Money to Burn

by Ricardo Piglia

  But the Kid, in contrast (and he himself said as much), felt sane and safe with this girl, as if there were no possible danger in being around her, he only had to let himself be carried along by her for a while, far from the Blond Gaucho, the twin, and well away from the Crow, just for a while, like a normal sort of guy.

  Meanwhile destiny had begun preparing its drama, weaving its intrigue, knotting off the last piece of wool (this was the youth's description when he wrote up the crime page for El Mundo), tying up all the loose threads of what those ancient Greeks were talking about when they said muthos.

  'I've got a place near here. Some of the boys in the cabaret lend it to me, and they're never around,' she told him.

  The flat had two bedrooms and a lounge and was in utter chaos: unwashed dishes piled high in the kitchen, leftover dope and food dropped on the floor, the girl's clothes hanging out of an open suitcase. There were two beds in one room, and a sofa and a mattress lying on a board on the floor of the other.

  'A woman comes and cleans, but only on Mondays.'

  'Who uses the place? It's a tip,' said the Kid.

  'It belongs to some friends from the club where I work, I've already told you that. They let me use it during the week and on Saturday nights I go back to the hostel.'

  The Kid took a turn around the pad, looked through the windows that gave on to an inner courtyard, at the passage that gave on to a staircase.

  'And upstairs, what's there?'

  'Another apartment and a flat roof.' She searched behind the bed and came out with a 45 r.p.m. record. 'Do you happen to like Head and Body ...'

  'What are you, telepathic? ... Of course I like them, better than the Rolling…'

  'That's it,' she said. 'They're fab, brilliant.'

  'When I was a child I was clairvoyant,' the Kid chuckled to himself. 'But I had a problem and it cost me my psychic power.'

  She looked at him, amused, convinced the guy was having her on.

  'An accident?'

  'Well, not me exactly, some friends who were travelling with me in the car began to mess about. We were all drunk - I used to drink gin in those days ... I ended up inside. And I stopped seeing what I'd seen as a child.'

  'Drinking is rough, I prefer hash,' the girl replied and perched on the arm of a chair to roll a marijuana joint. She looked like a hippie, the Kid suddenly noticed. A Uruguayan hippie, with those long clothes and her little pigtails, and she also worked in a cabaret, that was too much.

  'For example, as a boy I saw my Uncle Federico who'd died two years earlier and talked to him too.'

  She looked seriously and attentively at him, preparing the joint with deft movements. He told her the story when they began to smoke, because it was like talking about a period of life he'd lost, he'd never spoken to anybody when he was young, from the earliest times to the dead times in which he'd begun repeatedly getting locked up.

  'My Uncle Federico was a great guy, who went under two or three times, but he always came up again ahead. He lived in Tandil, and I'd go and visit and stay over with him. He had a garage, and he fixed Kaiser cars, he did well out of it, but then one afternoon his son was struck by an explosion in the fusion welding, a really stupid accident, as there was an exposed cable which short-circuited, and my uncle ended up watching his son die. From that moment on, my uncle let himself go, didn't want to see anyone, spent the entire day stretched out on his bed with the Venetian blinds down, smoking and drinking mate{11} and pondering. He emptied out his mate on to some newspapers in the flat, and in the end there was a sort of green island of dried herbs in the middle of the bedroom, and he wouldn't let anyone come in, not even to open the curtains,' or so the Kid related, according to the girl some time later, 'and just kept saying that he'd get up the next day. I went to visit him one afternoon and he was still there, lying in bed with his face to the wall, without doing anything. "Hi, Kid, how're you doing, when did you get here?" he said, as usual. Then he stayed silent for a while. "I've no great wish to get up," he said. "Do me a favour, buy me a pack of Particulares Fuertes." And when I got to the door he called me back. "Kid," he said, "better still, buy me two packs, then I'll have some in stock."

  'That was the last time I saw Uncle Federico alive,' said the Kid and took a long, deep drag of his spliff and smelt the acrid smoke, first in his throat and then at the bottom of his lungs, 'because he died within the week, and from then on he began appearing to me with monotonous regularity.' He gave a belly laugh, as though he'd cracked a particularly funny joke. He couldn't stop giggling and the girl started to join in while they passed the joint back and forth. 'It was really weird, because he was dead, and I could see him plainly, stood there in front of me, knowing he was dead, but this didn't seem to matter at all. At this time I must have been more or less the same age as Cholito when he died, some sixteen or seventeen years old, so that was why he appeared to me, no doubt, as if I were his son. If I came up close, say at a distance from here to the wall (when I saw him of course I knew it was a hallucination, but I saw him just as well as I'm seeing you), he'd be smoking a cigarette, and saying nothing to me. He smiled. Even when I spoke to him, he didn't hear, he just stayed put, smoking, partly hunched over, the ash forever on the point of dropping off the end of his cigarette. All he did was smile.' He suddenly started laughing, the Kid did, realizing how much he'd related to the girl. 'It was a ghost ... And it appeared to me. I've never told anyone, but it's the truth.'

