“Where are you calling from?”
The voice on the other end sounds impersonal, labored. It takes her a while to realize it is Ana on the line, the very same Miss Bolivia who disappeared the day before with the Bersa .38 that had belonged to the first man she lost.
“Don’t come looking for me, doctora. I’m fine, but don’t look for me.”
“I didn’t come looking for you. If you remember, it was you who came to me. All I ask is that you don’t kill anyone.”
Now that it is too late, she regrets having given Ana the gun. The call is from a public telephone; she could not trace it even if she had her own satellite. But the dethroned queen does not sound frightened, only agitated, perhaps from excitement. Perhaps she’s in the arms of a man who’s caressing her breasts at that very moment, Verónica imagines wildly.
“I’ll contact you tomorrow or the day after, doctora, to see if that skirt-chasing magistrate is back from his holidays yet.”
With that she hangs up. Veronica curses the fact that she is a lawyer for thieves and their women, that she has to splash around in the polluted mud of this city periphery, is clawing her way through garbage the whole time. She envies Bértola: the refuse he deals with doesn’t stink to high heaven. It is an abstract filth in which client and therapist can roll around without getting dirty and it only lasts fifty minutes a session. Like someone watching a talk show about their own life, knowing they can switch it off if it gets boring or too intense.
The no-longer young man’s arm does in fact stretch out toward Ana Torrente’s young body. His hands play with her breasts, stroke them. He brings his mouth up to drink their sweet milk, imagining it is a nectar that will help him regain his youth, fountain in the midst of a garden of sugar and honey. She lets him come close, fondle, caress and suck her breasts. She is enjoying the older man’s urgent desire. She looks on with amusement at first, then wraps her fingers round his erect penis, giving little taps at the base as if it were the Bersa the lawyer had lent her. When he tires of sucking her, she slides down and starts slowly licking him. She has learned by now not to close her eyes to hide her repulsion, to imagine she is in the arms of Di Caprio, in his room at a five-star hotel and not in this gangster hovel on the outskirts of San Pedro, where she has come to stay, following her instructions.
“Keep going, my love, keep going,” groans the older man, worried he may lose his erection if she becomes distracted, if she stops sucking him so deliciously, stops plunging beneath the flurry of bedcovers that swallow her like quicksands, searching until she finds the survivor that he tries to keep in her mouth, his penis that is stiff but rough on Ana’s tongue and mouth, like the mummified prick of a pharaoh who died two thousand years ago. Miss Bolivia feels as though she has reached the forbidden interior of an Egyptian pyramid. If she manages to get out alive, she will never again do what she is doing now, sucking him with the expertise she learned in the first model school she went to soon after arriving in Buenos Aires, with an agent who had a young, enthusiastic dick who told her yes! that’s how she had to move her ass on the catwalks if she wanted to take over from Naomi Campbell.
The older man shrieks as if someone were cutting his throat. When there is not much of life left to run, pleasure is this senile yelp from someone who has nothing but his money, if he has any, and the scant, fleeting power allowed him by some boss or other, some gang leader who has left him in charge after making him promise he won’t fuck the blond he is now busy fucking.
Ana spits the semen into his face. He throws her off, revolted by the watery, bitter juice this crazy girl has insulted him with. She wipes her mouth clean, then runs laughing into the bathroom. She locks the door behind her and studies herself in the mirror. The older man’s curses reach her like the sound of a distant pack of dogs, something she got used to hearing in the desolate towns she visited as queen. It is the music—as bitter as the man’s semen—that accompanied those winter nights when she shivered with cold and hunger at the start of her lengthy flight from Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Back in those days she dreamt of reaching Argentina and its capital, Buenos Aires, the Paris of South America, the city without indians where, if you are not careful—or so they told her—even the taxi drivers speak French.
They lied to you, Ana tells Miss Bolivia in the mirror, which is like a visitors’ room in a prison where she is the prisoner and Miss Bolivia has come to visit her, to bring her news of the outside world. They had no idea what they were talking about, she tells her, Buenos Aires is as overrun by indians as any ruined city in Bolivia or Peru.
