The Woman from Uruguay Read online

  This is what happened: I walked up to the car, at night, they put a gun to my head, threw me to the ground, kicked me, and took the money. Someone from Customs must have told them about me. I had gone to Uruguay for the day. It was very likely that I was bringing back dollars. In fact, that version sounded much more realistic than what happened, it was easier to understand. Like in the story “Emma Zunz” by Borges, only the circumstances and the time would be false, but everything else would be true: the robbery, my desperate tone, the humiliation, and the violence.

  I stuck to that version. I went over it a few more times, and then, when I needed to distract myself with something, I realized I had nothing to read. My Rimbaud biography had stayed on the bedside table at the Radisson. In the end, I paid for a nice room just to house the Rimbaud biography. Would it end up in the hotel’s lost and found? Would I be able to send Enzo to pick it up? I took off my sneakers, raised the armrests, and lay down across the length of several seats. The engines were already on. We were moving. I closed my eyes. I’d left Rimbaud crossing the desert on a stretcher carried by twelve Sudanese porters. He was going back sick, tired, penniless, swindled, robbed by the African kings to whom he’d tried to sell arms. He was crossing a lunar landscape where the Danakil, members of the most beautiful and most fearsome tribe, lay in wait. They could have killed the whole caravan and left the bodies to be devoured by lions. His knee swollen, gigantic. He couldn’t walk anymore. The world was about to claim its share. A leg. The adventure was ending, he was trying to get back to France where they would amputate it. The canvas of his litter fluttered in the wind. A room for Rimbaud, a bed with clean sheets for the death throes of the greatest poet of all time. A book on the bedside table. Room 262.

  I woke up drenched in sweat as we were coming into the port of Buenos Aires. I felt like I had a fever. People were already crowded near the exit.

  When I went down the escalator, I sent the ukulele through the scanner, and on the other side a woman asked me to wait. A man palpated me like he was looking for arms. Very rapidly and almost imperceptibly he touched my crotch where the money belt had been. They were looking for wads of bills. They had me take off my jacket, they felt it to see if it had anything hard in it. They had me lift up my shirt. They even looked inside the ukulele. I thought, You’re too late, muchachos. Nothing here, nothing there. They stopped and checked others alongside me.

  They couldn’t get anything off me because I had nothing. They couldn’t rob me. They let me through, and I went out into the darkness of the port thinking about that: no one can rob me now. I was going to walk, straight down Córdoba Avenue, more than thirty blocks, some of them completely dark, all the way to our place on Coronel Díaz, but I was going to do it fearlessly, with no paranoia that anyone was following me. The car was there; I didn’t have the keys. It stayed there until you went to get it two weeks later. I didn’t have Argentine pesos to take a taxi, either. I crossed the tracks of El Bajo, Madero Avenue, Alem, and I climbed the Córdoba ravine. I was destroyed, beaten, but invincible.

  It did not occur to me that they would have to put me in the hospital the following day. The fever made everything denser. I thought: I’m going to die, and that’s the way it should be. Without that money, I’m immortal. Because of the pain in my ribs, I was walking with my left arm pressed against my body, in a kind of a zombie’s stagger. The zombie with the ukulele. Fortunately I hadn’t smashed it on the beach or left it at Enzo’s. Maiko brought it the first weekend when he came to the apartment I moved into after we separated, and then he left it behind. So it stayed there. I learned chords, rhythms, how to strum it. Then I worked up the courage to pluck it. It saved me from my crash. That tiny mini-guitar fortified my soul throughout this year I’ve lived alone. What I knew from guitar let me learn quickly. It’s a simple instrument but it can also be complex. The guitar had always been too big for me, the chords had sounded messy, too many notes in that bridge. For an autodidact, for somebody who plays by ear like me, the ukulele is ideal. I realized I’d rather play the ukulele well than keep playing the guitar poorly, and that was like a new personal philosophy. If you can’t handle life, try a lifelet. Everything had gotten too complicated for me. That whole life we had created together, Cata—it was too big for me. I wasn’t well. You weren’t, either. We hated each other with our to-do lists. Now I have a chalkboard in the kitchen and I make my lists of pending tasks, but they don’t torment me. Your lists tortured me. And I imagine my invisible lists were torture for you, too. My tacit lists, my fickle demands. I assimilated from you those visible lists, and I organize myself pretty well, I would say. Because they’re my own lists. I no longer view those tasks as someone else’s.

