Mapuche

by Caryl Ferey

  “Well?” Susana said.

  “Did you look in the fridge?”

  “Twice!”

  “Look again.”

  “Aah!” Susana cried, for appearance’s sake.

  Elena finished the bitter beverage while her friend rolled out the dough in a mold.

  “Carlos will be here any minute and you aren’t even dressed!” Susana pointed out. The vice president wore a white dress with a cherry motif, simple but very pretty.

  “Just be quiet and start cutting up the apricots. I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

  That was how long it took to cook the fruit.

  Elena reappeared punctually, dressed as if she were going to a marriage at the Casa Rosada.

  “Is this all right, do I look presentable?”

  Straight-line blue dress, white chiffon collar, a white angora shawl big enough to cover a litter of pumas, a touch of mascara on eyelids curved toward the sun like sunflowers: all she needed was a cigarette holder, Susana thought.

  “Yes, yes,” she assured her. “I’m more worried about the pie!”

  Elena glanced at her reflection in the big mirror in the hall—the day before, at the hospital, she must have looked awful . . . The pie was still hot when the journalist honked his horn in front of the gate to the house—Rubén loved apricots.

  *

  The world was there, with its gasoline lungs, taking him back to the blackest hours of his life. The worst hours. The hours when he had wild thoughts, spurs digging into his sides, fire in his flesh. Rubén knew pain, he had lived with it during his months in detention: die or go mad, the pain that cracked open your body like an oyster, reducing you to a set of bare and unprotected atoms. Rubén had turned to ice. Cold. Nasty. Unbreakable.

  He had fallen into a coma after the fusillade in the delta. In his delirium, he remembered his mother at his bedside, the wrinkles of her face and her soft hand caressing his, her eyes closed, as if to wipe out the evil that had inserted itself into his body, as she had done when he was a child to drive away his bad dreams. He’d had one chance in a hundred of surviving: Rubén had fought tooth and nail against his torturers until a second banderilla had pierced him. He’d been found attached to the table in the bedroom, bathed in his own blood. Beside him, Miguel was no longer breathing; Rubén was. Thrust into his back under the pressure of the police sirens, the second sharpened point had missed his heart. The emergency team had stopped the hemorrhaging without being able to the bring Rubén out of his coma, but with all the blood he’d lost and the weakness of his pulse when he was taken into the operating room, he could have died ten times over.

  His body had stood up to the shock. He had awakened for brief moments, drunk on drugs, entangled in bandages on a hospital bed, the ceiling merging with the plastic tarps that delimited his realm. Chemically-induced hallucinations had cast him back into the pit, struggling amid crocodiles and snakes, two days outside time that left him groggy. Finally, Rubén found his footing in the world—the world and its black lungs.

  Sutures, healing, painkillers, blood pressure: Pichot, the surgeon caring for him, had prescribed six days of complete rest before he could think about going home. Rubén remained cold. Anita had been killed by a bullet to the head, the body of his friend Oswaldo had just been found on the bank opposite the island in the delta, but not the body of the Mapuche, who had disappeared in the turmoil.

  Rubén lay on the white bed in the hospital room, his eyes circled by dark nightmarish rings. Across from him, Ledesma’s face was also grim. The police captain hated hospitals—they smelled like sickness, other people’s deaths—and above all he hated the idea of being jeered at when he retired in a few months. The old cop hadn’t been able to resist the desire to torpedo Roncero and Luque, Torres’s flagship: with Eduardo Campallo’s suicide and the men in the delta on the run, their whole house of cards was collapsing. But his investigator, Anita Barragan, had been killed in the operation, and the case had been assigned to the forensic police led by Luque, the very man he suspected of major corruption. A fiasco for which he might have to pay a heavy price.

  A large man with a big, pockmarked nose despite his abstinence, Captain Ledesma wore a dark expression mixing anger and grief. He had hardly recognized Anita Barragan’s face when her body was brought back to him. Her blond hair was sticky with blood, her head had exploded under the hydrostatic stock: a bullet fired at point-blank range. It looked like a summary execution.

