Three days later I’m at the entrance to the zoo asking for the office and a girl dressed as an explorer points out a row of windows. Iris and Simón wait outside. I walk up, only to be sent in another direction: Human resources is the second door. I knock. A boy with freckles appears and tells me I have to go to the website and upload my CV. That’s what he says, your CV. Without really saying goodbye, he sees me off with a quick smile as he glances back into his office, beyond my line of vision. He gives the impression that something’s burning.
On the way out, a cross between Charlie Chaplin and a mime artist insists on giving Simón a balloon. Iris moves away, she doesn’t want to get involved. Assuming that he doesn’t talk, I explain with gestures that I have no money and he, exaggerating a tic at the corner of his mouth, and also in his eye, which keeps winking as if there’s a fly in it, says that it doesn’t matter. Thanks, I say, silently looking at the strongly outlined eyes. I can’t work out whether it’s a man or a woman. Iris becomes serious, frowning, and wants to know how I got on. I tell her what they told me and she touches her forehead. Ah, yes, she says, apologising for not having remembered. We say goodbye, she goes into work, we don’t really know where to go.
We make a bad job of crossing the road, too far from the pedestrian crossing, and walk into a fenced-off plaza of red stone chippings and squat bushes. I sit down on a stone bench. Nearby, two teenagers are kissing like amoebas. He is leaning over, embracing her, simultaneously taking care not to spill a tall bottle of Coca-Cola. Laughter and more kisses. Opposite, on either side, all around, is a vast scale model of the city. This landscape that is still incredible to me. I struggle to conceive of so many people, so many cars, so much everything. And yet, quickly, very quickly, I allow myself to surrender to the evidence.
Now, in front of me, a sequence of events brings me back to earth: Simón, running with the balloon, lets go of it and, wanting to get it back, trips and falls flat on his face in the shards of stone. First he looks at me, then he cries. I don’t go to his aid. He stands up by himself and comes towards me covered entirely in orange. He touches his knee, it hurts. A long scratch, superficial but long. The kind that looks impressive. And it’s impossible to tell where it ends because the red of the skinned knee mingles with the colour of the clay. I spit on my palm and pass it over the wound. Ow, ow, he jumps, it stings. It’s nothing, I say, and he curls up at my feet drawing in his legs like a wet dog.
At the bottom of the sky, or what appears to be the bottom of the sky, two flat, thin clouds are racing like greyhounds. The one on top is a few body-lengths ahead of the other, which is advancing fast and, because of the madness of the winds, in less than a minute gathers enough speed to overtake. I straighten my neck and am met with the figure of a horseman on a pedestal in the centre of the plaza. Hat and sword, galloping, a hero’s pose. But who? Belgrano, Urquiza, Güemes, San Martín run through my head, but no, this man doesn’t fit with any of the Argentinian greats of my memory, this one definitely escapes me. Impelled by intrigue, I walk the ten steps to a plaque that will enlighten me: Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882). Another inscription engraved on bronze helps me picture him better:
COMBATTEREMO PER L’INDEPENDENZA,
LA PACE E LA LIBERTÀ DEI POPOLI.
Simón forgets his injury and is now entertaining himself throwing stones at the pigeons. From despair to euphoria, with nothing in between. A plaza warden, sitting on a plastic stool next to her cabin, watches us but can’t decide whether to intervene. Perhaps she’s tired and hopes I’ll do something instead of her. I don’t see the danger: the pigeons take flight and save themselves, the projectiles are landing a long way from anyone else. In the distance, the statue gives such a sense of propulsion that it seems about to gallop off into the air at any moment. Hard and flying. A song enters my head, first as a hum, then with lyrics and everything, I have no idea where it comes from.
Who ever said Garibaldi was dead?
Poom Garibaldi Poom Garibaldi
Who ever said Garibaldi was dead?
