There’s a worse punishment than having a Jewish mother or an Italian one. It’s having a mother who writes. The two bloodlines flowed together in my own mother, and as if that wasn’t enough, my mother was also possessed by literature. Julia Goldemberg rejected her bourgeois family of origin and at age sixteen, after a brief involvement with Maoism, became a hippie, left the house where she was born, and went to live in a commune at a country house in Moreno. When they threw her out of the commune for keeping the proceeds from the sale of incense, her parents, Don Saúl and Doña Donatella, a couple of shop owners from the Once District, received their prodigal daughter with open arms and tears in their eyes. Especially Don Saúl, always ready to forgive her, like when she returned deported from Germany. However, let the record show that by that time Julie Gold—her nom de guerre—was no longer a little girl.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should mention those times when she brought me into my parents’ bed. That was in the days when we lived together. Although when she brought me into her bed, she wasn’t always in bed with my father. Sometimes she was with a woman friend. By then my mother was already Julie. That’s what she asked me to call her. What I remember: Julie would lay me back down on the floor on my mattress, wrap me in a Peruvian blanket, and softly hum a pacifist ballad by Joan Baez. But let’s take this one step at a time.
In the early seventies Julie Gold published The Madwoman Down the Hall. The novel, which told of her muddling around in the hippie community, was picked up by the censors, an event that for Julie represented a success, affirming her self-esteem. It was her only success. As well as her only book. The enfant terrible single mom. Even though by the end of the sixties she was living in a tenement in Tribunales with Rafael Míguez, an avant-garde poet, my father. Rafa, as I was supposed to call him, introduced himself as an anthology poet. Which, in fact, he really was, because all he ever published were three poems in an anthology. At that time I was a baby, an obstacle to the talents of both of them. Julie worked for a women’s magazine. And Rafa for a weekly. They hated those jobs, but without their salaries they couldn’t have rented that loft facing Plaza Lavalle, a beehive occupied by the trendiest bohemians of that small village, a village that, let’s be honest, was too small for them, and the reason why they would soon traverse the broad and alien world. The farthest they got: Machu Picchu. Rafa couldn’t stand the months-long fame that Julie enjoyed with The Madwoman Down the Hall. It was the cause of their separation. He wasn’t as bothered by the number of bodies Julie had bedded or the quality of her writing as he was by that sparkling popularity, so sudden that when they walked into El Colombiano, everyone greeted her, and when they arrived at the Di Tella, all eyes focused on his companion. You think you’re more important than I am, flaunting that piece-of-shit novel everywhere we go, Rafa said to her. You’re the one who’ll feel like shit when you see yourself in the one I’m writing now, she replied. And she left, slamming the door behind her. Forever.
Not knowing what to do with me, Rafa left me at his parents’ house. Grandpa Jacinto and Grandma Mari were both teachers in Las Heras, in the province of Buenos Aires. And so my grandparents raised me in a house in the middle of the countryside, a few kilometers outside of town. Shortly afterward I found out that Rafa, threatened by the dictatorship, had split for Venezuela. I didn’t see his face again till ’83.
After that novel, Julie never published again. She maintained that publishers didn’t understand the Beckettian turn her prose had adopted. The seventies came to an end. An era of writer’s block for Julie, who attributed her paralysis to the military dictatorship. It comforted her to fall in love with Sergei, a Ukrainian bassist who gave private lessons in a tenement in San Telmo. Sergei had won a German grant for young composers. The foundation offered him a three-month scholarship in Berlin. I still remember when they came over to bid farewell to the countryside. My grandparents regarded them scornfully. Good luck to you, said my grandmother. And don’t come back, my grandfather added.
When his scholarship ended, Sergei crossed the Wall, and my mother was left alone in a seedy apartment in a housing project. The last information she had about the musician arrived a few months later: he was teaching music at a school in Smolensk. On the back of a postcard Sergei asked her to come. Julie would fall in love with the Dnieper, he promised.
