Behold Things Beautiful

by Cora Siré

  “The part about him being in Paraguay,” she asked. “How will they discredit that?”

  “I don’t know. Would he have had a passport? Would it have been recorded if he’d crossed the border? Are there faked papers created to show that the commanders were ostensibly in Asunción?”

  “The military…they protect their own. They’ve covered his tracks.” She saw in his eyes that he agreed.

  “My guess is he was a fixer. Not a mastermind but a purveyor. They wanted to wipe out dissent and he was one of their foot soldiers.”

  Flaco insisted on walking her home. The sun bore down as they crossed the plaza. The Cathedral’s shadows lay tightly by the structure’s walls. Its spire pointed heavenwards, a finger accusing the gods. If she were to rewrite the poem, she’d render the structure hollow and meaningless, a metaphor for justice.

  25

  Alma turned to lie on her back, relinquishing the sheet to Gabriel. The midnight air cooled her limbs. She watched the curtain sway in tempo to the distant drumbeats carried through the open window from the courtyard. Gabriel breathed evenly and loudly. He’d come tonight with empanadas and a bottle of wine. Alma had needed the quiet, and so they’d eaten in the bedroom. She told him of witnessing the denials of Carlos Cruz. Gabriel had been horrified. He did not try to placate her with false encouragement, let her rage and pace the room and then he’d held her.

  Alma struggled to relax on the soft mattress, the one on which her mother had died and her parents had lain together. Against her will, she conjured the image of her parents making love and then tried to dismiss it, overlaying it with Agustini’s gothic symbolism. Magnificent beds spread with sadness / Sculpted with a dagger and canopied / By insomnia….

  Her work on the poet crept in on a regular basis now. Alma was deep into her writing, the counterpoint to testifying and bearing witness. Her mother would approve. “Immerse yourself, Alma. But face up to things, stop trying to escape your fate.” What would she say about the interrogation of Carlos Cruz? For the first time, she missed her mother, the strength of her intelligence and intuitive moral compass. “Let him sit and suffer in his cell, Alma.” Is that what Hannelore would say? She wouldn’t obsess, wouldn’t linger on the ethical crevice over which Alma found herself suspended. Let Carlos Cruz suffer in a PFL cell. To hell with his rights. Stall the process until he breaks down and confesses. Alma wondered whether his wife and children would be allowed to visit, bring him clothing, books and food. Lalo Martín was obliged to respect habeas corpus to indict those who had not. She understood that. In the absence of evidence, he’d be released, leaving Alma with a profound negation of self, her words and credibility as a witness discounted, valueless. The build-up to her testimony, the adrenalin of anticipated revenge as she’d imagined Carlos Cruz punished for his brutality on behalf of her cellmates, Díaz, then Isabel, who’d paid with their lives, would be deflated, leaving her dangling in midair.

  To overcome the vertigo she thought of Montréal, how the fall leaves crunched underfoot on Mount Royal this time of year, while in Luscano, the approaching summer delivered its hammer of humid heat. She’d called a friend in Montréal last week. Stephanie was organizing a Halloween party. She’d spoken of their friends and costumes. How quickly that life, Alma’s other world, had receded.

  Gabriel stirred and turned towards her. His hand stroked her leg. He cleared his throat. “What’s the matter?”

  She told him she couldn’t sleep, blamed the drumming, the humidity, the grease of the empanadas.

  A car pulled up on the street outside. There were voices, too faint to overhear. A door slammed, the car drove off leaving night sounds, a clanging gate somewhere on Calle Buenos Aires, jacaranda leaves shuffling in the breeze and the drumming, always the drumming. Gabriel’s hand moved from her leg to her upper arm, his fingertips brushing the welt of mottled skin, too uneven for a vaccination scar.

  “What was it like, Alma?”

  She shook her head and he seemed to understand. Not now.

  Alma reached out and traced his scar. A pale hyphen connected his eyebrows, caused by a childhood accident. As kids Gabriel and his brother had been locked out of the house once and he’d tried to be the big brother hero. But halfway up the ladder to the open window, nervous with vertigo, he’d slipped and fallen, gashing his face on the way down. Gabriel saw himself as a failure and struggled to shed this defeatism as if working off a layer of skin. This effort moved her. His eyes, a watery grey like the colour of the water in the river on its way to the sea, regarded hers and she knew he was thinking of his brother.

