Mapuche (36 page)

The abductions, illegal detentions, and systematic torture were a parallel structure of an effective bureaucratic and hierarchical coercion capable of sowing unprecedented terror among the population; the goal was also to torment the imagination of the living. Of the survivors. Rubén knew that the staging of Elsa's execution and the suicide of the Poet-cannibal could not have been hatched in the minds of the jailers. El Turco and his henchmen were just ignorant, obedient animals. By releasing him, the instigators of this machination hoped to make him their messenger of pain, the surviving witness who would tell his crazy mother how her dear family members had died, sure that the truth would kill her, just as it had killed her husband.

Die or go mad. Rubén had kept quiet, obstinately.

For thirty years, every Thursday, he saw his mother walk around the obelisk in the Plaza de Mayo, unbending in her battle for the truth: there was nothing and nobody who could make her give up, that was the pact. It was
impossible
for her to break this pact.

Nakedness, bodily contact, sounds, smells—it had taken Rubén years to be able to endure situations associated with torture. Beyond the physical trauma, the psychic wounds had taken the longest to heal over: an acute mental suffering then replaced the suffering of the tortures endured, horror rushed into the breaches to the point of making him want to commit suicide as a last act of autonomy. Daniel Calderón had understood that: he had immediately killed himself, fracturing his skull against the wall of his cell.

Not him.

Rubén lit a cigarette, pensively.

Darkness was drawing across the Andean desert. Jana was lying near the fire, wrapped up in the blanket. The flames were giving a reddish hue to her face, calmed after making love, and he couldn't sleep. Images passed through his mind, a confusion of feelings and times in an endless circle.
The melancholy his father tried to instill in him had disappeared one night in June 1978, a night of happiness. Words had betrayed him, those of his father's birthday poem, which Rubén had not been able to bring himself to destroy. He had written the
Sad Notebook
years later, in one sitting, as one tears oneself away from a lethal passion, in order to exorcize the core: he had hidden their memory among his little sister's dresses in the apartment across from the intersection where they had been kidnapped, and had never written anything again.

That night, everything was changing.

Rubén put the last log on the campfire's embers and by the light of the flickering fire did something he had thought he would never do again. Jana asleep in his line of sight, he opened Elsa's notebook to the last page and began to write. An hour went by, perhaps two. Abstract time, that cared little for periods, children's ghosts, or death. When it was all finished, Rubén tore out the page and stood up in the moonlight. Jana was still asleep curled up on the sand, her hands balled into fists. He pressed the school notebook in his hands for the last time.

My sweet . . . sweet little sister.

Then he threw it into the fire.

 

*

 

The Rock of Seven Colors stretched at the end of the canyon. They woke together, rolled up in the blanket. The logs were just ashes among the blackened stones of the camp. Dawn was growing on the steep ridges. They embraced to ward off the cold that had gripped them, and kissed as a welcome.

“Your butt's frozen,” he said, as his hand slipped into her pants.

“And your hand is warm. Brrr!”

She burrowed into him. Rubén was not thinking about what had happened during the night, Jana's face was already radiant, a miracle of youth.

“Sleep well?”

“Yes.”

She got up in the pale rays of the sun, her legs bare, and rubbed her nose, which was wet after a night under the stars.

“I've got sand everywhere,” she said, shaking out her tank top.

She took off her panties, dusted them off in turn, then exchanged them for another pair taken out of her bag, a triangle of black cotton that she put on without false modesty.

“What?” she asked, sensing that he was watching her.

“Nothing,” he said. “You make me laugh.”

“Right. Right,” she repeated, “don't ever forget that.”

He would try. He promised.

The breeze was growing warmer as the sun rose, the mountain range was deploying its stone rainbows. Rubén was picking up the remains of the food that were being attacked by ants when Jana found the sheet of paper folded in two under her bag, which had served as her pillow: a page torn out of the school notebook that had disappeared under the ashes. Jana unfolded it, and her throat slowly closed up:

 

Seeing nothing in the dew

But the

Dawn split

Like a log.

