Like Flies from Afar

by K. Ferrari

  “Now, everyone get to work,” he said.

  No one so much as uttered Pablo’s name. Mr. Machi was satisfied. And calm. Rabble-rousers, he thought, that’s it for the rabble-rousers.

  Pablo had worked as a waiter for all thirty years of his adult life. He knew the secrets of the service profession better than anyone, from the most formal (the placement of the cutlery, how to write out the orders, which side of the customer to serve from) to the most ineffable (when to be seen and when to vanish, which customers needed the luxury treatment and which ones wanted you to act like their friend). For eighteen of those thirty years, he’d worked under Mr. Machi’s command. Pablo knew the rules after all that time: discretion, obedience, readiness to work, and obedience again for good measure. He knew them, and he followed them. That’s why he’d made it through the meat grinder of the past few years. That’s why.

  After all, you made good money at El Imperio. Despite the miserable wages. Despite the fact that part of those miserable wages were paid under the table. Even despite having to grease Eduardo’s palm to get the good tables. Yes, despite all that—between El Imperio’s reputation; the grade-A shows; the strength of the dollar, which made Buenos Aires a cheap city for mobs of tourists; and his natural aptitude for the waiter’s vocation—he left El Imperio each night with his pockets bursting with tips. Pablo lived alone, and had for more than a decade. His kids were grown and his wife had left him a long time back, tired of the cold, lonely nights. Since then, Pablo lived in a small pension on the Calle Bolivar.

  “This is a cuckold’s business,” he used to mumble. “When the time comes to heat things up between the sheets, we’re always working. So you gotta take the backdoor-man factor as a given,” and he would laugh a joyless, spiritless laugh.

  Every night—along with Pipa, Muqueño, and one or two of the guys—he’d go to a club on the Calle Moreno, around the corner from the police station, to eat fries, play cards, and knock back a few beers until he got so tired it wasn’t so dispiriting going back to the pension.

  But there was something else. A brown-skinned little doll. A girl from Tucumán with dark eyes, killer curves, and a naughty smile that drove Pablo wild. She shook her hips, this girl from Tucumán, her white teeth glimmering in her face as she pranced between the tables serving empanadas. She could sing, too. If someone stepped up with a guitar and the food and drinks were on the tables, she’d belt out “La Pomeña” or “Doña Ubenza.” And every time this happened, Pablo would think about asking her out, taking her to the movies or something like that. He had waking dreams about those curves under the soft yellow light of his room.

  “How am I gonna do that with this job, though,” he complained to Pipa and Muqueño the night before the decisive one. “It’s gotta be on a Monday.”

  “A Monday when we don’t have a double billing,” Muqueño threw out from behind his glass of cold beer.

  “Enough with your moaning, mister. You sound like a faggot,” said Pipa, who liked to call everyone mister or miss, no matter how close they were. “What more could you ask for than a chick who serves tables and keeps the same hours as you? That reduces the absence factor and the backdoor-man factor along with it. Invite her to spend the day in Tigre or something next time we just have one act on a Monday.”

  “But she works Mondays.” Pablo went back to whining, self-indulgent and timorous, but also excited.

  Let me explain something.

  The evening before their only day off each week—which always fell sometime between Monday and Thursday—every employee at El Imperio, but particularly the waiters, had to check the schedule before leaving to see if a double act was booked for the next night. If a double act was booked, it went without saying they had to give up their day off. Mr. Machi didn’t like people trading shifts. He’d pay you, but you had to come in. And there were times when this happened every week for months on end.

  So Pablo waited and waited. He waited one week, then the next, scared stiff that someone might jump the line and the girl would be taken by the time he got his chance to ask her out. He waited, watching her smile with her ivory-white teeth, serving fried empanadas and wiggling her hips between the tables. He waited, playing endless card games and hearing her croon “Cantora de Yala” amid shouts of “raise” and “hold.”

  Until finally, with the first heat of September, when the blossoms on the trees in the Plaza de Mayo covered the sky with violet, a Sunday came when Eduardo told him there was only one show planned for tomorrow, and he could finally take his day off.

