I stopped visiting the Colonel as well, to the extent that I could. It remained a precarious balance: I didn’t want him to see the state I was in, but if I didn’t see him at all, I feared he would guess it more easily. So I did my best to include Mercedes in our plans, and confined our moments alone to activities like chess. Oddly, the Colonel didn’t seem to mind. Nor did he broach the subject of my job again. If he was playing a waiting game with me, I was content to let him.
I stopped sleeping. My insomnia—already bad like my mother’s—got to the point where I’d take overnight shifts and fall asleep on the short train ride to Floresta, leaning my head against a window or pole until it knocked forward with a start and an otherwise innocuous sight—the soccer stadium at Ferrocarril Oeste or the greenery of Plaza Pueyrredón—reminded me of my destination.
I stopped almost everything except my drinking and smoking and listening to records from bed. Even music barely broke through the fog.
I also didn’t stop taking walks, despite the onset of winter. I took long ones during my days off, when I was supposed to be in class, and shorter ones in the evening, after I finished work. They helped me put off lying in bed and smoking and drinking and listening to records for as long as I could.
I don’t care what Isabel or the Colonel would later say; I was as much a ghost then as I ever would be.
* * *
It was a night like any other during this period. I lay on my bed smoking, too lazy or numb to bother putting on a record. After I finished the joint, I didn’t get up or under the covers or move at all. Just lay there, like a corpse.
Noises sounded downstairs. Harmless ones—doorbell, greeting, the shuffle of feet and small talk. It wasn’t uncommon to have late-night visitors at the pensión. What was uncommon was that the visitor and the subsequent knock on the door would be for me.
I sat up, alert.
“Tomás?” the voice outside asked. A woman’s. Soft, quiet. Not Beatriz’s or the landlady’s.
Isabel.
I let her in, and she brushed hurriedly past me. Took in the tiny room in a frenzy, as if her eyes needed more to land on; they skittered like birds unable to find a perch.
“What is it, Isa?” I asked. “Why’d you come?”
“No idea,” Isabel said.
She sat on my twin bed. Removed her coat and threw it down beside her so haphazardly, it immediately slid to the floor. She was drunk.
“Do you want a drink?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
I got my bottle of Old Smuggler from off the dresser. It was cheaper than Chivas, and since starting at Automotores, I’d been replacing it weekly. Usually on Thursdays, after putting myself in a stupor the night before.
I owned tumblers Mercedes had bought me, but the prospect of having to wash them in the kitchen, when I didn’t want to see or speak to anyone, had grown so tiring that I’d switched to styrofoam cups. I poured us each one and sat down beside her. We drank.
“Orphans, no?” she said.
“What?”
“That’s what we used to say we were. You don’t remember?”
“I remember saying we were cousins.”
She waved that off with a smile.
“Orphans, Tomás. That was our link. Did I ever tell you my father died last year in a car accident? On the LIE—that was the name of the highway. My mom kept emphasizing that it spelled ‘lie’ in English, and the whole thing felt like one. The sadness at his death, but I mean the sadness before too. All of it.”
“You didn’t tell me,” I said.
“You never asked. You used to ask about such things, all the time. We both did.”
“You stopped asking before me,” I told her. It seemed so petty: I know you are, but what am I? “Why are you telling me now?”
“No idea,” she said again. Then, quickly, rushing out the words as if they’d be caught and gagged if she didn’t, “You’ve always been so good to me, Tomás. I don’t deserve you.”
“Maybe not,” I said, and she laughed before we both went quiet. We drank more—timid but consistent gulps. I could hear her every swallow.
“I’ve killed, you know,” Isabel said. “Ended a person’s life.”
“Is that what this is about? Coordinación Federal?”
She shook her head. Shrugged. “Not the way you mean it. It’s not about guilt or anything. Elba Hilda Gaudio can go to hell.”
