Hades, Argentina

by Daniel Loedel

  No, Isabel wouldn’t be so cruel or simplistic. It was something else I feared, the admission I’d be making telling them this, the acknowledgment of what I could be capable of. The truth, in other words. Little was scarier than that.

  Still no response. I tried the knob. Inexplicably, it turned. I pushed the door open slowly, and it creaked.

  Gustavo was at the stove frying milanesas, Isabel reading a magazine at the table. Neither of them turned in my direction.

  “Gustavo?” I called, uncomprehending. “Isabel?”

  They continued going about their business while the cutlets sizzled in the pan.

  Then the shudder of realization: the hand to my cheek, the recollection of what had actually happened on my sole return visit that week in ’76. It was on the Tuesday, and I didn’t even set foot on the driveway but darted off at the collie’s accusatory siren, as if the dog was a wily servant of fate.

  What was it the Priest had said? Things would be messier this time around, more customized for my edification? Perhaps the two of them weren’t oblivious; perhaps I was. Standing like Tantalus in a pool whose waters retreated when I tried to touch them, able to use the glassy surface of their lives only as a mirror or not at all.

  Gustavo had been putting out items for what must have been a late lunch—bottle of wine, jar of mayonnaise, freshly sliced lemon—when suddenly he stopped.

  “Isa,” he said.

  “Mm-hmm?” She flipped the page—a Rico Tipo, the humor magazine that had gone out of circulation some years earlier.

  “ERP is done. Montoneros—even you have to admit we’re not far behind. Nerea’s been gone a month, we haven’t heard back from Tomás. I think it’s time we talk about leaving.”

  “Leaving?” Isabel repeated, as if the word were puzzling to her.

  “We could go to Cuba. I still have friends there.”

  “Cuba? Why would we go to Cuba?”

  “Why? What do you mean, why? To live there, Isa.”

  She rested her magazine on the table. “Like you said, Nerea’s been gone a month. Clearly she’s not giving us up.”

  “That’s not the point, Isa.”

  “And Tomás is stronger than you think. He’s probably just upset with me.”

  “Not the point.”

  “You’re scared,” she said.

  “Of course I’m scared,” Gustavo said.

  “I’m not. Not of death. You’re not supposed to be either.”

  “If the milicos come banging on our door, I won’t be. I’d give you that grenade and let you take us all to hell.”

  They both laughed. Gamely Isabel said, “You won’t need to give it to me, Gusti. I’ll have it ready.”

  And then, out of some attuned intimacy or a shift of the atmosphere in the narrow space between them, they both stopped smiling.

  “I’m serious, Isa,” Gustavo said.

  “So am I,” she said.

  “We could have a good life.”

  “Do you know how many people in this country have probably told themselves that to avoid fighting?”

  “To avoid dying,” Gustavo said.

  “You can go, Gusti. I won’t stop you.”

  “But you won’t join me either?”

  “Not in Cuba,” she said.

  They were silent another minute. There was an explosive pop of grease on the stove, and for some reason that was enough: the tenderness returned, the smiles. All that emotion I was stuck on the other side of.

  “How about the bedroom then?” Gustavo said.

  Isabel nodded. “Sounds like heaven to me.”

  She took his hand and led him in without closing the door.

  The breaded chicken continued crackling, throwing off bursts of fat. I went over to the stove and turned it off.

  From there I had a clear view of the bedroom. But where I expected to see their writhing, ravenous bodies, I saw nothing. Only the shadeless lamp on the floor, the mattress next to it with the sheets tossed messily aside. No bullet casings or other signs they’d been there recently.

  “I don’t know if it’s a happy memory or sad,” I heard behind me. The voice was dry and croaky, and before I could place it, I turned and saw whose it was. He’d grown a beard, but it was as graying and splotchy as his sickly, pale skin.

  “Happy,” I told Gustavo’s ghost.

