by Selva Almada
Before me stands the cathedral, magnanimous. The further a place from the hand of God, the more imposing the building that honours him. On the day María Luisa went missing, the cathedral and the square would have been teeming with the faithful, worshipping the Immaculate Conception. Maybe she even passed this way, unnoticed in the crowd, to leave a flower for the Virgin. From my place in the square, I can see that it’s closed. Pity. I would have liked to go in: it’s always cooler inside churches.
I decide not to look at the time again. Whenever I take out my phone and check, only a few minutes have gone by. I set the alarm for five to five.
Suddenly I see them appear in a corner of the square. I don’t know if they’re real or part of a dream. From a distance the figures look hazy, their outlines rippling like a mirage. When they get closer, I see that they’re real. Two Mennonite men in denim dungarees, check shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, black lace-up shoes, white hats, and bags in their hands. Behind them, emerging into view as they draw nearer, two women in flowery dresses and aprons, with blue scarves covering their hair. One has a baby in her arms. Not far from the city there’s a Mennonite community. Their bags must be full of the cheeses and homemade produce they make and bring here to sell.
They cross the road, seeking the shade on the pavement. I watch as they drift slowly along, more prisoners of the siesta. They stop at the huge window of a home appliances store and gaze in as if sharing something illicit, a minor sin: feasting their eyes for a time on those forbidden inventions.
I follow the tradesman’s lead and stretch out on the bench, my rucksack under my head. I must have fallen asleep at some point because I wake up in the middle of a dream in which thousands of cicadas are singing in unison. It’s my phone alarm vibrating inside my rucksack. Five to five.
I sit up and pull on my trainers. Gradually things begin to stir. The street fills up with mopeds. The odd car, the odd bicycle, people on foot. The shops open at five.
I stop in a service station and ask for the key to the toilet. I wash my face, neaten up my hair, put some chewing gum in my mouth. I can feel my heart beating faster. Finally I’m going to talk to María Luisa’s brother.
But not at five, as we’d agreed. Yogui Quevedo keeps me waiting another half-hour, sitting yet again on that blessed wall.
As I wait, I have the feeling I’m being watched. I look up at the big broken windows of the building, which has another two floors above the Quevedos’ office. I think I see a curtain move. I feel slightly uneasy. I type out a message and press send. Yogui replies that he’s on his way. All in capitals, as if he’s shouting, as if we were still too far apart for me to hear him. And we must be, since it’s another fifteen minutes before he shows up.
Finally I see him come round the corner and cross the street, smiling at me. He holds out his hand. He’s just showered, his shiny black hair is flat against his skull, and he smells of an aftershave that reminds me of one my father used to use. He doesn’t apologise for being late.
He takes out a key and opens the door. We step into a dim, down-at-heel little office. He puts the envelope he’s been holding on the rickety Formica table that serves as a desk and tells me to make myself at home. I sit on one of the three chairs, which are also made of Formica. He puts a fan near the open door. I look over. There’s a large carob-wood shelving unit opposite chock full of spirits and whisky bottles, lined up and covered in dirt. They must buy them on those trips they make to the border, meaning to sell them on, and then they accumulate there, forgotten. As well as that table there’s another, smaller one, at the back, with a portable stove on top connected to a gas cylinder. He lights it and starts heating some water. While he prepares the mate, we talk about the weather. They said on the radio that it’s going to rain this evening, but the sky is blue and cloudless.
He comes over to the table with the mate ready and sits down. He slides the envelope towards me.
I brought you something.
I look at him, I look at the envelope, but I don’t move.
It’s a photo of my sister.
I’ve still never seen a photo of María Luisa. Just a pencil sketch in the paper. I’m interested to know what she really looked like. The drawing I saw was very rough, like one of those identikits the police put together. But my hands don’t do as I tell them and I go on staring at the envelope without opening it, without even touching it.
It’s a photo of her in the morgue, he says eventually.
My stomach turns over.
