The journey was very different. The blazing sun now obliterated everything; they could barely make out the blots of Ñandubay trees and cacti. Clearly, there were mistakes on their map because they wound up not in Bañado de Ovanta, but back at Huacra. Later, Emilia would often wonder whether they had got lost by accident or whether someone had switched the signposts. They had been driving for twenty minutes when in a ravine on the right-hand side of the road they saw the two dogs they had noticed as they left Huacra. Everyone knows that images, when they reappear inverted, herald disaster.
Disaster occurred almost immediately. They found themselves surrounded by a hundred uniformed soldiers who forced them out of the jeep at gunpoint. The buttons on the soldiers’ jackets strained from the pressure of paunches bloated by beer and noodles. The checkpoint, which had earlier been clearly deserted, was now teeming with soldiers going in and out of a corrugated-iron shack at the rear of a large courtyard.
The pot-bellied soldiers hustled them into a shack that served as a guardhouse. None of them wore badges indicating their rank, though from their ages they could only be corporals or sergeants. There might have been a captain; checkpoints usually had a captain in charge. Emilia tried to catch Simón’s eye but he would not look at her. He seemed lost, his eyes blankly staring, bewildered, unable to believe what was happening to them. Many years later, she thought that this was the moment when her husband began to disappear from the world.
A clerk with a toad-like double chin and breath that stank of beer asked them for their papers and laboriously copied down the details, sucking his pen after every letter. Emilia, accustomed to the inertia of bureaucracies, watched his sluggish routine calmly. Simón hugged his knees like an abandoned child.
The interview turned nasty as soon as they brought up El Abra. At the mere mention of the name, the clerk swallowed his words and trailed off into silence. Their attempted explanations about maps and scales only served to make things worse. What were you doing at El Abra? What were you doing waiting for dawn in open country? Who were you meeting? What were they bringing? When? Emilia and Simón had nothing to tell but the truth and explained again that they were working on a map for the Automobile Club. They had told the same account, used the same words at every checkpoint and had nothing more to add. But still the officer was not satisfied. He demanded they repeat it over and over. Why? What for? How many of you are there? He was determined to find out why anyone would travel two hundred kilometres from Buenos Aires to map nothing. ‘Since when did the Automobile Club start wasting money on such bullshit?’ ‘It’s the truth,’ Simón insisted. ‘Besides, it wasn’t our idea.’
‘What are you, Cardoso, a Communist? A Montero? A Bolshevik?’
‘I’m none of those things.’
‘You know what Communism is?’
‘I think so . . . It’s what they have in Russia, in Poland, in East Germany.’
‘Exactly. Godless countries where everything belongs to everyone. Even wives and children belong to the state. There’s no such thing as private property. Anyone can take anything belonging to someone else.’
‘Is it really that simple?’
‘I ask the questions here. Yes, it’s that simple. Where there’s no God, there’s no decency. You like the idea of some thug coming in off the street and fucking your wife up the arse just because he can?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘The Communist state gives everyone the right to do things like that. You could just as easily go to his house and return the favour, fuck his wife.’
‘I’ve never heard anything like that.’
‘Well, take my word for it. In Russia, even kids at school know this stuff, they’re used to it, they don’t know any better. Here, we teach people respect. God first of all. Then country, then family. It’s the Argentinian holy trinity.’
‘If you say so, I believe you.’
‘That’s better, Cardoso. Believe me. Where did you make contact with the subversives?’
‘I already told you, we didn’t see anyone. Only the homeless people.’
‘And you’re telling me they just suddenly appeared out of nowhere?’
‘We didn’t know there was anyone out there.’
‘That’s right, be a wise guy. Who are you trying to kid? Either you give me a straight answer right now or we’ll interrogate your wife while I fuck her right in front of you. Maybe I can make her come.’
‘I’ve told you everything. My wife and I don’t know any subversives.’
‘You can’t answer for her. Do you know any subversives, Dupuy?’
‘No, no one,’ said Emilia.
‘How would you recognise a subversive? This fucker you came with is a subversive, a dangerous subversive. We’ve got a file on him.’
‘He’s my husband. You can check, ask anyone. You’re making a terrible mistake.’
‘You’re the one who made the mistake when you married this Commie fucker. You had a meeting somewhere round here, didn’t you, Cardoso? The moishe you were supposed to be meeting gave you up. Just tell me where you stashed the maps and the weapons you brought. Tell me, and you can go. You can both go. Don’t waste my time.’
‘I’m not going to lie to you. We didn’t come here to meet anyone. We were sent to map the area. I explained all this to the officers at the last checkpoint. As soon as we finish, we’re leaving. Two hours, maybe three. Nobody told us we couldn’t.’
‘You think I’m some fuckwit? In the last week, we’ve caught five Trotskyites armed to the teeth. They were carrying a whole library of maps. They told us everything. Terrorists use maps to prepare their attacks, to get in and get the fuck out quickly, am I wrong?’
Emilia bowed her head, hopeless. What was happening was a farce, something that had no place in the real world. She tried to reframe things, to return to a sensible, safe place. She said: ‘I am the daughter of Dr Orestes Dupuy. You have no right to treat us like this.’
