“Who?” asked Vicky, resigned. “You’re sounding paranoid. What do you want to do, Pablo? Let’s hear it, what do you want to do? What can we do?”
“I don’t decide what to do. You’ve got the captain right here. He’s always been in charge.”
Gaspar, who was sitting with his arms crossed, shook his head. Then he said: “I don’t know what to do or what all this means. Not yet. But for now, we wait. And we tell each other everything. In detail. I think we can hold out a little longer.”
Marita had accepted Gaspar’s invitation to have a beer after they’d run into each other at the Princesa. She’d seen him there, like so many other times, sitting on one of the sofas and smoking, with his thin legs, black sneakers, his high, delicate cheekbones and hands with their long fingers always flecked with scrapes. He was thinner now. For the first time since she’d met Gaspar, she felt intimidated, and not because he acted any different. The girl who was reciting had a dramatic, declamatory style, and her poem was about the lack of work, the shipyards, the country’s roadblocked highways. It was political poetry, better than the Morrison emulators but extraordinarily bad, and Marita had been hit by a fit of laughter. It was terribly bad form to laugh at someone talking about those subjects, so she went outside. Gaspar followed her; when they met on the sidewalk, he bent over with his hands on his knees, and the shared, stifled laughter was a relief for Marita. Gaspar imitated the girl’s affected style and then, sitting beside Marita now, he told her that this girl may have been a debacle, but lately there’d been some incredible poetry readings at the Princesa.
“You’ve gotta come more often.”
“I have a lot of work at school. I’ve started practice teaching, working as a TA.”
“Meaning, they don’t pay you anything.”
“It could help me later on.”
“The other day this guy no one knew came in. First there was a really pathetically bad poet who acts all suicidal and reads something à la Pizarnik, a disaster. Then there was a more conventional girl, boring, Orozco with no heart. And then this guy got up, this stranger. He recited “I Explain a Few Things” by Pablo Neruda in full, without reading. Most people looked at him like he was a crazy old man, you know how they are, condescending. It made me cry, though.”
“Yeah right, you cried.”
Marita knew Gaspar hardly ever cried in public.
Then Gaspar recited some parts of the poem, the ones he remembered, and he ended with, “and through the streets the blood of the children / flowed easily, like the blood of children,” and shook his head.
“It was incredible, Mari. And to see those people who didn’t understand a thing, I just hated them.”
And they looked at each other while, inside, the music started up. Something from the eighties. Bronski Beat. Marita thought they were going to kiss, but Gaspar took a sip from his beer bottle.
“I miss how you used to read to me in bed,” she said.
“Me too,” Gaspar replied, and got to his feet. He reached out his hand to help her up, too. They went inside and she spent the rest of night talking to other people, never losing sight of Gaspar. She was attracted to him, that was never the problem. The day she’d seen him for the first time outside the Princesa, shy, just out of high school, beautiful, with his dark hair combed back, she’d thought he had a tragic face that reminded her of all those dangerous and delicate boys she fell for, James Dean looking at the stars, Motorcycle Boy playing pool. That first sensation had diluted over time, and in their last months together, all that had remained was his melancholy, and also his anger: if he got mad, he could destroy something valuable （she remembered how he’d once thrown a camera against the wall just because it was the closest thing in reach）， or even hurt himself if he was too furious. That tension was still telling her it was better not to get back together with him. At the same time, though, it was as impossible to ignore Gaspar as it was a house fire.
Days after they saw each other at the Princesa, Marita had gone to Gaspar’s house. He still lived in Villa Elisa but, he’d told her, he was looking for an apartment in La Plata. Marita was going to interview Luis: the university press where she worked was putting together a book on the resistance of Peronist trade unions. They’d had a simple gathering of friends, homemade pizzas, pot smoking. The house seemed warm in comparison to hers, to her boyfriend’s, or her friends,” who always heated their places with stoves and left the windows cracked so the rooms didn’t fill up with smoke, who always had light blankets full of holes, worn out on trips through Patagonia or Jujuy, and houses that smelled of starving dogs, where everyone drank mate and ate plain bread. She understood that, in part, she was fed up. Activism was surprisingly homogeneous, the discussions were circular, the offenses identical, the dues to be paid insurmountable. A year ago, the way El Hueso monopolized the party meetings at the university inspired a sort of pride. Now she felt like yelling at him to let someone else talk. She saw the frustration on her comrades’ faces when they lost votes, and the rhetoric seemed ever more useless, precisely now when everywhere in the country the strikes were layoffs and the layoffs were picket lines. The student branch of the party only answered with articles in its newspaper to express solidarity, denounce the patronal system and neoliberalism, and call for mobilization of workers and students. But the workers remained outside the factory, cutting off the highway or trying to form a co-op to get their jobs back. Marita thought they should participate fully in those actions or join in the strikes—enough with the talking and talking and the theorizing and mate drinking. She had discussed all that with Luis during their interview.
“There’s no solution,” said Negro, who had come by for a few glasses of wine. “They’re Trotskyists, they don’t know how politics work and they’re disgusted by the people’s happiness.”
From the kitchen, Julieta yelled that she deserved a little happiness, too, and could someone please deign to help her clean the kitchen. They ate like pigs, made messes like pigs, she said. Negro huffed a little, but got up to help. He came back from the kitchen with Gaspar, who was making dessert, and sprawled in the lounge chair. After a long time of searching, Luis finally had a job at a construction site downtown. He did a little of everything: foreman, some engineering work. But they couldn’t pay very many people well. Gaspar wanted to know how the job was going.
“It’s going well, the boys work like animals, plus, they’re much better than I am technically.”
“That’s not saying much,” said Negro.
“Go to hell. What can I do, brother? They won’t hire an engineer. Still, Sixto, the kids’ leader, is a natural at engineering, it’s really impressive. It just kills me that I can’t hire more people.”
Gaspar sat down beside Marita and served everyone strawberries with cream. She realized, as he leaned over her, that she missed his smell and his supple skin, the chlorine in his hair when he came back from swimming, the sex on the damp grass, at night, in that very yard where they were now eating dessert.
“You do hire some people,” said Gaspar, as he poured everyone a spritz he’d recently learned how to make. “I don’t know if it’s better with Cynar or Campari. You all can tell me.”