The Fragility of Bodies

by Sergio Olguin

  In less than a week, in less than three days, everything that he had bought in the hypermarket with Dientes was finished. El Peque didn’t have a single peso left, and so he began to dream about the next courage contest. He pictured himself jumping after the other boy, winning again, carrying off a hundred pesos. He made a decision: he wouldn’t save up for the boots. He would buy a load of stuff again. Every night he counted the days until the contest. During the last week he was as nervous as if he were going to play in the final of a soccer championship. And – though it took its time – eventually the night of the competition arrived.

  VI

  He said nothing to Dientes, and lied again to his mother. That night he walked to the corner where Rivero would come and pick him up. It was strange, but he thought more about what he would do the next day, going to the shop with Dientes, than about what would be happening in a few minutes. Rivero and the guy with the biker jacket arrived straightaway. El Peque got into the back. His opponent wasn’t there yet, so he just pressed his face against the glass and looked out at the night-time city. The avenue they took out of his barrio was clogged by heavy traffic, slowing their progress. After a while they emerged into some dark streets. Rivero stopped the car, the man in the jacket got out, looked all around him and got back in again.

  “Let’s wait a few minutes. He’ll be here soon.”

  Rivero had the radio on at a very low volume. He turned it up a little and El Peque could hear some sports commentators talking about a soccer match. The surrounding darkness was so dense that at first none of the three noticed that the other boy was a few yards away. Rivero turned the engine back on and flashed his lights at the boy, who ran over and climbed into the empty back seat. El Peque knew him. He was called Vicen and he played in an older division. Once they had shared a drink after a game. He was one of the boys El Peque liked. He didn’t know why; perhaps because he never made fun of the others, or because he didn’t talk all that much.

  He didn’t talk much in the car, either, but remained silent, looking out of his window, the same as El Peque. They drove back to the avenue and on towards the freeway. It was the first time that El Peque had been on a freeway at night and he was instantly fascinated by the lights of the cars circulating below, as though this were a crossroads and they had chosen to take the highest route. The cars looked like strange animals, or spaceships, something out of the ordinary. The ones below them seemed to be travelling slowly, but the ones beside them were silent and swift. He would have liked the car to stop so that he could spend a few hours watching those white and red lights moving around him.

  Vicen was evidently not so engrossed by the spectacle of the cars, because he took something out of his pocket and turned his attention to that.

  “What are those?” El Peque asked him.

  “Cards. Do you collect them?”

  “What kind?”

  “Soccer players.”

  “Ah, no.”

  They left the freeway. After a little while they arrived at a dark street that ran across railway tracks, similar to the one they had gone to before. On all four corners of the junction there were industrial buildings with no lights on, and if it hadn’t been for the parked cars, whose occupants could be seen in silhouette, anyone would have said they were in an abandoned part of the city.

  “Have you done this before?” Vicen asked El Peque when they got out of the car.

  “Uh-huh. I won.”

  “I’ve won twice,” Vicen told him, playing down his victory.

  Rivero gave them twenty pesos each.

  As on the previous occasion, some of the people in the cars got out to inspect the boys up close. Some of them greeted El Peque with “How are you, champ” or “go for it, lad”. El Peque smiled in response to the greetings. He liked being recognized.

  After Rivero and the man in the jacket had taken bets from people standing outside and from those in the cars, and spoken to some others on the phone, the children took up their positions on the tracks. Seconds later, the man in the jacket called them back. A car was coming up the street and crossed the tracks before the barriers went down. There wasn’t enough time for the boys to take their places again before the train passed, and they would have to wait for the next one. During those minutes they went back to Rivero’s car and everyone sat in silence, even the man in the jacket, who was no longer talking on the phone and had lit a cigarette. Smoke filled the inside of the car. They didn’t hear any noises; nobody else came down the road. Rivero looked at his watch and told them to get out. They went back to their places on the tracks and waited. Only then did Vicen break the silence, resuming the conversation that they had had when they arrived.

  “How many times have you won?”

  “Once.”

  “Against who?”

  “Against Cholito.”

  “He plays soccer with me.”

  “He tried to scare me, telling me all kinds of shit.”

  “What a dick.”

  “Nothing scares me.”

  “Me neither. If we draw, will they give us half the money each?”

  “No idea.”

  “I’m going to win anyway.”

  “Ha. Yeah, of course.”

  In the distance the train’s yellow light appeared, weakly at first but steady and getting stronger all the time, dragging a shadowy mass behind it.

  “Peque.”

  “What?”

  “What if we both jump now?”

  “No way.”

  The train was coming, preceded by the light, and in front of that a wind that struck the two boys’ faces as they stared ahead, their eyes wide open. El Peque’s body was as taut as a startled cat’s.

  It was coming closer.

  In that moment he wasn’t thinking about the hundred pesos. He was just looking at the train and, out of the corner of his eye, at Vicen.

  He had to win. But Vicen wasn’t jumping.

  Too close.

  How long to wait?

  A bit longer.

  “Come on, asshole, jump,” El Peque shouted.

