The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [85]
“No,” I answered. “Listen, I just went to see him, Miguel, to check, make sure he was okay. Now I feel like you were both laughing at me that whole time. There was nothing genuine—”
She interrupted me. “Oh, yes, it was genuine. It was beautiful, the way the whole plan unfolded.” She sounded rapturous. She also sounded like she was talking about something in the distant past.
I insisted on a question I had asked before. “And what was I in that plan?”
“You were perfect.”
“What do you mean, I was the perfect plaything?” I said it angrily, bitterly.
“No, no. You were always perfect.” Now she even looked like she had tears in her eyes. “You didn’t disappoint me. That rarely happens.”
I went home and lay down on the floor, those words ringing in my mind. I hadn’t disappointed her, whatever that meant. It was certainly a mixed compliment, but one that I felt too bewildered at the moment to understand. Later, I would have to go through and rethink everything. But now I needed to rest. I lay there, heart jumping, blood coursing in my veins, alive, unquestionably alive, if entirely unmoored.
thirty-one
Six months later, I was in the Boedo neighborhood again. I passed under a eucalyptus tree, tore some leaves off, crushed them, smelled them. Water was running out from under a closed door. I walked by, backed up, looked again. It rippled out onto the sidewalk, clear water. Thoughts or things I’d heard would float through my brain. We are living in the torrential present, water running under a door.
I had decided to stay on. The botanist had written me. He wanted me to do some research for him about the Argentine water hyacinth, one of the most notorious invasive plant species on the planet. Its reach was wide. It was currently causing major havoc in waterways in Africa, Asia and Australia, as well as the southern United States. A new effort was being launched to find a biological control agent to stem its growth. I could be part of it. He’d hooked me up with a lab.
“Good,” Gabriel had said when I told him. “Further study of the natives.” He flashed his demon smile.
“What about you?” I asked. “How are you doing?”
“Okay, though a weird thing’s happening. I’m just not that interested in sex these days.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I mean, I have a meeting with a client and then I just don’t feel like going. I’ve been thinking about medicine. I want to start studying again.”
I smiled. “‘Eros is life’?” I asked.
“Yeah, well, I’m beginning to think maybe it’s just a part of life.”
Isolde had stopped working at the beauty parlor, moved in with Hernán and was expecting a child. I had just been out to see Vera. The territory on the far side of the river where the beauty parlor was had historically been considered outside the law. If you got in trouble in Buenos Aires, you could always gather your belongings, cross the bridge and disappear there. But when I arrived at the hairdresser’s, it was Vera who had gone.
“She just picked up the other day and got on a bus,” the owner, Juana, said. “She didn’t tell anyone where she was going.”
As I got waxed and had my toes done by a new woman, I kept returning to an image of Vera, sitting there alone on the bus. What could she be thinking? Her children had grown. She was setting out again on her own, writing for herself a secret history. In that moment, this history of hers seemed as precious to me as the histories of any of the great conquerors or queens.
Now I was on my way to an opening. It was in an upstairs gallery, a new place. Up ahead I saw figures I recognized, surely also on their way there. Downstairs from the gallery, the woman with the red hair and tilted head was locking her bike up to a tree. The steps inside were steep.
A little while later, I was ready to leave. I’d looked at the photos, had a few glasses of wine out on the terrace, talked to some people. Then I saw her, Leonarda, in a new guise, her hair up bouffant style. She had her glasses on and a deep fuchsia Sophia Loren–style dress. I hadn