“So it’s hell then?” I asked. “This place?”
“A version of it. Hades, Argentina, if you will. I can’t say for sure, but I believe it is one of the oddities of the netherworld that national borders still exist. At least for us, we Argentines are so particular, as you know. I’ve only seen some Uruguayans and Brazilians down there too, but that’s it. No one else would put up with us.”
We arrived at a run-down crypt that looked like it hadn’t been cared for in ages; no ornaments, its engravings worn away, leaving a flattish wall discolored by rain. The name on it was almost illegible, and I soon wished it had been entirely so.
In lean, plain script it read: thomas shore.
“I meant . . . is this where the dead reside?”
“A version of them.” The Colonel smiled. “You know there are no dead in Argentina, Tomás. Only disappeared.”
He opened the crypt door. The cats padded softly around our legs and started to descend. It was dark enough inside that I quickly lost sight of them.
“Ready?” he asked. I nodded, then covered my ears when he screamed: “Wrong answer!” More softly, he continued, “No one here is ready. No one ever will be. Some of us, we thought we might be. Oh, it seemed pleasant enough, that dreamless, dreamy little land beyond the borders of the known and whatnot. But I don’t think even the suicides were quite prepared.”
“They regret it?”
“Regret? No, I wouldn’t say that exactly. Much too simple a notion, your regret. Do something, don’t do something—as if actions could be reduced to such measly forks in the road.”
“What do they feel then?”
His hand went to his brow, skipping over his mustache; they were the two places his fingers went when pondering a chess move.
“I would say they mourn,” the Colonel said. “What was, what could have been. That is what death is: we are confined to what was and what never had a chance to be. And we mourn for them. Ready?” he asked again. Chastened, this time I told him I wasn’t, but proceeded down into the crypt—my crypt—all the same.
PART II
Hades
SIX
Fields swept past, broken up by unpaved parking lots and billboards for Lucky Strike and the Citroën Ami 8. Mostly flat earth beyond them, a plain, ordinary blue horizon. Nothing was particularly striking about the sights. But on some intimate, bone-deep level I recognized them, even before I saw the empty bleachers of the rugby club or the signs for Tolosa and Gonnet on the highway running parallel to the tracks: it was the train from La Plata to Buenos Aires. And also—I gathered from the Citroën advertisement, which was for a model that debuted in the seventies—no longer 1986.
There’d been no transition, no physical reallotment of my body that I could pinpoint. It was more like a dream, the break in continuity somehow perfectly natural: there I was on the train, the Colonel’s ghost beside me in his gray suit and hair, the other commuters reading papers and tapping their knees against briefcases. “Are they . . . ?” I began, my voice small and squeaky. I cleared my throat, and the Colonel finished for me: “Other arrivals? No, Señor Shore. This train is solely for you.”
I looked back out the window at the uneventful montage, remembering long-ago trips when I had been so excited at the prospect of what lay at the end of this journey.
“Your passport,” the Colonel said, holding out his hand. “You did bring it, didn’t you?”
I removed it uncertainly from my pocket. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Well, I can’t exactly stamp it and give it back to you, can I? It’s like leaving your ID when you rent a boat, that’s all. You get it back when you pay.”
“When I pay?” I repeated. Logic felt as jumbled to me as space and time. “What do I pay with?”
Numbly it occurred to me he might answer, “Life.” But the Colonel shrugged, plucking the document from me and tucking it away in his suit pocket. “That depends. Most ferrymen here like cash bribes. Being as this is still Argentina, after all . . .” His inflection was wicked and pleased, and, perplexed, I reached for my wallet. “I’m kidding, Tomás! Joder,” he muttered exasperatedly. The swear was more common among Spaniards, but the Colonel had adopted it in his eccentric cosmopolitanism. “In this world, Tomás, you pay the right price for everything . . .”
* * *
The train pulled into the station at Constitución, and we got off with the rest of the crowd, pushed along by its current as on any other weekday. I walked stiff-armed, whether out of misplaced concern about pickpockets or a more general feeling of protectiveness I couldn’t say. The buzz of activity grew as we approached the main hall, then became a throb, the tall, arched ceiling amplifying the sound. The round panels dotting it were more ornate than I had remembered—shaped like the sun in the Argentine flag and containing small murals I couldn’t fully make out from below: military figures and men carrying crosses, haloed women outside fortresses with what looked like gargoyles standing guard on their ramparts.
“I don’t recognize those,” I said to the Colonel, still gaping upward as bustling apparitions brushed by me.
“I’m sure there will be much you don’t recognize here at first,” the Colonel said. “But don’t worry. This place, it recognizes you.”
He led me to the exit, expertly navigating the crowd on quick, clicking heels. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Denial,” he said. “You were always quite gifted in this arena, Tomasito. Me, on the other hand—I was always more honest.”
“Only with yourself,” I pointed out.
“Yes, that’s fair. One of my great sadnesses, or should have been, perhaps: no one ever really knew me.”
“It should have been,” I agreed.
