Kamchatka Read online

  She must have felt terribly alone.

  15

  WHAT I KNEW

  When you’re a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child’s universe is a space that comprises home, school and – possibly – the neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyacá and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond this area were when we went on holiday (to Córdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents’ farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires.

  We get our first glimpses of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)

  Given my circumstances, I had a much greater formal experience of politics than children my age in other times and places. My parents had grown up under other dictatorships, and the name of General Onganía came up in stories throughout my childhood. Would I have been capable of identifying this bogeyman? My parents called him La Morsa (The Walrus) so I associated him with that crazy song by the Beatles. I had gleaned all the essential details from a quick glance at a photograph: he had a peaked cap, a huge moustache; you could tell from his face that he was a bad guy.

  I remember that, at first, I loved Perón because my parents loved Perón. Every time they mentioned El Viejo (The Old Man) there was music in their voices. Even mamá’s mother, my abuela Matilde, who was a snooty reactionary, gave Perón the benefit of the doubt because, as she put it, why would the Old Man return from exile in Spain at the age of seventy-something unless he was motivated by a desire to put things right? But something must have happened, because the music changed, became more hesitant and then more melancholy. Then Perón died. The rest was silence.

  (Around about this time, grandpa and grandma went to Europe for the first time and brought us back many souvenirs, including a catalogue of the Prado collection. I used to look through it all the time, but after my first time, I was careful to skip the page depicting Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, because it terrified me. Saturn was a hideous old giant; in his hand he held the body of a little boy whose head he’d already bitten off. I remember thinking that Saturn and Perón were the two oldest people I’d ever seen. For a while, Saturn alternated in my nightmares with the River Plate shirt I got from Tío Rodolfo.)

  After that point, things get confused. There were kidnappings, shootings and bombings. The Old Man’s supporters were among the victims and the victimizers. But there were some people about whom there could be no doubts. ‘Isabelita’, Perón’s widow, spoke in the same high-pitched voice that ventriloquists use for their puppets. López Rega, her right-hand man, looked suspiciously like Ming the Merciless (the bad guy from Flash Gordon) but with shorter fingernails and no beard. Everything else seemed pretty grey to me. When I found out that some trade-union leader called Rucci had been murdered, I was confused. Was I supposed to feel happy or sad? I never worked it out. What was significant was that he had been murdered a few blocks from our house, in the middle of Flores, on a corner near to where I lived. If I hadn’t taken my normal route to school that day, I might easily have walked past it, heard the shots and seen the blood.

  The murder of Rucci hadn’t happened in the big wide world beyond my universe, the world I only got to see when we went on holiday, when I went to the cinema downtown or when I watched television: he had been gunned down in ‘my’ world, the area that stretched from my house to my school. One way or another, I must have realized that evil is no respecter of borders and makes no exceptions for individuals.

  This is politics.

  When the coup d’état came, in 1976, a few days before school term started, I knew straight off that things were going to get ugly. The new president had a peaked cap and a huge moustache; you could tell from his face that he was a bad guy.

  16

  ENTER DAVID VINCENT

  We got to mamá’s friend’s house just in time to watch The Invaders. Her friend sat us in front of the TV and mamá went off to buy milk and Nesquik to appease the Midget.

  The Invaders was our favourite TV show. The hero, an architect named David Vincent, is the only person who knows that aliens have secretly invaded the planet and taken on human form. Obviously no one believes him. How could anyone believe that that fat man over there, or that blonde girl, are aliens when they seem so nice, so ordinary, and when they speak such perfect Spanish? (Like Señorita Barbeito’s documentary, The Invaders was dubbed.) But David Vincent has an ace up his sleeve: he knows that as a result of some design flaw or something, when the aliens take on human form they can’t bend their little fingers, they’re completely rigid. And when you kill one of them, they fall to pieces and disintegrate, leaving nothing but a dark stain on the ground.

  In the 1950s, in the context of the Cold War, paranoid fantasies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers made some sort of sense. Behind the face of every ordinary American, a communist might be lurking, plotting to destroy the very fabric of democracy and replace it with a multitude of automata. But by the 1970s, The Invaders was just a mediocre genre piece with terrible production values and a cast led by the sort of po-faced actor Hollywood usually hired to play Nazis. And yet the theme of The Invaders resonated with the younger section of its audience. Any kid stepping out into the world for the first time could identify with the story of David Vincent, this man who had to study every stranger’s face to work out whether he was friend or foe, his ally or his nemesis.

  Like all the best TV series, The Invaders had implications far beyond the small screen and it leached into our games. The Midget and I were constantly staring at every stranger’s little finger, on the lookout for aliens in disguise. Restaurants proved particularly rewarding hunting grounds, since back then holding your glass or your cup with your little finger sticking out was still considered to be good manners.

