Hades, Argentina

by Daniel Loedel

  “Fleeing your life, abandoning your marriage. Venturing to the underworld of the disappeared to pluck a sexy, lovey one out, disturbing all those who grieve here just to heal your itty-bitty little bit of emptiness. Heroism—ja!”

  “You think my emptiness is little?”

  The Colonel grunted disdainfully. “Hmph. You living think you grieve. You are chipper little tweety birds with your sadness. You especially, Tomás—I can hear your happy birdsong all the way down here.”

  “You didn’t seem to think that when you invited me along. What did I have to lose, you asked me.”

  “And by the end of this expedition, you’ll be forced to answer.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ll see what it means. Your emptiness is like an empty stomach, no more. Hunger. Hunger! Ja. Can you imagine? I haven’t been hungry in centuries.”

  “You only died a couple years ago.”

  “Millennia ago. Millennia I was dead before I was born, and millennia I will be dead after I lived, and what the shit did I have in between? Sixty years? Watch me count them. Poof!” He blew so quickly and intensely, spit smacked my forehead. “That’s about as long as that nonsense lasts.”

  “All right, I get it,” I said, wiping my face. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I am. I’m beating a dead horse. Or the devil is beating a dead me—ja!” His wicked chuckle was quickly becoming less amusing. “I’m sorry, Tomasito. As I said, we still get jealous sometimes.”

  “I understand.”

  “You don’t. But it’s all right, I forgive you. Like I said, you’re not so adept in some areas.”

  Another plane roared overhead. Bodies fell like fat drops of rain.

  The Colonel grabbed my arm. “Shall we mosey, Señor Shore?”

  We did. Back to the original lot where I’d sat with Isabel, and then to the bus that took me home. At some point, as I drifted into my foggy 1976 state, completely inattentive to the muddled press of passengers getting on and off, I must have missed the Colonel sneaking out. When I returned to my pensión, I was alone again, and there was no trace of him, unless you counted the new bottle of whiskey I’d bought after finishing the one Isabel and I had together. I opened it and drank myself to sleep.

  FIFTEEN

  I never found out how they killed the Priest—shoot-out, car bomb, something more macabre. I learned about it only when he stopped coming to work and the Gringo started raging about the terrorists he’d punish in revenge. The net result, in that sense, did not necessarily seem a gain.

  I did find out who killed him, or at least who must have been involved: Isabel and Gustavo, Nerea and Tito. Two days afterward, Pichuca called to tell me the four of them had gone into hiding. Separately, she made clear, her voice a frantic mix of relief and apprehension: Nerea with Tito, and Isabel with Gustavo.

  She was living with him. Fenced off, beyond my reach. Pichuca had no way of contacting them, she said; they’d contacted her only to alleviate her worst fears, any more and they’d be putting us in danger. For the time being, we just had to wait for them to make contact again.

  * * *

  They didn’t. Not with me, anyway. My stranding felt complete. Not only because it destroyed the idea that I still had people looking out for me, however outnumbered; but because with no one to confirm that I was on the other side, it became frighteningly easy to feel I was on theirs—the military’s, Automotores’. If I was no longer in that evil place for some greater good, who was to say my role, through sheer complicity, hadn’t tumbled across that murky divide into evil itself?

  That evil—it seemed to balloon as well. The Gringo wasn’t the only one affected by the news; all of Automotores had been. It was like after the bombing in Coordinación Federal, but tenser, more foreboding; you had the palpable feeling that other, bigger bombs were soon to go off. The halls were perpetually smoky now that Rubio and the Gringo could have and toss cigarettes wherever they pleased, adding to the doomy, haunted-house atmosphere as well.

  The most noticeable reaction besides the Gringo’s was Triste’s. Without saying good-bye to anyone, he simply stopped showing up for work after the first week in September. The Gringo told me he’d sought a transfer to another army division, Campo de Mayo, which had a unit linked to ours under different oversight.

