Behold Things Beautiful Page 5

  “With the right contacts.” Hannelore shrugged, “You know Luscano. He helped me because years before I’d tutored his daughter. It was all very sad. The mother, Pindalo’s first wife, was killed in a helicopter accident. Little Celeste Pindalo was a mess, couldn’t study, wouldn’t eat. I helped her through that school year, Xenia fed her and somehow she pulled through.”

  Alma tried to single her out from the mental parade of children tutored by Hannelore. “Why did you wait so long to tell me?”

  “Why did you wait so long to come back?”

  The questions hung between them in a noxious silence until Xenia bustled into the living room. “It’s time, Señora, for your pills.”

  Hannelore fixed her green eyes on Alma. “I want you to go visit your father’s grave and, while you’re at it, check out my spot right next to his.”

  Alma walked to her bedroom, shut the door and sat on the bed. Through the wall she detected Xenia’s murmuring, the sound of drapes being pulled. She felt adrift and depleted. For all her fragility, Hannelore retained the power to wound. Alma could not lash back; it was unfair. But searching her memory, through all the adolescent spats and scenes that had been necessary to establish her identity as distinct from her mother’s, Alma knew she’d never really taken on Hannelore directly. And now, at thirty-six, how could she spew venom at her dying mother?

  Before leaving the house, Alma checked her laptop, as if by miracle she’d discover messages from Montréal. She’d have to find out from Flaco how to go about getting an Internet connection at the very least. She needed to talk to someone, a friend, outside of this world of illness and old age. Her friends in Montréal wouldn’t understand. But Roma would. Alma toyed with the idea of going to the bookstore instead of the cemetery.

  Outside, the street was quiet. It was siesta time and the shutters on neighbouring houses were drawn. Once she left the shade of the jacaranda, she noticed the sky, a colour that could only be described as Luscano blue. What made it so incredibly vivid, the thinner air, the salt breeze?

  When she reached Avenida Reconquista, she considered walking downtown for a visit with Roma. Cursing her sense of duty, Alma turned northwards, proceeding past the shuttered shops. Xenia had told her to take the bus, but she needed the exercise, needed to walk off the frustration Hannelore managed to inflame.

  The stationery store where she used to buy her notebooks and pens still existed, as well as the newspaper vendor and wine store. The shoe repair shop had been replaced by a cell phone supplier, the fruit store by a supermarket.

  The cinema was open for the afternoon’s first showing of Las Horas, the movie she’d seen on the plane. Before she’d left, it had taken months for foreign films to open in Luscano. On the next block, in an abandoned shop entrance, a group of kids were break-dancing beside a boom box blaring hip hop, the fast rhythm as catchy as a merengue. A few bystanders watched, tapping their feet, moving to the music as the kids practiced their moves and back flips. At first Alma thought the lyrics were in English until the chorus’s third repetition, “¡No puedo, no puedo, no puedo más!” Angry resistance in the drumbeats and words, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t anymore!” and the type of music that had once been banned from Radio Luscano. “Best group in Luscano,” a girl next to her said, “they call themselves Los Desaparecidos.”

  Alma tried to fathom how a band could pick such a loaded name, The Disappeared. Either they were deeply cynical or nihilistic. Nonetheless she found herself moving to the rhythms.

  It was already late in the afternoon by the time Alma made her way up the gravel road to Cementerio Real. Facing the gates was a snack bar advertising empanadas and Coca Cola Lite. Xenia had told her to enquire in the stone cottage at the top of the hill for the location of her father’s grave. She climbed the hill until it crested to a view of fields with tombs and graves and came to a stop under the immense jacaranda that shaded the cottage. From somewhere inside the building there was a faint rummaging sound. She clapped her hands but there was no response so she opened the screen door and stepped inside the narrow hallway. Beyond the kitchen to her left was a closed door. There were whiffs of coffee, cigarette smoke and something indefinable, the smell of grief perhaps.

  Alma knocked on the closed door. Footsteps approached, then the knob turned and a man peered out. After she explained she was looking for a grave, he invited her into his office, introducing himself as Gabriel Seil. He was her age, perhaps a little older, and there was something familiar about his face, the scar on the bridge of his nose, the eyes, intense and grey. The fearful lineup of faces reeled past but she could not find a match. Perhaps he’d attended her lecture. She stated her name and he extracted a file from the cabinet.

