The Woman from Uruguay Page 9

  “In Pocitos?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a ritzy rich girl from Pocitos?”

  “What are you talking about? Stop, I’m no ritzy anything.”

  “You just act like you’re workin’ for a living, bus boy, bartender …”

  “I’m middle class, as my mom used to say, ‘with aspirations.’ The only ritzy person here is you.”

  “Yeah, but at least I admit it. You’ll see when you’re forty-five what a little lady you’ll become. I’ve got your number now.”

  “Maybe so,” she said, slightly offended, and lit what was left.

  This time I didn’t cough. In one hand I had the ukulele and the alfajor, in the other the joint.

  “This alfajor is glorious.”

  “You see? Salty! From the sierras in Minas.”

  “But it’s not salty, it’s sweet …”

  “No, in Montevideo we say salty when …”

  “I know, I’m just kidding you.”

  “We seem to have swallowed a clown, I see,” said Guerra in a smarmy schoolmarm’s tone.

  We burst out laughing. She told me that one of her teachers at the “lyceum” used to say that whenever any of the students got up to anything.

  I was having a good time with Guerra, I didn’t want the afternoon to end. I was getting overheated with my jacket and my backpack on.

  “Where is this beach, sugarcane? Valizas? Tennessee? I don’t know if I can make it.”

  “We just have to turn here onto Acevedo, and then we go down and there it is.”

  “What’s this neighborhood called?”

  “Cordón.”

  We went around an older building and turned. Now I know it was the Universidad de la República, which is to say that for a moment we were walking inside their five-hundred-peso bill, which features that building in blue ink. The trees got enormous, gigantic banana trees. The block made its airspace felt, like a cathedral’s tall gleaming. We went down toward the promenade. You could see the beach the whole way down. I took a better look at the street sign and remembered:

  “Onetti wrote an incredible scene that takes place here. I think it’s here. This guy has his wife walk in a white dress. He gets her out of bed at night and brings her here just to have her walk down this street while he watches from over there on the promenade.”

  Guerra was looking at me like her interest was piqued. I went on:

  “He’d seen her when she was young one day walking toward him, and he describes her, you know, gorgeous, with the wind in her dress. And years later he drags her out of bed and makes her come back to the same place to walk in the same way, back and forth, time and again, like he’s trying to get back her youth. But it isn’t there anymore, now she has this sour expression, this embittered face—she’s just not a young girl anymore. ‘Nothing could be done and we went back,’ the paragraph ends. That son of a bitch. She isn’t Caro anymore, now she’s Carolina.”

  “La Ceci,” Guerra corrected me. “Cecilia Huerta de Linacero.”

  “Oh, so you were letting me expound for no reason. You like Onetti?”

  “I especially like that book, The Pit.”

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you as an Onetti fan. You’re full of surprises.”

  “Yeah. I think you underestimate me, Pereyra.”

  “Maybe you’re right. But I’m getting to know you. If you think about it, we haven’t seen each other very many times. When I saw you today it was almost shocking. After thinking about you so much it was like I had invented you, inside myself.”

  “You thought I was ugly?”

  “No, the opposite, so sexy and gorgeous, but just, like, out of sync with my memory. Too real, too liberated from any intervention from me. All those months I had you in my head and could rewind you, fast-forward you, pause you. I’d open and close the emails you’d send me. You know how you can go over things in your memory, relive them … And when you came today it was like you superimposed yourself over the memory I had of you, you just elbowed it right out of the way.”

  “Sounds a little awful.”

  “Not at all. It was fascinating. Seriously. And then the whiskey put it all together. You became a unified, single being again. It was just a matter of listening to you and looking at you. That’s what I mean about getting to know you. I like it.”

  “What?”

  “Getting to know you.”

  “You’re quite the seducer, Pereyra. It’s really remarkable. Your mind comes up with all these little pirouettes.”

  I felt all the wind off the ocean at once. I saw into the distance.

  “Why do they call this the river, when it’s the ocean?”

