I didn’t have to wait long. The sun above passed from the green tip of one grass stalk to the white panicle of another. Then Luxemburg’s rapid, even footsteps began to rustle, as they had that evening we first met in the history department’s evacuated hallway. She had her gun drawn and raised and she was not running, she cast regular glances to her left and right as she paced forward. In this manner she saw me. I fired as soon as she rotated her numismatic profile. She staggered and fell. The sound of my gunshot almost obscured hers. I had, by sheer chance, struck her squarely in the chest. Her blood, i.e., pearly darkness: well, it appeared. She tried to sit up and failed, proof that my own insult had worked on her. I had so successfully crushed and insulted her that she could not sit up. Because I did not want to walk all the way back to the place I’d left Klemperer, I did not use my shovel this time. I used the butt of her gun. It lay next to another clump of cinquefoil turning its leaves up in a minor breeze.
She shit herself when her forehead caved in. The smell mingled with the smells of the grass, the air, the sunlight, my own sweat, her blood, my blood, Klemperer’s blood, the earth. The crushed and insulted can behave in whatever manner they choose, assuming they have a choice. If they have no choice, this iron and mustache-like law still stands. Therefore the soul exists. No thanks to the great defecator, God. Amen.
15.
AHEAD OF ME, FLOATING in the dimness, a stripe of raw-looking flesh. It belonged to no one, no one at all.
Instead, I decided to observe the meat truck that had been driving next to me almost since I left the field near Cañuelas. The driver smiled through his window. I returned the smile through mine. He mistook me, I think, for a Departmental officer. I was wearing Klemperer’s uniform and over it the sky-blue windbreaker I found folded into a dense, loud oblong beneath the passenger seat. The windbreaker hid the blood speckling its collar and epaulettes and concealed, as well, the widening, continental stain my own blood was leaving on the cloth. I’d shoved Luxemburg’s undershirt against the wound. I didn’t know if Ojea’s drivers had to obey a protocol regarding Departmental officers. This driver, my driver, seemed intent on screening me from traffic, and thus from threats. Possibly he was obeying; possibly he was concerned about my fate. The huge blue words on the side panel vibrated along with the nonexistent carbuncles. I was concerned at first that these visual phenomena would interfere with my ability to drive, but they did not.
Violeta’s admonition about the airport closure concerned me. Or rather it concerned Pasternak. I myself felt only a mild eddy, a mild disturbance. Besides, it was almost sunset now, almost dusk. Had I slept, after dragging myself into the driver’s seat? In any case, time was lost, no matter how or how much. Other people seemed to be heading for the airport, taxis streamed toward the same off-ramp I took. When we pulled into the complex of overpasses and access roads around Pistarini, it was clear the airport was fully operational. Indeed, there was not even any residual traffic or congestion. I reached the long-term lot without difficulty (except for a few more sprays of pink foam from my mouth, because I’d started to cough). There was a line, but a normal one, and it made no difference because the parking attendants waved me ahead of the cars waiting. No one objected, I watched in the rearview mirror for rebellion among the drivers and passengers I was defrauding, but their faces remained set, still, uniform. The roofed lot smelled like gasoline. Lackeys in sky-blue coveralls, like the one I had seen effacing Ana’s name from her office door, carried red cans into a dark doorway near where I parked. I stepped down from the van. They averted their eyes from my passage. Luxemburg’s undershirt was warm and tacky against my skin, dense now with my own blood. The parking lot elevator stank of gasoline more strongly than the lot itself. A lackey had spilled fuel here and said nothing. Silence being the number one weapon of lackeys.
On a high walkway inside the main terminal, I watched through a window a detachment of my fellow officers (so to speak) marching out past the runways to the fen-like waste fields that surrounded Pistarini. The air I inhaled still cold and still sweet. I counted four officers, three women and one man, all carrying shovels. They reached a far point out in the field and set to work, their shovels glinting in the sunlight. They dug and they dug. Gray earth flew in spurts. The hole, rectilinear, deepened, grew darker, a void in the bright day. They stopped work. Their mouths moved in laughter. One, a woman, planted her shovel blade in the ground. From this ground, it seemed, some tender, some human curl was arising, black and dense. Above the digging officers, planes angled earthward. On the north terminal wall, a sky-blue banner hung. From ceiling to floor. It too trembled in the ceaseless, invisible breeze. Sketched on it in outline the features of Sanchis Mira. Mustache, necktie. His large hands at rest on a closed book. All the porteños in the airport ignored the banner; all the tourists pointed at it and murmured, assuring each other that it was a statesman, an Argentine statesman long dead. One even guessed it was Pistarini himself. It must be, he muttered, or why would they hang it so prominently? The tourists did not avert their eyes from mine as I passed among them, but the porteños did.
I first stumbled near the men’s room entrance. A lackey in a coverall was mopping the floor. I caught myself against the jamb. The lackey plunged his mop into the bucket on gray wheels that he would push through the airport and then through eternity. I muttered to him: Be more careful where you splash that water, you fucking faggot. He started mopping again as soon as I finished speaking, he wheeled the bucket away. The axles whined. In the men’s room, I unzipped my windbreaker. The right side of Klemperer’s shirt, hip to armpit, was bloodstained. I unbuttoned it to examine the wound. I pressed the flesh around the neat, dense hole. No pain, just lightness. The male officer with the shovel barged into the bathroom just as I finished zipping the windbreaker closed again over my hastily buttoned shirt. The shovel’s dented head carried crusts of gray earth. One crust tumbled to the white floor and shattered. The noise pure and thunderous, like the initial rumor of a storm. The stall door slammed. The officer started to grunt. I swallowed the blood and bile filling my mouth.
A few droplets, a few ovate droplets. I couldn’t avoid leaving them behind me as I crossed the terminal. I felt them slide down my arm, down my hand, and before I could close my fist and smear them away, they fell from my fingertips. Always some effluvium, Pasternak. Or even refulgence. I was lighter and lighter, lighter with every step. Fortunate, because it allowed me to continue, and unfortunate because the world grew heavier and heavier, so heavy that even the glances of passersby and tourists weighed me down. Someone kept demanding someone else over the announcement system. Would a Mr. Sordini (or Sortini, I couldn’t tell) please report to the courtesy lounge. In Spanish, in English. A white roaring, too, underlay the words. A sea, the hidden sea. I walked, I floated, so to speak, behind a couple with matching haircuts and suitcases.