  “I don’t know how far you’re involved in this, Calderón,” he concluded in the polluted air of the room, “but I want to tell you right away that the surveillance of Del Piro’s cell phone will not appear anywhere in the report, and agent Barragan will be said to have acted on her own initiative, tracking down the Peru Street murderer. There won’t be a word about Cam­pallo and his daughter. Luque and Torres will have my hide if they find out that I was carrying on a covert investigation. Moreover, I suggest that you do the same. Cap­tain Ron­cero will come to question you today, according to what I’ve been told. Limit yourself to the Michellini case: that’s my advice.”

  “Muñoz falsified the autopsy report on María Campallo,” Rubén retorted from his sickbed. “All you have to do is exhume the body.”

  “After her father’s suicide?” Ledesma asked, astonished. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “María was murdered, you know that as well as I do.”

  “You can explain that to Luque and Roncero, they will probably be curious to hear your version of the story. I’m finished with it.”

  There was a nauseating silence in the room. Rubén was dying of heat in his hospital gown, flying on an analgesic cloud that did nothing to calm his desire to kill.

  “Are you going to let the death of a cop go unpunished?”

  “I have no choice,” Anita’s boss insisted. “Luque has taken over the case, in person, and he’s going to make short work of your statements.”

  The gunpowder and ballistics tests implicated the detective in the killing, and he would be forced to reveal the hidden side of his investigation to Roncero and to Luque and his elite police, who would then never let him go.

  “Does Luque scare you that much?” Rubén grunted. “I thought you hated him.”

  “We often hate what scares us.”

  “Miguel Michellini’s DNA corresponds to María Cam­pallo’s, not to their alleged mother’s, and . . . ”

  “Forget Campallo,” the policeman interjected. “Harassing a mourning family, and one that is moreover close to the mayor, would blow up in your face, Calderón, you can be sure of that. The report I delivered to Luque is limited to the Michellini case,” he said firmly. “You’ve left a pile of dead bodies behind you, old pal. Whether it was in self-defense or not, you’re in no position to attack, you’re on the defensive!”

  Imprisoned on his hospital bed, his left arm hooked up to tubes, Rubén was almost lost in his pillows. He closed his eyes, suddenly weary. The old cop was drawing back. He was letting go. But he was right on one point: the forensic police had taken over the case and Luque wouldn’t do him any favors. Ledesma was shifting his weight from one foot to the other in front of Rubén’s chart, simultaneously eager to leave and ill at ease with the idea of leaving the detective alone in his condition.

  “Anyway, I’m pleas— . . . sorry about what happened,” he said.

  Rubén wasn’t thinking about the steel point that had been run through him in the bedroom on the island, about his ears burned by the picana, or about the electrical furies that were gnawing at his brain, he was thinking about his friend Anita, about his childhood dreams that were dying here on this hospital bed. He thought about her blond smile when she gave him her drawing of a captain sailing over a gray sea speckled with blue . . . Ledesma wanted to say something else, but Rubén bared his teeth, livid.

  “Get the hell out of here!”

 
; *

  Samuel and Gabriella Verón, the parents who had disappeared, were not Argentines, but Chileans: that was why they weren’t entered into any database.

  The Grandmothers had finally tracked them down in the archives of Nazareth House, a reception center within the church of Santa Cruz, through which many Chilean refugees passed after Pinochet’s coup d’état. Father Mujica, who was close to the poor and the oppressed, had been murdered by the dictatorship’s thugs, but the activists had questioned witnesses from the time. Samuel and Gabriella Verón had migrated to Buenos Aires in late 1973, shortly after Perón’s death, unaware that the same military junta would take power there. They had gone into hiding after the Triple A roundups, and escaped the death squads until they were finally kidnapped one day in the winter of 1976 along with their baby, a little girl then sixteen months old.17 Their disappearance had gone unnoticed because, like Father Mujica, their Argentine friends had all been swept up by the state machinery.

