Sweet Money (13 page)

18

As he makes his way down Callao toward Corrientes, Lascano thinks that the morning in 1536 when Pedro de Mendoza disembarked here must have been a morning like this one: its diaphanous sky, the temperature sweetly hovering around twenty-three degrees and a fresh and invigorating breeze explain why the spot was named Santa María de los Buenos Aires.

He crosses the avenue, preferring to walk along the plaza side of the street, where a group of men and women are practising Tai Chi. One of the young women, from the back, reminds him of Eva. He has a sensation of vertigo, a mingling of desires and fears. He also feels the urgent need to be held in someone’s arms. He sits down on a bench and observes her. She turns in slow motion, her hands seem to be floating in the air, and her body appears to have become part of the atmosphere. She bends over, as if curtsying to royalty, and stretches one arm out in front of her as she straightens out her bent leg and turns to face him. As she does so, her hair falls over her face. Another turn and again her back is to him. He knows she’s not Eva but still he remains there under the Araucaria trees in the plaza watching this dance that accompanies his memories: Eva is walking across his living
room, a towel loosely wrapped around her, then turns and looks him in the eyes. It embarrassed him so much that he blushed, which made her smile with pride. She had an air of helplessness even though she was, is, a wild creature. She could cry for hours in the utmost despair, wallowing in her pain only to then brush it off as if it were a pest, imbue herself with magnificent power and relieve all her sorrows in a session of deep and intense lovemaking. That woman taught him the unbreakable connection between love and death, the one we try so hard to hide between the lines of ballads and madrigals.

Weary of his longing for that love, he turns his attention back to the plaza, where the girl has stopped dancing to his memories. His weariness leads him to the certainty that love has always been, for him, something that is lost as soon as it is found. He wonders if, after all, it isn’t like that foreverybody. Could it be that love dies as soon as we name it, trap it, try to possess it? Could it be that love either kills us or dies? Lascano feels a cry, a howl, a groan of pain lodged in his chest and squeezing his heart, trying but unable to pour out like lava flowing from an erupting volcano until it fills the skies with ash, darkening the Earth forever. The death of his parents when he was a child; Marisa, his wife, dying at the very moment they were most deeply in love; and Eva, her double, whom he loved briefly but with such intensity, and who was now lost somewhere in the world. He longs to find her but is also afraid. Who is she now, after all that has happened? Did she give birth to that child who wasn’t Lascano’s but might as well have been?

A gust of wind blows through the plaza and brings him back to the present. The Tai Chi practitioners gather
their belongings and stand around chatting calmly. Perro stands up and crosses the plaza diagonally toward the service station. In front of Pizzurno Palace a crowd of men and women, dressed in white overalls, are protesting, demanding a raise, waving placards and making a lot of noise. He has allowed himself these moments of sorrow, a brief respite from the tasks in front of him. He has to find Miranda the Mole so he can make the money he needs to find Eva. He remembers her mentioning Brazil, Bahia to be more precise. But the map he looked at showed that, contrary to what he thought, Bahia is not a city but rather a province, and not a small one at that. His search will not be simple and he needs more facts to go on. He must find her parents. Eva talked to him about her childhood in Haedo… or might he have fabricated that memory out of his own desire and what Dandy told him about Miranda? He knows it won’t be easy to find Miranda or Eva’s parents, whether they are in Haedo or elsewhere. But they are the only leads he has.

 

At the foot of the stairs in front of the Palace of Justice a group of young women are dressed in caps and gowns and wearing mortarboards. They are handing out circulars for an information technology course for lawyers. Once in the foyer he consults his watch and sees that he is early. He turns down the corridor toward Lavalle and descends the narrow staircase to the basement, where the coroner’s office is located. A sixty-something-year-old man sits at the reception desk; he is lively and talkative and chews gum and bobs his head up and down like a woodpecker. Lascano stands right in front of him and puts on his best moronic –
boludo
– face.

 

 

As if he had said the magic word, the Woodpecker stops chewing, glues on him a questioning stare and lowers his voice.

 

 

Lascano feels like the world has stopped turning. Is his friend here?

 

 

The man’s head starts bobbing again, as if Lascano weren’t there. Perro understands it’s time to leave; he does an about-face and climbs back up the staircase he just came down. He returns to the elevator and gets in the queue. When Prosecutor Pereyra called, he said he wanted to talk to him about the Biterman case. He was taken aback by that young voice that spoke to him with such familiarity, and to learn that someone had resurrected the case Perro had investigated and which had almost cost him his life. Biterman, a moneylender, had been killed by Pérez Lastra, a poseur who’d fallen on hard times and owed Biterman a lot of money. The moneylender’s own brother was an accomplice. The body was dumped in an abandoned field next to the bodies of some young folks who’d been summarily executed by a death squad commanded by a friend of Lastra’s, Major Giribaldi. But when
Lascano took the lid off, the military creep had his friend and Biterman’s brother killed, and while they were at it, Lastra’s wife and several other witnesses who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most likely, Lascano thought, Pereyra wanted to prosecute Giribaldi for his involvement in those murders. Much of the evidence had disappeared and, best case, though improbable, he might get a short sentence for collusion and obstruction of justice. In the end, all they’d be able to pin on Giribaldi was the help he gave Lastra to dispose of the body; at the time it was impossible to hold that gang of brutal killers he commanded accountable for anything.

