Blood Makes Noise (17 page)

F
ormer president Aramburu thought,
This room is not so unlike the room of my youth.
The narrow concrete floor, flaky plaster wall. The tick of heat withdrawing off a corrugated metal roof. The former president was a moody child, or so his father once told him, but he remembered those days fondly, as he remembered few other things in his long, tired life.

He hadn’t heard a car pass for several minutes, and that meant he was in an outer barrio. The only light fixture was an oil lamp, which meant he must be in one of the poorer ones too. Probably the north. They always seemed, these people, to come from the north.

He was tied to the chair such that it was difficult to look at anything but the faces sitting directly opposite, of which there were three. Just as well; what glimpses he’d managed of himself revealed only spattered blood…

The Fat One, nervous, whose knuckles were surely wrecked by now—and why didn’t he put on gloves?—was on his feet again. He was young—they were all young, these college shits—with the body of a man but the swagger of a cruel child. His face was close, breath ferocious with garlic. “Where is she?”

You’d think he’d have gotten bored of the words by now.

“I don’t know.”

“Liar!”

Another crack to the numbed, swollen side of his face and he tasted blood, but he was old and bled easily. So predictable, these fiery children. So unskilled. What was one more crack to a destroyed face?

The Fat One stepped back, shook his knuckles in agony, then savagely kicked at the prisoner. A surprised blast of pain shot up former president Aramburu’s leg. As the tears cleared from his eyes he thought,
That’s the idea, kid.

The Short One was up now, waving the gun around like a second phallus. He jammed its stubby barrel against one of Aramburu’s pulpy hematomas and gushed stupidly, “You think we’re kidding? You think I won’t do it, old man? You think I won’t blow your fucking head off? I’ve used this, old man. Used it plenty.”

And every time a blast of drunken fury from a moving car.
How is it now, college boy? How is it close up, looking into eyes ready and bored?

“Where is she!”

Sigh. “I don’t know.” Ironically it was, after a fashion, the truth.

“You were president! You were in charge! You were president!”

President. Yes. Just for a moment a long moment ago. The carnival geek left with Perón’s rubble piled to the moon and just a broom to sweep it up with. A couple of strokes with that broom and he was gone, another turn in the endless Casa Rosada revolving door. In that time he had never asked. Never wanted to know.

“No one knew.” He hated the way his voice sounded. Sloppy and toothless. “She just disappeared. You don’t know what it was like in those days.”

“You expect us to believe that? Answer me!”

“I don’t care what you believe,
Little Man.
” A calculation and it almost worked. The Short One blanched and shook and stuck the quivering barrel in his eye. “You’re dead, man! Dead!” But in the end he hesitated, the fury dropped, and he was just another fool too close to his mortality.

Aramburu concentrated and managed his absolutely last smile.

“Carlos. Martin. Get out.” It was the Third One, speaking for the first time. The other two lingered, resistant, and the voice steadied with ice beyond its years. “Get out.
Now.
”

So they were alone, he and this calm, young voice that was clearly more than some collegiate firebrand. He rose now, medium height, and paced around Aramburu without hurry. This was no city boy, either. “Senor Presidente…” The voice was slippery gravel. His pace was unhurried and his feet, though clad in loafers, carried the unmistakable weight of a life in country boots. He crouched at Aramburu’s eye level. “You know we must have Her. You know what She means to us.”

His hair was reddish, his eyes full of the calm emptiness of a boy who was never a boy, living his existence now on the last mile of life. A scar ran from ear to ear on his neck. “And I believe you when you say you cannot tell us.”

The young man walked back to the table, picked up the curved blade of a gaucho
facón
, and Aramburu smiled.

Argentina had never developed a myth of the heartland. Like its topsy-turvy place on the globe, this topsy-turvy culture invested all value in urban
Porteño
values. The countryside was a hostile, brutal place; its people, their gaucho cowboy tradition, despised.