  What about their family? The Grandmothers had traced them back to Chile, where other associations were fighting the dictatorship’s crimes: Samuel Verón had been the student leader of a militant pro-Allende group; in 1971 he married Gabriella Hernandez, whom he’d met at the university in Santiago. After Allende’s fall and the general repression that followed, they fled to Buenos Aires. Although Samuel Verón had left everything behind, Gabriella’s parents were estancieros, the owners of hundreds of acres in the Mendoza region. Killed in a car accident not long after Videla’s coup d’état, they had left their land to their sole heir, Gabriella. She hadn’t had much time to enjoy it when she and her young husband were kidnapped.

  Carlos, for his part, had investigated the public works projects set up by the junta in order to modernize the city center—to drive out the underprivileged population and construct new buildings for the benefit of private enterprises. De Hoz, the economics minister, had assigned Colonel Ardiles (who was made a general in 1982) to public works. This war on the poor was not new: the junta had reduced by half the salaries of the working classes, done away with free hospital care, and raised the price of cattle 700 percent in order to satisfy the interests of the powerful Sociedad rural (an association of large landowners), while whole neighborhoods were deprived of water and electricity. Then forgotten diseases such as summer diarrhea and rabies struck certain areas of Greater Buenos Aires, taking the country back fifty years into the past. Carlos had pursued his investigation: General Ardiles was not unknown, because he was one of the high-ranking officers targeted by the CONADEP at the end of the dictatorship. After spending five years under house arrest, Menem had finally been granted amnesty when the Full Stop law was passed. Human rights groups had repeated their attacks when Kirchner came to power, but the new legal procedures were exploited to create delays, and Ardiles benefited from statutes of limitation and certificates of ill health to escape any punishment. In addition to his army pension, the old general also received stock dividends and attendance fees from various businesses, and obviously did not regret his past. Questioned by a journalist after the dismissal of his case, Ardiles had declared that a war necessarily implied deaths, that it was a matter of “us” or “them”—meaning the Reds.

  Susana would have swallowed her false teeth.

  Leandro Ardiles now enjoyed activities proper to his age (eighty-four) in the gated community of Santa Barbara that had been built by Vivalia, Campallo’s concrete company. Sum­moned several times to appear as a witness, notably in 2010 for the ESMA trial, Ardiles had never showed up, prevented by medical certificates signed by Professor Fillol, the owner of a private clinic in the same community of Santa Barbara: Fillol, who was one of the victims of the shootout in the delta.

  Carlos finished his report with a broad smile that hardly concealed his stubbornness.

  “Ardiles,” he concluded. “I’m sure he’s the colonel who organized the extraction of the Verón couple and the falsification of the birth certificates.”

  The Grandmothers nodded in silence. A fragrance of apricots was struggling with the sanitized air in the hospital room; Rubén was registering the news, his face pale despite the sunlight coming through the window. Ardiles, an old general: he might be the one responsible for the kidnappings and murders, his name might be one of those eaten away on the internment form. That didn’t explain Eduardo Campallo’s suicide. Why had Ardiles set up a secret meeting in the Andes, and who was “the man of the estancia”? Rubén gritted his teeth as he sat up on the bed.

  “What happened to Gabriella Verón’s land?”

  “That’s what we’re looking into,” the journalist replied. “I’ve filed requests with the clerk of the commercial court in Mendoza, but that will take time.”

  “Ardiles can take advantage of that to make himself scarce,”

  “If he hasn’t already done so,” the vice president agreed.

  “Don’t worry about that, Rubén,” his mother told him. “We’re not going to let him get away. You can count on us.”

  “Yes,” Susana said. “Rest now.”

  “Impossible,” Rubén replied. “No, impossible.”

  His voice was hoarse, almost malicious.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Luque and his gang are going to grill me,” he said, his eyes clouded. “If I end up in their hands, I’ll never get away.”

  Rubén was swimming in chemical vapors. He tore off the bandage over his IV, and then pulled the needle out of his vein.

