by Selva Almada
Despite being so popular with women – sometimes I took the bus alone or with my parents, and without my aunts, and I’d always see another girl standing behind the driver’s seat, also shrieking with laughter – Pepe was a man of few words, and not very sociable.
People said he was odd, with that inflection they put on the word when they meant a person wasn’t quite right. Sometimes he went to the boliche, a bar called El Ombú. Boliches were the meeting places for lower-middle-class men who couldn’t go and get drunk in the Jockey Club like professionals and the children of respectable families. According to the Ombú regulars, when Pepe went to the bar he never sat with anyone, he just drank alone while watching whatever game was showing on TV. He didn’t get involved in the talk about politics, football or women. If they ever tried to include him, he nodded from where he was sitting, without opening his mouth. An odd guy. Not quite right.
When he moved into a house near us, he brought a younger woman with him – he’d have been around forty at the time. No one knew anything about her, because she was from out of town and kept herself to herself. The mystery couple were the talk of the neighbourhood. And when he was linked to Andrea’s murder, the whispers multiplied like flies around a carcass.
Pepe drove the bus that took students from Villa Elisa, Colón and San José to Concepción del Uruguay, for the teacher training programmes and other vocational courses taught in that city. Andrea was one of the students who travelled with El Directo every day.
In the case file, some people who used to take the same bus said the driver and the girl were romantically involved; that when everyone else got out at the terminal, she stayed on the bus with him, and that sometimes they saw the pair having dinner by themselves in a little retaurant nearby. The owner of a boarding house by the terminal also said she rented him a room, which she’d seen him going into with the murdered girl. And a girl who studied with Andrea said he’d shown up at the teacher training college one evening that year. They were in class and he called to her from the courtyard. Andrea went out and they spoke for a bit, and when she came back in, the girl asked if her father had come to find her because something had happened at home. Andrea said it was nothing, and that he was a friend, not her father.
When summoned to give a statement, he denied all involvement with her beyond the bus journeys. He knew her by sight, as he did most of the students he took there and back, maybe they’d chatted once or twice or she’d borrowed the kit to make herself some mate. But that was it. The night of the murder, he said, he’d gone for a walk with his wife. Since it was so hot, they spent a long time sitting in the square, then headed home because a storm was brewing. His wife never contradicted him.
Still, it was a long time before the police left him alone. In the months that followed, I often saw patrol cars driving slowly around the dirt roads of my neighbourhood. We all knew who they were watching.
He didn’t kill Andrea. He was in love with her, says the Señora. In some ancient cultures, it was thought that the soul lived in the eyes, you know? And so lovers swapped souls by looking at each other: I’d give you mine, and you’d give me yours. But when one person stopped loving the other, they’d get their soul back and keep their lover’s soul as well. When one of them dies, it must be the same. Andrea took Pepe’s soul with her.
He said he heard about Andrea’s death the same way most people did, on the radio that day, on the 7 a.m. departure from Villa Elisa to Concepción del Uruguay. It must be awful to learn of the death of a loved one like that, to have to keep driving the bus as if the news, the worst you could ever receive, were just another of the countless daily misfortunes that always happen to other people.
One morning a couple of years ago, Pepe was found dead. He hanged himself from a roof beam in his house.
8
Andrea’s mother was called Gloria and she was suspected, along with her husband, of murdering the girl. In her statement, she said she found her daughter’s body after a noise woke her up, a scream or a premonition, she was never sure which. She’d shut the bedroom window overlooking the yard herself, not long before going back and finding her daughter had been stabbed. The kitchen door was closed as well. It was a small house, with just three rooms, all interconnected by doors.
Blood was found on her clothes, of the same blood group as Andrea’s, though she claimed never to have touched the body. Not in an attempt to revive her, and not for a final embrace when they were certain she was dead. The blood on her clothes, she said, may have come from her husband, whose shirt did have blood on it because he’d come into contact with the corpse. The couple had hugged each other, for consolation.
Those who knew her remember her as a withdrawn woman, odd and rather distant. At the time of the murder, Gloria was forty-six, the age Andrea would be now. She was a housewife.
After finding the girl in bed covered in blood, the father and a neighbour went to get the family doctor, Raúl Favre. When the doctor came into the bedroom, Gloria was sitting on the other bed, hands clasped in her lap, staring into space. Like an autistic person, he said. And according to close witnesses, she remained like that for the rest of the morning, and in the funeral chapel when the body was returned to them, and in the weeks that followed her daughter’s death. As if she’d been anaesthetised.
Back then I remember people saying Gloria went to get her hair done the day after the murder. Everyone was horrified at the thought: a woman who’d just experienced the worst thing imaginable for a mother, taking a seat in the hairdresser’s chair. That act, which could also have been a way of distracting herself from the nightmare she was living, was immediately taken as a sign of guilt.
It seems we expect a mother with a dead daughter to tear out her hair, to weep inconsolably, to shake her fist and beg for revenge. We don’t tolerate calm. We don’t forgive resignation.
