The Insufferable Gaucho (9 page)

Nothing, a girl, said Rousselot, trying to adopt the same tone as his
compatriot. Then he said a rather hurried good-bye and, as he was climbing the
stairs, he heard the bum’s voice telling him that death was the only sure thing.
My name is Enzo Cherubini and I’m telling you, death is the only sure thing
there is. When Rousselot turned around, the bum was walking off in the opposite
direction.

That night he called Simone but she wasn’t home. He talked for a while
with the old woman who looked after the child, then hung up. At ten, Riquelme
came visiting. Reluctant to go out, Rousselot said he felt feverish and
nauseous, but his excuses were futile. Sadly, he came to the realization that
Paris had transformed his colleague into a force of nature it was futile to
resist. That night they dined in a little restaurant with a charcoal grill in
the Rue Racine, where they were joined by the Spanish journalist, named Paco
Morral, who liked to imitate the Buenos Aires accent, very badly, and believed
that Spanish cinema was far better than French cinema, much denser, an opinion
shared by Riquelme.

The meal went on and on, and Rousselot began to feel ill. When he
returned to his hotel at four in the morning, he was running a fever and began
to vomit. He woke shortly before midday with the feeling that he had lived in
Paris for many years. He went through the pockets of his jacket looking for the
cell phone that he had managed to extract from Riquelme, and called Morini. A
woman, the one who had previously spoken to Riquelme, he supposed, picked up the
receiver and told him that Monsieur Morini had left that morning to spend a few
days with his parents. Rousselot’s first thought was that she was lying, or that
before his hurried departure, the director had lied to her. He said he was an
Argentine journalist who wanted to interview Morini for a well-known magazine
with a big circulation, widely read all over Latin America, from Argentina to
Mexico. The only problem, he alleged, was that he had limited time, since he had
to fly home in a couple of days. Humbly he asked for the address of Morini’s
parents. He didn’t have to insist. The woman listened politely, then gave him
the name of a village in Normandy, followed by a street and a number.

Rousselot thanked her, then called Simone. No one was home. Suddenly
he realized that he didn’t even know what day it was. He thought of asking one
of the hotel staff but felt embarrassed. He called Riquelme. A hoarse voice
answered on the other end of the line. Rousselot asked him about the village
where Morini’s parents lived: did he know where it was? Who’s Morini? asked
Riquelme. Rousselot had to remind him and explain part of the story again. No
idea, said Riquelme, and hung up. After feeling annoyed for a while, Rousselot
told himself it was better that way, if Riquelme lost interest in the whole
business. Then he packed his suitcase and went to the train station.

The trip to Normandy gave him time to go back over what he had done
since arriving in Paris. An absolute zero lit up in his mind, then delicately
disappeared forever. The train stopped in Rouen. Other Argentines, and Rousselot
himself in other circumstances, would have set off at once to explore the town,
like bloodhounds following the scent of Flaubert. But he didn’t even leave the
station; he waited twenty minutes for the train to Caen, thinking of Simone, who
personified the grace of French women, and of Riquelme and his odd journalist
friend: in the end, both of them were more interested in rummaging through their
own failures than in discovering someone else’s story, however singular it might
be, and perhaps that wasn’t so unusual. People are only interested in
themselves, he concluded gravely.

From Caen, he took a taxi to Le Hamel. He was surprised to find that
the address he had been given in Paris corresponded to a hotel. The hotel had
four stories and was not without a certain charm, but it was shut until the
beginning of the season. For half an hour Rousselot walked around in the
vicinity, wondering if the woman who lived with Morini had sent him on a wild
goose chase, until eventually he began to feel tired and headed for the port. In
a bar he was told that he’d be very lucky to find a hotel open in Le Hamel. The
patron, a cadaverously pale guy with red hair, suggested he go to Arromanches,
unless he wanted to sleep in one of the
auberges
that stayed open all
year round. Rousselot thanked him and went looking for a taxi.

He booked into the best hotel he could find in Arromanches, a pile
made of brick, stone and wood, which creaked in the gusting wind. Tonight I will
dream of Proust, he thought. Then he called Simone’s place and talked to the old
lady who looked after her child. Madame won’t be home until after four; she has
an orgy tonight, said the woman. A what? asked Rousselot. The woman repeated the
sentence. My God, thought Rousselot, and hung up without saying good-bye. To
make things worse, that night he didn’t dream of Proust but of Buenos Aires,
where thousands of Riquelmes had taken up residence in the Argentine
PEN
Club, all armed with tickets to Paris, all shouting, all
cursing a name, the name of someone or something, but Rousselot couldn’t hear it
properly; it was like a tongue-twister or a password they were trying to keep
secret although it was gnawing their insides away.

