Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  Rumi looked Engales up and down dramatically, lingering for longer than she needed to on his big, smooth lips. “I’m sure we can find something.” She winked with both her eyes.

  “Is Arlene invited?”

  “Of course Arlene’s invited.”

  “Arlene is busy!” Arlene yelled.

  “Oh come on,” Engales yelled back. “Let’s go get you laid.”

  Arlene let out a laugh and threw her brush into a coffee can. “Oh, fuck it,” she said. “Where are we going?”

  “I was thinking of crashing a rich-person party,” Rumi said. She had a subversive stroke of light in her tigery eyes, which Engales still found enticing, though he was no longer allowed to be enticed.

  “I hate rich people!” Arlene said. “I’m in.”

  “I’m in,” Engales said with a shrug.

  “Follow me,” Rumi said, her eyes flashing with promising flecks of gold.

  The rich people were all standing out on the rich-person balcony by the time they arrived, so Rumi, Arlene, and Engales had the rest of the wild, expansive set of rooms to themselves. First Rumi gave them a through-the-glass-door debriefing of who was in attendance—there’s Federico Rossi, owns half of the permanent collection at MoMA; there’s James Bennett, writes for the Times, if you’re lucky you’ll get a review but you never know with Bennett, kind of an odd duck that one; and there is John Baldessari—looks like he has no idea how to dress for a New York winter, huh? Engales gazed out at the rich people. He wanted to paint each and every one of them: a woman in a burgundy dress and open gray peacoat, whose stomach held an odd shape: a sort of sloped triangle, barely noticeable, wonderfully strange; a tiny man in suspenders whose wave of hair was about to crash. And then there was the man who Rumi said wrote for the Times—the Times!—the back of his balding head poking up out of his natty overcoat: a head that Engales both wanted to render (a white stroke, for its sheen), and to get inside of (what would a writer for the New York Times see in his paintings?). Someday, he vowed right then. Mentally he tucked a snapshot of James Bennett’s shiny head into a pocket of his brain, for someday.

  “Bup bup,” said Rumi, pulling Engales toward the rich-person fridge, which they ransacked, finishing a bottle of champagne in a matter of minutes, clanking their glasses and becoming louder as they drank. Then they wandered around the maze of dimly lit, insanely decorated, art-filled rooms, gushing over the de Koonings in the dining room, sniffing at the Stella behind the sofa in the living room, ogling a Claes Oldenburg sculpture of an ice-cream cone that sat sweetly and snugly in the fireplace, its melted parts seemingly made specifically for the little brick hole. The whole labyrinth of the place invited exploration and sleuthing, with its dim lights and zebra-skinned chairs and mahogany doors, and what were those? Pews? From a church? Eventually the three of them split up, each entering different rooms off the long hallway, toting their glasses of champagne like drunken detectives.

  Engales found himself in a den-like room, with a writing desk lit by a low lawyer’s lamp. Unlike the other rooms, there was no art on the walls; they were empty and painted a deep royal blue. There was only the writing table, the lamp, and a circle of light that haloed a tape recorder. Engales made his way around the desk and sat in the big leather chair behind it. On the tape recorder was a small white card that read: Milan Knížák: Broken Music Composition, 1979. Engales knew the name; Arlene had talked about Knížák, a Czech performance artist who was famous for his happenings and social art in Prague. Curious, Engales pressed the play button on the recorder. A rough, scratchy music emerged, halting and starting as if a record were being pulled back and then released. But the original song still retained some of its shape: a deep, old tune with slices of singing that made Engales’s stomach flutter.

  The music—in its brokenness and its sadness and its beauty—reminded him distinctly of home, of something his father would have put on, some scratched-up record he had bought on a trip to Italy, that he had probably found in the back of some hundred-year-old shop, or else a Beatles record he had bought in London or New York from a street vendor, not caring that it was a used, decrepit copy.

  “Listen to this!” his father would have told him and his sister, Franca. “Listen to this beautiful thing that a human made!”

