Blood Makes Noise (20 page)

Of Her.

And the faraway pressure of something building inside.

Though he lived once again on the pampas, he rode no horse, listened to no
payador
under bright moon. That life, the life of a
rastreador
, was gone. He lived a life away now, an orphan
pumping gas and wandering the open tracts outside town in undeveloped thought.

She was slow and didn’t go to the parish school. She was young, a child still, liked his reddish hair, and didn’t mind the puffy scar that ran ear to ear on his neck. For a month they’d find a clear piece of ground near the river, just sit, say little or nothing. Sometimes he’d try to express a fragment of his relationship to Evita; she’d never understand, would push his shoulder in tease, laugh a dull, retarded honk. He’d stop, sulk, draw stickmen in the dust, put the sudden blossom of emotion into kissing her or touching her flat, pubescent chest.

After Her death he followed closely the march of the Senora’s ideas through her husband, Juan Perón. Alejandro’s focus now rested on this man, once so unimportant to him, now the nation’s vessel of Her word. He read of the rising protests against their political vision, felt dead fury when the oligarchy called Her, in braver and braver tones, just another whore.

“Nobody likes you.”

“I know.”

“They think you’re scary.”

“I think they’re nothing.”

“I don’t mind your neck, y’know. I don’t mind it…”

A year after Evita’s last ride to the CGT, the oligarchy rose and banished Her husband. Her word, Her philosophy, Alejandro’s future were in a moment declared nothing, null, finished.

And the throbbing began behind his eye.

The slow girl’s father was a brutish drunk, and Alejandro gave him a wide berth, sitting with his daughter at the river, listening to her hum, feeling the throb in his head grow. He turned thirteen, worked in the store, pumped gas for the passing oligarchy and Yankee lackeys. Each night he read again Her autobiography; each day he spent his meager coins on more candles for Her shrine. A boy called Her a name one day and Alejandro broke
both his arms. They expelled him from the parish school. His stepfather tried only once to demand an answer to his stepson’s behavior but backed down, terrified of the silent eyes. Without school Alejandro spent more hours wandering alone the pampa grass and its snaking eddies, listening for his future.

And one day the future spoke to him.

In words he could at last understand. So he crouched, listened, even as a grass fire on the horizon came closer and closer, even as the smoke and ash stung his face; listened even as the flames rolled over him, and when they had passed he was unburned, and the words of the grass were clear: “You are the immortal protector of Her word, Alejandro. And your meter is fire.”

Afterward he brought the slow girl to the shrine and told her he felt his old life dissolving, felt himself blossoming into something beautiful.

“Blossoming into what?” she asked.

“Her word.”

And the girl didn’t answer, because she didn’t understand. But its import warmed her, and she drew him close when he reached out, didn’t resist when he pulled her down into dust flickering with the candles of Her shrine.

It couldn’t happen, because she was too young, the pain too great, and she was crying, clutching her dress, running away down the road.

He lay there in the dirt, bathed in candle and starlight, and as the girl’s footsteps faded, he thought of his mother: headless and corrupted and haunting.

The slow girl was brought to her father, the damage shown, and the father beat his daughter. This brought him no satisfaction and he went to the boy, still lying beneath the shrine, and attacked him savagely, would have killed him, but the boy crawled away to the river. There, heaving shallow breaths, Alejandro washed the hot pain of his body and noticed: the pressure in his head had stopped.
He found the girl’s father sitting near his hearth, drinking from a
mate
gourd. The man didn’t look up and possibly never recognized Alejandro before the boy killed him with his stepfather’s shotgun. He dragged the gun on the floor to the door and was hit by the slow girl—half mad, clawing him savagely, screaming and biting—and he pushed the girl to the ground, reloaded the gun, and shot her too.

The lights were out in his stepparents’ home, a
mandinga
wind gritty in his hair. He dropped the gun, hot and spattered. There was nothing left but to leave, and so he did—into darkness, the pampas, into Her.

He had no idea how long he walked.

The sun swelled his lips and blistered his scalp. Rain split his shoes and rent his shirt. He sucked water from muddy holes, cut the throats of dull cattle and ate their tongues. He passed through lightning storms, locust clouds; felt his clothes rot and peel away. Felt himself transformed into something more than dead.

Two months later he entered Buenos Aires the immortal protector of Her word.

T
hey’d refused to come closer than two blocks, Juan and Emilio, his worthless party hacks. The guards at the door had spooked them and they held back, holding a car ready. So be it. Alejandro went on alone, climbing into the building from the opposite roof. The guards were simple militia, not the more effective death squad paramilitaries, with their dark sunglasses and dark-green Ford Falcons.
Was there any sight closer to the rim of hell
, thought Alejandro,
than a pair of Latinos in a dark-green Ford?

The roof door was brittle with exposed hinges. The room beyond was large, a records-storage area stacked floor to ceiling with files. He moved swiftly through the carefully labeled boxes, mundane catalogs of tyranny. If there was one thing the generals of Argentina had inherited from the Nazis, apart from their war criminals, it was an obsession with documenting in exacting detail the most pedestrian of police horrors. Everything organized and alphabetized and ready for quick burning on flash paper should the merry-go-round suddenly come to a stop.

Choose your secrets well and they will stay buried. But make everything a secret and it’s like burying the ocean: it’s going to leak.

Alejandro walked past 1971 and 1970, the latest years, sagging with thousands of smiling young men dismembered and disappeared. His own file was there, luscious with broken bones, electrified genitals, transcripts of him howling in the dark for anybody, even his torturers, to keep him company.

