As I was going down the steps to Talcahuano Street, I hesitated for a moment. I was carrying a good bit of money in my pocket, because I’d planned to pay the final installment on my apartment after work that evening—the notary’s office stayed open late—but out of fear that the detour would take too long and I wouldn’t be able to find Sandoval, I decided I’d look for my friend and postpone my payment until another day. I patted my jacket to make sure the money was snug in the inside pocket and flagged down a cab. We drove up and down Paseo Colón, but I couldn’t locate Sandoval. The taxi driver, who seemed to be in a good mood, offered me a long, off-the-cuff disquisition on the simplest and most expeditious way to solve the country’s problems. If I’d been less worried and less focused on finding the bar Sandoval was in, maybe I would have asked the cabbie for some clarification of the logic linking such assertions as “The military knows what it’s doing,” “Nobody here wants to work,” “They should all be killed,” and “The River Plate club under Labruna is the example to follow.”
I had the driver cruise the side streets and eventually found Sandoval in an extremely nasty bar on Venezuela Street. I paid my fare, handing the money to the enlightened analyst of our national condition and waiting for him to give me change. Somewhat annoyed by my stinginess, he began to dig around in one of his pockets, and while he did so, I savored a tiny taste of revenge. By this point, I was no longer in a hurry. There was little chance that Sandoval would stand for being hauled out of the ugly little tavern before eleven o’clock, and now it wasn’t much past nine.
I sat across from him and ordered a Coca-Cola. The barman offered a Pepsi instead, and I accepted. I’d never seen Sandoval drink like that. It was genuinely frightening, though at the same time, you had to admire his staying power. Evenly, without excessive gestures, he’d lift a full glass to his lips and empty it in one or two swallows. Then he’d stare into the space in front of him and feel the hot liquid as it made its way down to his guts. A few minutes later, he’d fill the glass again.
It was almost midnight, and thus far I hadn’t succeeded in getting Sandoval out of his seat, although I must confess that I hadn’t tried very hard. From experience, I knew he’d go through an initial stage of drunkenness in which he’d become irritable, fiercely concentrated on his own thoughts, and then he’d reach a second level, more placid and relaxed. That would be the moment for me to carry him off, but on this particular evening, the transition to the second stage was a long time in coming. I got up and went to the men’s room. While I was standing in front of the urinal emptying my bladder, I heard a crash of broken glass, followed by a series of shouts and the sounds of running feet on the wooden floor.
I dashed out of the bathroom, nearly wetting myself in the process. At that hour, fortunately, there was no one left in the place but three or four regulars, who were looking on with more interest than fear. Sandoval was brandishing a chair in his right hand. The owner of the establishment, a short, powerfully built guy, had come out from behind the bar and was stalking Sandoval. Probably because he was afraid of getting whacked with the chair, the bar owner maintained a certain distance between him and his drunken customer. Behind the bar, I could see the broken mirror, the broken bottles, and shards of glass scattered on all sides.
“Pablo!” I called to him.
He didn’t even look at me. He remained focused on the barman’s movements. Nobody spoke, as if the duel the two were engaged in had roots too deep to be reached by words. Suddenly, without further preliminaries, Sandoval’s right arm moved in a wide semicircle and he hurled the chair at one of the windows that looked out on the street. There was another enormous crash, more running feet, more shouted insults. At this point, the bar owner stopped hesitating. It seemed to him that his drunken enemy, now disarmed, would be easy to subdue, and so he tried to rush him. He didn’t know (as I did) that Sandoval’s reflexes were not so easily dulled, despite his bloated appearance, or that he’d practiced boxing at a gym in Palermo ever since he was a kid. And so, when the proprietor of the bar got within his range, Sandoval caught him with a left hook to the jaw that flung him backward and left him sprawled on one of the empty tables. “Sandoval!” I screamed.