  “Álvarez. Right. Hannelore. Your mother? She came by a few months ago. I remember her.” He coughed. “This is a difficult time. We at the cemetery are entirely at your service. Please accept our sincere — ”

  “She’s still alive. It’s my father’s grave I’m looking for.”

  He blushed and laughed quickly. “I’m so sorry.” He looked through papers in the file. “Here we are…Eugen Álvarez, buried in 1993. Before my time.” Gabriel fumbled with a ring of keys, locking the filing cabinet, his office door, the front door to the cottage. “State secrets in there.” That distressed laugh again.

  They crossed through a glorieta and entered an alley of mausoleums adorned with carvings of angels and assorted saints. Here lay the families of Barrio Norte, the plantation owners like Flaco’s ancestors, the Molinos, their names etched on the exterior. Nearby, the Pindalos, a slew of them buried inside a white marble vault. Alma stopped short.

  “Do you know them?” Gabriel asked.

  She shook her head. “Do you?”

  “Not the dead ones.”

  “Patrón Pindalo?”

  “Vaguely. His son, Ernesto…a friend of my brother’s.” Gabriel looked down and kicked a pebble into the shrubs. The keys jangled in his pocket. “There’s a joke in Luscano, ‘el hombre propone, Pindalo dispone.’ Sad but true.” He laughed at his wordplay on ‘man proposes, God disposes.’

  “They’re that important?” Alma asked, reverting to the code used during the junta.

  His grey eyes looked at her intensely. “Caution, always.”

  So. Hannelore was likely telling the plain truth for once.

  They left the alley, walked through another arbour and towards an open field of gravestones standing inert like guardians of death in the afternoon sun. Gabriel broke the silence first. “I think I saw you on the Plaza Federal, a few days ago.”

  Of course! The man behind the newspaper, the one Flaco had said was checking her out. “What a relief. I thought I was going — ”

  “— loca,” he finished her sentence. “This place does that to you.” Alma couldn’t tell if he meant the cemetery or Luscano. The gentleness of his self-deprecation felt like a salve after spending the day with Hannelore. He pointed towards a granite tombstone in the shade of a pomegranate tree. “That’s it over there. The gates don’t close until sundown, so take your time.”

  Gabriel left her and walked along the path. Once he’d crossed the field, he glanced back. Her shoulders lifted inside the white shirt, the lightest strands of her hair catching the sunlight. If that was her stance in grief, she was containing her sadness admirably. Gabriel had witnessed all the variations, from sobbing and falling to the ground to cold disbelief.

  He returned to his office, smoked a cigarette while staring out the window, embarrassed by how inept he’d been assuming Alma’s mother had died. All the years working at the cemetery, he still stumbled when obliged to confront harsh realities. She’d caught him off guard. Alma. A good name, spiritual but not overtly religious. There was a soft rhythm to the two syllables, unlike “Aude,” a door slamming in his face. He resented that comparisons came to mind every time he met a woman. “You’re on the rebound from t
hat Estonian,” his sister had said when he’d confessed the habit. “I’m on the rebound from death,” he’d answered. “It’s an occupational hazard.” No wonder its inverse, life, had him jabbing and reeling, a pathetic shadow boxer.

  He stubbed out the cigarette and retrieved the box from the filing cabinet. What an idiot, Ernesto, for assuming he’d store the files sight unseen. Gabriel had spent the last days examining the military orders, lists of supplies, most typed and stamped, initialled by the chain of command. Nothing overtly damning until he’d opened a worn black-bound ledger. Pages and pages of columns, names with dates ranging from 1989 to 1991, in various forms of handwriting, some quasi-illiterate. The label on the cover page gave the contents away, 40 Calle Dominicana, the riverside prison known by its address, La Cuarenta. The truth of it chilled.

  Gabriel took the ledger to a storage room where the photocopier stood among coffins, brass stands and velvet cordons. Standing at the photocopier, with its clunk and whirr, its erratic flashes of light he copied one page at a time. Some of the entries were in pencil and he had to ensure that every name and date was legible.

