The Fragility of Bodies

by Sergio Olguin

  “They steal everything. They over-invoice, there’s a trade in items stolen from other train companies. And because I didn’t want to get involved in their corrupt little game, they threw me out, saying that I was the one who stole. Bastards.”

  López had information about illegal financial transactions, trains repaired with substandard materials, a black market in stolen items, and other shady dealings. But when Verónica tried to find out more about the drivers and people killed by trains, López replied with some platitude about the lives lost, then continued with more examples of bad management.

  “Tell me something, López, do all the trains have a camera installed in the driver’s cabin?”

  “Yes, of course, the security camera.”

  “So all accidents are recorded, right?”

  “Absolutely. Whenever there’s an accident, the first thing the company does is take away the camera. For the insurance – right? The insurance company uses it to prove negligence on the part of the person who got knocked down, so they don’t have to pay anything out. They didn’t want to pay me anything, either, but I won my case.”

  “Is it possible to get hold of those recordings?”

  “They’re kept under lock and key. Or the insurance company keeps them. But there are people in your line of work who buy recordings to show on TV programmes. If you want to buy them, you’ll have to speak to one of the reprobates who work on the legal team. Or with someone from the insurance company.”

  III

  Sex and sources. It was an unbreakable ethical principle for Verónica that she would pay for neither. Perhaps when she was old, she’d pay some gigolo to sleep with her but, as far as journalistic sources were concerned, she was keeping herself pure. Even if that meant not getting her hands on a video that could open up the investigation.

  But why make so much of this when what she needed to do was call Lucio Valrossa? Something was putting her off and she tried to find a logical explanation for her feelings. She was worried that, if Valrossa had advance warning of what she was investigating, he might go on the defensive and hide important information from her. She had to find another way to reach him.

  After meeting López that afternoon, she went to the Plaza Miserere station instead of returning to the newsroom. She had a very vague hope of catching Valrossa getting off a train or about to get into the driver’s cabin. The chance of that happening might be one in a thousand, but still she felt compelled to do it. Even if she did see him, she hadn’t thought about what she would do next, what excuse she would use to approach him.

  At that time of day Once was crammed with people. The terminal floor vibrated with commuters hurrying towards the platforms. That constant buzz of human activity reminded her of bees flying around a hive. She walked towards the turnstiles and looked into the TBA offices, then went from the ticket offices to the fast-food joints, but there was no sign of Valrossa. What if she had forgotten what he looked like? That was impossible. His every feature was imprinted on her mind. She knew that when she saw him again she would feel the same unquiet that had come over her at the funeral and then again when she saw him in the photograph at Carina’s house.

  After spending two hours walking pointlessly from one end of the terminal to the other, she decided to go.

  Back at home on her computer, she looked up Lucio Valrossa’s name on Google. She thought he might be on Facebook. She herself had an account, but used it only to snoop on other people. In fact, what she found on Google was better than a Facebook page. At first there was nothing. Then she ran a search without quotation marks – with very little hope of turning up anything on the the driver – and, to her surprise, found something. On a fan site dedicated to the Sarmiento line trains (that there were fanatics of any railway, including a badly run one, didn’t surprise her: she had seen other extreme cases of devotion) she found a blog post titled “Farewell to a legend”. It was an obituary for Carlos Valrossa. It said that Carlos had worked on the Sarmiento line for forty years, that he was the son of a railwayman and the father of one too, because his son Lucio was following in the family tradition of driving the trains that ran between the stations of Once and Moreno.

  Verónica saw now what she had to do. She started by getting the contact details of spokespeople for the TBA company. The following morning she called one of them, a certain Álvarez Carrizo, who sounded like an old lecher. So she put on one of her voices – that of a slightly stupid girl who’s eager to learn – which, according to her friend Paula, she had suspiciously down pat.

  “The thing is, Señor Álvarez Carrizo —”

  “Please, call me Ignacio. Let’s not be formal.”

  “The thing is, Ignacio, I’m planning to write about the history of the old Sarmiento railway and the future prospects of the company.”

  “But wouldn’t you prefer to write about the Mitre line? The route is much more interesting. And the people who use it are more…how shall I put this…more photogenic.”

  “I’m interested in the Sarmiento because it used to be the Western Railway. Argentina’s first railway.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I’d love to get all the information I can from you, both historical and current.”

  “You can count on it.”

  “I’d also love to interview someone who’s very familiar with the trains.”

  “That could be one of our engineers.”

  “No. What I’m after is a driver. When I looked on the internet I found out that there’s a driver on the Sarmiento who’s the son and grandson of railwaymen.”

  “Really? You know more about my company than I do.”

  They both laughed.

  “Far from it, Ignacio – it was just something I happened to stumble across. Perhaps that man doesn’t work for you any more. But don’t you think it’s lovely to think of three generations of a family working for the same company?”

  “Yes indeed. Do you have his name? If he’s one of our employees, I’ll get hold of him for your article. You can count on it.”

