The Scent of Buenos Aires

by Hebe Uhart

  Leonor went out to buy herself a dress one day when the stars were favorable for buying clothes. On such days, you could look at the storefront and say:

  “That’s the one for me.”

  And you knew it would fit like a glove; in fact, you knew it had been made just for you and you adored that dress. When the stars send us indecision we scrutinize every color, shape, and texture. We study everything with a critical eye.

  Leonor wore the new dress home from the shop. Next to the new dress, her old one, limp and sad, seemed to say, You’ll never love me again.

  It was Saturday night. Maria had gone to Chaco for a few days. Hugo combed his hair, changed his clothes, and shaved.

  “I’m going out dancing for a while, Mama,” he said in a serious voice.

  “Oh…” said Leonor.

  She was alone. Pili had gone dancing with Antonio somewhere else. They were going to get married.

  “Of course, Hugo,” said Leonor. “Go on, go out dancing.”

  But the thought of staying home in that new dress was unbearable. Then, out of the blue, Hugo proposed, “Alright, let’s both go dancing. C’mon, c’mon.”

  Pleased as pie, Leonor went to the dance. First she danced a cumbia with Hugo. Then she thought, Now I’ll just watch. As she watched on, enchanted by everything, a blond fellow with blue eyes came over to her. He was younger than Leonor, around thirty-four years old. Why did he ask her to dance? It had been a long time since she had danced.

  He asked her, “Do you dance with younger men?”

  “No,” Leonor said smiling proudly, “that’s my son.”

  He seemed to be from Buenos Aires, but his voice was so smooth—not like Antonio’s scratchy voice. He told her his parents were French. Leonor thought of how the French have lots of money.

  He wasn’t from Buenos Aires, he was from Neuquén, but he spoke like a Porteño. It was clear he was a sensible fellow, he wasn’t trying to step on anyone’s toes; he was a gourmet. When he’d asked her whether she liked dancing with younger men there was a certain degree of mockery in his voice, as if he found it mildly humorous, but feasible nonetheless. He wasn’t shocked, but he’d asked her coyly, as if he had some sort of right to know.

  He told her that his family was rich and powerful. Of course, thought Leonor, could you expect anything less from the French? He’d quarreled with them, but some day he would go back south to reclaim his part of the inheritance. Meanwhile, he was a gourmet. Leonor asked:

  “What’s a gourmet?”

  “Restaurant guild, pizzerias, stuff like that.”

  He was really important. And she danced with him all night. She couldn’t say “no” to that voice of his—a voice that was domineering yet somehow soft-spoken. It wasn’t like Hugo’s voice, which sounded like her own; this voice was different, foreign. At first she wondered why he had chosen her, but when they danced it was all so natural.

  Hugo came over to the table with a girl that wasn’t from the neighborhood and said, “Mama, tonight I’m not going home because we’re going to another dance after this. Do you want me to walk you home?”

  “Go on son, don’t worry about me.”

  After all, Hugo always did the right thing.

  Only afterwards did it dawn on her that he was with a girl she’d never seen and the two of them were rushing out the door, but she could only remotely register any of this, so in a strange stern voice that she hardly ever used she said:

  “Bundle up!”

  Hugo turned around, puzzled at first, as if she’d been talking to someone else, but when he understood her message, he left smiling. Calmly, the blond man watched all this unfold. When the dance ended Leonor took him home with her. And that’s how things evolved; sometimes he stayed at Leonor’s house and sometimes he went home.

  On Sundays, he came over while she was sleeping, calling out, “Loli!” because that’s what he called her. Then he would cook and prepare cocktails because he was a gourmet.

  One day, referring to Maria, he said, “Your older daughter is so mean!”

  Leonor didn’t know what to say. Why would he say that?

  He drank wine sometimes, but it didn’t hurt anyone. Once Maria told Leonor, “He drinks wine and he’s too young for you.”

  He got along with Hugo. Hugo had gotten married. The two told jokes together, and Leonor pretended like she had another child in the house. Maria approached the blond fellow one day and said to him:

  “Get out! Leave my mother alone!”

  He didn’t respond. He just told Leonor again, “Your older daughter is so mean!”

  Absent-mindedly, Leonor thought, I wonder why he thinks Maria is so mean.

  She didn’t listen to what he said. She was happy, everything felt normal. They had a little girl together, who turned out blonde Creole, with skin the color of sawdust. All the older children had gotten married and they pampered the little girl.

  When Leonor’s boyfriend was around it was all fair weather. He made delicious food and cocktails, and when everyone got together on Sundays it was a downright celebration. But when the children left, it was just the two of them. Leonor stayed in bed and he went out to do the shopping. She slept with confidence, and by the time she woke up he had purchased everything and started to cook. He spoke to her from the kitchen while she lounged in bed awhile longer.

  One Saturday he told her:

  “Tomorrow I’m not coming over. I’m going to a soccer game.”

  Surprised, Leonor said, “You didn’t use to go to games.”

  “Well,” he said, “but now I do. I’m going to watch Perfumo. See? This is him,” he said, showing her. “Perfumo takes the penalty kicks. He always scores.”

