Mapuche (14 page)

She nervously rolled her balls of paper, her mind elsewhere.

“You haven't said anything to your son about the visit you received last week?” Brother Josef persisted, all velvety.

“I never receive any visits!” Rosa certified, bouncing on her handicapped person's wheelchair. “Miguel even less: I wouldn't allow him to!”

She swallowed a ball of paper without even noticing.

“Rosa, I'm talking about the visit you mentioned the day you came with the paper. Do you remember? Do you still have it? Did you show it to your son?”

“Nothing at all!”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you know he takes pills? I saw him do it in the backroom the other day: they're hormones, I'm sure of it! To make him grow breasts!” the unhappy woman cried, enraged. “You'll see, someday he'll have his member reduced! Aah! My God!” she moaned in the confessional box. “My God, what have I done to deserve all that? Life is such a burden! I beg you, Brother Josef, save me, save me from Evil!”

The young priest cleared his throat and persisted.

“The document you showed me, Rosa, do you still have it?”

“It's a secret!”

“Yes, yes,” he reassured her. “Did you tell anyone else?”

“What?”

“Miguel, your son, perhaps?”

“You have to come talk to him! Right away! You have to come before it's too late!”

“What . . . what are you talking about, Rosa?”

“About his member!” she said, swallowing a ball of paper. The demon is capable of anything! Even having it cut off! It's awful. You have to . . . you have to help me!” she said, barely able to get the words out.

The laundress was seized by a fit of coughing so violent that it brought her to tears. In the darkness on the other side of the grille, Brother Josef sighed, perplexed: this old woman was becoming demented.

“All right,” he finally said. “I'll come speak with your son.”

Bits of chewed-up paper adhered to Rosa's lips.

“Ah! Ah!” she choked. “Watch out for him! This time, watch out for him! Oh, sparks are going to fly!”

Yes, thought the priest, more and more demented.

Rubén and Anita Barragan had grown up in the same neighborhood, San Telmo. At first, they were not close—the little girl was really too blonde to interest him—but then Anita grew six inches the year she turned twelve.

The metamorphosis did not go unnoticed in the neighborhood, but Anita's problem remained the same: her ugly face, which she hid behind her light colored hair, her locks like a curtain drawn over her unfortunate stage. Her measurements didn't matter, this brand new big body which begged to be put to use, Anita still woke up every morning with the same homely mug. “Rendezvous at the OK Corral,” as she used to say. The aquiline nose that she saw as crooked, too-small eyes, too-white skin, lips that looked like cigarette papers—Anita found it hard to endure this neutral, static, even dissymmetrical face that refused to conform to the canons of any period. Hiding behind a smiling mask, she avoided mirrors and reflections in shop windows as if her “ugly mug” was all that could be seen. In any case, boys were not taken in: although they followed her in the streets and sometimes whistled at her, none of them turned around when she passed.

Anita lived backwards.

Flipside.

She'd lost face.

Anita was delirious.

She had been in love ever since her early puberty: thinking herself ugly, she had chosen the handsomest, most impressive, most inaccessible of the neighborhood boys, Rubén Calderón of course, a big brown-haired boy with an incredibly sexy walk who had lost his father and his sister during the Process: in short, a hero, with eyes that would break your heart, an imperial bearing, and a small nose the exact opposite of her own. Anita had first confronted him in the street, while he was talking to a pretty brunette in a miniskirt; she had planted herself in front of him, holding out a carefully wrapped package that the young man had ended up opening with amused curiosity. Inside was a falsely naive drawing, a ship sailing over a sea of tears, with Anita as the captain waving from the bridge. “To accompany you in the life that we will never live together,” read the legend that she had added in her best handwriting. Rubén had left the pretty brunette standing there and bought Anita a strawberry gelato, the best she'd ever had.