Aramburu stared at the ruined young man before him, holding the symbol of his humiliated class, and now understood. It was not the urban spoiled but the pampas, Her pampas, that would rise against his
Porteño
universe to claim Her missing crown. And something untamed in Aramburu sucked deeply on that revelation.

“What is your name, young man?” Aramburu managed through a shattered face.

“Alejandro.”

“Did you love Her?”

“Above all others.”

“Such a love I have never known.”

“I pity thee.”

“And I admire thee.”

The feeling was not unpleasant, like the stroke of a lover’s fingernail, as Alejandro cut the former president’s throat ear to ear.

A
memory:

The air was serrated that first night she came to him. So silent, his father never stirred. So dark, her Indian hair, Indian stillness, waiting over the boy’s cot as a vision, willing him to wake, whispering, “Shh, Alejandro, it is your mother. Come with me.”

As a boy does in dreams, he released his will to her, finding himself in trousers and country boots, gliding now in the tow of this raven image, away from his father’s shack, past the corral where his father broke horses for the estancia, down the gravel path and into the sighing grass of the plain. When they were far from the village and the light on their skins was the frosty rippling of stars, this woman he had never before seen held his hands and knelt down to him, for he was only seven.

“It is a special night, Alejandro, when all the earth speaks.”

Certainly it seemed talkative. A warm wind boxed his ears as it surged everywhere in kinetic waves. Grasses hissed in return, cutting snaking eddies around them. A massive ombu tree rose and creaked as deep within its rustling canopy a Chaco owl hooted, and the feeling was electrical dread in the boy’s soul.

“Look to the grass, Alejandro. In its patterns you will find your future.”

He tried as she said but it was so much, a thousand shimmering ropes roiling in fat, powerful curls to the horizon. At first they seemed as frightening tigers, nipping his ankles; then huge,
snoozy beasts chasing one another’s tails; finally messengers, conjurings of this woman, speaking in low, urgent tones. The boy could almost feel their fortunes reverberating up his legs—almost—and then they were just indifferent beasts once again, chasing their tails. The woman smiled.

“It takes time, my son. There are words to help.” She whispered three of them—strange, alien ones.

The owl hooted again, and Alejandro caught just the strobe of a burning eye as his mother whispered into his ear, “Some day, Alejandro, I will tell you of the owl.”

Come dawn it was his father above his cot, and there was nothing ghostlike about him as he slammed logs onto the stove and drew water thudding into a kettle.

“Joining us today?” With a smile. The boy snuggled deeper into his blanket, exhausted.

“Come, Alejandro.” Sterner now. The boy raised himself up, eyes leaden, as his father poked him playfully in the ribs. “
Mandinga
dance on your eyes?”
Mandinga
was the pampa devil: part Christian, all gaucho, a nighttime seducer whose favorite targets were lonely cross-country travelers and the dreams of children.

The boy smiled, and this pleased his father, who valued the boy’s smiles highly. He dressed beside the stove, felt his skin prickle in the heat as he pulled off his bedclothes. The air filled with coffee and chorizo slobbering in a skillet. When his father turned his back, the boy spit on the hot surface of the stove. As he watched the globule hiss to and fro over heated pig iron, Alejandro foggily considered the previous night, thought of telling his father what he had seen, and decided finally with the razor shots of morning that it must have been just a dream, like the spit, noisy but evaporating quickly to nothing.

The day hit its stride as most—the boy’s breath puffy white, the horse dung matted with straw, some with its own steamy
breath. The workhorses knew him and tolerated the scrape of his shovel as he swept their stalls and picked out their hooves. The boy always brought a handful of spiced, rolled balls of lard. The horses disdained these but for two—his favorites—who lapped them up greedily and nuzzled for more. The boy patted their flanks, blew softly up their noses because they liked it, told them to be fair but firm with the cows and obey their masters.

His father was at the corral. This morning would be spent finishing the breaking in of a new horse for the estancia. His father dressed well for this work: loose
bombacha
trousers with a clean waist sash, pressed cotton shirt, red neckerchief tied at the throat, and rakish gray beret—a touch of the
paisano
blood that flowed through so many gauchos and gaucho tradition. His father was the unchallenged best at this work on the estancia and arguably the whole province, yet the boy could not help smiling at what an awkward, stumpy gait he cut, like a seal on shore, when away from his natural environment, which for his father was always atop a horse.

