Head Games, page 14
He moved her hand off in spite of his rising excitement, the tremor of an erection springing to life. He was ashamed of hardening under her touch, getting aroused by the wrong woman, a woman whose face was marked with the stigma of violence.
“You don’t want it?” she said, her voice shifting to neutral. “Alright. I’m not up to it anyway. Can I ask you a favour instead?”
Jim knew what she was after. Money. This time he was determined to dole out his cash smartly. It’s pay per play, girl, he thought. My money for your answers.
But she wanted a different kind of favour. “Can you drive me home?” she said.
Jim put the car into gear. “Where to?” he said, pulling out into the deserted street, eager to leave the industrial desert and return to the populated core of the city.
“I want to go back to my village up north,” she said. “It’s close to the Bolivian border.”
“Tilcara?” he said.
“So you know,” she said. “Your girl friend told you?” “Lisa said she was going to visit Tilcara. Will I find her there?” That’s what he had come to ask Asu: where is Lisa?
“I told you to watch out,” she said. “I told you they were after her. You didn’t take me seriously, did you?”
“They – who?”
“Jaime Anqua and his son, the men in charge of the village.”
“What do they want from Lisa?”
“It’s a long story. You’ll drive me to Tilcara?”
Jim thought he was the paymaster, but Asu had somehow high-jacked the game. He realized how little he had to offer and how much he wanted the information she could give him. Asu had a shrewd sense of its value. She was withholding the goods unless. There were conditions to be met.
“Okay, I’ll drive you there,” Jim said, but the story still wasn’t forthcoming. He didn’t want to repeat the question and give Asu an opening to up the ante.
She pulled up her knees, nestled into the curve of the seat with the unhurried grace of a cat, and fell silent. It was hard to tell whether she was asleep or deep in thought. There was something alert about her curled-up body though, as if she could be ready for action at a moment’s notice, on the release of a secret spring.
Jim stopped by the hotel, “to pack an overnight bag,” he told Asu. But he had another reason to go up to his room. He wanted to take along the stash of dollars he kept for emergencies. There might be a need for ransom money.
He parked the car down the street from the hotel. “I’ll be back in five minutes,” he said.
Asu didn’t respond. He left her, an amorphous thing in the passenger seat, looking like a forgotten bundle of clothes. When he returned, she was sitting up, looking at him with cool eyes, as if she had woken from a good night’s sleep. Jim put his bag into the backseat and handed Asu a wet facecloth. “Here,” he said, “wipe the blood off.” She put the cool cloth to her cheek and gave him a tiny smile of thanks. “And put this on.” He unwrapped a souvenir T-shirt celebrating Argentina’s victory in the soccer world cup. He had bought it for his ten-year-old nephew. It looked about the right size for Asu.
She slipped off her torn blouse and fluttered it out the car window as they entered the highway. A passing truck honked.
“Es un regalo, che!” Asu shouted, leaning out of the window, cupping her breasts, putting them on display.
“Absolutely free of charge.” She laughed a high-pitched laugh, rolled up the window and pulled on the T-shirt. “How did you guess I was a soccer fan?” she said.
They drove north on Route Nine, into the night. Asu’s fingers were playing a game of cat’s cradle. She was moving to a secret code with infinite suggestiveness, her skinny arms all wrists and elbows.
“You were going to tell me what happened to Lisa,” Jim said. He wasn’t sure he would get an answer this time.
“Santos took her to the chacra,” Asu said, speaking from the depth of her seat like an oracle. “The Saint told him to fetch her.”
Jim glanced at her sideways. “You believe in this ‘Saint’?”
“You think Santos is a charlatan, don’t you?” she said. She pronounced the word Spanish style. Tcharlatan. “You are wrong. He is a spirit man. He has second sight.”
“What’s your connection with Santos?”
“He’s my brother,” she said. “I thought you knew.” The story gelled. It was a vendetta. Maybe Don
had lied about buying the girl. Maybe he abducted Asu, and Santos kidnapped Lisa in turn, to get even.
“And how does Lisa come into this?” he asked.
