The Foreigners (12 page)

“Are you married?” she asked.

Wow, I thought, cut to the chase. “No,” I said. “Are you?”

She smiled. “Second time.”

“Happily?” I asked.

Vera shrugged. “I say to him—‘One day I'll just go down to Retiro and get on a bus, whatever bus, and see where it takes me.'”

I felt a bit jittery in a nice way. Only in a beauty parlor could you arrive at this place in a conversation so fast.

“What happened with your first husband?” I asked.

“He died in Belarus. Gangrene. You know what that is? When the blood stops flowing. It happens a lot in cold countries. The arteries get blocked. Nothing's circulating and the limbs just die. He had to have one amputation after the next. First they cut off his big toe, then the next toe.”

“Jesus.”

“The doctor said smoking made it worse. He had to stop smoking. But Dima couldn't stop. The doctor said, ‘Stop smoking for your wife.' He couldn't do it.”

She had waxed my eyebrows and was now touching them up with tweezers.

“Dima never used to drink, which was rare for a Belarusian. That was actually what I had liked about him. I'd been in love with a different guy from my high school. We had been going out together for four years. But when he came back from military service, he was drunk all the time. He worked in an auto factory. I'd see him around on the streets. He'd be totally drunk. It was a small city. I hated that.”

She dabbed a little cream on the skin around my eyebrows and passed me a hand mirror so I could inspect them. She had shaped the arches very nicely.

“Great,” I said.

“Anything else?”

I hadn't been planning to do anything else, but I also wasn't ready to leave. “Like what could I do?” I asked.

She laughed. “Everything. Armpits, legs, toes, down here.” She pointed between her legs.

“Okay, I'll do legs,” I said.

I had never done this before. We both waited for a second.

“You have to take off your pants,” Vera said, seemingly delighted by my awkwardness.

“Oh, yeah, right.” I stood up and took off my blue jeans and lay back down again.

Vera went to stir the wax.

“How did you meet your husband?” I asked.

She came over and put a strip of hot wax on my leg.

“He worked in the company where I did. I was twenty. It was a marketing studio. We sold stuff to shopping malls. One day, he asked me to go out for coffee. The next day he came to work with his document and asked me to marry him. I went to meet his family. Neither of us had gone to university. But the people in his family had. His mother was a professor, his father a lawyer. They played chess. I fell in love with them.

“When there's a lot of love, there's a lot of suffering,” she went on.

She tapped on the strip of wax on my leg to see if it was dry, then pulled it.

“Owwww!” It hurt like hell. I looked up at Vera. What the hell was I doing to myself?

“Oops, okay, it's always the worst the first time. You have to breathe in.” She pressed my shoulder back down on the bed. “I'll tell you when.” She put another strip of wax down.

“But Dima and I weren't in love, we respected each other a lot. He was a wonderful companion. We had fights sometimes, but it didn't matter. We were always doing things. We'd stay up all night talking until six in the morning, then have coffee. Or we'd play cards. I always lost. Okay, breathe.”

I breathed in. She pulled the strip. It still hurt, but not quite so much.

“We had a little quinta, where we went to work on the weekends. We'd bring the kids. We went fishing. Or collected herbs or nuts, which we dried on the roof and sold at the pharmacy. You could get a certificate that said you had sold herbs at the pharmacy, which meant you could buy an imported piece of clothing or shoes. Everyone had money, that wasn't the problem, there just wasn't anything to buy. Okay, breathe.”

“Things started to change when he got the gangrene. They had to cut off a foot and then a leg. He started drinking and got aggressive. He felt a lot of pain. When he was drunk, he didn't feel it. He didn't want to be an invalid. We found out he could get a prosthesis in Germany, though it cost a lot. There was a war vet, from World War Two, who had one. He said to us, ‘Your husband's still young, he can do it.' But then they cut off the other leg. Breathe. By now, he was staying in the clinic. We would visit him. He was jealous and thought I had a lover. I didn't have a lover. I didn't even have time to think. Okay, turn over.”

I had been lying faceup and now lay facedown. She put wax all over the back of my legs.

“Finally, it was his birthday. He went to a friend's and got so drunk that the ambulance came. He died three days later. His organism was too weak to sustain all that alcohol.”

“My God,” I said.

“I cried a lot. I cried all the time during those years. That's why I never get depressed. I've never been depressed because I always cry. Okay, breathe.”

I thought about how hard it was for me to cry. Maybe the inverse was true for me. I'd been depressed for years because I hadn't cried. But before I could get to the end of that thought, Vera ripped off another strip. Another searing pain, that left my whole body quivering.

She returned to the pot of wax. I lay there thinking for a second. “What did you use to do in Belarus?” I asked.

“I was the manager of a hotel.”

Vera's situation in this sense was exactly the opposite of Isolde's. Argentina for Isolde had meant instant promotion. She had leaped ranks for essential reasons, she was Austrian. Vera had stepped down, joining the ranks of that worldwide league of immigrants who live in states of demotion, whose present occupations reflect in no way their past ones or the ones for which they've been trained. She had arrived eight years ago at the age of forty, with her children in tow. Coming here was a way for her son to avoid military service, which she wanted him to do, as it could be brutal. Through Belarusian contacts of her brother, she had gotten a job as a prep cook in a kitchen. She went each day to help the cook, chopping vegetables, sometimes washing dishes. She always dressed well. There was no other option. In Belarus, when you went out in public you always dressed well, a skirt, stockings, a blouse or sweater, nice shoes. To work in the kitchen, she'd put on an apron. It was a restaurant where they put on shows in the evening. It stayed open all night. She would leave in the morning hours. During the daytime, she began working in houses, cleaning and ironing. She worked in twelve houses a week. Eventually, she stopped working at the restaurant. She earned more in the houses and the hours were better, allowing her to spend more time with her children. After several years of this, she began training in the beauty trade, which she preferred to both.