  IV

  Lucio was nervous, uncomfortable and annoyed with Álvarez Carrizo. He felt as though he were being shown off like a trained seal. Worse still, the journalist didn’t seem that impressed. Every remark from Álvarez Carrizo – who wanted to be actively involved in the interview – elicited a condescending smile. The spokesman provided figures, trotted out set phrases from the publicity brochure, told barefaced lies about the state of the trains and the plans for investment. Every now and then he let Lucio speak. Verónica asked him about the railwaymen in his family.

  “My grandfather and father were drivers. My grandfather drove the steam train that crossed Patagonia and my father also began by driving steam trains. He was the first person to drive a diesel locomotive. He worked on the Sarmiento line until he retired in 1993.”

  “Did you always want to be a driver like your dad and your grandfather?”

  “No, I didn’t want to be like them. Well, maybe when I was a child, but not afterwards. As a boy I liked going out with my father and taking charge of the controls. But as I got older I thought that I could be something else. Something…I don’t know…professional.”

  Álvarez Carrizo seemed to feel compelled to offer some wisdom on this point.

  “Blood will out, as they say.”

  “What did you want to be?”

  “A civil engineer. I went to university the same year I started in the Sarmiento workshops.”

  “You worked and studied at the same time.”

  “Yes, but I gave up in the second year. And here I did the training to be a driver, which I didn’t need because I already knew how to drive. I ended up staying.”

  The conversation, which Verónica recorded on a gadget about half the size of a mobile phone, lasted fifty minutes. Álvarez Carrizo, like a child with a toy, quickly lost interest in the stories about trains and drummed his fingers on the table or gazed off into the distance, now and then returning his attentio
n to them with a fake smile.

  “Thank you so much, Lucio,” Verónica said, switching off the recording device.

  Álvarez Carrizo suddenly became animated again, showing the same enthusiasm he had at the start.

  “I told you that Lucio would give you enough for a book.”

  “All the same, if you and the company don’t have any objection, I’d like to accompany Lucio on a journey.”

  “Go with him in the driver’s cabin?” asked Álvarez Carrizo, and she nodded. “No, I’m afraid that’s not possible. It’s against the regulations.”

  “But didn’t Lucio learn to drive while accompanying his father?”

  “Those were other times. The train belonged to the state, there were no rules.”

  Verónica smiled at Álvarez Carrizo. Lucio felt that she would never direct a smile like that at a man like him.

  “Ignacio, you are the voice and the eyes of this company. It’s up to you whether or not I can go in the cabin. Or are you going to tell me that I have to speak to one of those stuffy old directors that TBA presumably has?”

  Either the smile or the words were enough finally to persuade Álvarez Carrizo to authorize her to travel in the cabin.

  V

  It was cold, in a way that stung the lips and which the energy of the hurrying crowd did nothing to assuage. Their second meeting took place in the central hall of the station and, once again, he got there first. Verónica arrived in an overcoat, her face half hidden in a garish coloured scarf. She lowered it, gave him a kiss on the cheek by way of greeting, and Lucio felt her warm lips barely graze his frozen features.

  They went through the turnstiles, the ticket collectors eyeing them curiously. Everyone knew that Lucio was taking a female journalist with him in the driver’s compartment. For days he had been the butt of their jokes, especially when he’d told them that the journalist was hot. That detail was invented, because he had been so nervous the first time they met that he hadn’t dared look at her body. It was true, though, that he had thought her very pretty. A cold and distant beauty.

  They came to the first compartment and climbed into the cabin. In the metal box where tools were kept some joker had left him a condom. Lucio quickly closed the box before she saw anything. Verónica stood to one side and leaned against the window, a position that allowed her to watch as he handled the controls. Lucio didn’t much like that – he would have preferred to be the one watching her. To make things worse, there were still a few minutes before they would get the order to leave.

  “A few years ago,” he told her, “I used to work with freight trains. I liked that more. Freight trains have real locomotives. Not these little rooms.”

  “Like those engines you see in the movies. Black, belching smoke.”

  “Well no, not as old as that. When I was a boy I liked seeing the trains my old man used to drive. They called them ‘sows’. They had a Fiat engine and they were quite frightening. They looked as though they had giant heads, like the one in The War of the Worlds. A kind of galactic warrior with barred windows that looked like eyes and a metal jaw.”

  A voice came over the loudspeaker announcing that the train at platform two was ready to depart. A few seconds later the train embarked on its westward journey. Lucio felt her watching his hands. It had to be on a day when he felt clumsy.

  Even so, he preferred chatting with her here to in the station bar, without the annoying presence of Álvarez Carrizo and doing, at the end of the day, what he knew how to do best: drive trains. After a bit he admitted to her that he didn’t want his children to work on the railways.

  “The eldest is seven. I’ve never brought him into the cabin and I wouldn’t think of bringing either of them. I don’t want them to work here when they’re older.”

  “You’d prefer them to study.”

  “Of course.”

  “To be civil engineers.”

  “Whatever they want. I just don’t want them to drive trains.”

