Sweet Money (5 page)

 

With great solemnity, and racked with shame, Screw places an envelope on the table. Miranda stares at it, unable to get over the shock.

 

 

Mole peeks in the envelope and casts a disappointed eye on the bundle of dollars inside, then puts it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

 

 

Screw’s eyes fill with tears. He lowers his head. The waiter places the wooden platter with the pizza on the table, opens the Quilmes beer and walks away. Mole pours out the beer and hands Screw a glass. Screw finishes it in
one gulp. He looks up from the foam in the glass and meets Mole’s eyes. His face is twisted with grief. His voice sounds like his tongue is a wet rag.

 

 

He looks down and burps. Miranda calls over the waiter.

 

 

Mole stares silently at his friend, then pulls himself together.

 

 

Miranda, seeing that Screw’s about to fall apart again, squeezes his arm to bring him around. He doesn’t want to hear any more about it. He has no room for his friend’s pain. Prison has left him with dead zones that will take a long time to come back to life.

 

 

Suddenly his friend is out of reach. All Mole can do is look at him: Screw brings his hand to his forehead, drops his head again and a sigh comes out of his mouth that sounds like a muffled howl, almost inaudible, but that makes Miranda’s bones twinge as if someone had used a cattle prod on him.

 

 

Miranda stands up to give his friend a hug, but Screw avoids it, holds out his hand in a brief moment of desperation, then leaves without looking back. Mole watches him through the window as he turns the corner and disappears into the night. He finishes the beer in three gulps, pays and leaves. It’s cold outside.

He starts walking. This is one thing he never expected. Screw’s miserable face has remained stamped on his retina like a curse. And what if tomorrow the test comes out bad, and it turns out he’s condemned like Screw’s daughter? What would he do if something like that
happened to his son? He pushes that thought away with a grunt. He can’t even conceive of it. Miranda is capable of facing anything, rising to any occasion, but he doesn’t do well with problems he can’t do anything to fix, situations where the only possible course of action is no action, merely acceptance. Acceptance is an art that nobody would dream of practising voluntarily. It’s always imposed on us by the most implacable of tyrants: Mother Nature. The closest Miranda has ever come is resignation, which he’s practised every time human justice has placed him behind bars. But resignation is temporary, and even while it lasts, you can always do something, plan something, think about a future or find a crack – doing yourself in? – to escape through. But acceptance is reserved for when there is absolutely no other option, when it’s the only choice left.

He follows the same route he saw Screw take as he watched him through the window. Miranda watched him – alone, divorced from the world by a tragedy that places him out of reach of any comfort – knowing that he couldn’t do anything for his friend, that nobody could. But he has to do something for himself. He has very little money left. Soon it’ll be completely gone. He walks until his legs hurt, then he goes to his hideout and lies down, fully dressed, on the bed.

 

The La Plata train station looks just like it did when he first saw it as a child. He’s on the platform looking through a window at Duchess and Fernando, his son, sitting in the waiting room. Suddenly the train whistle blows, the engine spews out a blast of steam, and it starts to move. But it’s not the train that’s moving, it’s
the station. It’s not his wife and son who leave; it’s the station, it’s him. That image continues to cause him indescribable anguish for a long time after he’s already woken up.

7

 

Just as the last words are leaving her mouth, Ramona turns her back on him, picks up the tea tray and walks toward the house. Lascano watches her. Her straight black hair dances to the cadence of her walk. He wonders how it would feel sliding down his belly. Desire shines in his eyes, which she can no longer see, desire she guessed at long before Lascano even had a clue he felt it. She reminds him of Eva.

As fleeting as their meeting was, it has left its mark on him, as only true love can. Before Eva, there was Marisa, the woman he loved without a shadow of a doubt and who abandoned him forever when she died, just when he loved her more than ever. His grief lasted until he met Eva, who looked so much like Marisa that it was like she had come back for act two. With Marisa’s death, he’d lost all hope of ever finding love, he’d become some kind of ascetic who could only be aroused by memory or fantasy.
Eva erupted into his life with the power of a gale-force wind or, as Ramona would put it, like a force of nature. With her animal love, she reinfected him with the virus of desire. The indisputable urge for a woman’s body. She reminded him that his physical being was subject to the imperatives of the species, imperatives that demand, for moments of dazzling urgency, that this thing hanging between his legs be inserted into one precise spot, that it has a purpose it must carry out. Men disguise this urge to conquer, equate it with the hunting of prey, think we’re in charge when we are really just submitting to the imperatives of reproduction. Not to mention that the best part of the hunt is really when we are being hunted.

