After coffee, all seven of them went to the Carrefour hypermarket on Avenida La Plata. The other couple wanted to buy a mattress for their son’s bed and so Lucio and Mariana took the opportunity to do their weekly shopping. Their friends didn’t come back with them after that, but said goodbye at the store’s exit. At home, Mariana made more coffee and tea for the boys. Very soon it was night. Having eaten too much at lunch, Lucio decided not to have supper. He watched television while Mariana bathed the boys. They went to bed early and fell asleep straightaway.
Lucio couldn’t stop thinking about Verónica all weekend. On Monday, as soon as he had got up and was alone in the house, he wrote a text message saying that he wanted to see her again soon. She replied that she had just been thinking of him. So it began. Verónica and Lucio stopped being occasional lovers – ending that casual arrangement he had dreamed of – and became a couple, with all the limitations imposed by his status as a married man. At that moment, Lucio had a foreboding of how Verónica would change his life irreversibly. From now onwards he would have to lie to his wife and arm himself with excuses, with alibis. Find times when he could meet Verónica, in the morning, afternoon, at night. She was available to him in a way that nobody had ever been before, but they never had long when they met. An hour and a half or two, never more than three. They holed themselves up in her apartment, drank coffee, a bottle of wine or shots, which she prepared, and they had sex. Afterwards he got dressed and returned to his normal routine, to the Sarmiento line or to his family life.
If their first kiss, in the train cabin, had been a response to terror, the kisses that followed it were not so very different. Their lips were charged with a rare violence: they bit each other, hurt each other. Lucio acquired bruises that would have been difficult to justify to his wife, if she had noticed them.
VI
Read the magazine. My article’s in it, Verónica texted him. He had just finished work and was getting ready to go home. He went to a kiosk in the train station and bought the most recent copy of Nuestro Tiempo. On the front, a small coverline read THE DARK SIDE OF THE RAILWAYS: AVOIDABLE DEATHS AND MENTAL ILLNESS. WHAT THE RAILWAY COMPANIES ARE HIDING. He read the rest in the bus on the way home.
Inside, six pages had been given over to the subject, under the headline MADNESS AND DEATH ON THE TRACKS. There were text boxes quoting psychologists, railway users and even firefighters. The article began by saying:
“Anyone who thought the ghost train in Italpark offered a terrifying ride has never travelled on the suburban railways of Buenos Aires – a veritable nightmare for the hundreds of thousands of users who have to travel to the capital each day. But discomfort, poor maintenance and unreliable trains are just the problems we know about. There are other factors which contribute to making this old ghost train more ghoulish than a fairground ride. The suburban trains hide stories of suicides and accidents that could be avoided if there were a managerial policy in place to deal with them. As well as hiding or fudging the statistics, train companies gloss over another reality: the psychological problems endured by train drivers involved in serious accidents.”
Lucio was presented as “one of the most experienced train drivers in Argentina” and “an authority on this profession, which can be both enthralling and terrifying”. The article quoted a few things he had said, but she had only attributed the more positive observations to him. Everything that he had told her about the suicides and about the experience of train drivers appeared as information in the text, or was ascribed to “a source who prefers to remain anonymous”. There was nothing in the article about his train-driving father and grandfather, or about the development plans that TBA had scheduled. Álvarez Carrizo isn’t going to like this one bit, Lucio thought. He didn’t care very much what the company’s spokesperson might think. He knew that there was no way they would kick him out. But what did surprise him was that there was no mention of the children who played on the tracks. He had thought that that was what interested Verónica most, but it wasn’t even mentioned. She was certainly unpredictable.
He thought of taking the magazine home and showing it to Mariana and to his friends, who would surely ask him about his experience of being interviewed. Instead, as soon as he got off the bus he looked for a garbage can and threw away the magazine he had bought only minutes before.
7 Eyes Wide Open
I
They look like a portrait. Or a photo. They are three people, unobserved by anyone, standing motionless on the paved area around a plaza. There are trees, children running and dogs sniffing about in the background of the image and, in the foreground, cars passing on the road. But everything apart from them is out of focus or drawn with a broad brush. And none of these three figures seems to register the square, or the people, or the dogs. The man looks about thirty-five years old. An anachronistic hippie. His unkempt clothes and beard would not inspire anyone’s confidence. His arm is around a little girl of about ten or eleven. The girl is tense, as though keen to demonstrate her non-compliance in some matter, and she wears a white school smock. Beside her, a woman of about sixty holds a wheeled backpack of the kind used by schoolchildren. The young man strokes the girl’s head and is smiling in an attempt to look cheerful, but if anyone looked at him (one of the passers-by, or a bored driver in the slow-moving traffic) they would discern a great sadness in his eyes. The little girl is fixated by a button, or a missing button, on the man’s shirt. The older woman looks at the man with tenderness, but also with a fear of something going wrong, of some sadness befalling these two people whom she watches in silence.
