Hades, Argentina

by Daniel Loedel

  That compelling voice of his. So soft and sage. So priestly.

  “As for Gordo himself,” he continued, “he was not so innocent, I promise you. I know, his family’s from Boedo, right by me. Went to the church off Avenida Chiclana, where I take confession from time to time. His friends worried about him, thought he was using his technical expertise to build bombs.”

  “His friends told you this?”

  “I took confession, Verdecito!” He laughed. “Mothers do it too, when they can’t reach their children. It’s their duty to tell me. And mine to absolve them for doing so.”

  Hearing this, grasping what it meant, caused me almost as much pain as the physical kind I watched him inflict, and occasionally was forced to contribute to. Che, Verdecito. You’re a medical student, no? My patient may need your help . . .

  The Priest looked around, inhaled the smell of deodorizer like it was incense.

  “This place is looking gorgeous, Verde. One of the smartest things Aníbal ever did, bringing you around.” He wished me good night and clapped me on the back encouragingly on his way out.

  I went to the balcony, as I often did when I needed a safe-haven cleaning couldn’t satisfy. I looked down at the street and noticed the taillights of a parked car blinking on. Why I had a pen on me, I have no idea. But that I had paper—that I can explain: It was the list Aníbal had given me of the day’s transfers. I wrote the Priest’s license plate number down on the back of it, right beneath Gordo’s name.

  * * *

  I called Isabel the next morning, and I kept calling until I reached her. “I need to see you. Not like that,” I added hastily when I heard her intake of breath, the pained preparation. I heard her relief, too.

  “Okay,” she said after a moment, and we proceeded to make the arrangements. We had to be more careful since the bombing of Coordinación and the discovery of Ricardo Alberto Gayá. Mix up our meeting places, the way we actually met. This time we each took a starting corner on Calle 25 de Mayo, six blocks apart, then walked in opposite directions until we “bumped into” each other in front of a university building. We even went through the charade of exclaiming at its being so long, how we should go “catch up” in Plaza Roma. Isabel was a good actor—well-tossed grins and megaphoned references to long-lost school friends (“Can you believe Francisco’s started to go by Frankie? . . . Paz is trying to get into Argentine Playboy, I kid you not!”). Unsurprisingly, I was not as convincing.

  We didn’t stop in the plaza, as Isabel had announced we would for any eavesdroppers, but continued toward the abandoned harbor of Puerto Madero. Where once there might have been bustling docks, with steaming industrial barges and puffy white sails, now there were only large, empty warehouses and fenced-off tracts of undeveloped land. Forsaken cars were in the weeds here and there. The nearest was missing its tires and windows and had rust on the bumpers, but the hood was clean enough for us to sit on. The only sign of the river basin was the smell—a rotten sweetness, like spoiled food.

  “It’s no Pinamar, eh?” Isabel said wistfully. “I wish I’d been cut out for it. All that prettiness and happiness. But I wasn’t. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No,” I said. All those conversations I’d spent dissecting her every sentence for meaning, and now I barely listened.

  “It could never work. It’s like this port,” she went on, in what struck me as a dithery irrelevance. “You know the history, no? It was going to bring Argentina into the twentieth century. And now look. It was an illusion, a fiction. Reality is darker, often crueler. I’m crueler, you know?”

  “No,” I said again. I had tears in my eyes, I noted without interest.

  “Tomás,” Isabel said, her hand taking mine, “what I’m saying is I—”

  “I can’t ease their pain, Isa. I can’t—I—”

  I couldn’t ease my own, may have been what I was trying to say. But I couldn’t manage that either; bent over, my head in my hands, I’d started fully crying.

  Isabel slid closer. Hugged me with one arm and pressed her face near my cheek while I heaved and sobbed. “It’s okay, Tomás,” she whispered. “It’s okay. You can ease their parents’ pain, their friends’. Just tell me what you can—whomever you can. It’ll be enough, Tomás, I promise you. It’ll be enough . . .”

