The Fragility of Bodies

by Sergio Olguin

  In those five years, Verónica had become a part of his life. He had been wise enough not to talk about this with his wife, although every now and then, when they were commenting on the neighbours’ various comings and goings, they would talk about the girl in 2A. And if Marcelo knew secrets about all the building’s inhabitants, none of their lives interested him as much as Verónica’s. In five years he had found out a lot of things about her. She was the youngest of three sisters, the only one still single and childless. The other two visited her apartment every now and then with their children. A less frequent visitor was her father, who had given her the apartment. Well, actually she had inherited it from her mother, who had died a few months before she moved in. Her father had just helped her with some of the costs.

  In contrast to the other neighbours, whose lives were more or less structured around schedules and visitors, Verónica’s routine was always changing. He had seen her go out very early, to the gym; he had known her to work from home for a few years or go travelling in Europe for three months. Sometimes she filled the apartment with friends, but then weeks or months could pass without anyone visiting her, not even her sisters and nephews and nieces. She was always coming home at different times – when she came home at all, because days could go by without her returning to the apartment. That was unusual, though, and when it happened Marcelo felt particularly anxious and tempted to call the mobile number which she had once given him.

  Perhaps for that reason, the best time he could remember was when Verónica had been in a steady relationship. For a year she had gone out with a boy who sometimes stayed in her apartment but never moved in altogether. Not even during that time did Verónica stop calling Marcelo to fix problems in her home. The guy was clearly useless. He edited books or something, according to Verónica. Marcelo wasn’t jealous (not all that jealous, anyway). All he had ever hoped for was a brief sexual encounter, and that could happen whether or not she was engaged, married or single, as she so often was. Before and after that boyfriend the men had come and gone with some regularity. None of them lasted long. And, in contrast to her unpredictable routine, Verónica’s men resembled one another to an astonishing degree. They were guys between thirty and forty, dressed like those men he had occasionally seen on television in the audience of fashion shows, polite and gentlemanly. Perhaps a bit shy or stuck-up. Or both. Most of them wore glasses. Marcelo had no idea whether they were good-looking or not.

  Since she had been working at the magazine, Verónica had developed some routines. On working days she usually left home at about midday and didn’t come back before 9 p.m. That afternoon she was wearing long boots and a coat that hardly allowed him to imagine her tight jeans or the shape of her body underneath it. Another reason to hate cold winter days. Verónica was dressed and made up a little more formally than usual. Marcelo was standing at the door when she went out and asked her:

  “Got an important meeting?”

  “Lunch with my father. Not the best date in the world, but not the worst, either.”

  Marcelo handed her an envelope containing the telephone bill, which had arrived a few minutes earlier, and she hurried out.

  I’m your best date, he thought as he watched her walk away. Then he carried on sorting the other neighbours’ bills.

  II

  Since his wife had died, Aarón felt that some link with his daughters had broken. It wasn’t that he loved them less, or that he wasn’t interested in their future, or that he didn’t value their company, but he couldn’t honestly have said that the death had brought them closer together. In fact, the opposite seemed to be true. His wife had always been the family’s catalyst, the one who resolved conflicts, who received any kind of news, who communicated, healed, protected, cautioned, restricted, influenced. Her illness had been long and exhausting for all of them. During those months there had been a few disagreements with his daughters, but he could no longer count on his wife to resolve them. When she died, alongside the pain he had felt a certain liberation, not only from living around illness but also from the bond that tied him to his daughters. Since then they had seen each other and met up on certain occasions – they never missed a birthday or a Rosh Hashanah – but something had been lost forever and now it seemed too difficult to get it back.

  It was true that Aarón found it hard to maintain an easy relationship with Verónica, perhaps because, as the single one with no children, there were no tales of little ones’ antics to break awkward silences. She visited him once or twice a month, or they went out to lunch at a restaurant of his choosing. There wasn’t much personal news they could share and, to avoid fights, they steered clear of politics.

  He didn’t mind that his daughter was a journalist, but he would have preferred her to take up law as he had done, and his father before him. None of his three daughters had continued the family tradition. The eldest was a clinician, the middle one an educational psychologist and Verónica had a degree in communications. With no husband and those qualifications she wasn’t going to get very far, unless she worked in television. But she had decided that her thing was print journalism. He respected the decision and felt proud every time a colleague mentioned seeing her byline in a newspaper or magazine. However, he had always thought that, of the three daughters, she was the one who had the greatest chance of succeeding in law. She had always been good at making an argument and was quick to defend any hard-luck case she came across in life, be it a pet or a friend. She hated injustice and never chose silence over action. She would have been an excellent lawyer. Like him, like her grandfather. If she had been male, he had no doubt that his third child would have been the one to continue the law firm which was so respected and feared in the Palace of Justice.

  “Did you know that Alfonsín used to eat here?” he asked as his daughter (ten minutes late, as usual) settled into her seat opposite him, arranging the napkin over her lap.

  “Yes, Dad, you told me all the other times that we’ve come here.”

