Читать книгу Slaves to Fortune - Tom Lanoye - Страница 15

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1

Buenos Aires

What would Mr. Bo Xiang think of this? Tony wonders anxiously in San Telmo, as he presses the soles of his feet against the bedpost, bracing to give his labour of love more traction and depth. With good results. The hitherto polite, restrained panting of the matron beneath him turns into moaning. Something low and bestial. Unreserved.

In social intercourse, Mrs. Bo Xiang is the picture of reserve. The eternal smile that people ascribe to Orientals has been bestowed upon her. The grainy layer of pale make-up she smears on her face each morning, over her shaven eyebrows, shows more and more cracks as the day progresses, as fine as the veins in an antique tile. They follow a double pattern: her age lines and the craquelure of her smile. A double map, a palimpsest of an eventful life.

God knows what that poor thing has had to go through in that outsized country of hers, thought Tony, a little less than a week earlier, in the plane on the way over, as he observed his benefactress from close up. She lay next to him in her reclined seat, hanging crookedly in her seat belt, an insect caught in a web, her eyes closed, her small mouth obscenely open. From time to time, she snored or smacked her lips. The Boeing thundered through the freezing, anoxic atmosphere in a composed, almost noble manner.

It was Tony’s first opportunity to inspect Mrs. Bo Xiang undisturbed from this close up. There were several holes in her earlobes. Just before falling asleep, she’d removed her latest purchase—a pair of silver butterflies with a diamond on each wing—and put them away in her Louis Vuitton handbag, along with her rings, her bracelets, and her Breitling watch. What was she afraid of? Pickpockets in first class? Her breath smelled of peppermints and her teeth looked like ivory jacks that had seen too much use. Tony had to stop himself from putting his hand over the obscene, wrinkled mouth until the breathing stopped.

A hell of a life, he thought at the same time, not without compassion—to be born in China, shortly after the war, a woman. He inhaled through his mouth to escape the odour of peppermints. Starvation, refugees, propaganda. Days and days of banging on pots and pans until the sparrows fell out of the sky in exhaustion. Now and again, a purge, or a week of euphoria. How many bullet-riddled bodies had she seen, how many show trials and rapes? And still she carried on smiling from early in the morning until late at night. Perhaps she was already growing senile. And that’s the person giving me orders, that’s the person responsible for my fate. His hand itched again.

But he turned his gaze away from her and asked the stewardess for a gin and tonic. Bombay Sapphire, please. A double.

In daylight, observed from a distance, Mrs. Bo Xiang resembled a flawless porcelain doll, as white as gristle. She drew on new eyebrows, blacker than engine oil. She painted her lips with a red that shone like the bodywork of an Italian sports car. She had everything her heart desired. She bought her clothes in Paris, her shoes and handbags in Singapore, her smartphones and cameras in Tokyo. Plastic surgery was the only thing she didn’t subscribe to. The one time her smile vanished was when Tony cautiously enquired about it.

Four days ago, as they strolled along the widest boulevard on earth, the Avenida 9 de Julio, her countenance had already cracked by mid-morning. She had burst into peals of laughter. Just like that. All Chinese people had that affliction, Tony knew by now, and the women most of all. A high-pitched, hiccupping laugh with a vengeance. He wondered whether there was a reason for it. Usually, there wasn’t.

That same morning, during their very first breakfast on Argentinian soil, Mrs. Bo Xiang had explained her plans. This short trip would be no beach holiday, she’d warned. Idleness was the privilege of the young. She had no time to lose. She wanted to tick off as many sights as possible, with Tony as her guide. She was giving him a free hand. Wherever he went, she would go. It was all the same to her. Even so, she handed him a brochure with the top attractions circled in red pen. And, oh yes! Dear Tony! She laid her small, ringed hand on his. The claw was heavier than expected and felt cold and clammy—a bunch of wilted asparaguses just out of the fridge, pale against the Prussian-blue breakfast linen, the little vase containing a rose, the bowl of fresh strawberries. At the time, they were still staying in the Hilton on the Puerto Madero, the spectacularly modernized harbour district. Don’t worry, dear Tony! The claw gave a couple of soothing pats and then remained on his hand. She’d pay for everything! As though she didn’t always pick up the bill. There were more credit cards than banknotes in her purse, but there were a lot of banknotes, all the same. A whole range of currencies. She showed them off like a pimply boy with a handful of football stickers. Her complete collection—at home in Guangzhou—included a banknote in the largest denomination from every country she’d ever shopped in.

