By the time I turned onto Calle Florida the streets were filled with trucks and soldiers, and four polite young cadets told me the Plaza de Mayo was closed. The light from the streetlamps was beginning to look weak: the sun was coming up. At the corner of Avenida Sarmiento, a few blocks from the Plaza de Mayo, I came across a cadet in a blue helmet smoking a cigarette in the lee of a bank.
“What’s happening on the plaza?” I said.
He started as if he wasn’t supposed to be there, too far from his fellows, away from the action. “Who are you?” he said.
“What’s happening on the plaza?” I said again.
He glanced in that direction and dropped the cigarette. “The generals,” he said.
“Which generals?”
“Onganía. Of course.” He laughed. “Are you a student? A tourist?”
In the distance I could hear a loudspeaker, but couldn’t make out the words. The cadet was hugging himself against the chill morning. “He’s all right, the old man,” he said, meaning Illia, I guessed. “But he’s not doing us any good.” A low rumble reached our ears, a wash of mechanical knocking and grinding over a thrum of combustion, and a tank came into view around the corner of Avenida Maipú. The soldier and I both stepped back as it blustered our way. For an instant it was like a wall in front of us, vibrating and hot, and then it was shrinking away down the middle of the empty avenue, trailing blue exhaust.
I needed to get my things—everything, all the equipment out of the confitería first of all, and then whatever I could strip out of the flat in San Telmo. And then I had to get to the ferry launch on the river and book a ticket to Uruguay. I could be in Montevideo by nightfall if I hurried. I had planned for this, but I felt a trace of nausea, a buzz in my extremities and heaviness in my stomach, like stage fright.
The cadet was still staring after the tank. “I wish I had a camera,” he said.
I went back to the confitería first. It hadn’t opened at the usual time, which was six o’clock. When I approached from the front I saw first the strange deadness of the front windows, dark and empty, and then a few policemen standing in a casual group on the corner. I doubled back two blocks and approached again from the rear, hurrying through the back alley, which was divested now even of its dogs, and let myself in by the service entrance with the key the manager had given me.
The place was deserted. The great ringing kitchen was empty. Behind the bar, a row of demitasses stretched infinitely in the dim light from the street. I went up the back stairs, taking them two at a time, so that I was coughing by the time I reached the office. I packed up all the recording equipment into a green leather case. I swept the crust of a sandwich and an empty Coke bottle into a paper bag, folded up the cot I had been sleeping on and propped it against the wall, and put my sachet of toiletries, my toothbrush and powder case and throat lozenges, into my handbag. I was on the landing, struggling to close the door behind me with both hands full, when I remembered the loaded gun that I had locked away in the desk drawer weeks before. I emptied the chamber and put the gun in my coat pocket.
I waited ten minutes for the bus, realized finally that it would never come, and hailed a taxi. The driver seemed excited. He kept looking in the rearview mirror at me, and as we waited at a red light at a deserted intersection—uncharacteristic of a Buenos Aires cabdriver—he turned up the radio and I heard the first official report of the morning.
“Dr. Illia has left the presidential palace,” said the newscaster, over a penetrating low whine. “General Onganía will make a statement shortly.”
The cabdriver was chewing on his thumbnail. A bunch of dried flowers hung from the rearview mirror, trembling with the idling engine. He swiveled in his seat.
“Can you believe this bullshit?” he said.
“It’s an outrage,” I said.
“It’s a fucking outrage,” he said, facing forward again. “She knows,” he added, jerking his thumb at me, as if for the benefit of an audience.
In his distraction he turned the wrong way down one of the one-way streets that stymied the flow of traffic around my apartment building, and started cursing and hauling on the wheel. “Here is fine,” I said, grossly overtipping him, and hefted my things out onto the sidewalk. I could still hear him grinding gears, reversing in fractions in the narrow street, as I walked the last block home, the green case knocking against my legs. A cold drizzle had started up again. The street was deserted. As I passed the café on the corner where I sometimes sat with the newspaper, I heard a radio. Inside I could see an old waiter standing behind the counter with his arms folded, listening to the portable wireless that I sometimes heard emitting the distant roar of a soccer game on Sundays, now tuned to the news and playing at full volume to the empty dining room. “The generals will make a statement.”
