The Fragility of Bodies

by Sergio Olguin

  When they reached the supermarket, she paid and got out. She found herself alone outside the shop. It was closed and she couldn’t see anyone inside the premises. Rafael wasn’t there, anyway. He could be anywhere – in a bar, in the hostel where he had lived, in a drugs den scoring coke. Verónica remembered Rafael telling her about the little bar he used to go to with Julián, but she had no address for it. It must not be far away from here. Although it was very likely to be one of those daytime bars that only opened during business hours. Rafael had also told her about meeting his daughter in a plaza. Which plaza? She tried Rafael’s number again, without luck. On her telephone, she had a map of Buenos Aires. She located the supermarket on it and moved the screen in search of a plaza somewhere between her current location and the house where Rafael’s family lived. There was one seven blocks away. She set off in that direction, this time with very little hope of a taxi passing. She wasn’t scared of walking in this neighbourhood, which could be described as dangerous for a woman, or for a yuppie obsessed with personal safety. Her clothes were soaked through and the brisk walk made her sweat. She arrived at the badly lit plaza and scanned it. In the distance she could see a shadowy figure sitting on one of the further-flung benches. It wasn’t possible to tell from where she stood whether it was Rafael or not, but she had no doubts: she was sure that it was.

  Verónica hurried, almost running, towards him. Rafael turned to look at her. There was nothing in his eyes to say how he was feeling. One of his legs was in plaster and there were crutches flung down beside the bench.

  “You knew they’d killed Julián.”

  Verónica bent down and took his hands in hers. Rafael was even more drenched than she was.

  “He had a wife, a little girl…”

  It felt like the start of a longer observation, but as Rafael opened his mouth, it seemed as though no words would come out of it. She hugged him as best she could and, crying, he repeated “a wife, a little girl”. What were they both doing there, in the middle of the square, at midnight, in this interminable rain? The darkness that came over them was no greater than the solitude each felt enveloping them at that moment. Only they knew all that they had been through, what it had taken to arrive there, at that plaza, that night. She knew why Rafael was crying. And he had some concept of her pain, but he didn’t know the reason for her uncontrollable weeping, the tears that mingled with their soaked, exhausted, fragile bodies.

  Verónica helped him to his feet and Rafael said, more to himself than to her:

  “I went to the shop, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak to Elsa.”

  Verónica’s phone started ringing. It was Andrea. She answered and told her where they were. Andrea wanted to come over. She said that her taxi-driving neighbour could bring her in five minutes. Rafael and Verónica walked slowly to the corner, she staying close by him all the time. She was scared that, even with a leg in plaster, he could still escape. Andrea arrived a few minutes later, hugged Rafael and kissed Verónica. It didn’t make sense for her to go with them. She told them that she would pick up a taxi on the next avenue. They left her there. Andrea made a gesture of thanks and said something to her before she got into the car but Verónica neither heard what she said nor saw the gesture. She wasn’t there any more. She wasn’t anywhere.

  She walked blindly until she reached a bus stop. A number 46 bus appeared almost straightaway and she put out her arm to stop it. She had no idea where the bus was going, but she didn’t care. There was hardly anyone on board. She sat on the last single seat, her body frozen even though it wasn’t cold. At the same time, she was still sweating. She would have liked to light a cigarette. She rested her head against the window and closed her eyes, but didn’t sleep. The bus had taken Avenida Rivadavia and was running parallel to the Sarmiento railway line. They passed Villa Luro station and she got off when they arrived at Liniers. It was now scarcely raining any more, but her clothes were still wet. She climbed up the footbridge linking one side of the train station to the other. Halfway across she stopped and looked down at the tracks. There were no trains at this time of night. Lucio had died a few miles from here. Both times they had been together on the train, they had passed under this bridge. A few stations further down the line he had kissed her for the first time. Nothing of that past reality remained. All that endured were those rusty tracks and the trains, endlessly repeating their routine, indifferent to broken bodies. This bridge remained, along with the people who walked across it, the buildings that lined the railway, the passengers getting on with their lives. The only ones who were not there were Lucio and her. Lucio’s kiss. Lucio’s body and his face, disfigured by bullets. Nothing remained.

  She wanted to close her eyes and reappear in any place other than this. She took the steps down to the north side of the station. On the opposite sidewalk, on Calle Viedma, she spotted an open bar. She went in and sat at a table in the middle of the room. There were a few guys, all staring at her. An old man at the back of the room was smoking, so she took out her own packet of cigarettes and lit one. She asked for a beer. She needed some alcohol, even though she knew that it couldn’t help her.

  The waiter brought her a Chopp beer and a bowl of peanuts. She drank a long draught. A young man who had been leaning on the bar approached her table. He said something to her and she answered automatically. The man sat down. He was slight and seemed shy. It must have been hard for him to come and speak to her. He told her his name but she didn’t register it. He talked about the storm, about the summer which was taking its time in coming, something else that she didn’t catch. Verónica called the waiter over and paid for her beer. She asked the young man if he knew of any nearby motels. They left together.

