The Fragility of Bodies

by Sergio Olguin

  “I’m meeting Paula at eight o’clock for a drink.”

  “Tell her that she promised to send me Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Stories and they never arrived.”

  “I’ll tell her, before we get too drunk.”

  IV

  I need to speak to you urgently. And get drunk. Are you free? Paula had received the text message at eleven o’clock in the morning, four and a half hours after her day had begun: first she had taken her son to school, then she had gone to kick up a fuss at a branch of Movistar because they wouldn’t let her increase her calling credit; she had gone to a bank to pay in a cheque for a freelance job and finally she had gone to the offices of the publishing house where she worked as the press officer, counterphobic assistant to the general manager, general assistant to anyone who needed a hand and part-time carer for Luz, the office dog. The message had Verónica’s name on it, but she would have known who it was from just by reading it. Verónica was the only person Paula knew who always put complete words in her texts, who used full stops and accents and whose only act of grammatical rebellion was to permit herself not to start questions with the inverted question mark used in Spanish. Paula checked her diary for that night: the people in relationships would be with their partners, her single friends were suffering from various phobias and the only passable divorcee was out of the country. Her ex was going to pick their son up from school. So she had a free night. OK 8pm in Martataka, she replied, and didn’t think of her friend again until she was heading towards Palermo Hollywood, where the bar was.

  From Congreso she took a taxi, an expensive option, but she didn’t feel like getting a bus and much less like walking to the underground station. If Verónica was so eager to see her it must be because she had, or was about to have, man problems. It wouldn’t be the first time that they had disguised themselves as entomologists in order to dissect the brain and sex of a male specimen. Sometimes the specimen was provided by herself or Verónica, and sometimes by one of the other women they met at Martataka or at private views and other events in the intellectual world. The women were journalists, editors, press officers and the odd psychologist who had attached herself to the group. But when push came to shove, these conversations usually became two-handers and the larger groups were reserved for gossip and entertainment.

  She had known Verónica since the days when her friend wrote reviews and book commentaries for a magazine at the Public Bar Association. Later she found out that her father had got her the job so that she could take her first steps in journalism while still studying communications. The publication’s editor, thanks to her father – and Verónica never tired of saying that this was the only time in her career that he had helped her – had invented just for her a page devoted to book reviews. As a student, she couldn’t believe that publishers gave away books for free. Paula had already been working in publicity at the time and had forwarded a few press copies to this virtual adolescent. And in those ten or eleven years a lot of things had happened. Paula had married, had a child and separated. Her friend, meanwhile, had grown into a respected journalist. During that time Paula had seen her falling for, suffering and cursing the various men who came her way. She had seen her break off a six-year relationship with a friend from secondary school; she had been a witness to Verónica’s most promiscuous phase, a time when she might date two different men in one weekend (or three, if it was a long weekend). That chapter, which Verónica herself referred to as ‘sampling the goods’, had not been as much fun as her journalist friend liked to remember. Paula had seen her unhappy, suffering from panic attacks and having therapy four times a week. Her mother’s illness had marked a change in the way Verónica related to men, and to the rest of her life, too. That change became more entrenched with her mother’s death. Simply put, she had grown up. And although there was the odd encounter which took place in the middle of the night, or on a trip, or in some unexpected place, Verónica had lasted more than a year with Anibal, the editor of Exlibris. She had been at her most settled during that relationship. Ever since it had ended, almost two years ago, she had seemed to be drifting here and there. “The wrong man, at the wrong time”, one or another of the friends would decide. Whenever Verónica had a love-related problem she turned to Paula for advice. Verónica, like the other girls in the group, seemed to see her as a spiritual guide – perhaps motherhood and a stint in lawful matrimony had given her an aura of wisdom.

  Paula saw her from the taxi. Verónica was standing outside the door of Martataka, braving the cold along with many others who had come out to smoke. Her left arm was crossed over her body, while she held the cigarette in her right hand. She glanced around her, as though looking for someone. From the way she squinted, Paula suspected that her friend was a little short-sighted, that those glasses she wore were part of her look but inadequate compensation for her myopia. When she saw her, Verónica threw the cigarette away.

