Mapuche (32 page)

The prisoners were trembling with fear when they were made to get out of the van. The officer, his revolver in his hand, had ordered them to dig their own graves, but the couple had refused. In the end, it was Ricardo who'd gotten stuck with the job. The colonel had shot the two subversives himself, putting a bullet in the napes of their necks, first the woman, then the bearded man . . . Afterward, the officer assigned to the mission had commanded him to take the wheel again and to keep his mouth shut if he didn't want to get in trouble, and that is what he'd done. Montañez had left the army two months later, at the end of his enlistment, and returned to his region of origin, hoping never to hear anything about that period again.

The former driver was sweating on the backseat, his cheeks trembling with the bumps in the road. Rubén was harassing him.

“Did they give you money to keep quiet?”

“No.”

“How did you manage to buy your shitty hotel?”

“My parents died . . . They left me a little money.”

“This colonel—you must have run into him again after this episode?”

“No, never. He wasn't at the ESMA, I tell you!”

“Describe him.”

“Fairly tall . . . thick brown hair . . . pretty young at the time, maybe around forty. It was a long time ago, I don't remember anymore.”

“We'll see about that. Any identifying characteristic?”

“No. I'd never seen him before, and I never saw him afterward. It's a period that I want to forget, and . . . ”

“Describe the place where the couple was executed.”

“Toward Puente del Inca . . . I remember black rocks alongside a rough track, a huge landslide . . . It was a long time ago!”

Rubén grumbled in the backseat. There were gaps in the petty officer's story—the location of the
estancia
, what might have taken place there, the identity of the owner and that of the officer assigned to carry out the transfer and the murder. The interrogation had gone on for more than an hour. Montañez grew tired, his nerves breaking down after his confession. Rubén thought for a long time on the backseat. Jana was watching the road, looking out for stray cattle that could pulverize the car. Soon Rubén leaned forward toward her.

“Do you want me to drive?”

“No, that's O.K. Hey,” Jana whispered. “I'm thinking about something.”

“What?”

“What are we going to do about the cat? He must be hungry, poor old thing.”

Rubén caressed the nape of the Mapuche's neck and smiled in the dark of the car.

“Don't worry about him, he'll be all right.”

 

*

 

The valley of the Uspallata cuts deep into the Andes. The heart of the rock was yellow, red, gray, black, green—a miracle of nature escorting the defile. They had passed Mendoza before dawn and followed the road that climbed into the mountains. A few quarries with trucks standing about and improbable derricks miming the conquest of the West seemed petrified by the first rays of the sun. Farther on, a little chapel made out of a drainpipe contained a row of ex-votos. Rubén and Jana traveled through spectacular gorges, past a lake of turquoise water dominated by mesas, winding canyons in which rafting clubs often camped and which were closed to the public at the end of the summer. They drove for nine hours, almost without stopping; the lack of sleep was beginning to make itself felt, and they stopped for a cup of coffee at a mountain inn that was just opening its doors.

Awakened from his virtual ecstasy, Ricardo Montañez snorted. He was wearing linen pants, a beige tunic thrown on in haste, and moccasins without socks.

“I've got to go,” he said.

The inn was empty at that hour. While Montañez was in the toilet, Rubén ordered breakfast and returned to the sunny terrace. Huge rocks lay on the other side of the road; they had probably been there for centuries. Jana mewed as she stretched her arms; her muscles were stiff. The sun was coming up over the crest of the mountains, and a bird of prey flew high above in the pink sky. The air was cooler at 6,500 feet; the landscape had a cinematographic clarity.

“I've never come this way,” the Mapuche said. “It's beautiful.”

They soon arrived at the Aconcagua, “the stone sentinel,” the roof of the Americas, whose snowy peaks were lost in the clouds. Rubén stayed close to her, the scent of her hair as a guide.

“Do you think Montañez is putting us on?” she asked. “He's been moaning in the backseat for hours.”

“We'll soon find out.”

A truck passed by, whining in second gear.

“In any case, we should be wary of him,” Jana said with a frown. “This guy really looks like a sneak, with his little prick.”

