Mapuche Page 16

  “Didn’t your mother tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Well . . . that she isn’t your mother.”

  Miguel frowned with his carefully plucked eyebrows.

  “What do you mean, she’s not my mother?”

  “You should tell me the truth, Miguel,” the priest urged him in a low voice.

  “What truth? Mama!” he cried, turning toward the laundress. “What have you gone and said now?”

  “You’re the one who’s sick!” she shouted. “Impostor!”

  Everything was jumbled in Miguel’s head, the past and the present, up to that point carefully kept separate.

  “What is this all about?” he cried. “What do you mean, you’re not my mother? Is it true, Mama? You’re not my mother? Damn it, answer me!”

  But the old woman sat on her invalid’s chair, chewing something and fixing her predatory gaze on an imaginary prey. Disconcerted, Miguel shook his head.

  “All right, that’s enough,” a voice behind them growled.

  A giant with a heavily-veined skull burst into the room, followed by two fairly unpalatable men, a stocky, dark-skinned man with a thick neck, pot-bellied but solid as a rock underneath a shabby suit, and a kind of old lady-killer with slicked-back hair and the haughty look of someone who ultimately has nothing to say. Miguel backed up to the ironing table: the three men had hidden in the shop, the metal shutter was down, and their scruffy appearance was almost scary.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

  Parise positioned himself in front of the door to the storeroom, cutting off any route of escape.

  “Didn’t your mother tell you anything?” he asked, a threatening gleam in his eyes.

  “Tell me what?” he quavered.

  No one was paying attention to Rosa Michellini. In the background, Brother Josef was dripping with sweat.

  “Do you have the document?” the bald giant asked.

  “What document? I don’t understand anything you’re saying!” Miguel replied. Parise’s inquisitive gaze made him shiver, in spite of himself. “Who . . . who are you?”

  Parise turned to El Toro, a cube of muscles with protruding eyes and a skullcap.

  “Let’s hurry this up.”

  Miguel gulped when he saw the strange weapon aimed at him. The electric impulse bit him in the shoulder, two harpoons connected to a thread that petrified him. The transvestite hardly had time to cry out: a puppet charged with volts, Miguel looked one last time at his mother’s crumpled face before the floor came at him at high speed.

  “What . . . ”

  Parise put the blade of his switchblade to Rosa’s flabby neck.

  “Shut up, you old bat,” he warned her, “or I’ll nail you to the wall. Understand?”

  The poor old woman was paralyzed with fear, her hands clutching her precious box of cough drops. Her son was lying near the ironing table, writhing with convulsions. El Toro bent down to grab the weakling while El Picador unrolled the tape. Miguel felt the floor tiles against his cheek, the hoarse breathing of the men who were tying him up. He was incapable of moving at all.

  “I’ll bring the van around,” El Picador announced.

  “O.K.”

  Parise knelt in front of the tranny, now bound hand and foot.

  “Are you the one who told Ossario?”

  “N . . . N . . . ”

  “It wasn’t your mother, so who was it?”

  Miguel shook his head helplessly. The giant turned toward the laundress who, from her chair, was looking at him venomously: terror seemed to have shut her up in her world of dead angels and divine furies, unmasked by her lies or unable to hear them. Parise muttered—they had searched the apartment without finding anything.

  “I think he doesn’t know anything,” Brother Josef broke in, indicating the tranny lying on the floor. “He . . . he would have told me.”

  The walkie-talkie in the team leader’s pocket crackled: the coast was clear. He gestured to El Toro, who threw the tied-up “package” over his shoulder—light as a feather, like the Campallo girl and the other tranny they’d taken for him . . . Dropping her box of cough drops, which rolled against the baseboards, Rosa jumped up and down on her chair, as if she’d been struck by lightning.

  “What are you doing to my son! Let him go!” She brandished her spiked cane in the direction of the two men. “Let him go, you demons!”

  El Toro chortled at her flailing about.

  “That’s my son!” Rosa spluttered, her chin shiny with saliva. “My son!”

