“This country disrespects its victims,” says María Eugenia, some fifty years old, the wife of a yerba overseer who supported a strike attempt. When they killed him （that’s what she says; though there is no body, she knows they killed him）， she had been in disagreement with him.
“ ‘How can you go on strike, the patrón will fire you, how will we feed the kids?’ That’s what I yelled at him, morning, noon, and night. He would tell me that people were suffering. I understand him now, and you just can’t imagine how sorry I am.”
“Who did he work for?”
“For the Reyes family. More than half the people around here work for them. I met the owner once, Adolfo Reyes. I even thought he was a good guy. But he wouldn’t see me after my husband disappeared.”
María Eugenia is crying and the waiter brings her a Cachamai tea. Outside, the moon kisses the lagoon and insects hit against the restaurant’s lightbulbs. Beetles. I think how I’m afraid of beetles, but I know that if one of them falls on me, I’ll take it out of my hair like it was just a hair clip. Fear changes, accommodates. I don’t want to get used to that. That night I don’t dream of bones, but I do dream of a huge darkness over the lake, a fat storm heavy with hail.
The Skinny Woman
At breakfast, I say goodbye to some of the relatives. The ones going to Za?artú to leave their flowers and see if they’ll have any luck, and others who are headed home. Some to Corrientes. Others to Posadas. María Eugenia and the mother from Castelar are staying a few more days. Last night I saw them together at the edge of the lake, lighting candles. It’s a secret ritual that belongs to these families, a delicate, intimate one, shrouded in water and heat. I also greet the new guests. Some are coming from Za?artú, they say as they’re checking in: they couldn’t find housing there and were sent to San Cosme, the same story. Others already knew they should stay here, María Eugenia tells me. Mostly those who are from the area.
There’s one person, I call her the skinny lady, who didn’t come to dinner last night and who eats breakfast alone, smoking, at a table on the patio. She has an extraordinary face that, moreover, seems familiar. Maybe it’s just the peculiarity of her features: it’s such an angular face that from the front it’s pretty, but in profile and in a certain light she looks like one of Picasso’s Ladies of Avignon. I know she’s here for the bones, too. I want to respect the distance she imposes, but I find her fascinating, with her long, barely graying hair, and her dresses, always different, that go down to her feet.
I get the chance to talk to her after breakfast. She’s the one who approaches me: she asks me for a light on the Costanera. I give her one. She smokes constantly, as do I. Now that I see her in the merciless light of day, I recognize her, but I can’t believe what I’m seeing, I refuse to believe it. About seven years ago, on the boundary between the neighborhoods of Caballito and Parque Chacabuco, in Buenos Aires, a twelve-year-old girl was kidnapped. A girl who caught the press’s attention because she was missing an arm. It was never known whether it was a congenital defect or the result of an accident. The disappearance was the outcome of a game that turned macabre: the girl and her friends went into an abandoned house in the neighborhood. A prank. Something happened in the house that the kids couldn’t see very well, and the girl never came out. Remarkably, the disappearance, which was labelled a kidnapping, didn’t spend long in the news even though there were a lot of interviews with the mother, who didn’t avoid the TV cameras. The hypothesis was that she was kidnapped by a mysterious man, who was never caught: the police found an adult’s clothing covered with blood inside the house, though no relationship could be established with any individual, and the girl never turned up. I wanted to interview the mother at the time, but my editor wasn’t interested. I turned to the editor-in-chief. He told me people didn’t want to hear about such a morbid story, and we should run good news. I never believed him. He said it mechanically. In other circumstances, he would have killed for a story like that. It’s true that those were some horrible months, with the Carapintada uprisings and the desecration of Perón’s body: no one could believe someone would cut off the hands of the most surveilled cadaver in the country. There was something bleak about the story of the disappeared girl, it’s true, and maybe that’s why they didn’t follow it up. Those things happen in journalism. The public’s imagination falls in love with certain horrors and is indifferent to others. When I tried to interview the mother anyway, maybe for a different outlet, she had already left her house and the neighborhood. Her whereabouts were a mystery.
“I came for my partner,” said the skinny woman, and when she spoke, I had no doubt. The voice tends to kick-start memory. If it wasn’t the disappeared girl’s mother, it was her twin. Or else the resemblance was supernatural. It was noon and the heat could kill a bird mid-flight, but I remember I felt a shiver. I was scared. The coincidence seemed like a sinister piece of fiction.
She recognized my fear, and paused before speaking.
“My husband and I were militants in the Maoist Leninist Liberation Army. That was its complete name, although even the history books and articles just call it the LA. I survived.”
I was shocked. I asked her name. She told me. Beatriz Bradford. I stared at her. I had fully reconstructed Operation Itatí and I had no record of any militant with that name. That wasn’t the disappeared girl’s last name either. She was Adela ?lvarez. I remembered it now, even after years of not thinking of her.
“It’s right for you to question it,” she said. Her voice was thick, and I noticed she had marks on her neck and arms. Little scars from fine, superficial cuts. As if she had scratched herself too much with long fingernails. “My nom de guerre was Liliana Falco. Only my husband knew my true identity, and our leader, because part of our plan, which failed, was to kidnap a member of my family to finance our operation. My family, you must know, is immensely rich. They’re also some terrible sons of bitches, complicit in the dictatorship. They used their means and their influence to help bodies disappear. That’s why I don’t mix with the people who come here. My family was complicit in the murders of many of their loved ones. Eduardo wanted to save me from them, but he never knew what he was up against. I didn’t fully know, either.”
I felt dizzy. If she had used the name Liliana Falco as a fighter, then she really was the mother of the baby who was possibly murdered or stolen to give to another family. And if she really was a member of the Bradford family, I was looking at a monumental story. And a believable one, because the family’s legendary house was only ten kilometers upriver. How could she also be the mother of the girl with the missing arm who disappeared in Caballito?
I tried to formulate my question just right. I was afraid she would run away. There was something elusive about her. Already in that first conversation I realized she was unbalanced, that her family and her history had wreaked havoc on her psyche.
“Comrades of yours told me you had a daughter in Za?artú. They were wondering about the girl’s fate.”