Who Is Vera Kelly?

by Rosalie Knecht

  I searched his face. He looked very pleased with himself. “Not Perette?” The vice president, a post which also served as president of the Senate. A lawyer and a bulldog, with a touch of LBJ about him, I thought. Rampaging through the Senate and clearly enjoying himself.

  “Yes. He’s the treasure we will work tirelessly to bring you.” He winked. “We may have to make him a gift. Some new furniture, a picture for his wall.”

  “He checks his phone lines, but not his furniture?”

  “Phone lines are suspicious by their nature. Furniture is not.”

  “And he’ll take a present from Aliadas, will he? He doesn’t seem paranoid enough.”

  “It won’t be from the company,” he said.

  A flower seller appeared, proffering a basket of single roses, apparently sensing a smoldering romance between Nico and me, despite the gap of twenty years between us. He waved her away.

  “It will be an English landscape drawing,” he said. “Beautiful, original. Signed. It would be damaged terribly if anyone were to take the backing off the frame.”

  I laughed. “That’s a pretty simple trick.”

  “Sometimes the simplest tricks are the best.”

  I conceded that this was true and pulled my cigarettes from my purse. Nico flipped open a silver Zippo. I lit the cigarette and thought a bit more about the plausibility of an expensive landscape drawing hiding a bug in the office of Carlos Perette. “So who will give it to him?”

  “A wealthy lady,” he said. “One of the patronesses of the Teatro Colón. She’s a friend of mine. This week she will discover that she is overcome with passion for him, and will send him a gift, and he will hang it in his office, of course, because his wife would never have it in the house.”

  “She sounds like a good friend.”

  “Truly, she is an excellent woman.”

  I stretched my legs out, trying to air my overheated limbs, and began to feel successful. The Congreso building at the end of the square looked vulnerable and pompous, easily duped. “Well, I think that might work,” I said. “I heard of a diplomat once who found a bug like mine between the pages of a book in his study, and the housekeeper told him it was a trap for poisoning silverfish, and he believed it.”

  Nico guffawed. One of the children at the edge of the fountain leaped down into the basin and charged into the flock of pigeons, screeching, and the birds labored into the air.

  “You see that windmill?” Nico said. Across the street from the Congreso Nacional, on the corner of Callao and Rivadavia, there was a building in the French style—grand, with curving art nouveau windows and a façade darkened by the passing of traffic. A tower rose from the corner that faced the plaza, and at the base where the tower diverged from the roof there was a windmill, just the blades, fixed there like a bow tie. “That’s the Confitería del Molino. It’s a pastry shop like a palace. Senators and deputies go there to eat sweets, and it has an attic with a few offices in it that nobody uses. That’s your base of operations.”

  I searched out the top-floor windows that faced the Congreso, each one fitted with a tiny balcony. “They don’t use it?”

  “No one goes up there. I’m paying a few pesos a month to rent one of the rooms at the top as an office. It’s full of mouse shit, I’m sorry to say.”

  “I’m more concerned about interference.” The bugs operated by radio signal. The plastic discs were inert until I activated them by aiming a microwave transmitter at them, from a distance of up to one-quarter of a mile. Then they transmitted a signal back to me and my transceiver, and I recorded the audio on a reel-to-reel. I had taken a few test runs in my apartment with the equipment, and found that there was an anarchic universe of shortwave activity in Buenos Aires, most of it centered around the port. I had to do some recalibrating to avoid it, the hiss and chatter of cabs and policemen and tankers unloading in Puerto Madero.

  “There’s the key,” Nico said, prying one brass key loose from the ring he kept in his pocket. “But I’ll have to show you how to get up there, what stairs to take—and the door jams as well, there’s a trick.” He settled himself back on the bench. “The key only ever gets you halfway there. The rest is always tricks.”

  NOVEMBER 1957

  CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND

  One Wednesday I got to Miss Kay’s office for my counseling appointment before she did, and on her way in she banged her leg on the corner of the table by the door, the one covered with pamphlets on mental hygiene. She was red when she sat down. She had an overfull cup of coffee in her hands and her hot-roller curls were unraveling.

