“It doesn’t matter if Automotores isn’t after Montoneros,” she answered. “We’re all in this together now. We’re all fighting the same fight, the same bad guys.”
That was its own issue, though—those bad guys. I coexisted with them, bullshitted with them. I even slipped into the “we” when relaying their activities. How could I explain that the blurring of those battle lines might have been what was getting to me most?
When Isabel asked for the names of those we had, I gave them. And when she expanded her inquiry, asking for details about our organizational structure, I tried to give those too.
“Coordinación Federal,” she said, buttoning up her coat. (I wore only a sweater and was shivering.) “The bosses all stop in there, no? The Colonel does—we know that already. What about Aníbal and the rest of them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Information was shockingly hard to hang on to under the circumstances, so easily overwhelmed by all the terrible sensory input. (Although, sickeningly, my ability to retain the details of organ diagrams and the fetal pig corpses we dissected in my biology labs had improved; the sterilizing of life and death could have a narcotic effect on my psyche when I let it.)
“But copies of all the interrogations and confessions go there, don’t they? Like a library? Isn’t that how they cross-check?”
“Aníbal goes,” I told her. “I don’t know why—he’s always boasting about this big communications antenna in his office, and how Coordinación has a matching one, like a radio. They’re very fast—the Americans made it,” I added, as if that were key.
“So Coordinación is sort of telling Aníbal who to go after—does that sound about right? On this radio?”
“It’s an antenna. I don’t know, Isa. I don’t hear any of that stuff. Only—” I almost said the radio, but stopped myself, seeing the confusion that could cause. “I’m sorry, I don’t . . .”
“Don’t be sorry, Tomás.” Isabel reached out and raised my chin with her index finger, the way men did to damsels in distress in movies. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. You don’t know how much you’re helping us—how much you’re helping them.” She’d taken to emphasizing that word, as if it aggrandized the whole concept of other people to her, obscured the misanthropy she could fall victim to when considering individuals. “Every name you give, you could be saving someone else’s life. You see that, don’t you?”
I didn’t. But Isabel looked so pleased, her blue eyes so bright with belief, I didn’t want to say so. Instead I just sat there dumbly, until I felt the dutiful, speedy peck of her lips on my cheek.
“I have to go, I’m running late for an appointment. I know, I know,” she said, as if I’d been on the verge of teasing her for the tendency. “Really, you don’t know what this means to me. I wish you did, Tomás.”
I wished I did too. “I’m afraid it’s going to break me, Isa,” I told her.
She stood over me, and despite my trembling, she said, “I think you’re unbreakable, Tomás. Maybe it’s all the shitty things I’ve done to you, I don’t know. You just—you’re like me. We’re not scared of pain, remember?” She gave me another, longer kiss on the forehead, her hands on my ears as if she could block out every other sound. “Just don’t drink so much,” she added with a sly smile, standing upright. “We wouldn’t want another of those blacked-out calls to my house, would we?”
Somehow I also found myself smiling. “I’ll try to ease up.”
“Ease up on yourself, Tomás,” Isabel said. “That’s one thing I agree with my mother about. I wish you treated yourself better.”
All I did was nod. I shared that wish, too.
TWELVE
On the second of July, the Montoneros set off a bomb in Coordinación Federal. If Isabel had played a part in it, or if the information I gave her did, I was never informed.
They killed some twenty officers. It wasn’t much compared to the numbers of their own felled by the enemy—and the building continued to stand tall, along with its detention center—but it was the most damage they’d done in a single attack to date.
The retaliation was ferocious. That Montoneros weren’t in our jurisdiction didn’t matter; kidnappings increased, as did transfers. Tortures grew worse—the picana started to be applied while hanging someone from the rafters by the arms or legs instead of using the wire bed. The infamous “submarine” method made its first appearance, when we brought in the man who’d infiltrated the Federal Police and helped set the bomb: Ricardo Alberto Gayá, of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. How he got hooked up with the Montoneros, I had no idea, except that, as Isabel had pointed out, they were all fighting the same fight now.
Rubio and Aníbal himself dunked Ricardo Alberto Gayá in a two-hundred-liter vat of I don’t know what and, after he sang, drowned him in it. They left his corpse in the vat afterward, sealed it with cement, and transferred him out that way, throwing him into the Luján River.
My nightmares, which had been as erratic as my sleep since joining Automotores, grew more consistent. Nightly I’d find myself caught in some new way, the Colonel concernedly uncovering links to Ricardo Alberto Gayá I didn’t know I had, Rubio making me stare into the toxic brown pool of the submarine. In one, my mother even gave Aníbal my teenage correspondence with Isabel, convicting me herself.
Reality was hardly better. The Gringo’s claims over lunch that the Montonero conspiracy among our ranks was vast, the expletive-filled lecture Aníbal gave to staff one morning, insisting that no one in his shop would be so fucking stupid and we shouldn’t worry about it. The Priest’s more sedate assurance that there were many higher-ups already looking at the matter closely.
No one looked suspiciously at me yet, that I could tell. For now, the men focused their hatred on the detainees. The ones we had, and the ones we gained. The new “packages.”
