Blood Tango

by Annamaria Alfieri

  As the sun began to set, Avalos repeated the pronouncement he had been making since Ybarra had returned, chastened, from his tête-à-tête with his brother. “The whole thing will melt away as soon as they see no one is paying enough attention to oppose them.”

  When a phone call came in saying that there were now at least three hundred thousand in the plaza and the surrounding streets, Avalos asked only if violence was being committed. When he hung up, he reported to the president, “Colonel Novara says the crowd is huge, but not at all violent. Joyous, really. The Buenos Aires police are refusing to attack the workers. Many of them seem to be siding with the demonstrators.”

  The president said nothing, but when Avalos spoke again, he seemed to be answering a question the president had forgotten to ask. He glanced into Ybarra’s eyes and said, “I admit that the mob is much more powerful than we thought it would be, but we cannot send in the troops. I will not send my army into a bloody clash with the workers and the police. The army is already despised. We risk its entire future if we further alienate the populace.”

  Ybarra, of course, did not speak, but he did take special notice that Avalos had called them his army. But they really belonged to the man who held the undated letters of resignation: “Perón. Perón.”

  “You are right. It would be folly to turn this into a bloodbath.” Fárrell spoke the words in the tone he would use to give a direct order. Ybarra resisted the urge to stand at attention and salute, which could only be interpreted as satiric.

  “Evening has fallen,” Avalos said. “I think it is time to send for Perón.” He avoided his aide-de-camp’s eyes. He picked up the phone and dispatched his own bulletproof car to the military hospital in the Belgrano district, just a few miles north of the Casa Rosada. The car had to plow through a crush of people, now so large it overflowed even the enormous Plaza de Mayo and jammed the nearby streets. It took much longer than the twenty minutes it should have to get there.

  Amid that mob, with the murderer’s arm around her and his knife, concealed by the sleeve of his jacket, pointed at her ribs, Pilar hurried obediently along Calle Sarmiento, and across Avenida San Martín. She tried to look behind her to see if Señora Claudia had followed them, but the horde of young men moving in the same direction made it impossible for her to see.

  Her quaking heart crumbled. No one would ever find her in this multitude. A picture came out of nowhere, of children in trouble dropping a trail of bread crumbs so they would not get lost. She began to weep. “Shut up,” the murderer said under his breath, as if she had spoken. “If you make a wrong move, my knife will be in your heart before you can let out a sound.”

  She began to shake, but two breaths later, when a group of young men hurried past them and they all turned down Reconquista toward the plaza, she realized that he could not do what he had threatened. If he stabbed her here, all these people would see him. He wanted to kill her so that she could not give testimony against him. What good would that do if scores of people saw him draw her blood? He could not hurt her and go free. He was stupid. She started to laugh hysterically and then, seeing the men around her start to pay attention to her, forced herself to laugh louder, so that they would stay focused on her. As they approached the plaza, she started to chant with the masses of men milling around them: “Perón. Perón.”

  All she had to do was wait out the murderer. Stay in the crowd. Find a way to keep attracting attention. That could not be so hard. There was not another girl in sight. Her heart so near his knife tried to tell her she was wrong. She was an inch from death. She clung to her hope. He wouldn’t do it here. He was stupid for having taken her here. She tried to force herself to believe it.

  Following behind, with no idea if he was going in the right direction, Roberto Leary wondered at how different his inner feelings were from his outward actions. His nerves were screaming in terror, but he moved like a machine, pushing through the crowd, following the dressmaker, desperate to find the man before he hurt Pilar— His mind stopped there. She was not going to die. She was not. It could not be. Having just found her, he could not lose her so soon.

  Dusk was settling on the streets. In the half-light, as they moved toward the plaza and the chanting men, torches started to appear. The din of the crowd was joined by drumming on metal trash cans and clapping and shouting.

  “There,” Claudia Robles shouted. “That’s her fuchsia scarf.”

