My Biggest Lie (10 page)

Chapter 11

T
he days were quiet then, Spanish in the morning, lunch with Hans, afternoons on the terrace writing in my notebook. The weather grew cooler. Every morning I scanned the shelves for a new arrival, a book I wanted to read, and went back disappointedly to sip from
Bleak House
. The narrator was unreasonably virtuous and made me feel the opposite. Every time I got excited about the story a new subplot and set of characters arrived to take it further away from me. The novel was brilliant, occasionally enjoyable, the last thing I needed and all I had. It was a cheap edition and its nine hundred pages were set so tightly I would occasionally lose focus and seem to stare at a blank book crawling with ants. But at least not having anything to read was forcing me to write. That was Chandler's two very simple rules for writing a novel: four hours a day when, one, you don't have to write and, two, you're not allowed to do anything else. Eventually you write a novel just to keep from being bored. But Chandler's study wasn't on the top of a hostel roof constantly renewed with multinational young women
(in bikinis, when it was sunny). More fool him. Nevertheless, I was getting
some
work done.

On the second night I asked Hans if he'd like to accompany me to the bar in San Telmo, where I was going to try to track down Alejandro Miguel Marques Montenegro.

‘Will Lizzie be coming?' he asked.

‘I'm seeing Lizzie tomorrow. Her boyfriend is monopolising her tonight.'

‘
Boyfriend
. Please tell me some good news about the boyfriend.'

‘Although he's better-looking than Johnny Depp, he's substantially poorer.'

‘Substantially poorer than me?'

‘Mmm.'

‘Please. Try again.'

‘Although his eyes are hypnotically gorgeous, his job as a motorcycle courier exposes him to considerable personal danger in this city of terrible drivers and bloody accidents.'

‘Now tell me how you have interfered with his brake cables and you will put me in a good mood.'

After I had assured Hans of Arturo's imminent demise he agreed to come with me. We walked to an old-fashioned wooden bar with sleepy fans swirling around the ceiling. We avoided the long counter and sat in the corner. It was nine in the evening, early for Buenos Aires, and there were only three or four others in the place.

An elderly bartender was polishing glasses, elegant in his white shirt and black bowtie. Hans went to demonstrate his Spanish-class proficiency and came back with two small glasses of greenish-brown liquid which he placed nonchalantly on the table.

‘What the fuck is this?'

‘Fernet. The national drink.'

‘I believe I asked for a beer.'

‘Look around you. This is the real Argentina. It's not a place for a beer.'

‘They have beers. I can see them in the fridge. What are you talking about? Everyone I can see is drinking a beer.'

‘That's not the point.'

‘I've drunk this before,' I said.

‘So have I,' he said sorrowfully.

‘Don't they normally have it with coke?'

‘This is the real Argentina,' he repeated.

We sat there, sipping, wincing, looking around us. It was quiet. I couldn't see anyone who looked like my idea of an Alejandro.

Halfway through our Fernets I stood up and ordered us a bottle of wine. We finished it slowly. I liked being with Hans. Conversation was like playing tennis, with little breaks between rallies when we found out about each other. We always had the good grace to resume the game at the saddest moments of the conversation.

His sadness, like mine, like so many men's, was over a woman, a woman he had lost through carelessness and becoming caught up in a job (the difference being that his had earned him lots of money and that I had liked mine). He had been an analyst for a stockbroker's in Frankfurt, working sixteen hours a day six days a week before he quit. I turned off when he began to talk passionately of the beauty of pure algebra. Other people had tried that on me, including one or two Hollywood movies. Hans was travelling for another four months before he would go home for his sister's wedding, to the village near Hamburg where he had grown up. After that, he didn't
know what he would do. His travels around South America had not led to the epiphany he'd hoped for. I wasn't surprised by that: I thought then that epiphanies were a narrative convention encouraged by teachers of creative writing degrees.

‘You're shocked that changing location every couple of weeks, constantly getting drunk with strangers and doing no work at all isn't focusing your mind?' I asked.

‘When you put it like that, fuck you.'

