Needle in a Haystack (9 page)

What’s being said between the lines hits Horacio like a kick between the legs:
Jews are cowards
. He heard it hundreds of times at school. A spiteful, contemptuous knot tightens inside him:
if this idiot only knew
. His brother’s story, and the few times he has seen Elías angry, is enough to inspire complete terror in Horacio. Beneath the surface of the prudent, calculating moneylender lies a beast ready to attack. A resolute man who has killed before and is prepared to do so again, and Amancio thinks he could easily give him a fright. If Horacio were to persuade Amancio to go and threaten Elías, one of them would inevitably end up dead. If his brother were killed, Horacio would be his only heir. If Amancio were killed, it’d be no great loss to the world. The risk was that something could go wrong and Horacio’s complicity in the plan would be revealed, although it could always be denied. It was far more likely that as soon as Amancio threatened him, Elías would pounce; Amancio would then be left with no option but to shoot him. In any case, it was only like putting a chip on the number five: if the five comes up then great, but if not, things would be no worse than they are now.
The reward’s worth the risk,
he concludes.

Pam, pam, papám
. The dancing suddenly stops and, as if by some collective Pavlovian reflex, everyone stands up. A solemn mood descends upon the entire crowd at the sound of the first chords of the national anthem. The military men stand to attention and flaunt their patriotism with their intense salutes. At the opening line calling for all mortals to hear,
oíd mortales,
someone pipes up with a pretentious baritone. Lara and Ramiro make the most of the distraction to place themselves as far away as possible from the dance floor, out of sight from Amancio. Horacio, meanwhile, becomes completely distracted by someone to his right. The patriotic homage ends with repeated pledges to die for the glory of the nation,
juremos con gloria morir
, and then there’s a din of chairs being rearranged until the chaos of laughter and voices returns. The sighting of potential prey has awoken Horacio’s predatory instinct.

Horacio heads over to Isondú Quiroga, a fine young example of provincial nobility, three time “Miss Yerba Mate” and daughter of the biggest
mate
producer in
Misiones province. She is as much a lady as she is a wild animal, her eyes glowing like hot coals on her olive skin.
She’s good enough to eat
, thinks Horacio, as he sits down beside her smiling face. Amancio, with no little envy eating away at his soul, is left alone at the table, feeling pensive. He remembers Lara. His gaze searches the room for her in vain; they’ve disappeared. He serves himself a glass of champagne and pours it down his throat. He gets up, walks around the place looking for her, checks all the adjoining salons, but to no avail, so he returns to the table and sits down again. An hour goes by, two, the occasional acquaintance comes over to speak to him, but his eyes never stop looking for Lara. Another hour passes and the guests start to drift off, the party enters its death throes. Amancio has not stopped drinking or seeking out Lara, but his senses start to betray him. Horacio comes over to bid him farewell and whispers in his ear…

…and he leaves, arm round Isondú’s waist. Amancio holds the keys as if they’re a lucky charm. When he’s finally convinced that Lara’s not coming back, he puts the keys in his pocket, gets up and leaves. Outside on the street, he realizes he’s too drunk to drive and so takes a taxi home. Amancio’s head is a maelstrom. Horacio has told him to kill his brother if necessary. Elías’s death would indeed be the best solution to his problems. But he’s not sure he’s really up for killing a guy.
Give him a fright, yes, but kill him?
The image of Biterman’s dead body pops into Amancio’s head and it repulses him. He has heard Giribaldi say that many people shit themselves at the moment of death.
If giving him a real fright doesn’t
work then I can always ask Giri to take care of the Yid. After all, what difference does one more death make to him?

Dawn breaks. Amancio, in his dishevelled tuxedo, is asleep on the living-room sofa. And he carries on sleeping until almost seven in the evening, when the sound of the door shocks him awake. Lara arrives home, worn out.

Lara disappears into the bedroom leaving Amancio to chew on his fury and helplessness. He pours himself a glass of Tres Plumas whisky and throws it down in one swig, but his stomach rejects it and he has to go running to the toilet in the spare bathroom and vomit, hugging the porcelain until he’s reduced to a few dry and painful retches. When he can finally get up, he returns to the living room and slumps back on the sofa. Around eleven at night, he stirs to see Lara about to walk out the door again.

