Mapuche (12 page)

“I've been told that you're looking for
desaparecidos
,” she said. “The daughter of the laundress downstairs . . . ”

“Yes, yes, come in . . . ” Rubén emerged from his fog, and gestured toward the club chair that his visitors usually sat in. “Sit down.”

“My name is Jana,” she said. “I prefer to stand.”

The sculptress briefly surveyed the agency—American-style kitchen, bookcase, a messy desk with a turn-of-the-century lamp and missing person posters tacked to the wall, witnesses in trials who had been kidnapped, dozens of faces that seemed to be looking at her from their tombs without burial. She turned back to the detective, who had just closed the reinforced door, and recognized the painting over the 1960s sofa: Velásquez's
Las Meninas
.

“Is that an original?” she asked playfully.

He smiled.

“Coffee?”

“No.”

“Something else?”

“No, nothing, thanks.”

Paula had been right about Calderón—pure elegance compared to her scruffy clothes, and two coal-black eyes speckled with little blue forget-me-nots whose translucent, brilliant blue left her speechless. You'd think he'd just been crying.

“Am I disturbing you?”

“No,” he lied. “I wouldn't have invited you to come up.”

Jana relaxed a little.

“Calderón—is that your real name, like the poet?”

The detective raised his eyebrows.

“You know him?”

Jana shrugged. Daniel Calderón's dark poetry had rocked her in the shadows—and vanquished them. The writer had disappeared during the Process, like Haroldo Conti, Rodolfo Walsh . . . Tortured, beaten, liquidated.

Rubén didn't want to talk about his father.

“May I ask what brings you here?”

Jana forgot the dead people's faces on the wall and the little blue flowers that were sending distress signals.

“A crime was committed the other night at the port in La Boca,” she replied. “The body of a man was found near the old ferry. Have you heard about it?”

“Yes, I saw it in the newspaper.”

“You've got sharp eyes, it went almost unnoticed.”

Rubén lit a cigarette he took from the package that was lying on the coffee table, and let Jana continue.

“The victim is a friend of ours, Luz, a transvestite who turns tricks on the docks. The police haven't revealed the info, but Luz was tortured before he was thrown into the harbor. He was emasculated,” she added, her voice more serious. “I think he'd also been raped.”

“How do you know that?”

“We were looking for Luz when we ran into the La Boca cops, who were fishing his body out of the water down at the docks. They took us to the station to interrogate us, but they refused to take our deposition and threw us out. I called them this morning to find out how the investigation was going, but they blew me off. Somebody has to look into this. The guy who massacred Luz won't stop there. No one could possibly have anything against him, I mean personally. The killer's a sicko, a pervert of the worst kind.”

Rubén looked at her, her and her dark eyes washed with rainwater.

“My work consists in tracking down
desaparecidos
and their torturers,” he sighed. “I'm sorry, miss, but private matters are not my line.”

“The laundress's son is a transvestite too: he's my only friend and I care about him. A killer attacks the trannies of La Boca, the cops don't give a damn, and I don't want Paula to be the next one on the list.”

“Is your friend also a prostitute?”

“Not everyone is lucky enough to be a variety show performer.”

“Or to grow old.”

“That's why I've come to see you. No one saw Luz before the murder, neither on the docks nor elsewhere. We don't know what happened, whether the killer was a customer or a sadist: all we know is that Luz left a message on Paula's cell phone during the night to tell her she wanted to talk to her about something important, and then she was found in the harbor the next morning. Paula had taken her under her wing,” Jana added as an explanation. She drew a sheet of paper out of her jumpsuit, a page torn out of a notebook. “I don't have any photos of Luz to give you, but I drew her. From memory,” she added, handing him the piece of paper. “Maybe this will help you.”

A bus thundered past, making the agency's windows vibrate. Rubén unfolded the paper she gave him and saw the face of a young man with melancholy eyes. A charcoal drawing.

“You're an artist?” he asked, looking up.

