Behold Things Beautiful

by Cora Siré

  When she was finally done with the writing, she took a taxi to the university, cajoled a librarian into letting her print two copies of the document. Then she walked to the bookstore and handed Roma the envelope to hide in the basement in the safest of places where the banned books had been stored during the junta. She returned to the house knowing if she stopped to look for Carlos Cruz now, she’d risk giving herself away. Self-preservation kept her home until Thursday, when she rose, showered, and dressed, drinking a cup of warm milk instead of coffee so as not to disturb her imposed calm.

  She entered the revolving doors of the Ministry of Justice. A brilliant chandelier dangled from the ceiling. Its bulbs illuminated the alabaster statues, goddesses of truth, liberty and victory, positioned on the marble floor. Surrounded by this lavish decadence, it struck Alma that there’d once been a vision to make justice a cornerstone of a newborn country named Luscano. As she strode through the foyer, clutching her bag with the envelope inside, she considered the irony of it all.

  She entered an elevator with the men and women arriving for work, lawyers with briefcases and cell phones, busy purveyors of justice. She was relieved to escape their aftershave and perfume when she got out on the fifth floor. At the end of a desolate hallway, Alma found the Special Prosecutor’s office and rang the buzzer.

  A young man opened the door, introduced himself as César and directed her past the desks to a table by a windowsill. It was surprisingly noisy, with people talking on phones, typing on keyboards, making photocopies and sending faxes. Alma had expected to be alone in a small office with Lalo Martín. He came towards her now and leaned against the wall by the window. Unlike the expensive attire of the lawyers in the elevator, Lalo’s suit was shabby, the jacket frayed at the sleeves. César brought a stack of binders. “These contain the photographs.”

  Alma withdrew the envelope from her bag. Once she’d handed it over, there was no going back. “The photos, are they recent?”

  “We’ve tried to catalogue photographs from the time of the junta,” César said, “for every member of the military whose name has come up or who we know was posted at La Cuarenta. Some are group shots taken in the barracks, others are graduation pictures from the military academy.” He set the binders down on the table, and pulled a wooden chair up to it.

  Alma held the envelope. “I might have to revise this once I’ve seen the photos.”

  “Of course,” Lalo Martín said. “Memory is fickle. We understand that.”

  She glanced out the window. Below, in the Plaza Federal, office workers crisscrossed the cobblestones. A group of elderly women sat drinking coffee on the patio in front of La Loca. She knew Gabriel ate breakfast there every morning but she couldn’t see him. The two men regarded her. It was too late to bolt. She handed Lalo Martín the envelope and they left her alone with the binders.

  Alma sat down and reached for the top binder on the stack. She opened the cover. Within a plasticized sheath, three versions of a man’s face stared back at her. She did not recognize him but she knew his type. A military man, short haircut, prominent ears and a stubborn jaw. She heard someone talking on the phone, arguing. It was hard to concentrate. She looked up and looked down again. Still no recognition. She turned the page to a sheath with one photo. She stared into the eyes. Nothing. She turned to the next one. After several pages, she flipped more quickly. How ordinary these men were. You could find them at a football game, in a grocery store, at the post office. Mostly young, some recently enlisted and proud in their new uniforms, probably from poor families in the countryside. She knew nothing about military rankings, could not distinguish the army from the air force. But if they were in the binder, they were suspected of evil.

  An hour passed and she reached for the second binder. In the first few pages she recognized a face, or rather, the scar on the chin of one of her abductors. In the photo, he was sitting on a jeep, grinning ludicrously at the photographer. Black eyes and cropped black hair, the crooked row of teeth. He’d been snarling as he’d leaned back to shove her head down. Alma was somewhat certain. His face evoked the raunchy smells of beer and cigarettes. She noted the page number on a blank sheet César had given her and beside it, the word “lieutenant” to remind herself.

  She continued turning the binder’s pages and the faces began to blur so that they seemed to repeat themselves, although when she flipped back she saw they did not. She stretched her legs and looked out the window. A group of students loitered by some benches. They were carrying signs but she could not make out the lettering. In front of La Loca, the table where the elderly women had been sitting was now occupied by two men with short haircuts, white shirts and dark pants. They appeared to be photographing the students with their cell phones. Informers for the PFL, most likely.

  In the last binder, the men were older, some with medals on their uniforms. Page after page of unsmiling but clean-shaven men, their chins lifted with pride. Alma stopped at a studio-quality portrait of a man in a grey uniform visible to the shoulders, no cap on the head, the prominent mole just below his hairline. The face did not appear more or less cruel than the others. Just uninteresting, the eyes too close together, as trite as the books he read in the pizzeria on Saturdays. Detective stories with murders neatly solved and justice brought to bear on the criminals. Alma noted the page number and underlined it twice.

  She continued, hoping to find the doctor who’d taken her pulse, one of the guards, or the man who’d driven her home. One face seemed familiar, that of a guard who’d come for Isabel. She noted the number, placed a question mark beside it.

  When she’d gone through all the binders, she returned to the faces she’d recognized. Alma was sure of the first now, certain that this was the young man who’d pulled her out of the car by her sweatpants. Then she turned to Carlos Cruz again, trying to imagine him being arrested from his home on Calle Libertador in front of his family and neighbours. Would he resist or be cowed in humiliation? She suspected he’d put up a fight, at least cursing the men who’d come for him, calling them traitors and lackeys. Then she wondered if she’d be capable of taking a lit cigar and putting it out on his shoulder. Isabel, Díaz, and all the others would still have suffered for nothing. Bearing witness had only deepened the terror of her week in La Cuarenta, brought it back to memory’s foreground. It did not provide closure, that North American word. Quite the reverse, unstoppable now.

  “Would you like a coffee?” She jumped, surprised to find César standing by her chair. She asked for a glass of water. Lalo Martín came out of his office and sat across from her. He held her document in his hand. She drank the water as César brought another binder, thicker than the ones she’d been reviewing. He opened the binder and laid it down in front Alma. There was Isabel in a scarlet dress, her black hair to her waist, hand on her hip, the nose lifted in defiance.

  “I thought she was a psychologist.”

  “It’s her, then,” Lalo Martín asked, “the one in your cell?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Isabel Gómez. An amateur dancer apparently.”

  “She was never found?”

  Lalo Martín shook his head.

  “And her husband, Federico?”

  He consulted the index. “Disappeared.” Then he located another photo in the binder. “And him?”

  Díaz posed smiling between two men who resembled him, brothers or cousins. His shoulders were lifted, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

  “I heard him being tortured.” Alma handed over the sheet of paper with the three numbers. “I recognized these two for sure and the one with the question mark, possibly. The first is one of the men who kidnapped me from my house. The second is the man who…questioned me on my last day.”

  Lalo Martín opened the binder and studied the photograph. “We’ll try to find him.”

  It will be easy, she wanted to say, given that he lives nearby on a cozy street
. And hangs out at the officers’ club in the old port. But she decided to wait and see what they came up with.

  Alma’s attention was drawn to a commotion outside. Lines of protesters, most of them young, were streaming into the plaza from a corner street. Those at the head of the line carried a banner, but she couldn’t make out what it said. César mentioned that the government had announced the sale of a large parcel of land to a consortium. “They’re going to build a casino, hotel and golf course. There’s a march today to protest the development for its environmental impact. On the river and surrounding wetlands.”

  Lalo Martín suggested that they reconvene tomorrow. He and César would draw up a list of questions and draft a formal statement for her to sign. He took her hand. “It’s an act of courage for you. We know that.”

  Alma did not feel a sense of relief when she left the Ministry of Justice. Instead, what came to her was familiar — the combination of anger and resolve that had motivated, no, enabled her to leave Luscano in the first place. And it would be so easy to flee again. All she had to do was book her flight back. It was too late. She had to see it through, see what would happen to Carlos Cruz.

