Like Flies from Afar
Page 11
He returns to being—to feeling—himself. A businessman.
And to believing that businessmen have rivals, competitors, employees, and partners, but not enemies.
Now for a shower, a nice breakfast, and a bit of shut-eye, he thinks.
“Mirta,” he shouts, “I’m home.”
But he doesn’t get an answer.
Did the crazy bitch leave again? he wonders. Doesn’t she get bored with these theatrics, playing the betrayed wife running off to cry to her parents?
“Mirta,” he repeats.
Mirta doesn’t answer.
Just as well, Mr. Machi thinks, and cuts out two lines on the Carrara marble tabletop in the living room.
He snorts once.
Twice.
He lays down two more, just for the hell of it. And snorts.
Then he takes a deep breath, pinches his nostrils, shakes his head a little. He moves his jaw from side to side and purses his lips. He makes a face that is almost a smile.
Then he puts what’s left of the cocaine in a porcelain vase on the marble tabletop.
Guillote, he likes to call the thing, in homage to Guillermo Coppola. In the Coppola case, when they busted him with five hundred grams uncut stuffed down inside one, he protested, “That vase isn’t mine, they planted it!” That cast of characters—Yayo, Samantha, El Conejo, Jacobo—they raised up a real shitstorm, and that was when you first really started seeing coke all over the media.
Craziness, Mr. Machi thinks, you’d turn on the TV at two in the afternoon and there was someone talking about how many grams he took a day or where you could get the purest stuff.
“Herminia,” he shouts.
“Herminia.”
Did that bitch take the maid, too? he wonders. Didn’t she even leave a note?
And then he remembers: Mirta usually leaves her notes on the nightstand. He heads up, taking Guillote with him.
But there’s no note. No note, no nothing.
He looks through the nightstand—through all the drawers, the cubbyholes and shelves—but he doesn’t find anything. Then he sees his wife’s closet is open and there are no clothes inside.
Not one stitch.
No note, he thinks, no clothing: it looks like she’s taking it seriously this time.
Usually she just packs a few changes of clothes and her big bag of pills when she runs off to live forever at her parents’ house in Santa Fe, but emptying out the closet and taking the maid, that’s something new.
Alan must have gone with her, Mr. Machi assumes, relieved.
Or—he shakes his head, sighs—to his boyfriend’s place.
Suits me, he thinks again, I could do with a bit of rest.
He lifts the telephone from the wall and pushes the 5 on its keypad to speed-dial Eduardo.
“Yes?” his nephew’s groggy voice replies.
“Call BMW and get me a new trunk liner and a spare tire.”
“Luis?” Eduardo asks, not yet awake. “What? For your car?”
“No, dipshit, for your fucking car: obviously for my car,” Mr. Machi responds, overlooking the first two questions.
“But,” Eduardo manages to say.
Of course, Mr. Machi has already hung up.
He undresses. He tosses the Adibas tracksuit, the Mike sneakers, and the Reebot polo into a corner.
Later, I’ll give that crap to the pool boy, he thinks. Mr. Machi is a bighearted man.
He takes off his underwear, too, but sets it aside: that’s name-brand stuff, he’s not giving that away.
Naked as he is, he digs through the oak box that houses his collection of cigars and selects one for the occasion. He studies the Cohibas, the Montecristos, the Partagas, finally deciding on an H. Upmann.
Yes, he smiles, pleased with his choice, an H. Upmann Sir Winston, the best Churchill in the world. A cigar to smoke calmly, to take your time with, savoring it on your palate.
After my shower, he decides, and leaves it on the nightstand.
Next to it he cuts out two thick lines of coke from the bag inside the porcelain vase. He looks at the white trails, and for a moment, he hesitates. Then he sucks them up in the blink of an eye.
When I get out of the shower, I’ll cut a few more, he thinks, and smiles as his eyes sink deeper into their sockets.
He looks at himself in the mirror on the wall. He admires his naked form. He poses from the front, in profile. Even from the back. Attentively, he looks at his arms, his legs, his chest, his dick, his ass.
I look like a young stallion, he thinks, and expels a cackle.
44
DURING HIS LONG HOUR beneath the steaming hot water, on the other hand, Mr. Machi thinks nothing.
Nothing.
For the first time since all this began, he manages to stop the locomotive barreling ahead in his mind. He doesn’t think of complots or coincidences. About what was or what could have been. There’s just the abundant jet of water and the steam filling up the room, the hot and humid massage his body receives with gratitude. He finds bumps, bruises, scratches, bites.
But he thinks of nothing.
Nothing.
Not Cesspit, not his wife, not Heredia, not the Reds from the factory.
Nothing.
Not caltrops, not fur handcuffs, not high-priced whores, not even the Glock Alejandro Wilkinson gave him.
Nothing.
It’s ages before Mr. Machi decides to get out of the shower and wrap himself in a towel white and spongy as a spring cloud.
He walks through the house like that, wrapped in the white towel. At the little bar in the living room, he pours himself a shot of Chivas. Then he returns to his bedroom, sniffs a few more lines, and lies down, naked, not yet dry, in bed, on top of the fuzzy green comforter.
Now, yes, he picks up the cigar. He savors the soft but lingering taste, robust, earthy and woody, of the H. Upmann, which he smokes with leisurely patience to keep from burning it down too fast and irritating his nasal passages any further.