Nothing remains of the horizon

But the bark,

Cracks,

Images of lice,

Bones . . .

Who kills the dogs

When the leash is too short?

The birds have fled the sky

In the painted landscape

Traces of wings.

Of silence

There remains only the murmur

Implicit,

Cracked clouds

Images of lice,

Bones . . .

Who kills the dogs

When the leash is too short?

Biting words in the mouths of others,

It's like the shadow in your eyes,

I cling to it,

I slip into it on my knees without prayers

To love you inside,

The bottoms of the stars glow there,

Your skin, look, it scintillates as soon as

I touch it

Graze it,

Feed on it,

Still,

It's your heart, more or less,

A sorrow on the straw,

Halfway from nothing at all,

I loiter in you like a path at the

End of the day,

Your hands your fingers your thighs

I love it all,

See,

My wrinkled tears in you

rush down,

Washed-out glaciers,

A disaster at work, it amounts

To the same thing,

And delayed lightning bolts that

Exhaust themselves

In the adored dawn,

Which goes away,

Yet . . .

Trees, surrender your branches,

Raise up the ditches!

To you I sell freedom

To the most thunderous

The use

Of chance

And of time,

What do the crests matter,

Of the path

I won't yield a pebble,

Not a stone

I obey the rivers

The lakes

The vein that takes them to the sea

For you I will pour out my powder

Seller of nothing

On a desert of stones

Or of cutting

Sand,

Become flint again,

Life has its heads,

And in the mirror of the flames

Dancing on the surfaces,

Smooth,

I wait.

If it's not you, Jana . . . The wind.

 

A poem. The first. For her. Jana held the treasure of the paper between her trembling fingers: no, Daniel Calderón was no longer the only one, his son also had the
duende
. Rubén, who had so often been thrown out of the saddle and, miraculously, gotten back on the horse, Rubén, a loving ghost whom she loved for real. For her as well, everything was changing. Even the ugliness of her ridiculous breasts no longer made her ashamed. Jana had never felt beautiful—she had never felt so beautiful.

“Why are you crying?”

He had come up to her, but Jana couldn't speak. Rubén wiped away the tears that were running down her cheeks, then took her face between his hands.

“I love you,” he said. “I love you, little lynx.”

Rubén squinted at her a little, to make himself more convincing. Jana finally gave him a smile, a big one, her eyes like diamonds. And the world changed its skin. She, too, had a blue soul.

 

*

 

The stony path, the expanse of sand, the bones bleached in the desert, their long shadows stretching back toward the road, the landscape was moving past them in reverse. They were hungry and thirsty, but that no longer seemed important. They reached Uspallata at the hour when the first vehicles were rolling down the main street, passed the closed casino, and ate breakfast on the terrace of the bistro, which had just opened. Scrambled eggs, tea, toast, grilled fat.

“You got your appetite back,” she said.

“Thanks to you, big girl.”

Their eyes met, amused.

“I'm going to make myself beautiful,” Jana said with a defiant air, “you'll see.”

Rubén watched her lovely ass in the tight jumpsuit as she walked to the bar, and lit a first cigarette. Sweetness and pleasure—with her ass as a lens, you could see the whole world—which contrasted with the situation. Still no news from Anita, the Grandmothers, or Carlos; on the other hand, the Hyundai would soon be ready. They washed up in the cafe-restaurant's lavatories, bought a newspaper, a little food and water for the road. Eight hundred miles as the eagle flies before arriving in Buenos Aires. They were still gradually returning to reality. It was when they picked up the car at the garage in Uspallata, around noon, that they got the news: Eduardo Campallo had just committed suicide.

He had been found shot in the head that morning, at his home.

Three pacts bound the different branches of the military to the Argentine police: the pact of “blood,” when subversives had to be eliminated or tortured, the pact of “obedience,” which connected the hierarchy from the top to the bottom of the pyramid, and the pact of “corruption,” which involved the divvying up of the property stolen from detainees. Alfredo “El Toro” Grunga and León “El Picador” Angoni had gotten rich during the Process, reselling the confiscated merchandise to antique and secondhand stores that didn't ask where it came from. The good old days, those of easy money and the girls that went with it.