Her slight smile grew larger. Rubén suddenly felt like kissing her, telling her that last night had been marvelous, but the old petty officer was coming back from the toilets, as white as a sheet.

 

Puente del Inca: the last pass before the descent into Chile. An orange dust was flying over the asphalt road. As they approached the border post they met only a few trucks. Montañez continued to sweat heavily in the backseat of the Hyundai, barely reinvigorated by his breakfast. They saw a couple of llamas lost in the stony waste as they drove out of Las Cuevas, but not a single human being. The slopes of the mountains varied in color from mauve to red; it was growing hotter. Jana slowed as she crossed an abandoned train track: an old iron bridge signaled that they had arrived at Puente del Inca
,
the southernmost limit of the ancient kingdom of the Incas.

“Do you recognize it?” Rubén said as he drove.

Montañez was dripping under his tunic. He was afraid of his memories, afraid of spending years in prison for a crime he hadn't committed. Since the statute of limitations on crimes against the state had been abolished, the detective had made a deal with the former military man: no criminal charges in exchange for his collaboration. They drove along the bed of a dry river, then passed dramatic scree slopes in a narrow canyon: Montañez observed the landscape attentively.

“Turn right here,” he said after a while.

A sheet of ice gleamed in the lunar shadow of a rocky peak. They followed a dirt road that went to the right. The air coming through the windows was warmer. The Hyundai was traveling at the feet of titans eroded by the wind when the fat man signaled that they should stop. A lava flow had stopped near a pinnacle of black rock with steely glints.

“Is it here?”

“Yes, I think so.”

The petty officer had never returned to the scene of the crime, but it was impossible to forget these contrasts. They parked the car at the side of the road. Montañez said nothing, hypnotized by the metallic reflections of the rock that ate into the sky. Rubén poked into the soil apprehensively, as if the dead might rise up. Finally, Montañez pointed to a spot at the foot of the rockslide.

“Here, I think.”

The soil was dry and scattered with small stones. Rubén threw a brand-new shovel and pickaxe in front of Ricardo's tasseled moccasins.

“Dig.”

 

The sun rose steeply in the heart of the Andes. Montañez labored, hunched over his tool: he'd been digging at the foot of the precipice. He complained about blisters and backache. The earth was hard and the heat dreadful, despite the bit of cloth that protected his large, shaved head; Jana and Rubén, who had taken refuge in the car with the door open to let the desert air blow through, watched him struggle.

Jana had never been north of the mountain range, but she knew that there was a Huarpe site in this region, a center of energy as powerful as that at Machu Picchu, where the shamans talked with the cosmic spirit. The Huarpes, those peaceful giants, had not been destroyed by the little Incas but by the Jesuits, who had recruited them in order to save them. Rubén listened to her as he smoked, keeping one eye on the progress of the work. He thought again about their discussion on the roof terrace. The Mapuches also talked with the earth. Her sister and the
machi
. . .

“By the way, you never told me,” he said. “What is the secret of the Hain?”

The Selk'nam's great-granddaughter gave him a charming look.

“Maybe someday you'll find out. Or maybe never.”

He spat the smoke from his cigarette out the open door. Not very precise, her story. Twenty yards away, at the foot of the rocky mass, Montañez continually swore at the barbarous soil; his tunic was dirty, his moccasins dusty, his hands covered with blisters. He was killing himself under the blazing sun, a trembling mass half swallowed up by the hole, he dug on and on until he hit a bone.

“Here's something!” he cried.

He put down his pickaxe, his eyes baleful under his head-cloth. Jana and Rubén left the car that protected them from the sun and returned to the pit, from which the heavy man was extricating himself with difficulty. Bits of bone were visible at the bottom of the hole. Rubén set down the little case that Raúl Sanz had given him and jumped down into the cavity. Jana kept an eye on Montañez, whose face was red from the effort he'd made; he was almost apoplectic. The detective swept away the looser earth using small archeological tools: brushes, rakes, a pick; his actions were precise and cautious. Jana leaned over the grave. Other bones appeared, vertebrae the color of fabric, then a human skull. That of a woman, so far as one could tell by the remains of the dress. Montañez was still wiping his face, sitting in the shade of the black pinnacle that loomed over them.

