77, p.21
77, page 21
I started to become convinced that language was everything. But deep down I knew: taking refuge in language hardly freed one from danger. Which, in turn, implied another danger: madness. If all the hypotheses offered by a reading were questionable, the mother of all questions was one, just one, the most devious: Was I myself, I wondered. How was it possible to get any sleep after such mental gymnastics? Every so often I would get up, walk to the bathroom barefoot, and look at myself in the mirror: checking myself every so often became an obsession, seeing if that face corresponded with the image I had of myself. I started to get up more and more frequently. Eventually I began spending interminable stretches in front of the mirror. Till my feet froze. As a result, I slept less every night and then, during the day, I nodded off, dreaming brief dreams that turned into hallucinations, like that time I heard those two women talking. They dictated to me. And I wrote it down.
My breakfast consisted of tea and Criollita crackers. At noon I had some broth made from bouillon cubes and spread paté on the Criollitas. For dessert, an apple. At night, for dinner, I duplicated the lunch menu. I was turning into a fakir. And though all this time seemed eternal to me, it lasted barely a week.
One night I picked up my essay on absence, bundled up warmly, and went downstairs to the shop across the street, a sort of bookstore, photocopy joint, and kiosk combined. It was run by a young couple with two awful twins. A pair of ink-stained Tom and Jerrys. They were about to close, the woman told me. They’d have the photocopies for me the next day. Impossible to get them any sooner. I felt ridiculous, demanding that they have them ready that same day. Just a couple of millimeters separated ridiculous from suspicious. What I least wanted was to seem suspicious. With all the work Tom and Jerry gave the couple, they probably weren’t even interested in my file, I told myself. I also thought that if I went back home with the original, for sure I would go back to my crazed note-taking. All right, I would come back the next day for the photocopies, as soon as they opened. I returned to my apartment, took a Valium, and went to bed.
The next morning dawned to a black sky, the wind still whistled in the streets, papers, leaves, and trash piled up, heads stayed down and lapels went up. It was early. I couldn’t wait for the shop to open so I could pick up my photocopies. As soon as I stepped out onto the balcony I saw two green Falcons and an Army truck. Then some police cars, a dark blue police van. Some plainclothes guys got out of the Falcons, armed with Ithacas. They swooped down on the place. A captain in a helmet, pistol in hand, jumped out of the truck. The soldiers surrounded the store. They dragged out everyone who was inside. First the customers, though there weren’t many. Then the owners, the couple and the little twins. The plainclothes officers pushed the couple toward the Falcons. The kids, crying, were dispatched to the military truck. They lined the others up against the wall. They frisked them for weapons, seized their documents. They threw a fat guy to the ground, pointing guns at him. The guy was crying. They kicked him in the belly. I saw how the guy threw up. Except for the family and the fat guy, they let everyone go. Some soldiers carried off everything there was in the store, from the photocopier to the metal shelves, not forgetting, of course, the merchandise that had occupied one corner up front. Cartons of cigarettes, candy, toys. When they had finished emptying it all out, a police car arrived. The Army left. A cop was left in charge. He was a dark-skinned type with a mustache. He rubbed his hands together and tapped his feet against the chill. The temperature kept dropping.
In my misery I felt the anguish of vanity, what someone who has lost his masterwork feels, assuming that my little essay on absence was that. Deep down I grieved for my essay’s bad luck and imagined that it had been my masterwork only because I had lost it forever. There were more significant losses all around me.
And more profound absences.
18 In those days my phone was tapped. In the background you could hear the sounds of an auto repair shop and that Palito Ortega song, La felicidad. The screaming, too. Walter, I thought. But I had no way of calling him back. That lasted a few weeks.
I didn’t have the energy to go to Entel and ask for repairs. I imagined that if I filed a request, the repair would require a file, an investigation. Better not to subject my life to any investigation. I decided to wait. Every so often I picked up the receiver. Same thing: that song, those screams. The most advisable thing for my mental health was exercise: to start walking again. I began wandering through the city once more, getting lost. I walked till my legs couldn’t take it anymore. There were times when I even got as far as Nuestra Señora de Pompeya church. My walks usually ended up at some church: for example, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, on the other side of Parque Avellaneda. More than obsessive wandering syndrome, what I did was a pilgrimage. Maybe I was waiting for a miracle, but I didn’t know what kind.
Till early one morning, on a Tuesday, the phone started ringing again. From the Burn Institute, a nurse told me. De Franco had been admitted two days earlier and was just beginning to regain partial consciousness. He could now receive visitors. He had asked for me. No one else, the nurse said. I was the only loved one the patient claimed to have. That loved one thing really got to me. Please, she urged me, you need to come. Because the poor man can’t find peace. My visit would soothe him.
De Franco was the Mummy. All bandaged except his mouth and eyes. Or rather, one eye. I addressed that eye:
Don’t overtax yourself, De Franco. I thought I saw a glimmer in that eye.
I don’t have much time left, he said.