  The laundress slashed the air with her cane, almost fell forward off her chair, and returned to the attack with all the energy of despair.

  “Almighty God! Almighty God!”

  Parise picked up the tranny’s scarf that was lying on the floor and went around the wheelchair: in a single movement, he took away the cane that was trying to put his eye out and sent it flying to the other end of the room.

  “Almighty God! Almighty . . . ”

  He grabbed the old woman’s scrawny neck and wound the scarf around her throat. Rosa struggled on her chair, quickly suffocating in the killer’s grasp. It takes five minutes to strangle someone, much less to break a neck. Parise flexed his muscles and gripped her throat with all his strength: Rosa let out a long death rattle, her eyes popping out of their sockets. The vertebrae broke, sounding like jacks. Her head fell forward, forever inert, on her flowered blouse.

  Parise relaxed his grip, his shirt soaked with sweat. It reeked of laundry powder and death in the shop, the others were waiting in the van: it was time to get out of there. The bald man scowled one last time at the tousled mummy on her chair, her tongue hanging out like a pink snake, lumpy saliva running down her chin . . .

  The old witch.

  *

  Jana hadn’t slept a wink. She wasn’t up to doing anything, not even sculpting: that never happened to her. She had begun polishing the edges of the craters on the cement base, sharpening the steel rods to insert the fabrics in the colors of the native nations into the devastated territories, but the memory of that night shook up her slender certainties. Sculptor: someone who brings to life . . . Rubén had placed his warm hand on the small of her back and almost lifted her off the ground to press her against his sex, and in a dream in which his eyes gave off comets, he had given her the most sensual kiss she’d ever had before leaving her standing there like a dope, in front of the aviator with the unhinged smile. What was he up to? Did he reserve a special electroshock treatment for her or did he do that with every woman? Jana no longer knew what to think. The world had shifted its axis, changed color—anthracite gray, powdered with forget-me-not blue. She’d fallen into the trap. How could she get out? Paula had retired to her “dressing room” shortly before noon, her head whirling after her mad night at the Niceto, and she had immediately noticed that there was something odd about the Mapuche’s eyes.

  “Hey, girl, you’re in love!”

  Jana had shrugged.

  “Humph.”

  “Nonsense! Your eyes are shining, my beauty! So, what did he do to you? Did you kiss?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Did you sleep together?” she asked excitedly. “Come on, tell me about it!”

  “You know about Fukushima? It was like that, all rotten.”

  “I don’t believe you, you little kamikaze! Ha, ha!” she laughed, waving her arms around in the shed. “You’re in love, Jana, that’s great!”

  And how. She hadn’t been able to sleep, and hardly to work, now the floor was covered with tools that cast a menacing eye on her convoluted monsters. Paula had left in the Ford to see her mother, and Jana no longer knew what to do with her feelings. She was making herself a cup of coffee to get rid of the taste of sleepless nights when the sound of an engine resounded in the yard,
soon followed by the slamming of a door. Jana looked up, suspiciously—no one ever came there. Someone was walking through the grass to the sliding door, which had been left half-open. Rubén Calderón came into the workshop, but he was far from being the imposing presence he’d been the preceding evening: his beautiful black jacket, his shirt, his short Italian boots, all his clothes were covered with mud.

  “Are you competing with me?” Jana asked.

  Rubén forgot to smile. His hair was sticky and a long welt ran around his throat—a narrow, red, straight wound where blood was beginning to coagulate.

  “What’s going on?” Jana said more soberly. “What happened to your neck?”

  “Some guys attacked me in Colonia. The ones who killed Luz and María Campallo.”

  “Who?”

  “They just found her body in the wildlife preserve. She’d also been dead for several days, apparently.”

  Jana was looking at him as if he’d just emerged from the earth.

  “I talked to a guy in Colonia,” he went on, “Ossario, a former paparazzo who had compromising documents. María Campallo is supposed to be the daughter of desaparecidos. Your pal Orlando too. He was exchanged for another infant born in detention, Rodolfo, María’s official brother, biologically speaking. In any case, the Campallo family is involved in the theft of babies. Ossario didn’t have time to tell me more; he was killed. The killers were waiting for him, at his house. I was barely able to escape.”

  Jana was still staring at him, overcome—too much information all at once.

  “You’ve got to clean that up,” she said, pointing to the terrible wound on his neck.

  “I cleaned it on the boat.”

  “With what, seawater?”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “Doesn’t look like it to me.”

  Rubén pensively lit a cigarette from the packet he’d bought on the ferry.

  “What are you planning to do now?” Jana asked.

  “Persuade Orlando’s parents to testify. They also stole a baby: they can tell what happened at the ESMA, illegal adoption, exchange of babies, and bring down Campallo and the people who are protecting him.”

  Jana remained doubtful.

  “There’s something wrong with your story,” she said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “Orlando: he was twenty-five years old when he was killed on the docks.”

  When he heard that, Rubén stared.

  “Right,” she sent on. “He was too young to have been adopted during the dictatorship. The guy in Colonia was lying to you.”

  Rubén recalled Ossario’s words regarding the missing brother, his sister’s search when she learned of his existence, which led to the docks in La Boca where the transvestite was hanging out. He suddenly paled.

  “The laundress’s son—how old is he?”

  “Thirty-four,” Jana replied.

  The current age of the children of the desaparecidos.

  “Shit.”

  Jana gulped. She was also beginning to understand.

  “Orlando Lavalle is not the brother that María was looking for,” he breathed. “The killers kidnapped him along with María as they left the tango club, but they took the wrong transvestite.”

  They’d mixed things up, gotten everything backward: Miguel was the photographer’s brother, not Luz. That’s why she had called him the other night, that was what was so important, what she wanted to tell him, before she was murdered. Miguel had been adopted during the dictatorship.

  *

  Jana was trembling with rage on the seat of the car: Miguel’s mother was pure poison. She was the apropriadora, and not Orlando’s parents, she, with her soldier-husband, had accepted the sordid deal offered by the rich Campallo family. Whether or not Rosa Michellini had a choice left her cold: her husband having died in combat, the perverse woman had taken her revenge on their adopted son, as if she held him responsible for her misfortunes—the disappearance of the hero-accomplice, Miguel’s sexual orientation, the state of her health. The other way around, everything became comprehensible. That was why the disoriented boy felt so alone, misunderstood, and scorned: he’d lost his sister, his parents, his identity, the very origin of his life.

  Jana had called Paula’s cell phone but there was no answer. Avenida 9 de Julio. Rubén was driving; he was worried. On the way they’d said what mattered, and now a heavy silence prevailed in the car. They got there at twilight and drove down Peru Street, which was deserted. The laundry’s metal shutter was down.

  “There’s a rear entrance,” Jana said.

  Rubén parked the car in a side street, took a Colt .45 out of the glove box, and put it under his jacket.

  “Let’s go.”

  The orange cat lounging on the pavement arched his back before suddenly running off. They slipped into the alley and into the little weedy backyard through which the storeroom was reached. Jana was wearing a pair of simple cloth shorts and a black tank top—she hadn’t had time to change her clothes. She knocked on the door but received no response. Their eyes met. Rubén grabbed the revolver and pushed open the door to the storeroom. It was completely dark. He gripped his gun in one hand, and with the other held back Jana, who was following him: Rosa Michellini was sitting in her wheelchair, her blue tongue hanging out of her mouth, a scarf still wound around her throat. Rubén crossed the room in an instant and disappeared into the shop, leaving Jana alone for a moment. She turned on the lights and shivered when she saw the old woman with her eyes protruding from their sockets, her crimson face resting on her torso: Miguel’s mother was dead. Rubén reappeared.

  “Lock the door,” he said.

  Jana obeyed while he had a look at the other rooms. He soon came back, having found nothing. The apartment was empty. The Mapuche hadn’t budged, hypnotized by the body slumped on the wheelchair. An odor of old age hung in the air despite the stale smell of laundry powder.

  “The scarf,” she said. “It’s Paula’s, I mean Miguel’s.” Not long before, it had been around his neck.

  Rubén thought for a moment. Was it a clue meant to accuse Miguel of murder, or to throw them off the track?

  “Do you think they kidnapped him?”

  “If they’d wanted to kill him, we would have found his body,” Rubén replied.

  He put on latex gloves. Miguel’s mother seemed to have shrunk to half her size with her quilt wrapped around her sick hips, her blouse covered with saliva, and her box of cough drops scattered all over the floor. The angle of the neck suggested that it had been broken; the body was lukewarm, indicating that she had died no more than an hour or two before. There were no other traces of wounds, just this face disfigured by strangulation, with little balls of chewed-up paper stuck to the lips and this satiny scarf that belonged to her son. It was growing more humid in the back room. Rubén lifted up the laundress’s head, opened her mouth and saw something stuck in her esophagus. A little ball of paper, half chewed-up. He pulled it out with the tips of his fingers.

  “What’s this?”

  “The old woman was crazy,” Jana said. “The Rapunzel syndrome.”

  He grimaced.

  “Rosa chewed up her bills, her papers, her hair, anything she got her hands on,” she explained. “Miguel was planning to ask a psychiatrist for help, and then . . . ”

  The sculptress, wavering between anger and nausea, didn’t finish her sentence. Rubén wiped the saliva on his jacket and unfolded the little ball of paper he’d taken out of Rosa’s throat. The writing was minuscule, typed: he could distinguish numbers that resembled a table, a series of letters . . . Rubén bent down and saw the box of cough drops and its contents, which had rolled against the wall. They weren’t candies to suck on but more little balls of paper that Miguel’s mother had torn up with maniacal care. The detective picked them up; there were about half a dozen of t
hem. He flattened them out on the ironing table: they contained more numbers, but also names.

  “What is it?” murmured Jana, leaning over his shoulder.

  “They’re not bills, in any case. They look instead like . . . file cards.”

  The numbers seemed to correspond to schedules. Then Rubén saw a date, September 9, 1976, with a cryptic code alongside it. September 1976. The dictatorship.

  “It’s an internment form,” he said.

  Rubén turned toward the body. There were only seven intact pieces of paper. How long would the autopsy on Rosa take, ten, twelve, twenty hours? Too long, in any event. Between now and then her gastric juices would have eaten everything up. He straightened up the corpse on the chair, then took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  “What are you doing?”

  “She swallowed the rest of the document,” he said, indicating the apropriadora. “With a little luck, the acid won’t have erased everything yet.”

  Jana didn’t immediately understand what he had in mind. Rubén’s eyes had changed, as if he had fallen into himself. Jana stepped back, speechless: he breathed out to relieve the stress, took out the blade of his knife, and cut open the old woman’s blouse. Her empty eyes were fixed on the ceiling and her withered flesh appeared in the harsh light of the storeroom.

  “If I were you, I’d look the other way,” he said.

  The Indian woman kept her eyes fixed on him.

  Her choice.

  Ruben stuck the blade into Rosa Michellini’s abdomen and disemboweled her.

  13

  The moon was climbing over the roofs when they opened the reinforced door of Rubén’s office. No one had seen them leave the laundry and go down Peru Street. The detective lived two blocks farther on. Jana had followed him on the unreal sidewalk, her head full of images of dead people, hardly listening to the phone conversation he had with his cop girlfriend on the way: she was thinking about Miguel, about the horrible fate that seemed to have hounded him ever since his birth. It was hot in the apartment, one of those muggy nights typical of a Buenos Aires summer. Rubén threw his stinking jacket on the sofa, drew the drapes, and spread his precious masticated papers on the desk. Most of them were damp, in poor condition. He let them dry in the open air. The soles of his boots squeaked on the marble floor. They were shot, too.