by Caryl Ferey
Rufino, a little place somewhere out on the pampas. Jana had taken reckless risks but she had done good work.
“Pisco sour?” she asked.
Rubén emerged from his lethargy. Juicer, lemon, sugar, shaker, alcohol, egg; Jana had arranged all the fixings at the end of the table.
“I’m going to get the ice cubes,” he said, getting up.
“They’re already there.”
A bowl, hidden under the plants: a very precise approach. The two of them set about making the cocktail, filled the glasses with alcohol-laced foam, and drank to this special day. The bamboo swayed in the evening breeze that was blowing between the buildings. The tension relaxed; they drank and forgot the investigation, the threats that hung over them, gave the rest of the soy steaks to Ledzep, and smoked to prolong the intoxication. The stars came out one by one over the terrace. Rubén realized that he knew nothing about her.
“Where did you grow up?” he asked from the bench across from her.
“In Chubut Province,” Jana replied.
“In the Mapuche territories?”
“Yes.” She picked up one of the rose petals on the tablecloth and began to tear it up with great care. “But we were expelled from out lands,” she added. “An Italian multi-national . . . ”
“United Colors?”
“Yes. We must not have been the right one.”
The irony didn’t fully conceal her bitterness.
“Is that why you came to Buenos Aires?”
“No, I came to do sculpture,” she said. “It was the machi, the shaman of the community where we took refuge, who encouraged me to sculpt my dreams when I was little. I began like that, sculpting my nocturnal visions in araucaria wood. Art school came later.”
Jana kept her distance—slippery terrain.
“Did the machi want to transmit his powers to you?” Rubén asked.
“No, it was my sister who stuck to that. But that’s another story. Defending the Mapuche identity doesn’t mean the same thing for them as it does for me. The force that binds me to the Land is less organic: I use symbols, materials. Does this interest you?”
“Do you take me for a dolt?”
She smiled slyly.
Few Argentines were aware of the situation of the people who were still called “Indians.” Jana talked to him about a world of poverty and defiance, of villages lost in the foothills of the Andes where development was limited to a few tractors, and tribal councils were sometimes corrupt and sold off parcels of the ancestral lands that had been reconquered at considerable cost, a world in which activists disappeared or got killed without an investigation being made, a world of people who didn’t interest anyone. Rubén listened, attentive to the variations in her voice, which betrayed her growing emotion. Jana hadn’t had to wait for Furlan or courses on the history of art to know that Mapuche culture had its place alongside the others: for her, asserting the Mapuches’ identity and knowledge was not so much a matter of asserting the possibility of another world—with finance as a weapon of mass destruction, it was essentially already dead—as a pact of resistance signed with the Earth. The winkas had stolen the Mapuche territories, but they understood nothing about the ongoing dialogue that bound them to the world. Their ignorance would be her main focus.
Rubén was thinking again about the monumental sculpture in the middle of her workshop, and began to fit together little pieces of it.
“And you have never wanted to return to your community?”
“No.” She shook her head. “No.”
“Why?”
Jana crushed the last rose petal with her fingertips.
“Because it’s too hard to leave it. And then I’ve already told you: that’s another story.”
Her eyes had become sad, as they were when he’d found her standing at his door. She was hiding something. Maybe the main thing.
“Can I put my head on your lap?” Jana asked.
Rubén suggested that she lie down next to him on the bench. The glasses were empty, the wind cooler after midnight. She smoked, looking at the stars, the nape of her neck resting on his thighs. With the trip to Rufino, tomorrow would be a long day, but neither of them wanted to sleep.
“How about you, haven’t you ever thought of getting married, Sherlock Holmes?” Jana asked offhandedly. “Having kids?”
Rubén shrugged.
“You must have had a woman in your life?”
His sister.
“No. No woman, at least not the way you mean it.”
“A guy?”
Rubén caressed her cheek.
“The missing person posters in your office, the photo off to the side, a young man with a beard and his pals in front of the Eiffel Tower. Who is that, your father?”
The sepia face of Daniel Calderón, surrounded by his comrades in arms—another Argentine poet and the exiled publisher who also translated him.
“Yes. It’s the last photo I have of him. A Parisian publisher gave it to me. My father was kidnapped when he returned from France.”
“I read that. Is that why you became a detective, to avenge him?”
“Avenging the dead doesn’t bring them back,” Rubén replied evasively.
“The living are not always better off.”
“That’s true.”