  'I know,' she said, handing him the spliff. 'That's what I meant when I said there was something about you I found disconcerting. I mean you look as if you come from around here, but your spirit comes from somewhere else ...' Hash, because it turned out to be hash rather than marijuana, made her speak slowly, as though she chose each word very carefully. 'What are you doing on this side of the River?'

  'I'm passing through. On my way to Mexico ... I've a friend living in Guanajuato ... Poor thing ...' he said, with nobody particular in mind. Could he be thinking of the Uruguayan girl or of his friend, the Queen, who'd gone to live in Guanajuato because he was sick of living in the capital? He'd also been thinking of his mother, of course, she was a poor thing, who by now must be aware that he was being hunted by the police, along with the rest of the world. 'My mother wanted me to study architecture. She wanted to have a son who created houses, because my dad ran a construction business.'

  Smoking made him melancholy, it was always the same, it made him sad and made him relax, both at the same time, he felt slow and lucid.

  'Me too, I'm passing through ... I left home. Wait, I'd almost forgotten,' said the girl and quickly held out to him the butt of her joint clamped in a pair of eyebrow tweezers, then fell to her knees and started rummaging under the bed.

  From somewhere way underneath she pulled out a Winco player and put a record on the turntable. It was a record with two sides by Head and Body (the tunes were 'Parallel Lives' and 'Brave Captain' and the girl had been listening to them for months on end, the entire time, without letting up, always the same, first one and then the other side until they'd both become scratched).

  'Shall we play it?'

  'Of course ...' said the Kid.

  'It's the only record I have,' said the girl.

  'Parallel Lives' began playing at full blast, and they moved their bodies to the rhythm and smoked the marijuana spliff down so low they burned their lips on the butt. They could hear the throbbing music through the cheap record-player, it vibrated just as obsessively, and the two began to chorus in English along with the rock and roll.

  I spent all my money in a Mexican whorehouse

  Across the street from a Catholic church.

  And if I can find a book of matches

  I'm goin' to burn this hotel down ...

  He and the girl sang along together, in descant, in a rough sort of English, copying the phonetics of the music with alternately merry and angry yelps.

  When the record finished, the Kid sat down on the rumpled bed beside her and took
her hand (which was very cold) and pressed it to himself with a sensation of strangeness and loss. Then he closed his eyes.

  'Kid,' she said, speaking in a muddled manner but with great emotion, as though she were uttering profound truths. 'I know the scene only too well. You need to pretend that nothing matters to you at all and carry on in there with all those to whom nothing really does matter at all, or you'll drown in it all.'

  He looked at her, waiting for what was to come, and she propped herself on one elbow and then, after a long pause, kissed him on the mouth. The girl had a confused and passionate way of speaking which he liked, as if she wanted to give the impression of being more serious and intellectual than she was, using words he couldn't follow at all.

  'You're searching for something unknown and so you end up falling into despair,' she said and then hummed the next tune ('Brave Captain') by Head and Body which rang out forcefully, like a harder and fiercer version of the life they were leading.

  You got to tell me, brave captain, she sang.

  Why are the wicked so strong ...

  'Take off your blouse.'

  With a sudden start she realized the Kid was beginning to undress her, she stood up and began to feel offended.

  'All you lot are always saying how macho you are and you take time out and do it with girls to prove it, but when you do it with each other, you always say it's only for money. Why don't you give it up, if you really want to leave off and flee into your own inner world so much? Give it a miss for now Go find a job.'

  'I work the whole time and I don't want to be talking about this kind of crap,' he answered, on the defensive.

  'But you always go back to it. Do you do it with machos? Do you like it that way round?'

  She was sincere and ruthless. He nodded slowly and seriously.

  'Yes ...'

  'Since when?'

  'I dunno. What does it matter?'

  She hugged him and he, almost without thinking, went on talking, as if he were alone. The girl then began to grind the hash into a delicate little pipe with a round bowl, where the drug burned and crackled.

  It was a disease, this going out at night like a vagabond, seeking out humiliation and pleasure.

  'I'm bored,' said the Kid. 'Aren't you bored? I like men, from time to time, 'cause when I've spent a long while without going out, I get bored. I'm married and my wife is a teacher, we live in a house in Liniers, and I've two sons.' Lying helped him to speak and he could see the girl's face illuminated by the glow of the drug and then he felt the warmth of the pipe in his hand and the smoke going down into his lungs and he felt passably happy. 'But family life doesn't interest me. My wife is a saint, and my children are real little pigs. I only get along with my brother, I've a twin brother. Non-identical. Did I tell you about him? They call him the Gaucho, because he lived in the countryside for a long time, out in Dolores ... He has a nervous disorder, he's extremely quiet and hears voices talking to him. I look after him, and care more about him than about my wife and sons. Is there anything wrong in that? Life' - it was hard work for him to connect his thoughts - 'life is like a freight train, haven't you watched one of them go by at night? It goes so slowly, you can't see the end, it seems it'll never finish going by, but finally you're left behind, watching the tiny red light on the back of the last carriage as it disappears into the distance.'

