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One
night, as he was reading George Steiner, he got a call from someone he at first
couldn't identify. a very agitated voice with a foreign accent said it's all a
lie, it's all a con, not as if this were the start of a conversation but as if
they'd been talking for half an hour. What do you want? he asked, who is this?
Is that Sergio Gonzalez? asked the voice. Speaking. Well, then, you son of a
bitch, how are you? said the voice. It sounded as if it came from very far
away, thought Sergio. Who is this? he asked. What the fuck, you don't recognize
me? asked the voice with a hint of astonishment. Klaus Haas? asked Sergio. At the
other end of the line he heard a laugh and then a kind of metallic wind, the
sound of the desert and of prisons at night. That's right, I see you haven't
forgotten me. No, said Sergio. How could I forget you? I don't have much time,
said Haas. I just wanted to tell you that the bullshit about how I paid off the
Bisontes isn't true. I'd need serious cake to cover all those deaths. Cake?
asked Sergio. Money, said Haas. I'm friends with a crazy bastard everybody
calls El Tequila, and one of the Bisontes is El Tequila's brother. But that's
all. There's nothing else, I swear, said the voice with the foreign accent.
Tell it to your lawyer, said Sergio, I don't write about the killings in Santa
Teresa anymore. At the other end of the line Haas laughed. That's what
everybody says. Tell this person, tell that person. My lawyer already knows, he
said. I can't do anything for you, said Sergio. Well, I'm telling you, I think
you can, said Haas. Again Sergio heard the sound of pipes, scratches, a
hurricane wind that came in gusts. What would I do if I were locked up? Sergio
wondered. Would I hide in a corner, wrapped in my blanket, like a child? Would
I shake? Would I beg for help, cry, try to
kill
myself? They want to destroy me, said Haas. They're postponing the trial. They're
afraid of me. They want to destroy me. Then Sergio heard the sound of the
desert and something like the tread of an animal. We're all losing our minds,
he thought. Haas? Are you still there? No one answered.

After
the arrest of the Bisontes gang in January, the city got a break. The best
Christmas present, read the headline of the story in
La Voz de Sonora
describing the capture of the five pachucos. True,
there were deaths. a longtime thief whose stage of operations was the city
center was stabbed to death, two men with ties to the drug trade died, a dog
breeder died, but no one found any women who had been raped and tortured and
then killed. This was in January. And it was the same in February. There were
the usual deaths, yes, those to be expected, people who started off celebrating
and ended up killing each other, uncinematic deaths, deaths from the realm of
folklore, not modernity: deaths that didn't scare anybody. The serial killer
was officially behind bars. His imitators or followers or hirelings were, too.
The city could breathe easy.

•

In
January, the correspondent for a
Buenos Aires
newspaper spent three days in Santa Teresa on his way to
Los Angeles
and wrote a story about the city
and the killings of women. He tried to visit Haas in prison but was refused
permission. He went to a bullfight. He was at a brothel, Internal Affairs, and
he slept with a whore called Rosana. He visited Domino's, the club, and
Serafino's, the bar. He met a fellow reporter from
El Heraldo del Norte
and consulted the paper's file on disappeared,
kidnapped, and murdered women. The reporter at
El Heraldo
introduced him to a friend who introduced him to another
friend who claimed to have seen a snuff film. The Argentinean told him he
wanted to see it. The friend of the friend of the reporter asked how much he
was willing to pay in dollars. The Argentinean said he wouldn't give half a
mango for filth like that, he wanted to see it only as a matter of professional
interest, and also, he had to admit, out of curiosity. The Mexican made an
appointment with him at a house in the northern part of the city. The
Argentinean had green eyes and was six foot three and weighed almost two
hundred and twenty pounds. He came at the appointed time and saw the movie. The
Mexican was short and on the heavy side, and as they watched the movie he was
very still, sitting on the sofa next to the Argentinean, like a young lady.
Through the whole movie the Argentinean was waiting for the moment when the
Mexican would touch his cock. But the Mexican didn't do anything except breathe
heavily, as if he didn't want to miss a cubic inch of the oxygen previously
breathed by the Argentinean. When the movie was over the Argentinean asked
politely for a copy, but the Mexican refused even to consider it. That night
they went to a place called El Rey del Taco for beers. As they were drinking,
the Argentinean thought for a moment that all the waiters were zombies. It
didn't surprise him. The place was huge, full of murals and paintings depicting
the childhood of El Rey del Taco, and the heaviness of a petrified nightmare
hung over the tables. At one point the Argentinean thought someone had put
something in his beer. He left abruptly and went back to his hotel by taxi. The
next day he took a bus to
Phoenix
and caught a
plane from there to
Los Angeles
,
where he spent his days interviewing any actors who would agree to be
interviewed, which wasn't many, and his nights writing a long article about the
killings of women in Santa Teresa. The article centered on the porn film
industry and the underground subindustry of snuff films. The term
snuff film,
according to the
Argentinean, had been invented in
Argentina
, although not by an
Argentinean but by an American couple who had come there to make a movie. The
Americans were called Mike and Clarissa Epstein and they hired two relatively
famous
Buenos Aires
actors who had fallen on hard times, and several young people, some of whom
were later very well-known. The crew was also Argentinean, except for the
cameraman, a buddy of Epstein's called JT Hardy, who got to
Buenos Aires
a day before the filming began.
This was in
  
