Matias Nespolo - Seven Ways to Kill a Cat

As tense as a thriller, as vivid as an undercover documentary, Matías Néspolo’s bold and brilliant first novel takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride through a place of crime and deprivation. Set in Buenos Aires at the time of Argentina’s financial crash, and seen through the eyes of twenty-year-old Gringo, it tells the story of two boys on the cusp of adulthood who have no choice but to join the gang warfare that rules their community. At least, Gringo’s friend Chueco thinks they have no choice. He’s determined to prove himself hard enough to get into El Jetita’s gang, but smart enough to remain his own man. Gringo is more intelligent. He knows that gangs don’t work like that: you obey the leader or else. As the two get drawn ever deeper into a pitched battle between El Jetita and his rival Charly over control of the barrio’s drugs and prostitution, Gringo sees a life of love and loss pass before his eyes. A few days before, he was joking with Chueco about killing cats. Now, he’s fighting to save his skin.

Written in the street-slang of the slums, and full of fantastic characters from the sympathetic Gringo to the ruthless gang leader El Jetita or the grotesque bar owner Fat Farías, this is one of those novels that is about one place and every place. While its depiction of Buenos Aires rings vibrantly true in every detail, the barrio could be any place of urban deprivation where young men are pushed into a violence that, ultimately, will destroy them.

ONE OF THE challenges in any translation is preserving a sense of place, affording the reader a glimpse of the foreign, of another life, another culture.

The Buenos Aires of Seven Ways to Kill a Cat is not simply a place, it is a patchwork of smells and tastes and especially sounds since Matías Néspolo does not describe this world but conjures it through dialogue, idiom and slang. Slang varies from country to country, from city to city, even from town to town. More than meaning, it has a music and an attitude; translating it, taming it can risk making what is alien too familiar.

In trying to capture the crackling energy of these voices, the vernacular of drugs and guns and sex, I felt there was a danger that these street kids from Buenos Aires might sound as though they were from south London (or east Baltimore), so I have chosen to keep elements of the original which I hope can be easily understood in context. Since I could not imagine Gringo addressing his friends as ‘mate’, ‘buddy’, ‘bro’ or ‘brah’, I borrowed from Spanish the many words for friend — socio (partner), loco (madman), viejo (old friend), compañero (comrade), pibe (kid) and the ubiquitous Argentinian interjection che (which can translate as ‘man’ or simply as ‘hey!’) which famously gave Ernesto Guevara his nickname.

Many characters in the book are also only ever referred to by their nicknames and these, too, I left unchanged, deciding that, on balance, more would be lost than gained by having characters called Bandy-legs ( El Chueco ), Blondie ( Gringo ), Babyface ( El Jetita ) and The Jellyfish ( El Medusa ).

Lastly, there are the cultural trappings that have no equivalents — foodstuffs like morcilla (a blood sausage utterly unlike black pudding), alfajores (chocolate-covered sandwich biscuits filled with quince jelly or caramel), to say nothing of the complex ritual of making and drinking mate (carefully prepared from bitter yerba buena leaves in a hollow gourd, often ornately carved and with a silver rim, and drunk through a bombilla — a long metal straw). Mate is not simply a drink like coffee or tea, but a crucial ritual of friendship and bonding.

The Buenos Aires where Gringo and his friends live is not the city of broad avenues, baroque cemeteries, the Casa Rosada and Tango, but one that visitors and indeed most porteños never see: neighbourhoods like Zavaleta to the south of the city, between shantytowns 21 and 24, where families live in makeshift shacks without water or electricity surrounded by crumbling buildings and new apartment blocks, areas blighted by poverty, petty crime and paco (a cheap cocaine paste like crack). But these are also places that crackle with extraordinary energy, with danger, with cumbia music and with hope. Welcome to the barrio.

Frank Wynne

‘THERE’S SEVEN WAYS to kill a cat,’ Chueco says, stroking the animal Ernestina’s kid just brought him, and giving me a sly wink.

He cradles it in his left arm and strokes its head, leaning over like he’s trying to protect it, then jerks back as it lashes out. I hear a sound like a dead branch snapping and Chueco lifts the shuddering cat by the scruff of its neck. The head is lolling, the paws rigid. It stops moving.

‘But when it comes down to it, there’s only two ways,’ he goes on like he’s teaching a class. ‘In a civilised fashion, or like a fucking savage.’

‘Don’t tell me. That was savage?’ I say to wind him up.

‘No, viejo , that was civilised. This way the kitty doesn’t suffer because …’ He lets the sentence trail off and laughs. When he laughs, he screws up his face so he looks like an old woman in pain. He looks so ridiculous, I laugh too. Not much, just a bit. Just enough to convince myself this thing I’m staring at isn’t a cat any more. It’s food, a gift from God. I haven’t had meat in over a week and I’m fucking sick of cornmeal mush — I figure Chueco is too — or the weevil-infested rice we get free from a grocer up in Zavaleta and the plums we steal from the garden of the old Portuguese guy, Oliveira.

Chueco holds the cat by the hind legs so its head is hanging down. With a quick backhand flick of his knife, he slits its throat, and nudges a tin can under the head with his foot to collect the blood.

‘What the fuck are you going to do, make morcilla ?’ I say.

‘What does it look like?’ he says. I don’t know if he’s taking the piss or if he’s really planning on using the blood to make black pudding, so I don’t say anything. I just watch him, let him get on with it.

With a deep slash, he slits the cat open and guts it. The entrails spill into the can. Chueco moves quickly, skilfully. He looks like a pro.

‘Now for the tricky bit,’ he says, jerking the tip of the blade at me, his eyes half closed.

He cuts off the tail and starts to cut around the paws, following the curve of the joint.

‘It’s a bit like stripping electric wire,’ he explains, ‘except it’s got fur obviously, and it’s thicker. Bit like Fat Farías’s finger.’

‘Fat Farías! There’s a lot of fucking meat on him … Why don’t we just butcher him?’ I’m joking, but Chueco gets a serious look and I see a gleam in those beady little eyes.

‘Forget butchering him! We should fleece the fat fucker of all that cash he’s got stashed away.’

‘What are you talking about? Farías hasn’t got two pesos to rub together, he’s as fucked as everyone else round here. You know he’s in deep shit with his suppliers. If things don’t pick up, he’s not even going to have beer to sell in that dive of his.’

‘He’s in the shit because he’s a stingy fucker, forever crawling to God and the Holy Virgin Mary. I’m telling you, Gringo, Farías has a fat wad of cash stashed somewhere.’

‘ Yeah, in the bank maybe ,’ I’m about to say but I bite my tongue. Stupid fucking thing to say. Since the exchange rate tanked last September, nobody puts money in a bank. Anyone with serious cash gets it out of the country, but that wouldn’t include Farías, ‘El Gordo’. Most people who’ve got a little bit put aside just stuff it under the mattress.