THE GATES OF HEAVEN
José María came at eight with the information, hardly beating around the bush at all he told me that Celina had just died. I remember that I noted the phrasing with a flash, Celina just dying, almost with the sense that she herself had decided the moment. It was almost night, and José María’s mouth was trembling when he told me.
“Mauro’s taken it very hard, when I left he was like a man out of his head. We’d better go.”
I had to finish off some files, aside from which I’d promised a girl to take her to dinner. I knocked out a couple of phone calls, then went out with José María to look for a taxi. Mauro and Celina lived at Cánning and Santa Fe, so it took us only ten minutes from my place. Coming up we could see people standing about the hall door looking speechless and guilty; on the way I’d learned that Celina’d begun to vomit blood at six, that Mauro had fetched the doctor and that his mother was with them. It seems that the doctor had just begun to write out a long prescription when Celina opened her eyes and finally died with a sort of cough, more like a whistle.
“I held Mauro down, the doctor had to get out because Mauro wanted to beat him up. You know how he is when he gets sore.”
I was thinking of Celina, of Celina’s final face waiting for us inside the house. I hardly heard the old women crying and the commotion in the courtyard, but on the other hand I remember that the taxi cost two pesos sixty, and that the driver had a shiny cap. I saw two or three of Mauro’s buddies from the neighborhood reading La Razón in the doorway. A little girl in a blue dress was holding a white cat with brown markings in her arms and smoothing its whiskers fastidiously. Further inside the laments began and the smell of a funeral.
“Go sit with Mauro,” I told José María. “Make sure he gets high as a kite and stays that way.”
The mate was already going strong. The wake was organizing itself, by itself: the faces, the drinks, the heat. Now that Celina had finished dying, it was incredible how the neighborhood could drop everything (even the quiz programs), and congregate at the scene of the disaster. A mate straw muttered very audibly when I passed the kitchen and looked into the death-room. Old lady Martita and another woman peered at me from the shadowy depths, where the bed seemed to be floating in a sea of dark jelly.
“The poor little thing passed away,” old lady Martita said. “Come in, doctor, come in and see her. She looks as though she were sleeping.”
I almost told her to go take a flying— I didn’t even swear, and stuck my head into the hot soup. What a room. I looked at Celina for a long time without seeing her, and now I went over to her, black straight hair down the low forehead, which was bright as the mother-of-pearl on a guitar, to the beach-white platter of face, nothing to do. I realized there was nothing to do there, the room already belonged to the women, the mourners coming in the night. Not even Mauro could enter in peace and sit beside Celina, not even Celina was there waiting, that black and white thing had fallen over onto the side of the mourners, giving them the advantage of its immovable theme, repeating it. Better Mauro, better go look for Mauro, who was still on our side.
From the death-room to the dining room, deaf sentinels were smoking in the unlighted passageway. Peña, Crazy Bazán, Mauro’s two younger brothers, and an unidentified old man. They greeted me respectfully.
“Thanks for coming, doctor,” one brother said. “Yer always such a good friend of Mauro’s, poor guy.”
“Critical moments always show you who your friends are,” the old man piped, with a handshake that felt like a live sardine.
All this was happening, but I was with Celina and Mauro again, the carnival, Luna Park, 1942, dancing, Celina in sky-blue which went badly with her dark color, Mauro with his Palm Beach suit, and I with six whiskeys in me and drunk as a monkey. I liked to go out with Mauro and Celina, a witness to their hard, hot happiness. The more I was reproached for this friendship, the more I leaned on them (my days and hours) to be witness to what they themselves were never conscious of.
I dragged myself away from the dance, a wail rose from the room, lancing through the doors.
“That must be her mother,” said Crazy Bazán, almost complacent.
“Perfect syllogism of the meek,” I thought. “Celina dead, mother arrives, mother shrieks.” It made me sick to my gut to think like that—for other people it’s enough to feel that way—I have to think it. Mauro and Celina had not been my guinea pigs, no. I loved them, I still love them, very. Only that I could never enter their simplicity, only that I saw myself forced to feed myself on the reflection of their blood. I am Doctor Hardoy, a lawyer who doesn’t fit in with Buenos Aires, not its law courts or its music or its racetracks; and I move as hard as I can in other directions, other bags. I know that my curiosity lies behind all this, notes that fill my files a bit at a time. But Celina and Mauro, no. Celina and Mauro no.
