“I shouldn’t be out late,” I said.
“What is late? This isn’t late. You are coming.”
“I can’t—”
“You shouldn’t hide in your flat like you do. It’s bad for your health.”
It was pointless to resist her.
“Come early, if it will make you feel better,” she said.
At the last minute, as I was hunting for my shoes, I decided to take a bug with me. Perhaps this party was an opportunity.
Her apartment was at the edge of the Palermo neighborhood, on an upper floor of one of the new apartment buildings that had gone up before inflation: white, strung with balconies, ten or fifteen stories, jarring against the eroded stone and rusted ironwork that were the natural texture of the neighborhood. In the hideous mod lobby, a guard at a desk was being menaced by an enormous orange circle on the wall behind him. The building was funereally quiet, and I heard the music coming from Victoria’s apartment before the doors of the elevator even opened on her floor.
Most students lived with their parents, or in grim boardinghouses. Yet Victoria lived in this high-rise by herself. The grandfather with the soda factory must have been generous. I knocked softly on the door and Victoria jerked it open instantly, as if she had been waiting just inside.
“Yes, I knew it!” she said, kissing me on the cheek. “I knew Anne was not such a coward!” Behind her, Elena was hugging her elbows and shifting her feet next to the hi-fi, and Román was trying to contain the frothing overflow of a beer bottle. He came to greet me, giving me the customary kiss on the right side of my face, with a brisk, fraternal squeeze of my shoulder at the same time, as he always did. I wished him a happy birthday, and he beamed as if I were the first person to think of this courtesy and squeezed me again, leaving a beery handprint. Elena’s boyfriend, Juan José, brooded in anticipation in front of the oven, which gave out a rich smell of sausages and toasting rolls. The blue evening showed through the sliding doors of a tiny balcony, where three dark silhouettes crouched together over a joint.
“This is my bird’s nest,” Victoria said, spinning in a circle. “Very small, but just right for me.” She pressed a water glass filled with fernet and Coca-Cola into my hand and then spun away as the doorbell chimed again.
I stood in the narrow kitchen for a while with Elena, who was having some kind of problem with Juan José that I could not quite understand. His parents wanted him to leave Buenos Aires until it was safe again, and Elena thought this was cowardly but couldn’t say so. The effort of not saying so was straining their relationship, making her arch and sarcastic, making him bully her in front of their friends. She held on to my forearm with one hand and a glass of beer with the other, murmuring and shaking her head, sniffling periodically, and alluding to a reservoir of shared female knowledge between us: You know how they are, how it is, they always, we always, etc. In the living room, Román was talking about the Tupamaros across the river in Uruguay, Marxists who had been robbing banks and distributing the money in the slums of Montevideo. There was a picture in a mimeographed student newspaper I’d seen of a group of young men in crew-neck sweaters, their faces covered with handkerchiefs, standing on the roof of a Peugeot, waving bricks of bundled money at an assembled crowd of old women in shawls. Román, who kept tucking an unlit cigarette behind his ear and then removing it to gesture with it, was saying that they were the real patriots, patriots of the Americas against the foreign banks. “But they have bombs,” said someone, a girl I vaguely recognized, and he snatched the cigarette from its perch again and jabbed it toward her, triumphant, saying, “You’ve been reading propaganda.” I hadn’t heard him talk this way before. Perhaps, as his plans in the warehouse were developing, he was becoming more free with his ideas.
The Tupamaros were mostly college students like the people sweating and dancing in this room. They thought a revolution would be ecstatic and spontaneous. I thought they’d failed to learn the lesson of Cuba: the movie-star revolutionaries were always followed by a bleak and endless repression. The Tupamaros would make an opening with their stylish bank robberies, and the KGB would fill it. Gerry had just given me a report of KGB activity in the unions, pipe fitters bused in from remote provinces to march in protests on the Plaza de Mayo, men who had never seen a subway car who were mysteriously being put up in fine hotels. More brazen were pamphlets I’d seen denouncing United Fruit plastered to wet sidewalks just the week before, credited to youth coordinating committees that stopped just short of signing off with a red star. I thought of Castro and his four-hour state-sponsored Russian ballets, with party officials struggling not to fall asleep in the balconies lest they bring suspicion on their commitment to the revolution. That was the future that the Tupamaros would create by accident. They wanted rock and roll, and instead they would get the First People’s State Theater for Opera and Ballet.
Someone turned up the hi-fi so loud that threatening static began crackling in the speakers, but Victoria didn’t care. She had put red scarves over her lamps, and the living room was bathed in bordello light. Twenty or thirty people were crammed into the small apartment now. Sometime around midnight, as I was pulled into a knot of dancers hemmed in by a teetering floor lamp and a chaise longue, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been to a party in at least a year.
“Victoria,” I said breathlessly, “aren’t you worried the neighbors will hear?”
“There are no neighbors,” she said. “The building is half-empty. They haven’t sold an apartment here in two years.”
I kicked off my shoes. Shoes were littered around the living room, peeping out from under the furniture like Easter eggs. Victoria clapped and spun me in a circle. I was a little drunk; I had always liked to dance. I was sweating, and the green linen dress I had chosen was sticking to my back. I remembered crashing a party in Morningside Heights full of Columbia students—that was the last time I had danced this much.
