The Argentina Rhodochrosite (27 page)

56

The sun had sunk behind the
Andes, sending fingers of pink and orange overhead, through the gaps between the peaks, across the empty grayish-green plain below. The rocks were suffused with such soft light that they seemed to be glowing.

The hermit walked past the visitors towards her hut. She didn’t offer anything, didn’t even look at them.

Marcelo turned to Ainsley with apologetic eyes. “How was I supposed to know? I never saw him up close.”

“You can stop saying ‘him’,” said Ainsley.

The rancher was disturbed. “It doesn’t make sense. What kind of woman lives up here alone?”

“One who doesn’t want to worry about rapists following her out to her car.”

Marcelo wasn’t in the mood for humor. “Let’s go make some conversation.”

They entered the hut again. The hermit had removed some of the brown rags from her body and folded them carefully and laid them on the floor. She was sitting crosslegged on the green wool blanket.

Ainsley sat down near the woman. The hermit was utterly unconcerned with her visitors. She reached into the burlap bag and removed a carrot. Her teeth nibbled on the root vegetable, leaving tiny bite marks, the way a small animal would.

Up close, Ainsley could make out her face a little better. She had been a plain woman, with a narrow chin and brown eyes. Now her skin was blistered and sagged, presumably from the ultraviolet radiation, which was surely stronger at this elevation. Plus there was the rumor of a giant hole in the ozone layer over Patagonia anyways. Ainsley had read that in one of her e-books on the plane.

The hermit put the gnawed carrot back in the bag and wrapped it. She looked straight ahead. Her narrow shoulders were slumped forward.

At last the hermit turned to Ainsley. “Did you bring anything to read?”

“No,” Ainsley said.

“I’m starved for a good book,” she said. “The rocks all say the same things after a while.”

Ainsley wasn’t sure if the rocks spoke to her literally or metaphorically. “My name is Ainsley Walker,” she said, “and I am from the United States.”

The hermit didn’t respond to that. She was excellent at blocking out unwanted static, like
yanqui
voices.

“I am called Marcelo,” he said, “and—”

“You already told me that,” said the hermit. She glanced at his clothes. “Are you a rancher?”

He nodded. “My herd is at Lago de Miel.”

“It was.”

He grew very sad. “You heard the gunshots too.”

“Yes, so I went to see.”

“They’re dead?”

“They are.”

Marcelo dropped his head into his chest. Then he looked up. “If I ever find that man.”

“Someone is trying to destroy you,” said the hermit.

“Yes, it’s absolutely true.”

The three of them sat in silence, digesting this fact. Ainsley was burning with curiosity. “So what’s your story?” she said.

“I live alone,” the woman replied.

“Have you always lived alone?”

“No.”

“What were you before?”

“I used to be a nurse.”

“Someone said you had been a doctor,” said Marcelo.

“No. I was in obstetrics. I was a nurse.”

Ainsley had never given birth, but she had been told that the obstetrics nurses often knew as much as the doctors did, and sometimes even more. So this woman had probably been an invaluable resource at one time.

“You were probably very good.”

The hermit’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, I was excellent. I birthed two thousand one hundred and seven babies.”

“So why did you leave?”

The hermit stood up unsteadily. “I would offer you some tea, but the fuel is very difficult to get up here.”

“We have some water,” Marcelo said. “We also have some
matambre
. Can we share with you?”

The hermit nodded sadly. Ainsley sensed that, deep down, she was growing tired of her self-imposed lifestyle.

Marcelo unwrapped their food and spread everything out on the wax paper on the floor of the hut. Then he cut the slab of rolled flank steak into several slices with his knife. He offered the woman the first slice.

Ainsley accepted the next one. Inside the rolled meat were minced vegetables, eggs, and herbs. It was savory and delicious, even cold.

The three people ate in silence for a few minutes. Ainsley could hear the sound of her own chewing, her own swallowing. She’d forgotten how hungry she was.

When they were finished, Marcelo closed up the wax paper and put it back in his pack.

The hermit woman seemed more at ease now. “I left nursing because I saw some bad things.”

She had something she wanted to get off her chest. Ainsley gently nudged her to continue. “Like what?”

The hermit sized her up with a saucerish eye. “Babies taken from their mothers.”