“Who’s Elba Hilda G—”
“You didn’t read the news? Secretary who died a week later. Gusti was all torn up about it. I pointed out that civilians are killed all the time by the milicos, but—shit. You think I’m bad, you should hear him when he’s up on his soapbox. All that holier-than-thou shit. There’s nobody more arrogant, I swear.”
“You’ve been fighting with Gustavo?”
“He thinks I’m cruel. Not that he’s wrong. I just thought he accepted me for who I was, you know? Didn’t need me to tell any more lies.”
“I do,” I said. “Accept you.”
“You should run, Tomás. You know that, don’t you? You should get as far from me as you can.”
There was no hesitation on my part. “You know I’m not going to,” I said.
She nodded. Stared into her cup.
“You should drink out of glass,” she said. “Something you can break.”
“It’d be too dangerous. I’d be walking on shards all the time.”
She smiled. Then gradually opened her hand and watched the cup drop out of it, as if she wanted to pinpoint the exact moment in which her fingers no longer clasped it. It fell without bouncing.
“Tomás,” she said, but by then I’d thrown my own cup aside and leaned toward her. Brought her closer with a hand on her neck and kissed her before I knew what I was doing. Isabel kissed me back.
In some ways, it was less like the time in the basement and more like when we were teenagers: those flashes of uncertainty, the delicate pauses that followed bursts of hunger and tearing at clothes. The pain at the core of it, the sorrow and solace we found in burying ourselves in each other’s flesh.
But it was also wholly, radically new. Rawer, more violent—like we were clawing at the world as well as each other, trying desperately to fling ourselves past it. If as a boy I’d wanted nothing more than to submerge myself in such a moment with Isabel, now it was like I wanted the moment to submerge everything else, to blot it all out. And it did. In a sense, it has continued to ever since. I’ve been playing that night back to myself for years.
THIRTEEN
Loud thumping on the door. Terror at the sound of my name. They’d learned; they knew. I sat up in a sweat, awaiting the machine gun that would be pressed within seconds into my nose.
“Wake up, boludo!” Beatriz shouted. “A call for you! You think you’re the only one skipping physics to sleep in today? La puta que lo parió . . .”
I glanced about my room, blinking, trying to ground my recollections. Old Smuggler. Two styrofoam cups. An open condom wrapper with a weird sheen in the glaring light of day—it must have been well after noon already. Where was the other condom? I remembered we’d done it twice, without speaking in between. Absurdly, I got out of bed to search underneath, and only dressed once I found my evidence and could confirm that it had all been real.
I went downstairs. Usually I avoided my housemates’ looks, but now I met their gaze. I didn’t know what they thought of me, and I didn’t care.
I picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“I’m sorry,” Isabel said immediately. “It was wrong. A bad idea.”
“It can’t be both, can it?”
I meant her reason, the issue. Whatever prevented her from being with me. Either it was wrong or a bad idea—it seemed to me it had to be one or the other.
But Isabel answered, “Yes, it can.”
I looked for a rejoinder, a counterargument, proof that we should be together.
I didn’t have any.
“But don’t you think—”
“We shouldn’t even be talking right now,” Isabel said. And again: “I’m sorry.”
Then she hung up.
When I called back, the line was busy. I went to the bathroom before trying again, and when I returned, someone else was on the phone. He stayed on it nearly an hour, and by the time I got through, Pichuca informed me Isabel had gone out.
“Is everything okay?” she asked me. “She seemed upset.”
I told her I didn’t know. It was already late afternoon, and I had a night shift. Soon enough, it’d be time to go to work.
* * *
No decision had been reached about the American girl. Which meant she was treated mostly like any other prisoner, except she got her own cell. And though such treatment should have galled me for anyone, in her case it seemed particularly vile. She was innocent. Not that being a socialist like Gordo, whose only crimes against the government probably consisted of voting a certain way and attending a few meetings, wasn’t. But her innocence was different. It wasn’t about the cruelty of this country or these men so much as the cruelty of the universe: Why did it make her blond and put her in this hotel when Rubio went hunting for his mark? How could it be so stupidly inconsiderate?
