Sweet Money (12 page)

A little before dawn Lascano stations himself in the doorway of a house on Pasaje El Lazo. From there he has a good view of the front door as well as the back, which Miranda could easily come and go through. Miranda’s house is silent and still. The neighbourhood slowly begins to come to life. A Falcon carrying three plainclothes cops turns the corner at Cuenca. Perro immediately recognizes one of them: it’s Flores, one of the most corrupt and bloodthirsty superintendents of the Federal Police. Lascano knows that his presence there is no coincidence. Flores has the same idea he has, except Flores is not going to waste time following the son and hoping he’ll lead him to Mole, as Lascano was planning to do. He’ll surely take a much more expeditious route, like, for example, kidnapping him and demanding Mole in exchange. Perro’s brain kicks into high gear. He starts walking away quickly while digging around in his pockets for a coin. As soon as he’s out of sight of the Falcon, he jogs to Jonte. El Quitapenas is raising its metal curtain. He dashes in, rushes to find the telephone, picks up the receiver and dials information.

 

 

A recorded voice recites the number, one digit at a time. He hangs up, cradles the phone between his shoulder and his ear and inserts another coin into the slot, repeating the number to himself as if it were a mantra. He dials.

 

 

It seems an eternity before they answer.

 

 

It rings six or seven times, then finally a young voice answers.

 

 

He hangs up, then dials the police. A woman answers immediately. Trying to sound arrogant and intimidating, like a lordly landowner, he spits his words out like a machine gun.

 

 

Lascano returns at a fast clip to Miranda’s house but keeps walking past it at least a few yards. Everything remains calm. One of the cops stands guard, next to the Falcon, the other two are still sitting inside. He sits down on the front steps of an Italian-style house. Lascano doesn’t have
to wait long. Two squad cars, blasting their sirens, enter the alleyway in the wrong direction and two others block the other end of the street. The car doors open and twelve uniformed police officers get out, their pistols, machine guns and rifles drawn, and crouch down behind their cars. The inspector, talking through a megaphone, orders the men in Flores’s car to come out with their hands up. They register a moment of shock and confusion. The order is repeated through the megaphone. Several neighbours look out their windows. The shutters over the window in Miranda’s house open and Susana looks out. Flores and the other cop descend from the Falcon and slowly lift their arms over their heads. Flores shouts that they are policemen. In response, they’re told to get on the ground face down. They look at each other: they have no choice but to obey. Lascano stands up. A news van from Channel Nine arrives and brakes abruptly. Susana opens the front door, looking sick with worry. A reporter walks up to her, straightening out his tie and fixing his hair. A cameraman follows behind, shooting the scene. The uniformed officers, their fingers on their triggers, cautiously approach the men on the ground. Susana walks to the corner and tries to see who the men are. A sergeant goes up to her and takes her by the arm; she shakes him off with an indignant gesture. Flores is already standing up, angrily brushing off his suit. The inspector desperately tries to explain. Lascano smiles. Susana turns on her heels and heads for her front door, where her son has appeared. Flores seems about to levitate from rage; he motions to his men; they get in the Falcon and leave. The inspector guestures to the squad cars to let him through. Relieved, the twelve policemen
return to their squad cars and leave. The reporter pats his hair into place as the cameraman returns to the van and sits down in the back seat. Lascano turns to look at Miranda’s house. Leaning against the door frame, Susana, still and serious, is watching him. Perro slowly crosses the street toward her.

 

 

Her interruption was abrupt and bitter. Lascano opens his arms in a conciliatory gesture; she starts to close the door.

 

 

The woman shuts the door in his face. Lascano feels a sharp stab in his chest and can’t breathe. He stumbles,
his head knocks against the door and he falls to the ground. Susana opens the door and sees him crumpled up at her feet. Fernando looks at him, frightened, and bends down to help him up.

 

 

Perro loosens his tie and feels the air beginning to flow back into his lungs. He’s drenched in sweat. Susana disappears and an instant later returns with a glass of water and a wicker chair. Lascano rejects the chair and accepts the water. He takes tiny sips. His breath is still laboured but he’s starting to recover.

 

 

He nods. His vision has cleared up.

 

