He tried to pay back her efforts by trying even harder, but alongside desperation, melancholia began to delay his climax. What was he doing here?
And what else could he do but give in to that melancholy? Perhaps, moving forward on autopilot, he’d be able to achieve what he couldn’t if he thought about it too much. Disassociation, the mind breaking free from the body, didn’t have to be all bad.
My God, he thought to himself—eyes closed, his body making love unabated—how wrong I was about this city! Buenos Aires is fantastic! The past week seemed like a month, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang had seen and done so much.
They had visited a theatre converted into a bookshop, with the flocked wallpaper and the gilded ceiling intact. They’d attended an equestrian show in a distant suburb, and after that, a procession in a square clamped between an ominous-looking barracks and a stinking abattoir. The difference between the two buildings had been minimal, the fiesta after the procession ecstatic.
They had explored the collection of the practically empty Museo de Bellas Artes. Rembrandt, Renoir, and Jackson Pollock all hung within arm’s reach. You could stand with your nose pressed right up to them, no guards to tell you off. They had enjoyed the fantastic wines in the working-class cafés, with their stirring music and elderly waiters. Tony had seen an old conviction of his confirmed, there. If you wanted to know if a city was worth anything, you needed to look at the age of its waiters. The young studs and teenyboppers in Los Angeles and Sydney were after big tips and a different job, the sooner the better. An elderly waiter lived only for his profession. He knew people and their impatience. He had been serving drinks and the same dishes for thirty years; he’d been listening to the same sorrows and the same gossip for thirty years without scoffing or butting in. That took wisdom, and self-knowledge, and class.
This beautiful city had class in spades. After his initial crabby resistance, Tony had completely changed his mind about tango. They’d taken an actual lesson together, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang. Mad, carefree fun that he would have simulated in the past, but which he now actually experienced. All of the foreign students were bumbling around, laughing; only he and Mrs. Bo Xiang were complemented on their efforts by the teacher—a fat queen with a pointy beard and werewolf eyebrows, shrouded in baggy black drapes that resembled net curtains, but with steel-tipped cowboy boots sticking out under them.
After that, and indeed, all the way into the early hours, they, too, washed into the dance halls—the Porteños, as the inhabitants of the largest meat market in the world called themselves. Young and old, rich and poor, all of them together. They didn’t need lessons. Dignified and frenetic, they lost themselves in the music that Tony had whole-heartedly hated a week before, but which could now touch him to the bottom of the soul he thought he had lost long ago. What had happened? What had Buenos Aires done to him? Why had he succumbed here rather than in Monaco?
Monaco had proven to be a façade. Disneyland for billionaires, a cardboard cut-out skyline, an expensive cordon sanitaire for upstart proles, sanctimoniously clean and laughably chic, an architectonic neurosis for operetta walk-ons. This city, Buenos Aires, was a city. Unabashedly dirty, sincerely impure, stubbornly recalcitrant. She didn’t beg for compliments but swept you up into her orbit. Tony realized this as, in the middle of the night, rooted to the spot and increasingly drunk, he was watching a performance by El Afronte, an orquestra típica with one singer and ten musicians. Four bandoneons, three violins, a cello, a double bass, and a piano.
They played with the refinement of a symphony orchestra and the rhythmic passion of a heavy-metal band. Tony couldn’t explain why, but when the bespectacled singer—an anomalous cross between an angular existentialist from the Paris of May ’68 and a charming rocker from ’59, and yet every inch an Argentinian—when this anomaly began to sing, tears poured from Tony’s eyes, even though he didn’t understand most of the lyrics.
Mrs. Bo Xiang, who was no less drunk than he was, cleaned up his waterworks with paper tissues. Tony let her. He capitulated, there and then. He no longer begrudged the woman what she was looking for. She was quite sweet, really. He had obliged more repulsive women than her, obnoxious battle-axes who had looked down on him because they desired him. Mrs. Bo Xiang didn’t look down on him. She must have been a fresh-faced beauty once. He had been wrong about her, too. She seemed more patient and generous than he’d thought. Had she always been like that, or had she been chastened by adversity along the way, by some kind of trauma, or a series of disasters?
It didn’t matter. She was who she was, here and now, and Tony felt neither judged nor mocked by her. To his surprise, he felt grateful, even moved. He kissed her two claws in the semi-darkness of the clammy, sweaty milonga. He stroked her neck and her pierced earlobes. Casanova for beginners. She giggled like a schoolgirl—no, like a drunken cocotte in an ancient opium den, her head cocked, her narrow eyes squinting even more.
No one gave them a second glance. Tony wasn’t the only man in the buoyant company of an elderly woman. No one asked any questions, no one gave them judgemental looks, no one hissed. People took the night as it came. Tony saw a bony man dancing with an overgrown teenager—his daughter, judging by her features. A long-legged beauty with a skirt that was too short and a tragic look in her eyes. They focussed only on each other as they danced. It was more like elegant wrestling, an intense duel. If they hadn’t been clothed, you might have suspected them of public incest. They only stopped to smoke, still gazing into each other’s eyes. Finally, they walked out into the early morning, entwined, and just short of kissing.
The following day, the Calle Defensa, San Telmo’s main artery, was transformed into an elongated flea market, just as every Sunday. And there was El Afronte again, this time in the open air, performing on the steps of a church the colour of a desert, with a silly little amp for the singer. Tony’s inexplicable tears returned and, again, no one took any notice. An elderly charmer of around eighty, dressed as a gaucho, was inviting passing women to dance on the tiny balata-wood floor of about a metre square in size. Mrs. Bo Xiang refused. She didn’t let go of Tony’s arm, except to buy him a CD that El Afronte had brought out themselves. She put ten times too much money into the collection basket, acting like she couldn’t hear the singer calling after her and trying to offer her change, and pulled Tony into a neighbouring parrilla. It was the only thing she’d chosen herself for the week’s sightseeing.
Tony had even grown to love this type of folkloric grill room, part Austrian Weinstube, part Wild-West saloon. Chequered tablecloths, broad-beamed ceilings, battered wainscoting, smoky plaster. On every free spot on the wall hung the preserved head of some kind of animal, with beady eyes and two horns or a set of antlers. There was a whole stuffed cow on the pavement by the entrance.
Anyone going inside had to pass not just the stuffed cow but also the circular grilling area. It was around two or three metres in diameter. The floor and the raised edge were covered in enamel tiles; a knee-high log fire smouldered in the centre. Various animals were arranged around the languid, intense glow, as though around a nocturnal campfire in olden times. Stripped of their skins, hooves, head, and innards, and attached to iron crosses. A coven of decapitated messiahs, confessing the sins of mankind in general, and this metropolis in particular, as they slowly cooked. Hissing and scorching, they took on all the unresolved pasts, and all of history’s sorrows, before being devoured by their faithful followers, the worshippers of the flesh.
Exhausted and pouring with sweat, Tony was finally able to let himself fall forward onto the bed, next to Mrs. Bo Xiang. It was done. He felt more drained than ever before.
Mrs. Bo Xiang seemed to have calmed down, too. Tony had pulled out just in time. He had caught the proof of his climax in his right hand. He wiped it off on the side of the mattress and rolled onto his back, still panting. The synthetic scent of violets had made way for more authentic body odours. The silence was deafening without the squeaking of the bed, even though the fan and the air conditioning were still whirring away frantically.
As always after the deed, Tony was hit by contrarian sadness. Why were they leaving this place tomorrow, already? He wouldn’t have minded staying a little longer. Mrs. Bo Xiang was enjoying herself, too, wasn’t she? A bizarre vision revealed itself, an image of a possible