Hades, Argentina

by Daniel Loedel

  “Having his own lunch,” Rubio said. “Look, Aníbal asked for you to make him a sandwich. Are you going to or not?”

  I didn’t bother confirming that I would. I just went to the kitchen, to have my moment of panic there.

  Aníbal had never asked me to make him a sandwich. For that reason alone, the request seemed ominous. The routine at Automotores, grim as it was, could be relied upon. You could steel yourself for certain guards’ sessions, for night shifts, for Wednesdays. But this was a Saturday at noon, and a departure. Again and again I kept thinking: Aníbal has never asked me to make him a sandwich.

  I surveyed the kitchen, my memory as well. I recalled Aníbal saying there was an art to mayo, the proportions—or had that been the Gringo? Best to trust my instincts, not doubt myself. I tremblingly pulled the refrigerator door open and took out the jar. Scrounged for cheese—there were some cheddar slices I could use—and ham. Cured would be better, but the only kind in there had been cooked and saran-wrapped. It appeared pink and soggy when I removed it.

  Bread. Baguette would be ideal, but of course we didn’t have any of that either, and I cursed the ever-munching Gringo under my breath. Swung open a cabinet—there was American Wonder Bread, it would have to do. We had no toaster. How could Automotores not have a fucking toaster?

  Shaking, smelling the whiskey in my pores, and barely able to steady my butter knife, I tried to coat the bread with a fine layer of mayo. But I lost control and slathered so much on I had to get a napkin and—looking over my shoulder to make sure Rubio wasn’t spying, ready to pounce on my tremors—dab it clean and try again. The ham followed, then the cheese. Everything felt so wet and gummy and wrong. Artificial, like rubber. How would Aníbal eat this? He’d throw it back at me and say I wasn’t good for anything, I couldn’t even do my job without tattling to the Colonel about it. Or worse, without tattling to the Montoneros.

  I put the sandwich on a plate. Considered cutting it into two rectangles and opted for two triangles instead. Prepared to take it to Aníbal’s office before remembering I should bring a napkin too. I got another and, staring at the sad, sodden meal in my hands, breathed and headed down the hall.

  Aníbal didn’t look up when I entered. Didn’t speak either, at first. I set his lunch on the desk and made to leave, when he said, “Did you suck the Colonel’s cock, Verde?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He picked up one half of the sandwich and turned it in his hand, inspecting it as if to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. He bit into it and chewed.

  “When he asked me to give you a job, he asked me not to give you certain kinds. And now we’re down two men, and I’m asking myself how to make up for it.”

  I didn’t answer. Don’t until you know if the Colonel called him, I ordered myself. Prepare excuses: You didn’t ask him to, you don’t feel overworked. You’re willing to do whatever’s needed.

  “You wouldn’t be willing to pick up the slack, would you, Verde? Put in some hours with the picana?”

  I swallowed the way I did so often in his presence. Like my conscience was creeping up my throat, a kind of moral acid I felt an urge to puke out. Wrong answers were in it too, so many wrong, impossible answers.

  The right one was stuck as well, though: I’m willing to do whatever’s needed.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think so,” I said. “I’d understand if you needed to fire me.”

  “Fire you! La puta que lo parió, we’re down two men, Verde. And you don’t just get a fucking severance package from this kind of work, you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” I told him. And again, before I could catch myself, “I’m sorry.”

  He finished the first half of his sandwich, picked up the other. Examined it as before, but with repugnance on his face.

  “You know why I trusted you, Verde?” Aníbal said. I shook my head as casually as I could. “The Colonel’s vouching for you, sure. But truthfully, I’d trust just about anyone who worked here, who saw what went on. Do you know what I mean?”

  I told him I did; I knew what he meant.

  He took another bite and licked his lips.

  “Fire you,” he repeated, with his booming, full-bellied laugh. “No, Verdecito. In fact, you get a promotion. Congratulations. On top of your other responsibilities, you’re Automotores’ new chef.”

