The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [51]
She told me later how she’d stared out the window on the taxi ride home. Hideous city, horribly loud. Dogs barking frantically, both near and far away. It seems that someone is torturing these dogs. There’s no other explanation. The grinding sound of traffic, much louder than in other cities, right here, against your ear. The buses heaving, huffing. What has happened to the mufflers, the concept of mufflers? The mufflers in this city all worn out, badly made to begin with. People sit out and dine on the street, screaming at each other above the traffic. It doesn’t seem to bother them. They always scream anyway. Argentines scream. At a table full of them, they’re all screaming at once. Each one screams his or her own thing, cutting off the other midway. No one ever hears what the other person said. It doesn’t matter. The farce of it. The unceasing, bantering show, tears and reclamations. Nobody actually even understands entirely why the other person’s crying. Nor does it matter. Hateful, melodramatic race, with their Italian inheritance. People reaching out to strangle each other in restaurants. Another version of the same, old women meeting for tea and repeating over and over exactly the same thing. It’s the form, not the content, that it’s all about. The endlessly boringly repetitive hours spent at lunches, barbecues, birthdays. The absolute sacralization of birthdays. Three hours attendance is the minimum, five is expected. Six hours in the company of the same people. Everyone gets sick of everyone else. Yet nobody knows when to stop, leave. The long goodbyes. It takes at least an hour. You go around to everyone, one by one, strike up a last conversation, repeat most of the things you’ve already said, exchange kisses, make plans, open an entirely new conversation, which means you have to turn back, explain yourself, linger, repeat things again, kiss again. By the end, everyone wants to kill each other. They go home in cars, taxis, buses, depleted, hating humanity. The following evening there’s a similar event. All the same people will be there.
Sometimes Isolde would feel a kind of Third World revulsion. The streets of Buenos Aires, in certain architectural zones, were like Paris, as everyone said. But all the same, let’s admit it, there was a seedy edge. You couldn’t forget the hours when the city was scuttling with cartonero figures, sifting through the garbage, their hands touching everything, mothers holding small children defecating in the street. One day, Isolde had seen human feces in the subway. In the wealthy Barrio Norte, where she lived, all this was almost invisible, but someone like Isolde was sensitive, she knew it was there. Anyone who’d been to Europe could feel the seediness. It was a down-and-out Paris, a northern zone Paris, taken over by African and Arab immigration. Was this her fate? To live not in Paris, but a seedy simulation? Part of her revolted. When she thought about returning to Europe now, she never thought about returning to the Austrian town where she was from. Her fantasies were about London, of falling in love and having a British family. The illusion was proving more and more complete. She thought of herself as upper class.
Back at home, the cleaning woman, Claudia, was there. The owners of the apartment paid her wages, a common Argentine arrangement. A “rental” came with cleaning services. Claudia eyed Isolde. Isolde felt that she was always eyeing her. Isolde knew little about her, except that she was from the north, Salta, which meant that she spoke with a peculiar accent. Isolde had images of colonial houses, humidity, jungle heat. Once Claudia had missed a week, returning to Salta, because her father had been sick. Claudia was probably Isolde’s age, maybe a bit older. She had a funny way of mumbling everything she said, so that sometimes Isolde would get frankly irritated. She’d even told her.
“Look, I’m foreign. I won’t understand unless you speak clearly.”
But then she began to think that a lot of the time Claudia was just talking to herself. Or at least didn