The man starts beating on the bathroom door, at first with gentle taps, a crescendo with the palm of his hand, then his fists, finally vibrato, kicking like a horse who has eaten too much oats and marihuana salad. “Open up you bitch”—bang! bang! like someone being stoned alive, bang! thump! bang!—“you asshole bitch, open this door or else!” The same blows, the same fury she had met when she was locked in the dairy of the German farmer who had taken her in only to force her to grow up shutting her eyes in the darkness. “Open up, I’m shitting myself,” she hears from the other side of the bathroom door. It is as though oral sex has acted on him like a laxative, but Ana still does not open the door. Instead, she shrinks back to the corner of the bathroom behind the toilet, presses herself against the tiles and waits for the man’s desperation to give him the strength to break open the door, which just at that moment gives way with a sharp crack.
As sharp as the cracking sound from the Bersa that Ana, this time accompanied by Miss Bolivia on her side of the mirror, uses to shoot him and watch him collapse in his own pile of shit.
7
“Foreign millionaires aground in Buenos Aires” is the headline of the evening newspaper that has survived the takeovers of the media groups in Argentina. It is a sensationalist rag bought by those workers who still have a job.
“Five-star hotel on the rocks” is how the news is put by the free paper handed out to the middle-class employees, secretaries and the unemployed who cram into trains and buses as they travel home after another exhausting day looking for work, or keeping it by pushing and shoving others out of the way.
The rest of the front pages of both papers are full of photographs of weary tourists and on-the-spot interviews with some of the 3,340 passengers from the Queen of Storms, who tonight should be sailing south to spot whales off Puerto Madryn, poor creatures who, like monkeys in a zoo, only come close to the coast so they can be seen by tourists.
The Río de la Plata is an estuary where the average depth of the water fluctuates between one meter and one meter ninety centimeters, depending on the winds. All vessels calling at the port of Buenos Aires have to follow narrow channels that are constantly being dredged—unless the crews of the dredgers are working to rule because they have not been paid the bonuses they were promised. This was what happened a couple of days earlier, although no-one was told about it; neither the travel agencies nor the officers on board the Queen of Storms, men trained to grapple with the wild seas of the Magellan Strait or to avoid the Antarctic icebergs that global warming increasingly places in their path, but helpless when faced with a measure decreed by the powerful unions that control the port, the tugboats and dredgers.
The reporter in the middle-class free sheet speculates that no-one said a word because the invasion of tourists stuffed with euros and dollars is a bonanza for Buenos Aires hotel owners. They claim to be unable to cope, but they have already divvied up the spoils they are likely to enjoy, if as expected it takes a week to repair the liner’s hull. Two hundred dollars for the privilege of spending the night in a corridor, however well appointed, is a price the passengers pay only under protest, but it is immediately salted away in the hoteliers’ black books, minus the percentage slipped to the tax inspectors whose frowns suddenly disappear as they count the notes in the equally well-appointed hotel toilets.
Pacogoya is not worried about the delay. His apartment looking out on the illustrious dead is
far more comfortable than the bunk the travel agency allots him when they take him on as a guide. He is not complaining; the pay is good and he does not spend much time in his bunk: he comes and goes between cabins every night, and often strikes it lucky if the person succumbing to his charms is a young, uninhibited tourist. Swedish and German girls are his favorites; he does not understand a word they speak and they do not understand him. The entire cultural exchange is restricted to laughter and sighs, or gestures the other person interprets as they see fit. Sometimes the results are surprising; usually they are pleasant, except for the night when a German man in his fifties, one meter ninety tall and with a body honed in the gyms of the former East Germany, mistook his intentions and threw him face down on the bed with a quick judo move. Pacogoya had seen something similar with the cattlehands at San Antonio de Arecho, a “for-export” town on the edge of the pampas where tourists are taken to eat barbecued beef and gawp at the gauchos with their daggers and baggy trousers. The gauchos, though, do it with young steers. They upend them with a single flip, but that is where their prowess ends: they soon let the animal go, then stand up to receive the applause of their grateful audience.
