The Mulberry Bush (25 page)

Sunday was a windy day. Surf pounded the beach and the black-and-white gulls of Patagonia were blown around like paper airplanes. Diego had to shout his secrets in order for me to hear them. The inventory was heavy: love, death, betrayal, the loss of illusion, the slow realization as things fell apart that illusion is not necessarily another name for virtue. I asked no questions because I did not need, and in truth did not want, more information about this tawdry
Iliad
of a failed revolution.

Like Homer, Diego started in the middle and did not always stick to the point.

“These gulls—
Larus dominicanus
after the holy order's vestments—are suspected of killing the right whales by landing on their backs, dozens, even hundreds at a time, and pecking and ripping off bits of flesh,” Diego said. “To Alejandro, the revolution was the gulls, the oppressors were the whales who were too stupid to dive because they thought they were invulnerable.”

For once Diego was slow to get to the point. He began with the Damon-and-Pythias childhood friendship between him and Alejandro.
He told me little that Luz hadn't already told me. The boys lived in adjoining houses, one of them with a rich father, the other with a failure for a father. They were inseparable from the sandbox onward. Felicia lived two doors away. Felicia's father had gambled away his inheritance, millions of pesos, at the roulette tables. She was younger than the boys. They saw her go by in her stroller, pushed by her mother, the haggard relic of a belle. Later on, when she was a toddler, Felicia would appear out of nowhere and watch the boys in silence as they played with a football or wrestled. They would tell her to go away. She would remain where she was. She had enormous unwavering brown eyes and shining hair to her waist. She always wore a dress—made, she later told Diego, by her mother from the elegant gowns she had worn as a debutante.

When Felicia was seven, her father, while blind drunk, shot himself while he was having sex with his wife. She went into a trance from which she never afterward emerged. Felicia went to live with her grandparents.

“They came and took her away to their ranch on the pampas,” Diego said. “We never gave her another thought.”

When she was seventeen and Alejandro and Diego were twenty-one, Felicia's maternal grandfather died. She and her grandmother moved into the house with Felicia's crazy mother.

“We knew who she was the minute she reappeared,” Diego said. “But she was no longer a child. Now she made your heart ache and your blood rush to your manhood. Neither of us had ever before seen or even imagined such beauty, such sexual magnetism. I fell in love with her at first sight. Alejandro fell in lust. Neither of us confided his feelings to the other, but I knew Alejandro. He wasn't interested in how I felt. Or how Felicia might feel. He was the irresistible one. She was his, of course. Girls fell at his feet. They had always done so. Women in their thirties had taken him to bed when he was fourteen and he had taught
them
about pleasure. This innocent beginner would be no different.”

Alejandro pursued Felicia. She ignored him. He thought this was flirtation, that she was luring him on. Diego, who loved her too much to touch her, became her friend—her only friend. No man could be alone with her for five minutes and remain just friends. Out of love, Diego managed it.

Felicia was always alone. She was too beautiful to have girlfriends—no female who was merely pretty wanted to be compared to her. Her beauty frightened men.

She entered the university, Alejandro's father secretly paying the fees. She and Diego were often alone together. The two of them studied together, bicycled together, went to the movies together. It was a chaste friendship. She told him nothing about herself. Diego asked her why. She replied that there was nothing to tell. There was no Felicia. Her life was the death of her father and the madness of her mother. And inescapable aloneness. There was nothing else in it. The two of them studied together like brother and sister at Diego's house, in his room.

One day, without warning, she kissed Diego—not the chaste kiss of a young girl, but a full, long kiss with an open mouth. He was amazed. She gave him her tongue. He thought he would ejaculate. They sank to the floor and became lovers. Both were virgins, so their instincts taught them what Alejandro had planned to teach Felicia. And more.

