Money to Burn

by Ricardo Piglia

  'Hubris' was a word the youngster who wrote up the police reports in El Mundo was busily checking in the dictionary. It was defined as 'the arrogance of one who defies the gods and brings about their own downfall'. He decided to ask whether he could use such a title for a strapline in the paper and began writing his copy.

  The one responsible for eliminating the prisoners in cold blood during the bank raid was Franco Brignone, alias the Kid, alias Angel Face, firstborn son of a wealthy entrepreneur in the construction business, resident of the rich suburb of Belgrano, who began his criminal way of life in 1961 at the age of seventeen, when he was a secondary school pupil at St George's, a smart English boarding-school, and was imprisoned for being the accomplice in an attempted robbery which ended up as a case of homicide. He was the favourite son of a respectable businessman, who'd enjoyed unlimited indulgence in being permitted to grow up dominating both his father's will and that of his younger siblings. One night he took the car and went in search of some friends - those he'd got to know at the Excursionistas Football Club - who'd ask him to go out and collect musical equipment. Waiting at the wheel, not getting out of the car, Brignone wasted hours, only for his friends to finally return empty-handed. His mates then explained that they'd fallen out with the bar owner and he'd refused to lend them any of the gear. The following day, the young man - still a minor - read in the paper that right there in the bar a man had been killed in the course of a robbery. He'd been beaten to death with a crowbar, one which just happened to be permanently stored underneath the Kid's car seat. The youngster went off to jail for the first time. The shock to his father was so severe that he died of a heart attack when he heard the news. The judge told Brignone that while the sentence might have been for mere complicity, he deserved to go down for parricide.

  When he came out of jail, despite the money he inherited from his father and his mother's and brothers' desperation - they being respected and honest members of the professional classes - but under the influence of his prison contacts, he embarked on a path of crime.

  'In clink' (he would sometimes recount) 'I learnt what life is: you're inside and they bug you, and you soon learn to lie and to swallow the venom inside you. It was in jail I turned into a rent-boy, a drug addict, I became a real thief, a Peronist, and a card sharp; I learnt to fight dirty, how to use a headbutt to split the nose of anyone who tried to split your soul from your body if you so much as looked at them the wrong way; how to carry a joint hidden in my balls, and to stash the wraps of dope in my arsehole; I read every history book in the library, I didn't know what else to do with myself, you can ask me who won which battle in whatever year you choose and I'll tell you, 'cause in jail you have fuck-all to do and so you read, gaze into space, you get annoyed by the noise made by the brutes they bang up there, you become poisoned and you fill up with venom - you might as well have inhaled the stuff; you listen to the cons forever repeating the same nonsense, you think it must be Thursday by now but it's really still only coming up to Monday afternoon; I learnt to play chess, how to make belts out of silver foil from cigarette packets I stuck together; how to fuck my girlfriend when we were allowed together in the yard during visiting hour, in a kind of small tent made out of a sheet, over to one side. The other prisoners helped you out, if they were also at it with their wives and the kids were there too and they needed to hide to get it off, those whores are made of steel, they pull down their knickers and get astride you, while the screws look on, they really enjoy it, laughing at how dumb and hot you are for them, grown men with no chance to make it, because that's why you're banged up, to stop you fucking, and that's why you fill up with poison, they've got you in an ice box, they put you in a cage full of males and none of you can fuck, you want to and they beat you, or worse, they make you feel like a beggar, a hobo, you end up talking to yourself, hallucinating' (and the Gaucho let him ramble on, saying yes every so often, sometimes going so far as to take his hand, in the darkness, both of them awake, smoking, face upwards, in bed, in some room, in some hotel, in some provincial village, hidden, on guard, two twins hand in hand, slagging off the cops, with the pistol wrapped in a towel on the floor beside them, the car concealed beneath the trees, taking a break, attempting to take a rest and calm down, to leave off going wild for one night at least, and get to sleep in a bed).