The next morning, at breakfast, he was stunned to discover that he had
no money left. Le Hamel was three or four kilometers from Arromanches; he
decided to walk. To lift his spirits, he told himself that on D-Day the English
soldiers had landed on those beaches. But his spirits remained as low as could
be, and although he had thought it might take half an hour, in the end it took
him more than twice that time to reach Le Hamel. On the way he started doing
sums, remembering how much money he had brought with him to Europe, how much
he’d had left when he arrived in Paris, how much he had spent on meals, on
Simone (quite a lot, he thought, melancholically), on Riquelme, on taxis
(they’ve been ripping me off the whole time!), and wondering whether he could
have been robbed at some point without realizing. The only people who could have
done that, he concluded gallantly, were the Spanish journalist and Riquelme. And
the idea didn’t seem preposterous in those surroundings where so many lives had
been lost.

He observed Morini’s hotel from the beach. By that stage, anyone else
would have given up. For anyone else, circling around that hotel would have been
as good as admitting to idiocy, or to a sort of degradation that Rousselot
thought of as Parisian, or cinematic, or even literary, although for him the
word “literary” retained all its original luster, or some of it, at least. In
his situation, anyone else would have been calling the Argentine embassy,
inventing a credible lie and borrowing some money to pay for the hotel. But,
instead of gritting his teeth and making the phone calls, Rousselot rang the
hotel’s doorbell and was not surprised to hear the voice of an old woman who,
leaning out of one of the windows on the second floor, asked him what he wanted
and was not surprised by his reply: I need to see your son. Then the old woman
disappeared, and Rousselot waited by the door for what seemed like an
eternity.

He kept checking his pulse and touching his forehead to see if he had
a fever. When the door finally opened, he saw a lean, rather swarthy face, with
large bags under the eyes; it was, he judged, the face of a degenerate, and it
was vaguely familiar. Morini invited him in. My parents, he said, have been
working as caretakers of this hotel for more than thirty years. They sat down in
the lobby, where the armchairs were protected from dust by enormous sheets
embroidered with the hotel’s monogram. On one wall Rousselot saw an oil painting
of the beaches of Le Hamel, with bathers in
belle époque
costumes,
while opposite, a collection of portraits of famous guests (or so he supposed)
observed them from a zone infiltrated by mist. He shivered. I am Alvaro
Rousselot, he said, the author of
Solitude
—I mean, the author of
Nights on the Pampas
.

It took a few seconds for Morini to react, but then he leaped to his
feet, let out a cry of terror, and disappeared down a corridor. Such a
spectacular response was the last thing Rousselot had been expecting. He
remained seated, lit a cigarette (the ash dropped progressively onto the
carpet), and thought sadly of Simone and her son, and a café in Paris that
served the best croissants he had ever tasted in his life. Then he stood up and
started calling Morini. Guy, he called, rather hesitantly, Guy, Guy, Guy.

Rousselot found him in an attic where the hotel’s cleaning equipment
was piled. Morini had opened the window and seemed to be hypnotized by the
garden that surrounded the building, and by the neighboring garden, which
belonged to a private residence, and was visible, in part, through dark
lattice-work. Rousselot walked over and patted him on the back. Morini seemed
smaller and more fragile than before. For a while they both stood there looking
at one garden, then the other. Then Rousselot wrote the address of his hotel in
Paris and the address of the hotel where he was currently staying on a piece of
paper and slipped it into the director’s trouser pocket. He felt he had
committed a reprehensible act, executed a reprehensible gesture, but then, as he
was walking back to Arromanches, everything he had done in Paris, every gesture
and action, seemed reprehensible, futile, senseless, and even ridiculous. I
should kill myself, he thought as he walked along the seashore.

