Betty Boo

by Claudia Piñeiro

  After emptying the ashtrays and airing out the room to banish the smell of cigarette smoke, Nurit Iscar sweeps the floor. Then she washes some plates left over from the night before, puts the tablecloth in the washing machine – she’ll set it off later when she’s gathered more dirty laundry – and dumps the scattered Sunday papers into the regulation black bag which, in a few minutes, she’ll take out to the landing with the other rubbish. Only moments before, Gladys Varela was doing precisely the same chores for her boss, Pedro Chazarreta. But at this moment, as Nurit Iscar ties up the black bag full of newspapers, Gladys Varela isn’t doing anything, apart from crying, as she sits in the electric buggy one of the Maravillosa guards drove over in, minutes after another resident called to advise security that a woman – a domestic, he said – was screaming like a lunatic in the middle of the street. Soon afterwards a van arrived, bringing the head of security and three more guards, and they offered to drive Gladys to the infirmary. But there’s no way she’s leaving until the real police come. The Buenos Aires police. She tells them she’s not moving an inch. And this time the guards also seem to be more cautious. Once bitten, twice shy, the security chief tells a neighbour who’s come to ask why nobody is inside the house with the body. Nobody with a good memory is going to repeat the mistakes made by the guards who came to that house on the day Gloria Echagüe died, three years ago. They aren’t going to approach the scene of the crime or let anyone else near it. They aren’t going to move so much as a stray hair that may be lying anywhere in the vicinity of the victim, much less allow anyone to clean up the blood, or place the body on a bed; any request not to inform the police, with the argument that everything was “just an accident”, will fall on deaf ears. If necessary, no one will breathe until the patrol car arrives. They made that mistake once before. And although nobody mentions it, although guards, neighbours, the odd gardener, the maid who works in the house across the road and Gladys Varela do no more than exchange silent glances while waiting for the Buenos Aires police to arrive with the district attorney, everyone has the strange sensation that, this time, someone is giving them the chance to get things right.

  3

  It’s a few hours later, in the afternoon, when Nurit Iscar takes the bag of Sunday papers out to the landing for the concierge to pick up with the other rubbish, and she still doesn’t know that Pedro Chazarreta is dead, his throat slit from side to side. She’s going to find out soon, though, in about a couple of hours, when she takes a break for tea. Because the news has started to spread. And soon after Nurit concludes her cleaning effort and remembers to pour a bit of water into the plant pots that adorn her balcony – she’s never been what you’d call green-fingered, but she’s aware of those plants as the only other living beings in her home and she’s determined not to let them dry up – in the newsroom of El Tribuno newspaper the internal line 3232 lights up on the telephone that sits on Jaime Brena’s desk. In the world of crime journalism, he’s better known as plain Brena – but he’s not actually on Crime any more. They moved him to Society. It wasn’t a move, it was a demotion, Brena likes to point out. But on one of those occasions his (and everyone’s) boss, Lorenzo Rinaldi, snapped back: What are you complaining about? On any other newspaper you’d be on the Society desk too, or haven’t you noticed that almost no leading newspaper has a Crime section these days? They put the crime stories in Society or News. It’s thanks to this change of section that, when his internal line starts ringing that afternoon, Brena isn’t writing a crime report but studying a survey that claims 65 per cent of white women sleep on their backs while 60 per cent of white men sleep facing down. And his first reaction to this revelation is a mathematical niggle: why not say that 65 per cent of women sleep facing up and that only 40 per cent of men sleep in the same position? Or that 60 per cent of men sleep facing down, while only 35 per cent of women sleep in that position? It’s like when the weather forecaster predicts a 30 per cent chance of rain. If it’s only 30 per cent, wouldn’t it be more useful to state “70 per cent chance it won’t rain”? What’s being highlighted