I asked myself what I was doing. Reprimanded myself for wasting precious time. But time just didn’t feel that precious to me anymore.
* * *
Lunch. It was like breakfast except that I didn’t lie when my mother asked me if I’d had a good time with Pablito and the others. “I didn’t end up seeing them,” I told her, to a concerned frown. “I just walked around. Revisited places from when I was a kid.”
“You miss it?” she said a bit hopefully, and when I shrugged in reply, “No one likes getting older.” She laughed, but with a teary sniffle. “I can’t stand it for you. All this—it’s no way to grow up.”
“Don’t worry, Mami,” I assured her. “I’ll be fine.” She nodded and blew her nose. Then she cleared our plates and washed them, and I told her I ought to be heading off soon. “Finals,” I said again, despite myself.
“Do you want to take the car? I’m not using it. You should take it. Take it,” she insisted, and knowing she’d keep pleading until I relented, I agreed. She went to get the keys from the entry table and I followed her, leaving her little choice but to walk me out.
“I love you,” I said, in the half-muttered way I always said it on the phone. “Take care of yourself, Mami. Talk soon.”
“Thanks for coming,” she said from the doorway, her voice shy, afraid to show too much affection. “You didn’t last time.”
“What?”
“Last time,” she repeated. “You didn’t come see me. At the end.”
It was like a switch that had toggled on, or one of those flashes in a dream when you realize you’re in one before the awareness sputters out completely. In ’76, I recalled, I’d stared at the departures board at Constitución—Neuquén, Catamarca, Iguazú—and decided that my name would probably be flagged at the borders. Then I’d considered La Plata. But I was afraid I’d cause my mother more worry than relief if I came, and I ultimately resolved to go back to the pensión and sleep, think it all through with a fresh mind in the morning. On waking, other concerns took over—should I return to Automotores? call the Colonel? seek out Isabel?—and I didn’t consider going back to La Plata again.
I didn’t call her from Rome at first either. I was too ashamed, and by the time I got through two weeks later, after a series of unavailable long-distance lines and busy signals, a neighbor answered. She’d volunteered to help clear out the house after my mother overdosed on sleeping pills. An accident, she said, but I doubted it, and those doubts contributed to my almost having a similar “accident” of my own with the Colonel’s revolver.
I looked at my mother on the threshold of our narrow little house now and saw her changed: the skeletal features, the stooped back, the general shrunkenness. The bags under her eyes, so dark they looked like bruises, black sockets in a wizened skull.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said. “But you better go. Otherwise I may not want you to.” She closed the door, and I heard the light click of the lock shutting her inside.
Immersed again in the calm, homey quiet of the neighborhood and the bright, clean summer air, I went to the curb and got into my mother’s car. It was just a silver Peugeot sedan, nothing special. But at the moment my gratitude was so great that I had to clear my watering eyes before I could start the engine for the trip back to Buenos Aires.
TWENTY
There was something about driving, the clichéd sense of freedom I attached to it growing up, perhaps, that made me feel calmer, more in control. The traffic was light and flowing at first, and I felt, if not quite like I could go anywhere, that at least there were paths still open to me, corners to be turned, however few. Even when the road slowed, and congestion and police lights up ahead suggested an ID check, I decelerated with the detached thought that to many, this was probably the dictatorship’s biggest fault—shitty commutes. I didn’t even feel relieved when I discovered it was just another car wreck.
It wasn’t my intention to continue to Villa Ballester. But by the time I crossed Chacabuco Park, it seemed natural to keep going. Pausing only to study my mother’s map and refuel when I got lost in Villa Devoto, I went from Avenida San Martín to Avenida General Paz to who knows how many other streets with military namesakes, until I reached Calle 25 de Mayo.
I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I saw them. The vague notion of a warning flitted through my mind, telling them they were in danger. Though what they were in danger of—I couldn’t go so far as to articulate that. There’d been many times when the goings-on at Automotores felt behind a curtain, but none quite like this. I imagined more interviews with Rubio, with Aníbal, maybe a call to the Colonel to double-check my background. Or maybe they didn’t need to go through all that, maybe they already had me pinned, and were simply waiting for me to return to my pensión.
The more difficult warning to articulate, probably: they might be in danger of me.
* * *
As I got closer, I was struck by the unpleasantness of the neighborhood, how downtrodden it looked in the evening light. Uncollected garbage, mangy mutts and locals peering at my car suspiciously whenever I slowed at an intersection. I’d barely seen any of this the last time I was here, since I’d been staring at my feet as instructed, and the street itself seemed impossible to find. I zigzagged, doubled back, doubled back again. When I pulled up at their corner at last, I remembered with surging anxiety that I wasn’t supposed to be there, to know where they lived. The Gringo had told me that Montoneros disappeared their own just as the military did when they learned of traitors, that they even held their own mock trials before executing them.
From the curb, I saw the landlady’s dog in her yard. Just a scraggly collie with a chew toy, nothing to be intimidated by. But the prospect of its high-pitched yelp made me hesitate, the tingly certainty that it would receive me like an intruder. When I got out, though, it remained silent, and as I headed down the driveway, it barely raised its head from its slobbery toy.