Diego said, “For a year we made love every day except when it was her time of the month or she was ovulating. I was a medical student. I taught her how to count the days and gave her a fever thermometer and explained how to use it. For once, angels watched over her and the Vatican roulette worked. All the while Alejandro pestered her without mercy. She continued to ignore him. At last, desperate to have her even though he thought she was incurably stupid like her father and would soon be ugly like her mother or as crazy or both, he asked her to marry him.

Diego said, “He thought she'd have to let him fuck her if they were engaged and then he could get rid of her. He told me this. Whatever Alejandro thought, Felicia wasn't stupid. She said no to his proposal of
marriage. A week later Alejandro's father, Luz's kindly, beloved
abuelo,
offered the grandmother a dowry of fifty thousand U. S. dollars—at the time, half a million pesos. He reminded her who had paid Felicia's fees at the university. A day after that, Alejandro proposed again and Felicia accepted him.

“My heart broke,” Diego said. “Hers, too. I said, ‘Marry me tonight, we'll go to Uruguay and never come back. ‘

“She said, ‘If I do that, my family will starve. What else can I do but marry him? But you and I will still be together in our real marriage. We'll find a way. ‘

“But I knew we could never do that. We weren't characters in a pulp novel for lovelorn women. I couldn't share her. This had nothing to do with my friendship with Alejandro—Felicia and I had burned that bridge. I hated Alejandro, I would have killed him with my bare hands if I could. But then Felicia and I would have been lost to each other forever, so instead I encouraged him to make his stupid revolution in the hope that the junta would kill him. On that last night together we both knew she was fertile.

“She counted on her fingers to make sure. I did the same. There was no doubt. This last time we were together was clinical.

“Afterward, she said, ‘What shall we name him? ‘

“It was the only joke Felicia ever made in my hearing. She was wonderful in every other way but she had no sense of humor—none. How could she have? Life had made her sad to the bones. How else could she have been, with her history and now with this loveless future, this mortgage on her life that the
abuelos'
money had made possible?”

All this Diego shouted into the wind as if making a speech without a microphone. At the end of it he showed no emotion. It was impossible to tell if this was a virtuoso display of self-control or if he actually was hiding his agony as he had hidden everything else all his life, or if in reality he felt nothing and was playing a role.

He said, “This was a bad idea, the wind is too strong. Let's go back. My throat is getting sore.”

Back at the house, over the howl of the onshore gale, Madonna sang “Don't Cry for Me Argentina.” Diego showed no sign of resuming his runaway monologue. At lunch he chewed his food and drank his wine, looking into the distance at nothing.

Breaking the silence at last, Diego said, “I'm tired. If I don't reappear in an hour, wake me up.”

While he napped I watched
The Official Story,
an Argentinean movie about a child whose natural parents had been disappeared. The man whom the child, now grown up, believed to be her father was not her father but a policeman who had taken her as a baby from her murdered parents.

Halfway through the film, Diego woke from his nap. He glanced at the screen, his reaction to what I was watching, if he had one, was unreadable. I switched it off and removed the headset.

He said, “I'm rested now. Let's sit at the kitchen table. It's better to talk face-to-face. Do you have any questions about what I've already told you?”

“One. How did Alejandro get into the drug business and survive?”

“In the usual way, by killing people before they killed him and taking over their operations. When he bought his escape with the lives of the fighters, he didn't give the military everybody. The best killers, the ruthless ones, the ones who would die protecting him because he was the magic, those he kept for himself. When he got to Leticia he sent for them.”

“Your people.”

“You might say that.”

“He actually ran drugs, corrupted the masses, to fund the revolution?”

“Without blinking an eye. To Alejandro the revolution was a way to go on killing the people who deserved to die. If he had to forfeit the lives of some of the people he wanted to rescue from capitalism, so be it. It was a small price to pay for the Maoist nirvana to come. That was his
fixation, to defeat the antichrist or the anti-Marx or the anti-Mao, the aliases didn't matter.”

“You're describing a psychopath.”

