The Foreigners (3 page)

 

 

My new apartment was quiet. There were black-and-white tiles in the hallway. Every now and then a winged cockroach flew through the kitchen. The owner, Olga had told me, had gone to Europe and disappeared. Her brother rented the place out for her now. In the living room was a vine that wanted to creep in the window. “If you let it, you'll have ants,” Olga said. I decided to let it for the moment.

“Are you sure you're going to be all right?” Olga asked on leaving me the day I moved in. I reassured her.

The windows looked out on an abandoned back garden. No one ever went there. To one side was the white wall of the adjacent building. When it rained, water ran down the wall. I would sit there on the chaise lounge staring at the sheen of water for hours.

It was a mammoth building. There was no one in the halls. Sometimes, rarely, I'd hear a key turning. Another time, from the hallway, I heard the sounds of people making love in a somewhat brutal fashion. But the walls were thick. Once I was inside my apartment, I listened again and heard nothing.

I had paid Olga six months in advance. When the phone rang, it would startle me. It was always a wrong number. I felt as if, apart from Olga, nobody knew I was here.

In one of the books Brian had given me, I'd read about nineteenth-century urban plans to build parks or “green lungs” all over Buenos Aires, to ward off the infestations of tuberculosis. The idea was that the disease festered in the tiny cramped quarters with no ventilation where crowds of people lived on top of one another. The green lungs would allow these people open-air spaces where they could escape from their homes and come to sit and breathe. Now it seemed that instead of momentary refuges, people had just settled directly in the parks or plazas. This was new, Olga had told me. The year before there had hardly been a homeless person on the street. Now the square outside my building was full of people huddled, individuals, whole families, camped out, it seemed, permanently, and then right here this empty building.

Around the corner from my house was a church. At Mass hours, especially in the evening, people would be pressing in at the doorway, spilling out, couples, families, teenagers in their coolest clothes casting sidelong glances. One night, post-Mass, I saw a small group gathered on the church steps with baskets of food. I asked what they were doing and a woman, slightly cross-eyed, told me they were going around to feed the homeless. I asked if I could join them and she agreed, taking my hand in hers. It turned out to be an odd venture. As we moved around the streets from one cluster of homeless people to the next, the cross-eyed woman wouldn't let go of my hand. If I dropped hers, she'd find a way to sidle over to me and pick mine up again. Not being able to bear this anymore, I finally broke away and hurried down a side street on my own.

On another corner was a small
parrilla,
or classic Argentine barbecue restaurant, where I'd go sometimes for a meal. I'd sit against the wall by the window. The waiter, a man who must have been in his fifties, with a long face and droopy eyes that showed the lower part of his eyeballs, called me “daughter,” as they sometimes did here. I'd wait for him to call me “daughter” when he was asking for my order or afterward, when he was bringing me the food. It was as if the food, the atmosphere were secondary. I'd come to hear him say that.

At the end of the block was a
locutorio.
The
locutorio,
I'd quickly grasped, was an Argentine institution, a public place lined with phone booths and computers where you could go to write an e-mail or make a call. They were always bustling. Even the cell phone culture hadn't stymied them. You could sit down in the booths. Often there was a mirror. Women, as they were talking, fixed their makeup and hair. People who'd lost their offices during the crash ran their businesses from here, students without computers shacked up to write their papers. Kids sat in rows playing video games. Of course, there were undoubtedly all kinds of illicit things occurring there as well, in the privacy of telephone booths and computer screens. I would go every few days and read my e-mails, from friends, from my mother, from my ex-boss, the botanist. But I rarely lingered. My other life seemed, in all ways, far away.

Thinking it would be good if I met some people, I decided to put up signs at the university offering English classes. The Philosophy and Letters branch, previously a factory building, was far from the center of the city. I went there one afternoon. The entranceway was low and dim. The walls, ceiling to floor, even along the stairs, were papered with bulletins, calls for meetings, political tracts, torn off, recovered, torn again, giving the impression of an entire interior plastered with papier mâché. In the bathrooms, there were no toilet seats and no paper. Rather than carrying books around, the students for the most part carried photocopies. Later, I would learn that this was because books were expensive. I wandered around on the different floors, looking in doorways and posting my own signs.

In the afternoons, I walked. I always took the same route, down the hill to the big avenue. Along the avenue, there were brilliant green patches, grassy spots with trees. Thick pods from the palo borracho trees burst and spread tufts of cotton all over the ground. There were several statues I liked, one of a girl in rough stone, nearly featureless but with curves, sitting and leaning to the side, propping herself up with her hand, another of a faun. He was behind her, up on his hind legs. One night, he appeared in my dream. “I want to suck your armpit,” he said. I walked here almost every day, but then, as sometimes happened when I had nothing to do, I walked on endlessly for hours.

I circled outward into neighborhoods I didn't know, the pale buildings, dark doorways, the plazas with dogs loitering, a fountain not working but half filled with copper-colored rainwater, the clanking buses hurtling by. I'd lose my way completely in streets whose names I didn't know. The whole sky was light. The shadows looked blacker here than anywhere I remembered. I would get walking and wouldn't stop. In the wide dark doorway of a garage a man stood in the center cutting up meat.

As I said, there were often crowds. Sometimes I skirted them, looked and skirted. One time I got caught up. Something happened. We were out in front of the government building. There were policemen with plastic shields, a helicopter overhead. The crowd started to panic, ran. One guy with his pants down was running right toward me. He must have been caught off-guard peeing. I ran too. We were in a square, dodging statues. My heart was racing. There was exhilaration mixed with the fear. People were scrambling, touching, in a way that would have been impossible under any other circumstance. In one moment, we were all rubbing against each other and the next we were dispersed. I found myself spiraling off, into a new neighborhood. I slowed down, catching my breath.