They don’t have the same sense of pride as we do, Tony thought, nodding amicably as he carefully extracted his hand from under the claw. They imitate us. They imitate everything. They are delighted to forsake who and what they are, and they don’t feel threatened for a second, because they are convinced they’ll win in the long run. We think in centuries, they think in millennia. We swear by the loner, they know better. They believe in hordes. In billions. No one is closer to the cockroach. He startled himself with his vitriol, but didn’t tone down his thoughts. He quickly stuffed two strawberries into his mouth and stood up, shoving his chair away with the backs of his knees.

When she started to laugh on the Avenida 9 de Julio, Mrs. Bo Xiang was hanging on his arm. Her chubby flank was pressed against him as she pointed, gasping like an overgrown adolescent, at the Obelisco—a tall, chubby memorial column which rose up pontifically in the middle of the boulevard, as misplaced as a strap-on penis on a child’s belly. Patriotic borders and lawns had been laid around the foot of the obelisk, full of flowers and dog shit. This was it, then, the famous Plaza de la República. The obelisk was not rounded off at the top, but crowned with a small, comical pyramid. If you felt compelled to worship a penis as a totem of your fatherland, Tony groaned—sullen and pale from the jet lag—at least do it right. Chop off that pyramid and put a proper bell end on top. He had woken up with a headache and a nauseated feeling, neither of which had subsided after the much-too-saccharine breakfast coffee, the strawberries, and the croissants that had been cloyingly sweet, too.

On either side of the Obelisco, hundreds of cars came and went along a full twenty lanes of traffic, most of them honking angrily. It wouldn’t take much more to turn his headache into a migraine. He had lived in Jakarta for a few years during his peregrinations, and in Cairo, and Bangkok, so he was used to infernal traffic, but this was different. This exuded menace. He didn’t belong here. He knew it, and this city knew it. It was already about to turn on him.

None of the hundreds of passers-by gave the unusual couple a second glance. Businessmen, young mothers, begging Falklands War vets, skateboarders, cops in short-sleeved shirts with sweat rings under their armpits and truncheons in their belts… No one gave anyone a funny look here, Tony chuckled to himself. Harried indifference is an asset. Or not. This was it, of course: the famous Argentinian cool. The gaucho’s unflappability, the baccy-spitting cowboy who still believed he was descended from the conquistadores. The Indian-killer with his bow legs and his unshaven chin, his leather hat, his metal yerba maté cup, his incomprehensible Spanish. Perhaps they’d learned from their cattle to wear that indifferent expression. Socializing or flirting was for later, for after work, after the heat, in the new heat of the wood fires in the grill rooms where they would devour half a bull each, just for starters.

After that, they’d withdraw, as pissed as newts, to their shady milongas, with their cheap wine, their sweaty accordion music, and their spastic dance steps, until daylight dawned. Ridiculous. What were tango dancers but a pair of tangled-up flamingos with epilepsy? Tony felt a surge of deep animosity, bordering on disgust. He’d already felt it the week before, when he’d opened his first tourist guide. ‘City of roasted sweetbreads with Malbec!’ ‘Mysticism and romance immortalized in timeless music!’ Each article came down to the same thing: glorified folk dancing and glorified barbecuing. Nobody mentioned the dictators and their coups, though they drooled all the more over their wives.

The only one on the Avenida who seemed bothered by this odd couple—a young gringo in designer jeans accompanied by a Chinese pygmy woman, hung with jewels and laughing like a lunatic—was a barking poodle. Clearly a creature with a pedigree. That’s just perfect, Tony groaned. As he’d predicted, this place was ‘Europe squared.’ Even a dog was a status symbol. Yelpers like that didn’t go down well with Muslims or Asians. Let alone blacks. They knew what a dog was for: to ignore or kick. The beginning of all civilization.

