Blood Makes Noise (3 page)

Everything around him—the air, even the light—creaked with rot. Everything but Her. Here time had been shackled to an ageless instant. Ara hovered over her protectively, beaming with pride at his creation. “She’s beautiful,” Ara murmured, as if to a stuck butterfly.

“Yes. She is.” Hector’s voice was soft. For the first time Michael thought he caught a glint of fear in the soldiers’ eyes. Hector’s boys perhaps, but boys of the pampa nonetheless.

Hector cleared his throat. “You will bear witness, Doctor, that no damage or disrespect has been done to Her.” The dampness seemed to close around his words, crush them in midair.

“…Doctor?” Hector prodded.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he answered impatiently. He was lost to them now. Cooing to her. “You’re so lovely…”

In life she wrapped herself in nothing less than the most exclusive Christian Dior, but here lay only a humble, pious servant of God clad in a robe of simple white muslin. She wore none of the half-million dollars in jewelry that had flashed and dazzled
paparazzi on two continents, just a rosary from the pope knitted between unpainted fingers.

Hector ordered the crystal lid removed. Ara knelt down beside her head, examining rouged, waxy lips. “Look at them,” he mumbled—to whom Michael wasn’t sure—“the downfall of nearly every artist. Two weeks I spent on these alone. Perfect.”

The first time Michael had seen Ara was at an embassy reception where the doctor had brought with him a stitched leather hatbox. Sometime between dinner and cigarettes, he removed from it the embalmed head of a Spanish peasant. The work was so remarkable, the reconstruction so flawless, it inspired not horror but wonder among the guests, most of whom were used to this nightly unveiling and treated it as a rare objet d’art taken from a host’s safe for viewings among friends. No longer belonging to its original owner, yet not the grave, it had emerged as something more: a piece of expressive art, with Ara its proud sculptor.

Michael didn’t remember what condition the lips were in.

Evita didn’t look dead, but she didn’t look alive either. She looked…Ara’s. One hundred thousand dollars he’d been paid by Juan Perón to preserve his wife, returning to him nearly a year later an incorruptible effigy he declared would last a thousand years. It was his masterpiece to eternity—a monument that would never fade.

And that was exactly the problem.

Michael hadn’t noticed the soldiers leaving, but they returned now, carrying between them a long, simple pine box. Not a casket. A box. They set it down beside the raised bier.

“What are you doing with Her?” Ara demanded. He had placed himself between Hector and his masterpiece.

Hector’s chestnut eye, the good one, seemed to soften with sympathy. “No one here doubts your devotion to the Senora, Doctor.”
Hector spoke quietly, without hurry. “Your work and loyalty are beyond reproach. But outside”—Hector’s eyes gestured to a world beyond blank walls—“are dangerous times…”

Beyond those walls it was now a crime to read of her, to own her photograph, to utter her name. Yet every night that name rode the breezes above the city, screamed in a thousand flowers stacked at the foot of a shuttered building, in a million gallons of spray paint that everywhere demanded over and over
WHERE IS SHE?
, in the kitchen pipe-bombs that crackled through the barrios.

Hector took in a breath and released the words that would forever change their lives: “It is time Evita Perón was removed from politics.”

Together they lifted her—chilly and weighing all of a twelve-year-old girl—from the half-ton casket and set her into the box with the maximum dignity possible while still putting someone into a box. The eyes remained closed and serene, the hands still clenched their rosary, the pleated gown found its old rhythms.

They screwed a wood top over her.

The box was taken down back stairs to the rear alley, where an army truck waited. The soldiers loaded it onto the bed and secured a tarp. Suddenly everyone was left standing with nothing to do but avoid one another’s eyes and listen to the bleats of tugboats on the Plata. It was Ara who finally spoke. “Where will She be taken?”

“She will be given a Christian burial,” Hector answered, anticipating the next question by adding quickly, “in private.”

Ara seemed ready to fight the idea, but the moment receded. His eyes drifted to the tarp. “She is a symbol to so many, Senor Cabanillas, but please remember that she is also a woman.”

“Thank you for coming, Doctor.”

They didn’t shake hands. Ara looked Hector up and down, as if to memorize his features, then turned and walked through the alley, his dwarfish figure slipping into a fragment of night.

