The Fragility of Bodies

by Sergio Olguin

  No, he didn’t know what time it was, just that there was still some time to go before dawn. He went back to the bed and lay down, not so much because he wanted to keep sleeping as because he felt a bit ridiculous standing there in his underwear.

  It was the first time that they had spent the night together. Mariana and the boys had gone to visit an aunt in San Pedro for the weekend. He would have gone with them, but that Saturday he had to work. He had hesitated to tell Verónica that he had a free night, that they could meet each other for longer than the few hours they usually had together each week. He wondered if it might perhaps be better to go straight home from work and spend the evening alone, watching a soccer game or some movie on cable while drinking a really cold beer and eating a hamburger. All day he mulled over his options. He liked the thought of spending a whole night with Verónica, but he didn’t know if it was a good idea as well as a tempting one. Finally, tired of his own doubts and knowing that if he didn’t tell Verónica he would spend the whole time thinking about her, he had sent her a text to let her know about this development.

  He went to her apartment after his last shift on the railway that day. Verónica had ordered in sushi for supper. Lucio ate it, despite a certain aversion. He didn’t much like fish anyway, and much less the idea of it raw. The combination of cream cheese with avocado and rice didn’t appeal to him either. On the other hand, picking up the rolls with chopsticks was fun. He found them easy to use. So he dexterously picked up the portions of sushi before submerging them in a very salty soy sauce which had the virtue of masking the taste of fish. At least the white wine they drank made up for the onslaught on his taste buds that evening.

  “Today I’m your geisha,” she said to him at some point that night (which seemed very distant now, six hours later).

  After taking off her clothes, Verónica had made him lie down on the bed. He wanted to touch her, but she didn’t let him. She pushed his hands out to the sides, as though he were being crucified or had his wrists tied to the edges of the bed. She put a condom on him and climbed on top. Then she moved slowly, going up and down with a straight back, not letting any other part of their bodies, apart from their sexes, make contact. Lucio liked looking at her naked. He liked the rounded shape of her hips, her white skin sprinkled with moles, her firm breasts, moving as she raised and lowered herself on his cock. He would have liked to bite her waist, to roughly handle her nipples, but any attempt to raise his arms was met with a brusque response.

  Verónica came without changing the rhythm of her movements up and down, just by making them more intense.

  “They say that geishas know how to make a shogun come without moving their bodies, just by contracting their vaginal muscles. But I’m a fake geisha. I don’t know how to do that.”

  She bent forward to kiss him, then took Lucio’s hands and placed them on her breasts. She started to move faster and faster, while Lucio’s hands squeezed her body roughly.

  Six hours later, Lucio was trying to go back to sleep in that unfamiliar bed. It wasn’t that he felt uncomfortable; he didn’t actually know if he liked being there or not. The only certainty was that he was in Verónica’s bedroom, lying beside her, waiting for Sunday to dawn. Would they have breakfast together like a married couple? Would they read the newspaper in silence? Would they play at being the spouses they weren’t, at a routine they didn’t share, at that placid love they didn’t have to fall back on?

  He thought about all this for another hour, and with each passing minute something inside him told him that it was a mistake to stay there any longer. He got up again and started to get dressed. Verónica sat up in bed.

  “I see that you’re an early riser, Sundays included.”

  “It’s just that I remembered I —”

  “No, Lucio, please. Don’t make up excuses. Just to torment you a bit, let me say you’re not original. Guys often get seized by the Cinderella syndrome – not at midnight, but a few hours later.”

  Verónica looked for her bra, which was lying on the floor, then collapsed back onto the bed as though the effort of putting it on had used up all her remaining energy. Lucio came over and sat beside her. He stroked her face and neck.

  “I’m not Cinderella,” he said.

  “But would you be Cinderella if I asked you to? Would you be whatever I wanted you to be?”

  “Of course.”

  “Would you wear a mask for me?”

  “A mask?”

  “Not the face of a lover, but another kind of love. A mask, nothing more.”

  Lucio didn’t understand exactly what she was asking of him, but he suspected that it involved some kind of need that he would not be able to satisfy, not then, not ever. Even so, he repeated:

  “Of course. For you I would.”

  II

  Her friends kept pestering her with emails and text messages. They weren’t unreasonable. In contrast to men (who prioritize soccer sessions or lads’ nights out over meeting up with a lover), women understand perfectly that a friend may abandon them temporarily for a pair of well-filled boxers. But there were limits, and Verónica had gone too far. Her relationship with the one they had dubbed “the General” (in tribute to the Buster Keaton train caper of the same name) was absorbing her completely. At the same time, they knew that what really prevented her from seeing them was her work, not her love life. Nobody really knew what she was up to, but whatever it was was getting in the way of get-togethers, nights out, drinking sessions and gossip. Worst of all, that night there was a hen party and none of their negotiations, threats and bargaining had succeeded in prising her out of her apartment. Verónica had replied to the first messages with promises to make up for lost time as soon as she could finish the article she was working on. When she wrote to Paula to say that she wasn’t going but that she needed to see her to get some advice on the married man, her friend had answered with a stream of insults, finally suggesting that she go to confession in a church, a temple or wherever it was that Jews went to do that kind of thing.

