by Caryl Ferey
“Do you want a drink?” he asked.
Jana shook her head. She felt like throwing up. Rubén still had that dreadful mark along his neck and the old madwoman’s blood on his shirt.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he said.
The Mapuche didn’t react; she stood there with her arms crossed, her big, dark eyes in freefall. Keep cool, don’t think about what they might be doing to Paula at this very moment . . . The pipes moaned behind the tiles in the bathroom. Jana listened to the long moan of the water in the pipes, far, very far, from the sobbing of the wind in the grass.
A mixture of blood, water, and organic materials had spilled out on the quilt when Rubén pulled out the apropriadora’s stomach; he had put it down on the ironing table, lukewarm and bloody, as in the courses in forensic medicine, opened the membrane with a disconcerting skill, and using the point of the knife, slit it open lengthwise. The gastric juices had begun to eat away the food, but the balls of paper were still visible among the stale-smelling contents of the stomach. He found seven of them, which he cleaned briefly before taking off with Jana.
The shower finally stopped. A bad dream.
Rubén soon reappeared, barefoot, clad in black pants without a belt and a plum-colored shirt that hugged his shoulder muscles. She felt pathetic in her worn-out shorts, tank top, and old Doc Martens, as if the difference in their ages was to her disadvantage. He filled a glass with cold water from the tap and handed her a pill.
“Take this,” he said. “It’ll help you hold up.”
“What is it?”
“A tranquilizer.”
“I don’t want to be tranquilized.”
“And I don’t want to see you in this state . . . Please.”
He was looking at her in a friendly way again. Jana swallowed the pill with the glass of water without seeing that he was looking at her lovingly. She was still thinking about Paula, about her spangled dreams that were collapsing, about their sleepless night that turned into a nightmare.
“Do you do this sort of thing often?” she asked, getting a grip on herself.
“What?”
“Disembowel old women.”
“No . . . they’re not all so crazy.”
Some kind of balm glistened on Rubén’s neck. He went to the bar to make a pisco sour.
“It would be better for you not to go home,” he said while mixing the ingredients. “Stay here tonight . . . afterward we’ll see.”
A night bus rattled the windows of the office. Rubén filled a glass to the brim, lit a cigarette, and glanced at the bits of paper spread out on the desk. They were almost dry. His hair was dripping on his bruised neck. Poc, poc, a rain of tears over what happened to them.
She came closer.
“What are you doing?”
“A puzzle . . . Anyway, what remains of it.”
Parts of the writing had disappeared as a result of the gastric acid, but the density of the balls of paper had preserved a good half of the content.
“How did the old woman get her hands on these papers?” Jana asked.
“Through the intermediary of María Victoria, I suppose. Or Ossario. Unless she had had them ever since the time of the adoption, and tried to destroy them. That’s what we’re going to find out.”
Rubén started reconstituting the document under the art deco lamp, while Jana watched from outside the circle of light. He didn’t know when the crazy old woman had begun swallowing these precious papers, or how many pieces were missing: he was weaving his fabric, laboriously, fitting together the bits of paper on the table one by one. The minutes passed. Jana yawned in spite of herself.
“You can sleep in my bedroom if you want,” Rubén said. “This is going to take me a while, I think.”
The sculptress was dead on her feet. Probably an effect of the pill, accumulated fatigue, or nerves that were relaxing.
“What about Miguel?” she said quietly. “Do you think they’re going to make him disappear, too?”
“Like all the witnesses to this business,” he replied in a voice that he tried to keep neutral. “You’re one of them.”
“You too.”
“Yes. But I’m not going to let you go like that.”
Jana wasn’t certain that was reassuring. They hadn’t touched each other since their kiss at the base of the aviator, three centuries ago. Absorbed in the puzzle’s game of musical chairs, Rubén was no longer paying attention to her. Names soon appeared, places, then the ESMA’s coat of arms. An identification form, as he’d expected. The one Ossario had shown María Campallo as a proof of her adoption? How had the former paparazzo obtained such a document? He pursued his task, no longer feeling any fatigue: sleep had fled, the world had disappeared into an abyss that took him back thirty-five years. He rotated the debris, established connections. The apartment was silent, hardly disturbed by the rumble of traffic on the airport superhighway beyond the accursed intersection. Jana had curled up on the couch without even taking off her Doc Martens. Another hour went by before he obtained a coherent result.
It was clear that what he had before him was not one but three pages of a single document: three badly printed photocopies of an identification form created at the ESMA and dating from the summer of 1976.
Rubén worked out an initial scenario on the basis of the evidence at his disposal. Ossario had contacted María Victoria to show her the internment form that condemned her adoptive parents, with the goal of getting her to testify in his “Grand Trial,” but the photographer had not followed the paranoiac’s instructions: she had tracked down the laundress to whom her biological brother had been given, with a copy of the document as proof. Miguel being away, his mother had kept the copy, probably promising to show it to her son, to confess to him, one on one. María must have doubted what the old madwoman said; pursuing her search by questioning people in the neighborhood, she had been sent to the La Boca docks, where the transvestite son of the laundress had been turning tricks for years. María then happened on Luz, and had taken her away or made a date to meet at the tango club, without knowing that the killers were tailing her. They had been abducted as they came out of the club.
