Holy City (25 page)

Verónica paints Ana's lips with a soft, shiny lipstick, then licks it off again.

“Some men want to be women, though,” she says.

“But they have no idea where to start. They confuse the trappings with the essential.” Ana, Miss Bolivia, allowing her to rub off the lipstick and lifting the hair from Verónica's perspiring forehead so that she can give it a kiss, laughs as she leaves her wet imprint on the wrinkles that the forty-something-year-old covers with make-up.

How long has Ana been there? She came in through not one but two open doors, in spite of Carroza's warnings. Who did that wreck of a cop think he was, with no more meat on him than a resentful skeleton?

She laid the Bersa on the coffee table as if she was about to sign some kind of armistice, then pulled Verónica toward her. Verónica allowed herself to be drawn in. Nothing like this had ever happened to her with any man, not even Romano, who arrested her without reading her rights. Their hands fluttering like falling leaves between their two
bodies, so close to each other, pulled together as if by a magnet. They came together cell by cell, blended into one another unhurriedly, like paint settling in a bowl. They sought each other out because someone or something that is not them has already decided they should be together tonight, that they should meet without offering any explanation, two tightrope walkers balanced above the abyss of this strange night, an abyss of only a few hours that will not appear on any official register, ghostly hours they both wanted so much.

A mobile ring tone goes off in the distance, like one of the ambulance or police sirens crossing the city streets in the early hours. Neither Verónica nor Ana bothers to answer: “My phone sounds just like yours,” says Ana. “We're the same even in that.”

“It might be urgent,” says Verónica, pretending to be worried, but Ana's warm palm is there, waiting for her wet lips and tongue.

“Gypsy tongue,” says Ana, probing her mirror image, slowly substituting her lips for her hand, then tightening her arms around Verónica's waist as if she were going to lift her however heavy she was, to rescue her from wherever Verónica's life might be in danger.

But the only danger Verónica faces tonight is that of falling in love with another woman. Perhaps that is why she claws at Ana's body to try to break free, and reach out to grab the mobile that is still ringing and is hers. The ring tone dies—Beethoven filtered through cybernetic acid—before Verónica can light the dial. Ana's arms rescue her and again pull her irresistibly back to her, her lips close on Verónica's mouth, her tongue pushes in so deep she can hardly breathe. Verónica ought (whether or not she wanted to, she ought) to fight her off, to be able to see herself as they say those who are about to die float out of their bodies but remain nearby, up on the ceiling, tame specters who brush against the world beyond simply to get a better view of the world down here.

Yet Verónica cannot, does not want, does not have the strength, has never had the strength to break free of desire when the fight is no-holds
barred, outside the ring, outside the laws she has been brought up to respect. She gives herself again, opens up, feels how the hands that could be a man's hands tear her trembling body like a silk gown, strip her bare. She does not care that the voice says “it's so good to have you,
doctora
,” when she has always demanded to hear “I love you.”

There are many ways to fuck and be fucked, as many different ways as there have been men on her forty-year-old body, but this time it is different. This time it is an invasion, one body taking over another one cell by cell, replacing them entirely. Miss Bolivia's hand searches inside her, lights up Verónica like someone lighting candles in a temple that until now has been in darkness and without idols. Verónica is engulfed, pushed, lifted, held. Everything is bright and warm, fire has lips of cool water, the trap is laid like a last supper of the senses.

Too late—intensely, implacably too late—as Verónica turns so that Miss Bolivia can continue to open up her body with more hands than the goddess Kali and opens her eyes trying to find something to cling on to in order to delay a little longer reaching the bottom of her abyss, she sees that there is nothing on the coffee table.

The voracious cold now pushing her legs apart can be nothing other than the barrel of the Bersa.

Pacogoya, delivery faun, Che Guevara lookalike in full retreat, is running and running, clinging on to the only weapon he knows how to use with his eyes shut: his mobile phone. His hands are shackled, but his feet are free to fly over the grass like a bisexual spore once he has
sent a message to the number of the cop Verónica recommended, the colleague of her first conjugal stiff. “I'm a friend of Verónica's, a cop in a gray Toyota abducted me,” he texted, ending the message “Pacogoya.” Then the reply that lit up his screen a few seconds later: “Run.”