  “For now,” he added, loosening a black-and-yellow tie he considered the height of good taste. “If anything changes, we’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Or else,” Pablo tried, knowing that trying was futile, “you could call in Gustavo. He hasn’t gotten any overtime in a while.”

  “You know Machi doesn’t like people switching out,” was Eduardo’s predictable reply.

  “Yeah, but…”

  “I’ll set you up with the good tables if you have to come in. Don’t sweat it, I’ll make it worth your while,” Eduardo said with a wink. He was trying to buddy up to him, but all Pablo could think of was the girl.

  “All right then, see you Tuesday.”

  And he asked her out that very night. It took three beers and a bit of shoving from Pipa before he gathered the courage to do so.

  “A day in Tigre,” he said, “now that it’s getting nice out.”

  “We could go for a boat ride, he said.”

  “What do you think,” he said.

  The girl opened her eyes wide and then batted her eyelashes.

  “About time you made up your mind,” she said, smiling, and her teeth lit up the whole nightclub—lit Pablo up, too. And since they were heading out early and didn’t want to waste any time the next morning—the train to Tigre takes more than an hour—they decided to spend the night together.

  The truth is, Pablo was half kidding when he proposed it, because he was tipsy and euphoric, but the girl said of course, what else did he expect, he should wait for her, they’d be closing down soon.

  “Your place or mine?” she asked at the door, as the dawn spread out over the Calle Moreno. They chose hers.

  Pablo’s cell woke them up at two in the afternoon. Pablo stretched, looked in disbelief at the girl’s nude convexities, and decided he wouldn’t pick up.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, beautiful, you look so good today,” Pablo replied, because it was true, and because he wanted to see her laugh. She laughed. Pablo’s phone rang again.

  “Why aren’t you picking up?” the girl asked, getting out of bed naked to boil water for maté. “You married?”

  If I don’t look, it’s like it’s not happening, Pablo thought. If I don’t pick up, it’s like I never heard it. Doubt gnawed at his conscience like a starving rat. He’d never ignored a call from El Imperio, never missed a shift in eighteen years.

  “No! Married. Give me a break,” he said. “Must be work.”

  “You gotta go in?” the girl asked.

  Discretion, obedience, readiness to work, and obedience again, Pablo remembered. The meat grinder, he remembered. He thought of all the people he’d seen fired those eighteen years for far less than not showing up on their off day. And he thought of those succulent tips. But just as the teeth of the rodent of doubt were undermining his desire, the girl came to ask once more if he had to go, and Pablo saw her, naked, maté in hand.

  “Nah, I’ll tell them I lost my phone or something,” he said with growing joy—a feeling he’d forgotten over all his years of solitude—throbbing now in his chest.

  But it didn’t last.

  The next day, when he showed up for work, Eduardo didn’t let him in the door.

  “Machi’s orders,” he said. “Here’s your check, sign for it,” he added, and handed him one of the last pens left over from the days of the Skylight.

  “What happened yesterday?” he asked, as if he even car
ed, just to make Pablo realize what a small thing he’d lost his job over.

  “I couldn’t find my phone, Eduardo, and anyway, it was my day off, I was in Tigre, I mean,” Pablo blubbered, “they’re not gonna let me go after all these years just for that!”

  Eduardo cut him off.

  “You know how Machi is.”

  “But,” Pablo said, and then he didn’t say anything more. He thought of how hard everything would be now without a job. Of the money he had to give his daughters, of the pension. He thought of the girl: she was a little old to be babysitting some jobless prick.

  “Anyway … you knew we might need you,” Eduardo finished with the one thought his tiny brain managed to formulate.

  “Tell Machi he’ll pay for this,” Pablo said, handing him back the pen.

  “Keep it, as a souvenir,” Eduardo said with a scornful, condescending smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

  “He’ll pay,” Pablo repeated. “You tell him.”