I was beginning to get quite drunk and armed with this courage I approached the barman and asked him if he knew Alejandro Montenegro. ‘
No lo conozco, conozco a muchos Alejandros. ¿Como es?
'

I was stuck here. I had no idea what he looked like.

I thanked him and excused myself and returned to our table with another bottle of wine. An hour or so later I noticed a new man had entered and sat at the bar. He was the right age, in his mid-forties. I had imagined him as a Latin version of Bennett but in translation, if this was him, he became tall, broad-shouldered and handsome. I watched him drain a whisky.

As I walked to the bar, resolved to ask him if he knew Alejandro, another man walked through the door of the bar, younger than me, slim with gelled dark hair and earrings.

‘Alejandro!' he called to the man at the bar. This was exciting. The man called Alejandro stood up and they kissed each other. This was the usual way men greeted each other here. The casual way the man rested his hand against the other's waist and stroked it lightly was something else. It was a discreet gesture and I would have missed it if I had not been staring. They stood there, talking in a low voice for about a minute, and then they began to argue. The
small man pushed Alejandro in the chest and Alejandro pushed him back. Next thing, the small man had taken a swing at Alejandro, which he blocked with one arm before pushing the small man back with his other arm. He spat something dismissively at the smaller man before pointedly turning and sitting at the bar with his back to him. The small man stood there, staring, and threw at Alejandro a volley of
cornudos, gils, hijos de puta
. Alejandro knocked back his drink and turned round slowly to watch him with immaculate disdain. With that, the smaller man turned on his heels and left.

The old man behind the bar had watched them sleepily. He reached out with a bottle and poured another measure into Alejandro's glass.

‘
Gracias. Perdon
.'

The barman just raised his hand. ‘
De nada
.' He turned to me and I ordered another bottle of wine.

While he was opening it, I studied Alejandro's profile. He was an attractive man, well-dressed in a fitted white shirt, his silvering hair cut stylishly and complemented by a close-trimmed beard. He turned and trained sad mahogany eyes on me. ‘
¿Que?
'

‘
¿Vos sos Alejandro Miguel Marques Montenegro?
' I began tentatively.

He looked at me bluntly, uninterested and turned away.

‘
¿Amigo de
Craig Bennett?
Soy amigo de
Craig Bennett.'

‘I wouldn't be surprised if I spoke better English than you,' he said, looking back at me. ‘But I'm not friends with Craig Bennett and not only because he's dead.' He turned back to his reflection in the mirrors behind the bottles and in the awkward seconds of silence that followed I decided I should leave him alone. But then he spoke. ‘You're too young to be his friend anyway.'

‘I'm no younger than your friend.'

‘I think you may have witnessed the end of that particular “friendship”. Are you one of those people who like to use the word “friend” euphemistically?'

‘Er –'

‘People do, you see. “Why don't you bring your
friend
for dinner, Alejandro?” Well, because he's an uncivilised drama queen and he's my lover, not my friend. Because I'm embarrassed I dredge such depths. But Craig Bennett, he was your
friend
, was he?'

‘Nearly. We only knew each other for one night.'

‘You
are
using the word euphemistically.' He raised an eyebrow at me now, more interested, flirtatious.

‘Not like that,' I said. ‘But I did sort of fall in love with him. Whatever that means. And then he died.'

The bartender served me my wine. Alejandro had finished his drink and I pointed to it and asked for ‘
uno mas
'.

Alejandro made a flat, humourless chuckle. ‘Your Spanish is cute.'

I paid the bartender and slid Alejandro's whisky across.

‘You were his friend, though?' I asked.

‘A long time ago.'

‘I was supposed to be looking after him. I work in publishing. I mean, I did work in publishing. My girlfriend left me on the day I met him. He took care of me.'

Alejandro exhaled and stared into his drink. He looked very sad.

‘And you didn't take care of him?'

‘No. I didn't do a good job of that.'

Alejandro pushed the whisky back to me and stood up sharply. ‘I am afraid I cannot drink with you. I do not want
to discuss Craig Bennett. I do not know why you came looking for me but I do not have what you're after.'