‘You think so, puta? We don’t give a shit about some Dupín here. This is a war, you get that? I can kill you right here, right now, give any excuse I like. I can say you were trying to escape, that you tried to take my gun off me, I can say the first thing comes into my head. Out here, you have no name; you don’t exist.’
Simón didn’t know how to appease the toad. He was desperate for this nightmare to end, for them to leave him in peace. With the country in the state it was in, who cared about maps?
Another paunchy officer appeared in the doorway and asked the pencil-pusher if he needed any help.
‘Help? With this little whore?’ the toad said. ‘Are you shitting me? I could fuck her three times over and still have dick to spare. See the Commie fucker who came in with her? He’s already given up.’
Simón’s head had slumped onto his chest. Lashed to a chair with the toad’s belt, he could barely move. The clerk rolled up his sleeves and went back to sucking his pen. He was preparing himself for more questions. He took the pot of coffee heating on the stove and threw it in Simón’s face.
‘You going to tell who you brought those fucking maps for? What about the weapons we found in the jeep?’
Maddened by pain and fear, Simón hauled himself to his feet, still lashed to the chair, and struck out wildly. It was a senseless thing to do, he couldn’t hope to achieve anything, he didn’t even succeed in loosening the belt. He slumped onto the floor with the chair on top of him. The noise attracted the attention of the paunches outside. Two of them quickly hauled him to his feet and slammed him against the wall. Emilia watched her husband slide down in slow motion. It seemed unbelievable to her that life should play them such an ugly trick, just when they were beginning to be happy. A few insignificant lines on a map had brought them to this place by chance, and now chance was destroying them. The world refused to be mapped, and those who violated this principle paid their price in tears. She heard a crack like breaking bone. Simón’s nose was swollen, his lip split; a trickle of blood stained his shirt.
This was Emilia’s last glimpse of him, the image that in future she would dream of so often. But in her dreams, Simón was never Simón, but one of the other men they had encountered that day. Or a city that rose and fell. Or a flickering candle flame.
On the drive back to Tucumán, the sky grew dark. Every few kilometres the weather shifted and changed. At times, a furious storm burst, bringing clouds of steam rising from the asphalt. Further along, the sun shimmered and the air shattered into slivers of ice. They came to a point where a convoy of carts hauling sugar cane blocked the road. The officer guarding Emilia got out of the car to try and deal with the obstruction only to come back shaking his head. ‘There’s no way through,’ he said. ‘Two mules dropped dead in the road and there’s no one to move them. We’ll just have to drive round.’
He turned on the two-way radio and informed the checkpoint that they would be making a detour. The cane fields were deserted; the horizon veered from purple to a deep, ominous yellow. They drove along a crude dirt track, the car constantly getting stuck in potholes. Emilia no longer cared where she was being taken or when they would get there. She cared only about Simón. Over and over, at seemingly endless intervals, she asked the guard about him, but the man stared out at the eddying dust and did not answer. Maybe it was pointless to resist, Emilia thought, after all everyone else in the country had already given up. The military were the aristocracy of the spirit of Argentina, and that aristocracy was once more trooping out of its barracks to save the country. How many times had she heard her father recite ‘El discurso de Ayacucho’8, in the same antiquated bombastic tones as the national poet who had penned it? Written in 1924, it was a piece of rhetoric which every schoolchild was forced to learn by heart. Every word of it was burned into her brain and circled there still.
As night began to fall, they were forced to stop by a passing train. Slowly, clumsily, the train approached. On freight cars smooth as still water, corpses were being shipped as though they were merely cargo. Except for the three wagons behind the engine, the bodies were exposed to the elements, indifferent to the obscenity of death. The wagons at the front were shrouded in black plastic which billowed open in the wind to reveal a hand, a head, a leg. Ash from the stubble fields whirled around the freight cars in dark flecks: a host of dying butterflies.
It was almost dark when the first Ford Falcon arrived in the suburbs of Tucumán. The broad avenues were lit up; the facades of the houses gleamed as though freshly painted. In the freezing air, the city huddled in on itself. Cars moved slowly; people walked with heads bowed, hugging the walls. The stillness was so deliberate it seemed artificial. Across the boulevard that divided the north of the city from the south hung a banner showing a photograph of three strapping, dishevelled, thuggish young men and, underneath, the words: We will not allow the extremists to destroy the country. Help us eliminate them. A block further on was a poster with an illustration of a hard-working broom bearing the legend, in blue and white: Order and Cleanliness. Death to Subversion.
Order and Cleanliness was one of her father’s propaganda slogans for the government Emilia remembered. How many other slogans had he penned that she was not aware of? God, Country, Family she knew was his, though it belonged to everyone now.
