The Ministry of Special Cases (6 page)

It seemed they were having a coup.

It seemed they were having a coup, and for this Cacho stayed home to scratch out his eyes.

Frida was at her desk when Lillian walked in. She said, before anything, “Isabelita is trapped in the Pink House. It’ll be over before it starts. A day at the most, Gustavo is saying. We’re going back to a military government.”

“You’d think they’d have come home,” Lillian said. “Kaddish was gone and Pato off to university before I got up. Classes must be canceled. Where would the kids go?” Lillian shook her head. “When do I ever sleep late?”

“Adaptability,” Gustavo said. He was out of his office and inserting himself into the conversation as if Lillian had been talking to him. It was Gustavo’s way of being boss, of owning everything there. He stood between them and smoothed down his hair. “We have inbred ourselves into supreme adaptability, and now it’s become a detriment. We’ll get used to this government same as the last—and if it turns on us we won’t even see it coming. We’ll go down, thinking
All is well.”
Gustavo said this as if the three of them were observing it from Switzerland. He spoke with a certain glee.

Lillian nodded a thank-you and turned her back to him and said, very clearly to Frida alone, “A truckful of men point their guns at me, and still I go on my way.”

Gustavo circled around and returned himself to the conversation.

“After the soldiers, who else should come to work more than you? We sell insurance. Today is what we are about. It’s our big gamble. We pay out. Others pay in.”

“And?” Frida said, dragging out the word.

“Life. Property. All the values shift. You’ll see when things settle; much will have become precious, and many will have no worth at all.”

Frida gave up. She asked for the advice that he’d dispense regardless.

“So then what do we do? Sit here and wait?”

“We get down to business,” Gustavo said. “Life and death you can’t control now. It is only profit that can be arranged absolutely during a war.”

“Who are we having a war with?” Frida said.

“That’s the point. Figure out the sides and begin to earn.”

With that, Gustavo went back into his office.

Lillian took Frida’s hands.

“You’d think Pato—he’s very sensitive. You’d think he’d have turned back from school.”

A glass floated above the floor, held steady by five fingers pressed, from above, around the rim. The fingers were of a hand, the hand of an arm, and the arm hung disembodied behind the back of the couch.

Lillian dropped her keys on the little antique shelf. She dropped her purse, loudly, by the wall underneath. The glass held steady; the arm did not move. The television visible beyond the couch showed the Liberators Cup, River Plate vs. Portuguesa. The little men ran back and forth. Lillian couldn’t see the ball through the smoke, a thin gray cloud in front of the black-and-white of the set.

Lillian approached, leaning over and kissing Kaddish on the head. He put his cigarette in the ashtray resting on his stomach and placed the glass on his chest.

“I’ll know you’re dead,” she said, “if I ever come home and find that cloud missing or that glass knocked over on the floor.”

“What’s wrong with ritual?” Kaddish said. “It doesn’t hurt for some things to stay the same.”

“No,” Lillian said. She agreed.

Kaddish sat up with his back against the arm of the couch, his legs stretched out. He moved the ashtray to the floor.

“Crazy day,” he said.

“Very crazy.” Lillian smiled and went to sit. Kaddish raised his legs and Lillian slipped in underneath, then patted them down. She closed her eyes and let herself relax. She listened for the music that was always on and always too loud, emanating from Pato’s room. Lillian couldn’t hear it, and that only meant headphones or a grinding needle when the boy passed out. Creatures of habit, her husband and her son. They shared a great love for the comfort of sameness.

“He asleep?” Lillian said.

“Out,” Kaddish said.

With a tilt of her head, screwing up her face, she stared hard at her husband, trying to understand.

She stared hard at her husband and was already mad at herself. On Coup Day, on this day, how had she not raced straight for his room to check? Then there was Kaddish, this man who understood nothing, whom she could not for a few hours trust.

“Out?” Lillian said.

“With the hairy one. That kid that looks like an octopus—all head.”

“Rafa,” Lillian said. Then as an afterthought, distracted with worry, “It is time you learned your son’s friends’ names.”