  I couldn’t walk very fast. I continued down Córdoba, passed the whorehouses with mysterious curtains, the Galerías Pacífico where six years ago I had bought you that Bahía dress that looked so pretty on you when your belly got big. I crossed the 9 de Julio and as always I wished I could get on a ferry that would take me over to the other side. I don’t know exactly when they demolished the block that was there in order to make the enormous avenue, but ever since there’s been an emptiness, an antimatter, still palpable today. Today it’s a space that is so much more than a block. It’s a nothingness you have to cross, and it exhausts even the bravest among us. I kept going, past Plaza Lavalle, the Cervantes Theater, ugly blocks, cold, with no personal references, up to the internet café just before Callao where I would make my photocopies for my classes at the university. The McDonald’s, the entrance to the subway. I thought about going down and jumping the turnstile. I felt pretty bad. Everything seemed impossible to me. Except to keep walking, falling forward with every step, like Herzog says when he tells the story of his journey on foot from Munich to Paris.

  Would I have been considering it as I traversed those streets? Did I already have the drive to separate from you? What about you? Had you thought about it over the course of that long day when you saw my email and suspected something? We needed a push. That slight force that would let everything that was already fissured crack all the way apart. Was it falling apart because of age? I don’t know. What I do know is that we had to stop. Quit gathering spite. Those mornings, for example, those Saturdays or Sundays when Maiko would wake up at seven and want his Nesquik and you and I would start the contest of who could pretend to be most asleep. Maiko would insist, and one of us would get up with hatred, make him the Nesquik, along with coffee for the other one, the lazy one who was pretending to be paralyzed, the one who hadn’t slept enough, the one who just can’t, who needs more sleep, who’s suffering, poor thing, that fucking son of a piece-of-shit bitch. Maiko in the kitchen now with his labor union tactics, moving furniture, chairs, climbing onto the counter, grabbing knives, you have to be there, you have to watch him, you have to take care of the drunken dwarf from dawn on, while the other nestles into those warm sheets, while the other self-cancels, pretends not to exist, but they’re there, pretending not to know, in their great betrayal. Then, you or I, the one who had gotten up, would wash the dishes from the night before, making as much noise as possible just to be mean (I heard you do it a number of times, and I did it, too), the frying pan lurching all around the sink, we made it sound like a big tin bell to wake up the one who was horizontal, spoons falling onto the stainless steel and sounding like a drum, the clink-clink of glasses about to be smashed to smithereens, the chattering of fragile white earthenware dishes that made you want to stamp them into the floor like at a Greek wedding, hold a smashing karaoke like they do in Japan, where they put loud music on for people in a room with vases and old TV sets and they give them a baseball bat so they can break it all apart. Fuck the dining room set, blow up the wedding gifts, the family love, the lists, set the Flox on fire, dynamite the house and be waiting for the newlyweds with a machine gun as they greet everyone in the atrium like a scene from The Godfather. And the other one, from bed: “Everything alright, my love?” “Yes, everything’s great!” �
��Did something break?” “No, nothing’s broken.” What do you want? Tell me want you want. I want war, I thought. I want a guerra against you. But I never said a word.

  It must have been past ten. On Plaza Houssay a group of skaters was trying out difficult jumps. They would fail and try again. We had to talk, that was certain. But I didn’t expect what you ultimately told me. I also didn’t expect, passing by the Hospital de Clínicas, that ten hours later they would be taking me to that emergency room in an ambulance. A few months of debt and the private hospitals shut you out. The operator made that clear when you called. Me with a fever of a 104 degrees, shaking, sitting in a bathtub full of lukewarm water that felt freezing to me. They told you that not only were they not going to send over a doctor, but also that they would not be able to receive me at any clinic. “Your husband has no coverage.” So they took me to the public hospital. The horror, our great state nightmare, death guaranteed, and yet, in ten minutes they had plugged me into an IV with who knows what miracle droplets, and I started to recuperate, and they even put me under observation in a room with some other fragile saps. Public hospital. And here I’d been trying to avoid paying import tariffs.

