Mapuche

by Caryl Ferey

  Torres quickly scanned the plantations: the winery was too far away for them to be seen.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” he replied, with his customary authority. “You had better go back where you came from before I call security.”

  He took a cell phone out of his checkered shirt. Rubén grabbed Torres’s wrist and, using his right hand, twisted it until the phone fell to the ground. Torres swore at the brute, who was impassive despite the sweat running down his forehead, and held his wrist as if he might fall. Rubén took the Glock out of his jacket, the silencer still screwed onto the barrel, and pointed it at the old man’s belly.

  “What do you want,” Torres grumbled. “Money?”

  Rubén shook his head slowly.

  “Vulgar to the very end, huh? Tell me instead how much Gabriella Verón’s land was worth at the time. Did you buy it for a song, or did she and her husband cede it to you in exchange for the lives of their children?”

  The old boss’s jaws remained inflexible.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” he repeated. “Take it up with my lawyers.”

  “Why didn’t you have them fill out the sales contract while they were being tortured at the ESMA?” he asked in a sugary voice. “That would have been simpler, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’m a businessman, not a soldier. You’ve got the wrong person.”

  “Let’s say instead that you preferred to manage the affair with Ardiles, who brought you Samuel and Gabriella Verón to sign the sales contract before they were liquidated. Who else did you pay off, high-ranking military officers? Was the couple kidnapped for the purpose of stealing Gabriella’s land or did you learn of their existence while they were at the ESMA? Huh? Who told you about them, Ardiles? In any case, the sales documents and the signature were extorted from them by force, from defenseless people, people who were tortured before their children were stolen,” the detective said heatedly.

  Torres put on a face of false pity.

  “You’ll never be able to prove that,” he grumbled.

  “We’ll see about that at your trial.”

  “There won’t be any trial,” the landowner boldly assured him. “You don’t know what you’re getting into, Calderón.”

  “I do, actually. You financed your son’s political career by profiting from lands stolen from the desaparecidos. The ESMA form María Campallo got her hands on threatened to taint you, so you made an unholy alliance with your old accomplices to protect the property you acquired in such a criminal way. You’re the one who had María Campallo kidnapped and killed, who gave the order for the dirty work to be done, relying on the networks of your old friends, first of all Ardiles. Luque and his elite cops were ordered to cover up the affair, at the price of sacrificing one of your main supporters, Eduardo Campallo, whose daughter you had killed. Your son’s friend. It’s terrific, that morality you’re always talking about.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Crazy enough to put a bullet in your belly and let you lie here dying for hours.” He cocked his pistol and changed his tone. “Tell me where Ardiles is hiding. Tell me right now or I swear I’ll leave you here like a piece of shit in the sun.”

  Torres got scared: Calderón was staring at him with the eyes of a rattlesnake, his finger curled around the trigger. He was going to shoot.

  “In a monastery,” he said. “A monastery in the south . . . ”

  “Where in the south?”

  “Los Cipreses,” Torres said, his mouth dry. “In the lake region.”

  Ruben gripped the handle of the gun, seized by nausea.

  “Who’s hiding him?”

  “A former chaplain . . . von Wernisch.”

  “Is his name also on the ESMA form?”

  “Yes.”

  A warm breeze was coming up over the hills.

  “We’re going to check that right now.”

  Rubén crouched to pick up Torres’s cell phone on the ground and held it out to him.

  “Call the monastery’s number and turn on the speaker,” he ordered. “You must have it in your contact list.”

  Torres had lost his haughtiness. He took the phone.

  “What do I say?”

  “Ask for news of Ardiles. Just that. You try any funny business and you’re dead.”

  The old man nodded under his Stetson and obeyed, the Glock aimed at him.

  A monk answered the phone. Torres introduced himself, asked about the health of his military friend, and received a mixed response: Mr. Ardiles had gone away with the cardinal on an urgent errand. They would be back before nightfall, that’s all he knew.