But the German never understood that Pacogoya was not shrieking with pleasure. His own eloquent gestures were meant to convey how pleased he was, because normally he suffered from premature ejaculation, yet this time had managed to contain himself for another couple of minutes. In fact he was so delighted he gave Pacogoya the gold wrist-watch he had bought for the ungrateful girl who had left him high and dry in Piraeus.
Pacogoya spent the next seven nights flat on his stomach in his narrow cabin, until the German did not re-embark at Rio de Janeiro. He got lost in the city, probably enamored of some young garoto whom he doubtless rewarded, if he broke the record established by the tourist guide, with the necklace or earrings he had also bought for Miss Ungrateful of Greece.
Whenever river silt, Antarctic icebergs or a strike lead to a cruise ship being delayed in port, Pacogoya takes it easy. He tries to be his own tourist guide. He looks for amorous adventures outside the routine and for the business opportunities that all cities offer to those who know how to take advantage of them.
In Buenos Aires he is helped by the fact that he knows his way around. In recent years, as well as places to dance tango and restaurants where the tourists can stuff themselves with beef, the so-called Queen of the Río de la Plata has seen the growth of an activity that calls for speedy reflexes and a well-developed network of contacts. Selling drugs to foreign tourists is not the same as supplying the local pimply adolescents in their discos, schools or universities. The foreigners have no problem paying, but they insist on top-class stuff. They might spend silly money on a set of gaucho boleadores from some tourist trap on calle Florida, but when it comes to coke, they are experts. And not every dealer can get them what they want.
Pacogoya took their orders the night before. News of the delay in Buenos Aires meant they were doubled. Anything unexpected creates anxiety among those who think they have bought every single minute of the rest of their lives, only to discover that the world, “external reality” as airheads and new-age psychologists call it, obeys its own laws. In the end, Pacogoya was scared by how much they wanted: he usually only made fifty- or sixty-gram deals; this time he was expected to come up with almost half a kilo of topnotch cocaine. In addition, absolutely all of them had paid up front and in Argentine pesos, banknotes adorned with portraits of national heroes completely unknown to them, looking on sternly as if they had helped found a real nation.
His usual dealer meets him in his virtual office in the Florida Garden, a bar on the corner of Florida and Paraguay. Like liners in port, celebrities call in here for a while: local politicians and artists, intellectuals who write for newspapers that the middle class (although fewer and fewer of them) buy so as to know what to think, or more often to line the floors of their apartments with when they are going to paint the walls.
“That’s a lot, I can only supply half.”
“Where can I get the rest, Uncle?”
He does not say so, but the dealer knows Pacogoya has got all the money on him. He can tell it from his hands, his eyes: even the way his lip trembles makes him an open book.
“I’ll give you an address,” he says, writing on a scrap of paper. “Memorize it, then tear it up.”
Glancing down at the piece of paper, Pacogoya immediately protests.
“But that’s not in Buenos Aires! Where on earth is San Pedro anyway?”
“It’s close by, che. A hundred and seventy kilometers away, no more than an hour on the motorway.” With that he takes the bit of paper from Pacogoya and tears it up himself. “Give me the dough now and call me when you get back from San Pedro.”
Pacogoya is carrying a student rucksack. His thin face disguises the fact that he is already forty-eight years old. A sparse beard gives him that Che Guevara look which often leads tourists to think he must be a left-wing guerrilla. In reward for his services they thrust books about Che written in French or Italian on him.
He unzips his rucksack and hands the dealer a wad of notes.
“Twenty percent now. The rest tonight, when I’ve picked up the stuff and returned from San Pedro.”
Despite sixty years of hard living, Uncle’s face rejuvenates as soon as he sees the money. The skin around his eyes gets a botox injection when he handles the notes, counts them under the table, then like a conjuror makes them disappear into his jacket pocket.
Although everyone knows him as Uncle, it is only with Pacogoya that he has a real nephew relationship. Pacogoya has known him for fifteen years, since the days when the dealer was private secretary to the vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies, and Pacogoya’s own position in the Foreign Ministry allowed him to use the invaluable diplomatic bag to bring shipments in directly from Colombia.
