by Linda Wolfe
This certainty grew when, after we finished watching the tapes, Alberto rose and, pulling open the drapes that masked the windows in the TV room, said, “I wish I knew the real reason Ricardo turned himself in. He says it’s because of remorse, but somehow, I don’t believe him.”
“Why not?” I asked as the previously darkened room flooded with late-afternoon sunlight.
“I don’t know. But when his wife was here doing that PrimeTime Live show, she told me that the medical-supplies people Ricardo was working for in Mexico were like the Mafia down there. Then he decided to go into business for himself, and his bosses got very mad. And that’s when he disappeared.”
“And turned up in Argentina,” I exclaimed.
Alberto nodded.
“So he had to flee Mexico,” I said triumphantly. In my mind’s ear I was hearing, as clearly as Ricardo claimed to hear voices, the raspy sound of John McGrath, Gordon McEwan’s partner, saying to me so many months ago, “People don’t come down with remorse like a flu or head cold. There’s got to be more to the story.” And in my mind’s eye, I could picture Elise McCarthy sitting opposite me and sliding across her scarred table the article from Clarín about Ricardo’s abrupt escape from Mexican police who were supposedly attempting to shake him down for money.
“Do you know about the article in Clarín?” I asked Alberto and when he shook his head, I told him about it. “The newspaper reported that Ricardo had told somebody or other that he had to bribe his way out of Mexico.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d be able to tell me.”
Alberto frowned. “I didn’t know anything about Ricardo, hadn’t heard a word from or about him for twenty years until my parents called me from Mendoza, said he was there, and put him on the phone.”
“Maybe your parents know the reason. Did you ask them?”
“No. It was all so chaotic. I’d just returned from a trip to Mexico, a trip where I’d been very close to the town Ricardo was living in. And when Ricardo got on the phone and told me where he’d been living and what he’d done, I was terrified the police would think I had seen him down there, which I hadn’t, and all I could think about was my own skin. I wanted him to just go away again, disappear. But anyway, by the time he called, he’d been home for a few weeks and he was already saying this stuff about being so religious and wanting to surrender himself in order to atone.”
“So you found him a lawyer?”
“Yes. Kennedy. I got to him through Hamilton Fish, who’d run for political office up here and was a friend of mine. I did it because my parents asked me to—they’d already taken Ricardo to an Argentinian lawyer, but he’d said an American attorney would be necessary.”
“What did you tell Kennedy?”
“What Ricardo told me to tell him. That he was nuts, that he’d killed those women because he heard voices, and that he wanted to turn himself in because he was suffering from remorse. But it could have been a story he concocted after he went home and saw my parents. I mean, when he showed up at home, he said he wanted to turn himself in. But he wavered, too, talked sometimes about getting my parents to hide him. They refused. My mother said he had to make his peace with God. And maybe she filled his head with all that atonement stuff and he thought it would fly, get him off or at least into a mental hospital, not a prison.”
I was surprised by how cynical Alberto was sounding about his brother. “You think he was scheming,” I pointed out, “yet you stood by him, got Kim to write that press release about his having hallucinations and being sick?”
“I believed it then,” Alberto, who had begun putting away the videotapes, said simply. “There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Like this stuff about Mexico.”
I sighed. “I wish I could track it down. Do you suppose Ricardo’s wife would speak to me?”
Alberto shook his head. “She’s scared of Ricardo. But maybe if you went down to Argentina, you could find out something about it. Find out who gave that information to Clarín.”
The thought had crossed my mind many times. But I’d made no plans to go. Now, however, I was experiencing a surge of enthusiasm for such an expedition. “Your mother,” I said, “how extraordinary that she would talk her own son into turning himself in. Do you think that if I went down there, she’d speak with me?”
Alberto was struggling to get a particularly recalcitrant tape into its jacket. “I imagine so,” he replied distractedly.
“But why?” I said, as much to myself as to him.
“Because for one thing, the local media picked up on Ricardo’s having called her a whore. She was very upset about that, along with everything else, and she might want to talk to someone who’d set that particular record straight.”
