“Where are we?” I said.
“Refueling,” she said.
“But where are we?”
“Comodoro Rivadavia.”
One of the oil cities of Patagonia. The airport we were approaching was stranded alone on a plain at the foot of a ridge, and a low city spread out to the south. Beyond was the ocean. It was late morning by now, but there was a dark cast to the air. The humid spring that had already begun in Buenos Aires was not evident here. The mountains below were olive drab. The plane bounced in the air, which made me feel sick.
The descent was turbulent, and I discovered that I could remember most of the words to the Lord’s Prayer. Victoria was cursing softly to herself as the runway tilted and swung into view. The landing knocked me forward into the back of her seat. Nausea threatened. I collected myself while the plane taxied, checking my mouth for blood with one hand and finding my grip on the gun with the other. The young pilot was on the radio. I climbed awkwardly out of my seat and tried to reach him. I was tangled in a belt of some kind.
“Tell him not to say a word!” I yelled to Román, who was in the copilot’s seat. “Not a word!”
Román looked alarmed. “He won’t,” he said. “He won’t say anything.”
“The police would take you away as well as me,” I said.
“He won’t say anything,” Román said again.
“Calm down, mi amor,” Victoria said to me. “No one wants police. Please don’t be agitated.”
“I’m staying in while you refuel,” I said.
“We all are, except the boys,” Victoria said.
I smoothed my hair. “Bring food,” I called to the pilot and Román, who were climbing down from the plane. “Do you hear me?”
The refueling took a long time. I had to pee. There was no good way to take care of it. The men were gone for thirty minutes, maybe forty-five. Could I climb down and crouch on the tarmac under the plane? Out across the long runway, crews of luggage men went to and fro with carts. A group of mechanics in green coveralls worked on a Boeing a hundred yards away. I would look crazy, squatting under the plane. It would draw attention. The airport terminal loomed.
“Victoria, do you have to use the bathroom?” I said.
She looked back at me with intense relief. “In the most terrible way,” she said.
“Okay, we both go,” I said. “You stay with me. All right?”
“Anything, anything.”
The girl with the pixie cut wanted to come too. We climbed down and began the long walk to the terminal. I put the gun in my purse but kept my fingers on it. The mechanics in the green coveralls waved at us, blew kisses. The sun had nearly come out; it was a hot white spot in the low sky. The two girls walked ahead of me.
The inside of the terminal was bustling, tidy. A row of navy officers in uniform sat along the bar of the café, reading newspapers. We found an empty ladies’ room at the far end and, after some hesitation, I hung my purse with the gun in it from the hook on the back of the stall door. Everything I did while in possession of the gun was made ridiculous by it.
I washed my hands at the basin alongside Victoria and the other girl, the weighted purse sliding insistently down over my hip. Victoria studied herself in the polished steel mirror and adjusted the pin in her hair.
“I saw a stand with croissants,” the girl said.
“Can we?” Victoria said.
We bought bags of chocolate croissants and beef empanadas. I paid. “My treat,” I said. I felt delirious. The girls were both glassy-eyed. We pushed through the revolving doors and walked back to the plane, tearing into the bags as we went. The sun had come out and we seemed to be walking into an utterly empty planet that had nothing but the bare mountains and the little Britten-Norman in it.
The boys were waiting for us in the plane. They had bought pastries as well, and we sat in silence for a few minutes, eating. I felt warm again, and hopeful. There were crumbs in my hair. I decided that when we were in the air again I would tell them there were no bullets in the gun.
We taxied, waited twenty minutes for the all clear from the tower, and took off. The mountains below us looked velvety in the sunlight, wrinkled and soft like the hide of an animal. The plane banked and I was blinded by the sun streaming in the window. I thought again that I might vomit, and groped around under my seat for the paper bag that the croissants had come in. I bent down to look for it and felt cold air streaming in through a bolt-hole at my heel. I tried not to think too hard about it. The plane turned east. The bay of Comodoro Rivadavia, ringed with white, disappeared behind us. I looked down into the deep blue of open ocean. I felt a rush of fear.
Victoria was looking at me over the back of her seat again.
“Why don’t you give me that pistol,” she said.
“Why are we over the ocean?”
She held out her hand. Her nails were painted pink.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“There are four of us,” she said. “There is one of you. Just give it to me.”
“That’s not how it works,” I said. Over her shoulder I could see the girl with the pixie cut, whose name seemed to be Silvia, watching the two of us. “Just tell me where we’re going.”
“You can’t fly this plane,” Victoria said. “So you can’t kill anyone.”
“That’s ridiculous. I can kill everyone but the pilot.”
I tried to see what Román and the pilot were doing. The backs of their heads gave nothing away.
“You know you won’t shoot anyone,” she said.
“Tell me where we’re going,” I said.
“It may upset you.”
“Why aren’t we going to Ushuaia? Where are we going?”
“No one’s destiny is in Ushuaia,” she said.
“Mine is,” I said. “My destiny is absolutely in Ushuaia, you lunatic.”
There was a lurch and a crash of pain. When I opened my eyes again I was on the floor, or not quite on the floor but wedged between the seats, with blood in my hair and on the left side of my face, and my head was throbbing. I turned with great difficulty and looked up. Victoria was framed against the white light at the window. In one hand she held a wrench with my blood on it, and in the other she held my gun.
“This is too light,” she said, waving the .22.
“Ow,” I said.
She opened the chamber and gave me a look of deep disappointment.
“Aahh,” I said. I had forgotten Spanish and most of English. “You hit me.”
“There are no bullets in the gun,” she called over her shoulder to the others. She dropped it on the seat and leaned over me. She was kneeling, like a child on a school bus craning to see a fight. “We are going to the Malvinas. You should not have come.”
“What—what for?” I said.
“To tear down the English flag,” she said, and then she smiled, and she was radiant.
For an hour I lay in the back seat, lifting my hand every so often to feel the blood coagulated in my hair, assuring myself it had not begun to bleed again, and trying to think what to do. I lay dreaming like that, defeated.
“How will you get away?” I said finally.
Victoria glanced over at me. “They will take us away.”
“Who?”
“The English Navy, you idiot.”
“That’s what you want?”
“We want to tear down the flag. Sacrifice ourselves for la patria.”
“Sacrifice?”
“Revolutionaries often go to prison.”
I thought again about vomiting.
“I think you’re a spy,” Victoria said.
I wondered if I was about to die. Would they do it here, on the plane? It would be messy in a small space.
“I told you not to come,” Victoria said. “You didn’t listen to me.”
“I’m not a spy,” I said weakly. “What flag, anyway?”
“We’ll find one. We’re landing in Stanley. It’s the capital. There must be fla
gs.”
For another hour I said nothing. I was trying not to fall asleep. I probably had a concussion. I could see that the English would arrest us instantly when we arrived. Everything depended on whether I could get separated from the others and convince someone to let me get Gerry on the phone.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” I muttered to Victoria. “I don’t see what it’s good for.” Why does the KGB care about restoring the Falklands to Argentina, was what I meant to say. What does it matter to them?
“I said you shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“I just don’t understand it,” I said. “Why would they help you do this?”
She looked back at me over the seat. “They?”
I said nothing further. Everything was off, tilted to the side.
“You’ve behaved very badly,” she said. “Back at the airport, I thought you might ruin everything. But now I see it doesn’t make any difference that you’re here.”
She picked up the book of poems again. The sun was going down by then, and the light in the plane was honey-colored. She looked like a government poster for literacy.
She was not KGB. None of them were.
I propped myself up, drawing in a deep breath. Victoria didn’t look up, and I lay down again. The pain in my head made it hard to think.
None of them were KGB. They were just students, acting out a fantasy about la patria. The only agent on that plane was me, and I was fighting a proxy war against no one.
“There it is,” Silvia said. “I see it.”
I pushed myself up and looked out the window. Below us, in the slanting light, a new horizon rose from the sea. The tension in the airplane lifted. They were joyful. Afraid, but also joyful. The plane bumped through the air as if over a country road. We were beginning to drop.
Victoria hummed to herself. I touched the crusted blood over my ear again.
The Falkland Islands, the Malvinas, opened up beneath us. Dusk was gathering over the ocean and a few lights twinkled already along the coast. A port and a handful of white houses appeared, and then steadily drifted away beneath us. Two white roads threaded through a dun expanse like an English moor. For a few minutes we seemed to be following one of the roads, meandering slightly to match the way it curved through a low mountain range. The land was empty. I remembered that there were only a few thousand people living here.
“What is all this for, Victoria?” I said. “Don’t you see there’s nobody here?”
“It’s for Argentina.”
“What does Argentina need this rock for?”
“It’s not for the rock,” she said. “It’s for the idea.”
We were passing over the interior. Far to the south I could see the Atlantic gilded by the sunset, but the land below us seemed to swallow light. I thought I could see a single white truck on the road beneath us. It rolled and rolled through low, treeless mountains. There were no buildings anywhere.
At last Stanley appeared. There was a narrow bay like a fjord, gleaming in the late sun, and beside it, when my eyes adjusted, there was a patch of gridded streets where tiny yellow lights were beginning to come on. The plane droned on. The town looked lonely and small with the dimming interior at its back. I wondered if Victoria and company might be foiled in their mission by a sheer lack of witnesses. What if they got out of the plane and found a flag to tear down and no one noticed? I stared intently at the town. We were beginning to bank. I couldn’t see much on the water. No ships at anchor in the bay. A few jetties reached into the water, flanked by boats. I searched the ground for signs of the airport. The Britten-Norman was circling, corkscrewing lower, but I couldn’t tell where we were headed.
“Where’s the airport?” I shouted to Victoria. The engines were growing louder as we descended.
“There is none,” she said.
“What?”
“There is none,” she said, as if this information were not at all interesting. “There’s no airport on the whole island. Everything comes by sea.”
All the blood rushed to my face. “Where the hell are you going to land?” I said.
