Hanging on a brick wall within view is a collection of stirrups. And in a glass cabinet different types of receptacles and gourds for drinking maté. The rugs scattered around the room are all animal hides: cow, sheep, lamb. On a high stool there’s a photograph of a horse saddled up and beside it two silver embellished belts typically worn by gauchos and a long knife in its sheath. It doesn’t get more Argentine than this, the Crime boy tells himself. All they need now is some zamba music, he thinks, and guesses that if it were the weekend there would indeed be zamba playing. Behind what appears to be a bar, hanging on a wall which still shows the outline of a door that has been filled in, there’s a large shield with the words Exaltación de la Cruz embroidered near the top. That does strike the boy as different; it’s not something he’s seen before. It’s not an object he would choose to include if someone told him to draw the elements of a typical farm or ranch. The boy snaps it from several angles. Casabets’ wife watches and suddenly seems alert, not to the boy and his photographing but to some noise coming from afar; she cocks her head, like one of those dogs that can hear a sound before their owners. He’s coming now, she says, and soon they hear the galloping of a horse. A few minutes later the door opens and a man walks in, dressed from the waist down for the country (gaucho trousers and espadrilles) and from the waist up for the city (a sun-bleached Chemise Lacoste T-shirt). In his hand he carries a shapeless wide-brimmed hat. The man looks at his wife as though nobody else were present and says: Yes? He waits for her to explain who these people are that he neither greets nor even looks at. These gentlemen know some people who know you, and they want to talk to you. And who are these people that know me? Casabets asks, still not looking at them. Luis Collazo, for example, says the Crime boy. Luis Collazo, the man repeats, then walks over to the bar and pours himself a whisky without offering one to them. So Luis Collazo speaks about me and counts me among his acquaintances. The man sits down in an armchair beside the window and crosses his legs, his eyes fixed on the whisky as he swirls it in the glass. The woman looks at him. The Crime boy looks at Jaime Brena, waiting for him to make the decision about what to tell and what not. Brena, seeing that they can’t continue in this elusive vein, says: Look, Casabets, I’m going to be honest with you. We know Luis Collazo, but we’re not here because he sent us. We’re journalists investigating a series of deaths, all of people that you knew. Does anyone still care about the deaths of Gloria Echagüe and Pedro Chazarreta? the man asks. Lots of people care, yes, but I’m not just talking about them. So who else? Gandolfini, who died in a car accident, Bengoechea, who died skiing, and Marcos Miranda, who died in a shooting in New Jersey. Marcos Miranda is dead too? the man asks. Yes, says Brena, and also Luis Collazo, who’s just been found hanged. Casabets looks at him impassively, expressionless, as though he hadn’t heard him. But he has heard, because he then looks at his wife and makes a face, a barely perceptible smile, and says to her: There’s nobody left. She doesn’t answer, but it’s clear that she knows what her husband is talking about. Nobody left, Casabets says again and grins openly. But Brena corrects him. Yes, there is someone left: you. And he gestures to the Crime boy to hand over the photograph of Chazarreta’s friends. What is that? asks the woman, and tries to take it before it reaches her husband. Leave it, he says, let me see. And don’t worry, I’ve already explained to you that there’s nothing to worry about. Casabets looks around the room for his glasses then sits back down. He studies the photo and nods several times. We’re concerned that the deaths of the men in this photograph were not accidental and that you may be in danger, the Crime boy says. The woman looks anxious. Casabets laughs. He points at himself in the photograph. Nothing can happen to this guy here; he died a long, long time ago, if I’m not mistaken, a few days after this photograph was taken. Emilio, says the woman, perhaps — but he cuts her short: Perhaps nothing. Have you also failed to understand that the man in this photo is dead? No, I understand, but — she begins and he interrupts her again: If everyone in this photograph is dead, it’s because they deserved it. Apart from this boy, he says, pointing to himself again. He didn’t deserve to die, but they killed him anyway. One day someone was going to get him justice. Justice for what? Brena asks. The man scowls at him: Don’t you listen? he says, and knocks back the rest of the whisky. Who got justice? the boy asks. It must have been God, the man replies. It seems to me that these deaths are the result of a man’s actions, not God’s, Brena ventures. If it was a man, who could it have been? Casabets considers the question, not wanting to enter into Jaime Brena’s game but unable to avoid it, either. He takes the photograph back and examines it more closely. He looks thoughtful, but not worried. If it was necessary to get justice then there must have been a crime; what was the crime, and who got justice? Brena presses. If it wasn’t God…, says Casabets, who seems to have accepted the challenge and, still looking at the photograph, starts to smile as if he finally knows the answer. If not God… Who? Brena