The Mulberry Bush (12 page)

Luz took me home to meet her grandparents, who looked like royalty that had walked out of a Velázquez on the day it was painted and had been aging gracefully ever since.

Alejandro, their only child, was born just before his mother entered menopause. Joy had gone out of their lives when he renounced them and everything they had taught him. A quarter of a century later they were very sad people still. But they were a pleasure to be with because of their transparent love for Luz, their exquisite manners, and their beautiful Spanish. Both had been educated in Spain. By now I understood the language well enough—even spoke it well enough so that
porteños
did not cringe at the sound of my voice—to know that I was hearing from them a kind of Castilian that was on the point of extinction.

How, I wondered, had they felt while listening to Marx torturing Cervantes in the coarsened speech of their deluded son and his joyless wife? If they were surprised that Luz had brought a Yanqui home with her—she hardly paused for breath after the introductions before informing them
that we intended to marry—nothing showed on their faces apart from a very brief widening of the eyes.

We drank aged Argentinean Manzanilla, ate a five-course, three-wine dinner served by a butler in frayed livery that was almost as old as he was. We lingered over coffee in front of a wood fire. The
abuelos,
as Luz always called her grandparents no matter which language she was speaking, never asked me a question about myself. There was no need: Luz itemized the essentials. They listened as if they had somehow known all about me before they knew I existed. Luz loved them deeply, and we went back to their house often, but their manner never changed. The
abuelos
were proper in every way. They offered hospitality, not quite the same thing as acceptance, but more than I deserved. After all, I was inflicting upon them the loss of the only descendant they had left to love. I was going to make her disappear, transport her to my barbarous country.

Luz also introduced me, one by one, to her honorary uncles and aunts, the former terrorists Alejandro had handed over to Amzi instead of giving them to the military. Few of them had accepted Amzi's offers of secret employment, but most must have given him information and other kinds of help or they wouldn't have been where they were today—or even alive if he had chosen to tell the military who they were. Some of them could barely contain the loathing they felt for me and would have felt for any North American who worked inside the U.S. embassy. Even if I was not a baddy personally, I was still an agent of capitalist imperialism and deserved death even if it was merely social death, the only sort of assassination still available to them. Others were more mannerly, if only to preserve the illusion that they had left the folly of their youth behind them. They were respectable now, and because the respectability was a disguise, they took care not to let the masks slip. One and all behaved as if they were at all times gazing into invisible mirrors.

None of this meant they had foresworn the true faith. The catechism of the radical left still trumped reality. In the United States they would have
gone on shouting out the vocabulary of slogans that was the Esperanto of their youth. For them, such behavior remained unwise. They were in hiding for life. They never knew whom they might be talking to or what that fellow down the table who didn't sing with the choir might really be—or worse, what he
used
to be. Or whom he knew.

I did not regard their hostility as a problem. From an operational viewpoint, it was a good thing that they had never changed. The important thing was, they hated the same Headquarters I had targeted. When offered the chance to carry out one last revolutionary act, perhaps with luck to slay the vile monster, they would not refuse, as long as they didn't have to be suicide bombers, which was a job best left to persons of less value than themselves.

Luz shared this analysis. This surprised me. Politically speaking, these people had raised her. They had baptized and confirmed her. They had shown themselves to her as they really were because it was her birthright to be trusted. They were her political tutors. They had taught her to be undyingly proud of her father and mother. They had told her stories of their heroism, told her secrets, painted in her mind a picture of Alejandro as paladin of the people, slayer of fascist dragons, the very definition of righteousness, and of Felicia as his Joan of Ark.

Alejandro, they believed, had saved every one of their lives. They knew he had done this by sacrificing everyone else, but by the time Luz was old enough to be told the legend, they had buried the memory of the price he had paid. They assumed he had done what he had done to save the revolution, namely themselves. He had not, after all, sacrificed anyone who mattered. They knew what they knew because they had been what they had been, and in their minds they had never changed even if capitalism had made some of them very rich.

