The Woman from Uruguay Read online

  All that money that had shaped me, served as my entrance into a social group, a series of friends, a way of speaking, and that was curious, too: money had shaped my language. One time a couple of thugs had robbed my sister in a taxi, and when she was cursing them out one of them said to the other: “Man, that money really talks.” That theft of consonants: “coacola” instead of “Coca-Cola,” “again” instead of “against,” “sparkplu” instead of “sparkplug,” “too ien” instead of “todo bien” … The infinite codification of class. And the price of my Anglicism—how much had it cost to format the part of my brain that’s in another language? That dream I had once about a guy who was screaming in the room next to mine and when I asked what was going on, they said: “They’re taking out his English tongue.”

  There was money in my childhood, it surrounded me, it covered me in good clothing, provided me with blocks of a safe neighborhood in the city, picket fences on the weekends, soccer field fences, well-pruned privets, barriers that rose up on either side of me wherever I went. And I had subsequently taken the liberty of going off the rails, the artist with no business sense, the bohemian. Another liberty, another luxury. The sensitive child of the haute bourgeoisie. But the price of my Bohemia would have to be paid now. It was a long-term loan. A gradual slippage: a subtly justified switch in neighborhoods, a kid who wouldn’t know snow, nor Europe, nor Disney World, and we’d have to put him in a different school when his tuition grew prohibitive, and soon enough he wouldn’t be given the time of day at his first jobs, he’d belong but he wouldn’t, he’d be semi-invited, always going swimming in other people’s pools, inheriting the beat-up old car that ought to start all right. At twenty-five I had to learn to clean my own house, run the vacuum, scrub the bathroom, put my clothes in the wash, hang them up, cook twice a day, wash the dishes before going to bed. Live my life. Had that been good or bad? Now, at forty-four, it was bad, it was atrocious. That’s how I figured it. I was tired, I wanted to have a cleaning lady, pay somebody by the hour, at least a babysitter for half the day so I could hole up and have a little time to write or simply pretend to be writing. I wanted to be alone, and it struck me then that solitude costs a lot of money, meant cleaning ladies doing the things I didn’t want to do. I felt like a pauper among princes, the beggar of the gated communities, crashing others’ wealth for a minute. I wanted my dollars, and I wanted them now. To write hearing somebody vacuuming in another room of the house and have it not be me. That seemed like a luxury to me. Who would have thought, when in my teenage years I had slept in while the cleaning lady vacuumed the hall outside my room and hit the door with the tube, again and again, so many of my awakenings happened that way, it was the call of the vacuums, You’ll see soon enough, Luqui, we’ll be a part of your life soon enough, you’ll really get to know us then. Vacuum turbines blasting at full volume like a premonition.

  I was next in line. I checked my pocket for my passport. It was one in the afternoon. I was this close to reaching my goal, a woman in a purple jacket was talking with the cashier, they knew each other, you could hear it all. I looked to see who was behind me. A guy in his fifties. And farther back there were more people. I was going to try to speak softly so they wouldn’t be able to hear my request. There wasn’t any partition to shield the activity at the counter. In Argentina they had made the banks cover up the counters so people wouldn’t be able to tell how much money you were withdrawing. That was after a pregnant woman had been shot coming out of the bank with the cash for some real estate transaction, since in Argentina you have to buy houses and apartments in cash. I can’t think what her name was. They blamed the bank, the cashier was a suspect … it was the most shocking in a succession of violent robberies like that of people leaving banks, and they ended up putting in those partitions to shield the counters. Here it was all just exposed.

  The woman in the purple jacket left.

  “Next,” said the cashier.

  I went up and spoke, kind of crouching down through the opening money was handed through.

  “I’d like to take out fifteen thousand dollars,” I said, almost in a whisper, passing her my passport.

  “Tell me over here,” she said, pointing to a kind of round speaker right in front of her face.

  I said it again as quietly as I could.

  “Fifteen thousand?” she said, and it sounded pretty loud.

  I nodded. She looked at my passport, looked something up on her computer. She left her station, went to talk to another employee in one of the cubicles. They looked at me. The other employee said something. The cashier came back.

