Kamchatka (11 page)

This story is usually told to emphasize the power of Cyrus, the king who mutilated a river, who had his soldiers work like slaves to avenge a horse. The leader of the most powerful army in the world, whose hail of arrows could eclipse the sun, Cyrus would have punished the sun for its envy, or the moon, or the seas.

My response to the story of Cyrus was always different. Even as a kid I thought Cyrus was ignorant and stupid. A river can't murder someone, let alone be malicious; a river is just a river. It was stupid to jeopardize his campaign on a whim, making his men run the risk of injuring themselves as they dug the trenches, reducing their effectiveness with their bows and arrows and their swords. The story doesn't say as much, but some of the soldiers must have died during
the digging, making his revenge all the more costly. No horse would ever receive a more bizarre tribute.

Over the years, my view of Cyrus ceased to be quite so black and white. At first Cyrus was an exotic prince, with braids in his beard, who spoke a barbaric language and whose decisions could be understood only in the context of the Olympian logic of great kings and warriors. Then time passed (there are rivers that even Cyrus could not stop) and when I went back and read the story of Cyrus again, he didn't feel alien or unfathomable. He seemed like a lot of people I knew, people with whom I shared a human frailty: the tendency to accumulate power without wondering why or how to use it. People who have Cyrus's power (military, political, economic) always forget that with power come responsibilities, they prefer to believe that evil exists only in other people. Diverting a river is easier than facing the truth; Cyrus did not want to acknowledge the fact that his horse would not have drowned if he had not forced it to try and cross the river.

I've known a lot of Cyruses in my life. Some of them now only appear in books nobody ever reads. Others walk the same streets, breathe the same air as we do. And though they now live in palaces and people pay them tribute, time will do to them what it did to Cyrus. Men who accumulate power and misuse it are like coins with only one face, they have no currency in any market.

I was thinking about the story of Cyrus as we worked on the reverse diving board. The fact that there was no obvious connection between the two ends of the plank did not mean no connection existed; we don't see the network of roots that keeps the tree anchored in the ground, but it's there just the same.

But I admit, I came to no conclusions. I like to think that the way in which others had forcibly diverted the course of my life back then had conferred on me a compassion beyond my years. I like to think that I was better than Cyrus, that I assumed responsibility for the
death of the toads and respected the existence of the river. I like to think I was trying to act according to the wisdom of nature, doing no more than nature might have done in toppling a tree whose branches might dip into the swimming pool. At the time I thought none of these things, preoccupied as I was by
The Invaders
and Houdini, but that does not mean these things did not contribute to my actions. If I have learned anything in life, it is that we do not think only with our brains. We think with our bodies too, with our emotions; we think with our concept of time.

On the face of it, the fact that, a few pages later, Cyrus dies and has his head cut off and plunged into a bath of blood has no connection with the story of the river Gyndes. And yet something tells me that the truth is not so simple.

We see with more than our eyes; we think with more than our brain.

I knew we were in some kind of danger. I knew that the military
junta
was hunting down all those who opposed it, in particular self-confessed Peronists and/or those who held left-wing views – a broad category that included papá, mamá and the ‘uncles'. I knew that if mamá and papá were caught, they'd be arrested, just as papá's partner had been arrested. And I knew that there was a risk of lethal force. The bullets that killed Tio Rodolfo had not come from his own gun, if in fact he had actually been carrying one when he died.

But danger was a secondary consideration. Papá had already disappeared for a couple of days once before, some time in 1974 or 1975, at the peak of the Triple A's activities, only to reappear safe and sound and convinced that things had calmed down. Life went on. Nothing serious ever happened. Political stuff. People campaign, go on marches and demonstrations, sing songs and make speeches. Sometimes they get a round of applause, sometimes a brickbat.

This time things were clearly more serious – after all, this was the first time that me and the Midget had become caught up in it – but not
really
serious. For the time being we all had to disappear for a few days. After that, we'd go back to our house, back to our lives and everything would go on as before, with or without the military.

What bothered me, my main preoccupation, was the disruption to my daily life, the fact that I had been cut off from my games with Bertuccio, from my belongings (given that I no longer had access to them whenever and wherever I wanted to); cut off from my world, the streets, the neighbours, the local grocer, the guy at the local newsstand, my club; cut off from a universe of familiar sensations: the smell of my bed linen, the feeling of the floor beneath my feet when I got up, the taste of tap water, the sound of sawing and hammering drifting in from the patio, the sight of mamá's flowerbeds, the rough feel of the knobs on
my
TV.

I could pretend our time at the
quinta
was a spur of the moment holiday – after all, that first weekend we spent more time with papá and mamá than we had in months – but it was hard to forget that it was a holiday we had been forced to take. A holiday that is planned, that you dream about, is one thing. It was a very different matter to be forced to run away, forced to live somewhere else – however wonderful the
quinta
was – until the mists cleared and we got our own lives back.

For years, when I was living in Kamchatka, keeping watch for wild bears, I thought I was the one who had been forced to go through the long tunnel that was the winter of 1976 blindfolded. In time, I came to realize that mamá and papá had been almost as blind as I was. Their political beliefs were clear and unambiguous; they would never give them up. But before 24 March 1976, when the military coup occurred, they knew exactly what to expect. Afterwards, they didn't know what to expect anymore. (The dictatorship began on 24 March, Houdini was born on 24 March. Time is strange and everything occurs simultaneously.)

The advent of the dictatorship changed the rules of the game. Everywhere my parents looked they saw shadows. They knew the military
junta
were hunting them, just as they were hunting down their political comrades, but what they didn't know was what
happened to those who were caught. They simply vanished into thin air. Their families searched for them, but in the police stations, the army barracks, the courts, everyone claimed to know nothing. No arrest warrants had been issued, no charges brought. Their names did not appear on any list of prisoners. A week after papá's partner was hauled away, nobody knew anything of his whereabouts.