  “Gabriel,” she said, “I often feel ashamed. A week, not even, six days at La Cuarenta. I allowed that time in prison to occupy so much inner space. It’s nothing compared to what others endured.”

  Propping himself up against a pillow, Gabriel asked if she’d heard of Roberto Bolaño, the Latin American writer born in the fifties in Chile. “He died this year in Spain. But back in 1973, he returned to Chile from Mexico and was detained for eight days after the coup. Friends from high school helped him escape. He joked that it helped sell his books, called it the ‘Latin American tango.’ If his book didn’t sell well, his publisher would exaggerate the eight days to a month, then three.”

  Alma remembered Bolaño’s famous acceptance speech when he’d received the Rómulo Gallegos prize. “Didn’t he say that everything he wrote was a letter of love or goodbye to the young people who died in the Dirty Wars of Latin America?”

  Gabriel thought for a while. “Everyone thought that after the eighties, it would never happen again. Remember Nunca más, the Sábato commission’s report in Argentina, the cleansing it seemed to promise? The disappeared, acknowledged and accounted for…the promise of never again. I was in university, you were in high school. Latin America was supposed to have been purged, cleaned up, democratic and free, remember? But we had the misfortune of being here in Luscano, the last holdout, slow learner and copier of everyone else. Luscano had to do it, too, have its dictatorship, have its war on terror, pave the route towards an unregulated capitalism. All the armies in the region were more than happy to help…share the dirty tricks they’d picked up during their juntas. Luscano, once it got going, did a very good job.”

  “What kind of place is this?”

  There was no answer. Gabriel held her as if to absorb her distress. She leaned into him, heard his pounding heartbeat. There was a difference between being an outsider like Gabriel and being an exile. This difference involved shadings of identity, confidence and clarity. Hannelore had been an outsider with complete self-possession. Like Gabriel, she’d observed Luscano from a distance.

  Flaco and Roma, who were of and about and by Luscano, remained tangled inside their roots, couldn’t view the place dispassionately, but lived the gift of never doubting their identities. The exile’s doubt was constant. The human mind, trained to compare, shifted between geographies, never satisfied. Living elsewhere gave a point of comparison, a second home with its own weaknesses.

  Coming back, a form of reverse exile, exacerbated the doubt. There was nothing to ground her but Gabriel’s beating heart.

  26

  He stood in his office, waiting for Sara, and contemplated the destruction down below. Two backhoes loaded prison rubble into dump trucks. The wreckage exposed the interior cells of the second floor. Clouds of pulverized concrete carried by the wind coated the university’s walkways and windows with toxic dust.

  All along, Flaco had wanted to be able to see the sculpture from his office but now it would be invisible from this vantage point. His reasons were selfish. He’d wanted to be able to look down and see redemption, the gravestone as work of art marking the wretched site that had consumed his friends. Creativity and art, literature and music fed the healing process necessary for the country to able to move forward. But the artists were mostly gone, leaving a fissure in the national psyche. What kind of countr
y could emerge without its artists? A fascist, totalitarian prison without walls, a conglomerate of hotels and casinos and banks elevating money over humanity, guarded by drug lords and arms traders.

  The words themselves, “sculpture garden,” represented a whitewash of his intent, a total capitulation, more tourist attraction than solemn remembrance. If anything, his meeting with Pindalo’s lawyer had redirected his energies and fuelled his outrage that a guy so apparently well educated, young and smart could be completely indifferent to the symbolism of this demolition and the dusty mirage of shame.

  He was disgusted with his country and himself. Nervous exhaustion, the false confidence he’d been presenting to his students and Alma and everyone else, sustained by the pills in his pocket. The doctor had refused to renew the prescription, ordering Flaco to wean himself from chemical dependency. And so he’d come up with the plan. Immediately after tomorrow’s ceremony he’d jump in La Vieja and drive north to Porto Alegre. Stay for a week, sit on the beach, eat seafood in cheap restaurants, read novels and enjoy the Brazilian beauties. He needed the time out to overcome the sense he’d let everyone down — Alma, his students, and his children. This single-minded focus on the sculpture and its unveiling had been necessary, he didn’t regret any of it, but it had cost him and he needed to regroup.

