Crocodile Tears

by mercedes Rosende

  There is nothing but countryside, soya fields and forestry plantations, woods of eucalyptus and pine in the gentle rolling landscape of rural Uruguay, the odd acre of wheat, one or two fields with animals which, from a distance and in this rain, could be horses or cows, could even be camels. And, a bit further off, what we’re interested in now: a landing strip which is barely more than a track from the road to the houses of the farmworkers, three hundred and fifty yards of poorly flattened earth which, during the rainy season (like today) becomes impassable even for four-wheel drives. Despite this, the plane that was flying overhead a few minutes ago manages to touch down and taxi to a halt without any difficulty, coming to a stop near the houses and sheds.

  The one who does seem to be in difficulty is Antinucci, who is stranded halfway along the track in his Audi A6 with its smell of shiny new leather, sinking into the mud which covers part of the wheels and is now threatening to reach the door. At that precise moment he gets out with tense, rapid movements, a furious expression on his face and the eternal unlit cigarette between his fingers. In the distance, a tall thin man alights from the Cessna and leans against the fuselage to drink from a can or a bottle; he is calm, he drinks and he waits, resting against the plane, as if he doesn’t care about getting soaked. Another man, a white-haired giant in the clothes of a farmworker – boots, baggy bombacha trousers, cowboy hat – comes running across the field towards the stationary car.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” he shouts, still more than thirty yards away.

  “Bring a tractor and get me out of here, Eugenio. And make it quick: I need to go back to Montevideo in half an hour. Come on, Eugenio, hurry up.”

  “The tractor’s broken, sir. I told you the last time.”

  “Jesus —”

  Antinucci interrupts himself. We already know about his religious convictions and we’re not going to labour the point. Father Ismael can judge his behaviour tomorrow, not us. He looks at his moccasins again, and at the hems of his trousers, which are covered with mud. He restrains himself, he doesn’t want to blaspheme, Holy Mother of God.

  He regrets the whim that led him to bring his new Audi instead of just using a pick-up truck, all so he could test out the car’s performance on the open road. He talks quietly, pronouncing each word separately, sliding them between his teeth, chewing them, spitting them out.

  “You’ve got fifteen minutes to get me out of here. Okay, Eugenio?”

  “Yes, sir. Should I bring the Toyota?”

  “Bring whatever you want, but move your ass. And that guy, standing over there as if he had all the time in the world? Does he think I’m going to wade through this mud to the plane? Tell him I’m off.”

  The labourer hurries away without another word.

  A truck appears from somewhere and approaches the Cessna; words are exchanged between the pilot and the labourer and boxes are unloaded while Antinucci, who has returned to the shelter of his Audi, watches as he compulsively drums his fingers on the dashboard, raises the unlit cigarette to his mouth, looks at his shoes and the hems of his trousers dripping onto the new floor mat.

  Ten minutes pass and the labourer returns in the vehicle we saw earlier, and from the back he takes out a steel cable, a large box that appears to be very heavy and a long thin box.

  The aircraft starts taxiing again, takes off and flies away.

  “Get me out of here, Eugenio. And then put everything in the back.”

  “Yes, sir. Don’t forget to leave some money to fix the tractor.”

  The man in bombacha trousers and cowboy hat attaches the cable to the Toyota and then to the Audi, gets back in, starts the engine, puts it in gear to pull the car out: huge quantities of mud are churned up, inevitably splashing the shiny black waxed paintwork, the gleaming windows, the iodine headlamps, the alloy wheels. Finally, Eugenio manages to get the car out. He jumps down from the truck, and the boxes are passed from one vehicle to another without a single word being exchanged.

  That night, when Antinucci’s car enters the garage, it’s a pitiful sight. He doesn’t even want to think about it; he has a shower, eats supper.

  After ten, he goes back down to the garage, looks at the state of his Audi A6 and – with great effort – takes the two boxes from the back, puts them down to catch his breath, stands up and shakes his head: by tomorrow the mud will have dried and the grime solidified, and it will be easier to clean.

