Holy City (2 page)

He gazes round at the cowed faces of the crowd. A feudal baron condemning the disloyalty of one of his subjects, the black sheep who has to be sacrificed at once.

“We're going to amputate this right hand so that the infection does not reach comrade Pox. But tomorrow someone else you can trust will take his place. Comrade Pox is like a snake or an iguana: the corrupt limbs we chop off always grow back again.”

He pushes Zamorano forward. Zamorano stumbles but stays on his feet in the center of the empty space that has opened up between his executioners and the locals around this makeshift scaffold of beaten earth and stagnant water from the last downpour. They have untied him. He could make a run for it and get shot in the back, but he would
rather stare at this pair of thugs he has so often given orders to, at the driver who is as accurate with his gun as he was at avoiding the traffic with his foot pressed to the floor.

Zamorano does not say a word, merely stares at them. He could say to them: what I did doesn't merit being put to death; there are people higher up than us who do far worse, who back-stab all the time and yet win cups and medals, people who double their fortunes with a single shady deal, then get their photos taken with Counselor Pox.

But Zamorano is already dead and the dead do not speak. He closes his eyes to see the cherub more clearly. Blinded by the car headlights, Ana's face shines in front of his eyelids. She smiles as she recognizes him, as she tells him yet again: yes, I'm with you, I like being with you.

That is why (the image of Ana beneath his eyelids), an instant before the shots ring out, Matías Zamorano raises his arms and wraps them round his own body.

As he slumps to the ground he is not alone: he is with Ana.

The legal profession is a lonely one. It is looked down on by all those respectable people who bathe their consciences in cologne and perfume, thinking they can disguise the stink. As lonely as a private eye in an American film, as scorned as any cop in any rotten city in the world.

In Buenos Aires, lawyers who defend clients already considered guilty are hissed and booed when they leave court. They are pursued by swarms of cameramen and reporters, who attack them for defending
clients that the supreme court of public opinion has sentenced to be hanged from the very first day. It does not matter if there is any evidence to convict the accused thief or criminal, if the body or the stolen goods, the weapon used to kill the wife, the tools they are said to have used to break into a bank vault, have been found: there is a suspect who has been found guilty by the editors of newspapers and television news programs, and a bonfire waiting for them which burns the twenty-four hours a day that the news channels are on air.

It was two in the morning when someone knocked on the lawyer Verónica Berutti's door. Verónica had just got rid of a lover who had come to ask her for money before they had even fucked and was watching the repeat on television of a crowd on the outskirts of Buenos Aires trying to lynch a pedophile rapist who the cops were pushing into their patrol car. She was not watching because it interested her, but simply because it was on, as people usually do, especially at that time of night and after the unpleasant scene when she had thrown her lover out. He could be a good lover, but lacked the braincells to tell his muscles to get moving and look for work. “You're a whore,” her ex-lover shouted as she slammed the door in his face. “Whores don't pay, they charge people,” she had replied under her breath, then waited until the lift had arrived and the landing light had gone off to add “bastard.”

The peaceful inhabitants of Villa Diamante surround the police car the cops have managed to smuggle the pedophile into. They throw stones and beat on the roof with sticks. They even toss rotten tomatoes at the cop who is trying to ward them off so that the car can get out of there. The knocking on Verónica's door synchronizes with the beating on the police car roof, which finally succeeds in pulling off down the muddy street. The camera shows it skidding in the mud, and Verónica wonders how many of those wanting to lynch the pedophile are themselves pedophiles or wife-and-children beaters, drunkards on cheap wine, occasional rapists.

A shame she cannot turn down the sound of the hammering at her
door, press “mute” on her remote control, and leave the world silent and far away for a while longer.

Although the lens of the spyhole distorts her face, Verónica recognizes the round, pink cherub's face with its marrow-green eyes, the golden curls, the beauty as polished as in a reliquary.

Why bother to say good evening when it is already nearly dawn and nobody turns up at this time on a social visit. Better simply to heave a sigh and head for the blue corduroy armchair she has sat in before, ask for a glass of water and, pausing for breath, apologize for how late it is.

