“Ever onwards to victory,” he says, pressing the ground-floor button.
2
When the moon left the stage and a moist south-westerly breeze sprang up, the two of them went down to Bértola’s living room for a whisky. Only Mauser stayed on the terrace, gnawing bones that had become a reality.
Verónica was worried Bértola might try something after the whisky, but the guy (he was a psychologist, after all) must have made a mental note of how she had kneed Pacogoya and did not want to repeat the experience. Or perhaps he really was becoming her friend, as well as sharing the office costs.
Too much baggage, Verónica told herself later, trying to explain Bértola’s good behavior. She had called him on his night off, then turned up on his terrace with stories more suited to a pathologist than a psychoanalyst.
Occasionally, when she looked at herself in the mirror on one of her rare self-indulgent mornings—good figure, tits still firm, backside as perky as her nice nose, light-green eyes, thick jet-black hair that was all hers and was never dyed—Verónica forgot she was twice a widow and that men are superstitious about women who have buried their men.
Bértola was a saint. He had put up with her—for free—on his night off. He had fed her the steak and everything else he had bought to share with his dog. He must have taken pity on her when he saw how bowed down she was by the weight of all her worries.
“You were very young when you married your cop.”
“I was twenty. At that age, you don’t understand a thing. You talk about everything, but you don’t get it. You’re an open book—plus I was a student at the time. I have a good memory. I talked and talked, always quoting Greeks and Romans.”
“So you hooked up with a Roman. You fell in love with his name.”
Verónica smiles. Her hand grows cold on the whisky glass.
“Argentina was a mess. I wanted to get out. I had all my papers and a contract to work in an Argentine restaurant in Barcelona. I couldn’t give a damn about graduating as a lawyer. Then Romano came on the scene.”
Bértola bites his tongue to avoid the all too obvious associations: “Chaos looks for authority.” He recalls yet again that it is Saturday night; she is not a client. But it turns out Verónica can read thoughts as well as case files.
“He was authority and I fell for it,” she says. “I got pregnant before I finished university. We used to screw in a cheap motel for cops where they played sirens instead of muzak. Romano had just finished his police training. He swore he’d never tortured anyone; I’ve even got a friend who’s a communist, he told me.”
“How touching. What happened with your pregnancy?”
“I lost the baby.”
Romano reacted with a violence he had been careful not to display before. It was her fault, she tried to do too much, she wanted things that normal women did not aspire to. He demanded she stop studying; she refused. Then one night when she came home from the faculty she opened the apartment door and ran straight into his fist. She had not told him she would be back so late—“look what time it is, what motel have you come from, you whore?” The landing outside was filled with shouts and the faces of their neighbors, consortium hyenas roused by the smell of blood.
She left him, but he followed her across half the city before tracking her down to a room in a boarding house in Lanús Este, lent as an emergency measure by a fellow university student. He went down on his knees and begged forgiveness. He loved her, he never thought he could stoop so low: “But you have to understand, I’m under a lot of pressure, I work with the dregs of society,” he said, trying to justify himself. “They’re clearing everything out because democracy is on its way. They don’t want to be sent to jail or lynched.”
“Poor Romano, I could have saved his life. ‘I’ll resign tomorrow,’ he told me, ‘we’ll go far away, into the interior if you want. We can live in peace there. You set up your lawyer’s practice and I’ll open a shop, a baker’s for example. My old man was a baker, so I know the trade, it’s great.’”
She almost agreed. She imagined herself in a typical small town. Just another local couple, the lawyer and her baker husband. Dawns with the smell of bread and freshly baked cakes, happiness with yeast.
“If I had said yes, maybe he wouldn’t have done what he did.”
But she was scared. She might not be a psychoanalyst like Bértola, but Verónica knew that men who turn to violence are almost always hopeless cases. And she had not studied the law all those years to end up as a punchbag for Kid Baker. She imagined the scandals there would be in that small town, the fingers pointed at her as she went by with her bruised face. She said no.
Out of spite, or because he was really convinced (she would never know which), the next day Romano went to see a magistrate and denounced what was happening in the federal police: files being burned, threats so that no-one said anything. The mafias thought democracy would not last long, so all they had to do was resist. Everyone was to stay quiet below ground until the triumphant crowing of the communists had died away again and the mustachioed Kerensky who had won the elections by reciting the preamble to the Constitution had been brought down a peg or two.
“Romano obeyed his conscience,” says Bértola.
“He’d already fired the bullet that blew his brains out the day he went to see the magistrate a month later,” Verónica concludes.
Still Bértola did not make a move, sitting primly opposite her, holding a glass of whisky (made in Argentina, to boot) that would be mostly water by the time the ice melted. All he could say was that she should stop collecting all these ghouls, should let go a little, try something different. He advised her to keep away from the scrounger she had taken in the previous night. She told him at least she had not given him a gun, as she had Miss Bolivia.
“You don’t mean to say that …” She did mean to say that. The Bersa was the same one that Romano, “presumably and according to all the evidence,” used to kill himself—as stated in the report she was sent, together with the few belongings he kept in his police locker.
“You should have got rid of that revolver.”
