Ricardo Piglia - Money to Burn

The Kid immediately clocked that the Gaucho was highly intelligent, but completely off his head.

'Psychotic,' added Dr Bunge, chief headshrinker at Melchor Romero.

That was why he heard voices. Those who kill for killing's sake do it because they hear voices, they hear people talking, they're in contact with the energy exchange, with the voices of the dead, with lost women, 'it sounds like a humming,' said Dorda, 'an electric buzz you can hear going cric, cric inside your brains, that doesn't let you get to sleep.'

'You suffer a thousand martyrdoms, you madman, with that radio always playing in your head, you know what that means. They talk to you, they tell you all kinds of obscenities.'

The Kid worried about the Blond Gaucho and looked after and defended him. He picked him for the assault on San Fernando. Malito called him because he'd carefully observed the Kid and needed a heavyweight from the next generation, he wanted to renew the team, enough of old fogeys ('For old fogeys you can stop at me,' Malito would say, having recently celebrated his fortieth.) He put the job his way, and the Kid responded with: 'If we go fifty fifty with the cops, how much do we end up taking home?'

'Minimum, half a million… divided between four of us.'

'And the other half-million?'

'It's theirs,' said Malito.

'They' were those who set up the deal, including the cops and those on the Town Council. The Kid gave this some thought. He delayed reaching a decision. They were on borrowed time: if he got caught again he would never get out.

'I'll come in with the Blond Gaucho as my second. Otherwise count me out.'

'Who d'you think you are?' asked Malito. 'Man and wife?'

'Of course, cretin,' answered the Kid.

When the flesh urged they shared a bed, the Kid and the Blond Gaucho, but generally less and less. Dorda was a semi- mystic: he preferred to let himself be taken and didn't jerk off because he was deeply suspicious. He thought that if he lost his juices, he'd lose what little light still illuminated his mind, and he'd be left high and dry, without an idea in his head.

'I'm up to here with playing Little Bo Peep. Seriously, doctor,' Gaucho told the doctor, as though it was a heavy load to bear, 'when you're banged up by the cops, what are you to do? Do it to yourself every half-hour like a monkey… or like a dog licking itself, haven't you noticed, doctor? Dogs lick themselves off, in Devoto jail there was a guy from Entre Ríos who could suck himself off, he doubled over like a piece of wire, stuck out his tongue and sucked away…' the Gaucho was laughing.

'Well and good, Dorda,' answered Dr Bunge. 'That'll be all for today.' And he noted on his pad: 'Sexual obsession, polymorphous perversion, uncontrolled libido. Dangerous, psychotic, perverted. Parkinson's Disease.'

The Gaucho had a slight tremor, electric and almost imperceptible, but he explained it away with his schema of aerated and corporal humours.

'We are composed of air,' he declared. 'Skin and air. Beyond this, inside ourselves, everything is all wet, wetness covers everything between skin and air,' he was attempting to explain things scientifically this Blond Gaucho, 'and there are some little tubes…'

This vision of man as a balloon was confirmed to him when he saw the guy he'd pricked with a darning needle deflate and fall to the floor like clothes dropped there at the end of the day. The guy, on the floor, like so much dirty washing.

'We're made of spunk, air and blood,' announced the Gaucho, one night when he was flying on coke and loquacity.

'He was full of words,' recalled and recounted the Kid, 'he'd swallowed a load of first-class stuff we'd lifted from the car glove compartment of a deputy in the National Assembly.'

'There are these little tubes,' went on Dorda, and here he pointed to his chest, 'going from here to there,' and he fingered his way around his ribcage. 'Like, made of plastic, they are, and they empty and refill, empty and refill. When they're filled, you think, and when they're empty, you sleep. If you remember something, like back when you were a kid, it's because those things, memories or whatever, happened to be out there in the air, they just came along, didn't they, those things you remember, blowing in the wind, right there for you to catch. Am I right, Kid?'.

'Naturally,' Brignone said to him, letting him be right.