“Who would have thought …” I heard Peña, “so fast …”
“Right, but you know her lungs were very bad.”
“Sure, but all the same …”
They were defending themselves against an open grave. Bad lungs, but even so and all that … Celina must not have anticipated dying either, for her and Mauro the tuberculosis was “a weakness.” Again I saw her whirling enthusiastically in Mauro’s arms, Canaro’s Orchestra on the platform and the smell of cheap powder. She danced a machicha with me afterward, the floor was a hell of thick smoke and bodies. “How well you dance, Marcelo,” as if surprised that a lawyer could follow a machicha. Neither she nor Mauro ever addressed me in the familiar; I used the intimate form with Mauro, but returned Celina’s formalism. It was just hard for Celina to drop the “Doctor,” maybe it gave her pride to use the title with her friends, “my friend, the Doctor.” I asked Mauro to tell her, then she started using “Marcelo.” So they came a little closer to me, but I was as far from them as ever. Not even going to the local dances together, or to the boxing matches or the football games (years ago Mauro had played with the Giants), or drinking mate in the kitchen until all hours. When the case was over and I’d won five thousand pesos for Mauro, Celina was the first to ask me not to drift off, but to come see them. She was already not very well; her voice, which was always a little hoarse, was getting weaker all the time. She coughed every night, Mauro bought her Escay Neurophosphate, which was stupid, and Bisleri iron quinine tablets—things people see in the magazines, and trust.
We went to the dances together and I watched them live.
“You ought to talk to Mauro,” José María said, he’d just popped up next to me. “It’ll do him good.”
So I went, but I was thinking of Celina the whole time. It was an ugly thing to realize, but what I was doing was, really, collecting and reordering my data on Celina; they’d never been written out but I had it all in my head. Mauro was crying openly like any sane animal in this world, with no shame at all. He took my hands and wet them all up with his fevered sweat. When José María made him drink down a gin, he took it down between two sobs with a queer noise in his throat. And the phrases, that sputtering of stupidities with his whole life inside them, the obscure awareness of the irreparable thing that had happened to Celina but which he only resented and railed against. The great narcissism at last excused and free to make a spectacle of itself. I was disgusted with Mauro, but even more with myself, and started drinking cheap brandy which burned in the throat and tasted awful. By this time, the wake was moving like an express train; they were all perfect, from Mauro down, even the night was helpful, warm and even, so pleasant to stand around in the courtyard and speak of the poor deceased, let the dawn come while we stood around in the night dew and washed Celina’s dirty linen.
That was on Monday, I had to go to Rosario later in the week for a lawyers’ convention, where we did nothing but applaud one another and get blasted. On the train back that weekend, there were two dancers from the Moulin Rouge, I recognized the younger of the two, but she played dumb. All that morning I’d been thinking of
Celina, not that Celina’s dying was that important to me, but what mattered was the adjournment, the interruption of the system, the suspension of a necessary habit. When I saw the girls on the train, I thought of Celina’s career and the expression on Mauro’s face when he took her away from the Greek’s, he took her from Kasidis’ place to live with him. It needed a good deal of courage to expect anything from that woman at that time, and it was exactly at that period I got to know him, when he came to consult me in the matter of his old lady’s lawsuit, some properties in Sanagasta. The second time Celina came with him, still in near-professional makeup, still swinging her hips in anything but housewifely fashion, but hanging very tight to his arm. It wasn’t difficult to make a rational guess about them, to enjoy Mauro’s aggressive simplicity and his unspoken assumption that he was taking Celina wholly for himself. When I began the business with them, it seemed to me he’d succeeded, at least outwardly and as far as daily demeanor went. I second-guessed the situation later, and better. Celina got out from under it a little by a certain capriciousness, her insistent taste for the local dances, her long daydreams beside the radio with some mending or knitting in her hands. When I heard her sing (one night after the Giants had taken the Brooms, 4–1), I realized that she was still at Kasadis’, far from a stable household and from Mauro, just a guy running a stall in the Abasto. I encouraged her cheap tastes, to get to know her better. The three of us went to an endless string of pizza joints, the jukeboxes turned up until you thought your eyes were going to fall out, the pizza bubbling away, the greasy floor strewn with little papers. But Mauro preferred the courtyard in his own house, long hours of bull session with the neighbors, and mate. He accepted the rest of it grudgingly, but he acquiesced without coming to terms. Then Celina pretended to accommodate herself, maybe it was true, she was getting used to being a housewife and not going out so often. I was the one who urged Mauro to go to the dances, and I knew she was grateful to me from the beginning. They loved one another, and Celina’s happiness made up for the two, sometimes for the three of us.
