By chance, in a bar in Recoleta, near Bioy Casares street, I met Elías Borgovo and accepted the case mandate. The veteran journalist and writer, turned professional detective with his own office-inherited from a grateful former client-received me at his table as if we agreed. I was finishing a coffee, I ordered a peach smoothie with water, with ice. And a sorbet, of course. The waiter denied me the tool. Having forgotten that senseless ordinance, I replied to Borgovo with my Platonic argument, like Cato (whose historical meaning I am completely ignorant of):
“What is the motivation behind the sorbet ban? That kind of harmless blowpipe we used to drink a drink, a smoothie or a snack. One drink I particularly enjoy in bars is the current ice peach shake. It is taken with a straw. For many reasons: the ice, the density, even the flavor. It’s not like glass: annoying and uncomfortable. It reminds me of the fox who served stork soup on a shallow plate, impossible for the guest’s beak. In revenge, the stork then welcomes him with the delicious meat in an elongated and narrow bowl, the bottom of which the fox’s snout cannot reach.
“It is absurd to pour the contents of the frozen can into a glass: you lose the polar cold initially conceived. Drinking directly from the metal container is inconvenient and dangerous: the short slot, the annoying fuse. But the kiosks no longer provide straws. I don’t know who the unfortunate person was who thought straws harmed the environment. Greta Thunberg? Al Gore? Al Gore lost the election to Bush and out of revenge he banned straws. The farce is over: return the straws. How many years less will the Earth last if we replaced straws? Will we waste twenty years? It’s not that humanity is something so wonderful, twenty years or so won’t fundamentally change the outcome. I prefer a world with sorbets. In fact, I’m thinking of starting some kind of bootlegging, like during prohibition. Al Capone sorbet. I don’t smoke, I do physical activity. Let me use the straw.
Borgovo looked at me disenchanted. In fact, he seemed disenchanted long before I spoke, even before he was born. My presentation had neither convinced nor irritated him.
“It’s not because of climate change,” he muttered, “whatever that means, that they banned sherbet.” In this same bar, at the dawn of the 21st century, a death occurred which put an end to the distribution of sorbet as we knew it until then.
“It put an end to the plastic straw,” I pointed out.
“With sorbet,” Borgovo confirmed dryly.
“It must be six in the afternoon,” Borgovo began. “Some parishioners were already planning to spend the night at the bar, drinking until their wives fall asleep or leave the house. The man who dares not return home. The young girl hung at her lonely table waiting for her suitor; and viceversa. The waiters alternated the cocktail with the latest non-alcoholic appetizers. Transition moment.
“A man, almost an archetype of the stabilized bourgeois porteño – if something like that can still exist -, not defined by his marital status, between forty and fifty, healthy, alert, calm. An individual adapted to the rhythm of things: without anxiety nor satiety, pondering the possible in the air, attentive to the immediate future, accounts fairly settled with the past, with occupation rather than with profession, living honestly with a reasonable effort.
“A woman comes in who is more beautiful than expected. In short, the whole bar is changed. Beauty is not necessarily exhilarating. We overestimate the virtues of beauty. We tend to associate it with Good, with intelligence, with common sense. We rarely recognize it. beauty is in itself, devoid of moral or example. It does not matter. But the union member remains indifferent. He doesn’t feel it or show it. The rest of the population of the bar, including me, vibrates to the rhythm of that woman who just entered. A moment ago the man ordered a sorbet like the one you yourself requested without luck: also to consume a peach smoothie with ice. The waiter denied it. But now that the vestal asks, the waiter smells. Who knows where, the waiter extracts and hands the lady the traditional plastic straw.”
The forbidden sorbet -apostrophe-.
“No, no”, Borgovo contradicts me. They hadn’t been banned yet. The waiter denied the customer a straw because they don’t use straws here, just as in some bars they deny you toothpicks: here we don’t work with toothpicks. We don’t work with sorbet, he told her. But when the girl asked him, the young man nodded.
And what did the girl drink?
“A strawberry smoothie,” Borgovo reported. Logical. It inevitably requires sorbet. But also the peach smoothie with ice. And no less notoriously than she denied it to the man, he provided it to the girl.
“We’re done,” I fumed.
“This is just the beginning,” Borgovo told me.
“The girl drinks her strawberry smoothie with sorbet with a certain ostentation. This is not a question of scandalous exhibitionism or an exacerbated triumph of the player lifting his shirt (incomparable with the fact that she had lifted her shirt). But there is the shadow of a smile, of a mocking gesture. Some useless skirmishes with the straw in the air: having achieved what others were denied. Didn’t human discord begin like this, in the dawn of our unfortunate species?
Then the client turns pale, takes the pulse on his neck and his chin falls onto his chest. His eyes strangely round. “Hard as a glass, dry as a rag.”
“He’s dead,” I interrupt.
Borgovo nods in confirmation.
From disgust? -I asked incredulously. Of the resentment caused by seeing the sorbet denied in another mouth?
Am I my brother’s keeper? – It is no coincidence that Borgovo imitated Cain’s question to God, in the first police case in human history.
“He is dead,” Borgovo added. And he added: Years later, I found out that like Abel: murdered.
But in the biblical story, the resentful person is the murderer.
«Not in the history of the bar», underlined Borgovo. Although we can’t completely rule it out. Resentment, as the name indicates, is an exponential category of feelings and, like all feelings, elusive of exact definitions. In any case, you were not wrong in evoking the tale of the stork and the fox. Only this time the humans plausibly correct that uplifting ending: the fox’s dinner would have been that naive vengeful stork. It strikes me strongly that Aesop, La Fontaine or Samaniego allowed the stork to emerge alive from that fable.
Who, how, why killed him? -I muttered, struggling to drink the pulpy smoothie without a straw, hitting my aprons like hail with ice, gargling peach filaments on my tonsils, hindering my diction.
Patricio – summoned the young man with the name Borgovo -. Fuck, please.
Only on occasions when the professional investigator rendered a verdict was the traditional mixture permitted.
Source: Clarin