Poom Garibaldi ha ha ha
On the way back to the guesthouse we stop at an internet cafe with swing doors like a saloon from a cowboy film. The boy behind the counter, a chubby lad who looks like he’s never seen the sun, is speaking into a mobile phone and doesn’t raise his eyes immediately. Computer? Yes, I say, and he points at the first one against the window. But I don’t move, I need something else, he realises this and hangs up ill-humouredly. I have to do a CV, I say. He bites his lips, not concealing his annoyance, but his altruistic side wins over. You have to pay for CVs, he says, remember that for next time. I’ll give you one I did for a girl yesterday, use it as a template and change the details. I thank him with my best smile. With a magician’s touch, the boy moves his fingers over the keyboard, he opens and closes screens and programs, he mutters, in a trance, until he suddenly interrupts himself. That’s it, now you can enter what you want. Before turning my full attention to the computer, I pause and follow the retreating footsteps of this fat boy in his Anthrax World Tour T-shirt. I manage to read: Melbourne, Liverpool, Dublin, Barcelona. And Simón? Hidden beneath one of the tables, curled into a ball.
The CV belongs to a Nora, ten years younger than me. She has worked as an assistant in various clothes shops, in a supermarket, also as a waitress in El Caracol and as a publicist for Océano publishing house. Her hobbeys, that’s how she spells it: dancing and running. I start with the easy part. I replace Nora’s forename and surname with my own, as well as my ID number and date of birth. I put Iris’s telephone number, which I have written on a piece of paper, and the address of the Fénix. University studies, incomplete, computing and languages, blank. Under work experience I leave the bit about Océano publishing, it sounds good and seems unverifiable. There’s a spell of around three or four years when I did nothing, I didn’t work, study or anything. I invent a rural veterinary hospital in Open Door and give myself the position of assistant for a year and five months.
When I’m almost done, I shake the mouse but the arrow stays still. I ask the chubby boy, who comes back around the counter again. If I may, he says, then types and types but nothing happens. It’s crashed, he tells me, you opened too many windows at once. They opened themselves, I defend myself, and he looks like he doesn’t believe me. And because Simón is impatient, but mainly because the idea of starting from scratch drives me mad, I give up. I’ll come back later, I say out loud. Ok, he says, I’ll try and save it. We eat on the street on the way back to the guesthouse, pork in bread rolls sold to us by a woman sweaty from the grill of her tiny stall under the bridge. Going through my head for the rest of the day: Garibaldi poom, Garibaldi poom.
In the evening, Iris forces me out again. She says I have to hurry and send my CV because there are public holidays coming up that will complicate things. Because Simón is sleeping, she’ll wait for me in the courtyard in case he wakes. I retrace that morning’s steps and reach the cyber cafe. The entrance is now lit by a neon arrow. I’m served by the same boy in the same T-shirt, but he doesn’t recognise me, I have to remind him. The CV, I say. Ah, yes, I managed to save it but I don’t have any machines free up here, I’ll send you down to number thirty-three. So I go downstairs, where a never-ending basement opens out with fifty-odd compartments separated by curtains. I get settled and in the centre of the screen an icon called CV is flashing. Magic.
After a while I realise that I’m caught in crossfire. They’re playing to the death. Initially it sounds as though there are two of them, one on either side of me, but as the minutes pass, the war cries multiply. Occasionally, because they’re wearing earphones, someone will let out an ill-tempered, uncontrolled cry, which makes me shudder. What are you doing, you bastard, you shot me in the back. Stick your machine gun up your arse, dickhead. I go to the zoo’s website and have to upload my CV three times before it’s accepted. I don’t want to go back too soon, so I start browsing. I scroll through an online newspaper. I find out about the death of a singer I’ve never heard of, goals, a multiple collision on the coast road and an archaeological discovery in Palestine that could change the history of Christianity. An advert appears for a car that operates without fuel. I close everything and a page pops up with women in bikinis or underwear, framed by endless little windows. They show their tits, their arses, they blow kisses. Some reveal their faces, others have their eyes pixellated. The crème de la crème, says the slogan. Astrid, Marina, Perla, Natalí, Kiara, Casandra and many more, each with a telephone number below their picture. I click on Mona, facing the camera, posing on all fours, enormous tits, erect, like foam rubber, and nipples like corks, with some kind of Hindu decoration in the background. I watch her for a while, my gaze distant, resting on the furthest point, trying to guess where this girl came from, where she’s going, why her and not me.
