Hades, Argentina Read online

  “What she said didn’t make any sense, Tomás.”

  “A lot of things don’t make sense, Ceci,” I replied.

  She sighed irritatedly. “Pichu said you needed to see that colonel friend of yours, okay? Felipe Gorlero?”

  He was someone else I’d underemphasized to Claire. Just another name on that list, not “the Colonel,” as he’d long since been to me.

  “Why doesn’t that make sense?”

  “Because I thought he was dead. I read he had a heart attack last year or maybe the year before, I don’t know. When all those accusations started coming out about death flights and whatnot. He wasn’t as high up in the army then, but it didn’t matter, they pinned what they wanted on him. It sounded like he was in bad shape.”

  I remembered the bottle of Johnnie Walker in my hotel room trash. The brochure on the nightstand for tours of the Recoleta Cemetery.

  “Was it the Colonel who gave Pichu my number?”

  “I don’t know, Tomás. Honestly, I don’t care.”

  Before I could press—my mind was careening too rapidly, struggling to pick a point of entry—I heard the click indicating she’d hung up on me.

  * * *

  I didn’t call back. I told myself it was because I’d be embarrassed again—and rude and selfish as well. Instead I went downstairs to a confitería for coffee and medialunas, hoping my head would clear when my hangover did. But it wasn’t nearly as palliative as the greasy American breakfasts I’d gotten used to. Bacon and eggs and butter-slathered toast—I first had such a meal at a diner in Kew Gardens a few days after arriving in New York. The Colonel had pontificated to me about their benefits for hangovers, and I’d been desperate to confirm another of his teachings.

  I didn’t set out with the intention of finding him. As I staggered into the sunshine toward his neighborhood, there was only the instinct, the reliability of a first step along a well-trodden path. Simply a long, dazed walk like the ones I used to take here, amid the cruel, sprawling beauty of Buenos Aires.

  The swaying greenery and Parisian architecture, those charming specialty shops like umbrella stores—the city remained completely unmarred by what happened within it. Buenos Aires never showed its scars, never let its surface be ruffled; it was a city made for forgetting as much as for nostalgia.

  It was only in taking specific turns as I got closer—off Avenida Libertador onto Scalabrini Ortiz, left on Cerviño—that I acknowledged what I was doing. Seeking him out as usual, for help or guidance. The last time I’d done so was in ’76, as hungover and distressed as I was now. “All I’m saying is you can always come to me,” he’d told me some months earlier. “Whatever it is. You need never be afraid with me.”

  I never was. Not even when I first met him as a ten-year-old boy at Atenas, a men’s club in La Plata. Most of the guests went there for smoky pleasures like whiskeys and cigars and prostitutes—I lost my virginity there years later—but I went because Atenas was also the only real chess club in the city. I was good for my age, and my father finagled a membership for me to get some proper competition. The best players in the city and some from farther away came for matches, among them a colonel named Felipe Gorlero, who happened to watch me beat an elderly math professor from the local university. Intrigued, he challenged me next, and I impressed him enough that he offered to give me lessons whenever he returned to town.

  Those lessons quickly expanded beyond chess. Books, science, history—knowledge bubbled off him as much as his personality. Though he was slim as a twig, he seemed so much grander than my parents—than anyone. “You seem different from people in the army,” I said to him once, in a state of youthful awe.

  “Do you know many people in the army, Tomasito?” he asked. After an interval, I confessed I didn’t. The Colonel laughed proudly. “Don’t worry: I am different from people in the army. Most of them—they’re pawns. Most people are, Tomás. And if I have a creed, it is not to be a pawn in anything.”

