The Fragility of Bodies

by Sergio Olguin

  This time they met in a bar on Zelarrayán, one that they had been to several times in the past, on the way home from a concert, back when they were still together. He got there before Andrea. He saw her cross the road and come towards him with a cautious smile. She was dressed the same as always: hair caught up in a ponytail; padded jacket similar to the one Martina wore, and underneath it a black polo neck. As far as Rafael was concerned, she hadn’t changed in all these years, but doubtless she thought she was fatter, because she had dressed in black. And in fact, almost the first thing she said was:

  “We’ve both put on weight.”

  They spent half an hour together. Rafael tried not to overwhelm her with details of his new life. He told her only that he was living in a hostel in Soldati, that he was working at a soccer club, that he was clean and intended to stay that way. He didn’t ask, he didn’t want to know, if she still had a boyfriend. He found out only that she was working on the till in a superstore. The rest of the time they talked about Martina, her school, her lessons, her friends. Rafael was on firm ground with these, since his daughter had told him the details herself. Andrea expressed some anxiety about Martina’s thinness; she told him that she had taken her to see the doctor, who hadn’t found anything wrong.

  “She takes after me – I was a skinny boy.”

  There weren’t many people in the bar: at one table was another couple, quite a bit older than them. Where would Andrea and he meet one another in twenty years’ time? Would they have a coffee together, like today? Would they talk about their thirty-something daughter? Would they be together again? Better not to wonder about such things, to have the last, cold gulp of coffee, to call the waiter, pay – insist on paying and do it. Let Andrea see that things were going well for him, that he wasn’t obsessed with knowing if she had a partner or not. That he wasn’t even going to moot the idea of getting back together. He was happy just to see her without fighting, and to be spending increasingly more time with his daughter.

  “And don’t think that I didn’t know you’ve been seeing Martina. Your mother ended up spilling the beans one night.”

  They said goodbye inside the bar. He told her that he would like to stay there a bit longer. He watched her leave, crossing back over the street the way she had come. Then, without thinking about it too much, he stood up and went out after her. Andrea walked at a steady pace and Rafael followed about twenty yards behind. At no point did she look back; if she had she would have seen Rafael straightaway, since he made no attempt to hide but simply matched his pace to the rhythm of her gait. He didn’t have any particular intention. Nor did he think about whether what he was doing was right or wrong; he just wanted to accompany her, at a distance, as she walked home, thinking perhaps of the meeting they had had a few minutes before. Rafael watched her and saw a different Andrea – Andrea on her own. Her body emanated the solitude of someone who doesn’t have to account for anything around her. She moved in a world of strangers, people who were there but might just as well not exist. Who, in fact, did not exist for her. She wasn’t the Andrea of the bar, the one who had watched him, who weighed up what he said, who was on the defensive. Nor was she the Andrea her daughter knew, or her mother, her workmates or bedmates. That Andrea walking ahead of him was an Andrea covered in loneliness. He saw her as fragile, defenceless. And Rafael, who was already juggling various feelings about his ex-wife, added one more: compassion.

  Andrea arrived at the tenement house. Rafael saw her disappear inside it. He turned round and began to retrace his steps.

  V

  Dientes spent a large part of that morning on the terrace, alone. He had found a place to sit against the wall and was languidly torturing a line of ants carrying scraps of leaves. The sun was beginning to bother him, though, and boredom crept over him, from feet and hands to head. He was about to get up and go down to the courtyard when he saw El Peque emerge from the stairway. He hadn’t seen him for a week, not since El Peque had told him about Vicen.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Neither of them answered. El Peque sat down beside him without saying anything. Dientes was hot from spending so much time in the sun. He felt as though he were sweating even though it was quite a cold day. He slapped his hand down, squashing some ants.

  El Peque looked for something in his trouser pocket. He pulled out some balled-up paper. In fact it was a twenty-peso note, which he smoothed out over his legs.

  “Shall we go and buy some Coke?”

  They walked to the newsagent on the next block in silence. As well as the litre-and-a-half bottle of Coke, El Peque bought a big packet of Don Satur salted crackers. They walked on to the Plaza España and sat down under a tree. El Peque opened the packet while Dientes unscrewed the bottle top. He took a long drink and passed the bottle to El Peque, who drank about half a litre without pausing for breath. He put down the bottle and burped. Dientes crammed crackers into his mouth.

  “I’m going to school today,” El Peque said, reaching into the Don Satur packet.

  “What about the club?”

  “I’m not going back to the club any more.”

  VI

  Rivero was in the habit of leaving his mobile on a table in the bar, or sometimes on the bar counter. If it started ringing, Rafael would leave whatever he was doing and quickly take it to him at the pitch, where he was training the boys. So this wasn’t the first time it had happened, but it was the first time Rafael had tried to remember who the caller was. The mobile was ringing right in front of him, on the bar top. He saw that on the screen it simply said GARCÍA. Six letters which, for him, still had no significance.

