Ana Torrente buries her face in her hands. It is obvious she is making an effort to burst into tears, because melodrama is not her thing, at least not in front of women, especially someone like Verónica Berruti, this qualified lawyer aged forty-five, who has twice been widowed. Once after her policeman husband was killed in a shootout; the second time when someone took revenge on her by shooting her partner (she had decided never to get married again), an ombudsman, a man of the law who begged her on his knees not to try so hard to get people out of jail and still less to put them there in the first place. “Why put them in jail if you’re only going to get them out again?” he would ask, genuinely anxious and uncomprehending. One cool September morning his car was intercepted only three blocks from their home in the middle of the Villa Devtoto residential neighborhood and he was shot to pieces before he even had the time to ask why.
“Don’t try to fool me, Ana. I won’t lift a finger for you. In fact I’ll throw you out right now if you don’t tell me the truth.” Ana squirms on the blue corduroy armchair as if she has sat on an anthill. She starts to blink as though suffering an allergy attack so strong not even corticoids can calm it. She is suddenly if fleetingly aware of the seriousness of what she has done. “The truth or the street,” says Verónica, hurrying her up because she still has not lost all hope that the son of a bitch will come back, ring the bell, plead for forgiveness on the entry phone.
Slowly but surely, she hears the truth. She has to disentangle it from all the unconvincing pouts her witness puts on, all her half-truths, her unwillingness to tell her everything. But the truth arrives.
So Verónica concludes, without fear of being mistaken, that Matías Zamorano has already been dropped from Counselor Pox’s team and by his own men. It was not a good idea of Ana’s to try to double-cross him: could not have been worse, in fact, given these first results. “You can’t mess with those who run the game,” Verónica tells her; if they have reached that position, it is because they have learned a thing or two, because they have people to guard their backs, their asses, the whole caboodle.
Veronica does not tell Ana this last part. She does not want to make her cry for real. She bites her tongue. You’re a racist Bolivian bitch, she would tell her if she really wanted to make her cry. But it is the truth she wants, not tears.
“I’ve had it up to my ovaries with all the crap you Bolivians get up to. You should have stayed in Santa Cruz de la Sierra.”
“Bolivia doesn’t exist. Tomorrow or the next day, Bolivia is going to be more in the news than Iraq or Palestine. A dark night is coming, so don’t talk to me about my home country: they’re nothing more than a bunch of indians on the warpath, the lost tribe of the puna. They think Viracocha is going to come and save them—they’re worse than the Arabs.”
Now Verónica understands what is keeping Ana from seriously crying: her hatred. She hates the place she has escaped from, that prosperous city on the Bolivian flatlands inhabited by cattle ranchers, corrupt bureaucrats and drugs barons. That was where only a year earlier she had been crowned Miss Bolivia: the blond, slender Ana Torrente, one meter seventy-two centimeters tall, as shapely as high mountains, light-green eyes, a cherub with tropical lips and tits. She signed a contract to take her round the world, “the ambassadress of Bolivian culture and beauty,” as the presenter said in the Santa Cruz amphitheater to applause, ovations, camera flashes, microphones and a contract she signed while still blinded by all the floodlights, deafened by the shouting and the fireworks set off to celebrate her coronation.
Poor pale-faced Cinderella. The next morning, although her hangover made it hard to focus, she managed to read the small print of her contract. The world promised to her was not the whole planet—it was a tour of Ecuador, Peru and the Bolivian interior, a night in every miserable village of its jungles and high plateaux. She was the bait for the campaign trails of unknown politicians, ambitious subalterns of a power installed to help the affairs of the rich and powerful who do travel in the real world.
Hatred, not tears, lends Ana that look of a fallen angel which so bedazzled Matías Zamorano he completely lost his head and thought he could double-cross the Pox.
“There’s a lot of money in it for you if you help me out. It’s a good deal, if I can get it off the ground.”