  He was a patron as much as a tutor. Hosting me on trips to Buenos Aires, getting permission from my mother to drive me to Mar del Plata to see Najdorf play in a tournament. As I got older, he started mentoring me academically as well, steering me toward both medicine—his father had been a chemist and wanted him to be one, and my mother wanted me to be anything with a stable paycheck—and English. Through the army, he’d become exposed to many high-level Americans (including at the School of the Americas in Panama; he never told me what he trained in there but his light references to stuffy CIA types and counterinsurgency tactics from Vietnam gave me ideas), and he’d developed an infatuation that rubbed off on me. “Such a pretty, hunky language,” he’d insist, and, convinced, I studied it from middle school through college. “Cloaked in those words, you can be who you want. The American Dream. What’s the Argentine Dream, meanwhile?”

  I didn’t even know my own dreams. Maybe if I’d had firmer ones, my relationship with the Colonel wouldn’t have morphed again the way it did when I moved to his city. But by then, what dreams I had involved Isabel, and her dreams involved fighting the military, and there was no getting closer to anyone, only more entangled.

  * * *

  I stood in front of the Colonel’s building for several minutes before entering. There was a doorman in the lobby whom I didn’t know, despite his advanced age and air of having worked there forever. Haltingly, I asked for the Gorleros, sixth floor—6A, I clarified, to prove I wasn’t a stranger.

  “They moved out years ago. Separately,” the doorman said, eyebrows raised, I assumed because divorce remained illegal here. My own disappointment was of a more basic sort: when I was growing up, no couple had seemed as perfect or happy to me as the Colonel and Mercedes.

  “Where’d they go?”

  Those eyebrows rose again—bushy and white, with long, sprouting hairs that highlighted his skepticism. “Afraid I can’t tell you that,” he said. I toyed with making up a story to get myself upstairs—journalist or executor or something—but out of awkwardness or some more latent reason, I opted not to.

  I went afterward to Plaza San Martín. It was one of the Colonel’s favorite places—the sole one he claimed he could keep quiet in. For over an hour I watched the middle-aged men reading in the shade of the ombú trees, and when there was no sign of him, I continued southwest several kilometers toward Balvanera, the less ritzy neighborhood where I’d lived in ’76. Skirting my old building, I wound up on the corner of Jujuy and Yrigoyen, staring into what used to be the café Parada Norte—a dank, old-fashioned spot to which the Colonel had introduced me. Now it was named the Roxy and sported a bright, modern ambience and an American-influenced menu—french fries with everything. At least it was the kind of food my stomach needed, I told myself as I went inside.

  There was a newspaper on the table. All the headlines seemed to be about the aftermath of the dictatorship—the languishing trials of military officers; the likely passage of the Full Stop law, which mandated the end of all prosecutions of people accused of political violence under the junta; the general atmosphere of anger and unfulfilled justice. On one of the interior pages, I caught sight of an article about an assault at a ski resort in Bariloche on an army lieutenant named Rodrigo Astral—or, as he’d apparently become known, the Blond Angel of Death. A small photo beside it showed his aquiline features and slicked Prince Charming hair, which I recognized instantly: Rubio, one of the soldiers who worked at Automotores while I was there. The place was also identified in the article, with the strangely formal-looking abbreviation CCD—Clandestine Center of Detention.

  I folded the paper neatly and set it back down, then left the restaurant without a word to the waiter. It pressed heavily on me—the vendetta-like feel of events, the sense that Argentina had summoned me back for a reason. There could have been other occasions for my return—those letters about my mother’s assets had stipulated that I claim them in person, and the interview request
s from CONADEP had alluded to airfare reimbursements—but those requests had been faceless, impersonal, confined to administrative communiqués I could ignore. This by contrast was one face after another, and it seemed clear whose would inevitably be next in the procession: I could already picture the Colonel’s grin beneath his mustache as he raised a whiskey to his lips.

  I thought once more of the bottle of Johnnie Walker in my hotel room and the brochure for the Recoleta Cemetery. Suddenly they seemed to constitute a message for me. Of course it was there, in the last place I’d encountered the Colonel ten years ago, that I was to meet him again. The past was swinging violently back around, and for me personally.

  * * *

  I remained on foot, and the cemetery was closed when I arrived. But instead of going back to my hotel, I went to a nearby café and stayed until dark. Then, semi-drunk on the two liters of beer I’d consumed, I took a seat in the plaza outside the main gate.