  The effects on the rest of the men were subtler. They spoke less over meals and more often in hushed voices—once I came into the kitchen to find Aníbal and Rubio awkwardly silent, as if they’d cut themselves off at my entrance. The joy some of them took in the torture room also diminished; it seemed fueled less by power, the pleasure young boys got plucking wings off flies, than by anger. It was profoundly disturbing, to find myself wishing for fiercer screams or to see the Gringo emerging as he used to, with a big, fat grin plastered on his childlike face.

  In Rubio I sensed the greatest transformation. Paranoia may have been part of it, my mental filter translating cold glances into piercing, knowing stares. But every time I fell into Rubio’s field of vision, I felt his eyes probing me like searchlights. No one had ever looked at me with such loathing. His attractiveness accentuated it, finding such ugly desire buried beneath such a handsome face. When we bumped shoulders in the hall, I felt the tension in his muscles, as if he were holding himself back. And whenever he called me into the torture room for some task, it was with the contempt reserved for a shifty, unreliable servant. Once, when I stayed to clean a pool of blood he’d left behind, he returned to gawk at me while I worked. “Puta madre,” he eventually said. “The Priest is dead. He’s the only one who gave a shit about keeping this place clean.”

  “I give a shit about it,” I heard myself say.

  “Do you?” Rubio said. He gave my bucket of water a kick, and it slid across the floor several feet before spilling over. “Now you have more cleaning to do.”

  Truthfully, I was grateful. I was always grateful when I had more cleaning to do.

  * * *

  I couldn’t say if that was the moment that motivated Rubio to speak to Aníbal about me. I couldn’t even definitively say he did, no matter how many times I replayed that interaction or the one in the kitchen, trying to capture the exact expressions in his and Aníbal’s eyes when they landed on me. But that Wednesday, when I went to retrieve my list, Aníbal said something that put me on guard.

  “Twelve today,” he instructed, handing me the slip of paper. “Not too many for you, Verde, is it?”

  “No, sir,” I managed.

  “Good. Because after Gordito, some of us worried. The Priest, God rest his soul, he was worried as fuck about you, like a lamb in his flock. But me and Rubio, we were worried too.”

  “I’m fine,” I told him.

  “But that’s what we’re worried about, Verde!” he exclaimed, as if intervening with an alcoholic relative. “Gordito goes, the world caves in. The Priest goes, and you’re fine. You see why we’re concerned?”

  The experience was an out-of-body one. Some fight-or-flight mechanism switched on, and it was like I was observing myself from afar, evaluating if it was over or not, if I’d reached the end.

  “Well? Alleviate our worries, Verdecito.”

  “I can’t,” I told him.

  “You . . . can’t?”

  I shook my head. Swallowed. The moment at the Colonel’s dinner party when I feared I’d been caught came back to me. Numbly, preposterously, I thought: I went up the stairs. At the Colonel’s party, I saw the stairs, and I went up them.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m not really fine. Since the Priest was killed, I’ve been cleaning twice as much as usual.”

  “You’ve been . . . ? La puta madre, but the Priest was killed, Verde!”

  “I know. Rubio said the same. But I was a lamb of his flock, like you said. I can’t help thinking he’d want me to.”

  Aníbal assessed me for what fe
lt like centuries. Then pulled out the garbage bin from under his desk, shook his head, and spat.

  “Fucking sentimental types,” he said. And since he didn’t say anything else, I assumed I was dismissed. I went off with twisted relief to vaccinate the twelve names on my list.

  * * *

  Elizabeth wasn’t on it. That relieved me too. I needed to speak to someone, anyone, and she was the only person there with whom I believed I could.

  Not that I planned to tell her what had happened with Aníbal. But to sit with her, to feel, in some way, recognized—I still clung to that possibility, even if it had proved unattainable so far. I hadn’t made many more visits to her cell since the first, but enough that they’d become enmeshed in my rhythm, grown dependable. Perversely, it had helped with my credibility too; the perception that I was having my way with a prisoner and indulging my own animalistic desires put me more on their level.

