Mapuche

by Caryl Ferey

  “Does Montañez have a wife or children?”

  “Divorced her, I think.”

  “What business is he in?”

  “The hotel!”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know,” the manager of the sheds stammered. “The rooms . . . I just take care of the rooms!”

  A nocturnal bird chirped in the branches. Rubén pushed the guy toward the porch and handed the .45 to Jana.

  “If this pile of lice tries to run away, shoot him in the foot.”

  “O.K.”

  Paco looked around him like a seagull in front of prey washed up on the beach.

  “What? Are you nuts or what? Whattya going to do with . . . ”

  “You’ll get another bullet in your ass if you do anything stupid,” Rubén whispered to him. “Now ring.”

  Paco’s short legs were trembling under his rags. He rang, several times. The sporadic noise of trucks could be heard in the distance, insects were circling under the wisteria, but no one came to the door. It was open: Rubén pushed the wigged dwarf in front of them, ordering him to keep his mouth closed. A dark hall lit by candles led to a white double door with gilt reliefs. There was an odor of jasmine in the hall, where the candles flickered. Paco walked cautiously on the pink marble floor, giving off a foul odor amid the incense. The voices became more audible behind the gilding of the double door: a woman’s moans, languorous and punctuated by unmistakable cries. Their eyes met, stunned. The double door was locked: Rubén broke the lock with a powerful kick and shoved Paco into the middle of the room with the same violence.

  It wasn’t a swingers’ party for the leading figures in Rufino, and still less an orgy with deluxe whores getting paid per moan: Ricardo Montañez was alone in the middle of the room, naked as a jaybird, a glass of ice-cold champagne nearby. A giant screen connected to a computer faced the bubbling Jacuzzi under the speakers, from which wailing orgasms were roaring. A girl in garters was exhibiting herself on the king-size screen, clitoris wet and pubes shaved, in a clichéd brothel setting. A devotee of cybersex, Montañez was communicating with the performers on a site that offered, at the rate of fifty pesos for ten minutes, erotic stimulation of all kinds: the girls responded to their customers’ orders by typing short texts, moaning on cue. Montañez saw his employee on all fours on the acrylic animal hides, the couple accompanying him, and, after a moment of shared stupefaction, reacted.

  “What are you doing here? It’s . . . it’s private here!”

  In his sixties and fattened up by business meals, Ricardo Montañez had a soft, milky body lathered with fragrant oils, short-sighted brown eyes, and a elephantine belly that almost concealed his child’s penis: an immature penis, not ten years old.

  Rubén approached him while Jana turned off the sound. Ashamed, furious, Montañez stood up in his birthday suit and rushed toward the silk dressing gown lying on the bed.

  “It’s . . . it’s a violation of my home!” he protested.

  Ricardo Montañez had gained over a hundred pounds since his youth in the military, but it was indeed the former petty officer.

  “Listen, big guy,” Rubén began, confronting him. “I’m looking into a double murder that took place under the dictatorship: Samuel and Gabriella Verón. I know that you were serving at the ESMA at that time, and I also know that you took part in the couple’s transfer and killing. September 1976. A couple whose children had been kidnapped.”

  “Who . . . who are you?” the brothel’s owner asked angrily.

  He looked around him, saw only a video that suddenly seemed obscene, and his sheepish employee.

  “Don’t expect anyone to help you,” Rubén warned him.

  “But . . . ”

  “I don’t give a shit about your sexual problems, Montañez. I just want to know who the officer was that accompanied you that night, and where you buried the bodies.”

  The fat man pulled his dressing gown tighter around him, not knowing what to do.

  “Either you talk or we’ll have to cut off your little worm,” the Indian woman said.

  “It wasn’t me . . . I . . . I was just the driver . . . It’s ancient history.”

  “Not for us. Who was the officer assigned to extract the couple?”

  Ricardo was sweating heavily under his makeup. Rubén grabbed him by the collar.