The poodle tugged, barking peevishly, at its incredibly long lead. The lead kept being pulled taut between the collar around its neck and the belt around the midriff of its escort: a sturdy, bespectacled girl barely twenty years old in a lemon-yellow top, lime-green hot pants, and dirty gym shoes. A princess from the upper middle classes, Tony guessed. Today a prissy student, tomorrow the petulant wife of an oil baron or a meat millionaire. She was wearing a pair of showy white headphones, the jewellery of contemporary youth, and her unbound breasts bobbed around boldly. There were four more leashed show dogs attached to her belt: the biggest was a pure-bred German shepherd, the smallest a kind of chihuahua. It might also have been a rat. She was already the third of this type of dog walker they had encountered. Most of them were walking. This bespectacled girl was jogging, surrounded by her pack like a heavenly body with insane satellites. Only the poodle remained behind, barking angrily at Tony, bracing against the tugging lead each time: a mutineer, an Argentinian rebel, a four-legged gaucho.

It didn’t stand a chance and was dragged along, tug by tug, once almost choking, to the renewed merriment of Mrs. Bo Xiang, who, after the Obelisco, now pointed annoyingly at the animal. Chinese people point at absolutely everything, Tony sighed. Except other Chinese people.

The girl with the dogs bobbed off into the crowd and disappeared. Mrs. Bo Xiang shook her ornamental porcelain head and snickered something in Chinese. Tony nodded without asking what she meant. He was just glad she was still enjoying herself. The first attraction he’d wanted to take her to—a guided tour of the Teatro Colón, one of the largest opera buildings in the world—turned out to be closed due to a union protest. In front of the entrance, a delegation of enraged comrades was making a racket with cowbells, panpipes, Inca drums, and firecrackers. What was it with this city and its cacophony? He apologized to Mrs. Bo Xiang, but she seemed to find the carry-on quite normal, even enjoyable, as though Tony had planned it all. She radiated happiness. Perhaps, Tony shuddered, she sees it as an homage to her communist origins. He quickly coaxed her away, before she got it into her head to go and shake the hands of the entire delegation of strikers, or hand out money to them. That woman was capable of anything.

She willingly let herself be guided away on his arm, smiling gratefully. He was almost convinced he could hear the layer of foundation cracking.

Her good humour stayed afloat even in the graveyard, a few hours later, when it turned out that Tony had made a mistake. Evita Perón was buried somewhere else.

He should have known. It had taken them half an hour to get there. Taxis were so cheap and so abundant here that the chauffeurs were all too eager to misunderstand you so that they could rack up a few extra kilometres. Or was it a genuine misunderstanding? Tony had asked for ‘the cemetery with the famous dead people’ because he’d forgotten the name of the neighbourhood. Perhaps the driver had liked music more than politics when it came to cadaverous heroes.

There was no lack of heroes in this sweeping boneyard: a genuine park with broad lanes, each one cobbled, each one bordered with graves that looked like miniature houses. They even had windows and ornamental doors—mausoleums custom-made to the dimensions of an extinct bourgeoisie. All of them built in the most flashy of materials, from marble to granite, topped off with a frieze of angelic hosts or a bust of the departed. The richest had had themselves anchored full length to the world they should have left behind. Fossils of bygone glory and self-importance. There were soldiers, eternally saluting in their dress uniforms of bronzo bombarda, and there were musicians, seated on chairs with bandoneons on their knees, frozen in everlasting ambiance. Nostalgia on a pedestal.

The undisputed high point was the grave of Carlos Gardel, Tango King, singer-songwriter of ‘Mi Noche Triste’ and ‘Volver,’ not to mention skirt-chaser, chain-smoker, and patron of Café Tortoni. He went down in a plane at the age of 45. His massively attended funeral disrupted traffic for an entire day. And that was in 1935. Tony remembered it all from his Michelin guide. He had still managed to hit a goddamn tourist jackpot!

And indeed, Mrs. Bo Xiang stood happily admiring the statue. Behold the eternally youthful, perpetually singing dandy, flaunting a bow tie and the smile of a Latin lover. He stared haughtily over their heads at the graves on the other side of the path, shining as though he had just been polished. There were fresh bouquets at his feet, and the wall behind him was adorned with copper plaques and enamel tiles covered in sayings, expressions of gratitude, and love poems written by admirers, most of whom had been born long after their idol’s plane had crashed. Someone had threaded a white carnation through his bronze buttonhole. A real cigarette butt smouldered between the brownish-green fingers of his right hand.

