by Maxine Swann
“Yeah, an Austrian,” Vera said. “At first, she didn’t speak at all. She was very cold. But she learned quickly. She has a certain touch, and a stylish look, which Juana likes.” Vera smiled. “Now she’s changing, loosening up a little bit.”
The black hair actually looked great on Isolde, giving her a different air of sophistication.
When I came out of the waxing room, black-haired Isolde was coming right toward me, leading a woman to the pedicure area. We made eye contact. There was no way to avoid it. She started.
“Hey,” I said, softly.
She put her finger to her lips. I nodded. I was getting a pedicure with Vera. It was near the end of the day. When I finished and stood up to pay, Isolde walked by me again. “Wait for me in the café at the end of the block,” she whispered.
I did as she’d said. About twenty minutes later, she came in. This had been her nightmare, being discovered. But now that it had happened, she was matter-of-fact. She sat down and took her wig off. Her blond hair was pulled back tight in a ponytail, then looped up at the base of her neck. She pulled off the ponytail holder and shook it out. Watching her, I admired her practicality.
“So,” she said, “what are you doing all the way out here?”
I told her about the first day I’d come to look at the Riachuelo and how I’d met Vera.
“Now I come back to see her,” I said.
“Yeah, she’s nice,” Isolde answered. “She tells good stories.”
She seemed a bit tired. Her nails were freshly done. She looked up at me and smiled. Suddenly, the voice was back, melodious, the accent. “There’s an opening at Benzacar tonight, a new artist, should be interesting. Would you like to join me?”
“Sure, why not?” I said, both impressed and thrown, not least by the trace of irony in her eyes.
She glanced at what I was wearing. “If you come home with me now, you can borrow some clothes.”
I looked down at what I was wearing, an outfit that up to then had seemed perfectly fine to me. “Okay,” I agreed.
twenty-six
Night fell rapidly. Leonarda and I were prowling around. I flashed my teeth at her in the dark.
“I think it’s time to tell you,” I said.
“Tell me what?”
“What I’m doing here.”
“What do you mean, what you’re doing here?”
“Well, I actually work in intelligence,” I said.
“Ha-ha. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. And that’s coming from someone stupid.”
“Think about it. Why else would I be here?” I countered.
This seemed to hit home. Her weak spot, the national inferiority complex. Why would anyone come to Argentina?
Cars were whizzing by us, shaking up the flowering trees. Just then my cell phone beeped, indicating it was low on battery.
“What’s that?” She glanced around quickly. Miss Techie to boot. It was almost like a caricature. That’s right, of course, I thought, she’s pathologically paranoid.
“No, nothing,” I said.
I laughed. In that moment, I remembered something else that Canetti says, this time about laughter. “A human being who falls down reminds us of an animal we might have hunted and brought down ourselves. Every sudden fall that arouses laughter does so because it suggests helplessness and reminds us that the fallen can, if we want, be treated as prey. We laugh instead of eating it.”
I was working to destabilize her in one way or another.
She hadn’t lasted long living at the guy’s place, which wasn’t to say that she was through with him. She’d found lodging in a house with several other young women. “Come visit me,” she said. “I have the cutest little room.”
I timed it so that I was on my way out for the evening. I was meeting up with Pablo, the guy I’d met that night in the bar with Gabriel.
“Can I take a shower?” I asked. I took a shower in the little bathroom off her room. I came back out. “Do you have anything lacy?”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Just to look nice. I have a meeting.”
She stood, opened a drawer, looked through her clothes. She was clearly unhappy and not adept at hiding it.
I tried on one negligee after another and finally decided on a purple one.
“You like that one?” she said. “Good. Let’s go.”
“What do you mean?” I laughed.
“Let’s go, I’m going with you.” She gripped the back of my neck with her hand.
I shrugged her off, laughing, started putting eyeliner on in the mirror. “I wish I could bring you,” I said. “But I can’t.”
That encounter gave me an idea. Her place was centrally located. At every possible opportunity, whether she was there or not, I would stop by on my way out for the evening. I would use her bathroom. I would pee or take a shower, drying off with her towel. My excuse was always that the water wasn’t working at my place. I would use her deodorant, her perfume. Or if I had perfume with me, I would spray it around. Once I even touched myself and left a snail trail on her washcloth.
Silly as they might sound, these gestures were satisfying me. With each one, I wriggled freer from the trap.
Her bras didn’t fit me, but once I borrowed some underwear, leaving a pair of mine in her dirty-clothes basket. I left a trace of lipstick on the sheet. A few blond hairs in her hairbrush, contrasting markedly with her dark ones. I shaved my armpits with her razor.
The idea was to scatter pheromones around. I kept a litany in my head of the substances containing pheromones: snail trail, spit, snot, perfume, sweat, pee.
If she was there, I would lie back on the bed, stretch my arms out, baring my armpits.
“This guy I’m meeting tonight is a writer, quite good, I think. At least, he has original ideas.”
Sometimes I would actually be meeting someone—I had picked up the habit of going to that bar and occasionally going home with someone. At other times, as in this case, it was a lie.
