by Lewis Shiner
I found an Internet place a block from the mall and spent an hour writing an email, then rereading it and rewriting it and reading it again.
*
Dear Elena,
Please understand just one thing: I don’t care.
Whatever your secret is, it won’t change how I feel about you. I don’t care about your past. I care about what your father did only because it hurts you so much.
I don’t care about the difference in our ages or in our cultures. If you do, okay, I will live with that. If I can’t be your lover, I want to be your friend. If I can’t be your friend, I at least want to dance with you again.
Dancing with you is like nothing I have ever felt before. All I want is to feel that way again.
—Beto
*
I clicked Send. It was my last idea.
*
Wednesday was a big night for milongas. La Nacional, very traditional, a long, narrow, smoke-darkened room with cracking plaster. La Viruta and Salon Canning again and El Beso and at least half a dozen others I’d never been to.
I went back to my apartment for a few hours’ sleep. When I woke up, the light was fading and I had the momentary conviction that my consciousness had inhabited a corpse. My body lay like an inert slab of meat and my brain was dark and empty as a shuttered nightclub. I managed to roll my legs off the bed and sit up, which made my head throb.
I splashed water on my face and freshened my deodorant. I hadn’t shaved since Monday morning and I decided it gave me a certain grizzled porteño authenticity.
It was only 7:00. The idea of staying in the flat was unbearable. I put on a dress shirt and a jacket, grabbed my dance shoes, and went down the street to call Sam. He told me I looked like hell, “in a degenerate, Mickey Rourke kind of way.” I couldn’t talk to him about Elena, though he knew something was wrong and kept pushing for an explanation. After I hung up, I caught the Subte to Federico Lacroze and Don Güicho’s class.
The building was run down, the tiny elevator tired and barely willing to climb the six floors. The Sexto Kultural was a long, empty loft with improvised décor, the walls covered with graffiti-style art, the furniture third-hand and losing its stuffing.
The class was already underway. Don Güicho was breaking down a doble tiempo change of direction step. He went through it twice, put on some music, and came over to me. «You look like shit, Beto,» he said as he hugged me. «No luck with your friend yet?»
I shook my head.
«Well, I found out something interesting. I talked to a guy I know who’s been following the trials. He works at La Biblioteca Nacional and he’s done a lot of research on the dictatorship. He said there was a guy named Osvaldo del Salvador who worked for Cesarino, you know, the guy who ran the detention centers? This guy del Salvador was a torturer at the Club Atlético.»
I’d heard about it. It was on Avenida Paseo Colón, under the elevated highway that led to the airport. The detention center, one of the worst, was in the basement. They said the noise of the cars overhead helped drown out the screams.
«He got off under La Ley de Punto Final, changed his name, got a civilian job.»
I saw it coming, wanted to put my hand over Don Güicho’s mouth to keep him from going on. I didn’t have the strength to lift my arm.
«My friend said he was living under the name Osvaldo Lacunza. The same as your girlfriend. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but…»
«No,» I said. «It’s no coincidence.» What had Elena said? I couldn’t understand her because I didn’t have the history.
«Beto, my friend, welcome to Argentina. You want to know why we have more psychiatrists than anywhere else on earth? This is what I tried to tell you at the demonstration, we deal with this every day. These people are walking among us.»
«Thanks for finding this out. You’re a good friend.»
«It wasn’t anything. Come and dance, they’re waiting on me.»
«In a minute.»
*
I felt the fear in my shoulders and neck, in the itching of my scalp and the burning in my right eye.
Elena’s father hadn’t betrayed her with a mistress or a crooked business deal. He’d betrayed her by not telling her that he was a monster. Conservative, she’d said, deeply religious. What would he think of some godless Yanqui corrupting his daughter?
I danced for a while. I took a turn with Patricia, who found plenty of things to correct me on, as usual. «Are you paying attention?» she asked.
«Trying,» I said.