Devastated and confused, Amancio hears the lift door open and close, the distant sound of its motor up in the dark roof. Like a lightning bolt, he’s struck with the idea that she has gone to meet Horacio. Although no, they never had a chance to arrange it. At no point were they ever alone together. But their exchange of eager looks didn’t go unnoticed. Amancio is in love with Lara, in it up to his neck. He knows, feels she’s more than he deserves.
The story about meeting up with one of the girls doesn’t fool him for a second. It’ll be Ramiro or else her boss, the Pole with the name with more consonants than vowels. And he can do nothing to stop her, nor can he stop the blood rushing to his head, the choking in his chest. He has no power of control over Lara, no influence, nothing he can offer to keep her sweet. She has given him an ultimatum and the clock is ticking.

He goes to the mini bar, serves himself a Tres Plumas and necks it. The drink is like a bag of rabid cats tumbling down his throat. He sinks another shot to drown them, then another, and another. Finally he starts to calm down and the image of a naked Lara on top of the naked Pole fades away and loses importance. His body has cooled down, the pain numbed, the hatred frozen. After the fifth or sixth shot, he smashes the empty bottle on the floor and he thinks that Biterman, the Jews and the Poles of the world are to blame for his predicament. He goes over to the display cabinet with a stupid smile on his lips. He opens the case, takes out the nine millimetre. He caresses it. The gun’s as cold as he is. He opens the box of steel-tipped bullets. He removes the magazine, fills it with the eight cartridges, one by one, and tucks the pistol in his belt. One lonely bullet is left in the box and he pops it in his pocket. He goes into the bedroom, takes out his tweed blazer, looking somewhat worn on the lapels, and puts it on. He straightens his tie, resplendent with crests, and leaves.

When the lift doors open and close and he hears the motor upstairs, it feels good that he too is going out and he thinks that everything is about to change. That it is the Jew who has brought him all his bad luck. He feels in control of the situation.

Manuel felt like a prisoner trapped in his own body. Always on the move, as if trying to escape from his own skin. Always running, always fleeing, always thirsty, always out front, always crossing roads without looking. Eva spent the entire day thinking about Manuel. Their non-future together. Living a clandestine existence has the destructive side-effect of giving everything a temporary nature, unstable and blurred. They first got together after the demonstration outside the Ministry of Social Welfare, when two hundred thousand voices had chanted in unison that José López Rega had been born to a whore:
López Ré/López Ré/López Rega / la puta que te parió.
The passions aroused in them that day never developed into true love, if such a thing even exists. The cause was always more important, the future but a suspended execution sentence. Manuel would never be the father of her child. His death was no more than a confirmation of this certainty. Their assignments kept them apart and they separately went about their tasks with total conviction, intent on changing the world by force, whether the world wanted it or not. They were part of a youth movement violently indoctrinated by the words of the new prophets, like Che Guevara, who
during their brief lives appealed to them with pompous pronouncements:
Let me tell you, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, that the true guerrillero is guided by deep feelings of love.
Death and sex, always getting mixed up together, combined in Eva and Manuel in uneven measures. The result was a lethal cocktail. That last time he inhabited her body, quickly, like in a dream, in a rush, in the hide-out in Villa Martelli, she didn’t even get as far as orgasm, never mind making him understand she was late, telling him her dream, her pressing need to abandon the armed struggle.

Eva doesn’t want to die, doesn’t want them to kill what’s growing inside her, the child her body tells her is there more clearly than any medical examination could ever do. She’s glad they didn’t capture Manuel alive, that he died in combat and thus avoided the beatings and execution simulations, was spared being tied to a bed and electrocuted, having his head submerged in water over and over again. She hates herself for having this as her only comfort and she hates him for having sacrificed himself. And dead he may be, but she can’t forgive him for not having realized what he was, the father of her child, for not having been closer. A line from the play,
Yerma
, suddenly resonates with her. She remembers seeing Nuria Espert’s performance at a theatre on Corrientes Avenue, her words full of yearning for something she knew she would never have, as she asked her pregnant neighbour:

The world seems more distant to Eva today, and she seems less responsible for it. She just wants to live and she dreams of the moment when she puts her breasts,
already bulging out of her bra, into the mouth of the child who floats inside her, who knows nothing of the stupidity of men. She feels a sudden need, overwhelming and urgent, to be hugged. But she’s alone in this strange house. She could easily escape if she wanted to, but she doesn’t want to, she wants to stay as she is, lying on the sofa, watching the hours pass by, rejoicing in the silence, or at least the muffling of the row of the outside world. She just wants to be left to brood, to cackle with laughter one minute, cry the next. Her skin has gotten smoother, softer, her hair more shiny. She imagines a girl. Plaiting her hair ready for school,
in case of lice…
She imagines a boy in the park with a red ball.
I might not have managed to make the world a better place for everyone, but I’ll make sure it’s better for my son.
But she thinks, she remembers: