The Buenos Aires Quintet (20 page)

The woman who is obviously Vladimiro’s companion seems rather upset at this.

‘Well I don’t see what’s so wrong with being a cop.’

Nobody pays her much attention, not even Vladimiro, who’s giving the
asado
the look-over with an expert eye. The old woman disappears into her kitchen. She struggles over to the button on the wall, presses it, and the concealed door swings open. She shouts into the hole: ‘Favila! Everyone’s here! It’s your birthday. Favila! Come on out, will you, you old goat?’

Favila’s pale, wrinkled face appears in the light. He’s dressed in his Sunday best.

‘Anyone can tell you’re Spanish by the amount you curse.’

‘I talk as I see fit.’

‘Are you sure the coast is clear?’ Favila asks, pausing but not completely halting in his progress out into the yard.

‘In Argentina it is. It always has been.’

‘Did you remember the cider?’

‘Why didn’t you see to it instead of playing at hide-and-seek?’

The old woman stamps off, sustained by her accumulated sense of grievance. Before stepping out into the yard, Don Favila gives his painful black shoes a final polish with a tea-towel. When he appears, he’s immediately surrounded by his relatives and their guests. They applaud him, kiss and hug him, give him presents.

‘Has Vladimiro come?’ Favila wants to know.

Vladimiro comes up to his father, who embraces him with special affection.

‘My youngest, born in hard times during the dictatorship of that assassin’s apprentice, Onga...’

He’s so passionate about what he’s saying he can’t get the words out. One of his daughters interrupts him.

‘Papa. No politics. Today is your day, a year on our planet.’

‘I called him Vladimiro in homage to Lenin, I called you Rosa after Rosa Luxemburg, and you Dolores were named after Dolores Ibárruri,
la Pasionaria
,’
Favila insists, pointing to each of his offspring in turn.

‘So why am I called Fulgencio, Papa?’ another son calls out. ‘In homage to Fulgencio Batista?’

‘Don’t try to annoy me. You’re called Fulgencio because that was the name of my father, your grandfather. Revolution doesn’t mean throwing away traditions. Let’s see: I want to pour the cider, because you lot are a bunch of ninnies who were brought up on Coca Cola and Seven Up.’

He’s handed a jug of flat cider.

‘We bought it in that shop in Calle Corrientes – you know, the one that sells Spanish goods.’

Don Favila’s eyes express their satisfaction. He picks up a traditional wide-rimmed glass. With one hand, he lifts the cider jar behind his head; in the other he holds the glass in front of him. With expert judgement he pours a stream of cider into the foaming glass. Everyone cheers and applauds him. He courteously offers the glass to his wife. She takes it with a trembling hand, and starts to cry softly. She takes a sip, but still manages to comment: ‘I never liked cider, it tastes like piss.’

All the guests sit round the table, wherever they can find a place. The table is already overflowing with meat, salads,
empanadas,
Italian pasta dishes and a bowl full of tinned Spanish beans. Suddenly, the street door bell rings. The old woman gets up to go and answer it, but one of her daughters-in-law restrains her.

‘By the time you get there, they’ll have given up and gone.’

‘Bitch...1 hope your cunt freezes over,’ the old woman mutters to herself.

A short while later, the daughter-in-law reappears, accompanied by Carvalho. Both of them seem rather embarrassed: she doesn’t know how to explain what’s obviously a long story, and he is taken aback at seeing so many people. He’s even more disturbed when he notices Vladimiro is one of the guests.

‘This is José Carvalho Tourón, a nephew of your cousin, Evaristo Tourón,’ the daughter-in-law says, pointing at Favila, ‘and the son of Evaristo Carvalho, brother of...’

Favila stands up with a cry of emotion.

‘Nephew!’

He gives Carvalho a warm hug, and the reminiscences start to pour out.

‘I didn’t recognize you at first, but you’re the spitting image of your uncle and your father.’ He turns to the others. ‘This man’s father was a hero who fought Franco and paid for it with forty years in jail.’

‘It was only five,’ Carvalho corrects him.

‘In those days, five years was like forty.’

Carvalho sees Vladimiro shoot him a silent look that pleads: keep quiet. Favila is busy presenting each of his children. Fulgencio after his grandfather. Rosa for Rosa Luxemburg. Dolores in honour of Dolores Ibárruri. Vladimiro for Lenin.

