The Woman from Uruguay Read online

  “What?!”

  “Exactly what you heard,” said Guerra. “The snake is pregnant.”

  They brought us our whiskeys, and we downed them quickly. That pregnancy changed everything. I didn’t know what to say to her. We started eating.

  “Were you able to take care of your errands?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, that’s done.”

  “Good,” said Guerra.

  I don’t know if it was because I was very hungry or what, but that lamb was one of the most delicious dishes I’ve had in my whole life. It was prepared with rosemary, the potatoes and sweet potatoes cut kind of big, these crispy wedges. I sat back in my chair, relaxed. Under the awning there was a patio light—Borges had been right. I watched Guerra eat. It felt like my odds had improved. Maybe she wanted revenge sex, to restore her self-esteem. But I needed to be careful not to overplay my role as a shoulder to cry on, since I could get sucked down into a whirlpool. The biggest problem was still the dog. I ordered two more whiskeys.

  I pulled up the picture I’d taken from the window of the hotel room.

  “Look, Guerra,” I said and handed her my phone. She put down her knife and fork and took it.

  “The Palacio Salvo?”

  “Yeah, I just took that photo in the hotel.”

  “At the Radisson? Look at you, Pereyra! You’re doing pretty well these days.”

  “I got a room so we could be alone.”

  “You’ve got it all planned out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how long has this plan been in the works?

  “Since I saw you dancing in Valizas.”

  “Well, look at you …”

  I leaned in, and she leaned in to hear what I was going to tell her in a low voice:

  “I want to be in bed with you. See you naked. Cover you in kisses.”

  I watched her mouth. The number of things that crossed that mouth in two seconds. She kind of bit her lips, almost puckered them, curled them to one side, smiled.

  “I have a friend who works reception at the Radisson. She could see me. I told you that Montevideo’s full of eyes.”

  “What do you care? You don’t have a boyfriend anymore.”

  I had phrased that poorly. She recoiled in her chair. The intimacy I had fostered broke. I wanted to fix it:

  “You can tell your friend you have to do an interview for the paper.”

  “Who writes these scripts of yours, dude?”

  I laughed, I sat back in my chair, too. It wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Forget about that graybeard.”

  “That graybeard is younger than you are. How old are you?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “He’s thirty-eight, ten older than me.”

  “An old man! How does he have all that gray hair? He isn’t doing too good.”

  “I like my men worn in, just like my jeans.”

  “I’m at death’s door, in that case. Totally destroyed.”

  At least I made her laugh, but she regained her footing swiftly:

  “You’ve just been spoiled by life,” she said. “You’re a Peter Pan who never wants to grow up. That’s why you don’t age.”

  “That’s because I’m waiting for you. I sleep in a freezer like Walt Disney in order to wait for you.”

  “You won’t be attracted to me when I’m forty.”

  “Let’s do a little test. A friend of mine came up with this. I’m going to name a character, and you tell me the actor that first comes to your mind. Deal?”

  “Sure.”

  “Batman.”

  “Um … Val Kilmer.”

  “Good!”

  “What does that prove?”

  “That we can be together.”

  “Because …?”

  “According to this rule, you can’t go out with someone if there’s a difference of more than two Batmans. To me, Batman is Adam West, the psychedelic one with the light blue leggings from the seventies.”

  “What other ones are there? Val Kilmer …”

  “Michael Keaton, the one from American Psycho, what’s his name?”

  “Christian Bale.”

  “That’s the one. If you had said Christian Bale, our affair could never have been. There’d be a difference of too many Batmans. That would mean different worlds, imaginations that don’t coincide at any point. Every single thing one person says the other imagines in a completely different way.”

  “Do you really think it’s like that?”

  “No.”