  I sat up. Rubbed my eyes and wiped away the snot that had dribbled onto my upper lip. Then I went through the routine, to the best of my abilities. New prisoners included Samanta Gelman, the daughter of the poet. Enrique Rodríguez Larreta, the Uruguayan journalist. Eduardo and Nelly Vicente—the Priest would often torture the husband and wife together. Gonzalo Piera. Ana Vidaillac. Silvestre Salvadora. The list went on. I also told her about the kid from the copy place in Retiro whom Aníbal was excited about—Rubén Wilkinson was his name; relating it made it harder to hold his betrayal against him somehow—and she noted everything accordingly.

  She asked for other details—more about the tortures themselves, the daily goings-on. She was sorry for doing so, she said, but they’d made connections at a couple newspapers—La Opinión, which sounded like something grander than the struggling operation it was, and an English-language paper I’d never heard of—that still operated with some freedom and might be able to publish the information. If not, they could use it for pamphlets, she continued, and I thought: Pamphlets? That’s what you have to fight them?

  Still, I gave her what she asked for. And when I was done, and my sniffling and breathing were back under control, I said, “I want to do more than ease people’s pain.”

  She looked at me without understanding. “What do you want to do?”

  I wasn’t trying to impress her or to join the ranks of her and Gustavo. This I wanted for myself.

  “It’s war, you said,” I reminded her, and thought again of the Priest’s words:

  You must remember that even the worst sinner is human. Which is not to say you must forget the sin. But that sometimes you must forget the humanity . . .

  I reached into my pocket, removed the list of transfers, and handed it to her, back side up. “The Priest’s license plate. Lives in Boedo, takes confession at a church somewhere off Avenida Chiclana. Can you . . . or someone . . . ?”

  Isabel nodded. “It’ll ease their pain in the afterlife, Tomás,” she assured me.

  Now I couldn’t help but wonder if it did.

  FOURTEEN

  I’d put my head back in my hands at some point, and when I removed them, I found that Isabel was gone from my side, and the Colonel’s ghost stood before me instead, pouting in commiseration.

  “Well,” I said to him, my voice hoarse, as if my sobbing had been more than a memory. “Did it?”

  “Did it what?”

  “Ease anybody’s pain.”

  “Some, perhaps. Hard to say. Knowledge here is a tricky thing. You begin to lose it quickly. But when you gain any . . . Ahhh!” He sighed elaborately, as if the port air were made of roses. “Like a fine whiskey. Or those clean sheets of mine. Now,” he continued more contemplatively, “if your question is, was it worth it? For that you need not consult the dead, I think.”

  “Then whom should I consult?”

  “Yourself, boludo. Whom else? That’s the whole point of this.”

  “I thought the point was to get Isabel.”

  “It’s the same thing, really.”

  “How can that be the same thing?” I didn’t conceal my irritation. I felt unwell, like I hadn’t fully returned from that moment with Isabel—sleep-deprived and astonishingly fatigued, my eyes dry and straining.

  “Was it worth it? That’s the question you’ll have to ask about her. That’s the question this place is always forcing you to ask. Over and over and over, rather monotonously, truth be told. Was it worth it? Would you do it differently, given the chance? What would you change? It’s like a nagging mother, this place, taunting you with what you
could have done better, what choices you should have made. Come, Tomasito,” he said, tacking suddenly, heading into the weedy field. “We’re deep enough now that I can give you a peek at this nagging mother of souls.”

  I followed him. Through a clipped opening in a barbed-wire fence and past a blocky brown factory with smokestacks emitting trails of black smoke. Then across a road and into another small lot just off it.