‘Congratulations. You must be the last Leninist,’ Carvalho comments, before he’s steered to a place at the table to join the feast.

He sits down and starts to eat, more hungrily with each mouthful. As if the flavours help him find his way home, he feels more at ease and begins to enjoy himself. After a while, a scene rises from the depths of his memory – a wedding banquet in Barcelona, a cousin getting married to a girl in service. Both are from Galicia, they’ve been engaged for years, saving up for the wedding, and it’s a real Galician feast, meat with tuna, cockle
empanadas.
This banquet fills his childhood memory – it’s the happiness of abundance, of a strange moment when life or even history somehow relaxed. History had marked his childhood, lived out among hidden men and women, and now Carvalho rediscovers a similar happiness as he eats and drinks free of fear, talking and answering questions, especially from Don Favila.

‘I’m still in hiding, just in case. One day there’ll be another coup, or perhaps the revolution will really come, and we shouldn’t be caught out. We always have been and always will be the vanguard. Revolutions fail when the vanguard disappears or goes soft, like it did in the USSR. The vanguard are people like your father and me.’

Rosa Luxemburg lifts a finger to her temple to warn Carvalho Don Favila is not quite right in the head. The feast fills the guests’ stomachs and hearts, and finally makes its way up to their brains, telling them they’ve had enough. Slices of cake are handed round, after Don Favila has done his best to spread bits all over the table during his ten attempts to blow out the eighty-four candles on it. Carvalho looks on with his usual stony poker face, but there’s a glint of emotion in his eyes. Vladimiro comes over.

‘You’re one of life’s great surprises.’

‘My father doesn’t know I’m a policeman.’

‘My father died without knowing I wasn’t a Communist any more, and that I’d become a private detective.’

Vladimiro hesitates, but finally decides to speak.

‘I knew you were going to be here, but not for the meal. Raúl told me to tell you he hasn’t got a definite answer for you yet. He’s gone into hiding again. The Captain raided the Brucker place.’

‘So you’re Raúl’s contact?’

‘He’s my cousin. Only a second cousin, but still a cousin. Do you think I could ever look my father in the face if it was me who caught him?’

‘What about Pascuali?’

‘He’s a cop with a good pair of balls.’

‘Are there any cops who don’t have them? The problem is where they put them. If they use them instead of brains, we’re all done for.’

Vladimiro sits down again next to his girlfriend. She looks like a girlfriend and not a wife, Carvalho thinks. Then he is distracted by the sight of the old woman carrying out a secret inventory of real or imaginary objects in the kitchen. It’s as if she’s praying. She smiles at him through the window, and beckons him inside with a crooked finger. Carvalho joins her in the kitchen, and sees that Don Favila is waiting for him half-hidden in a corner of the room, out of sight of the yard.

‘I have to go back into hiding. I’ve taken too much of a risk already. It’s all right once in a while, but I mustn’t push my luck. But I brought you in here because on behalf of your heroic father you deserve to know my secret. I live hidden, and only come out once a year for my birthday’

‘And whenever Boca’s playing on TV,’ his wife quickly adds.

‘Everyone has their weak spot. Didn’t Lenin like to howl like a wolf in the moonlight?’

Don Favila presses the button and his hide-out door opens. He steps inside, and invites Carvalho to follow. Carvalho stands aside to let the old woman go ahead of him.

‘Me in there? Over my dead body. When this old fool comes back to bed and does his duty like a proper husband, then I’ll set foot in there. It must be like the gates of hell.’

Carvalho follows the old man. Don Favila scuttles down four steps and switches on a light. They are in a fairly large basement, but Carvalho stops in his tracks, overwhelmed by all the messages bombarding him from the walls. It’s like a Red cultural museum from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1970s, plus a few examples of bang up-to-date post-Marxist protest. Some ‘liberation theology’ posters hang next to pacifist ones from the First World War. Others from Spanish deserters in the North African war. The Spanish Civil War. Che. Castro. The October revolution. Photos of all the icons of world revolution. Books selected for a Red shipwreck survivor on a 1930s desert island. A model of one of Lenin’s giant statues. Another for the Third International by Tatlin. A photo of subcomandante Marcos in his mask. Rigoberta Menchú. The old man observes the effect all this iconography is having on Carvalho.