The years ticked back, a secret policeman’s view of history, wide rows of shelves in the seasons of coups and paranoia, smaller ones in times of distraction and order. They swelled and shrank, each in passing, till he arrived at the particularly thick years of the mid-1950s.

It would not announce itself, this secret. Even the president of the time had not wanted to share in its ugliness. Alejandro remembered the president with fondness: a man, even in death, who understood things as they were. A skill rare enough in this world, rarer still in this city. No, this secret was like the buried ocean: you had to look for the leaks.

Alejandro plied through Casa Rosada memos. The dull work of dull, savage men. Alejandro’s efforts, his obsession, was supposedly the charter obsession of all neo-Peronist Montoneros. But theirs had become a commitment thin as a peso coin. With rumors of the government considering negotiations to bring Juan Perón back from exile to stop the country’s descent into civil war, many considered the battle essentially won. They were fools. Perón was never the heart of the movement. An old man now, he would easily be manipulated by the ruling junta. This was never about him. It was always about Her. She was the soul of the revolution. If Her body were allowed to be returned under this government’s control, even with Perón, it would inevitably become
their
tool. That’s why it was absolutely necessary they find Her first and bring her back under Montonero control. Why couldn’t these middle-class clowns understand that?

The memo names flitted past, mostly dead now, some in exile, one in retirement, one foreign—an American.

The American.

They’d clearly burned his main file a long time ago, but the ocean is deep and the name dripped constantly on tiny invoices, surveillance chits, patrolmen’s musings. The beads of water drew together, began to form a picture…

Footsteps.

Alejandro slunk against the cool metal racks, waited to hear if their cadence was lazy and militia. The pair of footsteps cleared the stairwell and halted several yards away. He had a Walther P88 in his waistband, but to use it now would be to bring down an army.

A radio gagged. “
Suspect is believed in building. Armed and dangerous. Wait for backup…
”

So the army was already coming down.

He pulled the gun from his back and stepped out. The shock of seeing him toppled one backward onto his ass. The second jerked spastically at his gun belt, probably for the first time. Militia. When nothing but Alejandro’s stare struck their bodies, the two militiamen—gulping wrecks—backed away and fled.

Sirens outside now on pretty dark-green Fords. These guns would certainly come out of their charcoal blazers more skillfully.

From his own leather coat Alejandro removed two cap-fused tubes of jellied gasoline. The first he laid on the stairwell, played out its fuse and lingered, waiting for dark-green footsteps. Arrogant on new heels, they didn’t disappoint. Alejandro let them draw nearer, lit the fuse, and walked calmly back onto the floor as a hot concussion blew down the stairwell and licked out along the ceiling. There were one or two screams, and a great deal of footsteps headed the other way, now distinctly without arrogance.

More footsteps, coming through the roof door now. Alejandro lit the second tube, winged it over the stacks, and there was a blossoming
whump
of thick gasoline droplets pelting the room. The footsteps fanned out, separated, and Alejandro withdrew into darkness.

The fire moved with animal speed, kicking out over 1971 and 1969. Footsteps continued their search but grew cautious, now fearful, now slower still.

And Alejandro waited.

Waited as rising heat stiffened hairs on his arm and stung his eyes. Waited, because he knew he could always wait longer than they.

The fire’s voice grew from taunt to bully, and the building offered its first groan of protest. Alejandro couldn’t hear the footsteps anymore but knew they were in full, terrified retreat. Still he waited, as his skin cracked and ears blistered, and watched the fire stumble and close around him.

Then he ran. Through its maw and the fire was surprised and made way, tapping just enough to ignite his hair. He bashed through the consuming stacks, took a fistful from the year 1956, felt his melting hair fall in dollops, and went for the roof.

Out across the top where the smoke rolled in iron waves. He could hear shots buzz past as the roof tar began to bubble, and it was hard to get speed as he moved, faster and faster, for the edge, pushing off the granite lintel, falling through air, over the narrow alley, and onto the roof of the building opposite. His hair snuffed out, and his legs rose raggedly, drawing themselves to a ladder, off the building to the street.

His two party hacks were gone.

They startled when he entered the safe house. When his party hacks finally recognized the face beneath the destruction, the stupid gaggling began.

“We waited…I swear, man, we waited as long as we could…” The fat one, Juan.

The short one, Emilio, now: “He’s right. Shit, the terror cops were everywhere, cutting off the streets. We thought you were dead, man, dead for sure…Goddamn, you need a doctor…We’ll get you a doctor…”

Their words bounced off him. Alejandro lowered himself into a chair. Pieces of skin, colored and stiff, dropped in to his lap.
I am a mess
, he thought.
Soon, this is going to hurt.

In no particular hurry he cut off their jabbering. “Where did you park the car?” He was surprised how a voice could sound so…burnt.

“Don’t talk, man, just relax. We’ll get a doctor…” He was, just by living, scaring the shit out of them.

“The
car
.”

“On the boulevard. Where we’d be sure to see you. We were there. I swear, we waited as long as we could. We’ve always backed you up. You know that. That time with the president, with this…”

Parked on the boulevard. Two guys sitting in a car on the busiest street in town, pointed straight at the building. Waiting nervously and not bothering to look like anything but two college terrorists waiting nervously. Anyone who saw them—that is, half of rush hour—would’ve been blind not to report it.

“I see.” His mind was starting to fog. He could let it go of course, but honestly, he was just so tired of their voices.

He shot the fat one in the neck, and the kid registered nothing as he dropped to the floor. The short one blanched, backed up to a chair, and collapsed fearfully into it, an obedient schoolboy once again. He started to moan something, and Alejandro opened a hole in his chest that kicked out plaster in the wall behind.