The Golden Eleventh

by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Barrio Parque

Translated by John Washington

You look out the window at the flowing path of the highway, smooth like a river, the highway down below golden in the same light that falls on you, on the golden cars almost lost in the light of the highway, just there and yet still so far from the exhaust in your head, Ariel. You see it like a line twisting on itself, opening, splitting, beautiful in this light so far below your room, the highway silent at this distance, which isn’t really so far but as far as you’ve come for now. Soon you’re going to be gone, far away, so far, Ariel, that you might even miss this place, but really you won’t miss shit, you think, as you keep looking down. You better start planning on new heights after spending hours looking down from the eleventh floor you’ve risen to: you’ve climbed, Ariel, all the way up to here, all the way up to this table with its line of amber-white powder, clean, the line of amber as if floating on the designer glass table. You’re happy in your bubble, concentrating on your work under the light, you’ve been living two days illuminated on the eleventh floor, and the clean and crystal highway golden like the line of coke on the table, floating on your own reflection, you see it as if weightless and suspended over itself in its smooth amber white, as if you were tromping through and catching little glimpses of ghosts in the Arctic, where you might be heading soon, where you might want to visit. Why not? It’s got to be clean, Alaska, with its pines and its ferocious hairy dogs pulling sleds. You’re going to steer your sled from up so high, red and yellow shooting across the ice after the dogs; and you’ll marry a white girl and you’ll live with her in the woods close to a little village, and you’ll chop down beautiful pine trees for Christmas even though you live in a forest, and what would you need to cut down a tree for? You don’t want to kill anything, not a single other thing, not even a tree: you’ll hang ornaments on the tree closest to the house so the colored lights shine in the whiteness. Is it really white? Is snow actually white? White like a sheet of paper before writing or white like the amber-white powder floating on itself, levitating on the table, enjoying its moment of weightlessness until it’s snorted? Waiting for you like your new Victorinox knife you bought for the trip, red with its white cross, right next to the silver Zippo, everything dry and bright at this height, Ariel, dry and clean and in order. You’ve gotten yourself ready, it was hardly anything, just what you bought for the trip, your new clothes: underwear, shirts, jeans, all brand-name—everything from the Alcorta mall. They were a little nervous when they saw you walk in, they eyed you, but then you put on their clothes and you walked out of there like a gentleman and the thugs didn’t even recognize you. You weren’t from the barrio anymore, they asked you for some change to buy a beer and you gave it to them and then went to buy your own German beer in Malba. And you thought, Yes, like this, more or less, this place full of plazas and museums where they treat you like a king would treat you in some foreign country. Aaaah, yes, like this, like in a movie, strutting down the New York streets, you’re going to start going for morning runs in Central Park because that’s how you live a good life, waking up early before work to run, even if you’re the president. But no, no, not the president, he lives in Washington and he’s black and you’re not, which is why you get to leave, because you’re not black, not like the rest of them, you don’t belong, you’ve been wanting to leave since you were born, which is why you’re going to get up and run and drink coffee from a mug out on the street in the middle of winter. Even when it’s snowing you’re going to take off your gloves and warm your hands on your coffee mug while the steam billows out of your mouth; and you’re going to stroll around like you’re in the movies, and you’re going to stay away from the gangs. You’ll be alone in New York, you’re going to start over, this is the last job you’re going to do and they’re not going to catch you. You’re going to live easy now. What luck you never got tattooed like everyone else, just the Nazi cross that you have over your heart. You’re going to have to work someday, you explained to them, but you’ll always be one of them, those who saved you from the prison tomb where you almost became the wife of the black thug of thugs, but not you, you’re the white-collar hacker, which is what you studied so hard in prison for. The ace in the sleeve of the Aryan South Americans when the bullets or the knives don’t do the trick. You’ve always been primed for something better—you knew it, and they knew it, and now there is your little suitcase with everything you need, the clothes folded like your mom taught you, a photo with her and your sister, just one photo, because everyone else in your life disappeared with every phone you lost or broke or every computer that met the same fate and died; all the other photos gone now, and they’re gone too, your mother and sister, in a shoot-out with the Peruvian narcos, asshole sons of bitches. Those sorry motherfuckers will see now, but what a shame you won’t get to see their faces when the metal rains down. But what metal? There’s not going to be any metal, and you don’t want to think of this now, you just want to know that your mother and sister, wherever they are, are proud of you, that you’re here breathing in that purified air on the eleventh floor of that seven-star mega hotel doing your work, though they probably wouldn’t approve of the work you’re doing now. Your mom didn’t break her back so you could be a crook, poor lady, cleaning the houses of rich folk who live just around the corner from where you are now. They let her in because she was light-skinned, even though she was from the barrio and they sensed that she had lived a tragedy: an injustice, a fall from grace; white people aren’t born into the barrio, they fall into it and always