I was all in. In the best sense. I could feel it when the sun shone on my face. I had taken the necessary precautions. Now all I had to do was surrender to the rhythm of the day. I relaxed and enjoyed the walk. I was going to meet a woman. There’s nothing better than that. All around me it was a beautiful blue September day.
I got to Plaza Independencia, where the monument to Artigas barely cast a shadow. There were a couple of disoriented Brazilians looking at a map. I thought I recognized them from the ferry. The man was muscular, with skin the color of café con leche and a baseball cap; the woman had recently been to the hairdresser’s, and she was wearing tight jeans over her powerful thighs, and big earrings. They were pointing up at something behind me when I passed by. I walked a couple more steps and turned around. There was the Palacio Salvo. Gigantic. Guerra had sent me a link to the solo album by the singer from Blur that had on its cover a picture of that old building, half Art Deco and half Gothic. It has a twin on Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the Palacio Barolo. Both of them have a tower with a lighthouse. At some point those two lighthouses used to send each other signals, they were like an entrance portal to the River Plate. There it was, impressive. But the album cover showed it from another angle. From above, maybe from a taller building. I looked around. They must have taken the picture from a high floor of that tower, the Radisson. That was the instant serendipity of associations: I looked at the Brazilians who were looking at the building, and it was identical to the one in the picture that Guerra had sent me that had been taken from the Radisson for the cover of a CD. With those ricochets, my mind clambered up to that high floor. And my desire climbed with it. I could do it. Why not? I crossed the street and went inside the hotel.
There were few people in the lobby. Marble floor, leather armchairs, high ceiling, smooth surfaces, the empty space of luxury, that international air. At reception I was helped by a young guy who could see I was a little trepidatious.
“How can I help you today, señor?”
“Good afternoon, I was just wondering how much a room would cost on the … How many floors do you have?”
“There are rooms up to the twenty-fourth floor.”
“On the twentieth floor, facing the plaza, how much would it be?”
“One bed?”
“Yes.”
“Two hundred and forty dollars a night.”
I looked at him, I thought it was going to be more expensive. I thought the exorbitant price was going to decide for me, foreclosing the possibility.
“Great, I’ll take it,” I said.
“Just one person?”
“Yes.”
“And if I could just have your credit card, please.”
“If I pay you up front in cash do you need the card?”
“No, if you pay for it now I would not need the card.”
I had a hard time getting the money out of my belt. I made some suspicious maneuvers. The man was watching me, he couldn’t see what I was doing with my hands on the other side of the counter, trying to loosen my pants. I must have looked to him like I was about to take a piss right there. I gave him my passport and paid him with three hundred-dollar bills.
I went up to Room 262. I liked the number. I opened the door. I put my backpack on the bed and pulled back the curtain. The view from that height! The strange tower of the Palacio Salvo, the horizon of the river in the background. I was living my life. Enough sublimating into literature, making up stories. I wanted to live. To see, to touch. To get inside reality. Get inside Guerra. Get into a war with my fucking imagination, my eternal invisible world. I sat down on the bed. I checked how well it bounced. I wanted to hold her naked there, her real body with me. That was the bed where I would finally go from thought to action. You had already done it, you went over to the other side of the mirror every now and then, brought back smells, moods, opinions, laughter, echoes of an intimacy that I didn’t know; then you dreamed alone by my side. I also dreamed alone. In that moment, sitting there in that empty room, I was like a director scoping out locations for a movie I’d never get to make.
I left nothing in the room but a huge biography of Rimbaud, six hundred pages, which I’d brought to finish reading and hadn’t even opened yet. It was just weighing down my backpack. It got left on that bedside table. I went to the bathroom and took a long, foamy piss. With all my nervousness about the money, I hadn’t realized I had to go. I washed my hands and my face. I looked in the mirror. I fixed my hair a little, it had been squashed down by those hours on the bus. That was my face; as always, I felt somehow unreal. I said, “Vamos Pereyra.” Let’s go. Before leaving the room, I took a picture from the window. It was ten to two.
