The men did not pause. They climbed up onto the roof of the car and disconnected the poles from the overhead wires. “Pablo,” one of them shouted. They jumped down from the roof of the trolley.
A relative giant came from the back of the crowd and squatted at the front of the car, grasping the undercarriage. About thirty of them heaved and counted and grunted and, to Leary’s and everyone else’s amazement and delight, they picked up the trolley and turned it. A couple of the boys scrambled back up on top and reconnected the poles to the overhead conductors. They hung the back of the car with a huge white cloth with “Sindicato” scrawled on it in black paint, and the packed trolley took off in the direction of the center with scores of men dancing and singing behind it.
The joy that day was all in the streets. Grim faces looked down from balconies on the happy, thickening crowd going by. The rich peered out from behind brocade draperies and quaked with fear.
In the Palacio Paz, the top army officers walked as if on eggs and spoke in whispers. Their only encouraging news came from a police report that the crowd in the Plaza de Mayo was not very large and not at all organized. Things in the city center were glum but peaceful, and the president decided there was no need for alarm.
When Ybarra asked General Avalos outright if he had any plans to bring troops into the center, the minister of war said, “No.” In his judgment, he explained, it was unnecessary even to keep them on standby. A livid Ybarra went to his phone and was further angered when it rang before he could make his call. He picked up the receiver.
“Ramón? Ernesto here.”
His lily-livered brother was the last person he wanted to talk to today. “Yes, hello. We are quite busy here.”
“Yes, I can imagine. The general asked me to come and see you. I am downstairs in the lobby. Please meet me immediately. I need just a few minutes of your time.”
Avalos was speaking into his own phone again, but he was looking at Ybarra with a commanding stare. Evidently, he knew exactly who was calling Ybarra at this moment and what he was saying.
“Fine. I’ll meet you,” Ybarra said and hung up.
At that moment, waiting on the platform for a Subte train that seemed never to come, Claudia Robles, like Ybarra, was fuming. She paced and listened to her fellow passengers gossip. “I got a phone call from my sister who lives in the Constitución district,” a young woman was telling an older man in a camel-hair blazer. “She said that there are workers crossing over the Riachuelo and heading for the center of town.”
The man stood with his hands behind his back and shook his head. “This is the end of tranquility,” he said, as if Buenos Aires had seen anything approaching peace and quiet in the last several months.
Claudia looked down the track into the tunnel in the direction of the train that would not come. She wondered, with all the tumult, whether the Subte was working at all. Her whole financial future was in danger. She could not wait any longer, and she could not walk all that distance to the store in the shoes that she had on.
After waiting almost an hour, she gave up and went back home. Calls for a taxi yielded nothing but a busy signal. She knew better than to telephone Hernán to see if he would come and give her a lift. He would only get outraged that she wanted to go to the center in the first place.
Meanwhile, just south of the center, in San Telmo, Pilar was having the same problem. She had already given up, gone back to Leary’s apartment, and changed into flat shoes. She walked toward the shop through eerily deserted streets. There were a few small groups of workers passing up the avenues every once in a while. A bunch of men were drinking from a fountain in the small park on the corner of Humberto and Defensa, but by the time she got to the Calle Florida, she saw only shuttered storefronts and empty sidewalks. She decided to go in through the front. Ordinarily, she was required to use the back entrance to avoid disturbing the customers, but there were no customers today; that was certain.
It surprised her that Señora Claudia was not there already, but she figured there were no trains from her neighborhood, either. She raised the shutters and left them up. The señora would be arriving at any moment.
Pilar unlocked the front door of the store, left the shade down on its glass, and locked it again from the inside.
In the meantime, through the area Pilar had traversed half an hour earlier, workers were now pouring north, flooding the streets between tall, graceful gray palaces and huge movie houses with splendidly carved facades and posters behind glass announcing Double Indemnity, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck and Carta de un Enamorada, with Bette Davis. The men from the Pampas were stupefied by the magnificence of what they saw.
