As Karina Vives leans into the spray and lets herself be soothed by the hot water, more than thirty blocks away Jaime Brena is arriving home. It’s nearly eleven o’clock at night and he carries a packet containing three beef empanadas bought in the delicatessen on the corner. He walked a long way this evening, before going into a cinema to watch a film where he fell asleep; he called Irina to see when would be a good time to come and collect the books that are still in the house they used to share – books he’s been asking her for since they separated nearly two years ago – but Irina didn’t answer the call. Does she believe that books bought as a reflection of one’s own taste, interests, travels and mistakes, that personal library put together over the span of a life, also constitute a joint asset? Do they, in fact? No, no, they don’t, whatever she wants to think. No matter what the Civil Code says, he’s sure that he could argue in front of any judge that a personal library does not constitute a joint asset. It just isn’t. How could it be? Jaime Brena feels that if his ex-wife, or any of the other women there have been in his life, laid claim to his books, it would be equivalent to refusing to return his clothes, his shoes, the notebooks he’s kept all these years or the photographs of his mother. They aren’t really notebooks, in fact, but jotters, bound at the top. He makes daily notes in them, recording what he’s talked about and to whom, as a precaution, in case somebody makes a complaint or asks him to show where he got a piece of information. To cover himself, basically. And at the end of each day he draws a double line across the page. The day he left the marital home he took his shoes and underpants in a bag. He never got the photographs of his mother. He has the jotters: Irina sent them to him in a box the same day that he moved into this apartment, leaving the two-star hotel where he had spent his first days as a separated man. But not the books. Sometimes, as he knows all too well, women choose peculiar ways to exact what they feel is owed to them. He walked past their building once, the one where he had lived with Irina for nearly twenty years, but he didn’t dare ring the bell. The concierge recognized him and proffered a stiff greeting, pursing his lips as though to say “tsk” and shaking his head several times, a gesture Brena took as one of solidarity and as a complaint about women generally. His thoughts return to the dog. He pictures himself, Jaime Brena, walking a dog. It’s a happy image. He’s definitely going to try it – one of these days he’ll go and buy a dog. If he had already made that decision, if he already had a dog, it would be here to greet him now as he entered the apartment with the beef empanadas – wagging its tail as it bounded around him, sniffing the packet – and he’d feel the dog’s infectious delight in seeing its master back home. And know that it was sincere. A dog never lies. It can’t wag its tail untruthfully. Moreover, a dog doesn’t keep the complete library it took your whole life to assemble, then, when you ask for it back, keep ignoring your calls. A dog would never do anything like that, nor its canine equivalent. Jaime Brena drops the empanadas onto the table and turns on the light. When he goes to put the keys on the entrance table, he sees a brown envelope to one side of the door; he must have walked over it without noticing a few seconds before. For: Jaime Brena, From: Comisario Venturini. He opens it; inside there’s an A4 sheet of paper with scribbled writing and over it, attached with a paperclip, a brief note which says: Brena dear, you’re going to have to bathe me in Dom Pérignon. I’ve got you the forensic officers’ in situ observations. I jotted them down and I’m sending them to you via a colleague from the Buenos Aires division who’s going your way. Obviously they don’t carry the weight of an autopsy report, we still have to wait for that, but this gives you the data a few days earlier and, going on what I’m told by people who know, the autopsy is going to reach roughly the same conclusion. There are already a lot of idiots barking up the wrong tree. Warmly, Comisario Venturini. Now Jaime Brena doesn’t know whether to get started on the contents of the envelope or on his dinner, but since the microwave hasn’t been working very well the last few days, he elects to eat the empanadas before they go cold. He can’t remember any more how you heat something in a bain-marie. And he can’t use an ordinary oven, nor does he plan to learn how in his remaining years on this earth. He pours out the last of a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon that he opened two nights ago and switches on the television, looking for news. As expected, Chazarreta’s death is still making the headlines, but evidently there still isn’t that much to say because they’re filling the space with old pieces about the murder of Gloria Echagüe and on one of the channels he even stumbles on himself talking about that case, with a little more hair than today and a lot less gut. There’s nothing new, though, nothing important. After watching his own report, he takes the few implements he’s used to the sink and washes them, then picks up the envelope Venturini sent round and goes to the bedroom. He’s tired, and hopes to get off to sleep quickly. He takes off his shoes and clothes. The boxers he’s wearing are in a disgraceful state – once they were black but he’d hesitate even to call them grey now. He’ll have to buy