  The gigantic Clínicas building greeted me as I passed, said, See you in a little while, but I didn’t pay it any mind. I was caught up in our fury. I crossed Larrea. Half a block away was the Mix telo, where some time ago I had gone with one of my students at the university. I remember that one time I went to the kiosk next door to buy condoms, it was raining, she appeared. Skirt and laced boots. Smiling. I remember all of her tattoos. We’d see each other there some Fridays before class. Then we would each show up separately. In order not to arouse any suspicion, I would try to dry my hair with the dryer they had screwed into the wall. And her with her hair wet, listening to me from her desk. It must have lasted a couple of months. Then she made up with her boyfriend. She passed the class. She went to Mexico. I think Maiko was about two. There’s a section of my bandit’s tour for you who always want to know everything.

  I turned on Pueyrredón going toward Santa Fe. No one tried to rob me, no one even saw me. The area was in terrible shape. Very little light, trash that hadn’t been collected, piles of rotting bags, a few blocks of kiosks with beat-up signs for ice cream brands. A preview of the Once neighborhood, without the Orthodox garb. Someone ought to chronicle Pueyrredón Avenue from the old French buildings of Recoleta to the peddler heart of the Recova de Plaza Miserere. The invisible gradation, simply enumerating, managing to see.

  The neighborhood of Villa Crespo, where I’m living now, is peaceful. Maiko will soon be able to go to the grocery store to buy things, and a bit after that take the subway from Corrientes Avenue to your house. Step by step. It’s not time yet. The thing is that the other day he looked so big to me. We painted the wall of the patio together, he helped me cook, lit the burner on his own, chopped tomatoes with an enormous knife. He also helped me with the pots. I have mint, basil, thyme, rosemary, and cilantro. I like this place. You never wanted to have plants, not even on the balcony. I’d like to see your place in Parque Chas.

  I crossed Ecuador, Anchorena, Laprida. There in the Pelícano telo, I used to meet a Brazilian girl some years ago. She told me she wanted to translate me. She never translated a thing. We just fucked, and then she would tell me about the fights she had with her bodybuilding boyfriend and about whether she was going to go back to Belo Horizonte or not. She came and went. She’d fall off the face of the earth for a few months and then show up again suddenly on chat: Lucas, want to do a Pelican? Each encounter was an extreme sport. She knew jujitsu, that Brazilian martial art. She’d show me captures and I’d be left unable to breathe, my head pressed between her chocolate thighs. If she’d wanted to, she could have killed me and left me there. Remember how surprised you were at that barbecue when I was playfighting with Nico, and he and I were both drunk, and I subdued him with a capture in the grass? She’s the one who taught me that.

  I’m not telling you so that you’ll tell me. I’m doing it to explain myself to myself. I think that something built up in you. The fact that something was happening in your blind spot filled you with uncertainty. Because I was very careful. I was never with a girl in public. At most it was three meters at the entrance to the telo, where someone could have seen me. That sole moment of risk. The rest was pretty perfectly clandestine. I was extremely careful with the details, I was a good agent. I always came back showered, checked to make sure I didn’t have even one long hair attached to me. I deleted every message. But somewhere you knew. Then I calmed down, I took a step back. And then you started up with your late arrivals, your secret agenda, your revenge, conscious or not.

  When we came back after that night in the hospital—you too silent, me with the X-rays of my cracked rib in hand—you told me Maiko was going to stay at your mom’s place. That was when I saw it coming. “Lucas, what are we going to do? We can’t keep going like this. We have to talk to see what we want.” You asked me who Guerra was. “Tell me the truth.” I told you. You were a bit disillusioned, I felt you wanted something fuller. My little long-distance romance was childish to you. You needed a boost from me to tell me yours. Regardless, you launched in. I never thought you’d say: “I’m in love with someone, she’s a friend of mine.” “A woman? But you’re not a lesbian.” “I don’t know if I’m a lesbian, but I’m attracted to her,” you told me. That she was a doctor, that she worked at Trinity, that you’d met her at a cocktail hour on a terrace with the foundation, that she had sent you emails and WhatsApp messages, that you’d met up with her, that you’d smoked pot at her place, that you had loved each other for almost a year now, and you weren’t going to hide it anymore.

