“Listen, in Ciudad Oculta there is in fact a church with quite a lot of history. Nuestra Señora del Carmen. During the dictatorship various social militants were disappeared in the area. Years ago I covered a Mass that Bergoglio gave in the street, in that parish.”
“Don’t tell me that the Archbishop of Buenos Aires takes Mass in Ciudad Oculta?”
“No, obviously not. It was for a fiesta of the Peruvian community, which is quite important in Oculta, although less so than in the Villa 1-11-14. I interviewed the parish priest at the time. They have a soup kitchen for single mothers and their children.”
“I happen to be looking for exactly that: single mothers with children.”
Álex scrolled through the contacts on his phone.
“Make a note. The priest is called Pedro, like the first ever pope. Say I told you to call. Look out, though: as far as I know he’s taken a vote of poverty and obedience. I don’t know if he took the celibacy one.”
II
It was true that she didn’t have any Gucci handbags, but she still didn’t know how best to dress for a shanty town. Verónica had spoken to the priest and Pedro had invited her to visit that same afternoon, even though she hadn’t told him what it was she wanted to talk to him about.
She settled on a fairly discreet pair of black trousers, some low shoes that seemed horrible to her and a dark crimson sweater which she hadn’t worn since the days when she used to like punishing herself by wearing clothes that made her feel ridiculous. She asked her sister Leticia if she could borrow the car again; her sister had got so used to lending it to her that she didn’t even ask where she was going.
This journey to the capital’s southern neighbourhoods was more congenial second time round, even though Verónica took a different route. This time she didn’t go by the freeway but took Avenida Eva Perón and circled Ciudad Oculta before turning onto Avenida Piedrabuena. She looked around for a paid parking lot, before deciding to leave the car in the street.
The priest was waiting for her at the entrance to the villa, at the intersection of Piedrabuena and Argentina. He was easily recognizable by his clothes: a greyish-blue shirt with a mandarin collar and a space for that white strip usually worn by priests. He also wore tight petrol blue jeans like the kind favoured by a 1960s rockabilly. His belt, with its rectangular buckle, seemed designed to go with the collar and its rectangular insert.
On top of that he was wearing an unbuttoned black coat, which gave him a certain air of Neo, Keanu Reeves’ character in The Matrix, only ten years further down the line. Her eye was particularly drawn to one detail: the priest was bald. Or rather, he shaved his head. You could tell that his baldness was the result of a lot of time spent in front of the mirror with a razor. For some reason, and without knowing why (she was Jewish, after all, and oblivious to the precepts of Rome), she found this evidence of narcissism shocking.
He seemed to recognize her too. Was she also dressed in a uniform that could be decoded? The uniform of a journalist? Or of a middle-class girl about to plunge into a shanty town?
“You’re Father Pedro, right?” she asked, by way of greeting. As a seasoned journalist she could have done better than that.
“Verónica?” He kissed her on the cheek as she was awkwardly extending her hand for a handshake. “Let’s not be formal. Please just call me Pedro, like everyone else here.” He gestured at the villa as though it were his domain. “If it’s all right with you, I suggest we go to the church and we can talk about what you need without interruptions.”
That part of the villa, at least, seemed not at all frightening. Verónica watched people going past, mothers and children, teenagers in school smocks, just like in any other neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. True, the houses looked more precarious, but there was nothing to suggest that she needed the company of a priest to keep her safe. If she had come on her own, she would have had no problem.
“I must seem like a rubbish journalist, asking someone dressed as a priest if he’s the priest I’ve come to meet.”
“I imagined you asked because you thought I could be a different priest. There’s a few of us here, you know.”
The light-hearted exchange emboldened her to say:
“I’ve always wondered about the white strip you all wear in your collar. What’s it called?”
They had arrived at the church, a humble brick building that rose sturdily from among the ramshackle homes surrounding it. The priest unlocked a door and ushered her into a kind of office.
“This,” he said, taking it off, “is a dog collar.”
He put it on a bookcase at one side of the room and hung the coat on a hanger, then motioned her towards a chair while he sat down on the other side of the desk. Pedro undid two buttons on his shirt and rolled up his shirtsleeves as he explained.
“The dog collar replaced the soutane. The truth is we don’t use it much. I walk around here without it. It’s not an essential part of being seen as a priest.”
“They don’t oblige you to wear the dog collar?”
“We Salesians take a very broad view of life. Are you Catholic? Normally I wouldn’t ask someone who comes here what religion they are, but I can see you’re interested in questions of sacerdotal etiquette.”
“That must be because I’m Jewish. I’m curious about all things Christian.”
“Well, interestingly, non-Orthodox rabbis tend to dress much more informally than us Catholics. Would you like a coffee or some water?”
The offer seemed more like a way of ending the conversation about religion. Verónica declined it and told him about what she had come to look for in Ciudad Oculta. She explained that she was carrying out a journalistic investigation into children who had been knocked down by trains. That two of the boys were from that villa and she wanted to speak to their families.
“I know about those two cases,” said Father Pedro.
