Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  Thank you for downloading this Scout Press eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scout Press and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  FOR FRANCA.

  AND FOR MY FAMILIES, ALL OF THEM,

  YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Eating Cake Underground

  PART ONE

  Our Year

  Already Famous

  A Girl in New York Is a Terrible Thing

  PART TWO

  Abnormal Circumstances

  Painting Is Dead!

  No More Midnight Coca-Cola

  PART THREE

  The Artist Leaps into the Void

  The Show Must Go On

  Lucy’s Yellow

  PART FOUR

  The Rising Sun

  The Missing Boy and the Lost Girl

  It Isn’t Enough to Be Beautiful

  PART FIVE

  Fuck Sunsets

  There’s Nothing to Be Done About the Love

  PART SIX

  Minus Any God

  Fun

  Epilogue: One Hundred Pictures Every Night

  Acknowledgments

  About Molly Prentiss

  A man’s work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

  —ALBERT CAMUS

  What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?

  —KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

  PROLOGUE

  EATING CAKE UNDERGROUND

  Buenos Aires, Argentina

  September 1980

  The meetings happen on Tuesdays, in the basement of Café Crocodile. They’re at six o’clock sharp. To get there in time, Franca Engales Morales has to close up the bakery early. She has just under an hour to finish up the last cake, mop the floors, pull the grate. She’s hurrying, tossing the cake’s thick yellow batter with her big wooden spoon, blowing her bangs from her eyes. She swipes a finger in, licks it, decides to add poppy seeds, dumps in a generous sprinkle. Pulls her favorite Bundt pan—the red one with the scalloped edges—works a slab of butter up the sides with her fingers. Then she pours in a layer of the yellow mix, which settles like mud. A layer of brown sugar and cinnamon, and then another layer of batter. Thirty-five minutes for the cake to bake, then she’ll tuck a sheet of foil around its plate. She’ll step out into what’s left of the winter and there will be a pang in her chest as she clicks closed the oversize lock on the grate. She’ll lose customers from closing early, she knows. And she can’t afford to, she knows. But what are a few customers against the rest of it? Against what will be lost if she doesn’t go to the meetings at all?

  What Franca does is bake cakes, and how she does it is well. She bakes quickly and efficiently, and she makes sure the cakes taste good. But here is the thing that is difficult about baking cakes: it doesn’t mean much, in the grand scheme of things. Franca has grappled with this since she began working at the bakery, when she was only seventeen—the year her parents died and she and her brother had been forced to get jobs. Now she is thirty-two and she runs the place and she still can’t help thinking that making cakes for people with extra money to spend on cakes is not necessarily the life that she was meant for. She can’t help thinking she was meant to think just a little bit more.

  Here is the thing that is difficult about thinking: this is Buenos Aires, and right now Buenos Aires does not care too much for thinking. In fact, it is as if there is a ban on thinking altogether; if you think too much you might very well never think again. You watch what you think, and you watch what you say out loud. You even watch what you wear and how you walk. When you want to think, you do it in your bed at night, lying there and watching the ceiling fan, hoping no one can hear your thoughts through the thin white curtains that separate you from the perils of the outside world.

  “You’re quite an idiot,” is what Franca’s friend Ines told her when she found out about the Tuesday meetings. “If something happens to you? Dear god I pray for Julian.”

  But Ines is the kind of friend Franca cannot let herself listen to. If Franca had listened to Ines, she never would have had Julian in the first place. “Who would want to bring a kid into this shit hole?” Ines had said before she knew Franca was pregnant—almost seven years ago now. Ines had already had three children, but she’d had them under Perón. “A whole different time,” Ines promised. “And now? Chaos.”

