“I have to speak to some people,” Nico said. “It won’t be long now.”
“You think so?”
“I think no more than a month. Then Onganía does what he’s been wanting to do.”
“I’ve heard he’s very—proper,” I said.
“Oh, he is. The proper ones are the worst.” He rallied. “Do you have another cigarette?”
I passed him the pack.
“She doesn’t like it when I smoke,” he said, nodding toward the living room. “I don’t care.”
“A lot of things could happen,” I said. “Onganía might fail. Brazil might take an interest.”
“He will succeed, and there’ll be another thousand nobodies sitting in prison,” Nico said. “Students. Union men. Psychologists. The fucking children who write the editorials in the papers. He’ll round them up and put them all in jail, break a few legs, some won’t come back. You watch. What a fucking joke.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Are you?” Nico said.
We looked at each other for a moment.
“Of course I am,” I said. “I don’t believe in coups.”
“The Americans love Onganía. They think he’s John Wayne.”
“The Americans aren’t intervening here,” I said.
A small detail came back to me from the previous day: Perette said the American ambassador had chosen this month to go on vacation. I felt a pang of guilt.
“No one wants a coup,” I said. “But it’s a war, isn’t it?”
“With who?” he said.
“With the Soviet Union.”
I couldn’t read his expression. For an instant it seemed like anger, but then it dissolved into something multivalent, wry. I pressed on. “Do you think they care about elections?” I said. “Ask the Hungarians.”
An ambulance went by in the street. Nico rubbed his eyes. “I’m tired. Do you know how old I am? I’m forty-nine. You would not believe how tired you can be at forty-nine. I spent fifteen years carrying buckets of bricks before I was a foreman, and now I wake up in the middle of the night so tired I can’t get up to take a piss.” He sighed. “What are you going to do when it happens?”
“Go. It won’t be safe to stay. They might find the bugs.”
We sat and smoked. Señora Fermetti had turned on the television. It was Cleopatra. I could hear Richard Burton’s insinuating voice.
“Best of luck to you,” Nico said. “However it goes.”
JANUARY 1958
MARYLAND YOUTH CENTER, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
By the end of the second week I started composing letters to Joanne in my mind, even though I knew I would never write to her. You are my best friend and I miss you so much. I can’t think of anyone else I would even want to see when I get out of here. Everyone else could be blown up with a bomb for all I care.
Being declared incorrigible meant that I couldn’t go home, and I had no idea what other arrangements were being made for me, since I was a minor with most of a year left before my eighteenth birthday and I still had to finish my education.
When I thought of Joanne I could never do better than a kind of wounded evasion of my romantic feelings for her. I pretended I was like one of the great ladies of the nineteenth century who sent each other genteel letters when they were apart about how desperately they missed each other. When we read those letters in history classes or came across that kind of talk in books, our teachers would explain that what read like passion was just the natural affinity of women for each other and there was nothing out of the way about it at all. Joanne had been my favorite person in the world, and when she hugged me and her face pressed against my neck I felt a fizzing, nauseous thrill from the pit of my stomach to the bones in my feet. That was all I knew about it and all I could have told anyone, if anyone had asked.
JUNE 1966
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
This was the week for settling accounts. Perette, in his office, was having meetings with every person who’d ever benefited from his friendship. They came in columns through the afternoon, were offered coffee, were offered sherry, had long conversations in which they either feigned sudden, total ignorance of politics or weakly defamed the president’s enemies. Most of them claimed to have no power over the situation. I had never heard so many political men claim to have so little power.
I went out for lunch when Perette did, locking the door behind me and hurrying back afterward. I went only as far as the main room of the confitería. I tried to chat with the manager, but he had become surly since May, resisting my attempts to draw him out on the subject of the famous men who dotted his dining room. I was confused at first and thought I might have offended him somehow, but it came to me after a few days that there was nothing more distasteful and unwelcome to a person in his position than a sudden shake-up in power. He was mourning the four years of knowledge—of who was who and in charge of what—that was about to be rendered meaningless.
“What do you know about Onganía?” I said to him one day.
“Nothing,” he said, with a look of deep pain.
Some of the right-wing magazines were running profiles of Onganía, although none of them came right out and stated the reason for his sudden relevance. A few other military men were doted on as well: bets being hedged. The left-wing magazines were publishing editorials about the inviolable will of the people. They looked like they had been printed with more haste than usual, blank pages sometimes intruding in long essays, photos printed upside down. The editors were fleeing Buenos Aires already, leaving a few typesetters and stringers to manage in their absence.
June was the depth of the Argentine winter, and the city lay muffled and depressed under a layer of cold, damp air that never lifted, not even in the evenings when the wind began to blow from the glassy expanse of the Río de la Plata. I wasn’t used to such early darkness with no Christmas lights to brighten it. Crows landed in the bare jacaranda trees along my street and stayed there all day, circulating languorously from one end of the block to the other in a giant wheel. The stray dogs that usually congregated in the evenings in the alley behind the confitería began to grow in numbers, sleeping nose-to-tail along the wall where the half-ton pastry oven radiated heat through the bricks. It rained every day, and the cafés were deserted. The bars frequented by the transit union were empty; the students in the facultad were reticent about politics.