Someone had opened a bottle of champagne, and I was giddy. I went into the bathroom, a strange narrow closet with tiles in a vibrating pattern of yellow and green, to wash my hands and splash some water on my face. A dark, flushed girl looked back out of the mirror. My hair was damp, sticking to my temples, and my lipstick had all worn off. The bump in the bridge of my nose was shiny with sweat. I edged back into the hallway.
Victoria was there, holding a lit cigarette. I tried to pass by her, and she put a hand on my waist. “Stay a minute and talk to me,” she said. She leaned close, wobbling a bit. “Do you like Román?”
“Sure,” I said. “I like Román.”
“Román and I are going to do important things. We are very strong together.”
“You seem very strong together,” I said.
“Very important things,” she whispered, leaning on me. “We have big spirits. Huge spirits. Together. For the people.”
I laughed, and she laughed too. She had put most of her weight on me, the end of her cigarette was smoldering a little too close to my face, and now she squeezed my waist through the damp linen and looked frankly down my dress. She kissed me, quickly before I could pull away, and bit my lip.
“You’re drunk,” I said, stepping back, shocked that she had the nerve. “Why did you—why did you think—?” I couldn’t come up with the things that a more innocent woman would say. I was surprised, but in the wrong way. Afraid that she had seen something in me. She had a greedy look on her face, her teeth showing insolently. “Anyone could see you,” I said finally.
“See what?” she said. Her hand was on my leg.
I stepped out of range. She laughed at me. When girls like her did this in bars, they were usually more kittenish. She wasn’t coy. She was flushed and amused. She swayed back toward her living room.
I was alone in the hallway, facing a framed poster from a Brecht festival in São Paulo. My mind cleared; I was nearly sober, and my hands were shaking. I took the bug from my pocket and slipped it into the back of the frame. The music from the hi-fi now sounded clattering and
strange.
I stepped back into the living room, smoothing my hair with both hands. Victoria was laughing with some boys from the law school, her back to me. I drifted numbly to the balcony, where Elena was standing with a cigarette. There was a buzzing in my lip where I had been bitten.
“There you are. I was just thinking that I’ve been talking all night about me,” Elena said, with a sad smile. “You always listen.”
I looked down at the street, the blue-white glow of a city bus many stories below. I patted her arm. “That’s what friends are for,” I said.
I said my good-byes soon after and left. While I walked through the hushed streets, I went over those few seconds in the hallway again and again, every step of our choreography, and decided I had done well: I had given nothing away. I had pulled back. I had shown surprise, the way most women would. Her smell was still with me—her hair, the gin on her breath.
JANUARY 1958
MARYLAND YOUTH CENTER, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Two weeks after Christmas, a social worker came into the dayroom looking for me and said I would be released in three days. I was being transferred to the custody of a boarding school in Delaware called the Barrington School. When she had gone, the sulky girl sitting next to me said, “It must be nice to have money.”
“Why?” I said. “What’s the Barrington School?”
“It’s where they send mental patients and sluts from nice families.”
My mother had sent a package with some of my clothes in it, my coat and heaviest sweaters, a few blouses and skirts. The package obviated any need for me to visit Chevy Chase before my move to Barrington, although there were other things I missed from my old room: books, a coverlet, my makeup box. I decided not to ask her for them. It would have afforded her a chance to be decent by sending them, and I didn’t want to give her that.
They came for me at breakfast to go to Barrington. I was sitting next to my roommate, who was eating an egg and tearing her toast into bits and soliloquizing about a piece of beef that her brother had saved especially for himself once and how she had stolen it and seared it in butter and eaten it in a shed. When the social worker came through the doorway and nodded to me I said, “Claire, I think I’m going now,” but she didn’t pay any attention. I glanced back as I was leaving the room and saw her tipping the eggs and toast from my plate onto hers.
I stripped off the smock and stockings in the small room again, unobserved this time, and put on new clothes from the package. Outside it was a blinding, cold day, a light snow crusted over the grass. In the parking lot there was a blue van with BARRINGTON printed on the door. I felt free, actually, walking across the parking lot to the van, which is a funny thing. I’m sure I was smiling.
JUNE 1966
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
For two days, when I tuned in to the bug in the warehouse in La Boca, I heard nothing but an empty hiss. On the third day, the murmur of male voices. I heard snatches of their conversation through the afternoon.
“It won’t be ready in time,” said a voice I didn’t recognize.
“It will be ready,” said Román. He had a lilting intonation that I recognized easily. How much did he know, I wondered, about his girl? I kept turning it over in my mind. He had been just around the corner, at that party. What secrets did she allow him, if she took liberties like that?
“Carajo, this is a disaster,” said the first voice. “We have to start over.”
And then silence, mixed with scraping sounds, footsteps. An afternoon passed that way, with unclassifiable noises and bits of conversation about the facultad.
Gerry was impatient. “They haven’t said where they’ll put it, when, nothing?”
“No.”
“They must be waiting for Onganía to move.”
“Maybe. Sounds like they’re having trouble with the material.”
