Violeta, p.24
Violeta, page 24
The cardinal was too old for a mountain expedition, but he traveled with his secretary to Nahuel, where he waited for the others, who had left separately from the capital in order to avoid arousing suspicion. Despite their precautions, the people in the village realized that something serious must have happened for a cardinal to show up in those parts. He was wearing casual clothes, but he was recognized anyway; his foxlike face was easily identifiable.
The cardinal made the first statement to the press from Nahuel after the group returned from the cave. By then the locals were already whispering about the bones that had been discovered. That’s when Facunda called me in Sacramento.
“They say it’s the disappeared tenant farmers—the ones who were taken right after the coup, do you remember?”
The official explanation was that there had been an accident, that some tourists had suffocated from poisonous gases inside the cave; then they blamed it on a revenge plot by guerrilla fighters, or criminals who killed each other in a shootout. Finally, after pressure from the public and the Catholic Church, as well as the fact that all of the skulls bore a single gunshot hole, the government attributed it to executions committed by uniformed soldiers acting of their own initiative in the heat of battle, eager to save their country from Communism. The men would be duly reprimanded, the officials assured the public, betting on people’s short attention span as they bought time to tamper with the evidence.
They erected walls and put barbed wire all around the cave opening to keep out the people who’d arrived at the scene: journalists, lawyers, international organizations, curious onlookers, and the silent pilgrimage of family members of the disappeared, some coming from far away, with photos of the victims. This time the government couldn’t get rid of them using their typical means. The families camped on the mountainside for several days and nights, until all the remains were removed. The authorities went into the cave covered from head to toe, wearing masks and rubber gloves, and they pulled out thirty-two black plastic bags, while the pilgrims outside sang revolutionary songs that hadn’t been heard in several years but had not been forgotten. These people had spent years desperately searching for their disappeared loved ones, hoping they might still be alive and that they’d one day return home. Camping right alongside them was Facunda, deformed by arthritis, but as strong as always.
Faced with the fact that the scandal hadn’t blown over in a few days, as they’d hoped, the government ordered an investigation and, finally, several weeks later, they allowed the families of the presumed victims to identify the bodies. It was just a way of giving them the closure they demanded, because in reality the forensic experts had already determined who the bones in the cave belonged to, though the report was sealed.
...
Facunda gave me the news and I took the train to Nahuel so I could go with her to the precinct. Autumn was showing itself in the color of the landscape and the cold humid air; the rains would soon begin to fall. They’d summoned the families of the farmers who had been detained and forcibly disappeared in the early days of the military dictatorship—among the abducted were four brothers, the youngest fifteen years old, who’d been tenants on the Moreau land. Everyone around there knew each other, Camilo. It’s not like now, with industrialized agriculture, land that belongs to large corporations and farmhands replaced by migrant workers, nomadic, rootless. Back then everyone was related; they’d been born and raised there, had gone to elementary school together, played soccer as kids, had fallen in love and married each other. The population was shrinking because many young people had moved to cities in search of better opportunities, so every absence was felt heavily. The men who had disappeared were part of a large family network—they had faces, names, loved ones and friends who missed them.
We waited almost two hours outside in the street; more than twenty women and even a few kids clinging to their mothers’ skirts. The majority of them knew each other, were relatives or friends, almost all of them with the indigenous features so common in those parts. Hard work, poverty, and tragedy had marked them with a patina of sadness. They were dressed modestly in the faded secondhand clothing from the United States that was sold at the flea market. The older women and one pregnant woman sat on the ground, but Facunda remained standing, as straight as her arthritis would allow, dressed entirely in black to represent her anticipated grief, with a stony expression that wasn’t sorrow but rage. There were two human rights lawyers with us, sent by the cardinal, and a journalist with a television camera.
I was embarrassed by my American blue jeans, suede boots, and Gucci purse, taller and whiter than everyone else, but none of those women seemed bothered by my wealthy bourgeois appearance; they accepted me as one of them, united by the same loss. They asked me who I was looking for, but before I could respond, Facunda interrupted.
“Her brother—she’s looking for her brother,” she said.
And that’s when I realized that Apolonio Toro had in fact been a brother to me. He was more or less the same age as José Antonio and had been part of my life for as long as I could remember. I prayed silently to heaven that we’d find no evidence of his murder, because in this case doubt was preferable to certainty. I often imagined Torito living like a hermit in a mountain cave somewhere, as would be fitting to his character and his extensive knowledge of the land. I didn’t want proof that he was dead.
An officer came out and barked instructions at us: We had half an hour, we couldn’t take pictures or touch anything, we’d better look carefully because we wouldn’t be given another chance. We had to turn over our ID cards, which would be returned when we left. The lawyers and journalists had to wait outside.
We went in.
Under a tent in the middle of the courtyard, two long tables were flanked by guards. We didn’t see bones, as we’d expected to, but pieces of tattered clothes corroded by time, shoes, sandals, a notebook, and wallets, all numbered. We filed slowly past those sad remains. The women, crying, would stop in front of a wool vest, a belt, a cap, and say “This is my brother’s,” “This belongs to my husband.”
