17 Stone Angels

by Stuart Archer Cohen

  “‘Pau1é,’” she says.

  “‘Is your accent German or French?’ he asks.

  “‘French!’ she answers. ‘I’m insulted that you even ask me that! The Germans have an overbearing accent in their Spanish, as if every word is a heavy object and they are beating you with it. The French always capture the correct meter.’ In truth, she speaks rather badly, a careless salad of genders and tenses, but she doesn’t seem to know it and laces it all together with a spoiled coquetry. She signals a passing waiter. ‘Che mozo! Another little glass, please.’

  “Pablo is making one of our gestures at Waterbury, gathering his fingers together and shaking his hand up and down, as if to say, Que loca! She turns to him in the midst of it, but isn’t bothered. ‘And you, Pablo. It’s Pablo, no? I remember because I am Paulé, which is the French version. Pablo!’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘How’s life?’

  “‘Life is a river in the Amazon, Paulé. Rich and tranquil and sensual, and always leading to someplace mysterious at the next turn.’

  “‘Perhaps for you, my love, life is a river. For others life is a sewer, filthy and mean and always going down a hole.’ She touches Waterbury on the arm. ‘And for you? How is life?’

  “The champagne must have affected him. He considers his books and his flight to Buenos Aires. ‘Life is a quest.’

  “She gives his answer a weary arch of her eyebrows. “A quest for what?”

  “Waterbury thinks for a short time. “To unite the world of the imagination with the world of the senses,” he says at last.

  “She nods. ‘Fine. I see we have an intellectual at the table. Thank you, Messieur Rimbaud.’

  “‘And what is it for you?’

  “She looks at the bottom of the champagne that Pablo has just poured for her. ‘It’s a quest … to get at the place where all these bubbles come from. Salud!’ She takes a sip, frowns at the bottle in disappointment. ‘The Cordon Rouge always has too much taste of lanolin!’

  “At this Pablo throws his hand to his forehead. ‘She’s impossible, this woman!’

  “‘Not impossible,’ she corrects him. ‘Just improbable.’

  “Waterbury watches the improbable woman who has improbably invited herself to their table. She seems to know Pablo and he can’t escape the feeling that he knows her.

  “‘And what do you do?’ he asks her.

  “‘I’m a dancer. I dance the tango. I’m also an actress, and I do some modeling.’

  “At this last Pablo seems doubly amused.

  “‘How did you end up in Buenos Aires?’ Waterbury asks.

  “‘You’ve heard of Virulazo, haven’t you?’

  “‘He was one of the great dancers of tango,’ Pablo explains. ‘Very famous.’

  “‘Virulazo and his wife were dancing in Paris, and I met them there. I was a student of dramatic arts at the Sorbonne at that time. From them I learned the tango, and I returned to Buenos Aires to continue my studies. For a time, I danced at the Teatro Colon. I also maintain a studio of psychiatric dance pedagogy.’

  “Waterbury asks what that is.

  “‘It’s my own creation to help people learn about their inner psyche through theater and dance.’

  “Pablo pretends to take it very seriously, but Waterbury can see the arch expression lurking behind his ‘How interesting!’ Paulé says to him, ‘You’re a businessman, I know. What about your friend from the United States? Is he a businessman too?’

  “‘No,’ Pablo says with real pride. ‘He’s a novelist. He’s here making investigations for his next novel.’

  “‘How pretty. And have you published anything?’

  “The writer sums up the languages and the prizes in a slightly bored tone of voice.

  “‘Oh!’ She turns and looks at Waterbury, her face suddenly losing its disdain and seeming genuinely impressed, like a student of literature at the Sorbonne. At that moment Waterbury recognizes her with a shock that makes him feel faint. She is the woman he’d seen on all fours with a man at each end on the computer monitor at Pablo’s internet site. The dissonance between the burning image from the website and the real person in front of him blanks his mind. Beneath those clothes is that body, with the same mouth, the same buttocks. One could say that Waterbury had finally succeeded in unifying the world of the imagination with the world of the senses, only to find himself astounded at the unexpected result.