  He drags the boxes to the kitchen and opens the larger one first. He takes out four SIG Sauer P226 pistols, checks them, feels their weight; next come the four Parabellum magazines – a hundred 9 mm bullets each – and he smiles faintly, for the first time today he smiles, he seems satisfied; he takes out the two Calico M960A sub-machine guns with their helical magazines, 750 rounds per minute, and his facial muscles contort into an expression that appears to be one of happiness.

  And finally, in the other box, the night’s real star: the RPG-7 grenade launcher with anti-tank rounds, which he takes out with care, almost reverentially. Antinucci sighs and looks at it in wonder. He tries it out, rests it on his shoulder, imagines the hole it would make in steel armour-plating up to two inches thick; he caresses the barrel, polishing it with his sleeve. To think that the boss didn’t want to send it to him, he said it was too much, but here it is, resting in his very hands. This one is for him, he decides. He brings it close to his face, smells it, licks it, removes a fragment of nylon with his tongue. He touches his lips to the metal.

  At the bottom of the box all that is left are ten plastic bags, 100 grams each, white, absolute top quality. He smiles, gradually showing his teeth. 750 rounds a minute, and a kilo of high-grade coke. He stretches his lips until they become tense strings which frame his nicotine-yellow smile.

  X

  “Take off your clothes,” the policeman orders. He’s tall and fat, with the neck of a Russian doll. The uniform is tight at his stomach and his arms. “Come on, take your clothes off, all of them. Turn around.” The room measures six feet by six; it has a low ceiling and no windows. It’s a wooden cubicle. There are distant sounds: a rat scratching, a man coughing, a car braking, tyres squealing. “Turn around, quick,” he repeats. “Bend over, a bit further, a bit further, that’s it.” Diego obeys the order and touches his toes so his buttocks are pointing upwards, towards the fat man’s greasy hair. Silence, a few moments of hard, interminable silence. From outside comes a damp smell, a smell of cold morning, of reheated stew; a smell of absent dog. The fat man tells him to stand up. Diego stands up. The fat man tells him to get dressed. Diego gets dressed. “Perfect,” the policeman says. “Let him through,” he shouts to his colleague, who is picking his teeth at the door. “Take him to the car.” Then, to Diego: “Get on with it. Quick.”

  Diego comes out, still buttoning up his shirt. A couple of guards – bored faces, cigarette butts in the corners of their mouths – take him outside and put him in the car just like in a crime movie. “Watch your skull,” says one, and shoves him in. “Hurry up, sit in the middle.” The guard keeps the door open and, before Diego is even fully inside, gets in too and slams it closed behind him. Checketen, checketen, blares the radio, pumping out cumbia beats. Diego slides along the seat, hunkers down, a policeman at each side. “Nice and easy, eh, that’s the way we like it.” He squeezes himself into the narrow space between the two men’s shoulders, his legs pressed together, his arms by his sides, walled in between two bodies.

  He searches his memory, looking for a series or a movie. He’s sure he’s watched a thousand scenes like this, the criminal being taken somewhere in a patrol car, between two cops, and while Diego racks his memory for the scene – not the one happening just now but another, more colourful, brighter and, above all, more enjoyable scene because he is looking on from outside – and tries to block out the deafening noise of the music pounding out of the loudspeakers, checketen, checketen, but it’s hopeless, he can’t do it, and he remains stuck between the bodies, with the music so loud it’s distorted. He can’
t remember. In the end, he thinks about how shabby this shot would look in a movie, thinks about the details of his faded dirty shirt, his worn-out shoes, battered and stained, the grey stubble on the cheeks of one of the cops, the black fingernails of the other one. Reality is always messier than fiction and, we suspect, that’s why he prefers the latter and is trying to recreate it.