It seemed like a good idea to get in and out of a tub, telephone Nilda that I’d pick her up Sunday on the way to the track, and then go see Mauro. He was sitting in the courtyard smoking between prolonged cups of mate. Two or three little holes in his shirt made me feel tender, and I put my hand on his shoulder by way of greeting. His face had the same expression as the last time, beside the grave, when he threw the fistful of earth and darted back as if bewildered. But I found a clear light in his eyes, his hand firm in our handshake.
“Thanks for coming over to see me. The time drags, Marcelo.”
“Do you have to go to Abasto, or did you get someone to replace you?”
“I sent my brother, the gimpy one. I just haven’t the heart to go, even the day seems to last forever.”
“Of course. You need some distraction. Get dressed and we’ll take a drive around Palermo.”
“Fine, let’s go, it’s all the same to me.”
He put on a blue suit, stuck an embroidered handkerchief in the upper pocket, and I saw him put on some perfume from a bottle that had been Celina’s. I liked the tilt of his hat with the brim snapped up, and his silent walk, loose and bouncy. I resigned myself to hearing “you can tell who your friends are at times like this,” and with his second bottle of Quilmes Cristal he let me have everything he’d been sitting on full blast. We were at a back table in the café, almost by ourselves; I let him run on and from time to time I’d pour him some more beer. I hardly remember anything that he said, I think, really, it was always the same thing over again. I’ve remembered one phrase: “I have her here,” and the gesture of driving his forefinger into the center of his chest as though he were indicating where a pain was, or a medal.
“I want to forget,” he said also. “Anything, get loaded, go to a dancehall, pick up some chick, any chick. You understand me, Marcelo, you …” His forefinger rose, enigmatically, folded suddenly like a pocket knife. High as he was, he was ready to accept anything, and when I casually mentioned the Santa Fe Palace, he took it for granted that we were going to the dance and was the first to stand up and check his watch. We walked along not speaking, wiped out from the heat, and the whole time I suspected he was having a double-take, a recurrent feeling of surprise at not feeling on his arm Celina’s warm happiness on the way to the dance.
“I never took her to this Palace,” he said suddenly. “I used to come here before I met her. It’s a place for very rough broads, do you come here?”
I have a good long description of the Santa Fe Palace in my files. It’s not called the Santa Fe nor is it on that street, though on one nearby. A shame that none of that can be accurately described, not its modest façade with posters that arouse man’s hope and the filthy box office, even less the hangers-on killing time at the entrance and who check you out, hat to shoes. What follows is worse, not that it’s disagreeable, just that there’s nothing there that’s precise; just plain chaos, confusion dissolving itself into a false order; hell and its circles. A hell like an amusement park with a 2 peso 50 admission and ladies at 0.50 centavos once around. Poorly isolated booths and a succession of sort of covered patios; in the first was a regular tango orchestra, in the second a group doing country music, and in the third a small combo from the north, guitars and drums, singers and malambos. Standing in a connecting passage (I was Virgil) we could see the three dance floors and hear all three musics; one could then choose whichever he wanted, or go from dance to dance looking for tables and women.
“It’s not so bad,” Mauro said in his gloomy mood. “Too bad it’s so hot. They should install air conditioning.”
