The Woman from Uruguay Read online

  “How come you don’t have any Black people in Buenos Aires?” she asked when she had calmed down.

  “We do have Black people. The thing is … there are all kinds of different theories, Guerra, but I really need to pee.”

  “Then pee!”

  “Where?” I asked. (I sounded like a little kid).

  “Señor, where might we be able to access a bathroom?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “There are restrooms at the back of the arcade,” said the guy, without raising his gaze from whatever he was doing.

  I went all the way to the very back, past the last stores. As I went I saw the tattoo parlor, saw it for a second, passing by, out of the corner of my eye, but from then on it kept flashing in my brain. I went carefully down the spiral staircase, which twisted around into darkness. Perhaps it struck me as so endless because of my somewhat fragile state. It went down like a corkscrew into the Earth’s core. That bathroom was a catacomb. I don’t know how many things I pondered during my long, drunken piss, one hand pressed against the tiles. The marijuana was weaving rapid theories that seemed brilliant to me and that also, when I tried to hold on to them so I could remember them later, kept unraveling into thin air. Something about Black people in Buenos Aires; it seemed like I understood everything, in a kind of nontransferable clairvoyance. The light, which to save energy was on a timer calculated to serve customers more expeditious than I, suddenly went out.

  Now I’m trapped inside that Tuesday like in the movie Groundhog Day, I go over it again and again, study it, blow it up in my mind, enlarging each individual moment. I try not to put in anything that didn’t happen, but nonetheless I do add angles, takes, perspectives that in that moment I didn’t see, because I passed by like we always pass through our lives, as fast as we can, stumbling. And now, obsessed, I learn by heart the songs I heard that afternoon, snippet by snippet, and I look for bigger images of the bills I paid with, look at them as though I were going to have to counterfeit them, I see that the front of the thousand-peso bill in Uruguay shows a palm tree, the Palm Tree of poet Juana de Ibarbourou, planted on the promenade in the neighborhood of Pocitos, near the last house where she lived, I look at the illustrated palm tree, go inside that landscape in ink, look up the palm tree on Google Street View, look under the microscope at the places, the things I saw, the minutes of those hours like a dead man permitted to remember just one day. And there I was in the darkness, releasing my sonorous stream in that bathroom, feeling like I was floating, in my relief, understanding everything, although I know it only felt like I understood. But it doesn’t matter. My head was spinning and something in my theory had to do with revolution.

  The first spark had been when Guerra was dancing upstairs, and I danced, too, albeit on a tiny scale, making a slow little turn to the left. I thought about that. And how she liked it when I did it. I remembered something I’d read at some point: some anthropologists once did a study of dance and movement. They specifically measured the reactions and decisions of women presented with men they’d have to choose between after seeing them dance. One of their conclusions stated that women, in all cultures, preferred men who rotated more on their left leg than on their right. Turning to the left is more seductive than turning to the right. But why? As if there were some cellular behavior, from when we were the size of bacteria, when the whole gamut of options for movement was whether to turn one way or the other. I had made that rotation, I had made Guerra laugh, then I went to the bathroom, and the staircase turned to the left. I went down the spiral, my spiral. Your spiral, Cata, the IUD. To have or not to have a son. Or a daughter. I thought about a daughter, I think for the first time in my life. A daughter! I could have had a daughter. I thought about matryoshka dolls, a woman inside a woman inside a woman, I thought about the chain of orgasms that has brought us to today, in my case a succession of Spanish boys and girls and Portuguese boys and girls getting it on, and some Irish couples on my mother’s side whispering sweet, sexy nothings into each other’s ears, inseminating each other and devouring each other’s hearts. Where did my spiral come from, and where was it going? What was that Afro bass there, that pulse that Guerra had unwound in her mini Candombe and that had continued resounding in me? The Black men’s Peñarol. That low drum that grounds the rest, almost guttural, that dance as if the sand under your feet were burning you. Was the animal that I was not going to have more kids? Had its reproductive mission finished? I was in the exact middle of my life, up until then I had been just getting started, but this was the boundary line, the end of the rainbow, as far as the rope could go down, now all that remained was to return, to travel the staircase in the other direction, untwisting myself. My destiny, for some reason, had been to push down on the cold button on the toilet in that basement in Montevideo, a secret button that activated some imperceptible mechanism of the machine, which absorbed the black whirlpool, the roar of the lion in the bathroom I feared so much as a child … I was, in that moment, just a drunk man peeing, it is true, and I was stoned, but I was in raptures over my big personal night, my stars like dragons in the sky, comets caught in the vortex, the rotation of the Earth, the possibility of seeing in the total darkness through the window of an instant the infinite spectacle of the Cosmos. I shook off the last drops, fastened my pants and groped my way toward the exit until I could find the light sensor again.

