The St Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires Read online

  Copyright, acknowledgements and dedication

  The Saint Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires

  by

  Eric Stener Carlson

  Tartarus Press

  Copyright © Eric Stener Carlson/Tartarus Press, 2009/2016

  The characters in this book are works of fiction, and their opinions should not be taken to represent those of any organisation with which the author has been associated or for which he has worked. The likeness to any person, living or dead, or that of any entity, program, policy, organisation or group appearing in this book is purely unintentional. Even so, the author suggests that readers do not attempt to locate the Saint Perpetuus Club in Buenos Aires, for their own sakes.

  The publishers would like to thank Jim Rockhill

  for his assistance in the preparation of this book.

  For Luján

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Book In

  Book II

  Book III

  Book IV

  Book V

  Book VI

  Book VII

  Chapter Three

  Book VIII

  Book IX

  Book X

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Book XI

  Book XII

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Book XIII

  Book XIV

  Book XV

  Chapter Eleven

  Book XVI

  Book XVII

  Book XVIII

  Book XIX

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Book XX

  Book Chapter Sixteen

  Works Consulted and cited

  CHAPTER ONE

  I entered Bernardo’s Bookstore and Antiquary and heard the pleasant ‘ting-ling’ sound of the brass bell above the door, as it slowly creaked closed behind me. The sounds of traffic on Avenida Santa Fe faded, muffled by row upon row of leather-bound spines with faint gold lettering. Everything was hushed. The air was cool, like the nave of a church.

  This was how a bookstore was supposed to sound, how it was supposed to smell—musty, dusty, isolated from the cares and troubles of the outside world. It beckoned back to a more refined time, when Buenos Aires was the Paris of Latin America. Before the crash, before everything went to hell. Bernardo’s was nothing like those awful, modern bookstores, with hip-hop blaring and cappuccinos foaming and salesgirls in tight T-shirts offering self-help books on everything from Zen Buddhism to computer programming. No, not here.

  Even the owner, Bernardo, was in keeping with the ambiance of the place. He was the quintessential porteño, with impeccably combed-back white hair, pale blue eyes, and a purple silk scarf knotted around his throat. In summer or winter, he always sat erect behind the counter at the far back of the store, buttoned up in his brown wool cardigan, invariably thumbing through a battered copy of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

  I used to go there frequently when I was still writing my dissertation . . . before I’d given up on my dissertation. What treasures I’d found there! An excellent French edition of Machiavelli’s Discourses from 1753. A first edition of Mitre’s Spanish translation of Dante’s Inferno. I’d even found an original of Hobbes’ Leviathan just sitting there on the shelf! Of course, as a graduate student, I couldn’t afford to even ask how much it cost (and now, as a civil servant, even less).

  But back then I could dream. Back then, I could run the tips of my fingers over Hobbes’ faded script, turn the fragile pages pocked with acid stains, and imagine that, one day, I could write a book like that.

  How many kingdoms and governments had been created (and overthrown), because Hobbes had convinced their leaders that life was ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short’? If I could come up with just one idea, one original idea like Hobbes, then I could change the course of the world.

  But I never did. Hobbes was right . . . life is too short. There was never enough time to finish my dissertation on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, especially after my son was born. How could I write it at night, juggling marriage, fatherhood, and a job at the Ministry of Parks, Public Monuments and Green Areas? What final chapters I’d submitted to my dissertation committee before taking a permanent leave of absence I’d written out of inertia more than anything else. I’d settled into my job at the Ministry and my life at home like lying down on an old feather bed that takes the form of your body. It’s full of lumps too difficult to knead out, so you just have to learn to accept that you have to lie in that same position, night after night, if you’re going to get any sleep.

  But going into Bernardo’s book store that particular afternoon on my lunch break made me feel like I’d felt when I was younger, that something new and exciting was just around the corner, that some jewel was waiting to be discovered. Everything was just as it should be. Well . . . everything except for two things.

  One was Bernardina, Bernardo’s wife. The other was Edgardo, whom I took to be Bernardo’s retarded, older brother, but I always had the decency not to ask. They lived in the back of the shop, up a rickety set of stairs.

  Bernardina was the one who actually kept the place going. Although she must have been at least a decade older than Bernardo, she wheeled around the heavy oak ladder to get the books off the top shelves. She rang up the purchases at the antique cash register. She fussed and fretted about like a mother hen, adjusting and dusting the piles of books that continually surrounded Bernardo.

  All of this should have made her seem rather sweet, but something wasn’t quite right. In a certain light, they could almost be mistaken for mother and son. I know that, as some couples get older, they start looking like each other, kind of like masters and dogs. But sometimes she looked so very much like him—especially the far-away look in those pale blue eyes, the crinkles round the edges—that it made me wonder, as I got older, if the same wouldn’t happen to me and my wife, Julieta, if we wouldn’t just slowly become the same person.

  If I felt a certain vague apprehension about Bernardina, then what I felt about Edgardo can only be described as outright fear. He, too, resembled Bernardo in a way (with a shock of white hair streaked with grey).

