Holy City (7 page)

“Chucho?”

The whale calf flaps his flipper and blinks as though he is having his passport photo taken. His way of showing his delight at being included. Verónica hands him the phone and Chucho listens to his instructions. He nods several times in rapid succession and waves his flippers again—as if he was in the pool catching fish thrown to him, thinks Verónica.

When Chucho hands her back the phone, the magistrate has already hung up.

“He's gone off to sleep, the bastard!”

If Verónica quits now she will lose a lot of money and will return in a bad mood to her apartment, where she will find Pacogoya sleeping like a fallen angel on her sofa, after trying to force her down onto the living room carpet like the second-rate porno movie actor he imagines he is. A knee to the balls from Verónica finally convinced him of one thing: that violence had become part of what until then had been a comfortable existence as a cheap seducer.

“You've got nothing to fear,
doctora
,” says Chucho. He seems to have grown even bigger—probably due, thinks Verónica, to the words of encouragement from the magistrate.

Verónica smiles, pretending to be flattered. She feels slightly sorry for this hulk with his Magnum .44 and the Uzi in the boot of his gray car with tinted windows that he uses to fetch and carry her to and from the market. He seems like a nice kid, a baby whale, no pretensions to know everything like her, but not someone who takes advantage of the fact that he is armed and two meters tall to extort money from
taxi drivers or shopkeepers, like so many youngsters of his age do. Youngsters Verónica springs from police stations so they can be shot from any passing patrol car without even leaving the neighborhood.

Fed up with waiting for the accountant who promised to meet her at the market but who is probably off fishing in the lake at Chascomús, Verónica leaves the caravan to walk round the market.

The stallholders are loading their goods onto trucks worth two hundred thousand dollars or onto broken-down jalopies. There is even one horse-drawn cart. Nothing is left of what until a couple of hours before had been a busy market: no underwear from Taiwan, no two-dollar Swiss watches, no brand-name clothes, no M.P.3s or thousand-dollar notebooks selling here for three hundred. Everything disappears onto trucks, jalopies or carts, off on the provincial merry-go-round until Tuesday night's market brings them all back here once again.

Birds' guano is starting to fry on the tin roofs of the shanty town barely a hundred meters from the open-air market. Barefoot kids are already diving into the trash left by the stallholders, searching for what might have been thrown away: radios not even a deaf person would have bought, perfumes that stank as badly as the waters of the Riachuelo, leftover goods that could find no home. There is always something, and the kids are rats with sharp teeth and claws. If any of them happens to stay asleep when the market is being packed up, there will always be a stepfather or some other man to get them going with a couple of slaps.

There is not much for Verónica to do in her office at the market this Saturday morning: her accountant has gone fishing and the magistrate has put her life in the hands of the whale calf. She asks him—the whale calf, that is—to take her to Liniers. There she gets out of the car and takes a number 28 bus, despite protests from Chucho, who insists his job is to pick her up from her apartment, leave her at the market, then take her home again. Veronica explains she wants to go home alone and
that nobody is going to do anything to her. She boards the bus and sits in the back row. She opens the window so that the breeze can ruffle her hair and make her feel more alive, not enveloped in some air-conditioned fishtank, hooked up to telephones that only ring to cause problems.

She is not surprised when she sees Chucho's car following the bus, then drawing up alongside in the middle of Avenida Paz. Chucho sounds his horn at her. He was not going to abandon her just because she asked him to, it is the magistrate he answers to, not a female lawyer who is not even from Lomas de Zamora. “Whose idea was it to send her to that den of thieves as inspector?” Chucho must be thinking, if his cetaceous brain is capable of thought.

*

While Verónica is traveling on her bus with the whale calf alongside to make sure she comes to no harm, a Colombian couple—a fifty-five-year-old man, a twenty-two-year-old woman—are being led from their room in a five-star hotel in the city center by men armed with revolvers and sub-machine-guns. To reach the room the men—four who go up, two at reception and another two outside the hotel—have had to step over the tourists sleeping in the corridors. “Be careful, they're coughing up two hundred dollars a night,” the hotel manager told them, after all eight identified themselves as federal-police officers.

