A declaration of the end.
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL! GOOOOOO—
The radio snapped off.
Footsteps thudded outside.
Everything—my questions and back-and-forths, my unraveled threads of reason—it all vanished. Nothing was left but the fear, the animal drive for survival.
Please, I tried to call, but was stifled by the gag. Please just ask me . . .
The click of the lock. The heavy swing of the door.
Ask me something! Please! Ask me anything!
Hands. On my head, my hood. They tugged.
Please! Please just let me go . . .
The hood came off. Light threaded through, faint and diaphanous, tinting the blackness charcoal. Next, those strong, sure hands pulled my blindfold down, so it sat like a neck scarf on my collarbone. Pulled the spit-soaked sock from my cottony mouth.
The figure—he was nothing more to me yet—leaned back. Squatted, it looked like, then changed position to kneel. He waited. Silently, I don’t know how long, until I’d stopped crying.
* * *
As my vision adjusted, I began to piece together his outline: lean, line-like arms, eyes that seemed weirdly round and huge until I realized they must be glasses.
“Can you see me?” he asked. Feebly, I shook my head. “What about my voice? Do you know it? Someone told me once it sounded sad, but I think that was because of my name.”
My mind acclimated as well. To the setting, the circumstances, the slow, staccato rhythm of his words, the flatness of one in particular.
“Triste?”
“You had a sad voice yourself, Verde,” he said. “In hindsight, I wonder if the only reason people didn’t pick up on what you were was because you had me as a foil.”
The cell felt stagnant despite his presence, almost airless.
“Who was it who told you that about your voice?” I asked.
“The Colonel,” Triste said. “Told me my face was too—a sad, moral face. Straight, stiff features. I told him it was just a face.”
“Were you close to the Colonel?”
“You know I wasn’t close with anyone, Verde.”
“You used to talk to the prisoners,” I reminded him.
“True,” Triste acknowledged. “That much hasn’t changed, I guess.”
A pause. The darkness continued gaining texture, as if the amber light from the crack under the door were crawling upward, searching out shapes to curl around. A hinge, a corner. The hood still hanging from Triste’s hand like a shadow.
“Is that what this is? A visit like your old ones to Gordo?”
“Most of us, we just find ourselves places,” Triste said. “Same as life. At a certain point, you know your orders without getting them.”
“And what happened to your life?”
“Drunk-driving accident in ’81.”
“I don’t remember you being much of a drinker.”
“Yes, well. Wasn’t much of an accident either. Rarely is for our type, isn’t it?”
I still couldn’t make out his face, only the black circles of his glasses. Yet I felt certain he could see me clearly.
“You regret it?” I asked.
“I regret other things more. Not that I ever felt I had much choice about any of it. I don’t think any of us do much.”
“We’re all just victims of circumstance in your view, aren’t we?” I said, remembering my own conversation with Gordo in his cell.
“Maybe not all of us,” Triste said. “I don’t know, Verde. Everybody’s always telling everybody else it’s up to them. It’s not, though, not the way they mean it. Take your own case. You probably think they got you because of that escape, right? No. It was this pregnant girl they had at Coordinación, something Aroztegui. Held on for a few weeks, then she had her baby. She wanted to get it back, so she gave your name. She didn’t get the baby back.”
I thought of the goofy star-crossed hopes I’d had around Nerea as a twelve-year-old, before I met Isabel. That our fates were entwined like this instead, that I might have had so little to do with my own—it seemed so unjust. Yes, I was used to feeling like a bystander to my own life—that was part of what had driven me to Isabel, the sense that life was elsewhere, somewhere she could take me. But I’d always believed that I came to this particular fork on my own.
“Who got the baby?” I asked.
“Depended on the center. Knowing Coordinación, probably a dumpster.”
I thought of the girl at Hospital Alemán, her dark hair and big brown eyes nothing like Isabel’s or Nerea’s. “The grandmother didn’t get her?”
“Pichuca Aroztegui? I gave her another one—why I remember the name,” Triste explained. “There were plenty of babies to go around back then. Not at Automotores, nobody lasted long enough there. But at the ESMA, Campo de Mayo? The Colonel had taken this one home a couple weeks before, to save it from the dumpster, or maybe just because he wanted to, I don’t know. He didn’t look good when he brought her in—sleep-deprived, bad scratch on his face from their cat. Gave the girl to me in this big crib with ribbons on it and told me where to take her. Said it wouldn’t make a difference to those desperate enough.”
More recollections. The young girl in the beach parking lot with the might-have-been Colonel, the end of his marriage and his answer to my question about miscarriage—I’m more inclined to say I did—the many dead ends in the maze of possibility. My failed attempts to reach him in the days before I was taken, and that cry, like a baby’s, the one time Mercedes had picked up.
They didn’t own a cat, and I knew without thinking that Mercedes’s fingernails were always long and manicured.
“Why’d he give her up?”