  The money belt was getting extremely uncomfortable. I tried to move it up a little, so it wouldn’t gouge me in the groin. What did I want all that money for if I couldn’t have Guerra? I just wanted to make her fall in love. She hadn’t shown the least bit of interest in going to the hotel with me, so I decided I couldn’t keep pushing. It wasn’t going to help me win her over. I needed to let our time together flow, flower. The afternoon. The conversation. The alcohol. I needed to loosen up a little, like they say. Not annoy her by bringing it up again …

  “Shall we go to the Radisson, Guerra? We can order champagne to the room. If you don’t want to, we don’t have to do anything. We can just take a nap. I’ll spoon you.”

  “Lucas …”

  “What, Magalí? Maga, you’re La Maga. I’d never thought of that, and you’re Uruguayan, just like Cortázar’s La Maga, from Hopscotch!”

  “Lucas, seriously. Can we have a serious conversation?”

  “Yes.”

  “You send me an email out of the blue saying you’re coming, you suddenly show up, you want us to race off to a hotel and have sex, and then you’re off to catch the ferry to go back …”

  “You’re right, and I’m being clumsy, it’s just I don’t have much time.”

  “Well, of course you don’t have much time, you don’t have much time here, because your time is elsewhere, with your wife and your child. You’re from a completely different time.”

  I looked at her.

  “I’m down for the count, Guerra. That was Uruguayan Taekwondo. That was a knockout.”

  She studied me to see how I took it, watched me gradually absorb the effect of her words.

  “Uruguayan Taekwondo,” I said, “is Taekwondo but with a thermos under your arm, am I right? All the martial arts are like that here: thermos and mate in one hand, offense and defense with the other. Extreme sports, too. Bungee jumping with a thermos. Even the surgeons here operate with a thermos …”

  “Are you hearing what I’m saying?”

  “Yes … I heard you say something about time.”

  Guerra’s face remained serious.

  “I heard you,” I said, “I’m making jokes out of sheer patheticness, to negate my demise. If I’ve got to go, I at least want to make my executioners laugh on my way out.”

  “I loved what happened in Valizas, our walk to Polonio,” Guerra said. “I was really into you. But then we didn’t see each other. I can’t afford to just go to Buenos Aires. And you only show up from time to time. We’ll get involved again, you’ll leave again, we’ll spend months sending each other little emails, you’ll show up next year … I’m hurt right now, I don’t want any more pain. And that’s not because I’m scared you’ll hurt me, it’s because I don’t want any pain, I don’t want to miss you. I don’t want to miss you.”

  “You’re right,” I said, looking her in the eye, and I raised my glass with its half-melted remains of ice. “A final round?”

  “Sure, a final round.”

  We ordered some more whiskey. Cuco was snoring, stretched out over the big cool stone tiles.

  SEVEN

  But the final round wasn’t the final round. There were a couple more. It was my treat, I paid a ton of money without any idea of the exact amount, since with my undulating math I found it impossible to calculate the exchange rate with that currency. Bills featuring the face of the poet Juana de Ibarbourou. Another with a portrait of the painter Figari, one of his paintings of a dance
on the flip side. Artists on banknotes, rather than war heroes. Will there ever be a bill with Borges on it?

  We walked with Mr. Cuco (I started calling him that because I started getting along with him better). Guerra asked if I would walk her to her friend’s place, where she’d be leaving him. Something eased between us as we walked together, shoulder to shoulder, now that we weren’t facing each other down, across the table. It was a relief to move along, taking in the day, the two of us. I remember that on the corner I saw her back, in that short t-shirt that opened up behind her.

  “Is this a bikini?” I said, tugging slightly on the horizontal elastic of her light green bra.

  “Fft!” she swatted me away. “It’s a sports bra.” Walking next to her, I put my arm around her waist and squeezed.

  “That’s how I grabbed you in Valizas that night.”

  “Oh, I remember. Pretty bold.”

