The plates of food came out. They were bready and bland-looking in the extreme, but a glimpse of them was enough to exacerbate my queasiness.
“Do you know what else Americans have mastered? The art of the hangover breakfast. Bacon, eggs. We’re stuck with croissants, meanwhile.”
He plucked one out and examined it between two pinched fingers, buttery flakes gliding off them to the table.
“Listen to me blabbing on. Anything you’d like to say?”
“About what?” I asked, as if I’d lost the gist. It was the one relief his constant sidebars allowed.
“I don’t know. About being yourself, Tomasito! That’s the point of this place. You can say whatever you want here, and for a change no one will blackmail you or put you in prison.”
I grabbed a tostado, drew it slowly to my mouth—my hand was unsteady, likely as much because of my hangover as my nerves—and discovered that it tasted fine, that I could stomach another bite. I even managed a third before I answered.
“American breakfast does sound good,” I told him.
He laughed. “You have no idea, Señor Shore. Because let me tell you: If you’re having breakfast in America, odds are you woke up there.”
“Please, Colonel,” I said, welcoming the opportunity to jest, to slip out of the conversation through this jokey crevice. “Whatever you say to the contrary, you’re as Argentine as Gardel himself.”
He laughed again, more heartily. “Don’t you know? Even Gardel had his secret identity: he was French-born and applied for Uruguayan citizenship. Look it up if you don’t believe me! He was hardly the pure-blooded Argentine we have made him out to be. Another defining attribute of our country—our god isn’t even ours. But listen, Tomasito,” he added more seriously. “All I’m saying is you can come to me. Whatever it is. You need never be afraid with me.”
* * *
I gave up my abortive form of espionage after that. I called Isabel and, when Pichuca picked up, asked her to pass on a message.
“Can you tell her the party was a failure?”
“The party at the Colonel’s?” Pichuca said. “But it wasn’t a failure.”
“It’s a joke,” I said. “Isa will know what it means. You can tell her I’m done throwing parties altogether.”
I tried to focus on school, to meet classmates and stay busy. I even asked my lab partner—a nice, freckly girl from Mendoza who reminded me of my ex—if she wanted to go on a date sometime.
I never followed up. Instead I kept waiting for Isabel to call. I thought she’d try to enlist my help again or want to hear more about the Colonel’s party at least. But there was no word from her.
A study group from my organic chemistry class was convening in Palermo on Saturday, and since I couldn’t tolerate the idea of another fruitless phone call, I decided to go and drop by Pichuca’s afterward rather than wait for a summons.
Isabel wasn’t there. And Nerea, who’d answered the door, didn’t know where she was. “It’s Isabel—you know how she is,” she said, and I admitted regretfully that I did. “Anyway, what’d you expect? Like I said when you first got here, you do it to yourself.”
“Do what, Nerea?” I asked with aggravation, like she was my annoying little sister as much as Isabel’s.
“Do this. Follow her around.”
“You always followed her around too.”
“She was my big sister. My idol, the one who took care of me growing up, who put her arm around me whenever I needed it. Of course I followed her.”
“I don’t remember her putting her arm around you very much,” I said pettily.
“Well,” she replied, “you may not remember a lot then.”
I didn’t stay, convinced despite whatever Nerea claimed that Isabel must be avoiding her too. Maybe another of their activist friends, someone more devoted to the movement, had more insight. The only one whose number I had was Rodolfo, and when I got back, I called him to ask if he’d seen Isabel recently.
“No,” he answered curtly.
“Well, do you know what she might be up to?”
“No, why would I?”
“Because you’re friends?”
“We’re not friends,” Rodolfo said. “Listen, Tomás, I’m not involved with her type anymore, okay? My advice, you shouldn’t be either.”
“What about all that Mao Zedong shit you used to spout?”
“Fuck you, Tomás,” he said. “Don’t call me again.” And he hung up the phone.
* * *
I was still tossing and turning around two in the morning, trying to make sense of his behavior, when I received a call. It was Isabel.
“Tomás, can you come over?”
“Right now?”
“Yes, as soon as you can.”
“Is something the matter?”
“Please,” she said. “Just come as soon as you can.”
Flustered and exhausted, I didn’t ask why. I told myself she was drunk and feeling remorseful and got ready as fast as I could, throwing on deodorant and patting my hair down with a wet towel. The bus would take too long so I called a cab, but it was still forty-five minutes before I got there. I didn’t ring the doorbell; it was so late, I figured Isabel wanted the visit to remain stealthy. Correctly, it appeared; she was waiting for me in the entryway and didn’t turn on the light when I entered.
“Isa—”
“Shh. In the basement,” she said, leading me down. “Careful,” she added, in a harsh, distinctly unseductive whisper. “The stairs might be slippery.”
It wasn’t raining. Why would the stairs be slippery?
The basement light was on. Seated on one of the metal chairs, his foot resting on a second chair, was a man holding a bloody towel to his thigh.
