Holy City
HOLY CITY
Translated from the Spanish by
Nick Caistor
Guillermo Orsi
An imprint of Quercus
New York • London
© 2009 by Guillermo Orsi
Translation © 2012 by Nick Caistor
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ALSO BY GUILLERMO ORSI IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
No-one Loves a Policeman (2010)
To Raúl Argemí, Carlos Balcameda,
Juan Ramón Biedma and Alejandro Gallo
—in alphabetical order, as in film credits.
To Eduardo, my brother.
To Estela, my partner.
You were the messenger of my death,
Of my metamorphosis.
ROBERT BROWNING
The spider you saved has bitten you.
What can you do about it?
When God is far away!
Don’t even trust your brothers,
They hang you from the Cross …
“DESENCUENTRO,” A TANGO BY
ANÍBAL TROlLO AND
CÁTULO CASTILLO
CONTENTS
Prologue
PART ONE The Queen of the Río de la Plata
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART TWO Pichuco Opens his Eyes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
PART THREE God Exists, Man Only Sometimes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
PART FOUR Happiness is for Fools and Madmen
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
TOURIST GUIDE: JESUS CHRIST HAS HIS OWN THEME PARK IN BUENOS AIRES
Buenos Aires (A.F.P.).—The crowd cannot contain its wonder at the sight of Christ crucified on Golgotha. Some of them cross themselves. Not far away, Roman soldiers keep watch, ignoring the peasant women in garish costumes who are selling Oriental sweets … this is the Holy Land theme park.
Although only the heat is reminiscent of the banks of the River Jordan, here every weekend on the shores of the Río de la Plata in Buenos Aires the founders of the Holy Land religious park are recreating the real atmosphere for a cardboard Jerusalem.
Next to the airport for domestic flights, this park, which according to its owners is “unique in the entire world,” is entirely dedicated to religion, above all the Christian beliefs. Although its seven hectares also contain a “mosque” and a “synagogue,” the park concentrates on the Christian religion and the life of Christ.
From the first moment, visitors are invited to witness the birth of Christ in the kind of staging that is repeated throughout all the “attractions” in the park.
Deep inside a cave, a life-sized polyester crib takes the visitor back to Christmas Eve alongside an ox, an ass and articulated Three Kings.
The Catholic Church has given the park its blessing. The archbishop of Buenos Aires has called it a “place of cultural and spiritual enrichment”.
WATERFALLS, TANGO, STEAKS, GLACIERS AND WHALES AT KNOCKDOWN PRICES
Buenos Aires (United Press).—Savage devaluations are the means by which the economic powers in Argentina regularly carry out their “profit-taking.” The one that took place in 2002—which tripled the value of the U.S. dollar—made fortunes overnight for the country’s grain exporters and brought in foreign tourists like flies to honey.
A country which has glaciers that crumble on cue, which shares with Brazil the biggest waterfalls in the world, which has leaping whales and a capital city with echoes of Europe where you can dance the tango and eat the best grass-fed beef in the open air is, without a doubt, a wonderful bargain for visitors.
PART ONE
The Queen of the Río de la Plata
1
The cop leaning on the door of his patrol car smoking a cigarette under the Avenida Mosconi bridge is dimly aware of a car zigzagging along Avenida General Paz at 140 k.p.h. He ought to put out a call for the driver to be pulled in for speeding and reckless driving. Instead, he prefers to take another lungful of his ghastly blond tobacco. Some day he’s going to give up smoking, he tells himself, but when? Not as long as he’s a policeman, that’s for sure.
In the boot of the car veering from one side to the other as it careers down the highway, its driver skillfully dodging all the traffic, is Matías Zamorano. His hands are tied; he is gagged and blindfolded. He is not suffering from being tied up or because he can hardly breathe, but because he knows this journey is his last. The car racing along like an emergency ambulance is his hearse. The two gunmen should have killed him where they found him, in the toilets of the Central Market, but preferred not to run the risk of being recognized. They are in the pay of Counselor Pox, a.k.a. Alberto Cozumel Banegas, a man always known by his nickname. Everyone calls him the Pox, even though he has inherited one of the many empires built on the squalid outskirts of Buenos Aires: the absolute ruler of an area twenty blocks square in the district of Matanza.
The idea to doublecross the Pox was not his, Matías Zamorano thinks with relief. It was Ana’s: just twenty-two, with the face of a cherub floating on a cloud, but guts enough to manage the gambling dens and whorehouses run by Zamorano, who in turn is run by Counselor Pox—as the Pox is by the go
vernor of the province. Everything was going smoothly, but women, especially if they are young and beautiful, are ambitious. And if they are ambitious, nothing satisfies them. They think they are the center of the universe, absolute suns of a planetary system that had its Big Bang when they were born, not a second before. And the rest of the world are nothing more than limp and decrepit pricks, stupid dummies with acrylic dentures who swallow half a packet of Viagra and think they have got a hard-on because the women they rent scream, close their eyes, shake like piggy banks while waiting for the old men to finish or be finished off, exhausted or paralyzed by a heart attack.
The car leaves Avenida General Paz and speeds into Buenos Aires Province along the extension of Avenida de los Corrales, heading for the rubbish dumps at Tablada, where executioners can dispatch the condemned without any problems. Zamorano knows the way: he has done it often enough behind the wheels of other cars, with stool-pigeons and hired guns squashed into the boot, people born of the garbage who return to it with grateful thanks because they can no longer bear being called “sir,” or having some poor woman fall in love with them and demanding fidelity.
Zamorano is not afraid. Above all he is sad: a feeling of tremendous misery and self-loathing. Given the chance, he would have speeded things up, but the Pox does not give anyone a chance. That is why he rules with an iron fist his twenty blocks in the south of Matanza, an open sewer inhabited by the rejects of the system, zombies who steal and kill for food, ragged foot-soldiers in an army whose only discipline is the certainty that if they disobey orders they will starve to death.
Zamorano thinks of Ana as the car slows down and pulls into the street the Pox has chosen. “I want him to be an example and a lesson,” he must have said, because that is a favorite phrase of his. “I want the whole neighborhood to see how anyone who crosses Counselor Pox ends up.”
The boot is flung open and the two thugs haul Zamorano to his feet. They take off his gag and blindfold. It’s a bad, terrible sign, or perhaps merely inevitable, thinks Zamorano; a routine procedure, the tiniest drop of dignity allowed to the condemned man. There is a third man, probably the one who drove the car here, who taps him gently on the back to straighten him up, then pats his crumpled clothes so he does not die looking like a scarecrow. He wants the locals from the cardboard and corrugated iron shacks, honest Bolivian or Peruvian families, to see the prisoner’s face, the look of terror—or in Zamorano’s case, resignation—that is his last farewell. They need to realize that they at least (the Pox’s men) do not kill just anyone, do not get their hands dirty with tramps or two-bit killers. The cops can take care of the riff-raff, says Counselor Pox, who boasts that his men are elite troops, the marines of these outer suburbs of the Holy City.
“You know who this is,” the driver shouts to the gathered locals, putting an almost affectionate arm round Zamorano’s shoulder. He was comrade Pox’s right-hand man. “You’ve all bought stuff from him …”
He gazes round at the cowed faces of the crowd. A feudal baron condemning the disloyalty of one of his subjects, the black sheep who has to be sacrificed at once.
“We’re going to amputate this right hand so that the infection does not reach comrade Pox. But tomorrow someone else you can trust will take his place. Comrade Pox is like a snake or an iguana: the corrupt limbs we chop off always grow back again.”
He pushes Zamorano forward. Zamorano stumbles but stays on his feet in the center of the empty space that has opened up between his executioners and the locals around this makeshift scaffold of beaten earth and stagnant water from the last downpour. They have untied him. He could make a run for it and get shot in the back, but he would rather stare at this pair of thugs he has so often given orders to, at the driver who is as accurate with his gun as he was at avoiding the traffic with his foot pressed to the floor.
Zamorano does not say a word, merely stares at them. He could say to them: what I did doesn’t merit being put to death; there are people higher up than us who do far worse, who back-stab all the time and yet win cups and medals, people who double their fortunes with a single shady deal, then get their photos taken with Counselor Pox.
But Zamorano is already dead and the dead do not speak. He closes his eyes to see the cherub more clearly. Blinded by the car headlights, Ana’s face shines in front of his eyelids. She smiles as she recognizes him, as she tells him yet again: yes, I’m with you, I like being with you.
That is why (the image of Ana beneath his eyelids), an instant before the shots ring out, Matías Zamorano raises his arms and wraps them round his own body.
As he slumps to the ground he is not alone: he is with Ana.
2
The legal profession is a lonely one. It is looked down on by all those respectable people who bathe their consciences in cologne and perfume, thinking they can disguise the stink. As lonely as a private eye in an American film, as scorned as any cop in any rotten city in the world.
