I also must have secretly asked myself: What use would I be to her if I connected her to the Colonel directly?
I felt tired. The sun was strong, the sidewalk wasn’t shaded, and my forearms were straining under the weight of the turntable.
“Can’t we sit down somewhere?”
“I’m sorry, Tomás, I don’t think I have time. Why I had to squeeze you in like this—I have to meet someone.”
“Can we at least talk about something else then? Five minutes, Isa. Let’s just talk. Get to know each other, like you said we would.”
She gave me a puzzled look.
“When I ran into you last year. You said I’d get to know you again if I moved here . . .” I trailed off, for the first time doubting whether she actually had said that. Maybe I had.
“But you are getting to know me, Tomás,” she said. “That’s what I meant that day in the rain. I warned you you might not like what you see.”
I looked at her. Overtly, lingeringly. Including her whole body in the sizing up, so she’d know this wasn’t just about the cause for me, or that the cause still had this fleshy underbelly. So she’d know I hadn’t forgotten its image—not a single detail. The constellation of little moles across her abdomen swam back to me, along with the diaphanous look of her closed eyelids when she slept. Nothing seemed so intimate as the knowledge of that fine skin, the fact that her eyes didn’t always have the hard diamond shine they did now.
“I like what I see,” I told her. Either the sunlight cast a particularly rosy hue on her face that instant or she blushed.
“Boludo,” she said. She rose to her tiptoes and gave me a hasty kiss good-bye.
* * *
Arranging the evening with the Colonel, I had him invite only Pichuca and Cecilia, who implied they were glad it was a more exclusive affair. “Some young people these days,” Cecilia said to me, “you just can’t trust to be decent.”
The Colonel made his own invitations on top of mine, but I wasn’t sure they were the type Isabel had hoped for. Another chess acquaintance, this one from Rosario, and an American businessman with an unexplained tie to the Colonel who had the lispy accent of a Spaniard and spoke of Argentina as if it had been stuck in the nineteenth century and only now, in selling its state-run companies to private international entities and opening its markets to free trade, was starting to catch up. (“I mean, shit, your main export is beef! Your whole economy relies on the fact that bulls don’t turn fag!”) He worked in cars and went into a fifteen-minute diatribe over cocktails and hors d’oeuvres about a rubber plantation Ford had opened in the Amazon back in the twenties. The town built for its administrators was apparently deemed a “New Detroit”; it had paved sidewalks, he emphasized lustily, and white picket fences!
Aside from that, the night was off to an unexpectedly lovely start. The Colonel put on a great speechifying performance that succeeded in subduing the businessman, and Mercedes put on her own performance to subdue the Colonel. “Felipe, please. Only Tomás and I are willing to listen to your philosophical talk,” she said, and proceeded to jest about his need for attention and pupils wherever he could find them. “He’s like a beggar in the street asking for listeners. Sometimes I wish we’d had children. Sometimes I thank God their poor ears were spared!” She was impeccably dressed and made up as usual, and attractively perfumed. She smoked from a long vintage cigarette holder and catered to Pichuca and Cecilia as if they were foreign dignitaries. The mood was jolly, effervescent. And the whiskeys the Colonel kept pouring me—Johnnie Walker; it was a special occasion—relaxed me enough to think I might go through with this plan.
After my third, he asked, “Tomás, don’t you have friends your own age?”
“Pardon?”
“These ladies are charming, don’t get me wrong. But they’re rather old, no?”
A prickle of alarm wriggled through my skin.
“They’re your age,” I said. “I’m friends with you.”
“Yes, but I’m a child at heart. My question is, given the times we live in—well, I’d be curious to meet some of these idealistic agents of change.”
“What makes you think my friends are agents of change?” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “Here I am with a colonel, an American businessman, and a bunch of upper-middle-class conservatives.”
He laughed. “Right you are, Tomasito. You’re a regular bourgeois imperialist.”