“But I can see you were still awake,
doctora
” says Ana perceptively, so Verónica prefers to go into the kitchen, turn on the tap and let the water run for a while before returning with a full glass.

“You're not the first. It's been a busy night.”

“Men,” Ana guesses.

“They've all gone,” says Verónica. “Who's chasing you?”

“Nobody for the moment. But I'm in a mess, I think, or I wouldn't have bothered you like this.”

The lawyer thinks that around now—at this very instant, why not?—she should be climaxing, feeling in her vagina all the virility of the son of a bitch who had come and ruined her night. Exhausted, she collapses into the armchair next to her desk. She prefers the silent television to clients like Ana Torrente, involved in conflicts that last longer than the Middle East War, and with little or no inclination to pay or even reduce the debt she has run up with every appeal, every request for proceedings to be quashed, every postponed hearing, and all the other legal niceties that wear out so much energy, expenses and shoe leather.

“My varicose veins really ache,” Verónica announces. “If I don't have them operated on this year, I'll have to employ someone to carry me round the corridors of the court on their shoulders.”

Ana Torrente does not take the hint that she should at least open her purse. She is far too busy trying to protect herself from the violence
exploding around her because of her business deals. She gulps the water down in one, then leaves the glass on a magazine.

“I don't want to spoil the surface of your table,” she says, hoping Verónica will repay her consideration with a friendly gesture.

“As I asked before: who's after you this time?”

Another sigh. Ana searches for a painting, a mirror, a lamp, a file on the lawyer's desk she can gaze at like someone leaning on their elbows before they speak.

“Nobody as yet. But I'm scared.” Ana explains she had agreed to see Matías: they were to meet at 10 p.m. in the Los Pinches café on the corner of Avenida del Trabajo and Pola. “When I got there they were already stacking the chairs on the tables and the owner was closing up. Someone called on Matías Zamorano's behalf,” he said. “Don't bother waiting for him.”

“It's two in the morning, so that was four hours ago.” Verónica seems to understand how serious things are. “Why didn't you come straight here? We won't find any magistrate awake now”

Ana Torrente buries her face in her hands. It is obvious she is making an effort to burst into tears, because melodrama is not her thing, at least not in front of women, especially someone like Verónica Berruti, this qualified lawyer aged forty-five, who has twice been widowed. Once after her policeman husband was killed in a shootout; the second time when someone took revenge on her by shooting her partner (she had decided never to get married again), an ombudsman, a man of the law who begged her on his knees not to try so hard to get people out of jail and still less to put them there in the first place. “Why put them in jail if you're only going to get them out again?” he would ask, genuinely anxious and uncomprehending. One cool September morning his car was intercepted only three blocks from their home in the middle of the Villa Devtoto residential neighborhood and he was shot to pieces before he even had the time to ask why.

“Don't try to fool me, Ana. I won't lift a finger for you. In fact
I'll throw you out right now if you don't tell me the truth.” Ana squirms on the blue corduroy armchair as if she has sat on an anthill. She starts to blink as though suffering an allergy attack so strong not even corticoids can calm it. She is suddenly if fleetingly aware of the seriousness of what she has done. “The truth or the street,” says Verónica, hurrying her up because she still has not lost all hope that the son of a bitch will come back, ring the bell, plead for forgiveness on the entry phone.

Slowly but surely, she hears the truth. She has to disentangle it from all the unconvincing pouts her witness puts on, all her half-truths, her unwillingness to tell her everything. But the truth arrives.

So Verónica concludes, without fear of being mistaken, that Matías Zamorano has already been dropped from Counselor Pox's team and by his own men. It was not a good idea of Ana's to try to double-cross him: could not have been worse, in fact, given these first results. “You can't mess with those who run the game,” Verónica tells her; if they have reached that position, it is because they have learned a thing or two, because they have people to guard their backs, their asses, the whole caboodle.

