The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  * * *

  That night, when Javier finally returned to the house, Saul decided not to tell him about the mathematics professor. Instead, after Javier asked him if he had found anything new, Saul just shook his head no. Some seconds later he added: why are we still even here, we should go home, but Javier didn’t respond.

  Later, as Javier lay on the air mattress, gazing indistinctly at the ceiling with his arms crossed over his chest in a type of cryogenic silence, Saul realized that both of them for some days had been reluctant to admit what sooner or later they would have to admit: that they would not find Maxwell Moreau and that Javier had used this trip, this false quixotic journey, entirely as a pretext for traveling to yet another ruined city. In the end, it hadn’t been Saul’s idea to come to the city. It had been Javier’s because—as Saul understood more fully now—he wasn’t driven by friendship, not by an interesting story about a recovering city that could be parceled, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder, or even a persistent, adolescent search for freedom, but rather by a yearning for disaster, a need to see himself and others at the imminent end of the world.

  Disaster as obsession or addiction, thought Saul. Disaster as a symptom of something uncanny at work in the world: the Lago Agrio oil fields in Ecuador, the Tepito neighborhood of Mexico City where Javier went looking for Marina and her sick patients, the collapsing financial center of Buenos Aires, the aftermath of the great deluge of New Orleans. Disaster as the infrastructure of the world. Disaster as jet-black liquid enveloping his skin like oil. Disaster as guilt, self-reproach for earning a salary from disaster while in other places, other people with his same forehead, earlobes, teeth, skin, and voice were invisible—displaced from time and history—as if a thousand-mile fog had settled over that southern continent.

  But did he have any right to be angry with Javier? If he were to be honest with himself, or, at the very least, half-honest, was he any different? Didn’t his own mind tunnel ceaselessly back to abandonment and disaster, to landscapes of the dead, to endlessly repeated images of a Kalashnikov rifle, his American mother, his foreign father, smoke, flesh, filth, bullets, an incinerated bus? Didn’t his own mind also tunnel incessantly forward to all those vast and synthetic skies as imagined and portrayed by Isaac Asimov, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, and, now, even Adana Moreau, skies set in motion by modern-day harbingers of disaster, skies awash in the mingling of human grays and dead alien stars?

  * * *

  My feeling is that you’re addicted to disaster, said Saul after a long silence, and then, not being able to determine if Javier had heard him or was fast asleep, he went to the porch and looked out at the flickering streetlight, under which a rooster was moving in slow oracular steps, before adding rather more quietly, but I’m hardly one to talk.

  * * *

  You’re probably right, pana, said Javier, after a long pause. Then he joined Saul on the porch, put both hands on the railing, and said, we’re both a little fucked, aren’t we?

  * * *

  The photojournalist and I found a corpse, he said, like the words were poisonous to him. A man, he said, young, or I think he was young, like us. We were taking photos in the Fairgrounds, a neighborhood northeast of Maxwell Moreau’s house, and we came across an overturned canoe in a backyard full of high grass and weeds. The photojournalist turned the canoe over and there was the dead man, lying faceup. Both the severe humidity and time had already taken its toll, said Javier, his skin was blistered and already greenish-blue from decomposition, his abdomen swelled like a fat man, and dried blood covered his face. He smelled even worse, like a rotten egg. It was just shit, pana. There were no forms of identification. Maybe he died there or maybe the flood had placed him there. We don’t know. But it was clear that he had drowned and that, at some point, someone else had covered him with the canoe.

  I’ve seen similar things before, in other cities, in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, for example, but those places and events now suddenly feel like a daydream or like it happened to another version of me on a parallel Earth, just as you always say, pana. In any case we tried to call the morgue, then Kenyon International Emergency Services, the fucking failure of a disaster-relief company hired by the state to care for the dead, and even the police, but we couldn’t get through to anyone.

  We waited on the dead man’s front steps. The sky was yellow and orange and violently red, like something, I remember thinking, out of a Neruda poem about an Aztec garden. In the end, nobody came for the dead body.

  It’s strange, pana, how all stories about the apocalypse are essentially the same, which is why I always end up writing the same goddamn story. So, yes, you’re right in thinking I’m addicted to disaster. In fact, it comes with the territory. The whole fucking media is addicted to disaster and the money that comes pouring in during one. Not only that, but we are complicit in creating audiences with powerful addictions to disaster, to fear, self-righteousness, outrage, and vitriol. A real apocalypse would be the most cosmically lucrative reward for the media.

  Or maybe, what I’m trying to say, pana, is that my job has taken its toll on me. On my family. Especially Maya. I know so little of my daughter and I can tell she already suspects that this is the case. It’s even taken a toll on our friendship, hasn’t it?

  * * *

  For a while neither of them said anything, both waiting expectantly for the other to speak, both listening to the erratic sounds of night—the occasional solitary footfalls, the faint insect-like buzzing of the single working streetlight, the distant and languid clip of sawteeth on lumber. It was a quarter to midnight and even from a distance Saul could tell that whoever was sawing would be doing so well into the night, until his eyes were cloudy with specks of light and dust, until his joints were stiff and his limbs like paper limbs, sawing, sawing.

