‘I take him to Mass with me on Sundays,’ she told Emilia, ‘and he rushes out of the church afterwards to find out the exchange rate of the dollar against the yen. I wear the baby-doll nightdress I couldn’t wear while I was pregnant and he just goes to sleep, can you believe it? He doesn’t even wake when the baby is squalling, never picks him up, and I don’t think he’s having an affair, because he doesn’t even have time for that.’
In a few short months, the little bank which Marcelo Echarri bought blossomed, buying up agricultural cooperatives, empty factories and shares in businesses that existed only as a letterhead: it was a lavish graveyard peopled with the dead that no one wanted. The Echarri empire – as the magazines called it – rose like the villages Potemkin built for the tsarina as she travelled through the Crimea only to vanish as soon as her carriage had passed.
Everything was happening too quickly. His wealth was colossal, but existed only on paper. To escape the firestorm would require an act of daring. He looked for short-term investors prepared to entrust their modest fortunes to banks that promised the best interest rates, and his were the highest. Inevitably, the moment came when he could not pay them. The more people deposited the deeper he sank into this dirty business. Bankruptcy loomed, but still he was not prepared to give up. He had never failed and did not see why he should fail now. After a sleepless night plotting and scheming, he happened on what he thought was a providential solution. Rather than paying the monstrous interest rates demanded of them, his frontmen invested the reserves in banks which offered more realistic interest rates. He had two or three million pesos invested for a fixed term in Philadelphia, where he had lived during his carefree student days, but he had no intention of touching it. This money was his shield, his safeguard for the future. But the future was now moving away and rather than coming towards the present, as Bradley’s Metaphysics proposed, it was disappearing. Whichever way he turned, Marcelo could see no future. The future, like the money, had run dry.
He could not sleep for worrying. ‘If you carry on like this, you’ll give yourself a heart attack,’ Chela said to him. ‘Why don’t you talk to Papá?’
‘No, your father gave me some advice. He said: “You’ve got to play this like a game of chess, Marcelo. Before you attack, think about how you’re going to defend yourself. Nobody’s going to sit in your seat and play the game for you.” ’ He had followed this advice and sunk ever deeper. He bought a second foundering bank and opened up branches in the provinces to attract new deposits. In every branch, he had a motto engraved in Latin which cashiers translated for customers: Fac recte nil time: Do right, fear nothing. For the first few weeks everything went well. Customers entrusted their savings to him because the word bank inspired confidence. But when they returned to withdraw their funds, they found the doors closed, or they were sent away by the security guards with implausible excuses: we’re waiting for funds from another branch, it will all be sorted by 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, go home, don’t worry, don’t believe the rumours, your money is safer here than with the Pope in Rome. It sounded like mockery, because at the time, the Pope in Rome was on his deathbed and the Vatican Bank itself was foundering.
Marcelo had no lack of imagination, but now he lacked the funds to use it. He considered laundering money through the drug dealers who were beginning to flood in from Colombia and Mexico, but he knew that if he got into debt with them and did not pay up promptly he would be signing his own death warrant. ‘I can’t take the risk,’ he said to Chela. ‘I haven’t got the guts to leave you a widow, all alone with the baby.’ ‘You need to talk to Papá,’ his wife insisted. ‘How many time do I have to tell you?’ For several days, Marcelo hesitated, but finally decided to do so when thousands of furious investors staged a demonstration outside his bank, smashing windows and furniture, stealing telephones, forged paintings and typewriters. His debts amounted to more than two hundred million pesos.
He invited Dr Dupuy to the Jockey Club, where they were able to lunch away from indiscreet witnesses. In plain language he explained the hopeless situation he found himself in, employing all the rhetorical devices for compassion he knew while his father-in-law did not move a muscle.
Dupuy listened, impassive. He shot Marcelo a bleak look and sat for a moment in silence, devoting his attention to the shrimp cocktail the waiter had just brought.
Marcelo was about to take out a photograph of his son, Dupuy’s only grandson, prepared himself to shed tears if necessary, but in the end he did not have to lower himself to such stratagems.
