All Men Are Liars Read Online Free

Aires was a city in which I had scarcely lived and which—even during the years that I knew it—had entered a decline. Bevilacqua, on the other hand, had fallen in love with Buenos Aires when she was still a grande dame, resplendent
in silk and high heels, perfumed and bejeweled, unaffectedly elegant and unostentatiously brilliant. But in the last few decades (this was how Bevilacqua explained recent Argentine history), a shameful illness had defiled her. She had lost her grace, her eloquence. Her new avenues and skyscrapers seemed false, like artificial limbs. Her gardens were withering; a dense fog descended on her, one that was barely pierced by the intermittent glow of orange lamplights. By comparison with this decayed Buenos Aires, the city of his childhood seemed a thousand times more beautiful and radiant.
    From very early on, when he first became aware of a certain subcutaneous itch and of a particular weight in the groin, he knew that what he felt for Buenos Aires was similar to an erotic attraction. To touch the rough stone facades, the cold railings, to smell the jasmine in September and the damp pavements in March (I, too, was in paradise!) aroused him. Walking down the street where he lived or sitting on the plastic seats in the buses made him pant and sweat with desire.
    â€œSouvenir
,
souvenir
,
que me veux-tu,”
as someone once said. I’ve remembered something that may satisfy your scurrilous, journalistic curiosity.
    Bevilacqua first fell in love on the day of his twelfth birthday. A classmate oddly named Babar (which is why I’ve never forgotten him) had told him about a cinema a few blocks away from the Retiro station, wedged into the wall which separated the tracks from the Paseo Colón. The woman in the box office didn’t ask if the boy with the unconvincingly deep voice was indeed eighteen, as required by the notice at the entrance. With his blood pounding in his ears, Bevilacqua penetrated the gloom and groped his way toward a seat. Incidentally, the cinema smelled of sweat and ammonia.
    Bevilacqua could never remember (if indeed he ever knew) the name of the film: he thought that it was German or Swedish, and he never saw it again. The story line, so he told me, sparing no details, had something to do with a country girl who went off to the city to seek her fortune. This innocent child had a heart-shaped face and wore a tight white dress which, in the film’s raunchiest scene, she tore off and flung onto a chair. Bevilacqua watched on, mesmerized, as her face filled the screen and a boy (because of course there was a boy) kissed her. With mawkish sentimentality, Bevilacqua told me that he had felt as though the lips kissing her were his own.
    Gradual fade-out. The following scene showed dawn breaking over the tiled rooftops. Naked but for a pair of underpants, the boy jumped out of bed and started to fry a couple of eggs. The girl asked him sleepily if it wasn’t too early to eat eggs. Bevilacqua, for whom breakfast, in the Argentine style, consisted only of coffee and toast, never forgot the answer: “I eat what I want, when I want.” “It was then,” he told me, “that I understood what that freedom was that I had dreamed about in my grandmother’s shop. Freedom was fried eggs at dawn.”
    I don’t know if the poor man really believed in the relevance of this inane observation, or if he made it simply to relive the adventure—but it’s certainly true that Bevilacqua spent a large part of his adolescence wanting to do unusual things in unpredictable places. For survival’s sake, Bevilacqua meekly filled the roles required of him by convention—loyal grandson, disciplined student, restless adolescent—at the same time regarding himself as a youth far wiser than any adult authority, braver than any adventurer, and so bursting with passionate love that his imagination latched onto worldly knowledge like those sticky