Authors: Tomás Eloy Martínez
Three months ago I met a poet. Not just any poet. One of the greats.
They say I’m the best poet in the country
, he’s written.
They say, and it may well be true
. We got
together almost every night in his house in Belgrano, beside the bridge where the train tracks cross Ciudad de la Paz Street. We talked about Baudelaire, René Char and Boris Vian. Sometimes,
we played cards, just like you and I used to do in the old days. I knew that, just before Perón’s return, the poet had been in Villa Devoto prison, and that he was a legendary
militant, mythic: the opposite of mystic, Téfano, a devotee of food, women and gin. Petit bourgeois, I called him. Petit nothing, he’d answer. I am a grand bourgeois.
One night, in his house, after a few drinks, he asked me if I was scared of the dark. I live in the dark, I said. I’m a photographer. The half-light is my element. Not afraid of darkness
or death or enclosed spaces. Then you – he said – are one of my men. He’d prepared a perfect plan to steal Aramburu’s corpse.
We started at six in the evening, two days later. There were four of us. I never knew, nor will I ever know who the other audacious ones were. We walked into Recoleta Cemetery through the main
entrance and hid inside one of the mausoleums. Until one in the morning we didn’t move. No one spoke, no one dared to cough. I kept myself occupied by braiding the threads of some cloths I
found on the floor. The place was clean. It smelled of flowers. It was the middle of October, a warm night. When we came out of our hiding place, our legs were numb. The silence burned our throats.
Twenty steps away, in one of the central avenues, was the Aramburu tomb. Forcing it open and removing the coffin was simple. We had more trouble with the cemetery locks, which made a dreadful noise
when we broke them. An owl hooted and flew between the poplars; it seemed like a bad omen. Outside, on Vicente López, a stolen hearse was waiting for us. The street was deserted. The only
people to see us were a couple coming out of one of the hourly hotels on Azcuénaga Street. They crossed themselves when they saw the coffin and quickened their pace.
Remember, Alcira said, during those months Isabel and the astrologer López Rega had ordered the construction of an altar for the nation, where they planned to reunite the bodies of the
adversarial national leaders. Figueroa Alcorta Avenue was cut off at Tagle, and the cars got tangled up in a detour designed by a cubist city planner. The projected building was a Pharaonic
Pyramid: San Martín’s mausoleum was going to be at the entrance. Behind it, those of Rosas and Aramburu. On the top of the pyramid, Perón and Evita. Without Aramburu, the
project would be incomplete. When the wizard found out one of his corpses had been stolen, he flew into a rage. He sent a mob of policemen out to comb the streets of Buenos Aires in search of the
lost body. Who knows how many innocent people were murdered in those days. Aramburu, however, was right there in everyone’s sight.
Shortly before the Recoleta operation – Mocho told Martel, and Alcira repeated to me much later – the poet had seized one of those tanker trucks they use to transport gasoline and
kerosene. Don’t ask me how he did it, because he didn’t tell us. All I know is that for at least a month no one was going to notice it was missing. The truck was new, and the
Montoneros’ mechanics had cut a door through which you could access the tank from below. At the top, they’d cut three invisible holes that let in air and, sometimes a bit of light. The
poet had decided to hide the body there and drive it around the city, in full view of the henchmen. In case of any accidents, we were supposed to protect the trophy with our own lives. One of us
would stand guard inside the tank, with an arsenal for emergencies. We planned to each take turns of eight days in the darkness, and forty-eight hours at the wheel of the truck. Sometimes we parked
in secure places, other times we drifted around Buenos Aires. The one in the cab had to stay alert. The one who was in the tank had a mattress and a latrine. There were four of us, like I said. We
tossed a coin to see when we took our turn in the tank. The poet got the first one. I got the last. By chance, I was to drive for the first forty-eight hours.
The plan went along without the slightest hitch. We took the coffin to the no man’s land in between the River Plate stadium and the targets of the Federal rifle club, and there we moved it
from the hearse to the tank. The poet allowed me to take photos for five minutes but, before we dispersed, he handed the camera to one of the other comrades.
You’ll be able to take all the photos you want when it’s your turn to ride inside, he said.
I got up behind the wheel. No one else was in the cab. In the glove compartment I had a nine-millimeter Walther and, within reach of my hand, a walkie-talkie to inform the others, at regular
intervals, as to how everything was going. I crossed the city from one extreme to the other, until the early hours. The truck drove well and turned easily. I went down Callao Avenue first, then I
took Rodríguez Peña again and headed for Combate de los Pozos, Entre Ríos and Sársfield. It was the first time I’d wandered around with no destination in mind,
without deadlines, and I felt that life was only worthwhile like this. When I got as far as Malbrán Institute I turned onto Amancio Alcorta and then headed up north, towards Boedo and
Caballito. I drove slowly, to save gas. The streets were full of potholes and it was difficult to avoid jolts. The poet’s voice startled me.