  “Oh,” said Leonor.

  Then he started going to soccer games every Saturday and she said, joking and laughing:

  “You always go to soccer games now. You never come see me anymore!”

  He opened the newspaper and showed her, “Look at all the people who go to soccer games.”

  It was true. The number of people who went to soccer games was impressive. If so many other people went, why shouldn’t he go, too? The following week he said, “This weekend I’m going to Rosario because Perfumo’s playing.”

  She heard the game broadcast from Rosario on the radio and thought to herself, He’s there.

  When he came back from Rosario, he spent an entire afternoon talking with Hugo about penalty kicks, the left wing, and shots on goal.

  One day, they were joking around like always but suddenly he said, “In case I leave.”

  And Leonor said, “Just where would you go!” following his lead, as if it were a joke.

  She felt jumpy, on edge; but she ignored it. The next day he didn’t come around, nor the following day. She went over to his house but he wasn’t there. When Maria stopped by Leonor eyed her to see whether she knew something, but Maria’s face was a blank slate; she didn’t know a thing. Leonor argued with her anyway, for no particular reason. Maria didn’t lose her cool. She held her own, calmly and patiently.

  Leonor kept thinking, Tonight he’s going to come. And she waited for him. She didn’t cry because he had left, instead she found herself looking for him around the house all day; she searched the bathroom and sought him out in bed at night. Sometimes she thought she heard him coming, but it wasn’t him. She said to herself:

  He has to come back at some point.

  She figured if she thought about him enough, he would come back, but he didn’t. When it had been three years since he left, she said:

  “I have to forget him, even if it takes everything I’ve got.”

  So she got a job as a cleaning lady at lots of different houses. She scrubbed from eight in the morning until eight at night, without stopping. And it worked because the job was exhausting and at night she would fall right asleep,
without having to think. She was so tired that she couldn’t think about anything. She told the whole story to one of the ladies whose house she cleaned and the lady said:

  “But if your daughter didn’t like him you never should have let him move in.”

  “Oh…” said Leonor.

  But she didn’t quite understand how that would have worked out. Then the lady said:

  “Don’t you have his address?”

  “No,” said Leonor. “He must have gone to Neuquén, to claim his part of the inheritance. Who knows where he is now.”

  * * *

  —

  He wasn’t going to come back anymore, she knew that now, but it felt better to work than do nothing all day. By now she had five grandchildren plus the little girl, who she spoiled rotten. A traveling photographer took ten color photographs of her by the new brick house Leonor was having built. Sandra—that’s her name—is crazy about dancing; she wants to become a famous dancer, like Raffaella Carrà. One day, Sandra asked her mother if there was a school where she could study to be an artist, to be like Raffaella Carrà. Leonor asked the lady whose house she cleans, the one she trusts, and the lady said:

  “Even a starlet has to have an education. She must finish high school and study languages.”

  So Leonor bought Sandra a new textbook, but she also bought her boots to dance like Raffaella Carrà, an Italian singer who dances in boots and sings, “Fiesta, qué fantástica, fantástica la fiesta,” with an energy verging on fury.

  Sandra knows perfectly well how to imitate all of Raffaella Carrà’s moves, but she doesn’t have the same energy—Sandra’s movements look strange and slow. Her entire dance routine is nothing more than a silly fad, there’s no real audience. She sings, too. When Sandra sings “Fiesta, qué fantástica es la fiesta,” her voice is pleasant enough, but it’s not dynamic. She’s too occupied by matching the lyrics with the steps. Besides, she has a frail little voice that sounds as if she hasn’t quite grasped the importance of exclamation points or whole phrases, which contain a beginning, middle, and ending.

  Leonor watches her tenderly; she looks at the girl’s beautiful boots which—praise the Lord—she was able to afford, the pretty sweater, and that blonde hair that Sandra has learned how to tame.

  She’s already eleven years old and before long Leonor’s tender gaze won’t be enough; Sandra will want to dance for others. Will she have enough conviction to pursue her dreams? Because dreams, like the saying goes, need someone to pursue them, to take care of them. And, with a bit of luck, Sandra will find someone to help her in that pursuit.

  Possibly an Old Husband

  NOT long ago, I had this idea that I should marry an old man. It only lasted a few days. I imagined a strong, stout old man over the age of sixty—not a middle-aged man. The old man would have what’s known as “life experience” and I’d do whatever I pleased. He would love me, protect me, stay by my side when I needed it, and give me some space when he realized he was bothering me.

  And when I didn’t know what else to do, I would fall back on the old man’s experience for amusement, let him come up with ideas on how to pass the time, that sort of thing. I mean, I’ve never much believed in life experience. What I expected from the old man was competence and a lack of anxiety. It never even occurred to me that I could end up being mean to him, or resentful—so mean that he could get sick or die, or that the old man could be a complete maniac and I would always have to tell him what time it was or what the weather was like.

  I had almost forgotten about all this when one afternoon, at a café, I met up with a group of acquaintances. We’d been there a long time already without saying much, but there was this vague sense of hope lingering around the table and that’s when an old man showed up. He was around sixty years old. I didn’t know him, but some of the other people at the table did.

