Mapuche

by Caryl Ferey

  “Do you like that name, Diesel?” Jana asked.

  It was the first time they had really talked. The dog did not answer; he was too busy sniffing something or other. The air was sharp, the night violet under the carpet of stars. They walked half a mile or so over the pampas. Finally Jana put the gun she was carrying to her shoulder and examined the virgin landscape around her. Diesel was biting at some fleas, and almost scratched off his ear with his hind paw before finally going off to find a place to relieve himself. The earth was still warm after the hot day. Jana lay down in the grass, put the rifle in firing position, and looked for a target in the dark.

  A fencepost a hundred yards away: she aimed and fired, three times. The first two bullets missed, causing Diesel, who was pissing there, to run off; the third decapitated the post.

  *

  Nothing in her heart but a blue-black storm. A flea-bitten dog and an Indian with a broken nose crying herself empty: that was their team. The Ford was also holding up. Jana crossed San Carlos de Bariloche the next day, her eyes burning after the run against the wind. Her stomach had tolerated the coffee at breakfast and a Coke at noon, but not the sandwich she’d bought in a service station. The foothills of the Andes rose against the blue of the sky, which could do nothing about it. Diesel was still sitting facing the dusty windshield, impassive, looking like an old sea wolf ready to come about. She still hadn’t heard his voice. Finally the landscape changed: great, age-old trees dotted the hills preceding the mountain range, their shadows growing longer as the sun went down. Jana crossed green plains toward the mountains perched in the clouds and reached the little town of Futalaufquen late in the day.

  After the last Mapuche leaders were defeated, the land had been distributed to greedy estancieros, and churches were built to preach the Gospel to the savages who had been spared by diseases. The Los Cipreses monastery had been included within what was now the Los Alerces National Park, a valley lost in the Andes near the Chilean border. According to her map of the region, they were now getting close. The Ford climbed the switchbacks on a stony track, and passed a dump truck stuck on the hill, raising a storm of red dust, before descending toward Los Cipreses.

  It was getting dark when she reached the mountain village. A row of houses with closed shutters lined the asphalt-paved road, and there were a few poor-looking farms. Jana slowed down in front of the restaurant, a kind of pulpería with a broken sign that seemed to be open, the only sign of life in this ghost town, and then drove on. The monastery was located outside town, a large stone building at the foot of a wooded hill. A waste ground served as a parking lot for visitors. The monastery was dark except for the dim light of a lantern at the entrance. The Mapuche drove slowly around the place and, after a few exploratory detours in the surrounding area, returned to the town.

  There was still no one out. She parked on the street.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked the dog as she cut the ignition.

  Diesel was panting softly on the seat, which was already covered with his hair.

  The Los Cipreses restaurant was run by a mozo perdido, a young man who had strayed, as mixed-race gauchos were called. His features tanned by the mountain winds contrasted with his youthful eyes, which were somber and timid and must not have seen many female strangers. Jana ordered the only dish on the menu, a cutlet à la milanese, while Diesel went through the garbage cans behind the shack.

  Half a dozen rickety tables were languishing in the room, on whose walls a few hunting trophies hung askew were gathering dust. The crossbreed was ogling her from behind his tiled counter. Jana didn’t utter a word, her mind absorbed by her plans. She had never been in this remote hole, but she knew the region: having been driven out by the carabineros, her family had taken refuge in a friendly community on the other side of the mountains.

  “Isn’t it good?” the waiter asked, intimidated.

  The women with the broken nose had hardly touched her food.

  “I’m not very hungry, anyway,” she said.

  “Can I make something else for you?”

  She looked up.

  “What?”

  The young man shifted from foot to foot, ill at ease.

  “It’s late,” he said. “Do you know where you’re sleeping?”

  Since the customer gave him a suspicious look, he hastened to add:

  “I’m just asking because there’s no hotel in the village. You have to go on to Futalaufquen. I live next door, with my family. If you want, we could put you up for the night.”

  The crossbreed blushed under his young man’s mustache.