  Yes, it had been chaotic then—Perón, during his second, tumultuous term, had just kicked the bucket and left his incompetent second wife in charge; rumors of a coup had surfaced and spread. Franca’s personal life had felt similarly precarious: her brother, whom she had lived with in her parents’ house since they died more than fifteen years ago, openly detested the man she had chosen to bring into the house and marry, and had finally owned up to his threat, cashing in on his American passport—just another of the things he possessed that she didn’t—and abandoning her for New York City. He claimed he was leaving to pursue painting, but she knew the truth because she felt it, too: he couldn’t stand to share their dead parents’ house with Pascal, or even to be in the house at all; it had become three stories of sadness. He had dragged something sharp through her heart when he went; Raul’s presence was like electricity, lighting up her world when it flicked on for her, darkening everything when it was shut off. It was dark when he left, and she was alone in that dark with Pascal.

  She had loved Pascal, she had. With his straight back and his curved lip and his solemn promise that he would take care of her (for an orphan this was the only promise). He was a good man, and by all logical accounts he had seemed like the right choice. But it was when her brother left that she realized that Pascal’s love—easy, dependable, just-fine love—was not enough. Her whole being yearned for Raul: her brother who filled the house with turpentine smell and covered the walls with his paintings; her brother who could look at her eyes and know exactly what was in her heart. She craved the closeness, the almost too-closeness, of real family, a comforting, suffocating closeness that could not be replaced. The paintings he’d left up on the walls only reminded her of his absence, and so she took them down, shoving them under beds or rolling them up to lean in corners. She began to have fantasies about packing a bag and taking Pascal’s stash of cash from the pantry to buy a ticket to New York. But she didn’t have a passport, and it was nearly impossible to get one these days, and the walls were lonely and closing in on her, and so she developed a new fantasy: a tiny baby, a little boy, a companion who sat and drank pear juice with her in the sun. The week after Raul left, Franca crept toward her husband in the middle of the night, and through his bleary state of half sleep, with the moon coming in, with her on top like a madwoman, Franca made herself pregnant. (That was how she thought of it, her making herself pregnant; Pascal, in true Pascal form, was rather passive in the act.)

  After Julian was born, the distance between Franca and Pascal only grew wider. Franca spent her days lost in the little human she’d made, gazing into his wide, curious eyes, petting his swish of dark hair, feeding him from her breast, which felt simultaneously painful and satisfying. She was happy only when the baby was in her arms; the baby understood her; the baby reminded her, incredibly, of her brother. The thought of Pascal sitting in his big chair in the living room—his whiskers sticking themselves out of his face, his face sticking itself out of its collar, his hand sticking itself down his pants to itch—began to disgu
st Franca, and she avoided him altogether, resisted his every touch. They moved into separate rooms. When they spoke, they yelled. And then one morning in April, Franca woke up, breathed in, and understood before she got up from bed that Pascal was not in the house. That he had left her and Julian and would not come back. It was that very day that she’d gone to Café Crocodile for the first time. She’d needed to feel surrounded. She’d needed to feel smaller than something.

  So no, she would not listen to Ines, who warned her with a furrowed brow that these meetings were gonna get her scooped up—the term people were using for the mysterious kidnappings that had been happening daily, all over the city, since the coup. Because the meetings remind her every time that she is not the only one who has lost something, that this is a city full of losses, a world full. And because the people at the meetings—young Lara, funny Mateo, serious Sergio, brave Wafa—are, aside from six-year-old Julian, the only family she has.

  Franca pushes her way through the wind, down the six blocks to the café. Whenever she feels the familiar pang of nervousness she reminds herself that she looks harmless in her friendly blue coat, carrying the cake she’s made for her friends. She remembers what Raul used to tell her: You’d make the perfect radical, Franca. Because you look so fucking nice. The part of her heart that belongs to her brother pulses: if only he could see her now. She quickly wonders what would have happened if he had stayed, but stops herself. Raul never responded to her letter—she could bring herself to try writing only once—and has never called the house. And so her brother will never know about these meetings, about Pascal’s leaving, or about Julian, her greatest—perhaps her only—accomplishment. Her brother will never even care. Still, she knows, she’s here at Café Crocodile for Raul.