With that, he slapped two notes on the counter, turned his back and walked out.

Chapter 12

I
had arranged to meet Lizzie and Arturo the following evening for dinner in Arturo's favourite restaurant, a place owned by his cousin. I'd spent the morning in my Spanish class, before writing an email to Amy Casares to describe my meeting with Alejandro. In my letter I conceded defeat. I had met Bennett's friend and he hadn't wanted to know. Why should he care? I was still struggling to answer that question for myself. I was curious why Amy hadn't told me Alejandro was gay – from her emails I had constructed the impression of them as a talented heterosexual pulling partnership – but I didn't mention his encounter with the younger man, or his weary flirtatious camp. We should be sensitive not to send messages other people may have gone to lengths to avoid sending themselves. I have, I admit, a vested interest in recommending this scrupulousness.

Every day I looked for an email from Sarah. I had not sent her one for weeks now and wondered if curiosity would eventually make her write to me. That afternoon, as usual, there was nothing from her, and, as usual, before
I logged off I navigated to her Facebook page to try to deduce what she was up to. She wasn't the type to post confessional statements, so I had been marking her progress by the increasing number of friends she was making, most of whom had Latin American names. Every time I saw her name followed by the information ‘Is in a relationship with Liam Wilson' it brought home the reality of what I had lost.

Today I was ‘no longer in a relationship with', news illustrated by a small broken-heart icon. I deleted it, felt sickened. My sisters might have seen that, my friends. A child's cartoon scrawled to announce a tragedy. Why not print T-shirts? What was ‘in a relationship', anyway? Why did they make the wording so coy, so passive? Be brave if you're going to tell the world, operatic. Sing it like a tango. Liam loves Sarah. Sarah does not love Liam any more. Liam's heart broke. Liam is trying to mend it with alcohol, cocaine and indiscriminate lust. Liam is in trouble.

I deleted my broken heart and returned to the hostel, feverishly composing lines for my love letter. The letter, perhaps about fifty pages long now, was written in various styles. Chief among them was the lyrical nostalgic, manipulatively dredging my memory for our loveliest times together, a form I hoped was more Proustian than sentimental. (I did not re-read the love letter, only added to it.) The other mode competing for prominence was the angry jeremiad to lash the societal hypocrisy I claimed had destroyed us. But when I sat down in a quiet corner of the roof terrace and began to add again to the letter I felt its overwhelming futility. I had my third cigarette and first and only very small cry of the day (I was beginning to feel like Clint Eastwood) and then I felt able to put the love letter away and pull out my other notebook. Four
hours later, I felt more optimistic. Things were beginning to fall into place. I had three great characters – Craig, Amy and Alejandro – and I knew just little enough about them to simplify them into life without having to worry about accuracy. Amy blurred into Sarah. Craig blurred into me. A love triangle took shape.

When I had exhausted myself writing and settled down to relax, the thing I had been dreading all month happened. I finished
Bleak House
. Disconsolately, I trudged back down to the communal bookshelves and began to reassess what I might consider reading. There were the eight copies of
The Alchemist.
There were the five copies of
The Beach
. There were the four copies of
Tricks of the Mind
by Derren Brown; three of an instruction manual on how to exploit women with low self-confidence.
On the Road
.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
.
The Dice Man
. I was thirty years old. And that's when I saw it: an English translation of
El Diego
by Diego Maradona. I flicked through and read a bit: it was the flipside of the native literary tradition with its formalist restraint, puzzles and experiments: this was operatic melodrama, the real Argentine sublime, with headings progressing from The Passion to The Resurrection to The Glory, The Struggle, The Vendetta, The Pain. I understood
this
. I was delighted and returned to the roof to read my new guide to Argentine life.

I arrived at the restaurant at half nine. I was more confident at the basic stuff now and asked for a table at the window for three, and a gin and tonic. Twenty minutes later, I was still on my own. I hadn't taken
El Diego
with me so I spent my time staring through the window, imagining what Craig might have thought twelve years ago waiting for Amy to arrive and meet him.

