Who Is Vera Kelly?

by Rosalie Knecht

  In the midst of this froth of political chatter and school gossip, Román was often aloof, sitting at one end of the table, undercutting another person’s point with a joke, doing casual impressions of professors, rarely saying anything that would reveal his point of view. Perhaps it was this withholding that drew people in, kept this tight circle revolving around him night after night. Or perhaps it was Victoria.

  Victoria was Román’s girlfriend. I met her on a Friday evening in the middle of March when I came into La Taberna with a book, hoping someone might be there to talk to. I had been alone in the top room of the confitería all day, switching between Perette’s office and the office of the deputy undersecretary of internal affairs, a new bug one of Nico’s people had just installed. The deputy undersecretary of internal affairs had discussed a dispute over fishing rights on his family’s ranch in Corrientes all morning, and then spent the afternoon considering the strengths and weaknesses of the River Plate football club. It had been a long, dull day, and the tedium of transcription was depressing me, as it sometimes did. I arrived at La Taberna at nine, after my politicians had gone home for the day, and sat at the end of a long table in the back, near the radiator. La Taberna was cheaply styled to look like an Alpine cabin, with unfinished wood everywhere, the tables and chairs edged with crumbling bits of bark that put runs in girls’ stockings. Dark planks had been sunk in the plaster ceiling to give the impression of half-timbering, and there were plastic cuckoo clocks over the bar and the empty fireplace, where they competed for space with a needlepoint of a cluster of snowy firs. The students liked La Taberna because you could fit ten people at one of the long tables and no one would bother you if you spent the afternoon studying there instead of in your overheated apartment, even if all you ordered was an espresso. I asked for a beer and a dish of olives and opened my book.

  Elena came in at nine thirty, unaccompanied, and sat at the bar. I whistled until she turned around and smiled. She carried her wet raincoat and beer from the bar and sat down at my table.

  “I’m waiting for a friend,” she said. “Maybe you know her. She goes with Román.” I looked up, interested. I had so far failed to find out anything about Román that suggested clandestine activity, or even clandestine sympathies. Perhaps his girlfriend would clarify things, or offer a new avenue of inquiry. Elena looked at my book. “I can’t remember my English lessons,” she said, lifting it and squinting at the cover. It was a cops-and-robbers Harlequin called Cold as Death, with a girl in garters holding a gun on the cover, looking deeply shocked.

  “It’s about what it looks like,” I said.

  “It looks like pornography.”

  I laughed. “Not quite.”

  Elena ran her fingers over the back cover, sounding out the words in English. “She was cold—as cold as death.” The door opened with a gust of rain, and Elena dropped the book and turned around. “There she is,” she said. “There’s Victoria.” She rose in her seat, impeded by the edge of the table, and waved with both hands. I took in her enthusiasm before turning to see the object of it. There was a ripple through the few patrons in the room as Victoria came in, bright and pink-faced from the warm night outside, pushing damp bangs back off her forehead, a small curvy figure.

  I would find out later that Victoria was twenty-seven, two years older than I was. That came as a surprise. I guessed at the time, I think, that she was twenty-one. She was blonde and had a round face, winged eyeliner. She sat down on the bench with a sigh and a roll of her eyes, dropped her bag on the table, collapsed against Elena.

  “I’ve had the most terrible day,” she said. She clutched Elena’s sleeve, and then straightened and looked at me, as if she had just realized I was sitting there. I wasn’t usually taken in by this trick—unfolding an entrance in stages—but she was good at it. She widened her eyes and leaned over the table, giving me the customary kiss on the right side of my face as if dazzled and confused by my presence. “You are . . . ?” she said.

  “Anne,” I said.

  “Oh, I’ve heard about you,” she said. “You’re from Toronto.”

  “That’s me,” I said.

  “Do you miss the snow?”

  “Not really.” It hadn’t snowed in Buenos Aires in fifty years.

  “I bet people ask you that over and over,” Victoria said, leaning in.

  They did. I nodded.

  “You know why?” she said.

  I shook my head hesitantly, wondering if there was some trap here.

  “In Buenos Aires people think snow is First World. Snow is for Paris, London, New York. In the movies, it’s always snowing.”

  I said nothing. Elena nodded seriously. The bar was filling up. At the tables pushed up to the front windows, a group of young men, none of them over twenty, were shouting their orders to the bar. Every one of them was wearing a shirt that was too small, cuffs stopping short of the knobs on their wrists. Students just come from the provinces. Still outgrowing their clothes. I felt an opaque sadness.

  Victoria smelled like amaretto, I noticed, as she leaned across the table to take one of my olives. As if she had dabbed cooking extract behind her ears. She looked at the boys in the front window and then, confidingly, at me. “Isn’t it terrible, the condition of our young people?” she said. “None of these country boys know anybody in the city. They come in packs like that and live in flophouses. It’s disgusting.”