  “What are you doing?” Elena asked.

  “I’ve got to find those guys.”

  “What? But . . . ”

  Rubén threw off the tubes that tied him to the bed as his mother looked on imploringly. She knew him only too well.

  “This is crazy,” she said soberly.

  “I agree,” Susana added. “You’ll never make it past the end of the corridor with your blood pressure the way it is.”

  “I’m feeling better,” Rubén lied.

  He could see clearly, that was about all. Carlos glanced at his friend’s haggard face and understood that it was pointless to insist. He’d had the same look on his face when they told him about the disappearance of Jana, the witness whose body was still being sought. Rubén took the clothes his mother had put in the metallic cabinet.

  “You can’t leave in that condition,” Elena whispered. “You’re going to kill yourself.”

  His eyes were glowing with rage.

  “I’m already dead.”

  *

  Jana.

  Rubén thought about her constantly.

  With the eyes of love, he saw again the room in the delta, her frightened face when they had separated. Three days had passed since the shootout, and she had disappeared. She too had become a ghost. Rubén opened the door of his office in a state of confusion close to dizziness.

  Carlos had dropped him off at Peru Street after he had picked up a set of keys at his mother’s house. They had left the hospital without anyone noticing, but the news would soon circulate among the staff and get back to Luque.

  Rubén walked around the apartment a bit, feeling alien to himself: the faces on the walls, the couch where she had slept the first night—without her everything seemed lifeless. Useless. Sordid. He leaned on the bar, feeling as if he might faint. The effects of the IV were fading, and the pain in his lungs was increasing, dull, piercing. He took two painkillers from the hospital and put his head under cold water in the sink. A long time. His legs felt cottony but he mustn’t stay here—it was the first place Luque’s cowboys would look for him. He raised his head, walked into the bedroom at the end of the hall—a few things, weapons, he would take the minimum with him.

  Rubén groaned as he slipped aside the chest of drawers on the rug. He lifted the floorboards and remained stunned for a moment: the cache of weapons had been emptied. The grenade, the tear-gas bombs, the handcuffs, the r
evolver, the ammo, even the sniper rifle and the cash had disappeared. There remained only a set of brass knuckles and the Glock 19, along with its silencer and three cartridge clips.

  Rubén’s heart was beating faster: Jana. She alone knew where he hid his arsenal. The keys to the office were in her bag, on Oswaldo’s boat: they hadn’t killed her. She’d escaped. She’d returned to Buenos Aires. Tears of joy welled up, but the mad hope that gripped him quickly dissipated: why hadn’t she called the Grandmothers, or tried to find out what had happened to him? Instead of contacting his mother, she had preferred to make off with the weapons in the cache: why, unless it was to make use of them herself? Rubén shuddered beneath his icy armor.

  Jana was his sister, his little sister in rage . . . And that was precisely what scared him.

  5

  Concentrated in the Panama Canal Zone, the United States’s military schools had instructed thousands of soldiers who were to train the security forces of future dictatorships: social control over the population, interrogation methods, tortures. By a domino effect, one country after another fell under the yoke of military regimes: Paraguay (1954), Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1971), Chile and Uruguay (1973), and finally Argentina, in 1976. Contrary to his predecessor Jimmy Carter, the Republican president Ronald Reagan did not disapprove of the policy conducted by the Argentine junta: the former actor invited General Viola to Washington; Viola had replaced Videla at the head of the dictatorship, lifted the embargo that blocked loans to financiers and military men, and ceased to support the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who opposed the establishment of “anticommunist” military training bases in their country.

  Colonel Ardiles had been promoted to the rank of general by this same Viola, before the disastrous episode in the Falklands. Subsequently, Leandro Ardiles’s political and financial supporters had allowed him to slip through the cracks, but the Campallo case put everything in question again—his comfortable retirement in the gated community of Santa Barbara, his independence, and even his freedom. The situation was getting out of control. They had had to flee, his wounded arm still hurt him, and the statue of the commander was beginning to crack under the soldier’s veneer.