What We Become (21 page)

“I thought I had killed a man,” he said at last, in a neutral tone, “so I enlisted in the Spanish Foreign Legion . . . Then I discovered he wasn't dead, but by then it was too late.”

“A fight?”

“Something like that.”

“Over a woman?”

“Nothing so romantic. He owed me money.”

“How much?”

“Enough for me to stab him with his own knife.”

He noticed her eyes gleam. With pleasure, perhaps. Max thought he knew that look from a few hours earlier.

“Why the Foreign Legion?”

He screwed up his eyes, recollecting the harsh sunlight in the streets and squares of Barcelona, afraid of running into a policeman, anxious at his own shadow, and the poster on a wall outside number nine, Prats de Molló:
To those whom life has betrayed, who are out of work, who live aimlessly and without hope: Honor and pride.

“They paid three pesetas a day,” he said briefly. “And a man who changes his identity is safe in the Legion.”

Mecha opened her mouth again slightly. Avid as before. Curious.

“That's good. . . . You enlist and you become someone else?”

“Something like that.”

“You must have been very young.”

“I lied about my age. They didn't seem to care.”

“I love the idea. Do they take women?”

Afterward, she wanted to know about the rest of his life, and Max alluded briefly to a few of the steps that led him to the ballroom on the
Cap Polonio
. Oran, the Vieux Port in Marseille, the cheap cabarets in Paris.

“Who was she?”

“She?”

“The lover who taught you how to tango.”

“Why do you assume she was a lover and not a dance teacher?”

“Some things are obvious, ways of dancing, for example. . . .”

He remained silent for a while, mulling it over, then he lit a cigarette and spoke a little about Boske. The barest minimum. In Marseille he had met a Hungarian dancer, who had then taken him to Paris. She bought him a tuxedo and they performed as dance partners at Le Lapin Agile and other two-bit establishments. For a while.

“Was she beautiful?”

The tobacco smoke tasted bitter, and Max automatically threw his cigarette into the oily waters of the Riachuelo.

“Yes. For a while.”

He refrained from telling her more, although the images rushed back into his mind: Boske's splendid body, her black hair, bobbed in the style of Louise Brooks, her beautiful face smiling beneath straw or felt hats, amid the bustle of the Montparnasse cafés, where, with remarkable naïveté, she insisted class differences no longer existed. Always provocative and passionate in her slang-ridden Marseille accent and her gravelly voice, she was ready for anything. A dancer and occasional model, she would sit on the terrace of Le D
Ô
me or La Closerie des Lilas on one of the wicker chairs in front of a café-crème or a glass of cheap gin, surrounded by American tourists, writers who never wrote, and painters who never painted. “
Je danse et je pose
,” she would declare for all to hear, as though peddling her body in search of paintbrushes and fame. She would breakfast at one in the afternoon (she and Max rarely went to bed before dawn) in her favorite place, Chez Rosalie, where she met her Hungarian and Polish friends who supplied her with vials of morphine. Casting a greedy, calculating eye about her for well-dressed men, women in jewelry, expensive fur coats, and luxurious automobiles cruising up and down the boulevard. Just as every night she would
watch the customers at the second-rate cabaret where she and Max danced graceful tangos, she in silk and he in a white tie, or clinging Apache tangos, he wearing a striped shirt and she black stockings. Always waiting for the suitable face and the decisive word. For the opportunity that never came.

“And what became of that woman?” Mecha asked.

“She got left behind.”

“How far behind?”

He didn't reply. Mecha continued to look at him, admiringly.

“How did you move into high society?”

Very slowly, Max was returning to Buenos Aires. His eyes once again contemplating the streets of La Boca converging on the little square, the banks of the Riachuelo, and the Avellaneda Bridge. Mecha's face peering at him inquisitively, surprised, perhaps, by the tension in his own expression. Max blinked as if the bright daylight bothered him as much as the searing glare of Barcelona, Melilla, Oran, or Marseille. The glare of Buenos Aires stung his eyes, already dazzled by another more somber, ancient light, with Boske sprawled on their disheveled bed, her face to the wall. Her pale, naked back motionless in the gray shadows of a dawn as soiled as life itself. And Max, silently closing the door on that vision, as someone might furtively slide the lid over a casket.

“That isn't difficult in Paris,” he replied simply. “The different social classes mingle a lot. People with money frequent low-life bars . . . like you and your husband at La Ferroviaria; only they don't need an excuse.”

“I see. I am not quite sure how to take that.”

“I had a friend in Africa,” he went on, ignoring her protest. “I mentioned him to you on the boat as well.”

“I remember. The Russian aristocrat with the long name. You told me he died.”

Max nodded, almost relieved. It was easier for him to talk about that than about Boske, half-naked in the misty morning on Rue de
Furstenberg, about his last glimpse of the syringe, the empty vials, the glasses, bottles, and leftover food on the table, the dim half-light so close to remorse. That Russian friend, he said, had claimed he was an officer in the Tsar's army. He fought with the White Guard until the retreat at Crimea, and from there he went to Spain, where he enlisted in the Legion after an argument over a wager. He was a peculiar fellow: condescending, debonair, popular with the ladies. He had taught Max good manners, provided him with the first basic veneer (how to knot a tie, fold a pocket handkerchief, explaining which hors d'oeuvres, ranging from anchovies to caviar, should accompany a glass of iced vodka). It amused him, he once remarked, to transform a bit of cannon fodder into something that could pass for a gentleman.