  I had no fondness for the place. Even at the start of my stay in Buenos Aires, I considered it a tourist trap, a gaudy homage to some of Argentina’s most abusive institutions: the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Only the military was missing. Which was why its having been one of the Colonel’s stomping grounds was characteristically peculiar: they weren’t his people entombed there, nor were they his people traipsing about taking photographs. I’d never been able to square it. But then the Colonel was not exactly right-angled to begin with.

  Night had settled in, and there were no streetlights in the cemetery proper, making the sky above it marginally blacker than it was over the rest of the city. The only lamps hung from wrought-iron fixtures on the outer wall, and cast barely enough light to illuminate the gate’s white Greco-Roman columns. The austere Latin sign above—requiescant in pace—was shadowed to the point of illegibility, and the bell tower of the colonial church beside it was hazy enough to seem merely another mausoleum spire.

  Still, the scene was sufficiently lovely that a man dressed like a caricature of Gardel, with a fedora and a red rose pinned to his vest, was playing bittersweet notes on his bandoneón and asking for money. Scrawny stray cats padded past him as if drawn by the music, but more likely by the hope that anyone generous enough to give him a peso would be generous enough to give them a snack. One was a scruffy gold, another spotted black-and-white, the third a sleek Siamese with eyes that shimmered like chips of ice. Purring every now and again, they made their circuitous way back to the cemetery wall and slipped past the bars of a smaller gate farther south.

  That gate, I noticed, was slightly ajar. I rose and, without looking around to see if anyone was watching, slipped past myself.

  I’d never been inside at night. With all the regal details of the architecture and sculpting obscured, its splendor was diminished, along with any sense of upkeep; it seemed more like a ruin, a genuine city of the dead. Overturned flower vases caught my attention, the reediness of dried stems. Broken angel statues and Gothic crosses cast wild, ghoulish shadows, and my steps resounded eerily behind me, loose tiles snapping back into place with quick, frightful clicks under my weight.

  One of the cats sat licking itself in the middle of the lane. Silhouetted, it looked black at first, adding to the Halloween decor; then it glanced up at me cross-eyed and I realized it was the Siamese. It took off to its left, and when I reached the corner, I turned after it.

  That was when I saw him—a man proportionally as skinny as the animal he was petting, stooped in a narrow alley beyond a crumbling ancient crypt belonging to some forgotten aristocrat named Dasso and the cracked, noseless Virgin Mary that peered down from atop it.

  He was dressed in civilian clothes—a gray suit the color of the stone around him and his thinned-out hair. Only his bushy whiskers retained the rich brown they’d had a decade before. Even his eyes—little beady things that, because of the rest of his highly cultivated personality, seemed to demand a pince-nez—had dampened and become cloudy.

  “Colonel,” I called, and the Siamese darted off, leaving his hand to stroke the air.

  “Señor Shore.” Straightening, he took me in from head to toe with a familiar smile of amusement. “You have a beard.”

  He said it like I was still a teenager, wearing it in an effort to seem grown-up. The impression bothered me—maybe because it was right.

  The name he used bothered me more—haunted me, really. He’d always enjoyed showing off his English with me, and one trademark way was translating my name. I don’t remember if he started calling me Thomas Shore before or after he told me about the nineteenth-century British writer of the same name, but I do remember what he said when he did. It was the summer I moved to Buenos Aires, not long before the ’76 coup:

  “Wrote a book called The Churchman and the Free Thinker. Interesting, no? If it was anything like Argentina, the two probably didn’t get along. In fact, if it was anything like Argentina, it probably would have been called simply The Churchman. I’m the closest thing to a freethinker this country can tolerate, Tomás. Er, excuse me—Thomas. Señor Thomas Shore, that’s what I should call you. Since you, in your own way, are a freethinker like me.”

