Glaxo Read online

  Luque decided last week to rerun the film Last Train from Gun Hill. It was a surprise. He kept a copy in the cinema’s archives, and according to La Verdad, it’s one of the most moving films he’s ever seen. The film premiered in 1959. And it was shown in the Cinema Español, in the spring of the same year. I went to see it with the boys from the neighbourhood. Vardemann was a huge fan of Kirk Douglas. And he loved imitating him. It was funny seeing skinny Vardemann copying Kirk Douglas’s gestures and gait. We laughed in the bar at the Bermejo. The departed Miguelito Barrios, the poor thing, could walk just like John Wayne, though. And so when they got drunk, Vardemann and Miguelito Barrios set up an imaginary showdown. Vardemann went out into the street, Miguelito sat down with his back to the entrance, and when Vardemann reappeared, he was no longer the only son of the barber from Glaxo, that gawky, dull kid, now Vardemann was Kirk Douglas, and with faltering steps he closed in, struggling to hold off a smile, to tap Miguelito on the shoulder, who by then had also transformed and was now John Wayne. And so the showdown was inescapable. They stood twenty or thirty paces apart. It was amusing to see Miguelito walking just like John Wayne, bow-legged and swaying with a look of menace in his eyes. But the stiffness of Vardemann’s posture was too noticeable to pass for the true movements of Kirk Douglas. It would be impossible, unless it were one of the boys in the group, for someone to tell, just by watching, that what skinny Vardemann was doing in those moments was an imitation of Kirk Douglas and not just goofing around. Then the shootout began. Vardemann loved to writhe around on the ground. Most times that’s what he did. Miguelito drew and shot from the imaginary revolver in his hand, then he spun it around, blew on the end, and put it back in the holster. While Miguelito was doing that, Vardemann played at being a dead man, a wounded man dragging himself along the floor of the Bermejo (once he knocked over a table covered with bottles); and he nearly always died in the same way: he spluttered out a lament, and dedicated a few words to Nelly Sosa, his girlfriend at the time, which one of us, afterwards, had to send to her. And then he died while he let out a hoarse croak. Sometimes he’d stay down there on the ground, for a long time. We’d start chatting about any old thing, someone would put on a tango; the showdown routine was over. And so Vardemann had no other choice but to recompose himself, to go back to being skinny Vardemann, to sit in that seat in the corner against the counter in the Bermejo, and consider in silence the opinions of others, sharpening his gaze over the details. Or to chew, in a methodical manner, little cubes of cheese.

  Luque says in La Verdad, our newspaper, that he sent his copy of the film to Buenos Aires to have a special treatment done to it, to protect it. And he says that when the film came back, it came back in colour. I have just seen, then, in the Cinema Español, Last Train from Gun Hill, in colour, although I recall seeing it in 1959 in colour. But that’s just a memory. The queue, much longer for the second screening—there must have been twenty people—filed in gently until it disappeared behind the burgundy curtains. Sardoni’s blue Gordini goes past the cinema and turns on the corner of La Farola. Behind Sardoni, Lucio Montes goes by in his pickup. As he goes by, I see that he jerks his head around to see who is in the Don Pedrín, and when he sees me he wheels around sharply. He parks on the corner. He fixes his clothing a little, as he steps out, and comes towards me. When he opens the door he winks and then casts an eye over the rest of the room. He raises a hand, greeting the Echeverrías. He sits at my table. Bicho, my man, he says. He smells of soap, and has wet hair. Have you eaten? I ask. He shakes his head. And so I order a large muzzarrella and beer, nice and cold, with two glasses. The waiter, the murderer of Kirk Douglas’s wife, writes it down in a little notebook. It seems like he’s new. Montes says that his face looks familiar. Have you heard the latest, he begins, enthusiastic. I just got back from Saladillo, guess who I bumped into? His eyes are shining, and his mouth, as Abelardo Kieffer says, is loose. I have no idea, brother, I say, but what the hell were you doing in Saladillo? Did the old man send you? He says that you should go and see him this weekend. He told me to tell you that, if I saw you. I took the afternoon off from the butcher shop, I went to fix up my mother’s grave, says Lucio Montes, melancholy. But guess who I saw at the entrance to the cemetery in Saladillo? I make a gesture, purse my lips together and shrug my shoulders, while the waiter, the murderer of Kirk Douglas’s wife, sets us down a nice, cold bottle of beer and two glasses. La Negra Miranda, rattles off Montes, while I tilt the glass to let the head rise evenly. La Negra Miranda? I say, and I pass him the glass, brimming. Montes drinks it without waiting for me. He nods his head. He repeats, as he savours the beer, La Negra Miranda. And so, now that he’s finished arriving—telling me how he saw La Negra Miranda in Saladillo is to have finished arriving—he takes over the table, stretches out his legs, looks out at the street and waits for me to start asking questions.

