The St Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires Read online

  Twenty pesos was a lot for someone in my situation, and I was supposed to buy some baby formula for my son, Miguelito, with it on my way back home. But I thought I could always sell the book for a profit if I ended up not wanting to keep it. So it really wasn’t like I’d be wasting money. I’d be investing it.

  So I pulled out all my coins and bills, counted them out as quietly as possible and laid them on the counter. As I began to back away down the aisle, Bernardo looked up at me and said, ‘You know, the devil’s in the details.’ But he didn’t try to stop me. Then he mumbled something else I couldn’t understand.

  By the time I approached the exit, Bernardina had become aware of my escape. ‘Wait,’ she called out. ‘Don’t leave with that book. There’s been a mistake.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I called over my shoulder, ‘I don’t need a receipt.’ Before she could say anything else, I was out the door, the ting-ling of the brass bell behind me. The cacophony of traffic on Santa Fe engulfed me, as I stuffed the book into my portfolio and sprinted back to work.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I got home late that night, and Julieta had already given Miguelito his dinner. When I came in, she was kneeling over the wet tiles in the bathroom, giving him a bath. Her hair was all frizzy. There were bubbles on her face and she had on that old, green T-shirt of mine she insisted on wearing clinging to her hips and breasts. Even without makeup, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. But I didn’t tell her that, because she said I said it too often for it to be true anymore.

  So, I simply said, ‘Hello, my young Latin filly,’ and slapped her on the behind. She splashed some bubbles my way and said to Miguelito, ‘Oh, there’s your daddy, the important government official, keeping the world green. How was your day, my love?’

  Unknotting my tie, I said, ‘Better not ask, Juli. I think I probably killed more trees than I saved today, with the amount of memos I had to write.’

  ‘Good,’ she replied, ‘I’ve always thought trees were such a nuisance, cluttering up the parks with their leaves. It’s a good plan of yours to kill them. Here,’ she said, getting up and handing me the damp towel. ‘Pass it over his forehead and under his armpits a bit. He’s got just a touch of fever—nothing serious—but keep him in the water for a few more minutes, okay?’

  She kissed me on the cheek, and then went into the kitchen. ‘I’ll heat up something for you.’

  Later that night, after we’d dried Miguelito and powdered him and put him into his fuzzy pyjamas, and sung him to sleep (twice), Julieta and I made love. I was lying on our bed, still wearing my crumpled blue suit, exhausted and incapable of any movement. Then she came into the room, pulled off her T-shirt and rocked slowly on top of me. She was the most amazing lover I’ve ever known; she anticipated everything, as if she could see into the future and knew what I wanted even before I did.

  Afterwards, as we lay sweaty, wrapped in each others’ arms, she said, ‘Be a dear and get me a glass of water, please.’

  As I slid down the hallway to the kitchen naked in my fuzzy slippers, over the freezing tiles, I glanced down at my battered portfolio sitting by the door. The way the moonlight came through our small living room window, it looked like a spotlight, reminding me of the book from Bernardo’s store sitting inside it. I’d been so busy that day I’d completely forgotten about it.

  Instead of going straight to the kitchen, I quietly picked up my portfolio and skated towards my ‘study’. The small room—a maid’s room barely larger than a cupboard back from the 1930s when the Argentine middle class could actually afford live-in maids—was mostly now a deposit for Miguelito’s old toys and stacks of philosophy books I rarely consulted. I pushed back some piles of rough drafts of my dissertation on the make-shift, plywood table and made way for the Lives of the Saints.

  In the pale light of the hanging bulb, I saw this was the shortened, 1894 Benziger Brothers’ edition, not the 1,200 page opus Butler had written for the pious back in 1756. I’d once leafed through a copy at the national library when I was cramming for my final on Saint Augustine.

  For each saint, there were a few biographic details, a description of martyrdom and a reflection for every day of the year. Saint Agatha (breasts mutilated and naked body rolled on potsherds), Saint Blase (body torn with iron hooks), Saint Cyrile (burned at the stake) . . . pretty standard, gruesome Early Church stuff.