They burst into the room using the magnetic card the manager has given them, after insisting they are not to let on to anyone he made things so easy for them and did not even ask to see a search warrant.

The fifty-five-year-old Colombian man and the twenty-two-year-old Colombian girl are sleeping in each other's arms. They look more like a honeymoon couple than the drugs baron Osmar Arredri, boss of the Carrera Cuarta neighborhood in Medellín, and his girlfriend. They are in Buenos Aires because they were on board the
Queen of Storms
on a
pleasure cruise. The blond girl is called (or says her name is) Sirena Mondragón. She is the pleasure in the fifty-five-year-old's cruise. When she jumps from the bed, naked and with her hands above her head, her tits dazzle the four feds training their guns on her.

“Poppa's out for the count. We drank a lot last night because the ship didn't leave,” Sirena explains, pouting and looking so sad the leader of the group gives her a handkerchief to wipe away her tears.

They shake Poppa roughly, then throw the fresh orange juice that room service brought up with the rest of his breakfast a few minutes earlier in his face. Poppa sits up, cursing them; when he makes to reach for his 9 m.m. gun sleeping like a cat on the bedside table, a karate-expert federal cop smashes his hand, then with the same imperceptible movement sends him crashing against the mini-bar.

Down below in reception the manager is sweating like a boxer working at the punchbag. Half a dozen employees are nowhere near enough to look after the dozens of tourists complaining about the night they spent in the hotel corridors. They have mutinied, or something close to it, and are refusing to pay a single dollar or euro unless they are offered somewhere decent to spend the nights until their cruise liner is repaired.

“We came here to dance tango and eat your famous steaks, and we get treated like immigrants, for God's sake,” one of them protests in an unidentifiable Spanish accent. He explains to his partner, who has an equally unidentifiable Spanish accent, that Argentines are more Italian than Spanish and that's why you can't trust them. They promise you one thing and do something completely different, for God's sake.

The manager watches as the posse of feds leaves without so much as a thank-you. The Colombian couple are only half-dressed; he stumbles along, but she is as upright as if she were on the catwalk at a Cacharel fashion parade.

“I've got one free room,” the manager shouts to the line of first-world refugees. There is uproar, shouts of “I was here first,” while he
looks meaningfully at one of his minions for him to go upstairs and see what damage the feds have caused.

*

It is four hours later, toward midday (by which time the stranded, mutinying tourists have formed a gypsy encampment in the lobby) and the classic red headlines of Crónica Television announce two breaking stories to the world: “Ghastly beheading on outskirts of San Pedro,” screams the first. Then, after the weather forecast—“30° in the shade: no let-up to the summer!”—the second news item: “Kidnapping in central hotel: fake feds rifle minibar and abduct Colombian couple.”

“Urgent service needed for oil levels in my noddle,” says Verónica when she recognizes Damián Bértola's voice on the phone.

“It's Saturday night and I have a private life too.”

“What does a psychoanalyst do with his private life on Saturday nights?”

“If he's a Lacanian, he reads Freud. If he's Freudian, he examines the interpretation of Jung's dreams. If he's a vegetarian, he could invite a criminal lawyer to come and eat a decent barbecue on his roof terrace.”

“What about your children?”

“Fine, thanks. The boy's in Spain, the girl in Mexico.”

“You're on your own? You were going to make a barbecue just for yourself?”

“My dog's with me. He's the only patriot who hasn't left Argentina. And that's only because they won't give him a European passport.”

In less than half an hour the lawyer and the psychoanalyst are standing side-by-side in front of the glowing barbecue, the spicy smoke from grilled sausage fat swirling round them.

Bértola lives alone in a large house he kept after his divorce. The children left seven years ago. Villa del Parque is a quiet neighborhood; the burglars walk on tiptoe, the serial killers go about their business quietly, the streets are lined by chinaberry and jacaranda trees, there are no noisy avenues near the house and the barbecue smells delicious.

