Hades, Argentina Read online

  I’d never encountered anyone who felt as much as Isabel did. When she was happy, she seemed ten notches more ecstatic than I’d ever been, splashing in the water like an unruly child and laughing so wildly she snorted. When she was upset, she picked bruising fights with her mother and took long, sulking walks along the dunes for which she offered no explanation.

  The first few times I asked to come with her, she didn’t answer or declined. But once I went anyway. Isabel remained silent, shrugging in response to my questions until I went silent too. Then, without warning, she started jumping away from the water lapping at our ankles, and we turned it into a game, dodging the waves as if they were sent by the evil world just for us, and together we could escape them.

  I joined her on all her walks after that. We never repeated that game—one time I tried and instead Isabel turned to the water and walked right in—but the experience opened a door between us. Our heart-to-hearts were probably no more than the usual teenage schmaltz, but to me they seemed cataclysmically special. We bonded over loneliness as if we ourselves had discovered the concept, and dreamed aloud about finding romantic partners with characteristics that to me sounded strikingly like each other’s—honest, committed, unafraid.

  The main narrative was that we both felt like orphans. Though we still had our mothers, the absence of our fathers weighed heavily on us. Hers had left during the clampdown on universities that followed Onganía’s coup in ’66, taking a job and a lover in New York, and it made a rebel out of her. While I felt alienated, alone in the universe, she seemed constantly embattled by it.

  We hardly left each other’s side that summer, making little effort to keep poor Nerea from feeling her third-wheel status. We even started addressing each other as cousins; I called her prima, while she used the diminutive primito for me.

  By the end of the season, I was sure I was in love. And on one of our last nights together, stealing off to the beach after everyone else had gone to bed, I tried to kiss her.

  Isabel rebuffed me. “We’re cousins, Tomás,” she said.

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Well. We might as well be.”

  For a time it seemed a self-fulfilling pronouncement. The following year our relationship was confined to letters, and in correspondence we retreated into cordiality and banal jokes. Isabel even confided that she’d developed a crush on someone, an older boy in her school, which was such a betrayal that I had to invent a redhead named Susana to get back at her.

  Susana was made up, but others weren’t. I soon developed real crushes of my own, and Isabel spent the following summer in the States with her father, so I didn’t see her again until I was fourteen and she was fifteen. By then I felt like a different person; I was getting top marks in school, I’d had a growth spurt, I’d fooled around with girls while their parents were downstairs. Enough time had passed that all possibility seemed to have shifted on its axis.

  Later, when I moved to Buenos Aires in ’76, it was the same thing. I always rediscovered her after such distance that I felt we could start over, that this time we’d get it right, or the world would. With Isabel, I never believed it was too late.

  * * *

  When I’d reminisced about Isabel during the past ten years, it was primarily about the girl with whom I spent summers on the beaches of Pinamar. How she was in 1976 had gotten tangled up in 1976 itself, and it was safer to keep the doors locked to both if I could. Prettier too: without 1976 in the picture, the rest of it changed. Whole alternative realities opened up, among them ones in which history skipped over us entirely, and we found ourselves married or having an on-and-off affair, thrown together with the same enduring force as in our youth.

  As a thirteen-year-old, Isabel had a body inclined toward plumpness, lushness. Puberty shaped her early into a woman, as did the bouts of depression she smothered in jars of dulce de leche. I don’t know if everyone would have found Isabel beautiful, at least not in Buenos Aires, which liked its women pencil-thin. But to me that lushness only made her lovelier, as if I alone perceived her as she deserved. As if it testified to the deeper connection between us, an antenna-like link no one else shared.

  The plumpness was gone entirely now. From her waist and limbs, but also from the cheeks whose cherubic roundness had remained a defining feature into her twenties. Her clothes were baggy and shapeless on her—bell-bottom jeans under a loosely hanging top with a flower pattern. Her chestnut hair looked thinner too—stiff and brittle, like a wind couldn’t toss it if it tried. And her eyes, once a piercing blue, were now a leaden gray.