  The boy took her to a by-the-hour hotel two blocks away. At the vigil for her mother, Federico had never left Verónica’s side. Whatever she had needed, he was there to get it for her – a glass of water, to call a friend, making her toast or getting her coffee. During the funeral he had continually hugged her and held her. Close friends and family, Federico included, were invited to Verónica’s father’s house after the burial. She had taken advantage of a lapse in Federico’s attention to get into a car with her sister Leticia’s family. When they reached Avenida del Libertador, she had asked to be let out there, saying that she would go to her father’s later on. Verónica had called a friend who lived a few blocks away, on the top floor of a building on that avenue. You could see the coast of Uruguay from his windows. They had had sex a few times, but they had never been anything more than casual lovers. He had been in his apartment and waited for her there. They had fucked. She had stayed a little while, looking out across the River Plate, then she had gone to her father’s house.

  Now she was looking at the young man’s body on top of her, in the ceiling mirror. She closed her eyes and tried to coax some reaction from her body, to let it be carried away by her senses, to get it to react like a normal body, but she couldn’t manage it. Half an hour later, as they were getting dressed, the boy discreetly left a fifty-peso note on top of her jacket. He must have thought that she was a prostitute. Verónica took the money without saying anything and put it in her bag with her cigarettes. They separated at the door of the hotel and she walked back to Calle Viedma, where she had seen taxis passing earlier. She stopped one and went back to her apartment.

  She had left the television on, the glass of Jim Beam and the chocolates out on the coffee table. Tony Montana was no longer on the screen. A movie had started that she didn’t know and wasn’t interested in. Verónica took off her raincoat, sneakers, her socks, her still-wet tracksuit bottoms and her sweatshirt, and was left in her underwear. She covered herself up with the bath towel she had used to dry herself off, took a sip of whisky and went to sleep on the sofa.

  IV

  She woke up in the morning, very early. The television was still on and showing one of those commercial programmes that sell gizmos for losing weight or lifting sagging buttocks. Her mouth felt sticky and s
he had a slight headache. It was Thursday, and no longer raining. She still had various things to resolve.

  At ten o’clock she had to be at the Tribunales courthouse to make a statement in front of the investigating judge about the events outside her building on Monday afternoon. Her father called her to arrange a meeting beforehand. When push came to shove her father didn’t delegate a job to anyone, not even to Federico.

  Once they were together, he repeated to her what she had to say: how, fearing for her friends’ lives, she had borrowed a car and driven to her apartment. How, when she arrived and saw the scene, with her friends apparently lifeless on the ground, she had lost control of the car and mounted the sidewalk with such bad luck that she had knocked over four people who, as fate would have it, were the killers of a supermarket owner in Villa Soldati and who had gone to the building with the express aim of killing a witness in the case. She had been involved in an accident – a misfortune with happy consequences.

  The judge seemed willing to accept whatever she said. The only objection he raised was that the insurance company would surely want to carry out its own investigation so as to avoid paying for the car repairs. Her father told the judge not to worry, that his law practice was negotiating an agreement with the company and that there would be no problem. The judge seemed more like her father’s assistant than anything else. Verónica was reassured by that, but nonetheless uncomfortable being the witness (or protagonist) of the scene.

  Verónica and her father had lunch in Tomo 1, not a restaurant she liked, but she wasn’t going to put up any resistance that day. She ate bocconcini de pâte a choux with spinach and crispy dry-cured ham; he asked for classic spinach ravioli with a tomato ragout. They talked about her sisters, the children in the family, some lost uncle who lived in Tel Aviv and had recently made contact again, via the law firm’s web page. They avoided talking about the events of the last few days. He asked her nothing about work, not even about all the use she had made of his law firm in the last few weeks. As they were leaving, Verónica hugged him.

  “Thanks, Dad, thanks for all your help.”

  “It’s all down to Federico. That boy is still in love with you.”

  “Oh, Dad, don’t stir things up. Anyway, he’s got a girlfriend.”

  Her father shook his head and walked off quickly towards the parking lot. She walked a few blocks in the opposite direction. She needed to get some air.

  Federico himself rang her later on. It crossed her mind not to answer, but that would be mean and he deserved better. They talked for a while. Federico told her that Rivero, his sidekick and Palma had been arrested the previous afternoon. That day the newspapers had published this information, but they hadn’t been able to say much, nor draw any conclusions, much less link the death of the train driver with the boys or Julián’s murder. Everyone would wake up the next day to her scoop in Nuestro Tiempo.

  Federico also told her that he had talked to Álex Vilna about his car. That the question of insurance would be resolved and that he had offered to rent a car for Vilna until his own one was repaired, but that the Politics editor of Nuestro Tiempo had rejected his offer with such insufferable pedantry that he had felt like telling him to get lost.

  She could tell that he was worried about her. Federico offered himself as a dinner companion, to go to a movie, to chat, to do whatever she wanted. Verónica politely turned down each of these suggestions. She would have liked to spend some time with Federico, but she feared that afterwards she would have to say no to sleeping with him and she didn’t have the stomach for the kind of lopsided relationship they might be left with.

