I didn’t want to be there, that part of me continued. I should never have been in that fight.
It’s not my fault.
Please! Please just let me go . . .
“You wouldn’t have them detained?”
“It will be quick, Tomás,” the Colonel said. “I promise it will be quick.”
He didn’t lie, another, farther-off part of me recalled. He was my angel.
“And me?”
“Freedom. Of a kind, anyway. You would have to leave Argentina, of course, but wouldn’t you want to after all this? Go to some other country, start another life? Cut ties, clean slate. You could meet a woman, a safe, stable one. Have children, a family?”
Poots and chortles, shoulders toweled off after a shower. I was doing my best, yet another part of me insisted. I really was.
“Live, Tomás,” the Colonel continued. “My point is that. What will it matter what you do? You will live.”
I don’t know how much time passed, how many circles we walked around the crypts in silence as I wrestled with it, my neck alternately hot in the sun and cool in the breeze, the chatter of the tourists in my ears. I’m not positive what I was wrestling with exactly either: My pain, my sense of betrayal? My fear of going back in the hood? Dying? Was I even really wrestling at all?
I don’t know. I only know that soon enough I stopped. I told the Colonel Villa Ballester. Gave him the address.
It was such a beautiful day.
Afterward he handed me a bulky manila folder and a fake U.S. passport, which had a plane ticket tucked into its pages. The Colonel explained that immigration to Italy was easier than to Spanish-speaking countries right now, since they were eyeing those like hawks and he couldn’t arrange travel to America on such short notice. Besides, Rome harbored other former revolutionary types, and if I wanted to get in touch, he’d given me a number, along with a bit of cash. The exchange rate with the lira was decent, he added, in what felt like a brutal irrelevance.
“Listen, Tomás,” he said then. “I know this will seem like the breakdown of everything. I know that. First time I had someone killed, I remember it was the same—it was like I had broken too, shattered. But time, Tomás—you remember what I told you about time? There’s no proof of it without these things falling apart. Which is to say there’s no life either. You see that, don’t you? Dying is just a cost of living.”
“You get comfort from this shit?” I asked. Again I couldn’t make out if it was the past or the present, or which version of the Colonel laughed and slapped me on the back.
“Ja, no, perhaps not. But I try to comfort myself with it all the same. Thought it might help you.”
“Help me,” I repeated.
“Tomás, Tomás. You think it’s just bullshit, don’t you, just a lot of speeches, don’t you? All I’m saying is this is the way it goes. That’s all I’m saying. You’re neither the first person nor the last to do something like this. It may not get better with time. But it should get clearer.”
“I’ll look forward to that,” I said, but asked myself: Had it gotten clearer?
“Go home, have some whiskey, put on some music. Trust me. Before you know it, you won’t hear yourself anymore. So tell me,” he continued, when I said nothing. “What will you listen to when you go home, Tomás?”
“I don’t know. The Beatles? What does it matter?”
“The Beatles!” he cried, in sincere dismay. “No, please. Let me give you some advice: Listen to Gardel. He’s the musician of memory. And you will be remembering this far longer than you wish.” He patted me on the back again. “The Beatles! Ja!”
He went ahead. Left me in front of an uncared-for crypt with no detectable family markings and one of its inner shelves halfway caved in. I stared into it a long while before starting my departure as well.
* * *
I found the Colonel at my side again. It was the ghost version of him, but he looked worse, hollowed, like in our exchange he had lost something too.
“I thought you said actions couldn’t be reduced to such measly forks in the road.”
“Well,” he said. “They couldn’t, could they? In the end?”
We walked slowly, the way I had alone. I gave the tourists a wide berth, as if afraid they’d catch my stink or something worse—whatever look you must have after you’ve done something like this. Despite the space I put between us, their leisurely, indifferent babbling still rang inside me, along with the click of the Colonel’s shoes.
“You didn’t walk me out that day,” I recalled.
“I’m not going to today either,” he answered. “Not really.”
A profound loneliness came over me, not unlike what I’d felt when I left in ’76. It was as if I’d already been aware of all the years I’d be alone with this, how isolated I’d feel, snapped off like a twig from a tree.
“Was it all a game?” I asked. “Something to teach me a lesson?”
“Maybe it was something to teach me a lesson. Maybe there are no lessons. I don’t know, Tomás, not even we do, really. Haven’t we all tried to tell you that?”
A group of cats was following us. Among them, that Siamese with crossed blue eyes that looked benevolently, almost wisely befuddled, as if there were much grander questions at stake than ours.
“I still don’t know what I got out of this,” I said.