  “I like my dining companions to be well informed. So I’m going to tell you again.”

  But it was only a joke. He didn’t continue with the story that she already knew – that in this restaurant, Pedemonte, on Avenida de Mayo, her father had often lunched with Raúl Alfonsín, the President of the Republic. In the 1980s her father’s law firm had been close to the government and it still maintained links with the Radicals and with other parties, although he had never been an activist except, for several decades now, at the Buenos Aires Bar Association.

  Aarón ordered a sirloin steak, medium rare, with a tomato and carrot salad, a half-bottle of Chateau Vieux and a sparkling water. Verónica opted for grilled Patagonian toothfish with a green salad and still water. Neither of them ate dessert. He asked for a herbal tea and she a black coffee, no sugar.

  “What are you up to at the magazine?”

  “I’m at the start of an investigation that I think is going to be really important. It’s for a piece looking into the dark side of the railways.”

  “About the privatization of the branch lines? We’ve got a Metrovías case on at the firm.”

  “No, nothing to do with contracts. It’s about suicides, people who throw themselves under trains.”

  “Ah, very dark.”

  “Yes, but with some interesting twists in the tale.”

  “I don’t know how you don’t get depressed working on this sort of stuff.”

  “I do get depressed, but I hide it.”

  “How about your boss – do you get on well with him?”

  “With her. My boss is a woman.”

  “But the magazine’s editor is a man.”

  “Yes, but I don’t answer to him. Luckily. In his office, which is pretty big, there’s only room for him and his ego.”

  They left the restaurant quickly, not because they were keen to get the lunch over with but because neither could wait any longer for a cigarette. Both of them lit up in the door of the restaurant.

  “I don’t
like you smoking, darling, it’s not good.”

  “I, on the other hand, love you smoking. It makes you look like Charles Boyer in an old movie. Bye, Dad, I’m off to the magazine.”

  She gave him a noisy kiss, then headed off in the opposite direction from the way he was going.

  III

  It wasn’t that Patricia hated her work, she was just tired of journalism. She hid the fact under a display of scepticism about the career she had chosen twenty years earlier. Perhaps her mistake had been to marry her work and never apply for a separation. She, who had been divorced twice, who had managed to have children with two husbands, who had slipped off so many bonds, had never been able to step away from journalism. She no longer felt the same excitement that she used to, years ago, when she saw her name at the head of an article: Patricia Beltrán. Her colleagues used to call her ‘La Beltraneja’, an allusion to the nickname mockingly given to the medieval infanta Juana of Castile because she was presumed to be the illegitimate child of the nobleman Beltrán de La Cueva. Patricia, who had never been unfaithful but had always known how to break off relations the day before disaster struck, lived a kind of double life. Everyone thought of her as a brilliant journalist whose work her colleagues remembered (the general public tends to have shorter memories). But the truth was that she was no longer truly a journalist. She took refuge in editing the work of her team and scarcely wrote any articles herself. She thought up the headlines, scheduled pieces, counted characters and improved badly written articles. She was like a priest who has lost faith in God and now goes through the motions at Mass, repeating what comes easily after so many years as an officiant. That was Patricia: a journalistic atheist. Her weekly Mass was editing the Society section in Nuestro Tiempo. The magazine had been launched in the mid-1990s under the title Última Decada. In the year 2000 it had needed a new name.

  Her years of experience allowed Patricia to carry out her work with a certain professional dignity. Nobody ever reproached her for her cynicism or weariness. She had put together an excellent team: four outstanding writers, an intelligent intern and contributors chosen with her unerring instinct for picking out reliable colleagues. Society was one of the magazine’s longest and most important sections. She got on well with the back-room team who managed the publication and, since she had no interest in joining them, they treated her with respect and gratitude.

  If there was one thing that did still have the power to move her, it was witnessing other people’s passion. When she saw a journalist who could still get fired up about the job, Patricia couldn’t help feeling a special emotion and a desire to protect them. That was particularly the case with Verónica. If it weren’t for the fact that, at Verónica’s age, she had been in a relationship and pregnant with her first child, you could say that she had been the same when she was thirty. She had watched Verónica grow as a journalist, from the time she started as an intern on the magazine of which Patricia was already editor. She had seen something different in the young reporter and a few years later she had had no hesitation in taking Verónica with her to her next job. Of her staff writers she was the best, and the only one without ambitions to become an editor or deputy editor. Verónica, like Patricia light years ago, wanted to be on the street investigating, meeting people, finding explanations for problems, naming and shaming those responsible for them. She was meticulous, obsessive, clear-eyed and a very good writer. Patricia trusted her, and that is always the best thing an editor can say about one of her journalists. Plus she had an instinct. A sixth sense. Where someone else saw ordinary behaviour, Verónica might uncover some hair-raising backstory. When she had said that she was going to write about a suicidal railwayman, Patricia had expected to get a nice crime story with some heart-wrenching anecdote. She didn’t imagine that there could be much else to say. However, early that morning she had received an email from Verónica that read:

  Dear Pato,

  When I was a little girl I used to get frightened on the ghost train in Italpark. Now I’m starting to see that the real horror stories are on the normal, everyday trains. I’ve got some good leads and if all goes to plan I think we can pull a nice big rabbit out of the hat. A terrifying rabbit, in fact. Tomorrow I’ll tell you everything.