  “Let’s go inside. I’m freezing to death out here.”

  They sat at the back, at a table that still bore witness to its previous occupants. Paula cleared it, sweeping the peanut shells on to the floor. The waitress took a long time to come. A young man walked over from the bar. He was the owner of a bookshop who often organized literary events and he knew both of them – Paula a little better than Verónica. They greeted one another but, since neither woman invited him to sit down with them, he returned to the bar. There were so many people that the waitress practically had to climb into their laps to clean the table and take their order. They asked for a margarita and a caipiroska. The waitress may have been slow, but the drinks came quickly. They talked about this and that. As a general rule, the serious conversation only started after the first round of tequila and vodka.

  “I’m writing a piece for the magazine, and it’s doing my head in. It started as a crime report on a railway worker who committed suicide, then it segued into an article about people who kill themselves by jumping under trains and then that opened up a new line of investigation into some fucked-up story about kids who play chicken on the tracks.”

  “It sounds like a dark piece.”

  “But I didn’t call to ask you for editing advice. That pleasure falls to Pato, who gets harder to please by the day. She thinks she’s some big-shot journalist, like Oriana Fallaci.”

  “I warned you about her a long time ago. I’ve known her since she was married to that loser Salvador Lutz.”

  “Aaanyway, that’s not the issue here. One of my sources is a driver on the Sarmiento line. He’s called Lucio Valrossa. Valrossa, Rosenthal: Valley of Roses – get it?”

  “No, you’ve lost me. How old is this driver?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “Physical shape?”

  “Good verging on great.”

  “Marital status?”

  “Married.”

  “Now I understand the problem.”

  “You see?”

  “Girl, you never learn.”

  “It’s my target market. Married men with children.”

  “Have you slept with him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Yet.”

  “Last night he let me travel in the driver’s cabin while he was operating the train. At one point he showed me something terrible.”

  “He dropped his trousers?”

  “No, stupid. Something to do with this thing about the children, the investigation I’ve got involved in. Afterwards I was in shock and Lucio kissed me.”

  “Just a kiss then?”

  “A kiss, a bit of a grope. He could have fucked me right there. But he had to keep driving the train.”

  “How irresponsible. This is how accidents happen. Guys taking their floozies into the cabin. And when you got to the station, did you say goodbye? Swap emails? What did you do?”

  “He wanted to take me to a by-the-hour motel.”

  “Ah, this married man’s a fast mover. And you didn’t want to. Never on a first date.”

  “I don’t kn
ow, I was a bit nervous. I don’t know anything about the guy, apart from what I found out in the interview. Anyway, I hadn’t waxed.”

  “As if it would be the first time you let that get in the way of hooking up with someone.”

  “I went to get material for a piece, not to get laid.”

  “A driver with wandering hands, a wanton journalist caught up in a horror story. It definitely sounds bizarre, but I still don’t see why it has to be a problem.”

  “I like the guy, a lot. He’s so different from all the other jerks you see around. I mean, there’s nobody in this bar remotely like him. I know that I’m going to get into trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I don’t know. It’s as if he were behind some kind of veil.”

  “As if he’s hiding something.”

  “No, as if there’s something he can’t tell me.”

  “You’re inventing excuses. You like him because he’s a bit of rough and that’s catnip to girls like you.”

  “No, or at least not only that. There’s something violent in him. Stop – don’t misinterpret me. I’m not saying that he seems violent but that he’s immersed in a universe of pain. And that’s always violent. For the person suffering it and for the person who watches from the sidelines.”

  “Too much poetry and not enough realism. You’re either seeing things or you’re not seeing reality.”

  “I’ve got it bad.”

  “Did you arrange to see each other?”

  “Monday night.”

  “I see. And you’re going to a motel. And what if the guy’s a perv or something worse, like a man who kills women in cheap hotels?”

