Juan José Saer: Scars

He had barely looked at me during the meal, and now he raised his eyes and whispered:

— A man shot his wife to death with a shotgun earlier today, in Barrio Roma, he said. They want me to take his statement tonight, because they don’t have space for him at the station. I told them to wait until tomorrow afternoon.

— Why did he kill her?

— I don’t know anything, said Ernesto. I know he shot her to death with a shotgun, outside a bar.

— Are you going to take his statement tomorrow? I asked.

— In the afternoon, probably. I have other appointments in the morning, said Ernesto.

— Can I come? I asked.

— We’ll see, said Ernesto.

Then we went back to the study and Ernesto put on the record player. He poured whiskeys, and we sat down to listen to his favorite record, Shönberg’s Violin Concerto (Opus 36) . We didn’t say a word while the concerto was playing. I thought about a lot of things. I thought about a girl I was in love with for a full year two years ago. Her name was Perla Pampiglioni. The first time I saw her she was standing at the bus stop near the suspension bridge, on the train station side, to be exact. I went crazy the moment I saw her: we were two meters apart, both standing at the curb, looking sidelong at each other. She had on a yellow dress that showed her arms and neck and her suntanned legs. Her hair was like polished sheets of copper. We took the same bus, and by chance there was only one double seat open, so I sat next to her, giving her the window. She was pretending to look out the window, but every once in a while she glanced at me. I did the same. In the bus’s rear view mirror I could see her knees. We went more than twenty blocks together, and at one point her arm brushed up against mine. Then, in the city center, she got up and left. I thought about getting off at the same corner and talking to her on the street, but I got the feeling that she was watching me the whole trip, so I decided to get off a block later. When I got back to the corner where she got off, she was gone. For three days I wandered around the train station, hoping to see her again, but didn’t find a single trace. I saw her a week later. I was at the bar in the arcade, drinking a cup of coffee with a college friend who had been in medical school in Córdoba for six months, and I see her coming up the corridor toward the bar, again in that yellow dress, the copper sheets of hair bouncing on her shoulders. I liked her perky little tits and realized that she had seen me because she started looking bored. She went up to a toy store window. And then Arnoldo Pampiglioni gets up, walks over to her, gives her a kiss, and they start talking. They were five meters away and the fucking son of a bitch couldn’t invite her to the table for coffee and instead left me waiting fifteen minutes. Then she turned — not before throwing a sidelong glance at me — and went back down the corridor toward the street, shaking the roundest, tightest — the word is perfect —ass I’ve seen in my life. Arnoldo sits down again and says, Perlita only gets a pass because we’re cousins . I exhaled and asked who she was. She’s Perlita Pampiglioni , Arnoldo said. She got her masters this year . He told me where she lived and everything. Then he went back to Córdoba. The next day I launched the operation. Based on the address that Arnoldo gave me, I looked for her number in the phone book and found what I was looking for. Her father was José Pampiglioni, and he lived in Guadalupe. There was also a José Pampiglioni downtown, under the heading Home Furnishings . So I posted myself a whole afternoon in front of the shop on San Martín until I saw all the workers leave, and finally, half an hour after the shop closed, a fifty-year-old man locked the door, leaving the shop lights on.

The next day, around eleven, I went in and asked the price of a vacuum cleaner, if I could buy it on credit, and if the credit could be in my name, because I was under age and wanted to surprise my mother. The salesman asked if I worked and I said yes, and on top of that I regularly got a two-hundred-dollar-a-month allowance from my mother’s brother, a Mister Philip Marlowe, from Los Angeles, California. The salesman told me it might be possible, but in any case I would need an older person, someone with property, to guarantee the loan. Just then I felt something strange behind me; I turned, and she came in: she had on these super tight white pants and a white shirt. She trailed a soft perfume as she passed toward the back of the shop and entered the offices, disappearing inside. Unfortunately we were at the end of the conversation, and it was obvious that the salesman was trying to put me off until I came back with more security. I asked if he could get me a credit application, and if it wasn’t convenient I could make my case to the owner, but the salesman took me to the register at the back, gave me an application, and told me it wasn’t worth talking to the owner because the situation was perfectly normal as long as I could find someone older, with property, to guarantee the loan. I asked him to show me the vacuum cleaner again, that I wanted to try it out some more. The salesman told me that there was nothing else to see, that he had shown me all the functions and features of the machine, and if I came back with the application in order and had the down payment, I could take the vacuum cleaner home and work it as much as I wanted.

So I left and set up on the corner to wait. I was there more than a half an hour in the sun. Around twelve fifteen, after the rest of the workers had gone, I saw her leave with her father. They turned toward the opposite corner, but as her father was turning back to lock the front door, I realized she was looking in my direction, very discreetly, and was making like she knew I was there. I started following them, for something like thirty meters. Her father had his arm around her shoulder. They reached the first corner on San Martín and turned right toward 25 de Mayo, passing in front of the Banco Provincial, whose round clock read twelve sixteen, and then continued toward the Parque Palomar. The old man had parked his car next to the park. It was sky blue, long, and wide, and must have had at least two or three different climates and indoor plumbing. They talked a second before getting in (I had stopped at the corner, pretending to wait for a bus), and finally I saw the old man give her the keys and she sat down behind the wheel, but not before throwing a sidelong gaze toward where I was standing. Then they left.

I went half crazy realizing that I was up against more than her body, that her body was something frail compared to the element that had just appeared: her car. And so began the long period in which I waited for her to appear in her car. I waited for it so fiercely, with such conviction, that it appeared twice. Once was on the waterfront, a rainy afternoon — I was leaning on the railing, watching how the rain fell on the river, sheltered only by a tree, thinking, Right now she’s going to show up in her car and take me away, right now , and I turned around suddenly and saw the massive blue car coming slowly up from Guadalupe along the wide, deserted waterfront. It took forever to get there, growing slowly out of the gray horizon, and as it approached I could make out the regular movement of the windshield wipers clearing the drops that were falling on the windshield and blurring the face behind the glass. It passed by and it wasn’t her. And the second time, an afternoon in January, I was crossing another completely deserted street, and just as I’m thinking, Her car is going to turn the corner and come this way , I hear the squeal of brakes and see the blue car speed around the corner, growling on the boiling asphalt. Again it passed by and again it wasn’t her. But I realized that I was developing the ability to manifest the blue car and bring it where I was, no matter where it had been before.