“Daddy told me who you are, Gotán, but I couldn’t speak openly with you without betraying him. ‘Men don’t help each other just so they can boast about it afterward, or expect to be repaid,’ he told me. When he realized he was up to his neck in trouble with C.P.F. and was certain that he was finished whatever he did, he came to see me one night when Mummy was at a mass in her church, the one where they provide you with the papers to pass from one world to the next without having to go through customs.
“‘Your mother is half-crazy,’ he told me. ‘Look after her, but make sure you don’t catch it. Here, take this, in case you should need it.’
“He gave me the security code of his account, which was why they kidnapped me. He also deposited a quarter of a million dollars in a Spanish bank for my mother.”
“She thought they were trying to buy her off,” I said.
“She wasn’t wrong. It was too late, but Daddy was in love with her again when he died. But obviously, after all he had made her suffer, he couldn’t tell her.”
“What about Lorena?”
“A fleeting passion, ‘fresh meat,’ as you would say.”
“Who do you mean by ‘you?’”
“Dirty old men. Stupid ’70s idealists who grow old thinking that 21st-century revolutions can be brought about by fooling around with girls the age of their daughters or granddaughters. Pedophiles.”
“‘To each according to his need.’ We’re still loyal to Lenin.”
“You’re old cretins who can’t stand retirement and crawl back for whatever crumbs you can get. But I’m not one to judge.”
“Thank God for that. How did Edmundo get involved with the G.R.O. in the first place?”
“Initials,” Isabel said. “In Argentina four people get together, think up some initials that sound good for the group, and believe they’ve started a new political movement. For C.P.F., the G.R.O. was no more important than any other N.G.O. they support financially. Capitalists are big gamblers. They take over the tables and couldn’t care less what the croupier calls. They always win—they’re the bank. Daddy was playing a double game: he took on the New Man Foundation to siphon off C.P.F. funds, but at the same time they were using the money for arms trafficking. But while he was playing his game, others were playing him.”
“Like the Relusol cat,” I said. I explained what I meant: in an ancient advertisement for scouring powder, there was a picture of a cat staring at itself in a gleaming frying pan, with the reflection of an infinite number of cats also staring at themselves in an infinite row of frying pans.
“I wasn’t born when that ad appeared,” said Isabel.
“Nor was Félix Jesús, but I stuck a copy I rescued from El Hogar above his litter tray, and he seems to like it.”
In the game of mirrors that C.P.F. and state officials play, the cats are being watched when they think they are staring at themselves as they plot mischief or crimes against humanity.
“What did that stupid ’70s idealist tell you about me?”
For a moment, Isabel held her breath, then exhaled deeply. That was how she prepared to tell someone something they did not want to hear, a way of relaxing while she considered whether it was worth saying or not, if the other person would listen without flying off the handle.
But in this case that person was happy to listen. He could have told Isabel everything she found out from her father, but for the moment preferred to hear somebody else describe what he did all those years ago.
“You’ve always had a weakness for shooting people at close range, haven’t you?” Isabel said, quite bravely: it is no easy matter to call someone who has just saved your life a murderer.
“I had not used a weapon since I was thrown out of the National Shame.”
“Then nostalgia got the better of you.”
“I was tempted by the .38 I found in your glove compartment.”
By now, Isabel was driving. The pain in my chest had returned as soon as we left the mine works, though less intense than before. Burgos said I needed to be opened up to find the piece of stiletto still in there. I hoped he would not be the one to do it.
“When you were sacked you left a lot of bodies behind.”
“Killing is part of the job; that wasn’t why they sacked me.”
“No, they were suspicious because you never caught any guerrilleros.”
“True—somehow they all managed to escape. That was my job, too: to cover the backs of idealists like your old man, people who still believed it was Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanes who made the Cuban Revolution. Why did you have a .38 in your glove box? For self-defense?”
“It was Daddy’s. He gave it to me with the account number, when he realized he was trapped. Lecuona had suggested you join the G.R.O., and Daddy liked the idea. It meant you could be together again in something that was worth the effort, like thirty years ago. But the G.R.O. high command, and La Negra in particular, had other ideas.”
“Debora is her name. It’s about time we stopped all this noms de guerre nonsense. We’re nothing more than killers.”
The speedometer climbed to 150 kilometers per hour. In a few seconds, Burgos’ V.W. was a distant blue speck in the rearview mirror. I asked Isabel to take her foot off the accelerator.
“Listen to me, then. If I can’t talk, I accelerate. I’m fed up with silence, Gotán. I grew up with it.”
There was not much more for me to listen to, but I did not like what I heard. Isabel Cárcano, a magnificent 23-year-old, told me all you had kept quiet about, Mireya.
She told me you recruited Toto Lecuona. You sold him the lie that it could all begin again. He left his Canary Island paradise hoping to construct another in his home country. Before that you sold the same lie to Edmundo, who was as dazzled by the idea of returning to his revolutionary youth as he was by Lorena the blond.
“It’s true that I loved Debora too. But I have no idea who she really is.”
“She appeared in my life one night, at one of those sordid tango dance halls I used to go to when loneliness became too much for me. I never told her I had been a policeman.”
“So you really thought she fell in love at first sight with a toilet salesman?”
Isabel laughed out loud and slowed down until Burgos caught us up. She flicked the indicator in response to his flashing headlights. I did not reply, but sat staring out at the empty countryside, the vast, sandy plain. We were still traveling at 120, but it felt as though we were stationary.
I lit a cigarette. Isabel took another that I passed to her, “Even though I’ve given up smoking,” she said. I told her the doctor’s theory: that two or three a day help prevent cancer. She agreed, we can’t give everything up. The world’s gone crazy, nowadays nobody smokes, nobody eats fat, people care more about whales and penguins than they do about street kids, homeless and dying of cold. They want to ban the bomb, but they dream of somebody wiping out the entire Arab world.
“Debora left me when she found out I had been in the National Shame during the dictatorship.”
“That wasn’t why she left you. You’d already been hoodwinked.”
“You call falling in love being hoodwinked?”
“While I was her prisoner, she told me one of your exploits had been to shoot an army officer, a brigade commander.”
“That’s true, although there’s no report about it, so I don’t know how Debora could have known. After the ’76 coup the guy organized death squads in Morón, just outside Buenos Aires. They hunted people down, looted their homes—nothing remarkable in those days. The guerrilleros in the area began to drop one by one. I didn’t ask anybody’s permission. I knew him, and I knew where he lived, so one day I went to his place. He showed me in: “What a surprise, Martelli,” the bastard greeted me. “We haven’t seen each other since Caracas.” We had been together at a congress for the military and police in Venezuela, organized by the Yankee intelligence services. We came back with diplomas and everything, we looked like university professors. I still have the pictures in a trunk somewhere.”
“I heard he was pleased to see you. You shot him in the back of the head while he was pouring you coffee.”
“What was I supposed to do, read him his rights? Who told you all this anyway? He lived alone, he died alone.”
“No, he didn’t live or die alone. He was separated from his wife and had a young daughter. Over time she grew up and learned to dance the tango.”