Stories for Beatriz

Luis Barros

After the Egg

Professor Enríquez had to interrupt the class when, through the window overlooking Berro Street, a low-flying egg came hurtling in, grazing Monteverde’s curls and smashing against the blackboard. As the egg white began to trace a sort of vague Hellenic shape on the black surface, the professor took off her glasses, stood up, and closed the shutters. Grasso and Arenas, who sat together, looked at each other, stunned into silence, while Ruiz, known for being sharp, said he was sure the one who had thrown the projectile was that idiot Sergio, the baker’s son. Professor Enríquez sent Bianchi to ask Blanquita to come up with a bucket and soap to clean up the mess, and then, with that little champion-like gesture we all knew, she said:
“Let’s continue the class” and “let’s see, Nogueira, who had the right to vote in Athenian democracy?”

In history class I was there, but not really there. My thing was math and physics. Give me formulas and equations and I was in my element, joy filled me, my brain would leave my skull and go off to devour the world. But Greece bored me. Until the day of the egg. That day, I started paying attention. It was like an alarm clock that shook me from my stupor, and suddenly I saw Corinthian columns in the vacant lot on Comodoro Coe Street and Apollo statues in Los Aliados park. From that moment on, my personal Greek history was divided into the period before the egg and the one after the egg.

The following Tuesday, Professor Enríquez resumed the topic of Athenian democracy. She was a small woman with short hair. She spoke softly and slowly and inspired respect — and a bit of fear — because one of her breasts was made of foam rubber. She would sit behind her desk, cross her legs, and the one in the air would swing and swing. On the blackboard, a faint trace of egg white was still visible. Some yellowish streaks that were barely noticeable but, in truth, could still be seen. I fixed my eyes on one of them, way down near the chalk tray, and imagined that, since it was located to the south, it could very well be the outline of the northern coast of Crete. The professor was now talking about Pericles and magistrates, councils, and courts. And I imagined myself raising my hand in the assembly, voting yes or no, dressed in a white tunic and wearing sandals. I was chatting with Socrates — though really he was the one doing the talking, a man very skilled with words, though not as obsessive as Demosthenes, who went around saying who-knows-what down by the Piraeus docks with his mouth full of pebbles. But what I liked best was going to have some wine at Democritus’s house, because that bearded eccentric didn’t believe in gods, but he did believe in atoms and the self-creation of matter.
“Who do you think you are?” I remember asking him once. “”Fidel Castro?”
It was at that moment I heard the professor’s voice reaching me like a distant echo from a future twenty-five centuries away.
“Let’s see, Bermúdez, who had the right to vote in Athenian democracy?”

“I already answered that last class”, Nogueira interrupted.
“I know”, said Enríquez, “but now I want Bermúdez to answer.”
I adjusted my tie, struck a pose that seemed very Hellenic to me, and answered that all citizens had the right to vote except slaves and women. Take that.

That very morning, Ferrari, the chemistry teacher, while lecturing on oxygen and carbon, absentmindedly ran his finger over the northern coast of Crete and then put it in his mouth. There were giggles among the students, but I was outraged by the geographic assault on the Aegean Sea. And I imagined Themistocles commanding a hundred Athenian triremes rushing toward Crete to repair the coast that brute Ferrari had destroyed. When the bell rang and everyone bolted out to recess, I stayed alone in the classroom and approached the blackboard to inspect the egg remnants. Yes, no doubt. There were the Attic peninsula and the Isthmus of Corinth. There was also a profile with little curls, and that could only be Epaminondas. And the northern coast of Crete — or what was left of it.

Colet

The room was very dark and had green-painted walls. From my bed I couldn’t see the door, but I could see a sad window facing Cufré Street, always covered by a lowered blind. During the day, it let in only six or seven horizontal slits of sunlight, and at night, it became a black rectangle. I couldn’t move. The redhead would come —an enormous beast who surely lived in a cage at the Villa Dolores zoo —she’d turn me over in bed, give me an injection, pat the pillow, and then the bald guy would come and stick a thermometer you-know-where. My grandmother dozed in the chair, and when we were alone, she talked to me. It was tough to follow her train of thought, and at the end of every long-winded speech, she would ask:

“But what do you think?”

I would have liked to nod, but I couldn’t. So I raised my eyebrows in agreement, unsure whether I actually managed to raise them. My grandmother went from the price of potatoes to the airs Zulema gave herself with her little new outfits from London Paris, but what do you think?, and from the pension she never got to Wilfredo’s bad smell—he never bathed, that man—and how in this country, everyone was just messing around, drinking mate and eating asado, and at the little school in Maroñas they didn’t even have chalk, but what do you think?

Three or four times a day they took me to the iron lung. My grandmother would bring her own chair from the room and sit next to me. And she would sing to me. Very, very softly, but she sang. And I listened, spellbound, because her voice was so sweet, very contralto, very something, very grandmother. María washed, Saint Joseph hung the laundry, and the baby cried from the cold. Saint Anne, dear lady, why does the baby cry? For an apple that has been lost. A delicious drowsiness would come over me. And as I dozed off, the mechanical monster that had swallowed me in its jaws replenished my oxygen with its shooooos and shaaaaas.

Then the bald guy would come back and I’d think, “Here we go again,” but sometimes it was a false alarm because what he did was lift me up in his arms and carry me to the pool. That place was like the Niagara Rapids. The water rushed furiously and made a terrible roar. The bald guy sat me down in the middle of that whirlpool, and then my grandmother came and held me by the armpits. The waves crashed against my chest, and scared, I thought what a pity I wasn’t Johnny Weissmuller. That guy would’ve escaped with clean strokes.

Then I spent a few days in an oxygen tent. The world became blurry. Out there, things moved and noises could be heard, but I couldn’t get past the plastic veil. In truth, I couldn’t get past anything. I couldn’t even touch my own nose. On my left were two round holes, and through them now and then appeared two gloved hands that touched me here and there and sometimes even gave me an injection—so I figured the redhead had escaped from the zoo again. One afternoon, those gloved hands stuck a straw in my mouth. Stiff and immobile as I was, I had no choice but to sip. I closed one eye to read the label on the bottle. It said Colet, chocolate milk. That’s what cured me.

The next day, the bald guy took me out of the oxygen tent and stood me up. I wobbled a little. Once he was sure my slight frame could somehow remain upright, he raised one arm, then the other, let them go suddenly, looked at me thoughtfully, took a few steps back, and asked:

“Think you can walk over here?”

And I walked. Or something like it. My right leg dragged. But who cared. I was moving. Thank you, Colet.

While we waited for the taxi that would take us back home, my grandmother chatted with the redhead. I, sitting in my wheelchair, watched the trees, mesmerized by the play of sunlight among the branches. Some kids were playing soccer with a Pepsi bottle cap. One of them, wearing a smock and bow, was a star. “One day I’ll be better than you,” I thought. And another thing I thought was that I would never again let myself be put in a room with green-painted walls.

Nancy

Without Nancy noticing, I slipped a dried rose between the pages of her book. When class started, she opened it and saw it right away. Perfect. The gods were on my side. She picked up the flower, but the petals crumbled between her fingers. Then she blew the brown dust that was left on the page. I was staring at her, thinking, "look this way, come on, look this way..." But she didn’t look.

The next day, I slipped in a little note instead. It read: There’s someone in class who loves you. Look up and you’ll see me staring. Then you’ll know who I am.
I went back to my seat, all nervous, and from my desk I didn’t take my eyes off her. Nancy opened the book, then closed it. Opened it again, closed it again. She raised her hand to ask Professor Bordoli a question. She placed the book on the lower shelf of her desk. Took it out again. Opened it, checked something, and closed it once more. I had no choice but to watch everything she did with that damned book, because at the very moment she found the note and read it, I had to be burning her with a gaze full of feverish passion. I wasn’t Richard Widmark, but at least I could look.
The bell rang. Nancy got up, grabbed the book, and the note fell to the floor. She didn’t even notice. She left chatting with Marianela and Pesce. Bordoli was the last to leave the classroom. I lingered a bit to see if I could retrieve the note, but Bordoli beat me to it and picked it up. He read it, and when he looked up, I looked away—just in case.

Then I cut a lock of my hair and did it all over again. The gods were on my side once more, because the first thing she saw when she tried to read Article Six of the 1815 Land Act was my neat, straight, innocent little lock of brown hair proclaiming my love. "Look this way, look this way..." I thought. If she looked, she’d understand. But she picked up the lock, stood up, and tossed it in the trash.
To hell with the gods, and to hell with Artigas and his lie that the most unfortunate would be the most privileged.

Roberto had his arm around her as they walked down the sidewalk, and I followed behind them. The guy was a head taller, and Nancy nestled against his chest. That girl was happy with that idiot.
Marito told me to forget about Nancy, not to be a fool, that there were plenty of girls out there, and many of them were beautiful.
What the hell was I doing wasting time trying to win over a girl who was already in love with someone else?
Marito was practical. I wasn’t. I liked complications.
Well, I don’t know. I liked Nancy. That was all.
Anyway, Roberto and Nancy waited for the 192 bus at Jaime Cibils Street and Centenario Avenue, and I kept walking to Avenida Italia, mulling over new plans of conquest.

She didn’t come to class for several days.
“Is she sick?” I asked Elena.
“Yes. Something like that. Or not. But don’t worry. She’ll be back soon.”
That vague answer left me kind of dazed.
That afternoon, Bordoli spent the whole class staring at Marianela’s boobs. During his lecture on Artigas’s military tactics, he used the words vanguard, bosom, breast, and front line more times than I could count.

And finally, she reappeared. She had broken up with Roberto. Or rather, Roberto had left her. The blow had been hard, and Nancy was knocked out. Three days crying in bed with her mom bringing her linden tea.
Now she was more or less recovered. Back in life and back at the Dámaso Institute.
As for me, I was thrilled to see her again, but I didn’t know what to do with all the love I had for her—so much, so beautiful, so unique, that it was already keeping me up at night. And also a sadness that couldn’t be eased, not even with painkillers or Arturo’s mom’s breaded cutlets.
I’d tried. I ate one to cure the melancholy. No luck.
“Want another?” she asked.
“No, ma’am, thanks,” I said.
It was clear. I was very sick. I had to do something, because I couldn’t go on like this.

I went to the pharmacy to buy myself some Courageol or something like that.
The lady behind the counter was losing patience with me.
“Well, kid, make up your mind. What do you want? I don’t have all day.”
It was hard for me to bring it up.
“Condoms? Is that what you want?”
“No,” I said. “I need a pill or some kind of stimulant to give me courage. I want to confess my love to a girl...”
“What you need is a glass of whiskey,” said the pharmacist. “A good shot of whiskey is worth ten Courageol pills.”
So, following the expert’s advice, I went to the San Marcos bar and ordered a whiskey.
The counter was super high and Gutiérrez looked down at me from up there with his big Mexican Revolution-style mustache.
“Lactolate,” he said in his graveyard voice. “What I’m giving you is a Lactolate. Or would you prefer a kick in the ass?”

And so, drunk on love and Lactolate, I got on the 192 bus that afternoon and rode with Nancy to the Manga neighborhood.
At the romantic corner of Cuchilla Grande Avenue and Marrubio Street, I told her that I loved her, that I’d always love her, and that I’d never stop loving her because my love was forever, and because she was my everything, my love, my—
And I had to cut the dithyramb short because Roberto showed up on his bike, slapped me on the back, and asked:
“What are you doing out here, dude?”
I watched them ride off toward Piedras Blancas. Roberto pedaling like a jockey with his butt up in the air, and Nancy sitting sideways behind him.

My world fell apart.
Back in my neighborhood, languid and drained, I gathered the last bit of strength I had and sat myself down on Doña Celia’s low wall.
As I watched Rosales working up a sweat turning the crank on his jalopy, I began tallying up my misfortunes. When I got to number one hundred forty-seven, I heard Doña Celia open her front door behind me.
My sadness must have been obvious even from the back of my head, because before she even reached the wall, she asked:
“Why are you sad?”
“Because I told a girl in my class I was in love with her, and she said no.”
“What a fool,” said Doña Celia. “She doesn’t know what she’s missing.”

Ñato

He would show up mid-morning at the red wooden gate of Doña Rosa’s house, and she’d give him a big chunk of white bread with dulce de leche. Ñato would stick his fingers into the spread and suck them clean as he walked down Propios Avenue. He lived across from Comodoro Coe Street's summer theater, in a tin house. One time I passed by and saw Ñato playing with a beetle. He had dismembered it with incredible patience. First, he unscrewed its head, and then he slowly removed the little legs, with a tenderness that surprised me. The beetle's parts were scattered all over the ground, but each of them kept moving on its own. Ñato watched the whole thing, hypnotized. Without looking up, he said:
“I’ll trade stickers.”
“Okay”, I said, and pulled out my little stack from my pocket.
I showed them to him one by one, and he said:
“Got it, got it, got it, need it, got it, got it, need it, need it...”
I gave him the ones he was missing, and once my stack ran out, I said:
“Now show me yours.”
Ñato ignored me, stood up, and walked calmly down the dirt path leading to the door of his house. I ran after him, and without turning around, he slapped me with the back of his right hand. At the door, a guy in a tank top appeared and looked at me as if to say “and what the hell are you doing here?” I said good morning, just to say something, and I left.

Ñato was tall—really tall—and walked in slow motion. The pick-up games in the field would stop when he walked by. He’d grab the ball and inspect it. If he thought it was worth it, he’d take it. That’s why we played with whatever junk we could find. We had a cloth ball and another green plastic one with a hole in it where your shoe would get stuck. It looked like a bitten lemon. But usually, thankfully, Ñato ignored us. He wasn’t much older than we were, but he had a brother in jail, and that gave him a lot of respect in our eyes.

Years later, I ran into him on a 122 bus. He was carrying a bag of Swiss candies and shouting:
“Five candies for one peso!”
He moved down the aisle with the same slowness as before, completely unaffected by the jolts of the vehicle. As he passed by me, I said without looking up: “Give me five.”
I waited for him to hand them over, then jumped up, ran to the back platform, and got off without paying. He tried to chase me, but Ñato was still too big and too slow. When I reached Julio Herrera y Obes Street, I slowed down and remembered his tin house and his bread with dulce de leche, and I felt sorry. I felt like a spiteful piece of shit. To think I still hadn’t forgiven him for the sticker thing. I felt ashamed of myself. I turned back and saw him walking down the sidewalk on Dieciocho Avenue. I went up to him, and without turning around, he slapped me again with the back of his right hand. I ended up sitting on the sidewalk. A lady passed by and gave me a weird look. I got up, said good morning just to say something, and left.

San Martín Street 523

Elena and Bebona were always together. They came out of the bathroom wrapped in white terrycloth robes and towels coiled on their heads. As they passed, they left a trail of Palmolive soap that knocked out the cabecitas (slang for working-class guys) at the boarding house. They slipped into their room, opened the window facing Lavalle Street, drank mate, and wouldn’t come out again until nighttime. Meanwhile, the bathroom was occupied again, and Professor Cedrés and Darling, the poet, waited their turn. Now and then Cedrés would knock on the bathroom door and yell:

“Today, please!”

The professor was still in his undershirt and pajama pants. In his hand, he held an enamel mug, a shaving brush, and a Gillette razor. Darling, more relaxed, leaned against the wall and hummed an unrecognizable tune. Sebastián pulled back the curtain of his room and observed them.

“There are still two waiting”, he told Martha, who was breastfeeding the baby.

At last, the bathroom door opened and, through the thick steam that flooded the hallway, emerged Blanca, the woman from Tucumán. She gave Cedrés a kiss on the mouth, and he said, “Cut it out, Blanca,” while feeling around for the doorframe. Before the professor could close the door, Blanca pinched his butt.

No one ever saw them leave. It was a mystery. When night fell, Elena and Bebona vanished from the boarding house as if by magic. If you stood on purpose in the entrance hallway, all you’d perceive were two barely perceptible shifts in the air, two perfume-laden breezes with blond wigs and monstrously red lips, two sequin-covered ghosts gleaming in the dark, floating over the granite floor and disappearing suddenly into the San Martín Street night without you noticing, without understanding a thing. They’d turn down Lavalle street heading toward the Bajo. Buenos Aires swallowed them whole. All we cabecitas could do was wait until morning to admire those divas when they emerged from the bathroom.

I kept the same hours they did. I had come from Mendoza ten years earlier to work at the Central Post Office. I had to leave my house in Caballito because Cristina, with whom I had a school-aged daughter, couldn’t stand the fact that all I did was sleep all day. But I worked at night – what did she expect?

That’s why I was comfortable in the boarding house. No one bothered me with “Come on, get out of bed, you bum.”

On Sundays we’d play rounds of truco with Luis, Sebastián, Alfaro, and Darling. All of them were from the provinces. And then there were the bolitas (a slang term, often derogatory, for Bolivians) Pérez and Duarte. The Uruguayan Lenzué never missed a game either. He dreamed of becoming a music star and had a tailored suit made to look as much as possible like Sergio Denis.

I was happy with that lively social life, my little alcohol stove, my Terrabusi cookies, powdered milk, Nescafé, and portable TV. I shared the room with Lenzué, Ortega from Santa Cruz – who had been exiled by Hugo Banzer – and Viazzi, the Italian, a psychologist, pain in the ass, and hopeless drunk.

Ortega was a major spitter. The wall space between the door and the wardrobe bore the history of his phlegm missiles. He’d lie on the bed with his arms under his head and, mid-conversation, launch green blobs of mucus that surprised and fascinated you. The spit would slowly slide down the wall – moving art. Viazzi wouldn’t be outdone, and he regularly puked on the floor when he got back drunk from his incontri accademici with colleagues at Moyano Hospital.

At dinnertime, I’d sit at the table with Cedrés. Turns out the guy was a polemologist, and I had no idea what polemology even was. He was interested in wars and was writing a treatise on the War of the Pacific. I loved listening to him. He talked about von Clausewitz, Trotsky, and Beaufre, but when it came to those matters, I leaned more toward Lennon’s philosophy – better to stay in bed than make war. Still, his conversations were a pleasure. Sometimes he’d be interrupted by Blanca, the woman from Tucumán, who’d come over, sit on his lap, mess up his hair, and kiss him.

One early morning, coming home from work, I ran into Susana, who was Darling’s girlfriend—or rather, one of his many. She was stumbling through the hallway and reeked of beer. She said:

“Hey, Martínez”, and somehow got into the elevator.

I helped her with the door.

After that, I ran into her almost every dawn. Sometimes I’d find her crying, dabbing her nose with a wadded-up tissue. Other times she’d pass by me muttering curses under her breath. One time I almost ran into her at the corner of Tucumán Street and San Martín Street. I dodged her just in time, but she grabbed me by the lapels of my overcoat, shoved me against the wall, and inserted her tongue down my throat. Then she stepped back and squatted. I watched a playful trickle of pee make its way toward Reconquista Street.

The following Sunday, she showed up in my room, well-groomed and perfumed. I opened one eye – I think it was the right one.

“I brought pastries”, she said, and handed me a paper bag that crinkled and gave off a heavenly little steam.

I was still in the arms of Morpheus – which felt more like the claws of Morpheus. That Greek bastard wouldn’t let me go. But somehow, I managed to open the other eye and get out a “hello.” I was hoping that with so much effort, all the world’s freemen would answer with salud, gran pueblo argentino, but all I heard was Susana’s voice.

“I’m crazy”, she said.

“Yeah, I figured.”

“No, silly. I’m crazy about you.”

“Great.”

“Darling says you’re a bum, that all you do is sleep all day, that you won’t even leave your room to go to the bathroom, and that’s why you pee in a wine bottle behind the wardrobe.

“It’s not a wine bottle. It’s a Coca-Cola bottle.”

To celebrate the romance, we went for drinks at El Pucherito de Gallina bar. Lenzué dedicated a song to us – I fell in love without realizing it – and Pérez and Duarte gave a charango and panpipe concert. Professor Cedrés improvised a toast to our health, and from the bar, Blanca, the woman from Tucumán, shouted:

“And I toast to you, you gorgeous old man!”

The only one missing was Darling. He stayed at the boarding house humming his unrecognizable little tune and writing a poem about love’s betrayals. He titled it Susana.

From that moment on, Susana and I have showered together at dawn. That’s when our paths cross. I’m coming home from work, and she’s heading to hers at the Borda hospital. But first, we have to wait for Elena and Bebona to come out.

Scalene triangles

Ours was the triangular space behind open doors. Except for the bathroom, there wasn't a single door in that house behind which we hadn’t committed some carnal offense. They were tiny spaces where we stayed tightly bound together, and love was a race against the clock. We needed so little. A minimal base and height, and a hypotenuse that shifted with the force of our thrusts. How I loved those doors. Once, behind my bedroom door, locked in our struggle, we heard Aunt Alicia and Aunt Elbia laughing in the dining room. They had come to visit after having tea at the Lion d’Or. Duque ran to greet them with a stick in his mouth, and when he saw me, he stopped. I held his gaze and the dog kept going. Coca came in right after him. Luckily, I had anticipated the danger and dived into bed, lying face down, pretending to be asleep. María de los Ángeles went out to meet her, said hello, patted down her skirt a couple of times, and then breezily went to greet the aunts and ask if they wanted to play generala.

Our romance was sometimes isosceles, but mostly it was very scalene. Though when you're fifteen and your girlfriend is seventeen, you don’t think about those details.

When I come down from Trinidad to Montevideo and go to my parents’ house, I walk through all the rooms, open the doors, and calculate the area of those triangles. I multiply the base by the height and divide by two. The result is a few meager square centimeters, and I have no idea how María de los Ángeles and I managed to do what we did in there. Love turned us into contortionists.

On one of those visits, I went to the kitchen. That little piece of furniture was still there behind the door. That’s where María de los Ángeles would stand. Her private parts were right at the height of my mouth, which was very convenient for our purposes. The piece had four wheels, and you had to be very careful not to have an accident. But one day, María de los Ángeles fell on top of me and we rolled to the floor. Just then Coca came in.
“What happened?”, she asked.
“I dropped a ten-peso coin”, I muttered from the floor.
“And we’re looking for it”, said María de los Ángeles.
“Ah, here it is, how lucky, I found it”, she added triumphantly, and held up the face of Artigas shining in the palm of her hand. Then she stood up with great difficulty. Her head had gotten stuck between the legs of a chair.

The door to my parents’ room was our favorite. On the back it had two little hooks where Coca’s robe and my father’s dressing gown hung. That space was a tangled triangle where María de los Ángeles’s eyes would disappear among the silk and cotton, and then reappear with the look of an odalisque or the ruthless glare of Bette Davis. That drove me wild.

We only used the front door of the house once. Guillermina, the neighbor from 1834 bis, had died, and Coca, my father, and Duque had gathered on the sidewalk to watch as the coffin was taken away. The door had been left ajar, and María de los Ángeles and I exchanged a glance and understood each other instantly. The hearse passed along Monte Caseros Street, the women crossed themselves, the men lowered their eyes, and we, in the confines of that triangle, beat death with nothing but kisses. From the upper tip of the hypotenuse, next to a damp stain, the portrait of Saint Anthony watched us, somewhere between lustful and indulgent.

Thank you, people

It was amazing to see them up so close. Their sneakers made a little suction-cup sound on the asphalt, and you could see the strands of sweat on their necks and the messy hairs of their bangs.

Those players had the manners of British lords. When Sánchez Padilla blew the whistle for a foul, they immediately raised a hand so the officials at the scorer’s table could take note. It was me, it was me, they seemed to say. And after five fouls, they would leave the court and let someone else take their place. I didn’t understand a thing. Back on the dirt field on Presidente Oribe Street, we kids would end up punching each other over any little foul, and we’d spend three hours yelling to settle whether it was Favale or the Rat who committed a “hands.” But here on Tabaré’s court, those giants behaved like Crandon schoolgirls, even though they jumped, collided, grabbed at each other, and clashed in the air in ways that were terrifying. And as if that wasn’t surreal enough, they didn’t even protest when the referee blew the whistle. It was clear that basketball was a game invented by Walt Disney.

Mirtha, who in the Amsterdam stands was a complete lunatic, kept a decorum here in the Parque de los Aliados that would put Batlle Berres’ wife to shame. She came to see Márquez. The rest didn’t interest her in the slightest. I, on the other hand, was fascinated by Gómez, because he had a little belly like my uncle Nelson’s—though my true idol, no doubt about it, was Poyet. That man’s body seemed to begin at ground level and end in the stratosphere. I had seen him several times in civilian clothes, wearing a black trench coat, getting on the 143 bus at tthe corner of Ramón Anador Street and Propios Avenue. He paid the fare with his neck bent against the ceiling. He looked like God.

My grandmother had dyed her hair blue and put on that perfume whose scent reached all the way to the corner of Rivera Street and Gabriel Pereira Street. Walter watched the game in deep concentration, leaning a little this way and then a little that way, leaning back and murmuring aaahhh whenever the ball sailed through the air toward the hoop. Little Huguito, who couldn’t make it past halftime at the Central pitch without punching someone, was calmly watching the basketball game. He seemed like a different person. All in all, the Tabaré supporters were adorable. From our stand—the one facing Brito del Pino Street—we applauded the field goals scored by our Oteros and Piñeiros, while the Welcome fans on the opposite side celebrated the acrobatics of their own.

There were only a few minutes left and Tabaré was down by two. The night was delightful. The scent of jasmine floated in the air and mixed with the smell of grilled sausages. You could hear the cruic of Coca-Cola bottles being opened. Asuaga and Monzani were watching the game from the club’s bar window, each holding a pool cue. That’s when Márquez got under the opposing basket, scored, and rolled on the floor in a tangle of legs and arms with Óscar Moglia. Sánchez Padilla canceled the field goal and called an offensive foul on Márquez.

“Thief!” shouted Fat Gregorio, a Tabaré fan known for wearing a little gray feather in his hair held in place by a headband.

It was shocking. It couldn’t be. Tabaré fans were refined people. They never insulted anyone. Sánchez Padilla tucked the orange ball under his arm and scanned the stands. A hush fell. His eyes locked onto the gray feather. It screamed again:

“Thief!”

Sánchez Padilla took a few steps in that direction and stared at Fat Gregorio, who by now had gotten to his feet, dragging little Gregorito by the hand—who still had half a frankfurter in his mouth. Without taking his eyes off the big man, Sánchez Padilla gestured to Monti, the police officer, to remove this hysteric from the stands. But Fat Gregorio wanted to start a debate.

“If you unfairly cancel a field goal,” he shouted Nardone-style, wagging a finger in the air, “you’re stealing. And if you steal, you’re a thief!”

But Monti, weaving through the crowd—“excuse me, ma’am, pardon me”—wasn’t interested in semantics. At last he stood in front of him and said:

“Calm down, Gregorio. Go to the bar and get a drink. The game won’t continue until you leave.”

As he passed behind my grandmother, Gregorio took the feather from his head and planted it in her hair. She loved the gesture. The blue matched perfectly with the gray. As the fat man left, dragging little Gregorito—who was still wrestling with his frankfurter—the Welcome fans burst into loud applause. It was meant for Sánchez Padilla, but Gregorio took it differently. He raised his hands above his head and shouted:

“Thank you, people!”

The hint

When River scored the first goal, my mom told me not to worry because Peñarol always started off losing but ended up winning. Gina looked at her with those incredulous little eyes, and my mom handed her a piece of navy biscuit, which the little dog swallowed without chewing.

“Want another mate?” she asked me with that dead calm so typical of the Guardado Rodríguez clan.

I nodded and said,
“But just so you know, last year they lost the final to Independiente four to one. So this thing about always winning isn’t exactly true. Let’s not exaggerate.”

My mom gave the straw a couple of turns, poured in hot water and sugar, and passed me the mate.
“The thing is, sweetheart, you’re way too pessimistic.”

And I couldn’t really argue with that. I was feeling kind of down because the evening before, Alma had denied me her love on the airport balcony. A Braniff airplane had started up its engines and was making a hell of a racket. In the middle of that roar, I moved closer and started whispering romantic things. She was waving goodbye to Mirtha, who was headed off on a scholarship to Minnesota. Then she turned to me and asked:
“What’s up with you? What bug bit you?”

I got the hint. I was lightning quick when it came to hints.

When River scored the second goal, I seriously considered suicide. Should I hang myself from the grapevine out back? Dunk my head in the bathroom sink? Shove a Ricardito in my mouth until I suffocated? Life had no meaning anymore, it wasn’t worth a thing. My mom poured another mate, oblivious to the sufferings steeping inside me. Gina rested her head on my knee, and I tugged at my hair. Across the street I saw Carlitos and Tarta—die-hard Nacional fans—playing frog on Doña Pura’s wall, over the moon, I imagined. My mom passed me the mate, but I refused it. It wasn’t a time for mate. It was time for hemlock.