“Just look at that moon.” Bértola points up through the leaves of the chinaberry that is putting on its nightly display above the terrace, creating tiny shadow figures. The moon he is talking about is sitting on the highest branch. “It's like living in the country,” he says enthusiastically. “But what brings you here? I know, an oil check. I can check the level alright, but changing it takes years. And remember, it's Saturday.”

“You talk like a supreme-court judge,” protests Verónica. “You said you lived with a dog, so where is he?”

From a corner of the roof terrace it is the enormous dog that replies rather than his master. He has been so focused on the barbecue he has hardly even wagged his tail since Verónica appeared.

“Living on your own is complicated,” says Bértola. “Most people in cities live alone. They say that's fine, that it's their choice. Crap.” He turns the meat over and carefully pricks the intestines, adding, “People say that to protect themselves. First came fire, then the wheel and then muuuuch later, in the twentieth century and above all in the well-off parts of Buenos Aires, the word.”

“The paid-for word, you mean.”

“That's how I make my living, Verónica. But at least when I write a
report or a clinical record I don't end them with bombastic stuff like ‘in accordance with the law.' The meat's going to dry out if I leave it much longer. Do you like it juicy?”

He stabs a piece of spare rib, lifts it and holds it under the light so that she can decide if it is juicy enough for her. Verónica suggests they start with the sausages and intestines; she is a lawyer and so follows written legal advice that does not leave much room for improvisation. Although strictly speaking there is no law to cover this eventuality, precedents suggest it is offal first.

“After that, the meat and salads,” she concludes her speech.

Bértola again laments the fact that he lives on his own. He does not know how to make a salad. He always ruins them by smothering them in oil and vinegar, he does not know how to wash a lettuce. Hygiene is a female thing, he says: it's woman's work. That's why he's sorry his wife left him: because of the salads.

They sit down to eat, still a little uncomfortable but beginning to get used to each other. A roof terrace in Villa del Parque is not the kind of place where foreign tourists eat their barbecued meat. They get taken to cattle ranches or restaurants where steak is paid for in hard currency. There are cattle and gauchos (as plastic as their credit cards), sometimes even “traditional”
malambo
dances and “typical”
boleadores
whirled round the gauchos' heads. A roof terrace in Villa del Parque can offer none of that. It is, though, a good place for a psychoanalyst and a lawyer who hardly know each other, who are work associates more than friends, to begin to glimpse each other's concerns, to wait patiently for the secrets to be revealed.

“His name is Mauser,” says Bértola, when Verónica jumps as the dog's tail tickles her shins under the table. “He's happy. He's always happy when there is a barbecue. He dreams of the bones before he starts to chew them.”

Once she has explained what Pacogoya means in her life (little more than nothing: a good dinner once in a while, love making that
is not always so good), Verónica tells him what happened the previous night.

“I live waiting for a skunk I happen to be in love with to reappear,” she says, “but the only people knocking on my door are ghouls like Pacogoya and Miss Bolivia.”

“Then don't open your door. The early hours are no time to go visiting. Nobody who's in love with you is going to come and ruin your night's sleep.”

Just to contradict his arrogant psychoanalyst's tone, she points out that the last time she saw the skunk was in the early hours.

“The guy's a swine, I'm sure he didn't come to make love, did he?” A sad smile from Verónica. She pushes the intestines to the side of her plate: too greasy for her. “Give them to Mauser. He can eat anything.” The dog snaffles them, but then does not seem too happy to eat them under the table. He prefers meat too. Bértola tells her he does not know what breed he is. “He looks like a cocker spaniel, but he's the size of a sheepdog and has their eyes. He's probably one of those fashionable genetic experiments. Alright, don't talk to me about your love life: I expect it's the ghouls who brought you here, isn't it?”

Verónica explains she senses that something is about to explode. The same feeling she had shortly before the death of Romano, her first real man, the cop.