  * * *

  This is the second or third time you’ve brought up Buenos Aires, said Saul finally. What happened there? Before, you told me you joined a street demonstration that turned brutal. I read your report on foreignpolicy.com that protestors were killed that day. Am I right to think that the dead man you found made you remember something terrible about Buenos Aires? Am I right to think your addiction started or ended there? Who were you with? asked Saul. What happened that day?

  * * *

  While covering the Argentine Depression toward the end of 2001, Javier began, I was invited by a senior editor at Clarín to take a tour of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), which was used as a secret detention center during the Dirty War. I told the editor it sounded interesting, but that I was running two deadlines and it would have to wait. He just said, “Listen, Silva, the past devours the future, as you norteamericanos always say in your novels. I’ve already made the arrangements, so it’s the least you can do. It’s not a church. You don’t have to cross yourself when you enter or leave.”

  Two days later, I went to ESMA. I was surprised to see gardens and walkways and colonnaded whitewashed buildings with red-tiled roofs. But, then again, pana, the State often conceals acts of treachery behind elegance, doesn’t it? At some point, I was approached by a man in his late twenties. He introduced himself as Alejandro Marías, a taxi driver and occasional fixer for foreign journalists. Our mutual friend from Clarín had been unable to make the appointment. He had a touching smile and wore his hair to his chin, like someone out of an American film from the seventies, all of which contributed to his resemblance to “Che” Guevara, but the comparisons stopped there.

  As we walked around the compound, Alejandro explained the similarities to the Terezín Nazi camp; some prisoners worked and were even entertained, especially when foreign journalists visited, while nearby others were tortured and killed. At ESMA, he told me, the prisoners were kept hooded and chained in tiny cells. They were tortured with water and electric cattle prods or taken on vuelos de la muerta, during which prisoners were drugged, weighted, stripped naked, and thrown from a p
lane into the ocean.

  “So, they were disappeared,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, and his voice sounded very close, like an echo, and also very gentle, “into the abyss.”

  At some point, we went to the basement of ESMA. From outside I could hear the sound of high school kids playing in a nearby field.

  “Also like Terezín,” said Alejandro, “prisoners were forced to contact family members and tell them they were being treated well. There was a monitored telephone booth in the entrance. I remember just such a call from my mother.”

  I didn’t say anything or ask anything just then. I suspected this was the story the senior editor at Clarín had wanted me to hear in the first place.

  “We only spoke briefly,” he said. “She asked me to tell her about my day and the days before that. I was eight at the time. I was staying with my grandmother. I’m sure I spoke of soccer, school, and cartoons. Then she told me about her days. She told me she was happy and watching good films and reading a lot. She was writing poems like she always did, and she promised to show them to me when she returned home. At some point, my grandmother heard me talking and came into the kitchen and took the receiver from me. My mother and grandmother spoke for a short time. After my grandmother hung up the phone, she told me that my mother was having ‘a nice visit in Mar del Plata.’ But then she sat at the kitchen table and started to weep inconsolably into her palms. Everybody, I remember thinking then at supersonic violent speeds, was lying to me.”

  * * *

  “My mother, Sol Marías, stopped being a poet at ESMA,” said Alejandro, sometime later as we walked the streets of San Telmo, a neighborhood I often visited during my trips to Buenos Aires, but, on that day, I felt like I was visiting it for the first time. Alejandro’s parents had been organizers for a Marxist offshoot of the anti-government Peronist movement. At that time, his father was in exile in France and his mother was a celebrated poet in underground circles sympathetic to that movement. I asked him what her poems were like.

  “She wrote about eclipses of the sun, semblances, spectacles of entertainment in the face of political incoherence, impulses being starved of expression. They were modern poems and some of them even had drawings and were quite funny—she was a disciple of Nicanor Parra—but according to the regime they were seditious poems, they were reason enough to arrest her. She was seized midday as she walked to a corner grocer while passersby turned their heads.”

  We walked in silence for a few minutes and then we went to a narrow bar tucked into a building with a crumbling façade. We ordered beers and talked for some time about soccer and my great-uncle, the poet, Medardo Ángel Silva. As we paid our tab, Alejandro confessed, a little drunk, that when he told his mother at the age of fifteen that he wanted to be a journalist, she just looked at him, as if spitting out a mosquito, and said, “Avoid any profession involving printed words at all costs, mijo, before it’s too late.”

  Shortly afterward, he quit school and started a type of poor man’s apprenticeship with our mutual friend from Clarín, who was familiar with his mother’s past and whose articles condemning the Dirty War he had read in secret as a kid while sitting on a lonely curb outside a café long ago frequented by Borges.

  * * *

  I hired Alejandro as a fixer, continued Javier, and over the next two months he helped me set up interviews with laid-off teachers, waitresses, oil workers, two priests from the church of San Cayetano who were helping the unemployed, and a night watchman for a bank who told me he kept all his savings in a small lacquered box along with his great-grandmother’s glass eye.