  There were subtler shifts too, differences I struggled to attribute a meaning or broader explanation to. Her stride, quick now, slow then. Her stare, which sometimes seemed vacant and bored, but sometimes darted about our surroundings as if they were new to her, as if she were young to the world and its every mundanity appealed.

  For all their darting, those eyes never fell on me. Not as we walked a block to the nearest café nor as we entered it, proceeded to a spot in the back. She gave none of the signs of affection one might expect at such a reunion either. I was reminded of the coolness with which she’d returned to Pinamar at fifteen. She sported a pair of oversized sunglasses at all hours and constantly dangled a cigarette over her wrist as if she were a famous actress. After all, she’d seen New York—snow, Vietnam War protests, Coney Island, freaks on St. Mark’s Place, one with a whole spiderweb tattooed on his face—why would she have any interest in us third worlders?

  This coldness had to be something worse. I braced for accusations, words of hatred or betrayal. But recriminations were no more forthcoming than endearments. With the exception of our orders—whiskey for her, a glass of red for me (I’d had a rule since ’78 to stay away from hard liquor)—we remained silent until they came.

  Our gazes flitted from our drinks to the ashtray between them to the bottles behind the bar and the wall decorations opposite—framed jerseys and other tokens of national pride. “I don’t know where to begin,” I said.

  “What? You mean catching up?” Isabel said. “It’d be nicer if we didn’t have to, don’t you think? Fresh starts and all that.”

  “I’m not sure I’m so good at those now.”

  “Really? Don’t you have a whole new life in New York?”

  I wondered how she knew that. Which is to say, I wondered whether she might have been the one to track me down and give Pichuca my number.

  “It’s not so new anymore,” I said.

  She sighed. Drank. Plucked a napkin from the dispenser and crumpled it. “Ten years, no?” she said, as if it were a genuine question. “Hard to believe.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me, Isa? Ten years. Do you know what it would have meant to me to know you’d survived?”

  She laughed. Waved a hand down the side of her body as if to display it as evidence. “Does it really seem I’ve survived, Tomás?”

  “As much as any of us,” I answered hesitantly.

  “Well, that’s not saying very much, is it?” Her cynicism, that offhand negativity—it was so her, so Isabel, that despite the sinister undercurrent, I felt grateful. “I’m a shell, Tomás. Don’t you see I’m a shell?”

  “They found you, then?”

  “They found us,” Isabel said.

  “You were in a detention center?”

  “The biggest of its kind.”

  I went silent again. Finished my drink and waved the waiter down for another.

  “But let’s not talk about that,” Isabel said. “Let’s talk about you. I hope you’re more than a shell, Tomás?”

  Recent fights with Claire shuffled through my awareness, along with older ones, nights out with her friends or parents when I was taciturn but insisted nothing was wrong. Arbitrary recollections from further back as well: the United Nations couple who rented me a room in their Parkway Village apartment in Queens and got me
my first translating gigs, and whose invitations to barbecues I consistently declined; a girl I picked up at a bar who asked me, in a cutting timbre that suggested she knew how limited the answer would be, what I did for fun.

  “Not much more,” I said.

  “Tell me,” Isabel said. “Tell me about your ten years. You did escape, no?”

  She gave me an unaccountable desire to echo her: “Does it really seem I’ve escaped?” I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. Instead I told her I’d fled to Rome in December ’76, and struggled there enough that I fled again for New York, where I got a job and, later, a wife.

  Isabel didn’t ask about the wife or, I was no less thankful, how I’d gotten out of Buenos Aires. Only about those struggles in Rome. So I told her how I was unable to find a place among the Argentine exiles there, those former members of the revolutionary movement who still spoke till dawn about Perón and Che Guevara and the country’s destiny as if they had any control over it; how I couldn’t find work like they did either—the architects who built toys to sell in the streets, the artists who did bijouterie; how I spent all my hours walking those ancient, winding alleys like a ghost unsure what to haunt, confused by the colors of the signs and circling sites like the Colosseum thinking it should have been a soccer stadium.

