The Buenos Aires Quintet

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘You’re crazy. You’ve got a headache and here you are, rubbing your feet.’

  She gets up and changes into more comfortable clothes: a pair of baggy trousers, a blouse, slippers. She opens her fridge, and sees defeat staring her in the face. She gives up, and goes to find a can in the pantry. The door bell interrupts her, and she goes over to it without opening it. She peers out through the spyhole, and sees a man dressed in an overall. She can’t see his face properly.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Terminator.’

  ‘I’m not in the mood for jokes.’

  ‘I’m the rat man, senora. Didn’t you have a problem with rats?’

  She looks through the spyhole again. Sees Raúl’s face, distant and distorted by the lens. Alma throws back locks and bolts, and when the door is wide open, Raúl stands there waiting until she drags him inside, slams the door, and enfolds him in a possessive embrace. There are shreds of words, greedy hands trying to recover so much time lost, both of them rushing to get out of their clothes in search of nakedness, of human contact, of shapes and volumes they knew so well twenty years earlier, panting and groaning as if from a recorder, the recorder of memory. Later, bothered by her own nakedness, Alma puts on a pair of pyjamas, and sits on the bed, her head resting on the board. Raúl is curled at her feet, and she reaches out to take his hands.

  ‘Twenty years later, and we’re starting again...’

  ‘I never expected this. For many years, I thought you were dead. I don’t understand why nobody told me the truth, not even you. I can understand you impersonated your sister to fool the military, but why me, Berta? Why me?’

  ‘My name is Alma. I’ll never be Berta again.’

  ‘What about the baby?’

  ‘I looked everywhere for her. You can’t imagine how I looked. I joined the grandmothers’ group, disguised as my daughter’s aunt. It was no use. If she’s still alive, she must be in the hands of someone powerful enough to destroy all the traces leading to him. Every so often I see a girl in the street, and something inside me says: that could be your daughter. I cry inside, I can’t help it. Then as soon as I get back here, I cry for real. I’m tired, so tired psychologically of needing her. Sometimes I think: you don’t really want to find her, what you want is vengeance on the person who took her.’

  Raúl agrees.

  ‘I’m going through something similar. Am I hiding because people are after me, or simply because I can only live hidden? From whom? From what?’

  ‘But people are after you, Raúl, and don’t forget it. The Captain, his associates who betrayed you and are selling your discoveries, even though they still care for you – Güelmes, Font y Rius. The best thing would be for your cousin to get you out of here. Argentina doesn’t exist. The Argentina you and I knew, the one that gave us our identity, doesn’t exist any more. Those of us who survived and go on believing in the same ideals are even more disappeared than those who did disappear.’

  ‘You want me to go, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alma replies, but in the end she throws herself on him again, and kisses him hungrily: ‘but stay for tonight at least.’

  Day breaks to find them under the sheets, with the ceiling their only horizon. Alma is about to say something, but Raúl hushes her with a finger on her lips.

  ‘No, don’t say a word. I know what happened last night, and will always happen between us. In our memory we’re still the young lovers who wanted to change life, like Rimbaud, and to change history, like that odd couple Marx and Evita.’

  ‘Don’t forget Trotsky’

  ‘Marx, Evita and Trotsky. I was a secret Trotsky supporter. You were a Perónist nationalist. Now you’re a woman in the prime of her life, with not even the name I remember, who has just slept with a depressive with no desire. One of the first signs of depression is you can’t get it up, you know’

  ‘Sex isn’t everything.’

  ‘No, that’s not true. I’m going. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to meet freely, to talk and rediscover what we have in common; then perhaps it’ll happen. Now all I ask is permission to see and talk to you. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel. I’m a hidden man. I’m not even going to tell you where I hide or who is hiding me. But I’m not charging ahead blindly, even though that’s how it looks. I know Eva María is alive, and in the past few months I’ve learnt I might be able to find her. Don’t ask me how: I couldn’t tell you anything definite.’

  They kiss again. Raúl has slipped out from under the bedclothes, and looks down contemptuously at his own nakedness.

