“It’s four in the morning, Hector.”
“I apologize, Michael.” He was apologizing again. Hector patted Michael’s arm affectionately. “Let’s get off the street, no?” He nodded to one of the soldiers, who produced a key for the door. Michael meditated on the soldier’s face: brighter, sharper than those of the typical grunts here, most of whom were illiterates culled from the ferociously poor Barrio Miserias. Despite the olive uniforms, these were clearly Hector’s private reserve.
The entryway smelled of must. Michael knew people still worked here—army-installed yes-men caretaking the CGT workers’ union in name only. Still, it seemed crowded with stale ghosts.
Ghosts…
They took the stairs to the third floor, snapping gloomy lights as they went. Hector lagged cheerfully behind, favoring a crippled leg with his silver dog-headed cane. Before the war, Hector had been tortured by a previous regime until the cartilage in his knee disintegrated. Years and several governments later, that same torturer rose again to authority, had the cane handmade in London, and with a boyish lack of irony only Latins can truly manage, threw a lavish banquet and presented it to Hector. That regime was, of course, also long gone now, but Hector endured. Still the quiet, patient voice in dark alleys.
The third floor felt even more musty than the two below. This time it wasn’t an illusion; all the offices in the north end of the building had been cleared out three years ago. The thought chilled something in Michael.
At the end of the hall stood a sealed wooden door, its edges plugged with wax, yellowish and crumbly. Room 63. Hector, his soldiers, and Michael stopped before it. “We are waiting for one more,” Hector smiled.
He was short in coming, his bald pate clearing the landing, and the chill in Michael’s gut rolled into a snowball.
Dr. Pedro Ara, cultural attaché to the Spanish embassy, approached them on soundless loafers. His eyes went straight to the door and lingered, as if waiting for it to speak. Only after a long beat did they reluctantly shift and pass without enthusiasm over Hector, Michael, the soldiers.
“Is there no one here of rank?” Ara’s Madrilenian Spanish hummed with imperiousness.
Hector stepped forward. “I am Hector Cabanillas, representative of the government.”
“There is no government.” The accent was leased from dead aristocracy, composed to humiliate those like Hector, their New World dialects marked by the cadences of immigrants. Hector let it go, his face the mask of the ever-patient host.
“I have complete authority to speak for Casa Rosada.”
“So Casa Rosada finally speaks.”
“This is Michael Suslov, of the American embassy.”
Michael had been introduced to Ara before, by other people in other places, but the good doctor’s eyes showed no recognition. Michael was low rung, a twenty-eight-year-old diplomatic nobody. Ara was more than a senior rep; he was the social track’s magician, its dwarfish undertaker. It was Ara’s career that landed him in the capital, but it was his hobby—his obsession—that gave him access to the most rarefied circles of the oligarchy. That obsession now brought him to the third floor of the CGT.
He didn’t shake Michael’s hand.
Hector nodded to the soldiers, who removed bayonets from their belts and began prying the wax from the doorjamb. It peeled and fell in crumbly strips that skittered on the tile floor. Hector brought forward a key, but the lock had frozen. As the boys in olive went to work on the door, Michael stared at Ara.
What a strange-looking bastard, he thought. With his puckered chin, his elfin ears, his ubiquitousness—like a bad dream, perched on the edge of every night here. The station had vetted him a dozen times, and the conviction held that he wasn’t a spook. He was just…Ara.
The soldiers tore out the hinges and the door came down, drawbridge-like, onto their forearms.
And Michael knew.
Knew the moment the smell, a wakened dragon, snicked through them. Mold, carbonized incense, lilacs.
Ara shouldered past Michael to the room’s threshold of darkness and breathed deeply the scent of things dead, things changed—and his face took on a kind of beatific satisfaction. A soldier snapped his flashlight. Ara pushed it gently aside. “No. Candles.”
Hector nodded, and the soldier produced one. Michael wondered if candles were standard combat equipment or if Hector had anticipated this, understood the moment. A match struck the wick, and with candle held high, they crossed into the room.
