The Pavón Protocol

Forging the genealogy of an immortal San Telmo lineage proved an unexpectedly captivating enterprise that far surpassed any commercial advertising commission of my freelance career. For two weeks, while Buenos Aires slept under February's sweltering humidity, Julián and Valente converted the dining table into a turn-of-the-century notary bureau. I learned that Valente not only recalled every grim nuance of the 1871 yellow fever epidemic, but harbored a bitter personal grudge against 19th-century President Sarmiento for closing a literary salon where he used to take tea with society debutantes.

—Sarmiento was a man of suffocating pedantry —Valente grumbled, drying a forged 1934 death record with a handheld blow-dryer—. Forever droning about common schools and English sparrows in Palermo, yet utterly incapable of appreciating an elegy composed in alexandrine meter.

Our building's co-tenants represented a classic tapestry of Buenos Aires eccentricities: on the third floor resided a retired opera soprano from the Teatro Colón who practiced Puccini arias at two in the afternoon to scare away pigeons; on the ground floor lived an elderly naval architect who hoarded Portuguese decorative tiles along the hallway and predicted the River Plate would reclaim the historic district before 2030.

The true crisis detonated the following Friday, when the building's homeowners association manager, Doña Nélida —a seventy-eight-year-old widow with lilac-tinted hair and a hound's instinct for detecting code violations—, summoned an extraordinary tenant tribunal for eleven in the morning in the ground-floor lobby.

—Eleven in the morning, Julián —Valente echoed, frozen on the buttoned velvet sofa with genuine horror—. Does that woman ignore that midday sunlight falls like white phosphorus upon the asphalt? It is deliberate malice.

—The notice states that unless the registered owner appears in person with valid state identification, they will shut off the main gas line and file an eviction petition for unlawful squatting —I explained, sliding the notice across the table.

Valente rose, stepped soundlessly across the Persian rug, and faced the gilded salon mirror, which reflected only the vacant bookshelves and my own anxious expression.

—There is no alternative —he pronounced with tragic nobility—. I must enact the daytime protective protocol I deployed during the Battle of Pavón in 1861.

The 'protective protocol' consisted of a floor-length British wool greatcoat, a wide-brimmed black felt fedora, industrial welder's goggles sourced from a hardware shop on Perú Street, and two full tubes of SPF-100 sunblock plastered across every exposed millimeter of his skin. He resembled an unholy cross between a Cold War defector and a deeply depressed beekeeper.

We reached the lobby at ten minutes to eleven. The residents of all six units stared in tense, bewildered silence.

—Good morning —Doña Nélida declared, lowering her tortoiseshell spectacles with venomous suspicion—. I presume you are the elusive heir to the De la Serna estate. Peculiar attire for summer in San Telmo, young man.

—I suffer from severe xeroderma pigmentosum, madam —Valente replied in a hollow, resonant bass that vibrated through the elevator shaft—. A single stray ultraviolet ray decomposes my epidermal tissue into a purulent, infectious sludge requiring municipal health department quarantine.

Doña Nélida recoiled half a step, crossed herself discreetly, and did not utter another word regarding paperwork for the remainder of the assembly. She scrawled her signature with a trembling pen and dismissed the assembly in record time, allowing us to retreat into our second-floor twilight unharmed.

Back upstairs, Valente peeled off the welding goggles and collapsed into an armchair with an exhausted, theatrical groan, fanning himself with an antique copy of the Civil Code. 'A triumph, Julián. A bureaucratic masterpiece worthy of Talleyrand. But if that woman ever summons another morning conclave before the next century, I swear upon the memory of my ancestors that I shall purchase the entire building through a shell corporation in Montevideo and convert her ground-floor unit into an underground crypt museum. Bureaucracy is far more exhausting than three revolutions and the War of the Triple Alliance combined.'

Doña Nélida stared at Valente one final time over the rim of her spectacles, thoroughly unsettled by the porcelain rigidity of his jaw and the arctic breeze radiating from his woolen skirts. In her municipal property-manager mind, any clinical syndrome bearing an ornate Latin moniker was more than sufficient justification to stamp the attendance ledger without inviting scrutiny from federal health inspectors.

The neighbors gathered in the hallway exchanged nervous, hushed murmurs, hastily retreating toward their respective doorways as Valente tipped his wide felt brim with icy courtliness. Not a single tenant dared question the inheritance documents or suggest an official police inquiry after witnessing his otherworldly bearing.

Once safely back within our second-floor twilight, we shed our protective military layers with quiet, conspiratorial chuckles that echoed pleasantly down the hallway. Doña Nélida would require at least half a year to summon the courage to knock upon our threshold again, buying us six months of untroubled peace.

When we finally crossed the wrought-iron gates back into our shaded vestibule, Valente peeled off the welding goggles with an immense sigh of relief and dusted his greatcoat cuffs. We had outmaneuvered the municipal housing bureaucracy without firing a shot or breaking a sweat, guaranteeing our peaceful nocturnal lease for another twelve uninterrupted months.

Valente paused on the first step and looked up at the skylight, where the sky was starting to pale. —Twelve months —he repeated, like a man doing a sum—. It has been a long time since I had a whole year ahead of me. It didn't last. One night, at half past three, someone started climbing up our balcony.