  What he was telling Verónica was something he didn’t usually talk about to friends. Perhaps because they took it for granted that Lucio’s sons would study for a career, that they would forge a much more promising future for themselves than a job on the railways. And if he ever did mention that he didn’t want his children to be railwaymen, they would all understand and wouldn’t ask him the question Verónica was asking now.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t.”

  “Aha. I suspect that’s the short answer. Now give me the longer one.”

  He took a few seconds to reply.

  “Promise me you won’t put it in the article? Álvarez will haul me over the coals.”

  “I promise.”

  “Because the job is shit.”

  They had arrived at Villa Luro. The sun was shining right into the cabin and the morning’s cold had dissipated. Verónica had unbuttoned her overcoat and Lucio would have liked to look and see if she was as hot as he had told his colleagues she was. But he didn’t dare, like when as a boy he noticed a woman’s cleavage in the bus: his eyes would become heavy, and he’d feel that he couldn’t move them in that direction. He kept concentrating on the sleepers between the tracks and on the controls.

  “You don’t earn much money, you work rotating shifts, plus terrible things happen that no amount of money could make up for.”

  “What sort of things?” she asked, and Lucio felt her watching him more intently.

  Just as he could tell if some mechanism in the train was failing from signs that nobody else would notice, the journalist must have spotted in his last remark something juicy for her article. He shouldn’t have said anything.

  “Things. I’d rather not talk about it.”

  Her gaze fell away, and instead she looked out at the landscape. The city disappeared for a few seconds: there was an absence of buildings or houses, creating the false sensation of having arrived in the country. The only thing to see was abandoned rolling stock, and this space between Haedo and Morón looked like a graveyard for trains.

  “You see?” said Lucio, pointing at the carriages which lay broken and rusting at the side of the tracks. Those are the sows I was telling you about a minute ago. When I was a boy people called them lobsters. I got to drive a few in the 1990s. Then the camels came along and now we even have pumas. They didn’t give this train an animal’s name. She’s a little old Toyota. Still, gets the job done.”

  He looked at Verónica, hoping for a journalist’s approval of his description of the Sarmiento carriages, but her gaze was fixed on the city which was slowly beginning to reappear before them. Then she asked him something surprising:

  “Did you know that we have the same surname?”

  Now he looked at her incredulously.

  “Seriously?”

  “You’re called Valrossa and I’m Rosenthal. Mine is a Jewish surname and yours is Italian, but they mean the same thing: valley of roses.”

  “Valley of roses.”

  “Life isn’t a valley of roses.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Lucio.”

  Finally he dared to look at her. Not at her body but at her face, that pale face, accentuated by chestnut hair, with delicate lips and green eyes that weren’t about to release their prey. How old must she be? Twenty-eight, twenty-nine? Why wouldn’t she smile at him the way she had kept smiling during that meeting in the bar?

  “‘Come on, Lucio’ what?”

  “Tell me about the suicides. About the people who throw themselves under trains. Because the terrible things that happen are suicides, aren’t they?”

  VI

  Morón was behind them. The train was emptying out as they approached Moreno. Inside the cabin, Lucio and Verónica were locked in a sordid, subterranean fight no less dogged than the ones you see taking place on top of train carriages in westerns. Verónica was asking him to reveal something he never spoke about, not with his wife, his friends, not even people he worked with. When something like that happened
, nobody ever asked him about it. A merciful silence always covered it and now Verónica wanted to stick her fingers not in the wounds, because there were no wounds, but right into his brain. He had managed – and it had been a struggle – not to go crazy, and now she was messing with his head and once again he felt that fear of madness.

  “There are thefts, too, and car accidents.”

  “But suicides are the worst.”

  “They aren’t always suicides.”

  “Murders, then?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. Accidents. People come along, they don’t see a train approaching, they walk on the line, they cross the tracks without looking. And there’s no time to do anything.”

  “It’s impossible to brake, or to warn them.”

  “Some never know what happened. Others realize half a second before. They try to get off the track, to jump out of the way, they put their hand up as if to stop the train.”

  “Have you had a lot of accidents?”

  “Me? Five accidents and six deaths. Someone I work with has had fifteen.”

  “It must be hard to go back to driving a train after you’ve run someone over.”

  “Impossible, more like.”

  “But you do go back, just like your friend who had fifteen.”

  “A lot of the ticket inspectors are drivers who couldn’t face driving a train again. I keep going back because it’s the only thing I know how to do and I’ve got a wife and two kids to support.”

  “You could become a ticket inspector too.”

  “Or I could shoot myself. The possibilities are endless.”

  “Do you think the deaths could be avoided?”

  “What can I say? That you shouldn’t cross when the barrier is down, that you shouldn’t walk on the line, that if you’re going to commit suicide you should take pills or jump from the tenth floor? I don’t know. Excuse my language, but I couldn’t give a shit about their prevention policy. Nobody can take away the fact that I’ve killed six people.”

  “You didn’t kill them. They threw themselves under your train.”