One morning, Rubio called me in to resuscitate a young blond girl they’d gotten the previous night. The skin around her blindfold was purple, her bottom lip large and puffy, and other bruises were quickly forming along her breasts and torso despite the mandate to use the machine to avoid physical traces. Blood stained the inside of her thighs.
I retched, working every muscle in my throat to swallow the stomach acid back down and conceal my reaction from Rubio.
“Well?” he said. When I still didn’t do anything, he laughed. “You know if you want a shot with her too, you’ll have to bring her back.”
I did. I brought her back.
* * *
She was American, I found out the next day. I was in the garage, where there was a fresh array of bullet holes in the floor—Aníbal and the Priest discouraged warning shots, but sometimes the men couldn’t resist. I heard a crash, and I rushed upstairs to see what had happened. Aníbal was speaking to Rubio outside the torture room. The crash was the radio, which Rubio had knocked off its chair in anger at the discovery. He’d been told about a blond Montonera hiding in a hotel in San Telmo and, with nothing more to go on than the physical description, had picked up the wrong person. No one had bothered looking at her papers until after his session with her yesterday.
It was as humiliating for him as it was potentially endangering. Americans were our allies. They funded our operations and had once even sent one of their own to conduct a session with two acquired Cuban diplomats. I had been alerted that my English might be called into service, but as it happened, the interrogator spoke Spanish and, though his gringo accent made the Gringo Carlitos seem as Argentine as the first-ever gaucho, he didn’t end up needing me.
It was the Gringo who best explained our nations’ relationship to me. Biting into a cheeseburger over a recent lunch, he’d said, “You know this Kissinger guy in their Casa Blanca, Verde? Got us eighty million dollars! If he wasn’t such good pals with Pinochet over in Chile too, the church would name him patron saint of Argentina, I swear . . .”
Rubi
o must have known he was in a pickle. Kidnapping an American—much less raping and torturing one—was not politically ideal. When he caught me staring at him from the end of the hall, he spat and rushed off, shoving past me furiously.
Aníbal picked up the radio, which had a bent antenna and a dent in its side and no longer worked. “Fucking shit,” he said, and rattled off a few more choice oaths: hijo de puta, concha de su madre. He handed me the radio. “See if we have any electricians in the cells. Guerrillas are supposed to be good with machinery.”
* * *
It should have been an easier task than most. But I knew who we had in the cells by name and profession—we had a “merchandise” closet where we kept their things, including IDs, which was how I got the names I’d give to Isabel—and there were no electricians. I didn’t imagine any of the prisoners would open themselves up to the additional torture that would come with admitting they’d worked on machinery for guerrillas either. We were in the middle of a relatively busy neighborhood in Buenos Aires—the better to instill fear in its residents, however obscure—and I could have gone to a local electrician in Floresta, but Aníbal hadn’t said to do that, and an unwritten rule was that you always did what Aníbal said. There was also the psychological divide between what went on inside Automotores and what went on outside. We rarely bridged those worlds. Not even for a radio.
I couldn’t figure out what to do. So I went to Triste. It wasn’t that he was particularly friendly toward me; the Priest and the Gringo were more so. But Triste wasn’t friendly with anyone, and that made him a kind of indirect ally to me. Skulking around, ignoring the Gringo’s jokes about his skulking around, limiting his interactions with the other guards to work and really treating it like that—a job he clocked in and out of. His lack of interest in any broader goals around what we did was palpable.
Triste did have other interests, though, more extensive human interactions. They were with the prisoners.
The majority we kept in the common cell that fit about twenty people—the Uruguayans and other foreigners had a separate cell downstairs—but we had three isolated cells for individuals we wanted to protect (or, depending, to torture using the method borrowed from the ESMA—capuchita). Some guards, like Rubio, paid visits to the women, for predictable reasons. Others, like the Gringo, stopped in to bring them things: leftover cakes or slices of steak from family occasions, a supplement to their usual diet of canned soup, cornmeal, and stale bread. He also brought toilet paper he bought himself so they wouldn’t have to use the newspapers Aníbal kept stocked in the bathroom, which were coarse enough to make the prisoners bleed. As far as I could tell, the Gringo never questioned the strangeness of showing care for their bodies in one instant and torturing them the next.
Triste’s attentions to the prisoners were arguably even stranger. He didn’t bring treats and, unlike Rubio, he never visited a woman in her cell—whether because he had a wife and daughter or a conscience, I don’t know. The only thing he seemed to bring was conversation. He’d sit with some of them for hours when he was off duty, and if you passed you’d hear murmurs inside, maybe catch a name from the news or the score of a soccer game, as if they were just chatting, catching up on the goings-on of the outside world.
The outside world—what could be a bigger treat to them than that?
I imagined Triste would know which of the prisoners could help, and that afternoon I showed him the radio. “What of it?” he replied tersely, taking off his glasses to mop his face with a rag. I told him it was broken. “Again,” Triste said. “What of it?”
“Aníbal wants one of the prisoners to fix it,” I explained.
