Like Flies from Afar

by K. Ferrari

  The third thing he did was wait.

  Three months later, Carlos Amante’s kid had an attack, and they went running to Artigas Clinic. Naturally, when he got there, they told him his name didn’t ring a bell, they were very sorry, but they couldn’t do anything for him. In the interim, Carlos Amante Junior started to shake and spaz out in the waiting room in his mother’s arms.

  “Talk to Mr. Machi,” Carlos Senior begged, “he’s the one who told me, just ask him…”

  And so after a while, one of the receptionists called Mr. Machi, who told them of course they should take care of Carlos Jr., and to please put his father on the phone.

  “I don’t know how this happened, Carlos, but don’t worry, they’ll take care of your kid and the two fuckups that made you wait are fired,” Mr. Machi said.

  “Thank you, sir, thank you,” Carlos Amante babbled.

  So now the line cook owed Mr. Machi two favors.

  The doctors intervened quickly, but it was too late, and Carloitos suffered serious brain damage. They kept him eight days at the Artigas Clinic with the best care money could buy. Eight days Carlos didn’t have to go to work.

  “We’re a family,” Mr. Machi repeated the first night he went to visit. “You can come back when the kid’s better.”

  Now Carlos owed him three favors.

  And when the eight days were up and he went back to El Imperio, Mr. Machi had him sent up to the office and told him how much he regretted that the doctors’ efforts hadn’t been enough. They had to be thankful it wasn’t worse. They had to keep looking ahead.

  “Where’d your boy work?” he asked.

  “In a call center,” the father answered, “but now…”

  “Probably it’ll be hard for him to find a job now, no?” Mr. Machi said.

  “It occurred to me,” he went on, “that we could set him up with something here. Help out in the kitchen, have him wash dishes, something like that.”

  He clapped him on the back: “Pay won’t be much, but at least he’ll be with his family.”

  Carlos Amante thanked him, weeping silently.

  Now he owed him four.

  “Hey, now, don’t cry, just remember: you scratch my back, I scratch yours.”

  A self-made man, that’s me, Mr. Machi thought. And his Theory worked.

  31

  “A LITTLE CHAT BETWEEN FRIENDS,” Chamorro had told him.

  When they were settled in at one of the tables in the private dining room, Mr. Machi ordered champagne and asked him what the deal was, not bothering to beat around the bush.

  Chamorro said his visit was just a sign of his goodwill, of the solid friendship that united them. There’d been some dissatisfaction on the subject of days off, and then about one of the waiters, Pablo, who no longer worked there. A rumor had reached the office that the doorman or the receptionist had been riling the others up, proposing some kind of mutiny, a strike, maybe, believe it or not, or something else along those lines.

  “Those days are over,” Mr. Machi said, “we do things differently, always have, we’ve always talked these issues through.”

  “Yes. And gotten rid of the undesirables,” Chamorro finished the thought before emptying his glass in one swallow.

  Mr. Machi grinned in agreement. Even if it was just Chandon, the champagne wasn’t half bad.

  No point in opening the good shit, he thought. I don’t need to butter up this jerkoff.

  “So?” he asked.

  “Well, some of the guys are scared, you know. Like Carlos, the cook, the guy who called us, he’s worried about his job and his kid’s job, but what’s really getting him is that some crank has come in and is screwing up the family environment at El Imperio,” Chamorro said.

  “We’d like to know what’s happened so we can advise our guys and win over anyone the agitators might be influencing, you know?” he added around a deep, sonorous belch that made his dewlap wiggle.

  Mr. Machi explained: he hated temp workers, he didn’t like taking on part-timers to fill holes in the schedule, he liked having his own employees at El Imperio. His employees: the phrase was crystal clear. Meaning: if the employees were his, why wouldn’t he do what he wanted with them?

  “My employees, Chamorro,” he repeated.

  He knew, Mr. Machi did, that the threat of unemployment now did the same job guys like Almirón and Romero used to do for him before: God bless the market economy and the law of supply and demand. There were hardly ever any surprises. Everything worked better and got cheaper all the time. So times were twice as good. And there was an added benefit, the private and unconfessable pleasure of breaking other people’s will. But he didn’t say that.

