“Looks like tits,” Franca said.
And he had busted up laughing, and she had, too, the kind of ridiculous, necessary laughter that only siblings shared. They laughed until their stomachs hurt, and when they stopped, Engales had felt terrified. He remembered thinking, in that moment, that this would be the only time he ever laughed. That the laughter was just a small break in more endless aching, which was almost worse than having never felt relief.
In order to make enough money to afford to stay in their parents’ house, both Franca and Raul had to take jobs. Raul painted houses for rich people — mostly military families — in Palermo and Recoleta; Franca worked at the bakery, which she would later take over. They created necessary habits: taking baths together — with their backs toward each other — so as to have enough warm water; lighting candles instead of turning on lights, telling each other stories alternately, so the other could fall asleep. They existed this way — parentless, but together — for eight long years, before Pascal Morales came around and cracked their delicate balance right down the middle.
Pascal had been selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door, and when he’d knocked on theirs and seen Franca, he’d told her she was more beautiful than the woman on the cover of the magazines he was carrying, who happened to be Brigitte Bardot. “Nobody’s more beautiful than Brigitte Bardot,” Franca had said in her shy way, but Pascal had already sold her — on both the compliment and the subscription — and she went out to dinner with him that very night.
“You bought a fucking magazine subscription from that asshole?” Engales yelled at her when she got home from the date.
“He’s not so bad,” Franca had said. “He took me to that new place, Tia Andino. Raul, he can afford Tia Andino!”
“Well, we cannot afford magazine subscriptions!” Raul yelled.
“But we could if he helped us!” Franca pleaded. “What if he could take care of us?”
Raul just looked at her and shook his head. What she was really saying was that he, Engales, could not take care of them. That he was not enough. What hurt the most is that he knew he wasn’t. That he wasn’t a strong enough man to take care of his own sister, or even himself.
Quickly, though, he saw that Pascal was not up for the task, either. The man had a sneaky, weaselly quality to him, and something told Engales that if the house were to suddenly catch fire, Pascal would sprint out the door to save himself without a thought cast back to Franca. Engales performed a series of miniature tests — break the hinge on the back door and see if Pascal will even try to fix it (he didn’t); voice a disgustingly conservative political opinion (something pro-Perón, who had essentially turned into a fascist) over dinner to see if Pascal would object (he didn’t) — which told him that Pascal was not only unworthy of dating his sister but unworthy of setting foot in their house at all.
“He’s a pansy, Franca,” he tried to tell his sister, after they’d been dating a few months (already much too long, in Engales’s opinion). “A conservative pansy. He’s not for you!”
“It’s too bad you feel that way,” said Franca. “Because I’ve asked him to move in.”
In the hottest part of January in 1973, Pascal brought over a truckload of furniture that, in its attempt to look modern, only appeared hideously cheap and clashed in an upsetting way with their mother’s antique glass tables and ornate, beautiful couch cushions. He installed a giant brown square of a chair in the living room and installed himself atop it, a spot which he would come to think he owned, and where he would sit for long, seemingly endless stretches, watching the most conservative of the news stations, his knotty feet propped up on their mother’s glass table as if it were not a precious memento of their dead parents but a disposable ottoman, built just for him and his bony heels.
Pascal’s presence drove Engales to practically live at El Federal, the bar around the corner, where he could go to drink and be silent and where he didn’t have to smell Morales’s thick breath or hear Morales’s farting in the night or see Morales’s hair in the drain of the tub. All of the habits with his sister were interrupted — Pascal paid to have the lights turned back on; he slept in the bed with Franca, and Raul slept back in his childhood bedroom, in his old, creaky twin bed. There was scarcely enough hot water for the three of them, and Engales’s baths were almost always freezing. The thought of his sister sleeping with Pascal nearly drove him mad, and this he blamed on her.
“He’s not going to save you,” he shouted at her one night when they had both been unable to sleep, and had wandered, as they had done in their youth, to the dark kitchen. “He’s not going to bring back Mom and Dad!”
He had made Franca cry that night, as he would many times before he left.
“You have to let me live my life, Raul,” she said. “You’re going to leave one day and then where will I be? I need someone.”
“Well, he’s not the right someone!” he yelled at her.
She had clamped her hot hand on his shoulder, given him the look she gave that meant don’t.
Buenos Aires, for Raul Engales, was becoming a series of don’ts, he saw then. Don’t come between your sister and her sleazy new boyfriend. Don’t feel comfortable or welcome in your own house. Don’t sleep with women who hang out too late at El Federal, looking to escape their own husbands (their husbands will find you, chase you down Calle Defensa, and force you to hide in the dark behind the Dumpster). Don’t gain any recognition for your paintings, which are at this point only a pathetic hobby, not worth anyone’s time (not that anyone cared about art right now in Buenos Aires, where things were becoming too fucked up to care about such frivolous endeavors). And don’t, when your sister tells you she has married Pascal Morales at the San Pedro Gonzáles Telmo church yesterday morning, try for one more second to disguise your abhorrence of him, of them, because Pascal Morales is here to stay, in this enormous old house your parents saddled you with, that even with its four bedrooms is not big enough for three.
Do pull your American passport from your father’s old writing desk, run your palm over its gold emboss, and remember your father saying, It’s a city of pure poetry, I’m telling you, kids.
You are ready for poetry. You are through with the suffocating text that has become your life in this old house.
In the end Franca had begged him not to go. In the earliest part of the morning, on Saturday, June 29, of 1974, just two days before Perón’s death would rock the country and one day before Raul turned twenty-three, as he walked away from the house with his backpack, he heard Franca yell from their front stoop: Don’t leave, Raul! Please don’t leave! He could not look back at her. If he looked back he would never be able to look forward. He would see her holding her silly cake, which she had baked for his birthday in one final plea to make him stay, in her old blue coat that used to be their mother’s. He was terrified to leave her: the only person who cared about him and the only home he’d ever known. He did.
The door to the blue room opened and Engales, startled, knocked over his champagne glass. Thankfully it was empty, or he would have spilled all over Broken Music Composition, 1979. At the door was a woman — not beautiful, but important-looking — sporting a black silk dress and a fountain of graying black hair.