  “Normally withdrawals of more than ten thousand dollars have to be done at our central headquarters, unless you let the branch know in advance. But we can make an exception, okay?”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that, thanks.”

  She had me sign the receipt, she checked my signature, she left her post again. She went in the back and disappeared behind a door. There was too much happening. She came back with a wad, put it in the electric bill counter. The machine made a horrific, whistleblowing noise. She put a rubber band around the wad and when she was about to hand it to me, I said:

  “Could you exchange five hundred into Uruguayan?”

  “Sure.”

  She exchanged them for me, gave me the pesos, which I put in my pants pocket, and then the wad of dollars, which I put in the inside pocket of my jacket. I zipped up my jacket, said muchas gracias, turned and darted out of the bank without looking anybody in the eye.

  Done. I was loaded. I thought of Guerra. That was the first thing I thought about. A sum of possibilities in that wad of cash I could feel against my heart. A sort of opening in all possible directions. Master of time. Time was mine. Almost a whole year in my pocket. I could do what I wanted. That’s why I thought of Guerra. That strength also came with fear. The fear of the prey in the jungle. I had paranoia on my heels. I quickened my step, cut across the Plaza del Entrevero down its diagonal path, jaywalked across the avenue and went into La Pasiva.

  There were a lot of people there around lunchtime. I found an empty table by the wall and sat down, almost at the very back, facing the door. I saw your message on my cell: How’s it going? I wrote you back: It’s done. But I took a minute to send it. I erased it, and then I wrote it again, and then I sent it. My battery was down to about half. I tried to find an outlet to plug in the charger, but the plug was for two little round pegs, and mine were flat, and there were three of them. I didn’t have an adapter. A waiter came up to me in a black vest, very dapper, looking a little like Alfredo Zitarrosa.

  “Sir,” he said, like that, without a question mark.

  “A half-pint of Pilsen, if you would.”

  I waited. I’d be meeting Guerra in a different place, by the water, along the promenade. Here I was killing time, mixing with people in a safe place. I wondered if it was safer to leave the bank and go inside a restaurant, or just walk around and go into a building every so often, a hotel or wherever, to give them the slip. The waiter brought me my beer.

  “Thanks.”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  I took stock of the faces of everyone who came in. I fantasized about a guy coming in and heading straight for my table, whispering, “Hand it over, and no harm will come to you,” barely opening his jacket to show me the gun, and I would hand it over without batting an eye, the guy would leave: the perfect heist. I took two sips of my beer. I took my backpack and went to the bathroom.

  I went into one of the stalls, but it didn’t lock, so I went into a different one, which also didn’t. Both locks had been busted. I backed up against the door so no one could come in and got my travel money belt out of my backpack. Quickly I stuck the wad of dollars inside it, zipped it up and put it around my waist. I undid my pants. The money was against my crotch. I tightened the elastic and did my pants back up over it. Now I was like a mule trying to get drugs across the border. I looked at my reflection and smoothed out my clothes. I looked
like I had a bit of a belly, but with the sweater and the loose t-shirt, it didn’t stand out. It was safer than going around with the money in my jacket.

  When I came out of the bathroom and returned to my table I noticed that the belt was somewhat uncomfortable. Sitting down, the wad pressed into my thighs. Regardless, I stayed that way, figuring things would adjust, that I’d get used to it. The restaurant’s radio was playing some very eighties tunes: Guns N’ Roses, the Eagles, and one song I’ve always hated that says something about “toy soldiers,” I don’t know whose it is, but it reminds me of a girlfriend I had in high school who used to listen to it on repeat. I took a look at the menu. All of it made me hungry, the special chivitos, the chajá for dessert. Their logo was a blond kid eating a huge hot dog, sitting on a barrel that said La Pasiva. I’ve always found that image funny. Wouldn’t somebody have opened up a chain of restaurants in Montevideo called La Activa? The beer was cheering me up, putting me at ease. I emptied the glass with a couple of large swigs. All the ills of the world had healed over. I motioned to the waiter, paid my check and went outside.

