The Blue Line

by Ingrid Betancourt

  Suspended like a piece of meat, Theo looks. He shouldn’t have. Writhing at the end of the rope, he screams with a fury that makes him vomit.

  Laughter, always their laughter around him, everywhere.

  “But him, I let him go. I freed him. Yes, I did. I’m not saying it just to please you.”

  The sound of footsteps, and the projector begins to whir.

  “I’ll let you go, too. But not yet. After all my efforts I’m entitled to a little party.”

  The reel starts spinning, but this time it is neither the voice of the Führer nor the black-and-white images of the concentration camps. Unmistakable, the eyes of his brother Gabriel fill the screen. His face in close-up, disfigured. He is on his knees, begging, crying. Then a wide-open mouth, a silent scream as Gabriel is pushed out from the plane into the void. The fall, and their laughter, and the fall over and over again, and the reel running idle. And their laughter.

  —

  Theo exits the tunnel screaming, blinded by a steely sun. He slips between two cars and vanishes onto the exit ramp.

  —

  He had stopped trying to see her. Theo came back every evening to an empty house and paced from the kitchen to the living room like a caged animal. She doesn’t exist. She is his. She is nothing to me. He didn’t want to take Julia’s long-distance calls either. He couldn’t stand her carefree attitude. He needed silence. I only think about her because I think about him, and I think about him all the time. I’ll have him on his knees. I want to be the only thing he sees before he dies.

  —

  Theo began to work out twice as hard. Luckily Mia had stopped coming to the gym. He never wanted to see her again. Her car had disappeared from the parking lot. She was avoiding him too, probably.

  One day, feeling self-destructive, he walked by Mia’s office, just to check.

  “She’s on vacation,” a coworker of hers informed him, with a look Theo found irritating.

  “I’d loaned her a file. Too bad . . .”

  “All the files she’s working on are on her desk. Would you like me to take a look?”

  “Yes, please. I’ll give you a hand.”

  He’d found some photos, addresses. But Theo wasn’t satisfied.

  “So she’s gone to visit some friends?”

  “Yes, lucky her! I’d love to go to Argentina. But it’s expensive. Having a husband helps, that’s for sure.”

  Argentina! There was no way she could have figured it out. Theo rubbed the back of his neck and went to the water fountain, his throat dry. Nobody has ever known, not even Julia.

  —

  The sheets were damp and acrid with sweat. Theo woke from a restless sleep, his mind racing. He went downstairs to the kitchen. A ray of moonlight fell across the living room. He wished Julia were there so he could forget Mia. Mia: the monster’s daughter. Mia: between him and me. Theo was shivering. He sat down on the stairs, a bottle of water in his hands, unable to slake his thirst. He finished the rest of the bottle in one long gulp. I want him to know that he has lost.

  The first light of dawn drove back the shadows. He got up, got dressed, and set off for the beach. The vast orange sky awaited him like a promise of oblivion. But I can’t turn back anymore. I will be forever haunted. Even my own death won’t grant me any peace. Theo picked up a few pebbles and sent them skimming over the water.

  —

  Mia was back, paler than before, he’d been told. He was extra-careful. He moved his car to a different spot in the parking lot several times a day. He steered clear of the gym, preferring instead to run on the beach in the early morning. But one evening when he got back from work, she was waiting for him in her car outside his house. Intrigued and wary, he parked and walked over to her.

  “I hope you don’t mind me coming to see you at home.”

  She had become very thin, which made her eyes look even more striking. He went around her car and got into the passenger seat.

  “Theo . . . you never explained.”

  “There was nothing to explain.”

  She bit her lip.

  “. . . I went to Argentina.”

  “I know.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “I’ll tell you anyway. I went because of you.”

  He muttered something incomprehensible and opened the car door to get out.

  “Theo. Listen to me. You owe me that much. Let’s go for a drive.”

  She added by way of explanation: “I’ll feel more comfortable telling you about it with the noise of the engine.”

  Theo reluctantly shut the car door. She started the car and searched for his hand.

  “I wouldn’t have gone to Argentina if you weren’t important to me.”

  “That doesn’t change anything.”

  “For you, maybe. But for me, everything’s changed.”

  “Mia, you don’t understand.”

  “Yes, that’s true. There are far too many things I don’t understand. You left with no explanation. . . .”

  “I don’t owe you an explanation. I don’t owe you anything.”

  On the outskirts of town, Mia turned into a narrow road skirting a small forest of evergreens. It was growing dark. Here and there a few houses had lights on, their windows like eyes.

  “Yes, you do, precisely. You owe me an explanation. But there’s something else. I need your help. What I’m carrying inside is too heavy for me. And you’re the only one who . . .”

  “Mia, we shouldn’t see each other again.”

  “I’m not talking about that. Even if I wanted to! No. I’ve come to you because I think you know things about me that I don’t know about myself.”

  The car came to a stop at the edge of the forest. Mia switched off the lights.

  “What do you think I know, Mia? I don’t know anything.”

  “Yes. You do. You have a lot of information. It’s your job. I think you know something about my mother’s death. I think you can help me find the person who killed her.”

