The Buenos Aires Quintet (22 page)

‘I couldn’t stop her studying, though; otherwise she’d have ended up a drunken vegetable like my wife.’

‘Now we won’t even be able to take her there or bring her home, in case we meet that subversive.’

Images from the video are flashing through the Captain’s mind. Alma shouting at Robinson: ‘Where does this prophet think he’s from? Are you crazy or just irresponsible?’ He also sees Muriel, staring fascinated at Robinson. Alma and Muriel’s faces blend into one. The Captain closes his eyes. The fat man is following the changes in his expression in the rearview mirror.

‘I could get rid of her, boss.’

‘I could do that myself, but as things stand, we can’t touch them. And anyway, the situation is interesting: a mother giving literature classes to a girl who is her daughter, but she doesn’t know it. Though Muriel is my daughter really, because I took her away from her mother to save her from a dynasty of subversives. It’s a wager. A game.’

‘But you can’t play Russian roulette with emotions. Let me finish her off, boss. Some day the girl might...’

‘For now, keep Robinson and the lecturer in your sights. We still have to find Raúl Tourón. And be very careful, because there could be a very, very unfortunate development. Any meeting between Gálvez, Robinson and Tourón could be very dangerous indeed. I’ll worry about my daughter.’

At the far end of the room, Norman is compèring his show: laughter and his voice reach Alma and Pepe, but they cannot work out what he is saying. Perhaps that is because their own conversation is a heated one, so much so that Alma gets up in mid-sentence and walks off to the side to listen to Norman instead.

‘Before, if your wife went off with someone else while you were in jail or away at the wars, in the Malvinas for example, it was looked on very, very badly. The more patriotic the war, the worse it made adultery seem. Nowadays, what’s badly looked on is if, when you come out of jail or return from the wars, there she is, there the silly cow is waiting for you because no one else wants her. Nowadays they’re there waiting because they can’t find a lover to rescue them from being a housewife. It’s a crisis, an ethical crisis, the corruption of our habits. Are there no good women? Were there ever any good women? Are there any now? Listen to this tango by Adriana Varela, the woman whose voice is more than a voice, it’s a whole orchestra. Goyeneche the Polack once said: “I can’t stand women who sing tango, the only one who can do it is Adriana Varela.”’

The spotlight picks out Adriana and plucks her like a mythic silhouette from the darkness. When the silence, darkness and her mythic silhouette coalesce, the bandoneon thumps out the start of the first verse:

A no-good woman has cost you your life
Said your momma, that saint in disguise
A no-good woman has cost you your fortune
Said your poppa, that great teller of lies.

Silverstein moves away from Adriana’s singing to join Pepe and Alma. The pair of them are indignant and silent, and Alma’s cheeks are still glowing red with annoyance. Pepe’s anger is busily being dissolved in a large glass of whisky.

‘What are you talking about?’

Faced by their stubborn silence: ‘What were you talking about?’

Carvalho shrugs an expressive shoulder in Alma’s direction: ‘Alma’s made friends with Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday’

Before Alma can manage to coordinate her indignation into words, Silverstein kneels in front of her, takes one of her hands, and intones: ‘All shipwrecked sailors are bound to meet some day.’

Now it’s Carvalho’s turn to cast a sarcastic eye in Alma’s direction: ‘She even knows where their island is.’

It’s more nose-to-nose than head-to-head as Alma thrusts herself at Carvalho.

‘Listen here, you fat Spaniard. Either you shut up or I’m off. It’s far more simple than he makes out, Norman. Have you seen that pair who walk along Calle Florida dressed as Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday?’

‘I haven’t actually seen Buenos Aires for ages. I sleep every morning; in the afternoon I rehearse plays that are very rarely staged even though there must be eighty or ninety “alternative” theatres in Buenos Aires, and then at night I’m working.’

‘They’re either two mystics or two jokers. It doesn’t matter which. They preach a new world order.’

‘Just like Carlos Menem.’

‘They dress up as Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday. They preach a new world order based on equality. Not that I give a damn about that. They live in an old mansion near the Tigre delta – halfway between San Isidro and Tigre. They give refuge to beggars and the homeless. And Raúl goes there sometimes. Robinson told me he’s helping Raúl. Do you think it’s so stupid to want to follow that lead? Can’t you convince this mule of a shitty Spaniard here that I’m not a lying cretin?’

