The Woman from Uruguay Page 6

  A pregnant woman appeared on the other side of the street, with a big round stomach. Was that Guerra? It looked like her. She got closer, but then she crossed diagonally, and once I could see her better, I realized it wasn’t Guerra after all. She kept going, but my heart continued bucking like it was trying to dodge a knife. For a moment I thought she was going to show up like that, with a big belly. It was possible. Although maybe she would have said something in an email. I fantasized about her showing up pregnant, and we would take a walk, get some ice cream, sit down every so often for her to rest. I’d go with her to look at baby things. It couldn’t be mine, that I could be certain of. I fantasized that, pregnant, she would want to fuck regardless; we’d go to the hotel room. I made up a whole movie that was very tender, her naked with her belly, beautiful, her breasts bigger. I felt aroused. I don’t even have a thing for pregnant women in general, yet suddenly I felt I could have been with her like that. You were beautiful, too, when you were pregnant.

  The waiter brought me the beer, put the cloth over his shoulder, went to the curb to get out from under the awning and stood staring at the sky in the direction of the promenade. I could tell he wanted to chat.

  “Think the president might come today?”

  “Oh, El Pepe hasn’t been here in a while.”

  I filled my glass. He kept staring in the same direction as if searching for something in the distance.

  “Storm coming?” I asked him.

  “No, not a storm. Aliens,” he said, smiling.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “There was a light out there yesterday, over the river.”

  “A spaceship?”

  “I don’t know what it was. It was glimmering, it had a diamond shape, like this.”

  He made a shape with his hands that I couldn’t quite make out. I wasn’t sure if he was serious. I asked, warily: “Did it move?”

  “No, it was still. A pinkish light. You could see it crystal clear. It must have been four or five kilometers away. It was big.”

  “Well … sometimes strange things happen,” I said.

  “I had never seen anything like that.”

  It didn’t seem like he was joking.

  “Everybody who was here saw it, but they didn’t say anything about it on TV or in the papers.”

  “Did people get scared?”

  “Nah. It was more the unexpectedness of it. We all looked at it awhile, and then just as suddenly as it had come, it was gone.”

  “You hadn’t had anything to drink that could have …?”

  “Water,” he said, with a straight face.

  “Maybe it was the Virgin.”

  “Nah, how could it be if none of us here are religious.”

  “You don’t have to be religious,” I said. “Besides, aren’t the Virgin and the aliens the same thing?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. He didn’t want to speculate. Neither did I.

  I asked him how old the restaurant was, who the chef was, what kind of food it was known for, what he’d recommend. Roast lamb with potatoes and sweet potatoes, ravioli with a little tomato sauce, their stews … I was hungry for it all.

  “As soon as the lady arrives, we’ll order.”

  “Very good,” he said, heading back inside.

  “If anything appears in the sky, I’ll let you know.”

  “Deal.”

  It was a quarter past two, and there was no sign of Guerra. I considered the possibility that she wouldn’t show. There was a part of me that almost would have preferred it that way. That way I could have left, with an aura of someone abandoned yet not quite rejected, free from humiliation, almost victorious, the encounter declared null and void. I could say to myself: she didn’t show. She didn’t keep the appointment. And that would have prevented me from getting into any trouble. It would have freed me from trickery and lies. I could have remained on this side. Instead of crossing lines, passing the point of no return. It would have been a way of not taking responsibility, I guess. A ploy, in a way, not to have to decide for myself, to leave it up to the elemental particles of chaotic becoming. My heart was pounding. There was still time to flee. For a moment I considered that, too. Get up, pay, and go without looking back, leave along the promenade, take a walk and kill time until my visit to Enzo in the evening. A clean break. An emailed apology afterward. And I could be calm and alone, and think, focus on my novel, sit in some other café on 18 de Julio … Suddenly the meeting made me panic. What was I going to talk about? How was I going to convince her to come to the hotel with me? I was a little tired now, I was hungry. Didn’t have much energy. What if she agreed to go to the hotel, and I couldn’t get it up because I was nervous and tired, and there were too many expectations? What if her boyfriend came instead of her and beat the shit out of me? Or just gave me a dressing down. “You Lucas Pereyra?” My friend Ramón had that happen once. He’d made a date in front of a telo with a girl who had a boyfriend. They’d hooked up two or three times before. Suddenly as he’s waiting a guy comes up and says: “You Ramón?” “Yes.” “I’m Laura’s boyfriend. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hit you. But if you try getting in touch with Laura again, I’ll have to kill you. Deal?” “Deal,” Ramón said, and the guy went on his way. My friend told me the guy wasn’t particularly big, but he had a decisive and controlling attitude that terrified him. Of course he didn’t see the girl ever again; he didn’t tell her what happened, either. I figured that if Guerra’s boyfriend—that guy I saw in Valizas when she got off the bus—found out he’d be less disposed to have a conversation. But I hadn’t actually done anything, I’d just invited her for lunch. Up until this point it was all completely on the up and up.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a dog with the muzzle and someone jammed two fingers into the back of my neck. I jumped and bumped the table and knocked over my glass, which was fortunately almost empty. It was Guerra, coming from the promenade, with a dog. She was different; I almost didn’t recognize her.

  “Hey handsome, don’t be scared,” she said into my ear, giving me a little squeeze. “I have to go to the bathroom, hold him for me, will you?”

  She handed me the leash, righted my beer glass and disappeared inside the restaurant. The flash of her back, the blue apple of her ass in jeans. It all happened in five seconds. An earthquake. I stood there holding the leash. The dog looked at me like it was embarrassed. The muzzle looked like more of a punishment than a preventative measure. It was a black pit bull with a white patch on its chest. A shy pit. Both of us made uncomfortable by this forced introduction. The dog took another look at me, lowered its eyes, and sat down. Then I sat down, too.

  SIX

  We can’t go to a hotel with a dog. That was my first thought. Less still with that dog. Years and years of genetic manipulation had edged it toward what it was today: a jaw of a dog, rough, tough, a canine cudgel of lethal chomps, a Tasmanian devil with a huge square head. The muzzle canceled its very essence. It was a handcuffed Tyson. Every now and then it gave me a glance.

  Who would want a dog like that? What emotional vacuum was a monster like this supposed to fill, in a home? Was it a metaphor for something? For what? What was it an extension of ? Double animal, nagual—whose? Why the fuck was this chick bringing me her boyfriend transformed into a dog, leaving me to tend to him? Or was the dog watching me? I poured beer into the two glasses. And Guerra showed up. She was gorgeous, my God.

  “You’re thinner, Pereyra,” she said as she sat down.

  “You’re different, too. Didn’t you change your hair?”

  “I got rid of my flex.”

  “Your what? Your bangs?”

  “We call it a flex here.”

  “It looks good on you. You’re more sort of …”

  “More what?”

  “Less of a kid.”

  “You mean it makes me look older?”

  “No, it makes you look like a woman. Not a little girl. It looks great.” We looked at each other for a
moment in silence, smiling.

  “Want to pass me Cuco?” she said.

  “Cuco’s its name?

  “Yep. He’s a bit of a monster, isn’t he?”

  “A bit … He won’t run off ?”

  “No, but tie him to the chair just in case.”

  I got up and tied the leash around the chair leg. “There we go. Does he bite?”

  “No, he’s very easygoing. But for a couple of years now these kinds of dogs, fighting dogs, have been required to wear muzzles in public.”

  “Such an organized country, Uruguay. Is he your boyfriend’s dog?”

  “Yeah, but no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yeah, the dog is his, but no, he’s not my boyfriend anymore.” (I’m not a Peronist, but sometimes you’ve just got to shout, at the top of your lungs, silently of course, keeping your poker face: Long live Perón!)

  “So what are you doing with the dog?”

  “A friend is going to take care of him, until he gets back from a tour.”

  The waiter arrived. He asked Guerra what she wanted to eat.

  “What are you having?” she asked me.

  “I’ll have that lamb with the potatoes and the boñatas. What was the word? They’re sweet potatoes, right?”

  “Boñato,” she corrected me. Lots of little things had different names in Uruguay.

  “That,” I said.

  “I’ll have the same,” said Guerra.

  The waiter went back inside to put in our order. I raised my glass.

  “It’s good to see you, Guerra.”

  “Same, Pereyra.” We clinked our glasses.

  For a moment I thought: Who is this person? She was like a total stranger. It was hard to match her to my months-long delirium. I don’t mean she wasn’t good-looking—in fact, in those jeans and that t-shirt, which was kind of open in the back, she was hot as hell—but the ghost of Guerra that had been with me all that time was so powerful that I found it strange that this was really her, here, before my very eyes.

  “What happened with your boyfriend?”

  “The latest Uruguayan epidemic happened.”

  “What?”

  “The worst part is that it was my idea. They raised our rent by quite a bit at his place, so I asked my friend Rocío—the one with the publishing house, remember, from Valizas?”

  “Yeah …”

  “I asked her if she wanted to rent a place with us because she’d been looking for something.”

  “Mmmm … What had she been looking for, exactly? This can’t end well.”

  “Wait. We each paid a third of the rent. Things were going well: we cooked together, we took turns cleaning, plus she’d occasionally leave us alone because she went to her mom’s quite often … The ideal situation.”

  “Did she and your boyfriend get along?”

  “No. César said he couldn’t stand her.”

  (First time I’d heard her boyfriend’s name: César. I looked at the dog. He’d fallen asleep under the table.)

  “She would hole up in her room, she wasn’t one to be out with us having tea or watching television. She’d grab these cookies, take a couple, then go back to her room with her yerba mate to read.”

  “The perfect roommate,” I said.

