The sober pantheon obviously belongs to a rich family that fits in well among these long, broad avenues of a cemetery that itself is a reflection of the rich, well-appointed houses of the neighbourhood outside, where houses with gardens boast bronze doorknockers on doorways made of the finest woods – the external signs of having arrived for people who live protected by porters, like the one on duty in the apartment building where Berta and Raúl lived until the night they were raided. In his smart uniform, the porter is busy polishing the brasswork on the stairs and makes it clear he doesn’t have time to waste talking to someone so obviously Spanish. While Carvalho is waiting for some kind of response, an old woman tries to use the lift.
‘It’s out of order.’
Resignedly, the old woman starts to climb the noble marble staircase. For some reason, this loosens the porter’s tongue. ‘The only thing that works around here are us porters.’
‘Did Señor Raúl ask for his key by any chance?’
‘Which Raúl would that be?’
‘As I tried to tell you, I’m the cousin of someone who used to live here, Raúl Tourón. I’d like to see him, and I thought he might have called in here.’
‘Ah, you mean Professor Tourón? He lived here a long time ago. But not for long.’
‘Has he been back recently?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t give him the key. He didn’t ask for it. If he had, I wouldn’t have been able to anyway. After the night of the raid, the apartment was sealed off. Later it was handed back to its owners – Doctor Tourón was only renting it. The owners are selling loads of apartments in the neighbourhood, especially to Europeans and North Americans. Lots of Spaniards bought bargains. Argentina was for sale, although now the prices have gone up again, and it’s become very expensive for foreigners.’
‘What did Señor Tourón do exactly when he came back?’
‘At first he stood there for a while on the pavement opposite, as if he was scared to come any closer. A good while. Then he crossed the street and opened the door. I went up to him to see what was going on, because although I sort of recognized his face, he’d changed a lot. He replied with my name: “Mattías.” I asked him: “You’re Doctor Tourón, aren’t you?” He nodded. Then he asked me: “What about the girl?” “I don’t know, doctor, I never knew anything about her.” So then he left the same way he had come.’
‘Is it true you never knew anything?’
‘A porter knows everything and nothing. I see people come and go. I nearly always know who they are, and when I don’t, I ask. For many years now. I polish the metal and dust the carpets. If you were to go up to one of those luxurious apartments today, they probably couldn’t even offer you a coffee, because their coffee-makers are electric, and there’s no electricity. Am I making myself clear?’
‘Yes, you are. Not that I understand a word of it.’
‘That’s what I wanted, to be clear and yet leave you guessing.’
‘Fine. So after years in exile, Doctor Tourón comes back, turns up here, asks you obvious questions, then disappears again. And in all this time has his sister-in-law Alma never been here?’
The porter doesn’t seem to want to continue the conversation. His eyes have turned cold, and he is clinging on to his shammy leather cloth as if his life depended on it.
‘I can’t tell you any more, because I don’t know any more; and anyway, I’ve already said too much. Ninety per cent of Argentines wouldn’t have answered your questions at all. What went on in the Process had nothing to do with us porters. All we ever did was see who came and went.’
It’s a slogan which is also the name of a company: ‘New Argentina’. Carvalho suddenly remembers the conversation he had with the fat man on the plane. Small world. The food and animal behaviour institute his cousin had worked in before the dictatorship is now called New Argentina. But even though that’s its name, it is housed in a neoclassical 1940s building with more than a whiff of Mussolini, and nationalist pride is evident on all sides. Production statistics, pride in Argentina’s cows, its horses, even its human beings. Carvalho is led down scrupulously scrubbed corridors by a girl dressed in a white coat that cannot hide her splendid ass or legs, and Carvalho gives in to her obvious charms.
The laboratory door opens and one of the fattest men in the world appears. It takes Carvalho a few seconds to identify him with the photo file his brain sends him in a flash: of course, the passenger next to him on the plane. The man pretends not to have seen Carvalho, who also busies himself looking around what appears to be a typical laboratory, with its rats’ cages and scientific equipment that’s always seemed to him should be used for alchemy. Eventually Roberto Améndola comes up. He’s big in every way: physically, cynically, playfully. In his hands and mouth everything seems small. He looks at Carvalho as if he were a tiny mouse. ‘Raúl and I studied biology together. We got our professional qualifications together. We ran this laboratory together. Fortunately, I didn’t get married; unfortunately, he did. His wife Berta was like a cross between Marta Harnecker and Evita Perón. Do you know what females I’m referring to?’
‘As far as females go, I’m a real encyclopedia.’
‘He let Berta do whatever she wanted, he just accepted it. He was brilliant. I was stubborn. That wasn’t right. Why not? Because he was the son of recent immigrants, so he should have been the stubborn one. I’m from a family which has been here since the time of Rosas in the nineteenth century. That’s a long time for Argentina. So I should have been the brilliant one.’
‘He got into a political mess; you didn’t.’
‘That was where his being an immigrant betrayed him. He was a rebel, but a rebel who wore silk Italian ties, had an apartment in La Recoleta and an imported European car. The ones who got him mixed up in politics were his wife and his sister-in-law. Those two had a very masculine view of history’
‘And you have a feminine one?’
