Verónica didn’t like it because it reminded her of her teenage years, when either her mother or father would wait for her at the entrance to her school, which was a few yards down the same street. When she arrived, Federico was eating a toasted sandwich, which only served to reinforce the memory of herself eating the same kind of sandwich with her parents.
“Apologies – I didn’t have time for lunch.”
“If that’s what you call lunch, no wonder you’re so skinny.”
“You seem on edge.”
“I hate bars that have no smoking areas.”
Federico opened his briefcase and took out the folder which Verónica had given to him the last time they met.
“It wasn’t easy getting info, but I’ve got something for you.”
“I expected nothing less.”
“I’ve got something on six of the seven cases you gave me. The only case there’s nothing for is the one where the boy got away unharmed; I found some information about the people inside the train who were hurt, but of course they’ve got no connection to the boy who caused the accident.”
“I suspected as much. The boy escaped from the scene in a car.”
“Here’s the thing: that isn’t mentioned in the case brought by one of the injured parties against the rail company. In the other cases the correct details regarding identity and addresses are given. One of the dead boys is still unnamed. Nobody ever came to claim his remains and he couldn’t be identified. In that case, the most interesting witness statement is from the driver, who says that he saw people standing beside the tracks at the moment of impact, but that statement died along with the case. There wasn’t much expert evidence to go on. Justice isn’t only slow, it’s also absent-minded and superficial.”
“I need the name of the presiding judge in each case.”
“It’s all there in this folder which you gave to me and which I’m returning expanded and improved. In five of the cases, there are statements from the fathers, mothers and guardians. They all claimed not to have any knowledge about what their children were doing in those places. The boys said that they were playing. End of story.”
“It’s not the end.”
“Sweetheart, I wouldn’t arrange a meeting just to give you this information. I’d have sent it to you by email. There’s something else I wanted to show you.”
“Ah, I thought that the meeting was just an excuse to chat face-to-face.”
“My girlfriend wouldn’t let me do that.” He searched in his briefcase and took out a map of Buenos Aires. “There’s something very strange about the five cases for which we do have some information. If you look here, the alleged accidents all took place along a stretch of about twenty miles between the one that was closest to Once at one end and the one that was closest to Moreno at the other.”
“To be more precise, they happened in Caballito and in Paso del Rey.”
“Exactly, those are the end points. But look at the addresses given by the people responsible for these children. They all live in the capital. So I took the liberty of pinpointing on a map the places where they or their children lived, and to my surprise – and I’m guessing to yours, too – their homes aren’t within a big radius. If we draw lines between all the addresses, as I’ve done on this map, you’ll see that they fall within a radius no greater than two miles. They’re not all on the same line, but there is a kind of zonal pattern which we could define as the neighbourhoods of Lugano, Oculta and Soldati.”
Verónica felt a shiver that pricked all her senses. She had to confirm her hunch.
“OK, something else: do you have any idea which comuna those neighbourhoods belong to?”
“The comunas…those dear old Centres of Administration and Participation which for some absurd marketing reason they decided to rebrand as ‘comunas’.”
“Do you know which one it is?”
“It’s number 8, of course. The poorest one in Buenos Aires, the one with the highest rates of infant mortality, unemployment and illiteracy. I had to go there recently to renew my driver’s licence.”
“Fede, you’re not only thinner and more handsome. You’re cleverer than ever. I almost envy the receptionist.”
VIII
García García García García. The name that Corso had given her was stuck in her head. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Why had a boy from the Villa 15 shanty town been playing in Morón? Why had a boy from Soldati been in an accident in Caballito? How had a boy from Lugano ended up in Ituzaingó? Clearly somebody was taking them to these places. García, I’m going to grab you by the throat and I’m not going to let go, Verónica said to herself as she arrived back at her apartment.
She needed to think, to draw up a strategy. A text message arrived from Paula: Bring good wine. It was dinner with the girls that night. The feminist asado. She texted back: I can’t go, too much work. Minutes later came an enigmatic message from Paula that read Butch. Then came another with the text corrected: Bitch.
She needed a double Jack Daniel’s and two packets of cigarettes to help her think. She didn’t believe she could have a decent idea before she had finished the first pack. She sat in the middle of the sofa and unfolded the map which Federico had so carefully marked up for her over the coffee table. The lines crossed over each other, forming a slightly concave trapezoid. The centre, not very symmetrical or circular, but still quite clear, was at the point where the Dellepiane freeway crossed Calle Larrazábal.
For the moment, she decided to forget García. The guy couldn’t be wandering about abducting children off the street. Those boys must have something in common: school, the soccer club they all supported, the hospital they went to. They were too small to be meeting in a bar. Perhaps they were street children, those ones you see begging at busy junctions. Or the ones who clean your windshield for a coin. She needed to see the area. Once there, she could get a better idea of what those boys had in common. If she could track down some of the ones who had survived, perhaps she could get them to tell her something. But how could she speak to them without arousing suspicion? If they found out that she was sniffing around, it could put her investigation at risk.