  “But it’s scratched,” Engales or his sister would have said.

  “But that’s the point,” his father would have said back. “The imperfections, the time that’s passed, the hiccups . . . that’s the wear of the world on it. That’s the life.”

  Engales was surprised at how moved he felt now, listening to the ruptured music in this rich person’s blue room. The sound felt religious and powerful, sincere and vulnerable. It was like a discovery, of some part inside his body that released both deep pleasure and profound ache, a tugging of that part. It was a moment he would remember later for what it did to him: think about home, but really think about home, for the first time since he had fled it.

  His sister, Franca, had betrayed him: she had gotten married. To a spineless man named Pascal Morales, at San Pedro González Telmo church, on a rainy morning in July of 1973. She hadn’t told Engales she’d done it because she’d known he’d disapprove. She’d only come home one afternoon with a gold ring on her finger and a guilty look on her face, gone straight to the kitchen and begun to make one of her cakes. It was only later that Engales would realize that his sister had been making her own wedding cake, a round, sugary thing that would sit on their kitchen counter for weeks, that no one would eat but that no one could bring themselves to throw away.

  He wouldn’t have admitted why he was so angry that morning, and all the mornings afterward, but both he and Franca knew. Franca was his, and her marriage to Pascal was a distinct threat to their siblinghood. Since their parents’ death, she had been the only one who cared at all about him, and, being that he was prone to staying out late and drinking himself into oblivion, her caring was the only thing that defined them as any sort of family. She was the one who waited up when Engales came home at three in the morning, reeking of smoke. She was the one who asked him too often what he was doing and what he wanted to eat, when the answer to both of these things was always nothing. She was the one who listened through the walls when he brought women home, knew what lusty crimes he had committed, when he had stolen a girl’s virginity or been cold to her and made her cry. He resented Franca massively, sometimes wanting to scream at her that she was not his fucking mother, but he knew, too, how easily he could undo her, undo them.

  He knew that in order to survive, Franca and Engales had to maintain the precise balance of silence and understanding that could only be held by siblings who had shared as great a loss as they had. Franca saw everything, all his dark spots, all his faults, all his points of pain. Because she was the only one who had those same dark spots, different but similar faults, different but similar pain. Sometimes he could hardly look her in the eyes for fear he would witness his own despair. He would avoid her, go to another room in the house, the house too big for just the two of them, where they circled around each other like moths or cats or ghosts. At the same time he knew she was there; he could feel her care through the walls, and this is what mattered. There was someone else in the world who was witness to his sadness, and part of it.

  Their parents, Eva and Braulio Engales, had died in October 1965 when Braulio, drunk, crashed their Di Tella Magnette into a tree on the way home from a weekend at Mar del Plata. Raul was fourteen years old, Franca seventeen. It was the same day that ten Argentine explorers made it to the South Pole. Operation 90, it was called, because the South Pole was at ninety degrees south. Franca and Engales sat on the stiff floral couch in the living room with the television on, watching the explorers salute the flag in their orange uniforms. The guy who had come by the house just a few hours earlier—blue suit, clean-shaven face, hands that looked like a woman’s—had told them their parents had died on impact, on the highway just outside of Miramar. Impact: like a
bird hitting a glass window. But Raul and Franca would carry a different vision of their death around with them, a death that they would refer to for the rest of their time together as Operation 90. A slow thaw, a South Pole freeze, their parents laying at ninety degrees south, holding each other’s hands under the Argentine flag.

  To an outsider, Eva and Braulio might have struck you as the type of people who would die young, if only because they were in a constant state of motion that was nearly reckless. They flung themselves onto airplanes and trains, jetting to Brussels on a whim, or up to Córdoba for a meeting, then drove, as they had that fateful night, down to the beach for a weekend of cocktails and communism talk with their somehow never busy bohemian friends. What they did remained vague to Raul and Franca: something to do with international politics and, as they dubbed it, the slow fight toward social justice. If nothing else, their constant travels had left their children with the ability to care for themselves for long stretches (something that would come in handy when they never returned), and a vague residue of radicalism (Never trust anyone who wants to be in charge, his father had often said). Also, a US passport for Raul; they had had him during a six-month stint in New York City, a story they loved to tell—our American boy, they’d say in English at parties—and a fact that linked him to the continent above, kept Raul studying English through his teenage years, just in case he ever wanted to go north. Franca, three years old at the time, had been given only a temporary visa.