“Was that what she was wearing?” Rubén asked him.

The former petty officer approached the grave very slowly, then made an affirmative gesture. Rubén went on with the exhumation. There was another body, intertwined with the first, a man, his neck broken by the impact of a bullet. Samuel and Gabriella Verón. It couldn't be anyone else.

The detective did not separate the two skeletons of the couple intertwined in death: he detached the skulls and put them in a military sack brought for the purpose. Jana didn't say anything either. The noonday sun was beating down unmercifully. Rubén thought sadly about these two young people who had spent six nightmarish weeks in detention at the ESMA, and then found themselves in the Andes in the middle of the night, hugging each other and trembling in front of the grave that was being dug for them. The girl first, Montañez had said, then the bearded man. Two young people twenty-five years old, whose children had been stolen from them. Lovers.

 

*

 

A gray, angry thunderstorm was sweeping across the valley. They went around the cloud, following the ray of sun that passed through it. Jana was driving silently. They had just left the dirt road and gotten back on the asphalt that wound down to Uspallata. The bones were in the trunk of the car, along with the tools and their baggage. Rubén had buried the remains of Samuel and Gabriella, hoping to give them a decent grave later on. In the backseat, Montañez was slowly recovering, counting the burst blisters on his pudgy fingers. He too was shaken. They drove past abrupt cliffs of astonishing beauty without meeting any other vehicles. The detective was sending messages on his BlackBerry when Jana slowed down as she came out of a curve.

People were blocking the road.

“Rubén . . . ”

He looked up.
Piqueteros
. There weren't many of them, about a hundred yards away. People who hadn't shared in the economic growth and who had assembled in haste under a billowing banner. It was hard to determine what they wanted—probably just work. Bizarre. Standing in the middle of the road, the unemployed men signaled to them: Jana braked as they approached the roadblock and rolled down her window. A man wearing an old sweatsuit came to meet them, a colored sun hat on his head. The
piquetero
smiled broadly at her; he had a nasty scar on his nose and held leaflets in his hand.

“
Hola, señorita!
” he said as he leaned on the car's windowsill.

There were six of them under the banner, their heads protected by straw hats; there was a fellow at the wheel of a pickup who was observing them from the side of the road.

“Go!” Rubén shouted, plunging his hand under his jacket. “Go!”

These guys were not
piqueteros
. The man at the door of the car dropped the leaflets that had been hiding his gun and pointed it at the Mapuche at the wheel. A shot resounded in the car as she floored the accelerator. Rubén had fired first, at point-blank range: hit in the solar plexus, the scarred man fell to the asphalt.

“Go! Go!”

Jana no longer heard Rubén's cries nor the roaring of the motor: the gun had gone off a few inches from her ears; a high-pitched whistle was piercing her eardrums, and the world seemed to be turning. She crossed the line of fake
piqueteros
, who immediately moved aside. They pulled their hidden weapons out of their shirts and emptied their cartridge clips as if they had been at a shooting range. The rear window of the Hyundai was blown to pieces.

“Keep your head down, Jana!” Rubén bellowed. “Damn it, keep your head down!”

The Mapuche was focusing on the road, clutching the steering wheel: a volley of bullets passed over them, spraying bits of glass everywhere inside the car. Jana had her foot on the floor but they still weren't going fast enough: the car was hit, the trunk riddled with bullets. Montañez was howling in the backseat. Jana was gripping the wheel when one of the tires exploded. She immediately lost control of the car, which swerved suddenly toward the side of the road. There was no guardrail, but the dry land prevented serious damage when they went off the road: bullets were still flying around them as they bumped over the desert.

“Keep going, keep going!”

Jana drove a hundred yards before she heard the first sounds: Rubén was pointing to the ruins of a building a little higher up the hill. The Hyundai climbed another thirty yards and then stopped against a talus of stone and sand. Rubén grabbed the .38 under the driver's seat and opened the door.