The Buenos Aires Quintet

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘That’s right. I had a contract to supply a lot of the army barracks, and that contract meant some juicy kickbacks for the top military men. It was Don Evaristo here, Don Evaristo there, what can we do for you, Don Evaristo? My son’s been taken in, just some silly young people’s nonsense. We’ll see what we can do, Don Evaristo. What does he think is so funny?’

  Silverstein has doubled up laughing.

  ‘What I’m telling you is true, every word. I had very good connections in this country, the bribes I paid stood me in good stead with the commanders, and so I got to talk to the Captain’s superiors. You had lost everything, and Eva María was in an orphanage, without any legal identity. You Raúl were alive, so I did a deal to hand over all your research and to keep quiet about what had happened. Berta was dead, or so I believed at the time, and anyway, it wasn’t only you I got out, but all those who had been picked up with you, in your apartment. That meant the fellow who’s so amused over there, Alma, and Pignatari – where is Pignatari, by the way?’

  ‘He’s dead!’

  Silverstein says between guffaws: ‘So this guy saved our lives because he sold the army milk!’

  ‘At least I had something to sell: you lot had nothing, either then or now; and either that bonehead stops laughing, or I’m not saying another word. What is there to laugh about anyway? Isn’t the Captain still around? Do you think you’re more powerful than I am? What are you going to do when the Captain comes to get you again?’

  This time it is Raúl who speaks, without looking his father in the face.

  ‘No one is judging you. We knew something must have happened for us all to be saved so miraculously. We didn’t want to know the details, until I came back because I wanted to feel I belonged somewhere. Anyway, the Captain is no threat any more. At this very moment there’s a warrant out for his arrest.’

  ‘Idiots! People like him never get arrested!’

  ‘Tell Adriana I’m off the case. I’m leaving. Going back to Spain with my uncle. I’m handing the Great Gratowsky case over to Don Vito. I don’t have the heart to tell her myself.’

  Alma refuses to believe what she is hearing.

  ‘You’re telling me you’re going back to Spain? That you’re never going to visit Tango Amigo ever again?’

  ‘No, this is my last tango show. And with a quintet, no less. The Quinteto Real. Or the New Buenos Aires Quintet, as the posters say. After that, it’s goodbye.’

  There’s a bottle of Bourgueil wine on the table, compliments of the house, and on the platform five old tango masters are tuning up with a skill born of a lifetime’s practice. They are in the wine club in the Calle Contreras, the kind of place that advertises alternative theatre venues and plays born of the alienating madness of a city steeped in identity. Luis Cardei and Antonio Pisano on the bandoneon, Nestor Marconi and Antonio Agri on the violin, Salgán on the piano, De Lio on the guitar. Carvalho cannot take his eyes off the casual virtuosity of Agri, who used to play the violin for Astor Piazzola. He is an elegant old man with worried eyes that are full of the music he lives and breathes. The instruments start up their dialogue, with the bandoneon taking the lead and making room for itself. To Carvalho the bandoneon seems like the objective correlative, while the piano, guitar and violin fill in behind. The bandoneon is a stabbing spotlight, weary of illuminating only battlefields of defeat. Raúl, Norman, Font y Rius and Alma are excited. They are paying attention to the music, but are also busy discussing their meeting with Muriel this evening – we can’t let this evening go by without talking to her.

  ‘Shall we call her Eva María?’

  ‘I prefer Muriel.’

  ‘Let her choose.’

  Carvalho is a stranger outside the group, which is caught up in an adventure that is exclusively their own concern. It has nothing to do with him, or Raúl’s father, or Güelmes.

  They leave the wine club and set off for their meeting with Muriel.

  ‘Callao on the corner with Corrientes.’

  Font y Rius says goodbye.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’

  ‘I’ll pick up the pieces afterwards. Remember, you can always get a discount at my clinic.’

  Carvalho’s car is commandeered, and he finds himself hired as driver, although no one asks him if he agrees. There is a lot of traffic, and lots of police on duty for what looks like a large demonstration.

  ‘Is it the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The old-age pensioners?’

  ‘No. It’s for the “night of the pencils”.’

  The night of the pencils. While in the back of the car Raúl and Alma continue to go over the details of what to say to Muriel, in the front seat Norman explains what to Carvalho what that means.

  ‘At the start of the dictatorship, the military arrested some secondary school students, just children. They accused them of putting out a “subversive publication”, and killed them all. Well, one survived. We call it the “night of the pencils” because they were young schoolkids.’

  Norman turns round and looks at Raúl and Alma, who are oblivious to anything that might happen in the car or in the wide world outside. He comments: ‘I was reading an article in Nuevo Porteño about Paco Urondo’s kids. The elder one is a boy, who grew up with his father. And there’s a girl, who was kidnapped by the military and was one of the disappeared. They have met again after all these years. The boy is a living book of memory, because he had the time to realize what it meant to be Urondo’s son. But the girl needs everything explaining to her, everything, including the fact that her father was a great poet. None of these kids can ever be normal. Muriel will never be normal.’

