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  Paula needed spangles, perfumes, people like her, with echoes of loneliness in their wild laughter: Miguel needed men who would see him as a woman. His mother had never understood or accepted him as he was. Would things have been different had there been a male presence in the house? Miguel remembered little about his childhood, and almost nothing about his father, Marcelo, who had died during the Falkland War, when the flagship of the Argentine fleet sank with its three hundred sailors. A black page in history: their history ended there. Miguel was five years old, and his mother Rosa was his only guardian, a pious woman attached to cleanliness and order who very quickly revealed her manic-depressive tendencies. When he was still very little, she tucked him in so tightly that the bed looked like a sarcophagus: his chest restricted by the covers, Miguel slept feeling that he was suffocating—a psychosomatic explanation for his heart problems? Objects and furniture were arranged with a positively military rigor, his toys limited to a set of little cars or soldiers in which the boy took no interest. Life had come to a stop after the death of his father, the hero whose cult Rosa maintained. In the household, laughter was considered an affront to the deceased, who, by his absence, occupied all the space.

  Miguel hardly went out, except to go to school or to accompany his mother to church, where the atmosphere was not very different from that at home. Conversely, he told himself that the arrival of his cousins was just a matter of acting out his feelings. Miguel had to fill the void in his heart, a terrible void he couldn’t explain. Without a diploma, forced to help Rosa in the laundry, the transvestite had never had or seized the means to become independent. A shared love would no doubt have helped him leave his mother, but his need to transform himself intervened between desire and the other: at twenty, Miguel understood that he could never love anyone. Never really—never the way one imagines. And that he would die of it. He was himself the other.

  Narcissus. A matter of reflection, of a cruel lack of self he tried in vain to fill by cross-dressing. Miguel was not the only one who was “sick”: alerted by the sudden aggravation of her case, he had informed himself about his mother’s maniacal lunacy.

  People afflicted by geophagy ate earth, coprophagics ate excrement; people suffering from the Rapunzel syndrome ate their hair, chewed-up paper, or various kinds of food wastes. Rosa was risking intestinal occlusion and other serious complications connected with what medical science considered bulimic behaviors: in any case, psychiatric treatment was indispensable. One more worry for Miguel. How long had his mother been suffering from this syndrome? Was she swallowing all sorts of stuff when his back was turned? How much? Should he have her hospitalized, as soon as possible? And the choreographer, the revue at the Niceto: what would happen if he was given an opportunity to go on tour with the troupe, as Gelman had just suggested? Should he once again give up any idea of having a happy life to take care of his crazy mother?

  It was the evening of the premiere: Paula had hardly had time to rehearse her choreography, and the telescoping of reality put her in a state of confused excitement—would she be up to her dreams? A blond Venetian wig, her favorite, was on the dressing table stand; she was putting on the last of her makeup when Jana found her in front of the mirror, a headband over her pulled back, pinned up hair, amid ribbons and bows and cotton balls.

  “Are you ready?” she asked on coming into the transvestite’s “dressing room.”

  Her long eyelashes fluttered briefly.

  “Almost!”

  There was a smell of spangled powder and patchouli in the trailer: Paula put down her beauty tools and examined her face.

  “What time does your revue begin?”

  “I go on stage at 2 A.M.,” Paula replied. “But I have to be there at eleven for makeup and costumes. Oh, Jana! I’m scared to death but it’s great!” she cried impatiently, her eyes popping in front of the mirror. “A tour, just imagine! I could get my tooth fixed, and maybe even buy myself, buy myself . . . ”

  “Some chewing gum,” her friend suggested.

  “I got through the audition, but I’ve never done a show like this!” Paula continued, in her made-up bubble. “If that happens, I’ll be completely petrified! You know what they say about stage fright? You can shit your pants!”

  “Your show is going to be great,” Jana said.

  “You’re coming, right?”

  “Of course.”

  Paula had gotten an invitation for her friend, who hardly ever left her metal sculptures. It would do her good, too.

  “Paula?”

  “Yes, my love?”

  “Why don’t you come live here permanently? Don’t wait for your mother to be institutionalized. That’s unavoidable anyway, and this tour may be the chance of a lifetime: don’t spoil it.”

  In her mind’s eye, Jana saw the madwoman, her stringy old dirty graying red hair and her malicious face, incapable of loving: let her die and go to Hell.

  “What do you say?” she persisted.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know anymore . . . ”

  “This kind of opportunity doesn’t come along every day, Paula. It’s a sign you’ve been given. Life is full of them. Fol­low it.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s Luz sending me a sign from wherever he is . . . poor dear.”

  “Well?”

  Her wig adjusted, the transvestite turned around on her seat of pink plush.

  “I’m ready!”

  Paula smiled, made-up as if for a wedding to be held on Venus. Jana sighed—Paula was so pigheaded . . .

  *

  Sarmiento 4006, at the corner of Medrano: far from the clubs in San Telmo, where the city’s great singers performed for a select audience, La Catedral didn’t look like much, with its old-fashioned lobby lit by neon lights, its stairway in 1950s tiles, and its ten-peso entrance fee.

