Mapuche (5 page)

Participating in meetings of left-wing students or labor union activities, expressing overt criticism of the military, having the same name as a suspect, having witnessed an abduction, being Jewish, teaching or studying sociology, providing advice to poor people or suspects involved in legal proceedings, taking care of suspects or poor people, writing poems, novels, or speeches, being a foreigner and “too noisy,” being a refugee from a country ruled by a military regime, being sought for political reasons, practicing as a psychologist or psychoanalyst—that is, influenced by Jewish theorists—giving a piano recital before workers or peasants, being “too” interested in history, being a young soldier who knows too much or who protests, being “too” fascinated by the West or making films that are “too” focused on social subjects or that contravene “good morals,” being active in a human rights association, having a brother, sister, cousin, or friend close to a
desaparecido
: the military and the police abducted people for any reason at all. Anyone who opposed the “Argentine way of life” was considered subversive.

“Subversion is what opposes the father to his son,” General Videla had explained. A phallocratic paternalism that drew its ideology from Catholicism extended to the whole of society: three hundred forty concentration and extermination camps distributed over eleven of the country's twenty-three provinces, for a maximum efficiency—90 percent of those incarcerated never returned.

Rubén Calderón was one of the survivors.

One day in July 1978 he had been freed without explanation, amid the popular jubilation after the national soccer team won the World Cup.

Probably people were needed to talk about the atrocities that took place in the clandestine prisons, in a way sufficiently convincing to scare off the recalcitrant. Or rather he had been spared so that he could tell what happened during his imprisonment, so that he could tell it to Elena and her Mothers who gathered on Plaza de Mayo every Thursday: to drive her mad, precisely.

But Rubén had said nothing.

To describe what could not be described was to relive it, to make the fear, sorrow, and pain rise up again, to speak was to restore to his tormentors the power to crush him. He had said nothing to his mother about his months in captivity at the Navy Engineering School, or what had happened to his father and his sister—impossible.

Since Elena Calderón had joined the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo resistance movement, Rubén could not remain in Buenos Aires without giving the oppressors a way of exercising pressure; he had been hidden in the countryside, with friends who were not involved in politics—like many people of the time, “they didn't know,” or didn't want to know. Hiding out in the converted attic of their home, barricading himself with books like a literary lab rat, Rubén met his mother with deceptive smiles.

He was the friend of owls, of stones. At night, he went out on the plain to spill his guts and didn't come back until he was out of breath, his lungs burning; he collapsed on the grass to revisit the stories they used to tell each other on the terraces of bars—the poet was dead but his voice still echoed in the prodigious memory of his son—stories in which women moved like pumas through the darkness, stories of woods where groups of people set out on horses pierced with nails, stories about encounters with women that Rubén repeated to himself under the stars to give himself the courage to write someday, if he could not speak. But the words fled. They still fled.

His mother brought news from Buenos Aires, where protest was growing. The economy was in tatters, the government's legitimacy was questioned, and there were strikes: after six years of dictatorship, hope was being reborn. He said nothing, he was flayed at the heart of the underworld, a coffin open to the great silence, a messenger of news he had never delivered.

But Rubén had a blue soul. He fooled the sisters at the neighboring
estancia
—how had such a sweet lover accumulated such scars?—developing a rangy animal musculature, invigorated in the outdoors, that would later make him a lady-killer.

“How handsome you are, my son!” Elena said, dazzled, when she visited.

It was true that Rubén resembled his father more and more—in his way of walking, the tilt of his head, the vivacity and color of his eyes, and the disarming smile that unsettled even the surliest women. Naturally, Elena was partial and his mother on top of it, but above all she was in love with her husband who had disappeared. She did not see that Rubén was hatching a monster that kept quiet as it grew stronger every day. The country girls loved his stormy eyes without knowing on whom they would one day fall, his muscular arms that tried to embrace them, taking his shivers for responses to their caresses. Rubén returned from their beds panting, divided between gratitude and fear. The people with whom he lived subscribed to
La Nación
, didn't notice anything.