  The car starts. Diego barely sees the prison buildings go by, one after the other; he hardly sees the barred windows with clothes hanging to dry and faces looking out, the grey of the cement, the plastic bags fluttering in the sad landscape.

  We suspect we know why he closes his eyes when they stop at the control post, why he squeezes them shut. The guy on the right gets out and all he can hear are voices, laughter, a little distance away another radio with other music that seems like the same music, the noise of metal clanging, doors opening, chains being removed. He closes his eyes tight, we were saying, squeezes them as if soldering his eyelids shut to defend his thoughts, his dreams, the fiction he now manages to remember or to imagine. We don’t want to be too hard on him, he’s our character after all, but we know Diego has never had much talent for coping with reality, and this moment is no exception. With his eyes closed, he no doubt wants to escape from the closed space of the car, crossing the frontier between the prison and the world, and maybe that’s why he opens them shortly after the car moves off and leaves the prison buildings behind.

  Now they are driving past shacks: there are motorbikes, bicycles and people arriving on foot from the bus stop, loaded with bags and packages, who will soon be standing in line to go through the prison checks. Diego observes the scene but imagines others, he wants to get away from all this and begins to slip into that state of sadness and isolation with which we are already familiar.

  He swallows down a mouthful of bad breath and saliva.

  The car heads for the city centre, first along Route 1, then through the Cerro, around the shanty towns on the edge of the city, before hitting the port road, past the builders’ yards, between the towers of shipping containers, the water to the right and, to the left, the glass and concrete of the Palacio de la Luz and the train station. Diego thinks about the route, trying to avoid specific thoughts, and for a brief moment he manages, but he can’t keep his emotions at bay: since he woke up this morning he has oscillated between dejection and despair, aware that nothing good can come of this piece of legal theatre which could have been lifted from an American movie, this hearing with Ursula, the wife of the man he kidnapped little more than a month ago. Just over thirty days ago, and so much has happened that he already struggles to recall the details. Everything has become vague, it seems old and shabby, like a sepia-toned melodrama, something that occurred in another era and in another place. He thinks about the time since he returned from Spain, the plans he made with Sergio to abduct Santiago, the day of the kidnapping, the hideout, the ransom they demanded from the victim’s wife, Ursula, and the final betrayal by his partner. The story seems distant, alien, with the exception of the strange relationship he struck up with the victim’s wife. He asks himself if it’s true that she once suggested becoming partners or if he just imagined it.

  Dejection, we were saying, despair, hopelessness; he is overcome by a rising sense of imminent disaster, a flashback of rapid images, of partial ideas, of mistaken beliefs, sometimes mere sensations such as the resentment he feels towards Sergio or his bewilderment at Ursula’s behaviour. And he thinks about her a lot. Soon they’ll be facing each other in a courtroom, and he asks himself for the umpteenth time why she said she didn’t recognize him and had never heard his voice and had certainly never received a ransom demand for her husband. He asks himself if she wanted to protect him and he doesn’t understand, but right now Diego doesn’t understand much.

  The policeman sitting on his right is sending text messages, tapping them out at the speed of sound then waiting as if on standby, motionless and expectant, his eyes glued to the screen, turned to stone until the notification pings him back to life and everything starts again.

  On the patrol car radio, the music is still playing, cumbia or salsa or some fake version of both, nobody can tell the difference anyway. Diego would like to move through the city without any sounds to disturb him, he’d like to escape, of course he would. Who doesn’t want to escape, from prison, from routine, from reality? He wishes he could go on a journey, if only in his mind, without the sounds that tie him to the car. But it’s always the same: everyday reality never matches our dreams. His ears are ringing and he asks (in a very low voice, admittedly; he’s shy and will still be shy when we come to the end of this story) if they can turn the music down, but nobody seems to hear him because he doesn’t even elicit a stare, a contraction of the facial muscles, not so much as a blink from either of the two policemen who are guarding him.