The sight of him didn’t summon any pity in me. Only intimidation, a reptilian sense of rivalry. For one thing, he hardly seemed in pain. A smile—suave was the descriptor—creased his flushed, swarthy face. Long-framed and dark-featured, with flowing black hair glistening with sweat and a five-o’clock shadow that placed him five years older than me and would have won my envy under any circumstances. Aside from the blue eyes that matched Isabel’s and contrasted with my muddy brown ones, he seemed the picture-perfect definition of tall, dark, and handsome. He even had a leather jacket draped over the back of his chair.
“He’s a major,” Isabel said to me.
“In the military?”
“No. Not in the military.”
Of course he wasn’t in the military.
Later I learned that the Montoneros used the titles to give themselves a sense of legitimacy. To give the whole so-called war that sense.
I looked at that red, drenched towel.
“I’m not sure I can do this,” I said.
“He can’t go to the hospital, Tomás.”
The police would be monitoring the emergency rooms if they knew they’d wounded him. And if he gave his name and address, they wouldn’t have to hunt for him at hospitals. They could just wait for him at home.
My first question was what this man had done to earn a bullet in his thigh. But it was quickly superseded by another: What was Isabel doing with him when the shots came?
“It’s all right, Isa,” the man said. “He’s afraid.”
“He’s not, Gusti, not the way you think. Are you, Tomás?”
“A limp could do me good,” he intervened again. “Give me some credibility against these milicos.”
“It could be more than a limp these milicos give you, Gusti,” Isabel said. I noted the pejorative: it wasn’t just the police who were after them, it was the military. I also noted the familiarity: she called this “major” of hers Gusti, rather than Gustavo. “Tomás isn’t afraid to help, he’s afraid he won’t be able to—”
“Stop fucking speaking for me, Isa!”
; She opened her mouth and closed it. I pulled her aside.
“You lied to me,” I told her. We’d gone only a few strides away and I don’t know if my voice was even lowered.
“The phones could have been tapped. Also, I never lied.”
“Whatever you want to call it, Isa.”
“I can’t help what you hear, Tomás,” she said.
I looked away and caught sight of the sofa, where we’d had our moment of passion. The cushions were in disarray again, one of them back on the floor.
“He won’t be able to leave here for a few days,” I said, changing tacks. “Doesn’t your mother employ a cleaning lady?”
“Nelly? She’d probably want to help. But that’s all right, I’ll hide him.”
“And nurse him?”
“I’ll do whatever has to be done.”
“Because he’s your major?”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Are you going to let a good man die because you’re jealous, Tomás?”
I said nothing. What could I say but that a part of me very much wanted to?
“I’m not asking you to fight,” she continued. “I’d never ask you to do that.”
“Of course you would,” I said. She smiled. Laughed, and then I did too. I even heard faint laughter from Gustavo.
“Well,” she said, “I’m not asking you that right now . . .”
I recalled what she was asking me. Did everything I could to recall my minimal medical training, which seemed incredibly far away.
“If it hit the bone—”
“I don’t think it did,” Isabel said. “Positioning his leg, I thought I saw an exit wound. Thank God they wanted us alive—otherwise they wouldn’t have gone for the leg.”
I was not thanking God for this. For any of it.
“Sewing kit. Scissors. Alcohol—vodka if you have it, no wine,” I directed Isabel, as I turned at last toward the man in the chair. “More towels—as many as you can carry. We’ll have to apply pressure to stop the bleeding.”
“Tourniquet?” Gustavo asked.
I shook my head. “If the blood flow stops altogether, you could lose the leg entirely.” (Right? I asked myself privately, poring through mental images of textbooks and hazy conversations with doctors at the hospital where I’d volunteered the previous summer. Tourniquet, tourniquet—it was like a missing entry in an index.) “Is Nerea here?”
“Tito’s,” Isabel said. “Luckily—she’d have panicked.”
While Isabel went upstairs, I removed Gustavo’s towel and tried to inspect the wound. With his pants on it was difficult, I’d have to cut them off.
“I should know how to do this myself,” he said, wincing at my every touch.
“I should too,” I told him.
“Fuck,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if it was from the pain or his worry over who’d be attending to his wound.
Isabel came back with what I’d asked for. Using the scissors, I worked past the fabric and sticky towel threads for a better look. The red, seeping hole was hideous, and I felt a wave of nausea. But Isabel’s guess as to the bullet’s exit seemed right: it had passed through the meaty outer part of his thigh, missing the artery as well as the bone.
“You’re going to need to get antibiotics—penicillin probably,” I told her. “However we sew this up won’t matter if it gets infected.”
“It won’t get infected,” Isabel said. “You and I won’t let it.”
I took one of the towels. Handed it to the man and indicated his mouth. “Sorry in advance,” I said.
“Me too,” he answered, and after a deep breath that revealed his own fright, bit down on it.
I asked Isabel to take over applying pressure with another fresh towel, showing her how before I proceeded to disinfect the needle. “Ready?” I asked them stupidly. No one answered.
* * *
The name he went by—I never learned if it was an alias—was Gustavo Morales. Apparently being a Che Guevara–like warrior wasn’t enough, he also had to have morality itself etched into his identity. It was as if Isabel had fallen prey to the same trick I had at thirteen, when I’d lined up the names Orilla and Nerea and made a pretty, aquatic myth of them.
