Who Is Vera Kelly?

by Rosalie Knecht

  There had probably been no one in the apartment when I was standing in the hallway. No one would ransack an apartment with the door open. So whoever had done it had been fast and timed it well—come and gone in the hour I had been away.

  I remembered Nico, that strange drunken call just before I left for the ferry. Advising me against Montevideo. Wheedling with me to stay. I had been betrayed.

  I stared into the mirror above the bar. Inviting me up for dinner with his wife. She knows a liar when she sees one.

  After a few minutes I returned to myself, noticed what I looked like, smoothed my hair. My hands were shaking.

  What would he gain from giving me up, from having the police turn over my apartment?

  The tremble had gone out of my legs, but I still felt weak and I would need to find someplace to hide. The barman whistled to himself, a moody little milonga, casting sideways glances at me. “What kind of day is this,” he said to the empty bar, to me. “What a shame.”

  I nodded and said nothing.

  “It’s a shock to the nerves,” he said. “Another drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Where are you from, miss?”

  “France.”

  “Beautiful country.”

  I dropped my money on the bar and slipped back out onto the sidewalk. A light, cold rain had begun to fall again. It seemed like the street and sky were darkening, as if a drawstring were being pulled shut overhead. I didn’t know how much Nico knew about me or my movements or connections in Buenos Aires. The man he had following me might know about Victoria and Elena and Román and their friends, because I saw them often. I couldn’t run safely in their direction.

  I considered hotels. I was standing in the rain now, facing a tattered park across the street, my view interrupted every so often by a cab with its lights switched off. Any foreigner checking into a hotel would be a cause for suspicion on a day like today. The Argentines were always alert to signs of foreign interference in their politics. Some would be theorizing already that the Americans, so enamored of Onganía, were behind what had happened this morning.

  Perhaps that was why Nico wanted to feed me to the police: to bolster this impression, which would cast suspicion on Onganía. I would have bet a thousand dollars that at that moment while I stood getting steadily more damp and more anxious on a sidewalk in San Telmo, the Buenos Aires police were tearing apart the attic room in the Confitería del Molino. I needed to get off the street immediately.

  An orange cat looked balefully at me from under a parked Citroën.

  I thought of James, the mod I had met that night in the bar. I remembered his apartment, which faced a large French-style building across Calle Riobamba that looked like a nunnery in the dark. I couldn’t remember the number of his building, but I was almost sure it was on the corner of Tucumán. And the longer I stood and looked at the ragged orange cat and felt the chill coming through my coat, the more it seemed clear that he was the only person I knew in Buenos Aires whom I could be sure Nico knew nothing about.

  DECEMBER 1959

  GREENWICH VILLAGE, NEW YORK CITY

  It was around the time I quit my job as a typist with Con Edison that I finally worked up the courage to go into the Bracken. The Bracken was a piano bar in the Village that I had heard of, by reputation, from other girls at the boardinghouse; they were making fun of a new arrival from Texas, who had been going down there to cadge drinks and plates of spaghetti from the dykes who worked for the transit authority. Like many things at the boardinghouse, the Bracken was at once a place that everybody knew about and that nobody would admit to having been to. Twice I walked past the narrow door without going in, and once I hesitated for a few minutes at the end of the block, pretending to be waiting for a bus. I saw women go in and out—some with lipstick on, hair curled and pinned, and some who wore big black shoes and kept their cigarettes tucked behind their ears. I saw a few men, too, laughing and joking with their arms around each other.

  I had no one to go with me. I couldn’t ask Cathy. I had gone with girls at the Barrington School, but that place was a cloister, where the girls romanced each other out of boredom and loneliness as much as real desire. A running joke in the senior class compared these relationships to the arrangements made by men trapped on ships on long ocean voyages. This was different. I was out in the world and I couldn’t pretend it was a game anymore. I could have a good time with men, but with women it was different: I was lit up, rattled, consumed.

  I chose an evening when Cathy was out on a date with a law student and dressed carefully in our room. I chose a shift that I thought was very chic—it was black and it did something clever with the draping on one shoulder but otherwise refused to call attention to itself, and it made me feel a bit like a French girl, or at least a co-ed at the New School. I looked nice, I thought. I was tall, and my legs were all right.

  The Bracken was crowded and noisy, a fog of smoke around half-lit chandeliers. Colored Moroccan lanterns hung over the bar; the banquettes were draped in old velvet, and the wood floor showed through in places where the linoleum had been danced away. I pushed my way to the bar, licking dry lips. A woman whose short hair was combed back with oil stared straight into my eyes, her expression blank, and I let my gaze drop to the floor. The barmaid brought me a gimlet and I edged onto a stool. Beside me, a row of girls in cocktail dresses clung close together, laughing, prodding at the ice in their drinks with straws.

  Butch women stood in clusters at the back of the room. While I watched, one woman approached the girls to my right and pushed in deftly among them, ordering a round, dropping a white hand onto the shoulders of the smallest blonde. My drink was empty, and it was hard to catch the barmaid’s eye. The blonde girl next to me, lost in her romance, laughed uproariously and elbowed me hard in the ribs, looking round a moment later with bleary eyes, as if not sure she’d made contact with a real person. “Sorry,” she said. She studied me, her eyes narrowing, then turned pointedly away.

