Who Is Vera Kelly?

by Rosalie Knecht

  “Eva Perón,” he said. “A miniature city called the República de los Niños. With a tiny little post office and a tiny little Congress. They take busloads of kids out there to learn about democracy and weep over Evita.”

  “Really?”

  “I was there,” he said. “They don’t take care of it properly. There are rats.” He drank the last of his fernet and signaled to the waiter. “This stuff is like medicine.”

  “It certainly clears out the lungs,” I said.

  “Two more?”

  “Two more,” I said, and the waiter pushed slowly off from the bar like it was the side of a pool. “My neighbor told me I have to be careful because this city is not a playland. You think that’s what he meant?”

  “This is not the República de los Niños, that’s for sure.” He toasted me with his empty glass. “Hardly a república at all, really.”

  I moved to go at eleven o’clock, and he followed me out to the sidewalk, offering to call me a cab, hanging on to my arm, then bundling me into a kiss for a moment beneath the awning. “I’ll take you out,” he muttered. “Tell me your name again.”

  “Anne,” I said. I liked the way he smelled, and his touch was raising the hairs on my arms.

  “I’ll take you out,” he said again.

  “Oh, I don’t go out,” I said.

  “How long are you in Buenos Aires?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Come up to my room,” he said. “It’s just there.” He pointed down a narrow street. “I have a bottle of gin and a bag of ice. Isn’t it too hot to walk home?” He was tugging at my unraveling hair with one hand, untucking my blouse with the other. He was speaking close to my ear, so I could feel his breath on my neck. I had a weakness for that.

  He lived up a narrow staircase, in an apartment that was bigger than I expected. When he turned on the lights, his expression was so hopeful and open that I took my shoes off right away. He had a good profile. I wheeled around his living room for a few minutes in bare feet with the gin and tonic he made me, joking about his furniture. It had been a long time since I had gone home with a man, and I felt like I was reverting to an old script, a script I’d learned from novels and films like every other girl: waiting for him to cross the room, watching him nervously refresh his drink. And then later, being small and breathless, and seeing that he liked it. With women I always felt a bit like we were the first two people to ever do what we were doing, that we were inventing it, that we decided in each transaction who we were.

  I woke the next morning at eight, sweating in the overly bright bedroom, and put my clothes back on while he snored gently. It took twenty minutes to find a cab in the street outside.

  I was hungry and thirsty, and my knees were shaking when I reached my own apartment at the top of the landing. The phone was ringing inside. I fumbled with my keys, trying to focus my mind through an incipient hangover, wondering if it was James calling. Had I left something at his apartment? Maybe he was angry with me for leaving. I lurched through the door finally and got the phone off the hook.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Buen día,” said a low female voice.

  Of course it wasn’t James; I hadn’t given him this number. I felt more clearheaded. “¿Quién es?” I said.

  “Victoria,” said the voice, and then, in carefully accented English, “I want to practice English. You teach me.”

  She had said that before, that she wanted English lessons. I hadn’t thought she meant it. It seemed like one of those things people said to be polite.

  “I have an exam,” she said, each word slow and emphatic.

  “All right,” I said. I glanced at the clock on the wall: it was a quarter to nine. I wanted to go back to bed.

  “Gracias,” she said, and then slowly in English, “I will like to talk to you. Thank you, thank you.”

  Gerry dismissed Victoria. “Fine, chat up his girlfriend,” he said. “But we need more on him. We need to know where he’s going, what his plan is, where his friends are. How are you going to get it?”

  “I have an idea,” I said. I was thinking of the row of bicycles I had seen chained up outside Román’s boardinghouse.