  However, as I flipped through the book, I noticed a series of annotations between the lines beginning at the entry for Saint Perpetuus, eighth Bishop of Tours. It was beautiful, flowing cursive, the kind you find in old court documents from the 1800s.

  At first, I didn’t give it much thought, because that sort of marginalia is common in prayer books.

  But, as I picked up words here and there, it dawned on me this writing was not a devotion to the saints. In fact, it was anything but saintly. It was a sort of malicious diary hidden between the lines and arranged in a series of books.

  I rushed through the text, just to get a sense of what it was about. Then, I read it slowly. Then I read it again and again, I don’t know how many times. By the time I put down the book, I saw the first rays of sunlight coming in through the tiny window carved into the study wall. I realised I was shivering all over because of the cold.

  I hid the book between some old drafts of my dissertation, and I locked the study door. Then, teeth chattering, exhausted, I skated naked back to bed. As I pulled the covers over me, I felt ridiculous for having spent the night with that book instead of in my warm bed with my warm wife. To make matters worse, I’d have to get up in less than an hour to go to work and start that shit with Gutierrez all over again.

  As I fell asleep, I told myself the entry was pure nonsense, that I’d just been reading it out of some morbid curiosity. It was mostly gibberish, and half of me suspected it was the ravings of a lunatic. But . . . the other half of me sensed there was something powerful in those words. Perhaps, amongst all that nonsense, there was something true in it.

  I particularly wondered about the author’s assertion that he’d found a way to control time.

  From the notes I later took, I’ve transcribed the first entry below, so you can form your own opinion.

  Book I

  (First entry, Lives of the Saints)

  Although not formally recognised by the Vatican, I’m a saint. Who needs the Pope and the other termites of the Church, when I have so many followers?

  But since I’ve got no bishops or acolytes to propagandise for me, I’ve decided to add my chronicle to these pages, so you—and others like you—may better worship me.

  And what’s the miracle to which I owe my sainthood, you ask? Why, it’s the power to control Time. It makes me Greater than any of the charlatans in this book (may the devil take your Saint Peters, Pauls and Georges!). But I am becoming greater still. Woe is me, I think I’m becoming a god.

  Every day, I grow more dominant. I am more jealous than Yahweh, less forgiving. I’m more demanding of my city than Jonah was of Nineveh.

  My power runs deep under the cracks in the pavement where the sound of stiletto heels and alligator-skin shoes ‘clickety-clicks’ its way into the dark fissures of the subway and then beneath them, to the older tunnels, forgotten caves and rivers that flow beneath my Buenos Aires.

  But this was not always so.

  Like other Saints before me, I had to be born amongst the Herd, the pathetic and the powerless—policemen, mid-wives, boys selling candied nuts on the street corner—even though there was always something of the Divine in me.

  I’ll describe this to you in simple terms, foolish mortal, so you’ll understand. Let’s pretend a friend of yours—we’ll call him Pablo—is leaving a party at your house, but he’s too drunk to drive. You call a taxi for him and help him into it, making sure he doesn’t bump his head . . .

  The next day, you switch on the radio and hear that, last night, two ten-year-old boys from that slum behind the train station roasted a man alive in a taxi .
. . just outside your friend Pablo’s apartment. They did it, just for the hell of it, just to see what a man in flames looks like, a scalding puppet dancing on a string.

  You burst out crying, sure, in your heart of hearts, that poor old Pablo is dead. And then . . . the first eight bars of Beethoven’s Ninth play on your cell phone: it’s Pablo calling, telling you he made it home all right. He’s alive! You fill with joy—‘Freude, Schöner Götterfunken . . .’

  In that moment, you forget your friend’s neighbour—let’s call him Pedro—the man who did die roasted like a Christmas goose. His eyes bulged wide as those two little shits threw a kerosene balloon into the open window, and it splattered all around him. He screamed like a little girl, as they tossed the flaming match into the backseat.

