His Own Man (33 page)

As I listened to him talk, I became increasingly aware of the bones being ground in front of me, the skin being ripped, the chunks of meat being chewed. Eric had polished off all the chicken he’d grilled. For a man who had described his appetite as “frugal” three weeks earlier at lunch with me, he certainly
packed it away. I had the uneasy feeling that his hunger had grown in proportion to my silence. There was, however, a positive side to what was happening: the pieces of my story were finally starting to fit together.

The Café Sorocabana (“
I used to go there all the time
,” he revealed at one point, “
long before they served liquor, and was among those who maneuvered behind the scenes to revoke Fernández’s license
,
reckoning that we needed lucid people on the job
,
not drunks
”); the wiretapping of the embassies; the code names Zorro, Sam Beckett, and Batman; CIA and MI6’s hesitation to avail themselves of Max, since both agencies considered him unstable, “
given his extraordinary ambition
,
which meant he would have not one but several agendas of his own
” — all this information and more began to surface as though awaiting me for years.

Revelation gave way to revelation. Eric had me under his spell, not only because of the content of what he was saying but also because of his distant, haunting tone. He might have been leaning over an old family album, identifying people, lingering here and there to mull over their journeys and misfortunes. At one point, he reminded me that a good deal of what he was telling me came from documents that had already been declassified by the National Security Agency, and that the rest would soon come to light as well. Pointing over to his garage, he added, “I have my own archives, which I’ve been carrying around with me for years as insurance.”

In the meantime, we’d cleared the table and scraped the leftovers into the trash bin. While I’d brought in the plates, utensils, and glasses, Eric had zealously cleaned the grill, using gloves, an old dishrag, and a can of spray. Then he’d lowered the lid. It wasn’t yet three o’clock. From the other side of the kitchen counter, Eric said to me, “Now we need to figure out what to have for dessert. Pecan ice cream. Or fruit … I can offer you melon or grapes.
Seedless
grapes, in my mind the greatest invention of recent times.”

“I’ll go with the grapes,” I said.

“Wise choice, wise choice,” he again murmured to himself. He opted for the ice cream.

Then, with bowls in hand and no further explanation from Eric, we headed farther into the house, crossing a small room with bookcases, two sofas, and a TV (“our family room,” he said, as if his wife were still alive), and turning into a hallway, at the end of which was a door.

I could see it led to the garage. Or, as Eric made a point of saying, “to my past.”

Metal shelves ran from one end of the garage to the other, divided into rows and crammed with boxes with numbered labels.

Waving his ice cream spoon in the air like a conductor’s baton, Eric explained, “I devoted years to putting my papers, photos, negatives, and microfilms in order. And I managed to get it done. My wife was a great help. I never would have been able to organize this archive without her. Today, I’m a shadow of what I once was. After she passed away two years ago, I didn’t set foot in here for months. But I ended up coming back. The prodigal son returns home.”

He paused ever so slightly and indulged in another spoonful. Was it possible that he harbored no doubts whatsoever about his decades of active service? Or was he trying to keep his ice cream from melting?

He soon proceeded. “A small part of the archive could in theory be accessible to the general public. Newspaper clippings, photos, copies of innocuous reports. There’s a confidential part, which is gradually being declassified by the government. The rest, more than half, and don’t ask me which because I couldn’t even tell you at this point, is secret. All mixed together, intentionally. Maybe out of spite. The wheat and the chaff are scrambled together amid the dozens of boxes in this garage, which will one day go back to Langley, as specified in my will.”

After a bitter laugh, he concluded, “It’s going to be one helluva job to sort through all this material. This cursed legacy
will be my revenge, for having been sent home before my time, after so many years serving my country. Let them sift through the paperwork for months, if not years! And may they be frightened by what they find!”