Mrs. Bo Xiang got her compact red titanium Sigma camera out of her Louis Vuitton, peered through the lens, and gestured frantically with her free hand for Tony to stand closer and closer to the statue. She wouldn’t calm down until he had climbed up onto the knee-high tomb and posed next to Gardel, mirroring his stance, right down to the cigarette in his left hand. Her gadget chirped like crazy—she had chosen an electronic bird sound for each snap. She had already taken shots of Tony at the gate of the Casa Rosada on the Plaza de Mayo, and next to the colourful houses on the Caminito in La Boca.

‘You look exactly like him,’ she crowed now.

Without breaking his pose, Tony shouted back that all Westerners were as alike as peas in a pod. To his irritation, Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t contradict him. No, she sank laboriously to her knees, so that she could take a picture of him and his doppelgänger from below.

Tony surveyed the boneyard as though it were a battleground. His headache finally seemed to be abating. He liked this peace and quiet. It made him long again for the sea, with its unbounded horizon. Three hundred and sixty degrees of nothing, as far as the eye could see. He missed the calm of the lengthy journeys on the cargo ships and cruise boats on which he’d been able to pass more than twenty years of his life unnoticed, sometimes with hard labour, sometimes with paid services of another kind, but always with total independence and a consoling insignificance. He had learned to live like a nomad, a compulsive tramp, a stowaway without a destination, and that life had suited him well.

He had left behind his home country with a bitter kind of pleasure. He went back sporadically just to keep the mass of paperwork at bay. What good are roots anyway, except as a way of wangling a valid passport? He had burned all his other bridges, starting with the frayed rope ladders that could have taken him back to his once-promising youth. He had nothing more to do with the scum and the provincial backwater that had spat him out. The spitting out was mutual. No one asked after him anymore; no one had anything to do with him. It felt like a kind of recognition. Tony had once been brought up to be successful, loved, an exemplary human being. He had become none of the three, and he flaunted it the way a fisherman shows off his catch.

His father’s legal practice, sold to a complete stranger? Good riddance. He may have been cheated out of his inheritance, but that was just one less thing to worry about. His only motto was one he’d hated as a child because his family had professed it so sanctimoniously, though he’d given it a different turn. ‘Live in the shadow, you’ll live happily there’ had become ‘Live in the shadow, less shit will rain down on you there.’ He didn’t need any other principles or tenets than that. He had learned to love emptiness, the overwhelmingly infinite world which surrounded his home soil like a desert around a sewage cover.

A man has to feel at home somewhere, even if it’s in the void.

‘Please concentrate!’ Mrs. Bo Xiang cried, her free eye shut. ‘And look at me!’ She kneeled down on the cobblestones before her idol, and it wasn’t Gardel. ‘Smile!’

Tony looked at the family standing behind her, waiting for her to finish taking pictures. He saw himself through their eyes. A hooligan with his feet on a beloved tomb, a barbarian posing next to a titan as an equal. The father of the waiting family coughed for the third time. He tightened his fists around the handles of a wheelchair in which an old man with a razor-sharp mouth and two cataract-filled eyes sat muttering away. The mother exhorted her two plump daughters, each of them blushing and holding bunches of flowers in her hand, to be patient. She didn’t raise her voice but her face spoke volumes. The encyclopaedia of scorn.

Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t notice. She carried on taking pictures. No angle was too bizarre for her. She didn’t quite go so far as to lie down on her side. Tony felt more and more ridiculous, and not only because of the designer jeans she’d bought for him during the stopover in Doha, which stretched grotesquely over his crotch and around his waist. What was she going to do with all these photos, he wondered. A slideshow with Ástor Piazzolla’s ‘Libertango’ as accompaniment? Entertainment for her husband? They called each other every day, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Xiang. Intercontinentally, sometimes for half an hour at a time. They laughed together. What were they saying in that filthy Chinese of theirs? Were they talking about him? What were they plotting?

Mrs. Bo Xiang noticed Tony’s awkwardness. She let her Sigma drop and looked him in the eyes, tenderly, it seemed. It wouldn’t have taken much for her to climb up on the gravestone, too, pinch his cheek between her thumb and forefinger and softly shake it back and forth.

One of these days, Tony thought, I’ll wipe that smile off her porcelain face.

◆ ◆ ◆

Things turned out differently. By the end of the week, Mrs. Bo Xiang had even persuaded him to fuck her. No pain, no gain.

