Being Argentinean, he was angry. Not that all Argentineans were angry but many were, and rightfully so, after the dirty war and its dirty resolution—a general amnesty for everybody for everything, even the foulest crimes. In other words repression of the past and of even the idea of justice, and of course the return of the repressed is guaranteed, and always a nightmare.
So Edgardo Alfonso had left Argentina behind, like so many other children of the desaparacedos, unable to live among the torturers and murderers who were free to walk the streets and ride the trams, who stared at Edgardo over their newspapers which held on their backsides the articles Edgardo had written identifying and denouncing them. He had had to leave to remain sane.
So of course he was at the Kennedy Center to see an evening of Argentinean tango, Bocca’s troupe on Bocca’s farewell tour, where the maestro would dance with a ladder and handstand his way to heaven one last time, to Piazzolla’s “Soledad.” Edgardo cared nothing for dance per se, and despised tango the dance the way certain Scottish acquaintances winced at the sound of bagpipes; but Edgardo was a Piazzollista, and so he had to go. It was not often one got a chance to hear Astor Piazzolla’s music played live, and of course it would never be the same with Astor gone, but the proof of the strength of his composing was in how these new bands backing the dance troupes would play their accompaniments to the dancers, tangos for the most part made of the utterly clichéd waltzes, two-steps, ballads, and church music that had been cobbled together to make old-style tango, and then they would start a piece by Astor and the whole universe would suddenly become bigger—deeper, darker, more tragic. A single phrase on the bandoneon and all of Buenos Aires would appear in the mind at once. The feeling was as accurate as if music possessed a kind of acupuncture that could strike particular nerves of the memory, evoking everything.
The audience at the Kennedy Center was full of Latin Americans, and they watched the dancers closely. Bocca was a good choreographer and the dances were insistent on being interesting—men with men, women with women, little fights, melodramas, clever sex—but all the while the band was hidden behind a black curtain, and Edgardo began to get angry yet again, this time that someone would conceal performers for so long. Their absence bit him and he began to hate the dancers, he wanted to boo them off the stage, he even wondered for a second if the music had been prerecorded and this tour being done on the cheap.
Finally however they pulled back the curtain, and there was the band: bandoneon, violin, piano, bass, electric guitar. Edgardo already knew they were a very tight group, playing good versions of the Piazzolla songs, faithful to the originals, and intense. Tight band, incandescent music—it was strange now to observe how young they were, strange but wonderful: music at last, the ultimate point of the evening. Huge relief.
They had been revealed in order to play “Adios Nonino,” Piazzolla’s good-bye to his dead father, his most famous song out of the hundreds in his catalog, and even if not the best, or rather not Edgardo’s favorite, which was “Mumuki,” still it was the one with the most personal history. Edgardo’s father had been disappeared. God knew what had happened to him, Edgardo resisted thinking about this as being part of the poison, part of the torture echoing down through the years, one of the many reasons torture was the worst evil of all, and, when the state used and condoned it, the death of a nation’s sense of itself. This was why Edgardo had had to leave, also because his mother still met every Thursday afternoon in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires with all the other mothers and wives of the desaparacedos, all wearing white scarves symbolic of their lost children’s diapers, to remind Argentina and the world (and in Buenos Aires these two were the same) of the crimes that still needed to be remembered, and the criminals who still must face justice. It was more than Edgardo could face on a weekly basis. Now even in his nice apartment east of Dupont Circle he had to keep the blinds shut on Sunday mornings so as not to see the dressed-up kindly Americans, mostly black, walking down the street to their church, so as not to start again the train of thought that would lead him to memories and the anger. Especially now that the Americans too had become torturers.
He had to look away or it would kill him. His health was poor. He had to run at least fifty miles a week to keep himself from dying of anger. If he didn’t he couldn’t sleep and quickly his blood pressure ballooned dangerously high. You could run a lot of anger out of you. For the rest, you needed Piazzolla.
His own father had taken him to see Piazzolla at the Teatro Odeón, in 1973, shortly before being disappeared. Piazzolla had recently disbanded his great quintet and gone to Europe with Amelita, gone through the melodramas of that relationship and its breakup and a succession of bands trying to find a Europop sound, trying electronica and string quartets and getting angrier and angrier at the results (though they were pretty good, Edgardo felt), so that when he came back to Buenos Aires for the summer of ’73–’74 and regathered the old quintet (with the madman Tarantino sitting in on piano) he was not the same confident composer devoted to destroying tango and rebuilding it from the ground up for the sake of his modernist ambitions, but a darker and more baffled man, an exile back home again but determined to forge on no matter what. But now more willing to admit the tango in him, willing to admit his genius was Argentinean as well as transcendental. He could now submit to tango, fuse with it. And his audience was much changed as well, they no longer took Piazzolla for granted or thought he was a crazy egotist. With the quintet dispersed they had finally understood they had been hearing something new in the world, not just a genius but a great soul, and of course at that point, now that they had understood it, it was gone.
But then it had come back. Maybe only for one night, everyone thought it was only for one night, everyone knew all of a sudden that life itself was a fragile and evanescent thing and no band lasted long, and so the atmosphere in the theater had been absolutely electric, the audience’s attentiveness quivering and hallucinatory, the fierce applause like thanks in a church, as if finally you could do the right thing in a church and clap and cheer and whistle to show your appreciation of God’s incredible work. At the end of the show they had leaped to their feet and gone mad with joy and regret, and looking around him young Edgardo had understood that adults were still as full of feeling as he was, that they did not “grow up” in any important respect, and that he would never lose the huge feelings surging in him. An awesome sight, never to be forgotten. Perhaps it was his first real memory.