  But where Bernardo was refined and scholarly, Edgardo was lumbering and grotesque. If you’ve read ‘La Gallina Degollada’ by Horacio Quiroga, you’ll know what I mean when I say he was like the four idiot Mazzini-Ferraz brothers all rolled into one. He had a gaping mouth, with the tongue lolling out to one side, and huge, empty eyes, set deep in their sockets. His heavy, awkward hands were perpetually wrapped around the handle of a mop, and, like the boys in Quiroga’s story, I could just as easily imagine them wrapped around a little girl’s throat, ripping her blonde hair out by the roots like plucking feathers from a chicken.

  Sometimes, I’d see him in the back of the store, rocking slowly back and forth like an ape, whispering under his breath to his brother, always at a distance of a metre or more. Then I’d look up from whatever book I was browsing, and, suddenly, he’d be at my elbow with that awful, gaping mouth. Stifling my panic, I’d hurry off down another aisle pretending to look for some other book.

  What disturbed me most was how he moved, as if he couldn’t settle on a pace. It was either ridiculously sped-up, and he hurried around with a convulsive twitch, or he’d lumber slowly, almost too slowly to be imagined, as if something were clogging the signals sent by his brain to the muscles in his arms and legs.

  I don�
�t mean by this to say I despised the man because of his mental limitations, but I always felt there was something deeply odd about him, perhaps even something sinister. That was the only thing that made me reticent about dropping by the bookshop more often.

  This day, however, I felt an urgent need to browse for books. I needed to escape from what had been a particularly-trying morning at the Ministry. I don’t want to go too much into detail, because I’m trying to put that chapter of my life behind me. To put it briefly, I was involved in organising a conference that was tentatively being called ‘Uses and Abuses of Green Spaces: Parks in the Age of Social Disparity’.

  From the title, it doesn’t sound too life threatening, does it? But the truth is, it was tearing me apart.

  I’d become embroiled in a monumental debate over whether or not all the parks in Buenos Aires should be gated and locked at night. Gating the parks had been proposed by a coalition of wealthy patrons for the arts. They were appalled that local slum-dwellers were sneaking into the parks at night and sawing off bits of priceless statues to sell for scrap. In this way, an archer by Bourdelle had had his bow chiselled from his hands, and a woman’s ham-like leg by Botero was amputated by hack-saw, and then melted down and turned into copper wiring.

  On the other hand, there was a group of homeless rights advocates. They argued the poor had nowhere else to sleep, and that closing the parks would mean virtually condemning them to die on the streets.

  Both of these were compelling arguments, I suppose, but what did this have to do with me, the lowest-rung bureaucrat in the most obscure ministry in Buenos Aires?

  The reason is, the government didn’t want to get involved in this debate. Not during an election year. Not ever. If they sided with the wealthy patrons, they’d alienate the Opposition. Then there’d bound to be protests that would paralyse the city for months. On the other hand, if they sided with the homeless, then they’d alienate their wealthy patrons, and those coffers of campaign contributions would be slammed shut on their noses.

  So the government decided to kick the problem down the chain to a Ministry they didn’t give a shit about . . . mine. My Minister, smelling a political disaster, kicked it down to my Department Director. My Director, who almost had a major coronary at the sight of the Minister’s memo assigning us the conference, handed it off to the Assistant Director, who gave it to his Assistant (my boss), who palmed it off to me.

  I can still remember the grin on that bastard Gutierrez’s face—with his awful, crooked teeth that made him look like an evil guanaco—when he lumbered into my cubicle and tossed the file on my desk. ‘Here you go, Licenciado Ibañez,’ he said, his terrible comb-over moving from side to side as he shook his head, ‘you studied all that philosophy and shit at the University of Buenos Aires. See if you can philosophise your way out of this one.’

  Gutierrez was the son of a plumbing supplies clerk who’d made a political contribution just before his business went under. That’s how he got his job, and that’s why he hung a big, rusty pipe wrench on the wall behind his desk, ‘To remind me of me origins’. I swear, every time he summoned me into his office, I wished that wrench of Damocles would come crashing down on his head and split his skull wide open.

  That muscle-bound goon’s been after me ever since I proofed a memo for him in which he referred to the plaza in the neighbourhood of Versailles as being ‘named for the homogenous palace in Madrid’. I pointed out that, first, the word was ‘homonymous’, and that, second, the palace of Versailles was in Paris. Ignorant shit that he was, he didn’t take my advice and sent the memo up to the Minister’s office anyway.

  When the memo was returned, all marked up in red by the Minister’s secretary, Gutierrez sent an e-mail to me (CC’ing the entire Ministry), in which he advised me to use Spell-check the next time I sent out a memo, ‘because these stoopid (sic) mistakes reflect bad on us all.’ He’d been biding his time to get back at me, and now he’d finally found a way screw me with this stupid conference.