The young man is called Rafael and he’s clean. There is no cocaine or alcohol in his body. It’s been hard. Years in hell and a few months in the purgatory of a self-help group. But there was a day when he woke up without thirst or anxiety. A morning when he felt, finally, that this was the first day of what he had been looking for: a body that he could manage.
The woman is his mother. She had taken responsibility for the granddaughter when Rafael and his partner entered the worst phase of their lives. She didn’t want to leave the girl at the whim of destructive forces. When he left her, Rafael’s wife, Andrea, had re-established her normal life. The separation had signified both Andrea’s salvation and Rafael’s continued decline. The mother opted to stay with her daughter-in-law and granddaughter, to help them. She had two other children, but neither of them caused her the worry and anguish that Rafael did. She looked after her granddaughter as though she were another part of her son’s body.
The girl’s name is Martina. It’s likely that she has experienced fear at the sight of her father drunk, or high on coke, but she doesn’t remember, or she has decided not to remember. On the other hand, she feels that her father doesn’t love her. That’s the only way she can understand how so much time has passed without him visiting her and why now they are only meeting in this square for a few minutes. Why isn’t he coming back to live with them? If her mother refused, she herself would persuade her to let him come back. He strokes her hair, tells her that it won’t be long before they can spend more time together. That they must be patient. He tells her that he has a job. He works in a bar, in a club where the boys play soccer. That as soon as he has somewhere nice to live, he is going to get a room ready for her.
Rafael had in fact tried before to see Martina again, but Andrea had not allowed it. She had made it clear that, now that she was clean, and for as long as he continued to destroy himself with alcohol and cocaine, she wasn’t going to let him have anything to do with his daughter.
They didn’t have much time. He offered to buy her something. She could choose: an ice cream, candied almonds, a Coca-Cola. She hugged him and said that she didn’t want anything, she just wanted to be with him. So Rafael chose for her: a can of soda and some Sugus sweets.
II
His pocket, his hands, his eyes burned. El Peque slept with the hundred-peso bill under his pillow. He had planned to wake up every hour to make sure that t
he note was still there, but when he awoke it was at the same time as usual. He looked for the note and there it was, as violet as the night before. He got dressed and put it back into his trouser pocket.
Dientes wasn’t in the courtyard, so he went to look for him at home. Dientes’ mother ushered him in and gave him a glass of milk, which was what his friend was having. El Peque ate a few cookies and said nothing. He didn’t need to speak or to explain why he was there, because it wasn’t unusual for him to have breakfast with Dientes. Together they went out to the street, and only there did El Peque tell him that he had something to show him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled note.
“Where did you get that?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You nicked it off your mum.”
“No. I didn’t nick it off anyone.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“I earned it. But I can’t tell you how.”
“Don’t be a dick, tell me.”
“I’ll tell you, but if you tell anyone else I’ll bash your face in.”
“Who am I going to tell? My idiot sister?”
“I won it in a game. Rivero gave it to me.” And he told Dientes about the coach’s proposal. He described what had happened that night, the tracks, the people, Cholito, the jumping, the running away and the note that he had won.
“And what if the train had knocked you down?”
“How’s that gonna happen, moron, if I jump out of the way before it comes? It’s the easiest thing in the world. Cholito got scared, the loser.”
“Cholito is a loser.”
El Peque had already decided what he was going to do with the money. He wanted soccer boots like some of his teammates at Breezes had. They went to a sports shop on Avenida Castañares, where a surly assistant told them that the cheapest boots were two hundred and twenty pesos. He didn’t even show them to the boys. Dientes and El Peque came out looking at the ground.
“If I win two more times, I’ll have three hundred.”
“And if you win five, you’ll have five hundred – so?”
But El Peque didn’t want to save up. A note was nothing more than the promise of a future with shining boots, boots that would help him play better. And he didn’t want a promise. He wanted to see and feel those hundred pesos converted into things. As if he were a wizard. I’ve got a note in my hand and suddenly – puff – I’ve got a ball, or a two-litre bottle of Coke, or whatever.
“He can stick his boots up his ass. I’m going to buy some fries.”
“Just fries?”
“Plus whatever I want. Let’s go to the shop on the corner.”
“It’s better to go to Coto.”
They went to the hypermarket on Larrazábal. They got a shopping cart but this time they didn’t play around like other times, hanging off it or having races between the shelves. They didn’t secretly eat some of the products. Today they had a hundred pesos, more than most of the people around them.
They loaded up the shopping cart with two boxes of chocolate Oreos, a pack of dulce de leche alfajor cookies, two packets of sponge fingers, two caramel strips, two packets of gumdrops, some big, salted potato chips, more potato chips, this time smaller and prosciutto-flavoured (to try), and a six-pack of Coca-Cola.
“Ninety-four pesos and sixty centavos,” said the cashier after scanning everything. “Would you like to donate forty centavos to the Favaloro Foundation?”
“Yes,” said El Peque.
“No,” Dientes said, louder.
“Well do you want to, or not?”
“No, we don’t want to.”