  Elena nodded, also looking at me. “It’s such a shame,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Such a shame,” Elena said again. She glanced at Victoria to gauge the effect her empathy was having, but Victoria was watching the boys in the window make obscene gestures at each other. I had seen Elena hectored on other nights for her tailored coat and patent shoes, her parents’ apartment on a pleasant side street in Palermo. Her father was a judge. Hernán and Rafa felt they were closer to the proletariat than she was, because their father was a country doctor who worked in a clinic on Thursdays and Fridays in a port town on the Río Paraná, where the Paraguayans who ran boats out of Asunción alighted for treatment of malaria and respiratory disease. I tried to read Victoria for money, but it was difficult. She had a good raincoat, but a button was missing and one cuff had worn down to loose threads. But that could easily be a bohemian affectation. Her hair was neatly done, freshly colored, no roots. The smell of amaretto was persistent, distracting.

  “Do you like Argentina?” Victoria said.

  The students often asked this question on meeting me, but they usually answered it themselves in the next beat. “Of course, the weather is terrible,” they would say, gesturing to the street outside where it was either too hot or raining, and I would say that the weather in Toronto was worse, and we would go on to something else. Or they would say, “We are very poor now,” meaning the exchange rates, the import market, the cost of food, the tomatoes being sold by the half kilo in stores because people blanched at the price of the kilo. And I would say it was criminal what the IMF was doing and a shame how little President Illia did about it, and someone would change the subject. Victoria didn’t do this. She made no move to answer her own question. She sat looking at me across the pitted surface of the table, and behind her on the wall a cuckoo burst through the wooden doors of its clock and began a palsied orbit of a cutout pine.

  “It’s a beautiful city,” I said. As I said it, I realized that I meant it. I was thinking of my balcony and how my street looked from it at five in the morning when I couldn’t sleep, the air blue, the city appearing to have sunk peacefully underwater overnight, the trees undulating softly, the birds muted and confused. At that hour I sometimes saw men walking arm in arm in the shadows of the buildings, brief clutches in bus shelters. All things flow in the end to a city like that. I almost felt that Victoria could see these thoughts, the fuzzy poetics of a person who would always see this place from a distance.

  “We’re fascists, aren’t we?” Victoria said.

  “I’m sorry?” I was
startled.

  “Do you think so, Elena?” she said, turning toward the other girl, who blushed.

  “I don’t know why you say that,” Elena said.

  “It’s true,” Victoria said. “The generals will take over soon, and my father can’t wait. He says Illia has no balls. I bet your father can’t wait, either.”

  “My father is for the republic,” Elena said. “He doesn’t want a coup.”

  “Everybody’s father wants a coup,” Victoria said. “Why are there never any coups in the United States? It’s a very fascist country. I’ve often wondered.”

  She had sharper edges than Román. “There’s always a first time,” I said lightly.

  “That’s very clever,” she said. “I like that. What a clever thing to say.” The waiter brought her a glass of beer. “What do you think will happen with Illia?” she said. She had turned her warmth on again, and it clashed with the subject. I found myself paddling backward, fighting the current she made.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been here long. Your politics are very complicated.” I looked at my own beer and saw it was empty, as was my dish of olives. Her attention was scorching and suddenly I wanted to get away, to boil some ravioli in my apartment and watch television. “I should go,” I said. “I’m up early tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I hope we’ll see you again soon,” Victoria said. “I need English practice. We could meet just like this and speak English the whole time. Do you have a telephone? Give me your number.”

  I gave it to her, writing it on the back of a napkin. The two girls stood to kiss me good-bye. I had some trouble disentangling the strap of my pocketbook from the bench, and then I was out the door and into the street, remembering that it was raining.

  NOVEMBER 1957

  CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND

  Our house was often empty. It had been that way even when my father was alive; both my parents worked long hours at the magazine, and my afternoons had always been quiet, myself and Mrs. Cooper attending to separate business in distant rooms of the house. My loneliness now, in my junior year of high school, had an almost narcotic quality; I lost hours of time lying diagonally across my bed, listening to records. Sometimes I went to my father’s old office and looked at the photos in his desk. My parents’ wedding photos were there—punch and cake in the wallpapered front room of my maternal grandparents’ home in Texas—and their college yearbook photos, the two of them dark-eyed and soft, their faces impossibly smooth. My father’s family photos were there as well, crooked and blurred photos of a ranch, of jagged mountains white with snow, women in dark clothes gathered in doorways. There was a portrait of my father’s mother in an oval frame; it must have been taken not long after she came to America from Armenia, disembarking from a steamer alone in 1909. My father always said how much I looked like her. I had her big, confident nose, the tan that persisted into the winter, the large dark eyes with corners that turned down. My hair even curled like hers. She died when I was seven.

  My paternal grandfather killed himself in 1919 by eating a plate of arsenic, which ranchers kept around in those days for poisoning rats. They lived on a homestead somewhere on the plains of northern Montana. My father was four when it happened, and he never talked about it. I heard about it from his brother, my uncle Clement, who came to visit when I was thirteen and told me about it in a confidential tone while my mother was in the other room. Uncle Clement’s arms were thickly scarred because when he was young, a half-trained horse had dragged him through fifty yards of barbed-wire fence. Because of stories like that, I always had an impression of Montana as a barren waste populated with monsters, even though I saw photos in magazines that contradicted this belief—blue mountains, prairies dotted with yellow flowers, happy cowboys.

