Hades, Argentina

by Daniel Loedel

  “The prisoners screamed goal with you?” I asked, though I needed no clarification. I’m not sure what I needed.

  “We told them not to be shy—it was a special occasion. And you wouldn’t believe it, Verde, once we gave them permission? They could have blown the roof off that place with their screaming, I swear. Now that would have been an escape, huh? Not like the shit you pulled.” He didn’t say it like an accusation, but we were quiet for a moment all the same, as awkward as exes who had bumped into each other.

  Knowing the Gringo, I guessed he would break under the weight of too much silence soon enough, and I was right. He would have done terribly in a detention center.

  “You watch this year? Pah, that Maradona! The Hand of God! Incredible. The war against subversives is the best thing that ever happened to Argentine soccer, I swear. And you know why? Patriotism. We wanted it more for the country after that. We’ll see if it lasts, now that the patriots are being hung out to dry by the bosses. You know, they won’t give some of us promotions, blame what happened during the war on our type? The Colonel—they basically made a fall guy out of him for Campo de Mayo. Rubio, he was attacked, can’t even leave the country because the Spanish will extradite him for those nuns. And Triste, fuck, you hear about him?”

  I didn’t want to hear about Triste. About any of them.

  “I should get going, Carlitos,” I said, before realizing I couldn’t claim to be pressed for time, that Automotores had waited for me for ten years, and would go on waiting another ten minutes.

  But to my surprise, the Gringo stepped aside with an understanding nod. “Got to pay your respects, right? I get it. Truth is, I did come back once, when the women’s operation here was shut down. Having the place to yourself—goddamn, what a thing. But anyway,” he went on, “we should get coffee while you’re in town. Talk old times, watch a game.”

  “Sure, Carlitos.”

  “I’m serious. That American girl—pah. I understand. I could’ve done the same.”

  “Sure, Carlitos,” I said again.

  “What? You don’t think I have nightmares? You don’t think I cared?”

  I couldn’t help but recognize, with no small amount of disgust, the resonances of my conversation with Isabel. It’s not like I don’t have my own nightmares, Isa, I’d said.

  “I do, Carlitos,” I said, giving in to his whims as if it really were old times. “I’ll give you a call later, after I’m done here,” I assured him, though I didn’t have his number and wasn’t asking for it. “We’ll get that coffee.”

  He smiled sadly before walking off. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel bad about it. Even when I considered how hard it must be for Argentines who hadn’t left, having to go about their daily lives with the possibility of bumping into their torturers at train stations and random intersections or having to wonder, because they’d been blindfolded back then, if the man giving them a funny look on the bus had raped them—even then, I felt bad, like I was running away again.

  But now the passage into Automotores was unbarred, and I remembered I wasn’t running. Not any longer.

  * * *

  Just go to where that path began, the Colonel had instructed, and then go down it. Instead of taking the staircase up to what had been the officers’ quarters—the bottom half was wooden, the top marble, as if you were ascending toward royalty—I went through the guard booth into the garage itself. It had barely changed: car parts remained strewn about the front, and the smell of engine oil was thick and strong, as sticky in your nostrils as the concrete floor was under your feet. Only the curtain that hid the back end was missing, and the space looked wider and emptier than I’d ever seen it in my six months here. Darker too—the bulbs dangling from the ceiling were off, and no sunlight snuck in through the garage door.

  I waited for something to happen, a flash of memory or fear, or the prickling of the hair on my arms at least, but there was nothing. It was like most of my nightmares: oddly practical, the trauma conspicuously offstage.

  There was a staircase here as well—this one entirely wooden, and no doubt as creaky as ever; it had a flimsy appearance, like it would cave in at the first step, but I knew from experience it wouldn’t. It was the staircase prisoners were taken up, and the one I went up the last time I was here, and for that reason I went up it now.