  36

  FOR THREE LONG YEARS, he’d managed to avoid meeting him. In part because Luciana hadn’t brought the guy around much, in part because this Federico or Felipe—he never figured out which—didn’t seem too interested in showing his face or getting to know the rest of the family, and finally because, on the few occasions when the boyfriend did come around, Mr. Machi cut out under the pretext of work or some unforeseen business trip.

  He wasn’t keen on having to stare at the bearded face—the beard looks nice on him, Luciana always said—of this Felipe or Federico that was knocking his daughter’s boots.

  But this time, there was no getting around it. Luciana had come to them saying she wanted to move in with her boyfriend and they’d managed to get an apartment. They were moving on Thursday, and she invited the three of them—Mr. Machi, Mirta, and Alan—to come to lunch the following Saturday.

  “Me and Fe thought we’d do it early in the day so Papi could come, too,” she said. And that left Mr. Machi without an escape hatch.

  The kid—this Federico or Felipe—had a couple of years on Luciana, but he didn’t have a degree. He wasn’t studying, either. He worked odd jobs.

  “He just does whatever comes along,” Luciana repeated proudly. “He’s a writer.”

  So this Felipe or Federico did whatever job came along to keep himself afloat as a writer. Mr. Machi could imagine this bearded shit-for-brains sticking it inside his daughter and thinking about her father’s millions and how, with them, he could go on writing without a care.

  Probably writes poems, Mr. Machi thought.

  “So what does he write?” he asked.

  “Stories, mostly,” Luciana gushed. “He’s finishing a novel now, a detective novel.”

  The apartment was in Congreso; it was a matchbox full of books and black-and-white photos of people who were presumably dead. Mr. Machi wrinkled his nose.

  “How’s it going,” Federico or Felipe said, reaching out his hand, after greeting Mirta and Alan with a kiss on the cheek.

  “Who’s that one,” was Mr. Machi’s only response, as he pointed out a photo at random.

  “Dashiell Hammett, an American who—”

  “I don’t like Americans,” Mr. Machi cut him short, considering the conversation finished. “I prefer the English, the English are the ones who invented everything.”

  And that more or less set the tone for the rest of their lunch.

  “Don’t you drink wine?” asked Felipe. Or Federico.

  “Yeah, but good wine … Why didn’t you say you needed some, Luciana? I would have brought a bottle.”

  “Luis, please,” Mirta jumped in. “Since when do we—?”

  “Since I’ve been able to pay for it,” Mr. Machi snapped, ill-humored.

  “Papa,” Luciana cut in. “Don’t be nasty.”

  And she gave him a loving shove, defusing the situation. Then she kissed her boyfriend—that grimy beard is touching my daughter’s mouth! Mr. Machi thought—and told him not to pay Papa any mind, he was always like that at first.

  “He’s a brute,” Alan said, seconding his sister. “You’ll have to forgive him.”

  The kid, Federico or Felipe, didn’t respond right away. No, he thought, he wouldn’t forgive him, and yes, he would pay him mind. Just then, he decided he would write a novel with Mr. Machi as protagonist, and terrible things would happen to him. He poured himself a glass of wine and drank it in the lingering silence, not looking at anyone.

  “No problem,” he said, finally.

  37

  “POUR ME A WHISKEY, will you, my throat’s dry as a bone.

  “What do you mean, high? Fuming is what I am. Asshole thinks he can lecture me. Your old man was born with a silver spoon in his mouth so he thinks that gives him the right to get all preachy!

  “You know what it would take to get rid of your old man? One phone call, that’s it. Don’t make faces at me—one phone call, I promise you. His day is done, Mirta, and he can’t seem to get that through his head. His name doesn’t scare anyone anymore, got it?

  “I built an empire, babe, that’s no bullshit. I started with nothing. Work ethic, my pops used to say—God bless his soul—and you know what, he didn’t understand either, the old bastard.

  “It seems easy now, it looks like a cakewalk, but someone had to make it happen, okay? I had to keep my eyes peeled, make the right moves. Like your blowhard of a father could have done it—like he could have figured out the score.

  “A tumbledown factory, that’s all I had! Not acres and acres of farmland and cattle and a fancy last name. No. Just a textile factory! And the bar we set up with a couple of friends. That’s it. But I saw. I saw what was coming, because I’m a businessman, a self-made man, like Alejandro.