The sense of trespass lingered, the pure, hazy wrongness. The unmown grass seemed taller and the Fiat rusty, not the smooth, skylike turquoise I remembered. The shutter on the barred window beside the front door was open, which was odder still. And though I formed a loose, clammy fist in my pocket to knock, I found myself leaning over for a look inside instead.
The main room was empty. But I heard their voices drifting out of the bedroom—his husky laugh, her distinct snort—and, without contemplating what I was doing, I squeezed my way around the side of the house. The shutters of the bedroom window hung wide open too.
There was no nightstand, only a shadeless lamp on the floor where one should have been. It was off, and with dusk swiftly descending, I don’t know how I made them out. They were lying naked on the mattress, only halfway under the sheets—her breasts and torso, his left arm and leg. Cigarette cartons and gold-encased bullets were strewn about them, as if during the work of packing the latter into the former they’d gotten distracted. Though how they could have been so distracted as to do so naked, with the shutters open—it was either a cosmic jape at my expense or, after Nerea and everything else, they’d thrown caution to the wind with the same abandon I had.
Isabel was cackling, her head on the pillow, while Gustavo hovered over her. “What’s so funny, love?” he asked.
“This, no? I have bullets in my hair and I’ve never been so happy.”
I looked away. At the discolored panels over the window, a broad blank stretch of wall where the beige paint had been scratched off. The pipe running up the side of the house and the stuffed gutter overhead, the graying, soupy sky. It was so ugly, all of it. Yet Isabel found happiness in it, beauty. I couldn’t remember her ever saying, amid the branches of the Bosques or the sands of Pinamar, that she was happy with me.
“You should hurry up with this whole pregnant thing,” Gustavo said.
“You should hurry up with this pregnant thing,” Isabel answered, and my gaze drifted back right
in time to catch her moving Gustavo’s hand farther down. He laughed.
“A couple weeks ago you almost leave me, and now you want to have babies?”
“Wasn’t it more like a couple months?”
“I don’t think that’s the point.”
“No? What is the point?”
“I just want to make sure you know what you want,” Gustavo said.
“Who the fuck knows that?” Isabel replied.
Gustavo lay back on his side of the bed and sighed, and I thought: Oh, to be able to simply sigh at something like that.
“You remember why I almost left you, Gusti?”
“Elba Hilda Gaudio?”
“No.”
“Tomás Orilla?”
“No.”
“Isabel Aroztegui?”
She laughed. “Yes. Isabel Aroztegui. I worried you wanted some other version of her, a lie.”
“Like Tomás, you mean. Any word from him, by the way?”
She shook her head, sending several bullet casings sliding off the pillow. “I should check the messages. I have to touch base with Miguel about the investigation into that priest anyway.”
Who was Miguel? Just another Tomás at another detention center? Or maybe, I thought sadly, Tomás was just another Miguel.
“Poor guy,” Gustavo said.
“Miguel?”
“No. Not Miguel.”
I half expected them to glance out the window and spot me, as if they knew I’d been there the whole time. But they didn’t, and it seemed fitting, another sign that I was merely background to them, barely there at all.
“What was it you said, Gusti? He’d take me as I am, never even blink?”
“He’d never open his eyes, I said.”
I remembered the night she came to my pensión, her reference to an argument with Gustavo and that same name, Elba Hilda Gaudio. The drunken talk of lies and acceptance and the backdrop of her fear of abandonment, the steadfast childhood comfort I’d always provided. My conversation with her in the back of their Fiat a month later, when she told me to open my eyes.
“My eyes, though,” Gustavo said, pinching the sheet around her collarbone and pulling it slowly down to her belly button. “You have no idea how open they are.”
She started laughing again. “Not the point either, Gusti.”
“Since when do you care so much what the point of anything is?” he said, taking in the rest of her body, drinking in the sight as if there were no more relevant point than that. “If we have a boy, should we name him Juan like everyone else?”
“Shit, Gusti. This isn’t about Perón for us.”
“Fine, what’s it about?”
“Something bigger, no? Perón can go to hell. Besides, I think if we have a boy, he should be Guido. That way I can have my Gusti, my Guti, and my Guido. Sounds nice, no?”
“Sounds like a boludez,” Gustavo said affectionately. “Sometimes, Isa, I do wonder about all that happiness of yours here. Is it me, the cause, or just the bullets in your hair?”
“What’ll make me really happy is when the bullets are in someone else’s hair,” she said, rolling toward him and holding her fist over his lap. It opened, and gold bullet casings dropped onto him like rain.
“I’ve created a monster,” he said.
“No,” Isabel said, bending to kiss him. “You’ve set one free.”
I looked away again. Turned entirely, to stare at the fence I was pressed against, the dull metal lattice with twigs and ivy leaves poking through. At the neighbor’s house beyond the bramble, the linden tree that jutted out from the garden. I was thankful not to be able to smell it from here.
