‘Are you going to explain or not?’
But the presence of a waiter hovering over them cuts short their conversation. Carvalho surveys the list of cocktails, shuts it with a sigh, and hands it back.
‘Surprise me.’
‘Would you like to try a Maradona?’
‘What’s in it?’
‘Bourbon, peach, lemon and orange juices, with a sprig of fresh mint and some strawberries.’
‘What’s that got to do with Maradona?’
‘Nothing, probably. But if you are Spanish...’
‘How can you tell?’
‘You Spaniards are almost as unmistakable as we Argentines are.’
‘Oh, you don’t say. Go on. If I were Spanish, what would you offer me?’
‘A “fifth centenary”, perhaps.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Pisco, white wine, and a few drops of sweet sherry’
‘Help!’
Alma laughs despite herself, but when the waiter moves off, her eyes are again full of concern and enquiry.
‘I went to see Raúl’s former associate, Roberto. My cousin had been there, and paid him another visit. Their experiments are part of a foundation which calls itself The Spirit of New Argentina. I’ve been hearing about it since I started my trip here. The man in the seat next to me on the plane is one of their promoters, he told me about the foundation and about Güelmes.’
‘Güelmes?’
‘Yes, your almost minister Güelmes. While Roberto was showing me the pride of Argentina’s cows, he thought he saw Raúl and ran off. All of a sudden, two motorcyclists leapt on me and started to beat me to a pulp. Before I lost consciousness I saw my flight companion, a fat guy out of a B-movie. He was giving the orders.’
‘What did Roberto say?’
‘He patched me up. He said he was sorry, and explained how obsessed Raúl seemed to be with returning there. First he paid them a call, then one night he got into the laboratory and trashed it, and now he’s been back a third time. The strange thing is that when I mentioned the fat man, the man I’d met on the plane and who was in charge of the motorcyclists, he looked at me like a scientist faced with some farfetched theory, and told me the only fat things around were the New Argentina cows. I reckon the meeting in the plane was a set-up. They knew I was coming from Spain. They must have been monitoring your letters or your phone calls to my uncle. How else would they know?’
Although she’s on the verge of it, Alma has no time to be scared stiff. Two ‘fifth centenaries’ fall from the skies and put a stop to Carvalho’s confessions. She waits until he’s tried the cocktail, winked at the waiter and given his verdict.
‘Very refreshing.’
The waiter glides off, pride assuaged.
‘Ghastly, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve drunk worse. What d’you make of my adventure?’
‘Why did they beat you up? I mean, why did Roberto let them beat up the person they thought was Raúl?’
‘He said Raúl’s night-time shenanigans had annoyed them.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘No; but I’ve no better idea. By the way, I won’t be attending your classes any more.’
‘Why? Are they that bad?’
‘You’re pessimistic about language, but you earn your living discussing and analysing other people’s language. Don’t you believe in what you’re doing?’
‘I use words to earn my living, and say what people expect to hear. Aren’t you a pessimist?’
‘I’m supposed to find a cousin I don’t know in a city I don’t know either. Those of you who were closest to him could help me. Are you sure you haven’t seen him?’
Alma sustains his gaze.
‘No.’
‘Why not? I don’t understand.’
‘He didn’t want to see me. Perhaps I remind him too much of my sister. We’re very alike.’
‘Perhaps.’
Alma changes the subject. Sips at her drink.
‘I’ve tasted worse too.’
‘What did you make of your brother-in-law?’
‘An industrialist who used science. All he wanted to do was make money from his discoveries. He was a behaviourist who taught how to treat people like rats.’
‘Did Berta agree with him?’
‘No. At some point she thought perhaps the discoveries could serve the cause, but she often expressed her doubts to me. Like all of those who come from the working classes, Raúl had a twin brother inside him who wanted to be rich, even though his father was already rich enough. But that’s enough about Raúl.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘You mean, in general?’
‘No. I mean the night you were arrested. How did you survive? What exactly happened to the little girl?’
