The Fragility of Bodies

by Sergio Olguin

  “It hurts,” moaned El Peque.

  “Run, you faggot, or they’ll catch us.”

  They didn’t run but went as quickly as they could with all four hands occupied in carrying the box and El Peque limping. Blood was running down his leg.

  “What did you throw it?” El Peque asked.

  “A bit of salami sandwich,” said Dientes, adding bitterly, “I was going to eat that later.”

  Once they were home, they made straight for the smaller roof terrace, which was above the back bedrooms and which nobody ever visited, apart from them. Dientes went to his house and came back a few minutes later carrying a half-full bottle of red wine, another of alcohol and a dishcloth.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I’m going to clean your wound.”

  He uncorked the wine, opened the alcohol and poured some onto the dishcloth. The bottle of wine he passed to El Peque.

  “I don’t drink wine.”

  “You have to drink some, so that it doesn’t hurt. Have one gulp.” El Peque lifted the bottle and took a long sip. He put on a disgusted face.

  “Don’t be gay. Have a bit more.”

  He did as he was told and if he didn’t spit out the wine it was because at that moment Dientes placed the dishcloth on the place where the dog had bitten him and El Peque had to swallow quickly so as to scream better.

  “Ow, blow on it, it’s burning.”

  Dientes wiped his leg with the cloth again until the wound was clean, and only then did he blow on it to calm El Peque down and get him to stop screaming. He took a few plasters from his pocket and applied two of them, trying to cover the fang marks left by the dog.

  “What if the dog was rabid? Look at the bruise it’s given me.”

  “It’s not going to be rabid, is it.”

  El Peque grasped his friend’s arm, like a man on his deathbed about to pronounce his last words.

  “Dientes, promise me something: that dog is a dead dog.”

  “I promise. But first let’s sort out the copper.”

  They spent the rest of the week, each with a knife, peeling the cables to reveal the copper. The work had to be done with great care, because it was easy for the knife to slip and cut a finger. As they stripped more cables they honed their skill, and the last ones were ready in just a few minutes.

  “Piece of cake.”

  The terrace was full of stripped cables, but the resulting copper was a small portion of what they had lugged back from the garage. That Saturday they didn’t go to wash the car. They didn’t even dare walk in front of the store owner’s house, for fear that the dog was loose and might launch itself at them. It didn’t occur to them that the owner might link their absence to the loss of the box with the cables or with the dog’s incarceration in the garage. That day, instead, they went to see El Pardo, the scrap dealer who bought any kind of metal. El Pardo asked no questions about the source of the copper – it wasn’t his job to ask. He merely inspected it and weighed it on his scales: just under four pounds.

  “Eighteen pesos,” he decreed.

  “We were thinking of more like a hundred,” El Peque said to him.

  “And I was thinking of marrying Angelina Jolie.”

  “But isn’t it seven pesos a pound?” insisted Dientes, who was good at maths. “You should be giving us at least twenty-seven pesos.”

  “That’s the price if you bring me more than twenty pounds, and if the copper is top quality, not surplus. Eighteen, or you can take it away again.”

  The boys took the money. El Pardo paid them with two five-peso notes and four of two, so that they could split it between them. The first thing they did was go to the corner store to buy a litre-and-a-half bottle of Coca-Cola. Next they went to the plaza to see if they could join in a game. El Peque’s leg wasn’t hurting any more.

  The following week they turned their attention to the dog. Dientes had got hold of some meatballs, to which he had added reckless quantities of rat poison. The meatballs had fallen apart a bit, but they didn’t think that that would bother the dog.

  “This is what my mum did with Adriana’s dog.”

  Dientes and El Peque went to the store owner’s house. There was the dog, lying by the door, just like last time. He looked at them as though he didn’t remember what had happened before. Dientes took out the meatballs and threw them towards the dog, which sniffed and then ate them one after the other. They stayed to watch the dog’s demise, but the animal continued as normal. After finishing the last meatball he lay back down on the doormat, watching them with an indifferent expression. The boys waited for twenty minutes, half an hour, and there was no change. They went away disappointed. They had expected to see the dog have a seizure and keel over with its four stiffened paws pointing at the sky. But nothing like that happened. The following day they walked past the store owner’s house and the dog was not lying on the doormat. They made the same trip a week later and didn’t see it then, either. They never saw it again. By then, the eighteen pesos they had made from the cables were only a memory and they no longer had the option of earning two pesos by washing the store owner’s car. Lounging on the roof terrace, with no enthusiasm for games, they let the Sunday afternoon go by.

  “We need to get hold of more cables to sell,” said Dientes.

  “What we need to get hold of is money,” El Peque said, not knowing that in a few days he was going to get his hands on a sum that in that moment he couldn’t even dream of.

