Behold Things Beautiful Page 3

  The waiter arrived with wine and water, set the bottles on the tablecloth and proceeded to fill the glasses. Alma downed a full glass of water while Flaco deliberated with the waiter on the day’s specials. They settled on milanesas and salads, and after the waiter had left, Flaco raised his glass. “Now this is a good wine.” And he was right, the Uruguayan wine tasted of summer, flowery and pungent. Among the deprivations of exile, she’d missed the tastes and smells most. Walking with Flaco from the campus through the downtown traffic, Alma had breathed the city’s essence in all its layers. Coffee, exhaust fumes, puddles sizzling in the afternoon sun, savoury wafts of empanadas, the leathery pungency of shoe polish, the roses and lilies offered by vendors along the plaza, and the hawkers’ cries. A short walk, not more than ten minutes, and an immersion, her footsteps affirming, I’m back, I’m back.

  Flaco lit a cigarette from his pack of Parliaments. Alma picked up the gold lighter and ran her thumb over the engraving, MM, the initials belonging to Flaco’s father, a gambler who’d almost ruined the family. She asked if Mateo Molino was still alive. “He died in his flat ten years ago, beaten by some toughs sent by a money lender, an ugly ending to an ugly life. And that should be the end of it except…when my children ask about their grandfather, I’ve no idea what to say. I always swore I’d tell them the truth. They’ll find out anyway. You know what Luscano’s like.

  “I don’t spend enough time with the children and when I do, well, who wants to launch into heavy conversations about dead relatives bringing shame on the Molino clan? Sorry, chica.” He shook his head and the dark curls rearranged themselves. Then he spoke of his grandmother, the family matriarch who’d bound them together, his three brothers and four sisters. “Despite our differences, political and otherwise, we’re close and loyal because of her. She died after my first divorce.”

  The waiter brought the food and Flaco served up mounds of tossed greens and beet salad to accompany the thin filets of beef coated in spices that Alma had never been able to emulate in Montréal. They ate quickly, in the manner of friends accustomed to sharing meals. Flaco entertained her with stories of the university, the gossip among faculty members, careful not to mention mutual friends or any topic that might veer into the past. But she wanted to know about Roma. “I can’t believe she still works at the bookstore.” All through the junta, Roma had sold banned books from a box hidden in the basement of the store. And she’d never been caught. “She’s still one of the bravest souls in Luscano,” Flaco said. “Openly gay now. Some people want nothing to do with her. You know how cruel this place can be.”

  Flaco emptied his wineglass and signalled the waiter to bring a second bottle. “So what are your plans now? This book you’re working on, will you translate it into Spanish eventually?” He mentioned a small press at the university that might be able to help.

  “I’m going to Uruguay to research the archives for Agustini’s unpublished poems and letters.” Alma conveyed her plans with exaggerated certainty. She hadn’t really worked out a precise structure for the book, which so far consisted of a few pages of biographical prose and the outline she’d written to justify her sabbatical from the college.

  And then there was her mother. Alma described her shock at seeing Hannelore. “I’m worried about Xenia, too. Taking care of the household and my mother is quite a handful.”

  Flaco laughed. “Succinctly put. Your mother, what a character, charming of course but incredibly determined. Now who comes to mind? Ah yes, the lecture, a certain poet’s mother. How was she characterized…overbearing and neurotic?”

  “You’re bad. Hannelore told me yesterday she loves you.”

  “Your mother tutored my eldest in French until just a few months ago. Fredo adored going to your house, having his lessons outside in the courtyard where your mother used to stage our plays, remember?”

  He refilled his wineglass and looked past her at the structure she’d been ignoring. Alma could picture the monolith, the spotlights lighting the spire that narrowed to a point in the dusky sky, a finger accusing the gods. Flaco turned his gaze to her. “Do you regret writing that poem?”

  The waiter arrived with a candle flickering inside a red globe and placed it on their table. Alma weighed her reply. “In Montréal, nobody knew of it. Anonymity heals.” She wanted to ask, “Do you regret publishing it?” and was just about to when he spoke again.

