Читать книгу Slaves to Fortune - Tom Lanoye - Страница 17

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3

Buenos Aires

THE HAPPY CORPSE HADN’T made it, after all. It had died a second time. No one could really accuse Tony Hanssen of not trying hard enough to bring Mrs. Bo Xiang back, though. Cautious pats on her cheek, repeating her name ten times with his lips pressed to her pierced earlobe, shaking her, imploring, crying, and cajoling, he’d tried it all and nothing had worked. Mrs. Bo Xiang had entered the Kingdom of God and flatly refused to come back.

Tony had been advised in his resuscitation attempts by the pension owner—a towering, extravagantly-dressed fake blonde with a face of granite and permanently raised eyebrows, both the result of plastic surgery. Her full lips enjoyed the benefit of the doubt—her mouth was the only thing on her face that seemed able to move easily. And yet she was still attractive in a wilful kind of way, Tony judged, like most of the women in this city. It didn’t matter where Eva Perón was buried, the actress and first lady’s spiritual legacy had not gone to the grave with her. The Porteñas, young and old, still had fiery temperaments and rock-solid self-esteem. And they continued to have just as many problems with their men—men whose domineering nature they criticized while refusing to tolerate any sign of weakness in them.

Tony had called her, the pension owner, in panic because she was the only person in Buenos Aires whose number he had saved on his smartphone. She interrupted him after his first sentence, ordered him to stay where he was, snapped at someone in Spanish—probably the cleaner—to alert the emergency services, and rushed to the scene herself. All of this without hanging up. She lived two floors above them. There was a good chance, Tony thought, when she entered still clutching her mobile phone, that the sounds of he and Mrs. Bo Xiang going at it had reached her upstairs.

She kept a straight face, but that could have been the Botox. Her gaze, though, directed at the mortal remains of Mrs. Bo Xiang, betrayed contempt, if not ridicule—as though she considered it typical of a Chinese woman to kick the bucket at the moment suprême. While they waited for the ambulance, she stood at the foot of the bed and gave Tony more orders than advice. Her father, she had told him when he’d checked in, had been a general during los Años Dificiles. Tony hadn’t dared ask more. He had read in the Rough Guide that Argentina had had many difficult years. The difficult years outnumbered the easy ones. Her name was Mercedes. Her father had not only been a general, he’d also had a lot of German friends.

‘Slap her face again,’ Mrs. Mercedes commanded, looking down her nose at Tony and his happy corpse as if they were two street fighters down for the count. Her English wasn’t bad for a Spanish speaker. From her tone, she wasn’t too pleased that death had paid a visit to her casa de turistas. She managed two small hotels and twenty guest rooms, spread out over rustic San Telmo and hip Palermo, but this house was her headquarters and the jewel in her crown. A former architecture student, she had supervised the renovations herself, and lived on the only floor that was never rented out. ‘Have you already put a finger down her throat?’ She sounded more and more sincere and more and more concerned, looking down with her arms folded across her stiff bosom. ‘Maybe she’s swallowed her tongue.’ After that, she didn’t say anything else.

What a difference from the first time they’d met, at check-in. Then, Mrs. Mercedes had monopolized the conversation in record time, as though she were worried her two wealthy guests might escape to her competitors if she stopped talking. Tony was forced to think about this now, in her mute presence, as he tried to lure Mrs. Bo Xiang out of her new-found homeland of the smile. The poor woman was naked under the damp, thin sheets. Only her head stuck out, with its shocking grin, open and bared. Tony began to massage her heart through the sheets even though he knew it couldn’t be coaxed to beat again. He didn’t want to do it, but he did it all the same. Again, he bridged the gap through dissociation. By reflecting on a trivial event from two days earlier, he could avoid thinking about the cruelty of the present.

The three of them had stood waiting in the entrance hall, next to a desk on which Mrs. Mercedes’s laptop rested.

Mrs. Bo Xiang was supposed to pay for their three-day stay in advance by internet banking, using this laptop and not her own smartphone. This was a strict condition imposed on all guests, Mrs. Mercedes had apologized. It was just a precaution. She’d been ripped off too many times in the past. She’d added that her bank was in the Virgin Islands, so it would take a while for confirmation of their payment to come through.

This is the kind of thing you have to deal with these days, Mrs. Mercedes sighed—as they still stood there waiting—all these long distances and passwords and devices you’d never have dreamed of in the past. My God! She still had vivid recollections of the tube radio of her childhood. Her hard face now showed a grimace of happiness, which she further improved on by rolling her eyes and shrugging coquettishly. Dios mío! The tube radio of her childhood! She was so caught up in her story, she missed Mrs. Bo Xiang’s confused expression.