But Julie preferred dying of hunger to crossing the Wall. An artist had to put up with economic hardship, she thought. Besides, it was better to sell your body than your soul. Around that time, she met Hannah Biermann, a sociology student and call girl who would later triumph in the field of noir fiction with her stories of eroticism and violence. Hannah convinced her that she could survive more easily in the port city of Hamburg. Since Julie wouldn’t accept just any client, her choosiness was the cause of her misfortune. The pimp beat her senseless, breaking two of her ribs and leaving her lying at the port. But Julie never was one to let herself be defeated by troubles. She didn’t wait to be officially discharged. She couldn’t stand that Nazi hospital, she said. The truth was that she had no documents, and once she was back on her feet, she’d have to deal with her situation as an illegal. She fled the hospital, leaning on a crutch, with a stolen coat over her white hospital gown. In the end, destiny was kind to her, offering her experiences that deserved to be told. The money she’d saved in Hamburg was enough to allow her to return to Berlin and pay a few months’ rent on a basement apartment. She had decided to write an autobiographical novel. The neighbors complained about the clatter of her typewriter. As she still had no papers, she never left her room for fear of being reported as an illegal. She ate whatever she found in garbage bags. She wrote day and night, on practically no sleep. She was faint from hunger, but she hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to rob a supermarket. One windy morning, a newspaper fluttered by her ankles. An article caught her attention: in Paris, a Japanese student had eaten a classmate. She made a mental note.
Julie was never one to give up. She was caught at a supermarket, stealing a carton of milk. To compound her woes, the police arrested her. When they discovered that she was undocumented, they deported her back to her country. And on her return, she had no choice but to appeal to her parents.
By this time her parents were two ailing old folks, and she a thirty-something woman who looked older because, as she used to say, she was weather-beaten. And this, her return from Germany, was more than thirty years ago. But time was never a concern for Julie. You have to live in the present, she often said. The past is a sheet that tangles around our feet and keeps us from moving forward, and the future is a night that descends on us. All we have is the light of the present, a light that lasts as long as a match flame. That light, the present, would never illuminate someone: her son, me.
Don Saúl had closed the store on Calle Larrea. Doña Donatella, despite what Julie had anticipated, refused to take her in this time. But Don Saúl, a sentimental type, managed to soften up his wife. For a while, as she tried to get back into journalism, Julie slept in the empty store. At last she found work editing the “Daily Living” section of a newspaper. Julie detested nothing more than “daily living.” She never understood what “daily” could possibly mean besides “the adventure of living and telling about it.” Regardless, she got her bearings in the section and managed to rent a studio apartment in Parque Chacabuco.
Not long after renting the apartment, she went to the country to find me. She tried to take me away to live with her. But my paternal grandparents objected. I’m going to report you for kidnapping, I remember Julie shouting as she returned to the train station. Not only did she not file a report, she didn’t come back for me, either.
I should mention that my father came to visit me in ’83. He brought me a toy airplane. He stayed for just a few minutes. Grandpa Jacinto threw him out. It was too late to make up for the abandonment, he said. Grandma Mari cried. My father agreed. I never heard from him again.
Julie remembered my existence when I published my first book of short stories, Son of the Madwoman Down the Hall, in which, predictably, the last and longest story stank of autobiography. I published it with a small press and didn’t receive too much critical attention, but the few reviews that did come out were favorable. I worked at an advertising agency. I was in love with Mariana, an art director. We lived together, first in an apartment in Olivos, by the railroad tracks. Later, when I became creative director, we bought this house near the cemetery. This is an upper-middle-class neighborhood. There’s a tennis club, a little plaza, and security booths on the corners. A quiet neighborhood whose buildings date from the fifties, many of them refurbished while still respecting the gable roofs and the gardens in front. Most of them have a tree planted on the sidewalk. You can see orange blossoms, magnolias, laurels, and palm trees. In the spring, the whole neighborhood is in flower and there’s a fragrant breeze. It was springtime again: Mariana and I had a baby, Martín. Even if we weren’t a dream couple, we were very much alike. Though no one can forget where he comes from, at least I felt I was comfortable there; I resembled the person I had wanted to be. I was in love and had started writing my first novel on weekends, a coming-of-age tale. Salinger was my master.