“Aren't Messiahs usually psychopaths? Genghis, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin. The deity of the Old Testament behaved like an escaped lunatic, murdering and punishing and ordering massacres and the rape of widows and daughters and drowning whole populations because some of the daughters of man had fucked the Nephilim, the sons of God, and polluted the blood of the creatures he had made in his image. He only spared the Israelites divine genocide in the desert after his spies failed him in the Land of Canaan because Moses told him he would be ridiculed in Egypt, where people would ask what kind of a god this was whose people would not obey him. Why did he love Abraham, Job, Noah, David? Because they flattered him with their obeisance. That's why homicidal maniacs like Hitler and Stalin are obeyed. Their behavior is godlike behavior. Or perhaps you don't agree.”

I didn't disagree. I said, “You put Alejandro in the same class with that list of names?”

“It doesn't matter where I put him. That's where he put himself.”

“If lunacy is what you saw in him, why did you help him?”

“Two reasons. One, because I wanted to separate him from the money, put it where he could not find it.”

“Steal it?”

“Sequester it. Without it he couldn't have his revolution.”

“Why would a revolutionary like you want to prevent it?”

“Because I was no longer a revolutionary and profoundly regretted that I ever had acted like one. I was a convert from idealism. Idealism is the curse of man's existence. Nazi idealists slaughtered seventeen million. The Leninists, the Stalinists, the Maoists, the small fry like the puppets who ran the countries in the Soviet bloc and Kim Il-Sung and Pol Pot and Castro murdered ninety-four million of their own people worldwide. That was enough.”

As Diego said these things, which sounded like words from the heart, he seemed as calm, as reasonable, as rational as ever. I had asked a question. He was answering it. But no human being could possibly be as calm and reasonable as he imagined himself to be. If he was telling me the truth about himself he was just as crazy as the mad Alejandro he was describing to me.

I said, “You thought you could control a psychopath?”

“No but I could block his intentions and get away with it. I was the custodian of the treasury of the dead revolution, the one Alejandro had killed by betraying it to save himself when all was lost to the enemy. He needed this capital to finance his new enterprise. If he killed me he'd never know where I had put it.”

“How much money are we talking about?”

“Too much to run a total at any given moment because it grew, and still grows every hour of every day. There was a lot of seed money. During the revolution we robbed many banks, we collected some large ransoms. Operations cost practically nothing because we stole our weapons and explosives and lived like the poor.”

“How did you get control of the money?”

“Alejandro handed it over to me from the start. It was beneath him to touch filthy lucre. He had never had to worry about money and he didn't want to start. He was busy thinking up a new Flood.”

I believed him. Whatever Diego did, he did for Felicia. Control of Alejandro's money made almost anything possible. Felicia had been forbidden to him. He wanted to rescue her. He wanted her back. He would do anything, kill his best friend before betraying him, to accomplish this.

I knew how he felt.

I said, “You said you had two reasons for doing what you did. What was reason number two?”

“That's why we are here, to talk about that. There was someone I wanted Alejandro to die with. The two of them at the same time in the same way.”

“A second man?”

He waved the question away.

I insisted: “Who was the second man?”

“We'll get to that, but not yet. I had no access to this man. He was out of reach, too dangerous to touch even for Alejandro. He's still alive. And still out of reach.”

“But you still want him to die.”

“I want to talk to him, to look into his eyes.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“He's not out of reach for you.”

I said, “If that's so, and I doubt it, why would I get involved?”

“You involved yourself when you married Luz.”

But our marriage was over. I started to say so. Diego held up a hand. You might expect a surgeon to have shapely hands. His were large, broad, with blunt fingers made for the wrench rather than the scalpel.

He said, “That's enough for now. We have the whole night and longer to talk. Meanwhile, let's drive into town and have a drink and dinner. I know a restaurant in Las Grutas where you don't absolutely have to order steak and chimichurri.”

It was almost midnight when we returned to the house. We had drunk a lot of wine. I drove. Diego was in no shape to do so. I was astonished that he let me see this. First he reveals to a total stranger whom he knows to be a spy his secret hatred for his best friend and the unspeakable reason for it.