  He just spelled it out: My employees.

  “I never take a day off,” he said, gesturing to one of the waiters to bring another bottle of champagne. “And I’m the owner. So if I’m here every day because the business needs me, why should these guys get to call in when the business needs them?”

  He paused to see if Chamorro agreed or if he was going to pass judgment in his capacity as a representative of the workers’ interests. There it was: he agreed.

  “Plus, Pablo knew how things go here,” Machi clarified. “I come here to work, they come here to work—am I right or am I right?” he asked, just as the waiter topped off their glasses with more Chandon.

  They were both working, Mr. Machi and the waiter, each in his own way, of course.

  “Of course, of course, no doubt whatsoever,” Chamorro said after thanking Mr. Machi for the wine and singing its praises.

  And he proposed a division of labor: they’d take care of the other guys who were stirring up shit, Mr. Machi would take care of the doorman.

  “Absolutely,” Mr. Machi agreed, “we can even get started now.”

  “Gustavo!” Mr. Machi called. “Fill up our friend Chamorro’s glass here and send me the door guy and Carlos.”

  “Sir,” the two men summoned said, almost in unison, a few minutes later.

  “You,” Mr. Machi said to the first, “you’re fired, go get changed and come back next week for your check.”

  “And you, you get a raise, now go back to the kitchen,” he said to the second.

  “As you wish,” said the first, and left.

  The other, the cook, Carlos Amante, barely managed to say “Thank you so much, sir, again, thank you,” smiling at Chamorro, who tried to hide his astonishment.

  “Be sure our friend here is well taken care of,” Mr. Machi said to Gustavo.

  And then, turning to Chamorro: “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot on my plate…”

  “Of course, of course,” Chamorro answered, and reached out his hand. Mr. Machi pretended not to see it and walked to his office. He listened with displeasure as Chamorro—seated at the very table Mr. Machi kept reserved for congressmen and ambassadors, big-league athletes and ministers, people he plied with liquor, food, and girls brought in by Mariela Báez—Chamorro, the no-name head of the restaurant workers’ union, a mere go-between, ordered another bottle “of that wine with the bubbles and a couple of sandwiches on white bread.”

  “You, follow me,” Mr. Machi said to one of the hostesses.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. The way all of them did.

  Now, thirty years later, Mr. Machi could say yes, he liked that power.

  PART X

  INNUMERABLE

  32

  HE FEELS RELIEVED, Mr. Machi does. He holds the steering wheel in place with his legs while opening the bottle of Coca-Cola he bought at the Chinese family’s mini-mart and taking a sip. The flavor is sweet and sticky and the soda is hot, but his throat is burning with thirst and he drinks it down like cool, clear water. He takes another sip and the bubbles in the syrupy, hot, viscous liquid make him belch. Mr. Machi screws the bottle shut, drops it, emits a thunderous burp, and feels more relieved still. A kind of tranquility suffuses him, and for the first time since he felt the BMW jerk from the blown tire, he breathes calmly and smile
s without fear.

  He looks in the pocket of his Armani shirt, filthy with blood and soil and vomit and bits of dead body, and digs out the pen. The S and the K are almost smudged out, but with a little effort, you can read the words SKYLIGHT TANGO BAR.

  As he leaves behind the abandoned shack, the overgrown meadow, the screeching, busted, rusty gate, as the BMW races on like a black bolt of lightning provoking looks of astonishment and envy in its wake, Mr. Machi leaves behind his fear as well, his vertigo, the sense that the world is ending. He throws the pen out the window and watches in the rearview as a truck rolls over it, scattering it in dozens of pieces. It seems inconceivable that it frightened him so as he sees it transformed in the rearview mirror into a cloud of shards that look like flies from afar. Lunatic flies. Annoying, maybe, but they can’t scare anyone.

  Mr. Machi has a good laugh. He turns on the radio. A Cacho Castaña song comes through the speakers, growling that when all is said and done, life goes on.

