“You haven’t, Mami. I promise,” I said, lugging my suitcase toward the door and trying not to show how strained my arms were. “Your son’s probably the one getting things wrong.”
“You’re a child to me still. I know,” she added hastily. “You’ll say I’m cliché. But they have truth to them, Tomás, clichés do.”
“Well,” I said, frowning at her misty eyes and—awkwardly, my body lurching in the opposite direction—giving her a quick kiss on the cheek, “you speak very truthfully, Mami.”
* * *
Despite the airs I’d put on with my mother, I was a nervous wreck on the train ride. From comparatively small-town La Plata, heading for a life of my own among the porteños of Buenos Aires who infamously, because they fancied themselves so European, turned up their noses at anyone from the rest of the continent. I tried to keep my attention on the window, but an armed police officer in a bulletproof vest hovered conspicuously at the end of the car, and every two minutes someone came through the aisle selling something in a loud, practiced voice: gum, alfajores discounted from the kiosk, aluminum wallets. The last seemed like an ominous sign, as bad as the zippered pants pockets I’d noticed on some of the regular commuters—what could one need an aluminum wallet for if not protection from thieves?—until I realized that any pocket-size wallet, even one made of adamantine or metal from the moon, would still be susceptible to theft.
Clumsily pushing my way through the station at Constitución, I got a cab and gave the address of my pensión. It was in Balvanera, a half-hour walk from the UBA School of Medicine and all of my classes, and it lay just south of Avenida Rivadavia, so I could contend to Isabel and her ilk that I lived in the real Buenos Aires, not the upper-crust areas north of that line. The neighborhood also had a Jewish history, something my mother was happy about; Orilla was my father’s name, but tagging sneakily along behind it, under varying amounts of obfuscation, was hers: Zimmerman. She’d fled with her parents from Germany in ’35 after the Nuremberg Laws stripped them of their citizenship, and the many Nazis who followed after the war on the church’s secret ratlines kept her wary of anti-Semitism (and highly alert to the perils of raising a son generally).
My arrival at the pensión didn’t alleviate my anxiety. The Gran Atlántico was a converted hotel, but there was nothing grand about it: three stories, two windows wide, no balconies or architectural ornaments, the walls an ugly pinkish brick. It had a shoddy feel inside too—tiny rooms, communal phones and bathrooms, a locker-room-like funk. Taking me upstairs, the landlady rattled off a short list of rules primarily focused on kitchen usage and washing the glassware. “Just don’t make any trouble, and all will be forgiven,” she said, and I assured her she needn’t worry about me.
After unpacking—no housemates knocked to introduce themselves—I went out walking. First, I practiced my route to the university, so I wouldn’t get lost once classes started. Then I wandered east, familiarizing myself with the big avenues and memorizing as many street names as I could. I even stopped by a few tourist destinations, relishing the big crowds and anonymity, telling myself I wasn’t lonely but free.
In the evening, I called the Colonel from a pay phone and arranged to stop by his apartment. He let me use his shower and prepared a spread of cured meats, nuts, and olives. “Mercedes is out and last week we had to let go of our housekeeper, otherwise we’d give you a more proper welcome, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, wolfing down a handful of peanuts. I hadn’t eaten all day.
“I promised your mother I’d fatten you up. Quite the fearful heart she has, doesn’t she? Reads too much news—all this stuff about Montoneros and other guerrilla bands.”
I nodded. It had been one of her arguments against my move, the armed revolutionaries supposedly operating in Buenos Aires. There had been a raid on a General Motors factory recently, she’d noted in alarm, and before that the kidnapping and ransoming of an Exxon executive. To which I’d reminded her that I, as a lowly medical student, was probably not at too much risk of abduction.
“That does remind me, though,” the Colonel said, rising suddenly and going to the cupboard. “I promised your mother I’d take care of you too, and—well. You won’t need it, but I’ll rest easier knowing you have it.”
He came back to the table with a compact, dark object in his hand. It took me a second to comprehend that it was a revolver. He set it down gingerly next to my plate of olive pits.