‘Let’s just say I take the conventional female position. I’m passive with regards history. I’m more interested in the biological memory of animals than in the historical one of men. What use is historical memory to us today?’
‘Did he come and see you when he returned to Argentina?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did he want?’
‘I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’ve no idea. He talked of his work, and how far he had got with it. We’ve come a long way since then, but I offered to help him get his job back here. We don’t make as much as before, because we can’t get any contracts with private firms, and the state pays badly. He was very angry we call this New Argentina. He said it sounded Fascist. But I needed new partners, and they as well as all other Argentines need to believe in Argentina after all the crap we threw at each other or had thrown at us. It was easier before. Can you guess how we managed to live well, very well, and still do? We apply some of what we’ve discovered to making rat poisons.’
With his interior gaze, Carvalho tries to stand back from himself alongside the biologist, to take in the whole of this laboratory built as a prison for rats perhaps out of fear that otherwise they might imprison men. The animals scamper around looking for a way to escape, or perhaps they’re simply imagining it. He hears Améndola trying to tell him something.
‘These rats’ behaviour teaches us not only what we have to do to get rid of other rats, but also what’s needed to save mankind. What we have to do to save the only animal that doesn’t deserve to live. For example, by improving his diet. What do you know about lupins?’
‘That’s strange. It’s the second time I’ve been asked that. Next to nothing. Should we be eating them?’
‘No, the cows will eat lupins, then we’ll eat the cows.’
‘That seems like an idea that’s been tried often before in history.’
Roberto has fallen silent, and Carvalho respects his withdrawal for a few seconds. ‘Raúl.
Did he say anything about what his plans were?’
‘What he said was quite a jumble, but he was calm. He talked about rats. He said that when he was a rat he’d been kept in an underground dungeon with a small grating in the roof for air. Sometimes he’d look up and imagine he could see the two of us examining him. You and me, he said, we were there above the grating, looking down at me the rat – and I wanted to behave properly, like a well-behaved rat, even though I might get impatient sometimes, like a rat who looks at his watch, but...’
‘But what?’
‘But he didn’t have a watch. Apparently they wouldn’t let them have watches.’
Améndola seems to be enjoying the thought of the imaginary scene. The well-endowed young woman, possibly an assistant, passes by. Carvalho can’t help admiring her ass and legs again. Roberto notices his interest. ‘That comes from a lot of meat protein. Lots of steaks. Our asses are full of the best of Argentina. Do you want to see the real Argentina?’
Roberto’s eyes go to the poster showing the contented cow. Carvalho follows his gaze. New Argentina it says on the door. Outside the window, motorcyclists dressed as if they intend to terrify circle round. Roberto leads the way and shows Carvalho to cowsheds that look like something out of a Hollywood film, with all the latest equipment. Unbelievable cows. Superbly looked after. ‘First the lupins, remember...then the cows, then mankind – riches, plenty. We have a future again.’
He goes into the pastures, strokes the cows, kisses them. Carvalho doesn’t know whether to laugh or be concerned. He looks round to see if anyone is watching, but doesn’t see how behind a Venetian blind a gaunt-faced man with pale grey ice for eyes is staring at them. Next to him is the fat man from the plane, who’s clenching his teeth so hard he almost seems to have a jawbone beneath the rolls of fat. The gaunt, athletic-looking man of around fifty stares out of the window and says: ‘He’s a fool. Why did he let the Spaniard in here?’
‘I told you Captain, he’s unreliable. He’s going to cause us trouble. The mess that crazy guy Raúl caused here the other night has knocked him off balance.’
‘I should have finished them all off twenty years ago. That son of a bitch isn’t going to cause me any trouble. I wish I’d never even thought of doing a deal with them.’
Out in the field, Roberto is still spouting his theories about cows and the future. All of a sudden he falls silent. He’s spotted Raúl a bit further on, peering at them from a ditch. Roberto tries to say something but fails, as if Raúl’s hidden gaze had paralysed his body and his voice. Then he snaps out of it, mutters an excuse to Carvalho, turns on his heel and runs into the Foundation. He bursts into the room where the fat man and the Captain were observing them. They stare angrily at him. ‘He’s here! I’ve just seen him!’
The fat man rushes up to him and asks: ‘Who?’
‘Raúl!’
The Captain turns to the window. All he can see is Carvalho philosophizing with the cows. The fat man hurries out of another door and runs waving his arms towards the motorcyclists. The bikes roar off round the building, and zoom towards Carvalho, who is taken by surprise at their determination to catch him. He doesn’t have time to ask them why. Two black leather angels throw themselves on him and knock him down. They start punching, and as he is trying to avoid the third one landing on top of him as well, beyond their masked faces he thinks he sees the fat man from the plane come panting up, shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Not him, you assholes!’
Carvalho loses consciousness.