These first months were the months of devastation. Many people thought that all they needed to do was retire from political activism and they would be spared. But they were dragged from their homes regardless. Public places – bars, cinemas, restaurants, theatres – were dangerous because a raid could occur any place, any time. Leaving the house without papers was dangerous because being unable to prove one's identity was sufficient reason to wind up in a police station. But leaving home carrying identity papers was more dangerous still. Once identified, there was no need to take someone to the police station; they were dragged away and –
poof
– they vanished into thin air.

Those who thought that the crackdown would abide by clear rules, observe defined limits, were mistaken. In early April, papá met up with Sinigaglia, a lawyer friend of his who told him, over a cup of coffee, that he believed things were going to get back to normal. Sinigaglia explained that the military's natural deference to order and discipline would force them to enact laws to legalize the repression, outlaw paramilitary groups and publish a list of prisoners. Papá thought that Sinigaglia's view was logical, but even so he advised him not to show his face in the courts at Tribunales. Sinigaglia dismissed his advice. He had been threatened a thousand times before, he said, and he was not about to give up defending political prisoners and applying for writs of habeas corpus. I remember Sinigaglia well. He was a tall man, ramrod straight, with Brylcreemed hair; his old-fashioned taste in suits made him look much older than he was. He always called me
pibe
(kid). What are you up to,
pibe
?
How are things,
pibe
? And he'd muss my hair, I suppose because he was fascinated by the unruly shock of hair so unlike his own.

Sinigaglia was the first to fall. They took him away in an unmarked car. I can imagine him as they pushed and shoved, worrying about creasing his carefully pressed suit and saying to me, see this,
pibe
? There's no need for this insolence, it's completely unnecessary.

Roberto was the next to go, on a morning when papá was not at the solicitor's office. If papá had been there, they would have taken him too. Ligia, papá's secretary, told him that the men who arrested Roberto took him away in an unmarked car. When he asked her to describe the men, Ligia said they were rude. They dragged the poor man away like a common criminal, said Ligia, another disciple of the old school.

Mamá felt a little safer. The union she headed up at the university described itself as non-aligned. Not only was it not Peronist, it had actively campaigned against Peronism during the elections. Feeling protected by the apolitical nature of her profession, and given her tendency to analyse everything in terms of rational propositions and scientific facts, mamá thought that she would be able to weather the storm without any difficulties.

But day after day, she heard the same stories about professors and students who had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Some, people said, had been hauled away, and the modus operandi was always the same, plain clothes officers armed to the teeth, in unmarked cars. Others simply disappeared and no one ever heard from them again. Now, roll calls were suddenly filled with the silence of people marked absent.

For papá and mamá, in those first days of April, the shadows began exactly at the boundaries of the
quinta
. The image of the desert island which mamá had suggested to make our life here easier now took on a life of its own and began to torment her, just as the wooden Christ had tormented the terrified Marcelino. Beyond the
quinta
there
was nothing but uncertainty – dangerous waters, impenetrable fog. They tried to phone certain people only to discover that the ground had opened and swallowed them up. Sometimes their phone calls went unanswered. Sometimes they were answered, but the voices at the other end of the line denied all knowledge of anything. What information they had was vague and incomplete. The assessments of the situation they heard didn't square with reality as they saw it. In the midst of this fog, it became increasingly difficult to know what to do, what to expect.

This was why mamá had gone back to work. She wanted to keep at least one line of communication open so they would know what was going on. In her laboratory, mamá could speak, ask questions, arrange meetings and organize a modest political course of action.

After a few days, fear began to take its toll on papá, and he too decided to go back to work. The question was what to do with us.

One Saturday we set off with mamá to fetch grandma Matilde. The official story was that she was coming to spend the weekend with us and we would drive her home on Sunday evening. We didn't know, and nor did grandma, that the whole thing was a secret mission. Papá and mamá were testing us. They wanted to find out whether grandma could survive living in the same house with us. Had we been told what they were planning, we would have pointed out that it was just as dangerous, maybe more dangerous, to leave us to the tender mercies of grandma.

Grandma Matilde was one of those people who believed that her responsibilities as a parent lapsed on the day her children left home. In all the photos from mamá's wedding, she looks radiant under her big hat, but while everyone else in the photos is looking at the camera, grandma looks as though she is at her own private party. From that day on, grandma spent her time travelling the world, playing canasta with her friends, and getting involved in whatever charity event happened to come her way.

Once I read a
Mafalda
comic where Susanita – the little girl who's obsessed with finding a good husband, getting married and having a traditional family – explains one of her dreams of the future. In the dream, she's at a tea party with other posh women with fancy pastries
and things. It's a charity event to raise money to buy polenta, rice ‘and all that horrible garbage poor people eat'. I remember showing the comic to mamá and saying, ‘Look, it's grandma Matilde when she was little.' mamá gave a complicit giggle, but avoided actually saying something that would compromise her, and went back to reading her newspaper. Later on, when she thought she was alone, I heard her giggle as she was chopping onions, and I heard another giggle again as she went up to her bed. I think she probably giggled herself to sleep.

Grandma Matilde hardly ever phoned. She only ever showed up for our birthdays. Her presence made us all (including papá, obviously) slightly uncomfortable, especially when it came to gifts: we never worked out how to say thank you for the pair of socks or the underpants or the handkerchiefs which represented the full range of her ideas for presents. Whenever we had to go to her house – usually for her birthday – she spent the whole time making sure we didn't open the piano or ruck the rugs or put our feet up on the Louis-the-Something chairs.