Behold Things Beautiful Page 6

  When he was out of sight of the school, Flaco floored the accelator. He sped back to the capital. The sea was less placid now, with churning waves and whitecaps. A lone windsurfer crossed into the bay. Flaco raced him until the traffic thickened, obliging him to keep his eyes on the curving road, alert to oncoming trucks heading down towards Uruguay. He pushed La Vieja as fast as she would go until he reached the city. The traffic slowed on the bridge over the river. To his left lay La Cuarenta, an abandoned blight in the morning’s lemony sun. There on the dusty space that was once the prison yard the sculpture would stand. Luis Corva had promised his installation would shock.

  Gabriel paced at the window while keeping an eye on the gravel road. The jacaranda was sparser this time of year, allowing more light into the office and a clearer view outside. In the distance, the tractor was idling by a newly dug grave. Castillo was loading a trailer with the exact amount of soil that would not be needed, displaced by the casket once it was lowered into the narrow trench. It was a calculation that Gabriel deemed miraculous. If only he could anticipate things with such precision. There’d be no shocks or surprises, no Aude in and out of his life. It was the unknown that had him pacing, unable to concentrate on the preparations for this afternoon’s burial.

  Gabriel had not slept the previous night, trying to guess where Ernesto had found the files and where he was planning to take them. It seemed impossible to hand evidence back to someone so fundamentally untrustworthy. His mother would know what to do. She had never given up on her efforts to have an accounting for the junta’s abuses. But calling her now would implicate her and that seemed as cowardly as his past inaction.

  Finally, the black convertible swerved over the hill in a cloud of dust. Ernesto parked and hurried into the building. The screen door opened and closed, his footsteps approached the office. Gabriel sat down on the chair behind his desk as if guarding the locked filing cabinet behind him.

  “There was an accident, Gabi. The traffic was horrendous.” Ernesto hadn’t shaved, wore the same shirt, less the tie, he’d been wearing when he brought the box. The blond hair no longer lay neatly blow-dried across his forehead.

  “You want a coffee?”

  “No time.” Ernesto stood by the desk, shifting his feet. “I’ll take the box and leave.”

  “Sit down for a minute.” Gabriel took his time lighting a cigarette. “You owe me this. Where are you — ”

  “The less you know the better.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “It’s for your own good, I swear.” Ernesto sat on the edge of the desk and rubbed his hands over his creased pant legs. “If it comes out I stole them from my father’s safe…my God, I’ll be in the deepest shit.”

  Gabriel forced himself not to react. “Tell me where you’re taking the files.”

  “The university.”

  And slowly Gabriel extracted the information, not by throttling the guy’s neck as he would have liked, but by wrapping himself in the cloak of his cemetery administrator persona, absorbing the distress of the person across from him and returning an emotionless calm. He learned that Ernesto was meeting one Federico Molino, a professor who’d organized a conference last year on the legacy of the junta’s dirty deeds. Gabriel recognized the last name, another old Luscanan family. It was not reassuring. “How do you know you can trust him?”

  “He’s the only contact I’ve got.”

  Gabriel looked through the window at the jacaranda, its halo of leaves lit by the morning sun. The powerful trunk gave him strength, but in tasks usually disassociated from himself, comforting the bereaved or planning a burial. He tried to adopt the same detachment now. The only alternative was to accompany Ernesto to the university. If this professor seemed suspect, he’d make Ernesto bring the files back here. In the meantime, he had the photocopy of the ledger.

  Ernesto pushed his hair off his forehead. The Rolex on his wrist caught the sun from the window and the gold gleamed of complacence. Gabriel knew that he and Ernesto were stepping towards the trench they’d long avoided.

