Excerpt:

The Alleyways of the South

Nothing would please me more than a cup of café con leche after the siesta. That afternoon aroma of over-roasted coffee, sugar scorched black so it burned going down, yet I drank it like it was the sweetest thing on earth. The little sachet coffee, too poor for the rich kids up the hill, too posh for the ones down below. It brought me nothing but bad karma when I carried it to school: some laughed, others ran from me. Better not to mention snacks or belongings at all; better to just meet up and drift through the backstreets, letting the afternoon give us whatever it had in store. Nothing matched the energy of that maternal brew—one sip equal to a kiss, equal to an embrace—even long after she was gone and no one was left to make it. It smelled of old summers, though I was still young; it’s just that so many years have already slipped by. Its color was the color my eyes take on in the dark, because in daylight they shift and women tell me they’re like honey and galaxies. I know nothing about eyes, so maybe they’re right and a layabout like me is wrong. But all of that belonged to a time before; few of us ever know exactly what that “before” is before, yet there’s always a before.

I’ll try to stick to what matters, so I’ll start with my old man.

He was already an old fat man in his forties who sat in the yard watching the grass grow and cursing every time a ball smacked the fence. Little by little the fence leaned farther into our side; I understood why it pissed him off, never why he acted like a decrepit. He never punctured a ball, never grabbed a kid by the collar, but the moment anything crossed the invisible line between family and the outside world he’d pick it up and rub it slowly across his balls, in broad daylight, with one of the kids’ fathers usually within earshot.

His surname was Castellano, same as mine. He’d been raised among windswept hills waiting for a miracle to calm the frozen gusts of his Patagonia. The merciless south forged a man of iron and sentenced him to bitterness. On the ranch he was just another mule, lost who-knows-how-many siblings, and learned to hate his mother in a way no son ever should. Fired by patriotism and the dream of getting ahead, he climbed the latitudes until he reached the city. He worked three jobs a day and never learned what rest was. Work was his only synonym for life. After conquering the map northward, he tried to conquer the skyscrapers, but agonized Buenos Aires pushed him out to the suburbs. That’s how he ended up in a studio flat in one of those municipalities that, when named, make people look away because everyone pictures guns tucked into waistbands.

He built his life on cheap wine and relentless work, but what matters to this story is his car.

The Torino had four doors. None of that flashy coupé nonsense the old guys liked back then. He loved that it was reinforced, imposing—anyone thinking of ramming it would think twice. No chassis on earth could withstand a collision with that leviathan of steel and rubber.

It used to be white before it was blue, though I barely remember it that way. He painted it himself one weekend, without warning anyone. I think it was shortly after he turned forty. More a reasoned guess than a clear memory, because that’s when he truly started getting old. As if the cold from the cradle that had chased him all those years had finally caught up. So his car—half talisman, half extension of himself—had to match the color of his soul. Calling that shade “navy blue” is polite understatement. The honest name would be the color of the ocean floor where whales no longer sing.

By sixteen I was already driving it. I hadn’t even finished high school, but around the neighborhood I felt untouchable. Every other night we’d pile in—half-stoned, laughing our asses off—tearing through the streets earning ourselves a bad reputation. Picking up at least one girl per outing, I felt like the king of the pack. People said about me what they say about anyone with a name: that one day they’d catch me in an alley and finish me. I didn’t care; those things were said about everyone. Any little stupidity could set some idiot off, but ten minutes later the same guy would be opening a beer beside you, unable to remember your face.

Between Castellanos we spoke without words. One frown from my mother was enough for me to confess I’d taken the money off the table or still hadn’t brought in the washing. It’s almost all I remember about her. I suspect it was her worn-out city toughness that let her get along with the old man.

We lived in a housing block the color of rotten grass and funeral gray, like all the others. Whether that was the good life or not depended on who you asked. For some it was the necessary step between scraping by and the dreamed-of stability. For others those buildings were rock bottom, the final pit you fall into after every floor beneath you has given way.

