The Buenos Aires Quintet (52 page)

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s all over. The Captain’s little group has been split up. We’re free at last!’

‘What about the others?’

‘What others? The Captain was a useless leftover. He had to be dealt with for us to get back to democratic normality.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that corruption and state violence are in the hands of civilians, not the military.’

‘And what about the Captain’s civilian friends?’

‘When can you remember any civilians paying for their sins? The only civilian linked to the barbarity of this century who paid at all was Alfried Krupp. Let the Captain’s civilian friends be. Their servants can pay in their place. The military and the police.’

‘What about Richard Gálvez? He was chasing those civilians to avenge his father’s death.’

‘Richard Gálvez? Do you really think someone like Richard Gálvez could give the state sleepless nights? Sometimes the state needs to remember it has a monopoly on violence.’

Silverstein appears in the spotlight, his hands full of coloured pencils.

. ‘It is especially gratifying to see the presence of power amongst us tonight. The minister Güelmes is doing us the honour of taking a moment to cover the shortest distance between poetry and life, that is, the tango. Just so long as it is clear this is not setting a precedent, let’s have a round of applause for the minister.’

He waits for the applause to finish, without joining in, and then shows the audience what he is holding.

‘These pencils have travelled through time to write history with the uncertain hand of schoolchildren, full of spelling mistakes. The future may be imperfect, but less so than the past. I could shed floods of tears tonight to the sound of the drums of our most glorious defeats. I could allow other people to learn by their mistakes and to have the right to a different kind of anger. Do you think I’m talking about politics? You couldn’t be more mistaken. I’m talking about the splendour in the grass we witnessed in Buenos Aires tonight, that confirmation of what Wordsworth wrote in his
Ode to Immortality
:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

‘Which means, translated into Argentine – grab the dough and clear off! Adriana Varela is about to sing the saddest verses – for example: “you should not, know not, you cannot, you will not return”. What she sings is not a tango, but within it there are the shards of all the shattered tangos, all that is somewhere above and beyond Piazzola. Through the looking-glass of tango.’

Adriana strides onstage and starts to sing or recite, recite or sing a poem with only perfectly placed, occasional bursts of disharmony from the violin, bass, piano and bandoneon:

Recall that nothingness and its world
The four corners of your protection:
You should not, know not, cannot, and will not return;
Four ancient pasts of pewter and amethysts,
Four wars, four corners, four doors,
Four hells.

When the angel comes to paint your memory
In innocent and pretty water-colours
Trading in death, trading in desires
In the freest levels of your self-obsessed body,
Even if they cast you from the pre-ordained paradise
In memories you will always find fulfilment:
Earth, water, air, fire, and time.
Useless for memory to invent journeys
Beyond those four protecting horizons,
Well-known faces only lead
To the snares of underwater voices
On a badly-recorded tape that
’
s close
To the expressive wholeness of silence.

Like an hourglass built from shifting sands
You
’
ll sink into the dark corners of desire
Foreigner in the city of a thousand exiles
Your absence will mark the start of a union of dreams
A deception that does not even exist
Wandering through this city of useless certainties
That lead neither to origins or to extremes.

They’ll give you a name like they call wolf
The fear sheep have, like they call fear
The ill-repute the shipwrecked sailor earns by drowning.
Twelve wars, twelve corners, twelve doors,
Twelve hells.

But if you float down through this surrendered city
To where the shades of all that lives reside
Worlds toppled into dark and filthy waters
Trees like rubber, endless streets,
With no birds or stars to forget your presence
No sounds, no waltzes.

No sun or moon, only the emptiness of a thousand absences
Only the echo of a last and final word;
Float down to that city to try to bury time
Under cyclopean weights of saturated rocks.

If you float down

If you float down you will not recognize a single shadow
Or yourself be recognized by any shade
And this will not be your home even if your home
Was a makeshift model of this ruin,
The desecrated tomb of your forgetting.

Recall that nothingness and its world,
The four horizons of your protection:
You should not, know not, cannot, and will not return.