  For example, if Kirk Douglas’s wife, the Indian, who travels along those solitary paths in a wagon, accompanied by her son, well, if that woman, who is travelling to visit her family, if she hadn’t attacked Anthony Quinn’s son by beating his face with a whip, perhaps none of what happened next would have occurred. But if that is true, the film wouldn’t exist either, the film that is being shown again today at the Cinema Español, in colour, and that now, surely, would be beginning its second screening with nearly twenty people inside. Here, in the Don Pedrín, Lucio Montes tells me about a ghost, because to name La Negra Miranda is like naming a ghost. I crack my knuckles on one hand. The bones pop. I followed her, says Montes, anxious. I wanted to know what she was up to, what she had done with her life all these years, he says. The waiter, Rick, the murderer, puts the pizza down in the middle of the table. Then Lucio Montes says something to him. Aren’t you Salazar’s kid? And the waiter, who is new, and no, has none of the cockiness of Kirk Douglas’s wife’s murderer, says no, that he’s not from here, he’s from Suipacha. He winces at us, timid, trembling, before withdrawing. But Lucio Montes is sure, he says, that he’s seen that kid, he’s seen that kid somewhere.

  Faint drops stick to the glass of the window, blown in by a freshening wind. We eat. Lucio Montes, who chews quickly with his mouth open, says that it’s drizzling. I think about Ramón Folcada, I think about Anthony Quinn and about Ramón Folcada. There is something that links them, the arrogance of power, for example, but there’s also something apparently different in them, a moral limit. Someone like Pajarito Lernú, let’s say, would tell me that a moral limit ceases to separate them when Anthony Quinn is questioned about the foundations of his power. You don’t lay a finger on that boy, insists Quinn. And so the man who had a moral limit, who was capable of saving his best friend’s life, when that guy, his best friend Kirk Douglas, begins to question the foundations of his power, he’s capable of fighting a duel if that’s what’s necessary to prevent it. Accordingly, I suppose Pajarito Lernú would tell me, there’s no great difference between Ramón Folcada and Anthony Quinn. They stand on the same flagstones.

  At first she didn’t recognise me, not even by name: Montes, I told her, from Glaxo, from Souza’s butcher shop. And I thought to myself that the bimbo was playing dumb to avoid me. How could she not remember me. Sure, more than twenty years have passed. But I’m almost the same, a bit fatter, but then I’ve always been fat. Almost the same. It’s not like I changed. She was the one who was different. Oh yes. I recognised her—how can I explain it—from a tic, a little thing she did, lifting up her lips, as if to bite them, raising the bottom one. And because she seemed like her. What do I know. You can’t explain these things. You recognise her or you don’t. And I confirmed my suspicions when La Negra Miranda did that thing where she bites her lip, I reckon she did it when she was nervous, when she waited on the little wrought-iron tables on the pavement, and she was nervous. If I was the one who used to deliver meat to her at the bar, how could she not recognise me. Man, you’re confusing me with someone else, she said to me. But I insisted: You’re La Negra Miranda, Folcada’s wife
. And when I said it like that, when I said Folcada, she stopped, she stopped dead. She transformed. What do I know. She must bear that name on her back, I thought, just like a cross.

