The Woman from Uruguay Read online

  “What are you going to do?”

  “About what?”

  “Tonight, Lucas, what are you going to do, are you going back?”

  “Yeah, I guess so, I have my passport. I can go back.”

  “Do you want me to lend you money so you can take a taxi?”

  “No need. I have some money in my pocket.”

  When we got to the corner where the police station was, Guerra asked me if I could report the theft on my own because she had to get to her meeting.

  “Go, I’ll be fine.”

  “If anything comes up just go to an internet café and send me an email, or get a phone card. I’ll send you an email with my number and the number at my dad’s place right now. If you want to stay there tonight, you’re more than welcome.”

  “Thank you.”

  We hugged, exchanged the quickest peck like faces bouncing off each other, and I watched her walk away. She turned around and blew me a kiss. The most beautiful thief in the world. That’s what I thought when I started walking again, I wondered if maybe she hadn’t wanted to go into the police station with me. Was that possible? I walked. Was that really possible? Had that been her plan? I looked over my shoulder: Guerra was gone.

  On my last trip I’d told her I’d be back to take out money. She knew. “Were you able to take care of your errands?” she had asked me that afternoon, almost as soon as we met up. Later she saw my money belt when I was getting my tattoo, she had a heated conversation with someone over the phone, she took me to the beach, she undid my pants … In just a few steps on the street a thousand images connected in my mind. Was it her boyfriend who had robbed me? Was she acting? Was it all an act? That whole afternoon? Did she cry on the beach because she was betraying me? I thought about that tiny pause, that silence when they kicked me a second time. Had it been Guerra giving them the sign to leave? A sign of “that’s enough, don’t hit him anymore.” Was it Guerra directing the whole thing? Was she the boss of those two guys? I imagined her stopping them with a single tiny gesture, then telling them to scram, with simply a movement of her eyes. The boss.

  “How can I help you?” asked the policeman standing in the door.

  I looked at him.

  “I doubt you can,” I said and kept walking.

  TEN

  I stood there at a corner not knowing which way to go. I have rarely been so lost. I knew where I was but didn’t know where I was going. My immediate future was complete confusion. I could go to the Radisson and throw myself out the window on the twentieth floor, although it might have been one of those anti-suicide, anti-smoking windows they seal shut. I could also sleep there until I decided what to do. I could leave that night for Brazil with the money I had in my pocket, flee from everything, from you, from myself, from my son, my house, my inexplicable idiocy, and live my life instead of writing it. Start a new life there, work … But what the fuck was I going to do in Brazil? I was in a choose-your-own-adventure moment, and all the adventures I had in mind ended badly. I also didn’t understand the recent past, because I didn’t know what exactly had happened to me. The possibility that Guerra was to blame brought about a total retrospective uncertainty in me. I was lost in time. All I could do was step on my present, on my shadow, be still there. The rest was vertigo.

  I don’t know how long I stood in place. Until a ragged-looking guy approached, with his wild mane of hair, his teeth in ruins, his many bags. I didn’t see him until he was right in front of me. He said:

  “Play one for the papooses.”

  “I don’t know how to play it,” I said, looking at the ukulele. “I just got it.”

  “You’ll have to learn. So we can all dance,” said the guy and took a few dance steps with his pants half falling off.

  I crossed the street, walked down the sidewalk like a deer in headlights. Simple motion was drawing me out of my autism. “You’ll have to learn.” That was true. I remembered Enzo and went in the direction of his house.

  It was on Fernández Crespo, almost at the corner. Closer than I’d realized. I found the door to the street but didn’t know what apartment he was. I thought he was on the fifth floor, but I wasn’t sure. I looked up. From the sidewalk I shouted:

  “Enzo! Enzo!”

  A woman appeared.

  “It’s Lucas!” I said.

  A minute later Enzo came to the same window, naked, giving me the salute President Perón used to give from the balcony when he would raise both his open hands over his head like he was giving the dimensions of the enormous fish he caught one time, and he shouted:

  “The Dutch! I’ll be right down.”