I almost never asked Dad’s permission to go out. Once—the very first time—was enough for him to know I’d reached that age. I still don’t know why I bothered that particular night. I often wonder if anything would have been different, but deep down I think nothing would have changed.

It still gives me chills to remember the old man’s words. He was sunk in a threadbare armchair someone had dumped on the street years before; it might once have been brown, now the color of rotting fruit. He was reading the Official Gazette as if lost in it—who knows what a man like him cared about executive decrees. Without lifting his eyes, he rasped a refusal. He said that night was dangerous. His exact words: the night was brewing a gale, and I wouldn’t want to be near the sea if it broke. Then he gave me an inquisitor’s stare. I nodded, pretending obedience, because the strangeness of the moment wasn’t enough to overcome my insolence.

His warning meant nothing to me. Going down the stairs was as mechanical as an old clock. Those buildings never had elevators; the only ones I knew were in hospitals. The great Torino waited below.

The houses in that zone were low. The neighborhood was a geometric rehearsal of irregular shapes built from naked brick. Inside, walls stayed unplastered; people knocked them down to join flats for extended families. Roofs were corrugated iron, leftovers turned into fences. If the city proper was gray with soot and cobblestones, these lots were brick-red and cheap chrome. Asphalt didn’t reach the dirt streets. Good thing it hadn’t rained that week; even the Torino’s fat tires would have stayed glued in mud. The whole area looked like trench warfare minus the rules.

I reached the bodegón almost without noticing the drive. It sat between 700 and 200 streets; you knew you were in deep when the streets stopped being named after national heroes. I’d been out of the car barely a minute when some kid slipped inside.

I’m afraid to admit that from here there was no turning back. Damn the Greeks and their fatalism; their taste for doom splashes onto me. Cocky as ever, I’d stayed leaning on the hood. I heard the eternal struggle of the door finally shutting. I saw him glide between the seats with eerie ease and felt him like a vulture circling carrion from above. The idiot thought the Torino was already dead meat, but we weren’t dead yet. Seeing him in there drove me insane; I nearly smashed the windows with fists and curses. The son of a bitch, soon as he saw me, pulled a gun and aimed from the comfort of the driver’s seat.

I ran crouched low. I remember turning back and seeing the lunatic trying to start the engine. I burst into the bar screaming like a madman that they were stealing my Torino, that we had to go out and beat the shit out of him, that he was younger than me but had flashed iron, that nobody better try to stop me when I got him face to face. A shirtless bald guy with a rabbi beard stared at me. He seemed to be the boss, so I stood my ground. I froze when he asked, calm: “What’s wrong, son?” Even now I’m not sure why, but it was the tone. The concern sounded so genuine I thought it had to be an expert fake. A perfect imitation of worry for me—though I had no way of knowing if it was real; nobody had ever asked how I was with that kind of sincerity. It felt so strange to be moved by it that I think I blushed. A legitimate gesture from an old man—maybe he had a son too; obviously he did, you could see it in those rough, wrinkled hands; nobody works that hard just for themselves, always for family, and I knew that from home. I doubt he was as old as I thought, same way Dad wasn’t, barely pushing fifty, yet I always made him older in my head when he wasn’t around; always when he wasn’t around, because with the old man you didn’t talk—we Castellanos spoke with looks and that was it, a gesture and a few words only when strictly necessary. And I’d shoved the necessary straight up my ass, because on top of using his car I was about to lose it.

I was lost in those melancholy thoughts when I heard the engine. I almost ran to hug the bearded man. I shot out as agitated as I’d entered, tears banked deep in my soul—warehouse open for business since age nine, when Mom left. I watched the beast disappear into the indigo night. If it had been heading toward some kind of heaven or the sea, maybe I’d have let it go. Only now, telling the story, do I see how many “if onlys” I let slip by. It vanished down the alleyways. I still don’t know how. That wheeled monster couldn’t possibly fit through passages so narrow. All the same, I followed without questioning.

