Mapuche (21 page)

“Lock the door,” he said.

Jana obeyed while he had a look at the other rooms. He soon came back, having found nothing. The apartment was empty. The Mapuche hadn't budged, hypnotized by the body slumped on the wheelchair. An odor of old age hung in the air despite the stale smell of laundry powder.

“The scarf,” she said. “It's Paula's, I mean Miguel's.” Not long before, it had been around his neck.

Rubén thought for a moment. Was it a clue meant to accuse Miguel of murder, or to throw them off the track?

“Do you think they kidnapped him?”

“If they'd wanted to kill him, we would have found his body,” Rubén replied.

He put on latex gloves. Miguel's mother seemed to have shrunk to half her size with her quilt wrapped around her sick hips, her blouse covered with saliva, and her box of cough drops scattered all over the floor. The angle of the neck suggested that it had been broken; the body was lukewarm, indicating that she had died no more than an hour or two before. There were no other traces of wounds, just this face disfigured by strangulation, with little balls of chewed-up paper stuck to the lips and this satiny scarf that belonged to her son. It was growing more humid in the back room. Rubén lifted up the laundress's head, opened her mouth and saw something stuck in her esophagus. A little ball of paper, half chewed-up. He pulled it out with the tips of his fingers.

“What's this?”

“The old woman was crazy,” Jana said. “The Rapunzel syndrome.”

He grimaced.

“Rosa chewed up her bills, her papers, her hair, anything she got her hands on,” she explained. “Miguel was planning to ask a psychiatrist for help, and then . . . ”

The sculptress, wavering between anger and nausea, didn't finish her sentence. Rubén wiped the saliva on his jacket and unfolded the little ball of paper he'd taken out of Rosa's throat. The writing was minuscule, typed: he could distinguish numbers that resembled a table, a series of letters . . . Rubén bent down and saw the box of cough drops and its contents, which had rolled against the wall. They weren't candies to suck on but more little balls of paper that Miguel's mother had torn up with maniacal care. The detective picked them up; there were about half a dozen of them. He flattened them out on the ironing table: they contained more numbers, but also names.

“What is it?” murmured Jana, leaning over his shoulder.

“They're not bills, in any case. They look instead like . . . file cards.”

The numbers seemed to correspond to schedules. Then Rubén saw a date, September 9, 1976, with a cryptic code alongside it. September 1976. The dictatorship.

“It's an internment form,” he said.

Rubén turned toward the body. There were only seven intact pieces of paper. How long would the autopsy on Rosa take, ten, twelve, twenty hours? Too long, in any event. Between now and then her gastric juices would have eaten everything up. He straightened up the corpse on the chair, then took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

“What are you doing?”

“She swallowed the rest of the document,” he said, indicating the
apropriadora
. “With a little luck, the acid won't have erased everything yet.”

Jana didn't immediately understand what he had in mind. Rubén's eyes had changed, as if he had fallen into himself. Jana stepped back, speechless: he breathed out to relieve the stress, took out the blade of his knife, and cut open the old woman's blouse. Her empty eyes were fixed on the ceiling and her withered flesh appeared in the harsh light of the storeroom.

“If I were you, I'd look the other way,” he said.

The Indian woman kept her eyes fixed on him.

Her choice.

Ruben stuck the blade into Rosa Michellini's abdomen and disemboweled her.

The moon was climbing over the roofs when they opened the reinforced door of Rubén's office. No one had seen them leave the laundry and go down Peru Street. The detective lived two blocks farther on. Jana had followed him on the unreal sidewalk, her head full of images of dead people, hardly listening to the phone conversation he had with his cop girlfriend on the way: she was thinking about Miguel, about the horrible fate that seemed to have hounded him ever since his birth. It was hot in the apartment, one of those muggy nights typical of a Buenos Aires summer. Rubén threw his stinking jacket on the sofa, drew the drapes, and spread his precious masticated papers on the desk. Most of them were damp, in poor condition. He let them dry in the open air. The soles of his boots squeaked on the marble floor. They were shot, too.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked.