  Alma stepped through the revolving door into the stifling heat. She stood facing the backs of policemen lined up to guard the entrance to the Ministry of Justice. Beyond them, protesters jammed the plaza. They were cheering a young woman who stood on a bench shouting through a bullhorn. Drumbeats sounded in the distance. The boisterous noise was completely unlike the stunned silence in 1990. She and Roma, curious about the amassing crowds, had hurried to the plaza. They were in wordless shock as they watched the tanks roll over the cobblestones. Minutes later, General Galtí and his cohorts marched into Government House. Then nothing happened. Alma and Roma dispersed with the others. When she got home, Hannelore was glued to Radio Luscano. The newscast confirmed the coup had been successful. With the tacit approval of the oligarchy and most of the middle class for whom the economic shambles of the country justified the prospect of a dictatorship and order, the President had resigned immediately. Not a single shot was fired.

  Alma wedged between two policemen and pushed through the crowd of chanting protesters. She squeezed through the chaos, a laborious wending left and right around the clusters of protestors. Then a surge carried her forward as the marchers proceeded to Avenida Primero de Abríl. Immobilized cars and trucks occupied all four lanes of the artery. Some drivers honked their horns, while others had left their vehicles to curse the protesters. Sirens blared in the distance. Alma spotted an opening on the other side of the avenue, a pathway leading to campus. Better to avoid a protest she barely understood. Alma made her way around the vehicles on the avenue, lunged past a column of students and approached the riverbank.

  A group of bystanders, Flaco among them, clustered beneath a willow tree. He greeted her quickly and pointed across the river but she couldn’t see over the trees. Flaco helped her onto a boulder and she rested her hand on his shoulder as she watched the students approach the prison yard. Riot police equipped with shields and batons stared them down. The policemen stiffened, legs planted apart, and began beating their shields with batons. It was a provocation, the nasty sound of rubber striking Plexiglas. The protesters crept forward, some shouted through bullhorns, others held out cell phones and cameras to photograph the lines of policemen protecting La Cuarenta. Competing against the banging of the truncheons, a group of drummers advanced, Roma among them, a bandana over her nose and mouth, a large drum strapped to her shoulders. They were within metres of the riot police.

  “Stop,” Flaco said, his voice low like an offstage director. “Stop now.”

  A convoy of jeeps approached the rear entrance of the prison yard, followed by the cavalry on horseback. All they had to do was cut off the road between the bridge and La Cuarenta and the students would be trapped.

  “Stay calm, deliver the message, show them your numbers, and leave.” Miraculously, the students slowed to a stop. They did not grab stones and hurl them, did not lob bricks or bottles from their knapsacks. While a television crew filmed the protesters, two students managed to infiltrate the column of policemen on the far side of the prison. They shimmied to the second floor, rappelled up to the roof and moments later a red banner was unfurled across the wall of the prison. ¡No al casino! ¡Sí al medio ambiente!

  The crowd hooted and applauded as the perplexed policemen turned to look up. By the time they spotted the banner, the pair had slid down the prison wall and were running into the crowd. The protesters turned and proceeded back across the bridge, dispersing into the avenues. Flaco yelled, “They did it!”

  Alma jumped off the boulder. “You were behind this?”

  “My students came up with the plan.”

  “More effective than any of the protests during the junta.” Alma didn’t let on that the prospect of La Cuarenta’s destruction appealed to her, a symbolic erasure even if it wouldn’t negate what had happened inside.

  “We didn’t have the Internet.” Flaco offered to walk her home. “You can tell me how it went with Lalo Martín.”

  “Does anything happen in Luscano without you knowing it?”

  “Plenty. And none of it good.”

  Alma told him she’d identified one of her kidnappers and an officer who interrogated her. “From photos, of course.”

  “It must have been tough.”

  “Coming back was tough.” All along, her return to Luscano had led to this reckoning engineered by Flaco. “You knew I’d end up doing this, didn’t you?”

  “I hoped you would…but how could I know you’d have the guts?”