  “I noticed you in the lecture, looking out the window. How hard, no, terrifying, it must be.”

  Alma touched the globe, felt the burning heat from the candle and kept her hand there until it became intolerable, testing her threshold for pain. But she was in control, nobody else.

  Flaco continued. “My friends were being abducted and I was hiding out at my grandmother’s finca, ostensibly working on my thesis. Most of my time was spent riding horses and getting drunk with the gauchos at night.” He lit another cigarette, snapped the lighter shut. “Chica, things have changed.” Flaco looked up at the night sky towards the first handful of stars.

  The man at the next table stared. He was about Flaco’s age but leaner, with a white crescent-shaped scar between his eyebrows. He lowered his gaze, folded some pesos next to his plate and rose with his newspaper under his arm. Alma whispered, “He was listening to us. You think he’s a military type?”

  “The hair’s too long. He was just checking out a woman, like any ordinary guy.” Flaco regarded her with his lopsided grin. “I don’t blame him.” He leaned forward and for a moment Alma worried he’d try for a kiss but the table teetered precariously and he drew back. There’d been a night in his room, just before the crackdown. Flaco had kissed well.

  “Next week,” he said, “I’m throwing myself a birthday party. You’ve got to come.” Flaco raised his glass. “To you, your eyes, the colour of Luscano’s sky, sapphires and bright as…let me quote your poet, un manojo de estrellas, am I right?”

  “You’re drunk, Flaco!” What had possessed his family to give him that nickname? Surely he’d been born robust and bowlegged as a gaucho, nothing feeble about him, but the nom de guerre that meant the very opposite of all that he was had stuck for forty years.

  Leaving Alma at the front gate of her house, Flaco doubled back towards the university. On Avenida Reconquista, the flow of pedestrians thickened with the day’s last shoppers. He caught sight of himself in the reflection of a pharmacy window, a plodding figure with messy hair. ¡Qué pelotudo! Is that what she’s been looking at all evening? Alma hadn’t changed much, her hair shorter than the blond curtain behind which she’d hidden herself when they were students, the same watchful blue eyes. Flaco had checked, discreetly, he hoped, for scars on her hands, face and legs. Detecting nothing, he hoped she’d been spared. But he knew he was deluding himself, that restraints, electric cattle prods, near drownings rarely leave visible marks. The most excruciating scars were invisible. Too many in exile had never returned and there were all those who had hanged themselves, walked into the sea or shot a gun at their heads for relief.

  He entered the campus and felt for the plastic vial of pills in the pocket of his jacket, considered taking one. The doctor had warned against mixing the sedative with alcohol and he was still feeling the effect of the wine. No wonder the walk back seemed arduous, worsened by imagining Alma’s reaction when she discovered why he’d instigated her return. Flaco gritted his teeth. Somehow he’d have to speak to her before the party or else tell all the others not to mention his project. How does one ensure the discretion of what, at least twenty other people? He’d lost track of how many friends he’d invited to his fiesta. By the time Flaco entered the building he concluded it had been a mistake to invite her. Hijo de puta, that’s what I am. Self-disgust gripped him as he stamped up the stairs, unlocked the office door and turned on the lights.

  The secretary had left a stack of phone messages on his desk. From his students, some guy called Ernesto, and the sculptor, whom he ca
lled immediately. The answering machine kicked into Luis Corva’s distinctive voice, high pitched and quick with an accent, Slavic or Nordic, exacerbated on tape. Flaco left a message, trying not to sound concerned.

  He lit a cigarette and stood up from the desk, walked towards the windows to look down at the site where the sculpture would be erected. It was too dark, the riverbank invisible beyond some strands of light rippling on the surface. The phone rang. Flaco returned to his desk, picked it up, hoping it was Corva. “¿Hola?”

  “Is this Doctor Molino?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Ernesto Pindalo.”

  His heartbeat surged and he wished he’d taken the sedative.

  “Hello?”

  What in hell would a Pindalo want? “I’m here.”