  Sara arrived and spread El Día on his desk to show him the article that his students were upset about. There was a photograph of a PFL officer standing in front of a table of so-called evidence: rocks, tin cans and glass bottles that “hooligans demonstrating on the site of the planned casino had hurled at policemen trying to keep the peace and protect the citizens of Luscano.” The article, an in-depth investigation occupying two full pages in the newspaper, concluded that left-wing professors and anarchists with violent intentions were agitating the students.

  “It’s a total fabrication, Dr. Molino. We have to respond.”

  “How?”

  “We’re going to write a rebuttal with our own photos. Showing them it was peaceful. You were there. Nobody hurled anything. We’ve got tons of witnesses.” Sara asked him if he could provide a direct quote and review the article before they sent it to the journalist. He agreed, doubting the rebuttal would ever be published.

  Flaco looked into her face framed by the curtain of dark hair. Sara’s serious resolve conjured Alma in that crucial meeting thirteen years ago, when they’d decided to publish their dissent. He’d replayed the meeting many times in his mind. Not one of them, himself included, had paused to assess the consequences of their words. He’d been propelled by the same enthusiasm he now saw in Sara. The blame from Alma, expressed in her outburst, was not misplaced. His whole life, the consequences of his actions and gestures, had always been cushioned by the Molino name.

  Sara said the students were planning further protests. “We may have lost on the casino, but we’re going to fight the golf course.” Not because the green turf would carpet the killing fields and burial grounds of the disappeared but because of its environmental consequences in a country facing a water disaster.

  Flaco brought her around to his immediate concern, tomorrow’s ceremony. They reviewed the schedule, who’d be attending, when to set up the stage and sound system. The news release had been emailed, the dignitaries invited, the families of the disappeared contacted. What if the PFL stopped them from coming? Eduardo had warned him that the recent arrests of former officers, including Carlos Cruz, had set things in motion. There would be repercussions. And, he’d reminded Flaco, most of Luscano opposed a ceremony acknowledging its ugly past.

  Memorials were controversial, he knew that. Who cared about Luscano anyway? In the context of a century’s suffering on this continent, in Africa and the Middle East, in Europe and Asia, what was the significance of a small sculpture on the campus lawn of a country that had contributed so little to history, culture and mankind? There were no heroes here, no great inventors or Nobel laureates. Just the brutal legacy of the genocide of indigenous peoples, then the caudillos pushing back the Spaniards and, centuries later, a few hundred young people made to disappear in the name of national security.

  For the last few weeks, Sara and others had been agitating for a more lasting and, to them, relevant version of a memorial, an online tribute to the disappeared. Now she insisted on showing him the websites created to remember the executed, the disappeared and detainees.

  Flaco sat next to her by the computer as she scrolled through the concrete memorials in Chile; the remembrance shrine in Chillán; a carved wooden cross for agricultural workers executed in Liquiñe; a stone commemorating seventeen woodworkers killed in Chihuio in October 1973; the Park for Peace in Santiago erected by Villa Grimaldi — the torture centre set up after the Pinochet coup in Santiago.

  Moving on to Argentina, Sara showed him ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires, the largest of 400 detention and torture camps operated by the military in Argentina, and the online wall of memory, photos of the disappeared created to capture the immensity of suffering inflicted by Argentina’s military. Sara clicked on an Andean city called Salta, in the north, and he saw the list of the disappeared, their names, numerous Álvarezes among them. It was powerful, reading those strangers’ names, here in Luscano hundreds of kilometres away.