She was taken to the police station where they fingerprinted her and made her sign a piece of paper admitting that Simón had rented the jeep. ‘Under instructions from the Automobile Club Argentina’ Emilia explained in a note at the bottom. Flanked by two guards, she was led down into a vast basement lined on both sides with a row of cells from which there came not the slightest sound. Emilia was locked up in the furthest cell. As soon as the guards left her, she lost all track of time. It took a long while for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. She could make out a cot bed bolted to the floor; in the corner was a bucket from which came the stench of geological strata of urine. The wall opposite was dizzyingly high, at least eight metres, and converged with the wall behind her meaning the cell was shaped like a pyramid. At some point, a guard passed a jug of water through the bars and she gulped it down in one breathless swallow. Her throat was dry, filled with sand and fear.
Just as she was about to fall asleep, a ghostly glow jolted her awake again. On the high wall opposite, some invisible machine was projecting dreamlike images. The pictures came and went, disappearing like shooting stars. She thought for a moment that she was seeing things and remembered a line from Dante she had read at school: Poi piovve dentro all’alta fantasia. It was true: it was raining in her imagination, but raining so hard that the forms and shapes blurred and melted almost as soon as they appeared. She saw Simón rushing headlong into a fire, but that too was one of Dante’s images. She saw a newborn baby being strangled with an electrical cord. The umbilical cord was still attached, and the baby’s face was crumpled in a rictus of terrible pain. The image swelled as though about to encroach on the real world; it grew larger and larger before dissolving into a poster whose typeface reminded her of old cinema newsreels: Baby butchered by subversive criminals. She saw the three persons of the Holy Trinity devouring one another: the Father devouring the Son, and the resulting two-headed monster devouring the dove that was the Holy Spirit, then the dove taking flight and, using his beak as a scythe, beheading the other two. And then she saw herself watching these things, and it was only then that she realised the images were not inside her head, that somewhere there was a hidden projector, though she could not understand why. Who would spend money creating such images? Could anyone else see them?
Every so often the images were repeated, always in the same order, as though part of an infinite loop. At dawn – she assumed it must be dawn by now – they vanished like flotsam carried out on the tide. She tried to sleep, but a radio somewhere nearby kept repeating the lottery results over and over. ‘Two thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight. Eight hundred thousand pesos,’ the presenter announced. ‘Two thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight. Eight hundred thousand pesos,’ echoed the darkness at the end of the corridor. Reality retreated, becoming more and more remote, its place taken up by the only two senses Emilia trusted: smell and touch. But were these senses free or were they too prisoners of some alternative reality which moulded her imagination as it pleased?
She woke again just as someone pushed a mug of steaming maté, a hunk of bread and some fried pork strips through the bars. The litany of lottery numbers continued, but the images on the wall had disappeared. If she wanted to survive, she thought, she had to stay calm, to clear her mind completely, to dissociate herself from what was happening to her body. Difficult as it seemed, she needed to sink into a trance. This would give her the strength to face the worst, if the worst should come. If she allowed herself to feel any emotion, she would be lost. Finally, when she could feel nothing she decided she was safe.
On the third day, a warder ordered her to wash and brush her hair.
‘You’re free to go, kid,’ he said. ‘Round here, rich people always land on their feet. Your parents are waiting for you outside.’
She was blindfolded and someone took her by the arm and led her across what felt like a damp courtyard to a room that smelled of sweaty clothes. Before closing the door he ordered her to count to twenty before taking off the blindfold. When her eyes adjusted to the dim light that flattened everything, she could make out a small sofa, a wooden desk, a few chairs. On the walls hung coats of arms, a photo of the Eel, a portrait of General San Martín. For no apparent reason, a memory buzzed in her brain like a maddening bluebottle, a phrase she had heard for the first time in primary school: the battle, the treaties, the obligatory hero. All across the country obligatory heroes were multiplying like saints in the Catholic Chu
rch. For every battle never waged, a new hero was created; for every miracle never performed a new saint was venerated. The battle, the saints, the obligatory hero.
A door opened behind her letting in a sudden burst of light and her mother’s bird-like voice.
‘Emilia, hija! Just look at the terrible mess Simón has got you mixed up in.’
Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be hugged. She had always taken comfort in her mother’s warmth but she was shocked by this accusation against her husband.
‘It’s not Simón’s fault, he’s as much a victim of this mess as me. Where is he? I want to see him.’
‘You can’t see him like that,’ her mother said, ‘you look a fright. Go and get yourself cleaned up. We brought you some clean clothes.’
In the bathroom, the shelves groaned under the weight of shaving equipment and imported perfumes. The blouse and the bra her parents had brought from Buenos Aires were her sister Chela’s and a little too big for her. Her mother had been right, she did look a sight – her face was haggard, she had deep bags under her eyes, her hair was greasy and dishevelled. She did her best to make herself presentable, but there was not much she could do. In the room next door, a voice she didn’t recognise was making abject apologies to her father.
‘Two days, Dr Dupuy, yes, I know, it’s unforgivable. Almost all our men were out on patrol and the officers here at headquarters are terribly ignorant. They work twenty hours straight. They’re so exhausted they don’t know good from bad when they see it. It was late at night when your daughter was brought in and there was no duty officer. If you want, we’ll look into the matter, get to the bottom of this, doesn’t matter whose head rolls.’
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