Or—I don’t know. I don’t know if it was really different from Gordo, despite what I’d told myself. Sometimes I even have the appalling thought—I deny it to myself, always—that she was just an attractive girl around my age whom I discovered in the wake of the worst rejection I’d ever known. That that’s all the extra innocence she really had for me.
Her name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth Brady-Watson, as American a name as you could conjure. Especially if she went by Lizzie: Lizzie Brady-Watson. The day after my conversation with Gordo, I went to the “merchandise” closet and snuck a look through her wallet—the only confiscated possession of hers they’d kept. Any jewelry she wore had probably been sold or given to girlfriends or wives—possibly her clothes as well, if they’d been fashionable.
She was a student at Columbia, one ID card told me. Another suggested she might be from New York originally, or at least had a permanent address there: 218 West 108th St. That piece of identification also told me her birth date: February 9, 1955. She was twenty-one. More than around my age—a mere eleven days older.
That was one of the reasons I gave myself for deciding to visit her cell—we were peers. Another was the fact that I spoke English and would be able to communicate with her, to explain, to the extent that it could be explained, what was happening. But again, maybe it was simpler. Maybe it was just that I knew I could visit her now. Could maybe have the kind of relationship Triste had with Gordo, the ability to say to someone: I’m broken too.
Her breakdown was much more palpable. The stench rose to my nostrils as soon as I entered her cell. I sat opposite her on the ground to signal some sort of equality between us, but she cowered in the corner all the same. Even in the dark—hers was one of the cells without a hanging bulb, and I had only a flashlight on me, which I positioned awkwardly against my leg and shone toward the ceiling—I could see her wounds and bruises hadn’t healed. The only other discernible change at first was the dirtiness—of her blindfold, her cheeks. The latter from sleeping on the floor.
“You don’t speak Spanish?” I asked in English. She shook her head. “Here as a tourist?” She nodded. “Friends?” Nodded again. It was like speaking to a scared child. “They’re probably looking for you.” Again. “It isn’t fair,” I said, as if to mix it up and get another shake of the head. It came. “Will you speak to me, please?” It was the most pathetic question I have ever asked.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked timidly.
“Anything but what they’ve been asking you to,” I said. “You’re from New York? I saw it on your driver’s license. I always wanted to go to New York. I have this dream, this image of my life where—” I broke off idiotically. “Please, Lizzie,” I said, and even with the blindfold on, I could see it in her face, in those cracked lips and tight jaw: disgust. How many times in this place had she said the word please?
“My name’s Elizabeth,” she said.
* * *
The rhythm in Automotores. Time cycled differently there. With rare exceptions—the bombing of Coordinación, or Isabel’s coming to my pensión—outside events no longer marked time for me. Instead of a change in season or a new exam period in school, the months were clocked by the arrival or departure of a prisoner, or a torture method. The man who died of a heart attack back in May; the Uruguayan family picked up in June (the whole house cleared out, including furniture, children, and dog; the mutt scampered around for days until it disappeared with the children, supposedly given up for adoption alongside them); Ricardo Alberto Gayá’s death by submarine in July; Elizabeth’s kidnapping in August—which coincided with the introduction of capuchita and my new task of tying prisoners’ hoods before leaving them in the dark. Weeks were simpler; they always started and ended on Wednesdays now.
On the following Wednesday, five days after Isabel’s call, Aníbal gave me my list. Gordo’s number was on it: seventeen.
He’d been one of Automotores’ earliest prisoners—we were into the two hundreds by then. For some reason that made it even harder, more unjust. Gordo had survived this long—didn’t that earn him survival generally?
“He fixed the radio, sir,” I reminded Aníbal; that was the only bit of moral logic I felt he’d understand.