  “You spent all your hours walking in Buenos Aires too,” Isabel said.

  “Not all my hours,” I replied. The irony that I was the one to show resentment did not elude me.

  “No,” Isabel granted. “But I don’t think you were ever much of a ghost haunting anything either, Tomás.”

  There was no point arguing. Isabel never took my pain as seriously as her own.

  “How long are you here for?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I got a one-way flight.”

  Isabel nodded as if that made all the sense in the world. “Are you sure you didn’t believe it when you saw me, Tomás?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You just always knew more than you pretended.”

  It felt like a refrain, the secret underpinning of our whole relationship, even though she’d used the phrase with me only once that I could recall. It was shortly after I first moved to Buenos Aires; she asked me if I believed I could ever kill someone, and when I said I didn’t know, she told me: You know more than you pretend.

  Suddenly I remembered that Isabel had been wearing this same flowered top that day. Drenched after running through the rain, the white and yellow flowers had looked to my clouded mind like bees. It had been raggedy even then, and now, ten years on, was clearly out of fashion too. Which struck me, since for all of Isabel’s talk of bigger things, petty concerns like that had always kept their hooks in her as well.

  “You don’t live here anymore, I take it?” I asked, attributing the shift to some new lifestyle of hers, a hermetic, off-the-grid existence.

  “No,” Isabel said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be here either. Probably not very.”

  “Why not?” It occurred to me we hadn’t discussed her mother yet. “Won’t you need to stay to make arrangements?”

  “Cecilia and her Nazi husband can handle them, I’m sure.”

  “But the funeral? All that goes into a death?”

  “I didn’t come back for death, Tomás. If I came for anything, it’s life. I’ve forgotten the taste of it, you know?”

  I thought about reminding her of her endlessly high expectations. Asking how she hadn’t learned to lower them yet.

  “How about dinner then?” I said. “That’s what I’ve forgotten the taste of—a proper, bloody Argentine steak.”

  Isabel shook her head. “You don’t understand. I want to go back to Pinamar, or tag walls somewhere. You remember when we did that? Food is just food. I want experiences, stories. Did I ever tell you the one about Gustavo at the chicken factory?”

  He’d made other unexpected entries into my life, but perhaps none as unexpected as that. The first overt reference between us to the great jealousy of my life.

  “We needed cash and he’d take whatever odd job he could get. His first try was in construction. But he lost a tool in the septic tank and—I swear—was forced to fish it out.” She laughed; I failed to. “After that, he worked at an understaffed chicken factory in Caseros, preparing the chickens you’d buy at supermarkets. His role was on the assembly line, tying the legs, wrapping the meat in plastic, that kind of thing. But Gusti couldn’t keep up, the skinned chickens started piling on top of him. He tried to push them back but—splat!—they started falling to the floor. Splat, splat, splat! As he bent over to pick them up, some on the conveyor belt got away from him. The result? Let’s just say the resistance was fought for a day or two by gifting the Argentine supermarkets of the bourgeoisie a shocking number of unwrapped, unsanitary, and salmonella-inducing chickens.”

  She laughed again—loudly, like a cackle. Splat, splat, splat!

  “What happened to Gustavo?” I asked.

  “We were in hiding together when they found us. What do you think happened?”

  Based on experience, I could guess. The women often lasted marginally longer, thanks to the proclivities of their male captors. The men they tired of more quickly.

  “Anyway, you get my point. We could go to the water or some of the old spots from ’76. Sneak into the Japanese Garden or visit your old pensión.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “What about going to the Bosques? After Pinamar, that was probably where we spent the most time together. We could pick up some wine and drink it out of styrofoam cups.”

  I waited for a grin or some other indication that she was referring to a specific memory—a night when we drank that way, side by side, on my twin bed before our pain and our clothes came off—but none followed.

