The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [11]
“This is a place for sluts,” she said. “C’mon.”
“It is?” Doubly surprised and confused, I gathered my things and followed her.
“Wow, you’re really lost, aren’t you?” she said, once we were out on the street.
“It did feel weird,” I said.
“Those guys just want to fuck you in your butt.”
“What?”
“Of course. Or haven’t you read Naipaul’s theory about the supposed Argentine propensity to brutal heterosexual sodomy? Turn around.” She made me turn around and looked at my butt. “And you even have a nice butt. Which makes it worse—or better. I don’t. Mine falls off like a little shelf. And you’re foreign. And Ramplingesque!” She started laughing a lot. “The compliant victim. It’s perfect. I guess you’ve seen The Night Porter?”
“Hey, wait a second,” I was completely lost. “You’re Leonarda, right?”
“Yeah. You can call me Leo, if you want.”
“Why are you speaking English?” By now we were walking along Córdoba Avenue.
“Oh, I speak English. Who doesn’t? I just wanted to meet you. I’m always interested in foreigners and I saw you putting up your sign.”
“Why didn’t you just say hi?”
“I was shy. Besides, you probably would have thought I was weird and been scared off. I do scare off people. And this way I could have time to tell if I liked you.” She rolled her eyes. “Only now, well, I see that it doesn’t matter if I like you or not. You need me. You’re lost.” Though she feigned exasperation, she seemed delighted by this news.
“Your English is very good,” I said.
“Yeah, I’d only ever speak another language perfectly. I’m ashamed of Argentines who don’t.”
“You should hear me speak Spanish.”
“Well, happily I don’t have to.” She shrugged. “Anyway, what I meant is that we Argentines always have to prove ourselves. We feel that we’re so far away from everything, in the provinces of the provinces. No one even knows we’re here. I’m like that too.” She took a little skip forward. “I love my country. Hey, I know. Why don’t we go to this meeting? I was going to go anyway until I got your message. C’mon.”
I followed her as she hailed the next bus.
“What’s the meeting?” I asked, once we were on the bus.
“It’s this group called Mercury. They’ve created an alternative society, with their own currency and everything. Maybe it would interest you.”
The bus was crowded. We stood pressed against the other people, hanging on to rubber straps.
“So what are you doing here?” Leonarda asked.
“I have a grant to study the waterworks of Buenos Aires,” I said.
“Oh, wow, exciting,” she said, in the most bored voice in the world. “Well, at least it’s not the Dirty War or tango.” She looked around, discontented.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Whatever. Those are the two things foreigners always study.” Her face suddenly brightened. “Oh, but Sarmiento says one thing about water.”
“Who’s Sarmiento?”
“Just, like, the father of the nation.” Her voice suddenly got rapturous. “He has a beautiful image, that the whole nation is a sickly anatomy. This Argie dude, Salessi, wrote about this. It was, like, right at the start of our history and Argentina is so big. Sarmiento said what we suffered from was extension, like this huge inert body of latent riches, but none of it moving around. Anyway, so what we needed to make it work was a circulatory system, vivifying fluids put in motion, interconnecting the different organs, giving life to the modern state. ‘Because the greatness of the state is in the grassy pampa, in the tropical productions of the north and the great system of navigable rivers whose aorta is El Plata.’” She looked up, bedazzled.
“What you just said was a quote?” I asked.
Her face suddenly lost its rapturous look. She looked at me warily. “Yeah, why?”
“No, nothing, just surprised.”
But her expression was strange. The change was unmistakable. Her face looked like it was disintegrating around the edges. I backpedaled as vigorously as I could. “But I liked what you were saying. Please go on.”
She looked out the window, then back at me.
“Are you patronizing me?”
“No, God.”
She