Money and respectability were their impenetrable cover. Alejandro's pragmatism, learned from Marx and Mao and his own intestines, had taught them this. They owed him too much, he had sacrificed too much, for them ever to change their ideas.

Luz was the living credential I had needed to enter this fun house. She was the only credential I needed, because I had no plan to ask these people personally for help or information. I knew they would refuse me out of hand. They would not, could not refuse Luz. They would assume that the political education they had given her meant that whatever she did for the rest of her life, she would do for the cause, which lived on in her like a transmission of genes. They never doubted that they were right about her. By nature and nurture she was the enemy of the enemies of mankind. If she was marrying one of those enemies, it had to be for correct reasons. They would help her carry out whatever secret purpose she might have. It was their duty to help—their penance for living on after Alejandro had died for what they told themselves they themselves had been willing to die for.

By wink, nudge, and tone, Luz made silent excuses for me: After all, they could hardly expect me, as a serving officer of the U.S. government, to join openly in their Orwellian hour of hate. The fact that I was in love with the daughter of two of the greatest haters of America who ever lived must mean that there might, just possibly, be hope for me after all.

One of the regulars at these affairs was a quiet man named Diego Aguilar Ordoñez. He was a distant cousin of Alejandro's and looked a little like him, though less tall, less handsome, less charismatic. Diego had salt-and-pepper hair, quiet eyes, an arched nose out of a cinquecento painting, a look of perpetually amused, benevolent intelligence. He stood out for his modest manner, his plain dress. Sometimes I tried to visualize the rest of this crowd, now wearing bespoke suits and designer dresses, as they must have looked in their terrorist days—both genders wearing
descamisados
clothing, though they had never in their lives performed an hour of manual labor. Unwashed, braless, bearded, long-haired, in need of a bath. Solemn in their narcissism.

Oddly, Diego was the only one who still wore a beard—a well-kept spade but a beard just the same. He was a surgeon. During the revolution he had somehow completed his residency at the Hospital Británico in Buenos Aires while acting as Alejandro's chief of operations. It was he who had planned the bombings and the assassinations and assigned others to carry them out. He was, Luz said, Alejandro's oldest and closest friend. The way the others treated him, as if he had inherited custody of Alejandro's aura, set him apart. If anyone in this crowd had been a primary target for recruitment by the Russians, Diego was the likeliest candidate. He had been the administrator of the revolution—in bourgeois terminology, prime minister to Alejandro's president for eternity. Through him the KGB could manipulate Alejandro. With his help, they could nurse the revolution. By helping him they could befriend and eventually control Alejandro, who might become Argentina's Lenin. There was small chance of this actually happening, but if conditions were right, stranger things had come to pass: Consider the improbable Fidel Castro. Everything begins with 1.

At these parties, Luz invariably had private moments with the aunts and uncles. One or another of them would put an arm around her and lead her into another room. I would see the two of them talking intently, looking deeply into each other's smiling eyes, the aunts and uncles touching Luz's hands or cheeks as if they had wandered out of the moment and into a memory.

This behavior seemed more intense in Diego's case, the conversations lasted longer, Luz usually came back from their encounters with shining eyes. Clearly he was special, closer to her than the rest. She had almost never spoken about him. I felt something like jealousy.

One evening I asked her on the way home what was going on.

She said, “After the worst happened, Diego saved me. He was the one who loved me the most, actually loved me for myself, not just because I was my father's child. I could feel that. I still do. He knew my father and
mother better than anyone in the world, better than a child ever could know them, and he made them real in my mind. When I look at Diego I see Alejandro standing beside him. If the others are like aunts and uncles, Diego is like the father. He has always looked after me as a father looks after a daughter. Sometimes I think Alejandro willed me to him.”

