The Woman from Uruguay Page 4

  Maiko’s birthday was coming up soon. My train cake had been a hit the previous year among the kids he went to preschool with. All the moms asked how I’d done it. Three pound cakes, chocolate topping, sprinkles, and cubanitos. It was easy. “Genius,” they said. When I thought of his cake for this year I got a lump in my throat. His party. It was coming up. In a toy store I saw a dinosaur as tall as a person, thought Maiko would know if it was a velociraptor or what. My kid. That drunken rug rat. Because it was like that at times, like taking care of a plastered dwarf who gets really emotional, cries, and you can’t understand what he’s saying, you have to keep cutting him off at the pass, you have to carry him because he won’t walk, he makes a huge mess at the restaurant, throws things, shouts, falls asleep wherever, you take him home and try to clean him up, and he falls down, gets a bump on his head, shoves around the furniture, falls asleep, throws up at four in the morning.

  You know I adore my child. I love him more than anybody in the world. But sometimes he exhausts me, not so much him as my constant worrying about him. Sometimes I think I shouldn’t have had a kid at my age. It’s a terrible thing to think, but it has filled my life with a fear that I never had before, fear that something will happen to me and he’ll be left an orphan, that something will happen to him, to you. It’s a new fragility, a vulnerable side I didn’t know I had. Maybe younger parents don’t get that. It terrorizes me at times. When he runs all the way to the corner and I can’t catch up with him and I scream at him not knowing if he’s going to stop. There ought to be a class on raising children. All those prenatal courses and then it’s born and when you get back to your house you don’t even know where to put it. Where do you set him down, in what part of the house does that tiny little elderly man, that haiku of a person, go? Nobody teaches you that. Nobody warns you how hard it is not to sleep, to give up on yourself all the time, to postpone yourself. Because you will never go back to sleeping eight hours in a row, your permanent soundtrack ends up being “The Sweet Potato Queen,” if you want to fuck you have to plan a weekend without the kids a month in advance, you only go to the theater to see movies where stuffed animals speak in Mexican Spanish, and you have to read the rhinoceros book fourteen times a day. The rhinoceros book did not get lost, I hid it where no one would find it, among the unhung pictures in the hall closet, because I couldn’t take it anymore. It must have stayed there until the move.

  Sometimes I am also afraid of Maiko. Afraid of him. He comes down with every virus anybody at his preschool gets, he isolates and strengthens it within his snazzy new immune system and then attacks me with it as hard as he can. His colds demolish me, make me think I’m going to die, his stomach bugs bench me for a week at a time, his slight pink eye can blind me for two months. I see him coming toward me with his mucus, saying “papá,” kind of crying, with that bubble of snot he gets in one of his nostrils, getting closer and closer to me, three-foot strep. My flesh and blood, my infectious little focus. He sticks his fingers in my mouth, the spoon he’s sucked on, playing house, playing meals. He kills me. We were one body, because the monster was one and a trinity. The family body. Three organisms fused by a single circulatory system. Hence the terror that something might happen to any one of the three of us, since that would be like having a major part amputated.

  Now Maiko is bigger, but at that time there were moments when I’d go into quasi-psychotic states, clutching my head when he cried, and nobody could calm him down. And that time he gave us lice, and that time with the subatomic diapers, remember? Not yet in control of his sphincters, the preschool report said. Shit all over everything. Arms coated up to the elbows trying to clean it up. The transition period, portable potties, accidents on the carpet, in the bathtub. Pure reality. And that involuntary superpower of his that lets him hit me in the balls from impossible angles. In the chair, in the bed, or playing any game, I’m across from him and his kick strikes with absolute precision, or his elbow, his throw that makes me double over. Sometimes he pauses before kicking the soccer ball, as if he’s calculating all the variables of its trajectory, ballistics, gravity, and then the kick with the perfect aim at the very center of my suffering.