  I was kind of catatonic, I remember. It was toward that news that the naïve zombie was going now, down Santa Fe Avenue, among the closed clothing stores. I didn’t see it coming, I have to admit. I was sure you were seeing a doctor from the foundation, a guy. I’d have put all my money on that. I hadn’t thought it could be a woman. It was just a few more blocks, and I felt I might actually faint. I was cold and hot at the same time. My head was pounding. I guess I’m still processing it and still in pain. Were you not attracted to men anymore, or was it just me? I didn’t understand. Your mom asked me over the phone, I didn’t know what to tell her, your dad wouldn’t talk to you for two months, it was a bombshell among your cousins and our friends. All of them on my side at first; and then they started to understand. And I remained wounded, sexually, I mean, the injured male, depressed. Is that why I’m throwing in your face all the girls I fucked, even though you no longer care? It hurts, but I don’t feel hatred, not even anger.

  Lately I’ve been seeing my yoga instructor. Once a week, the morning I don’t go into the radio station. She’s taught me a lot. Tantric things. She has kids who are grown and don’t live with her anymore. She’s five years older than I am. Fifty. An honest-to-god MILF. She doesn’t want to fall in love, or have kids (she can’t anymore), or go to the movies with me. We get together, and we “put all the tinsel on each other’s trees,” as she puts it. What happens between us is really quite something. I’ll spare you the details, but the one thing I do want to tell you about is this moment that tends to repeat. She likes to fuck standing up. She bends over a kind of sideboard, I don’t know what it’s called, it’s a piece of furniture where she has all her family photos, except for her ex-husband they’re all there, sons, daughters-in-law, her parents, Russian ancestors, a temporal range of photos from black and white to the first digital ones when we didn’t know yet how to take off those red little numbers that gave the date. People smiling on trips, on beaches, in all different landscapes, on top of camels, with dogs, with cats. You get it. My point is that what she’s most turned on by is being fucked hard while you grab her by the hips, or the hair, and that slamming motion gradually knocks every one of those photos onto the carpet. That old family altar keeps crashing down, and she can’t come until with a single swipe she throws t
he few frames that remain on the sideboard onto the floor.

  I say this because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about family and marriage. It’s going to sound like I think I’m better than everyone, but I’m serious: there has to be another way. We grew up inside this idea of family that wound up filling us with anguish when we saw the cracks in it. All this to say I don’t have any problem with Maiko living with you and your partner the days he isn’t with me. Secondly, I have no problem meeting her—in fact, I’d like to meet her, I’d like you both to come over if you want for dinner, and I’d like for Maiko to see the three of us, and if I am ever in a real relationship again I’d like it if we could all run into each other without being awkward or anxious. I’d like it if we could do something together, maybe even take a vacation together. If we don’t want to rent one house for all of us, then maybe we could at least spend a week at the same beach. Or maybe that’s too much, but what I want to say is that Maiko’s family is a new thing now. We need to have the courage to throw the photos on the floor. Your decision took a lot of courage.

  I guess the idea of family has changed. Now it’s kind of like those little interlocking bricks. Everybody puts them together as best they can. The other day I felt like watching Tremble, Ye Tyrants on YouTube, I saw old episodes and, among the minute things that happened in one of those weeks in Uruguay, one was a triple wedding between Guerra, César, and Rocío. The image lasts for five seconds. It says something like this: “This week a Star Wars convention was held, some kids juggled in Tacuarembó, there was a roller-skating contest, a girl did a handstand on the promenade, Cristóbal the dog couldn’t drink his water because he had frost on his dish, the first triple wedding was held in Montevideo …” It’s a quick image, two pregnant brides in white, and the groom in the middle, all laughing, on a patio, in an alternative ceremony, almost a parody of marriage, invented by them. There was Guerra with her big belly. I had to pause the image to recognize her. Those three had done something right. Afterward I got on Facebook and on her friend’s page (since Guerra had deleted hers): there they were, both of them, with their babies in their arms. One of the photos showed César with a spoon in each hand, simultaneously feeding both his kids with their different mothers. Maybe they really lived together, the five of them. I don’t know because Guerra and I don’t correspond anymore, things quieted down and then fell silent. I’m glad she had a baby. She looked happy in the video. Even if in the more domestic pictures she looks tired. You might be wondering how I could still be thinking occasionally about a girl who robbed me or got me robbed. But I’m 98 percent certain that it wasn’t her. That 2 percent is the silence after the second kick, a glitch in the matrix, a tiny blip in my brain that is never going to go away. I owe Guerra at least the benefit of the doubt, and I let her hover there in my idealized Uruguay, hiding inside of a song that only I know.