Of these three lineages — the three strongest in Argentine
literature, the three departure points of the literature of doom — I’m afraid
that the one which will triumph is the one that most faithfully represents the
sentimental rabble, in the words of Borges. The sentimental rabble is no longer
the Right (largely because the Right busies itself with publicity and the joys
of cocaine and the plotting of currency devaluations and starvation, and in
literary matters is functionally illiterate or settles for reciting lines from
Martín Fierro
) but the Left, and what the Left demands of its
intellectuals is soma, which is exactly what it receives from its masters. Soma,
soma, soma Soriano, forgive me, yours is the kingdom.
Arlt and Piglia are another story. Let’s call theirs a love affair and
leave them in peace. Both of them — Arlt without a doubt — are an important part
of Argentine and Latin American literature, and their fate is to ride alone
across the ghost-ridden pampa. But that’s no basis for a school.
Corollary. One must reread Borges.
Natasha Wimmer
C
RIMES
She’s sleeping with two men. She’s had other lovers before
and now she has two. That’s the way it is. They don’t know about each other. One
says he’s in love with her. The other one says nothing. She doesn’t care much
what either of them says. Declarations of love, declarations of hate. Words.
She’s sleeping with two men; that’s just the way it is.
She’s a journalist. Now she’s sitting in a bar near the newspaper
office with a book open in front of her, but she can’t read. She tries, but she
can’t. She’s distracted by what’s happening outside, although there’s nothing
special to see. She shuts the book and stands up. The man behind the bar sees
her coming and smiles. She asks what she owes him. The man names a sum. She
opens her purse and hands him a note. How’s things? asks the man. She looks him
in the eye and says: So so. The man asks her if she’d like something more. On
the house. She shakes her head, No, I’m fine, thanks. She stands there for a
while, waiting for something. Then almost inaudibly she takes her leave and
walks out of the bar.
She returns unhurriedly to the office. Waiting for the elevator,
she notices a young man, about twenty-five, wearing an old suit and a tie whose
design intrigues her: identical sky-blue faces screwed up in surprise against a
background of watery green. Beside the young man, on the floor, is a suitcase of
considerable dimensions. They say hello. The doors of the elevator open and both
of them get in. Having examined her, the young man says that he sells socks, and
that if she’s interested he can offer her a good deal. She says she’s not
interested and then she thinks that it’s strange to find a sock salesman inside
the building, especially at a time when most of the offices are closed. The sock
salesman gets out first, at the third floor, where there’s an architect’s studio
and the office of a legal firm. As he’s stepping out of the elevator, he raises
his left hand and touches his forehead with the tips of his fingers. A salute,
she thinks, and smiles at him. As the doors of the elevator close, he returns
her smile.
When she gets back to the newspaper office, the only person there is a
woman, sitting on a chair next to the window, smoking. The journalist goes to
her desk, switches on her computer, and then walks over to the window. At this
point the woman who’s smoking realizes she’s there and looks at her. The
journalist sits on the windowsill and looks down into the street, which,
unusually, makes her feel dizzy. Both of them are quiet for a few seconds. The
woman who’s smoking asks the journalist if she’s OK. Fine, she says, I came back
to finish the article about Calama. The smoking woman turns and looks out of the
window at the river of cars flowing away from the city center, then half closes
her eyes and laughs. I read something about it, she says. Complete shit, says
the journalist. It was kind of funny, says the woman who’s smoking. I don’t get
you, says the journalist. After thinking for a moment, the smoking woman says,
Actually, it wasn’t funny at all, and looks out of the window at the traffic
again. Then the journalist gets up and walks over to her desk. She has stories
to file and she’s running late. She takes a walkman from a drawer and puts the
headphones on. She gets to work. But after a while she takes the headphones off
and turns on her chair. There’s something weird about all this, she says. The
woman who’s smoking looks at her and asks her what she’s talking about. About
the woman in Calama, she says. At that moment the silence in the newspaper
office is absolute. Or so it seems. Not even the hum of the elevator.
