The Foreigners (11 page)

“The hunt is on,” Leonarda said.

I tried to suppress a giggle. I had never done anything like this before.

She looked over her shoulder, then back. “I don't want to wound him right away. This is just about letting him know that I'm out there, that I'm after him. I want him to start getting scared.

“Oh, wait, lipstick,” she said. She got out a mirror and a lipstick tube and began reapplying a deep red. She had already explained to me that lipstick was meant to represent blood on the mouth of women, making them attractive.

“Why would that make them attractive?” I had asked.

“It goes back to primal times, when a red mouth showed you were lucky and healthy, having just devoured prey.”

Was this hunting metaphor actually getting us anywhere? I wondered, as I applied more lipstick too. Yet in another part of my brain, I heard drumbeats. I pictured us strapping on weapons. We resumed walking. We were two against one, but she didn't see it that way.

“I don't need you here,” she said. “I want you here. I can handle the guy perfectly well on my own.”

We reached the far side of the yellow passage and stepped out into a garden. Ivy covered the walls. There was a bathtub to one side full of water, with goldfish flitting around inside. Champagne was being served on a table along the wall. A white stone staircase led upward from the garden to the second floor. Leonarda stood, a bit slouched in her high heels, checking out the scene. She suddenly changed her posture and moved into action. This was the point where her social fears, her pathological shyness, collided with her ambition. The shock could yield some interesting results. “Come on,” she said, “let's check who's here.”

We got glasses of champagne and climbed the staircase so we could look down from the terrace above. She pointed out heads, trashy history writer, novelist, filmmaker, right-wing journalist, backs of heads, tops of heads, a face just turning, dark, gray, curly.

“Okay, I'm bored,” Leonarda said. She turned around. The house rose up behind us. “Come on, let's look inside.”

From the terrace we stepped into several large, open rooms, where the Allemand family used to entertain. There was a DJ set up beside the piano, a service area to one side. Above on the wall was a projection of a large rose-like flower, pink, white, red, circling slowly.

A set of steep stairs led to the next floor. It was darker here, quiet. This was where the family had had their private rooms, slept, dressed. We went through a door, then crept down a hall past a bathroom. We heard giggling voices. A couple in a corner room was smoking a joint. We passed through. In the adjacent room we stopped. A dark window looked down on the garden, a whole other view. We were high up here. Vines bounced in the wind.

“We have to go back down there,” Leonarda said, as if it were a condemnation.

“Do we?” I asked. “Why?”

I felt it too, dread.

She looked at me. She didn't have her glasses on. She had her exposed look, then didn't.

“Because we have to,” she said. “The plan dictates that we have to. Come.” She took my hand in her little hot one. We went back downstairs. “Let's smoke,” she said.

We asked a woman at one of the tables inside for a cigarette and stepped out on the terrace to smoke.

Down below was a cluster of people posing for a photo op. “That's the artistic literary establishment, though they'd never call themselves that,” Leonarda said. “In their minds, they're still the avant-garde. He belongs there too.”

“Where is he?”

“He's not there. He must be preening for his prize.”

There was an announcement at the back of the garden, a woman at a microphone.

“This is a show event, you realize. The prize is all rigged,” Leonarda said.

We were watching from above. The bald head appeared, glinting. “There he is,” Leonarda said. She seemed to rise up like some animal. The guy stepped out, receiving the prize. But it was like on a battlefield, you couldn't see anything, a blur of movement, a body part in the way, then just in front of you a head looming, it ducked, you had a squinted view into the distance, but then there were people moving one way in a herd, stopping, turning, forced the other way.

Though we couldn't see him, we could hear his voice now. The prize, he received it, was accepting. His voice was remarkable, as everyone knew. He'd done radio, television, politics, literature. “He's done everything, everything,” Leonarda said. “That's the whole point of him.”

And then it was over, dispersion, milling.

“We need to meet him.” She was thinking. I could see it, I had faith in it, entirely, the rapid firing of her brain. “He's going to go off somewhere now with his friends. We have to find ourselves where he is.” She spotted a cluster of people down below. “We have to step into the inner circle,” she said.

“The inner circle?”

“I'm sure they've reserved one of those upstairs rooms.”

I felt that our lives had gotten suddenly complicated, after that glorious position of floating above.

“We do?” I asked.

“Yes, we do.” She seemed nervous, even full of trepidation, but also eager.

We were approaching the inner circle, we'd already greeted some of them in passing. Now we were getting nearer, plucking fresh glasses of champagne on the way, standing, installing ourselves.

“Are you naked under that coat?” a woman asked Leonarda.

“She's important, the Madame of the social group,” Leonarda whispered afterward to me. “That's her husband, a filmmaker,” she said, nodding toward the handsome, younger man standing just left of the Madame's shadow.

Oh, but soon, he'd arrive, the monster. Soon we'd all be gathered here, the monster in our midst.

I turned to look and, lo and behold, there he was, tall, chest puffed out, the shiny head. He had some scars on his face. His language was absurdly eloquent, his eyes sad. He had just won the prize, the biggest prize for literature in the country. He was probably more puffed up than usual.

Where were we going, now that he was here?

We were with them, following them up the stairs. We made it to the upstairs room, on the corner, overlooking the garden. It was small, crowded now with all of us inside. There were red plush couches and chairs.

Yes—the inner circle all looked at each other—finally we're alone.

Leonarda and I were being tolerated as anomalies. But, faced with the challenge, not of the group but of this man, Leonarda was in her prime.

We sat down for drinks at a table.

I was talking to the handsome husband. On her side, Leonarda was directing herself to the others, and most precisely to the prizewinner. He was sitting, his long thin legs out of sight under the table, his body puffed out. Leonarda faced him, talking.

