Behold Things Beautiful

by Cora Siré

  I resort to poetry. Isabel says nothing, her eyes never close, and her forehead is hot. I recite the poet’s verses through the night.

  January 10

  Just after the cathedral bells ring at dawn, they come for her with a hood. “She needs a doctor,” I say.

  “Callate.”

  “Where is she going?”

  The door slides shut. I’m left alone all day. Someone taps on the wall. I tap back. There’s a pattern to the response tapped out on the wall but I never learned Morse code and can’t decipher the message. When my tea arrives I ask for something to read. Later a hand slides a magazine through the slot. A battered Hola, six months old. I read about royal families and celebrities into the night. I hear the scratching of rats and scorpions. I feel them on my arms and legs. I recite poetry. The sound of my voice scares the creatures away for a while.

  January 11

  Two guards come for me in the afternoon.

  “Where is Isabel?”

  “We ask the questions around here.”

  They cover my head with a hood and walk me down the hall into an interior room. They bind my hands together and force me to sit on a chair. They remove the hood. The room is windowless. I’m sitting by a table. There’s an opaque glass partition to my left. I sense someone watching me. I try to prepare myself. I want to fight back like Isabel did. By the time the officer enters the room, my body is shaking and my thoughts are incoherent.

  He locks the door behind him and sits across from me, folding his hands on the table. He’s wearing a grey uniform, has light brown skin, black hair and an oval mole on his forehead.

  “Are you being treated adequately?”

  I can’t answer.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions. I suggest you cooperate.”

  I might be nodding. I am out of control. I am suffocating.

  “Who are you?”

  It is not a question I anticipate. ¿Quién eres? I state my name.

  “Are you sure?”

  I repeat my name. He asks for my date of birth, address, parents’ names. I deduce that they may not know who I am, that with all the people being brought to La Cuarenta, they’ve lost track. He asks about my studies, whether I’ve ever left Luscano, how I spend my free time. The questions resemble a job interview. I try to look at his wristwatch. I tell myself it will soon be over. Someone knocks on the glass and he leaves the room.

  I hear screaming, then the scuffle of boots and a drilling sound. Men’s voices, one pleading, “I don’t know.” My hands are still bound. I can’t cover my ears. I hear screaming, muffled sounds in the distance, yelping. Then a voice shrieks, “Me llamo Díaz.” He is screaming his name so everyone will hear and know that he’s the one being tortured. “Díaz Velásquez! Díaz Velásquez!”

  After a period of silence, the officer returns. He’s carrying a book and throws it down on the table. It is a copy of the university quarterly published by my friends. I recognize the issue, fall 1990. The officer sits down, opens the magazine and thrusts it into my face.

  “Did you write this poem?”

  I nod.

  “What gives you the right?”

  I say nothing.

  He lights a cigar. “This magazine is subversive. You criticize the church. You incite and provoke.”

  I wonder whether my friends have been arrested and are being held here, too. And why it took them so many months to arrest me.

  “You are an enemy of the state.” He blows cigar smoke into my face. “You understand? You and your friends. Who are they?”

  I’m confused. If he wants names all he has to do is to leaf through the magazine on the table in front of him. I try to speak loudly. “Me llamo Alma Álvarez.”

  I think he asks me again for the names of my friends. I hear his watch beep, he glances at it and gets up. He stands behind me. I’m choking from the stench of the cigar and fear. He accuses me of being a subversive, an atheist, a traitor. I try to repeat my name. He puts the cigar on my shoulder and grinds it into my bare skin. I pass out.

  Some time later, a doctor is feeling my pulse. My hands have been untied and I’m slumped over the table. The room reeks of cigar smoke. The officer returns and tells the doctor he’s needed next door.

  Two guards hood me and drag me back to the cell. I collapse on the lower bunk, praying for Isabel to return. The pain from the burn on my shoulder spreads down my arm and back. I hear a tray being slid through the slot in the cell door. I crawl towards it. One ration of tea and biscuits. Isabel is dead. I think I am next.