  He came down in a loose shirt, long pants, and sandals. Slight, with a decisive step, balder than the last time, ears withering, an attitude that was in between relaxed and dangerous, a backwater Yoda. We hugged. By the time we had gotten up to his apartment, I had told him everything.

  A woman who must have been around forty opened the door for us. She had light-colored eyes. I didn’t recognize her.

  “They jumped him,” Enzo said.

  “You were robbed?” she asked in alarm.

  I had to tell the story all over again. In more detail, between offers of coffee, explanations about the ukulele, the offered possibility of calling Buenos Aires. I could have called you on the home phone, Cata, but I didn’t know what I was going to tell you yet. Enzo served me coffee in a glass cup. I added some sugar. Was this woman Enzo’s daughter, a student, or his new girlfriend?

  “That is so strange, because people don’t really get robbed like that at the Ramírez,” she said.

  “They followed him!” Enzo said and turned to me. “They targeted you. They waited until you were in a place where there weren’t so many people.”

  “They followed me the whole afternoon? When I left the bank I went down the street that runs behind the Solís Theatre, there wasn’t anyone around, and I was sitting at the Santa Catalina restaurant for a while, too, with no one around … They could have robbed me there.”

  “They’re professionals,” said Enzo. “You can’t outsmart them.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought that after that much time they’d still be following me.”

  “Now, tell me … what were you doing on your own on the beach with all that cash? Who would dream of doing such a thing?” Enzo scolded me.

  I didn’t mention Guerra. To protect her, to protect myself. From that moment on I would have been on my own at the beach, sitting in the sand, watching the guys jumping and flying in the waves as they kitesurfed. I could erase Guerra from the whole movie. Me having lunch on my own at the restaurant, on my own on the street, on my own at the shopping arcade, at the music store … It could have been the tattoo artist who arranged it, he saw me with the money belt, too, or maybe his brother because I paid for the ukulele in dollars. Even the kid at the Radisson could have done it, or someone from the bank. It could even have been random. I would have had my shirt raised up, partly exposing the money belt, when I was lying in the sand. Or if it was Guerra’s boyfriend, he could have followed her, he might be angry with her, he might have gotten revenge by hitting me and taking everything I had. Maybe he’d seen the emails, maybe he knew about me. Why not him?

  I sat in silence before my coffee. I started answering everything in monosyllables.

  “Do you want to rest for a while?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to wash up a little? You’ve got sand on your face.”

  I went to the bathroom. I did have sand on my face, in my hair. I looked like I’d been in an accident, knocked down by some rough happenstance of fate. I tried to get it off in the sink but couldn’t, and I was getting sand everywhere. I opened the door a crack and said:

  “Enzo, I’m going to take a quick shower.”

  “Of course, no problem,” he said. “The blue towel is clean.”

  I got undressed and got under the stream of cold water that gradually warmed up. I thought about Guerra, when she had snuggle
d up to me and told me that I was good for her, and how I shielded her and protected her with my body while continuing to walk. Now the water was hot. Steam was rising. Suddenly I surprised myself by bursting into tears. It had been a long time since I’d cried. Leaning against the tiles, trying to stifle my whimpers, biting my arm. You cried sitting at the kitchen counter, Maiko cries every day, the stiff-legged lady the Evangelist on the bus helped forgive cried, and both Guerra and her friend who betrayed her cried. We all cry. In tears “that gather downward to the sea / We know as Death,” Manrique might say. I never cry, less so out of sadness. Love makes me cry, tenderness. I cried because I thought of Guerra and realized I was never going to see her again, I refused to believe that her tenderness wasn’t real, and I felt your love, too, Catalina, beyond the shadow of a doubt, and the love of my child wrapped around me holding on to my neck when he doesn’t want me to leave. And Enzo’s hospitality, his blue towel. When someone attacks you, you get more alert, as if you were alone in the world, and when out of nowhere someone treats you nicely, you let your guard down, and you fall apart. Tenderness is what really knocks you down.

  I had to go back to Buenos Aires. I knew that.