“Where are you going?” she asked when she saw me get up from the table.

“I don’t know. Out somewhere.”

“Stay and listen to the game, you pansy. We’re losing, but it’s not over yet. You’ve got no faith in the boys. What kind of fan are you?”

“The boys?” I replied. “They’re a bunch of geezers. Abbadie has grandkids, Tito’s got rheumatism, and Spencer’s already started filing for retirement.”

I walked up to the radio, as if to say goodbye to Solé and Toto Da Silveira, and just as I was about to touch it, my mom warned:
“Careful, it shocks.”

I sat on the curb on Estivao Street. Clarita and Don Jorge were, as always, sitting in front of their house. Clarita with her hands clasped over her belly, and Don Jorge tapping his cane on the sidewalk—tap, tap, tap—just like he had since the Thirteen Instructions era. Trelles walked by, leaving a trail of hair gel perfume, and the Serena kids were playing marbles. Nothing new under the sun.

Suddenly I saw Elías, dressed in his police uniform, turn the corner on Tomás Gómez Street and head my way. He must have sensed something was wrong because he came over and greeted me.

“What’s wrong, kid?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I answered, twisting a blade of grass from the ground.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

But after a few minutes, since the guy wouldn’t leave, and considering he was the law and I really needed to get this off my chest, I told him the truth—that I was bummed because in the final in Chile we were losing two–nil.

“Two to one,” he corrected.

“Two to one?” I exclaimed, my voice cracking.

“Yeah. Spencer scored.”

I headed over to the Garcías’, a bit less destroyed, though still not giving in to hope, because surely there wasn’t enough time left to tie. Besides, hope only exists to disappoint you. Damn. My mom was right. I was being a total pansy.

When I got there, Raúl laid the Ludo board on the floor and we started playing. His mom was pissed because every time she walked through the living room, she had to do acrobatics to get around us. Don García was lying in his room, wearing just a tank top, reading the racing section and puffing on his contraband cigar. His radio was tuned to CX8 but with the volume turned way down.

I pretended not to care and acted like I was focused on the game, but I kept trying to catch bits of the match with one ear. I let myself get my pieces eaten like a fool, and suddenly I heard Raúl say:

“Hey, dude, roll again—you got a six.”

I rolled. A four. I started counting the squares. One, two... “the ball rebounds off the defense...” said the announcer. Three, fou— “Joya tries to pick it up, but Abbadie gets there first,” fou... fou...

“Come on, man, don’t take all day.”

“Abbadie shoots, it bounces off Matosas—goaaal, goaaal!” fou—four. I froze with the piece in my hand. Raúl was looking at me. I looked at him. We stared.

“What’s up?” he asked. “You gonna kiss me or what?”

I took off up the hill on Propios Avenue breaking the 100m hurdles record. I leapt over the pile of lime in front of the hardware store, vaulted over Baigorri’s betting table like an Olympic champ, and sidestepped Sultan, who was napping with his nose between his paws. I was going back. Back home, full of hope, joy, faith, confidence, and fifteen hundred other things I can’t even remember now. No, all wasn’t lost. It was tied.

But the door was locked. Weird, I thought. Locked? Our door? Our door was never locked. I don’t think it even had a proper keyhole. Doña Rosa would shuffle through every morning for mate with my mom, bringing her own bread and quince jam. The neighborhood kids would burst in like the door wasn’t even there, just a drawing in the air. The only one who ever acknowledged its “doorhood” was Saturnino, who came by at night, opened it slowly and carefully, peeked in with his gelled hair and mumbled:

“Gooood evening.”

I never figured out why he crouched when he said it.

My dad, without lifting his eyes from the paper, would say:

“Come on in.”

And Saturnino would settle into the awful African armchair, tune his guitar, and torture us all with that ballad about Felipe Varela dying, coming back, and leaving again.

But anyway, I had no choice—I had to knock. What a ridiculous thing: knocking on the door of my own house. Knock knock. Nothing. Knock knock knock. Nothing. I started to worry. After a few minutes, I heard something. Quiet footsteps, creeping closer, hesitant, as if asking themselves, Do we open or not?, like they were scared they might run into a UTE bill collector.

A pause. The footsteps stopped. Silence.

Then, through the metal slats of the peephole, a brown eye appeared. It pierced me. Pierced me hard. It’s tough facing a one-eyed stare, especially when that eye belongs to your own mom, and you realize you can’t really communicate without at least a nose or an ear in the frame.

“What do you want?” the eye asked.

“What do I want? What do you mean, what do I want? I want to come inside. Open up.”

“No. You’re staying out.”

“What?”

“You heard me. You’re staying out. You bring bad luck. We were losing. You left. We tied. If I let you in now, we’re definitely gonna lose again.”

“But…”

“No buts.”

At least she had the decency to bring the radio closer to the door, so I got to hear the headers from Spencer and Rocha that gave me the most beautiful 4–2 win of my life. I celebrated with my forehead pressed against the door, back to the street. Thank God. That way nobody saw the little tears of emotion leaking from my soul. Crying over a football match—who would’ve thought?

I promised myself I’d go back to church next Sunday, after more than a year, because it was clear as day: Jesus was a Peñarol fan, and life was beautiful.

Cars started honking in the streets, Maeso appeared on his balcony waving a black-and-yellow flag, and fireworks lit up the sky over Ramón Anador Street. Vicente brought out the record player and a dance broke out.

“Not the speakers!” shouted Vicente’s dad. “Don’t take the damn speakers out to the yard—they’ll get wrecked, idiot!”

But the guy didn’t care, and “La pollera colorá” started blasting through the whole neighborhood.

Then Alma came up and said something to me. I told her I couldn’t hear a thing with all the racket. I hope she got the hint.

The ivory chess set

It was a beautiful chessboard with matching ivory pieces. It was rarely taken out of the display cabinet because the old man couldn’t find a worthy opponent anywhere in Pocitos. Every now and then, Gabarain would drop by for a visit, and only then would the old man take the set in his hands with the reverence one reserves for a chalice, and gently place it on the little table by the window that looked out onto Llambí Street. Gaspar, sucking his thumb, would watch the opponents from the doorway until they started smoking cigars and disappeared into a cloud of smoke. At the end of the match, Gabarain would rise from his chair, smiling, say, “Until next time, Hugo,” and extend a hand the old man never shook. Then María Esther would arrive from the kitchen, patting her apron, hand him his trench coat, and say, “Come back soon, José. You know this is your home.”
In the room, the old man would remain for quite a while, staring at the board. Motionless. Then he would get up, and on his way out, he’d run into Gaspar. With one swipe he’d knock the thumb out of the boy’s mouth and continue on to the kitchen. Five minutes later, the crash of a plate shattering against the wall could be heard. Sometimes it was the sugar bowl or the teapot. María Esther was worried. Gabarain’s visits were taking a toll on the dinnerware.

When Gaspar turned seven, the old man decided he was old enough to learn the basics of the game. He showed him all the pieces, explained how they moved, and what a check was. One day, without further ado, he set up the plastic chess set Gaspar had won at the Noruega School’s fair and said, “Sit down, we’re going to play.”

At first, he gave him a queen’s advantage and checkmated him whenever he wanted—in four or five moves, or six or seven if he felt like it. Gaspar would scratch his head while the old man stood up with a smug smile and headed to the living room, opened the skylight, and reclined on the sofa. At three o'clock, when the weather was nice, the sun would shine right there. He’d put on his sunglasses and, for a moment, pretend he was on Copacabana beach.

When Gaspar started to improve his game, the old man decided to stop giving him a queen's advantage and gave him a rook's advantage instead. “You’re catching on, kid. You’re doing well.” Gaspar bit his tongue in frustration with every move his father made and had to respond quickly because the old man had no patience. When the old man started tapping his boot on the floor, Gaspar knew he had to move a pawn or a bishop fast.

On his ninth birthday, Gaspar was inspired. Maybe it was the new skateboard he’d been given, or because Uncle Tato had promised to take him to Parque Rodó that evening. Whatever the reason, during that afternoon’s game with his father, he managed to put the old man in a tight spot at times. The old man shot him a couple of dark glances, but Gaspar wasn’t intimidated. His white bishops were well-positioned, his knights roamed freely across the board, and the rooks stood proud on the flanks. Suddenly, it was the old man who was taking his time to move. Gaspar tried tapping his sandal on the floor. The old man took the insult in stride, arching his left eyebrow slightly and licking his lips. Five gambits later, after a fierce assault by pawns and bishops, order was restored. At ten past three, the old man rose from the table with the same smug smile as always. The checkmate had been merciless. Gaspar hadn’t seen it coming. The old man went to the living room, opened the skylight, and settled on the sofa. The sun shone on the corner where the begonias were. There was no Copacabana.

On December fifteenth, 1933, at two in the afternoon, the old man took the ivory chess set out of the cabinet and placed it on the table. He opened the shutters facing Llambí Street. The chinaberry trees filtered the sunlight, and the warmth was pleasant. Gaspar was turning ten, and he was about to play the first match of his life against the old man with no advantage at all. It would be a match of equals. He had become a man. It was the moment of truth. And the old man wanted to honor him by letting him handle the ivory pieces of that magnificent treasure.

They played in churchlike silence. María Esther brought a soda with Fernet for the father and a glass of cocoa for the son. Every time Gaspar touched a piece, the Holy Spirit whispered the move he had to make. The archangel Gabriel, floating beside the cabinet, gestured as if to say nicely done! every time the boy made the right move. With that kind of support, Gaspar knew he couldn’t lose. The old man’s army began to weaken. The enemy squad, commanded by the boy, had become relentless. Those pawns were like the host of God. At four o'clock, the old man accepted defeat. With a trembling hand, he picked up his king and brought it close to his eyes, scrutinizing it. He murmured, “What a beautiful king,” and hurled it violently out the window. Then he did the same with the queen and the rest of the pieces.
Magdalenita Viera, who was across the street drawing a hopscotch on the sidewalk, saw the knights and bishops cut swiftly through the warm air of Francisco Llambí Street and land near her after bouncing three, four, five times on the cobblestones. She picked up the pieces one by one and slipped them into the little pockets of her dress. They’d look perfect in the nativity scene.

The little Peñarol players

Those strange and wonderful beings would come out from under the earth and disappear back into the tunnel when the match was over. Could there be a hidden and mysterious world beneath the surface that I didn’t know about? Did those creatures roam through catacombs always impeccably dressed in yellow and black, kicking a ball? Did they eat their ravioli by candlelight under a ceiling of stalactites? I watched them emerge from the depths and told myself they couldn’t be Martians—no, they couldn’t possibly be Martians because where would they leave the spaceship? In which cave? Impossible. Could there be, down there, a kingdom called Peñarol where those eleven little peñarolitos crossed balls into the box and brought them down with their chests, while eleven peñarolitas washed their shirts and shorts? Was there also a Mother Peñarola, fat and mustached, who scolded them after the game for dirtying their knee pads or leaving their shoes in shambles?

I was stationed behind the goal on the Amsterdam side, popping another caramel po in my mouth while my grandma kept an eye on me to make sure I didn’t leave a single one in the bag. At the price that junk cost, I’d better eat them all.
One of those mysterious little peñarolitos—the different one, the one dressed all in black with a huge white number one on his back—walked toward the goal and put on a cap.
“Grandma, is it allowed to wear a cap?”, I asked her.”The others don’t have one.”
“It’s because of the sun”, my grandma said.
“Makes sense”, I said. “If you live underground, even a bit of half-assed sunlight will blind you.”
My grandma looked at me like: what’s this idiot saying now, and glanced over my shoulder at the contents of the po bag.
“ You’ve still got some left”, she said. “Eat and watch the game.”

Borges got the ball and started running full speed down the sideline on the América side. When that little guy took off, he really took off, and before he even got to tthe Colombes side he was already out of sight. You could only guess where he was by the trail of opposing players he left in disarray. I figured he made it to the end line and sent in a cross, because the ball suddenly dropped into the box and there rose Hohberg—who was like eight feet tall—and headed it in with one of those headers.
Mesías started protesting and protesting. He followed the ref, hands clasped like he was praying. The ref didn’t even flinch and blew the whistle to restart the match.
Then Mesías grabbed the ball and furiously booted it toward the América stand. The ball rose through the air, tracing a beautiful arc that captivated the spectators. Forty-five thousand heads turned skyward in unison, breath held, absorbed in the elegant descent of that projectile. Would it land on the heads of the Radio Carve commentators? Or would it overshoot the stands and fall onto the peanut brittle vendor outside?
The kids on the Amsterdam slope shouted in frustration.
“Next time kick it over here, Mesías, don’t be stingy!”, they yelled.
Because when a ball landed on that slope, forget it, that ball was gone for good. It vanished like magic. It passed from hand to hand and foot to foot until it reached Miriam, a fourteen-year-old girl who lived up the hill on Dos de Mayo Street. She slipped it under her little floral dress and at the end of the match, she emerged through the crowd miraculously pregnant.

When the match ended, the peñarolitos returned to their underground kingdom. Bye, champions. The crowd applauded them. There was something a little sad about watching the earth swallow them up, but I knew they’d rise again the following Sunday, full of energy, to run across the grass and make people happy. I took comfort in thinking that, after all, emerging from the bowels of the earth wasn’t as gruesome and dramatic as what the players from the Fénix team did—they rose from the ashes. That was seriously messed up.

The revelation

It was a revelation. It was the missing piece of the puzzle. Now I knew where I stood. The world that had been gradually unfolding before my eyes took on shape and meaning. Mercedes, the teacher, who called me Roberto (my real name was Arturo), said to us:

– Write on the top line, top right corner: Tuesday, August nineteenth, nineteen fifty-eight, Montevideo, Oriental Republic of Uruguay.

Before panic could spread among the kids (Elizabeth already had a capital O forming on her lips and Gustavo was frozen stiff with his hand inside his pencil case), she grabbed a piece of chalk and wrote the sentence on the blackboard for us to copy. Ah, thank goodness. We had thought it was going to be a dictation. The sighs of relief from the desks created such a gust of wind that Mercedes’s skirt fluttered like a scrap of sky. It was a colorful skirt that looked like a Sudamtex blanket.

I sharpened my pencil, blew the graphite, and steadied myself over the Tabaré notebook page. When I wrote the word Montevideo, I stared at it in amazement. Wow. I had done it. A little bead of sweat ran down my nose and I had to scratch it because it tickled. In that decisive moment, I understood the purpose of all those months of struggle with b with a = ba, p with o = po, and t with u = tu. And with that endless, sleep-inducing story about the mom who loved me and the dad who bathed. Because my mom didn’t love me, she smacked me, and my dad didn’t bathe, he walked around filthy. But what really moved me was the revelation that I lived in a city called Montevideo, and within it there were places like Pocitos, La Unión, Cerrito de la Victoria, old cars called cachilas, trolleybuses, and the old aunts from Aguada neighbourhood who walked along the sidewalk in their furs and little hats with tulle on their foreheads. The part about Oriental Republic of Uruguay sent me into a frenzy. Because, just imagine, it turned out that the city of Montevideo, that huge and ever-present thing with its ice cream vendors, Sunday goal shouts, crooked trees, the smell of yerba, the swarm of schoolkids in white smocks and blue bows, and buses bursting with people hanging from the back platform, was part of something even bigger—something almost impossible to imagine—and that something was called a country, and that country had a long and complicated name. I felt complete, perfect, confident. My name was Arturo Villagrán, I was born on January ninth, nineteen fifty-two, and I lived in the city of Montevideo, Oriental Republic of Uruguay. And let them come slashing if they dared—I wasn’t stepping off the path.

After recess, Mercedes ran her hand through my hair and said:

“You're all messy, Roberto.”
And what did she expect? It’s hard to show up neat in class after chasing Dardo all around the schoolyard, considering Dardo was chasing Teresita and Teresita was chasing me. We were too young to realize we were in a love triangle. We were moving way too fast.

Shyly, I replied: “Arturo. My name is Arturo.”
She didn’t hear me. She clapped her hands and exclaimed:
“Everyone sit down, we’re going to continue the lesson.”

Through the window, I saw Bervejillo taking away the leftover sodas and pastries that hadn’t been sold during recess. He lived in the basement of the school and was everywhere—cleaning, dusting, carrying folders from the office to the classrooms and back, greeting us kids when we arrived, splashing around in the bathroom with his rubber boots when the toilets got clogged and the girls came running out holding their noses. Bervejillo was Superman. And he was also a guardian angel, because he’d comfort you when you were stuck in the hallway like a fool in detention. He’d come by, say a kind word, or slip you a Zabala candy, like it was nothing.

At five o’clock, the bell rang and chaos broke out. Ricardo was always the first to vanish since he sat closest to the door. Then came Martha and Alma, very proper with their briefcases, and then the crowd led by the De Pedro twins. I was always the last to leave. As I passed Mercedes’s desk on my way to the door, she said:

“See you tomorrow, Roberto.”
“See you tomorrow, Eulalia”, I replied.
Either she didn’t catch the irony, or she just didn’t hear me.

Bervejillo was out on the sidewalk selling chocolate bars. I walked up to him with a confident, worldly stride. With a sweeping gesture, as if encompassing the entire scene, I said: “Montevideo. We live in Montevideo.”
Bervejillo looked at me, took off his beret, and put it back on.

Across the street, I saw Dardo running after Teresita. And I took off running after them.

The trial

It was a giant, heavy wardrobe with two doors that slid along rails. It had its glory years in the kids' room, and then it was banished to the back room, where Aunt Lala’s record player, a baby crib, and a wicker rocking chair of uncertain origin also enjoyed their golden exile.

Jorge played the conductor and sold you an imaginary ticket, which you paid for with the gesture of pulling something from your pocket and placing it in his palm.

"Move to the back, move to the back," he shouted with a supposedly Galician accent, and Nora, Cristina, the other Cristina, Daniel, Walter, and I would climb into the wardrobe from the left side. Jorge would close the door, and we’d all be squished together, swaying in rhythm, imitating the movement of a bus. I would murmur vroom, vroom, vroom, vraaam to make it more realistic, while one of the Cristinas always complained that she was going to be late for the dentist. Clever Walter liked to occasionally push the other passengers and exclaim, “Whoa, what a sudden stop!” and Daniel would ask if we were almost at Cuñapirú Street. Always Cuñapirú Street. He was four years old, and I don’t know what he had with Cuñapirú Street.

After a while, someone would say:
“Hey, stop, I’m getting off at the next one.”

And then Jorge would open the door on the right side so they could get off.

After a few minutes, the person who had gotten off would climb back in from the left side, and that operation was repeated with each passenger until we got bored and started playing something else. More than once we forgot to let Daniel out of the wardrobe, still waiting for the Cuñapirú Street stop.

One of those afternoons, the wardrobe-bus had had enough. It, which had protected so many starched sheets, so much underwear, and so many blankets in its mothball-scented belly, wanted to stop being a substitute for the Cutcsa. One of its doors came loose and hung from the top rails, swinging dangerously. We stepped back cautiously, just in case it came crashing down on us. After a minute of silence, the accusations began.

“It’s your fault, Jorge, with all that opening and closing...”
“It’s your fault, you made me the conductor, I didn’t want to be.”
“I think it was Cristina who messed up the door because when she got off, she grabbed it and pushed it too hard.”
“What do you mean me? Are you crazy? That door was already messed up.”

That’s when I decided to take the bull by the horns and exclaimed:

“Calm down, calm down. What we need here is a trial.”

“A trial? Are you nuts? What do you mean, a trial?”

“Yes, a trial. Like in Perry Mason. Look, we’ve got a defendant — that would be Jorge, right? I’ll be the prosecutor, and Nora can be the defense attorney. You, Walter, are the judge, and the others are the jury. And the jury decides who’s guilty for the door coming off.”

The kids looked at each other with faces like what a dumb idea, but little by little, those faces changed to well, whatever, why not, we don’t care.

With a calm stride, I approached the stand where the accused waited fearfully for my questions. Jorge knew I was capable of proving his guilt in the famous case of the derailed door. The world longed to find someone on whom to unload all its indignation, and I was the champion who could — and must — serve him up on a silver platter.

I pointed a dramatic finger at the rickety wardrobe door, victim of horror and human incompetence. Then I turned to Jorge.

“Confess, oh villain, that you were the one responsible for the mishap.”

“Screw you,” replied the accused.

The jury burst into laughter — the judge too.

“Hey, Walter, you’re the judge, how can you laugh?”

“Yeah, sorry,” said Walter. Then added:
“Alright, alright, order in the court.”

I asked two or three more deeply thought-out questions and passed the floor to Nora, the defense attorney. My sister squinted, rested her right elbow on her left hand, scratched her chin slightly, approached Jorge and asked:

“Where did you hide the murder weapon?”

“Objection, your honor,” I jumped in right away. “That question has nothing to do with the case.”

“Sustained,” said Walter. “Ask another question, counselor.”

Nora paced thoughtfully, leaned slightly forward, clasped her hands behind her back, and asked:

“Where were you at four in the afternoon when Mrs. Morgan was strangled?”

“Objection, your honor. Whatever happened to Mrs. Morgan has nothing to do with the wardrobe door,” I said.

But it was all over by then. Everyone was cracking up. The jury began to disperse, and someone suggested we go steal plums from Mangacha’s place.

While the gang climbed over the wire fence and invaded the neighbor’s backyard, I sat in the wicker rocking chair and began to fall asleep with its gentle swaying. I dreamed that Perry Mason came and asked how the case had ended. I felt terribly ashamed to admit that we hadn’t been able to identify the culprit behind the wardrobe door coming loose.

“No. I’m not talking about that case,” he said. “I mean the case of Mrs. Morgan’s strangling.”

It was a dream. But even so, I didn’t know how to tell him to go to hell in English.

I woke up with a plum smack to the face and heard Walter shouting at me from Mangacha’s:

“Eat it. It’s delicious.”

The Vudu

The Vudu, Viejas Unidas del Uruguay (United Old Ladies of Uruguay), met on Friday afternoons to play conga in one of the halls at the Centro Gallego on San José Street. María Esther was the president because she was the one who brought the deck of cards, and María Eugenia was the secretary, in charge of bringing yerba for the mate. Lucila was the one who kept score. Sessions began at three, and they played two rounds with a half-hour break, during which Manuel, the house caretaker, served tortugas filled with ham and cheese.

“What do you say about those Andes boys? Incredible, right?” said Eloísa, shuffling the deck.

“Can’t you shuffle a little faster, Eloísa? You’re making the cards dizzy,” Natalia commented.

“No. I can’t go any faster. Arthritis, you know?”

“It was a miracle,” said María Eugenia.

“The real miracle was that they didn’t eat the plane too,” said Natalia.

“How crude can you be, saying something like that? They were very refined boys, I’ll have you know. One of them had a shirt brought to him from Paris, and he didn’t hesitate to take it off to make a tourniquet for one of the injured. Do you even know what a shirt like that is worth?”

Eloísa began dealing the cards. María Eugenia covered hers with her right hand and lifted the corners with her left thumb. Natalia stacked hers into a little pile so she could then lean back in her chair and spread them out like a fan. Mangacha, sitting at the other end of the table, received hers by extending her arms and holding them under her palms. Lucila, with a pencil behind her ear, looked at hers indifferently.

“And to think there are still people who don’t believe in God,” continued María Eugenia. “As Adolfo Oldoine Old once said: ‘You either believe or burst.’”

“And what does he know about any of that? He only knows about football.”

“Not even that,” murmured Natalia.

“It’s just that Adolfo is a believer, that’s why he said it. Because if it wasn’t by the will of God, then how do you explain what those boys did to save themselves, huh? Faith moves mountains.”

“They didn’t move them. They climbed them,” clarified Natalia, discarding a three of clubs.

“What a cheeky card!” exclaimed Soledad.

But María Eugenia, absorbed in her story, ignored her and drew a card from the deck. She examined it, studied it, puckered her lips, moved the pucker this way, then that way, raised it, lowered it, and said, “God helps his flock,” and cut.

“We’re screwed,” someone murmured.

“No vulgarity,” decreed María Esther, asserting her authority as president.

Lucila brought her hand to her ear, grabbed the pencil, pulled a notepad from her purse, and said:

“Start calling out your points.”

---

One rainy Friday in the fall of ’76, I went to visit the Vudu. Manuel came out to greet me and asked me to take off my raincoat so as not to damage the carpet. I approached the conga table and noticed there were only five players. Mangacha, who was my grandmother, gestured for me to grab a chair and come closer. María Eugenia, as always, led the conversation, invoking God every two minutes. Eloísa had a niece beside her holding her cards and asking what to play or not to play, and Soledad was keeping score because Lucila was a bit out of it and couldn’t manage the numbers anymore.

“Poor Zelmar,” said María Eugenia. “What a beautiful head of hair he had.”

“Golden curls,” noted Natalia.

“And what a nose. Like Artigas’s.”

“But did you notice how many people those Argentine military bastards have killed?” said Soledad.

“Bastards, the whole lot of them, what else can I say.”

Mangacha dealt the cards, and I joined the round by partnering up with Eloísa, who already had about ninety points. I got a dreadful hand. A little bit of everything, as my Aunt Olga used to say at the kitchen table in Francisco Llambí’s Street house. So I started by discarding the biggest one, the king of gold. María Eugenia, sitting next to me, picked it up joyfully and pinched my cheek.

“What a divine little grandson you have, Mangacha!” she exclaimed.

The next card I got rid of was the knight of clubs. This time María Eugenia spared my cheek, but when she picked up the knight, she hugged me, kissed me on the forehead, and closed her hand with a minus ten that left the table stunned. Soledad didn’t even bother asking if everyone was out. She just told Manuel to bring the tortugas, and María Eugenia started preparing the mate.

“What’s going on? Game over? Who won?” asked Lucila.

---

The Vudu meeting quorum shrank over the years—due to colds and heart attacks. And on one fateful Friday in ’79, the wall clock in the Centro Gallego’s hall struck three, and there was no conga.

On another Friday, this time in the spring of ’82, some grandchildren decided to reunite to pay tribute to those queens of the cards. Alicia, María Esther’s granddaughter, brought the deck. A great-niece of Lucila’s brought the scorepad, and Valentina, María Eugenia’s granddaughter, brought the yerba. At the end of the first round, Valentina drew a card from the deck, examined it, studied it, puckered her lips, moved the pucker this way, then that, raised it, lowered it, and said:

“God helps his flock,” and cut.

What we once were

It was a watery soup and you had to add a lot of grated cheese to make it taste like anything. The cheese container was round, made of wood, and the spoon was wooden too. Filomena was frying potatoes in the kitchen and Jorge Negrete was playing on the radio.
“Change the station, Filomena. The game’s about to start.”
“Did you finish your soup?”
“Yes,” said Heber, getting up from the table. He walked over to Filomena and gave her buttock a squeeze. It was an Italian buttock that had arrived at the port of Montevideo in ’23. Heber went to the radio and tuned the dial. The machine went uuuíííuuu until the voice of Carlos Solé came through.
“Leave it there,” he said, and sat back down at the table.

Things weren’t going well. The Hungarians were dancing csárdás and the celestes couldn’t get a single move right. But Heber hadn’t forgotten Maracaná and knew the charrúas always came from behind. So he calmly opened the newspaper to see if they had found the Masilotti treasure. Filomena’s fried potatoes had filled his belly with happiness.
When the equalizer came, Heber couldn’t hold it in and ran outside shouting into the street. Filomena ran after him carrying his pants.
“At least put them on, don’t make a fool of yourself in your underwear.”
“Uruguay, Uruguay, Uruguay!”, Heber’s voice rang out across Sagasta Street.

On the opposite sidewalk, Don Carlos, sitting at his doorstep, poured another mate, looked at him and thought, “there goes that hysterical guy again.” The Dubois sisters crossed themselves on their balcony. Francesco patted the forehead of the horse pulling his fruit and vegetable cart and came over to greet him.
“Abbiamo vinto un’altra volta, Heber?”
“Abbiamo drawn, Francesco. Due a due.”
“E perché stai nudo?”
“Tell him to put his pants on, Francesco, maybe he’ll listen to you,” said Filomena from the doorway.

That night, Heber set the alarm for six a.m. and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. Filomena lay down beside him.
“You embarrassed me so much today,” she said. “Going out in the street in your underwear.”
“Don’t you see, Filomena? We lost. We lost. We’re not what we used to be.”
“And what were we?”
“Champions.”