  That afternoon Patricia watched Verónica walk through reception and into the newsroom. She said hello to the colleagues who were already there and walked on towards Patricia, smiling.

  “You’re smiling like the cat that got the cream…”

  “I prefer the Cheshire cat. I’m exhausted. I’ve just had lunch with my esteemed father and I ate too much. I need a siesta urgently.”

  “Did he take you to Hermann again?”

  “No, we went to Pedemonte.”

  She hung up her coat and perched her shapely rear on the desk. Looking at her, Patricia couldn’t help thinking that she would give anything to be thirty again. Although she had never had a body like Verónica’s. Or perhaps she had. Who isn’t beautiful when they’re young? And the chances were that Verónica didn’t even know it. If somebody had told Patricia at twenty-five (let alone twenty) that someone of thirty was young she would have burst out laughing. She’d have done the same, for that matter, if someone had told her at thirty that she was young.

  “Pato, start lining up the cover for me, because I’ve got a big fat story for you.”

  “The suicidal railwayman with criminal tendencies is really that big a deal?”

  “I can assure you it is.”

  How must Verónica see her? As an older woman, no doubt, even though she was only twenty years older. A colleague who had run the gamut of the leading newsrooms of Buenos Aires and who had chosen where and with whom to work. Who had reached all life’s milestones – marriage, children, separation – twice over. She must see her as a historic monument.

  “There are actually two articles. Or rather, two subjects that I want to cover in the article. The theme is death.”

  “Trains and death. I’m beginning to get it.”

  “Let’s say that the railwayman’s suicide was the trigger. I went down that road, but what I found was a guy haunted by the ghosts of the people he’s run over. You wouldn’t believe how many suicides there are on the line. Anyway, the number isn’t important. Figures are never that useful.”

  “What do you mean ‘not useful’? Figures are essential. We’re journalists.”

  “Yes, but stories are what stay with the reader. And there are some terrible tales. The men who run over people suffer dreadful guilt. Some of them go mad. In some cases the company takes them off driving duties, but most of them carry on as before. All of them are, or should be, getting psychiatric treatment for the rest of their lives.”

  “It certainly seems to meet the legal definition of ‘insalubrious work’.”

  “Do you know of any other job where you wind up in a psychiatric hospital?”

  “Darling, I’ve worked on the Politics section of several newspapers.”

  “These people go off their rockers for a long, long time.”

  “Blood and madness. I’m liking it, but I’m not seeing a cover story. I see a headline on the cover, certainly, but not the lead piece.”

  Patricia would be the first to admit that she enjoyed pulling apart her writers’ proposals. At the end of the day, she might say, she was paid for good stories and not for being kind to journalists who didn’t know how to come up with a winning idea. It was because she admired Verónica that she took particular pleasure in being hypercritical of her ideas. It was also true that she delighted in seeing her protégée double down on an idea and talk her out of her doubts, and she relished her role as devil’s advocate. So far, Verónica had brought her a good idea for a piece, but there must be something more. She wouldn’t settle merely for a good idea.

  “There are children. Not exactly suicidal children, but almost. Kids who stand on the tracks and compete to see who can last the longest before jumping off to one side. Imagine it. The train is bearing down on t
hem and they don’t move a muscle, holding out to the last minute.”

  “This is really happening?”

  “I saw it last night with my own eyes. Between Caballito and Flores. On the Sarmiento line. Two boys of about ten. I was in the driver’s cabin.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “A source had told me that it might happen, and he took me along with him. And it did happen.”

  “What a macabre game.”

  “You know what I think? That those boys weren’t just messing about – someone is making them do it. If I could find something on that side of things we’re looking at a criminal case. And you know how this kind of thing works. If there’s betting, there are powerful people implicated, there’s impunity. The same old thing as always, except that in this case it could lead to the deaths of children.”

  Verónica was managing to draw her in, turning her into an atheist who doubted. What if God in fact existed? What if journalism was a worthwhile endeavour after all?

  “OK, let’s get ourselves organized. There are two articles here. First, one about work insecurity with some highly dramatic content: suicides and the train drivers who are left traumatized by them. End of story. Cover line. Pretty pictures of dismembered bodies, or grisly illustration by Sapo González. Second, a piece on a potentially criminal instance of child abuse. It’s not going to be easy to find more than what you’ve already seen, but it has to be found all the same. Start with the suicides and take as long as you need for the other piece. Without abusing my generosity, of course.”

  “OK. I’m on it. I can’t do anything for this week’s deadline, anyway.”

  “I thought as much.”

  “I’m not staying late tonight.”

  “You all go off and leave me then, as usual.”