The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  It was into such a desert that Alberto and Ricardo’s father, Alberto Matias Caputo, had made his way as a young man after leaving the cosmopolitan pleasures of Buenos Aires. Or being forced to leave. Alberto Matias, who along with his parents, brothers, and sisters had immigrated to Argentina from Italy, was always closemouthed about why he had left the capital, traveled to the foothills of the Andes, and taken up residence in the provincial city of Mendoza, where the zonda, the dry, disease-laden wind from the desert, swept regularly through streets of tightly shuttered houses. Nor had Alberto Matias’s siblings, who lived in Buenos Aires, been inclined to offer much by way of explanation to his elder son, Alberto, when, as an adult, he sought them out. They had erected a wall of silence around their connection to their brother Alberto Matias, who, once having parted from them, kept his distance and established a life for himself in Mendoza that gave him connections he apparently preferred to those of family life.

  He had women, lots of them; friends, many of them on the local police force; and employees, workers in the small construction business he established and turned into so much of a success that he could spend his evenings doing what he loved best, drinking and gambling beneath the art deco chandeliers in the casino of Mendoza’s principal hotel. A handsome man with slicked-back hair and a dark, brooding expression, he had estampa, the aristocratic bearing much admired by Argentinians. And although he was not wealthy, he loved the trappings of wealth—fine clothes, good horses. Partying, he wore expensive long-jacketed suits similar to those of his hero, Juan Perón; playing polo, he sported jodhpurs, high boots, silk ascots around his neck. He was also, not unlike his son Alberto, a talker, a spinner of tales who could entertain a group of cronies for hours, and not unlike his son Ricardo, he was given to deceit or at least exaggeration—“he was a con artist,” Alberto characterized him at one point.

  Alberto’s mother, his and Ricardo’s, was much younger than Alberto Matias. She was seventeen years old when she met him, and he was in his forties. Curly-haired and fair-skinned, but with deep-set eyes and high cheekbones, Alicia was descended from a long line of Spaniards, the adventurers, soldiers, and settlers who had overrun the native populations of Argentina, but her exotic face hinted at a distant mingling of the blood of the colonos with those of the people they had conquered.

  Long residence in Argintina had not brought Alicia’s people riches. They were country folk, plagued by poverty and ignorance. Alicia’s father was a gaucho, a laborer who took care of horses on an island ranch; her mother was a homemaker and child-rearer—she had nine children, five girls and four boys. Few of them received more than a paltry education. Alicia was sent to a distant convent school until she was twelve, but after that her education ceased. Still, she enjoyed the boons as well as the hardships of country life, growing up enthralled by the heavy scents of flowers and animal breath that wafted through the green fields of the ranch, the raucous cries of the birds overhead, the brilliant colors of the swiftmoving river that flowed past the island. “She used to tell us she grew up in paradise,” Alberto said.

  Paradise ended for her soon after she met Alberto Matias. She was introduced to him by an older sister who took her to his house in Mendoza and, promising she would be right back, disappeared. Perhaps the introduction was undertaken casually. Or perhaps it was part of a plan. Alicia was at the time engaged to marry a young man who was as poor as herself, and her sister may have been trying to show her that there was more to the world of men than she realized. Or her sister may even have been cool-heartedly hoping that her exotic-looking younger sister might be made to help their poverty-stricken family by catching the fancy of the well-to-do Alberto Matias. Whatever, she left her little sister in his home, went away, and failed for days to return. By the time she did, Alberto Matias had seduced Alicia.

  It wasn’t difficult. The young country girl had been awed by Alberto Matias’s comfortable home, a house with fine furnishings and discreet servants. And she had felt honored by the attentions of her host, a man so much more polished, educated, and well-off than any she’d known before. When he told her he adored her, she was flattered and pleased and gave herself to him with a joyous heart.