“We’re looking for a place,” she said. “Someplace flat,” she added.
I hadn’t considered that I might die in this particular way. I gripped the vinyl seat and thought of my mother.
“Are you trying to kill yourselves?” I said.
“Of course not,” Victoria said.
Silvia was fishing under her seat. She straightened up and brushed her hair out of her face; she was holding a square blue-and-white package, the Argentine flag folded so that the golden sun showed. The boys in the front were chattering excitedly to each other, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. We were circling lower and lower. I could see cars now, and the shrubbery in front yards. The spire of a church passed beneath us. An ambulance—a red cross painted on the roof—crept along a narrow street.
“But if we can’t—” I offered, but couldn’t finish the sentence.
We headed out over the bay, then inland again. The pilot shouted something, and Victoria said, “There’s a soccer field.” She leaned forward. “On a soccer field there won’t be any flag to tear down,” she said. “But we can lay this one out, anyway.”
I couldn’t see a soccer field. Through the right-side window I could see only blocks of houses. The plane shuddered. I covered my face with my hands.
“Nacho is a great pilot,” Victoria said. “Once he landed on a lake in Bariloche.”
The soccer field slid into view from the south, a brown rectangle bordered on one side by the last houses of Stanley, on the other side by a hurricane fence that faced into the rolling plain. The pilot would have to set the plane down between the houses and the fence; it was a distance of perhaps a hundred yards. My mind was blank with fear. Victoria was holding my hand. The view through the windshield of the Britten-Norman was only earth now. A blue car turned onto the narrow street that girded the field, and then stopped, and a person got out and looked up. We were so low that I could see he was wearing a scarf. The nose of the plane jerked upward. My head started to bleed again. A torrid sunset filled the windshield, and then two white houses, side by side, in ordinary human scale, and then we hit the ground and rolled.
I was thrown to the floor by the landing and struggled to get into my seat again while Nacho wrestled with the plane. It took only a few seconds to come to a stop. I crawled up onto the seat, but I was dizzy, and I sank forward and pressed my face into the back of Victoria’s seat. My feet were braced on the floor. I began to be aware of my body again, feet and hands, seething gut. The engines cut out. Silence descended over all of us.
Victoria was saying something but I couldn’t make it out. I could hear her voice in the ringing quiet, but her words wouldn’t resolve. I watched her turn toward me and back toward Román, who was clambering back over the seats. She looked frightened and thrilled. They were all talking at once now and none of it made any sense, like the chatter of birds. Victoria pulled a handkerchief from her coat, balled it into my hand, and pressed it to my head. I looked down at my dress. My left shoulder was stained black with blood.
We climbed down out of the plane onto the soccer pitch. My knees were shaking. Our faces were filled with orange light. Silvia and Victoria and Román spread the flag out on the cold ground, singing and crying. Their shadows were twenty feet long, reaching toward the darkness that came over the hills behind us. A small crowd was forming in the street that edged the field to the north. I could see them gathering, conferring. There was a woman in a kerchief, two men in overcoats. I thought I was cold, but I still couldn’t feel my body very well.
The four young Argentines linked arms. They must have looked striking from the street, standing behind the flag, ten feet of pale blue nylon spread out on the ground, the white plane at rest behind them on the pitch. I stood off to the side, thinking, breathing quickly. It had been five minutes now since we had landed. The cluster of men and women were beginning to
come across the street. Neighbors were coming out of houses up and down the block. Victoria and Román and Silvia and Nacho swayed back and forth, singing the himno nacional. I folded the handkerchief that was in my hand and tied it over my head so it covered the wound on my temple.
“Who are you? What is this?” a man called out. English voices. There was a sharp evening wind in our faces that smelled like the ocean. In the distance, a siren was going off.
“Vinimos por la patria,” Victoria called out.
“Who are you?” called a woman. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“A derrotar el imperialismo inglés,” Román shouted.
There were two dozen people on the pitch now, and more coming. I clutched my coat around myself. A tremor was running down my back and legs.
“The police are coming,” a man said.
“This stupid bloody business,” said a woman near me.
Victoria and Román and their friends sang and shouted in Spanish, pink-cheeked, euphoric. The woman closest to me was staring at me curiously, as if I were a member of a species not only alien to her but also clearly alien to the four young Argentines on the pitch. She wore glasses with thick frames and a man’s wool hat, pulled on hastily over curled hair.
“Hello,” I said. She started.
“You speak English,” she said. Then, “What’s happening here?”
It seemed pointless to try to answer that. Behind her, a dark sedan with a flashing light on the roof turned off the road and drove slowly onto the grass, followed at a block’s distance by a second. Victoria raised her arms and crossed her wrists, as if to welcome her arrest. A man came up behind the woman in glasses and peered at me.
“You could have killed someone,” he said, “flying that damn thing in here.”
My head was bleeding again. I pressed my hand to it. Policemen climbed out of the two cars, which were parked at angles to each other, their lights flashing silently. A third car appeared at the end of the street. I was dizzy.
Who Is Vera Kelly? Page 17