“This is going to protect me?” I asked. In addition to the news of guerrilla raids, there’d been growing talk of counterintelligence operations and government death squads, and the little gun seemed somewhat ridiculous against that backdrop.
“Maybe not,” the Colonel said, “but like I told you, it’ll ease my conscience.”
I nodded, and he gave a huge sigh, followed by the speech about fresh sheets.
The revolver remained on the table the rest of our meal; I finally picked it up only when it was time to leave. I wasn’t wearing a backpack and worried about letting it stick out of my pocket, so I bought something at a grocery store around the corner and carried it home in a paper bag.
* * *
The next day I had nothing to do. My housemates—most of them students, many foreigners—continued to take little interest in me. The only one I spoke to for more than five minutes was a Colombian named Beatriz with glassy red eyes and glittery constellations of expensive-looking jewelry. She informed me we shared a wall. “Sorry in advance,” she said, her bracelets jingling. “It’s not very thick.”
It was Saturday, and I’d slept in. Going out for lunch that afternoon, I saw kids my age gathering in parks and plazas with bottles of wine, and when I returned, the pensión was already coming alive with music and laughter. Unable to resist any longer despite my having told myself not to be pushy, I called Isabel.
Her mother answered. “Tomás! I can’t believe you haven’t been by yet.”
“I only got in yesterday.”
“Well, why would that stop you? Are you busy? Everyone’s already here.”
“Everyone?” I asked.
“You know how the girls are—always holding court,” Pichuca said. “They’ve been so looking forward to your coming. Isa especially,” she added, and I could almost hear her wink as she proceeded to give me directions.
* * *
It was the first time I took the subway. I was afraid I’d show up sweaty if I walked, but the train was little better, and I waited under the trees outside their building for five minutes to cool down before ringing the buzzer.
Pichuca took me inside in a flurry of kisses and exclamations. She was a bundle of energy, with unruly curls and darting eyes the same color as her daughters’—fondly I recalled her driving in Pinamar and gesticulating so wildly that we’d gasp in the backseat because her hands had flown from the steering wheel. Handing me a tray of sandwiches de miga, she steered me to the basement and practically shooed me down the stairs.
The room was dim and smoky, with discombobulated furniture that suggested it had been taken over by the girls for socializing some time ago. I spotted Nerea first, on the sofa with two young men and a collection of ashtrays and empty bottles on the coffee table in front of them. A trio of girls sat opposite in cheap metal chairs. Isabel was in the far corner; she’d just pulled another wine bottle from the rack when she turned and saw me.
“Tomás!” she cried, with more of a squeal than was customary for her. “Primito!” She hugged me when I reached her, so closely the sandwiches nearly spilled. “Oh, just put those here,” she said, resting them on a nearby filing cabinet herself. “I’m so happy to see you!”
“You seem good,” I told her.
“I am, Tomás. I am. And you? I can’t believe you’re really here!”
“I can’t either,” I admitted.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you. We all need taking care of
in these times, no?”
Seeing that grin on her face, I asked, “Why doesn’t it seem like you do?”
“You’d be surprised.” She laughed, lighting herself a cigarette and offering me one. I waved it away regretfully. “Ah, I forgot. Who am I kidding? Take care of you—look at me already corrupting you!”
“Corrupt away,” I told her.
“No, no,” she said, blowing smoke straight into my eyes. “Your mother would kill me.”
I smiled, picturing that brawl. “And your boyfriend?”
Isabel shook her head. “No longer, I’m afraid. Nerea is the one on the happy track to marriage and convention. Marriage, anyway—I’ve finally broken through her conventional streak. Come say hello,” she continued, pulling me along with a delectably moist hand to the couch where Nerea sat. “Here she is—my rebel little sister.”
Nerea rolled her eyes. “Don’t listen to her, Tomás.”
“You do,” Isabel said.
“I never had any choice. Family.” Nerea shrugged. “Not like you, Tomás, you do this to yourself. Oh,” she said, standing to greet me properly only then. Nerea had always been staid and timid, and she looked that way too, with her glasses and fastidiously straightened, pulled-back hair. But she seemed more at ease and confident now, less the left-behind little sister I remembered running from with Isabel.