When Julie called one Saturday afternoon, I arranged to meet her at a café in Belgrano. I didn’t want her nearby. I hesitated to tell her she was a grandmother.
I thought we should talk, Julie said.
I asked her if she wanted coffee or tea. She ordered a dry martini. Not me—I had coffee.
I was about to call her Mom. No son of hers would have called her that. I asked her:
Talk about what, Julie.
You’re a very good reader, she said.
What are you talking about.
The madwoman down the hall is me, she said.
I wondered how to react. What to say to her after so long. I shouldn’t have written about Julie, given her the satisfaction. I didn’t know what to say. Julie stared at me with her pale blue eyes.
May I order another, she asked.
I called the waiter over.
I was about to tell her that Martín had eyes just like hers. But it wasn’t the right moment. It never would be. Julie didn’t tolerate imitations.
You used me, she said. You have no shame.
Never before had I seen anyone down a dry martini in one gulp. Or after, either. Julie stood up. Straight, like a classical ballerina. She looked down at me from above. She couldn’t lower herself, not even a centimeter.
Did you read the book, I asked.
I don’t need to, she said. I’m your mother.
She started to walk away.
It’s not the end of this, she said.
But it was.
It was the end till one winter night five years ago. A call at three a.m. startled us awake. It woke Martín, too.
Forgive me for calling at this hour, Julie said. I’m in trouble.
It was a well-known fact that trouble didn’t faze Julie. She’d been held up, coming out of the mini-mart. Two thugs, in the Constitución district. I asked her what she was doing in Constitución at that time of night.
If you cared about me, you’d know that I live in Constitución, darling, she said. I live in Constitución. In a rat trap, but with internet. The worst part is that I had my meds in the supermarket bag.
I calculated a half hour from Olivos to Constitución. I ran all the red lights. It was a drizzly night, and below zero. The address was on Calle O’Brien, a narrow, two-block-long street between the walls of the railroad tracks and Calle Salta. I stopped at the corner of Lima. I didn’t dare go any farther. There were bars, as sordid as they were noisy, interspersed with doors leading to dark hellholes. Whores and gangsters on the sidewalk. Brothels, red lights. Cumbia music rang out and zombies stumbled. To either side and on the pavement, thugs, druggies, and drag queens ambled around. I threw the car into reverse. I had to maneuver carefully to avoid running over a couple of brawling drunks. A blow exploded on the trunk of the car. Some kids were coming after me. I hit the gas and went back along Lima.
I drove around till I found a parking lot on Santiago del Estero. I walked toward O’Brien. Three drag queens emerged from a doorway, hugged me, we struggled; one of them grabbed me by the balls. I managed to get away.
If you come back here, it means you like it, baby, said the stockiest one.
We’ll be waiting for you, sugar, said another.
They left me reeking of a nauseatingly sweet perfume.
Calle O’Brien stank of fried grease and piss. I spotted several druggies. On that street you could buy anything you wanted. From smack to blow. A Dominican girl. Or several. In order to walk that street, you had to look like someone who was interested in whatever was on offer. I didn’t have that look. In a little bar, two cops were drinking beer with a couple of hookers. They looked at me, I looked at them and kept going. An old hooker offered me her services. I kept going. A bottle smashed against the wall behind me. I heard loud laughter. I kept going.
The building where she lived in that pigsty was murky and dark. A small yellow lamp barely illuminated the entrance. You could hear cumbias blasting. Also shouting, cursing, a child crying. A scrawny, toothless, graying Paraguayan stopped me. He had a pistol.
Where ya goin’, my man.
The guy studied me with his toothless smile.
You want pussy?
No, I said.
Weed, he tempted me.
