Mapuche (29 page)

“Who else was going to do it? You, maybe? It's true that no one in the army knows you, and I'm sure they all adore you. Am I wrong?”

Rubén shook his head, disconcerted.

“You're crazy, just think what would have happened if you'd been caught! Damn, you should have warned me.”

“About what? That I was going out without your authorization? You're not my father, and I didn't leave the reservation to obey the next person who came along, if you see what I mean.”

“No.”

“Well, in any case it's too late,” Jana said to drop the subject.

“Where are you?”

“At the house. I just got here.”

“Stay there. Please.”

“O.K.,” she said at the other end of the line. “When are you coming back?”

“Not before 8
P.M.
I've got two or three things to deal with. I'll explain.”

“All right.”

“Anyway, bravo,” he said before hanging up. “The archives. I don't know how you did it, but you're managing like a real pro.”

“You haven't seen me in bed,” Jana added. “A real little lynx!”

Rubén smiled in spite of himself. Yes, she was completely nuts.

Gusts of wind were blowing the veils of the women assembled around the family tomb; the men were hanging onto their hats, their sorrow, the women hung on their arms. There were no children present except a newborn infant who was not yet afraid of the cemetery.

The cemetery of Recoleta received the country's elite—presidents, governors, ministers, celebrities. To find Evita's grave, all you had to do was follow the funeral sprays. The Campallo family belonged to these privileged groups. That did not console them. In the late afternoon, heavy gray clouds had descended on the city, darkening the mourners' faces a little more. There were about twenty of them, dressed in black, crowding around María Victoria's coffin. Eduardo, a large man, freshly shaven and wearing a designer suit, his wife Isabel, an invisible skeleton under her veil, clinging to him for support, their son Rodolfo, in pleated pants, his jaw pulled into his double chin. Behind this trio, a few stooped women had congregated, their handkerchiefs hanging from their withered hands, and two not very agreeable-looking teenagers in suits, who had been forcibly combed and who were constantly smoothing their hair blown about by the wind. At a distance from the familial cocoon, a heavyset man with a shaved head and a hard face behind fine black glasses was prepared to get rid of any reporters who might appear.

Eduardo Campallo had taken care to bury his daughter in the strictest privacy, after the official closure of the cemetery. He was meditating in front of the coffin, his hands joined. He had refused to let his wife see María's body, a sight that was traumatizing in every way. A priest with an emaciated countenance was officiating in Latin; he was so skinny under his cassock that he seemed to be swaying in the breeze as he sprinkled a few drops of holy water on the oak coffin. Isabel could hardly stand up. A final prayer, the last tears; Eduardo signaled to the employees that they should lower the casket into the family tomb. The sobs grew louder.

The statue of General Richieri stood guard, uselessly, over the little star-shaped plaza. Rubén, who had played hide-and-seek with the cemetery guardian before the closure, had found an observation post not far away—a white marble monument depicting the “Conquest of the Wilderness,” illustrated with rather mediocre carvings of Mapuches on horseback. The detective came down from his perch as the tomb was being closed up over the body of the unfortunate María.

The striped cat that was prowling among the tombs came to be petted, his eyes dirty and indifferent. Rubén tapped the scarred head of the tomcat and took the service road.

The funeral cortege, driven away by sorrow, had begun to disperse among the gray crosses covered with moss. Eduardo Campallo was leaving with his wife on his arm when he saw the man near the little plaza. Isabel, who was walking with her head down, also saw him. Her fingers clutched her husband's sleeve.

“I have to speak with you, Mr. Campallo,” Rubén said as he approached him.

The businessman's face, his black Prada suit, and freshly shined shoes bespoke nothing but dignity, sorrow, and distress. Isabel whispered something in her husband's ear, after which Eduardo's face grew even more somber.

“I have nothing to say to you, Calderón. Your presence here is as indecent as it is inappropriate. I know about your intrusion into our home,” he added, without concealing his anger. “The police do too. I warn you right now that you're going to hear more from me.”

“The newspapers will too when they learn that you adopted two babies during the dictatorship,” he said.