Alma shakes her head, but eventually thinks about it and starts to speak as if she has no need for an audience. As she tells the story, she takes on the role of the different people involved that night.
‘They forced their way in, shouting, insulting us, guns in hand. We were in Raúl and Berta’s apartment. There were more people there, who didn’t survive. Font y Rius, my husband, was there. Pignatari had written a piece of music dedicated to Eva María, and I’d had it recorded in a music box. Have you ever heard a rock song in a music box? Then they burst in. It was like a full-scale battle. Berta grabbed a pistol and faced up to them. They hit the walls of the entrance hall and crawled their way towards us. Raúl shouted at Berta not to resist. “Don’t be stupid! They’ll kill us all, the child too! Don’t be so stupid! We surrender! Just spare the girl’s life! The little girl!” I remembered Eva María in her cot, so I dropped my gun and ran in there. She was only a year old. I picked her up. My mind was a blank – perhaps that’s how I managed to get out, by being completely blank. I got out with my Eva María – it was as if the bullets stopped to let us through.’
Slowly Alma comes back to reality. She’s cradling her arms as though the baby were still in them. Carvalho gently stops her movements, but encourages her to go on with the story.
‘Some days later I read in the papers that Berta had been killed in the shoot-out. I thought it was the right moment to go home or at least to my parents’ place to hand over Eva María. Until then I’d been in hiding, like an insect, not knowing who to turn to. So I went to my parents’ apartment. The goons were there. I didn’t even get to see my parents. I was arrested. They took the baby away’
She’s about to break down. Carvalho comforts her.
‘It’s all right. That’s enough for today’
‘You’re right. You made me talk about something I never wanted to mention again.’
Now it’s not an emotional Alma opposite him, but a woman furious with herself and with him. She’s had enough of confessions and of being there. She stands up abruptly, and leaves Carvalho open-mouthed when he realizes she’s stood him up yet again.
All human rights offices look the same, especially if organized by a group of victims of crimes against humanity. They are down-at-heel apartments full of second-hand furniture and posters proclaiming hope beneath garish neon lights. The people there act as if they were in a convent, fired by the secret joy of those who have succeeded in freeing themselves from at least a tiny part of their innate selfishness. In other words, people who feel solidarity: in this case, almost all of them women, somewhere between old and very old, well-dressed middle-class ladies who discovered in their own families during the Process how cruel history can be. Anyone who goes into the office hands over and receives an invisible ethical credit card, a solidarity Mastercard. Carvalho can feel its presence in his jacket pocket just above his heart as he explains why he has come to an impossibly short-sighted old woman, behind whose pebble glasses he can see at least five pairs of eyes superimposed on each other, and with a tin
y mouth painted a gentle pink to chime in with her oh! so nice way of talking. She turns away from him and makes off down a corridor to the room where the grandmothers keep all the painful memories of the grandchildren they hope to find alive, even though they are just as disappeared as the parents who were snatched by the armed forces during the years of the military junta. Carvalho is moved by everything he sees around him, even the routine inertia of what has become an office, the veneer of habit laid over the most sensitive skin, the rawest of wounds. Then the old lady comes back with a big white folder. She sniffs it before opening it. ‘I told them to put in those little white balls for damp.’
Then she plunges her inadequate, ocean-deep eyes into the pages of the file, until... ‘Ah, yes...I remember...I remember...’
She remembers and looks up at Carvalho.
‘Eva María Tourón Modotti. No trace of her from the moment she was taken from her aunt, Alma. A disappeared baby, disappeared without trace. The raid was led by a Captain Ranger, although his prisoners knew him as Gorostizaga. No one is sure of his real name. Do you want to see him?’
She hands him a press cutting. Someone is giving Captain Ranger a medal. All muscle and fibre, eyes that command obedience, a disdainful smile on his lips, triangles where his hair is receding. ‘A hero of the Falklands War.’
‘Has anyone talked to him about the raid?’