  “It’s a possibility. Although beyond that dark aura which you say I’m imagining, he seems protective, in a gruff kind of way. He’s not a caveman.”

  “Oh, Vero, I won’t be able to rest easy on Monday, thinking that you might be lying drugged in a by-the-hour motel bathtub. I’m going to call you that night, just to be sure.”

  “Why don’t you call the waitress over instead and ask for another caipiroska.”

  V

  Verónica’s username was Beija-Flor, as in the song “Codinome beija flor” by Cazuza. It means hummingbird – literally “flower-kisser” – but she preferred the erroneous translation “bella flor”, “beautiful flower”.

  Nobody knew and perhaps nobody would ever know that she was Beija-Flor. That information belonged to a part of her life she would never allow anyone to describe as “secret”. It was personal, that was all, one of those areas you keep in the shadows. It had started out as curiosity. An inquisitive spirit made her seek out things she was not supposed to see. The internet had turned out to be a repository of bizarre knowledge: she had seen people being decapitated, a cow mooing with two heads, a blonde woman moaning while simultaneously being penetrated by three black men. She had visited sites that spat racism, on which people were aroused by menstruation or promoted anorexia. Every now and then she indulged in decadent tourism of those places that provoked her curiosity, to a greater or lesser degree, as much as her revulsion.

  She would visit a site, be startled or shocked by it, and leave. Rarely did she return to it. The only internet pages to which she kept returning with a curiosity that grew into excitement were the ones containing revelations of a sexual nature. Erotic, or even pornographic, stories. She didn’t mind whether they were confessions or mere narrative exercises – invariably mediocre. She read them – and some of them she reread. They got her going.

  At first she registered on the Todo Relatos page so that she could vote for the stories she liked best, but gradually she found herself wanting to write stories herself. In her case these would be purely literary exercises. While her colleagues dreamed of publishing novels or short-story collections, she was happy just to write pornographic stories under a pseudonym. She didn’t know if it was her pornographic inclination that she was keeping quiet, or the fact that every night she turned into a fiction writer.

  Verónica didn’t try to analyse what she wrote. The stories were neither sexual fantasies nor autobiographical tales, even when she made use of things that had happened to her in real life. At the end of the day, she was creating literature, and everything was permitted.

  The Marquis de Sade was probably largely to blame. She had been fifteen years old when she discovered on the bookshelves at home a copy of Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue. Rarely had the sight of a man’s naked body induced in her the excitement and heat that she had experienced while secretly reading that book. Since then she had read most of the Marquis’ work, but she had never rediscovered that primordial feeling of pleasure, fear, disgust, discomfort, chagrin (because she was not Justine) and joy (for the same reason).

  Sade had opened in her brain a conduit for all her desires and anxieties. She began to search online for pornography linked to sadomasochistic practices. And her stories took the same direction – men and women united not only by desire but by pain. Or rather, by the desire for pain. She had only been bold enough to post two stories. Again, that had less to do with what she was telling than with how she was telling it. The question of style.

  The night before her first date with Lucio, when she got home drunk from Martataka, she typed his name into a Word document but couldn’t get as far as writing anything more. She surrendered before the evidence. She preferred to imagine nothing, not to presuppose any story. To let herself be carried like a bella flor, a beautiful flower on the current of a dangerous river.

  6  In the Labyrinth

  I

  “Long Live The Sarmiento Toshibas”, a colleague had written on a photo stuck up in the driver’s cabin of the eight formation, a Toshiba train imported from Japan decades ago. The photograph was of a sunset and had been taken from the driver’s cabin close to Haedo. The different hues of red had spread from the horizon over the landscape, creating the impression of a bucolic scene.

  Less than a mile further on was the place where the largest percentage of suicides took place. There were various explanations for the popularity of this spot: the trains travelled faster at this point (at almost forty-five miles an hour) and the General Acute Interzonal Hospital was nearby. One theory was that many of the suicides were relatives of gravely ill patients. It wasn’t hard to imagine somebody desperate leaving the white hulk that loomed up north of the railway, walking a short distance to the tracks and letting ten thousand tons of metal banish their problems forever.