  All over the city, like a shared dark secret, people were afflicted not only with the python-like constrictions of austerity, but also by fears of a literary and political nature. That is, pana, they were fears that afflicted both the self and the body politic, so that a person had trouble distinguishing one from the other. Fears of the self, a self clothed in the flesh of the State. As people waited in long bank lines or struggled to feed their families, they were once again asking themselves: Could I really push an enemy of the State from a plane into the bloodless sea? Could I risk being disappeared for my beliefs in a better life?

  One afternoon, we went to a Chinese restaurant where he introduced me to three former oil workers who told me about the oil towns scrapped and abandoned after the privatization of the state-run oil company YPF in June 1993.

  I asked them what they thought of the future of the country. One of the former oil workers said, “A better question is—in what kind of country are we living in right now?”

  “A country full of orange-faced chantas like Menem and de la Rúa,” said the man to his left, “hollow men willing to sell anything they can get their hands on.”

  “A country half in love with Peronism and half in love with death,” said the man to his right.

  “A labyrinth with no center,” said Alejandro, quickly.

  “See?” the former oil worker said to me. “How can we talk of the future when this is a country with no future, a country entirely dependent on the false myth of inexhaustible wealth, just like your country, che, a wealth once so great that my dad who worked the pampas his entire life told us as kids that you could kill any cow you wanted out of thousands just to eat the tongue.”

  * * *

  Some days later, Alejandro invited me to go with him and his family on a day trip to San Antonio de Areco, just seventy miles outside of the city. His wife, Edin, was tall and had big green eyes and shoulder-length black hair combed straight. She drove and Alejandro sat next to her. I sat in the back seat with their three-year-old daughter, Sophia, who wore large round black sunglasses that hid her eyes and half her forehead, like a Mexican actress from the sixties. We headed northwest, through the empty pampas. To pass the time, Edin told jokes that stretched like rubber bands until, at some point, Alejandro and Sophia would explode into fits of laughter. I remember thinking then (or maybe I’m thinking it only now, pana) that this is what happy families did as they drove long distances, they told jokes and invented stories that made sense only to them, creating a rarified sense of space and time all their own. By comparison I felt rootless, mute.

  We checked in at an estancia, a cattle ranch, just a few miles west of San Antonio de Areco’s main plaza, and spent the afternoon with a few other families watching horse races and a gaucho sport involving crossbeams and small rings called corrida de sortija. Afterward, we bought ice cream bars and walked around. There was an outdoor pool, a playground, a large ringed barbecue pit, and a small lagoon crowded with noisy migratory birds. As we walked, Alejandro held his daughter in his arms and talked to her about the things they had seen that day. Despite all the excitement or maybe because of it, she fell asleep, still holding, but loosely, the small wooden stick from her ice cream bar, her head resting on the crook of Alejandro’s sun-burned neck. Alejandro kissed her forehead, which was damp with sweat. The sky turned violet and there were prairie shadows toward the pampas. On the shores of the lagoon, we listened to the migratory birds as they called out to each other, one by one.

  * * *

  On December 19th Alejandro and I drove from supermarket to supermarket in Buenos Aires, documenting as best we could what other foreign correspondents had by then already started calling looting, but it wasn’t looting, pana, people were exhausted and starving and on the brink of something, yet, at that time, I couldn’t figure out what, maybe—I thought as Alejandro drove and as I stared out the car window at people gathering on streets as if on the proscenium of a great theater, at helmeted officers firing tear gas, at dark buildings, at orange and red fires in the street that had been set ablaze, I suspected, by piqueteros—maybe they were on the brink of something like the destruction of a machine.

  * * *

  The following morning, after a quick breakfast, Alejandro and I made plans to visit Plaza de Mayo, where protestors were converging, in direct violation of
the state of siege declared by De la Rúa, which suspended constitutional guarantees, and where the Federal Police would no doubt meet them in full force.

  We parked Alejandro’s taxi on the corner of Estados Unidos and Piedras, just south of the neighborhood of Monserrat. We walked north along Piedras, past closed storefronts covered in bright graffiti, car parks shaded with blue tarp, the Argentinian Puppet Museum, and apartment buildings with narrow, wrought-iron balconies packed with onlookers.

  In the middle of Venezuela and Piedras there were burning tires and a man holding a sign that read PATRIA O BUITRES. Near the church of San Juan Bautista, we saw a man lying in the middle of the street while another man, possibly an emergency worker, placed a thin cloth over his mouth and then gave him CPR. Nearby, we ran into our mutual friend from Clarín. He was bent over and sweating. When he saw us, he held up his hand and said, “Ah, good, you two.” He then told us the rumors that De la Rúa was “disconnected from reality” and that one of his ministers had found him just that morning in his office watching cartoons. “Fucking cartoons, che,” he said and then waved us along.

  We headed east down Avenida Hipólito Yrigoyen, avoiding a knot of shirtless men wearing bandanas over their faces. At some point, we crossed a street flooded with chanting protestors, workers, and students banging on pots and pans, all marching toward Plaza de Mayo in a general atmosphere of festivity, as if they were in a carnival procession. As we neared the plaza, someone handed me a pot and a large wooden spoon.