In Buenos Aires, lawyers who defend clients already considered guilty are hissed and booed when they leave court. They are pursued by swarms of cameramen and reporters, who attack them for defending clients that the supreme court of public opinion has sentenced to be hanged from the very first day. It does not matter if there is any evidence to convict the accused thief or criminal, if the body or the stolen goods, the weapon used to kill the wife, the tools they are said to have used to break into a bank vault, have been found: there is a suspect who has been found guilty by the editors of newspapers and television news programs, and a bonfire waiting for them which burns the twenty-four hours a day that the news channels are on air.
It was two in the morning when someone knocked on the lawyer Verónica Berutti’s door. Verónica had just got rid of a lover who had come to ask her for money before they had even fucked and was watching the repeat on television of a crowd on the outskirts of Buenos Aires trying to lynch a pedophile rapist who the cops were pushing into their patrol car. She was not watching because it interested her, but simply because it was on, as people usually do, especially at that time of night and after the unpleasant scene when she had thrown her lover out. He could be a good lover, but lacked the braincells to tell his muscles to get moving and look for work. “You’re a whore,” her ex-lover shouted as she slammed the door in his face. “Whores don’t pay, they charge people,” she had replied under her breath, then waited until the lift had arrived and the landing light had gone off to add “bastard.”
The peaceful inhabitants of Villa Diamante surround the police car the cops have managed to smuggle the pedophile into. They throw stones and beat on the roof with sticks. They even toss rotten tomatoes at the cop who is trying to ward them off so that the car can get out of there. The knocking on Verónica’s door synchronizes with the beating on the police car roof, which finally succeeds in pulling off down the muddy street. The camera shows it skidding in the mud, and Verónica wonders how many of those wanting to lynch the pedophile are themselves pedophiles or wife-and-children beaters, drunkards on cheap wine, occasional rapists.
A shame she cannot turn down the sound of the hammering at her door, press “mute” on her remote control, and leave the world silent and far away for a while longer.
Although the lens of the spyhole distorts her face, Verónica recognizes the round, pink cherub’s face with its marrow-green eyes, the golden curls, the beauty as polished as in a reliquary.
Why bother to say good evening when it is already nearly dawn and nobody turns up at this time on a social visit. Better simply to heave a sigh and head for the blue corduroy armchair she has sat in before, ask for a glass of water and, pausing for breath, apologize for how late it is.
“But I can see you were still awake, doctora” says Ana perceptively, so Verónica prefers to go into the kitchen, turn on the tap and let the water run for a while before returning with a full glass.
“You’re not the first. It’s been a busy night.”
“Men,” Ana guesses.
“The
y’ve all gone,” says Verónica. “Who’s chasing you?”
“Nobody for the moment. But I’m in a mess, I think, or I wouldn’t have bothered you like this.”
The lawyer thinks that around now—at this very instant, why not?—she should be climaxing, feeling in her vagina all the virility of the son of a bitch who had come and ruined her night. Exhausted, she collapses into the armchair next to her desk. She prefers the silent television to clients like Ana Torrente, involved in conflicts that last longer than the Middle East War, and with little or no inclination to pay or even reduce the debt she has run up with every appeal, every request for proceedings to be quashed, every postponed hearing, and all the other legal niceties that wear out so much energy, expenses and shoe leather.
“My varicose veins really ache,” Verónica announces. “If I don’t have them operated on this year, I’ll have to employ someone to carry me round the corridors of the court on their shoulders.”
Ana Torrente does not take the hint that she should at least open her purse. She is far too busy trying to protect herself from the violence exploding around her because of her business deals. She gulps the water down in one, then leaves the glass on a magazine.
“I don’t want to spoil the surface of your table,” she says, hoping Verónica will repay her consideration with a friendly gesture.
“As I asked before: who’s after you this time?”
Another sigh. Ana searches for a painting, a mirror, a lamp, a file on the lawyer’s desk she can gaze at like someone leaning on their elbows before they speak.
“Nobody as yet. But I’m scared.” Ana explains she had agreed to see Matías: they were to meet at 10 p.m. in the Los Pinches café on the corner of Avenida del Trabajo and Pola. “When I got there they were already stacking the chairs on the tables and the owner was closing up. Someone called on Matías Zamorano’s behalf,” he said. “Don’t bother waiting for him.”
“It’s two in the morning, so that was four hours ago.” Verónica seems to understand how serious things are. “Why didn’t you come straight here? We won’t find any magistrate awake now”
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