  “Having entered into the dominion of the imagination, though, Waterbury is pulled still further inside. A man comes over and asks Paulé to dance. She accepts, and as Waterbury watches her follow him to the floor he cannot resist seeking the woman in the photo beneath the glittering one-piece dress and the high-heels. The man has curly black hair and a small mustache, a cinematic tanguero in a button-down gray shirt and pleated black pants. Waterbury imagines him fucking her in a picture. He clutches her to him, and to the tune of ‘El Choclo’ they begin to spin and lean through the complex steps of the dance. Their faces are severe. They look past each other, a thousand kilometers apart. Each of them do completely different steps, out of the hundreds of tango steps, and yet they match perfectly. They lean together, they pivot, he slides his foot in a crescent while she turns her knee. The man leads and the woman follows, and yet so tightly are they bound together that no one can say that he truly dominates her.

  “‘The girl dances!’ Pablo says, and Waterbury nods, astonished behind his glass of champagne.

  “She returns to the table when the music ends and she begins to ask him about his books. Waterbury is still cowed by the photo of her with the men, but her face becomes that of the young student at the Sorbonne. “And what were your books about?”

  “‘The Black Market was about an international banker who goes on a business trip with his wife. The wife disappears and he starts to look for her, but then he starts running into all these dead people. What it turns out is that he’s in the Underworld, and only when he confronts the lies about his life and his work can he get out again.’

  “‘It was excellent!’ Pablo adds.

  “‘The second, Indigo Down …’ He feels almost embarrassed at the memory. ‘It’s about an advertising campaign. It was tied in with the Bible, prophecy, things like that.’ He discards the book. ‘Now I want to write one about Buenos Aires, a thriller type. Something they can fit into one of their little niches.’

  “She has heard the bitterness in his last statement, nods thoughtfully, and to his surprise he feels she understands his life. ‘It’s difficult, no? To aspire? It brings one a world of problems.’

  “Pablo offers her a ride home. She lives in the center, not far from the Hotel San Antonio, where the tight walls of Robert Waterbury’s room are waiting for him. Pablo drops them off together at the hotel, says goodnight as discreetly as a banker, then dissolves his night-colored car into the ashes of the evening. Waterbury contemplates this piece of woman in front of him, this student at the Sorbonne, this tanguera, this whore that fucks two men in front of a camera. The memory of his family insinuates itself, and besides, she might ask him for money and it would be strange. He walks her to her tiny apartment on Calle Suipacha. She shivers in her silver dress, in the silver dawn, and ducks into the door looking like the girl in all the tangos who grew up in the barrio and then became a toy of playboys and the dollars that they throw to the passing crowd. La Francesa. They exchange a kiss on the cheek, perfume mixed with smoke, and he floats back between the weary faces of the buildings. Thus ends his first night in Buenos Aires.”

  /

  Fabian leaned back in his chair and gave a little toss of his head, seeming to tire momentarily of his role of entertainer. The other two said nothing. The Waterbury case had spiraled irremediably into a kaleidoscope of brilliant facades, and they could only stagger unsteadily among its images.

  Athena looked around the room. The café had begun to clutter up for lunch, and white-jacketed waiters were threading the busy air with steel platters and sip
hons of soda water. Gazing at the mahogany paneling and heavy wooden refrigerated cases, Athena felt as if they could all be far in the past, debating the Caso Waterbury in a timeless noir atmosphere of cynicism and lies. No use to ask questions; even the Comisario, slumping in his worn sports jacket and staring out the window, had withdrawn into a cigarette. She couldn’t blame him. Fabian was turning his investigation upside down and laughing at all his own jokes while he did it, but the unspoken object of his laughter was the Comisario himself.

  Fabian spoke first, lighting up again. “Are you getting hungry?” he asked them. “Because I, yes. Why don’t we order something? I invite you both. I suggest the puré de papas and grilled beefsteak.” Looking at Fortunato. “You can even get it Uruguayan style, with a fried egg on top, in honor of Boguso’s mysterious accomplice!”

  The Comisario gave him a deadpan look. “Gracias, Romeo. I woke up this morning thinking that I needed more irony in my life.”