Jana shook her head. She felt like throwing up. Rubén still had that dreadful mark along his neck and the old madwoman's blood on his shirt.

“I'm going to take a shower,” he said.

The Mapuche didn't react; she stood there with her arms crossed, her big, dark eyes in freefall. Keep cool, don't think about what they might be doing to Paula at this very moment . . . The pipes moaned behind the tiles
in the bathroom. Jana listened to the long moan of the water in the pipes, far, very far, from the sobbing of the wind in the grass.

A mixture of blood, water, and organic materials had spilled out on the quilt when Rubén pulled out the
apropriadora
's stomach; he had put it down on the ironing table, lukewarm and bloody, as in the courses in forensic medicine, opened the membrane with a disconcerting skill, and using the point of the knife, slit it open lengthwise. The gastric juices had begun to eat away the food, but the balls of paper were still visible among the stale-smelling contents of the stomach. He found seven of them, which he cleaned briefly before taking off with Jana.

The shower finally stopped. A bad dream.

Rubén soon reappeared, barefoot, clad in black pants without a belt and a plum-colored shirt that hugged his shoulder muscles. She felt pathetic in her worn-out shorts, tank top, and old Doc Martens, as if the difference in their ages was to her disadvantage. He filled a glass with cold water from the tap and handed her a pill.

“Take this,” he said. “It'll help you hold up.”

“What is it?”

“A tranquilizer.”

“I don't want to be tranquilized.”

“And I don't want to see you in this state . . . Please.”

He was looking at her in a friendly way again. Jana swallowed the pill with the glass of water without seeing that he was looking at her lovingly. She was still thinking about Paula, about her spangled dreams that were collapsing, about their sleepless night that turned into a nightmare.

“Do you do this sort of thing often?” she asked, getting a grip on herself.

“What?”

“Disembowel old women.”

“No . . . they're not all so crazy.”

Some kind of balm glistened on Rubén's neck. He went to the bar to make a pisco sour.

“It would be better for you not to go home,” he said while mixing the ingredients. “Stay here tonight . . . afterward we'll see.”

A night bus rattled the windows of the office. Rubén filled a glass to the brim, lit a cigarette, and glanced at the bits of paper spread out on the desk. They were almost dry. His hair was dripping on his bruised neck. Poc, poc, a rain of tears over what happened to them.

She came closer.

“What are you doing?”

“A puzzle . . . Anyway, what remains of it.”

Parts of the writing had disappeared as a result of the gastric acid, but the density of the balls of paper had preserved a good half of the content.

“How did the old woman get her hands on these papers?” Jana asked.

“Through the intermediary of María Victoria, I suppose. Or Ossario. Unless she had had them ever since the time of the adoption, and tried to destroy them. That's what we're going to find out.”

Rubén started reconstituting the document under the art deco lamp, while Jana watched from outside the circle of light. He didn't know when the crazy old woman had begun swallowing these precious papers, or how many pieces were missing: he was weaving his fabric, laboriously, fitting together the bits of paper on the table one by one. The minutes passed. Jana yawned in spite of herself.

“You can sleep in my bedroom if you want,” Rubén said. “This is going to take me a while, I think.”

The sculptress was dead on her feet. Probably an effect of the pill, accumulated fatigue, or nerves that were relaxing.

“What about Miguel?” she said quietly. “Do you think they're going to make him disappear, too?”

“Like all the witnesses to this business,” he replied in a voice that he tried to keep neutral. “You're one of them.”

“You too.”

“Yes. But I'm not going to let you go like that.”