  The first copies of Nuestro Tiempo would be arriving in the newsroom at midday, but she didn’t plan to go there. She phoned Patricia and asked if she could delay her return until Monday. The editor put up no objection. She told her that the photos had come out very well.

  Verónica decided to go to visit Marcelo in hospital. She bought him a box of sweets and wrote him a brief note that was intended to be funny, as well as a way to say thank you. The doorman’s wife was with him, along with some other relations she didn’t know. He seemed to be much better, and eager to get back to work. They would probably discharge him on Saturday morning. There were some problems claiming on his workplace insurance, Marcelo’s wife told Verónica under his reproving gaze, because what had happened to him wasn’t recognized as a work-related accident.

  “My friends in the union will sort it out,” said Marcelo, playing this down.

  The distribution of Nuestro Tiempo began at news kiosks in the centre of town, so Verónica walked to the underground station and took a train to Calle Florida. She killed time in a bar until she saw the vans that delivered newspapers and magazines going past. She bought a copy of Nuestro Tiempo, which had photographs on the cover of Rivero and Palma in handcuffs. The heading above made clear that this was “Thanks to an exclusive investigation by Nuestro Tiempo.” The main headline, in the catastrophic typeface favoured by the magazine, was FALL OF THE TRAIN MAFIA, then, in slightly smaller print: THEY FORCED CHILDREN TO RISK THEIR LIVES. She didn’t reread the article, but focussed on the pictures. They had used all the screenshots that she had taken from the video. There was also a photo of Palma at some public event, standing next to the chief of the city government and with an ex-governor of Misiones. García’s not going to like that one bit, she thought, but she didn’t care what García might think. She had done enough to honour their agreement. There was no mention of him in person, nothing that could link him to the case. He could congratulate himself on the way he had managed to avoid punishment.

  That night she followed the repercussions of her investigation on the internet and television. Even TV channels that were unfriendly to the magazine had been obliged to talk about her article. Her mobile started to ring. Producers were calling to invite her on to radio and television programmes. She accepted the requests for radio interviews which could be done by phone and, of the television offers, only agreed to those which could be recorded from Monday of the following week. She didn’t feel like showing off the dark circles under her eyes to the whole nation.

  Her friends also called her, asking for detailed descriptions of what she had been through. She gave them a brief, lighter version of the adventure, enough for them to coin a new nickname for her: Wonder Woman. At some point the intercom buzzed. She definitely wasn’t going to answer it: she was afraid. Whoever it was kept buzzing, though, and she was about to call Federico when her mobile rang. It was Paula.

  “Can you open the door, honey? I’m downstairs.”

  Paula had made some pork and chicken tacos and brought tortilla wraps, a bottle of Nieto Senetiner Malbec and a two-pound tub of ice cream from Freddo.

  “I guessed that you were going to stay closeted in your apartment on your night of journalistic glory and that, if I called you, you’d try to boot me into next week.”

  They ate, drank and bitched about all their mutual friends. While Verónica made coffee and they talked about inanities, Paula took her hands and said:

  “This will pass. The world around you has shattered into a thousand pieces. But it will pass. I promise you.”

  Verónica nodded and couldn’t hold back her tears. Paula hugged her and they both cried. They sat together in the living room until three o’clock in the morning.

  On Friday Verónica took part in various radio interviews. Obviously, she had nothing to add to what was in the article, but that didn’t stop her colleagues pushing for more. She was used to the pointless reverberation that can accompany a news story, and stoically endured her interviewers’ limitations, their pushiness and lack of understanding.

  She had also received numerous congratulatory emails. One was from the magazine’s editor, saying, I see that the Nuestro Tiempo school of journalism has found its most outstanding student in you. She thought of giving him the answer he deserved, making the most of the protection afforded by her five minutes of fame, but she opted for a di
gnified silence.

  The email that most got her attention was the one she received from Rodolfo Corso. It said simply: And Juan García? Rodolfo had good instincts, and he had figured out the truth. She wrote him a long reply, with all the details of what had happened, then deleted it. She didn’t answer him, either.

  Father Pedro called her. He said that he had read the piece and that he felt happy knowing she had been able to pass all the tests of forbearance that were necessary to achieve justice. He didn’t mention whether he had decided to abandon his vocation or if he was still leading the church in Villa Oculta.

  On Saturday morning she received a text message from Rafael reminding her that Andrea had invited her to have lunch with them. That they were waiting for her. Verónica had no memory of arranging anything, but it didn’t seem like a bad idea, especially as it meant that she could see Dientes and El Peque at the same time.

  Once more she borrowed the car from her sister Leticia, who was now past complaining. When she dropped by the apartment to pick up the keys, her sister Daniela was also there and the two of them subjected her to an interrogation, centred especially on the man who had been staying at her apartment. She reassured them by telling them the truth: that her guest was back with his family now, that there was nothing between them, that, in fact, she needed the car to go to his house, since they had invited her to have lunch there.

  On the way there she bought some chocolate-covered dulce de leche alfajores. She parked the car outside the entrance to the tenement house and saw Dientes, who was walking down the block. When he recognized her, he smiled and ran over.