Nerea introduced her fiancé, Tito, a heavy, disheveled boy with a sweet face who clearly adored her in a goofy, puppy-dog way. Like her, he was studying journalism, and like her, he seemed to lack the personality for it, the fierceness necessary to ferret out the truth in a country uninterested in a free and independent press. The rest of their friends appeared to be cut from the same cloth—intellectual and eager but soft, cushioned by their upper-middle-class upbringing. Only Isabel didn’t seem made of that same mush.
A drink was passed to me, and Isabel proposed a toast. “To the future,” she said.
“To a passionate future!” Tito elaborated endearingly. Chin-chins followed, and I caught Isabel’s eye as we clinked glasses.
“Is that what he offered you when he proposed?” someone asked Nerea, laughing. Rodolfo, the only other man there, a mustached philosophy scholar who wore a blazer despite the heat and claimed to be named after the journalist Rodolfo Walsh.
“Most men can only offer passionate pasts,” snickered another girl in the circle, who had a bob and wore denim overalls. I hadn’t caught her name, only a lecture she’d given earlier on the virtues of free love.
“And here I was thinking innocently of our activism,” Isabel said.
“You? Thinking innocently?” Nerea scoffed.
“She was thinking of a passionate future fucking the country’s fascists in the ass,” Rodolfo remarked, rather aggressively. “Tomás, have you read Seven Pillars of Wisdom? T. E. Lawrence’s account of the Arab Revolt . . . ?” I pretended that I had, and the conversation went on predictably from there, getting caught up in politics and news and affording few opportunities to branch off into more intimate one-on-ones. Not until the end anyway, when Nerea and Tito had passed out on the sofa and the others started trickling out. But by then it was late enough that I felt I had to tell Isabel I’d better be going too.
She walked me to the door. “Any plans the next few days?”
None, I told her, except that at some point I’d likely visit the Colonel again. The name seemed slow to register, like she’d missed a line in a book and was striving to re-create it from the surrounding text, so I went on. My old mentor? Chess player? She remembered my mentioning him, didn’t she?
Gradually her mystified expression gave way to a definitive nod. She remembered him perfectly.
* * *
I was still very much asleep the next day when someone knocked—grumpily, apparently for the second time—telling me I had a phone call. “Who is it?” I asked, still in my pajamas. My unhappy alarm clock—Beatriz, whom I’d heard in the throes of a late-night dalliance when I came home—gave a shrug before returning to her room, and I shambled downstairs lackadaisically, believing it was my mother.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all morning, boludo,” Isabel said.
“Sorry,” I told her, in what felt like a massive understatement. “There’s only one phone line at the pensión, and—”
“What are you doing today? Want to come with me on an adventure?”
Bleary-eyed and uncaffeinated, I looked at the time: Who went for adventures before ten a.m.?
“Okay.”
“Great. I’ll meet you at Estación Once, and we’ll take the thirty-nine bus, okay? Oh, and can you bring some food?”
“Food?”
“Empanadas, pastries, whatever you like. Maybe enough for ten people? And a couple bottles of Coca-Cola? Sorry,” she said, though I could tell she wasn’t in the slightest. “An adventure, boludo. Trust me, will you?”
I couldn’t say I did especially. But neither did I care. At least not until I picked up the groceries and realized I should have brought my suitcase to carry them all. The Cokes in particular were a pain in the ass. I was parched and I’d drunk one myself by the time Isabel showed up.
“Sorry, let me help you,” she said, though she had several large, blocky-looking bags of her own.
“Enough for ten people?” I finally had the wherewithal to ask, after we’d heaved the stuff onto the bus and—luckily—into the seats we were able to procure.
“Well, really it’s for a lot more. But I tried to go easy on you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome. These people—they make do. You’ll be a hero for bringing anything at all. Did you a favor, really.”
“Thanks,” I said again. But the gratitude was more genuine than I let on: there was something couplish about our exchange—the preempted complaints, the jokiness. Besides, it seemed like a privilege to me to be chosen as her workhorse.