  “Bad day?” I said. I meant it politely, but it was obvious when she looked up that she thought I was being nasty.

  “Fine, thank you,” she said. Under the desk, she tugged at her pantyhose. “You’re failing English and Spanish. How is that possible?”

  I blinked. “Is it—ever not possible?”

  “Your Spanish teacher says you’re passing the tests but not turning in any of the papers. And you won the sophomore prize in English last year, I remember.”

  I had written an essay about the soul and the Industrial Revolution. We had been reading Dickens. In junior high, back before everything fell apart, I had been a star student in languages, the one they sent to translation competitions in the city. I had a Spanish tutor from Valencia, and then a French exchange student came and lived with us. My mother enrolled me in special classes during summer vacations. She’d had an idea I’d be in the diplomatic corps, which had been opened to women. That all felt like a long time ago.

  “So, if you’re failing English, I have to assume it’s on purpose,” Miss Kay concluded.

  She was being much sharper than I expected. “No,” I said.

  “So why are you failing?”

  Because everything was so boring all of a sudden. Why did anybody fail English?

  “I’m having trouble concentrating,” I said.

  I was tired. My father had sometimes let me stay home from school when I told him I was too tired to go. He liked to give in when I wanted things. My mother in the doorway, rolling her eyes. He had been dead five years.

  “You like to read, though.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What do you like to read?”

  I considered. “I liked The Power and the Glory. I liked The Cocktail Party.”

  “So you have more modern taste, maybe, than the curriculum here.”

  I wondered if she was making fun of me.

  “Well, yes, I guess.” I looked at a framed lacrosse team photo above Miss Kay’s desk. “I haven’t been sleeping much, you know, and I have to read Middlemarch in two days for an exam.” Tears were actually welling up in my eyes at the thought. “It’s a brick, it’s seven hundred pages long. I’m so far behind and just looking at it makes me feel desperate.”

  “The book makes you feel desperate?” Miss Kay said.

  I felt stupid. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe there’s something else going on. Something else driving this—this behavior.”

  We stared at each other for a minute.

  “Why don’t you go home and think about it,” she said. “Write it out.”

  At home I sat and tried to write an explanation to Miss Kay for my behavior, but could think of nothing, so I wrote down every poem I’d had to memorize the previous year.

  I hold with those who favor fire.

  Frost was all right. I liked Emily, though, for being such a crank.

  This is my letter to the world

  That never wrote to me—

  Well, I could cry about that all day. Who couldn’t?

  FEBRUARY 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  It took a while to set up my equipment in the small room on the top floor of the grand pastry shop with the windmill, the Confitería del Molino. It was an old accounts office with a CUENTAS stencil still just visible on the pebbled glass of the door. It felt like the air in the room hadn’t moved in decades. Once
I had pushed all the broken furniture out into the hallway, I was left with a tin desk and a wooden chair and two windows that faced the Congreso Nacional across the street. I arranged with the manager of the confitería to use the service entrance, where they took deliveries of strawberries and raspberries fresh from the provinces and still drenched with dew in the mornings, so I could go up the back stairs whenever I wanted, even when the confitería wasn’t open. The manager had been told the standard story, that I was handling Nico’s accounts for pocket money while my fictional parents bankrolled a long educational sojourn in Buenos Aires. I had a feeling the manager might also have been given to understand that Nico and I were having an affair. This was often a good cover, because it could explain all kinds of petty lying and sometimes inspired elbow-nudging collusion from other men.

  I did my best to make friends with the manager, Señor Torres. One day I came down from a morning spent over my tapes and collapsed onto a stool at the bar, smiling at him. He was standing beside the enormous brass espresso machine, arms folded, and its water-tower appearance gave him the aspect of a rancher surveying his land.

  “I’m sorry for the condition of the office,” he said in Spanish. “It needs airing out. I would have sent someone, of course, but I had very little notice from Señor Fermetti.”