“Right. He fixed it,” Aníbal said, as if I were the one lacking understanding. “You think I’m going to let Rubio break it twice? He’s taking up space, Verde. A private cell, what’s more, thanks to Triste. But we just picked up a kid from a copy place in Retiro with ERP credentials who’s ready to sing, and I want to make him feel special, well treated. He’s trying to sell us his services like he’s a fucking mercenary, I swear. To think—a fucking mercenary, here, in the Garden!” He laughed boisterously. Then calmed himself and clarified, as if in an effort to console me: “Besides, Verde. We can always get a new radio if we need.”
* * *
Gordo was one of seven Triste lined up for me—wordlessly, with typical stoicism—on the garage level. The blindfold was back on, so we couldn’t make eye contact at first. I was glad we couldn’t.
I gave my speech: They would become legal detainees and be handed over to the jurisdiction of the executive government to be processed in federal court; for their transfer to the federal prison in Devoto they had to be vaccinated to avoid the spread of disease after being kept in these conditions. Why I had to go to the trouble when the narrative wasn’t fooling anybody, I’m not sure. I didn’t look at Gordo until it was his turn, and even then I tried to keep my gaze on the limbs that pertained to me, as if he were just a collection of body parts. I raised his right arm and injected him in the armpit. I removed his blindfold. He didn’t look at me either. He didn’t move or say a word. I half hoped he’d have the fortitude or forgiveness in his heart to whisper that I was a victim of circumstance too, but he didn’t. He didn’t acknowledge me at all.
When I was done, he walked off and got into the truck on his own. He wouldn’t have needed to, but I wondered if he’d counted the steps of those who preceded him anyway.
* * *
That night, after most of the other men had left, I went to clean the torture room.
By now it had become my first response to almost anything. A new arrival—go clean. Hear Elizabeth’s screams—go clean. Transfer Gordo—go clean.
So I took the deodorizer, the mop, whatever I could lay my hands on. I went at the floor like it was marble in someone’s mansion; scrub, scrub, scrub again. I took the flowers—yellow tulips—to the bathroom to water them and brought them back. I adjusted the defibrillator’s positi
on in the corner ever so slightly, the same with the picana, as if they were picture frames or objets d’art. I was contemplating yet another adjustment when I heard a voice. The Priest’s.
“Aníbal told me you didn’t like transferring Gordito.” Aníbal had a jarring fondness for diminutives. The words could even seem cute and harmless in his mouth—asadito, mojadito—unless you knew their meanings. An asadito, a “little barbecue,” was a reference to sessions with the picana on the so-called grill; mojadito was a “little wet one,” a transfer who would be thrown in the sea. There was capuchita too, of course, and affectionate-sounding nicknames for many of the camps: el campito, la casita, la escuelita. The last had apparently been an actual school in Tucumán before the military took it over.
The Priest’s ball-like head had been leaning over the threshold as if it needed permission to enter, and he ambled in with a small smile that implied he was grateful I’d granted him admission.
“You must remember that even the worst sinner is human,” he said. “Which is not to say you must forget the sin. But that sometimes you must forget the humanity.”
Despite myself, I actually glimpsed some wisdom in that statement. In the Priest more broadly as well. Like the Colonel perhaps, you could hate him, but you couldn’t help but listen to him. The roundness of his head, as if he were open to the world, without the sharpness of prejudice, the hunch in his back that aided his feigned air of humility—he filled the role I needed filled there.
“Can I ask you, Father,” I began. Father was what we called him to his face, and I always stumbled on it. “What about forgiveness? Doesn’t the church teach—”
“You are forgiven, hijito.” Little son. I wondered whether Aníbal had actually picked up the diminutives from him. Maybe their propensities fed off each other the way their anti-Semitism did. “That is what is important. They may be forgiven as well and, if so, will meet our savior in the world above. But in our battle for this world, for a righteous, stable Argentina, we must eradicate the sin even if it means eradicating the sinner. The tree of evil must be pulled out, root and branch, even if the seeds seem innocent.”
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