  We never imagined that our game might one day turn serious, that one day we really would have to study every face, every little finger on every hand, looking for some sign that might tell us whether we were in the presence of the enemy.

  17

  NIGHT FALLS

  Mamá’s friend was a woman who didn’t much like kids, at least that was how it seemed to me. From the moment she opened the door and peered at us over the security chain, her face bore an expression I interpreted as irritation at our presence. The fact that she was a friend of mamá’s clearly did not mean she had to extend the same courtesy to us; after all, it’s possible to love someone and hate their relatives, like I hated my friend Román’s cousin even though he had the same name as me (my Doppelgänger). As soon as she saw kids, this woman obviously thought about screaming and finger marks all over her white walls, scratches on her floors and sticky marks on every surface. That, at least, was what I thought until night fell and they ordered pizza. Then, given that papá still hadn’t shown up, the friend said, ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’ and showed us into a bedroom that obviously belonged to her own kids, who for some reason weren’t around.

  So this woman obviously didn’t hate kids; she had simply been terrified. But even so, she had invited us into her home. I don’t remember her name and I wouldn’t be able to work out where she lived; I don’t even remember if it was in Buenos Aires or out in the suburbs. All I remember is that it w
as an apartment, that we had to go up in a lift, and that there was a globe on a shelf in the kids’ bedroom with a bulb inside. Sometimes I think I’d like to see her again, or meet her children and tell them about the night that they harboured fugitives in their bedroom. But then I think that things are better as they are, because the people who proved to be heroes back then had no names, and that’s how we should remember them.

  Luckily for mamá, the Midget fell asleep watching TV. They put us in the same bed; the other bed was meant for mamá and papá. I couldn’t imagine how both of them could fit in it, given that me and the Midget barely managed to fit onto the narrow mattress. What was worse, the Midget kept tossing and turning in his sleep, hitting and kicking me.

  I tried to concentrate on the globe. From where I lay, the section of the world I could see seemed strange. I could make out parts of China, Japan and Kamchatka, of course; the Philippines, Indonesia, Micronesia and Oceania and the far side of the Pacific; all of North America and the Pacific coast of South America, where I could make out Chile and the west of Argentina. Since maps always showed North America in the top left corner and Oceania in the bottom right, it took me a moment to recognize the face of the Earth shining down on me. I thought it was some other world, a parallel Earth.

  It was at this point that papá showed up. He seemed in good form, his shirt sleeves were rolled up, his tie loose, his collar unbuttoned. Assuming that we would be asleep, he had clearly only intended to pop his head around the door. When he saw that I was still awake, he smiled but when I opened my mouth he brought a finger to his lips; the Midget’s sleep was sacrosanct.

  ‘He keeps kicking me,’ I said in a whisper.

  ‘I’ll make up a bed for you on the floor if you like,’ he said, whispering too.

  ‘You’re the one who’s going to have to sleep on the floor. If you and mamá get into that bed it’ll collapse!’

  Papá came into the bedroom and closed the door carefully. He nodded in agreement. Our bed creaked as he sat on the edge to give me a kiss.

  ‘Did you get to see it?’ he asked, concerned.

  ‘We got here just in time. But it was a repeat. It was the one where some girl sees the Invaders disintegrate a truck and David Vincent is trying to track down the driver because he stole some file.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that one about three times. So, how is your mother holding up?’

  I made a fist and brought it up to my face, a gesture papá understood immediately.

  ‘The Rock.’

  ‘She wouldn’t even let me call Bertuccio to let him know I wasn’t coming over. And today is Thursday!’

  Finally realizing what day it was, Papá frowned. ‘That wasn’t very fair, but think about it this way: by being here we’re not just protecting ourselves, we’re also protecting Bertuccio.’

  ‘Why? What’s going on?’

  ‘Didn’t mamá tell you?’

  ‘She spent the whole time talking to her friend and every time I went into the kitchen, they changed the subject. But I did hear them saying something about Roberto and the office.’

  Roberto was papá’s partner at the law office on the Calle Talcahuano. He had a son called Ramiro who was the same age as me, but in a class below me at school. Now and then we’d go to their quinta – their country house – in Don Torcuato for a barbecue. It wasn’t like Ramiro was my best friend or anything, but we got along OK.

  ‘Some guys showed up at the office this morning.’

  ‘Soldiers? Policemen?’

  ‘I don’t know. They were obnoxious arseholes. They arrested Roberto and turned the place upside down.’

  ‘Roberto’s in jail? But why? What did he do?’

  ‘He didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Well, why then?’