  Rubén signaled to Torres to hang up. He wasn’t lying: they were there. Rubén hesitated. The lake region was more than 250 miles away, several hours’ drive over a highway in poor condition. By the time Rubén got there, Ignacio Torres would have been able to warn Ardiles and his men. He turned toward the patriarch. He couldn’t be left free to move around. He also couldn’t be thrown in prison: Ledesma would lose his nerve. Ruben’s eyes, already somber, grew even darker.

  “You like land, huh, Torres? Well then, eat it!”

  Ignacio paled behind his Ray-Bans.

  “What?”

  “Eat it!” Rubén ordered.

  “But . . . ”

  The Glock’s barrel raked across Torres’s face: Torres bit the dust, his hat rolling against the vines. Blood ran into his hands speckled with brown spots, dripping from his split lip.

  “Eat it!” Rubén yelled, pushing him with his foot. “Eat that goddamned earth or I’ll kill you!”

  A deadly spark crossed the detective’s retina. Ignacio, lying among the vines, picked up a clump of soil in a shaking hand. This guy was out of his mind.

  “Eat it, I tell you!”

  He carried the clump to his mouth and reluctantly put it on his tongue.

  “More!”

  Trembling, Torres obeyed and raised his head, his mouth already full, but Calderón was still aiming at his belly.

  “More!” he hissed, the hammer cocked. “Go on!”

  Torres chewed, with difficulty. Rubén was about to burn up under the heat of the sun. It would be hours before they started getting worried about the absence of the boss, who had gone to inspect the vines. Torres was feeling sorry for himself among the grapes, his chin covered with brown earth and blood, close to vomiting. Rubén lowered the silencer and fired two shots that pulverized Torres’s kneecaps.

  8

  Ituzaingó 67: the Grandmothers were feverish as they opened the gate to Franco Díaz’s garden.

  They had received Jana’s letter at the association’s offices, a few laconic words, barely credible, without further explanations. It had been sent two days earlier from Futalaufquen, a small town in Chubut province. Elena and Susana hadn’t hesitated long. Carlos had met them with the required equipment at the Buquebus of Puerto Madero, where they had taken the first boat to Colonia del Sacramento, on the other side of the estuary. The crossing, in their state of excitement, had seemed to last a century. Finally they arrived. Ituzaingó 67: a blazing sun was flooding the botanist’s garden. Leaving the gate open, the trio went down the charming walk where bees were busily at work. The immaculate flowers of the palos barrochos, the hollyhocks along the wall, the violets running along the flowerbeds, azaleas, orchids—Díaz had created a little paradise around his posada.

  “I’d like a nice cold beer,” Carlos remarked as he put down his equipment in front of the ceibo.

  “Dig first, then we’ll see,” Susana kidded him.

  “Besides, you already drank two on the way over!” Rubén’s mother added.

  Sheltered by a straw hat, the journalist grumbled about them being pains in the neck, then set about the task without complaining. The ceibo the letter mentioned dominated the back of the garden, next to Ossario’s house
—the blackened walls of his terrace and the collapsed roof could be seen over the hedge. Carlos dug around the base of the tree, taking great precautions. Elena was sweating heavily under the white scarf that protected her from the heat—that never happened to her.

  “Are you all right, Duchess?” Susana whispered.

  “Yes.”

  Elena opened her eyes wide as if she had to hold reality in them lest it escape.

  “An agent never destroys his archives.” According to Jana’s letter, the former SIDE official had buried the original document at the foot of a young ceibo, the Argentine national tree. The guardian of the temple, Díaz, was supposed to have fled, leaving the document where it was: among the roots of the totemic tree. The Grandmothers waited impatiently behind Carlos, who was no longer young, notwithstanding his propensity for drinking alcohol at unsuitable times.

  “Well?” Susana encouraged him.

  “I’ve got it,” the bearded man finally said.

  The two friends peered over the shoulder of the journalist, who was clearing away the last soil attached to the roots: a small cylinder was caught in the rhizomes. He pulled it out and then went to take refuge in the shade. Elena, who had the best eyes, adjusted her glasses and the magnifying glass they’d brought for the purpose. Then she unscrewed the lid. Inside the cylinder was a roll of film, just as Jana had said.

