“BEHIND EVERY ONE of the Superintendent’s questions,” states Don Augusto Noel, now as then owner of the Trigo Limpio bakery, ‘Malihuel’s Number One’, “there was a veiled threat. Know what he suggested when it became clear I was reluctant to give him the support he was after? That if we didn’t sort things out ourselves the milicos would move in from Rosario and quite a few more would end up carrying the can. The righteous end up paying for the sinners was how he put it, who knows how he told them apart. Know what else he said? I can remember him standing there clear as daylight. Better if this matter remains in police hands Don Augusto. You know what the difference between the milicos and the police is? Us policemen fish with a hook, the milicos use a net. It’s up to all of you,” Don Augusto recalls, tongs in hand, before asking me, “Shall I put some vigilantes on too?”
AND ONE NIGHT, a Saturday as it happens, my mind, blunted by the exponential proliferation of voices, reaches saturation point and I take to the streets in search of some relaxation too disgraceful to confess to my hosts, who, since my arrival, have generously granted me the use of either of their two Fiat Unos, though out of deference to Guido’s extra headlights and souped-up engine I always take Leticia’s. I park half a block from the infamous Kawasaki Bar and the moment I’m inside I confirm that the good townspeople have been understating their execration. The Kawasaki is a godforsaken dive within whose walls bedecked with cave paintings of fluorescent rockers and laminated posters of motorcyclists and motorists painted in primary and complementary acrylics circulate twenty or so longhairs in leather jackets and big-collared shirts unbuttoned to the sternum, followed around by a barely less numerous band of little cumbia-dancing spades flaunting rotund thighs beneath their skimpy miniskirts or an abundant volume of buttock moulded by the biting white cloth of their trousers. The jukebox oscillates between heavy-metal numbers—outdated before they became dated—and the usual cumbia rhythms. The drinks lined up behind the precarious bar are unalleviatedly foul, and the service slow and gruff—the place is, from one end to the other, exactly what I needed and I soon find what I came looking for. Precariously balanced over the black hole of the toilet I separate two lines of charlie, cut with that other, unnamed soap powder that never passes the test in the TV ads, and further emboldened by a shot of gin I go up to the only face I recognise in the crowd. If she can’t tell from my sudden verbal outpouring and my sparkling corneas, she must have a very good nose because, after a few minutes, she accepts my proposal unquestioningly and walks at my side the few blocks that separate us from the darkest dirt streets. For half a joint of the more than decent local weed and what’s left of the soapy coke she lets me fuck her against the shadowy corner of a deserted hallway; I could have driven her out to the Mochica but I’m aroused by the echo of my vague teenage memories, and the cold on her nipples that no bra separates from her T-shirt. It isn’t love, but for once it spares me the tiresome process of spanking one out in a house not your own. Two days later, when I go into the telephone exchange, Soledad predictably pretends not to recognise me, or more accurately, pretends only to recognise the man who makes regular if ever less frequent visits, asking for a booth to call Buenos Aires.
“NO FILES,” Leticia warns me, wolfing down one croissant after another, having been kept at the court until four without lunch. “Nothing before eighty-three. They were all lost in the floods, ours and the police’s. When the flood waters went down we discovered that the ones below the waterline had turned to pulp and those above it were covered in enormous pouffe-like balls of furry green mould. The shelves were made of wood and sucked up the water like a siphon. The ones in the Civil Registry and the Inland Revenue fared better—they’re a bit higher up and have metal shelves. They lost documents dating back to the days of Comandante Pedernera and the foundation. Anyway at best you’d’ve been able to confirm there wasn’t anything there about the Ezcurras. None of that was recorded in the guards’ logbook and no files were opened, not a thing. I couldn’t say if they kept parallel or secret files. But nothing for you or me or even the judge to’ve looked at.”
