About a year ago he resorted to the child argument. This would sanctify their union because it was part of God’s plan, and so it served as a foil to increase the frequency, if not the intensity, of their lovemaking. But it also led down another path. Despite their best efforts, Maisabé didn’t get pregnant. They calculated the days, asked for advice, went to consultants, all to no avail. Her body was fine: all systems go, according to the fertility analysis. Everything was as it should be, but pregnancy just wouldn’t come and with every menstruation Maisabé sank into a deeper pool of despair. Giribaldi agreed, with some reluctance, to a sperm test. He was given the all-clear too. But still nothing. The doctor said the problem must lie elsewhere and so Maisabé started to feel guilty and Giribaldi exploited this guilt by having his way with her more regularly. This satisfied him for
a while, Maisabé being a devout and self-sacrificing woman, but the regular monthly frustration, her periods denouncing her infertility, diminished her will and their amorous encounters soon became poisoned with varying degrees of shame and resentment. The military doctor who was helping them, with all the discretion that corresponded to his rank, spoke to Giribaldi of his experience:
many women who can’t get pregnant despite being organically capable decide to adopt. Once they have adopted, as if by magic, they end up getting pregnant themselves. I’d bet my life that’d be the case with Maisabé. Adopt, Major, and you’ll see how everything falls into place. What’s more, adoption is the easiest thing in the world these days.
Giribaldi put the idea to Maisabé, who agreed, with a timid nod of the head. And so he finds himself in the gardens of the Military Hospital. Pregnant fair-haired prisoners are generally sent there to give birth.
Forty days ago, a girl of around twenty was brought in from COTI Martínez, the secret detention centre. Pitocin ran through her veins, forcing the contractions along in ever more frequent waves. The doctor, somewhat distractedly, monitored the dilation process. She dealt with her labour pains with a defeated and distant attitude but she collaborated towards the birth with determination. She was dying to see her child. Yet when the baby started to come out, when her efforts were no longer required, Pentotal did its thing and she fell into a chemical sleep, in what the medical world would describe as “an induced coma”.
Earlier today, the doctor came for the child, claiming he had to vaccinate it. The girl watched them take her baby away and knew, knew, knew that was the end, but she tried to expel this thought from her head and later,
she let them take her somewhere they said would be more comfortable for her to nurture her child. Off she went, resisting the certainty that she would never see her infant again, that she would never be coming back.
Now the child is in Giribaldi’s arms, along with a bag, a few rushed instructions and the address of a trusted paediatrician. Next it will go to the Major’s home, where Maisabé is waiting, kneeling and praying.
Giribaldi arrives and places the baby on the coffee table, like an offering. He practically has to drag the frightened Maisabé over to meet it. On seeing the little thing asleep, a bittersweet smile spreads across her face. Then the baby stirs, opens its eyes and wails hard. Maisabé recoils, stumbles and falls, landing on her backside. She covers her eyes with both hands.
It hates me; it knows I am not its real mother.
When Giribaldi takes Maisabé out of the living room, the baby stops crying.
4
There’s nothing like a well-timed death. When stars die at the pinnacle of their careers, before the ageing process has reared its ugly head to disappoint the fans, they stay on top for ever, suspended in the popular imagination, adored in life and idolized in death by the masses. Like Gardel dying in the plane crash. Like Marisa. She died at the very moment Lascano loved her most. A traffic accident. Simple, quick, brutal, irreparable. She left and every comfort, every happiness, everything went with her. Everything lost.
At first the shock had stunned him, left him disorientated, detached from reality. Then a blind fury awoke in him, directed at everyone and no one, but mainly against himself. Then her absence became a knife to the chest, twisting deeper by the day. He was unable to resign himself to his fate and began to regret his lack of religion, finding himself wanting to believe in a God he could blame and curse. He fondly contemplated his Bersa, picturing his brains splattered across the bed, so incomplete without Marisa.
This was when Fuseli stepped in. He read the symptoms and saw where they were leading. On the pretext of having nowhere to live, Fuseli asked if he
could stay with Lascano for a while, as a favour to a friend. Not having the strength to say no, Lascano fell for the trick, which would save his life. Fuseli took charge of protecting Lascano from himself. With perfect patience, Fuseli brought him from the depths of despair back to the surface where life, absurdly, continued. Lascano recovered because his friend gave him something to believe in, something to hold on to. Fuseli appealed to Lascano’s sense of justice and Perro clung on, in desperation, to what became his mission in life: making the world a fairer place, even if only a little. A bit ridiculous perhaps, but as good a lifeline as any. Mission accomplished, Fuseli went home, back to his solitude, leaving Lascano to his.