tries again. The man knows; they can tell he knows. Brena is sure, now they’ve got God out of the way, that he knows. This photograph was taken on a date very close to that day, Casabets says. Which day? That’s enough, says the woman, please don’t take this any further. Leave them alone, Casabets tells her, let them. Then he looks at the Crime boy and says: How many men are in this photo? Six, the boy replies. Wrong, says Casabets. And what about you? He turns to Brena. You have a more experienced eye – how many do you think there are? I’m sorry, even to my more experienced eye there are only six. What a shame, says Casabets. You’re missing the most important thing: seeing what isn’t there. On that day, the day that I’m not going to bring back to mind, we were all there, he says, the ones you see and the ones you can’t see. The same as in this photo. Casabets throws it onto the table and continues: Sometimes the witnesses get the worst of it; the pain can be more intense even for them than the victim. They feel so guilty for not having been able to avert the tragedy, for not having done anything. The man stands up. How could I have forgotten about him? About who? Brena asks. Either he or I was going to kill them… and I’m a coward. Casabets doesn’t go on. He knocks back his whisky in one go, leaves the glass on the bar and acts as though he hadn’t heard Jaime Brena’s question. He looks up at the shield of the Exaltación de la Cruz and stays in this attitude for a moment, with his back to them, contemplating it. Or perhaps he’s contemplating the boarded-up door. Who do you think embroidered this? he asks. Then he turns to face them, smiles and says: Isn’t it incredible? What is that shield exactly? Jaime Brena asks. It’s the shield of Exaltación de la Cruz, the region to which this town, Capilla del Señor, belongs. In 1940 the mayor, a man called Botta, commissioned a shield to depict local historical events. A shield is like a heart, don’t you think? Two atria, two ventricles. I was going to study medicine, I was going to be a doctor, but that was before… Casabets seems waylaid for a moment by this thought that he doesn’t share, then takes up his story again: It was the municipal secretary José Peluso who came up with this design. What’s in the left atrium? asks Casabets, pointing to the shield’s first quarter. It’s a cross, says Jaime Brena. Yes, very good, a cross, representing the founding of the town by Francisco Casco. And in the right atrium? he asks the Crime boy, in the tone of a secondary school teacher. Is it a wagon – or a cart? A wagon, yes, the wagon that carried the image of the Virgin Mary and that came to a stop at the other end of Route 6, so giving rise to the legend of the Virgin of Luján. Because, in truth, all stories are legends – yours, mine, the Virgin Mary’s, right? he says, looking at Brena. I agree with you there, Brena says. Left ventricle, two ears of corn representing the fertility of the land, and right ventricle, a pen, because this is where Rivadavia founded the first state primary school in 1821. What else can you see? he asks. Give us a clue, says Jaime Brena. A silver thread, says Casabets and points. See this grey line separating the left and right sides? That’s a stream, the Arroyo de la Cruz. Emilio Casabets sighs and seems tired. I’m going to have a nap, he says, wa
lking over to his wife. He kisses her on the lips. Don’t worry, he says, don’t worry. It’s all over now. And he goes off towards the bedrooms, calling back to her: Go with them as far as the cattle gate. The woman stands up. I’ll take you now, she says. Jaime Brena looks at her for a moment. Can you explain any of this to us? There’s nothing to explain, she replies, my husband has already said everything he had to say. Come, I’ll take you up to the cattle gate. Jaime Brena tries again: Look, I respect your and your husband’s silence on this, but the truth is that he may be in danger. Why wouldn’t the person who killed your husband’s friends not come looking for him next? They weren’t his friends, she says, bitterly, and nobody will come for him because Emilio didn’t do anything. So what did the others do? The woman says nothing. Now it’s the Crime boy who says: Somebody who kills five people or who arranges for them to be killed doesn’t think like us, doesn’t use the same logic. We’re talking about a murderer. Do you really believe, Señora Casabets, that you can know what’s going through the mind of a murderer? Do you think there’s always an explanation for murder that’s comprehensible to the rest of us? The woman begins to look doubtful. Seeing this, Jaime Brena gestures to the Crime boy to keep up the pressure. If the murderer thinks that your husband could give him away, the boy says, don’t you think he might come for him even if he hasn’t done anything? The woman looks at him for a moment, then says: Wait for me at the cattle gate, I’ll follow behind.
Five minutes after Jaime Brena and the Crime boy get to the cattle gate, Casabets’ wife arrives in an old Ford Ranger with mud-caked wheels. When she sees Jaime Brena smoking, she asks him for a cigarette: Emilio doesn’t like me smoking, she says, taking her first drag. Do you also believe that my husband could be in danger? she asks Brena. On my honour, Señora, I truly believe that he could be, Brena says intently. She thinks for a moment, takes two or three more puffs on the cigarette and then begins to tell them what she knows.