Tony had stopped resisting and given in. It had been on the cards for long enough. At a certain point, refusing became more dangerous than consenting. That was another thing he’d learned on the cruise ships he’d served on. Protecting your job security, and in some cases your hide, could take all kinds of forms. Love was the least objectionable. Love is always good, even if it’s rotten to the core.

During their walk, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang had discovered San Telmo and taken it into their hearts. The antiques shops and the charming covered vegetable market in crumbling art-deco style certainly had something to do with that. Fading glory lends itself more to romance than new buildings.

Mrs. Bo Xiang, in particular, radiated joie de vivre once again. For anyone living in the lap of luxury, being confronted with deprivation is an unbeatable aphrodisiac. They instantly swapped the Hilton for a bed and breakfast in a ramshackle town house, cheerfully renovated on a tight budget in daring colours, and just by the Plaza Dorrego, the navel of San Telmo. This was the plaza where beggars and musicians held court from early in the morning, where every afternoon a flea market uncoiled, and where every evening an amateur dance display took place among the terrace tables of the many cafes and restaurants. Tango, tango—el amor!

Their own mating dance, on the second floor of the mansion, began staidly. In the tepid, heavy afternoon air, barely circulated by the ceiling fan, there was a wistfulness. Their journey home was approaching. Tomorrow they’d be checking out. Any kind of parting is sweet sorrow. The timid respect which with Tony had originally treated Mrs. Bo Xiang inhibited the intensity of their relationship.

But not for long. Intimacy breeds trust, and that trust increases as shame is reciprocally cast aside. Once Tony had braced his feet against the bedstead and slowly increased his tempo, a languid, noisy euphoria overcame Mrs. Bo Xiang and her worn-out bones.

Tony was embarrassed for her. The poor woman was lying prostrate and defenceless, her legs spread, one side of her face pressed into the pillow. Her whole body rocked backward and forward, assisted by her mild corpulence. Her face rocked along each time, as though she were trying to spread out the stiff pillow, using her head as a rolling pin. Just now she’d pulled the other pillow under her midriff to keep her hips raised without getting a cramp. When love comes knocking, you have to open your door to it. Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t take any persuading.

Just how old is she? Tony wondered. She smelled of violets and green tea. I really don’t get it, he groaned inwardly, without sacrificing momentum. What do all these old bags see in me? Some objects attract flies, or iron filings. I’m a magnet for the motherly type. Or even the grandmotherly type, of late. What does Mrs. Bo Xiang think I’m going to help her achieve, or recover? Or does she enjoy humiliating me? Is that the role I’m playing? Despite the heat, he systematically increased his pace.

The euphoria beneath him swelled just as systematically. ‘More,’ Mrs. Bo Xiang whispered in English, for the second time now, a little louder than the first time. ‘Yes. I want more.’

Why didn’t she say it in her own language if she was really that euphoric? Why did she use the lingua franca of the American porn industry? Did elderly women watch sex on the internet nowadays, too? At each of Tony’s thrusts, Mrs. Bo Xiang’s shiny red lips poked out sideways between her squashed face and the stiff pillow. Her lipstick was coming off, her foundation, too. What she liked, she’d confided to him on one of the previous days, was being bitten in the scruff of her neck ‘during the act.’

Tony didn’t do it. On top of everything else, he was supposed to bite her? There were limits. ‘I want more,’ Mrs. Bo Xiang whispered, even louder this time. Tony was having more and more trouble empathizing. And the hardest part was still to come, he realized. The seduction and the foreplay were bearable; the action itself was a matter of not thinking too much and doggedly keeping at it. The aftercare, that was a terrible prospect. What could they possibly say after the deed? Two beings who were so different?

‘More, Tony. More.’

Outside, the metropolis was taking its siesta. Spray trucks were driving around to mist up the pavements and beat down the dust. The heat managed to penetrate everywhere all the same, air conditioning or no air conditioning. It clamped around you like a truss. A shortness of breath was stealing up on him. Tony pounded away, anyway. What was the problem? It was years since he’d taken so long. It wasn’t just the smell of violets and the creaking of the bed. It was also Mrs. Bo Xiang’s husband and the fortune that Tony owed him, of course. How could he have been so stupid? Roulette wasn’t his thing. He should have never allowed himself to be seduced. Not then, not now. Not ever.

‘More! More!’