  “What are you talking about? Your mother committed suicide. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “Yes. That’s what I was led to believe. But that’s not how it happened. I checked the archives, I talked to people. My mother was murdered. The police found her mutilated body. They also found photos the killer left behind.”

  Mia’s voice began to shake.

  “She was at home when she was killed.”

  “How do you know you really are her daughter? There were so many crimes during that war. . . .”

  Mia pushed her car seat back and hugged her knees.

  “I got in touch with the Mapuche.”

  “The Mapuche?”

  “Yes. With my mother’s family.”

  “But how?”

  “There are lots of Mapuche Web sites. That’s how I contacted them, before even thinking to make the trip. Things went quickly after that. My mother’s brother sent me a reply. He asked me to go and see the family in Argentina. They wanted to make sure it was really me. In fact, they thought I was dead.”

  “Make sure how? They couldn’t recognize you.”

  “No, of course not. But we went to a center that researches the disappeared. They do DNA testing.”

  “That’s crazy! How could you do all that in such a short time?”

  Theo was thinking hard, his head in his hands.

  “Did they ask you where your father was?”

  “My mother’s husband? No. He was an Argentine army captain named Ignacio Castro.”

  “And?”

  “And so it turns out that my biological father . . . isn’t my father. Not the one I call my father, in any case.”

  “Did you get your DNA tested against his too? Did you see photos of your bio
logical father?”

  “Yes, a few. Of their wedding day. My mother’s husband looked very different: tall, slim, blond. Quite a handsome man, actually. It’s obviously not the same person. I would recognize my father anywhere. I have to admit he’s not very good-looking. In fact, he’s rather ugly.”

  Her childlike laugh rang through the car.

  There was nothing of El Diablo in her. Her Asian eyes, her high cheekbones, her pale skin. Theo moved back to get a better look at Mia. And yet. El Diablo had pulled it off brilliantly. With her Asian features, Korean name, and perfect English, the girl would be untraceable. It would be impossible to establish a connection between Mia and Argentina unless Mia revealed the secret of her Mapuche origins, and her father had warned her against this. The feeling of shame he had instilled in Mia because of her mother’s suicide was an additional safeguard. Finally, El Diablo had hidden his treasure at Swirbul and Collier: where better than a CIA contractor to keep enemies at bay? All the employees were CIA protégés in one way or another, bound by a secret related to their own personal story that went beyond the scope of professional confidentiality. It was the reason he himself was working for Swirbul. In exchange for the information Theo had passed on to the American intelligence agencies, he lived a sheltered life, protected by a structure that made him invisible. That same structure had thwarted all of Julia’s attempts to track him down. It had also enabled him to pick up the trail of his torturer. Or so he had thought until now. Through the company’s archives, Theo had found out that El Diablo had come to the United States before the end of the dictatorship, but he hadn’t expected his torturer to benefit from the same protection as he had. Which, he now realized, explained the lack of accessible information on El Diablo, and Theo’s own fruitless search.

  Her rounded forehead, her silky black hair. There is nothing of him in her. And yet. The red lips, the perfect teeth, that distant smile.

  “He’s fat,” Mia went on, “and short, with a big nose and black hair. And anyway, his name isn’t Ignacio Castro!”

  “So who is he?”

  The young woman was taken aback by his aggressive tone. Her brow furrowed in concentration.

  “I don’t know. They say lots of children were given up for adoption back then. My mother’s brother thinks maybe that’s what happened to me. I looked, but there doesn’t seem to be a record of adoptions. I don’t even have a birth certificate in Argentina.”

  “But your real father can’t have vanished into thin air. He didn’t leave you on the doorstep of a church!”

  “My biological father committed suicide shortly after my mother was killed. He drove his car off a cliff. The car blew up—”

  Theo interrupted: “And no one ever found his remains.” He put his hands on his knees and said bitterly, “Take me back home, Mia. I can’t help you.”

  It was pitch-black. A glimmer of light somewhere in the distance accentuated the contrast of Mia’s profile. Theo watched as she hid her face in her hands. He refused to be moved. She turned the key and the engine purred obediently. A couple of deer caught in the headlights froze for an instant, their eyes red, then bounded away into the trees.

  —

  Nothing should derail me. Not even Mia. Squatting in the garden holding a hand rake, Theo admired the hydrangeas. Julia’s return would give him a break. He thought he saw his neighbor looking enviously at his well-kept flowerbeds. He gave the old lady a wave and smiled. It’s impossible not to make the connection. It’s written in black and white. Or else she’s her father’s accomplice. Theo wiped away the large beads of sweat rolling down his face. A bumblebee hovered a little too long at the corner of his eye. He flicked it away in irritation. After this I can live my life again. I’ll go away with Julia. Far away. He pushed the spade into the ground and turned the soil over. The bumblebee returned, stupid and stubborn, and began buzzing in concentric circles around Theo’s head. Disheartened, Theo threw the spade and the rake to the ground and walked back into the house.