in each of these cases? The difference? The coincidence? The majority? The minority? A desirable or undesirable outcome? What really rankles with Jaime Brena is that, at least in the survey about white men and women’s sleeping habits, nobody thought to ask themselves those questions before writing up this wire story. Whoever wrote the headline will have phrased it that way because that’s how the information came to them. There’s hardly any time these days in an agency or newsroom to think about syntax and vocabulary, only spelling. Barely even that. The agency story with the survey findings comes furnished with quotes from researchers at the University of Massachusetts who suggest possible sociological, cultural and even psychological reasons to explain their findings. Is this news? Jaime Brena wonders. Who really cares what percentage of people sleep in which position? Were other races not included in the survey because the researcher couldn’t – or didn’t want to – include them, or didn’t care? Now that could be a news story, the reason why some races – or one, whites – get studied and not others. Or perhaps no other race was surveyed because the only people willing to contribute to such a stupid enterprise were white, he decides, picking up the phone which was ringing until a second ago and saying Hello? But by now there’s nobody at the other end, just a dialling tone. Brena uses the interruption to stretch his arms above his head, interlacing the fingers, turning the palms upwards as though aiming for the ceiling, cracking the knuckles and so easing his lower back which, at sixty-something, doesn’t respond well to so many hours sitting down. Tell me, why do 65 per cent of women sleep on their backs and 60 per cent of men on their fronts, he asks Karina Vives, a journalist on the Culture section who sits at the desk on his left, next to one of the few windows in the newsroom, the one that looks on to the boulevard. And Karina, who has known him since she came to work at the newspaper eight years ago, and who knows what it means to Jaime Brena to have been forced out of Crime in order to write up stories like this one, puts on a gormless expression and guesses: Because squashing your tits hurts more than squashing your dick? then waits, po-faced, for his answer. It’s prick, girl, prick, Brena says, and with a look of distaste starts bashing out on his keyboard the title of the piece and an intro: Women Upwards, Men Downwards. The headline will only confuse readers, but it amuses Brena to imagine the wild scenarios their misunderstanding may conjure up. How long is it since they moved him to Society? Three weeks? Two? he wonders, scratching his head with a black pencil, though not in response to any itch. He can’t remember. A long time. And all because he went on that cable show, the one with two armchairs and a lamp for a set, and said: I work at El Tribuno, but I read the competition because I trust it more. He’s still angry with himself. It was a stupid thing to say, Jaime Brena knows that. But he’d been out to lunch with a colleague and there’d been wine, a lot of wine. Too much wine. And anyway, what he had said was true. That’s not in dispute. Several of his friends had switched papers in recent months. Some colleagues from work, too. But nobody apart from him was stupid enough to own up to the fact. Much less in front of a television camera, whether cable or terrestrial. So much news about the president’s assets, the president’s broadsides, the president’s teeth, the president’s business dealings, the president’s shoes: it got boring. The president’s teeth and shoes are of absolutely no importance to him; as for the rest, the first time it’s news, the second time it’s repetition and the third, if it takes up half the front page and that same day the death of the president of a European Union country and his official retinue in an air accident doesn’t make the front page (or does, but in a tiny space) it’s something else he doesn’t dare find a name for. But not news. That’s his hunch, anyway. His take. He liked it when El Tribuno used to lead with an international news story. Or a sporting one. Or crime, of course, because then he, Jaime Brena, would be writing that lead piece. That time is long gone, though, as Brena knows only too well and, worse, he suspects that it ma
y not be possible to revive it. At least not for now. If it does return, he doesn’t expect to be around to see it.

