The Fragility of Bodies Read online

  Sergio Olguín was born in Buenos Aires in 1967. His first work of fiction, Lanús, was published in 2002. It was followed by a number of successful novels, including Oscura monótona sangre (Dark Monotonous Blood), which won the Tusquets Prize in 2009. His books have been translated into German, French and Italian. The Fragility of Bodies is his first novel to be translated into English, and is the first in a crime series of three novels featuring journalist Veronica Rosenthal. Sergio Olguin is also a scriptwriter and has been the editor of a number of cultural publications.

  THE FRAGILITY OF BODIES

  Sergio Olguín

  Translated by Miranda France

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  LONDON

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London WC1X 0ET

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  First published in Spanish as La fragilidad de los cuerpos by Tusquets Editores Argentina, Buenos Aires, 2012

  Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council of England

  Work published within the framework of “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Argentine Republic

  Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina

  © Sergio Olguín, 2012

  Published by agreement with Tusquets Editores, Barcelona, Spain

  English translation © Miranda France, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher

  The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978–1–912242–191

  eBook ISBN 978-1-912242-207

  Typeset by Tetragon, London

  Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire

  To Gabriela Franco, Natalia Méndez and Pablo Robledo

  The complete truth about someone or something can only be told in a novel.

  STEPHEN VIZINCZEY,

  THE MAN WITH THE MAGIC TOUCH

  […] structural weaknesses in all fields, considerable fundamental disadvantages: technical and economic backwardness, a society dominated by a minority of exploiters and wastrels, the fragility of bodies, the instability of a rough sensibility, the primitivism of logic as an instrument, the rule of an ideology that preaches scorn for the world and that science is profane. All these traits continue to prevail throughout the entire period that we are considering and, nevertheless, it is a time of awakening, of boom, of progress.

  JACQUES LE GOFF,

  LE MOYEN AGE

  If you want a lover

  I’ll do anything you ask me to

  And if you want another kind of love

  I’ll wear a mask for you

  If you want a partner, take my hand, or

  If you want to strike me down in anger

  Here I stand

  I’m your man.

  LEONARD COHEN,

  ‘I’M YOUR MAN’

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  1 Editorial Meeting

  2 Two Brave Boys

  3 Iron Man

  4 El Peque versus Cholito

  5 The Others

  6 In the Labyrinth

  7 Eyes Wide Open

  8 The Investigation

  9 Licking the Wounds

  10 Clean

  11 The Hidden City

  12 Light Years

  13 Who Doesn’t Know Juan García?

  14 Cuyes, Gazelles and Jackals

  15 Leaving my Heart

  16 Supergirl

  17 Full Speed Ahead

  18 The Death Train

  19 The Journalist’s Violent Calling

  Prologue

  The building was at least eighty years old. Once it had been the Hotel Arizona, but Alfredo Carranza didn’t know that, nor would he have cared. For him it was the place where he went to see the psychologist the company had arranged for him. He didn’t know that the building at 1000 Calle Talcahuano provided space not only to psychologists and doctors but also to lawyers, small businesses and prostitutes offering a discreet service from rented apartments. For that reason, the number of casual visitors every day was considerable and security on the door was correspondingly lax, despite the presence of two employees in reception.

  Carranza knew exactly where he was going. He had taken the number 39 bus from Constitución to a stop on Marcelo T de Alvear, just as he had twice a week for the last three months. As he turned onto Talcahuano he felt a cold wind hit him full in the face. It was one of those autumn evenings when you start to feel winter in the air, pricking your face. Carranza wore brown chinos, a checked shirt beneath a cream-coloured pullover and on top of everything a raincoat which was arguably too light for such a cold day. A storm was brewing. Flashes of lightning lit up the sky and any minute the downpour would be unleashed.

  Carranza walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down, his gaze lost among the broken paving stones and dog shit. In the last few weeks he had familiarized himself pretty well with the building. He had noted the indifference with which visitors were greeted and been heartened by it. He couldn’t have coped with anyone catching his eye between the entrance and the therapist’s consulting room.

  When had his plan for that day begun to take shape? Perhaps it was on the afternoon when he came out of his appointment with no stomach for the street, people, buses, the journey home, his family and his wife’s quizzical gaze. She was always trying to read in his expression if the therapy was working.

  Carranza crossed the street, keeping a tight hold on the paper that he carried in his left pocket. It was a lined sheet of notepaper which he had taken from his eldest son’s folder. He had written on it while locked in the bathroom, before leaving home, in that uneven handwriting that he had never managed to improve, not since primary school. He had folded it four times and stored it carefully in his coat pocket.

  Nobody but me is to blame for this.

  A few yards before reaching the building, he bumped into someone, a young man who got annoyed and told him to look where he was going. The man looked ready for a fight, but he had to resign himself to continuing on his way, because Carranza apologized without even looking up.

  I can’t go on any more. I killed them. All four of them.