Things were moving from bad to worse. He looked at me. Was he trying to place me in the strange and belligerent context he’d created? He picked up another chair and walked a few steps in my direction. That’s it, I thought. Just what I need to crown the evening: an all-out brawl with my assistant in a lowlife dive on Venezuela Street. But Sandoval had other plans. With his free hand, he gestured to me to get out of his way. I stepped aside. The chair passed before my eyes at a respectable height and velocity and smashed into a glass sign advertising a brand of whiskey: a mature-looking gentleman sat in an armchair in front of a chimney fire and sipped the liquor from an elegant little glass. We’d seen a sign like that before, in some other bar in the area, and it was a piece of advertising that Sandoval detested, as he himself had informed me in the course of a previous bender.
With this final chair attack, which Sandoval probably considered an act of justice, his destructive impulses seemed to have been exhausted. The bar owner must have made the same assumption, because he jumped on him from behind and both of them fell to the floor and started rolling among the tables and chairs. I went to separate them and, as is the usual outcome in such cases, received several blows myself. I wound up sitting on the floor, clutching Sandoval against my body and shouting to the barman to calm down; I’d make sure my friend kept still, I said.
“We’ll see about that,” the fellow said at last, getting to his feet.
His cold, menacing tone of voice scared me. He went over to the cash register. I figured he’d pull out a pistol and start shooting at us, but I was mistaken. What he pulled out was a telephone token; he was going to call the police. The two or three remaining customers, who hadn’t deemed it necessary to intervene, realized his intention and left the place in haste. I looked around. Was it possible that there was a public telephone in this hole in the wall? There was not. The proprietor of the little bar gave us a series of murderous looks as he headed for the door. The last thing we needed that night was to end up in the slammer. I stood up. Sandoval looked like a man unaware of his surroundings. I went out after the bar owner, who was walking toward the Bajo. I called to him. Only after my third try did he turn around and agree to wait for me to catch up. I told him there was no need to call the cops; I’d take care of everything. He gave me a skeptical look, for which he had his reasons. The broken storefront window must have been worth a healthy sum, and I seemed to recall a number of splintered tables and chairs, not counting those that Sandoval had turned into missiles. I insisted, and the owner finally agreed to return to the bar. We walked back in silence. When we arrived, I couldn’t fail to understand why the guy was mad. His front window was lying in pieces on the sidewalk, and inside, signs of damage were visible everywhere.
He spread his arms and looked at me as though asking for an explanation, or as if he’d changed his mind and now considered his recent indulgence excessive and unwarranted.
“How much will it cost to repair all this?” My question lacked conviction and emphasis, as he must have noticed.
“Well … a whole lot. Just look around.”
I’ve never been any good at bargaining. I go from feeling like a sadistic exploiter to feeling like a dimwitted sucker, and vice versa. And that situation—with Sandoval sitting on the floor in front of the bar, leaning back against it and calmly drinking from a bottle of whiskey (he’d somehow managed to get his hands on an intact survivor of the recent disaster), and with the bar owner clinging to the possibility of calling the police like an ace up his sleeve—absolutely surpassed anything I might have imagined.
He named a ridiculously high figure, practically enough to renovate his nasty little dive from the foundations up. I told him I wasn’t close to disposing of that kind of capital. He answered that he couldn’t accept so much as a peso less. A relatively smaller figure crossed my mind: the sum of the roll of banknotes I still had in my inside pocket. In my deluded state, I’d thought the roll represented the cancellation of my mortgage debt, but now, trying to sound final, I offered the sum to him.
“All right,” he said, giving in. “But pay me now.”
He must have doubted that a guy like me, a guy who went around playing guardian angel to a hopeless drunk, could be carrying that amount of cash. I held it out to him. He counted the bills and seemed to grow calm. “Help me put things back in some order. If I leave the place this way, I’ll have to spend tomorrow cleaning up, and I’ll lose the whole day.”
I agreed. We shifted Sandoval off to one side so he wouldn’t be in the way, swept up the broken glass, stowed the broken tables and chairs in a little storeroom located on the far side of a filthy patio, and redistributed the undamaged furniture. Not counting the mirror and the window, I believe the bar owner came out ahead. After all, that glass advertising sign for whiskey had been an appalling thing to look at. You could almost say Sandoval had been right to pulverize it.