  His hips were misaligned, as if he’d continued limping through the underworld. I recalled the Colonel saying that people died as differently as they lived, and wondered if the line between heaven and hell was as thin as that—if everyone came to this place in the end, and everyone simply had different stays.

  “I’m not sure,” Gustavo said.

  “Is Isa here somewhere?” I asked.

  “Depends what you mean by ‘here.’ If you mean in this house, in this room, no. We’re never in the same rooms anymore.”

  “Why not? Falling-out?” I jabbed.

  “This place doesn’t let us,” Gustavo said. “Sometimes I think we could be centimeters apart, even literally on top of each other, and it would still find a way to keep us separate. Invisible to each other. When it comes to love, only the living seem to be within each other’s reach. What we get are lies.”

  “At least you have these memories,” I said.

  “Memories are dead things,” Gustavo said. “You see that here. Maybe that’s all you see.”

  What I’d just seen was vibrantly, terribly alive. Yet here I was unable to do anything grander than turn off a stove. A static feeling had crept into the room, a musty, mothball-like quality, as if the windows hadn’t been opened for years. The milanesas didn’t give off any scent, and neither did anything else.

  “What happened to the linden tree your house had?”

  “This isn’t our house,” Gustavo said. “I told you what this is.”

  I didn’t know if he meant a dead thing or a lie. Maybe they were the same to him.

  “So there’s nothing to be done then?”

  “Done?” he repeated, in the same perplexed way Isabel had said, “Leaving?”

  “I thought I could save you,” I said. “Tell you to get out—”

  “Didn’t you hear our conversation? For Isa, there was no getting out.”

  It should have been obvious. Perhaps on some level it always was. Isabel would never have fled Argentina; there was no saving her that way. There was only one way I could have saved her, only one choice I could have made differently. And that, I realized quietly, with no flash or bang of epiphany, was what my so-called do-over would be limited to: the one proverbial coin I’d ever truly wished I could toss back into the air.

  “It didn’t have to end that way,” I told Gustavo.

  “Maybe not that way,” Gustavo admitted. “But it would have ended.”

  I considered telling him I was sorry. I don’t know why I didn’t; maybe I simply wasn’t. Whatever the reason, I didn’t say anything when I left, and neither did Gustavo.

  * * *

  When I got back to my pensión, I put the rest of my still-damp clothes away. After I made my bed and everything was as pristine as it was going to be, I went to my dresser. I removed the revolver from my belt and looked at it. So many pointless journeys back and forth—La Plata, Villa Ballester, even my organic chemistry classroom; it was like I wanted to give it a rest, or a proxy for giving myself some. I put it in my underwear drawer and closed it, thinking, I won’t need this anymore.

  Then I went out for another of my walks.

  Rush hour, people going for after-work drinks, students with backpacks headed to libraries or basement hangouts or who knew what other normal things. The air was sweet and golden, rich like honey.

  On the tail end of my wandering, I went to nearby Plaza Primero de Mayo, where there was a little pasture used as a dog run. Typically whe
n I visited I stood some meters away and watched as the dogs sniffed one another or ran after tennis balls, their simple happiness a sweet kind of envy for me. This time, though, I went up to the edge of the green and held out my hands, and the kind creatures licked them as if they knew I needed it.

  When I returned to my pensión, the green Ford Falcon was waiting for me outside. My palms were moist in my pockets, and I didn’t know if it was from sweat or the saliva of the dogs. A man in the passenger seat I didn’t recognize—well-groomed goatee, extremely calm, even friendly green eyes—asked me if I was Tomás Orilla. I said I was, and the car’s back door opened. I got in voluntarily. A balled-up sock was tossed back, then the blindfold and hood. I put them on myself.