  Carranza entered the building and, as usual, nobody paid him any attention. The receptionist, short, dark-skinned, with a cheerful face, would later not remember having seen him at all, and – if it hadn’t been for the security camera at the entrance, the only one in the building – it would have been difficult to ascertain exactly when he came in. The people who took the elevator with him wouldn’t remember him either, nor would the lady who, on the fifth floor, was about to get in and asked Carranza if he was going down to the lobby. Nobody saw him enter, or go up in the elevator, or get out on the top floor.

  I thought that I could live with this. I thought that I could live with the deaths of the first three. But not with the child’s.

  There was nobody on the roof. The lowering sky was lit up by periodic lightning and a few drops of rain began to fall. He walked to the edge of the terrace, which was contained by a low wall, not much higher than his waist. Leaning against the wet concrete, he looked down. He saw t
he cars waiting at a red light and people hurrying along the sidewalk. Some umbrellas moved from one side of the street to the other, like balls in an electronic game.

  I knew that day that I would kill him. That it would fall to me. We all knew it. All the way round I was waiting to come across them. At that moment I wanted to kill them. Both of them. Just for being there, for wanting to ruin my life.

  There was no time for anything else. It was all decided. He had thought about it a lot and, although he would have done everything in his power to avoid this, there was no other way out of the hell he was living in, the deep pit into which he had fallen years ago.

  But when they appeared I didn’t want to kill them any more. I wanted everything to be different. I wanted to go back to Sandra and the kids. But I killed him, I killed the little one. I want to say that I’m so sorry, say it to everyone, to his family. Sandra, forgive me. Look after Dani and Mati. Forgive me. I just can’t bear it any more.

  With difficulty he climbed onto the wall, which the rain had made slippery. He stood up straight, like an Olympic swimmer about to dive. It was simple. All he had to do was step forward and jump. But his legs wouldn’t obey him, he couldn’t bring himself to take the step. The body rebelled against the mind’s plan. Carranza had imagined that something like this might happen, so he reached into the right pocket of his raincoat and took out the pistol he’d brought with him. Then his hand accomplished what his legs had refused to do. He shot himself in the temple and his body fell like a rock, ricocheted off the top floor overhang and finally slammed onto the sidewalk. There were screams of panic, confused movements around the body, the sound of a police siren approaching, another siren, more distant, from an ambulance. And all of it beneath a rain that kept coming harder, crueller and more desolate.

  1  Editorial Meeting

  I

  One good reason to pursue a career in magazine journalism is that you don’t need to get up early. Sure, every now and then you have to cover some event in the morning, and there are also journalists who work for news agencies or websites on the early shift, but the majority start work after 2 p.m. This was not the main reason Verónica Rosenthal embraced the career when she was barely out of her teens, but it had certainly played a part in her choice.

  “Whores and journalists get up late,” she would explain sleepily to any friend who called before ten o’clock in the morning.

  In fact, it was rare for Verónica to sleep until midday, but it did take her a while to get going. That morning was a case in point. With her eyes half-closed she got into the shower and let the hot water run over her body like the slow caress of a virile lover. She spent less time on the morning shower now that she had cut her hair to shoulder-length – sacrificing the chestnut mane that she used to comb carefully under the water so as not to look like the Lion King’s girlfriend. When she finished she wrapped her short hair rather unnecessarily in a towel and looked for a tampon in the cupboard that contained a mad array of perfumes, talcum powders, hair dyes that she had never used and never would, half-finished deodorants, boxes of panty liners, an electric hair remover that didn’t work and even an ultrasonic nebulizer that her sister Leticia had lent her and which should have been returned a year ago. There was only one tampon left in the box, plus the one she reckoned was in her bag. She’d stop by the pharmacy on the way to work.

  Verónica put on mismatched underwear: multicoloured pants she should never have bought, let alone worn, and an aquamarine bra which was at least more comfortable than the ones she usually wore. She didn’t look at herself in the bedroom mirror. Avoiding her reflection was increasingly becoming a habit since she had turned thirty and her body had made its own adjustments to the new decade. She kept promising herself to go to the gym or take up running in Parque Centenario or visit a plastic surgeon, but never got round to any of these, chiefly because she realized that men were much less critical of her than she expected them to be. A pair of tight jeans, a push-up bra or a new bikini easily satisfied them; they didn’t seem to notice all the details that worried her. Perhaps this farce could continue for a few more years.

  She urgently needed coffee.

  She didn’t feel well, not because she had her period but because she was still a bit hung-over from the night before. Her friends had come over and stayed until the early hours, drinking every last bottle of wine, smoking all the cigarettes and all the available weed. Verónica contemplated with dismay the disastrous scene in the living room. Her friends had shown some solidarity by collecting all the plates, but there were still coffee cups, glasses, overflowing ashtrays, CDs separated from their cases, books taken from the shelves and strewn about. And presumably they thought they had left her apartment tidy because they had washed up a few plates and thrown away what remained of the quickly improvised supper.