  They’d moved her into Gordo’s cell after his transfer, and as I remembered well from watching him fix the radio, there was a functional bulb in it, meaning I could see her more clearly. The old bruises had blossomed into purples and blues, the newer injuries were still raw and red. Her limbs and face were bonier, her sharpened chin especially. It was as if Automotores had eaten the meat off her.

  The conversation was as one-sided and start-and-stop as usual. I resisted the urge to tell her that if she knew what was good for her, she’d be more talkative.

  Instead I wound up asking her, as I always did, if there was anything I could do. Typically she didn’t answer, but now she said, “Can you put me back in my old cell? There was a hole in the corner in that one.”

  I didn’t understand. “A hole in the corner?”

  “I have to call a guard to take me to the bathroom now. That gives them a reason to come in. Sometimes they don’t leave. Sometimes they take me and lie about where the toilet is and laugh. Or they don’t give me toilet paper and laugh. Then I have to leave it on myself. It smells just as bad on me as in the hole in the corner.”

  They’d picked up a high-level ERP operative named Juan Miguel Pereyra a few days earlier—high enough that the men had celebrated after his capture, uncorking a bottle of champagne in the kitchen; apparently he had ties to the ERP’s treasury and was quite the soldier to boot—and he inhabited Elizabeth’s old cell now. At least when he wasn’t hanging from the rafters—it was almost exclusively the way the picana was applied these days. They’d leave someone up there for hours, returning as the mood struck to continue the session. With Pereyra, whom they called negro de mierda because of his indigenous descent, the mood struck frequently and powerfully.

  “I can’t get you your old cell,” I told Elizabeth. “But I can try to get you a shower.”

  “I don’t want a shower,” she said. I didn’t ask her to explain.

  * * *

  When I got home that night, I called the Colonel. I asked if I could stop by the next day. Tomorrow was no good, he told me, and my heart snapped a little. Would the next day work? I said I guessed it would have to. He must have detected my desperation, since he muffled the receiver a moment to check with Mercedes, and then returned to say that dinner tomorrow was actually dandy. “Never a better day in all of 1976, Tomasito.”

  I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I saw him. It was an instinctual urge, as simple an equation as: I needed help; the Colonel could help me.

  I had the full day off. To kill time before dinner, I walked. It was humid and muggy for Buenos Aires in October, and I arrived sweaty.

  “You don’t look good, Tomasito,” the Colonel said on seeing me. “You’re all white. You need some blood in those veins. Good thing Mercedes is already working on the meat.”

  She gave me a kiss on the cheek before returning to the kitchen, apologizing that it was the housekeeper’s day off. Without asking, the Colonel poured me a Johnnie Walker with ice. I tasted little difference between that and his usual Chivas, but the Colonel treated it like it was far more refined. I supposed it was the English sound of the name, the elegant top-hatted man with the cane.

  He set up a game of chess without asking if I wanted that either. Taking black to give me the advantage, he grumbled disparagingly when I played the queen’s pawn opening—he preferred the freer, wilder board that came out of king’s pawn. “Joder, Tomasito,” he said. “You play it so safe.”

  I looked up. When I did, he was a ghost again and I was . . . whatever I was now.

  “Do I?” I asked him.

  “I concede the point,” he said. “Perhaps you overcompensate sometimes.”

  The grandfather clock that had been ticking tiredly was suddenly silent, and the curtain at the open window no longer fluttered in the breeze.

  “Hell freezes over,” the Colonel said. “Another good one, no?”

  On that I didn’t comment. “We’re nearing the end, aren’t we?”

  “Depends how you look at it. You could also say you’re nearing the beginning, no? Of the rest of your life?”

  “It doesn’t feel like it,” I said.

  “No. The cross of the matter, as they say in your language. Will what happens shortly be the end or the beginning of Señor Tomasito Shore? Wait—is it cross? Or crux? At any rate, you understand.”

