Of Love and Shadows (14 page)

“Don't say that,
comadre
,”
Señora
Flores replied. “Don't you know that no one can escape misfortune? Don't you remember that a few years back I lost my husband and my four sons? They took them away—they took them from me just like they did with Evangelina. It was her destiny,
comadre.
It isn't your fault, it's mine—bad luck runs in my blood.”

Evangelina Flores, fifteen years old, sturdy, and in robust health, was listening to the two women, standing behind the chair of her adoptive mother. She had Digna Ranquileo's serene face, her square hands and broad hips, but she did not feel as if she were Digna's daughter, because as an infant she had been placed in the other woman's arms and had been nursed at her breast. Nonetheless, for some reason she knew that the girl who had disappeared was more than a sister: that girl was she herself; it was her life the other girl was living, and it would be her death that Evangelina Ranquileo died. It may have been in that instant of lucidity that Evangelina Flores assumed the burden she would later carry through the world in search of justice.

By the time Digna and Irene had finished talking, the last sparks were dying in the bonfire and night had spread across the horizon. It was time for them to leave. Irene Beltrán promised Digna that she would look for Evangelina in the capital, and she gave Digna her address so that she could reach her if there was any news. As they said goodbye, they embraced.

That night Francisco noticed something different in Irene's eyes; he did not find the usual laughter and wonder. Her eyes had become dark and sad, the color of dead eucalyptus leaves. Then he understood that Irene was losing her innocence, and that nothing could prevent her now from beginning to see the truth.

*  *  *

The two friends went to all the usual places, asking about Evangelina Ranquileo with more persistence than hope. They were not the only ones making such inquiries. At detention centers, police lockups, the off-limits section of the Psychiatric Hospital—entered only by straitjacketed torture victims and Security Corps medics—Irene Beltrán and Francisco Leal found themselves in the company of many who knew the route of that calvary better than they, and who guided them along the way. There, as in all places where there is great suffering, human solidarity was the balm that eased shared misery.

“And who are you looking for,
señora
?” Irene asked of a woman standing in line.

“No one, daughter. I spent three years trying to find a trace of my husband, but I know now he is at peace.”

“Why have you come, then?”

“To help a friend,” she replied, pointing to another woman.

The two had met several years before, and together had searched from place to place, knocking at doors, pleading with office workers, bribing soldiers. One of them had been luckier than the other, and she at least knew that her husband no longer needed her; the other continued her pilgrimage. How could she let her go alone? Besides, she was used to the waiting and the humiliations, she said; her whole life revolved around bureaucratic office hours and forms to be filled out; she had learned ways to communicate with prisoners and get information.

“Evangelina Ranquileo Sánchez, fifteen—held for questioning in Los Riscos, and never seen again.”

“Don't look any longer. I'm sure someone's hand slipped, and they were rougher on her than they intended.”

“Go to the Ministry of Defense, there are new lists there.”

“Come back next week at this same time.”

“The guard changes at five—ask for Antonio, he's a nice man and can give you information.”

“It's best to begin at the Morgue. That way you don't waste time.”

José Leal was experienced in these inquiries, because a major portion of his energies was spent in such work. He used his contacts as a priest to get Francisco and Irene into places they could never have entered alone. He accompanied them to the Morgue, a timeworn gray building with an air of neglect and foreboding entirely appropriate for the house of the dead. Indigents ended up there, anonymous cadavers from the hospitals, people killed in drunken brawls or murdered by an unknown hand, victims of traffic accidents, and, in recent years, men and women with their fingers amputated at the knuckles, bodies bound with wire, faces burned by blowtorches or beaten beyond recognition, all of whose final resting place would be a nameless grave in Subdivision 29 of the General Cemetery. An authorization from Headquarters was needed to visit the Morgue, but José went there so often that all the employees knew him. In the Vicariate it was his assignment to try to follow the trail of
desaparecidos.
While volunteer lawyers unsuccessfully executed legal maneuvers to protect the missing in case they were still alive, José and other priests carried out the macabre bureaucratic task of sorting through the dead, photographs in hand, trying to identify them. Only rarely did they succeed in rescuing someone who was still alive; but with divine assistance, the priests were confident they could at least deliver the remains to their families to be buried.