  “No thanks,” she said. “Just bring the bill.”

  Jana paid with Rubén’s money and after a disagreeable visit to the toilet, left the little mountain restaurant. The ratty dog was scavenging around the overturned garbage cans; he trotted after her to the Ford, as mangy as his coat, and climbed aboard. He was familiar with the place and began to paw the seat, yapping as if they were coming home to spend an evening by the fire.

  “You’re completely off the mark, old man,” Jana said, starting the car.

  The flanks of the mountains stood out against the dark night; she drove as far as the exit from the village, then turned up the dirt road she’d found earlier, which wound toward the wooded hill. She parked the Ford at the end of the track, among the ferns and brambles. The forest became denser when she turned off the headlights. Jana put on her poncho to calm the heat of the night, grabbed the bottle of vodka on the seat and the flashlight. Diesel dug around for a moment in the ditch before following his mistress to the flat, bushy area that looked down on the monastery two hundred yards down the slope, its tiled roof lit by the moon. A good observation post.

  As the humidity decreased, so did her fatigue. Jana found shelter under a pehuen, a large umbrella tree that had succeeded in slipping in among the pines, and laid out her few things. Moths were beating against the gas lamp, crazy about the heat, and Diesel snapped at them as they looped in and out. She opened the bottle of vodka. The liquor burned her throat, which had been dried out by the trip: she took another drink, but felt hardly any better. The dog had momentarily disappeared, busily nosing around in the thickets. She drank again, but two days of sleeping badly had depleted her reserves. She put out the gas lamp and stretched out on her back.

  Chile was on the other side of the Andes, an opaque mass in the night: her ancestors had lost their lands, but they had kept their magnetic soul. Jana thought about her young sister, her brothers. No, it was impossible to ask their help: they would ask her to return to the community rather than get her revenge, want her to reconstruct herself with them, her people, exiles on their own land. Everything she had tried to do since she’d left would have come to nothing, and she had this dark sun in her heart: Rubén. Jana thought about him, very hard, imagined the luminous spirit floating somewhere in the sky, but in the Milky Way she saw nothing but the diamonds of despair. She closed her eyes, numbed by fatigue and alcohol, a scruffy dog at her side. Slowly, nature took hold of her senses.

  Was it the proximity of her people, the Mapuche spirit of her childhood that was calling her back, Ngünechen, the supreme deity of the volcanoes who, from the depths of time, was confronting the dark force of kai kai? The specters faced each other in the obscurity; she could almost feel them running over her icy skin. The forces. She felt them boiling up from the earth, spreading through her body, as if the telluric fire that woke the machi was still there, crackling . . . Jana suddenly sat up, her eyes wide open.

  “Rubén?”

  The Mapuche remained motionless under the pehuen, short of breath, but there was no answer other than the rustling of the wind in the branches.

  *

  A pale sun was spreading its mist in the hollow of the valley. Jana had been observing the monastery since dawn, bundled up in her woolen poncho, her eye glued to the gunsight. Six cartridges in the m
agazine, 7.62 caliber, range 900 yards, with a 10x zoom: she could sweep half the courtyard, invisible among the bushes at the top of the hill.

  A monk had made a furtive appearance a little earlier, a young, blond man with thin hair. According to the priest who served as Rosa’s confidant, Cardinal von Wernisch, who was very old, had retired there to spend the rest of his life. What about the others? Running about the thickets, Diesel was marking his territory with offhand spurts of urine. The dog finally sat down alongside her, a loyal shadow among the bushes. Jana had still not heard him bark. The temperature was climbing with the sun. Nothing was happening. Diesel soon went to sleep, his muzzle resting on his crossed paws, the ultimate in canine chic. Jana was waiting, sulkily, when her heart suddenly jumped: a fat man in a white shirt had appeared in the courtyard.

