Tuesday Nights in 1980 (10 page)

Pascal had been selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door, and when he'd knocked on theirs and seen Franca, he'd told her she was more beautiful than the woman on the cover of the magazines he was carrying, who happened to be Brigitte Bardot. “Nobody's more beautiful than Brigitte Bardot,” Franca had said in her shy way, but Pascal had already sold her—on both the compliment and the subscription—and she went out to dinner with him that very night.

“You bought a fucking magazine subscription from that asshole?” Engales yelled at her when she got home from the date.

“He's not so bad,” Franca had said. “He took me to that new place, Tia Andino. Raul, he can afford Tia Andino!”

“Well, we cannot afford magazine subscriptions!” Raul yelled.

“But we could if he helped us!” Franca pleaded. “What if he could take care of us?”

Raul just looked at her and shook his head. What she was really saying was that he, Engales, could
not
take care of them. That he was not enough. What hurt the most is that he knew he wasn't. That he wasn't a strong enough man to take care of his own sister, or even himself.

Quickly, though, he saw that Pascal was not up for the task, either. The man had a sneaky, weaselly quality to him, and something told Engales that if the house were to suddenly catch fire, Pascal would sprint out the door to save himself without a thought cast back to Franca. Engales performed a series of miniature tests—break the hinge on the back door and see if Pascal will even try to fix it (he didn't); voice a disgustingly conservative political opinion (something pro-Perón, who had essentially turned into a fascist) over dinner to see if Pascal would object (he didn't)—which told him that Pascal was not only unworthy of dating his sister but unworthy of setting foot in their house at all.

“He's a pansy, Franca,” he tried to tell his sister, after they'd been dating a few months (already much too long, in Engales's opinion). “A conservative pansy. He's not for you!”

“It's too bad you feel that way,” said Franca. “Because I've asked him to move in.”

In the hottest part of January in 1973, Pascal brought over a truckload of furniture that, in its attempt to look modern, only appeared hideously cheap and clashed in an upsetting way with their mother's antique glass tables and ornate, beautiful couch cushions. He installed a giant brown square of a chair in the living room and installed himself atop it, a spot which he would come to think he
owned,
and where he would sit for long, seemingly endless stretches, watching the most conservative of the news stations, his knotty feet propped up on their mother's glass table as if it were not a precious memento of their dead parents but a disposable ottoman, built just for him and his bony heels.

Pascal's presence drove Engales to practically live at El Federal, the bar around the corner, where he could go to drink and be silent and where he didn't have to smell Morales's thick breath or hear Morales's farting in the night or see Morales's hair in the drain of the tub. All of the habits with his sister were interrupted—Pascal paid to have the lights turned back on; he slept in the bed with Franca, and Raul slept back in his childhood bedroom, in his old, creaky twin bed. There was scarcely enough hot water for the three of them, and Engales's baths were almost always freezing. The thought of his sister sleeping with Pascal nearly drove him mad, and this he blamed on her.

“He's not going to save you,” he shouted at her one night when they had both been unable to sleep, and had wandered, as they had done in their youth, to the dark kitchen. “He's not going to bring back Mom and Dad!”

He had made Franca cry that night, as he would many times before he left.

“You have to let me live my life, Raul,” she said. “You're going to leave one day and then where will I be? I need someone.”

“Well, he's not the right someone!” he yelled at her.

She had clamped her hot hand on his shoulder, given him the look she gave that meant
don't.

Buenos Aires, for
Raul Engales, was becoming a series of
don't
s, he saw then.
Don't
come between your sister and her sleazy new boyfriend.
Don't
feel comfortable or welcome in your own house.
Don't
sleep with women who hang out too late at El Federal, looking to escape their own husbands (their husbands will find you, chase you down Calle Defensa, and force you to hide in the dark behind the Dumpster).
Don't
gain any recognition for your paintings, which are at this point only a pathetic hobby, not worth anyone's time (not that anyone cared about art right now in Buenos Aires, where things were becoming too fucked up to care about such frivolous endeavors). And
don't
, when your sister tells you she has married Pascal Morales at the San Pedro Gonzáles Telmo church yesterday morning, try for one more second to disguise your abhorrence of him, of
them,
because Pascal Morales is here to stay, in this enormous old house your parents saddled you with, that even with its four bedrooms is not big enough for three.

