Mapuche

by Caryl Ferey

  “No, it was stolen from us,” Rubén said with cool self-assurance. “It was like this when we found it.”

  “Hard luck!”

  The mechanic was not deceived, but he pretended he was.

  “We have to drive it back to Mendoza. Can you repair it?”

  The man’s brother came out to the little parking lot flooded with sun, wiped his hands on his coveralls, and nodded to the couple. Jana went toward the toilets while they hemmed and hawed. Rear window, headlights, axle, not to mention the holes in the body: in view of the damage, they would need at least until the following noon, and then only if they could get the right parts.

  “What if I paid you double?” Rubén suggested.

  “That won’t bring the parts in by plane,” the brother noted. “Even if we work all night, it won’t be ready before noon tomorrow. At the earliest! It’s full of electronic shit, your car.”

  “Sure . . . ” A sticky silence in front of the garage.

  “O.K.,” Rubén said. “Noon tomorrow.”

  He advanced the money to buy the parts, which the brother would go to pick up in Mendoza, and the same sum in exchange for them forgetting the rest. Once the car was on the ramp in the garage, Rubén took the bags out of the back of the trunk and rejoined Jana, who was splashing water on her face in the lavatory. She had only a superficial cut on her cheek that was no longer bleeding.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “We’re stuck here until tomorrow.”

  Jana sighed.

  “Poor Ledzep.”

  Rubén washed his flayed hands in the dirty sink.

  “What about the local police? Aren’t they going to give us trouble?”

  “The next police station is a dozen miles away,” he said. “And the garage guys seem O.K. Let’s go eat something, then we’ll see.”

  A blazing sun for a soporific Sunday in the little town in the Andes. It was six o’clock in the afternoon, the wind was warm, their eyes were burning from lack of sleep, and they hadn’t eaten anything since morning. A bleached blonde in a Hello Kitty T-shirt ran the only shop open in the village, a snack bar with gaudy signs that sold mainly ice cream. They swallowed homemade bocadillos under the breath of a capricious fan. The room was empty, the cumbia at full volume: Rubén could hardly hear his cell phone ring.

  He went outside to take Anita’s call.

  Married men taking a day off for the traditional asado, the intern sleeping off a binge with his partying friends, Anita was spending Sunday having a nap with her cat Mist. The recent events had upset their little habits. Del Piro still hadn’t shown up, but she was on the botanist’s trail thanks to her “pal” at Immigration: Díaz had in fact crossed the Argentine border the preceding Wednesday, that is, on the day of the raid in Colonia. The paparazzo’s neighbor had fled. Whom was he running from? The killers or the cops? Was his hostility to Ossario a façade? To hide what? At the other end of the line, Anita remained in doubt.

  “Who says that your botanist is not involved in all this? He might be a military man, a former Nazi, an old piece of garbage who has taken refuge in Uruguay under a false name, or an accomplice of your famous silent partner.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The stray dog that was sniffing the municipal garbage cans in the shade of the cracked walls went around Rubén, his tail between his legs.

  “Do you have a photo of Díaz you can send me?”

  “I can scan the one in his passport.”

  “O.K. Send copies to Carlos and the Grandmothers too. Díaz might be in our files under another name.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “Not for two days.”

  “And the piqueteros?”

  “I hardly saw them,” he said, “apart from the guy who stopped the car: a heavyset, brown-haired fellow with a scar, average size, about forty. I can ask Jana to make a sketch, if we can find some paper in this hole.”

  “Jana?”

  “What do you want me to call her, Picasso?”

  “She also draws killers on the road?” Anita pretended to be astonished. “What talent!”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “Terribly.”

  “Tsk.”

  “I’ve been in love with you since I was a girl, you jerk.”

  “You’re not a girl anymore, querida. So, is it over?”

  “Yes. I’ll let you know if Del Piro calls from his cell phone,” Anita said before hanging up. “Ciao, bello! Kisses to you know who!”

  The enchanting friend.

  Jana was waiting with the sacks in front of the snack bar. According to Hello Kitty, the only hotel in Uspallata had closed the year before; there remained only the prefab cottages visible behind the hedges of the campground, and they had all the charm of a suppository.

  “Not exactly pretty,” Rubén commented.

  “It’s either that or sleeping under the stars.”

  Her dark eyes were already shining.