“An unmarked grave?” It was Michael’s turn to speak. They were alone now, the soldiers busy with the truck.

“A sanctuary.”

“From whom?”

“History.”

There was purple in the sky now, deep and low over Uruguay. Hector removed his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned them with a cloth. A job-completion ritual.

“Thank you for coming, Michael.” His myopic eyes were aimed at the wall but focused beyond it, to the docks and river that lay on the other side.

“Why did you call me?”

“I needed you.”

“For what?”

The glasses were returned to the bridge of his nose. He faced Michael now. “To be a witness.”

Hector squeezed Michael’s arm, turned, and climbed into the truck’s cab. There was a dry cough of pistons, a lurch of gears, and the prewar Mack whined away down the alley with its cargo. The sound lasted three blocks, fading behind the hum of the city’s waking, cranky infrastructure.

And Michael was alone.

The sides of the CGT were bluish now, the light from street lamps retreating in tiny halos. He walked back down the alley to his car, paused to put the key in the door, and smelled it again for the first time.

Wafting up the alley on gusts of memory: slaughterhouse blood atop dead canals. The warm stench of half-sunk fishing boats. The rot of night-old tango sweat. It was a smell of childhood, of La Boca, which for Michael were one and the same.

He hadn’t realized how close he was to the old neighborhood, just a few blocks south and a million miles away, with its crumbling piers and crazy immigrant homes. La Boca. The dockworkers would be up now, setting off for work, swinging lunch bags thick with
fugazza
. The children would wake soon. Hammering feet on slick cobblestones, school-bound voices catcalling in an Italian-accented Spanish that was true of all Spanish here but no more so than in La Boca.

After four years back in Buenos Aires, he had yet to visit the old docks. It seemed another world now, too far away to touch, close enough to burn if you stared too long. His innocence lay there. So did his mother and sister. He thought of them, let the dull spasm reach stiffly over years…

…Then started his car and drove away.

A
first memory:

His mother, young, raven hair brushing his cheek as she kneels beside him, smelling of spoiled milk. Something weak and small twitches in her arms and he’s only two but he knows it’s trouble. “Michael,” she says to him in Italian, “this is your sister.”

His father, an old man even then, towering sinew with a shock of arrogant white hair. He picks Michael up roughly, bellows at him in Ukrainian: “Not king of the hill anymore, eh?”

They lived in Chicago. West Taylor. His father had played clarinet with the Kiev symphony, had survived the Reds in ’18 but not his brother’s reputation in the White Army. The Cheka sniffed his house, sniffed his friends, sniffed his back as he picked through a pile of frozen, massacred corpses on Christmas morning for the body of his brother. The symphony was disbanded the next day on Stalin’s orders, and on New Year’s afternoon Nikolai Suslov read the writing in the snow and walked out of Russia.

Through Poland, where he slept in church doorways with his clarinet. Into Germany, where he hunted rabbits in the Black Forest to stay alive. Across northern Italy, where he stole grapes in the shadow of the monastery at Monteriggioni and was discovered by the vintner’s daughter, Constantina D’Oro, a moody, restless woman, who brought him pecorino and Sienese prosciutto. He was thin, broke, and had only his clarinet. She was bored, sharp, and had only her swollen, veiled chest. She was eighteen. He was fifty-seven.

They came to America, to Chicago, where he looked for an orchestra, then a band, and ended up with one-nighters in gangster speakeasies. He grew frustrated. She grew pregnant: first with Michael, then Maria.

Not long after, Michael’s parents gave up on the Depression, on America, and emigrated to Buenos Aires, where Constantina had relatives.

“Love her, Michael. Love your little sister…”

Michael and Maria grew and came to understand, then love, their La Boca neighborhood. He palled with the other immigrant kids, and they ran in gangs through the narrow rainbow streets; drew chalk dragons on apartment walls painted red, yellow, and green; sailed waste-wood battleships in the putrid canal; pestered dockworkers, who’d make them sing sweetly before surrendering candies from Bolivia or Scotland. And always there was Maria, following, just wanting to be near him.

“Watch out for your sister, Michael.”

His father now, and Michael vowed he would. Though she was weaker and sickly, Michael allowed her to tag along and bloodied the nose of any of the gang who complained. And Maria steeled herself, built forts with them, slayed demons, helped spook the ice man’s old cart mare with Chilean firecrackers, only occasionally lying down to gulp, to search for her breath and medicine. Never telling their mother, always climbing to her feet and running with Michael home when she called for supper.