Bértola’s years of study cannot cope. He would need to be a guru, shaman, North-American psychiatrist and Middle-Eastern ayatollah all rolled into one even to begin to understand the beautiful woman sitting opposite him. He says goodbye to her with a kiss on the cheek. As soon as she has climbed into the taxi and he has shut his front door, he gulps down the whisky she left untouched.
Back in her apartment, Verónica finds Pacogoya sprawled on her living room sofa, fast asleep in front of the television. On the screen there is a boxing match going on. Two overweight zombies are sporadically exchanging blows in the ring of a Las Vegas casino. The presenter is going on about how many millions of dollars the one who falls over last will make, and about a world-boxing federation that hands out and withdraws championship titles (Verónica has an image of them getting together in a smoke-filled room, gaunt Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro lookalikes, protected by baby-faced bodyguards, to decide who is to be crowned champion, who is to be dethroned).
Tempted by the fact that Pacogoya is fast asleep, Verónica slides her fingers into the pouch where he keeps his mobile. She would like to learn—she says, to justify her voyeurism to herself—who exactly this guy is who gets given books by Che Guevara in languages he does not understand and which he would not read even if they were in Spanish, because not reading is at the root of his ability to take the world as it comes and gain his feeble rewards from it.
The list of names on the mobile screen means nothing to her. Most of them are women, some companies, a few men’s first names and then, as if daring her to take the next step, five glowing letters: “Uncle.”
She suddenly thinks of Call for the Dead, the John Le Carré novel, one of the many good books her friends have never returned. She ought to ask Laucha the Mouse Giménez for it. Not only is she a voracious reader of borrowed novels, she is called “the Mouse” because
she chews and digests everything she comes across: newsprint, the nocturnal terrors of her women friends recently turned forty, tales of lost happiness.
So this is not Verónica indulging in a spot of private phone tapping as she presses the mobile key. It is a homage to a great thriller writer that she performs while Pacogoya is out for the count, as though one of the blows the zombies are dishing out in Las Vegas had caught him squarely on the chin.
The phone rings somewhere or other.
“Don’t ever call me again, you idiot.”
She rings off immediately. In Las Vegas, the referee counts to ten and raises the winning arm of the zombie left standing. But Verónica is the one who has been knocked out.
It is scary to hear dead people talk when they are angry.
3
Like Jerusalem, Buenos Aires is a Holy City. Pacogoya wakes with this idea in his mind: he is being pursued by a mob of federal mercenaries, crucified—I didn’t feel any pain, he tells Verónica—and then displayed in the middle of Plaza de Mayo.
“The Mothers were walking round as they have done every Thursday for the past thirty years. They were dying of old age before my eyes, Verónica. Collapsing like trees uprooted by drought, still demanding to know what had happened to their disappeared children. The people of Buenos Aires were looking on with their proverbial indifference: the middle classes who run from one bank to another and then at six in the evening choke all the entrances to the underground. And there I was, like a crucified Che Guevara no-one would ever shed a tear over, bleeding to death, giving up the ghost.”
Pleasant conversation to spread on her toast, drink her lukewarm black coffee with and rush downstairs from as soon as the entry phone goes.
“It’s my whale calf,” says Verónica, pleased that for once someone has arrived in time to rescue her. “Don’t move without telling me where you’re going,” she tells Pacogoya by way of goodbye. She has not told him about the call she made on his mobile to Uncle’s apartment, the threatening voice.
*
Buenos Aires is a city of merchants and pilgrims, of monarchs free from control by any parliament who arrive at Aeroparque in their private jets and stare with genetic disdain at the gray line of the city’s buildings to the West and the river like a brown sea to the East. They bound down the exclusive steps like thoroughbreds and ask their advisers who speak the native language of Argentina:
“Where is Patagonia?”
On the southern bank of this city as arrogant as the princes without principalities, the caravan Verónica uses as an office by the Riachuelo stands out from the metal skeletons of the stands, all of them dismantled because today is Monday and tonight there is no market.
The sun pours pure ultraviolet radiation over the caravan on this early August morning. There is no electricity. The batteries have run out and someone has cut the illegal connection to the supply network the magistrate had set up so that the inspector could use the sophisticated equipment inside: a computer almost as old as a pedal sewing machine, running a Windows 95 operating system that refuses to contemplate any less archaic diskette.
“Let’s talk about it then, if that crappy machine won’t work,” says Verónica.
Back from his weekend fishing trip, the accountant says that is impossible. He cannot put into words what the black hole in the accounts signifies. Not a single transaction in order, not a single figure that adds up, no stamps or proof of origin that can be authenticated.
“This market is a joke, doctora.” Fake and real goods have been cleverly mixed together, never sold on their own. “These people weren’t born yesterday. They haven’t come from Bolivia to improve themselves or save pennies for their vegetable plots.”
“There are all kinds here,” says Verónica. “The hard-working Bolivians who got here first are at the back of the queue now.”
“So I’m right: this place is an open-air den of thieves. What I don’t get is what happens to everything on days like today when there’s no market. Where does it all go?”