  “Oh, it’s lovely,” I said. “Just what I needed. And how lucky, of course—to be in company like this!” I waved at the vast dining room that spread out before us, brass lights lost in the intricate plasterwork of the ceiling, marble columns providing a gentle punctuation to the room, like an Egyptian temple lined with pastry cases. It was one o’clock, and the tables were filled with men in summer suits, relieved to remove their hats under the great beating wings of the wicker fans. They were jowly, most of them well into middle age: functionaries and politicians. At a table nearby, one man bore down grimly on a chocolate profiterole while his companion cackled over a clutch of empty aperitif glasses. “Such a high quality of people,” I said.

  He warmed visibly. “We are honored to have a very good clientele,” he said.

  “I’m such an admirer of political men,” I said. I leaned forward, elbows on the bar. “You must know everyone.”

  He flushed at the collar. “Oh, I have been here a long time. And it’s an important part of my position.” He searched the room, and then smiled. “There is the Uruguayan ambassador, for instance.”

  “How marvelous!”

  He searched again. “And there is the minister of agriculture.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “Of course, of course. He is here nearly every day. I make up the tray with the brioche and espresso myself.”

  “I love to sit in a place like this,” I said, patting the bar, “and just watch the people.”

  “It’s a great virtue to be interested in other people,” he said. “Especially people at, you know—” He waved his hand. “The top.”

  “I’ve always thought so.”

  At the end of February the fall semester began at the Universidad Central. Having paid the foreign student fee, I spent the mornings hanging around the main university building on Reconquista, sweating more than normal, trying to look friendly and aloof at the same time. I attended survey lectures in psychology, which enrolled hundreds of students and were taught in huge, sloping halls. Psychology was the most popular course of study at the UC, each entering class bigger than the last; the syllabus was going through the Freudian stages of development in order, so that now, at the beginning of the year, my notes were heavily fixated on the anus. After my classes I would spend a while in the student café, doodling in my notebook and reading a huge volume of Erikson. The coffee was quite good in that cafeteria. The air was always full of smoke and there were rude things about the girls carved into all the tables and windowsills.

  In that first week, I found the student directory in the library, a cheaply printed volume that was chained to a desk the way pens are chained up in banks, and looked up the phone number and address for Román Orellanos. I walked past the address on a rainy Saturday afternoon in a kerchief and glasses. It was a boardinghouse, a crumbling place with a PENSIÓN ESTUDIANTIL sign, a faint smell of frying eggs drifting out to the street. A battalion of bicycles was chained up in front.

  I went across the street and had a cup of coffee in a café, sizing the place up. The café was full of law students, reading in the corners and burning their fingers on glasses of espresso. I came up with a plan. The pensión was only a few blocks from the UC law school. I bought a secondhand copy of a nicely bound Don Quijote and wrote “Orellanos” on the flyleaf in pencil. I waited until an hour after the last law lecture had let out at the facultad, and then I walked to the pensión with the heavy book. The front door was propped open; someone, apparently having forgotten their key, had wedged an umbrella in the doorframe. There was a lady custodian at a desk in the front hall.

  “Hello, excuse me,” I said. “Could I speak to Román Orellanos?”

  “He’ll have to come down,” she said. “Women are not allowed upstairs.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  She picked up a telephone at the desk and murmured into it. A few minutes later there were footsteps on the stairs, and then Román Orellanos appeared, looking as if he’d just been woken from a nap.

  He had a sharp face, nice eyes. His hair was just long enough to displease a priest. There were hundreds of young men like him at the UC.

  “Is this book yours?” I said. “I found it in the facultad. There was only one Orellanos in the directory.”

  “Oh.” He was confused, turning the book over in his hands. He gave me an appraising glance, which I met with a bright smile. I showed him his last name on the flyleaf. “Oh, that’s not my writing,” he said, relaxing now that he had sorted the situation out. “It’s not mine. I’m sorry you came all the way over here.”

  “It wasn’t far,” I said. “It just looked so expensive, I didn’t want to leave it.”