Now I was the one who was frightened. I’d accompanied him, slowly munching on my seedless grapes, thereby giving the impression that nothing out of the ordinary was going on, as if we were strolling along the Champs-Elysées on a spring afternoon, not surrounded by the tragic spoils of bloody battles. The labels went parading by my eyes without my daring to linger over them:
Allende
,
1968–1969
;
Allende
,
1970–1971
. After 1972, the boxes were classified by month (
Allende
,
January–April 1972
;
Allende
,
May 1973
). The labels on the last — the smallest of all — hit me the hardest amid that grim collection of memories:
Allende
,
August/September 1973
. At the end of the same shelf devoted to Chile, names of familiar martyrs (Miguel Enríquez, Tucapel Jiménez, José Carrasco among them) and others, unknown, appeared. There were labels designating paramilitary groups, torture centers (
Arenal Base
,
Casa José Domingo Cañas
), regions and islands (
Dawson Island
,
Puchuncaví
,
Chacabuco
).… Still others referred to informants or individuals who, according to Eric, needed to be watched (“You have no idea how many people we had to keep an eye on”). Many bore enigmatic titles.

An entire shelf was devoted to the Chilean secret police and the infamous names of those who had served in the dreaded organization: Contreras, Krassnoff Martchenko, Fernández

Larios, Osvaldo Romo Mena, Mario Jahn Barrera.… Some had only numbers, all in blue ink circled in black, or code names (
Zulu
,
Orpheus
,
Zapata
, and — the most curious of all —
Onassis
). I counted three boxes with the label
MIR
, undated, and another three for Letelier, Bernardo Leighton, and Prats. Cuba and Fidel were relegated to secondary spots on the next shelf. I remember one box in particular:
Cuba — OSPAAAL
,
1966
. “The Cuban
stuff wouldn’t fit in three garages this size,” joked Eric. “But, fortunately, the island wasn’t my problem.”

I went past at least four boxes devoted to General Pinochet and one to his family. Five shelves, from one end of the garage to the other, had to do with the Uruguayans, most with the Tupamaros (namely, Raúl Sendic) and the dictators and torturers of the time (Bordaberry, Gregorio Alvarez, Manuel Cordero). The Argentinean Montoneros also figured prominently.

Eric kept talking all the while. His words reached my ears in counterpoint to our steps, receding only when he took another spoonful of ice cream. He’d finish it eventually, though, and his speech would soon be deprived of its pauses.

We’d reached the Guevaras. They took up an entire set of shelves in one of the rows. His “African phase” was there, from his passages through Mali, Guinea-Conakry, Ghana, Dahomey, and Tanzania to the guerrilla warfare he’d been a part of in the Congo.

“Copies of field reports,” Eric explained when he saw me slow my pace. “From colleagues stationed at African posts. Not everything that’s here has to do with me, of course. But in Montevideo, we received copies of reports from countries that were in some way connected to us.”

Having finished my grapes, I wondered what to do with the bowl. “Set it over there.” Eric pointed to an empty shelf near the door.

We traveled up and down the aisles of his doleful bazaar, reaching the far end of the garage, then moved up the next row back toward the door. I estimated that we would finish the whole trip in nine or ten more rounds.

“You have no idea what it’s like to be born trapped in a system,” Eric said at one point. His tone had changed. It was no longer assertive but had veered off on a more evocative path, which required attention on my part. Eric had finished his ice
cream and set his empty bowl next to mine. He licked his fingers before wiping them on his Bermuda shorts. “I don’t say that as an apology. I don’t owe anyone an apology.”

Had the man who’d held his hands up to the TV screen when he saw the World Trade Center towers collapse finally stepped onstage?

“To be born trapped in a system,” he repeated. “For a man like you, a man who was young at the time, the world was a chessboard where pieces could be freely moved based on faith or idealism. But we …” Another pause.

Frustration prevented him from keeping up the appearances he’d relied on during lunch. He seemed to need air. “We were at war,” he said at last.

He vented with the conviction of someone who had experienced day-to-day life in the trenches. He knew what he was talking about. The war, for him, was no abstract phenomenon. I’d seen plenty of awards for acts of bravery hanging on the walls of a hallway on my trip to the bathroom. He’d killed Vietcong, lost friends, even been wounded. In sum, he’d seen death up close. It hardly mattered if it came wrapped in an ideology or not, or whether the ideology was right or wrong. When the time came, the horror would always be apolitical. Two adversaries suddenly confronting one another, wielding weapons in the middle of the jungle, couldn’t both be right. Or both be wrong. In a split second like that, what difference did it make where the truth lay? What mattered was to be the first to fire. And hit the mark.