  *

  Something like a desert extended for miles beyond the village, the Andean plateau surrounded by blue and mauve mountains over which falcons soared. Rubén and Jana were walking north, their weighted-down sacks over their shoulders. Animal bones were bleaching along the brown earth track; the sun’s heat was getting less intense as they made their way over the bare land. The walk had reduced them to the silence of these immense spaces, as if nothing had existed before them. Soon the landscape devoured everything, shrubs and brittle grasses; they walked a couple of miles, the breath of the wind like a wave singing over the sand. Nature was so impressive that they forgot the fright of the day.

  “You all right, old man?” Jana said to Rubén, who was lugging the heaviest sacks.

  “I can still walk a yard or two,” he assured her. “How about you?”

  “I’ll have to put my shoes back on.”

  A stony path led to the Rock of Seven Colors. Jana, who had been walking barefoot since they’d left the village, stopped to put on her Doc Martens. Strange little thing. They passed the skeleton of a cow that was lying in the shade of a stunted tree and found a sandy place where they could set up camp for the night. The site, enclosed at the end of a canyon, was blazing with the light of the setting sun. They put down the blankets and the food they’d bought—ready-made salad, industrial bread, two bottles of beer that were still more or less cool, and a piece of beef that they would grill if they could find some firewood. Jana used the lighter to pry off the caps while Rubén collected stones for the fire, waited until he sat down next to her, opposite a rainbow-colored rock, and handed him a bottle. All that remained of the Quilmes, the mountain people who had died off in the reservations on the plains where they had been parked, was the name of a beer: Quilmes.

  “Odd how Christians are able to honor the people they’ve massacred,” the Mapuche observed.

  “What do you do with your victims, pull out their nose hairs?”

  “Yes, with our teeth, to make the kids laugh.”

  Their mouths met.

  “For the rest of our lives,” she said.

  “Yes, for the rest of our lives.”

  They clinked glasses, Rubén more worried than he wanted to show. He was still afraid of losing her. He wanted to hold her to him, on any pretext, to hug her tight until he could feel her Indian pulse beating in his veins, but part of him was still down there . . . He looked out blankly over the stony ground. Jana moved a little closer to him, as if she had heard an echo of the silence of his abyss, and put her head on his shoulder. The sky was turning pink as it withdrew from the Andes. For a while, they continued to contemplate the desert and the passes in the fading light. The beauty of the world: it was there, before their greedy eyes, and Rubén could no longer see anything but ghosts. The sky was melting on the rock when she murmured:

  “Rubén, there’s som
ething I haven’t told you. The other night, in the bedroom, I saw the marks on your skin when we made love, the scars . . . ”

  Dark scars in the light of the candles, on his breast, his armpits, terrible wounds that time had not erased. Rubén did not reply, but the little flowers trembled in his eyes.

  “They tortured you, didn’t they? Those scars—did they do that to you? Electrical burns?” He remained silent. “You were also in the ESMA’s jails, weren’t you? But you got out,” she added to help him. “They didn’t kill you.”

  “Yes they did.” He was looking down at the sand.

  “No, Rubén. You’re alive, more alive than anyone on Earth.”

  “No.”

  The crack in his façade was now gaping. He had said nothing to others, shown nothing. He had seen Death, and no one must see that, on any pretext, on pain of going mad.

  “Your mother survived the tragedy,” Jana said in as gentle a voice as she could manage.

  “She doesn’t know what happened.”

  “She can guess.”

  “No.”

  Rubén was mumbling. She glanced at him, suddenly concerned. Spirits were floating around him, stone spirits. Jana knew this feeling of eternal solitude, all those years when her breasts had not grown—solitude, anger, and helplessness.

  “We almost got ourselves killed today,” she said bravely. “It might happen tomorrow, as we come out of a cafe or an apartment building, and then it will be too late. I want to share everything with you, Rubén, not just anonymous lovemaking in some bed or other. Your hands have known other women, but I don’t want to be like them. Not today and not tomorrow, either. Moral niceties have nothing to do with it. What are you afraid of, me? Do you think I’m going to steal something from you? Your most precious possession, maybe? What do you take me for, a winka?”

  He smiled wanly.

  “I can handle anything,” she said, challenging him. “After what I’ve been through with you, I can handle anything.”

  “No one can handle anything.”

  “You have to want it. And I do.”

  “Want what?”

  “You. In my mouth, in my arms, all of you. As you are.”

  He looked down at the sand.

  “Do you think that’s too much?” she asked.

