The Foreign Girls. Sergio Olguin
them come in, only becoming aware of them when one of them asked, in Spanish with inflections of German or Russian or something similar, “Good afternoon, where can we get some rope?”
You could tell straight away that they were foreign, especially the blonde, who had a Nordic look and was wearing military-style trousers with lots of pockets, a black vest and lace-up boots. The other one could have passed for Argentine with her slightly curly black hair, bone-coloured shorts, flat strappy sandals and a loose T-shirt with some writing on it that Verónica couldn’t make out.
The question sounded absurd. What did two foreign girls want with a length of rope? She stared at them with the same expression as the barman.
“It’s for a guitar,” the blonde girl clarified.
The barman told them that they would have to go to the city. He looked in a telephone directory for the address of a specialist shop and mentioned that it was about to close. The dark-haired girl asked if they could call a taxi from the bar. Verónica listened to the whole exchange and thought nothing of offering to take them herself.
Frida and Petra had come into her life a few seconds earlier, when Frida first spoke. Now she was the one entering 35into the destiny of the Norwegian and Italian girls. They looked at each other and all three felt a connection. They exchanged smiles, never suspecting that they were already moving towards a tragedy. Days later, Verónica would keep revisiting, tirelessly, each moment they had spent together, and would alight on various things that she wished she could change, but she would never regret speaking to them in that lost wayside bar.
By the time they arrived in San Miguel de Tucumán some minutes later, they had already told each other a bit about themselves. Frida was a sociologist with a doctorate titled “Migrations and Social Change in the Suburbs of Buenos Aires between 1950 and 1990”. Her studies had brought her to Argentina on various occasions. Petra was a music teacher and an amateur singer-songwriter. Petra and Frida had first met in Córdoba two years previously. At that time Petra was living in San Marcos Sierra and about to separate from her Córdoban boyfriend. Frida had moved to Buenos Aires to work on the final part of her thesis. Petra made several trips to the capital to visit Frida, who returned to Oslo a few months afterwards. Petra went to visit her there. Together they had travelled through the Norwegian fjords, then Sweden and Denmark. They had visited other parts of the European continent too. But Petra didn’t want to stay there. Her new corner of the world was Córdoba: “I’m an orphan, I have no siblings, no aunts or uncles. And the mountains of Córdoba remind me of Piedmont, which is where my paternal grandparents were from. I feel at home in the San Marcos Sierra.”
While travelling through the Norwegian fjords, Frida and Petra had promised each other to visit the ruins of the Incan Empire. They would start in the north of Argentina, travel through Bolivia and then on to Peru. They were at the start of that adventure now.36
Verónica briefly described her work and home life. When the other two pressed her on her love life, she told them only that she had been dating a married man and that it was over now.
“Good thing too. Married men are the worst.”
She didn’t tell them that Lucio had been killed or about the circumstances of his death. Nor any of what she had been through at the end of the previous year. Why would they want to know? When it came down to it, Verónica was exactly as she must have appeared to them: a friendly girl.
They arrived at the music shop just before it closed, then decided to get something to eat. A colleague of Verónica’s from the magazine had recommended a wine bar where they served the best Tucumanian empanadas and tamales to die for. The GPS said it wasn’t far, so they headed for Lo de Raúl, a traditional bar full of families. That night there was no show. From the loudspeakers came the voice of folk legend Atahualpa Yupanqui:
I went to Taco-Yaco
To buy a Spanish steed
And I came back with a little bay
A snoring, skinny low breed
They ordered empanadas, tamales, humita and red wine. Deciding against the house wine, they asked for a bottle of Finca Las Moras. Over coffee they polished off a second bottle.
Petra told them how she had broken up with her Argentinian boyfriend, also a music teacher, prompting Frida to observe, as though she were writing a sociology paper about the local male, “All Argentine men are liars. I don’t know a single man in this country who hasn’t lied to his wife at least once.”37
“Not to sound overly patriotic or anything, but I don’t think lying is exclusive to Argentinians.”
“Or to men,” Petra added.
“Sorry, girls, no. I’ve met men from all over and none of them is like the Argentine male. He reels you in, he gives you a lovely present, all beautifully wrapped and with a ribbon on top. And inside is a big fat lie. Greek mythology talks about the sirens. In this country they should talk about the Argentine male: deceptive, charming – I won’t deny it – but incapable of honesty. Even the Uruguayans are better!”
“Hey, that’s going too far.”
Verónica wanted to know if her knowledge was based on some specific romantic disappointment.
“Well, obviously I went out with some Argentinians. A European woman on her own in Argentina is going to end up in the bed of a local male at some point. They talk to you, they whisper sweet nothings. They work so hard to seduce you, as though their lives depend on it.”
“They put their backs into it.”
“Their backs?”
“They make an effort.”
“Right – they put their backs into it. And you fall for it like a sailor on the Aegean in Homeric Greece. You end up in their bed. And it takes a while for you to realize that they aren’t men, they’re more like mermen.”
“What, fish?”
“No, I mean like sirens. A lot of singing, no substance.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Just look around the table: you used to go out with a married man. Petra got cheated on by her little music maker. I’ve had men tell me they’d move to Norway for me.”
“And why not?”38
“Nobody in their right mind wants to go and live in Norway! It’s all talk. They think they’re Borges. But at least Borges really did have a passion for Nordic countries.”
The bar had a patio with no tables, which smokers could use without having to go out into the street. Petra and Verónica went there for a cigarette and Frida accompanied them so as not to wait alone inside. It was a moonless night, quite cold. There were vines on a trellis above the patio from which a few bunches of grapes still hung. The attenuated sound of music and chatter reached them from inside the bar. The women smoked in silence and Frida looked around at the trees and the vines as though searching for something.
“I always feel that nature’s hiding something.”
“Men lie, nature hides. Nothing’s safe.”
“No, no. I mean that it’s hiding something supernatural. I’m an animist. I believe that there are spirits in the branches, in those vine leaves. We’re surrounded by ethereal beings.”
“Ah, la piccola Frida and her childhood full of Viking legends,” said Petra, going over to her friend and smoothing her hair as though they were mother and daughter.
Frida let her do it, like a good girl, then moved her hand to Petra’s face and stroked her cheek. A brief but unmistakable gesture. It was dark and Verónica couldn’t see how they were looking at each other, but she intuited there was something more than friendship between the two women.
Back at the table, they