Don’t you worry, my dear Tony, Mrs. Bo Xiang had said to him a week earlier, shortly before falling asleep next to him in the Boeing with her mouth obscenely open. She was drunk; she’d had one gin and tonic after the other. You’ll figure it out, you and my husband. He can be very generous and forgiving. If I ask him. And if you help me. Can you help me, Mister Tony? To avoid answering, he’d kissed her hand. She had pulled her hand away, giggling, and then kissed the back of it herself. Her own hand. With closed eyes, ardently, protractedly, not quite licking the place he’d kissed. It wasn’t the first trip she’d taken him along on. She’d dragged him to Monaco, and even to Dubai. He’d always managed to ward off her advances. But not anymore. He knew what was coming. Buenos Aires would be his Waterloo.

‘More!’

Just before falling asleep on the airplane, she’d stroked his cheek. She’d never done that before. It felt like he was being branded. ‘My Tony is a little damaged, that’s all’ she’d jabbered. It sounded like a verdict. ‘Damaged,’ as in damaged goods. As in ruined. What was she then? A perfect peach? An immaculate saint?

‘More!’

Stop whining, Tony thought, keep up the tempo and everything will come good. This is the fate of everyone who gets into debt; plenty of people are worse off than me. While thinking this, he looked at himself in the full-length mirror next to the bed. It was a shocking sight, the way he was mounting that hillock of flesh. Pale, veal-coloured, quivering flesh.

‘More!’

I should learn to keep my eyes shut, Tony thought. But he carried on watching, focussing on his own pumping hips. Where his belly had once been taut, all muscle, now, in shock, he counted three rolls. I should learn to close my eyes to everything, he thought, and I have to stop complaining about my life. I’m not important enough to complain. I’m a louse in other people’s bedsheets, nothing more. The traces I leave behind won’t survive the first wash. So what? What have lice got to complain about, except that they exist? Where there’s blood, there’s hope. No self-pity! Everyone has to pay. Everyone looks for a scapegoat and everyone longs for a saviour, there isn’t anything else to be said about life. Give up grousing and ejaculate.

But he didn’t ejaculate. His breathing grew frantic, his floundering took on a desperate note. Liberation was a long time coming.

Mrs. Bo Xiang, whose head was still pressed solidly into the pillow, didn’t take it personally. She began to help. She grubbed back up at him, harder and harder. The sounds she was making no longer resembled anything like words. The bed squeaked as though it were about to collapse. It was a long time since anyone had enjoyed themselves so much in Tony’s company, and thanks to him, too.

He tried to pay back her efforts by trying even harder, but alongside desperation, melancholia began to delay his climax. What was he doing here?

And what else could he do but give in to that melancholy? Perhaps, moving forward on autopilot, he’d be able to achieve what he couldn’t if he thought about it too much. Disassociation, the mind breaking free from the body, didn’t have to be all bad.

My God, he thought to himself—eyes closed, his body making love unabated—how wrong I was about this city! Buenos Aires is fantastic! The past week seemed like a month, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang had seen and done so much.

They had visited a theatre converted into a bookshop, with the flocked wallpaper and the gilded ceiling intact. They’d attended an equestrian show in a distant suburb, and after that, a procession in a square clamped between an ominous-looking barracks and a stinking abattoir. The difference between the two buildings had been minimal, the fiesta after the procession ecstatic.

They had explored the collection of the practically empty Museo de Bellas Artes. Rembrandt, Renoir, and Jackson Pollock all hung within arm’s reach. You could stand with your nose pressed right up to them, no guards to tell you off. They had enjoyed the fantastic wines in the working-class cafés, with their stirring music and elderly waiters. Tony had seen an old conviction of his confirmed, there. If you wanted to know if a city was worth anything, you needed to look at the age of its waiters. The young studs and teenyboppers in Los Angeles and Sydney were after big tips and a different job, the sooner the better. An elderly waiter lived only for his profession. He knew people and their impatience. He had been serving drinks and the same dishes for thirty years; he’d been listening to the same sorrows and the same gossip for thirty years without scoffing or butting in. That took wisdom, and self-knowledge, and class.

This beautiful city had class in spades. After his initial crabby resistance, Tony had completely changed his mind about tango. They’d taken an actual lesson together, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang. Mad, carefree fun that he would have simulated in the past, but which he now actually experienced. All of the foreign students were bumbling around, laughing; only he and Mrs. Bo Xiang were complemented on their efforts by the teacher—a fat queen with a pointy beard and werewolf eyebrows, shrouded in baggy black drapes that resembled net curtains, but with steel-tipped cowboy boots sticking out under them.