Do
pull your American passport from your father's old writing desk, run your palm over its gold emboss, and remember your father saying,
It's a city of pure poetry, I'm telling you, kids.

You are ready for poetry. You are through with the suffocating text that has become your life in this old house.

In the end
Franca had begged him not to go. In the earliest part of the morning, on Saturday, June 29, of 1974, just two days before Perón's death would rock the country and one day before Raul turned twenty-three, as he walked away from the house with his backpack, he heard Franca yell from their front stoop:
Don't leave, Raul! Please don't leave!
He could not look back at her. If he looked back he would never be able to look forward. He would see her holding her silly cake, which she had baked for his birthday in one final plea to make him stay, in her old blue coat that used to be their mother's. He was terrified to leave her: the only person who cared about him and the only home he'd ever known. He did.

The door to
the blue room opened and Engales, startled, knocked over his champagne glass. Thankfully it was empty, or he would have spilled all over
Broken Music Composition, 1979.
At the door was a woman—not beautiful, but important-looking—sporting a black silk dress and a fountain of graying black hair.

“You've found the Knížák,” she said in a rich-person voice: the kind of voice that was so nonchalant, so languid, that it ended up sounding uptight.

“I'm sorry,” Engales said, picking up the glass. “I was just listening.”

“Listen all you want,” she said, entering the room and extending a polished hand. “That's what it's here for. I'm Winona.”

“Hello, Winona.”

“It's beautiful, isn't it? Completely new. Completely odd.”

“Yes, very,” Engales said. For some reason the woman was making him feel nervous, and he didn't know whether he should get up from the leather chair or stay where he was. He looked into the warped tunnel of his champagne glass.

“You know, I saw him in Prague,” she said casually, as if Prague were a neighborhood in New York that she frequented. “Doing his
Demonstration for All the Senses
? Wasn't it remarkable? All these funny actions, absurd actions, really. At one point the participants had to sit in a room where perfume had been spilled for five whole minutes. Ha! Can you
imagine
?”

Engales smiled but didn't respond. He got the feeling she was one of those people who liked to talk, and that she was important, and that this was her house, and so he should let her.

She moved closer to him, putting her hand on his bicep.

“What are you, thirty?” She said.

“Twenty-nine,” he said with a gulp; he was rounding up.

“Too young to be alone at midnight,” she said. “And too handsome.” But just when Engales thought she might pet his face, she grabbed it instead, and used the grip to pull him to standing, then toward the door.

“You've got to find yourself a woman to smooch then,” she said coolly. “There are only a few moments left!”

“I guess so,” Engales said.

“Oh, but wait!” Winona said, her rich eyes brightening. “I forgot to give you your fortune. Everyone gets a fortune, based on the piece of art they've ended up with. You got
Broken Music
.” Then she paused, her face becoming white and serious.

“I don't want to be
grave,
” she said slowly, her eyes narrowing. “But this piece has a sinister quality. You'll have to do what Milan Knížák did. You'll have to lose everything—the whole song you've memorized and thought you loved—in order to make something truly beautiful.”

Engales was quiet; Winona's face had taken on a crazy-lady quality; he only wanted to leave and go back to his night of drinking with Arlene and Rumi.

“You're an artist, am I right?” Winona said.

“How did you know?”

“I have a way of knowing these sorts of things,” she said, nodding at Engales's hand with her eyes. Engales looked down at his fingernails, which were lined with blue paint.

“Ahh.”