  “Are you Brazilian?” he said.

  “Canadian.”

  “Oh! Your Spanish is very good.”

  “Thank you.”

  The custodian at the desk was beginning to project some diffuse form of disapproval, so I excused myself and left.

  I could be charming if I wanted to. There were basic tricks. The main thing was to be vacant but responsive, to put up no resistance whatsoever to another personality. So in the grand halls of the Universidad Central I had the same temperament and enthusiasms as whomever I was talking to, and everyone I met had the openness of a student, and before long I was drinking narrow glasses of weak beer in the bar across the street from the main facultad with a revolving series of undergraduate girls and boys. My manner shifted, but my story was always the same. I was taking a year abroad, a little adrift, and my parents were paying my school fees, hoping I would stay out of trouble long enough to get married. The leftist students were sometimes suspicious of me for being North American, in a coy, almost flirtatious way. Being Canadian instead of American made me a novelty, a fellow spectator of the United States. They liked to denounce capitalist imperialism over glasses of beer, and I would cheerfully denounce it also, and they would all be delighted. Privately I thought they should be worrying about Soviet imperialism instead. There were reports coming in of KGB cells in mountain hideouts in Bolivia, safe houses for Stalinists in the high-rises of São Paulo, Communist agents seeded into the governments of Chile and Uruguay. The American objective in covert ops was to preserve democracy, while the Soviet objective was to nationalize and repress. I marveled privately that the students couldn’t see this. They seemed so intelligent otherwise.

  Once I knew Román’s face, he was everywhere, as Gerry had said. His voice carried in the halls of the UC, and he seemed to be always surrounded by a group of laughing boys and girls. It was easy to approach the fringes of this group, which congregated in a bar called La Taberna. I befriended his friends: Juan José, twenty years old, also a law
student, whose ambition was to open a law clinic for indígenas in the high desert to the west. He wanted land reform, he wanted the properties of the Catholic Church broken up and distributed to the people, and one evening one of the other boys interrupted one of his speeches on this subject to say, “And the big ranches as well, yes? Break those up?” and Juan José left abruptly to buy cigarettes and refused to speak for the rest of the night, which was how I learned that his grandfather owned a ranch in La Pampa that covered fifty thousand acres. His girlfriend was Elena, and she was smarter than he was, a source of constant embarrassment to them both. She was small, neat, disappearing in a wool skirt and sweater, studying psychology. She lived with her parents in Palermo, and talked anxiously and intently about Simone de Beauvoir whenever the boys left the table. She dutifully suggested that women’s liberation came from a neurotic fixation on the phallus, as any psychology student would, but I don’t think she believed it. And then there were Hernán and Rafa, muscular brothers who expressed most of their politics through soccer, moving smoothly back and forth between the two topics as if they were one. The character of other countries came out on the field, they said. The Brazilians presumed, the Uruguayans lacked heart, the more prosperous teams aped European styles, and the proletarian ones had the light footwork that you learn when you play on pitted dirt.

  When they exhausted politics, they talked about music. They all loved the Beatles, despite declaring eternal enmity toward the English for stealing the Falkland Islands, two frigid inkblots in the South Atlantic. The islands were only four hundred miles from the southern tip of Argentina, but the British had annexed them in the nineteenth century, and they were populated now by a few thousand English-speaking sheep farmers and fishermen and a great deal of penguins. Two small, book-matched islands, their fringed coastlines driving into the gray sea. In Spanish they were called the Malvinas, and their theft by the English, the daily affront of English imperialism so close to Patagonian shores, was the single point that all Argentines, in all parties, at all times, could agree on. A Marxist in La Boca was just as likely as a navy captain in Bahía Blanca to have a banner on the living room wall with the slogan Las Malvinas son Argentinas embroidered over the flag. In bad times, Argentine politicians had traditionally raised this unifying specter before the public, and Illia was no different. Every time the boys of the facultad got drunk they would explain the injustice of it to me again, ardent and wounded, gripping my sleeve.