himself a new pair. Irina used to buy them for him. But it can’t be that difficult to buy a pair of pants. He places a large cushion at the end of the bed to elevate his legs and aid circulation. He picks up Comisario Venturini’s brief and reads: The body is positioned in a green velvet armchair; in the right hand is a carving knife and there is a glass of whisky at its feet. The whisky bottle, almost empty, is on the chair, between Chazarreta’s body and the right armrest. The neck wound is approximately six inches long, with an entry in the left sternocleidomastoid and an exit in the right lateral cervical region. The exit site is longer than the entry site, and more superficial. The wound is straight and horizontal, except at its exit point, where it runs upwards. The cut has severed the cricothyroid membrane, revealing the laryngeal vestibule. Its lips are well separated, forming an acute angle. Its margins and its walls are clean without any bridging. There are no tentative cuts nor any wounds that might suggest an attempt at self-defence. The bloodstain at the foot of the chair is not, at the time of observation, bright red, indicating that some time has passed since the attack occurred. Not many hours, though, because coagulation has only recently begun. It is likely that death was caused by air embolism and not by haemorrhage alone, given that the depth of the incision would very likely have allowed blood to enter the airway. Once he’s finished reading the notes, Brena leaves them at the foot of his bed. He’s too tired to start mulling over theories. He may not even remember what he read tomorrow morning. But what does it matter, since it’s not his job to report on this anyway? His job is to enlighten the world tomorrow with the revelation that while 65 per cent of white women sleep facing upwards, 60 per cent of men sleep facing down; he’s already written it up as a filler piece and filed it today. That’s his mission as a journalist now, after more than forty years’ work. He feels a surge of contempt and doesn’t know whether it’s for himself, for Rinaldi or for that strange thing his profession has become. His profession. Tomorrow he’ll have another look at the voluntary redundancy form. He sits on the edge of his bed and opens the drawer in the bedside table. Before he goes to sleep he ought to return the Crime boy’s call, he thinks, to see what he wants and pass on the information he’s just read and which he can no longer remember. He’s not sure that the boy really deserves this, but you can never be sure who deserves what. And Comisario Venturini’s gone to so much trouble that it wouldn’t be right to slight him. Yes, he must call the Crime boy. Jaime Brena gropes inside the drawer of the bedside table until he reaches the tin where he keeps his compressed marijuana, a small tin that once contained lemon drops. He’ll leave the call for later. He opens the tin; there’s not much weed in it, enough for two or three joints, four if he’s lucky. He checks in the drawer to see if there’s anything left from the last lump he bought, his hand sweeping back and forth over the wood, but finds nothing. He’ll have to track down his dealer before Friday if he doesn’t want to go the whole weekend without a smoke. And this time, when he calls, he’s going to complain
about the quality: too many sticks and seeds. He grabs the packet of Virginia Super Slims, takes one out and empties the tobacco into the ashtray. He’d like to know how to roll a joint, but he’s always been clumsy and it’s too late to learn now. Refilled Virginia Super Slims do the trick. He lays the empty cigarette case on the bottom of the tin and moves it forward like a shovel, trying to make the marijuana go in. Then he lifts the cigarette and shakes the grass down to leave space for a little more, repeating this action a few times until the joint is ready. He twists the end. He lights it, takes a drag, retaining the smoke then letting it out slowly. Then he calls the Crime boy, who doesn’t answer because he’s busy screwing his girlfriend. Brena puts the phone down beside him on the bed and draws again on the joint. He gets under the covers, tries to relax. He notices his body softening, especially his lower back. He smiles. After one last drag he puts the cigarette out, carefully, conserving the rest of his bogus Virginia Super Slim for another time. The pages Comisario Venturini sent fall off the bed and glide along the wooden floor. The Crime boy holds his girlfriend for a moment before giving her a kiss and going to the bathroom. Only when he gets back does he see the phone’s screen lit up with a missed call from Brena. Didn’t you hear the phone ringing? he asks his girlfriend irritably, as if it were her fault the call went unnoticed. The Crime boy calls Jaime Brena, whose phone rings somewhere amid the crumpled bedsheets; he’s already asleep. The answering machine cuts in. The boy hangs up without leaving a message and rings again, but gets the answering machine once more and swears. Turning his back to his girlfriend, he pulls the sheet over himself. He closes his eyes but keeps the telephone in his hand in case it rings again. The girl also turns away. Jaime Brena sleeps soundly, deeply, insensible to Chazarreta, redundancy packages and the bedtime rituals of white men and women. If he is dreaming, it isn’t about them. If he were dreaming about any of them his face wouldn’t look so peaceful. Next to him his phone screen lights up: Two (2) missed calls, number unknown.