A few feet inside stood a pair of tall votives. Ara took the candle from the soldier and touched the two others with an air of private ceremony. The room rose and sharpened. It was large and windowless, with a high ceiling of pressed tin. The walls were empty but for a pair of curtains framing a portrait of the Virgin. At the room’s center was a raised pedestal draped in the blue and white of the Argentine flag. They stood around it now: Michael and Ara, Hector and the two soldiers with intelligent eyes.
“Remove the flag, please,” Hector said. Voices had fallen to whispers. The soldiers reached for either end.
“—With care.”
A soft tug, and silk slid silently away, revealing beneath it…
Her.
Dust shivered in amber glare.
Michael had been prepared for nearly anything: a corpse, a wasted shell, a shrunken effigy. But not what lay before him. Blonde hair glistening in dancing light. Smooth porcelain skin. This was Her. Eva Duarte Perón.
Evita.
In life she’d shattered the pointless cycles of Argentine politics, flung open the gates of history to the great ignored, and ruled them as their pampa Cinderella. This bastard of a cow baron’s toady, the kept daughter of a kept mother of a kept town, rocketed into history on the shoulders of a dream-crazy mob that sang of her, named stars after her, and on her death, at a still-beautiful thirty-three, choked and paralyzed a country with grief.
This was Her.
A hundred and sixty thousand people signed petitions urging the pope to declare her a saint. Santa Evita, who fed the mob and exploited it ruthlessly. Even in death, her corpse carried within it such imagined power her husband had it sealed away here, in a $30,000 bronze casket with an inch-thick clear-crystal cover, at the bosom of the building that had once been the heart of her obsession.
She seemed so small now.
Michael conjured their only conversation. The strange words passed between them. It tugged unexpectedly, and he wondered if it showed. Michael tried to place those words now in the tiny mouth before him. They wouldn’t fit.
Everything around him—the air, even the light—creaked with rot. Everything but Her. Here time had been shackled to an ageless instant. Ara hovered over her protectively, beaming with pride at his creation. “She’s beautiful,” Ara murmured, as if to a stuck butterfly.
“Yes. She is.” Hector’s voice was soft. For the first time Michael thought he caught a glint of fear in the soldiers’ eyes. Hector’s boys perhaps, but boys of the pampa nonetheless.
Hector cleared his throat. “You will bear witness, Doctor, that no damage or disrespect has been done to Her.” The dampness seemed to close around his words, crush them in midair.
“…Doctor?” Hector prodded.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he answered impatiently. He was lost to them now. Cooing to her. “You’re so lovely…”
In life she wrapped herself in nothing less than the most exclusive Christian Dior, but here lay only a humble, pious servant of God clad in a robe of simple white muslin. She wore none of the half-million dollars in jewelry that had flashed and dazzled paparazzi on two continents, just a rosary from the pope knitted between unpainted fingers.
Hector ordered the crystal lid removed. Ara knelt down beside her head, examining rouged, waxy lips. “Look at them,” he mumbled—to whom Michael wasn’t sure—“the downfall of nearly every artist. Two weeks I spent on these alone. Perfect.”
The first time Michael had seen Ara was at an embassy reception where the docto
r had brought with him a stitched leather hatbox. Sometime between dinner and cigarettes, he removed from it the embalmed head of a Spanish peasant. The work was so remarkable, the reconstruction so flawless, it inspired not horror but wonder among the guests, most of whom were used to this nightly unveiling and treated it as a rare objet d’art taken from a host’s safe for viewings among friends. No longer belonging to its original owner, yet not the grave, it had emerged as something more: a piece of expressive art, with Ara its proud sculptor.
Michael didn’t remember what condition the lips were in.
Evita didn’t look dead, but she didn’t look alive either. She looked…Ara’s. One hundred thousand dollars he’d been paid by Juan Perón to preserve his wife, returning to him nearly a year later an incorruptible effigy he declared would last a thousand years. It was his masterpiece to eternity—a monument that would never fade.
And that was exactly the problem.
Michael hadn’t noticed the soldiers leaving, but they returned now, carrying between them a long, simple pine box. Not a casket. A box. They set it down beside the raised bier.
“What are you doing with Her?” Ara demanded. He had placed himself between Hector and his masterpiece.
Hector’s chestnut eye, the good one, seemed to soften with sympathy. “No one here doubts your devotion to the Senora, Doctor.” Hector spoke quietly, without hurry. “Your work and loyalty are beyond reproach. But outside”—Hector’s eyes gestured to a world beyond blank walls—“are dangerous times…”
Beyond those walls it was now a crime to read of her, to own her photograph, to utter her name. Yet every night that name rode the breezes above the city, screamed in a thousand flowers stacked at the foot of a shuttered building, in a million gallons of spray paint that everywhere demanded over and over WHERE IS SHE?, in the kitchen pipe-bombs that crackled through the barrios.
Hector took in a breath and released the words that would forever change their lives: “It is time Evita Perón was removed from politics.”
Together they lifted her—chilly and weighing all of a twelve-year-old girl—from the half-ton casket and set her into the box with the maximum dignity possible while still putting someone into a box. The eyes remained closed and serene, the hands still clenched their rosary, the pleated gown found its old rhythms.
They screwed a wood top over her.
The box was taken down back stairs to the rear alley, where an army truck waited. The soldiers loaded it onto the bed and secured a tarp. Suddenly everyone was left standing with nothing to do but avoid one another’s eyes and listen to the bleats of tugboats on the Plata. It was Ara who finally spoke. “Where will She be taken?”
“She will be given a Christian burial,” Hector answered, anticipating the next question by adding quickly, “in private.”
Ara seemed ready to fight the idea, but the moment receded. His eyes drifted to the tarp. “She is a symbol to so many, Senor Cabanillas, but please remember that she is also a woman.”
“Thank you for coming, Doctor.”
They didn’t shake hands. Ara looked Hector up and down, as if to memorize his features, then turned and walked through the alley, his dwarfish figure slipping into a fragment of night.
“An unmarked grave?” It was Michael’s turn to speak. They were alone now, the soldiers busy with the truck.
“A sanctuary.”
“From whom?”
“History.”
There was purple in the sky now, deep and low over Uruguay. Hector removed his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned them with a cloth. A job-completion ritual.
“Thank you for coming, Michael.” His myopic eyes were aimed at the wall but focused beyond it, to the docks and river that lay on the other side.
“Why did you call me?”
“I needed you.”
“For what?”
The glasses were returned to the bridge of his nose. He faced Michael now. “To be a witness.”
Hector squeezed Michael’s arm, turned, and climbed into the truck’s cab. There was a dry cough of pistons, a lurch of gears, and the prewar Mack whined away down the alley with its cargo. The sound lasted three blocks, fading behind the hum of the city’s waking, cranky infrastructure.
And Michael was alone.
The sides of the CGT were bluish now, the light from street lamps retreating in tiny halos. He walked back down the alley to his car, paused to put the key in the door, and smelled it again for the first time.
Wafting up the alley on gusts of memory: slaughterhouse blood atop dead canals. The warm stench of half-sunk fishing boats. The rot of night-old tango sweat. It was a smell of childhood, of La Boca, which for Michael were one and the same.
He hadn’t realized how close he was to the old neighborhood, just a few blocks south and a million miles away, with its crumbling piers and crazy immigrant homes. La Boca. The dockworkers would be up now, setting off for work, swinging lunch bags thick with fugazza. The children would wake soon. Hammering feet on slick cobblestones, school-bound voices catcalling in an Italian-accented Spanish that was true of all Spanish here but no more so than in La Boca.
After four years back in Buenos Aires, he had yet to visit the old docks. It seemed another world now, too far away to touch, close enough to burn if you stared too long. His innocence lay there. So did his mother and sister. He thought of them, let the dull spasm reach stiffly over years…
…Then started his car and drove away.
2.
A first memory:
His mother, young, raven hair brushing his cheek as she kneels beside him, smelling of spoiled milk. Something weak and small twitches in her arms and he’s only two but he knows it’s trouble. “Michael,” she says to him in Italian, “this is your sister.”