I crossed the plaza and went down toward the water along a street that ran behind the Solís Theatre. Again the dark purple horizon of the open river, or a piece of it, at least. I had the intuition of a poem, but I didn’t write it down, and now I can’t remember what it was I hoped to say. Perhaps it was merely beer-infused enthusiasm, nerves. But I went with a diaphanous spirit, intuiting a celestial, atmospheric poem, in the intimate glare of a Montevideo that was largely deserted. I remembered that poem by Borges about Montevideo where he talks about the piety of a slope. “My heart slides down the evening like weariness down the piety of a slope.” Later he edited it and put: “I slide down your evening like weariness …” I guess the sliding heart struck him as over the top in the end, almost a butcher’s shop image, a bolero image (in fact “heart” is one of the words he removed most often in his edits). I like that intimate second person at the beginning, he’s speaking almost in secret to the city: I slide down your evening. He also struck two lines in their entirety. The first said: “You are still and pellucid in the evening like the memory of a friendship that was flush.” Something bothered him, the repetition of “evening,” the two adjectives that were a little stilted: “pellucid,” “flush.” And the other one he took out said: “Love sprouts from your stony surface like a humble lawnlet.” It might have struck him as too sentimental, too precious, that diminutive, “lawn” too close to “lamb.” But I liked the poem. It talks about the Uruguayan capital as a Buenos Aires of the past. “You are ours and frolicsome, like the star the water doubles,” it says. “Frolicsome,” although it’s used less commonly these days because it has erotic implications, continues to be a good word. It has some Candombe in it. And the doubled air of Montevideo; the same but different, swaying in reflection. Then he talks about the sunrise, the sun that rises over the turbid water. And he ends with the line: “Streets with the light of a patio.” A simple line, short, effective after those longer ones, capturing the affable, familiar air of those low buildings, the idealized hospitality of Montevideo. At some point over the course of the year, magnetized by long-distance love, I had learned the poem by heart, and as I was doing that, I’d discovered the differences between the two versions.
I saw from afar the Santa Catalina restaurant with its yellow awnings. I went by a construction site with a half-demolished building, its walls graffitied, crossed the street and entered. There were a couple of customers having lunch. Guerra wasn’t there yet. I said hello and selected a table outside, facing the direction she’d be coming from. President Mujica came to eat here sometimes, it was said. It was near the Executive Tower and was a place that suited Mujica’s simple, popular style: an old restaurant, unpretentious, with aluminum chairs on the sidewalk and honest meals. It was lovely in the shade of that awning, Cata, in that establishment that took its name from your saint, waiting for a woman I had seen all of twice. The first time in January and the second at that very restaurant, in March.
An older man came up to me from inside. This time I initiated:
“How’s it going?”
“Can’t complain. You?” he asked as he wiped my clean table.
“Excellent. Nice day for a beer.”
“What kind can I bring you?”
“A big bottle of Pilsen and a couple of glasses.”
“You’re waiting for someone, I take it?”
“Waiting on a lady.”
“Marvelous. Will you be dining with us today?”
“Most likely.”
“Even better,” he said and went inside.
The last time, when I went to open the bank account, Guerra and I had a few beers at that same table. I told her my economic microplan, that I was going to be traveling a few times a year to get money, that we could meet up each time. She kept my advances at bay. She said: “There are many pairs of eyes in Montevideo.” She laughed. That day I had to go back through Colonia, taking a bus that left early from Tres Cruces station, so we were only able to spend a little while together. We didn’t even kiss. But we talked a lot. She told me that she was living with her boyfriend in the Nuevo París neighborhood, that she was still with the newspaper, that she rode her bike to work. She talked about her mother’s illness, a bone marrow cancer that took her quickly. She didn’t get along with her father, and she had a brother who lived in the United States. That time I took a book to give her, but not one of mine: Herzog’s diaries from when he was filming Fitzcarraldo. She told me she had looked for my books in Montevideo but hadn’t found any. She had read a couple of things online, and she said she liked them. I don’t remember what else we talked about. I know I promised her I’d be back soon, and I hadn’t kept that promise because only now, six months later, had I returned.
A pregnant woman appeared on the other side of the street, with a big round stomach. Was that Guerra? It looked like her. She got closer, but then she crossed diagonally, and once I could see her better, I realized it wasn’t Guerra after all. She kept going, but my heart continued bucking like it was trying to dodge a knife. For a moment I thought she was going to show up like that, with a big belly. It was possible. Although maybe she would have said something in an email. I fantasized about her showing up pregnant, and we would take a walk, get some ice cream, sit down every so often for her to rest. I’d go with her to look at baby things. It couldn’t be mine, that I could be certain of. I fantasized that, pregnant, she would want to fuck regardless; we’d go to the hotel room. I made up a whole movie that was very tender, her naked with her belly, beautiful, her breasts bigger. I felt aroused. I don’t even have a thing for pregnant women in general, yet suddenly I felt I could have been with her like that. You were beautiful, too, when you were pregnant.
The waiter brought me the beer, put the cloth over his shoulder, went to the curb to get out from under the awning and stood staring at the sky in the direction of the promenade. I could tell he wanted to chat.
“Think the president might come today?”
“Oh, El Pepe hasn’t been here in a while.”