Her family, Mrs. Mercedes had cooed, was the first in the village to acquire one of those hulking great things. It was nearly the size of a cabin trunk, and you had to wait two minutes for all the lamps to warm up. Only then did the scratchy music come out, or the news, or hours of background noise. You could pick up Montevideo when the weather was bad. The neighbours gathered once a week for the radio play. She had shrugged coquettishly again, her voice taking on a languorous tone. The weekly radio play! My goodness! Everyone had crammed into their old drawing room around that one appliance, the way you’d gather around a preacher, all thirty of them hypnotized, half of them bursting into tears during the final episode because of the injustice of the heroine’s death. And that was just the tube radio! Again she’d rolled her eyes, elatedly shaking her granite head. After that, there was the freezer, the washing machine, the colour TV! Unbelievable, wasn’t it? The colossal changes that could take place within a single person’s lifetime. And just look at this! She’d shown Mrs. Bo Xiang and Tony an outdated mobile telephone. Now she could even receive text messages from the Islas Vírgenes. Thousands of kilometres away. Handy, wasn’t it? Dios mío, where would we be without mobile phones? She’d reply to the bank manager right away, and then everything would be in order. Her sincere apologies for the delay. But she couldn’t help it.

‘I’ve helped fill this country’s bottomless pits more than enough times already,’ she complained, her thumbs working away over the mobile’s keyboard. ‘Those blundering politicians should be happy with the likes of me, the people who haven’t completely upped sticks to the Islas Vírgenes yet.’ She determinedly pressed the send button.

To Tony’s astonishment, Mrs. Bo Xiang stood there, nodding energetically. Her head was almost coming off. But her expression was disparaging. Did she actually understand what Mrs. Mercedes was saying? Or was she simply impatient, and all the more prepared to nod at everything the pension owner said, as long as it got them closer to the love nest on the second floor?

Mrs. Mercedes still didn’t notice a thing. ‘It’s just the same with the beggars on the street,’ she continued, checking confirmation of payment once again, this time on her laptop. ‘Those penniless bums can count their blessings that there are still rich buggers like me left.’

Again, Tony had the impression that Mrs. Bo Xiang was nodding too emphatically, prior to accepting the room key, smiling broadly, and even bowing—it was more a curtsey.

The overt mutual contempt felt by the two ladies had begun there and then, with the curtsey and then the look they exchanged. One of them felt deadly contempt, the other felt she’d been caught out. The pleasant atmosphere could be heard shattering.

Despite her predilection for grand gestures, Mrs. Mercedes wasn’t blind to the subtleties of human interaction at the micro level. She watched the curtsey, read the expression, and knew she’d been trumped. Ridiculed by someone who must be immeasurably richer than she. Someone who had come here to experience picturesque poverty, not the self-proclaimed wealth of a woman who shared a name with a German car.

A unconceded defeat doesn’t count as a defeat. Mrs. Mercedes didn’t say another word. She proved the benefits of the national dance tradition. She let her well-restored body speak in pantomime. With just as deep a bow, a cramped smile, and a theatrical wave of the arms, she showed Mrs. Bo Xiang the winding staircase that would take her and her young companion to seventh heaven on the second floor.

‘You’ve got one last chance,’ Mrs. Mercedes said now, looking at Tony and his lifeless mistress with ever more concern. ‘Mouth to mouth. If that doesn’t get results within two minutes, she’s brain-dead.’

There was sympathy in her voice but no inclination to give the life-saving kiss and spare Tony, who was still trembling from his recent efforts. He’d already given so much of himself today. It was still boiling hot in the room. His armpits were dripping. He felt the same bleak despair as—well, how long ago was it? Fifteen minutes? Five? Half an hour? He had lost all sense of time. He was almost suffocating. His migraine had returned, more aggressive than ever. A trepan was boring its way through his head, from temple to temple. Nevertheless, he bent down over Mrs. Bo Xiang’s beatific face, opened her happy mouth as well as he could, took a deep breath, and then, breathing out heavily, pressed his lips to hers.

Her mouth felt so cold, it was like kissing a dead sea creature. After the third deep inhalation and exhalation, he began to feel dizzy. He still didn’t dare ask Mrs. Mercedes to take over for a moment. He wondered why. A human life was at stake. And, regardless of her age, Mrs. Mercedes’s physical condition was probably better than his. She’d told them about that, too, as they waited for permission from the Virgin Islands. Her real wealth was her stamina.

Tony tried to remember all the details, so that he didn’t have to think about anything else during the kissing.

Every night, Mrs. Mercedes had recounted, not without pride, she went out dancing in one of the nearby milongas. Yes, that’s right, every night. At dusk, she’d leave her top floor to grab a bite to eat in the Plaza Dorrego. After the meal, she’d wash her hands in the toilets, dab perfume behind each ear to suppress the smell of food and anything else, pick one of the dance halls at random, and stay there until the early hours. She drank enough to forget her age, but too little not to be able to find her way home. Otherwise, she’d be condemned to accompany her last dance partner to his casa.

She’d never minded that in the past, but since her last minor procedure—she didn’t say what it was—she’d stopped bed-hopping. Just as long as she could dance. Every day. That was the only thing that stopped her from moving to the place where her fortune was already housed.