“Those were the days,” says Pacogoya, while the two of them are smoking a cigarette outside the bar, now that the municipal authorities have banned smoking in enclosed spaces. “I should have stayed on. I’d be an ambassador by now.”
“The foreign service is full of queers,” says the dealer, taking a lungful of smoke, then breathing out a dark, polluted cloud that the east wind whirls around the walls of the bar, then off up calle Paraguay. “I’ll see you tonight.”
*
Anyone determined to believe God exists will find him on any corner, in the lift, or while he is walking along a lonely road. Any woman equally keen to find love will end up convinced that a noise in the corridor must be her lover coming back at any hour, at 3:30 a.m., for example. To beg her to forgive him for having stormed off the other night when she refused to give him what he had come to ask her for. For having been so stupid as not to make love to her first, to leave her well satisfied so that, still caught up in the dreamy haze of their second fuck, she would find it impossible to refuse him such a tiny favor, nothing more than three thousand pesos.
But neither God nor love exist, Verónica groans when she hears Pacogoya’s voice on the entry phone. Or at least, this is not the way to find them, groping around in the dark, holding back as she gives herself in exchange for a meal and real French champagne in an expensive restaurant, followed by a lovemaking session in a room with a view of the noble dead.
“I thought you were back on your ship. What happened: did they throw you overboard?” she asks when he comes in.
Instead of replying, Pacogoya tries to embrace her, but she slips away like a cat who will not allow itself to be stroked. He lets his arms drop and sinks onto the sofa. He is exhausted.
“You know what happened. The ship ran aground, and …”
“I’m not talking about the cruise ship: what happened to you?”
Pacogoya looks at her in dismay. As though it were possible not to tell her, to say he saw her light was on and came up, to have a drink of the Argentine whisky which is all she has in the little bar she keeps under a table loaded with plants, then make
love to her or take her to eat in an all-night restaurant run by fake Italians.
“I have to get up at seven,” Verónica says impatiently. “Give me a quick summary of what happened, then you can go back and sleep in your cemetery.” Pacogoya was always pallid; now his skin is transparent. All he wants is somewhere to spend the night: any corner, the dog kennel if necessary. “I don’t have a dog.”
“Wuff, wuff,” he says, managing to bring a smile to her face, smothered with creams to make her look young. “I’ll tell you in the morning. Go to bed now.”
“You could be dead by morning. The refugees who come here seem to have a tendency to disappear.”
Curiosity to find out what Verónica means has the effect of loosening Pacogoya’s tongue.
“Until now everything had been fine. Fifteen years living off it and not a drop of blood.”
“Living off it” meant the tourist guide was a low-level dealer practicing low-intensity corruption, the only explosions coming with sex.
“So who’s spattered you with it now?”
He has no idea. All he can do is tell her what happened and curse the dealer, the Uncle who loves him like a nephew, for sending him into that bloody lions’ den—to the armpit of the world, a place called San Pedro.
“San Pedro is Saint Peter, so you must have been close to paradise. I know the town, it’s a pretty place, surrounded by olive groves and with a beautiful view of the river.”
“Well then, paradise must be next door to hell.”
*
He has a hard time finding the address.
He has driven there at 180 k.p.h., dodging lorries and buses, forcing his way past other drivers, as if he was already aware that someone in the place he is aiming for is bleeding to death.
He finally turns into the street. A dirt track. Its name is on a hand-painted sign, although in reality the road is little more than a line crossing a grid of bare lots, scarcely half a dozen small, poor-looking, unfinished houses. Stray dogs watch Pacogoya’s red Porsche go past—slowly, bouncing over the potholes. He tells himself he ought to have left it in his garage and rented something less ostentatious, but a nagging voice told him he had to get there as quickly as possible, without even pausing to think: after all, he could have got the drugs somewhere else. No, he had been with the Uncle so many years now, he trusted him.
Holy City Page 4