Free Novel Read

Kamchatka Page 9


  Those who thought that the crackdown would abide by clear rules, observe defined limits, were mistaken. In early April, papá met up with Sinigaglia, a lawyer friend of his who told him, over a cup of coffee, that he believed things were going to get back to normal. Sinigaglia explained that the military’s natural deference to order and discipline would force them to enact laws to legalize the repression, outlaw paramilitary groups and publish a list of prisoners. Papá thought that Sinigaglia’s view was logical, but even so he advised him not to show his face in the courts at Tribunales. Sinigaglia dismissed his advice. He had been threatened a thousand times before, he said, and he was not about to give up defending political prisoners and applying for writs of habeas corpus. I remember Sinigaglia well. He was a tall man, ramrod straight, with Brylcreemed hair; his old-fashioned taste in suits made him look much older than he was. He always called me pibe (kid). What are you up to, pibe? How are things, pibe? And he’d muss my hair, I suppose because he was fascinated by the unruly shock of hair so unlike his own.

  Sinigaglia was the first to fall. They took him away in an unmarked car. I can imagine him as they pushed and shoved, worrying about creasing his carefully pressed suit and saying to me, see this, pibe? There’s no need for this insolence, it’s completely unnecessary.

  Roberto was the next to go, on a morning when papá was not at the solicitor’s office. If papá had been there, they would have taken him too. Ligia, papá’s secretary, told him that the men who arrested Roberto took him away in an unmarked car. When he asked her to describe the men, Ligia said they were rude. They dragged the poor man away like a common criminal, said Ligia, another disciple of the old school.

  Mamá felt a little safer. The union she headed up at the university described itself as non-aligned. Not only was it not Peronist, it had actively campaigned against Peronism during the elections. Feeling protected by the apolitical nature of her profession, and given her tendency to analyse everything in terms of rational propositions and scientific facts, mamá thought that she would be able to weather the storm without any difficulties.

  But day after day, she heard the same stories about professors and students who had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Some, people said, had been hauled away, and the modus operandi was always the same, plain clothes officers armed to the teeth, in unmarked cars. Others simply disappeared and no one ever heard from them again. Now, roll calls were suddenly filled with the silence of people marked absent.

  For papá and mamá, in those first days of April, the shadows began exactly at the boundaries of the quinta. The image of the desert island which mamá had suggested to make our life here easier now took on a life of its own and began to torment her, just as the wooden Christ had tormented the terrified Marcelino. Beyond the quinta there was nothing but uncertainty – dangerous waters, impenetrable fog. They tried to phone certain people only to discover that the ground had opened and swallowed them up. Sometimes their phone calls went unanswered. Sometimes they were answered, but the voices at the other end of the line denied all knowledge of anything. What information they had was vague and incomplete. The assessments of the situation they heard didn’t square with reality as they saw it. In the midst of this fog, it became increasingly difficult to know what to do, what to expect.

  This was why mamá had gone back to work. She wanted to keep at least one line of communication open so they would know what was going on. In her laboratory, mamá could speak, ask questions, arrange meetings and organize a modest political course of action.

  After a few days, fear began to take its toll on papá, and he too decided to go back to work. The question was what to do with us.

  34

  THE MATILDE PERMUTATION

  One Saturday we set off with mamá to fetch grandma Matilde. The official story was that she was coming to spend the weekend with us and we would drive her home on Sunday evening. We didn’t know, and nor did grandma, that the whole thing was a secret mission. Papá and mamá were testing us. They wanted to find out whether grandma could survive living in the same house with us. Had we been told what they were planning, we would have pointed out that it was just as dangerous, maybe more dangerous, to leave us to the tender mercies of grandma.

  Grandma Matilde was one of those people who believed that her responsibilities as a parent lapsed on the day her children left home. In all the photos from mamá’s wedding, she looks radiant under her big hat, but while everyone else in the photos is looking at the camera, grandma looks as though she is at her own private party. From that day on, grandma spent her time travelling the world, playing canasta with her friends, and getting involved in whatever charity event happened to come her way.

