me curiously. “How long were you married?” he asked.

  “Nine years.”

  “No shit. The longest I ever stayed with anyone was two weeks. Kids?”

  “We always said we’d have kids. That was the next step, but it never happened. I mean, we always said that, but never tried.”

  “Affairs? Did you have affairs?”

  I shook my head.

  He looked at me closely. “It’s like you’re starting at year zero or something.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Cool,” he said. He seemed to be getting more and more interested in my case. “This is a very good place to be starting at zero. Everyone will be nice to you.”

  “Because I’m a foreigner?”

  “Because you’re a certain kind of foreigner. My advice is to try things. Try everything.” He looked at his watch. “I really have to go now.”

  I walked him to the door.

  “But wait,” I said. “About the gigolo. When you say it alleviates desire, what do you mean?”

  “Desire, I mean the emotional part of desire.” He thought for a second. “You still function as an animal, but you’re not in that horrible state of yearning.”

  After he left, I sat thinking for a while. For starters, I couldn’t believe
that I’d just met someone who was studying to be a doctor and working as a gigolo at the same time. Then I thought about what he’d said about “that horrible state of yearning.” “Horrible state of yearning”—what was he talking about? Finally I remembered what he’d said about me. “My advice is to try things. Try everything.” The thought of it interested me and gave me the jitters.

  three

  I received an e-mail from a girl named Leonarda that said: “I read ur sign. Plese I kneed to study English.” I wrote back proposing that we meet the following day in a café with a red-and-gold motif near my place. I had never been inside, but had passed it numerous times.

  I arrived a bit early and sat down. After a few minutes a man came over and asked if he could sit with me. I said I was waiting for someone. He laughed and began to sit down anyway as if he didn’t understand. I shook my head more vigorously. It seemed he wanted something. I looked around. At the other tables were women sitting alone. Now I saw it, the situation, the way the women were dressed, in tight black, white and red clothes, with makeup on and very high sandals. I watched them wonderingly for a moment. Another man seemed to be approaching. Just at that moment, I felt someone grab my hand. It was a young woman with dark hair in a ponytail and startling green eyes under thick-rimmed glasses. She wore a baseball hat.

  “This is a place for sluts,” she said. “C’mon.”

  “It is?” Doubly surprised and confused, I gathered my things and followed her.

  “Wow, you’re really lost, aren’t you?” she said, once we were out on the street.

  “It did feel weird,” I said.

  “Those guys just want to fuck you in your butt.”

  “What?”

  “Of course. Or haven’t you read Naipaul’s theory about the supposed Argentine propensity to brutal heterosexual sodomy? Turn around.” She made me turn around and looked at my butt. “And you even have a nice butt. Which makes it worse—or better. I don’t. Mine falls off like a little shelf. And you’re foreign. And Ramplingesque!” She started laughing a lot. “The compliant victim. It’s perfect. I guess you’ve seen The Night Porter?”

  “Hey, wait a second,” I was completely lost. “You’re Leonarda, right?”

  “Yeah. You can call me Leo, if you want.”

  “Why are you speaking English?” By now we were walking along Córdoba Avenue.

  “Oh, I speak English. Who doesn’t? I just wanted to meet you. I’m always interested in foreigners and I saw you putting up your sign.”

  “Why didn’t you just say hi?”

  “I was shy. Besides, you probably would have thought I was weird and been scared off. I do scare off people. And this way I could have time to tell if I liked you.” She rolled her eyes. “Only now, well, I see that it doesn’t matter if I like you or not. You need me. You’re lost.” Though she feigned exasperation, she seemed delighted by this news.

  “Your English is very good,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’d only ever speak another language perfectly. I’m ashamed of Argentines who don’t.”

  “You should hear me speak Spanish.”

  “Well, happily I don’t have to.” She shrugged. “Anyway, what I meant is that we Argentines always have to prove ourselves. We feel that we’re so far away from everything, in the provinces of the provinces. No one even knows we’re here. I’m like that too.” She took a little skip forward. “I love my country. Hey, I know. Why don’t we go to this meeting? I was going to go anyway until I got your message. C’mon.”

  I followed her as she hailed the next bus.

  “What’s the meeting?” I asked, once we were on the bus.

  “It’s this group called Mercury. They’ve created an alternative society, with their own currency and everything. Maybe it would interest you.”

  The bus was crowded. We stood pressed against the other people, hanging on to rubber straps.

  “So what are you doing here?” Leonarda asked.

  “I have a grant to study the waterworks of Buenos Aires,” I said.

  “Oh, wow, exciting,” she said, in the most bored voice in the world. “Well, at least it’s not the Dirty War or tango.” She looked around, discontented.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Whatever. Those are the two things foreigners always study.” Her face suddenly brightened. “Oh, but Sarmiento says one thing about water.”

  “Who’s Sarmiento?”