  “Really? The Bosques at night?”

  “Does it frighten you, Tomás?”

  I felt as if I were twelve again, staring at her bloody foot after she stepped on a broken beer bottle on the beach and said it didn’t scare her. Then I felt twenty-one, staring at her as she said things about her role in the revolutionary movement and what she wanted mine to be. By then, she didn’t need to tell me it didn’t scare her.

  “Don’t you want to get a taste of life with me?” she said.

  * * *

  It was a half-hour walk to the nearest entrance to the Bosques, but on Isabel’s urging we took a cab. The whole ride she stared out the window as if she were a tourist and didn’t want to miss the sights. She hardly spoke. Hardly moved. Her rigidity was such that I was hyperaware of every movement of my own, from my bouncing after a bump to the sway of my shoulders on a turn. On one, I was forced so close to her, I realized she had scarcely any scent. No perfume, no body odor. Not even the stink of cigarette smoke. I attributed it to the cracked window, the battling fragrances of the city—car exhaust, sweat, the pollen of late-blooming flowers.

  I paid the driver and we entered a supermarket off the park. Inside, Isabel seemed to regain her spirits; she went straight to the liquor section and handed me a bottle of Old Smuggler whiskey.

  “I thought you wanted wine,” I said.

  “I can’t tell good wine from bad anymore.”

  So much for my rule about hard liquor. She started back down the aisle, presumably for the cups.

  “Do you want to get food?” I asked.

  “What? To stay sober?”

  “To eat, Isa.”

  She shrugged. “You get some empanadas if you want.”

  I did, enough for both of us, despite her declarations. Then we got in line to pay.

  “Shit,” Isabel said, noticing the fatness of my wallet, which I’d filled at the airport with Argentine pesos. “Are you rich now, boludo?”

  Boludo. That most Argentine of all Argentine colloquialisms. Literally it meant you were big-balled, but it was used
so indiscriminately, it really just meant you were human. It was wonderful being called human by Isabel again.

  “I thought I’d be richer,” I said. “Being an American in Argentina.”

  “I don’t know how you can live there,” she said.

  There was a period I didn’t either. When my original reason for coming had evaporated like the whim it was, and I found myself stranded in a purgatorial state and a borough I’d never heard of prior to my arrival. When all those conversations of my youth about the “Yankee imperialists” were still fresh in my memory, and my knowledge of how they’d backed the military and its horrors shadowed every opportunity that arose there, every chance at enjoyment.

  But time had dulled that particular shame, or left no room for it. I rarely took a bird’s-eye view of my life anymore, burying my head like an ostrich in the day-to-day instead. I hadn’t felt worried about my growing Americanness in years.

  “Are you a fascist like Cecilia now too?” Isabel asked as we exited the store.

  “I’m as bad as Ronald Reagan himself,” I said. Isabel looked at me blankly. “US president? Actor from California?” Still no sign of recognition. She crossed the street ahead of me and made her way under the trees.

  * * *

  It was as if night followed us in. Cleared the spaces between the leaves, snuffed them out so that all that was left was the sense of canopy, a tightly woven quilt of shadows. The breeze murmured after us as well—playfully, lightly. Even the clouds kicked up along the dirt path seemed gentle, pretty puffs of red.

  I scanned for less hospitable presences—kids with bottles of their own, the glint of a knife in a crack of moonlight, the glow of police flashlights—but spotted none. We passed the botanic gardens and the zoo, where we once secretly met amid the calls of exotic birds, and continued into the Bosques’ sprawling heart. Our conversation along the way was fragmented, punctuated by exchanges of the whiskey and more stories: “I can’t believe you gave me the fucking code name Penguin,” I told her, and she retorted, “Shit, Tomás, I was Mrs. Bitter, you remember?” We recalled asados, late nights singing along to Mercedes Sosa and Piero, giddy flights away from angry, excluded Nerea. The air teemed with nostalgia, the past in all its flawed, flavorful glory.