I filled my glass. He kept staring in the same direction as if searching for something in the distance.
“Storm coming?” I asked him.
“No, not a storm. Aliens,” he said, smiling.
“Oh yeah?”
“There was a light out there yesterday, over the river.”
“A spaceship?”
“I don’t know what it was. It was glimmering, it had a diamond shape, like this.”
He made a shape with his hands that I couldn’t quite make out. I wasn’t sure if he was serious. I asked, warily: “Did it move?”
“No, it was still. A pinkish light. You could see it crystal clear. It must have been four or five kilometers away. It was big.”
“Well … sometimes strange things happen,” I said.
“I had never seen anything like that.”
It didn’t seem like he was joking.
“Everybody who was here saw it, but they didn’t say anything about it on TV or in the papers.”
“Did people get scared?”
“Nah. It was more the unexpectedness of it. We all looked at it awhile, and then just as suddenly as it had come, it was gone.”
“You hadn’t had anything to drink that could have …?”
“Water,” he said, with a straight face.
“Maybe it was the Virgin.”
“Nah, how could it be if none of us here are religious.”
“You don’t have to be religious,” I said. “Besides, aren’t the Virgin and the aliens the same thing?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. He didn’t want to speculate. Neither did I.
I asked him how old the restaurant was, who the chef was, what kind of food it was known for, what he’d recommend. Roast lamb with potatoes and sweet potatoes, ravioli with a little tomato sauce, their stews … I was hungry for it all.
“As soon as the lady arrives, we’ll order.”
“Very good,” he said, heading back inside.
“If anything appears in the sky, I’ll let you know.”
“Deal.”
It was a quarter past two, and there was no sign of Guerra. I considered the possibility that she wouldn’t show. There was a part of me that almost would have preferred it that way. That way I could have left, with an aura of someone abandoned yet not quite rejected, free from humiliation, almost victorious, the encounter declared null and void. I could say to myself: she didn’t show. She didn’t keep the appointment. And that would have prevented me from getting into any trouble. It would have freed me from trickery and lies. I could have remained on this side. Instead of crossing lines, passing the point of no return. It would have been a way of not taking responsibility, I guess. A ploy, in a way, not to have to decide for myself, to leave it up to the elemental particles of chaotic becoming. My heart was pounding. There was still time to flee. For a moment I considered that, too. Get up, pay, and go without looking back, leave along the promenade, take a walk and kill time until my visit to Enzo in the evening. A clean break. An emailed apology afterward. And I could be calm and alone, and think, focus on my novel, sit in some other café on 18 de Julio … Suddenly the meeting made me panic. What was I going to talk about? How was I going to convince her to come to the hotel with me? I was a little tired now, I was hungry. Didn’t have much energy. What if she agreed to go to the hotel, and I couldn’t get it up because I was nervous and tired, and there were too many expectations? What if her boyfriend came instead of her and beat the shit out of me? Or just gave me a dressing down. “You Lucas Pereyra?” My friend Ramón had that happen once. He’d made a date in front of a telo with a girl who had a boyfriend. They’d hooked up two or three times before. Suddenly as he’s waiting a guy comes up and says: “You Ramón?” “Yes.” “I’m Laura’s boyfriend. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hit you. But if you try getting in touch with Laura again, I’ll have to kill you. Deal?” “Deal,” Ramón said, and the guy went on his way. My friend told me the guy wasn’t particularly big, but he had a decisive and controlling attitude that terrified him. Of course he didn’t see the girl ever again; he didn’t tell her what happened, either. I figured that if Guerra’s boyfriend—that guy I saw in Valizas when she got off the bus—found out he’d be less disposed to have a conversation. But I hadn’t actually done anything, I’d just invited her for lunch. Up until this point it was all completely on the up and up.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a dog with the muzzle and someone jammed two fingers into the back of my neck. I jumped and bumped the table and knocked over my glass, which was fortunately almost empty. It was Guerra, coming from the promenade, with a dog. She was different; I almost didn’t recognize her.
“Hey handsome, don’t be scared,” she said into my ear, giving me a little squeeze. “I have to go to the bathroom, hold him for me, will you?”
She handed me the leash, righted my beer glass and disappeared inside the restaurant. The flash of her back, the blue apple of her ass in jeans. It all happened in five seconds. An earthquake. I stood there holding the leash. The dog looked at me like it was embarrassed. The muzzle looked like more of a punishment than a preventative measure. It was a black pit bull with a white patch on its chest. A shy pit. Both of us made uncomfortable by this forced introduction. The dog took another look at me, lowered its eyes, and sat down. Then I sat down, too.