  Three months later, the couple married. The aging, debonair bachelor had fallen in love with Alicia, or so she would later tell her children, allowing that it was a miracle and a mystery since she was so unsophisticated that she had never, as she used to put it, “been to the center of Buenos Aires, never even owned a bathing suit.” She would also tell her children that she wasn’t pregnant when she and Alberto Matias married, but that because she was a minor and was lacking her parents’ consent, Alberto Matias persuaded the local authorities to let him marry her by telling them that she was.

  Theirs was a civil wedding. Alberto Matias refused to be married by a priest, a scorning of propriety that deeply troubled his religious young bride. And in the next few months her troubles mounted. Alberto Matias had married her, but he had no intention, she discovered, of giving up the pleasures that had filled his life as a single man. At night, if he hadn’t invited his cronies to the house to play cards, he went out to the casino and afterward to the cabarateras, where he would pick up women. When she learned this, Alicia was frightened that he would catch a venereal disease and pass it on to her. But most of all, she was humiliated, for frequently he came home with one of his women and said, “This is a friend of mine and I want you to put her up.”

  She never refused. He had a terrible temper. Daily, he would rail at her, and also at God and the Virgin Mary, which bothered her just as much. And on several occasions, he struck her.

  She had, by the time the beatings began, given birth to their first child, Alberto. And she had even succeeded in getting Alberto Matias married to her in the bosom of the Church. She had done it without his knowledge. He had become ill with typhus and was lying in a hospital, at death’s open door. Alicia had begged a priest to give him last rites and, while he was at it, to marry them, even though her husband was in a coma.

  Alberto Matias had recovered, and to her amazement, he hadn’t been angry with her. “Perhaps you and your God saved my life,” he had told her. But the marriage, even once she had made it legitimate in the eyes of God, remained a misery to her, for her husband remained a reprobate.

  Still, she bore him another child, their second son, Ricardo. And she tried to love Alberto Matias, always praying to Jesus and the Virgin to give her strength to bear with his harsh and errant ways. And with her loneliness. It was a loneliness so deep it seemed like the river that had surrounded her childhood home, and sometimes she feared she might drown in it.

  Then fate, or her prayers, rescued her. She made a friend, a roomer whom Alberto Matias had hired to do domestic chores. Luis Pinto, who worked in Alberto Matias’s factory, was a provincial, just like Alicia. And in this, as in many other ways, he was altogether different from Alberto Matias. He was young, a year or two younger than Alicia. He was helpful, always assisting her with the children. He was respectful, always addressing her calmly and gently. And instead of running from her, he confided in her, told her his dreams and his longings. One day, her loneliness evaporating at the mere sound of his voice, she went to bed with Luis.

  She wasn’t sorry. Not then, nor for many years afterward. She and Luis were in love.

  They saw each other secretly over the next year, and their love grew like the parras on the hillside. And then Alicia became pregnant again.

  She could have kept her indiscretion a secret, borne and birthed the child and let Alberto Matias assume it was his. But such a subterfuge seemed wicked to her. Soon after she gave birth—this time, she had a daughter, little Alicia—she told her husband about her affair and about the baby’s uncertain parentage. “Puta!” he bellowed, and threw her out of the house. Her, and little Alicia, too. But he wouldn’t let her take the boys. The boys were his, he told her, and he wasn’t going to let them be raised by a whore.

  Alicia left. But afterward
she came back, begging for custody of the boys, and when Alberto Matias refused, she began going to the house regularly and begging to be allowed just to see them. But each time, Alberto Matias denied her entry, and not once did he tell her sons that she wanted them or even that she had tried to visit them. “She abandoned you,” he said whenever her name came up. “The whore.”

  Alberto didn’t miss her very much. He was seven, already in school and busy with friends. It was different for Ricardo. Five and a half, and a difficult child, he often got on the wrong side of Alberto Matias, who was far less gentle with him than his mother had been. When he wet his bed, which he couldn’t seem to stop doing, his father would grab his mattress, toss it out the door, and make him sleep on it outside. And when he cried, which he often did, Alberto Matias would throw him down onto his bed, once flinging him down so hard that the bed broke.