Stony-faced, Verónica. “I disconnect my emotional hemisphere,” she says of herself when she listens to possible clients before deciding whether or not to rescue them from hell. She settles in her chair by the desk and listens. She is only briefly distracted when she hears the lift coming up. She cannot help it: once a fool, always a fool, as her faithful friend Laucha the Mouse Giménez tells her. Apart from that she listens closely, notes down some phrases, does the sums, draws little diagrams that help her follow the thread of Miss Bolivia’s confession. Slowly but surely she begins to understand why Ana reacted, tore up the sequined buffoon’s contract and abandoned her kingdom.
3
The Queen of Storms is a cruise ship that can carry 1,340 passengers, all of whom, in this misty August morning, are crowding to the rails on the port side of the ship in response to a call from the captain, a what you might call phlegmatic Englishman who has faced the raging seas of Asia, the stormy, cold North and South Atlantic, including Cape Horn, but is now seeing the enormous ship under his command run aground for the very first time in the brown soup of the Río de la Plata.
The tourists’ pirouettes have no effect. They find the situation quite funny, especially since as soon as the mist rises they can see the reassuring outline of the city of Buenos Aires before their eyes. No-one is going to die, except of laughter; some of them even start to try out tango steps on the tilting deck. Eventually six tugboats appear in single file, sent by the harbormaster. The English captain is no longer so phlegmatic. He was only expecting two of these shabby craft which, like the ticks of underdevelopment, will cling on and take with them a high percentage of the profits made by any luxury liner that ventures into this treacherous river.
Still sleepy, Verónica sits up in bed with her phone to her ear, listening to the story of the complicated disembarkation as told by Francisco Goya (who has the same name as the painter but does not paint): he seduces tourists with his guidebook knowledge of the cities they visit and gets paid in dollars for it. He always gives her a call when he lands for a couple of days in Buenos Aires. He offers Verónica a bit of time out—during those two days she can go to restaurants normally reserved for foreigners, dance in exclusive nightclubs and make love twice a day, so four times altogether.
She laughs, by now fully awake, when Pacogoya (as she calls him) tells him that the first dancers on the listing deck were a gay couple—“and you should have seen how the one who must be the woman in bed crossed her legs,” says Pacogoya with that Paraguayan accent of his that women find so irresistible and which Verónica adopts for the couple of days they spend together. “I’ll be there tonight,” Pacogoya adds, from the huge ship stuck in the silt. “If they don’t free us I’ll swim to shore, but there’s no way you’re going to escape me, princess.”
Verónica cannot help comparing her kingdom to that of Miss Bolivia, who slept on the sofa after keeping her up with the details of her betrayals and with whom she watched Crónica Television when it announced in a screaming red banner strapline that a body riddled with bullets had been found on a rubbish tip near the Matanza shanty town. “The victim is apparently a male linked to a prostitution ring, who was shot in a settling of accounts,” said a provincial police officer to the cameraman and reporter on duty from the sensationalist news channel.
That was the outcome, the foreseeable climax to Miss Bolivia’s declarations before she stretched out on the living room sofa without shedding a tear. All she did was close her eyes and ask Verónica to wake her up so they could go down to the law courts together.
“You’re in a good mood, doctora. Or something’s aroused you.”
“How would you know?” snaps Verónica. She has just h
ad a shower and is examining her breasts when she sees Miss Bolivia standing in the bathroom doorway.
“I can see it in your face. And from your hard nipples: that’s not because of me, is it?”
Embarrassed, Verónica gathers up the bath-towel and covers herself. In her mid-forties and with two dead partners on her conscience, she still feels a sense of shame that, despite being only just twenty, Ana Torrente seems to have shed completely.
“Get dressed or we’ll be late,” says Verónica. “The magistrate isn’t going to wait for you just because you’re the Queen of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.”
“All magistrates are skirtchasers,” Ana replies, pushing Verónica gently out of her way in front of the mirror with a swing of her hips. “The scent of woman is the only code they really respect.”