  The white paint over the brickwork upstairs had always been cracked, but now it was peeling off; gray showed through in dirty patches. There were still loose threads and lint from the sweatshop on the floors, and the roof was corrugated metal, browned over the years. The windows remained tightly covered and sealed, but there was more light upstairs even so, seeping in from the terrace. It stretched far enough for me to see the doors to what had been the three isolation cells, and the one to collective holding. Farther down, the corridor became more shadowy, like the end of a black, unlit tunnel. But I knew what was at the end.

  The torture room. The door, mercifully, looked closed.

  I turned instead toward the nearest isolation cell. Its door was shut too, but unlocked. I pushed it open tentatively, as if someone might be inside.

  No one was. But in the light from the balcony I saw that there was something on the floor besides lint and thread: two red bandannas and a larger piece of thick black fabric that, despite its shapelessness, I still recognized.

  “Anything else?” Claire had asked me in that conversation about my nightmares. I’d stared at the bedroom wall. Cliché, I remember thinking in the delicate silence as Claire looked at my cheek, gently kneaded my shoulder with her fingers. This is what a wounded person is like. This is what a refugee is like.

  “The radio. Trucks parking in the garage. Capuchita.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means ‘little hood.’”

  Her look was puzzled but kind, as if I must have been confused. “Never the machine, that electric cattle prod they used?” she asked. “What was it called?”

  “The picana,” I said. Shrugged, then shook my head.

  “I thought they— Didn’t they use it on your balls and things, your sensitive areas?”

  “Your sensitive areas. Yes.”

  “But they didn’t touch you while you were in that . . . that hood?”

  “They didn’t touch you much, no.”

  “Well, what did they do?”

  “They didn’t have to do much of anything.”

  What I couldn’t explain was that you did it to yourself. That to escape that darkness you clawed out of your self. Out of your mind.

  Nudge the door to death open a little bit, the Colonel’s directions had continued, and it’ll swing wide, you’ll see.

  I closed the door behind me and sat cross-legged on the ground. I used one bandanna to tie a blindfold over my eyes, put the hood over my head, and, by feel, as if my hands had never forgotten how, used the other bandanna to tighten it around my neck. Not too tight—just enough to block the light from climbing in through the bottom and up my throat. Some air still got through. But nothing more.

  I lay down, with no need to close my eyes.

  * * *

  There are no shadows in that darkness. No silhouettes or outlines. Even when you do eventually press your eyes shut in the hope of catching a swimming speck of light or two behind your lids, it seems they’ve all fled too.

  The sounds, though—they’re amplified. Most are your own: ugly, grossly biological. You hear yourself sniff or swallow or accidentally lick the gag in your mouth and it’s like you can hear every bit of liquid moving, every slimy gear in the action turning. It feels like such a flimsy, haphazard device, your body. You think it’ll fall apart. And for most people experiencing capuchita, it already has.

  That’s not the worst part, though, or it wasn’t to me. It was the other sounds, the other things falling apart. Time was one. The hours stretched, snapped, and scr
ambled, and I didn’t know when I was: ’86 or ’76 or fallen out of the cycle completely.

  Ask me something . . . please ask me . . .

  Another was—how do I put it? Knowledge? Assumptions? Locked doors started opening in my thoughts: So what if it’s wrong? What does love matter? What does death?

  They hadn’t asked me a question when they gave me the picana, not a single question. I cried into the gag, desperately wondering why. Why hadn’t they asked me anything?

  El tiempo no lo cura. Locura.

  Random phrases, recollections seeped through me. It was less like a dam that had burst than a leak, a steadily spreading puddle. A mess of unconnected thoughts and memories, at least at first: A game of chess—when? against whom?—in which I experimented and failed with the French defense. A chicken soup so thick with onions you couldn’t find the chicken in it—who cooked that? A couple fighting and one of them replying, El tiempo no lo cura. Locura. Was it my parents? A movie? The expression meant, Time doesn’t cure you, but makes you crazy. Or, in my rendition: Time doesn’t heal you. It steals you.

  Lo-cu-ra.

  Even words crumbled into their component syllables, rearranged themselves like wicked children playing a trick on you.