  He heard Vicen’s response.

  “No.”

  And El Peque, without wanting to or thinking about it, jumped away from the line. The sound of the train came over him as though he were under the foot of an ogre. But it was only noise, and the sound of shouting, that kept him pinned to the ground close to the tracks. His eye or his body had registered something that lasted a millisecond, and it was Vicen, standing motionless on the track, not moving. Motionless at the moment El Peque had jumped and the train had come through, amid a terrifying noise of screeching and howling. El Peque looked at the train, which had come to a stop; the last compartment had ended up beside him. He looked down but he saw nothing. Everything was black. And above his head, shouting. More shouting.

  El Peque got to his feet and started running alongside the tracks, away from the train. He ran in the darkness, leaving the screams behind him. He ran without seeing, because it was dark, or because he was crying or screaming as well. He saw a side street and dashed down it, to get away from the railway. At the next block he stopped abruptly, realizing that he had no idea where he was. Knowing that he was lost made him even more afraid and he sat down on the kerb to cry. He couldn’t get his breath, he was choking, but he couldn’t stop crying. He felt that he would never again see his mother, his little brothers and sisters. He wiped his nose and brushed away his tears on the sleeve of his jacket. A car drew up beside him. It was Rivero. The other guy ordered him to get in.

  “What about Vicen?” he asked, hoping to hear that the boy had in fact jumped without him realizing. He didn’t mind losing. Not getting the hundred pesos.

  “Vicen beat you.”

  “He jumped?”

  They didn’t answer him. The car went faster than usual. Rivero said to him:

  “Listen, Peque, not a word about this to anyone.”

  “If you say anything you’ll go to prison.”

  “Pris
on?”

  “Vicen didn’t jump in time because you waited too long to jump. If you had jumped sooner, he would be alive.”

  “They could charge you with murder. So don’t say anything to anyone, no matter who’s asking.”

  “Not to your mother, to the police or to your friends. Not to anyone. Or the rest of your life in prison. Got it?”

  “But I told him to jump.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’ll still go to prison.”

  “Keep quiet and nothing will happen.”

  They left him in the same place as last time. He started running again, but this time he didn’t have a hundred-peso note balled in his hand. He felt as though a fist were clenching around his chest and throat.

  8  The Investigation

  I

  A journalistic investigation requires time, patience and reliable sources. The journalist must not rush even when she’s racing against the clock to get a scoop. For that reason, perhaps, the best investigations are always into subjects that are not currently on the news agenda. When a journalist knows that she is the only one investigating a particular issue, she can take her time and wait to uncover the information she needs for the job.

  Much harder to come by than time and patience, however, are good sources. Ones that can pass on information, open up new lines of enquiry, corroborate facts or dates, always off the record and under the protection of professional secrecy.

  Verónica had been careful not to mention the railway boys in her piece about suburban trains. She didn’t want to tip off any colleagues who would spot the potential exposé just as she had. Being the only one chasing the story would allow her more time to get the information she still needed.

  Lucio had been a source in her article and, if it hadn’t been for him, she would never have seen the boys on the Sarmiento tracks. There wasn’t much more that he could contribute now. He didn’t know more than what he had already told her and Verónica had no plan to go back on the train. She wanted to try a different tack. Smoking, lounging in the armchair in her apartment, she felt lost, with no clear idea of how to frame her investigation.

  She was counting on her editor’s approval to take the time she needed, so long as she kept turning in those regular space-fillers that could usually be wrapped up in a couple of hours on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The rest of the time was for her and her investigation. It was one of Patricia’s great virtues: ensuring that her writers had enough time to research their articles. She could be demanding, pedantic, liable to get annoyed by the excessive use of a gerund or the lack of precision in a piece of information, but she gave them all the time they needed.

  That day Verónica decided not to go to the magazine. It was more relaxing to work at home, where she didn’t have to go outside every time she wanted to smoke. She had to start at the beginning: work the archive. The chance of finding something interesting there was slim, but worthwhile if it provided the end of a thread which she could follow to find a way through the labyrinth.

  While at university she had managed, thanks to a teacher who had recommended her, to get an internship at Editorial Atlántida, a publishing house that produced around ten different magazines. She had pictured herself spending six adrenaline-fuelled months at the heart of the journalistic world. As soon as she arrived, though, they had sent her to the archive to gather information for articles to be written by staff writers on the celebrity gossip magazine Gente. She wondered if getting stuck in a room with a lot of brown envelopes filled with newspaper and magazine cuttings was a way to pay her dues before she got any meaningful work. A week later they sent her back down there to catalogue photographic negatives. It was actually a very agreeable place: an old room that smelled of mahogany. But she wanted to be in the newsroom, among computers, printers and the cigarette smoke that still hung heavy in those spaces back then. She spent the third week looking through catalogues of children’s illustrations for Billiken magazine, and seemed to be getting ever further from the day when she would find herself in a real live newsroom.

  “It was a bit too old-fashioned for my liking,” she said to her lecturer when she had to explain why she had given up the internship after a month.

