The Buenos Aires Quintet (4 page)

It’s not far from the Plaza de Mayo where the mothers plod round and round, but emotionally those protests are at the far ends of the earth from these docile-looking ladies chatting over their coffee or hot chocolate. Carvalho wonders if any sense of the demonstrations down below in front of the Casa Rosada has seeped in here. But in among the noble woods perfumed with the smells of excellent coffee, liquors, cakes and ice-creams, there’s no room for History, and as ever men and women seem like nothing more than cheap traders – in their lives, in any other goods. ‘A few yards from here, there are mothers protesting about their dead children, but nobody in here spares them a thought.’

‘Nor out there either.’

Alma seems taken aback at Carvalho’s sense of surprise. ‘As individuals we tend to forget the harm we do or that’s done to us. Why should it be any different for a society?’

‘Sometimes I get flashes of my old naïve secondary school feelings of revolt.’

‘Ah, the ethics of revolt. They’ll die with my generation, and my generation is on its last legs.’

They set off down to the square. They come across a small group of women walking round and round. Some are holding placards, others wear photos of their disappeared children on their chests, like medals. Some seem as if they have a whole universe of emptiness on their shoulders. Few local people are looking on; only a few tourists who perhaps are ethical tourists, perhaps not. Feelings of emotion, curiosity and indifference in equal measure; there’s even a certain annoyance in the air among the passers-by, because of the ‘bad reputation’ this insistence on historical memory gives the city.

‘Have they explained why they go on doing this? Don’t they know their children are dead?’

A flash of anger appears in Alma’s eyes. ‘If they accept their deaths, they can’t accuse the system any more. If they accept money in reparation, it would be exonerating the system. How many accomplices did the military have to help them do what they did? But you’re right, the mothers have almost become just another tourist attraction. I work with the grandmothers. They’re searching methodically for all the children adopted – that is, kidnapped – by the military. Like Eva María. Those children exist. They’re not spirits. My niece, for example. She must be twenty years old now. How could anyone recognize her?’

The demonstration is almost over. Hébé Bonafini, the leader of the Mothers, grabs a megaphone and delivers the political message for today: we will come back again and again so that our children are not wiped from the memory of infamy. They were taken from us alive. They must be returned alive. In other countries of the world, mothers are looking for their children. The system and its barbarity goes on and on. Carvalho and Alma cross the street separating the square from the entrance to the Casa Rosada. Carvalho searches in his memory for everything stored there about one of the most famous presidential palaces in the world.

‘Do you want to go in? Or would you rather walk up to the Congress building? The old-age pensioners demonstrate outside it once a week. It’s like a complete collection of fantastic old people. Or would you like to see inside here?’

‘Is it that easy to get in?’

‘It’s full of former friends of mine. Some of them ex-revolutionaries. Menem wanted to undermine the left by incorporating them into the system, like the PRI did in Mexico. All I have to do is give my name in reception and all the doors will be opened, even at the highest levels.’

‘I don’t have the time to see any politicians.’

‘Well, when you need me just whistle, and I’ll come running.’

True to her word, Alma turns on her heel and leaves him standing there. She’s strangely annoyed with Carvalho or with herself or with the backdrop of the Casa Rosada and the Mothers. Carvalho catches her up.

‘I want to see Raúl and Berta’s place. Will you come with me?’

‘Who do you think I am? I’ve had more than enough tragedy for one day. No, thanks. Do you think I’ve nothing better to do than follow you around?’

‘What did I do wrong?’