  33

  NOW FOR THE CLOTHES, Mr. Machi thinks, with a serenity extraordinary for this very strange day. He can’t believe all that’s happened. And in so little time.

  How long ago was it that the chick with the blond mane was kneeling between his legs? With a little effort, he can still feel her lips tighten on his dick, still taste the tobacco, the pristine cocaine. He checks his Rolex to see if it’s really true that his life fell to pieces that fast. And that he needed so little time to put it back together. He’s tired, he figures he must look like hell, but something resembling happiness invades him.

  I just need a shower to feel like myself again, he thinks.

  A line, he thinks, a smoke.

  He thinks: some clean clothes. A black Brioni suit, one of the red Marinella ties from his collection. The clean clothes Mr. Machi thinks of are exclusive, like everything else he owns. Exclusive, costly.

  “Instruments for the ratification of a reality that may only be obtained by means of said objects,” Alejandro Wilkinson used to say.

  If it’s tobacco, it’s Cohiba, or else Montecristo. If it’s a lighter, it’s a Dupont. The watch is a Rolex; the pen, a Montblanc; the shoes, Crockett & Jones; suits and shirts are Brioni, Armani, Versace, or Scappino. Ties: Italian silk, preferably Marinella. Whiskey, Chivas. Car, BMW, of course, or a Mercedes or even an Audi. Someday it’ll be a Rolls or a Bentley, he thinks.

  “That’s new-money swagger,” his father-in-law, Mirta’s old man, still says with contempt.

  Sure, Mr. Machi always thinks, easy for you to say: son, grandson, great-grandson of a dynasty, born in the lap of luxury, owner of half of Santa Fe.

  “Objects reaffirm the individual and also his social context,” Alejandro Wilkinson used to repeat.

  “They’re showy, vulgar, and they’ve got no class, those new-money types like your friend,” Mirta’s father used to preach to her. “They don’t buy things, they buy symbols, and they think that if they do so, they can buy their way into having real class.”

  “You need to learn how to live, my boy, now that you’re part of the family,” the old man told him those first few times.

  Mr. Machi swallowed and gritted his teeth.

  New money, he thought. It wasn’t the words that got to him so much as the condescension in the old man’s tone.

  “Self-made man, Machi,” Alejandro Wilkinson used to tell him, “keep repeating that phrase. That’s what we are: self-made men.”

  New money means guys who did it their way, Mr. Machi tells himself. That very night, he’s going to dress to the nines, he thinks. The Brioni suit he bought last winter in Naples, the lavender blue Versace shirt, and the red silk tie Thaelman gave him for New Year’s.

  “But first you gotta deal with this, Luisito,” he says to his face in the rearview. Sure, it looks like hell, but there’s a glimmer of something in it that resembles happiness.

  He makes a mental list.

  Once he gets home and changes clothes, he needs to work things out with Mirta.

  Mirta, the ball-breaker, he thinks to himself.

  I’m going to have to promise her something, he reckons, a round-the-world cruise, a yacht, something big.

  Next thing is to call Cesspit, he thinks—his confidence in his security chief suddenly restored—and have him find out how they could get hold of my BMW or else dump the body inside it. And then take care of whoever’s responsible.

  We can’t have things like this happening.

  If Cesspit had wanted to fuck me, it would have been me showing up in someone else’s trunk, and not the other way around, he thinks. And the guy’s not gonna bite the hand that feeds him. I’m all he’s got. How could I have suspected him, he asks, how could I have doubted.

  But the doubt doesn’t go away. Once a doubt creeps in, it’s not easy to dislodge it.

  These next few weeks, Mr. Machi decides, the best thing will be to find someone to take care of Cesspit, who’s scraped together a lot of power in those bloodstained hands of his.

  He opens back up the bottle of Coke and takes another warm sip.

  Too much power, he thinks.

  34

  THREE EXITS BEFORE the one that will take him home, he makes a final stop. He pulls up to a rickety kiosk, a shack with a single window. A girl waits on him, no older than eleven. A brat with long, slender arms. She’s got crust in her eyes, ashy, unwashed hair, and a flowery dress draped over a body showing the tiny beginnings of breasts. The girl gets on tiptoe to reach the counter behind the window of the makeshift kiosk.