  The room darkened as the sun dropped west, and through the oval window, Gabriel spotted Alma leaving the cemetery. He watched her back recede downhill until it was no longer visible. The family name common. Alma, less so. The two together in the ledger’s entry, “Alma Álvarez,” alongside “6/01/1991, 21:16” narrowed the odds.

  6

  On Thursday morning, Flaco got into the Fiat to clear his mind. He had slept badly, trying to imagine what Ernesto Pindalo wanted from him. Flaco drove from his campus flat down into the old city near the port, weaving in and out of the traffic. He loved the luxury of letting La Vieja deliver him and his chaotic thoughts to spontaneous locations. Swerving past pickup trucks parked along the entrance to the market, he narrowly missed an empanada stand on wheels pushed by a boy his son’s age. His brakes squealed like an ornery hog and the crowds turned to look, including a familiar figure on the opposite side of the street.

  La Vieja handled the U-turn to perfection and Flaco shouted the lawyer’s name through the open window. Lalo Martín walked over and stooped to greet him. In his belted gabardine jacket the lawyer resembled a colonialist railway inspector, but Flaco resisted teasing him, did not want to malign the one person in Luscano who deserved his support. Flaco asked how the work was going, noting the dark rings under Lalo’s eyes.

  “We’re taking testimony today from a lieutenant, one of Galtí’s cronies. I’m hoping he’ll break. So far, most are pleading Nuremberg: ‘We were just following orders.’”

  “I got a call from Ernesto Pindalo, claims he’s got some documents. I’m seeing him at my office this morning. I can’t figure out why he didn’t contact you.”

  “He’s probably scared, like all the others.”

  Flaco could not bear the resignation in the Special Prosecutor’s voice. “My friend’s back, the one I told you about.”

  “When’s she coming to see me? If I don’t produce some hard evidence soon, they’ll cut me off.”

  Flaco promised she’d be at his birthday party. “You’ll meet her tomorrow night.” He swerved back into traffic and watched in his rearview mirror as Lalo’s creased beige figure plodded uphill. He had to admire Lalo Martín, commuting to work alone on foot so the office could direct scant resources to the real work. Any other lawyer — and there had been others named to similar jobs in the Ministry of Justice — would be seated in the back of a bulletproof vehicle with an armed chauffeur for protection.

  Flaco drummed the steering wheel. He’d have to speak to Alma, didn’t relish the pressure he’d have to apply, especially given her mother’s illness. He hadn’t factored that in when he’d planned his deceit, luring her back to Luscano on the pretext of the lecture. Hijo de puta, why did I even mention her to Lalo? Then he immediately retracted the thought.

  Leaving the city limits, Flaco heard the distant clanging of the cathedral bells. Against his will, the memory of his first wedding resurfaced. Such misguided elation he’d felt, emerging from the cathedral alongside the eighteen-year-old Ana, daughter of his grandmother’s maid, as they ducked the handfuls of rice tossed by their families. Even his grandmother had joined in, flinging the surprisingly hard grains into his face. She’d come to the wedding despite her threats to disown Flaco. She’d been right for the wrong reasons and sometimes, on her behalf, he regretted that she’d died before the marriage had fractured, robbing her of the satisfaction of throwing failure in his face. That wedding had been nothing but a pent-up act of rebellion fuelled by lust. He dismissed the memory — eleven years ago and what the hell can I do about it now? — as the ringing receded from the carillon in the spire.

  Whatever horrors played out in Luscano, he realized, there were always those ringing bells. The country’s single consistency. The bells marked Luscano’s rituals from its beginnings in 1895. Armed caudillos led by his great-grandfather chased the Spaniards back to their ships for good. “Bravery begets brutality,” Flaco reminded his students. Invoking Lorca, he’d warn them about the dangers of too much spilled blood, boding badly as in a bullfight. Privately, he conceded that the curse of history was easily overlooked in the theatre of daily life, scraping for pesos, prevailing through breakdowns and deaths, caring for children and ex-wives. So few had the time or inclination to dwell on what future was possible when the gains of the past were won so dishonourably. Lalo Martín, me and a handful of others…maybe Alma.