At the building beside mine, two boys in primary school uniforms were sitting on the step.
“Is there no school today?” I said.
“Mama said no,” answered the bigger boy.
“We’re going to go to the park,” said the little one. “When the rain stops.”
“We’re not allowed to go to the park,” the older one said, exasperated, as if he’d been saying it all morning. “It’s dangerous at the park today.”
“Mama said we could go to the park,” wailed the little one.
“She said another day,” said the older one. “You don’t listen!”
Upstairs, I started in the bedroom, pulling my dresses out of the closet. A box under the window held receipts and grocery lists, pamphlets from museums I had visited on lonely days, my library card, a stack of magazines. I sifted out a few things that had my handwriting on them, took them to the kitchen, opened the window, and burned them in the sink. Then I rinsed the ashes down the drain.
Nico would understand why I had gone; there was no need to contact him.
I thought of Victoria and Román.
I felt tired, suddenly, and bent down to rest my elbows on the edge of the sink. I thought of Victoria and felt relief that I would soon be away from her, her flamboyance, her unpredictable movements, her indiscretion. I lit a cigarette. But there was something else as well, under the relief.
I flipped on the television in the living room. One station played a test pattern. Another was dark static, with snowy figures moving in it. The third showed a newscaster sitting at a desk, waiting for a cue that didn’t come, his arms limp at his sides.
Victoria’s attention had been like a spotlight on me—blinding, acute—and soon it would be gone. I would be back in the States in a few days or weeks, and I would never know what she had wanted from me.
I hesitated beside the telephone, scolded myself out of the impulse, and went back to the bedroom to pack my shoes and stockings and my good coat. A moment later, the telephone rang. I hurried back out of the bedroom.
“Hello?” I said.
“So you’re at home,” Nico said.
“Is everything all right?” I said, hoping that he could divine the questions nested within the question.
“Yes, it’s fine, all fine,” he said. “You’re not in your perch today?”
“Of course not,” I said shortly. I was confused by Nico’s openness on this unsecured line. Maybe it was despair. He had said before that he hated every coup, although his boss would be happy with Onganía. Or perhaps he was drunk. Late at night when I couldn’t sleep, those last few weeks before the coup, I had seen men leaving the bar on the corner at last call, half-buttoned into their jackets, lurching alone down the sidewalks in the cold. I wondered if that was how Nico had been passing his time. In a bar in Barracas, maybe, until late at night, complaining to neighbors who wouldn’t repeat what he said, and then home again to his sleeping wife, bringing the cold in his coat and hair.
“So you are abandoning us,” he murmured. “I think you ought to stay. Safer to stay, really, for a week or two.”
I didn’t like the soft voice he was using. “Are you drunk?” I glanced a
t the clock: it was eight o’clock in the morning.
“I wanted to know if you’d spoken to your man at the CIA,” he said.
I was so angry for a moment that I pressed the receiver to my chest. I blinked for a few seconds, staring at the heavy curtains drawn across the french doors to the balcony, and then lifted the receiver again and said, “What man?”
He laughed. “What man.”
“How does your wife feel about these calls?” I said, and hung up.
The buzzing in my palms and the soles of my feet was becoming unpleasant. If the phone rang again, I wouldn’t answer it. I stepped out onto the balcony to finish the cigarette, even though it was cold and I was wearing house slippers. A low winter sun shone over the buildings across the street, picking out the television aerials and whitewashed chimneys. At the corner of Humberto Primo two olive-drab trucks roared by, soldiers standing in the beds like cattle, miserable in the cold. A traffic cop saluted as they passed.