  Once I read a Mafalda comic where Susanita – the little girl who’s obsessed with finding a good husband, getting married and having a traditional family – explains one of her dreams of the future. In the dream, she’s at a tea party with other posh women with fancy pastries and things. It’s a charity event to raise money to buy polenta, rice ‘and all that horrible garbage poor people eat’. I remember showing the comic to mamá and saying, ‘Look, it’s grandma Matilde when she was little.’ mamá gave a complicit giggle, but avoided actually saying something that would compromise her, and went back to reading her newspaper. Later on, when she thought she was alone, I heard her giggle as she was chopping onions, and I heard another giggle again as she went up to her bed. I think she probably giggled herself to sleep.

  Grandma Matilde hardly ever phoned. She only ever showed up for our birthdays. Her presence made us all (including papá, obviously) slightly uncomfortable, especially when it came to gifts: we never worked out how to say thank you for the pair of socks or the underpants or the handkerchiefs which represented the full range of her ideas for presents. Whenever we had to go to her house – usually for her birthday – she spent the whole time making sure we didn’t open the piano or ruck the rugs or put our feet up on the Louis-the-Something chairs.

  Just the idea of grandma Matilde travelling in the Citroën made the long journey to and from the quinta worthwhile. Grandma said she’d prefer to hire a private car, but mamá said that was impossible, that she couldn’t give grandma the address of the quinta for security reasons. Predictably, grandma was peeved. ‘You don’t even trust your own mother,’ she protested. Mamá told her it wasn’t about trust, it was about security; by not giving her the address she was protecting her. In the face of such a demonstration of filial love, anyone else might have surrendered, but this was grandma Matilde, so the battle was only just beginning. ‘You don’t trust my chauffeur?’ she argued stubbornly. ‘I’ve been using the same chauffeur for years!’

  Grandma always stank of face cream and hairspray. She never went anywhere without jars of gunk and a huge black can of hairspray in her handbag. (I owe this information to the Midget.) When mamá suggested she put a headband over her eyes and wear a pair of sunglasses to hide the blindfold, grandma raised the roof. ‘You expect me to ruin this perfect hairdo which, I might add, I had to have done at eight o’clock on Saturday morning since it was the only available appointment?’ (Grandma is the sort of person who goes to the salon to have her hair done even if she’s going out to the country.) In that case, mamá told her, she would have to keep her head between her knees for the whole journey. Grandma immediately agreed to this, thinking that at least this way her hairdo would be spared. Me and the Midget knew better.

  I’m sure that when Houston is training astronauts to withstand changes in gravity, NASA uses an old Citroën. The combination of the car’s bizarre suspension and the springy seats subjects the body to a series of opposing forces which, I imagine, are pretty similar to shifting from gravity to zero gravity every minute. And if the person in the driving seat of the Citroën is impulsive – like mamá for example – the effect is multiplied a thousandfold.

  Grandma had to spend the entire journey – more than an hour – staring at her shoes as she was buffeted from side to side, and
thrown back against the seat every time mamá braked. It was more than even a veteran sailor could take. Me and the Midget giggled every time mamá brutally twisted the steering wheel, especially if grandma happened to be talking at the time, because her voice would be choked off as if someone was bouncing on her stomach; she sounded like Foghorn Leghorn.

  But we giggled to ourselves, waiting for the inevitable. It came about halfway on the journey back to the quinta, when a truck pulled out of the side street before his light had turned green. Mamá was forced to brake sharply and grandma’s hairdo crashed into the glove compartment.

  Life may not be fair, but it has its moments.

  35

  THE EXPERIMENT FAILS

  Grandma Matilde was not born to Contend with nature. Once we had arrived at the quinta, she did not set foot in the grounds until it was time for her to go home. She couldn’t stand the flies and the ants. She couldn’t stand walking on the grass in her high heels. She couldn’t stand the sun because it would ruin her complexion. She couldn’t stand the toads: even the sound of their croaking made her shudder. To grandma Matilde, the swimming pool might as well have been the river Ganges, dark with ashes and corpses.