  In order to carry out my idea, I had to modify one of the telemetric tracking devices I’d brought. It was the newest, top-of-the-line, best on the market. The army had been testing them on coyotes in the Nevada desert. It was small, a transmitter that weighed only three and a half ounces, a lovely little thing, but the shape was wrong. I had to take it out of the casing, rewire it so I could move the antenna, and jury-rig the casing back together at my kitchen table with a travel-sized soldering kit. It took me most of an afternoon. That was a Tuesday. I knew that Román had an early lecture on Wednesday mornings; I had heard him complaining about it with Juan José. He would be asleep by midnight. For all his sociability, he was a good student with disciplined habits.

  I killed time until 4:00 AM, drinking coffee and reading a novel, then put the telemetric device in my pocketbook and went out in a dark dress and soft-soled shoes.

  There were no streetlights in front of the boardinghouse. I approached from the corner, glancing up at the windows; they were all dark. If I was interrupted, I would bolt. I was a fast runner, and the gloom of the street was so thick that my chances of getting away were good. I gripped an adjustable wrench in my pocket.

  A weak yellow light shone from the door of the boardinghouse. I walked past quickly, without glancing over. Román’s bicycle, the familiar black frame with a red pinstripe that I had seen chained up in front of La Taberna, was at the end of the row, under an oak tree that had covered the sidewalk in fallen leaves. I moved cautiously, trying not to rustle too much. I was grateful for the dark, but it was hard to see the bike seat. I worked by touch for a few seconds, found the bolt that held it on and loosened it with the wrench. It took a few hard twists to pull the seat free. Beginning to sweat, breathing through my nose, I dropped the telemetric tracking device into the tube frame of the bike and fastened the seat in place over it.

  It was done. I turned and walked away, hands in my pockets, pleased. The wrench had warmed in my hand. There was light in the sky, and the breeze that came before the dawn drifted down the street, cooling my hot face.

  DECEMBER 1957

  CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND

  My mother hit me when I brought home my end-of-term grades. She had me backed into the dining room, where all the most expensive and fragile objets d’art in the house were, and somehow it was the fear of breaking some of the good china and being blamed for it that sent me into a panic, more than the immediate pain or humiliation of the attack. I hit her back. She grabbed me by the neck and pressed hard on my throat, and I balled my hand into a fist this time and hit her in the jaw, and she let go.

  There’s a card in the tarot that shows a man in a black cloak standing beside a river, three cups of wine spilled at his feet, facing a castle that stands across the water. A palm reader in Union Station told me the castle is where he’s going, but it always seemed clear to me that the man had fled the castle and was looking back for the last time.

  That night I ran outside with her car keys and took the Packard. I made one stop, because I had some hopes; and then I drove straight out of Chevy Chase, heading north toward Baltimore, where my aunt Bev lived. She was my father’s younger sister, and she seemed like my best chance. There was a tender spot on the inside of my lip where it had cut against my teeth when my mother hit me, and I ran my tongue lightly over it, back and forth, while I drove. My head ached from crying. The radio was playing hymns and nothing else would come in. They were up-tempo hymns at least. I sang along to some—we had been Methodists once.

  Aunt Bev’s house was on a corner by a cemetery on the fringes of Baltimore, a brick twin, the wood trim painted white on her side and blue on her neighbor’s side. I parked at the curb and turned the engine off. A light upstairs was on. It was cold, and I wasn’t well dressed. I stalled for a few minutes, sitting in
the car. My conviction that I would be taken in as an outcast had begun to shrink over the miles from Chevy Chase. I tried to think what I might do if Aunt Bev didn’t rally to my side, if she was unmoved by the swollen lip and the lack of socks, if I actually turned out, under her kitchen lights, to be a stupid child sulking over a punishment.

  I went up the steps finally and pressed the bell. There was a patter of clipped claws in the hallway immediately, and then the barking of her fat old corgi. Paws scrabbled on the door, and then a black nose poked through the mail slot. Heavier footsteps sounded in the background. “It’s me, Aunt Bev,” I called. “It’s just me, it’s Vera.”

  “Vera?”