  “Just, like, the father of the nation.” Her voice suddenly got rapturous. “He has a beautiful image, that the whole nation is a sickly anatomy. This Argie dude, Salessi, wrote about this. It was, like, right at the start of our history and Argentina is so big. Sarmiento said what we suffered from was extension, like this huge inert body of latent riches, but none of it moving around. Anyway, so what we needed to make it work was a circulatory system, vivifying fluids put in motion, interconnecting the different organs, giving life to the modern state. ‘Because the greatness of the state is in the grassy pampa, in the tropical productions of the north and the great system of navigable rivers whose aorta is El Plata.’” She looked up, bedazzled.

  “What you just said was a quote?” I asked.

  Her face suddenly lost its rapturous look. She looked at me warily. “Yeah, why?”

  “No, nothing, just surprised.”

  But her expression was strange. The change was unmistakable. Her face looked like it was disintegrating around the edges. I backpedaled as vigorously as I could. “But I liked what you were saying. Please go on.”

  She looked out the window, then back at me.

  “Are you patronizing me?”

  “No, God.”

  She looked out the window again. “You swear you want to hear?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Okay.” She took a breath and went on. “So it was like he was really talking about the waterworks of the whole nation.”

  I nodded, encouragingly.

  “Oh, and the other part was about immigration. He said that, along with the rivers and railroads, immigration would be a kind of oxygen, promoting internal circulation and commerce. They were really trying to get people to come here at the time to fill that empty land. But not just anyone, that’s the funny part. Sarmiento was very clear about the kind of immigration he wanted, Anglo-Saxon blondies like you because, he said, the instinct of navigation wasn’t bestowed on the Spanish or Italians, but is possessed to a high degree by the people of the north. They would bring the spirit necessary to ‘agitate these arteries.’ And then guess what happened? Only the southern darkies came! Like me. I’m Spanish Andalusian and, even worse, with Peruvian Indian mixed in.” She looked up. “Oh, here we are.”

  We got off the bus in a neighborhood I’d never been to and walked down a wide, straight street. It had rained the night before, the concrete in the shady spots was still drying. We came to a large gray-green metal door and Leonarda rang the bell.

  There was no response whatsoever.

  I felt a little nervous. “So what are we doing again?” I asked.

  “It’s a group of people who gather to discuss things. As I said, it’s supposed to be an alternative society. And everyone’s supposed to offer something, a service of some kind, like computer classes, or a haircut or blow jobs or whatever. And people are also supposed to propose things, projects in which everyone participates.”

  “Blow jobs?”

  “Yeah, yeah, one guy was doing that.”

  We heard footsteps. After a moment, a young woman with thick brown hair cut close around her face opened the door. She had a patterned skirt and funky sneakers on. Leonarda introduced her as Milagros.

  Speaking of circulation, inside there was a feeling of cool air circulating. It was a high open space, with old printing machines sitting here and there.

  “They’re all upstairs,” Milagros said.

  We followed her. In the room upstairs, people were lounging around on couches, two shoddy armchairs, a mattress on the floor, i
n the midst of a discussion. On a low table in the center were a few bottles of basic red wine, some plastic cups and a bottle of Coke. There was a trash can full of papers.

  Leonarda and I sat down squished together on one end of a couch.

  A man in his late fifties, poised on the edge of a chair, with gray hair cut short, a black turtleneck, looking at any moment as if he might leap up, seemed to be leading the discussion. Another man, younger, slightly plump, in his mid-thirties, with a swath of dark hair falling in his eyes, sat beside him, prompting him with questions. Now and then other voices chimed in.

  “At one point I got interested in a group of Trotskyites,” the gray-haired man was saying. “They had this literature, this magazine, and when I asked to see it, they said, ‘Why?’ ‘Why?!’ I asked.” People in the group laughed. “ ‘Well, don’t you want people to know what you’re doing?’ The answer was ‘No,’ precisely no, they didn’t. They didn’t think there was any point in trying to disseminate what they knew. The question is what do you do when you’re living in an age of stupidity and in possession of a truth that no one wants to hear? From the Christians to the Trotskyites there has been this model of a secret society. The secret society gathers to encrypt the truths that other people aren’t ready to hear. What you have to do is think, not transmit. People in another era will be ready to hear.”

  The young woman, Milagros, looked up with a shy, slightly mischievous smile. “Was that your intention in starting this group?”

  The gray-haired man, Ernesto, laughed. “Well, if it turns out that way. No, no, not really. What I had in mind was a strategy of happiness,” he said. “We’re confronted today with an immense amount of uncertainty. The idea of this group was to construct networks, or containers if you will, to alleviate the anxiety of uncertainty.”

  Leonarda leaned in and whispered to me, “That guy’s the founder.”

  I looked around. The crowd was in general substantially younger than the speaker. There was a pale woman with delicate features and hair dyed bright orange, a young slender man in a purple turtleneck.

  “The pending question is how are we going to organize ourselves ?” Ernesto said. “At one point, we proposed that this group be something like a permanent assembly. But nobody wanted to do it, nobody wanted to take charge.”