Mapuche Page 2

  The entrance to the Transformer was a simple hole cut in an iron shutter. A lesbian with body piercings, dressed for hunting big game, was letting some people in, others not: Jill, eighty kilos of violence perched on a stool on the sidewalk. Transvestites and prostitutes obeyed her finger gestures and looks, too afraid of losing their places for later, along with the possibility of picking up some extra cash if the night turned out to be slow.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  Jana hadn’t been in the Transformer for years, but Jill let her in, impassive beneath her bleached military crew cut. Jana bent down, made her way through the gloomy tunnel that led to the club, and pushed open the padded door. It was almost as dark inside as it was outside, the best way of hiding the dirt and the state of the furniture. A zombielike faun was wandering in the shadow of the head-high runway; watched by everyone, two trannies with made-in-China fake diamond necklaces, two addicts she didn’t know, were writhing at the edge of the dance floor. Otherwise, the Transformer hadn’t changed, with its cigarette burns on the benches, its lukewarm champagne, and its sex à la carte. The couples that formed incognito in the dark reached the back rooms by the runway, lit up by flashing strobe lights, but the trannies looked tired this morning. There was no mad revue under rotating disco lamps, no laughing to cover the blows and bullying: the customers took refuge behind the speakers pumping out indifferent house music, peering at new arrivals as if they were messiahs nearing the finish line.

  Jana’s Doc Martens adhered to the club’s sticky floor. She headed for the bar and finally spotted Paula among the rudderless and anchorless shipwrecks,. She was snorting coke on the counter, in the company of Jorge, the club’s manager.

  “Well, well,” he said when he saw the Indian woman come into his cave. “Look here, it’s ‘La Pampa’ . . . ”

  Her little nickname referred to her chest, which was as flat as the Argentine plains. Jana hated that son of a bitch.

  “I thought you were a great artist,” he said with the complacency of a real estate agent. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I’m choking on the stink of your breath.”

  Jorge chuckled. Stocky, wearing a bracelet and a white shirt opened to show a tuft of hair and a priceless gold chain, the manager laid out three lines of coke on the counter and handed Jana a damp straw, giving her a sly look.

  “A little hit for the prodigal child?”

  “No.”

  “Have you quit, too?”

  “Fuck off,” she said, looking at him under her brown locks. “O.K.?”

  Paula’s mouth twisted under the beauty spot that contrasted with the pallor of her nostrils: one sign from the boss and Jill would throw them out with their Adam’s apples on the back of their necks if she felt like it. Jana pulled her friend down to the other end of the bar, where the music wasn’t so loud.

  “You should go easy on the coke, love,” she said to the tranny perched on her high heels. “There’s nothing but laxatives in it. And above all you should keep away from that louse.”

  Jorge was taunting them from the opposite end of the counter.

  “I was so nervous,” Paula confessed, wiping her nose.

  “Coke does calm you down, it’s true.”

  “Listen, something happened to Luz,” Paula repeated, “I’m sure of it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have called you.”

  Paula was wearing a white dress with flounces and heart-shaped earrings; her foundation was crumbling in the early morning, and by that point her curls were attractive to no one but other homosexuals.

  Jana shook her head.

  “It’s the coke that’s making you paranoid.”

  “No, I swear,” Paula replied, her eyes big as saucers. “I asked the girls,” she said, turning toward the lap-dance fans, “they haven’t seen Luz all night, either. I’ve used up an incredible number of credits texting her; even if Luz had lost her cell, she’d be here. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “What did her message say, exactly?”

  “Just that she wanted to talk to me about something important, that she’d meet me here at 5:00, after the Niceto . . . ” The Niceto was the club in the barrio of Palermo where Paula was auditioning for a part.

  “By the way, how did it go?”

  “Great! They told me they’d let me know!”

  Paula smiled with Bambi-on-barbiturates eyes—this was her first encounter with show business.

  “Who’d you see,” Jana joked, “the doorman?”