  ‘Are you going to come to the barbecue at Baroja’s place?’

  ‘It’s too risky’

  ‘You’re right. I organized it to talk about you, and find out what was going on, not to have you there.’

  Raúl leaves the building dressed in the overalls of a pest-control company. He’s carrying a box with some official-looking initials on it.

  Vladimiro speaks into his walkie-talkie.

  ‘There’s a guy coming out. He looks like someone from a pest-control place.’

  ‘What kind of pest?’ Pascuali wants to know on the other end.

  ‘Rats. It says something about rat poisoning.’

  ‘Follow him!’ Pascuali orders. ‘Have you still not got it, bird brain?’

  ‘Still not got what... ?’

  Vladimiro starts up his car, and puts the siren on.

  ‘Is that your siren I can hear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Stick it up your ass then! I bet the guy’s vanished, hasn’t he? Have you got the balls to deny it?’

  Vladimiro tries in vain to find the pest-control man among the crowd of passers-by thronging the street, but the relaxed expression on his face contrasts sharply with his nervous manoeuvring of the car.

  ‘Would you like me to try on foot, Inspector Pascuali?’

  ‘I’d like you to drop dead. And don’t worry. The most beautiful wreath at your funeral will be from me.’

  A lamb split lengthwise and crucified on a stake. Placed too far from the embers of the fire for Carvalho’s liking, as if the flames were playing at roasting the meat. The barbecue includes beef as well as lamb, and a terrifying list of internal organs that Carvalho picks up from his neighbours’ comments: spare ribs, sirloin, intestines, sweetbreads. A group of about twenty people are either appreciating the dexterity of the men doing the barbecue, or are walking around the garden of a country house in one of the thousands of suburbs of Buenos Aires. The garden has a slightly abandoned air, and without knowing why, it reminds Carvalho more of a dacha like those he encountered in the 1960s outside Moscow than any elaborate weekend cottage in Spain. Most of the guests are relaxed professionals living a weekend in the open air. They have stopped off to pick up their children at the children store and are now trying hard to reinvent the idea of the noble savage with them. The conversations between adults are more strained when they touch on political and cultural topics, except when one of them breaks off to show the children his skills with a soccer ball.

  ‘Closer to forty than thirty. Some, like Girmenich over there, almost fifty. The generation that started the armed struggle by kidnapping General Aramburu. The one that were still adolescents playing at revolution when they felt the full force of the 1976 coup and the military dictatorship. The whole of Argentina in arms greets you, Carvalho my friend.’

  Silverstein has got into the habit of muttering in his ear as if it were a stage whisper, or simply the way that all villains behave in Shakespeare plays. Font y Rius is another guest; but all those present are eclipsed when an official car and its escort comes sweeping in and Güelmes steps out. A blond, blue-eyed man comments sarcastically: ‘Well, if it isn’t our old friend Güelmes.’

  Again Carvalho hears Silverstein’s whispered commentary, sees the scene through his darting eyes. ‘That was Luis Baron
e, Luigi to his revolutionary comrades. And over there, look, the one with the heavy jowls and the annoyed look in his eyes, that’s Girmenich. We still can’t make our minds up about him after all these years. Some worship him, others wish he were dead. He’s still a Catholic. They say he believes in the Virgin Mary.’

  ‘Güelmes looks as if he owns that official car,’ comments a woman with finely sculpted eyes, and a sensitive, sharp nose whom he has been introduced to as Liliana Mazure.

  ‘Long may he reign, I say At least he shares things out with his old friends.’

  ‘He was the king of plastic explosives,’ Barone explains to Carvalho. ‘It was no good giving him a machine-gun, because he couldn’t hit a barn door, but with explosives he was a real magician.’

  ‘D’you remember when we blew up that police station?’ adds a paunchy man with tired, drooping eyes.

  Carvalho avoids being presented to Güelmes by walking off with Silverstein, who provides him with a rapid summary of the occasion.