Back in Arromanches, he did what any sensible man would have done as
soon as he realized that his money had run out. He rang Simone, explained the
situation, and asked her for a loan. The first thing Simone said was that she
didn’t want a pimp, to which Rousselot replied that he was asking for a
loan
, and that he was planning to repay it with thirty-percent
interest, but then they both started laughing and Simone told him not to do
anything, just stay put in the hotel, and in a few hours, as soon as she could
borrow a car from one of her friends, she’d come and get him. She also called
him
chéri
a few times, to which he responded by using the word
chérie
, which had never seemed so tender. For the rest of the day
Rousselot felt that he really was an Argentine writer, something he had begun to
doubt over the previous days, or perhaps the previous years, partly because he
was unsure of himself, but also because he was unsure about the possibility of
an Argentine literature.

Two Catholic Tales

I. The Vocation

1.
I was seventeen years old and my days, and I mean
all of them, were a continual shuddering. I had no distractions; nothing could
dissipate the anxiety that kept building up inside me. I was living like an
interloping extra in scenes from the passion of St. Vincent. St. Vincent—deacon
to Bishop Valero, tortured by the governor Dacian in the year 304—have pity on
me!
2.
Sometimes I talked with Juanito. Not just sometimes.
Often. We sat in armchairs at his place and talked about movies. Juanito liked
Gary Cooper. Elegance, temperance, integrity, courage, he used to say.
Temperance? Courage? I knew what lay behind his certitudes, and would have liked
to spit them back in his face, but instead I dug my fingernails into the
armrests and bit my lip when he wasn’t looking and even closed my eyes and
pretended to be meditating on his words. But I wasn’t meditating. Not at all:
images of the martyrdom of St. Vincent were flashing in my mind like magic
lantern slides.
3.
First he is tied to an X-shaped wooden cross
and they tear at his flesh with hooks and dislocate his limbs. Then he is
subjected to torture by fire, roasted on a grill over hot coals. And then he’s a
captive in a dungeon where the ground is covered with shards of glass and
pottery. And then a crow keeps watch over the martyr’s corpse, abandoned in a
wasteland, and fends off a ravening wolf. And then the saint’s body is cast into
the sea from a boat, a millstone tied around his neck. And then the waves wash
the body up on the coast, and there it is piously buried by a matron and other
Christians.
4.
Sometimes I used to feel dizzy. Nauseous.
Juanito would talk about the last film we had seen and I would nod and realize
that I was drowning, as if the armchairs were at the bottom of a very deep lake.
I could remember the movie theater, I could remember buying the tickets, but I
simply couldn’t remember the scenes that my friend (my one and only friend!) was
talking about, as if the lake-floor darkness had infiltrated everything. If I
open my mouth, water will come in. If I breathe, water will come in. If I stay
alive, water will come in and flood my lungs forever and ever.
5.
Sometimes Juanito’s mother would come into the room and
ask me personal questions. How my studies were going, what book I was reading,
if I’d been to the circus that had just set up on the outskirts of the city.
Juanito’s mother was always very elegantly dressed, and, like us, she was
addicted to the movies.
6.
Once I dreamed of her, once I opened
the door of her bedroom, and instead of seeing a bed, a dresser and a closet, I
saw an empty room with a red brick floor, and that was just the antechamber of a
very, very long corridor, like the highway tunnel that goes through the
mountains and then on toward France, except that in this case the tunnel wasn’t
on a mountain highway but in the bedroom of my best friend’s mother. I have to
keep reminding myself: Juanito’s my best friend. And, as opposed to a normal
tunnel, this one seemed to be suspended in a very fragile kind of silence, like
the silence of the second half of January or the first half of February.
7.
Unspeakable acts, fateful nights. I recited the formula
to Juanito. Unspeakable acts? Fateful nights? Is the act unspeakable because the
night is fateful, or is the night fateful because the act is unspeakable? What
sort of question is that? I asked, on the brink of tears. You’re crazy. You
don’t understand anything, I said, looking out of the window.
8.
Juanito’s father isn’t tall but he cuts a dashing
figure. He was in the army and during the war he was wounded a number of times.
His medals are displayed on the wall of his study, in a glass-fronted case. He
didn’t know anyone when he first came to the city, Juanito says, and people were
either afraid of him or jealous. After a few months here, he met my mother,