Then she was saying it—it was her line—others listening. “The Left has behaved so cowardly. When are they going to examine their own actions? It's disgusting, it's degrading, the way they take on the victim role. We're all waiting, my whole generation is waiting, for some act of recognition, that would represent true valor. We want heroes we can believe in, not these sniveling wretches. Oh—” She paused and covered her mouth with her hand, looking at him. She giggled. “Well, anyway, that's what I believe.”

There was silence. No one spoke. The prizewinning leftist looked at her bedazzled. He was the one to answer, who was supposed to know the answer, the war hero, yet he was speechless before her. She knew it. Never had she been so powerful. It was in her face, eyes, the tilt of her head, the way she held her shoulders, her whole delicate frame. Then the moment passed. He rose, puffed up again, laughed at her.

Still the door had been opened, the moment occurred. She turned to me. Triumph, her green eyes fiercely glowed green. Looking back at her, I too felt it, a mixture of exhilaration and the chills.

Okay, tell me more,” Gabriel said. We were in my apartment. He had had a long night and was lying back on the chaise lounge. I had been telling him about the Master Plan.

“Do you know this guy?” I asked, referring to the famous writer.

“Of course I know him. Everyone knows him. There's no way
not
to know him.” He seemed amused, indulgent, if a bit wary. “So the plan is to hunt him down?”

“Yeah. Can you believe it? I've never done anything like this before,” I said.

“Me neither,” he said. “I'm wondering how it works. And what the end result's supposed to be?”

“We catch him, I guess.” I laughed. “I don't really know. You're the one who said I should try everything.”

“You're right, I did.” He thought for a second. His face, tired like this, had its mournful look. “This Leonarda sounds very compelling.”

I flushed. “She is.”

He hesitated, looking down, then up again. “I guess my only point would be to make sure you're trying things for yourself, not other people.”

I was surprised at how little he seemed to understand. “But I am, don't you see? All this is entirely new to me.”

He backed off. “Yeah, yeah, I understand. I'm not saying not to do anything. My only advice would be to keep your mind free.”

His wariness seemed weird, especially coming from the apostle of freedom. But, I decided, it was probably just his mood.

 

 

We're preparing to send a second installment of funds at the end of the month. Please let us know how you're progressing.” Shit. The grant people. It was September. I'd been here for six months. The agreement was that they'd send me the second installment of funds halfway through, once they'd received a brief progress report. If they didn't send the money, I was in trouble. But I also hadn't done any research for a while. I decided to check out the Riachuelo, the river, notoriously contaminated, that marks the line between Buenos Aires and the suburbs in the south.

I looked at a map and got on a bus that seemed like it would take me to the Barracas neighborhood, bordered on one side by the river. The bus wound on and on through the city on what seemed to be an incongruous path. Apart from a slight feeling of wooziness, I didn't mind once I got a seat by the window. I had brought some reading with me about the river and the areas around it. I looked at it as we rode along.

This neighborhood, in the southern part of the city, had once been home to the wealthy, I read, until the yellow fever epidemic chased them north. The servants, largely black, stayed behind and were wiped out, another reason, along with the black troops sent off to fight the Paraguayan War, that the black population in Argentina, once sizable, had been so decimated.

As for the pollution of the Riachuelo, it seemed that it was hardly new news. As far back as the 1870s, the British engineer Bateman, hired to tackle the port problem, expressed horror at its filthiness and even cited it as an obstacle to the reconstruction of the port. The resultant “city of Bateman” plan traced a blueprint for the modern city of Buenos Aires with its storm drain and sewer systems and—this part was new to me—underground streams. In the 1940s, the construction of a web of subterranean rivers began. There was a striking photo in a brochure I had picked up from the Palace of Waters of men at the end of an underground tunnel leaning on their shovels. I looked up, gazed out the window, then down again at the map of subterranean waterways, many under streets I walked every day, oblivious of the secret water city underneath.

Had I missed my stop? I went to ask the driver, who told me it was the next one, a bus terminal, the end of the line. The river wasn't immediately in sight. I started walking one way, felt I was definitely off track and turned the other way. There was a chainlink fence, a jacaranda tree. Then I saw it, a glimpse. I was coming up on a bridge, small, cement, with sidewalks on either side for pedestrians. I stepped onto the bridge and walked out to the middle. The water below was moving slowly, almost curling, like molasses. On the banks were mudflats. Trash littered the flats. The smell was not so bad here or the wind was just right, I wasn't getting it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something floating, near the right shore, a russet-colored shape, familiar. Then I understood, it was a dog's back, most likely an entire dog, its legs hanging down out of sight.

I looked across the bridge. I knew the city ended here. The Riachuelo was the limit. In the distance, on the other side, I saw people walking on the streets, some carrying bags, out shopping. There was smoke rising, a smell of something burning. I decided to go across. I crossed and began walking up the street. I passed a supermarket, stores. I stopped in front of a hairdresser's and looked in the window, then stepped inside.

 

 

I'd never had an elaborate beauty regimen, but would regularly get a haircut and have my eyebrows plucked. I'd noticed that morning that my eyebrows needed work. In the States, my hairdresser had plucked my eyebrows too. But this time, when I asked about eyebrows, I was sent to the back, the waxing area. A woman in her late forties, with short dark hair and a round face, greeted me, introducing herself as Vera.

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

“Eyebrows,” I said.

She patted a high vinyl bed with a large sheet of paper over it. “Lie down here,” she said. In one corner were metal bowls of hot wax and a spatula.

She had an accent. “Where are you from?” I asked.

“Belarus. You?”

“The States. The U.S.”

Her Spanish was good, if quirky, as was mine, only our variety of quirkiness was different. Still, we managed to communicate pretty well.