At the end of the second long table, when we’d almost given up, Facunda and I saw the proof we didn’t want to find.
“This is Torito’s,” Facunda whispered, her voice broken by a sob.
I’d searched for him and hoped he might return for so many years. But lying on that table was the wooden cross I’d carved as a gift for Apolonio Toro’s first birthday celebration, when my mother, my aunts, and the Rivases were all still alive, when Facunda was a young woman and I was a little girl. It hung on a leather string, the wood polished by time and wear, but my name, Violeta, could still be clearly made out. I knew that the other side would show Torito’s name. A convulsive sob caused me to double over like I’d been kicked in the stomach, and I felt Facunda’s arms around me. That’s when a whistle blew, ordering us to leave the tent. Without hesitating, blinded by tears, I impulsively picked up the cross and tucked it inside my shirt.
That cross is magical, Camilo. None of my possessions interest you, I know, but when I die, I want you to keep that cross, to hang around your neck and wear always, so that it will protect you like it has protected me. That’s why I never take it off. It’s charged with the loyalty, innocence, and strength of Apolonio Toro, who wore it over his heart for many years and died to save your uncle, Juan Martín. Torito has been my guardian angel and he will be yours as well. Promise me this, Camilo.
Sometimes our fates take turns that we don’t notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight. At each crossroads or fork we must decide which direction to take. These decisions may determine the course of the rest of our lives. That’s what happened to me the day I recovered Torito’s cross. I know that now. Until then I’d lived comfortably without questioning the world I’d been born into; my only unflagging objective had been to raise the boy that Nieves had left an orphan.
That night, as I got undressed, I saw the mark that the crude wooden cross had left on my chest, pressed into my skin by my bra, and I once again had a long cry for Torito, for Facunda, who loved him so much, for the other women who had identified their dead, and for myself. I thought about my house, my bank accounts, the properties I’d invested in and all the antiques and other frivolous items I’d acquired at auctions, of my wealthy friends, my infinite privileges, and I felt overwhelmed by it all. It was as if I was pulling a cart loaded down with all that baggage as well as the weight of wasted time. I never imagined that I’d begin a new life after that night.
22
The names of the victims found in the cave weren’t released for several months, and the press didn’t dare to defy the censorship laws by publishing them, even though word was out about a group of women who had identified the bodies at the station. The government strategy consisted of keeping the information under wraps for as long as possible, alleging security concerns, as a way of putting off demands to return the bones to the families for dignified burials. The remains had been removed from the cave in bags, all jumbled together, and the work of reconstructing each skeleton was very tedious. It would be much easier to dump them all in a mass grave and forget about them forever, but it was too late for that.
I imagine that Facunda talked to her family and friends about Torito, but I told only Etelvina and Miss Taylor, who was still alive at the time. They were the only two people I had left who still remembered that gentle giant, aside from Juan Martín, who I immediately notified by mail. For years he had been asking what had happened to our dear friend who’d helped him cross the border and was never heard from again. That’s why an alarm bell went off when Julián Bravo, of all people, mentioned Torito.
He came through the capital on one of his quick visits for “business,” which was how he described his money laundering and smuggling. Out of habit he stopped by to see us and stayed for dinner because Etelvina had made duck with cherries, his favorite dish. He was still as handsome, athletic, happy, self-confident, and seductive as ever.
“Have you missed me?” he asked with a laugh.
“Not one bit. How is Anushka?”
Anushka was an eternally languid model, who never ate—poor woman, she was constantly starving. He had promised to marry her too, just like Zoraida, but managed to keep her at bay for years.
“Bored. And you, Violeta, what have you been up to lately?”
“I was in Nahuel …”
“Oh! Because of the thing with the bones in the cave, I suppose.”
“How do you know about that? You don’t even live in this country. Yes, they found the remains of fifteen disappeared men. The police arrested them in the early days of the military coup, then they murdered them and hid the bodies.”
“It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last,” he commented, studying the label on the bottle of wine.
“They laid out pieces of the men’s clothes and other belongings from inside the cave. I went with Facunda …”
“Did you find anything of Torito’s?” he asked distractedly, filling his glass.
It was in that exact moment, sitting at the table before a platter of duck with cherry sauce and a bottle of cabernet sauvignon, that the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was Julián Bravo finally came together for me. For years I’d had signs, indications, and evidence, but I didn’t want to acknowledge the obvious because it would mean admitting my own complicity. I recalled my poor daughter, her tragic life, the drugs, the poverty, the prostitution, Joe Santoro dead from a bullet to the back of the head, Nieves’s fear of her father, and Juan Martín’s. I also remembered the beatings and humiliations of the past, the Mafia henchmen, the CIA agents, the rolls of bills and the guns, his connection to the dictatorship. How could I have let all that happen?
Julián knew what had become of Torito—he’d always known—just as he’d known that Juan Martín had taken refuge in Argentina and hid that from me for four torturous years. I can’t prove that he was guilty of Torito’s death, but it’s possible that he turned the man in to get rid of him once he’d saved Juan Martín. It was always preferable to leave no witnesses. In any case, he knew that Torito’s remains had been in that cave and that there were other bodies as well.