“The merchandise circulates, crosses bridges, looking for other places to be sold. There are fourteen million souls in greater Buenos Aires. No-one is going to relax with so many potential customers.”
The accountant almost understands. He is a man of numbers: even on his fishing trips he is not so worried if he catches huge pejerreyes or tiny tariras. What matters to him is how many there are and if they are fit to eat. He accepted the position—he explains to Verónica—because the money he was promised will come in handy.
“But I like a quiet life, I don’t want my head to explode. Even the Ministry of the Economy is child’s play compared to this.”
“What the Lomas magistrate wants,” Verónica explains, “is a façade of legality. He needs a file with figures he can bring out, even if it’s only in the half-light, when the journalists or opposition politicians on the campaign trail start sniffing around for fresh scandals in this garbage.”
“Who does the magistrate report to?”
“I suppose he has his own convictions.”
The accountant spews out a guffaw and Verónica finally breathes more easily. His cynicism clears the air. In the end, what she wants is the same as the accountant: to live a quiet life, get paid what is owed her, then head off so that she can be a long way away when the shooting starts.
“Sort out all the figures on that,” she says, pointing to a diskette which, even if there were electricity, the museum-piece computer would refuse to read. “Put them in a nice folder, like at secondary school, and make a neat cover with my name on it. I’ll sign whatever you like, but let’s get it done before the weekend so we can go home and wait for their call for us to come and collect our money.”
The accountant’s eyes clouded over as quickly as if he had taken an overdose of diazepan. A suicide on his window ledge would have been more reassuring, and would have had a less complicated immediate future, than having to face sitting at a working computer to draw up a financial report that did not blow up in the face of anyone daring to read it in public. Verónica knows as much and so she says: come on, Rosales.
“Come on, Rosales, you’ve done more complicated and less well-paid jobs than this. We’re working for the state and the state doesn’t really care about anything.”
Touched by the magic wand of a witless fairy, Rosales confesses he had thought of visiting Disneyworld.
“To Disneylandia, as we used to call it. My two grandchildren asked me to go. I thought that with what I earn from this crap and with some of my savings, I could treat them. The kids are very excited about it: there are real Mickey Mouses, Red Indians who attack stagecoaches, giant hamburgers and roller coasters as high as our national debt.”
If granddad Rosales gives up now, the whole precarious edifice created by the Lomas magistrate will come crashing down. The people across the river, the ones betrayed by Miss Bolivia and her bullet-ridden lover, are not going to stand around waiting with their arms folded. In fact, they are probably already enlisting their mercenaries. The slaughter could start at any moment.
“You can trust Rosales,” the magistrate had told Verónica. “He’s an honest sort. He’s worried at already having reached pension age—‘I’ve managed to put a bit aside,’ he told me, ‘but they pay so little.’ People like him move me, doctora. Their lives go by and yet they always respect the system. They don’t make Argentines like that anymore.”
“It’s one week of hard work, Rosales. Possibly less. I promise I’ll talk to his honor. You’ll be able to go to Disneylandia without having to smash your piggy bank.”
He gives a distant smile, a smile from the other side of a misted-over window. Rosales is no fool, but it is his grandchildren peering back at Verónica through his gray eyes, as well as Donald Duck, Daisy, Goofy and Walt Disney himself before he was cryogenically frozen.
“Nobody’s going to kill us, are they?” he asks, still expressionless, his eyes lacking any spark.
“One week, Rosa
les. Then you can pack your bags for your trip with the kids. And don’t forget to take an overcoat. It gets cold at night in Disneylandia.”
4
The presenter announced the two runners-up before he opened the envelope with the name of Miss Bolivia in it. As he did so, Ana Torrente looked up into her still-adolescent sky, trying to find the stars that the stage spotlights prevented her from seeing. She closed her eyes to invent for a few seconds at least her own small firmament. She was just nineteen and had recently broken off her relationship with a fifty-year-old Colombian coffee grower whom she had fallen in love with when she saw his palace in Santa Cruz de la Sierra’s most elegant neighborhood. “I live here peacefully,” he had told her, “but if I go back to Colombia I’m a dead man.”
Even before she was crowned Miss Bolivia, Ana Torrente realized that the coffee her Colombian grower sold was the color of milk. She imagined him shot dead by associates he had cheated or impatient rivals, with her lying beneath him on his bed, unable to force her way out as he stared at her through unseeing eyes and she had no idea why she was not dead too. This was no nightmare: it happened soon enough, but Ana was not in the bed at the time. Instead she was waiting, eyes tight shut, for the master of ceremonies to read her name out on the stage of the packed theater in Santa Cruz.
The applause, lights and camera flashes snapping voraciously at her, a check in her name, a fake diamond crown and lots of bouquets of flowers led her to believe, for a few hours, that her life could change, that she was a real queen. The illusion faded when she was taken on tour through wretched villages in the Andes by a manager who promised her all the tinsel in Hollywood while they bucketed around in a clapped-out motorbike with sidecar. Time and again he presented her as the Queen of Bolivia to stony-faced indians packed into the villages squares, while scrofulous dogs and kids clung to her skirts, begging for toys, food, miracles.
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