I don’t know if you’ll want to see it. I bought it off a police photographer.
I can’t understand why anyone would want to have a photo like that. Before I have the chance to ask, he tells me: Since here they did fuck all, I got in touch with a magazine in Buenos Aires, one of the true crime ones. Esto, I think it was. Anyway, you know how those magazines like morbid shit. And I wanted the rest of the country to know about my sister’s murder, in case that gave people here a kick up the arse.
I’m not convinced by his explanation, but I reach for the envelope and quickly pull out the photo. It’s an enlargement. I glance at it briefly. The poor thing. I check inside the envelope, hoping he’s also brought one of María Luisa alive. But there’s nothing else. I look up and he’s watching me.
See how she ended up. Completely disfigured. I only recognised her because of a scar on her leg, from when I chucked a tape player at her one time.
You threw a tape player at her?
Yeah, we were arguing. You know what brothers and sisters are like. I didn’t mean to actually hurt her...
I’d like to see a photo of her.
I don’t have any. There was one in the paper, of her with my mum and my sister-in-law, but it got lost.
The fan by the door just drags the hot air in from outside and moves it in circles above us. I’m sweating, and I feel a bit annoyed and also a bit tired. Or sad.
I tell him the mate’s got cold. Maybe if we go back to the moment when we’d just arrived, if he puts the kettle on the stove again and adds fresh leaves and comes back and sits down and I forget about the envelope with the photo, we can start the interview.
He waits for the kettle to start whistling and sprinkles more mate leaves into the gourd. He drinks the first one, then refills it and passes it to me.
Better?
I nod, and tell him I’m surprised he doesn’t drink tereré like everyone else there.
We’ve got no fridge.
Has he been working with his brothers for long?
On and off, helping them out. I took voluntary retirement. For a long time I worked driving a rubbish truck.
I ask if he remembers the last time he saw his sister and he tells me it was the same day she disappeared, around 10 a.m. He was on a bus, on his way to the job he had then in a radio repair shop, and since it was a holiday or half-holiday he was going in later than usual. He saw her through the window: she was on the pavement outside the house where she worked as a maid, she had a shopping bag in her hand and was talking to a boy on a bicycle, leaning on the handlebars as they chatted. The boy was Francisco Suárez, an employee of Don Gómez, who Yogui knew by sight. Were it not for what happened afterwards, he’d probably have forgotten the scene: his teenage sister flirting with a boy on the pavement. If things had carried on as normal, perhaps he’d only have remembered in order to tease her, the way older brothers do when their sisters are discovering boys.
Did she have a boyfriend? Was this Suárez guy her boyfriend?
No, no. Well, not that I know of...
Yogui was twelve years older than María Luisa, so yes, he probably wouldn’t have known.
He tells me María Luisa didn’t go to school and her only friends were from the neighbourhood. She was a real homebody, and this was her first job.
However, in that short, in
tense week that marked her leaving the house to join the adult world, the world of going out to work, María Luisa made two friends: Norma Romero and Elena Taborda, two girls slightly older than her, and more streetwise. Quevedo blames them for leading her astray. As if her death were a punishment for something she’d been doing wrong. According to him, that day, probably the last of María Luisa’s short life, she met up with her new friends after work and they invited her to spend the afternoon in Villa Bermejito, a village around sixty miles away on the banks of a tributary of the Bermejo river, where people had weekend homes. They were going with Francisco Suárez, Catalino Lencina and Jesús Gómez, the boss of the first two.
That’s what the girls said the first time they were questioned, and their statement was backed up by a petrol station attendant who confirmed that he’d filled up a car containing Don Gómez, two guys and three girls. But Norma and Elena, when called before the judge, denied everything they’d told the police and filed a complaint of unlawful coercion, showing the marks from beatings they’d received to make them give false testimony.
The judge for the case, Oscar Sudría, believes the two girls hold the key. He’s convinced that they (and the murderer or murderers) are the only people left who can say exactly what happened on that December 8th.
