wealth of a woman who shared a name with a German car.
A unconceded defeat doesn’t count as a defeat. Mrs. Mercedes didn’t say another word. She proved the benefits of the national dance tradition. She let her well-restored body speak in pantomime. With just as deep a bow, a cramped smile, and a theatrical wave of the arms, she showed Mrs. Bo Xiang the winding staircase that would take her and her young companion to seventh heaven on the second floor.
‘You’ve got one last chance,’ Mrs. Mercedes said now, looking at Tony and his lifeless mistress with ever more concern. ‘Mouth to mouth. If that doesn’t get results within two minutes, she’s brain-dead.’
There was sympathy in her voice but no inclination to give the life-saving kiss and spare Tony, who was still trembling from his recent efforts. He’d already given so much of himself today. It was still boiling hot in the room. His armpits were dripping. He felt the same bleak despair as—well, how long ago was it? Fifteen minutes? Five? Half an hour? He had lost all sense of time. He was almost suffocating. His migraine had returned, more aggressive than ever. A trepan was boring its way through his head, from temple to temple. Nevertheless, he bent down over Mrs. Bo Xiang’s beatific face, opened her happy mouth as well as he could, took a deep breath, and then, breathing out heavily, pressed his lips to hers.
Her mouth felt so cold, it was like kissing a dead sea creature. After the third deep inhalation and exhalation, he began to feel dizzy. He still didn’t dare ask Mrs. Mercedes to take over for a moment. He wondered why. A human life was at stake. And, regardless of her age, Mrs. Mercedes’s physical condition was probably better than his. She’d told them about that, too, as they waited for permission from the Virgin Islands. Her real wealth was her stamina.
Tony tried to remember all the details, so that he didn’t have to think about anything else during the kissing.
Every night, Mrs. Mercedes had recounted, not without pride, she went out dancing in one of the nearby milongas. Yes, that’s right, every night. At dusk, she’d leave her top floor to grab a bite to eat in the Plaza Dorrego. After the meal, she’d wash her hands in the toilets, dab perfume behind each ear to suppress the smell of food and anything else, pick one of the dance halls at random, and stay there until the early hours. She drank enough to forget her age, but too little not to be able to find her way home. Otherwise, she’d be condemned to accompany her last dance partner to his casa.
She’d never minded that in the past, but since her last minor procedure—she didn’t say what it was—she’d stopped bed-hopping. Just as long as she could dance. Every day. That was the only thing that stopped her from moving to the place where her fortune was already housed.
‘You can stop, Mister Tony,’ Mrs. Mercedes said now, more gently than he’d heard her speak up to now. ‘That’s enough.’ She gripped him by the shoulder, not at all reprovingly, not at all unkindly. It was the hand of an understanding nurse. ‘The ambulance is here.’
Tony looked at the hand on his shoulder so as not to look at the face belonging to it, or the face that he had just been kissing so intensely. The consoling hand had an unexpected quantity of age spots and wrinkles—it didn’t match Mrs. Mercedes’s face. The gems in her rings were so disproportionately large, they couldn’t be real. ‘Mister Tony! Can you hear me?’ Tony kept on staring at the elderly hand. He didn’t dare stand up, he felt so dizzy. He heard, as in a nightmare, the deafening zoom of the fan’s blades above him. Mrs. Mercedes’s voice seemed to be coming from under a bell jar. ‘Mister Tony?’ His own lips seemed frozen, too.
He let two men dressed in white help him to his feet. They were careful and considerate, and looked with more concern at him than at the happy corpse. As one of them checked for a pulse, the other placed an oxygen mask over Mrs. Bo Xiang’s cold, ecstatic smile. Almost at once, the man gave Mrs. Mercedes a look that said no, and did with his free hand what Tony hadn’t dared to do. He closed Mrs. Bo Xiang’s eyes. The truth could no longer be denied. Tony almost toppled over. His legs could no longer carry him.
He let himself be supported, and brought to a chair, by the medic who was taking care of him. A lovely, slender boy with black curly hair, a sensual mouth, and a scar on his chin. His eyes were greyer than Belgian hardstone and still deeply melancholic. He asked Tony whether he wanted a glass of water. Tony nodded. The medic let go of him and went into the bathroom.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tony, swaying backward and forward in his chair in a seasick way, saw Mrs. Mercedes bend toward the other medic and begin a whispering conversation with him. She seemed to know the man; he seemed to have some respect for her. Tony noticed that he hadn’t removed the useless oxygen mask from Mrs. Bo Xiang’s face. He was a corpulent man in his 40s, with the features of a galley slave and the expression of a domestic skivvy. He let Mrs. Mercedes stuff something into his hand, at first trying to give it back and gesticulating wildly, but then later putting it into his pocket, sighing, shaking his head, and looking away in shame.
Despite his nausea and his overheated exhaustion, Tony could make out a couple of the sentences that Mrs. Mercedes was whispering: ‘She didn’t die here, right? Somewhere along the way, or on arrival. But not here.’
◆ ◆ ◆
Godforsaken and dog-tired, Tony found himself in a room in the darkest depths of the hospital to which the happy corpse had been taken, and where it had died for the third time, this time officially. He sat bolt upright in the only chair, a monstrosity made of aluminium tubing with a green leatherette seat. It peeped and creaked with every movement. He tried to move as little as possible as he waited for the undertaker who’d been recommended to him by the youngest medic, the handsome one with the curly hair and eyes of melancholic bluestone.
Next to him, on a simple iron hospital bed, lay Mrs. Bo Xiang. Under a sheet, thank God; he didn’t have to look at her smile anymore. His head was still bursting, despite the painkiller and the sedative they’d given him. They left him there, stupefied, yet still unpleasantly aware of the situation. He didn’t need any mirrors to be able to see himself sitting here. He could have chosen a dog, but his mind imposed a scene from a black-and-white Japanese film on him. The last samurai, next to his shogun’s open grave, on guard, exhausted.
But you could hardly call Tony Zen. He was seething inside. To his astonishment, even rage, thoughts of his mother had been popping into his head since Mrs. Bo Xiang’s death. For the first time in how long? Her? The woman who had ordered him to address her as mummy, even when he was 16 and she well into her 40s.
Mummy! Mamaa-tje! There wasn’t a language in the world as polluted by the diminutive as the Flemish variant of Dutch. Every other word had a -tje or a -ke tacked onto it to make it sound smaller and more precious. Every time you went into a post office: ‘How many envelopkes would sir like?’ A bank employee to his adult customers: ‘Have you got your kaartje or do you know the nummerke of your bank account by heart?’ Mutual degradation under the pretext of politeness. And always, always, with that persistent, asinine immaturity, even as they prattled away so fluently. This was how he remembered Mamaatje’s imperium, the little landke in which he’d grown up.
But why was he longing for it from the bottom of his heart? Now, all of a sudden? A little steak with a little glass of wine. A little stroll around the garden. A little newspaper, a little cigarette, a little cup of coffee—all at a nice, easy, little pace. It all sounded so damned tempting, so painfully tempting. Fuck no. He didn’t want this. He’d never wanted this. If he had to choose between homesickness and cancer, he’d choose cancer. But he didn’t have a choice, he realized, shivering, reeling with seasickness in his chair.
They were things you just got. Both of them.
What would she look like today, his Mamaatje? Twenty-five years after