  We had a somewhat restricted personal mythology. Just a few anecdotes together. But we made them count. I don’t know what street we took. Even looking at the map now I can’t find it, but it must have been one that ran parallel to the promenade. We sang “Sweetness in the Distance,” badly, forgetting parts. In tune enough, though, the both of us, especially in the last verse of, “My destiny has flown away. My life has gone by in just instants, a crossroads at the end of a day. And your sweetness in the distance.” Although sometimes we’d get the last line mixed up with “crickets’ songs were constants,” from the previous verse. At some point I stuck my hand in my jacket pocket and found the flyer from the tattoo parlor.

  “Wow,” I said. “Genital perforations!”

  Guerra looked at the paper.

  “What is this?”

  “Somebody gave it to me when I was walking down the 18 de Julio.”

  “Just 18,” she says. “Nobody says ‘the 18.’ ”

  “Sorry, sorry. I had no intention of breaking the rules of the Montevidean sociolect! I’m going to get a genital perforation. That way my cock can communicate with your piercing, through telepathy.”

  Guerra started laughing.

  “I’d like to see it again.”

  “What would you like to see again?”

  “Your esteemed piercing.”

  “You didn’t see it before.”

  “Well …”

  “No, you didn’t see it.”

  “Right, I guess I didn’t meet it face to face. But I felt it. I had it sizzling against my fingers.”

  The most beautiful smile in the world. A dirty smile, surreptitious and complicit.

  “There’s a room waiting for us,” I told her. “How far is your friend’s house? Let’s let this dog loose right here and just go. We’ll take off his muzzle, we’ll release him once and for all, may he run free and dine upon all the children in the plazas. Free Mr. Cuco!”

  She had a kind of heroic air about her, Guerra, walking that dog that was dragging her forward by the leash. A Homeric goddess with her mastiff.

  “I’m going to get a tattoo that says ‘Mr. Cuco’ on my shoulder. Seriously.”

  “You are not getting a tattoo. You don’t have any, do you?”

  “No. But seriously, I want to get one.”

  “Like what?”

  “A flower,” I said. “Maybe a rose petal with a piercing.”

  “How poetic. Your wife will love it.”

  “Yeah. Or I’ll get a tattoo that says ‘Guerra’ here on one shoulder and on the other I’ll put ‘Paz.’ War and peace! Why not?”

  “Is your wife’s name Paz?”

  “No.”

  That was all I told Guerra about you, Catalina. I didn’t say one word more. There was a certain loyalty in my disloyalty. And I was very drunk. All of this was happening as we were jaywalking, in a state of grace. Fortunately Uruguayans actually slow down when they see you set foot in a crosswalk. In Buenos Aires we would have been run over.

  We came to a stop in front of a house that had loud music coming out of it.

  “They’re rehearsing,” said Guerra. “Let’s wait until they stop because they won’t be able to hear us otherwise.”

  “Let’s see, what could we do in the meantime?” I said and slowly cornered her against the door.

  She let me come in for the kiss. Waiting for me with her eyes. A long, dizzying kiss. At last, that intimacy. The distance of the secret into the ear. That fusion of two spaces into just one. And through the window of the house a sort of ethno rock was coming, very distorted, with a repetitive, insistent bass, and a woman’s voice that shouted: “I had love, I kept it waiting, and when I went back, it wasn’t the same, the same.” Suddenly they stopped, and we stayed in each other’s arms, agitated by that drive inside us, that collision.

  “Easy does it,” Guerra said, putting her hand on my chest. She said it for both our sakes. She rang the bell. A voice asked:

  “Who is it?”

  Guerra answered:

  “Zitarrosa. I came back from the grave to kick the shit out of you guys.”

  “Be right there!”

  Her friend came to the door. A tiny girl. I wondered if she was the singer. She nodded to me in greeting. The dog darted in like it had been there before. Guerra thanked her friend. Then she asked her if she had a joint or something. Her friend said, “Come in,” and Guerra said:

  “I’ll just be a second.”

