The Buenos Aires Quintet (33 page)

‘Murderers or their accomplices. Nobody is innocent.’

Suddenly Alma sees the women selling their wares as accomplices to a crime. She stares at all the victims, especially the whole fish on slabs, imagines their quiet or thrashing deaths. Closes her eyes.

‘How horrible! If you look at it like that, we’re in a cemetery.’

‘But these are the dead without burial. Their burial is here and here.’

He points to his head and stomach.

‘I’ll never eat animals again.’

‘But is it any better to kill plants? Have you seen the face of a stick of celery when it’s pulled from the ground? Some botanists say plants scream when they die.’

Alma stares at Carvalho as though he is the messenger of death.

‘Did you come here to give yourself a fright?’

‘I was already scared. Font y Rius has been playing games again, and he’s brought Raúl back into the eye of the storm.’

They walk back to Carvalho’s apartment, his bag full of death, his head full of plans for cooking.

‘It’s only by cooking that we can disguise tragedy and horror.’

Alma describes the talk she had with Font y Rius, but Carvalho seems uninterested in anything to do with Raúl. He is staring at the rain drizzling outside the windows. Alma is sitting opposite him with a
mate
gourd in her hands. Carvalho is cupping a glass of whisky on the rocks, amazed at the persistence of this Argentine monsoon.

‘It’s done nothing but rain for weeks. It reminds me of the rains in Ranchipur. I’m so old I can remember the version of
The Day the Rains Came
with Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power. Have you any idea who Myrna Loy was? I wonder what the weather’s like in Barcelona?’

‘The sooner you find Raúl, the sooner you’ll be able to go home. You’re like ET. Home! Home!’

‘Font y Rius is off his head. He would be a psychiatrist, wouldn’t he? But what about my cousin? Why is he playing Russian roulette like this? And who told you you would find me in the market?’

‘Don Vito. He was very pleased that cretin asked you for help. That son of a bitch who passes himself off as Borges’ son.’

‘None of my clients are sons of bitches.’

‘Well, he is. He’s trying to destroy the old man’s reputation, to tarnish his image.’

‘Why are you so worried about the image of a reactionary like him? He made short shrift of you revolutionaries, and applauded the dirty war.’

‘Who didn’t applaud the dirty war? Even some of our own comrades did. We said: let them come and get us! That way they’ll show the true nature of this fascist regime.’

‘Arrogance in arms.’

‘If we were arrogant, what was the system? Anyway, within fifty years Borges will be read just as a writer, not as an ideologue. Who nowadays is bothered by the fact that Virgil was Octavius Augustus’ arselicker? Or that Defoe was a miserable police informer, or Verlaine a poor wretch?’

‘I never got as far as Virgil. I’ve only read Jules Verne.’

‘That’s a lie. And just because you pretend you’re not cultured, that’s no reason to try to do down Borges. To do down his memory is to humiliate all of us who need it. We need at least to believe in the magic of our creators.’

Carvalho takes Alma by the arm, to try to calm her down.

‘That’s enough, I believe you. But my job is my job. D’you say all this kind of thing in your university classes?’

‘I said exactly the same this morning to my students. I’ve only got a few truths and a few rights left, but one of them is to choose my own brand of cultural necrophagy.’

Carvalho reaches into one of his shopping bags and pulls out the lifeless corpse of a huge fish. When he sees the look of sheer disgust on Alma’s face, he quickly drops it back inside.

‘Don’t I have the right to choose the bodies I eat?’

The Captain is wearing a Nike tracksuit as he performs sit-ups with weights on a mat in his office. A computer and files rather than books; a punchbag, a pulley, a rope hanging down from the ceiling like an upside-down snake. Muriel comes running in, arms full of books. She bends down to give him a kiss on the cheek in mid-sit-up.

‘Are you running or flying?’

‘I’ll be late for university. I don’t want to miss my class.’

By now the Captain has got up and is drying his sweaty face with a towel, but still flexing his legs.

‘Which class is it?’

‘Our lecturer Modotti promised she’d talk to us about Borges. She told us about the fake son who’s appeared, and said she’d talk to us about the
Universal History of Infamy.
Did you see there’s this asshole who’s passing himself off as Borges’ son?’

‘Asshole? Is that the kind of language they teach you at university?’