‘How are we going to write up the story for La República, Marcelo? What possible explanation can we give, when there is none? How are my readers, the good men who have trusted me their whole lives, going to go on trusting me?’ At no point did Dupuy raise his voice, yet his voice boomed as though it filled the heavens. ‘They won’t understand why I gave you a position of such responsibility at the paper when you’re a piece of shit who couldn’t even see what was coming. They’ll ask why I didn’t warn you. How can I tell them that I did warn you, that I gave you more time than anyone else had, and that you were stupid enough not to listen to me?’
Marcelo was trembling. This was no time to apologise; all the while he had felt he had not put a foot wrong, and now he discovered that his one mistake, the one which a whole lifetime would not suffice to excuse, was not to have heeded the infallible voice of his father-in-law.
‘It’s not just a few banks that are failing,’ Dupuy said, ‘the whole system is falling apart, foreign credit has dried up and now the country is being asked to pay its debts. Even if I wanted to – and I don’t want to, I can’t – how would it look if I asked for you to be thrown a lifeline when the Titanic is going down?’
Marcelo’s voice faltered; he felt on the brink of tears. ‘So what do you advise me to do?’
‘Leave the country. And before you go, think about how to preserve your good name. Though it pains me to say so, it is my grandson’s name too.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. I was going to ask for an audit, a financial inspection, but I don’t have time to doctor the figures and delete the fraudulent transactions. As soon as the auditors look at it, they’ll know my only way out is to get the state to cover my debts. I could speak to the comandantes, but if, as you say, the whole ship is going down, my hands are tied.’
‘Tied? You’ll be lucky not to have your hands cut off. The comandantes aren’t going to put themselves on the line for anyone. They’re gouging each other’s eyes out as it is. Will the books stand up to a slightly underhand audit?’
‘No. Anywhere they look there are papers implicating me.’
‘Papers,’ echoed Dupuy. He sat for a moment in silence. Marcelo feared his silences more than his poisonous tongue. ‘Paper is a perishable material. Are these papers scattered around the place?’
‘More so than I would like.’
‘How long would it take you to get them all in one place? You need to gather them together as if they were the bones you’re going to be confronted with at trial. There can’t be a single scrap, a stamp, a file missing.’
‘Twenty-four hours, thirty-six, I’m not sure. Maybe a little longer if the branches don’t move quickly.’
‘That’s a long time. You need to get your press office to issue a statement today saying that you are going to get your files in order so that the government can see that you have acted with complete rectitude. You need to denounce the damage being done to your business by these unfounded rumours. And you need to promise that, as soon as the audit is complete, you’ll pay back every last centavo. The statement needs to sound utterly sincere. Repeat that hypocritical Latin motto your bank uses: Fac recte . . . what’s the rest of it?’
‘I don’t understand, Dr Dupuy.’
Marcelito Echarri, who, as a student in Wharton, had solved the most complex theoretical equations, was completely at a loss. ‘If I ask for an audit, they’ll find enough evidence in half an hour to arrest me. I�
��d be better off leaving the country like you suggested. Chela and the baby will be fine, don’t worry.’
‘I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about me. You have dragged me and La República into this mess and you have to get us out. You can’t do it on your own, because in the state you’re in, you’re worthless. I’ll advise you. You and Chela and my grandson are going to disappear, but not yet.’
‘What should I do, Doctor? I’ll do whatever you say.’
‘Get your managers to gather all the paperwork together by tomorrow after you’ve issued your statement to the newspapers. Then announce that, while the audit is taking place, you are going to take a holiday with your wife and son. Choose your destination wisely. You might not be coming back.’
‘The papers will need to be handled by people we can trust. Don’t worry, I won’t forget anything.’
‘The way you’ve been recently, it’s impossible not to worry. Keep a close eye on the papers. I’ll send official vans to pick them up and drop them off at your bank’s head office. Nothing else is to be moved, not the furniture, not the paintings. When you lock up for the night, there will be an unforgettable fire.’
‘An accident? No one will believe it.’