  He opens his drawer and takes out the voluntary redundancy papers. Perhaps the time has come. Perhaps he should do this once and for all: take the money and run. If I had any sense I would, he tells himself, but I’ve always been a bit of a tit. Or a complete tit. Brena’s been working at El Tribuno for eighteen years. He learnt his craft there. And while he can imagine reading a different newspaper every morning – in fact he does – he can’t imagine working in another newsroom. Even though having to see Lorenzo Rinaldi’s face every day makes him feel ill. Very ill. One of these days he’ll tell him to go to hell. He doesn’t know when, but it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time. And space. Because you can’t tell a man to go to hell anywhere. Not in a lift full of people, for example. Brena, I’d like you to cover the National Festival of Patagonian Lamb in Puerto Madryn. Go for two or three days. Get out of town – have you ever been whale-watching? You’re going to love it. And Jaime Brena who, as Rinaldi knows, hates leaving town and cares very little about whales and even less about Patagonian lamb, would have loved to reply: “It’ll be a pleasure, Rinaldi, and why don’t you suck my dick” – but there wasn’t enough room. Because after a retort like that, you have to be prepared to get thumped. Anyway, that would have been the end; that would have been tantamount to emptying his drawers and walking out. And if he’s going to leave, it won’t be with only the scant contents of his desk. Gustavo Quiroz from International News got a cake, as did Ana Horozki from Travel. Apparently even Chela Guerti walked off with a tidy sum, three years after her exile to the back page. They get rid of salaried staff whose pay has gone up over the years and replace them with recent graduates who can be paid half as much. That’s what they’re paying for – to get rid of people. Never mind that the new recruits can’t conjugate a verb or differentiate between advise and advice, or that they get Tracy Austin mixed up with Jane Austen. Somebody will pick that up later down the line. And if not, too bad. What counts is – slowly but surely – to get rid of everyone old and expensive. Mind you, Brena would be willing to bet that Rinaldi isn’t going to wave him off with a fat redundancy packet, that he won’t get even a fraction of what’s been approved for the others. He’ll get his retirement money, but it’ll be the minimum amount required by law, maybe less. Jaime Brena picks up the receiver and calls Personnel. When does this voluntary redundancy thingy have to be signed by, sweetheart? You can take until the end of the year, if you like. It depends on how you feel yourself. I don’t feel myself, my religion doesn’t allow it but I might be interested in voluntary redundancy, he tells her, and he hears her laugh at the other end of the line. You never change, Brena. If only, he says. And he means it. He wishes he weren’t changing, but for a while he’s been feeling older. That he can’t get away with playing the fool like he used to until a few years ago, and with pretending that he’s ten years younger than he really is. Better still, pretending to be ageless. Age used to be an irrelevance to him. Strange, then, that he’s started to feel so old. Too old for everything: for work, travel, even for girls. It’s not only a feeling: in the last year his body has visibly aged. He sees it in his abdomen, which protrudes just below his chest and sinks undifferentiated into his belly. Why, if he’s never been fat? And in his hair, which isn’t yet falling out copiously but which is beginning to look thin in the area that will one day inevitably be bald. And in his bum cheeks, which – although he tries not to catch sight of them in the mirror – he knows to have fallen like two ripe pears. Or two tears. What do you expect, you’re over sixty, he tells himself by way of consolation, only to realize immediately that this is the very opposite of a consolation: he doesn’t want to be over sixty. Brena puts the forms back in the drawer and gazes over the desk partition at the boy they brought in to replace him on the news stories that used to be his: violent crime and assault. A nice boy, but wet behind the ears. Very soft. Generation Google: no legwork, just keyboard and screen, everything off the Internet. They don’t even use a biro. The boy makes an effort, it has to be said: he’s always the first to arrive, the last to go, and Rinaldi is squarely behind him, making it look as though the Crime section can run perfectly well without him – without Jaime Brena, that is. Well, these things happen sometimes; you can land up somewhere fulfilling a function quite separate to the job for which you were taken on and with an ultimate objective you know nothing about. You can end up being someone else’s puppet and that, he believes, is what’s happening to the boy in Crime: Lorenzo Rinaldi is using him to stamp on Brena. But even though he has the boss’s backing and doesn’t suspect the machinations behind his appointment and new position, the boy seems very lost, almost dazed; he misses important things and, even though he doesn’t make the clumsy mistakes typical of a beginner, there’s a whiff of insecurity in the way he writes, a hesitancy that doesn’t escape Brena. For the first time, the competition is breaking important crime