  TWENTY-THREE

  There were scarcely any sensations to attach to the drive. Dark, imageless, textureless—that may be why memories of it would hide from my nightmares. The men who picked me up were quiet the whole way, keeping the windows closed and the radio off, not speaking even to one another. The machine gun lying across my seatmate’s lap and pressed into my side hardly moved, and neither did the hand he’d placed on my head to keep it down. Aside from the itchiness of the hood, the taste of the gag, and the damp, warm smell of my breath on it, I felt almost nothing.

  The car slowed to a stop, and I heard the grating of a garage door opening. Breathed the unmistakable odor of motor oil. The hand came off my head and the machine gun prodded me to get out. “Guess you’ll be the Garden’s last act,” one of the men said, before another told him to shut up. Their voices were low and muffled, and I couldn’t identify them.

  I didn’t know if it was the same men or others who led me up the stairs. My assumption was that they’d pass the baton to those who’d want it more—Aníbal, maybe the Gringo, Rubio certainly. Whoever they were, they didn’t say a word to me either. Directions were given to me again with the nudge of a gun—up under my arm to tell me to rise, down along my waist to undress, jabbed in the back to march forward. Whenever I didn’t understand, a boot or the weapon’s butt made the order clear. Their silence felt excessive to me, like a betrayal I didn’t deserve. My jailers were presumably people I knew already, so why wouldn’t they let me see them? Hear them at least? Why was it so important that I feel alone?

  Straight down the hall from the cell where I’d stripped. The gun kept directing me toward the torture room, as if I needed the guidance; I could have made it there like Gordo, by counting my steps.

  Someone strapped me onto the table. Removed my gag and threw cold water on me. Some of the wires had coiled and snapped after so much use, and a few stabbed into me—one at the top of my spine, another on the edge of my left butt cheek. The worst reopened a blister on my foot that had just begun to heal.

  They didn’t turn on the radio. Every expectation I had, every bit of knowledge I’d gained of this process, they upended. Whereas everyone else was made to sing, to say names, my punishment was silence, anonymity. I told myself that maybe they couldn’t stand doing it to someone they knew, had trusted. Maybe it was the Gringo hovering there, his conscience quivering like his belly, his shame so great he couldn’t say it was him. “Sorry, Verde,” I kept waiting for someone to tell me. No one did.

  No one applied the picana for a while either, and the delay was strangely terrible. The dread, the endless mental priming, reminding myself over and over again that all I’d have to do was keep quiet. Let them take everything from me but that.

  But they never asked me a thing. And as the minutes dragged on, my quiet felt less like a safe haven than like another instrument they’d turned against me. Verde thinks he knows how to endure this, I imagined them telling one another as they planned this; he thinks he can hang on to something. He’ll wish we wanted him to sing.

  The unwrapping of a cord, the methodical adjustment of the rheostat. I could hear each individual click of the knob and did the math: 14,000 volts was what they settled on.

  The low, droning thrum of the picana gliding ever nearer.

  The experience goes staticky then. Not in terms of sound but . . . everything else. The chaotic, inconsistent bursts of pain; the rough, scratchy swerving in and out of consciousness. The flailing of my limbs, the nerve-deep burning of my skin and my organs, like a wildfire inside me.

  And the screams. All my incoherent, unfettered screams.

  * * *

  Capuchita. At first it seemed like a relief, to find myself in that fuller, blacker darkness of the isolation cell, under the blindfold and hood. At the end of pain, of terror. I could tell myself it was peaceful, in some pure way. Nothing to be done, nothing to worry about. Just plain nothing.

  But then that steady trickle. Like nothingness was a hole through which I seeped. I couldn’t tell whether my eyes were open or closed or where my body parts were in relation to one another. My thoughts felt like they were scattering, roaming free of my mind. This isn’t the end, they taunted me, like schoolyard bullies. This is the beginning. Soon they’ll take you back to the torture room. And soon, maybe not the next session or the one after, but soon, they’ll start asking you things. And there are things you know.

  I tried not to consider it any more precisely than that, to push away the concept of knowledge altogether. Or maybe capuchita did, throwing open doors in my brain, letting drafts blow through to buffet the rickety foundation at my core.