  * * *

  My dreams the next few nights all played on the theme of my new position: In one I was stooped over a bubbling cauldron, stirring soaked, steaming blindfolds; I wasn’t sure whether I was cleaning them or preparing them to eat or—this seemed likeliest, based on the internal logic of the nightmare—both. In another, I was in Gordo’s old cell, with him handing me the battered radio parts and a toolbox saying he didn’t know the recipe, and I, feeling guilty and dismayed, had to confess I didn’t either.

  In the last and most horrid, I was a waiter at Parada Norte, serving a table at which sat the Colonel, Isabel, and my mother. I kept getting their orders wrong, and despite their low voices when I turned my back, catching snatches about my incompetence, my failures.

  On the way to the kitchen, I passed the Priest. He was playing the bandoneón, a yellow tulip in place of the classic red rose on the breast of his cassock, and singing, his whispery, feminine voice serenely beautiful. It was Gardel. In “La Canción de Buenos Aires,” he prayed for the cry of the bandoneón to play at the end of his life, and in “Silencio” he intoned again and again about silence in the night. Worst of all, in the chipper ditty of “Caminito,” he chimed: Una sombra ya pronto serás, una sombra lo mismo que yo.

  A shadow you’ll soon be, a shadow just like me.

  SIXTEEN

  I woke from the last of these dreams in a twin bed I thought must be mine at the pensión. But in the moonlight from the window I realized the room was much bigger. Empty, well-made beds with crisp, tightly tucked-in sheets lined the walls. It had to be a military barracks.

  I went out to the hallway. The Colonel was standing several doors down, gazing into a room. His office, I gathered, judging from the framed commendations and the bar with his Chivas and Johnnie Walker. But it was unornamented for his taste, had a characterless feel: the blank walls, the cushionless chairs, the solitary jade plant on the windowsill and the lack of a bookshelf. The younger version of him was sitting on the desk, legs dangling freely before an officer who was younger still. His cheeks were clean, his hair longish and slightly glistening, as if he’d recently showered. They were laughing over whiskeys that hovered by their lips.

  “Ah,” my version of the Colonel said, like he’d just taken a delectable sip of the liquor himself. “Beautiful, no?”

  “Did this happen?” I asked.

  “It could have.”

  I recalled my belief that the Colonel went to the men’s club in La Plata mainly for the chess. Also those words of Aníbal’s: Did you suck the Colonel’s cock, Verde?

  “Why didn’t it?”

  The two specters clinked glasses, ice tinkling, and the Colonel’s bushy mustache crawled up over the most earnest smile I’d ever seen on him. “To subversion,” he toasted.

  “Because of that,” his ghost told me. “My position, the army, all those Catholic farts around it. The definition of subversive got pretty bad, you remember.”

  The younger officer leaned in to kiss the Colonel’s ear, his cheek reddening. “To love, boludo,” he replied.

  “That too,” the Colonel said to me. “Mercedes and I. We really did love each other, in our way.”

  “Did she know?”

  “She looked away. Same as with everything else in our marriage—she looked away until she didn’t. And when she stopped, it wasn’t because of any handsome young stallion, I can assure you. It was my other faults as a husband. As a person, I mean.”

  “And him?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “No idea. We only ever
flirted. Then there was a bit of a reshuffle in the army in ’77, and, well. Let’s just say I hope he still only ever flirted.” The Colonel gave me an elbow tap to signify we were moving on, and led me down a nearby staircase. “You can try to return the favor someday and sort out all my might-have-beens if you want. But right now, Señor Shore, we’re trying to sort out yours.”

  We emerged in the yard of a base that could have been the ESMA’s gargantuan older brother: neoclassical white buildings separated by large, well-groomed pastures, a webby network of runways filled with jets and helicopters. The sky above was cloudless and peppered with stars, and the big, lush palms were moist enough to send shimmers of reflections back like ponds.

  The scene’s splendor was marred only by the thick, smelly air, reminiscent of my chemistry labs, where steam rose and objects caught fire. Fabric in this case? Hair maybe? It stung my nostrils, whatever it was.