(For the files: note, following Ortega, the contact between the common man and technology. Exactly where one would imagine a cultural shock, there is, on the contrary, a violent assimilation and enjoyment of the progress. Mauro talks about refrigeration units and audio-frequency amplification with the self-sufficiency of the Buenos Aires inhabitant who firmly believes he has everything coming to him.) I grabbed him by the arm and steered him into the aisle toward a table because he still seemed so distracted and was watching the bandstand of the tango orchestra and the singer who gripped the mike in both hands and moved it slowly back and forth in front of him. We rested our elbows comfortably in front of two brandies. Mauro took his down in a single shot.
“This puts a lid on the beer. Jesus, what a crowd in this joint!”
He called for another one and gave me a break in which to turn him off for a moment and look around me. Our table was next to the dance floor, on the other side there were chairs stretched along a long wall and a pile of women who replaced one another with that absent air taxi-dancers have when they’re working or amusing themselves. There wasn’t much talk and we heard the tango orchestra only too well, backed by squeeze-boxes and blasting away with a will. The singer was very heavy on the nostalgia and had a remarkable talent for making something dramatic out of a beat that was rather fast and basically without cutting-edge. I cut my baby’s head off and I carry it in a bag … he held the microphone as if he were about to puke into it, with a kind of tired lasciviousness that had to be organic. For long moments, he’d put his lips against the chrome grid, and a voice like glue emerged from the loudspeakers, I’m a respectable man … ; I thought it would be a better deal to have a rubber doll with the mike concealed inside it, that way the singer could grab it in his arms and get as hot as he wanted while he was singing. But that wouldn’t work for the tangos, better the chrome truncheon with the little skull glittering on top, and the frozen spasmodic smile of the grid-work.
It seems right for me to say here that I come to this dance hall to see the monsters, I know of no other place where you get so many of them at one time. They heave into sight around eleven in the evening, coming down from obscure sections of the city, deliberate and sure, by ones and by twos, the women almost dwarves and very dark, the guys like Javanese or Indians from the north bound into tight black su
its or suits with checks, the hard hair painfully plastered down, little drops of brilliantine catching blue and pink reflections, the women with enormously high hairdos which make them look even more like dwarves, tough, laborious hairdos of the sort that let you know there’s nothing left but weariness and pride. The men nowadays wear their hair loose and high in the middle, enormous, faggoty foxtails which have nothing to do with the brutal faces below them, or with the expression of aggressiveness, ready and waiting its hour, or the efficient torsos set on slender waists. They recognize and admire each other in silence and without letting on, it’s their dance and their meeting, their big night out. (For the files: where they come from, what professions they pretend to during the day, what condition of servitude insulates and conceals them.) They come to this place, then, grave monsters twine with one another in grave esteem, one number after the other they twirl slowly without speaking, many with their eyes closed, enjoying at last complete parity and fulfillment. In the intervals they recover, at the tables they’re arrogant and the women talk in shrieks so that they’ll be looked at, then the gorillas grow more fierce and I’ve seen one let go with a flat of the hand that spun the face and half the hairdo of a crosseyed girl in white who was drinking anise. Furthermore there’s the smell; one could not conceive of the monsters without that smell of damp powder against the skin, of rotten fruit, one thinks of them washing up hastily, the sour washcloth over the face and under the armpits, then what really matters, lotions, hairspray, powder on all their faces, a whitish crust, and under it the dusky patches shining through. They use peroxide too, dark girls raising a rigid ear of corn over the heavy earth of their faces; they even practice blond expressions, wear green dresses, convince themselves that they are authentic, manage even to condescend and scorn the girls who keep their natural color. Looking sidewise at Mauro, I could spell out the difference in his face with its Italian features, the face of the Buenos Aires docks, with neither Negro or provincial mixture, and I remembered suddenly that Celina was much closer to the monsters, much nearer than Mauro and I. I think that Kasidis had chosen her for the darker part of his clientele, whatever few of them enlivened his cabaret. I’d never been to Kasidis’ when Celina was still there, but I went down afterwards one night to get to know the place she’d worked in before Mauro dragged her out of there, and I saw nothing but white girls, blondes, brunettes or redheads, but white.