Raúl runs along the ditch and falls panting by an irrigation channel. He raises himself on his elbows, and can’t see any immediate danger. Kneels down again to cup some water from the channel, and is brought up short by the image of himself reflected in the water. The wild, staring eyes of a man: Raúl. Himself. In a bad way. Several days’ growth of beard, as if he were still down in that cement hole with a narrow grating on its roof. He remembers how when his mind wandered in those days, he would sometimes see himself on top of the grating with Roberto, commenting on the behaviour of his other, imprisoned self, the laboratory rat. The two of them would stand there, in their white coats, staring down at the tortured Raúl with the same indifference as they would study a rat. Perhaps it was because he was able to stand outside himself and see that Raúl, that rat in a torture laboratory, that he managed to grasp the situation more objectively, that he managed to survive. But what was Roberto doing there, always alongside his other scientific self, the rat torturer? Passing neutral comments on the rat’s squeaks of fear. Raúl, beside himself, about to succumb mentally from the pain and fear. Then all at once the Captain appeared alongside them, with his refined, subtle cruelty.
‘Would you like to go out into the street, Doctor Tourón?’
Or: ‘Who would you kill, son of a bitch, to be allowed outside?’
The same Captain. The one who once took him out for a ride in his own car. That was no guarantee you would survive. It just happened that sometimes the torturers took you out of the cave where all you saw were shadows of reality, and allowed you a glimpse for an hour or two of the life you had left on hold. They took you to the cinema. Or showed you the bills for flowers they had sent in your name to their wives, or to your mother. The Captain took him to see Being There with Peter Sellers, and within a few minutes both he and his torturer were laughing, taking time out from their real roles. But then back in the underground cell, there was no guarantee that the good mood would continue, that a beating or a torture session with the cattle prod would not immerse you once again in the only possible reality. And you couldn’t take advantage of being outside to escape, because your family was facing all kinds of threats, as were you, and then beneath or beyond those threats was the syndrome of the grateful hostage.
‘That’s an excellent idea, Señor Tourón,’ the Captain said to him on one of these outings. ‘And it was you who first thought of it. The grateful hostage! I remember that in your research into animal behaviour you wrote brilliantly about awarding a prize arbitrarily and very rarely, as a powerful exception to the rule of constant and equally arbitrary punishment.’
Then one day they let him see his father. That was a sign they were not going to kill him, that he wasn’t going to disappear – or if he was, his father would disappear too. But he seemed in control. He was very sure of himself, and the Captain seemed to respect him. Raúl was allowed to speak alone with him, but they didn’t manage to say anything to each other. They never managed to say anything ever again. Not when a few days later the two of them returned to Spain. Not for almost twenty years in Spain. Only when Raúl, his mind made up, told him he was leaving the next day for Buenos Aires. And then all the old man had said was: ‘What will be, will be. And all I’ve done is useless.’
The students listened to her perhaps because she had the look of a mature Madonna, with scars on her face that looked gentle or traced with her permission. The lecture room of a university fallen on hard times, in keeping with a pauper culture. Alma is sitting behind a table up on the platform. Carvalho has slipped in through the half-open door, behind the backs of the carefully scruffy students sitting in this carelessly scruffy room, a rundown, cheap and mercenary scene that is completely at odds with the words coming from Alma’s pale, sensual lips.
‘The criticism that the language of marginalized people is a non-language merely disguises the fact that all language has now become non-language. Look at all the usual messages we get from politics or advertising. They are not trying to convey knowledge, truth, or a sense of mystery. All they want to do is convince us. And we all pretend we have been convinced, because we doubt whether there is any point in doubting, suspecting, or still less, denying. Steiner asks himself the Romantic question of whether it is still possible that words can reacquire the mystery they had at the dawn of tragic poetry’
The lecturer is as beautiful as she is sure of herself, and sceptical.
‘But why does Steiner ask himself that question? Isn’t he doing it from a position where his own language has become false? Isn’t he laying claim to an impossible nostalgia?’
Silence.
‘Thank you for your attention. Tomorrow we’ll look at the topic from the point of view of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies.’
Carvalho pushes his way forward through the scrum of young bodies. He observes how Alma rhythmically collects up her books, straightens her cardigan, stands up and accommodates her dainty muscles to her remarkable forty-year-old frame. She smiles briefly to dismiss everyone, and when she raises her head to decide which corridor she should make her escape down, she sees Carvalho standing by the platform.
‘The masked Galician. Are you interested in Steiner or Barthes?’
‘Are they a tango duo? Or do they play on the left wing for Boca Juniors?’
‘Don’t make me talk any more. I’m thirsty. Thirsty for water.’
‘The thirst for water is a primitive one. Thirst for wine means culture, and thirst for a cocktail is its highest expression.’
Only now does Alma notice the bruises on Carvalho’s face, and a transparent bit of plaster on the corner of his mouth.
‘What happened?’
‘I got beaten up by mistake. They thought I was Raúl.’
Alma’s ironic mask slips. She looks around as though Raúl’s name could only bring alarm and disaster. Carvalho leads her out and she allows herself to be taken along without realizing exactly where they are going, until she finds herself in a club inevitably lined with precious woods, and with a cocktail list in her hands. She doesn’t even glance at it, still horrified by Carvalho’s face.
The Buenos Aires Quintet Page 4