The Foreign Girls

by Sergio Olguin

  “In cases like this,” María said while surveying the menu, “I always ask myself what was in the mind of the killer.”

  “Rape, murder.”

  “It’s the torture part I don’t get. Because you can kill, rape or abuse someone while in a state of hatred, arousal, perversion, whatever. But the time between the beginning of the rape and the moment when the girls were finished off must have been between twenty and forty minutes. Time for the guy to regret his decision or try to hasten the ending or change his mind. But he doesn’t do that, he keeps to the plan. There’s no sign of arousal, or violent emotion, or the murder being intended to cover another crime.”

  “What is there, then?”

  “Evil. Evil exists.”

  “Evil is causing torment. Torture is evil in its purest form.”

  “To torture someone is to think the crime through. A murder or a rape can be unmeditated crimes. Impulsive. Let me be clear – I don’t mean in legal terms, because I don’t consider that an extenuating factor. But when you see the degree of violence visited on these girls, you realize some thought went into their deaths.”

  The waiter came to take their order, but María’s eyes were fixed on Verónica. When the waiter had moved away, María asked her:

  “Did you know those girls?”

  Verónica took a few seconds to answer.

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t ask you anything about it. But I want you to know that, when you say their names, something in you seems to break. Bear it in mind.”

  Verónica smiled and drank some water.

  “Thanks,” she said, and María changed the subject. They didn’t discuss the murders again during the rest of the meal.

  II

  A town is like a cage. At least that was how Verónica saw Yacanto del Valle. She felt stuck in a back and forth between the hotel and the square, between the square and the police station, or between the hotel and Ramiro’s gallery. She couldn’t imagine living in an environment where everyone seemed like a character in a play repeated until the end of days. She felt out of place. Luca and Mariano, on the other hand, seemed very comfortable in that world. When she arrived at the hotel, Mariano was waiting for her with news.

  “The attaché from the Italian embassy is in Coronel Berti. I took the liberty of talking to him and explaining your intention to take charge of Petra’s funeral. He seemed pleased. Apparently it’s very expensive to send a body from here to Italy. He’s waiting for us in Coronel Berti with some papers for you to sign, and you can collect Petra’s belongings at the same time.”

  They went together. On the way there Verónica realized she hadn’t driven for days. If it wasn’t Federico driving her, it was Mariano or Luca. She didn’t mind the company. On the contrary; she felt as though she wasn’t really up to doing anything much, even driving a car. It was soothing to travel as a passenger and take in the views on either side of the road.

  “One day we’re going to get drunk together and I’m going to tell you a lot of things about myself,” Mariano told her.

  “Such as?”

  “That you remind me of my sister.”

  “Your sister.”

  “She was disappeared. They took her in 1976. I was twelve years old.”

  “Oh, Mariano.”

  “I don’t want to get dramatic or anything. I just wanted to tell you it makes me happy you’re so like her.”

  Verónica squeezed his arm.

  The diplomat from the Italian embassy was waiting for them at the entrance to the Coronel Berti hospital. He explained how they had tried to find some relation of Petra’s and kept drawing a blank. From the way he acted, though, it seemed they probably hadn’t tried all that hard. His eagerness to pass on the responsibility for Petra’s body was further evidence of that.

  After signing all the paperwork the judge had sent so she could take charge of Petra’s body and effects, Verónica was given the rucksack and the guitar. Outside the hospital, Mariano said:

  “I’ve arranged for an undertaker to take the body straight to the cemetery tomorrow morning at eleven.”

  Back at the hotel, Verónica went up to her room. She put the guitar and rucksack down on one side of the room. She didn’t feel ready to look through Petra’s belongings. She left the rucksack untouched.

  She walked over to Amigo’s shortly before the time she had agreed to meet Mechi there. Since she knew they had Wi-Fi, Verónica took her laptop and ran a search on Guillermo Aráoz senior. She found quite a lot of information about his activity before and after the military dictatorship. There were various allegations of human rights abuses. In 1975 he had been transferred from Córdoba to Tucumán and moved into the provincial capital with his wife and children. In 1980 he bought a ranch in the area of Yacanto del Valle with money derived from “the spoils of war”, according to various allegations. In 1981, he took early retirement. The soldier turned rancher. During the last years of the dictatorship he made good contacts among the Tucumán movers and shakers and, in 1983, he supported the candidate who later became mayor of Coronel Berti. As for the rape and murder of a twenty-one-year-old girl in 1982, there was no information at all. Verónica had only the published article Robson had copied for her. The last activity she could find for Aráoz senior was from midway through the year 2000: he appeared as a member of the steering committee of the province’s Rural Society.

  She stopped reading when she saw Mechi arrive. The girl looked taller and more relaxed than the last time she had seen her, perhaps because on that occasion Mechi had been arriving home after a long walk and this time she was a young woman breezing into a bar. She was still just as serious, though. She wasn’t a girl much given to smiling.