  I dried off and got dressed. I could feel that crying had cleared up my chest, but I noticed that when I breathed deeply, my ribs hurt on the left side.

  “I left a sand dune in the bathroom.”

  “Don’t you worry,” said Enzo. “Have a seat. Clarita, there’s an orange cake in the pantry.”

  “I’ll bring it right out,” she said, getting up.

  Clara was a beautiful woman, definitely around my age. She seemed relaxed, slightly tousled, with a peace in her voice like she was high on the endorphins of a recent orgasm. Had I interrupted something when I’d shouted from the street? Enzo looked the same way, but Enzo always looked like that. She definitely wasn’t his daughter. That was for sure.

  When we were alone, he asked me:

  “How much money did they get?”

  “Fifteen thousand dollars.”

  “Fuck.”

  “It was the money I got for two books, columns for Milenio and a novel for Astillero.”

  “In Spain?”

  “Yeah. I have to turn them both in in May. With the dollars I was going to have about nine months to work. And I would have paid off my debts. I owe everybody money. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Have you started the novel?”

  “No. I was going to start it now.”

  Clara came back with the cake. Enzo was still thinking. Finally he said:

  “You have to be careful with Montevideo. Montevideo will kill you without a second thought. Every now and then it does, just lays somebody out. Look at Fogwill.”

  “Fogwill died in Buenos Aires.”

  “Yeah, but days after coming here, where the cold got him. And what about the one from the Orsai magazine, what was his name?”

  “Casciari.”

  “He had a heart attack here in Montevideo, barely lived to tell the tale. There is something like a Bermuda Triangle here, it’s not to be underestimated. It’s kind of the B-side of the River Plate, the side that’ll eat you right up. If you can’t handle it, it’ll kill you. You have to be careful with Uruguay, especially if you come thinking it’s like the countryside in Argentina only everybody’s good, there’s no corruption, no Peronism, you can smoke pot on the street, the cute little country where everyone is a good person and friendly and all that bullshit. If you’re not paying attention, Uruguay will fuck you in the ass.”

  “Enzo!” said Clara.

  “That’s how it is, my love, that’s how it is. Just think of the Maracanaço on the Brazilians.”

  Clara went into the kitchen.

  “Don’t underestimate these Charrúas,” Enzo said to me quietly so she wouldn’t hear.

  He showed me purple marks on his shoulder, which looked like tooth marks.

  “They’re biters …”

  Enzo, counting on his fingers, enumerated:

  “The rugby players who ate their friends in the accident in the Andes, the Indians who ate Solís, the Suárez shark that bit that Italian, this one,” he said pointing to the kitchen. “It’s no coincidence. They are not to be underestimated. They took a bite out of you, too.”

  I stayed silent, eating the cake.

  “Although they did you a favor, Dutch. That dough was poisoned, that’s why you let them jump you like that. You didn’t feel like it belonged to you.”

  “Don’t therapize me.”

  “I’m not therapizing you, but you’ve got to see this as a liberation. You were going to have to write a thousand-page tome just to pay off your debt. Nobody should write like that.”

  “It wasn’t a debt, it was time, that money was time to write without having to take another shitty job.”

  “I would not have read the mess you could have written with all that dough in all those months. Who ever heard of paying for books that haven’t been written yet?”

  He looked at me and continued:

  “I promise you it isn’t envy, or maybe it is a little, but books have to be written, that’s the first step, and then you decide how much they’re worth. As Girondo said, you polish them like diamonds and then you sell them like a string of sausages. You they paid for diamonds, yet you would have twirled a string of sausages at them in return.”

  “How am I supposed to write with my kid dangling from my balls, reading ten thousand students at once, teaching classes? How the fuck am I supposed to write like that?”

  “Write about that.”

  “About what?”

  “About that, what you’re telling me, what’s happening now in this situation.”

  “Now’s not the time to play the Zen master.”

  I got up and looked out the open window. You could see far: the roofs, the antennas, the lights of the houses that were starting to gleam. It was getting dark. I looked at his overflowing library. His books were like mine are now, in double rows on the shelves.