But by now Alma is far away, running to catch a bus, and it would be too violent to try to catch up with her. A taxi appears from Puerto Madero, and Carvalho tells him to go to La Recoleta. He tries to remember what he’s learnt about it in the book on Buenos Aires he read by Vázquez Rial before leaving Barcelona, with all the mixed feelings he gets when he reads these days. The well-off area of north Buenos Aires comprises more than one neighbourhood, the author says, and several have a very definite character of their own. This is the case of La Recoleta, which is bordered on one side by a cemetery celebrated in a poem by the young Borges. The rich people of Buenos Aires arrived here in the mid-nineteenth century, fleeing the plagues of the port area; later they continued their exodus towards even more select neighbourhoods, as has happened in every city in the world that can lay claim to be something more than a mere city. Carvalho finds himself in front of the huge gum trees mentioned in the book, with their enormous cement crutches holding up the centuries-old branches. And beyond them is the Recoleta cemetery Borges wrote about – Borges here as everywhere else in the imagined world of Buenos Aires. Carvalho goes in, looking for the family pantheon of Eva Duarte de Perón, which contains all that’s left of a body that was embalmed, tortured, broken, even raped by a crazy necrophiliac military officer who hated Perón but fell in love with the icy soul of his dead enemy. The severity of the marble is softened by bouquets of flowers, and two women are talking to Evita as if she could hear them in the depths where she’s been buried to avoid any further desecration. ‘Oh, poor Evita! So far from Chacarita, where Perón’s buried!’

The sober pantheon obviously belongs to a rich family that fits in well among these long, broad avenues of a cemetery that itself is a reflection of the rich, well-appointed houses of the neighbourhood outside, where houses with gardens boast bronze doorknockers on doorways made of the finest woods – the external signs of having arrived for people who live protected by porters, like the one on duty in the apartment building where Berta and Raúl lived until the night they were raided. In his smart uniform, the porter is busy polishing the brasswork on the stairs and makes it clear he doesn’t have time to waste talking to someone so obviously Spanish. While Carvalho is waiting for some kind of response, an old woman tries to use the lift.

‘It’s out of order.’

Resignedly, the old woman starts to climb the noble marble staircase. For some reason, this loosens the porter’s tongue. ‘The only thing that works around here are us porters.’

‘Did Señor Raúl ask for his key by any chance?’

‘Which Raúl would that be?’

‘As I tried to tell you, I’m the cousin of someone who used to live here, Raúl Tourón. I’d like to see him, and I thought he might have called in here.’

‘Ah, you mean Professor Tourón? He lived here a long time ago. But not for long.’

‘Has he been back recently?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t give him the key. He didn’t ask for it. If he had, I wouldn’t have been able to anyway. After the night of the raid, the apartment was sealed off. Later it was handed back to its owners – Doctor Tourón was only renting it. The owners are selling loads of apartments in the neighbourhood, especially to Europeans and North Americans. Lots of Spaniards bought bargains. Argentina was for sale, although now the prices have gone up again, and it’s become very expensive for foreigners.’

‘What did Señor Tourón do exactly when he came back?’

‘At first he stood there for a while on the pavement opposite, as if he was scared to come any closer. A good while. Then he crossed the street and opened the door. I went up to him to see what was going on, because although I sort of recognized his face, he’d changed a lot. He replied with my name: “Mattías.” I asked him: “You’re Doctor Tourón, aren’t you?” He nodded. Then he asked me: “What about the girl?” “I don’t know, doctor, I never knew anything about her.” So then he left the same way he had come.’

‘Is it true you never knew anything?’

‘A porter knows everything and nothing. I see people come and go. I nearly always know who they are, and when I don’t, I ask. For many years now. I polish the metal and dust the carpets. If you were to go up to one of those luxurious apartments today, they probably couldn’t even offer you a coffee, because their coffee-makers are electric, and there’s no electricity. Am I making myself clear?’

‘Yes, you are. Not that I understand a word of it.’

‘That’s what I wanted, to be clear and yet leave you guessing.’

‘Fine. So after years in exile, Doctor Tourón comes back, turns up here, asks you obvious questions, then disappears again. And in all this time has his sister-in-law Alma never been here?’

The porter doesn’t seem to want to continue the conversation. His eyes have turned cold, and he is clinging on to his shammy leather cloth as if his life depended on it.

‘I can’t tell you any more, because I don’t know any more; and anyway, I’ve already said too much. Ninety per cent of Argentines wouldn’t have answered your questions at all. What went on in the Process had nothing to do with us porters. All we ever did was see who came and went.’