Asu shrugged. “It’s my fault, I guess. Santos told me to go back to the chacra. I said no, not while Jaime Anqua is in charge there. Jaime pretends to be in touch with the saints, but he’s a fraud. My grandfather was a true saint. He slipped into your mind and tugged on your thoughts, softly, softly. You obeyed him in your sleep. When he played his ocarina, it was like a resurrection. Every fibre in you wanted to get up and follow him. Santos is like his abuelo. He has the curandero’s eye. He knows what’s ahead. If you don’t go back to Tilcara, he said to me, the Saint will make Don pay with his life.” Asu sat up. A splinter of unease caught in her throat. “I didn’t want to go back, not with Jaime Anqua calling the shots, but it’s hard to say no to Santos. His words are like bolas. They wrap around your neck, and you are caught. When I refused to go back to Tilcara, Santos took Lisa instead.”
So that was the story. Perhaps it was not too late to reverse the deal.
Asu slid closer to him. He could hear her silver earrings jangle. Her words were brushing his cheek. “Is Don very much in love with Lisa?” she asked. “Will it kill him to lose her?”
“Don is in love with you,” Jim said. “She’s just a substitute.”
Asu sighed. “But she doesn’t even look like me.”
“She has your dark hair,” he said. The parallel disturbed him. It made him want to stroke Asu’s hair, to find out whether it had the same texture. He suspected it was thicker than Lisa’s, coarser to the touch.
“Santos is using her as a decoy to bring me back,” she said. “Some curanderos use clay figures or cast iron hooks, but the human body is a better magnet.” She paused and raised her head as if she was on the lookout and could feel the magic blowing her way. “I think it’s working already. Or else I wouldn’t be here in the car with you.”
The road was deserted except for a few trucks rumbling south in the direction of Buenos Aires. The night had an air of science fiction. The headlights of the oncoming truck blazed up like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There was hardly any traffic going their way. For a while they were stuck behind a semi loaded with pipes. Someone had painted a fancy landscape on the tailgate, in pink and turquoise. The headlights of Jim’s Renault nosed ahead and illuminated a hula girl on a beach with palm trees. Above her, the parted clouds revealed a heavenly host of angels. Jim overtook the truck and pulled ahead, outrunning its high beams. They dropped back into darkness.
“Did Don treat you okay when you were living with him?” Jim asked.
Asu did not immediately answer. Her silence was of the dense kind, full of meaning. She was listening to her memories, searching her mind for things halfforgotten, paper-thin memories.
“He treated me okay, except that he was kind of clingy. He is the type who won’t leave you alone, as if you owed him something. He had a way of wrinkling his forehead and giving me a starved look. He was starved for love, I guess. He was unhappy.”
“What was he unhappy about?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “You can’t tell with Don. He is a liar. At one point he told me his wife died in an accident. He was all broken up over her death and wanted to kill himself, he said. Later he said his wife divorced him because he couldn’t get it up. He did that a lot, changing his stories until you didn’t know what to believe.”
Jim thought of Don’s shapeshifting anecdotes and of the rumours that he had padded his CV.
“Yeah,” he said. “His life comes in variants.”
“But in the end it was always the same story. Someone hurt Don, and I had to make it up to him.” “I thought he wanted respect,” Jim said. “That’s what all his stories were leading up to: He had been around. The world owed him respect. He told me he’d been in the diplomatic service.”
Asu laughed. “He never told me that.”
Jim realized they were off course. He didn’t want to talk about Don’s foibles. He wanted to talk about Tilcara, the limbo that had swallowed up Lisa. “So Don knew your grandfather in Tilcara?” he said.
Asu settled deeper into her seat, tunnelling back in time. “Don came to the chacra when I was ten,” she said, panting a little as if the memory excited or scared her. “He offered to take me with him and put me through school. Money changed hands, and the abuelo told me to go with Don. We drove off. Before we got to the main road, he stopped the car and said he had a present for me. He handed me a cardboard box tied with pink taffeta ribbons. There was a dress in the box, a fancy thing, I had never seen anything like it before, and white panties, white socks, white sandals, and a baby doll with eyes that closed when you laid her down. I remember thinking: it’s too wonderful. It’s a tease. I didn’t smile. I didn’t want Don to see how much I liked his presents. I was afraid he’d take them away again. That’s how it goes. If you like something too much, you’ll lose it, right?”