Juanito says. They were engaged for five years. Then my father tied the knot.
Sometimes my aunt talks about Juanito’s father. According to her, he was a good,
honest police chief. That’s what people said, at least. If a maid was caught
stealing from her employers, Juanito’s father locked her up for three days
without so much as a crust of bread. On the fourth day he would question her
personally, and the maid would be quick to confess her sin, giving him the
precise location of the jewels or the name of the laborer who had stolen them.
Then the guards would arrest the man and lock him up, and Juanito’s father would
put the maid on a train and advise her not to come back.
9.
The
whole village applauded this procedure, as if it were a sign of the police
chief’s intellectual distinction.
10.
When Juanito’s father
first arrived, the only people he knew socially were the regulars at the casino.
Juanito’s mother was seventeen years old and she was very blonde, to judge from
a number of photos hanging unobtrusively around the house, much blonder than she
is now, and she had been educated at the Heart of Mary, a school run by nuns in
the northern part of the old fort. Juanito’s father must have been about thirty.
He still goes to the casino every afternoon, although he’s retired now, and
drinks a glass of cognac or coffee with a shot, and usually plays dice with the
regulars. New regulars, not the regulars from the old days, but it’s not so
different, because of course they’re all in awe of him. Juanito’s older brother
lives in Madrid, where he’s a well-known lawyer. Juanito’s sister is married and
she lives in Madrid too. I’m the only one left in this damn house, Juanito says.
And me! And me!
11.
Our city is shrinking every day. Sometimes
I get the feeling that everyone is either leaving or shut up inside packing a
suitcase. If I left, I wouldn’t take a suitcase. Not even a few belongings
wrapped up in a little bundle. Sometimes I put my head in my hands and listen to
the rats running in the walls. St. Vincent, grant me strength. St. Vincent,
grant me temperance.
12.
Do you want to be a saint? Juanito’s
mother asked me two years ago. Yes, Ma’am. I think that’s a very good idea, but
you have to be very good. Are you? I try to be, Ma’am. And a year ago, as I was
walking along Avenida General Mola, Juanito’s father said hello and then he
stopped and asked if I was Encarnación’s nephew. Yes, Sir, I said. You’re the
one who wants to become a priest? I nodded and smiled.
13.
Why
did I do that? What was that stupid, apologetic smile for? Why did I look away
smiling like a moron?
14.
Humility.
15.
That’s
excellent, said Juanito’s father. Fantastic. You have to study hard, don’t you?
I nodded and smiled. And cut down on the movies? Yes, Sir, but I don’t go to the
movies much.
16.
I watched Juanito’s father receding into the
distance: old but still vigorous, he held himself straight and looked as if he
were walking on tiptoes. I watched him go down the stairs that lead to the Calle
de los Vidrieros; I watched him as he walked away without a moment’s
unsteadiness or hesitation, without looking into a single shop. Not like
Juanito’s mother, who was always looking in storefront windows, and sometimes
she would go into the stores, and if you stayed outside, waiting for her, you
could sometimes hear her laugh. If I open my mouth, water will come in. If I
breathe, water will come in. If I stay alive, water will come in and flood my
lungs forever and ever.
17.
And what are you going to be,
dickhead? Juanito asked me. Be or do? I asked him back. Be, dickhead. Whatever
God wants, I said. God puts us all in our rightful places, said my aunt. Our
forefathers were good people. There were no soldiers in our family, but there
were priests. Like who? I asked as I nodded off to sleep. My aunt grunted. I saw
a square blanketed with snow, and I saw the farmers come with their produce,
sweep the snow away and wearily set up their market stalls. St. Vincent, for
example, my aunt burst out. Deacon to the bishop of Zaragoza, who, in the year
304,
anno domini
, though it might well have been 305, 306, 307 or 303,
was arrested and taken to Valencia, where Dacian, the governor, submitted him to
cruel tortures, as a result of which he died.
18.
Why do you
think St. Vincent is dressed in red? I asked Juanito. No idea. Because all the
Catholic martyrs wear a red garment, to identify them as martyrs. This boy’s
clever, said Father Zubieta. We were alone and Father Zubieta’s study was
bone-chillingly cold, and Father Zubieta or rather Father Zubieta’s clothes
smelled of a combination of dark tobacco and sour milk. If you decide to enter
the seminary, the door is open. The vocation, the call, when it comes, can make
you tremble, but let’s not get carried away. Did I tremble? Did I feel the earth