The descamisados oohed and ahed over the goods in the sophisticated shop windows and admired the pretty, ornate streetlamps. As they moved, their ranks were swelled by other working stiffs seduced by the festive air of the marchers. Clerks from perfumeries and marble banking houses and the lowest-level functionaries in many of the businesses they passed joined in and went along with the happy men who had broken free for a day from the drudgery of their factories. God knows what they ate or drank. They did not care. Whatever else happened in the future, today they were free, today they were full of hope and wonder. By tens and twenties and then by fifties and hundreds, they converged on the Plaza de Mayo. As they neared the center, the lucky ones passed brother unionists from the printing industry, who handed them placards to carry.
Tulio Puglisi watched in amazement as thousands massed in the square. His eyes welled with tears. They were beautiful in their solidarity, so hopeful, so sure they were fighting on the side of right. But they could see only one path to their goal: Perón, a man who would use them. Exactly like the masses who hailed Hitler or Mussolini as their savior, they were drunk on hope brought to them by a scoundrel. The poor, naïve little shits were going to put a fascist in charge of Argentina. Tulio loved them, but they were totally wrong, and now no one could stop them.
While Puglisi feared destruction from the right, Lieutenant Ramón Ybarra was obsessed about a debacle coming from the other end of the spectrum: organized labor—in his mind, communists. He left his office and marched down the broad marble stairs and met his brother Ernesto at the main entrance to the Casa Rosada. He took him to the empty reception room near the rear door.
As usual, Ernesto sidled up to the subject with a lot of small talk about their mother and their sister. When Ramón couldn’t stand it any longer, he forced his brother to the point. “This is no day for family small talk,” Ramón said, with no attempt to disguise his impatience. “We have a tiger by the tail, and if we don’t kill it, it will eat us all.”
Ernesto winced as if he had been slapped. “Keep your voice down,” he said. He looked over his shoulder and lowered his own tone to an annoying whisper. “I am here to save you from yourself. I tried to tell you the other night,” he said, “about the GOU.”
“I was a bit drunk to be truthful. Grupo Obra de something or other. Some kind of lodge of army officers. But how can you be thinking about some silly secret society from years ago while the pond scum of Argentina gather to bring down this city.”
Ernesto looked around at the empty room again. “Please keep your voice down and listen to me. Grupo de Oficiales Unídos. I will explain again. It goes back at least to 1942, some say to the Mendoza garrison before then. Perón and Fárrell organized it with lovely words, saying it also stood for Government, Order, Unity, and the like.” His tone was barely audible. “We were fighting communism, we thought, and defending Argentina’s neutrality and independence. So we organized ourselves the way the communists organized themselves—to fight fire with fire, as they said—in small cells where the members knew only one another. Only military, no civilians.”
Ramón thought he would explode. “Get to the point, Ernesto.”
“Hear me out, Ramón. I’ve heard as many as two-thirds of the officers took an oath to support the GOU. Everyone’s ticket to perfect mutual loyal
ty was to hand in a signed, undated letter of resignation. After that, GOU officers were maneuvered into the most powerful positions. There was a center of command—some vague cabal that none of us knew, except that Perón and Fárrell were at the center of it. The men just called it the Colonels’ Clique.”
“What has this got to do with today? The country is facing a worse threat than communism now, if you ask me.”
“Please, Ramón, you have to be careful. We were all sworn to secrecy. That’s why Avalos wouldn’t talk to you himself.”
“You are one of them?”
“I had just made captain. I felt honored that they asked me.”
Ramón wanted to scream, but he held his tongue. His brother was an ass.
Ernesto went on, obviously exasperated now, but still he spoke barely above a whisper, which made Ramón pay close attention. “Once Fárrell became president, they dissolved the GOU, but no one ever got his resignation letter back. Everyone believes Perón still has them. He’s got just about every senior officer in the army by the balls, little brother. No one is going to move against him, because everyone who has any power to command is hogtied by those letters.”