 

The afternoon sun falls slowly behind the eucalyptus trees. The leaves quiver. Friday’s first star makes its appearance in the dark sky. Lascano hears the sound of the screen door opening, Ramona’s steps on the quartzite path set with shells. The breeze carries her perfume ahead of her, announcing her arrival.

 

 

Lascano no longer needs help getting up. They both know that, but Ramona leans down so he can put his arm around her shoulders. She holds him around the waist and helps him stand up. Once on his feet, he closes his eyes to better feel this woman’s proximity. In his mind he inevitably makes comparisons. Where he expects to find a curve, there’s bone; where his hand predicts hair, there’s smoothness. His touch remembers, longs
for another body. There’s something false about this closeness. His reservations are fleeting, the unexpected makes way for curiosity.

 

 

When they get to the bedroom, he sits down on the bed; she stands there looking at him. He doesn’t have the patience for insinuations. Just as he’s about to speak, she places her finger on his lips. She goes and switches off the light, walks to the window, opens it and pulls open the shades. A powerful scent of jasmine wafts into the room. Ramona sits down next to him. Lascano lets himself collapse, his head coming to rest on her lap, then looks up at her. The rest of the world is in suspense. She is staring off at the leaves in the garden; he can tell she is also missing someone. Perhaps she too is curious and wants to find out what there is besides this attraction. Maybe she’s afraid, as he is. Then Lascano does what he must, he overcomes his fear, sits up, puts his arms around her, kisses her, touches her, undresses her, caresses her. Slowly, she joins in and starts playing the game, dancing to the music of the breath, the cadence of the blood, the piping of the flutes, the glances, the creaking of wood, the blowing of the bellows, the plucking of the strings, the pulsing, banging marimbas, vibraphones, kettledrums, which bear them aloft to the end, where she, already sated, begs him to come, for now she wants to receive his warm semen, this other semen, a final ringing of chimes, once, twice and again… the telephone, it’s the telephone that keeps ringing.

Leaving Lascano alone with the aftereffects of a stupendous session of loveless sex, Ramona gets up and walks across the room naked, as majestic as the Seventh Fleet entering the Mediterranean. Lascano lies back in bed, enjoying the release of tension and the cool night air on his overheated body. The effort has left him exhausted, and the pain of his chest wound has returned, steady and implacable. From the adjacent room he hears Ramona’s voice but not her words. He hears a tone of urgency, a vibration of alarm. Lascano sits up, suddenly and totally alert. When she returns, the expression on her face tells him immediately that recess is over. She quickly starts getting dressed. Fear propels her haste.

 

8

Miranda’s gait reflects his anxiety. One part of him just wants to get it over with, wants to know already, but the other part of him is scared to death. The news about Noelia, Screw’s daughter, plays over and over in his head like a stubborn melody. Then there’s Andrés’s eyes… and Villar’s ghost, chiding him at every turn. That pink spot that appeared under his nipple. This morning his eyes were very red when he got up. Maybe it’s the price you pay, he thinks, for a year of buggering a dude, and so much for his excuse that’s it was just for survival, for the release he needed. Maybe he should have been stoical and made do only with masturbating.

 

He walks through the lobby of the laboratory. When the elevator doors open he finds himself face-to-face with a guy who’s got death tattooed all over him. His dim, sunken eyes seem to be interrogating him. Miranda steps aside at the same moment and in the same direction as the sick man. The action repeats itself until finally they coordinate and each one goes on his way. He no longer has any doubts: this encounter has confirmed his worst fears that he is doomed. Now nothing will have any meaning. His dearth of funds, Noelia’s illness, Duchess and
her supposed lovers. In this case, he thinks, everything will boil down to one simple question: should he slash his wrists with a razor blade? As he walks up to the counter where they give out the test results, he thinks about his own funeral and the image of his son standing next to his coffin makes his throat constrict. The beautiful young woman in white attends efficiently to those waiting in line to pick up the results of their tests. When it’s his turn, Miranda feels like his heart is about to explode. The girl hands him the envelope and notices how his hand is shaking. She looks him in the eye and offers him a splendid smile: