Less than a week later, Felicitas was sending a detailed report:
“The front door is discreet,” it said. “There are no signs or anything else that would identify the place as a transitory lodging. But on one of the outside walls, there’s the painting of a great windmill, obviously blue. You first go into a small room with the cash register on the left, behind a mirrored glass which hides the cashier.” Right, right, now that Felicitas mentioned it, it was as if Lorenza were watching the anonymous hand that would slip them the key through a slot in the smoked glass. The key to happiness? For a while anyway, because after a couple of hours the noise of a bell would startle them: either they left the room or they would have to pay double. Felicitas described a plaster fountain with a tiny angel, somewhat metaphorical, holding an amphora that poured out a stream of froth over a seashell. Felicitas and her friend had paid the cashier the equivalent of ten dollars, which had secured them one of the deluxe rooms for an hour. “It smelled like cheap and cloying air freshener, a mixture of marmalade and disinfectant, a smell characteristic of all the telos in the world, as I know from experience,” she had written.
Yes, that must have been the smell. But the angel, the froth, the seashell? They must not have been there back then, or she didn’t remember. “The room is about five meters by five meters wide and is decorated in shoddy art deco.” Once they were inside, Felicitas and her friend had amused themselves taking pictures that they eventually sent to Lorenza. They posed in front of the painted cardboard faux-stone, both very tall and very marvelous in their coats, boots, and scarves, on the bed, in the bathroom and facing the mirrors, specifically a huge, hexagonal mirror, with uneven sides, that by all accounts was the pièce de résistance of the set. Those afternoons in El Molino Azul, in the Buenos Aires of the dictatorship. The memory of a long line of couples slowly returned to Lorenza, very young men and women, just as they themselves must have been. They waited for their rooms embracing each other or holding hands, chatting in low voices, not betraying any shame, or need for secrecy, or modesty, as if they were waiting in line at the movies. During the week it wasn’t very crowded, but Fridays and Saturdays there was a long wait. In general, they didn’t see too many bosses with their secretaries, or prostitutes with their johns, or adulterous affairs; what they saw was mostly students, the type who still lived with his parents and saved up during the week to take his girl to a refuge as far removed from parental control as possible. There was no one there who would insult them, who would point an accusing finger or create a stir. That telo with its wine-dark satin blankets, its cups of cold tea, its disinfectant smells, had been for them a liberated land amid the demoralizing violence of those times. Because of the occupational hazards of the resistance, Aurelia and Forcás could not know where the other lived, and so for many afternoons, El Molino Azul took them in as if it were their home.
Two details of Felicitas’s report made Lorenza uneasy: for one, “the bathtub is discreetly hidden behind a frame of frosted glass,” and “the bedspread is a plush peach with assorted pillows.” Plush peach bedspread and frosted glass? Could her most detailed memories be trusted, the satin sheets and the shower curtain? She had to admit it, the room in Felicitas’s photo was not the same as the one from her nostalgia. It was disheartening to have one’s memories modernized, she thought, but what could she do, she had to accept the fact that El Molino Azul had opted for an upgrade and undergone a furious renovation. And why not, for even the seediest hotels update their decor now and then. So let them do what they wanted, Lorenza would keep what she had: a pair of young lovers, a green plastic shower curtain, and wine-colored satin sheets.
28
GOYENECHE ARRIVED at the café on Florida Street, where Lorenza had agreed to meet him. They had seen each other every day during the time that they had been party comrades on the front lines, but during that hour that they shared in the café, Lorenza found out more about him than she had ever known from the years in the resistance.
He was wearing a dark shirt, a black leather coat, his hair was already graying and balding, but smoothed and gelled back like a tango singer’s, just like it had been during the years of the dictatorship. He told Lorenza that his real name was Luis Antonio Méndez, the brother of the Arturo Méndez who had been disappeared in ’74, that he wasn’t Argentinean but Uruguayan, and that after the fall of the dictatorship he had finished medical school and specialized in gynecology. Who would have thought it? Goye, a gynecologist!
“Even though Goye is not your name anymore,” she told him, “you still look like a tango singer.”
“A very old one who never knew how to sing.” He smiled.
In the old times, Goye played the flute and now, in the café, they laughed remembering the mess he had caused for doing just that, the day he hadn’t shown up to a meeting, and had spread panic everywhere because he had been so absorbed with this sweet flute that he forgot the time.
“Damn it, Goye,” Lorenza said. “You scared the hell out of us. You dispersed us to such an extent that it took us a month to round up everybody. Do you still play the flute?”
“After what happened, are you crazy? The flute for me was like it was for the czar’s musicians,” he said. And he told her how if they played well, the czar ordered that the instruments be stuffed with gold, and the flautists ended up fucked, and that if they played badly, the czar ordered them to stuff their instruments up their asses, and the flautists ended up fucked.
Lorenza had sought out Goye for a specific reason; apparently he knew about Ramón’s time in prison. And not through the political grapevine but through a chance circumstance: his wife was the first cousin of Forcás’s girlfriend at the time he was detained.
Mateo had not wanted to go with her to the meeting at the café. He had decided instead to go shopping in the stores on Florida. A present for a friend, a girl, he told his mother. But he refused to tell her who the girl was.
Goyeneche, or Luis Antonio Méndez, told Aurelia, now Lorenza, that his wife’s cousin, a girl named Marisa, who worked as a professional makeup artist, had suffered tremendously when Ramón had been arrested. At first, they had accused her of being complicit, since they had a stable relationship, but later they found her innocent. Goye had already left when Mateo returned from his shopping trip and showed his mother the cherry-colored leather change purse that he had bought for his nameless friend.
“Do you like it?” he asked. “I also bought another one, a green one.”
“For another girlfriend?”
“No, for you. Or would you rather have the red one?”
Lorenza took the green change purse and planted a loud kiss on it, which she would rather have planted on Mateo, but he would have resisted. Then she told him what she had learned from Goyeneche.
The prison incident had nothing to do with politics but with some shady scheme, for which Ramón was the brains, along with his only brother, Uncle Miche, who had come up with the idea and was the main player. It involved a good deal of cash transferred monthly from a bank in the provinces to Buenos Aires by a moving company. The money would arrive at its destination in the middle of the night and would be placed in a high-security deposit safe until it was picked up the following morning. But it wasn’t the only delivery that arrived, since the moving company had other clients aside from the bank. So Ramón sent, from some town in the interior, a huge wooden box addressed to himself that was scheduled to arrive on the same day as the bank’s money.