have done this much sooner.
-
3
Buenos Aires
THE HAPPY CORPSE HADN’T made it, after all. It had died a second time. No one could really accuse Tony Hanssen of not trying hard enough to bring Mrs. Bo Xiang back, though. Cautious pats on her cheek, repeating her name ten times with his lips pressed to her pierced earlobe, shaking her, imploring, crying, and cajoling, he’d tried it all and nothing had worked. Mrs. Bo Xiang had entered the Kingdom of God and flatly refused to come back.
Tony had been advised in his resuscitation attempts by the pension owner—a towering, extravagantly-dressed fake blonde with a face of granite and permanently raised eyebrows, both the result of plastic surgery. Her full lips enjoyed the benefit of the doubt—her mouth was the only thing on her face that seemed able to move easily. And yet she was still attractive in a wilful kind of way, Tony judged, like most of the women in this city. It didn’t matter where Eva Perón was buried, the actress and first lady’s spiritual legacy had not gone to the grave with her. The Porteñas, young and old, still had fiery temperaments and rock-solid self-esteem. And they continued to have just as many problems with their men—men whose domineering nature they criticized while refusing to tolerate any sign of weakness in them.
Tony had called her, the pension owner, in panic because she was the only person in Buenos Aires whose number he had saved on his smartphone. She interrupted him after his first sentence, ordered him to stay where he was, snapped at someone in Spanish—probably the cleaner—to alert the emergency services, and rushed to the scene herself. All of this without hanging up. She lived two floors above them. There was a good chance, Tony thought, when she entered still clutching her mobile phone, that the sounds of he and Mrs. Bo Xiang going at it had reached her upstairs.
She kept a straight face, but that could have been the Botox. Her gaze, though, directed at the mortal remains of Mrs. Bo Xiang, betrayed contempt, if not ridicule—as though she considered it typical of a Chinese woman to kick the bucket at the moment suprême. While they waited for the ambulance, she stood at the foot of the bed and gave Tony more orders than advice. Her father, she had told him when he’d checked in, had been a general during los Años Dificiles. Tony hadn’t dared ask more. He had read in the Rough Guide that Argentina had had many difficult years. The difficult years outnumbered the easy ones. Her name was Mercedes. Her father had not only been a general, he’d also had a lot of German friends.
‘Slap her face again,’ Mrs. Mercedes commanded, looking down her nose at Tony and his happy corpse as if they were two street fighters down for the count. Her English wasn’t bad for a Spanish speaker. From her tone, she wasn’t too pleased that death had paid a visit to her casa de turistas. She managed two small hotels and twenty guest rooms, spread out over rustic San Telmo and hip Palermo, but this house was her headquarters and the jewel in her crown. A former architecture student, she had supervised the renovations herself, and lived on the only floor that was never rented out. ‘Have you already put a finger down her throat?’ She sounded more and more sincere and more and more concerned, looking down with her arms folded across her stiff bosom. ‘Maybe she’s swallowed her tongue.’ After that, she didn’t say anything else.
What a difference from the first time they’d met, at check-in. Then, Mrs. Mercedes had monopolized the conversation in record time, as though she were worried her two wealthy guests might escape to her competitors if she stopped talking. Tony was forced to think about this now, in her mute presence, as he tried to lure Mrs. Bo Xiang out of her new-found homeland of the smile. The poor woman was naked under the damp, thin sheets. Only her head stuck out, with its shocking grin, open and bared. Tony began to massage her heart through the sheets even though he knew it couldn’t be coaxed to beat again. He didn’t want to do it, but he did it all the same. Again, he bridged the gap through dissociation. By reflecting on a trivial event from two days earlier, he could avoid thinking about the cruelty of the present.
The three of them had stood waiting in the entrance hall, next to a desk on which Mrs. Mercedes’s laptop rested.
Mrs. Bo Xiang was supposed to pay for their three-day stay in advance by internet banking, using this laptop and not her own smartphone. This was a strict condition imposed on all guests, Mrs. Mercedes had apologized. It was just a precaution. She’d been ripped off too many times in the past. She’d added that her bank was in the Virgin Islands, so it would take a while for confirmation of their payment to come through.
This is the kind of thing you have to deal with these days, Mrs. Mercedes sighed—as they still stood there waiting—all these long distances and passwords and devices you’d never have dreamed of in the past. My God! She still had vivid recollections of the tube radio of her childhood. Her hard face now showed a grimace of happiness, which she further improved on by rolling her eyes and shrugging coquettishly. Dios mío! The tube radio of her childhood! She was so caught up in her story, she missed Mrs. Bo Xiang’s confused expression.
Her family, Mrs. Mercedes had cooed, was the first in the village to acquire one of those hulking great things. It was nearly the size of a cabin trunk, and you had to wait two minutes for all the lamps to warm up. Only then did the scratchy music come out, or the news, or hours of background noise. You could pick up Montevideo when the weather was bad. The neighbours gathered once a week for the radio play. She had shrugged coquettishly again, her voice taking on a languorous tone. The weekly radio play! My goodness! Everyone had crammed into their old drawing room around that one appliance, the way you’d gather around a preacher, all thirty of them hypnotized, half of them bursting into tears during the final episode because of the injustice of the heroine’s death. And that was just the tube radio! Again she’d rolled her eyes, elatedly shaking her granite head. After that, there was the freezer, the washing machine, the colour TV! Unbelievable, wasn’t it? The colossal changes that could take place within a single person’s lifetime. And just look at this! She’d shown Mrs. Bo Xiang and Tony an outdated mobile telephone. Now she could even receive text messages from the Islas Vírgenes. Thousands of kilometres away. Handy, wasn’t it? Dios mío, where would we be without mobile phones? She’d reply to the bank manager right away, and then everything would be in order. Her sincere apologies for the delay. But she couldn’t help it.
‘I’ve helped fill this country’s bottomless pits more than enough times already,’ she complained, her thumbs working away over the mobile’s keyboard. ‘Those blundering politicians should be happy with the likes of me, the people who haven’t completely upped sticks to the Islas Vírgenes yet.’ She determinedly pressed the send button.
To Tony’s astonishment, Mrs. Bo Xiang stood there, nodding energetically. Her head was almost coming off. But her expression was disparaging. Did she actually understand what Mrs. Mercedes was saying? Or was she simply impatient, and all the more prepared to nod at everything the pension owner said, as long as it got them closer to the love nest on the second floor?
Mrs. Mercedes still didn’t notice a thing. ‘It’s just the same with the beggars on the street,’ she continued, checking confirmation of payment once again, this time on her laptop. ‘Those penniless bums can count their blessings that there are still rich buggers like me left.’
Again, Tony had the impression that Mrs. Bo Xiang was nodding too emphatically, prior to accepting the room key, smiling broadly, and even bowing—it was more a curtsey.
The overt mutual contempt felt by the two ladies had begun there and then, with the curtsey and then the look they exchanged. One of them felt deadly contempt, the other felt she’d been caught out. The pleasant atmosphere could be heard shattering.
Despite her predilection for grand gestures, Mrs. Mercedes wasn’t blind to the subtleties of human interaction at the micro level. She watched the curtsey, read the expression, and knew she’d been trumped.