  “Nearly as beautiful,” the Colonel said. “I didn’t stay many nights here, but when I did—ah! Those stars. Everything else, war and the rest, it all seemed so small by comparison.”

  “The School of the Americas?” I asked, because of those large, tropical palms, that heavy air suggestive of the Caribbean. Though it had been located in Panama, not Argentina, the American base certainly had a history hellish enough to belong here; it had trained not only the Colonel in the CIA’s preferred techniques for quashing subversion, I knew from the Gringo, but some of the bloodiest rulers across all of South and Central America.

  “No, alas,” the Colonel said. “This is an ugly desert compared to the School of the Americas. The school was like a resort, a resort in the jungle on a beautiful lake. If you didn’t mind the mosquitoes or the rather long torture manuals they made you read, it was as nice as any American university, or so I believed. Stanford was the one I compared it to in my imagination—ever been there? I heard when I was up above that they’d moved the School of the Americas to Fort Benning, in Georgia. A shame, but probably still nice, no?”

  He sounded disillusioned.

  “No, alas,” he repeated, when I failed to answer. “This is Campo de Mayo. I oversaw operations here for a time.” He sniffed with regained delight. “Ah, the smell of hellfire . . .”

  “That’s bodies burning,” I told him. The chemicals and hair—suddenly the source of that acrid odor had become clear to me.

  “Yes, well, I never understood why it was supposed to smell like sulfur, but I wasn’t a good Catholic boy, so what do I know?”

  The only other animate being on the grounds was a dog. Muscled and rangy, some kind of pit-bull mix. It was sitting just off the runway, chewing a long, dirty bone, and as we neared, I was able to discern what kind: a human femur.

  “We loved these beasts,” the Colonel said. “We really did. The treats we gave them! Real treats, I mean, not . . . this. We played Frisbee with them too. Isn’t that amazing? We’d feed them corpses, then throw the Frisbee with them.”

  I watched the dog work the bone. “Amazing,” I said.

  “Does it seem like a contradiction to you, that we could be so good to dogs and so bad to people?”

  “You could be good to people and bad to them too,” I said.

  “It’s true. Like I was with you. But do you know what I think? Usually we speak of people doing good to make up for the bad—we talked about ourselves doing just that. But what if we have it reversed? I wonder if I didn’t do some of the good I did, with you and others, my wife, for example, for the sake of the bad. To store up a kind of moral credit, as it were, before I returned to work. Take my identity off like a suit, put it in the closet for a time, and recharge before wearing it again. Does that make any sense?”

  It did, but I said no.

  The Colonel smiled. “Señor Shore, do not pretend to be so sure of yourself. You have several suits in that closet yourself.”

  “I don’t own any suits,” I said.

  “So literal. Your translations must be tedious.”

  “The texts themselves are tedious.”

  “In any case,” the Colonel continued, and we did too, strolling the base like a park, taking in the sights, “what I guess I’m really saying is I’m not all that bad. I did enjoy badness sometimes, I admit. But sometimes it got tiring.”

  “The mere fact that you know what you did was bad would suggest you aren’t.”

  “Would it, though? That’s giving humans a lot of credit, I think. I saw it in my men, sometimes they loved doing a thing even more because they knew it was bad. Sure, some told themselves the woman they raped in detention deserved it. But most, even if they told themselves that, they weren’t raping out of a sense of justice, I can assure you. Not even brute animal savagery. You remember how it was.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Take Triste. We overlapped here—I got him his transfer out of Automotores. A sweetheart really, Triste. And not the only one under my supervision either. Some of the worst, most terrible torturers—they were actually the most fragile of men. So insecure. Little arms, many of them, little skinny arms like mine. Outside of a detention center, I wonder if they could have killed a fly. But inside—something was set free in them. In all of us. No one remained innocent in the orbit of such a place.”