Ainsley felt her stomach take another maddening drop. It was a roller coaster for her digestive tract today. “The children of
desaparecidos
?” she said.

“You don’t have to speak about this,” said Marcelo.

“It doesn’t matter,” said the hermit. “You don’t know my name. I’ve even forgotten my name.” She cackled.

“Where were you a nurse?”

“Tucumán.”

A deep sound of sadness issued from the back of Marcelo’s throat. “That was the center of the dirty war,” he said, looking at Ainsley. “Near to my mine. There were more detention centers and informants there than any place else.”

“Yes, it was,” said the hermit. “The reward for turning in somebody was a state job. It was a smart move in a bad economy.”

Ainsley tried to stay diplomatic. “So what did you see?”

The woman was almost in a trance now. “Blindfolded pregnant women brought in secret doors. Locked delivery rooms. One doctor did all the deliveries. He asked me… he asked me…”

She began to falter.

“He asked you what?” said Ainsley.

The hermit sounded fainter now. “He asked me to assist him.”

“Did you?”

She dropped her head. “I couldn’t say no to a doctor.”

Marcelo interrupted. “This story is well known. The public trials brought everything out.”

“Not everything,” the woman said, alert now. “Not everything. Those trials are why I ran away. I found marks of abuse on the women. Torture.”

Ainsley didn’t say anything. Outside the hut, the wind was starting to grow more violent.

“After the deliveries, the doctor took the babies. Immediately.” The woman smacked her hands together to emphasize the point. “The mothers were wheeled out of the room. I never heard from them again.”

“It was a national tragedy,” said Marcelo.

“And he kept asking me to assist. Over and over. Always, the babies disappeared immediately. And that doctor was respected too. He was a lecturer at the medical school.”

“You didn’t have to follow his orders,” said Ainsley.

The hermit was agitated now. Her hands were twisting the green wool blanket into tiny little knots. “We couldn’t say no. We all had to do what that asshole said. Besides, he was taking orders himself.”

“From who?”

“The military.”

Ainsley and Marcelo exchanged glances. Then the rancher cleared his throat. “I have my own history too.”

Ainsley listened as Marcelo explained his own past, his Zorro rhodochrosite mine, his mysterious customer, and the adopted children who’d surfaced in later years with those very necklaces.

The hermit sat very still. She was listening. Ainsley guessed that she valued the spoken word pretty highly; at this altitude, it was probably in even shorter supply than oxygen.

When he had finished, the former obstetrics nurse was silent for many seconds. Then she spoke. “So you know what it feels like. We were all part of the conspiracy, whether we wanted to be or not.”

“It’s true,” said the rancher. “But what I have been trying to learn for years is the name of the military man who your doctor was taking orders from.”

“Why?”

Marcelo grew intense. “It may have been the same asshole who has been destroying my life. Why do you think I moved here?”

“I don’t know if I can remember the name,” said the hermit. “It’s been so long.”

“What did he look like?”

“I only saw the man once, for just a few seconds, and he wasn’t dressed in his military clothes. But he was tall, handsome. Very blonde. He was attractive.”

Ainsley perked up. That matched Marcelo’s description.

Then the hermit stared off into the distance. “But he had something else.” The hermit’s finger went up towards her eye. “His eye. It wasn’t healthy. There was a… a twitch.”

Ainsley felt her head starting to spin. She thought back to that half-hour she’d spent in the executive club at La Bombonera. She remembered talking to the military man in his dress whites, feeling pity for his empty shell of a wife.

It all made sense. In fact, it had been at the back of her head ever since her own subsequent kidnapping and ejection from the country. And now she guessed what was coming next.

The hermit was still deliberating. “I think… his name was—”

“—Ortiz,” said Ainsley, interrupting her. “Lieutenant Colonel Ortiz.”

The hermit nodded. “Yes, that was him. I thought I’d forgotten.”

Marcelo looked at her, amazed. “How did you know that?”

“Because I’ve met him too,” Ainsley said.

57

The windstorm arrived that night, and
even inside the relative safety of the hut, it was the fiercest weather event that Ainsley had ever experienced.

The wind played a horrible symphony on the primitive stone hut, like an orchestra tuning up before a performance. The treble was played on the small finger-like crags. The roar of the wind across the land occupied the midrange. And the heavy bass—that was the sound of large stones bouncing down the scree slope. It was enough to rattle Ainsley’s teeth.