Now, here, on this night in Washington, D.C., the capital of everything and of nothing, the dancers were dancing on the stage and the young band at the back was charging lustily through one of Piazzolla’s angriest and happiest tunes, the furiously fast “Michelangelo 70.” Beautiful. Astor had understood how to deal with the tragedy of Buenos Aires better than anyone, and Edgardo had never ceased to apply his lesson: you had to attack sadness and depression head on in a fury, you had to dance through it in a state of utmost energy, and then it would lead you out the other side to some kind of balance, even to that high humor that the racing tumble of bandoneon notes so often expressed, that joy that ought to be basic but in this world had to be achieved or as it were dragged out of some future better time: life ought to be joy, someday it would be joy, therefore on this night we celebrate that joy in anticipation, and so capture an echo of it, a ricochet from the future. That this was the best they could do in this supposedly advanced age of the world was funny. And there weren’t that many things that were both real and funny, so there you had to hang your hat, on how funny it was that they could be as gods in a world more beautiful and just than humanity could now imagine, and yet instead were torturers on a planet where half the people lived in extreme immiseration while the other half killed in fear of being thrust into that immiseration, and were always willing to look the other way, to avoid seeing the genocide and speciescide and biospherecide they were committing, all unnecessarily, out of fear and greed. Hilarious! One had to laugh!
During intermission the beautifully dressed people filled the halls outside and gulped down little plastic flutes of wine as fast as they could. The sound of three thousand voices all talking at once in a big enclosed space was perhaps the most beautiful music of all. That was always true, but on this night there was a lot of Spanish being spoken, so it was even more true than usual. A bouncing glossolalia. This was how the apostles had sounded when the tongues of fire had descended on them, all trying to express directly in scat singing the epiphany of the world’s glory. One of Piazzolla’s bandoneon lines even seemed to bounce through the talk. No doubt one appeal of that thin nasal tone was how human it sounded, like the voice of a lover with a cold.
And all the faces. Edgardo was on the balcony with his elbows resting on the railing, looking down at the crowd below, all the hair so perfect, the raven blaze of glossy black tresses, the colorful clothes, the strong faces so full of the character of Latin America. This was what they looked like, they had nothing to be ashamed of in this world, indeed where could you find handsomer faces.
His friend Umberto stood down there near the door, holding two wine flutes. When he looked up and met Edgardo’s eye, Edgardo raised his chin. Umberto jerked his head a fraction, indicating a meeting; Edgardo nodded once.
During the final song of the evening Edgardo closed his eyes and listened to the band rip through “Primavera Porteño,” one of the greatest of all the maestro’s compositions, bobbing and tapping his feet, uncaring of the people around him, let them think what they like, the whole audience should be on its feet at this moment! Which they were during the long ovation afterward, a nice thing to be part of, a Latin thing, lots of shouting and whistling, at least for an audience at the Kennedy Center. There was even a group above him to the right shouting, “As-tor—As-tor—As-tor!” which Edgardo joined with the utmost happiness, bellowing the name up at the group of enthusiasts and waving in appreciation. He had never gotten the chance to chant Astor’s name in a cheer before, and it felt good in his mouth. He wondered if they did that in Buenos Aires now, or if it only happened in Europe, or here—Astor the perpetual exile, even in death.
Show over. All the people mingling as they made their exit. Outside it was still stifling. More Spanish in the gorgeous choir of the languages. Edgardo walked aimlessly in the crowd, then stopped briefly below the strange statue located on the lawn there, which appeared to portray a dying Quixote shooting a last arrow over his shoulder, roughly in the direction of the Saudi Arabian embassy. And there was Umberto approaching him, lighting a cigarette and coughing, and together they walked to the railing overlooking the river.
They leaned on the rail and watched obsidian sheets of water glide past.
They conversed in Spanish:
“So?”
“We’re still looking into ways of isolating these guys.”
“Is she still helping?”
“Yes, she’s the decoy while we try to cut these guys out. She’s playing the shell game with them.”
“And you think Cooper is the leader?”
“Not sure about that. He may have a stovepipe that goes pretty high. That’s one of the things we’re still trying to determine.”
“But he’s part of ARDA?”
“Yes.”
“And where did they relocate that most exciting program?”
“In a group suspended between Homeland and NSA. ARDA Prime.”
Edgardo laughed. He danced a little tango step while singing the bitter wild riff at the start of “Primavera Porteño.” “They are so fucking stupid, my friend! Could it get any more byzantine?”
“That’s the point. It’s a work of art.”
“It’s a fucking shambles. They must be scared out of their wits, granting they ever had any wits, which I don’t. I mean if they get caught…”
“It will be hard to catch them outright. I think the best we can do is cut them out. But if they see that coming, they will fight.”
“I’m sure. Is all of ARDA in on it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“That’s good. I know some of those guys from my time at DARPA. I liked them. Some of them, anyway.”
“I know. I’m sure the ones you liked are all innocent of this.”
“Right.” Edgardo laughed. “Fuck them. What should I tell Frank?”
“Tell him to hang in there.”
“Do you think it would be okay to tip him that his girlfriend is still involved in a root canal?”
“I don’t know.” Umberto sucked on his cigarette, blew out a long plume of white smoke. “Not if you think he’ll do anything different.”