Marisa had been a star for him only, adored by the masses - of one, Lascano. Destiny never allowed them the time to tire of one another, for daily routine to overshadow the magic moments that bound them. Conjugal life had not yet worn down their love; over-familiarity had not diluted the mystery. Eight years after their wedding, on the edge of the precipice, which claims most marriages, maybe just moments before irremediable boredom set in, she went and died.
His soul refused to accept it and stubbornly raved delirious, imagining a recovered Marisa, a resurrection, a miraculous second chance. Back by his side, to accompany him through the rest of his days until he becomes intolerable, poisoned with old age. Back with him until their love reaches its final thread, a love that was left with no outlet just when it was ready to peak. Back so he can love her so much that it becomes impossible to love her more, or so that he can just love her. So that she can become his constant companion,
until having her by his side becomes taken for granted, taken as given. Until her most intimate habits hold no secret, until not a single fold of her skin remains unexplored. So that he can say to her all the words that now choke him. Until her sex loses any taste of the new, any sense of discovery. Until he no longer notices her smell and her voice becomes as familiar as his own. Until he knows what she’s going to say before she says it. Until understanding comes without even needing to look at each other. Until she becomes as familiar to him as the atmosphere itself, he stops sensing her presence and she becomes but an appendix to him. Until he guiltily lusts after, even has, other women. Until they become strangers eating in passive silence in restaurants, having given up wondering what they are doing there one with the other. Until it is she who’s left standing alone at the end of the pier when his ship sails.
But there’d be none of this. Their future suspended, finished, buried under a small gravestone in the Jewish cemetery that he never visits, because he knows she’s not really there. Instead, she visits him during his interminable nights, sometimes as a painful presence, sometimes as a lascivious phantom that possesses him. His body remembers her body as if it’s been tattooed onto him, making her presence real, lifting his sex and squeezing his hand until his hand is her hand. In the darkness, in the silence, while the furniture in the flat creaks, she makes love to him and leaves him feeling more alone than ever. He curses her a thousand times because her absence forces him to confront true solitude every night, and he wishes he had never met her. To go on as he was before Marisa, when solitude was his natural state, his habitat, an environment he
lived in without even fully sensing it. After her… after her, Lascano falls asleep.
Crack.
He wakes up. The sound of footsteps on pine floorboards reverberates in his ears like a gunshot. The flat lies silent. Someone is walking around. He gets out of bed. Hiding behind the door, he sees a shadow in the lounge. He leans against the wall. His eyes mist over. It’s Marisa. She appears to be rearranging things, but the things don’t move. She has her back to him, with her nightgown on, the thick winter one, although it doesn’t hide the curves of her body. Lascano feels as though a stake has been plunged into his chest. Marisa turns around. There’s a distance in her eyes, a sadness, a pain, an absence… He sits down and looks at her. He knows if he speaks to her she won’t answer. She’s barefoot, as she always is. She stands still a moment, then starts to sway, dancing without moving her feet, rocking her empty arms. Perro thinks he can hear a sad song playing. He covers his eyes with his hands, but he still sees her. She encourages a reluctant little boy to come out from behind her skirt and show himself. He has his mother’s eyes. Marisa acts like nothing has changed, like she’s still alive. She does it for Lascano, so that he doesn’t feel so alone, so awful, so sad, but these visits pain him. He’d rather not see her.
Leave me be
, he thinks, recalling the popular bolero:
Vete de mí.
And she does leave him be, disappearing into the kitchen, and then when he looks in there she’s gone again, and he hears her singing in the bathroom,
Tú, que llenas todo de alegría y juventud
:
you fill everything with happiness and youth
. When he goes into the bathroom she’s not there. He hears her in the room. He follows her sounds but she’s not there. He collapses on his
bed in need of respite. Then she enters, slips under the sheets and Lascano’s body does the rest, without being able to help it, surrendering himself to the ghost, knowing he’ll pay dearly for it .
Showing all the signs of a sleepless night and a full day at work, Lascano heads over to Fuseli’s house, a small one-bedroom apartment with a huge terrace, on the corner of Agüero and Córdoba. Fuseli leans on the balcony railing and calmly waits for his friend to say whatever it is he’s come to say. Lascano, meanwhile, whimsically looks over at the Ameghino Mental Health Centre across the street, with its tumbledown gardens and peeling walls, and imagines himself a boarder there. The night is clear, fresh and still.