  I worry most of all about the part that isn’t funny. Maiko when he had fever seizures, and I thought he was going to die in my arms. Then the doctors explaining that it’s totally normal for this to happen, that it’s nothing serious. How can no one warn you about something like that? Maybe they just can’t. If they offered a course on what it’s like to raise kids, no one would have them. You need that ignorance in order for the species to continue, generations of ingénues who leap without even the remotest look. A course that would anticipate all the dangers and afflictions of paternity and maternity would frighten off everyone. It could be sponsored by some brand of condoms. You’d leave the classroom and go buy a pack of 120 without giving it a second thought.

  I didn’t go into the toy store. It’d be better to do it afterward when I had the money and more time in the afternoon. But I was going to have to get Maiko some kind of gift. Maybe in the duty-free on the way back. I was also going to get a good bottle of whiskey to celebrate. And a bottle of perfume for you, for putting up with me those past months. That was my rationale, my sensible decision: to be with you, tend our nest, our child. And yet sometimes you surrender to darker decisions, ones you make with your body, or that your body makes for you, the animal that you are. If you could see it, that would be one thing, but it can’t be seen, it’s a blind spot, outside of language, out of reach, and the crazy thing is that that’s what we are, to a great extent, we’re that beat that wants to perpetuate itself, because we know we’d decided to quit using protection, I remember it well, but months went by before you got pregnant, and how does the body decide? What changes? I’m almost certain you got pregnant after that night we argued at your apartment on Agüero, remember? For a minute it seemed like I’d go back to my place and like that would be that. “I’m not so sure,” I told you, and I used the word “vertigo,” saying I was afraid, and you were outraged. You were hurt by my hesitation, my restraint, you went to bed crying. I stayed in the living room for a little bit, not knowing what to feel, and then I went in to console you but still thinking I was leaving, and you said, “Stay today, you can go tomorrow,” and we slept together, and at some point in the night we fucked in a way that was different, in a sort of battle between animals that are plunging deep into darkness, and that’s where I remember the vertigo, surrendering to that vertigo when I came inside you, a liberating surrender, a total bravery, and may forces unknown to me decide, impulses, fluvial wills, cells, creatures, the fauna of the mystery, an orange dinosaur in a toy store.

  I passed by some high schools (they call them “lyceums” here), they were just finishing their morning shift. Kids were coming out, shouting their goodbyes. From one side of the street to the other, one yelled to his friend in a superhero voice: “May nothing get in your way!”

  I knew where that came from. I knew it was a catchphrase from Tremble, Ye Tyrants, and I laughed because I got the joke and because I felt like I was on the inside of the interweaving of allusions and events. Back then, Tremble, Ye Tyrants was a viral hit. Every other week this guy would put out videos, with an affable voiceover, that people in Uruguay had uploaded over those two weeks. Little things, insignificant things: some kids removing a bird that had gotten into their house, for example, a girl riding a bike for the first time, a guy building a compressor out of a fridge … The result was a mix of tenderness, surprise, Uruguayana, third-world ingenuity, anthropological revelation. One Peteca, heavyset with a smile with no teeth in it, would appear every so often and repeat the sentence “May there be nothing in your way.” And the video would always close by saying: “Which is why we give our thanks, YouTube, for everything you’ve given us.” YouTube, like a divinity provider of the abundance of experience, intimacy, and human details. The smaller, inoffensive tone contrasted with the title, which is a quote from the nation
al anthem: “The glory of this sacred gift/We warranted: tremble, ye tyrants!”

  The walk had made me hot, but I wanted to leave my jacket on because at the bank I was going to stash my money in the inside zip pocket. I passed some mildly frightening spots, a shopping arcade with dark shops. In front of one I was given a flyer that said: TATTOOS, tribal, goth, EXCELLENCE, safe, piercings, genital perforations. Again my associative constellation blazed. A person in love is like a person afflicted with severe paranoia: he thinks everything is speaking directly to him. The songs on the radio, movies, the horoscope, random street flyers … Guerra’s piercing. At some point she’d gone into a place in the back of a shopping arcade and, with her legs open on a stretcher, received from someone a genital perforation, as the little gray piece of paper referred to it. A tattoo-artist friend? A person she could trust? With anesthesia? Did it hurt? In none of our e-back-and-forth had we brought up the subject. I put the flyer in my jacket pocket. I could have thrown it in any trash can instead of keeping it, and maybe if I had, what ended up happening would never have happened. But I kept it because I was interested in the language, the oscillation between “tú” and “vos,” how when it said “You choose the design yourself,” it mixed the local and the international grammars.

