Mapuche

by Caryl Ferey

  “We went hunting in the forest. I was the best shot, for your information. Why, are you planning on shooting people?”

  “I hope not.”

  The hiding place was underneath the old chest of drawers, a false plank that followed the lines of the wooden floor. That was where Rubén kept unregistered weapons of several calibers, cash extorted from former oppressors, a rifle and its sights, a defensive grenade, and handcuffs. Intrigued, Jana bent over the hiding place. He took out the Colt .45, two boxes of bullets, a telescoping billy club, a fighting knife, and half the bundle of cash. For her, he selected a .38 caliber revolver that would not jam. Afterward, he put the chest back in place.

  “Are you ready?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you all day.”

  Rubén made the rounds of the room three times without seeing anything suspect. He picked up the bag, which had belonged to his father.

  “Let’s go while the coast is clear.”

  *

  A Colombian dance standard was playing on the corner, being pumped out the open windows of an overloaded VW Polo: kids who were going to a party. Rubén beeped open the door of his car and followed the sculptress down the sidewalk.

  It hadn’t been hard to convince Jo Prat to provide them with a hideout. María Victoria was carrying his child, she had been murdered—a daughter of desaparecidos—and his own aunt Noemi had been kidnapped during the Process, and so had cousins he’d never seen except in photos and that the old people were still weeping for, people who hadn’t mourned, without bodies, devastated by this absence that was more cruel than death itself. Gurruchaga 3180: the stairway on the left led to the upper floor, there was no other. Rubén waited a moment before ringing the bell at the apartment—they could hear music behind the reinforced door—Hint-Ez3kiel, post-rock with devastating riffs. The singer promptly opened the door. He too seemed to have emerged from a tomb.

  “Well, well,” he said, seeing the couple on the landing.

  Calderón was accompanied by a young, slender brunette in an urban guerrilla outfit, as flat as a flounder under her black tank top—a Mapuche, to judge by her facial features, completely ravishing.

  “Jo,” he said, introducing himself with a jowly smile.

  “Jana.”

  He shook the Indian’s hand, invited her to leave her bag in the vestibule, and turned down the sound. Rubén closed the door behind them while she looked around the musician’s loft—a living area with a high ceiling and a brick bar in the middle, a stairway of glass and steel with a fishing line as a guardrail, art photos on the walls, musical instruments, a couch and Japanese furniture, farther on a collage by Dao Anh Viet.

  “Nice place,” Jana said.

  The rocker seemed a little cheesy with his made-up eyes and leather pants, but all in all still attractive despite his rolls of fat.

  “Would you like something?” he asked with a thoughtfulness Rubén had never seen him display before.

  Jo preferred women to men.

  “I don’t know,” she said pointedly, “to see the Piazza Navona in Rome, especially Borromini’s fountain, with his muse wringing a swan’s neck. Do you know baroque art?”

  “I’d love to learn about it. Nothing more, shall we say, accessible?”

  “Do you have the means to blow up the banks and oil companies?”

  “Not at hand,” he conceded. “But I can make a song about it for peace in the world, if you want.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Do you believe in that sort of thing?”

  “You’ll see, when you get older it’s consoling.”

  A big white cat was observing the intruders from the glass stairway, its eyes two golden balls on full alert.

  “You don’t have anything against old tomcats, I hope?”

  “Not so long as they shit in their litter boxes,” she replied, peering at the animal. “What’s his name?”

  “Ledzep. Of course, he’s no longer young, but after the first twenty-four hours he’ll be eating out of your hand.”

  “You don’t have bowls?”

  The musician smiled before turning to Calderón.

  “There’s a couch upstairs, you can just sleep there,” he informed him, before pointing to the hall that led to the right. I’ve set you up in my bedroom,” he told Jana. “There’s an adjacent shower and a Jacuzzi upstairs, if you want to take a bath: the view is very nice if you like blue sky.”

  “We’re putting you out,” Jana interjected, not used to being hit on.