Fuseli, do you believe in ghosts?
The doctor takes his time to answer, eventually raising his eyes and pointing upwards.
What do you see? The sky. And in the sky? Stars. You think you see stars, but you’re mistaken. Stop fucking about, she visited me again last night. Marisa? Who else? OK, but you asked me if I believed in ghosts. And you started banging on about the stars. Bear with me: many of those stars you think you see actually disappeared millions of years ago. How can they have disappeared if I’m looking at them right now? Because what you see is the light of those stars. I don’t get you. It’s very simple. Well go on then. A star emits light, right? Right. Light travels through space, right? Right. The star dies, right? OK. The light reaches you. Yes. But the star died long ago. Shit. That light is the ghost of the dead star.
Lascano sparks up a cigarette, his gaze lost somewhere among the pattern of the floor tiles. Fuseli, seeing the reaction of his friend, inflates like a frog and adopts his most solemn and doctorly tone.
Every life form, simply by being alive, emits energy that projects itself into space. Like with the stars, this energy keeps on travelling, maybe does so eternally, even once the thing that emitted it has long gone. Marisa died, we both know that, but her energy keeps reaching you. And Marisa was a very bright being. All the time you were together, your body was training itself to receive her signals, so now you’re like an antenna for her energy waves that carry on flying around your house. When everything else in the flat is turned off, and you relax and let your guard down, that’s when her signals reach you, like the light of a dead star. That’s what ghosts are.
Lascano takes a deep puff of his cigarette. Fuseli looks like a professor giving a seminar.
But she does things, she gets into my bed. That, my friend, is your crazy little head. When you receive her signals, memories come back to you, fantasies, your body’s recollections of the feelings she used to stir in you, the emotions. The mind loves to make up stories and it starts spinning a yarn, giving shape to an explanation for what you’re sensing. When someone leaves us, they leave us with a void we didn’t have when they were there. Our emotions end up with no place to go because we no longer have someone to direct them towards. You’re on your own… Our other half is our great witness, the keeper of our imagination, the one who confirms that our world is real, concrete, palpable. Our other half is the key piece of our universe. You ask: Did you see that? Did you hear that? What do you think about that? Our other half provides us with the only proof we ever get that what we sense is real.
The friends remain silent. The wind starts to blow, night deepens. Fuseli seems woken from a dream.
You’re still suffering from Marisa’s death. Pain has the virtue of making people deeper beings. Suffering makes the good guys more compassionate, more noble; it makes the bad guys worse,
more perverse, more wicked. So what can I do about it? Just stay calm. Trying to resist will only make it worse. In time it will pass. Right now I’ve got a lovely bottle of red waiting to be drunk and a pork loin stuffed with pineapple cooking in the oven, which it would be plain stupid to eat on my own. You fancy tackling it with me? Did you wash your hands after work? Are you crazy? That’s where the extra flavour comes from.
5
A sticky night descends on the city. Eva is out on the terrace gathering in the washing when she hears engines and people running in the street. She peeks out cautiously. The house is being surrounded by soldiers dressed in army fatigues and carrying rifles. The olive-green bonnet of an army truck pokes around the corner. Twenty soldiers fan out in formation. An armoured car crosses the road, demolishes the railings, ploughs across the garden, charges the door and sends it flying, then pulls back quickly. The troops advance shooting. Physical fear takes control of her muscles, emptying her mind of any thought other than the need to flee. She leaps down the staircase that gives on to the backyard, gets a foot up on the gas pipes and climbs the dividing wall, jumping down into the neighbouring garden. She sprints across it and scales another dividing wall. An Alsatian jumps up at her from the shadows and she avoids its jaws by a whisker. A light comes on and a voice calls out, which distracts the dog for a split second, allowing Eva to duck into a passageway and shut the gate behind her. Away from the angry barking, she scampers up a staircase and onto a rooftop, where she waits to get her breath back.
Glued to the wall, she feels like an animal pursued by a pack of hounds, fleeing from the gunshots that ring out into the night sky and echo off the river. She comes across an empty room and enters. There are long make-up tables with mirrors and lights, like a theatre dressing room. She drops into a chair. She doesn’t even recognize her reflection in the mirror, her face is so distorted by fear. She holds her head in her hands and starts to cry. Outside, the gun battle draws to an end with the final, sporadic
coups de grâce
. Far off, she hears the sound of the movement of troops, motors, muffled orders. Completely exhausted and her mind a blank, her body shuts down and she dozes.