Mapuche (4 page)

The station at La Boca smelled of worn-out shoe leather and mothballs. Two broken chairs next to a dead plant decorated the room where Paula and Jana had been waiting for three-quarters of an hour, sitting on a bench opposite the desk. They had been refused a phone call, a glass of water, and access to the toilets, which were, it seemed, plugged up.

“It's going to be okay, precious,” Jana whispered to her friend. “It'll be okay when we get out of here.”

Tears were running down Paula's cheeks, completing the ruin of her makeup.

“It's horrifying,” she repeated into her Kleenex. “Did you see what they did to him?”

In death, Luz had become a man again.

“Try not to think about it,” Jana said, stroking her feeble hand.

But Paula wasn't listening.

“What kind of animal could do something like that? What monster? And Luz? I don't understand how he could have let himself be taken in like that.”

Luz was her protégée, her kitten by the roadside, her associate; Paula had taught her about the night, the neighborhoods, the hours to avoid, suckers to be cajoled, hotels that welcomed prostitutes, backrooms, the risks and the rules that had to be observed: it was just incomprehensible. And then why did they have to kill her? Because she was different? Because she was on the bottom rung of society, and it was eternal human nature to take revenge?

“It's disgusting.”

“Yes,” Jana agreed. “But it's not your fault.”

“If I hadn't had that appointment in Niceto, I could have been there: things would have turned out differently.”

“It's pointless, I'm telling you.”

Agent Troncón was watching them out of the corner of his eye, and was less frisky than he'd been when his boss was around. Raised by a father who kicked him in the ass and who even in the morning looked like he'd just come out of a
pulpería
—a country bar in the time of the gauchos—Jesus Troncón came of age on a high, arid plain, afflicted with short-sightedness, persistent acne, and a downy mustache that caressed downturned lips. The apprentice policeman walked up and down a few times in his too-short uniform and finally beckoned to them from the hall.

“Hey! It's your turn!”

Paula cringed beneath her cheap cream-colored coat. She knew Sergeant Andretti by reputation—he was to be avoided. Jana helped her get up from the bench where they'd been marinating and shot a withering look at the greenhorn in his cap. The boss's office was situated at the end of the hall, after the empty vending machine.

“Come on, we've got lots of things to do!” Troncón bawled for form's sake.

Paula moved forward, teetering.

“You won't do anything stupid, will you?” she whispered to her friend before going in.

“No. I promise.”

A smell of old sweat emanated from the walls of the office, which were covered with search bulletins, drug-abuse prevention posters, and tattered pictures of naked women. His burly body wedged into a groaning chair, Andretti sized up the couple—a transvestite with a giraffe's neck decked out in an unlikely white dress with flounces and an Indian with a torso like a female monkey's, her buttocks poured into a black combat suit: faggots disgusted him, but the little whore, with her round ass and her Amazon's legs, would be well worth visiting in a cell.

“Can you tell us what we're doing here?” Jana asked for openers.

“What do you mean, what are you doing here? We're dealing with a murder, kid,” the cop snapped at her, “and I'm the one who asks the questions. Three out of four guilty parties are friends or relatives of the victims, did you know that?”

Paula shrank on the nearby chair.

“So far as I know, we're witnesses,” Jana said, “not suspects.”

“And the story of the killer who returns to the scene of the crime, have you heard that one?”

On the wall behind Andretti was a poster showing a girl with Teflon tits who was biting her thumb with a naughty air.

“Bull,” Jana said.

“We'll see about that: where were you between midnight and six o'clock this morning?”

“At home,” she replied calmly. “In my workshop.”

“Workshop for what?”

“I'm a sculptor.”

“Is that right. What do you make, totem poles?”

“Hilarious.”

“The thing is, you don't have an alibi, sweetie, that's what I see,” the head of the night squad declared. “And you, tranny,” he barked, “where were you?”

Paula's tears had made her mascara run, her heels and stockings were spotted with vomit, the sight of Orlando mutilated had struck her dumb, and this jerk terrified her.

“She was at the Niceto for an audition,” Jana replied for her. “A club in Palermo: two thousand people can confirm it for you.”

“That means that your pal Orlando was alone on the docks when he was attacked,” the policeman deduced.

“Massacred would be more exact.”

“Yeah. Did he have enemies, this Orlando?”

The Mapuche shook her head.

“No . . . We know lots of sons of bitches but nobody who would do that.”

“A matter of settling scores, did you think of that?”

“Orlando and my friend here were working for themselves, and they earned hardly enough to live on: that doesn't deserve that kind of ruthlessness.”

The policeman pretended he hadn't heard.

“Who else was close to Luz?”

Jana turned to Paula, or rather her colorless shadow.

“Only us,” she mumbled from her chair.

“You've started talking again!” the sergeant observed. “So: you don't know anyone who might give us information about Orlando?”

“No.”

The giant receded like a tide of fuel oil into the chair, and crossed his meaty hands behind his head.

“If I understand correctly, you claim that the victim has no friends other than you, and that you're close to him but not to the point of knowing his last name,” he laughed. “That's some friendship!”

“It's not friendship,” Jana said, “it's loneliness.”

“Oh ho! Do you at least know where he lives, your best friend?”

The Mapuche grimaced. “No idea.”

“In a barrio,” Paula threw in. “La Villa 21.”

A slum in the center of town.

“Family?”

“In Junin . . . At least that's what Luz, Orlando told me. He broke with his former life and came to Buenos Aires.”

“Where he ran into the wrong person at the wrong place,” Andretti continued.

Paula was interlacing her fingers on the chair. The sergeant pushed back the keyboard of his computer, which resembled the shabby buildings in the neighborhood.

“Since you don't have anything else to tell me, you can go home,” he announced.

“You're not going to take our deposition?” Jana said, astonished.

“To write what, that you know his first name?”

“You're going to inform his parents, at least?”

Andretti scowled at her in a special way. “You know what they say around here, Indian: mind your own business.”

An old adage that had been widely repeated during the dictatorship. At that time, Jana hadn't yet been born.

“Our friend was massacred by a psychopath and there's every reason to think he's still roaming the neighborhood,” she said. “Luz had a purse and clothes; if you haven't found anything, that's because the murderer must have picked up Luz in his car and taken him somewhere to kill him and then throw his body in the harbor.”

“Listen, no little whore is going to tell me how to do my job!” the policeman grumbled, shaking his chops. “Now get out of here,
India de merda
, before I lock you up. Naked, how would you like that?”

Paula shivered on her chair. The station's walls oozed violence, arbitrariness, and beatings. Jana held her breath, her eyes burning with hatred. It wasn't just Jorge, the manager of the Transformer; for the cops too she would never be more than someone who sucked cocks, a subhuman or alien of the species that you fucked in cars, a bastard who grew up in the dirt and was thrown into the city like a prison, an Indian who pissed her kind's blood: nothing.

Nothing but a whore.

She took Paula's icy hand.

“
Rajemos
!”
3

The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, the Peruvians from the Incas, the Colombians from the Mayas, and the Argentines descend from boats,” goes the old joke.

In fact, Buenos Aires existed chiefly through European eyes. A play of mirrors and reflections that honed the soul of
Porteños
. After the natives were wiped out, losers from the old world gathered in this silted-up port without docks, which was reached by half-submerged wagons drawn by horses. Hardly had the dust raised by the Indians settled than the colonists began building the city of Buenos Aires that Daniel Calderón loved so much.

Was that why he left it so often, like a passionate mistress, the better to return to it? When he talked about the city, Daniel had the
duende
, that creative brilliance dear to Lorca that is sometimes found in a bullfighter's pass, a singer's voice, or the trance of a flamenco dancer. Rubén found this
duende
that “rejects muses and angels / as learned dogs in the mud” in his father's poems, the fire and light that had dazzled his childhood. Daniel and Elena Calderón had given him this name in honor of Rubén Dario, the instigator of their language's independence movement and a precursor of the manifesto of
Martín Fierro
, the avant-garde poetry magazine that had put its stamp on the beginning of the century in Argentina, and of which Daniel was one of the most innovative heirs.

