Mapuche (9 page)

“Crack? Coke? Heroin?”

“No. A little line from time to time. But she didn't use drugs.”

“Like Chet Baker, for example.”

“Not even.”

“Was she dealing?”

“No, I would have known that, too.” Paula yawned in spite of herself. “Poor Luz,” she sighed sadly. “To think that I don't even know his last name. You do know mine, at least?”

“Michellini. Miguel Michellini. Don't worry, you're not cut out for anonymity.” Jana crushed out her cigarette in the saucer, where the butts from breakfast were already piled up. “In any case, it's out of the question for you to go back on the street, my love: not so long as there's a sicko out there on the docks.”

Paula narrowed her eyes.

“That's lovely, Cinderella, but I don't have more than two hundred pesos left in my pocket. If I don't work a little, my mother's laundry won't make it through the month. Things are going badly, you know,” she added, looking contrite. “The bills for Mama's treatment are piling up, we don't have the money to pay them, and her head's getting no better, either. Did I tell you the latest? Last night I found her chewing up receipts and bills! She'll eat anything! Shit, what if she even swallowed money?”

The Mapuche grimaced.

“The Old Witch with Horns.”

“You know very well that it's more complicated than that,” Paula sighed.

Jana thought it over—she'd seen the old woman once in the laundry, completely bonkers.

“We've already talked about that,” she said. “Why don't you go sit down outside? Your room's all ready, all you need to do is put your stuff in there and lay down a mattress.”

“That doesn't solve the problem of my mother,” Paula retorted. “I can't leave her in that state, especially not just now: with debts, her state of health, and the choreographer who hasn't called me back . . . What will become of us? I have to work on the docks!”

“Not while a psychopath is on the loose around here,” the sculptress repeated, categorically. “Do you want to end up like Luz?”

“No, but . . . ”

“Promise me! Just until we find a solution.”

Looking into Jana's dark eyes, in which a pure friendship glowed, Paula acquiesced.

“O.K. But we'll have to find one, and soon.” She looked at her watch and jumped on the car seat. “Oh, shit—it's Sunday, I'm going to be late! Damn, I have to get my makeup off or she'll swallow her rosary!”

“Good idea,” Jana commented.

Paula put on her heels and crossed the workshop on an invisible thread.

“I'll call you soon, O.K.? Bye, angel, bye-bye!”

Jana wanted to tell her to send her mother to graze at the other end of the cosmos, but half of “her” had already gone out into the rain.

Few transvestites were effeminate men: their psychology was feminine, not their shoulders. Miguel Michellini had delicate features, a slender body, and refined manners. Jana never understood why he hadn't changed sexes: Miguel had never been a man.

That was exactly what people had against him.

 

*

 

Miguel had dreamed of having a woman friend who would lend him her clothes, or better yet, a women who would give him the illusion that he was being forced to dress as a girl—and that he was merely yielding to her request. As long as he could remember, the feminine universe had always attracted him: women's movements, their clothes, their games. At first, Miguel had repressed this impulse, but the attraction resurfaced depending on the circumstances and the witnesses—always feminine. And then there was that day in his early puberty when a girl cousin who had amused herself by dressing him in women's clothes noticed the growing bulge under the dress he was wearing: the contact, the feeling of being armed with silk as he slipped into the dress, the burning shiver on his skin—all that was simply delicious. His sexual orientation had been set that day, in a summer room where his cousin was laughing.

The desire to do it again had grown with his body. Miguel had always felt alone in the world. It was as if he lacked a part of himself, lacking a father, a brother, and especially a sister: his passion for the opposite universe would make up for his solitude. He had never been at ease in his body. Or if he was, it was in the body of unknown other. As if his place were not his own, as if an intense void filled it, as if he lacked himself, his own identity. Very soon he had to have women's clothes; hiding what he was doing from his mother, Miguel had started going through trash bins, and then roaming through the markets and discount clothes stores. The sight of certain garments or fabrics produced in him a sexual panic that soon led him to masturbate only when he was wearing women's clothes. He still had to go out in public. He understood that sober dress wasn't sufficiently deceptive, while sophistication was too deceptive, and he dressed accordingly. Miguel learned to walk, to show himself to others, to feel with a thrill what a passerby perceived at the moment they met, to sit down keeping his knees together; in time Miguel had learned to become Paula. In front of the mirror, “she” could repeat the same gesture countless times, as if to imbue himself with it—all that auto-eroticism that made him so lonely. The transvestite's first audience was himself.

