Melodrome Read online

  Melodrome

  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

  Marcelo Cohen

  Melodrome

  Translated by Chris Andrews

  Published in 2018

  from the Writing & Society Research Centre

  at Western Sydney University

  by the Giramondo Publishing Company

  PO Box 752

  Artarmon NSW 1570 Australia

  www.giramondopublishing.com

  First published in Argentina

  under the title Balada

  by Alfaguara S.A. de Ediciones, 2011

  Copyright © Marcelo Cohen 2011

  Translation copyright © Chris Andrews 2018

  Designed by Harry Williamson

  Typeset by Andrew Davies

  in 11.25/15 pt Garamond 3

  Printed and bound by Ligare Book Printers

  Distributed in Australia by NewSouth Books

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

  ISBN: 978-1-925336-77-1 (pbk)

  Series: Southern latitudes

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A story from the Panoramic Delta

  This is a story of desire and sacrifice. It’s already beginning.

  Tock paff. Tock fff. Tock…

  It’s around ten at night. Somebody is approaching along the fairly quiet street. There’s a certain musical pattern to the steps.

  Tock paff. Tock fff. Tack paff. Tack fff. Tock fff.

  The steps are lively but unbalanced. A woman is coming through the half-light of the streetlamps. Two corners of a balled-up silk scarf protrude from the pocket of her mauve coat. A droplet of sweat hangs from the tip of her nose. She is wearing boots with serious heels, but the heel of the right-hand boot has come off. She seems to have been in too much of a hurry to stop and look for it, but even obliged to hobble like this, she is vigorous – more: formidable. Each shake of her chestnut hair puts a rip in the dimness. Tock paff. Tack fff. More quickly now.

  This continues for a few seconds.

  We’re in the courtyard that adjoins the Deluxin guesthouse. Sitting on the ground, against the walls, among the drink crates, around a motorbike and a mincar: eighteen indigents in thermic wraps handed out by the municipality to protect us from the cold and damp, like so many meals in faulty vacuum packs. Our gazes converge on a cubicle in the corner of the courtyard, drawn by the prospect of some entertainment rather than the hope of relief. I know, because I am one of these onlookers.

  The chronodeon of a nearby building sings the time – quarter-past ten – and announces that the temperature is fifteen degrees. In the centre of the courtyard, smashed-up wooden crates are burning in a metal drum. The whole moodscape is concentrated in those flames.

  A kitchen hand emerges from the side-door of the guesthouse and hands out platylene bags to the wretches in the courtyard. Each bag contains a reheated vulture wing or cubes of barbecued meat, with vegetable scraps and a chunk of bread.

  Every night, the Deluxin’s compassionate proprietor distributes the remains of the evening meal. This good work is almost as easy as taking out the rubbish.

  But there’s another reason why people come to this courtyard. A therapeutic counsellor gives consultations in that corner cubicle. A tag attached to the front of his reasonably clean white coat identifies him as Suano Botilecue, Ther. Couns., but the homeless call him Doctor Botil. He’s paid to work this shift by the municipality.

  These days, it’s only the poor who seek the help of soul therapists, people like the man in the booth now, occupying the patient’s place. He’d be in his fifties and he’s asking Doctor Botil how to dissipate the feeling of guilt that keeps him in thrall to a tyrannical and stupid mother, who’s neither particularly helpless, nor as poor as her son.

  Counsellor Botilecue is struggling not to let fatigue blunt his attention. In this he is helped by the chill of the night, which the small heater in his booth is powerless to moderate. Hunger helps a little too, the background hunger that he tries to fend off, to stop it becoming chronic. He keeps a bag of leftovers in his satchel, along with the professional’s rations issued by the municipality.

  Tock paff. Tack fff. Tack fffff. FFF. PFF. TOCK…

  A twitch of suspicion pinches the faces of all the homeless people, as if they had seen an eye squinting in the heavens. And what they do see is, effectively, an omen. In a gap in the wall, which serves as an entrance and gives onto the street, a woman has appeared: quite young, wearing make-up and a mauve pearltex coat. Not tall, but she has a slim and energetic build. Eyes the colour of camomile tea in a face that is full without being coarse. She rearranges her luxuriant hair; she’s wearing crystalene earrings. She looks up as if searching for something, then down at the ground; she cranes her neck to see into the courtyard and spots the therapist’s cubicle to the right. She steps in resolutely. Tack, pff. Each unsteady step takes her further from the nearest streetlamp and brings her closer to the glow of the brazier, sharpening her features. Finally, she stops at the counter of the cubicle, behind the client, facing Doctor Botil.

  The flow of a time to come is suspended in this moment. The whole story is beginning to unwind.

  It’s not that the therapist is stunned by the woman’s sudden appearance. Or dismayed. But some of the colour does drain from his face. And suddenly he flags. He pretends to go on listening to the patient, unconvincingly, and finally glances up at the woman with an exaggerated look of fatigue and longing for the end. But his pallor is sincere.

  He lifts the hinged counter, dismisses the patient, and slips out of the cubicle as if to flee. The woman’s hand that reaches for his white coat is left hanging in the air like a sprawling vowel. She follows him. Raises her voice.