Little Ranch was a group of friends in their late teens, the ones you saw in that photograph. They had fun just like any other boys that age, but they also used to enjoy being provocative. That was their greatest pleasure: bothering people. The woman draws deeply on the cigarette. Jaime Brena and the Crime boy wait for her. She exhales the smoke and continues: Whenever the Little Ranch boys arrived at a party or a get-together everything would stop and soon the party would begin to revolve around them. Maybe because the people there admired them, maybe because they were scared of them. They were a gang of “bad boys”, and if you couldn’t be part of the gang, you certainly wanted it on your side. And Emilio, even though he was scared of them, wanted to belong. The woman takes two more drags then throws the cigarette butt on the ground and crushes it with the tip of her shoe. Before any new member could be accepted into the gang, she says, the candidate had to submit to an initiation ceremony: break into the carriage of an abandoned train, drink urine, walk down the most godforsaken street in the dark, go into a graveyard at midnight. But when it came to Emilio, Chazarreta asked for more. The woman falls silent now, and it’s clear that she isn’t pausing but saying that the story ends there, or that she wants to end it there with those fateful words: Chazarreta asked for more. Her eyes are red with anger. She asks for another cigarette. Jaime Brena passes her the packet, waits for her to take one and put it in her mouth, then lights it for her. The woman still says nothing. What did they ask of him? Brena prompts. She continues with difficulty: It wasn’t a request as such; it’s not what they asked of him but what they did to him, she says, and her voice breaks. Forgive me, but I need to ask: what did they do to him? Brena says. Don’t make me say it, the woman begs, her lips pressed together in rage. Brena stares into her eyes, trying to gauge if he should say this or not, trying to ascertain whether the woman really wants silence or for someone to say the words aloud once and for all, for someone to find words to describe what happened so that it will hurt less, if such a thing is possible. Then Jaime Brena makes his decision and says: Chazarreta raped him. The woman tightens her jaw and tears start to roll down her cheeks, big, hot tears, shed for someone else’s pain. Then she corrects him: Not just Chazarreta – all of them. And once she’s said this, she really does weep with abandon. The words and the weeping get mixed up. All five of them, she seems to say between sobs, all five of them raped him. Though inevitable, the woman’s distress make them uncomfortable. The Crime boy moves as though to comfort her, but Brena stops him with a gesture and mouths the words: let her cry. When she’s managed to calm down, she continues: We’ve been married thirty years, but I knew nothing about it; he never told me, never. He told me only recently, one night not long after Gloria Echagüe was killed. He couldn’t tell me before, you see. Then these people started appearing on the news, in the papers, in magazines, and the memory of that horror which had been dead and buried came back to him. The woman dries her tears, breathes deeply and makes an effort to speak calmly, in spite of what she has to say. He told me everything, how they took it in turns to penetrate him, he told me all the details, the smell of the place, the beating, the shouting, his face scraping against the brick wall, the pain, the laughter and then the shame, the silence. He made me promise that we’d never speak about it again. Emilio had never told anyone, do you understand, not even his parents. He never could. She starts to cry again. How can somebody keep something like that quiet for so long? He had buried everything, he’d killed the boy he was and been reborn as someone different, as far as he could; as another person. That’s how I knew him, as another person. I’m never going to know how he was before, at the time of that photograph. When these people reappeared, it brought back all the dead memories and didn’t resuscitate the Emilio who had died, but instead reminded him that he was dead. He looked for them, all of them – he needed to look for them, he spoke to them, he even met Miranda when he was on a visit to this country. They denied everything. As if it had never happened. As if he were mad. Emilio wanted only for them to recognize the damage they had done, for them to say sorry, but no: the bastards wouldn’t even give him that, they wouldn’t make even the smallest atonement. That was a very hard blow for my husband. It was then that he thought of buying this house and land. It wasn’t for sale but he set his sights on it, made the owners a very good offer and got it. I didn’t want it, I fought him all the way, but eventually I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to stop him. It had to be this farm. This and no other. Why this place in particular? the Crime boy asks, almost dreading the reply that he can already feel coming. Years ago this was the Chazarreta family’s farm, the woman says. Her chin trembles, but she doesn’t want to give in to the tears; she contains herself and speaks through the tremors: The place where they raped my husband, the place where they killed the man he had been until that day, for ever. After the others had denied everything, he came here, he went back to the basement where they had violated him. He needed to confront those mute witnesses, the walls, the bricks. He needed confirmation that he was not mad. And there it was. The same place, same smell, same damp. We bought the farm and soon afterwards we came to live here. He spent a whole week holed up in there, not speaking to anyone, barely eating. And when he came out, he bricked up the door himself, the one that’s hidden behind the Exaltación de la Cruz shield. He covered it over for ever. Since that day he’s never spoken another word about what happened and he’s never left the farm except to go into town with me, to the bank or the doctor, then back. Now the woman does cry again. The Crime boy gets a bottle of water from the car and offers it to her. She drinks, then awkwardly dries her eyes. I knew nothing. I lived alongside him and yet I knew nothing until the cursed day Gloria Echagüe was killed and they all came crawling out of the woodwork. Do you know who your husband believes to be the murderer? No, and I don’t think he’d tell me; he won’t talk about it again. Try to get him to talk anyway, Brena urges. I swore to him that I would never raise the subject again, she says. But this is a case of force majeure, he insists. I don’t know if I’l
l be able to. If you can, if he happens to give you any information that you think could be useful to us, please call me, says Jaime Brena, and he gives her his card. And if you discover anything that may endanger my husband’s life, tell me, too, the woman asks. Don’t worry, you can be sure that we will.
Betty Boo Page 24
