Authors: Guillermo Orsi
Holy City
Holy City
Translated from the Spanish by
Nick Caistor
Guillermo Orsi
An imprint of Quercus
New York ⢠London
© 2009 by Guillermo Orsi
Translation © 2012 by Nick Caistor
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ISBN 978-1-62365-245-6
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual personsâliving or deadâevents, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ALSO BY GUILLERMO ORSI IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
No-one Loves a Policeman
(2010)
To Raúl ArgemÃ, Carlos Balcameda,
Juan Ramón Biedma and Alejandro Gallo
âin alphabetical order, as in film credits.
To Eduardo, my brother.
To Estela, my partner
.
You were the messenger of my death,
Of my metamorphosis.
ROBERT BROWNING
The spider you saved has bitten you.
What can you do about it?
When God is far away!
Don't even trust your brothers,
They hang you from the Cross â¦
“DESENCUENTRO,” A TANGO BY
ANÃBAL TROlLO AND
CÃTULO CASTILLO
PART ONE The Queen of the RÃo de la Plata
PART TWO Pichuco Opens his Eyes
PART THREE God Exists, Man Only Sometimes
PART FOUR Happiness is for Fools and Madmen
TOURIST GUIDE: JESUS CHRIST HAS HIS OWN THEME PARK IN BUENOS AIRES
Buenos Aires (A.F.P.).â
The crowd cannot contain its wonder at the sight of Christ crucified on Golgotha. Some of them cross themselves. Not far away, Roman soldiers keep watch, ignoring the peasant women in garish costumes who are selling Oriental sweets
â¦
this is the
Holy Land
theme park
.
Although only the heat is reminiscent of the banks of the River Jordan, here every weekend on the shores of the RÃo de la Plata in Buenos Aires the founders of the Holy Land religious park are recreating the real atmosphere for a cardboard Jerusalem
.
Next to the airport for domestic flights, this park, which according to its owners is “unique in the entire world,” is entirely dedicated to religion, above all the Christian beliefs. Although its seven hectares also contain a “mosque” and a “synagogue,” the park concentrates on the Christian religion and the life of Christ
.
From the first moment, visitors are invited to witness the birth of Christ in the kind of staging that is repeated throughout all the “attractions” in the park
.
Deep inside a cave, a life-sized polyester crib takes the visitor back to Christmas Eve alongside an ox, an ass and articulated Three Kings
.
The Catholic Church has given the park its blessing. The archbishop of Buenos Aires has called it a “place of cultural and spiritual enrichment”
.
WATERFALLS, TANGO, STEAKS, GLACIERS AND WHALES AT KNOCKDOWN PRICES
Buenos Aires (United Press).â
Savage devaluations are the means by which the economic powers in Argentina regularly carry out their “profit-taking.” The one that took place in 2002
â
which tripled the value of the U.S. dollar
â
made fortunes overnight for the country's grain exporters and brought in foreign tourists like flies to honey
.
A country which has glaciers that crumble on cue, which shares with Brazil the biggest waterfalls in the world, which has leaping whales and a capital city with echoes of Europe where you can dance the tango and eat the best grass-fed beef in the open air is, without a doubt, a wonderful bargain for visitors
.
The Queen of the RÃo de la Plata
1
The cop leaning on the door of his patrol car smoking a cigarette under the Avenida Mosconi bridge is dimly aware of a car zigzagging along Avenida General Paz at 140 k.p.h. He ought to put out a call for the driver to be pulled in for speeding and reckless driving. Instead, he prefers to take another lungful of his ghastly blond tobacco. Some day he's going to give up smoking, he tells himself, but when? Not as long as he's a policeman, that's for sure.
In the boot of the car veering from one side to the other as it careers down the highway, its driver skillfully dodging all the traffic, is MatÃas Zamorano. His hands are tied; he is gagged and blindfolded. He is not suffering from being tied up or because he can hardly breathe, but because he knows this journey is his last. The car racing along like an emergency ambulance is his hearse. The two gunmen should have killed him where they found him, in the toilets of the Central Market, but preferred not to run the risk of being recognized. They are in the pay of Counselor Pox, a.k.a. Alberto Cozumel Banegas, a man always known by his nickname. Everyone calls him the Pox, even though he has inherited one of the many empires built on the squalid outskirts of Buenos Aires: the absolute ruler of an area twenty blocks square in the district of Matanza.
The idea to doublecross the Pox was not his, MatÃas Zamorano
thinks with relief. It was Ana's: just twenty-two, with the face of a cherub floating on a cloud, but guts enough to manage the gambling dens and whorehouses run by Zamorano, who in turn is run by Counselor Poxâas the Pox is by the governor of the province. Everything was going smoothly, but women, especially if they are young and beautiful, are ambitious. And if they are ambitious, nothing satisfies them. They think they are the center of the universe, absolute suns of a planetary system that had its Big Bang when they were born, not a second before. And the rest of the world are nothing more than limp and decrepit pricks, stupid dummies with acrylic dentures who swallow half a packet of Viagra and think they have got a hard-on because the women they rent scream, close their eyes, shake like piggy banks while waiting for the old men to finish or be finished off, exhausted or paralyzed by a heart attack.
The car leaves Avenida General Paz and speeds into Buenos Aires Province along the extension of Avenida de los Corrales, heading for the rubbish dumps at Tablada, where executioners can dispatch the condemned without any problems. Zamorano knows the way: he has done it often enough behind the wheels of other cars, with stool-pigeons and hired guns squashed into the boot, people born of the garbage who return to it with grateful thanks because they can no longer bear being called “sir,” or having some poor woman fall in love with them and demanding fidelity.
Zamorano is not afraid. Above all he is sad: a feeling of tremendous misery and self-loathing. Given the chance, he would have speeded things up, but the Pox does not give anyone a chance. That is why he rules with an iron fist his twenty blocks in the south of Matanza, an open sewer inhabited by the rejects of the system, zombies who steal and kill for food, ragged foot-soldiers in an army whose only discipline is the certainty that if they disobey orders they will starve to death.
Zamorano thinks of Ana as the car slows down and pulls into the street the Pox has chosen. “I want him to be an example and a lesson,”
he must have said, because that is a favorite phrase of his. “I want the whole neighborhood to see how anyone who crosses Counselor Pox ends up.”
The boot is flung open and the two thugs haul Zamorano to his feet. They take off his gag and blindfold. It's a bad, terrible sign, or perhaps merely inevitable, thinks Zamorano; a routine procedure, the tiniest drop of dignity allowed to the condemned man. There is a third man, probably the one who drove the car here, who taps him gently on the back to straighten him up, then pats his crumpled clothes so he does not die looking like a scarecrow. He wants the locals from the cardboard and corrugated iron shacks, honest Bolivian or Peruvian families, to see the prisoner's face, the look of terrorâor in Zamorano's case, resignationâthat is his last farewell. They need to realize that they at least (the Pox's men) do not kill just anyone, do not get their hands dirty with tramps or two-bit killers. The cops can take care of the riff-raff, says Counselor Pox, who boasts that his men are elite troops, the marines of these outer suburbs of the Holy City.
“You know who this is,” the driver shouts to the gathered locals, putting an almost affectionate arm round Zamorano's shoulder. He was comrade Pox's right-hand man. “You've all bought stuff from him ⦔