It’s a slogan which is also the name of a company: ‘New Argentina’. Carvalho suddenly remembers the conversation he had with the fat man on the plane. Small world. The food and animal behaviour institute his cousin had worked in before the dictatorship is now called New Argentina. But even though that’s its name, it is housed in a neoclassical 1940s building with more than a whiff of Mussolini, and nationalist pride is evident on all sides. Production statistics, pride in Argentina’s cows, its horses, even its human beings. Carvalho is led down scrupulously scrubbed corridors by a girl dressed in a white coat that cannot hide her splendid ass or legs, and Carvalho gives in to her obvious charms.

The laboratory door opens and one of the fattest men in the world appears. It takes Carvalho a few seconds to identify him with the photo file his brain sends him in a flash: of course, the passenger next to him on the plane. The man pretends not to have seen Carvalho, who also busies himself looking around what appears to be a typical laboratory, with its rats’ cages and scientific equipment that’s always seemed to him should be used for alchemy. Eventually Roberto Améndola comes up. He’s big in every way: physically, cynically, playfully. In his hands and mouth everything seems small. He looks at Carvalho as if he were a tiny mouse. ‘Raúl and I studied biology together. We got our professional qualifications together. We ran this laboratory together. Fortunately, I didn’t get married; unfortunately, he did. His wife Berta was like a cross between Marta Harnecker and Evita Perón. Do you know what females I’m referring to?’

‘As far as females go, I’m a real encyclopedia.’

‘He let Berta do whatever she wanted, he just accepted it. He was brilliant. I was stubborn. That wasn’t right. Why not? Because he was the son of recent immigrants, so he should have been the stubborn one. I’m from a family which has been here since the time of Rosas in the nineteenth century. That’s a long time for Argentina. So I should have been the brilliant one.’

‘He got into a political mess; you didn’t.’

‘That was where his being an immigrant betrayed him. He was a rebel, but a rebel who wore silk Italian ties, had an apartment in La Recoleta and an imported European car. The ones who got him mixed up in politics were his wife and his sister-in-law. Those two had a very masculine view of history’

‘And you have a feminine one?’

‘Let’s just say I take the conventional female position. I’m passive with regards history. I’m more interested in the biological memory of animals than in the historical one of men. What use is historical memory to us today?’

‘Did he come and see you when he returned to Argentina?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he want?’

‘I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’ve no idea. He talked of his work, and how far he had got with it. We’ve come a long way since then, but I offered to help him get his job back here. We don’t make as much as before, because we can’t get any contracts with private firms, and the state pays badly. He was very angry we call this New Argentina. He said it sounded Fascist. But I needed new partners, and they as well as all other Argentines need to believe in Argentina after all the crap we threw at each other or had thrown at us. It was easier before. Can you guess how we managed to live well, very well, and still do? We apply some of what we’ve discovered to making rat poisons.’

With his interior gaze, Carvalho tries to stand back from himself alongside the biologist, to take in the whole of this laboratory built as a prison for rats perhaps out of fear that otherwise they might imprison men. The animals scamper around looking for a way to escape, or perhaps they’re simply imagining it. He hears Améndola trying to tell him something.

‘These rats’ behaviour teaches us not only what we have to do to get rid of other rats, but also what’s needed to save mankind. What we have to do to save the only animal that doesn’t deserve to live. For example, by improving his diet. What do you know about lupins?’

‘That’s strange. It’s the second time I’ve been asked that. Next to nothing. Should we be eating them?’

‘No, the cows will eat lupins, then we’ll eat the cows.’

‘That seems like an idea that’s been tried often before in history.’

Roberto has fallen silent, and Carvalho respects his withdrawal for a few seconds. ‘Raúl. Did he say anything about what his plans were?’

‘What he said was quite a jumble, but he was calm. He talked about rats. He said that when he was a rat he’d been kept in an underground dungeon with a small grating in the roof for air. Sometimes he’d look up and imagine he could see the two of us examining him. You and me, he said, we were there above the grating, looking down at me the rat – and I wanted to behave properly, like a well-behaved rat, even though I might get impatient sometimes, like a rat who looks at his watch, but...’

‘But what?’

‘But he didn’t have a watch. Apparently they wouldn’t let them have watches.’