  It was the name he had put in my fake passport eventually. And it became, through a special twist of casuistry and hindsight, a kind of curse for me, the spiritual reason I became a translator when I moved to New York. Granted, it was medical texts I translated for a living, certainly nothing too free-thinky, but still. It was as if with his christening my whole identity got tangled up in translation, lost in the proverbial way between two worlds.

  “Are you some kind of ghost?” I asked him.

  “More like an angel, really. I’m your angel, Tomás, don’t you know? Always have been. All that’s changed is your . . .” He took me in again, before gesturing vaguely from cheek to cheek, like a parent instructing a child to wipe his face. “Your . . . chin.” He grinned at finding the word, then came close to pouting when he saw I didn’t share his satisfaction. “Come, Tomás, you know it’s true. I’ve saved you from this place in more ways than one, haven’t I?”

  He spoke as he had in life: Inflected with a certain strain of power, the kind that enabled his idiosyncrasies. His conversation seemed to have a freewheeling nature, but he was always headed somewhere, even when you couldn’t divine the destination.

  It was also the way he played chess. Or perhaps more accurately, chess was the way he played everything: with bold, random-looking sacrifices, moves so inexplicable they seemed taunts. It used to rattle me. Apparently, it still did.

  “And what are you here to do now?” I asked.

  “Not save you from this place. Rather the opposite, in fact.”

  The hint of foreboding I felt—I found myself drawn by it. It was the same dark gravitational pull the Colonel—Isabel too—had long exerted on me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My morality has always been . . . complicated. You know I never went in fully for the hero-villain stuff. Yet . . . it finds its way into you, doesn’t it? For some of us?”

  “You mean guilt?”

  “Sure. Penance, guilt,” he said, as if nuance among such notions was needless. “You want to go back and change things. But in life you can’t go back and change things, can you? Not in life. All you can do in life is try to make up for it in other ways. I know you know about that, Tomás.”

  It should have been a good thing, arguably, trying to compensate for past wrongdoings. But he lobbed the observation like it was the reverse—a moral failure, a testament to the irredeemable size of those wrongdoings.

  “Do you know about that?” I asked.

  “Of course. Why do you think I sought you out?”

  “You’re going to make it up to me?”

  “To you? Ja! You’re so selfish, Tomás, really.” He tsk-tsked. “To her, Tomasito. We’re going to make it up to her.”

  Moments from the day before with
Isabel started to replay in my head and on my senses: I could feel her cracked lips, her dry hair on my fingertips, the unfamiliar boniness in her thighs. Sniff the scentless air and hear that elusive laughter of hers.

  It’s nice to know in some ways you haven’t changed.

  In some ways I have.

  And it was only as these moments unspooled that it became concrete for me. Only then did those ghostly wisps of logic and feeling thread together into hard fact and certainty, the strange, grainy reality of ghostliness itself. The Colonel belonged to it. And Isabel—despite my denials, I’d known it all along, from that first, unmiraculous instant—she belonged to it too.

  Ten years. Do you know what it would have meant to me to know you’d survived?

  Does it really seem I’ve survived, Tomás?

  “How?” I asked.

  “You know how,” the Colonel said smugly. Maybe that was all it was, that quality in his speech I’d attributed to some mix of freedom and calculation, some eccentric kind of foresight—maybe it was simply smugness. “We took her life away, Tomás. Wouldn’t you like to give it back to her? To give her back to life, I mean?”

  “Give her back? You mean get her from . . . ?”

  “Get her, bring her, take her—what difference does that word make? The important word is back. Back here. From there.”

  “But there is . . . ?”

  “You think it impossible? Even now, after seeing her? After seeing me,” he emphasized proudly. “Just look at me—fresh as a daisy. Or something a little more wilty, I admit, but lively enough for the purpose of this proposal. The border, it’s very real. But it’s thin, porous in a way. There are more ways to cross than you might think.”

  “If it’s so easy, why can’t she just come back on her own again?” I asked, catching more echoes from the previous night, watching the whole interaction turn further upside down in my recollection.