Good-bye, Buenos Aires, I thought. Then I said it out loud. I felt more remote in Buenos Aires than I ever had, and maybe that was close to happiness, being adrift far down the Atlantic coast with thousands of miles of grasslands at my back, the south a desert that stretched to the Antarctic Circle, even the river an empty expanse, the far shore never visible.
I checked twice to be sure the gas was off on the stove and the water heater, and then I went out, carrying two cases, all I had. I took the key with me. I wondered how long it would take the landlord to notice I had gone.
JUNE 1959
THE BARRINGTON SCHOOL, MIDDLETOWN, DELAWARE / NEW YORK, NEW YORK
My mother sent me a letter the month before graduation, explaining that she had received an invitation to commencement from the school, but because it was so painful for her to see the mess I had made of my life, she would be in the Virgin Islands instead. I spent an afternoon sunbathing on a weedy Chesapeake beach rather than attend the ceremony, which was thronged with the disappointed parents of the delinquent senior class.
Afterward, at a loss for anything else to do, I went up to New York on the train with a cardboard suitcase and my best friend from the dorm, a girl named Cathy who wanted to be an actress. We moved into a boardinghouse and found jobs as waitresses in a cocktail bar with pretensions on the west side. I couldn’t stand the job for long. After a few months I left for work as a typist with Consolidated Edison, which was so boring that once, around two o’clock in the afternoon, I suffered a hallucination in which the periods and commas on the notice in my typewriter began to pulsate gently on the page. A few weeks later I went out for lunch and never came back.
JUNE 1966
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
The cabs didn’t want to stop. I waited for twenty minutes on the Avenida Independencia as they went by, conspicuous in a green raincoat with my bags, visibly foreign and outbound, beginning to sweat under my collar despite the cold. Soldiers appraised me from trucks. If they stopped me I would pretend to be rich and naïve. I had thousands in cash in my purse. There was a way of offering a bribe that made you look like you didn’t even realize what you were doing. Two more cabs sailed by in tandem, two more drivers not even glancing toward the sidewalk.
Puerto Madero was only a mile and a half away, but the walk would take thirty minutes, and with my bags I would be obvious to every policeman and soldier I passed. I could abandon one case here if I needed to, on the sidewalk—it contained only clothes—but the other held my equipment and would have to either come with me or be dropped into the canal that separated the city proper from the spiky, chaotic fringe of the port. Just then a cab turned the corner onto Independencia and was stopped short by the wheezing passage of an empty bus, and while the driver was still cursing and banging on the horn I jerked open the back door and threw my bags onto the seat.
“I’m not taking anybody! I’m not taking anybody!” he yelled.
I slammed the door shut behind me. “Fifty pesos for Puerto Madero,” I said.
“Nobody!” he said.
“Are you out of your mind? Fifty pesos!” I said.
“Eighty pesos!” he said. “I don’t know who you are!”
I gestured my submission to this, slumping down in the seat, and he pulled into traffic. A lot of cabbies between San Telmo and the river would be going home rich tonight. When Castro came to Havana, the old plantation families thronged the airport depots along the northern coast of the island with cash and jewelry and even their best furniture, loaded into borrowed farm trucks. The bush pilots of Cuba became kings overnight. Their wives wore pearls for months.
We crossed the Avenida Paseo Colón at a hysterical pace, and then edged onto the bridge over the canal. Traffic was heavy here. Through a gap in the warehouses along the docks I could see the river, placid and brown in this season from the rain falling hundreds of miles north in Misiones, no waves and no glint of sun, no other shore, a view like the unfinished edge of a drawing. Then we were over the bridge and past the customs buildings, and the driver jerked to a stop in front of the ferry terminal, which was swarmed with cabs.
“Quickly,” he said. “I want to go home.”