  Fabian reached above the crowd and called out “Lucho! Lucho!” and summoned him with a wiggle of his fingers. “Three menus, amigo, the bifé with a fried egg and ham on top, al Uruguayo. Also a tomato salad and a bottle of the house tinto with soda. Bien?” The waiter hurried off and Fabian settled back contentedly. “I continue:

  “The next day Waterbury devotes to wandering, the simple gorgeous pleasure of being in a foreign city that offers up its coffee and its elegance like a bouquet. October has come over Buenos Aires, injecting a fresh promise in the branches that comb the air with new leaves. For Waterbury, coming from an October of autumnal decay in the higher latitudes, the spring feels miraculous, infusing him with hopes that the new book will save him at a single stroke. He wanders the city that he remembers, past Retiro station to the elegant apartments of La Recoleta. He sits in parks and plazas, he stops for an espresso or a triple sandwich with the crusts cut off. At all sides he’s assaulted by our famous beauties, now using the excuse of the spring sunshine to turn loose their sensuality. As he sits in the cafés and dreams of the book he’ll write, he waits for the plot. Something set in the atmosphere of the wealthy upper-class, whose nineteenth century mansions rise behind iron fences in the splendid little barrio of Palermo Chico. He dreams of gleaming North American four-by-fours and private jets, of the dignified facade of massive riches built upon decades of fraudulent business deals and mafia tactics. In fact, he is dreaming Carlo Pelegrini without even knowing it, dreaming the future that will soon be chasing him like a train chasing its tracks. He is certainly dreaming of Paulé.”

  “Fabian, por favor!” Fortunato broke in. “Stop swelling my balls with your verses! If there is a connection between Waterbury and Pelegrini, tell me plainly and let’s go on! I have things to do!”

  Fabian slapped himself gently on the forehead. “You’re right, Comiso. My cousin in Los Angeles keeps telling me the same thing. This is where the literary types always go wrong. They can’t understand that the world doesn’t care about their themes or their graceful little phrases. But now I see why they keep doing it—there’s a certain pleasure in saying this has meaning or that has meaning, when the truth is that none of it has any meaning.” He rolled on over Athena’s protest. “No, chica. You can read a thousand masterpieces with a thousand philosophies, and when it’s all over you eat your pizza and drink your beer and do whatever you would have done anyway. The Comisario here isn’t going to strip off his clothes and give away all his worldly possessions because of a sudden illumination he buys from the bookstore. A conscience like that, yes, is fantasy.”

  Fortunato had tired of being used as an example. “Mira, Fabian,” he began coldly, “I’m fed up with … ” The chirping of his cell phone interrupted him and he held up his hand for silence. “Fortunato.”

  One of his inspectors had found a youth who had broken his leg in a soccer game and he and a lawyer wanted to write it up as a traffic accident to collect the insurance money. There was the question of shares. “Do I have to wrap you in a blanket and give you a baby bottle?” Fortunato growled at him. “Manage it yourself!” He hung up the phone, and Fabian started talking before he could resume.

  “I was only making the point, Comisario, that metaphor, hidden significance, it’s all verso.” Cocking his eyebrow with a smile. “Better to stay with the formula.” He turned to Athena. “But we are discussing Robert Waterbury, no?

  “Bien. The novelist spends a week taking in atmosphere, reading the local magazines and following the scandals in the newspapers. He tries to outline a story in his journal, but all he has are a selection of characters that seem to him rather stereotypical and uninteresting, but which he imagines are the kind of characters that will make him money. This not-so-noble goal empties him of inspiration.

  “But Pablo has promised to be helpful and Pablo is a friend of iron! He introduces Waterbury and he makes phone calls on his behalf, always presenting him as ‘the novelist from the United States,’ and Waterbury in turn carries a copy of his first novel to all his appointments, flashing his jacket photograph like a carnet. He’s getting background on contemporary politics, he says, or he’s getting background on the Dirty War. He works his way from friend to friend, each of them gracious and ready with their version of the world.

