The table, the window, and the waiter who strolls by like the world, coming and going, bringing and taking the glasses, which are the only reasons why us regular guys put up with this stupid jaunt through the world.
I think the only thing I have worth telling about is the time I’ve killed in bars. From skipping class to skipping work, even skipping out on the girlfriend or partner of the day.
It was always best not to go, to get there a little later, to leave it for afterwards. And always close at hand was that good friend who’d tell you, “come on, stop fucking around, let’s grab a cup.”
I skipped school in a single bound. I was off killing time so long that I remember very little about it, and few teachers recognized my face. They called me “the new guy.”
At the Colegio Mariano Acosta I used to gang up with the others in the bathroom, but as soon as I could I would go to La Perla del Once, back when it was La Perla for real, and we would smoke us some fat ones that got you so blasted that all the innards of your brain would come tearing out your eyes and ears, and down the empty hallways of your mind you could only hear the horrified heel clicks of newborn paranoia. Which then grew stronger and I sprouted eyes all over, even out of my asshole to keep track of how the chair was moving. Esteban, who was a fifth-year, shoved morphine suppositories up himself in the famous pisser where Tanguito also indulged between verse and chorus. When Esteban got out of the bathroom he had turned into the cartoon version of a ghost lost in time: the dude was no longer at La Perla, he was walking between the tables as if dodging Prana-brand arrows shot his way—he said—by the goddess Minerva from the planet Pluto.
But the true, the gallant, the legendary times I killed were in a bar called Los Leones, on Constitución, long since missing in action. With Buján, from Quilmes, I smashed world records of time spent in a bar. We practically lived our whole lives there: we started with naval battles, then we were poets, we explored the world on a map from a geography book, we parted ways in France and met back up at a shootout in Prague, we planned robberies and murders, we made prodigious lists of how we would spend the millions of dollars we would find in a briefcase on the street. We were adventurers, and women and friends bid us tearful farewells from every port in the world and, in the end, when we were through with high school (or, rather, when high school was through with us) we had done it all and I don’t know about Buján, but I kept hanging out in bars, dreaming about all the lives I couldn’t live because the only life you get to live forces you to keep living it.
The last times I killed were when I tried to get into college for Psychology. That was my first and only course of study. I was crippled at the starting line. But the spot—rather swanky, I don’t recall the name, over on Charcas—always resembled nothing more than a brawl in Caseros or Devoto. Everybody there was walking around with at least one or two hundred books in their head. Sartre passed and Nietzsche shot and Neruda found his way up the left side. I was reading Henry Miller and pumping out boastful tales of good fucks to make Elisa and Mirta blush, plus regaling them both with Mayakovsky poems signed as if by yours truly. That’s when the love bullshit started. It always hurts and leaves you halfway moronic for the rest of the fight. School, Mirta, Elisa, and the intellectuals kicked me while I was down. The time-killing stopped. I no longer had the student gig. Now, goddammit, I had to get to work.
Returning Defeated to the Neighborhood Spot
I won’t tell you I was anguished, guilty, desperate. But, quite worried, I kept on killing time, now in a spot in Barracas. It’s still there, at Montes de Oca and Uspallata. It was called Kinteto. It was the best. All the heavyweights, middleweights, and even featherweights of the Grand Brotherhood of the Scammers stopped by there. They lived on the trains around Ituzaingó and were always running along the rooftops of the flophouses taking shots at the fuzz. The dapper Pololo, who was constantly busting us out of some police station, better not to ask how. Old Chaina, who came back from Constitución station every day with a lifted suitcase and tried to sell us ties or bras. The heroic Queso y Dulce. The dangerous Yoyega; Black Marta, who was a listless hooker; Gerardo, captain of the shitass firm. Even the posh types were there: Fede, Alejandro, Gus. And the intellectuals, who ended up being Omar and me.
We kept it going: matinee, evening, and night. The thrice-accursed classified ads in Clarín were always lying on the table, holding up the pages I toiled over to justify my long absence from the world. I had no alternative but to become a writer. This was a whole life, while I sat and waited for the ship of adventure to come pick me up, to take me to the legendary legends dreamed about by all the little boys I once was back when I was lucky enough to be a little boy.
We made up a handsome family of slackers. I still remember the smell of the world looking out the window. It was a smell that made the hairs on your heart stand on end. There we discussed the world’s dumbassery, we healthily spoke ill of those who were not present, the odd punch was thrown, and sometimes we had one of those chats that Buddha or Shakespeare would have copied down if they were listening. We took long walks with Omar, promising ourselves a thrilling world that later, like everything else, would come to us, but frozen. My brain was pretty much fried by that point, and instead of aspiring to acquire some fresh, juicy, romantic Barracas pussy, I envisioned myself becoming a famous writer such that, someday, I might talk my way into a literary, psychoanalyzed Palermo vagina.
Then, all of a sudden, the world came to get me. One day, Omar disappeared once and for all from every street and avenue on the planet. The guys went to jail or got jobs at the bank. Just like a woman later took me to Brazil, and another to Amsterdam, a woman also pulled me clean out of the neighborhood. Leaving the neighborhood means emigrating forever. No neighboring schools, no neighboring nobody. Downtown is the land of pariahs.
Bars Are a Map
I had lived twenty long, boneheaded years. And if you know where I was going, you tell me, so I can write myself a letter and let myself know. I wasn’t even good enough to steal a hot dog. Work and school were sports my core weakness kept me from playing. What did I have left? Keeping on waiting in bars. But downtown, until you got into the swing of things, I won’t say it was impossible, like escaping one of Borges’ labyrinths, but it was a real son of a bitch. A spot called Eros was the hide-out. It’s not there anymore. And across the way was the Cultural, the game-spitting grounds. It’s not there either. It was a land of thuggery, with gunshots and pitched battles. The guy walking past you was already three steps ahead of you.
All along the way there was a lot of theatre being cooked up and poetry on the grill. We were fucking thick and fast. We planned all the ruckus that would later come to pass. I often visited the police station, and once I took a long distance bus from the bar Academia to the jail at Devoto, stopping for a hearing at Tribunales.
At those bars I learned to get women to look at me and men to listen to me. But if you ask me about anything worthwhile, I’ve got nothing to tell you. I took a long journey from Eros. A friend introduced me to his girlfriend and, years later, I went with her to the place she met a friend of mine and left with him to Italy, and not long after I met the woman who took me to Amsterdam, and the bars abroad were not the same. You sat down at a table in a tavern in Sanremo or Madrid and smiled, contented, remembering that guy who, at a table in Kinteto, dreamed of traveling to the other side of the universe to sit down at a table in a bar and keep waiting for something interesting to happen for fucking once in this rotten world.
Enrique Symns
Cerdos & Peces
January 1989
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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