  But in other ways, Alberto Matias was permissive, or at least so inattentive that his sons could do things that were prohibited to other boys in the neighborhood. They drank café con leche, sucking it in from a big, nippled mayonnaise jar—Alberto remembers sucking at the jar until he was eleven. And they could fondle the maids—Alberto remembers doing this at the age of nine, and seeing Ricardo do it when he was seven.

  There was something else Ricardo liked to do at that age. He liked playing a game that Alberto had invented, a game about forts and troops and soldiers they called tefuer, which was fuerte—fort—spelled inside out. In the game, they had guns, chased after people, spied on them. Alberto was always the commander, and Ricardo the followers, but he didn’t mind. “Juguemos al tefuer,” he would say each morning, “Let’s play tefuer,” and Alberto would set a story in motion, some plot in which they had to sneak over a wall, storm a barricade, run for their lives. But Ricardo always wanted Alberto to put girls into the plot. He wanted them to chase girls, capture them, rape them. “Las cojamos,” he’d say, using the Mendoza word for sexual intercourse. Las cojamos. Let’s fuck them.

  “It was puzzling,” Alberto said to me. “It wasn’t something I particularly wanted in the game. But Ricardo loved it. And as he hated two little girls who lived across the way from us, I put them into the game, and we’d pretend we were going after them. We did this over and over again, and I got bored with it, but Ricardo could never get enough of it. And to this day, it haunts me—I mean, did my imagination have anything to do with arousing the images that would later come to be Ricardo’s life?”

  Alberto felt a goodly amount of guilt about Ricardo, a guilt arising not so much from their childhood games as from the fact that Ricardo had turned into a murderer while he himself had become a successful businessman. He kept wrestling with the difference between them and wondering why, given their same parentage and rearing, Ricardo had collapsed under the weight of their history. “I just don’t get it,” he said at one point. “I mean, Ricardo and I suffered terribly as children. And we had the same sufferings. But I’m not a killer. Except in business. Where it’s okay.”

  I laughed, and he went on, “We suffered because our father was so harsh and because we had no mother. And then our story gets even worse. When I was eleven and Ricardo was nine, our father died and our mother came back and claimed us. And after that we were poor, dirt poor. Our mother had nothing. We hated that. We hated her. Because our father had brainwashed us against her. Against her and Luis, whom she married right away and who right away began bossing us around and telling us what to do.”

  “Was Luis brutal?” I asked. Kennedy, in attempting to create sympathy for Ricardo, had made a point of saying in his press conferences that Ricardo had been beaten by his stepfather.

  “Well, he beat us when we disobeyed. But that was the way men in that time and place disciplined their children. All the boys we knew had fathers who beat them, and they didn’t become killers.”

  “So what do you think made Ricardo a killer?”

  Alberto put his head in his hands. “I don’t really know. I just know that starting at a very early age, he was different from other little boys.”

  “Different how?”

  “Well, he was always telling lies. I mean, I told lies, too. But I always knew what was real and what was a lie. With him, you couldn’t be sure. He seemed to believe his lies.”

  “What else was different?”

  “The way he fought. Fighting was nothing in and of itself. The boys we hung out with beat up on each other all the time. But when Ricardo got into a fight, there was something savage about him. Something that struck me, even then, as too intense. I don’t know. Maybe he got a head injury that time my father threw him down onto his bed. Or maybe it was because of that time he says he was raped.”

  “When was the rape?”

  “When we were still living with my father. Ricardo says that one of the maids sent him out to buy bread and on his way home a man who lived near the bakery sodomized him. But I’m not sure it ever really happened. The first I heard of it was when Ricardo turned himself in, and he could have been making it up to make people pity him. As I said, Ricardo’s relationship to the truth has never been a particularly strong one.”

  I was struck by the skepticism in Alberto’s voice. For a man who had insisted he wanted to humanize his brother, which I had taken to mean that he wanted to show him in a good light, so far he had told me nothing admirable about Ricardo. Perhaps there was nothing. “Do you like your brother?” I asked.

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Yes, but aside from that.”