“You’d ask her to?” I persisted.
“Sure.”
“But why?” I said again. And then what was really on my mind tumbled out. “In fact, why the hell are you being so helpful to me?”
“Because I want you to find out the truth about why Ricardo turned himself in.” Alberto shoved the tapes into a cabinet and slammed the door. “Because I want to know if he’s been bullshitting me all these months.”
“Well, maybe I’ll go,” I said then, tentatively. “Maybe I’ll try to talk to that lawyer Ricardo saw down there. And the psychiatrist he visited.”
I had no idea if they would agree to meet with me. But the idea of going to Argentina had taken hold of my imagination. Argentina. The bottom of the world. “Who else do you suppose I could see if I go down to Argentina?”
“There’s that psychiatrist Ricardo saw when he was a teenager. I don’t know him, but I think he’s been talking to the press.”
“Good idea.” I was speaking firmly now. My idle daydream of going to Argentina was becoming a resolution, a plan.
14
I flew to Argentina in June 1995. It was fifteen months since Ricardo had turned himself in, ten years since Gordon McEwan had first uttered his name to me. On the plane to Buenos Aires, an overnight flight, I dreamed that Ricardo was sitting across the aisle, sitting so close that if I reached out my arm, I might grasp him. Or he me. It was a nightmare and I was glad to awaken from it to the twinkling lights of Buenos Aires, mile upon mile of them piercing the still-black sky of what was, down below, a windy autumnal dawn.
The airport was chaotic. I’d been warned by a friend of a friend, an Argentinian psychiatrist with whom I was planning to meet later in the day, not to take a taxi to my hotel, but to take a special airport-to-city limousine instead. “Never never an airport taxicab!” he’d faxed me. “They are unreliable.” But so was the limousine service he’d recommended. I joined a milling throng around the service’s desk, put my name down for a vehicle, then was told I’d have to wait at least an hour and maybe more before one became available. I cooled my heels awhile, watching battalions of departing passengers stampede toward a luggage-wrapping station. (Argentinians don’t trust even diligently locked suitcases to their baggage handlers, but pay several dollars a case to get their bags sealed into formfitting, airtight plastic, rather as if they were like supermarket chickens.) Then, too exhausted from the long night’s ride to wait any longer for a private conveyance, I boarded a bus whose driver had been shouting that he was going from the international airport at which I had landed to the one used for domestic travel and that he would be stopping en route in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires. I was ecstatic to learn about that bus, not just because taking it meant I’d soon be getting to my hotel room and having the luxury of a shower and a nap in a horizontal position, but because I’d understood the driver. My Spanish was coming back.
The sun, a cold sun unlike the hot early-summer one that had been shining when I’d left New York the day before, was up by now, and as we bumped and shimmied through the outskirts of Argentina’s capital, I had a chance to examine my surroundings: flat fields, oddly shaped trees, paper-strewn roadsides, run-down houses, and cars
that looked as if they’d been assembled for a period movie, big rounded American cars from the forties and tiny Beetle-like German cars from the fifties, many of them with stripped paint and wrecked bodies. Argentina, it seemed to me in the first hour of my visit there, was stuck in a time warp, was a place where the past was more in evidence than the present, or at least more in evidence than what we in North America consider the present.
I had the same impression when the bus finally entered the capital. Here, there were office buildings and crowds of people on their way to work. But the office buildings were shabby and squat, and the people were dressed in clothes that had long ago gone out of style up north. It was as if I’d gone back in time, not just back to a chilly season I’d already experienced, but back to decades I’d already lived through.