“Don’t worry, it is one now. As I said, this place—it’s quite intimate. Specific. Nothing assembly-line about our pains here, I promise you.”
“I can see that,” I said as we reached the street, its frantic, moblike swarm filling me with uneasiness.
“As they say in your language, Tomás, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“My language?”
“You aren’t going to tell me you’re Argentine still? Remember what we talked about with regard to denial. You are more gringo than the Gringo Carlitos.”
Outside it was hot and just as crowded. Constitución was known for its seediness, and I recalled the panicky way I’d rushed toward the buses the first time I arrived on my own, my huge suitcase dragging behind me ridiculously. What I felt now was something closer to the resignation of my final return to this station, the solemn, ponderous step-after-step of someone going through the motions.
We went down Lima, where blaring horns and engines prevented conversation, then turned down a squalid-looking side street I didn’t know. It was narrow, parking technically illegal, but halfway down the block, I saw a car sitting brazenly next to a hydrant. A green Ford Falcon, no license plate. It was the staple vehicle of the regime, the one the kidnapping task forces used most frequently. I’d seen many at Automotores, their trunks or back doors opening to reveal a hooded head. I had ridden in the backseat of one myself, too.
“What?” the Colonel asked, jangling his keys cheerfully as he approached. “Don’t like the color?”
I ignored that. Pulled the passenger door open and got in.
“Where are we headed?” I asked.
“Memory lane,” he said in English, and guffawed, a loud, typical “Ja!”
* * *
Despite its seven lanes, there was traffic on Avenida 9 de Julio, the thick, somnolent kind, and soon I felt my eyes closing.
It must have been a dream. But it didn’t feel like a dream. Nor even like a memory, exactly; though there was a musty flavor to it, like living out a black-and-white film, the sensations seemed new. Precise, photographically crisp. The press of bodies in a crowded doorway, the smel
l of perspiration and perfume. The music, the low lights, the taste of Fernet and Coke. An acquaintance’s grimace after taking a shot, the inelegant shuffle from the kitchen bar to the makeshift dance floor in the dining room.
Easter break, 1975, my visit to Buenos Aires the year before I moved there. I’d been seeing my next-door neighbor in La Plata for over a year, and we were getting serious: not just spending time together when her parents were out, but all of us at dinner, like we were a family and going to be one in the long term. We’d even gotten to talking loosely about an engagement, and I had started to feel a need for certainty about it I lacked. Which is why I went to the capital with some friends and wound up one night, not entirely coincidentally, going to a party where Isabel would be.
Our romantic summer had turned out to be our last together, and our parting that February had been similar to our first. No outright rejection or talk of cousins, but the peck on the cheek in front of our mothers when we separated, the promise that we’d write each other throughout the year. Again, our correspondence had flattened and dwindled, and again Isabel had returned to the States in December. She never gave me any explanation as to why she chose not to go back to Pinamar; my mother told me about the decision, and despite her argument that it’d still be fun with Nerea there, I never went back either. For three years Isabel faded beyond my horizon. I didn’t hear about her outside the gossip of my mother and mutual friends, and I didn’t see her until that night.
At twenty-one, Isabel still had those round cheeks, but there was something mature about her eyes, an air of experience our peers lacked. She appeared to be looking past us all, with our frenetic inattention, to those “bigger things” of hers.
She had a boyfriend, I saw. But for the first and last time in my history with Isabel, I didn’t feel threatened by my rival. He was short, a petty demerit I clung to; another was the American-style button-down he wore, with its angular, starched collar. Most significant was Isabel’s mutedness around him, and that wandering gaze that, after I cast my own on her long enough, landed on me.
The jolt of electricity it sent through me was sufficient; though my decision wouldn’t fully coalesce until the drive back to La Plata, on some level I knew my current relationship, which had never sent such a quiver through me, was bound to come to a close.
It took a good amount of hovering and chatting with others to come in direct contact with Isabel, since I was determined to wait until she was by herself. Clumsily, I asked how she was. Fine, she told me, but she didn’t seem convinced. There was no allusion to the boyfriend who’d caressed her hip minutes before.
“As always, something’s missing,” she said, going on before I had a chance to pry. “And you, Tomás? How are you?”
“I’m happy,” I told her, but didn’t mention my girlfriend either.
“Really? And here I thought you were a pessimist like me.”
“I am. What allows me to be happy. Low expectations.”
She indulged me with a smile. “How long have you been working on that line?”
“Haven’t been. I lifted it from a book.”
“Did you? The whole exchange?”
“Want to know how it ends?”
“Probably not. My expectations remain high, sadly. I’ll be disappointed.”
I was the one disappointed then, of course. “You just like the sense of mystery,” I told her. Pressed, really.
She shook her head. “I think you do, Tomás.”