  Leary saw no such thing, but he followed her as she plunged forward.

  Claudia reached up and pulled the hat pin out of her hat. As they moved forward, the crowd became so thick that they could hardly move, but some people, seeing the hat pin in her hand, moved out of the way. If they hadn’t, she was prepared to stab their stubborn backsides. Her eyes scanned the crowd. She could not see Pilar anymore. All she could do was swim as fast as she could through this sea of men, toward the spot where she had last seen the girl she refused to lose. She could not lose another one.

  From Ybarra’s perspective in President Fárrell’s office, that sea looked more like an ocean. Avalos had turned off the bronze chandeliers. The only light came from sconces in the hallway. They were keeping the lights out to prevent the room from becoming the target of a Molotov cocktail. The lieutenant stood at the window of the dim room, staring out at thousands of dark heads, illuminated here and there by torchlight.

  “There is nothing out there that looks dangerous at this moment,” the president said over his shoulder to his minister of war.

  “We cannot guarantee what will happen when darkness falls,” Avalos said.

  Ybarra was sure the animals would tear down the building if the day ended and they had not gotten their way. His superiors were about to be dealt the deathblow their own inaction had arranged. And once this was over, God only knew what they would do to him. He would very likely be arrested as a traitor. But, in fact, he was the only real patriot in this building at the moment.

  “Where is our colonel?” Avalos asked, looking at his watch. None of them needed to define which colonel he meant.

  “The bastard must be on his way from the hospital by now,” Ybarra said.

  Avalos’s head snapped around, and he gave his aide what must have been a sharp look, if there had been enough light to see it. The ever-courtly Fárrell merely said, “Yes. I imagine you are right, Ramón.”

  A blaze went up outside the windows, near the fountain in the center of the mob. “Bonfire,” Avalos said. “I wonder what they are finding for fuel.”

  Ybarra hoped it was the placards with the hated name. Even better if they burned one another. The spray from the fountain reflected the flames so it looked as if the water itself were burning.

  “We have to stop this before they set fire to us,” Fárrell said. “Go down, Ramón, and hurry Perón up here as soon as he arrives.”

  Ybarra saluted, did an about-face, and marched smartly away from the weak fools who had signed away their power to Perón. They were treating Ybarra as if he had done nothing. He had conspired against them, and they did not even have the balls to accuse him. Yet. No matter how much he wanted them to be merciful to him, he could not get over their having done nothing against the real traitor to Argentina. “Perón. Perón.”

  Down in the mob, Pilar had no option but to obey when the murderer ordered her, “Sit down.” She sank down in the middle of the crowd, near a bonfire. Though her heart palpitated, her brain was totally clear. He could not stab her here. He was confused about what to do. How could he kill her in full view of thousands, many of whom were taking an interest in the smiling, chanting girl being held close by a glum little man in a flashy suit, wearing a jacket and tie, as no one else around was.

  To Pilar’s complete disgust, her assailant sat behind her and wrapped his legs around her body. The men around them looked at her strangely. She took up their chant to get them on her side. If she could figure out a way to distract the murderer long enough to put some space between her ribs and his knife, they might help her
subdue him. “Perón. Perón.”

  Not very far away, the darkness had stopped Hernán Mantell and his photographer colleague from taking any more photos of laborers climbing monuments and straddling the tops of lampposts. The photographer gave up and went back to his darkroom. Hernán made for the edge of the crowd to look for a pay phone so he could dictate copy to a stenographer in the typing pool in time for the early edition.

  Less than fifty yards on the other side of Pilar, Claudia Robles plunged ahead with Leary right behind her. He was wishing that the Buenos Aires policemen carried guns. Not that he could fire in this crowd, but a pistol in his hand might get these dolts to move out of the way. Señora Robles’s hat pin was a joke.

  “Can you see her?” he shouted in her ear. She did not respond because she could not without stopping and turning around to make herself heard over the beating of drums and the chanting of the crowd: “Perón. Perón.”

