You were in a detention center?
The biggest of its kind.
“Easy? No, no, you mustn’t leap to conclusions, Tomasito. There’s the way she came back, the way I did. But what I said was that there are more ways. Other ways. We came here, your darling little rebel and I, essentially by slipping through cracks. Taking advantage of some fleeting, flimsy loopholes, like the rest of those miserable phantoms you read about in stories. But you have to understand: that place, the underworld—it changes you. Kills you all over again, really, every moment. It’s not just your life that’s lost after enough time, it’s you. So, to come back, this way—it’s no good, you see. You’re missing something, missing everything. It’s a technicality, not real. Not life.”
“But you’ve found another way,” I said, allowing an edge into my voice, something sharper than sarcasm or skepticism. It still seemed too easy to me, too much like a pawn thrown my way as bait. He did it so often, I occasionally lost games because I was afraid to take it, to discover the net he’d made me weave around myself.
“Don’t believe me, Señor Shore? Fair enough, I admit. We are scientific men, the both of us, rational to a fault. But whatever my record with morality, you know it’s much less spotty when it comes to honesty. You know I have never lied to you.”
I did. Though the distinction between technicality and reality felt appropriate here too: you don’t lie when you offer up a piece in service to a greater design; but you do deceive.
“Besides,” the Colonel continued, “scientific type that you are, don’t you want to know for sure? To know there’s nothing more you could do for your penance, your guilt, whatever you’d like to call it? What do you have to lose?”
I thought of Claire, crying in the shower the night before I left. I’d listened from our bedroom for several minutes before undressing and joining her. By the time I did, I couldn’t tell the difference between the water on her cheeks and the tears. We soaped each other without saying anything about her affair or my departure, and when we got out, she dried my back for me, since I never did a good job. “You know, if this ends, you’ll literally go to bed cold every night,” she said, and laughed. I’d laughed mildly too.
“How do you cross the border?” I asked.
“How do you cross the border, you mean? But you already know that too, Señor Shore. The path—you almost took it once, after all.”
Another pinch of suspicion. More than that, a kind of grabbing of the neck or seizing of the intestines—a deep, twisted clawing. I glanced up at the noseless Virgin Mary and the other statues looming over us and felt the same kind of penetration in their gazes, as if they saw the images competing before my eyes, the memories: the last time I was here at the Recoleta Cemetery, so dizzy from the darkness of the hood over my head I couldn’t even see the car I got out of; or that night in Rome several months later, when I got a hotel room and, with a shaking hand, pressed a revolver to my temple.
I felt dizzy again now.
“It was more than once,” I told him, covering my eyes and closing them, hoping I’d get my bearings back in the darkness. I should have known better.
“What, Rome? Rome was nothing. You only came close once in truth, and it wasn’t in Rome. Only in Buenos Aires did you really look into the darkness of that other world. And only here. The car dropped you off, you made your decision . . . But you could have made other decisions, couldn’t you? Gotten back into that car and wound up in a different kind of cemetery . . . ?”
I reopened my eyes. Saw the Colonel smiling.
“And this time I will?” I asked.
“Just go to where that path began, and then go down it. Nudge the door to death open a little bit and it’ll swing wide, you’ll see. By the time you get back into that car, well—it won’t just be a car you’re in anymore.”
“But the path,” I said, focused as usual on the practicalities, the minutiae. Never the bigger picture. “If you mean Automotores, won’t it be closed? Locked?”
“Tomás, Tomás,” the Colonel sighed. “Don’t you know I take care of these things in advance? It’s like chess, it always has been for me. True, in this case you were a little slower taking the bait than I expected, but oh well. You’re here now, aren’t you?”
“I came as soon as I got the message,” I answered.
“Please, Tomasito, I’ve been sending the message for years. Request for an in-person interview with CONADEP in ’84? My finagling. That follow-up on your mother’s assets? Mine too. I’ve been trying ever since I arrived in that wonderful world of secondary education. My little ploy with Pichuca was just the first one that worked.”
Perhaps the conclusion should have been that there was nothing particularly special about this moment, if he’d been trying so long to get me here without success. Mere timing, coincidence. But the only coincidence I could discern in my relationship with the Colonel was meeting him randomly at a men’s club when I was ten. Something stickier had kept us bound together in life and—apparently—beyond it.
“I’m here now,” I repeated, to a satisfied nod.
“All you’ll need on arrival is your passport,” he said. “Your real one, the one I gave you.”
“That one’s fake.”
“Ja—I don’t think you think that, Tomasito. You brought it, didn’t you? Brought it to Argentina without my saying a word about it to you?”
It took me a moment to return his nod, as if by doing so I would admit more than he’d implied.
“See? Don’t pretend to be so naive, Señor Shore. You knew where you were going as soon as you set off for this country. You knew what it was to you, what you came looking for. In some ways, Tomasito, you’ve started the journey already.”
What could I say in response but that it was true? That I was, without realizing it, ready to continue.