“There were tanks in the streets in ’62,” said Elena. “People are going home early at night. No one knows when it will happen.”
My downstairs neighbor, the widow of the playwright, scolded me on the stairs for coming in late. “There are soldiers doing drills on the parade grounds at Campo de Mayo,” she said. “They’ll be coming downtown soon. Girls shouldn’t be out.”
While the city grew quiet, Victoria grew so loud, so manic and cheerful, that I wondered sometimes if she might be taking amphetamines. By the third week of June, she and Román were the only ones coming to La Taberna in the evenings, and instead of talking about Illia or Onganía they talked about the Falkland Islands and the insufferable imperialism of the British. I nodded seriously through these conversations, a little mystified. They seemed to be performing for each other, not for me.
The wall in front of the British embassy in Recoleta was defaced regularly, and in recent weeks, as he felt his grasp on power weakening, Illia had begun to imprecate the British thieves in radio addresses. In response, the British embassy staff had doubled the foot patrol in front of the gate. On weekends I saw teenagers standing on the sidewalk across the street from the grand building, shouting patriotic insults and basking in the approval of passing adults. Various generals, not to be outdone, gave interviews to right-wing magazines making veiled threats, stopping just short of promising to invade the islands should the reins of government be passed to them. A bartender in Palermo recoiled in alarm at my accent that week and asked if I was English, and when I assured him that I was Canadian he poured my wine for free.
The streets were deserted now by 8:00 PM, when the last of the office workers in the Centro had gone home. There was a sudden profusion of police, some of them looking too young to wear the uniform, still pimply, narrow shoulders squared in their jackets. They had been brought in from somewhere—reinforcements. On Fridays, drunk cadets straggled down my street, throwing bottles. Everyone I met had a story of seeing the soldiers marching in the Campo de Mayo, the base at the edge of the city. Endless drills, as if a coup were a parade.
Román sat in La Taberna and talked about the Falklands and the restoration of honor and sovereignty and the essential nature of Argentines, earth and blood, silver, beef. He and Victoria giggled like children, his dark head and her yellow one, his long arm draped across her shoulders. Victoria leaned in close one evening just as I was putting on my coat to go and said, “Have you seen the boats in the river?”
“Boats?”
“There are gunboats at anchor in the river. No lights.”
“Argentine?”
“Of course, Argentine. Onganía put them there.”
This was the first time she had spoken Onganía’s name in weeks. She seemed indifferent, most of the time, to the matter of who occupied the presidential palace and how they got there. Her vision of Argentina was historical, eschatological. She was concerned with its destiny, not the grubby shifts in power that were happening right now. She cared about the integrity of its territory. Its honor among nations, that kind of thing. A very long view.
“He put them there because he’s a fascist,” she said lightly, rolling her glass of beer between her palms.
She sometimes cast glances at me when Román was expounding some point, flirtatious looks, as if she were inviting me to join them in their outrage. I thought about her on the way home, wondered if she meant these little passes, or if she just liked to see me blush. She sometimes wore me out, the way she needed to be looked at all the time. She chased after Elena’s attention too, when I really thought about it.
Silly to think of her instead of the darkened gunboats on the river. I wondered if there would be street fighting. I hoped the boats and the soldiers and the hordes of teenage cops were just for show. Still, I lifted my mattress that evening to be sure the cash I kept on hand for plane tickets and ferry passes was still in the envelope where I had left it. I was straightening the sheets, reassured, when the doorbell rang.
I stepped onto the balcony and looked down. It was Nico at the street door. I recognized him by the top of his head, a ring of dyed black hair around a thinning patch. I went back in and buzzed him up, and then stood in the middle of the living room, thinking. Nico had never been to my flat. Why would he come here now? I heard the creak of his shoes in the hall and opened the door.
“What a surprise,” I said. “Would you like a glass of wine?”
“Whatever you have,” he said.
His face was red from the cold, and he scanned my living room while he took off his coat, an omnivorous glance. The smell of alcohol rolled off him. He hung up the coat himself, not waiting for me to do it. I found a second wineglass in the cabinet under the sink, glazed with dust, next to all the other items I’d found in the kitchen that I’d never use: a set of oyster forks, a fondue pot, a Bundt pan.
“All I have is white,” I said.
He was paging through the copy of El País I’d left open on the table. “You have something to eat?” he said.
“Well,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “I guess I do.” There was a bag of biscuits from the bakery on Carlos Calvo.
“Let me have something,” he said. “I’m drunk.”
“I can see that.”
He sat at the table. He moved like a dancing bear, a brain struggling for precision in a large, imprecise body. He kept a very straight posture in the chair, eyeballing my sofa and french windows as if they might be on the verge of saying something disrespectful.
“How drunk?” I said, setting the biscuits down on a plate in front of him.