  You’re a monster, I say, and I dress him down. Montes is expecting me to say something else, that I’m interested, for example, in his story. But I’m not. I tell him he’s an animal, a monster, and he sits there forcing a smile on his face that falls away, slowly, and while it falls away, his smile reveals a pair of teeth stained with oregano leaves. Hey, take it easy, what’s wrong with you, says Montes. I wipe my mouth with a napkin, and I realise, as well, that Montes annoys me, the presence of Montes, his invasion, annoys me, and that’s why I react how I react. There’s always something behind a bad mood, an unvoiced grievance. I look out at the street, drink a little beer, and moisten my mouth. How could you talk to her like that, I say. Montes looks at me like a kid who’s made a mistake, who’s put his foot in it. Montes has the look of a kid who has put his foot in it. How could you put her on the spot like that, I say. And Montes goes quiet, he sits thinking, he says, What, did I do the wrong thing? You’re a monster, I tell him again, an animal, the girl got scared, don’t you see, she was avoiding you, she doesn’t want to know anything about you, or Glaxo either. Yes, says Montes, she told me that herself afterwards. What do you mean afterwards, I say. Yes, afterwards, he says, and captures me again, the bastard, with his story.

  She bought me a coffee in a shitty little bar, near the cemetery. There’s something about her face, as if she had different lips, a different way of laughing. What do I know, maybe she got her lips done, who knows. She looked at me and laughed. What are you laughing at, I say. At you, the bimbo tells me. And she started laughing louder. El Monte Negro, the Black Mountain, said the stupid bimbo, teasing me. It’s been a lifetime, ages since anyone called me that. It’s strange when other people dig up those things. El Monte Negro, the Black Mountain, that’s what Miguelito Barrios used to call me. Because one night, in a carnival parade, it was pouring down rain and I came across Miguelito on a corner, the two of us were running, and he saw me wearing a black cape and he began to laugh, and after that he began to call me El Monte Negro. What are you up to, I asked La Negra Miranda. I’m with Papelito, she says, in the circus. Come on, stop shitting me, I said. And La Negra Miranda, who has platinum-blond hair and blue eyes, but who has La Negra Miranda’s tic when she gets nervous, the one where she raises her bottom lip as if to bite the other, she tells me she’s serious, that one morning she couldn’t stand it anymore: that night Folcada beat her, and while he beat her he told her what he had done in the clearing, he told her what Miguelito had told him, and so that very same night, she wrote a terrible letter to Miguelito Barrios, and pushed it under his door, she pushed it under before leaving, because La Negra Miranda couldn’t stand it anymore, and that morning she hopped the dairy train that stopped by the doors of the Ace of Spades to load the drums from the Glaxo factory, and she said she didn’t even think about it, she just jumped on the train with what she was wearing and left, she went up in smoke, she abandoned Ramón Folcada, who was sweating in the little room that opened onto the street, onto the chinaberry trees in the street. Folcada was surely snoring, while the train was taking La Negra Miranda away forever. And so this story, the story told by La Negra Miranda, is quite different from the one told by Ramón Folcada at the time. La Negrita has gone off to her mother’s for a while, in San Fernando, Folcada told us, convinced—it looks like the mother-in-law might kick it at any moment. It was no effort at all for Folcada to lie, to hold up a lie. Not long ago I heard that a cancer ate up the son of a bitch and left him bare as a bone, but then some people say the commies stuck a bomb under him in Luján and blew him away. I don’t know which version is true. In any case, he deserves either death. I was born again, Montes, she told me. My life went like this, she said, and flipped over one of her hands, now wrinkled and splotched on the back, by time, by the years La Negra Miranda has lived. A radical change, she told me. Then she didn’t want to say any more. She asked about me, about my business, she asked me how the neighbourhood was, Miguelito’s mother, she told me that one day, when she could, she would return to Glaxo to close up the wounds. But for now she told me she didn’t want to know anything about all that. Then she left, alone, walking on the sealed road that leads downtown. She didn’t even want me to drop her off in the pickup. Later, as I was leaving Saladillo, I saw by the side of the road that they were beginning to set up a circus tent, for Papelito’s Circus. You get what I’m saying. And then I got to thinking, Bicho, about the way life changes.