  Diego concentrates. Trying not to listen to the noise or to inhale the cigarette smoke, he focuses all his energy on capturing the landscape, the morning sun, the slightly wet road and even the river–sea smell which insinuates itself through the closed windows; he makes an effort and manages to see himself in the near future, free again, and he enjoys the idea, at least for a moment. But, as happens so many times a day, he falls once again into a state of dejection – the bitter memory of Sergio, the betrayal, his own failure – and he is overcome by the anguish of someone caught unawares, the harsh pain which comes with the discovery that he has fallen victim to a trick. And he remembers Ursula, that enigma he is unable to solve. Why did she lie? Now he is going to come face to face with her, he wonders if she will stick by her original statement. The outside world is a provisional stop between now and freedom.

  Another phone goes off and the policeman on the left shoots out his right arm and buries his elbow in Diego’s lower back with a movement and a degree of strength that Diego finds hard to believe are unintentional; the cop grinds his elbow around until he takes out the phone, not before repeating the dig with a Neanderthal force that Diego has already learned to endure without complaint.

  They have left the countryside behind, crossed a beautiful wide river and entered the city. Diego sees the glow of the refinery towers and the trail of grey smoke. Now the car is driving along the port road, it speeds past the brickyards and turns left. The journey ends in a street in the Old Town, just thirty or forty minutes after it began.

  XI

  Ursula has few memories of her mother. The face of a vaguely friendly if somewhat absent woman, a slack face with a lost look in her eyes, a young face trapped inside another older, more tired one, a lifeless voice, cold white hands which sometimes, very occasionally, touched her, brushed her cheek, her forehead. She has lost the memory of her mother’s voice, perhaps because she didn’t hear it often, because her mother didn’t talk much or didn’t talk to her or talked when she wasn’t listening. Nor does she recall any of her mother’s habits, what she ate for breakfast, the clothes she wore, what she did when she was at home or where she went. But she does remember her mother’s face, although she wonders if those features come from her memory or from the photos with which her father later filled so many spaces around the house, occupying corners and other places where his slender wife had scarcely cast a shadow in life, spaces he conquered for a dead woman. What she does retain, though, is an olfactory memory, the delicate grassy aroma of Heno de Pravia soap, the scent of wild herbs accompanied by the more personal smell of her clean body; and the stench of disease which came later, of medicine and sweat and urine.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  Sometimes she remembers a long hot summer, a time they would normally have spent at the beach, but that year the whole family stayed in the apartment in the Old Town – her father, her sister Luz, Auntie Irene and her – all talking in whispers despite the blazing sun outside. The windows were closed and they shut the doors behind themselves silently as they tiptoed in and out of darkened rooms. She remembers the smell of white jasmine that the man with the basket brought ev
ery Saturday without fail, a sweet odour for the first few days but with a hint of decay and death before the flowers were changed.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  She remembers, sees herself standing beside a bed in a huge room that her father closed up and which remains locked to this day; she remembers the high ceiling and the glass teardrop chandelier, the white imitation ivy of the mouldings, the solemn curtains, the baroque images of saints and virgins, the mothball odour of the velvet chairs, the white bedspread with its smell of laundry soap, the rugs redolent of the dry cleaner’s, and the tang of antibiotics mixed with the Heno de Pravia scent given off by her mother’s body. She remembers the nurse, a fat blonde woman who wore her glasses on a gold chain, who would remain still for hours and hours, her elbows resting on the windowsill and her gaze fixed on cars and pedestrians, like a melancholy bride; she remembers the woman taking her mother’s wrist, checking her pulse, looking at her watch and then placing her mother’s hand back on the white bedspread, resting it carefully on the ribbed fabric, turning slowly towards them, looking at the father, meeting the girl’s gaze and sizing up the fear in their eyes. Her mother was lying in the bed, her headscarf had slipped towards her right ear and her hand made no move to adjust it, as it had on so many other occasions.