Mapuche (30 page)

“Tell me, do I have an effect on you,” she said, to break the chains.

Rubén smiled, the sheets pulled up around his torso. Was it modesty? She'd seen the marks on his body, but it wasn't the moment to talk about them.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Not very.”

“I'm going to make something while you lie there and think.

“O.K.”

Jana leapt up, put on her shorts and shirt over the tight-fitting tank top, which she hadn't taken off.

“It'll be ready in ten minutes!”

Jana headed for the kitchen, leaving him alone in the bedroom. Ledzep immediately climbed up on the bed, put his nose to Rubén's face, and purred like a steamboat going up the Mississippi.

“Damn,” he mumbled, brushing himself off, “you're getting hair all over me.”

But to judge by his reaction, the cat didn't care a bit.

A rough, pugnacious Iggy Pop was playing in the living room when he got out of the shower, “Beat 'em up.” He found Jana on the terrace, where she had set up the table while waiting for him to return. The Mapuche had lightly made herself up; it was the first time. Rubén sat down in front of the steaming dish.

“What is it?”

“I haven't the faintest idea,” she replied.

The macrobiotic products that were in the rocker's fridge were, in fact, not very appetizing. At the end of the table, Ledzep didn't look very convinced, either. Rubén started in on the soy steak and told Jana about his day. The petals on the tablecloth reminded him of the time they had just spent together, the night was warm, the neighbors invisible behind the bamboo hedge that protected them from the outside world. Jana listened to him, regained hope when she heard about the pilot, and told Rubén in turn about sneaking into the Navy's archives. The lax security around the archives room, her close escape, and her return by bus from Antepuerto with Montañez's record: Ruben's round eyes looked like those of the cat at the end of the table.

“What if you'd been caught?” he scolded her.

“Like an old dog?”

“Phhh.”

Jana changed the subject but she had had the scare of her life that day. He opened the document she had stolen for him. A photo at the top of the page showed a young man with a jowly, pimply face: Ricardo Montañez had been trained at Campo de Mayo before joining the ESMA (May 1, 1976), which he had left at the end of his tour of duty in November of the same year, with the rank of petty officer. Everything fit, the date of birth, that of the transfer. Jana had his address and phone number on her phone company list: today, Ricardo Montañez was the owner of a hotel in Rufino, La Rosada (no Internet site), which served as his address.

“It would be worthwhile to question this guy, no?” Jana concluded.

Rubén agreed, lost in his thoughts. The Forensic Medicine Center in Rivadavia had just confirmed the genetic links between María Campallo and Miguel Michellini, but the comparison of their DNA with the anonymous bones stored in their collections had for the moment yielded no results. If the parents who had disappeared had been executed at the time of the “transfer,” only Montañez and the officer commanding him knew where they had been held. Finding the DNA of the murdered couple would prove their connection with María and Miguel: Eduardo Campallo and his wife would then be forced to admit having stolen the children, thus confirming the authenticity of Samuel and Gabriella Verón's internment form, even if it was fragmentary.

Rufino, a little place somewhere out on the pampas. Jana had taken reckless risks but she had done good work.

“Pisco sour?” she asked.

Rubén emerged from his lethargy. Juicer, lemon, sugar, shaker, alcohol, egg; Jana had arranged all the fixings at the end of the table.

“I'm going to get the ice cubes,” he said, getting up.

“They're already there.”

A bowl, hidden under the plants: a very precise approach. The two of them set about making the cocktail, filled the glasses with alcohol-laced foam, and drank to this special day. The bamboo swayed in the evening breeze that was blowing between the buildings. The tension relaxed; they drank and forgot the investigation, the threats that hung over them, gave the rest of the soy steaks to Ledzep, and smoked to prolong the intoxication. The stars came out one by one over the terrace. Rubén realized that he knew nothing about her.

“Where did you grow up?” he asked from the bench across from her.

“In Chubut Province,” Jana replied.

“In the Mapuche territories?”

