17 Stone Angels (10 page)

He saw her watching the well-attired people who strolled tranquilly, or raised their glasses in the golden light of a restaurant.

“Forgive me, Athena, I'm very content that you've come and I have great hopes for our investigation, but I still do not understand why they have sent a human rights expert such as yourself and not someone from the FBI.”

The girl tried to be
piola
, but he could sense a stiffness in her explanation. “I think that's internal politics, Miguel. The State Department found it more convenient to approach it as a matter of human rights because of jurisdictions and that type of thing.”

Fortunato relaxed. She really meant what the Chief had already said: the gringos didn't care. Why else would they send a woman with no authority and no credentials? “Of course. There's always politics. But here is Avenida Corrientes.”

The street became a river of light. Theatrical posters displayed manic actors with comic smiles, and a dozen bookstores had rolled their wooden shelves onto the sidewalk. At eleven-thirty, the cafés were packed and lively.

“This is the theater district. As you can see, the people of Buenos Aires like to live fully. At one in the morning, it is the same.”

“Wow!”

“This is a city with its own culture,” he went on. “There are many famous writers: Borges, Bioy-Casares, Julio Cortazar, Roberto Arldt.” Fortunato knew the names through Marcela's crumbling paperbacks. “Also, Buenos Aires has its own music and dance: the tango. We have our own food, our own dialect, called
lunfardo
.”

They rounded the big white obelisk that pointed to the pink infused sky, turned onto the Avenida 9 de Julio. “This is the widest street in the world,” he told her. “Fourteen lanes in each direction. Look there . . .” He pointed across the vast Plaza de la Republica to where an American hamburger chain had hooked two huge outlets onto the street amongst the restaurants and traditional businesses. “That should make you feel at home.”

“People actually go there?”

“Si, Señorita!” he said. “There are every day more in Buenos Aires. And others like them. Also Wal-Mart and Carrefour: many big corporations from the exterior. Little by little they go eating the old businesses.”

They streamed down the 9 de Julio with a thousand other cars, some, he thought, with false papers like his, most others slightly out of order, with some little
coima
paid to get them through the inspection. Buenos Aires, the city of the
arrangement
. And he, a citizen in full.

She was looking all around. “This is really marvelous, Miguel. Thank you for bringing me.”

“Now we're coming into La Boca. It's called La Boca because it's near the port, which was the mouth of Buenos Aires.”

Here the buildings became low and ramshackle. Many were armored with corrugated tin, two-story shacks without balconies or decoration, as if they'd been cut out of sardine cans. They looked tight and mean. “These are
conventillos
. Here live many poor people. This part of the city can be a bit dangerous.”

They continued through the narrow streets, past fluorescent-lit cafés and dark wooden bars, huddles of rough-looking men with faces inclined towards televised football games. Fortunato parked the car and gave a little boy permission to watch it for him. “17 Stone Angels,” he said as they approached a single-story building. “Look up there . . .”

He pointed to the roofline where a long row of the mythical beings looked down from amidst molded sprays of lilies and garlanded escutcheons. Some glared down with turbulent eyes and frothy beards, others smiled, laughed coyly, or turned their lips down at the impulse of some sorrowful mineral thought. Sixteen of them, progressing from sadness at one side to laughter at the other, the whole range of emotion that a life might encompass. Largest of all loomed the one over the entrance, the seventeenth, seeming masculine at one moment and feminine the next, its identity obscured by a blindfold that covered its eyes.

“The owner claims that they were originally carved for the
Palacio de Justicia
in the last century, but the official in charge of the contract found a reason to reject them. The reality was that he'd taken a bribe to award the contract to someone else. Somehow they ended up here.”

Athena stared up at the outsize statues. “So the blindfolded one is Justice?”

“Yes,” Fortunato said with a trace of humor. “Because she never sees anything.” Athena looked at him dubiously and he added, “For the same reason, my wife used to insist that it represented Love.”

Fortunato had been coming to
the 17 Stone Angels for decades now. He used to come with Marcela. Every Thursday they'd gone to the club in the barrio to dance, and every two weeks they had made the drive here, to La Boca, where the tango had been born, to dance and chat away the night with other regulars over bottles of red wine and soda. He didn't know exactly why they kept coming. Other than its grandiose facade, the place itself had little to set it apart from a thousand other poor bars in the city. Fluorescent lights bounded off plaster walls, while a mirror of tarnished silver doubled bottles of grappa and mysterious spirits that Fortunato suspected dated to the last century. Some immigrant carpenter had hammered the bar together a hundred years ago out of tropical woods from the North, without pretensions to beauty but plenty strong enough to support the slouch of a
guapo
coolly watching the proceedings or a body shoved up against it in a brawl. Uncountable
milongas
had been stepped out by easy women and questionable men, and Fortunato could still feel the presence, in the islands of stained white tablecloths, of that vanished demi-monde.

At midnight, Los Angeles de Piedra had just begun to percolate. Mostly older people, like himself, but also a sprinkling of curious young people who had discovered the place in the last couple of years. He hadn't been here since Marcela had gotten too sick to dance, some three months ago. Even so, he could see at a glance that everyone had found out.

“
Capitan!
” Norberta said as he came in the door. The owner kissed him on the cheek then continued talking softly with his arm around his neck. “I'm so sorry about Marcela. All of us, we heard the news and we didn't know what to do! We thought we'd lost you! Did you get the flowers that we sent to the
comisaria?
”

“Thank you, Norberta. I received them. It was a comfort.” He turned to the gringa. “Norberta, this is Doctora Fowler, a friend of mine visiting from the United States. She's here for some police matters,” he clarified, to allay any speculation.