  “No, no, the choreographer! Gelman, a kinda younger Andy Warhol. You know, I saw part of the rehearsal, and the show looks like it’s going to be good! Listen, Jana,” she said, growing more serious, “Luz couldn’t have been fooling around. That’s not her style, and even less if she had something important to tell me. Not to mention the audition at the Niceto.” Paula put her hand on Jana’s. “I’ve got a bad feeling, Jana. Otherwise I wouldn’t have called you. You know how much I care about Luz. Please help me find her.”

  Paula wrinkled her little trumpet-shaped nose, an expression known only to the two of them. Her smile was missing a tooth, but the rest was still intact under the makeup. Jana sighed in the club’s polluted air. “O.K.” Figures were slipping into the obscurity: party animals going home, habitués, gay junkies, police informers, resolute virgins, the waltz of the backrooms was getting into full swing. Jorge’s voice drowned out the Latin disco blaring from the speakers.

  “Hey, La Pampa!” he roared. “There are two gauchos here asking if you’ll still lay them for a hundred pesos! Hey, Indian! You hear?”

  “Don’t listen,” Paula whispered to her friend, “he’s too stupid.”

  Jana had a metallic taste in her mouth; on the other side of the bar Jorge was snickering. She took Paula’s hand and dragged her toward the exit.

  It was either that or set this rat-hole on fire.

  *

  Buenos Aires arose out of nothing, a land of brush and mud on the edge of an estuary that opened onto the ocean where contrary winds blew. It was there that the colonists had constructed a commercial port, La Boca, its jaws closed on the Amerindian continent. La Boca, where so many cattle were slaughtered that the blood ran over the sidewalks, along with the blood of girls who thought they were emigrating from Europe to a new Eldorado or who had been kidnapped with false promises of marriage before they were sent to the slaughterhouses, where they serviced sixty customers a day seven days a week in sailors’ whorehouses—another century.

  The port had been abandoned, and La Boca was now known only for its corrugated metal houses painted with the remains of ship paint pots, its craftsmen, and its pretty buildings on the Caminito occupied by rainbow-colored galleries where all kinds of portraits of Maradona, Evita, and Guevara could be found. A lookalike of soccer’s golden boy, or the end-of-career version, little skirts in the Argentine national colors, merchants catering to gringas, kids in soccer jerseys, one restaurant after another, and as many touts. During the day La Boca had loads of tourists, but the area emptied out at nightfall: prostitutes, drug dealers, addicts, riffraff, poor people, shady characters roamed it until dawn. Even the brightly-painted houses took on a macabre appearance.

  Jana’s Ford cruised slowly along the docks; it was a 1980 model and did not clash with the surroundings. Leaky boats served out their time in the old commercial port, half sunk or covered with algae; grayish low-income towers rose up, clothes hung to dry on the balconies like so many tongues stuck out at Buenos Aires propriety. Paula looked at the sites of perdition outside the broken window; coming down from coke made her anxious, she felt responsible for Luz and her premonitions were tying her stomach in knots.

  Bosteros, bumpkins—that’s what the people of La Boca are called. Also known as Orlando, Luz had begun his career as a transvestite blowing truck drivers in Junin. But he’d fled his life i
n the service stations on Route 7 after his only contact in town, a cousin, had thrown him out when he found women’s clothing in his suitcase. Luz had felt pretty much at home when he landed in La Boca. He’d made the rounds of the bars and clubs, looking for a man who would take him as he was, and finally found Paula.

  Most of the transvestites saw their peers as amateurs at best and as competitors at worst. But Paula had enough heart for two. Above all, the Samaritan was in a position to see how Luz’s story would end. Overwhelmed by her need to dress as a woman, Luz had already lost everything—family ties, job, friends. After the first encounters at traffic circles, more phantasmal than profitable, prostitution had quickly become her lifesaver. She would die worn-out and toothless, in the gutter. Lost in Buenos Aires, Paula had suggested that they work as a team on the La Boca docks; they would protect one another while waiting for something better, and Paula would teach her the trade.