  Cura.

  The Priest. I thought of him then. The way he not only called the torture room an operating room but seemed to actually believe it sometimes, as if the extraction of information by violent means was something surgical, medical. He dreamed of having gowns and latex gloves, tiled walls instead of the styrofoam coating used for sound insulation. He had us clean it compulsively, spray it with deodorizer and even, occasionally, bring in aromatic herbs and flowers. What is a hospital without flowers? he would ask.

  Che, Verdecito. You’re a medical student, no? My patient may need your help . . .

  I could hear their muffled voices in the hallway. They had a name for that too—the Avenue of Happiness. Everything had to be inverted; down was up, up down. Prisoners weren’t killed, they were “transferred,” or “got their ticket.” Or, if they were out of earshot—perhaps—“sent upstairs to heaven.”

  Merlo. Now to López. But Tarantini with a clean tackle. Morete gets there but is offside. Keeper kicks it deep. Passarella . . .

  The voices—they didn’t belong to the other guards. Was that the radio? A soccer game? It was close and loud, as if just outside the door. My skin crawled at the sound of it.

  Passarella, back to López. Passes it wide, looking again for Merlo. Marked by Pernía. Waiting, waiting . . .

  Only our aliases weren’t inverted. The Priest was an actual priest. The Gringo had spent time in America, Rubio was blond, and I was green. Triste’s name was Félix, but he was unhappy and dour and made it sufficiently clear that the job got him down to earn his title too. All of them except the Priest and me were army men, supposedly there to help bring discipline and organization to the place.

  A few others rotated in and out, including two hairy look-alikes called Goat and Nose. There were also the foreign operatives—Automotores was a base of the international Operation Condor, a program sponsored by the United States to repress South American communist tendencies, and we often had nearly as many Chileans, Brazilians, and Uruguayans as we did Argentines.

  We also had some higher-ups from the Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado (SIDE), since they ran the place in conjunction with the Federal Police. Aníbal Gordon, designated Black, was in charge. The others from the intelligence agency similarly went by a color: Red, Gray, Brown. No one except me was Verde.

  The rest were from the Federal Police, or handpicked monsters of Aníbal’s. And with the exception of me and Rubio, all were at least in their thirties. The two of us were the kids of the place, occasionally summoned as nene when our superiors got too lazy for distinctions. It grated on Rubio, since he was older than me, and he didn’t like when we were grouped together; I was too soft for his company.

  . . . Counterattack now. Boca pushes forward, River’s on the defensive. Veglio on the left wing, knocked out of bounds. Tarantini with the throw-in. Down the wing again, looking to cross . . .

  You could mostly tell who was at work based on the use of the radio. Whether he left it outside the room or brought it in, and by the station he put on. The Priest chose classical and, if he could find any playing, opera. I even got the impression he occasionally picked his shifts in order to catch a recording from the Teatro Colón. Often he’d belt out arias himself—Puccini, in particular—his hearty tenor a contrast with the nurselike, feminine voice he used when asking prisoners to confess their sins.

  Triste liked tango, which fit his name but little else; he had the quietest personality of the group, the most nondescript features too: lean, relatively short, a typical set of shaggy Argentine sideburns, overlarge shoes, and tortoiseshell glasses. For the Gringo, it was American tunes, of course. His big body would swing to everything from Elvis to the Ramones, and the picana with it, making his sessions slightly more tolerable to his victims since the bronze double-pronged tip of the machine would skitter briefly off their skin now and again.

  Rubio didn’t care; for him, the music that mattered was what went on inside the room. He’d leave the radio on a chair outside, give the knob a quick, careless turn, and go straight in. So sometimes you heard the screams over the news, sometimes over static. Sometimes . . .

  . . . and the ball goes back to Veglio, careful, careful, ball to Russo, careful now, he makes it between two outside the box, nice gambetta, Felman goes in, he finds him in danger, takes his shot—GOAL! GOAL! GOOOOOOOOAL!