“Che tell me,” I tell her, “you work there, I mean you’re right next door aren’t you? Can’t you get me a visit to headquarters, an interview with the current chief, or some other? …”
“Sure, course I can, I’ll talk to the judge, I shouldn’t think there’ll be a problem,” Leticia enthusiastically agrees, and we fall to discussing the subject. When he gets home and we tell him, Guido buries the plan with a shovelful:
“I wouldn’t tango with the cops if I were you.”
“IF YOU WANT TO KNOW what was going on inside headquarters,” Iturraspe tells me one night when not even all the gas fires in Los Tocayos can keep the glacial cold at bay, “the man you should talk to’s Sayago. He was a cop back then and word is that he was well in on it. Know where to find him Guido?”
“In the FONAVI social-housing estate right?” my friend replies.
“Lives in his sister’s house you know the one behind Ña Agripina’s. But don’t go and see him there, he’ll smell a rat and you won’t get a word out of him. Get him to come here and offer to pay for his drinks. It can’t fail.”
ÑA AGRIPINA, the local healer, is no dishevelled, toothless, wrinkled Indian crone as folklore dictates, nor does she drag sandals across the tamped-down dirt floor of an adobe shack. On the kitchen walls of her little house in the FONAVI district, within its green roof and bare bricks, there are no painted-plaster statuettes of St George, or red candles, or pygmy-owl feathers: two little old china figures talking on the phone, connected by a black flex, a rectangular tray with a tropical sunset in furious oranges and blacks, a wall clock in the shape of a gigantic golden wristwatch that in mythical times may have graced the wrist of a Titan. She herself is on the diminutive side, her dyed, spongy hair in an abundant perm over her heavily made-up eyes and mouth, her cream rayon blouse separated from her double chin by several ropes of fake pearls, her feet embedded in faded, bunion-battered flat-soled shoes.
“I remember you well,” she says to me the moment I walk through the door, I sit down and thank her for the tea and petits fours she’s honoured me with. “Your grandmother called me once to cure your bellyache. No, not by pulling the skin on your back; the seamstress’s tape measure. It works every time. Don’t you remember? Darío often used to come and see me yes,” she remarks, sipping her sweet tea from a blue cup. “Potions for the girls he used to ask me for most of all, concoctions for his binges, balms for the occasional dose of clap. He was as young as you now. You have to watch out for the drugs Fefe,” she says to me without pausing, in the same amiable monotone of tea and petits fours. “The spirit of the drugs is climbing up your back like a creeper. You can carry on with the marijuana for now, better not drop her all of a sudden ’cause she gets very jealous, but watch out for the others, especially the mineral ones. Minerals are terribly ruthless, they’re capable of anything just to live a while. What was it you had in your head? A bullet?”
“A piece of helmet.”
“He came to see me that week, but the moment he walked in I realised the die was cast,” she returned to our initial topic of conversation in the same natural tone, making me wonder if I hadn’t hallucinated her warnings about drugs, which would have had the paradoxical effect of confirming how apt they were. “The work was advanced, the web”—she interlaced her fingers with their varnished nails to illustrate—“extremely dense, too many people behind it. His shield had already been pierced, he came to me too late. The only thing he could do I told him was to get away before the net closed. The circle I told him had a break in it—the road to Fuguet. Above all he had to stay away from the lagoon, from water. Everything mineral aspires to the condition of the vegetable. And the vegetable to the condition of animals, and animals want to be people. That little girl the other night she’s a vampire. She’s already sucked the lifeblood out of the Lugozzi boy like sucking on a marrowbone. If you feel the urge to see her again pay
it no mind, it isn’t coming from you. It’s she who’s calling you. Put the photo of your wife and son next to your skin over your heart and hold it there. He couldn’t say no when a woman called to him. He couldn’t even say no, not even to Mother Death. What could I do? He turned to me the way you have but he came too late. Don’t repeat his mistakes Fefe. Don’t let the new moon find you in town the way it found him. When the new moon caught up with him there was nothing left to do. You were in touch with Gloria a while ago weren’t you. I can see her every time you smile. Send her my regards when you see her again. And don’t pull such a scared face. Nothing of what you confide to me, nothing of what you don’t confide to me but I can see anyway—you know what I’m talking about—goes any further than this,” she said and traced the outline of the round table with her finger.