Francisco's brother had warned him of what they would see in the Morgue, and Francisco pleaded with Irene to stay outside. But he found her filled with a new determination born of her desire to know the truth; she felt she must cross that threshold. Because of his practice in hospitals and mental asylums, Francisco was a man who thought he was inured to horror, but when he left the Morgue he was numbed, and he continued to feel that way for a very long time. He could imagine, therefore, how Irene must feel. There were too many bodies to be contained in the refrigerated units, and because they could not lay them on the tables, the cadavers were stacked in large storerooms that had formerly been used for other purposes. The air stank of formaldehyde and dankness; shadows filled the large, filthy rooms; the walls were mildewed and stained. Only an occasional bulb lighted the corridors, the shabby offices, the cavernous depositories. An air of hopelessness pervaded the building, and all who worked there were contaminated by indifference, their capacity for compassion drained. The attendants performed their duties handling death like banal merchandise; they lived so close to the dead that they had forgotten life. Irene saw employees eating lunch on the autopsy tables; some were listening to sportscasts on the radio, unconcerned about nearby bodies stiffened in rigor mortis; others played cards in the basement depositories while they guarded the day's cadavers.

Irene and Francisco checked the different sectors one by one, pausing at the bodies of women, which were few, and always naked. Francisco felt his mouth fill with saliva, and Irene's hand trembled in his. She looked pale and ill as her icy figure glided through room after room as if in an unending nightmare, so dazed she felt as if she were adrift in a pestilent fog. She could not absorb this hellish vision, and not even her wildest imagination could have measured the extent of such horrors.

Francisco had never retreated at the moment of confrontation with violence; he was a link in the long human chain of covert operations, and he knew the inside workings of the dictatorship. No one suspected his connection with political refugees, with money collected from mysterious sources, with names, dates, and information gathered and sent outside the country in case someday someone should decide to write the true story. But he still had barely been touched by repression; he had always managed to slip by, skirting the edge of the abyss. Only once, and then by chance, had he been seized: the time they shaved his head. During the days when he still worked as a psychologist, he was returning home from his consulting office when he ran into a patrol that was stopping all traffic. He thought it was a routine check, and held out his documents, but a machine gun prodded his chest and two hands like grappling hooks yanked him from his motorcycle.

“You, faggot! Get off!”

He was not the only one in this predicament. A pair of school-age boys were on their knees on the ground, and Francisco was forced to kneel beside them. Two soldiers held their weapons on him as a third grabbed him by the hair and shaved his head. Years later, it was still impossible for him to recall that episode without a spasm of impotence and indignation, even though with time he had come to realize how insignificant it was compared with other things that were happening. He had tried to reason with the soldiers, but for his trouble earned a kick in the back and a few cuts on his scalp. He returned home sputtering with rage, more humiliated than he had ever been in his life.

“I warned you they were cutting men's hair, son,” his mother wept.

“From this moment you are to wear your hair long, Francisco. We must resist in every possible way,” mouthed his irate father, forgetting his own objection to shaggy-haired men. And Francisco had let it grow, sure that he would be sheared again, but a counterorder had been issued that left long-haired men in peace.

Until the day she visited the Morgue, Irene Beltrán had lived in angelic ignorance, not from apathy or stupidity but because ignorance was the norm in her situation. Like her mother and so many others of her social class, she escaped into the orderly, peaceful world of the fashionable neighborhoods, the exclusive beach clubs, the ski slopes, the summers in the country. Irene had been educated to deny any unpleasantness, discounting it as a distortion of the facts. One day, she had seen a car screech to a stop and several men overpower a pedestrian and force him into their vehicle; from a distance she had smelled the smoke of bonfires burning blacklisted books; she had glimpsed the outlines of a human body floating in the dark waters of the canal. She had heard patrol cars and the roar of helicopters shattering the night skies. She had stopped to help someone who had fainted from hunger in the street. Irene had lived surrounded by the gales of hatred, but remained untouched by them behind the high wall that had protected her since childhood. Now, however, her suspicions had been aroused, and making the decision to enter the Morgue was a step that was to affect her entire life. She had never seen a dead body until the day she saw enough to fill her worst nightmares. She stopped before a large refrigerated cellar to look at a light-haired girl hanging on a meat hook in a row of bodies. From a distance the corpse resembled Evangelina Ranquileo, but as she walked closer Irene saw it was not she. Horrified, she stared at the extensive marks of beatings on the body, the burned face, the amputated hands.

