Mapuche Read online

  *

  On her deathbed, Jana’s great-grandmother had given her a knife. Angela was the last woman of the Selk’nam, a people related to the Mapuches that had lived for centuries in Tierra del Fuego. One day fishing boats had come to their cold and icy islands, bringing diseases and weapons, and the Selk’nam all died. Angela was the only one left, and she was so old that her hands were all wrinkles. Jana was seven years old but she was the eldest daughter, and a little Selk’nam blood flowed in her veins. Angela had given the little girl her old knife with the whalebone handle so that at least her memory would be preserved. And especially, she had told her the secret of the Hain, that fantastic drama. Jana had kept both of them warm in her memory full of stories that the old woman had been telling her since she was an infant: Shoort, Xalpen, Shénu, and Kulan, who came down from the sky to torment humans, fabulous stories.

  Jana had grown up on the pampas of Chubut province, in the middle of the world’s most fertile plains. At that time, there were two cows, a heifer so timid that they’d had to pull her out of her mother’s body, Eyew (“down there,” in Mapudungun), and her sister Ti kude (“the old one”; it wasn’t clear why she was given this name). An affectionate, lively, and curious child, Jana knew the sound of tall grass and the wind that blew over it, deciphered its many voices, the strings with gloomy sounds and the brief whistles in stems as rigid as wires, the moaning of the wind that grew and died away among the smooth reeds of the marshes, bearing light rain or a thunderstorm. The flatness of the place made her see what we can only guess, and guess what we do not see. She was eleven years old and, like all little Mapuche girls in the countryside, knew little about the world around her. She knew her father’s resolute voice, her mother’s strong hands and rare smile, races and fights with her brothers, but she did not yet know the winka—the outsiders. Traditionally, the Mapuches saw the state and Western society as at best a foreign body, at worst an implacable enemy. For her, they were still only abstract silhouettes, names.

  Some of them occasionally came along with their big cars, their skimpy clothes, and their neckties. They discussed matters with her father, who was the community’s envoy, its werken. His name was Cacho, and his eloquence authorized him to speak in the name of the others. The fate of all of them depended on his know-how. They counted on him, because problems were multiplying. Cacho became gloomier day by day. He had not told his children about the expulsions to which the community was being subjected, about their claims to retain their ancestral lands—and let them continue to go to school, study, and become lawyers in order to defend the rights of their people.

  No one suspected what was about to happen. Jana was asleep in bed with her sister when the carabineros broke down the door of their house. Giants with steel heads stormed into their home, howling like devils, guns in their hands. The girls woke up, terrified. The men pulled them out of bed and then threw them into the arms of their mother, who was trembling with fear in the kitchen with the rest of the family. They insulted them in Castilian Spanish, breaking everything of the little they had with a ferocious frenzy. Their spiked boots slammed the furniture into the wall, their soldier’s physiques, their voices like roof beams falling on you, the military insignias on their uniforms, their caps: Jana was petrified, hypnotized by the fury of their violence.

  When there was nothing still standing, when everything had been reduced to ruins, they started beating her father, the messenger, kicking him with their boots and hitting him on the head and spine with their truncheons: the carabineros went at it full tilt, several of them at once, shouting to egg each other on, while the werken writhed on the floor. His wife was moaning the way pumas do when facing the hunter’s rifle, crushed by fear, pressing her daughters to her nightshirt. Jana couldn’t see anything but them: the winka were ugly, frightening, as tall as cranes, destroying everything in their way, bellowing insults that she could not understand at the age of eleven. Beaten, lying amid the debris of the devastated kitchen, he father no longer protested. A thread of bloody saliva was flowing over his split lips. His eyes closed, Cacho did not see the men in helmets push the children away to seize his wife. Jana did see it.

  She had looked Evil in the eye. She had seen its pale, grimacing face, pupil to pupil, and her mother groaning with terror when, laughing, they tore off her nightshirt to humiliate her.