I paid him and picked my way through a triple ring of cabs that were circling and jockeying for space at the curb. Women with undone faces chaperoned anxious children. Men were lined up five and ten deep at the pay phones. University professors and union men, I guessed, the leftist middle class. I hoped they had Uruguayan relatives to visit, that none of this would go down too badly. I had the nervous guilt of a survivor already as I smoked a last cigarette by the heavy doors.
The line for the ticket counter was long, stretching down one side of the terminal toward the shuttered café at the far end. I waited thirty minutes for my turn. The man at the ticket desk, when I finally reached him, was red-faced despite the cold morning, sitting on a high stool beside a ticket-printing machine, with a radio at his elbow droning a constant promise of more news soon to come.
“Destination?” he said.
“Montevideo.”
“Round-trip?”
“One-way.”
“Passport,” he said.
I slid it across the desk and began to dig in my bag for the money.
“Canadian,” he said.
I glanced up at him with a polite smile, both hands still on my pocketbook. “Yes,” I said.
“You are aware of what happened this morning?”
My eyes went to the radio. “Yes, of course,” I said.
“Foreigners are not traveling out of Argentine ports today,” he said.
I began to sweat. I felt myself circling over a deep emptiness, like a bird above a canyon.
“I don’t really understand what you mean,” I said, broadening my accent. “My Spanish is—” I shrugged apologetically. “I have to go to Montevideo. A friend is expecting me.”
“No movement of foreigners,” he said.
“But it’s all arranged.”
“It is not arranged,” he said. He had put one foot down on the floor and was now half standing, half leaning on the high stool. “It is not possible.”
“I don’t understand,” I tried again.
He looked at me with frank hatred. “There is no movement of foreigners today,” he said again, pushing the passport away as if it were filthy. “These are orders from the police. You are delaying the line.”
“I’ll buy a return ticket if that’s what you want,” I said. “With cash.” A bribe.
“You are delaying the line,” he said again.
“I have enough,” I said, holding up my wallet, but the gesture was too obvious and I saw his face crumple in disgust. The muttering of the people behind me had stopped, and I could feel eyes on my back.
“I will call the police,” he said.
We stared at each other for a moment. “I’m going to speak to the embassy,” I said, only because it was the kind of thing a person with a real passport would say. I made for the nearest doors, which opened onto the pier.
The cold air was a relief. Behind me, the terminal was a seething mass of people, but the narrow pier was empty. I took off my hat. I’d gotten hot, my nerve failing. I thought hard for a minute, looking down into the brown water rising and falling below the tarred pilings, and then emptied my second suitcase over the edge of the boards. My recording equipment disappeared into the water. A seagull the size of a chicken landed on the railing and screeched. I walked the long way around the terminal, leaving the empty suitcase in a garbage bin, and headed back toward my apartment, the mile and a half that I had just covered at such exorbitant cost.
When I stepped onto the landing on my floor, the door of my apartment was open. I had not left it open. I remembered turning the key in the lock. I could feel my pulse in my temples and ears. From downstairs, faintly, I could hear the barking of the Pomeranian in the apartment of the optometrist and his wife. I edged to the right so I could see through the open doorway and into the living room beyond.
The damask sofa had been pulled away from the far wall, and the fabric across the back of it had been cut away from the frame so it trailed on the floor in long strips. It had a dazed, pretty air, like a girl in a ruined dress. The lamb painting lay facedown in its frame on the parquet.
I was back down the stairs and halfway down the block before I realized what I was doing. It was only when I stopped to catch my breath beside a newspaper stand that I remembered I was carrying a gun in my shoulder bag. If I had wondered whether I was the type of woman who would confront a stranger with a gun, I was now relieved of any uncertainty. I was not the type. Had there been anyone in the apartment as I stood in the hallway?
I walked for a while and then started to feel weak in the legs. I went into a bar that was open and asked for a glass of whiskey and drank it on a stool in the corner. The radio was on, still promising more news soon.
Who Is Vera Kelly? Page 10
