The Foreigners

by Maxine Swann

  Sometimes the street outside her little room was silent, sometimes it was filled with a throng. I pictured a thronging mass on the cobblestones.

  She had decorated the room, put a colored scarf over the light. She must have been touching herself before I arrived. Her pussy glistened in the colored light. It looked swollen, pinkish, reminding me of a mouth smudged with lipstick after it’s been kissed. All over Buenos Aires you see that, in the plazas, on the streets, the smudged mouths of women and teenage girls. I remember especially the jeering, smudged mouth of a girl who rushed past me out of a plaza, hands high in the air. She seemed to have achieved some victory by being kissed, was advertising it to the world.

  A fragile shower of pollen was settling over the streets when I stepped out, like the fine gold dust on the inner edge of her ear, which I had rubbed off with a finger.

  “Are they dirty?”

  “You should clean them.”

  She started to get up. I pressed her back down. “Not now.”

  We were lying there quietly. Finally, after all this time together, we could be quiet. I had a longing to stay, but I knew I couldn’t.

  Outside on the streets everything trembled, the flowering trees shook. I walked calmly through the city, though the noise of the buses was jarring and the fetid smell in some spots nearly overwhelming. People brushed against me, jostled me, seemingly trying to exasperate me, but it didn’t work.

  I chose my path, at the opportune moment slunk underground, glided along the waterways. I would have preferred not to leave, to stay the night with her, but I knew it was impossible. My staying would have destroyed everything, shattered the cage, she would have been gone in a flash. I had been ingenious enough to find a way to trap her, of this I was proud. I had a certain power over her now, which was not entirely satisfying, but it was satisfying enough. Much better than not seeing her at all, which I couldn’t have borne.

  twenty-nine

  Early on in Madame Bovary, there’s a passage devoted to Charles and Emma’s love in the early months of their marriage. Here we have a vision of how the story could have ended, this young love deepening, if Emma had been able to continue to love Charles, instead of growing bored, yearning for something else.

  From a double, Isolde soon found that she had a triple life. She wouldn’t think of asking Hernán to her cocktail parties, couldn’t imagine him fitting into that world. When she was thinking in this vein, she felt repugnance. He wasn’t good enough for her. He wasn’t sophisticated. Sometimes even the smell of him bothered her.

  On the other hand, she began to feel a sweetness to her days, a slight ripple of happiness at the thought of coming home from the beauty parlor, knowing she could knock on his door and find him there. She felt comforted knowing that she could call him, at any moment in the course of her day, and he would always pick up the phone. Sometimes she’d call just for that reason, checking to see if he was still there. He seemed to understand that that was why she’d called and it didn’t bother him. No matter what she did, he seemed touched and amused by her.

  The sweetness of repetition—she’d call as she was leaving the beauty parlor to let him know when she’d be home. He’d have something nice waiting for her, a snack or a cocktail. She’d tell him about her day. If she was in a talkative mood, she could go into as much detail as she wanted, and Isolde could go into exhaustive detail, or, if she didn’t feel like talking, she simply wouldn’t. The music would be on.

  She had never been near someone, not really. It was completely strange to her. She marveled at how he so simply included her. The loneliness that she had become familiar with—it had been perhaps the one constant in her life—was gone. The longing that went hand in hand with the loneliness was also gone. She felt that although she had been surrounded by people—she had always, somewhat frantically, been surrounded by people—she had been alone her whole life until now.

  One day, he showed her one of his other rental properties, a larger place. “Too good for me,” Hernán said. “I’d never live here on my own.” She looked around. It wasn’t stunning, but it was nice enough. “But the two of us could live here,” he said. “You wouldn’t have to work.” For a moment, her repulsion rose up again. Move in with him? What was he thinking? But in the weeks that followed, she found herself decorating the new place in her mind.

  thirty

  I have to finish this up. I need you to come,” Leonarda said.

  “Sure, why not?” I answered.

