Mapuche (2 page)

Jana had no iPhone, no television, no credit cards, and her closet wasn't overflowing with clothes; Art was her only escape hatch and her ancestral lands her only target in the workshop.

Her current work—her masterpiece—was a map of the southern cone of America, set up monumentally on a base of reinforced concrete, into which she whacked the ancient native territories with a sledgehammer.

Jana was a Mapuche, the daughter of a people who had been shot on sight in the pampas.

Exterminating natives or seeking to convert impious souls, Christians had given no quarter. She didn't either: the hammer fell on the Ranquel territory, already smashed up; jets of pulverized stone hit her eyes. Her black shorts were soaked, sweat was running down her thighs, temples, neck, her dead breasts, her muscles straining toward the objective: the world, a concrete skin she was massacring with a salvific joy.

The cartography of a genocide:

Charrúa.

Ona.

Yamana.

Seik'nam.

Araucan.

The Christians had dispossessed them of their lands, but their spirit-ancestors still roamed them like red ants in the blood. Concrete dust on a tense body: the Mapuche brought her weapon down again and, her eye fixed on the impact, noted the damage done. A real bloodbath.

Eight hundred thousand dead: no, the Christians hadn't given any quarter.

That was what united the natives.

Jana was still working hard when the telephone rang. She turned to the pallet that served as a table, saw the time on the alarm clock—six in the morning—and let the phone ring: The Jesus Lizard was making the walls of the shed vibrate and a dense rain was beating on the roof, lending rhythm to the apparent chaos prevailing in the workshop. Jana was jubilant. The wind had come up, and that old dog David Yow was screaming his lungs out from the speakers and a magnetic rage was flowing like smoking nitrogen in her Indian veins.

“Haush.”

“Alakaluf.”

“Mapuche!”

The hammer finally fell to the floor glittering with shards. Jana was examining the contours of the craters that pocked her ethnocidal map, her arms aching, when the telephone rang again. The alarm clock read 6:20. The Jesus Lizard album had just ended, the rain had stopped. The sculptress picked up the receiver, her mind elsewhere—her bare feet made wolf's tracks in the concrete snow . . .

She quickly came down to Earth—it was Paula.

“Ah! Darling, finally you picked up!” she burst out. “Sorry to bother you, but I swear I'm not calling about makeup! It's about Luz,” she went on breathlessly. “I'm worried: she left me a message on my cell a little while ago to tell me that she had to talk to me about something super important, but I'm still waiting, and her cell doesn't answer: something's wrong!”

Jana wiped the layer of dust off her lips—Luz was the tranny who had been sharing the docks with Paula for the past six months.

“Is that why you're calling?”

“I don't know anyone but you!” Paula pleaded. “We were supposed to meet at five, I've been waiting a long time and she doesn't answer her phone: something's wrong!”

“What time did Luz leave her message?”

“At 1:28,” her friend replied above the background noise.

“She might have been picked up by the cops.”

“No, something's happened, I'm sure. She wanted to see me,” Paula insisted. “I'm telling you, something's wrong!”

Jana hated to be disturbed while she was working: she didn't allow herself to be moved by her friend's melodramatic air.

“Was Luz working last night?” she asked.

“Yes!”

“Maybe she met Prince Charming. At least give her time to come back to Earth.”

“That's not funny. Listen, I'm really worried. For once she's not pretending. I need you. Can't you come?”

There was deafening music in the background.

“Where are you?”

“At the Transformer.”

A transvestite bar where losers like her met after working the streets. Jana glanced at her concrete sculpture and promised it a brief respite.

“O.K.,” she panted into the receiver. “I'm coming.”

 

*

 

The stars on the cosmic blotter were fading out one by one; Jana slid shut the worm-eaten wooden door, padlocked it, and walked across the empty ground surrounding the shed. The big Ford was getting rusty around the grille, under the blind eye of a giant hen on acid, one of her first sculptures made from scrap metal—steel bars, bolts, welding rods, beams—that still showed Furlan's influence. The other installations were also beginning to decay.