He shrugged his shrug. “Time. If nothing else, you got more of that. There’s shockingly little, remember. Goes by like that—poof. A puff of air.”
We passed the mausoleum of Arturo E. Gómez and Family and turned onto the lane leading to the southern gate. The same Virgin Mary watched from atop the Dasso crypt, and in the same decrepit condition. Did time ever really pass at all?
“I guess we’ll meet back here soon enough then,” I said.
“I’m afraid not, Tomasito,” the Colonel said. “Once you’re here, once you’re here in truth—there are no more meetings, really. Just long farewells.”
We were back at the gate. The Colonel halted, and the cats did too.
“Well, Señor Shore,” he said, “you should have everything you need.”
“I don’t need this,” I said, indicating the fake passport. The top of the plane ticket remained sticking out of its pages as it had a decade before.
The Colonel gave another shake of his head. “Rather a stupid kind of intelligent, Tomás,” he said, and closed the gate behind me.
TWENTY-FIVE
Hardly anything seemed different outside. The day was hot and lustrous, and people continued buzzing around me as if I were invisible. The only immediately discernible changes from when I’d left the cemetery in 1976 were the destination and date on the ticket the Colonel had given me: New York and December 5, 1986, respectively. The name, however, was the same: Thomas Shore.
The transition was as seamless and anticlimactic as that. When I glanced back through the bars of the gate, the Colonel was gone. And when I went to a kiosk off the plaza to check a newspaper, I saw that the date was the same as on my ticket. Existence didn’t offer any more proof than that to welcome me back.
I walked from Recoleta to my hotel in Palermo. I needed to clean up and pack, to get a move on generally. Death might wait on me a little longer. But life wouldn’t.
* * *
With the exceptions of my letting the front desk know I’d need a cab in a few hours and there being no gun in my underwear drawer, my return to the hotel was reminiscent of my return to the pensión that day in 1976. The length of the shower and the sensation of melting under the water, the lazy scrubbing despite how dirty I was. The ridiculous lines I rehearsed in my head in case the landlady inquired where I was going with my huge suitcase or the hotel clerk asked why I was checking out early. The difficulty I had actually packing, stuffing everything inside, and the wish, in one case, that my mother was there to help me
and, in the other, that Claire was.
There were the disjointed sounds outside my room as well: In the hotel, it was the ring of the elevators and guests in the hall, the knocks on doors before housecleaning entered. In my pensión, it had been music. I didn’t put on either the Beatles or Gardel as the Colonel had recommended—though I did have a joint and several whiskeys—but through the walls I heard Beatriz’s record player. “The Girl from Ipanema.” So light and pleasant, romantic vacation music if ever there was any. And when the woman’s voice came in, singing, Tall and tan and young and lovely, I finally cried. Isabel wasn’t any of those things, I thought, trying to console myself and stop my tears, before I remembered: She was certainly young. And lovely too, in her way.
And when she passes, I smile, but she
Doesn’t see. She just doesn’t see.
I was drinking out of a styrofoam cup. Which led me to another thought, namely: Isabel was right. I should have been drinking out of glass, something I could break.
* * *
Not long before it was time to head to the airport, the phone in my hotel room rang. It sounded obnoxious, like an alarm, but maybe that was because it had no place in my memories of ’76. That day, I made the calls. They weren’t to my mother or to Pichuca or to anyone from the university. Instead, both were to our messenger at the locutorio. Two brief, garbled pleas—I was unambiguously drunk and high by then, otherwise I would have known the effort was futile—to call the Profe and Señora Amarga and tell them Pingüino said to get out of their house as soon as possible, to go anywhere else, it didn’t matter where, that I was getting out too and I—
He didn’t have their number, the man reminded me. They just called him for their messages.
I hung up. Then I thought better of it and went through the same thing again. This time, practically weeping himself, the man at the locutorio told me he didn’t want to be involved. “Please,” he said, his usually automated-sounding voice breaking into human tones. “Please, just let me go.” And ultimately I did.
The phone in my hotel room continued ringing. Finally I answered. It was the front desk, informing me that my cab was downstairs.
* * *
I wasn’t nervous about what the immigration officers would say regarding my fake passport this time. In ’76, it had been my last moment of terror, watching the eyes roll up and back down, listening to every crinkle of a page, wondering if it was sturdy enough. Now, though, I felt like nothing could stop me, like I knew how the story would end. Or, more accurately, how it would continue: another airport in which I’d be anonymous, with no one to pick me up. I hadn’t told Claire I’d decided to come back, and who even knew if she’d let me. Though I vaguely pondered telling her about the whole experience, considered writing it out in English for her and framing it as a kind of love letter, a testament to some tenuously renewed faith in life, the truth was, this might be yet another way things turned out to be too late.