  Vulgar features, a bovine look: the torturer in the delta, El Toro. He was there, in her line of sight. Part of the world shifted. Jana instinctively put her index finger on the trigger: if she pressed it, she would blow his head off. Images flashed through her mind—this vermin’s head exploding, blood spurting onto the walls, bits of brain scattered all around—and then she got hold of herself. At this distance, she couldn’t be sure of hitting her target: El Toro could take cover in a few steps. Alerted, the rest of the gang would barricade themselves in the monastery, from which she would never be able to dislodge them. They would send other men to ferret her out, the local police or men under orders to hunt her down. Jana kept her sangfroid: they were there, for the moment that was all that mattered. She had the advantage of surprise. Their vehicle must be inside, in one of the covered courtyards of the monastery where the killers had taken refuge. She could fire into the whole group if they happened to come out—sooner or later, they would emerge to buy cigarettes, liquor, provisions—but a thought shook her: what would she do if they stayed holed up there for a week or two without coming out?

  Jana was thinking up suicidal plans for coping with that possibility. Long after El Toro had disappeared from the sunny courtyard an unexpected event occurred.

  A metallic gray Audi parked in the little lot bordering on the woods. A man soon got out of it, wearing a blue blazer of an old-fashioned cut, and walked slowly toward the entrance to the monastery. Jana observed the newcomer in the telescopic lens of her gunsight: a man in his seventies, average height, short brown hair on a half-bald head, rather common features, and two weasel’s eyes that she had seen somewhere before. Where? The man was now standing in front of the heavy wooden door, hesitating to ring the bell. Jana finally remembered: the photo sent to Rubén’s BlackBerry as they were returning from the Andes. The neighbor in Colonia who had fled. Díaz, the former SIDE agent.

  *

  Franco Díaz had worked on special operations in and outside the country before joining the intelligence service. Falsifying documents, organizing a giant meeting in order to photograph and identify left-wing militants a few weeks before the coup d’état, infiltrating terrorist groups, liquidating certain targets, planning kidnappings. The dirty war, as it was called. There was no war that wasn’t dirty. Díaz obeyed orders. Those who gave them were severe but just. The “Rosario” operation, poorly prepared, had marked the beginning of the end: once the defeat in the Falklands was completed, the military had had to give up power and erase the proofs of what might come back to haunt them. General Bignone had trusted him, Díaz, the shadow agent.

  The botanist had fled Colonia, but fate pursued him. A cause-effect relationship, a manifestation of the cancer that was eating away at him? A new bout of illness had befallen him, so violent that he had to hole up in a shabby hotel in La Plata with his morphine pills. Three days spent in delirium, shot up with drugs, imagining that they were coming to dig up his treasure, or that a storm was devastating his Garden of Eden, that the cops and judges in black robes were condemning him on the spot for damaging the historical memory, daytime visions that sometimes made no sense and from which he emerged haggard, suffering atrocious pain, begging the Voice that guided him to grant him a little of its mercy—for just a little while still. After a bitter, relentless struggle, the Voice had risen up out of the void to extract him from the jaws of the disease. The power of faith in a single God who, better than morphine pills, had put him back on his feet. No, Franco would not die sick and alone in an anonymous hotel room, he wouldn’t fail when he was so close to the goal. The cardinal had been his moral guarantee during the Dirty War: Díaz foresaw that the old sage would be able to counsel him one last time, and absolve him as he faced death. Only after that could he go in peace.

  Leaving the hotel in La Plata where he had finally made it through the crisis, Díaz soon tracked down von Wernisch via a priest in the provincial diocese. He arrived in the remote village of Los Cipreses after two days of driving on dusty roads, his face sunken with fatigue. The Franciscan monastery to which the cardinal had retired was a vast building of gray stone with a moss-covered tile roof.

  Franco parked the Audi and slowly climbed out. The illness was still there, watching for him to make a mistake.

  The monastery’s door was massive, the bell from an earlier time. The botanist had reached his final objective but now that he was there, something made him hesitate. Retaining his old reflexes, the former agent had not called to announce his arrival. He overcame his apprehensions and rang the bell.