  I rallied and gained interest. He wasn’t really the old man I had imagined; this guy was an old painter with a black bow tie and a poet’s long wavy hair. Realizing the old man was lucid—which was ideal—I told him:

  “Sit down.”

  The painter sat down next to me and in a competent voice without a hint of anxiety he asked me:

  “What’s your name?”

  “Catalina,” I told him, which was a lie.

  A younger man would have asked my name with reservation, irony, or shyness; but the painter asked like an old teacher who’s seen so many students come and go, and yet wearily, with renewed interest, learns the name of one last student. He spoke like a gaucho recalling some saintly or mythological reference to Catalina. I can’t remember which because I was too amused by the fact that I’d lied about my name.

  I was intrigued by that mix between Martín Fierro and Joan of Arc. Since I was smiling, he stopped his digressions and asked me:

  “But seriously now, is your name really Catalina?”

  “Yes,” I said. And it was a lie.

  “Then that’s that: Catalina it is,” replied the old man and he latched onto that reality, willing to play along. Everyone else at the table looked on—half curious, half worn out. The old man kept talking and I got a little bored. I was starting to get infected by everyone else’s fatigue when he began writing things on a piece of paper and showing them to me; then I wrote other things and passed them back to him. It was all a bunch of nonsense and I couldn’t figure out whether the old man was trying to inject some hidden meaning in the notes beyond the words themselves.

  His handwriting was neat and clear so I could read everything perfectly.

  After passing back and forth three or four nonsensical notes our friends had to leave and he told me:

  “C’mon, let’s go get coffee somewhere else.”

  We went nearby for some coffee, but it was nothing like that old café where we’d just been. This was some sort of American café with bright tables and colorful cups.

  He obviously knew the waiters there, calling them by name. It’s alright, I told myself, it’s just because he’s so competent.

  But I was surprised that he would drink coffee in one of those colorful plastic cups. Well, I thought, it must be normal. Otherwise old people would never learn to say words like “melamine” or “nylon,” (which I would have preferred). We started talking about the world and about life in general. I spoke mostly about the Bible. I like talking about the Bible, especially about the Book of Job, but perhaps I was casting pearls before swine because the old man had an amazing ability to roll with the punches, while my principles were set in stone. When I told him he was wrong about something, he said:

  “I don’t mean it’s exactly like that, I mean it’s vaguely like that—which is entirely different,” emphasizing the word “different” and sidestepping any further confrontation by quickly turning to the waiter to request another melamine cup of coffee.

  That’s when I realized that discussing the Bible with him was my way of demonstrating my ability to be melodramatic. I wanted to see how far I could take things when I noticed that my voice was getting stubborn and childlike, but the old man just smiled. There’s that lack of anxiety, I thought. And then I looked deep into his eyes, but immediately I turned away.

  Talking about the Bible segued into the old man telling me about the death of his father, which I imagined had occurred some forty years earlier, but in fact it had only been two years, and he told me:

  “You can’t imagine how broken up I was.”

  I thought to myself, his father must have been ninety-eight years old. And he told me how he’d wanted to keep him alive as long as possible, no matter what. He told me that his father had wanted to die because he was suffering so much, but he’d kept his father alive with shots and advice and the like. But his father would say to him:

  “Let me die, please.”

  Plus, his father wanted to receive the sacraments before dying, but to keep him alive, one of
the words to the wise he’d spouted off to his father—this very old, bedridden man—was that receiving the sacraments was cowardly at that point, in addition to a series of other similar suggestions. When it came to his father, the painter’s behavior seemed incompetent and fraught with anxiety, which concerned me and made me think twice.

  I’d assumed the old man had been around the block a few times since he was sitting there with me drinking coffee, but I didn’t mention it. Now he wanted to invite me out to dinner. He said:

  “Let’s get dinner, Catalina.”

  “I’m not in the mood for dinner,” I told him.

  He insisted several times but I didn’t want to. By then it was late and all the cafés were deserted or closed. I told him:

  “Alright, I’m heading off.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” said the old man. “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” I told him.

  But we ended up walking by the cafés, in silence, and I told him:

  “I’m going to check out the cafés, to see if there’s anybody I know.”

  “Like who?” asked the old man, and I could tell by his tone that he felt left out, but the possibility of being excluded didn’t surprise or offend him. It was natural for him to be excluded, because we had only just met. There I was, walking down the street with the old man looking for my friends, who by this time of night had surely left. There we were, the two of us, for different reasons, as forlorn and anxious as two children.

  Me, because I was looking for people who weren’t there—and I really did search them out at several empty cafés—and him, because he was keeping me company, looking for people he didn’t even know with his bow tie and his poet’s hair.

  “Stop looking for them,” he said, rolling with the punches. “Can’t you see there’s no one here?”

  “There’s no one here,” I said, and I felt sad and could hardly say anything else.

  The old man looked at me and said:

  “You’re sad, Catalina. You’re sad about something.” And then, in a more matter-of-fact and gaucho-like tone: