Chapter 12
Diego
He hadn’t noticed the mirrored exhales of their rough scraping, the low hum of the rhythm that had slipped over them until he stopped to rest, his heavy arms falling limp at his sides.
Liliana was perched behind him, her hair loose and flying and the sharp end of her tool reaching for the filigreed molding circling the inside of the porch. Sunlight passing through the thick hanging vines that Diego had yet to strip from the face of the house cast swirling shadows on her arms, along her right thigh, and up the soft slant of her neck. His eyes were pulled to the smoky shapes along her skin and he watched them bleed into the soft hollow of her collarbone as she lowered herself down from the graying railing and back onto the porch.
His gaze on her seemed to go unnoticed until, instead of moving on to the next section of molding she stopped there, right in front of him, her eyes pouring something fierce into his.
“We’ll be able to start re-painting soon,” Diego said, hoping the sound of his own voice would draw him back into his body.
Liliana brought her forearm to her brow, the soft hairs along it speckled white, and wiped the sweat along her hairline. A few strands stuck dark like wisps of smoke curling along her jaw but she didn’t seem to notice.
“If it doesn’t rain,” Diego added, his words hanging there, waiting to be mingled with hers.
She leaned against one of the columns reaching for a bottle of water, the stray dew slipping down her neck as she drank, a thin moist trail cutting through the dust and flakes of paint that had settled on her skin.
“You said you moved here when you were fourteen?”
“Yeah, my dad and I. He had been working at the vineyard for about a year and we moved here when he took over the grounds position.”
Liliana glanced down at the thin wooden posts, their backs bent beneath the weight of the vines.
“Was the vineyard bigger back then? Is that all he looked after?” she asked.
Diego glanced up toward the road, his memory filling in the scant backdrop with soft leaves the size of his fourteen-year-old palms, lush and buzzing with insects.
“When we first moved here you could see it from the road and it stretched almost all the way down the beach. There were ten guys, maybe more, who worked here every day.”
“And now there’s just the two of you?”
Diego nodded, trying not to think about the day they’d ripped them down, about the roots limp and starving, and the deep cracks splintered across the soil that took months of hard rain to finally fill in.
“During the war, I guess it was just too much to maintain. Some guys quit and ran off to join the rebel groups, I’m sure a few were killed, and they let the rest go. No one was buying anything anyway. Then, finally one winter, when all the vines were dormant, they cut most of them down. They left one acre for personal use but by then your grandparents were getting older and they knew they couldn’t take care of the vineyard on their own so my father and I stayed.”
“How long ago?”
“Five, maybe six years ago?”
“I don’t remember it, what it looked like back then. I think I was only three years old the last time I was here. But I just wish I could remember.”
“Do you remember anything?” Diego asked. “Do you remember leaving?”
“It’s hard to know for sure. Sometimes I can’t tell if something is a memory or if I just read it somewhere or saw it on the news or if it’s something my father or Ana told me.”
“It’s probably better that way, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, maybe. But it’s strange to feel like your memories aren’t really yours, like they really belong to someone else. Sometimes it makes me feel like…” She broke off, exhale stalled within her lungs, “like I’m not real.”
Her shoulders rolled forward and her hands gripped her knees. Diego watched her face as something pale flushed across her cheeks.
She seemed to feel his eyes on her and she spoke again, quickly terminating his evaluation of her. “I do have this dream, though,” she said. “There’s a fire, people are running. I can hear them yelling.” Her eyes fluxed to something grave, something dark.
“Like one of the riots?” Diego said.
“I’m not sure. But I know it’s a real memory. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I know I was there.”
“I’m sorry,” Diego said.
Liliana watched his face, her eyebrows cinched low.
“I mean that you were there, that that happened to you.”
“I’m sure you’ve seen worse,” she said.
The air suddenly seemed to recoil from Diego’s lungs. While Liliana’s memories trickled in through the safety of her dreams, his came in a frantic pounding wave, all at once, bitter and stinging, and if he let himself get caught in them, in the torrential swelling that knocked him breathless, they would pound him and tear him and break him into a million pieces. But even as the word fire had perched itself on the edge of Liliana’s lips, Diego was already spinning back there to that corner store on Belgrano, his knees tucked into his chest behind a magazine display as the gasoline caught fire, the flames licking across the linoleum floor as they reached for him with trembling blue arms.
A member of one of the rebel groups had recognized a soldier in civilian clothes as he made his way into the store to buy a pack of cigarettes. Diego, eleven at the time, had made the mistake of walking in behind him as his father waited across the street for his son to carry out the brown paper bag the store clerk had refused to sell him any more of that day. The line to the register wound back to the front of the store and Diego was leaning against the glass window that trembled every time someone flushed the toilet in the nearby bathroom.