Now this. What next? Was this peeling-away process genuine or part of whatever convoluted plan he was executing? Needless to say I favored the second of these possibilities.

Diego said he was too tired to talk any more and tired also of remembering. We'd continue in the morning, maybe the wind would die and we could walk on the beach as planned. It was better to speak of these things when outside. He staggered off to bed. A better man than I might have been kept awake by what Diego had already told him, but the sound of the surf was soporific and I was not entirely sober myself. I fell asleep almost immediately and as far as I now remember, did not dream. When I woke I did not feel for Luz beside me in the bed. I knew before opening my eyes that she was gone forever.

It was full morning. I heard the whine of a coffee grinder. Over the speakers Selena sang “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.” I knew her extraordinary voice because I had bought one of her CDs as a study aid when I was learning Spanish. How fitting it was that a victim of murder should sing me awake in the house of Diego, manager of murderers.

I got up, showered, got dressed, and made my appearance. In the kitchen as he cooked breakfast, Diego, his back turned, was singing along with the next song on the album—”Amor Prohibido.” He knew something about that.

I wished him good morning. He turned around, smiling. He was in a buoyant mood. How had I slept? Had I seen the sunrise? This was one of the best spots on earth for sunrises and sunsets. On certain evenings, especially after the autumnal equinox, you could even see the colors of the sunset reflected in the eastern sky and vice versa—light from halfway around the world, projected from a star.

The weather front had passed, the day was cloudless. The wind had died. The surf was gentle. Diego and I went for a swim that made the skin pucker. I hadn't swum in such cold water since the polar bear club at Camp Chingachgook. Afterward we trudged along the beach in our bare feet. For the first fifteen minutes or so, as the strengthening sun took the chill off the morning, Diego was mute. Nor did I speak.

Moonshine Manor: Create a silence and the subject will fill it.

Diego had wound his white towel around his neck like a scarf. This made his tanned skin look darker. You could see the younger man he had been—not an Apollo like Alejandro, but the rough-cut masculine type many women preferred, as Felicia had demonstrated. I had never seen him in the company of a woman. I wondered if he had foresworn sex when Felicia was kidnapped out of his life.

Diego was a romantic, or at least had been one when he was young, because otherwise how could he have imagined he could change the
world or regain lost love, so it was conceivable he had lived in celibacy ever since he lost Felicia. That would explain a lot, considering the use he had made of all that surplus testosterone. I told myself to stop speculating, to wait for the facts.

He said, “You know, I always think of Felicia in this place, imagine her in the house and on the beach, which is odd because she never came here.”

The whales were gone. The gulls circled, eyeing us. Was each bird a part of the flock's collective mind, and was this mind deciding whether to land on our bare backs and peck the flesh from our bones as if we were some smaller, paler kind of whale?

Diego continued: “If she and I had gone away that night, across the river to Uruguay, we might have had a place like this in another country. Everything would have been as it was meant to be.”

Meant to be by whom? By the psychotic gods Diego did not believe in?

Before I had finished the thought, Diego said, “You know Amzi Strange, I know you do. He was the one who rescued Alejandro, who otherwise would have ended up falling ten thousand feet into the ocean at nine point eight meters per second per second, just like Felicia. The mathematical formula is vf equals g * t. Or do you already know that?”

“I used to know it. Please continue.”

“Amzi also did his best to save Felicia and nearly did so, but he was betrayed.”

“Betrayed? By whom?”

“Again I say we'll come to that. And in a minute or two we
will
come to that, so in the meanwhile please pay attention. I want you to know the context.”

“I'm listening.”