  She wasn’t much better inside the house. Grandma announced that the living room looked like a garage sale with cast-off furniture to be sold to the highest bidder. ‘It’s like a gypsy caravan in here,’ she would mutter when she needed to express the full extent of her disgust.

  But papá and mamá were determined to make the experiment work. Papá quickly gave up his place in the double bed and came to sleep in our room. We were thrilled, but for mamá it was a very different experience. Sharing a bed with grandma, with her face covered in gunk, must have been like sleeping next to a block of provolone cheese.

  Worse still, grandma refused to set foot in the kitchen, because, as she saw it, she was a guest and the kitchen is the domain of the hostess. This did not, of course, stop her from commenting on the food mamá put on the table. While grandma was there, the usual dynamics of dinner changed completely. Usually, when mamá served dinner, papá would altruistically take the first bite, as a good husband should; I would mount a passive resistance and the Midget would swallow anything that was put in front of him like a hippopotamus in Hungry Hungry Hippos. But grandma’s presence disrupted everything, resulting in conversations like this:

  ‘What’s this?’ grandma would ask, poking at the brownish stew on her plate with a fork.

  ‘It’s goulash,’ said mamá, a slight tremor in her voice.

  ‘Goulash is a Hungarian dish,’ papá explained, only for grandma to catch me out.

  ‘And do you know what the word “goulash” means in Hungarian?’

  ‘No, grandma.’

  ‘It means warmed-up leftovers!’

  Because although grandma stank of face cream and used too much hairspray, and although she was snobby and scheming, she was also intelligent and refined and she had a tongue like a cat-o’-nine-tails; she invariably stung you in more places than one.

  Papá and mamá did their best to ward off disaster. Whenever it looked as though things might come to a head – when, for example, they allowed grandma to take over the television so that we couldn’t watch The Invaders or cartoons, not even Superpower Saturday – they tried to make it up to us in order to preserve the delicate equilibrium. There were sudden offers to play Risk, promises of new comics and trips to the cinema. They offered us everything they had to hand and anything else was entered into the debit column, but by the time the sun set on Saturday, papá and mamá had frankly run out of credit. There was nothing left in the quinta for them to give us and we were beginning to suspect that a lot of the debts they had already run up would never be paid.

  Then came dinner, and with it, the goulash.

  Shortly afterwards we heard the half-time whistle. The home team retired to the dressing room two-nil down with a sense of impending disaster.

  We said goodnight to mamá almost guiltily. We left her to the mercy of the lions. And of the provolone cheese.

  We had always known that mamá and grandma Matilde didn’t get on, but we had never seen them together over an extended period. At birthday parties, there were always other distractions, at least for us. In this respect, that weekend was a revelation. Mamá was clearly suffering from a Matilde overdose.

  Against all our expectations, mamá turned out to have kryptonite of her own.

  36

  MONSTERS

  It took a long time for us to get to sleep. What with papá having to sleep in our room, me and the Midget having to share a single bed and mamá in the clutches of grandma Matilde, it wasn’t easy to relax. Under cover of darkness, the accusations flew.

  ‘Grandma is unbearable,’ I said. ‘

  You think so?’ papá asked, half-asleep.

  ‘Grandma’s got jars of smelly gunk in her handbag,’ said the Midget, ‘and she sprays Flit in her hair.’

  ‘What if we wait for grandma to fall asleep and bring mamá in here with us?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean the two of you are prepared to venture into the monster’s lair?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as monsters,’ yelped the Midget, shrivelling like a prune behind me.

  ‘There are some monsters I quite like,’ I said. ‘I feel kind of sad for Frankenstein. And Dracula in the old movies is funny. But the Mummy is scary.’

  ‘Which one, Boris Karloff?’

  ‘The one in Titanes en el Ring. Ana took me to see the film and I had to sleep with the light on that night.’

  ‘Turn on the light!’ whined the Midget.