“I made an appointment with the doctor for you,” Rosa called from the back room of the laundry. “This time you'd better go!”

Miguel turned to his mother: the old woman was fingering the rosary that hung from the armrest of her wheelchair, looking at him with her seagull eyes. Miguel put the iron back on its base.

“I don't need to go to the doctor, Mama,” he repeated. “I'm not ill.”

“That's not what the pope says!” Rosa put her sick fingers back under her checkered blanket. “Nor Brother Josef!”

“Aaah . . . He's beginning to get on my nerves, that guy.”

“They say it's against nature!” she choked out. “Ah! Ah!” She was getting upset. “They know more about it than you do!”

Miguel went about piling up the shirts and stopped listening to her nonsense. The old woman mixed everything up, the pope, the Virgin, Guadalupe, God and his mother . . . Miguel couldn't bring himself to hold it against her. Rosa had had a hard life, and as she grew older, her misfortunes increased: after thirty years of widowhood and loneliness, the economic crisis and the sharp cuts in retirement expenditures had cut her military pension to almost nothing, her hip had given out, condemning her to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Miguel, who kept the books and helped in the laundry, brought enough money back from the docks to keep their heads above water: half the neighborhood knew that he was working as a prostitute, but his mother? After her hip, her spirit would give out, too: the slightest thing would send the poor thing into mad fits of rage in which the angels and the Church became completely mixed up, and then there was this new mania that was gnawing her.

Rosa had started rolling into balls everything within reach: she tore up pieces of paper, chewed them with her remaining teeth, and then swallowed them. Periodicals—all right, she read nothing but stupid magazines anyway, but bills, receipts, the account books? The situation was becoming impossible: Pascual, the only cousin with whom Miguel was still in contact and who had just gotten married, had been clear about this (“one hysteric in the house is enough”), they hadn't enough money to hire home help, a retirement home, or a nursing home. An insane asylum, that was the fate reserved for his mother: the laundry in Peru Street wasn't worth anything, the few customers who brought their clothes there did it out of charity, and Rosa had no savings, nothing she could sell, and her only monument was a hero who had died in battle and this accursed son.

Rosa hadn't understood that, either. Or refused to. Or it was too much for her brain. She thought that the good Lord was ruining her life, that he was putting her to the test: she had wanted a child, preferably a son, not . . .
this
, a kid with pale skin who shut himself up in his room instead of playing soccer with the other boys in the neighborhood, an effeminate weakling mocked on the schoolyard by decent idiots dying of laughter as they swung their hips along an imaginary line, Miguel the laughingstock, the sickly kid incapable of running ten yards without getting out of breath, an out-and-out sissy, Miguel the girl sniffing hawthorn blossoms and grotesquely sensitive, his unbearable, disgusting inclinations, Rosa was outraged with shame. No, she refused to understand why her husband had gone away leaving her with this package of dirty laundry, why she found herself alone with this useless quarter of a man, his mind twisted by this damned sex: it obsessed him, the filthy thing! They'd really been duped when they bought that! Not at all what they'd ordered! The good Lord had allowed it to happen, that was her penitence, her intimate Calvary, a secret between her and God, who'd pulled all kinds of tricks to teach her. Things got mixed up in her head, memories and the present, Rosa no longer knew if it was the economic crisis or divine punishment that was driving customers away from the laundry—as if people no longer ironed their shirts!—if she had to pay for her sin, this child possessed, and then she suffered like a martyr, always that damned hip, these mysterious headaches, these children's cries in the streets that she could no longer bear, these nightmares that made her head feel like a pressure cooker. Yes, Miguel had caught the girl-sickness: that was one more dirty trick played by the Lord, something she'd have to discuss in the confessional, like the day when she'd caught him in his room, dressed as a woman from head to foot, in the company of another boy! Enough to make you throw up, for God's sake!