“A second Yanqui was involved—better to say that he intruded. He was a Headquarters man, like Amzi, like you. Younger then than you are now. Quiet, smart, patient, ruthless. A gentleman. Destined for great things. So many Yanquis give that impression, they are educated to give
it. He was the go-between for the Headquarters station in Buenos Aires and the people who were torturing and killing revolutionaries. His heart was in this dirty work. He
liked
the oppressors. He was one of them. He hated us, especially Alejandro, I think because he saw us as renegades, traitors to our class, which of course we were, and saw Alejandro as a danger to the life he had always led, which of course Alejandro was. He himself was the most dangerous foreigner in Argentina.”

Diego paused for effect. “He was the one who was told by a traitor inside the revolution exactly where Alejandro would be at any given moment. He made everything that happened, happen.”

“Who was this traitor?”

“Only the traitor and the Yanqui know.”

On the horizon, a white sail broke the horizon. Diego stopped talking and watched it. The boat turned and sailed northward before the offshore southeast wind. It was a strong wind. In a remarkably short time it became a white dot, then vanished. While Diego watched the boat I watched his face. He looked like he might weep. How unbearable his feelings must be, I thought, having been bottled up since the day Felicia married his best friend. So maybe he wasn't faking it.

I said, “If only the traitor and the Yanqui know, how do you know?”

Testily, as if I were a patient who had inconveniently awakened on the operating table, Diego said, “Why do you constantly interrupt? Wait.”

“Go on.”

He said, “It was Alejandro's own fault. He refused to be protected. It was the keystone of his self-image. It was the cult of the personality. He wanted the world to believe he was afraid of nothing. He would die if he had to, but he would never fear the oppressor, never yield to tyranny. He was the only free man in Argentina. If the masses followed him, they would be free, too. It was said by his admirers that he had a cyanide pill he would crush between his teeth if the enemy found him. Or if that failed, blow up himself and his attackers with the powerful bomb he
carried in his backpack. This was all fantasy, but the myth was useful. His bravado was a threat to the cause. I always had him shadowed by my best guys—the ones he didn't take notice of, the ones who did the dirty work, the ones I sometimes operate on now—in case the enemy tried to grab him. He was so hopeless when it came to even the simplest tradecraft that he never realized they were there. They were armed with Uzis with orders to shoot to kill.”

“Uzis? How could they kill his kidnappers without killing him?”

“They couldn't. Their orders were to kill Alejandro in case he didn't have time to kill himself. Now be still.”

Diego said, “If I may get back to the point, this Yanqui, Alejandro's case officer, was a shrewd reader of people. He pretended to be a sympathizer, an enabler. He found Alejandro's weak point and made a proposal. He would help the revolution. Alejandro was interested: He hadn't been told that the revolution already had a helper, Boris. The Yanqui proposed to Alejandro, who knew that the revolution was doomed, that he, Alejandro, had a duty to save himself for future work. He knew his man. This was an idea Alejandro could not resist. It planted in Alejandro's mind the seed of the second, new improved revolution, led by a resurrected Alejandro. That was a strange thing for a Headquarters man to do unless he was recruiting Alejandro, which of course was exactly what he was doing whether Alejandro knew it or not ….”

He interrupted himself, pointed out to sea.

“Look, whales!”

“Where?”

“Underneath that flock of gulls, south-southeast, about two hundred meters out.”

I saw them now—a whole pod of them, adults and calves. Gulls wheeled overhead.

Then the gulls attacked, all at once and as a single creature, as if poured in their hundreds from a spout. The whales swam serenely on as if they didn't know the gulls existed.

“The whales are being eaten alive,” Diego said. “Maybe the whales can't feel the beaks. The blubber must block the pain.”

We watched the whales a little longer, as they became a sort of living, breathing Galapagos covered with squawking gulls. Over the years, according to Diego, hundreds of dead whales had been found along the coast. Gulls were the chief suspects, or so scientists believed. Protectors of the whale were alarmed, Diego told me, but this had probably been going on for millennia. Seagulls didn't suddenly decide, all at once,
Let's eat the whales,
so maybe, since there were still plenty of whales to eat after centuries of feasting on blubber, there was less to worry about than whale lovers feared.