  ‘Just look how all of us turned up when Alma called, drawn by the smell of a good barbecue. The house is owned by someone who has an incredible library and I think is a descendant of the Spanish writer Baroja. They’ve been a mainstay of the Argentine left for several generations. Baroja! Why don’t you show our Spanish friend here your library?’

  Güelmes is busy greeting people, shaking hands: he is one of them, but also knows very well he is a statesman. Some of the guests bend and ironically kiss his hand, muttering with false reverence: your honour. Silverstein ostentatiously ignores him, still shouting at one of the men cooking the meat: ‘Baroja, why don’t you show the masked Spaniard here your library? He loves burning books, so perhaps he can help you sort out your problem of not knowing where to put them all.’

  Baroja looks younger than most of the others, but he is playing his part in this nostalgic event, and he wipes his hands on his apron, then leads Carvalho off towards the house. When they enter, they are immediately overwhelmed by the presence of books. It’s a mausoleum of twentieth-century left-wing literature. Carvalho pulls out volumes by Gramsci, Howard Fast, Wright Mills, Habermas and Adorno as carefully as if they were protected species, then carefully returns them to their original place.

  ‘It’s like a left-wing paradise for readers between forty and seventy,’ he says. ‘Everyone from Lukacs to Marta Harnecker.’

  ‘My father was a Red before me. He still is in fact, he’s always been a left-wing Perónist. He was friends with Rodolfo Walsh, German, Paco Urondo. I was still a kid in 1976, but all those people out in the garden were like my elder brothers and sisters. They were my heroes.’

  ‘What about now?’ Carvalho asks.

  Silverstein is the one who answers: ‘He loves us like you do all your childhood memories, from your toys to sugar lumps, don’t you, Baroja?’

  ‘Will Raúl show up, do you think?’ Carvalho interjects.

  ‘Raúl’s moment will come. Alma explained why she invited everyone here.’

  The three of them stare out of the window at the guests in the garden. They can see several people pointing at their watches. They seem to be in a hurry.

  ‘The barbecue is taking its time, and some of them want to get back to Buenos Aires. Boca is playing Independiente. All I have are books – I haven’t even got a TV to offer them. Is this your first Argentine barbecue? It’s more than a meal, it’s a sophisticated rite which started with the determination of our pioneers the gauchos to survive by eating every scrap of meat they could lay their hands on. Are you familiar with all the cuts of meat here?’

  ‘To some extent. There used to be a fairly decent Argentine restaurant in Barcelona: La Estancia Vieja, run by two people called Cané and Marcelo Aparicio. But I don’t remember all the cuts, just bife de chorizo and asado de tira.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that. The bife de chorizo is a sirloin, from close to the rump, but your rump steak is bife de lomo, and bife de costilla is what you call chuck steak. Then there’s vacío, which is very tasty and is like your brisket. Then we also have the entra ña or offal, but we also cook the intestines, the chinchulines. Ah, and you mustn’t forget the morcilia or black pudding sausages we make from the blood. Here, take this copy of the Manual del asador argentino by Raúl Murad.’

  ‘Don’t give it him – he’ll only burn it!’

  ‘I don’t burn useful books.’

  In the garden, the barbecue is ready. Carvalho has more than enough time to observe how all the guests overdose on protein: the adults eat as voraciously as the children, and even the women do not disguise their appetite for dead animals as they might in Europe. The banquet reminds Carvalho of the great popular feasts in Spain, where the sacred alibi for eating so much was always the memory of times of scarcity After a while, the table is littered with the remains of meat, empanadas and salads, and half-empty bottles of wine.

  ‘In Argentina, a barbecue is judged not so much by what’s eaten as by how much is left over.’

  Alma’s words reach Carvalho over another conversation he has been half-listening to: ‘Tell me Font, how are the lunatics getting on in your asylum based on the principles of anti-psychiatry?’ a man with moustaches is asking. ‘I’ve been told that nowadays you even take in the rich wives of poor husbands who want them locked up so they can get their hands on their fortunes.’