  Inside, Franca nods to El Jefe, the boss of the place and Lara’s father. El Jefe doesn’t smile with his mouth but from somewhere in his forehead. Franca remembers his forehead from all the mornings they came here when she was small, when El Jefe’s hair was still black. She remembers running toward the counter with Raul, jumping on the stools and begging El Jefe for lemonades.

  “They’re downstairs,” says El Jefe, his voice as distinguished as a butler’s.

  The code: knock three times, cough once. The basement door will open just a crack, which is when you must say: Jacobo, the password. Usually: the whole lot of them smile at her silently, mime pulling zippers over their mouths while the door is open. Usually: she sits in the orange chair closest to the door, pulls out her notes, gets started with the transcripts. But now: Something is different. Something is wrong.

  No one is sitting and no one is smiling. The basement is all movement. Sergio is shoving a mess of papers into his old leather briefcase. Mateo, usually the calm one, full of jokes and immaculate impersonations of the generals, is jamming piles of books under the bed, the still-burning chunks from his cigarette falling onto the carpet, glowing orange and then dying. Lara, with her pretty, ash-colored braid, is ripping pages from the binder where they keep track of all the names—the names of the people who have gone missing, which they’ve been recording since the very first meeting: there are thousands now. And Wafa, who is sitting on the couch with her head in her hands, is weeping.

  Mateo, panting from the weight of the bed he is lifting, says without turning toward Franca: “Remo’s gone.”

  Franca feels a swift rush of blood through her body. She knows exactly what this means. Remo is Wafa’s husband, and if they know where Remo lives, they know where Wafa lives. This means they might very well know where Wafa is right now, that Wafa is here, which means they might have followed Wafa, six men in plainclothes, driving very slowly down Calle Defensa, watching Wafa’s skirt sway as she stepped inside the café. And they might still be waiting just outside, the windows of their Ford Falcons rolled down, the sunlight reflecting off their mirrored sunglasses, their cigarettes burning the minutes away, the minutes before they barge through Café Crocodile’s big glass doors, hold a gun to El Jefe’s head until he tells them where those fucking radicals are hiding, sparing El Jefe because the ones they want are downstairs, down the spiral staircase and through the locked basement door, which they can easily knock through with their rifles, which they will use to dig into the backs of these fucking radicals as they drag them to their low, fat, black, heavy cars.

  Julian appears in Franca’s mind so vividly it is as if he is in the room. Wide eyes, small hands. Too smart for a six-year-old, overly wise, since birth. Just yesterday he’d asked her in his tiny voice: Mama, when the government gets fixed, can we visit the Brother, first thing? Smart enough to know the country was broken, hopeful enough to think it could be fixed, astute enough to intuit his mother’s secret wish: to leave for America; to find Raul. It’s not likely, she’d said, so as not to get his hopes up. Or were they hers, these hopes?

  She tries to remind herself that she’s made a plan for this. Julian is at a friend’s this evening, Lars’s house; she has specifically set it up this way. The fact that Lars’s parents, Sofie and Johan, are Danish, and are free to come and go from Argentina at their own will, is no accident. The stack of American dollars she’s stashed in Julian’s backpack is no accident. But the fact that there is a plan at all is the very reason she’s worried. She thinks of Sofie and Johan: blond, strict, too formal. She thinks of how scared Julian will be if she does not come to pick him up, how he will not like it if he has to spend the night in their house, which is so cold and full of angles. She suddenly longs for Pascal. If only she had been better to him. Raul was wrong about him, she knows, but she had let his opinion overshadow everything, like she always had, like she was doing still, here in this basement full of radicals: each a ticking time bomb. Look where listening to Raul has gotten her: her only son is alone in a strange house; her only husband is gone. And Raul? He’s gone, too. He’s the most gone of anyone.

  Franca attempts to speak, to ask some question or give some answer, but finds that she cannot; her whole nervous system has gathered in her mouth. Her claustrophobia intensifies, a slow pinching of the room. When she looks up it is as if the basement has shifted slightly, as if the walls are now at a diagonal. She has the sensation she gets when she visits somewhere she has been before and the layout of things seems changed, but she can still remember the way she inhabited the space before: an unfaithful déjà vu.