I was looking for my mother, I explained, a woman who looked like such-and-such . . .
The one down the hall, he said. The crazy broad down the hall.
Reality imitates art, I said to myself.
I had to admit that Julie had stayed consistent throughout the years. I entered the building. At the end of a dark hallway, I found the door. Julie had hung two decorative posters. The first announced: “Julie Gold, Literary Expression Workshop.” The second warned: “There is no money here. Only books.” On that same poster someone had written: “Crazy old bat,” “Get help, Granny,” “Suck my dick,” “I wipe my ass with your books.” There was no bell. I knocked on the door three times.
Coming, Julie said. It was her voice. Hoarser than I remembered, but her voice.
Neither of us ventured a kiss.
How are you, I asked.
Julie was a woman of seventy. Maybe more. I never knew her age. She had short white hair, like Jean Seberg in Breathless. The difference between Jean Seberg and Julie was that Julie hadn’t committed suicide. I wondered what Jean Seberg would have looked like as an old woman. Julie wore a plaid shirt over a black T-shirt. And torn jeans. She had on woolen socks and clogs.
I’m as well as can be expected, she smiled. At least they didn’t knock me down or kick me. What I feel worst about are the meds.
It was true: Julie lived in a pigsty. The atmosphere smelled of incense, joints, and stale tobacco. But she had figured out how to conceal the damp spots on the walls with posters of nouvelle vague films. She had also decorated her rat hole with throw rugs. Her library: cement blocks and unfinished wood. There were stacks of books on the floor, on the table, around an old computer: white letters on a black background. I went over to read the screen. There was a Japanese name. I could see she was writing about anthropophagy and beauty. She lit a joint. And she told me. In Paris, Issei Sagawa, a Japanese literature student, had murdered and devoured Renée Hartevelt, a friend from the university. With the excuse of chatting with her about his progress in analyzing the European avant-garde movements, young Sagawa invited Hartevelt to his apartment. He shot her, butchered her, and ate her. Raw. He liked her thighs. He made special mention of the clitoris, a delicacy. He was tiny, scrawny, with a disabled man’s body and an oversized head. The picture in the newspaper revealed a malnourished Japanese man. Sagawa also said that by eating the young woman, he was trying to absorb her energy. How could the writer, as weak and skinny as an Egon Schiele, fail to understand him? Understanding and writing him a letter were Julie’s immediate reactions. She was prepared to convert his story into a novel.
Your meds, I said. Let’s look for a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, Julie.
Once again I was about to call her Mom, but it wouldn’t have been like me. Or her, either.
Have a pisco first, she said.
No, thanks.
She poured me one anyway. I didn’t touch the glass.
Aren’t you interested in what I’m writing, she asked.
Maybe later on you’ll accuse me of plagiarism.
You couldn’t, she said. You’d have to swim in deep waters.
She had spent the whole last year corresponding with the anthropophagus. In jail Sagawa was dying of a brain disease. The French got rid of him by vacating the charges and extraditing him. His father, an entrepreneur, was waiting for him in Tokyo. He had his son committed to a psychiatric clinic. Miraculously, Sagawa recovered, and as he had no charges against him in his country, he regained his freedom. Today he’s a commentator for a TV show and a food connoisseur. Julie got in touch with him. Although there already was a novel out that told his story, Sagawa’s Letter by Juro Kara, Julie found it not only insufficient, but also mediocre. She was prepared to write a great story. She exchanged emails with Sagawa every week.
I don’t think you’d be able to get deeply into a story like that, darling, she said. In order to write it, you need to have lived deeply.
Let’s find a pharmacy, I said.
It’s not necessary, she said. I have the meds. I cried and pleaded with the robbers, and they let me keep them. Two possibilities: either they showed some moral fiber, or else they got frightened and thought, maybe the old bitch will go and die on us.
Why’d you call me, I asked.
Because I knew you’d come, she smiled.
Julie was sizing me up.
The truth is, I wanted to tell you about my project, she said. I need you to be a reader.