  That evening, however, even Lucio found a serene beauty in the reddish horizon he saw at Haedo. All he had to do was reach Moreno and return to Plaza Once, then his working day would be finished. He would have a shower at the station and then meet Verónica.

  Some nights Lucio went to get a pizza with friends from work. Those get-togethers could go on very late. When he arrived home his wife was already asleep. Since she got up early to take the children to school, they would hardly see each other again until the following night. Lucio had told her that he was going to the pizzeria with his friends that night. A simple, credible excuse, allowing him quite a wide margin until he had to see his wife again.

  “What’s your wife called?”

  That was the first thing Verónica asked him when they met in La Perla del Once. Lucio had arrived before her, his hair still wet from the shower he had taken at work. When she arrived, she had made him change tables, relocating to the smoking area, a small room at the entrance to the bar which stank of cigarette smoke. They had scarcely sat down when Verónica asked the question. He took a few seconds to answer.

  “Mariana.”

  “And your children?”

  “Patricio and Fabián. Is this still an interview?”

  “No. I just like to put names to people. It’s how they take shape for me.”

  “Do you dye your hair?”

  “No. This is my natural colour. I used to lighten it, but now I stick to the colour I was born with. What else would you like to know about m
e?”

  “What I want to know isn’t something you can tell me here.”

  Lucio had never been unfaithful to Mariana. At least, not since they were married. When they were dating, he had had a fling with one of his neighbours. At the time Lucio had been living with his parents on Calle Fonrouge. A couple had moved in round the corner. She was about fifteen years older than Lucio. Their houses backed on to each other and, the first time they saw each other, he had been up on the roof, cutting back creepers. She had waved to him, and not long afterwards he had ended up in her bed. It had only been a couple of times. Neither of them had wanted to continue the relationship. He had never regarded this as true infidelity, because he had only recently started going out with Mariana. Once married, he had never wanted to have an affair, not seriously. Lucio was unfamiliar with the etiquette of an illicit relationship. He didn’t know if there was anything like a code of conduct. And perhaps for that reason, to avoid any possible confusion, he suggested going to a love hotel after they had been together just a few minutes. This time Verónica agreed.

  There was a hotel opposite and another on the corner of Mitre and Jean Jaurès. He asked her if she would mind walking there and she said no. The hotel opposite seemed too exposed and he didn’t want anyone to see him, not even his friends from work, even though, if they did ever find out, they would admire him for the rest of their days. So they went to the other hotel. They walked diagonally across Plaza Miserere, barely speaking as they passed the shrine to the 194 victims of the 2004 República Cromañón nightclub fire and the remains of what once, before that tragedy, had been a venue for rock concerts. The hotel was on the corner of that street.

  As the elevator made its brief ascent – just one floor – they kissed. They looked for their room without acknowledging the moans that could be heard coming from behind other doors. If the first kiss in the driver’s cabin had been like a mutual mauling, now, too, they sought each other out with the same urgency. They fell onto the bed with half their clothes still on. Silently they went to war, Lucio gripping her wrists and she seeking his body with her teeth. When Verónica climbed on top of Lucio, her breasts free, trousers open, she grabbed hold of his wrists in the same way that he had held hers. She brought one breast close to his mouth and Lucio sucked on the nipple greedily. Silence gave way then to Verónica’s moans as she let herself fall onto the bed. Lucio took off her trousers and removed the rest of his own clothes. He picked up the condom which was lying on the bedside table and put it on. She watched him, smiling. She was wearing only a white pair of pants now but he didn’t take them off, just pushed the material aside and penetrated her, letting his full weight fall onto her as she clung to his back. She dug her nails into him as she reached orgasm. Only then did her body soften, and then Lucio pounded his hips harder against Verónica’s pelvis until he came. They had not said anything to each other since leaving La Perla.