  Evita, in her silent apartment, sang the chant in her heart and waited for news. The radio was useless, telling the same story over and over again, just enough to be tantalizingly hopeful, but not enough to answer as to the state of her colonel. “Perón. Perón.”

  She had long since sent her sister and Adele away. She paced, flopped into a chair for a few minutes, chewing her cuticles, then jumped up and paced some more. When the telephone rang, her nerves, already jangled from continually drinking coffee, flared and flamed. Miguel Angel Mazza’s voice greeted her hungry ears.

  “Señora,” he said. “They have come to take Colonel Perón to the Casa Rosada. He is prepared to quell the uprising.”

  She gasped. “Will he be set free? Will he?”

  “Oh, yes, I think so,” Mazza said. “He is likely to come out of this reclaiming his place as the most powerful man in Argentina.”

  “Oh, thank Christ,” she said. “Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.”

  She hung up and stood in the middle of the room hugging herself, feeling like a part of destiny, of his destiny. Of her country’s destiny.

  The top of her head tingled. She pictured the men she had spoken to quietly in the barrios two days ago. And those she had implored yesterday in the Plaza San Martín. Bring ten more. Tell them each to bring ten more. In her mind’s eye, she saw them facing the pink palace among the statuary in the elegant Plaza de Mayo with its pyramid-shaped monument at the center, surrounded by banks, the old Cabildo, and the facade of the cathedral—like an ancient Greek temple. Ten of each of the faces she remembered, a hundred of each of them, chanting, “Perón. Perón.”

  The realization of her power seeped slowly into her brain, her lungs, her soul. Not everyone knew it yet. But she did. She had become a different person. This was it. This was the “it” she had longed for all her life, and now it was hers. She would never live in that old, poor, nasty world again. She was a new Evita.

  When Perón, dressed in civilian clothes, arrived at the Casa Rosada, the negotiations between him and his former allies Fárrell and Avalos were carried out without rancor or even any hint of underlying tension. Officers and gentlemen behaved with the habits of a lifetime. Perón, now in perfect control of the situation, refrained from lording his triumph over vanquished men. There would be time for that later.

  While polite bargaining took place in the palace, out in the plaza Pilar searched for a way to distract her assailant, who gripped her with his disgusting arms and legs. She could not bear being touched by this snake anymore. All the people close around her were also sitting on the ground. Just then, about ten yards to her left, in a group of people standing in a pool of light created by a streetlamp on the other side of the fountain, she saw a woman’s hat—one she recognized as Señora Claudia’s. If she could stand up and shout before the knife found her heart, the bonfire would give enough light to make her recognizable. She was sure the creep must feel the pounding of her pulse. The men nearest her were focused on the facade of the Casa Rosada, as if at any moment the man they called for would appear on the balcony. She tried staring at one of the demonstrators next to her, larger and stronger-looking than the rest, hoping to get him to look at her, but he would not.

  Suddenly a light came on in a room on the second floor of the building they all faced—the room where the balcony was. As one person, the hundreds of thousands in the plaza, including the man who held the knife to Pilar’s ribs, took in a breath. For a couple of seconds, the chanting stopped and everyone froze. Pilar jumped to her feet and shouted, “Help! Help me!”

  Within an instant, he was up and grabbing at her, his knife flashing in the light of the bonfire. The men around her jumped up and stood there, frozen, while the murderer wrapped an arm around her and held his knife to her throat. “I will kill her if you come near us,” he said. Suddenly, in the densely packed crowd a circle of space opened around them. Beyond that ring of shocked bystanders, in the ocean of humanity that surrounded them, the chant had resumed and reached delirium: “Perón. Perón.”

  None of the men who stared at her lifted a hand. Pilar knew she was dead. She could do nothing, except let him drag her through the crowd. If he wouldn’t have killed her in front of them before, he would now. She thought of Leary. He had said he would protect her. But this was not his fault. He had told her to stay in his apartment. No one could help her now.