Less carefully than I should have, I stepped past the window and curled back around the house. As I made my way down the driveway this time, the landlady’s farce of a watchdog did bark—a violent, toothy yap—but I didn’t care. I got into the car and, after several minutes with my elbows propped up on the wheel and my head in my wet hands, I put the key in the ignition.
* * *
There was heavy traffic on the way back, and since I also had to find parking, it was almost two hours before I made it to my pensión. On entering, I called the man at the locutorio. Told him it was Pingüino and asked if I had any messages.
I did. Señora Amarga had called to say she heard the auto-repair shop was closing and she wondered if there were plans to open another location. Also, there was going to be an asado Tuesday night, and if I needed a ride, she could give me one. Just let her know.
“Well,” the locutorio man said in his perfunctory way afterward. “Want me to let her know?” And when I still didn’t answer, “Well? Señor Pingüino?”
“No,” I said, then corrected myself. “Yes. Tell her I got another car. I don’t need a ride.”
I could almost hear him shrug as he hung up, leaving the drone of the dial tone in my ear. I went upstairs, indulged in my ritual of obliterating intoxication, and lay on my bed in my clothes until I fell asleep.
TWENTY-ONE
On Monday I woke early. I hadn’t pulled down the blinds, and though my window was porthole-sized and faced another building, which shut out most of the sunlight, it was still bright enough to feel sharp and painful against my eyelids.
I sat up. Shifted so my feet were on the floor. Then got to my knees and pulled out my suitcase. I’d started using it to keep my savings—torture was unsurprisingly a cash business—and with the inflation, they took up space. I counted about thirty thousand pesos. A year or two ago, that would have amounted to six thousand dollars, more than enough for an international flight. Now it was worth less than twenty.
I went downstairs. After waiting for the phone to be freed up, I dialed the Colonel.
“Is he there?” I asked, as soon as Mercedes picked up.
“He’s at work, Tomás. The man does work, believe it or not. Is something wrong?”
I tried to picture her: that neat bun of silver-streaked hair, her expert application of eyeliner. Nothing ever seemed to be wrong with Mercedes.
“Can you tell him to call me? I’d just—I’d like to see him,” I floundered. “I haven’t in a while.”
“We had you over for dinner just last month.”
It felt like ages ago.
I heard something in the background—long and strident, like a baby’s cry. “Sorry, Tomás, I have some people over. Having . . . breakfast,” she said, in a last-minute way, as if she’d just remembered the name of the meal.
“That’s okay. I have to go anyway,” I said. “Thanks for giving him the message, Mercedes.” I waited a minute after hanging up in case she called back out of concern. But she never did.
* * *
I returned to my room. To my unmade bed. I hadn’t put my suitcase away or even closed it—the cash spread along its bottom would have been glaringly visible to anyone coming in—and I kicked it carelessly back into its hiding place.
Aníbal had said not to come to work until Tuesday, but I decided to go in anyway. I figured I’d look more innocent if I showed up to help—in fact, I should have gone in early, or the day before. Besides, I had nowhere else to go and, I reasoned contradictorily, it was probably too late to save myself anyway.
On the train platform, I found myself pacing; it was the first time I’d ever wanted the commute to go faster. But after I got on, I was hit with a variation of the usual terror. The dingy backsides of buildings, the sweep of greenery flying past in that unstoppable way. The prospect of visiting the scene of my crime, so to speak—it felt like diving straight into a monster’s hungry mouth.
When we reached the first stop and the train doors sprang open, I told myself to get off. But the pole felt liquid and cool in my hand, weirdly sedating. Like I imagined a syringe full of sodium pentothal would feel.
The doors opened and closed at Flores, and ag
ain I just stood there. Only when the train reached Floresta was I able to move. The idea that I was walking into their arms hadn’t left me. But I walked the four blocks to Automotores nonetheless.
* * *
There was no sign of anything unusual outside. The guard in the booth—a regular in the rotation, though his wariness was new—accepted my mumbled “sesame” without comment. I took the half-wood, half-marble staircase upstairs, spotting a nick in one of the steps from where Ramírez must have shot and missed.
Halfway up, I started to hear the bustle—crinkling garbage bags, what sounded like a frantically buzzing shredder. It was coming from Aníbal’s office, but the door was closed, and I continued into the kitchen. The drawers and cupboards were all thrown open and plundered-looking.
More startling: the cells were unoccupied. Even the common one was vacant, revealing stained, muddy-brown sections of floor. I remembered Isabel’s message for me at the locutorio: she had heard the “auto-repair shop” was shutting down.
In the torture room, I found the Gringo, kneeling in the corner with his ass crack showing under his strained Hawaiian button-down. “Mierda, carajo,” he was muttering as he struggled with the picana’s electrical cord, evidently trying to work it free from the socket. “La puta que lo . . .”
“Carlitos,” I called.
He spun around. Grinned his childlike grin and stood. “Verde!” he shouted happily, brushing his knees off. “I’ll just leave the thing jammed. Who cares, right? It’s not like these things are actual fucking cattle prods anyway, no one would wonder what it’s doing in a garage instead of on a farm.” He paused and furrowed his bushy eyebrows. “Say, Verde, didn’t you have the day off? What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
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