That afternoon, after registering at my hotel and getting my shower and nap, I toured the city. I saw more elegant buildings than I’d seen earlier, vestiges not of decades but of centuries past, patioed eighteenth-century houses, ornate nineteenth-century palaces. I saw the colorful bohemian section of Palermo, the busy shopping district of Florida, and the affluent neighborhood of Recoleta with its amazing cemetery, a necropolis where the tombs look like mansions. (In one of them, I was informed, Evita Perón lies buried, her bones so far beneath the ground that her body, which was once stolen by her enemies, is thoroughly safe from disinterment.) Later, I went to a concert at the Teatro Colón, one of the most exquisite opera houses in the world, with Dr. David Rosenfeld, the psychiatrist friend of my friend. I had written to Rosenfeld, asking for his help in trying to set up interviews with the psychiatrists who had treated Ricardo, and Rosenfeld had come through, had provided me with a contact in Mendoza who knew many of the psychiatrists there.
Rosenfeld was a psychoanalyst. He hadn’t known Ricardo, but he knew about his case because his return had been a big story in Argentina, and Rosenfeld was interested, as any psychoanalyst might have been, not so much in hearing about Ricardo’s murders as about his childhood. Did I know at what age his mother had left him? he asked when the concert was over and we were on our way to dinner. And did I know at what age his father had died?
When I answered these questions with five and nine respectively, Rosenfeld said, “Ah. His father died when he was still little. He may have blamed his mother for ‘killing’ his father. So when he killed those women, he may have been killing not just the mother he felt had abandoned him, but someone he thought of as a killer herself.”
It was fancy footwork, but intriguing, suggesting as it did a reason for Ricardo’s always sounding as if his killings were justified, as if the women he’d removed from the world had gotten what they deserved. Interesting, too, was Rosenfeld’s fascination when I told him that Ricardo had reported to Dr. Dietz that he always experienced a racing heart and a fluttery feeling in the pit of his stomach just before he murdered. “Panic attacks,” Rosenfeld said. “They date from early infancy, you know. The symptoms he describes are what babies experience when they are left alone. Hunger. The feeling of a hole at their center.”
By this time we were in the restaurant he had chosen for our post-theater meal, and it was nearly midnight—a not uncommon Argentinian dining hour. I was feeling a bit of a hole at my center, too, I told him, and he ordered us the restaurant’s signature squid dish and began questioning me about Ricardo’s mother. “What is she like? Is she pretty?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said between bites. “I haven’t met her yet.”
“Well, you must find out what she looked like when he was a small boy. You must get to see pictures of her at that time, at the time of his developing sexuality. I can guarantee you that she will have been extremely beautiful, and that she will look like the women he murdered.”
At the time, I was too busy gobbling down squid to think much of the remark, but the next day I was to marvel at Rosenfeld’s perspicacity.
That next day dawned gray and damp—Buenos Aires, which means “good air,” is definitely a misnomer for Argentina’s capital, which tends to be unpleasantly humid in both hot weather and cold. I was glad to leave the port city and arrive by plane a couple of hours later at my true destination, Mendoza, where the air was crystalline and the sun was shining on a monumental wall of mountains. The Andes. They were higher than any mountains I had ever seen, and their snow-topped immensity took my breath away.
Alberto was waiting for me in the terminal. He had decided to visit his mother during my own visit and to introduce me personally to her. He’d let me know this back when I was still in New York, and we’d arranged that he would meet me at the airport. So I wasn’t surprised to see him. But I was surprised to discover that apparently he intended to introduce me to his mother the minute I arrived. A slim woman in her mid-sixties was standing alongside Alberto.
It was Alicia. “You mustn’t stay at a hotel!” she said to me in Spanish as soon as Alberto had introduced us. “I have prepared a room for you in our house.” Her deep-set eyes gave her a melancholy look, but she was bobbing her head of curly, gray hair up and down enthusiastically.
“No, no,” I demurred, and, speaking English, added, “I don’t want to trouble you.”
She understood me, just as I’d understood her. We each had a smattering of the other’s language. “It would be no trouble,” she declared.
I thought, perhaps not. But the last thing in the world I wanted was to spend my time in Mendoza in the bosom of Ricardo Caputo’s family. There were things I wanted to do, people I wanted to see whose interchanges with me it might be necessary to keep secret. “Please,” I said, “you’re very kind. But I think it’s best that I stay in a hotel.”