  “I’ve got some information.” There was hesitation in the man’s smooth diction. “Files, actually…I think you should have them.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve heard of your work. The files could help.”

  Flaco stared through the windows. It was black out there, just a handful of stars scattered across the sky. He’d wanted to confess to Alma what he saw most nights when the stars flickered on. Hundreds of eyes imploring him until dawn. Then they disappeared. “What’s in the files?”

  “You’ll find out when I bring them.”

  Flaco flipped open the agenda on his desk. His gut told him to see the guy, but as a precaution it had to be daylight, during the week with students and professors milling in the halls. They agreed on Thursday morning and the stranger hung up.

  He’d probably met this Ernesto at some point but couldn’t remember his face. They were a tight family, those Pindalos in their Barrio Norte fortress. It lay next door to the beach house where Flaco had spent summer weekends with his grandparents and siblings until he was about ten. That year his father had lost the property to some general in a card game. Flaco remembered the mansion hulking behind the trees that separated the properties, how he’d aimed his slingshot at that turret, envious of the splashing and shrieking from the swimming pool to which he’d never been invited, the Pindalos’ ascendancy coinciding with the Molinos’ decline.

  The phone rang and it was the sculptor. “I’ve ordered a sheet of titanium large enough to shape over the bodies in my piece. I need your help in transporting it to my studio.” Luis Corva described the progress of his work, how the metallic sheet would be blinding when the sun was out.

  Flaco could picture it perfectly, a glaring indictment by the river.

  5

  The sun crossed the Atlantic over the shores of Cape Town, Luscano’s latitudinal twin, the two equidistant from the Tropic of Capricorn, that imaginary marker encircling the globe. A faint bleaching on the horizon and the country stirred, beginning with the airborne, horneros and swallows and pigeons, and above them, the first airplane of the day sliding south through Luscanan airspace.

  Inside the droning vessel, sleepless passengers peered down at the country shaped like a discarded cape some bullfighter might have dropped onto the sand. A man-made creation, Luscano’s outline delineated by the sea and inland frontiers fought for in bloody incursions and still subject to sporadic disputes. Within these arbitrary borders, an oceanside grid of streetlights marked out the avenues of the capital. A beacon flashed from the spire of a cathedral hunkering in the city’s heart, a plaza out of which arteries became highways, then dirt roads snaking through fields. From the lush tangle bordering Paraguay, the river emerged as a glint of silver opening into the sea. A brief montage of a country few, if any, could identify as Luscano, with its capital of the same name, before the plane crossed the Uruguay border and began its descent to Buenos Aires.

  The southern constellation faded, handfuls of stars snuffed out by the first rays of sunlight. Earthly residents began to twitch. Roosters scratched, goats bleated and horses flicked their tails.

  The fishermen set out, loading nets and gear onto wooden skiffs moored on weathered docks jutting out of the coastline. The more prosperous shoved off wharves in the port. These larger vessels, with their supply of fuel and radios that sputtered warnings of coast guard inspections and armed pirates, were taking a calculated risk. Despite fishing within the limits allowed them by well-equipped Brazilian fleets, they were subject to sabotage. Shots fired in the air or, worse, at the boats themselves. At least once a month the bloated body of a fisherman washed ashore, discovered by early risers.

  Rubén was spared a gruesome discovery on his morning walk from the seminary. White egrets skittered among the shadows of debris and driftwood. The Franciscan always scanned this stretch of sand on his way to the cathedral, squinting into the dawn hues for the evidence he’d heard of but never witnessed, the fishermen of late and longer ago, the living thrown out of military planes. Innocents whose bodies had refused to disappear. Rubén considered their memory a daily reminder to his conscience.