There was a loud crack, like lightening striking inside of a tin can, and Diego, hands reaching for his ears, fell to the floor. The tile seemed to shudder as people rushed passed him, the force of their panic steeling him to the ground. By the time he could move again, his limbs were already racked with fever, the tiny hairs along his arms turning to ash, his skin flushing a translucent pink.
He felt the hot glass of the storefront window as it gave way, the glowing pieces spilling passed him as someone outside tried to force their way through. He felt hands, cold and dank, wedge themselves under his arms and then he was being pulled from the heat, the smoke swirling fervently around his legs and ankles as it trailed out after him.
The heat seemed to linger, but Diego realized it was just Liliana’s eyes on him, waiting for him to speak. He blinked, trying to remember what she’d said, trying to think of what to say next when he noticed something pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She twisted it there and he could see the corner of it curling from the humidity. She noticed the trajectory of his gaze and glanced down at it.
“What’s that?” he said, though he knew it was none of his business. But he was desperate to reignite the conversation and in a new, less painful direction.
Liliana handed him the slip of paper and he grabbed each end, unraveling it.
“Do you know where this is?” she said.
Diego read the address. He knew where it was, el Molino, the mill. His parents had played there once. It was a bar underground in the middle of the flatlands district. He looked at Liliana and nodded.
“Could you take me?”
He wanted to say no, to tell her he didn’t go out that way anymore. To tell her that his mother had almost died there and his father was almost murdered. He wanted to tell her how he had watched it all from between the legs of a barstool and that it was dangerous, too dangerous for somebody like her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Where did you get this?”
“A girl I met at the University. She said the journalism students meet there sometimes.”
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Diego asked, though it clearly was. The girl who gave Liliana the address had even noted the narrow cement staircase that led to
the door and the sliding window where they were to ask for her by name.
Liliana nodded. “Why is it…in a bad part of town or something?”
“Sort of,” Diego said.
But there was something in her eyes, glinting there like hope and he couldn’t tell her no.
“Ok,” he said, “I’ll go with you.”
Chapter 13
Liliana
His white shirt caught the moonlight, lighting him up like a flare, which Liliana used to guide her down the gravel path. She followed him to the truck and when she reached for the door handle he stepped in front of her and opened the door himself. He spread a towel over the seat to cover up the grease and dust and then Liliana slid in.
It was quiet—the sound of the wind sliding across the windows the only indication that they were even moving. Liliana leaned her head against the glass. It was cold against her skin and she could feel the pressure of the wind outside—gusts carrying the last breaths of summer, fierce and tearing after them. She looked up. The moon was bright and the dark clouds were strung along the sky like giant ink smudges.
She tried not to think about her mother, about the fact that she had another life before she married her father. She knew it was impossible and even a little selfish to expect that everything her mother had done, everything she had said, and everything she had wanted before Liliana, had been wiped clean the moment she was born. But it was the illusion and not truth, as much as she didn’t want to admit it, that had always been the thing to guide her, to giver her strength in those moments when she needed her mother the most.
She had never been mad at her mother before, she was gone before Liliana could grow into those teenage feelings. But she was angry with her now and being angry with her dead mother only made her angry with herself. The more she dwelled on it the sicker she felt until she couldn’t even bare to keep the journal hidden under her mattress anymore, so close to her as she slept, for fear that somehow this man named Ben would creep into her dreams and corrupt them too.
She wasn’t ready to read more, for the illusion to be completely shattered. Instead, she was ready to try and settle into her life here; she was ready to make friends and to start school. Maybe that would start tonight with Jo or Diego. She didn’t feel like the same ghost she’d been in the States, absorbing her lecture notes and the pin thin type of her textbooks with more ferocity than she did any kind of social interaction. She had always been distant from her classmates, and it was an independence Nita had never understood, and as if it was some kind of vulgar flaw, could never seem to forgive her for.
But Liliana knew it had been born from a place of impermanence. The second her mother was taken from her, the entire world turned to fragile finite sand, the flecks constantly shifting and the shapes they once created being lost within the folds. And when they moved to the U.S. it was as if her soul had already walked the path back to Argentina’s soil and knew no other place would ever be its home. She had been safe in her solitude but every night she spent in her mother’s room, reading her mother’s journal beneath those pulsing southern stars she could feel something rising in her. Something reaching.
Liliana suddenly felt strange sitting next to Diego as if maybe she shouldn’t have asked him to drive her. She had felt comfortable talking to him but what did she really know about him? Ana had told her that Diego and his father had worked at the vineyard for a long time. Diego had grown up there. It was more his home than it was hers and it made her trust him almost instinctively. But regardless of how she felt, the truth was they didn’t know each other, not yet anyway, and Liliana just hoped that her instincts wouldn’t turn out to be wrong.