Carvalho insists, grimly: ‘It’s a trap.’

‘Who’d lay a trap like that? Inspector Pascuali, who’s got less imagination than a worker bee? The Captain? Can you see his men dressed up as Robinson Crusoe? The fact is, I’ve arranged to go to the house, and I’ll go with or without you two.’

Silverstein has calmed Carvalho down by putting his arm round his shoulders.

‘Of course we’ll come with you.’

Carvalho spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness, and smiles as Norman tries to console him. ‘No-good women always get what they want from us.’

Which just happens to be what Adriana Varela is singing about at that very moment:

A no-good woman has cost you your life
Said your momma, that saint in disguise
A no-good woman has cost you your fortune
Said your poppa, that great teller of lies.

Before it was droopy blondes with a scowl
Now, they
’
re skinny redheads in a thousand wigs;
Before they were stuck-up tubs of lard
Now they
’
re skeletons on the prowl
But be they fat, thin or on the jive
They
’
ll spit in your soup as soon as they arrive.

The Marguerite Gautiers of a thousand poems
Ended their days as tragic consumptives
Or ripped off some poor louse
Who loved them as they slit his throat
Stuck like a prick in a whorehouse.

Now they
’
re Misses from another planet
From Cosmos, from Belgrano or from Misiones
Top models strutting their naked stuff
Designed by some pretentious creep
Who
’
s buying and selling Buenos Aires cheap.

A no-good woman has cost you your life
Said your momma, that saint in disguise
A no-good woman has cost you your fortune
Said your poppa, that great teller of lies.

And me, the no-good woman of this shack
Can tell you
‘
I
’
ve had it up to here
With all the creeps who ask me to hurt them
To get dear wifey off their back.

Before it was droopy blondes with a scowl
Now they
‘
re skinny redheads in a thousand wigs
Before they were stuck-up tubs of lardNow they
’
re skeletons on the prowl
But be they fat, thin or on the floor
They
‘
11 spit in your soup as they go out the door.

As if bowing to the inevitable, the key finds its way into the lock despite the Captain’s unusual hesitation. It’s only on the third attempt that the door opens, and he is faced with the evidence of his wife, sitting staring at the buzzing television screen, lost in herself, drunk, her eyes desperately wide open in an effort to show that the empty bottle on the table is nothing to do with her, that she hasn’t the faintest idea why her husband is saying to her: ‘Sometimes I think you don’t even get up to have a pee. Is my daughter back?’

Still trying to stand on her imagined dignity and clear-headedness, his wife gestures up the stairs, but when the Captain starts to climb them, she starts to mutter, gradually more and more loudly: ‘You son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!’

Muriel hears him tapping at her bedroom door and quickly hides what she was writing under a pile of books. Then she says: ‘Come in!’

She smiles back at the Captain’s affectionate gaze. Gets up and goes over and hugs and kisses him.

‘My little grizzly bear...’

‘Muriel, Muriel, do you think it’s right to call your father a grizzly bear?’

‘Well, if he is one, and he’s such a nice little one, then yes, it’s OK...’

Apparently satisfied with this explanation, the Captain runs his eye over the books filling the bedroom.

‘Books, books. Real life is outside books, you know.’

‘But it always ends up in books. Everything that’s done – good or bad – finds its way into books in the end.’

The Captain sits down. Now it is the posters on the walls that worry him. They are of rock stars like Kurt Cobain who mean nothing to him, Nelson Mandela, travel posters, especially to South Sea islands. He inspects them one by one.

‘Travel, yes, that’s a good idea. I have to talk to you, Muriel.’

‘About Mummy?’

This briefly throws the Captain, but it is Muriel herself who sets him straight.

‘I know you don’t like talking about her, but she needs help. She’s drinking more and more. She’s completely cut off. She needs a doctor or a psychiatrist. She says some very odd things.’

‘What kind of odd things?’

‘She keeps insisting that one day she’s going to tell me something that’ll completely change our lives.’