Campallo's bodyguard came up immediately. He was wearing a coat with epaulets and had a jutting jaw.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Campallo?”

Rubén brandished a plastic bag before Campallo's eyes.

“This hair belongs to your daughter,” he said with a straightforward look. “Or rather to your adopted daughter, María Victoria. I've compared your DNA: you have no biological connection. Would you prefer to speak with me now or do you want to explain to the press?”

The patriarch's waxen mask grew paler. His son was approaching the plaza.

“What's going on?” Rodolfo asked when he saw how agitated his parents were.

Rubén ignored the gorilla with a shaved head who was waiting for his boss's orders.

“María Victoria was kidnapped before she was murdered along with those close to her. She was looking for her brother—her real brother, Miguel Michellini. Does that name mean anything to you, or did you never meet the family that agreed to the exchange of infants?”

There was a moment of hesitation at the gates to the cemetery. Eduardo grew crimson with rage.

“You have no manners or compassion for . . . ”

“Have you read the autopsy report?” Rubén interrupted him.

“María drowned,” Campallo grumbled. “Isn't that enough for you?”

“Ask Muñoz if there was water in her lungs, ask him if she was still alive when they threw her in the ocean!” he roared, feeling a desire to bite.

“What are you talking about?”

“The fractures show it very clearly. Your daughter was thrown out of a plane, Mr. Campallo, like in the good old days of the dictatorship. Either you knew about it and you're the worst pile of shit on earth, or you didn't, and I suggest you speak to your friends about it.”

“Don't listen to this bastard, Papa,” Rodolfo whispered.

Isabel seemed to disappear behind her husband's back. Half a dozen people had now gathered around the patriarch.

“María discovered that you aren't her biological parents,” Rubén went on, “and that her real parents were abducted and killed during the Process. She also learned of the existence of her brother, who was born in detention,” he added, turning to Rodolfo. “But that is not you, Rodolfo: her real brother was exchanged at birth because he had a cardiac insufficiency. He was the person María was looking for when she was kidnapped: Miguel Michellini. What was his problem,” he demanded of the
apropriadores
: “did he have a limp? Is that why you traded him in for a new one? How much did the new one cost you?”

Rodolfo was incredulous. His father didn't blink, standing there on the little plaza as if he'd been turned to stone. A tear rolled down Isabel's cheek under her veil.

“You son of a bitch!” Rodolfo barked.

“Let him speak,” Eduardo breathed.

Rodolfo looked with alarm at his father.

“Your daughter was planning to file suit against you, Mr. Campallo,” Rubén went on. “You and your wife. She was murdered before she could talk. That's one thing I'm sure of.”

A flight of crows passed through the construction magnate's eyes.

“I didn't kill my daughter, Calderón,” he said hoarsely.

“Someone else could have done it for you. María Victoria had her hands on a document that compromised you,” he said, driving the point home, “you and the people implicated in the sequestration of her parents. Seven years in prison, that's the sentence you could get for stealing children.”

Eduardo swayed back and forth in the breeze, livid.

“What? Is this true? Papa?”

“Don't listen to this demon,” Isabel finally said.

Eduardo Campallo was stunned. The world was crashing around his ears. He remained motionless, his eyes empty, completely dumbfounded. Next to him, his son's forehead was wrinkled. Rodolfo put his hand on his overwhelmed father's shoulder.

“Papa? Papa?”

 

*

 

Rubén returned from the La Recoleta cemetery supercharged with adrenaline. He left his things in the apartment's entry hall and found Ledzep lying on his back, his front paws pedaling the air. The Japanese lamps in the living room were turned on, the curtains drawn.

“Jana?”

No response, except for the sounds coming from the street, nor any evanescent smell of marijuana. Rubén stepped over the cat and climbed the glass staircase—maybe she was in the Jacuzzi. The computer was on standby on the coffee table, his traveling bag and things were scattered on the sofa bed, the bathroom was empty. He opened the bay window, his attention attracted by the little lights on the terrace.

“Jana?”