Rubén was twenty years old when the defeat in the Falklands brought about the fall of the dictatorship. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other victims' associations soon filed a civil suit against the abuses committed during the “National Reorganization Process”: it was the time of the first trials, which were to go on for years. Laws granting amnesty followed laws of exception, weariness grew over time, and the army, the police, and most of the oppressors slipped through the judicial system's net. The Grandmothers were the only ones preaching in a desert in which the country's memory was being lost.

Rubén gave up journalism, which had provided him with a living since his return to Buenos Aires, and found the apartment at the corner of Peru and San Juan that was to become his agency. He studied relentlessly the torturers' techniques of interrogation, the resistance to pain, the ways of shadowing people; he studied history, politics, economics, Nazi immigration networks, international law, legal anthropology, shooting moving targets, the martial arts of the combat teams of the
Montoneros
,
5
the ERP
6
, and the Mossad: in order to fight back.

His detective agency's goal was not to find the
desaparecidos
—he had seen enough to know that they had been killed—but rather those responsible.

In a country where nine out of ten judges who had been on the bench during the dictatorship were still in office, Rubén Calderón was the declared enemy, the Grandmothers' enforcer, the one who received animals' heads by mail, threats by telephone, and insults. For his part, he collected reports on investigations and settled accounts.

The military men hated him, and half the cops in town would have gladly riddled him with bullets, while others would not have shed many tears over his death: Calderón was hunting on their terrain.

 

“Ricardo Ravelli, born 07/07/1952, corvette captain who had attended the ESMA
7
, where he served as an interrogator until 1981, suspected of being involved in a false automobile accident that killed Monseigneur Angelleli, a bishop close to Vatican II and opposed to the ultraconservative Argentine Church, which supported the generals: committed suicide.”

“Victor Taddei, born 01/19/1943, member of the Federal Police from 1967 to 1984, where he worked with military intelligence: left the country and his family in 2000 without providing a forwarding address.”

“Ricardo Perez, born 05/02/1941 in Mendoza, judge on the military tribunal (1975-1982), then on the Supreme Court: found soaked in his own excrement a few steps from his home.”

“Juan Revalde, born 11/25/1950, interrogation officer at the Campo de Mayo (1976-1980), agent of the intelligence services (SIDE) until he was forced to retire in 2003 after Néstor Kirchner took office: has not spoken for two years; interned at the Rosario psychiatric hospital.”

“Hector Mancini, born 06/14/1948, frigate captain in the Navy (1971-1981), twice decorated during the Falklands War; heroin addict, currently without fixed address.”

“Miguel Etschecolaz, born 1929, director of investigation with the provincial police from March 1976 to December 1977, suspected of having planned the ‘Night of the Pencils' during which several students were taken away, tortured, and killed: found naked at dawn, on an empty lot in Greater Buenos Aires.”

“Juan Cavalo, minister to Carlos Menem and former minister of Labor in Isabel Perón's government, in 1975 signed the decree providing for the ‘eradication of subversives' in the province of Santa Fe: bankrupted, went into exile in Paraguay in 2006.”

 

The list was long, not exhaustive. Elena Calderón did not know everything—that was their fate as survivors. In fifteen years of working for the Grandmothers, Rubén had survived two attempts to gun him down on the street, a gas leak, a car without license plates that tried to run him over in front of his home, promises to rape his mother, and three physical attacks with no serious consequences. “Memory, truth, justice”: since he'd gotten out of prison, the Grandmothers had in no way changed their method of harassment. It was too late. At this point, no threat, law, or decree would make them let up: now, they were the Jaws of History.

 

*

 

Summer was coming to an end, and the heat wave that had weighed on the city for a month had suddenly been swept away by a strong gale: as it grew dark, a cloudburst fell on the sidewalks of the Avenida de Mayo, driving the lottery-ticket vendors to take refuge in the newspaper kiosks.