  Mechi ordered a Coca-Cola. Verónica asked about her work. The girl explained that she was one of two maids working for the Arregui family. She went there Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. She also worked some Saturday nights, when the Arreguis had visitors. Verónica asked if she was studying. She had some subjects pending, but she wasn’t currently studying because she had started working full-time. Then Verónica told her what she had managed to find out.

  “Your sister’s case isn’t closed and hasn’t expired. So we still have time to find the people responsible. You told me it was El Gringo Aráoz. How can you be sure? You were little when it happened.”

  “My sister was very pretty. And El Gringo was after her. I heard her say that more than once. I was always eavesdropping on what she talked about with her friends.”

  “So did they go out together?”

  “Bibi was playing hard to get. El Gringo had an official girlfriend. A stuck-up posh girl who ended up getting married to the youngest child of the Arteagas, a family from round here. Anyway, her best friend told me.”

  “Roxana?”

  “How did you know?” asked Mechi, surprised.

  “In the witness statements, Roxana mentions parties with rich kids, but she doesn’t name Aráoz.”

  “She told me Bibi and El Gringo had had a fight because my sister didn’t want to go back to his house. And that that Saturday Bibi said to Roxana they should go to the party but Roxana didn’t want to know. They went for a beer in Gorriti’s bar and El Gringo went to find her there. Bibi tried to make her stay but Roxana didn’t want to know. Even Gorriti told her that those boys were jerks and she shouldn’t hang out with them.”

  “Gorriti was the owner of the bar? He said that to Roxana?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where can I find this Gorriti?”

  “He sold up and left.”

  “When?”

  “Right after they killed my sister.”

  “What about Roxana, does she live here?”

  “She went to San Miguel.”

  “Are you in touch with her? I’d like to talk to her.”

  “No, but I can ask some of my sister’s other friends. I’m sure they’ll know how to find her.”

  They talked about Pae Daniel’s release. Verón
ica told Mechi that she’d like to speak to her grandmother again, and they decided to go and find her straightaway. As they walked back to the hotel, where the car was parked, Verónica asked her if she liked living in Yacanto del Valle.

  “No,” she said, without elaborating.

  They were driving when Federico called, wanting to know where Verónica was. When she told him she was on her way to Mechi’s, he lost his temper, saying she mustn’t move around on her own, that Peratta was still at large and they had to be on their guard. Federico told her he would go to Mechi’s house too and wait for her outside.

  The two dogs barked on their arrival there but, as Verónica walked through the gate, they merely sniffed her. Mechi’s grandmother opened the kitchen door and the dachshund puppies rushed out in a gaggle.

  The grandmother prepared coffee.

  “I don’t believe you told me your name the last time we were here.”

  “Ramona Ortiz.”

  “Ramona, do you know Pae Daniel?”

  “Of course I do. When he moved here I used to go to his house. He came from the Amazon straight to Tucumán.”

  “Do you practise Umbanda?”

  “My dear, at this age it’s hard to take on anything new. But I thought perhaps I could learn to do hexes. I won’t lie to you: I wanted to make a doll of the man who killed my granddaughter, but Pae Daniel explained to me that it wasn’t Umbanda.”

  “And so you stopped going.”

  “No, I kept going because I’m stubborn. I thought the pae was lying and that one day he would teach us. I only wanted to hurt that miserable swine, mind you, not anyone else.”

  “And do you get on well with Pae Daniel?”

  “I take him a black cockerel every now and then. And he talks to me about the Orisha, who connect human beings with the spirit world, and things like that.”

  “I need to speak to him, because I think he may be able to help us find the people responsible for the girls’ deaths. Since he doesn’t want to speak to people he doesn’t know, I thought I might have more luck if I went with you.”

  Ramona couldn’t go the following afternoon, but they agreed that Verónica would pick her up the day after and they would go together to see the pae. She left the house expecting to be accosted by all the puppies, but only one approached her.

  “They’re being weaned,” Mechi explained. “Niebla doesn’t want to feed them any more but the puppies keep trying. Apart from this one, who’s already got used to Grandma’s rice.”

  Verónica squatted down, more than anything to prise the little dog from her shoe. The puppy immediately licked her hand. Verónica stroked her head. She was an ugly little mutt, like all dachshunds.

  “What’s her name?”

  “She hasn’t got one. We’re giving them all away. If you put El Gringo behind bars, you can have her.”

  Verónica laughed nervously. “Just what I need. A dachshund. I’d settle for seeing him prosecuted. I don’t think he’ll go to prison right away.”

  “Well, if you make it happen, I’ll give you the puppy.”

  Outside Federico was waiting for her; he smiled and waved.

  “Listen, Bruce Willis, we’re going to have to go in separate cars.”

  “Lead the way and I’ll follow you.”

  III

  As a teenager she had been drawn to cemeteries and when, at twenty-two, she went backpacking round Europe on her own, she took a list of graveyards to visit, as well as one of museums. She had been to Père Lachaise in Paris, to Highgate in London, to the Jewish cemetery in Prague and the one for Protestants in Rome. But now she was the other side of thirty, graveyards repelled her more than anything else. The aversion had in fact begun at her mother’s burial. Although she had gone to the funeral, she never returned to La Tablada cemetery. She knew her father went, that her sisters even took their children there. She couldn’t go. Or rather, she didn’t believe. She didn’t believe there was anything there connected to her mother. Verónica had arrived at the conclusion that the place where you get buried is an irrelevance. And to think she had become emotional beside the tombs of Jim Morrison and Karl Marx.