She was twenty-seven and she was stabbed twenty-seven times. Too much
of a coincidence. Why? says the smoking woman, stuff like that happens. It’s a
lot of stab wounds, the journalist replies, but without much conviction. I’ve
seen stranger things than that, says the woman who’s smoking. After a moment of
silence she adds: And maybe that’s just a typo anyway. It could be, thinks the
journalist. Is something bothering you? asks the smoking woman. The victim, the
journalist replies. It could have been any of us. The woman who’s smoking looks
at her with a raised eyebrow. It could have been me, says the journalist. No way
— you’re nothing like her, says the smoking woman. I’m sleeping with two men
like she was, says the journalist. The woman who’s smoking smiles and repeats:
No way. Everyone’s against her, one way or another. Against who? The victim, of
course. The smoking woman shrugs her shoulders. The reporters who cover stories
like this are no better than the killers. Not all of them, says the woman who’s
smoking, there are some really good ones. Most of them are useless barflies,
murmurs the journalist. Not all of them, says the smoking woman. Twenty-seven
years old, twenty-seven stab wounds, I’m not convinced. Anyhow, they might have
got the victim’s age mixed up with the number of stab wounds. She had a
nine-year-old kid, says the journalist, holding the headphones in her left hand
and stroking them. The woman who’s smoking stubs out the cigarette in the
ashtray beside the window and stands up. Let’s go, she says. No, I’m going to
stay for a bit, says the journalist, and puts the headphones back on.
She’s listening to Delalande. Her back is hurting, but otherwise she
feels fine and she’s keen to keep working. Out of the corner of her eye she
watches the woman who was smoking lean over her desk and put something into her
handbag. Soon she feels her colleague’s hand gently pressing her shoulder to say
good-bye. She goes on working. After half an hour she gets up and goes to the
newspaper’s archives (which are hardly ever consulted any more) and that’s when
she sees him.
He’s standing there, just outside the open door, not daring to cross
the threshold, looking at her with a half-smile on his face. She stifles a cry
and asks him what he wants. It’s me, he says, the sock salesman. The suitcase is
sitting at his feet. I know, she says, I don’t want to buy anything. I just
wanted to have a little look around, he says. She examines him for a few
seconds; she’s not frightened now but angry, and she senses that the presence of
the young salesman is a sign of something important, but what that something is
eludes her grasp. All she knows is that it’s important (or has some degree of
importance) and that she’s no longer afraid. Haven’t you ever been in a
newspaper office? she asks. I haven’t, actually, he says. Come in, she says. He
hesitates or pretends to hesitate and then he picks up the suitcase and walks
in. Are you a journalist? She nods. And what are you writing? She tells him
she’s writing an article about a murder. The salesman puts the suitcase down
again and his gaze wanders from table to table. Can I tell you something? She
looks at him and her mind is blank. In the elevator, he says, it seemed to me
that you were suffering for some reason. Me? she says. Yes, I thought you were
suffering, although of course I don’t know why. Everyone suffers, she says, as
if they were talking in general terms. Neither of them has taken a seat. He’s
standing with his back to the door. She has retreated and is standing near the
window. Both of them are frozen now, tensely upright, waiting. But when they
speak, their voices have a false tone of familiarity.
What murder are you working on? he asks. The murder of a woman, she
says. He smiles. He has a nice smile, she thinks, although it makes him look
older (he’s probably no more than twenty-five). It’s always women who get
killed, he says, and gestures with his right hand in a way that she can’t
interpret. As if she’d suddenly woken up, she realizes that she’s alone in the
office with a stranger, at a time when the building is almost empty. A slight
shudder sweeps through her body. He notices, and looks for a place to sit down,
as if to reassure her. Seated, he looks even taller than he is. Tell me about
it, he says. The request exasperates her. Wait till the issue comes out. No,
tell me now, maybe I can make a suggestion, he says. You’re an expert on the
subject, are you? she says. He looks at her without replying. She realizes she’s
made a mistake and tries to correct it, but before she can say anything more, he
tells her that he’s not an expert on murder. And why should I tell you about it?
she says. Maybe you need to talk to someone. You could be right, she says. He
smiles again. It was a woman who’d broken up with her husband, she says. Did the
husband kill her? No. The husband has nothing to do with the crime. How come
you’re so sure? Because they arrested the killer the same day, she says. Ah, I
see, he says. She was twenty-seven, she broke up with her husband, then she had
a boyfriend, she lived with him, a younger guy, twenty-four, then she split with
this boyfriend and starting going out with another guy. Boyfriend A and
boyfriend B, he says. If you like, she says, and suddenly she feels calm, tired
and calm, as if a part of the imaginary struggle (whose rules remain opaque to
her) was already over and done.