‘He’s a joker. We have to keep our respect for true creators. It’s the only magic we have left. The magic of poets.’

‘But there are dangerous poets who infect the blood with the virus of destruction and self-destruction. Some of the subversives were poets. Urondo, Gelman. At least, they called themselves poets, but a poet has to be constructive.’

‘I love Gelman! I haven’t read any Urondo yet, but I really like Gelman!’

‘You’ve read people like that?’

Muriel runs out of the room. As he watches her go, the tender smile on the Captain’s face gradually freezes. He goes over to the punchbag and starts to hit it. His blows become harder and harder as he starts to shout: ‘Magic, magic...magic!’

Muriel rushes to catch a bus, but her watch tells her she is still going to be late. She grows increasingly impatient as the bus nears the city centre and gets stuck behind a crowd of people in the street. When she looks out of the bus window, Muriel sees Borges Jr. on the pavement, enjoying a new-found importance that is confirmed by the passers-by who turn to stare at him as if they recognize him from the television. But the crowd is due to a van with a loudspeaker in the road that is crawling along beside Ariel. A threatening voice can be heard over the loudspeaker:

‘That peacock strutting along the pavement claims he is the son of the greatest Argentine writer of all time. He is an impostor who can only exist in an Argentina full of impostors. In the name of our great Borges: spit in the face of the impostor!’

The bus sweeps Muriel’s astonishment away with it, while Borges Jr. first of all hears the threat as if it had nothing to do with him, then belatedly starts to walk more quickly. An old woman stops and spits at him. Ariel speeds up, pursued by the stares of other passers-by and by the van, which is still calling on them to ‘spit in the face of the impostor’. Eventually he breaks into a run, and scurries several blocks before coming to a panting halt at the doorway to Carvalho’s apartment block. His bulk makes it hard for him to climb the stairs, and by the time he reaches Carvalho’s front door, he is out of breath yet again. He tries to get his breath and his calm back, and finally pushes open the office door. Carvalho is at the far side behind his desk, and Borges Jr. has just enough breath left to walk over to the window beside him, and overcome his fatigue by staring down at the traffic and people in the street below.

‘My father wrote in
El Aleph: “
This city is so horrible, that merely by existing and persisting through time, even though in the middle of a secret desert, it pollutes the past and the future and in some way compromises the stars. For as long as it persists, no one in the world can be valiant or happy...” Doesn’t that sound like a premonition and at the same time a description of Buenos Aires today?’

‘All cities pollute the past and the future. Cities and people.’

‘I remembered what you told me the other day about your cousin. Papa was a deliberately hermetic writer, and in another fragment from
El Aleph
there might be a clue to your case. Your cousin is like Ulysses, who returns to Ithaca and finds nothing is like it was, isn’t that right? Perhaps Penelope has simply undone all her weaving, and Telemachus is either dead or is still in hiding. Homer tells the protagonist of
El Aleph
that, like Ulysses, he lived for a century in the city of the immortals, that city which pollutes the past and the future.’

Carvalho reacts with surprise at this, and Borges Jr. falls silent.

‘So?’

‘So there will come a moment when your cousin makes the same discovery as Cartaphilus: “As the end draws near, no images of memory survive: all that’s left are words.”’

‘There is something in that. Recently my cousin has been writing anonymous letters, but at least he is writing. His memories have run out. That’s why he’s become aggressive. He wants to stir things up, to cause trouble. No. He doesn’t want to die. He wants to come back to life. He is attacking all those who betrayed him. He’s even writing to some Japanese. He is entering the modern world. And there’s no modernity without the Japanese.’

‘My father wrote things about Arabs and the Chinese, but I can’t recall anything about the Japanese.’

‘Was your father ever interested in livestock feed?’

‘Never!’

With his eyes and a wooden spoon, the chef is busy stirring the contents of various pans lined up on a xylophone of burners. In the staff changing-room next to the kitchen, four waiters are dressing as butlers with spare, practised gestures that give them the appearance of a group of Buster Keaton look-alikes. A bell rings. It is the service door, and as one of the waiters opens it wearily, he almost falls into Don Vito’s embrace.

‘Lorenzo? You are Lorenzo, aren’t you?’