  “I’m used to living in a hotel,” Jo assured her.

  “A stroke of luck.”

  “To see you again?”

  “You mean see me alive?”

  Rubén let them fence, and shooing Ledzep, who had taken refuge on the steps, went up the stairway with his baggage. The upstairs room had a sloping roof, with a low wooden table on casters, a sofa bed covered in white fabric, a bathroom with mosaics, and a large bay window that gave on the terrace: a sail was spread over a teak table surrounded by flourishing plants. He put his bag down on the sofa bed and reevaluated the places he’d inspected that afternoon. A barbecue for making asado, an outside shower and a bamboo screen that separated it from the neighbors, whose terrace could be seen down below. The front door to the loft was reinforced and, except for Carlos and Anita, no one knew that Prat had hired him to find María Campallo. The evening breeze reminded him that he hadn’t slept three hours in the past two days. He sorted his things on the couch without seeing the cat hiding underneath them, put the computer on the table and plugged it in, heard the front door slam, and repressed a series of yawns before the digital icons appeared in their places.

  Bare feet soon came up the stairs: Rubén paid hardly any attention to her, absorbed as he was by the blue reflection of liquid crystals. Jana looked over his shoulder, an immaculate towel in her hand.

  “I’m going to take a bath.”

  “O.K.”

  But he wasn’t listening. Jana disappeared toward the Jacuzzi, while data flowed over the computer screen. Eaten away by gastric acid, illegible or missing, several of the oppressors’ names had been irretrievably lost—the chaplain on duty if there was one, the obstetrician, some of the interrogators. Among the usable names, Rubén had listed Victor Heintze, Pedro Menez, and Manuel Camponi, the successive guards in charge of the parents who disappeared. The first two appeared in his files (rubric “deceased”), while the third had gone into exile in Italy in the mid-1980s. The principal actors in the fate of the Veróns remained.

  According to the copy of the document, Samuel, the biological father of Miguel and María Victoria, was tortured every day until his wife Gabriella gave birth on September 19, 1976. The couple had been extracted three days earlier, but strangely, Samuel and Gabriella Verón had been shot only two days later, on September 21. The notation of the place where the execution took place had unfortunately been destroyed, as had the name of the officer assigned to the task: all that could be deciphered was part of the name of the petty officer involved (“ . . . do Montañez”) who accompanied him. The latter did not appear in any of his files. Rubén pursued his research in the Internet phone book: Leonardo, Fernando, Orlando, Eduardo, Ricardo, Bernardo, Alfredo, he ran through dozens of Montañezes scattered all over the country. After a while, Jana emerged from the Jacuzzi, a large white towel wound around her torso and hips.

  Wet, her hair looked longer, falling over her naked shoulders. She saw the traveling bag and the detective gear, sat down without a word, and curled up on the sofa bed.

  “You O.K.?” Rubén said mechanically.

  Since she did not answer, he looked up from the screen. Her almond-shaped eyes were distressed, dark. Sad. No dream in them.

  “Why did you kiss me the other night?” she asked him point-blank.

  He sighed a little.

 
“I wanted to, probably.”

  Jana looked at him from under her wet locks.

  “What does ‘probably’ mean?”

  Rubén did not reply. He’d been practicing for almost thirty-five years. Jana pulled her towel a little tighter, a slender defense against the fire that was consuming her.

  “Well?” she persisted.

  “I’m forty-seven years old, baby doll,” he finally said. “I’m afraid that all my responses are bad.”

  “I’m a sculptress, I can give you different ones.”

  Rubén could smell her soaped skin. He lit a cigarette to hide his embarrassment, but it didn’t work.