“Sculptress. On the back I wrote a list of the places that Luz and Paula usually work at night. My friend looked around there yesterday. She didn't find anything, but you might be luckier. There was music in the background of Luz's message. Obviously a public place.”

Jana held her drenched jacket in her hands, trying to decipher the thoughts of the man behind his veil of smoke. He was standing in front of the coffee table in the living area, a little taller than she was.

“So, is it a deal?”

Rubén handed the drawing back to her.

“Sorry, I don't know anything about the transvestite scene. And above all I don't have time.”

“But you're going to accept the job,” Jana retorted.

“I am? What makes you think that?”

“It's the only way to find out what happened.”

She was speaking in syllogisms. She refused to take the drawing back, and Rubén put it down on the table.

“You're wrong about me,” he said. “I'm not the man you need, not for this kind of investigation.”

“You don't know that before you've tried,” Jana insisted. “Help me stop this bastard before he attacks someone else. Before he attacks my friend.”

Rubén took another puff. He should never have let her come up.

“I am concerned with the people who disappeared under the dictatorship,” he repeated. “Only
desaparecidos
.”

“Paula has to turn tricks to earn a living. I'm scared for her, scared of what might be done to her. Do you understand, or are you made of stone, too?”

Tears had dried in the depths of her dark eyes, a long time ago. Rubén was contemplating the disaster when Jana took a step toward him.

“I don't have any money, but I can pay you in a different way,” she said boldly.

Rubén froze when she put her jacket on the back of the armchair.

“I don't need money,” he said.

“But you must want to fuck me.”

He sized her up briefly.

“No.”

Her pupils shone. He was lying.

“Don't play the classy gentleman,” Jana taunted him. “Everyone wants to fuck. And I don't give a damn.”

Rubén stubbed out the butt that was burning his hands.

“I'm sorry for you.”

“You're the only one.”

Her Indian eyes were fixed on him like a wolf in the line of sight.

“You've knocked on the wrong door, miss. I can't help you. And still less in that way. I don't take advantage of war, or of despair, call it what you will.”

Jana's throat was dry. She drew herself up to her full height and looked at him.

“You don't like me?”

“Go home,” Rubén said, suddenly tired.

Jana didn't open her mouth. That would teach her to ask for help from a
winka
. She blushed when she thought about her ratty chest underneath her T-shirt. Sure that he must be disgusted, the Porteño with fine, delicate hands, sure that he must be used to another kind of merchandise. She would petrify with shame, right there in the middle of the agency.

“I'm sorry,” Rubén repeated, seeing tears welling up in her eyes. “I don't have time right now, but I have a woman cop friend who knows what she's doing: I can speak to her about it . . .”

“Forget it,” she interrupted.

Jana grabbed her jacket and left the room without looking at the detective. A draft helped her slam the reinforced door, animating for a moment the faces of the dead on the wall.

The thunderstorm was raging outside the open window. Rubén remained motionless, sifting through his contradictory feelings. A mantle of depression fell on his shoulders, inexorable. He saw the notepaper left on the table, the face in charcoal that the Indian had made for him, no doubt convinced that he would accept her proposal. His throat tightened with pity—the drawing was magnificent.

 

*

 

On her deathbed, Jana's great-grandmother had given her a knife. Angela was the last woman
of the Selk'nam, a people related to the Mapuches that had lived for centuries in Tierra del Fuego. One day fishing boats had come to their cold and icy islands, bringing diseases and weapons, and the Selk'nam all died. Angela was the only one left, and she was so old that her hands were all wrinkles. Jana was seven years old but she was the eldest daughter, and a little Selk'nam blood flowed in her veins. Angela had given the little girl her old knife with the whalebone handle so that at least her memory would be preserved. And especially, she had told her the secret of the Hain, that fantastic drama. Jana had kept both of them warm in her memory full of stories that the old woman had been telling her since she was an infant: Shoort, Xalpen, Shénu, and Kulan, who came down from the sky to torment humans, fabulous stories.