I left at 10:15 to get to El Beso by 10:30. If Elena had gotten my email, if I’d touched her at all, El Beso would be the place she would go.
Visualization, they say, is the key to getting what you want. I pictured her walking in, seeing me at my front row table, me rising to take her in my arms as she ran to me…
Then I pictured the tall, sharp-faced man, who was probably one of del Salvador’s torturers, following us outside and putting a pistol to the back of my neck, firing a single shot through my brain and disappearing into an alley.
*
She wasn’t at El Beso. She wasn’t at La Ideal. I went by the office to check my email. Nothing from Elena. I fell asleep in my chair, woke up at 1:00 a.m. not knowing where I was, and dragged myself off to bed.
*
Late Thursday morning, I called Don Güicho and canceled my class for that night. It was one week from my first dance with Elena. I told myself that if she had a trace of desire for me to find her, that if she were remotely open to leaving things to Fate, she would be at El Beso. I had been telling myself things all day. Not to check my personal email, for example, which I continued to do every five minutes. I told myself to give up. That I was an idiot, that she was crazy, that her father was a murderer, on and on, until I had made myself thoroughly sick of myself.
The milonga started at 6:00 on Thursdays and I was there by seven.
Superstition is the last refuge of the hopeless. I wore my red tie and freshly laundered black shirt. The woman who’d accepted my first-ever cabeceo was there again and we danced a tanda. I told myself that it would all play out the same way as the week before and any minute Elena would walk in.
I danced with two or three other women. Mostly I watched. Time crawled. I wanted it to go even more slowly because suddenly it was after ten, and then it was eleven, and Elena was still not there.
I stayed until 12:30, until they played “La cumparsita” to end it, and I walked down to the street with the last of the diehards and waited in the street for a cab. The weather had turned cold again, the wind coming straight from Patagonia and the South Pole, and it chilled me to the center of my chest.
I was not going to find her.
*
Friday was unbearable. I couldn’t remember my last good night’s sleep. The weekend yawned before me, empty and endless.
I didn’t bother to go out that night. A steady, cold, determined rain fell on the city, spattering noisily on the floor of the airshaft next to my bed. I sat there in the dark in my work clothes and when the voices in my head started in on me I told them to shut up.
Eventually I fell asleep.
*
Saturday morning.
I ate the last food in the apartment and made a grocery list. The rain still fell relentlessly. I put on an extra layer of clothes and a pair of old shoes and went downstairs with my umbrella. I had the key in the inside lock when something caught my eye across the street, in the sheltered overhang of the technical school.
It was the glow of a cigarette. A car hissed past and the headlights caught a tall, thin, dark man turning away.
I was suddenly wide awake.
I backed away from the door and forced my brain to work. If I went up to him he might run away, or turn on me. If he had a gun or a knife, I could be dead in a second and he could be on the Subte and gone.
I was nine-tenths crazy and didn’t consider how far over my head I was getting. He was a connection to Elena and tha
t was all I cared about.
If, as I assumed, he was there to follow me, I had someplace to take him.
I unlocked the door and stepped outside, careful not to glance across the street. I opened my umbrella in the doorway and hoped my hands weren’t visibly shaking. I checked the lock and headed downhill at a fast walk, between the gray buildings on the gray sidewalk in the gray rain.
Follow me, you bastard, I thought.
At the end of the block I crossed Tacuari, then crossed Humberto Primo, staying in the open and keeping up the pace. I didn’t slow down until I got to Avenida San Juan, where I turned the corner and ducked into the entryway of the office building there. I pressed myself flat against the wall, trying to look casual. I collapsed the umbrella and pretended to be busy folding it.
Come on, I thought, come on.
I couldn’t know for sure that he was following. Maybe he was under the delusion that Elena was in my apartment and he was going to wait there for her. Maybe he didn’t want to risk the bigger crowds and higher visibility of a major street like San Juan. Maybe he knew I’d seen him.