  “I’ve fucked rattlesnakes to survive,” Jana said, showing her pretty teeth. “That doesn’t mean that I’ll kiss just anybody. My friend has disappeared, you’re my only hope of finding her, and you don’t say anything to me, you don’t show me anything except a mysterious Great Silence that reeks of the cosmic void for miles around. What’s your problem, Calderón? You kiss me at dawn as if I were all you had in the world, and then you leave me standing here like a crane in front of my bits of scrap iron, come back and whisk me away to the home of an old madwoman whom you cut up before my eyes before locking me up amid your dear desaparecidos, forbidding me to go out: what do you take me for, a good-for-nothing princess? Don’t I deserve at least an explanation, a couple of tender words to let me know where I stand in this mess? Do you think I’m a throwaway girl, a simple Kleenex you can use to wipe away your moments of abandon?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “With you, it never seems to be the point,” she said, stifling her rage. “What’s in your heart, apart from dead people? You’re living in the past, Rubén, to the point that you are incapable of imagining the future. You’re the one who has lost your senses along the way, winka, not me. You’ve lost your ability to smell shit, which is what makes us different from all those sons of bitches. I have faith in what I’m doing, in what keeps me going. Now it’s you. Because we still have a chance of finding Miguel and because no one has ever kissed me so sweetly.”

  Jana kept her eyes on him, wrapped in the towel, her copper-colored legs folded under her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what, for having kissed me? I don’t believe you, old man.”

  “We’re on the run.”

  “What does that change, the color of my eyes?”

  Jana wanted him to take her in his arms as he had the other night in the yard and to run her heart through with his damned forget-me-not eyes so she might die of him once and for all, since fate had reduced them to one another: then the BlackBerry on the coffee table rang. The detective saw Anita’s name on the screen and answered. The discussion was short—they had a one-hour window.

  Jana was still looking at him from the sofa bed, her jade-colored hair dripping on her thighs.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  It was 11:30 P.M.

  “Where?”

  “To the morgue.”

  *

  Anita Barragan was not really a sex maniac; was it her fault if men, who were usually so proud of their reasonableness, lost their heads over a pair of tits? What did that remind them of, she laughed, their mothers? Her tendency to relieve the little darlings being equaled only by the obstinate resistance to her charms on the part of the only bachelor she found really attractive, Anita preferred to have affairs with married men that normally went nowhere. One would never have expected Guillermo Piezza, a hirsute forensic scientist fifteen years her junior who was completing his training at the Morgue Judicial, to have been her lover. He didn’t plan on getting married, and at the age of forty, Anita thought herself too common to inspire youthful ardor, but the intern must have liked old maids who handled sex and humor with all the contradictory guile of a depraved neurotic (that was how she defined herself to sugar-coat the pill). Guillermo sometimes sodomized her in the upstairs toilet, an exciting little game without consequences that would go on as long as no one felt injured by it. Anita didn’t expect anything from him: Guillermo couldn’t refuse her anything.

  The old Buenos Aires Institute of Forensic Science, which used to be adjacent to the medical school, had been transferred to the Avenida Comodoro Py, not far from the Retiro and the new port. Opened with great ceremony in Antepuerto, a new zone filled with public buildings, the Morgue Judicial, a resolutely modern structure, contrasted with the Mussolini-style austerity of the past century; a large marble hall sheltered the reception area, the cafeteria, the educational sector, and a private space reserved for victims’ families. The upper floors—containing laboratories, forensic clinics—were reached by a two elevators, one reserved for the public and employees, and the other exclusively for the medical staff, corpses, and authorized persons.

  Anita was waiting in front of the ambulance entrance, worrying about being caught there, when Rubén arrived.

  “Did anyone see you?” she whispered.

  “Apart from a few spy satellites, no.”

  “Ho, ho, ho.” Anita pinned the badge Guillermo had given her on her lapel. “Come on, let’s not waste any time.”

  With its long marble corridor, soft lighting, balustrades and glass staircases, the smooth architecture of the Forensic Institute was more reminiscent of the international airport than of a morgue. A little Bolivian woman was distractedly mopping the floor, a white mask over her tanned face, which she hardly raised as they passed by. Anita walked fast under the filtered neon lights: Rubén had no business being in the lair of the forensic police, and her job was absolutely on the line here.