  As we neared the end of the runway, I realized we were in fact in something of a park—an amusement park. The tops of rides poked out of a valley below like skyscrapers in a madcap city. One—a Ferris wheel—rose up to where the pavement and moonlight stopped and the earth broke off like a cliff. The highest cart was level with us, its door open.

  I smiled fondly, despite everything.

  “You don’t strike me much as the roller coaster type, Tomás,” the Colonel said.

  “I’m not—scared of heights. But Isabel—I remember her telling me in Pinamar about the rides in Coney Island, how much she loved them. That moment right at the top, before the plunge. She wasn’t scared of anything.”

  “Hmm,” the Colonel murmured. “Rather naive, don’t you think, Señor Shore?”

  “You mean everyone’s scared of something?”

  “I mean she was scared. Her love of roller coasters and gunfights and all that flailing after a meaningful life? Who cares about that if not for the fear that it’ll end? Oh, I’m sure you’ve drawn comfort over the years from the idea that she wasn’t, that she was ready for her death. Made it easier for you to swallow, no? If it was her choice what happened, if she wouldn’t have had it any other way? But there always are. Other ways, other choices. Other suits in a person’s closet, if you like.”

  I didn’t like it. Hadn’t he said just the reverse when we started out on this journey, in the cemetery? Why did it feel like he—like everything—was going in circles? I gazed at the Ferris wheel, as if it were there solely to emphasize that fact.

  “You’re saying I didn’t know her really?”

  “I’m saying the maze is complicated. This or that, either or—it’s not that simple, with life or with people.”

  Big red swervy letters on the door of the cart read italpark. A misleading name: it was an attraction in Buenos Aires, not in Italy, and if it meant anything to Isabel, she’d never told me about it.

  “Do you know what this was to her?” I asked.

  “I know what it is to you. How’d you say she put it? The moment at the top, before the plunge?”

  “Plunge into what?”

  “Let me tell you something, Señor Shore. For thousands of years human beings have been trying to come and go from the underworld. Usually it’s to bring back the dead. Gilgamesh, Orpheus, who knows how many others. Sure, the landscape would have been different for them, the symbols, they’d probably have squinted through proper hellish gates instead of Argentine steakhouses and seen three-headed dogs and better demons than the likes of me and Aníbal Gordon. But the quest? The outcome? The same, I’m sure. They’d come back wi
th ghosts or wisdom or nothing at all. The flimsy stuff of loopholes, in any case, the wispy sort of phantoms we all come back as. Life is where you save lives, Tomás. With death, it’s more of a give-and-take.”

  “Plunge into what, Colonel?” I repeated, tired of all his dancing around.

  “I told you. What could have been is the underside of what was. What happened and what might have happened—flip sides of the same coin. I’ve been taking you through each of your tosses, as it were. Most you don’t really wish landed differently. But there’s at least one I know you’ve dreamed for ten years of throwing again . . .”

  I shook my head in annoyance. Stepped into the cart and waited for him to follow.

  He didn’t.

  “Aren’t you coming? We have to get to the underside of whatever the fuck.”

  The Colonel sighed regretfully. “You have to go your own way, Tomasito. My proverbial coin—you have to toss it yourself.”

  “You and your proverbs,” I said. “That’s all you have to offer, isn’t it?”

  “Not all,” he answered. “I gave you my revolver too.”

  My hand went instinctively to my lower back. The gun was tucked into my belt, the way I’d worn it during the few periods when I did.

  “Tom, why do you have this?” I suddenly recalled Claire asking me, dangling the revolver from her pinkie like she was afraid to get fingerprints on it. She’d come over to help me pack my things before I moved into her apartment, and had been digging through bags stuffed with miscellany like a giddy child digging for treasure.

  “The Colonel gave it to me in ’76,” I told her, “for protection.”

  “And do you still feel you need protection?” she asked. She’d worked so hard to convince me I had a future. It was like a personal project for her, outlining all those shimmery years it supposedly had in store for me. “Do you need this kind of protection?” When I didn’t answer, she carefully put the revolver down on the linoleum floor and said, “I won’t have you killing yourself in my apartment, Tom.”