After that, and indeed, all the way into the early hours, they, too, washed into the dance halls—the Porteños, as the inhabitants of the largest meat market in the world called themselves. Young and old, rich and poor, all of them together. They didn’t need lessons. Dignified and frenetic, they lost themselves in the music that Tony had whole-heartedly hated a week before, but which could now touch him to the bottom of the soul he thought he had lost long ago. What had happened? What had Buenos Aires done to him? Why had he succumbed here rather than in Monaco?

Monaco had proven to be a façade. Disneyland for billionaires, a cardboard cut-out skyline, an expensive cordon sanitaire for upstart proles, sanctimoniously clean and laughably chic, an architectonic neurosis for operetta walk-ons. This city, Buenos Aires, was a city. Unabashedly dirty, sincerely impure, stubbornly recalcitrant. She didn’t beg for compliments but swept you up into her orbit. Tony realized this as, in the middle of the night, rooted to the spot and increasingly drunk, he was watching a performance by El Afronte, an orquestra típica with one singer and ten musicians. Four bandoneons, three violins, a cello, a double bass, and a piano.

They played with the refinement of a symphony orchestra and the rhythmic passion of a heavy-metal band. Tony couldn’t explain why, but when the bespectacled singer—an anomalous cross between an angular existentialist from the Paris of May ’68 and a charming rocker from ’59, and yet every inch an Argentinian—when this anomaly began to sing, tears poured from Tony’s eyes, even though he didn’t understand most of the lyrics.

Mrs. Bo Xiang, who was no less drunk than he was, cleaned up his waterworks with paper tissues. Tony let her. He capitulated, there and then. He no longer begrudged the woman what she was looking for. She was quite sweet, really. He had obliged more repulsive women than her, obnoxious battle-axes who had looked down on him because they desired him. Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t look down on him. She must have been a fresh-faced beauty once. He had been wrong about her, too. She seemed more patient and generous than he’d thought. Had she always been like that, or had she been chastened by adversity along the way, by some kind of trauma, or a series of disasters?

It didn’t matter. She was who she was, here and now, and Tony felt neither judged nor mocked by her. To his surprise, he felt grateful, even moved. He kissed her two claws in the semi-darkness of the clammy, sweaty milonga. He stroked her neck and her pierced earlobes. Casanova for beginners. She giggled like a schoolgirl—no, like a drunken cocotte in an ancient opium den, her head cocked, her narrow eyes squinting even more.

No one gave them a second glance. Tony wasn’t the only man in the buoyant company of an elderly woman. No one asked any questions, no one gave them judgemental looks, no one hissed. People took the night as it came. Tony saw a bony man dancing with an overgrown teenager—his daughter, judging by her features. A long-legged beauty with a skirt that was too short and a tragic look in her eyes. They focussed only on each other as they danced. It was more like elegant wrestling, an intense duel. If they hadn’t been clothed, you might have suspected them of public incest. They only stopped to smoke, still gazing into each other’s eyes. Finally, they walked out into the early morning, entwined, and just short of kissing.

The following day, the Calle Defensa, San Telmo’s main artery, was transformed into an elongated flea market, just as every Sunday. And there was El Afronte again, this time in the open air, performing on the steps of a church the colour of a desert, with a silly little amp for the singer. Tony’s inexplicable tears returned and, again, no one took any notice. An elderly charmer of around eighty, dressed as a gaucho, was inviting passing women to dance on the tiny balata-wood floor of about a metre square in size. Mrs. Bo Xiang refused. She didn’t let go of Tony’s arm, except to buy him a CD that El Afronte had brought out themselves. She put ten times too much money into the collection basket, acting like she couldn’t hear the singer calling after her and trying to offer her change, and pulled Tony into a neighbouring parrilla. It was the only thing she’d chosen herself for the week’s sightseeing.

Tony had even grown to love this type of folkloric grill room, part Austrian Weinstube, part Wild-West saloon. Chequered tablecloths, broad-beamed ceilings, battered wainscoting, smoky plaster. On every free spot on the wall hung the preserved head of some kind of animal, with beady eyes and two horns or a set of antlers. There was a whole stuffed cow on the pavement by the entrance.