  ‘Most of them just want to get rid of their wives,’ Font y Rius replies calmly, then adds: ‘Or you could see it as my contribution to the revolution. I take money from rich women to give to poor men, or vice versa. Didn’t you do the same in exile when you used to counterfeit Visa Gold cards?’

  Barone tells Carvalho the man in question had supplied half the Argentine exiles in Europe with domestic appliances by making fake credit cards. It’s the men rather than the women who laugh at this joke, and one woman comments sarcastically: ‘So you’re such a macho man you won’t accept rich men in your clinic?’

  ‘I must admit that statistically speaking they’re a small minority’

  ‘I only ask because I wouldn’t mind sending my husband there.’

  Alma clinks her coffee spoon against the side of a cup.

  ‘It’s been wonderful to see you all again. But what we’re really here for is to try to find Raúl Tourón before others do. Some of you already know he came back to Buenos Aires. We have to get together to protect him.’

  Font y Rius still has his head lowered; Güelmes looks interested but remote; Silverstein is busy observing all the others’ reactions. Some remain poker-faced; others are clearly moved by Alma’s voice.

  ‘You all know Raúl managed to escape from the hell here. And now years later, he’s back from Spain. Nobody knows what he’s looking for, perhaps his disappeared daughter, perhaps he’s trying to build a new life, like the rest of us. For the moment though, he’s in hiding. He’s running from himself, but also from people from the intelligence services who’ve stolen one of his discoveries and don’t want him around to reclaim it. It’s too complicated to explain now, but if any of you know anything at all...we have to find him before the Captain and his men do.’

  Some of the faces around the table look alarmed. Güelmes and Font y Rius look concerned. Several voices call out: ‘is that murderer still in action, the son of a bitch?’

  ‘Yes, he’s still in action,’ Alma goes on. ‘There’s someone else pursuing Raúl. He’s what you might call a professional policeman, someone who believes in the law and in democratic rule, in the separation of powers.’

  ‘God is dead, Marx is dead, Montesquieu is dead, but there are still some idiots who refuse to lie down and die!’ Silverstein shouts scornfully.

  ‘The ideal would be for his cousin, this Spaniard here...’ Alma points to Carvalho.

  ‘The masked Spaniard! The hidden Spaniard! The one and only Spaniard!’ Silverstein shouts gleefully.

  ‘Y
ou can trust him,’ Alma insists. ‘At least the people I trust can. Please, if Raúl has been in touch with any of you, remember the ideal solution would be for him to go back to Spain with his cousin here.’

  Silverstein clambers up on the table, treading on various scraps of asado. ‘A hidden man could be anywhere. But let’s not think of those of us who came, but of those ex-combatants of the glorious, unfinished Perónist revolution who didn’t show up here today. Let’s remember them!’

  Silverstein stoops to pick up a piece of meat from the table near his feet. Carvalho drinks as if all of a sudden he’s extremely thirsty.

  ‘Did any of you realize Honrubia isn’t here?’ Barone asks.

  Some people whistle, others laugh.

  ‘He’s on his honeymoon, busy robbing the Brucker family blind, except that this time he doesn’t have a machine-gun. You used to know him well, didn’t you, Girmenich?’

  Girmenich has said very little all afternoon, but around him there has been an ebb and flow of people, as though each of the guests had his or her own personal agenda with the best-known revolutionary.

  ‘Knowing people in those days didn’t mean you knew them well.’

  ‘Are you still a Catholic, Girmenich?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘And you believe in the Virgin Mary?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And in the armed struggle?’

  Barone is the one asking the questions, perhaps trying to provoke a dialectical argument. Girmenich doesn’t answer, but a pale-faced woman with skin so transparent her veins show through steps in.

  ‘If we win, yes, I believe in the armed struggle. But if we lose... they won the struggle...and look at the way they did it.’

  ‘What about reconciliation, Celia? Would you kill them if you had the chance?’ Barone asks.

  ‘With these hands.’

  By now, night is coming into its own. Barone is driving. Sitting beside him, Carvalho is somewhere between drunken slumber and trying to keep one ear on what the driver is talking about. But he has succeeded in asking to be dropped off at a night-club called El Salto.