  Jana was stroking his hand as it lay on the ground; she was filled with an unfamiliar, virgin tenderness. The sky was falling on the Rock of Seven Colors; Rubén glanced at his father’s bag—everything was there, close at hand. Of course . . . it wasn’t the fear that the killers would search his apartment that had led him to empty his closet, it was she . . . his little sister. He rose to get the leather bag, dug around inside it, and handed her a school notebook. Jana recognized the handwriting: The Sad Notebook. It was Rubén’s. His eyes were also filled with tears.

  “I’m going to find some firewood,” he said.

  The desert was peaceful at twilight. Intrigued, Jana opened the notebook to its first page. Rubén was already walking away, a hunched-over silhouette against the fading sky. She read the notebook, almost without breathing, all the way to the end.

  And the horror electrified her.

  THE SAD NOTEBOOK

  The “tumba”: a greasy stew smelling of tripe with bits of boiled meat floating in it, the bread we dipped in it apprehensively, closing our eyes in order to be able to swallow it . . . The indigestion of the world, the poetry of the starving. Let’s talk about poetry—or rather let’s no longer talk about it. When you’re hungry, time stops, life is immobilized in wax, a derelict vessel crushed by ice, eyeless faces that waddle about just as bears get used to their cage, blindfolded eyes that no longer deceive, or so little, the bars they put around you and then the rumbling, the belly that twists in its emptiness, and so many other things to tell you, little sister . . . Urine oozed from the walls. There was a pail, however, with bits of dry shit on the plastic—all I had to do was to lift my hood to see that mine was red—a cellmate, provided that you had anything to shit out. Even dreams turned gray, dreams without women and without love that hardly escaped reality, the blows, the fever, the cries, the dirt. How long were we separated? I left you staggering among the lambs in the Orletti garage, with that expression of pure fear in your eyes and your efforts to hide your young adolescent nakedness. How long have we been separated, little sister? Two months? Three? First they laid me in a box upstairs, a coffin three feet wide, they left the tops off the better to keep an eye on us, the “sardines” as they called us with the infamous wit of obedient ordinary people. A first variant, to get us in condition. P-45 was my name. It was forbidden to move or speak to each other. We could stay for days in these “lion cages,” captives all in a row. At first, I didn’t even know that I was at the Navy Engineering School: I hadn’t had my hood off during the transfer, and I’d been put in isolation in a cage-coffin. I didn’t know why they were holding me that way, for how long, or whether they were going to kill me or drive me mad. And then one day they transferred me to a cell, a container five feet by seven that was, as I later learned, in the basement of the ESMA. And it was worse. Chained up, naked, my legs hobbled and bent, a hood over my head, I was reduced to waiting, lifeless, for the next session of picana. Did they do that to you, too? At the age of twelve, did they consider you a child or an adult? I saw dead people, little sister, people who died of panic when the men came to take them away, telling them they were going to be cut up with a chain saw—they revved the motor in the hall so that they would scream louder—or when, through the slamming doors I heard the cries of another person, another person who was already me. Then the terror was so great that we forgot our own stench, the juice of fear that ran down our thighs: I could no longer see anything but the torturers’ screwed-up eyes over me and the diodes that they were applying to me before skinning me alive. Skin stinks when it’s burned, little sister. Some interrogating officers played the good father: “Why don’t you talk, my child? Just look at the state you’re in now!” I saw the blackened bodies that they were taking out of the cells, so covered with burns that you could hardly see their eyes, black as coal, some succumbed or had given up and were covered with excrement, their sparse beards repeating the same phrases, shades or what remained of them, incredulous at the idea of witnessing their own burial—people who probably resembled me . . . Where were you? Woman or child? It was on you that they avenged themselves the most: for them, women’s bodies were battlefields, especially those of the most beautiful, whom the jailers relentlessly raped to teach them to stay at home, or not to wear miniskirts. Whores, or considered as such. I heard them laugh about their sexual exploits, discuss the best women, like the thirty-year-old brunette I’d met in the corridor and with whom I had spontaneously fallen in love. I didn’t know her name but I’d called her Hermione, a poet’s name. At that time I knew nothing about women except the kisses of girls seen in the darkness of movie theaters, Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway as a background, but that slender brunette with such a dignified, intelligent look was for me a fantastic apparition at the heart of nothingness. I held tight to it in the evening, I clung to her, to her big blue eyes that had pierced my heart in the corridor. She brought me back to the women we followed around on the terraces of bistros, to happy life, to life before Hermione. I saw her again later, haggard, scarcely able to stand up after a “work session.” She could no longer see me because her blue eyes expressed nothing at all: she had gone mad. The jailers gave scores: She was 322: they had raped her three hundred and twenty-two times. Where were you, little sister?

  Before the Human Rights Commission visited, they had walled off the stair leading to the jail cells: the naked, wet bodies lying on iron plates, the rapes, the electricity—the emissaries of the international community saw none of that. The soccer World Cup could take place. They left again with their attaché cases full of recommendations, leaving us alone, at their mercy. And everything began
all over again. The prohibitions—talking, seeing, sitting down—the odor of hoods drenched in the blood of former detainees who had bitten their tongues while they were being tortured, my cries when I was taken to the workroom for the tenth time, the picana that empties your intestines, the torturers’ jokes, the unquenchable thirst, the beating of your heart that drums in your temples, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty, a hundred and fifty, still more blows, the nakedness, the isolation, the loss of bearings, the smell of shit become almost familiar, the fear, still more blows that I didn’t see coming from behind my hood, the insults, the threats, and the despair when I thought about you. The terrible thoughts. Where were you, little sister? I heard the cries of the new arrivals who were being tortured, the television cartoons and comedies the guards turned on in the break room to drown out the screams, trembling at the idea that it was you who were being torn apart on the tables. They questioned me about Papa, asked me where he was—in France—what he was doing there—writing poems—kept telling me that I was lying, that I was the son of a Red, that they were there to clean up the mess, and I was already part of it. Papa hadn’t said anything to me about communists, Montoneros, or terrorists who had taken refuge abroad. The answers I didn’t have threw them into mad, or simulated, rages. The crying fits, supplications, their stubbornness, insanity loomed everywhere. Time was erased, a life in pencil. I was afraid I’d become like those zombies, the people who had never been political activists and who were not prepared to die for a cause that they were not fighting for, people incapable of getting back on their feet and who lost their minds, who played the slave thinking the torturers would spare them or collaborated so that it would all finally end.

  Die or go mad.

  Die or go mad.

  Die or go mad.

  The elastic of the hood pressed on my skull, was slowly cutting it in half, a shooting, unbearable pain; tears flowed by themselves all night, or during the daytime, I no longer knew, time had dissolved, hanged itself, a dead life—madness that soon no longer looms but creeps closer, lies in wait, watching for the slightest weakness, to carry me off like a sheep in its claws. Through the walls I felt the presence of other detainees dispossessed, as I had been, of their names and their rights, reduced to simple matriculation numbers that could be tormented at will, the abstract universe of questions in which submission meant survival, the disgusting stew they served us, the night terrors when we were awakened on a whim so that we could be beaten, riding crops, clubs, whips, karate holds, water-boarding, hung by the feet with a cloth over the head and lowered into a bathtub full of icy water: the shock, the asphyxiation, the pain of water in the lungs, a death by suffocation. Doctors were assigned to bring the drowned person back to life, so it could begin all over again, once, ten times, repeated deaths, and then the attack dogs trained to kill that were let loose on the poor devils who had nothing left but their bones, my neighbors whom I saw when they took us out of the cells for collective beatings, burning us with cigarettes, boiling water, red-hot pokers, cut, gashed, slashed us, skinned us alive, the new arrivals who were given a choice between electroshock torture and gang rape, sadistic, systematic vexations, sitting on the floor without being permitted to lean against the wall of the cell, from six in the morning to eight in the evening, fourteen hours to stay in that position, those who fell were beaten, those who turned their heads were beaten, those who talked were beaten, and then the detainees who were forced to fight each other without taking off their hoods, the worker, number 412, who had been literally forgotten in his cell, the victim of some administrative problem, and who died of thirst and exhaustion, the sophisticated humiliations, still more blows, gratuitous, the same routine that was inflicted to punish us for being born, for having long hair, for wearing glasses, for going out to nightclubs. Where were you? In time, I succeeded in communicating with the people in the neighboring cells, whispering a few words when we were jostled together or when one of them brought our meager ration. Of you, no trace. I sometimes heard children’s screams from the upper floor, but they didn’t last. I still didn’t know that they were being given to sterile couples close to the military. Twelve years old, little sister: you were too big to be given to just anyone. And then one evening, while I was picking up my bowl of “tumba” I heard a comrade’s voice whispering to me: “Your father’s here.”