Lascano? How ’re you doing, Fermin? I see you got a promotion. Please, please, come in. I can’t believe it. I saw you, dead, right here in front of the door. Well, I guess I wasn’t that dead. I can’t believe it. Start believing it.
It takes Fermin a good while to get over his shock. Lascano invents a story that will suit his temperament. Fermin is sincerely happy that Lascano has survived, this despite the fact that Lascano was the one who arrested him for robbery when he was a young man. Perro had rescued him, half dead from fear, right at the moment they were about to work him over, hard.
Look, Fermin, I’m here because I got this crazy idea. I don’t know if you remember that I opened a safe deposit box. I remember very well. What happened to it, does it still exist? Nope. The bank changed ownership, I mean, just between us, the only thing that changed was the name and the decor. Then, when they started the construction that turned this into what you now see, they notified the owners of the inactive boxes and gave them a certain amount of time to come by the bank and close out their accounts. Those who didn’t show up, their boxes were opened in front of a notary. I handled it personally. There were three or four, and one of them was yours. They were all empty. I see.
Perro looks down, the little wisp of hope vanishes without a trace, just as he suspected it would. Fermin notices.
Are you in trouble?
Sticking in bits and pieces of the true story, and seasoning it just right to prevent him from getting the idea that it would be dangerous to help him, Lascano spins a yarn about political rivalry within the department that, along with his gunshot wounds, left him on the street. He tells him he’s hoping to recover the money that was in the safe deposit box, which no longer exists, and which, it appears, a treacherous female associate has stolen from him. When Lascano says “female associate” Fermin understands “lover”, and he doesn’t ask the amount or the source of the money. Nobody would ever think that a police superintendent would have a safe deposit box to stash his salary, and these days no banker is going to worry about where money comes from.
What are you planning to do? I’ve got a few job interviews. But it’s not easy. These days, if you’re over thirty-five you’re all washed up.
They keep conversing until Fermin has to attend to an important client. They agree to meet another day after work, and Fermin tells him he’ll see what he can do for him.
Even though Fermin came away thinking exactly what Lascano wanted him to, the visit brought about no tangible results. He needs to reflect, and walking is the best way he knows to do that. His world has shrunk even further. By now, he’s got almost nothing left. With Jorge’s death — whether brought about by the Apostles or a gift to them from Heaven — they won the battle. Chances are high that his own life’s in danger. Suddenly he’s overwhelmed by that same confused, diffuse and constant fear he had during the dictatorship, that sensation that at any moment he could be captured, tortured and killed. He doesn’t know if his friend, Fuseli, and Eva, his too-brief lover, are in exile or if the military made them disappear. He wants to believe, he hopes, they managed to escape. Then, just as he turns down Corrientes, she appears: crossing the street diagonally toward him. He catches a brief glimpse of her profile as she walks by. Is it her? The air she stirs up as she walks past swirls around him. He feels like he’s falling into the slipstream of foaming pheromones she leaves in her wake. Her catlike walk compels him to quicken his pace, like the cyclist who drafts behind a truck, taking advantage of the vacuum created by the movement of a body through space. Suddenly, she breaks into a trot to get to the bus waiting at the stop, and she boards. When she’s on the stairs he calls out her name, she turns, it’s her, it’s not her. As this anonymous woman departs, Lascano sees the love of his life, love lost. He remembers Marisa’s coffin being carried along the paths of the La Tablada cemetery, Fuseli’s last words on the telephone, the foreshortened figure he saw from where he lay bleeding on the ground: Eva running away. That very real Eva who loved him one stormy night. Just when he thought he had nothing more to lose, she appeared, and from there unfolded the entire story that has brought him to this exact moment when he truly has nobody or nothing left. Lascano angrily pops two aspirins into his mouth and bites into them; the sound echoes inside his head like a pair of smashed and broken testicles.
11
He’s been wandering aimlessly around the house ever since he woke up, out of sorts, unable to make sense of what he’s doing, but finally it’s the clock that gives him orders about how to proceed. He has to quickly get dressed. He hates rushing. Last night Vanina suggested they meet for breakfast. For her, it’s always “we have to talk”. She’s always going on about their relationship, their connection. Marcelo has the impression that all those years of psychoanalysis poisoned her language and that “we have to talk” comes so frequently it can’t be healthy, even though to her it seems the most natural thing in the world.
In the elevator, he presses his briefcase between his legs and finishes adjusting his tie. The outside world greets him with a massive traffic jam accompanied by a deafening symphony of insults and honking. Buenos Aires drivers are a plague. He looks at his watch and calculates that he’ll arrive no less than ten or fifteen minutes late. He knows Vanina will wait for him, but only so she can tell him how angry she is, a privilege she allows herself because she herself is never late. To top it off he wants to get to the office early, he’s got a ton of things to do, but as he didn’t write anything down he’s afraid he’ll forget. Last night, on his way home from his mother’s house, he had a breakthrough on the Biterman case. In a moment of inspiration he saw each and every step he needed to take as well as the order he should take them in — which is as important as the steps themselves. He told himself he was going to write it all down in his little grey notebook on his way to meet Vanina, but he has now decided to walk to avoid the traffic. To make matters worse, he knows that Vanina is going to come with demands, a pile of questions about their intimacy, and what are we going to do about it, and she’ll make the whole thing so tangled and complicated that he’ll be left totally in the dark. The light changes just as he gets to the corner of 9 de Julio, leaving him stranded. The avenue roars in front of him like a tsunami of metal bodies. He stares at the little man in the box, and waits anxiously for him to start blinking on and off. The only way to cross the widest avenue in the world on one light is to run. So Marcelo runs and keeps running till he gets to the corner of Corrientes and Uruguay, where Vanina will be waiting for him, a stone in each hand to throw at him. Not so long ago he played rugby, so he’s in good enough shape to dash down these few blocks, using evasive manoeuvres to avoid all the other creatures in the judicial jungle who, at this hour of the day, are also rushing to be among the first to arrive at the courthouse. Half a block before El Foro he reduces his pace to a brisk walk, taking deep breaths to slow down his pulse. He tries to locate Vanina through the window, but he doesn’t see her. He enters and looks for her at all the tables brimming with coffee cups, croissants, cigarettes, newspapers and legal briefs. She’s not there. Were they supposed to meet here or in Ouro Preto? No, it was here, he’s certain. A young female lawyer, wearing a very tight pin-striped blue suit, gets up to leave, prompting a wave of greedy stares. She walks by him, her breasts pushing against the buttons of her white blouse, stretching the buttonholes and producing a gap through which he glimpses the delicate lace of her brassiere. She leaves in her wake a cloud of sickly sweet perfume, easily compensated for by the sight of her hips’ enchanting ability to slip between the tables. Marcelo sits down in the chair she has just vacated. He can feel the warmth of this fantastic woman’s body that still permeates the vinyl.