“What do you know about original ideas?” she snapped.
What mattered was that I had captured her attention in a new way. Her energy, usually so diversified, was caught and she with it, here in this little cage of a room. The key, of course, was that I had somewhere to go. I had no delusions, the whole situation was predicated on that. If I was fleeing, she had no need to.
“Oops, it’s late,” I said, sitting up.
twenty-seven
One day, as she was coming home from the beauty parlor, Isolde’s downstairs neighbor, a man in his forties, asked. “Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?”
Isolde was taken aback, which made her answer somewhat brusquely. “Oh, no, no, I can’t. Thank you.” She couldn’t imagine any interest in having tea with this man. In fact, a moment later as she was opening her apartment door, she had a hard time even recollecting his face. Was he that nondescript or simply off her radar?
The guy didn’t mention it until a month had passed, when he asked again, “Would you accept my tea today?”
His timing was propitious. Isolde had had a hard day. She was tired. Her hands were tired. She’d been working with them all day. Her legs were tired. She was someone who liked company. She went in and sat with him. In a moment, she would continue on up to her apartment, get dressed for the cocktail party she meant to go to, but for now she would rest.
The guy, Hernán, had untidy brown hair that fell into his eyes. He put music on. He was cooking. He seemed to feel that was enough, to be in each other’s presence, cooking with the music on. Usually, Isolde would have felt uncomfortable with such a lack of chatter but, after the daylong chatter at the beauty parlor, silence was a relief. And the smell and sound of food cooking. He had a comfortable chair with cushions. She let herself sink into it.
After that, from time to time, she’d stop in and have tea with him at the end of her day. Once tea led to dinner. He was actually a good cook, surprising in an Argentine man. Except for the barbecu
e, which was a field of macho competition, very few Argentine men she’d met could cook.
Now and then he mentioned a friend, but it seemed that, on the whole, he lived in his own world. He didn’t seem to expect her to invite him to her place or to do anything really. He didn’t ask her any troubling questions about her life. He was not much of a talker in general. But she could feel how content he was with her presence. One day it occurred to her to wonder what he liked about her. Certainly not the things she would imagine a person would like about her. She never acted like her glamorous self in front of him. She was often tired, never dressed up, hardly bothered to charm. And she certainly wasn’t supplying sexual favors. They hadn’t so much as brushed hands in passing.
She didn’t mind his seeing her going out to a party dressed to the nines, as he sometimes did, but she was embarrassed that he would know what kind of work she did. She didn’t tell him. He didn’t ask. Then one day she found herself simply talking about something that had happened in the beauty parlor, something funny, it came tumbling out. It must have been that she was feeling so comfortable. In any case, it didn’t seem to matter. He enjoyed her story, listened and laughed, and didn’t seem in the least surprised about where she worked. Had he known it all along? She didn’t ask, simply left it at that.
One day, playing, she showed up in her black wig. “That looks nice on you,” he said.
“Do you prefer dark-haired women or blondes?”
He shrugged. “Either way. I like both.”
“Oh, come on, that’s impossible. You must have a type.”
He shrugged. “Not really. Take you. You look great both ways.”
Another day, she inadvertently discovered that his mother was institutionalized. In and out of depression for most of her life, she had tried to kill herself the year Hernán had turned thirty. She hadn’t succeeded, only enough to turn herself into a vegetable. “Probably better that way, poor thing,” he said. “She seems to suffer less.” He had grown up with her, his father gone, though it was from his father’s side that he’d come into the rental properties, a few apartments, some Chinese grocery stores. One of them was this apartment where he lived now. The others generated enough for him to live off the rents.
Once after a particularly harrowing day—she’d had a prostitute client who’d kept falling asleep as Isolde was doing her nails, then waking and saying that she didn’t like the color, so that Isolde had had to start all over again—Isolde stayed on later than usual at Hernán’s.
“Here,” he said, seeing how tired she was, “why don’t you lie down?” She let him put her in his bed, take off her shoes. She turned away and collapsed, her blond hair on the pillow. Hernán sat across the room in an armchair, watching her for a while.
Isolde woke, surprised, looked over, alarmed. But she was still in her clothes, while he, also fully clothed, slept soundly in the armchair. She felt a first flush of feeling for him in that moment. It frightened her. It seemed so enigmatic and not at all attached to any of the reasons she’d imagined a person would love another, that she crept out without waking him as quickly as she could.
After that experience, she stayed away for a week or more. He didn’t press her. When she finally came down again to visit him, she had a different awareness. Maybe it was this she’d been afraid of, that had been keeping her at bay. She watched him cook. She noticed everything, the way his hair dipped to one side at the back of his neck, his smell. As she watched, she wondered, does he have girls? Then she remembered. She’d seen him often with a girl in the early days, small, cute, dark-haired. What had happened with her?
“What happened to that girl you were always with?” she asked.
He looked over his shoulder. “Sofia? We didn’t fit together,” he said. “I was trying to force it, but we didn’t fit.”