Jana wasn't certain that was reassuring. They hadn't touched each other since their kiss at the base of the aviator, three centuries ago. Absorbed in the puzzle's game of musical chairs, Rubén was no longer paying attention to her. Names soon appeared, places, then the ESMA's coat of arms. An identification form, as he'd expected. The one Ossario had shown María Campallo as a proof of her adoption? How had the former paparazzo obtained such a document? He pursued his task, no longer feeling any fatigue: sleep had fled, the world had disappeared into an abyss that took him back thirty-five years. He rotated the debris, established connections. The apartment was silent, hardly disturbed by the rumble of traffic on the airport superhighway beyond the accursed intersection. Jana had curled up on the couch without even taking off her Doc Martens. Another hour went by before he obtained a coherent result.

It was clear that what he had before him was not one but three pages of a single document: three badly printed photocopies of an identification form created at the ESMA and dating from the summer of 1976.

Rubén worked out an initial scenario on the basis of the evidence at his disposal. Ossario had contacted María Victoria to show her the internment form that condemned her adoptive parents, with the goal of getting her to testify in his “Grand Trial,” but the photographer had not followed the paranoiac's instructions: she had tracked down the laundress to whom her biological brother had been given, with a copy of the document as proof. Miguel being away, his mother had kept the copy, probably promising to show it to her son, to confess to him, one on one. María must have doubted what the old madwoman said; pursuing her search by questioning people in the neighborhood, she had been sent to the La Boca docks, where the transvestite son of the laundress had been turning tricks for years. María then happened on Luz, and had taken her away or made a date to meet at the tango club, without knowing that the killers were tailing her. They had been abducted as they came out of the club.

Rubén mulled over the reassembled fragments of the puzzle. There were gaps, names, dates, or places censored by the time it had spent in Rosa's stomach, but it still constituted an organizational chart of the military men involved in the kidnapping and sequestration of María Victoria's parents. The latter's names were legible: Samuel and Gabriella Verón. Eduardo Campallo's name was also on the document: the children had been handed over to him on September 21, 1976. The detective remained for a moment hunched over the lamp on the desk, troubled. Despite its condition, he'd never seen such a precise internment form: names, dates, movements, everything was carefully recorded. It would take him hours to inventory it, index the names of all the guilty parties and their accomplices, and compare them with his files. No, this time he wouldn't be able to handle things by himself. He needed help. Carlos, Anita, the Grandmothers . . .

Old ghosts were roaming around the office when he looked up. Jana had fallen asleep on the red couch in the living room. She was there, hardly six feet away, knocked out by the pill. The curve of her brown legs gleamed in the light of the art deco lamp, a bit of her face, her hair falling over the armrest. Barefoot, he slipped silently to the sofa where she was sleeping off her misery. The Mapuche, curled up like a hunting dog, was holding her arms hugged to her chest, but her sleeping face was that of a child. Muddy tears that had risen from the underworld beaded on her eyelashes. Rubén knelt down beside the little angel and caressed her forehead with the tips of his fingers.

My sweet . . . my sweet little sister . . .

Franco Díaz had tears in his eyes when he saw the majestic ombus rising against the Argentine sky—trees that botany classifies as giant grasses and that are typical of the pampas. The retiree from Colonia hadn't seen them for how long—fifteen years?

A fervent Catholic and a patriot, Franco Díaz was a man with principles—never regret, never betray. For more than thirty years the Argentine army had been his sole mistress—demanding, faithful. A family was fine for civilians. But as he got older, his early retirement guaranteeing him a comfortable pension, Franco had become attached to the idea of growing old with a woman—a sweet and submissive woman, like his mother; to make him happy, she would have only to respect the order of things. Nothing complicated, he thought. He had retired to Colonia del Sacramento, the Uruguayan port opposite Buenos Aires, hoping to find what he was looking for. He'd had to lower his sights. The ancient colonial city receiving primarily tourists or families in shorts with digital cameras, available women in his age bracket were few, under surveillance, or even atheists, so that after a number of episodic or unhappy experiences, Franco Díaz had ended up forgetting the idea of growing old with a woman.

Perhaps he should have thought of it earlier. Perhaps, too, he had see too many ugly things—women must sense that. Franco had no regrets: what had been done had to be done, and above all he had found in flowers the otherness that was lacking in his life in the barracks.