Diego's mind worked in its own way. I listened patiently—with interest and amusement, even, and waited for him to get back to the point he was evading. Moonshine Manor again:
As long as they're talking, let them talk until they say something useful.
Sooner or later, in theory, Diego would get back to Alejandro's Mephistophelean Yanqui case officer.

In time, the whales swam out of our field of vision along with the hovering gulls. We walked on in silence for a while. There were few gulls left on the beach and presumably the ones in flight were glutted with blubber and blood, so it was quieter than usual. Diego spread his towel, the one he had wrapped around his neck, and sat on it.

As if there had been no interruption, Diego said, “This Yanqui's idea was to persuade Alejandro that there was no hope whatsoever for the revolution. Now that he had learned his lessons from its failure he should drown it like a litter of kittens, and having profited from its mistakes, start a new revolution that would succeed and justify the sacrifices of the one that had failed. He would save many lives, because there would no longer be any reason to kill our comrades, who no longer had a leader. A soul.”

Did I follow? I said I thought so, but please continue.

“Alejandro was immediately seduced by this argument,” Diego said. “It was an offer of immortality. Of course he knew exactly what would
happen to those he betrayed. We had a source, one of the good people, one of us, a woman Alejandro had slept with for a while when we were all students. Now she was married to an army officer who, thanks to her political influence, had discovered that he had a conscience. He was the aide de camp of the general who was in charge of the torture. On inspection tours with the general this husband saw what was happening to the disappeared. He saw people he knew, people he had had dinner with, his wife's friends. They recognized him. This shook him up. He would come home and tell her everything. He thought the junta, which saw itself as the Fourth Reich in everything but name, was staining the honor of the army, of Argentina itself, in a way from which neither could ever recover. He would cry on her bosom, but he went on with his career. The wife would tell us everything this bastard told her. So the point is, Alejandro knew perfectly well what would happen to everybody else if he did as the Yanqui advised. Including Felicia.”

“But?”

“Be patient. The Yanqui insisted on meeting Alejandro's wife. Felicia was hiding at the time like a good freedom fighter in Villa Cartóna, a shantytown, a
villa miseria.
She had become an operative—she had done enough and more than enough on her own to be wanted by the torturers. Even in rags in a room where rats ran over your feet, she was breathtaking. If the world was coming to an end, no man who saw her could be interested in anything but her. The Yanqui saw how invaluable Felicia was to his purposes. How Alejandro must love her! He wanted to give Alejandro an incentive to do what he wanted to do anyway. Rescuing this amazing woman was just what the doctor ordered. That could be arranged. It would make it possible to do anything he wanted to do, commit any outrage, and only enhance his mystique. But first Felicia had to be kidnapped. The Yanqui told the torturers where she was. That night they took her.”

A pause. “The officer with the conscience saw Felicia in prison because the general particularly wanted to get a look at this beautiful wife of
the famous scarlet pimpernel, Alejandro. She was spread out on a table, naked ….”

At this point Diego leapt to his feet and walked away and into the surf, where he stood, knee deep in the heaving water, gazing out to sea—assuming he could see anything besides the pictures in his mind.

When he came back—eyes averted, face ravaged—he started to speak even before he sat down.

“The Yanqui thought that Alejandro could now be blackmailed. It didn't work, of course. It didn't work because Alejandro didn't care what happened to Felicia. So when the Yanqui suggested that there was a way to rescue his beloved wife, he cut him off and stalked away, as if this heathen had no right to speak her sacred name.”

“Your watchers heard and saw this?”

“How else would I know it happened?”

“You don't think Alejandro did know he was being shadowed and didn't want witnesses present?”

“No.”

“For the sake of argument, suppose he did—”

“I suppose nothing for argument. Neither should you. Reality and only reality matters.”

“OK. What would your men have done if Alejandro, in a state of ignorance, had listened and agreed?”