His gray hair pulled back, El Picador had prominent cheekbones and wore a thin mustache, fitted three-piece suits that were slightly old-fashioned, and two-tone shoes that looked like those worn by pimps at the beginning of the twentieth century. Taciturn, tormented, a specialist in using the
picana
, El Picador had refined his art to the point that his buddy could have seen it as reverse osmosis, if he'd had the vocabulary. The buddy they'd nicknamed “El Toro.” Atavism or congenital mediocrity: his father had already died in the stupidest possible way—he was taking a piss under a tree when it fell on him. Short, stocky, and energetic, El Toro followed his instincts and considered El Picador his best friend. The two men had never done very well in school: the army had offered them something better than a future: a present.

Together with Hector “El Pelado” Parise, they formed a
patota
, a trio of rowdy friends. They had kidnapped Reds in the streets or in their homes, blown the heads off countless Jews, eggheads, unionized workers, and darkies, sometimes in full public view, they had extorted confessions using the
picana
, they had quaffed champagne in the glasses of people who were writhing in the ruins of their homes, proposed toasts at their colleagues' birthday parties, supported nonsense and many other half-forgotten things as well that they saw as the memory of a riotous youth.

The end of the dictatorship had marked a turning point in their careers: El Toro and El Picador had been involved in trafficking luxury automobiles with the Soviet embassy, but they had almost been caught red-handed, and had to give up any desire to engage in free enterprise. Not clever enough. Too much the hotheads. They preferred to rely on Hector Parise, their former interrogating officer and the brains of the group, who always knew where the action was.

This operation was to pay off big.

The house that served as their base was comfortable, though a little too isolated for their taste; they'd been there for four days, rotting in that damp jungle where the mosquitoes whined. Finally, Parise and the other men being absent, the two pals could take it easy on the bank of the river. A third man had joined them in the house in the delta, Del Piro, called “the Pilot.” The latter, not very talkative, kept his distance from them and affected an aristocratic air.

“Why don't you want to play Truco?” El Toro asked the pilot, who was sulking in a wicker chair. “
Tilingo!
14
We've got nothing else to do!”

“I just don't feel like it, that's all,” the man replied.

Gianni Del Piro didn't feel like playing cards, or dominos, especially with these two guys. He hated dominos, and he didn't know how to play Truco. What made it all the crazier were the fucking mosquitoes, voracious monsters capable of biting you through your clothes. A good way to catch dengue—it was endemic in the delta. Gianni Del Piro was ruminating on the bank of the river, in a bad mood. He had planned to meet Linda for an escape to Punta del Este, a resort town in Uruguay, as soon as the operation was over, not to play dominos in a house in the middle of the jungle with two louts who weren't bothered by mosquito bites—a fat one who was outright repugnant with the grease stains on his shirt and his alter ego, thin as a knife blade, the token taciturn one.

Del Piro had had to prolong his mission, and this was unforeseen. Contrary to his dopey wife, Linda was not one of those women that you screw in a motel after eating takeout pizza. The money he was being paid by his former employers was worth a minor misdemeanor, long enough to do a little job that would pay for several adulterous adventures: Gianni Del Piro had lied to everyone, his employer, his wife Anabel, and a few friends who were too curious, but a hitch had forced him to remain in Argentina, and the others had left him hardly any choice. Anabel wouldn't cause any problems, unlike the beautiful Linda. His young mistress had been waiting for him since noon at the hotel in Punta del Este, she was harassing him with messages he couldn't answer, which were getting more and more scathing the longer he remained silent. It would be a euphemism to say that Linda was jealous: possessive, exclusive, anticipating the other person's perversities as if dirty tricks and treachery were ineluctable by nature, putting up with his talk about getting a divorce so long as he swore never to touch his wife again, Linda called several times a day and at the first doubt that formed in her twisted mind, refused to believe in anyone's sincerity, and especially that of Gianni, her Italian male. It is true that the pilot had had some success with women who were impressed with the prestige of his profession. His forced silence was going to drive her crazy.