The candles in the jars were going out one after the other. Jana raised her head—it was difficult to see if he was talking about himself, with the obscurity of the roofs. They were both pursuing the same thing, whether ancestors or desaparecidos: ghosts. And with a poet of that caliber for a father, she thought, Rubén must like stories. Jana told him the story of the Selk’nam, the cousins of the Patagonian giants, from whom she descended through her great-grandmother, Angela, the last representative of that vanished people in Tierra del Fuego. She told about Angela’s old, wrinkled hands that she caressed when she was little, like crevices, the knife she’d inherited from her ancestors, and the secret of the Hain, which the matriarch had revealed to her on her deathbed. The Hain ceremony was a veritable cosmic drama, staged by men to frighten women and keep their power over them. For this ceremony the Selk’nam impersonated fantastic characters, putting on terrifying, extraordinary costumes, those of the spirits that composed their myths, costumes that made them literally unrecognizable; some characters proved to be violent, others ludicrous or obscene. The women, who knew nothing about the men’s disguise, reacted accordingly, hooting and trembling with fear as they collected the children under animal hides. The oldest children were taken away from their mothers and subjected to three days of hell, humiliated, beaten, and chased through the snow and the forest by the most evil spirits. In this cosmogonic drama, Jana was particularly fascinated by Kulan, “the terrifying woman.” A spirit of flesh and blood, Kulan descended at night from the sky to torment her masculine victims. The men announced her arrival by singing, the women and children hid. The spirit of Kulan, young and slender, was played by a kloketen, a child or adolescent girl whose breasts had not grown, her head camouflaged under a strange conical mask, with a white band around her body as far as the crotch, which was covered by a G-string. Kulan kidnapped men at night to make them her sexual slaves, kept them a week or more, and no one heard anything about them. The women begged the heavens, but the ogress’s appetite was insatiable: the men returned to the camp stumbling, exhausted, emptied out by Kulan’s excesses, fed only on birds’ eggs, their hair covered with celestial excrement.
Rubén smiled as he caressed Jana’s head, which she had lain on his lap, enjoying the magic of this moment that they both knew was utterly ephemeral.
“What is the secret, then?” he asked.
“The secret of the Hain? I’ll tell you that the next time!”
Her dark eyes outshone the stars.
“We’ll never leave each other again, if I understand correctly,” Rubén s
aid.
“No.” Jana was no longer smiling. “We will never leave each other again.”
Never.
6
Montañez—does that name mean anything to you? Ricardo Montañez?”
“No. Who is he?”
“A former petty officer attached to the ESMA,” Luque replied. “Montañez served over there in 1976 and I’ve just been informed that his military record has disappeared. Someone entered illegally into the Navy archives, an Indian woman, to judge by the surveillance video cameras. Jana Wenchwn. She left her papers at the reception desk. No police record. Wenchwn—that name means nothing to you, either?”
“No.”
“She’s suspected of having fled with Calderón. I don’t know why she wanted that military record, but since Montañez served at the ESMA, I thought it might interest you.”
“Uh-huh. You did the right thing.”
Still holding the receiver to his ear, Torres thought it over. Calderón worked for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and those nosy old bitches would move heaven and earth. Their style.
“This Montañez,” he asked, “do you know what happened to him?”
“Manager of a hotel in Rufino, according to what we know now. A remote village along Route 7. Remains to be seen what he has to say.”
A knowing silence. The line was secure, the threat vague. The chief of police took the chance.
“Should I tell . . . ”
“No, no,” Torres interrupted. “He doesn’t know anything about it. I’m going to inform the general. If anyone knows Montañez, he’s the one. I’ll get back to you afterward.”
“All right, Mr. Torres.”
“Goodbye, sir.”
“Goodbye.”
Fernando Luque hung up, pensively. Torres had put him in deep shit, up to his neck, and he could no longer back out. The head of the elite police rang his secretary.
“Sylvia, get me Customs.”
*
Beyond the outer suburbs of Greater Buenos Aires, the wind was blowing over the plains, the wind the gauchos called the pampero. The herds used to be so large there that when enemy ships approached the city, its residents released the cattle whose horns would serve as ramparts. The pampas where they grazed still extended as far as the Andes, over five hundred miles, an “amorphous and harmless country, uniform and boring, like the representation of nothingness” that nourished, according to the writer Ernesto Sabato, Argentine literature’s metaphysical imagination. The conquistadors had already sought in vain the fabled silver mines mentioned in legends that had given this depressive El Dorado its name: Argentina, a deserted land of grass and lakes that is now traversed by a paved highway that seems to run straight as an arrow.
Rubén was thinking about his father on Route 7, deciphering the flashing headlights of oncoming trucks that were signaling to each other in the distance. Jana was dozing in the passenger seat. As the miles rolled by he regularly checked the rearview mirror. They had passed a police roadblock not long before, as they left the province. The motorcycle cop had demanded the car’s registration and written down their names before letting them drive on. Their weapons were hidden under the seat, and their bags were in the trunk, along with the items they’d bought that morning in a suburban shopping center. They still had over two hundred miles to cover before arriving in Rufino. He’d opened the window to smoke as he drove, lulled by the hum of the engine. Jana finally awoke; she wedged the soles of her Doc Martens on the glove compartment, her mind still hazy.
“You O.K.?”
The sun shone brilliantly beyond the dusty windshield, fields rolled away as far as the eye could see, green oceans dotted with brown cattle.
“Uh-huh,” she replied faintly.
Her head bouncing against the side window, she had dreamed about Miguel. The memory left a bad taste in her mouth.
“I’d like a cup of coffee,” she said.