The lonely road and the sleepless night were beginning to tell on Jim. Half-way through Asu’s story, his mind started to wander, to play tricks on him. He saw Asu in the backseat of Don’s car, knees drawn up, counting her toes, refusing to raise her eyes, keeping her happiness to herself. He blinked the mirage away, tried to concentrate on the road, think of another question to ask Asu, to keep her talking, to stay awake. He looked at his watch. It was almost five in the morning.
“And then?” he said.
She cast a languid look at him, and his mind went off into a haze again. He saw Asu casting a languid look at Don, handling the fabric of her new dress gingerly, pretending she wasn’t sure she liked it. He heard Don pleading with her for a kind look, a gesture, and Asu withholding heaven. No sweet smile, no sparkling thank-you, no happy look from her still, dark eyes. He saw Don taking her hand, her limp, unresponsive hand. He saw her stripping naked wordlessly, exposing her skinny body to Don’s hot and cold looks, slipping on the dress, which turned into a soccer shirt, the soccer shirt Asu was wearing.
Jim came to, brought his mind back to the road and concentrated on the band of asphalt in front of the car. “Right?” Asu was saying, but Jim had missed her question.
“You aren’t much of a talker,” she said. “What’s eating you, che?” There was a skittish breeze in her voice. “I’m worried about Lisa,” Jim said, suddenly awake again. What was Santos’ plan? Making Lisa relive his sister’s life? Was he preparing a parallel life for her, pandering to Jaime Anqua or selling her off to the highest bidder?
“I need a smoke,” Asu said, spilling over to Jim’s side, groping for the pack of cigarettes she had spotted in his shirt pocket. “I thought you didn’t smoke. That’s what you told me at the Luna.”
“I tried to quit, but it didn’t work.” He was back to smoking a pack a day. This time his abstinence had lasted only three weeks. It was hopeless. Argentines were a nation of smokers. There was no getting away from the smell and sight of tobacco.
Asu was trailing her fingers over his chest, stroking him in her feline, half-domesticated way. She was making a play for him. Unknown fibres were tingling under the touch of her fingers, evoking a tactile memory of Lisa. Was that part of Santos’ parallel life plan? Jim sensed a remote power, a gossamer net of connections spreading over the highway, growing weblike over himself and Asu, reeling them in, bringing them closer to Tilcara.
“You haven’t got any dope on you?” Asu said. “I guess not. I’ll get some when we stop for gas. Maybe that’s what you need. You’re too uptight, you know.”
She lit up a cigarette and sucked in the smoke. “Are you getting it on with Lisa?” she said. “What’s she like?”
“You’ve seen her,” Jim said.
Asu leaned back, marching her feet up on the dashboard and sliding her naked toes along the windshield. “What’s she like in bed, I mean.”
Jim dodged her question. He didn’t want to feed Asu any more information. He was afraid she would absorb the description and turn into a phantom Lisa. He was afraid of falling under Santos’ long distance spell and losing out on the real Lisa.
“Don said she reminded him of you,” he said.
“You know, I miss Don,” Asu said. Jim was relieved they were off the Lisa topic. Or was he mistaken, and was that Lisa speaking? Was Lisa at this very moment looking at the diamond ring on her finger and saying: I miss Don?
“Don was okay, really,” Asu said. “He just talked a lot. Otherwise he was a softie. I didn’t appreciate it at the time. He was easy to hold off. It was a game to see how far I would let him go. Everybody plays games, but most of the men I’ve been with want to be in control. Sometimes they let you win. More often they cash in the chips themselves. No, Don was okay. What got to me were his eyes. He never let me out of his sight. If he wasn’t looking at me straight, he was watching me out of the corner of his eyes. He didn’t ask me for anything kinky. A little hugging was good enough for him. I bet he got off on me just by looking.”
Could the surveillance of eyes stifle ambition? Could dirty looks corrupt and drive a girl to prostitution or did Asu have a natural calling to sabotage herself ? Was there a self-destructive germ that Don’s eyes brought to fruition?