  Tick . . . tock. Tick . . . tock. The clock slowly started back up, as if yawning itself awake.

  “I’m afraid,” I told him.

  “That’s just the memory talking.” The Colonel laughed. “Don’t worry, Tomasito. Sometimes you overcompensate, as discussed.”

  He nodded to the board, and when I glanced back down, we were our 1976 incarnations again, the spring air drifting past our necks once more.

  We resumed playing, and soon he was poking holes in my defenses. My wall of pawns began to leak, and he sacrificed a knight I took without thinking.

  “You’re distracted,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Please, Tomás, what could you be sorry about? I’m winning!”

  The Colonel was always winning. I’d come close over the years but had never beaten him. A few moves later, I discerned from the position I wouldn’t win this game either, and I knocked over my king in resignation.

  The Colonel was already resetting the board. “Is Aníbal taking care of you?” he asked suddenly.

  It was the opening I’d come seeking, but I was still surprised to get it. Barely anyone even asked me how I was anymore.

  “He says he worries about me,” I answered.

  “Well, that’s good, better than his not worrying about you, no? I’ll give him a call, though. Say it seems he’s working you too hard.”

  “You probably shouldn’t,” I said. Best case: like Rubio, Aníbal would conclude I was soft. Worst case: he’d conclude I was scared and wonder why.

  “Please, Tomás, are you concerned about my lack of subtlety? The beauty of not having any is that no one notices when you lack it. The truth is, I didn’t know it would be such a hard place to work. Don’t get me wrong! I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But I didn’t know they’d wear you so thin. I’ll give Aníbal a call, make sure he’s treating you well.”

  I didn’t want Aníbal to treat me well. I didn’t want him to treat me at all. I almost said so; variations of the statement knocked about my mind: I just want out, Colonel. I just need to get away—from Automotores, Argentina, everything. I just need your help.

  But I said nothing. I don’t know why. Not even by reliving it, in the excruciating manner that I relived our conversation in Parada Norte, could I figure it out. Mercedes came, true, called us to the dining room a few minutes later and put an end to the exchange. But before that, in some covert chamber of my unconscious, it had already been decided: I was going nowhere. I would not ask for help. I’ve relitigated the moment many times since, turning over possible explanations—I still clung to Isabel, to my role in the
fight against oppression, to my worries over the repercussions, to my fear more generally, to the country, to my gnarled roots and home in it, to something beyond all this, to fate or purpose or some more numinous force I lack conception of—and the only satisfactory answer I could pluck out of that messy heap of contingency was that the opportunity had already slipped.

  We sat down to dinner. The steak was wonderful, but I couldn’t eat. The wine was full-bodied and almost too flavorful for my palate as well. I longed for the burn of the Johnnie Walker.

  “Your mother must miss you, Tomás,” Mercedes said at one point. She couldn’t tell me to eat my food, but I caught her glancing at it as if she wished she could—have a son to scold and fuss over, I mean. “Do you call her enough?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “That’s the problem these days. Family has gone by the wayside.”

  “Everything has gone by the wayside,” the Colonel said.

  She rolled her eyes at him for me to see. “He likes putting on a show for you. We both do, truth be told. But call your mother more, Tomás. She must be worried sick. I know I would be.”

  * * *

  I returned to work the next day. Avoided Aníbal in case the Colonel had called him, and stuck to the cells and the torture room. I hadn’t lied when I told him I was cleaning twice as much as usual since the Priest was killed.

  Rubio spotted me at it again late that morning. I gave my soap bucket an anxious glance before turning to him.

  “Aníbal wants you to make him a sandwich,” Rubio informed me.

  “What?”

  “You’re so good at the womanly stuff. Figures you can make him a pretty good sandwich too.”

  “Where’s the Gringo?” The Gringo was the closest thing we had to a cook in the place, often bringing leftovers or making snacks for the rest of us to pick at.