  “Don’t worry about anything,” Jana said. “I’m sure Luz took some guy home with her.”

  “No,” Paula replied. “Rule No. 1 is always to fuck at other people’s places, never at your own. If the guy is a nutcase who wants to kill you, he’ll have to get rid of the body, whereas at your place he can just leave and shut the door. No,” she repeated as if to convince herself, “Luz would never have done anything that stupid.”

  Jana drove slowly under the flickering streetlights, peering into the shadows between abandoned warehouses and vacant lots. A steamboat in the last stages of decomposition was creaking against the broken-down dock, while farther on a couple of worn-out cranes and a sand barge completed the impression of neglect and decay. At dawn, the streets had emptied out: the trannies, the junkers of the prostitution game, had gone home.

  “Except for sniffing dogs’ hind ends, there’s nothing to do here,” Jana said.

  Paula, sitting beside her and clutching her fake zebra-skin purse on her knees, agreed.

  “Let’s have a look over by the stadium,” she said. “There are a couple of regular customers over there, you never know.”

  The La Boca stadium was a cube of yellow and grayish-blue concrete painted with Coca-Cola signs: it was there that Maradona performed his first exploits before avenging a whole country for the Falkland Islands humiliation by beating England all by himself.

  Dieguito was thinking about Maradona’s sombreros, about the way he left the English team mystified, about the Goal of the Century, over and over.

  “Whaaaa . . . ”

  Dieguito was dribbling the stars. An effect of the paco, the dregs of the dregs of crystal meth he’d just sniffed after making the rounds of the neighborhood.

  A hundred thousand cartoneros came down from the suburbs every day to collect and resell recyclable garbage: paper, metals, glass, plastic, cardboard, for forty-two centavos a kilo—a few cents. Among them were many children who knew each other from their neighborhoods or soccer clubs. Dieguito and his gang wore the jersey of the Boca Juniors, the club formed after the Río de la Plata team’s departure to the wealthy neighborhoods—a betrayal that had never been pardoned. Naturally, number 10 was reserved for their leader.

  “Whaaaa . . . ”

  Dieguito was delirious. The rest of the gang was drinking a mixture of orange juice and 80-proof alcohol in plastic bottles, sprawling on the trampled flowerbeds at the north entrance: no one saw the Ford park in the shadow of the stadium.

  Dieguito soon felt a presence over him, blinked his eyes to define its contours, and jumped back: a tranny was bending over him in a cream-colored coat with a stained collar and a dress below the knees . . . It took him a few seconds to come out of his trance and recognize Paula.

  “What are you doing there,” the cartonero stammered.

  “We’re looking for Luz,” his guardian angel replied. “She was working the docks tonight: it’s your sector, you must have seen her, no?”

  Dieguito leaned back against the concrete pillar. There was an Indian with the tranny, whom the kid eyed with a disgusted air—she didn’t even have any tits.

  “Luz?” he said, his mouth feeling woolly. “Uh, no . . . ”

  “You didn’t see her because you were high or because she wasn’t here?”

  “Whoa!” the boy snorted. “We worked all night while you were getting fucked: you know where you can stick your comments?”

  “Hey, do you want me to smash your face in with my purse?”

  The rest of the gang slowly emerged, bandy-legged; they got up without enthusiasm.

  Jana rephrased the question. “We’re just asking you if you’ve seen Luz working tonight.”

  “I don’t know anything!” the kid yelped.

  “You didn’t see her all night?” Paula insisted.

  “No! How many times do I have to say it?”

  “Would it kill you to be friendly, Pinocchio?”

  “Up yours! Yes!”

  The gang started to form a circle around the trio.

  “Is there a problem, Dieguito?” asked one of the cartoneros.

  Paula shivered under her flounced dress: some of the kids bent down to pick up stones.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jana whispered.