He told me to meet him again tomorrow, the way he’d explained, and from there we’d go down together. “Romantic, almost, no?” he said, laughing, and I tried to think of Isabel and tell myself it was. Yet something, his laughter or my desire to turn and leave and get to the end of this journey as quickly as possible, told me it wasn’t. It wasn’t romantic in the least.
FIVE
It wasn’t so different from the morning before: hazy, spotty, fogged. Hungover, too. Only that aura of unreality had been shed, the drapery of dreams and wishful illusion.
I called Claire. We’d agreed not to talk for a few days, to give ourselves some space, some time. But that feeling of irrevocability had returned to me, the fear that, even if I came back from this journey, some part of me might be left behind, the bridge burned in my wake. It had been so long since Claire and I had really spoken, besides. In that sense, the notion of my absence, my being only half there, wasn’t such a new one.
Her voice was tired, lazy, as if she’d just woken up. The two-hour time difference, I reminded myself, when the hypocritical suspicion that she’d been indulging her affair this morning crossed my mind. She asked me how I was, and I told her fine. She asked about Pichuca, and I told her I was glad to have seen her. She asked me what it was like to be back, and I told her it was the same. Then different. Then that I had no idea, really.
“Have you decided when you’re coming home?” she asked. I’d booked my room for two weeks, figuring I could stay longer if needed.
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
We were silent for a time.
“Have you decided about Roger?”
“No. Not yet,” she said.
Again, we were silent.
“What are we doing?” Claire asked.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re not talking. This isn’t talking.”
“Well,” I said slowly, with the kind of deliberateness she’d have reprimanded me for when our problems were smaller, “didn’t we say we weren’t going to talk until we figured
out what we wanted to do?”
“And did you figure it out?”
I held the phone close to my cheek. “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“Well,” she said, without finishing the thought.
Until recently, I might have described Claire’s defining characteristic as lightness, her ability to foster it. All that weight I carried around on my shoulders—sometimes she massaged it in the usual manner partners did, with tenderness, consolation; but more often she tried to flick it away with a joke. “Tom,” she’d call me, having taken a liking to my name in English, much as the Colonel had. “Feeling grumpy today? Need some ice cream? A blow job?” Nothing was sacred or off-limits to her, which might have been why we could convince ourselves of our openness, our total acceptance of each other. “I know you were having nightmares last night, Tom. But you were also pooting up a storm.” She barreled through my bashfulness at every stage of our relationship, starting with the first: when I knocked on her apartment door and had to tell her, awkwardly, that I had the wrong one, darting my glance self-consciously away from her long, bare legs in running shorts. Claire—still sweaty, wiping her brow with her shirt so I got a glimpse of her toned torso—invited me inside. “Tom you said your name was?” she asked, and I was too embarrassed to correct her or, on that initial invitation, to accept. That took two years and another accidental encounter uptown. She grinned at me then as if she’d been waiting for me on 103rd Street and Amsterdam all along.
It had seemed a miracle, her resolute interest in me. I couldn’t understand it, and once even asked her outright what made her want me. She jested about having a duty to bestow her gifts on the saddest sacks she could find, but I told her I was serious. “I know. So serious. What can I say, I like to make you chortle.” “I don’t chortle,” I replied, though I was already starting to laugh. “You’re the chortliest,” she said. “How do you say that in Spanish, Tom? Chortliest?”
She didn’t call me Tom much anymore.
“I just,” I began. “I just wanted to say you’ve made me very happy, Claire. That’s really why I called.”
“‘Very’ seems like a strong word,” she answered.
“Fine. You’ve made me as happy as anyone could, how about that?”
“That’s fine,” she said. “We’ll talk in a few days, okay?”
“Okay.” I don’t know if either of us said good-bye before hanging up.
* * *
The Colonel hadn’t said when to meet him, but I knew: First thing in the morning, time to go to work. Since work was, to use his language, where that path began.
The route wasn’t so different from the one I used to take: bus to Estación Once, train to Floresta. Back then, I walked to the station, skirting the Plaza Miserere, with its sparse, seemingly never-blooming jacarandas.
On the platform, men sold medialunas and other pastries, repeating the names of their goods with the practiced cadences of chanting monks. The wait was short, as was the commute—three stops, a mere half hour. Too short.
“Your dreams,” Claire had said a few months into our relationship, having seen me wrestle with them in my fidgety, anxious sleep, “your nightmares. Do you want to tell me about them, Tom?” I’d outlined their general sources by then, couching them in impersonal language, as if for an introductory lecture or generic documentary for Americans. For twenty years, I’d told her, there’d been a cycle in Argentina of democracy, dictatorship, protests, democracy, dictatorship, protests. This time the dictatorship wasn’t going to fall to protests or democracy. They established these detention centers—they were illegal but run by the armed forces and government with the goal of terrorizing the population and repressing threatening ideologies. In some five hundred of them across the country, probably thirty thousand detainees had disappeared.
“They’re nothing,” I said of my nightmares when she asked. “Usually it’s just the train. On the way there.”
“They took prisoners there by train?”
“Yes,” I lied, telling myself it was for simplicity’s sake.
