Blood Tango

by Annamaria Alfieri

  At last, at 3:00 A.M., the navy doctor received a telex from the Casa Rosada, authorizing him to release Perón to the military hospital in Buenos Aires. The regime, what was left of it, was unwilling to risk Perón becoming a martyr.

  Shortly thereafter, an exhausted Miguel Angel Mazza presented the new orders to the commander of the military prison at Martín García and was given permission to move Colonel Juan Perón to the capital.

  At six that morning, a ringing phone awakened Evita, who had tossed and turned in the night, thinking of the workers and wondering if they were doing as she and Juan Jiménez had exhorted them to. Anxiety flashed her awake at the first ring.

  “Señora,” the voice on the line said. “This is Dr. Mazza.” He told her that Perón was in the city.

  “Thank you. Thank you,” she said. Mazza was such a nice man. He always called her señora, not señorita, as so many of Perón’s supposed friends did, emphasizing the ita to show that they were very well aware that she and her colonel were not married.

  She immediately called Jorge Webber’s room, which Perón kept for him on the first floor in the rear of the building. With a groggy voice, he answered after several rings. She told him the news. “We must go to the hospital at once.”

  “I am sorry, but I cannot,” he said.

  “What? What do you mean you cannot?” She was incredulous. Perón paid the little squirt plenty for his services. “I will not take no for an answer.”

  “I am so sorry, but I have a very urgent personal matter I must take care of.”

  “At this hour?”

  “It may take all day.”

  She blew out a breath of exasperation. As far as she knew, Jorge did not have a personal life. “Very well. Drive me to the hospital and leave me there.” She hung up before he could give her any other excuses.

  She dressed quickly, but took pains with her makeup. By the time Webber rang the bell, she was standing just inside the apartment door, with her hat on and her purse over her arm, waiting for him.

  Evita was surprised to see the chauffeur wearing not his uniform but a cheesy brown glen plaid suit she had never seen before. She could not imagine what he was thinking. This was not the compliant man in jodhpurs. She did not know this Jorge.

  “I am sorry, señora,” he said on the short drive to the hospital in Belgrano. “I wish I could be more useful.”

  His tone was, as usual, just this side of obsequious, but, very uncharacteristically, he left her at the entrance to the hospital and drove away as if Domingo Mercante’s car belonged to him.

  Evita watched the red taillights disappear into the gloomy dawn and made a vow to take his job from him before the end of the day.

  At the hospital reception she was outraged to find, within minutes of her arrival, that they would not let her in. “Relatives only,” the corporal at the desk told her. He looked away when he said it, so she pressed her case.

  He went into an office behind him and brought out a lieutenant with a sanctimonious smile. “I am sorry, señorita,” he said without a hint of sincere regret. “Regulations forbid admitting visitors to the treatment rooms if they are not relatives.” Both men returned to the office and left her standing there alone. Without asking anyone’s permission, she picked up the phone and called for a taxi to take her home.

  Angry and humiliated as Evita felt at that moment, she would have been heartened by the scenes playing out under gray, heavy skies at the gates of factories on the periphery of the city; down in Avellaneda near the gates of the meatpacking plants, men arriving for their work shift were greeted by fellow workers urging them to strike that day, to follow them to the center of city. Talk spread quickly among these dark-skinned poor from the Pampas, who had come to Buenos Aires in the last ten or fifteen years. These were not the white, skilled workers of the old unions: men with political philosophies and sophisticated agendas. These descamisados had only one clear conviction—their champion had been jailed, and they wanted him out.

  Word got around. “The big shots and the kids from the universities are marching through the streets asking for what they want. Why not us?” Plans took hold. When the slaughterhouse workers discussed what it was they would demand, there was only one answer. They all agreed. The name of the only government official who had ever cared a fig about the needs of the people who did the dirty work, people that his fellow well-to-do porteños had never set eyes on. These men had only one demand: “Perón. Perón.”