At the Christophersen office, Pereira was waiting for him with the news that the dockworkers were on strike.
“What do they want?”
“The usual. More money, better working conditions…”
Heber sighed and said,
“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”
He walked to tthe corner of Rincón Street and Treinta y Tres Street and entered the union hall. Tellería was there. He still limped a bit from the beating he had taken at the Maldonado cavalry barracks, but he went with him to the Brasilero bar for a coffee.
“I’ve got a Swedish ship, Emilio. I’ll pay double. Send someone.”
The old man looked at him and didn’t curse him out only because he’d known him since he was a kid, when he took him to play in Liverpool Club’s youth league. Sighing, tired, he said:
“The union isn’t here for fooling around, Heber. The comrades know this is a collective struggle.”
“Triple. I’ll pay triple. Help me, Emilio.”
Tellería shook his head sadly. He thought about the forty years he’d spent busting his back at the port, and the sweat it had taken to make his comrades see that wages were a right and not a gift from the boss. He thought of those youthful Batllista ideals, when the country was green and full of trams and it was believed that with democracy and freedom anything was possible. In the end, instead of punching him, he said:
“We Uruguayans are no longer what we used to be.”
“And what were we?”
“Educated and brave.”

Later that afternoon, before heading back to Belvedere, he climbed the Rondeau Street slope and walked to the Sorocabana. Don Félix was there, as always. He approached the little table of the man from Salamanca and greeted Roberto Barry on his way.
“Hi, Heber. Sorry I can’t chat. I have to go. I’m singing at the Stella, you know?” Roberto said.
“And? How’s it going?”
“Great. When I sing… I pack the place.”
He let out a laugh that made the coffee spoons tremble, patted Heber on the shoulder, and went out with his guitar into the cold of 18 de Julio Avenue.

At that moment, Don Félix set aside the thick tome he had on the table.
“Let me tell you, Heber, things aren’t going well in Uruguay. Do you know what the main problem is? You Uruguayans have started thinking you're some special case in America. No, not just America. You believe you’re the best in the world. That you’re the holy grail. The Switzerland of America. That there’s no place like Uruguay. Come on, man, this is too much. You’ve forgotten that your culture, your history, your very language, damn it, is Spanish — as pure and as castiza as the mother who bore you. Your existence as a nation can’t be explained without Spain, to whom you owe everything.”

The man from Salamanca stroked his beard.
“You Uruguayans are no longer what you once were,” he added.
“And what were we?”
“Well damn it, kid — you were loyal and reconquering.”

Wise and argumentative

I arrived at the police headquarters with old Kouzounis and saw Grecia running down the stairs. A cop posted on the landing had struck her behind the knees with his baton. Silvia was right behind her and got hit too. There were about twenty kids running down the stairs, and the officer didn’t spare a single one. Old Kouzounis wanted to beat the uniformed man to a pulp and was already climbing the stairs, cursing him out, when Corporal Cardona—whom I knew because he coached the neighborhood’s youth soccer team—grabbed his arm and said, “You stay right here, mister, or you’re going to jail.”

Only once we crossed Colonia Street did Kouzounis let go of Grecia’s hand, and she shook it to get the circulation back. I was behind them with Silvia, who couldn’t stop crying. While we waited for the 143 bus, Grecia told us they had been at a protest in front of the Dámaso high school when the police vans showed up and took everyone away. At the station, they were made to stand still for about an hour and then forced to run up and down the stairs. At every landing, a cop was waiting to hit them with his baton.

Grecia Kouzounis was an anarchist, and that was her father’s fault—he was very wise and loved to argue. I had read The Apology of Socrates and was familiar with the glories of ancient Greece, so I couldn’t understand how the Kouzounises could support chaos. “Man doesn’t need government,” they would say in unison, and I would defend myself with the argument that it was precisely the law that made freedom possible. Well, I was studying law, after all. I had to stand my ground.

Whenever Grecia started speaking Greek, she’d always call me megalo malaka. She admired Alexander the Great—now you tell me, how does that square with anarchism? For me, that famous Macedonian was a fool who cut the Gordian knot with a sword—anyone could do that. The ones who truly deserved my admiration were the great thinkers of the classical era: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They were the Abbadie, Spencer, and Joya of philosophy.
“What a vulgar comparison,” Grecia would say.
And off she’d go again, back out to the street, because there was another protest. She never missed a single one. And there I’d go, following behind her with my sign that said “UNTIL WHEN?”—a very convenient slogan because it worked for everything. I’d position myself in the second or third row of the crowd so I wouldn’t lose sight of her. We weren’t marching shoulder to shoulder, but we were much more than two.

When old Kouzounis was diagnosed with lung cancer, Grecia collapsed into my arms, while Silvia—supposedly the emotional one in the family—kept her composure. I began calling him by his first name, something I had never done before.
“Tell me, Alexis, why did you come to Uruguay?” I asked when he had little strength left and barely left the bed.
That’s when he told me about his childhood in Volos, about a ship crossing the Mediterranean, about shotgun blasts that took off half his ear in ’Ndrangheta territory, about an Onassis yacht that brought him to Buenos Aires, and about arriving at Montevideo’s port on the Río de la Plata ferry.
“I arrived in Montevideo sometime around January of 1941,” he told me, laughing. “And why? I don’t know. I was young. I wanted to see the world. And in Uruguay, people argued a lot—I remember that very well. What a country of arguers. It felt like fifth-century Athens. And so, argument after argument, I stayed and stayed and here I am.”

One afternoon he surprised us all. Weak and gaunt as he was, he got dressed, put on his trench coat and beret, and asked us to call him a taxi.
“I have to take care of one last thing before I go see Zeus on Olympus,” he said.
He got out at the corner of San José Sreet and Yí Street, walked to the police station, and kicked the cop on duty at the door square in the ass.

Ben Hur

We only had to walk three blocks, but they felt as long and as perilous as Ben Hur’s adventures. Not even Charlton Heston could have handled Osvaldito. He would leap back and forth between the sidewalk and the street, and motorcyclists had to brake hard to avoid running him over. On the Comodoro Coe Street slope, he’d start kicking a bottle cap and chase it all the way to the summer theater, where he’d abandon it, climb onto the empty stage, and start singing like a carnival performer. He’d do the whole carnival routine and repeat a hearty greeeeting about two hundred times, but never got past that because he didn’t know the lyrics. He was six and had a very limited vocabulary. I’d circle around the theater and wait for him on the other side, where the uphill street to Comercio Street began. By then, he’d already taken about twenty tumbles and had his smock covered in dirt and his bowtie a total mess. When we passed the widow Castellán’s house, he’d cross through her garden, ring the bell, and run off. The widow didn’t even bother coming out anymore. Osvaldito had pulled that stunt like three thousand five hundred times, and all three thousand five hundred times she took it out on me, and all three thousand five hundred times I had to apologize.

Across the street began the usual scene with Dalevení, the dog who used to be ours but now belonged to the vet, since my mom didn’t want dirt in the Neira apartment we’d moved into a year earlier. Dalevení had grown grumpy. Osvaldito would tease him, and the dog would stick his head between the bars and bark ferociously. Osvaldito would lift his smock, show him his butt, and do a little dance. I’d stand a few meters ahead, head down, resigned to my fate, just like Ben Hur facing misfortune.

Crossing Comercio Sreet was the adventure of the century. Osvaldito would let go of my hand just as a 141 bus passed, or he’d run after a fruit cart trying to yank off a banana. By the time we finally entered Figueira school, I was more exhausted than Charlton Heston after the chariot race. But he’d go to his class and I to mine, and I could rest for the rest of the morning.

The way back was the same story, but somehow, I always managed to drop him off safe and sound at his house on Propios Avenue. Mrs. Medina would shower me with praise.
“I can’t thank you enough, Fernandito. It’s such a blessing for Osvaldito to have you walking with him to school—you’re so responsible and sensible.”

I had been the victim of a conspiracy between Mrs. Medina and my mother. The original idea had come from my traitorous parent.
“Since they both go to the same school, they can go together, don’t you think, señora? And little Osvaldito will be in good hands, don’t worry, because my Fernandito is older and will take great care of him.”

But we hadn’t accounted for the march of civilization and the fatal blow of progress. One afternoon, we were walking back from school and as we turned onto Propios Avenue, Osvaldito disappeared. I looked around in a panic. Roadworks had started and there were excavators everywhere, and workers hauling wheelbarrows back and forth. There were steamrollers, concrete tanks, and mechanical beasts swinging cranes in the wind. The sidewalk leading to the Medinas’ had been torn up and fenced off with red-and-white painted wooden barriers.

Suddenly, I heard a trembling, tearful little voice calling my name. I crouched down, crawled under one of the fences, and peeked into the depths of a pit. Down at the bottom sat Osvaldito.
“Are you okay?”, I asked.
He nodded yes, then shook his head no.
“Are you hurt?”
He nodded yes.
“Can you stand up?”
He shook his head no. I also shook my head no, and he mimicked me. Then I nodded yes, and he answered with a no. I quickly realized we’d be doing this all afternoon and end up with a case of whiplash you wouldn’t believe.

I thought of Charlton Heston. He hadn’t abandoned Esther when she caught leprosy, and I had to follow his example and do something for Osvaldito, who after all, was my responsibility to return safe and sound to Mrs. Medina. So I took a deep breath and let myself drop into the pit. I helped him stand and supported him with one arm while trying to climb the dirt wall with the other. But it was impossible.

I told him I couldn’t get him out by myself. I had to go back up and ask for help. He nodded yes, and I nodded back. I started climbing but soon realized there was nothing to grab onto. The Ben Hur in me made me try three or four more times, but the realist in me had already decided it was pointless. I sat next to Osvaldito to weigh the pros and cons of our situation. It was clear: there were no pros.
“Osvaldito, we have to call for help.”
He nodded.
“We have to shout”, I said.
“What do we shout?”
“I don’t know”, I answered.
“In movies, they shout “help.”
“But the workers don’t speak English, Osvaldito.”
“Help” is English?”
I nodded.
He nodded too.
And then we both shouted in unison the first thing that came to mind, a loooong aaaaaaaaaa that lasted about five minutes. When we paused to catch our breath, we saw the eyes of Mrs. Medina and my mom peering down into the pit, blocking the only sliver of sky we could see.

The next morning, I walked the three blocks to school without Osvaldito. I never imagined Comodoro Coe Street could be such a peaceful and sweet place. The widow Castellán didn’t suffer her usual morning doorbell attack, and even Dalevení wagged his tail when he saw me walking along the sidewalk. On my way back home, I stopped by the boy’s place to see how he was doing. He’d have his leg in a cast for a month. Mrs. Medina looked at my mom with accusing eyes, as if to say “great job Fernandito did taking care of my son, huh?”

As for me, I resolved to enjoy to the fullest those thirty days of peace fate had finally granted me.

Castrotierra de la Valduerna

The farmhands from Robledo, Ribas, and Villamontán would arrive with their eleven-meter banners, take the Virgin out of the hermitage, and carry her in procession to the cathedral in Astorga. Amalia was awestruck by the greens, reds, and blues fluttering in the sky above Castrotierra, and she felt her heart beat in time with the drums and tambourines that accompanied the prayers. Although rain was being implored from the Lord who made such decisions from on high, Amalia would have been satisfied if a second-rate little angel had taken care of the matter and arranged for the River of Fishes to have enough flow to turn the mill. If the mill turned, there was flour. If there was flour, there was bread. If there was bread, there was no need to leave for Uruguay.

Her two older brothers, Bernardino and Francisco, had already gone. On the day of San Fermín, they climbed into a cart pulled by two oxen. Amalia still carried their image in her mind. They waved goodbye, growing smaller and smaller in the distance until the plateau swallowed them up. Since then, their mother hadn’t said a word. She only opened her mouth to sing ya no va la Sinda por agua a la fuente, ya no va la Sinda ya no se divierte. And that only when she went out to thresh the grain. The rest of the time, she stayed silent.

Things got a little better. The Almighty seemed pleased with the banners and sent rain. There was more bread and more chorizo on the table, but Amalia saw the empty chairs of Bernardino and Francisco and lost her appetite. Pilar, the carpenter’s daughter, began going to school in La Bañeza, and Amalia had the whole street to herself. She became a fly hunter. She would chase them from the church to the bridge and could spend hours sitting on the cobblestones of Nuestra Señora, waiting for one to land within reach. When she caught them, she let them go right away because flies didn’t go to Uruguay. They stayed close by to keep playing.

One afternoon, Mr. Miranda came to visit. He lived in Valderrey and knew how to read. Her mother handed him the letter Bernardino had sent from Montevideo. Miranda read it and said nothing. Since her mother didn’t say anything either, Amalia asked:
“What does the letter say?”
Miranda took her mother by the arm, led her out to the patio, and spoke to her by the door of the shed.

Two days later, her mother kissed her, stroked her hair, lifted her up, placed her next to the driver, and began to sing the song about Sinda. As the cart climbed the path toward Fresno and then Vigo, where ships set sail for South America, Amalia watched as Castrotierra became smaller and smaller in the distance. Then the plateau swallowed it up.

Flea

Sara motioned for me to come in for a coffee. She opened the glass door and let me inside. In the hallway, I passed a client zipping up his jacket.

'How’s it going today?' asked the Argentine woman, adjusting one of her breasts inside her black bra.

'Good. Five guilders in two hours.'

'You're getting rich.'

She poured the coffee into two plastic cups, turned off the red lamp that faced Koestraat, and closed the window curtain.

'Sing me one,' she asked between two sips.

I launched into Melodía de Arrabal in G minor. When I got to baaarrio baaarrio, my fourth string snapped and I lost my D. Still, I kept going because that’s how we Uruguayans are — nothing to be done about it — we push through. A tear slipped from Sara's eye. It didn’t roll down the cobblestones, but it did wash away her eye shadow.

'You need to redo your makeup. Your eyes are a disaster,' I said while stringing the guitar with a new string.

'How long are you staying in Amsterdam?' she asked, looking at herself in the mirror and pressing a wet wipe to her eyelids.

'Till tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm off to The Hague.'

'You make more money in The Hague?'

'No. Less. But the cops don’t bust my balls as much.'

It was my last day in Amsterdam. The money you made on the street was worth it, but your head would swell from all the noise. If it wasn’t the organ grinders, it was the Hare Krishnas chanting their mantras with a little bell, and if it wasn’t them, it was the Bolivians with their charangos and quenas, and if that wasn’t enough, there were also the doomsday prophets shouting about the apocalypse of St. John, and the blind accordionist singing Allez venez Milord with such force that the Disney mermaid had to cover her ears in the depths of the canal. The police were overwhelmed by so much ruckus, and to assert their authority somehow, they’d kick me out — me, poor innocent soul from the Río de la Plata. It wasn’t fair. Always going after the weakest one — oh cruel world. But in The Hague, the cops knew how to appreciate a sweet and rhythmic dos por cuatro, because back then Prince Willem was in love with a young lady from Buenos Aires, and that changed things. Picture this: the Argentine ambassador presenting his credentials at the royal palace, and me just a few steps away at the gate, beside the honor guard, passing the hat and singing miiii Buenos Aires queriiiidoo, cuaaando yo te vuelva a veeeeer.

The money in The Hague was pretty pathetic. But since I was a poet of the pavement, I didn’t care about filthy lucre. Going hungry actually helped accentuate my tragic look. I’d post up in front of a McDonald’s and let the smell of grilled meat engulf me. A burger with fries cost me eighteen Madame Ivonnes and fifteen Desencuentros. By the fourteenth Desencuentro, hunger would rise up in my throat and I’d sing like Plácido Domingo.

It was in that heart-wrenching moment — por eso en tu totaaal fracaaaso de viviiiir — that Betsy walked by, holding two children by the hand and a third wrapped in a sling on her chest. That prolific mother looked me in the eyes and I dove right into ni el tiro del finaaaal te va a saliiiiiir. The B minor with one finger on the D-sharp sounded like crap, but who cared. The point was to heighten the tragedy, and that final chord came out gloriously tragic. Betsy kept looking at me and I detected in her gaze a hunger for something. We were two hungers that had finally met. It felt fantastic because I was sick to death of all the Desencuentros. Then Willem, one of the kids — the blond one (the other was black) — stared at me for a moment and then asked:

'Mom, is that man real or does he run on batteries?'

That night I forgot all about tango. Betsy took me by the hand and by other parts and showed me the Netherlands starting with her stretch-marked belly and continuing through her Vermeer eyes and her breasts like windmill blades. It was a shock, an Erasmus orgasm. And I, drifting near despair, was nourished without sarcasm by the milk freely offered to me and I gave myself without reserve — because, truth be told, I didn’t have any.

The next morning, I opened one eye and saw Saleem standing next to the bed with a pacifier in his mouth. Willem poked a finger into my ribs, looking for the battery that made me run, and Betsy was nursing the baby. I had breakfast like I hadn’t had in years — coffee, toast, ham, French cheese, and orange juice, three kids staring at me and Betsy’s hands moving nonstop, caressing curly heads, buttering bread, pouring juice, and changing diapers in the crib.

I went to Germany and came back to the Netherlands a year later. I came from Bonn and had to change trains in Amsterdam. My luggage consisted of a guitar and a small bottle of perfume. The bottle was essential because I traveled locked inside the train bathroom. I went to Koestraat to see Sara but she was very busy. That night was the Champions League final and she had a lot of drunk Englishmen to attend to. So I stepped into a phone booth and called Betsy. The moment she heard my voice, she said:

'Thanks for the little gift you left me last year. He’s dark-skinned and has your eyes. I named him after you — Flea. Flea van der Meer. What do you think?'

The final shot had come out just right.

June

My first girlfriend worked in Hollywood. Her name was June and she spoke in a rather complicated way. If it hadn’t been for the subtitles, I’d never have understood a word she said. She did it all. She never stopped surprising me. One afternoon, she’d point a revolver at you and threaten to blow your brains out, and the next day she’d sit on your lap in a negligee, flutter her eyelashes against your nose and say, “Darling, life is now—what do we care what people say?” When you weren’t paying attention, she’d start tap dancing on the table and singing a foxtrot, backed by an orchestra that seemed to come out of nowhere. Sometimes she showed up with Egyptian eyes, other times she’d leap onto a horse and gallop off into the mountains. Not even Riboira could pull that off.

June lived at Rivera Avenue and Mac Eachen Street and only made herself visible in the afternoons from three to seven. I never managed to kiss her. Thank goodness. I’d have left her lips stained with chocolate-covered peanuts. The truth is, I never really understood what she saw in me. I was a boring fool who just showed up, sat down, stared at her and said nothing. She, on the other hand, did everything she could to get my attention. She really tried everything. She ran through castle ruins as bombs fell, grabbed James Stewart by the neck and shook him all across Texas, threw herself to the floor in hysterical sobs, climbed stairs two steps at a time, then came back down slowly and sensually, caressing the railing. She helped a cow give birth, flung herself onto a bed with Gene Kelly, and sometimes she screamed “Nooooo!” and other times “Yes, yes, yes!” And all the while I just sat there, silent, shifting uncomfortably in my seat because my underwear didn’t fit right.

The crises in our relationship were intense. One afternoon she got up close, looked me in the eyes—very, very close—and told me, with a certain disgust, that she couldn’t stand my drinking habits. Before I could explain that the only thing I ever drank was a Bilz Sinalco now and then, she turned around, grabbed the suitcase she already had packed, and told me she was taking the plane to Chicago at six fifty. And that I shouldn’t try to follow her, because then she’d tell Sanders everything, and he’d make sure I ended up in Sing Sing prison. I wanted to ask her who Sanders was, but I couldn’t speak—I had a lump in my throat. I thought I would die. Thank goodness she called me ten minutes later from the airport and asked for forgiveness through sobs. Of course I forgave her, because I was a love-struck idiot to the core and had no willpower whatsoever. But I swear I nearly broke down from sadness and disappointment when, after a brief silence, she said: “I love you, George.” I like to think she got confused.

Later on I had other girlfriends, but they bored me. Instead of coming out to greet me in cowboy boots and a multicolored blouse, they came out in fifteen-peso Aliverti skirts and told me things that didn’t need subtitles. They didn’t do pirouettes on horseback, didn’t throw themselves to the ground or beg for my love clinging to my ankles, and they never slapped me with the back of their hand. They didn’t drive Buicks or drink milkshakes. They did nothing. Turns out now I was the one expected to do something. The silly girls would just sit on the low wall, staring at the tips of their shoes, and I couldn’t think of anything. All because of June, who had me terribly spoiled.

So many times we ended up going to see her. That’s when it all came back. When she appeared, I’d hold my little girlfriend tight in the dark, kissing her and slipping one hand here, another there, always keeping one eye on June to see if she got jealous. When June disappeared from the screen, I’d stop my advances and my girlfriend would be left puzzled, hair tousled, not knowing what to do. June would come back and I’d go in again—tongue, fingers, and whatever else I had on hand. She’d leave and I’d suspend hostilities, leaving my girlfriend with her skirt up on her thighs, one leg draped over the armrest, and her breath short and shallow. June would return and I, the Uruguayan, would attack again—relentless, merciless, one eye always fixed on that crazy woman who had now decided to write a letter of betrayal only to tear it up and toss it in the trash. Then she kicked the trash can. She was tortured by jealousy.

Just then the usher lit us up with his flashlight and my girlfriend and I froze, eyes glued to the screen like two attentive, well-behaved moviegoers. At that moment my little girlfriend whispered: “I love you, Washington.”

That was my name. I wasn’t George. I was Washington. That’s when I decided to break up with June and love the girl who truly knew me, who knew who I was. Because my girlfriend lived in the real world. Something I couldn’t say about June. Poor thing.

Kolynos

He smiled and the sun came out. It was ridiculously white and dazzling. It couldn't be real. Us kids stared at him, dumbfounded, not quite sure if what he had in his mouth were teeth or the ivories of a piano. Otherwise, he didn’t stand out much. If he didn’t part his lips, he didn’t exist. He was dark-skinned and short, and he had a Basque grandfather who always wore a beret and sash. His father was in jail for embezzlement. We didn’t really know what that meant, but it made an impression. Microbio, who was a Mirtha’s hellraiser, was inside for pickpocketing, and Zoquete spent a few nights in the slammer when he came home drunk and beat up his old lady. That, we understood. But “embezzlement” left us wide-eyed. I asked my old man what it meant and he answered that it was stealing, but with class.

“Eh?” I asked.

And he gave me a clear example.

“Look. If a thug corners you in a dark alley and says ‘Give me the cash or I’ll plug you’ and takes a thousand pesos, that’s stealing. But if a man in a tie takes the same amount from you in an office by ‘revaluing assets’ on a balance sheet, that’s embezzlement.”

“What’s a balance sheet?”

My dad gave me that tired look he pulled when it suited him and replied:

“Go to the kiosk and get me the Oxibithué cigarettes. Tell Selma to put it on the tab.”

I crossed the street, asked for them, and asked Selma if she was going to write them down on the balance sheet.

“Balance sheet? No, kid, what balance sheet are you talking about? I write them in the notebook.”

Her answer reassured me.

Kolynos knew how to use the magic of his smile and we had learned to take advantage of it. When the neighborhood girls saw us coming and started scattering, annoyed, we’d ask the guy to smile. Then they got all flustered, and Raúl would corner Elizabeth with one hand on the grocery store wall, and Four-Eyes would ask Olga for a kiss, and she would always reply, “Sure, sweetie, come back tomorrow, there’ll be croquettes.” I would hang out and chat with María Luisa. I tried to explain the law of gravity to her, but she just couldn’t get it. She said something fell because it fell, and if you didn’t want it to fall then you just put it on a table, and that I should stop talking nonsense about how things fall due to the Earth’s gravitational pull on objects within its field. María Luisa was very empirical.

On Sundays we’d go to the stadium and try to sneak in. We almost never managed because sometimes they didn’t believe we were under ten, and other times they said we needed to be with an adult. But none of that happened when we went with Kolynos. The guy would smile at those mastodons at the gate, and then the beasts would soften up, let us through, and sometimes even picked him up in their arms and gave him a kiss.

One day he left the neighborhood and we never heard from him again until 1985, when he appeared on TV walking out of Libertad prison with a bundle of clothes over his shoulder. The camera zoomed in and the guy smiled. He was missing several teeth.

Leopolda

They were skirts with ruffles, with little white dots on a red background. Sometimes they were sky blue—not soccer blue—and other times they were white, like those summer clouds, white but super white. When God heard my prayers and actually answered them, then they were black—black like the panic in Boris Karloff movies, black like Pelé, black like General Buendía’s coffee. And all of them, absolutely all of them, made that sound, that malicious and exasperating swish-swish that turned the crotch of my sanforized Far West jeans into a tent.

When Leopolda showed up at seven in the evening, I was already waiting. It was something that happened every weekday, Monday through Friday, but that didn’t make it any less suspenseful or thrilling. I lived for that moment. Everything else was secondary. Leopolda’s appearance was more important than the missing sticker I needed to complete my animal album, more important than homework, more important than the hair gel and pomade I used to smash down my quiff until it looked just like Elvis Presley’s. Leopolda would say good evening to my mom with a voice that, I have to admit, sounded kind of like a turnip. But who cared? Nobody’s perfect. Her conversation didn’t exactly stimulate the intellect with exquisite musings on the immortality of the crab. And she made a horrible noise when she drank mate. She could get dissonant sounds out of the straw worthy of a free jazz concert. But I forgave her anyway because at thirteen I was a big forgiver. I was training to be a priest.

By the time the soap opera was about to begin, I had already taken up my strategic position behind the couch, in the space between it and the window that looked out on Tacuabé Street. Nobody ever asked me what I was doing there at that hour from Monday to Friday. Thank God.

On the television screen appeared the flawless face of Delfy de Ortega, followed by a shot of Iris Láinez's hands brushing a young lady’s hair. Behind her was Claudia Lapacó, animatedly talking on the phone—who knows with whom—and Bárbara Mujica was sitting in an armchair reading a magazine. When Angélica López Gamio burst into the salon with a face that said she brought bad news, Leopolda and my mother entered the living room and walked toward the couch. I took a deep breath and braced myself. My mom flopped onto the couch like a slob, gracelessly. Leopolda, on the other hand, spun around like Maya Plisétskaya and, before sitting down, lifted her skirt so it wouldn’t wrinkle. It all happened in a second. It was a flash of eternity, a blinding glimpse of paradise. From behind the couch, my ecstatic eyes captured the magical moment when I saw the sheer panties and two buttocks that weren’t buttocks but angel wings. The gates of heaven opened, and my dangly part was no longer a dangly part but a steel mace capable of bringing down the Berlin Wall. After five minutes of the soap opera, I discreetly slipped out from the side of the couch, passed through the kitchen, and when I reached the hallway I faced the dilemma of whether to go to the bathroom or the bedroom first. The natural order of things required me to go to the bathroom to calm the damned dangly part with a couple of tender and understanding caresses, and then head to the bedroom to kneel beside the bed and ask forgiveness for my sins. But I went straight to my bedroom and, showing incredible willpower, started doing my homework. I had defeated lust. I defeated it—until night came and I went to bed. Then lust beat me in a landslide.

Redhead

I was quietly enjoying a mate when my sister called me. Redhead had to get his shot the next day, and she asked me to go with him to the Vilardebó hospital. My sister was never quite right in the head, but I never suspected she’d marry someone with no head at all. She fell in love with Redhead that very afternoon I brought him home. The guy put so much sugar in his coffee that it overflowed, and then didn’t drink it because he said he didn’t like things that were too sweet. When he explained to my parents that greasy bread rolls should always be eaten starting from the side tip and not from the top, otherwise it would cause a disruption in the planet’s magnetic field, my sister burst out laughing in a way that seriously worried me. I saw that look in her eyes—the same one she had when she stared at a photo of Alain Delon. My parents were visibly uncomfortable and gave me looks that clearly said, who the hell did you bring into our house?
After that, my sister and Redhead became inseparable. It was a romance of laughter and more laughter. The guy’s hebephrenic schizophrenia was no obstacle to happiness. I know that sounds weird, but that’s how it was. With that magical shot of I-don’t-know-what they gave him at the Vilardebó every three months, the guy was just a normal person.

When I got to my sister’s place, I was greeted by Rubito, my five-year-old nephew. My sister, behind him, didn’t even say hello. She just gave a half-hearted shake of her head and pointed toward the backyard. That’s where I went. Redhead was dressed like a football player in Racing colors—jersey, shorts, and cleats. He was jogging laps around the yard, weaving elegantly between the hanging laundry. I started trotting alongside him. A pair of boxers hit me in the face, and I asked him:
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing? Can’t you see? I’m training. I’m going to play for Racing.”

We got on the 147 bus, and one of Redhead’s cleats got stuck in a gap in the wooden floor. An inspector banged on the window from outside, yelling “Move back, move back!” and I had to crouch down to free his shoe. We moved toward the driver. A schoolkid looked at him and asked:
“Are you Mario Bergara?”
The idiot Redhead said yes and signed the sticker album the kid pulled from his bag.

At the hospital, we sat down to wait for his name to be called. Carmen, who already knew us from our quarterly visits, passed by with her bucket and mop. She wasn’t even fazed by Redhead’s football gear.
“So now we’re football players?” she said.
“You play football too?” asked Redhead.
“No. Why?”
“Well… because you said ‘we’...”
The old lady chuckled indulgently at his joke and fixed her green eyes—those same ones that had caused quite a stir in her native Galicia at the turn of the century—on his jersey.
“Racing’s getting relegated,” she said. “You’d better go play for Liverpool.”