By the end, everyone is out of breath: Adriana, Carvalho, the audience. Güelmes is the first to recover. He whispers in the detective’s ear: ‘Was that tango? Tango as chamber music, perhaps.’

The helicopter circles over the forest, looking for the clearing and the flags put out to mark the landing spot. It lands, and the door is opened for Captain Doreste, who leaps out as the rotor blades come whirring to a halt, ignoring the difficulty the fat man is having in following him into a void that seems impossibly daunting. Doreste glares at the man who is there to receive them, straw hat twirling in his hands.

‘Why did we have to land here? Why couldn’t we fly straight to Paraguay?’

‘The helicopter wasn’t authorized any further. You’ll be taken to the Puente de la Amistad, and you can cross into Paraguay through Ciudad del Este.’

‘And run the risk they recognize me at border control?’

‘Here nobody recognizes or controls anyone. Your Paraguayan contacts are waiting for you in Ciudad del Este.’

A jeep is ready for them in the trees, its wheels deep in the muddy red earth typical of this land close to the mighty Parana river, a few miles downstream from Iguazú falls. The Captain is fed up of hearing the fat man panting along behind him, and does not want to hear how they turn to groans when the other man’s body gives out as he tries to clamber into the jeep.

‘I don’t feel well, boss. My chest hurts.’

‘You need legs to get into the jeep, not your chest.’

Sweating from the tropical heat and his own anxiety, the fat man finally succeeds in scrambling up alongside the Captain, who is sitting there ice-cool, muttering to himself: ‘Our four eyes are not enough. We’re in other people’s hands.’

‘But you can trust these people, boss. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, that’s their motto.’

‘You could trust them in the days when there was order around here.’

The bridge is submerged under an endless caravan of tourists, all flocking to Ciudad del Este so that they can pay Paraguayan prices for anything and everything that this universal Ali Baba’s cave can offer them.

‘It could take us an hour to get across in the jeep.’

The driver turns to face him. He is dark-skinned, and his breath smells of spicy food.

‘Why don’t you go on foot? They’ll be waiting for you on the far side of the bridge. It would be quicker.’

‘Who is on the other side?’

‘The general.’

‘Elpidio?’

That’s right.’

The Captain smiles, and the fat man gives him a wink.

‘So everything is in order, boss. If Elpidio is there, everything is just fine.’

The Captain strides across the steel walkway of the bridge, pushing his way past the obsessive buyers drawn to the travelling bazaar that is Ciudad del Este, with its fake labels from Paris or from the vast consumers’ city that is the world, all stuffed into huge warehouses as if an army was in massive retreat, spilling on to muddy streets where water from broken drains mingles with puddles from the most recent rains. The fat man struggles to keep up, from time to time begging the Captain to have pity on him and take a moment’s breather, because his chest is hurting as if he had a huge boulder pressing on his breastbone.

‘One day we’ll be back. They’re not going to get away with taking my child from me so easily. One day we’ll return, and I’ll explain how it was me who saved her from what her parents were. I brought her up like a princess, like my princess. One day we’ll be back, I swear.’

‘Can’t we have a rest, Captain?’

The fat man is beginning to realize he is never going to make it across the Puente de la Amistad. He can barely walk. There’s a shooting pain in his left arm, and his chest feels like stone, a stone that hurts. He cannot breathe. He spreads his arms to get air into his lungs and to cry out, to ask the Captain for help. But Doreste strides on and does not even look round. He has spotted Elpidio at the boundary marking the start of Paraguayan territory, and although he hears the fat man collapse to the ground, slowing still further the trickle of cars able to cross the bridge, all he does is turn his head once and shout:

‘This way you’ll be buried in Argentina. You’re lucky!’

When he reaches the other side, General Elpidio points back to the group of people gathered round the prostrate body of the fat man sprawled between two cars. Doreste shrugs. Elpidio is a man of few words.

‘You’re safe here. But times have changed.’