  He trudged uphill and crossed the Plaza Federal, where pigeons pecked at the windowsills of the Ministry of Justice. Rubén trailed behind the flower vendors, who’d left their shanties in the villa miseria, stopping at the market, where they’d haggled with farmers and wholesalers selling flowers from stalls and pickup trucks. Carrying their wares in plastic buckets, they’d chatted and complained until they crossed the river, falling silent for a moment as they passed the abandoned prison. By the time the vendors reached the cathedral, the ball of sun balancing on the horizon brought to life the roses, lilies and carnations they stooped to arrange in white pails beneath the eaves of the cathedral. The aroma of coffee from La Loca drifted across the plaza. Rubén could smell it commingling with the flowery sweetness as he greeted the vendors, “Buen día,” and they answered, “Que le vaya bien, Padre,” silent envy in their eyes as they turned to watch office workers, government employees and security guards line the counter inside La Loca for medialunas baked in the wood-burning oven. As the first city bus heaved out of the nearby station, the bells of the cathedral began to toll and the rest of the capital struggled to consciousness.

  Rubén unlocked the cathedral door, genuflecting into the darkness, then flicked on the light switches. Candelabras above the altar cast a golden light. He completed the preparations for mass, then as he waited for the devout, paced the marble floor in and out of the blue reflections from the stained-glass window above the chancel where the Virgin stood with outstretched arms, her palms turned heavenwards, a gesture that Rubén wished would inform his own attitude, an open-mindedness that he had to struggle to maintain, especially in this parish. The cathedral’s lavish interior dome and elaborate fixtures struck him as painfully ostentatious, more representative of Luscano’s oligarchy than of the congregants who occupied the pews on weekday mornings.

  Rubén delivered his mass alone. He did not see the necessity of altar boys and assistants. Older priests performed the well-attended masses and the bishop presided on Sundays, allowing Rubén to focus on his true vocation, the music and choirs. He kept the ceremony tight, as free of dogma as he could get away with. Two widows stopped to shake his hand after the mass. Then he waited inside the confessional for the requisite fifteen minutes. Just as he was about to leave, someone entered the booth. A man his age, definitely not one of the shoeshine crew coming to confess a wallet lifted or a scam perpetrated on a tourist. No, this man spoke an educated language, something about betraying his father and courage and theft and where to hide los archivos, for he was in deep trouble. Through the grille, Rubén made out the glint of a gold watch, a white shirt and blond hair. He recommended coming clean, facing the victim, talking it out. “Impossible.” He told the fellow to think about it, then prescribed some Hail Marys and Our Fathers. And that should have been the end of it, but the man lingered in the confessional. Rubén asked, “Should we pray together?” But the fellow said nothing. Finally, he left and one of the widows took his place. “Forgive me, Padre, for I have sinned,” to which
he would have liked to reply, “Who hasn’t?”

  Ernesto did not feel cleansed as he got into his car but at least he’d figured out what to do next. The morbid chill inside the cathedral, the lingering incense and the grave authority of the priest’s voice all prompted ritual, death and then, eureka! The cemetery.

  He drove away from the plaza, up Avenida Primero de Abríl into the anonymity of dense morning traffic. The cemetery was a gamble. He didn’t know whether Gabriel Seil still ran the place and tried to recall how many years had passed since he last saw the guy. An asado at the house, he decided. Gabriel had arrived seeking information on his brother and they’d smoked cigars in the old man’s study. Ernesto had endured Gabriel’s angry staring through the smoke of the cohibas. Months later, after he’d heard about forensic teams digging up remains from mass graves, he’d thought of phoning Gabriel but never did. Their meeting had opened his mind, a process of awakening that had led to this. Grand theft, conspiracy, treason. Betraying his father was like betraying the country. No, it was quite the opposite. He was no longer a traitor. It was over. For the first time in his thirty-nine years, he’d done something that made sense to himself. Removing the files just as the muchacha made for the stairs with the glass of juice, an unfailing Sunday ritual. The old man, out of some twisted loyalty to his first wife, had never bothered to change the combination on the safe.

  Since stealing the box of files, his plans had unfurled smoothly enough. Dr. Molino had agreed to meet him in two days. All Ernesto had to do was leave the files in a safe place until then, keep a low profile and hope his father wouldn’t notice the missing files. If he found out, it was game over. But it was game over anyway. He had nothing to lose. With a sense of euphoria, Ernesto turned into the Cementerio Real and waited for someone to unlock the gates.