Highly intelligent, that Dorda, if very locked in on himself, with that problem of his, aphasia, that dumbness which meant he didn't speak for a month on end, communicating simply with signs and gestures, rolling his eyes to the skies, or pursing his lips to make himself understood. Only the Kid could understand him, that loony Gaucho. But he was the most complete and courageous guy you could ever wish to see (according to Brignone). There was the time he confronted the police with a.9 and he held them at bay until the Kid could get there with a car jammed in reverse and pull him out, in Lanús. It was awesome. Stock still, firing with both hands, serenely — bang, bang — even elegantly, and the cops shitting themselves with fear. When they come across a character like that, decisive, who doesn't give a fart, they give him respect. 'If there'd been a war, let's just suppose, say he'd been born in the time of General San Martín,{8} that Gaucho,' or so the Kid proposed, 'they'd have erected a monument to him. He'd have been I dunno what, some kind of a hero, but he was born out of his time. He has this problem about expressing himself, which makes him very introverted. Perfect for carrying out special assignments. He'll go and kill off anyone, and do it in the blink of an eye. Once, during a robbery, the cashier wasn't prepared to play along with it, thought it was some sort of a game, and he acted like a fool, the cashier did, in that bank, 'cause he couldn't see a gun, 'cause the Gaucho wasn't showing his weapon.

'So he said: "This is a raid."

'And the prick of a cashier, when he saw him there, looking like a mental defective, thought it was all a joke, and that he was fooling. "Get out," he said. Or "Stop fucking with me, dumbo," he might have said. Dorda scarcely moved his hand, just slightly like this, inside the pocket of his white coat (because he'd put on a medic's, one he'd taken from the hospital) and he emptied the chamber into the guy's face.

The bank staff themselves all rushed to fill his bag when they saw him smiling broadly after stiffing the guy, the cashier guy. A very, very heavy guy, Gaucho Dorda, a total loony. They don't beat him up either, the cops, don't put him through their paces. You might as well kill him, for all the talk you'll get out of him.'

'You remind me of a fellow I picked up once in the Retiro station, in the toilet — did I tell you this one, Gaucho? — a fellow like you, I was peeing, the guy was circling me, staring at my thing, circling me again, so then I began making small talk and the fellow held out a sheet of paper which read: I'm deaf-and-mute. So I did it anyway. And he paid me 150 pesos. He breathed heavily while he was shafting me, 'cause of course he couldn't say anything, but he let out his breath, exhaled, enjoying it.'

'I'm deaf-and-mute too,' the Kid went on and burst out laughing and the Gaucho gazed at him contentedly, before he too uttered a disturbed little cackle.

Dorda remembered it, and he also loved the Kid. He couldn't say as much, but he was willing to give his life for Brignone. Right now he made an effort, and got up. It was hard work thinking, but he was doing it and his mind was running on like a translation machine (according to Dr Bunge), everything seemed directed personally to upset him (well, him or the Brignone Kid). They spoke to him and he translated. For example, when he was a boy, he used to attend the church cinema, since he, Dorda, was from the countryside, and in the country cinema is a religious devotion. 'If you went to Mass,' (recounted the Gaucho) 'the priest would give you, when you left, a ticket (and if you'd taken communion, the priest would give you two) which got you in free to the parish cinema, which was showing after morning mass.' Dorda could get to see even a whole series of films and translated every one, as if he were on screen, as if he'd lived it all himself. 'Once we had to take him out of the screening, because he pulled out his willy and began weeing: in the film he could see a child urinating, his back to the audience, urinating in the night, in the middle of the countryside…': deposition from the sacristan to Dr Bunge, included in his psychiatric report.) A devout believer, Dorda, always wishing to remain in God's grace, and his mother went so far as to declare that he had wanted to become parish priest at Del Valle (a village some five kilometres away from his family home) where the Brothers of the Sacred Heart were based, but when he was on his way to visit, a hobo stopped and took advantage of him, and from that time stemmed all his many misfortunes.