He clapped me on the shoulder, still grinning, then turned back to the others.
For a moment, I didn’t move. My legs felt wobbly, and my heart was pumping with adrenaline. I took several deep breaths, ordered myself to stop drinking and go throw some water on my face in the bathroom.
It was occupied. But there was another upstairs and the staircase was just around the corner. After a moment’s hesitation, I went up and found myself outside the Colonel’s study.
Reassured by the ongoing murmur of the voices below and the fact that I’d heard no additional creak on the stairs, I entered and switched on the desk lamp. This time, not even hidden away in a drawer, but right there in a neat stack, there were papers.
The first few entries on the memo’s top page were enough for me to flip the light back off as soon as I’d read them:
RE SUBVERSIVE INFILTRATION SCHEMES
A. On infiltration vis a vis obligatory military service [Page 2]
B. On infiltration vis a vis children of officers and other familial/social connections [Page 10]
C. On infiltration vis a vis offers of intelligence [Page 15]
The list went on, but I stopped there. It could have been a coincidence, but knowing the ever-calculating Colonel, I didn’t interpret it as such. To me, the message was his own and clear as day: Be careful, Tomás, he was saying.
When I returned, they were gathering around the dining room table and platters of juicy, smoky-smelling red meat. The topic was today’s “young ruffians,” and Cecilia was leading the charge, focused on the American businessman and telling him how they frightened her, these kids who wanted to destroy everything.
“Feeling all right, Tomás?” the Colonel asked me in an aside, patting the empty chair next to him to indicate he’d saved it for me.
“I’m all right,” I said.
“You’re probably just hungry. Here,” he said, serving me. “You like yours rare, no? I’m the same. That’s the real Argentine way. For us? It’s the bloodier the better.”
TEN
Without realizing it, I’d been wandering, going door-to-door to find the memories lurking behind each one like I was sleepwalking. Coming to, I found myself in a hallway with many more to go. The Colonel’s apartment had ballooned in size, spawned mansionlike passages that branched into other corridors lined with room after room and punctuated by staircases where none had ever been before. Whispers drifted through them all.
More than whispers. The jingle of a cash register, the slap of meat on counters, the belting of orders, quantities. The sounds seemed to be coming from a closet in the guest bedroom. I opened it and saw—the breakdown of space and logic barely registered—the butcher shop on Juncal where I’d gone with the Colonel to get chorizos and morcillas the evening of his party.
“Great sense of humor, no?” he said behind me, the ghost version of himself again. “This place. It puns! In English, even—must be the special treatment you Americans get in Argentina. Skeletons in the closet, joder.”
Carcasses hung on the far wall, fatty pink sides of ribs and thighs and long ropes of sausage links. I caught the thread of our conversation while we waited in line: “Our American friend does have one thing right,” the Colonel was saying. “What to make of a country whose chief resource is big, dumb animals, eh?”
He chuckled beside me now as if newly impressed with his wisdom.
“You seem to be enjoying this,” I said.
“Mostl
y an act, I’m afraid. You could say it’s part of my punishment, in fact, having to relive it with you. Come,” he said, stepping away from the room on tiptoes, as if our intrusion had been indiscreet. The staircase had relocated right outside and now twisted into a spiral, and I followed him down it.
We emerged back in his garage. It had grown in size too, become a massive underground parking lot. Mostly the cars were Fords, and mostly Ford Falcons. But there were other models as well, many discontinued: The legendary Mercedes 170 V my father grew up riding in; the Chrysler Valiant with the frequently jammed stick in which he gave me my first driving lessons; a neighbor’s apple-red Cisitalia Spyder I coveted; and a Hispano-Argentina “Criollo” I had read about in a history textbook detailing the country’s futile efforts to develop a domestic auto industry.
Then there was the vehicle the Colonel was evidently taking us to: his classic coconut-colored 1965 Chevrolet Impala. He took out his keys—they were on a huge ring that must have likewise expanded—and searched for the right one.
