Going up the stairs in James’s apartment building, my heel caught in the hem of my dress and ripped it. In the living room, I hunted around in my bag until I found the clamshell sewing kit, relieved to have something to do.
When James came back from the bank he was agitated, his hair disordered, his coat wet from the rain. He lit a cigarette the moment he was inside the apartment.
“My account is frozen,” he said.
I stopped what I was doing and took a pin out of my mouth, surprised.
“Foreign accounts are all frozen,” he said. “Yours must be as well.”
I had no bank account, but I said nothing. I wondered if this might be good, actually. It would make him feel trapped, like I was. Tilt the balance so that I wasn’t so aware at every moment of being at a disadvantage to him.
“You have cash, don’t you?” he said.
We watched each other for a moment. During my time in Argentina I had lived on rubber-banded stacks of cash, counted out for me at the post office counter where they handled wire transfers from overseas.
“Yes,” I said, putting another tiny stitch in my dress.
“Well, all right,” he said. “So we won’t go hungry, anyway.” His shoulders came down a bit; he relaxed. I was touched. He didn’t have a suspicious mind. He wasn’t thinking about how to trick the money out of me. He assumed I would share it because we were stuck here together. And I would. Why wouldn’t I? He was helping me. He came over to my chair and looked down at what I was doing.
“You’re handy,” he said, and there was a pause, the length of a shallow breath, and he put his hand on my shoulder.
“You can’t sew?” I said. I didn’t turn my head.
“You have obviously never been to Texas,” he said. “Of course I can’t sew.”
My hair was pinned up. He brushed his fingers over the back of my neck. A smooth gesture, as if he were stroking the feathers of a bird and didn’t want to startle it.
“The bank manager took me into a back room,” he said. “I think he was enjoying it. This whole situation—” He fell quiet. “It didn’t seem real before. I thought it was kind of a technicality. But now it’s—I’m a little afraid.”
I leaned into his hand. He bent down and kissed me. I liked him, even if he did seem silly sometimes, a person who had always been well taken care of. He was generous, without thinking much about it. He assumed generosity in me that no one had seen or expected in a long time. I caught a handful of the front of his shirt.
I kept thinking we might go into the bedroom, but we didn’t. It was a bit rushed, as if we might miss our chance if we paused or spoke to each other. Afterward we lay on the rug for a while, partly covered by his jacket, and I tried to think where I was in the month. Toward the end. I would be all right. He would feel better having me around, I thought, if this was part of it. I stroked the back of his head.
“Where’d you come from?” he said.
“Far, far away.”
“What a coincidence,” he said. “Me too.”
JANUARY 1959
GREENWICH VILLAGE, NEW YORK CITY
After I spent the night at Sheila’s, I walked around for weeks feeling as if there were spotlights on me, as if everyone could see what I was thinking and remembering, as if a vice squad might erupt out of nowhere at any moment. For a while I couldn’t even walk past the Bracken, or any of the other gay bars that I knew of in the neighborhood. My preoccupation was so intense that I thought a raving bum on Broadway was shrieking “Dyke!” at me when in fact it was “Kike!” which I realized with intense relief. It was five months before I worked up the courage to flirt again, to meet another girl, and because it had hurt my feelings when Sheila didn’t call me, I didn’t give this one my number.
Most of my other friends pretended to be so worldly and louche that homosexuality hardly merited discussion, which sometimes struck me as an excuse to avoid discussing it. Even when a bar near the boardinghouse was raided, and the police marched out columns of women in cuffs while men jeered from across the street, my roommate never said a word.
JULY 1966
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
Three days later it was in the paper: BOMBING PLOT THWARTED. Several pounds of explosives found in a riverfront warehouse. EVIDENCE OF COMMUNISTS IN THE VERY HEART OF ARGENTINA, said the headlines. The warehouse had been empty when they raided it. They must have staked it out first, I thought. Did Román see them, and stay away? I read and reread the articles, listened to all the bulletins on the radio. It was the first clear action, the first cause firmly fixed to an effect, of my career with the CIA. Maybe I had saved a life. Lives.
When I spoke to Gerry he had seen the story already in the international pages of the Times. He was pleased, but insistent. He needed more. “You have to follow up,” he said. “You have to see your friends.”
“Victoria?” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. A headache instantaneously spread across my temples.
“Yes, her, him, whoever you can. There’s too much to learn.”
“Fine. But this is the last thing, yes?” I said. “I’ll be out of here soon.”
“You’ll be out of there soon.”
I told James I was going to argue with the visa office, and went to Victoria’s apartment. The security guard was still there in the lobby, but the building seemed somehow even quieter, more sepulchral, than before. I knocked on her door twice, softly. She pulled it open, a scarf over her hair.
“Anne!” she said. “God, it’s nice to see you!”
I was brought back to the party so forcefully that I could almost smell it, the choripanes and cigarettes in the apartment. “It’s been a while,” I said.
“It’s been since Román’s birthday. God, I drank too much. Did I make a fool of myself?”
I blinked twice and smiled blandly. “What do you mean?”