‘It won’t be an accident, it will be an deliberate act of sabotage. An attack against you, against me, against the comandantes. Another terrorist attack by subversives. There won’t be anything left in the rubble.’
Two days later, on the radio from Miami, Marcelo Echarri declared that this atrocity (he used the word atrocity, everyone remembers that) had ruined him. All the money in the banks’ safes had been burned, he said, millions in bearer bonds, a Picasso harlequin, one of Francis Bacon’s cardinals, priceless, irreplaceable treasures. He had no doubt that subversive elements were responsible for the conflagration. ‘They have committed yet another crime against the country,’ he said, ‘against peaceful citizens and their savings.’
After this fleeting appearance, he vanished. The comandantes promised to mount an exhaustive investigation and track down the perpetrators wherever they were hiding. A few hours later, six suspects who had holed up in a warehouse on the docks were surprised by a naval patrol and died during the altercation. Marcelo moved with his family to the Bahamas, and when the last spark had died down, he moved to San Antonio, Texas, where he bought a luxury-car dealership and a house in the Dominion, the most expensive neighbourhood in the city. Chela phoned Emilia from Nassau to tell her she was pregnant again.
As usual on Saturday nights, Emilia does not feel like cooking and is preparing to order Japanese food from Sultan Wok or Megumi. Japanese food was an exotic concept back when she and Simón lived in Buenos Aires and she does not know whether he has tried it since, whether he likes it.
‘Why do you ask?’ her husband said. ‘I like what you like.’
Just as Emilia goes over to make the call, the phone rings. It is Nancy, worried because she has not heard from her for several days. She has decided to give back the file of newspaper clippings her friend gave her to organise. ‘I’ll bring it over,’ Nancy insists, ‘it’s all sorted.’
‘No . . . you can’t,’ Emilia says, ‘I’m going to be away for a couple of days.’
‘What about the file?’ Nancy is not about to give up.
‘Hang on to it. And stop bugging me.’ She doesn’t care when Nancy says she is offended. She’ll be back, she always comes back, she is a loyal, meek little puppy.
Simón is sitting at the drawing table and is sketching the outline of a map, an island. ‘I’ve been looking for this island for a long time,’ he says. ‘I find it, and when I try to pin down in space where it is, it slips through my fingers. Maybe that’s my mistake, maybe there is no place in space for it. I try to draw it differently. I put it down on paper and turn away for a minute, and when I look at it again, the island is gone. It has vanished.’
‘It must be situated in time, then,’ Emilia says, ‘and if it is, then sooner or later it will come back. Sooner and later are refuges in time.’
‘We’ve spent our lives making maps,’ says Simón, ‘and I still don’t know what they’re for. Sometimes I wonder if they’re not simply metaphors of the world. What do you think?’
‘Not metaphors, but maybe metamorphoses, like words or like the shadows we project. By the time a map has circumscribed reality, reality is already different. In the first geography lesson I ever took, the teacher told us that the principal purpose of maps is to stop people getting lost.’
‘The opposite of what your father wanted,’ says Simón. ‘Maps to make people lose their way, so they don’t know what day it is, what time it is, where those who still are, are. He would have liked you and me to draw maps in which people disappeared and became dust from nowhere.’
‘Maybe that’s what we did,’ Emilia says. ‘Maybe we were just figures on a map that he and the comandantes were drawing, and everyone on that map got lost. There’s nothing more disorienting than falling into a map and not knowing where you are.’
