“Your companion, she couldn’t get you out?”
“She thinks I’m chickenshit because I don’t agree with armed struggle. She left on her own. If I meet up with her, we’ll see what happens. I don’t know if she’ll take me back, but I hope so.”
“And? Are you a coward?”
“Now that they’re killing us, it doesn’t matter. From her point of view, I’m a coward, but I still believe she’s wrong.”
“You don’t have kids, Luis?”
“My girlfriend has two daughters and I’ve raised them as my own. I don’t have my own kids, not yet.”
“Can we talk about how to do this?” said Juan. I ignored him.
“Do you want to freshen up, Luis? The hot water in this house is a pain in the neck, but if you don’t mind lukewarm water, you can take a shower or a bath, whatever you prefer. Then we’ll talk about the details. I go to Paraguay once a week, for work, sometimes with my sister. We often cross over to Brazil because there’s a really nice restaurant on the border. We could do it today, even. Or tomorrow morning. The soldiers know me.”
“Things have changed,” said Luis.
“I’m sure they haven’t changed that much. They’ll let us cross without problems. Have you been to the border here? It’s pretty lax, and there are surnames that carry weight in these parts. Like mine.”
Luis got up to thank me, and his hug was sincere.
“Thank you,” he said into my ear. “We barely even know each other. You once promised to help me, and I haven’t forgotten.”
“I haven’t either,” I said. And it was true. Juan loved that man, and so did I. He had always been unconditional, even when they’d hidden Juan from him behind threats and lies. Without Luis, Juan wouldn’t have been capable of loyalty and affection. I remembered him from years before, insistent, stubborn, waiting for Juan in the plaza if Mercedes’ cruelty kept him from entering the apartment. He had never abandoned his brother. And Juan hadn’t ever forgotten him. From England, he had mailed Luis a beautiful book on the architect who had designed Big Ben; I couldn’t remember his name, but I did remember that he’d gone mad and died at the age of forty. His life had seemed so brutal, and so had those monuments, those churches imagined by the feverish insistence of a young man who wanted to be close to God and found only dementia. And wasn’t that always the way?
Luis apologized for his sweaty hug, and said he would accept the shower. He only had the clothes he was wearing because you couldn’t flee with a suitcase, it had to seem like a short trip. I called Marcelina and asked her to give him a clean shirt. When Luis left the room, I closed the door and went over to Juan. He needed a bath, too. I took Gaspar from his arms and put him on the floor, where he had a toy car he would soon throw against the glass window.
“How did you get away from the bodyguards to make the drive?”
Juan touched the side of his head to remind me of the mark.
“That’s a long time to keep up the secret. That’s why you’re exhausted.”
I wet my fingers in water and refreshed his forehead. As always, my husband had gone too far, got what he wanted, and as a result would go even further the next time.
“Tell me.”
“The door is still open, it obeys me, I can go in and out. It’s the Other Place, no doubt about it. Stephen is working on getting a house for us nearby. We shouldn’t talk about the Other Place, I can’t keep up the secret with you and for now we can’t go somewhere we won’t be heard, because frankly I can’t get up from this chair. Are you going to take my brother? It was impossible to let you know we were both coming.”
I moved back to get a better look at his face. He was telling the truth about the doorway. When he was feeling better, we’d have to go to our private place near the beach, where we held our secret conversations. I had a moment of euphoria. The Other Place had returned. It was ours. We could ask for things, ask for Juan’s health, ask for wisdom about how to maneuver politically in the Order, finally ask for Mercedes’ death and my entrance into the power of the Three. And, of course, we would also ask for the seal to mark our son and save him from his destiny.
“Yes, I can take him,” I said, drying my tears. “The soldiers know us. I’m going to tell him, though, that he can’t talk about this with his comrades. We can’t be an exit door or put this place in danger. Betty is already putting us at risk, in my opinion. She can’t find out about this, either. She would beg us to get her and Adela out, and that’s impossible. There are plans for the girl. Does Stephen know?”
“He’s looking for a house for them, too.”
Juan massaged his temples and I recognized the signs of a migraine, his red eyes, the right side of his face a little paralyzed. I took his pulse: weak and dangerously fast. It was a severe arrhythmia.
“I can go with you,” he said. “When it’s all ready, we have to give our address to Luis. We can’t lose contact with him. Your parents aren’t going to understand why we want to live in that neighborhood, and I don’t want them to suspect anything. It’s far from Libertador and near the hospital, just like we thought.”
“They’re going to think we want to antagonize them, that’s all. You know why they want Beatriz and Adela to live near us, right? They got it into their heads that the girl will grow more powerful if she’s near you and Gaspar. It’s not the best time to move to Buenos Aires now, but I no longer expect anything to be easy, and I can’t stand this house anymore. I need to work.”
I pulled Gaspar out from under the table so he wouldn’t hit his head, and picked him up. He was sleepy.
“You don’t need to come with me. The soldiers will confuse you and your brother. They don’t know you well enough to tell the difference. They just know my husband is a tall blond man, and that’s enough. You need to rest.”
“I know,” he replied.
Down below, the gardener was getting ready to water the plants. It was better to go the next day. The bodyguards didn’t follow me to the border if I didn’t have Gaspar with me. We had time. We would drive to Asunción like we did every week. And I’d take a quick detour into Foz. They would let me pass. The yerbatero’s daughter. The daughter of the powerful. The guards at the border had arrangements with my father. In Foz, Luis could take any transport or rent a car. As soon as he was in Brazil, he’d be safe. He could be in Río in two days.
We were all going to survive. I could sense it. My son, Juan, Luis, Betty, Adela. For a while, at least. The Darkness was open and the night was clear.
V
The Za?artú Pit
Olga Gallardo, 1993
“Here, we knew,” says the woman, her eyes racked by cataracts and her skin too taut for someone nearing one hundred years old. “They put the bodies there.”
She indicates the exact direction of the mass grave, as if she weren’t blind.
“But us, what could we say, miss? My sister used to hear them cry out at night.”
“Hear who?”
“The dear little souls. Angá. Hundreds of them!”