  After the Plaza de los 33, the avenue curved. Who could that hero on horseback be? And then there was the big building, the Municipality Administration with a replica of the David on the esplanade. The two-way avenue, white taxis unlike our black-and-yellow cabs, buses, ANCAP “evolving for you,” pharmacies, exchange offices, cash loans, Orion heaters (“the first with virgin copper tanks”), lottery offices, Magic Center, Motociclo, opticians, La Hora Exacta watch repair. I don’t know what order I saw those things in, but I observed and absorbed them all as if it were the last day of my life. Expo Yi, the love locks fountain, La Papoñita, where I had once had coffee with Enzo, stands on the street, clothes, belts, peanuts, caramelized nuts, purses, wallets, the trees with their new leaves, some guys playing chess on top of some crates and others watching, among them a street sweeper taking a break leaning on his broom, the Delondon shopping center, a minibus with loudspeakers, “Check us out, charge your cell phone,” Argentine magazines at the kiosks, traffic noise but not much honking, Parisien Indian, Galería 18. It all gets mixed up in my head even if I look at the streets on the map, since a few hours later Guerra and I walked those blocks on the other side, going the other way, totally wasted.

  FOUR

  There weren’t many people at the bank. I got in the line for the cashiers. Up on the wall there was a TV to assuage the customers’ anxieties. It was a sports program, someone interviewing Luis Suárez. You couldn’t really hear it because they’d turned it way down, but they showed a few of his goals for Liverpool and Barça. Incredible shots with the gall of an angered bull, unstoppable and, with that remarkable capacity to penetrate matter, passing right through his rivals, the double nutmeg against the angel-faced Brazilian David Luiz, these goals coming clear from the middle of the field at maximum velocity, dematerializing the defenders, without that impossible diagonal of Messi’s goals, more facing the goal and with a powerful kick. They left Suárez’s little face in a corner of the screen as he watched his own goals. He was laughing with those enormous teeth of his, his eyes becoming slits.

  His last contract with Barcelona had been for one hundred million dollars. And here I was, pleased to be about to take out fifteen grand—everything I had. What a chump. I couldn’t wait to feel those crisp brand-new bills in my hands. I mentally went over my money again. Eight thousand dollars from Spain, seven thousand from Colombia. Exchanged on the Argentine black market at that time, that was around two hundred and forty thousand pesos. From an Argentine bank I’d get less than half that. This was the era of the dólar blue, the soybean dollar, the tourist dollar, the brick dollar, the official dollar, the future dollar … There were so many different exchange rates around I couldn’t keep track. Nobody really knew how much things cost. The peso was going down, there was a lot of inflation. And they started trying to control exchange. It was like being paid in ice in the middle of the summer, and freezers were illegal. Everybody on a desperate search for dollars. The market split into official and parallel, and between them the cuevas popped up, the intermediaries, the friends of the cousins. That time they tried to rob me when I’d gone into the city center to exchange some cash, I called my cueva contact afterward. I told him: they followed me, they broke the window of my car, wanting to rob me. “I would put my hands in the fire for those guys,” he told me, “they’re my rugby friends.” “Right, like the Puccios, you mean?” I asked him. He didn’t laugh. But I think it was actually the parking-lot guys who already knew where the cuevas were and would target you. A medieval situation in the twenty-first century, a time of electronic transfers and virtual money, and here I was fetching some papers printed green from the other side of the river, hiding them, seeking some alternative, attempting to dodge the measures, the side effects of the State’s determinations, finding that crack I could slip through.

