was years since he’d taken so long. It wasn’t just the smell of violets and the creaking of the bed. It was also Mrs. Bo Xiang’s husband and the fortune that Tony owed him, of course. How could he have been so stupid? Roulette wasn’t his thing. He should have never allowed himself to be seduced. Not then, not now. Not ever.
‘More! More!’
Don’t you worry, my dear Tony, Mrs. Bo Xiang had said to him a week earlier, shortly before falling asleep next to him in the Boeing with her mouth obscenely open. She was drunk; she’d had one gin and tonic after the other. You’ll figure it out, you and my husband. He can be very generous and forgiving. If I ask him. And if you help me. Can you help me, Mister Tony? To avoid answering, he’d kissed her hand. She had pulled her hand away, giggling, and then kissed the back of it herself. Her own hand. With closed eyes, ardently, protractedly, not quite licking the place he’d kissed. It wasn’t the first trip she’d taken him along on. She’d dragged him to Monaco, and even to Dubai. He’d always managed to ward off her advances. But not anymore. He knew what was coming. Buenos Aires would be his Waterloo.
‘More!’
Just before falling asleep on the airplane, she’d stroked his cheek. She’d never done that before. It felt like he was being branded. ‘My Tony is a little damaged, that’s all’ she’d jabbered. It sounded like a verdict. ‘Damaged,’ as in damaged goods. As in ruined. What was she then? A perfect peach? An immaculate saint?
‘More!’
Stop whining, Tony thought, keep up the tempo and everything will come good. This is the fate of everyone who gets into debt; plenty of people are worse off than me. While thinking this, he looked at himself in the full-length mirror next to the bed. It was a shocking sight, the way he was mounting that hillock of flesh. Pale, veal-coloured, quivering flesh.
‘More!’
I should learn to keep my eyes shut, Tony thought. But he carried on watching, focussing on his own pumping hips. Where his belly had once been taut, all muscle, now, in shock, he counted three rolls. I should learn to close my eyes to everything, he thought, and I have to stop complaining about my life. I’m not important enough to complain. I’m a louse in other people’s bedsheets, nothing more. The traces I leave behind won’t survive the first wash. So what? What have lice got to complain about, except that they exist? Where there’s blood, there’s hope. No self-pity! Everyone has to pay. Everyone looks for a scapegoat and everyone longs for a saviour, there isn’t anything else to be said about life. Give up grousing and ejaculate.
But he didn’t ejaculate. His breathing grew frantic, his floundering took on a desperate note. Liberation was a long time coming.
Mrs. Bo Xiang, whose head was still pressed solidly into the pillow, didn’t take it personally. She began to help. She grubbed back up at him, harder and harder. The sounds she was making no longer resembled anything like words. The bed squeaked as though it were about to collapse. It was a long time since anyone had enjoyed themselves so much in Tony’s company, and thanks to him, too.
He tried to pay back her efforts by trying even harder, but alongside desperation, melancholia began to delay his climax. What was he doing here?
And what else could he do but give in to that melancholy? Perhaps, moving forward on autopilot, he’d be able to achieve what he couldn’t if he thought about it too much. Disassociation, the mind breaking free from the body, didn’t have to be all bad.
My God, he thought to himself—eyes closed, his body making love unabated—how wrong I was about this city! Buenos Aires is fantastic! The past week seemed like a month, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang had seen and done so much.
They had visited a theatre converted into a bookshop, with the flocked wallpaper and the gilded ceiling intact. They’d attended an equestrian show in a distant suburb, and after that, a procession in a square clamped between an ominous-looking barracks and a stinking abattoir. The difference between the two buildings had been minimal, the fiesta after the procession ecstatic.
They had explored the collection of the practically empty Museo de Bellas Artes. Rembrandt, Renoir, and Jackson Pollock all hung within arm’s reach. You could stand with your nose pressed right up to them, no guards to tell you off. They had enjoyed the fantastic wines in the working-class cafés, with their stirring music and elderly waiters. Tony had seen an old conviction of his confirmed, there. If you wanted to know if a city was worth anything, you needed to look at the age of its waiters. The young studs and teenyboppers in Los Angeles and Sydney were after big tips and a different job, the sooner the better. An elderly waiter lived only for his profession. He knew people and their impatience. He had been serving drinks and the same dishes for thirty years; he’d been listening to the same sorrows and the same gossip for thirty years without scoffing or butting in. That took wisdom, and self-knowledge, and class.
This beautiful city had class in spades. After his initial crabby resistance, Tony had completely changed his mind about tango. They’d taken an actual lesson together, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang. Mad, carefree fun that he would have simulated in the past, but which he now actually experienced. All of the foreign students were bumbling around, laughing; only he and Mrs. Bo Xiang were complemented on their efforts by the teacher—a fat queen with a pointy beard and werewolf eyebrows, shrouded in baggy black drapes that resembled net curtains, but with steel-tipped cowboy boots sticking out under them.
After that, and indeed, all the way into the early hours, they, too, washed into the dance halls—the Porteños, as the inhabitants of the largest meat market in the world called themselves. Young and old, rich and poor, all of them together. They didn’t need lessons. Dignified and frenetic, they lost themselves in the music that Tony had whole-heartedly hated a week before, but which could now touch him to the bottom of the soul he thought he had lost long ago. What had happened? What had Buenos Aires done to him? Why had he succumbed here rather than in Monaco?
Monaco had proven to be a façade. Disneyland for billionaires, a cardboard cut-out skyline, an expensive cordon sanitaire for upstart proles, sanctimoniously clean and laughably chic, an architectonic neurosis for operetta walk-ons. This city, Buenos Aires, was a city. Unabashedly dirty, sincerely impure, stubbornly recalcitrant. She didn’t beg for compliments but swept you up into her orbit. Tony realized this as, in the middle of the night, rooted to the spot and increasingly drunk, he was watching a performance by El Afronte, an orquestra típica with one singer and ten musicians. Four bandoneons, three violins, a cello, a double bass, and a piano.
They played with the refinement of a symphony orchestra and the rhythmic passion of a heavy-metal band. Tony couldn’t explain why, but when the bespectacled singer—an anomalous cross between an angular existentialist from the Paris of May ’68 and a charming rocker from ’59, and yet every inch an Argentinian—when this anomaly began to sing, tears poured from Tony’s eyes, even though he didn’t understand most of the lyrics.
Mrs. Bo Xiang, who was no less drunk than he was, cleaned up his waterworks with paper tissues. Tony let her. He capitulated, there and then. He no longer begrudged the woman what she was looking for. She was quite sweet, really. He had obliged more repulsive women than her, obnoxious battle-axes who had looked down on him because they desired him. Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t look down on him. She must have been a fresh-faced beauty once. He had been wrong about her, too. She seemed more patient and generous than he’d thought. Had she always been like that, or had she been chastened by adversity along the way, by some kind of trauma, or a series of disasters?
It didn’t matter. She was who she was, here and now, and Tony felt neither judged nor mocked by her. To his surprise, he felt grateful, even moved. He kissed her two claws in the semi-darkness of the clammy, sweaty milonga. He stroked her neck and her pierced earlobes. Casanova for beginners.