  Flaco scratched his chin. The pair sat across the desk from him, a box on the floor between them. When they’d entered the office, he’d assumed the intense fellow in the sombre suit had to be Ernesto Pindalo. But it turned out he was Gabriel Seil, manager of the Cementerio Real. Ernesto was the fair-haired one, agitated, his clothes creased as if he’d spent the night sleeping in an alley. Flaco now remembered the blond beauty living next door to his grandmother’s house in Barrio Norte. He’d spied on her through the trees while she sunbathed in her bikini by the Pindalo pool. She must have been Ernesto’s mother, the one killed in a suspicious helicopter accident in Brazil. The other fellow, a few years older, smoked a cigarette, regarding Flaco with a morose stare.

  Ernesto fidgeted, waiting for Flaco to speak, as if this meeting were commonplace and he’d know what to say or do. They couldn’t sit here all day, so Flaco asked, “This box, what’s in it?”

  Ernesto rubbed his hands on the thighs of his wrinkled khakis.

  Gabriel spoke. “Tell him.”

  “Military papers…and documents.”

  Silence until Gabriel prompted, “What kind of documents?”

  “Supplies, orders, a log of some sort with names, dates…I think they might be of help.”

  “For what?” Flaco asked.

  “You know, investigating…the military, the disappeared…all that.”

  “You’ve heard of Lalo Martín?”

  Ernesto nodded. “We were in law school together.”

  “Why not bring him the files? He’s running the investigation. He’s got a mandate from Congress to — ”

  “That’s the problem. He’s got judicial powers to issue subpoenas. I’d have to say where I found the files and…” Ernesto clasped and unclasped his hands.

  “Then what?” Gabriel asked, exhaling a ring of cigarette smoke.

  “I’m as good as… Never mind. Please, I’ve got two young children.”

  Flaco’s gut told him the fellow’s fear was real, something to do with the father perhaps. He felt a tightening around his heart. After the elections, the military had scrupulously destroyed all documents. But he’d always believed that something incriminating somewhere had survived. Running an operation on that scale, terrorizing a population so efficiently, eliminating dissent with such precision required documentation, and the military was, in the end, a bureaucracy. It bothered him, Ernesto’s back-door approach, his presumptive arrogance of dumping the evidence on Flaco. “Why are you doing this?”

  Gabriel prodded Ernesto’s foot with his loafer. “Tell him.”

  Ernesto shrank into himself.

  There was a knock on the door and a young woman peered in. “Doctor Molino, some students want to see you.”

  “I’m busy, Sara. Ask them to wait.” The door closed.

  Staring at his hands, Ernesto spoke, his voice so low Flaco had to lean in to catch the words. “When I first found the files…a few months ago…I thought of going to a journalist…but you know…they get harassed or murdered if they publish anything incriminating the military — ”

  “Or lawyers. Or bankers,” Gabriel added. “All Barrio Norte untouchables.”

  The sarcasm didn’t help. Ernesto stood up unsteadily. “This is as far as I go.”

  “Sit down.” Gabriel yanked Ernesto’s sleeve. Ernesto stopped but didn’t sit.

  Flaco couldn’t allow a fight in his office. He promised to look at the files and decide whether to pass them on to Lalo Martín. “It depends on what’s in them and where you found them. Were they removed from army property? Because the military’s lawyers could argue that they were stolen and discredit any — ”

  “I didn’t take them from army property.”

  “If the Special Prosecutor wants to use them as evidence, he’ll have to prove their authenticity. He
may ask you to testify.”

  “Can’t you just say you found them in a garbage dump somewhere? Or that an anonymous source provided them?”

  The questions eroded Flaco’s empathy, the lies of convenience so typical of the oligarchy’s thinking. “The whole point of Lalo Martín’s assignment is to uncover the truth.”

  Ernesto backed out of the office. The door opened to the sounds of students milling the hallway and closed again.

  “How do you know him?” Flaco asked.

  “He was a university friend of Roberto, my brother. Out of nowhere, Ernesto showed up at the cemetery and asked me to store the box in my office.”

  The whole thing was perplexing, the two types showing up at his office, one half-deranged, the other a professional dealing with death.