  “Just one last time. Then we’ll be done with him.”

  Dinner with the Beast, take two. Otherwise known as the final act of the Master Plan. He had cooked us an elaborate meal. I watched the flashing of the forks and knives. The living creature is always soft and vulnerable somewhere. I looked at his bald head, her short neck. Someone here will be prey. Where were we each the most fleshy? I turned and eyed her quickly, in case she was up to something. But she wasn’t paying attention. Her nose was crinkled up.

  I noticed it too, a smell, almost like meat rotting in the early stages, beginning to turn. It was faint. I didn’t say anything. But then Leonarda got up and said, “I think there’s something bad in your fridge.”

  She went to the refrigerator and started looking over things.

  “Hey, stop that, eat your meal,” he said.

  She was bent over, her butt in the air. “Yes, Daddy,” she said. She turned and looked over her shoulder—“We decided we’re both calling you ‘Daddy’ today”—and went on looking, lifting up one thing after another and smelling it. She found something and held it out. It looked like a bag of greens, Italian parsley.

  “How can parsley smell so bad?” she said. Although it did look sort of liquified. “There must be something else.” She began poking around some more.

  “Okay, okay, enough,” he said. He took the parsley bag from her hand, put it in the trash, took the trash bag out of the can and placed it outside the door. “Now can we eat?”

  “I’d be delighted to,” she said.

  There was tension between them, but it was of a different kind than before. It seemed her fascination with him, or with her fantasy of him, the big game she’d been after, had waned. In its stead was something else, a sort of charged repugnance. He had been her prey. Her interest had been in the pursuit, in tracking and seizing her quarry. Now that she had succeeded, she didn’t seem to have much interest in eating him. But it was not only that. There was also disappointment. He had surrendered too fully. She had told me on the way there that in their last encounter he had gotten down on his knees, begged her to marry him. Could it be true? He said she was a coward, she was denying something big if she refused him. She would regret it to the end. Again, the island came up, the island he would buy for her in Tigre.

  He cared so much that she liked his food. But she wasn’t eating. I felt for him, a pang. There was nothing worse she could do to him than not finish his food.

  She pushed her plate back. “This was so fun before. Now it’s ruined.”

  “Why ruined?” he asked, in his radio announcer voice. He seemed to be attempting to make it emanate off the walls. But nothing worked anymore. He had to be great to warrant her humiliating him. His greatness alone, imagined or real, made it satisfying. When she didn’t answer, he chewed on his lip, rabbit-like, yet another specimen of small game, the streets outside full of such rabbit-like game, chewing on pale grasses. It was this that made her furious, that he was like the rest.

  “Stop doing that!” He stopped, which seemed to irritate her even more. She stood up. “I’m going.”

  “Wait.” We both said it, he and I in tandem.

  “I wanted to open a bottle of wine, a very special bottle,” he said.

  “Oh, you with the wine,” she said, rolling her eyes. But it was clear that this had had an effect.

  “A Saint Emilion from ’76. It was written up recently.”

  “In your wine magazine?” she asked with condescension. There was a wine magazine tha
t he sometimes wrote for. He had managed to make her curious, but she still pretended to be bored, in a juvenile, boyish way. “Okay, I’ll have a sip before I go.”

  He took tiptoe ballerina steps to the kitchen, as if any brusque move might make her leave.

  I knew that, as always, the best thing was to distract her. I picked up one of his pipes from the windowsill. I lit it, puffed. She laughed.

  He reappeared, wine bottle in hand. “Come this way,” he said, wisely changing the setting.

  We migrated to the living room. He had opened the wine, was letting it breathe. I kept the pipe in my hand. It was evident, from her demeanor, that the tide had changed. Always, when she perked up, she was like a child. It was so easy to make her happy. He and I caught each other’s eye—here she was, happy again.

