Purgatory (19 page)

That night, Emilia talked to her father. She began by minimising the problem. She told him it was their duty as a family to support Chela. ‘Marcelo?’ Dupuy sounded surprised. ‘I can’t believe he betrayed me.’ ‘What he did is only natural,
Papá
, it’s not a betrayal.
Mamá
was ill and we left Chelita on her own all the time. One thing led to another.’ ‘What are they going to do now?’ ‘Chela wants to have an abortion to avoid the shame, but I’ve already managed to get that idea out of her head.’ ‘How could she even think of such a thing? Abortion is a mortal sin, it’s worse than murder, and I won’t have hell coming into this house.’ ‘What if we brought the wedding forward?’ Emilia suggested. ‘I don’t know,’ her father replied. ‘The monsignor wants to perform the ceremony himself. The date has already been set, and who knows what other commitments he has. How far along is the little fool?’ ‘Not far, but the wedding needs to take place as soon as possible.’

‘I’ll ask for an audience with the monsignor, though as you know he’s terribly busy with good works – things no one but a saint would do. Every day, he visits the prisons, takes confession, comforts the prisoners, gives them the last rites. But I’m sure he’ll make time for me. You will both come with me. Chela needs to take responsibility for her actions, and I don’t want you leaving her on her own.’

The monsignor received them in the palace which the government had recently put at his disposal. The armchairs in the great hall where they were asked to wait were large and upholstered in maroon velvet. Young priests and seminarians in soutanes came and went carrying heavy files. The monsignor was wearing a business suit. When they entered, he extended his hand bearing the Episcopal ring. Emilia and Chela bowed and kissed it.

‘What a pleasure to have you all here, what a privilege,’ the monsignor sighed. Emilia, who had not seen him since the dinner with the Eel, noticed he had grown fatter and balder. His bald head glittered.

A seminarian came over and whispered something in his ear.

‘Tell them I’m busy. They may wait for me if they wish. They must wait their turn like everyone else. Put the files on my desk under the others.’

‘May we speak in private, Monsignor?’ Dupuy asked. ‘We have come on a rather confidential matter.’

‘Very well, come with me into the library. If it is confidential, then I shall treat the matter as though administering the Sacrament.’

He led them into a room filled with scrolls and handsomely bound books. A spiral staircase carved from a single block of wood rose to the gallery above. He put his embroidered stole about his shoulders, kissed it. ‘
Reconciliatio et Paenitentia
,’ he intoned. ‘I trust you have truly searched you consciences.’ Dr Dupuy interrupted him: ‘We won’t take up much of your time, Monsignor. We need to bring forward the date of Chela’s wedding. You offered to perform the ceremony. We were hoping you might give us a date that suited you.’

‘What has happened, my child?’

Chela started to cry. ‘Why is this happening to me, Monsignor? You can’t imagine how much I was looking forward to getting married.’ After her fashion, she told him what had happened. Her tale was interrupted with sobbing, and it was difficult to understand what she was saying. Emilia took her sister’s hands in her own and finished explaining.

‘What does Marcelo think?’ asked the monsignor.

‘He wants to get married as soon as possible,’ said Dupuy.

‘In that case, I can’t see the problem.’

Chela again started to talk about the shame she would feel appearing before her guests, the rumours that would hound her and her unborn child for the rest of their lives.

‘Have you repented of your sins?’ the monsignor wanted to know.

‘Of course I have. I confessed and I said ten rosaries as a penance.’

‘Well, my child, there’s no need to make so much out of such a little thing. I know some nuns who will make you a wedding dress finer than anything in Paris. I’ve seen them. They can hide a pregnancy, however advanced it is, and what’s more they use the latest fashions. Dry your tears, now, and don’t worry your head about it. Your
papá
and I will set a date.’

He commanded Chela to kneel and gave her his benediction.
Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti
.

‘Amen,’ father and daughters replied as one. Dupuy made to get to his feet, but the monsignor stopped him. He wanted to ask him what the
comandantes
thought of his work in the military prisons.

