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Mapuche Page 9


  They had become cardboard themselves.

  Rubén rocked in the humid breeze, the baby’s tears like obsessive reminiscences. Time went on, its back to the future. All these sobs, these cries of the children who ran over his ceiling, the little footsteps of careless orphans above his cell . . . A silent hatred gripped his heart. The first stars appeared in the mauve sky. Rubén swallowed hard, his knuckles white. Soon there was only a ghost hung on the balcony, and this baby wailing in the night . . .

  Will Papa come back?

  Of course, why do you say that?

  Foreign countries are far away. And then he always tells stories . . .

  Oh, yes. That’s even his specialty.

  Holding his little sister’s hand, Rubén smiled—he found her amusing. And a smart cookie: when she was only two, Elsa already spoke almost fluently, without adopting the intonation of a soppy princess that some people found charming. His little sister had a ready tongue, like Lucky, the big black dog that escorted them on their way to school.

  Foreign countries are someplace you come back from, Ruben decreed to reassure her. Otherwise they become home.

  Elsa had lifted her face toward the long-haired teenager holding her hand—how old he looked for someone not even fifteen!—without really understanding what he had just said, but she pretended she did, anyway.

  Do you think we’ll have to leave, she asked. Leave the house?

  Would that bother you?

  Elsa had shaken her little brown curls.

  No. Maybe a little.

  Rubén smiled on seeing the freckles around her nose, the marks of her feline mustache. She was starting middle school, and didn’t yet know many people.

  Leaden silence in the streets of Buenos Aires, a diffuse threat, teachers stuffed into blouses that looked like they belonged to someone else, as if the chalk on the blackboard might betray them: except for the dog Lucky (but they could take him), Elsa wouldn’t be sad if they had to leave Argentina. Go into exile. Many people had done that.

  What is France like? she asked.

  Rubén had shrugged.

  Full of cheeses, it seems.

  She laughed. That was his goal.

  The Argentine World Cup victory was still a few months off, but the junta would take advantage of the event to strengthen the feeling of national identity, to con the foreign media by mobilizing a whole people behind its soccer team: on the pretext of giving lectures, Daniel had left for France to organize the resistance, to denounce the trick of the World Cup unofficially before journalists that he would have an opportunity to rub shoulders with or media figures who had committed themselves to their democratic aspirations. They had to rain on the parade, turn the situation to their advantage. Rubén knew nothing about all that. His parents hadn’t told him anything, but Daniel had asked him to take care of his sister while he was away; he would be the man of the household.

  It was late summer, the sun ran over the puddles left behind by the thunderstorm that brought them home from school. Elsa and Rubén were walking hand in hand, Lucky was sniffing his way down the sidewalk as if an army of bones were running away under his snout, they arrived in front of the florist’s shop at the corner of Peru and San Juan: the dog had stopped dead and then lowered his ears. A car suddenly came out of nowhere, almost hit the bouquets that had been set out on the sidewalk, a Ford Falcon without plates that blocked the street. Three men in civilian clothes immediately jumped out of the doors, guns in their hands. Rubén pulled his sister back but a hand grabbed her by the nape of the neck. Rubén protected himself without letting go of Elsa, whom he heard screaming next to him.

  Rubén!

  The men tried to separate them. Lucky bit one of their assailants, who swore until a man unholstered the gun he was wearing under his leather jacket and emptied his magazine, shooting first into the belly of the good old dog, and then finishing him off by putting a bullet in his eye. Clinging to her brother, Elsa was shrieking with terror. Rubén tried to pull away, hitting out haphazardly, and his sister was also kicking desperately, but in vain; the men flung them to the ground, calling them names, grabbed them and put a gun to their temples, roughly hustled them off to the Ford and flung them into the backseat. Rubén was no longer resisting. He couldn’t see clearly. Everything had happened in a few seconds and blood was running over his eyelids.