  The night went on. The guards crossed the garden. We sipped the wine. She disappeared for a moment, then came out eating a slender bit of ham, pink and delicate, carved from the spit. She put her head back and let it drop into her mouth. He was watching her mutely. The ridiculous, hilarious thought occurred to me, he wants to be eaten like that ham.

  Suddenly, she was excited. “I had an image, I had an image,” she said to him. “I came over, I was spying on you from the garden. You were here, right here, down on your hands and knees with another guy, biting each other’s necks like dogs.”

  Eyes on her, he slowly got down on his hands and knees. Her nostrils flared, watching. There was a sense that he was obliging her, like a father does a child. Is he a little jaded? He’s too old for this. Or is that precisely the point? He’s sensing this will be his last round of fun.

  She stepped nearer, was standing over him. The surge of power, she the survivor standing over her victim, this at least still captivated her.

  “Okay,” she said, “now we’re going to tie you up.”

  He started to stand, but she pressed him down with her foot.

  “Get some rope,” she said to me.“Hey, Daddy, where’s the rope?”

  I found some rope, under the sink. He let himself be tied. I had worked on boats for a summer, so knew how to tie a knot. I did it well, his hands behind his back, his knees and ankles together.

  He was down on his knees tied up before her. “At least let me suck you,” he said in that marvelous voice.

  I didn’t think she was going to do it, but she slowly undid her pants, lowered her purple flowered underwear.

  We left him tied up there. I didn’t care at the time. I felt nauseous, like I’d had an overdose of something. On the street, Leonarda and I parted somewhat brusquely. The truth was I wanted to get away from her. I was thinking how lovely it would be to meet up with some nice girl or boy and go out for an ice cream or dance a slow dance in my kitchen.

  But a few days later, I started to wonder about Miguel, tied up there. Another day passed. I checked the Internet to see how long you could survive without water. I knew how good those knots were.

  On the evening of the fourth day, I decided to go over to his house, just to reassure myself. I took a taxi. Dusk was falling. We passed a police car on the way. Suddenly, I had an image of his building surrounded by police cars.

  But when I got there, there were no police cars. The building was quiet. I went in, nodding to the doorman as I passed. It was the chubby one with bristly hair, he knew me. I rang Miguel’s bell and waited. No answer, no sound. I rang again. Nothing.

  Instead of leaving the premises, I slipped through the door at the far end of the lobby into the night garden. There was the smell of the jasmine, woozily strong. But then another smell too, putrid. I crept nearer to his windows. They were dark and closed. But the smell was stronger here. We had chased down the prey, caught and tied him up, and then allowed him to rot. The prey? What was I thinking, using this language? He was a man, with whom I had talked, shared meals. He’d actually been quite kind to me.

  It was all coming back. The way Leonarda had turned out the lights before leaving. Also the gag at the last minute. She had handed me her scarf and told me to gag him. Thinking now, it seemed like madness.

  I had been keeping a journal about our adventures from the beginning. I had written about our hunting games. And about my jealousy. Suddenly it occurred to me—they would find my journal and use it as evidence. Leonarda had also been writing things down. I could never decipher what they said because of her crabbed writing, but surely they were even more incriminating.

  I slipped back out of the garden, left the building and began walking away fast. For some reason, as I walked, I started thinking about the house I’d grown up in, in Seattle, the little yard, playing out there on the swings. I was a nice girl, a good girl. Had always been. There was no way to explain what I had just done. Coercion? But I hadn’t been coerced. Brainwashed, colonized? I imagined a court case here in Buenos Aires. Next I saw the look of bewilderment on my mother’s face.

  But we were just playing, I imagined telling my mother.

  My age made it all the more bizarre. If I’d been twenty, it would have been different. But thirty-five? The age when you turn a corner one way or the other. What corner had I turned? Murder, incarceration. I’d be lucky if I got off with thirty, forty years. I’d be out at seventy-five. The end of my life too. The end of life.

  I suddenly felt that I had to call Gabriel. Of all the people I knew here, he was the one I trusted most. I’ll do whatever he says, whatever he thinks is right, I thought.