Last year Ángeles Rawson, a girl of sixteen, was killed in the Colegiales neighbourhood, in Buenos Aires. Ángeles was missing for almost twenty-four hours and then her body was found on the conveyor belt at a waste processing plant, some miles from the capital. When she learnt what had happened, Ángeles’ mum said: No human being is less important than the worst thing they have ever done, and she was harshly criticised for these words. We don’t accept mothers being pious, either.
As well as being accused of murdering her daughter, or at least of participating in the murder and cover-up, and of going to the hairdresser, Gloria is blamed for not attending any of the marches demanding justice for Andrea, not attending a single mass held in her memory, not lifting a finger to help resolve the case, and repeating, whenever she was called in for questioning, the same story, right down to every full stop and comma, as if she were following a script.
She outlived her daughter by twenty-four years. Curiously, they both died on the same day: November 16th.
Andrea’s father always comes out on the side of the violence, the Señora tells me, laying the cards on the table again and again. Are you sure he was her real father?
I thought so at the time. But later I learnt of a rumour that Gloria had been seeing a boy from the countryside who died in a motorbike crash. When she realised she was pregnant, she married another suitor, Eymar Danne, who, whether or not he knew about what happened, ended up becoming Andrea’s dad.
There’s no proof of this, but if it’s true, I think, what a destiny: father and daughter both violently killed at such a young age.
Eymar Danne worked in a meat plant and in his free time he liked to make knives. There were knives he’d made all over the house. Lots of knives. But after the night of the murder, one was missing. Maybe the one that was used to stab Andrea.
María Luisa’s mother also died several years ago. The only one who’s still alive is Sara Páez de Mundín, the mother of Sarita. She still lives in the city of Villa María in Córdoba province, in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts.
I go and see her one winter Sunday. It’s cold and overcast. There’s no one in the streets, no children playing football or dogs to come snapping at the wheels of the taxi when we drive by. A restless wind lifts the loose dirt in the street into eddies.
The taxi driver drops me at a house with nothing growing outside. The bare earth reaches all the way from the street to the front door. Sara lets me in. She’s one of those women whose age is difficult to work out. She has short, curly hair, dark with some grey. A face carved with wrinkles. A mannish air. You can tell she’s a woman who’s suffered, who life and bad luck have never given a break.
We go into a room containing nothing but a gas cooker. It’s nice and warm because she has the oven on. There’s a smell of empanadas cooking. She tells me she makes them to order, to earn money so she can travel to the city of Córdoba, where her husband is in hospital. We go through to the other room, where there’s a table with three chairs, a dresser and a double bed. I sit at the table and Sara opts for the end of her bed.
She arrived in Villa María in the early hours of this morning, and this evening she’s going back to the hospital in Córdoba to look after her husband, who seems to be in a very bad way. Her health isn’t so good either.
A few months before Sarita’s disappearance, Sara lost another child. She said another child of hers was killed, although really the boy died playing football – he had a heart attack. She says they made him play, that he knew he couldn’t because of his health problems, and that’s why he didn’t just die but was killed. And a few months after Sarita, she lost a granddaughter, the girl her other daughter, Mirta, was expecting.
I’ll go and get Mirta, she lives just round the back, she says, and leaves the room.
I’m left alone. The grimy daylight filters in through a small window. A yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling lights the room. There’s not much to see on the bare walls, no paintings or anything. That’s why the photo is so noticeable, at the head of the bed, where other people hang a crucifix. I move closer. It must be Sarita. She has a short, eighties hairdo, red plastic hoop earrings and a black pullover with fuchsia swirls. Quietly beautiful, she looks at the camera with a slight smile.
I’m still looking at the photo when I hear the voice of Sara, now back.
That was my daughter, and this is my other daughter, Mirta.
We say hello. Mirta is also a good-looking woman, but with a harder, wilder beauty, her hair long and jet-black, her eyes large and dark.
They both sit down, once again on the end of the bed.
Sarita was a very good daughter, she was always helping me out. If she saw my trainers were falling apart, she wouldn’t say anything, she’d just go to the shop and get me another pair. She always made sure I had everything I needed. And when I came out of hospital, a few days before she disappeared, she took me to the apartment where she lived with the boy and Mirta, to look after me until I could take care of myself.
Sara doesn’t remember much about the last day they saw Sarita. She’d just had an operation and was taking a lot of tranquillisers for the pain, so she was feeling a bit woozy. She remembers being in bed and her daughter coming to say goodbye, with a towel in her hand. And Marta saying the next day that Sarita hadn’t come back, and feeling worried, but not being able to get up to look for her, and Mirta and some friends going to report her disappearance to the police. A few weeks later, when she still hadn’t come back, they had to leave the little apartment that Dady Olivero, her daughter’s lover, paid for on Sarita’s behalf.