  The first years after their parents’ death, Raul kept expecting them to come home, to whirl through the house in their new, foreign clothes, his mother’s long skirts and belled sleeves swishing over tabletops as she arranged the trinkets they had picked up: a set of brightly colored nesting dolls, an engraved wooden box lined with purple velvet, a giant cow’s skull, which would hang above the fireplace until Raul, two years after they died, would stand on a chair, pull it down, and break it into pieces over his knee.

  After he began to take their absence more seriously, to stop waking up expecting them to have come back, he started to feel the loss in his body. It was like a dark, lethargic mass, a blob of anger and pain that would sometimes have him drinking straight from whiskey bottles, sometimes stealing from grocery stores, and sometimes paralyzed, utterly unable to get out of bed. It was the ache that kept him from attending most of his classes at school, in favor of smoking cigarettes in the alley on the side of the building. The first time Franca discovered his hiding spot he was not surprised—she somehow always knew where he was, as if she had a sixth sense. But he was surprised when she squatted down next to him in her navy uniform and, instead of scolding him or telling him to go back to class, took the cigarette from his hand and breathed in a slow, silent drag. She looked up at the sky, which had two puffy clouds floating in it.

  “Looks like tits,” Franca said.

  And he had busted up laughing, and she had, too, the kind of ridiculous, necessary laughter that only siblings shared. They laughed until their stomachs hurt, and when they stopped, Engales had felt terrified. He remembered thinking, in that moment, that this would be the only time he ever laughed. That the laughter was just a small break in more endless aching, which was almost worse than having never felt relief.

  In order to make enough money to afford to stay in their parents’ house, both Franca and Raul had to take jobs. Raul painted houses for rich people—mostly military families—in Palermo and Recoleta; Franca worked at the bakery, which she would later take over. They created necessary habits: taking baths together—with their backs toward each other—so as to have enough warm water; lighting candles instead of turning on lights, telling each other stories alternately, so the other could fall asleep. They existed this way—parentless, but together—for eight long years, before Pascal Morales came around and cracked their delicate balance right down the middle.

  Pascal had been selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door, and when he’d knocked on theirs and seen Franca, he’d told her she was more beautiful than the woman on the cover of the magazines he was carrying, who happened to be Brigitte Bardot. “Nobody’s more beautiful than Brigitte Bardot,” Franca had said in her shy way, but Pascal had already sold her—on both the compliment and the subscription—and she went out to dinner with him that very night.

  “You bought a fucking magazine subscription from that asshole?” Engales yelled at her when she got home from the date.

  “He’s not so bad,” Franca had said. “He took me to that new place, Tia Andino. Raul, he can afford Tia Andino!”

  “Well, we cannot afford magazine subscriptions!” Raul yelled.

  “But we could if he helped us!” Franca pleaded. “What if he could take care of us?”

  Raul just looked at her and shook his head. What she was really saying was that he, Engales, could not take care of them. That he was not enough. What hurt the most is that he knew he wasn’t. That he wasn’t a strong enough man to take care of his own sister, or even himself.

  Quickly, though, he saw that Pascal was not up for the task, either. The man had a sneaky, weaselly quality to him, and something told Engales that if the house were to suddenly catch fire, Pascal would sprint out the door to save himself without a thought cast back to Franca. Engales performed a series of miniature tests—break the hinge on the back door and see if Pascal will even try to fix it (he didn’t); voice a disgustingly conservative political opinion (something pro-Perón, who had essentially turned into a fascist) over dinner to see if Pascal would object (he didn’t)—which told him that Pascal was not only unworthy of dating his sister but unworthy of setting foot in their house at all.