“I hardly remember it, the whole night.” She waved me in, not looking at me. “I haven’t seen you since Onganía came in. I tried to call you the day it happened, and didn’t get you. And then things have just been—I should have tried again. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Are you? I read about the arrests at the university.”
“I wasn’t at the protest, I had an exam. Román, though, they knocked him down. But it could have been worse.” She went to the kitchen, filled a kettle. “You want mate?”
“Sure. He’s all right then?”
“He had a bruise, a scrape. He was fine. But he went to Rosario, to calm his mother.”
“Is he coming back?”
“Of course.” She smiled from the kitchen doorway. “We don’t run away.”
She seemed calm, or perhaps only detached. While she lingered in the kitchen, I stood at her living room window, wondering how much she knew. Whether she was protecting Román now, whether he was really in Rosario. “There were so many police on the way over here,” I ventured. “A dozen at the subway station.”
“I haven’t been out,” she said from the kitchen. “The police have been much worse since—you know the bomb they found in La Boca?”
“I read about it,” I said.
“It’s a good excuse for them. They’ve been beating people in the street. Yesterday I saw it happen myself from the window. And when they stop girls to check papers, they grab you all over. You can’t do anything.”
“But you said you haven’t been out?”
“I hear things.”
“Don’t your parents worry about you?” I said.
“They want me to come home.” She came out of the kitchen with the mate and the kettle, a plate of cookies balanced on her arm.
“Are you going to go?” As I said it, I realized that I wanted her to go, to be safe at her parents’ big house outside the city. But this was absurd. She was dangerous herself. It was easier for me to think sensibly when I was alone. She poured a generous cascade of sugar down the side of the mound of tea leaves, which was the way I liked it, since the
tea was so bitter. She doused it in hot water and passed it to me. The scalding rush gave some clarity to my thoughts.
“I can’t go,” she said.
“Why not?”
She took the mate back from me and filled it for herself. An expression of fatigue passed briefly over her face. “If I go home, they won’t let me leave again. I’ll never get out.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had to argue for a whole year to make them send me to the university. They wanted me to marry when I was twenty, to a neighbor of theirs. I’m twenty-seven. Did you know that? They think I’ll never get married. My mother prays about it. But I have to finish my degree.”
The sun broke through the cloudy day, and now, through the doorway, I could see the disorder of the kitchen: the sink was filled with dishes, and a chicken carcass lay exposed on the counter. The air in the apartment was stale, I noticed now. She looked thin.
“How long has it been since you went out?” I said.
“Oh, a day or two.” She concentrated. “Two days.”
“You’re so afraid?”
She frowned. “Afraid, no. I never feel afraid. But I’m cautious when I need to be.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
She looked at me carefully. Then she refilled the mate and passed it to me. “You should remember sometimes that this is different for Argentines. I’m not on a visa, Anne. This is my country.”
She knew, I thought. She knew everything about Román and the warehouse, and she was afraid, no matter what she said. She was lying low. Her fingernails were bitten.
“I’m worried, that’s all,” I said. “You look tired.”
She waved her hand dismissively.
“I’m scared myself,” I added, trying to be conciliatory. “I’ve been at the Canadian consulate twice since it happened. They say they can’t do anything.” I stood up. “Let me tidy up.”
“No, no. You can’t do that.”
“You’re not feeling well, I can see it.”
I went into the kitchen and ran water in the sink. I heard her switch on the radio in the living room, and then the drone of the news. The words comunistas, subversivos. When I looked in on her again, she was asleep on the sofa, one foot dangling over the edge.
I took a few minutes to go through the papers on her desk, but found only class notes and a stack of letters from a grandmother in Mendoza. There was nothing under her mattress; the boxes in her closet contained only shoes.
Back in the living room, I caught my breath, straightened my blouse. She was still asleep, her arm crossed over her stomach. I pulled a blanket over her and quietly let myself out.
Gerry said I must be careful. “They’re backed into a corner now,” he said. “They may be unpredictable. You’ve gotten all you can. We need to get you out.”
But he had no way to get me out. Every time I called him, he said he was working on finding me a visa, that he had another man to try, that it would be soon, very soon, but not yet. The American delegation had gone dormant and he was now working through the back channels of the Argentine state, or what remained of it, trying to call in favors. In the midst of this, he learned that Nico had disappeared, together with his wife.
The story was simple. It had all come out in the first weeks after the coup. Nico was a Peronista. Juan Perón and his old allies in Argentina, who had never stopped working for his return from exile, had seen an opportunity in the much-predicted coup. They had hoped to make Onganía look like a CIA puppet, to turn the people against him. With Illia gone and Onganía weakened, they could bring Juan Perón triumphantly home from Spain and reinstall him in the Casa Rosada. To that end, it now seemed clear, Nico had given me up to the Buenos Aires police on the day of the coup. Nico had worked for years for Aliadas, for the CIA, pretending. Coming to my apartment with that gun—giving it to me, I thought now, so the police could find it later. The smile, taking cigarettes from my pack. Sitting with me in his own kitchen. In mine.
“What about the man he had follow me?” I said. “Who was he really working for?”