  And the Kid wouldn't let up, it was there he'd learnt to feel the screws' venom when they bugged him, just because ... because he was young, because he was pretty, because your cock was bigger than theirs (said the Kid), 'I learnt to store all the hatred inside, that terrible poison, like a fire, loathing is what keeps you alive, you spend the night unable to sleep, in the cage, staring at the lightbulb on the ceiling, swinging away feebly, half yellow, lit up twenty-four hours a day so that they can always spy on you, forcing you to keep your hands outside the bedcovers, so you can't have a wank, and when a screw goes by and looks in through the spyhole, he sees you there, awake and thinking. Above all you learn to think in the clink: by definition a prisoner is a guy who spends the day thinking. D'you remember, Gaucho? You live inside your head, you withdraw inside it, invent yourself another life, right inside your brain, you come and go inside your mind, as though it were a screen, as if you had your own personal television set, you have your very own channel and project your life on it, the life you could be leading, isn't that right, little brother? You turn to rubber, and you go deep inside and travel, with whatever quantity of drug you can muster, bye-bye, you're off, taking a taxi, getting down at the street corner where your old woman lives, going into the bar at the crossroads of Rivadavia and Medrano Streets, to look out of the window at the fellows sweeping the pavement, or at whatever takes your fancy. On one occasion I spent three days building a house, I swear, beginning with the foundations and then building upwards, working by memory, the structure, the joints, every floor and wall, the staircase, the roof, all the furniture and soft furnishings. Once you've finished building, you set a bomb and blow it all up, 'cause the whole time you're there thinking that everyone is trying to drive you mad. That's what they're there for. And, sooner or later, they do drive you mad. That's if you spend the whole time thinking. At the end of the day you've had so many thoughts and so little movement that you are, I dunno, like those fellows who go off and climb a mountain and sit themselves down to meditate for six or seven years, right? Hermits, they used to call them, off in a cave, those guys, thinking about God, the Holy Virgin Mary, making vows, refusing to eat, just like you, really, when you're inside, so many thoughts and so little actual experience, you end up like a skull, like a flower-pot growing a plant, those thoughts are devouring you like worms in dung. If I told you everything I thought when I was inside I'd have to keep talking, I dunno, probably for the same amount of time I was a prisoner. I'd remember little girls of eight or ten years old I'd known at school, and I'd see them grow up, I'd see them develop, filling out, and at siesta time I'd watch their skinny legs in their little white ankle socks, their little tits starting to stick out, and within a week of being in that state I was already getting them moving, I didn't allow them to grow up too much. And I'd take and shove them down on to the embankment, 'cause alongside the traintrack there's some wasteland, there before you get to the canefields and a short strip of countryside, and it was there I went and shagged them, making them lie on their backs, holding them face upwards too, both my hands under their butt, then I pushed it into them, well all this thinking took about an hour, and in the end I took their virginity. In fact there was one who went to school with me, it must have been in about third grade, and afterwards I began to think I'd really taken her to the embankment at Adrogué where the train goes around the bend towards Burzaco. This girl wanted to be a virgin on her wedding night because her fiancé was a doctor, you know, someone with plenty of money, and so I took her the other way. I told her, your hubby won't notice anything, you'll stay sealed and intact, and she lay there face down in the field, with my cock stuck in her arse, a young girl
aged fifteen, maximum, a real little whore, placid as could be because she was going to her wedding with an unruptured hymen, all very medical. Sometimes I'd think of a woman and I'd sense her there on the cell windowsill and I'd begin sucking her clitoris, she could be any kind of girl, my sister if you like. But the women aren't the worst of it because, for good or ill, you can see the women, the worst part is being banged up so you can't live, it's as if you were dead, and you have to do what they want, and that whole empty life breaks you apart in the end, it fills you with resentment and with venom. That's why whoever goes to prison is jail-meat, goes in and out, in and out, and that's because of the well of poison they fill you up with.'

  The Kid had sworn that they would never get him inside again, they'd have to catch him asleep, but even then they'd never get him, and not even asleep could they carry him inside. For the time being he was protected, in the safehouse, down in the centre of Montevideo, but he couldn't just stay placidly indoors, there too he felt banged up, having to wait, always having to wait, staring at Malito and at Mereles and at the two Uruguayan fixers, playing poker for hours, not being able to tolerate the quiet, the lock-up, he wanted to get out and take a breather. The Gaucho whiled away the hours asleep, he'd come across another stash, opium, morphine, who knows what, he was always turning over chemists' shops or finding mules who'd bring him pills, drops, crystals, whatever, and he lived in the clouds, those early days after they arrived in Montevideo, stretched out on a bed, harmonizing (as Mereles would have it) with the voices of his madness.

  By contrast Kid Brignone couldn't remain quiet, he was filled with foreboding, the need to breathe fresh air, and so he went out for a walk once twilight fell. He was convinced that if the police were on the warpath, it didn't matter what they did, and if the police weren't on the warpath, the chances of encountering them were remote. Malito let him get on with it. There was a degree of fatalism in each one of them and no one could imagine the turn that events would take.