Over the twenty years it took him to close the case, he summoned them several times to make statements. It wasn’t easy because the girls left Sáenz Peña soon after the murder and never stayed long in the same place. So every two or three years, first he had to find out where they were, and then he had to bring them back. He saw them at weekends, never with the police, because, after their complaints of illegal coercion during the 1983 investigation, if there was anyone they didn’t trust it was the police. As the years went by, he watched them grow into women, have children. But he could never get a word out of either of them.
The petrol station attendant, when called in to make another statement, changed his story as well: he’d never seen Don Gómez and María Luisa together.
Quevedo maintains that they’re lying, that these key witnesses in his sister’s rape and murder were bought off by Gómez and his immense fortune – Gómez, who even Quevedo still calls Don Gómez, as if he inspired in him a strange sort of fear or respect.
We’re interrupted by his phone. He answers and begins a conversation, practically shouting. The signal’s bad, it’s a call from Buenos Aires.
On the other end is an adviser to the Chaco politician Antonio Morante. They chat for a bit. Quevedo tells him about me, hands me the phone, the adviser and I say hello, he tells me something about a bill they’re putting forward in the Chamber, we swap email addresses. I return the handset, Yogui says a few more words then hangs up. He seems pleased. Since the line wasn’t great, I didn’t fully understand about the bill they’re planning to present in the Honourable Chamber of Deputies of the Nation.
Is it to request the case be reopened? I ask Yogui.
No, it’s for them to condemn the lack of justice in my little sister’s case.
Oh, I say, disappointed.
Suddenly it starts to rain. The radio was right after all.
7
I go several times to see the Señora. The green cloth folded in half, which was on the coffee table that first afternoon, is always there. She keeps the pack of tarot cards inside it. Each time, she peels the cloth back carefully, as if uncovering a sleeping child. She asks me to cut the deck into three. Then to shuffle each third, moving the cards in a circle, seven times, with my right hand. She forms a stack again and we hold hands over the freshly shuffled deck, saying aloud the name and surname of the girl we want to ask about. Then she draws cards and lays them on the cloth one by one. I see the figures upside-down. It makes no difference because I don’t know what they mean.
Other times, the girls get in ahead of the cards.
One afternoon she says she can’t breathe and raises a hand to her throat. She stays like that, her eyes closed. I sit still. All I can do is wait until whatever’s happening to her stops happening. When she comes to, opens her mouth and takes a breath, her eyes are shining.
I couldn’t breathe, I was suffocating, it was so intense. Pressure here and a pain here, she says, pointing first to her neck and then between her legs.
It’s María Luisa, strangled and raped.
Poor little thing. Pulled up like a reed. She was still so young, with so weak a hold on life. Like the reeds that grow beside lakes, she says to me.
I remember the photos I saw of María Luisa. The one her brother showed me of her body in the morgue, swollen, muddy, with parts of her face eaten by birds. And another two I saw in the case file.
One is also of her body, in the place where they found her. It’s taken from a short distance away, and it’s in black and white. It shows the body of a woman floating in the water. This photo reminds me of the painting by John Millais, of the dead Ophelia. Like the character from Hamlet, María Luisa is floating face-up. Like in the painting, the flat green reeds curve over the lake, and the surface is covered in tiny aquatic plants. Not the purple flowers Queen Gertrude calls dead men’s fingers, and that Ophelia wove into her crowns, but others, known as duckweed. A tree, not the willow young Ophelia falls from, but one with a low, squat canopy, casts its shadow over María Luisa’s body. Death, for both of them, shot through with anguish.
The other photo is in colour and in it María Luisa is alive. It’s a family photo, of a group of women. Maybe it was taken on someone’s birthday. On the left is her little sister, then her mother in a fancy housecoat, then one of her sisters-in-law holding a baby girl, and finally María Luisa. All the others, even the baby, are smiling at the camera. But not her. She’s wearing a white vest that stands out against her brown skin, and she’s not smiling. Under her thick fringe, her large, serious eyes look slightly downwards and off to one side. She seems sad.
