Disappeared

by Colin Falconer

  The doctor gave her another needle. The world of grief and pain slipped away from her, for now at least.

  ***

  Francesca never held her dead child. Even Angeli never saw the baby. A priest was summoned to whisper rites over the cold, blue wreckage and then it was burned in the hospital incinerator with other redundant organs. All Francesca was told was that if her baby had lived it would have been a daughter.

  Two days later they told her the full truth of it; a genetic defect in Francesca's womb caused the premature labour and the child's subsequent death. The surgeons had performed an emergency hysterectomy to save her life. She and her husband would not never be able to have children of their own.

  Francesca bore this news stoically and without tears. Angeli took this to be a good sign.

  He was wrong.

  Chapter 11

  GABRIELLA SAT AT the dressing table mirror, taking off her make-up. Reuben leaned on his pillow and watched her. He admired the swell of her flesh as she reached over her head to brush out her hair. Her breasts were still swollen with milk.

  He drew back the bedcovers as she got into be. She flicked off the lamp. “Don't turn off the light,” he said. “I want to look at you.”

  “I don't want you to. I'm fat.”

  “That's ridiculous.”

  “Well, I feel fat.”

  He nuzzled her neck, his hand on her thigh. “Caro,” he whispered.

  It had been so long and he needed her tonight. When she did not respond he got angry. He had been so patient with her. What was wrong? He rolled away.

  “Reuben? Reuben, what's the matter?”

  “If you don't want to, just say so.”

  “It's not that. Don't be angry.”

  “I'm not angry.” He switched on the bedside lamp and lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.

  “I'm sorry. I'm just tired, that's all.”

  “You're always tired.”

  “It's not easy looking after twins, Reuben.”

  “We're not poor. Get a maid.”

  “I don't want someone else raising my children. We didn't do it that way where I come from.”

  “Where you come from,” he said, slowly.

  “What does that mean?” One of the twins started crying in the next room. “Simone,” Gabriella said.

  “Let her cry. You can't get up to her for every little sound she makes.”

  Gabriella slid out of bed and padded into the nursery. When she came back to bed Reuben was asleep.

  ***

  Once a month Domingo came.

  He did not have Gabriella's charm or looks. He was a small, mean-eyed man, with a dark complexion, a mestizo. He always dressed in his best suit for these visits, which only served, it seemed to Reuben, to make him appear even more shabby. Either his tie was knotted across his collar or a frayed shirt cuff protruded from his jacket sleeve. He perched on the edge of his chair, a man uncomfortable with elegant surroundings, ready to bolt. He had large, clumsy hands, they hung limp between his knees, as if they were soiled shoes he had taken off at the door and now did not know where to put them.

  He spent most of the hour answering Gabriella's questions about distant family members. He never brought his wife or children, although he had been invited to do so many times. It served to remind Reuben of the huge gulf between him and his wife.

  Reuben remembered the first time he had come, soon after he and Gabriella were married. Domingo's eyes had roamed the apartment, taking in the polished timber floor, the Persian rugs and the black leather sofas as if it were a museum and he had paid admission to gawp..

  Reuben always felt uncomfortable at these meetings, his liberal opinions colliding with inbred attitudes of wealth and privilege.

  At the first opportunity Gabriella had jumped up, announcing she should brew more maté. “Reuben,” she said, and indicated for him to follow her into the kitchen.

  “He needs money,” she said when they were out of earshot.

  “What for?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “How much?”

  She did not answer. Her expression made him feel mean. He went to his study, found his chequebook and wrote out a cheque for fifty thousand pesos. He went back into the kitchen and handed it to her. She folded it neatly and put it in the pocket of her blouse.

  She gave it to him later as he was leaving. Their hands touched for just a moment and the slip of paper disappeared from view.

  Reuben shook his hand. It was hard, calloused by heavy work.

  “Goodbye Domingo.”

  His new brother-in-law did not know how to address him: “Señor Altman' was too formal, “Reuben' somehow suggested a friendship that did not exist. So he just smiled and gave a slight bow of his head.

  After he had gone Gabriella went out onto the balcony and started to clear away the cups. Nothing more was ever said about the fifty thousand pesos, but each month the ritual was the same. It seemed Reuben had entered into an unspoken agreement to support not one family, but two.

  But Domingo was not the only visitor from Gabriella's other life. One day, just before the twins were christened, he came home to find a Catholic priest drinking coffee in his kitchen.

  Gabriella jumped to her feet as he walked in. “Reuben, this is Father Salvatore. He was our priest in La Boca.”

  Reuben put out his hand and the priest took it. A grip as hard and as firm as Domingo's.

  He was a small, slight man with too much hair for so small a body. It sprouted from the back his cuffs and from his collar where he had stopped short with the razor. He had bright, dark eyes that burned like coals.

  Reuben looked at his wife and a look passed between them: what is he doing here?

  “He got my address from Domingo. He came across town to see me. To see us.”

  “That was very kind of you.”

  Gabriella and the priest had the guilty look of lovers. If he wasn't a man of God he might have been jealous.