  I climbed slowly and, half blinded by the neon lights, went inside the tattoo parlor. A bald guy with a goatee greeted me. He’d had to stop doing whatever had been occupying his attention on the computer.

  “How much would it be to get a tattoo in one color on my shoulder, here?”

  “Depends on the complexity of it,” he said.

  “Something simple …”

  “Oh, probably fifteen hundred pesos, more or less.”

  “And how long would you take to do it?”

  “Could be half an hour, an hour. Like I say, depends on the complexity.”

  I asked to see symbols for war: guerra. I thought I would get a tattoo of a secret ideogram on my shoulder. He showed me some Chinese ideograms in some laminated folders, but none of them was right. The Celtic symbols were more my style. There were a lot of them, some intricate and intertwined like medieval illuminations, others simpler. When I saw the triskele, I thought: that’s the one. The three connected spirals. It made perfect sense with my subterranean intuitions, as if I had come up to seek out that specific image knowing it would be there.

  The tattoo cost me twelve hundred pesos (one Juana de Ibarbourou and one Figari wearing big round glasses with an angry expression on his face). About forty dollars.

  “Left or right shoulder?”

  “Left.”

  He printed it out and stuck it on me with a washable ink to see how it looked. I looked at my shoulder in the mirror. It looked good. He asked me to take off my T-shirt. Guerra came in looking for me. When she saw me sitting inside the tattoo parlor, she started laughing.

  “I can’t leave you alone for one minute, Pereyra,” she said.

  “I’m going to get a tattoo of a heart that says ‘Guerra’ in the middle,” I said.

  “No! Don’t let him,” she said to the tattoo artist. “He’s wasted.”

  “Or maybe I’ll get ‘Sweetness in the Distance.’ ”

  Guerra stepped up, looked at my shoulder and saw the triskele design.

  “That’s lovely!” she said.

  “You thought I was going to get your name tattooed? With you what I need is a tattoo that will help me forget, not remember: an anti-tattoo. What kind of tattoos do you have for people who want to get a woman off their minds?” I asked the tattoo artist.

  The guy smiled as he kept working and didn’t respond. It didn’t hurt that much, it was like a bunch of tiny, quick injections. Suddenly Guerra grabbed on to the elastic of my cash belt, which, now that I wasn’t wearing a shirt, she could see sticking out of my pants.

  “What is this?” she said, stretching it and then releas
ing it so it hit me in the back.

  “Fft!” I said. “That’s my sports bra.”

  I tried to hide the elastic inside my boxer shorts. But the tattoo artist asked me not to move so much, and I remained in that position that gave away my crude smuggling trick.

  My cell phone vibrated. I thought it was the warning that my battery was running low again, but no. It was your message: Who is Guerra? Fuck. The first thing I thought was: How does she know? It seemed impossible to me. Because I was stoned, I thought it must have been something like skin telepathy, like my skin had communicated with yours, and you’d felt something that had set off some kind of alarm in you. Total ridiculousness. Guerra saw my face.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No.”

  “How long does it take?” she asked the tattoo artist.

  “Twenty minutes,” he told her.