  And what of Pedro’s family? His nervous wife with long, thin hands will never kiss him again. His blind father, long estranged, will never be able to make things right. (Oh, why did they have that senseless argument over who’d inherit dear old granny’s tea-set!)

  Consider your momentary rejection of Pedro’s life. Think of your preference for Pablo. That is what I’ve felt for every human being I’ve ever met, young or old, man or woman, Argentine or foreigner, every minute of every day of my life.

  I reject them in favour of myself, for mine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, not theirs. That is what predisposes me to be a god . . . and a master of Time.

  But enough of Nature. Nurture has also had its place.

  Take, for example, my great-uncle, Teófilo.

  Teófilo worked for the subway, walking up and down those endless tunnels underground, removing detritus: fallen bricks from the ceilings; remnants of rats; remnants of cats who came looking for the rats; remnants of bums looking for somewhere dry to sleep at night and who were too drunk to roll off the tracks before the first morning train came rushing by.

  When I was young, Teófilo gave me some advice I’ve always cherished: ‘You can’t control whether the trains run on time, but I’ll be damned if you can’t show up to work on time.’

  Something else he did for me—while still walking the lines at the age of 89—was to have a stroke. The tough bastard struggled in the hospital for three days before he died. He left me, his only heir, his apartment at the corner of Avenida Santa Fe and Colonel Díaz.

  I’m sure you’ve seen that wonderful building while window-shopping in Barrio Norte. Its eight floors perch just above the gaudy, red canopy of the ‘El Tolón’ café. Up and up past all the other apartments until the cupola, a dome shingled like some ancient, grey fish. Mine is the apartment with the smallest window, all the way at the top.

  Long before there were any zoning laws, the cupola was divided into an entre piso. You have to take the elevator to the eighth floor and then climb a rickety, wooden ladder to the upper half.

  That’s where my great-uncle lived ever since he turned fourteen, the day he left home and started working for the railways. He occupied it when the last of it was still being built, sneaking through a broken window at night along the metal scaffolding, just a place for pigeons and old cans of paint.

  The years went by, and the people in the building began to grudgingly accept his presence. Soon he started paying rent to the large, Armenian family living right below, until he saved enough to pay it off. Now, the beauty is all mine.

  But the best part about the place is that it’s just two blocks away from the Bulnes subway stop, on the ‘D’ line. And that’s just six stops away from where I work. I’m a clerk at the Institute for the Study and Resolution of Contested Glacier Frontiers (ISRCGF). My father worked there as a clerk, and so did his father, who also died there, which is worth explaining, because that’s how I got my job.

  Book II

  The Institute was born out of the ‘Treaty of Naval Equivalency, Peace and Friendship’, commonly known as Los Pactos de Mayo, signed in 1902 between the governments of Chile and Argentina to avert the impending war. As you know, the Pacts decreased naval tonnage on both sides and banned Argentina from interfering in the affairs of Pacific-coast countries. But, perhaps less known to the lay-man, they established an arbitration mechanism to prevent any future border conflicts flaring into all-out war.

  Among the various provisions, Article 94 mentioned the creation of a permanent Institute to monitor disputes over land ownership at the highest elevations of the Andes.

  I don’t need to tell you how sneaky Chileans are. Under the cover of heavy snowfall, they often climb up the mountains separating our two countries and move the markers along our 4,500 km border eastward onto Argentine territory, thus gaining precious metres of mineral deposits underneath. And in the Falklands War we had the nerve to call the British ‘pirates’!

  Four years passed after the signing of the Pacts before the Institute was created in 1906. This was to gather the necessary ratifications from the thirteen founding member states—Argentina, Chile, Dutch Guyana, Estonia, the East African Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Liberia, Lichtenstein, and the United States of America.

  Our main task is to receive complaints of surreptitious Chilean movements of the border markers from summer ’til winter. Then, when the snow melts in the contested areas in the spring, we convene a Task Force to consider the veracity of these complaints. In most cases, the process is confined to an exchange of written documents between the Task Force and the Chilean Foreign Office.

