Mapuche (11 page)

“No,” Rodolfo replied furiously. “Your trade.”

“I get the impression that yours isn't too bad either, fatso,” he said to bug him. “Radio host, right? Stupidities and laughs galore. I hope you thanked your papa.”

Rodolfo grew pink, cramped in his white shirt. He was the comedian on the morning show of a radio station that in fact belonged to his father, and his job consisted of pissing people off on the telephone by pretending to be someone else, making “trick” calls that were usually rigged; it would have been hard to say who, if anyone, they amused.

All that could be heard was the sound of the pruning shears among the rosebushes and the rustling of the wind in the willow over their heads.

“I won't spend another second in the presence of this individual,” Rodolfo hissed to his mother.

“Good idea,” Rubén said.

“Throw him out, Mama, or I'm calling the security men.”

“Yes.”

Petrified behind the screen of her dark glasses, Isabel Campallo did not move. Rodolfo hesitated a second: his mother was upset, this troublemaker provoked them, but a vague fear kept him from making the call himself, and anyway he'd left his cell phone at home.

“I'll call Papa,” he said curtly, turning on his heel.

Isabel drew the shawl around her skinny shoulders, pale in spite of the carotene and the vacation at the beach.

“You know something, don't you . . . ” Rubén said.

“No. But my son's right,” Isabel resumed. “I don't know where you're getting your information, but I beg you to leave my home. Now, immediately,” she ordered, recovering her dominant status.

Rubén crushed out his cigarette.

“I'm trying to find out if your daughter is still alive. Is that a problem for you?”

“You're making me crazy with worry, if you want to know the truth.”

“You know something, something I don't know.”

The blue arrows of his irises pierced her.

“No,” she said, feeling threatened. “I don't know anything and you are not welcome in our home. Leave,” she panted. “Right now!”

Isabel turned toward the porch and started to get up, but he grabbed her wrist.

“You're lying,” Rubén insisted. “Why?”

“Stop bothering me. I have nothing to say to you. Let me go.”

The air in the garden was charged with electricity. Rubén tightened his grip on her wrist, almost without noticing.

“You're hurting me!”

“You're lying.”

“No!”

“Then tell me what you're scared of.”

Isabel Campallo trembled when she met the eyes of the detective, who was staring at her maliciously. He'd have liked to break her wrist. To grind her bones.

“You,” she replied in a tremulous voice. “You . . . ”

 

*

 

A truck slit the twilight, howling. Rubén crushed out his cigarette against the railing of the balcony, deaf to the clatter of the wheels on the metal plates. His bedroom looked out on the bridge leading to the airport, part of the superhighway that cut a deep scar through the neighborhood, at the corner of Peru and San Juan. Trucks hurtled past day and night, spewing diesel fumes, but Rubén heard nothing but the wailing of the baby under the concrete pillars, which had been going on for two weeks.

A family lived under the bridge, a couple of
cartoneros
and two scruffy children who had never slept in a bed or gone to school. Only this bridge. They'd made it their shelter for two years now, with kitchen utensils, bottles of water, canned goods, the wretched mess that constituted their possessions. A baby had recently been born, a catastrophe, their third, clothed with what was at hand. Where had the mother given birth? In the street? Those people not only picked up cardboard boxes, they lived among them. A whole family, anonymous and recycled as well. They had constructed a barricade, an empty shell that they closed behind them when night fell to protect themselves from the cold, stray dogs, down-and-outs; they came out in the morning, stiff after a sleep without memory, all rags and dirt, incapable of saying thank you to the rare passersby who gave them a coin.

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.

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.