  “He’s a pansy, Franca,” he tried to tell his sister, after they’d been dating a few months (already much too long, in Engales’s opinion). “A conservative pansy. He’s not for you!”

  “It’s too bad you feel that way,” said Franca. “Because I’ve asked him to move in.”

  In the hottest part of January in 1973, Pascal brought over a truckload of furniture that, in its attempt to look modern, only appeared hideously cheap and clashed in an upsetting way with their mother’s antique glass tables and ornate, beautiful couch cushions. He installed a giant brown square of a chair in the living room and installed himself atop it, a spot which he would come to think he owned, and where he would sit for long, seemingly endless stretches, watching the most conservative of the news stations, his knotty feet propped up on their mother’s glass table as if it were not a precious memento of their dead parents but a disposable ottoman, built just for him and his bony heels.

  Pascal’s presence drove Engales to practically live at El Federal, the bar around the corner, where he could go to drink and be silent and where he didn’t have to smell Morales’s thick breath or hear Morales’s farting in the night or see Morales’s hair in the drain of the tub. All of the habits with his sister were interrupted—Pascal paid to have the lights turned back on; he slept in the bed with Franca, and Raul slept back in his childhood bedroom, in his old, creaky twin bed. There was scarcely enough hot water for the three of them, and Engales’s baths were almost always freezing. The thought of his sister sleeping with Pascal nearly drove him mad, and this he blamed on her.

  “He’s not going to save you,” he shouted at her one night when they had both been unable to sleep, and had wandered, as they had done in their youth, to the dark kitchen. “He’s not going to bring back Mom and Dad!”

  He had made Franca cry that night, as he would many times before he left.

  “You have to let me live my life, Raul,” she said. “You’re going to leave one day and then where will I be? I need someone.”

  “Well, he’s not the right someone!” he yelled at her.

  She had clamped her hot hand on his shoulder, given him the look she gave that meant don’t.

  Buenos Aires, for Raul Engales, was becoming a series of don’ts, he saw then. Don’t come between your sister and her sleazy new boyfriend. Don’t feel comfortable or welcome i
n your own house. Don’t sleep with women who hang out too late at El Federal, looking to escape their own husbands (their husbands will find you, chase you down Calle Defensa, and force you to hide in the dark behind the Dumpster). Don’t gain any recognition for your paintings, which are at this point only a pathetic hobby, not worth anyone’s time (not that anyone cared about art right now in Buenos Aires, where things were becoming too fucked up to care about such frivolous endeavors). And don’t, when your sister tells you she has married Pascal Morales at the San Pedro Gonzáles Telmo church yesterday morning, try for one more second to disguise your abhorrence of him, of them, because Pascal Morales is here to stay, in this enormous old house your parents saddled you with, that even with its four bedrooms is not big enough for three.

  Do pull your American passport from your father’s old writing desk, run your palm over its gold emboss, and remember your father saying, It’s a city of pure poetry, I’m telling you, kids.

  You are ready for poetry. You are through with the suffocating text that has become your life in this old house.

  In the end Franca had begged him not to go. In the earliest part of the morning, on Saturday, June 29, of 1974, just two days before Perón’s death would rock the country and one day before Raul turned twenty-three, as he walked away from the house with his backpack, he heard Franca yell from their front stoop: Don’t leave, Raul! Please don’t leave! He could not look back at her. If he looked back he would never be able to look forward. He would see her holding her silly cake, which she had baked for his birthday in one final plea to make him stay, in her old blue coat that used to be their mother’s. He was terrified to leave her: the only person who cared about him and the only home he’d ever known. He did.

  The door to the blue room opened and Engales, startled, knocked over his champagne glass. Thankfully it was empty, or he would have spilled all over Broken Music Composition, 1979. At the door was a woman—not beautiful, but important-looking—sporting a black silk dress and a fountain of graying black hair.