The Foreigners

by Maxine Swann

  Certain figures in Buenos Aires are known to have important libraries. If you need a book, you can find a friend who has a friend who knows this guy who probably has it. Then you can hope to arrange an introduction. These figures with the marvelous libraries are often happy to lend books—it is, after all, part of their prestige. They rarely ever ask for a book back directly, too gross a gesture. Rather, if the book is not returned, they find ways of securing it, sending envoys who insinuate themselves into your house and slip the book off your shelf when your back is turned.

  Miguel was the possessor of one of these famous libraries. Leonarda had been scrutinizing his books. She showed me the way he made comments as he read, underlined things. For her part, she had been making comments on his comments, disparaging, mocking remarks or suggestions for further reading, there was something he hadn’t understood. The next time, she showed me some love letters from a woman, where she’d done the same, put commentary in the margins, made grammatical corrections.

  Must youth be bound up with evil? What was not clear to me was to what degree Leonarda’s evilness was real and to what degree an affectation, a generative force to make something happen. And what about me? Was I drawn to this evilness, even thrilled by it? I had actually never considered being evil before. New terrains were opening all around me.

  Little by little, I was becoming aware of the magnitude of her target. It seemed to have grown, and taken on all kinds of shadowy significance, like those deep water beasts on whose hides crustaceans accrue to the point where the actual animal disappears from view. Sometimes, it seemed that we were moving in this deep water light, luminous and murky at the same time, an occasional ray cutting through. Did she sense the same murkiness? She of the million synapses firing at once. Could I be aware of something she wasn’t?

  At other times, it seemed that the light was firmly on, maybe even too bright. She kept that clinical operating-table light on all the time. It was as if she were preparing for some awful surgery, laying out her shiny tools.

  “Can we turn that off, please?” I asked one day.

  She shrugged. “Sure”—flicking it off—“why?”

  With it off, I felt better, as if he was less present, more gone. Even though, of course, he was everywhere.

  One night when I came over, she was crying.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She had her terribly exposed look. “Sometimes I just feel so alone.”

  “Maybe you should leave here,” I said. “Do you want to come stay with me?”

  “No, no, it’s not that. It’s that sometimes I feel that if I were arrested, accused of some terrible crime, no one around would defend me. No one would stand up for me, say to the cops: ‘You’re fucking crazy, she didn’t do it.’”

  “Wouldn’t your family?”

  “No, they’d think I’d done it.” She looked miserable. She waited. “I was thinking maybe you might be the one, the only one, who would vouch for me. But I’m not even sure of that.”

  She looked away, waiting.

  I paused too long. Would I stand up for her? Of course I would want to defend her. But would I actually believe she hadn’t done what she’d been accused of? Wouldn’t I too have a doubt?

  “I would, of course I would,” I said.

  She turned on me fiercely. “No, you wouldn’t.” Then firmly and more calmly, “Don’t lie. The worst thing you could do is lie about it.”

  The rest of the night she was quiet.

  No matter what, in my mind, one thing was certain. I wanted to be with her. I dreamed I was in bed with a woman with full round breasts, who suddenly sat up, revealing her dick, which she put inside me. I understood then too that this was what I wanted. There was something here that expressed the pinnacle of my desire. I wanted both to be with that girl and to be that girl. She was both the thing I desired and the model.

  The dream stayed in my mind as an image of fulfillment, but I was not fulfilled. I walked all over the city, restless, at all hours, to exhaust myself. The smell of the streets, still crowded with young people at three, four in the morning, excited and upset me. I remembered my earlier walks, the way a pall had hung over everything. Now, on the contrary, I felt that I was surrounded by endless combinations of unfamiliar ideas and forms, if only I could seize them.

  seventeen

  The vine crept in the window. The water ran down the wall in a sheen. I lay on the floor. If I lay there quietly, I would feel something in my chest, a kind of pressure. At first it was painful. Then it gave way. The place was very quiet. I could hear the sounds of water running in the pipes. I pictured water being pumped up from the Río de la Plata, purified, running through all the pipes of the city. Next I pictured the complex of underground streams, the filthy dark water, having been reoriented, sloshing beneath the streets I knew. But I was tired. I wanted to rest. My mind, so excited, wanted to think about nothing, or to only see the same thing over and over again. I let it drift until I saw the water farther out, the empty gray sea, the monotonous lilt of waves, the beautiful regularity of their irregularity, lapping, endlessly, lap, lap, lap.

  I must have dozed off. The doorbell, for what it was, a scratchy insect sound more than a bell, woke me. Gabriel was outside.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Just resting.”

  He seemed to look at me more closely. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, just tired.”

  For the first time, I didn’t really feel like telling him what was going on. I was exhausted and there was too much to tell. But also, I felt somewhere a gnawing feeling, that if I told him what I’d been up to, this time he wouldn’t approve. Basically, because he would think my mind was not free. It was true, my mind was not free.

  “Is there such a thing as feeling too alive?” I asked. “In medical terms, like, I don’t know, what would you call that? Hyperactive, overstimulated?”

  He laughed a little. “Those two states exist. You sure you’re fine?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” My phone was ringing. Shit—Isolde.