‘Nothing was ever officially proven about his taking part in it or the kidnapping. There’s nothing in the archives. We know that from information given us by the girl’s aunt, Alma Modotti, and from other survivors. But it wasn’t always the officers in charge who were responsible for this trafficking of babies. Sometimes it was their subordinates. Ranger is a pseudonym he was given because he was always boasting about how he was trained in the US Marine school in Panama – the place where the Yankees trained all the Latin American butchers.’
‘Are there no leads?’
‘Nothing. It’s one of those obscure, baffling cases which if and when they are eventually solved, prove to have been right in front of our eyes the whole time. Sometimes we can’t see for looking.’
Even though she’s so short-sighted, she is aware of Carvalho’s ironic smile at this.
‘I’m not talking about myself. I know I’ve got the worst eyes in the world – every time I got pregnant, my eyes weakened by three dioptres. And I had four pregnancies.’
That’s when Carvalho notices she has three photos pinned to her dress. The woman would be entitled to cry, but her voice is firm as she comes to the end of her train of thought.
‘Only one of the four is still alive. A girl, who lives in Sweden. She reckons she’ll never come back to Argentina even if President Menem sends his Ferrari to fetch her.’
‘D’you have any grandchildren in your files?’
‘A boy we found, and a girl we’re still looking for.’
Carvalho wishes her luck with a vague gesture. Then gives her his card. ‘If you ever hear anything about the Tourón Modotti baby’
‘Baby? By now she’ll be almost twenty years old.’
It’s no easy task to open a door with a bag in each hand and with your mind set on the idea of saving time by not putting the bags on the floor, opening the door, and then picking them up again, and going in. Carvalho prefers to do it all at once, wondering how he could manage things better, but when he succeeds in depositing his bags safe and sound on the table he is delighted that he has not only overcome his own sense of how things should be done, but has achieved the feat without even putting the light on. He goes over to the window, opens the shutters and smiles at being free from the weight of the bags and at the light streaming in from outside. But there’s something unexpected filling the space behind him, so he turns round. An angular, strongly built man is calmly going through the bags Carvalho dumped on the table. Another man is standing there, hands in pockets, staring at him menacingly. The first one tips up a bag, and books pour out. Then the other, which is full of food. A tin rolls across the floor towards Carvalho, who stoops to pick it up. A foot appears, and kicks the tin out of his reach. Carvalho looks up at these threatening figures, and slowly straightens. A police badge is thrust into his face, and when he peers beyond it he can see that this Argentine cop is just like any other cop in the world. A cop isn’t a face. It’s a state of mind.
‘Inspector Oscar Pascuali.’
Carvalho stares at him suspiciously. Gives him his best hard-boiled private detective look – sometimes it’s best to start where you mean to leave off. But this Argentine cop is one of the sarcastic ones. ‘Been shopping, have we?’
The second man is still watching carefully. Carvalho moves away from Pascuali, picks up the tin, and puts it on the table. Pascuali goes over, and starts to examine some of the things from the bags. ‘Salted cod, tomato sauce, peppers, rice, a guide to Buenos Aires, olive oil, cloves of garlic; Who Killed Rosendo? The Open Veins of Latin America, The Cafés of Buenos Aires, The Complete Works of Jorge Luis Borges, Adam Buenosayres, A Funny, Dirty Little War, two bottles of Chilean wine – ah! just as well, three bottles of Argentine wine: Navarro Correa, Velmont; The Tragic Decade, Flowers Stolen from Quilmes Gardens, Perón s Boys, a large portion of offal, black pudding. Have you got someone to cook all this for you?’
‘I’m quite a good cook.’
‘And a good reader.’
‘I hardly look at the books. Reading them would be too much like hard work. I like to buy them, and then burn them.’
‘To burn them? Did you hear what he said, Vladimiro? Señor Pepe Carvalho here burns books. That’s a job for us police to do, isn’t it? Because we are Fascists, aren’t we? Isn’t it true we’re Fascists? And book-burning is for Fascists, isn’t it? Are you a Fascist too?’
