I was facing away from the ocean and the two guys had come from that way. I thought there were two. “Stay still and keep your mouth shut.” But I couldn’t open my mouth because one of them had smashed my face into the sand, I don’t know if it was with his knee or his foot, but he was jamming something into the back of my neck. Pressing down on my back with his whole weight. It all happened so fast. The thing that terrified me the most was having my dick out and my pants undone. My modesty was more powerful than my fear of death. Guerra was saying, “No, no, no!” When I heard that they were shaking her, I tried to get up, and they started kicking me again, this time in my stomach. In the grip of that pain, I was sidelined. All that existed was that godawful suddenness. There was a silence. And they ran off. I couldn’t breathe. When I finally did breathe again, I had sand in my mouth, and I almost choked on it. I spit and sucked in sand. Guerra was asking me if I was okay. I couldn’t answer. I was slowly getting my breath back. I opened my eyes. She was fine. I touched my side, where they had kicked me the first time. It hurt. I touched my stomach. The money belt was gone. My backpack was gone, too.
“Which way did they go?” I asked Guerra, buttoning up my pants.
“That way, up the stairs,” she said. “But wait, Lucas, stay here.”
I went up the stairs. Guerra behind me. I started running, randomly, wherever, I didn’t care. I ran across the street and almost got run over. A car slammed on its brakes, and then I was on top of the hood. I got off and kept running. Guerra, standing on the promenade, shouting.
“Lucas, wait!”
But Lucas couldn’t wait because Lucas had just been jumped and had lost fifteen grand in dollars. Two hundred and twenty-five grand in Argentine pesos, four hundred and fifty grand in Uruguayan pesos. The biggest dumbass in all of the Americas. I couldn’t not run a little, at least. At least to flee the black clouds amassing over my head, my perfect storm, my personal mafia that had just won the battle, and I was running along the sidewalk on the other side of the promenade shouting “You motherfuckers, you motherfuckers.” People stared.
Suddenly you’re the crazy person in those situations, the man out of control. I stopped short and looked in all directions. Cars drove by, indifferent to my personal microdrama, my desperation. I crossed the street a few times without knowing what direction to go in, I got stuck on the little island between the two lanes, lost, gasping, furious as the Incredible Hulk in the middle of that avenue. I kept thinking this couldn’t really be happening, and I would check my groin, the absence of the cash that had been there three minutes before. “No way, no way,” I said in all possible tones, from tearful supplication to scream of incomprehensible fury. I jogged back to where Guerra was standing with the ukulele in her hand.
“Lucas, calm down, you’re going to get run over. You almost got run over. Please, calm down.”
“Are you okay? Did they hit you?”
“No,” said Guerra. “They knocked me down when I tried to stand up, but they didn’t hurt me.”
“Two guys?”
“Yeah.”
“What did they look like?”
“I don’t know, like two guys. I didn’t get a good look because I was scared. They were wearing gym clothes, I think. I think they left on a motorcycle because I heard one starting when they went up. Did they get a lot of money?”
I nodded. I was so ashamed. Infinitely ashamed. And suddenly I was enraged. I grabbed the ukulele. I raised my arm to smash it against the railing of the promenade, and Guerra seized my wrist, on tiptoes.
“Don’t break it,” she said and didn’t release me.
Wise words. Not only because it was a gift for Maiko, or because after, in the months that followed, that tiny instrument kind of saved my life, but also because destroying it there on the promenade would have served only to underscore my own stupidity with a ridiculous act. The image of me shattering the ukulele against a column like a shrunken Jimi Hendrix … The scale was ridiculous, a mini-gaucho Martín Fierro shattering his guitar, you’d have to change the stanza slightly: “At this point, the singer/reached for a bottle to comfort him,/he took a drink deep as the sky/and brought his story to an end/and with one blow, smashed his guitar/into splinters on the floor.”
I was left with what I had on, the ukulele in my hand, and a little bit of Uruguayan money in my pocket. With my backpack they had taken my phone, my house keys, my car keys, my wallet with my credit cards … My passport had been spared because as soon as they’d given me the money in the bank I’d put it in the inside pocket of my jacket. I clutched my head and walked. The fear and the adrenaline had eliminated from my bloodstream the floating feeling I’d had from the alcohol and the pot. I was sober, and there was a sort of high-pitched feedback that was deafening me. Guerra was talking to me, trying to calm me down. I couldn’t listen anymore. I was trying to figure out if there was any solution, but was irreparable. Those two guys would be in some distant neighborhood of Montevideo by now, on their motorcycle, counting up my money. Regardless I got it in my head that I had to report it to the police, and I asked Guerra where there was a station. Suddenly I was like a German tourist; I couldn’t even interact with people. Guerra asked where the police station was and took me up along the edge of Rodó Park until we went up Salterain Street.
What so recently had worried me—your question about who Guerra was, the story I was going to have to make up, the other emails that you might have seen and that I wasn’t sure if I’d deleted—all that had faded into the background. Now the problem was the money that wasn’t there anymore. How was I going to explain coming back empty-handed? What could I possibly come up with to justify such extreme stupidity? How had I let myself get robbed that easily? Why had I put myself in such a vulnerable position? Guerra gave me a glance every so often.
“I’m sorry to put you through all this, Guerrita. I honestly never thought something like this could happen to me.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“We were on another planet, weren’t we?”
“Yes,” she said. “A very pleasant planet.”
“And you’re pregnant,” I remembered. “Are you sure they didn’t hit you?”
“I’m sure. Does it hurt where they kicked you?” she asked me. “I don’t know how you can walk.”
“My side hurts, here.”
Guerra lifted up my shirt, the skin was red, but nothing like the bruise that came afterward, like a cloud of purple, blue, and in the end, kind of green. On my belly I had a scrape from the money belt, from when they ripped it off me.
“We should take you to the hospital so they can check that out.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“What are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“Tonight, Lucas, what are you going to do, are you going back?”
“Yeah, I guess so, I have my passport. I can go back.”
“Do you want me to lend you money so you can take a taxi?”
“No need. I have some money in my pocket.”
When we got to the corner where the police station was, Guerra asked me if I could report the theft on my own because she had to get to her meeting.
“Go, I’ll be fine.”
“If anything comes up just go to an internet café and send me an email, or get a phone card. I’ll send you an email with my number and the number at my dad’s place right now. If you want to stay there tonight, you’re more than welcome.”
“Thank you.”
We hugged, exchanged the quickest peck like faces bouncing off each other, and I watched her walk away. She turned around and blew me a kiss. The most beautiful thief in the world. That’s what I thought when I started walking again, I wondered if maybe she hadn’t wanted to go into the police station with me. Was that possible? I walked. Was that really possible? Had that been her plan? I looked over my shoulder: Guerra was gone.
On my last trip I’d told her I’d be back to take out money. She knew. “Were you able to take care of your errands?” she had asked me that afternoon, almost as soon as we met up. Later she saw my money belt when I was getting my tattoo, she had a heated conversation with someone over the phone, she took me to the beach, she undid my pants … In just a few steps on the street a thousand images connected in my mind. Was it her boyfriend who had robbed me? Was she acting? Was it all an act? That whole afternoon? Did she cry on the beach because she was betraying me? I thought about that tiny pause, that silence when they kicked me a second time. Had it been Guerra giving them the sign to leave? A sign of “that’s enough, don’t hit him anymore.” Was it Guerra directing the whole thing? Was she the boss of those two guys? I imagined her stopping them with a single tiny gesture, then telling them to scram, with simply a movement of her eyes. The boss.
“How can I help you?” asked the policeman standing in the door.
I looked at him.
“I doubt you can,” I said and kept walking.