Holy City by Guillermo Orsi Read Free Book Online Page A

anyway?”
    â€œIt’s close by,
che
. A hundred and seventy kilometers away, no more than an hour on the motorway.” With that he takes the bit of paper from Pacogoya and tears it up himself. “Give me the dough now and call me when you get back from San Pedro.”
    Pacogoya is carrying a student rucksack. His thin face disguises thefact that he is already forty-eight years old. A sparse beard gives him that Che Guevara look which often leads tourists to think he must be a left-wing guerrilla. In reward for his services they thrust books about Che written in French or Italian on him.
    He unzips his rucksack and hands the dealer a wad of notes.
    â€œTwenty percent now. The rest tonight, when I’ve picked up the stuff and returned from San Pedro.”
    Despite sixty years of hard living, Uncle’s face rejuvenates as soon as he sees the money. The skin around his eyes gets a botox injection when he handles the notes, counts them under the table, then like a conjuror makes them disappear into his jacket pocket.
    Although everyone knows him as Uncle, it is only with Pacogoya that he has a real nephew relationship. Pacogoya has known him for fifteen years, since the days when the dealer was private secretary to the vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies, and Pacogoya’s own position in the Foreign Ministry allowed him to use the invaluable diplomatic bag to bring shipments in directly from Colombia.
    â€œThose were the days,” says Pacogoya, while the two of them are smoking a cigarette outside the bar, now that the municipal authorities have banned smoking in enclosed spaces. “I should have stayed on. I’d be an ambassador by now.”
    â€œThe foreign service is full of queers,” says the dealer, taking a lungful of smoke, then breathing out a dark, polluted cloud that the east wind whirls around the walls of the bar, then off up calle Paraguay. “I’ll see you tonight.”
    *
    Anyone determined to believe God exists will find him on any corner, in the lift, or while he is walking along a lonely road. Any woman equally keen to find love will end up convinced that a noise in the corridor must be her lover coming back at any hour, at 3:30 a.m., forexample. To beg her to forgive him for having stormed off the other night when she refused to give him what he had come to ask her for. For having been so stupid as not to make love to her first, to leave her well satisfied so that, still caught up in the dreamy haze of their second fuck, she would find it impossible to refuse him such a tiny favor, nothing more than three thousand pesos.
    But neither God nor love exist, Verónica groans when she hears Pacogoya’s voice on the entry phone. Or at least, this is not the way to find them, groping around in the dark, holding back as she gives herself in exchange for a meal and real French champagne in an expensive restaurant, followed by a lovemaking session in a room with a view of the noble dead.
    â€œI thought you were back on your ship. What happened: did they throw you overboard?” she asks when he comes in.
    Instead of replying, Pacogoya tries to embrace her, but she slips away like a cat who will not allow itself to be stroked. He lets his arms drop and sinks onto the sofa. He is exhausted.
    â€œYou know what happened. The ship ran aground, and …”
    â€œI’m not talking about the cruise ship: what happened to you?”
    Pacogoya looks at her in dismay. As though it were possible not to tell her, to say he saw her light was on and came up, to have a drink of the Argentine whisky which is all she has in the little bar she keeps under a table loaded with plants, then make love to her or take her to eat in an all-night restaurant run by fake Italians.
    â€œI have to get up at seven,” Verónica says impatiently. “Give me a quick summary of what happened, then you can go back and sleep in your cemetery.” Pacogoya was always