I decided to spend the night in Bahía Blanca, in the same hotel as my murdered friend’s widow and daughter. We shared a frugal supper and said goodnight until the next morning, when we planned to return to Buenos Aires in Isabel’s car.
I felt depressed. I had lost my car because I had left a blond inside it while I went blithely off to have a pee. The local police had questioned me as if I had been a crime suspect rather than the owner of a car reporting its theft. To add insult to injury, they growled at me that the robbery had occurred outside their jurisdiction, in Carmen de Patagones, so all they could supply me with was an untidy report that a bulimic inspector took half an hour to type on a rusty Remington. He was more interested in his mate and telephone calls that had nothing to do with his police work. In fact, it seemed as though he used his hours on duty to run a numbers game: he took bets quite openly, and even discussed the merits of such lucky numbers as twenty-two or forty-eight with his clients.
When I called the insurance company, they told me the crime report was a start, but that at some point I would need to go down to Carmen de Patagones so that the “relevant authorities could give me an official confirmation of the theft.” I spent a good few moments cursing a system that washes its hands of anything that disappears, be it a car or a close friend. Typical, I thought, of a country that sends hundreds of cargo boats abroad piled high with food, yet allows more than half of its citizens to live off charity or scraps, with the age-old excuse that Argentina is a country that does not deserve what is happening to it, because we are a nation inevitably destined for greatness.
I went for a walk around the frozen streets of Bahía Blanca, half-hoping I might find my car parked on some corner or other. Luckily, just as I was about to freeze solid, I saw the universal neon sign with red lettering and a champagne glass flickering upward. Pro Nobis the place was called, and if you looked as carefully at the sign as you might at a Goya painting in the Prado, you could see that alternating with the glass were a pair of female thighs.
I went in, hoping to find a drink and a woman who would not overwhelm me with demands or confessions. As a young man I had always avoided dives like this, frequented by desperadoes and sailors stranded on dry land, who dug into the dark corners in search of the fools’ gold of their memories. Every lone wolf knows of long-haired women with perfect bodies who have betrayed them: the loss has remained with us for the rest of our lives, even though we are aware that if we met them again we would soon run into the same misunderstandings and contradictions, would yet love them as though they were the only ones for us, expose ourselves to ridicule, and believe for a while at least that what we cannot see or touch does not matter in the slightest.
“Get me a whisky, would you?” asked a redhead who came and sat beside me at the bar. The room’s red light made her look transparent, the closest thing to an angel you could find etched in the filigree of smoke swirling round the dark surroundings. The barman was a blond bear with the face of a Swedish actor signed up by Bergman who spent his free time making porno films so he could have sex without having to spout nonsense about God and the human condition between fucks. He looked at me as I might have looked at him if he had spoken Swedish when I told him to serve the girl a real whisky, that if she was thirsty she could have a glass of water, because I had no intention of paying for a glass of colored water when all I wanted to do was forget everything about the day I had just had.
“We can guarantee you’ll forget everything in here,” said the redhead. “And if after three glasses you start to cry, the fourth is on the house.”
“And just when I was thinking there was nothing new in advertising.”
“Do your zip up, darling. If anyone sees you like that they’ll think I did it, and there are house rules.”
Hearing her speak in that way confused me. She sounded more like a schoolmistress than just another woman I could spend some time with and never see again.
“You went red. Of course in this light it doesn’t show, but you went bright red.” She winked ostentatiously at the barman, and the two of them laughed. They must have been lovers, indulging in this kind of game to keep the nightly boredom at bay. She slid her hand onto my crotch and started fiddling with the zip and the little animal curled up inside. Poor thing, he did not even seem to realize the warm fingers caressing him were of the opposite sex.
Instinctively, I looked round the room. It was empty. Techno music was blaring out, strobe lights alternately blinded and dazzled, but there was nobody to enjoy them. I was the only customer in Pro Nobis, which must have been the only bar open at 2:00 in the morning in this southern port city. It was from here that the Argentine fleet threatened to leave to vanquish the British in the 1982 South Atlantic War, except that none of them ever weighed anchor.
With great relief, doubtless, the redhead realized I had not come into Pro Nobis for sex but to feel less alone, to share small talk or simply healing silence, despite the music and the lights that were an unavoidable part of the atmosphere for anyone who came here to escape the harsh emptiness of the early hours outside.
On the wall, a framed photo of the cruiser General Belgrano adorned with an anchor and a lifebuoy got us talking about the disaster when it was sunk by British pirates. The redhead told me she had a brother lying at the bottom of the south Atlantic. He was not yet twenty when the submarine Conqueror torpedoed them, on the direct orders of the British prime minister whose scorched-earth policies went on to inspire the “new” Peronism of ’90s Argentina. Today her brother would have been more than forty, and could well have been sitting at this same bar, making sure that his little sister (she was five years younger than him, she told me coquettishly) did not prostitute herself with the dirty old men who brought their moss-lined hulls into this particular berth.
“He could have been, he might have been, but he isn’t. Sometimes I see him coming in through that door over there,” she said. I gazed in the direction she was pointing, but all I could see were other girls, the barman and the dish-washer coming in and out.
“He comes in, sits down right where you are now, and bums a cigarette off me. He never bought his own, but smoked all kinds, and marihuana too—it was all the same to him. ‘Take care,’ he says when he comes to see me, ‘and try to find another job, because I don’t want a sister who’s a whore.’”
I had no doubt the redhead’s story was true, that her brother came in just as she said, spoke to her, then stayed for a while, smoking his borrowed cigarette without saying a word. And that she waited until he had left to avoid upsetting him by seeing her sell her body, a body firm now only in this half-light, her flesh gouged by the toothless night-sharks.
I sat watching her silently, just like her brother who never reached the Malvinas. I only left when the Swede said he was no longer serving, that the evening was over. It was not yet 3:00. The Pro Nobis sign clicked off above my head, the woman’s thighs frozen in the night.
I should never have left the hotel, I told myself. My words of wisdom proved prescient when two giants straight out of a body-building ad sprang from a car parked a few feet away and proceeded to wipe me from the map with a few well-aimed punches.