“Yes.” She picked up one of the rose petals on the tablecloth and began to tear it up with great care. “But we were expelled from out lands,” she added. “An Italian multi-national . . . ”

“United Colors?”

“Yes. We must not have been the right one.”

The irony didn't fully conceal her bitterness.

“Is that why you came to Buenos Aires?”

“No, I came to do sculpture,” she said. “It was the
machi
, the shaman of the community where we took refuge, who encouraged me to sculpt my dreams when I was little. I began like that, sculpting my nocturnal visions in araucaria wood. Art school came later.”

Jana kept her distance—slippery terrain.

“Did the
machi
want to transmit his powers to you?” Rubén asked.

“No, it was my sister who stuck to that. But that's another story. Defending the Mapuche identity doesn't mean the same thing for them as it does for me. The force that binds me to the Land is less organic: I use symbols, materials. Does this interest you?”

“Do you take me for a dolt?”

She smiled slyly.

Few Argentines were aware of the situation of the people who were still called “Indians.” Jana talked to him about a world of poverty and defiance, of villages lost in the foothills of the Andes where development was limited to a few tractors, and tribal councils were sometimes corrupt and sold off parcels of the ancestral lands that had been reconquered at considerable cost, a world in which activists disappeared or got killed without an investigation being made, a world of people who didn't interest anyone. Rubén listened, attentive to the variations in her voice, which betrayed her growing emotion. Jana hadn't had to wait for Furlan or courses on the history of art to know that Mapuche culture had its place alongside the others: for her, asserting the Mapuches' identity and knowledge was not so much a matter of asserting the possibility of another world—with finance as a weapon of mass destruction, it was essentially already dead—as a pact of resistance signed with the Earth. The
winkas
had stolen the Mapuche territories, but they understood nothing about the ongoing dialogue that bound them to the world. Their ignorance would be her main focus.

Rubén was thinking again about the monumental sculpture in the middle of her workshop, and began to fit together little pieces of it.

“And you have never wanted to return to your community?”

“No.” She shook her head. “No.”

“Why?”

Jana crushed the last rose petal with her fingertips.

“Because it's too hard to leave it. And then I've already told you: that's another story.”

Her eyes had become sad, as they were when he'd found her standing at his door. She was hiding something. Maybe the main thing.

“Can I put my head on your lap?” Jana asked.

Rubén suggested that she lie down next to him on the bench. The glasses were empty, the wind cooler after midnight. She smoked, looking at the stars, the nape of her neck resting on his thighs. With the trip to Rufino, tomorrow would be a long day, but neither of them wanted to sleep.

“How about you, haven't you ever thought of getting married, Sherlock Holmes?” Jana asked offhandedly. “Having kids?”

Rubén shrugged.

“You must have had a woman in your life?”

His sister.

“No. No woman, at least not the way you mean it.”

“A guy?”

Rubén caressed her cheek.

“The missing person posters in your office, the photo off to the side, a young man with a beard and his pals in front of the Eiffel Tower. Who is that, your father?”

The sepia face of Daniel Calderón, surrounded by his comrades in arms—another Argentine poet and the exiled publisher who also translated him.

“Yes. It's the last photo I have of him. A Parisian publisher gave it to me. My father was kidnapped when he returned from France.”

“I read that. Is that why you became a detective, to avenge him?”

“Avenging the dead doesn't bring them back,” Rubén replied evasively.

“The living are not always better off.”

“That's true.”