  The already-packed crowd was trying to press closer to the balcony of the Casa Rosada. Inside the palace, under the now-lighted ornate chandeliers, the men who held the future of Argentina in their hands were coming to agreement. Perón would speak to the workers and persuade them to leave the center peacefully. The entire cabinet, what there was of it, would resign, including Avalos, and leave the next government to the voters in an election in February, an election they all knew Perón would win.

  While the powerful men inside put the finishing touches on their pact, out in the gathering dark, bright pools of light from the torches and the bonfire had made searching the huge crowd for Pilar and her assailant increasingly difficult. Leary’s eyes had frantically scanned for her fuchsia scarf. He cursed himself for not staying with her. There were hundreds of thousands of people here. He despaired of finding her, and then there— His heart leaped. There, over a hundred heads of suddenly silent men sitting on the ground, silhouetted against the bonfire, she stood and shouted. Claudia saw her, too. They moved toward her, treading on some of the sitting men and shouting, “Stop him. Stop him.” But by now the balcony doors had opened and the chanting had begun again. The workers were close to ecstasy. They felt it in their souls. Their demand was being heard. They were accomplishing something workers never had before all by themselves. They were forcing the government to listen. They had broken history and were remaking it. Many had taken off their shirts and were waving them over their heads at the man who stepped out onto the balcony. The descamisados were bellowing, “Perón. Perón.”

  Certain she had nothing to lose, Pilar let her body go limp. If her assailant was going to kill her, she was not going to make it easy. Let him do it here, in front of all these people. Maybe one of them would have a knife and kill the bastard in his turn.

  All at once, Leary was blocking their way.

  He took his hat off and crushed it around his left hand and went for the murderer. She felt the knife thrust and jammed her elbow between the blade and her ribs. The cut on her upper arm stung like fire. The murderer slashed the knife at Leary, who parried with the hand in the hat and punched the murderer in the face. A bystander handed Leary a knife. And suddenly that union man, Tulio Puglisi, was in the fight. And Señora Claudia was suddenly on top of the three men, stabbing with her hat pin and screaming.

  Leary locked the murderer’s head with his left elbow around the man’s neck. The hat pin was dangling from his cheek. “She’s bleeding,” Señora Claudia shouted as soon as Pilar was free. She took the scarf from around Pilar’s neck and bound the wound.

  At that moment on the balcony, Perón raised his arms over his head. The crowd went delirious,
men jumping up and down, shouting themselves hoarse: “Perón! Perón!”

  Leary handcuffed the murderer. “Jorge. Jorge Webber,” Señora Claudia said his name. She put her arm around Pilar.

  “Help me get him out of here, Tulio,” Leary said to the union man.

  As they made their way to the edge of the sea of workers, up on the balcony the man of the moment embraced President Fárrell and raised his hands again to quiet the crowd. Their little group was too far away to hear what he was saying.

  “Why did he kill her?” Señora Claudia asked.

  Pilar looked at the miserable weasel and wanted to stomp him into mush on the spot. “He said Luz was a whore. That people say Evita is a whore, but she is a saint. That Luz imitating Evita would feed people’s hatred of her, when they should revere her as a saint.”

  “God help us,” Claudia said.

  Tulio looked up at the man on the balcony who was flashing his famous smile at the crowd below. President Fárrell was waving and grinning. Perón basked in the kind of adulation he had not seen since his days in Mussolini’s Rome and Hitler’s Berlin. The workers thought they had won, but all of Argentina had lost. “Yes,” Tulio said, “God help us.”

  As they reached the edge of the plaza, the crowd behind them began to sing the Argentine national anthem.

  Leary commandeered a squad car to take Pilar to the hospital. As he threw Webber into another car to be taken to police headquarters, the workers started to chant again, “Perón. Perón.”