Rubén mulled over the reassembled fragments of the puzzle. There were gaps, names, dates, or places censored by the time it had spent in Rosa’s stomach, but it still constituted an organizational chart of the military men involved in the kidnapping and sequestration of María Victoria’s parents. The latter’s names were legible: Samuel and Gabriella Verón. Eduardo Campallo’s name was also on the document: the children had been handed over to him on September 21, 1976. The detective remained for a moment hunched over the lamp on the desk, troubled. Despite its condition, he’d never seen such a precise internment form: names, dates, movements, everything was carefully recorded. It would take him hours to inventory it, index the names of all the guilty parties and their accomplices, and compare them with his files. No, this time he wouldn’t be able to handle things by himself. He needed help. Carlos, Anita, the Grandmothers . . .
Old ghosts were roaming around the office when he looked up. Jana had fallen asleep on the red couch in the living room. She was there, hardly six feet away, knocked out by the pill. The curve of her brown legs gleamed in the light of the art deco lamp, a bit of her face, her hair falling over the armrest. Barefoot, he slipped silently to the sofa where she was sleeping off her misery. The Mapuche, curled up like a hunting dog, was holding her arms hugged to her chest, but her sleeping face was that of a child. Muddy tears that had risen from the underworld beaded on her eyelashes. Rubén knelt down beside the little angel and caressed her forehead with the tips of his fingers.
My sweet . . . my sweet little sister . . .
PART TWO
THE SAD NOTEBOOK
1
Franco Díaz had tears in his eyes when he saw the majestic ombus rising against the Argentine sky�
��trees that botany classifies as giant grasses and that are typical of the pampas. The retiree from Colonia hadn’t seen them for how long—fifteen years?
A fervent Catholic and a patriot, Franco Díaz was a man with principles—never regret, never betray. For more than thirty years the Argentine army had been his sole mistress—demanding, faithful. A family was fine for civilians. But as he got older, his early retirement guaranteeing him a comfortable pension, Franco had become attached to the idea of growing old with a woman—a sweet and submissive woman, like his mother; to make him happy, she would have only to respect the order of things. Nothing complicated, he thought. He had retired to Colonia del Sacramento, the Uruguayan port opposite Buenos Aires, hoping to find what he was looking for. He’d had to lower his sights. The ancient colonial city receiving primarily tourists or families in shorts with digital cameras, available women in his age bracket were few, under surveillance, or even atheists, so that after a number of episodic or unhappy experiences, Franco Díaz had ended up forgetting the idea of growing old with a woman.
Perhaps he should have thought of it earlier. Perhaps, too, he had see too many ugly things—women must sense that. Franco had no regrets: what had been done had to be done, and above all he had found in flowers the otherness that was lacking in his life in the barracks.
At first, he thought botany would help him fight loneliness and idleness: better than a hobby, in flowers he had found another time. The time of growing . . . Wild irises from the marshes, gleaming gladiolis, haughty roses or azaleas, flowers would be his redemption.
Franco Díaz wanted to die in peace.
The liver cancer that was gnawing at him was spreading. The doctors he’d consulted in Montevideo gave him hardly six months to live. No one knew. Not even his former superiors. The illness developed in successive crises, more and more violent, and soon nothing would be able to hold it back. Franco was alone with Death, his metastases and his Secret, which was killing him perhaps even more than the cancer.
“Speak, and God will help you,” his friend and confessor at the time told him.
As the last months of his life fizzled out, Franco Díaz had become a mystic. Sometimes he heard It as a result of prayers and ecstatic appeals, when his reason gave way or when the pain in his guts became too much to bear. The Voice counseled him, omniscient and yet so near, more comforting than the morphine tablets: it was the Voice that had given him the idea of hiding his Secret, of letting time do its work. He had planted a ceibo, the Argentine national tree, like a stele, a mausoleum. The world was not yet ready: first, his generation had to pass away. An irony of fate: it was at the moment that Franco Díaz was getting ready to bow out that his past caught up with him.
It had all begun the preceding week, when the retiree had seen unusual things on his street: a gray car and figures prowling around his neighbor’s house. The following day, a man had come to ask him questions, a big, husky man with a strong Argentine accent who claimed to be a friend of Ossario’s passing through the area. Ossario hadn’t opened his shutters for three days, and his car was not there: everything suggested that he had left. The big guy tried to seem friendly, but Franco guessed that he was lying. Ossario never received visits from friends, and his house seemed clearly to be under surveillance. The insurance agent who’d come from Buenos Aires had also lied about his identity. What did all these people have against Ossario? Franco Díaz had sensed danger. Something had filtered through, inevitably, something that concerned him. Blackmail, the extortion of money, putting “revelations” up for bids, the former paparazzo had been capable of anything. Diaz could have looked into it, found out through a traitor or a convert who he was. Familiar with interrogations, Díaz knew that the men who had visited him were professionals, cops or secret agents connected with some office. If the men prowling around his house were sent by his own people, they would have told him. Ossario’s impromptu return and the attack on the house had accelerated everything.