“He came by, Rafa did, and they went off to some bar.”

Lillian pushed Kaddish’s legs off her lap so that he sat up straight, so that she could stand up and face him.

“What bar do you think is open tonight? How could you let him leave?” She looked toward the door, as if Pato might come through it. And then she asked Kaddish, quite calmly, “Don’t you have any sense of your own?”

“I told him. He doesn’t listen.”

“Then tie him up. Hold him down. If your son doesn’t listen, why didn’t I find you by the door sitting on his back?”

“Uncontrollable,” Kaddish said. “By his father, uncontrollable. Rebellious Jewish boys only listen to their mothers. For fathers they have no use.”

IN THE FIRST WEEKS
after the coup, Lillian’s office received the people who had what to insure and the money to do it. Business rose steadily, and the caliber of the clientele rose with it. Gustavo was the epitome of Argentine politeness as still-stunned citizens took out policies on themselves. They repeated questions, asked the obvious, and all touched upon the central point:
What happens if I die?

“Covered,” Gustavo would say. Then, after a
God forbid
, he’d offer a withered smile. When asked about the money, Gustavo spoke with a comforting detachment. “The insurer issues the payment,” he would say. “You—that is, the surviving family—send us proof of death. We alert the company, and then….”

And then Gustavo would make one hand motion or another, signifying ease and flow and continuity. He was not deceiving them. The process was to be that smooth—that is, for those with proof of death. Gustavo had heard whisperings of his own. That is why, in each instance, he made sure to state this point out loud. The customers noted it or they didn’t.

It was Lillian writing up these policies, and Frida typing the forms, who dealt with the addresses where payments were to go. In the event of misfortune the beneficiaries were in Havana and Miami, Manhattan and Rome. Every foreign street name depressed Lillian more. It did not bode
well. The men and women who’d fallen out of favor had already sent their families away.

Lillian watched Gustavo lead one of these people out of his office, a
diputado
she recognized from the TV. Without the lights and the pancake makeup he simply looked old. Gustavo walked close to this man with his arm raised as if he were about to hug him. But the arm never came down. It served as a guide so that, when his client bumped into it, he redirected himself as he shuffled to the door.

As delicate as Gustavo was when dealing with truncated prospects, he was equally deft when managing windfalls, the steady stream of acquisitions that were hard to explain. That is why, more and more, the upper crust turned to him as an agent.

There was also the matter of his parentage. With a change in government comes a change in fashion. Though he’d done little with it, somewhere—generations back—introduced into Gustavo’s line was a very fine, very un-Perón last name.

Some sounds are unmistakable even if you’ve never heard them in real life before. With the first gunshot, Lillian knew she’d been waiting. She sat up in bed, not yet awake and absolutely sure. There was another shot and then a steady burst. Kaddish snored through it and Lillian let him. She got low out of bed and crawled to Pato’s room, though there were no windows anywhere in the hall. Pato was under the covers and asleep and Lillian crawled over to his window. She peeked out through the space under the curtains, too afraid to pull them apart. There was no yelling or footsteps. She couldn’t hear any cars. Then it would come, another tattoo of it, and Lillian tried to figure if it was people taking turns—a shootout—or if it was one man with one gun taking his time.

So many waves washed over their beautiful city. There’d be a wave of quiet before a wave of crime. They’d get a wave of kidnap and ransom, of political promise, then leftist terror followed by rightist death squads. With the new government, the clean streets, and a safe high-strung city, Lillian had been waiting for this. This was the wave of scores settled,
and maybe of what Lillian feared most. Pato had said it after they’d found that boy murdered. What if this was the wave of innocents shot dead?

You cannot ever let your guard down in Buenos Aires. It’s like standing in the ocean and facing the beach. It’s up to you to know what’s behind you. Always there’s another wave coming, building in force and crashing down.