  When they get to the corner of Corrientes and Callao, Alma dives into a shop selling Argentine books and records. The three men stand watching the demonstration go by: thousands of young people, veterans already of years of marching, of so many defeats, with the image of Che Guevara waving over their heads, and above that too the shout of ‘Venceremos!’ It’s like an optical illusion that the seventies are still with us, Silverstein says to himself over and over again, the years when it seemed we were on the verge of winning, until the sons of bitches came and wiped us out, wiped us out once and for all, in Argentina, in the United States, in Italy, in Germany. To Carvalho it seems as though the loudspeaker vans are groaning under the weight of all the drums and triumphant anthems. Alma reappears from the shop and hands him a bag.

  ‘Here. Records and books to teach you something about us. The records are for you to listen to. The books are for you to burn.’

  Alma’s beautiful eyes are telling him: farewell, farewell, my masked Spaniard, I’m saying goodbye first, before you say goodbye to me. But perhaps Carvalho does not want to say goodbye. Perhaps Alma wants Carvalho to say: ‘No, I don’t want to say goodbye.’

  Carvalho’s lips move as if he does want to say something. It’s not very clear what that might be: perhaps he wants to ask Alma – do you want me to stay? After you’ve got Eva María back will you devote a part of your lovely green eyes to me? Will I be an indispensable part of the everyday life of your green eyes? But Raúl is shouting that there she is, there’s Muriel. She is marching with Alberto in the first row of a group of students. Alma runs to join her, followed by Raúl, then Silverstein, who apologizes to Carvalho but rushes off for his appointment with history, only to return a few moments later after kissing Muriel on both cheeks to tell him breathlessly that he is leaving because he has to go to Tango Amigo to present Adriana. Carvalho and Silverstein join the march alongside others who are relieved to find that for a few hours at least they can dispel the demon of forgetting. Then they push past the security guards and reach the pavement, where crowds of curious onlookers judge this attempt to go back down the time tunnel respectfully but without great enthusiasm.

  Muriel seemed very serious when she saw them coming. Alberto had
his arm round her shoulders. She looked Raúl up and down with great curiosity. She said: I know everything already. That was all. They all march on and on.

  Carvalho has changed his mind. He does go to Tango Amigo one last time, but keeps his promise of not saying goodbye to Adriana. He has to watch her lunar expressiveness one last time, to seek out the thrill of her neckline for the origin of her voice in the spot where women bury all sense of time and place to reproduce the species, where the division of work is made between victims and executioners, tortured and torturers. Silverstein has promised him that tonight he will hear the first tango of the future, a tango beyond Piazzola, through the looking-glass of tango.

  ‘I wrote the words, and they’re dedicated to you.’

  Güelmes is in the club. Drinking and observing. First he waves to Carvalho from the far side of the room, then decides to come over.

  ‘Great atmosphere, isn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t realize you came here.’

  ‘I come quite often, but I don’t like to bother Silverstein. We lead parallel lives. In fact, it was Alma I was hoping to see. And you. Are you satisfied?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s all over. The Captain’s little group has been split up. We’re free at last!’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘What others? The Captain was a useless leftover. He had to be dealt with for us to get back to democratic normality.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that corruption and state violence are in the hands of civilians, not the military.’

  ‘And what about the Captain’s civilian friends?’

  ‘When can you remember any civilians paying for their sins? The only civilian linked to the barbarity of this century who paid at all was Alfried Krupp. Let the Captain’s civilian friends be. Their servants can pay in their place. The military and the police.’

  ‘What about Richard Gálvez? He was chasing those civilians to avenge his father’s death.’

  ‘Richard Gálvez? Do you really think someone like Richard Gálvez could give the state sleepless nights? Sometimes the state needs to remember it has a monopoly on violence.’

  Silverstein appears in the spotlight, his hands full of coloured pencils.

  . ‘It is especially gratifying to see the presence of power amongst us tonight. The minister Güelmes is doing us the honour of taking a moment to cover the shortest distance between poetry and life, that is, the tango. Just so long as it is clear this is not setting a precedent, let’s have a round of applause for the minister.’

  He waits for the applause to finish, without joining in, and then shows the audience what he is holding.

  ‘These pencils have travelled through time to write history with the uncertain hand of schoolchildren, full of spelling mistakes. The future may be imperfect, but less so than the past. I could shed floods of tears tonight to the sound of the drums of our most glorious defeats. I could allow other people to learn by their mistakes and to have the right to a different kind of anger. Do you think I’m talking about politics? You couldn’t be more mistaken. I’m talking about the splendour in the grass we witnessed in Buenos Aires tonight, that confirmation of what Wordsworth wrote in his Ode to Immortality:

  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

  Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

  ‘Which means, translated into Argentine – grab the dough and clear off! Adriana Varela is about to sing the saddest verses – for example: “you should not, know not, you cannot, you will not return”. What she sings is not a tango, but within it there are the shards of all the shattered tangos, all that is somewhere above and beyond Piazzola. Through the looking-glass of tango.’