  3  Iron Man

  I

  The first time Lucio saw Verónica was in the bar at the Plaza Once train station, on the Sarmiento line. Lucio had arrived half an hour before; he had dropped in at the offices of TBA and together with one of the railway spokespeople, a certain Ignacio Álvarez Carrizo, continued to the bar. A few days earlier, Álvarez Carrizo had brought him very quickly up to speed on the concession company’s plans, its history, its social engagement and its constant development. The spokesman slapped his back and reminded Lucio again that the honour of the old Sarmiento railway was in his hands – or at least in his words. His tone was cheerful and good-natured, but Lucio couldn’t help noticing a certain underlying menace. As a colleague had already observed, they had chosen Lucio because he knew his stuff, he spoke well and wasn’t going to go shooting his mouth off like some others. Besides, he was the only one who had known these trains all his life.

  Verónica arrived punctually and he recognized her as soon as she entered the bar: she looked nothing like the women who would usually come somewhere like this. She didn’t seem surprised or intimidated by the place. Lucio watched as she looked around the room, trying to spot them. Álvarez Carrizo made some friendly gesture and she came forward, with a sure step and a half-smile. She was wearing glasses, woollen gloves and a black raincoat that made her look very tall. Her hair, which she wore short, was chestnut with blonde tones. She looked to him like a psychologist, or an architect.

  He knew that she was a journalist, though. She worked on a weekly magazine called Nuestro Tiempo, which Lucio had sometimes seen on the news stands but never bought. She wanted to write a piece about Buenos Aires trains. And who better to talk about the company, Álvarez Carrizo had said, than Lucio himself: a veteran who had joined the company nearly twenty years ago as second assistant. A son and grandson of railwaymen.

  They stood up as Verónica approached their table. She spoke first to Álvarez Carrizo.

  “Ignacio?”

  “Verónica. I told you it wouldn’t be difficult to recognize us. Let me introduce you to Lucio Valrossa. I promise you, by the time you’ve finished the interview you’ll have enough for a book.”

  Lucio awkwardly stuck out his hand, but she greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. They sat down. Álvarez Carrizo seemed as nervous and uncomfortable as he was. She didn’t seem nervous at all.

  II

  Verónica’s meeting with Lucio and Álvarez Carrizo took place a week after she had met Carina, Carranza’s sister. Her first ins
tinct then had been to call Lucio Valrossa, the dead man’s friend. It was the most obvious thing to do. He could tell her about Carranza, the accidents, what was happening in the rail company. The number Carina had given her was for a landline, not a mobile. When she dialled it, a woman had answered. Verónica had immediately hung up, as though she had been caught out. She couldn’t understand why she had reacted in that way. She should simply have asked to speak to him. Perhaps he was at work. The woman would have given her his mobile number or told her what time she could find him at home. But Verónica had hung up, like a teenager calling a boy at his house.

  Since she wasn’t a teenager any more – and certainly not calling a boy – she had better buck up her ideas if she wanted to make any headway with the piece. Carranza’s friend might be a good source, but couldn’t be the only one. She needed to find others, try other avenues. She would have preferred to be meeting Carranza’s friend with a bit more research under her belt. Just in case the guy turned out to have something to do with the deaths, or got frightened and decided not to tell her anything. Yes, ideally Valrossa would have been better handled further down the line.

  What she needed were statistics, concrete data on the deaths. Since Patricia could do without her for the close of their section, Verónica took the opportunity to spend all of Thursday making enquiries. She called the Ministry of Transport, the body responsible for overseeing public transport, and the City Transport Department. All of them seemed to be playing a strange game of ping-pong. They were short on statistics but long on compelling reasons why she should call another office. When some bureaucrat did come up with official data, Verónica did not need to dig very deep to realize that the numbers were more clumsy than clever. Only one gave her an interesting piece of information: he said that the trains were fitted with a camera, in the driver’s cabin, which recorded journeys and therefore any accidents – but this official could not tell her how a copy of these recordings might be obtained. She also tried two foundations dedicated to traffic accidents and was surprised by their lack of interest in trains. They only cared about train accidents when cars were also involved. She made a note to herself to investigate, some time in the future, what these foundations were hiding. Neither the federal nor the metropolitan police had any idea what she was talking about. People who die under trains? Well, we all have to die of something. If there was no crime, they weren’t getting involved.

  Finally she realized that she needed inside information from someone employed by the company. Someone who worked in admin and wasn’t too loyal. Either that or an ex-worker.

  The quickest solution was also the one she would rather have avoided: calling Federico. If she was clear about one thing, it was that you should never mix business with pleasure: keep work and sex separate and, as far as possible, emotions and family far away from both. That rule foundered when Federico was involved, though. With him, every one of those components got mixed up in a sticky mess. It was fatal to mix. That was the advice she always gave herself at the start of a drinking session. But she always ended up mixing. There were various reasons why she should never have had sex with Federico: they had known each other for a decade, when Federico had started working at her father’s law firm; in those years he had been like a brother to her and a son to her father, who trusted him blindly to the point of making him a junior partner in the company. Aarón Rosenthal would have given his right arm for one of his daughters to marry Federico. And, of the three Rosenthal sisters, she was the only one who was single. She shouldn’t have fucked Fede, but she had. And now she avoided crossing paths with him: she met her father outside the office, stayed away from family get-togethers (to which Federico was always invited, as much on her sisters’ say-so as her father’s) and ran in the opposite direction any time he popped up with an invitation to something. This time, however, Federico was the very person she needed to turn to. His voice on the other end of the line was rich with that falsely professional tone she knew and always found amusing. But, not having time to make any observation about that, she got straight to the point:

  “I’m writing a piece and I need your help.”

  “The Rosenthal Studio is at your disposal. Which judge do you want put behind bars?”

  “None, not right now. I’m writing a piece on the Sarmiento Railway Company.”

  “Ex.”

  “Ex what?”

  “The ex-Sarmiento Railway Company. That’s been defunct for a long time. The Sarmiento line is run by Trenes de Buenos Aires now.”

  “The ex-Sarmiento Railway Company, then. I need someone to get me some administrative information. Company statistics, accident protocols, stuff like that. And since I can’t go and ask for it at the offices of TBA, I thought an ex-employee would be ideal.”

  “An ex.”

  “An ex-employee, a disgruntled worker. The kind of person who brings a lawsuit. There must be loads of cases.”

  “Hundreds. Open, closed, however you like them.”

  “I want an employee who’ll talk.”

  “An ex.”

  “Yes, an ex. Can you see if you can find one?”

  “Exes are my speciality. I imagine this is urgent? I’ll call you in a few hours.”

  While Federico made his own investigations, Verónica asked a colleague from the Politics section for a contact in the railway workers’ union. When he asked her what she needed to find out, she was deliberately ambiguous. She didn’t like to reveal too much about an article to a fellow journalist. But it turned out that he was asking because the union body and the railway line delegates were separate organizations with different political allegiances.

  “Do you want a big cheese from the Fraternity, or a delegate from the rank and file?”

  “I think a delegate from the Sarmiento would suit me fine.”

  He gave her the details of a Trotskyite militant employed in the Sarmiento workshops who opposed the political line espoused by the Fraternity. Verónica called him and the delegate agreed to meet her the next day in a bar close to Moreno Station, at the other end of the railway line, twenty-five miles from Buenos Aires.

  Mid-afternoon, Federico called her. He had what she needed.

  “Francisco López. He worked in Accounts. They fired him, alleging that he had stolen a computer monitor, but he won the suit against TBA and they had to pay him compensation.”

  Verónica called López and they arranged to meet two days later at a bar in Almagro, where he worked on the till. He told her to come between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, when the bar was less busy.

  The next day she set off to meet the unionist. She decided to make the journey by train, partly to avoid a tussle with Accounts over the cost of a taxi to Moreno, and partly because she wanted to know more about the territory she was investigating. Fortunately, she was making the journey out to Greater Buenos Aires at midday, which meant she got a seat. At rush hour it would have been a struggle even to get on. Verónica was not all that used to travelling by train and had never been on the Western Railway. From Plaza Miserere to the first stop, in Caballito, she felt an unease verging on fear. The compartment moved much more than she had expected. After that she relaxed, or got used to it, and the train’s rhythmic clatter could have sent her to sleep for the rest of the journey if she had not been alert to everything that was happening around her: from the mother wrangling four children who must all have been under four, to the endless procession of hawkers who came by offering sweets, folders or wallets in the colours of some soccer club, MP3 compilations on CD, the latest movies on DVD and even a set of brushes and combs that she was quite tempted to buy.

  She spent almost an hour talking to the unionist and struggled to direct the conversation towards what she wanted to know. He was more interested in denouncing the low salaries and union-bashing by the management than anything else. He knew about Carranza’s suicide, but it was hard to steer him away from spouting joint statements that sounded like written communiqués. What Veró
nica found most useful was his criticism of the company’s lack of support, which was limited to sending employees to a state psychologist. He confirmed that drivers were made to return to work before they had fully recovered, and told her that it was impossible to drive a train without clocking up at least one fatal accident. If Verónica had been looking to write a critical article on the current state of railways in Buenos Aires, she would have come away with plenty of material. She could write such a piece now for the next edition of the magazine. Carranza’s death could not simply be the consequence of labour or management problems, though. There was definitely more to it, but the unionist was not about to help her find out what. When she asked him about the child Carranza had run over, and the confusing allusion to this in his letter, she noticed a very slight change in the unionist’s manner, as when a dog responds to a faraway noise.

  “I don’t know about that specific case, but anyone can be the victim of a train accident, old or young. And somebody about to commit suicide doubtless doesn’t express himself clearly.”

  Things didn’t go much better with the ex-employee. She found López behind the till at his workplace, a seedy joint that would at any minute be ravaged by the winds of modernity and reborn as a heritage bar, falsely rustic, with that patina of antiquity demanded by current tastes. López came out from behind the bar and sat down with Verónica at a table looking onto the street. It was early enough that all the other tables were empty. Verónica took out her notebook. She rarely taped interviews, unless she needed a record of what had been said or wanted her subject to experience a real sense of being interviewed. When she was questioning a source, she took notes and sometimes simply relied on her memory, which seemed, for the moment, to be quite good. The tape recorder intimidated interviewees, but taking notes necessarily meant losing eye contact with the person she was talking to, something she didn’t like.