  I had a general idea of what I was going to do with the money. First I wanted to hold it in my hands. Then the fog would go, and I’d be able to see clearly. But in general I was planning on paying you back, paying the overdue bills, doing the repairs around the house, paying back my brother, getting a babysitter who would come over in the afternoon so I could get to work. Nine months or maybe even ten of working with tranquility, door shut, no interruptions. The novel for the Spanish publisher and the shorter pieces for Colombia. I owed two books. The shorter ones were almost done, I just had to figure out the structure of the book, put the pieces in order. The main thing was the novel. Ten months to write a novel. It wasn’t bad. This was going to be my great novel. I could sense it. A guy who leaves his wife and kids and disappears in Brazil, transforms into somebody else. It was going to have moments in Portuñol, lots of wordplay, lots of verbal gunpowder, I was going to explode Spanish and then branch it out like a tree in every direction, a thousand things were going to happen, on the beach, in Brasilia, in the Amazon, lots of sex, and boats down huge rivers and contraband, drugs, shamans, shooting, wild parties, stories inside stories, it was going to be my Ulysses, my Devil to Pay in the Backlands, my total novel.

  Just three more people, and it would be my turn. The security guard was slowly ambling around the bank with a step that was practically absent. Suárez was still being featured on the TV show. There was another guy I’m not sure wasn’t “El Loco” Abreu, the one who scored that penalty goal in the 2010 World Cup against Ghana. You’d have to be really insane to try the Panenka right now, everybody thought, and then there he went, calm as a cucumber, out of the range of planetary nerves, he took one look at the ball, gained momentum, approaching with long strides and just when it seemed like he was going to shatter the ball, he chipped it, a lob into the blue, a parable of the devastating effect of slowness, an elegy to insanity, and the ball went in slowly, making a mockery of overwrought nutmegs, humiliating completely the goalie who had thrown himself to one side. Long standing ovation. Uruguay made it to the semifinals. I was very curious to know what Abreu was saying. Everyone in line was looking up at the screen.

  At some point, without realizing it, all human beings became Rain Man. We cannot live without a screen. I don’t ever go to the bathroom without my cell phone. It’s this crippling fear of silence. Out of habit, you get more on board. Everybody with their mini TV in their hand. And since you aren’t allowed to use your cell phone at the bank here, there’s a screen on the wall. Now they were showing one from the archives where Suárez was around ten, on a kids’ games program, he was supposed to overcome certain obstacles, jump down slides, climb. You could already see that desperate, competitive gall. Later he added skill.

  What was my skill? Putting words together? Building elegant, expressive sentences? What did I know how to do, when all was said and done? Whenever I had earned some silver, what had it
been in exchange for? Gathering words together on a sheet hadn’t yielded me all that much cash. Teaching, a little bit more, perhaps. My seminars, my composition classes, my workshops. The trick with workshops is not to get too involved, not to dampen the literary enthusiasm, just let people make mistakes and figure it out on their own, encourage, guide, allow the group to go where it wants to go, let each member find whatever it is they’re looking for and get to know themselves better. Something along those lines. For that they paid me at institutes and universities. But now it was different, now they were giving me money to sit down and write. And now I owed them. That debt was an invisible thing that was buried in my brain. A succession of narrated images that were supposed to emerge from my imagination. What I was supposed to pay that debt back with didn’t exist, wasn’t really anywhere. It had to be invented. My currency was a series of neural connections that would go about producing a verbal daydream. And if that narrative machine didn’t work?

  Silver, money, bills. When I was a kid my mom would give me “a red one and a blue one” for the school’s refreshments stand. I didn’t know how much that was. Bills back then were colors, not numbers. Ancient faces with watermarks. From the seventies to now, General San Martín has had to watch thirteen zeros pass through the corner of his eye. How much money had I cost my father? From my birth in the private hospital right up to the last few times I asked him for a loan, not long before his death. Since I showed up in the world I’ve been an endless procession of banknotes: room, board, soccer, English-language high school, uniforms, orthodontics, beach vacations, ski trips, trips to Europe, gifts, a horse, private university, gas, panels and paint after several car wrecks, a significant portion of our apartment on Coronel Díaz.