  “It’s a mix,” she said. “The ocean really begins in Punta del Este, that’s what they say. But here there are some days when it’s greener, or bluer, with saltwater, and then there are some days when it’s just brown, and that means it’s mostly river here.”

  Before going down to the beach, we leaned back against the railing. Behind the breakwater there were some guys kitesurfing, with colorful sails that swayed and meandered like paragliders.

  “Guerra, I need to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to be your gay friend.” I looked at her. “Don’t laugh, dumbass, I’m serious. I don’t want to be a buddy you can dance around with without having to think about the consequences. The helpful advisor, the sympathetic ear that’s always ready to listen. I want to be good for you, but that’s not all I want. I’m not some teddy bear.”

  “Dude, get a grip. First of all, my gay friends give the worst advice of anyone I know. If I followed their advice I’d be fucking seven different guys at once. My gay friends are not even remotely interested in my sniveling. And secondly … secondly … I don’t remember what the second thing was because this joint is actually pretty strong.”

  I kissed her, and as we kissed, she ran her hand over the back of my neck, and it sent an electric charge all the way down my back. She reset me. I forgot everything, my name. We held each other, and when I opened my eyes I saw something weird in the sky. At first I thought it was one of the paragliders, but it was bigger than that.

  “Look at that!”

  It was like an enormous diamond shape that looked like it was vibrating, or glimmering, high above the surface out at sea.

  “What is that?”

  “The waiter from the place where we had lunch told me they saw something like this yesterday. I didn’t take it seriously, though.”

  “What is that, Lucas? I’m scared. What could it be?”

  It was darker in the middle and pinker around its edges, which seemed to undulate. It had a bit of a butterfly feel to it. Then suddenly it was gone. We tried to find it again, all up and down the horizon, but it didn’t come back. We couldn’t believe what we’d seen.

  “Do you think we hallucinated it?” Guerra said. A guy was coming toward us quickly wearing jogging gear, and I asked him:

  “Did you just see a pinkish light, like a diamond in the sky?”

  The guy stopped, and I had to repeat the question because he had his headphones in.

  “Yeah, I saw it. It has to be some meteorological phenomenon, that’s what I’m assuming. Or the U.S. is conducting some experiment. They’re always somewhere with their navy ships, doing strange things,” he said and resumed his exercise.

  We went down to the beach and walked along the shore without our sneakers on. Or rather, as Guerra would have put it: we walked along the shore without our “Nikes” on. Guerra was saying that maybe what we’d seen was like a forcefield or a portal that opens and closes.

  “But who generates it? What’s it for?”

  “It self-generates. It’s energy.”

  “But what happens through that portal?”

  “How would I know? I have no idea.”

  “You know what it looked like? You’re going to think I’m really sick …”

  “Yeah …”


  “A cunt!” I said.

  “Yes! Such a cunt!” shouted Guerra.

  “The cunt of God!” I shouted.

  We fell onto the sand. We were a couple of potheads prowling around in the world. The astonishing, incomprehensible world. There was almost no one on the beach. Every now and then someone with a dog. A kid in the distance digging a pit. The wind was blowing, and I started to get cold. We went to sit up against the wall.

  There in its shelter we were fine. Guerra was sucking on a lollipop. I tried to get “Zamba For You” out of the ukulele, the Zitarrosa song the girls from La Cita Rosa had mangled, but I didn’t know the chords, and my knowledge of the guitar confused me more than helped. Now I can play it without any flubs, plucking and everything, and every time I sing it I’m right there by her side, impressing her with my rendition: “I’m not singing to you: what sings to you is zamba.”

