Ricardo Piglia - Money to Burn

'You'll come to a bad end.'

Meaning, dead from a bullet, wounded in the back, betrayed, and none the less he had ended well, whole, without betraying anyone, without allowing his arm to be twisted. He was enthused by his own words and could see, as if in a photo, an arm being twisted, wrestled over the counter in an open-air bar in Cañuelas, followed by his corpse on the front page of the magazine Crónica. 'Dorda the hyena is dead.' Let them come, he said, let them come, the rotten bastards. He held out his arm and tied the rubber tube around it, to bring up the vein.

Nothing else mattered. He leant out of the window, to see what the goons were preparing, they were moving around below like little dolls, pinned to the walls, spotlights illuminating the afternoon. At the back, behind them, there was the Rodó Park, and beyond that, the river. Under the ground, below the drains, were the sewers, the giant pipes running like secret passageways and emptying into the river. To escape through the cellars, excavate a tunnel with your hands, get out through those passages via the sewer outlet, climb up the iron staircase, raise the manhole cover and emerge into the fresh air. Some priests ran a school in the midst of the countryside, with trees, estates, and ancient walls.

'Pupil, you'll be enrolled as a pupil.'

And he used to first of all imagine an eye watching over him as he slept, an eye belonging to Pinky Jara, the watchman, blind in one eye, a single eye all white and milky, who beat them all over so that the individual marks couldn't be distinguished. Gaucho used to wet his bed and they made him pick up his mattress and parade before the lot of them, while they laughed at him and he carried his mattress out to dry in the sun, pacing the patio without crying, that Gaucho, until he was sent into the showers, and there, the water streaming all down his face, yes there he could cry without anyone noticing.

'Don't be a pansy, Dorda, don't be a tart, watch out — pansies get pissed on!'

And they laughed, the rest of them, and he threw himself on them, and they all rolled on the ground, hailing blows. 'Pupil', his mother turned him into one to be shot of him, and the word sounded strange to his ears, like a curse. 'You'll attend as a pupil,' his dead mother informed him, and he thought they were talking about an eye operation, making a mark that would forever prevent him from seeing his mother's face, but later, as time went by, he realized it was the girls, whom they'd spy on from the rooftops, through the skylights of the village brothel, getting fucked, their white legs flailing in the air… Were they the pupils, were they sending him there? That surely couldn't be so. Madame Iniguez's pupils, who went for their walks at dawn through the empty village. There were no men in the house on the heights, behind the old corrals, they had to do everything for themselves, the women, with only a handyman to help out, and they got rid of him pretty sharpish, to be all women, living off prostitution, there behind Maria Juana station. Rusita was the first woman he ever went with, she didn't speak like a Christian, but smiled at him relaying words in a foreign language, all mixed in with a few Argentine words. 'You handsome fellow, pay me a canario , come inside me, darling,' uttered with such an air of indifference she might have been totting up bills, or reciting words distantly remembered from a dream. They were on a level, he and the Russian, neither of them really knew how to express their feelings properly He went to visit and sat down beside her, looking at her as she stroked herself between the legs. For that privilege he paid her what he'd earned or what he'd stolen around the country estates, in the station sidings, in the depths of the store run by Abad, the Turk. They said nothing to one another. The Gaucho was almost speechless during this period of his life, aged fourteen, even thirteen, fair-haired, light-eyed, face flat as a biscuit, and sometimes given to hearing his brainwaves resonate in imaginary tubes like sweet music to the pure and inexplicable voice of Rusita, who spoke to him in her own language, but also called him lovely, handsome and learnt to say My Blond Gaucho and more sweet-talking phrases so incomprehensible that only the two of them could understand, and which entered into the Gaucho through the depths of his heart. He attempted to explain it to her, those roots woven into his heart, belonging to an arbour watered by his blood. And she, what did she understand? He attempted to explain to her. And she knew that he should not be looking for love among women, that his soul could not seek warmth with her kind. He too wanted to tell her things, about the songs his late mother listened to, but his voice wouldn't come out. He practised what he wanted to say to her, but the words tripped him up. Then she looked at him smiling, as if she understood the Gaucho to be different from the rest of them, not effeminate, a true macho, but different from the rest, a pervert they said in the countryside, but not a queer, so, and she buffed her toe-nails, naked, sitting on her bed, the smell of the nail polish remover making him both sick and hot, and he felt like varnishing his own nails, and gazed at the woman with the little balls of cotton wool between her toes, and he wanted to kneel down and kiss her, like the idea of a virgin, but he couldn't manage it and remained there silently, sad, subdued, and from time to time she smiled and spoke to him in her incomprehensible language or sang to him in Polish, the little Russian, and in the end she approached him and the Gaucho permitted his cock to be touched, whether erect or flaccid, without ever succeeding in penetrating her and sometimes it was he who touched Rusita, caressing her as if she were a doll, a little kid he loved in secret, that Blond Gaucho.

This must have all been happening around 1957 or '58. He'd already started going about armed, and she was neither surprised nor afraid, to see him deposit the Ballester Molina on the bedside table, she made as if not to notice, just carrying on, sweetness itself, beneath the night light, speaking her language like a litany. When was that? He can no longer remember. He'd done time twice in borstal, but as yet they'd not sent him to Melchor Romero, as yet they'd not attempted to empty his head with their electric shocks, with their insulin injections, to make him like the rest of them. It was Dr Bunge, with his round spectacles and pointed goatee, who was the first to begin telling him that he had to be made like all the rest. That he had to look for a woman and make a family. Because since forever the Gaucho — who was a killer, an animal, an assassin, a man quick to anger, feared throughout the province of Santa Fe, and along all the frontier posts — the Gaucho had always fancied men, agricultural labourers, old Uruguayan peasants who crossed the river at dawn, from the far side of Maria Juana. They took him under the bridges and sodomized him there (that was the term employed by Dr Bunge), they sodomized him and obliterated him in a fog of humiliation and delight, from which he later emerged both ashamed and liberated. Always detached, always enraged and unable to say what he felt, with those voices reverberating inside him, the women who gave him orders and muttered obscenities to him, issuing contradictory commands, cursing him, and all the voices in Dorda's head belonged to women. That was why they treated him with injections and pills in hospital, in order to cure him, to render him deaf to the voices, to save him from the sin of sodomy. He smiled to himself now, remembering how he looked at the labourers with whom he lived during the harvest season. They had to spend months living closeted together, in high summer, with the other peasants, and a sunburn that could fry your brains. Until the afternoon when they were playing at sapo {21} together in the store, all of them pretty much drunk, and they began to have a go at him, making fun and cracking jokes, and the Gaucho couldn't respond, he only smiled, with vacant eyes, and Old Soto took him on, provoking and provoking him until the Gaucho treacherously killed him, pulled him down when the old man was attempting to mount his chestnut mare, and he kept missing his footing in the stirrup and the Gaucho, as if merely wishing to halt this ridiculous dance, took out his weapon and shot him dead.