  A group of students approached them, one of them calling out, “Doctor Molino, did you see? They got the banner up.” They told Flaco of the videos and photographs they’d be posting on social media. Flaco advised them to stick to the facts. “Nothing triumphant. Not yet.”

  He took Alma’s arm and they navigated the mass of students and professors in the quadrant. Many stopped to speak to Flaco, but he didn’t linger, sensing Alma’s need to go home. He led her down the side streets to avoid the crowds, telling her of his plans for La Cuarenta. After the memorial for the disappeared was unveiled in the prison yard, he envisaged a renovation of the prison to convert it into a museum of modern history. “One with audio-visual installations documenting the last twenty-five years. Film clips of the junta, displays of the cattle prods, hoods and shovels, all the implements of evil.” He hoped the university would help with the funding and the government as well. He spoke of all this, clomping along next to Alma, sweat coating his forehead.

  On Calle Montevideo she stopped at a stand to buy water and they drank from the bottles. She looked at him. How could he be so sure of himself? “I don’t know, Flaco. Tourists walking around in rooms where people were tortured. A memorial, maybe, but a museum?”

  “Better than a casino, don’t you think?”

  They turned onto Reconquista where a man was stapling fliers onto a telephone pole. They were advertisements for a bullfight.

  “Another issue my students are willing to take on.”

  “Good for them. I’ve never understood the fascination with — ”

  “It’s our legacy, chica, left by the Spaniards. The blood and violence began with genocide, the slaughter of the Mapuche and Quechua, the Guaraní and the Querandí, and left us with the bullfight…the battle in the ring between man and the snorting energy with horns capable of goring to death.” Flaco gestured like the boy who’d played Che in her courtyard. “Read your Lorca. The matador steps into the ring, beloved and courageous.”

  “But bravery dies and it’s a brutal death.” Flaco was wrong about her guts. If I was really brave, she thought, I’d have gone to see Díaz’s wife to deliver the message he’d entrusted with me in the holding cell.

  Flaco addressed the sky, his fists clenched, more despairing than macho. “Because
you have died forever, / like all the dead of the earth, / like all the dead who have been forgotten / on some heap of snuffed-out dogs.”

  In Lorca’s “Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” Alma recalled, the matador is killed at five in the afternoon.

  20

  After her second session with Lalo Martín, she returned to the house and hesitated by the front gates. Across the street, a muchacha swept the neighbour’s driveway. The leaves of the jacaranda rustled. It was usually a gentle, soothing sound, but today it felt menacing. Alma strained to hear banging or someone searching the rooms over the sound of the broom swishing the pavement. Finally she unlocked the front door, walked through the living room into the dining room, the kitchen, the bedrooms and bathroom. She pulled back the shower curtain and checked the tub. She opened closets. Outside, the courtyard seemed empty. Or was it? The noonday sun, almost directly overhead, shaded the corners.

  Alma sat down and tried to assess the situation. Lalo Martín’s words, “the situation,” as he’d outlined the dangers of sabotage and expected revenge. “Before Christmas, I plan to table an interim report. I’ll request an in camera session with a judge and present the affidavits and evidence collected to date. There could be a backlash.” He described the tactics of intimidation that he, César and others working in his office were experiencing.

  Alma made the mistake of asking, “What about Carlos Cruz?”

  His name had not yet come up and Lalo Martín picked up on this, asking how she knew his identity. Alma explained that she’d caught sight of him recently.

  “Did he recognize you?”

  “No.”

  “Leave him to us.”

  “Will he be arrested?”

  “You have to let us handle that.” Lalo Martín emphasized safety, said the element of surprise was critical to finding witnesses willing to cooperate. Alma sensed he had little to go on, that he needed an insider who dared confess, who wanted to set things right even if his own life or his family’s would be in peril. Carlos Cruz was not such a man. Not a cell of remorse in his body when he paid for his cigars and newspapers, the arrogant tossing of pesos on the counter. No, Alma thought, he’ll resist them to his death.