He had lost the breezy tone of their first exchanges and seemed to be looking into her eyes as though trying to read her mind. It would be better not to hide the truth from him.
“Some of the information I have found and some of the conclusions I’ve reached are making me think that these weren’t mere accidents, that there’s something behind them. Something and someone, obviously.”
“And you think that the family knows.”
“The truth, Pedro, is that I’m quite lost in all of this. I have some clues, very few concrete facts and too many vanishing lines. No. I don’t necessarily believe that the family knows, but perhaps they can help me onto firmer ground, as far as the investigation is concerned.”
The priest drummed his fingers on the desk. He seemed to be sizing her up.
“The first case was three years ago.”
“Agustín Ramírez, son of Luciana Ramírez, eleven years old,” Verónica recited from memory.
“I knew them both well.” Pedro had let his hand rest; his expression had softened. “They came to our soup kitchen. Luciana left soon after Agustín’s death. She went to Santiago de Estero. She had family there. I don’t know how you’d find her.”
“And Vicen? Did you know him?”
The priest nodded. “Carmen and her other children live near here.”
“Vicen had brothers and sisters?”
“Four. He was the second. The youngest is a baby, just a few months old. Carmen has always taken immense care of her children. She doesn’t just bring them here to eat, she makes sure they have their vaccinations, she brings them to the infirmary we have here, and she does everything she can to make sure that the older ones go to school. Vicen was a loner and got into trouble sometimes, but all the kids from round here are like that. He was a good lad.”
“I’d like to speak to her.”
“She generally works in the mornings. We can see if she happens to be home.”
They walked about three hundred yards down the avenue that ran across the villa, before taking a turning to the right. The houses seemed more higgledy-piggledy in this
part of the town, as if they had been jammed in and squashed down, one next to the other. Pedro stopped in front of a rusty metal door which barely fit into the unplastered wall.
The door was opened by a slight woman of indefinite age, with very black short hair, dressed in a faded dressing gown with a black woollen jacket on top. Her sleeves were rolled up despite the cold. Pedro introduced them to each other and explained that Verónica was a journalist who was interested in knowing more about Vicen.
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
Verónica had remained a couple of feet behind the priest. Now she came forward a little and glanced into the house through the space left by the woman in the doorway. She was surprised to see that someone was looking back at her from inside. She was young and had a baby in her arms. Verónica stepped back again.
Pedro urged the woman to reconsider; it was always good, he said, to try to establish how things had happened. Vicen’s mother stood her ground. The face of the younger woman with the baby in her arms appeared behind her. She was a teenager, really. These must be Vicen’s siblings.
“Get back inside,” the woman admonished her. The teenager shrugged her shoulders and turned away.
Verónica thought of saying something then, but she realized there was no point. If the priest could not convince Vicen’s mother, she would be hard-pressed to come up with a better argument. She wanted to leave, to put a distance between herself and this woman who looked at her with such suspicion. She pictured herself as a roving reporter, probing the pain of victims in order to display it on air. But no, she didn’t want that. She wasn’t on the hunt for pain that could be turned into articles. She was looking for facts, leads. To shine a light on the murky circumstances of that boy’s death.
The woman closed the door and left the two of them standing there. Verónica was the one who said, “Let’s go”. The priest seemed more confused and frustrated than she was. They walked in silence back to the church. She saw the only firm lead she had crumbling and without it all her suspicions about the boys’ deaths appeared baseless. For a moment she felt that she had nothing, that she would have to abandon the investigation.
“This isn’t the time to give up, Verónica,” the priest said, as if reading her mind. “Let me speak to Carmen. Perhaps if I talk to her alone she’ll have a chance to reflect and tell us something that might be useful to you.”
They had stopped at the door of the church. Pedro’s words had moved her, and she had an urge to cry. She felt stupid for getting emotional over something said by a priest. It would be best to leave quickly. She asked him to call her if he heard about anything. He offered to accompany her out of the villa, but Verónica said no. When the priest insisted, she didn’t know if that was because it really was dangerous for her to walk on her own or if he just wanted to be nice. Either way, they reached Avenida Argentina without either of them having spoken a word.
She said goodbye to Pedro, crossed the avenue and walked towards her car. She was searching in her bag for the keys when she heard:
“Hey, Señora.”
On the other side of the car, standing on the sidewalk, was Vicen’s sister. She was alone this time, without the baby which had been in her arms minutes before.
“My brother was murdered, wasn’t he?”
She spoke in an almost-whisper that Verónica could barely hear. She was not entirely sure that those had been her words. Verónica walked around the car and towards the teenager. She glanced back towards the villa. It crossed her mind that at any minute the girl’s mother might appear and tell her to go back home. She thought of bundling her into the car and taking her further away, so that they could talk.
“When you left with the priest, I followed you. I wanted to speak to you.”
“What’s your name?”
“Milagros. Mili for short.”
On the next block there was a bar sign. Lightly she took the girl by the shoulder and said:
“Come.”
Mili followed her and they went into the bar. Verónica asked for a Coca-Cola for the girl and a coffee for herself. Mili seemed serious, but not uncomfortable. She was wearing a blue jumpsuit and a denim jacket, which she didn’t take off.
“Your brother was run over by a train, but I think he was on the tracks because somebody had taken him there.”
“Vicen was always getting into scrapes.”
She must have been fifteen or sixteen years old. Verónica thought her beautiful. She was attractive in that way that other women find aggressive and men find intimidating. Verónica would have liked to have been like that at her age.
“Did Vicen go to school?”
“Yes, he went. He had to take fourth grade again. My mum practically killed him.”
“Which school did he go to?”
“To 24, same as me.”
“Are you still studying?”
“I left in the second year.”
Verónica couldn’t bring herself to ask what Mili was doing now. She didn’t want to put herself in the position of an adult giving advice to an adolescent who might be taking drugs, or selling sex, or waiting for something to happen in her life that would take her out of the villa. She hadn’t come here for that. In a few years this girl would look like a thirty-year-old, and when she got to thirty she’d look fifty. In the best-case scenario, she’d have loads of children – that was if she didn’t die young at the hands of a drunk and violent husband.
“Outside school, who did your brother hang out with?”
“With kids from the barrio.”
“Kids his own age?”
Mili shrugged her shoulders, just as she had done when her mother had sent her back inside their shack.
“His age, or older, or younger.” Mili took a quick sip of her Coca-Cola and added: “He liked playing ball. He wanted to be a soccer player.”
“Did he go to any club?”
“Yes, he used to play at Spring Breezes. Once I heard him say that the coach was going to take him to River or Vélez to play there.”
“Can you remember what the coach was called?”
“No.” She took another sip and fell silent.
Verónica was about to ask another question, but something stopped her. Years ago, a photographer had given her a lesson in journalism. She had been twenty then and writing her first articles for a general interest magazine which, on this occasion, entailed interviewing a woman who had been the victim of medical malpractice. The woman had been wrongly diagnosed as suffering from a particular illness, and the medication she had been prescribed had left her sterile. Verónica’s questions, neatly written in a notebook, addressed the role of doctors, the hospital, the type of treatment the woman had received and the way in which the mistake had been discovered. At one point the woman had been talking about how her husband had convinced her that she should sue the clinic and the doctors, then she had fallen silent. Verónica had been about to use that silence to jump in with a question about the legal challenge when the photographer (a surly and cynical type of about forty, whom she still regarded as one of her best journalism teachers) put his hand on her knee. He had bent down to take a photo and from that position touched her leg. Verónica looked at him, puzzled. She thought that the photographer must be steadying himself, but he made a gesture with his mouth, a barely perceptible indication that she should keep quiet. When Verónica looked back at the patient, the woman started talking about how frustrating her life had been since the medical disaster, knowing that she would never have children; how this tragedy had been the catalyst for her marriage unravelling, because she and her husband had now separated. After the interview, the photographer had lit his umpteenth cigarette of the day and, as though in passing, said, “Sometimes saying nothing is the best question you could ask.” “If I don’t speak there’s no interview,” she had retorted, thinking she knew everything. “It’s like a song, sweetheart, like music,” he had responded. “You have to learn to hear that internal call for quiet, so th
at you can let the other person say the thing you’ve been wanting to hear since the interview began. If you were a man I’d explain it with a soccer metaphor that you’re not going to understand. You have to know how to leave gaps. And stop writing down your questions – it makes you look like a journalism student.”
And now that moment of silence had arrived with Mili. The girl took another sip of Coca-Cola, and retrieving from her memory something that had been seeking expression for a long time, she said:
“A few months ago the coach took him to a game at night. Vicen got back at like one o’clock in the morning. I ran into him on the avenue. He told me a load of bullshit. I mean, Vicen and I used to cuss each other a lot. We were always fighting. I told him that that was no time for an idiot like him to be out in the street. He said something similar back to me. To mock him, I took out a hundred-peso note that I’d been saving, and he took another hundred-peso note out of his own trouser pocket. I was stunned. I thought that he must have fallen in with one of those degenerates. I totally lost it. I grabbed him by the neck and slapped him a couple of times, asking where he had got that money. Any other time he would have slapped me back twice as hard, but this time he looked scared and he said, ‘I won it in a contest against another guy.’ I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t want to say anything to my mum, either. The day that he got run over by the train he had said he was going to watch a match, but I think he went back to the same place where he got that money.”
“Did he tell you what kind of game it was?”
“Yes, but I didn’t understand. It sounded like something he made up to get me to stop hitting him. It was against another kid. That’s all I remember.”
12 Light Years
I
“Do you know what time it is?”
“No.”
“Half past five.”
Verónica was talking to him from bed. He had got up a few minutes earlier with a dry mouth and gone quietly to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of tap water. Then he had returned to the bedroom, taking care not to bump into anything, trying to remember where each thing was: the desk, the armchairs, the coffee table, the bedroom door, the wardrobe. In the bedroom he could hear Verónica’s steady breathing. Light from the street filtered in between the slats of the lowered venetian blind. He walked to the window and looked out. There were no cars or pedestrians. That was when Verónica woke up and spoke to him.
The Fragility of Bodies Page 19