Don Vito will not take the man’s silent no for an answer, and rapidly squeezes himself inside, asking again: ‘Well, but Lorenzo is here, isn’t he?’

The waiter is unimpressed.

‘We’re all called James here.’

He turns his head towards the others.

‘Anyone here called Lorenzo?’

One of the other three waiters lifts his head without much enthusiasm.

‘Yes, me. My name is Lorenzo.’

Don Vito pushes into the room, arms open to give another embrace to the real Lorenzo. When he sees the three men dressed exactly the same, he pauses, but keeps his arms out as he identifies the least bored-looking of the three.

‘Lorenzo!’

‘Vito?’

‘The very same.’

Don Vito embraces him, and Lorenzo begins to remember who he is, while he is being dragged off to talk alone with him.

‘Can’t we go somewhere more private?’

‘The problem is that this place is going to be in an uproar in a minute, and the club members may be off their heads, but they are very demanding.’

The other three men are already patrolling the kitchen in their butler uniforms, and in the changing-room Don Vito has to appeal to Lorenzo to keep quiet when he explodes at the detective’s suggestion.

‘But...d’you know what you’re asking me to do? This is one of the most private of private clubs. How am I supposed to let you see the club files?’

Don Vito is a picture of nostalgia as he puts his arm round the other man’s shoulder.

‘D’you remember when you used to smuggle stuff and I watched your back? Altofini, your wife used to say, give Lorenzo a hand, he’s always getting into trouble.’

‘That’s precisely why I don’t want any now. The club members are dangerous people. True gentlemen, but very dangerous. They’re either in power or friends of the powerful, one hundred per cent oligarchy, and I don’t know what their real game is. To live out literature, they say. To play the fool, I say. But when they take their masks off, they’re real bastards, cannibals. I’m called James, like the other three, and that’s how I want it to stay.’

‘Just a little glance at the files, Lorenzo. For old times’ sake.’

Lorenzo weighs Don Vito up, from perhaps a very personal view of what he is worth.

‘I pay my debts, but I’m repaying you not because you helped me stay out of trouble, but because you screwed my wife and gave me the chance to get rid of her, the old bat. I couldn’t stand her any more, the Valkyrie.’

Touched by this confession, and anxious to cement the bond between them, Don Vito puts his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

‘To be frank with you, Lorenzo, I couldn’t stand her either.’

‘Now get out, and take this key with you. After midnight, this place is deserted.’

It is more like a quarter-past twelve when the door connecting the changing-room to the kitchen opens again. Don Vito tiptoes through the room. He emerges into a hall leading to the downstairs rooms of the El Aleph club, and guides himself thanks to the dim glow of emergency lights. He takes a piece of paper from his pocket and studies the plan drawn on it. He climbs the stairs to the first floor. Then he heads for the door he wants, checks on the paper it is the right one, and is just about to go in when he hears what sounds like a cough coming from an unknown source. He stiffens, waiting for a confirmation of the sound, but nothing happens, so he steps inside the room.

Once he is in the office, he can no longer hear how a second coughing sound from the room next door confirms the first one, nor see how a group of club members are clustered there expectantly. They are dressed like boxers from the early twentieth century: baggy pants, shirts with horizontal stripes, heavy leather gloves, hair parted in the middle and plastered down with brilliantine, moustaches in the style of the King of England or the Tsar of Russia. There is only one butler present: Lorenzo. He tells them triumphantly: ‘The son of a bitch is in the office.’

The boxers are anxious to get on with it: they prance around on tiptoe, throw punches in the air. The chairman gives his verdict: ‘It’s time to give him his just desserts.’

The posse of boxers leaves the room. They look more military than sporting. As he watches them leave, Lorenzo’s face takes on the imperturbable smile of James. But his teeth are bared, and he snarls as he says: ‘Vito Altofini, now you’ll have something to remember this cuckold by’

Afterwards, Don Vito can scarcely recall that he had already opened the filing cabinet drawers, had taken out the files he was interested in, and had even put his glasses on to read them by the light of a little torch Madame Lissieux had given him.

That is because the door suddenly flies open and four boxers of the old school advance towards him, thumping their gloves and breathing heavily. Don Vito tries to regain control of the situation, but his words lack conviction: ‘This is all a misunderstanding.’