  I arrived late to my lunch meeting with Isolde. She was looking smooth, impeccable, in close-fitting knee-length khaki pants, a white blouse, her blondness. But she was distressed.

  “I thought you’d never come,” she said.

  She didn’t want to eat. Was it because she was dieting? I knew that was an interest of hers. I ordered something myself. Only then did it occur to me that she might not have money, difficult as it was to believe with her sitting there looking as she did, expensive in every way. I offered to invite her for lunch. She flushed for a second, then agreed. She ordered the salmon, “with sparkling water, please, that’s sparkling, remember.” In restaurants she always behaved like one of the entitled, even now, when in despair. But this selfcontrol on her part was highly unusual. It lasted a few moments, then everything tumbled out.

  “Diego’s disappeared. It’s been weeks now that he hasn’t answered my e-mails or calls. I don’t have any money. I really can’t ask my parents again. I know they can’t send me anything more.”

  Bit by bit, she had had to cut back on what were to her basic things: manicures, pedicures, waxing. She had bought a nail kit and a waxing kit. She was now waxing herself. The nails were okay. She held out a hand. She had done them over and over and over again, looking online for instructions until she’d got them right. Though I didn’t know a lot about manicures, they looked pretty near perfect to me. The waxing was painful. She’d burnt herself, then left the wax on so long it turned brittle and was almost impossible to pull off. All the same, after several tries, she had managed to give herself a real bikini wax. This included the back.

  “What do you mean, the back?”

  “The back, the butt. I think it’s important.” She was serious, stoic, having stopped crying now. Her near plumpness, sometimes invisible, seemed in this moment very touching. The main thing she was worried about, she said, was her hair.

  She had w
anted at least to keep dyeing it professionally. She was afraid that that too she would have to stop. And then what? Do a home job? She had a horror of how that would look, cheap, above all. Comparatively, eating in restaurants was of the least importance. She could always eat at home.

  “What about work?” I asked.“What’s happening on that front?” Since I’d met her, she’d been looking around. “Could you work in a bank again, at least for now?”

  She had had an interview with an Austrian company. Her qualifications were bizarre, at once too many and too few. The interviewer ended up inviting her out. He wanted to get to know her better. They went to a party at the Italian embassy that very evening. Isolde knew she shouldn’t have said yes, if she was actually interested in a job. And anyway, aren’t you always supposed to say you have a previous engagement? But she wanted to go. After that, she didn’t hear from him again. She knew this was her problem. She appeared too easy. Wasn’t that the worst thing for a woman to be? But she couldn’t help it. She was simply incapable of biding her time.

  I offered her some money, what I had in my wallet, which she took as we parted. “Good, good,” she said. “Thank you.” She walked away, shoulders back, by the looks of it proudly, although I suspected she was crying again as she turned.

  She told me later how she’d stared out the window on the taxi ride home. Hideous city, horribly loud. Dogs barking frantically, both near and far away. It seems that someone is torturing these dogs. There’s no other explanation. The grinding sound of traffic, much louder than in other cities, right here, against your ear. The buses heaving, huffing. What has happened to the mufflers, the concept of mufflers? The mufflers in this city all worn out, badly made to begin with. People sit out and dine on the street, screaming at each other above the traffic. It doesn’t seem to bother them. They always scream anyway. Argentines scream. At a table full of them, they’re all screaming at once. Each one screams his or her own thing, cutting off the other midway. No one ever hears what the other person said. It doesn’t matter. The farce of it. The unceasing, bantering show, tears and reclamations. Nobody actually even understands entirely why the other person’s crying. Nor does it matter. Hateful, melodramatic race, with their Italian inheritance. People reaching out to strangle each other in restaurants. Another version of the same, old women meeting for tea and repeating over and over exactly the same thing. It’s the form, not the content, that it’s all about. The endlessly boringly repetitive hours spent at lunches, barbecues, birthdays. The absolute sacralization of birthdays. Three hours attendance is the minimum, five is expected. Six hours in the company of the same people. Everyone gets sick of everyone else. Yet nobody knows when to stop, leave. The long goodbyes. It takes at least an hour. You go around to everyone, one by one, strike up a last conversation, repeat most of the things you’ve already said, exchange kisses, make plans, open an entirely new conversation, which means you have to turn back, explain yourself, linger, repeat things again, kiss again. By the end, everyone wants to kill each other. They go home in cars, taxis, buses, depleted, hating humanity. The following evening there’s a similar event. All the same people will be there.

  Sometimes Isolde would feel a kind of Third World revulsion. The streets of Buenos Aires, in certain architectural zones, were like Paris, as everyone said. But all the same, let’s admit it, there was a seedy edge. You couldn’t forget the hours when the city was scuttling with cartonero figures, sifting through the garbage, their hands touching everything, mothers holding small children defecating in the street. One day, Isolde had seen human feces in the subway. In the wealthy Barrio Norte, where she lived, all this was almost invisible, but someone like Isolde was sensitive, she knew it was there. Anyone who’d been to Europe could feel the seediness. It was a down-and-out Paris, a northern zone Paris, taken over by African and Arab immigration. Was this her fate? To live not in Paris, but a seedy simulation? Part of her revolted. When she thought about returning to Europe now, she never thought about returning to the Austrian town where she was from. Her fantasies were about London, of falling in love and having a British family. The illusion was proving more and more complete. She thought of herself as upper class.