  The texts kept coming, so Verónica decided to switch off her mobile until the girls calmed down a bit. That way she could concentrate better on her own stuff. Her desk was covered with newspaper cuttings and index cards. She knew that those pages contained the key to many things she had not yet managed to piece together. Thanks to Vicen’s sister, she now had the name of the soccer club and the firm suspicion that some kind of sinister game was being organized from there. If she could establish that one of the other dead boys had gone to that same club, she’d have a stronger lead. Could Juan García have been a member of the club? She didn’t think that was possible. It seemed unlikely that he would limit himself to that kind of activity here if in Misiones he had been trafficking women and drugs. How could a supposed political leader cover his tracks so well? In the newspaper archive she had found the same information that Rodolfo Corso had given her. Afterwards his profile completely disappeared.

  The only clue she had was an article that had appeared less than a year ago in Página/12. It reported that there had been a meeting in Comuna 8 with leaders from all the parties and that the ruling party had boycotted the approval of the operating statute. The report added that an opposition politician had left shouting, “González is sending his thugs to intimidate us. He thinks he’s still in his Misiones fiefdom.” Verónica was struck by that specific reference to Misiones. The erroneous reference to González instead of García might not be the politician’s but the reporter’s, to whom it would have sounded similar. Verónica detested sloppy journalists.

  She called Federico, even though it was now eleven o’clock and he was probably with his girlfriend. That wasn’t something that bothered Verónica. From the way he answered, her friend seemed to be alone and keen to talk. So she made some small talk before getting to what really interested her.

  “Fede, my love, I’ve got a new lead in my investigation into the boys and the trains.”

  “I guessed as much.”


  “That I had a new lead?”

  “That you were calling me about something related to work.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m sensitive.”

  “OK, Señor Sensitive, I need your help. You aren’t going to find many women who’ll say that to you.”

  “That’s true.”

  “There’s this guy called Juan García who’s very difficult to locate.”

  “Hardly surprising with that name.”

  “Exactly. There are millions of Juan Garcías in the world. I even found some beefcake who’s a model or Mr America or something. But I’m not interested in him at the moment.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “This García was mayor of Capitán Pavone in Misiones until 1998. He had to resign because he was implicated in a scandal that included the trafficking of women. A journalist based in Buenos Aires denounced him. The guy was completely exonerated in the case brought against him by the Misiones justice system.”

  “Which we do not hold in the highest esteem.”

  “Exactly. We don’t rate it highly. But at least the case took place, so it must be traceable. What I’m after is very simple. That you retrieve his ID number and find out everything you can about the Juan García we’re after.”

  “A complete audit.”

  “More even than that. More than you can find in a standard database. I want to know everything about this guy. If he has property, outstanding warrants, traffic infractions, credit cards, electoral roll, hospital admissions. Whatever you can find.”

  “And what do I get in exchange?”

  “The same as always: my eternal love – and my dad’s, too.”

  III

  There were times when Lucio would have liked to have had a friend he could talk to about Verónica. More than once he had felt tempted (after a game, or in the changing room at work) to ask El Gordo Denegri or Lombardo to go for a drink, so that he could talk about her. It wasn’t that he wanted to boast about having a lover (although the idea that his co-workers would admire his powers of conquest wasn’t unappealing) but so that he could get some clarity on what was happening. He wasn’t very adept in these matters. He wasn’t like El Gordo, who had slept with half the female lottery ticket sellers at the Plaza Once railway station and was still married and happy to talk about the missus and the kids as if these occasional lovers didn’t exist beyond the moment of bedding them. Surely Denegri or Lombardo – who was single and had a different girlfriend every month – would have some illuminating advice to offer on his relationship with Verónica.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to say anything to them. After work, or the Saturday game, he walked away alone, ruminating on the last encounter with his lover or fantasizing about the next one. If there was one thing he dare not think about it was breaking up. That idea seemed a greater betrayal to him than the infidelity to his wife. It was as if he and Verónica had started something that couldn’t come to a clean and simple end. Finishing with her didn’t even enter into the realm of possibility.

  And yet he knew that sooner or later it would happen. A malaise had grown between them. It had been silent and subtle to start with, then become more evident. Verónica needed something from him that he wasn’t able to define, much less satisfy. The days that Lucio left her apartment to go back to his house were the worst. As he got dressed, Verónica would fall into a kind of mutism from which she would not emerge until the next time they met, or spoke on the phone.