‘They think it is invaluable, Monsignor.’

‘Perhaps, but this is merely the tip of the iceberg,’ said the monsignor. ‘I need reinforcements. From morning to night, I listen to extremists and to their families, I tell them to make a clean breast of things, to confess everything they know. In doing so, I do no harm to anyone, quite the reverse.’

There was a knock at the door and a seminarian popped his head round. The monsignor, clearly irritated, waved his hand. It was enough. The terrified messenger fled. ‘Don’t they understand orders? Can’t they leave me in peace?’ He gestured to a pile of abandoned files next to the spiral staircase. ‘The priests here are mere novices, they do not know how to offer succour to so much human misery. Now, if you’ll forgive me, Doctor. You can rely on me to marry that silly girl Chelita as soon as you wish, in the Basílica de Santísimo, the Iglesia del Pilar, El Socorro, in the cathedral, wherever you choose. It can wait another two or three weeks, don’t you think? Might I suggest the newly-weds spend as little time as possible at the reception to avoid any prying eyes. They can simply greet the
comandantes
and leave. The
comandantes
will be attending, will they not?’

‘I shall be inviting them, obviously.’

‘Ah . . . well, when you do speak to them, don’t forget to tell them that you’ve seen how overworked I am.’

Chela and Marcelo Echarri were married with all pageant that the bride had ever dreamed of. The security cordons operated without a hitch, Emilia did not leave her sister’s side for a moment; stood in front of her whenever she noticed someone staring a little too insistently. Dupuy, for his part, banned magazines – even those loyal to him – from taking photographs. No one gave a thought to Señora Ethel’s absence; there was a rumour that she was suffering from terminal cancer and had been sent to a clinic in Switzerland where the family visited her every month.

The honeymoon lasted three months. Chela had an uncomplicated labour in a clinic in Uruguay (a boy, eight pounds, eleven ounces). When she got back, she was bored to tears changing nappies and watching soap operas while Marcelo went to
La República
first thing and came back shattered when it was dark. Marriage was exactly what she had expected it to be: a routine from which there were no distractions and no reprieve, which snuffed out any spark of love before it appeared. As the months passed, her husband wrote less and less for the paper, allowing himself to be caught up in the new businesses now thriving in Argentina fuelled by cheap credit and a weak dollar. He began importing things as useless as they were baffling, selling them on calle Lavalle where people mindlessly lined up to buy them. His father-in-law was his guide. It was Dupuy who advised him, long before the announcement, that the government was going to abolish import duties to force Argentinian companies to learn to compete. Excitedly Marcelo started buying up watches from Hong Kong, screwdrivers from Malaysia, shirts from Taiwan, coats in fake fur and astrakhan from France. However outrageous the merchandise he imported, shopkeepers ripped them out of his hands, paying him in hard cash, determined to satisfy the greed of their insatiable customers. Though the son-in-law barely slept, he made sure not to forsake Dupuy. Every day he spent an hour in the offices of
La República
, dictating to various copyists optimistic predictions about the state of the economy which he insisted was now safe from speculators and prophets of doom. Industries were collapsing but nobody cared about their downfall. The secret of wealth consisted of leaving money with companies in the financial sector and waiting for it to multiply by itself, which is what Marcelito did, though this was something he did not mention in his articles, which recommended restraint and prudence and endlessly repeated the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, while he took the fortunes he was earning and invested them with the banks recommended by his father-in-law: those which paid 12 or 13 per cent interest monthly, sailing full steam ahead, secure in the knowledge they were protected by the state.

Chela found it difficult to accept this transformation in her husband. She too had changed. She was fat, she permanently carried around a box of chocolates and she would go for days without taking a bath, putting on make-up or even looking at herself in the mirror. She was still breastfeeding and her huge breasts spilled out of her nightdress. She was three years younger than Emilia but now she looked older; she even began to get grey hairs which she forgot to dye. At the height of her bitterness, she told Emilia that she spent nights lying awake, waiting for her husband, the baby in her arms, while he sat up, yoked to the calculator, the telephone and the teletype machines.

