Ricardo Piglia - Money to Burn

One of the girls aroused the Kid's curiosity. She was the most arresting to look at: she must have been about nineteen, with long black hair and hypnotic eyes. She watched the men with a kind of smile that gave her a pensive air, as if to her the world, while miserable and corrupt, amused and filled her with the will to live. There was something special about this girl, as if she were in some way absent, as if she regarded everything from a great distance.

Just outside the park the police had picked up a lad dressed like a queen, his face thick with make-up, wearing a blond wig. The girl smiled and commented: 'Another Queen of the Night taken prisoner for disobeying the rules of trade.'

The Kid abandoned his seat and went to sit beside the girl, where they talked freely for a while. They left the café, then, and went into the park where they again sat down, opposite an old man who was preaching from a Bible propped on a lectern, with a microphone held to his lips.

'Christ's words are within us all, brothers and sisters.'

He spoke as if he were alone, the old man. And he gave a blessing, making the sign of the Cross in the air with his hand. He was wearing a dark frock-coat, and looked very dignified, like a priest perhaps, a little barmy, or perhaps a reformed alcoholic, escaped from the Salvation Army, a repentant sinner.

'Jesus was denied twice over and twice over the traitor was punished.'

The voice of the old man preaching mingled with the murmuring of the wind in the trees. For the first time in many months the Kid felt at ease and at peace. (For the first time, perhaps, since he'd joined Malito's gang, he felt safe.) There he was, sitting in the park with a girl, and he was pleased to be seen with her by some of the men who'd already been his tricks, guys who'd previously gone with him, last night or maybe the night before, in the toilets at the Rex cinema.

Suddenly she was looking at him with that smile of hers, surprising him when she said: 'There's something about you I find disconcerting. I've seen you in the cinema, and I've seen you scoring off the men here, and you seem just like the rest of them, but you're not, there's something different about you. You're more of a man…'

The girl said exactly what she thought, right out, and with total sincerity. The Kid was so used to faking it and everyone lying to him, that he took fright, felt really scared. He didn't like women who confronted him, or who told him he was a rent-boy.

'Lady,' he said. 'You seem a little confused to me. You talk all the time, chatter like a Uruguayan hen. Or are you a cop? A proper cop?' and the Kid laughed out loud. 'Are you a WPC from the Pocitos Division, by any chance? Or are you on the pull?'

She stroked his face and drew him closer.

'Quiet, now. Come, now, what are you on about, ssh… I only meant to say that I've kept my eye on you since you first turned up here, last Friday, with that velvet jacket of yours.' She took him by the arm, feeling the electric current and the softness of the fabric on the palm of her hand. 'And I can see who you are, and that you're not the same as the rest of them, you don't talk to anyone. And you're Argentine. You must be from Buenos Aires, aren't you?'

He was from Buenos Aires and lived in Buenos Aires, and had come to Montevideo on business, selling contraband fabrics. Whatever version you like, as long as it was believable, long enough to last until the next morning. All the Argentines loose in Montevideo were smugglers. She smiled and then laughed, looking even younger, and kissed him on the mouth and then at once (just as the Kid had feared) began telling or inventing her own story (like him).

She was working shifts in a night-club and came from across the River Negro. She wanted to save money and invest it in something for herself, in another part of the city, possibly near Mercado, where there were some decent bars, an area the queers didn't frequent, or any lowlife, none of the cheap negroes who came down from the slums on the Cerro. She liked Argentines because they were educated and because they had a distinguished accent. She, in her turn, had a very archaic manner of speaking, because she came from the interior, and because she said whatever came into her head. She was genuine. Or she seemed genuine, perhaps a little affected, but naturally so, as if she were a lady from an earlier epoch (as though she was playing at what that sort of lady might be like). Didn't he remember the outfits he saw as a child in the pages of the Billiken magazine? For sure she did, and she reeled off the titles: 'The Lion of France'; 'The Dutchwoman'; 'The Old Lady'. The youngster was a simple country girl, but she gave herself an air of grandeur, something at once authentic and theatrical, and which pleased him. The girl could have been a sister to him and, at one and the same time, a lost woman. He'd always wanted to have a sister, a young and beautiful woman, in whom he could confide and whom he would have been obliged to keep his body well away from. A woman his own age, lovely to see, with whom he'd be proud to be seen, without anyone needing to know she was his sister. He felt as much, and after a little while, told her as much, straight out.

'Your sister, you'd like me to be your sister?' the girl smiled in surprise, and the Kid roughly replied: 'Why? What's so funny about that?'

Like every guy who plays the man's role with their male partners (the girl was to explain later), the Kid was very touchy on the question of his masculinity.

The Kid was utterly fed up of going with bum boys. Every so often he got sick of it. At present he didn't want a single one of those boys circling the square to look at him, he'd known them under other circumstances, in a fleeting meeting, in toilets that stank of disinfectant, where monstrous acts were described and phrases of love were inscribed on the walls. There names were written up as if names of the gods, hearts were drawn with inartistic ardour, gigantic organs, depicted like sacred birds along the walls of the urinals in the stations and on the flip-up seats in the El Hindu cinema and in the cloakrooms of numerous clubs. He would suddenly feel the urge to humiliate himself, it came on like a sickness, or like grace descending, a breath in his heart, something you have no way of preventing. The same blind force which draws the person who experiences an irresistible desire to enter a church and make a confession. He would kneel in front of these unknown guys, bowing down (it would be better to say, or maybe he'd actually said so, added the girl) before them as though they were gods, knowing the whole time that the least false move, the faintest insinuation of a smile, of a joke, could lead him to kill them, that a mere false gesture was sufficient, one word too many, for them to die with an expression of shock and horror on their faces and a knife buried in their stomachs. They who stripped off their clothes, stock still like kings before him, had no idea of who he was, they never imagined, they were incapable of intuiting the risk they were running. The Kid might be powerful but he was kneeling there on the ground, nauseous from the smell of disinfectant, while some unknown pervert talked to him then paid him. Or was it he who paid? He could never clearly recall what he'd done the previous night, nor the night before last, during his escapades in the harbour bars and his pickups in the El Hindu cinema. He could only recall the irresistible pull that got him to his feet and out on to the street, it was like a euphoria, that left him incapable of thought (he told the girl, according to her later declaration), left him without any thoughts at all, vacant and free, tied to one idea alone. It's like looking for something under a white light and in the middle of the road. It's irresistible. Until afterwards, somewhat disoriented, as if emerging from a dream, he went back to the flat where Malito was waiting for him, and where everyone was waiting for Nando to help them across to Brazil, and whenever he arrived there the Gaucho was huddled in silent withdrawal, maybe he was furious, locked in what he called his 'filthy pad', in a corner, upstairs, at the top of the stairwell. But she didn't pass on any of this information (it was the Gaucho who did) because the girl thought the Kid was a smuggler who trafficked in English cashmere, who lived off the anthill that controlled contraband manufacturing, and who had his vices, like all the guys the girl had ever met since she came to the city.