Rubén had discovered Buenos Aires through the eyes of his father, a poet bound to his city the way the plain is bound to the rain: very early on, Daniel had told him about his tricks of sleight-of-hand, his bars where they smoked and talked until dawn about politics, about the tango that had returned from the whorehouses and its women bent under the other's desire, the colors and prism of the Europe that haunted them. As they sat for hours on benches or café terraces in the Florida neighborhood of Buenos Aires, his father had taught him to observe people, to recognize that a young girl was walking alone in the street for the first time, so proud in a touching way to show everyone that she was free, the elegance of lovers on the paving stones shining in the night, to divine the reflections of old men in parks, the lost thoughts that had to be recuperated for them, the insouciance of cats in cemeteries, the peaceful happiness of mature women when they had fallen in love again, the stirring vitality of some women when they gave the gift of their grace to the world, thus restoring its enchantment. Together, they imagined the lives of passersby, like the man in a hat they saw near the opera house who, by following Borges's itinerary, would end up shaking Pinochet's hand (a typical joke, the great writer having both drawn up his “ideal itinerary” through the checkerboard of Buenos Aires and shaken the hand of the Chilean dictator before retracting his act “to some extent”). As Rubén grew up, women became their favorite playground, where passionate abstraction proved most fertile. Poems and ideas piled up in the notebooks he filled, the Hispanic
duende
being the target:

 

Beauty, beauty . . .

I would like to die with you,

Beautifully . . .

 

Rubén was advancing with giant steps when Videla's coup d'état—
la Golpe
—happened on March 24, 1976.

“One death is a cause of sorrow; a million is news.” Thirty million was the number of the
desaparecidos,
those who “disappeared.”

The method applied by the military junta duplicated the Nazis' practices during the war: they simply picked people up without warning. The advantages of proceeding in this way: no information about the conditions of detention, the preservation of their image on the international stage, and the possibility of liquidating individuals who would otherwise be protected by their age (minors), their sex (girls, pregnant women), or their fame. Contacts established with French officers who had fought in Indochina, and then with members of the OAS Delta groups who had returned from Algeria,
4
were soon to add to the terror by introducing electroshock torture that was henceforth used systematically on prisoners: the
picaña
. These methods and the ties established with Nazism were in no way unprecedented: the national icon, Juan Péron
,
had received a considerable sum in exchange for providing eight thousand passports for Axis agents fleeing Europe. In this way, many Argentine police had been trained by former Nazi officers, and pamphlets circulated in the barracks—“SS in Action,” “Hitler may have been right,” and the famous forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which was still to be found in the used bookstores on Corrientes Avenue. In addition to the instructors, the greatest war criminals had passed through the country, Mengele, Boorman—who was said to have possession of the “Nazi treasure”—and Eichmann, whose house looked out on a Jewish cemetery.

Following the example of the commander of Auschwitz, one of the high-ranking officers in the Argentine junta, General Camps, had declared that he had “never personally killed a child,” which did not prevent him, however, from proposing, at the height of the repression, that every subversive child in primary schools be arrested in order to muzzle all future opposition. Under pressure from the persnickety Carter administration, Videla, the first head of the dictatorship, had finally given up the idea—it was a matter of image.

All the military men had been involved in these secret operations, and were regularly rotated. They were forbidden to talk about or to comment on these “purification” missions, but rumors were allowed to circulate in order to terrorize the population. Threatened with reprisals, some people turned up their radios in order to mask the cries of neighbors who were being taken away. Ford Falcons roamed the city without license plates and with an officer in the back seat. The actions took place chiefly at night or in the early morning, and on weekends, if possible: the Intervention Group cut off the neighborhood's electricity if the operation looked like it was going to be tricky, and, in the event of resistance, shot into the crowd—in his report, the officer in charge described this as an “anti-terrorist assault.” Afterward, they emptied the building before taking the subversives to “processing centers.”