According to De Franco, after the consultation with the psychic, Azucena was overwhelmed by negligence. Whatever flirtatiousness remained began to dissolve. First she stopped bathing for a few days. She no longer dyed her gray roots. The neglect included the chalet. Once so obsessed with the decorative details of her home, she no longer bothered to adjust a picture, sweep the corners, or change the water in the vases, where the scent of rotting flowers filled the entire house. The garden suffered from the same abandonment. Grass and weeds encroached on the flagstone path. Not to mention Pedro’s deterioration. It wasn’t that Azucena forgot to change his diapers. It was that she no longer cared. The husband, in his wheelchair, traversed the house from one end to another, reeking. De Franco wanted to vanish, but his guilt kept him there: after all, Gabrielito was sort of his son, too. A gentleman like him couldn’t back down under those circumstances.
Besides, at this age, Gómez, he said to me, it’s not so easy to find a chick.
De Franco had gotten used to spending Saturday nights at Villa Ballester. Azucena insisted that he stay till Sunday. De Franco knew that even if she didn’t admit it, her insistence was due to her fear of being alone. Now she only talked about Gabrielito.
A lampshade, Azucena said to me one night, related De Franco. They’ve turned my Gabrielito into a lampshade.
And she continued to stick pins in Videla’s photos. As usual, she would then slip them under the door of the sealed room.
Another time Azucena got the idea into her head that they had bound Bibles with her son’s skin.
I’m going to check out all the santerías in the city till I find him, she told De Franco. I know I’ll find him in God’s book.
De Franco remained silent. And stared at the sky. With this gray, drizzly weather, what he feared most was that a terrible storm would erupt, leading to a repetition of the tragedy of that night when the thunderclaps had driven the invalid crazy and provoked Azucena’s delirium, even though De Franco wasn’t altogether convinced that it really had been a delirium. He couldn’t forget the bluish light twinkling under the door of the sealed room, the door handle turning without explanation.
That night Azucena drugged Pedrito, tied him up, got into her nightgown, and went to bed. De Franco put on a shirt that used to be Pedrito’s. She turned her back and he put his arms around her. They heard a police siren. Far, very far away. Then, silence. A silence barely cut by the passing of a car, a gust of wind, a dog barking.
Stay till tomorrow and I’ll make you some goulash, Azucena said.
Okay, said De Franco.
He fell asleep clinging to Azucena, inhaling the dense scent of the nape of her neck. She hadn’t bathed or washed her hair, but she did apply perfume. And that heavy perfume, mixed with the odor of recent sex, gave De Franco the comforting feeling of animal heat. He fell asleep thinking that nothing in life mattered more than a dish of food and a lay. Not much more. He slipped into drowsiness. But his rest didn’t last long.
More than the heat of the flames, it was Pedrito’s frantic laughter that woke them. Pedrito was applauding and laughing his head off. The fire consumed the entrance to the home, the dining room, the kitchen, and the sealed room. Pedrito had managed to untie himself, climb into the wheelchair, and set fire to the pile of newspapers and magazines Azucena collected. The house was on fire. It was too late, and not just to put out the flames. Also to escape. When they opened the bedroom door, a wave of heat suffocated them. The most intense, raging fire scorched them. From the sealed room, came children’s voices, an infantile chorus:
Can you see, can you see,
It’s the glorious J. P.
When he heard those screams, Pedrito started babbling the Peronist March. He sang and spun around in his wheelchair. He had a plastic fuel can in his lap. He propelled himself toward them at full speed. De Franco managed to close the door. The crash of the invalid and his wheelchair against the door coincided with the explosion of the fuel. Azucena cursed herself for having barred the windows. Flames were also rising on the other side of the door, the outside. There was a blast at the doorway: the fuel can Pedrito was carrying. If they wanted to escape, they had no alternative than to pass through the flames. De Franco had an idea: they wrapped themselves in the blankets.
When I got to the street, on fire, I realized I was alone, Gómez. I’ll never know if Azucena was trapped by the flames or by the past.
Sometimes they’re the same thing, I was about to reply.
De Franco’s single eye dripped fat tears. I took out my handkerchief.
That night they took him back to intensive care. I went home to my apartment. In the morning another nurse phoned.
De Franco had died at dawn.
19 I thought of my mother, I thought of Esteban, of Martín and Mara. Since it was unavoidable, I thought of Diana. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. If she hadn’t gotten in touch with me again, I thought, there were two probable explanations: either she’d been kidnapped, or else she had managed to flee the country. And both explanations justified her silence. If they hadn’t come for me yet, I thought, it was either because Diana hadn’t given me up under torture, or, if she was safe, she hadn’t called me so as not to get me in trouble. But I was anxious. In fact, in the absence of news, for me Diana had become one of the disappeared. Her features and habits were now taking on a physical presence in my memory. The same thing happened with the memory of my mother. Sometimes I recognized her gestures in my own. Other times, when I didn’t recognize myself in them, I wondered if those gestures might be from my father, that unknown quantity.
If I really wanted to know about Diana, I reflected, I simply had to visit the apartment on Calle Pasteur where, with luck, her parents would still be living, and again, with luck, they might know something about their daughter. With luck, I repeated. It’s just that luck probably held more sway in those days than ever before. Luck and superstition. Because when terror infects the body, it’s followed immediately by prayers, religious stamps, candles, a string of garlic, a little red ribbon. Let him who is free of magical thinking throw the first amulet.