‘You can stop, Mister Tony,’ Mrs. Mercedes said now, more gently than he’d heard her speak up to now. ‘That’s enough.’ She gripped him by the shoulder, not at all reprovingly, not at all unkindly. It was the hand of an understanding nurse. ‘The ambulance is here.’

Tony looked at the hand on his shoulder so as not to look at the face belonging to it, or the face that he had just been kissing so intensely. The consoling hand had an unexpected quantity of age spots and wrinkles—it didn’t match Mrs. Mercedes’s face. The gems in her rings were so disproportionately large, they couldn’t be real. ‘Mister Tony! Can you hear me?’ Tony kept on staring at the elderly hand. He didn’t dare stand up, he felt so dizzy. He heard, as in a nightmare, the deafening zoom of the fan’s blades above him. Mrs. Mercedes’s voice seemed to be coming from under a bell jar. ‘Mister Tony?’ His own lips seemed frozen, too.

He let two men dressed in white help him to his feet. They were careful and considerate, and looked with more concern at him than at the happy corpse. As one of them checked for a pulse, the other placed an oxygen mask over Mrs. Bo Xiang’s cold, ecstatic smile. Almost at once, the man gave Mrs. Mercedes a look that said no, and did with his free hand what Tony hadn’t dared to do. He closed Mrs. Bo Xiang’s eyes. The truth could no longer be denied. Tony almost toppled over. His legs could no longer carry him.

He let himself be supported, and brought to a chair, by the medic who was taking care of him. A lovely, slender boy with black curly hair, a sensual mouth, and a scar on his chin. His eyes were greyer than Belgian hardstone and still deeply melancholic. He asked Tony whether he wanted a glass of water. Tony nodded. The medic let go of him and went into the bathroom.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tony, swaying backward and forward in his chair in a seasick way, saw Mrs. Mercedes bend toward the other medic and begin a whispering conversation with him. She seemed to know the man; he seemed to have some respect for her. Tony noticed that he hadn’t removed the useless oxygen mask from Mrs. Bo Xiang’s face. He was a corpulent man in his 40s, with the features of a galley slave and the expression of a domestic skivvy. He let Mrs. Mercedes stuff something into his hand, at first trying to give it back and gesticulating wildly, but then later putting it into his pocket, sighing, shaking his head, and looking away in shame.

Despite his nausea and his overheated exhaustion, Tony could make out a couple of the sentences that Mrs. Mercedes was whispering: ‘She didn’t die here, right? Somewhere along the way, or on arrival. But not here.’

◆ ◆ ◆

Godforsaken and dog-tired, Tony found himself in a room in the darkest depths of the hospital to which the happy corpse had been taken, and where it had died for the third time, this time officially. He sat bolt upright in the only chair, a monstrosity made of aluminium tubing with a green leatherette seat. It peeped and creaked with every movement. He tried to move as little as possible as he waited for the undertaker who’d been recommended to him by the youngest medic, the handsome one with the curly hair and eyes of melancholic bluestone.

Next to him, on a simple iron hospital bed, lay Mrs. Bo Xiang. Under a sheet, thank God; he didn’t have to look at her smile anymore. His head was still bursting, despite the painkiller and the sedative they’d given him. They left him there, stupefied, yet still unpleasantly aware of the situation. He didn’t need any mirrors to be able to see himself sitting here. He could have chosen a dog, but his mind imposed a scene from a black-and-white Japanese film on him. The last samurai, next to his shogun’s open grave, on guard, exhausted.

But you could hardly call Tony Zen. He was seething inside. To his astonishment, even rage, thoughts of his mother had been popping into his head since Mrs. Bo Xiang’s death. For the first time in how long? Her? The woman who had ordered him to address her as mummy, even when he was 16 and she well into her 40s.

Mummy! Mamaa-tje! There wasn’t a language in the world as polluted by the diminutive as the Flemish variant of Dutch. Every other word had a -tje or a -ke tacked onto it to make it sound smaller and more precious. Every time you went into a post office: ‘How many envelopkes would sir like?’ A bank employee to his adult customers: ‘Have you got your kaartje or do you know the nummerke of your bank account by heart?’ Mutual degradation under the pretext of politeness. And always, always, with that persistent, asinine immaturity, even as they prattled away so fluently. This was how he remembered Mamaatje’s imperium, the little landke in which he’d grown up.

But why was he longing for it from the bottom of his heart? Now, all of a sudden? A little steak with a little glass of wine. A little stroll around the garden. A little newspaper, a little cigarette, a little cup of coffee—all at a nice, easy, little pace. It all sounded so damned tempting, so painfully tempting. Fuck no. He didn’t want this. He’d never wanted this. If he had to choose between homesickness and cancer, he’d choose cancer. But he didn’t have a choice, he realized, shivering, reeling with seasickness in his chair.

They were things you just got. Both of them.

What would she look like today, his Mamaatje? Twenty-five years after he’d made his escape. How had the ravages of time abused her?