Soaked tourists were lining up in front of the Café Tortoni, despite the late hour; Rubén made a crack to the aging doorman carrying an umbrella and wearing an impeccable uniform who accompanied him to the heavy door with brass knobs. The Tortoni was the oldest bar in Buenos Aires: Borges still had his table there, and Gardol had his statue under the polished stained-glass windows. The muted hubbub of the customers contrasted with the concert of the dishes that the smartly-dressed waiters were sending back to the kitchen. Dripping rainwater on the thick carpet, Rubén crossed the room, which was luxurious in the style of another age; he spotted Carlos's easygoing face behind the glass window of the smoking room and greeted his friend with a brotherly
abrazo
, the local embrace.

Carlos Valkin, descended from a family of Ukrainian Jews who had fled the pogroms, had been active in the Montoneros, the Péronist revolutionary party. Arrested in 1975 (when the imprisonments were still official) at the offices of the newspaper where he worked, he had been saved by the protests of Daniel Calderón and other artists and celebrities, and was able to take refuge abroad. Carlos had not been a Montonero since the Falklands War, when the leaders of the exiled party had attempted, confronted by patriotic frenzy and on the pretext of opposing English imperialism, to recruit soldiers to fight under the command of their murderers. A generational disillusionment that had not diminished his thirst for justice: Carlos had abandoned his activism but not politics, because today he was an investigative reporter for
Página 12
, a left-of-center daily
.
A dangerous job in Argentina.

Rubén had worked with him on
Página 12
. Together, they had solved the world's problems during late-night talks in bars, at an hour when people blow off their despair, and talked about women and love, about time past and especially time to come. At sixty, Carlos lived as if he were thirty, wore a short white beard on a smiling face, was eternally optimistic despite the turpitudes of the past, and had hungry eyes that seemed to have drained all the blue from the sky.

Old paintings decorated the walls of the little smoking room, which was deliciously empty. They ordered a bottle of Malbec and two
bife de lomo
and exchanged a few bits of news. Since their inveterate ritual forbade them to report bad news before having eaten a large meal, they waited to be served and then attacked the main course.

The McDonald's culture had hardly taken root in Argentina, where beef raised on the grass of the pampas was the basis for the traditional
asado
, the Sunday barbecue. A gourmet with a strong carnivorous atavism, Carlos complained about the fact that the best meat, the Premium, had recently been reserved for exportation.

“You'll see, someday our cattle will be offshored as well!” he prophesied, waving his fork in the direction of the rococo ceiling.

“Where? To India?” Rubén replied with amusement.

“Go ahead, laugh: our best red wines cost an arm and a leg, our whites taste like vanilla, and our women have even started eating salads!”

“I'd as soon they ate salad as knitted,” Rubén said, finishing off his meat. “By the way, are you still with your girlfriend—what's her name?—Alex?”

The two friends hadn't seen each other all summer.

“No,” Carlos replied with a touch of nostalgia, “the poor thing got sick of me. But I found a widow, a German woman: very nice, intelligent, rich, sexy . . . That is, as sexy as one can be at sixty,” Carlos enthused; he was a chronic lover. “Ah, Ruth! ‘The charm of knowing someone would be slender if, in order to achieve it, there were not so much modesty to be overcome!'” he recited, his heart and eyes full of passion.

“Who is that,” Rubén asked. “Goethe?”

“Nietzsche. But translated into Argentinian, right?”

“Right!”

“And you, you rascal, do you still have nobody to introduce me to? No? Ha!” he burst out when his friend shrugged. “These ladies' men!”

“One at a time would be enough,” Rubén said.

Carlos wasn't sure whether he was joking, but, ladies' man, he acted as if he were.

A couple of old Americans, both wearing checkered shorts, made a brief appearance in the smoking room. Rubén lit a cigarette to smoke while Carlos ate dessert.

“O.K.,” he finally said, “you didn't want to see me to talk about women.”

“Well, actually I did, in a way . . . ”