  A young monk soon opened the door, looking a little suspicious of the visitor. His austere face changed when Franco introduced himself as an old friend of Cardinal von Wernisch, whom he had come to see about an urgent matter. The monk immediately asked him to wait there, pushed open the ancient oak door that led to the courtyard, and disappeared on the other side of the building, leaving Díaz alone in the entry hall.

  A painting was ostentatiously displayed in a gilded frame: a bishop from olden times who looked at him in a benevolent way. Franco took his pills in the shade of the cool vaults; he felt a piercing pain in his stomach. There was not a breath of air in the monastery’s internal courtyard; only a few lizards were sunning themselves on the stones. Díaz was sweating under his blazer, his throat dried out by the medicine he was taking and the dust he had swallowed. A fat man then appeared about twenty yards away in the courtyard, a civilian with a puffy face who was coming out of the refectory, holding a plate piled high with food. An empty holster hung under his armpit, and his white shirt was ringed with sweat.

  Díaz hid behind the door, his heart pounding. Alert. Red alert. It was not instinct that spoke to him, but the Voice. It warned him of a danger, an imminent danger. He remained crouched there in the shadows. The big man in the courtyard had not seen him; he was entirely focused on his food. Who was this guy, a cop? One of the men who’d been in Colonia? The botanist stepped back slightly. The Voice told him he mustn’t stay there. That a plot was being formed against him, a deadly trap. The Voice told him to flee: immediately.

  Díaz retraced his steps without waiting for the monk to return. The presence of this armed man was necessarily related to his secret. How could they know that he would come here? Von Wernisch was a friend, but they might be using him as bait. The sun dazzled him for a moment as he left the monastery; the car was parked on the waste ground. Franco hurried, seized by an irrational fear, beeped open the Audi’s door, and climbed in. Get out of there, fast. He didn’t see the silhouette emerge from the nearby bushes; as the car door opened an Indian woman with a furious look jumped into the passenger seat. Her nose was broken, she had mauve bags under her eyes, and she was wearing a poncho that covered a revolver. Díaz immediately tried to defend himself but the Indian stuck the barrel of her gun in his belly. The gun was cocked.

  “Start the car or I’ll kill you, you filthy son of a bitch . . . ”

  4

  Elena Calderón was still living in the house in San Telmo, in the Avenida Independencia. She and her family had spent their happiest days there. She had kept her door open ever since Elsa and Da
niel disappeared thirty-five years earlier, as if they might come back at any time. She would close it, not on the day when their bones were returned to her—this mourning was personal—but on the day when all those responsible were brought to trial and convicted: that was her way of not mourning.

  The sun’s first rays were touching the flowers in the garden. Susana knocked at the varnished wooden door and went in without waiting for a response.

  “Duchess? It’s me!” she shouted. “Come on, get up!”

  The vice president of the Grandmothers headed for the kitchen—unlike her, Elena was a late riser, a habit she owed to her past as a middle-class night owl. Susana took the apricots out of their sack to avoid crushing them, saw the maté that was heating on the gas stove, and began to go through the cupboards in search of a suitable pastry dough. Her friend finally appeared at the door to the kitchen, made up and with her hair done, wearing a long embroidered silk dress.

  “Hello, Duchess!”

  “Hello, my dear . . . ”

  “Still in frills and furbelows?”

  Elena was wearing an extraordinarily elegant dishabille, her shoulders covered with a white angora shawl. Her forehead wrinkled when she heard the cupboard doors slamming as Susana closed them as if there were an animal inside that was going to jump out at her. Elena saw the apricots that had fallen out of the sack, which Susana’s tornado had scattered all over the kitchen table.

  “How gently you treat things,” the mistress of the house observed ironically.

  “I can’t find the pastry dough,” Susana replied. “You must have some, don’t you? I’ve looked everywhere! You’ll have to help me, you know I’m a really bad cook, I burn everything!”

  Elena Calderón, who never appeared in public without makeup (old age is a disaster, and makeup was her lifesaver), didn’t like to speak about personal matters before she’d had her maté. She poured herself a cup while her friend bustled about.