A man in a suit with an enormous bunch of flowers hurried by, looking at his watch. Across the street the door to a block of flats opened and a uniformed maid stepped out, buttoning her coat.

The restaurant's tables were almost all occupied by couples, a lot of them young: the men in tight T-shirts, showing off their trim torsos and biceps; the women small and fragile with shampoo-advert shiny hair and mini-dresses, taking constant trips to the pavement for a Marlboro. I was feeling lonely.

At half past a moped pulled up, a long, limber woman gripping onto the driver, the nylon gloss of her legs slicked against his white jeans. Arturo pulled off his helmet and shook his hair loose. He grinned at no one and showed the white of his teeth. His face was full of the delight of driving his English girlfriend around, attracting glances, the star of his own movie. He hadn't looked over to the restaurant yet but I sensed he knew he was being watched. It is a common feeling (and failing): to suspect you are the only person in the world and that everyone else is performing for your benefit. I never felt it anywhere else as profoundly as I did in Buenos Aires. Everybody moved as if they knew I was watching them.

Now Lizzie took off her helmet and waved at me. Arturo, pretending he hadn't known all along I'd been there, turned and directed his smile at me.

I stood to greet them as they came in, hugging Lizzie hello and giving Arturo the handshake, kiss and stubble-rub that now felt so natural. Arturo, who made jeans and T-shirts look expensive, was smarter than I'd seen him, in a black shirt with three buttons undone. That's a hard look to pull off without coming across as a salsa-class Casanova. He managed it. I looked at the hollow where
the low slope of his neck dipped into his shirt and wanted to press my fingers into it.

From over his shoulder, Lizzie winked at me. She was more dressed up than I'd seen her too, blending in with the rest of the
porteños
in a royal blue dress made of a sleek material that ruched around her waist. But below the dress and the dazzle of her legs she wore a pair of cheap-looking leather flats, one of the straps frayed and hanging on by a thin thread. They were the sort of shoes Sarah wore when I first met her and seeing them made me want to curl up and lay my head on them.

‘Arturo!' a voice cried from the kitchen. A man in a chef's apron bounded over to embrace him, the cousin. I pursed my lips and winced at Lizzie: the theatre of pain a man might show his friend when a woman walked past who hurt him with desire. It was a popular look in Buenos Aires. She mimed her own look of shock and then we both started laughing.

‘He does scrub up well, doesn't he?' she said.

When we had all sat down and Arturo had ordered a bottle of red, Lizzie attempted to explain to me what the different steak options on the menu referred to. Arturo quickly cut her off: ‘This one is the best.' Lizzie began to explain the difference between that and another but he repeated it again sternly: ‘This one,
bife de chorizo
,
al punto
,' to a wilful child demonstrating the correct solution to a maths problem. Lizzie shook her head at him affectionately; giving him the benefit of the doubt in his cousin's restaurant. And Arturo was in a good mood, calling over to other tables where he knew people, putting his arm round Lizzie and resting his head on her neck, offering waiters good-natured insults whose tone I could understand if not the substance.

‘What's made you so happy?' I asked.

‘My beautiful girlfriend, this wine, the company of good people . . .'

I looked around me. ‘Good people?'

‘You are not so bad,' he told me, looking directly into my eyes as if he had been reading Derren Brown's
Tricks of the Mind
. (I had taken a furtive browse of this to see if there was a section on how to brainwash women into forgiving you.)

‘Talking of good people, I got an email from Sarah this morning,' announced Lizzie.

Dread blotted through me. Oh, it wasn't
worth
it. I gripped the table and tried to say something.

‘I wrote to her to tell her what a fun day out we had together, how nice I thought you were.'

‘Did she correct you?' I managed to say.

‘She just said she was glad I was looking after you. You didn't tell me she's in Brazil.'

‘
She's in Brazil?
'

They both looked up.

‘She's in Brazil, of course she's in Brazil,' I continued calmly. ‘I must have got the dates confused, you lose track of time out here.'

‘It's a shame it's so soon after I'd just been or I might have gone to see her. Aren't you tempted?' she asked.