So Pacogoya runs across the fields. The thistles tear at him, draw tattoos on his translucent
guerrillero
skin that Sylvester Stallone would love to have on his aging Rambo body. He runs with his hands behind his back, his feet stumbling on mounds of earth and stones. He falls, hits his head, but gets up again like a roe deer chased by a puma: the cop in the gray Toyota might return and come looking for him, shoot him down, and before or afterward tear him apart with the razor-sharp teeth and claws of a corrupt, murdering policeman.

Why bother with all those trips to the sauna, all those massages, all that botox round his eyes, all those hours in the gym and all that waxing, if now he has to run through the night with thorns tearing at him, falling over, struggling back to his feet? Every step takes him still further from the ideal he has pursued for so long in gyms and massage parlors, turning him into a scarecrow, a bag of rubbish at the mercy of any stray dogs that might be around. He plunges on aimlessly; his telephone rings again and the screen lights up: “Run, run as fast as you can.”

Who can this cop friend of Verónica's be? Why trust him when all cops are the same, why did she send him off to ask the cop for help, why did she push him away from her? Who has the right to cast the first stone, what is so wrong about pointing out millionaires who are only going to be held for a few hours? Why is the whole of the civilized world scandalized when one or two hairy guys are kidnapped, but nobody turns a hair when a thieving kid is shot down in cold blood? Or when they rob a workman of his seven hundred pesos pay as he gets off the train in Quilmes and kill him if he refuses? Things like that never appear in the papers; the president carries on sleeping, the ambassadors continue their game of golf, their wives a game of bridge; the Pope
goes on scrawling encyclicals to comfort the poor in their eternal, celestial poverty.

*

Another cop, not the one who sent the text “Run” several times on his telephone, but who is so close to him he could almost touch him, is thinking of Pope Leo XIII as he lovingly strokes the butt of Rerum Novarum.

“With sword, pen, or word” says the hymn to Sarmiento. Any weapon will do in the fight for liberty and you can blow anyone's brains out: the indigenous savages and the unruly gauchos were the enemies of Argentina's founding father who way back in the nineteenth century admired the United States, and dreamt of erasing the original inhabitants of the barbarous pampas from the face of the earth. Sarmiento used words and the pen, General Roca the army, to spill the blood of gauchos, Tehuelches, Mapuches, Yagans and Comechingons. With sword, pen and word they reduced the proud first peoples to rubble. They wrote the history that even cops like Oso Berlusconi had to learn in primary school. What better name then than Rerum Novarum (a manifesto for the extermination of all undesirables) for the 9 m.m. toy Oso caresses at his waist while he cradles the Czech rifle he chose when he distributed them back in the warehouse? He checked them all, one by one, and kept the best for himself, the mortal Stradivarius which in the hands of a traitor like Walter Carroza could lead to the failure of tonight's concert, could ruin the night, send him to hell.

“What are we waiting for now, if it's not a rude question?” asks Carroza, who for the first time in his life is so close to the mythical, despised commander. The damp from the ground is penetrating his bones, bones once protected by flesh and even a layer of fat.

Oso growls and stirs uneasily. He does not like a subordinate asking him questions. He detests nosy people; he never gives press conferences.
If he had his way, all journalists would be lined up and shot so they could not interfere with his work anymore. They never have a good word to say about the police, they only encourage thieves and murderers until they have become victims of police brutality; then lawyers, sociologists and communists of every stripe still hiding under the ruins of the demolished Berlin Wall spring up like mushrooms to squawk that criminals are not responsible for their crimes, that it is society as a whole which creates them. Imbeciles.

Oso Berlusconi chews on the stem of a wild flower to avoid having to answer Carroza.

The pager he is wearing on his belt next to Rerum Novarum bleeps twice. That is the signal: everyone to their positions, the game is about to start. He points his Stradivarius at the roof of the first shack and pulls the trigger: a tin sheet two meters long and half a meter wide flies off like a bat.

“Fire at will,” he shouts and the police orchestra launches into its version for Czech rifles of Tchaikovsky's
1812 Overture
.