  That’s why I’d ducked out of our office on Esmeralda Street and hurried to Bernardo’s. Although I’m not a particularly religious person, bookstores are a bit like confessionals to me. The thoughts and feelings of all the greatest people who have ever lived, good and bad, are stacked up in an appeal towards heaven. Somewhere, in one of those pages, there had to be an idea that would show me a way out of this mess.

  But, after scanning the bookshelves for an hour, the only thing obvious to me was the irony of my situation.

  I had a job I’d never wanted. And, now, I was running to and fro, desperately trying to think of a way to save it, like a neurotic hamster spinning endlessly in its stupid, plastic wheel. Looking at my watch, I realised I’d have to leave immediately if I was going to make it for my afternoon meeting with Gutierrez. Even then, I’d have to run down Santa Fe and bolt across Avenida 9 de Julio, dodging taxis and busses like a madman.

  Resigning myself to my fate, I gave a deep sigh and ended my little routine at Bernardo’s the way I always did. I wandered down to the Greek classics section to gaze at the oldest copy of Plato’s Republic I’ve ever seen, the 1713 Latin edition by Edmundus Massey. (I was sure no one was ever going to buy it, because it was so awfully expensive.) I instinctively reached for it on the shelf, in the dark and lonely place it always sat.

  I grabbed it, but, somehow, it felt different in my hand. I brought it up to my eyes in the dim light and saw it wasn’t the glorious version of the Republic after all but a rather battered edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints.

  Disoriented by this unexpected book—I really am a creature of habit and get upset by the smallest of changes—I wandered to the back of the shop to ask Bernardo about it. He was still sitting behind his fortress of books, unmoving.

  ‘Sorry,’ I called, ‘but where’s Massey’s Plato? It’s apparently been mis-shelved, and someone’s put Butler in its place.’

  He looked up at me, or, rather, beyond me, and said, absentmindedly ‘Tempus fugit’. That was one of Bernardo’s favourite aphorisms, along with ‘The devil’s in the details’. Then he mumbled something to himself about ‘You’re a good boy’ or ‘Be a good boy’ and returned to reading Proust.

  Thinking he was getting deaf—and perhaps even a little senile—I tried to approach him from around the back of his desk. But, suddenly, Bernardina appeared from behind the stack of books and wedged her ample bosom between me and Bernardo. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

  ‘Well . . . uh, I was looking for Plato’s Republic, you know, the Latin edition. And I found this instead.’

  Her face suddenly turned crimson, and she asked, accusingly, ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘Like I said, where the Republic should be.’

  She started wringing her hands and called out, ‘Edgardo, what have you done now?’ And then, to me, ‘Look, that boy sometimes does things he shouldn’t. Why don’t you just give that to me now, and I’ll see if I can locate the Plato for you?’ and she tried to snatch it from my hand.

  For a split second, I thought about handing it over to her—which, in retrospect would have been the most sensible thing to do. But I didn’t. My curiosity had been piqued. Holding it away from her, I opened it up and flipped through it. It was in decent enough shape. The binding was good, the leaves sturdy. But the more I looked at it, the more I felt there was something deeper. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt Bernardina sensed it too.

  Books with a little mystery have always appealed to me. I once bought a French translation of Kipling’s The Jungle Book from 1916 in a book stall near Tribunales, just because the pages had never been cut. The idea that the book had been on someone’s shelf—Who? A French immigrant? A school teacher?—for almost a hundred years, and no one even opened it, like it was just waiting for me, was brilliant. I bought it around the time I’d first met Julieta.

  One day after classes, I’d invited her over to my impossibly-tiny apartment on Mansilla to drink some cheap wine. After w
e’d finished most of the bottle, she’d noticed the book and grabbed it off the shelf. She’d declared, ‘We must liberate the book! It’s our duty to cut the pages and let its spirit go free.’

  I made a mock protest, saying we couldn’t defile such a perfect book. So we struck a deal, a kiss for every leaf we cut with an old Victorinox. And then, after a few chapters, it was one button of her blouse for every page. By the end of the afternoon, all the pages had been cut and we were making love on my sofa-bed. It was the day our first child was conceived . . .

  In a strangely similar way, I felt this copy of Butler’s Saints belonged to me, that I was the one meant to liberate its spirit. I glanced at the first page where the price had been written in pencil, in large, stubby letters. And now I understood Bernardina’s consternation. Someone had accidentally priced it at 20 pesos, when it was surely worth ten times that amount.

  By this time, Edgardo had miraculously appeared out of nowhere (how did he do that?) and Bernardina was chiding him, his lolling head wagging downwards like a naughty puppy dog’s. ‘What were you thinking, Edgardo?’ she asked. ‘After all we’ve talked about? You’ve got to stop this, for all our sakes. Now take it, and put it back where it belongs.’

  I know this is going to sound rather odd, but the more they discussed the book’s future—a future that didn’t include me—the more convinced I became I had to have the book. Bernardina was now hugging Edgardo because she’d been too harsh to him, and he had tears in his eyes. Under cover of this diversion I felt around in my pockets for twenty pesos.