There would be evenings she caught up to Michael and he’d be standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the riotous hulk of their apartment building—purple corrugated walls, green shutters, orange cupolas trimmed with blue-and-red doors. The lights would be coming up in each window, and with them the tumbling smells of
bifes
, pasta, and burbling tomato that mingled with canal garbage into something unreally sweet that shot to the back of their mouths. Struggling through it all, as the sky fell and
the gas street lamps ticked and fussed, would be the thin, drifting sound of their father’s clarinet, and for a moment Michael knew his universe worked. As the certainty swept out from his heart, he turned to Maria and she was looking at the same building, feeling the same confidence, and he put his arm around her and promised his sister he would always look after her.

Inside, supper was hot and clanging. His father would uncork the Chianti, bought cheap off the docks, and alternate with straight shots of Finnish vodka as his family waited nervously to see which side of the mountain the sled of his emotions would tip to. Sometimes it would be the gentle slope of his better nature, and with a stamp of his boot and an open gesture with bony fingers, he would tell stories of his days in Kiev, of the orchestra and legions of doe-eyed Ukrainian flowers that had wept for his attention. Sometimes he would skip a part on purpose, and his children would catch him and demand the full version, for they’d heard these stories a thousand times and loved them for the certainty of their cadence.

But sometimes the sled would tumble the other way, his father’s face darkening with frustration. He had twice the work here in the music halls of Avenida Corrientes than in Chicago—at half the pay. His nights were busy but the days were spent watching the Suslovs sink further and further into Constantina’s relatives’ debt. He hated the half-breed orchestras here and their bombastic, mercurial conductors. As his rants broadened and soured, he would sweep his eyes over each of them, looking for a blink, a rise that would stoke a flash of temper. Sometimes it was Michael; a wrong look, a half sentence, and his father would be on him, boxing his ears till the tears stung and his head rang.

More often it was his mother, unable to contain another slur against her family, who would take the bait, their voices leapfrogging over each other, and Michael and Maria would dive for cover, knowing one would eventually brush its mate and release
a furious, scrapping brawl. In the face of Constantina’s flailing rage, Nikolai’s temper would collapse into belly laughter as she’d struggle and shriek and finally collapse into tears. There’d be kisses, and a pause, and the scoot of a chair as he’d carry her to the bedroom. Foreplay in Michael’s home usually involved broken furniture.

And once a broken body.

Up past the docks. To the tanneries, where the canal fermented with cattle guts and bone. Where they were never allowed and where they stood now—his gang, and he and little Maria—on a rise over the tannery’s waste pipe, shouting over the roar of chemical entrails blasting—too heavy, too slow—in their tumble to the canal. There, even though it was forbidden, to see an older girl living in one of the tar paper shacks clinging to the rear of the tannery—a girl who, for a fistful of dock candy, would lift her dress and let them touch her thing.

A boy’s moment, and Maria can’t come. She’s to wait by the belching pipe. Because she’s a girl and most of all because she’s his sister. So he lines up with the others, passes down his toll of Belgian taffy, reaches, and feels something to his eleven-year-old mind mind horrifying, thrilling, impossibly important. When it’s over he stands with the gang, wired and anxious and a little sick, making it better with bravado. Making it go away. Finally he remembers Maria, goes to the churning wastepipe, and she’s not there. Annoyed at first, he calls her name harshly, looks briefly around the mushy rise, and decides, even as a shiver rattles his guts, that she got bored and left.

He starts home, slowly, then faster, then finally in a blind, stumbling panic. Her room is empty and Michael stands on its threshold, feeling the stare of her only doll.

His parents were in the kitchen, and hadn’t heard him come in. He waited, shivering, till they saw him, blurted out that Maria was gone in a single, tangled breath. Watched his mother’s face
grow and distort into reaches unfathomable. His father leapt from the table, demanded to be taken to the spot. Neighbors followed—the D’Annunzios and Spitalieris, Calabresis and Mottos. They searched the banks, the shrubs, pulled the ears of each boy till they were satisfied none knew. Except Michael. No one pulled Michael’s ears. He was left on the muddy embankment, alone.