  “Like your old man could have ever pulled that off!

  “It’s easy to talk when you’ve been loaded for three generations, but you’ve got to know how to fight for your money, make every peso count, study what works and what doesn’t. Like the pens from the Skylight: I ran the numbers and I bought them when the dollar was down, and later, when things went to shit and Buenos Aires filled up with tourists, I sold them as souvenirs at the end of our shows, and we made out like bandits. That’s why I held on to a few, for the memories, and I still use them to sign important documents, understand? That’s how much of a profit we made. And back then, too, when the shows, the club, everything was on the skids.

  “So I’m high, huh? So what—I don’t see you paying for the shit. I don’t see your old man buying it for me. I don’t see anyone donating it to me, thanks to your fancy last name. Pour me a whiskey, will you, and listen to what I’m trying to tell you. Pay attention!

  “I was saying that even though the Skylight wasn’t El Imperio and everything was in the toilet, we still made money regardless. Why? Well, you tell me. Because I took advantage of opportunities, that’s why. Because I was sharp and it’s better to be slick than be smart. See if you can get that into your head …

  “Sure, the shows were pure sleaze. The food? Mediocre or worse. Say what you want, but I took advantage of every chance that came along, okay? And I followed Alejandro’s advice—your old man always hated him because he was a self-made man and not the son and grandson and great-grandson of some fat cat like him—and I made the right friends and they kept me up on which way the wind was blowing. And then I did what I had to do. Things your old man didn’t have the guts for, or the cunning, despite his fancy last name. Things my old man would have called immoral, or some shit.

  “I got my hands dirty, sure. I got dirty all the way to my eyebrows! And now you people want to come preach to me?

  “And I won’t have your dear old dad telling me how I ought to live. Same way I didn’t let my old man tell me. That hard-nosed dago couldn’t see anything but work and more work, no time for friends, no time to enjoy his money. But that’s not how you do business or hit the big time! That’s how you get a heart attack. Work, that’s for niggers!

  “Could yo
u people have seen the potential in the XL Group, the benefits of merging with Varano and liquidating Machitex? And if we hadn’t done that, how would we have made it to the big leagues with El Imperio, tell me that? You think you all would have had the foresight? Tell me … Or tell your old man to tell me, since he thinks he knows so much.

  “No: our fathers wouldn’t have seen what was coming. They’re too shortsighted, the both of them. You had to listen to the whispers in the hallways, on the street, where the real power is, get it, Mirta?

  “Look at this pen: this is what you make cash with, this. Signing papers at just the right time.

  “I’m going to the bathroom, I’ll be right back. Make me another whiskey, will you …

  “Where’s that whiskey I asked for?

  “About time. Go ahead and pour me another while you’re at it.

  “Take the factory, for example. You wanna know where the fuck we were headed with that shithole when the dollar was on par with the peso? Straight down the toilet, that’s where! My old man? I’ll tell you what he would have done: put his shoulder to the wheel and worked, worked, worked. Yours wouldn’t have even done that! All he does is ride his horses, count his cows, and talk with that tight-assed accent of his about your ancestors and God knows what else. But words won’t do it: you gotta think fast and be merciless and act. Like when we had to set fire to the Skylight to collect the insurance.

  “Don’t bust my balls, Mirta. Where the fuck are my whiskeys? And look, if the mood strikes me and I want another rail, I’ll do it right here and now and you’ll watch me and enjoy it. Look, I’ll snort it through one of my magnificent Skylight pens, okay? One of these collector’s items I bought for chump change and sold for hard cash.

  “With one of these! These are what you do business with!

  “Look. I did what I had to do.

  “I passed the factory over to the investors at Varano, we issued bonds, we stripped the motherfucker down, and we declared bankruptcy a few years later. In ’92 all we had was a second-rate textile plant and in ’94 I could put two million just into remodeling the club, see? And then we brought on Old Man Lazzaro and the rest of the heavy hitters for the orchestra and we started to play in the big leagues.