  “You are not of the faith,” Salvatore said, with a wry smile.

  “With a name like Altman?”

  “One should never suppose too much.”

  “What are you doing in the Barrio Norte? Aren't you poaching on someone else's turf?” It was meant as a joke, but it came out with a much harder edge than he had intended.

  “I am sure God does not draw boundaries.” He proffered a benign smile. “Gabriella and I have been discussing your daughters. Have you given any thought to what faith they will be raised?”

  He looked across at his wife but she would not meet his eyes. Gabriella attended Mass at the San Isidro cathedral and he had always been content to let her do what she wanted as far as religion was concerned. He never took it seriously. He thought of it as a slightly eccentric hobby. “Neither of us is particularly religious.”

  “Really? Well, perhaps you should talk about it more with her. You might be surprised.” He gave him a patronising smile that he didn't much care for. “Well, I should be going.”

  After he had left Gabriella turned on him. “You didn't have to be so rude.”

  “What was he doing here?”

  “He's a wonderful man. Sometimes in La Boca, he was the only friend I had.”

  “What did he mean, I should talk to you more about the children?”

  “I am thinking I would like to have them baptised into the faith.”

  “You know how I feel about that.”

  “They are my children as well.”

  “The answer is no,” he said and went into his study, slamming the door behind him. She knew he was Jewish when she married him. He had not tried to convert her, why did she want to change him? Besides, it was all nonsense anyway. A cultural curiosity.

  He thought she was different. No one cared about those things any more, did they? Not here, in a modern Argentina?

  Chapter 12

  ISABELITA'S GOVERNMENT stumbled from one crisis to another. There had been a wave of strikes and the cost of living ha
d risen three and a half times in a year. Every day the newspapers reported some new atrocity, wives and children of soldiers torn apart by a bomb inside a military base, mutilated bodies found in the woods near the international airport. The killings were variously blamed on the left wing Montoñeros or the right wing death squads.

  And then, late in March, the tanks rolled into the Plaza and a military junta under Lieutenant General Jorge Videla seized power. Everyone was relieved. When Videla dissolved the legislature and imposed martial law the porteños predicted a return to stability and common sense, as had happened a decade before when the army did the same thing.

  But the junta's “Process of National Re-organisation' - Il Proceso - was not the panacea they had all prayed for. The killings went on. Bullet-ridden bodies continued to appear in ditches and rubbish dumps all over the city. The government blamed communist subversives. But then the violence took a new and sinister twist, for instead of dying in public view, some victims simply vanished.

  Anyone even vaguely identified with the left was targeted. General Iberico Saint Jean, the new governor of Buenos Aires, made the position of the military quite clear: “First we will kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators ... then their sympathisers ... then, those that remain indifferent. Finally we will kill the timid.”

  Buenos Aires, the city that never slept, the place where people rarely ate dinner before nine or ten o'clock, became eerily quiet. Buses stopped running after dark because there was no one left on the streets to ride on them. People scurried home after work and locked the doors behind them.

  Soon almost every porteño had a story of a friend or family member who had been kidnapped in the night, never to be seen again. They had even coined a name for them: los desaparecidos, 'the disappeared.”

  ***

  Reuben bought an apartment in Recoleta, one of the most expensive residential areas of the city. Nowhere was the city's faded glory more evident than among the fin de siècle mansions of Italian gingerbread and Victorian Gothic. It was where the rich colonists and adventurers had built their homes, well away from the silted river with its rats and fever swamps. A stranger to the city might have believed they were back in Paris or Madrid.

  The apartment was on the fourth floor of a six storey edifice that might have been excised complete from the Latin Quarter. A plant-filled wrought iron balcony overlooked a quiet and leafy street shaded with sycamore and tipuana trees.

  Gabriella and Carmen sat by the shuttered window, drinking coffee. The city sweated under a lowering sky. The twins were down for their morning nap. As usual, Eva had gone straight to sleep, Simone had taken forever to settle.

  “How are things between you and Julio?” Gabriella asked him.

  “We broke up.”

  “Again?”

  Carmen shrugged and sipped her coffee

  That bastard. Gabriella thought again about that night, about what he had done. She had always been afraid to tell Carmen about it, thought she would not believe her, that she might suspect she had led him on. It was what he would say, of course, what the police would have believed. “What happened this time?”

  “I found out he was sleeping with some other woman. I told him it's over. I never want to see him again. This time I mean it.”

  She hoped so. Carmen had finished with Julio countless times but she always took him back. “It's for the best.” Carmen's trouble was that she loved him and love always got in the way of good decisions.

  “I guess you're right. There's a lot of men out there. I just have to find myself the right one. Someone like Reuben.”

  Gabriella forced a smile and looked away.

  “Trouble in paradise?”

  There was so much Gabriella wanted to say but she hesitated, afraid of where it might lead. “It will be okay.” After a while, she said: “We haven't had sex for months.”

  “You think ... he's having an affair?”

  “No! No, it's not that.”

