I looked through the three windows to my left and observed: no visible disturbance. The travelers gathered on the domestic departures platform, the squat family floated on the Bolivia platform, and the old man was still peeling his orange. To my east a fence, an empty, weed-broken concrete expanse (toward Ramos Mejiá, this expanded into a parking lot), another double set of empty platforms and tracks, Padre Carlos Mugica, and the spike-shaped southern tip of the shantytown, its roofs now dark. I let go of my sighing suitcase as the voice on the phone continued to chirrup. I checked the other platforms and the station exit again: no security officers swarmed out to arrest me, nothing at all except the aborted and dental platform lights. The distance to earth from this platform was negligible, about five feet, so — I leaped down. No one, I realized, could see me. No track workers, no signalmen paced this section, and I had a clear path to the fence. Cold and greased beneath my fingers, like the fence at the meat distribution company on Zenz. I was contemplating how best to climb over, when I saw a tear, half-concealed by a clump of melic, its furry stem tips nodding in the breeze. Gravel spattered as I worked my way through, and a sharp-ended cut fence link tore open my windbreaker, but not my skin.
The Department’s arrogance, its grand insult, resounded. I saw no one, no one at all in the parking lot, the cars (all white) contained no one and no attendant’s booth shone out at the front. Through the silence, the silence that always blankets the zone around train yards, the kiosk phone went on chirping. Even the mingling announcements from within Retiro reached my ears. I kept trotting along in the twilight, not too fast, toward the unwatched gate in the fence facing Ramos Mejiá. Above it curled a stunted, scentless jacaranda.
13.
THE CITIZENS OF THE shantytown — in effect, the truest porteños — kept late working hours. This I observed for myself.
From ornament boxes or tangled piles, they lifted watch buckles, metal studs for trimming handbags, rolls of sateen lining, golden rabbit-shaped labels reading GENUINE PAMPAS HARE. A whole family in one house, mother, father, and triplet sons, all three faces stained red by a repetitive birthmark, sat at a card table and worked; in another, an old man and an old woman — who might have been siblings or husband and wife — engaged in the same labor as their radio blared out a Chopin barcarolle (I knew because my friend and colleague whistled phrases from it if her fury prevented her from speaking). Many of the shantytown dwellers, regardless of their age, wore jeweler’s loupes, which lent an inexplicable and utterly sinister element to their appearances. Euclidean scissors flashed in the dense, yellowed light, needles leaped and thread followed, pulled along with a nineteenth-century strength.
And in every house, too, I saw the same piles of objects next to the worktable. Stiff, hairy polygons, in many cases with the skin over the skull and the tail attached. The shantytowners worked with such speed that I saw the hides fully transformed: the pelt of a former fox terrier (I thought) was sliced up in threes and made into watchbands, and with the skin that once covered a mastiff the old couple sewed a handbag. They caught me spying but didn’t seem to care, they both grinned and waved, and called out: Good evening, sir. Then they sewed a clasp onto the handbag’s gaping mouth, set it aside, and picked up another skin. Ink-black and softly shining.
As befits a sufferer in a dream, I had no specific idea where I was, only that I was heading northwest toward my goaclass="underline" the American Consulate on Colombia just south of Avenida de Libertador. Streets here, however, had no names. The lanes and alleys lacked public lighting as well. Most illumination came from within the houses. The shantytown dwellers filled the narrow streets, moving from house to house, asking their neighbors how the work was going, reporting on their own “progress” — that’s the term they used repeatedly. A young man, tall and wedge-shaped, wearing an amethyst-purple tracksuit with the name KATALINSKI lettered across the shoulders, seemed to be organizing this procedure. He looked in almost every window, smiled, waved, and reminded the dwellers: There’s a truck coming every day this week, so don’t worry if you have too much for the A shipment. He even said hello to me. Smiling, silent children, boys and girls alike, weaved left and right, pushing wheelbarrows full of skins (heading southeast) or finished goods (heading northwest, like me). Katalinski paid close attention throughout all his greetings and unctuous encouragements to the wheelbarrow bearers, nodding, making hard, curt gestures with a finger, and the kids obeyed with a speed that unnerved me.
Above us was the Illia overpass; the shantytown dwellers had continued building without interruption beneath it; here exterior bulbs dangled more abundantly than before, to compensate for the shadow cast by the overpass and the concrete pylons supporting it; here the lanes widened and wheelbarrow drivers traded loads of finished goods for loads of skins. Around us children furiously unloaded and reloaded wheelbarrows, and they whistled or shouted greetings at the man in the amethyst tracksuit. Katalinski circled and roved through the crowd. I cut out from the overpass shadow, he darted across my path, gave me a sour glance, and vanished behind a cubical house. I walked up a gentle rise. Beyond the low roofs, beyond the railyard, the first greenswards of Recoleta appeared, the Parque Thays and the United Nations plaza, resembling black lakes. Along Mugica, alone and loud, a blue van coursed, and I crouched next to a house where an adolescent woman held a dachshund skin up to the grimy bulb hanging from her ceiling, ignoring me.
In each sharp shadow I saw a security officer, I saw Luxemburg. Hard-beaten dirt spread emptily and tawnily before the doorways. No bowls, no meat, nothing. Blue plastic-walled outdoor toilets (surrounded by clouds of night-born flies) stood in for interior plumbing; filthy rivulets ran down the center of many streets, even down the main streets — children and adults alike plashed through them, spattered in graying muck up to the ankle, up to the knee. The dwellers, too, kept close together, moving in streams or swarms.
Two wheelbarrows collided. The children pushing them, a boy and a girl in identical jeans and T-shirts advertising the Ojea Meat Company, started to swear at each other, swear and laugh. I collapsed against a stack of tractor tires in fear, my knees bent, the porous, stinking rubber struck my right cheek. The girl was heaping up the purses that had slipped from the boy’s wheelbarrow, and the boy was arranging the skins that had fallen from the girl’s (by size, largest to smallest, and with shocking speed). They both kept looking at me as Katalinski had done: with dark, soured glances. After they’d finished loading up the purses once more, they did not seize the wheelbarrows and drive them away but embraced each other, whispering and looking at me. Katalinski appeared and tousled their hair, and they forgot all about me, it seemed. My fear receded. I staggered past the stacked tires, staggered along in the street muck, as the light, heavy tread of Katalinski continued to resound behind me. My lungs burned from the few miles I had walked and from the effort I expended in my assault on the clerk. The long lane stretched into the gray-green darkness, where the houses lost their distinct outlines, where the proleptic haze of the parks was soon to begin. Behind me open laughter and mockery rang out. The shantytown dwellers chuckling (I assumed) at my hesitation. A smeared shout rose and died, too quickly for me to determine its meaning. The word “azogue,” that was the single word I knew it had contained — in that shimmered a sinister threat. Like the faint train whistles punctuating the radio noise.