*

Scotty does not hear the shots. He is a long way from the gun battle in the Descamisados de América slum, just leaving his shift at the federal-police headquarters. He is even more convinced than when he started that morning of how useless it is to keep such an expensive mechanism as justice going.

A person, or whatever he might be called, a genetic throwback like the Jaguar, who has a long police record but has always been found not guilty, in and out of the courts' revolving doors, laughing fit to bust at the victims' relatives, killing as if he is playing billiards or bowls at his local club, out of boredom and with no sense of guilt, feeding on his perversion like someone slaking his thirst on his own urine.

“Ana Torrente Morelos,” says the file sent by fax by the Bolivian
Margaride. “Born on January 23, 1982 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Mother unidentified, presumed dead after giving birth. Father unknown. Presumably given in adoption. No criminal record.”

Scotty's passion—which his colleagues know nothing about because it is hardly macho enough for the police—is to restore paintings. He does not do it professionally; he has never studied or been to any workshops. A painter uncle who died in anonymity and was buried with his talent intact taught him the rudiments and passed on the pleasure of rescuing something in danger of being lost. Blurred figures, gazes that were once happy, ferocious, or vacuous, colors fading to nothingness. Removing the veil, driving away the phantoms of decay and oblivion—that is what Scotty devotes his leisure hours to.

He spent his Sunday shift at headquarters with little to do apart from sort out reports, file complaints about domestic violence and sexual abuse, watch a lot of football and sketch the angelic face of Ana Torrente, Miss Bolivia, and the demonic oval of Ovidio Ladislao Torrente Morelos, alias the Jaguar. When he got back to his minimal apartment that night, he pinned both drawings to the living-cum-bedroom wall, then colored them in and stretched out on his sofabed work table to stare at them, like someone arriving home exhausted who collapses in front of the television.

Scotty has lived on his own for the past two years, ever since his wife swapped him for a criminal lawyer, a well-known legal eagle who spent his time preventing middle-class children who spurn an expensive, stressful university career in favor of the easy money to be made out of drug trafficking from ending up in jail and being raped by common criminals or being thrown into a ditch because they used someone else's capital to start up their own businesses.

Scotty's wife, a stranger to him after thirty years' marriage, took with her a mink coat (as in the tango) and the comfortable four-room apartment where they had lived together through three decades of arrests, shoot-outs, lost pregnancies and bitter arguments about the meaning of
life. If Scotty has achieved anything it is to live now, aged fifty-five, as he did when he was an adolescent. It is no small thing, to keep going, find yourself again, only to end up being observed deep on a Sunday night by the sketches of a cherub and a devil who (Scotty suspects) have also started out on the road to meeting each other once more.

No-one is going to teach Oso Berlusconi how to rescue hostages. Let the toffs in the embassies play their golf and bridge—that's what they were trained to do, but we're the ones who pay for that bunch of pansies, Oso snarls to Carroza: the peace treaties they sign are drawn up on the bodies their armies have spread all around. We dig the trenches to defend the salons where those leeches dance the waltz.

“I don't think they dance the waltz any more,” Carroza corrects him, intrigued by Oso's attitude. “That was in the nineteenth century.”

A calm silence followed the first volley of shots. Oso ordered them to stop firing, although it took some time for everyone to react. As so often, some of the men have forgotten to switch on their radios, they are thinking more of their pensions than the details of the operation, wishing they were at home already, clutching their wives if they can still bear each other, then climbing into bed as soon as possible, happy to return home without a scratch. They have already made enough of a sacrifice, stretched out on the wet grass and taking orders from a madman.

The silence is so profound they can hear the music from the nearby Riachuelo market.

“I'd like to see them out here on the ground in their best sports
clothes and four-hundred bucks running shoes.” Oso is referring to the diplomats of course, in particular the Italian Ambassador who has just called him on his mobile, breaking all the rules of the damned protocol, shouting at him that he had to make sure he respected the lives of his fellow countrymen. “As if this was the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow and not the Descamisados de América. Fuck that pedantic fascist.” Oso Berlusconi suspects that some rat with a walkie-talkie is keeping the ambassador informed step by step about the rescue operation. “I bet it's one of those provincial boys. They'll kill people for a few bucks, but want paying in foreign currency to betray someone.”