Glasses went back on; sour, usually averted eyes glanced at me. Without saying anything, he directed me down the hall to the isolation cell where he spent the most time.
* * *
The prisoner inside they called Gordo—Fatty. The appellation was ironic; he was skinny and droopy as spaghetti. But there was a steadfastness to him, a degree of control: he walked without stumbling even in his blindfold, and he turned at corners on his way to the bathroom or torture room before the guard accompanying him had a chance to tug him in that direction. He was an old-timer, relatively speaking: probably in his forties—a good fifteen years older than the average prisoner—with a creased brow and splashes of gray in his reddish-brown beard. That he’d survived at all when another prisoner his age had died of a heart attack after a few weeks already commanded respect. But it went deeper than that. He wore his dignity like a physical feature. Even with his shrunken, fragile frame, you got the impression that little could break him, and that his silence, when he kept it, was of his own choosing.
Turning on the cell light, I laid the radio and some tools from the garage at his feet. Gordo ran his hands over them as I figured a blind man would, mentally recording the exact shapes and details.
“I’m sorry,” he said earnestly, as if he really were sorry about it. “I need you to take my blindfold off to do this.”
“You don’t seem to need it walking around the place,” I observed.
“I count my steps,” he answered. “It’s different.”
After weighing my options, I went over and lowered his blindfold.
The way he looked around called to mind someone on a scaffold whose noose had been taken off. His first few blinks were slow and mesmerizing, his control over his eyelids as uncertain as an infant’s.
I saw prisoners’ eyes only when they were dead or soon to die; these were the only occasions when their blindfolds were allowed off, since there was no risk to it then. But it meant that there was little sense of humanity to it then either; what life could those eyes reveal, taking in the world just before being pushed into the transfer truck?
This was different. When we made eye contact, we held it. No more than a few seconds, but there was as much communication between us in that time as has ever been carried in people’s words, I think.
His eyes were hazel. I know they weren’t special. But at that moment, they seemed the most dizzyingly unique and complicated shade I’d ever seen.
He lowered them and got to work. Neither of us spoke for a while.
“Where’d you learn to do things like this?” I asked eventually, and when I saw the wary look on his face, clarified, “I’m not asking if you’re in the movement. Just if you were—I don’t know, a mechanic.”
He continued working meticulously, and I got the impression his mind was too, calculating if this was a trap, if he really could speak candidly. When he answered, it was without raising his eyes, as if the magnitude of their meeting mine again would be more overwhelming than he could bear. “My father taught me. Worked in a garage—probably not too different from what this place used to be.”
“And you?”
“Professor. Engineering.”
“University of Buenos Aires? I don’t recognize you.” I’m not sure how I would have—there were hundreds of professors across different buildings. But I could have, and as an engineering student Isabel certainly could have—I tried in vain to recall her reaction when I’d given his name. The truth was, you’d stretch any connection you could in that place to bring it closer to home.
“I’ve been in custody since March, just after classes started,” he said. “Why I’ve made it so long, I don’t know. Maybe for this, to fix things like radios.”
“I thought it was for Triste,” I said, with accidental boldness. It was just so good and freeing to speak openly about the people here with someone who knew them.
Gordo must have felt the same: “There’s no fixing him,” he said, before glancing up to catch my own wary look and adding hastily, “What? He’d say so himself. Has, in fact.”
“He tells you he’s broken?”
“He tells me he’s like me. Another victim of circumstance. Loves talking about his shoes.”
“His shoes?”
; “They’re two sizes too big, apparently,” Gordo said. This was another frequent target of the Gringo’s jests, but I’d forgotten. “He told me that in training they stole your shoes. One or two people’s, and if you showed up at roll call without them, they gave you a beating or threw you in a cell like this. Only way out was to steal another soldier’s shoes. Triste got used to his being too large.”
I didn’t know what to do with this. In myself, I mean: What happened to you when you started seeing the humanity in monsters? To your humanity? Your own monstrosity?
No one had told me how Triste came to be stationed at Automotores. For all I knew, he had just kept at it after his obligatory military service, decided to make a career of it. Not that it would absolve him, but it made you wonder. Made me wonder, anyway.
“And what was your circumstance?” I asked Gordo.
“My father,” he said, with pride that shouldn’t have been audible—less so visible, in those luminous hazel eyes. “He taught me socialism too.”
* * *
The radio returned to its place. Normalcy, insofar as it could be called that, resumed. The rhythm of Automotores and my minimal life outside it chugged along, from hangover to hangover, vaccination to vaccination.
Regarding that minimal life: Automotores had shrunk it, the way it did everything, skinned it of all but the bones. I stopped seeing what few school acquaintances I’d made. I stopped going to classes. (No one seemed to notice except Beatriz, who remarked sporadically on some crazy fact I’d missed in physics when selling me more pot.) I also stopped calling my mother. Since her visit, our every conversation had devolved into a rote exchange about how hard I was working (“Very,” was my brusque, unremitting reply), and except on the rare occasions when she called me, I hardly spoke to her at all.
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