Sunday morning. The songs, hallelujahs and applause from the Evangelical church drive me out of bed. I’m beginning to suspect that it shares a wall with my room, I should go up to the hotel roof to find out. Up too early, in order to prevent Simón from waking the rest of the guesthouse with the tears of boredom I can see coming, we go to the plaza. A local plaza that takes up a whole block, surrounded by bars, ice-cream parlours and clothes shops; there are early risers like us and others who are still resisting the idea of going to bed.
We install ourselves in the sandpit. As I push Simón on the swing from the other side of the railings, I see a blond coffee seller, Russian or Romanian like Iris, surrounded by a group of taxi drivers, some in uniform, even wearing ties, others more informal. The guy serves coffee and hands out croissants with the gravity of a civil servant, without raising his eyes, meticulous and slow. During the lulls, he changes round the flasks, the silver for the red one, the red for the green, a mysterious operation. Trade secrets, superstition, who knows. Despite the seriousness, it looks fun. He doesn’t take part in the conversation, as if he only understands the language of requests, which he interprets with emphatic blinks and fulfils with an ostentatious nod. Almost reverential. Nor is he affected by the peals of laughter, not even when two customers have a play fight very close to him. I lift Simón down from the swing so that he can keep playing in the sand with an empty plastic bottle. Without saying anything, I leave, I turn round and approach the coffee seller. I wait my turn and ask for a black coffee. Hearing my voice, the man is surprised, he’s used to dealing with a different clientele, but he hides it by interchanging the flasks and serves me the coffee in a polystyrene cup. Before he hands it to me, he shows me a lid and mimes covering it. No, no, it’s fine like this. It strikes me that this man could be doing anything else, anywhere, but no, he’s here, unhurriedly serving coffee. I move away a few steps and put myself in his place, a coffee girl like Iris, why not. I’d have to find another plaza, another corner. A freelance job where I could bring Simón along without having to ask anyone’s permission. Iris’s cart is still in her room. Although I’m not sure whether she still has the flasks. Coffee, pastries, sandwiches, fruit salad. I talk myself into it.
Back at the hotel, I spot Iris from the corridor, sunbathing in a corner of the courtyard, the only wedge of light that isn’t blocked by the surrounding buildings. I never would have imagined that she was into tanning. I’m about to say: Do you still have the cart? And the flasks? Because I was thinking … But as soon as she opens her eyes and sees us, she waves and gets in ahead of me: I was looking for you for ages, she says. Her expression is radiant, she builds the suspense, she has some news for me. I think about Draco, her boyfriend, who must have returned from Patagonia. I could swear that’s it. No. She says that on Friday the people at the zoo left me a message on her mobile asking me to go in on Monday. I just heard it yesterday, Iris apologises and starts pressing her phone. Aren’t you happy? Yes, I say, and swallow my other idea.
Five minutes before twelve on Monday, the sun as hot as it could be, I knock on the human resources door again. Yes, they’re expecting me but I have to wait for forty minutes in a tiny reception in front of a gigantic map of the zoo’s attractions. A last-minute meeting, the freckly boy explains. Iris has the day off, so she’s stayed with Simón in the hotel. I make the most of the time to familiarise myself with the place a bit, the layout of the cages, the food stands, the toilets. If it occurs to the person conducting the interview to test me, ask me for example what was behind the Hindu temple where the elephants live, I would be able to answer: The Bengal tiger.