  I was left standing on the sidewalk, and that sudden solitude acted as a mirror. There I was, out of my mind, making out with a twenty-eight-year-old kid in broad daylight, on the street. I pictured my face all red and upset. That would have been another good moment to flee, to disentangle myself from my hormonal agenda. Play the man of mystery, the man with the vanishing act, the invisible man. Dissolve into particles of light. Be everywhere and nowhere. But no. I stayed. I sat down, surrendered to my South American destiny, there on the doorstep watching motorcycles, cars, and people pass. Guerra came back and said:

  “Want to come with me, Pereyra? I have to pick something up.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I jumped right up, because yes of course I was going with her. Guerra had dropped off the pit bull but now had me as her lapdog, thrilled to follow her wherever she went.

  She told me that immediately after she confronted her boyfriend, she’d gone to stay at the place where we’d just left Mr. Cuco. That had lasted two days, then she’d had to leave because the rehearsals were driving her insane. It was an all-female band called The Pink Date: La Cita Rosa.

  “They’re good, but if you aren’t part of the noise, it kind of gets to you.”

  “That cover didn’t sound that great,” I told her.

  “Not that version, no,” said Guerra. “Some of their other ones are better. They always perform in that angry way, though. I feel like they should calm down a little.”

  “Where are we going, Guerra?”

  “To the end of the rainbow, in search of a treasure,” she said, and she took out the joint her friend had given her.

  As always, I coughed like an amateur on my first couple of puffs. It burned my lungs. Guerra asked me if I was okay, and I nodded with tears in my eyes. They had recently legalized marijuana consumption in Uruguay. It surprised me that you could smoke on the street like that, without a care in the world. We went up to the avenue and into a shopping arcade. She led me into a place that sold old magazines. I thought the whiskey and the pot must have disoriented her a little bit.

  “If I don’t find it, they’ll kill me,” she was saying.

  “If you don’t find what?”

  I fell in with her Candombe step. She was looking for some magazines. The owner let us browse around. There were stacks and stacks of a magazine called Sports Stars.

  “Look for any issue that has a Black player on the cover wearing a Peñarol jersey.”

  “What does the Peñarol jersey look like?”

  “How can you not know that? It’s black and yellow. Try the ones from the sixties.”

  I looked through ma
gazines that were half coming apart. Faces and faces of players with little mustaches, gelled hair, notaries dressed up as soccer players, posing in their trim little shorts, frolicking after a goal, kicking the ball, leaping into the air. It was like going through a time tunnel. Players before professional soccer and the gym, before advertising and PlayStations, some with a bit of a belly on them, one with a handkerchief fixed to his head with four knots. They looked like my grandpa, Ángel Pereyra, during his time as a diplomat in Portugal. That’s when they were around. I could practically hear the nasal-voiced announcers narrating the games on the radio. Time on that side of the River Plate was different, not so much chronological as total, I thought. In Uruguay all times cohabitate. The owner of the store seemed like he’d been sitting in his chair there since 1967.

  Suddenly I stopped in front of a photo of a kind of mixed-looking guy, sitting on the grass on the field, surrounded by soccer balls. I remembered my assignment.

  “I’ve got one here, but he’s not all that Black,” I said to Guerra, showing her the magazine.

  “Spencer! You genius,” she said and planted a kiss on me. “Now we just have to find Joya. Also Black.”

  The Radisson was slowly drifting off into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, like a ship. Guerra told me that in the production part of the movie she was working on she’d been asked to look for magazines that featured Joya and Spencer. That was what the movie was going to be called: Joya and Spencer. One of them had been Peruvian and the other Ecuadorian. Guerra started singing, “Joya and Spencer, hand-in-hand with each other. They get into heaven, the two of them brothers.” She was dancing slightly. I danced a little for her, almost dancing more on the inside. But apparently this inward dance was not altogether invisible. The owner kept glancing at us out of the corner of his eye, looking uncomfortable, coughing to let us know he was still there. He wasn’t too impressed with our intoxicated whirlwind through the dusty peace of his store. “When it came to the game both were great, never better. One would run with the ball, the other handled the headers.” Guerra sang moving her butt around with antidepressant impudence.