“Get a move on,” Verónica repeats as she leaves the bathroom. She is resigned to the fact she is going to have to spend the morning with Ana at the law courts. She cannot think of any other way to get her some protection and is sure that if she abandons her it will not be more than a few hours before the discovery of another body is reported with the same screaming headlines on Crónica Television.
The magistrate does not receive them, but his secretary does.
“His honor has taken a short vacation,” he tells them, his eyes fixed on Miss Bolivia’s chest as if it were a teleprinter he was reading the words off. “But you needn’t worry,” says this individual, a fat, balding man in his forties, with thick lips and the slanted eyes of a lecherous pig, as Miss Bolivia describes him when they have left his office. They needn’t worry, because his honor has taken every measure to ensure that the days of Counselor Cozumel Banegas are numbered: “There is far too much evidence against him for the provincial government to go on protecting him; he will be judged and stripped of his position any day now,” he promises in a reedy voice, thrusting his snout and dribbling lips up against Miss Bolivia’s face. She leaves the court wiping off the microscopic spots of saliva.
“Stay at my place for a couple of days, at least until that skirtchasing magistrate gets back and puts some protective measures in place and gets you a police bodyguard.”
“I don’t want a bodyguard. I don’t trust your country’s police, doctora, I don’t trust any cops. And I don’t want to be in your bed when you turn up with one of your men; I don’t like threesomes and tourist guides aren’t exactly to my taste, particularly if they’re Paraguayan.”
“So you were listening behind the door. But who said I was going to bring him home? Pacogoya’s got a fabulous apartment in Recoleta, with a balcony that looks out on our illustrious dead, and in an area with the best restaurants in town, or at least the most expensive.”
With the air of a lodger who pays her rent and after extracting a promise she will not have to witness someone else’s sex, Ana Torrente agrees to stay in Verónica’s apartment. She won’t sleep in the living room, won’t leave even to go shopping, won’t open the door even if she hears Leonardo di Caprio’s voice on the entry phone and under her pillow she’ll keep warm the Bersa .38 that Verónica’s first husband left her.
“You take off the safety catch, raise the gun, keep your arm steady and bang!”
“What happens if it really is Leonardo di Caprio?”
“I’ve heard he doesn’t do visits—they take women to his hotel suite.”
Pacogoya is waiting for her at La Biela, a café packed with foreign tourists and local clients who fill the interior and spill out onto the broad pavement outside. It is mid-winter, but the weather is like a humid summer evening; costly furs are dangling over chair-backs, and bags stuffed with Buenos Aires souvenirs catch the greedy eyes of pickpockets who come and go, watched by their old acquaintances from the nearby police station. La Biela’s owner pays the cops to put in an appearance every now and then.
“Wow, it’s hot for August,” says Pacogoya. “Hotter even than in Asunción.”
He gives her a brotherly peck on the cheek and then in response to a gesture Verónica only just catches out of the corner of her eye, the florist from the flower stall on the nearby avenue enters, bearing two dozen freshly cut roses. He attracts everyone’s attention and the envy of all the women. Pacogoya is good at these touches of an opulent lover, or a soap-opera star who can no longer tell fiction from reality and really believes that women love him for the dreadful scripts the writers pen for him.
“What am I supposed to do with this enormous bouquet?”
“We’ll take it up to my place straightaway, put the flowers in water, then make love twice. Afterward we can end the night at Ci Lontano, a delightful pasta restaurant recommended by some old landowning biddies who are traveling on the Queen of Storms with me.”
A tourist night, as befits a guide like Pacogoya: roses in water, sex twice over and the à la carte menu, trout raviolis for him and fetucini aglie bóngole mediterrani for her, expensive ersatz food washed down with a Malbec 2001 from the La Caverna estate, fifty dollars a boteglia that they double like their lovemaking. “From my apartment to Ci Lontano, then why not back to my place?” he says.
“Because,” she tells him sharply, “twice makes a night of love, three times is indigestion.”
