Hades, Argentina

by Daniel Loedel

  “Cleaning up. Aw, what is it, Verde?” he said, as if to a downcast child. “Feeling left out?”

  I glanced around the room. The radio remained, along with the picana and the wire mesh table. But the defibrillator and the rest of my supplies were gone.

  “The center’s closing?” I asked.

  “Gang’s breaking up too, at least for a bit, till we get settled. Club Atlético for me. Not sure what’s happening to you non-army types . . .” He trailed off awkwardly.

  “Is Aníbal here? Rubio?”

  The Gringo shook his head. “Just me and the SIDE folks. Don’t get the impression they’re too thrilled about the situation.”

  He gestured over my shoulder, and I saw one of them peering from the far end of the hall, his features indistinct despite the light from the terrace. He stared a moment longer, then withdrew.

  “Do you need help?” I asked the Gringo.

  “No. Thanks, Verde,” he said kindly. “We got it. Mostly throwing shit away, not your kind of thing. Doesn’t actually get cleaned up, you know?”

  I considered the random, missed items I’d seen strewn about the hallway: cigarette butts, towels, pencils, a syringe. No documents or blindfolds or anything else that could directly give away what went on here, and I felt momentarily reassured by the Gringo’s explanation. But then I remembered that no one had asked me to help.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me. “I’m sure somebody will be in touch with you soon.”

  I nodded. I felt sure of that also.

  * * *

  It was the same question when I left: what to do. Same pendulum too, from panic to indifference, desperate certainty to complete bewilderment. Though the arcs were less definite than that, really, more that of a string, or a yellowed, wavering blade of grass.

  I took the train to my stop and continued toward the university. It occurred to me I had an organic chemistry class that afternoon. I hadn’t attended classes in weeks, but the droning of a lecture appealed to me at that juncture, as did the complicated molecular formulas that used to put me to sleep. On arriving, though, I found the classroom closed—finals, a reality I’d forgotten after lying to my mother. Since there was nothing else for me to do there, I grabbed some empanadas and headed back like a yo-yo to my pensión.

  On my way upstairs, I passed Beatriz, who told me, “Someone came by looking for you an hour ago. Rodrigo?”

  “Rodrigo?” I repeated. It rang no bells. “Not Felipe? Or Gustavo?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe it was Gustavo.”

  Could Isabel really have been alarmed enough by my message the night before to send Gustavo?

  “He just came and left?” I asked.

  She shrugged again. “Said he’d be back.”

  I took my food to my room and ate on the bed with the door closed, remembering meals I’d made at Automotores, almost missing those duties. At least I’d known how I was supposed to fill the time then.

  No word from the Colonel. Only, possibly, from Gustavo. I could check at the locutorio to see if Isabel had left another message, but the truth was, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to talk to Gustavo either. I didn’t ask myself why, merely thought again: Let me go.

  Throwing away the last of my empanadas, I went back out to take another walk.

  * * *

  The city was quiet, almost like a Sunday, with everyone at family dinners or recovering from the weekend. Few people were about, even in the usually busy downtown areas. Buenos Aires never had a real curfew during the dictatorship, but that night it felt like it did.

  My mind was quiet too. Empty, but largely impenetrable: neither the pair of nuns in angelic flowing white habits nor the old man chasing the teenager who’d stolen his wallet made much of an impression. I batted away any reflection I didn’t wish to have: Why didn’t I get back to Isabel? Give them my warning? Was I really safer from kidnapping in the streets than at home? Instead, I wound up in much narrower lanes of rumination: the ballooning exchange rate and its accompanying, tedious calculations; whom I could talk to about going abroad (Beatriz was Colombian, remember?); how I’d deal with my course credits (I’d have to take this year over again, maybe previous ones too, if I went to a country with different medical requirements). The most substantial question I tackled—fleetingly, without answer—was how, even if I could afford a plane ticket, I could possibly afford life wherever it took me.

  The wind on wide avenues, the coppery glow of the streetlights—they made me feel small and alone, removed from everything. Like the center of the world was elsewhere. I remembered Isabel, returning to Pinamar after one of her summers in New York, explaining what was so magical about that city: “The feeling that you’re right in the middle of everything, Tomás. Things matter there. Whereas Argentina—it really is the third world for everybody else. Some lost corner. No stakes. No one cares what happens here. None of it matters.”

  If only it didn’t, I found myself musing. If only there were no stakes. It would have been better for us all if we hadn’t needed there to be.

  * * *

  It grew late. I wasn’t wearing a watch, but it must have been past midnight when I returned to my block. A sinewy-looking man was standing outside my pensión, smoking a cigarette. I made little of it at first—between visitors and the residents themselves, there were often people lingering outside. Then the traffic light on the corner switched from red to green, and as the white headlights rushed nearer, I saw the gilded shimmer of his hair.

  “Verde,” he called.

  I was too close to turn back or cross the street—I worried I’d look too guilty if I did—so I simply stopped where I was.