  “What is it?” whispered the vice president, who couldn’t see anything. “The ESMA form?”

  Elena unrolled the film, still incredulous.

  “Well?” Susana persisted. “What’s going on? Elena? What’s going on?”

  “It looks like . . . a microfilm,” her friend murmured.

  The names and dates were illegible at this scale, but they were miniaturized cards: some of them carried the infamous symbol of the ESMA, others did not. Elena Calderón continued to unroll the film, inspected it several times with the magnifying glass, and suddenly the Earth seemed to move. It was not only Samuel and Gabriella Verón’s internment form: there were dozens, hundreds of others.

  “Susana,” Elena whispered, shocked. “It’s the microfilm . . . ”

  “What? Do you mean the microfilm?”

  Elena nodded under the scarf that protected her from the sun.

  “Yes,” she said, convinced. “Yes, this is it. The microfilm of the desaparecidos. This is it, Susana. It exists. They’re here.”

  Susana and Carlos held their breath. The military men had destroyed the reports on clandestine operations in the late 1970s, General Bignone had done away with other documents in 1982, and the federal police had burned everything else a few days before Alfonsin was elected, but there were rumors that all the documents connected with the desaparecidos had been duplicated on a microfilm that was concealed in a safe in Panama or Miami, or more likely had been destroyed . . . Now, there it was before their eyes.

  The reception of prisoners, the processing and recycling of information, periodic reports on the advancement of the “work,” names and matriculation numbers, actions authorized by the hierarchy, tours of guard duty, nocturnal thefts ordered by authorities further up the chain of command—Díaz had preserved on microfilm the internment forms of all the Argentine desaparecidos in a secret state document that had been entrusted to him, the patriot. The Grandmothers’ eyes misted over. Their whole life was there.

  Not only the truth about what had happened to their children and husbands: the truth about the disappearance of thirty thousand persons abducted by the dictatorship, what had been done with their remains, the part of Argentine history that had been stolen.

  Susana pressed her sad Duchess’s hand. The fate of Daniel and Elsa had to be on one of these miniaturized documents, but Elena Calderón was not afraid to confront it. Rubén believed that the truth would kill his mother, just as it had killed his father. He was wrong: Elena was fighting because a country without the truth was a country without memory. The fate of her husband and their daughter was only one part of the tragedy that bound together the Argentine people, victims and tormentors, passive participants and complicitous. Justice was there, between their trembling hands.

  The Grandmothers could die in peace.

  “Our search is over,” Elena whispered, her throat tight.

  The old women shed a few tears as they thought about their compatriots, all those unfortunate people who, like them, could soon begin their work of mourning over all the unfathomable voids that the microfilm’s revelations would fill, over the sick hearts that could finally be reconstructed. They wept in the garden, no longer knowing whether they were crying with joy or with relief as Carlos took them in his arms. He too was having a hard time controlling his emotions: “The truth is like oil in water: it always ends up rising to the surface,” as activists said.

  The midday sun was blazing. Elena called Rubén, impatient to tell him the incredible news, but he didn’t answer his cell phone.

  The old woman’s face grew dark.

  “What is it?” Susana asked.

  Elena tried again, several times, in vain: there was no answer.

  9

  Franco Díaz thought Argentines weren’t ready to wash their dirty linen at home: that wouldn’t happen for years, when his generation had passed on. It would be a long time before the ceibo tree in his garden grew and, as it flourished, one day spat out the truth. By that time, he would be gone, killed by cancer, and the last actors of that time would be dead, too.