  'Dead right,' she replied. 'Freight trains, crossing the countryside, in the night. Do you want more?' she asked him. 'I've got some. It's good, isn't it? Brazilian. When I was a child back in my village, I used to watch trains and there was always some old tramp taking a ride on the top. I'm from across the River Negro, the trains came up from the south and carried on all the way to Rio Grande do Sul.'

  They remained peaceful, lying on their backs, in silence, for a long time. They heard a train go by every so often, and the Kid realized that the sound reminded him of the freight trains running through Belgrano when he was a boy. The girl began to undress him. The Kid turned round and began kissing her and stroking her breasts. She sat down on the bed and within an instant had stripped off her clothes. Her skin was white, it shone like a lamp in the twilight of the room.

  'Wait,' she said, when he was on the point of entering her. She leapt, stark naked, from the bed. She went to the bathroom and returned with a condom. 'It's impossible to know where you guys have stuck your pricks,' she said brutally, as though she were a third party, as though up until then it had all been a game that was now over, and it was time to start behaving like a proper prostitute. He held her down by the wrists, flattened, and with her arms outstretched across the bed, murmuring to her as he kissed her neck.

  'And you?' he asked, without letting her budge. 'Every last one of the guys down the Mercado clubs has had you ... several times over.' He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.

  'I know, I know,' she sighed regretfully.

  Then they embraced with a kind of desperation and she said to him: 'I still haven't told you who I am. They call me Giselle but my name is Margarita.' She felt for his penis and inserted it between her raised legs. 'Go slowly,' she said, guiding him, 'give it me.'

  They paused in between times to resume smoking and listening to Head and Body and in the end she turned around naked and supported herself on the windowsill, her buttocks lifted, her back towards him. The Kid slowly entered her until he could feel the girl's flanks against his stomach.

  'Push hard inside me,' she said and twisted her face to kiss him.

  He pressed against the nape of her neck, her hair short and rough, and she turned her face again with her eyes wide open and moaned loudly and afterwards spoke to him gently, in soft tones, as if she were apologizing, sighing again as she did so.

  'Your prick will get covered in shit, your whole cock coated with shit.'

  The Kid felt himself come and fell back.

  He withdrew from her and wiped himself on the sheet. Then he turned over on to his back and lit a cigarette. The girl stroked his chest and he felt himself fall asleep for the first time, after months and months of relentless insomnia.

  From that afternoon onwards, and during the whole of the following week, he'd drop in frequently at the Mercado café and they'd stay in the empty flat together. They always played the same Head and Body record, always both sides, which they now knew by heart, and they'd smoke some hash and talk together until they fell asleep. He began leaving her money, which she accepted as completely natural.

  A while ago, but not all that long ago (according to what the newspapers would later report), the country girl had come from the interior, her head filled with illusions about the capital city. She was from the other side of the River Negro, but the river waters cascading over the dam weren't the only mirror she needed to reflect her growing up. She came to Montevideo with the hope and candour typical of youthful feminine beauty. Once in the city, she became increasingly caught up in the shining threads of night life and of a club called the Bonanza, shortly before moving on to another called the Sayonara, to end up in another one in the centre, known as the Moulin Rouge, where she found a man friend who set her on course working as a high-class escort. This friend was one of the night-club owners.

  It was through this very club that two farmers from the eastern region of the country came to sublet the flat from the night-club owner. The place itself was in the city centre, and the rent was kept low, while the flat contained everything necessary for a proper bachelor pad. But this friendship born of regular night-time contact soon turned the apartment into a place for the country girl to stay in: a favour{12} that the new owners of the flat generously afforded the night-club owner.

  Later on, as if by chance, the deal became more complicated and the flat generated an increasing number of keys which gave access to increasing numbers of casual users. The previous evening, for example, one of the waiters from the club had stayed there and had left behind all his documents, some personal possessions and a few clothes. The more regular
occupants of the flat on the corner of Julio Herrera and Obes Streets turned a blind eye to its use for occasional nocturnal encounters. No reason to be surprised, then, at this chain of circumstances, for in this multiplication of actual and apparent tenants and of owners, you'd find the keys to the series of errors that terminated in bringing in the boys from Buenos Aires. So now it's out in the open: by the scanty light in the dingy corners of a cabaret strange friendships form, which have a tendency to evaporate in the clear light of day.