and assault stories before El Tribuno. Apparently the boy will say: I wasn’t happy about running it, it was an unreliable source. Or: It didn’t strike me as relevant. Or: I had a lot of copy and not much space, so something had to go. But Jaime Brena doesn’t believe him; he suspects the real problem is that the boy doesn’t have good contacts. And a good crime reporter depends on contacts passing on leads that, sooner or later, will blossom into stories. Better still if the info is exclusive. Because if you have to wait until they lift the gagging order, you’re toast. It doesn’t matter if the contacts are police, lawyers, informants, judges or prisoners, so long as they have the right information. Sometimes he thinks he ought to help him. The boy. Then he thinks, why should he? They didn’t assign the boy to him. Let Rinaldi train him up; after all, and though Rinaldi hasn’t said he’s the Crime Editor and doesn’t appear as such in the paper, he seems to be acting as the head of that leaderless section. But Brena reckons that Rinaldi’s less likely to give the boy a training than a kick in the teeth, sooner or later, once he’s outlived his purpose. A painful kick. The worst of it is that – although Jaime Brena doesn’t want to admit this – the boy inspires mixed emotions in him. He doesn’t entirely dislike him. He reminds Brena of his own first steps in journalism more than forty years ago. Forty-four years: an eternity (why shouldn’t he be expensive, why shouldn’t they offer him voluntary redundancy?). The difference between him and the boy is that he had mentors, both in the newsroom and out in the world, and since he’d come straight from school, he had none of that virgin petulance that some of the university graduates arrive with. The boy’s all Google and university and no street, Brena thinks. He’s worked in the crime section on a rival newspaper, alongside Zippo, a long-time colleague with whom Jaime Brena has a love–hate relationship. Brena knows that working with Zippo amounts to little more than a secretarial role, because the man doesn’t even trust his mother. Just at that moment, as he’s thinking about Zippo’s caginess, the boy looks up, sees Brena watching him and acknowledges him with a quick jerk of the head, and Brena returns the greeting, making a hat-tipping gesture even though he’s not wearing anything on his head. From his desk, Brena calls over: Got anything for tomorrow? Nothing weighty, the boy answers. Nothing weighty, Brena repeats. Why not see what’s happening in the rest of the newsroom, he suggests; do you know what the most important element is in deciding whether a crime story deserves to be news? The question catches the boy off guard, and even though it’s the equivalent of that old favourite – what colour was San Martín’s white horse? – he seems flustered and unsure what to answer. Then reluctantly, as though Brena had sprung a surprise exam on him and he were scared of flunking, the Crime boy opens his mouth to answer and Brena immediately warns him: And don’t say “the place where the crime took place, the people involved, the gravity of the deed”, because you’re not at university any more. Jaime Brena waits. The boy thinks. Or tries to think. Brena says nothing, but knows that if the boy panics and, just to prove he knows
something, spouts that five “w’s” rule “who, what, when, where and how” (though strictly speaking the last one’s “w” goes at the end), he’ll have to make an effort not to slap him, both for the wrong answer and for giving it in English. Brena wonders why some people, though not everyone, add a sixth “w” – why – and others don’t. Perhaps because it is the hardest question to answer, the most subjective, the one that requires you to get inside the head of the criminal. Come on then, Brena chivvies. No, I don’t know, I can’t think of anything else, says the boy, giving up. Brena smiles and then declares: The other stories circulating in the newsroom that day. Never forget that on a quiet day some bastard’s going to spring out of nowhere at the eleventh hour demanding you give him something – anything – to put on the front page, and you’re going to have to think of something on the spot. I think they’ve got tomorrow’s cover sorted, says the boy, the sworn statements and the personal fortune amassed by a prominent civil servant in the Ministry of Finance. Wow, that’s massive, Brena interjects, not trying to hide his sarcasm. Didn’t that story run last week? Yes, but some of the details have been confirmed now. I see, so this is how they hope to stop losing readers, and then they go blaming the Internet and online new sites for their falling sales. In this country, everyone’s busy lining their pockets. Since when is the increasing wealth of one senior civil servant big news? And two weeks running? Jaime Brena shakes his head and shuts up, he’s tired of the subject, bored by it. God knows why he always ends up ranting about the state of modern journalism. Doesn’t he perhaps share some of the responsibility for it, through either his actions or his omissions? He tries to change the subject, but nothing comes to mind. He gazes at the Crime boy for a few seconds, as though wanting to give him some advice, to orient him a bit. But his fit of bonhomie goes unheeded and so Jaime Brena returns to his survey on the sleeping habits of white men and women.