  Those who live under pressure, in situations of extreme danger, persecuted and accused, know that chance is far more important than courage in order to survive in combat. But this wasn't a fight, more a complex movement of dilatory manoeuvres, of waiting and procrastination. They were hoping the storm would end, they'd reach calm, and Nando would send a courier to get them overland into Brazil.

  The Kid began to pace the old city, along the main drags of Sarandi and Colon Streets. He liked Montevideo, it was a tranquil city, of little low houses. He was weary of waiting so he regularly left the house at nightfall. The Gaucho watched him leave, knowing where he was going, without asking questions, without saying anything. He'd made himself a kind of lair in the corner, in a gap in the stairwell, the Gaucho, and he lay down there to dream about, or to sketch the cars he found in Popular Mechanics. The Kid invited him to come out a couple of times, but the Gaucho didn't want to know. 'I'm staying right here, in my filthy pad,' he said with a smile, wearing his Clipper sunglasses which gave him (or so he thought) the look of an aviator, a man of the world, living forever in twilight, in penumbra, isolated in his refuge. Then the Kid would salute him and leave, setting off down the street with a sense of adventure, on meeting the scent of the coast, the sour stench coming up from the port.

  Mingling with the gangsters and queers taking a walk around Montevideo's Plaza Zavala there are always some lost girls. They're all youngsters, though generally prematurely hardened. They know everything about the lads they do it with, and with whom they sometimes live: that the boys seek out others and either pay or charge them. Despite knowing all this, they don't care. From time to time one of the girls goes to the park with her stooge and they sit there together until he picks up a punter and they separate as if by tacit accord: the lad goes off with his trick, and the girl goes off to the corner café to wait for him.

  One of the girls aroused the Kid's curiosity. She was the most arresting to look at: she must have been about nineteen, with long black hair and hypnotic eyes. She watched the men with a kind of smile that gave her a pensive air, as if to her the world, while miserable and corrupt, amused and filled her with the will to live. There was something special about this girl, as if she were in some way absent, as if she regarded everything from a great distance.

  Just outside the park the police had picked up a lad dressed like a queen, his face thick with make-up, wearing a blond wig. The girl smiled and commented: 'Another Queen of the Night taken prisoner for disobeying the rules of trade.'

  The Kid abandoned his seat and went to sit beside the girl, where they talked freely for a while. They left the café, then, and went into the park where they again sat down, opposite an old man who was preaching from a Bible propped on a lectern, with a microphone held to his lips.

  'Christ's words are within us all, brothers and sisters.'

  He spoke as if he were alone, the old man. And he gave a blessing, making the sign of the Cross in the air with his hand. He was wearing a dark frock-coat, and looked very dignified, like a priest perhaps, a little barmy, or perhaps a reformed alcoholic, escaped from the Salvation Army, a repentant sinner.

  'Jesus was denied twice over and twice over the traitor was punished.'

  The voice of the old man preaching mingled with the murmuring of the wind in the trees. For the first time in many months the Kid felt at ease and at peace. (For the first time, perhaps, since he'd joined Malito's gang, he felt safe.) There he was, sitting in the park with a girl, and he was pleased to be seen with her by some of the men who'd already been his tricks, guys who'd previously gone with him, last night or maybe the night before, in the toilets at the Rex cinema.

  Suddenly she was looking at him with that smile of hers, surprising him when she said: 'There's something about you I find disconcerting. I've seen you in the cinema, and I've seen you scoring off the men here, and you seem just like the rest of them, but you're not, there's something different about you. You're more of a man ...'

  The girl said exactly what she thought, right out, and with total sincerity. The Kid was so used to faking it and everyone lying to him, that he took fright, felt really scared. He didn't like women who confronted him, or who told him he was a rent-boy.

  'Lady,' he said. 'You seem a little confused to me. You talk all the time, chatter like a Uruguayan hen. Or are you a cop? A proper cop?' and the Kid laughed out loud. 'Are you a WPC from the Pocitos Division, by any chance? Or are you on the pull?'

  She stroked his face and drew him closer.

  'Quiet, now. Come, now, what are you on about, ssh ... I only meant to say that I've kept my eye on you since you first turned up here, last Friday, with that velvet jacket of yours.' She took him by the arm, feeling the electric current and the softness of the fabric on the palm of her hand. 'And I can see who you are, and that you're not the same as the rest of them, you don't talk to anyone. And you're Argentine. You must be from Buenos Aires, aren't you?'