  "Then what's wrong?”

  “Everything changed after I got pregnant. He said ... he said he was frightened of hurting me ... but I think when I got big he just didn't ... want to. After the twins were born, I was tired and ... well, you know, having babies it does something to you and you just don't feel the same straight away.”

  “It will be all right.”

  Gabriella nodded.

  “He loves you, Gabriella.”

  Gabriella choked back tears. She had to tell someone, she felt as if she were going insane, day after day alone here in the apartment with the twins, Reuben coming home late every night, pale, exhausted, hardly talking to her, eating his dinner then falling straight to sleep. All their friends were his friends. She had never been as lonely in her whole life.

  “It's not him, it's me.” She took a deep breath. “I just don't like him touching me.”

  Carmen waited, her eyes huge.

  “Something happened. Before we were married, before I even met him. I don't think I ever got over it.”

  “Gabriella?”

  “I was raped.”

  A long, aching silence.

  “Have you told Reuben about this?” Carmen said.

  “I couldn't.”

  “Why?”

  When she did not answer Carmen said: “Julio.”

  There were no more words. They held each other in silence and the future was changed, irrevocably.

  Chapter 13

  THE BLACK LIMOUSINE cruised the quiet, leafy streets of Palermo. It was one of Buenos Aires' premier residential districts, an area of private schools and embassies where members of the military kept expensive homes and apartments. The Mercedes 450 drove through a pair of high wrought-iron gates and into the driveway of a large Spanish colonial house with manicured gardens. The driver, a uniformed police captain, got out to open the door for the car's only passenger. Colonel César Angeli got out and walked up the front steps to the portico where a white-jacketed servant already held the door open for him.

  Angeli had the face of an aesthete and the hands of a piano player, and looked much younger than his forty years. His thick, dark hair was parted on one side with great precision. But his most striking feature were his eyes. They were a pale and wintry blue. They were so startling that even his superiors sometimes found his gaze unsettling.

  A woman in a black cotton blouse and skirt with a short white starched apron waited for him in the foyer. This was Antonia, his senior maidservant.

  He handed her his gloves and braided cap. “Where is the señora?”

  He knew at once that it had been another bad day just from Antonia's expression. This was not the way it was meant to be. He had not come this far to have the edifices he had built for himself so artlessly destroyed.

  “She is upstairs, señor.”

  He nodded and took the stairs, two at a time.

  ***

  His wife was sitting in a chair by the bedroom window, still in her nightdress, her head resting on her chest. The blinds were drawn and the room was in darkness. How could this have happened? Every day hundreds of women in the villas miserias had babies without problems. Why should it be so hard for the daughter of a banker?

  “Francesca?”

  She woke suddenly, and her fingers went to the collar of her nightgown. For a moment she blinked, startled, then gave him an uncertain smile. “Caro. You're home.”

  Her hair hung loose around her shoulders. It needed brushing. It seemed she had started to apply make-up some time during the day but had abandoned the effort halfway through. Her face looked grey in the half-light, making her seem much older than her thirty two years.

  “It is almost evening.”

  The accusation hung in the silence. Francesca nodded, almost as if she understood, then turned her head to stare at the digital clock beside the bed. The numbers glowed like coals in the shadows.

  He went to the blinds and threw up the sash. The late evening sun flooded the room. The bed was unmade and there w
as a cold cup of coffee on the bedside table.

  Francesca squinted against the light. “I must feed the baby,” she said. She got slowly to her feet and went into the nursery. Angeli followed her.

  Before the baby had been born Francesca had employed a private decorator for the nursery, at great expense. The ceiling had been painted a pastel blue by a professional artist who had added white clouds to the frieze so that their child would always look up at a perfect sky. Soft toys of immense size had been purchased on Florida, and had been placed inside a crib hand-carved from mahogany. The crib itself was on rockers so that the child could be gently lulled to sleep by the servants each afternoon and evening. The pink chenille bedspread and the soft pink coverlets had been added after Francesca had returned from the hospital, and without his knowledge.

  She sat down on a low stool besides the crib. A toy moon had been attached to the rail and a cord hung from it. Francesca tugged on it pulled gently and it started to play a nursery rhyme. Francesca sang along with it as she rocked the cradle.

  “She's dead, Francesca.”

  She looked up at him, frowned as if she hadn't quite heard him. She put a finger to her lips. “Shhhh. You'll wake her,”

  “Who?” he shouted. “Who is there to wake?”

  But she ignored him.

  He had thought she would get better. All right, he had expected her to be depressed for a short time. But she had been home from hospital almost a month now and every day she slipped further away from him.

  Such weakness was the last thing he had expected from his wife. Ever since they were married he had thought her impossibly remote, even cold. She was the daughter of a banker and ten years his junior; a tall, sophisticated and well educated criollo like her had been an impossible prize for a junior military officer of immigrant stock. He had never understood what she saw in him.

  Francesca looked up at him, her face wreathed in a beatific smile. “She's asleep now,” she said. She took his hand and led him from the nursery.