He stared at his hands and thought of the very first moment he knew he wanted to make art: in Señor Romano's class, when he had seen a slide of Yves Klein jumping from a building to what looked to be his death. It had occurred to him then and it occurred to him now that art was about making yourself visible and making yourself disappear all at once. Visible because you were leaving your mark; invisible because it was so much bigger than you that it swallowed you. You were just this tiny thing, and the art was huge. The art was a big void that you could jump into, try to fill, and swim in forever. When he looked up again, Winona was gone. The clock in the corner informed him that so was 1979.

When Engales emerged
outside, the crowd was engaged in postmidnight hoopla: extra kisses, extra champagne, extra confetti, just for good measure. He saw that Arlene had found a beau of sorts: a short man with a prominent mustache, who had led her to a corner of the balcony and was feeding her grapes on a stick. When she saw Engales she pointed at the grapes and mouthed:
Means good luck in Spain!

Engales gave her a thumbs-up and a raised-eyebrow face. Rumi had gone missing, and he was once again unsatisfied with his surroundings—all there was was the drone of high-end chatter, a sea of old men in tuxes, a few younger women who did not interest him in the least, in designer clothes whose price tags were meant to stand in for style. He scanned for the writer, but he must have already left, which for some reason saddened him.
Someday.
In general, Engales could feel the night taking its inevitable turn for the worse: the memory of the music, or the memory of the memories that the music had conjured, played in his head, alongside Winona's odd psychic reading. The party began to feel both surreal and unimportant. What was he doing here? So far away from home, with all these rich people he didn't know, drunk on champagne?

He had managed in the past few years to avoid such thoughts. The city had consumed him so, he had refused to think about Franca hardly at all, had only sent her one postcard saying he had arrived, to which she had responded with a lengthy, overly sentimental letter that ended with a cryptic:
I've got big news, Raul. But I'd rather tell you over the phone. If you might call? Yours. Yours always. F.
He hadn't written back, and he hadn't called. Her letter had felt like looking her in the eyes: there was just too much there. The letter reeked of home, and he didn't want to think about home. This was his home now, and Franca's big news—surely it was something domestic, they'd bought a new house, sold the bakery, or else Franca had gotten pregnant with Pascal's child—could wait.

But now, with the New Year upon him and the music still in his mind, he couldn't help it. He wondered what Franca was doing. If she was drinking champagne, unless the military had banned that, too, or maybe she was asleep. But then again, he didn't have to wonder. He knew. He always knew. Franca was sitting by the window with a glass of water, looking out and up at the moon. She was wondering where her brother was, what he was doing right now. But then again, she didn't have to wonder. She knew. She always knew. Her brother was on a balcony with a bunch of rich people, looking out and up at the moon, thinking of her.

Cigarette.

Engales escaped back through the glass doors and through the maze of rooms and down a dark stairwell and back out to the street. There he found Rumi, just as he had the first night he met her, sitting on the stoop next door as if she had appeared by magic lamp. At the sight of her, a trophy of the future, all thoughts of Franca fell away again. Here was his life, right here on this stoop, living inside of Rumi's beautiful mound of hair.

“Well, if it isn't the painter,” Rumi said.

“Well, if it isn't the lesbian,” he said, sitting next to her on the cold step, starting his immaculate cigarette-rolling process.

“Why'd you leave?” she said. “You were getting on so famously with Winona.”

“You saw that?”

“Yes, I saw that. And I'll tell you exactly what is going to happen from here. Winona will find you. You've captured her interest, and once Winona George's interest is captured, she follows. She's like an art hawk.”

“What do you mean?” He coughed a bit of smoke out into the cold air; it looked like a flower.

“Just wait,” Rumi said. “Soon you'll get a call. A call will turn into a dinner, which will turn into a studio visit. You'll become her pet for a while. You'll get a show at one of her galleries. She's pals with a few of the best critics, including Bennett; you'll get a review before you know it. It's done. Your fate is sealed. You're already famous, Raul.”