“Is this all hell is?” I asked, taking in the cars, wondering if each one led to a different recollection. “Just your life again?”
“Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than that. Your life—oh, I know you consider yours some terrible tragedy. But most people’s, they’re relatively okay in the end. Full of pain, but full of joy too. No, Tomás, I’m sorry to say, hell is not merely life a second time. You know what else is here. I told you at the outset, or have you forgotten?”
I hadn’t. His description of death in the cemetery: confined to what was and—I said it aloud—“what never had a chance to be . . .”
“Very good, Señor Shore. We’re trying to give it that chance. Mind you, we have a ways to go yet. What could have been is the underside of what was, in effect. We have to keep digging through all these layers of the past to get there.”
“And once we do?”
“One thing at a time,” the Colonel said casually, getting into the car and whistling some scattered bars of an upbeat Gardel. He rolled down the top.
“You don’t usually think of things one at a time,” I pointed out.
“Well, death does force some adaptation, Tomasito. Even I—I know it doesn’t seem like it, I know I must look like a shiny beacon of life to you. But I’ve changed, Tomás. I’ve changed terribly.”
No, not Gardel—he’d picked up the tune in a light, pacey hum. Fleetwood Mac again? The lyrics were American certainly—I had a flashing glimpse of Nerea and Tito singing along with awful accents in Pichuca’s basement, their heads bobbing like figurines. Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me, / Other times I can barely see . . .
“Good grief. Grateful Dead? You must be kidding.”
“Alas, no,” the Colonel said, cringing as we started off. We were quickly submerged in daylight and traffic, the weekday bustle—taxis flying furiously around bends, suited businessmen on Vespas swerving in and out of lanes.
“And where are we headed in the meantime?”
“In the meantime I’ll drive you home the way I did after that party. But where home is in this world—that is another question.”
“What do you mean?”
The wind sweeping in carried the taste of memory, that peculiar flavor I was growing used to: sharp and random enough to seem new, but emotionally musty, sprinkled with something I can only describe as soul dust or spirit ash—a kind of sandy, aged interior. Familiar, but heightened and mystical.
“Certain places in this world, they keep calling you back the way they did in life. They’re not homes per se, more like portals, gateways, that propel you on the way they did in life too. Only problem is, the deeper down you go, the more muddled they get. All those rivers in the Greek underworld? It’s more like a delta, I’d say. They all get tangled, mixed up. And eventually dissolve into the ocean, of course.”
“That happens here too? Dissolution into the ocean?”
“I think so. I think you keep on dying in a way. Why we still age here too, probably—I don’t know. I haven’t found any Argentine cavemen, that’s certain, so I’m inclined to say ghosts pass on eventually. Everything does, after all.”
Suddenly, there it was: the déjà-vu-like hint of—what was it this time? The cigar smoke still clinging to my clothes, the faintly minty scent of the Colonel’s cologne. It had made me want to vomit on that jittery, hungover morning. Or maybe it was the monologue itself—the words clattered against my skull like ambulance sirens. After what I’d seen the night before, everything took on an additional layer, a latent warning or possible pitfall.
“I think you said something like that on this ride actually,” I recalled painfully.
“Did I? What was it now? Oh, yes, I remember! Waxed scientific, didn’t I?” And now he waxed again, and the transition was complete: late March 1976, Gardel back on the radio, aviators on the Colonel’s decade-younger face, and the early-autumn breeze in my hair. “People say the military is going to destroy this country. But destruction is progress, Tomasito. It’s the only measure of it, in fact. Scientifically, I mean. My father—a chemist, don’t forget, and a much better chess player than either of us—he told me the only indication that time has a direction, from past to future, is entropy. And what is entropy, Tomás? Disorder. Destruction of order. The direction it increases is the direction time moves. So, something breaks, a country falls apart—that’s just what time is.”
