“Adela isn’t in the pit. Maybe Eduardo is there. I don’t know why they take so long with the identifications. Eduardo’s mother already donated blood. She has no love for me, but she told me she did it. I tell Eduardo every night, I tell him how I tried to save the child. The ones who come here don’t know how to get close to the pit because they don’t study the terrain. You have to study the terrain.”
I had turned on the recorder without asking her, and it was vibrating in my hand under the book I was reading. She said:
“Don’t hide it. You can record me if you want. I have nothing to lose. Plus, if they don’t want this conversation to be published, it won’t be. They play by other rules. They’re not so skittish anymore. You know that my aunt’s house is near here. Mercedes Bradford. She’s my aunt, make sure you get that, I don’t want anyone thinking I’m that monster’s daughter. My mother and father are different from her, in spite of everything.”
“Do you have contact with them?”
“With my aunt, or my parents?”
“Any of them.”
“I’m not going to talk about my aunt. I can’t. With my parents, I do what I can, and so do they.”
Starting here I’ll transcribe the conversation. It would be very hard for me to paraphrase it. Our exchange that day was short. So was the one later that night, but both of them felt very long to me, and I remember checking the recorder several times to be sure the cassette didn’t get stuck.
“Do you remember the operation?”
“We were woken up by gunshots and we knew it was them, so we ran. Or rather I ran, with my daughter. I knew what path to take through the jungle to reach safety. We had planned it, I had to get to the house of a woman who helped us, the wife of a tarefero. The only one who helped us in that shitty village. I never would have said they were shitty people back then, but these days I can’t talk about class consciousness or about contradictions, I don’t have the patience. I don’t care about them. I couldn’t find the house, I was disoriented. So, I made my way to my aunt’s house. I needed to save my daughter, and I thought I would leave her there and go back to find Eduardo. I was tired and terrified. My family has private guards. I decided to stay with Adela in the house. We should have died that night. Sometimes, cheating death is the worst thing that can happen.”
Beatriz’s thick smoker’s voice never once broke. She spoke with the hardness of one who isn’t afraid of dying, or who wants to die but has a few things to resolve first.
“I stayed in the house with them. With my cousin Rosario and the others. I’m not going to tell you about my life. I want to tell you that what you’ve guessed is true: my daughter is Adela ?lvarez, the disappeared girl. I never hid my first name: I told the cameras my name was Beatriz ?lvarez. I never married Eduardo, but I took his last name. Adela was registered with her real name and she didn’t die in the jungle. They didn’t kill her in the operation. I tried to save her. I tell Eduardo. I tried, but there were other plans for our daughter.
“You’re the mother of the girl who disappeared in Buenos Aires?”
“That’s what I just said. The girl who went into the house on Calle Villarreal with her friends, near Castelli Park.”
“I recognized you from TV. Your family is very rich. As I recall, your house in Caballito was fairly modest. I mean, the house where you lived with your daughter.”
“The house was fine. It was what I wanted. I didn’t live with them or live like them, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did your daughter lose her arm in the repression?”
“My daughter came out of the jungle in one piece. She lost her arm at my aunt and uncle’s house.”
“She had an accident?”
“Do you know what is in this jungle? I don’t either. I never fully understood. It’s big and it’s terrible. Voracious. My family has venerated it for hundreds of years. What lives in this jungle, asleep for now, it took my daughter’s arm and marked her as its own. She was no longer mine. I always wanted to escape from the Bradfords, and when I fell in love with Eduardo, I believed in what he did, because it was a way of getting away from them, and a noble way at that. But they brought me back, and they kept my daughter.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Better for you.”
I thought, then, that she was unstable. But when she left and I was alone in the silence broken only by the splashing of animals in the lake, I felt an irrational dread of the jungle and all that beautiful and hostile landscape, capable of harboring so much suffering and so much death. What did she mean that her family “venerated” something terrible in that wilderness? Was it a metaphor? Was it literal? I was disturbed by that first part of our conversation, by the coincidence and her instability, which was clear from her dark, jumpy eyes, from her hair that, close-up, I saw was fine and brittle, from her ragged, neglected nails. She was an elegant and destroyed woman. I was also disturbed by the insinuation of that voracious monster she’d mentioned, the one she related to her daughter’s disappearance. She went to walk under the sun, without a hat. I didn’t follow her, but instead went back to the hotel to transcribe the recording. I wanted to ask more questions. The list of Operation Itatí’s victims includes Eduardo ?lvarez （alias Mono ?lvez）。 Disappeared, husband of （alias） Liliana Falco. She wasn’t lying. The metaphors she used to understand the tragedy of her life moved me, but also shook me, especially those almost mystical ravings about the powers of the jungle. Though I understood why she could go crazy in that regard. If you travel by car along a road through the jungle in Misiones, the bush is a prison with walls on either side, and the red earth is a river of lava. There, near the lake, the jungle seemed more distant. Maybe that was the real reason the family members chose that village—because of its openness. I imagined the bodies in trucks driving down muddy roads to be tossed in a pit, the nocturnal birds hushed by the sound of the motors. Earlier, I had seen an altar to San La Muerte. And the first day, when we arrived by car from Posadas, I’d seen one to San Güesito, a dead, venerated boy—an animita, as they’re called in Chile. I thought of bones left dry by the heat, heat that eats the flesh until nothing is left.
I encountered Beatriz Bradford again that night, in the hotel hallway. Her room was at the end that led to the breakfast area. She was drunk. So drunk that I felt pity or solidarity and I brought her into my room. I locked the door and she collapsed on to the bed, faceup. I was afraid she would choke on her own vomit. I hadn’t seen her eat, and I don’t think she ever ate much. She was drunk, yes, but still fairly lucid. She wanted to talk. I recorded her again.
“No one remembers my daughter. You do.”
She used the formal usted with me. I told her to call me by my name, Olga.
“Olga. What an ugly name, like Beatriz. Rosario, on the other hand, now she had a lovely name. Poor Rosario. She was a mean one, but she wanted to save us, and herself. She was mean, but she had love, you know, Olga? She had love.”
“Who is Rosario?”
“My cousin, Mercedes’ daughter. She let me in that night and she said to me Betty, don’t come out, not tonight, people are coming, they’re holding the ceremony, you know you can’t participate in the ceremony, you’re not authorized. Stay in here, Betty. But I went out. What an idiot.”