Veronica does not tell Ana this last part. She does not want to make her cry for real. She bites her tongue. You're a racist Bolivian bitch, she would tell her if she really wanted to make her cry. But it is the truth she wants, not tears.

“I've had it up to my ovaries with all the crap you Bolivians get up to. You should have stayed in Santa Cruz de la Sierra.”

“Bolivia doesn't exist. Tomorrow or the next day, Bolivia is going to be more in the news than Iraq or Palestine. A dark night is coming, so don't talk to me about my home country: they're nothing more than a bunch of indians on the warpath, the lost tribe of the
puna
. They think Viracocha is going to come and save them—they're worse than the Arabs.”

Now Verónica understands what is keeping Ana from seriously
crying: her hatred. She hates the place she has escaped from, that prosperous city on the Bolivian flatlands inhabited by cattle ranchers, corrupt bureaucrats and drugs barons. That was where only a year earlier she had been crowned Miss Bolivia: the blond, slender Ana Torrente, one meter seventy-two centimeters tall, as shapely as high mountains, light-green eyes, a cherub with tropical lips and tits. She signed a contract to take her round the world, “the ambassadress of Bolivian culture and beauty,” as the presenter said in the Santa Cruz amphitheater to applause, ovations, camera flashes, microphones and a contract she signed while still blinded by all the floodlights, deafened by the shouting and the fireworks set off to celebrate her coronation.

Poor pale-faced Cinderella. The next morning, although her hangover made it hard to focus, she managed to read the small print of her contract. The world promised to her was not the whole planet—it was a tour of Ecuador, Peru and the Bolivian interior, a night in every miserable village of its jungles and high plateaux. She was the bait for the campaign trails of unknown politicians, ambitious subalterns of a power installed to help the affairs of the rich and powerful who do travel in the real world.

Hatred, not tears, lends Ana that look of a fallen angel which so bedazzled Matías Zamorano he completely lost his head and thought he could double-cross the Pox.

“There's a lot of money in it for you if you help me out. It's a good deal, if I can get it off the ground.”

Stony-faced, Verónica. “I disconnect my emotional hemisphere,” she says of herself when she listens to possible clients before deciding whether or not to rescue them from hell. She settles in her chair by the desk and listens. She is only briefly distracted when she hears the lift coming up. She cannot help it: once a fool, always a fool, as her faithful friend Laucha the Mouse Giménez tells her. Apart from that she listens closely, notes down some phrases, does the sums, draws little diagrams that help her follow the thread of Miss Bolivia's confession. Slowly but
surely she begins to understand why Ana reacted, tore up the sequined buffoon's contract and abandoned her kingdom.

The
Queen of Storms
is a cruise ship that can carry 1,340 passengers, all of whom, in this misty August morning, are crowding to the rails on the port side of the ship in response to a call from the captain, a what you might call phlegmatic Englishman who has faced the raging seas of Asia, the stormy, cold North and South Atlantic, including Cape Horn, but is now seeing the enormous ship under his command run aground for the very first time in the brown soup of the Río de la Plata.

The tourists' pirouettes have no effect. They find the situation quite funny, especially since as soon as the mist rises they can see the reassuring outline of the city of Buenos Aires before their eyes. No-one is going to die, except of laughter; some of them even start to try out tango steps on the tilting deck. Eventually six tugboats appear in single file, sent by the harbormaster. The English captain is no longer so phlegmatic. He was only expecting two of these shabby craft which, like the ticks of underdevelopment, will cling on and take with them a high percentage of the profits made by any luxury liner that ventures into this treacherous river.

Still sleepy, Verónica sits up in bed with her phone to her ear, listening to the story of the complicated disembarkation as told by Francisco Goya (who has the same name as the painter but does not paint): he seduces tourists with his guidebook knowledge of the cities they visit and gets paid in dollars for it. He always gives her a call when he lands
for a couple of days in Buenos Aires. He offers Verónica a bit of time out—during those two days she can go to restaurants normally reserved for foreigners, dance in exclusive nightclubs and make love twice a day, so four times altogether.