  But at the time my efforts didn’t sound very good. I was more interested in Guerra focused on her sucker. I got out mine. Hers was purple, and mine was red. The kind of sucker that’s a little ball. We started discussing them: “Is that one grape?” “Let me see that.” “Let me see yours.” We swapped lollipops. And then a kiss that tasted like strawberry, a kiss that tasted like grape. More kisses, many sweet kisses, sheltered by the wall that created a little nook up against a set of stone steps. We ended up on our sides in the sand. You’ll be the death of me, Guerra. We always end up in the sand. I write it like this because there weren’t any orderly dialogues, one after the next, but rather words breathed into each other’s ears, with no space in between them. A single whispered breath. She touched my cock through my pants. She pulled down my zipper. She stuck her hand in and took hold of my cock. “Well, well, you’re no stuffed animal, Pereyra, that’s for sure—I never had a stuffed animal with something like this.” We covered ourselves a little with my jacket, but we also didn’t care. We were off. I kissed her neck, I held her breasts under her T-shirt and her much-discussed sports bra. “Guerra, let’s go to Brazil together. Let’s take the bus tonight. Let’s go for a week.” She didn’t say anything, she just kept jerking me off. “We could be by ourselves in Brazil by tomorrow afternoon. I’ll take care of everything.” “Shh,” she said. “Let’s go,” I said. She didn’t say anything. I felt her face get wet. I saw a couple of tears on her cheeks. She was barely shaking her head. She unbuttoned my pants. “Baby, Guerra, I want to fuck you so bad, I want to be inside you so bad. I can’t stop saying your name. Sometimes I say it in my sleep.” Guerra was crying silently. She was looking into my eyes. She was holding me tightly, opening her mouth between gasps. “Let’s go to Brazil today.” I felt her have a spasm of sadness, crying, but she didn’t stop jerking me off. She confessed into my ear: “I’m pregnant, too, Lucas.” I looked at her. She nodded. “Two months, I don’t know if I’m going to have it.” I held her close to me. “Exercise caution when getting in the water when there is no lifeguard present,” said an old sign on the wall. Recalculating. No one is just one person, each of us is a hub of people, and Guerra’s hub was among the more complicated ones. “I want you to come.” The lights in my brain flickered yellow. I didn’t know what was happening, but I was still hard. I didn’t know what to say. Guerra moved her head toward my cock. She looked at me. “Come,” she said. She took her tongue and slid it over the head. That was when I heard the footsteps and felt the kick in my ribs.

  NINE

  I was facing away from the ocean and the two guys had come from that way. I thought there were two. “Stay still and keep your mouth shut.” But I couldn’t open my mouth because one of them had smashed my face into the sand, I don’t know if it was with his knee or his foot, but he was jamming something into the back of my neck. Pressing down on my back with his whole weight. It all happened so fast. The thing that terrified me the most was having my dick out and my pants undone. My modesty was more powerful than my fear of death. Guerra was saying, “No, no, no!” When I heard that they were shaking her, I tried to get up, and they started kicking me again, this time in my stomach. In the grip of that pain, I was sidelined. All that existed was that godawful suddenness. There was a silence. And they ran off. I couldn’t breathe. When I finally did breathe again, I had sand in my mouth, and I almost choked on it. I spit and sucked in sand. Guerra was asking me if I was okay. I couldn’t answer. I was slowly getting my breath back. I opened my eyes. She was fine. I touched my side, where they had kicked me the first time. It hurt. I touched my stomach. The money belt was gone. My backpack was gone, too.

  “Which way did they go?” I asked Guerra, buttoning up my pants.

  “That way, up the stairs,” she said. “But wait, Lucas, stay here.”

  I went up the stairs. Guerra behind me. I started running, randomly, wherever, I didn’t care. I ran across the street and almost got run over. A car slammed on its brakes, and then I was on top of the hood. I got off and kept running. Guerra, standing on the promenade, shouting.

  “Lucas, wait!”

  But Lucas couldn’t wait because Lucas had just been jumped and had lost fifteen grand in dollars. Two hundred and twenty-five grand in Argentine pesos, four hundred and fifty grand in Uruguayan pesos. The biggest dumbass in all of the Americas. I couldn’t not run a little, at least. At least to flee the black clouds amassing over my head, my perfect storm, my personal mafia that had just won the battle, and I was running along the sidewalk on the other side of the promenade shouting “You motherfuckers, you motherfuckers.” People stared.

