Further along, the tripe sellers clean tripe on their tin counters, or hang immense red livers on hooks.
Ten monotonous cries are continuously repeated:
‘Fresh pejerrey… it’s fresh, lady.’
Another voice:
‘Here… the good stuff’s here. Come and see.’
Pieces of ice covered in red sawdust melt slowly in the shade over the backs of boxed fish.
When I went in, I would ask at the first stalclass="underline"
‘Where’s The Crip?’
Hands on hips, dirty aprons billowing over their stomachs, the vendors would shout out in their nasal or shrill voices:
‘Crip! Come on, Crip!’ And because they liked him, they laughed richly as they called his name, and The Crip, recognising me at a distance, would walk slowly in order to enjoy his popularity, limping slightly as he came. When he saw a maid he knew standing by one of the stalls he would touch the brim of his hat to her with the tip of his riding crop.
He paused to chat and smiled as he talked, showing his twisted teeth in his perennial roguish smile; then he would move on, winking slantwise at the butcher boys who were making obscene gestures at him.
‘Crip… che, Crip… over’ere,’ they called from the other side.
The layabout would turn his angular face to one side, tell us to wait, and elbow his way through the women who crowded in front of the stalls, and the females who did not recognise him, the grumbling avaricious old women and the bilious and greedy young women and the pretentious and lymphatic little girls all looked with bitter suspicion, with a disgust that they made small effort to disguise, at this triangular, sun-reddened, brazen face.
He was an idle fellow who liked to fondle the backsides of the huddled-together women.
‘Crip… Over’ere, Crip’
The Crip was popular. Also, like all historical figures, he liked having friends, saying hello to his female neighbours, bathing in that atmosphere of carnival and crudeness that is immediately established between a low-class tradesman and a greasy housewife.
When he talked about dirty things, his red face would shine as if it had been freshly larded, and the circle of tripe sellers, vegetable sellers and egg sellers would revel in the dirt with which this scoundrel’s jokes spattered them.
They called him:
‘Crip… Over’ere, Crip.’ And the burly butchers, the robust children of Neapolitans, all the bearded dirty folk who earn their living in an impoverished traffic in poor goods, all the riffraff, people both thin and fat, corrupt and merely greedy, the fishmongers and the vegetable sellers, the butchers and the buttermen, all of the grasping scum-of-the-earth would rejoice in The Crip’s tomfooleries, in The Crip’s shamelessness, and The Olympian Crip, insolent and gossipy, the market’s mascot, would walk with his hips swaying along the passage strewn with greens and stems and orange-peel, his favourite obscene song on his lips:
And it’s great to get some for free.
He was a worthy scoundrel. He had joined the noble profession of cart attendant ever since the day when he had been lamed by a horse. He always wore the same uniform, that is, green flannel trousers and a jacket that looked like a bullfighter’s.
The part of his neck that was left uncovered by the jacket collar he adorned with a red handkerchief. A greasy wide-brimmed hat shaded his forehead and instead of boots he wore straw-soled shoes with violet canvas uppers decorated with pink arabesques.
He would hobble from one end to the other of the row of carts with his riding crop, which was permanently in his hand, calming the horses that bit each other ferociously for amusement.
The Crip was a cart attendant, but he was also a thief, a pimp by vocation and a gambler by habit. All in all he was a particularly friendly rogue, who would gladly do you any favour or play any trick on you.
He said that he had trained to be a jockey, and had been lamed in his leg because his comrades had enviously caused his horse to shy, but I don’t believe he had ever got beyond shovelling shit in a stable.
He did, it is true, know more names and qualities of horses than a churchgoer knows about martyrs. His memory was an Almanach de Gotha of equine nobility. If he spoke about minutes and seconds you would imagine that you were hearing an astronomer, and when he spoke about himself and the loss that the country had suffered in losing a jockey such as him, then you would be drawn close to tears.
‘What an idler!’
If I went to see him, then he would leave off talking to the women of his stable and, taking me by the arm would start off by saying:
‘Give me a gasper, eh…’ and we would walk up to the line of carts, get up into the one that had the best canopy and sit down for a long chat.
