Full Moon
by Dominic Hilton
October 2021
On the bustling streets of Buenos Aires, Dominic Hilton is surprised by a stalker.
He gave the impression of being a wholly upright citizen. Boring, even. His neatly pressed khakis had been paired with brown suede Oxford shoes and a tattersall check shirt toned in coffee and blue hues. When I first caught him staring at me through his little round spectacles, I’d pegged him for a doctor, between shifts. A respectable man, clearly, in his late forties, at least. A man whom, minutes after having first made his acquaintance, I’d have trusted to cup my testicles in his palm and command me to cough.
He began following me after I’d stepped out of a famous bakery in Buenos Aires, clutching a box of pastries elegantly tied with a scarlet ribbon bow. I’d caught his eye and smiled, not because I was trying to provoke or entice him, but because… well, because I thought he was a doctor. Isn’t that what you do when you encounter a doctor: smile at them? Haven’t they earned that sort of respect, what with failing to cure helpless, saucer-eyed toddlers with leukaemia and pulling the plug on all those silent, unaware geriatrics? “Always smile at doctors,” my mother used to tell me. Or was it, “Never turn your back on a doctor”?
Either way, I forged on up the avenue, past a snaking line of bank customers being manhandled by heavyset security guards. A woman with upswept hair shook a grapefruit-sized fist in the air. “We want our money!” she yelled. “The government is stealing what is rightly ours!”
My stalker was now a few paces behind me, salmon-faced and barking something or other over the woman’s desperate cries of “¡Corrupción! ¡Corrupción!”
Buenos Aires is a maddeningly noisy city. Add the spluttering sounds of its traffic to the peculiar version of Spanish spoken in Argentina and you start to wish everyday life came with subtitles. “Excuse me,” is what I believe he said. “Yes, you. Tall man. Giant. Can I help you? What do you want? Come on, tell me. What do you want with me?”
“Nothing,” I shouted back at him, keeping up my stride. “I don’t want anything with you, do you understand? Forget it. Go away. Shoo.”
He cupped a hand to his ear. “What’s that? I can’t hear you very well.”
Which was when I told him to sod off, in English.
Curious pedestrians were now staring at us. An elderly couple stopped to watch, arm-in-arm, clearly hoping things would escalate.
“Ah, an Englishman!” the man said, in Spanish, smacking his forehead. “Of course! I should have known.”
I lifted a hand from the pastry box and waved it dismissively at him, like I was swatting away a fly. It was four o’clock on a hot afternoon, and the cruel, low sun was threatening to curdle the vanilla custard in my bolas de fraile.
I stopped at a crossing. He stopped too, about five metres behind. In hindsight, I should have made a dash for it when he started nodding his head, saying, “Fine, fine, OK then, let’s see how you like this,” as he unbuckled his belt. But it’s hard not to wonder what will happen next in circumstances like that. Hard to look away. Hard to return to the safety of one’s home with its fob key entry system, 24/7 concierge service and emergency intercom.
“Now this, I remember thinking as I surveyed the scene before me, is why I moved to Argentina.”
By now a small crowd had gathered, consisting mostly of pensioners. A little old man in a flat cap stood eating an empanada. He brushed a few flakes from the lapel of his tweed sportscoat as his wife waited expectantly alongside him, clutching a handbag against her bosom with two gloved hands.
Now this, I remember thinking as I surveyed the scene before me, is why I moved to Argentina.
The man’s khakis were bunched up around his ankles. He said something that I didn’t catch and as he turned his back to me, he tugged down his underpants and bent over at the hips like a toy Lego man.
There were one or two gasps, but not as many as I’d hoped for. Mostly, there was just faint murmuring, as if the crowd was judging what score to give the performance. “The underpants are a 9.3, maybe a 9.4, but the asshole is a 3.8, at best.” Still, nobody looked away. Not even me.
His show now over, the man pulled up his trousers, fastened his belt, and with his back still turned, marched up the street, in the direction he was originally headed. The crowd spun round to stare at me. I took a moment to scan their hopeful faces, then shrugged my shoulders.