She looked disappointed, her eyes growing even sadder and her face, sun-dried and wrinkled, turning away from mine for a moment. But she was determined to be hospitable: “Then come to us for dinner tonight. Everyone’s coming. Alberto here, and my second daughter. And her two little girls—my granddaughters. We can get to know each other.”
I didn’t want to get to know her. Not today. I’d been thinking and thinking about Alicia for weeks, wondering what sort of woman she was, wondering how she coped with having given life to a man as vicious as Ricardo, wondering if I would like or despise her. But I didn’t feel ready to find any of this out. I was too tired. The all-night flight to Argentina and my marathon day yesterday had drained me of everything, even of curiosity. I wanted only to withdraw, go to my hotel room and sleep till the next morning.
But Alicia wouldn’t hear of it. “Come. We won’t talk about anything serious. We won’t talk about Cadi.” It was her pet name for Ricardo, and I was soon to learn that though he was a grown man and a murderer, she still often called and thought of him as Cadi, her little boy. But at the moment, all I knew about her was that she thought of Alberto as a boy, for she reached out a delicate hand and rumpled his thinning hair. “I have my son back, thanks to you,” she said. “He hasn’t been home in over a year.” And then, still trying to be gracious in the face of my churlishness, she touched me on the arm and implored, “You must come. I’ve already started preparing the food.”
Alberto tried to deflect her. “Linda’s tired,” he said in Spanish. “She can come to us tomorrow.”
“No, no,” Alicia rattled in Spanish, “I would feel terrible if we let her spend her first night in Mendoza all alone in a hotel room.”
I had understood her, again. And I didn’t want her to feel terrible. There was something extraordinarily simpática about her, some sweetness that seeped through her sad eyes, weather-beaten skin, and affectionate gestures. And so we negotiated. I would go to my hotel, sleep for a few hours, and then join the family for their nine-o’clock dinner.
I had chosen my hotel, the Plaza, because Alberto had told me that it was in the casino of this very hotel that his and Ricardo’s father used to gamble the night away. A turn-of-the-nineteenth-century edifice, its facade and lobby had been lovingly, artistically restored. At the entrance was a colonna
de of gilt-trimmed, gleamingly white pillars, a row of handsome brass, antique lampposts, and a colossal cut-glass-and-brass chandelier. But the interior was another matter. The rugs on stairs and corridors were threadbare and torn. The rooms were spartanly furnished, the mattresses saggy, the bathrooms malodorous. I settled into one such room, unheated and drafty in the late-afternoon Andean cold and plagued by a noisy dripping of water from underneath the bathtub. But when Alberto picked me up in the evening and took me to his mother’s house, I thanked my lucky stars for having insisted on staying at a hotel, even this one.
It was not because her home wasn’t comfortable. A brick house with a crucifix over the door, it wasn’t large, but it had an eat-in kitchen, a living room with a gas fireplace and several upholstered couches, and a dining room with enough space for a big table and numerous chairs. But soon after Alicia had shown me around these front rooms and excused herself to do a few last-minute cooking chores, Alberto said with a mischievous smile on his lips, “Come see the bedroom my mother fixed up for you.” He led me into a foyer, then opened a locked door. Within was a dark room, and at first I could see nothing. Then Alberto flicked on a light, and I saw a tiny monastic bed in the center of the room and a couple of framed pictures on the walls. Alberto watched my glance settle on one of the pictures, a colorful religious print. “La Madre de Dios,” Alberto, still smiling his mischievous smile, said. “My mother hung it specially in your honor.”
“Nice of her,” I murmured. Alberto stood patiently by, waiting for me to examine the other picture.
That one proved to be a large photograph of a young man standing at the edge of a river dressed in a stylish leather jacket and skintight jeans. His hair was cropped close to his head, like the hair of an ancient Roman emperor, his stance was cocky, hands deep in his back pockets, and his face seemed to be surveying some unseen but pleasing horizon with a determined and confident expression. “Ricardo,” Alberto said. “She’s kept this picture of him on one wall or another ever since he first left home.”