  I was at home now. It was late, midnight. I called Gabriel, but there was no answer. The idea of calling Leonarda frightened me, as if it would bring me closer to the very thing I feared, as if, if I spoke to her, the worst would be confirmed.

  I called Gabriel again. No answer.

  I spent a horrific night. Wide awake, imagining things. When I did sleep, for forty-five minutes or so, I dreamed again of my childhood backyard.

  In the morning, Gabriel called me back. I asked him to come over right away.

  “What is it?”

  “Please just come. I can’t tell you on the phone.”

  It took a while, but I was happy to have something precise to wait for. Rather than something horrific but imprecise, looming. Finally, he arrived.

  “What happened?” he asked as soon as I opened the door.

  I brought him inside. I was speaking rapidly, at first in a very soft voice, so no one could hear. Even though the building, as both he and I knew, had some of the thickest walls in the world.

  “Wait, I can’t hear you,” he said. “Speak up.”

  I told him the whole story. Halfway through, I started to cry.

  When I’d finished, Gabriel’s face looked crushed. “I never trusted that girl,” he said.

  This made me start crying harder.

  “But wait, wait,” he said, pulling himself together. “I’m not saying I believe the guy’s dead. Take it easy.” He stood up.

  “But the smell—”

  “Maybe the smell’s from something else. If he’s dead, it would’ve been in the news.”

  “But they haven’t found him yet,” I said. “That’s why there’s the smell.”

  “Just take it easy. Have you checked the news?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Let me do that now.”

  He went to my computer. There was no Wi-Fi set up in the apartment, but sometimes if you went near the window you could pick up a signal.

  I was sitting down on the floor, huddled into a ball.

  “I can’t get a signal,” he said, after a few minutes of holding my computer up near the windows. “Have you spoken to Leonarda?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why don’t you call her? Maybe she knows something. Maybe she’s even seen him since.”

  I got up and found my phone. Instinctively, I’d wanted to keep my distance from Leonarda. But I was determined to do what Gabriel told me. I called.

  The phone rang and rang. No answer.

  “No answer,” I said, putting it down.

&nbs
p; In the meantime, Gabriel had received a call. “Okay, okay, I’m leaving in a minute,” he said, exasperated, to whomever it was.

  “Listen,” he now said to me. “I have to do a delivery, out to the suburbs. Then I’ll come back. It should take me a few hours, no more than that. Just try to relax. Anything could’ve happened. Maybe he went out of town. The guy travels a lot. He left some food rotting. Or the sewer system’s out.”

  Once he was gone, I tried Leonarda again. I called and called her. This had never happened, that I’d called this much and she hadn’t answered. I interpreted it as a terrible sign. She’d been caught. Or worse, and more likely, she’d disappeared, was leaving me to shoulder all the blame.

  I checked my watch. Only a half an hour had passed since Gabriel had left. There was no way in hell I could wait here for hours.

  I decided to go over to Miguel’s again. Action, I had to take action.

  I took a taxi. Again, I pictured police cars crowded together outside The Palace of Pigeons. Again, they weren’t there. I didn’t recognize the doorman on duty. He was young, must’ve been new. I said I was going to see Miguel. The indoor pillars, the polished floor. Again, I rang the bell.

  There was silence for a moment, then a sound. A moment later, Miguel opened the door.

  “Oh!” I said. I flushed. I was stammering. I could never have predicted being so happy to see him. He was wearing shorts, socks. “Please excuse me,” he said. I knew he didn’t like to be seen in shorts and socks. While this had struck me as ridiculous before, now it seemed touching. He returned a moment later, changed into long pants.

  He bowed and invited me in.

  “So—you’re all right?” I asked, still stammering.

  “Yes, of course.” He smiled. Was it a smirk? I didn’t care, I was so relieved. “Would you like a drink?” he asked, though it was just twelve noon.

  “Sure,” I said. A drink sounded good.