The Jardín Botánico was crawling with cats, hundreds and hundreds of them. They crept over everything, collected, preened.

The city would abruptly change the subject. I had felt this from the start. You were walking along a smooth Palermo street lined with bars and shops and would suddenly stumble into a wasteland, grass and dirt. Or you looked through a doorway into a huge empty hole. It was an unfinished city, but not only that. It seemed interminable, an interminable job. This was also what I liked.

I went to make tea one morning, only to realize that the faucet was dry. I had no water. I called Olga, but was told by her son that she was in New York, on a trip. She loved New York. It was her dream, she had told me, to live there—there people treated you well. I looked for the owner's brother's number. I called and left a message. No response. Having the vaguest understanding of how these things work, I decided to take a look up on the roof. I had a dim memory of a nighttime Seattle rooftop and a water tank there.

I didn't take the elevator but the stairs. I climbed, floor after empty floor. On the fourth floor, there was the sound of a key and then a man standing there, black hair cut close, wearing a raincoat. He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him. I nodded, kept climbing. The stairs gave me confidence, as opposed to the elevator. I heard a burst of classical music—it sounded like a Mahler symphony—coming from below just as I reached the next floor.

After the sixth floor, there was a last, smaller flight of stairs, then a small door leading, as I'd suspected, to the rooftop. It was a clear bright day, a bit cool. I walked out across the roof. There was indeed what looked like a water tank up on a ledge. It sounded like water was running into it right at that moment. I climbed up on the ledge to peer inside. The lid was attached to the tank with wire, only letting me lift it a little bit. But I was right, it was low but filling. The water inside looked dark and wavy. Below the tank was a round, black shape that could have been a pump.

I climbed back down from the ledge. Already while up there, I had felt something. Now I saw what it was. There was a guy looking out over the edge of the rooftop, his back to me. Then he turned and looked over his shoulder. He'd seen me too.

He wore sneakers and corduroys and a shirt with green, red and white stripes, dressed like a kid. He had blondish curls and a mournful expression at odds with his youth. “Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he answered from his distance.

I wasn't sure whether to stay or turn away.

“I never see anyone up here,” he said.

“I never come up here. This is my first time.” I paused. “I came because I don't have any water.”

“You live in this building?” he asked.

“Yeah, I'm renting. Do you?”

“No, no, I just have client meetings here sometimes.” He looked tired, but like a child would look tired, not the actual worn tiredness of an adult. His skin was rosy and gold.

“Really? That's funny. I never see anyone.”

“Yeah, we, my firm, rents a place. So that sucks anyway that you don't have water.”

“I know. Especially since I don't know who to call. There isn't like a super, is there?”

He shrugged, a helpless face. “I never see anyone.”

“I just don't know anything about how water works, like why it would get shut off,” I said. “On the other hand, it seems like there's been some activity. That tank there's filling. And here there's water, or was water, on the ground.”

I pointed to a wide stain of water on the rooftop, not a puddle because it was sunken in, but a stain.

By now he'd approached me. He also looked down at the stain, then, looking up, followed it over to the end of a hose. I went with him and, together, following the hose, we came to where it was attached to one side of a pipe. At the point of attachment was a spigot. We turned it on. Nothing happened. Then a little water trickled out of the hose.

We turned it off again.

“You have no water whatsoever?” he asked.

“None.”

“Hmm. But there's water in the tank?”

“Yeah, it's filling now.”

He stood there, thinking. “I don't know anything about any of this either. But there's someone I know who could help us. I'd have to make a call.”

“Would you?” I asked.

“Sure, but my cell phone's out of juice.”

“You can call from downstairs,” I said.

“I'm Gabriel, by the way,” he said. I put out my hand. He looked surprised and shook it. “Where are you from?” he asked.

“The States.”

“Oh, really? We can speak English if you like,” he said. “I could try. The terrible thing is I can't make jokes in English.” He smiled.

When he smiled, his nose wrinkled up and his teeth showed suddenly, altering his face completely. He looked like a demon, as if there were a demon inside him peeking out its head. Then the smile disappeared just as quickly and the serene mournful expression settled on his face again. He had shadows under his eyes, like the shadows children have.

We entered my apartment. “Oh, wow, this is a weird place,” he said. He was walking down the checkered hall. “Cool. Weird.” We circled through the kitchen—I checked the water again, just in the off shot—then went into the living room.

“Here, the phone's here,” I said.

“This is a guy I know, not that well, he's a client, a plumber and an electrician. He can tell us.”

He called the guy, whose name was Hugo.

I went back into the kitchen and fiddled with the faucet.

Gabriel got off the phone. “Okay, he says first to check the tank—you did that—and then to check all the valves, here in the apartment and up on the roof. They have to be open, which means to the left counterclockwise.” We went around the apartment, looking. I found two valves in the bathroom, another in the kitchen below the sink, all apparently open.

“Okay, now let's check up on the roof,” Gabriel said. This time we took the elevator.

“Do you give English classes?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I'm just starting.”

“Maybe I'll take English classes from you.”

“Really? Great. Why do you want to learn English?” I asked.

He switched to English hesitantly, moving his hands. “For work, for my work,” he said.

We were on the roof again, walking across it. The stain looked smaller, as if it had dried somewhat in the sun.

“What do you do?”

He returned to Spanish. “Well, I was studying medicine, to be a doctor, but then when the crash came, I had to stop and find a job. I've been mostly working as a messenger, you know, for a company that delivers things. They give you one of those little bikes.” We had arrived at the water tank. “Okay, now Hugo said there should be a valve around here, just below by the pump.”