  Sara left him on the Polynational Memorial, a virtual record of the disappeared in armed conflicts, “We have to get Luscano added to this database, Dr. Molino.” Then she left, with the promise she’d be there early tomorrow morning.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Flaco sat at his desk reading through the website’s record of human suffering. He scrolled in reverse chronology until the parameters of his life closed and he felt himself alone in a small cell, his petty anxieties superseded by this massive and infinite toll…Somalia Civil War, Darfur, Eritrea versus Ethiopia, Hutus versus Tutsis, Western Sahara war, Namibia versus South Africa, Sri Lankan Civil War, India versus Pakistan in Kashmir, the Santa Cruz Massacre in East Timor, Memorial to the victims of the attack in Bali, Russia versus Chechnya, Bosnia against the Serbs, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, El Salvador and the FMLN guerrillas, Colombia versus FARC, Peru versus the Sendero Luminoso, Argentina’s Dirty War, the Dos Erres Massacre in Guatemala, the Disappeared in Chile, the Cambodian Holocaust, the Vietnam War Memorials, the Yom Kippur War, the Sino-Indian War, the Oran Massacre in Algeria, the South Korea National War Memorial, the Katyn war cemetery, the museum in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Peace Memorial in Genbaku Dome, Hiroshima, the Sino-Japanese War, the Memorial to International Brigadiers in the Spanish Civil War, the monument to the Mexican Revolution, the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan….

  Flaco understood. Evil never dies, it simply relocates.

  27

  “Hang on, Señor.” Castillo steered the truck onto the sidewalk into a column of thick black smoke. Gabriel ducked to avoid the palm fronds whipping into the window. The pickup jolted past cars and panicked pedestrians. The stench of burning rubber infiltrated the open windows. Gabriel coughed, tightening his grip on the vases of flowers in his arms.

  At an intersection, a dozen protesters stood behind flames shooting from a pile of tires. Policemen leaned against the hoods of their PFL jeeps. Castillo veered onto Calle Florida. Gabriel turned back to look at the milling protesters covering their mouths with handkerchiefs. They appeared ordinary enough, pensioners protesting cutbacks perhaps, or worse, agents provocateurs. He’d expected trouble, wouldn’t put it past the military to blockade the university or incite a riot. Castillo narrowly missed an oncoming fire truck as he pulled into a narrow lane between the faculties of law and fine arts. He slowed over the cobblestones and stopped the truck by the Humanities building to the receding wail of sirens.

  Gabriel stepped down with the vases. Castillo unlatched the tailgate and removed the stands and cordons. They carried their armloads across the sloping lawn. The setting struck Gabriel as perfect, a natural amphitheatre with willow tr
ees and shrubbery as backdrop. In front of a raised stage, a team of students was assembling rows of folding chairs. Next to it, the sculpture gleamed in the sunlight.

  Flaco waved them over. From his imploring gestures, Gabriel deduced that he was arguing with Luis Corva. The sculptor’s face was flushed, his arms crossed over the bib of his overalls. Between the two men, a beige tarp lay folded on the ground. “We’re at an impasse,” Flaco said. “I want to lay this sheet over the sculpture and when everybody’s here, have it removed. Create some drama.”

  “Why lay a sheet over a sheet?” Luis Corva shook his head of white hair.

  The two men regarded Gabriel. For days, Flaco had been calling him for logistical advice, assuming that all the burials he’d orchestrated endowed him with the necessary insights as to how this ceremony should unfold. Castillo whistled softly. “Qué trabajo,” he said, gazing at the tented mass of limbs and writhing figures. Gabriel couldn’t bring himself to read the names etched on the base. Not yet. “What do you think, Castillo?”

  From the intensity of the man’s gaze, Gabriel guessed he’d soon be carving a replica of the statue in the workshop where he reproduced Luscano in miniature. Castillo discerned details in a single glance that Gabriel missed in years of staring. “Let people see it like this. You don’t need to cover it.”

  Satisfied with the verdict, Luis Corva left for his office to change his clothes. Smoke drifted through the buildings down the lawn. Gabriel mentioned the protest and burning tires.

  “Anyone armed?” Flaco asked.

  “The PFL is there, fully loaded and doing nothing.”

  Flaco muttered something about it being the rector’s problem. Gabriel could barely hear him over the feedback and clamour of the sound crew testing microphones. Shouting over the din, Flaco introduced Gabriel to Sara, the point person in charge of the ceremony, and left for the stage. Sara was twenty at most, with round brown eyes and a walkie-talkie in her hand. She’d been just a child during the junta, yet here she was organizing the only event ever held in Luscano to honour the disappeared. Sara directed him to arrange the vases on the front corners of the stage.