“We can’t be sure, now. It’s thrown everything into chaos.”
“Christ.”
“We can’t be sure where Nico is, either,” Gerry said. “If we’re lucky, he’s left the country. But if he’s still in Buenos Aires, he could be dangerous.”
“He doesn’t know where I am,” I said.
The ports, the airport, and the bus stations were still closed to foreign passports. Onganía was on the radio talking about Argentine sovereignty and freedom from foreign influence. People were having their papers inspected on the bus.
On the street and in cafés, people were beginning to use the word dictador. There were rumors that a couple of journalists had disappeared in Córdoba, and that a meeting of the carpenters’ union in La Boca had been broken up by police. A satirical magazine called Tía Vicenta published a cartoon that depicted Onganía as a fat walrus with a bristling mustache, and the magazine was shut down for a month. I felt a little sick when I heard this news. It boded badly for everyone if the general was this sensitive, if his dignity was so fragile.
I told James about the walrus cartoon. He had already heard.
“No sense of humor,” I said.
“None whatsoever.”
“It’s like having a child in charge,” I said. “The pettiness of it.” I was chewing my nail. I thought of the building-sized images of Stalin and Mao, which were laughable and yet were not laughed at. Onganía so proud of his mustache. There was guilt mixed into my fear. The Americans liked him so much.
“Did we do this?” I said to Gerry, the next time I spoke to him.
“What do you mean?”
“This. All this. You know what I mean.”
“We only create conditions,” Gerry said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means what I said. You sound irritable.”
“They’re cracking down harder because of the bomb plot,” I said. “I’ve heard the chief of police talking about it on the radio. An excuse to tighten the curfew.”
“Well, that’s standard operating procedure. I’m not surprised.”
I rubbed my chin. I had been grinding my teeth lately, and it was hurting my jaw.
“Maybe I should just try again with cash,” I said, meaning: make another run at the ferry terminal and hope for better luck this time.
“I can’t recommend that. The whole country is in a very paranoid frame of mind right now.”
To soothe myself I went to department stores. As a child I had been comforted by the gold-trimmed counters at Bloomingdale’s on Christmas trips with my mother; she was warm and surprising at those times, because she loved to spend money. She made a good living and had grown up with very little, and she bought me things that awed me, gloves and handbags stitched elaborately with seed pearls and silk thread, tiny cut-crystal bottles of perfume, winter coats trimmed with leather. Things I never asked for and didn’t know how to handle or repair. When she gave me these things she would turn them over and inside out so I could see their construction. It was important to her that I understand how to spot cheap leather and bad shoes. I didn’t understand then what she thought she was protecting me from. I understood better when I was grown up and on my own and had no money. It was love, when she towed me around the Junior Miss section and had arduous conversations with salesgirls. That was her at her best.
So I went to the Retiro neighborhood and spent afternoons in Harrods. It had lovely tiled floors. I took armfuls of dresses into the dressing rooms, which were lined with benches upholstered in plum velvet, and spent thirty or forty minutes at a time trying on silk crepe. I spoke as little as possible; I waved away the salesgirls, not wanting to display my foreign accent if I could avoid it. I read books in the Harrods tea shop and eavesdropped as the waitresses repeated rumors that the English had anchored a destroyer off the Falkland Islands. For a week or two that winter I heard that rumor everywhere on
my short trips outside the apartment, in grocery stores and at newspaper kiosks. These stories of English perfidy in the islands always came up when the president of Argentina was unpopular, and they worked their magic, every time. There were fewer complaints about Onganía for a while. On a Tuesday I arrived at Harrods and found that someone had thrown a brick through one of the display windows, inside of which a mannequin’s fur coat sparkled with crushed glass. Fuera de Argentina ingleses de mierda was painted on the wall. Harrods was of course a British enterprise. I stopped going there.
There were protests against Onganía in Córdoba, and during a melee with the police on one of the broad avenues, a student was shot. He hung on for five days in the hospital and then he died, and graffiti appeared on walls around the Universidad Central, his name and the dates of his birth and death. The messages were always painted over quickly but they kept reappearing. Bars where students liked to go were nearly empty. Plainclothes police lounged conspicuously in the windows.
APRIL 1960
MIDTOWN, NEW YORK CITY
After Con Edison, I got a job as the night girl at WVBI, the radio station. The nocturnal life appealed to me. The night shift, which began at eight o’clock in the evening, paid more than the day.
We worked on Forty-Sixth Street, across from a theater that cycled through cha-cha revues and a fur emporium where you could pay to have your minks stored in a refrigerated box. The night girl at WVBI was expected to sweep the floors, empty the ashtrays, brew coffee, and handle the switchboard for callers who wanted to dedicate songs.
We had an elderly engineer named Kirkland who began drinking at midnight and started missing his cues at two, and Hal, the station manager, handled it by making Kirkland teach me his trade so I could step in when he began to fade. Kirkland was offended by it at first, but he could see the use of it. He was about seventy years old, with a courtly manner that was not undone by the smell of bourbon in the air.
Who Is Vera Kelly? Page 13