“Do you hear what I'm telling you?” she wheezed, brandishing her cane.

Miguel was breathing in the lavender fragrance of the shirts piled up on the ironing table: he yelped with pain.

“Ouch!”

Surprised by the prick, he spun around and grimaced: the old woman was holding a cane fitted with a spike, like the ones trash collectors use to pick up papers in the gutters, and she was shaking it before his frightened eyes—where did she get such a thing?

“You hurt me!” he complained, rubbing his buttock.

Rosa didn't listen to him, she was too proud of her anger, with her bits of chewed-up paper on her shining lips.

“What are you eating now? Mama!”

“You've always been sick!” she screamed. “Always!”

A lightning bolt of hatred trembled in her eyes. Her thin, withered arm waved the point of her cane in his face. Miguel met her demoniacal eyes and drew back against the ironing table.

“Put that down, Mama.”

“Don't touch me!” She was stabbing the air. “You hear me?”

“Put down the cane, please.”

“Never!” Rosa cried. “Never!”

“Mama!”

But she was already lurching out of her wheelchair. Miguel dodged the spike that was aimed at his chest and grabbed the cane as she fell back on the chair, but Rosa clung to it stubbornly: she was drooling her balls of paper all over her flowered blouse.

“Give me that damned cane!”

“Help!” She braced herself against the chair. “Help me!”

The fury refused to yield: her face crimson, curls of hair escaping from her bun, she screamed, her faded eyes popping out of their sockets.

“Brother Josef!” she howled. “He's going to come, you'll see!” she declared. “You'll see that he's going to fix your brain!”

Miguel let the harpy have the cane and retreated into the back room, frightened. This time it was clear: his mother was going insane. Completely insane.

 

*

 

Jana had put on the faded shorts hanging on the antique screen that marked off her bedroom before going to work on her sculpture, the plastic cartography of an organized ethnocide. The “Conquest of the Wilderness,” according to the official expression, as if the Mapuches didn't exist.

Crushed militarily during the Great Roundup on the pampas, shot like rabbits with Remington rifles, sent to religious schools or handed over as slaves to the
estancieros
who had divided up their territories among themselves, acculturated, impoverished, reduced to silence, lying about their origins during the infrequent censuses, forgetting their culture out of shame or inertia, the Mapuches had gone through the century like shades. Ghosts. By abrogating twenty-five years of treaties signed with Spain, the Constitution of 1810 had simply denied the Mapuches' existence, the existence of the “people of the land” who had lived there as nomads for two thousand years.

The land was everything for them; the sanctuary of the ancestors, the dwelling place of the gods, the myth and point of departure for any symbolic representation, the ritual foundation and constitutive element of their identity. Without the land, the Mapuches were nothing. Some communities had clung to their farms and flocks, but many of them had had to sell their land under threat, at the risk of disappearing all the more easily because they did not appear on any civil register. Today, the Mapuches represent only three percent of the Argentine population, concentrated in poor regions in the South or scattered in the slums of distant suburban areas.

Jana worked furiously all afternoon: she cut the iron, accentuated the concrete craters, added collages of fabric and glass in the colors of the native peoples, but in spite of her efforts to concentrate, Luz's death and its consequences continued to pollute her mind.

Paula was a brainless hothead when she was acting in her own interest, but she was right about one thing: if she didn't work the La Boca docks, who would pay the bills and take care of her mother? The situation seemed impossible. A killer had attacked Luz and the barbarity of the murder suggested that he would kill again. For reasons that escaped her, the cops weren't doing anything, and the fate of an anonymous tranny was of no interest to anyone. Unless she talked to someone: who? A private detective? Jana stopped working and opened the phone book. She went down the list of names in alphabetical order. She noticed that a “Calderón” had his agency in Peru Street, a few blocks from the laundry. Was that a sign?