“The cold war was hanging over our heads,” Eric said quietly. “Today, if you look back, with a minimum of goodwill and forgiveness, you’ll see what we escaped from. Because, no matter how crazy you may be” — another glance at me, which I returned with a cordial smile — “you can’t simply go on admiring our comrade Stalin as before, right? Or condoning Mao’s cruelty, which caused millions to die from starvation. Historically
proven facts, which explain what’s transpiring in certain parts of the world nowadays. Or can you?”

Put that way, I couldn’t. So I agreed without feeling I’d surrendered any space on my chessboard. “No,” I replied, “I can’t.”

He exhaled deeply, as if he’d won the first round.

I then felt obliged to add, “The problem with this kind of reasoning, as often happens to be the case, is the broader context in which such matters are analyzed.”

I had to bite my tongue, given the crap my highfalutin words were hiding. But there was no other way. And I had to take it to the end, increasingly aware of the ditch I was digging between us. “Its
dynamics
, and the necessarily shifting perspective of those … 
those watching
.”

Eric stopped in the middle of one of the aisles, in front of two boxes, on the labels of which I could read
Jorge Videla
,
miscellaneous
and
Alejandro Lanusse
,
correspondence with Galtieri
. He set his clenched fists on his waist, which was rather comical since he was in Bermudas and Docksiders and looked more like a tourist indignant over a canceled reservation than a war hero offended by the rhetoric of an academic.

“And what exactly do you mean by that?” he asked angrily.

I faced the same options as usual, in analogous situations. Grab the bull by the horns? Or negotiate a strategic retreat? Better negotiate.

“Eric, I don’t think this is the time, or the place, for us to get into this kind of argument. I was merely trying to say —”

“
Bullshit!
” he burst out furiously. Immediately, however, he apologized. And I, in turn, raised my hand as if to say,
Forget it
.

“Did abuses take place in South America?” my host asked, throwing his arms open wide. The indignation was directed at his boxes, not at me. Facing the general silence, he himself took charge of answering. “Of course! You bet they did! Why? Because we couldn’t always choose our partners down there.
And, often, these turned out to be the worst sort of people. Do you think we were mad about Pinochet? Or Contreras? The corrupt military we had to deal with in some of these godforsaken countries, including yours?”

A bit more and I’d feel sorry for Eric and his companions. But the moment didn’t lend itself to irony.

“
War
,” Eric said heavily. “We were at war. And there was no time to lose.”

He’d returned to the start of his verbal digression. I waited to see if he’d end there — or head off in another direction.

“There was no time to lose,” he repeated, as if gathering strength before climbing a hill. “Either we snuffed out the fledgling Communist movement in South America or we would have to contend with
two
guerrilla wars on opposite sides of the planet. And we didn’t even know if we could win the one
we’d been involved in for years
. But if the Orientals knew how to play dominoes, so did we. And we decided to set up
our own game
in your neck of the woods.”

Here I recalled Merce Cunningham’s choreography, brought up by Max twenty years earlier. But Eric went on: “
The right-wing dominoes
, we joked. We went in through Brazil in sixty-four and from there all the countries toppled one after the other, just like a house of cards: Argentina in sixty-six; Uruguay and Chile in seventy-three (a good year for us); Peru at some point, I no longer recall just when; then Argentina again in 1976 (after the brief and pitiful Perón hiatus); and so on. A beautiful domino effect … just perfect. We worked the guerrilla warfare in our backyard with gusto. Without firing a shot or losing a single man.”

Given my silence, he continued down the slope.

“We were used to conventional wars. We’d won two at once, against the Germans and the Japanese. But a guerrilla war was a whole other ball game. Two, in fact … and on a continental scale. No way would we have managed!”