‘But not your people.’

‘No one believes in ideals any more. Communism has been defeated. We have to adapt. It’s the drug traffickers who control and guarantee everything now.’

‘What about arms trafficking?’

This sets Elpidio laughing out loud, revealing a set of teeth carefully repaired in Chicago. ‘A million dollars this cost me,’ he says, tapping the gleaming capped teeth. ‘Arms? You’re already thinking of buying arms? Look. Here in Ciudad del Este, on the main streets the tourists go to buy their Cacharel shirts, their sable furs and their Japanese word processors: they’re all fake or smuggled in. But on all the others, where the tourists never go, they sell arms and drugs. But are you really thinking of buying arms this early in the morning?’

The Captain looks back one last time at the fat man saying his last goodbye to this world. Belatedly, an ambulance siren sounds, and the vehicle starts to thread its way slowly through the two opposing queues of cars.

By the time it reaches the body, the Captain has been introduced to Elpidio’s friends, has been given a gun which he sticks in his waistband, and handed a new passport. He stares at his image in the photograph, and starts to memorize his name.

‘Juan Carlos Orellana. I like it. I always liked being called Juan Carlos.’

There is nothing sordid about the old people’s home, but there is nothing pleasing about it either. There’s a garden with old folk shuffling around on their own, as if they had already accepted their ultimate solitude. A few old women are knitting or embroidering, others are singing. One of them is reciting a poem, although no one is paying her any attention:

Do you remember you wanted to be Marguerite
Gautier? In my mind I see your face so sweet
When we dined together that first time
On a wonderful night that never will return.

Your scarlet lips with their accursed flame
Sipped from a crystal cup the finest champagne
While your fingers plucked at the whitest flower
He loves me...he loves me not...and I was in your power!

A group of men has found sufficient fellow-feeling to organize a game of bowls, while a few nuns stroll about keeping the peace in this nondescript garden. But the old man Don Vito and Madame Lissieux have come to see is having nothing of it.

‘Old farts. That’s what they are. Nothing more, nothing less.’

‘Don’t say that, Don Aníbal. Old age is a treasure-house of experience.’

‘Treasure-house of shit, you mean.’

Madame Lissieux embraces him with a tender look and then with tender words: ‘How can anyone who looks as splendid as you think that? Every age has its regrets and its desires. A man is a man until the day he dies. The Great Gratowsky, for example.’

Don Vito strikes while the iron is hot.

‘A skirt-chaser, wasn’t he? Fancy dying with a pair of knickers in your mouth. That’s really dying with your pants on, isn’t it?’

Aníbal laughs wickedly and shows his own toothless mouth.

‘But he didn’t have a tooth in his head, like me.’

‘He had all he needed, apparently.’

Don Vito takes advantage of the fact that Madame Lissieux appears to be looking elsewhere to make a vague gesture towards his crotch.

‘Oh, that? I don’t know how he was getting on, but I can’t even use mine to piss properly – those butchers have operated on my prostate four times already, and yet it’s still the same. Take a look.’

He starts to unbutton his trousers and pull them down, but Don Vito stops him by nodding towards Madame Lissieux.

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘I’ll just show you the tube and the bag for my urine.’

‘There’s no need,’ Don Vito winks at him. ‘I’ve been there myself

‘You too?’

‘I had a prostate as big as a hernia. Take it from a fellow-sufferer. But Gratowsky still did what he could in that department. I bet he had fun with some of this lot.’

‘With these relics? Not likely! Sometimes we would sit here and think to ourselves: who could ever have slept with any of these old cows?’

At this point Madame Lissieux returns, light-hearted and content.

‘What lovely old ladies they are!’

The old man shrugs his shoulders in disgust and sets off along the path. He walks with feigned cheerfulness until he reaches one of the rooms and opens the door. The dark rectangle lights up when the old man feels inside, finds a switch, and all of a sudden bulbs blaze out around a frame containing a huge photograph of Gilda Laplace taken in the 1950s.