 

When Lascano walks into the prosecutor’s office, Pereyra is giving instructions to a young woman with long straight hair wearing what look to him like party clothes. The young man greets him with a friendly gesture, and Lascano can’t help but notice how much things have changed. These offices used to be inhabited by taciturn, musty old bureaucrats, dressed invariably in grey or brown. Now, the old farts are retiring, making way for these eager and multicoloured youths. He wonders if the change is a positive one. The prosecutor himself looks like a kid, or maybe Lascano’s just gotten old. As if he could hear him thinking, Pereyra looks up and straight at him. That’s when Lascano realizes he’s seen this kid before, though he can’t remember where. Pereyra says goodbye to the girl and doesn’t deprive himself of watching – a worthwhile activity – as she leaves. When he realizes that Lascano has caught him in the act, he raises his eyebrows in a show of innocence, complicity and regret. Lascano likes this guy.

 

 

In a flash the face he’s looking at gets superimposed on the face of that young pup who was working as a clerk for Judge Marraco when he was investigating the Biterman case.

 

 

At six o’clock on the dot, Lascano walks up to La Giralda. Just as he’s about to enter, he sees the man he came to meet leaning against the newspaper kiosk, smoking a cigarette. He goes up to him, making an enormous effort not to ask him for one.

 

 

Fuseli’s place is on the corner of Agüero and Córdoba, a small one-room apartment on an enormous rooftop terrace. He opens the door and gets a blast of a damp and musty odour. It’s neat and clean and quiet. A film of dust has left a uniform greyish patina over every object and horizontal surface. He walks across the room and opens the French doors leading onto the terrace. He goes out. The sky is cold, smooth and bright. This is where he and his friend last talked. This is where Fuseli explained his theory about stars and ghosts. He said that many of the stars we see shining in the sky actually burnt out millions of years ago and that what we see now is the light still travelling through space. He said that people also emit radiation. And that, after they die, those waves can still reach the living, like the light from dead stars, and that’s what ghosts are. Lascano shakes his head and a pained smile appears on his face. Fuseli would always pontificate when he smoked pot. He’d go on and on with the wackiest ideas as if they were deep revelations, vastly important insights nobody could afford not to know, truths far and away above daily miseries and petty sorrows.
He made you feel like a microbe, but a marvellous and unique microbe
. The cantina that used to
be on Agüero is gone; it was an awful place, but Fuseli, a gourmet of sorts, inexplicably liked it.
Come on, let’s go to the cantina where you eat crap and it’s expensive and they treat you like shit.
He looks back inside the apartment. His footsteps have left an imprint on the dust on the floor. They are perfect footprints in which you can read the brand and even count the lines on the bottoms of his shoes. Perro figures you should always examine your own footsteps that carried you to this particular present, this exact situation, whatever it may be, fortunate or dreadful, joyous or sorrowful. Then you should ask yourself: how do I feel? The word that takes shape in his head is: abandoned. A shiver runs up and down Lascano’s spine. He goes back inside the apartment. He looks around. The four bookshelves are full of books and photographs. Fuseli’s son is smiling out of a black frame, leaning his head a little to one side and holding a green ball with rough outlines of the continents. He, Lascano, appears in another photo, laughing, sitting and eating with Fuseli and a group of men from the force in a cantina in La Boca. He contemplates those youthful faces, still not brushed by the wings of death, by the corrosive breath of lasting sorrow. He picks up one corner of the quilt over the bed; in one quick movement, he shakes it and lets it fall on the floor, raising a cloud of dust that falls with it, but in slow motion. He lies down on the bed and stares at the ceiling. He’s sick and tired of feeling so alienated, so alone, of listening to his own laments. Sick of it and angry, and the anger fills him with renewed energy, and he decides that the time has come to look for Eva. This is his version of Fuseli’s theory about stars and ghosts: nobody disappears without leaving a trace,
a footprint. Perhaps in this very apartment he’ll be able to find a clue to his friend’s whereabouts, but first, he decides, he’ll pursue every other possibility, because he feels a certain reticence about looking through his things, dissecting his intimacy, digging into his nooks and crannies, meddling in his hidden sorrows and joys, discovering his secret pleasures, uncovering those things he chose not to share with him.