move? Did I experience the rapture of divine union?
19.
Let’s
not get carried away. Let’s not get carried away. It’s what the reds wear, said
Juanito. The reds wear khaki, I said, green, with camouflage patterns. No, said
Juanito, those red faggots wear red. Like whores. That piqued my curiosity. Like
whores? Which whores, where? Well, here, for a start, said Juanito, and I guess
in Madrid too. Here, in this city? Yes, said Juanito, and then he tried to
change the subject. You mean there are whores even here, in this little city or
town or godforsaken backwater? Well, yes, said Juanito. I thought your father
had reformed them all. Reformed? Do you think my father’s a priest or something?
My father was a war hero and then a police commissioner. My father doesn’t
reform. He solves crimes. That’s all. And where have you seen these whores? On
Cerro del Moro, where they’ve always been, said Juanito. Good God.
20.
My aunt says that St. Vincent—Enough about your aunt
and St. Vincent, your aunt is raving mad. How can you trace your family back to
the year 300? Who’s got a family that old? Not even the House of Alba. But after
a while, he added: Your aunt’s not a bad person; she’s got a good heart, but her
mind’s not right. Shall we go to the movies this afternoon? They’re showing a
Clark Gable film. And Juanito’s mother: Go on, go, I went two days ago and it’s
very entertaining. And Juanito: The thing is, he doesn’t have any money.
Juanito’s mother: Well, you’ll just have to lend him some.
21.
God have mercy on my soul. Sometimes I wish they’d all just die. My friend and
his mother and his father and my aunt and all the neighbors and passers-by and
drivers who leave their cars parked by the river and even the poor innocent
children who run around in the park beside the river. God have pity on my soul
and make me better. Or unmake me.
22.
Anyway, if they all died,
what would I do with so many bodies? How could I go on living in this city, or
sub-city? Would I try to bury them all? Would I throw their bodies into the
river? How much time would I have before their flesh began to rot and the stench
became unbearable? Ah, snow.
23.
Snow covered the streets of
our city. Before going into the cinema we bought roasted chestnuts and sugared
almonds. We had our scarves up around our noses and Juanito was laughing and
talking about adventures in the old Dutch East Indies. They didn’t let anyone in
with chestnuts—it was a question of basic hygiene—but they made an exception for
Juanito. Gary Cooper would have been better in this role, said Juanito. Asia.
The Chinese. Leper colonies. Mosquitoes.
24.
When we came out
we went our separate ways in the Calle de los Cuchillos. I stood still in the
falling snow and Juanito went running off home. Poor kid, I thought, but Juanito
was only a year younger than me. When he disappeared from sight, I went up the
Calle de los Toneleros to the Plaza del Sordo, and then I turned and followed
the walls of the old fort, headed for Cerro del Moro. The snow reflected the
light of the streetlamps, and, in a fleeting but also natural and even serene
way, the old house-fronts gathered the glamour of the past. I peered through a
gap in the whitewash on a window and saw a tidy room, with the Sacred Heart of
Jesus presiding on one of the walls. But I was blind and deaf and continued up
the hill, on the dark side of the street so I wouldn’t be recognized. When I
reached the Plazuela del Cadalso, and only then, I realized that throughout the
climb I hadn’t come across a single person. In this weather, I thought, who
would exchange the warmth of home for the freezing streets? It was already dark,
and from the square you could see the lights of some of the neighborhoods and
the bridges beyond the Plaza de Don Rodrigo and the river bending around and
then continuing eastward. The stars were shining in the sky. I thought they
looked like snowflakes. Suspended snowflakes, picked out by God to remain still
in the firmament, but snowflakes all the same.
25.
I was
starting to freeze. I decided to go back to my aunt’s house and drink some hot
chocolate or soup beside the heater. I felt weary and my head was spinning. I
went back the way I’d come. Then I saw him. Just a shadow at first.
26.
But it wasn’t a shadow, it was a monk. He could have been a Franciscan,
judging from his habit. His thoughtful face was almost entirely obscured by a
large hood. Why do I say thoughtful? Because he was looking at the ground.
27.
Where was he from? How’d he get there? I didn’t know.
Maybe he’d been administering the last rites to someone who was dying. Maybe
he’d been visiting a sick child. Maybe he’d been supplying a destitute person
with a frugal meal. In any case, he was walking without making the slightest
sound. For a moment I thought it was an apparition. But soon I realized that the
snow was muffling my own footfalls as well.
28.