  At that point I decided to try harder at getting drunk. I caught the arm of the barmaid as she went by, and she looked up, irritated. “Another gimlet, please,” I said. Maybe she could see something in my face; her look softened. She mixed the drink and then stepped aside and said something to a woman with a painted-on beauty mark at the end of the bar.

  Now I was drunk. The girls on my right had paired up and were dancing near the piano. The man at the keys played “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” with a twelve-inch ivory cigarette holder clenched between his teeth. I smoked a cigarette and then another. The feeling of being invisible stopped being so awful.

  When my drink was empty, I drifted unsteadily out to the sidewalk, trying and failing to button my coat. I felt a heaviness that was a step past tears.

  “Are you all right?”

  I lurched back and squinted. It was the woman with the beauty mark.

  “Am I what?” I said, trying to be dignified.

  She smirked. She was holding a thin jacket closed. The night had gotten cold. “It’s because they think you’re a cop,” she said. “That’s why no one would talk to you.”

  I must have looked shocked, because she laughed. “I’m not a cop,” I said.

  “You’re not femme enough to be a femme and you’re obviously not a butch,” she said. “So they think you’re a cop.”

  My coat was hanging open. I looked down at my clothes, my shoes.

  “I like your dress,” she said. “It’s not that it’s not a nice dress.” She brushed a hair behind her ear. “Are you hungry? There’s a place around the corner that sells burgers.”

  JUNE 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  James’s apartment building was larger and whiter than I remembered it, seeing it now sober and in daylight. I pressed the bell at the side of the filigreed iron gate and then realized it wasn’t locked. I went in and climbed the stairs. It had been months since that night we left the bar together, but I remembered that his door was on th
e third floor, beside an alcove at the top of the stairs. There was a prayer placard on the door that looked like it predated the building.

  “¿Quién es?” said a voice from within.

  “It’s Anne,” I said, and my voice came out with an exaggerated mid-Atlantic flatness, as if to brush aside his carefully accented question. “Anne from—from a couple of months ago. From the Bar Catalán.”

  There was a long, ponderous silence. I dropped my face into my hands. You are all right, you are all right, I said to myself. You are quick and smart. He will open the door. You will not go to prison today. He will open the door.

  I heard footsteps within and then another long hesitation. I cleared my throat and brightened my voice. “Maybe you don’t remember me,” I said to the peephole. “I’m sorry to come on a day like this. You must be thinking—”

  The door opened and he appeared in the gap, unshaven, wearing glasses I didn’t remember, in an undershirt. His hair was standing up. He looked like a cadet in a war movie, about to go into France.

  “Anne?” he said.

  I mustered an apologetic smile.

  “I couldn’t remember your name. You sneaked out,” he said. His face was open and curious, but he was not smiling.

  “Can I come in, please?” I said.

  He stepped back out of the doorway. The room beyond was larger than I remembered it, perhaps an effect of daylight coming through the large street-facing windows, the white bulk of the colonial building opposite, its terra-cotta roof leaching Mediterranean warmth into the winter day. A weaving on the living room wall showed the eagle and snake from the Mexican flag, their details picked out in pink and green thread. Between the windows there was a framed photograph of an Aztec sculpture, a pre-Columbian face laughing riotously, crowned with feathers, with a knife for a tongue.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Is this a social call?” he said. I watched him pick up a sweater that was draped across the back of a chair and pull it on, then resettle his glasses and run a hand over his hair. He was only slightly taller than I was, and he had a ready stance, like a boxer.

  The room was neat and settled. No sign that he was packing up.

  “My apartment was ransacked,” I said. “I’m afraid to go back there.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Ransacked? By who?”

  I suddenly wanted to sit down. “I have no idea.”

  “Was anything missing?”

  “I was too scared to go inside. The door was open when I got there, I didn’t know if they were still there.”

  “Well, you have to call the police.” His arms were akimbo now, like a marionette.

  I laughed. “The police?”

  He was already walking toward the phone hanging on the wall in the kitchen, but at this he stopped and turned around. “Right, I guess this isn’t the day for it. Do you think it was them that did it? I’ve heard of that happening. People get home and there’s a note on the door telling them to come in for questioning and all the cash in the place is gone.”

  I pretended to consider this with dawning horror. “I guess it could have been.”

  “Sit down,” he said. I sat in the chair under the eagle and snake. He rattled in the kitchen for a few moments and then came out with a cup of instant coffee that he handed to me. “You’re a student?”

  “Yes. Psychology at the UC.”

  “Maybe they’re cracking down on students. They’re always suspicious of psychologists anyway. All those dirty books.”

  This was true. There was an antipathy between Freudians and political conservatives in Argentina that had persisted for decades. If James was willing to make this argument for me, I would let him. “But I’m not even Argentine.”

  “Well, that’s even worse. A foreign psychology student. They probably think you’re transmitting straight to Moscow.”

  I laughed uproariously.