  Díaz didn’t know that his neighbor, who had lost the suit he’d filed the preceding year, was spying on him day and night to prove that he was in fact polluting his garden. He also didn’t know that Ossario was paranoid enough to have installed an infrared video camera at the window of his living room that covered his neighbor’s whole Garden of Eden. And he didn’t know that when Ossario was viewing one of the cassettes he had seen him bury something at the foot of the a young ceibo—Franco had even made the sign of the Cross over it before covering it with earth, looking all around him as if he were afraid someone might see him. The following night, Ossario had sneaked into Franco’s garden, dug around in the still loose dirt, and found a cylinder that he had taken home with him. What he’d discovered that night went beyond anything he could have imagined. Díaz didn’t know that Ossario, obsessed with the mystery, had feverishly copied dozens of pages of microfilm, put the cylinder back in its place just as dawn was breaking, and begun to work his way through the internment forms on desaparecidos, looking for witnesses. It was the scoop of his life. The name of Eduardo Campallo, the businessman who was constantly in the news at the time of his disgrace, was on one of the ESMA forms, as an apropriador: imagining his revenge as a springboard, the former paparazzo had contacted his daughter, María Victoria, and by that very act signed their death warrants. No, Franco Díaz didn’t know the hidden agenda, but that didn’t matter anymore: after spending five hours bound hand and foot in the trunk of the Audi, suffocating on the gag, without morphine to relieve his pain, the old SIDE agent had told her everything he knew.

  Jana had listened to his revelations without showing the slightest emotion, and then offered him a deal. Paralyzed by the violence that emanated from her irises, already feeling the cold knife in his sick flesh, Díaz had obeyed all her orders.

  The forest where she had dragged him was compact. Chained to the trunk of a large araucaria, the SIDE agent had watched her silently daub her face with black. The Mapuche had left before dawn, carrying her backpack, her rifle, and her other weapons, still without saying a word. The night had been long, cold, and anxiety-producing. What if she had abandoned him there? What if she never came back? Díaz had thought he heard gunshots far away in the forest, then it was silent again. He had finally dozed off, frozen with cold and fear.

  The Indian woman had reappeared shortly before dawn, leading her prisoners. There were three of them, tied up; the thinnest was staggering, his tibia obviou
sly broken, and he was being supported by an old, emaciated man in a cassock. The third man was unconscious, wrapped in a blanket that the Indian was dragging through the trees. Franco recognized his friend von Wernisch despite his pitiful appearance: the cardinal, manifestly shaken by what had happened to him, tried to communicate with him, but Franco Díaz didn’t dare reply. He was forbidden to talk, to move, or to make signs to anyone: the Indian had been clear about that. First, she grouped the prisoners in the middle of the clearing, tied their feet, and then gagged the wounded man and the wretched cardinal. Then, terrible under her painted mask, she used a dagger to shred their clothes.

  Kept at a distance, Díaz was given favored treatment: fresh water, his ankles unbound if not his wrists, and he was allowed his precious doses of morphine, which the Indian gave him in small amounts. On seeing the captives, the botanist shivered: the big guy he’d seen two days earlier in the courtyard of the monastery emerged, his face bashed up and covered with piss and blood. A few paces away, the Indian continued to dig her hole, silently, methodically.

  “What . . . What are you doing?” Díaz dared to say.

  But, concentrated on her task, she seemed not to hear him.

  The Mapuches had assimilated horses better than the winka, who had brought them to the continent. Their horses were faster and had more endurance, and the rest was settled with lances. Since treaties bound only those who believed in them, native surprise attacks and raids were common along the frontier. The warriors brought mounts and captives back to camp, where each victory over the winka, the invaders, was celebrated. White women were treated according to the chief’s appetites, and the men were literally thrown to the dogs. Reduced to sleeping outdoors, half-naked and starving, the Christians soon looked as wretched as the dogs. Beaten, humiliated, gnawing on the remains that had escaped the greedy jaws of the canines, shivering with cold and despair, the captives’ lives depended on chance. The Mapuches killed them before eating their hearts; the head was then carefully stripped of its flesh and contents and transformed into a ralilonko, a trophy cup from which they drank chicha, a corn liquor. The leg bones were emptied out, cut, and used as flutes to make the souls of the sacrificed sing. Among the Mapuche, during wartime every­thing was daubed in black, from the symbolic weapon of the gentoqui, the master of the battle-axe, to the warriors, the conas, who painted their faces with charcoal before going into battle. Jana had found suitable pigments, which she had mixed with water to obtain a dark-colored paste. In using the pigments of her childhood, she rediscovered her artist’s soul, her Mapuche soul. That did not console her.