The Askers
Carolina De Robertis
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Seven years after the dictators left, their luggage stuffed with whorls of clothes and cash, we found out what Mateo Musco really was. We’d all seen him, walking his dogs around the neighborhood, smoking his cigar, letting ash scatter at his feet. Musco only walked the dogs at night. He had a maid who walked them in the morning, though God knows what happens in that house now in the morning, or, for that matter, at any time of day.
His demeanor was impeccable, as was his hair. At fifty or so, he was still handsome, though we didn’t say so; once men pass a certain line of beauty, women (especially married women) would rather not acknowledge what they see. If the man is proud, the effect is even stronger. Mateo Musco was both handsome and proud. We could tell the latter from his swagger, and also from the speed of his smile. He always smiled at those he passed on Calle De León. He would not stop to talk, but he flicked a grin at neighbors drinking mate in their doorways, and somehow this was enough, back then, for him to avoid our censure, especially considering the dogs. They yelped and pulled him on, enthusiastic, barking brightly, refusing to let him stop, obliging him to gloss over cordiality. One was black, one spotted, and the third the color of sand. They were the kinds of dogs that spent their whole lives looking like puppies. They were well-groomed and had huge, wet eyes.
Mateo Musco’s house was simple, the color of sad sky, not the prettiest house on the block by any means. But it was clean. Perfectly clean. There was no garden in the little plot in front of his door: just grass—a square of green grass, tidy, all the same length. No flowers. No wife either. His wife had left sometime in the cold years, before Musco had come to live on our street.
He owned two pharmacies in the city, which explained the house but not the maid. The maid was a mysterious extravagance. These, after all, were the years of empty pots on stoves, of boiling hopeful water in case a chicken came along. They were the years of sons coming of age and boarding airplanes with one-way tickets—to another South American country or, more likely, off the continent altogether. They were not years for well-groomed dogs and grass, not in our neighborhood anyway. Not for ordinary men, not for pharmacists. But Mateo Musco, as fate would have it, was neither.
It was his maid who opened the secret, the day she ran from their house with lipstick smeared, and small white apron askew. No one asked about makeup and apron, and she did not volunteer that story. We gathered—all the women of our street—in one single kitchen to listen to what she said. It was a hot January day, and the room smelled of mixing sweat, perfume, and fresh-poured coffee. Mateo Musco’s maid drank four slow sips before she spoke. We waited. Spoons clinked.
“He was one of them,” she said.