  Wafa lets out a low moan. “What about Simon?” she suddenly blurts, as if just remembering. Franca imagines Wafa’s small son, Simon: just a year older than Julian. Suddenly everything goes wavy. The smoke from Mateo’s cigarette is burning her eyes. Franca’s hands slacken; the cake falls to the carpeted floor with a thud. Everyone—Sergio, Mateo, Lara, Wafa—stops what they are doing to look at her, letting a silence as dense as the cake fill the room. Their eyes are frosted over with panic. Then Sergio, suddenly possessed, does something so odd that Franca wonders if it’s a hallucination. He takes the binder from Lara and rips out one of the pages, crumples it, and kneels next to Franca’s fallen plate. Then he rips off the sheet of foil, stuffs the paper into a piece of the soft, still-warm cake, and shoves the slice into his mouth. Lara kneels, too, grabs a list of names, stuffs them into the cake, starts to chew. Then Mateo comes, then Wafa. They swallow the names of the people who are missing. They swallow what could get them killed.

  Franca feels a sudden surge of pride in the cake. A cake that’s worth something, that’s pulling its weight. But this feeling leaves as swiftly as it comes, because just as Mateo is finishing his slice of cake, digging in for another, she is filled with two distinct regrets. She’s left the oven at the bakery turned on. She’s left her little boy with no one. And all she can do now is sit here on her knees, swallow, wait for the banging on the basement door.

  PART ONE

  PORTRAIT OF MANHATTAN BY A YOUNG MAN

  BODY: A tight torso, flexing with a million muscle groups. Neighborhoods connected by taxi blood. Hefty, hard shoulders of Harlem, strong pectorals of the Upper East and West
Sides, the spine of Central Park and the messy lungs of Midtown. Go farther down and find the pancreatic sack, surrounded by bile, just below Union Square, and even farther are the bowels and bladders of downtown, filled with beggars, booze, little pockets of bright. And what of the parasites that have eaten up these lower guts? Who have eaten out the insides of downtown’s most wary buildings? Look harder. Ventricle streets, hydrant valves; way down here is the city’s throbbing heart.

  EARS: If you had to describe this song, how would you describe it? The song of setting foot onto such dirty new concrete, the song of the soaring buildings, the song of looking upward, following a bird out of the thicket of metal and through the portal of blue sky. How would you describe this song, young, unknown man? You’d need eighteen musicians, surely. You’d need expectant, vibrating buildup. You’d need a genius composer, smart enough to capture what should not be allowed to go undocumented: this frequency of pure, unfettered hope.

  FEET: It feels like running away, says an overheard voice, pumping to the rhythm of the music at a not yet familiar nightclub. What does? says another voice. Manhattan, says the first voice, and the island’s name sounds like wheeeeeee!

  LIMBS: From above, Manhattan is just a lonely arm, squirting and bending from the big body of Brooklyn. It is not until you are inside it that you see it is the vital appendage, the hand that squeezes at the rest of the world, the muscle where everything that’s anything is made.

  MOUTH: Come on in, the water’s fine! The water’s not fine but there’s always wine. There’s always a taxi when you need one, except when you look like you need one. There’s a shitload of everything for sale. HOT DOG, HOT DOG, COCA-COLA, PRETZEL. People are dancing in Tompkins Square Park. Watch their mouths turn into O’s and their bodies turn into S’s. Come on in, the water’s fine! This is what the bouncer at Max’s says, but only when you’re on the list. If you’re not on the list, go take a piss. The guys in the band wear skinny ties and combat boots. There’s an art project on the sidewalk, on the fire escape, in the back bathroom. Somebody’s crawling through a gallery on his hands and knees, moaning. This is a project. Somebody’s talking shit about Schnabel. This is a project. Somebody’s mouthing the words to that song everybody’s listening to: You’re just a poor girl in a rich man’s house, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh! This, too, is a project. Come on in, mouths the bouncer’s sour mouth. Someone’s making a scene tonight, and you’re about to be a part of it.