  “What can I get for you, sir?” she asks.

  “A box of matches and a peanut bar,” Mr. Machi responds.

  “Big or small?” the brat asks, squinting her crusty eyes in what looks like a naughty or maybe a mocking smile.

  “The peanut bar or the matches?” Mr. Machi asks her back.

  The brat looks at him cheekily, almost like they were equals. Now there’s no mistaking the mockery in her smile.

  “Whichever you prefer, sir,” she says. “I’m here to serve.”

  “Big for the peanut bar, small for the matches,” Mr. Machi barks, slightly irritated.

  Little cunt, he thinks.

  Rude little cunt.

  “Oh, okay,” the girl says, and stretches to look up at the shelf over the window. She steps on a case of soda to reach it. For an instant, the window frames her small breasts in her flowery dress while the girl reaches up and feels around. Then she steps down, sets the matches and the peanut bar on the counter, and asks if Mr. Machi needs anything else.

  Though he doesn’t know why, really, all of a sudden, she reminds him of Luciana. She doesn’t look like Luciana, and she’s filthy, but something about the girl’s sass reminds him of his own daughter when she was ten, maybe eleven years old. Those nascent breasts are just the first step, he thinks. A few years from now she’ll fuck off and move in with some douchebag with a beard. Just like Luciana. He’s indignant as he recalls his daughter, her embarrassment of a boyfriend, her insistence on pursuing a stupid and pointless major. He remembers that she’s supposed to drop by tonight to pick up that piece of shit book that hundreds of Dunas, Peugeot 504s, and Renault 19s must have run over by now. He thinks of other things, too; he couldn’t even count all the things that he thinks of in that moment.

  “Anything else?” the brat asks again, scrubbing the crust from her eyes.

  Mr. Machi wants to get under her skin, to offend her a little bit. Creep her out. Scare her. Something. His voice stiffens, same as his features.

  “A box of rubbers,” he says.

  “Which ones?” the girl asks, smiling again. “We’ve got lubricated, studded, extra thin—”

  “Any of ’em, babe, just give me a pack,” Mr. Machi interrupts her, again seeing Luciana at ten, eleven years old. Then he grabs everything, pays, and stalks off without waiting for his change.

  He walks back to the BMW, takes the bottle of lighter fluid out of one of the Chinese mini-mart bags, puts the dea
d man’s clothes inside, and sets off on foot. He leaves behind the kiosk, the BMW, his daughter’s memory, the avenue, and looks around. Three blocks up, he finds what he’s looking for. The corner is deserted, there’s no lid on the trash can. He puts the bag of clothes inside and sprays it down with lighter fluid until the bottle is empty. Then he throws the bottle in, too. He lights a match and looks at the flame for an instant before dropping it inside. He makes sure it catches, then drops the rest of the box over the top of his miniature bonfire. When the flames start to climb, he turns around and walks back to the BMW with long strides, eating his peanut bar along the way, while behind him, farther and farther off, the trash can burns, burns, burns.

  And burns.

  PART XI

  DRAWN WITH A FINE BRUSH MADE WITH CAMEL HAIR

  35

  HE WAS LOVED BY HIS COWORKERS, Pablo was. Maybe that’s why Mr. Machi thought, for a moment, that someone would do something.

  But no.

  He called together all the workers at El Imperio to tell them the news himself: the new system, the way things would work from then on out. He usually sent someone else, Eduardo or one of the office girls, but not this time. With the affection they felt for Pablo and with the 2001 protests against the banks and the government and that little bullshit slogan “Throw them all out,” he didn’t need people stepping out of line.

  “So on your off days, an hour before your normal start time, call in and check to see if we need you, understood?” Mr. Machi said, more as an affirmation than a question.

  “Don’t wait for us to call you, call and ask yourself,” he added, as if there were any need to.

  He looked at the thirty or so men and women sitting in front of him in silence, trying to hide their displeasure, most staring at the floor, looking for some hole to crawl into.

  “I don’t want any more problems like we had yesterday,” he said.