  “Rubio?” I said, and only then remembered: “Your name’s Rodr—”

  “And your name is Tomás Orilla, temporary residence the Gran Atlántico pensión, permanent residence 334 Calle 54, La Plata. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  He stepped closer, so close I had to rotate out of his way toward the wall. In the light from a window overhead I could see the flush of his fair cheeks and the sweat that, for once, had mussed his gelled hair. Also the handgun in its holster at his waist. At Automotores, he’d had little need to wear it.

  “What are you doing here, Rubio?”

  “What are you doing, Verde? It’s a school night, isn’t it? Don’t you have classes tomorrow?”

  “Finals,” I said like an idiot. “Rubio, I—”

  “The truth, Verde, that’s all I want. How’d he get the gun, for instance? Pereyra, how’d he get the gun?”

  “I don’t know. The American girl must have—”

  “Found the merchandise closet? In her endless bravery thought she could take the time to find an isolation cell and a fucking ERP guerrilla and give him a rifle?”

  I told myself not to panic. My own gun was in my belt, under my shirt—I hadn’t left the pensión without it since the escape. I’d fired only the one shot, so there must be more bullets in the cylinder. Mustn’t there?

  “Well?” he said, breathing hard. He gave my shoulder a shove, and I felt my back press against the coarse bricks behind me.

  “You’re drunk, Rubio.”

  “I am drunk. Drunk enough to do something stupid.” He removed his gun, and whatever courage I required to reach for my own died, frozen in my hand. “Like you did, no?” He aimed the thing haphazardly in my direction, using it to gesticulate. Cars whooshed past without halting, and what few passersby there were averted their eyes like this was just an ugly everyday occurrence. “You said you were so drunk tying up that American girl. Didn’t you say that was how it happened, you were so drunk . . . ?”

  Don’t panic. Look at him: the perspiration, the heavy breathing, the drunkenness and wildness of his motions with that gun. You know what this is—you recognize it, even in Rubio. You feel it every day.

  “You’re alone,” I sa
id.

  “You think I need anybody else to make you sing, Verde? You think I need a picana? You’d piss yourself even without it. You’re pissing yourself now.”

  “If you were here to pick me up, you’d have other people with you,” I continued, thinking rapidly, trusting my instincts blindly the way I had with Aníbal, and the Colonel before him. “They’re looking at you too, aren’t they, Rubio?”

  He didn’t answer at first. Then whatever pleasure he was getting out of this chaotic exercise appeared to dissipate. Something equally recognizable, more rooted in Rubio as I knew him, took its place. He glared at me in anger. Hatred.

  “The truth, Verde,” he said.

  “Of course,” I persisted, almost giddy at the budding realization, the glorious-feeling irony. “You were there that night. You caught her in the first place.”

  “Verde, the fucking truth.”

  “You were in charge and didn’t even go after them when they escaped. Make me sing? Put me on a table, I’ll sing for Aníbal loud and cl—”

  It was so quick, his gun across my face. It felt like a knife, it had that speed and slicing quality, and a spray of blood landed on the sidewalk as my head whipped to the side. Another blow followed from the other direction, and I followed that too, to the pavement, smacking my chin. When I fell, I saw people down the street: a young couple, uncertain what to do or whether to do anything, and a woman walking her dog, a goofily groomed Maltese, who marched past us as if we didn’t exist.

  Rubio’s boot found my belly. Again. The air went out of me, and the lights of the night as my eyes rolled upward beyond my lids.

  “The truth, Verde,” Rubio said, in an echoey way that made me feel he’d been saying other things prior and I just happened to regain consciousness for this. “You want to live, do us both a favor. I’d be willing to listen.”

  Something touched my face. It was soft, softer anyway than the sidewalk and Rubio’s gun, and got stuck to the blood gushing from my lip. I raised a hand and peeled off what turned out to be a piece of paper. I opened my eyes and saw a marred but legible phone number.

  I sat up and looked around after lying there for I don’t know how long. Neither the couple nor the woman with her Maltese was anywhere to be seen, and there was no newly formed crowd of onlookers to come to my aid or see how I was. In Argentina, you didn’t get involved. You saw, but you didn’t see.

  * * *

  I stumbled back into the pensión to much the same reaction from what few housemates were still awake. Only Beatriz said anything different, as I passed her room on the way to mine, catching the sound of jazz and the soothing smell of pot; I could already imagine how, with the help of my whiskey, it would numb my pain.

  “Careful, boludo,” she said. “The landlady might think you’re trouble now.”

  The landlady. I actually laughed, completing what must have been a horror movie image—a bloody apparition, cracking up like something undead. What struck me as funny was that her warning was entirely reasonable. In this country, a single, well-placed phone call from a frightened landlady could get you killed as easily as a military torturer with a gun on the street. If it wasn’t one thing, I thought later, in what felt like a mad epiphany but was really just the reckoning of a scared, stoned college kid, it was always something else.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Tuesday. Wasn’t something supposed to happen Tuesday night? I couldn’t remember. I woke up stuck to the pillowcase the way Rubio’s paper had stuck to my face. There was blood on the sheets. Though it had dried and I knew there was no way to get it out, I decided to wash them and do the rest of my laundry. Usually that was taken care of as part of our room and board, but I didn’t relish the idea of someone in the landlady’s employ catching sight of the bloodstains, and it was as close as I could get to the consolation of cleaning, besides.