“AND ONE DAY at noon on my way to the lagoon I cross the square at siesta time, sun beating down, and I see some kids playing and for some reason or other I stop and watch them. It was like hide-and-seek but in reverse—they were all counting and one was hiding. The one hiding ‘was Ezcurra’ and had to get to the Comandante’s statue before the others caught him. See what it was like Fefe?” Iturraspe asks me one of those afternoons in the bar. “Even the kids knew.”
“’CAUSE THAT’S WHAT BEGAN TO HAPPEN, in the middle of the week,” Carlitos “Turquito” Majul, heir to the old general stores of Babil “Turco” Majul, the one over by the watchtower, tells me in the gym. The exercise is a shoulder press and this time it’s me who’s being spotted. My body still aches from last time. “Ezcurrita might have been lots of things but slow on the uptake he wasn’t and it began to dawn on him something was afoot. Now even his friends crossed the street to avoid him and when he came into Dad’s place say for cigarettes everyone in the queue’d stop talking. I remember him sitting at the table in Los Tocayos—one of the last images I have of him—his feet stretched out the way he always used to, drinking a beer on his own and smoking with his head down trying to work things out. He looked up in hope when he saw me and I signalled to him I’d be right back, but I didn’t show up again. Behind his back there were these two lads playing Foosball sort of robotically ’cause they couldn’t take their eyes off him. He must’ve been the only one in town who didn’t know by that stage—and his mother of course, who unfortunately was out of town. People were running from him like the plague and nobody had the common decency to at least tell him why. Till somebody plucked up the courage, or maybe it was more than one, I hope so, I don’t know what you’ve heard. They say there was a letter too, my old man used to say.”
“Wouldn’t he be able to remember who sent it if we asked him?”
“The only thing he remembers these days is Syria,” he replies, helping me to stow the weights I’m groaning under.
“KNOW WHAT THE FUNNIEST THING IS?” Carmen Sayago, the reformed ex-police officer will ask the day my promise to buy him some drinks clinches his decision to visit our table in Los Tocayos. “The Ezcurra lad came to us of his own accord. Someone must’ve tipped him off and he went right up to the Superintendent there and then. Ended up shouting at each other they did; there was—must still be—a window in the door to the chief ’s office, it’s always open in summer and you can hear everything through it. The second Ezcurra stepped inside he squared up to the Superintendent he Did I hear you’ve been asking about me around town? If there’s something you want to check on about me why don’t you come and ask me to my face? I’ve got nothing to hide and if the law has a score to settle with me I want to know about it he rattles off and the Superintendent when he can get a word in edgeways says to him a bit sad like The law’s got nothing to do with it lad, things have changed around here too. Or don’t you know what’s going on everywhere? And Ezcurra goes You can’t compare, those are communists and guerrillas. I’m one of the most influential figures in the town, not some spade who you can push around. You mess with me and you’ll end up with the whole town against you I give you my word and the Super goes Let’s see if I can talk some sense into you lad, there’s a time to defend your honour and another to save your sorry ass and I reckon you’re mixing them up but it wasn’t any use and I don’t know if you ever met Ezcurra but there was nobody could hold a candle to him for pig-headedness, even on his way out he turns round and I was born here he says to him, my mother was born here and my grandfather too. We built this town from nothing and now you, who breeze in through one door and out through another, you’re playing the big boss? Keep on messing with me and you’ll be the one who ends up leaving! Screamed at him he did in front of everybody and though the Super tried to laugh it off afterwards saying What a fucking joke and shaking his head this one’s as much chance of saving himself as a headless chicken, but if you ask me he never forgave him for that one. But in a way he was right, don’t you reckon Chief? I don’t mean it was right what they did to the Ezcurra lad but he was sort of asking for it. Going and squaring up to the chief of police like that right in headquarters just when the other one held his life in the balance and was making up his mind.”