Since he was the last person she was seen with, Mirta called him before anyone else to ask what he’d done with her sister. He said that after going for a drive in his car, he’d dropped her near the bus terminal. They asked at all the ticket windows, and tried all the porters and taxi drivers, but nobody had seen her.
Nine months later, at the end of December 1988, a woman’s remains showed up on the banks of the Tcalamochita river. Mirta went to the morgue to identify them.
They told me those bones were Sarita’s. A load of white bones. They picked one up and showed it to me. Look: long bones, from a tall woman. They took a skull out of a box, with a few hairs stuck to the crown. They opened the jaw and showed me the teeth with fillings. Sarita had had some things done to her teeth, but what do I know, it could have been her but it could have been someone else. All it looked like to me was a pile of bones.
In the case file, the discovery is described as follows:
The skeleton was found at the tip of the island, at the place called La Herradura, in a tangle of debris left by the flooding of the Tcalamochita river, comprising a fallen tree into which branches and logs had been enmeshed, in addition to rubbish borne along by the water (bottles, polystyrene). The remains were found lying perpendicular to the course of the river, in a supine position, with the legs facing towards the bank; the right side against the current and the left flank protected from the same. The skeleton presented more damage on the right side than on the left, and the top of the skull more than the lower part. Women’s clothing was present: knickers, brassiere, skirt and the remains of a polo shirt.
The remains of the clothing they showed me were just scraps of rotting rags, Mirta recalls, so I couldn’t say if it was what Sarita was wearing that afternoon or not. They also found a necklace nearby that looked like one my sister used to have. In the end, a dentist who said he’d treated her identified the body by the teeth.
Sara never believed the skeleton belonged to her daughter. She always thought Dady Olivero was behind Sarita’s disappearance. When those remains were found, Olivero went to prison for a few months. Contradicting Mirta, he said he hadn’t seen Sarita the day she disappeared, he hadn’t taken her for any kind of outing, his relationship with the girl had ended a few months before and she’d once said to him: Baby, I’m mixed up in so much shit that sometimes I just want to get the hell out. He said that between March and April of that year, he’d been with relatives in the city of Salta, where his wife had family. He was planning to open some butchers’ shops there and went to set things up. Olivero’s wife confirmed his alibi.
Since it was never possible to say how Sarita died, the only person suspected of her disappearance was ultimately released.
Ten years later, Sara found out about a new test that could identify human remains, even if they were just bones: DNA. She moved heaven and earth to make the courts exhume Sarita’s body, which was buried in the cemetery next to her brother and baby niece, and they tested it. They took some of Sara’s blood. The result was negative. They repeated the test, and again the result was negative.
Soon after that, her brother-in-law received a mysterious phone call claiming Sarita was in a brothel in Valladolid, Spain.
I think Olivero sold her to a trafficking ring, to get rid of her, Sara says.
But Mirta shakes her head.
If my sister were alive, she’d have come back. I don’t know how, but even if she’d been kidnapped, she would have found a way to escape and come back. She wouldn’t have abandoned us. She wouldn’t have left her son. Those bones aren’t hers, but my sister is dead as well.
Mirta says as well and then it hits me that there’s another dead woman who no one’s making a fuss about, or whose family are still searching for her: that bundle of bones buried in Sarita’s name.
Germán, the son of Sarita Mundín, is now a grown man and has children of his own. His grandmother and aunt are proud of him, of having made sure he studied and finished secondary school. Although he was unlucky and married a wastrel, says Sara, a girl who left him for another man. He never asks about his mother, or even mentions her.
He takes after me there, says Mirta. We’re private people. No one at work knows she’s my sister. Every now and then something comes out, something in the paper that reminds people. Everyone knows about her case, it’s been talked about so much. If anyone
asks if we’re related, I say no. I don’t want people knowing she’s my sister, I don’t want any more questions. My pain is mine and I don’t want to share it. It’s only her, my mum, who keeps going with it all.
Two years after this conversation, I found out that Germán was in prison, in Detention Facility 5 in Villa María, for possession of drugs.
There’s never any sign of Sarita in the tarot, either alive or dead. She’s the only one of the three who never speaks. The Señora says she feels that Sarita is alive, or at least that she was until recently.
As well as the negative DNA test, her mother has an almost occult reason for believing Sarita is alive: I’ve never been able to dream about her, she says. I would have liked to touch her again, to hear that voice I can no longer remember, even if it were only a dream. But then, I think if I’ve never dreamed about her it must be because she’s still alive. If she were dead, she’d have come back in a dream to say goodbye.
When I leave Sara’s, the afternoon is still cold, gloomy and deserted. The taxi driver is waiting for me, parked opposite the house. He’s listening to a football match. The broadcast is interrupted now and then by the crackling of the taxi radio, the voice of a young woman who, from the little central office, reels off customers’ names and addresses.
Since 1977 in Villa María, some twenty unpunished murders have been recorded. In 2002, the femicide of Mariela La Condorito López led to the formation of the Truth and Justice Organisation, which later became Real Truth, Justice for All.