She turned toward him, watching his face. His skin was dark and it glowed red under the moonlight drifting in through the windows—stark against his raven-colored hair bleeding with the night.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and she quickly shifted her gaze back to the dark road in front of them. She fought the need to examine his features more closely until the silence hanging between them was too thick, and then she spoke.
“Thanks for driving me,” she said.
“I didn’t want to,” Diego said.
She tensed against the seat, watching him, and he shook his head.
“I mean I don’t know what kind of school club would meet out there.”
“Jo, the girl who gave me the address, she said it’s where the journalism students meet.”
“The journalism students or the Montoneros?”
Liliana leaned her back against the window. “Who’s that?”
“The Montoneros, the ERP, they were socialist anti-government groups. They were big during the war. The military called them terrorists.”
“Terrorists?” Liliana sat up on her knees.
Diego shook his head. “Actually a lot of the founders were students, mostly young guys in their early twenties.”
“And el Molino was one of their meeting places? What does that have to do with the University?” Liliana asked.
“Not the University. Journalists, writers, artists, musicians—anyone considered liberal. When the military took power, suddenly they all had a common enemy so they decided to try and work together and the Montoneros and the People’s Army joined forces with a lot of the University students. You’ve been there. Why do you think everything is under construction? It’s because everything was shit to pieces during the war.”
“So they had to meet somewhere else.”
“Right.”
“But the war is over. Why would they still be meeting there?”
A long breath cut Diego’s lips. “Not everything’s been set right. People are still fighting, every day, in their own way. It was bad.” He met her eyes. “And the worst part is it wasn’t the first military take-over and it won’t be the last.”
“It was hard to find out anything while we were in the U.S. It was never on the news. No one seemed to even know there was a war going on.”
“Trust me, the lack of media coverage, the segregation from the rest of the world, it was all under their control.”
Liliana felt a fierce blush rising across her cheeks. Sometimes she felt like she had no right to be asking questions. Like she was some kind of traitor because her father had money and connections and friends who helped them escape. But even though they had been lucky and had gone somewhere safe she had longed for Argentina, for her home every day, and didn’t that count for something?
There was a part of her that felt so unbelievably lucky that they never went to bed afraid that they’d be snatched up in the middle of the night during a raid or of being killed on a routine trip to the market. But there was also another part of her mad with curiosity and completely fixated with filling in that gap of her life where the war should have been. The war was a thing—a living, breathing beast that had taken her mother. All she wanted was to give that beast a face.
“You see that light?” Diego nodded to something up ahead.
A small light bulb was dangling from a wooden post. Liliana looked in both directions. On one side was an empty field and a hazy horizon line and on the other was a row of short brick structures that were so low to the ground they seemed to be sinking into the earth. The truck rounded a corner and there were other cars parked askew in front of a row of broken floor to ceiling windows.
They stepped out of the truck and Diego led Liliana down a narrow stairway that plunged straight down into darkness. She stumbled and reached for some kind of railing, her fingers catching on Diego’s shirtsleeve instead. He stopped and Liliana let go. Something was in front of them. Diego used the toe of his boot to knock four times and then a board slid out of place, light flooding from the hole. A pair of pupils, dark with bright veins bleeding from the irises swelled within the frame. With a slight quake in her voice Liliana asked for Jo and then they were led inside.
Lamps hung low from the ceiling casting a red dusty glow over everything and the walls curved up into stone arch
es making the place seem less man-made and more like it had been formed naturally by the slowly shifting stones. There were four metal tables with mismatched wooden chairs, a gray couch with exposed springs, and a couple of wooden crates with red lettering stamped on the sides. There were cardboard boxes stacked from floor to ceiling and a group of people sat on the various chairs as well as the floor with piles of papers in their laps. One girl had an entire box sitting between her legs and she was fiercely wetting her fingertips and flipping through the pages.
“You’re here,” Jo said when she spotted Liliana. “Grab a box.”
“What is everyone doing?” Liliana asked.
“Pulling articles.”
Jo led them to a table and Diego grabbed a box for each of them. He carried them to the center of the room and they sat behind the girl marking every page with her saliva. Jo grabbed a box for herself and sat across from Diego.
“These are militant newspapers printed by the Montoneros. Some of them were circulated, but most of them never made it out of the rabbit houses.”
“Rabbit house?”
“The rabbit houses were a cover. They transported the newspapers with the rabbits.”
Liliana’s confusion began to swell and Jo seemed to sense it.
“See, that’s the problem with you expats,” she said, “you don’t have a goddamn clue.”
“Hey, watch it,” Diego said. “She came here to help you.”
“Yeah,” Jo said, shaking her head, “I’m sorry. Ok, I’ll start at the beginning. Newspapers weren’t allowed to publish anything negative about the military, even if it was true, so it was pointless and impossible for journalists to write about the war or the disappearances. You do know about the disappearances?”
The Things They Didn't Bury Page 5