  The florist’s frightened look, Lucky’s body on the sidewalk, the passersby turned into stone statues, the back of the Ford Falcon, the burlap sacks put over their heads, the oppressive dark, the muffled sobs of his sister at his side, her trembling body pressed up against his on the seat, more insults, threats, the ride in the car: time had contracted.

  Rubén . . .

  Shut up, you stupid kid!

  Miles of fear and anxiety. Finally the vehicle stopped. They were taken out of the backseat. The dark under the hood grew even more opaque when they were pushed with rifle butts toward a cooler place. Forbidden to speak or move. They were not alone, Rubén felt it in the air: other people were being held prisoner there, and they were scared too. An odor of tires and grease. Not until the hoods were removed did Rubén regain his footing in the real world. A lightbulb that dazzled them for a moment hung in the basement of a garage: there were a dozen of them under the harsh light, men and women alike, trembling like sheep before the bitter laughs of the wolves that surrounded them. Young men full of haughtiness and military certainties, others with unbuttoned shirts and holsters under their armpits, masticating their chewing gum with their mouths open.

  Take your clothes off! the man who seemed to be the leader ordered.

  Any hesitation was corrected with the blow of a truncheon. They obeyed, cold fear in their bellies. Their naked bodies were soon shivering on the frigid concrete of the Orletti garage. Elsa was crying silently, her bare feet curled up: anyone who opened his mouth would be beaten within an inch of his life, they had been told, and so she pressed her pink lips together, emitting little squeaks like a mouse. The men laughed to see them naked—it was funny. Rubén hardly dared raise his eyes. His sister was the youngest, and also the most terrified: he sensed her silhouette alongside him, terribly embarrassed to be naked in front of all these people, with her little pointy breasts and her young adolescent’s public hair, which led to indecent remarks. But they didn’t laugh long: the officer with a mustache barked insults, “red dogs,” “hippies,” “communists.” Rubén didn’t know what they were going to do to them, even if one evening he had caught his parents talking in the kitchen about kidnappings. He didn’t lose heart. Not yet. They were separated, the men on one side, the women on the other, in the greatest tumult: blows rained down under the garage’s obscene lightbulb.

  Rubén! Rubén!!!

  That was the last image he had of his sister; a little woman writhing in tears who implored him with her big green eyes, trying desperately to cross her thighs over her pubescent vagina. She was calling to him for help as they suddenly dragged her back to take her away, amid cries of fear:

  RUBÉN!!!

  The rumbling of the trucks penetrated from the balcony of the bedroom. Rubén sniffed the dress that he was holding in his hands, his favorite, the orangey-red one with the little black collar, deeply. The fragrance had evaporated long ago, but he smelled it whenever he wanted.

  “A desaparecido is someone who is not there, and to whom you speak.”

  Returning from his exile in the countryside, Rubén had found Elsa’s clothes in their place, carefully folded in the closet in her room. Their mother wasn’t going to touch anything, not even a pen or a pair of shoes, until her husband and her daughter “reappeared alive,” the slogan of the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo. But neither Daniel nor Elsa had come back. They would never come back. Like thousands of others, they would remain phantoms forever. Finally, years having gone by, Rubén had urged his mother to give the clothes to the needy—there
were plenty of those in the city, and even if by some miracle Elsa were to come back someday, her clothes would no longer fit her, would they? Elena had accepted, weary of waiting. Maybe it was better that way . . . But Rubén had lied to his mother. He hadn’t given his sister’s clothes to the poor: he had taken them to the apartment in Peru Street that he had just bought, across from the accursed intersection with San Juan where they had been abducted one summer day in 1978. He had put Elsa’s things in his bedroom closet, the forbidden closet, which he still watched over.

  All her dresses were there, folded on the top shelf, the orangey-red one that reminded him of her freckles, and the others, her T-shirts, her shorts. Rubén slept with the remains of his sister, her sad little bones and the school notebook in which he had closed up their nightmare.

  Prey.

  Or carrion.

  Rubén put down the dress and closed his eyes, wishing he’d never have to open them again.

  “My little poppy . . . ”

  Rain was falling when she rang on the intercom.

  7

  Jana was tall for an Indian, a svelte woman with medium-length hair as black as her eyes, whose ancestral sorrow seemed to drip with the raindrops on the doormat.

  “Are you Rubén Calderón?” she asked in a hoarse voice.

  “Yes . . . ”

  A Mapuche, to judge by her almond-shaped eyes. She was holding a half-soaked cloth jacket in her hand and wearing a dark, close-fitting jumpsuit, an old pair of Doc Martens with worn toes, and a tank top that emphasized her round shoulders. No bra—no need.

  “I’ve been told that you’re looking for desaparecidos,” she said. “The daughter of the laundress downstairs . . . ”

  “Yes, yes, come in . . . ” Rubén emerged from his fog, and gestured toward the club chair that his visitors usually sat in. “Sit down.”

  “My name is Jana,” she said. “I prefer to stand.”

  The sculptress briefly surveyed the agency—American-style kitchen, bookcase, a messy desk with a turn-of-the-century lamp and missing person posters tacked to the wall, witnesses in trials who had been kidnapped, dozens of faces that seemed to be looking at her from their tombs without burial. She turned back to the detective, who had just closed the reinforced door, and recognized the painting over the 1960s sofa: Velásquez’s Las Meninas.

  “Is that an original?” she asked playfully.

  He smiled.

  “Coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Something else?”

  “No, nothing, thanks.”

  Paula had been right about Calderón—pure elegance compared to her scruffy clothes, and two coal-black eyes speckled with little blue forget-me-nots whose translucent, brilliant blue left her speechless. You’d think he’d just been crying.

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  “No,” he lied. “I wouldn’t have invited you to come up.”

  Jana relaxed a little.

  “Calderón—is that your real name, like the poet?”

  The detective raised his eyebrows.

  “You know him?”

  Jana shrugged. Daniel Calderón’s dark poetry had rocked her in the shadows—and vanquished them. The writer had disappeared during the Process, like Haroldo Conti, Rodolfo Walsh . . . Tortured, beaten, liquidated.

  Rubén didn’t want to talk about his father.

  “May I ask what brings you here?”

  Jana forgot the dead people’s faces on the wall and the little blue flowers that were sending distress signals.

  “A crime was committed the other night at the port in La Boca,” she replied. “The body of a man was found near the old ferry. Have you heard about it?”

  “Yes, I saw it in the newspaper.”

  “You’ve got sharp eyes, it went almost unnoticed.”

  Rubén lit a cigarette he took from the package that was lying on the coffee table, and let Jana continue.

  “The victim is a friend of ours, Luz, a transvestite who turns tricks on the docks. The police haven’t revealed the info, but Luz was tortured before he was thrown into the harbor. He was emasculated,” she added, her voice more serious. “I think he’d also been raped.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We were looking for Luz when we ran into the La Boca cops, who were fishing his body out of the water down at the docks. They took us to the station to interrogate us, but they refused to take our deposition and threw us out. I called them this morning to find out how the investigation was going, but they blew me off. Somebody has to look into this. The guy who massacred Luz won’t stop there. No one could possibly have anything against him, I mean personally. The killer’s a sicko, a pervert of the worst kind.”

  Rubén looked at her, her and her dark eyes washed with rainwater.

  “My work consists in tracking down desaparecidos and their torturers,” he sighed. “I’m sorry, miss, but private matters are not my line.”

  “The laundress’s son is a transvestite too: he’s my only friend and I care about him. A killer attacks the trannies of La Boca, the cops don’t give a damn, and I don’t want Paula to be the next one on the list.”

  “Is your friend also a prostitute?”

  “Not everyone is lucky enough to be a variety show performer.”

  “Or to grow old.”

  “That’s why I’ve come to see you. No one saw Luz before the murder, neither on the docks nor elsewhere. We don’t know what happened, whether the killer was a customer or a sadist: all we know is that Luz left a message on Paula’s cell phone during the night to tell her she wanted to talk to her about something important, and then she was found in the harbor the next morning. Paula had taken her under her wing,” Jana added as an explanation. She drew a sheet of paper out of her jumpsuit, a page torn out of a notebook. “I don’t have any photos of Luz to give you, but I drew her. From memory,” she added, handing him the piece of paper. “Maybe this will help you.”

  A bus thundered past, making the agency’s windows vibrate. Rubén unfolded the paper she gave him and saw the face of a young man with melancholy eyes. A charcoal drawing.

  “You’re an artist?” he asked, looking up.

  “Sculptress. On the back I wrote a list of the places that Luz and Paula usually work at night. My friend looked around there yesterday. She didn’t find anything, but you might be luckier. There was music in the background of Luz’s message. Obviously a public place.”

  Jana held her drenched jacket in her hands, trying to decipher the thoughts of the man behind his veil of smoke. He was standing in front of the coffee table in the living area, a little taller than she was.

  “So, is it a deal?”

  Rubén handed the drawing back to her.

  “Sorry, I don’t know anything about the transvestite scene. And above all I don’t have time.”

  “But you’re going to accept the job,” Jana retorted.

  “I am? What makes you think that?”

  “It’s the only way to find out what happened.”

  She was speaking in syllogisms. She refused to take the drawing back, and Rubén put it down on the table.

  “You’re wrong about me,” he said. “I’m not the man you need, not for this kind of investigation.”

  “You don’t know that before you’ve tried,” Jana insisted. “Help me stop this bastard before he attacks someone else. Before he attacks my friend.”

  Rubén took another puff. He should never have let her come up.

  “I am concerned with the people who disappeared under the dictatorship,” he repeated. “Only desaparecidos.”

  “Paula has to turn tricks to earn a living. I’m scared for her, scared of what might be done to her. Do you understand, or are you made of stone, too?”

  Tears had dried in the depths of her dark eyes, a long time ago.
Rubén was contemplating the disaster when Jana took a step toward him.

  “I don’t have any money, but I can pay you in a different way,” she said boldly.

  Rubén froze when she put her jacket on the back of the armchair.

  “I don’t need money,” he said.

  “But you must want to fuck me.”

  He sized her up briefly.

  “No.”

  Her pupils shone. He was lying.

  “Don’t play the classy gentleman,” Jana taunted him. “Everyone wants to fuck. And I don’t give a damn.”

  Rubén stubbed out the butt that was burning his hands.

  “I’m sorry for you.”

  “You’re the only one.”

  Her Indian eyes were fixed on him like a wolf in the line of sight.

  “You’ve knocked on the wrong door, miss. I can’t help you. And still less in that way. I don’t take advantage of war, or of despair, call it what you will.”

  Jana’s throat was dry. She drew herself up to her full height and looked at him.

  “You don’t like me?”

  “Go home,” Rubén said, suddenly tired.

  Jana didn’t open her mouth. That would teach her to ask for help from a winka. She blushed when she thought about her ratty chest underneath her T-shirt. Sure that he must be disgusted, the Porteño with fine, delicate hands, sure that he must be used to another kind of merchandise. She would petrify with shame, right there in the middle of the agency.

  “I’m sorry,” Rubén repeated, seeing tears welling up in her eyes. “I don’t have time right now, but I have a woman cop friend who knows what she’s doing: I can speak to her about it . . .”

  “Forget it,” she interrupted.

  Jana grabbed her jacket and left the room without looking at the detective. A draft helped her slam the reinforced door, animating for a moment the faces of the dead on the wall.

  The thunderstorm was raging outside the open window. Rubén remained motionless, sifting through his contradictory feelings. A mantle of depression fell on his shoulders, inexorable. He saw the notepaper left on the table, the face in charcoal that the Indian had made for him, no doubt convinced that he would accept her proposal. His throat tightened with pity—the drawing was magnificent.