  An overhead light blinded me and the corgi rocketed past my shins, glanced off the porch railing, and circled back to press his wet nose against my bare ankles. Aunt Bev was tiny, somehow tinier than I remembered her even though it had been only two years since she last came to Chevy Chase for Christmas. She was draped in a huge red sweater with cuffs past her hands, and she patted at me like a large woolen bird. She squeezed my upper arms in lieu of a hug. Her wide gray eyes stared up through thick glasses. They were my father’s eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “Did something happen?”

  “We had a fight,” I said. “I’m not going back.”

  She waved me in. The corgi shot up the hallway and made a sharp right turn into the kitchen. Aunt Bev, like a tugboat with a barge, pulled me after her and set me down in a vinyl chair at the table. She began searching through the cabinets, her back turned to me.

  “How did you get here?” she said.

  “I drove.”

  “It’s late, Vera.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” I was snuffling again.

  “What happened?”

  “She hit me,” I said. “She always hits me, and this time I hit her back. I can’t go home.”

  She set a canister of Hershey’s cocoa powder on the counter and looked at me.

  “Have you ever seen her mad?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “You think she’d let me? Not our Liz.”

  I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. I had no handkerchief, no Kleenex in my pocket.

  “I have egg salad,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She took a covered bowl from the refrigerator, a loaf of bread, a quart of milk. She made a sandwich and put the milk in a saucepan. She was making cocoa. For a few minutes she didn’t say anything, and I began to think that she might not care what had happened in Chevy Chase. An opportunity to explain myself was slipping away. “She hates me,” I said. “She hardly talks to me.”

  “I’m sure she doesn’t hate you.”

  “She does. She acts like she does.”

  “She has to manage all by herself, Vera.”

  That didn’t make any sense to me. If ever there was a person in the world who had no trouble managing, it was my mother.

  “She’s far from her people, too,” Aunt Bev said. “And I don’t know how much help they ever were.”

  The dog lay down on my feet. I was so tired. I put my head down on the table. My mother’s people: a few quiet Southerners who seemed a little afraid of her, except for her sister, who glowed with scorn for her and everyone else in the world.

  “What was she like when you first met her?” I said.

  “Oh, she was something. She used to play tennis and then go and drink whiskey at the club. Lord knows where she learned.”

  “To drink whiskey?”

  She laughed. “To play tennis!” She stirred the pot for a while, and then turned the burner off. “Listen, Vera,” she said. “Soon you’ll finish school and then you can get married and you’ll have your own house and you won’t have to live with her anymore. But you know you have to go home for now.”

  I couldn’t look at her. A tear dropped on the table.

  “What’s the point in fighting,” she said, “when you know you’ll lose?”

  MARCH 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  Vice President Carlos Perette was not in his office the whole first day of the new legislative session. I sat in the attic of the confitería and read a newspaper, hoping he might come in. There was a long, high-flown editorial about the Falklands, and nothing else of interest in the newspaper or the office or the street below. I took a long nap at my desk. The second day it rained, and a commotion on the radio at 10:00 AM signaled the arrival of someone important—a bustle of secretarial alarm—and then I heard the low, barking voice of the vice president. He laughed a lot. His secretaries adored him.

  “Four meetings this afternoon,” he said. “It hurts my head.”

  “Three meetings,” murmured a female voice.

  Someone had canceled. Perette was losing influence, and he knew it; he could read it in these cancellations, senators suddenly away in Mar del Plata at their summer houses when he needed to speak to them. Phone calls unreturned. There was some shuffling, and the female voice was inaudible for a moment. I scratched in the margin of my notes. The reels of my machine hissed companionably. The rain had cooled the air outside, and I had managed to open both windows, after spending half an hour using a screwdriver to chip at the yellowed paint that sealed the sashes together. I had a thermos of coffee with me and a cigarette. Carlos Perette and I were going about our day together. He made a joke about how busy Onganía must be, the general everyone expected to lead a coup. That he must have more than three meetings today.