  January 12

  The cathedral bells are still ringing when the cell door slides open. A guard puts the hood on me. I stumble out of the cell, barely able to walk. The burn on my shoulder is hot. I am shaking and sweating. I wonder how I’ll be able to carry a shovel, let alone dig my own grave. I trip on the stairs. The guard steadies me and leads me down a hallway. He hands me over to two men who push me through the doors to the entrance. They shove me into the back of a car. The car speeds. I retch from the motion, from fear. I think I am about to be executed. The minutes pass. The brakes squeal and the car stops. Someone opens the back door, yanks the hood off my head. The light is blinding. By the time I stumble onto the street, the man is back in the car. He’s not wearing a uniform, has dark bushy hair and a moustache. I’m too dazed to take note of the car’s make or colour. I realize I am standing on Calle Buenos Aires in front of the gate to my parents’ home. It is just past seven in the morning.

  The foregoing presents the facts of my kidnapping and imprisonment in La Cuarenta. I reserve the right to amend or expand this testimony should certain details or chronologies come to me later. It is written from memory of my own free will, without coercion or prompting.

  Alma Álvarez

  October 4, 2003

  18

  Lalo Martín wedged himself into the idling car, briefcase on his lap. Flaco drove through the late afternoon traffic. He glanced over at Lalo’s profile, noting the stooped shoulders, the shadows beneath the deep-set eyes. Perhaps the sea air would refresh them both. Flaco wondered whether the sculptor’s studio was far enough from the capital to be safe. What were the odds that Luis Corva was being bugged, that they possessed the technology to eavesdrop the studio on the seaside bluff, out of range for cell phones? It was naive to assume, based on his presumption, not theirs, that the artist’s workplace should be sacred. Flaco silently raged against this enemy, even more obscure than during the junta, a pack of carnivores, rabid behind their respectability. He clung to the notion that Luis Corva was protected by international fame. The most vulnerable of them all was sitting next to him. He had to resist calling Lalo Martín every morning to make sure the man had made it through the night.

  They reached the coastal road and the traffic thinned for a while. Around a bend, the road straightened to a line of vehicles inching forward. Flaco slammed on the brakes to avoid rear-ending a truck. Alongside a blood-red cliff, two PFL jeeps were parked on each of the narrow shoulders, forcibly stopping the cars and trucks. Four officers manned the improvised checkpoint. One of them approached La Vieja.

  “Fucking police state.” Flaco rolled down the window.

  Lalo reached for his wallet in the pocket of his pants and pulled out his federal identity card, the cédula with the thumbprint, photo and personal data every Luscanan was obliged to have on hand at all times. Flaco reluctantly rummaged for his.

  The officer leaned in, took the cards and scanned their faces.

  “What are you stopping us for?” Flaco asked.

  “We’re looking for contraband. Car registration, please.”

  He reached into the glove compartment, dug through the jumble of cigarette packages and papers for the pale green document in a plastic case. “Do we look like smugglers?”

  “Standard procedure, sir.”

 
“You think they do this in other countries? You think this is standard?”

  “Open the trunk.”

  Flaco got out of the car. He unlocked the trunk and watched the officer’s hands. He knew their tricks, the planting of a little bag of white powder and the subsequent theatre of surprise and outrage. The officer lifted a crowbar, felt around the trunk and nodded. Flaco slammed the trunk.

  “Turn on your headlights.” The officer stood in front of La Vieja, arms crossed over his chest.

  Flaco got in the car and complied. “How much do you think they want?”

  “Ten pesos?” Lalo shrugged. “But wait.” He removed a plasticized badge from his briefcase and reached across Flaco, flashing it at the officer. The policeman regarded the clip-on pass to the Ministry of Justice and smiled. “Sorry to trouble you.” He waved them on.

  Flaco started the car and drove off in a slow zigzag, hoping to spray the officers with gravel and exhaust fumes.

  “I could denounce them, you know,” Lalo said.

  “Would you?” Flaco asked, knowing the answer. What was the point? This was a tradition, the end-of-month improvised checkpoints where the PFL stopped cars on some pretext to collect the bribes that would feed their families, pay rents, leverage a paltry wage into something sustainable.

  Flaco flicked on the radio and tried to focus on the litany of world crises broadcast by Radio Luscano. Tight security greets Bush in Pakistan. A probe of espionage at Guantánamo prison widens. Then the regional news: the drought and mad cow embargo, a meeting of Luscanan and Paraguayan officials to resolve the border dispute. President Kirchner moves to revoke amnesty laws for military officers accused in Argentina’s Dirty War. In Chile, President Lagos promises to redress the human rights abuses under the military regime but has yet, the announcer dryly states, to overturn the amnesty imposed by General Pinochet twenty-five years ago.

  “Twenty-five years!” Flaco looked over at his passenger. “I’m not waiting that long.” The sun’s rays glanced sideways onto the Bay of Luscano. Shadows streaked the road like lances or swords, an abandoned arsenal of weaponry. Even his thoughts had become militarized and to bolster his resolve, Flaco resorted to crafting the news release in his mind. Luscano, November 1, 2003. A new sculpture commemorating the disappeared is unveiled today on the grounds of La Cuarenta, the notorious prison where hundreds of Luscanans were detained without cause, tortured and executed in 1990 and 1991. He thought of adding during the nightmare of the junta, then dismissed the idea. Just the facts, no adornment necessary. A car appeared, heading towards them on the narrow road, and Flaco managed to swerve just in time.

  Lalo Martín turned the radio off. “Alma’s agreed to see me.”

  “When?”

  “Thursday morning at ten.”

  The same time Flaco gave his class on the vanguardistas. He tried to think of who could adequately teach Gabriela Mistral and Alfonsina Storni in his place but, oddly, only Alma came to mind. Worse, he wondered why Alma hadn’t told him of her decision. He’d seen her at the university just the other day, playing piano with Emilio in a rehearsal room.

  “She’s bringing a written testimony.”

  Flaco envisaged Alma in the courtyard bent over her laptop. It would be painful but also purging, he hoped. It struck him that the absence of pressure had prompted Alma to act. A lesson for him — knowing when to be quiet as important as when to speak.

  La Vieja jolted along the rocky trail leading up to the studio and he parked next to Corva’s car. The door to the studio was open but there was no sign of the artist inside. They retraced their steps across the field. Flaco spotted tracks of damp earth leading towards a line of shrubs. Behind the shrubs lay a dense grove of carob trees. They followed the tracks into a clearing.

  The sculpture was placed on a wheeled trolley that Corva must have pulled into the clearing. Sunlight reflected off the titanium sheet. It was shaped in tent-like angles over a mass of bodies in various stages of decomposition, some still fleshy and alive, others skeletal. In one corner, a limb protruded. In another, a hand reached out. The base, a platform of reddish-brown wood, stood as high as Flaco’s knees. In a corner of the clearing, Luis Corva sat cross-legged on a cushion, his gaze focussed on his work, hands resting on his knees.

  A tero screeched from the upper limb of a carob tree. The bird’s cry seemed to ricochet off the titanium and pierce right into Flaco. His cursing alerted Luis Corva, who rose slowly and approached the two men. His normally pale face was flushed.

  “Were you meditating?” Flaco asked.

  “Repenting.”

  “There’s nothing to repent. The sculpture is — ”

  “It’s Yom Kippur. Day of fasting and repentance.

  “We wouldn’t have come today had we known.”

  Luis Corva waved off the apology.

  “You want us to help you pull the sculpture back?” Flaco asked.

  “It needs to be out in the elements for a while. I want to see how the piece weathers rain, dew, the salt air and sun.” Luis Corva retrieved the cushion he’d been sitting on.

  Inside the studio, the worktables were strewn with sketches. Wood shavings and particles of sand crunched underfoot. Luis Corva cleared the sofa of books and magazines. Lalo Martín sat down and opened his briefcase. “Here’s the revised list.” He handed over the stapled pages.

  “How many?” Flaco craned for a glimpse of the names.