They put everything into four bags and left Coto, loaded down as never before.
III
The roof space was not very big and part of it was covered in rubble and bits of wood left over from some refurbishment or other. Nobody used that terrace – not even to hang up clothes – apart from the boys. Dientes and El Peque made themselves comfortable on one side and put the Coto bags down on the tiles. They had started eating the potato chips on the way back, and now they were thirsty. They opened a small Coke each and finished them almost in one gulp, then burped and sent the cans spinning over the side of the roof. Someone down below (Martina’s mum) shouted at them not to throw things. They opened a box of Oreos and divided up the individual snack packs, each containing two cookies. They didn’t speak, savouring their confectionery.
They had already got through quite a lot of their haul when they heard footsteps coming up the stairs: it was Martina. When they were smaller the three of them often used to play together and had gone up and down the stairs to this terrace thousands of times, but in recent years they had begun to ignore each other and now didn’t even say hello when their paths crossed in the courtyard.
“What are you doing?”
“Men’s stuff.”
“We’re taking drugs.”
“Yeah right. I believe you and everything.”
“It’s not anything that concerns you.”
Martina shrugged and prepared to go back down the way she had come. El Peque called her by the nickname they used to mock her: Martota. Martina turned around and El Peque shouted “catch” and threw her an alfajor, which Martina caught in mid-air. She looked at it, looked at the boys and opened it. She left the wrapper on the roof and went down eating it.
“What do you say?”
“You say thank you, stupid.”
“Thanks.”
Dientes and El Peque decided to take the caramel strips to school. They found a hiding place for everything else and went back down around midday. El Peque took three alfajores with him. He went to his room and there were his brothers and Dientes’ sister, who looked after them. He gave them an alfajor each. Soon afterwards, they all set off for school. El Peque chatted with Dientes as they walked.
“Man, this game is great. From now on I’m going to start saving for the boots.”
“Yes, it’s great,” said Dientes with a certain sombre tone which could have been interpreted as worry, suspicion or envy.
IV
Rafael knew that one of his virtues – which, like all his virtues, was not often recognized by other people – was observation. He realized a lot of things simply by looking around him. He saw things to which others – so sure of themselves – remained blind. The best thing about that was that nobody saw what he saw. Especially not when he was behind the counter in the Breezes bar, almost invisible to everyone except the children, whom he liked to cheer up with the odd gift of a sandwich or some snack. As for the adults who met there to play cards, he never failed to recognize them: the failure, the grudge-holder, the thug, the whoremonger, the man who came to escape his unhappy home life, the man who was alone and found something like a family around those tables. He didn’t like those people, he didn’t like what he saw. But he wasn’t there to deal in subtleties: his job was to serve. He was lucky to have found that job after such a long time of being unable to take control of his own life. Now he knew that, from there, from that invisible spot in the Breezes bar, he could set off on a path that would lead to Martina, and perhaps to Andrea.
“Rafa, can I have a large Coke?”
The children converged on the counter. The one asking for a drink was El Peque, the boy who lived in the same house as his mother and daughter. He took a five-peso note from his pocket and the others added coins to make up the nine pesos which the bottle cost. It was the first time he had seen El Peque with a note. He handed them the bottle and alongside it a generous portion of potato sticks, which the boys devoured in a matter of seconds, like termites. El Peque seemed to be on a winning streak: besides the note, Rafael had noticed how Rivero treated him. This disagreeable character, who mistreated the boys whenever possible, behaved differently with El Peque. He didn’t insult him or berate him, in fact he was full of praise every time the boy touched the ball. Rafael was no soccer expert but he could tell that El Peque wasn’t a star in the making. Why was it, then, t
hat Rivero praised him so much? Because you could see – at least Rafael could see – that there was something servile in that encouragement, as if he felt obliged to be generous in what he said. Rivero didn’t seem like a child abuser, but he would keep an eye on him all the same without letting anyone know. One of the advantages of being invisible.
V
El Peque was willing the month to fly by. He had just spoken to Rivero, who had told him that in a month there would be a courage contest. That’s what the coach had called it: a courage contest.
Rivero had waited for all the other children to leave before approaching him. First he gave him a few tips on how to mark a striker going in for a header, and then he moved on to talk about the contest. He said that El Peque should get ready, that there would be another one in a few weeks. That he already knew he had faith in him.
“Well, not faith, that sounds too religious. What I have is trust. Because you’re the toughest boy in this city.”
El Peque told him that he didn’t have any problem with competing more often. Every week if necessary. Rivero clarified that it was only ever once a month. El Peque thought that he was going to have to wait for about three months before he could buy the boots. He asked if he would be competing against Cholito again.
“Cholito’s out of the game now. You snooze, you lose. Cholito can’t compete again. Only the ones who win keep playing. So you know what to do…keep winning and you can carry on all year.” And he added: “Don’t think that this is going to be easy, by the way. You’re going to be playing against someone who’s already won twice, last year.”
The Fragility of Bodies Page 12