Around that time Juan Martín sent me the English translation of an in-depth article on Colonia Esperanza, which was published in Germany and circulated throughout Europe.
“Dad does special flights for those people, doesn’t he?” he asked. According to the article, Colonia wasn’t the agricultural paradise it claimed to be, but a hermetic compound of immigrants who had come seeking utopia and ended up trapped by a psychopath who imposed brutal discipline on the two hundred persons living under his rule, many of them children and teenagers. No one went in or out without permission; the members received paramilitary training and endured physical and sexual abuse. One person who somehow escaped and managed to get out of the country to testify in Germany said that ever since the military coup, Colonia had functioned as a torture and extermination center for government dissidents. None of that information had been published in our country, thanks to censorship.
Colonia had built a runway for the private planes and military helicopters that transported the dictatorship’s prisoners. Julián’s relationship to Colonia became abundantly clear, and I understood why he was so well informed and connected: Operation Condor, his cooperation with the CIA and with the dictatorship.
“Dad is capable of anything,” my kids had always said.
Julián Bravo’s motto was that the ends justified the means. He’d employed the most dubious methods to obtain his ends with total impunity. He declared himself above the limits placed on other mortals. The moment had arrived for me to apply his axiom: His end justified my means.
The day after that illuminating dinner I took a plane to Miami to speak with Zoraida Abreu before Julián returned. We’d maintained sporadic contact, so I knew that the love she’d felt for him had begun to wane. As always, I met her at the Fontainebleau Hotel, which had been rejuvenated by a recent remodel. Zoraida was just over forty and still looked the part of the golden Boricua Rum queen, with the same defiant hips, showgirl legs, and fruitlike breasts. She showed up in a yellow sundress more appropriate for the beach. We hugged with an affection born of shared disenchantment. She took off her tinted glasses and I noted the age on her face; plastic surgery had pulled her skin taut but couldn’t remove her tired expression.
We brought each other up to date on our lives. Hers was more or less the same as before in her role as secretary, accountant, housekeeper, lover, and confidante to Julián Bravo. She’d given in to his pressure to have her tubes tied, just as I had, because he wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t bring any kids of his into the world. Zoraida would forever lament having given up motherhood out of love for that man. When she told me, I wondered how many women Julián had convinced to undergo the same procedure just to avoid the inconvenience of using a condom.
“I’m his jack-of-all-trades,” Zoraida told me bitterly.
“He pays you well …”
“The money doesn’t make up for the mistreatment. I can’t have a life outside of him, he’s so jealous. He made sure I’ll never have kids and now he doesn’t even want me; he never sleeps with me anymore.”
“You could leave him.”
“He’d never allow it, he needs me too much.”
“Why are you still with him?” I pressed.
“He’ll marry me eventually, even if only to have someone to take care of him in his old age.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“I used to be, but I’m not anymore. Now I just want to punish him. I’m fed up,” she said.
“That’s why I came, Zoraida.” And I proceeded to tell her about Anushka, who according to Julián was the most expensive woman in his life.
Anushka was smarter than Zoraida and I were. She’d convinced Julián that she was sterile, and in due course she surprised him with a pregnancy; she didn’t tell him about it until it was too late for an abortion. It was the end of her career as a model, she said, although in reality she was over thirty-five and hadn’t worked in years. Julián refused to get married and never lived with her, but he generously supported her and the daughter they’d had together.
Zoraida had put up with many of Julián’s infidelities, fleeting and inconsequential affairs, but she never dreamed that he’d been maintaining a secret lover and daughter for years. She immediately concluded that if he hadn’t married the mother of that child, he wouldn’t marry her either. She didn’t understand how Julián could’ve hidden it from her for so long or how he provided for that woman without it reflecting in his finances. Those expenses had never showed up anywhere. She kept his official books as well as his unofficial ones, the ones no one else saw, the secret book of illegal transactions. She was smug about the fact that not a dollar passed through Julián’s hands without her knowing about it, but she’d just discovered there must be a third book she didn’t know anything about. It might not even be the only one—there could be others. She was more hurt by his hidden money than she was heartbroken by his infidelity. She asked me if I had a photo of Anushka and I showed her some pictures I’d ripped from a fashion magazine years prior. Zoraida examined them as carefully as an etymologist.
“This girl has anorexia” was her only comment.
As we said goodbye, she assured me that Julián would curse the day he’d met her.
Zoraida Abreu’s revenge was swift and drastic. She’d served Julián Bravo loyally and patiently for nearly two decades, loving him, in spite of everything, with all her passionate heart. The same passion aided her in sinking him, exactly as I’d imagined when I went to Miami to recruit her. The beauty queen was too intelligent to hire a hit man, cause an accident, or poison Julián, like in some detective novel, as I had fantasized doing so many times. The plan she hatched in under two hours, with three martinis in her system, was much more sophisticated.