“And wasn’t that going to get him into trouble?” I’ll intervene when the ex-corporal pauses to practise an avid piece of cunnilingus on his upturned glass of caña.
“They wasted him didn’t they? Ain’t that enough?”
“Neri I mean. He practically alerted him to the fact.”
“See Licho? Ain’t that what I’ve always been telling you?” Then back at me, “The Super wanted to save him if you ask me. If he’d skedaddled to Buenos Aires or Rosario or even Alcorta he’d’ve been out of our jurisdiction and we couldn’t’ve laid a finger on him. If the military or provincial headquarters found out Neri was going to be in a right fucking pickle, but there you are. He was up a what’s it called a cul-de-sac but he was even willing to run that risk long as it gave the lad a chance. But it’s no use with some people right Don? There’s no way to make them understand,” Carmen Sayago will say with a broad grin, which given his lack of teeth looks heroic at least. “’Nother round Maestro?”
“Nene,” I’ll bark. “Keep an eye out for my friend’s throat over here, don’t let it get dry will you.”
THE GATHERING AT LOS TOCAYOS BAR has stretched into the small hours, as we await the ex-policeman, who always ends up standing us up. Guido left a while ago to answer the call of his occupied bed; Don León Benoit and the bar’s landlord muttered their vague farewells and retreated too, one to the catacombs of the premises, the other to the biting cold of the street. That leaves Iturraspe, who’s got nothing better to do, Licho, living in hope of scoring another drink; Nene rock-steady as ever at the counter, and myself. Then one of the doors onto the main street opens—enter a fat man with long curls and a moon face as white as an unbaked pie crust, his eyes and mouth looking for all the world like the slits in the dough. We’re introduced, Bartolo someone-or-other, currently employed at the Tuttolomondo factory, pasta-nests department, and once he’s drawn up a chair they put him in the picture. “Sayago,” he laughs hoarsely with a triple shudder of his double chin, “good thing he didn’t show up, he’s on my blacklist he is, one of these fine days I’m going to cut him into little pieces. Fancied my ladyfriend he did and chucked me in the can to get me out of the way, the royal sonofabitch, came looking for me at the Sucundún on my birthday, ’cause we was drunk according to them but it was ’cause once I was eighteen they didn’t have to report to the juvenile judge. Couldn’t wait another day he couldn’t so I copped a beating with sticks and boots, lovely present, and to cap it all he locked me up with the vice cons he did who didn’t fuck me by this much,” he says bending his index finger inside his thumb to illustrate. “That’s an easy one”—he answers Nene’s question—“eighteenth of December nineteen seventy-eight. I’ll never forget it as long as I live, nor’ll he, since he stopped being a cop I lay him out flat once a year, out of principle. I’m told he takes a detour all the way round the block just to avoid going past the factory door. Anyway I got off
lightly all in all, I mean look what happened to Ezcurra. You related or something?” he asks me and I say, “No.” “Friend of Guido’s,” Iturraspe explains, and Gordo Bartolo says, “Oh right”—pat on the shoulder—“if you’re a friend of the little boss’s say no more. Oh so you’re the one who’s going to make the movie”—he looks at Licho, then at me to seek confirmation—“if you need someone to play the lead look no further. The Ezcurra business you mean? Well not much, just what anybody knows, they locked me up in Greco’s day and that all happened before. What was him before Greco called? He had to be taken down a peg or two for sure but they went over the top. A good hiding would have done I say, no need to go that far. They showed no mercy did Rosas Paz and Echezarreta, took full advantage of the fact they had a free hand.”
“Who?” I take a moment to ask, long enough to register Nene, Iturraspe and Licho’s panic-stricken exchange of glances.
“The Rosas Pazes were the biggest ranchers in the area, not any more, and the Echezarretas—”
“I know who Echezarreta is,” I interrupt sharply. “What I want to know is what … why you said he … that Rosas Paz and he …” I’ve suddenly developed a stutter as my arse rises off the seat of its own accord.
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