  But on the second floor everything changed.

  Testosterone, toxins, dance steps, and pheromones collided like blind passions in the half-light. Rubén made his way into the cavern of the tango, the theater of dance born more than a century earlier in the conventillos, old buildings rented to immigrant families or converted into brothels. The place owed its name to the ancient wooden cathedral that now housed a different kind of temple. The light was warm and brilliant on the immense red curtains that marked off the space, which was of an impressive beauty. A giant portrait of Gardel dominated the dance floor where the couples competed: there they danced transverse tangos that were always astounding. In the shadows, the dancers waiting their turn watched each other from the tables with a subtle play of glances: soon they would have to take each other in their arms. Often without being acquainted or saying a word, they would have to sense and divine their partner’s intention before taking the first step, which was henceforth ineluctable.

  Two young Scandinavian blondes were waiting near the dance floor for a stallion to come break them in; Rubén thought of his father (Daniel Calderón had written several poems about the “bicephalous monster” of the tango), then moved toward the heavy red curtains. Behind them was the bar, a long counter of polished wood where aficionados came to have a drink between dances. Old posters climbed up the walls under long Chinese lanterns; an artist’s sculpture hung from the main beam of the ancient cathedral, a large scarlet gagged heart that seemed to float under the roof.

  “Does that remind you of anything?” asked a voice while he was gazing upward.

  Rubén turned around and saw a large-breasted woman in her forties, a brunette who was very attractive despite her sinuous nose.

  “Love, no?” he said.

  She examined the work that hung over them.

  “Uh-huh,” she acquiesced. “Do you dance?”

  He saw that she was wearing suitable shoes.

  “Like a foot,” Rubén replied.

  “Ah? That’s not the impression you give!” she burst out with an
open laugh.

  “Don’t be misled by the poor light, I’m a terrible dancer. Do you come here often?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Too bad.”

  An elegant young man with an unkempt beard was collecting the empty beer glasses on the bar. Rubén left the solitary dancer, asked the bartender to make him a pisco sour, and showed him the photo of María Victoria.

  “Do you know this girl? Or have you ever seen her here?”

  “No,” the young man promptly replied. “We see a lot of people.”

  “María Victoria Campallo,” Rubén announced, while the man was crushing the ice. “She comes here to dance, I’ve been told.”

  The bartender finished mixing the drink, glanced again at the photo on the bar, and pulled an evasive face as he agitated the shaker.

  “I don’t know.” He filled a glass with white foam. “Ask Lola and Nico, they know everybody.”

  “And where would I find them, these turtledoves?”

  “Over there,” the barman said, with a jerk of his head.

  Lola and Nico were taking a break at a nearby table, away from the dancers. Rubén left the barman a generous tip and picked up his glass.

  Outrageous makeup, a black hat, fishnet stockings, a red dress tight over the hips—except for the sneakers she had just put on to give her feet a rest, Lola was still wearing her full tango regalia. Forced, like many Argentines, to work several little jobs, during the day the couple performed on the terraces of bars in La Boca, where, fascinated by the tango’s mimed coitus, oafish tourists had themselves photographed for a few pesos, hanging on each other’s necks in sensual poses. In the evening, they gave dance lessons at La Catedral. Nico spoke lunfardo, the slang of the conventillos. His girlfriend Lola looked sour; she would have preferred to work in a nursery rather than as a street dancer taking in the bumpkins. Rubén found them sitting at a table in a corner, massaging their weary feet after the evening’s dance lessons. He introduced himself, briefly explained his request, and showed them the photo of María Victoria. Nico, who was very angular, bent over the face printed on matte paper.

  “Yes,” he promptly replied. “I’ve given her a couple of lessons this summer . . . A nice girl, rather talented.”

  Next to him, Lola retained her haughty pout.

  “Have you seen her recently?” Rubén asked.

  “We ran into each other last weekend. She was sitting there,” Nico said, pointing to a table shaded from the spotlights. “But she was taking lessons.”

  The detective felt his skin prickle.

  “When was that?”

  “Friday.”

  The day María had called Carlos at the newspaper. New, shadowy couples were entwining on the dance floor, but Rubén was no longer paying attention to them.

  “Was there anyone with her?”

  “Yes. A little redhead, all tarted up,” Nico laughed to avoid his panther’s wrath. “The girls must have stayed an hour. Why?”

  “The girls?”

  “No need to be a physiognomist to see that the redhead was a tranny!” the dancer with the slicked-down hair chortled over the sound of the concertina.

  Rubén still had in his pocket Jana’s charcoal drawing, which he had shown to Anita at lunch. He unfolded the sheet of note-paper, trying not to show how nervous he was.

  “This kind of transvestite?”

  Nico smoothed his mustache and glanced at his companion, who assented with a detached look.

  “Yes,” he said. “That looks pretty much like her.”

  Rubén shivered in the warm light of the spots: Luz.