“Keep listening.”
When the warehouse was empty, when Perette’s office contained only secretaries, I listened to Victoria’s apartment. In this way I learned that she had a Vandellas record that she listened to over and over again, that her mother called her every afternoon at two o’clock and asked her if she was studying, and that Román often visited during the siesta. I overheard sex one afternoon; they must have been on the living room sofa. I heard them fighting. Between them I heard the same vague anxieties that were spoken in the warehouse.
“How much longer?” Victoria said.
“Hard to say. Not much.”
“There aren’t many chances.”
“Sweetheart, I know. We won’t fail.”
This pretty girl, collaborating in a bombing plot. If I hadn’t heard it all with my own ears, seen the equipment in La Boca with my own eyes, I would not have believed it. I understood more easily now the grim edge to Gerry’s suave manner, the tense way he went through the world, enumerating dangers. The KGB was like a poison gas. It rattled me to know that it could wreak such awful havoc among bright and charming young people with the whole world to lose.
“Keep listening,” Gerry said.
It wasn’t tanks but trucks that woke me from a light sleep around five o’clock on the morning of June 28. They were downshifting roughly on the street outside the confitería, one after another making the turn from Calle Rodríguez Peña onto Avenida Rivadavia. It wasn’t until I had pulled a sweater on and lifted the sash to look out the window that I realized all other traffic noises had stopped. The trucks—square, flat-topped vehicles whose color I couldn’t distinguish in the distorting yellow of the streetlights—were alone in the street. All other traffic had been shut down. The first in line turned left, mounted the sidewalk with a drunken-sailor lurch, and drove straight into the plaza, over the sand that was populated in the daytime by darting dogs and children. The rest of the line followed. In a moment they were assembled behind the huge dry fountain, facing the Congreso building across the empty street.
I turned on my radio, instantly wide awake. It took me a minute and a half to find the right frequency and aim the transceiver properly. When I found the signal from Perette’s office, I heard the gentle, sleepy static of an empty room. Over that, faintly, I heard an echo of the trucks.
I pulled on my shoes and coat. It was still very dark in the hallway, but I left the lights off, creeping down with one hand on the wall instead. The walls were unfinished in the upper floors of the confitería, a rough lath that had never been painted, and I scraped my palm on a staple halfway down. One floor above the dining room, near the manager’s office and the storerooms, I saw a light on and went toward it. It was coming from a room beside the service stairs. Leaning against a counter beside a pile of folded cloth napkins, the bag from the laundry at his feet, was the boy who’d surprised me in the top room months before. He was smoking and looking out the window at the trucks on the plaza.
He looked over his shoulder at me. “What’s happening?” he said. He gave no sign of remembering me.
“You don’t know?” I said.
He shook his head. “They’re driving on the plaza,” he said. “They’re not allowed to do that.”
“It’s the army,” I said. And then I said the word for coup, which in Spanish, as in French, means a strike or shock, a blow with the fist. I knocked my fist into my palm as I said it, and it stung where I’d scraped it on the stairs.
“How do you know it’s a coup?” he said.
“Everybody knows,” I said. “It’s been in the papers.” I crowded in next to him to look out the window. From this lower vantage point, a couple of magnolia trees obscured part of the Congreso building, but I could still see the row of trucks idling on the sand with plumes of exhaust lit pink by their taillights. Onganía wouldn’t be here; he would be at the presidential palace in the Plaza de Mayo, a mile off. It would all be timed to happen simultaneously—the trucks here at the Congreso, another contingent there at the palace. I needed to hurry. This would be my last report.
I went down to the ground floor. The vast din
ing room was silent and abandoned, the heat and clatter of the early-morning kitchen shift barely discernible at the far end. The loading doors were open to receive the shipment of fruit that would come at six, and two dogs in the alley behind the confitería lifted their heads as I jumped down and walked toward the streetlights still shining on Calle Rodríguez Peña. I headed east, toward the lightening gray over the river.
My route was along Avenida Rivadavia, the long artery that divided the north of the city from the south. I tried to light a cigarette without slowing down, blocking the breeze with the collar of my coat, not wanting to look too hurried but not wanting to go too slowly either. Newspapers were being delivered to the kiosk at the corner of Uruguay, and the deliveryman and the proprietor were chatting over the bundles with their hands in their pockets, looking toward the plaza behind me, which was mostly obscured now by Beaux-Arts apartment buildings. The rumble of trucks was faint already, even just a few blocks away.
Before Avenida 9 de Julio I passed a nightclub with the doors propped open, young people streaming out into the street. I was startled by the intrusion of raucous nighttime into this quiet dawn moment. It was morning and maneuvers were underway, but they didn’t know. The nightclub was called Le Troc. Through the open doorway I heard the Kinks, or something like the Kinks. A drunk girl, young enough that her weaving across the sidewalk seemed lamblike and sweet, stopped in front of me and took the cigarette from her lips. She started to sing in a cartoonish growl. “Giiiiirl,” she sang, and then a run of slurred nonsense, the lyrics from “You Really Got Me.” I was hypnotized by her for a moment and then hurried away.
Who Is Vera Kelly? Page 9