He’d say:
‘Hey, I really got one over on Salomon the Turk. He forgot a leg of lamb in his cart, so I called Little Guy’ — one of his protégés — ‘and said to him: “Get this up to the room, chop-chop”.’
He’d say:
‘The other day an old woman showed up. She wanted to move some stuff, nothing to it… And I didn’t have nothing, nothing at all… It’ll be a peso, I say to her and grab the fishmonger’s cart. Oh, I let the horse have it! When I got back it was nine fifteen and the nag was sweating so much I got frightened. I tied her up and dried her off, but the spic must have realised something because yesterday and today he’s come a bunch of times to see if the cart was there. Next time I’ll have to use the tripe-woman’s horse.’ When he saw my smile, he added:
‘You’ve got to earn a living, che, think about it: ten pesos for the room, Sunday I put a three-way down on His Majesty, Vasquito and Blessed… and His Majesty let me down royally.’ But just then he saw two tramps who were sneaking round the back of a cart at the end of the row, and he shouted after them at the top of his voice:
‘Hey, motherfuckers, what the fuck you doing over there?’ And brandishing the riding crop above his head he ran to the cart. After checking the harnesses carefully he came back grumbling:
‘I’m really fixed up if they steal a backboard or some reins.’
On rainy days I was accustomed to spend mornings with him.
Under a cart’s cover, The Crip would improvise amazing armchairs out of bags and boxes. You could tell where he was because clouds of smoke would come out of the arc of the cart’s hood. For fun, The Crip would hold the handle of his crop as if it were a guitar, half-close his eyes, suck the cigarette with vigour and with a horrible voice that was sometimes swollen with anger and at others painfully lusty, he would sing:
I’ve got an extra bedroom, mack,
where it’s always time for fun
and that I rented out to her
and that I rented out to her
so she could grind for herself.
With his hat over one ear, the cigarette burning right under his nostrils, and his shirt half open to his suntanned chest, The Crip really looked the part of a thief, and sometimes he’d say to me:
‘Ain’t it the case, Blondy, that I look just like a finger-man?’
Or else he would tell me in a low voice, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, stories from the slum where he was brought up, his childhood in Caballito.
They were memories of assaults and rapes, daylight robbery, and the names of Garlic Head, the Englishman and the two Arévalo brothers were always cropping up in his stories.
The Crip would say with melancholy:
‘Yes, I remember! I was just a kid. They were always on the corner of Méndez de Andés and Bella Vista, leaning on the window of this Spaniard’s grocery shop. He wasn’t what you’d call a brain, this spic. His wife slept around and he had two daughters on the game. Yes, I remember! They were always there, taking the sun and making fun of the guys as came past. Some farmhands from the sticks would come past and one of the Arévalos would say: “Who ate all the pies?” And then his brother would say: “One of these guys.” Yes, they were really funny! And if you got at all pissed off, they’d let you have it. I remember. It was one o’clock in the morning. This Turk comes along. I was with a girl in this dive some French guy owned just across from the bar. It all happened at once, like. This Turkish guy’s hat flies into the middle of the street, he tries to pull out his gun, and then bam! The Englishman knocks him down with one punch. Arévalo gets his bag and Garlic Head gets the wallet. When the fuzz turned up, there was just the hat and the Turk, who was crying with his nose smeared across his face. The older Arévalo was the worst. He was tall, dark and blind in one eye. He had some dead people to his name. The last one he got was a corporal. There was a warrant out for him already. They got him one night along with lots of other guys in the pimping business in a café that there used to be in San Eduardo. They searched him and he didn’t have any weapons on him. A corporal puts the cuffs on him and leads him off. Before they got to Bogotá Street, in the darkness, Arévalo whips out a flick-knife that he’s got hidden under his shirt, and wrapped up in tissue paper, and he sticks it in this guy’s heart right up to the handle. The corporal falls down dead and Arévalo beats it; he went to hide in his sister’s house, she took in ironing, but they got him the next day. They say he died of consumption, caused by being beaten so much with the “rubber”.’