  “You hear what I’m saying to you?”

  “I don’t know anything!” Montañez yelped. “I was never told. He . . . he wasn’t at the ESMA. Or I’d never heard of him. I don’t know anything, I swear!”

  “Where are the bodies buried?”

  “I . . . I don’t remember anymore.”

  “Where?”

  Montañez began to choke.

  “In the Andes . . . near the Chilean border.”

  “Where in the Andes?”

  “A pass!” the obese man breathed. “I don’t know any more!”

  Paco backed toward the door, staring with fear at the scarlet face of his boss, whom the big brown-haired guy was manhandling.

  “Stay where you are,” Jana whispered to him, giving him a kick.

  “A pass!” the boss said hoarsely. “Near Puente del Inca! In . . . in that area!”

  The former petty officer was beginning to suffocate. Rubén relaxed his grip.

  “You’re going to take us there,” he announced in a cavernous voice.

  “Wh . . . what?”

  “To the pass where you buried them.”

  Montañez’s entire body was trembling; it seemed to be deflating.

  “Huh? But . . . it’s over five hundred miles from here!” he said, readjusting the collar of his kimono, which had been wrinkled by Rubén’s grip.

  Rubén sized up the man with a boy’s penis, who was shaking beneath the silk.

  “Get dressed, old man.”

  *

  Jana drove while Rubén grilled the guy in the backseat. Looking like a Buddha curled up in a corner of the car, receptive to the detective’s threats or relieved to talk after so many years of silence, Montañez told them his story.

  Having grown up in the region, without plans or any qualifications other than a license to drive large rigs (his father had been a truck driver), Ricardo had enlisted in the army at the age of nineteen, on a sudden impulse that had boomerang effects. The verdes, the young recruits, had no choice: those who didn’t obey orders, even if they were iniquitous, found themselves on the other side of the fence. Ricardo had first been detailed to the Campo de Mayo, which had been made into a vast concentration camp in connection with hunting down “subversives,” and then to the ESMA, as a driver. He had been chosen for the extraction of a detained couple, but not informed of the special mission to which he had been assigned. The identity of the prisoners, who were drugged for the trip, was unknown to him, but he remembered the transfer, an endless road they’d covered partly at night and that took them up into the mountains. An officer accompanied them, a colonel in the army who had never said his name. Montañez had driven the van without asking any questions. When they arrived at the foot of the Andes, the officer had ordered him to put on one of the hoods they used to cover the eyes of subversives, and to keep quiet while he took over at the wheel. They had driven for an hour or two, without a word, as far as an isolated estancia somewhere in the bottom of a valley. Montañez had helped the colonel take the couple out of the van. At that point they were awakened and their hands tied behind their backs: a bearded man and a woman who was wearing a dress that was in pitiful condition and who could hardly walk. Someone was waiting for them inside the estancia: the colonel had gone in with the two detainees, while he remained freezing in the van. An hour later, the trio came out again. Ricardo had put the hood back on, still without saying a word, and they set off again in the night, as they had come. After what seemed to him another hour of driving, the colo
nel had taken winding roads before stopping the vehicle in the middle of the desert.

  The prisoners were trembling with fear when they were made to get out of the van. The officer, his revolver in his hand, had ordered them to dig their own graves, but the couple had refused. In the end, it was Ricardo who’d gotten stuck with the job. The colonel had shot the two subversives himself, putting a bullet in the napes of their necks, first the woman, then the bearded man . . . Afterward, the officer assigned to the mission had commanded him to take the wheel again and to keep his mouth shut if he didn’t want to get in trouble, and that is what he’d done. Montañez had left the army two months later, at the end of his enlistment, and returned to his region of origin, hoping never to hear anything about that period again.

  The former driver was sweating on the backseat, his cheeks trembling with the bumps in the road. Rubén was harassing him.

  “Did they give you money to keep quiet?”

  “No.”

  “How did you manage to buy your shitty hotel?”

  “My parents died . . . They left me a little money.”

  “This colonel—you must have run into him again after this episode?”

  “No, never. He wasn’t at the ESMA, I tell you!”

  “Describe him.”

  “Fairly tall . . . thick brown hair . . . pretty young at the time, maybe around forty. It was a long time ago, I don’t remember anymore.”

  “We’ll see about that. Any identifying characteristic?”

  “No. I’d never seen him before, and I never saw him afterward. It’s a period that I want to forget, and . . . ”

  “Describe the place where the couple was executed.”

  “Toward Puente del Inca . . . I remember black rocks alongside a rough track, a huge landslide . . . It was a long time ago!”

  Rubén grumbled in the backseat. There were gaps in the petty officer’s story—the location of the estancia, what might have taken place there, the identity of the owner and that of the officer assigned to carry out the transfer and the murder. The interrogation had gone on for more than an hour. Montañez grew tired, his nerves breaking down after his confession. Rubén thought for a long time on the backseat. Jana was watching the road, looking out for stray cattle that could pulverize the car. Soon Rubén leaned forward toward her.

  “Do you want me to drive?”

  “No, that’s O.K. Hey,” Jana whispered. “I’m thinking about something.”

  “What?”

  “What are we going to do about the cat? He must be hungry, poor old thing.”

  Rubén caressed the nape of the Mapuche’s neck and smiled in the dark of the car.

  “Don’t worry about him, he’ll be all right.”

  *

  The valley of the Uspallata cuts deep into the Andes. The heart of the rock was yellow, red, gray, black, green—a miracle of nature escorting the defile. They had passed Mendoza before dawn and followed the road that climbed into the mountains. A few quarries with trucks standing about and improbable derricks miming the conquest of the West seemed petrified by the first rays of the sun. Farther on, a little chapel made out of a drainpipe contained a row of ex-votos. Rubén and Jana traveled through spectacular gorges, past a lake of turquoise water dominated by mesas, winding canyons in which rafting clubs often camped and which were closed to the public at the end of the summer. They drove for nine hours, almost without stopping; the lack of sleep was beginning to make itself felt, and they stopped for a cup of coffee at a mountain inn that was just opening its doors.

  Awakened from his virtual ecstasy, Ricardo Montañez snorted. He was wearing linen pants, a beige tunic thrown on in haste, and moccasins without socks.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  The inn was empty at that hour. While Montañez was in the toilet, Rubén ordered breakfast and returned to the sunny terrace. Huge rocks lay on the other side of the road; they had probably been there for centuries. Jana mewed as she stretched her arms; her muscles were stiff. The sun was coming up over the crest of the mountains, and a bird of prey flew high above in the pink sky. The air was cooler at 6,500 feet; the landscape had a cinematographic clarity.

  “I’ve never come this way,” the Mapuche said. “It’s beautiful.”

  They soon arrived at the Aconcagua, “the stone sentinel,” the roof of the Americas, whose snowy peaks were lost in the clouds. Rubén stayed close to her, the scent of her hair as a guide.

  “Do you think Montañez is putting us on?” she asked. “He’s been moaning in the backseat for hours.”

  “We’ll soon find out.”

  A truck passed by, whining in second gear.

  “In any case, we should be wary of him,” Jana said with a frown. “This guy really looks like a sneak, with his little prick.”

  Her slight smile grew larger. Rubén suddenly felt like kissing her, telling her that last night had been marvelous, but the old petty officer was coming back from the toilets, as white as a sheet.

  Puente del Inca: the last pass before the descent into Chile. An orange dust was flying over the asphalt road. As they approached the border post they met only a few trucks. Montañez continued to sweat heavily in the backseat of the Hyundai, barely reinvigorated by his breakfast. They saw a couple of llamas lost in the stony waste as they drove out of Las Cuevas, but not a single human being. The slopes of the mountains varied in color from mauve to red; it was growing hotter. Jana slowed as she crossed an abandoned train track: an old iron bridge signaled that they had arrived at Puente del Inca, the southernmost limit of the ancient kingdom of the Incas.