  You thought you knew what this would be like? You never got close to it, not really. Even when you were in the room, working the defibrillator or the straps or whatever else, you were listening to the cries from outside. And the silence afterward—you’ve never heard it before now either. You don’t yet know how loud it will grow.

  * * *

  The slowness. The way time spreads out, giving every conclusion space to shift direction or be forgotten, become one more drop in the deepening puddle.

  I was sitting in one by then. The stench was putrid, but I got used to it, and other sensations took precedence—the taste of my spittle, the sluggish, clogged rhythm of my breaths. The rustle I made with any movement, however slight—they’d put my clothes back on while I was unconscious—and more distant noises as well: sporadic footsteps in the hall, a fly buzzing somewhere, a leak in a pipe in the wall, trickling with perfect precision. How could everything be so clear, I thought, when simultaneously I couldn’t see anything?

  I had no handle on time. Night, day, the accumulation of either. It remained slow but unhinged, as if counted by a clock without hands.

  Sleeping or waking—that difference was also blurry—I continued to lean against my wall. That was how I’d come to think of it, as mine. Like this nerdy kid we had at Automotores from the Institute of Technology who wouldn’t let go of a knocked-out tooth of his until the Gringo pried it from his fingers by stepping on his hand. Spend enough time with nothing, and you take possession of whatever you can.

  That technology student with the tooth—he lasted a month before they transferred him. Gordo, nearly half a year. Meanwhile, I felt barely able to endure what had probably been a mere few days. I kept returning to the fact that Automotores was supposed to have been cleaned out, that I shouldn’t be there at all.

  “You are no one,” I’d heard the Priest tell prisoners more than once during a session. “You don’t exist anymore.” The first few times my torturers took a break while I was on the table, I’d hoped the session was over. I came to know better. But among the many thoughts that kept repeating as time dribbled onward, constantly cycled back to me as if on a recorded loop, were those words of the Priest’s. Remembering them, my hopes for the end broadened, became all-encompassing. What a blessing that would be, I thought. To be no one.

  * * *

  Another thought on that loop: Those things I knew. They continued to blend with and take the form of things I didn’t know. Hardened faiths frayed, assumptions about myself became anchorless, untethered. Was I a good person? Did I even care about
morality? What difference does one person make, their love or their death? None of it matters. None of it is worth holding on to.

  Easier to look at it that way, more palatable. Philosophical, abstract doubts rather than particular certainties. Nothing to do with my circumstances or the actions I might take to deal with them.

  I never looked at those things directly. Never mentally pronounced the street or the number or went far beyond articulating the names associated with it: Gustavo Morales. Isabel Aroztegui. Like they were merely entries on a list.

  And why shouldn’t they be, I asked myself. Again: What does love matter? What does death?

  * * *

  Scattershot images and memories. Elizabeth in her isolation cell, maybe this same one, telling me she missed the hole in the corner. Soapsuds pooling on the torture room floor after Rubio knocked the bucket over. My mother’s forcing me to clean after my father died, insisting that the skill would come in handy one day. My photo on my Club Atenas ID, the spot of gloss on my youthfully parted hair. Joking with Isabel about Pichuca’s chicken-and-onion soup and its lack of chicken. Isabel’s soft knock on the door a couple summers later and her demands that I hold her closer when I was already holding her as close as I could. My tiny twin bed, and her hushed whisper: You’re dreaming, Tomás. Keep dreaming.

  * * *

  For the first time since I was in detention: the radio. A soccer game—River against Boca. Whoever was on guard probably couldn’t resist.

  The game must have been close, dramatic. There was such energy among the broadcasters, in the roaring of the crowd. It all sounded so important—so much more important than this.

  Then, a goal. It went off like a series of explosions.

  GOAL! GOAL! GOOOOOOOOAL!

  Like a trumpet, a herald.

  GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!