“Don claimed he adopted you,” Jim said. “Or was that just a sexual fantasy of his?”
Asu laughed. “Would it turn you on if I said Daddy molested me?” Her eyes intruded on his mind, bored into him, searching for a cue to his desires. She was willing to put on a sketch of imaginary lust if reality was too dull for him.
“That’s not why I asked,” Jim said. He had asked on Lisa’s behalf. He was afraid Santos would make her suffer whatever Asu had suffered at Don’s hands. Perhaps Jaime Anqua had his hands on Lisa already.
“If it feels good, is it still molesting?” Asu said, looking thoughtfully into the smoke curling off her cigarette. “I can’t remember. Was it good or bad? Did I love or hate Don? What did I know? I got my knowledge out of fotonovelas. Don told me to call him daddy. So I did.” She dragged violently on her cigarette as if she had an aching passion in her lungs. “I guess he meant it. He wanted to be my father.”
Asu slipped back into the groove of her story. “So he took me to Catamarca. That’s where he was living at the time. He introduced me to his housekeeper. She said nothing. Just smirked and put her hands behind her back, afraid of touching me, a filthy little thing. Don told her I was the daughter of a friend. I’d be living with him during the school year. He made it sound respectable, but she kept smirking.”
Asu lit another cigarette and breathed throatcatching fumes Jim’s way. “The abuelo came to visit me once, not long after I left Tilcara,” she said. “I was doing schoolwork in my room. I looked up, and there he was standing beside my desk, as if he had come through the wall, but before he could say anything, the housekeeper was at the door. ‘Get out of here,’ she said to him. ‘I am her abuelo,’ he said. ‘You have no business here,’ she said. “Get out. Afuera!’ She shooed him out like a stray dog. I was ashamed of the way he left, without a word. He should have cursed her. When Don came home, the housekeeper told him about my grandfather’s visit. ‘Better make sure nothing’s gone missing,’ Don said, as if my grandfather was a thief. I waited for the abuelo to take revenge, but nothing happened to the housekeeper or to Don, and I started to have doubts about his power. I should have been more patient.”
WHEN LISA WOKE UP, IT was dawn. Grey light was filtering through the string curtain. A car engine sputtered into action. Lisa got up and went to the door. The fire in the hills had burned itself out. The hillside was blackened and bare. In the yard, the women had lit a cooking fire in the pachamanca stove and were busy making flatbread. Jaime was sitting at the trestle table, smoking a cigarette. His eyes were following Santos’ car bouncing over the dirt track, leaving a plume of dust in its wake.
“Where’s he going?” Lisa asked, pointing after the Fiat.
“To find work,” Jaime said.
“But I need a ride back to Jujuy.”
“Si, si,” he said. He ground the butt of the cigarette into the dirt and patted Lisa’s arm, smiling: it will all come out alright, just you wait and see. But the future was like the dirt road, meandering out of sight.
Fine white ash was drifting over the bare hills. Lisa wanted to escape like a wisp of smoke, but Tilcara had turned into an open-air prison. She watched her captors going about their work. The women had gone to unload what was left of the firewood. They formed a line to the storage shed, tossing the logs in a rhythmical relay under the old man’s supervision. They were oblivious to Lisa. No need to guard her. There was nowhere to go.
“You want to visit the grave of the Saint?” Jaime said. “My son will take you. Simon. He is coming.”
“Alright,” Lisa said, “but I have to be back in Jujuy tonight.”
“What do you want in Jujuy?”
“I have to rejoin the group I’m with,” Lisa said. His face remained blank.
“My friends are waiting there,” she said.
He stretched out his hand. “Come here,” he said, speaking soft Quechua spells: dear child, in my arms you will find eternal peace.
Lisa shook her head, resisting bondage.
He withdrew his hand, shrugged his shoulders and walked away, leaving her at the table.
After breakfast, Lisa watched the women settling down to their daily chores, sitting cross-legged in front of their looms, weaving blankets, interlacing brown and charcoal grey wool. Their hands passed the shuttle through the warp with practised speed. Mirella glanced in Lisa’s direction without stopping her work. She smiled meekly and assured her in broken Spanish that Simon would come soon, very soon, cada momento.