She leaps into a taxi before Pacogoya can react. She knows it is best this way, that if she gives in to temptation there will be no second night, which is usually the more satisfying, more relaxed one, the one that leads her now and then to believe she is not with some shyster from the tourist industry who is trying to impress her with expense-account luxuries or going to ask her for money, so that she can sleep peacefully in his arms without waking with a start when she hears the lift stopping at her floor and footsteps along the corridor which carry on past her apartment.
Her mobile rings while she is still in the taxi. Pacogoya tells her he loves her, that he had a great time, “but by nightfall we’ll be on our way to Rio,” says the guide, who is the favorite of the old landowning biddies and the gay tango-dancing couple. He is getting his cheap revenge in the hope that she will change her mind, beg him to see her again.
And perhaps she would, were it not that she sees she has a missed call on her phone, a call from heaven knows where—not from her apartment, that is obvious, because when she arrives there she finds no sign of her, no note, no dress and woolen jacket she lent her, nor the Bersa .38 which she hopes against hope that Miss Bolivia has not been forced to use.
4
That night the only companion in Verónica’s anxious vigil is the television, on in the background as she comes and goes in her apartment, searching for something or other, a letter, a perfumed handkerchief, or the photograph of a lover that Miss Bolivia might have mislaid.
The television, which in the early hours endlessly repeats items as if they were still breaking news, is showing a reporter, microphone in hand, pursuing rich tourists as they disembark from the Queen of Storms that afternoon. Since none of them speaks Spanish, the reporter tries out his rudimentary English, which the American, Japanese, German or French passengers accept with a smile without even trying to decipher it: “How do you feel about being on board a ship that traveled thousands of kilometers to run aground in a polluted river close to the last civilized city on the continent?” Far too long and complicated a question—“very tired, very tired,” respond the alien beings from the old continent, the Far East, and the most powerful nation on earth, which the struggling reporter translates for his audience.
Verónica pauses for a moment in her fruitless search when she recognizes Pacogoya’s soft Paraguayan lilt: he is the only one who comes to a halt for the roving reporter. He tells him that although regrettably the liner needs some repairs, this will give the passengers the time really to get to know a city like Buenos Aires, the Paris of South America, a magnificent opportunity to learn to dance the tango and eat lots of steaks.
“Son of a bitch,” says Verónica, remembering the excuse Pacogoya used to get his revenge for her standing him up. “Our nightly
son of a bitch.”
She says this out loud, as she often does when she is coughing up her resentment. She talks to herself the way lots of people who live alone do, detesting the male half of humanity. She is sorry now that she ignored Miss Bolivia’s advances: so young and beautiful, and with such soft skin. She could have kept her near for a while and so perhaps saved her from the slaughter she was probably heading straight toward, even though she thought she was escaping it. Verónica could have embraced her as she brushed past her on the way out of the bathroom, let the rough bath towel drop to the floor. Pushed her toward the bed like the male sons of bitches did to her every night—well, perhaps not every night, only some of them. Caress her slowly like the men do, then let herself drift away with a desire she imagines must be all the crazier, more intense, for being unknown, unexplored: something so fashionable these days among single women, so that she could boast of her conquest, or perhaps even fall in love—why not?—with a body she would have liked to have had when she was Miss Bolivia’s age.
But there is no sign of Ana—no name, no telephone number. She has left not a single trace, apart from the smell of her cheap perfume on the towel and the missed call which plays the flat, neutral voice of the answering message. She could be dead, but the telephone company would go on charging for her calls and messages. The companies have performed a miracle: no-one, not even the deceased, can be released until their inaccessible bureaucracies give permission.
But someone had called from somewhere. If it wasn’t Miss Bolivia, who was it? Why wouldn’t it be her? Verónica asks herself in an attempt to calm down, playing her personal game of chess with the board on her lap: no bishops or rooks can stay upright on their squares, no kings or queens are safe.
Holy City Page 2