  Suano, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Suano!

  Somewhat wearily, he escapes. Beneath the smoky stars.

  But here, of course, he won’t get far. He goes around the brazier, comes to the wall, turns his back on it and mutters as he slides down to sit. She runs and squats beside him; she’s steadier that way. Her coat gapes, showing that her skirt has ridden up over her thighs. A homeless girl approaches her with a fruit crate. The woman takes out a purse, gives the girl a twenty-bit nickel, sits on the crate and removes her boots. The girl takes a few steps back, tosses the coin in the air and catches it in the palm of her other hand. The woman stretches her toes under the blue silk of her stockings. Her feet are slender, and surprisingly long and straight for someone with a lithe but rather small body. She wants to get Suano’s attention, but can’t bring herself to touch his knee. He speaks with the feeble voice of a deflated tumbler doll.

  Don’t think I’m going to believe that rubbish, Lerena.

  What rubbish?

  Nothing. Nothing. I wish I was blind.

  I didn’t know you were in such a bad way, Suano. I’m really sorry, I don’t know why.

  Why do you say I’m in a bad way? This is my job.

  Suano, I need…

  Lerena, I really can’t stand the sight of you. Even the mark left by your photo on the wall makes me sick.

  You used to draw a line between compassion and brutality, Suano, I remember that. And now you’re not even prepared to listen?

  You’re worse news than
a stain on a new shirt.

  The exchange of reproaches and insults continues like this for two or three minutes: bitterness and tatters of recognition. Suano refuses to let her explain; his own explanations are merciless. It’s simple enough to infer that, whatever happened between them, it was one of the six or seven standard therapeutic scenarios gone wrong. A patient ear gathers from their ‘dialogue’ the following.

  A couple of years ago, when Suano Botilecue had consulting rooms on the third floor of a rather well-appointed building, this Lerena went to ask him for treatment. She wanted to overcome disturbing memories of her late father, who was still intimidating her, and escape from the paralysing effects of her mother’s competitiveness. She estimated that her problems would take no less than twenty but no more than thirty weeks to solve. Flabbergasted by the naivety of it – a potential patient setting out the aims and conditions of the treatment – the therapist was unable to respond, even with sarcasm. He sensed that Lerena didn’t match the prototype of the transcendental hysteric, familiar to him from personal experience and the breviaries of psychotherapeutic tactics. She was something harder to manage.

  Lerena Dost is what he called her just then. There’s so much in that name.

  Bold, determined and inflexible, Lerena Dost was a faulty laser-reader ruining the music of her own sensuality. She drew people in with a cool sincerity and froze them with her gaze, while she herself was melting. Then she could find no better way to recover her original form than by appealing to the frozen victim, whose immobility distressed her. Lerena headed a team of account analysts in a company that managed investments in scenic real estate. The millionaires of the Panoramic Delta were looking for nature to buy, and Lerena, based on a spacious island, was building a career. On that first day, Doctor Botilecue, adhering to modern professional standards, made no attempt to work out why this woman really needed him. In the course of the second consultation, well before the point at which the therapeutic breviaries suggested that something like this might happen, she asked him point blank how long it usually took for women to get sick of him. Skilled in evasion, the doctor said that, theoretically, a therapist should not spend too long looking out the window during a session of treatment. She asked him what he could see. What are you imagining? he asked in turn. As recommended in the breviaries, the client was seated facing a blue wall, with her back to him, and he could look at the wall over her shoulders, or out the window beside him, or elsewhere if he liked. Lerena removed her jacket, not because she was hot but to disencumber herself. The Arnasian kaplon blouse that she was wearing conjured up scented hotel lounges where Doctor Botilecue would never set foot, or so he believed at the time, not that he had any interest in such places.

  Seven weeks later the doctor remarked: I’m certain you never cry, Lerena, but I can’t work out why. Do you know?

  Lerena swivelled on the chair and, as she examined him, her expression was distorted by a revealingly bitter smile. Do I know why you’re certain? she asked. Although Suano was looking out the window, he decided on an impulse to meet her gaze and fall back on a therapeutic silence. He told himself to wait a moment before analysing her expression. It must have been this slight breach of protocol that let in the warmth of the carnal underworld.

  Three weeks later, Doctor Botilecue began to ask Lerena to tell him about her dreams. She humoured him with four or five, all containing reddish mountains and trips in cars without wheels, plus another in which she was swimming in the river under the covert surveillance of a crowd of girls just like herself. She recounted the dreams indifferently and said that she couldn’t see how they would limnicate anything. Much more relevant to her cure, she felt, was her prowess as a long jumper: she could jump seven cubits thirty, she told him, and had won a cup. Before he could think better of it, Suano heard himself replying breezily: How about that? I run a hundred metres in twelve seconds twenty-seven. She retorted scornfully: Well I do it in twelve flat, doctor…He asked her if she really thought she was so exceptional. But since there was no reply, the only thing left hanging in the air was his remorse at having broken the rules.