  “You’re going to go back to poetry, Dutch. You’re too angry still to know it. The anger will have to pass.”

  “But what am I going to do? All I have is the five hundred dollars I exchanged into Uruguayan pesos, and I already spent some of that on whiskey. I was supposed to pay off my debts, pay back my wife, the preschool, the insurance, a thousand other things. She’s waiting for me to get back with that money so we can patch up all those holes.”

  “How many pesos do you have left?”

  “I don’t know. Five thousand, something like that.”

  “I know it’s not great timing, but could you lend me three thousand, and I’ll give it back to you in two weeks when I go over there?”

  I looked at him with a straight face, and he looked at me with a smile. I burst out laughing. Enzo laughed, too:

  “I’ll give it back to you with interest in two weeks. My pension comes next week.”

  I handed him two bills, and he said:

  “The world isn’t for guys like you and me. That whole thing about dating all the girls, earning all the money, blowing it, owning fancy cars. We can’t pull it off. You can’t because deep down you don’t want to. You’d rather be melancholic just like me. Surplus value makes you uncomfortable.”

  “Stop lecturing me.”

  “Done. I’ll be quiet.” He watched me stand there. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go to the port.”

  “Do you have enough for the taxi?”

  “I think so. If I don’t hit any other little tolls …”

  “I’ll give it back to you in Buenos Aires, we’ll get a pizza at Pin-Pun. I’ll take you out. Now, go back, get some sleep, tell your wife what happened …”

  “Just in case, please don’t tell anyone.”

  “Never you fear. In Buenos Aires we’ll discuss the magazine. It’s a guaranteed failure.”

  I said goodbye to Clara. Enzo walked me downstairs. We said go
odbye, and he said:

  “Don’t get bitter.”

  Then it was absurd because I had forgotten the ukulele, and after he let me out I had to start tapping the glass on the door, so he opened again, and we went back up and came back down, but without saying a word this time. I’d worn out my farewell. When he opened the door to let me out onto the street, I gave him a couple of slaps on the back and said:

  “Good luck with the biter.”

  ELEVEN

  I was among the last to board the ferry. It was a new one, snazzy, baptized Francisco, I assumed in honor of the Pope, with carpets so impeccable that before getting on you were required to put gauze coverings over your shoes, the kind they have in operating rooms, so as not to sully anything. Chilean tourists, Uruguayan doctors, old Argentine gadabouts of high-society heritage, ladies wearing strident perfumes, families, all of them in those same light blue sneakers, like Smurfs.

  In the very back I found a row of four empty seats. I settled in there, I needed to be still for a while. My side was really hurting. If I’d had my backpack, I could have taken a Tylenol from the pack I always carry in the front pocket. What would the thieves have done with my things? I was going to have to cancel my Visa, get a new license, a new insurance card, subway card, registration … I zipped up my jacket because the A/C was hitting me right in the face. I put my hands in my pockets, there was sand there, and I found a piece of candy from that afternoon. I opened it, started chewing on it, it was dulce de leche flavored. Sweetness in the distance. I looked at the wrapper: it said ZABALA and featured the face of a historical man, from the eighteenth century, with a long wig with curls and an imperial mustache. It was none other than the founder of Montevideo, as Wikipedia tells me. Bruno Mauricio de Zabala. Candy under Guerra’s mother’s maiden name. Guerra Zabala sounded like “guerras a bala”: it connoted mayhem, bullets, and, of course, war.

  How was I going to tell you all this? What was my version of the story going to be? What did it look like from your perspective? Your husband, whose life you’ve been paying for almost a year, goes over to Uruguay (on a ticket you bought) to get the money he was finally paid and then returns without a peso, with a tattoo on his shoulder and a ukulele in his hand. You had one job, motherfucker. It wasn’t that hard. Maybe I wouldn’t have to lie that much. The robbery had happened. All I had to do was change its backdrop. I could tell you I had been robbed on my way to the parking lot, that in the morning there had been no spaces in the Buquebus lot, which was true, and I had had to park the car farther away, and when I went to get it coming back … In fact, the car would stay there in that lot two blocks from the docks.