You’re crazy, Julie.
Another pisco? she asked.
I hadn’t drunk the first one.
I left.
Out on the street, the wind and rain shook me. I didn’t know what to feel, other than the cold and desolation of the neighborhood. Maybe that was all I could feel. But one thing was very clear: I didn’t want to see her again. The drag queens were still on the corner. I crossed the street.
When I returned home, I needed a hot shower, a change of clothes.
Then I slipped into Martín’s bedroom. He was sleeping like a little angel. He was a little angel.
I didn’t want to cry. But I cried.
Tell me, Mariana asked.
What.
Julie, she said. Tell me.
I told her. We sat down in the living room and I told her.
It’s her life, Mariana said. Not yours, not mine.
She’s my mother.
She’s an independent woman, Mariana said. You can’t deny that she did what she wanted to do with her life. She had balls. Not like us. That’s the part of her generation I admire. That freedom she had. She didn’t wait to be given her freedom; she took it. And she always risked everything for what she believed. Look at it that way.
What do you mean, Mariana.
In a way, I admire her.
In what way.
I always wonder what my life would’ve been like if I’d kept on painting instead of becoming a designer.
Why didn’t you.
You didn’t get very far with your ongoing novel, either.
If you hadn’t gotten involved in design and I had continued with literature, we wouldn’t be thinking about moving to a gated community.
But maybe we’d be happier.
What’s happiness, I asked.
I didn’t stick around for her reply. I had to be at the agency early the next day to present an ad campaign for a new model car. A small convertible, fully loaded. I went to sleep. I dreamed I was a baby with an adult-sized head. I was swimming in a fishbowl. Julie and I were both in the bowl, and Julie was a barracuda. She chased me around, baring her teeth. She ate one of my feet, then the other. The water turned red with blood. I woke up. And I couldn’t fall asleep again. I climbed on the exercise bike.
We didn’t discuss the matter again. Mariana was still pissed off. It was a week of silence. We barely exchanged the occasional word about Martín. Martín might have been the only thing we had in common. And that joined us together. But if I thought about it a while, not even Martín held us together. Because her Martín wasn’t my Martín. Our son had become a form of entertainment, like the TV. And each one of us saw him on a different channel.
One night, when I got home from the agency, I made a suggestion:
We need to take a trip.
What about Martín, she asked. He’s very little.
We’ll leave him with your parents—a week, ten days.
Mariana’s parents are young. Fifty-ish. Good jobs. Eduardo is a court clerk. And Fina’s most important occupation is playing bridge. The kind of perfect grandparents you see in commercials. Besides, they’re always asking when we’re going to leave him with them. It didn’t seem like a bad idea to leave Martín with them for a few days.
But where would we go.
Europe, I said.
Europe, she repeated.
Barcelona, Paris, Rome.
Why not Berlin, she said.
Why Berlin, I asked.
There’s a lot of art in Berlin.
Not Berlin.
Give me a reason.
I didn’t reply.
I had news of Julie last week. Twice. The first time, when I was about to walk into the agency. I saw a homemade flyer stuck to a light post. Right in front of the agency. It was her photo. In black and white. “Looking for Julie Gold,” it said. “Last seen in Constitución. Wearing a jacket and jeans. Black T-shirt. Clogs. Talks and laughs to herself.” Then a phone number. I yanked off the flyer, folded it up, stuck it in my pocket.
I called that number. The Paraguayan guy picked up. I told him I was looking for Julie.
The one down the hall, he said. Wait a second, my man.
I didn’t wait. That afternoon, when I left the agency, I went to Constitución. The winter was even more wintry. Night was falling as I parked. The sensation of falling into a trap, getting stuck in a spider web.
In contrast to the early morning when I’d walked into that grimy, stinking building, now there was movement. A gang of kids was drinking beer and smoking in the doorway. They didn’t move aside to let me pass.
One of them stepped into my path: A couple of pesos, don.