We got off on the outskirts of the city—jumping, almost, since the bus barely stopped; one of my Coke bottles flew to the grass with a loud plop. Then we walked for a stretch on back roads and underpasses. Isabel had kept where we were going a surprise, and though I typically would have felt unease in such surroundings, I found I did trust her a little, after all.
The destination turned out to be a shantytown. Or, as we called them in Argentina, a villa miseria. The reason for the designation had always been evident to me, but our approach—on foot, down the unpaved lane—underscored it. Shacks made of tin and wood and scrap metal and roofed here and there by tarps; trash and the lack of trees; the overpowering stench; the skinny children in tattered hand-me-downs rushing to greet us, cheering Isabel’s name.
She doled out some of the food and treats we’d brought, saving the rest for “class,” and directed me—I just stood there gaping, as if in admiration of some magical creature—to a makeshift porch outside one of the hovels, to let the grandparents know we’d arrived. (When I had the chance to ask her where the parents were, Isabel said, “Dead or looking for jobs usually.”)
From their gap-toothed smiles, the elders seemed as pleased at our arrival as the children. An overturned cart was readied for use as a table, and Isabel started spreading the food and Cokes around it, as well as the other items she’d brought: pencils, notepads, elementary textbooks. Then Isabel began her lesson, for young and old alike.
The old were especially enthused. One woman with pudgy, wrinkled hands, which Isabel steered in her own with methodical sweeps across the paper, looked at the result with indescribable awe.
“Beautiful, no?” Isabel asked me of the childlike scribble. “The first time Flor ever signed her name.”
I could only nod my assent, since I was awestruck too—not so much at the signature or the woman’s proud smile as at Isabel’s astounding glee. It made me pick up a pencil and ask the girl on my right her name. “Evita,” she
said, “like Perón.” I took that to be a lie, but I wrote it out for her halfheartedly all the same.
After an hour in the shade of that porch—the tarp providing it tinted everything turquoise, like the bottom of a pool—and a chorus of waves and hugs, Isabel and I got on another bus. As soon as we did, it was like she deflated: allowed herself to appear tired, distracted, her gaze firmly locked on the window.
“You do this a lot?” I asked. It was a dumb, needless question, but I’d have said anything to get her talking again, and my story about the girl calling herself Evita hadn’t gone over the way I’d intended. (“What’s wrong with her wanting to be Evita? Peronism is for everyone, Tomás, illiterate eight-year-olds especially. That’s why we subscribe to it,” she’d said, not unfairly including me in that sweeping “we.”)
“Not as often as I should,” she answered. “It still can feel so small, you know? Flor has her signature, great. What the fuck paper will she ever put it on?”
I was surprised at how sudden yet entrenched this glumness seemed. Had it been there all along, underneath the displays of joy and teacherly encouragement?
“It’s still something, Isa. Hope, self-esteem, whatever. You’re giving them a lot.”
“I know. Sometimes I do, anyway.” She laughed at herself, shaking her head. “It never seems to be enough, though. You find that bigger thing to care about and then—boom. Something bigger’s still out there.”
“Boom?” I repeated teasingly. “Is it a bomb going off, this realization of yours?”
Isabel smiled. Not like before, but widely enough. Then she nestled close and put her head on my shoulder. “Maybe it is,” she said, her voice a sweet, sleepy hush. She closed her eyes, and so did I.
* * *
We didn’t return to the villa over the following days—I fretted again about my fraught show of enjoyment and whether the mocking tone of my Evita story had cost me a second invitation—and Isabel didn’t summon me to any other gatherings. I saw only Rodolfo, who’d taken a perplexing fraternal interest in me and invited me to a boliche. I went, hoping to run into Isabel, but neither she nor the rest of their gang was there, and the dance music wasn’t loud enough to drown Rodolfo out; for the better part of an hour I had to listen to him wax on about Cuba and Che Guevara. (“The Che was Argentine, don’t forget! That’s why they called him Che, they didn’t know it was just the way we greet each other.”) But eventually I found him a law student to preach to instead, and I made my way home alone.
Hades, Argentina Page 8