A gas station came into view alongside the road. They filled up at the pump while trucks lined up for diesel, and stretched their legs as they watched the semis roar by. A dusty wind was sweeping across the station’s pavement, crushed by the midday heat.
“I’m going to take a turn driving,” Jana said to emerge from the mist of her dream.
“Later on, if you want.”
“I drive better than you do.”
Rubén also couldn’t care less about cars. His, a Hyundai, ran fine. He ran his index finger over the Mapuche’s lips, counting up the kisses he’d left there for her.
“What would you like to eat?” he asked.
“Guess.”
A smell of soggy fries permeated the service station’s snack area. They drank a cup of coffee from the machine as they observed the hovel where the truck drivers were grumbling, furtively kissed as they were going toward the toilets, and met again in the shop. They paid for the gas at the counter covered with chocolate-covered junk and bought some more or less fresh vacuum-wrapped empanadas to take with them. They were sitting down outside in the shade of a yellowing advertising umbrella when Rubén received an SMS from Anita. A laconic message: “The Old Man is O.K.”
“What does that mean?”
“That we’ll soon be able to track down the cell phone of the pilot, Del Piro.”
Ten minutes later Jana, reinvigorated, took the wheel: she put on the Jesus Lizard CD she’d borrowed from the apartment, turned onto the highway, and followed the exhaust of the trucks polluting the blue skies. “Goat.” Chacobuco, Junín, Vedia, the towns flashed past like explosions as they drove along Route 7.
*
Just a stopping point on the road to Mendoza, the little town of Rufino lived in slow motion, its cruising speed. A soybean processing plant with smoking chimneys provided most of the town’s activity, the rest being limited to: a couple of service stations where heavily-loaded semis gathered; a few shops with Far West display windows; and two hotels on the main street, which was almost deserted even though it was a Saturday evening. Neither of the hotels was called La Rosada. Worn-out after hours on the road, Jana and Rubén ate in the restaurant of the less depressing of the hotels. The young waitress seemed bored to death, her breasts almost popping out of her low-cut blouse in the hope that someone would get her out of this dead end: according to her, La Rosada was on the outskirts of town, beyond the traffic circle that took the truck drivers back to the main highway. The girl’s eyes, at first pleasant, had turned bittersweet.
A narrow paved road full of potholes led off to the north; following the waitress’s directions, they drove past the BP station with faded paint and went on half a mile farther. Soon they saw La Rosada’s sign among the bushes; it was shabby and seemed centuries old. Jana parked the Hyundai in the graveled lot. Empty parking sheds were lined up behind the building, one of them closed with a blue plastic tarp. They got out and glanced briefly around, looking in vain for the entrance to the hotel.
“Strange place,” Jana said.
Rubén bent down in front of the shed covered with the blue tarp and saw the wheels of a car poking out.
“Good evening!” someone sang out behind them.
A man with a craggy face was approaching them. He was wearing a moth-eaten wool sweater flared out over his short legs, a pair of baggy sweatpants, and worn-out sandals with holey socks of different colors. He sized up the Indian woman and the white man accompanying her, and smiled, showing his remaining teeth.
“Are there two of you? It’s a hundred and fifty pesos a room,” he announced valiantly. “Half an hour, huh?” he added with a complicitous wink.
A toenail black with dirt was poking out of his green sock. The couple looked at him cautiously, but the man didn’t get flustered.
“If you want to stay an hour, or longer, I can give you a special price! Come on,” he said with jovial impatience, “a hundred pesos.”
Jana turned to the open shed and saw a little sign in the form of a red heart crudely taped to the door at the back, which must lead to a dinky room. La Rosada was a hotel used by prostitutes and unfaithful husbands who came there to relieve the boredom of the great plains.
“Are you Ricardo Montañez?” Rubén asked with a grimace.
“Hell, no!” the dirty dwarf retorted. “He’s the boss, I’m just the manager of the sheds, Paco! As for the rooms in the hotel, we can make a deal: how about two hundred pesos for the whole night?”
Paco was wearing a wig so tacky that it looked more like a cap. The dark lines around his eyes made him resemble a sad panda, and his brain also seemed to be masticating bamboo.
“Where is he, the big boss?” Rubén growled.
“At his place,” Paco replied, pointing to the house behind the trees.
Lights were coming on at dusk, partly hidden by a high, thick hedge. The manager of the highway brothel stared at the Indian woman, met the oblique glance of the big, brown-haired man who was inspecting the place in an inconvenient way, and went all out.
“Fifty! Fifty pesos for an hour!”
The dolt. Rubén took the lout by the mop that served him as a tunic, and breathed into his drunken face:
“You’re coming with us, Don Juan.”
“Hey! You can’t just go to Mr. Montañez’s place like that!” Paco gurgled as he was dragged over the gravel. “It’s private! Hey! It’s private!”
“Shut up, I told you.”
A small home appeared, a single-story house covered with ivy, invisible from the road. A string of lights and a wisteria decorated the front door, but the windows were closed.