  There was only one car in this one—another Chevrolet—and someone was packing the trunk with towels, umbrella, a bag of plastic shovels and buckets and other beach equipment. A tall, skinny man in his bathing suit, with a young girl at his side. Her hair was dark and wet, with a strand stuck to her broad forehead, and she was tugging on his arm, trying to tell him all she’d accomplished. “It had two moats, and there was a tunnel too, Papi, and I made towers so—”

  “Come here, love,” the man interrupted her. He knelt and wiped the sand off her legs and feet.

  She continued, her brown eyes big with excitement. They reminded me of Claire’s: the youthful eagerness, the hunger for small, silly pleasures.

  “Papi, do you think we could make a dragon? I could draw scales into its side, but the wings—the wings would be hard. Maybe—”

  “Yes, love,” the skinny man said. “Dragons, monsters, anything you like.”

  He straightened and I recognized him: the Colonel. Not quite the version from a decade before, or the one beside me. But from some point in between, maybe five years younger. He took the girl around to the passenger’s side, strapped her in, then took the driver’s seat and turned on the engine, removing the rest of their sweet, arresting dialogue from earshot.

  “That was you,” I said to my version of him after they’d driven off.

  “It wasn’t, actually. But could it have been? More important, should it have been? We’re nearing the delta, to use my earlier analogy. Soon you may not be able to tell one person’s hell from another. Or even if you’re in hell at all.”

  I looked around. A majestically beautiful sunset, with a bloodred sky and unnaturally vibrant pink and purple clouds. I couldn’t tell if it was due to the magic of the place or the pollution, the fumes of the factory towers behind us, or the exhaust from a plane in the distance. I could even hear waves now, murmuring softly somewhere over the dunes.

  “Doesn’t seem like anybody’s hell,” I said.

  “No indeed,” the Colonel said. “It’s deceitful, the maze of possibility.”

  “The maze of . . . ?”

  “You know: contingency, if-thens. If this didn’t happen, then that would have. If Gardel didn’t come to Argentina, we’d be as much a backwater as Chile; if you didn’t meet me and learn English, you’d be in as much a backwater as Chile. Et cetera. It’s a vast, tragic labyrinth, what with all those dead ends . . .” He trailed off sadly.

  “Are you saying Mercedes miscarried?”

  “I’m more inclined to say I did,” the Colonel answered.

  I thought again of Claire. Having children was perhaps the one topic in our relationship in which I’d provided any resistance. I’d even moved in and proposed at her suggestion: “It just makes sense, doesn’t it?” she’d said in the lead-up to both, and I’d basically agreed. When Claire cared to, she always made sense, and she did with regard to children too. But I dug in my heels, at least as much as someone like me could. Sometimes her entreaties took the form of a picture she painted, of our happy, stable, very American marriage completed by “a pooting, chortling little Tom or Claire Jr.” Sometimes she took a more philosophical tack: she’d tell me she understood why I was scared of bringing a person into this world, having seen all the terrible things people can do, and I’d have to explain that it had nothing to do with other people, that it had to do with me, and shrug when she told me I wasn’t a bad person.

  Most of our arguments petered out like that. Despite a decade living and translating in New York, I still didn’t like having them in English, especially not when pitted against Claire’s lawyerly mind. “Do you know what it was like having those conversations and then going to work and seeing someone cheerful and open, who had dreams about a life with you, who wanted a family with you?” she’d said, telling me about her affair. Responses of varying degrees of bitterness and candor had gone through my head: “I don’t; I work at home.” “I don’t; I barely see anyone but you.” “I don’t; I don’t know what it’s like to have dreams.” But in the end, I didn’t say anything except that I’d be sleeping on the couch that night.

  “And here I always thought you wanted to have children but weren’t able to,” I said to the Colonel. He shook his head, disappointed with his bumbling pupil.

  “You were always rather a stupid kind of intelligent, Tomás,” he said, taking off toward the water. “Good at chess, bad at nearly everything else.”

  * * *

  It was the beach in Pinamar. Its most romanticized manifestation—rose-hued twilight, pines casting long shadows over the dunes and filling the breeze with their scent. It was as if the place had snatched a picture from my imagination and plopped me down to testify to its accuracy. All that seemed to be missing was an image of a young Nerea, dancing dolphinlike about the water and sand before I met her sister and my heart ceded her place.