The candles in the jars were going out one after the other. Jana raised her head—it was difficult to see if he was talking about himself, with the obscurity of the roofs. They were both pursuing the same thing, whether ancestors or
desaparecidos
: ghosts. And with a poet of that caliber for a father, she thought, Rubén must like stories. Jana told him the story of the Selk'nam, the cousins of the Patagonian giants, from whom she descended through her great-grandmother, Angela, the last representative of that vanished people in Tierra del Fuego. She told about Angela's old, wrinkled hands that she caressed when she was little, like crevices, the knife she'd inherited from her ancestors, and the secret of the Hain, which the matriarch had revealed to her on her deathbed. The Hain ceremony was a veritable cosmic drama, staged by men to frighten women and keep their power over them. For this ceremony the Selk'nam impersonated fantastic characters, putting on terrifying, extraordinary costumes, those of the spirits that composed their myths, costumes that made them literally unrecognizable; some characters proved to be violent, others ludicrous or obscene. The women, who knew nothing about the men's disguise, reacted accordingly, hooting and trembling with fear as they collected the children under animal hides. The oldest children were taken away from their mothers and subjected to three days of hell, humiliated, beaten, and chased through the snow and the forest by the most evil spirits. In this cosmogonic drama, Jana was particularly fascinated by Kulan, “the terrifying woman.” A spirit of flesh and blood, Kulan descended at night from the sky to torment her masculine victims. The men announced her arrival by singing, the women and children hid. The spirit of Kulan, young and slender, was played by a
kloketen
, a child or adolescent girl whose breasts had not grown, her head camouflaged under a strange conical mask, with a white band around her body as far as the crotch, which was covered by a G-string. Kulan kidnapped men at night to make them her sexual slaves, kept them a week or more, and no one heard anything about them. The women begged the heavens, but the ogress's appetite was insatiable: the men returned to the camp stumbling, exhausted, emptied out by Kulan's excesses, fed only on birds' eggs, their hair covered with celestial excrement.

Rubén smiled as he caressed Jana's head, which she had lain on his lap, enjoying the magic of this moment that they both knew was utterly ephemeral.

“What is the secret, then?” he asked.

“The secret of the Hain? I'll tell you that the next time!”

Her dark eyes outshone the stars.

“We'll never leave each other again, if I understand correctly,” Rubén said.

“No.” Jana was no longer smiling. “We will never leave each other again.”

Never.

Montañez—does that name mean anything to you? Ricardo Montañez?”
“No. Who is he?”

“A former petty officer attached to the ESMA,” Luque replied. “Montañez served over there in 1976 and I've just been informed that his military record has disappeared. Someone entered illegally into the Navy archives, an Indian woman, to judge by the surveillance video cameras. Jana Wenchwn. She left her papers at the reception desk. No police record. Wenchwn—that name means nothing to you, either?”

“No.”

“She's suspected of having fled with Calderón. I don't know why she wanted that military record, but since Montañez served at the ESMA, I thought it might interest you.”

“Uh-huh. You did the right thing.”

Still holding the receiver to his ear, Torres thought it over. Calderón worked for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and those nosy old bitches would move heaven and earth. Their style.

“This Montañez,” he asked, “do you know what happened to him?”

“Manager of a hotel in Rufino, according to what we know now. A remote village along Route 7. Remains to be seen what he has to say.”

A knowing silence. The line was secure, the threat vague. The chief of police took the chance.

“Should I tell . . . ”

“No, no,” Torres interrupted. “He doesn't know anything about it. I'm going to inform the general. If anyone knows Montañez, he's the one. I'll get back to you afterward.”

“All right, Mr. Torres.”

“Goodbye, sir.”

“Goodbye.”

Fernando Luque hung up, pensively. Torres had put him in deep shit, up to his neck, and he could no longer back out. The head of the elite police rang his secretary.

“Sylvia, get me Customs.”

 

*

 

Beyond the outer suburbs of Greater Buenos Aires, the wind was blowing over the plains, the wind the gauchos called the
pampero
. The herds used to be so large there that when enemy ships approached the city, its residents released the cattle whose horns would serve as ramparts. The pampas where they grazed still extended as far as the Andes, over five hundred miles, an “amorphous and harmless country, uniform and boring, like the representation of nothingness” that nourished, according to the writer Ernesto Sabato, Argentine literature's metaphysical imagination. The conquistadors had already sought in vain the fabled silver mines mentioned in legends that had given this depressive El Dorado its name: Argentina, a deserted land of grass and lakes that is now traversed by a paved highway that seems to run straight as an arrow.