hard labour, sometimes with paid services of another kind, but always with total independence and a consoling insignificance. He had learned to live like a nomad, a compulsive tramp, a stowaway without a destination, and that life had suited him well.
He had left behind his home country with a bitter kind of pleasure. He went back sporadically just to keep the mass of paperwork at bay. What good are roots anyway, except as a way of wangling a valid passport? He had burned all his other bridges, starting with the frayed rope ladders that could have taken him back to his once-promising youth. He had nothing more to do with the scum and the provincial backwater that had spat him out. The spitting out was mutual. No one asked after him anymore; no one had anything to do with him. It felt like a kind of recognition. Tony had once been brought up to be successful, loved, an exemplary human being. He had become none of the three, and he flaunted it the way a fisherman shows off his catch.
His father’s legal practice, sold to a complete stranger? Good riddance. He may have been cheated out of his inheritance, but that was just one less thing to worry about. His only motto was one he’d hated as a child because his family had professed it so sanctimoniously, though he’d given it a different turn. ‘Live in the shadow, you’ll live happily there’ had become ‘Live in the shadow, less shit will rain down on you there.’ He didn’t need any other principles or tenets than that. He had learned to love emptiness, the overwhelmingly infinite world which surrounded his home soil like a desert around a sewage cover.
A man has to feel at home somewhere, even if it’s in the void.
‘Please concentrate!’ Mrs. Bo Xiang cried, her free eye shut. ‘And look at me!’ She kneeled down on the cobblestones before her idol, and it wasn’t Gardel. ‘Smile!’
Tony looked at the family standing behind her, waiting for her to finish taking pictures. He saw himself through their eyes. A hooligan with his feet on a beloved tomb, a barbarian posing next to a titan as an equal. The father of the waiting family coughed for the third time. He tightened his fists around the handles of a wheelchair in which an old man with a razor-sharp mouth and two cataract-filled eyes sat muttering away. The mother exhorted her two plump daughters, each of them blushing and holding bunches of flowers in her hand, to be patient. She didn’t raise her voice but her face spoke volumes. The encyclopaedia of scorn.
Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t notice. She carried on taking pictures. No angle was too bizarre for her. She didn’t quite go so far as to lie down on her side. Tony felt more and more ridiculous, and not only because of the designer jeans she’d bought for him during the stopover in Doha, which stretched grotesquely over his crotch and around his waist. What was she going to do with all these photos, he wondered. A slideshow with Ástor Piazzolla’s ‘Libertango’ as accompaniment? Entertainment for her husband? They called each other every day, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Xiang. Intercontinentally, sometimes for half an hour at a time. They laughed together. What were they saying in that filthy Chinese of theirs? Were they talking about him? What were they plotting?
Mrs. Bo Xiang noticed Tony’s awkwardness. She let her Sigma drop and looked him in the eyes, tenderly, it seemed. It wouldn’t have taken much for her to climb up on the gravestone, too, pinch his cheek between her thumb and forefinger and softly shake it back and forth.
One of these days, Tony thought, I’ll wipe that smile off her porcelain face.
◆ ◆ ◆
Things turned out differently. By the end of the week, Mrs. Bo Xiang had even persuaded him to fuck her. No pain, no gain.
Tony had stopped resisting and given in. It had been on the cards for long enough. At a certain point, refusing became more dangerous than consenting. That was another thing he’d learned on the cruise ships he’d served on. Protecting your job security, and in some cases your hide, could take all kinds of forms. Love was the least objectionable. Love is always good, even if it’s rotten to the core.
During their walk, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang had discovered San Telmo and taken it into their hearts. The antiques shops and the charming covered vegetable market in crumbling art-deco style certainly had something to do with that. Fading glory lends itself more to romance than new buildings.
Mrs. Bo Xiang, in particular, radiated joie de vivre once again. For anyone living in the lap of luxury, being confronted with deprivation is an unbeatable aphrodisiac. They instantly swapped the Hilton for a bed and breakfast in a ramshackle town house, cheerfully renovated on a tight budget in daring colours, and just by the Plaza Dorrego, the navel of San Telmo. This was the plaza where beggars and musicians held court from early in the morning, where every afternoon a flea market uncoiled, and where every evening an amateur dance display took place among the terrace tables of the many cafes and restaurants. Tango, tango—el amor!
Their own mating dance, on the second floor of the mansion, began staidly. In the tepid, heavy afternoon air, barely circulated by the ceiling fan, there was a wistfulness. Their journey home was approaching. Tomorrow they’d be checking out. Any kind of parting is sweet sorrow. The timid respect which with Tony had originally treated Mrs. Bo Xiang inhibited the intensity of their relationship.
But not for long. Intimacy breeds trust, and that trust increases as shame is reciprocally cast aside. Once Tony had braced his feet against the bedstead and slowly increased his tempo, a languid, noisy euphoria overcame Mrs. Bo Xiang and her worn-out bones.
Tony was embarrassed for her. The poor woman was lying prostrate and defenceless, her legs spread, one side of her face pressed into the pillow. Her whole body rocked backward and forward, assisted by her mild corpulence. Her face rocked along each time, as though she were trying to spread out the stiff pillow, using her head as a rolling pin. Just now she’d pulled the other pillow under her midriff to keep her hips raised without getting a cramp. When love comes knocking, you have to open your door to it. Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t take any persuading.
Just how old is she? Tony wondered. She smelled of violets and green tea. I really don’t get it, he groaned inwardly, without sacrificing momentum. What do all these old bags see in me? Some objects attract flies, or iron filings. I’m a magnet for the motherly type. Or even the grandmotherly type, of late. What does Mrs. Bo Xiang think I’m going to help her achieve, or recover? Or does she enjoy humiliating me? Is that the role I’m playing? Despite the heat, he systematically increased his pace.
The euphoria beneath him swelled just as systematically. ‘More,’ Mrs. Bo Xiang whispered in English, for the second time now, a little louder than the first time. ‘Yes. I want more.’
Why didn’t she say it in her own language if she was really that euphoric? Why did she use the lingua franca of the American porn industry? Did elderly women watch sex on the internet nowadays, too? At each of Tony’s thrusts, Mrs. Bo Xiang’s shiny red lips poked out sideways between her squashed face and the stiff pillow. Her lipstick was coming off, her foundation, too. What she liked, she’d confided to him on one of the previous days, was being bitten in the scruff of her neck ‘during the act.’
Tony didn’t do it. On top of everything else, he was supposed to bite her? There were limits. ‘I want more,’ Mrs. Bo Xiang whispered, even louder this time. Tony was having more and more trouble empathizing. And the hardest part was still to come, he realized. The seduction and the foreplay were bearable; the action itself was a matter of not thinking too much and doggedly keeping at it. The aftercare, that was a terrible prospect. What could they possibly say after the deed? Two beings who were so different?
‘More, Tony. More.’
Outside, the metropolis was taking its siesta. Spray trucks were driving around to mist up the pavements and beat down the dust. The heat managed to penetrate everywhere all the same, air conditioning or no air conditioning. It clamped
