When the creatures saw Simón walking towards them, they howled piteous, meaningless words. The skin of the man in the raincoat was black with filth and grime. From a distance, he did not seem human. Emilia, recognising that they were as sick with dread as she was, got out of the jeep, throwing a blanket around her shoulders. As she approached the two old women, she heard a feeble wail and realised that wrapped in the bundle of newspapers was a baby. She offered them the blanket without a moment’s hesitation. As she walked the scant hundred metres from the jeep to where they stood, day had finally broken. The sun now rose at a dizzying speed as if to compensate for the delay. An icy wind whistled, whipping up the sand.
In the distance, the strange creatures went on howling the same words over and over, the tone, the volume shifting. The guy with the frizzy hair jus’ shitted hi’self. Or: ’ey, you, gi’s some money for a drink. Can’ you see ’m dyin’ of thirst? And in unison. We’re all Raya morada7 here, that’s why they rounded us with nets like stray dogs. Raya morada, Raya morada. Even more incomprehensible was the strange behaviour of the men, who threatened each other, bared their toothless gums or sobbed as though some terrible memory had crawled up their noses. Pressing a finger to one nostril they blew their noses then stopped to see whether the snot had landed on the gravel or their clothes. When they had calmed down, the woman with the shock of hair, who was easily the most articulate, explained to Simón and Emilia that they had been picked up in military raids shortly before midnight from the doorways and the church porches where they slept.
There were some eighteen or twenty of them and they had been living on charity. Some pretended to be mad, making people laugh playing guitars that were nothing more than broom handles or writing poems on pieces of newspaper. Others were genuinely mad. The man in the threadbare raincoat believed he had been transported back from the Last Judgement to a time when there was no God, since there was no need of God now. He believed he was surrounded by angels through whom he could communicate with the dead and he was never bored because he spent his time talking to them about family secrets and mysterious diseases.
They had been shipped out to Tucumán in trucks used by dog-catchers and dumped in the bleak wasteland here in Catamarca, under the El Abra Bridge, between piles of hospital waste — bloody bandages, cotton pads smeared with pus, vesicles, appendixes, pieces of stomach, ulcerated intestines, kidneys with tumours and the other insults visited by disease on the human body. Even on the bitterest nights, clouds of blowflies laid their eggs in the waste and flocks of carrion hawks fought viciously for scraps of human detritus. The feverish stench drove out all oxygen and clung to the bodies of these beggars with a tenacity that would last forever.
Simón offered to drive them in groups to the military checkpoint at Huacra. He was prepared to put off starting work on the map until the afternoon and spend the morning making as many trips as necessary, but they told him that two of the men had already made the trip during the night only to arrive, their feet bloody and raw, and be bundled into an army truck and brought straight back out into the desert. Simón suggested it might be better to go for help to a village called Bañado de Ovanta, twenty kilometres east. ‘I’ll go with you,’ said Emilia. ‘We need to bring back bread, coffee and blankets for these people before they die.’
The journey was very different. The blazing sun now obliterated everything; they could barely make out the blots of Ñandubay trees and cacti. Clearly, there were mistakes on their map because they wound up not in Bañado de Ovanta, but back at Huacra. Later, Emilia would often wonder whether they had got lost by accident or whether someone had switched the signposts. They had been driving for twenty minutes when in a ravine on the right-hand side of the road they saw the two dogs they had noticed as they left Huacra. Everyone knows that images, when they reappear inverted, herald disaster.
Disaster occurred almost immediately. They found themselves surrounded by a hundred uniformed soldiers who forced them out of the jeep at gunpoint. The buttons on the soldiers’ jackets strained from the pressure of paunches bloated by beer and noodles. The checkpoint, which had earlier been clearly deserted, was now teeming with soldiers going in and out of a corrugated-iron shack at the rear of a large courtyard.
The pot-bellied soldiers hustled them into a shack that served as a guardhouse. None of them wore badges indicating their rank, though from their ages they could only be corporals or sergeants. There might have been a captain; checkpoints usually had a captain in charge. Emilia tried to catch Simón’s eye but he would not look at her. He seemed lost, his eyes blankly staring, bewildered, unable to believe what was happening to them. Many years later, she thought that this was the moment when her husband began to disappear from the world.
A clerk with a toad-like double chin and breath that stank of beer asked them for their papers and laboriously copied down the details, sucking his pen after every letter. Emilia, accustomed to the inertia of bureaucracies, watched his sluggish routine calmly. Simón hugged his knees like an abandoned child.
The interview turned nasty as soon as they brought up El Abra. At the mere mention of the name, the clerk swallowed his words and trailed off into silence. Their attempted explanations about maps and scales only served to make things worse. What were you doing at El Abra? What were you doing waiting for dawn in open country? Who were you meeting? What were they bringing? When? Emilia and Simón had nothing to tell but the truth and explained again that they were working on a map for the Automobile Club. They had told the same account, used the same words at every checkpoint and had nothing more to add. But still the officer was not satisfied. He demanded they repeat it over and over. Why? What for? How many of you are there? He was determined to find out why anyone would travel two hundred kilometres from Buenos Aires to map nothing. ‘Since when did the Automobile Club start wasting money on such bullshit?’ ‘It’s the truth,’ Simón insisted. ‘Besides, it wasn’t our idea.’
‘What are you, Cardoso, a Communist? A Montero? A Bolshevik?’
‘I’m none of those things.’
‘You know what Communism is?’
‘I think so. It’s what they have in Russia, in Poland, in East Germany.’
‘Exactly. Godless countries where everything belongs to everyone. Even wives and children belong to the state. There’s no such thing as private property. Anyone can take anything belonging to someone else.’
‘Is it really that simple?’
‘I ask the questions here. Yes, it’s that simple. Where there’s no God, there’s no decency. You like the idea of some thug coming in off the street and fucking your wife up the arse just because he can?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘The Communist state gives everyone the right to do things like that. You could just as easily go to his house and return the favour, fuck his wife.’
‘I’ve never heard anything like that.’
‘Well, take my word for it. In Russia, even kids at school know this stuff, they’re used to it, they don’t know any better. Here, we teach people respect. God first of all. Then country, then family. It’s the Argentinian holy trinity.’
‘If you say so, I believe you.’
‘That’s better, Cardoso. Believe me. Where did you make contact with the subversives?’
‘I already told you, we didn’t see anyone. Only the homeless people.’