Mine had been a reverse commute, away from the city’s center, and it wasn’t unusual for me to have a car to myself, as I did today. I looked out the scratched-up window. There was graffiti on the walls on either side of the rails, which was new, as well as on the rusted, abandoned train cars farther out. But the rest of the scenery had barely changed: the uncared-for backsides of decrepit buildings followed by taller, more modern ones with awnings and balconies, the residences of rich and poor alternating with little apparent logic. Lush, green parks emerged behind the platforms at Caballito and Flores, making the ride seem charming and picturesque. Indeed, maybe it was; maybe that was the problem. The world remained stubbornly, indifferently beautiful despite my destination in it.
I got off on Avenida General Venancio Flores and made the familiar five-minute walk. On one side were the tracks, on the other mostly residential buildings; depending on how early I arrived in the mornings—or on night shifts, how late in the day—I’d see parents taking children to school or to the soccer field a couple blocks away. One evening I’d played on it myself, not two hours after I’d had to resuscitate someone with a defibrillator. I wasn’t much of a player to begin with, and I spent most of the game watching the ball move among others’ feet as if they had some dazzling magnetism I lacked. But I never so lost myself in the dance as I did that day.
Automotores was known in the public record as Automotores Orletti, I’d discovered in that article about Rubio. The name on the sign out front had originally read automotores cortell, but the C had fallen off, and apparently when the escape happened, and the reporting fugitive looked back for a terrified instant, the words he saw were automotores orletti.
To me it was always simply Automotores. But to the other men who worked there, it was also El Jardín—the Garden. Someone in command probably thought that was funny.
It’d been an auto repair shop in its last incarnation, a train-car repair shop in its first, and from the outside retained the look of a garage. To the left of the large roll-up metal gate was the regular entrance, which in those days was unlocked only after radioing the absurdly unoriginal password sesame to the guard booth. Now it hung open, and a man I recognized stood at its side with keys in his hand. It was the Gringo Carlitos. His big, childlike face beamed when he spotted me.
“Verde!” he called. “La puta madre, Verde, is that you?!”
Verde was what they called me at Automotores, because of my inexperience. Carlitos we called the Gringo, since he’d been stationed briefly at a base in North Carolina and bragged ceaselessly about having had his own US counterinsurgency training. He’d always been meaty, but now he was more so; his shirt was too small and had one too many buttons undone, revealing his hairy chest and a gold cross and allowing a whiff of talcum powder to drift from his neck. For all his unbounded liveliness, there was still something bumbling and pitiable about him—or at least there might have been, if I didn’t know he’d been a torturer not long ago.
“Never would’ve guessed you were the one I was supposed to let in,” he said.
“Me neither,” I told him.
“Couldn’t stay away, huh? You never could, really. I remember at the end—”
He broke off. It was possibly the first time I could remember him stopping himself before saying something he shouldn’t.
“Seems like you couldn’t either,” I said.
“Huh? Oh this,” he said, as if he’d forgotten he was holding open the door to a detention center and we’d run into each other randomly, at the train station or some intersection. “I haven’t been in years, not sure anyone has. The downstairs became another auto-repair shop, and a little clothing manufacturer took over the second floor after we left—as a matter of fact, I heard she kept some aspects of our setup, had people locked in the closets at sewing machines twelve hours a day and that kind of
thing—but both closed down again back in, oh, ’83, ’84. I just came to do the Colonel this favor. He did plenty for us, you remember.”
I preferred not to. “The two of you stay in touch?”
“Shit, Verde, you want to go in there and interrogate me for real? Ja!” He laughed grandly, from deep in his belly. “I’m kidding you, don’t worry. I just got the one letter asking me to be here this morning. For the Colonel, I figure why the hell not? A couple hours standing guard, what’s the harm? Truth is, I don’t stay in touch with anyone from the old days. Sad, no? What happened to us all? Just take the Colonel—that whole news frenzy a while back, I guess he won’t show his face anymore. And Triste—puta madre.”
I didn’t ask about the Colonel’s letter, assuming it was like those he’d arranged for me over the years, and we wound up making small talk. The Gringo asked me how long I was in town, and I told him briefly. He asked me where I lived, and I told him that too. I tried not to ask him anything.
“We missed you in ’78,” he said, referring to the first World Cup Argentina won, right as the dictatorship reached the peak of its power. I was in New York by then, but couldn’t help tuning in to the radio and, for whatever disturbing, inexplicable reason, quietly cheering on my homeland. “We all watched together at Olimpo—that’s where most of the crew was stationed then, just ten minutes away over on Coronel Lorenzo Falcón. Everyone yelled the goals when we scored. You should have been there, Verde.”
He still had that weird-seeming innocence, like a child who didn’t know better. I remembered when he’d asked me, in an almost frightened voice, if it was true what they said, that the Jews were taking over Patagonia. He was too oblivious to realize I was Jewish myself.
“Everyone watched?”
“Of course.”
“Even the prisoners?”
“Of course. That would have been real torture, not letting them watch that. You should have heard them screaming ‘goal’ with us. Goooooal! Goooooooooal! It was like we were all on the same side, I swear.”
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