  “At his home, though, things are going badly, and troubling advisories flood into his brain in the worrisome telephone calls of his wife. His daughter falls from the swing set and needs two thousand dollars’ worth of bone setting. A dozen checks have been returned by the bank, and his wife has borrowed money from her brother to meet the latest mortgage payment. Worst of all, his agent, who has grown more and more elusive since the failure of his second book, informs him that he’ll now be handled by a new young face at the agency. ‘You need someone passionate about your career, Bob, and I think that in this respect you would be better served by an agent with a fresh outlook.’ The rejection devastates Waterbury, a professional judgment on his ability even to write something cheap and commercial. For some days he is too depressed to continue his research.

  “And just at that moment when it seems most impossible, when he has come to see himself through his agent’s eyes and realize that the dream that made him abandon his prosperous career has finally abandoned him, Paulé appears at the desk of the Hotel San Antonio. It is evening. She is wearing a slim one-piece black dress that is slit from the knee to the thigh. ‘Why didn’t you pass by my apartment?’ she scolds him.

  “The truth is, he hasn’t been able to get her off his mind. At night, he fantasizes about her pornographic performance and in the day she comes back to him in fugitive glimpses of dance or of that deep comprehension reflected in her simple phrase, ‘It’s difficult to aspire, isn’t it?’ He has walked past her apartment several times, imagining the scorn she would feel for him if he appeared. Moreover, he loves his wife, who supports him, and his child, for whom he is the world. For those reasons, he has not called her. But now she is before him in all the crooked luxury that the city can offer.

  “‘I’ve come to take you for tango lessons. It’s essential for your investigations!’

  “He surrenders to the dream. It whirls him away in a taxi and by the time they reach the Confiteria Ideal, he is a writer again, in the embrace of the tango that directs his steps, smelling always of tobacco and perfume, erotic, over-warm, his hand feeling slightly sweaty against hers. ‘Boludo, you’re stepping on me!’

  “‘Forgive me!’ he says. ‘I have two 1eft feet.’

  “Paulé laughs. ‘Don’t worry. Now enter again. First, to the side, then together, yes, now three steps—you’re knocking me over, you idiot!’

  “Everyone at the Confiteria Ideal already knows Paulé. The Ideal is one of those ancient pastry shops from the Year Zero, all dark wood and marble tables and stained glass panels in the ceiling. Only a few survive now: the Tortoni, el Aguila. The old 1920s typescripts and the cast-iron cash registers always bring on a cloud of nostalgia, like something from a childhood you never had. In a ballroom ups
tairs they give tango lessons six days per week, and thus Paulé gathers a few pesos. Waterbury can see in the longing glances of many men that Paulé has a following. Lonely old widowers with gray hair and threadbare suit jackets, shy public servants with two left feet. Waterbury feels awkward in front of their anguish, regrets it, but he leaves it behind for the intensity of the woman in his arms. He keeps his hand on her back, feeling her skin shift beneath the cotton fabric, imagining her sandwiched between two men, a woman eager to do anything and completely available. And yet: how can that image be this woman in front of him? He makes a misstep and she shoves him backwards. “Stop flattening my toes!” She sees Waterbury’s stricken look, the angry glances of her fellow teachers, and she slides back into his arms, her breasts and stomach close to him as she puts one hand on his shoulder and the other out to the side, waiting for his grasp. Half hopelessly: ‘I’m the worst teacher. I know. Let’s try again.’

  “He invites her for a snack downstairs. It’s only seven in the evening: too early for a real dinner. Paulé orders a campari and soda with crescents, and Waterbury an empanada. As soon as the waiter turns his back Paulé starts in.

  “‘You’re here because you’re desperate, aren’t you? Don’t be embarrassed: I have a nose for it. I am the Patron Saint of Desperation. Like the Virgin of Lujan … ’ she tilts her head ironically, ‘but not a virgin.’

  “Waterbury plays it off. ‘What makes you think I’m desperate?’

  “‘Your family is at home. You’re staying at a cheap hotel. Your books are out of print—I checked it on the Internet.’

  “And I checked you on the Internet! Waterbury feels like answering, annoyed at her presumption.

  “‘Maybe you have other money,’ she goes on, ‘but I don’t believe so. No, I can see you are living out that tired myth of the desperate artist. What is your book in Buenos Aires about?’