  Some went home to paint that name on torn bedsheets. Others fanned out to nearby plants and factories where their brothers and cousins worked, to bring the word. Others headed straight for the center of Buenos Aires: that beautiful fairyland of parks and opulent buildings that most of them had never seen in their lives.

  At seven thirty, Lieutenant Ramón Ybarra reported for duty at the Casa Rosada and found his boss, General Avalos, already on the telephone, discussing the merits of potential members of a new cabinet proposed by incoming Prime Minister Álvarez. Ybarra listened to Avalos’s end of the conversation with growing satisfaction. His boss was doing the expected. The army brass were carefully going over the qualifications of people who would never govern Argentina, because by the time they finished their prissy discussions, he and his fellow junior officers would have risen up and taken over.

  While Avalos was on the phone, at his desk across the room, Ybarra called the three key men in his plot, Novara, Cieza, and Garín, to make sure they were readying troops to march the moment things got out of hand in the city. Two of them said they were too busy to talk at the moment, but he should be assured that everything was being arranged. Cieza’s aide said he was away from his desk. That might have worried Ybarra except that the tank battalion’s barracks were far from their commander’s office. He dialed Francisco Rocco. Cisco’s voice immediately lowered to a whisper. “The low-level workers from the factories on the outskirts are converging on the center,” he said.

  “Today?” Ybarra’s voice was so loud it caused Avalos, still on the phone across the room, to look up in alarm. Ramón swiveled around and faced the wall behind him. “Are you sure?” he whispered into the receiver. “I heard the big strike was supposed to be tomorrow.”

  “Well, something is happening today,” Rocco said. “The animals are escaping from the zoo.” He laughed.

  Ybarra was frozen. “This was supposed to happen tomorrow, not today. We aren’t ready to mobilize,” he whispered in the phone. “What are we going to do about this, Cisco?”

  There was silence at the other end of the line.

  Ybarra could barely suppress a groan. “The actress is behind this.”

  “Oh, come on,” Rocco said. “You are obsessed with her.”

  Ybarra glanced over at Avalos, still on his call. “Listen. You have to get the other guys to move today.”

  “How?” Rocco asked. “I am not sure—”

  Ybarra opened his mouth to insist, but General Avalos hung up his phone and called his name. “I have to go,” Ybarra told his friend. “I will call you in a few minutes.”

  He stood and approached the general’s desk. “Sir,” he said, “Francisco Rocco just told me that there is a mob of workers coming into the city.”

  “Yes,” Avalos said. “President Fárrell just told me.”

  “Sir, what are we going to do?”

  “The Federal Police are handling it for now. We are going to keep a close eye on the situation.”

  At that moment, the situation in question, to the south of the center, was heating up. More and more workers continued to gather in small groups in their dirty, overcrowded neighborhoods—La Boca, Barracas, Parque Patricios. The employees of the Swift-Armour plant in La Plata showed up for the first shift but never punched their time clocks. They headed, instead, for the bridges over the Riachuelo, leading to the city center. In Berisso, out by the leather-tanning plants, Cipriano Reyes, one of Perón’s most faithful union supporters, watched the parade of laborers coming up toward the
canal crossing and was stupefied by the swell of numbers. He had been working to get something to happen today, but he had no idea it would be this huge. He encouraged the men to go on to the Plaza de Mayo in front of the Casa Rosada. Then, he found a telephone and called the printers’ union to order placards. “What should we put on them?” the printers’ union chief asked.

  “Perón. Perón.”

  When for the third day in a row his phone rang before eight in the morning, Hernán Mantell knew before the government did how massive the worker’s demonstration was becoming. He got the call from a photographer at the paper who had heard a rumor from the woman who cleaned his sister’s house. “I’m at a pay phone at the end of the trolley line,” he said. “You have to get yourself out here. It’s going to be bigger than the one Perón held last week when he resigned. It is impossible to get on a trolley toward the center. They are all packed.”