No one forced María Luisa. She went on that trip, or whatever it was, because she wanted to. Maybe she was invited by the boy her brother saw her with, maybe they were going out or she was in love with him, or maybe her friends convinced her. But it wasn’t a kidnapping. She wanted to go. Then, for some reason, it all went to pieces. She’s not annoyed. I don’t think she understands what happened, even now. She was still so young. For her, everything was new: the new job, the new friends, that boy...
I think we have to find a way of reconstructing how the world saw them. If we can understand how people saw the girls, we’ll be able to understand how they saw the world, does that make sense?
Teenagers or even children having jobs was common in towns in the interior, at least until the eighties. You didn’t have to be from a particularly poor family. Girls from working-class homes, whose mothers did the housework, were sent out to work by these same mothers from when they were very young.
My best friend in those days had a job as a babysitter from the age of ten, when she was barely older than the kids she looked after. My mum had also worked from when she was young, and because of that we weren’t allowed to. Strangely, I felt a bit jealous of my friend’s situation: she earned a wage, not much of one but a wage all the same, which meant she had money of her own; she had responsibilities, she spent a lot of each day out of her house, and what’s more, she went to school and got good grades, like me. In my eyes my friend was superior. Confident, streetwise.
And yet my other friends didn’t see her that way. To them, my friend was beneath us: she had to work and we didn’t. Even though the most those girls could aspire to was qualifying as teachers and marrying kind, hard-working men.
Andrea didn’t have to work as a girl either. The only person in her house who worked was her father. In a meat processing plant. She was able to study because her boyfriend paid for it. If he hadn’t come along, maybe Andrea would have ended up working in the Vizental like most young people in San José, who finished sec
ondary school, if that, then put their names down, took a seat and waited to be called. Plant worker or secretary. Andrea, being pretty, would have got a job in the admin department. Well-dressed, well-groomed and always sweet-smelling, even in the fetid black cloud of boiled meat, the secretaries typed on typewriters and did sums on calculators and strode down the corridors with their arms full of files and their feet falling neatly in line, that elegant gait. Ogled by the workers, who, as they sawed up hooves, tails and heads, and separated skin from flesh, felt as frisky as bulls and dreamed of mounting the secretaries like cows.
If the possibility ever crossed her mind, it can’t have been very appealing. The memory of her father coming back from the slaughterhouse every afternoon, smelling of blood and disinfectant, must have turned her stomach.
Sarita also started work young. She had no choice, because in her family they were very poor. The last job she had before getting married was as a cleaner in a doctor’s house. They treated her well there, almost like a daughter, and encouraged her to study. But she fell pregnant and got married. She was too pretty for her husband to send out as a maid again, all that beauty going to waste in a haze of cleaning products. So he sent her out as a prostitute.
Andrea wanted something different, the Señora says. It’s not true that she dreamed of getting married, having children and qualifying as a teacher. If Andrea hadn’t been killed, she would have upped sticks. She wanted out. She didn’t see any future where she was.
In the tarot cards a lover appears, an older man. In the case file, too.
I knew him. He lived a few blocks from my house at the time of the murder. But I knew him from before. He was called Pepe Durand and he was a driver with the El Directo bus company, which made short trips from my town to nearby towns and cities. Sometimes, when I went to visit my grandparents in the countryside, I’d take the bus there with my aunts and he’d be driving. He was a good-looking guy. At least, my aunts liked him, especially the youngest, who’d deposit me in a seat with the bags then go off and spend the whole journey chatting to him. Standing behind his seat as they talked, leaning on the backrest and laughing loudly, a high-pitched laugh like a whinnying colt. Sometimes she also prepared mate and passed him the gourd. I don’t know if anything ever happened between them, but I’m sure my aunt had a crush on Pepe.