“He had relatives exiled in Paris, where some made a living as hotel porters or taxi drivers. Others had managed to salvage their money, among them a cousin who owned a few tango cabarets. One day, I went to see his cousin, he hired me, and things improved. . . . I was able to buy the right clothes, to live reasonably well, and to travel a bit.”

“And what happened to your Russian friend? . . . How did he die?”

This time Max's memories weren't somber. At least not in the conventional sense. His mouth twisted in a compassionate grimace as he thought of the last time he had seen Second Lieutenant Dolgoruki-Bragation, holed up in the most expensive room at the Tauima brothel with three whores and a bottle of brandy, whence, having finished with one then the others, he embarked upon life's final adventure.

“He was bored. He shot himself because he was bored.”

Max is sitting at a table outside the Bar Ercolano, beneath the palm trees and the clock tower in Piazza Tasso, with his glasses on
to read the newspapers. It is midmorning, the busiest time in the old quarter, and the occasional noise of a car exhaust pipe makes him look up from his reading. No one there today would think the tourist season was in its death throes: the tables outside Il Fauno, opposite, are all taken up by people enjoying a lunchtime drink; at the entrance to Via San Cesareo the stalls selling fish, fruit, and vegetables are crowded; and noisy swarms of Fiats, Vespas, and Lambrettas drive up and down Corso Italia. The only thing not moving are the horse-drawn carriages waiting for tourists, while their bored drivers stand in groups beneath the marble statue of the poet Torquato Tasso, chatting and smoking as they watch the women go by.

Il Mattino
features a long article about the Keller-Sokolov contest, and the various matches they have played. The last ended in a draw, and apparently that puts the Russian ahead. According to the explanation Lambertucci and Captain Tedesco gave Max, each game won is worth a point, and when the opponents draw, they both mark up half a point. As things stand, Sokolov has two and half points to Keller's one and a half. An indecisive lead, the specialist reporters agree. Max has spent a while reading all this with great interest, although skipping the technical details cloaked in strange terms like the
Spanish Gambit
, the
Petrosian System
, and the
Nimzo Indian Defense
.

The newspapers all highlight the tension surrounding the contest, not so much due to the fifty thousand dollars the winner will receive but rather the political and diplomatic situation. According to what Max has just read, the Russians have held on to the international chess crown for the past twenty years, the title of world champion having been won by successive grand masters from the Soviet Union. Since the Communist Revolution, the game has become a national sport (fifty million players out of a population of two hundred-odd million, according to one of the articles), and a valuable propaganda tool beyond the Iron Curtain, to the point
where every chess competition enjoys the state's full backing. As a result, according to one of the journalists, Moscow is throwing all its resources into the Campanella Chess Contest, since Jorge Keller in five months' time will be challenging Sokolov for the world title (informal capitalist heterodoxy versus rigorous Soviet orthodoxy), in what, after the thrilling prologue in Sorrento, promises to be the chess contest of the century.

Max takes another sip of Negroni and leafs through the newspaper, skimming the headlines: the Beatles plan to break up, French rock star Johnny Hallyday attempts suicide, long hair and short skirts revolutionize England. . . . The international political section refers to other revolutions: the Red Guards continue their attack on Peking, in America colored people are demanding civil rights, and a group of mercenaries is detained while attempting to intervene in Katanga. On the page, between a headline about the launch of another Gemini space mission (“USA Heads Race to Moon”) and an advertisement for gasoline (“Put a tiger in your tank”), is a black-and-white image of a burly American GI, his back to the photographer, giving a piggyback ride to a little Vietnamese boy, who has turned his head and is staring distrustfully at the camera.

An Alfa Romeo Giulia goes by with the windows down, and for an instant Max thinks he recognizes the tune playing on the car radio. Looking up from the photograph of the GI and the boy (it has brought back memories of other soldiers and children, ­forty-five years ago), he gazes with a puzzled air at the car as it heads toward the yellow-and-white façade of Santa Maria del Carmine at the far end of the Corso Italia. Still absorbed by the newspaper, his brain takes a few seconds to identify the music his ear has already registered: the familiar strains of the popular classic, in an arrangement for orchestra with drums and electric guitar, among others, commonly known for the last forty years as the Old School Tango.

When Max halted midstep to perform the
corte
, Mecha looked into his eyes for a moment, before boldly pressing herself up against him, snaking this way and that, and sliding her thigh up and down his leg, firmly thrust forward. He stoically resisted the feel of her flesh beneath her thin crepe dress, their extraordinary intimacy, while everyone in La Ferroviaria (a dozen pairs of eyes, both male and female) seemed fixed upon them. Then Max stepped sideways, and she instantly followed with effortless grace.

“That's what I like,” she whispered. “Slow and steady, don't let them think you're afraid of me.”

Max placed his lips close to her right ear. Enjoying the game, regardless of the risks.

“You're quite a woman,” he said.

“You ought to know.”

Her proximity, the soft scent of perfume lingering on her skin, the tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip and at the roots of her hair, reawakened the desire freshly imprinted on his memory of warm, languid flesh, the aroma of sated sex and a woman's perspiration, as he felt her skin grow moist once more, the thin fabric of her dress swaying in time to the tango. It was late and the warehouse was all but empty. The three-man band was playing “Chiqué,” to which only two other couples were tangoing halfheartedly, like tramcars on slow tracks: a small, chubby woman accompanied by a youth wearing a jacket and collarless shirt with no tie, and the Slavic-looking woman Max had danced with on the previous occasion. She was wearing the same floral blouse and moving with a bored expression in the arms of a fellow in a vest and shirtsleeves who could have been a docker. Occasionally, as they danced, the couples drew near to each other, and for a second the woman's blue eyes met those of Max. Indifferent.