Holy City by Guillermo Orsi Page B

zombies are sporadically exchanging blows in the ring of a Las Vegas casino. The presenter is going on about how many millions of dollars the one who falls over last will make, and about a world-boxing federation that hands out and withdraws championship titles (Verónica has an image of them getting together in a smoke-filled room, gaunt Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro lookalikes, protected by baby-faced bodyguards, to decide who is to be crowned champion, who is to be dethroned).
    Tempted by the fact that Pacogoya is fast asleep, Verónica slides her fingers into the pouch where he keeps his mobile. She would like to learn—she says, to justify her voyeurism to herself—who exactly this guy is who gets given books by Che Guevara in languages he does not understand and which he would not read even if they were in Spanish, because not reading is at the root of his ability to take the world as it comes and gain his feeble rewards from it.
    The list of names on the mobile screen means nothing to her. Most of them are women, some companies, a few men’s first names and then, as if daring her to take the next step, five glowing letters: “Uncle.”
    She suddenly thinks of
Call for the Dead
, the John Le Carré novel, one of the many good books her friends have never returned. She ought to ask Laucha the Mouse Giménez for it. Not only is she a voracious reader of borrowed novels, she is called “the Mouse” because she chews and digests everything she comes across: newsprint, the nocturnal terrors of her women friends recently turned forty, tales of lost happiness.
    So this is not Verónica indulging in a spot of private phone tappingas she presses the mobile key. It is a homage to a great thriller writer that she performs while Pacogoya is out for the count, as though one of the blows the zombies are dishing out in Las Vegas had caught him squarely on the chin.
    The phone rings somewhere or other.
    â€œDon’t ever call me again, you idiot.”
    She rings off immediately. In Las Vegas, the referee counts to ten and raises the winning arm of the zombie left standing. But Verónica is the one who has been knocked out.
    It is scary to hear dead people talk when they are angry.

3
    Like Jerusalem, Buenos Aires is a Holy City. Pacogoya wakes with this idea in his mind: he is being pursued by a mob of federal mercenaries, crucified—I didn’t feel any pain, he tells Verónica—and then displayed in the middle of Plaza de Mayo.
    â€œThe Mothers were walking round as they have done every Thursday for the past thirty years. They were dying of old age before my eyes, Verónica. Collapsing like trees uprooted by drought, still demanding to know what had happened to their disappeared children. The people of Buenos Aires were looking on with their proverbial indifference: the middle classes who run from one bank to another and then at six in the evening choke all the entrances to the underground. And there I was, like a crucified Che Guevara no-one would ever shed a tear over, bleeding to death, giving up the ghost.”
    Pleasant conversation to spread on her toast, drink her lukewarmblack coffee with and rush downstairs from as soon as the entry phone goes.
    â€œIt’s my whale calf,” says Verónica, pleased that for once someone has arrived in time to rescue her. “Don’t move without telling me where you’re going,” she tells Pacogoya by way of goodbye. She has not told him about the call she made on his mobile to Uncle’s apartment, the threatening voice.
    *
    Buenos Aires is a city of merchants and pilgrims, of monarchs free from control by any parliament who arrive at Aeroparque in their private jets and stare with genetic disdain at the gray line of the city’s buildings to the West and the river like a brown sea to the East. They bound down the exclusive steps like thoroughbreds and ask their advisers who speak the native language of