Ramón backed against the wall, stupefied. Had Ernesto really told him all this the other night? Had he been that drunk that he had not heard it? Did Avalos know he had been stirring up his fellow officers at the garrison? He must. Someone had reported him. His intestines quaked. He sank down on one of the ornate settees covered with blue silk.
Ernesto sat beside him and blew out his breath. “The general has been trying to save you by getting me to tell you what he cannot say himself for obvious reasons.”
“But—but—” Ramón sputtered. “If everyone is afraid of Perón, how come he let himself be arrested?”
Ernesto leaned even closer. “It is just the army that this applies to, Ramón. Not the other services. Not the civilians.”
Ybarra’s throat constricted. He could barely get his words out. “Ernesto, if today’s revolt of the revolting works, Perón will reclaim power. Are you telling me the army is going to let that happen?”
Ernesto sat back and spoke almost normally. “There isn’t going to be any opposition from the generals, Ramón.” He put his hand on Ramón’s forearm. “And there is going to be no putsch from Campo de Mayo. Fárrell and Avalos are going to let this drama play out, whatever it brings. And if you don’t stop plotting to bring troops in the center and trying to get others to do the same, you are going to find yourself in one of those prison camps down in the Pampas or worse yet, falling from a plane into the ocean.”
The image of falling stayed in Ybarra’s mind throughout the next hour while he attempted to wrap his mind around the idea that the army, which he had expected would be the center of his life, was toothless. Not only toothless but in thrall to its most unworthy member: Perón. Perón.
It took Pilar that same hour to conclude that something was awfully wrong. The señora had not arrived at the store. Pilar had been telephoning her apartment every ten minutes or so but never received an answer. Lonely by herself with no real work to do, she tried calling Leary at his desk at police headquarters. He did not answer, but another man picked up the phone and took a message. “My name is Pilar Borelli,” she said. “Please tell him that I am at the shop on Florida.” She went back to filling bobbins and sorting patterns.
Evita Duarte had not even such mundane tasks to occupy her time while she waited for news of the dramatic events she knew must be taking place in the tense city center. She called her sister Erminda and Adele Nicolini to come and keep her company, but almost as soon as they arrived, they started to argue with each other about what Evita should be doing. Her sister favored an escape, getting Perón out of jail and then leaving for a life of peace and quiet somewhere far away from all the turmoil of Argentine politics. Adele said it was too late for that now; didn’t Erminda understand that, with what was happening at that moment in the Plaza de Mayo, Perón would belong not to Evita alone but to the nation?
Evita paced the room and finally, unable to stand their effrontery for another moment, screamed at them, “You are arguing about my life. It is my life. Not yours to decide. My decision.” She stalked into her bedroom and threw herself onto the bed. She knew exactly what should happen, but right now there was not a thing she could do but wait. She was not made to sit idly by at such a crucial moment.
Ybarra’s mood perfectly matched that of the lady he abhorred, and he was equally frustrated by his inability to act. He had no friend or sister nearby at whom he could scream. Duty forced him to march with his general and a phalanx of guardsmen from Avalos’s office to the president’s sumptuous yellow room overlooking the stately plaza. Outside the french doors, down below the balcony, many thousands had already gathered beneath the palm trees and around the lovely monuments. As the shadows began to lengthen, the president’s adjutant told them the police were estimating the crowd outside already at more than a hundred and fifty thousand. All those little animals out there, waving their placards and calling for that disgraceful bastard: “Perón. Perón.”
Ybarra was helpless, and he knew it. Pilar, on the other hand, did not understand her own vulnerability when she heard a knock at the front door of the shop. She couldn’t imagine it was a customer. Certainly Señora Claudia would let herself in with her key. It could only be Leary, and she ran to see. Before she unlocked the door, she moved the window shade that covered its glass, giggling, ready to make a funny face at him. She screamed. It was that man. In that same suit. The murderer, holding a knife! She ran to the telephone in the workroom as glass shattered behind her. He was on her back as she picked up the heavy black receiver. She swung it over her shoulder and smacked him in the head, but the blow glanced off his thick, brilliantined hair. He held the knife to her throat. She dropped the phone.