  Clearly that was the more important factor, since I ended up doing the wash in the bathroom sink. There was no clothesline at the pensión, so afterward I stuffed some of the items back inside the drawers wet and spread others across the floor, the mattress, and my dresser. Clearing space, I looked at Rubio’s bloodied paper again. Small and yellow, the ripped-off corner of a notepad. Nothing but a standard Buenos Aires number.

  What was he offering? Hard to believe it was a way out. But if he felt frightened enough, endangered enough? He couldn’t kill me; he needed me to affirm that I was guilty and he was innocent. And maybe he knew enough about the false confessions you got using torture to need a different kind of confession from me.

  No. Of course not, that couldn’t be it; I was reaching. The rest of the crew were likely simply taking their time, deciding how to navigate the politics of harboring two possible traitors, including one with ties to Colonel Felipe Gorlero. There was still only one way out Rubio could offer me.

  But I folded the stained paper the best I could and put it in my pocket regardless.

  * * *

  Not long after, a knock on my door informed me I had a phone call. I had an urge to stay where I was, pretend I was asleep. But I’d unsuccessfully tried the Colonel again earlier, and with my room still a mess I wasn’t going to be able to lie on my bed anyway, so I went downstairs and picked up.

  It was Pichuca. I hadn’t heard from her since we’d gone to Villa Ballester.

  “I heard you were invited to an asado tonight,” she said, with a hint of rebuke.

  “Busy,” I told her.

  “I thought you didn’t need a ride.”

  “It’s all a bullshit code, Pichu, what difference does it make?”

  She was quiet. I thought about that make-believe asado. Was that why I woke up thinking something was supposed to happen tonight?

  “The code doesn’t make any difference,” Pichuca said at length. “But going, Tomás—going could make a difference.”

  It felt like more code she was speaking in, and something seemed off about it, false. Her voice struck a similar note—it sounded raspier and farther away than it should have, as if she were calling me long-distance.

  “What are you talking about, Pichu?”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Tomás. The Colonel explained it to me.”

  “The Colonel?”

  “While I was sick. At Hospital Alemán.”

  That switch toggled on. The dreamlike mistiness temporarily cleared. Recollections lurched back to me, as if from across an infinitely wide divide: her shriveled form in the hospital bed, the muted tones of the mourners. Her granddaughter telling me I’d get a do-over.

  “The Colonel told you to call me?”

  “He told me he could give you a second chance—give us all a second chance. I didn’t believe him at first. But he was convincing. You know how he could be convincing.”

  I felt no need to say I did.

  “You’re not the only one with regrets,” she continued. “You don’t know how many regrets I have. If I’d been a better mother, if I’d kept a closer eye, if I’d sent my daughters to live with their father in New York . . . We all made mistakes, Tomás. Why it’s come down to yours, I don’t know. I don’t know why things ever come down to any one person’s choices.”

  Maybe they don’t, I considered saying. Maybe it doesn’t come down to anything, and we just tell ourselves it does for the pain, so we don’t have to feel so small and powerless. It sounded logical, the kind of argument the Colonel might have approved of. But I could also imagine the rejoinder: Maybe we tell ourselves we’re small and powerless so we don’t have to feel the pain.

  “What do you want me to do, Pichu?” I asked.

  “You know what I want you to do, Tomás,” she said.

  We were quiet a minute, and though there was no disconnecting click or dial tone, eventually I realized the line was dead. Someone had been waiting for the phone, and he gave me a critical look as I hung up—slowly, with the quickly fadi
ng, soon-vanished thought that once more I’d failed to tell her good-bye.

  * * *

  I went outside. No blood or other mark was discernible on the pavement where Rubio had attacked me, and people walked past as uninterestedly as the night before, without noticing my swollen lip or scraped chin. Typical porteños, with their red wine and meat and hedonism—they were chatty and smiling, enjoying the warm weather, the approaching holiday. You could already feel them counting down to it—the close of the year, the unpleasant but forgettable chapter that was 1976. I felt it too, if in a different, much less apathetic way: the nearly closed circle, the looming, abstract sense of the end.

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out Rubio’s paper. Looked at the number again and then uncurled my fingers. Let the breeze pick it up from my palm and take it scurrying and jumping into the air and far down the street.

  I didn’t expressly know what I meant to do when I went to the car. But I laid out my mother’s map of Buenos Aires on the passenger seat as if I did, as if nothing in the world could be clearer than my destination.

  * * *

  When I returned to Villa Ballester late that afternoon, the neighbor’s dog was missing, but the Fiat was in the driveway. The sight of it made me angry. All those overnights I’d spent in the torture room at Automotores, and they spent their days fucking with the shutters open.

  I approached the door. Knocked quietly, and then more loudly when no one answered. Still nothing, and I had an urge to retreat a second time. What was I going to do, after all? Barge in and say, “You need to flee before they make me sing”? Isabel would probably just hand me a gun and tell me to make sure I didn’t sing that way.

  I heard a murmur of movement from the window off the living room and knocked again.