“It never fogs my mind,” he said. “Never. What do you hear, my girl? What do the birds tell you?”
I shrugged. “At the confitería? You know already. It’s been more of the same. Rats off a ship.”
“Onganía has brought in police from Corrientes,” he said. “He has no authority over them, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The chiefs send them anyway.”
“Do you want a glass of water?” I said.
He grunted, and I turned to pour it for him anyway. As I set it down in front of him, he rummaged in the pocket of his jacket and then casually drew out a .22 pistol and laid it on the table.
“I think you should have a gun,” he said.
For a moment I could think of nothing to say. It felt like a trick. Something to unnerve me, which I hated.
“I don’t know why you don’t have one already.” He examined it, as if it were a piece of jewelry he’d never seen before. “In your line of work.”
I collected myself. “They’re difficult to travel with.”
“Well, you’re not traveling now, are you?” He set the gun down on the newspaper and put a whole biscuit in his mouth. “Foolish not to have one.”
I crossed my arms. “This just came into your head, just now? Has something happened?”
“Things are happening all the time.”
My aunt in Nebraska had tried to teach me to shoot once, setting up a five-pound sack of flour on a fence post. I couldn’t hit it. In the end she allowed me the satisfaction of murdering it in an enormous puff of white at a distance of ten feet.
“I’m not much of a marksman,” I said.
“You don’t have to fire it,” Nico said. “You just have to be willing to take it out of your pocket.”
“Is it loaded?”
“No.” He showed me, and rattled his other pocket. “I brought you some bullets, though.” He slid the gun across the table to me. “I look after you,” he said. He stood up, taking another biscuit, and put on his coat.
JANUARY 1958
MARYLAND YOUTH CENTER, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
At lights out at the Maryland Youth Center I sometimes heard murmuring and cries from other rooms on the corridor in the precious thirty-minute blocks between bed checks. The matrons believed that we were delinquents because we were sluts, even those of us whose crimes weren’t sexual in nature, and that we were Sapphists because we were insatiable and undiscriminating. The girls themselves seemed to feel no curiosity at all about their desire for each other; some were girlfriends, holding hands and passing notes. I missed Joanne, and this was new for me, the information that some women went to bed together habitually and casually, the same as they might do with men. Before that I could imagine sex between women only as the final calamity in a bloody drama, a self-destructive act of Hellenic proportions, Dido walking into her own funeral pyre. The world could not stand after a lesbian tryst. But it could, as it turned out, or at least it could if you had already destroyed enough of your world to be serving time in the Maryland Youth Center.
JUNE 1966
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
By the twentieth of June the senators and Perette were at their desks all day and all night, and I was keeping the same hours at my post, hunched over my equipment with a stale sandwich until four or five o’clock in the morning. To the manager in the restaurant, I delivered a long complaint about how the roof of my apartment had sprung such a bad leak in the last weeks of rain that the plaster was coming down, and while the place was being repaired I hoped I could count on his indulgence in letting me stay on a cot in the office upstairs. I offered a supplement to the rent, pretending it was from Nico. With the manager’s permission I came and went whenever I liked, taking breaks only to buy empanadas and cigarettes, to use the huge white-and-gold ladies’ room on the ground floor, and to stretch my legs by marching around the block in the rain. I kept the gun in a locked drawer in the desk.
The rain and the cold and the agitation in the Congreso meant that more
and more business was being conducted in the confitería dining room, and during peak hours, between one o’clock and three o’clock in the afternoon, I would leave my recording equipment running in the locked room and go down to sit in a window seat with a coffee and listen.
“They’re laughing at us,” said a man identified for me by the manager as the head of a barley concern out of Entre Ríos. “They’re laughing at us all over the world.” He used an elegant metaphor in which a boy with a long Beatles-style haircut he had seen waiting at a bus stop in Recoleta stood in for the ills of modern Argentina, its disregard of the church, its general hollowness and permissiveness and lack of character, all of which seemed to be enclosed within a general condition of homosexuality. Illia had been too weak to correct all this, but Onganía was strong. On the same afternoon, I listened to an assistant secretary of something—trade? internal affairs? transportation?—explain in a low voice that he had land in Uruguay and he was leaving on the ferry at the end of the week. “They’re all doing it,” he murmured to his companion, a young woman. “All the officials, they all have summer homes and they’re all going away as soon as they can.”
“But they have jobs to do,” said the woman.
“Not for very long,” he said. “I know when I’m finished. I’ve already sold my wife’s furniture. I won’t have to come back to this fucking city for six months, and by then it will all be different.”
That Saturday was Román’s birthday, and everyone was invited to gather in Victoria’s apartment for liters of Quilmes beer and choripanes grilled on the racks of her oven. It was a provisional party, a weak approximation of the cookout in the country that they would have had under better circumstances, if the streets were not full of soldiers and police and every cabbie in the city weren’t charging double after dark. I told her I wouldn’t come because it was too dangerous, and she cursed at me over the phone, a litany of insults ending in laughter. “Of course you will come,” she said.
Who Is Vera Kelly? Page 8