“I’m going to the bathroom,” said Redhead after a while.
“Go ahead,” I replied.
He disappeared down the hallway, his cleats going tacatlán, tacatlán, and I prayed he wouldn’t slip, since Carmen had left the floor shiny and clean but also dangerously slick. Just then, two male nurses approached. The one on the right asked if I was Ángel García.
“Ángel García is in the bathroom,” I said.
“Uh-huh. In the bathroom. Sure, sure. So then, who do we have the pleasure of speaking with?”
“We”? I thought. Was the royal ‘we’ mandatory in Vilardebó?
“You’re speaking with the brother-in-law,” I said.
“Oh, the brother-in-law, of course, of course. Come with us to the office, and we’ll keep talking there.”
Then he gave a signal to the nurse on the left and said:
“Alright, Míguez, proceed.”
Míguez grabbed my arm, and I immediately pulled away. He grabbed me again, harder this time, and I broke free once more. Then I felt a sharp jab—and the lights went out.

When I came to, someone was slapping my cheeks, and a pair of serpent-green eyes were examining my face intently. I heard Carmen’s voice asking if I was okay. The truth was, I felt absolutely amazing. I don’t know what the hell Míguez had given me, but I was deeply grateful. I was in nirvana.
“The doctor apologizes, do you understand? The nurses made a mistake. Míguez and Balbuena usually work the morning shift and don’t know all the afternoon patients. How are you feeling? Dizzy?”
I smiled beatifically and said:
“Don’t worry, baby.”
I felt like Cary Grant. I asked where the phone was. I had to call my sister.

“Redhead’s gone.”
“What do you mean he’s gone?”
“He told me ‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ but he didn’t come back. He ran off. But don’t worry. I’ll find him.”
“What’s wrong with you? Why are you talking like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re trying not to laugh.”

I went outside and took a taxi to the the Parque Roberto soccer field. Just as I suspected, I found Redhead banging on the gate, trying to get in. I got out of the cab and bought some pastries at the bakery across the street. Then I crossed back and approached him. Redhead grabbed a sweet biscuit from the bag I offered and kept banging on the gate with his other hand. I took a greasy roll and deliberately bit into the top tip, knowing full well it would throw off the planet’s magnetic field. That way, the photons would alter the fermions, and the fermions would open the gate. And that’s exactly what happened, because science is science. That afternoon, Redhead and I played an epic pick-up game. We used an imaginary ball, but that didn’t make it any less clear that his second goal was totally offside.

Smoke

After lunch, he would light his Montecristo and, while smoking it, read the band with the reverence one reserves for sacred texts. He’d lean his head back, cigar in his right hand and a glass of port in his left. Wrapped in that slow, peaceful cloud of smoke, he looked like God after creating the world and seeing that it was good. That man who used to chase me through the house and whip me with a belt was, in that moment, a perfect and happy being, a Buddha untouched by suffering and earthly passions. What mystery took place within him? I didn’t know. But what I did know was that if music could soothe the savage beast, tobacco could soothe my father.

Smoke made its way to high school in my fourth year, the day I turned the corner on Massini Street and found Elizabeth leaning against the wall of the greengrocer’s, smoking a cigarette, while Cabezón stacked crates of onions and tomatoes on the sidewalk. I had known Elizabeth since the Charleston era—that is, my whole life. We’d gone to kindergarten and primary school together, and I’d always thought of her as a full-fledged nitwit, summa cum laude from Harvard, with an upward arrow. But that morning, as I walked past her, she blew a puff of smoke in my face, and when I turned around to curse her out, my heart melted. Or maybe my inner savage woke up. Or maybe my fly caught fire. I don’t exactly know what happened. What I do remember clearly is that those two eyes locked onto mine through a sweet, violet smoke, and when the fog lifted, I kissed her—or rather, I bit her like a Doberman.

Cabezón stepped between us and said, “Come on, move along, I’ve got to put out the squash.”

We stepped aside, and I stared at her in disbelief. That wasn’t the Elizabeth I knew. That was a Shirley MacLaine who had escaped Hollywood and accidentally landed in Pocitos. That couldn’t be the same Elizabeth who used to pick her nose while calculating the surface area of irregular polygons and stuffed her bra with toilet paper to make her boobs look bigger. And yet, there was some continuity between the vulgar girl I had always known and the vamp who now had one foot propped against the wall, letting the ash fall gracefully on the sidewalk like a Parisian.

She looked at me with strange coldness, flicked her butt into the street, slipped the pack of Masters into her shirt pocket, popped a piece of gum in her mouth, and walked off down Chucarro Street. I stood there, my mouth still full of her smoke, shivering with a fever that felt half tropical, half deathly.

And then there was the smoke in the rickety bus I’d take from Comercio Avenue to the racetrack in Las Piedras. The driver would open the door and a cloud would billow out onto the sidewalk. You’d get in and have to wait a bit before you could even start to make out the outlines of the seats or the tips of your shoes. But I was happy. Once my eyes adjusted to that London-like haze, I could see the Turk Kerem studying the racing form and Tato—the owner of Alción—arguing about football with Pérez. The colt Alción was running in the fifth. He’d never placed at Maroñas. He was a beautiful dark bay cared for by Riboira, and he had cost Tato more money than he had, a girlfriend, and a duodenal ulcer.

The Turk Kerem passed his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other and occasionally spat out bits of tobacco. His fingers were yellow. As I got off, I always remembered to read the sign behind the driver: No Spitting or Smoking.

At the track, little clusters of wise men and know-it-alls would form, swapping tips about who was throwing the race and who was in it to win, organizing bets and side wagers. And always the smoke. That omnipresent smoke that permeated everything and gave a dear and deadly breath to the finish line, the final stretch, and the thousands of losing tickets scattered on the ground.

Gertrudis and Sarita also shared the smoke. After making love, they’d lie back—Sarita on her back, Gertrudis on her stomach—and light a cigarette. They were lovers of mine in different times and different countries, but when they smoked, they had the same gesture of surrender, and those soft eyes at peace with the gods and the universe. The spirals that rose to the ceiling were the same, the mellow taste of blond tobacco was the same, and the slow rise and fall of their chests with elegant indifference was the same.

Without tobacco, I wouldn’t have had love; without smoke, I wouldn’t have risked my heart on impossible romances, wouldn’t have given the kisses I gave, wouldn’t have lain in the moonlight with damsels whose souls were stained with nicotine.

And yet I never put a cigarette to my lips.

Suck on that

Nie wieder. Plus jamais. Never again.
I stood there staring at those words carved in stone and instinctively took Claudia’s hand. In the first barrack to our left, two security guards were shoving a young Italian kid who had written fascisti di merda on one of the walls. I inhaled the air of Dachau—a sweet tide of marigolds and petunias. Spring came back to life in Bavaria every year, always putting a flower in its hat. But in 1940, Lev had breathed in a different kind of air here—air with no oxygen, thick and gray. Death-laden air, holding a whip in one hand and a Luger in the other. Air filled with screams, the stench of burning flesh, and prayers to beautiful, deaf, blind gods taking a nap up in the sky.

Claudia kissed me on the cheek and we stopped in front of the cremation ovens. Through the window we saw the Italian kid walk by, gesturing wildly and shouting things we couldn’t hear but that clearly didn’t sit well with the guards.

I had never met Lev, but I was grateful to him for giving me Claudia. Funny how life works. To survive a Nazi death camp only to one day father a little doll in a blue dress who played the harp, cooked the best Black Forest Knödel, and ended up hooking up with the Rioplatense son of a frilly-dressed Andalusian woman with castanets. If life wasn’t a chaotic, unpredictable, and hilarious mess, then I didn’t know what it was.

“Dad never talked about Dachau,” Claudia said. “But I know they forced him at gunpoint to incinerate corpses.”

The guards and the Italian were still arguing and were now just a few meters from the gate. The kid was demanding a refund for his ticket. I told Claudia to wait a moment and went into the first barrack on the left. It didn’t take long to find the phrase that had caused all the trouble. Next to fascisti di merda, I drew a heart and wrote inside it: Claudia and Félix are in love. And underneath, I added: Suck on that, Hitler.

The captain

He had already calibrated the angle of ascent and checked the flaps, the airspeed indicator, and the oil pressure. In two and a half hours, they would land in Buenos Aires. The weather was favorable, and all the passengers were in their seats. All but one—but captain Franqueira didn’t know that yet. The tower had given clearance for takeoff, and yet Mariela still hadn’t given the okay.

“What’s going on, Mariela?” the captain asked as the flight attendant entered the cockpit with the passenger list in hand.
“We’re missing one. A woman named Gabriela Higueras.”
The captain grew impatient. He wanted to get home to Lomas de Zamora on time. Liliana was turning eleven, and he had promised he wouldn’t miss it. He looked at the co-pilot.
“Should we go without her?” the latter asked.
The captain turned his gaze to the runway and paused to think.

Gabriela had to report to the police every week. Her brother Andrés had gone into exile in Austria, and Juan had disappeared. Chile had collapsed. She looked at her Communist Party card one last time and couldn’t throw it away. She just couldn’t. She tucked it into her bra. Grabbed her bag and said goodbye to her mother.
“Mamá, I’m going to the police station.”
“Don’t come back late, Gabrielita. When you return, I’ll have some hot sopaipillas ready for you.”
Gabriela kissed her on the forehead and stepped out into the street. The cops were walking along the sidewalk armed to the teeth, and there was a military tank at the corner of Seis Sur. There she bought La Tercera from Luchito. The newsstand guy was cheerful.
“Peace at last, huh? Those damn commie bastards are all locked up. Now it’s safe to walk the streets.”
Gabriela paid for the paper and continued on her way.

“You’ve had her paged over the loudspeakers, I assume,” the captain said to Mariela.
“Several times,” she replied.
Franqueira drummed his fingers on the yoke.
“Let’s go without her,” said the co-pilot.
The captain thought of Liliana and imagined her sitting on the garden wall, waiting for her father to arrive. The house on Loria Street would be decorated with garlands, and her mother would’ve already set the birthday cake on the dining room table. There would be Beatles music playing on the turntable, and her school friends would be secretly putting on makeup in the bathroom amid laughter and whispers. Franqueira had spent most of his life crossing the skies of the Americas and had neglected some of the things happening on the ground. But he couldn’t miss his daughter’s birthday.
“What should we do?” asked Mariela.

Gabriela arrived at Pudahuel, took her ticket to Buenos Aires out of her bag, and headed toward customs. She was surprised to see there was no line of passengers. The Aerolíneas Argentinas employee gestured for her to come forward. Behind him stood two armed soldiers. Gabriela understood there was no way out now. She couldn’t turn back. She handed over her ticket and passport, and one of the soldiers looked at it, searching through a stack of papers held together with a clip.

“You’re just in time,” the airline employee said. “The plane’s about to take off—if it hasn’t already.”
The soldier holding her passport kept glancing between it and the papers over and over. Then he looked her in the eyes and said,
“Miss Higueras, you are not allowed to leave the country.”
He murmured something into the walkie-talkie on his shoulder, and the other soldier raised his rifle to Gabriela’s head. Suddenly, a man appeared behind the soldier. He wore a blue cap and a white shirt with black and yellow epaulets.
“Gabriela Higueras?” he asked.
Gabriela said nothing.
“Gabriela Higueras?” he repeated.
Gabriela nodded.
“Come on, hurry, we’re about to take off. Come with me.”
“Miss Higueras isn’t going anywhere,” said the soldier holding her passport.

Then Captain Franqueira took her hand, and Gabriela let herself be led.
“Stop!” they heard from behind as they ran toward the plane.
“Once you’re on board, you’ll be safe,” the captain said. “The aircraft is Argentine territory, and I’m in command there.”
The soldier took aim. The shot shattered a large window. He was about to fire again when he noticed a row of curious eyes watching him from the airplane windows. He lowered his weapon.

Once on board, Gabriela threw her arms around Franqueira and began to cry. The captain patted her on the shoulder and said,
“I don’t want to be late for my daughter’s birthday.”

The cows

My father only hit me once. It was the day a retreating German patrol passed by and took our bicycles. When two of those uniformed thieves broke off from the group and headed toward the mare, I rushed out of the barn and charged at them. My father grabbed me by the neck and slapped me so hard I staggered. Ten rifles were aimed at us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother at the window, pressing the Bible against her mouth.

I had only recently returned to the farm. The Germans had captured me during a raid in May of '42. They took me, along with twenty others, to work as slaves in a factory in Ahaus. The first time I escaped, I made it as far as Gronau, but I came down with typhus while hiding in the forest. I don’t know who found me. All I know is that I came to in a hospital and, after a couple of months, I was back at the factory.

The second time, I succeeded. Since I was weak and very thin, no one imagined I would try to escape again. I befriended Hans Wachter, the corporal who guarded us at gunpoint during the day and drank beer with the prisoners after work. I knew Hans couldn’t be trusted, and that his supposed camaraderie was just a way to keep us under control and find out if we were plotting anything. Or so it seemed to me. One day I told Hans I was going outside for a cigarette. He nodded, and I stepped out onto the street and started walking. I walked one block. Then two. By the third I looked back. Nothing. No one was running after me. No one was shooting. I was still very weak and didn’t know if I had the strength to get anywhere, but I told myself I had to keep walking no matter what. Only this time I didn’t head for Gronau; I went across the fields toward Vreden, avoiding roads and paths. I had some bread in my pockets and planned to drink from the streams I found along the way. I had lost my fear of contaminated water. I had already had typhus. I was immune. By nightfall, I was about ten kilometers from Vreden and, to keep from freezing, I curled up next to a cow. It stood up and walked away. I approached it again and it walked away again. We went on like that for a while until I wore it down. When I woke up, it was already dawn, and I saw a patrol of German soldiers crossing the field where I was lying. I stayed still and resigned myself to my fate. A pair of boots approached, and I caught a glimpse of Hans out of the corner of my eye. He looked at me and kept walking. A few meters ahead, he shouted:

"Nothing over here, commander!"

The second night, I snuck into a barn where there were four cows. They got nervous when they saw me and started to moo. I quickly retreated and hid behind a bale of hay. After a while, seeing that nothing happened, I went back into the barn, and the same thing happened. I repeated the process a few more times until the mooing started to fade. Once they got used to my presence, I curled up next to one of them and managed to fall asleep.

I crossed the border at Rekken. I was back in my homeland. It was still occupied by the Nazis, but the British had already liberated Arnhem, and an advance of Canadian paratroopers was making its way through Drenthe. I just wanted to return to my farm, to my family, and to my clogs. As I skirted the Buurse brook, I saw my brother Peter on a bicycle. I didn’t even have time to greet him. A squadron of British planes was diving toward a convoy of German trucks about a hundred meters away. Peter and I threw ourselves into the embankment. Shrapnel whizzed over our heads.

Once home, I lived in hiding for a while, but gradually I started to show myself. The Germans were losing the war and were too busy trying to save their own skins. So I began working in the fields and helping with chores around the house. It was around that time that those fleeing cretins passed through the farm and stole our bicycles and the mare. The day my father hit me for the first and only time.

The photographer

Elsa left the old house on Charrúa Street at seven in the morning with an empty stomach, her pleated skirt, a white headband, and her books clutched to her chest. She took Jackson Street, and by the time she reached the corner of Guayabos Street, Bebe already had the camera set up in the window. The aperture was adjusted, and all he had left to do was trigger the shutter at the exact moment she walked by. And Elsa never failed him. The medical student was punctual—very punctual. The moment the camera clicked, Paco the little parrot, perched on his shoulder, would say:
"What a beautiful chick."
And Bebe would correct him:
"Not chick. Woman."

The photographs of the beautiful passerby piled up in the darkroom. Always the same elegant, confident, distinguished step. That focused, though never stern, expression. Those pink stockings and those black shoes—rounded, with laces and a buckle. Bebe could have filled a room in the Louvre with those black-and-white portraits of the unknown woman.

Unaware she was being photographed, Elsa continued on her way. When she reached Rivera Avenue and Dieciocho Avenue, she stopped in front of Carbonell’s newsstand to read the day’s headlines. Almeida, who ran the flower stall, would offer her a carnation, which she always declined with a smile. Across the street, Rey would be waiting. Together they walked down Sierra Street, talking about biochemistry and pathological anatomy. Rey would share with her two or three pastries and the mate cocido he carried in a thermos. With something in her stomach—no matter how little—Elsa felt like a new person. Without realizing it, she quickened her pace, and Rey had a hard time keeping up. Then they crossed the gardens of the Legislative Palace, and at the medical school, they said goodbye with a kiss. He continued on to the chemistry building.

The house on Charrúa Street was in a frenzy. The widow Giménez’s eldest daughter was getting married, just after graduating as a doctor—after six years of walking back and forth to the university on an empty stomach, wearing the same skirt and the same shoes. Fortunately, Rey was going to cover the wedding expenses. The nuptials would take place at the Church of San Juan Bautista, and Tamburini would be the officiating priest.

It was summer, and the notes of Mendelssohn’s march filled the space. The widow Giménez and her five children occupied the front pews. Maruja, the grocer, who knew the family well and to whom the widow had owed money for many years without ever paying it back, thought about how happy the kids would be when they received the communion wafers—at least they’d have something to put in their mouths. Elsa and Rey walked down the aisle, and the photographer, positioned on the left side of the nave, began firing the flash.

That night, locked in the darkroom, Bebe developed the photos from the Pocitos wedding. The acetic acid began to reveal what he had somehow already suspected. The bride wasn’t wearing pink stockings or rounded black shoes with laces and a buckle. He hadn’t been able to see her face through the veil either. But he recognized that same elegant, confident, distinguished step, and that focused yet gentle expression. He hung the photos to dry, and after a while, took them to the dining room and sat down to study them. Paco came flying in noisily from the kitchen, landed on his shoulder, and said:
"What a beautiful chick."
Bebe was about to answer when the little parrot beat him to it:
"Not chick. Woman," he said, correcting himself.

The swap

We were at the corner of Feliciano Rodríguez Street and Diego Lamas Street. Elvira always showed up looking immaculate in her white blouse and blue skirt. I tried my best not to look out of place, but my shirt collar was worn out and my tie knot was a mess. We held hands, crossed Ricaldoni Avenue, and walked through the park. The first mandatory stop was at the Central stadium. There, we’d share two or three deep kisses, holding our breath for as long as possible. The second stop was in front of the velodrome. That’s where she’d run her hand down the back of my neck, and I’d hold her by the waist. On the athletics track, we’d whisper things like “Óscar, you’re the greatest” and “Elvira, you’re an amazing companion.” Saying the word “love” was strictly forbidden because we were free, intelligent, and informed. Climbing the slope near the América grandstand, I’d nibble her ear, and she’d rub her knee against my crotch. Then we’d cross Avenida Italia and run the last two blocks to the Dámaso high school. We were fourteen years old, happy, and Trotskyists.

One day, Elvira told me it wasn’t fair that we had to walk to school while rich kids got around in taxis or in chauffeured cars.

I told her, “Well, we could take the bus too, right? I mean, we do have student passes.”

“No, Óscar. It’s not about the bus or the student pass. It’s about social inequality.”

“Oh, right,” I replied.

Social inequality. What a terrible thing that was, social inequality.

“But,” I argued, “you and I have a great time walking to school, don’t we? It’s never boring.”

Elvira looked at me with a touch of annoyance. I wasn’t as sharp as she was. I was a petty bourgeois. She reminded me of that at least three times a week. But I tried my best to stop being one. I wanted to become a permanent revolutionary, but I don’t know... it was hard. I suffered from a certain tendency toward frivolity—silly me. One time, at the Palacio de la Música, I pointed out a Rolling Stones record to Elvira and said:

“Look! A Trotskyist record.”

“What?”

“Well yeah, can’t you see? It says thirty-three revolutions per minute.”

That dumb joke almost cost me the relationship. For a whole week, all I got was a single chaste, dutiful kiss in front of the velodrome.

Not long after that, she showed up on a bike. I was waiting for her, as usual, at the corner of Feliciano Rodríguez Street and Diego Lamas Street. I was shocked. All I managed to say was:

“What are you doing, Etchebarne?”

Elvira either braked badly or not at all. The point is, she passed right by me, one leg on the pedal and the other hopping on the asphalt, until she crashed into the curb on the opposite side of the street. She rolled over the grass and ended up sitting under a tree, holding her knee. I ran over and hugged her. Not because she was badly hurt or needed comforting. I hugged her for any reason. The bike was lying across the curb, and the back wheel kept spinning. We both watched it, silent and intrigued, until it stopped completely.

“Where did that bike come from?” I asked.

“I bought it.”

“Yeah right. Come on. You don’t have a dime.”

“Well. I swapped it.”

I tried to dab her bleeding knee with my handkerchief, but she stopped my hand mid-air.

“Are you sure it doesn’t have any snot on it?” she asked.

That day, we crossed the park on the bike. We rode swiftly but not recklessly. I pedaled with the tactical calm of René Deceja. She sat sideways in front of me, just behind the handlebars. It was pure bliss.

“See? We have rights too,” she told me, her chestnut hair blowing in the breeze while I tried to keep my eyes on the path.

There were no kisses anywhere, no stop at the Central stadium or the velodrome. Instead, we had a miniature Tour of Uruguay, a green and fresh park that lifted our spirits, and a pretend radio interview with Radio Sport saying, “Elvira and Óscar take this moment to send greetings to Trotsky and all the people of the East who are listening to us.”

At one in the afternoon, we came back from school. Just before we turned the corner at Pastoriza Street and headed toward Elvira’s house, she got off the bike and said:

“Take it to your place.”

“Why? It’s yours,” I replied.

“Just take it. Take it,” she repeated.

Half a block away, we saw Elvira’s mother coming toward us, flustered and limping slightly as she always did.

“Oh, sweetie, sweetie. The TV’s gone. Can you believe it?”

“What do you mean the TV’s gone?” I asked. “How can a TV just disappear?”

“I don’t know. I don’t get it either. Unless someone broke in and stole it. They left the table behind.”

Suddenly, she noticed the bike.

“Nice bike, huh?” she said. “I didn’t know you had a bike.”

I looked at Elvira, and she started watching a cloud pass by.

“Yes,” I said. “Uh... eh... they gave it to me for my birthday...”

The teardrop

I completed the front line with Petronilo Acosta and Guillermo Escalada. I glued the stickers in with homemade paste and stared at the album page with the satisfaction of a finished masterpiece.

From the kitchen, Nat King Cole's voice reached me. Si Adelita se fuera con otrou la seguirría po tiera y po maar. I took another sip of the Vascolet my grandma had made me and was left with a chocolate mustache, which I wiped off with the back of my hand.

It was the summer of 1959, and I was seven years old, and my innocence was beginning to wear thin. I was starting to realize how complicated and contradictory everything was. The catechism told me to love God above all things, but the one I loved above all things was Rita. Tota talked trash about Uncle Juancho, and Uncle Juancho told me dirty jokes I didn’t understand. My dad yelled at my mom, and my mom had argued with the grocer on the corner, so now she walked all the way to Capitán Videla Street to buy yerba from Don Anastasio. Cousin Eustaquia was always drunk—or as my grandma put it, “cheerful”—though to me, she looked heartbreakingly sad. And Santiago, the taxi driver, had hanged himself from a roof beam in his shack in de Buceo neighborhood. What a mess.

But I calmed down as I looked at how neat and complete the Nacional forward line looked in my album. I sighed like a stoic philosopher trying to make peace with life and went out to the hallway. I opened the inner door and sat on the step. My feet didn’t reach the sidewalk. Then, from the kitchen, Carlos Gardel’s voice drifted in.
Barrio, barrio, que tenés el alma inquieta de un gorrión sentimental.
I looked at the trees on Llambí Street, their tops reaching up and brushing each other across the road. In between the branches and patches of sunlight, I saw little birds—I didn’t know if they were sparrows, but at least I was sure they were birds. Could one of them be the so-called sentimental sparrow, the gorrión sentimental?

En tus muros con mi acero yo grabé nombres que quiero.
Just then, I saw Fernando scratching lines into the bakery wall across the street with a ten-cent coin, which wasn’t made of steel but of nickel—but still. He was sticking his tongue out, concentrating hard on writing who knows what. He must’ve been bored. I pictured myself asking to borrow the coin so I could write Rita on the wall. That was the name I loved. El nombre que quiero.

Y en la primer cita la paica Rita me dio su amor.
And believe it or not, just then I saw Rita waving to me from the corner of Manuel Haedo Street. She was heading into la Vasca, where she boarded. I didn’t really understand what that meant—boarder. Strange things happened at la Vasca, but they were clearly related to love. It was a very romantic place. It had a red light over the door.

Perdoná si al evocarte se me pianta un lagrimón.
I was starting to get emotional. I didn’t cry, but my eyes definitely got a little misty.

Que al rodar en tu empedrao es un beso prolongao que te da mi corazón.
I forgave Gardel for dropping the letter d, and now the tear truly came. It started to roll down the cobblestones. It rolled, long and slow, toward Rivera Avenue, and people stepped aside to avoid it. The paperboy standing in front of Chola’s kiosk saw it coming, already turned into a river, and shouted:
"Flood, flood! To the boats, to the boats!"

I came running into the dining room, crying and wiping my nose on my sweatshirt sleeve. My mum asked:
"And now what’s wrong with you?"
I ran straight to my room without answering, threw myself on the bed, let the sobs come, and found comfort staring at the stickers of Petronilo Acosta and Guillermo Escalada.

I heard my mum snapping at Fernando.
"What did you do to the kid?"
"Nothing, ma’am."
"That coin you’ve got there—did you steal it from him?"
"No, ma’am. This coin is mine. Rita gave it to me."

When I heard the name of the paica, I cried even harder. It felt like the entire Río de la Plata was spilling out of my eyes. The sadness reached all the way to the mouth of the Uruguay River.

A little while later, I saw out of the corner of my eye that my mum was pushing the bedroom door slightly open. She watched me for a moment, sighed deeply, then closed the door and walked away trying not to make a sound. I was still draining the sorrow I had inside. My pillow was a disaster. A swamp of heartbreak.

When I finally calmed down, I spent a while staring at Petronilo Acosta and Guillermo Escalada, and then I asked myself:
"What does paica mean, anyway?"

La Tertulia

She ran her finger over that little dimple Nuria had on her chin and then kissed it. Nuria tilted her head, and what came into view now was a delicate, red ear, half-hidden behind a small tuft of hair. Mabel wasn’t sure whether Nuria was asleep, but then again, with Nuria you could never be sure of anything. Suddenly she opened one eye—one of those beautiful black eyes that turned Mabel’s heart to gravel.

"Did you already turn on the coffee machine?" she asked.

"Mmm, yeah," Mabel replied.

"And the fridge?"

"That too."

"Have you set the chairs out on the terrace?"

"I’m leaving that to Jacinto."

Nuria had invested the euros and kept the books, Mabel took care of the kitchen and the customers, and Jacinto washed the dishes and was the jack-of-all-trades in the café. La tertulia was fighting for its life among the countless bars in Palencia.

"Come on, man, chop chop, get a move on."

Jacinto closed his eyes and tried to focus. He steadied himself between the Donostian’s buttocks and prayed to Saint Valentine. Mabel was peeling potatoes with her elbows resting on the sink, careful not to bang her head against the cupboard when the guy’s thrusts started to intensify. After a while, they heard Nuria’s footsteps coming down the stairs. By the time the boss walked into the kitchen, Mabel already had the potatoes frying and Jacinto was sweeping the floor.

"That smells amazing," said Nuria as she leaned in toward the pan. "Come on, you deserve a kiss."

And she planted one on Mabel’s cheek. Right away, she noticed something sticky on her lips and made a face of disgust.

"What’s wrong, Mabel? Are you feeling okay? You’re sweating, girl."

"It’s bloody hot in here, darling. You really should get some air conditioning in this kitchen."

After lunch, they went to take a siesta in Sotillo Park. Nuria laid her head on Mabel’s chest, and Mabel stroked that perfect black hair. At four in the afternoon that August, the world had stopped so that Castilla could overcome the heat and the holm oaks could offer shelter and shade to the lovers. Jacinto lay a couple of meters away on the grass, hands folded behind his head.

"Are you hooking up with Jacinto?" Nuria asked in a whisper.

Mabel was surprised. Not by the question, but because she thought her beloved had been asleep. With Nuria, you just never knew.

"Sex. It’s just sex."

"And what we have, what’s that?"

"Love."

"Mabel, you’re a filthy pig. You disgust me."

"I disgust myself too."