  Back at home, the cleaning woman, Claudia, was there. The owners of the apartment paid her wages, a common Argentine arrangement. A “rental” came with cleaning services. Claudia eyed Isolde. Isolde felt that she was always eyeing her. Isolde knew little about her, except that she was from the north, Salta, which meant that she spoke with a peculiar accent. Isolde had images of colonial houses, humidity, jungle heat. Once Claudia had missed a week, returning to Salta, because her father had been sick. Claudia was probably Isolde’s age, maybe a bit older. She had a funny way of mumbling everything she said, so that sometimes Isolde would get frankly irritated. She’d even told her.

  “Look, I’m foreign. I won’t understand unless you speak clearly.”

  But then she began to think that a lot of the time Claudia was just talking to herself. Or at least didn’t care if Isolde heard. No matter what, she didn’t want to complain. The way Claudia worked was incomparable. Never had Isolde lived anywhere so clean.

  As she walked through the apartment, Isolde turned on the lights. Light, light, she needed light. She went into her bedroom and closed the door. Sitting down on her bed, she checked her cell phone in case a message or a call had come in she hadn’t heard. Nothing. Loneliness overtook her. It sunk deep inside her, into her bones, as damp weather can. Or it felt like a gray box. She was shut inside. When people spoke about the pleasures of melancholy, she didn’t understand it. There was no pleasure here. The loneliness sunk further. It chilled her chest. She felt that she had been alone her whole life. No one had ever actually come near.

  She thought with longing of a past she hadn’t had, a house full of people and bounding dogs. She saw the dim wet house of her childhood, her mother’s shabby attempts at glamour. Her mother had valued glamour too, but had had neither the means nor the exposure to the vision to make it a reality in her home.

  Isolde did have a vision. Or at least she had had one. What had happened? The obsession with Diego had entirely derailed her. It was as if she had been on a fleeting silver train, the TGV streaking through the French countryside, and suddenly, instead of getting off at her proposed destination, against all her carefully laid plans, had disembarked at a dingy stop. It looked okay from the outside, like most of those station stops in the French countryside, with petunias in the flower boxes, humble but clean, only in this case what she found, when she went around the corner of the station building, was something else. A run-down house, filth collecting on the walls. The people who lived there had gray faces, their clothes looked greasy. They had no sense at all of glamour or beauty, no urge toward these things, no understanding even of the words. Isolde was meant to live here. Her destiny, it had been decided, was among them, cleaning, cooking, scraping the garden to grow what little they could. The soil in this particular patch was not very fertile. Though she might fight against it, time would tell. Her hair would lose its sheen, go back to dishwater blond. From the work and malnutrition, her skin would go gray, slowly, never maybe entirely as gray as that of the others, but still. At first, scrubbing the house vigorously—she couldn’t bear to live in a filthy place—she would gradually desist, it was too much work and what did it matter? There was no one to see. Dirt would begin to collect again on the walls.

  Isolde heard Claudia leaving. She felt scared. She went back out into the kitchen. No one. She couldn’t stay here. She had to go out.

  She walked down the hill to the grassy stretch beside the museum, buying a newspaper on the way. The lilt of spring was settling into summer, at the height of which the days would be sweltering, people trying to move as little as possible, their clothes, when they did, dark with humidity. Beginning with the holidays and through the months of January and February, whoever could would find a means of escape, to the gray-sanded wind-beaten beaches of Argentina, where t
he water was choppy and cold or, for the flusher, the more golden ones of Uruguay and, for the very few, the pristine paradisiacal white stretches of Brazil. But not yet. It was still early December, the spring flowers drooping and falling from the trees, everyone beginning to shed their clothes. People took to the parks with even more abandon, in couples, groups, families, flinging themselves down on the grass.

  The lack of solitary figures pointed up Isolde’s loneliness to her. She sat down on a bench and tried to absorb herself in her newspaper, looking for an interesting cultural event. It would have to be something free, like a gallery opening. Next she would have to summon cheer in her voice, pick up her phone and make some calls. “Hellooo, would you like to join me this evening ...” She thought for a moment. No, she couldn’t do it. She let the paper drop in her hand. But she also couldn’t return to her apartment, not yet at least. What then? After sitting for a while, she came up with a plan. There was a little cheap restaurant tucked into a side street not far from her house, where you could have a steak and a glass of house wine for ten pesos. She’d eat dinner there. It would be all right, she was sure not to be seen.

  eighteen

  I was walking along the wall that surrounds Chacarita, the municipal cemetery. I liked this walk. Usually I came here later in the day, around dusk, and walked under the brown light of the lamps. But on this particular day, the sun was still high. The wall cast a delicious cool shade. Animals and people rested in its shelter. Street kids played alongside it in the grass. Occasionally, a street dog crossed my path, trotting busily or loitering, the Buenos Aires street dogs like street dogs everywhere, mutt mixes, fox-like, on the small side, with German shepherd coloring.