It was an enormous racket.

Marcelo was the only one sleeping. He was on the hermit’s green woolen blanket. The recluse had offered it first to the American, but Ainsley knew she wasn’t going to be sleeping—it wasn’t in the cards in this country—and opted to sit upright instead, against the stone wall of the hut. She felt the wind blowing onto her back through hundreds of miniscule gaps between the stones. It felt as though she were reclining against a wall of plastic straws.

The hermit was perched on the stool at the table. She’d lit the rusted hurricane lamp, which was miraculously functional. Under the lamp was a fashion magazine that Ainsley had stowed in her purse. The woman was poring over every single word and photo on the page.

But the truth was, Ainsley barely noticed anything outside her own head. She was utterly preoccupied by the revelation of a couple hours before.

Of the thousands of military personnel in this country, she had encountered, by chance, one of the most lethal. Lieutenant Colonel Ortiz had been a hidden architect of the dirty war.

Before he’d fallen asleep, Marcelo had told her that Ortiz was a well-known name, but that he had seemed to have escaped national discussion for the last few years. In fact, he seemed to have escaped prosecution during the public trials of the perpetrators of the dirty war, a painful process that had been chugging along for several years.

All of which meant one thing: Lieutenant Colonel Ortiz was very clever indeed.

She thought about her mission. She’d been assigned to simply find a necklace. That was all.

Now, through a combination of luck, idiocy, and sheer doggedness, Ainsley had ended up discovering a much larger secret: part of the hidden history of tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands, of grown children.

She wondered what other secrets the future held in store.

The hermit woman turned a page. Her finger followed each line, and her lips formed each word silently.

“What is ‘www’?” she said. “I see it before many words without spaces.”

“That’s a website address,” said Ainsley.

“What is a website?”

“It’s on the Internet.”

“What is the Internet?”

“It’s an electronic resource. Like a second world. You go there on a computer, which is—”

“Oh, I know what a computer is,” snapped the hermit. “I haven’t been out here
that
long.”

Ainsley smiled to herself. Then her stomach growled. She was starting to get hunger pains. Now was the time of night she might wake up to head to the fridge to swallow a few slices of salami, or to swipe a few crackers into some hummus. But those were just fantasies out here. The
matambre
was gone. There was nothing left to gnaw on but rocks and blasts of gale-force wind.

“What do you do when you get hungry?” she said.

“I don’t get hungry anymore,” the recluse said. “That was only the first couple of years.”

She decided to change the topic. “If somebody could find this man, Lieutenant Ortiz, and eventually put him on trial, would you be willing to give your testimony? About the doctor who cooperated with him?”

This would be an enormous act of will for her. To come down from the mountains, clean herself up, learn how to interact with people again.

“Would I be safe?” the recluse said. “People warned me never to speak. My life was in danger.”

“You would be safe.”

“Then I would consider it.”

Ainsley nodded. They didn’t say anything else for several hours, not until the first pink rays of sunlight shot through the stone walls of the hut.

Marcelo sat up. His hair was completely flat on one side.

“Good morning,” Ainsley said. She felt worse than a heap of wet garbage but was determined not to let it show.

“What’s good about it?” he answered. “My cattle are shot dead and I’m broke. And the wind is howling.”

“Because today we can start planning revenge on the man who did this to you,” she said.

He thought about that for a moment. “That’s good motivation. I think we should leave.”

“Even in the wind?”

“It won’t be a fun ride, but that’s life in Patagonia.”

They gathered their belongings. The hermit was still absorbed in the fashion magazine. She was shaking her head.

“What is it?”

“Mascara,” she said. “I haven’t worn it in years. But now that I have seen these glamorous women, I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Look, we will come get you when the time is right,” said Ainsley. “You’re important.”

“I will be here,” she said, “unless I die first.”

“Then please stay alive,” Marcelo said. He kissed the woman on the top of her head. Ainsley recoiled at the thought of pressing her lips to the woman’s scalp, but Marcelo was a generous spirit.

“Take care,” Ainsley said.

But the recluse didn’t hear her. She had withdrawn into herself.

Outside, Marcelo untied his horse from a boulder. He removed a roll of dried meat from his pouch and left it outside the woman’s door before they left.