“It isn't Evangelina, don't look at her,” Francisco begged, leading Irene away, putting his arm around her, rushing her toward the door, as devastated as she.

*  *  *

Even though their journey through the Morgue had lasted only half an hour, when she left Irene Beltrán was no longer the same; something had shattered in her soul. Francisco could see this before she spoke a single word, and anxiously he searched for a way to console her. He helped her onto the motorcycle and they sped off toward the Hill.

They often went there to picnic. An outdoor lunch prevented any argument over who should pay the check, and both of them enjoyed the open air in the splendor of the park. Sometimes they went by Irene's house to pick up her dog, Cleo. Irene liked to let the dog run, for she was afraid that from being around old people all the time and roaming the paths of the retirement home, Cleo would become an idiot and forget all her instincts. The first few times, the poor animal was terrified by the ride, hunched between them on the motorcycle, ears drooping and eyes rolling, but with time she learned to enjoy it and barked wildly at the sound of any motor. Though Cleo's many-colored spots proclaimed her lack of noble pedigree, she was heir to an alertness and cunning bequeathed her by her bastard ancestors. She was bound to her mistress by unwavering loyalty. On the motorcycle, the three of them looked like a circus act: Irene in her fluttering skirts, shawls, and fringe, her long hair flying in the wind; the dog sandwiched between them; and Francisco balancing the picnic basket as he drove.

The enormous natural park in the center of the city was easy to reach, but few people went there and many were not even aware of its existence. Francisco felt as if he owned the place and used it for all his nature shots: soft thirsty hills in summer, golden cinnamon trees and oaks that sheltered squirrels in the autumn, and bared silent branches in the winter. In spring the park awakened pulsing with life, glowing with a thousand different greens, with clusters of insects among the flowers, its slopes gravid, its roots eager, its sap bursting from the hidden veins of nature. Irene and Francisco crossed the bridge over the stream and began to climb the winding road bordered by gardens with exotic plantings. The higher they climbed the more tangled the bushes became; paths began to disappear in the thickening growth of gentle birches showing the first leaves of the year; compact, eternally green pines; slender eucalyptus; red beech.

The heat of midday was evaporating the morning dew, releasing a light mist that lay like a veil over the landscape. When they reached the summit, they had the sensation that they were the only people in that enchanted place. They knew all the secluded nooks, the places where they could sit and observe the city at their feet. Sometimes, when the fog was thick, the base of the hill disappeared in a froth of seafoam, and they could imagine they were on an island surrounded by an ocean of flour. In contrast, on clear days they watched the flow of the endless silver ribbon of traffic and heard its bustle like a distant torrent. In some places the foliage was so dense and the perfume of growing things so intense that it was intoxicating. Francisco and Irene kept their escapes to the park hidden, like a precious secret. Without any spoken agreement, they never mentioned the Hill, keeping it theirs alone.

After they left the Morgue, Francisco felt that only the thick green of the park, the moist earth, and the smell of humus could help Irene forget the silent cries of all those dead. He drove to the summit and looked for a shadowy, secluded spot. Near a stream tumbling downhill between large rocks, they found a willow tree whose strands fell around them, forming a tent of green. Supported by the rough trunk, they sat in silence, without touching, but so united in their feelings they might have been cradled in a single womb. Half-paralyzed with horror, they thought their own thoughts, but each was consoled by the other's nearness. The passage of time, the southern breeze, the murmuring water, the wild canaries, the earth fragrances slowly brought them back to reality.