  “What are you going to do with the files?”

  “Exactly what I told Ernesto.” Flaco glanced at his watch. There was only so much of the university’s time he could devote to his work for the disappeared. Plus he needed to see Alma before his afternoon lecture. This meeting, the box of files, Alma’s return, they were like passages in a labyrinth. Which ones were dead ends? Lalo Martín had once described his work as a convoluted process driven by bizarre coincidences and fateful discoveries.

  “Keep them locked up in the meantime,” Gabriel said.

  “You’ve read them?”

  Gabriel stared noncommittally at the bookshelf behind Flaco. “Did you lose someone?”

  “Too many friends.”

  “You don’t give up? I mean, it’s been years — ”

  “My students. How can I teach them and ignore what happened?” He’d been asked the question so often the words came out perfunctorily. “I can only influence this generation if my actions support my words.”

  “So they’re like clay?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Then they live their lives until they come to the cemetery where they’re transformed back into clay.”

  “Maybe the soil’s a little less toxic with each new batch?” Flaco decided he trusted the fellow and hoped to God his instincts were on track, that he hadn’t been scammed.

  “Does it work? Do they adopt your zeal?”

  “They’re engaged in alternate ways. Disrupting free trade negotiations, exposing polluters, abolishing bullfighting, those are the issues they care about. They can’t quite fathom what happened here during the junta.” Flaco looked around, trying to figure out where to store the box. His cabinets were already jammed. “Do you know where Ernesto got the files?”

  Gabriel rose and walked to the window, looking outside as if searching for the answer. “Sometimes blood isn’t thicker than water.”

  Flaco refused to consider the dangers of taking on Patrón Pindalo. “Listen, if you’re not doing anything tomorrow night, come to El Barco in the old port around nine.” Someone in the crowd might know this Gabriel and vouch for him. Flaco reminded himself to call the restaurant to ensure a room large enough for his party. He couldn’t seem to stop inviting people.

  “I was grilled in this office once on Don Quixote. You still teach Cervantes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Something about you.” Gabriel opened the door and addressed the busy hallway, “The errant knight.”

  A student slipped past him into the dean’s office. “Dr. Molino, I have a question about the paper on the modernistas?”

  Gabriel navigated the crowds and hurried down the stairs. He’d recognized Flaco immediately as the talkative fellow who’d been with Alma at La Loca a few nights ago. But it was the bookshelf behind the desk that made him trust the guy. There, in full view, was a long row of books banned by the junta, a reminder, perhaps a prop Flaco showed his students.

  Outside, noonday traffic inched across the bridge. No point in flagging a taxi back to the cemetery, better to bypass the congestion on foot. He had to admire Flaco, the young women lining up to see him, the book-filled office and mostly his apparent fearlessness. With a professor like that, he might have turned out differently, instead of marking his days at the Cementerio Real, receiving widows and arranging burials. But after years of standing behind the counter in the bookstore, he’d been seduced by the mahogany desk and the salary paid in U.S. dollars.

  As he waited at a stoplight, Gabriel noticed a blond-haired figure lying in the grass under a willow tree. Ernesto Pindalo. Let him brood or sleep or whatever the hell he’s doing, he decided. Ernesto had plenty on his conscience. Gabriel crossed the street. It nagged him, though, seeing Ernesto collapsed on the ground. The compassionate thing to do would be to go over and talk to him. But really, their business was finished. What more was there to say? It had been obvious in Flaco’s office that Ernesto didn’t want to talk.

  On the far side of the river, the bunker crouched in a dusty field. And it struck Gabriel that if a ledger existed recording all those detained by the junta at La Cuarenta, there must be another list naming the prisoners who’d been loaded on trucks at night and brought to fields further up the road. He’d heard they’d been given shovels to dig their own graves. Dodging the traffic, Gabriel couldn’t fathom how someone as shallow as Ernesto got to live, while others, like Roberto, in every way his antithesis, had been tortured and killed.