  Hernán ran his hand through his hair, still wet from his bath. “Good God. Do you have your camera?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay. Meet me at the old bridge down between La Boca and Avellaneda, the one at Virrey Vieytes. It’s a straight shot from where I am. I can get there in twenty minutes. It will make a good picture if we can get a packed trolley crossing the big iron bridge.”

  Hernán sped back into the bathroom, took off the towel he had wrapped around his waist, and dropped it over the edge of the tub. “I have to go,” he said to Claudia, who was still at the sink, brushing her teeth. “A huge demonstration of the working guys from the abattoirs is brewing. They are marching into the center.” He went into their bedroom.

  He was already threading a belt through his trouser loops when she finished washing her face and followed after him. “You’d better stay indoors today,” he said.

  “Torres is in custody. I can go out safely. At the very least, I’ll have to go to the grocers.”

  “Sure, but do it early.” He was tucking his tie under the collar of his shirt. “Then stay in. I doubt they will come this way, but the city is going to be tied in knots, you can be sure of that.” With one arm in his jacket sleeve, he gave her a quick kiss and was out the door.

  She turned on the radio, but there was not a word about any worker demonstrations. Not that a lack of news was unusual. The last thing the generals would do was advertise a mass uprising of low-level workers. The marchers would most likely head to Plaza de Mayo to make their demands. If they did, they would be only eight or ten blocks from her store at the most. She put down her hairbrush and started to dress. It was easy for Hernán to say she should stay home, but it was really that store that supported them: her, her father, Hernán too, not that she would ever remind him how little a journalist made in these times of suppression. It did not matter to her who paid their rent, but it would matter to both of them if her shop was wrecked and she lost all that sumptuous fabric she had paid for so dearly at wartime prices. Garmendia was dead. Torres was in jail, where she hoped he would rot. Neither of them could hurt her, but the mob in the center could ruin her business for good.

  Vivid pictures fell into her head: of smashed windows and bolts of stolen English Tweed and Italian silk being carried away. Stuff no one would be able to buy anytime again soon, given the destruction in Europe. The faster the images of looting poured into her imagination, the faster she dressed. She put her forefinger through her stocking as she pulled it on and had to find another one. While she was rummaging in her drawer, the phone rang again. She ran and grabbed it.

  “Señora Claudia?”

  It was Pilar. “I was just going to call you,” Claudia said. “There is going to be—”

  The girl interrupted. “I know. I am not at home anyway.” She swallowed hard. “Señora, I am staying with the policeman. You know, Roberto Leary.”

  Claudia put her head back and laughed out loud. Fast worker, her little Pilar. “Oh, good. At least you will be safe with him.”

  “He has gone out already. They have called in all the policemen, even detectives like him. They are raising the drawbridges over the Riachuelo to keep the worker guys from coming into the center from the south.”

  Claudia’s index finger went to her mouth. Hernán had said something about one of those bridges to whoever had called him.

  “Listen, Señora,” Pilar said. “I have to talk to you about something. I need you to help me answer an important question.”

  “Pilar, I am on my way to the shop. I want to make sure it does not get looted by the demonstrators. Can you meet me there?”

  “Yes,” Pilar said. “That’s what I was hoping. It’s still quiet where I am. I’ll take the Subte.”

  “Me, too. I’ll meet you there. Do you have your key?”

  “Yes,” Pilar said, her voice suddenly glum. Mention of the key reminded them both that Leary had found it next to Luz’s body. “I’ll be there soon,” the girl said, and rang off.

  Claudia imagined that Pilar was in love and wanted to talk about Leary and her chances with him. The girl had no living mother. Claudia, who had also been a motherless girl, was so often the woman that motherless girls turned to. She, a childless woman. It must be something about her. She must have somehow sought them out. Her heart sank at the thought of poor little Luz, the motherless girl given aid by the childless woman. Not aid. She had brought the girl into a situation that ended her life. Nothing good had ever happened to that child, except getting to try on Evita’s clothes and model them for her idol. Well, at least now something good might be in store for Pilar.