The shooting stopped. Lillian looked toward Pato’s clock. It was barely after midnight. The whole incident couldn’t have taken more than three minutes or four. And as agitated as she was (or maybe because of it), Lillian fell asleep there on the floor between her son’s bed and the window. She awoke again after dawn. She got showered and dressed and went down to the bakery and to pick up the news. This time, she didn’t know how, it was already in the paper that morning. Seven bodies of seven rebels were found dead on different streets. Lillian wondered how far sound could travel. None of them was discovered on their side of town.

Lillian often tried to imagine what her parents would say if they weren’t already buried in respectable United Congregations plots. No great success, her life no better or worse than the one they’d struggled to give her. But together she and Kaddish had produced a wonderful son, tall and handsome and smart, and ten times more independent than she’d been. And even if Kaddish didn’t stop as he went by, no son-in-law spent more time around his in-laws’ graves. “Such beginnings,” they’d said, when she started seeing Kaddish. “Such a past.” They’d harped on this while Lillian pointed out in each and every argument that the past they abhorred wasn’t his.

With all her years in insurance, Lillian had become a great believer in statistics. Anything could happen to anyone anywhere, but if you didn’t want your car broken into, Lillian could tell you on which block not to park. That said, Lillian still made room for possibility. When she was young and Kaddish was courting her, it was his ambition that had won her over. Not only did he dream without limit but he got Lillian to
believe as well. And from their first date onward it had always been a
we
from Kaddish. All those dreams realized included her at his side. When Lillian flipped through women’s magazines, she couldn’t stand the photos of the mousy society wife on the corner of a settee, ankles crossed, with a fat-and-happy husband smiling for the camera and looking like he was a meter closer to the lens. The cheerfulness of those ladies’ interviews was what maddened her. How delightful the hard years were. Lillian believed every great success and wondrous achievement was based on bad judgment and recklessness, and more often than not on selfishness and the endangerment of more than one life. The successful ones were simply afforded better chances or had better luck. After spending as many years with Kaddish as she had apart, somewhere in herself Lillian still believed he could do it. What were the choices (what was her life) if she believed he could not?

In any new friendship, the question that accompanied the first trace of intimacy was always the same. They wanted to know why she’d married him. (Lillian, who’d sneaked off to find a rabbi who’d rejoice in their union and who didn’t know the Poznan name.) She always answered with a question of her own: “What would you ask me if his dreams had come true?”

This is why, even with the head-splitting pressure she felt during the change of regime, it was at these times she loved him best.

“They don’t order my services yet,” Kaddish said, “but when they feel safe enough to whisper the names again, I’ll be busy like never before. A government fifty times more Catholic than the last and a civilized class being built around it. To be part of it they’ll pay me the same and fifty times more.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said.

“When it feels quieter at night I’ll finish with the doctor’s job and then you’ll see the kind of cash I bring home. The shame industry is about to bloom.”

He was a man on the cusp and acted like it. Lillian had come home these last weeks to find that Kaddish had been to the vegetable man and the butcher. She’d step in the door to find Portuguese rolls laid out in a basket with a napkin underneath. She’d find Kaddish in the kitchen, his
glass of vermouth covered in greasy fingerprints on the counter, bent over a skillet flipping croquettes. He’d even defrosted the freezer himself. Kaddish was a pleasure, full of compliments and kisses, and if he still watched the same amount of football, it was while sitting up and leaning into the television, chanting and full of good humor, not flat on the couch as if someone had aimed the set at a corpse.

Lillian felt guilty about enjoying her son in the same way. She was happy to see that Pato wasn’t totally senseless. During this same period, he actually listened to his mother. He didn’t stay out late, didn’t talk too much on the telephone. He got up early each day like honest people do and went to fetch the pastries without fail. At night he made it home for dinner and didn’t much bother his father, who hadn’t much been bothering him. She didn’t want to get hopeful, but outside the financial pressures that threatened to put them on the street, and the political uncertainty that kept them locked inside, it was the best in a while that their lives had been. With debts and threats and all their troubles rolled up together, she didn’t miss the opportunity to see the good. There was a roof over their heads. There was food on the table and her family around it. Worse or better, now was good. And when she was feeling anxious, she’d only wonder if she’d overdone it with the door.