At the end of the first corridor I thought I saw two more branching off, and those led to new crossings that fed into still more alleys. If I hadn’t heard the engine close by, I’d probably still be lost. I’d always known how the car suffered when started: it coughed like an old man’s respirator—a somewhat macabre but accurate image. That night its death rattle became my compass.

The alleys were almost never lit; the few bulbs were the yellow of a jaundiced patient. I had to watch for broken glass scattered on the ground—remains of some bottle fight or a drunk’s early-morning collapse. Corners held cemeteries of beer cans buried under piss-soaked cardboard or black trash bags. The filth here wasn’t like elsewhere. It no longer felt like garbage; it had become part of the ecosystem: bags of dirty diapers, rotting meat scraps left by stray dogs, stains better not examined too closely. They weren’t in the alleys—they were the alleys.

After countless forks the passages acquired roofs. I don’t know when I realized there was no way back—because there was no actual “back.” The only thing left was the reverse search for an exit, though in practice that meant the same as going forward. I thought I was chasing a rat when I was really grazing the devil’s tail. Those city scraps were the bowels of the worst Lucifer, and my soul kept delving deeper. Beneath the sickly light leaking through cracks in walls and ceiling, I had no choice but to keep going.

The Torino’s roars echoed in that stinking maze I’d entered. Everywhere smelled of sex and masturbation. I’d heard about the prostitutes who worked these spots. The cloud of bodily fluids mixed with other stenches that seemed to come from the place itself. It was the native aroma of the alleyways—burnt oil, maybe laced with fernet and other bitter filth. I cursed having a nose, when smell was the sense most tied to nostalgia.

On one corner I saw bloodstains, impressive for how dull the color was. They looked like blackened rash spots that only grew on these floors. I studied the pattern: what had once been drops had spread into a dried lake. I pictured a man bleeding out there, those stains the only record of his agony; nothing else in the world proved it had happened. One wet mop and it was as if the blood had never been spilled. That was the underworld: if it wasn’t your turn today, you quietly prayed for tomorrow. But it was all unspoken; hardly anyone actually prayed. Survival was just a reflex you didn’t think about.

The engine cut out and the silence was worse than any ambush. Paranoia hammered my chest. Almost without noticing, the walls had turned a familiar color. That repulsive dead-grass green I hated. I felt that any moment the dark corridor would open onto a door, the door onto stairs, and I’d descend again thinking about clocks and hospital elevators. From the ugly green a tone spread through the whole atmosphere. Amid the garbage I began to distinguish the scent of the little gardens of my childhood—the fresias we smelled when we held hands to form lines at school. I thought of the pink walls and spat at the green ones around me.

I missed the weeds back home. I hadn’t forgotten the grass the old man constantly bitched about, though it smelled like paradise compared to these shitty alleys. I wondered where the hell I was, and for the first time I remembered Dad’s phrase. What sea was he talking about, for fuck’s sake. It made no sense. The old man had known something like this would happen, and if I came back he’d know I hadn’t listened. And that was nothing compared to if the Torino didn’t show up—its silenced wail no longer guiding me.

There was no point going on. I slowed to a funeral march. I felt pathetic. I wished the ground would open a mouth and swallow me whole. I would have surrendered gladly—let it rip out my eyes and toss them in a ditch, let it repaint the walls with its autumn. I was conjuring a demon made of a thousand intersecting corridors. I wanted punishment for failing Dad, but also an enemy to blame. I begged for a redeemer, because I couldn’t hate those adulterated concrete walls.

I stepped on a used condom and felt revulsion at the thought of sex. I didn’t deserve pleasure. Randomly I remembered the barman’s beard. I recalled it with an odd tenderness and realized it reminded me of Dad’s hair. Funny how with age he was going bald from the crown down, disguised by curls; some baldness doesn’t start at the hairline. It melted from the top like mountain ice…

…"

–Continue reading in its original Castilian language at fictograma.com , an open source Spanish community of writers–