Years later, they'd seen each other again in front of the residence of Juan Martin Yedro, an amnestied policeman. Anita and her student friends, intoxicated by the songs of vengeance sung by young people hopped-up on the illusion that followed the fall of the dictatorship, were throwing red paint bombs at the torturer's walls, locking arms and jumping up and down, shouting slogans denouncing the federal police. Rubén, who was at that time a journalist, had remained alone on the sidelines, as if scouting out his future hunting grounds, and then asked her to have lunch with him. The beginning of their adult friendship. The fact that seven years later Anita Barragan joined the federal police was not the least of her paradoxes. With her law degree in her pocket, she'd passed the examination to become a police inspector and was then transferred from one position to another by a macho administration. Finally, she had ended up in the police station in the neighborhood where she'd grown up, San Telmo, in the “911” brigade that patrolled downtown Buenos Aires. The police chief, Ledesma, an old, paternalistic cop relatively immune to corruption, led the team of about forty officers, which had ended up seeming old-fashioned after the mayor set up a new elite police unit.

An attorney, businessman, and former president of the Boca Juniors soccer team, Torres was aiming for the top, the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. His father, Ignacio, had made his fortune in the wine trade during the boom in the 1990s and had financed his son's first campaign: Francisco Torres openly supported the Peronist right wing that constituted the main opposition coalition, and it was well known that the mayor would become its head. Equipment, weapons, techniques of investigation, scientific policing, training—the mayor had modernized Buenos Aires's system of repression by greatly increasing communication. Torres had assigned Fernando Luque to manage this elite unit that was supposed to become the “Argentine police of tomorrow.” There was no skimping on resources or methods: the preceding year, Luque had been indicted in an case involving illegal wiretaps before being cleared—by a judge close to Torres.

In the meantime, the 911 brigade's two-tone patrol cars picked up drunks, wifebeaters, troublemakers, and a few thieves and pickpockets. An inspector not assigned to any investigation, Anita found herself training pimply interns who spent more time ogling her breasts than keeping an eye on the streets, a kind of work she found not very motivating and far from her initial areas of competence. About to turn forty, Anita, who had aspired to radiant passions, was living alone in a studio apartment in Parque Patricios with Mist, the gray cat that had taken up residence on one corner of her bed and vegetated there like a police officer on patrol.

Anita and Rubén met at El Cuartito, an ancient pizzeria in the city center that was jammed at lunchtime. Enormous numbers of yellowing posters covered the walls, showing Maradona and other soccer players in the tight shorts of the 1970s and 1980s that made people forget the smell of melted cheese constantly emerging from the kitchen. Amid office employees, Anita and Rubén ate an extra-large pizza, incognito in the racket of commentaries on the next match. He was wearing a shirt and a suede jacket that absorbed the greasy smell of the chair; she wore her navy blue uniform with three buttons open to allow her prodigious lungs to breathe. The detective told her about María Campallo's phone call to the newspaper, his visit to her parents, her mother's reaction on hearing about the baby, and the singer father who had hired him to find the photographer.

The waiters were weaving among the chairs in the cantina, their hands loaded with steaming platters. Anita leaned toward her childhood love so she wouldn't have to shout.

“What do you want me to do? Send out a missing person bulletin concerning the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the country, just like that?” she said, cracking her knuckles.

“Nobody has reported her disappearance,” Rubén replied.

“Have you thought about suicide?”

“Have you ever seen a pregnant woman commit suicide?”

“That depends on what she has in her belly,” the old maid added. “Suppose the child isn't Jo Prat's, that she's carrying a monster, the result of a rape or God knows what else?”

“You read too many women's magazines,
querida
.”

“Darling,” the nickname he called her to help her like herself. Rubén wiped his lips with a paper napkin, crumpled it up and tossed it on his plate, which he had hardly started on.

“O.K.,” Anita continued. “Let's assume that María Victoria has vanished, that she found out something about her father's activities, or about one of his friends connected with the Torres campaign, and let's suppose that she's in hiding or scared. Have you seen many children reproach their parents for lining their pockets?”

“María didn't call Carlos at the newspaper to talk about baby clothes,” Rubén objected.

“Was she politically engaged? I mean against her father?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“That's not much of a basis for putting out a missing person bulletin, you have to admit.”

“Her computer has also disappeared, either that or María took it with her when she fled. It might provide the key to the problem. Carlos is working on that, but it's going to take time. I need you to find her, Anita. If Campallo's daughter felt threatened, she might have left the country. Ask Immigration if they have any trace of her somewhere. I also need detailed bills for her cell phone,” Rubén added, writing numbers on a corner of the paper tablecloth. “I've been able to get my hands on only last month's bill.” He tore off the paper and slipped it under her glass. “Here's her number.”

Anita blew away her blonde hair—she was sweating under her shirt, among all these males braying as the pizzas came spilling out of the ovens, and Rubén was giving her one of his disarming smiles the secret of which the divine SOB knew only too well.

“You don't have to worry about losing your job with the cops,” she reminded him. “If I tell them that the information comes from you, I'm going to get my knuckles rapped.”

“You're too smart for that.”

“You're not the one who's under the hammer.”

“Nor holding the handle. You have a friend in Immigration, don't you?”

“We haven't slept together for a long time.”

“I'm sure that it hasn't caused him to lose the faculty of speech.”

Anita didn't answer. She was ruminating over the pizza crusts. Her years as a cop had dulled her complexion, her uniform had destroyed her sex appeal, but Rubén saw her again as a girl, with her strawberry ice cream in front of the stand and her teenager's eyes that were eating him up.

“O.K.,” she sighed, putting the number in her pocket. “I'll see what I can do.”

“Thanks,
querida
.”

“That's it, right.”

Anita got up amid the brouhaha, threw her napkin in Rubén's face, and with a century-old wink disappeared toward the restroom, swinging her hips. He ordered two coffees and took advantage of her absence to pay the bill.

The blonde soon returned, re-powdered, almost spruce despite her outfit.

“Thanks,” she said, seeing the money on the table.

“It was disgusting,” he said, to reassure her.

Anita's soft smile reminded him of the pizzas. They slugged down the coffee.

Dark clouds were sliding through the sky as they left the cantina. Rubén lit a cigarette and felt better in the open air. He was thinking about the sculptress from yesterday, about her request regarding the murder in La Boca. A little earlier, he had shown Anita the charcoal portrait of the transvestite; she'd heard about the body found near the ferry, but not about what had been done to it.

“Shit!” she exclaimed when she saw the time. “I'm late!”

She embraced him—she smelled like vanilla, the world's most popular flavor.

“By the way,” Rubén said before letting her go. “Does
Ituzaingó 69
mean anything to you?”

Anita frowned.

“No,” she said. “What is it, a swingers' club?”

 

*

 

Ituzaingó 69, a few scribbled words found in the pocket of María Campallo's jeans. Rubén had visited an apartment building on San Martin and questioned a couple of unionized workers who had lost everything, their jobs and their dignity, during the wave of privatizations, surviving one way or another by participating in trading clubs, people who had never heard of María Victoria Campallo or her father. The preceding night, the detective had followed another lead, a rock group, Ituzaingó, from the neighborhood of the same name in the Castelar Norte area: the musicians had played two weeks earlier at the Teatro de la Piedad, on the corner of Bartolome, a rather homey co-op bar where the group's bass player was performing solo that evening. A simple voice, sounds produced by a computer, a CocoRosie-on-the-moon atmosphere: asked after the set, the young brunette had stated that she had never met the photographer—they were only a self-produced group from the northern suburbs.

The trail was cold. Rubén gave up and drove to Palermo, where María Victoria's shoemaker had reopened his shop after his weekly two days off. Rubén showed him the card he'd found in the ashtray in the loft, trying not to dwell on the odor of leather and feet that permeated the shop. The shoemaker, who was very affable, confirmed that Miss Campallo had in fact left a pair of shoes with him the preceding week, to be resoled.