Chapter 1. ACRYLIC & GLASS
A fly caught in the web, while the spider, replete from its last meal, takes a while to reach him, can have a pretty good time of it if he relaxes while he waits. The threads are an almost intangible gossamer: they accompany the movements of his body without hampering it — as long as they aren’t too violent. It’s like stretching out in a hammock on holiday, with nothing to do but swing in the breeze and gaze at the blue of the sky through the cracks of your eyes. Yeah, you bet, I could lie here like this my whole life. And if I don’t squirm too much, I can’t even feel the threads, they’re so fine, it’s like floating on my back in the air. Yes, they only become real when I try to wriggle free.
I hadn’t been able to get the image of the fly out of my head all morning; it had been haunting me for hours as I rolled in the bedclothes, which somehow always dragged me back at the last; and whenever I was on the brink of persuading myself there was nothing to worry about, that it was just another job interview, the image of the fly would alight on my brain again.
Maybe it was the time I got the message — eleven at night — or the fact that, rather than summoning me by phone or sending me an e-mail, they came all the way to my apartment and rang the bell — not the entryphone down on the street, but my actual doorbell. The piece of work I opened the door to was broad-shouldered and muscled, looking not unlike a horse’s rear end in a two-piece, complete with cropped, greying hair, bristling moustache, mirrorshades (despite the ungodliness of the hour) and Italian shoes, one toe of which he discreetly jammed in the door to stop me slamming it in his face. A spook for sure, but too well-groomed to be Intelligence or the Army; he looked more like one of the many who had been privatised in recent years. He handed me an open envelope and I pulled out a card: Sr Fausto Tamerlán requests the pleasure of your company at 10.00 a.m., 1st June 1992, at his offices in the Golden Tower, Tamerlán & Sons, Puerto Madero. It looked like a wedding invitation.
‘Be there,’ grunted the sharp-suited thug when I looked at him inquisitively. ‘Or I’ll have to come and fetch you.’
The telephone had been ringing all morning, a secretary’s voice vying with the buzzing of the fly in my sleep-addled brain, leaving messages on the answering machine every fifteen minutes from ten o’clock sharp — urgent at first, then imploring, until she broke off in mid-entreaty and was replaced by a familiar voice: ‘Fifteen minutes,’ was all it said before putting the receiver down. Before they were up, I was combed and dressed and navigating the streets on the 22 bus, whose chrome-plated handrails felt like they were wrapped in sticky threads, as if a candyfloss seller had just disembarked, and for a moment I wondered if I wasn’t still in bed dreaming of the spider-web.
Four blocks before my stop I got a seat, which I grabbed to be rid of those tacky rails, and then, through the green glass of the closed window, they hove into view: the twin towers of Tamerlán & Sons, cutting through the sky above the captive water of the docks and the empty, red-brick storehouses and the defeated cranes. I’d seen them countless times, but it was always like the first: they were less unreal in memory than face to face, as if only the imagination could conceive of the expanse of muddy waters that is the River Plate crystallising into those two immaculate ice palaces. For a city that hasn’t managed to raise itself from the oppressive horizontality of pampas and river in over four hundred years an elevation of any kind takes on a faintly sacred character, shielding its inhabitants from the crushing gravity of the two interminable plains and the vast sky that bears down on them; and I was now about to become one of the few mortals ever to enjoy the privilege of seeing the famed towers from the inside.
I got off at the entrance to Puerto Madero and set off across the long esplanade leading up to them. From a distance the profusion of winter suns reflected in their mirrored panes confused them into a single block, a monolithic structure that, instead of a building erected by men, looked at times like a newborn mountain, unblemished by erosion, forced through the tender, green skin of the pampas by the subterranean agonies of some colossal cataclysm. But as I drew closer, the uniform summit of ice divided into two identical needles: two razors lined up blade-to-blade, leaving between them an intolerably narrow space through which the rebounding sunlight burst with blinding, almost supernatural violence. They were so perfectly alike it was easy to imagine they were a single building leaning against a gigantic mirror: a golden mirror in which the silver tower was reflected gold, a silver mirror making the golden tower’s silvered sister.
This was nothing to what I found inside. There were mirrors on the walls, mirrors on the ceiling, mirrors on the floor, mirrors on the mirrors — although ‘on’, strictly speaking, is inaccurate: there were no walls or ceilings or floors other than mirrors; there was nothing but mirrors, and I floated in their midst as if the law of gravity and the points of the compass had all of a sudden been overruled. I’d barely ventured a few steps before I was turned into some proliferating, tangled polyp, a Hindu god with ten legs, a hundred arms and a planetary system of heads. If I looked down, the black stone floor, polished to the point of dementia, wanted to swallow me in an unfathomable lake; if up, the ceiling burned with white fire, heightening rather than alleviating the gloom of the lake, one spotlight multiplying the next in a blossoming of reflections that stopped me dead in my tracks. (There is something appalling about a black mirror: your reflection stares back from an impossible distance, the other side of death.) Enveloped in a whirlwind of motion, like the only one moving in slow-mo through a film on fast-forward, I crossed the paths of men and women scooting left and right like tracer bullets, in and out of invisible doors, swiftly converging on their reflected forms and at the last moment, instead of shattering, melting into them and vanishing. They performed complex greeting rituals when they met, circling around each other in complicated dance patterns like social insects, some taking off the dark glasses most of them wore and waving them in the air as they spoke. There seemed to be hundreds of them, although it was difficult to decide if there were so many people or simply the image of a few, repeated ad infinitum in the deceptive panes. One person alone stood motionless, staring in my direction through mirrorshades.
‘Got your message,’ I said in a friendly tone.
‘So where have you been?’
‘Overslept,’ I answered pulling a sleepy face, even though the excuse rarely worked after midday.
‘Sr Tamerlán is very strict in matters of punctuality,’ he informed me. ‘He won’t stand for his employees being late.’
‘I’m not his employee,’ I reminded him.
‘But I am,’ he retorted, and without saying another word he began to walk towards the lifts, while I trotted after him, the familiar taste of slippers in my mouth again. By the time I caught up with him, he was inserting a card between two panels, one of which slid aside to reveal a lift made entirely out of glass. ‘Only for people with direct access to Sr Tamerlán,’ he muttered, leaving me barely a chink to squeeze through. ‘A lot of them wait a lifetime and never get to use it,’ he added, burdening me with a vague and, in my view, rather unfair sense of guilt for the thirty floors of our ascent.
On our way up, one stratum of the glass beehive after another passed before my eyes, and I looked on in astonishment at how the tower began to organise itself as the demented confusion of the mirrors gave way to the geometric order of translucent glass. I suddenly understood why: the mirrors were all one way, the mirrored ceiling of each level becoming the transparent floor of the one above, whereby the tower seemed to grow as floor after floor unfolded beneath our feet. At the speed I was going it was difficult to grasp the general layout, the organising idea: it must have been something very simple to have produced such complexity.