There’s no better place to write than in the darkness, he said.
I didn’t know the tank could communicate with the cab of the truck by way of an almost imperceptible sliver of air that slipped out through an opening behind the latrine.
I’m going to take you to Parque Chas, I said.
May the arrival point be the departure point, he answered. We’re always going to be to blame for everything that happens in this world. As the sky began to get light I parked at the corner
of Pampa and Bucarelli and got out to buy coffee and some cookies. Then I crossed the railway lines and stopped beside the Communications Club. No one could see us. I opened the entrance to the
tank and told the poet to get out and stretch his legs.
You woke me up, he complained.
We’re not stopping often, I said. You better get out now instead of when you’re going crazy with claustrophobia.
As soon as I saw him walk a few steps away, I took a look around the inside of the tank. In spite of the breathing holes, the air was thick and an acrid, dry odor that resembled no other floated
at head height. Rancid remains, I said to myself, although all remains are. Limestone and flowers. I opened the coffin. I was surprised that the protective panel was detached, because when we took
him out of the cemetery I hadn’t heard the sound of anything loose. The shadow lying there must have been no other than Aramburu: he had a rosary wound round what were once his fingers and,
on his chest, he wore the medal of the 5th Infantry Regiment that they’d found in Bucarelli Street. The shroud was frayed and what was left of the body was very little indeed, almost the
scraps of a child.
Leaning against one of the mudguards of the truck, the poet was chewing on a cookie.
It makes no sense to go from place to place, he said. I feel like Madame Bovary traveling all night with her lover through the suburbs of Rouen.
I was the driver, I said, but I wasn’t as desperate as the one in the novel to stop at an inn.
It would have been better if you’d got out and stayed quiet. I spent the time writing a poem by flashlight. If we take a monotonous route, I’ll read it to you.
When we got back on the road, I chose the most monotonous route I know: General Paz Avenue, the northern and western border of Buenos Aires.
Barely enough light to see, said the poet, from the tank. The batteries are going. Any moment now I’m going to go blind.
I spy / boasting and apocryphal / humility and much / hidden
suffering. I spy the shared / light of unknowing, I spy, / with my little eye, a branch, what color: I couldn’t say.
It went on like that. He read the whole poem and then read some others until the flashlight was dim and dying.
I spy and I want to rest / a little, it’s understandable.
I
can’t see very well, he said. About six in the evening we went to fill up with gas at the operations house, we got out for a moment to have a coffee and I felt the weight of the day on my
body. I wasn’t tired or feeling or wanting anything and I could even have said I was no longer thinking. Only time moved within me in some direction I don’t know how to express, time
backed away from the childhood without childhood we shared – Mocho Andrade said to Martel, and Alcira repeated to me later, in the first person as it had been passed from one person to the
next – and somehow went missing in what was perhaps my old age; we were all so very old in one of time’s lost gusts that day.
I watched the poet climb out of the tank looking as old as his father. The proximity of death had unhinged him: a lock of hair fell, as usual, across his forehead, but it was faded and dull, and
his wide, ox-like jaw was collapsing. That night we camped in Centenary Park and at dawn the next day I started to drive around Parque Chas where the residents weren’t surprised when the
truck passed over and over again down the same streets with their names of European cities: Berlin, Copenhagen, Dublin, London, Cádiz, where the landscape, though always the same, had seams
of mist or port smells, as if we really were crossing those remote places. Once I got lost in the tangle of streets but this time I did it on purpose, to use up time as I searched for a way out. I
followed the curve of Londres Street and without knowing how I was suddenly in Jimmy Joy’s dear dirty Dublin, or the truck frolicked in the Tiergarten on its way to the Berlin Wall, waving to
the neighbors who remained indifferent, because they were well used to the vehicles becoming disconcerted in Parque Chas and being abandoned by their drivers.
After I left the truck I slept for two days solid, and when I took the wheel again, a week later, the poet had vanished from the tank. I realized that the rounds of the dance meant we
wouldn’t coincide again until the end, when it was my turn to look after the corpse. At the beginning of November an incandescent sun shone over Buenos Aires. I was waiting to be called in as
relief, sleeping in ruined hotels in the Bajo under a false name. Every five hours I phoned the operations house, to let them know I was still alive. I would have liked to see the poet, but I knew
it wasn’t prudent. I heard that the truck was in motion almost always around the port, blending in with the hundreds of other trucks that came and went from the docks, and that life inside
the tank was getting intolerable. Perhaps Aramburu had also found another hell in that perpetual voyage.
Early one morning, around three, they came to get me so I could serve my sentence of eight days inside the tank. I had already packed my backpack with two cameras, twelve rolls of film, two
strong lamps with replacement batteries and a thermos of coffee. They had warned me not to take photos at night, and if the sun stopped shining through the breathing holes at any point during the
day I was to interrupt any work immediately. I tried not to retch as I entered the tank. Even though they’d just cleaned and disinfected it, the smell was venomous. I felt like I was in one
of those caves where moles collect insects and worms. As well as the gravitational force that death imposed on the air, there was the organic smell of the bodies that had preceded me and the memory
of the excrement they’d expelled. The ghosts did not want to withdraw. How had the poet been able to find his voice in that darkness?
I am about to open the doors
, he’d written,
to close / my eyes and not look / further than my nose, not smell, not take the name of God in vain.
I lay down, prepared to sleep until daybreak. The mattress had formed humps and ravines, the surface was slightly sticky, I didn’t want to complain, I didn’t feel that it was the end
of youth. I woke up a short while later because the truck was bumping around, as if the comrade at the wheel was driving carelessly over a muddy road. I approached the ventilation slit and
said:
Do you want me to sing to amuse you? I have a unique voice. I was a soloist in choir at school.
If you want to help me, don’t talk and don’t sing, came the answer. It was a girl. You don’t have the voice of a person, you screech like a bug.
One of the other two from the cemetery had begun the journey with me. I didn’t know when the girl had replaced him. Or maybe there were two people in the cab.
Are there two of you? I wanted to know. And the poet? Does he have a turn to drive on this leg of the journey?
No one said anything. I felt like the last survivor on earth.
We kept going around, without ever stopping. Every once in a while I heard airplane engines, the quick rattling of trains and dogs barking. I didn’t even know where I was when the sun came
out and I fixed the two lamps on projections on opposite sides of the truck so that, when lit, the light would shine directly onto the corpse. The person who was at the wheel of the truck, whoever
it might be, was not a great driver. We hit every pothole and all the uneven bits in the road. I was afraid that with so many jolts I wouldn’t be able to turn off the lamps in time if we went
through any darkened areas.
I’m going to turn on some lights back here, I warned, through the ventilation crack. Knock twice when we’re approaching a tunnel.
There were two knocks, but sunlight kept pouring through the holes for ten, fifteen minutes. I drank some hot coffee and ate two buns. Then, I checked my pulse. I needed to keep the aperture
open, without trembling, for at least five seconds. I illuminated the dingy space. Only then did I notice that beneath Aramburu’s body was another, in a wooden packing crate. It was slightly
bigger and wasn’t wearing any medals or rosaries, but the shroud that covered it was almost identical. If I hadn’t seen the real remains a few weeks earlier I wouldn’t have been
able to tell who was who, and even now I had my doubts. I took at least three full rolls of photos of both corpses, close-ups and long shots. When I developed them I’d be sure. After an hour
and a half I went back to the mattress. Who knows how long we’d been driving without a break. It couldn’t be much longer before we’d go back to the operations house. Suddenly, we
glided down a slope and I realized we were in Parque Chas. After a few circuitous laps, the truck eased into a straight line and left the labyrinth. We went on like that until night fell. I had run
out of coffee and food, my legs hurt and my senses were dulled by a dense cloud inside my head. I didn’t even notice when we stopped. Since they took their time opening the door of the tank,
I shouted and shouted, but no one answered. I was there for a long time, resigned to succumbing in the company of those two dead men. But before dawn they freed me. I could barely stand up in the
patio of the operations house, beside the running board of the empty cab. Someone who seemed to be in charge, a short guy with a red beard I’d never seen before, pointed me towards a straw
mattress in the attic and ordered me not to come down from that floor until they called me. I thought I’d fall asleep on the spot, but the fresh air woke me up and, leaning out the window, I
contemplated the patio with an empty mind, as the light turned from grey to pink, and then to yellow and the glories of the morning. A girl with a thicket of dark curls approached the truck,
shaking off the water from the shower like a puppy, and examined the contents of the tank. I guessed she was the one who had been traveling in the cab, and felt a flash of embarrassment because,
suffocated into stupidity, I’d forgotten to remove my excrement. It was mid-morning by the time a white van parked beside the tank. My exhaustion was getting the better of me but I was there,
awake, unable to tear my eyes away from the patio, where the tiles looked scorching. I suppose there must have been a street or a field beyond, I don’t know. Now I’ll never know. Three
men I didn’t know took Aramburu’s coffin out of the tank: I recognized it, because I’d taken a sickening number of photographs of the crucifix on the lid, with its golden halo
above Christ’s open arms and, underneath, the succinct plaque with the general’s name and years of birth and death. The girl with the ringlets ordered each of the corpse’s
movements: Put it on one side, on the platform, slowly, don’t scratch the wood. Uncover it. Leave what’s inside on top of the bed. Slowly, slowly. Nothing should be out of place.