  10

  A Yankee, young, drunk out of his mind, got out of a taxi holding in his hand a beer and a few pesos that he threw to the driver to pay his fare. Determined to impress the four cheerleader types who were accompanying him, he tried to cut into the long line at the entrance to the Niceto Club, emphasized his status as a natural leader of the Free World, protested when Rubén passed in front of his court, and got himself tossed by the bouncer, who sent the starlets to the end of the line, accompanied by the night owls’ sarcastic remarks.

  The most hyped club in Buenos Aires was jammed full for that night’s show, which was in full swing: the sound machine blared, and under strobe lights, an ecstatic crowd was gathering in front of an immense stage. The show that was being presented left Rubén stunned for a moment.

  A tall blonde straight out of an erotic comic book, wearing a miniskirt and a sailor’s jacket, was dancing voluptuously under the lights, occasionally giving a French kiss to her feminine alter ego, a willowy brunette with slicked-back hair and a man’s suit, who wrapped the super bimbo in her voracious legs. Blind to the petting of the two beauties, a bald tranny weighing at least 350 pounds and draped in silk was sodomizing a young gladiator, masked, muscular, and armed with a trident; his colleagues in the Roman legions were sinking their swords into the asses of terribly consenting ephebes, licking the plastic blades and making gluttonous gestures toward the audience, which was exulting along with them, caught up in the trance. A sexual execution, an act of unbridled lust, multiple partner-swapping, lesbian, homo, tranny, men or women dishonored, all kinds of combinations followed one after the other on the stage of the Niceto, a sort of orgiastic brothel orchestrated by one of de Sade’s henchmen, one in high form. Club 69 was the troupe’s name: an extravagant porno-comic choreography.

  It was four in the morning, it was the third club that Rubén had scoured, and Paula was stage right, wiggling her behind in a red dress with glinting fake rubies; radiant, a ten-carat smile making up for her missing tooth, the laundress’s son was giving a blow job to the beak of a pink swan who decorated the backdrop. They had been running into each other in Peru Street for years. Sated, Paula tapped the bird’s spangled hind side to emphasize its good taste, turned toward an audience that would applaud anything, and recognized the man in front of the stage—the detective, who signaled to her that he’d be waiting for her in the bar after the show.

  Rubén passed through the wasted crowd and ordered a drink at the nearest bar. He recognized the young Americans with pasteurized sex appeal who were swaying their hips to techno house music, had his drink passed to him over a hedge of drinkers whose average age couldn’t have been more than thirty. He was watching, pensively, the drunken parade of peacocks around blondes when he saw Jana at the other end of the bar. Auburn hair that evanesced, a black tank top, and fairy-like arms: she had seen him, too.

  Rubén made his way through the fauna.

  “What are you doing here?” the sculptress asked him, still surprised by what could only be a coincidence.

  “I was looking for you,” Rubén replied in the din.

  Jana wanted to make room for him but they were being pressed against the bar.

  “I thought we weren’t worth your trouble? How did you know that we’d be here?”

  Ruben leaned toward her ear.

  “You left me a list of places where your tranny friends hang out,” he said into her hair. “I made the rounds of three dance halls before the guy at the door told me about the show this evening. Naturally, that put a bug in my ear!”

  “Bravo, Rin Tin Tin!” she laughed over the bass.

  Rubén put a bill on the bar sticky with beer.

  “Can I buy you a drink without you throwing it my face?”

  “I wouldn’t want to ruin your hidalgo outfit,” she said considerately.

  Calderón was wearing a shirt under a 1960s-style leather jacket that must have been worth two or three of her sculptures.

  “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” he informed her.

  “Was it too big?”

  Rubén broke out laughing amid the drunks, and suddenly looked ten years younger.

  “So, what’ll you have?”


  “Same as you,” she said.

  He caught the bartender’s eye and ordered two pisco sours. Jana was almost as tall as he was, and so close he could smell her musky odor.

  “What do you want from Paula?” she asked.

  “I’ll explain it to you when we’ve gotten our drinks: it’s too noisy here.”

  They almost had to shout at each other to make themselves understood.

  “In any case I lied to you the other night,” Jana confessed, jostled by the sticky crowd. “I no longer have any desire whatever to have sex with you!”

  “You’d have tired yourself out anyway.”

  “Not my type.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not my type!” she shouted.

  Rubén handed her the glass that had just landed on the bar and led her off in search of a less deafening place. People were dancing even in the club’s corridors and hallway, where the boozers were walking back and forth. They found a table covered with empty glasses far enough from the dance floor so that they could talk; a man with an eye-patch was snoring on the neighboring bench, his shirt unbuttoned, probably abandoned by his pals. They sat down on the vacant stools without disturbing the drunkard. Rubén took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  “So,” Jana asked, her cloth jacket tossed on the bench, “why did you want to see us?”

  “Your pal Luz was seen in a tango club last Friday. A woman was with him, María Victoria, the daughter of Eduardo Campallo, a rich industrialist who is financing the mayor’s campaign. Do you know her?”

  Jana was looking at the skin on the inside of her forearms: she slugged down half the pisco, the little straw stuck between her lips, and answered with a pout.