The Captain scarcely blinks.

‘She’s delirious. She either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know how to get help, that’s all. But anyway, it wasn’t your mother I wanted to talk to you about. Listen, Muriel, I heard that today a prophet, a joker, went to your faculty, preaching revolution.’

‘Peaceful revolution.’

‘There’s no such thing. I know you’re a healthy girl, with clear ideas, but you seem to be far too much into this abstract world of books: it’s useless faced with reality, it’s a world of myths and lies. How long is it since you’ve been to the club, to play tennis or swim? Sport clears away the cobwebs of the mind. I knew a lot of healthy kids from good families whose ideas got corrupted, and they ended up badly, fighting against the society that had created them.’

‘The subversives?’

‘Most of them weren’t bad kids, until they started reading the wrong books, got into bad company, swallowed communist propaganda. The time came when we had to defend ourselves against them, because they wanted to turn Argentina into a Marxist concentration camp.’

‘But they disappeared, didn’t they? So in the end they built their own concentration camp.’

‘They wanted to change our lives for no better reason than a few cents’ worth of ideology. But they didn’t all disappear. They’re still active – hidden, but still at work. Nowadays they wear an ecological flower, or follow liberation theology, or belong to an NGO. And the worst are university professors. A lot of them are ex-guerrilleros who kill now with their words. What are your lecturers like?’

‘Some are good, some are bad. But there’s one really excellent one, Alma Modotti. I really like her, though I don’t think she likes me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Vibrations I get. I don’t know. Sometimes I think the complete opposite, that she looks at me in a very special way. She demands more of me than of anyone else. But that’s good, isn’t it? Ever since I was a child, you’ve told me that teachers and parents should be very demanding, haven’t you, my little grizzly bear?’

‘Altofini & Carvalho. Partners in Crime.’ So they exist, or at least that’s what the stencilled words on the frosted glass of the office door say, and when it is opened, there’s the back of the head of someone telling his story. He is a man of around fifty, well dressed despite the anxious look on his face, with carefully dyed hair that makes the white of his sideburns stand out all the more.

‘So in short, the trouble was a no-good woman.’

Carvalho tries to sum up without too much of a smile, helped by distance and by the desk Alma has bought in a junk rather than antique shop in one of the meaner streets on the fringes of San Telmo.

‘Yes, a no-good woman. And I’d like you, or you and your partner, to find her. My son was the least decisive person in the world, easily swayed, too kind-hearted for his own good. I’m sorry I couldn’t be with him more. I’m a widower. I work long hours in my undergarment business. The boy grew up on his own, and he didn’t always have the most suitable friends. My poor Octavio is a good person, but he’s changed since he met that slut. He’s become argumentative, aggressive, he always answers me back – although that’s a bit difficult, as we hardly ever speak. He tries to avoid me.’

Carvalho sniffs, he can smell roses, and realizes where it is coming from when Don Vito comes in. He’s perfumed like a bunch of roses. He’s also got a white handkerchief in his top pocket, his cufflinks and his tiepin are gleaming, and so are his gold tooth and his broad smile.

‘My associate and the owner of the firm: Don Vito Altofini, with a degree in criminology from the University of Buenos Aires.’

At first Don Vito is a little surprised at his newly acquired academic title, but he quickly accepts it and goes one better.

‘A degree? How typically Spanish of you to underplay it. A doctorate, dear boy, a doctorate. And then there’s the Master in Criminology and a few other baubles from the MIT.’

‘So sorry, Don Vito, a doctorate in criminology, of course. We have before us a heartbreaking case. Because of a no-good woman, this gentleman’s son has disappeared.’

Don Vito takes this in solemnly, but can’t help murmuring: ‘“A no-good woman cost him his life...” Everything that’s said in tangos is true! Carry on, dear sir, carry on. Only a father whose hair is turning white and who doesn’t know where his own children might be can understand what you are going through.’

This speech visibly affects their client. He finds it hard to pick up the thread of his tale.

‘Thanks to that no-good woman, my son has become an enemy to me. And one day – I can see it as if it were happening right now – I arrived at my office and found all my closest associates with faces grim as death.’