17

Sitting in the chaise longue, on that small balcony he built with the wood left over from the house, and which has become the most coveted spot, Fuseli lets the
Folha de São Paulo
drop out of his hands. He takes off his reading glasses and waits for his eyes to adjust to the distance. Soon the beach comes into focus: his woman is lying on a beach towel watching little Victoria build a sand castle with Sebastião, Leila’s son. The waves, the deserted islet and behind,
el mato de la serra
that ends just a few yards from the sea at a rugged path of black rocks. Rain clouds rush across the sky. The
cachoeira
roars above the road. The Brazilian
cantiga
Leila is humming in the kitchen reaches him through the window as does the scent of the palm oil she uses to make her famous
moqueca de camarão
. He thinks that life has gotten good in this place. This love he has found is not sewn with the cloth of great passion but has instead been patiently, laboriously embroidered with threads of solitude, stitched with needles of companionship and held together with hooks and eyes of
saudades.
A tolerant and peaceful love that asks no questions and makes no demands, whose roots are sunk deep in daily life, that has never pretended to be anything more than this day-to-day existence, known
to be temporary without this ever creating resentment, and that always had one mission above and beyond all else: to give little Victoria the happiness that he and his woman had been denied. That said, he never stops missing Buenos Aires. It’s a feeling – definitely worthy of a tango – that embarrasses him. He was never drawn to tango music, except the
tangos duros
of Discépolo, Borges’s
milongas
or the
reas
sung by Rivero, but even these, he could take only in homeopathic doses. He thinks the self-congratulatory conceit of the lyrics lacks all trace of modesty. He deplores the facile sentimentalism, the cheap sensationalism and retrograde moralizing, and, to make matters even worse, these are precisely the qualities touted with such pride as its highest virtues. Now, however, he often feels a stab of nostalgia that sounds very much like a bandoneon.

News from Buenos Aires is ambiguous. Alfonsín issues an order for the military commanders to be prosecuted. That photograph of the generals in civilian court – charges against them being read out by a bureaucrat in a grey suit and a bearded young man, treated like common criminals – brought home the fact that this was the first, perhaps the only measure any government has ever taken that has made him happy. But, in the best tradition of the Radical Party, what it wrote with one hand it tried to erase with the other when it passed the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, an attempt to give impunity to subordinates for the brutal acts they committed with their own hands. As a consequence, nobody was satisfied, neither those demanding justice nor the
carapintadas
, the military officers who’d staged an uprising against the fledgling democracy. There are constant rumours
and fears of uprisings, conspiracies, bad omens. The President insists the house is in order, but he himself must have a hard time believing it. Fuseli’s dreams of returning make him want to believe it to be true.

 

The sky bursts open, releasing a torrent of heavy rain over the jungle, the sea and the beach. His woman gets up, calls to the children, and the three walk slowly back to the house. Here the rain is not an event to take refuge from but rather a fact of life that flows out of the sky with perfect ease. Like darkness. In the tropics night doesn’t fall gently but rather pours onto the scene, like a gigantic bucketful of black water, and although it happens every day it never fails to surprise.

He looks up at the
mato
, thinks about the amount of life that swarms in among the roots of the
sambambaias
, that flies, crawls and camouflages itself, that imitates well-trained birds on the
heliconias
or that treads softly like the
oncillas
through the leaves of the
bananeiras
, as big as elephant ears. All that throbbing of pure animality, that urgency to live and reproduce, to kill and die, the entire framework of instincts, scents that mark out territories, eyes like beams, sweet or frenetic howling. All that restiveness drenched with rain. This hot land teeming with thousands of sounds, where our simian ancestors still swing from the branches that, according to Fuseli, we never should have left.

Return. To where? To what? If he returns he’ll have to deal with getting a job. He has a difficult time imagining himself standing in front of a dissecting table, poking around inside cadavers to find the key to their demise, clues that would lead to a possible culprit or free an
innocent suspect. Here, he has carved out a niche for himself, a place the locals have generously made available to him. Patients of all kinds come to his clinic, for he is the only doctor in a town without a hospital. In this place he has discovered the joys and the sorrows of working with bodies that are still alive. His work as a coroner was, in many ways, more relaxing. All he had to do was find out what the cadaver was trying to tell him before throwing it away. A dead body is nothing but a bunch of information to investigate, decode, order, systemize and record, but the subject himself is no longer anybody. It has no hopes, neither suffers nor desires anything, it has become an object, a thing already past its due date that is humbly initiating its process of decomposition, its return to the biosphere. It can be examined, studied, packed up and sent off to those who decide where it will go. His interaction with that dead flesh carries no commitment, responsibility or consequences, because its future is already beyond the realm of science. Because the dead force us to face our condition as beings subject to the laws of nature and our powerlessness over death, we are always so quick to hide them away in tombs, mausoleums and graves. They show us what we prefer not to see. The living, on the other hand, demand certainty; they want to be told that the inevitable moment to relinquish their suit of skin and bones has not yet arrived. They desire, feel, suffer; they place their fear, despair and pain, as well as their hopes, at their doctor’s feet; they make him the repository of secrets that will cure them or at least bring some relief. Hope is a fundamental component of the healing process, hence a doctor must act as if he knows, communicate confidence, give comfort and
strength to fight against illness, even though the fact is that what he knows is a mere grain of sand in the vast desert of what he doesn’t.

This place is life, whereas Buenos Aires, for him and many others, is impregnated, contaminated with horror and death. His son is buried there – a wound that never heals or stops hurting. Lascano, his best friend, is there, lying in the street, gunned down like an animal by a military death squad. Through its cobbled streets and paved avenues echo the shouts of the tortured, the murdered, the young people thrown from aeroplanes into the sea and the cries of fathers, mothers, friends and lovers who will forever be missed. Return? To what? To whom? The murderers still walk around, enjoying their freedom and good health. When he thinks about his city, it seems like a place of perennial night, and its name, Buenos Aires, like a cruel joke.