The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [27]
June came. Winter. The light changed. Everyone was shivering exaggeratedly, but the truth is it wasn’t that cold. I’d still go out walking. I walked a lot. Sometimes Gabriel stopped by, before or after a client meeting. I continued my water research, visiting the Palace of Waters, once the storage deposit of Buenos Aires drinking water, now a museum devoted to the water question. I met up with Isolde, over coffee, drinks, or joined her when she had tickets to a cultural event. But at the center of my life were my outings with Leonarda. We’d get dressed up and go to parties. We’d go out dancing. Or we’d go to bars and talk to people, mainly men, lying about everything, who we were, where we were from, forcing them to follow a train of logic that then doubled back on itself. We confounded them, it was all make-believe, and then just as we reached our apotheosis, some final absurdist conclusion, we were out on the street again.
Suddenly, thanks to lying, I detached myself from my biography. Rather than ruminating over things, I forgot about my past. Of course. Who has time? Leonarda had no interest in her past either.
“Childhood,” she would say with disgust, “who wants to talk about childhood?” Rarely, it seemed, did a memory cross her mind.
What she did like were ideas. She was enamored with ideas, above all, her own. Nostrils flared, she would walk along spouting them left and right.
At other times, she was full of mistrust. I could see her face turn. I’d done something, said something that made her suspicious. “Look, there’s not actually a problem here,” I’d say. “I swear. I’m not asking you to trust me, but trust me at least on that one small point. There’s not a problem here. We were having a nice conversation. I liked what you were saying.”
Sometimes I could soothe her, sometimes not. When I couldn’t, her eyes went depthless, animal eyes. She was only out to save herself. I learned that the best thing to do in these situations was distract her, tease her, if at all possible, make her laugh.
One day, she took a picture of me, in which, by some trick of the camera, I looked like a monster. She seemed afraid. She quickly made an excuse and said she had to go.
A day or two later, I received an e-mail, “Heyyyyyy, hiiiiiiiiiiiii, you have no idea how much you want to see me.”
I felt deeply moved. When I wasn’t with her, I felt concerned about her, imagining her in the clutches of her horrible family.
For my part, I was learning how to play. These nocturnal adventures, slinking along walls, lanes, gardens, chasing someone, being chased ourselves. There was playfulness in every tendon and digit of her form. Unless she got moody. Then she walked along, shoulders hunched up, eyes fixed on the ground.
There was her childish thievery. I soon understood that she was doing it for me, as an offering of sorts, which both confused and enraptured me.
She aspired to sophistication, glamour, not so much wealth itself, or that wasn’t the focus, but knowledge of things such as jewels, wine. She aspired to beautiful manners, which she practiced well enough, if a bit ostentatiously, until she forgot, something caught her attention. She hulked around, grabbing at things. This even when she was dressed in a miniskirt, with a tiny tank top only half covering her large boobs. One thing for sure was that she was ambivalent about her beauty, would dispose of it in a second. A part of it too was that there were so many different things she aspired to.
She was twenty-eight and lived with her parents, I never saw where. I gathered from her stories it was a little apartment and maybe she was ashamed. Certainly her clothes were cheap, though at the same time suited her so well.
I also gathered there had been some political activity in her family’s past. Her mother had been involved with an urban guerrilla group. This she told me proudly one day. “They’re monsters,