  Suddenly you’re the crazy person in those situations, the man out of control. I stopped short and looked in all directions. Cars drove by, indifferent to my personal microdrama, my desperation. I crossed the street a few times without knowing what direction to go in, I got stuck on the little island between the two lanes, lost, gasping, furious as the Incredible Hulk in the middle of that avenue. I kept thinking this couldn’t really be happening, and I would check my groin, the absence of the cash that had been there three minutes before. “No way, no way,” I said in all possible tones, from tearful supplication to scream of incomprehensible fury. I jogged back to where Guerra was standing with the ukulele in her hand.

  “Lucas, calm down, you’re going to get run over. You almost got run over. Please, calm down.”

  “Are you okay? Did they hit you?”

  “No,” said Guerra. “They knocked me down when I tried to stand up, but they didn’t hurt me.”

  “Two guys?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “I don’t know, like two guys. I didn’t get a good look because I was scared. They were wearing gym clothes, I think. I think they left on a motorcycle because I heard one starting when they went up. Did they get a lot of money?”

  I nodded. I was so ashamed. Infinitely ashamed. And suddenly I was enraged. I grabbed the ukulele. I raised my arm to smash it against the railing of the promenade, and Guerra seized my wrist, on tiptoes.

  “Don’t break it,” she said and didn’t release me.

  Wise words. Not only because it was a gift for Maiko, or because after, in the months that followed, that tiny instrument kind of saved my life, but also because destroying it there on the promenade would have served only to underscore my own stupidity with a ridiculous act. The image of me shattering the ukulele against a column like a shrunken Jimi Hendrix … The scale was ridiculous, a mini-gaucho Martín Fierro shattering his guitar, you’d have to change the stanza slightly: “At this point, the singer/reached for a bottle to comfort him,/he took a drink deep as the sky/and brought his story to an end/and with one blow, smashed his guitar/into splinters on the floor.”

  I was left with what I had on, the ukulele in my hand, and a little bit of Uruguayan money in my pocket. With my backpack they had taken my phone, my house keys, my car keys, my wallet with my credit cards … My passport had been spared because as soon as they’d given me the money in the bank I’d put it in the inside pocket of my jacket. I cl
utched my head and walked. The fear and the adrenaline had eliminated from my bloodstream the floating feeling I’d had from the alcohol and the pot. I was sober, and there was a sort of high-pitched feedback that was deafening me. Guerra was talking to me, trying to calm me down. I couldn’t listen anymore. I was trying to figure out if there was any solution, but was irreparable. Those two guys would be in some distant neighborhood of Montevideo by now, on their motorcycle, counting up my money. Regardless I got it in my head that I had to report it to the police, and I asked Guerra where there was a station. Suddenly I was like a German tourist; I couldn’t even interact with people. Guerra asked where the police station was and took me up along the edge of Rodó Park until we went up Salterain Street.

  What so recently had worried me—your question about who Guerra was, the story I was going to have to make up, the other emails that you might have seen and that I wasn’t sure if I’d deleted—all that had faded into the background. Now the problem was the money that wasn’t there anymore. How was I going to explain coming back empty-handed? What could I possibly come up with to justify such extreme stupidity? How had I let myself get robbed that easily? Why had I put myself in such a vulnerable position? Guerra gave me a glance every so often.

  “I’m sorry to put you through all this, Guerrita. I honestly never thought something like this could happen to me.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “We were on another planet, weren’t we?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A very pleasant planet.”

  “And you’re pregnant,” I remembered. “Are you sure they didn’t hit you?”

  “I’m sure. Does it hurt where they kicked you?” she asked me. “I don’t know how you can walk.”

  “My side hurts, here.”

  Guerra lifted up my shirt, the skin was red, but nothing like the bruise that came afterward, like a cloud of purple, blue, and in the end, kind of green. On my belly I had a scrape from the money belt, from when they ripped it off me.

  “We should take you to the hospital so they can check that out.”

  “I’m okay,” I said.