  Adriana strides onstage and starts to sing or recite, recite or sing a poem with only perfectly placed, occasional bursts of disharmony from the violin, bass, piano and bandoneon:

  Recall that nothingness and its world

  The four corners of your protection:

  You should not, know not, cannot, and will not return;

  Four ancient pasts of pewter and amethysts,

  Four wars, four corners, four doors,

  Four hells.

  When the angel comes to paint your memory

  In innocent and pretty water-colours

  Trading in death, trading in desires

  In the freest levels of your self-obsessed body,

  Even if they cast you from the pre-ordained paradise

  In memories you will always find fulfilment:

  Earth, water, air, fire, and time.

  Useless for memory to invent journeys

  Beyond those four protecting horizons,

  Well-known faces only lead

  To the snares of underwater voices

  On a badly-recorded tape that’s close

  To the expressive wholeness of silence.

  Like an hourglass built from shifting sands

  You’ll sink into the dark corners of desire

  Foreigner in the city of a thousand exiles

  Your absence will mark the start of a union of dreams

  A deception that does not even exist

  Wandering through this city of useless certainties

  That lead neither to origins or to extremes.

  They’ll give you a name like they call wolf

  The fear sheep have, like they call fear

  The ill-repute the shipwrecked sailor earns by drowning.

  Twelve wars, twelve corners, twelve doors,

  Twelve hells.

  But if you float down through this surrendered city

  To where the shades of all that lives reside

  Worlds toppled into dark and filthy waters

  Trees like rubber, endless streets,

  With no birds or stars to forget your presence

  No sounds, no waltzes.

  No sun or moon, only the emptiness of a thousand absences

  Only the echo of a last and final word;

  Float down to that city to try to bury time

  Under cyclopean weights of saturated rocks.

  If you float down

  If you float down you will not recognize a single shadow

  Or yourself be recognized by any shade

  And this will not be your home even if your home

  Was a makeshift model of this ruin,

  The desecrated tomb of your forgetting.

  Recall that nothingness and its world,

  The four horizons of your protection:

  You should not, know not, cannot, and will not return.

  By the end, everyone is out of breath: Adriana, Carvalho, the audience. Güelmes is the first to recover. He whispers in the detective’s ear: ‘Was that tango? Tango as chamber music, perhaps.’

  The helicopter circles over the forest, looking for the clearing and the flags put out to mark the landing spot. It lands, and the door is opened for Captain Doreste, who leaps out as the rotor blades come whirring to a halt, ignoring the difficulty the fat man is having in following him into a void that seems impossibly daunting. Doreste glares at the man who is there to receive them, straw hat twirling in his hands.

  ‘Why did we have to land here? Why couldn’t we fly straight to Paraguay?’

  ‘The helicopter wasn’t authorized any further. You’ll be taken to the Puente de la Amistad, and you can cross into Paraguay through Ciudad del Este.’

  ‘And run the risk they recognize me at border control?’

  ‘Here nobody recognizes or controls anyone. Your Paraguayan contacts are waiting for you in Ciudad del Este.’

  A jeep is ready for them in the trees, its wheels deep in the muddy red earth typical of this land close to the mighty Parana river, a few miles downstream from Iguazú falls. The Captain is fed up of hearing the fat man panting along behind him, and does not want to hear how they turn to groans when the other man’s
body gives out as he tries to clamber into the jeep.

  ‘I don’t feel well, boss. My chest hurts.’

  ‘You need legs to get into the jeep, not your chest.’

  Sweating from the tropical heat and his own anxiety, the fat man finally succeeds in scrambling up alongside the Captain, who is sitting there ice-cool, muttering to himself: ‘Our four eyes are not enough. We’re in other people’s hands.’

  ‘But you can trust these people, boss. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, that’s their motto.’

  ‘You could trust them in the days when there was order around here.’

  The bridge is submerged under an endless caravan of tourists, all flocking to Ciudad del Este so that they can pay Paraguayan prices for anything and everything that this universal Ali Baba’s cave can offer them.

  ‘It could take us an hour to get across in the jeep.’

  The driver turns to face him. He is dark-skinned, and his breath smells of spicy food.

  ‘Why don’t you go on foot? They’ll be waiting for you on the far side of the bridge. It would be quicker.’

  ‘Who is on the other side?’

  ‘The general.’

  ‘Elpidio?’

  That’s right.’

  The Captain smiles, and the fat man gives him a wink.

  ‘So everything is in order, boss. If Elpidio is there, everything is just fine.’

  The Captain strides across the steel walkway of the bridge, pushing his way past the obsessive buyers drawn to the travelling bazaar that is Ciudad del Este, with its fake labels from Paris or from the vast consumers’ city that is the world, all stuffed into huge warehouses as if an army was in massive retreat, spilling on to muddy streets where water from broken drains mingles with puddles from the most recent rains. The fat man struggles to keep up, from time to time begging the Captain to have pity on him and take a moment’s breather, because his chest is hurting as if he had a huge boulder pressing on his breastbone.

  ‘One day we’ll be back. They’re not going to get away with taking my child from me so easily. One day we’ll return, and I’ll explain how it was me who saved her from what her parents were. I brought her up like a princess, like my princess. One day we’ll be back, I swear.’