  Papá shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

  ‘If he didn’t do anything, they’ll have to let him go!’

  ‘I hope so. His family is trying to track him down.’

  ‘What about Ramiro?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘How is he? Where is he?’

  ‘He’s fine, he’s with Laura. I talked to them earlier, they’re fine.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to him now?’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen to him.’

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘We’re going to go away for a few days until things calm down. We’ll be staying in a house down in the country, a quinta.’

  ‘The one near Dorrego?’

  ‘No, it’s near here.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘It’s a quinta with a swimming pool. A quinta with lots of land. A quinta with a mysterious house.’

  ‘Did you go by our house?’

  Papá shook his head. This was how bad things were.

  ‘But we can’t go with just the clothes we’ve got on!’ I protested.

  ‘Whatever we need, we can buy.’

  ‘Well, then, we’ll have to buy a new game of Risk.’

  ‘You fancy losing again?’

  ‘No way, José!’

  ‘I think you’ve got a death wish.’

  I tried to think of a brilliant comeback, a zinger that would hit him like a smack in the mouth, but I was the one who got smacked when the Midget rolled over in his sleep and gave me a right hook.

  18

  SIRENS

  That night I woke up on the thin duvet, which was the only thing separating me from the hard floor, to find that papá, who had been lying next to me when I fell asleep, was not there. The room was still dark. It smelled of sweaty socks.

  Papá and mamá were sitting on the cold floor in a corner of the room. Mamá had raised the blinds a few inches and was peering through the narrow slit, out at the road, barely lit by the glow of the streetlights. She was wearing a nightdress I’d never seen before and she had no shoes on. One of her feet was tap-tap-tapping on the floor. Papá was sitting beside her in T-shirt and boxer shorts, staring at nothing. Dressed like this, or rather undressed, he looked even more like the Midget. The lock of hair plastered to his forehead, the self-absorption. All he needed now was his own Goofy.

  Papá and mamá were huddled together as close as their bodies would allow and yet they looked incredibly distant.

  Then the noise of a siren, far away but clear, broke the silence of the early morning. I don’t know if it was an ambulance or a police car. Papá and mamá reacted as one, suddenly connected again, peering through the blinds as though they could actually see anything in the street but the shadows.

  ‘What’s going on out there?’

  Mamá hushed him.

  A few seconds later, the siren faded as abruptly as it had begun, a calamity that was not part of our world, one that had brushed past, sparing us.

  The silence was transparent and now I could hear again, the tap-tap-tap of mamá’s foot and the sound of breathing, of a heart beating, that I suppose must have been my own.

  In a hushed whisper, papá told mamá to try to sleep for a while, even if it was only a couple of hours, because she would need to be clear-headed in the morning. It was going to be a long day, there was a lot to do and then there was us. ‘We have to try not to spook the boys.’

  Mamá nodded and lit another cigarette. The harder she puffed on the cigarette, the brighter the tip glowed. I thought she’d gone crazy, because she leaned across to the blind and kissed it. Actually, she was just blowing her smoke out through the crack in the window. She didn’t want the room to get full of smoke.

  I felt like getting up and going over to them. Hugging them, saying something stupid, joining their vigil, peering through the blinds and, when the church bells chimed, saying ‘Three o’clock and all is well,’ like they used to when Buenos Aires was still a colony.

  I think I wanted to protect them – for the first time. But I figured papá would probably say the same thing to me he had said to mamá. He’d give me a little lecture on the salutary effects of a good night’s sleep and sen
d me back to my thin eiderdown and my aching bones.

  I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep and in the end I dozed off again.

  Playtime

  * * *

  Can I view thee panting, lying

  On thy stomach, without sighing;

  Can I unmoved see thee dying

  On a log

  Expiring frog!

  Charles Dickens, ‘Ode to an expiring frog’,

  The Pickwick Papers

  Second Period: Geography

  * * *

  Noun. 1. Science concerned with the physical features of the Earth’s crust and as a habitation for man.

  2. The topographical features of a region: ‘The danger extends across the entire geography of Argentina.’

  19

  ‘OURS WAS THE MARSH COUNTRY’

  For centuries, no one wanted to settle the land where Buenos Aires now stands.

  The native peoples turned their backs on it, preferring the green pampas to the insalubrious air of the marshes, this zone that is neither sea nor land, nor anything. When the Conquistadores arrived by sea, the natives attacked them more out of curiosity than anything else and finally left them to their own devices, knowing well how things would turn out for them. Locked up in their fortresses, the Europeans succumbed to plague and starvation until they were finally forced to eat each other. The land on which the city stands retains the memory of these cannibals. I’m not sure whether this was an isolated incident or whether it was a sign of destiny.