They both gagged. It looked like they were about to throw up. Jacinto watched them with one eye half open. “Now what’s up with these two nutcases?” he thought. And the two nutcases burst out laughing and started wrestling like two scrawny sumo fighters.

They closed at one after a very busy evening. Don Marcos had talked about Quevedo and Javier had sung Brassens songs. When the time for applause came, the little drunk Juárez had stood up, raised his glass solemnly, and shouted:

"Long live intellectual song!"

"Long live!" the audience had responded.

Jacinto put the chairs on the tables, Nuria did the cash count, and Mabel cleaned the kitchen. Jacinto put on his motorcycle helmet and said goodbye. Mabel and Nuria went up to their room. Mabel wished with all her heart that Nuria would love the idea of having a little Jacinto or Jacinta in the family. She imagined the look of joy on her face when she announced solemnly:

"My love, we’re going to be three."

But with Nuria, you could never be sure of anything.

Deoxyribonucleic acid

Darwin was ugly and hairy—living proof that man descended from the ape. I couldn’t stand the sight of him, but he brought me these amazing chocolates that eased my menstrual cramps. And on Sundays he took me out for rides in his clunky old car, which raised my status among the girls at the Stella Maris high school. But that was it. I found him insufferable. Honestly, the only reason I didn’t dump him was to avoid disappointing my mother, who already pictured me married in Carrasco to that missing link, enriching the tree of life with a brood of small, rational vertebrates. Because, let’s not lie, the one I truly loved was Albert—with a mane that put Ringo Starr’s to shame, and on top of that, he spoke German. I tried to make Albert see the depth of my love, but he thought it was all relative and didn’t want to put too much energy into thatmatter. He moved at the speed of light squared, while I was slower than Manuelita the tortoise. Scientifically speaking, we were two opposite poles: I was the cathode, he the anode. That’s why, even though he didn’t love me, there was a certain electricity between us.

Darwin the brute honked the horn, and my mother immediately started nagging.
“Come on, girl, hurry up. Go, don’t keep him waiting.”
I kept glancing at the phone, secretly praying to the Almighty that Albert would call and free me from that hairy fossil with the clunky car and all the patience in the world. Darwin believed my indifference would evolve into higher stages of feeling. That sooner or later, I’d love him. It was all a matter of natural selection. I swear, when he talked about “stages” and “natural selection,” I thought he was talking about soccer, so to avoid sounding ignorant, I’d say something like I’d noticed the Fénix team had improved their defense lately. Anyway, Sundays belonged to Darwin—what could I do? But my inner electrons only vibrated in the atomic presence of Albert.

We stopped in front of Las Delicias and sat down to have some ice cream. Darwin, the idiot, was licking his zabaglione in the most disgusting way and throwing provocative glances at me, as if that tongue could impress me. The only interesting thing I noticed was that his tongue seemed to be the only hairless part of his body. Suddenly, the sunlight illuminating the patio of the ice cream shop dimmed. I instantly recognized Albert’s mane, blocking out the Arocena Sttreet sky. He sat next to us without asking permission or saying hello and gave us a distracted look—he was always like that, absent-minded in everything. I introduced them.
“Darwin, Albert. Albert, Darwin.”
Albert looked at him as if he’d just realized someone was sitting in that chair.
“Darwin?” he said suddenly, as if returning from an interstellar trip. “Man, what a pleasure! I love your milongón from Guruyú.”
“That’s Darvin, not Darwin,” Darwin replied.
“Oh, I see. And you’re Darwin with a w?”
“Yes.”
“Are there many Darwins in the world?”
“Millions. The product of genetic mutations over countless generations.”
“That’s all very relative. God doesn’t play dice with nature.”
“God doesn’t play any role in this. And nature loves a good game of seven-eleven.”
“Only at the quantum level. At the atomic level, everything’s pretty well organized.”
Darwin gave his zabaglione a few last licks. He wasn’t sending me obscene glances anymore, just ones filled with rage, because he’d realized how foolish and enchanted I became in Albert’s presence. Albert moved his chair, bothered by the curvature of light. You could really see the ancestral ape emerging in Darwin.
And the little German guy left just as suddenly as he’d come. In that very moment, I realized I was never going to win his love. He lived among the stars, in some impossible place I was never going to reach.

Darwin drove me home, and before I even got out of the car, I started feeling those damned menstrual cramps. That’s when the guy pulled out the box of chocolates and placed it on my lap. As if he knew. I looked at the brand. They were Beagle chocolates. That heavy, hairy man had worn me down. I was going to end up marrying him. What could I do? It was written in my deoxyribonucleic acid.

Dulce de leche

He started stirring the dulce de leche at ten in the morning and by one in the afternoon he was still stirring. There was hunger in that Hackney apartment, but one thing was certain: there would be dulce de leche by dinnertime. I walked into the kitchen and watched him stir.

“Doesn’t your arm get tired?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

“The cat died,” I added.

“Wrap it in something and throw it in the bin,” he replied.

The only thing I found was a Saturday Daily Mail. There was an article about Manchester United. I read it because I read everything. I’ll read anything. It’s a compulsion. Then I crouched down and wrapped the kitty in the newspaper. I went down to the street and opened the bin. Robert walked by and offered me some weed.

“No, zenkiu,” I said.

I had a real knack for English, though the English had a hard time understanding me.

“Is that a cat?” he asked.

“Yes. It died.”

I had found it the day before, hiding under Henry’s Toyota, and I’d felt sorry for it. I took it with me to the apartment and gave it milk, but it didn’t touch it. All it did was follow me around, meowing nonstop.

At dinnertime, we ate the dulce de leche. Pato’s arm was cramping from so much stirring and he had to eat with his left hand. Despite the effort, it had come out runny, and since he wasn’t good with his left hand, the dulce ended up on the floor, the table, and the collar of his shirt. I watched him and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Better to keep my mouth shut,” I thought. I was about to say something—I don’t remember what, but it had nothing to do with the dulce de leche. I hadn’t even parted my lips when he said, with barely restrained fury, that if I made any comment about the dulce de leche, he’d cut my balls off and eat them fried.

Luckily, things were going great for us. We had verbal agreements with five pubs where folk music was played. We were sure that as soon as the public got to know us, we’d go far. Our advantage was that we played only Marcos Velásquez songs, and in that category we had no competitors in all of London. We had just two bottles of milk left, a kilo of sugar, and a little packet of baking soda, but we were confident that contracts would start pouring in soon. We were in the city of raincoats and umbrellas, after all.

That night I played the guitar because Pato’s arm was still a mess. The audience listened to us with a lot of attention and a lot of respect. And most of all, a lot of silence. The only problem was that the silence continued after the song ended. But hey, in the underground scene, you can’t expect to be cheered like at La Scala in Milan. Pato passed the hat with his left hand and we picked up a couple of pennies. We weren’t doing it out of necessity but to tighten the bond in the duo and build confidence with an audience that didn’t speak Spanish. And also to make sure no one could say we were elitist artists.

We got off at Lambeth and went to Saint John’s Place. I had an understanding with Will, who was the guy in charge of hiring artists.

“Hello, Will,” I said.

“Who are you?” he replied.

“The duo of Pato and Pollo, remember?”

He told me to come back another time because he was really busy.

“Let’s go,” said Pato.

“He said we should come back, man. I think it’s looking good,” I replied.

At the other pubs we had spoken to, they also told us to come back another time. So the conditions for success were definitely there. We had dulce de leche for two more days and a lot could happen in two days. It was a matter of perseverance.

Before heading back to Hackney, we decided to stop by the Thames to see what was going on. There was a party on a boat moored to the shore, decorated with a garland of blue and red lights. A fat guy in a chef’s hat was roasting a pig outdoors, and the smell made us want to cry. A Watusi beauty waved to us from the deck with an arm that had about fifteen bracelets.

“Come on board,” she said.

I explained to Pato that “come on board” meant get on the boat, man. A sailor was untying the moorings, so we had to decide quickly. And we decided to jump aboard. Some get a lot and others get nothing, and that’s no coincidence, I thought, seeing all that food. Suddenly, the boat jerked away from the shore, catching us off guard. That day of tragic memory, Pato and I went down, and that was the end of the story.

Mozzarella

“I think it all started that time I went with Rosaura to the Tasende bar. She bit into the pizza and the mozzarella got stuck, hanging from her lips. You understand what I mean, doctor?”

Giménez said nothing. He jotted something down in his notebook.

“Then there was this little string that wouldn’t come off, and Rosaura pressed her lips together and leaned back. But that string just kept stretching and stretching. I looked at it and, what can I say, doctor—I don’t know. I felt something down there for the first time in my life. A warm and pleasant sensation. I opened my fly and right there under the table I started to masturbate.”

“Couldn’t you wait?” asked Giménez.

“I was transported. I was in another dimension. I was… happy. Oblivious to everything. What can I say.”

“But that happiness didn’t last long.”

“Very little. The little boy who was drinking a Pepsi at the next table told his dad, ‘Look, Dad, that man is grabbing his wee-wee,’ and the guy pulled me out of my chair and shoved me so hard I fell at the feet of Manolo, who was coming with a tray of two coffees and who luckily dodged me just in time—just in time—because otherwise the mess would’ve been much worse. That’s when I came, and that white burst shot up toward the ceiling and everyone was staring.”

“Did you feel uncomfortable? Ashamed?”

“No. Not in that moment.”

“Tell me more,” said Giménez.

“Well. They took me to the police station. I got slapped with a fine for disturbing the peace. Got a criminal record.”

“I already know that. What I meant was, tell me more about your obsession with mozzarella.”

“Don’t just say ‘mozzarella’ like that, doctor. It gets to me. It makes me nervous.”

Giménez was alarmed.

“Let’s take a break,” he said.

Giménez went down to the bar, and the patient walked over to the window overlooking Río Branco Street. Next to the Hotel Latino there was a hardware store, and next to the hardware store a pizzeria. Just seeing the sign that said Pizzería was enough to make his blood flow with more intensity. But after all, he wasn’t a murderer or a thief, right? he thought. Imagine making him see a psychiatrist in exchange for not sending him to jail. Judge Estefan’s idea, trial judge in the criminal court.

“Let’s continue,” said Giménez. “Let me ask you something. Mozza… I mean, the Italian cheese made from buffalo milk in its normal, uncooked state—let’s say raw—does that affect you?”

“No. I’m completely indifferent to it.”

Giménez scratched his chin.

“Is that bad?” asked the patient.

Giménez didn’t answer.

“Tell me how the fetish phase began.”

“I had no choice but to move into the fetish phase. I was forced by circumstances. Because after five or six incidents in various pizzerias around Montevideo, they had me pegged, and they’d set off the alarm as soon as I got near. The baristas were in cahoots with the police to deny me access. All I wanted, doctor, was to satisfy my sexual desires. That’s something every human being has a right to, no?”

“When was the first time you ejaculated on a cookbook?”

“It must’ve been around June of last year. It was at the Artigas-Washington Library. A gorgeous book in English, huge, hardcover, full-color illustrations. Italian Cuisine: a Trip to a Tasty Paradise. In the pizza chapter, between pages 25 and 28, there are photos of pizzas with mozzarella. I came like fifty times there. At some point I started having trouble opening the book because it was all sticky. Plus, the librarian started giving me funny looks. So I had to find other ways.”

“Weren’t you afraid of getting caught red-handed?” asked Giménez.

“I already explained, doctor. I was transported.”

“And then?”

“Then came the incident at the Robin Hood Library. I came across a book with tourist images of Italy, and one of them showed Claudia Cardinale eating a pizza with mozzarella. Imagine that.”

Giménez tried to imagine it.

“Blanquita caught me in the act, and the whole neighborhood freaked out. They wanted to lynch me. The club president demanded I return my membership card. When they took me to the station, Corporal Olivera said, ‘You again? You again, Techera?’ And when Blanquita and the president tried to explain what had happened, Olivera basically told them not to bother, that he already knew me inside out.”

Giménez called Judge Estefan to update her on the patient’s treatment.

“Is he making progress?” asked the judge.

Giménez asked in return if she knew a book called Italian Cuisine: a Trip to a Tasty Paradise.

“Of course. I have a copy at home. It’s a culinary orgasm.”

“An orgasm?”

“Yes. There are some mozzarella recipes that are delicious and super easy. You can make them with one hand.”

The 88 bus

"Use your head, man, use your head. Descartes and Spinoza were already saying it back in the seventeenth century — that's how far back this goes. You gotta use your brain, dude," said the driver.

The conductor pulled the cord when the fat lady in the green mohair coat hissed at him from the back door. The driver slowed down and the bus stopped at the stop.

"Thinking is useless. Come on, name me — if you can — a great thinker who was actually happy in life," replied the conductor.

The driver looked to the left. He let a motorcyclist pass, turned on the blinker, and maneuvered that enormous lever.

"It's not about being happy or unhappy. That's not the point. The point is, if you don’t use reasoning, you don’t understand anything, and if you don’t understand anything, then you're always going to stumble through life," he replied.

At the corner of Presidente Oribe Street and Bauzá Street, Bocha got on, paid his fare and moved to the back. Then his buddy, Pelado, got on. He was wearing a low-brimmed hat and sunglasses and stood close to the driver, watching the traffic. The old man with the cane sitting next to the conductor indicated he wanted to get off at the next stop.

"Front door," said the conductor.

The driver pressed the green button, the door opened, and just as the old man was about to get off, Pelado, apparently distracted, blocked his way. Bocha, coming up behind, slipped his hand into the old man’s pants pocket. The old man noticed and defended himself by swinging his cane, which grazed the conductor’s head and hit Pelado square in the jaw. Pelado fell to the floor and ended up with his head resting on the driver’s knee. The world started to spin. He saw the little bubbles from the Coca-Cola bottle painted on the ceiling spilling out and floating playfully in the air. His sunglasses were askew on his face, and the low-brimmed hat was flipped upside down on his thighs. He looked like a beggar.

Bocha darted out the door and the old man shouted:

"Stop that man! Stop him! He stole my wallet!"

"But what really matters is happiness. I mean, what’s the point of knowledge if you end up living your life sad and always with a sour face?" reasoned the conductor.

The driver shifted in his seat and pushed Pelado’s head off his knee. Pelado was still out cold.

"I don’t understand how anyone can be happy without understanding the circumstances they live in. I just can’t wrap my head around it," he said.

"I think it's a false dichotomy," chimed in a woman sitting in the priority seat, with a Subsistencias plastic bag on her lap. "One doesn’t exclude the other. You can let your mind wander, live through logic, and still be happy. Besides, there’s no precise definition of happiness. Happiness isn’t the Pythagorean theorem. So, gentlemen, what you're having isn’t a discussion, it's a waste of time."

The driver disagreed. He waited until the old man with the cane had gotten off, pressed the red button, the door closed, and the vehicle started moving again. The 88 bus descended the slope on Larrañaga Avenue heading toward 26 de Marzo Street. The driver continued the conversation with the woman through the mirror above the windshield.

"Let me tell you, ma'am, that yes, there is in fact a definition of happiness. Happiness isn’t some strange, esoteric thing, and it has nothing to do with supposedly higher or transcendental spiritual states. Happiness, ma’am — and you too, listen up, buddy," he added, referring to the conductor, "is simply the absence of fear."

"Come on, raise the level, will you?" said the conductor. "That’s like defining heat as the absence of cold, or wealth as the absence of poverty."

The driver had to brake when they reached Plácido Ellauri Street and Bocha ran across the street, closely followed by a police officer. A few meters later, he had to brake again when Bocha crossed back in the opposite direction. The officer drew his gun and shouted for him to stop. Bocha collided with the old man on the sidewalk and they both fell. When the pickpocket tried to get up and run again, the old man grabbed onto his leg. Bocha limped forward like a crippled dog. The old man, stubborn as ever, wouldn’t let go. The officer fired into the air.

Inside the bus, Pelado came to, sat up with difficulty, and rubbed his jaw.

"I mostly agree with..." He gestured toward the conductor as if asking for his name.

"Pablo," said the conductor.

"I mostly agree with Pablo. Emotion isn’t necessarily harmful, but reasoning is mankind’s downfall. Master Siddhartha Gautama explained it all very clearly. You have to sit and watch a river, observe how the water flows. In that eternal flow lies the answer to everything. You shouldn't think. You should just go with the flow."

The driver tapped the steering wheel impatiently.

"Don't you realize, Mr....?" He made a hand gesture for Pelado to tell him his name.

Pelado lied.
"Pelossi," he said.

"Don’t you realize, Pelossi, that what you're saying implies abandoning the fundamental trait of human beings — the ability to think? That Eastern philosophy of the self dissolved into the whole is a denial of who we truly are."

The driver braked for a third time when the officer grabbed Bocha by the hair and shoved him against the bus. He patted him down, looking for the old man’s wallet. The driver pressed the green button, the door opened, and when the old man saw Pelado getting off with his low-brimmed hat and dark glasses, he shouted:

"Grab him too, officer! He’s an accomplice! They’re working together!"

The officer turned, looked at the man who had just stepped off the bus, and without letting go of Bocha, said:

"Pelado! You around here? Aren’t you on duty today?"

"Arrest him, officer. He’s a pickpocket too," insisted the old man.

"No way. He’s a senior sergeant. Very well-read man."

The driver was left pondering that idea of "flow" Pelossi had mentioned. He had always been fascinated by water. He was born in Nueva Palmira and had spent many years watching the calm current of that beautiful river of birds. So much thinking, so much reasoning. Could he be full of it with all this insistence on the power of the intellect? The conductor, meanwhile, scratched his chin and wondered if he wasn’t fooling himself with that so-called pursuit of happiness. So much searching and never finding anything. Maybe the answer lay elsewhere. Or maybe there wasn’t any answer at all. The doubt disturbed him. The woman in the priority seat felt like sticking her head into the Subsistencias bag and ending it all. What a waste of time, all this nonsense! Didn’t they realize they weren’t even having the same conversation? Wouldn’t it be better to just embrace the Buddhist alternative of doing absolutely nothing and letting the current take you?

The three of them fell silent, lost in their doubts and thoughts, gazing into the distance. A distance momentarily interrupted by the Panamericano building five blocks away. Then a sense of peace took over. An unexpected and welcome peace.

Pelado was still staggering down Larrañaga Avenue with his hands in his pockets. The 88 bus passed by him slowly, and when the false Pelossi looked up, he saw the eyes of the conductor, the driver, and the woman in the priority seat. All three had their hands together under their chins in an oriental-style greeting and bowed their heads toward him. He thought the sign on the bus no longer read Aduana, but Nirvana. Yet the world kept spinning. In the distance, he still recognized the 88 bus as it turned onto 26 de Marzo Street, by the Coca-Cola bubbles it left floating through the air of Montevideo. As he crossed Luis Lamas Street, Bocha ran past him, tossed him the stolen wallet, and kept running. Pelado caught it in the air. Then the officer chasing him arrived.

"How much is in it?" he asked, panting.

Pelado checked. Not much. He took a few bills and handed them over. The rest he kept.

"Have you read Kierkegaard?" he asked.

The officer had caught his breath.

"Yeah," he said. "But I wasn’t convinced. I don’t know. Some of those ideas just float too much. Maybe if I read him in the original Danish it’d be different. You know a lot gets lost in translation."

"The Danish Embassy offers language courses," Pelado pointed out.

"I know. I’ve already signed up."

The bucket and the rag

Antúnez arrived at the office half-running and out of breath.
“I need a bucket and a floor rag,” he said.
I took a sip of the coffee I had just poured from the thermos. I made a face when I realized I had forgotten to add sugar. I brushed the crumbs from my croissant off the desk with my hand and moved aside the two enormous folders Borosousián had left on my desk.
“What department?” I asked.
“Surgery.”
“Surgery gets cleaned every morning and every afternoon.”
I stood up and checked the chart pinned to the wall with thumbtacks. I confirmed that Corradi was assigned to clean Surgery at that hour.
“You need to talk to Corradi.”
Antúnez grew impatient.
“The operating room is a mess. The patient they’re about to operate on threw up, and the anesthetist got sick and also threw up. With all that crap on the floor, they can’t work.”
“Which operating room?”
“Number one.”
I checked the chart again. Corradi was scheduled to clean OR1 in twenty minutes.
“Clearly, we can’t wait for Corradi,” I concluded.
Antúnez gave me a look that said, well done, genius.
“Just give me a bucket and a floor rag. I’ll clean it myself,” he said.
“We don’t keep supplies in the office. They’re in the storage room.”
“All right. Take me to the storage room.”
“Just a moment, please.”
I loaded a pink cleaning supply request form into the typewriter, and two more forms—a green one and a yellow one—with carbon paper in between. I wrote “Surgery” in the space for the requesting department and asked Antúnez for his full name to fill in the field for the requesting staff member. I gave him the green copy, had him sign it, stapled the yellow one to the archive folder, and with the pink form in hand, I went to the director’s office, because without his signature, nothing could be done.
I knocked. I felt Antúnez’s breath on the back of my neck and heard the sound of the green form crumpling in his hand. I heard Fernández’s voice from behind the door.
“Come in.”
I approached his desk. Antúnez stayed at the threshold, tapping his shoe against the floor and looking impatiently at the damp stains on the ceiling.
“What is it?” Fernández asked.
“Surgery needs a bucket and a floor rag.”
“So?”
I looked at him, not understanding the question. What kind of question was “So?”
Seeing my confusion, he kindly clarified.
“Bolaños, look, it’s very simple. If Surgery needs a bucket and a floor rag, then you go and give them a bucket and a floor rag. Got it? Or do you need me to repeat it?”
I was indignant. How could the very director of Hospital Facilities not know the procedure? With coldness and a faint expression of contempt, I handed him the pink form.
“Sign here.”
Under normal circumstances, I would’ve said “Sign here, please,” but Fernández didn’t deserve that much courtesy.
The idiot scribbled something on the paper, handed it back, and leaned over his typewriter, waving me away with a flick of his hand. I retraced my steps and asked Antúnez to follow me to the storage room. When we arrived, the door was locked, but luckily I spotted Martínez in the hallway. She was the shift supervisor and had the keys.
“Martínez, please open the storage room for me.”
“What do you need, Bolaños?”
“A bucket and a floor rag.”
“Why?”
“Vomiting in the operating room.”
And anticipating the question I knew was coming, I added:
“Number one.”
Martínez looked Antúnez up and down, tilting her chin forward like she was asking, “And who are you supposed to be?”
“Antúnez is from Surgery,” I explained.
I asked Antúnez to hand her the form. He had turned it into a little green ball. He placed it on Martínez’s open palm. She stared at it and began tossing it up and down—once, twice, three times. On the fourth toss, I caught it mid-air, unfolded it as best I could, and placed it back on her palm.
“It’s urgent, Martínez. Please open the storage room.”
Martínez inserted the key into the lock without taking her eyes off Antúnez.
When the door opened, a cascade of buckets, brushes, rags, and bottles tumbled out. Corradi emerged from the chaos, pants around his ankles, and hopped away toward the window facing Ricaldoni. There he collapsed without much ceremony.
From beneath a cardboard box, Silvana López, the afternoon shift elevator operator, appeared, hastily gathering scattered articles of clothing.
Martínez walked over to where Corradi had fallen and kicked him in the most vulnerable parts. Several times.
Antúnez and I were still standing in the doorway. We stepped aside to let Silvana López pass. She ran down the hall stark naked, dodging an old man in a wheelchair and a heavyset lady holding a bouquet of flowers, who surely envied the firmness of those buttocks.
I didn’t know what to do. Should I save Corradi’s life or look for a bucket and a floor rag in the wreckage? My indecision was interrupted by the appearance of Borosousián.
“Hey, Bolaños. The people from Surgery just called.”
“Yes, Borosousián, I know. They urgently need a bucket. I’m on it.”
“No, Bolaños. They said it’s no longer that urgent. The surgery couldn’t wait, so they went ahead with it despite the unhygienic conditions. But the crap’s still on the floor.”
“Well. I’ll send them the bucket and rag anyway.”
I rummaged through the mess until I found what I needed. I pulled the supply receipt book from my tunic pocket and recorded the numbers and identification codes of both the bucket and the floor rag. I asked Martínez to sign the receipt. She did, without taking her eyes off Corradi. I handed Antúnez the requested items, reminding him not to forget the return form when bringing them back to Facilities.

I returned to the office. The coffee had gone cold, so I poured myself another cup from the thermos. Without looking up from his crossword puzzle, Borosousián said:
“Apathetic, sluggish, unfeeling, eleven letters, starts with D, third letter is S.”
“Dispassionate,” I said.
“You’re a genius, Bolaños,” he replied, thrilled.

Half an hour later, just as we were about to head down to the cafeteria, Antúnez returned with the bucket. It was full of crap. He also handed me a form from the Surgery department that read:

This document certifies the return of bucket C428 from the Facilities department, containing the following: five hundred cubic centimeters of semi-digested food in various stages of decay, three hundred cubic centimeters of hepatic and gallbladder bile, six hundred cubic centimeters of unnamed organic waste, and floor rag X031 immersed in the aforementioned substances.
Sincerely, Dr. Aldo Rienzi, Surgeon.

The cacophony

She was from Vlaardingen, Dutch through and through, and had a nose pointing toward the Big Dipper. There was a sea in her eyes, and a mouth through which all the words in the world could pass. Beneath her thick brown hair, she possessed an atomic brain.

In May of ’84, I told myself this is my chance when I saw her walking down the Coolsingel sidewalk and she dropped two massive books she had been struggling with. I approached her, very British and manly, picked them up, handed them over, and then just stood there looking at her. What do I say, what do I say, I thought. And then I said:

"What's in these books?"

"They're Hungarian books. Are you Hungarian?"

"No. Why?"

"Because of your accent."

"Oh, no, my accent is Castilian, I mean Spanish. I'm from Uruguay and there people speak Castilian, that is, Spanish."

"Yes, I know, I'm not an idiot."

Well, shit, I thought.

We saw each other at the university café, under the sheets at Hotel New York, at tram stop 18, and on the little boats that took tourists around the harbor. Under her expert tutelage, I learned to eat raw herring by holding the fish by the tail and swinging it into my mouth, and to kiss with a North Sea flavor. She was soon to marry a Hungarian journalist and wanted to enjoy her final hours of single life in the company of a Zitarrosa wannabe who was doing postgraduate studies in Rotterdam. A matter of broadening culture and horizons before falling into the trap all women are predestined for. With the journalist, her horizon had already expanded thanks to a new language. Now, with a bit of luck, she could learn Spanish with me. Or practice it, rather. Studying it—she did that all by herself; she was a whiz at that kind of thing. In just over two months, she was explaining to me the circumstantial complements of time and place, and pointing out my excessive use of oxymorons. It was around that time, one afternoon in a room at the New York, that I observed her little nose perpendicular to the ceiling and asked:

"If agua is feminine, why do we say el agua and not la agua?"

"To avoid cacophony."

I said nothing. I just stared at the ceiling.

"Any other stupid questions?" she said, without opening her eyes.

There were two weeks left before the wedding. After that, she'd go live in Budapest with the journalist. So I figured I had to do something. Something special so she wouldn’t forget me completely. I decided to teach her how to prepare mate. The only yerba I had on hand was some Argentine junk—the only kind you could get in Rotterdam. Not what I would’ve wanted, but oh well. With the gestures of a university professor, I laid out the mate, the bombilla, the yerba, and the hot water on the table. Knowing what kind of student I was dealing with, I had conducted a thorough study of the topic in advance. From its Guaraní origins, Hernandarias’s prohibition, its reintroduction under the name "Jesuit tea", the ethnosocial importance of the brew, the chemical components of the yerba, the ideal water temperature, and the beverage’s effects on the human body. She looked at me impatiently, but I think she found my introduction fairly satisfying because she didn’t ask a single question. Then, when I reached for the mate to move on to the practical part of the lesson, she took it out of my hand, filled it a little more than halfway with yerba, gave it three taps against the table, poured in a bit of water, inserted the bombilla without stirring, poured in more water, sipped from the straw, spat it out, and only when she served the second one did she hand it to me. I received it, put the straw to my lips, and drank without saying a word. Through the window I saw a cloud shaped like Artigas’s hooked nose.

"And it’s a shame it’s not raining," she said. "Otherwise, I’d make you tortafritas."

The ironing board

Her little brother’s underwear, her father’s shirts, the bunk bed sheets, the dining room tablecloth—who did they think she was, huh? Cinderella? Clara wiped the sweat from her forehead and kept ironing. She wondered if the De Agostini family still hadn’t heard that slavery had been abolished.

Just then, her mother walked in. She placed a white plastic basket on the side table, filled with a tower of white napkins.

"I want these done today," she said.