Suddenly he was there, turning the corner.
I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the overhang. Tall as he was, he didn’t weigh much. I’d startled him and there was a second where he clearly didn’t know what to do.
«Do you see the cop?» I asked. «Right over there, in front of the market?» I jerked my head in that direction. The same cop was there every Saturday, rain or shine, in the same place. «If you don’t want him to come over here wondering what’s going on, you should act like you’re glad to see me.»
«Who are you?» the man said. «Where do you come from? What do you want with Elena?»
«You first.»
«I saw her come out of your apartment last week. She was crying. If you did anything to hurt her, I’ll kill you.»
«I didn’t hurt her,» I said. «I’m in love with her.»
I don’t know which of us was more surprised by that.
«Tell me who you are,» I said. «Did her father send you?»
He stared into my face. He had intense, dark eyes, almost black, with a depth like a clear night sky. They were Elena’s eyes.
«I am her father,» he said.
And then he started to cry.
*
Maybe it was because I had seen Elena in his face. Maybe I saw my own despair and hopelessness in his tears. I hugged him and said, «My name is Beto. We should get out of the rain and talk, no?»
He returned the abrazo, then slowly pulled away. He sniffed loudly and wiped his nose with his left hand as he held out his right. «I’m Mateo. I could use a cafecito. This weather is shit.»
He didn’t have an umbrella, just a black fabric raincoat. His hair and shoes were soaked. I shared mine with him as we walked three blocks to the Arte y Café, a corner bistro where I ate dinner three or four nights a week. We sat at a table by the window and ordered coffee and agua con gas.
«She told me her father was a banker,» I said.
«That’s her adopted father.» The word “adopted” carried a load of sarcasm and rage, barely suppressed.
I said, «He’s going by the name Osvaldo Lacunza?» Mateo nodded. «But,» I said, «I don’t think that’s his real name.»
«Do you have another name for him?»
«I’m told his real name is Osvaldo del Salvador.»
«Your sources are good. Del Salvador legally adopted her after she was born. Do you know who he was?»
«Yes. And I think Elena just recently found out. Does she know she’s adopted?»
«I don’t know what del Salvador told her.»
«And her mother?»
«Her mother was named Elena, too. Elena Bianchi. She’s dead.»
We sat in silence for a few seconds. His Spanish was fast and inelegant and I went back over it to make sure I’d understood all his conjugations. Then I had so many questions I didn’t know where to start. Finally I said, «Are you going to talk to her? Are you going to tell her who you are?»
«I don’t know. Three weeks ago I didn’t know she existed. Do I have the right to walk in now and destroy her life? Maybe she’s better off not knowing what I have to say.»
«Her old life is destroyed anyway. I don’t know her well—»
«You don’t?» he interrupted. «You said you were in love with her.» There was a fierceness now to those eyes, a readiness to attack any weakness they might find.
My face heated up. «—but I know she cares about the truth more than anything. That’s why she moved out of her—out of del Salvador’s house, because he deceived her. Do you know that she’s disappeared? She quit her job, quit dancing, she’s vanished.»
He thought it over before he answered. Finally, very quietly, he said, «I know where she is.»
I had thought I was all ashes inside. There turned out to be a coal or two still alive.
«If she thinks like you,» Mateo said, «that I’m a spy from del Salvador, she’ll never talk to me.»
«She does think that,» I said. «You won’t get near her. Not unless I’m with you.»
He didn’t want to believe me at first. He knew that it was after leaving my apartment in tears that she’d gone underground. I tried not to let him see my desperation, only my hurt.
«When we get there,» I finally said, «you can ask her. Ask her if I ever hurt her, if I ever did anything to her that she didn’t want me to.»
«You remember what I told you?»
«That if I hurt her you would kill me?»
«Exactly.»
«I’ll take my chances.»