  Even from overheard shreds of the conversation they are having now in the courtyard of the Deluxin guesthouse, much can be glimpsed and much more imagined.

  Finally, one afternoon, Suano let slip that the psychological relation between them had, he feared, exceeded strictly therapeutic limits. Lerena didn’t say: I don’t believe it, or tell him that she’d been waiting a long time to hear those words; but neither did she sit there dumbstruck. She said that it was her second surprise for the day; in the morning her company had announced that it was giving her an office and a suite to use as she saw fit. Patient and therapist said goodbye with a clumsily electric handshake.

  Two days later, Doctor Botilecue was introduced to the restaurant of an aromatised hotel and, drunk on the perfume and fogwater, ascended to Lerena’s office and suite on the tenth floor. They woke up attached to one another like a petal clinging to the fingertip of the hand that has cut a rose. Suano was still hungry for her body, even after the night of sex, and full of desire for what money can buy. He wanted to buy, or at least to possess, the armchair, the velvet gown, everything he could see in that room, down to the massage mattress. Lerena pointed out that not even her salary could stretch that far, then suddenly pulled away from him, slipped into her sylk sheath, hugged him again, rubbed his back a bit, and went to the window as if to greet a cheering crowd.

  Two weeks later, Suano would include these details in a despondent defence of his conduct before the Therapeutic Corporation, which had gathered to judge him for malpractice. Precious details, but science was unwilling to add them to its data set. As far as science was concerned, there was something far more harmful than sleeping with a client: entering into a lasting relationship. Lerena was already broadcasting to the world that she and Suano, who said nothing to the contrary, had fallen in love. We’re a couple, she was saying. At therapeutic conferences, panels discussed the doctor’s recalcitrant combination of weakness and temerity; the Corporation had to protect itself from discredit. So the jury asked Botilecue to hand over his private counsellor’s diploma, which was duly torn into six; an inspector applied a coarse stamp of invalidation to the door of his consulting room: a green stamp.

  If the affair continued in private, as it apparently did, in public things were now more delicate. Lerena had not foreseen that her lover’s professional downfall would have an effect, if minor, on her psyche and her performance at work. Two months later, she sat Suano down in an armchair and told him that they had made a mistake: she was hopelessly incapable of loving someone enough to disregard the loss of status it brought; his situation was undermining the most valuable thing she had: ambition. Suano said that he was capable of love even if she wasn’t; with her and a job as a state-employed public therapist, he would be perfectly happy.

  He meant it. Among the elements percolating through Suano’s rich therapeutic knowledge, as dense as any of the others, was a keen sense of risk, an appetite for adventure.

  But she said no; she was ambitious; more drawn to probabilities than risk. So she was sorry, but that was it.

  A pause. Botilecue, who was, after all, a psychotherapist and had a certain talent for strategy, replied that he never wanted to see her again, ever.

  That seemed logical to her. Perhaps he could pack his things that afternoon.

  No-one around here is going to lose sleep over the housing arrangements of a private therapeutic counsellor who has fallen from grace. The island state of Asunde, which is doing all it can to recover its reputation as a place of refuge, has apartoirs in a range of categories, all a step up from the outright slum. One such space is the cubicle in the courtyard of the Deluxin guesthouse, where our Botilecue keeps his things, sleeps on a camp bed and attends to his clients.

  More than two years have passed. Suano’s physical and mental vigour have been drained, not by the wounds to his pride and professional self-esteem
but by the sheer pain of losing Lerena. This clever and cheerful man is haggard. After the disaster he buoyed himself with scepticism; by dint of patient effort and the austerity enforced by his disgrace, he has graduated to an almost chronic self-forgetfulness, a surrender to circumstances, a detached but affable attention to others.

  The State is only too happy to break the independence of private therapists by incorporating as many as it can into its free welfare service, run on orthodox lines. Submission to the rules of the public health system is rewarded with a modest salary. Since his downfall, Suano Botilecue is not so imbrogant as to rail against the official breviaries of psychology; and free counselling for the helpless is something he approves of, especially when he can smuggle in some unauthorised advice.

  He lives in a kind of ramshackle comfort. Ramshackle, but clean.

  It’s also a very ascetic existence, requiring detachment from the self, but he’s proud of his capacity to endure and the progress that he has made in matters of the spirit. Which leads him to wonder idly whether he might not now be doing something worse than letting a patient seduce him: patting himself on the back for his spiritual achievements. Pondering questions of this kind has helped him to sleep soundly and to feel, at times, that he is attending to his patients in one long unbroken dream.

  But now he has been woken from this nap, this vacancy of desire, and by Lerena herself, no less. Love and pain are returning, indigestibly fried in rage.

  Let’s listen to them now. Because they’re still talking.

  Suano. Suano.

  Her plea is so peremptory it makes me and the rest of Dr Botil’s clients stir in our blankets. We’re not really chewing our rations but our jaws are at work: curiosity, perhaps. An icy dew is falling from the night air, evaporating with a hiss before it can settle on our skin.

  You’re worse than tobacco, Lerena. For someone who’s suffered to kick the habit, one miserable puff, not even that, just the sight of a packet: it’s a disaster.