When I checked in by phone over the next few days, Isabel was surprisingly available. She sounded as chipper and carefree as someone on vacation. “Yes, yes, I got the medication,” she said, as if I were her nagging mother. “Yes, I’ve been changing the bandages and cleaning the wound like you showed me. Don’t worry so much, Tomás.”
The fact that I did worry was its own mystery. Was I genuinely concerned for the healing of this pseudo-major? Or was I worried she would forget who his healer was—would forget my whole existence, if I didn’t thrust it back in front of her as often as I could?
Eventually I resolved to visit Pichuca’s again. Again Nerea came to the door. She took me down to the basement, where she and Tito were alone.
“Where’s Isa?” I asked.
Nerea shrugged, but with evident satisfaction, as if glad that my conception of our old Pinamar triangle had at last openly collapsed. “With her new boyfriend, I think? Gusti? Mr. Morales? Isa must have told you about him. She talks about him even more than the resistance.”
And that, I thought, with the kind of finality I have a devastating inclination toward, was that.
“What do you think of him?” I asked Nerea after an interval.
Another shrug. “He’s not afraid of her,” she said. “For Isa, that’s something.”
* * *
March 24 was the coup. The newspapers declared it with welcoming fervor, suggesting it was necessary for stability to return to the country. My mother was more cynical, but not the way ensuing history might make one think: her view was that it’d be no better or worse than the twelve previous military governments we’d had since Uriburu back in 1930. (But that it was better than a Peronist government—of that she, typical of her generation, was certain.)
I wasn’t exactly anxious myself. How much worse could things get, really? We’d had the Ezeiza massacre back in ’73, the death squads had been operative since ’75. What had been our de facto reality had merely become an officially recognized one. And I’d grown relatively numb to it, or believed I had. Repression is sneaky that way: you get used to a little, and chances are you’ll get used to more.
* * *
On the first of April, with no warning or preamble, Isabel called and asked me to go on a walk with her in the Bosques. And devoted puppy that I was, I went.
“I have a favor to ask,” she told me after a few banal, hurried exchanges about the news. We were under trees at that point, patchwork sunshine overhead.
“Of course you do,” I said. “You wouldn’t have called me otherwise.”
“Tomás . . . ,” she scolded.
“Isa . . .”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“Whereas now?”
“Now there’s been a coup.”
“There was always going to be a coup. This is Argentina.”
“It’s different this time,” Isabel said. “What they’re doing, it’s more than just a coup. We found out they have illegal detention centers—one is the ESMA, right here in the middle of the city. They’re taking journalists, unionists, people who volunteer in villas like we did—it’s not just Montoneros or other guerrilla bands anymore. It’s anyone they want.”
The ESMA. It was an abbreviation for Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada—a phrase I’d glimpsed on one of the Colonel’s papers that night I stayed over. Those other places I’d seen named—I remembered the American businessman lisping poetically at dinner about Ford, the fact that “Ford Motors Argentina” had also made it onto that list—they must have been illegal detention centers too.
“You found this out how?”
“That’s
sort of the favor I have to ask,” Isabel said. “We have people in the military, working with them, who help us. Give us information.”
I recalled entries on another, subsequent memorandum: On infiltration vis a vis obligatory military service. On infiltration vis a vis offers of intelligence . . .
“I tried to give you information from the Colonel,” I said.
“I know. No one said you did a bad job. There’s just another way you can try, is all. If you still want to.”
Maybe it was the knowledge of those detention centers. Maybe the unspoken fact that I’d unwittingly discovered some myself and, in passing their names to Isabel, helped the higher-ups map out the full scope of the regime’s strategy. Maybe the frightening snowballing of that repressive strategy, and the bravery and importance implied by what Isabel was doing—what she was asking me to do.
All these factors contributed to my decision, I’m sure. But the most compelling must have been that Isabel was asking. What were danger and caution compared to that?
“I still want to,” I said.
Lighting a cigarette, she relayed her plan. It seemed completely insane from the start, but I didn’t want to say it—I didn’t want to say I was useless to her. So I simply listened. Listened and nodded and said, over and over again, yes.
They’d gathered intelligence—her word now—that one of the bases of the self-styled war against subversion in Buenos Aires was at the ESMA; in English that abbreviation would refer to the Higher School of Navy Mechanics. Young people worked there, non-navy types too, according to Isabel, and seemingly in every capacity: as guards and messengers, helping forge documents, even as doctors’ aides. Her proposal centered on the last: I could go to the Colonel and tell him what I’d heard, tell him that I could use the money, that I needed it for rent or for my mother or whatever lie I felt like trying, and see if he’d look into a job for me. (An imagined memorandum entry flashed through my mind: Infiltration vis a vis offers of labor . . . ) I could even add a personal touch, she said: “You can tell him you always wanted to know what went on behind those beautiful white pillars on Avenida Libertador, that it seemed like a small paradise to you from the outside. That you used to walk by when you were little and foolish and think, ‘There, there must be a training ground for something that matters.’”
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