I waited for time to resume, as if it had been listening to his speech; for the reminiscence to crumble and the present or whatever you’d call it to dive back into its place. But it didn’t, not completely; though I could reply like we were back in 1986, nothing else rearranged itself accordingly. Neither the Colonel’s appearance, nor, I saw, glimpsing my bare cheeks in the side-view mirror, my own. Even my mental state maintained its pressurized, jumpy quality. Disorder, destruction, things breaking and falling apart—the words rang and rang in my ears.
“This place confirm your view?” I asked, disoriented.
“I suppose, in a way. Despite what I said, things can also stand still here. And it hurts when they do. I will say that: It hurts when they do.”
He’d overshot the street of my pensión. He turned left on Avenida Hipólito Yrigoyen, then pulled up on the corner of Jujuy and I saw—remembered—why. The small, unlit neon sign for Parada Norte, the café the Colonel had insisted on our breakfasting at that morning after I made the ill-advised confession that I wasn’t going to class.
“Not home, per se,” the Colonel repeated, reaching over to unlock the passenger door and the memory beyond. “But it calls us back all the same. Ja!”
* * *
The café was quiet and dark, especially compared to the frenetic glare of the morning outside. The place was empty except for a few men of the Colonel’s generation and older, reading the news over coffee, their expressions vaguely disgruntled; despite the dimness, I could make out the all-caps headlines about the precariousness of the presidency and emergency meetings at the Casa Rosada. We sat and—handshake with the waiter, exuberant introduction of his “prized pupil”—the Colonel ordered us cortados and plates of medialunas and ham-and-cheese tostados to share.
“You’ve never been here, have you?” he asked, prompting me to take another look around: ashtrays full to the brim at nine a.m., most of the liquor drained from the bottles behind the bar, the air seedy with smoke and secrets. “No, why would you? Most of the regulars have been coming twenty years or more. I’m a young buck here comparatively. It was my father who introduced me to it—he was like one of these fellows here, except studying a chessboard instead of the paper. He’d come every morning, and in the evenings he’d return before dinner. Mostly alone, I think, but I’m sure he also brought lovers here. It was that kind of spot—safe, no one would judge you. It was understood, accepted, for that whole generation. Your grandparents’, I believe? Were they in th
is country then, in the twenties, thirties?”
“My father’s parents were,” I said uneasily. “Their parents came from Spain.”
“Ah yes. One of the ladies you brought last night was saying so—Basque connection? Or was it your mother’s side, and I’m conflating things? Regardless, they might have come here, your father’s parents. It was a big immigrant café back then—lots of tango types getting nostalgic on the bandoneón, missing their homeland. I’ve always thought it should be more in our cultural memory, the way it is for the Americans, New World and all that. But somehow we got stuck in the old one. Rather like what I was saying in the car—time has to do its work. Out with the old, in with the new. It’s the one point we all seem to agree on. The politicians, the intellectuals, the guerrillas and gorillas alike. Gorillas—a good name for my military colleagues, I admit. You kids coined it, no? Oh, excuse me,” he corrected himself halfheartedly, “I forgot you wished to be considered older and wiser than your juvenile peers.”
I couldn’t tell if this was the particular slyness of the night before or if it was the same slyness as always and it simply felt more barbed in the night’s aftermath. I wasn’t even sure if he was trying to trap me or save me, only that he was enjoying the cat-and-mouse nature of it either way.
“At any rate, I like it here. The kind of place you can be yourself in. Not many in Buenos Aires like that. As you know, for me it’s mostly the tourist sites, which tells you something. Plaza San Martín, my beloved Recoleta Cemetery. But this city is hard in that respect—the whole country is. It’s one of the vainest in the world. So many of our problems stem from that. Have to be better than the Brazilians, have to be pretty, have to be European. I mean joder, I say joder, for God’s sake! My father’s parents would disown me if they knew I was still saying Spanishisms. For much more than that too, I’m sure. Some of the things I do—they’d be rolling in their graves if they knew.”
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