  “The body was prepared for burial,” she whispered as she guided the detective through the labyrinth of the high tech bunker. “Damn, the funeral service is going to start any minute now, and it’s crazy to be here!”

  Rubén avoided the surveillance camera at the corner of the corridor and followed the blonde to the cold storage area.

  “We have five minutes, no more,” Anita said as she opened the door.

  The room exhaled a combination of ammonia and deodorant for public toilets. The aseptic white walls, a harsh light, and a row of compartments on the right, dead bodies classified by their order of arrival. Number 23: Anita pulled out the aluminum drawer and immediately looked away.

  Rubén cleared his mind as he approached the monster. Muñoz, who had just finished the autopsy, had tried to make the corpse a little more presentable, but with half her head torn off, the state of her skin and her empty eye sockets, poor María was unrecognizable. Rubén swallowed as he thought about the self-portraits hanging in her loft, and better understood why the family was rushing the funeral.

  “Four minutes,” Anita whispered, looking at the wall.

  The skin was withered and faded, the skull had been cut behind the frontal lobes, rather cleanly despite the gauze bandages. Probably a boat’s propeller. The rest of the face was a horror. Not only the eyes but also the mouth had been eaten away by whelks. María Victoria Campallo. A diaphanous, almost milky body, round breasts, a slightly rounded belly, sewn back up in haste.

  “The windstorm that hit the coast caused some damage in the ports and marinas,” Anita said, keeping her distance. “But according to Maritime Affairs no shipwreck was reported in the Río de la Plata area.”

  Rubén nodded. The cadaver’s paleness indicated that it had been in the water for a long time, several days to judge by the state of the skin, which was beginning to rot in contact with the air. No sign of a bullet wound, a knife blow, or a cigarette burn.

  “What does Muñoz’s report say?”

  “If I knew that I wouldn’t be cooling my butt here,” his friend replied.

  Above all, it was the odor that was boring into his head. Rubén put on a pair of surgical gloves and handed a pair to Anita.

  “Here, help me turn her over.”

  Anita
blew aside her blond locks, a nervous tic she had. They grabbed María’s corpse and flipped it over on its stomach. No visible lesions, despite multiple apparent fractures. The body must have floated to the surface and then been ground up by a freighter, ferry, or trawler, whose propeller had cut off the top of her skull. Rubén forgot the ugliness of death and put his gloved hands on the drowned woman’s back. His senses very quickly became more acute, as if the lessons in forensics taught by Raúl were coming back to him through his fingertips: carefully, he felt the bones, followed the uneven shapes of the fractures. The jawbones were broken, the clavicle, the ribs.

  “The results of the toxicological tests won’t be in for several days, but Guillermo has some stuff for you,” Anita said to hurry things up. “Let’s get out of here, please.”

  The young intern on duty that night knew Calderón’s reputation as a troublemaker, like himself, but to hell with his superiors, for whom he had only moderate respect. The future forensic scientist had stoned the police’s armored cars during the crisis, and when those responsible for the bankruptcy fled from the rooftops by helicopter, he’d flipped them the bird, along with thousands of other bare-chested longhairs. Guillermo had not assisted Muñoz during the autopsy, but he had cleaned up after the heavyweight had done his work. In particular, he had found two X-rays in the waste bins, rejects that he had made off with before they could be destroyed.

  Rubén put the pictures on the lighted screen that lit the small room where the intern had been waiting for them. Certain fractured areas were not clear. He spent a long time examining them. It was not only the jawbones, the clavicle, and the ribs that had been caved in, but also the femoral heads and the heel. María’s body seemed to have imploded.

  The characteristics of the fractures left no doubt. María Campallo had not been beaten with iron bars or crushed by the hull of a ferry while she was floating on the surface: she had been thrown out of an airplane.

  “What is it?” Anita asked.

  Rubén paled. The Death Flights.