In bed after her visits with Diego, Luz seemed more tender, less aggressive than usual—shy, even, as if her hour with him had subtracted some of her love for me. Had the shade of Alejandro followed us home from the party and now stood guard over our bed? Was that what she imagined? Luz murmured in her sleep, so I could only be sure she was awake when she was silent. I seldom caught words but detected changes in her tone of voice. Often she sounded as if she were arguing with some figment in her dream, stridently demanding that something that belonged to her be given back.

On Diego nights her voice was soft. She sounded like a child wheedling for something she wanted. She smiled and laughed softly. This kept me awake for hours.

The next morning as we ate our bread and jam and drank our café con leche, she still had a faraway look in her eye. After breakfast she brushed her teeth, a lengthy process in Luz's case, while I scanned the newspapers.

When she came back to the kitchen there was something different about her. She gave me a searching look, as if in the night she had learned something about me she had not known before.

I asked her the question that had kept me awake most of the night.

“You think Diego is the one we can trust?”

She immediately knew what I was talking about, as though she had picked up the scent of my intentions.

She said, “The only one. But he knows who you work for, so that's a problem.”

“How does he know?”

“My love,
everyone
knows.”

“You told them?”

“You think I would reveal such a thing? It wasn't necessary. They can tell.”

We began to see Diego alone, just the three of us together, always in out-of-the-way places outside the city—small country restaurants, day sails aboard Diego's ketch among the picture puzzle islands of the Paraná River Delta, days on horseback on the pampas, picnics. Diego was good at everything—sailor, rider, cook, you name it. He was always the host, and like a man who is wary of being poisoned, he would not allow us to provide a crumb or a bottle of wine for the picnic basket or pay for so much as a cup of coffee.

All the while he was assessing me, of course, but he always treated me as if I had stepped off an airplane that same morning. The talk was always general. He didn't discuss his work because, Luz said, doing so might compromise doctor-patient confidentiality, and besides, he had already heard, many times over, every question a layman could possibly ask about medical matters.

He didn't talk about himself or about the past. Nor did he ever ask me about my work or pose a personal question. Knowing the one allencompassing thing he knew about me seemed to be enough for him. I did not believe this was true or that it would last, but I accepted the pretense. To all appearances Diego was a gentle man, kindness itself—an angel, Luz said.

He was the best surgeon in Argentina. He operated on the poor without charge. He had saved many lives. Perhaps, in his mind, he was paying a debt. If he was haunted by the innumerable murders and mutilations he had arranged in his youth—agonizing deaths and wounds designed to horrify and to show that the revolution and its justice would stop at nothing—he showed no sign of it. I had never
before met a person who seemed so at peace with himself, and few who were half as likeable.

This weird detachment, this deft separation of the Siamese twins that were the old ruthless Diego and the new saintly Diego, could only mean one thing: He was capable of anything. He could suture the two Diegos together again whenever he liked.

Diego had a beach house on the Atlantic at Las Grutas in Patagonia, a thousand kilometers south of Buenos Aires. In early February, during Carnival, he invited us to spend a long weekend with him there. We flew down in his twin-engine Beechcraft. Diego was a pilot, mainly because the airplane made it easier for him to fly to remote parts of the country on weekends to perform pro bono surgery on the poor.

His house, which overlooked a broad and sandy beach, was a stark-white Rubik's puzzle of concrete cubes designed by one of the honorary uncles who was an avant-garde architect. There was no telephone, no television, no radio, but he did own a Clearaudio sound system with JBL speakers that had cost not less than fifty thousand dollars. Luz played the Brandenburg concertos the whole weekend because Diego liked Bach's mathematical filigree. The water, like the weather, was a few degrees warmer here than in Buenos Aires. At night you could hear the surf, smell the sea. Summer was at its height, so there were a lot of people on the beach. We stayed away from them. We swam in the sea in the early morning and played tennis afterward on Diego's court. Diego was an excellent player. So was Luz. I was rusty—the desert countries are not good places to chase a bouncing ball in the sun. Diego was the same person—one personality visible, the other hidden, a twinning I felt more and more strongly the longer, I cannot truthfully say “the better,” I knew him.