“I don’t think he wanted to. But we got the call about you, Verde. Aníbal saying they’d picked you up, laying out terms for the Colonel to save you. He probably felt scared, or maybe guilty, I don’t know. Aníbal had him by the balls then, me too. His phrase obviously: ‘I got you by the fucking balls, Tristecito. I’ll have you back in my employment soon enough.’ You see what I mean, Verde? You get pinned by some girl in Coordinación, the Colonel’s life and mine turn to shit, and this baby winds up with a random new family. None of that was up to us, not the way we thought. Maybe we get choices, but what good are they when they’re like that?”
There were so many ways I could have answered. That it wasn’t anybody’s fault, or that it was everybody’s equally, or that we should have known long ago that choices weren’t any good. But it seemed those were lessons you never learned, and all I could say was, “I wish I knew how much was up to us.”
“Yes, well,” Triste said, “I guess you’ll find out soon enough, won’t you?”
He rose. Stooped closer, with the hood in his hand. I recalled his telling me he wasn’t here to visit, that he knew his orders. Triste had been one of the guards in charge of moving transfers at Automotores. Pedros, they’d been called, after Saint Peter; they held the keys to heaven, was the saying.
“It’s almost over now,” he assured me. “You don’t need to be afraid.”
Triste placed the dark cloth back over my head. Lifted me by the armpits and led me from the cell. Directed me carefully, gently even, down the creaky wooden stairs and into the garage.
There another set of arms took over. Shoved me into the car. The men remained taciturn, businesslike, as they pressed my head down in the backseat and rested the muzzle of the machine gun against my ear.
As the engine started, I heard the clang of a cell door shutting, as if Triste had locked himself inside one, and I thought of the words he’d left me with. Repeated them to myself like a mantra, a prayer: It’s almost over now. You don’t need to be afraid . . .
TWENTY-FOUR
I didn’t weep in the car. Just sat, my head bouncing periodically off my seatmate’s knee. Even when
a dim light crept through the hood’s fabric, it didn’t move me. Didn’t soothe or bathe my eyes or give me one last, glowing taste of life. It’s only light, I thought dully. There’s nothing special about it.
We parked. The guard removed my hood. Nodded his shadowy chin toward the window, while the driver got out to open my door. “There’s no point trying to run,” he said needlessly.
More light. It was so strong I couldn’t look into it, and instead I stared at my filthy sneakers until I could make out their different parts—the tongue and laces, the orange, clay-heavy dirt on the toe from the path I was standing on. That bit felt instinctively wrong to me, misplaced. And when I looked back up, and bright, clean grass and passersby and benches started to take shape, I realized the wall of the cemetery was missing. There were trees where it should have been, and under their swaying green leaves was a woman I’d have known anywhere.
Isabel. Waiting in a park for me, as she’d done so many times before.
She didn’t turn as I approached, or when I went to her side. All her attention was fixed on a solitary old woman pushing a walker, moving with the sluggish steadiness of someone who made herself take this stroll every day. Her knuckles were knobby and round as her cheeks, and one arthritic finger had swollen over a wedding band that gleamed in the sun. Her hair was white, and there was a scar on her neck that could have been from anything—a stumble, a surgery, any of the hazards that decades of life eventually throw at you. A silver necklace swayed below it, with the mysterious letter J dangling at its end, and though her eyes were clouded with cataracts and time, underneath I could still make out the blue.
“She looks at peace, doesn’t she?” Isabel said. Her own appearance was as it had been outside Hospital Alemán: thin, dried-out hair and, under the baggy flower-patterned top, a body that matched.
“She does, Isa,” I said.
“There are a thousand other sights like this here, showing lives I could have had: journalist like Nerea, politician, regular old engineer. Married mother of two, sometimes three. Sometimes in Argentina, sometimes in Cuba or Mexico, sometimes not even with Gustavo but with a man I never met, whom I never will meet. None of those sights do as much for me as this one, though. She just looks so full, so full of the whole thing.”
“She’s beautiful,” I said.
Isabel laughed. “That might be a stretch.”
“It’s not. I’d have still been in love with you at that age.”
“Tomás . . .”
“Why don’t you ever believe me, Isa?”
“It’s a fantasy. It’s like me with that old woman. I pine because I’ll never have to . . . never have to feel the pain of her joints or the fatigue, or watch loved ones die year after year for no reason but time.”
“Time’s a better reason to die than yours was,” I said.
Isabel shook her head. “I don’t think so, really.”
She took in the figure for another instant, then started off without warning, leaving me to chase after her as always.
“You must have thought so once if you escaped this place,” I said.
“It’s true, I’ve wondered,” she admitted, and it seemed she was doing so then as she cast her eyes from the ground to the tops of the trees, the shadows of the leaves playing across her face. “This place makes you. If I didn’t fight, if I’d survived one of the centers, lived long enough to become that old woman—yes, I’ve wondered. It’s why I returned when my mother was dying, sought you out. I was wondering again.”
The aura of peacefulness that persisted through the park seemed out of tune with her sentiment. The gentleness, the breeze and quiet—there seemed to be no room for contingency here, for such doubts. We started up a hill, and as we approached its top, a familiar sight came unhurriedly, torturously into view: the gate of the Recoleta Cemetery.
“I’m sorry, Isa,” I told her.
“I am too. But sadly it’s not so simple as that for us, is it? I told you that a long time ago, Tomás. Don’t you remember?”
