Behold Things Beautiful

by Cora Siré

  Gabriel stooped to rearrange the camellias, ferns and flowery branches gathered by Castillo early this morning, removing a few stems whose blooms had been decapitated during the truck ride. He kept an eye out for his mother and sister and mostly for Alma. She should have arrived with Roma by now.

  Once he’d finished with the vases, he helped Castillo set up the stands and cordons to ensure the first-row seats would be reserved for the rector’s guests and Flaco’s, the two groups separated by an aisle down the centre of the audience. The chairs formed at least twenty rows from the stage back towards the ivied building. But would anyone show up? The news release had been published verbatim in El Día yesterday morning. Radio Luscano had broadcast news of the event several times. In the last days, Flaco’s students worked their social media and some had even dropped flyers at bookstores and cafés and posted them on telephone poles throughout the city.

  Flaco instructed Sara to wait for his signal for the 387 seconds of silence. “Family members or friends may come up to…” His voice was drowned out by a ferocious racket from across the river, where a crew was jackhammering the concrete remains of the prison. Flaco clenched his hands. He could wade through the water onto the other side and attack them. The students stopped their preparations, stunned by the deafening noise. After an excruciating interval, the crew put down the jackhammers to separate the stones with pickaxes.

  Flaco took one of his remaining sedatives, discreetly he hoped. A school bus pulled up across the lawn and a dozen children were shepherded towards the stage by the Franciscan choirmaster. Rubén hurried over to shake his hand. “This is something, Flaco.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I overheard some women after mass speaking of the event. They were afraid to attend, never having set foot on the university grounds. I told them to come. When they asked me why, I said, ‘one word: remorse.’”

  “Is that the official position?”

  “Sadly, no.” The Franciscan turned to settle the choir down.

  Later, when Flaco was standing by the lighting booth, he saw the priest lead the children to the statue. They kneeled on the grass to study the names, touching the marble and peering at the bodies. There were fewer of them than at the dress rehearsal. Flaco was certain some parents had prevented their children from performing. He observed the priest crouching alongside the children, explaining and pointing to the ruined prison. Flaco would also have to find words to explain to Armonía and Fredo, who were coming with Ana, and to Beno, who was coming with Aurora. How would he convey to his children the meaning of the implicit violence of the sculpture without causing nightmares and trauma? He’d have to ask the Franciscan.

  Flaco felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find Alma standing in a black dress, her hair pulled back under a narrow-brimmed straw hat. He embraced her. “Are you all right?” She nodded. The jackhammers started up again.

  Alma covered her ears. “They work on Saturdays?” she asked, mouthing the words. Flaco couldn’t hear her above the assault. She left him to look for Gabriel in the crowd around the stage. He found her first and when the racket subsided, she asked where Castillo was. Gabriel explained he’d gone to the gates to wait for Juanita. They sat down on two of the folding chairs in the front row. Fifteen minutes to go, according to Alma’s watch. The ceremony was scheduled to begin at twelve o’clock sharp, the exact moment the cathedral bells tolled for noonday mass. She silently questioned the wisdom of timing the event so precisely. Luscanans were notoriously late. The noxious odour of burning rubber hovered over the lawn. Another bout of jackhammering started up. The deafening noise, like the protest by the gates, was surely intended to sabotage the ceremony.

  Alma regarded the sculpture and tried to invoke the faces of Díaz and Isabel. It was for them that she’d attended. But in the glow of an eye peering out from beneath the metallic covering, in the hand extended, she saw herself. She felt a sudden burning pain and began to hyperventilate. She fanned her face with her hat.

  Gabriel took her hand. “What is it?”

  She shook her head. Luis Corva, wearing a scarlet jacket of frayed velvet, took his place a few seats over. Absorbed in his thoughts, he seemed unaware of Alma and Gabriel to his right. A man sat down next to Gabriel. He was the son of Pedro Malú, the musician whose songs had carried them through the junta. Flaco’s colleagues took their seats. Alma recognized them from his birthday party. Across the aisle, a group arrived in suits and dresses, led by the rector and a woman with a helmet of white hair. “That’s General Galtí’s widow,” Gabriel said. She was followed by politicians, the mayor, Patrón Pindalo and an emaciated woman with large sunglasses and bleached hair. The jackhammers resumed and Patrón Pindalo broke off from the group and strode away, cell phone pressed against his ear. His voice carried as he shouted, “Tell them to stop immediately…the rest of the day…go to the site, Javier, if you have to.” He snapped the phone shut and returned to the seats. Spotting Alma, he crossed the aisle. “That’s Celeste sitting over there next to my place. I gave her the poems. Did she call to thank you?”

  Alma shook her head.

  “I’ll have to remind her.” Patrón Pindalo took his seat among the rector’s entourage. Alma imagined him saying, “That’s the Álvarez daughter, the one I helped get out of La Cuarenta.” Taking credit for her existence. Patrón Pindalo craved respectability, sought to wear it like his blazer and grey trousers.

  Alma leaned across the seats to tell Flaco that Pindalo had ordered the hammering to stop. Flaco tilted his head towards a group of seats occupied by photographers and cameramen. “The media, quite a turnout.” Swivelling, Alma noticed the rows of seats had filled. Many stood at the back and others sat in the grass.

  At twelve o’clock the bells began to toll in a solemn two-note beat. Spotlights crisscrossed the titanium before settling on the stage. Led by Rubén, the children’s choir sang a melody that caused a flutter of recognition. “La rana cuchichea ‘tranquilo’ al sol bajando del cielo….”

  Virtually everyone present had the song stored among their earliest memories. “Duerme, duerme, duerme…” The children’s voices transcended the viciousness embodied in the sculpture. “Cierra tus ojos y sueña con la brisa serena del rio…” Xenia had sung the lullaby to Alma, her father had played it by her bedside on his violin. “Precioso inocente mío….” as if the children were singing the dead to sleep.

  Patrón Pindalo averted his gaze from the sculpture, which struck him as a contorted piece of metal and less than appealing for a sculpture garden. Still, it had been a stroke of genius to endorse this cultural event, so well attended by the friends and colleagues he’d implored to come, his influence visibly manifested. His thoughts careened from the casino to the latest shipment of arms as he tried to resist the memories evoked by the choir’s lullaby. He rarely allowed himself to reflect on his childhood, a regimen of work and study imposed by his father. Against his will, the moment emerged, seventy years ago, in a dark bedroom of the house, a muchacha’s hand on his feverish head, the image superimposed by his wife cradling Ernesto in the clinic as she sang to her newborn. All the inhabitants of those memories were dead. What was the point? The past is the past. Even his daughter, seated next to him, was half-dead herself.

  This morning, as Damian drove them to the university, Celeste had accused him of killing Ernesto. “And now, you’ve brought me back to die, too. Are you happy?” He’d begged on behalf of Magdalena and Patroncito, they needed her, an aunt of their own flesh, a Pindalo, for God’s sake. And his frail daughter had summoned a ferocious strength. “Need me for what? I’m cursed, they’re cursed, and let’s face it, you’re cursed too.” She spat the word at him, “¡Sinvergüenza!” In front of Damian and the grandchildren she’d called her father shameless.

  Roma and Chichi began to drum the ancient rhythms of the Guaraní who’d once lived alongside the river, who’d witnessed the arrival of the Spaniards an
d were killed in the ensuing carnage. A troupe of dancers surrounded the sculpture. Among them, a woman in a white shift with long dark hair moved across the grass, dipping and writhing to the drumbeats as if fending off invisible attackers. Alma thought of Isabel. Even in her cell, after her body had been beaten and burned, Isabel had been as resolute as this woman dancing on the grass, embarking on a hunger strike to protest the conditions in La Cuarenta.

  The drumbeats receded. Flaco walked to the podium and gestured across the river to the demolition site. “We are at the scene of a crime and the evidence is being destroyed. With this sculpture we acknowledge the hundreds of people taken from us, brought to La Cuarenta, tortured and made to disappear. The ones you loved, sat next to in school, argued with, danced with or passed on our streets. Remembering them today, we reclaim our past.”

  Gabriel scanned the audience for an armed maniac. A few candidates stood out, stereotypical burly types with short haircuts, their hands never far from concealed weapons. But with the cameramen and oligarchs present, they couldn’t act. Cowards preferred the clandestine protection of night for their abductions in unmarked cars and executions in anonymous fields.

  To his far left, green moss dangled from a willow trees, and the vision of Ernesto lying there in the grass resurfaced. Without Ernesto’s one act of courage, many of the names carved in the marble would not have been known.

  He reached for Alma’s hand, grateful that her name was not among them. Wherever she went, Montevideo or Montréal, he’d follow, his destiny not tied to place but to this woman beside him. That possibility overcame the paranoia incited by the likes of Patrón Pindalo. And Carlos Cruz, despite his claims of an alibi, remained in prison. Lalo Martín had convinced a judge that releasing Cruz would jeopardize the investigation. In the meantime, Gabriel had developed a knot of worries around Alma. He worried for her safety, that she’d leave Luscano, that she’d wake up and decide Gabriel was not for her. He worried about the unveiling today and how others would react. The ceremony’s success depended on the participation of the families of the disappeared, but there was no single organization that linked them. Flaco said he was counting on those who’d lost loved ones to come together, find solace after years of denial and disregard. Emma would be coming, Inés with her children. How many others? The mentality of a typical Luscanan was to see how everyone else reacts before choosing a course of action, often nothing, just silence. That had been his position during the junta and his shame weighed on his heart like a stone.

  The mayor, a man facing corruption allegations, delivered a speech praising the university for its commitment to social justice. A congressman stood up and, making it clear he’d been studying abroad during the junta, promised a new chapter for Luscano, what with the casino and hotel project planned across the river and the world-class sculpture garden being inaugurated today.

  Luis Corva vaguely heard his name mentioned by the man on the podium, but was more preoccupied with the dust raised by La Cuarenta’s destruction streaking the titanium. Yesterday, when the piece had been towed from the studio on the flatbed truck, slow going on the winding coastal road, he’d sat in front with the driver and watched the onlookers. He’d seen people glance towards the back of the truck, observed their double-takes as they crossed themselves or bowed their heads. These spontaneous reactions meant more to him than any politician’s or critic’s assessment.

  From his seat on the lawn, the sculptor zeroed in on the flaws. The hand under the titanium should be angled as if reaching from the deepest hell. There were inconsistencies in the names etched on the marble. Corva would make the adjustments, seasoned enough to know that artists endured an infinite reassessing of their work, the desire to seek an elusive perfection. He accepted this self-criticism, recognized it in his friends — the musicians agonizing over compositions, the poets crafting lyrics, and novelists moving characters through narratives. The more authentic the impulse to create, the greater the self-doubt.

  Luis Corva could not forgive those who felt compelled to explain, overloading their creation with irrelevant meaning. Flaco had asked him to speak today and, for a few seconds, he’d been tempted to tell of his personal stake in history. His father’s assassination in Estonia, the escape through Europe with his mother, the family members lost to the camps. How eventually, after the Holocaust and in the revolution of the sixties, he’d actually believed that mankind would never repeat such a horror. But then in 1976, when his friends began disappearing from Buenos Aires, hauled off at night, dumped live from military jets in death flights, he’d had to face the truth. Horror upon horror was the trajectory of civilization.

  He’d stayed in Argentina through the Dirty War, until the bombing of the Jewish centre, when he’d witnessed the shattered windows, the dead and bleeding victims. A perpetual refugee, he accepted that his light-filled studio on the cliffs abutting the Bay of Luscano was a temporary stop. There was no escaping the cruel repetition, the arbitrary killing of those who found themselves in the wrong country at the wrong time. Nobody knew he’d strewn the dust he’d collected that September day in New York over the base of the sculpture. Ashes to ashes.

  Emilio and the singer took the stage. A few bars of the violin and Susana’s smoky voice rose like humid vapours feathering heavenward. “Luscano sufre tanto, asaltado al anochecer, / las estrellas caen, gotas de sangre sobre el mar.”

  The final refrain rose to the trees, gliding over the crumbling prison, down the riverbed, across the sea that ebbed and flowed along the craggy coast. “Los sacerdotes no dicen nada. / Hace frío, siempre llueve / muchos desaparecen este otoño del año noventa.”

  Then it began, the six and a half minutes of silence, one second for each of the disappeared.

  A woman rose and laid a stem of white lilies by the base of the sculpture.

  Two elderly men, brothers by their resemblance, came forward with a framed photograph and leaned it against the marble.

  Families approached with flowers, a cross, statues of the Virgin and photographs. Someone left a book. Some touched the names and lingered by the statue.

  Gabriel accompanied Emma, Inés and her children up the aisle. Emma carried a bundle of white camellias from her garden and placed it by her son’s name. Alma watched them, trying to fathom what they had endured all these years. Roberto’s existence negated by the state. The only evidence, his name in the prison ledger, pages before hers. Gabriel had shown her the photocopy he kept in his safety deposit box at the bank.

  Her parents and Xenia had lived through their own hells the week she’d been in La Cuarenta. She felt their presence here with her, as the minutes passed, a condensed history of unspoken eulogies. Artists and journalists, musicians and lawyers, psychologists and students disappeared, leaving Luscano to progress in fits and starts, prodded on by Flaco, Lalo Martín, Luis Corva, women like Roma and Chichi, whose integrity held the place together, gave Luscano its spirit, fragile, but despite everything, enduring.

  At the end of the ceremony, the rector rose to deliver concluding remarks, in which he expressed the university’s gratitude for the generous contribution from the Pindalo family for the sculpture garden envisaged on this very lawn. At the mention of his name, the benefactor rose from his seat, placed his hand on his heart to acknowledge the applause. Photographers rushed to kneel on the lawn before him, snapping shots to ensure the old warrior’s photograph would make the front page of El Día’s late edition.

  28

  They are, for the most part, well-meaning. The few who ask “What was it like?” To be imprisoned, they sometimes mean. Or to be in exile. Even worse, to be in exile in your own country. “Read your poetry,” comes to mind as a response. But that’s not sufficient for most. Prose is needed to spell things out. So you take her words and make them yours. Breathe your life into them, aware that it’s easier to write of her suffering than your own. Often, it’s the best you can do.

  Para v
er cosas bellas

  One night you’re snatched from your life and brought to a prison a few kilometres from your home. People you’ve lived among push, shout and threaten, they starve and torture you. You squat in a cell with a barred opening that looks onto a river. It is the summer of January, sweltering by day, dank at night. In the company of rats and scorpions, you hear the screams of others.

  You contemplate your life as a series of disjointed scenes and wonder what you’ve done to cause this violence. You pace the cell and count your steps. Fear makes you jumpy. You lose threads of thought, you cannot formulate conclusions. You’re always thirsty. You don’t remember when you last ate or washed. In this hell, you search for sustenance. What lies inside that you can reach for? You breathe in the smelly air, you breathe out.

  Turn out the lights… words emerge fragile as sprigs…and behold things beautiful. You exhale. Close all doors and enter illusion…the words pull you elsewhere. To a desk, clean hands holding a book, your former self, safe and sane. Briefly you remember who you are.

  After an interminable time that in reality amounts to a few days, you’re dropped back into your life. But you find you’re no longer that person, you have absorbed a hell. Symptom one: you can’t look at yourself in a mirror. Symptom two: you obliterate sensual memory, the screams, the smell of your burning flesh, the taste of fear in your unwashed mouth. Symptom three: you cringe from touch. Symptom four: you condemn your survival. Guilt festers, you can’t shake off the awareness that others suffered much worse. Memory closes with your wounds. Among the confused details of your imprisonment, you remember one truth. A dead poet saved you.