Jana had grown up on the pampas of Chubut province, in the middle of the world's most fertile plains. At that time, there were two cows, a heifer so timid that they'd had to pull her out of her mother's body, Eyew (“down there,” in Mapudungun), and her sister Ti kude
(“the old one”; it wasn't clear why she was given this name). An affectionate, lively, and curious child, Jana knew the sound of tall grass and the wind that blew over it, deciphered its many voices, the strings with gloomy sounds and the brief whistles in stems as rigid as wires, the moaning of the wind that grew and died away among the smooth reeds of the marshes, bearing light rain or a thunderstorm. The flatness of the place made her see what we can only guess, and guess what we do not see. She was eleven years old and, like all little Mapuche girls in the countryside, knew little about the world around her. She knew her father's resolute voice, her mother's strong hands and rare smile, races and fights with her brothers, but she did not yet know the
winka
—the outsiders. Traditionally, the Mapuches saw the state and Western society as at best a foreign body, at worst an implacable enemy. For her, they were still only abstract silhouettes, names.

Some of them occasionally came along with their big cars, their skimpy clothes, and their neckties. They discussed matters with her father, who was the community's envoy, its
werken
. His name was Cacho, and his eloquence authorized him to speak in the name of the others. The fate of all of them depended on his know-how. They counted on him, because problems were multiplying. Cacho became gloomier day by day. He had not told his children about the expulsions to which the community was being subjected, about their claims to retain their ancestral lands—and let them continue to go to school, study, and become lawyers in order to defend the rights of their people.

No one suspected what was about to happen. Jana was asleep in bed with her sister when the
carabineros
broke down the door of their house. Giants with steel heads stormed into their home, howling like devils, guns in their hands. The girls woke up, terrified. The men pulled them out of bed and then threw them into the arms of their mother, who was trembling with fear in the kitchen with the rest of the family. They insulted them in Castilian Spanish, breaking everything of the little they had with a ferocious frenzy. Their spiked boots slammed the furniture into the wall, their soldier's physiques, their voices like roof beams falling on you, the military insignias on their uniforms, their caps: Jana was petrified, hypnotized by the fury of their violence.

When there was nothing still standing, when everything had been reduced to ruins, they started beating her father, the messenger, kicking him with their boots and hitting him on the head and spine with their truncheons: the
carabineros
went at it full tilt, several of them at once, shouting to egg each other on, while the
werken
writhed on the floor. His wife was moaning the way pumas do when facing the hunter's rifle, crushed by fear, pressing her daughters to her nightshirt. Jana couldn't see anything but them: the
winka
were ugly, frightening, as tall as cranes, destroying everything in their way, bellowing insults that she could not understand at the age of eleven. Beaten, lying amid the debris of the devastated kitchen, he father no longer protested. A thread of bloody saliva was flowing over his split lips. His eyes closed, Cacho did not see the men in helmets push the children away to seize his wife. Jana did see it.

She had looked Evil in the eye. She had seen its pale, grimacing face, pupil to pupil, and her mother groaning with terror when, laughing, they tore off her nightshirt to humiliate her.

Jana was then eleven years old, and her breasts had not grown since. Not the slightest stirring. Days, months, years had passed, but her chest had remained hopelessly dry, an arid land, without life, like her ancestors who had been driven off their lands. Her chest had become her taboo, her pain and her shame. A supreme and cruel insult to femininity that all men would mock, breasts of bone, scorched earth, two dead fish floating on the surface, butterflies on pins, breasts that had nothing to give, or milk of curdled blood, breasts that would never nurse children: at the age of eleven, Jana had amputated herself.

She had never talked about them, never showed them to anyone, not even Paula. The first boy with whom she had made love had not asked any questions, and the later ones thought only about sex, Furlan about his sculptures, no other man had counted for more than the time necessary to satisfy her needs. Jana banged her jaw on the steering wheel of the Ford—what was she thinking, that she was going to seduce Calderón with her dirty little monsters?