  Petra’s funeral was attended by Luca, Mariano and Federico, as well as herself. The graveyard in Yacanto del Valle was a plot of land with simple graves, topped by headstones and crosses. They parked the car at the entrance and walked towards the area indicated by the undertaker. There were a few trees dotted around between the rows of graves.

  Some cemetery workers were finishing digging the pit for Petra’s grave. Seeing the mourners approach, they asked them if there was going to be a headstone. That was a question none of them had thought about and which Mariano promised to address in the coming days. The hearse couldn’t reach that part of the graveyard, so they had to carry the coffin there themselves. Since there were only four of them, the undertakers helped them. Of the six people carrying Petra’s body, Verónica was the only one who had known her. Such solitude, even in death, seemed unjust. Petra was someone who deserved to have family, friends and loved ones everywhere.

  Verónica cried. But now she was crying because Petra didn’t deserve that solitary and silent end, that meagre band of strangers. She closed her eyes when the gravediggers started to throw earth onto the coffin and tried to remember a prayer, a supplication like “El Malei Rachamim”, but she couldn’t. Instead she repeated Petra’s name to herself.

  Federico put his hand on her shoulder and led her away. They returned to the car. Before he started the engine, Mariano said:

  “I couldn’t say this before, but I want to now. God or nature or murderers can put an end to your life, but nobody can take away the life you have lived. That life is part of the cosmos. Petra is every moment she lived, including those days she shared with you. Your lives will always be intertwined, and nobody, not murderers, or nature, or God, can prevent that. That’s what I wanted to say.”

  IV

  Mariano believed in order – not in the military sense or the kind loudly espoused by retrograde sectors of society, but in an order where everything had its place in the world. Life, for him, was like a symphony he could hear throughout the day and night: the rhythm of travellers who arrived at his hotel, the staff busy with their tasks, the children who ran shouting past the door, the leaves that fell in autumn, the cloudbursts, his hands on Luca’s body, their breathing in the early morning. If ever there was a discordant note in the melody, he noticed it before anyone else. The symphony fell out of tune, life lost its order if something had gone awry.

  And his fine ear for daily life was alerting him now to a strange noise around him. Although it would be more correct to say that it was around the hotel. He thought he knew the source of that dissonant murmur: he intuited that Verónica was in danger. He needed to take immediate measures.

  When they returned from the graveyard, he told Verónica he had to change her room. She didn’t complain, only asked which room he was moving her to.

  “Not to any of them. You’re coming to our house. We have a guest room there that’s going to be for you.”

  In reality their house was simply a wing of the hotel, reached by crossing a patio and a veranda that started at the end of the run of rooms on the south side. It wasn’t very big but it had the benefit of a spare room, the one Mariano now offered to Verónica. Luca looked questioningly at him; Mariano avoided his eyes.

  There was something else he wanted to do, too. Mariano went to the police station and spoke to Officer Benítez. He asked him if he wouldn’t like to earn a few extra pesos working as a security guard during the night. It wouldn’t be for very long. Mariano explained that he would have to stay in a room that served as a wine cellar and was midway between the hotel and their house.

  Back at home, he went to the wine cellar and installed a computer there, connecting it to another one in the house. If anyone so much as touched a key or clicked the mouse, a sound would be made in the cellar. A home-made panic button, which Mariano tested and found t
o work perfectly.

  With those preparations made, Mariano felt that the symphony was back in tune, although he was conscious that maintaining order was no simple matter and that the unexpected could always happen.

  V

  Ramona got into the car and pointed out to Verónica the road that led to Pae Daniel’s house. Federico had surrendered the passenger seat to Mechi’s grandmother. Ramona liked talking, or perhaps she simply felt calmer when conversation was flowing. She told them about the five grandchildren she had been looking after since her daughter died. That two of the boys had gone to work in the sugar harvest, on the other side of the province. That the other boy lived with Mechi and herself, but that he wasn’t often around. She also told them that she had three other children, all living in the Yacanto area. Ramona asked them if they were romantically involved or just worked together.

  “We’re friends,” Verónica answered.

  They stopped the car in front of the pae’s house. Federico stayed in the car. Ramona clapped her hands and a woman appeared, greeted her by name and signalled that she should come in. As they walked across the garden, Ramona explained that she needed to speak to the pae.

  A minute later Pae Daniel appeared. He looked taller from close up. He must be about fifty years old, with abundant hair that was almost entirely grey. He greeted Ramona with some surprise, remarking that it had been several months since they had last seen each other. Ramona explained that she was here on very important business. Gesturing towards Verónica, she added that she needed him to speak to her. Only then did the pae seem to see the other woman.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Verónica Rosenthal.”