In order to see Julie, I had to pay an entrance fee. I gave them a few coins. They didn’t even budge. I gave them a bill. They ran away. I could hear their laughter behind me as I advanced down the hall. Some of the doors were ajar. The cumbia was deafening. Also the shouting. I walked toward the back.
I knocked three times.
Come in, said Julie from inside. It’s open.
I knew you’d come, she said. Sooner or later you’d come.
Can you explain this to me? I said.
And I showed her the flyer.
Want a pisco? she asked.
No, thanks. Explain this to me.
A joint? she asked.
No.
She rolled one, lit it, inhaled deeply.
That’s why we’re like this. We don’t connect.
Why did you make it? I said. The flyer.
It was a slump, she said. I thought I didn’t exist anymore, that no one remembered me. Not a nibble, can you believe it. I figured maybe you’d see it and would remember me. But I had my doubts, and then I cast off the fantasy. I asked around. You were easy to find. You advertising types change agencies but not lifestyles. You like money. I called the agency where you worked before. They told me you had changed jobs. I followed your trail. Now that you’re here, my slump has passed. Also because I finished the novel. It’s incredible how my mood has changed. I’m going to send it off to contests. I’m not going to drag myself around to publishing houses, asking them to publish me. It’s a sure thing I’ll win some contest. Though, now that I think about it, juries are so vulgar. These days everything is marketing. But who knows, maybe one of them will bite.
You finished the novel, I said.
I sent it to Sagawa, she said. I explained that I couldn’t pay for a translation. And look how sweet, that courtesy they have, the Orientals. He told me he’d take care of finding a Spanish-Japanese translator and that he would read it. Maybe it’ll come out first in Japan. No one is a prophet in his own land.
Then you’re okay, I said.
Julie handed me a brown envelope. It contained a file.
It’s a copy for you. In case something happens to me. I want you to be my executor.
I picked up the envelope.
But I want to warn you about one thing, she said.
What.
Don’t even think of plagiarizing it. I registered it as Intellectual Property.
Thanks, Julie, I said.
You’re not gonna drink the pisco?
No, Julie. I have to drive. And I’ve got a family.
You’re always the same, she said. A real goody two-shoes.
As I was leaving, I gave the kids another bill.
Thanks a lot, boss, said one of them.
There was a dumpster on the same block as the parking lot. I lifted the lid and tossed in the envelope with the novel. I wanted to feel relief, but I didn’t. I thought of Martín. All I wanted was to get home once and for all. I got into the car. Leaving Constitución behind, I merged onto the highway and accelerated.
But as I approached the Ugarte exit, I realized I had been humming a song, one of Joan Baez’s. Guilt had won me over. I turned around and headed back to the capital. I returned to Constitución at full speed. I parked next to the dumpster; once more I lifted the lid.
It was empty. 
Guillermo Saccomanno was born in Buenos Aires in 1948. Before becoming a novelist, he worked as a copy writer in the advertising industry and as a script writer for cartoons and other films. A prolific writer, Saccomanno is the author of numerous novels and short story collections. His novel Bajo bandera was adapted into a film by director Juan Jos. Jusid. Among Saccomanno’s many literary distinctions are: the Premio Nacional de Literatura for El buen dolor (2000); Seix Barral’s Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista (2010); the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction for Un maestro (2010); and the Dashiell Hammett Prize, won twice (for 77 in 2008 and Cámara Gesell in 2012). His work has been translated into many languages, including English, French, Italian, and Russian.
Andrea G. Labinger translates contemporary Latin American fiction. Gesell Dome, her translation of Guillermo Saccomanno’s noir novel Cámara Gesell (Open Letter, 2016), won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award. Her translation of Saccomanno’s 77 has been longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award by The Millions magazine. Labinger’s most recent publications include Proceed with Caution: Stories and a Novella by Patricia Ratto (Schaffner Press, 2021), Daughter by Ana María Shua (Literal Press, 2020), and The Clerk by Guillermo Saccomanno (Open Letter, 2020).