  FIVE

  I was all in. In the best sense. I could feel it when the sun shone on my face. I had taken the necessary precautions. Now all I had to do was surrender to the rhythm of the day. I relaxed and enjoyed the walk. I was going to meet a woman. There’s nothing better than that. All around me it was a beautiful blue September day.

  I got to Plaza Independencia, where the monument to Artigas barely cast a shadow. There were a couple of disoriented Brazilians looking at a map. I thought I recognized them from the ferry. The man was muscular, with skin the color of café con leche and a baseball cap; the woman had recently been to the hairdresser’s, and she was wearing tight jeans over her powerful thighs, and big earrings. They were pointing up at something behind me when I passed by. I walked a couple more steps and turned around. There was the Palacio Salvo. Gigantic. Guerra had sent me a link to the solo album by the singer from Blur that had on its cover a picture of that old building, half Art Deco and half Gothic. It has a twin on Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the Palacio Barolo. Both of them have a tower with a lighthouse. At some point those two lighthouses used to send each other signals, they were like an entrance portal to the River Plate. There it was, impressive. But the album cover showed it from another angle. From above, maybe from a taller building. I looked around. They must have taken the picture from a high floor of that tower, the Radisson. That was the instant serendipity of associations: I looked at the Brazilians who were looking at the building, and it was identical to the one in the picture that Guerra had sent me that had been taken from the Radisson for the cover of a CD. With those ricochets, my mind clambered up to that high floor. And my desire climbed with it. I could do it. Why not? I crossed the street and went inside the hotel.

  There were few people in the lobby. Marble floor, leather armchairs, high ceiling, smooth surfaces, the empty space of luxury, that international air. At reception I was helped by a young guy who could see I was a little trepidatious.

  “How can I help you today, señor?”

  “Good afternoon, I was just wondering how much a room would cost on the … How many floors do you have?”

  “There are rooms up to the twenty-fourth floor.”

  “On the twentieth floor, facing the plaza, how much would it be?”

  “One bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two hundred and forty dollars a night.”

  I looked at him, I thought it was going to be more expensive. I thought the exorbitant price was going to decide for me, foreclosing the possibility.

  “Great, I’ll take it,” I said.

  “Just one person?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if I could just have your credit card, please.”

  “If I pay you up front in cash do you need the card?”

  “No, if you pay for it now I would not need the card.”

  I had a hard time getting the money out of my belt. I made some suspicious maneuvers. The man was watching me, he couldn’t see what I was doing with my hands on the other side of the counter, trying to loosen my pants. I must have looked to him like I was about to take a piss right there. I gave him my passport and paid him with three hundred-dollar bills.

  I went up to Room 262. I liked the number. I opened the door. I put my backpack on the bed and pulled back the curtain. The view from that height! The strange tower of the Palacio Salvo, the horizon of the river in the background. I was living my life. Enough sublimating into literature, making up stories. I wanted to live. To see, to touch. To get inside reality. Get inside Guerra. Get into a war with my fucking imagination, my eternal invisible world. I sat down on the bed. I checked how well it bounced. I wanted to hold her naked there, her real body with me. That was the bed where I would finally go from thought to action. You had already done it, you went over to the other side of the mirror every now and then, brought back smells, moods, opinions, laughter, echoes of an intimacy that I didn’t know; then you dreamed alone by my side. I also dreamed alone. In that moment, sitting there in that empty room, I was like a director scoping out locations for a movie I’d never get to make.

  I left nothing in the room but a huge biography of Rimbaud, six hundred pages, which I’d brought to finish reading and hadn’t even opened yet. It was just weighing down my backpack. It got left on that bedside table. I went to the bathroom and took a long, foamy piss. With all my nervousness about the money, I hadn’t realized I had to go. I washed my hands and my face. I looked in the mirror. I fixed my hair a little, it had been squashed down by those hours on the bus. That was my face; as always, I felt somehow unreal. I said, “Vamos Pereyra.” Let’s go. Before leaving the room, I took a picture from the window. It was ten to two.