‘The world is full of hidden people. This city too. There’s always been a reason to hide. Buenos Aires is full of secret tunnels; I know of a complete network of catacombs in Calle Peru, for example. Why should I venture out? In here I know where I am. Outside, it’s capitalism which dictates how everything should be. For the moment it has won, but one day a new generation will discover the old and the new disorder, and then all the hopes you see here will regain their meaning. Don’t you agree?’

Carvalho agrees. He allows the old man to sit him down, and then put a bakelite seventy-eight record on a wind-up gramophone. A whirring sound, then the anthem of Thaelmann’s men from the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War rings out. The old man sings along in an imaginary German. Carvalho eventually pretends to sing along too, waving his arms about in the air.

‘Those Germans have always had a genius for symphonies!’

Carvalho nods his head.

Carvalho and Alma push their way through to find two seats near the platform in Tango Amigo. Norman is just drawing his monthly monologue on hidden men to its close.

‘I respect all those who are hiding because they’ve forgotten where Buenos Aires, Argentina, America, and the whole world are, those who only recognize the corner where they were, are and always will be frightened.’ He drops his bombastic tone. ‘And now at last the hidden Adriana Varela is going to sing for you “Hidden Man”!’

Adriana Varela comes on. This is tango from a woman’s heart, sung as if the words of the story had been written just for her:

What
’
s your game? Man without a shadow
What
’
s your game? Lurking in the darkness
Your only light an age-old fear
That shelters you and numbs you.

What
’
s your game? Owner without a dog
What
’
s your game? Master of nothing,
You who have killed your gaze
So you cannot see, so you cannot kill.

Some fear the executioners
Some fear just being afraid
Some fear being an executioner
Some simply want to go on being blind.

Some are running from their mother-in-law
Some are running from a memory
Some are running from their dreams
In order simply to stay sane.

What
’
s your game? Man without a shadow
What
’
s your game? Lurking in darkness
Your only light an age-old fear
That shelters you and numbs you.

What
’
s your game? Owner with no dog
What
’
s your game? Master of nothing
You who have killed your gaze
So you cannot see, so you cannot kill.
But see you will in the shadowsSee without fail in the darkness
The most precious of your memories
Which shelters you and numbs you.

If white was black already
When everything was so white
Why leave the hole you re in?
Why go back to the fight?

You
’
ve already killed your gaze
So you cannot see, so you cannot kill.

The tango ends, with Adriana exultant and Carvalho stupefied – the word Alma uses to describe his fascination for the singer. Her fingers are there to snap him out of his obsession as Adriana leaves the stage.

‘D’you know why you like Adriana so much? Because she sings tangos, and to you she represents the typical Argentine woman, that is, a mixture of guilt, sex and melancholy.’

‘Guilt, sex and melancholy. That’s not bad. I remember a one-woman show with Cecilia Rosetto I saw in Spain. The monologue of a poor hysterical woman. Oh, and I still haven’t seen Rosetto here.’

Suddenly he gets to his feet.

‘Are you leaving already? Trying to find Cecilia Rosetto? Why don’t you just look on the billboard outside?’

‘I’m a private detective. We’re always looking for a hidden man or woman. But tonight it’s not Raúl or Cecilia I’m after.’

‘Have you got a whole collection of them then?’

‘It’s a never-ending collection.’

Carvalho leaves the club, followed by Alma’s gaze. He has to walk quickly to make up time and reach the outer edges of San Telmo and enter the strange world of young Mudarra and Canelo, the dog who loves to eat croquettes. He enters the bar. The waiter looks more world-weary than ever, and even manages to doze off from time to time. Mudarra has not appeared, and it’s already past midnight. Carvalho posts himself outside the house, waiting for the doorway to open as it has done in the past. Half-past twelve. He goes back to the bar and questions the barman, who’s busy stacking chairs.

‘What about the boy with the dog? Hasn’t he been out tonight?’

‘I’ve no idea. He’s not a customer of ours. In fact, I don’t reckon he’s a customer anywhere, they’re dirt poor. The only cash going into that place is from his mother’s pension. You can imagine what they eat – less than a cannibal in a fishtank. And that boy’s always had problems with his nerves.’