The first pack of cigarettes was nearly finished and she had already poured herself a second bourbon when her mobile started ringing. She thought that it was Paula or one of the girls, calling to give her a hard time. But it wasn’t the girls. It was Lucio.
“I’ve just been told that there’s been an accident. The seven formation knocked down a boy in Ciudadela.”
“How’s the boy?”
“He didn’t survive. Jesus fucking Christ.”
“And the driver’s OK?”
“He’s lost it, he’s totally fucked-up. They’ve taken him to hospital.”
Lucio’s voice sounded grim.
As soon as they had ended the call, she rang Federico. It didn’t cross her mind that it was nearly midnight and that he might be with his girlfriend, which could be awkward for him.
“A boy’s been hit by a train at Ciudadela. The boy’s dead. Please, I need you to find out which judge is going to be in charge of the case and make sure whoever it is pulls out all the stops and gets this boy’s details. If necessary get my dad to pull strings to make the fucking judge work. Just tell me and I’ll call him.”
She drank what was left of the Jack Daniel’s and looked at the map: she was sure that the boy was from Comuna 8. She lay back on the sofa and closed her eyes. She was tired, but it was still going to be hard to get to sleep that night.
IX
And she slept badly. She tossed and turned in bed, cursing herself for having no tranquillizers. Halfway through the night she got up to piss, to smoke a cigarette and drink some water.
Federico called her at eleven the next morning and gave her the information that had not yet come out in the press. The boy who had been run over by the Sarmiento train was called Vicente Garamona, known as Vicen, and had lived in Ciudad Oculta with his mother, Carmen Garamona, a cleaner who work
ed by the hour in two houses, one in San Telmo and the other in Belgrano. It was no thanks to the justice system that the boy’s identity had been discovered, Federico said. His mother had reported him missing that same night, when he had supposedly gone to watch Vélez – the team he supported – play at their home ground. The Vélez stadium was not that far from Ciudadela.
“They’re on the same railway line, one station apart,” Federico told her. “But there’s one detail which isn’t in the police proceedings, perhaps because it seemed superfluous to them. Vélez weren’t playing last night. Did Vicen get the wrong day and then decide to walk on along the tracks to Ciudadela? It doesn’t sound very plausible.”
Like everyone else, the boy’s mother found out about the accident from the television. Maternal instinct told her that the dead boy could be her son. That day she happened to be working in the house of an architect, who went with her to the court. The mother identified the boy’s clothes, which, though drenched in blood, were all that was recognizable.
The statement made in Tribunales did not include much information about Vicen. Nothing about his school or his friends. Neither did it say anything about the architect who had accompanied the mother to the judge’s office. Federico had learned that detail from talking to the court secretary.
It was the first significant advance since Fede had shown her the map of Buenos Aires with all the places marked on it where the dead boys had lived. And that was something else she owed to him.
9 Licking the Wounds
I
A week before Lucio called Verónica to tell her about the most recent accident, they had been together in her apartment on Calle Lerma. He liked being somewhere that was so different from his home. He was fascinated by the quantity of books, CDs and magazines scattered all over the place which, nonetheless, obeyed some kind of order. As if this were a set, following a careful design. There was none of that chaos generated by his children at home. No toys chucked about, or bits of food that every so often appeared in the least expected places, no single socks lying in the corners.
What made this lovers’ relationship pleasurable was the same thing that made a marriage of many years tolerable: routine. Verónica and Lucio had created their own habits and enjoyed repeating them. Her text message, his phone call, Lucio’s arrival at the apartment, the music that would be playing low, like a soundtrack to their lives, the first kisses in the elevator, resumed in the kitchen while they opened a bottle of wine, or the caresses while she made coffee in the espresso maker, the removal of some clothes, if they were having sex on the sofa, the removal of all of them in the bedroom, Verónica’s forays to change the music, or look for chocolates, or for imported cookies; the clothes that always went astray between the sheets, or under the bed, or got forgotten about in the living room; the last kisses in the elevator, the formal goodbye at the door. There wasn’t time for much more in those two or three hours that they shared at least once a week and never more than three times.
Sometimes the routine was broken. Something would be said and not repeated.
“I like your back,” she told him as she ran a long nail, painted red, along it. “It’s like a wild animal. I like to imagine your back while you’re fucking me, how it moves over me. If I found you fucking another girl I wouldn’t react, I’d just stare at your back. But if you were underneath, with your back against the bed, then I would kill you.”
Or that night of torrential rain, when Verónica insisted on opening the bedroom window that looked onto the street and he moulded himself to her body while she looked out of the window, giving herself to the rain more than to him.
And that time when there were no condoms and she offered to give him a blow job.
“And what about your ass?” Lucio asked her casually.
She told him to close his eyes and went to the bathroom. Soon she came back and began to massage his thighs, his cock and stomach with an oily substance. A scent of jasmine filled the room. Verónica’s hands moved expertly.
“Do you like it?” she asked, and he nodded without opening his eyes.