  Flaco picked up speed on the seaside highway leading down to Uruguay. The absence of vehicles on the road this early allowed him to enjoy the views. To his left, the vast expanse of sea glittered in hues of blue and green. To his right, the cliffs of clay so fertile, small trees and shrubs emerged from the crevices. He was tempted to drive on towards the sculptor’s studio, but Luis Corva was rarely up before midday. Instead, he soon veered onto a mottled road leading inland towards his grandmother’s plantation.

  Through the alley of cypresses, La Vieja jostled over the dirt road, past the fields of soya. Everything looked parched, dusty and more than a little rundown. He parked at the back of the house and entered the screen door to the kitchen.

  “Papa! I knew you were coming today! Didn’t I tell you?” Armonía asked her brother. The children left imprints of jam and hot chocolate on his shirt, but no matter. Flaco poured himself a coffee and sat down at the table. Their joy at seeing him was well worth the risks of exposing himself to his brother’s admonitions and his ex-wife’s demands.

  “Where’s the beautiful witch?”

  “She’s sleeping.” Armonía giggled. “That’s not what you’re supposed to call Mama.”

  “Better than ugly witch, don’t you think?”

  Fredo came to his side. “I don’t feel like going to school. Let’s go riding, eh, Papa? We’ve got some new polo ponies in the stable.”

  Eduardo appeared in the doorway. Flaco rose to embrace him, a gesture that required extra effort for this brother in particular. He asked Flaco to drive the children to school. “You have to stop in and talk to Fredo’s teacher. He’s been getting into fights.”

  Flaco studied the eleven-year-old. Fredo played football and rode horses but was not the aggressive type.

  “Fredo beat the hell out of a boy in his class,” Armonía said.

  “He insulted my parents. I had no choice.”

  “You always have a choice and fighting’s never the right one. So what did he say?” Flaco was not surprised. For years, Ana had been the subject of whispered derision, a muchacha’s daughter taking advantage of the Molinos, her string of lovers coming and going from this house.

  “He said you’re a troublemaker!”

  Flaco laughed. “That’s nothing new.”

  Leaning against the doorway, Eduardo crossed his thick arms over his chest. “It’s not funny, Flaco. People are talking about you messing arou
nd with the past. This business with the prosecutor’s office, he’s paying for it,” he said, nodding at Fredo.

  Flaco grabbed a piece of bread and chewed to compose himself. “I’m sorry, son. I’ll talk to the teacher. Go get your books. We leave in two minutes.” There was no point in asking how Eduardo knew about his activities. This brother, retired with distinction from the military, now ran a security firm, a lucrative operation that paid the taxes on the estate and kept the plumbing going. All Eduardo’s employees, subcontracted to guard the banks, offices, museums and even the port, were ex-military men who gathered over whiskies to play cards and trade gossip. Eduardo knew everything going on in Luscano, above and below board, but loyalty to the family came first. Once the children had left the dining room, Flaco said, “You didn’t have to spell it out like that.”

  “What else do you want me to say? You’ve told me never to lie to — ”

  “How about defending me?”

  “I do all the time.”

  True enough. “So you’ve got some new horses.”

  “Yeah, we’re boarding Patrón Pindalo’s polo ponies. It’s good money. I’ve hired another stable hand. Soon we’ll be able to repair the stalls.”

  Flaco considered asking his brother about Ernesto Pindalo but he didn’t want more trouble. He helped Fredo with his knapsack, called to Armonía to hurry up in the hope that his shouting would rouse Ana. A proper mother would say good-bye to her kids before they left for school. Then again, he was not much of a father himself. Eduardo took care of them more than Flaco did, let them live in the house, treated Ana with kindness and paid the employees on time.

  The village school was a short drive from the plantation. As soon as Flaco stopped the car, Armonía and Fredo scrambled out and hurried to the courtyard to find their friends. Flaco entered the school for a brief conference with the teacher. All his resolve at taking her on fizzled with her opening remark. “Doctor Molino,” the prim woman, possibly a nun, began, “I know you abhor violence as much as I do.” Of course he had to agree, telling her that Fredo had been duly cautioned. “It shouldn’t happen again,” he promised.