  Perette sounded sad. I supposed he had been at this game a long time, and he saw the end of it coming now. I felt a little sorry for him, since he was one of those men who were made for politics—that was obvious even in the newspaper articles about him—and it’s always sad to see a person cut off from the thing they love. I exhaled the last of my cigarette over the casement, trying to keep the small room as fresh as possible. It was funny to look across the street at the Congreso building, the upper floors at the same level where I sat, and know this conversation was going on somewhere inside. I always liked that.

  I kept one notebook for transcriptions and another with special unlined pages that folded out to four times their size, which I used for making charts. I marked down new entities as I heard of them, and circled and connected them if they appeared to be connected, and it was always a good day if I could draw a new line between two old items. Pages and pages of this, and one-tenth, perhaps, would turn out to matter. One-twentieth. It took so much patience.

  “You have reports to read,” said one of the female voices.

  “Why doesn’t he come to see me?” Perette said suddenly, his voice rising petulantly.

  “Onganía?” said another male voice.

  “He doesn’t come to this office,” said Perette.

  There was muttering that I couldn’t make out.

  “Pah.” Perette laughed. “He thinks he’s too pious to come here.”

  “Oh, no. No.”

  “You don’t think so? You would be astounded how naïve the military men can be. In Bahía Blanca”—that was where the navy was based—“they say he was in a duel in ’43. Someone offended him, so they took a pair of dueling pistols out to the rugby field at the Academia San Bartolomé, with a priest and two surgeons watching. What a joke.”

  “Was the other man killed?”

  “I suppose so. Onganía is still walking, isn’t he?”

  “Maybe the other man was only wounded.”

  “Perez, your concern for him is touching. It probably never happened.”

  General Onganía’s name was on everyone’s lips. They called him the Cavalryman, or the Basque. He had resigned from his post in the army a few months back, and people said that when President Illia accepted his resignation, he “signed his own death warrant.” I had heard this phrase repeated several times in the bars around the Avenida Rivadavia, tossed off casually, and it was not clear to me whether people were being literal when they said “death.” These basic elem
ents of misunderstanding, which were deeper than language, sometimes kept me up at night. It was so difficult to know what people meant from what they said. Was this a city waiting for the murder of its president? Or would he just be pushed out, sent to rest in an estancia somewhere in the west where he couldn’t do any harm, or to Spain, where he would probably not be important enough, among the crowds of Latin American presidents in exile, to merit an invitation to Juan Perón’s dinner parties? I wanted to know, but it would take a bug in Onganía’s house to work it out, if Onganía even knew himself.

  There was a noise on the landing. I went still as a rabbit, then pulled off the headphones and set them gently on the floor. The noise came again. It was a footstep, undeniably, on the worn stairs. Someone was standing on the other side of the warped door that stuck in the frame, the door that had once opened on a typing pool that formed a secretarial moat around this back office.

  I put out one foot and hooked it around my tape recorder, which still hissed imperturbably, and pressed the stop button with my toe. It made a sound like a gunshot in the rainy half-light. Why had they not padded the button and the spools? I slid the transcription pad into a drawer, went to the door of the inner office, and looked out.

  The knob on the door to the stairs was turning. I practiced an expression of irritation, my heart pounding. I had a right to be in this room.

  “Yes?” I called out in Spanish. “Who’s there, please?”

  There was a muffled kick to the door, and it swung open. A boy stood in the doorway, as still as I was. He was wearing the loose blue trousers that all the kitchen staff wore, and he had the obscene thinness of adolescence, a ladder of bones with clothing draped uncomfortably over it. He said nothing.

  We looked at each other. There was a light on the stairs, and it shone straight down on the top of his head, so he was mostly hair and nose.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “You’re the Turk,” he said.

  I was confused. I was gripping a pen for effect, and I pointed it at him. “I’m the bookkeeper,” I said finally.