  Claudia pinned on her hat, took her purse, and decided not to tell her father she was going out. He would insist that it would not be safe for her to go alone. He would want to go with her. She had to go and defend her business, but she was not going to risk his getting hurt into the bargain.

  While Claudia was tiptoeing past her father’s apartment door and sneaking out of her building, Angel Mazza was waiting for Evita in the lobby of Perón and Eva’s apartment building on the Calle Posadas. When the actress arrived, she threw her arms around his neck. “They would not let me see him,” she said too loudly into his right ear before she let him go. “Were you with him? Have you seen him? How ill is he?”

  “Oh, my dear,” Mazza said in that courtly way of his. “You mustn’t worry. As I told you yesterday, we needed a reason to move him into the center, and I said I had diagnosed pleurisy. It was a disease that would make that damp prison island dangerous. But really, we used an old X-ray to give him an excuse. He is fine.”

  “What do you think is going to happen next? The city is so quiet.” She despaired of her attempts to free Perón. She had said too little. The workers had probably ignored all she and that teacher Juan had said the day before. She had just taken a cab home. Between here and the hospital, nothing was happening.

  Mazza smiled at her. “Not quiet for long,” he said. “While I was at the hospital this morning, Cipriano Reyes called and said that masses of workers are heading for the center.”

  She leaped and clapped her hands. “It is working. It is working.”

  “What is working?”

  She told him about the ten bringing another ten.

  He looked at her with awe.

  “We should go out,” she said. “We should gather more and more of them. Do you have a car? We must drive out and speak to them. I would have gone, but our driver has disappeared with Domingo Mercante’s car.”

  Mazza raised his elegant surgeon’s hands and patted the air in front of him. “No. No. So far, everything is perfect. But the colonel told me very explicitly that we mustn’t seem as if we are behind this. Whatever happens next has to look absolutely spontaneous on the part of the workers. He cannot betray the army directly. In the end it has to look as if he had no choice but to take the reins of government, as if events have overwhelmed him and only he can save Argentina.”

  Evita heard Perón’s subtle logic in Mazza’s words, her Perón, the wise and canny man who knew how to be invincible. Sh
e threw her arms around the old doctor again. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It is working.”

  Not even the determined and hopeful Evita could have imagined how well it was working. Roberto Leary, dispatched along with every available member of the city police force to help keep order, arrived at the Old Ferry Bridge in a patrol car with Estrada and Franco. By the time they got there, local-area policemen had raised the drawbridge to stop the influx of workers into the center of the Buenos Aires. Boisterous and joyful men were backed up on the avenida, but they were not giving up. Dozens were swimming the Riachuelo. Others laughed and sang while they constructed makeshift rafts to carry the nonswimmers across. The whole effort carried the atmosphere of a fiesta; cheering and whistling greeted every crossing whether by one person or a full raft. So many piled onto one float made of hastily strung-together boards that it half submerged and barely made it to the other bank.

  “There’s no stopping them,” Leary said. From all he had heard in the past week, Perón was nowhere near the hero these innocents thought he was. Perhaps just the opposite. But they were not some angry mob bent on destruction. They looked as if they wanted nothing more than to do what the rest of the population had been doing for two months—to stand in the street and shout for their rights. “If someone drowns, this could all turn ugly,” he called to Franco and Estrada. “Tell them to lower the bridge.”

  “Yes, boss,” Franco said, as if Leary were a foreman on the drawbridge brigade.

  When the crossing was opened, young men on the roadway and on the banks below, their shiny black hair dripping river water, let out a whoop of joy. A couple of dozen workers converged on a southbound trolley that had been stopped on the outbound track. “Turn it around. Turn it around,” they called to the driver, who held out his hands, palms up. Leary knew he couldn’t turn it until he got to the turntable at the end of the line.