  Followed by scruffy kids in shorts insulting them, they made their way back to the car and took off. Dark clouds weighed on the rising sun. The tranny’s spirits were plummeting.

  “Maybe Luz is sick,” Jana said, “and stayed home with the crud, she’s probably sleeping like a stone. The thing she wanted to talk about may not be all that important . . . You’re overreacting, honey.”

  “She would have told me,” Paula said sullenly. “We had a date . . . ”

  At the wheel of her old crate, Jana yawned.

  “We’ll find out tomorrow,” she said. “I’m dropping you off at your mother’s house.”

  “Can’t I sleep with you?” her friend simpered, “just for tonight?”

  “No, you kick too much.”

  “That’s because I run a lot in my dreams.”

  “A cheetah with fingernail polish, sure.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have an anxiety attack, Jana. Look,” she said, putting her hand on her fake breasts, “my heart is fluttering.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  The Ford was moving down Don Pedro de Mendoza, an avenue that took them along the harbor on the way back downtown, when they saw the rotating light of a police car at the end of the docks.

  *

  The old car ferry was slouched in the brackish water of the Riachuelo, exhaling an odor of mud and decomposition. A few spindly bushes had grown up against the worm-eaten dock, and there were patches of reeds where oily trash accumulated, corks and plastic bottles. A big guy weighing around 250 pounds was bending over the murky water, flanked by a puny fellow who was running a flashlight beam over the metal structure.

  “It doesn’t smell good, boss,” the man said.

  “Shine the light on it, you fool.”

  Sergeant Andretti grumbled as his eyes followed the beam of trembling light: a body was floating among the jugs and greasy papers, half submerged in the dense mire. The pale body of a young boy, clearly naked, that somebody had thrown next to the ferry.

  The policeman turned to look at the vehicle that was parked at the end of the docks: a strange couple soon emerged from it, a transvestite and a girl with black hair wearing an urban guerilla outfit.

  “What are you doing there?”

  Paula took a few steps toward the cops bending down in front of the bridge and saw the body swimming in the muck that was illuminated by the flashlight. She dug her nails into Jana’s arm, her eyes popping out: it was Luz.

  2

  What’s the matter?” Andretti asked. “Does she smell bad, your pal?”

  Paula was throwing up her guts on the pavement, while two cops called in as backup were teetering at the foo
t of the ferry. Jana examined the policeman by the intermittent flashes of the revolving light.

  “Does that amuse you?”

  Fabio Andretti wore a boar-bristle mustache and carried a good fifty pounds too many. He shrugged in response. He was paid to get the parasites out of the neighborhood; he left the trannies to the social workers. His partner, Troncón, whom he’d had to kick in the ass to wake him up in a cell at the station so they could go on patrol, kept back. A pimply man in his twenties wearing a cap too big for him, Jesus Troncón was not feeling well: he’d never seen a naked body floating in shit. They were just now pulling it toward the docks.

  Andretti hitched up the belt that supported his equipment and the inexorable bulge of his belly. The early morning sunlight was touching the tops of the gray low-cost housing towers—there were no witnesses other than these two clowns. He turned toward the Indian with her high cheekbones, her eyes still fixed on him.

  “O.K.,” he sighed. “We’ll start over from zero. What’s her name?”

  “Luz,” Jana answered.

  “Luz what?”

  “No idea.”

  “I thought you knew her?”

  “I only know her tranny name,” Jana explained.

  “Sure. How about you, over there?” he asked the guy in a dress. “Do you know the stiff’s real name?”

  Paula was choked with sobs, perched on her stiletto heels, ridiculously small compared to the former butcher’s boy. She didn’t want to believe that this little monkey curled up below the ferry was Luz.

  “Or . . . Orlando,” she finally said.

  “That’s all?”

  Paula nodded, realizing bitterly that she didn’t even know Luz’s last name. She pulled a Kleenex out of her zebra-striped bag and wiped her mouth while Andretti scribbled the information in a notebook, his big, sausage-like fingers covering half the pen.