His father, an old man even then, towering sinew with a shock of arrogant white hair. He picks Michael up roughly, bellows at him in Ukrainian: “Not king of the hill anymore, eh?”
They lived in Chicago. West Taylor. His father had played clarinet with the Kiev symphony, had survived the Reds in ’18 but not his brother’s reputation in the White Army. The Cheka sniffed his house, sniffed his friends, sniffed his back as he picked through a pile of frozen, massacred corpses on Christmas morning for the body of his brother. The symphony was disbanded the next day on Stalin’s orders, and on New Year’s afternoon Nikolai Suslov read the writing in the snow and walked out of Russia.
Through Poland, where he slept in church doorways with his clarinet. Into Germany, where he hunted rabbits in the Black Forest to stay alive. Across northern Italy, where he stole grapes in the shadow of the monastery at Monteriggioni and was discovered by the vintner’s daughter, Constantina D’Oro, a moody, restless woman, who brought him pecorino and Sienese prosciutto. He was thin, broke, and had only his clarinet. She was bored, sharp, and had only her swollen, veiled chest. She was eighteen. He was fifty-seven.
They came to America, to Chicago, where he looked for an orchestra, then a band, and ended up with one-nighters in gangster speakeasies. He grew frustrated. She grew pregnant: first with Michael, then Maria.
Not long after, Michael’s parents gave up on the Depression, on America, and emigrated to Buenos Aires, where Constantina had relatives.
“Love her, Michael. Love your little sister…”
Michael and Maria grew and came to understand, then love, their La Boca neighborhood. He palled with the other immigrant kids, and they ran in gangs through the narrow rainbow streets; drew chalk dragons on apartment walls painted red, yellow, and green; sailed waste-wood battleships in the putrid canal; pestered dockworkers, who’d make them sing sweetly before surrendering candies from Bolivia or Scotland. And always there was Maria, following, just wanting to be near him.
“Watch out for your sister, Michael.”
His father now, and Michael vowed he would. Though she was weaker and sickly, Michael allowed her to tag along and bloodied the nose of any of the gang who complained. And Maria steeled herself,
built forts with them, slayed demons, helped spook the ice man’s old cart mare with Chilean firecrackers, only occasionally lying down to gulp, to search for her breath and medicine. Never telling their mother, always climbing to her feet and running with Michael home when she called for supper.
There would be evenings she caught up to Michael and he’d be standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the riotous hulk of their apartment building—purple corrugated walls, green shutters, orange cupolas trimmed with blue-and-red doors. The lights would be coming up in each window, and with them the tumbling smells of bifes, pasta, and burbling tomato that mingled with canal garbage into something unreally sweet that shot to the back of their mouths. Struggling through it all, as the sky fell and the gas street lamps ticked and fussed, would be the thin, drifting sound of their father’s clarinet, and for a moment Michael knew his universe worked. As the certainty swept out from his heart, he turned to Maria and she was looking at the same building, feeling the same confidence, and he put his arm around her and promised his sister he would always look after her.
Inside, supper was hot and clanging. His father would uncork the Chianti, bought cheap off the docks, and alternate with straight shots of Finnish vodka as his family waited nervously to see which side of the mountain the sled of his emotions would tip to. Sometimes it would be the gentle slope of his better nature, and with a stamp of his boot and an open gesture with bony fingers, he would tell stories of his days in Kiev, of the orchestra and legions of doe-eyed Ukrainian flowers that had wept for his attention. Sometimes he would skip a part on purpose, and his children would catch him and demand the full version, for they’d heard these stories a thousand times and loved them for the certainty of their cadence.
But sometimes the sled would tumble the other way, his father’s face darkening with frustration. He had twice the work here in the music halls of Avenida Corrientes than in Chicago—at half the pay. His nights were busy but the days were spent watching the Suslovs sink further and further into Constantina’s relatives’ debt. He hated the half-breed orchestras here and their bombastic, mercurial conductors. As his rants broadened and soured, he would sweep his eyes over each of them, looking for a blink, a rise that would stoke a flash of temper. Sometimes it was Michael; a wrong look, a half sentence, and his father would be on him, boxing his ears till the tears stung and his head rang.
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