  The common denominator was soccer. When a game was on, it was a mystery who was inside.

  GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!

  Until Automotores, I’d been as indifferent a fan as I’d been a player. Nominally my team had been Estudiantes. But there I learned to root for the clubs from Buenos Aires, River especially, since the session was worse if they lost.

  GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL! GOOOOOO—

  The radio shuddered off suddenly.

  Footsteps thudded in the hallway.

  Ask me something! Please! Ask me anything!

  No one did. When the men came, they just grabbed me silently by the arms and dragged my limp body across the floor and down the stairs. I didn’t resist, not even when I heard the sounds of a car door opening. The men shoved me into the backseat, pushed my hooded head down so it couldn’t be seen through the windows, and sat to either side of me. The muzzle of a gun pressed against my ear, and the car drove off.

  I wept. Then—muted, filtered in by the thickness and blackness of the hood—light. It seemed to thread through the fabric and into my eyes, as if it was seeking them out. There was nothing salvation-like about it— I still believed I was at the end—but it was warm and sweet and all okay. It was all okay. Wasn’t it? Was I no longer crying?

  The car stopped. The men tugged off my hood and blindfold, removed the gag. I struggled to make out the face of the one who said, “Go on.” His silhouetted chin nodded in the opposite direction, as the other guard opened his door and let me out. “There’s no point trying to run.”

  Standing on my own two feet with the sun bathing me—it was incomprehensible at first, as disorienting as lying down in a tight space in the darkness. Then the shapes in my vision straightened, found detail. Paths, grass, a giant gum tree, people having picnics and making out on benches, curiously without noticing me or my stench. The wall of the cemetery and the tall gate at its front and, right underneath, his smile inexplicably perceptible despite all the surrounding fuzziness, the Colonel, waiting for me.

  I steadied myself and went toward him.

  * * *

  Something shifted again. Time or consciousness or some more mystical dimension I had no grasp of yet. I recalled where I was headed, what I was supposed to be doing. The Colonel was the same as I’d seen him the night befo
re, and, placing a hand against my cheek, I felt my beard.

  “This again?” I asked when I reached him.

  “Again and again, Tomasito. Isn’t this place one of your hells?”

  I looked around. Sun shining, throwing pretty little sparkles on the pavement; big palm leaves hovering overhead and casting shadows over the spires. Tourists snapping pictures, cats purring at my heels. It might not have seemed hellish to someone else. But the sky had an unnatural spectral flutter, the slippery iridescence of fish scales. And those cats—among them was a cross-eyed Siamese and another with scruffy gold fur; I could have sworn they were the same ones I’d seen the night before. That is to say, for lack of a better term, in reality.

  “I thought we were going to Isabel’s,” I said.

  “Death is not quite so neat as that, I’m afraid—it’s both a very lonely place and a very crowded place, if you get my meaning. Besides, you can’t just descend to another person’s darkness willy-nilly, Tomás. That’d be very inappropriate, like going to the bathroom with them or something. For this journey you have to—what’s the expression in English?—go your own way?”

  He started humming the Fleetwood Mac song. If it wasn’t so creepy and out of character, it might have been funny.

  “You’ve come a long way from tango, Colonel.”

  “I won’t say I did it out of choice, Tomás. It’s not hard to teach an old dog new tricks down here.” He sang some more. There was revulsion in his face, in the twitching of his lips in particular, as if he were trying to stop their movement but couldn’t. “Blagh, guachula!” he spat, as if coughing up the tune and hurling it to the cemetery sidewalk. “Tastes like a smelly brothel, that sound. Let’s go.”

  I followed him. With the sunlight, I could make out the different sizes of the caskets in the crypts—some small enough for ashes, others obviously for babies—and their varying conditions too, from glossy and pristine to ramshackle and caved in. More than a few had crashed to the floor and splintered, but there were no skeletons or loose bones in the spillage. Had they disintegrated? Run off? There was a peaceful breeze, and pinkish mourning doves were chirping on the mausoleum ledges.