Jana slid into the cracked leatherette seat, waved to a steel aviator at the entrance to the yard and started down the Avenue Libertador—the vein, twelve lanes wide, that crossed the city's arteries. Jana was no longer thinking about her work in progress; the wind was blowing around in the car (the month before, some jerk had broken her passenger-side window), filling the trash can on wheels with a whirlwind of ashes. All through Córdoba the shops were still shuttered, the leaves on the trees were rustling before the crowds arrived, at the hour when
cartoneros
were going home. She passed a group of latecomers, their rags steaming under a load of broken bottles, pulling their carts after a night of collecting.

Palermo Viejo. Jana parked the Ford in a delivery zone and walked to the next block. She had hastily thrown on a black combat jumpsuit and her Doc Martens, her tank top was still covered with concrete fragments, and she hadn't a penny in her pockets.

The entrance to the Transformer was a simple hole cut in an iron shutter. A lesbian with body piercings, dressed for hunting big game, was letting some people in, others not: Jill, eighty kilos of violence perched on a stool on the sidewalk. Transvestites and prostitutes obeyed her finger gestures and looks, too afraid of losing their places for later, along with the possibility of picking up some extra cash if the night turned out to be slow.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

Jana hadn't been in the Transformer for years, but Jill let her in, impassive beneath her bleached military crew cut. Jana bent down, made her way through the gloomy tunnel that led to the club, and pushed open the padded door. It was almost as dark inside as it was outside, the best way of hiding the dirt and the state of the furniture. A zombielike faun was wandering in the shadow of the head-high runway; watched by everyone, two trannies with made-in-China fake diamond necklaces, two addicts she didn't know, were writhing at the edge of the dance floor. Otherwise, the Transformer hadn't changed, with its cigarette burns on the benches, its lukewarm champagne, and its sex à la carte. The couples that formed incognito in the dark reached the back rooms by the runway, lit up by flashing strobe lights, but the trannies looked tired this morning. There was no mad revue under rotating disco lamps, no laughing to cover the blows and bullying: the customers took refuge behind the speakers pumping out indifferent house music, peering at new arrivals as if they were messiahs nearing the finish line.

Jana's Doc Martens adhered to the club's sticky floor. She headed for the bar and finally spotted Paula among the rudderless and anchorless shipwrecks,. She was snorting coke on the counter, in the company of Jorge, the club's manager.

“Well, well,” he said when he saw the Indian woman come into his cave. “Look here, it's ‘La Pampa' . . . ”

Her little nickname referred to her chest, which was as flat as the Argentine plains. Jana hated that son of a bitch.

“I thought you were a great artist,” he said with the complacency of a real estate agent. “What're you doing here?”

“Isn't it obvious? I'm choking on the stink of your breath.”

Jorge chuckled. Stocky, wearing a bracelet and a white shirt opened to show a tuft of hair and a priceless gold chain, the manager laid out three lines of coke on the counter and handed Jana a damp straw, giving her a sly look.

“A little hit for the prodigal child?”

“No.”

“Have you quit, too?”

“Fuck off,” she said, looking at him under her brown locks. “O.K.?”

Paula's mouth twisted under the beauty spot that contrasted with the pallor of her nostrils: one sign from the boss and Jill would throw them out with their Adam's apples on the back of their necks if she felt like it. Jana pulled her friend down to the other end of the bar, where the music wasn't so loud.

“You should go easy on the coke, love,” she said to the tranny perched on her high heels. “There's nothing but laxatives in it. And above all you should keep away from that louse.”

Jorge was taunting them from the opposite end of the counter.

“I was so nervous,” Paula confessed, wiping her nose.

“Coke does calm you down, it's true.”

“Listen, something happened to Luz,” Paula repeated, “I'm sure of it. Otherwise I wouldn't have called you.”

Paula was wearing a white dress with flounces and heart-shaped earrings; her foundation was crumbling in the early morning, and by that point her curls were attractive to no one but other homosexuals.

Jana shook her head.

“It's the coke that's making you paranoid.”

“No, I swear,” Paula replied, her eyes big as saucers. “I asked the girls,” she said, turning toward the lap-dance fans, “they haven't seen Luz all night, either. I've used up an incredible number of credits texting her; even if Luz had lost her cell, she'd be here. I don't know what's going on.”

“What did her message say, exactly?”

“Just that she wanted to talk to me about something important, that she'd meet me here at 5:00, after the Niceto . . . ” The Niceto was the club in the barrio of Palermo where Paula was auditioning for a part.

