Mapuche (19 page)

Rubén made it to the shore, exhausted, and dragged himself as far as the part of the beach in front of the dock. Lukewarm blood was running from his throat as he panted. He lacked oxygen, and points of reference; his head was spinning. Water and mud were dripping off him onto the wet sand, his body still trembling after the attack. He sat down among the bits of plastic and seashells, his lungs aching after being under water so long.

“Are you all right?” a fisherman asked from his boat.

Rubén didn't answer. The stench of mud was in his mouth and fear was running down his legs. He retched and vomited a black liquid onto the pearly fragments of seashells.

The bastards had almost killed him.

Among the five hundred babies stolen during the dictatorship, many were not listed at the BNDG, the genetics bank. Most of their parents had never reappeared, having been pulverized by dynamite, burned in clandestine centers, incinerated in cemeteries, cast in concrete, thrown out of airplanes: without exhumed bodies or searches by their families, these children would remain ghosts forever.

The babies were given to sterile couples close to those in power—officers, policemen, sometimes even torturers, adducing false documents.
Apropriadores
: that was the term used to describe the adoptive parents. The waiting lists were long, special privileges acceptable. The
apropriadores
waited until a prisoner had a baby, and then recuperated the fruit of her womb. If the mother was liquidated after giving birth, that was not their problem: these babies were part of the “spoils of war.”

Except that, since they were illegally appropriated, these children did not have access to their family history: it had been stolen from them. The men and women who had doubts about their origins thirty-five years later could call upon CONADEP, an organization whose job was to determine the identity of the
desaparecidos
. When they learned the truth about their origins, affection often won out over affliction, and many of them erased the past and reestablished contacts, when they could, with their original families—grandparents, uncles, cousins. In every case, these children underwent a veritable psychic earthquake: diverted filiations, interrupted transmissions, the bonds that bound these stolen babies were based on lies and crimes. They could not love, hope, build, or progress in their adult lives, mendacity insinuated itself everywhere, made minds and acts opaque, contaminated feelings.

The Grandmothers had understood this, and opened a psychological unit to help these children overcome the trauma. They had found more than a hundred of them: María Victoria Campallo was one of the four hundred children who were still lost. She and Orlando, the brother she was looking for.

In extremis, Rubén had found a seat on the last ferry for Buenos Aires. His cell phone had not survived its time underwater, and the remarks made by Uruguayan immigration officials and the foul humor he'd been in since his forced dip into the river had not sated his desire to kill.

On the boat taking him back to Argentina, he finally reached Anita by phone: and it got worse.

 

*

 

The Buenos Aires ecological preserve bordered on the Río de la Plata, whose muddy waters emptied into the ocean. Inextricable thickets, marshes infested with mosquitoes, pink flamingos, and puffins fishing provided some idea of what the first conquistadors found when they landed here five centuries earlier. Adjacent to Puerto Madero, the preserve was separated from the business quarter by a simple avenue that was more or less unused; the sunset was flaming on the reflective sides of the buildings when Anita Barragan's patrol arrived at the site. They were the first on the scene.

Novo, the current trainee, was driving the emergency squad's two-tone Fiat. Wearing a cap and a green uniform, Jarvis, the frumpy guardian of the preserve, made his rounds every night to chase out the little wise guys that liked to picnic in the fresh air and smoke joints while playing music: he was the one who had found the body and immediately called 911.

The Fiat bounced over the rocky track that wound through the bit of jungle and stopped within sight of the ocean.

“It's there,” Jarvis said.

The shore was twenty yards below, beyond a clump of acacias. They left the police car at the side of the road and went the rest of the way on foot. Tall reeds anticipated the skyscrapers that could be seen in the distance. By the light of the setting sun, they traversed a cloud of particularly persistent mosquitoes and made their way through the stunted trees to get to the beach, a bit of earth covered with branches and various kinds of rubbish.