1972, when there was still
talk in
Argentina
about revolution, about Peronist revolution, about Socialist revolution
 
and
 
even
 
mystical
 
revolution.
  
Psychoanalysts
  
and
 
poets roamed the streets and were watched
from the windows by psychics and practitioners of the dark arts. When JT
arrived in
Buenos Aires
he was met at the
airport by Mike and Clarissa Epstein, who were more excited about
Argentina
with each passing day. As they rode in a taxi to the house they had rented on
the edge of the city, Mike confessed that all of this, and in explanation he
spread his arms wide, was like the West, the American West, but better than the
American West, because in the West, when you thought about it, all the cowboys
did was herd cattle,
and
here, on the pampa, as he had come to see more and more clearly, the cowboys
were zombie hunters.
 
Is the movie about
zombies? JT wanted to know. There are one or two, said Clarissa. That night, in
honor of the cameraman, a traditional Argentinean barbecue was held in the
Epsteins' yard, next to the pool, with the actors and crew in attendance. Two
days later they left for
Tigre
.
After a week of filming the whole team returned to
Buenos Aires
. They took a break for a few
days. The actors, who were mostly younger, went to visit their parents and
friends, and JT, sitting next to the Epsteins' pool, read the script. He didn't
understand much of it, and what was worse, he didn't recognize any of the
scenes he'd shot in
Tigre
.
a little later, in a fleet of two trucks and a pickup, they left for the pampa.
They looked, said one of the Argentinean actors, like a troupe of gypsies
heading into the unknown. The trip was endless. The first night they slept at a
kind of truck stop and Mike and Clarissa had their first fight. An
eighteen-year-old Argentinean actress started to cry and said she wanted to go
home, back to her mother and little brothers and sisters. An Argentinean actor
who looked like a leading man got drunk and fell asleep in the bathroom and the
other actors had to drag him to his room. The next day Mike woke them up very
early and they got back on the road, looking sheepish. To save money, they ate
on riverbanks, as if they were picnicking. The girls were good cooks and even
the boys seemed skilled at grilling. Their diet was based on meat and wine.
Almost everyone had a camera and during the meal breaks they took pictures of
one another. Some spoke in English with Clarissa and JT, to practice, they
said. Mike, meanwhile, talked to everybody in Spanish, a Spanish riddled with
the Argentinean slang
lun-fardo
that
made the kids smile. On the fourth day of the trip, when JT thought he was lost
in a nightmare, they arrived at a ranch, where they were received by the only
two employees, a couple in their fifties who looked after the house and
stables. Mike talked to them for a while, explaining that he was a friend of
the boss, and then everyone got out of the trucks and took possession of the
house. That same afternoon work started up again. They filmed an outdoors
scene, a man making a fire, a woman tied to a barbed-wire fence, two men
talking business while they sat on the ground eating big pieces of meat. The
meat was hot, and the men tossed it from hand to hand so as not to burn
themselves. That night they had a party. There was talk about politics, the
need for agricultural reform, landowners, the future of
Latin
America
, and the Epsteins and JT were quiet, partly because they
weren't interested and partly because they had more important things to think
about. That night JT had discovered that Clarissa was cheating on Mike with one
of the actors, although Mike didn't seem to care. The next day they filmed
inside the ranch. Sex scenes, which was what JT was best at, since he was an
expert in indirect lighting, in the art of hints and suggestion. The ranch
caretaker slaughtered a calf, which they ate at noon, and Mike went along,
equipped with several plastic bags. When he came back the bags were full of
blood. The filming that morning resembled nothing so much as a massacre. It was
supposed to look as if two of the actors had killed one of the actresses and
then chopped her to pieces, wrapped the remains in sacking, and gone out onto the
pampa to bury them. Pieces of the calf slaughtered that morning were used, and
almost all of its innards. One of the Argentinean girls cried and said the
movie they were making was disgusting trash. The housekeeper, however, seemed
highly amused. On Sunday, the third day of filming, the woman who owned the
ranch drove up in a Bentley. The only Bentley JT remembered having seen was one
that belonged to a Hollywood producer, in a far-off time when he still thought
he could make a life for himself in
Hollywood
.
The owner might have been forty-five and she was an attractive, elegant blonde
who spoke much more proper English than the three Americans. The Argentinean
kids were cautious around her at first. As if they didn't trust her and as if
she, necessarily, would distrust them, which wasn't the case. Also, she turned
out to be a very practical kind of person: she reorganized the pantry in such a
way that there was always enough food, sent for another woman to help the
housekeeper with the cleaning, set a schedule for meals, put her Bentley at the
director's disposal. Suddenly the ranch was no longer an Indian camp. Or to put
it another way: the ranch lost on the pampa stopped being Sparta and became
Athens, as one of the young actors resoundingly declared during one of the
evening gatherings that since the owner's arrival were held daily on the large,
comfortable veranda. Of these gatherings, which sometimes lasted until three or
four in the morning, JT would remember the hostess's readiness to listen, her bright
eyes, the way her skin glowed in the moonlight, the stories she told about her
childhood in the country and her adolescence at a Swiss boarding school.
Sometimes, especially when he was alone, in his room, in bed and with a blanket
pulled up to his chin, JT thought that she might be the woman he'd been looking
for all his life. What am
I
here for, he asked himself, if not to meet her? What's the point of Mike's
 
disgusting and incomprehensible film if not
to give me the chance to come to this godforsaken country and meet her? Does it
mean anything that I was out of work when Mike called me? Of course it does! It
means I had no choice but to accept his offer and meet her. The ranch owner's
name was Estela and JT could repeat it until his mouth was parched. Estela,
Estela, he said over and over again, under the blankets, like a worm or an
insomniac mole. During the day, however, when they met or talked, the cameraman
was all circumspection and prudence. He didn't allow himself yearning looks, he
didn't allow himself suggestive hints or romantic swoons. His relationship with
their hostess never once departed from the strict pathways of courtesy and
respect. When the filming was over, the ranch owner offered to drive the
Epsteins and JT back to
Buenos Aires
in her Bentley, but JT said he would rather make the return trip with the team.
Three days later the Epsteins dropped him off at the airport and JT didn't dare
ask them directly about Estela. Nor did he ask anything about the film. In
New York
he tried in vain
to forget her. The first few days were tinged with melancholy and regret and JT
thought he would never recover. Anyway: recover what? And yet, with the passage
of time, in his heart he understood that he'd gained much more than he'd lost.
At least, he said to himself, I've
met
the
woman of my dreams. Other people, most people, glimpse something in films, the
shadow of great actresses, the gaze of true love. But I saw her in the flesh,
heard her voice, saw her silhouetted against the endless pampa. I talked to her
and she talked
back.
What do I have
to complain about? In
Buenos Aires
,
meanwhile, Mike edited the film in a cheap studio that he rented by the hour,
on Calle Corrientes. a month after the filming had ended, one of the young
actresses fell in love with an Italian revolutionary on his way through
Buenos Aires
and left with him for
Europe
.
No one could say why, but word spread that the actress had died while Epstein's
film was being shot, and a little later it was rumored, although it must be
emphasized that no one took this seriously, that Epstein and his troupe had
killed her. According to this last version Epstein wanted to film a real murder
and to that end he had selected, with the acquiescence of the other actors and
the crew—everyone, at the peak of the madness, immersed in satanic rituals—the
least well-known and most defenseless actress in the cast. Hearing these
rumors, Epstein took it upon himself to spread them,
 
and the story, with
 
slight variations, reached some cinephile
circles in the
United States
.
The following year the film opened in
Los Angeles
and
New York
.
It was a total flop, dubbed as it was into English, chaotic, with a weak script
and pitiful performances. Epstein, who returned to the
United States
, tried to exploit the
gruesome element, but a TV commentator demonstrated, frame by frame, that the
purportedly real crime had been faked. The actress, concluded the critic,
deserved to die for her poor acting, but the truth is, in this film at least,
no one had the good sense to do away with her. After
Snuff,
Epstein shot two more films, both low budget. Clarissa, his
wife, stayed in
Buenos Aires
,
where she moved in with an Argentinean movie producer. Her new companion, a
Peronist, later became an active member of a death squad that began by killing
Trotskyites and guerrillas and ended up orchestrating the disappearance of
children and housewives. During the military dictatorship Clarissa returned to
the
United States
.
a year later, while he was shooting what would be his last film (his name
doesn't appear in the credits), Epstein was killed when he fell down an
elevator shaft. After a fall of fourteen flights, the state of the body,
according to witnesses, was indescribable.