The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [6]
My new apartment was quiet. There were black-and-white tiles in the hallway. Every now and then a winged cockroach flew through the kitchen. The owner, Olga had told me, had gone to Europe and disappeared. Her brother rented the place out for her now. In the living room was a vine that wanted to creep in the window. “If you let it, you’ll have ants,” Olga said. I decided to let it for the moment.
“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” Olga asked on leaving me the day I moved in. I reassured her.
The windows looked out on an abandoned back garden. No one ever went there. To one side was the white wall of the adjacent building. When it rained, water ran down the wall. I would sit there on the chaise lounge staring at the sheen of water for hours.
It was a mammoth building. There was no one in the halls. Sometimes, rarely, I’d hear a key turning. Another time, from the hallway, I heard the sounds of people making love in a somewhat brutal fashion. But the walls were thick. Once I was inside my apartment, I listened again and heard nothing.
I had paid Olga six months in advance. When the phone rang, it would startle me. It was always a wrong number. I felt as if, apart from Olga, nobody knew I was here.
In one of the books Brian had given me, I’d read about nineteenth-century urban plans to build parks or “green lungs” all over Buenos Aires, to ward off the infestations of tuberculosis. The idea was that the disease festered in the tiny cramped quarters with no ventilation where crowds of people lived on top of one another. The green lungs would allow these people open-air spaces where they could escape from their homes and come to sit and breathe. Now it seemed that instead of momentary refuges, people had just settled directly in the parks or plazas. This was new, Olga had told me. The year before there had hardly been a homeless person on the street. Now the square outside my building was full of people huddled, individuals, whole families, camped out, it seemed, permanently, and then right here this empty building.
Around the corner from my house was a church. At Mass hours, especially in the evening, people would be pressing in at the doorway, spilling out, couples, families, teenagers in their coolest clothes casting sidelong glances. One night, post-Mass, I saw a small group gathered on the church steps with baskets of food. I asked what they were doing and a woman, slightly cross-eyed, told me they were going around to feed the homeless. I asked if I could join them and she agreed, taking my hand in hers. It turned out to be an odd venture. As we moved around the streets from one cluster of homeless people to the next, the cross-eyed woman wouldn’t let go of my hand. If I dropped hers, she’d find a way to sidle over to me and pick mine up again. Not being able to bear this anymore, I finally broke away and hurried down a side street on my own.
On another corner was a small parrilla, or classic Argentine barbecue restaurant, where I’d go sometimes for a meal. I’d sit against the wall by the window. The waiter, a man who must have been in his fifties, with a long face and droopy eyes that showed the lower part of his eyeballs, called me “daughter,” as they sometimes did here. I’d wait for him to call me “daughter” when he was asking for my order or afterward, when he was bringing me the food. It was as if the food, the atmosphere were secondary. I’d come to hear him say that.
At the end of the block was a locutorio. The locutorio, I’d quickly