know that they’re not from there just like you always knew it. Your mom who took you to school every morning of your life and sat with you and your sister every night to go over homework, you could almost cry, but you can’t work like this. You stop to go to the bathroom, that beautiful marble you’ve been living with for the last few days, you wash your face and look in the mirror and you like what you see, it fits you, the mirror and frame and marble and haircut and shave and soft cotton of the shirt that shines a little bit, it all bodes a bright future, all of it, Ariel. Stay calm, you’re going to be just one more foreigner so you have to concentrate now. Maybe it’s time to cool it with the lines of amber-white powder floating in that light like the sun that is already lowering over the shithole barrio, and you pause, you feel remorse, that you’ve left now, that you’re so far away though you can see it through the window all twisted in broken lines, one house on top of another without any foundation. It’s almost a miracle they don’t fall apart as if God wanted us to live all piled on top of each other, as if lines couldn’t be straight, as if nature itself were against a clean line. The sacks of shit who first built one on top of another for the families spilling out as if they were looking to actually live a life; those sad shits living and breathing exhaust billowing off that awful highway that when seen from down below isn’t clean and full of light like you see it from above: from below the highway is a dark sewer swirling with exhaust and oil and trash thrown by the sons of bitches driving cars, flying from one place to another, looking down at the barrio on the side of the road for two minutes at ninety miles an hour. From here the highway is beautiful, and the barrio too, and it makes you a little sad that you see its beauty only from afar, from another place, when you’re already gone, with the barrio about to fall to pieces because it’s going to crumble and people are going to die tonight because that beautiful highway is going to fall right on top of the barrio even though they told you it wouldn’t, that if anybody dies it will only be by accident, that they just wanted the people to move, to shake their twisted towers of trash. Maybe it’s true or maybe you’re just imagining this craziness because you’re leaving and in leaving you feel sympathy for the crooked houses and shit-stacks held together by a miracle. Looking down and now feeling shame again, thinking of Arno and Jennifer, who loved you even though you always told her she wasn’t going to be your wife because you were going to leave that place and you weren’t going to be able to bring her with you, because you didn’t want to be from the barrio so you couldn’t marry a black piece of shit like her even if she loved you. And she did love you, but you never told her this and you left her and left Arno, your little dog Arno who took care of you when that thing happened with your sister and your mom; Arno who licked you when you cried and who curled up next to you when you couldn’t sleep, turning over and over. Arno who accompanied you when you went for your runs or who barked at Jenny, Arno who understood and went out to rescue you in the rain even when the whole barrio outside was just a swamp of mud and shit. You’re going to shit, with the light from the window flashing on the line of powder. Get it off that floating mirror, stop it from flashing at you, and cut a line. Make it as beautiful as the highway now­­­—yes, that’s better, cut it in two, good thing you bought the Victorinox, which cuts a line for you all the way to the north, to the river, to the delta, which keeps you straight and fills your head with that golden light that seems to pause there above, between the highway and heaven, in your head here on the eleventh floor. High-quality product you’re filling yourself with and cold light and once again you think of Alaska and the white woman, yes, what you’re in the mood for, a white woman, right now, you could just call one up and your cock stiffens looking at the book that was left for you in which a number of extremely pale blond chicks look back at you from the cover. They told you you could spend as much money as you wanted. You checked on your computer but you haven’t figured out where so much money was coming from—$250,000 to spend. All you have to do is finish the work now, so you make a call for a blonde like the one who’s making you as hard as a baseball bat, as you like to think; you’re ready to take her hard as a pole like a gringo on vacation to La Paz, you just need a little more time to put the circuits in order, to get ready to activate, ready for the command to make it fall naturally, at the exact moment they decide to press the button, whoever they are. It doesn’t matter to you. There’s a bunch of them there today. You were trying to see at breakfast if there were others like you new to this life, living in the most expensive hotel in Buenos Aires, with a view of the river and the tracks and the barrio that’s going to shit. You chop another little line for yourself but you better go slow, this powder is like a venom—the purest product, the whitest white, even though it’s amber white, as if they bathed it in the light of a jungle at dawn, and not in the miserable kitchens where they actually produce the powder. You keep working, looking up now and again at the computer screen and the reddening sun out the window, almost all the way fallen now on this day when so much else will fall. And now you’re done and you deserve a big line, and you make it into a trembling zigzag to resemble the piece-of-shit houses and you laugh and pour yourself a glass of eighteen-year-old Dalmore that was put in the room along with the coke and the book of blond girls. Yes, they know how to treat somebody, how gorgeous they are. You take a swig and think that it was all worth it; you’ve never drank anything so good and you ask yourself why not just go to Scotland? All there is to do now is wait for the Aryans to bring you a passport that will let you travel to the US and England, wherever