Dirty brown water was lapping in small, oily thrusts, exhaling a sickly sweet odor of decay. The low-pressure system that had struck the Argentine coast had changed the currents; hundreds of plastic bottles had washed up on the beaches and riverbanks, carrying mussels and empty seashells into the estuary. Full of apprehension, Anita walked up to the edge of the water and held her breath in order to confront Death. The body was floating among plastic bags and algae, the top of the head torn off. Blue cloth pants, a T-shirt, no shoes. A woman, to judge by the tufts of brown hair full of sand and parasites that were jumping around. A swollen, unrecognizable body. Anita shuddered as she bent over the face: attached around the eye sockets, dozens of whelks were eating away the rest of the eyes. The smell got more intense; Anita didn't know what to look at first, if she could go on looking at this poor woman with the top of her head gone, half devoured by the sea.

Novo stood at a distance, preoccupied by the churning of his bowels; the guardian had turned his eyes away and was looking toward the thicket. Anita was trying not to vomit. She believed she'd seen the worst when she picked up burned bodies; but there were no limits to the worst. She thought about her cat to keep her mind off the body, swallowed even though her mouth was dry, ignored the putrid emanations and the mosquitoes harassing her, and crouched down in the mud. To be in this condition, the corpse must have been in the water for several days. The top of the skull had been scalped, a clean cut, probably made by a boat's propeller. It was hard to look at the face, with its orifices teeming with whelks, but the neck was intact. A tattoo was visible under one ear: a little lizard crawling toward the lobe.

Anita stood up, cold sweat running down her spine. She had seen the tattoo somewhere else. The digital photo Rubén had shown her. María Victoria Campallo: she had the same little lizard below her ear.

 

*

 

A greasy sandwich was dripping on Alfredo Grunga's shirt. El Toro knew the city like the back of his hand. He had roamed it in a Ford Falcon—in the good old days, as they said, or at least the times they constantly referred to as the good old days. Sitting at his side, El Picador was scanning radio stations, trying to find a love song to relax. Quite a lot of traffic on Buenos Aires's main artery: office workers going home, confident in their positions as officials, their families, their cobbled-together everyday lives.

 

O divina . . .

Toda, toda mia . . .

 

El Picador had found a suitable station. He gave his partner an angular smile. El Toro, who was driving the converted van, was finishing his cheese empanada; sweat was running down his flabby jowls, like the grease running onto his shirt, which was still more or less white—what a pig, this Toro—ho, ho, ho!

“Turn down that stupid fucking music!” the big bald man in the backseat growled.

Parise knew these wild-eyed fanatics, and this time there could be no slipups.

A charter member of the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), Hector Parise belonged to the group that had awaited Perón's return at the Ezeiza airport in 1973, when two million people stormed the airport to give the old hero a welcome he wouldn't forget. Parise and his team had taken up a position near the speaker's platform and fired into the crowd, concentrating their fire on the Montoneros, the most virulent activists. Thirteen dead, four hundred wounded, Perón's plane diverted to a military base, and a terrible panic that prefigured the general's split with the left wing of his party: on May 1, from the balcony of the Casa Rosada, where the Montoneros had assembled en masse to show their support for him, Perón called them “immature imbeciles,” “traitors,” and “mercenaries.” A perfectly orchestrated coup, because Perón died two months later, leaving power to his wife, a dancer under the influence of López Rega and his death squads, of which Parise was a member—the beginning of the scramble for power that led to Videla's coup d'état.

Ancient history.

Avenida Independencia. El Toro was wiping his fingers on his shirt when Parise barked from in the back of the van, “Take the first right.”

 

*

 

Miguel had opted for a white sheath dress under a belted, flared coat that showed off his ankles—the transvestite had a fetishistic taste for high-heeled pumps, which he wore smaller than his feet in order to “shrink” them. His debutante's outfit. People were going to laugh or cry, it didn't matter. The show at the Niceto had changed everything. The magic of the stage that you felt in the pit of your stomach and that liberated you. After her mad night spent dancing, laughing, and drinking with other artists, Paula had understood that her life was changing. One stroke of good luck following another, Gelman and Club 69's performers hired her for the tour to Rosario, and other gigs were coming her way, from Mendoza to Santiago. The shock had been staggering, the response urgent (they were leaving two days later), and from then on the decision was final: Miguel would give up prostitution on the docks for an artist's life. He would replace his broken tooth and maybe even one day,—why not?—change his sex, his name, his life, far from the mother who was blocking his way. Miguel was going to become Paula, like a butterfly leaving its chrysalis: forever.