  Isabel I never fantasized about in quite the same way. No glistening perfection, no painted clouds above a picturesque landscape. I daydreamed scenarios, increasingly sexual ones as puberty plodded its way through my body. These scenes were always grittier, beholden less to fairy tales than to tales of sacrifice and adversity and—what else could I call it?—reality. The kind I’d believed my love for her would battle through. The kind I must still believe it would battle through, to come here. Reality has a way of never letting even the direst of expectations catch up with it.

  Even though I knew this wasn’t really the site of my reveries, I still looked for signs of Isabel. The fragments of a broken Quilmes bottle, footprints made by her wide feet. A silhouette skirting the tide with that slightly lumbering stride I found enchanting.

  Nothing, though. Aside from the Colonel and me, the beach was empty. Aside from that plane too. Objects were falling from it now, catapulting toward the water like birds with broken wings.

  The most common way to dispose of transfers, the Gringo had told me: drug them with an injection of sodium pentothal a fake doctor like me said was a vaccination, then drop them into the depths of the Río de la Plata.

  One at a time they fell. I couldn’t hear the splash or, if there was any, the cry.

  “Come on,” the Colonel said. I felt the shakiness of his fingers as they reached for my elbow, scrambled along it like a squirrel trying to grasp a slim branch. “It’s not time for this yet.”

  “Time for what?”

  “For them. For others. This is my hell as much as anybody else’s, as I said.”

  I looked at the water. Waited for some indication of movement underneath, the surge of bound hands or the silhouette of a head. But the waves passed quietly, and there were no cries on the wind.

  “These others. They’re not like you?”

  “Some, depends,” the Colonel said. “People die as differently as they lived. I would suggest keeping your distance, regardless.”

  Unconsciously, I’d taken a step or two forward, as if there’d been an instinct in my legs to dive to a drowning person’s aid. The sand was oddly soft beneath my shoes—less like sand than something else. Mud? Tar? I glanced down and saw there was foam around my heels, and it was tacky, suctionlike. I could tell, with dreamlike certainty, that it wanted to draw me in. Down. Under.

  I pulled my foot free and took a step back.

  “They’re so lonely, Tomás. We are, I mean. Staring all day into rooms we never got to be in, reliving memories we can’t actually live, or can but don’t want to. Cloistered away with thousands of others we love and hate, yet equally far
from them all, so stuck within ourselves you can’t imagine. Sometimes we get jealous, want company. We won’t want you to leave.”

  I turned to him. His face was as mournful as I’d ever seen it.

  “Is that the real reason you brought me?” I asked.

  “Ja. We’ll see. I may have guilt enough to make up for it regardless, don’t forget.”

  I looked again at the waves, listened to their sleepy tumble.

  The Colonel continued: “If I told you you’d get stuck here going much deeper, Tomás, would you? Would you keep going?”

  I recalled the pull I’d felt moments ago, the sucking of the sand beneath me and the hypnotizing swell of the tide. I thought of Claire too, crying in the shower the night before I left.

  Then I thought of Isabel. That smile when I handed her the bottle of Old Smuggler to throw at the general’s statue.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What if it wasn’t just that you got stuck here, but that you’d been here all along, since 1976? Never met your wife, had those ten years? What if the place didn’t just show you how things could be different but gave you the opportunity to change them?”

  “Will it give me the opportunity to change them?” I asked. Abuela said you’d get a do-over, I remembered Pichuca’s granddaughter telling me at Hospital Alemán. Like in a game.

  The Colonel smiled. “You always did want to be a martyr, Tomasito, didn’t you? Well, let me tell you, this is less a case of heroic altruism than it might seem.”

  “It doesn’t feel very heroic to me,” I said, but he pressed on, heedless.