The table was set, with a white tablecloth, plates, and an elaborate array of silverware, little islands of candle jars flickering in the warm wind, a few red rose petals scattered at random, but there was no trace of the sculptress. The cat mewed behind him, its hair ruffled, and nuzzled his pants leg. Where had she gone now? Ledzep took off in front of him as he went back down the stairs, worried. The cat rubbed against the fridge, extending its fluffy tail like a reed trembling in a gale. Rubén went toward the hall and saw the door to the bedroom open.

“Jana?”

The heat grew more intense when he went in. A heady smell of roses floated in the half-light, and a dozen candle jars surrounded the bed. He froze. Jana was lying on the sheets, her eyes closed. She wore nothing but a black tank top and seemed to be asleep, her hands lying along her body. Rubén saw the brown tuft of public hair, her mouth, the shifting reflections of her body in the golden light of the candles, and didn't dare move. Had she heard him? For a moment he would have liked to go back thirty years in the past, to the time of fleeting romances and pledges made to women and their charms, but his hands, his poor hands, no longer obeyed him: they touched the Mapuche's cheeks, which hardly stirred at the contact.

Rubén kissed her as he had the first evening, tenderly, wholly.

“Your spit tastes like grass,” he said very quietly.

Jana finally opened her eyes and smiled, seeing him leaning over her, and spread her legs. Three red rose petals decorated her labia.

“Fuck me instead of saying stupid stuff . . . ”

 

*

 

Jana hadn't known many men away from the docks—that wasn't a competition, either. Once the clumsy encounters of adolescence were over, she had glimpsed the gates of a paradise to be conquered with Arturo, a young man who had given her a ride when she was hitchhiking to Buenos Aires and taken her home for a night of love all the more beautiful because it would be the only one, before she arrived in the capital and collided with the wall of reality: a country in a time of crisis, in which everyone was surviving with whatever means were at hand. Furlan had picked her up like an apple that had fallen from the tree too soon in a ruined landscape and eaten her green. The two guys with whom she had slept afterward—a student she met at a vernissage and a museum curator in his fifties who had invited her to a big meal at the Taberna Basca in San Telmo before very nicely proposing that they spend the night together at a hotel—were like little seashells found at the bottom of a pocket, souvenirs that you throw away almost without noticing.

Beneath her feral cat manner, Jana was sentimental. No, her meeting with Rubén had in no way been a matter of chance. Chance was like happiness, a
winka
notion. The spinelessness of the elites and the ukases of finance had thrown her alive into the world's garbage dump, where rats lined up to teach her how to be nineteen years old, but she had put up barbed-wire barriers to keep inviolate the house where Love would grow up. For this imaginary flame she would have sacrificed anything, even her sculptures.

That flame was still crackling in the light of the candle jars. Their languid bodies were recovering after their exertions. Jana saw strange forms in the crumpled sheets—animals' ears, old men, glaciers turned upside down, as she was. They had just made love, and their secretions were everywhere; fluid was running down between her thighs, heavy stars hung from the ceiling, rose petals were scattered among their earthly humors. Jana dreaded their first contact, a sensation that was often irrevocable, but Rubén had already put his smooth hands around her legs, petted her hair like the fur of a silky animal, and lapped her up in little gulps: her ankles, the back of her knees, the hollow of her groin, her lips, the
winka
had licked her in little concentric circles without ever touching her breasts—a delicate attention—his soft tongue had gone up the length of her arms, her armpits, her neck, the electric lobe of her ear, and then he had stood up into the sky to let her taste his cock, which was so full of her that Jana, greedy and no longer caring about anything but pleasure, had drawn it all the way to the bottom of her belly.

His blue soul was fading, piece by piece. His cock slipping over and over her clitoris, hypnotically, her murmurs urging him to take her, her eyes when he penetrated her, the incandescent arrow sinking into the silk, the patient quest for her abandonment, the abandonment: Jana had loved it all. Now night was falling behind the blinds on the windows, and on the messy sheets she was dreaming of strange sculptures; the world had expanded by a third, and even more, in all directions. She lay next to him, enjoying the silence that still bound them together in the cheesy half-light of a room that was not theirs. An unknown emotion that she put down to her background—love or not, no one had ever fucked her like that.