  As he drove to Alma’s house, Flaco rehearsed his speech. It had to be compelling and quick, his lecture was in an hour. He formed phrases, “it’s our last chance” and “we’re counting on you” and rejected them immediately. Too pat, clichéd. He smacked the steering wheel. Hijo de puta, how can I convince her? Quote Neruda. Maybe we still have time / to be and to be just. No, too condescending, she’s not a student.

  Alma opened the door, barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her hair in a pony tail. He stooped to kiss her. She looked younger, distinct from the lecturer in a suit for whom he’d practised his speech, more like the student who’d handed him a poem those years ago, a gesture with terrible consequences. But she seemed pleased to see him and led him to the courtyard. Hannelore, she said, was sleeping, Xenia at her bedside. It had been another bad night.

  Alma went to the kitchen to get some coffee while Flaco waited in a wicker chair. He felt at home here in the courtyard where he’d once played Che Guevara. The part had empowered him at a time when his father’s gambling was pulling the Molinos into ruin. There were moments with his students, his children and here with Alma when he felt he was acting, playing someone more competent and assured than he really was.

  Alma brought him a cup of coffee and sat down, crossing her legs. A rip in her jeans just above the knee flashed a half moon of skin. She mentioned her laptop and it took him some seconds to realize she was asking for advice. Then she spoke of her mother. “Yesterday Hannelore gave me her instructions for the funeral, where to find her will and papers. Our conversations tend to be morbid.” Suffering shaded her eyes. Flaco recognized that state, duty conflicting with self-preservation. Alma had never accompanied a loved one on their deathbed as he had. The difference was his ever-present circle of brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and, although he complained about their interference, it struck him now that he’d never had to endure anything as entirely alone as Alma. At least the Bolivian was around.

  Flaco sipped the coffee, wishing it were alcoholic and numbing. At the first opportunity, he leaned forward, the wicker creaking under his weight. “You’re still coming to my birthday party?”

  Alma nodded.

  “You’re going to meet some people… I want to prepare you. Things are going on that you should be aware of.”

  “What things?” Alma studied the sky. “Look, see that bird? Every time I come out here, there’s a carancho circling overhead. As if it’s warning me.”

  “It’s looking for food. Don’t read too much into it.”

  With her head tilted back, her lips parted, her profile was graceful but vulnerable, too. Flaco wished
he could deliver some cheer but forced himself to talk and talk, like a salesman closing a deal. Beginning with some hackneyed gibberish about dealing with the past, he talked of the future, how it will always be poisoned if Luscano doesn’t face up to what happened. He cringed at his words, the very clichés he’d sought to avoid.

  Alma drew her knees to her chest, propping her chin just above the rip in her jeans, staring quizzically at him.

  Flaco veered into politics, explaining that Stroppo, nearing the end of his second term as president, wanted to leave things clear for another victory for his party in 2005. With the drought and spill-off from Argentina’s collapse in 2001, the mad cow embargo and continuous strikes, the economy was faltering. “Stroppo’s scrambling to divert attention and appease. Congress has managed to renew the military’s image and get the Americans to reinstate aid by sending a platoon to Iraq, young recruits from the countryside.

  “The promise to investigate the disappeared, repeatedly made and broken, has resulted in the appointment of a Special Prosecutor, Lalo Martín, a lawyer with good intentions for once.”

  Alma tensed. He’d feared silence or, worse, that she’d tell him to leave. He plowed on. “Lalo’s mandate is to indict, name names, not only of those responsible but also of the victims. There’s no record of the disappeared and abducted. It’s his job to lay it all out in a report, what the junta did, based on evidence collected from witnesses.”

  Alma gave him an icy stare. “I’ve been here less than a week and — ”

  “Those who survived left.” He chose his words carefully. “You’re the only person in Luscano…we know of…held in La Cuarenta at the time.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Consider it. Maybe you remember the guards or the — ”