‘The writer with the slate who paced the corridors told us that twice he had disappeared inside a map. The first time was in Japan, he said, just after the war. He was supposed to be coming back from Nagasaki to Buenos Aires, he’d got his ticket, but he had barely any money. He was desperate. He spent his last yen on the taxi that took him to the airport. Bad luck always comes at the worst possible time, and that was what happened to him. There was torrential rain and all the flights were cancelled. If the writer didn’t make it to Tokyo that night, he would miss the weekly connecting flight to Buenos Aires. He didn’t speak a word of Japanese, didn’t have a penny to his name, as I said, he had no idea how to ask for food or shelter. He was worse than a beggar, he was a man without a language. Someone working for the airline took pity on him and gave him a ticket to Hakata train station. In nearby Fukuoka he would be able to take a flight to Tokyo and all his problems would be over. Miming, he asked how many stops it was to Hakata. Six stops, the attendant told him. To confirm it, he held up six fingers. The writer got on the train, saw an empty seat and rushed over to take it. All around him were other passengers relaxing in comfortable berths. The conductor offered him a white dressing gown, but he refused, he was afraid he might have to pay for it. Everyone else had a dressing gown, and he felt ashamed to be the only one not wearing one. Before the first stop, he saw some of his fellow passengers eating balls of rice they dipped into a dark sauce. The writer was famished but to calm himself he tried to think about something else. As he fell asleep, he began to repeat the only word that mattered to him: Hakata. Hakata-ga? Hakata-wa? One of the other passengers scornfully held up five fingers. He felt reassured, since this confirmed that after the first stop, he had to wait five more stops. He leaned his head against the window and fell fast asleep. He woke up in the middle of the night. Rain was lashing at the windows, as though the skies had been ripped open. The mountains in the distance were framed by moonlight, and next to the trackers, peasants were harvesting rice. He could not imagine where he had strayed on the map. He didn’t dare to think what would happen when the conductor forced him to get off the train. He resigned himself to spending the rest of his life in the paddy fields with people he would never understand. Eventually, the train stopped. He could not work out the name of the station, because the signs were all in Japanese ideograms. “Hakata?” he asked the neighbour who had previously held up five fingers. “Hakata-ga, Hakata-ka,” the man replied. He unfolded a map and pointed to a huge icon which meant nothing to the writer. It looked like a box raised on a pair of legs. “Hakata,” the passenger said again. He opened a secret door in the icon, winked at the writer and gestured for him to go in. The writer thanked him and entered. On the other side, it was daytime. A brilliant sun blazed in the sky. In front of him he saw a little station which looked just like the icon he had just come through. Two soldiers stopped him. They were talking to each other in a language that was not Japanese. It sounded more like Hebrew or Arabic.
The writer spoke to them in English and, to his surprise, they understood. “Where am I?” he asked. “You are at the Mandelbaum Gate, on the border,” they said. “If you want to cross, you have to show your passport.” The writer had his passport with him, he also seemed to have his suitcase, his umbrella and the books he had brought with him. “Hakata?” he asked fearfully, showing them the passport. The soldiers stamped it and pointed to a long track. “No-man’s-land,” said one of them. “Hakata no-man’s-land,” the writer repeated, satisfied. He walked along the track between pebbles, twisted metal, rusted fences and the skeletal remains of useless tanks. In the distance, he could make out the minarets of a mosque, could hear the chanting of the muezzin. He didn’t know which side of the border he was on, and he didn’t care. “Hakata?” he said aloud to cheer himself. To the right of the path, unseen by anyone, on a ruined wall, was a huge map of the city of Jerusalem: the Jerusalem of Ptolemy, the centre of the world. Above the map was the Japanese ideogram he had never been able to understand. He was amazed and heard himself exclaim: “Hakata!” A door opened in the map and, unable to resist, he popped his head through to see whether it was night-time on the other side. He hoped that by going through the door he might find himself back on the train, get to Hakata and catch the plane to Buenos Aires. “In a sense, I was right,” the writer said, “because I wound up in the old folks’ home and now I can’t leave here. Sometimes I try to draw the Japanese map on the slate. It never works, I end up drawing islands, countries even, I don’t recognise.” I asked him to show me the drawings,’ says Simón, ‘and he set me in front of the blank slate. I told him there wasn’t a single mark on the slate and he told me that it was his finest drawing: an island that disappeared as soon as it found a place in space. That’s what I’m trying to do too,’ Simón goes on. ‘I copy the island, carefully reproduce every line, every curve, but nothing happens. Sometimes I draw the sea around it, put a compass in the corner so it can find its place in space, and when I look again, the island is where it always was.’
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