Anyone going inside had to pass not just the stuffed cow but also the circular grilling area. It was around two or three metres in diameter. The floor and the raised edge were covered in enamel tiles; a knee-high log fire smouldered in the centre. Various animals were arranged around the languid, intense glow, as though around a nocturnal campfire in olden times. Stripped of their skins, hooves, head, and innards, and attached to iron crosses. A coven of decapitated messiahs, confessing the sins of mankind in general, and this metropolis in particular, as they slowly cooked. Hissing and scorching, they took on all the unresolved pasts, and all of history’s sorrows, before being devoured by their faithful followers, the worshippers of the flesh.

Exhausted and pouring with sweat, Tony was finally able to let himself fall forward onto the bed, next to Mrs. Bo Xiang. It was done. He felt more drained than ever before.

Mrs. Bo Xiang seemed to have calmed down, too. Tony had pulled out just in time. He had caught the proof of his climax in his right hand. He wiped it off on the side of the mattress and rolled onto his back, still panting. The synthetic scent of violets had made way for more authentic body odours. The silence was deafening without the squeaking of the bed, even though the fan and the air conditioning were still whirring away frantically.

As always after the deed, Tony was hit by contrarian sadness. Why were they leaving this place tomorrow, already? He wouldn’t have minded staying a little longer. Mrs. Bo Xiang was enjoying herself, too, wasn’t she? A bizarre vision revealed itself, an image of a possible future. The most bizarre thing was that he didn’t feel humiliated by it.

He and Mrs. Bo Xiang should come here more often. A few weeks, a few months, the whole summer. Maybe they could buy a pied-à-terre. Mrs. Bo Xiang had enough money, and he no longer had any objections. Why shouldn’t he pursue the only thing he seemed to do well without too much difficulty? All right, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang would never be a perfect match. They hadn’t had a real conversation yet; he didn’t know what her interests were; this lack of understanding was clearly mutual, and the sex bordered on the problematic. But the same went for even the most straightforward marriages. If the frequency isn’t too high, anything is bearable.

Why shouldn’t he do it—become her permanent male companion? A male geisha offering her a lot of fun, and all kinds of titbits of information, plus the occasional furtive gratification. What was wrong with that? There were worse professions and crueller pacts with the devil. At his age and with his prospects, it wouldn’t be that hard to adapt to profound servitude. And it would amaze him if Mrs. Bo Xiang vetoed the plan. He knew her well enough, by now. He turned towards her.

She lay with her head turned away from him. The poor woman must be recovering, Tony thought. Not that crazy, is it? She had seemed like a mustang trying to throw off its rider. It would take a while to catch your breath after that. At the same time, a terrible presentiment was creeping up on Tony.

He could no longer hear her breathing.

He quickly rolled her onto her back, facing him. She felt clammy but already cold, brushed from top to toe by the cool breath of the fan, which continued to rotate its wings of death above them.

Tony called her name and shook her thoroughly. She didn’t respond at all. The layer of foundation had indeed disappeared. Her face, paler than ever, had a bluish sheen. The lipstick and the mascara had left red and black streaks around her mouth and her eyes. It hadn’t made her ugly or macabre. Her face seemed frozen in deep, delirious ecstasy. Never before had Tony seen anyone radiate such intense happiness. It felt like a betrayal.

He shook the happy corpse once again. He refused to believe what was happening to both of them, and the irrepressible smile on her lips made him angrier and angrier. It was as though she were laughing at him, yet again, once more. As though she’d planned this all from the start. Not just the trip to Buenos Aires, not just the dinners, the tango lessons, the Renoirs, the Jackson Pollocks, El Afronte—but this, too. Especially this. She had used him, tricked him.

He had to refrain from punching her in the face with his balled fists. Again he shook her, as furious as he was impotent.

But all of a sudden, the happy corpse moved. It belched out a cough that was more of a rattle. For a moment, Mrs. Bo Xiang opened her eyes—two strips of shining white were all that was visible, then they closed again. What she did do, without losing her disconcertingly blissful expression, was raise one hand. The trembling claw moved slowly towards Tony, but fell halfway onto the clammy sheet.

Quick, Tony thought, fumbling for his smartphone in panic. To hospital with her! Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe he wouldn’t have to call his creditor, the most famous entrepreneur from Macau to Guangzhou, and tell him his wife had just died.