I’m guessing, says the sock salesman, that this woman was
good-looking. Yes, she was a beautiful woman, and very young too. Well, not all
that young, he says. So you think a twenty-seven-year-old woman isn’t young?
Come on, let’s be objective: young, sure, but not
very
young, he says.
How old are you? Twenty-nine. I would have guessed twenty-five, she says. No,
twenty-nine. He doesn’t ask her age. Did she work or did she live off her
boyfriends? She was a secretary. This woman never lived off anyone. And she had
a nine-year-old son. And who killed her, boyfriend A or boyfriend B? he asks.
Who would you say? Boyfriend A, of course. She nods. Because he was jealous.
Yes, she says. But do you think it was just because he was jealous? No, she
says. Ah, so you see, we have the same theory, you and I, he says. She chooses
not to reply and moves away from the window. I should switch on a light, he
says. No, leave it, she says, pulling out a chair and sitting down. After a
while, he says: And it’s getting you down, this story about a murder that
happened a couple of months ago, I think it was. She looks at him and says
nothing. Maybe you identify with the victim? Are you married? No, she says, but
I’ve thought about her quite a bit. Are you married? No, me neither, he says,
but I’ve lived with a few women. Do you think men have a problem with women who
like sex? he asks. She looks away: beyond the windowpane night is enfolding the
buildings. What she feels is a kind of claustrophobia. She got killed because
she liked it, the journalist says without looking at him. She hears him say, Ah,
and the tone of that ah is somewhere between irony and agony. She used to get up
early, at a quarter past six every morning. She worked for a mining company in
Calama, she was a secretary, and the stories in the papers say that her love
life was a continual source of conflict. A continual source, he repeats, how
poetic. Men kept falling in love with her, although she wasn’t classically
beautiful, she says. Beauty’s relative, he says: There’s a kind of beauty for
everyone. Do you think? she asks, and looks at him again, steadily. Yes I do,
says the sock salesman, everyone: the ugly, the not-so-ugly, the average-looking
and the beautiful. But just because the not-so-ugly seem desirable to the ugly,
that doesn’t make them beautiful. So you get what I mean, he says. Yes, I get
what you mean, she says ironically, but I don’t agree; beauty’s the same for
everyone, like justice. Justice is the same for everyone? Don’t make me laugh,
he says. In theory, at least. It’s all different in theory, he sighs, but let’s
not argue; tell me more about your murdered secretary. Did you see the body? The
body? No, I didn’t see it. I didn’t cover the story, I just wrote an article
about the crime. So you didn’t go to the morgue in Calama? You didn’t see the
victim or talk with the killer? She looks at him and smiles mysteriously. The
killer, yeah, I talked with him, she says.
Well, that’s something, at least, he says. And? Nothing, she says, we
talked, he told me he was sorry for what he’d done, he said he was crazy about
the victim. Well put, he says. They met at the airport in Calama; he was a
security guard, and she worked there for a while, as a receptionist. Before
getting the job at the mine, says the sock salesman. In a mining company, she
says. Same thing, he says. Well, not exactly. And how did he kill her? he asks.
With a knife, she says. He stabbed her twenty-seven times. Don’t you think
that’s strange? He looks down at the toes of his shoes for a few seconds. Then
he looks at her again and says, What am I supposed to think is strange? The fact
that she was twenty-seven and got stabbed twenty-seven times? Then a fury seizes
her and she says, I’m in pretty much the same situation, so I guess I’m going to
get killed one day too. She’s on the point of saying, And you’re the sad bastard
who’s going to kill me, but she checks herself just in time. She’s shaking. But
he can’t tell from where he’s sitting. To sum up: it’s her ex who kills her. The
night of the murder she sleeps with the current boyfriend. The ex knows what’s
going on. She’s told him and he’s been informed by others. Jealousy is eating
him. He badgers and threatens her. But she pays him no attention; she’s decided
to get on with her life. She’s met another man. They sleep together. That’s the
key to the crime: by refusing to give anything up she signs her death warrant.
Yes, says the sock salesman, now I understand. No, you don’t understand at
all.