  “The perfect bitch. Little miss prim and proper who couldn’t get a boyfriend, didn’t want to go dancing or anything else. One day I’m airing out her room a little, and I start sweeping, my plan was to freshen her sheets, and that’s when I saw it: a short gray hair. Rocío doesn’t have short gray hair. César does.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

  “Horrrrrrible. I was stunned, but then I started putting the pieces together, and I worked out the whole thing: all the times they’d been alone together when I hadn’t been there, the way César would put off leaving the house so I’d go out first, even the seemingly bad vibes between them took on this new meaning—it was awkwardness!”

  “That made it seem like they didn’t like each other.”

  “Yeah!”

  “But wait,” I said, “because … and sorry for saying this: I didn’t see your friend in that much detail, but it’s not like she’s some irresistible goddess.”

  “She’s not at all. She’s ugly! That’s exactly what I screamed at César. I still can’t get my head around it. Obviously I wouldn’t have put some bombshell in my house to get my boyfriend’s dick hard. Rocío was my friend, low profile, no curves, no tits at all, super quiet, practically a spinster, this little bookworm … The problem is you guys will hump anything that moves.”

  “Don’t lump me in with him.”

  “Men don’t fuck their sisters because their sisters won’t let them, otherwise they would. Mothers, too.”

  “Okay … Let’s get back to this man in particular. Did you confront him?”

  “First I wanted to be sure.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I recorded them.”

  “No. Seriously? How?”

  “One Saturday morning, Rocío was taking a shower, and I left my cell phone under her bed, recording. César was listening to music in our room. I told him I was heading into the city center for a bit for a meeting about the movie.”

  “What movie?”

  “I’m working on a movie.”

  “That’s so great.”

  “I agree, very salty.”

  “You’re acting?”

  “No, I’m in production. But wait, I’ll tell you about that after. The point is I left. I went back at noon, waited for Rocío to go to her mom’s place and got out my cell.”

  “It was there, they hadn’t found it?”

  “No, I’d put it on silent: it keeps recording, but it’s basically off. I put in my headphones and told César I was going to take Cuco for a walk.”

  Guerra fell silent.

  “And?”

  She didn’t say anything, just made a little movement with her head, like a mini no. Suddenly she spoke, her voice cracking. I’m terrified of women crying. I thought: How did I get mixed up in this Venezuelan soap opera? How do I come back from this? What does the manual say for cases like these?

  How do you seduce a girl who’s crying and has her boyfriend’s dog? That’s my first reaction when a woman cries, my brain flees as far as possible, to the very bottom of my selfishness, to the other end of grief and love, I plan out my escape, and only then do I start to return, little by little, I become soothing, perhaps because the crying finally has its intended effect on me.

  “I never thought … I swear, I never thought,” Guerra said with tears in her eyes. Her face sort of melted. “He said the same things to her that he said into my ear when we were in bed!”

  “What things?”

  “No, I’m not going to tell you, it’s very intimate, but he said identical things to her.”

  “That’s so awful, Guerra. It isn’t good to have that much information. You shouldn’t have recorded them.”

  “But they would have denied it to my face. And I wanted to know the truth.”

  “Sometimes the truth is too much.”

  “No, I prefer it this way. This way, you know what? I’ll never see the son of a bitch again.”

  “Where are you living?”

  “With my dad.”

  “Didn’t you not get along with your dad?”

  “I still don’t, but we never even see each other.”

  Suddenly I felt very affectionate toward her and wanted to protect her. I wanted to hold her. But there was the table in between us. I seized her hand between the glasses, like a tender arm-wrestling match, I kissed her fist.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I told her.

  She nodded. She used her hands to dry her tears. I handed her a packet of tissues, and she blew her beautiful nose.

  “Let’s order whiskey,” she said.

  They brought us the lamb, and I ordered two J&Bs on the rocks.

  “How are you?” she asked me.

/>   “I’m fine. But finish the story. What did you do after that?”

  “Oh my god, what I did after that was pretty outrageous. I overdid it a little, but it’s done now. I went back and said nothing, I just went to sleep. That night some kiddies were coming over. They started showing up at eight. More and more of them … so I waited. Once everyone was there, I told them I was going to put some music on, and on the big speakers I put on the audio of them having sex right at the worst moment, when she was screaming ‘Fuck me harder, fuck me harder.’ ”

  “Are you serious? What about the kids?”

  “What kids?”

  “The kiddies who were there.”

  “No, ‘kiddies’ means ‘friends’ in Uruguay. People my age.”

  “Ah! Still. That’s crazy.”

  “I know, but it was worth it. Their faces! You could even hear him spanking her. Nobody could figure out what was going on. Some of them were laughing. César went up to the speakers, disconnected my phone and threw it against the wall. He didn’t even look at me, he just went to the door and as he was leaving I said: ‘Yeah, get the fuck out of here. And you may as well get out, too,’ I said to Rocío. She burst into tears. Our friends had figured it out by then, but they didn’t know who to console. I was standing there, waiting for her to leave, when suddenly she says: ‘We were going to tell you tomorrow: I’m pregnant.’ ”