I use them too much to damage them, he jokes, and smiles one more time.
Contemplating the cigar, he realizes he’s not relaxed all over, no, a certain part of his body is still a little bit restless, starting to wake up, in fact, and he decides to take advantage of Mirta’s absence to order a couple of girls from Mariela Báez.
Two, he thinks, or three.
A little group action, that’ll do the trick.
And calls.
“Mariela, this is Machi. My wife fucked off somewhere and I’m feeling a little lonely. You wouldn’t want to stop by with a few of your best girls,” he says.
“But give me three hours,” he says, “so I can get a little sleep.”
He says: “Let me know when you’re close so I can wake up. I’m dead over here.”
He hangs up. The word dead resounds in the void left inside him by the hot shower, the cigar, and the whiskey. There’s a tear in the serenity that’s enveloped him since he arrived in El Barrio.
Dead, Mr. Machi thinks.
Dead, he repeats.
But more than a tear, it’s a crack. Or better yet, a hairline fracture. Too small for fear, too small even for anxiety. The thing’s behind him, and now Mr. Machi asks himself, with aloof curiosity, as if all of it happened to someone else, who the guy could be, the guy someone shot in the face and handcuffed in the trunk of his car. Who could the dude have fucked over so bad for them to finish him off like that, he wonders.
But who knows is the only conclusion he comes to.
He puts on a pair of briefs and a cotton T-shirt. Best if he sleeps awhile before the whores show up, he thinks. And that’s what he does. And he dreams that all that’s happened was nothing more than a farce, a joke, and one by one the figures who embody his fears start filing out from the wings of the stage, until at last the stiff, his face erased by a gunshot and his right hand sawed off, emerges to tell him it’s all been a setup, they’ve pranked him for Trossini’s variety show.
Or som
ething like that.
45
HE WAKES UP to the ringing of the phone.
“Luisito, amor, we’ll be over in fifteen minutes,” Mariela Báez says.
Mr. Machi gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom to wash his face and brush his teeth. Once more, in front of the mirror, he inspects his baggy eyes and wrinkles.
“Well, Luis, time to get dressed,” he says to the wrinkle- free face with no bags under its eyes, the one he sees reflected in the mirror. He chooses a cologne from his collection—212, Fahrenheit, Terre d’Hermès—and sprays it on his neck, his chest, his wrists and belly.
I’m dressing to the nines tonight! he thinks.
The lavender blue Versace shirt, he thinks.
The Brioni suit I bought last winter in Naples.
Yes, sir.
The Crockett & Jones shoes with the pointed toes.
And one of his red silk ties: maybe the one Thaelman gave him for New Year’s, which is one of his favorites.
New money, he thinks, I’ll show you new money, you son of a bitch.
In his bedroom, he combs his hair and takes his chosen footwear from the shoe cabinet.
In the safe where he keeps his watches and jewels, he looks for his ruby-encrusted Armani cuff links. Then he goes to the big closet and takes out the lavender blue shirt and the Brioni suit and leaves them on the bed. He looks at the combination with approval and starts to dress. When he’s done, he looks himself over in the large mirror.
All that’s missing is the tie.
He pauses a moment, Mr. Machi does. Is it worth it to bother with a tie? Mariela and her girls are about to arrive, he thinks, so I won’t stay dressed for long.
But he loves his ties. Each and every one in his collection. Almost three hundred of them, all of Italian silk. And so he goes to the closet where he keeps them on their specially designed hangers. He opens the closet and the first thing he sees is the red Marinella Thaelman gave him for New Year’s.
Well, the second, actually.
He takes two steps back and falls, Mr. Machi does, feeling a whirlpool opening under his feet, he falls over the nightstand and knocks down the vase called Guillote. There’s a crash of porcelain and a dusting of cocaine, but Mr. Machi, at the mercy of his demons, neither sees nor hears.
In the closet, hanging from his favorite silk tie, a stranger—skin sallow, tongue dangling from his mouth as if slowly melting—looks at him with cold eyes.
Cold and dead.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K. Ferrari was born in Buenos Aires in 1972. He is the author of three novels, two collections of short stories, and a volume of nonfiction. Ferrari works as a janitor for the Buenos Aires metro at the Pasteur-AMIA station on line B. In the 1990s, he was deported from the United States, where he and his wife were trying to find work. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Adrian Nathan West is a writer and literary critic based in Spain. He has translated more than twenty books, among them Rainald Goetz’s Insane and Sibylle Lacan’s A Father: Puzzle.
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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPHS
I. BELONGING TO THE EMPEROR
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
II. STUFFED
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
III. TAMED
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
IV. SUCKLING PIGS
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
V. SIRENS
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
VI. FANTASTICAL
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
VII. WILD DOGS
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
VIII. INCLUDED IN THE PRESENT CLASSIFICATION
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
IX. THAT SHAKE LIKE MADMEN
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
X. INNUMERABLE
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
XI. DRAWN WITH A FINE BRUSH MADE WITH CAMEL HAIR
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
XII. ET CETERA
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
XIII. THAT JUST BROKE THE JUG
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR
COPYRIGHT
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2018 by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A.
Translation copyright © 2020 by Adrian Nathan West
All rights reserved
Originally published in Spanish in 2011 by Amargord Ediciones, Spain, as Que de lejos parecen moscas
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2020
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71883-1
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