  —

  The parking lot was full. Swirbul was always a hive of activity on Mondays. He found a spot at the far end, next to a shiny new white SUV with oversize tires. Driven by an involuntary curiosity, he walked around the car to inspect it. When he came out late that evening the huge lot was empty, but the Chevy Crossover was still there. Theo hovered for a moment to give it another once-over before getting into his car.

  He was just about to pull out when a car raced across the parking lot, tires screeching, and came to a stop right in front of him. Mia got out wearing an emerald green suit. She was furious. Eyes brimming with tears, she yanked open Theo’s door and shouted, “I hate you. Do you hear me? I hate you!”

  A man emerged from the complex at that moment and came striding in their direction, fiddling with his keychain in one hand and holding a black crocodile briefcase in the other. Theo recognized him immediately. It was one of the company directors.

  “Get in,” he ordered.

  —

  Mia did as she was told. The car reversed, pulled away, and drove out of the parking lot. Theo accelerated, hurtled down the avenue, turned right, and braked in front of an imposing mansion surrounded by a large park. He turned to Mia, grabbed her forcefully, and kissed her.

  “I hate you,” she said again, beating at his chest with her fists.

  Theo wiped her tears away with the back of his hand.

  “I hate you too. I can’t tell the difference anymore between my love for you and my hatred, Mia.”

  “But why? Why me?” She had a sudden thought. “It’s because of my wedding photo, isn’t it?”

  He caressed her face. “No. But I think I know who killed your mother.”

  Mia’s breathing quickened. “Yes, I could sense it. That’s why I went to Argentina. To understand, Theo.”

  “You really don’t understand?”

  Theo grasped her face to force her to look into his eyes.

  “But I’m telling you I don’t understand! You’re hurting me, Theo. And you’re really scaring me. What happened to my mother?”

  Theo remained silent for a moment. He stroked her lips with a finger, then leaned back against the door.

  “You grew up with your mother’s killer, Mia. Your father’s name is not Samuel Matamoros, and he’s not Spanish.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “He’s Argentine, and he’s also your biological father.”

  “That’s crazy! He isn’t . . . he can’t be . . .”

  “His name is Ignacio Castro Matamoros and he was a captain in the Argentine air force. He was also known as El Diablo.”

  Mia stared at him in horror.

  “He was in charge of one of the torture centers during the Dirty War, Mansión Seré. Mia, your father is a murderer.”

  Her tears left glistening streaks down her face. She couldn’t draw enough breath to speak.

  “It’s not true. You’re wrong. You’re mixing him up with someone else. Ignacio Castro committed suicide.”

  “Your father lied to you. From the start, about everything. Except one thing: your mother’s identity.”

  Theo’s voice changed. “And I don’t know why.”

  “It’s not possible. . . . How do you know all of this?”

  “I’ve been searching for your father for thirty years, Mia. I recognized him in your photo.”

  “You must have made a mistake. Maybe they look alike. You don’t know my father. He’s a wonderful man, he . . .”

  “Stop it, Mia. You wanted to know. Now you know. I had no intention of revealing any of this to you. And I have no idea why I’m doing it now. But I think you have a right to know who this man is.”

  The first-floor lights of the mansion went on. Someone looked out the window.

  “I’d lost all trace of your father for years.”

  “And you want me
to believe you found him again by accident?”

  “Yes. I think about it all the time. It’s very strange. Either it’s destiny or . . .”

  “Destiny? There’s no such thing, Theo.”

  A police car with tinted windows cruised past. Theo started the car, then drove to the junction and under the railway bridge. He decided to take the old road that wound from one town to the next. They were no longer pressed for time.

  “You must have known it was me, Theo! You have access to all that company information.”

  Mia’s emotion turned into nausea. She opened the window to get some air, her mouth drawn into a grimace.

  “So you used me, Theo? That’s it. You knew . . .”

  The car jolted as it crossed a narrow bridge overlooking a marina. The lamps along the landing stage were reflected on the rippled surface of the water like a scattering of stars. Theo stopped the car on the side of the road, pulled up the parking brake, and switched off the engine.

  “No, Mia. You know perfectly well that’s not true.” And he added, as if to chase away his own doubts: “You didn’t know either.”

  A painful silence followed, each of them weighing up the other, uncomfortable.

  “Are you looking for him on the company’s behalf? Do you have to . . . ?”

  Theo cut her off. “No, the company’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “What am I supposed to think, Theo? You’re looking for him just like that, for no reason!”

  The blood had drained from Mia’s face. Her lips had turned bluish, emphasizing the pearly sheen of her skin. Her mouth trembled, hesitating.

  “Where do you know him from?”

  A muted violence struggled to surface, like lava rising. Theo’s voice shook, his skin blotched and red as he tried to control it.

  “El Diablo . . . tortured my brother,” he said in a strangled voice. “Then he killed him.”

  Mia could hardly recognize the man looking at her—the blue-tinted veins protruding from his temples, the dry lips edged with white saliva, the flared nostrils, the bloodshot eyes.

  “He took photos, he filmed it. . . . He showed me everything.”

  The young woman shrank into her seat.