  She went out to talk on the phone in the passageway of the arcade. I realized that you had seen Guerra’s email. But you didn’t know if Guerra was a man or a woman, because her email address was just initials and a number, and in the messages themselves I called her Guerra, and she didn’t sign a name, or if she did, it was only with the letter M. I thought. I wasn’t sure. Just in case, I answered you as neutrally as possible. One of the people who invited me to Valizas last year. I didn’t say if it was a man or a woman. It was very telltale, but it was what came to me in the moment while I was buying time and considering what I was going to tell you. My message sent, and my phone turned off, definitively out of battery.

  What a disaster, I thought. You had heard me say Guerra in my sleep more than once. What was I going to tell you? That I was repeating the name of some Uruguayan man named Guerra? That I was in love with a Juan Luis Guerra or a Maximiliano Guerra? How was I going to get out of this? I thought maybe I could leave it as a mystery to me, too. Who knew why I’d been repeating that word in my sleep? It was still suspicious: your wife hears what she thinks is “war,” “guerra,” in the night, and then she finds out that you’re going to meet up with a person whose name is Guerra. Of course it made you wonder. On top of which, the email said, Same place as last time. It could have been a second meeting with one of the organizers. I had to come up with something I could tell you that would not be too contradictory.

  The tattoo was starting to hurt. Not the needle, but the cloth the guy had run over my shoulder to get rid of the excess ink. I thought about my laptop. It would have been hard for you to get in. Maybe you had seen the email on the tablet. I remembered that the day before Maiko had insisted on watching cartoons while I was responding to something on the tablet, and I’d put on YouTube for him, perhaps without closing my email. That could have been it. You always came back early on Tuesdays. Maybe you picked it up and sat down in the armchair in the living room to take a look at your favorites on Pinterest, something like that, you wanted to check your email, and there was my Gmail open on the tablet. What a dumbass. You’re a dumbass, too, though, for reading my private correspondence.

  Guerra was pacing back and forth in front of the tattoo parlor with her phone to her ear. She looked like she was on edge. She was gesticulating with her other hand. She was upset with someone. Could she be having an argument with her father? Her ex-boyfriend? Then I saw her get more still, barely talking into the phone; her eyes were red. She looked like she was listening. She was shaking her head. I asked the tattoo artist if he was almost done. He said he was, he just had to fill in what he’d outlined a little, and we’d be through.

  “Boy, the vibe really changed, didn’t it?” the guy said a moment later. “You guys were laughing your heads off, and now it’s like a funeral.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  When he finished, he cleaned it off and covered the tattoo with a square of plastic wrap and an adhesive cloth. He gave me some tips on skincare for the first few days. I put on my T-shirt, I paid him, and I left.

  EIGHT

  Out of the arcade, Guerra told me that she was fine, that nothing was wrong, that she’d been upset with the director of production. I didn’t know whether to believe her.

  “What about the magazines?”

  “That old man was robbing people. I put them at the bottom of the stack so later, if they actually give me the money, I’ll go back for them. At least I know they’re there now.”

  She wanted to see how my tattoo looked. I showed her. We looked at each other without knowing what to say. Guerra’s face then was the saddest face I’d ever seen.

  “You’re not okay, Guerrita. Come on, let’s go.”

  I put my arm around her shoulder, and we walked. The avenue I’d walked down so enthusiastically that morning was now a different avenue, more rushed, no sun, grayer, less friendly. For a little while we didn’t talk. Then Guerra said, “You’re good for me.” And snuggled up to my side.

  Where were we going? We went inside a little store and started grabbing things. We were coming down off the pot, and our bodies wanted sugar. Guerra went to the back and returned with something in her hand.

  “Now you’ll see what good is, Argentine,” she said and showed me a package of alfajores that had a girl wearing a kerchief on the wrapper who resembled her a bit. I took some hard candies, some suckers, and chocolate.

  We went along the street, opening them and consuming them with passion and devotion. Guerra was smiling again.