By three in the afternoon, all the clothes were ironed and stacked. Clara unplugged the iron, leaned the board against the wall, and went to sit in the wicker armchair. Through the window, she watched Mangacha’s plum tree shedding its leaves. It was a slow, brown drizzle. She sighed. She didn’t want to iron. What she wanted was a boyfriend. And she wanted one now. Not when she was old and more wrinkled than Tita Merello. But who was going to give her the time of day at thirteen, with those tiny little boobs that had barely grown? Only losers. Just losers, of course. Last Friday, before class started, Cebolla had asked if she wanted to be his girlfriend, and she had said yes. Then, during recess, the big oaf had come up to her and, staring not into her eyes but at her nose, asked:

"So, uh… what do we do now?"

Clara had felt like yelling, “We make out, you idiot, we make out!” but that wasn’t ladylike. So she stared right back at his nose and said:

"Wipe your nose."

Being a virgin was awful.

And then there was Chacho, who was older. He must’ve been around fifteen and had a mouth like a latrine. Worse than a latrine. He had a mouth like the sewers of Kathmandu. One afternoon, tired of putting up with his crudeness, she turned around, stood in front of him, leaned in, and whispered in his ear:

"With you or with no one, steakhead."

Chacho stumbled back and fell to the ground, to the delight of the regulars at the Fray Mocho bar.

There was no way around it. Men were all idiots.

Mangacha’s plum tree kept shedding its leaves. Nature was dying, just like it did every April. Clara got up from the wicker armchair, pulled the colored pencils from her pencil case, and drew a face on the ironing board. First, she drew two eyes. Eyes that would look only at her. Big brown eyes. She drew two black eyebrows above them, then a nose and a mouth below. She colored the mouth with red lips. She didn’t forget to add a few purple lines at the rounded top of the board. Purple hair. Yes, why not. Her lover would have purple hair.

She turned on the Spica. Ah, perfect. A little Paul Mauriat music. Couldn’t be better. She wrapped around her waist the loose elastic from an old pair of panties and used it to strap herself to the board. She kissed those red lips. They tasted like wood, but what did it matter. She let herself be carried away by the music and began to twirl around the room, transported to a romantic and beautiful world where idiots like Cebolla and Chacho were strictly forbidden.

Mauriat’s melody faded out, and Vilma Lujambio’s voice came on announcing the new and extraordinary offers at Bazar Mitre. Clara and the ironing board, bound together by the elastic, stared deeply into each other’s eyes, and the love became so strong and irresistible that they lost their balance. They fell to the floor—Clara on top, the board beneath.

When her mother came back into the room and saw them, she cut the elastic with scissors and separated them.

"And what, may I ask, are you doing?" she said.

"I fell," Clara replied apologetically.

The mother put the ironing board back against the wall, and only then did she notice the big brown eyes, the purple hair, and the red lips. She waited until Clara had left the room, stepped closer, and couldn’t resist.

She kissed them.

The milonga dancer

They released the doves and Flavia said,
“Beautiful birds.”
When they sang the anthem, she said,
“Beautiful anthem.”
Predictably, she said,
“Beautiful players,” when the teams came out.
I looked at her and said,
“If there's something here that's beautiful, it's you.”
I lied like a dog, I admit it, but I was enamoradinho and saw everything through the lens of feeling, which as everyone knows is a three-meter-thick, fully opaque crystal. Flavia wasn’t Miss Universe, but she was the most striking girl in Jacarepaguá. Extremely striking. She was about two meters tall. Kissing her meant not only overcoming altitude sickness, but also turning my face sideways to avoid colliding with her nose, which stuck out like the prow of a Viking ship. She had small brown eyes beneath a single, intimidating eyebrow.

I was the only one in her life who dared approach her without preamble. I had several caipirinhas dancing a rock and roll in my blood when, at a party at the Clube de Regatas do Flamengo, I climbed up on a stool, reached her eye level and said that she and I were made for each other—me because I was o coolest shorty do Uruguay and her because she was the most elevada woman do universo. She looked at me, surprised, and for a moment I thought, I fucked it and closed my eyes waiting for the punch that, graças a Deus, never came. Instead, I heard a sweet mezzo-soprano voice that softly told me she had never heard anything so bonitinho. When I opened my eyes again, that single eyebrow was brushing both of mine, and the only thing between us was her nose.

“Uruguay?” she asked. “Is that far from Jacarepaguá?”

Friaça entered the box and scored, and Flavia hugged me and gave me a kiss that made me feel like a traitor to my homeland—because for her, I would have become a supporter da seleção brasileira without the slightest scruple.
“What a beautiful goal,” she said, and I nodded, may God forgive me.
Everyone in the stands was happy, and so was I. Then we had to wait about half an hour for the match to resume because o mister Obdulio was chatting with Mr. Reader, and they seemed to have a lot to talk about.
“They must be talking about something really personal,” I said, trying to be funny.
“Talking abut personal things,” Flavia replied. “My menstruation is delayed. I'm worried.”
I took her hand and, equally concerned, thought that if we had a child and it turned out as tall as she was, I was screwed as a father. Just try telling a kid who’s twice your height to do this or that—and don’t talk back or I’ll smack you. Us short guys were condemned to a lack of authority.
“Worried?” I said. “Why worried? Don't you want to have my child?”
Flavia didn’t answer. She turned her eyes back to the field and absentmindedly commented that o número seven do Uruguay runs beautifully. And right then, the worry was mine. What if it wasn’t my child? No, that couldn’t be. Flavia was way too tall to commit adultery. She was way too conspicuous.

Alcides was playing a match of his own with Bigode. He went this way and then that way, and Bigode was behind him, trying to steal the ball at least once—just once. The Uruguayan winger only lacked a red cape for the scene to resemble a bullfight. Suddenly, he escaped Bigode yet again and sent a cross into the box. Schiaffino saw the ball coming, aimed casually at Barbosa’s right corner, kicked poorly and sent the ball almost vertically upward. A mistake only a master could get away with. Goal. Amid the silence in the stands, I couldn’t help the little Uruguayan bastard inside me from popping his head out and saying:
“What a beautiful goal.”
Flavia smiled at me, unable as she was to catch sarcastic comments.
“I’m not worried. Preocupada is not the right word. Estou frightened,” she said.
I squeezed her hand and smiled.
“Then we’re two scared people,” I replied.
Though of course, if her period kept being late, it wouldn’t be two scared people—it’d be three.

And there went Ghiggia again—here I come, now I go there, now I pass you on the right, I stop, then off I go on the left—and Bigode signaling to the bench to please bring him something for the nausea. Suddenly, the unpredictable milonga dancer charged toward the goal and I could clearly hear the gulp that escaped Barbosa’s throat. The shot rang out and Flavia squeezed my right knee. When the ball went into the goal, she squeezed it even harder. With that big hand of hers, it was a miracle she didn’t crush my meniscus.

I spent the last ten minutes of the match dodging her hand. She wasn’t just squeezing my knee—she also squeezed my thigh, my calf, and even my groin. I silently begged the ref to blow the whistle and end the match once and for all. In the end, Brazil cried over the loss. I cried over my leg.

That night we went to bed and, as always, I rested my foot on her Mount of Venus. It had nothing to do with eroticism. That was just as far as I could reach, given our height difference. But after a while, the charrúa indian in me awoke and I slipped my hand inside her panties. I pulled it out soaking wet and sticky, and wiped it across my mouth. Then I looked at Flavia, obscene and lecherous, and said,
“Come here, baby, I’m gonna eat you whole.”
She turned on the nightstand lamp and, seeing my face painted red like a carnaval clown, laughed and sang:
“You think menstruation is water, menstruation is not water”

The Studebaker

He would take his place behind the wheel without a sound, with the lightness of an angel, and close the door with great delicacy. Beside him, I would sink into that huge brown leather seat and gaze upward in such a way that, once the vehicle was in motion, all I could see was a corridor of sky and, every now and then, the top of a tree. He would adjust the visor of his cap, brush off some imaginary dust from the sleeves of his jacket, and check every single one of the dashboard instruments as if they belonged to an airplane rather than a '39 Studebaker.

My grandfather was an elegant man. He had been the personal secretary of Juan Carlos Blanco back in ’25 and had the manners of a British gentleman, despite having been born in La Coruña. He was one of the first chauffeurs in the country. Later, he had a dairy shop on Rossell y Rius Street, and now that he was retired, he made a bit of extra money driving hearses for El Ocaso.

By the time I was seven, I had ridden plenty on trams and buses and knew firsthand the shoves you got from people getting on or off those monsters, the sudden jerks, the honking, the potholes that made you bounce in your seat, and the impatient gestures of the drivers. But when I rode in a car with my grandfather at the wheel, Montevideo turned into a calm and joyful merry-go-round. Suddenly, it seemed like the people on the sidewalks were in no rush, and everything on the streets moved to the slow, drowsy rhythm of a barrel organ waltz. The Studebaker would glide away gently from the curb, and when we reached the corner of Larrañaga Avenue and Emilio Raña Street, it would come to a stop. My grandfather would look tenderly from one side to the other, let a truck pass that was leaving a trail of sand behind it, or a Leyland bus belching out a black, stinking cloud, and then he would turn left. A little further on, I’d know we had reached Ocho de Octubre Avenue by the electric cables overhead. The Studebaker felt like a ship, and I was a happy little flea lost in the cargo hold.

When I began to see fewer trees and more rooftops, balconies with iron railings, and white laundry fluttering in the wind through the windshield sky, I knew we were in the Old City. My grandfather parked that enormous vehicle with exquisite calm between a junker and a horse-drawn cart, and we climbed the two marble steps of a house full of plants and sunlight. There were red and white geraniums. I had never seen white geraniums before. A woman came out to greet us, wearing a black fringed shawl, earrings, and a red fan that she opened and closed with quick flicks of her hand. She was absolutely delighted to see him. Then they stepped aside for a private word, and I realized they were talking about me. From behind my grandfather’s back, the woman would peek out every now and then and look at me with those huge black eyes that, for some reason, put me in a good mood. A little later, she brought me a cup of hot chocolate and a dulce de leche pastry, and just like that, she won my love forever. I devoured those treats with gusto because you had to seize happiness the moment it was within reach, not like those fools who let it slip by and didn’t take advantage of it. I was a fervent believer in carpe diem. And while I basked in that warm little paradise of sugar and flour, I noticed my grandfather and the woman had disappeared through one of the doors leading to the courtyard. I finished my chocolate and my pastry and sat staring at the sky through the skylight. I was happy. What more could I ask from life?

Later, my grandfather brought me back home.
"If your grandmother or your mother ask, tell them I took you for a drive to the Cerro."
"A drive to the Cerro?"
"Yes."
"What Cerro?"
"The Cerro."
"Oh."

"Where did Grandpa take you, Piolín?" my mother asked.
"To the Cerro."
"And what did you see that was nice?"
"Geraniums."
My mother looked up from her knitting needles for a moment and gave me a curious glance.
"White ones," I added.

The talkies

That old man must have been about a hundred and forty-two years old, and yet he would step out to cross Larrañaga Street with a kind of spiritual peace you just couldn't believe. A peace the drivers of the 161 bus certainly didn’t share, as they cursed him out good and proper. Gómez wasn’t just old—he was biblical old, old from the year old age itself was invented. He would raise his cane in a friendly gesture in response to the honking, as if he were out for a stroll through the Prado Park. All of the La Blanqueada neighborhood would come to a halt so he could reach the bar La Vía, take his usual table, sip his little glass of grapamiel, and sit there watching the street.

I walked up to him and said, “Good morning, Don Gómez.”
The old man tried to locate me with his eyes and I had to repeat the greeting. He adjusted his glasses, fiddled with his hearing aid, leaned back a bit, then leaned forward, finally focused on me, and said,
“Oh, it’s you, Miguelito. I didn’t recognize you with your long hair.”
“No, I’m not Miguelito. I’m Sandra.”
“Oh, Sandra, Sandra, of course. Which Sandra?”
“I’m just messing with you, Don Gómez, I’m Miguelito. And it’s not that my hair’s long. I just didn’t use any gel today. Mind if I sit with you?”
“Of course not, of course not.”
And with a gentlemanly gesture, he pointed to the chair in front of him.

Gómez fascinated me. Whenever I could, I’d swing by bar La Vía to have a chat with him. He had lived so much and seen so many things. He’d ridden horse-drawn trams, welcomed the arrival of the Plus Ultra, cheered the goals of the ’30 World Cup final, and applauded Blood Wedding performed by Margarita Xirgu. All I had to do was ask a question or make a passing comment, and that old man would start talking, filling my head with magical black-and-white images. He transported me to a different world, one where life moved slower, where love and hate ran much deeper, where every word and every gesture truly mattered—because people looked each other in the eye and didn’t beat around the bush. A world where knives settled disputes and guns were drawn as easily as hugs were given, prayers said, carnations tossed at passing ladies, eternal loves sworn or revolutions declared.

The night before, I had gone to the movies with Potota. We had gone to see The Silence. I slept through the whole film. Bergman puts me to sleep. I knew what I was getting into, but Potota, who operated on a different cultural wavelength, had insisted I go with her to “open my mind” and realize that Sandrini wasn’t all there was to life. Because to me, movies had to be fun. If they weren’t fun, they weren’t movies. So in my opinion, Sandrini and Isabel Sarli were the greatest things ever produced by the film industry.
Anyway, I tell you all this because that’s what led me to bring up the subject of cinema. I asked him if he still went, and right away I realized it was kind of a dumb question. The poor guy, besides moving slower than molasses, was half deaf and half blind. So, movies? Really? But his answer surprised me.

“Movies? You’re asking if I go to the movies?”
He made a gesture with his hands like: come on, Miguelito, what a silly question.
“Listen, Miguelito, I’m a movie fanatic. There was a time I never missed a single premiere in Montevideo. Every new release, I was there—first in line for tickets. It was an obsession. Every day I’d read the listings in the newspaper, and if there wasn’t a new release, I’d get depressed. I also tried to stay updated on the lives of the stars. Yes, Miguelito, cinema means a great deal to me.”

I hadn’t expected that response—let alone the enthusiasm with which he launched into it.
“My favorite theater was the Lumière.”
“The Lumière?”
“Yes. It was on Florida Street, between San José Steet and Soriano Street. But I also went to the Edison, the Uruguayo, the Ideal, and the Buckingham. I avoided the Edén Park. The audience there was too rowdy.”

Gómez took another little sip of grapamiel. A bus screeched to a stop nearby, but the old man barely reacted. I envied his century-old ears that filtered out most of the noise of the world.
“Do you like Bergman films?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He looked at me with the weariness of centuries, sighed, and then said,
“Cinema isn’t cinema anymore, Miguelito. It no longer exists. One day, a long time ago, I told myself, ‘I’m not going to the movies anymore.’ And I never went back.”
“Why? What happened?”
“The talkies arrived.”

I leaned back, trying not to laugh.
“But Gómez,” I said. “Sound made movies richer. It was an important technical advance. Things change, they improve, they evolve.”
The old man drank the last of his grapamiel, and before standing up he said,
“Silent films, Miguelito, were better. Much better.”
“Really, Gómez?” I asked.
He stood, steadied himself on his cane, and before walking out the door onto Monte Caseros Street, he said,
“They were perfect, Miguelito. Nothing was missing and nothing was extra. But then the noise came, and everything went to hell. Noise killed the movies.”

The tiles

I had already lived forty years on this Earth, but I had never noticed that detail. And mind you, in forty years I had walked hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks. All kinds of sidewalks: the neat and clean ones on Bulevar Artigas, the ones in Cordón interrupted every twenty meters by a decorative tree, the ones in La Unión where you had to dodge street vendors, the ones on General Flores Avenue with their little bridges, and the ones on Propios Avenue from before Christ, twenty meters wide.
Those sidewalks were made of tiles. And all the tiles were the same. Or so I thought. But that wasn’t quite the case. One day Patricia explained it to me.

We were walking one afternoon along Millán Avenue, coming back from the greengrocer’s, and when we crossed Reyes Street, Patricia looked up and turned to me.
'Hey, uncle,' she said.
'Yes?'
'Do you think all tiles are the same?'
'Yes. They’re the same,' I answered.
Patricia let go of my hand, stopped walking, and slowly moved her index finger from side to side like a windshield wiper. We’re in trouble, I thought.
'No. Not all of them are the same' she said.
'They’re not?'
'No.'
'How come? Explain.'
'Look. There are important tiles and tiles that are less important.'
'Well, I’ll be,' I said.
'See that one over there' she asked.
'Which one?'
'That one.'
All I saw was a dog turd. Fairly recent. A light brown that matched nicely with the generally autumnal tones of the Prado neighborhood.
'The one with the turd?'
She nodded, and didn’t need to say anything else, because I realized it immediately.
Yes, sir. That was an important tile. I solemnly removed my beret.
'Why did you take off your beret?'
I didn’t answer. I felt like a bit of a fool.

From Micenas Street to Regidores Street we counted fifteen important tiles. One with a raised corner, one painted green, one marked with a white chalk cross, one with a blue R, one with metal bars — and the others, unfortunately, I don’t remember.
They probably weren’t all that important.

The Trafalgar

Richard played the piano and Lorenz wrote the lyrics. They met in ’19, when New York had just begun to become the Big Apple of the world. At the time, President Wilson was banning alcohol, killing black people in Haiti, gunning down Huerta’s Mexicans, and helping himself to the Dominican sugar cane. Across the Atlantic, Corporal Adolf Hitler was coming back from the war, half-blind and with a bullet lodged in his hip. The world was a tragedy, as it had always been since the days of Hammurabi, but those two Jewish New Yorkers belonged—without knowing it—to the chosen sect of beauty’s craftsmen. When Lorenz died in ’43, Richard kept working with Oscar, and in October of ’65 they knocked on the door of my heart.

That day I was furious because my mom wanted to make me take my two younger sisters to the Trafalgar to see The Sound of Music.

“Why can’t they go alone?”

“I don’t want them going alone. You have to go with them. You’re older.”

I was thirteen. “Older my ass. Why don’t you take them?”

By way of reply, my mother opened her purse, pulled out some cash, and said:

“Here. This is for the bus. This is for the tickets. And this is just in case.”

We got off at the corner of Centenario Avenue and Propios Avenue, and when we were half a block from the theater, I swallowed hard at the sight of a blonde girl on the marquee, leaping through the mountains with a guitar in her hand. Behind her came seven smiling kids, all dressed in flowery shirts, and I didn’t scream “Help, every man for himself!” right then and there only to avoid seeming uncouth. My heart sank even further when I read that the movie was three hours long. I looked back at my two little sisters, and just as I was about to curse all of Hollywood and Julie Andrews, the MGM lion, the Fox spotlights, and the extras from The Ten Commandments, Elsa—the youngest—told me she needed to pee. The finger I’d raised for emphasis on the swear word froze midair, and we went into the lobby where a man in brown handed us three little boxes of chocolate-covered peanuts. Before I could react, my sisters’ dimwit hands had already accepted what they saw as a gift and I had to pay for it with the “just in case” money Mom had given me.

In the auditorium, I sank into my seat, bracing for the worst. The place was rowdy as hell. Kids were bouncing in their chairs, laughing and fighting with each other. Here and there I saw long faces—bored ones. No doubt other victims like me, sacrificial companions of the little rascals. When the curtain finally rose and the music started, the blonde girl from the marquee appeared, singing and skipping across the mountains. I thought of chubby Cristina, who was a little out of it and sang boleros while sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house in Paso Molino. It was the same scene, just in another world. To be fair, Cristina came off poorly compared to Julie Andrews because she didn’t have that symphony orchestra that came out of nowhere.

For the next three hours the songs kept coming. And little by little, despite my lack of enthusiasm and constant grumbling, they started sneaking into that secret place in my heart I had reserved for Gardel. Richard took up residence there with his piano, and Oscar with his lyrics. The Maestro approved. Something in there had grown richer.

A week later, not in the Austrian Alps but on the gentle slope of Carlos de la Vega Street, I played My Favorite Things on the record player for the umpteenth time, and my girlfriend told me to quit messing around with that music—because it was for queers.

The zoo

We held hands to cross Rivera Avenue. That was the high point, the crucial peril faced by those five little musketeers from the big house on Francisco Llambí street, led by Serafina, heading toward Villa Dolores zoo. The goal was to reach the opposite sidewalk safe and sound. Serafina held Hugo’s hand, Hugo held Elena’s, Elena held mine, and I held Mabel’s. Serafina, who was the tallest and oldest, scanned the horizon. Scanning the horizon wasn’t easy with so many route 141 buses spewing fumes into the warm Pocitos air, so many taxis honking, and so many bakers and greengrocers with horse-drawn carts. We little ones turned our profiles toward her like an Egyptian procession. We waited for the signal: “Now, kids, now!” and that little nudge she’d give Hugo’s hand to let us know it was time to move. We trusted her. She was our leader.

When she finally said, “Now, kids, now!” Hugo shot forward, but he was so eager and rushed that he ran into a cyclist. My cousin hit the ground, and the cyclist swerved a few more times on the asphalt before coming to a stop. He pulled the clips off his pant legs and shouted at us, “Ihr Scheiss-Kinder!” which we later learned meant “you little shits” in German. So we returned to our starting position by the curb and resumed our Egyptian posture. Mabel sneezed from the pollen and scratched her nose. When we heard the second, “Now, kids, now!” I stepped forward and immediately had to step back as a horn blast entered my left ear and ruffled the hairs on my right sideburn. Despite the temporary deafness, I could hear the distant voice of the driver as he lowered his window and sang an ode invoking my mother, my father, and all my Basque-French ancestors. Serafina said something I didn’t understand. I looked at her over the heads of Elena and Hugo. I felt Elena’s sweaty palm and when I looked at her face, I saw she had her eyes closed and was praying. Mabel sneezed again. And once more the four of us waited for Serafina’s “Now, kids, now!” That human chain of cousins depended on her keen eyes. On the third, “Now, kids, now!” we all dashed across the street like a frightened ribbon of flesh. We reached the other side running, but Serafina hit a tree, bounced off, and ended up sitting in the street. Rivera traffic came to a halt. The driver of the truck that had braked and now stood facing her stuck his head out the window and said:

“Girl, are you gonna sit there all afternoon? Are you comfortable? Want me to bring you a magazine?”

We arrived at the zoo entrance and Serafina went to buy the tickets. Elena was still praying and I said:

“Stop. Don’t keep going. The danger’s over. We already crossed.”

“I know,” she replied. “Now I’m giving thanks.”

We entered that paradise of monkeys, tigers, and elephants. Mabel spent the whole afternoon sneezing and Hugo kept crashing into everything in his path, including ice cream vendors, peacocks, and kids eating chocolate bars. Serafina, as always, tall and responsible, scanned the horizon to protect us from danger. So focused on keeping us in sight, she didn’t watch where she was stepping, tripped over a little dog, lost her balance, and fell into the seal pond. One of those sea lions approached her and brushed its whiskers against her cheek. Serafina scratched herself and stood up. The seal seemed to like my cousin and tossed her a ball with its snout. It hit her forehead, bounced off a rock, and fell into the water. The crowd applauded. So did we. A zoo employee came down into the pond. I thought maybe he was offering her a contract to repeat the show every afternoon, but instead, he just took her hand and helped her out. Once they crossed the railing that separated marine mammals from land mammals, Serafina fixed her dress and her hair, took Hugo’s hand, Hugo took Elena’s, Elena took mine, and I had to wait to take Mabel’s because she was now sneezing even harder and had both hands over her mouth. At last, after about twenty-five achoos, we got going. We were heading home.

When we reached the corner of Llambí Street, we stopped and took a deep breath. We had to cross Rivera Avenue again. I envied Moses. All he had to do was call on God, who would poke a little hand out from between the clouds, do a few magical gestures, and—bam!—the waters would part. But Serafina wasn’t Moses. So she began scanning the horizon again, and we resumed our Egyptian pose. When she shouted, “Now, kids, now!” Hugo let go of her hand and veered diagonally toward Bermúdez’s newsstand. Elena, thrown off by the unexpected move, let go of mine and weaved between two cars, praying with her eyes shut. I, since everyone else was letting go, let go of Mabel’s and leapt across like a kangaroo, dodging bikes and a couple of unidentifiable projectiles. Mabel, with no one to hold onto, stayed behind, frozen on the sidewalk, sneezing. After a few minutes of panic and uncertainty, we castaways regrouped on the other shore to catch our breath. Serafina went to Bermúdez’s newsstand to retrieve Hugo, who, while he was at it, had stolen a ticholo candy. We all had to talk Elena into opening her eyes and stopping her prayers. Only Mabel was missing. She was still on the other side of the street.

We looked at her, worried. She looked back and sneezed. She didn’t dare cross to us. And we didn’t dare cross to her.

Luckily, Bermúdez, who had witnessed the chaos, took pity, crossed over, took her hand, and brought her back. When he placed her safe and sound on our side, he pulled a ticholo from his pocket and gave it to her.

“This ticholo cures sneezing,” he said.

Then he turned to Hugo.

“Oh, and you owe me five cents for yours,” he reminded him.

Aunt Carmen was delighted to see us return from our trip to the zoo. We entered the dining room in single file, holding hands.

“They’re little, but with Serafina, they’re very safe. Serafina is older and very responsible,” she told Paca, the neighbor, as she served her another cup of tea.

Serafina let go of Hugo’s hand, slipped on the freshly waxed floor, slid under the table as she fell, popped out the other side, hit her legs on the wall, sat up, adjusted her dress, picked up a cup, handed it to Aunt Carmen, and said:

“Tea, please. No milk.”

Uncle Francisco

I got worried when I saw Aunt Zulma place a piece of toast on the table with a bit of tuna and a slice of tomato, and next to it, a glass of cold milk. I was well known in the close-knit, well-informed circles of the Umpiérrez family as a very chicken-hearted little boy, or as cousin Rosario put it, a kid with restless intestines. But Aunt Zulma didn’t know that detail. First, because she lived in La Aguada, which was basically where the world ended, and second, because she wasn’t a true Umpiérrez in the full legal sense, just a mere Silvera López who had married Uncle Francisco, who was a true Umpiérrez through and through. Therefore, she was excluded from certain secrets reserved for blood relatives, like, for instance, my tendency to have unexpected bowel movements.

Aunt Zulma didn’t eat almuerzo like everyone else—she took lunch. I don’t know where she got that from. I had done some digging and found out it was an English word that was written with a “u” but pronounced with an “a.” No comment. Aunt Zulma was a seamstress, and sometimes you couldn’t understand a word she was saying because her mouth was full of pins. Other times she’d appear with a measuring tape around her neck like a priest’s stole. And she always had a distant air about her. Always looking up, toward some spot on the ceiling. She would lean back against the chair, take a drag from a cigarette with a filter that seemed about twelve feet long, and flip through a women’s fashion magazine with her free hand.

That day, my mother didn’t get off work at the ministry until three in the afternoon, and since I had to go to catechism at one-thirty, she had asked Aunt Zulma to take me to the church in Reducto, where they were training me to be a little angel. I’d have almuerzo with her. Or take lunch. I looked at that tuna and that slice of tomato. Then I slowly shifted my gaze to the glass of cold milk and felt the microscopic critters in my gut flora go on high alert. I imagined my bacteria yelling in Mexican, que no panda el cúnico, which in Uruguayan meant stay calm.

Aunt Zulma, still staring at the ceiling light fixture, told me to eat, and that she'd take me afterward. I hesitated. In catechism they’d taught us that we must obey, because God just loves obedient children! But I also figured that kids with soiled underwear were probably less lovable. I reached for the toast, grabbed it, and touched the edge of the tomato slice. Aunt Zulma took another drag from that never-ending cigarette. With my other hand, I picked up the glass of milk. I felt like I had a cyanide capsule in one hand and a bottle of strychnine in the other, and I had to choose between death by diarrhea or intestinal cramps. Panic overtook me and I dropped both things. Aunt Zulma looked at a model in the magazine who was all dressed in blue and wearing a tiny black hat under which a few blond hairs peeked out.

“She looks like a flight attendant,” I said.

“Eat,” she replied.

I rested my chin on the edge of the table and moved my index and middle fingers like little legs walking toward the toast and the glass. I looked up, and suddenly my eyes clashed with Aunt Zulma’s. Faced with those fiery beacons, I had no choice but to take a little bite of the tomato, then the tuna, and then sip some milk. Her pupils didn’t release me until I had finished every last bit of those provisions. Then the sound of car keys pulled me out of my daze, and off I went, following her through the door that led to the garage.

When the catechist told us that God had created man out of love and in His own image and likeness, I let out the fart of the century. I don’t know if that was a mortal sin or a venial one, but when I told Uncle Francisco, he congratulated me for being a true-blue Umpiérrez.