  He picked up the mobile and went over to where Rivero was. Training was just finishing; in fact, the coach was coming back towards the bar. Gesturing thank you, he took the call. Since they were both now walking in the same direction, Rafael could hear what Rivero was saying. “Complicated…I still haven’t got anything…we’ll get there…the woman and the kids don’t want to budge…no, it’s a headache…OK, whatever you think.”

  Rivero went to one of the tables in the bar and sat down. Rafael went his own way and couldn’t hear any more. Quickly he mixed a Fernet with cola and brought it to the table just as the conversation ended. You could tell from Rivero’s face that he was angry.

  “Che, have you started looking for boys?”

  “This Saturday I’m going to Plaza Calabria.”

  “Look sharp, then.”

  “We’ll see what’s out there.”

  “Make sure you find something. The shit’s hitting the fan. And when that happens, everyone gets covered in shit. You too.”

  VII

  Impelled by the joy of their release, expelled by an educational system that didn’t want them there a minute longer, the children poured out of school like a plague of termites. Scuffing their feet until they started running, walking quietly until the insults started flying, looking angelic until four of them decided to set upon a little classmate. Somewhere in the middle of that throng were Dientes and El Peque. They were late because, while everyone was lining up to leave, a promising fight had begun to develop between two classmates, only to lose heat once they had reached the door. The would-be combatants had gone off in different directions. Disappointed, Dientes and El Peque had set off for home.

  Then, as if from nowhere, Rivero appeared. Dientes noticed that El Peque seemed to take a small step back, an imperceptible gesture to anyone who wasn’t a close friend.

  “Peque, old friend, you’ve turned your back on the team.”

  Rivero was standing, smiling a yard away from them, stopping them in their tracks. All around them the other children walked and shoved their way past, indifferent to the scene. Dientes remembered the dog they had poisoned and how, when it discovered them stealing cables, it had stood watching them at the entrance to the garage.

  “Come with me, I need to talk to you.”

  El Peque walked for
wards while Dientes stayed where he was. It was obvious that Rivero didn’t want him to join in the chat. Rivero and El Peque started walking, Dientes following a few yards behind. They didn’t go very far, stopping when they came to the corner of the block. Rivero was the one doing most of the talking. El Peque seemed cowed, and every so often he moved his head gently from one side to the other. The coach patted him on the shoulder and walked away. Dientes caught up with El Peque.

  “What did he want?”

  “He wants me to go back to playing the train game.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I won’t.”

  “Did he get angry?”

  “I don’t know. I told him that my mum won’t let me out at night on my own any more. And then he went.”

  Dientes turned and ran in the direction that the coach had taken, shouting:

  “Rivero! Rivero!”

  Rivero turned round and looked at him with a puzzled expression, as if he didn’t recognize the boy who had been standing beside El Peque minutes before or who had accompanied his friend the first time he went to Spring Breezes. Dientes introduced himself.

  “I’m a friend of El Peque. We went to the club together, do you remember?”

  “I think so.”

  “El Peque told me that you run a competition to see how long someone can last on the railway.”

  “El Peque talks too much.”

  “I’d like to take part.”

  Rivero fell quiet for a few seconds, weighing him up, as though he could look into his brain and read everything that he was thinking.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twelve.”

  “And your parents let you go out at night?”

  “I live with just my mum. She lets me do whatever I want,” Dientes exaggerated.

  Rivero said nothing for a while, then:

  “You also play soccer, right?”

  “Yes, nearly every day.”

  “OK, come to the club on Tuesday. I’m not promising anything. But don’t be cocky like your friend. Don’t go blabbering all over the place about what El Peque said, or about what you said to me. Real men speak little and do much.”

  Dientes turned round and ran to where El Peque was waiting for him. As he ran, dodging around several friends from school, he thought that he too was going to earn a hundred pesos. He could last longer than anyone.

  11  The Hidden City

  I

  Verónica had gone to the “smoking room”, a small space with a window into the building’s interior courtyard that also served as a repository for all the things no longer required in the newsroom of Nuestro Tiempo: CPUs that didn’t work, old monitors, old copies of rival publications, broken chairs and posters left over from a publicity campaign for the magazine. The window was open, despite the cold, so the only advantage of being in there rather than out on the street was proximity to the rest of the newsroom. Verónica was smoking while trying to piece together the different elements of her investigation, but her mind kept drifting to the trip to Villa Lugano which she had made with Lucio the day before.

  Before calling him and asking him to go with her, she had organized the information that she had so far: the map modified by Federico and the details of Vicente Garamona. Four boys were from neighbourhoods in the south of the city and two from a shanty town known as Ciudad Oculta, the “hidden city”. She had decided to start with the easiest, the boys from Lugano and Soldati, but there was a problem: Verónica couldn’t remember ever having been to that part of Buenos Aires. She knew that it existed, that there was an abandoned fairground there, and she had once been to see a Davis Cup game at the Parque Rosa stadium. But she certainly hadn’t paid much attention to the places she passed through on the way. In fact, she tended to mix up all those neighbourhoods in the south: Mataderos with Lugano, Soldati with Pompeya, Ciudad Oculta with the shanty town known as Villa 1-14-21. That disorientation alone had momentarily overwhelmed her. After all, she had discovered many new places in the course of her investigations. The ability to progress quickly from ignorance to detailed understanding was a vital journalistic skill. That weekend she spent hours studying the map, swearing that she would learn those streets with funny names by heart.