Verónica lay, face down, beside him. Lucio opened his eyes. She offered him the little bottle containing the essence with which she had massaged him. He poured it on his hands and rubbed it over her back, down to her ass and deeply inside it. He left the bottle on the bedside table and penetrated her while she moaned with her mouth half-open and her eyes half-closed. He put his hand close to her mouth and she licked it first, then bit it, biting harder as he thrust into her. The pain shot from his hand up his arm, but he didn’t try to take his hand out of her mouth. Instead he pushed harder against her and, only when he had come, did Verónica open her mouth and tightly close her eyes. A thread of blood trickled from the finger she had bitten. He wiped it against his own leg and rolled over to the other side of the bed. They lay like this, he facing up, her facing down, for a few minutes in silence, listening to the quickened pace of Lucio’s breathing.
II
They hadn’t met up in a bar again since starting to see each other regularly at the apartment. The arrangement to meet in a public place was therefore clearly a way for Verónica to signal that she wanted to separate this meeting from the time they spent together at hers. They settled on La Perla because it was close to where Lucio worked.
This time he picked a spot in the smoking section. She arrived almost at the same time as him. They greeted one another with a peck on the cheek, the kind of kiss they gave one another when saying goodbye at the door to Verónica’s building. She took out a blue folder and passed it to him. Inside it were various newspaper reports. She wanted him to look at them and tell her if he had been involved in any of the cases. He couldn’t focus on the articles; he could barely even read the headings. And yet each page reminded him of what had happened. The deaths, the colleagues who had stopped driving trains. Like Gringo Sosa, who spent a month as a patient in a psychiatric hospital after killing one of the boys; Marquitos Leme, who had quit and was never heard of again. No. He had not been directly involved in any of those accidents, but every one of them formed a part of his own story.
What Verónica was asking of him was absurd. There were doors that were closed and that Lucio wasn’t prepared to open. If she started interviewing his co-workers, some bond between them would be broken. The silence that they sustained together, day after day, would be destroyed for something as trivial as a piece of journalism. Her insistence was absurd, almost idiotic. How could she understand so little, even now?
Because, if what she wanted to know was what it felt like to crush a person’s body with the weight of a train, he could tell her about each one of his deaths. The faces, the sounds, the cries. The six of them were always with him. His six dead bodies. In this bar, in the haze of the cigarette smoke, in the tiles’ dirty patina, on every one of those chairs that looked unoccupied.
III
Why had the boy asked for forgiveness with his eyes? His name was Pablo Muñoz, he was twenty-two years old, single and studying economics at the Universidad de Morón. Lucio found all that out afterwards, in the Diario Popular. The incident had merited a longer article than usual because it turned out that the boy was the son of a provincial congressman. Lucio had kept the page on which the article was printed. Pablo Muñoz had become a part of his life. He had locked onto Lucio’s eyes and not let go until that image of the boy became noise beneath his feet.
A few days after the boy threw himself under the train, Lucio had gone to the Universidad de Morón. He had stood at the main door, watching the young people going in and out. He imagined that Pablo Muñoz must also have stood there, many times. If he had not jumped in front of the train, or if Lucio had managed to stop it in time, he might be there today, with his rucksack full of textbooks and notes.
Was it forgiveness that the boy had been asking for with that last look? He had wondered this every day, every hour since the accident. One morning, three weeks later, he thought that he had found the answ
er, that he knew what the boy had been trying to say.
That same morning he had gone to the city of La Plata. He had kept asking people for directions to the state legislature building until he found it. Once there, he had requested to speak to Congressman Muñoz. The receptionist had asked which party the congressman belonged to, because they had three gentlemen with that surname. Lucio didn’t know, so he replied:
“The congressman whose son died under a train.”
He was asked to wait in the entrance hall, together with a group of very disparate people all united by a look of needing a favour. After ten minutes a woman of about fifty appeared, asking who Lucio Valrossa was. This woman said that she was the congressman’s assistant and asked him the reason for his visit.
“I was driving the train that knocked down his son.”
The woman told him to wait and returned the way she had come. A few minutes later she was back with a short, fat, balding gentleman, who looked untidy despite his jacket and tie. The woman pointed at Lucio but did not approach him. Only the congressman came over to where the driver was waiting.
“I wanted to tell you that I am sorry about what happened to your son.”
Congressman Muñoz nodded. He had nothing to say to him. He could perhaps have asked if the boy had suffered when the train struck him, or if he thought that it had been an accident. But the congressman seemed not to want to talk about those things. He didn’t want anyone coming to tell him what he wasn’t ready to hear.
“There’s something else. When your son appeared, there was no way to stop the train before it hit him. I saw your son clearly. He had a sad face. I’m sure that he was trying to tell me something with his expression: that he did not want to kill himself. That he no longer wanted to kill himself.”
The congressman listened to him, studying the laces on his moccasins. When Lucio had finished speaking, Muñoz said to him:
“I’m grateful to you for coming all this way to tell me that.”
The Fragility of Bodies Page 15