This one was a male, separated from the others for its spirit. His father had begun the process two weeks earlier, accustoming the prideful male first to a rubber bit and simple halter. While these represented assaults on the horse’s freedom, they were largely symbolic. The true challenge to a horse’s self-identity, the moment it would or would not accept the dominance of its master, came when a man climbed for the first time upon its back and whispered “
Go.
” Today was that moment.

His father motioned to the boy, and he scampered to the tack room, returning, puffing, with his father’s leather saddle. Originally his grandfather’s, it was hand sewn by a master in Mendoza and covered with fine, pinpoint stitching and decorative tassels. His grandfather had ordered that he be buried with it, but his grandfather was a son of a bitch and the boy’s father—partly for its beauty, partly out of sheer defiance—had kept the saddle for himself.

The horse shifted, agitated by the sight of it.

His father stood beside its head now, soothed it with strokes and murmured patter. As another gaucho laid the saddle onto the horse’s back, his father sunk his teeth into the yearling’s ear.

Any man can, with enough snaps of a whip, force a horse’s submission. And to do so is to be left with a creature compliant but dulled. And in perhaps many places, even most, that is fine.

But not the pampas. Here, on these edgeless tracts of land, where a gaucho can be days from humanity—where the land conspires to confuse, humiliate, and finally consume him—a horse is not a servant but a partner, its intelligence, its spirit, its
will
vital components in keeping rider and mount alive. A true gaucho’s steed was ridden because it chose to be. Led because it trusted—even loved—its master.

The boy’s father held the horse’s ear in his teeth as the second gaucho cinched down the saddle, then released it as the boy tugged tight on the leads, and for just a beat the horse’s eyes found his, losing fast their dreamy surprise. Becoming wary.

And his father was on its back.

The boy threw him the reins, and they all gave man and horse distance.

The male was winding up now, trying to make its decision. The boy climbed onto the corral’s railing, watched as his father sat rigid and straight. Uncompromising.

The horse lowered its head to the ground, testing if man and leather would slide off. They didn’t.

So the horse bucked.

His father carried neither whip nor spurs. There would be no punishment. He would confront this horse with only stamina and certainty.

The horse decided to test his father on both accounts.

It jerked wildly now, staccato blasts of rippling muscle. His father held firm, a force of nature the yearling shook furiously at.

The boy felt pride surge in his gut, then fear for his father as the horse swung to crush him against the corral gate, and the man never flinched, only tugged slowly on the reins till the horse backed away from the fence.

The defiance continued across the corral, but soon the horse tired, the shakes and hops became for show only; then it stopped, panted, and accepted.

His father waited, let the horse feel, in its calm, the power of the man’s simple determination. He climbed down and fed it an apple from his pocket, whispered that they were partners now, patted the horse’s sweaty flanks once, and walked over to the boy, basking in the heat of his son’s affection.

“A fine horse,” he nodded, lighting a rolled cigarette. He said that about every horse he tamed. “To break a horse, Alejandro, to shape its spirit, you must tame not with blood but respect. You will find that true, my son, with most things in life.”

The next morning was always the boy’s favorite: a short overnight trip into the estancia’s vast interior to track a cut of the herd and accustom the new horse to its responsibilities. Just his father and he, the boy riding a small criollo he shared with another youth.

After a morning’s journeying, they stopped under a solitary ombu for the noon meal: bread, cheese, a thick steak—carried between saddle and horse, where the animal’s sweat kept it supple—that his father lovingly grilled over a coal fire. They hadn’t spotted the herd yet, but the horse had done well, and his father favored it with extra oats.

“Which direction is the ranch house, son?”

The boy grinned at the challenge and shot a glance at the sun, traced its arc back to the morning horizon, oriented himself two paces west, and pointed. “There.”

“And the direction of the cattle?”