Ricardo Piglia - Money to Burn

But the Kid, in contrast (and he himself said as much), felt sane and safe with this girl, as if there were no possible danger in being around her, he only had to let himself be carried along by her for a while, far from the Blond Gaucho, the twin, and well away from the Crow, just for a while, like a normal sort of guy.

Meanwhile destiny had begun preparing its drama, weaving its intrigue, knotting off the last piece of wool (this was the youth's description when he wrote up the crime page for El Mundo ), tying up all the loose threads of what those ancient Greeks were talking about when they said muthos.

'I've got a place near here. Some of the boys in the cabaret lend it to me, and they're never around,' she told him.

The flat had two bedrooms and a lounge and was in utter chaos: unwashed dishes piled high in the kitchen, leftover dope and food dropped on the floor, the girl's clothes hanging out of an open suitcase. There were two beds in one room, and a sofa and a mattress lying on a board on the floor of the other.

'A woman comes and cleans, but only on Mondays.'

'Who uses the place? It's a tip,' said the Kid.

'It belongs to some friends from the club where I work, I've already told you that. They let me use it during the week and on Saturday nights I go back to the hostel.'

The Kid took a turn around the pad, looked through the windows that gave on to an inner courtyard, at the passage that gave on to a staircase.

'And upstairs, what's there?'

'Another apartment and a flat roof.' She searched behind the bed and came out with a 45 r.p.m. record. 'Do you happen to like Head and Body…'

'What are you, telepathic?… Of course I like them, better than the Rolling…'

'That's it,' she said. 'They're fab, brilliant.'

'When I was a child I was clairvoyant,' the Kid chuckled to himself. 'But I had a problem and it cost me my psychic power.'

She looked at him, amused, convinced the guy was having her on.

'An accident?'

'Well, not me exactly, some friends who were travelling with me in the car began to mess about. We were all drunk — I used to drink gin in those days… I ended up inside. And I stopped seeing what I'd seen as a child.'

'Drinking is rough, I prefer hash,' the girl replied and perched on the arm of a chair to roll a marijuana joint. She looked like a hippie, the Kid suddenly noticed. A Uruguayan hippie, with those long clothes and her little pigtails, and she also worked in a cabaret, that was too much.

'For example, as a boy I saw my Uncle Federico who'd died two years earlier and talked to him too.'

She looked seriously and attentively at him, preparing the joint with deft movements. He told her the story when they began to smoke, because it was like talking about a period of life he'd lost, he'd never spoken to anybody when he was young, from the earliest times to the dead times in which he'd begun repeatedly getting locked up.

'My Uncle Federico was a great guy, who went under two or three times, but he always came up again ahead. He lived in Tandil, and I'd go and visit and stay over with him. He had a garage, and he fixed Kaiser cars, he did well out of it, but then one afternoon his son was struck by an explosion in the fusion welding, a really stupid accident, as there was an exposed cable which short-circuited, and my uncle ended up watching his son die. From that moment on, my uncle let himself go, didn't want to see anyone, spent the entire day stretched out on his bed with the Venetian blinds down, smoking and drinking mate {11} and pondering. He emptied out his mate on to some newspapers in the flat, and in the end there was a sort of green island of dried herbs in the middle of the bedroom, and he wouldn't let anyone come in, not even to open the curtains,' or so the Kid related, according to the girl some time later, 'and just kept saying that he'd get up the next day. I went to visit him one afternoon and he was still there, lying in bed with his face to the wall, without doing anything. "Hi, Kid, how're you doing, when did you get here?" he said, as usual. Then he stayed silent for a while. "I've no great wish to get up," he said. "Do me a favour, buy me a pack of Particulares Fuertes." And when I got to the door he called me back. "Kid," he said, "better still, buy me two packs, then I'll have some in stock."

'That was the last time I saw Uncle Federico alive,' said the Kid and took a long, deep drag of his spliff and smelt the acrid smoke, first in his throat and then at the bottom of his lungs, 'because he died within the week, and from then on he began appearing to me with monotonous regularity.' He gave a belly laugh, as though he'd cracked a particularly funny joke. He couldn't stop giggling and the girl started to join in while they passed the joint back and forth. 'It was really weird, because he was dead, and I could see him plainly, stood there in front of me, knowing he was dead, but this didn't seem to matter at all. At this time I must have been more or less the same age as Cholito when he died, some sixteen or seventeen years old, so that was why he appeared to me, no doubt, as if I were his son. If I came up close, say at a distance from here to the wall (when I saw him of course I knew it was a hallucination, but I saw him just as well as I'm seeing you), he'd be smoking a cigarette, and saying nothing to me. He smiled. Even when I spoke to him, he didn't hear, he just stayed put, smoking, partly hunched over, the ash forever on the point of dropping off the end of his cigarette. All he did was smile.' He suddenly started laughing, the Kid did, realizing how much he'd related to the girl. 'It was a ghost… And it appeared to me. I've never told anyone, but it's the truth.'

'I know,' she said, handing him the spliff. 'That's what I meant when I said there was something about you I found disconcerting. I mean you look as if you come from around here, but your spirit comes from somewhere else…' Hash, because it turned out to be hash rather than marijuana, made her speak slowly, as though she chose each word very carefully. 'What are you doing on this side of the River?'

'I'm passing through. On my way to Mexico… I've a friend living in Guanajuato… Poor thing…' he said, with nobody particular in mind. Could he be thinking of the Uruguayan girl or of his friend, the Queen, who'd gone to live in Guanajuato because he was sick of living in the capital? He'd also been thinking of his mother, of course, she was a poor thing, who by now must be aware that he was being hunted by the police, along with the rest of the world. 'My mother wanted me to study architecture. She wanted to have a son who created houses, because my dad ran a construction business.'

Smoking made him melancholy, it was always the same, it made him sad and made him relax, both at the same time, he felt slow and lucid.

'Me too, I'm passing through… I left home. Wait, I'd almost forgotten,' said the girl and quickly held out to him the butt of her joint clamped in a pair of eyebrow tweezers, then fell to her knees and started rummaging under the bed.

From somewhere way underneath she pulled out a Winco player and put a record on the turntable. It was a record with two sides by Head and Body (the tunes were 'Parallel Lives' and 'Brave Captain' and the girl had been listening to them for months on end, the entire time, without letting up, always the same, first one and then the other side until they'd both become scratched).

'Shall we play it?'

'Of course…' said the Kid.

'It's the only record I have,' said the girl.

'Parallel Lives' began playing at full blast, and they moved their bodies to the rhythm and smoked the marijuana spliff down so low they burned their lips on the butt. They could hear the throbbing music through the cheap record-player, it vibrated just as obsessively, and the two began to chorus in English along with the rock and roll.