  I crossed the plaza and went down toward the water along a street that ran behind the Solís Theatre. Again the dark purple horizon of the open river, or a piece of it, at least. I had the intuition of a poem, but I didn’t write it down, and now I can’t remember what it was I hoped to say. Perhaps it was merely beer-infused enthusiasm, nerves. But I went with a diaphanous spirit, intuiting a celestial, atmospheric poem, in the intimate glare of a Montevideo that was largely deserted. I remembered that poem by Borges about Montevideo where he talks about the piety of a slope. “My heart slides down the evening like weariness down the piety of a slope.” Later he edited it and put: “I slide down your evening like weariness …” I guess the sliding heart struck him as over the top in the end, almost a butcher’s shop image, a bolero image (in fact “heart” is one of the words he removed most often in his edits). I like that intimate second person at the beginning, he’s speaking almost in secret to the city: I slide down your evening. He also struck two lines in their entirety. The first said: “You are still and pellucid in the evening like the memory of a friendship that was flush.” Something bothered him, the repetition of “evening,” the two adjectives that were a little stilted: “pellucid,” “flush.” And the other one he took out said: “Love sprouts from your stony surface like a humble lawnlet.” It might have struck him as too sentimental, too precious, that diminutive, “lawn” too close to “lamb.” But I liked the poem. It talks about the Uruguayan capital as a Buenos Aires of the past. “You are ours and frolicsome, like the star the water doubles,” it says. “Frolicsome,” although it’s used less commonly these days because it has erotic implications, continues to be a good word. It has some Candombe in it. And the doubled air of Montevideo; the same but different, swaying in reflection. Then he talks about the sunrise, the sun that rises over the turbid water. And he ends with the line: “Streets with the light of a patio.” A simple line, short, effective after those longer ones, capturing the affable, familiar air of those low buildings, the idealized hospitality of Montevideo. At some point over the course of the year, magnetized by long-distance love, I had learned the poem by heart, and as I was doing that, I’d discovered the differences between the two versions
.

  I saw from afar the Santa Catalina restaurant with its yellow awnings. I went by a construction site with a half-demolished building, its walls graffitied, crossed the street and entered. There were a couple of customers having lunch. Guerra wasn’t there yet. I said hello and selected a table outside, facing the direction she’d be coming from. President Mujica came to eat here sometimes, it was said. It was near the Executive Tower and was a place that suited Mujica’s simple, popular style: an old restaurant, unpretentious, with aluminum chairs on the sidewalk and honest meals. It was lovely in the shade of that awning, Cata, in that establishment that took its name from your saint, waiting for a woman I had seen all of twice. The first time in January and the second at that very restaurant, in March.

  An older man came up to me from inside. This time I initiated:

  “How’s it going?”

  “Can’t complain. You?” he asked as he wiped my clean table.

  “Excellent. Nice day for a beer.”

  “What kind can I bring you?”

  “A big bottle of Pilsen and a couple of glasses.”

  “You’re waiting for someone, I take it?”

  “Waiting on a lady.”

  “Marvelous. Will you be dining with us today?”

  “Most likely.”

  “Even better,” he said and went inside.

  The last time, when I went to open the bank account, Guerra and I had a few beers at that same table. I told her my economic microplan, that I was going to be traveling a few times a year to get money, that we could meet up each time. She kept my advances at bay. She said: “There are many pairs of eyes in Montevideo.” She laughed. That day I had to go back through Colonia, taking a bus that left early from Tres Cruces station, so we were only able to spend a little while together. We didn’t even kiss. But we talked a lot. She told me that she was living with her boyfriend in the Nuevo París neighborhood, that she was still with the newspaper, that she rode her bike to work. She talked about her mother’s illness, a bone marrow cancer that took her quickly. She didn’t get along with her father, and she had a brother who lived in the United States. That time I took a book to give her, but not one of mine: Herzog’s diaries from when he was filming Fitzcarraldo. She told me she had looked for my books in Montevideo but hadn’t found any. She had read a couple of things online, and she said she liked them. I don’t remember what else we talked about. I know I promised her I’d be back soon, and I hadn’t kept that promise because only now, six months later, had I returned.