Yavé Pérez

Yavé Pérez lived in a huge, elegant house at the corner of Avenida Lezica and Peabody Street. It was called El Paraíso. He had two children, Adam and Eve, who had the habit of walking around naked in the backyard. Yavé took care of that backyard with remarkable devotion. There were rosebushes that were a delight, hydrangeas, violets, lilies, dahlias, and tulips. A babbling brook ran through that Eden, and at a bend in the stream, Yavé had planted an apple tree. His children had strict instructions not to eat the fruit from that tree, or else they’d be in big trouble. They weren’t surprised by this strange rule—by then they were used to their father’s eccentricities. He never said something like “Hey Adam, turn on the light,” but rather “Let there be light.” Instead of “stars” he called them “luminaries in the expanse of the heavens,” and when watering the plants, he’d say “Be fruitful and multiply.” He couldn’t start a sentence without “Verily, verily I say unto you,” which is why the kids avoided him as much as possible.

One afternoon, Áspid Urrutia showed up for a visit—an old girlfriend of Yavé’s from the days when he’d taken a magic and sleight-of-hand course in Jericho. Back then, Áspid had played trumpet in the orchestra assigned to the demolition of the city wall during the urban renewal. While Yavé and Áspid had had a few erotic encounters, things had never gone further because Yavé was creative and Áspid was destructive. They hated each other with the same violent intensity with which they loved each other. Áspid tried to tempt him, but Yavé didn’t want to fall into temptation. Yavé wanted to breathe peace into her; Áspid only wanted war. She was all about partying, he was all about Gregorian chant. Yavé was spirit; Áspid was grilled meat with the hide still on. That’s how it was all the time: “I hate you and I love you, I adore you and I spit on you, come here while I leave, leave because I’ve come back, get out of here but don’t abandon me.” They always ended up slapping each other. Then they’d get tired, rest their foreheads together, yawn, whisper “amen” in unison, and fall asleep under the palm trees of Jordan.

Áspid was delighted by the kids. Yavé suspected something fishy.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

Áspid laughed with that sardonic laugh of hers that made his hair stand on end. She touched her nose and said,
“By scent, Yavé. You reek of sainthood, my god. You’re easy to track.”

The children wanted to show her the backyard.

“Come, ma’am, come. Come see how pretty the yard is.”

“Why are the kids naked?” Áspid asked Yavé.

“Because they’re innocent. They don’t know the difference between good and evil.”

“But that’s no reason for them to catch pneumonia.”

“Verily, verily I say unto you, Áspid, they are my children, and I give them their daily bread this day.”

“‘Give them this day’? You still have a real knack for speaking cryptically, Yavé.”

Yavé looked at her in silence. Why was this woman reappearing in his life after so many years? When he tried to ask her the real reason for her visit, Áspid had already gone outside and was walking in the yard with the kids.

Adam and Eve ran and jumped among the flowers and trees. When they reached the apple tree, Áspid stopped to look at it.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “The tree of knowledge!”

“The tree of what?” asked Eve.

“Of knowledge.”

Áspid picked an apple and took a bite.

“We’re screwed,” thought Eve.

The woman handed the apple to the girl.

“No, no, no, thank you very much, but no. Dad has forbidden us to eat the fruit from that tree.”

“It’s fine. Go on. Try it. It’s delicious.”

“No way.”

But Áspid looked at her with those irresistible eyes, and Eve was hypnotized. She took a bite of the apple.

“Then I want some too, I want some too, why does she get to and not me, huh?” shouted Adam, and he gobbled up what was left of the fruit—which wasn’t much, because apple trees didn’t grow too well in Colón.

Then Yavé appeared. He faced Áspid and said:

“Verily, verily I say unto you: cursed shall you be above all beasts and all the animals of the field, and I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth.”

“Childbirth? At my age?”

“And you two—out of here. Now,” he ordered his children.

Officer Gutiérrez crossed the street and approached the children, who were walking down the sidewalk naked and crying.

“What’s going on?”

“Dad kicked us out of the house.”

The officer removed his cap and scratched his head.

“Where do you live?”

“There,” they said, pointing at the house.

He took them by the hand, walked up to the door, and rang the bell. Yavé Pérez opened.

“Are these your kids?” Gutiérrez asked.

“Cursed is the ground because of them,” Pérez replied.

“What?”

The kids ran back inside the house. The officer was bewildered, and since he felt he had to do something, he asked Yavé to identify himself. Yavé stared at him without speaking.

“Your name. Tell me your name.”

“The name of which of us? I am three.”

“Huh?”

“I am the Father, I am the Son, and I am also the Holy Spirit.”

“Excuse me, but I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” said Pérez. “It’s a mystery.”

And he slammed the door in his face.

Bern

I arrived in Bern and got ready to sing on Frühlingstraße, right where the street curves slightly in front of the little angel fountain. Just a few steps to my right, there was a hanging sign depicting a dwarf with a green hat drinking a beer. I placed my felt hat on the ground, tuned my guitar, and started with Guantanamera, guajira, Guantanamera, but didn’t get far because someone dumped a bucket of water on me from a second-floor window. I don’t know what strange premonition saved me from the flood. The fact is, I stepped aside just in time, and the water fell directly onto a woman walking her dog. When the culprit poked her head out, the soaked woman saw her and started cursing her out in German. The other one fired back in French. I took advantage of the confusion to disappear. When I reached the corner of Winterallee, I looked back. A police officer with a braid down to her waist had stepped in and was trying to calm things down.

I turned onto Winterallee, and when I reached Lovers’ Park, I stood under a streetlamp. I pulled out the guitar, tuned it, put the felt hat on the ground, and started with Guantanamera, guajira, Guantanamera. But a guy with carrot-colored hair interrupted me to ask if I knew that Jesus loved me. Of course I knew Jesus loved me, I told him. He was crazy about me. Thought about me every night. I tried to continue with Yo soy un hombre sincero, but the carrot-head asked me if I knew we were living in the last days. I stopped singing and asked him:

“The last days of what?”

“The last days of the world,” he explained. “On September 23, Christ will return. Are you ready to receive him?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll make him some grilled provolone.”

The redhead offered me a magazine called Dawn and told me that any donation would be welcome and that my gesture would be noted in heaven. I had a hole in my stomach from days of hunger. I wasn’t in the mood for donations. The little angels in heaven didn’t need to eat. I did. Just when I was about to smash the guitar over his head, two bearded men dressed in white tunics down to their ankles arrived and greeted us: “Inshallah.” I, who once had a Moroccan girlfriend back in Murcia, replied: “Salam aleikum.” They laid down prayer mats on the grass, and just as they were about to kneel, the redhead approached them and asked if they knew that Jesus loved them. The bearded men looked at each other, and within minutes the three of them were tangled in a religious debate that got louder and louder. It caught the attention of the police officer with the waist-length braid. She stopped about ten meters away and said something into her walkie-talkie. I figured it was time to pack up and take my music elsewhere.

I walked to the end of Lovers’ Park. When I reached Königstraße, I saw a sausage stand. A little boy bought one with sauerkraut and happily went to sit next to who I assumed was his grandfather, who was eating French fries from a paper cone. I gave myself a mental pep talk. “Come on, Carloncho, hang in there, damn it. A couple more Guantanameras and you’ll get to eat too.” I crossed the bridge over the Aare and entered through the Piper’s Passage. At the corner of Wilhelmstraße, I took out my guitar, tuned it, set the hat on the ground, and began my Guantanamera, thinking about those sausages with sauerkraut. But I didn’t even make it through the first verse. A blonde woman wearing a leopard-print dress and a shiny black belt stood in front of me. She looked like Wilma, Fred Flintstone’s wife.

“One hundred francs and the bed,” she said.

I looked at her without saying a word.

“Eighty francs and the bed.”

I still didn’t react.

“Fifty.”

If she keeps this up, I thought, she’s going to end up offering me money.

She walked off clicking her heels down the street. So much loneliness, I thought. I sincerely wished that someone in her life would welcome her home with a iapaiapatú. I didn’t even have that.

Just when I was about to start Guantanamera again, the braid-down-to-the-waist officer came over and asked if I had a city permit to play music in the street. I responded by slapping my forehead with the palm of my hand.

“I knew I forgot something,” I said. “I left it in my room at the Sheraton. I’m so scatterbrained. So much on my mind, you know?”

She didn’t say a word, just made a delicate little police-hand gesture that clearly meant: beat it.

I stood in front of the clock tower that had inspired Einstein to develop his theory of relativity. That famous wild-haired man imagined he was traveling on a train at the speed of light and that the hands on that clock lagged behind. I wanted to know where that train stopped so I could leave Bern as soon as possible. That’s when Wolfgang appeared with his banjo. Wolfgang was a drunk who thought he was Glen Campbell, and when his fingers didn’t work, he’d beg on the ground pretending to draw something on the sidewalk with a couple of colored chalks. On top of it, he was clingy. He’d hug you or put a hand on your shoulder to show how much he appreciated you. He stank. The guy desperately needed a shower.

“How’d it go today?” he asked me.

“Great,” I replied. “I made a ton. If you want to make good money, go play your banjo on Frühlingstraße, right where the street curves in front of the little angel fountain.”

Casanova

Casanova was a genius. He knocked out his homework in no time. The teacher had assigned an essay titled My Dog, and the lunatic filled two full pages with woof. That is, he wrote woof about three hundred times and then explained to us all, with academic gestures, that it was a story written in the first person (or in this case, the first dog) and that woof was the official language used by the canine species to express themselves.

"Have you never heard of French naturalism, Miss?" he asked.

Miss Tania said nothing and just stared at him.

"Let me explain," Casanova went on.

"Don’t explain anything. You get a failing grade," the teacher replied.

In geometry, Casanova showed off. Triangles, he explained, could be classified into love triangles, Bermuda triangles, and musical triangles. Love triangles were when a loved b, but b slept with c, and then c, out of pure jealousy, kicked a's hypotenuse. Bermuda triangles were when a, b, and c slept together and then disappeared without a trace. And musical triangles were when a, b, and c didn’t sleep together but met at the vertices and made each other vibrate — which was a real blast.

As for the Artiguist gesta, it was very diverse, he explained. There was the confident, self-assured gesture seen when he stood at the gate of the citadel, the human and conciliatory gesture toward Posadas at the end of the Battle of Las Piedras, and the grandiloquent, magnanimous gesture as he bid farewell to the deputies headed to Buenos Aires with the Instructions of the Year XIII. Fernández dared to say that gesta had nothing to do with gestures, because gesta meant struggle. Casanova explained with a wise and slightly weary look that gesta came from the Latin geste, which in turn came from the Etruscan gesticolare, which itself derived from the Sanskrit term gestirre, meaning "shut your mouth or I’ll wreck your soul."

We all lived glued to Casanova, and the question hanging in the air was how long he’d last at school before getting kicked out. He had appeared in our class halfway through the year, expelled from who knows what school, and it was hinted that he was on probation. So we watched him with wide eyes. He was a head and a half taller than the rest of us, and somehow we understood he was very smart. Too smart. The kind of intelligence that made you nervous, that sometimes made you laugh and sometimes made you cry. At least it did to me. That happened when Tania gave us this problem to solve: A tank has three taps. With all three open, it fills in two hours. If only two are open, it fills in five hours. How long would it take with just one tap open? Casanova raised his hand right away and said it depended on whether the washer in the tap was worn out. Everyone laughed, but when Tania told him to leave the classroom and take his notebooks and books with him, I couldn’t hold back a couple of tears. I knew he’d just earned himself another expulsion.

So I wasn’t surprised when I saw him years later in an interview on Swiss television, explaining how the hadron collider in Geneva worked. In impeccable French, Casanova answered the journalist’s questions and guided him through the different facilities, explaining everything in a way that was understandable for the average citizen. At the end of the interview, Casanova was shown at his chalet in Versoix, chatting animatedly with his dog, a border collie he introduced as Charles.

"It seems like you and the dog are having a conversation," the journalist said, joking.

"Indeed," said Casanova. "I learned his language. I even wrote a book about it."

The interview ended with Casanova offering the journalist a copy. He flipped through it and said:

"But these pages are all full of the word woof! A hundred pages of woof!"

"Want to take it?" Casanova asked. "It’s on sale. I’ll let you have it for ten francs twenty-five."

Johnnie Walker

The marijuana cigarette was being passed from mouth to mouth, and Juana took advantage of a quiet moment to announce that she was thinking about getting a divorce. Coca coughed and I scratched the tip of my nose. The others looked expectant, and Quique went over to the record player and turned down the volume. The stage was set. But since Juana didn’t start talking, Delia decided to give her a little push.

“It’s been fifteen years of marriage and two kids in school,” she said, tilting her head. “Are you sure about what you’re saying?”

When the joint reached me, I raised my hands and said no thanks. I was quite happy and very satisfied with my Johnnie Walker. I dug into the little dish of nuts and shoved a handful into my mouth. Juana made a move to say something but ended up saying nothing. Her eyes filled with tears, and Quique, always on top of things, handed her a box of tissues. Juana held her chin, looked toward the window and said that love was gone. And if there’s no love, what’s the point of it all? Zoquete exhaled smoke and asked if it was really a lack of love or if there was some other specific problem. Coca wanted to know if there was someone else in her life or if he had cheated on her.

“No,” said Juana. “It’s nothing like that. It’s just that I’m empty. I don’t love him. I’m not attracted to him. The affection I had for him is dead.”

“Are you sure it’s a relationship problem? Couldn’t it be your own issue? Maybe you’re depressed? You know there are some little pills that fix that and make you feel brand new.”

“I’m not sure about anything, Coca. The only thing I know is that I don’t love him. That’s all.”

Quique took another drag from the joint and said that love was, ultimately, an overrated thing.

“People obsess way too much over that invention. You, Juana, have a good job, your husband too, and you have two beautiful kids. And you can’t deny that even if there’s no ‘love’”—he made air quotes with both hands—“you two get along really well, you’re like comrades, good friends, and you have plans for the future.”

“And what exactly do you mean by that?” interrupted Zoquete.

Quique sighed.

“I mean,” he continued, “I mean… I don’t know... I don’t know what I mean.”

I took another swig of Johnnie Walker and checked my watch. In thirty minutes, the game between Aguada and Bohemios was starting, and I didn’t want to miss it.

The joint made its way back to Delia.

“When I was your age, Juana,” Delia said, squinting her eyes, “I also thought love was everything. I thought I’d found it with my first husband, and then with the second. You get this idea in your head of how it’s supposed to be, and then you just keep getting disappointed. Over and over again. It’s a mirage.”

Quique remained still, staring at the chandelier on the ceiling, as if hoping to find there what he’d been trying to say moments earlier. I figured it was a good time to lift everyone’s spirits with a Galician joke and then sneak out to catch the game. But Zoquete beat me to it.

“I’m gay,” he declared.

Silence.

“I came out,” he clarified. “Tonight, I was planning to introduce you all to Alfredo, my boyfriend, but I don’t know… I wanted to tell you myself first.”

This wasn’t just a bucket of cold water. This was an avalanche of ice straight from the Perito Moreno glacier. I looked at him closely. It wasn’t a joke. He was dead serious.

“And Laura? Does she know? Have you told her?” asked Juana.

“Yes.”

“And how did she take it?”

“Very badly.”

Another silence.

The Aguada-Bohemios game was starting in twenty minutes. I wanted to leave. But suddenly I realized everyone was looking at me with a strange and uncomfortable intensity.

“You haven’t said a word all night,” said Quique.

“Huh?” I replied.

Quique shifted in his seat, leaned his elbows on the table, and continued:

“Look, I don’t know how it happened, but tonight we’ve all opened up and shared very personal things.”

He didn’t go on. He left it there. I had fifteen minutes to run the five blocks to my house. I thought about brushing it off with a “what do you mean by that?” and leaving him to stare at the chandelier for the rest of the night. But five pairs of eyes were staring at me. I was cornered.

“Oh, so what you all want is for me to tell something personal,” I said.

Ten pupils, ten eyelids, five noses, and one accusatory silence.

I sighed. I thought of Estela, my wife, just as much of an Aguada fan as I was, waiting for me at home, sitting in front of the TV.

“Estela has the nicest tits in Uruguay,” I declared solemnly. “That’s enough to make me happy.”

I had ten minutes left. I started running. I was happy, skipping down the sidewalk dodging things

Laws

When Professor Benítez said that the sources of obligations were will and law, we heard the first footsteps of the boys running across the rooftop. I recognized the shrill little voice of Mieres shouting:
“They're coming up Tristán Narvaja Street!”
Another voice, which I thought was that of skinny Fuentes, yelled:
“Cover the Eduardo Acevedo Street side!”
Benítez leaned on the desk and opened the civil code. He adjusted his tie, something he always did whenever he consulted the law, and read the article that established that ownership of real estate was acquired by possession of thirty years.
We heard shouting in the street. Delia, Ferro, and Ramírez went over to the window overlooking 18 de Julio Avenue, and I stood behind them so I wouldn’t miss anything. In front of the Channel 4 studios, the students had stopped a bus and started rocking it. From the faculty rooftop, Mieres, skinny Fuentes, and the rest of the gang were throwing stones.
Benítez motioned for us to return to our seats.
“Now then. Regarding personal property, article 1214 applies,” he began.
But he didn’t go on for long. A tear gas canister bounced off the window, then another, and then another. Delia rushed to close the shutters, but the gas had already begun to seep into the room. I ran to help her and caught a glimpse of a group of riot police on horseback in the street.
When I looked back into the classroom, I saw nothing but a fog that covered everything. I took out my handkerchief, sprayed it with perfume, and held it to my mouth.
We left the room, went down the stairs, and when we reached the main hall, we had to turn back because we ran into the students fleeing from the police. The riot cops were approaching the faculty doors, but retreated whenever Mieres, Fuentes, and company began attacking them from the rooftop.
They pulled back to the sidewalk across the street and fired tear gas from there. And everyone was crying.
Since we couldn’t leave the building, I decided to go back to the classroom and wait for the battle to end. The fog had cleared a bit. I could already make out the seats. I thought I was alone, but then I heard something that sounded like a sob.
I turned and saw Benítez on the floor, huddled in a corner with his civil code on his lap. I went over and sat down next to him.
“What idiots, what absolute idiots,” Benítez was saying with a trembling voice.
I didn’t say anything.
“Don’t those fools realize they can’t repress students like that? They’ve already killed three, for God’s sake, do you understand?”
I took the handkerchief from his hand, sprayed some perfume on it, and gave it back to him.
“Coming with horses and tear gas to crack down on a bunch of kids protesting a bus fare hike. Where has anything like that ever been seen?”
He closed the civil code, set it aside, and stared at it.
“Laws,” he said.
He loosened his tie and threw it far away.

Madame Lagarde

I stationed myself at the entrance of the Petit Trianon, and when Madame Lagarde stepped down from her carriage, I approached her with a grand display of feathers and frills. I took off my hat and dazzled her with my fake ponytail and the blue beauty mark I had painted on my cheek. Then I took her hand, and just as I was about to kiss it, the guards shoved me out of the premises. Struggling with the soldiers, I managed to shout before being pushed past the gate:

“Madame, madame, je suis Luis, je suis Luis,” and I noticed Madame raise her left eyebrow, that perfect little triangle. Then she turned to me and asked:

“Quel numéro?”

“Numéro quarante-huit, madame.”

“Il est plus que mon roi Louis Philippe I.”

She must have found me sympathique because she ordered the guards to leave me alone and took me by the hand to her chambers, where I settled in with the Uruguayan ease that was my trademark. Right away she noticed the scar that ran across my forehead. I had positioned myself by the west window, where the sunlight came in full force at that hour, knowing the scar would drive her complètement folle. I’d gotten that scar like a fool chasing an armadillo. I’d tripped over a rock and gone flying. But I wasn’t about to tell Madame such trivial details.

Madame came close and ran her perfumed hand over the scar. Reflexively—and rather foolishly but very manfully—I grabbed her wrist and pretended to bite it. I made sure she noticed that I licked her snowy skin, and right away I saw in the mirror the white smudge left on the tip of my tongue and thought, Now how do I get that off? The Black workers at Lafone’s salting plant who had been in Martinique had already warned me that the French put all kinds of filth on their skin.

Madame laughed—or so it seemed. She said “jijijiji.” The only laugh I knew was Saturnina’s when she blew on my bowl of gofio. Oh well. Staying in character as a Rioplatense macho, I responded with two or three “hehes” spaced out over a few seconds, during which I stared into the depths of her soul.

“I need to see your king,” I said to her, as I licked here and there, desperate to wipe off that disgusting spot.

“I have to pee,” she answered, and left me alone in that room full of candelabras, sofas, and porcelain figurines.

I took from my doublet the strip of tasajo I had hidden and laid it on the pillow of that canopy bed, which could easily fit an entire regiment of dragoons. I walked over to the window and instead of delighting in the autumn landscape of the Parisian countryside, I started thinking about the corrals in La Teja and the strips of dried beef hanging in the sun. Damn this homesickness. I never thought I’d miss my homeland like this. But oh well. I had made it this far and had to carry out my mission. Lafone had told me that Cuba and Brazil were not enough. That there was a market in Europe which, back in colonial days, the Spanish crown had forbidden us to tap into, and that I now had to try to open.

“Do it for the homeland,” he had said.

“What homeland?” I had replied. “You’re English, sir.”

His only response was to crack his whip on the ground, grab his bolas, and mount his wild stallion. A very gaucho image.

Madame Lagarde returned to the room, and the first thing she did was sniff the air with her little rococo nose and make a disgusted face that scared me half to death. Suddenly she noticed the strip of tasajo and asked:

“What is this shit?”

“It’s tasajo, madame.”

She stared at me.

I explained that it was a very healthy food, rich in protein, and also very affordable. And that although in Uruguay it was still considered a staple of the lower classes, I had no doubt that Europeans would adopt it into their diets as soon as they discovered its marvelous properties.

Madame Lagarde screamed something I didn’t understand, and suddenly a very stiff servant appeared, picked up the strip of tasajo with his spotless white gloves, and carried it away, holding it at arm’s length as far as he could. When he was gone, Madame sprayed the whole room with perfume, lifted her five petticoats, and raped me about seven times. I entrusted my manhood to God and, with each of Madame’s thrusts, thought of Saturnina—thus keeping myself upright.

In the end, she lay down next to me in the bed, and before she fell asleep I asked if she could arrange an audience with King Louis Philippe. I needed to convince him to buy Uruguayan tasajo.

She didn’t reply and started snoring.

South Dock

Oh, oh, oh, my world was coming to an end and the ship was heading into nothingness. Leaning against the railing, I watched the waves crash against the hull and listened to their unsettling clos clos. The sun was very low, and that was the direction I was headed. I clutched the guitar wedged between my legs. “You're all I have left,” I thought. That Sentchordi, patched up with cement, was the last piece of Montevideo I was taking with me.

The air was thick with salt. The seagulls were no longer following us. They had stayed behind, gliding near the harbor entrance. Every now and then the ship let out a blast of its horn, and the roar made my hair stand on end. “This must be maturity,” I reflected. Cutting ties, breaking away from family, from friends, from all that was shared, and venturing into the unknown with nothing in hand. Well, not nothing nothing. I had my guitar, two pairs of underwear, two pairs of socks, two shirts, and a sweater.

When we set sail, some crazies had unrolled a banner that said Bordaberry, shove Uruguay up your ass. Let him do it. Let him do whatever he wanted with it. But there was another Uruguay, not Bordaberry’s. One that was mine. The Uruguay of family feasts in Parque del Plata where, between sausages and white wine, the communist cousins accused the conservative uncles of being traitors, and they, in turn, accused the cousins of being sold out to Moscow’s gold—and in the end, everyone would sing a murga chorus and old Don Carlos, drunk, would recite a poem by Serafín J. García.

I went down to my third-class cabin. A guy was sitting on the lower bunk.

“Good evening,” I said.

“You don’t mind sleeping on the top bunk, do you?” he asked.

“No. Not at all,” I replied.

“It's the rheumatism, you know? If I climb up there, my bones complain and creak.”

“Yeah. No problem.”

“I really like your city, man. Green and peaceful. You Uruguayans know how to live.”

“How do you know I’m Uruguayan?” I inquired.

He looked at me like I’d just asked the dumbest question ever.

“Your accent,” he replied.

I nodded like, yeah, right, of course. But I kept thinking about it. I hadn’t known until that moment that we Uruguayans had an accent. The ones with accents were always the others—Argentinians, Chileans, Spaniards, etc.

South Dock. It was raining. And me, without an umbrella. I walked to the Almirante Brown Avenue and caught a bus heading downtown. In Plaza de Mayo, Perón had appeared on the balcony of the Casa Rosada and a huge crowd was cheering him with banners and drums. I skirted the plaza along the cathedral side and made my way to San Martín Street. I felt tiny, microscopic. Buenos Aires was like a film projected on a massive screen, and I was a spectator sunk in his seat, mouth full of fear. I couldn’t enter that movie. I could watch it, but I couldn’t touch it.

I stopped at San Martín Street and Corrientes Avenue. Soaked. With my Uruguayan ID, my Sentchordi, and my plaid McGregor shirt. It was all too much. Too many people, too many cars, too much noise. I pressed myself against the buildings and made it to the corner of Lavalle Street, where I stepped into a bar and had a beer while trying to sort out my thoughts.

When I left the bar, I walked to number 523 on San Martín Street and went in through the building’s entrance. I climbed a staircase that spiraled around a wrought-iron elevator. After about ten steps, I sat down and started crying. I don’t know how long I cried. It could’ve been three days or a century. I don’t remember. All I know is that when I wiped away my tears, I stood up, cursed myself out good and proper, and kept climbing. When I reached the first floor, I saw a door with a little sign that said boarding house. I took a deep breath and rang the bell.

Sundays

I wish every day were Sunday. That’s the day of the week when the ogre takes the day off, disappears from the scene, and makes way for a man in a robe who sings Gardel tangos while shaving and smells like French cologne. A man who doesn’t curse at you or pull your hair, but instead grabs you for a playful sparring match in the kitchen, throwing uppercuts and right hooks that you dodge while pretending to be Dogomar. And if you’re lucky, you knock him out with a jab to the jaw and he falls theatrically, fainting right onto the cat’s milk saucer. Then you trot around the table, acknowledging the cheers of the spectators. A man who winds up the gramophone, and when Al Jolson’s voice begins to play, gets down on his knees and mimics the Southern black singers, placing both hands over his heart. A man who sits you on his lap and goes over the arithmetic problems that are so hard for you, the ones you can’t solve on your own because sometimes your brain flies off after a passing fly. A man who tells you to grab your jacket and takes you for a walk on the hill, and you race down the slope of the old fort with him and don’t feel scared of falling and smashing yourself against the low wall down below because you know his strong, hairy arms will catch you if you trip. The man loves you, and you call him dad without any shame and sometimes even with a bit of pride. Today all that is possible because it’s Sunday and the ogre isn’t here. Today there’s this man — a clumsy boxer and fox trot singer who smells like cologne and lowers his defenses so you can step into his world without him unleashing the guard dogs.

The Sunday man meets with other men at the bocce club, and suddenly you exist because between shots of grappa he loudly proclaims that you got top marks at school, and the other men slap him on the back and say, “Congrats on your smart kid.” You feel puffed up like a balloon, and your face turns red with embarrassment. Then they pat you too, and you wobble and bang your head on the counter. The Sunday man doesn’t ignore you. He brings you into the exclusive circle of the grappa-drinking, white-sneaker-wearing men, lets you throw the jack and make the first toss, and then lifts you up and places you on the railing where you stay in bliss, happier than who knows what, lost in a limbo that smells like booze and grilled meat. The man walks past you, winks, and bends down to patch a hole in the court floor with cement. Then he heads toward the planks at the back, rests one foot on them, raises a bocce ball to eye level, focuses on the distance and target with a serious look, takes three long jumps forward, and releases the ball in an underhand arc. The curve is beautiful. The gray ball hits the red one, the red one flies off, and the gray ball now sits where the other was, plump and proudly round. Cheers and applause erupt, and the man walks over to where you are and hugs you, and you feel like the son of the world champion.

The Sunday afternoon slowly loses its sky and light, and the man gives way to the Monday ogre. A crust begins to grow on his hands, feet, and face, and his voice turns harsh and rough. He speaks little and in short bursts, and he starts to stop seeing you — and you start to think you no longer exist. He slumps in front of the TV, frowns, lights a cigarette, and dozes off halfway. You back away, trying not to make a sound because you can sense the ogre might wake up at any moment and hurt you with a bite or a word. You tiptoe away and start counting the days left until next Sunday. You know it’s seven, but you count them anyway.

The can of tomato sauce

It was the first time I ever won anything. I couldn’t believe it. A can of tomato sauce. I walked out of that fair like Napoleon under the Arc de Triomphe, with my trophy in hand and ready to be swarmed by radio and TV journalists. But instead, I was swarmed by my Aunt Blanca, who said:

“Give me that.”

She yanked the can out of my hands and shoved it into her green handbag. I protested that the can was mine, that it wasn’t fair for her to take it, that the man with the red mustache had given it to me when I knocked down all five little monkeys in one shot, that the ball I threw had been phenomenal, and even Margarita had clapped.