I did. Our last conversation while she was alive. It’s a little too simple a concept maybe, being sorry.
But the memories swirled again, the Colonel’s words mixed in like a cocktail or potion, something blended to just the right proportions to—what? Cast a spell on me? Free me from one? Much too simple a notion, your regret. Do something, don’t do something—as if actions could be reduced to such measly forks in the road.
“I should have listened,” I said.
“You did,” Isabel answered.
Another swirl, another ingredient. Darkness but for the glow of a small, cheap hotel lamp, trembling hands, one going to the other to keep it steady, sweat on my temple. The muzzle of the Colonel’s revolver slipping off it, and words colliding, arguing in different voices, saying: Being sorry doesn’t fix it. Punishing yourself doesn’t fix it. You’re taking the easy way out.
“You mean Rome,” I said, hoping she would say, Yes, this whole time it turns out I saved your life. Or: Yes, didn’t you know I forgave you? Or: Yes. I’m the one who’s sorry, Tomás. I should never have done that to you. I should never have made you live with this burden.
She said nothing.
“And now that you’ve gone back, you’re done wondering?” I asked.
“You’re never done wondering. Already I’m back to mourning things I never wanted, dreams I never had. It’s so hard to remember who you are. Takes so much will.”
“You never had a problem with will,” I said.
“No,” she admitted. “I had enough to get me back to life, even. But that’s a case in point: Once I got life back, what could I do with it? What did I ever do with it? It was never enough to me, you remember. Like I used to tell Gusti, when he asked me why I fought in the first place, what made it feel meaningful. It was the bullets in my hair.”
She said it with such fondness. The phrase still broke her heart, I could tell.
“You really don’t want another chance?” I asked.
Her eyes circled the trees again, the prettily glinting leaves and the sunny sky checkered by branches, lingered uncharacteristically on each one like every infinitesimal bit of the sight was splendid, worthy of its own farewell.
Was that what she was doing, I wondered as her gaze slowly floated back down to meet mine—saying good-bye?
“Like I said, sadly it’s just not that simple. You’re never done wondering here.” She indicated the entryway to the cemetery with her hand, rolling it out like a hostess at a restaurant or hotel. “We all want another chance in the end. Don’t you?”
I looked at the cemetery gate. Underneath it, smiling, was the Colonel, as he was that day in December 1976, when the car drove me here and the hood came off.
Now, like then, I went toward him.
* * *
He led the way inside without speaking. Birds were chirping on the mausoleum ledges and palms were swaying over the walls, the sun giving them an unearthly glow. Everything in view maintained that radiance. People passed by the crypts, pointing, murmuring reverently about the beauty of this one or that, the splendor of the city of the dead. Statues of angels and Madonnas gazed down at them austerely. Gargoyles as well. There were more of them among the spires than I’d ever noticed before.
My smell was terrible, but I no longer noticed that either. And if the Colonel did, he gave no indication.
“May I give you some advice, Tomás?” he began. “May I?”
He was silent after the question, as if he really wouldn’t continue without my assent. I could hear the soft blows of a hammer somewhere, likely maintenance on one of the tombs.
I nodded.
“The people you are helping—no matter what you do, they will die. This is not a war their side can win. You, on the other hand—you can live. And you can spare the people you are helping from a fate you know well. The moral balan
ce, here, is on the side of giving me an address. Not a name—we have more of those than we know what to do with, unfortunately. Only an address will suffice here.”
I had only the one address at my disposal. It rebounded in my head ceaselessly: Río Negro 2166. Río Negro 2166. I saw it on the plaques of the crypts and the signs for the cemetery streets. Río Negro 2166. Río Negro 2166. If sometimes phrases lost meaning with repetition, this one seemed to gain it, grow bloated with it. Of course it would be named Black River. Of course it would be easy to remember.
“I don’t say it lightly or deceptively,” the Colonel continued. “I am a cynic, as you know. But the upside is that I have no real stake in this fight. The war against subversion, the battle for a Christian, Western state in Argentina, not even the remote goal of genuine simple stability here summons my allegiance. What is Argentina, after all? It’s not special. Not even this moment is special. There have been coups in Latin America going back as far as the nineteenth century—a Tennessean named William Walker got himself named head of state in Nicaragua in 1856, joder! No, Argentina, this moment—it is all just one more drop in the pond of world history.
“What this is about to me is people, Tomasito. Precious, simple little people. You came to me asking to work at the ESMA, remember? Do you think I didn’t have some inkling why? I didn’t know how bad it would be there, but even so. Better to have you under my eye, I thought, than under someone else’s who wouldn’t be protecting you. And I was protecting you, Tomás. I have always been protecting you. Even now, right now, at this very instant: you know what they will do with you. But if you give me an address, I can save you.”
He was my angel, a part of me recalled. The breakdown was complete, the dividing line between past and present collapsed like a bridge, leaving nothing but water, the indistinguishability of waves.
“I know these rebels are not so dangerous, really. But I know they put you in danger with that request. I do not take that lightly either.”
I didn’t take that lightly either, a different part of me thought. One tethered to that moment, to my anger in it, my tremendous sorrow.
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