The officer studied my passport, then stamped it. Handing it back to me, he warned me it was about to expire; I’d better renew it soon, before it was too late.
* * *
While waiting in the boarding area in ’76, I’d tried to convince myself that the locutorio man had succeeded in reaching Isabel and Gustavo. That at the very least, the phone had screamed as the milicos got there, so they knew I’d tried to warn them. I also pictured grander elements to the scenario: the exchange of glances as they saw the Ford Falcons pull up and decided what to do, grabbed their guns and readied themselves, or took a grenade out to the garden, to set the shed and the rest of their dreams ablaze.
But those two puny words still found their way to me, as they did now and throughout the years between: too late. The phone almost certainly hadn’t rung, and even if it had, it likely would have been to an empty room or over their corpses.
Only after time had passed did I begin to reckon with that aspect: the way their bodies were disposed of. It was hard to believe that whoever killed them would go through the trouble of dropping them at sea if they were already dead and starting to decompose. Chances are it was simpler—quick, like the Colonel said. Driven down some back road in Villa Ballester or nearby San Martín and tossed into a common grave. Chances are, in fact, that they’re still there, buried lazily beside their peers.
* * *
Waiting for takeoff, I tried to shift my thinking, force my perspective to face forward, so to speak. The future was still out there, presumably, behind the setting sun and the pillowy darkness enveloping the sky, and I gazed out the window as if trying to find its outline among the blurring silhouettes.
I couldn’t, of course. I couldn’t even locate my reflection. A decade before, I’d stared at the murky, gaunt face in the glass like it wasn’t mine anymore. Maybe that’s good, I’d mused then; maybe I’ll become someone else. Escape not only the country and the past but my whole being. Three months later, as I headed to New York, the notion had given me some false reassurance, a mistaken sense of casting off chains. It had seemed liberating, even, to arrive in America amid all its myths of new beginnings, able to claim that Tomás Orilla had disappeared.
I told myself this time would be different. That I’d return undisguised, with acceptance if nothing else, a sort of robust clarity. But with the horizon quickly dissipating in the deepening twilight, there was so little I could glimpse through my window. And whether for that reason or because something distracted me—people jamming their bags in the overhead compartments or the flight attendants checking the aisles—my attention returned to the inside of the plane. The recycled air, the lack of room for my legs. The stillness, more than anything. I didn’t hear the other passengers or see anything when I fruitlessly closed my eyes to sleep. Even with the roar of the engine and the wheels starting to turn underneath us, I still didn’t feel like we were moving.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was inspired by my half sister, Isabel Loedel Maiztegui, a Montonera who was disappeared on January 17, 1978, at the age of twenty-two. The novel could not have been written without her sacrifice.
Many other family members and friends contributed to this project with their stories and support. My profound gratitude to my father, Eduardo Loedel, and my siblings, Enrique and Bonnie Loedel; to my mother, Susan Lucks; to Juan Carlos, Isidro, and Mercedes Maiztegui; to Daniel Di Giacinti, Gustavo Villar, Virginia Urquizu, Maite Heras, and Paula Luttringer.
Extensive research went into this book, and certain sources were invaluable, especially A Lexicon of Terror by Marguerite Feitlowitz, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number by Jacobo Timerman, and of course the Nunca Más report from CONADEP. I am also very grateful to all the people working at the memorial site for Automotores Orletti, who gave me such extraordinary access and insight.
My vast thanks to my agent, Marya Spence, whose guidance and enduring belief will always awe me, and to Clare Mao, Zoë Nelson, and everyone else at Janklow & Nesbit. To my brilliant, wonderful editor, Becky Saletan, and the rest of the magnificent team at Riverhead, especially Jynne Dilling Martin, Geoff Kloske, Kate Stark, Catalina Trigo, Helen Yentus, Lauren Peters-Collaer, and Anna Jardine, and to the copy editor, David Koral.
Finally, many thanks to my early readers: Kate Barry, Emily Barasch, Kelly Farber, Daniel Magariel, Stefan Merrill Block, Mark Russell, Daniel Sterba, and most of all, for her incomparable patience, help, and wisdom, Julia Lee McGill. Thank you with all my heart.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Loedel is a book editor based in Brooklyn. Hades, Argentina, his first novel, was inspired by his family history.
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Hades, Argentina Page 27