  ‘One time, when we were on holiday in Santa Rosa de Calamuchita, I thought I’d been bitten by a vampire,’ I said. ‘Do you remember me coming to wake you up?’

  ‘I don’t actually.’

  ‘I found a strange mark on my neck, it looked like two bite marks right next to each other. The whole house was dark, everyone was in bed, the wind was howling …’

  ‘Turn the light on!’

  ‘And I went in and I was shaking you and crying “Papá, papá, I think a vampire bit me”.’

  Papá was laughing now.

  ‘And you wouldn’t even listen, I swear …’

  ‘There’s no such thing as monsters!’

  ‘Oh, there is such a thing as monsters,’ said papá, ‘but usually they don’t have fangs or bolts through their necks. A monster isn’t someone who looks like a monster, it’s someone who acts like a monster.’

  ‘López Rega,’ I said.

  ‘For example.’

  ‘Onganía, the Walrus.’

  ‘That’s two.’

  ‘And grandma Matilde.’

  ‘Hold on a minute! Don’t go comparing apples and oranges!’ said papá.

  ‘Grandma’s not a monster, she’s nice!’ the Midget protested.

  ‘There are First Division monsters and then there’s the rest,’ said papá.

  ‘But she’s horrible to mamá,’ I said.

  ‘That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her.’

  ‘You can’t love someone and be horrible to them.’

  ‘That’s not true. Lots of people are horrible to the people they love most.’

  ‘Well, people like that must be crazy.’

  ‘Grandma’s not crazy!’ wailed the Midget. ‘

  I know it doesn’t sound logical, but that’s the way it is,’ said papá. ‘There are people who try to control the people they love, or try to make them feel insecure or inferior or unworthy. They can be very hurtful, but they’re sad people. They’re afraid of being abandoned, they’re afraid of not being loved.’

  ‘Grandma’s afraid mamá will abandon her?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘Well, in that case, she doesn’t know mamá.

  ‘On that point we can agree.’

  ‘Of course grandma knows mamá, stupid!’ yelled the Midget. ‘She carried mamá in her tummy!’

  I asked papá about grandma M
atilde’s life (people usually assume their grandparents were always as old as they are now) and he told me some things. What he told me then, and what I learned when I was living in Kamchatka, I’ll move onto next.

  37

  THE ICE MAIDEN

  On the essentials, all the histories agree: grandma Matilde was not mamá’s mother.

  I’m not denying that she was mamá’s biological mother. As the Midget had pointed out, Matilde had carried mamá in her womb and that was all the labour required for her to earn the title. But the histories point to a more subtle distinction. A woman can conceive, gestate, give birth to and suckle a child; ensure the child is clothed, fed and educated, attend school concerts; she can choose a university, put a roof over the child’s head and walk her down the aisle to the altar that marks the beginning of her adult life. Most women who accomplish these things will, in fact, be fully qualified mothers. It is, however, possible for someone to fulfil all the requirements without showing the slightest enthusiasm. Someone who keeps up appearances for the sake of appearances but without the passion we consider inseparable from the task of motherhood.

  My grandfather was a timid, conscientious man, overshadowed by my grandmother’s histrionics and consumed by the need to accede to her every whim. Everything points to the fact that he lived simply to make money. When he had made a lot of money, he wanted to retire and enjoy it, but my grandmother wouldn’t let him; the very idea seemed to her grossly irresponsible.

  If grandpa felt any affection for his wife, he suppressed it, because grandma didn’t believe displays of affection had any role in the marital equation. And his love for his daughter he measured out with an eye-dropper, invariably behind grandma’s back, since she considered affection to be tasteless and inimical to a good education. My grandfather died at the age of forty-eight when mamá was seventeen. Though he was still a young man, the combination of too much work and too little love often proves toxic. When his body finally cried enough, he left two thriving businesses – a Chrysler concession and a garage – and hefty accounts in various banks. For her part, my grandmother considered that her husband had fulfilled his part of the deal and got on with her own life.