When the door finally opens, the person inside, still invisible, says: Come in. I enter a small room with an oblong window close to the ceiling, just like a doctor’s surgery. My first feeling is of having opened a fridge, and it will stay that way the whole time I’m there. A dry, artificial winter. The man is dark, thirty-something, with leathery, porous skin, his hair spiked up with gel like a porcupine. He has a little gold chain round his neck, a cross with no Christ figure, camouflaged against his chest hair. As the minutes pass, I come to realise that his hairstyle is a perfect reduction of the other parts of his body: his small, nervous mouth; fidgety hands, which cross and uncross at least a hundred times during our meeting; strong shoulders, as if he lifts weights between sentences. I’m listening, he begins. I open my mouth without much conviction and say the little I have to say. Nothing spontaneous, I recite with middling fluency what I wrote a couple of days ago on my CV, in more or less the same order. When I mention my years of studying veterinary medicine, he interrupts me, waving his hand in the air like a traffic policeman. We have more than enough vets here, he says.
I list my jobs, real and invented. Yes, yes, he cuts me off again, I’ve already read all that, he says and points at some printed sheets. Tell me something new, something I don’t know about you. I stare at him and try to think of an answer that will satisfy him. Something about me? I repeat. The spiky-haired guy screws up his eyes, lustful or conceited, as if I’ve insulted him, he starts fanning himself with a leaflet and says: Something, anything you like doing. I don’t know, I say quite honestly, and suddenly it comes to me: Dancing and running.
Good, good, he says, letting a smile escape, and he doesn’t know where to put his hands. As if they were superfluous. From then on he strikes me as a strange creature, one that inspires sympathy. I can’t look him in the eye any longer. On the desk is a frame with a family photo: him, the wife and three kids forming a human pyramid on the beach. And a magnetised desk-tidy full of paperclips and a little acrobat.
The thing is that there are two vacancies, one in the reptile house, the other in the children’s play area, he reveals quickly, as if trying to wrap things up. Any preference? I shrug. Well, if you haven’t heard within a week that you’ve definitely been picked, I’d advise you to keeping looking elsewhere. He says all this as he stands up, in a tone that makes no effort to disguise the fact that I have very little chance of being hired. He grips the handle and opens the door before I’ve even got to my feet. He doesn’t say goodbye so much as expel me. At the end of the corridor, before stepping outside, I think I hear a Good luck, very quiet, aborted by the sound of my footsteps; I add the final syllable myself.
The light of the sun at its zenith multiplies everything, endlessly. The asphalt steams; you can smell the soft tar. I cross the avenue and slip down a side street sheltered by enormous banana trees that manage to provide proper shade, a heat repellent. Halfway along the block, flanked by a series of narrow buildings, there’s an Adventist church. Three identical arches, a pretentious tower and a hand-painted sign.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
TODAY ONLY
I turn my head and look the other way. Next to the kerb there’s a skip full of debris and rubbish. Shoe soles, springs, computer carcasses and books. Volumes of encyclopaedias, historical journals, leather spines and marbled bindings, most of them rotted away by humidity. A waste. I grab one at random: The Decameron. Underneath it, a picture of snakes is revealed. The words reptile house, spoken by the greasy man I’ve just seen, echo in my head. The coincidence prompts a quick, self-conspiratorial smile, as if I were standing with my double. A sign of destiny, an oversight of chance, it could be either.
It’s a heavy book, bound in hessian, difficult to handle. In a corner of the second page there’s an embossed stamp: Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg Library, it says in relief, framed by a plume and a knotted ribbon at the bottom. At the foot of the page, in black ink and italics, it says: NAT 351/II. I flick through the pages: snakes, lizards, tortoises, some rare plants and many other creatures. I think about Simón. I hesitate, I picture myself carrying this monster of a book the eight or nine blocks between here and the Fénix. I take it, in spite of its size, the fungus and fate.