  Jana was then eleven years old, and her breasts had not grown since. Not the slightest stirring. Days, months, years had passed, but her chest had remained hopelessly dry, an arid land, without life, like her ancestors who had been driven off their lands. Her chest had become her taboo, her pain and her shame. A supreme and cruel insult to femininity that all men would mock, breasts of bone, scorched earth, two dead fish floating on the surface, butterflies on pins, breasts that had nothing to give, or milk of curdled blood, breasts that would never nurse children: at the age of eleven, Jana had amputated herself.

  She had never talked about them, never showed them to anyone, not even Paula. The first boy with whom she had made love had not asked any questions, and the later ones thought only about sex, Furlan about his sculptures, no other man had counted for more than the time necessary to satisfy her needs. Jana banged her jaw on the steering wheel of the Ford—what was she thinking, that she was going to seduce Calderón with her dirty little monsters?

  The windshield wipers struggled against the storm. Vega 5510, Palermo Hollywood. Paula was waiting in front of the Niceto, sheltered from the rain, when she saw the old jalopy’s headlights: her heels clattering on the sidewalk, her striped purse held over her head to protect herself from the rain, she ran over the paving stones without falling, opened the door, and broke into tears in Jana’s arms.

  “What’s wrong? Did it go badly?”

  She tried to calm Paula down, but her frail shoulders were heaving under her coat glistening with raindrops. Impossible to stop her. Jana gently pushed back her friend, whose mascara was running down her cheeks that were burning after the interview she’d just had.

  “Well?”

  “I . . . I got the job in the revue,” the transvestite stammered. “Someone backed out . . . I saw the choreographer, Gelman. He’s hiring me for the three dates in Buenos Aires . . . It’s . . . more than I hoped for, Jana, so much more!”

  The Mapuche grinned with pugnacious joy at the transvestite’s tears: three shows in a fashionable club weren’t going to get Paula out of her rut, away from blowjobs in cars and teeth knocked out when she met the wrong person, but the first steps are always the hardest, aren’t they?

  “That’s great, old girl, I’m sure you’re going to make a great hit! Come on, stop crying, you’re getting mascara all over!”

  Rain was still falling on the Ford’s cracked windshield. Paula was gripped by a vague happiness so intense that it took her a good two minutes to pull herself together. Jana handed her the packet of Kleenex that was gathering dust in the glove compartment and helped her dry her tears.

  “Thanks,” Paula sniffed. “Thanks . . . and how about you?” she asked, hardly over her emotions. “What happened with the detective?”

  “He sent me packing,” the sculptress replied, growing somber.

  “Ooh . . . ”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m disappointed,” Paula said sadly. “He looked like such a nice guy.”

  “You see, that’s not enough.”

  Before getting back in the car, Jana had walked a quarter of an hour in the storm to calm herself down—yes, she had really acted like the stupidest of idiots.

  “But that’s all right,” she declared. “We’ll manage without him.”

  “Ah?”

  “Next week the troupe will have left the Niceto and you’ll be on the street. You definitely can’t be out there when there’s a killer on the loose. Luz might have left papers in his squat that would allow us to identify him; then the cops will be forced to notify his famil
y and undertake an investigation worthy of the name. You know where Luz lives, right? Let’s go to her place and see if we can find anything.”

  There was a cosmic silence in the car.

  “In the barrio?” Paula gulped. “In the middle of the night?”

  “Don’t worry. No one’s around at this hour.”

  “Precisely. What if we’re attacked?”

  Her grimace circled her mouth three times. Jana chortled and that did them a world of good—she too was near the breaking point.

  *

  Poverty had been spread out over the Buenos Aires checkerboard. Unlike the shantytowns of Greater Buenos Aires built on public dumps or flood zones, the barrios formed pockets of poverty in the heart of the city. The people crammed into them experienced unbearable living conditions unimaginable for the middle classes and without equivalent on the South American continent. Driven out of the center of the city during the dictatorship, there were now a hundred and fifty thousand of them living scattered in the barrios, lacking everything—potable water, education, medicine. Illiteracy and delinquency completed the picture of the impoverished group that was here, as elsewhere, in a very bad situation.

  Squeezed between the Retiro bus station, through which employees came in from the suburbs and tourists left for Iguazú Falls, Villa 31 was the gaudiest shantytown in Buenos Aires. Luz lived in the nearby wasteland, a dozen acres left vacant alongside the San Martin rail station that hundreds of families, many of them foreigners, had taken over a few months earlier during the excitement—and with a few gunshots to settle disputes. Francisco Torres, the mayor of Buenos Aires, had sent in the police, but the squatters had driven them back, laying claim to the land and access to water and electricity.

  With the expanding holes in the floorboards and the bath towel stuffed in the door to protect against the rain, Jana’s Ford was not much out of place in Villa 31: they were coming into a disaster area, a succession of hovels made of bits and pieces of junk that were hard to identify in the dark. According to Paula, who had helped her protégée move in, Luz lived in a shack next to a stable.

  The dirt path that crossed the barrio was strewn with rubbish; the Ford dodged potholes and sleeping dogs, braving the shadows that danced just beyond the headlights’ range. They passed several unlighted shacks with crisscrossing illegal electrical hookups before finding the stable in question. Luz was squatting in the structure next door, a pile of red bricks and concrete blocks roofed with corrugated iron.

  Jana turned off her headlights, immediately plunging them into darkness. The place was sinister, deserted.

  “Let’s go,” she said, grabbing the flashlight in the glove compartment.

  They shut the car doors carefully, as if the shadows might betray them. Paula walked with great caution, but her heels still slipped in the mud.

  “You O.K., Lady Di?” Jana whispered.

  “Fuck,” she grumbled, catching herself by gripping Jana’s arm.

  Two luminous points appeared in the flashlight’s beam: the eyes of a scruffy dog that was lurking behind the shack. A padlock lay on the ground. The chain was gone. Jana pushed open the rickety door and, guided by the flashlight, swept the interior of the squat with her eyes. Kitchen utensils, cobbled-together furniture, a wardrobe, a screen of fabric with an oriental design, hangings on the brick walls: everything had disappeared. All that was left was the windows covered with plastic bags that flapped in the night wind. The neighbors had probably taken what they could. Jana looked at the floor, found food packaging, bits of plastic, clothespins, photos from magazines that had been trampled.

  “If Luz had any papers, they must have disappeared along with the stuff they stole,” she said.

  “Hm.”

  Paula thought about the wigs. Luz had begun with cheap ones, the hair as long as possible that accentuated the masculinity of her features as much as possible, but Paula had chosen a shorter wig for her that had transformed her face.

  “The wigs,” she whispered in the darkness.

  “What about the wigs?”

  “Luz had a hatbox that I gave her when she came here. She must have hidden it somewhere. Those beautiful wigs cost an arm and a leg: Luz would never have left them lying around where they could be seen. Without a wig, you’re nothing,” the transvestite added. “If she had to put valuable or important things somewhere, that’s where she’d put them.”

  The wind was rushing in through the shredded plastic. Jana ran the flashlight over the floor of the squat.

  “In any case, I’d be surprised to find a hidden trapdoor under this pile of shit.”

  Paula pulled her cream-colored coat more tightly over her breast while the Mapuche tapped on the brick walls. The thickness was the same everywhere, except between the kitchen area and the bedroom, where the wall was thicker. Jana bent down and noticed a dozen bricks that were not mortared to the others. She handed the flashlight to her friend, who was shivering behind her.

  “Take this, hold the light for me instead of jerking off.”

  “Hey!” Paula cried, taking offense for the sake of appearances.

  Jana stuck the blade of her knife into the crack and quickly pulled out a first brick. The others came out more easily. Finally, she extracted a round object from the wall.

  “That’s it,” Paula said over her shoulder.

  The hatbox she’d given Luz. Jana dusted it off before opening it. There was in fact a wig inside it, a short square-cut blond Venetian one that Luz often wore, a boa, a pair of black velvet gloves, a pink fountain pen, and envelopes. Dozens of sealed letters without stamps, all bearing the same address: Mr. and Mrs. Lavalle, Junin. Her parents? The Mapuche dug around in the bottom of the box and found two aspirin bottles whose contents she emptied into the palm of her hand: little bags holding crystals appeared under the flashlight. She put a little on the tip of her tongue and grimaced: clearly it was paco, chemical residues that demolished even the hardest users. Paula was coming apart underneath her makeup.

  “Didn’t take drugs, huh?” Jana grumbled.

  *

  They returned to Jana’s place before reading the contents of the envelopes, with a glass of iced vodka to restore their strength.

  There were about thirty letters written in the form of a diary, strange to say the least. Orlando “Luz” Lavalle seemed to maintain a correspondence with his parents in the purest South American style. The first missives dated from his arrival in the federal capital. In them, Orlando wrote about the beauty of Buenos Aires, the abundance of its museums, its enchanting parks where cats slept between neo-Romantic sculptures, the architecture of public buildings, the opera, so Parisian. An aesthete’s soul animated the feverish lines composed by the young man, the archetype of the provincial coming to the metropolis. In the following letters, Orlando told how he had found a first job as a dishwasher, then as a waiter in a cafe, and finally got a position as a server in a restaurant on Florida, the downtown artery. According to what he told them, the pay was good, and he hoped to be able to leave the attic room he was renting for a fortune from a cantankerous old rascal who answered to the name of Angelo Barbastro. The subsequent letters talked about his meetings with Alicia, a young woman he often met at the restaurant. One evening, Alicia had asked him when he got off work so that he might join her in a fashionable cafe in Palermo, where the bohemian youth hung out. Alicia was a painter and very beautiful. She had noticed the portraits of customers that Orlando amused himself by sketching during his breaks. Alicia thought the one he’d drawn of her was particularly successful; she had many artist friends, people who were a lot of fun and would help him if he wished. Someone who worked hard could hope for anything: the price of passion, the galleys—Orlando was prepared for anything. And then one night Alicia walked back to his attic room with him, they had kissed at the doorstep to the building, and since then they had been inseparable, her artist friends e
nded up adopting him, his marvelous drawings, blah, blah, blah. Orlando was fantasizing from start to finish.

  The reality was dirt, hunger, fear, getting up in the cold or the suffocating heat of a squat without water or electricity, going to shit in a field full of garbage, rinsing yourself in the basin, helping the flour collector make bread, feeding kids whose eyes were covered with flies, finally getting ready to go out, dreaming for a moment in front of the mirror before going back to the blows, the threats, the cops, the violent, homophobic fans who had to be avoided on pain of ending up without all your teeth like Paula, Jil the lesbian with fists of iron at the entrance to the Transformer, Jorge the cocaine addict and all the others, the reality was Luz, the little tranny who worked the end of the docks, who’d do you for a few pesos, unless instead you gave him a good beating to teach him to be a homo, the paco that he unloaded on other losers, all the pathetic lies that Luz/Orlando invented to hold up without upsetting his parents, who knew nothing about what was going on.

  Paula felt deceived, betrayed. Not only had her protégé failed to tell her everything, but he had lied to everyone. Jana, sitting on the car seat in the workshop, also looked downhearted. The young transvestite had not been the victim of a barbarous random crime on the docks: he had been killed for a precise reason that escaped them.

  8

  A smell of incense floated up from the marble walkways. Rosa Michellini drew the curtain in the confessional a little further, as if someone might see her there. However, the church was empty at this hour.