“By the way, how did it go?”

“Great! They told me they'd let me know!”

Paula smiled with Bambi-on-barbiturates eyes—this was her first encounter with show business.

“Who'd you see,” Jana joked, “the doorman?”

“No, no, the choreographer! Gelman, a kinda younger Andy Warhol. You know, I saw part of the rehearsal, and the show looks like it's going to be good! Listen, Jana,” she said, growing more serious, “Luz couldn't have been fooling around. That's not her style, and even less if she had something important to tell me. Not to mention the audition at the Niceto.” Paula put her hand on Jana's. “I've got a bad feeling, Jana. Otherwise I wouldn't have called you. You know how much I care about Luz. Please help me find her.”

Paula wrinkled her little trumpet-shaped nose, an expression known only to the two of them. Her smile was missing a tooth, but the rest was still intact under the makeup. Jana sighed in the club's polluted air. “O.K.” Figures were slipping into the obscurity: party animals going home, habitués, gay junkies, police informers, resolute virgins, the waltz of the backrooms was getting into full swing. Jorge's voice drowned out the Latin disco blaring from the speakers.

“Hey, La Pampa!” he roared. “There are two gauchos here asking if you'll still lay them for a hundred pesos! Hey, Indian! You hear?”

“Don't listen,” Paula whispered to her friend, “he's too stupid.”

Jana had a metallic taste in her mouth; on the other side of the bar Jorge was snickering. She took Paula's hand and dragged her toward the exit.

It was either that or set this rat-hole on fire.

 

*

 

Buenos Aires arose out of nothing, a land of brush and mud on the edge of an estuary that opened onto the ocean where contrary winds blew. It was there that the colonists had constructed a commercial port, La Boca, its jaws closed on the Amerindian continent. La Boca, where so many cattle were slaughtered that the blood ran over the sidewalks, along with the blood of girls who thought they were emigrating from Europe to a new Eldorado or who had been kidnapped with false promises of marriage before they were sent to the slaughterhouses, where they serviced sixty customers a day seven days a week in sailors' whorehouses—another century.

The port had been abandoned, and La Boca was now known only for its corrugated metal houses painted with the remains of ship paint pots, its craftsmen, and its pretty buildings on the Caminito occupied by rainbow-colored galleries where all kinds of portraits of Maradona, Evita, and Guevara could be found. A lookalike of soccer's golden boy, or the end-of-career version, little skirts in the Argentine national colors, merchants catering to
gringas
, kids in soccer jerseys, one restaurant after another, and as many touts. During the day La Boca had loads of tourists, but the area emptied out at nightfall: prostitutes, drug dealers, addicts, riffraff, poor people, shady characters roamed it until dawn. Even the brightly-painted houses took on a macabre appearance.

Jana's Ford cruised slowly along the docks; it was a 1980 model and did not clash with the surroundings. Leaky boats served out their time in the old commercial port, half sunk or covered with algae; grayish low-income towers rose up, clothes hung to dry on the balconies like so many tongues stuck out at Buenos Aires propriety. Paula looked at the sites of perdition outside the broken window; coming down from coke made her anxious, she felt responsible for Luz and her premonitions were tying her stomach in knots.

Bosteros
, bumpkins—that's what the people of La Boca are called. Also known as Orlando, Luz had begun his career as a transvestite blowing truck drivers in Junin. But he'd fled his life in the service stations on Route 7 after his only contact in town, a cousin, had thrown him out when he found women's clothing in his suitcase. Luz had felt pretty much at home when he landed in La Boca. He'd made the rounds of the bars and clubs, looking for a man who would take him as he was, and finally found Paula.

Most of the transvestites saw their peers as amateurs at best and as competitors at worst. But Paula had enough heart for two. Above all, the Samaritan was in a position to see how Luz's story would end. Overwhelmed by her need to dress as a woman, Luz had already lost everything—family ties, job, friends. After the first encounters at traffic circles, more phantasmal than profitable, prostitution had quickly become her lifesaver. She would die worn-out and toothless, in the gutter. Lost in Buenos Aires, Paula had suggested that they work as a team on the La Boca docks; they would protect one another while waiting for something better, and Paula would teach her the trade.