That night, Isolde went back upstairs, but as she lay in bed, her mind on Hernán, she began to feel impatient. She got up and went back downstairs in her nightgown. He’d been sleeping but, seeing her at the door, he took her hand quite simply and led her inside. For some reason, she’d imagined that he wouldn’t know what to do with a woman but, to her surprise, he actually seemed quite knowledgeable on the subject.
twenty-eight
The grant people wrote again. My time was almost up. They were expecting my final report, at which point I’d receive the last installment of money. I printed out my half-term report, gathered the rest of my notes and lay them out all around me on the floor. I wasn’t at all sure that I’d collected the kind of information they wanted. Nor was I sure how to present it.
I wrote an e-mail to my friend Brian to get some pointers about presentation and in the meantime settled down to work.
Gabriel rang the bell as I was dozing on the floor in my sea of notes.
“Oh, boy,” he said, seeing papers all over the floor, “what’re you up to?”
“Writing my water report,” I said. “What about you?”
“A funny thing just happened. A guy just wanted to watch me typing naked. Yeah, I swear. He brought his computer with him. For one hour and he gave me a hundred pesos.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “Do you think that could work for me? I could type up my report and make some money in the process.”
“Of course,” he said. “You just have to find the right person.” He sat down in his favorite spot on the chaise lounge. “How’s everything else going?” he asked.
“Good.” I smiled.
“Wait, you’re up to something.”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting down across from him. “I figured out a way to get my revenge. I’m attacking Leonarda, without her knowing it. It’s cool, I swear, I sort of have her in my power.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, really, I can’t believe it. It’s like she’s my little prey now. I came to the conclusion that it’s the only way to deal with her, the only thing she’ll respond to. She’s gripped, she’s totally gripped.”
“What’s the secret?”
“Simple, really. I realized I just need to have a second life besides her, somewhere else to go. Sometimes I really do have somewhere to go. I go to that bar we went to.”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah, I’ve been taking your advice about getting more sex in my life.”
“You pick up people?”
“Sometimes. But often I don’t. I just go home. Still I pretend to her that I have a date. It’s the need to leave. If you’re always fleeing, she doesn’t have to.”
He paused for a moment.
“It sounds like you’re enjoying this.”
“I am. But mainly I feel like I’ve broken free. I’m not in her power anymore.”
There was a flicker in Gabriel’s eye. Was it doubt? I registered it, but only took the time to think about it much later on.
“And what about Miguel?” he asked.
“Out of the picture. As far as I know. But now I don’t even care.”
“I can see that, comparatively speaking, your water report might be less than compelling.”
“Yeah, well.” I looked down at the sea of papers again.
Outside, dusk was falling. Silky darkness creeping in. Soon I would be on my way.
I slithered through the night, reptile-like, gleaming. A crocodile in the waterways of the city, traveling along the underground streams, surfacing when I reached my destination, crawling up, scales shining.
She would wait. She had indeed a furry-animal look. She’d be wearing a T-shirt and corduroys, eyes wary and eager at the same time.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
She was sitting on her bed. There was nothing else in her room but the little bed. I couldn’t believe it. She, so fleeting and squeamish before, was now here waiting, a furry prey under my dominion, finally, after all that, in my grasp.
I shook myself, the water dripping off my scales.
“I brought you something,” I said. I gave her a little pinkribboned bag. In
it was one of those mini chocolate cakes she loved.
“Oh!” She was happy.
She looked at me as she bit into the cake. This too was new. She, queen of action, was now watching, waiting to see what I would do.
I sat down. Very delicately, I pulled her dark hair aside and bit the back of her neck. First the sound she made, strangled, surprised, seemed genuine, then, as I moved my mouth farther down, biting along the tender muscles, she began to groan. It sounded like the groan she thought she was supposed to make, that she’d learned in the movies.
“Shh,” I said.
She shut up, surprised.
There was a moment of awkwardness. In an attempt to combat it, she turned and pulled her shirt up, offering her breasts to me. Her breasts, weighty, womanly, with their submerged blue veins, belying the girlishness of the rest of her form. In another moment, I would have eaten them hungrily, but that was not the plan. I stood up and smiled.
“I only have a moment today,” I said.
“Wait!” Breasts bobbing.
I waved and turned away. Tempt and torture, that was my idea.
The next time I came by, she was wearing a robe. She had put on false eyelashes. The pair on the left side now hung by a thread.
She was quiet, waiting, breathing. Her shallow breath was raucous. I had her lie down and moved my hands over her back. Her body, I could feel it, was very tense. This was difficult for her, I knew, to lie there and let herself be touched. But, while on other occasions she’d squirmed away, now she let me. I brushed the hair back from her forehead, caressed her sleek, shining seal head, the same caress over and over again. Very, very gradually, I felt her relax.
Then I lay down with her on the bed and held her until I had to go again.
The next time, I decided to try something else. I gripped her wrists behind her and turned her over. She was wearing violet underwear and I pulled them down. Her nimble little butt shone. I spanked her. She cried out in surprise, squirmed. The rosiness spread. She grew still again, waiting for more.
Each time beforehand, I imagined in my mind’s eye what I would do. Once I found a notebook. She too was keeping a record, writing down, each time, what we had done.