  Neither of them spoke about this. Lucio suspected that Verónica was simply getting tired of having a lover, a married man who always returned to his wife. He could have talked to her, explained that there were two different universes. And that she occupied one of them, a universe marked by things that were incredible and mysterious as well as by the horror of the trains. In the same way that he wished to expel from his head the image of the bodies crushed by trains, he wished he could stay forever between Verónica’s legs, or simply stay watching her while she put a CD on her computer and half-closed her eyes to listen better to the song. They were songs that he hadn’t known before then and which now formed a part of that universe where happiness and madness could lift him high or plunge him into the depths, like a wild roller coaster. He could have explained all this to her, told her that he needed and wanted her, but at those times he also remembered how she had deliberately brought death and pain to the bed. How she had taken pleasure in putting her fingers in his wounds. He thought of Verónica’s agitated expression, how she had called him a murderer while they had sex; he remembered her ambiguous and gloating smile. She had given him bruises and he had responded in kind, with marks that still showed on her skin. And if Verónica found pleasure in messing with his head, he reacted a different way: by showing indifference to her anguish.

  To make things worse, Lucio began to suffer cramps in his legs when they were having sex. This wasn’t an occasional discomfort but something systemic. All he had to do was tense his body to feel as though his legs were being crushed under a rock and then run through with a knife. He limited his movements, kept his legs still until the pain passed. This strong discomfort continued until they separated in the bed, and then his body would slowly return to its natural state. He said nothing about this to her, either, but Verónica must surely have found his behaviour strange. He with his painful legs and her falling into an unresponsive silence – they were light years away from that kiss on the phantom train ride, even though it had taken place only a few months ago.

  IV

  He didn’t say anything to his friends, but El Gordo Denegri did say something to him. He asked Lucio to go with him to visit Carlos Malvino, who had not been back to work since running over the boy in Ciudadela. He was still signed off work on doctor’s orders. El Gordo Denegri was Malvino’s greatest friend; even their families knew one another because every so often they got together for a meal. In fact, it was through his wife that he had found out that Malvino was still in a bad way. Every day Malvino went as a day patient to a psychiatric clinic. He spent the morning and afternoon there, then went back home. His wife also mentioned that the psychiatrist had recommended that Malvino meet up with his colleagues, that he needed to face up to the reality of his job on the railways. El Gordo Denegri didn’t want to go on his own, so he asked Lucio to go with him.

  The psychiatric clinic was in Ramos Mejía, in a location that was, for various reasons, ill-chosen. First, it was on the seventeenth floor, which seemed highly inadvisable for people with mental health problems. What if someone jumped off the balcony? Or one of the patients decided to go to a different floor? What would the building’s other residents think if they found out that they had run into a psycho with murderous tendencies? Second, the entrance to the clinic was on Avenida Rivadavia. From the seventeenth floor there was a perfect view of the Sarmiento railway line, which passed only fifty yards from the front door. It didn’t seem like the best idea to treat someone who had had a disturbing experience so close to the scene of their trauma.

  El Gordo and Lucio talked about all this on their train journey from Plaza Miserere. They had chosen a compartment in the middle, to be far from the drivers. It was strange to be travelling on this route as passengers, sitting in places not usually reserved for them. Perhaps that was why they talked so freely about the clinic, and even laughed when El Gordo said that having it on the seventeenth floor seemed crazy to him.

  In the elevator, when they pressed button number 17, they felt as though the others gave them strange looks. They may have thought that the two men were going there for treatment. From outside the clinic looked like a perfectly average apartment, or a doctor’s office. There was nothing to suggest that psychiatric patients were on the other side of the door. They rang the bell and the door opened.

  The receptionist asked them to wait for a few minutes until a doctor appeared. She must have been about fifty and wore her white coat open. In fact, she was the only person wearing any kind of un
iform, so it was hard to tell if the people who periodically walked across the waiting room were patients or doctors. The psychiatrist asked them a couple of questions but didn’t seem that interested in chatting with them. It was as if this kind of visit were part of a routine that she had repeated countless times. She emphasized the importance of their friend re-establishing contact with his daily life before the accident. The doctor called someone over (a nurse? another patient?) to take them to where Carlos Malvino was. The clinic occupied the entire seventeenth floor and they crossed various rooms in which there were people chatting or writing. It seemed like a school for adults, with men and women of very different ages moving around silently. Malvino was sitting at a table with three others. When he saw El Gordo and Lucio he came over to them with his customary serious expression. He gave them each a hug and they all sat down in a kind of living-room area that was in the same room. At first, the other patients kept looking over at them, but then they went back to their activities without paying the men any attention.

  “Not a bad life, eh?” said El Gordo, sprawling in the armchair.

  “They make me draw, they make me write crap. I’m sick of this loony bin.”

  He was badly shaven and wearing a shirt that didn’t look too clean. Apart from that he didn’t seem very different from the old Malvino, a rather sullen character they had known for the best part of a decade. They talked about soccer and the Argentine team, which was playing that week. Lucio told them about the match that the drivers had played against maintenance the previous Saturday. El Gordo hadn’t gone because he had more hernias than ribs. One of the drivers, El Negro Pernía, had fucked up his ligaments and wasn’t going to be able to return to work until after the operation. The company was going to have to take on more drivers because they were short of staff at rush hour. El Gordo asked Malvino if he had long to go and Malvino shrugged. Then he added that doctors didn’t know anything, and his friends agreed. They had told him that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Doctors talked claptrap and solved nothing.