Unlike the former military men who’d been driven out and put their houses in the Florida neighborhood up for quick sale, Díaz fled, leaving everything behind him: his property, his posada on the banks of the river, the precious plants that he’d spent so many years raising and that would fade without him in his secret garden. He crossed the border in his Audi that very evening and slept in Argentina, his beloved country, in a small hotel where he registered under an assumed name. Now he was driving along a tree-shaded road, ill at ease, on the run. “Speak, and God will help you,” his confidant repeated. Yes, but speak to whom? Viola, Camps, Galtieri, Bignone—most of the generals involved in the Process were dead. Who else knew? Who had betrayed them? In this treacherous game, whom could he trust?
Of the men from that time, the only one left was his confessor. And the Voice told him to look for him, so long as he had the strength to do so, and to find him before it was too late.
2
It was Thursday: the sun had returned, the sparrows on the Plaza de Mayo were taking a bath in the fountain at the base of the obelisk while waiting for the Grandmothers to arrive.
They were converging toward the assembly point, two by two or in small groups, shuffling along, the eldest holding the arms of their daughters. They greeted Elena Calderón, who was laying out the association’s flyers, DVDs, and books under the impassive eyes of a police squad—the infamous elite police. Rubén’s mother arranged her pañuelo, which the wind was blowing around, and returned the greeting of her companions in misfortune.
Elena Calderón would never have thought she would share the fate of these women.
Elena was a daughter of the old upper middle class of Buenos Aires, a descendent of the oligarchies that had gotten rich at the end of the nineteenth century, when Argentina, having liquidated its native peoples, had opened itself up to international trade. Her grandfather, an officer who had served under General Roca, had received immense lands as his reward and consolidated his fortune by allying himself with other great families that had divided up the country among themselves. His son Felipe had inherited thousands of acres on which the world’s best beef cattle grazed, fed Europe as it was rebuilding itself, made substantial profits, and woven networks of influence in the various Argentine political groups, whose waltz of coups d’état was orchestrated by the army, which was still closely connected with the government.
The fall of Juan Perón, who after the death of his wife Evita went about in public with a thirteen-year-old girl, changed nothing. Coddled by her family, Elena had grown up in a middle-class household in La Recoleta where, once her beauty was recognized, she very soon found herself courted by the most eligible suitors in the capital. But unlike her brothers and sisters who sacrificed themselves to the rites of passage of their social class—for girls, parties to celebrate their fifteenth birthdays, balls to the sound of boleros and an exacerbated romanticism—the youngest daughter dreamed of emancipation. While reading in the Querandi, a smoke-filled cafe where the counterculture youth met, Elena had met a young poet and polemicist, Daniel Calderón, whose verbal skill competed with his fiery eyes: the lightning bolt made a direct hit on both of them and they were inseparable from then on.
Two years later, Rubén was born, and then Elsa.
A progressive, like every good Argentine petit-bourgeois or intellectual, Daniel had managed to slip through the nets of the ever-present military censorship. His poems began to be translated abroad and his wife encouraged him to write, sure that the best was still to come. Daniel Calderón had the duende, the gift of enchantment. Someday everyone would be like her, dazzled by his personality and his power of expression, this smile that by its luminous peace disarmed everyone—Elena was a woman in love.
And then came the Golpe, on March 24, 1976.
Videla, Massera, Agosti. Because of her social origins, Elena thought she was protected from the generals who, each representing his respective corps, erected themselves as guardians of morali
ty and Christian order: the famous National Reorganization Process. Despite the life she had chosen, Elena represented the old right wing of the country, which sometimes supported Peronism. She was very quickly disillusioned. Foreign creative works were outlawed, publications were put under surveillance, there was an auto-da-fe of books on history and culture in general that were deemed to be too influenced by “Marxism,” and the literary landscape dissolved in the widespread terror and self-censorship.
Books on sociology, philosophy, psychology, politics, and even mathematics soon became impossible to find. The review and then Daniel Calderón’s books met with the same fate. According to the government, subversives would disguise themselves “as ordinary men-in-the-street,” which justified no-holds-barred repression.
Each case of disappearance constituted a universe of its own, an inexpressible totality of pain and an irreversible upheaval for those who remained.
Fear: every Argentine became a potential target, and was concerned first of all to ensure his own security and that of those close to him.
Ignorance: the media did not mention the kidnappings, ratified the official communiqués issued by the police and the military, according to which the ghastly daily discoveries were the result of conflicts with subversives, or even between subversives.
Confusion: hadn’t this violence begun before the coup d’état, amid the disorder and corruption of the Peronist regime? Hadn’t the guerrillas fought against the preceding military dictatorship, hadn’t they refused to play according to the rules of democracy and carried violence to inadmissible extremes?
In Buenos Aires, the repression was terrible, the atmosphere sordid. People avoided greeting each other in the street, speaking to strangers on pain of being accused of conspiring or arrested for having given a light to a passerby. Elena and Daniel temporized. Something had to be done, but what? Who could resist the military? The Church? It was in bed with the military. The political parties? They’d been muzzled. The intellectuals, the journalists? They were in the line of fire.