‘I take him to Mass with me on Sundays,’ she told Emilia, ‘and he rushes out of the church afterwards to find out the exchange rate of the dollar against the yen. I wear the baby-doll nightdress I couldn’t wear while I was pregnant and he just goes to sleep, can you believe it? He doesn’t even wake when the baby is squalling, never picks him up, and I don’t think he’s having an affair, because he doesn’t even have time for that.’

In a few short months, the little bank which Marcelo Echarri bought blossomed, buying up agricultural cooperatives, empty factories and shares in businesses that existed only as a letterhead: it was a lavish graveyard peopled with the dead that no one wanted. The Echarri empire – as the magazines called it – rose like the villages Potemkin built for the tsarina as she travelled through the Crimea only to vanish as soon as her carriage had passed.

Everything was happening too quickly. His wealth was colossal, but existed only on paper. To escape the firestorm would require an act of daring. He looked for short-term investors prepared to entrust their modest fortunes to banks that promised the best interest rates, and his were the highest. Inevitably, the moment came when he could not pay them. The more people deposited the deeper he sank into this dirty business. Bankruptcy loomed, but still he was not prepared to give up. He had never failed and did not see why he should fail now. After a sleepless night plotting and scheming, he happened on what he thought was a providential solution. Rather than paying the monstrous interest rates demanded of them, his frontmen invested the reserves in banks which offered more realistic interest rates. He had two or three million pesos invested for a fixed term in Philadelphia, where he had lived during his carefree student days, but he had no intention of touching it. This money was his shield, his safeguard for the future. But the future was now moving away and rather than coming towards the present, as Bradley’s Metaphysics proposed, it was disappearing. Whichever way he turned, Marcelo could see no future. The future, like the money, had run dry.

He could not sleep for worrying. ‘If you carry on like this, you’ll give yourself a heart attack,’ Chela said to him. ‘Why don’t you talk to
Papá
?’

‘No, your father gave me some advice. He said: “You’ve got to play this like a game of chess, Marcelo. Before you attack, think about how you’re going to defend yourself. Nobody’s going to sit in your seat and play the game for you.” ’ He had followed this advice and sunk ever deeper. He bought a second foundering bank and opened up branches in the provinces to attract new deposits. In every branch, he had a motto engraved in Latin which cashiers translated for customers:
Fac recte nil time
: Do right, fear nothing. For the first few weeks everything went well. Customers entrusted their savings to him because the word
bank
inspired confidence. But when they returned to withdraw their funds, they found the doors closed, or they were sent away by the security guards with implausible excuses: we’re waiting for funds from another branch, it will all be sorted by 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, go home, don’t worry, don’t believe the rumours, your money is safer here than with the Pope in Rome. It sounded like mockery, because at the time, the Pope in Rome was on his deathbed and the Vatican Bank itself was foundering.

Marcelo had no lack of imagination, but now he lacked the funds to use it. He considered laundering money through the drug dealers who were beginning to flood in from Colombia and Mexico, but he knew that if he got into debt with them and did not pay up promptly he would be signing his own death warrant. ‘I can’t take the risk,’ he said to Chela. ‘I haven’t got the guts to leave you a widow, all alone with the baby.’ ‘You need to talk to
Papá
,’ his wife insisted. ‘How many time do I have to tell you?’ For several days, Marcelo hesitated, but finally decided to do so when thousands of furious investors staged a demonstration outside his bank, smashing windows and furniture, stealing telephones, forged paintings and typewriters. His debts amounted to more than two hundred million pesos.

He invited Dr Dupuy to the Jockey Club, where they were able to lunch away from indiscreet witnesses. In plain language he explained the hopeless situation he found himself in, employing all the rhetorical devices for compassion he knew while his father-in-law did not move a muscle.