The transvestite looked at her watch, a little candy-red dial that emphasized the edging on her dress: it was closing time, and the laundry's metal shutter was already down. Miguel clicked his heels in the alley that led to the back room (“the artists' entrance,” he called it), his heart pounding—“Steady, old girl, be a man for the first and last time in your life!”

He had hardly opened the door before he was met with a cry.

“There he is!” Rosa jumped on her chair. “Aah! Aaahh!”

The old woman almost suffocated on seeing her son dressed in that way, gripped the armrests as if the Devil had given her wings, and clutched her checkered quilt in her scrawny hands.

“How dare you?” she said furiously, shooting him a murderous glance. “How dare you, you demon?”

Rosa was not alone in the laundry's back room. A man in a cassock was there with her, a man about forty with a soft smile and a white clerical collar. Brother Josef, no doubt, the priest the old bigot was always going on about.

“Did you bring in reinforcements?” Miguel asked his mother.

“Look at him, Brother Josef! Do you see the sickness in him? You have to exorcise it! Oh, Lord!”

“Now then, now then . . . ” The priest patted his parishioner's withered arm. “Take it easy, Rosa.”

Miguel shook his head under his wig, offended but almost amused by the situation.

“What a horror! Just look at his homosexual clown getup! To do that to his mother! In front of you, Brother Josef! And it makes him laugh on top of it! Brother Jo . . . ”

“Please, Rosa.” The man was trying to cool her outrage. “Calm down and let me talk to your son.”

His paternalistic manner reeked of conspiracy: Miguel was tired of all this.

“I don't have anything to say to you, old friend,” he said, to cut the conversation short. “It's my mother I want to talk to, not you.”

“Lout!”

“Let him say his piece, Rosa. Your son has important things to tell you. Speak, my son. I'm here to help you, you and your poor mother.”

The priest from the Immaculata Concepción was wearing discreet little glasses on a pale and mousy face that oozed Christian benevolence. Miguel ran his hands over the folds of his dress and shrugged.

“All right.” He took a deep breath. “Mama, I've come to tell you that I'm packing my bags and leaving the house. I've found a job in a transvestite revue; in two days we're leaving for Rosario, on a worldwide tour, and I won't come back. Not here anyway. I don't care what you think, since you've never thought about me, but always about yourself. I don't even hold it against you. If Papa had lived, we wouldn't be in this situation. In any case, it's too late. From now on, Miguel will dress as Paula, whether you like it or not. You've never loved me,” he continued, pulling the rug from under her feet: “even when I was a child, I could never do anything right. You scolded me all the time, as if you wanted to suffocate me, as if I weren't the person I was supposed to be, and well, that's too bad. Now I'm leaving. I'm out of here. I'm disappearing!”

“What?”

“Yes, Mama, I've had enough of living in mothballs, of listening to you tell me I'm sick and doing your ostrich act. I didn't come here to ask your permission or your opinion, I came to get my things. I'll come back to help you now and then, if you want me to.”

“Selfish brute!” Rosa yelped.

“Yes. In the meantime, I'm going to live with people who love me as I am.”

“Impostor!”

“Right.”

“Impostor!” the old woman shrilled. “I'm ashamed of you, you libertine! You want me dead, admit it! How ashamed I am, my Lord, what shame!”

“Miguel,” the priest interrupted, “why leave your mother so suddenly? Something must have happened recently that forced you to make your decision.”

“It's funny,” Miguel remarked. “It's when you become free that people start thinking that you're talking rubbish. You know what, Brother Josef? Since you and your God are so clever, why don't you take care of my mother.”