his peregrinations, and in Cairo, and Bangkok, so he was used to infernal traffic, but this was different. This exuded menace. He didn’t belong here. He knew it, and this city knew it. It was already about to turn on him.
None of the hundreds of passers-by gave the unusual couple a second glance. Businessmen, young mothers, begging Falklands War vets, skateboarders, cops in short-sleeved shirts with sweat rings under their armpits and truncheons in their belts… No one gave anyone a funny look here, Tony chuckled to himself. Harried indifference is an asset. Or not. This was it, of course: the famous Argentinian cool. The gaucho’s unflappability, the baccy-spitting cowboy who still believed he was descended from the conquistadores. The Indian-killer with his bow legs and his unshaven chin, his leather hat, his metal yerba maté cup, his incomprehensible Spanish. Perhaps they’d learned from their cattle to wear that indifferent expression. Socializing or flirting was for later, for after work, after the heat, in the new heat of the wood fires in the grill rooms where they would devour half a bull each, just for starters.
After that, they’d withdraw, as pissed as newts, to their shady milongas, with their cheap wine, their sweaty accordion music, and their spastic dance steps, until daylight dawned. Ridiculous. What were tango dancers but a pair of tangled-up flamingos with epilepsy? Tony felt a surge of deep animosity, bordering on disgust. He’d already felt it the week before, when he’d opened his first tourist guide. ‘City of roasted sweetbreads with Malbec!’ ‘Mysticism and romance immortalized in timeless music!’ Each article came down to the same thing: glorified folk dancing and glorified barbecuing. Nobody mentioned the dictators and their coups, though they drooled all the more over their wives.
The only one on the Avenida who seemed bothered by this odd couple—a young gringo in designer jeans accompanied by a Chinese pygmy woman, hung with jewels and laughing like a lunatic—was a barking poodle. Clearly a creature with a pedigree. That’s just perfect, Tony groaned. As he’d predicted, this place was ‘Europe squared.’ Even a dog was a status symbol. Yelpers like that didn’t go down well with Muslims or Asians. Let alone blacks. They knew what a dog was for: to ignore or kick. The beginning of all civilization.
The poodle tugged, barking peevishly, at its incredibly long lead. The lead kept being pulled taut between the collar around its neck and the belt around the midriff of its escort: a sturdy, bespectacled girl barely twenty years old in a lemon-yellow top, lime-green hot pants, and dirty gym shoes. A princess from the upper middle classes, Tony guessed. Today a prissy student, tomorrow the petulant wife of an oil baron or a meat millionaire. She was wearing a pair of showy white headphones, the jewellery of contemporary youth, and her unbound breasts bobbed around boldly. There were four more leashed show dogs attached to her belt: the biggest was a pure-bred German shepherd, the smallest a kind of chihuahua. It might also have been a rat. She was already the third of this type of dog walker they had encountered. Most of them were walking. This bespectacled girl was jogging, surrounded by her pack like a heavenly body with insane satellites. Only the poodle remained behind, barking angrily at Tony, bracing against the tugging lead each time: a mutineer, an Argentinian rebel, a four-legged gaucho.
It didn’t stand a chance and was dragged along, tug by tug, once almost choking, to the renewed merriment of Mrs. Bo Xiang, who, after the Obelisco, now pointed annoyingly at the animal. Chinese people point at absolutely everything, Tony sighed. Except other Chinese people.
The girl with the dogs bobbed off into the crowd and disappeared. Mrs. Bo Xiang shook her ornamental porcelain head and snickered something in Chinese. Tony nodded without asking what she meant. He was just glad she was still enjoying herself. The first attraction he’d wanted to take her to—a guided tour of the Teatro Colón, one of the largest opera buildings in the world—turned out to be closed due to a union protest. In front of the entrance, a delegation of enraged comrades was making a racket with cowbells, panpipes, Inca drums, and firecrackers. What was it with this city and its cacophony? He apologized to Mrs. Bo Xiang, but she seemed to find the carry-on quite normal, even enjoyable, as though Tony had planned it all. She radiated happiness. Perhaps, Tony shuddered, she sees it as an homage to her communist origins. He quickly coaxed her away, before she got it into her head to go and shake the hands of the entire delegation of strikers, or hand out money to them. That woman was capable of anything.
She willingly let herself be guided away on his arm, smiling gratefully. He was almost convinced he could hear the layer of foundation cracking.
Her good humour stayed afloat even in the graveyard, a few hours later, when it turned out that Tony had made a mistake. Evita Perón was buried somewhere else.
He should have known. It had taken them half an hour to get there. Taxis were so cheap and so abundant here that the chauffeurs were all too eager to misunderstand you so that they could rack up a few extra kilometres. Or was it a genuine misunderstanding? Tony had asked for ‘the cemetery with the famous dead people’ because he’d forgotten the name of the neighbourhood. Perhaps the driver had liked music more than politics when it came to cadaverous heroes.
There was no lack of heroes in this sweeping boneyard: a genuine park with broad lanes, each one cobbled, each one bordered with graves that looked like miniature houses. They even had windows and ornamental doors—mausoleums custom-made to the dimensions of an extinct bourgeoisie. All of them built in the most flashy of materials, from marble to granite, topped off with a frieze of angelic hosts or a bust of the departed. The richest had had themselves anchored full length to the world they should have left behind. Fossils of bygone glory and self-importance. There were soldiers, eternally saluting in their dress uniforms of bronzo bombarda, and there were musicians, seated on chairs with bandoneons on their knees, frozen in everlasting ambiance. Nostalgia on a pedestal.
The undisputed high point was the grave of Carlos Gardel, Tango King, singer-songwriter of ‘Mi Noche Triste’ and ‘Volver,’ not to mention skirt-chaser, chain-smoker, and patron of Café Tortoni. He went down in a plane at the age of 45. His massively attended funeral disrupted traffic for an entire day. And that was in 1935. Tony remembered it all from his Michelin guide. He had still managed to hit a goddamn tourist jackpot!
And indeed, Mrs. Bo Xiang stood happily admiring the statue. Behold the eternally youthful, perpetually singing dandy, flaunting a bow tie and the smile of a Latin lover. He stared haughtily over their heads at the graves on the other side of the path, shining as though he had just been polished. There were fresh bouquets at his feet, and the wall behind him was adorned with copper plaques and enamel tiles covered in sayings, expressions of gratitude, and love poems written by admirers, most of whom had been born long after their idol’s plane had crashed. Someone had threaded a white carnation through his bronze buttonhole. A real cigarette butt smouldered between the brownish-green fingers of his right hand.
Mrs. Bo Xiang got her compact red titanium Sigma camera out of her Louis Vuitton, peered through the lens, and gestured frantically with her free hand for Tony to stand closer and closer to the statue. She wouldn’t calm down until he had climbed up onto the knee-high tomb and posed next to Gardel, mirroring his stance, right down to the cigarette in his left hand. Her gadget chirped like crazy—she had chosen an electronic bird sound for each snap. She had already taken shots of Tony at the gate of the Casa Rosada on the Plaza de Mayo, and next to the colourful houses on the Caminito in La Boca.
‘You look exactly like him,’ she crowed now.
Without breaking his pose, Tony shouted back that all Westerners were as alike as peas in a pod. To his irritation, Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t contradict him. No, she sank laboriously to her knees, so that she could take a picture of him and his doppelgänger from below.
Tony surveyed the boneyard as though it were a battleground. His headache finally seemed to be abating. He liked this peace and quiet. It made him long again for the sea, with its unbounded horizon. Three hundred and sixty degrees of nothing, as far as the eye could see. He missed the calm of the lengthy journeys on the cargo ships