  “Do you recognize it?” Rubén said as he drove.

  Montañez was dripping under his tunic. He was afraid of his memories, afraid of spending years in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. Since the statute of limitations on crimes against the state had been abolished, the detective had made a deal with the former military man: no criminal charges in exchange for his collaboration. They drove along the bed of a dry river, then passed dramatic scree slopes in a narrow canyon: Montañez observed the landscape attentively.

  “Turn right here,” he said after a while.

  A sheet of ice gleamed in the lunar shadow of a rocky peak. They followed a dirt road that went to the right. The air coming through the windows was warmer. The Hyundai was traveling at the feet of titans eroded by the wind when the fat man signaled that they should stop. A lava flow had stopped near a pinnacle of black rock with steely glints.

  “Is it here?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  The petty officer had never returned to the scene of the crime, but it was impossible to forget these contrasts. They parked the car at the side of the road. Montañez said nothing, hypnotized by the metallic reflections of the rock that ate into the sky. Rubén poked into the soil apprehensively, as if the dead might rise up. Finally, Montañez pointed to a spot at the foot of the rockslide.

  “Here, I think.”

  The soil was dry and scattered with small stones. Rubén threw a brand-new shovel and pickaxe in front of Ricardo’s tasseled moccasins.

  “Dig.”

  The sun rose steeply in the heart of the Andes. Montañez labored, hunched over his tool: he’d been digging at the foot of the precipice. He complained about blisters and backache. The earth was hard and the heat dreadful, despite the bit of cloth that protected his large, shaved head; Jana and Rubén, who had taken refuge in the car with the door open to let the desert air blow through, watched him struggle.

  Jana had never been north of the mountain range, but she knew that there was a Huarpe site in this region, a center of energy as powerful as that at Machu Picchu, where the shamans talked with the cosmic spirit. The Huarpes, those peaceful giants, had not been destroyed by the little Incas but by the Jesuits, who had recruited them in order to save them. Rubén listened to her as he smok
ed, keeping one eye on the progress of the work. He thought again about their discussion on the roof terrace. The Mapuches also talked with the earth. Her sister and the machi . . .

  “By the way, you never told me,” he said. “What is the secret of the Hain?”

  The Selk’nam’s great-granddaughter gave him a charming look.

  “Maybe someday you’ll find out. Or maybe never.”

  He spat the smoke from his cigarette out the open door. Not very precise, her story. Twenty yards away, at the foot of the rocky mass, Montañez continually swore at the barbarous soil; his tunic was dirty, his moccasins dusty, his hands covered with blisters. He was killing himself under the blazing sun, a trembling mass half swallowed up by the hole, he dug on and on until he hit a bone.

  “Here’s something!” he cried.

  He put down his pickaxe, his eyes baleful under his head-cloth. Jana and Rubén left the car that protected them from the sun and returned to the pit, from which the heavy man was extricating himself with difficulty. Bits of bone were visible at the bottom of the hole. Rubén set down the little case that Raúl Sanz had given him and jumped down into the cavity. Jana kept an eye on Montañez, whose face was red from the effort he’d made; he was almost apoplectic. The detective swept away the looser earth using small archeological tools: brushes, rakes, a pick; his actions were precise and cautious. Jana leaned over the grave. Other bones appeared, vertebrae the color of fabric, then a human skull. That of a woman, so far as one could tell by the remains of the dress. Montañez was still wiping his face, sitting in the shade of the black pinnacle that loomed over them.

  “Was that what she was wearing?” Rubén asked him.

  The former petty officer approached the grave very slowly, then made an affirmative gesture. Rubén went on with the exhumation. There was another body, intertwined with the first, a man, his neck broken by the impact of a bullet. Samuel and Gabriella Verón. It couldn’t be anyone else.