8
Black trousers and a diaphanous top, suggestive, but not transparent. That was Paula Sibona’s pronouncement on what outfit Nurit Iscar should wear for her meeting with Rinaldi the following day. Never mind that there isn’t anything between them any more. Never mind that Nurit has taken the job for reasons that relate purely to work. And to subsistence. And to historic reparation. Nobody would go to meet an ex-lover – years later, at fifty-something, such an unkind age for a woman – without some minimal grooming, her friend said. And Nurit Iscar knows that Paula Sibona is right. She expects Lorenzo Rinaldi to look the same as always, though, having the absurd feeling that these last three years have passed only for her. He looks the same in the photo byline on his editorials, but she doesn’t know if she can trust that. After a certain age journalists stop updating those thumbnail portraits that accompany their newspaper articles. Writers are the same with the author photos on their jacket covers. When one comes out well, they keep it for ever. And yet, even knowing that photographs can be deceptive, Nurit can’t escape this ridiculous idea that he will be the same old Lorenzo Rinaldi. Men don’t have their crisis at fifty: at that age life has either already ruined them or will get to them later. But if she’s changed she must try to conceal the fact. Or make up for it. Or find the right clothes to enhance what needs enhancing and hide what needs to be hidden. For example, she’s lost her waist. She doesn’t have a tummy, and she’s grateful for that, but she has lost her waist. Her arse has fallen, not a lot, but enough to produce two or three folds in the jeans below her buttocks. Her thighs are worse: they’ve spilled outwards and acquired wrinkles. The skin on her legs has started to go transparent, and not baby-transparent but old person-transparent. Apart from a varicose vein that she hates and that she’s had for some time (she once considered getting it operated on, but when they explained that it would need pulling up with something like a crochet hook, because it’s a vein that runs over the whole leg, and that this would be inserted into her body through her vagina, she almost fainted and ruled out any surgery there and then), she also has spider veins on her calves. But by way of compensation, she’s much less hairy than she used to be, which is one of the few advantages of ageing. She has one or two marks on her face and means to have these removed one day with diamond-tip microdermabrasion or pulsed light therapy, like Viviana Mansini did. She’ll do it some year when there are various books to write like Untying the Knots – bad for the brain but good for the savings account. She hasn’t, however, got any liver-spots on her hands, nor does she have many wrinkles on her face. Nor on her neck which, while mercifully free of jowls, has lost elasticity. Wrinkles don’t run in her family; neither her mother nor her grandmother had many, so she expects to follow in a line of taut women. Taut in every sense. Her tits haven’t fallen, but they have expanded equidistantly: up, down and sideways. She feels them protruding ever closer to her clavicles and knows, too, that there’s a marked line between her breasts, which never used to be the case. On balance, Nurit feels she’s pretty good for fifty-four. She’s not like Betty Boop, after all; not a cartoon. An animated drawing can keep her curls, her mouth, her legs the same but Nurit Iscar’s body is bound to change, year after year. What would a fifty-four-year-old Betty Boop look like? she wonders. Would they draw her fretting – as Nurit is today, minutes away from seeing the last man she ever loved – about how her body looks? Recently she hasn’t given much thought to age-spots, to her long-lost waistline, or her thighs. In fact, she has never particularly worried about these things. But today, when Lorenzo Rinaldi sees her, she’d like to look – no point denying it – respectable, at the very least. With a respectable body. When does it end, this obligation women always feel to look “pretty”? She’d like to be a little younger – not twenty or thirty, but forty-four or forty-five, a decade less. She should have ended her marriage then; the children were quite young, but she’d still have brought them up well, she’s sure of it. That was her best age. But she didn’t know it at the time, and now it doesn’t matter. You can’t go back. You can only enhance what needs to be enhanced and hide what needs to be hidden.