  “Has anybody been after you at the university?” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I drank some of the foamy coffee. My hands were still unsteady. “I tried to go to Montevideo this morning, just until things settle down, and they wouldn’t sell me a ticket at Puerto Madero. They said there are no foreign passports going in or out today. And then I went back to my apartment and it was—well, I told you. And now here I am.”

  “You don’t have friends here?”

  “No. I haven’t been here long. Just a few months.”

  “I thought you said you’d arrived just after New Year’s.” Something changed in his tone, as if he had caught me in a lie. A black cat appeared from under the sofa and rubbed against my leg.

  “Six months, then,” I said.

  “Six months and all alone. You seem awfully friendly for that.”

  I glanced up. His arms were folded.

  “I’m pretty shy, really,” I said.

  He was avoiding my eyes. “I’m surprised you remembered this place,” he said. “To find your way back.”

  “I’ve got a good memory,” I said. Was he angry with me? That happened sometimes. They got angry with you for being too easy, for going on existing afterward. The Aztec sculpture in the photo stared me down.

  James got up abruptly and looked out the window. “More trucks,” he said, over the diesel squalling in the street.

  There was a long silence.

  “It’s just very unexpected,” he said finally.

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t have come,” I said. I set the coffee cup down on a magazine, relieved to get rid of it, the caffeine mixing badly with my adrenaline. I stood up, red-faced. “I’m so sorry. I’ll try the airport. Maybe I’ll be luckier there. I’ve got some money.”

  “No, no. You don’t have to—”

  “It’s all right.” I picked my handbag up off the floor and the cat struck at the scarf trailing from it, pulling it off in a long smooth sweep to the floor. “I just—it’s all right.”

  “It could be dangerous.” He was distressed now, hands open. I tried to disentangle the cat’s paws from the scarf, but she was rolling silkily on the rug now, delighted.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “You won’t be. You know that. You hear the same things I do.” He meant the secret jails, the beatings. “Stay here.”

  I gave up on the scarf and straightened up, letting him see my reddened eyes, then pressed my hands to my face.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Of course you can, it’s easy.” He took the handbag from my arm and set it down on the table. “I’ll make you something to eat. I feel badly now, I upset you. And you had such a bad morning already. Do you want to lie down?”

  I realized then how long I had been awake already that day. He pointed me toward the bedroom and I lay for a while in the aquatic dimness of the bed I barely remembered, the windows heavily curtained to keep out the light. I slept and had a dream that I was in the basket of a hot-air balloon that was rising and rising through thinning air, the sky shining on all sides, the earth becoming illegible in the distance. I woke with an ache in my chest and heard the subsiding whistle of a teakettle in the kitchen. I read the spines of the paperbacks on the night table: Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith. Novels about liars. I needed to call Gerry.

  If I could get back to America I would cash out everything and buy a house on a river and train up a big vicious dog that loved only me. A house and a dog. A trellis with some clematis on it. I ached and there was shame somewhere in it, for wandering so far away, for being so unconnected, about to be twenty-six years old with no one in the world wishing me well, no one who knew anything about me that was true at least, only this man in the other room, whose ego couldn’t bear the thought of sending me away to be arrested and tortured in the sub-basement of some police station in Avellaneda, as had happened to others before and would happen again.

  He tapped on the door and pushed it open a crack. “I warmed up some empanadas,” he said. “And soup. Campbell’s. Did you know they sell it here?
”

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  The afternoon was growing dim already, steel gray through the living room windows. My mind was clearer now than it had been before. He had set out the food on a small table with flowers carved around the edge, the kind of thing a proper señora would keep polished with wax. The radio was on. The government was now headed by a junta of three, whose names I had heard from time to time in the confitería. But where was Onganía in all this?

  “You have nice furniture,” I said. In a half-silvered mirror I caught my reflection before I sat down: my skirt crushed, with concentric creases radiating from my hips, and my hair a mass aggravated by sleep and humidity, impenetrable and black.

  “The apartment came furnished,” he said. “But the art is mine.”

  I looked again at the eagle and snake. The snake’s body was caught in one talon and it curved back on itself as if about to strike, the tongue a furious neon pink.

  “That snake looks like he might make it,” I said.

  James was not listening. The radio was making the trilling noise that meant there was a bulletin. “All officeholders are relieved of their duties.”

  “All of them?” James said, mostly to himself.

  “All services are suspended. Curfew in effect from sunset to sunrise.”

  “You couldn’t have gone anywhere anyway,” he observed to me, and then added, as if to clarify, “They said there’s a curfew. Can you speak Spanish?”

  So this had not been clear from our night in the bar. I wondered how much he remembered. “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m sorry to leave it on while we’re eating. I don’t want to miss anything.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  The radio went into a patriotic fugue state. A person of indeterminate gender with a dry, tremulous voice read aloud from Martín Fierro, a poem about horses and knives, with breaks for “Ave Maria” and the national anthem, sung by a soprano over a remote and crackling orchestra.

  “You’re Mexican?” I said finally.

  “My parents came from Oaxaca to Texas before I was born,” he said. “We used to spend summers there. My grandfather was a senator.”