At some point, probably before the boyfriend circled back and we parted, she said I should come spend some time with her in Buenos Aires and get to know her again. Or did she? That part of the recollection didn’t rise up with the rest. When I’d gone down the rabbit hole of self-reflection in the past, I sometimes wondered if I’d been the one to make the suggestion, if I’d said I’d like to get to know her again. Lying next to Claire, unable to sleep, I’d wonder if in fact Isabel had told me I shouldn’t come. Since I did remember this: She said—joking presumably, but still—I might not like what I found. “Low expectations,” she reminded me. “Best if you keep them.”
* * *
A horn honking. Gardel’s gravelly tenor fittingly belting “Volver” over the radio. We were in Recoleta, driving past the upscale jewelry shops on Avenida Callao, and I gathered we must be headed to the Colonel’s building.
Volver con la frente marchita
Las nieves del tiempo platearon mi sien
Sentir que es un soplo la vida
Que veinte años no es nada—
“How do you translate that bit into English?” he asked. “Un soplo la vida?”
I thought for a minute. It was useful for clearing my head. “Life is a puff of air?”
“Puff,” he repeated. He shook his head distastefully. “What a silly little word. Silly little word for a silly little thing.”
We parked in his garage, and I followed him upstairs. Then into his apartment, after he unlocked the door. All the furniture was covered in clean white sheets. I put my hand on the nearest, over the entry table, and discovered it was hot, as if recently removed from the laundry.
“Now that’s odd,” the Colonel said, pinching the fabric after I did. “Even for this place.”
“You don’t remember what you said to me? It was my first visit after I moved. You gave me a gun.” I went to the cupboard from which he’d taken it and pushed the sheet aside. When I pulled the drawer open, I found the exact same revolver again. The metallic, goosefleshy feel of the handle—I’d never forget it, after the hours-long grip with which I’d held the gun to my temple in Rome. “I asked you if it was to protect me,” I said.
The Colonel smiled. “Ah, yes. I said maybe not, but it would ease my conscience.”
It felt like we were rehearsing a scene in a play. “When I accepted it, you sighed as if I’d removed a five-hundred-pound gorilla from your back.”
“Ah, the sleep I’ll get tonight, I said, didn’t I? It’s like fresh sheets or a fine whiskey before bed, a clean conscience.”
“Fresh sheets,” I repeated skeptically. Then and now.
“Surely you know the joy of fresh sheets,” the Colonel said, and I could no longer tell if it was his ghost speaking or my recollection. “Ah, Tomás, Tomás. You have so much to learn, Tomás.”
A recollection. Unambiguous now: It was the younger version of the Colonel in front of me—hair darker and richer, mustache still skinny but a little straighter, sturdier. Seeing him, it was like a switch inside me clicked, and I was the younger version of myself too. Then I was there again—fully, bodily—at the end of February 1976.
SEVEN
I had been to Buenos Aires numerous times before that month, but I had never lived there, and I had certainly never lived there alone. I was an only child and fairly coddled, even before my father died. As a boy, I’d always needed much soothing: dogs howling after ambulances at night scared me, as did the roars of lions during the day—our house was on the corner of Calles 54 and 1, right near the zoo—and my mother often had to remind me that, even if the beasts could escape their enclosures, they didn’t have the key to our front door. I also had asthma: growing up, I was constantly out of breath, and even when I outgrew it, I still had enough of my mother’s warnings in my head to decline cigarette offers.
She tried to develop an iron fist as I got older, but at signs of resistance she tended to melt like butter. Which was how I won the debate over moving to Buenos Aires.
My arguments were full of holes. The university of La Plata was arguably better than that of Buenos Aires, and I’d put in two years there already. I had relationships at the local hospital where I’d been volunteering over the summer, and a circle of friends that dated back to elementary school. I’d also been lucky enough to get out of obligatory military service in the lottery and had fairly little financial pressure. In short, I had all the trappings o
f a good life, and in Buenos Aires I didn’t even have a home, since I couldn’t ask the Colonel to host me for such a long period.
But in La Plata I felt smothered. By my mother, by our home, by the mildewy odor of the wallpaper and its dreary tan shade. By the city, with its uneven cobblestones and junk carts pulled by clip-clopping horses, the claustrophobic everyone-knows-everyone mentality. I wanted independence, and I wanted Isabel Aroztegui, and it seemed to me that only in Buenos Aires could I pursue both.
The main excuse I gave my mother was particularly deceptive that way: After my recent breakup—from my poor next-door neighbor, with whom I’d talked marriage one moment and my desire for freedom the next—I needed distance, someplace new, a fresh start. I told my mother my heart hurt, which was relatively honest at least.
She protested and pleaded, but ultimately gave in after a reassuring call with the Colonel. She only refused to let me take my father’s car. She wasn’t using it, I pointed out, but she countered that she would already be using my father’s life insurance to pay for my room in a pensión. Not a thing more, she proclaimed, crying, and I was too self-absorbed to realize how much larger the cost was for her already.
“I just wish I understood it better,” she said the day I left. She’d helped me pack the previous evening, refolding several shirts and rolling my socks into such perfect round balls that my massive suitcase, at her forceful push, closed seamlessly. “You’re my only son. I don’t want to get things wrong.”
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