  On Sunday she reached the conclusion that it wasn’t enough to familiarize herself with the area’s layout: she needed to go there with someone. She thought of asking Patricia to send a photographer with her, with the excuse of getting a few shots from the neighbourhoods, but it struck her that this could be counterproductive for the investigation. Doubtless Federico would be wiling to go with her. But Fede – who had studied at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina – was even less streetwise than she was. He was more likely to be a hindrance than a help.

  But why was she agonizing over this so much if what she really wanted was for Lucio to go with her? Did she really feel so insecure and scared, or was it simply that she wanted to share part of the investigation with him? Sunday evening wasn’t the right time to make this kind of decision. She would try to contain herself, wait until Monday morning and only then send him a text.

  If she had been hoping to indulge some fantasy of coupledom, he had been very quick to put his cards on the table, making some stupid remark about his children as soon as he got into the car. As if she was going to forget that she was with a married man. Lucio could be so blindingly obvious sometimes and it confused her; it tore her up.

  They had covered Lugano and Soldati together, from the exit off the Dellepiane freeway to Avenida Eva Perón. They had skirted Ciudad Oculta in the west and gone as far as Villa Soldati in the east. The expedition could best be described as a failure. Verónica hadn’t expected all the victims’ families to be lined up waiting for her, but neither did she expect the number of useful encounters to be zero. If she had learned anything from working with more experienced journalists, it was that there’s no such thing as coincidence. Absence on this scale could only be interpreted as flight, a disappearance prompted by something that she could scarcely begin to articulate as a hypothesis of investigation.

  That day the only clear piece of information she had managed to obtain was that one of the boys played indoor soccer at a local club. And Lucio had been the one who got that piece of information. On one hand, that made her feel proud of choosing him to accompany her on the trip. On the other, she felt a combination of annoyance and despair to think that she had so nearly missed that crucial detail, and that there might be many others right under her nose that would escape her, too.

  There were still the two dead boys from Ciudad Oculta to consider. She had better get a move on, in the last case at least, because if there was a repetition of what had happened with the other victims, it wasn’t a wild theory to imagine that the family might soon move. How could it be that whole families disappeared from the system, leaving no trace?

  But getting access to the villa wasn’t going to be easy. There were no streets, apart from one avenue that ran across the shanty town from east to west, and the houses were chaotically numbered with an internal logic that only made sense to the people who lived there. It wouldn’t help her to have Lucio along this time.

  She explained the problem to Patricia as they drank coffee in front of the vending machine. Her boss recommended that she speak to Álex Vilna, the magazine’s deputy editor, who was in charge of the Domestic Politics section. Verónica didn’t much like the idea of talking to Álex. He had a much more important position than her, and was two years younger. A couple of times he had made a pass at her, but she had played the innocent and now she feared that any request for help could be turned into a debt for future payment. She found him disagreeable: too neat and tidy, smelling of some perfume he’d picked up in duty-free, professionally nice, vain, with a manner that oscillated between smug and obsequious depending on who he was talking to. Also, the last time that he had made advances (at a launch party hosted by the Industrial Union), she had hit him where it most hurt: in
his pride. He had studied at the highly traditional and highly competitive Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires.

  “I don’t go out with guys who went to elite schools,” she told him.

  But if Patricia was telling her to speak to him, she must have her reasons, so Verónica took a deep breath and went to his office. She felt like an exotic dancer limbering up for a pole dance.

  “Álex, can I borrow you for a minute?”

  “For as long as you want. I’ve got two hours to finish this column, but I’ve always got time for you.”

  “I’m writing a piece about children who get involved in accidents, and there are two cases in Ciudad Oculta.”

  “Only two in the whole villa? You must be missing some.”

  “These are very specific cases. The other figures aren’t relevant. The thing is that I should go into Ciudad Oculta, but I don’t know how to go about it.”

  “Especially if you go with your Gucci handbag.”

  “I don’t have a Gucci handbag.”

  Álex looked at her and smiled. The client was happy with his striptease. She should really lean forward so he could slip a bill between her tits.

  “You know why I prefer Catholic journalists to Jewish ones?”

  “Because they’re sluttier?”

  “No, because faced with a problem like this, the Catholic journalist immediately knows what to do.”

  What a jerk, Verónica thought, but she made an effort to return his smile.

  “Well, clearly my education in the Torah and all those kilos of knishes I ate are preventing me from seeing the light. Illuminate me.”

  “The priest, my love. There’s always a priest in a villa who can act as a link. They’re the ones who keep close ties with the whole community. It’s the famous ‘option for the poor’. Meanwhile, rabbis run around cutting off dicks.”

  “Rabbis don’t do circumcisions, you resentful goy.”