La Doctora was examining the place, and from what Fortunato could tell she looked pleased. He couldn't get his balance with the gringa. She seemed
very self-contained, vaguely prosecutorial, but at the same time he thought he could perceive a tenderness that animated her beneath that surface.

They conferred over the menu and he ordered them a mixed grill, “the most Argentine,” and Norberta brought bottles of red wine and soda along with a small metal bucket of ice. La Doctora crunched on a bread stick while Fortunato poured out her wine and lightened it with a shot of soda. He dropped in an ice cube, then prepared the same for himself. At a corner table the musicians were downing coffee, whiskey and cigarettes.

He leaned towards her. “There are the musicians, over there. A violin, a guitar, and a
bandoneon
.” She looked at him, puzzled, and he searched for the word. “An . . . accordion. This is not a tourist place,” he said. “The tourists go to Carlita's where everything is fine. This place is more . . . tango.” He told her the history of tango, that it had originated in the Andalusian tangos of the 1850s, then developed in whorehouses here in La Boca and in the southern suburbs at the turn of the twentieth century. Tango was a dance of the underworld, of pimps and prostitutes, of poor men losing their girlfriends to millionaires, of lost connections to the barrio, of knife fights between
guapos
—”

“What's
a guapo?
”

“
Guapo
is
lunfordo
for a hard young man who uses a knife. Tango is full of
lunfordo
. It's going to cost you to understand what they are saying, but I'll help you.” He bit into a breadstick and continued his thought. “Tango is all like that: about love, violence, memory . . . ” He took a sip of his wine. “Corruption. It has much that is dark and bitter, because life is thus.” He leaned toward her and hushed his voice. “This here isn't the best tango—they're all spent here, you'll see—but this is the soul of tango, where it began.” He nodded towards Osvaldo, a man of about sixty whose shaved head and jet black eyebrows enhanced the menacing aura that glittered from his gap-toothed smile and his gold chain. Fortunato leaned in towards Athena Fowler. “That man over there. He's managed women his whole life. Also, he was famous as a knife fighter. Now he's getting old, like us all. He carries a little gun in his belt. The other with him is a
puntero
of the barrio. A dealer of cocaine. And it's all in the music. There's tangos about the pimp, and about cocaine. There's tangos about men like that”—motioning towards another table—“sitting with their whiskey and their smoke, looking sad. There's tangos about bars like Los 17 Angeles de Piedra.”

Osvaldo the pimp saw Fortunato looking and raised his thumb towards him. “What do you say, Capitan!”

“Here in the battle, Osvaldo, as always.”

“I'm sorry about Marcela,” the pimp hollered across the room.

“Thus is life,” Fortunato said, returning to La Doctora.

“Everybody seems to know you.”

“I used to come here often.” He sat back, suddenly uncomfortable. “My wife and I would come here to dance.”

Her face filled with compassion again. “I'm sorry,” she said.

Fortunato shrugged. “There are even tangos about the dead wife.”

The grill came, a charcoal brazier topped with ribs, a steak, a half chicken, a pork sausage, a blood sausage, tripe, liver and, as a special gift to him, a soft crispy piece of
mollejas
, the sweetbreads. Brown and purple and beige, meat colors, glistening with oil. La Doctora looked at it with amazement as Norberta stood it on their table. “We can't eat all this!”

“This is a poor neighborhood. Nothing will get thrown away.” The musicians took their places now and the guitarist closed his eyes and tuned his instrument as they began to eat. They launched into a
milonga
, a lively dancing tango, and a few couples got up and began moving across the floor. La Doctora was watching them. “It's different from the tangos you see on television.”

“Those are show,” the detective said dismissively. “This is tango of the barrio.” Luis and Yolanda were dancing, each of them looking to the side and keeping a stiff back as they advanced and whirled and retreated. Luis was marking her well, moving her from side to side, and never missing a step. They were light and fluid, perfectly entwined. “Notice that the woman's steps and the man's steps are completely different, but they match perfectly. He advances, she retreats. She moves to the side, and he closes her off. In tango, the man rules. He leads her, but he allows her to be a woman.” He knew that in the United States, they saw things differently. “That's how it is here.”

“My father could tango.”

“You don't say!”

Her father, it seemed, had been quite the dancer in his youth. At family gatherings he would put on his old records and teach her a few steps. Fortunato had the silly idea of asking her to dance, but just then the music ended and someone got up to sing. Gustavo, a retired sailor of at least eighty years, in a dandruff-covered black suit, mangling “Silencio'. The withered old man
sang with one skinny hand in front of his chest and the other trembling out at the side, stretching the dramatic notes like pieces of taffy. La Doctora watched with an amazed smile as he missed note after note.

“He's the worst!” Fortunato whispered under the music, “but he's a friend. And he keeps singing!”

The song dated from after the First World War. It was about a woman who had seven sons who were all killed in the fields of France, leaving at last a terrible silence in the soul. As Gustavo was flinging his hand out for the climactic line, Fortunato felt a tap on the shoulder. Chief Bianco was standing over him, smiling.

“Miguel!”

“
Jefe!
” Fortunato rose to his feet.

The Chief was wearing his ivory dinner jacket, which meant he had come to sing. His wife, Gladys, stood behind him, stuffed into printed flowers. Fortunato made the introductions and everyone kissed. He invited the Biancos to sit down.

“I'm glad to see you out,” Gladys said sympathetically. “We've missed you here.”

“Thus is life,” Fortunato answered, trying to inject the proper weight into the tired reply.

“Retard!” Bianco scolded. “Why did you take Señorita Fowler to this place when Soriano is singing at Carlita's!”

“Ah!” Fortunato waved his hand. “It's full of tourists.”

“You're right.” The Chief addressed La Doctora, knocking his fist on the table. “This is the real tango! Without artifice or illusion!” He noticed the pimp and pointed at him. “What say,
loco?
”