*
It was not quite noon. I paid for the drinks and we caught a cab. I was still in my old clothes, unshaven, eyes bloodshot. I wasn’t willing to risk a stop at my apartment, not when it might give him time to change his mind.
It was a long trip and Mateo gave the directions in stages, first sending the driver toward the Primera Junta train station, far to the west of the microcentro. Then, a few blocks from the station, he gave the driver street names. He said nothing to me, except to mention that Elena had left her apartment Sunday night carrying a suitcase and come to this place, the home of a friend.
«Girlfriend?» I asked. «Or…» My throat closed on the word.
He looked at me with what might have been disappointment. «A girl,» he said at last and turned to look out the window.
Eventually we pulled up in front of an apartment building that would have fit in an upscale neighborhood in the States. I felt insubstantial, like I was in a dream. The trip had been good because I was moving toward hope. Now I was seconds away from the possibility of despair.
Mateo left me to pay the driver, 60 pesos plus tip. The rain came down like it could go on forever. I followed Mateo into a courtyard with potted plants, then up a stairway to a row of apartment doors. He stopped at number 29.
There was no bell. I knocked on the glass outer door. I counted to 20 and knocked again, harder.
«Maybe they’re out,» I said. The thought robbed me of the last of my energy.
He reached past me and pounded on the door with the flat of his hand. More seconds passed and I started to turn away.
The inner door opened.
It was a woman who could have been Elena’s age, though she looked younger, due to the reddish purple highlights in her short black hair, the tiny purple stud in her left nostril, and the heavy liner around her eyes. She was tall and well-built and she wore a man’s striped shirt over hip-hugging plaid pants.
She looked at me and then at Mateo, then at me again. Her voice, when it came, was muffled by the glass. «You must be Beto.» I wanted to believe I heard sympathy there. «And who is this guy?»
«His name is Mateo. He’s the guy that’s been following her.»
Her eyes widened at that.
«Is she here?»
«Beto, you know she doesn’t want to see you.»
In my peripheral vision I saw Mateo give me a
menacing look.
«Would you please tell her? Tell her that I’m here, and who this is with me. Tell her she needs to listen to what he has to say.»
She searched my face and then stepped back and closed the door. Which meant Elena was there. The idea of her being so close made me dizzy.
Enough time passed to account for considerable back and forth inside. «I hope you haven’t fucked this up,» Mateo said. «Why doesn’t she want to see you?»
«She won’t tell me.»
Mateo grunted.
I reminded myself to breathe, then a minute later I had to remind myself again.
When the inner door opened, it was the same woman. She unlatched the glass outer door and held it open. I felt giddy.
When we were inside, she offered her hand. «My name is Adriana.» She shook hands with Mateo too. «This is the deal. Both of you go in there and sit on the couch. Don’t get up, don’t go to her. Okay?»
«Okay,» I said.
«If she says leave, you leave immediately.»
«Okay.»
She looked at Mateo. «You too. You agree?»
«Yes, fine.»
There was an entranceway in off-white linoleum, living room on the right, kitchen straight ahead. The furniture was new, sand-colored, with an elegant simplicity that said taste and money. Above the low sofa was a large canvas that showed stylized human bodies and a pattern of bright colors. A window opened on the walkway and the opposite wall had oak bookshelves. Across from the couch, to our left as we walked in, was a TV on an oak chest of drawers. Next to the TV was a chair that matched the sofa. Elena was in the chair.
She was hunched over, holding her knees, her feet tucked under her. She had deep shadows under her eyes. She looked like hell, which is to say, she was heartbreakingly beautiful. She was wearing sweat pants and an oversized T shirt.
And the turquoise necklace I bought her in Plaza Dorrego.
The sight of it made me weak with relief. It was hard not to go to her, but I kept my word and sat on the couch. Mateo sat next to me. He was so tall he had to fold himself two or three different ways to fit.
Elena glanced up, met my eyes briefly, looked at Mateo, and then at the floor again.