your sweet ass feels like throwing down another line of coke and having another drink of that golden whiskey, as if you were drinking the sun, the glowing highway—you toast the sky. Look, Mom, I’m drinking the same drink your grandpa would drink. My dear mother, we’ve arrived. Look at me, Mom. One more line and you’re hard and as indestructible as the Tower of London. You’d like to stick it in a blonde, look at your Big Ben and she deep-throats and looks up at you with those eyes bugging out with so much cock in her mouth. You open the book of blondes and your dick keeps growing bigger and bigger than it’s ever been and you call the concierge of the hotel and you tell him to send Barbie up to you. He tells you that she’s busy and you tell him to stop fucking around and send up the blondest blonde he can find or he can come up and suck your dick himself or you’re going to come down and stick him like he’s a chicken over a fire. And the guy laughs and tells you to give him fifteen minutes and you prick up even more and you tell him to get on it or else, and you know you have to come down a little or you’re going to end up strung out and alone on the bed. But you cut yourself another line and open the computer to try to figure out where all the money is coming from or who’s making the devices. You look around and try to figure out what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into but you find nothing at all. You note that the devices, twenty of them, are all under the highway along the shithole barrio and you ask yourself if the high-frequency sound waves that are going to scream out will indeed activate one of those bombs that cause enormous explosions. They told you that it’s not, it’s just going to crack the columns holding up the highway, which would be enough to have to evacuate the shithole barrio and demolish the whole thing, which couldn’t be, but why not? If they’re going to pay you $250,000, you know they aren’t paying you for anything good and it’s certainly no good to knock over an entire highway and you serve yourself another whiskey and someone knocks on your door and you open it nervously and see this phenomenal woman and you think that with so much beauty nothing bad could happen in the world and you unzip your fly and her eyes widen and she tells you that she has never, never, nunca in her life seen anything like that big daddy. And then she asks if you’re a porn star and you tell her to cut it with the bullshit and you start ripping off her clothes and she tells you that it’s going to cost you, that you’ve just added a thousand bucks for tearing her blouse, and then she realizes that for someone like you a little extra money is a drop in the bucket and you have her there in front of you and you tell her to shut it and she takes you into her mouth and you’ve never before had a blonde kneeling in front of you and you look down at her hair, her white ears, and you choke her a little and fill her mouth with jizz and she swallows. And you know she’ll charge you for that too but you don’t care and you make her walk over naked and you cut a couple lines and you fuck her but you can’t concentrate anymore. You’re thinking of the noise you’re going to hear when the fuses blow; it’s not going to be slow. You think the whole shithole will go up in flames. They told you that where the barrio is now, they’re going to build a paradise and you think that, yes, this is it, you always knew that nobody was going to dupe you. That you couldn’t have kids with her because black genes are always passed down and you’re not going to raise little black babies, but what the fuck? You should have taken Jenny up here, you could have at least fucked her here and you could have tied her tubes, the goddamn whore, You damn whore, get out of here! you yell at the blonde who tells you, Okay, no problem, very nice to meet you. But you have to pay her now so you throw down some bills and she has to squat to get them. She tells you you’re a drug addict son of a bitch and you can go to hell and you shove her nearly naked into the hallway, you throw her shirt out to her and you get dressed and cut another line and put a baggy in your pocket and you pocket the black credit card and think that you could take Arno to Alaska as well. You go downstairs and tell the concierge that if anybody is looking for you, you’ll be back in ten minutes, and you start running and realize that a car is following you and you’re scared and you call Jenny while still running and tell her to get out of the barrio, to run to Retiro and to take Arno with her. You tell her to go, to take the route she always takes, and the people in the car are slowly getting closer like they’re letting you get all the way to the barrio. It’s time now. They stop and you keep running and you know that if the sons of bitches are stopping it’s because it’s safer to stop because what you installed is about to blow, but you keep running away from the hotels, now you cross the next block into the barrio and you see Jenny coming toward you with Arno behind her, beelining directly to you, and he jumps up and licks your face as if he knew that you had almost left him for good and you run to Jenny and grab her by the hand and pull her and she doesn’t understand but follows you because that’s how Jenny is, and the alarm on your watch sounds and you run faster and you don’t stop, never again will you stop. You leave flying at five hundred kilometers an hour and you’re not able to see the orange of the explosion because it knocks the three of you against one of the columns supporting the highway. You’re only able to hug both of them and think that you saved them and remember the face of the gringo, the boss of the boss of the bosses of the Aryans from the prison tomb. He was a Nazi like you, but whiter, he worked as a mercenary to the best bidder, sure, sure, the money that you didn’t get a chance to spend was from the furniture shops that they built in other cities, razed to the earth, just like they razed the barrio. You hug them, Ariel, you melt, embraced in the orange light of the explosion. They are all dead, Ariel.