  “Three hundred and eighty-seven.”

  Luis Corva leafed through the pages. “You’ve highlighted the additions. That will help. I’ll get these to the students first thing tomorrow.” He sat on a stool.

  “Your students?” Flaco asked.

  “I had to do it this way. It would have taken me too long.” Corva explained that as part of their assignment this term, his students would be engraving the names on marble panels to be inlaid on three sides of the sculpture’s base.

  Flaco glanced at Lalo Martín. “Don’t give anyone the full list, divide it up among them.” All along Luis Corva had resisted the idea of adding names to the sculpture. For aesthetic reasons, Flaco presumed, but he’d argued for the importance of names to families who’d never had the opportunity of identifying and burying their dead. Names were the markers of human existence, transcending all other existential details, such as birth date, eye colour or even the thumbprints on identity cards.

  Luis Corva lifted a sketch from a worktable. “This will be engraved on the fourth marble side of the base.”

  In memoriam los desaparecidos

  2003 a.d.

  Flaco lit a cigarette to compose himself. The words, their simplicity, moved him. Sadness, but also gratitude to the sculptor. “Where did you get the marble?” It must have cost a fortune but Corva refused to discuss a commission.

  “Gabriel Seil hooked me up with a local supplier. The marble is white with light grey flecks, works well with the sandstone and titanium.” Luis Corva removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I’m not convinced about having all those names engraved on the base. I’ll go along with it, leave enough room for new names to be added should you discover more.” He looked at Lalo Martín. “But understand, the precise figure doesn’t matter to me. One person taken from their home, imprisoned, tortured, killed for no reason, is cause enough to grieve and remember. It’s not a numbers game.”

  “Morally, I agree,” Lalo said. “But we all know people need quantification for outrage and there’s never been an official body count.”

  “At the end of the junta,” Flaco said, “we knew hundreds had been abducted, but who cared? Luscano was a little blip in a forgotten corner of the globe.”

  Corva replaced his glasses. “In Argentina, some 30,000 people disappeared from ’76 to ’83 and I’m telling you, the rest of the world didn’t pay much attention.”

  “When I go to Congress and the media with a
report,” Lalo said, “I need numbers and names. Some documents recently recovered were written by quasi-illiterate recruits. We’ve had to do a lot of checking, painstaking work neither perfect nor complete, to get the 387 names. When I file the interim report, it must be based on factual evidence. Let artists express the nuances of the suffering.”

  Flaco picked up the list and scanned the names. During the junta there had been many lists, some shorter, others longer than this one. Lists of banned books (to burn), lists of troublemakers (to eradicate), blacklists (to sabotage). With absolute control and stunning clarity, the lists had provided easy-to-follow directives down the chain of command. The list in his hand was the result of those lists, an unintended by-product of the military’s compulsion and more than ironic. Here they were trying to account for those lists, producing a list of their own. Each name on this list, a stone dropped in a well, the ripples reaching into families, friends, lovers. And the deniers. A short list with exponential repercussions.

  As he was leaving the studio, Flaco noticed a yellowed drawing tacked to the wall. A primitive depiction of a leafless tree. His four-year-old could do better. Looking closer, he saw roots traced from the trunk, long tentacles reaching into the earth, each with a label: Jews, Psychiatrists, Journalists, Communists, Artists, Franciscans. Corva said it came from an Argentine navy training manual on how to eliminate the tree of dissent: amputate its roots.

  19

  Days of pacing the courtyard, writing, then deleting and rewriting, reliving the shock and disorientation, the terror and the origins of her scar, the ugly mound of mottled skin where she’d been branded on her shoulder. Forgotten details retrieved from memory, activated by words. I remember repeated, until specificity emerged: the title of the book she’d been studying that night, the words of the poetry she’d recited in her cell. Then editing out the details that made no difference to her testimony. The name of the book or the poem that saved her didn’t matter to anyone but herself and it mattered deeply. Alma struggled to bear down on the significant details, those that would give her testimony credibility. She slept sporadically and woke up thirsty and jumpy, too distraught to leave the house.