  “He’s a sick person. He was sick from childhood. He didn’t have friends. He got on the bad side of teachers. I remember that at one point, my mother and Luis had to take him out of the school we were going to and send him to a religious boarding school. We packed this big trunk for him, but the next thing I knew, he was back. I guess the school sent him back.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows? My mother and Luis didn’t talk about it. And whatever Ricardo said, I probably didn’t believe. Because as I told you, he was always lying. I remember that when he was eleven, he ran away from home for two days, and when the police found him on the street, he said he’d been kidnapped. Nobody believed him. You couldn’t take him seriously. For example, there was this time that Luis took us to a friend’s ranch to go shooting, and the man who owned the ranch had a ram tied up there. Ricardo began taunting the animal, challenging it to butt him, but when he was reprimanded, he said that he hadn’t been doing it—even though everyone had seen him.”

  I nodded. The portrait of Ricardo as a boy that was emerging reminded me of a page I’d often had occasion to refer to in DSM-IV, the diagnostic manual used by the majority of American psychiatrists. A patient, the manual directs, may be diagnosed as having an antisocial personality disorder—that is, as being a psychopath or sociopath—if his history reveals three or more of such behaviors as playing truant, running away from home, being cruel to animals, telling frequent lies, or initiating frequent physical fights “before the age of fifteen.” Ricardo, before the age of fifteen, indeed before the age of thirteen, had exhibited most of these behaviors. And after that? “Tell me about your adolescence,” I said to Alberto.

  He leaned back, arms crossed over his head. “Our adolescence,” he mused. “Our adolescence. I’m not sure I can make you understand it unless I tell you what Argentina was like then.”

  The Argentina he proceeded to tell me about, the Argentina in which both he and Ricardo entered their young manhood, was a country torn by political violence. In 1963, when Ricardo was fourteen and Alberto sixteen, an elected president was overthrown by the military and a dictator placed in control of the government. This was nothing new for Argentina, which ever since 1930 had experienced one military coup after another, the most famous of which exiled the populist president Juan Perón and forbade the public mention of either the deposed leader or his wife, Evita. Nor would the military’s penchant for taking over elected governments end soon. In the late 1970s it would produce
one of the cruelest regimes in twentieth-century history, that of the junta that “disappeared” thousands of its own citizens in the infamous Dirty War. When Alberto and Ricardo were teenagers, that harsh government was in the future, but the seeds of its rule by torture and murder, guns and bombs, were already present in the regime that came to power in their youth.

  That regime banned labor unions, political parties, and even Eastern philosophy. It dissolved the country’s congress and its supreme court. And it sparked terrorist activity on both the left and the right. “Everyone, all the kids we knew, had guns,” Alberto said. “And everyone was antiauthority. Because the government was so terrible.”

  During high school, Alberto joined a secret right-wing organization. “You had to do things to be accepted,” he explained. “Things with guns and bombs at night. But I had friends in left-wing groups that were also committed to political violence. Politics dominated the lives of all my friends. But not Ricardo’s life. He and his friends had guns, too, but his friends were all ratóns, rats who weren’t the least bit interested in politics or ideas.”

  Ricardo’s primary interest, according to Alberto, was money. And in the atmosphere of violence that permeated Argentina, he and his friends, armed and daring, began obtaining money by petty thefts.

  Interestingly, Ricardo had also by then mastered another technique for getting money, one he would rely on the rest of his life. He extracted it from women, primarily foreigners to Mendoza who had come to see its mountains and vineyards. Hanging out at the cafés and discos where newcomers congregated, he would pick up female tourists, go to bed with them, and subsequently ask them for a little cash.

  “Women felt sorry for him,” Alberto said. “He was so cute and so sexy—and so poor. They’d help him out.”

  There was no dearth of sympathetic women. “He was so successful at finding women that it used to bother me,” Alberto went on. “I mean, I was the older brother, but he had many more sexual experiences than I did. I didn’t understand it when we were young. I thought he must be smarter than me. But now I can see his appeal. He came on so helpless, and women loved his helplessness.”