“A crazy!” somebody shouted, and I nodded, not knowing if they meant me or the flasher.
One of the little old ladies shuffled over to hand me a tissue. I thanked her, wondering what the tissue was for, and she patted my forearm maternally before rejoining her husband. The sun felt hot on my forehead as they trundled together towards the shops and I made my way home.
“Is a beautiful day today!” the concierge said, greeting me at the door of my building dressed like a funeral director. He’d recently taken to practicing his limited English with me and he swung his arms towards the sun-drenched square, in case I’d not understood the point he was making.
“Si, hace buen tiempo,” I replied, half-heartedly.
“Bay-kerry!” He pointed at my box of pastries, sweat on his lips and gluttony in his dark eyes. “Bay-kerr!”
Upstairs, I put the pastries in the fridge, having lost my appetite. I made some tea and sat at my desk, trying to work, but I couldn’t stop asking myself what I’d done to provoke a stranger to show me his rear end in broad daylight on a crowded street. My mind drifted to a day twelve months earlier when, walking aimlessly around my old neighbourhood, I’d bumped into an English friend of mine who has since moved to China. We talked about the day we’d each had: Josh had squabbled with a belligerent work colleague; I’d whiled away the perfect afternoon outside various local cafés. “Your life is what I aspire to, mate,” Josh said. I tried laughing it off, but he stared at me intently, insisting that he was serious.
“There were four of them and they all had wine glasses filled high and held to their mouths. One of them was grinning.”
Now, sitting in front of my computer, I wondered what Josh would make of the mooning incident, and if he’d still be envious of my life. But instead of contacting him to find out, I opened a new tab in my browser, typed “Mooning in China” into Google, and got 12,000,000 results in 0.46 seconds.
“Chinese tourists busted for mooning Taiwan independence supporter”. That happened in Taipei in 2020 and the police investigation “revealed that the men were the children and grandchildren of senior officials and dignitaries from Communist China”.
But I preferred “Pentagon: Mooning no laughing matter in the South China Sea”. That was a headline from 2009, when crewmembers aboard five Chinese vessels reportedly “harassed and threatened” the USNS Impeccable by disrobing and waving Chinese flags. A US Navy spokesperson called the incident “dangerous, unprofessional and reckless”, but was unable to confirm it was an actual mooning, as a series of grainy black and white photographs appeared to show the Chinese crewmembers fully clothed.
In the shower later that evening, I wondered if there was any photographic record of my own mooning incident, but I still couldn’t figure out why it had happened. Was it my gait? My pastries? Did my lemon-yellow T-shirt evoke a political allegiance, or a terrible, silent history that I could never understand? I worry about things like that. On the surface, Argentina doesn’t seem a million miles from home. You drink coffee and wine. You buy your steak from the butcher’s. Your bank cards are swallowed by malfunctioning cash machines. But turn up to a party on time and there’s hell to pay.
When I stepped out of the shower, I realised I’d forgotten to bring a towel into the bathroom, which is something I seem to do all the time. I shook some of the water from my body and paraded through the apartment, making perfect size 13 footprints on the hardwood slats. I couldn’t find a towel anywhere, so I leapt about a bit, in the hope of drying off. The sun was flooding through the open windows, and a light, warm breeze caressed my naked skin. It was only after I’d stood for a minute or two, eyes closed, enjoying its gentle embrace, that I noticed the women sitting on the balcony opposite, staring.
There were four of them and they all had wine glasses filled high and held to their mouths. One of them was grinning. She fluttered her bejewelled fingers, and instinctively, I span round, turning my back on them, unsure what I was doing or what else to do.
The sun had set behind one of the nearby tower blocks. As I vanished into the shadows of my apartment, it occurred to me that the women could have been in the crowd of onlookers earlier that day, watching that strange man drop his trousers somewhere up that noisy, congested avenue.
“A crazy!” they might have shouted. And I would have nodded, not knowing if they meant me or the flasher.
