Ricardo Piglia - Money to Burn

Apart from the voices, he was a regular sort of guy. On occasions even Dr Bunge thought he was faking it, this Dorda, looking to escape from the law by feigning madness and avoiding a sentence. In any case, Dr Bunge wrote in his report that Dorda's 'character pathology' had all the indications of a behavioural aberration, with a tendency towards aphasia. Because he heard voices he spoke little: they were the explanation for his taciturnity. Those who avoid speech, for example the autistic, are always hearing voices, people talking to them, they live on another frequency, preoccupied by the hubbub, an interminable muttering, listening to instructions, shouts, suffocated giggles, receiving orders. (Sometimes they called him 'the Slapper', these voices, all these women, calling to Gaucho Dorda, 'Come here Slapper, Slag, Bitch,' and he kept quiet, without moving, so that nobody could hear what they were saying to him, sadly gazing into space, occasionally longing to cry but without giving in so that no one would ever discover that he was a woman.) He took the greatest pride in his decision-taking and in maintaining sang-froid. Nobody could read his mind, or hear what his women said to him. He sported a brand of sunglasses called Clipper, with reflective lenses, he'd found them in a glove-pocket one afternoon when he was robbing a posh car out near leafy Palermo. He liked them, found them elegant, they afforded him a worldly air and he looked at himself in profile in the mirror, in every bathroom, in every shop window.

Right now he removed his Clippers, and with extreme care began perusing the design of an outboard motor on a launch drawn to scale. He was still sprawled across the sofa, studying a magazine called Popular Mechanics , and pausing now and then to draw engines. He sat down and placed a sheet of kitchen paper on the side table and began tracing with the tip of his pencil.

At that moment the Girl appeared, dressed in a man's shirt, and went barefoot into the kitchen.

'Want something, Doll?' asked the Gaucho.

'Nothing, thanks,' replied the Girl and the Gaucho watched as her shirt lifted above her arse while she stood on tiptoes to reach down the dope from the top shelf of the kitchen dresser.

'Give us a kiss,' asked Dorda.

The Girl paused in the doorway and gave him a smirk. She treated him as if he were invisible, or made of wood. He could see the little curls of pubic hair beneath the folds of the Crow's silk shirt, he could see the Girl's — the Doll's — pubis.

He visualized the soft rub of the silk between her legs and couldn't stop staring at her.

'What are you looking at? Just wait till I tell Daddy about you,' said the Girl and she went back into her room.

The Gaucho made as if to get himself up and follow her, but fell back across the cushions, with a faint smile on his face. When he was annoyed, he beamed like a child.

He looked at the closed door through half-screwed eyes, he was all screwed up over screwing and had a convergent squint (as his late mother put it), which enhanced his appearance as a highly dangerous obsessive type, which is what he was (according to Dr Bunge's report).

Dorda thus possessed the perfect look of the category of subject he represented (added Dr Bunge), a criminal lunatic who performed criminal deeds with a nervous smile, angelical and soullesss. When he was a boy, his late mother surprised him chopping a live chick in half with a shearing blade, and she removed him from the henhouse to the police station, whipping him with a leather strap, to have him banged up at Longchamps.

'My very own mother!' he stammered, without knowing whether to curse or to thank her for her efforts at straightening out his life. 'Wickedness,' said Dorda, flying high on the mixture of speed and coke, 'is not something that happens with intention, it's a bright shining light that comes and carries you away.'

He was repeatedly detained as a child, and at the age of fifteen they sent him to the Melchor Romero neuropsychiatrie clinic, near to La Plata. The youngest sectioned inmate in its entire history he'd proudly say, Dorda would. They sat him down in a white room with the other crazies and he hardly reached up to the table. But he was a veritable Judas, a child criminal: he killed cats by putting them into wasps' nests. A very complex operation.

'I don't want to boast,' the Gaucho said, 'but I made some wire cages so secure that the kitten couldn't move, it could only cry and squawk like a hen. The pussycat.'

Soon afterwards he killed a hobo, with his fists, in order to steal his torch. First off they took him to the police station, where they beat him to a pulp, then they sectioned him in the psychiatric hospital.

The doctor on duty was a bald fellow with glasses who wrote notes in an exercise book. He sent him to a unit for non-aggressive crazies and the first night he was raped by three male nurses. One made him suck him off, the next held him down, and the third stuffed him up the arse.

'A dick as big as this,' Dorda indicated the size with his hands. 'And I don't want to boast, or anything.'

He became meat for the madhouse. He'd escape and they'd recapture him, he'd escape again and roam around the train stations, through Retiro or Once, living off petty crimes and hold-ups, burgling empty houses. From the moment he spotted a car to when he took it out, he needed just two minutes, maximum two and a half. The fastest draw in the West, because he kept his patch to Morón or Haedo (on the west of the city). He came from the countryside and was always drawn to the city outskirts. He had the ruddy face of a peasant, straw-coloured hair, sky-blue eyes. He was a provincial from the provinces, from a family of Piedmontese immigrants at Maria Juana in the Santa Fe province, hard-working people, as taciturn as he but who didn't hear voices. According to his mother, evil came to him as naturally, and he welcomed it with the same force and obstinacy, as hard work to his father and his brothers.

'Out in the countryside, the sun's fit to fry your brains. The birds fall from the trees with the summer heatwave. You don't earn anything with the sweat of your labours,' the Gaucho Dorda decided. The more you work, the less you have, my youngest brother had to sell his house when his wife fell ill and he'd worked hard his whole life long.'

'Of course he did,' the Kid laughed aloud. 'Maybe the idiot's getting wise: the more you work, the more of a slave you become…'

Kid Brignone and Gaucho Dorda, forever together, had got to know one another in Batán jail, that old heap of shit, both happening to end up in a unit filled with faggots. Whores, trannies, queens… the whole selection box.

'The first time a man queered me, I thought I'd get pregnant,' said Dorda. 'Let's see if I'll go for the op now. I was still a kid when I first saw his stiffie and I thought I'd faint with delight.' He laughed loudly and pulled a stupid face. Dorda was acting the clown, making Malito nervous, he the pro, disliking coarse jokes, disliking rent boys. According to Malito, all whores talked too much.

But that wasn't true, the Kid protested, there were queens who'd lasted through torture sessions with the cattle prod without singing, and he personally knew several who played the macho and as soon as they saw the rubber straps began to sing aloud.

'Mad Margarita, a trannie, filled her gob with razor blades and made a real mess of her mouth, and when she stuck her tongue out at the cops she said: "If you want, I'll suck it for you, sweetheart, but you'll never get me to squeal…"

'They killed her and had to throw her in the river at Quilmes, completely naked but for her bracelet and ear-rings, but they never did get a word out of her.'

'You have to be all male to get yourself fucked by a macho,' decided Gaucho Dorda. And he smiled like a child, cooler than a cat. There was one guy he planted a darning needle into a lung of, the fellow went whishsh , the air went out of him like a balloon and he was left completely deflated. They called him Mental. And Gaucho didn't like being called Mental, or being called Menial. The Blond Gaucho demanded more respect. 'I've been a lost soul from the very start,' and he smiled like a girl.