  My father also had a sister named Beverly and another brother, Zachary, who had gone away to college on an engineering scholarship and later, as a graduate student at Berkeley, worked on a small piece of the atomic bomb project. He didn’t know at the time what he was working on, but he found out later, and the information seemed to fill him with something like megalomania, a confused state in which pride and guilt were indistinct from each other and both were dwarfed by an enormous sense of personal power. He divorced his wife and then had a spiritual epiphany at Yellowstone—it had something to do with a bear—and joined a Pentecostal church, then married a twenty-year-old from Manitoba. My mother thought it was ridiculous. “A lot of people worked on that bomb,” she said. “They didn’t all leave their wives.”

  What was there on my mother’s side? Mostly silence. She rarely spoke about her own father, and when she did it was elliptical, more scoffing and snorting than words, with a single point emerging for my benefit: you have it easier than you know. He was dead too. A stroke at fifty-four. “Don’t let me catch you smoking,” she said.

  My mother was an elegant woman, but she had grown up in the pine barrens of northern Louisiana and east Texas, her father moving the family from year to year to follow the oil fields, and she could be hard. She beat me for bad grades, for the incident with the schnapps, for being mouthy and sad and not as tough as she was. When I was seven she bloodied my lip and knocked out one of my loose baby teeth. She cried for an hour afterward, and I lied to my father about it, telling him I had fallen off my bicycle. That was what I could do for her.

  MARCH 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  Gerry and I had a talk on a pay phone. “I hear you don’t have much,” he said. The connection was bad, as if he were underwater.

  “No,” I admitted. I had already mailed my first batch of transcripts from a postbox in the Centro, downtown. The senator spent a lot of his time railing against his enemies in an emotional shorthand that made it hard to tell whom he was talking about. He spent half his day dictating letters in his office, but he had done nothing for the last two weeks but reiterate things I already knew: that the army was squabbling with itself over how to mount a coup, that the faction called the Azules was ascendant, that a general named Juan Carlos Onganía was head of the Azules. Onganía was a conservative, as all the generals were, but he was a nationalist as well, and it was not clear how pro-American he might be in the final analysis. Confirmado magazine had published an opinion poll, based on what science I did not know, showing that the majority of Argentines were yearning and keening for the army men to take over. I had never heard such frank talk of coups. No one even bothered to look shocked. You hardly needed spies for this.

  “What about our friend?” Gerry said, meaning Román.

  “Nothing yet,” I said. “I’m getting closer to him. I met his girlfriend.”

  “You must be charming them.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “When it happens,” he said, meaning the coup, “how fast can you get out?”

  “A day.” A few hours to strip my apartment and the office in the confitería of anything of interest, a little more time to get myself to a ferry. Then three hours across the Río de la Plata and down the coast to Montevideo. This would be necessary because the first thing a new government does is sweep the old offices for bugs. I would have to evaporate when the time came. If I couldn’t get out that way, if they closed the port, then Nico would drive me up to Paraguay.

  “Did you get the package?” Gerry said. That meant did I get my pay, which he had wired to a post office for me.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  March was the beginning of fall. The afternoons were still killingly hot, but the mornings were cooler, and a breeze sometimes came in through my open french doors. The optometrist two floors down had pulled me aside in the foyer and given me a scolding about keeping them open all night.

  “This is a real country,” he kept saying, “not a playland.” He said it in English, and I wasn’t sure what he meant by “playland,” although of course I could grasp that he wanted me to keep my windows locked. I just couldn’t stand to do it, since the night breeze was the only way to cool the apartment.


  On one of the last really hot days, I knocked off early from my equipment in the top room at the confitería and wandered for a few blocks, lost in thoughts of my favorite haunts. I missed the Bracken, and Calliope’s, and the basement of Bar 32. I was tempted to go to the place with the unmarked awning I had seen in San Telmo when I first arrived, to look for girls. But that was stupid, a fantasy, an intolerable risk. I stood for a few minutes at the corner of a park, having a cigarette under a date palm, thinking miserably about how long it had been since I had lain in the dark with someone I liked.

  When the cigarette was done, I put out my self-pity like a light and walked two blocks to an ordinary bar where I could try to cool down. The tables in front were filled with expatriate Americans. After a while, a mod type from Houston started to flirt with me, a man with glasses and a double-breasted jacket in a ridiculous color that he had laid carefully over the back of a chair. His name was James. He bought me a fernet and did not, to my relief, try to explain to me what it was. Expat men had a mania for explaining the indigenous liquors.

  “Did you know she built a miniature city out there?” he said after we’d had a couple of thick, black drinks. “On the pampas.”

  “Who?” I murmured. It had gotten dark while we were talking, and I actually felt relaxed. He was good-looking; I thought I could guess what kind of boy he’d been in high school.