  If her lecturer was disappointed, he didn’t show it, lamenting only that his favourite student had lost her chance of a career in an important publishing house.

  Since then she had hated any activity related to archives. If it were up to her, she’d hire other people (interns!) to do the search for her. But luckily the internet had made this job much easier and it was no longer necessary to spend days poring over cuttings taken out of manila envelopes. For example, for this investigation she could count on the complete archives of at least three national newspapers (Clarín, La Nación, Página/12) dating back ten years.

  She went to the kitchen, made maté, put hot water in a thermos and headed for her desk. Many hours in front of the computer lay ahead.

  II

  Verónica started searching by section – Society, Crime, City – using the key words “accident”, “train”, “children”, “boys”, “tracks”, “mutilated”, “dead”, “Sarmiento railway”, “accusation”, “crime”. She searched in time spans: starting with newspapers from ten years ago, she sorted the cases year by year until reaching the current day. She discovered, with surprise, that some incidents recorded in one newspaper did not exist for another. Or a news item appeared in one publication but was given space in another only two or three days later. In that ten-year span, what particularly drew her attention was the mention of some adolescents or preadolescents playing “chicken” on the tracks of the Roca railway. In fact, the article had appeared in the Psychology section and reflected on the way children deal with death. It had made reference to child bombers in the Middle East, to child addicts and then to children who played on railway lines. It said that the children came from a shanty town and were involved with a group of adults who gambled on their chances. The article added that these adults were as poor and as marginalized as the children playing “chicken”. It concluded by saying that several deaths had been caused by this macabre game.

  Verónica, who had a good eye for the way a piece had been constructed, noticed that her fellow journalist (who may in fact have been a psychologist or sociologist) had no firm evidence on which to base the story, but instead relied on assumptions and rumours. He did not state on which section of the Roca railway – which runs for some thirty miles between the Plaza de la Constitución and the city of La Plata – the game took place, or if there was more than one location. Nor did he give the name of the shanty town from which the children came or a figure for the number of deaths. That lack of information, far from annoying or frustrating her, made her happy.

  Verónica was no fan of Excel spreadsheets, but in this case it would be a helpful way to collate all the dates, cases and places. She also created a new folder on the hard drive, where she kept all the articles relating to what she was looking for.

  Continuing with the search, this time she discounted any cases of children who had been with a relative at the time of the accident and which had been subject to an inquest. Also those which had very clearly been accidents (kids who wanted to run across the lines and hadn’t seen the train approaching). The easiest cases to rule out were the ones in which the dead or injured child had been seen by witnesses who explained how the tragedy had occurred: a child who was coming home from school and hadn’t looked as he crossed the line; another who jumped down from the platform onto the tracks to pick up some coins he had dropped; kids who ran across and didn’t get to the other side on time. Those cases were no use to her.

  In all she found forty-eight cases of minors (adolescents and children) who had been killed or injured (usually mutilated) on railway tracks for ambiguous reasons, defined as “accident” or “reckless act”, with no clarification of how the incident had occurred. The majority had taken place in Buenos Aires (both the capital and province), but there had also been four case
s in the country’s interior. One in Entre Rios, another in Rosario, a third in Salta and the most recent in Mendoza, two years ago. Of course, the interior had very few railways and newspapers tended to reflect what happened in the capital and its environs. In the other cases it seemed that nobody had thought to look for a pattern, even though there were some significant common factors: all the victims were poor children, mostly from deprived neighbourhoods or shanty towns. There were rarely any details about who had been on the tracks with the victims. There were generally no witnesses. If there was a witness statement, it came from the driver.

  She ordered the cases by railway line and year, categorizing them as “not relevant”, “suspicious”, “very suspicious”, and “something very strange going on here”. She was basing her investigation on journalistic information, which was not always reliable, as she well knew. The pressure to fill space was enough to induce a reporter to make up a detail, or to leave one out. A paucity of details was also explained by the small space allocated by the editor to the news item. “You can always make something with what others have made,” she told herself, very loosely paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre.

  She discovered with some satisfaction that if she cross-referenced for time and location, the most suspicious cases were to be found on the Sarmiento railway in the last five years. She read her notes again and tried to find other connections. The Roca railway and a branch of the Mitre line returned some results that could raise eyebrows, but only from the last three years. She wondered if those incidents might be better documented in the local media – neighbourhood newspapers, small publications for locals worried about accidents in their area – but the thought of having to resort to a paper archive for these publications (because they had no internet archive) drained her enthusiasm for that line of enquiry. If necessary, she would ask Patricia to find a journalism student she could dispatch to these places.

  The Sarmiento railway appeared with a regularity that led her to suspect the key was there. It accounted for seven documented cases in the last five years. Two fatal (one of which must have been the boy that Carranza knocked down, although the driver’s name was recorded in neither case), four serious injuries (mutilations, according to the reporters) and one in which the child had miraculously escaped death but a passenger in one of the compartments had been seriously injured when the train braked abruptly. The seven incidents had all taken place in neighbourhoods between Caballito and Paso del Rey.