‘I'm really tempted,' I admitted. ‘How far again is it from here to . . .'

‘Sao Paulo's what?' she asked Arturo.

‘Four-, five-hour flight,' he said. ‘Bus, maybe two days.'

‘I guess she's very busy with the conference.'

‘That's it,' I said. ‘She will be. We have a sort of pact. I stay out of art events, she stays out of book events. That way we don't distract each other, feel responsible for the other's boredom.'

‘But she could not arrange to come here afterwards?' Arturo asked.

‘Oh, the conference had already booked her flights, they're not changeable I think.'

I must have looked very glum then. ‘You'll see her soon,' said Lizzie, reaching out and putting her hand on my arm. She changed the subject before Arturo could ask another bewildered question about my and Sarah's lack of desire to see each other.

‘How are you finding the hostel?' she asked. ‘You know I lived there for the first month when I arrived?'

‘Didn't you find the company terrible?' I asked.

‘No,' she said, surprised. ‘I liked the people there. Obviously, you have to hope they're different people to the ones still there now. But what's the problem with them?'

‘Well, I have a nice friend, Hans. But the young ones, they're all so uncynical. It's like nothing bad has ever happened to them. It's impossible to talk to them.'

‘You'd like bad things to happen to them?'

‘Only for their own good.'

‘Oh, yes,
their
own good. You're a terrible traveller, you know that, Liam?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're not really a traveller at all, are you? You just sit around, reading.'

‘That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.'

The food was delicious. I did my best to keep my mind on it and not on the growing fear that I was about to miss a chance to surprise Sarah and redeem myself. I wanted to leave the restaurant immediately and importune Google for her whereabouts.

But I didn't. I suggested we should order another bottle
of wine. Arturo was still on his first glass but put his hand up and made a gesture at the bottle I'd finished five minutes ago. A new one arrived in its place.

I had wondered if there would be some awkwardness between Arturo and me, the complicity with each other's misbehaviour (if he had misbehaved) making us wary of each other. Our conversation often fell into an unnatural earnestness because of Arturo's good but not perfect English and my concern to be understood. I spoke slowly, reduced my vocabulary and held my gaze to see if my meaning had been made clear. It was the way you might speak to a woman you were convincing of your love. Look into my eyes and believe me. Waiting to see if the lie would take. I'd lost the ability to give this look to Sarah. Her face had twisted up in revulsion when I'd tried.

Once we'd finished the steaks Lizzie went to the toilets and we were left on our own for the first time.

‘Thanks again for last week. That was a really good time,' I said.

He smirked. ‘You should enjoy your holiday. You liked Ana-Maria?'

‘Oh,
no.
'

He frowned.

‘Sorry, I didn't mean
no
. Of course I liked Ana-Maria, she's great. I mean earlier, I wasn't saying it was a great night
because
of Ana-Maria, that's what I mean. It was just fun.'

He looked amused. ‘Relax,
ché
. I saw her yesterday. Lizzie and I have dinner at hers.' He smiled. ‘The look on your face. You really are frightened? Don't be.
Tranquilo
. I'm not stupid. I don't tell anything next to Lizzie. Or Ana-Maria. We have, what do you say . . .'

‘Discretion?'

‘Manners, I think you say.'

‘In that case, you have wonderful manners. Thank you. But I don't like you having to lie for me. It was a mistake.'

‘Not saying is not a lie. You are too English about this. Make it what you want it. It don't matter. And, Liam, I see you. Lizzie says Sarah is in Brazil, there is something you don't tell us.
Vale
. You say what you have to say. I think you like to lie.'

‘That's not true. I hate to lie. It makes me feel sick.'

‘Then don't. Try, anyway. I don't think is possible. Life is lies.
Viveza Criolla.
Is like your footballers. They do not go down, even when is foul in the area. The truth is a penalty but because your player is truthful he gets the lie. Is why you lose. You have to make the truth. Now: tell me the truth about what you did with my girlfriend on Tuesday. When you spend the whole day with my girlfriend. What do you tell her about me?'