  However, when alleged infractions are considered particularly grievous, our Task Force may undertake a fact-finding visit. (This occurred in 1937, 1961 and 1983.) If they feel they have sufficient proof Chileans have moved the markers, the Task Force is empowered to make declarations. This, of course, occurred in 1937, in the celebrated case of Reynaldo v. Madga.

  Unfortunately, we had to table that declaration. The indigent Chilean family we’d accused of moving the border marker was subsequently slaughtered by Argentine cattle ranchers during a border incursion westward in November 1938. (Needless to say, this upset all the paperwork.) However, the case created important jurisprudence, and I’ve been told it’s obligatory reading for first-year law students at the University of El Cuyo in the province of San Luis.

  Carbon copies of the declarations are relayed to Santiago by diplomatic pouch, with the originals stored in the basement archives of our central office in Buenos Aires. This initiates a further exchange of written communications and may even lead to assembling a working group to discuss the matter more fully the following year.

  Now, that’s a brief history of the Institute. As my family’s history is so closely tied to it, I must explain a bit about them as well.

  The same year my great-uncle began to work for the railways, his brother (my paternal grandfather) began work at the Institute. Both boys were abandoned by their parents at the ages of 12 and 14, respectively, something about which they never talked. Now, whether it was the result of poverty, politics or incest, I never asked . . . as the story probably would have bored me. Neither does it interest me from what desperate nations their ships sailed: Italy, Lebanon or Lithuania, it’s all the same to me. As Nietzsche says, ‘A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men.—Yes, and then to get round them.’

  What’s important is that my grandfather could read and write German and Italian, two of the seven working languages of the Institute. On this basis, he was hired by Wenceslao Llewellyn, the second—and many would argue, the most distinguished—president of the Institute to sort his morning mail. (An elegant oil painting of Mr Llewellyn hangs in our conference room, his perfectly-waxed, walrus-like handlebar moustaches graces his chiselled face, like a hairy piece of Welsh coal.)

  Over the next few decades, my grandfather worked his way up from the mailroom to become Llewellyn’s clerk, not only sorting his mail but also bringing him the newspaper. When Llewellyn passed on, my grandfather worked for the next president and then the next president after him.

  This upward progression continued
until the tragic night of September 10th, 1955, when my grandfather died. I’ve never been able to determine the exact cause of his death, but it started with an argument with my grandmother.

  My grandmother was an ignorant, demanding hag. Of all my early memories, I recall most clearly the filthy house she kept in the neighbourhood of Caballito. Bits of mate scattered in the cutlery drawer. Sugar in the icebox. A thin film of grease and cigarette ash over everything.

  The only precise thing about her was how she hung her photographs. There were three of them: a daguerreotype of Dante hanging in the parlour; a photo of Pope Pius XII in the hallway; and a faded postcard of Mussolini as a young man . . . in the bedroom. She had hung each one of these with great care, so that the upper left-hand corners were perfectly aligned, one to the other, to the other. To achieve this, she had ordered my father—a young boy at the time—to measure and drill a series of holes through the walls and to run a string through them. Every morning, my father’s task was to dust and straighten the photographs.

  Then she would have him run the strings through the holes to measure how well he’d done. If they were perfectly straight, then he could eat all the gelato he wanted for dinner. If they were off by a millimetre, he would eat the usual slop: greasy slabs of mortadella with hard bread and cheese. If they were off by a centimetre or more, she would beat the hell out of him with a wooden spoon. (My father once told me, he got the worst beating of his life one Sunday afternoon, when he left Mussolini dangling two centimetres left of centre.)

  Knowing this much about my grandmother, I’m sure anything could have set her off that night in 1955. What’s for certain is that my grandfather stormed out of the house with a bottle of cooking sherry in one hand and a blood sausage in the other. For some reason, he headed straight for the office.