I spent a long time deliberating whether it would be better to go there in the morning, in the afternoon, or at night, during the week or on the weekend. The calculus of my fear, in fact, was circular and became an excuse for postponing my visit. It was a Saturday afternoon, as I recall. Night was descending over the city. Finally I put on my raincoat and walked out into the street. A heavy drizzle was falling. I glanced at the sky: A thick, dun sheet. No sooner did I hit the street than I felt the terror attack my weakened legs. I walked against the wind, hoping that by whipping against me, it might clear my thoughts. But every time a green Falcon passed by, I felt like I was about to vomit up my guts. Maybe if I hurried, I could warm up, I told myself. And so I picked up my pace. I worried that haste might make me look suspicious. I was about to cross Sarmiento when I stopped to let another Falcon go by. Suddenly I saw green Falcons wherever I looked. I was walking through a city whose cars were all green Falcons, all of them with three guys inside, their arms sticking out the windows, with their Ithacas and their pistols aiming in both directions. The Falcons left clots on the asphalt, the blood marks of their bloody tires. I tried to walk hugging the wall: there were no doors to let me in or to hide behind. The buildings had no doors. Only windows. But even those began at the second-floor level. Behind each window, entire families with little blue and white flags applauded and celebrated the parade of the green Falcons. You could hear the echo of a march in the wind. It was the Peronist March. I leaned against a wall. I felt something warm and sticky on the palms of my hands, on my fingers. The wall was gushing blood.
20 Diana’s parents looked older in the somnolent shadows of the apartment. Bernardo and Clara had covered the mirrors with white sheets. If we don’t see ourselves reflected in mirrors, we don’t exist. The old man must have noticed how I felt about mirrors.
The woman offered me tea with lemon in a heavy glass. They were testing me out, I recall. Especially the old guy, Bernardo. Where and when had I met his daughter, he wanted to know, what sort of relationship did we have, why was I so interested in finding out about her now. The military had already ransacked the apartment, he said. Early one morning. They had surrounded the block. They kicked the door in, turned everything upside down. They weren’t in uniform, but you could tell they were military. Sell the store and go back to Israel, they advised them. They would be closer to their daughter in Israel, because surely Diana was training with the Palestinians.
Bernardo kept testing me. What did I teach, he asked. What had Diana studied with me. He didn’t let up: Was it true that Diana had been my favorite Literature student when I was teaching in the department? He wanted to know her favorite authors. I figured, as I would later confirm, that the old folks had already gone through this: someone who came to see them, and with the explanation that they had information about their daughter, extorted money from them. Some guy had visited them a few times, asking for money in exchange for information. He had also asked them for clothes to take to the place where she was being detained. A naval facility, he told them. Because the Army had handed her over to the Navy. He couldn’t give them more information. A rehab farm for male and female political prisoners, he said. Then Clara made up a little bag of clothing: jeans, socks, a heavy sweater, underwear, and a copy of War and Peace. Money, too, everything she had in the safe in the apartment. A few days later, Bernardo said, as he was walking along that same block, in front of a construction site, among the garbage in a dump truck, he saw some clothes: it was the clothing Clara had given the NCO. Among that same garbage was also the Tolstoy book. That guy never returned. And they’d had no more news of Diana.
I’m not a cop, I said.
The old folks looked at me. Clara lowered her eyes. Bernardo held my gaze. I asked myself what those eyes saw in me—if they saw the person who had sheltered their daughter or the fag who’d been turned on by a cop.
I stared back at him.
If Diana were free, I thought, that business about the guy would never have happened. So then it was clear that Diana had been captured. And, as was the case with so many young men and women, they might never hear of her again.
I looked at the sheet-draped mirrors. As I said, not seeing my reflection, I felt like a ghost. And those two old folks were ghosts, as well.
Come, Bernardo beckoned. I followed him toward a little room that faced the courtyard. Diana’s bedroom. All of it a library. I focused on one bookshelf. It was filled with books of Russian literature.
Again I felt his eyes on me. Bernardo had his back to the window. I saw myself reflected in the glass. Now I existed. But this didn’t bring me any peace.
The truth, he said. Tell me the truth.
He spoke without anger, without rage. His strength came from his gaze. I will never forget that gaze, the professor recalls. It seems easy to define a gaze literally. Anyone can plug in adjectives and think they’re being faithful in describing a state of mind.
What truth, I asked him.
Yours, he said.
The old man took the copy of War and Peace from the library. The cover was half torn off. He shook off a layer of dust. That was the book he had picked up from the street.
My daughter hated English literature, he said. Read this passage she underlined:
It was clear and frosty. Above the dirty, ill-lit streets, above the black roofs, stretched the dark starry sky. Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised. At the entrance to the Arbat Square an immense expanse of dark starry sky presented itself to his eyes. Almost in the center of it, above the Prechistenka Boulevard, surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars but distinguished from them all by its nearness to the earth, its white light, and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812—the comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly—like an arrow piercing the earth—to remain fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars.