  Outside it’s raining harder. The storm brings a fresh wind. The lights from the cinema, from the Moulin Rouge, burst against the street. Little by little, in pairs or in small groups, under umbrellas, the people who saw Last Train from Gun Hill in the Cinema Español, in the second screening, begin to come out. Some run to get their cars, and the women wait at the entrance. Things go by like that. Kirk Douglas, once again, leaving on a train, like La Negra Miranda, I think, each time she tells that story, which is her story. I don’t know why I remember Ramón Folcada’s feet, one summer evening, barefoot, hosing down the pavement. I remember his feet gnarled from rheumatism, covered in mud, a few toes twisted up above the others. You’re no more than the reflection of the toes on your feet. That’s how it is. Montes goes to the bathroom. His plate is full of chewed olive pits. It’s five past twelve. It’s already the twenty-second of December. I walk over to the public telephone in the bar. I put in a couple of tokens. I dial a number in Buenos Aires. I wait awhile, until it starts ringing, starts buzzing intermittently. When the call is picked up, the token falls, making a metallic noise, and I clear my throat, covering my free ear with my free hand to distance myself from the mingled sounds of plates and voices, there, in the Don Pedrín, and I say: Federico, happy birthday, my son.

  Part III

  MIGUELITO BARRIOS

  July 1966

  He came back yesterday. He got off the train with a shaved head and rancid skin. He looked nothing like Kirk Douglas. At that moment I could see my death clearly.

  There are days when I start imagining the ways in which others will die. Because we’re all going to die one way or another.

  And so, sitting on the pavement in front of the house, in the Bermejo Club or while I send out the parcels from the station, I start imagining the deaths of the people I see. This idea, for years now, keeps coming back to me. It first came after seeing a film in the Savoy. And now, it comes back to me like dust filtering through the cracks in the doors and the windows, which, barely a day after the house has been cleaned, settles, this dust, once again, on the furniture, on everything. But it distracts me, I think, the insistence of this idea. If at first it terrified me, if it frightened me a little to think like that, now I’m getting more and more used to it, it clears my mind, it distracts me, imagining the deaths of others.

  What I couldn’t do (like the actor in the film they showed at the Savoy), what I couldn’t do until yesterday when I saw skinny Vardemann get off the train, with his threadbare bag and that serene, almost hypnotic stride, was imagine my own death.

  I don’t agree with those who, when they choose a way to die, prefer not knowing, or hope that death takes them in their sleep, or doesn’t make them suffer, as if death weren’t a consequence of the life that one chose to live. I like those movies where the guys who are about to be shot don’t show even the slightest bit of fear, they stand in front of the firing squad, brave, and it’s the executioners, the cowards, who take aim and try to avoid the stare of the waiting man.

  If my old lady heard me, or Bicho Souza, or if my old lady’s new boyfriend heard me, they’d think I was crazy, or that I wanted to kill myself, or that I’d been left traumatised from the accident my old man had while breaking in a horse. But I’m not. I’m not suicidal, nor am I traumatised by my father’s accident. That’s why I prefer not to go around saying such things. I keep them to myself, like m
y own secret, to be kept only by me. I imagine it’s like when a guy says he saw a flying saucer and he really did see it. I imagine you’ve got to have balls or be a bit crazy to tell people things like that. Because you know that no one will believe you. Or they’ll treat you like you’re sick. People are shallow. But we all have these ideas in our heads, I bet that everyone, even Efraín Bunge, must have ideas like that in his head, or the Germans from the Munich Club, or my mother’s new boyfriend. We all have these ideas in our heads, they’re like secrets, little personal treasures. That’s how it is.