  Verónica shook her head as though denying the reality of her living room and went to the kitchen to make a coffee.

  Two heaped spoons of Bonafide Fluminense went in the Volturno. She waited for the boiled water to reach the top part of the coffee pot, then poured it into the big cup her sister Daniela had given her. She added a dash of skimmed milk but no sugar. As she drank the coffee she began to feel better. All the same, she took a strong aspirin with a glass of tap water. She decided to tidy up the living room before getting dressed.

  II

  It had rained all night and the bad weather looked set to continue. She didn’t like umbrellas, so Verónica went out into the rain in a black raincoat, a waterproof version of the coat she usually wore on these cold days at the end of autumn. The thought of walking to the number 39 bus stop, then walking three more blocks in the rain at the other end was unappealing. Much better to go to the pharmacy around the corner then take a taxi to the door of Nuestro Tiempo.

  She had eaten nothing with the coffee and having an empty stomach made her feel nauseous. She didn’t want to arrive at work in that state, so she asked the taxi driver to take her to Masamadre, a small wholefoods restaurant three blocks from the newsroom. Any other day she would have gone to Cantina Rondinella or got a takeaway from McDonald’s to eat in the kitchen at the magazine, but she felt a pressure to eat healthy food when she had her period.

  By the time Verónica arrived at the newsroom it was about two o’clock. Nuestro Tiempo was on the third floor of an office block that had been completed two years ago and still had the new and soulless feel of a place where nobody lives.

  The magazine had relocated there soon after the building opened and occupied two whole floors: the third for editorial and the second for administration and the publicity, circulation and IT departments. The journalists sat in clusters distributed along the whole length of the third floor, together with designers, photographers and digital retouchers, each division grouped in small cubicles according to their job.

  The first person any visitor to Nuestro Tiempo saw was Adela, the receptionist, a woman close to retirement age, unlike the majority of people who worked at the magazine, who tended to be under forty. Verónica greeted her with a kiss and Adela handed her an envelope: an invitation to an opening at the Museum of Latin American Art. She should find out if any of the girls were going. She’d get bored on her own.

  Verónica sat at a long table with the other members of the Society section: her editor Patricia Beltrán, three other writers and an intern. Everyone, apart from Patricia, was already sitting at a computer when she arrived.

  “Where’s Patricia?” she asked, putting her coat on a hanger and rearranging her wet hair.

  “Don’t you have an umbrella?” Roberto Giménez, one of the section writers, looked at her with the expression of someone puzzling over a hieroglyph.

  “Don’t like them. And Fallaci?” she asked again.

  “She’s in a meeting with Goicochea and someone else. Remember we’ve got the editorial meeting in twenty minutes?”

  No. She hadn’t remembered. She was good at denial: she loathed editorial meetings because they went on
for so long and achieved so little. Each writer proposed ideas for an article and discussed or fine-tuned them with Patricia while the others checked their phones, made doodles or stared woefully through the glass wall, as though appealing to a colleague from some other section to come and rescue them. Given that nobody contributed anything to the others’ pitches, Verónica thought that it would make more sense for them to meet alone with the editor rather than collectively lose an hour locked in a room. Worse, since none of them had ever had much time to consider their ideas before the meeting (because some pieces had already been finished the day before, because a new article might now be under way, because the best ideas always strike when least expected, because the best content for a current affairs publication was precisely what was happening at that moment), the majority of pitches were just a formality, ideas that would never come to fruition. Some came up week in, week out (the rise in car ownership, the excessive medication of hyperactive kids, the exotic pets of the rich and famous), but nobody ever wrote them, or even acknowledged that these ideas had been on the table thousands of times before. Patricia would put on a face that said this was either an interesting idea or a shit one (depending on her mood that day), then move on to the next item. At the end, Patricia would dish out articles she had thought of herself or which had been sent down from management (Verónica had the impression that executive meetings were much more productive than editorial ones), or she would end up accepting suggestions at some other point in the working day.

  Verónica had twenty minutes before the meeting. Usually five were enough to assemble a list of possible articles that would pass muster with her boss. That day, however, she was clean out of inspiration. Perhaps because she had delivered a big piece the day before on a scam run by the medication mafia operating in public hospitals in Buenos Aires. They were using Plan Remediar (the Ministry of Health system which provided free medication to patients) to record deliveries of drugs that never actually made it to the patient. For example, the doctor would prescribe two boxes of an antibiotic. When the patient went to the hospital pharmacy, they would give him or her only one box, claiming that there were no more left. The patient would leave, and the pharmacist would record two units as having been delivered. It wasn’t that they had stolen the other box. It had never arrived at the pharmacy because the laboratory hadn’t sent it, although it had invoiced for it. Verónica had uncovered the doctors–pharmacists–laboratories nexus without much effort (nobody involved had tried very hard to conceal their part in the crime), and her feature was going to press that night, in the new edition of Nuestro Tiempo.