  “They ought to open a store called Comedown Seeks Snack,” I said.

  “Great idea.”

  “It would be a stoner’s paradise. With desserts you can turbocharge, like at ice cream places. A jar of dulce de leche with M&M’s. Chocolate with fruit chews …”

  “A lollipop with a chocolate center,” she suggested.

  “Genius, that has not been invented yet.”

  “But I’d call the place Sugar, in English so it would sound cool.” We kept talking about this project for several blocks. Suddenly in the window of a music store a ukulele hypnotized me. I stopped dead. It was adorable, like a tiny guitar.

  “What?” she said.

  “I need to buy that for my kid,” I said, thinking aloud, pointing to the ukulele. Still standing there like I was paralyzed.

  “So get it,” Guerra said.

  We went in. The salesman approached us. A bald guy with a goatee that looked very familiar. It was the tattoo artist.

  “Didn’t you just do my tattoo?” I asked in surprise, and I said to Guerra, “Isn’t he the guy who did my tattoo?”

  “He is!” cried Guerra.

  “Over at Dermis, in the shopping arcade?” he asked.

  “Yes …”

  “That’s my brother.”

  “That’s your brother?” asked Guerra.

  “Twin brother,” he nodded.

  We celebrated the coincidence. What are the odds that a person would get a tattoo from one guy and then, without having any idea, go directly to the store several blocks away where his twin is selling musical instruments? It depends on the distance, the size of the city, the options it offers, the connection between the two employees … Maybe music and tattoos belong to the same universe, and in that case, the coincidence was not all that strange. I showed him my tattoo; it had gone down a little, and there were a few droplets of blood under the plastic wrap. The guy was somewhere between happy and sick of discussing his twin. I asked him to see the ukulele, and then I tried it out. It sounded good. It came with a booklet of basic chords and ways to tune it. It cost me a hundred and fifty dollars. I took it and carried it in my hand, without a bag or a box. Evidently the money was burning a hole in my pocket. The hotel, lunch, the tattoo, the ukulele … I had managed to spend more than five hundred dollars in a day.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Guerra on the sidewalk, trying to coax a little sound out of the chords.

  “We’re going to finish this at the Ramírez,” she said, showing me the half of the joint that was
left. “Do you have time?”

  “What’s the Ramírez, a plaza?”

  “No. The beach, right here.”

  “What time is it? My phone died.”

  “Five o’clock,” she said.

  “I have a little while still. I have to meet a friend at six.”

  “You got tired of me, Pereyra, you couldn’t get me to go to the hotel, so you’re leaving.”

  “Exactly. This Uruguayan woman is the absolute worst … No, really, I’m meeting a guy who used to be my teacher. Enzo Arredondo.”

  “Does he write for El País?”

  “I think so, or for El Observador. A culture section somewhere, I don’t remember where.”

  “I think I know who he is. So what is he a teacher of ?”

  “He’s more of a guru than a teacher. He taught a very atypical workshop in the Almagro neighborhood of Buenos Aires in the nineties, and I went to it for a while. You could do whatever you liked except write with your words. He’d have you record snippets from the radio and edit them, make trailers for old movies, put together poems out of newspaper headlines, record sounds or conversations on the street, take pictures of very specific things: shoes, backs, clouds, trees, protests, cyclists, the people on your block.”

  “And you couldn’t write?”

  “Not a text with your own words. You could put together stories with pictures. Do interviews around the neighborhood asking things like: Has any part of your body ever been in a cast? If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go? And you would ask the cashier at the supermarket, the guy at the vegetable stand, everybody. He taught you to look and listen. He’d have you go see a tarot reader, or go to an Evangelical church, ufology conventions. He’d have you interview people …”

  “What a strange old man.”

  “He’s not that old, you know. He’s probably around seventy now. Do you want to come with me to meet him?”

  “I can’t, I have a production meeting in Pocitos later.”

  “Where does your dad live, Guerra?”

  “Around there.”