‘A bit, like everyone is, like you are.’
‘No, I’m only a cop. But I respect books. Even ones like these, which I would probably never read. Do you know why I respect books?’
Carvalho gives a shrug.
‘Because as a child I only ever had one.’
‘Trueheart, by Edmondo de Amicis?’
‘How did you know that?’
‘It was the only book working-class kids ever had, and you look as if that’s where you came from.’
Pascuali thrusts his face right up against Carvalho’s, then spits at him: ‘When you come into this country, you leave your balls at Customs. Pick ’em up when you leave.’
He steps back to survey the effect these words have had on Carvalho, but sees only a face trying its best not to betray any emotion. Pascuali signals to his assistant to follow him, and they head for the door. He turns round in the doorway.
‘The best thing you can do for Raúl Tourón is to stop looking for him. If his family wants to find him, tell them to go to the police.’
‘Where’s that? I’m a foreigner here. Where can I find the police? Wouldn’t you like to leave me your card?’
Vladimiro is about to launch himself at Carvalho, but Pascuali stops him.
‘Let him be. Assholes like him bring it on themselves.’
While he is busy fussing over a steaming pot, Carvalho can’t get this phrase out of his mind. ‘Am I really one of those assholes who brings it on themselves?’
He adjusts the seasoning. Snatches a handful of the steam rising from the pot, and sniffs at it.
‘Appearances are deceptive. I’ve always had a good instinct for self-preservation.’
He glances occasionally at a book open on the stove. The Open Veins of Latin America.
‘But what exactly am I trying to preserve? What have I got that’s worth preserving? Myself?’
The table is set in the dining-room. A single plate, one set of cutlery, one cod stew, an open bottle of wine, one glass.
‘An instinct to preserve this?’
Carvalho goes over to the fireplace. Puts on some logs
. Picks up the book he was reading. His hands tear it to pieces, and toss it on to the wood. As he lights the fire, the flames light up his face. He can see it as if it were someone else bending over in his place. He looks across at the table, where he dimly senses the smell of the stew calling him, but all he feels is nostalgia as he gets a sudden mental picture of his grandmother, her face enveloped in steam, carrying a pot of this same stew. Then when he sinks his fork into the rice it tastes of exile, as if there is some special ingredient missing to make it like the dish he remembers. To cut short any more self-pity, Carvalho’s fork hastily scoops up the last of the food, then his hand reaches out for the half-filled glass of wine and raises it quickly to his mouth. A satisfied sigh in honour of the other Carvalho who’s accompanied him throughout this solitary meal. He gets up. The fire is still blazing in the grate. Carvalho sinks into an armchair. Then he changes his mind, struggles up, and goes over to the writing desk to find the letter to Charo he has so often begun and abandoned. ‘Perhaps we ought to admit we’re not kids any more and that what’s at stake is choosing whether or not we’re going to enjoy the years left to us.’ He reads it through. Gives up yet again. Then decides to pick up the phone and dial a lengthy number.
‘Biscuter? It’s Carvalho, in Buenos Aires. It might seem I’m close by, but I’m not. Ten at night. Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t think of the time difference. Cod stew. No, no. Pure nostalgia. What’s the weather like in Barcelona? Any news of Charo? Good. This city’s still full of forlorn Argentines. Listen, is it true you sometimes put sausage in the base for cod stew with rice? Be careful with our funds.’
Alma is waiting in the bus queue. From a nearby taxi, Carvalho watches her get on. He leans forward and tells the driver to follow her: he’s not surprised at the request, but his eyes light up with excitement and he obeys the instructions as if this were the most normal thing in the world in Buenos Aires. He tails the bus with professional skill, only cursing out loud when another driver pulls in front of him. ‘See that? Good job I’m the calm type, otherwise I’d give that guy a good crack across the head. Is your friend going to the Caminito? Is this a tourist contest?’
The Buenos Aires Quintet Page 5