“You are a whore, just like that other one,” he said in her ear.
In her terror, a picture fell into her head of the ladies from the church where she had gone as a child with her mother. They had called her mother a whore and said she would be one, too. That whores deserved to die.
“I saw you,” he said, “kissing that man in his fancy car in front of this shop yesterday. Once I saw you I realized that you work here. You don’t even feel your own shame, picking up fancy men in fancy cars.”
“Please. You can’t kill me for that? Please.”
“I must,” he said, fingering the handle of the knife, which he pointed at her throat. “You saw me the night I killed that other little whore. That one who had the gall to dress herself to look like a woman who is a saint. If people saw that little puta and thought she was Evita, they would think Evita was doing the disgusting things she did. People say that Evita is a whore. Evita blushes when she gets excited about something. How could she be a whore? Whores don’t blush.” He threw Pilar to the floor and stood over her with the knife pointed at her chest.
Terror shook her. “No, don’t. Please.”
He assessed her as if looking for the right place to stick his blade. Some vaguely engaged part of her brain silently argued with him. Luz had never done anything that Evita wasn’t also doing. She bit her lip and cowered.
He spit at her, and his spittle landed on her cheek. Her stomach turned.
“Evita should be worshipped,” he said. “And she will be one day. She was kind to that little tramp. Gave her dresses that were much too good for her. And the little puta used them imitate Evita, to make people think Evita was doing the disgusting things a whore would do.”
“Luz loved Evita.”
“Not the way I do,” he said. “And you, you little slut. You made me betray her this morning when she really needed me. I saw you at the front door that night after the rally. I knew the other girl worked here. I saw her in that dress the day Evita gave it to her. But I didn’t know who you were. I left Señora Evita alone because I had to find you.” His eyes flashed, so angry that Pilar thought he would sink the knife into he
r at any second. “You knew it was me who killed that little slut. Now you have to die.”
“Please,” Pilar said. “I promise I will never say anything. I don’t even know your name. I can’t tell anyone. I swear. I will die before I will tell anyone.”
He laughed. “I should just trust a whore like you? Not on your life.” That made him laugh the more. “No. You will die before you have a chance to tell any—” A voice at the front door stopped his words.
“Get up,” he said under his breath.
She leaped to her feet. She heard Señora Claudia’s voice calling her name again from the front of the shop.
The murderer grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back. He kept the knife at her throat. “Walk,” he said and pushed her toward the door that led to the alley. Turning her to face them both toward the approaching voice, he reached behind him, unbolted the door, and dragged her through it. As he did, Señora Claudia came through the heavy velvet curtain that separated the workroom from the showroom. She screamed when she saw them.
“Follow me, and she’s a dead girl,” the murderer called to Claudia as he pushed Pilar into the alley, slammed the door behind them, and forced her to run to the end toward the side street.
As soon as they were out the door Claudia made to follow them, but at that moment a shout came from the front of the shop, and Roberto Leary ran into the room. “What’s going on? I saw broken glass at the front door.”
Claudia went to the back door. “Come quick,” she said to Leary. “Eva Duarte and Juan Perón’s chauffeur has taken Pilar. He has a knife.”
With Roberto Leary at her heels, Claudia ran into the alley and followed the disappearing forms she saw silhouetted against the light where the narrow passage met the street.
While two desperate people flew down an alley and out into the avenida where throngs of men rushed toward the Plaza de Mayo, Ramón Ybarra sat imprisoned and impassive on a brown leather chair in the president’s elegant office a few blocks away. He understood at last that his superior officers were empty uniforms, interested more in saving their positions of power than they were in securing the future of the country they had sworn to defend. A profound chill had settled on his insides. He no longer felt hot anger; his blood did not boil with the urge to take matters into his own hands, to foment a mutiny. Disillusion and fear for his own life froze his soul so deeply that not even Avalos’s inane pronouncements moved him to speak out, much less act. A firing squad could await him. He could do nothing but watch, and hate, and follow orders.
Blood Tango Page 18