“When I got here, I promised myself not to suffer in this country. I had suffered so much. Okay, anything else? Bikini line?”

I grimaced. “I don't know.”

When she smiled, she looked like a chipmunk. “It's nice,” she said. “For your boyfriend.” There was a blank where those words stood, but I didn't say that.

Oh, well, what the hell, I thought, since I seem to be trying everything else.

“Okay.” By now I knew the drill. I took off my underwear.

She looked. “You never did this before?”

I shook my head. I wasn't looking where she was. Already dreading it.

“How much do you want removed?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “How much are you supposed to?”

“You can take off everything or a little on the sides. Here, look.” I sat up and looked with her, the two of us staring matter-of-factly between my legs. “Or you can just leave a little strip here. That's what I do.”

“Okay,” I said, “let's do the little strip.”

She gobbed the wax on, then pulled. The pain here was what I'd felt earlier with the legs, only magnified at least a dozen times, dizzying. At first I couldn't believe it. I certainly couldn't speak. The skin afterward was pink and tingling. It also felt weird having a woman's hands moving so matter-of-factly over my private parts.

We were quiet for a while.

When she finished, there was, indeed, just a little strip. “Okay, take that off too,” I said. Vera laughed.

Afterward, Vera held up the hand mirror. “Look at that,” she said. I sat up and looked. It was a new sight, pink and gray, the curving folds all visible. Vera doused the whole area with powder.

I walked back across the bridge to the bus stop on the other side. I passed a boy, who glanced at me sideways. Then a woman in her fifties did a double take. Passing under the jacaranda, the translucent violet bells littering the ground, leaving the branches bare, I felt sure everyone knew.

The guy who had kissed her at the party, Diego, had entered Isolde's brainstream. “I can't stop thinking about him,” she told me. “I actually wrote to him the other day when I was sitting in the
locutorio
. I looked up his name on a group invitation and sent him an e-mail.”

“What did you say?”

She shrugged. “I invited him to meet for coffee or a drink sometime. He didn't write back right away. Then this morning he did. I'll forward you the e-mail. You can tell me what you think.”

She actually did send me the e-mail. Avoiding her question, full of prance and seduction, a male ruffling his feathers, it opened:

Isolde looked up the quote online. It was from Tennyson's “The Princess.” So he thinks of me as a princess? she thought. She pressed for a meeting. Diego wrote back another ornate e-mail, then silence, then at her urging, finally relented. “It felt like that,” she said. He suggested they meet at a bar downtown. In inimitable detail, as only Isolde could, she told me what had happened.

Diego arrived a bit late, swaggering in his long leather coat, which he obviously thought was very cool. He had faint beer cigarette breath, large features, nose and lips, a cleft in his chin, and a shaded, guarded look, though at the same time his brown eyes, slightly small, were warm. Isolde noticed that his fingernails were clean, as if they'd been cared for. His cool guy behavior was both absurd and delighted her. She pictured kissing him, his mouth, again.

He worked in the music industry, he told her. “But I get bored easily,” he said. “Now if I had money, I'd do a lot of crazy shit,” he said, “like Howard Hughes kind of shit.”

“What did Howard Hughes do?”

“You know, he produced these crazy movies, he was an engineer and flew planes, he broke all the world records for airline speeding.” He snickered. “Now that made sense that he had money. But usually it's the wrong guys who have the money. They have it but they don't
do
things with it.”

He was looking at her sideways, wary, not entirely looking at her, but musing about her, she could feel it. Something about him made her comfortable. Was it that, despite his whole cool act, he was afraid?

“What about you? What are you up to?”

Isolde, as always, was slightly taken aback. “Oh, I'm working on a project to connect artists around the world,” she said.

He seemed amused. “Uh-huh.” But seeing as she didn't elaborate, he quickly returned to the subject of himself.

“The music shit's fine. I like music, the weird shit, the stuff no one else likes and that you can never sell, but what I'm really interested in is science.”

“Science?”

“Yeah, science is my hobby.” He was obviously trying to seduce, his arrogance mixed with innocence. But Isolde was also beginning to think he had a propensity to ramble.

“Hey,” she said. “Should we walk a bit?”

He seemed surprised. “Okay,” he said.

They began walking toward the Plaza San Martín.

“Do you live around here?” Isolde asked.

“Yeah.”

“Where's your apartment?”

“Back that way. It's my parents' place. I moved back in after the crash.”

Living with his parents, this surprised her.

They had arrived at the grassy slope that tumbled down from the Plaza San Martín.

“See, here,” he said, pointing to a grassy patch. “This is where the first slave market was held.” He snickered. “Should we honor the sacred ground?” He sat. She followed suit.

“Anyway, systems theory is my latest thing,” he said.

Oh, boy, here we go again, she thought.

“What's that?” she asked.

“It's this idea that everything is organized into systems. Everything, all around us. And there are systems within systems.”

“What's an example of a system?” she asked.

“Well, society is a system. So is your brain. Each system has an inertia, meaning a structure that stays the same, though it's also a dynamic thing in constant interaction with everything around it. When a system is stable, it absorbs a disruption, receiving stimuli and readjusting its structure. Of course, this means that systems have these very complicated feedback processes. A whole complex chain of causes and effects is triggered until the system reworks itself into a new stability, which might have been entirely unforeseen by the researcher.”

She was letting the images bloom in her brain. “Okay, but does it ever happen that a system can't absorb a disruption?”