We took the bus home. I was squashed in the seat by Aunt Blanca’s hefty arms, which moved up and down as if filled with water. She had the green handbag on her lap, and inside it was the trophy that had been stolen from me. I closed my eyes and started to relive the sublime moment when I’d aimed at the five little monkeys. I must confess—I cheated. I had already tried to knock them down like five hundred times, and the ball hit everything except the monkeys. One hit the man with the red mustache on the head, another hit a pole of the tent, one landed on the shelf with the colored fish, and another hit a table leg. The monkeys fell, but the man with the red mustache said it didn’t count. Aunt Blanca had grown impatient.

“Abelardito, are you going to spend all day throwing at those monkeys?”

That’s when I decided to cheat. I grabbed the ball with my useless hand—my left—and, tired of aiming at the monkeys only to miss every time, I deliberately aimed wrong. I aimed at the balls of the man with the red mustache. If I couldn’t knock down any monkeys, at least I could knock down that guy. I threw. I saw the monkeys scattered on the floor and the man with the red mustache approaching triumphantly, wearing a smile that was hard to believe. He handed me the can of tomato sauce. What a moment of glory, mama mia. I heard Margarita clapping. She didn’t throw herself at me with kisses only because she couldn’t—her mother had her by the hand.

When we got off at Piccioli Street and Arévalo Street, the dogs came out to greet us. I didn’t see Gualberto anywhere. I panicked.

“Where’s Gualberto? Where is Gualberto?”

Gualberto was the chicken who always hung out with the dogs.

Aunt Blanca didn’t answer me, and I got this pain in my stomach that didn’t bode well.

The old man had set the table with the white tablecloth that only came out on holidays. I noticed a bottle of wine with a label in French. He had put out the silver-topped salt shaker. He had also used the plates with the golden rims, the ones normally kept in the cabinet. And no sign of Gualberto. It didn’t take me long to understand how terrible the situation was. A murder had been committed in my house. We were going to have chicken stew for dinner, but I wasn’t about to eat the corpse of one of my best friends.

I ran to the kitchen just in time to see Aunt Blanca pull my trophy out of the green handbag and hand it to my mother, who was stirring the pot and singing “For God’s sake don’t wear that blue blouse again.”

“He won it at the fair,” Aunt Blanca explained.

I thought my mother was going to say, How great, how nice, what a little champ my son is, but instead she kept stirring and asked:

“That’s all he won? A can of tomato sauce?”

Stung by resentment, I snatched the can out of her hands. I wasn’t going to let her use my tomato sauce to season Gualberto’s stew. I ran out to the street and sat down on the curb.

I looked up when I heard a clucking sound coming from the rooftop.

“Gualberto!” I shouted when I saw him.

What a relief! He was still alive!

Gualberto clucked back. I could tell he wanted to come down but didn’t know how. He walked back and forth along the edge of the roof. I decided to help him. I aimed at him with the can of tomato sauce. I threw it. Gualberto saw it coming, leapt, took off in a loud, flapping panic, and then landed right at my feet. He immediately started pecking at the grass as if nothing had happened.

“I didn’t know you could fly, champ!” I said.

He looked at me with that way of his—moving his head nonstop, like a little machine. I understood his reply. He said:

“And I didn’t know you had such good aim!”

I didn’t confess to him that I had cheated at the fair.

The debut

It had taken me two months, but I’d done it. Roberto had taught it to me in D major, but if I sang it in D, my voice came out sounding like Julio Jaramillo desperately needing a bathroom. And if I sang it an octave lower, it was darker than that Russian baritone from the Volga, Volga. So that’s when I put to use the brilliant cunning God had granted me at birth and transposed it to G. And that’s when I started to shine.

First, I made sure Ana, the neighbor from the first floor, was in her room to hear me. Her window faced the patio we shared, and her underwear and bedsheets hung above my underwear and shirts. When I spotted her faint silhouette behind the glass, I launched into so much time we enjoyed this love...

It had been two months of grinding and grinding. Starting out by mimicking Lucho Gatica and Rosamel Araya, gradually transitioning to a personal, well-defined style. I would study myself in the mirror, focusing carefully on the movement of my lips so they’d look convincingly sensual without crossing into sleazy. Tilting my head just the right way while declaring I don’t pretend to own you... and letting a lock of hair fall casually over my forehead—casually but not messily. Suddenly panting, as if I’d just run two laps around a track, then shifting pose dramatically to sing the next verse, half-angled toward the audience. Ana, from her window, applauded every version and then sent me her verdict through the hanging laundry. At first all she said was yes, but no. Gradually I started hearing “mmm, that’s better,” or “too whiny,” or “too slow,” until six weeks in she finally said “it’s getting good, I’m starting to like it,” and then that definitive “awesome, man, awesome,” which gave me wings and made me feel like stardom was just around the corner.

That very Sunday morning, I made the decision that would change my life forever. I was going into show business.

I had a light breakfast, dressed like a bolero singer, grabbed my guitar, hopped on my bike and headed to Channel 5. I walked in and saw a counter with a guy behind it talking on the phone. When he finished, he asked me what I wanted. Since I didn’t answer, he asked again.

“I... I sing,” I said. “Boleros. Sabor a mí.”

“You sing?”

There was a silence.

“Yes.”

“And you are...?”

“A singer. I sing.”

“Your name. What’s your name?”

I had seen that question coming. I wasn’t some amateur. I was prepared for the road to success. Nothing and no one was going to catch me off guard.

“Trópico Palmeras,” I told him.

“One moment. Please wait over there.”

He pointed to a couch on the other side of the room. The man made another phone call. Then a woman showed up. As they spoke, they kept shooting me side glances. Finally the woman came over and told me that Musical Appetizer would be starting in twenty minutes and that Pampa González was sick and couldn’t perform. Would I be willing to replace him?

I stared at her.

“Would you be willing to replace him?” she repeated.

I swallowed hard, and even though my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth, I managed a yes that sounded like a mouse hiccuping.

“What experience do you have?” she asked.

I felt like I had to go to the bathroom. But I had to say something. She was waiting.

“Two months,” I said.

She looked at me, puzzled. Then moved her eyes from side to side like my cousin Miguelito did when he was trying to work out fractions.

“So you’re pretty new to the métier,” she said after a pause.

“New to the what?”

Another pause. More eye movement. That woman made me uncomfortable.

“To the trade.”

The trade?, I thought. That’s what they called what prostitutes did. But I wasn’t about to let that subtle insult get to me. I put on that tough-guy face Javier Solís had when he sang don’t threaten me, don’t threaten me... and asked:

“May I make a quick phone call?”

“Of course.”

“And I’ll also need a bit of a set,” I added, trying to swallow the ten hectoliters of saliva that had gathered in my mouth.

In twenty minutes, following my instructions, the stagehands improvised a window between the curtains. Ana sat behind it, having agreed to come in a cab at my desperate request. I stood beneath some white sheets hanging from the studio ceiling. Now I was in my element. I tried to focus. The host spoke.

“Dear viewers, unfortunately Pampa González won’t be performing on our show this afternoon. But luckily, we have Trópico Palmeras with us, who will delight us with the beautiful bolero Sabor a Mí.”

The camera did a shot of Ana, slowly moved between the hanging sheets, and finally landed on me. I played an arpeggiated intro in C major, which delicately shifted to C minor and ended on a diminished G. It sounded like music from heaven. Absolutely beautiful.

At that very moment, in his house, my cousin Miguelito was doing homework. He was losing the battle against fractions. Discouraged and on the verge of giving up, he lifted his eyes from his notebook and saw me on TV. His mouth dropped open. My uncle, who was about to leave for the Maroñas racetrack and was packing his binoculars, saw me too. My aunt groaned:

“Oh dear, poor thing. They’re going to tease him so bad this afternoon in the neighborhood. I don’t even want to imagine it.”

Miguelito shut his mouth again. He hummed, there just like here, on your lips you’ll carry the taste of me..., and started giggling like an idiot. It lasted about ten minutes. Then he puffed out his chest, took a deep breath, sharpened his pencil, and attacked every variable and greatest common denominator in sight. “If my cousin's got the guts so do I”, he thought. That year, he got top marks in math.

The doctor

It’s almost eight, which means he’ll be here any minute. My Raúl is dying and there’s nothing anyone can do. But the doctor still comes every single day at this hour. He was the one who detected the tumor in his head and the one who said everything would be fine.
Even though the MRI had shown that the cancer was inoperable and that he had three months left to live.
“Everything will be fine,” he kept repeating like a mantra.
And Raúl believed him, and I believed him, and even he himself believed it. Since then, Raúl started to gradually lose strength, and now he barely gets out of bed. He spends the whole day sleeping, and when he’s not asleep, he just stares at the ceiling in silence, which is pretty much the same thing.
Funny thing is, he’s not in pain. He doesn’t suffer. Sometimes I get the feeling he’s happy. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.

The doctor arrives, shakes my hand, and has a round of affection with the dog, during which he wraps him up in the bottom of his raincoat and rolls him around in the hallway. Then he heads upstairs to Raúl’s room. I go with him, carrying the thermos and the mate, and sit in the chair by the window. Raúl barely lifts his left hand in greeting, and the doctor sits at the foot of the bed and taps the blanket as if to respond.
Raúl speaks very softly and very slowly, and the doctor talks back in a baritone voice that’s gentle but makes the floorboards shake, and I don’t want to exaggerate but it also makes the curls in my perm tremble.
Picture Zitarrosa talking about medical histories and pathologies. That’s the vibe.

The doctor takes the stethoscope and thermometer from his briefcase and proceeds to do everything a doctor is supposed to do. I love watching him. It’s like he’s kissing my husband. He, and I, and Raúl, and everyone, we all know it’s a useless and theatrical act, but it’s also an offering of tenderness.
He checks his eyes, taps his elbows and knees, makes him bend his legs, asks if he’s sleeping well, if he has digestive issues, and if he feels dizzy.
Raúl is happy with all the attention, and I see that sardonic little grin of his that used to get on my nerves for twenty-five years but now I adore like crazy, because it means my husband is still my husband, despite the damn carcinoma.

Then, of course, they move on to talking about football. Sometimes you can’t even make out what Raúl is saying, but the doctor listens intently, and after a long debate they come to the conclusion—if I understood correctly—that Uruguay lost the last World Cup because they didn’t call up Recoba or Forlán.
“You have to play with the old guys. We used to be champions because we played nice and slow. We drove them crazy. They ran. We didn’t. We just kept it short and tidy. Think about it, Raúl—those ’50 jerseys they have at the Amsterdam tribune museum aren’t even sweaty,” says the doctor.

My Raúl laughs. He loves the nonsense. I laugh too, and that laughter does us both good. It’s a slightly over-the-top laugh because tears are running down my cheeks and I can’t stop.

The doctor gets up, runs his hand over my husband’s head with that fatherly gesture you’d use on a child, and before leaving, he says:
“Everything will be fine.”

The hydrangeas

You go out, take the trash to the curb, and stop to chat for a while with Marieke, who’s seven months pregnant. You can tell it’s hard for her to stand. She spreads her legs slightly, rests her right palm on the small of her back, and uses the other hand to shield her eyes from the sun. She tells you she doesn’t want to know if the baby is a girl or a boy. Well, it’s not that she doesn’t want to know. It’s that her husband doesn’t.

“He likes surprises,” she explains.

You wish her the best of luck with the birth and tell her you hope she enjoys the uncertainty. That after all, that was the normal state couples lived in before ultrasound came along.

You say goodbye to the soon-to-be mother and as you turn around, you bump into Thomas, who’s come out into the garden with his pruning shears and asks you to admire his hydrangeas, to which you respond yes, they’re beautiful. After a short silence, interrupted only by the snip-snip of the shears as Thomas adjusts them, you say something like, “Lovely weather, isn’t it?” and Thomas replies that rain is in the forecast for the afternoon. You take another appreciative glance at the hydrangeas and just when you're about to move on, little Willem wedges the front wheel of his tricycle into your feet and you feel like killing him, but instead you laugh and pretend to run so he won’t crash into you again, and he speeds up behind you, chasing you all the way to the Temminks’ garden. You fake fear and breathlessness, and while you listen to Willem’s laughter, you see Sarita approaching with her eyes fixed on her smartphone, so you step aside to avoid being mowed down. You say good morning as she passes, and she responds with a faint nod — wouldn’t want her earbud to fall out.

You go back inside, open your laptop, and look up photos on Facebook from your nephew’s birthday in Canada. Then, after frying yourself an egg and drinking a beer, you sit down on the couch and wonder, what the hell do I do now? It’s rough living in a first-world country that gives you a thousand euros a month for doing nothing, that subsidizes your rent and your health insurance. You wouldn’t wish that on anyone. You suffer, missing out on the beautiful things that make life worth living. Like chasing a rabbit with such constant hunger that your vision blurs. Or living with the police on your heels because you break laws someone else invented. Or wandering from town to town because bombs are falling from the sky or bullets are being sprayed from rooftops.

You grab the remote and press the little green button until your finger goes numb, and then you half-doze off on the couch while a thin string of drool slips from your mouth. You wake up ten minutes later with a jolt because the garbage truck passed by making a hell of a racket, and so you go outside to collect the empty bin. You reenter the house through the kitchen door, look at the coffee cups perfectly lined up on the shelf, but you decide the space between the second and third ones could be better, so you fix that disaster. You put your hands in your pockets and take them out again, yawn for the umpteenth time, and suddenly, in a burst of impulse, you decide that a human being has to have some sorrow, at least one, and that you need to find one, and that it must be done urgently because things can’t go on like this. You’re on the brink of despair and call the suicide hotline. You don’t really want to kill yourself. What you want is for someone to tell you where to find a sorrow. But you hang up because you feel ridiculous. Then you frantically search for those nerve pills that were once prescribed to you when Antonio Prieto’s voice kept looping in your head all day singing blanca y radiante va la novia. You finally find them, pop two at once, gasp, press your hands against the stove, and start to cry.

The metaphor

The roof was gabled, supported by wooden beams. Through the two small windows, soft, silent snow was falling. It was getting dark in Alkmaar, and I took off my shoes and set them on the radiator. Liesbeth came into the room, gave me a kiss that knocked me out, and walked back out. I started reading what I had written the night before at the Stapper. I had gone to see a jazz trio, and after three rounds of rum and Coltrane, inspiration hit me and I began scribbling my inventions in the margins of a newspaper. I was surprised when I saw that what I had written was in Dutch. I hadn’t realized that. I must’ve been drunker than I thought.

Liesbeth came back into the room, and just as she opened her mouth to say something, we heard Remco’s voice from downstairs asking where the basil was.

“It’s on the spice shelf,” Liesbeth answered, while squeezing my crotch.

“There’s none there. I’m going to the store. I can’t make pesto without basil,” Remco called back.

“Go ahead,” said Liesbeth as she turned her back to me and pulled down her pants.

Twenty minutes later Remco returned with the basil, and Liesbeth stopped being a back rising and falling. She turned around and looked at me with those eyes that crushed my heart. She licked my cheek, rubbed her nose against mine, grabbed me by the neck with both hands, and just when I was expecting something beautiful and romantic from her lips, all she said was that she was going downstairs to make the salad.

I massaged my feet and put my shoes back on. I threw the newspaper in the trash when I realized that what I had written at the Stapper didn’t make any sense. One shouldn’t write while drunk.

During dinner, Remco asked me where I was heading after Alkmaar.

“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

“Aren’t you afraid of the unknown?”

“I love the unknown. What I’m afraid of is the known.”

Remco froze with a gnocchi hovering in front of his mouth, as if trying to gauge the depth of my wise and strange words. In truth, that nonsense was a rehearsed answer. I had realized a while ago that people thought vagabonds like me had some sort of philosophical superiority, that we were free and elevated spirits. Either that or we were drunks, addicts, bums, and lunatics. In any case, we were seen as weird people, different, from another planet. But the only real truth was that vagabonds were just a bunch of envious people. We envied precisely those who had a home, a family, and a job.

“If you’re afraid of the known, then you’re afraid of us,” said Liesbeth with a fork in her mouth and one eye closed, supposedly a wink.

“What I meant was, it was a, it was a—how do you say it?” I said, waving my hand in the air like I was unscrewing something. Sometimes the Dutch language felt like an uphill battle.

“Metafoor,” said Remco.

“That.”

“Come on, say ‘metafoor’, do it,” Liesbeth asked.

“Metafoor,” I said.

Liesbeth turned to Remco and let out a giggle—it wasn’t clear whether it was tender or nervous.

“Isn’t his accent adorable?”

Remco swallowed the gnocchi, took a sip of wine, and asked us if we didn’t think the pesto had turned out too salty.

The noodles

Celoso entered the bend a full length and a half ahead of the rest of the pack. Óscar Domínguez pulled out the whip and started going at it. When they reached the general stands, my dad put a foot on the railing and started yelling:
"Go, Celoso, go on, Celoso, go on!"

Out wide—really, really wide—and like two kilometers away, I spotted Remero. Number seven was coming down the middle of the track with Fajardo sitting still as if he were on a warm-up lap. It was two different races. One on the inside rail, with Celoso in the lead, and another with Remero surging forward along the edge of the universe. By the time they got to the Folle Illa stands, Domínguez still had a neck-length lead. Eight horses were coming at him in a whirlwind of sand, but Óscar was guiding the chestnut with a steady hand. I looked at Fajardo. He’d rested one cheek on Remero’s neck. It looked like he was whispering to him. From the general stands, I could see the spotless white backside of the jockey and the red tail of the horse brushing against its flanks.

In front of the members’ box, the horses disappeared into a cloud of dust. My dad was shouting himself hoarse:
"Go, Celoso, go on, Celoso, go on!"

Remero galloped alone along the edge of the track. Fajardo still upright, riding the horse cheek to cheek. Charging. He was coming with everything.

They crossed the finish line and the roar of Maroñas suddenly turned into a funereal silence. Every turf fan’s eyes were glued to the scoreboard. My dad was nervously stroking a huge stack of tickets. They were all win bets, and all had Celoso’s number one. I knew then that the entire Paredes family was counting on Celoso. If Celoso won, we’d have a barbecue the next day for lunch, my mom could get the iron fixed, and my little sister could buy her Caran d’Ache colored pencils. I’d get a frankfurter with mustard out of it, too. If Celoso lost, there’d be yelling from my mom, and she’d forbid my dad for the hundredth time from going to Maroñas to throw away money.

Green flag. There was an ooohhh that began in the official box, swept through the mid-stands, and reached the general seating. Then came the drunken voices of the turf experts.

"I’m on number one, a hundred pesos, I’m on number one, a hundred pesos!"
"I’m on three, I’m on three!"

A few minutes later, off in the distance, with majestic and theatrical slowness, the winning number rose. Number seven. Remero.

My mom served the noodles.
"Noodles just like that?" my dad asked.
My mom shot him a deadly look.
"Don’t we have a bit of butter for them?" he asked again.
Silence.
"Grated cheese? Tomato sauce?"
"It’s a new dish. Doesn’t need anything. It’s called Celoso-style noodles," my mom said.

My dad stood up from the table, furious, and looked for something to throw at the wall. If Celoso had won, there would’ve been something to throw—a Coke bottle, a pot of boiled potatoes, a loaf of bread. But there was nothing. My little sister handed him her plate.
"Here, Daddy," she said. "You can break it. It’s already kind of cracked anyway."

My dad turned around, went into the bedroom, and slammed the door.

I stood up for him.
"You have to understand him, Mom," I said. "Dad’s clueless. He doesn’t know anything about races. I do."

And I showed her the five win tickets I had placed on Remero.
"With what money did you bet?"
"With the money the tooth fairy left me."
"And why did you choose Remero?"
"The window for number seven was the only one with no line."

The next day I went downtown with my mom and my little sister. At the Jockey Club on Plaza Libertad, we cashed the five win tickets. At Mosca, we picked out some deluxe Caran d’Ache pencils for my sister, and my mom got herself a Philips iron from Casa Sapelli, one of those new models that, thanks to modern technology, lets you iron and dance the twist at the same time.

At dinner we had pickled tongue, Russian salad, and noodles with stew. My dad tasted them and before he could say a word, my mom said:
"Do you like them? They’re Remero-style noodles."

The notebook

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb... Oh God, here we go again, I’m such a pervert. I say womb and I immediately picture a bellybutton and a couple little hairs just below, where the panties start. What a sinner I am, it’s hopeless, I can’t be forgiven by God or anyone. I deserve the fires of hell.

All right, starting over. When I get to the word womb, I’ll think about Artigas’ nose—nothing erotic about that—or Grandma’s baked apples, or Ubiñas’ football boots, or the bus conductor on the 122 line, the one with the disgusting toothpick and three-day beard. I’ll think about anything, anything at all, to avoid thinking about Mary’s womb with a bellybutton and the start of some tiny hairs. My God, I’m beyond saving.

I close my eyes, rest my elbows on the bed, lift my aching right knee a bit and shift the left one. I start again: Hail Mary, full of grace… and bam—I get to the word womb and what do I see? Ursula Andress’s gleaming tummy emerging from the Caribbean Sea, with that navel that drives James Bond wild. So I shake my head to banish that image, and another pops up—another womb, this time Doris Day’s, with her yellow bikini and a bellybutton singing Que será, será, whatever will be, will be.
Dear God, how can someone be such a sinner? I try to focus back on the prayer and curse myself out. I tell myself: come on, man, you’re praying to the mother of God, show a little respect, for Christ’s sake.

I lay my head down on the bedspread and let two tears fall, full of terror and shame. I’m headed straight to hell. Which, as everyone knows, is crawling with bellybuttons and people as awful as me.
But still, there’s something inside me, some scrap of pious, well-meaning little boy that tells me to try again, to pray to the Virgin one more time and not to think about that belly with a navel when I say the word womb.

Sleep starts creeping in, my knees really hurt now and my feet are cold. My mom will come into my room any minute to check that I’m properly tucked in.
Come on, champ, you have to do this. Say that damn prayer to the fucking Virgin.
Wait—what am I saying? How could I call her that? I’m digging my own grave. A deep one. A straight tunnel to hell.
All right, here we go again. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit—fruit? A banana? A tangerine? A peach?
There’s no saving me. I’m a degenerate. A sinner. Imagining bananas and tangerines in the Virgin’s womb. I hate myself. I loathe myself. I feel like giving up, walking over to my mother’s bedroom and telling her: don’t bother checking on me, I’m disgusting. Call Father Santoro and tell him I’ve gone to hell. Tell him not to count on me for Sunday Mass. He should find a real altar boy.

But I don’t do any of that. Instead, I come up with something else. A brilliant idea that just might save my soul. I’m going to force myself to say five Hail Marys as punishment every time one of those filthy thoughts sneaks in when I get to the word womb. And I’ll keep track of them in this notebook, tallying the Hail Marys I owe.

"Are you okay, honey? Did you rest? Did you sleep well last night?" my mom asks while spreading butter on a piece of bread.
I look at her and say nothing.
"Last night you fell asleep kneeling by the bed with your head on the bedspread. I was the one who tucked you in. Don’t you remember?"
"No."
Then I pull the notebook out of my pocket. I read: I owe 508 Hail Marys.

A month later, the number has risen to 62,515. Either I stop thinking about wombs or I become an atheist.

That summer I went to Buceo Beach and walked over to Irma, my thirteen-year-old neighbor. She was lying on her back, sunbathing. I placed a banana on her belly. Irma didn’t say a word and I smiled like a saint.
"Blessed is the fruit of thy womb," I said.
"I'm full of grace," she replied.
I dug a hole in the sand, pulled out the notebook I had hidden under my shorts, and buried it.

Well done, William

It was such a pushing and shoving match in front of the Amsterdam ticket office, you wouldn’t believe it. My dad held me by the shoulders and I ended up in line with my face squashed against the backside of the guy in front of me. I turned my head to the side to avoid awkward rubbing, but then the line moved up a bit and once again my nose was stuck in that stranger’s rear. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. After an eternity, I was finally facing not a pair of pants but a brick wall, and I heard my dad’s voice way up high, talking to a little barred window:

“One adult and one child.”

When we got out of that suffocating bean-squeezer of a place, we still had to dodge the horses of the military police. Those four-legged beasts never stood still. They’d lift one leg, then the other, and nod their heads up and down. Every now and then they’d make a sort of neigh, but it wasn’t really a neigh—it sounded more like a sneeze. One dark bay started doing all of that at once, and I ran and slipped right underneath him. His back was broad, but his ribs were showing. On the other side of the horse, my dad was waiting with a peeled mandarin. He handed it to me, I took a segment, popped it in my mouth, he grabbed my hand again, and we kept walking toward the entrance where Walter and Tolo were waiting for us.

The match started, and Walter and Tolo kept jumping up and shouting:

“Well done, William!”

Other times, it was the whole crowd—old folks, young folks, men and women—who chanted:

“Well done, William!”

This William guy was, apparently, the Gary Cooper of football, the Tarzan of the pitch, the Lone Ranger of the stadium. But I couldn’t pick him out among so many players. From way up in the stands, that far from the field, they all looked the same to me. The only thing I was sure of was that the ones in yellow and black were from Peñarol. The rest were the bad guys. But beyond that, I was completely lost. I didn’t understand a thing.

At the end of the first half, my dad stood up and bought little cups of Sorocabana coffee for himself, for Walter, and for Tolo. I could get struck by lightning for all he cared. Then he commented on how well William had played, to which Walter and Tolo responded with emphatic nods.

“That William’s a star. With him as left back, no one’s getting a goal past us,” chimed in a chubby guy with a handkerchief tied around his head with four knots.

The woman next to him fiddled with the pearl necklace around her neck and said:

“William is a gift from God.”

For kids my age, condemned to a ninety-centimeter-high field of vision, the Amsterdam stand was a tangled jungle of legs and skirts. But through the foliage, two rows down, I caught a glimpse of a little girl’s face framed by a light blue hood. The girl took her finger out of her mouth, sipped from a straw in a Crush her mother was holding for her, and locked eyes with me. Those eyes were so beautiful, it was hard to believe. At that point in my life, I had never heard of telepathy, but I understood the message she was sending in no time. The little girl in the light blue hood was telling me she was just as bored as I was because football was lame. Wouldn’t it be way more fun to play tag instead? I didn’t have time to acknowledge the telegram or send back a proper reply, because just then the teams returned to the field and the crowd got all stirred up again.

While the players hopped around impatiently and everyone was waiting for the match to restart, I got over the whole coffee thing and turned to my dad.

“Dad.”

He didn’t answer. He lit a cigarette and blew out a puff of smoke.

“Dad.”

Nothing.

This time I tried raising my voice.

“Dad!”

My dad turned his head and looked at me—but he didn’t really look at me.

“Which one of the players is William?” I asked, tugging on his shirt sleeve.

“Huh?” my dad replied, eyes fixed on the field.

“I said, which one of the players is William?”

“Yes, buddy, yes.”

“Yes what?”

All I got in return was a pat on the head.

“Which one of the players is William?”

“Yes.”

I leaned my elbows on my knees and held my head in my hands.

Without looking at him, I asked:

“Dad, are you an idiot?”

“Yes.”

“Are your underpants full of poop?”

“Yes.”

I figured he wasn’t listening to me, so I decided to identify William on my own. I carefully scanned the field and quickly noticed that among all the maniacs chasing the ball, there was one guy who was different. He was shorter, rounder, dressed all in black, and had a whistle hanging from his chest. He was the only one on the field with a whistle. That was it—it had to be him. Who else could it be? So I made up my mind not to lose sight of him and to enjoy his feats too. And when that little black dot with legs started to run, I stood up and shouted:

“Well done, William!”

To my surprise, Walter and Tolo looked at me with worried faces and then glanced over at my dad. My dad said to me:

“Sit down.”

Suddenly there was a big scuffle in the penalty area. The players had forgotten about the ball and were shoving each other around. Some fell down, got up, and ran after someone else. It looked like recess at Brasil School. And my hero, the great William, came running, threw himself into the chaos, started scolding everyone, and restored order. I jumped to my feet and shouted euphorically:

“Well done, William!”

My dad grabbed me by the arm and made me sit down again. He looked me in the eye and frowned. He placed his hand on my forehead to check if I had a fever.

“Maybe that mandarin didn’t sit well with you,” he said.

At that moment, two rows down, the little girl in the blue hood stood up and shouted:

“Well done, William!”

And sat back down.

So I got up in turn and shouted:

“Well done, William!”

And sat down.

And we kept going like that five, eight, or five hundred times, taking turns shouting Well done, William! I’d sit down, she’d stand up, she’d sit down, I’d stand up. It was a seesaw. Her mom and my dad looked at each other and shrugged. They only started to worry when other kids joined in the game, and in the end, it was half the kids in the Amsterdam stand shouting Well done, William! while standing up and sitting back down.

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