  He was from Buenos Aires and lived in Buenos Aires, and had come to Montevideo on business, selling contraband fabrics. Whatever version you like, as long as it was believable, long enough to last until the next morning. All the Argentines loose in Montevideo were smugglers. She smiled and then laughed, looking even younger, and kissed him on the mouth and then at once (just as the Kid had feared) began telling or inventing her own story (like him).

  She was working shifts in a night-club and came from across the River Negro. She wanted to save money and invest it in something for herself, in another part of the city, possibly near Mercado, where there were some decent bars, an area the queers didn't frequent, or any lowlife, none of the cheap negroes who came down from the slums on the Cerro. She liked Argentines because they were educated and because they had a distinguished accent. She, in her turn, had a very archaic manner of speaking, because she came from the interior, and because she said whatever came into her head. She was genuine. Or she seemed genuine, perhaps a little affected, but naturally so, as if she were a lady from an earlier epoch (as t
hough she was playing at what that sort of lady might be like). Didn't he remember the outfits he saw as a child in the pages of the Billiken magazine? For sure she did, and she reeled off the titles: 'The Lion of France'; 'The Dutchwoman'; 'The Old Lady'. The youngster was a simple country girl, but she gave herself an air of grandeur, something at once authentic and theatrical, and which pleased him. The girl could have been a sister to him and, at one and the same time, a lost woman. He'd always wanted to have a sister, a young and beautiful woman, in whom he could confide and whom he would have been obliged to keep his body well away from. A woman his own age, lovely to see, with whom he'd be proud to be seen, without anyone needing to know she was his sister. He felt as much, and after a little while, told her as much, straight out.

  'Your sister, you'd like me to be your sister?' the girl smiled in surprise, and the Kid roughly replied: 'Why? What's so funny about that?'

  Like every guy who plays the man's role with their male partners (the girl was to explain later), the Kid was very touchy on the question of his masculinity.

  The Kid was utterly fed up of going with bum boys. Every so often he got sick of it. At present he didn't want a single one of those boys circling the square to look at him, he'd known them under other circumstances, in a fleeting meeting, in toilets that stank of disinfectant, where monstrous acts were described and phrases of love were inscribed on the walls. There names were written up as if names of the gods, hearts were drawn with inartistic ardour, gigantic organs, depicted like sacred birds along the walls of the urinals in the stations and on the flip-up seats in the El Hindu cinema and in the cloakrooms of numerous clubs. He would suddenly feel the urge to humiliate himself, it came on like a sickness, or like grace descending, a breath in his heart, something you have no way of preventing. The same blind force which draws the person who experiences an irresistible desire to enter a church and make a confession. He would kneel in front of these unknown guys, bowing down (it would be better to say, or maybe he'd actually said so, added the girl) before them as though they were gods, knowing the whole time that the least false move, the faintest insinuation of a smile, of a joke, could lead him to kill them, that a mere false gesture was sufficient, one word too many, for them to die with an expression of shock and horror on their faces and a knife buried in their stomachs. They who stripped off their clothes, stock still like kings before him, had no idea of who he was, they never imagined, they were incapable of intuiting the risk they were running. The Kid might be powerful but he was kneeling there on the ground, nauseous from the smell of disinfectant, while some unknown pervert talked to him then paid him. Or was it he who paid? He could never clearly recall what he'd done the previous night, nor the night before last, during his escapades in the harbour bars and his pickups in the El Hindu cinema. He could only recall the irresistible pull that got him to his feet and out on to the street, it was like a euphoria, that left him incapable of thought (he told the girl, according to her later declaration), left him without any thoughts at all, vacant and free, tied to one idea alone. It's like looking for something under a white light and in the middle of the road. It's irresistible. Until afterwards, somewhat disoriented, as if emerging from a dream, he went back to the flat where Malito was waiting for him, and where everyone was waiting for Nando to help them across to Brazil, and whenever he arrived there the Gaucho was huddled in silent withdrawal, maybe he was furious, locked in what he called his 'filthy pad', in a corner, upstairs, at the top of the stairwell. But she didn't pass on any of this information (it was the Gaucho who did) because the girl thought the Kid was a smuggler who trafficked in English cashmere, who lived off the anthill that controlled contraband manufacturing, and who had his vices, like all the guys the girl had ever met since she came to the city.