For that reason she accepts her friend’s suggestion of black trousers, although, bearing in mind that she’ll be going on to a country club, it would make more sense to wear jeans. A country club calls for jeans, shorts or Bermudas and she hasn’t worn shorts or Bermudas for a long time, thanks to that cursed varicose vein. Black trousers will have to do. But she swaps the sheer blouse suggested by Paula Sibona for a white T-shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves and a generous, round neckline that enhances her bust, the part of her body Nurit considers most promising, despite its expansion.
She gets out of the taxi with her suitcase and goes to the newspaper’s reception. There’s a brief argument with the receptionist about whether or not she can take the suitcase into the newsroom, but finally Rinaldi’s secretary comes to fetch her, pouring oil on troubled waters. How are you, Señora Iscar? It’s a long time since I last saw you here, this woman says as they walk towards the lift, and Nurit can’t decide whether the observation contains a hint of irony or not. Perhaps it is just that she feels paranoid about the past. Yes, it’s a long time since I was last here, she replies. The secretary who accompanies her is the same one who worked for Rinaldi when they were together, and on various occasions she’d call in her boss’s stead to pass on messages that were invariably humiliating for Nurit, such as: Señor Rinaldi says not to wait for him, he won’t be able to go. Or she sent things on his behalf: tickets for some show they were going to see together and then Rinaldi cancelled at the last minute, or plane tickets, flowers, chocolates. Nurit Iscar realizes that the fact that her relationship with Lorenzo Rinaldi was clandestine, on his side, still makes her feel uncomfortable today. As if this woman were somehow judging her. Or as if she were once more judging herself, through the woman’s eyes. Even though Nurit did separate, didn’t deceive anyone and therefore didn’t need clandestinity, she feels annoyed all the sam
e. Or is what really annoys, worries and embarrasses her the thought that this woman knows Rinaldi didn’t choose her; that he, unlike Nurit, preferred to remain in his marriage and let their secret relationship run its course? He didn’t choose her. And it’s not easy accepting that you haven’t been chosen, she thinks; you always dream that you will be. The secretary has her sit down in the reception area outside Rinaldi’s office and offers her a hot drink. No thanks, Nurit says. If her stomach is already in turmoil, a reheated coffee from an office machine that’s plugged in twenty-four hours a day won’t make her feel any better. Minutes later a young man comes dashing down the corridor, blurting “Rinaldi’s waiting for me”, and heads for the office door without waiting for the secretary’s say-so, apparently not thinking that he needs anybody’s permission. But the woman stops him in his tracks: Señor Rinaldi also has an appointment with this lady; take a seat and he’ll call you both in soon. Together? he asks, perplexed. Nurit doesn’t question the remark. Together, the secretary confirms, then busies herself with some photocopying. The man turns towards where Nurit is sitting, looks at her and, making a movement with his head that falls just short of a greeting, says: I guess we’ll just have to wait, then. She smiles and repeats: We’ll just have to wait. The Crime boy doesn’t sit down next to her, however, but takes a seat opposite the window and stares blankly outside.
Betty Boo Page 7
