‘And you’re telling me they just suddenly appeared out of nowhere?’
‘We didn’t know there was anyone out there.’
‘That’s right, be a wise guy. Who are you trying to kid? Either you give me a straight answer right now or we’ll interrogate your wife while I fuck her right in front of you. Maybe I can make her come.’
‘I’ve told you everything. My wife and I don’t know any subversives.’
‘You can’t answer for her. Do you know any subversives, Dupuy?’
‘No, no one,’ said Emilia.
‘How would you recognise a subversive? This fucker you came with is a subversive, a dangerous subversive. We’ve got a file on him.’
‘He’s my husband. You can check, ask anyone. You’re making a terrible mistake.’
‘You’re the one who made the mistake when you married this Commie fucker. You had a meeting somewhere round here, didn’t you, Cardoso? The moishe you were supposed to be meeting gave you up. Just tell me where you stashed the maps and the weapons you brought. Tell me, and you can go. You can both go. Don’t waste my time.’
‘I’m not going to lie to you. We didn’t come here to meet anyone. We were sent to map the area. I explained all this to the officers at the last checkpoint. As soon as we finish, we’re leaving. Two hours, maybe three. Nobody told us we couldn’t.’
‘You think I’m some fuckwit? In the last week, we’ve caught five Trotskyites armed to the teeth. They were carrying a whole library of maps. They told us everything. Terrorists use maps to prepare their attacks, to get in and get the fuck out quickly, am I wrong?’
Emilia bowed her head, hopeless. What was happening was a farce, something that had no place in the real world. She tried to reframe things, to return to a sensible, safe place. She said: ‘I am the daughter of Dr Orestes Dupuy. You have no right to treat us like this.’
‘You think so, puta? We don’t give a shit about some Dupín here. This is a war, you get that? I can kill you right here, right now, give any excuse I like. I can say you were trying to escape, that you tried to take my gun off me, I can say the first thing comes into my head. Out here, you have no name; you don’t exist.’
Simón didn’t know how to appease the toad. He was desperate for this nightmare to end, for them to leave him in peace. With the country in the state it was in, who cared about maps?
Another paunchy officer appeared in the doorway and asked the pencil-pusher if he needed any help.
‘Help? With this little whore?’ the toad said. ‘Are you shitting me? I could fuck her three times over and still have dick to spare. See the Commie fucker who came in with her? He’s already given up.’
Simón’s head had slumped onto his chest. Lashed to a chair with the toad’s belt, he could barely move. The clerk rolled up his sleeves and went back to sucking his pen. He was preparing himself for more questions. He took the pot of coffee heating on the stove and threw it in Simón’s face.
‘You going to tell who you brought those fucking maps for? What about the weapons we found in the jeep?’
Maddened by pain and fear, Simón hauled himself to his feet, still lashed to the chair, and struck out wildly. It was a senseless thing to do, he couldn’t hope to achieve anything, he didn’t even succeed in loosening the belt. He slumped onto the floor with the chair on top of him. The noise attracted the attention of the paunches outside. Two of them quickly hauled him to his feet and slammed him against the wall. Emilia watched her husband slide down in slow motion. It seemed unbelievable to her that life should play them such an ugly trick, just when they were beginning to be happy. A few insignificant lines on a map had brought them to this place by chance, and now chance was destroying them. The world refused to be mapped, and those who violated this principle paid their price in tears. She heard a crack like breaking bone. Simón’s nose was swollen, his lip split; a trickle of blood stained his shirt.
Two green Ford Falcons, engines running, were waiting for them at the perimeter fence of the checkpoint. Emilia was bundled into the first car next to a guard in plain clothes. The pot-bellied officers pushed and manhandled Simón towards the other, her husband shuffling along, his legs faltering and uncertain.
This was Emilia’s last glimpse of him, the image that in future she would dream of so often. But in her dreams, Simón was never Simón, but one of the other men they had encountered that day. Or a city that rose and fell. Or a flickering candle flame.
On the drive back to Tucumán, the sky grew dark. Every few kilometres the weather shifted and changed. At times, a furious storm burst, bringing clouds of steam rising from the asphalt. Further along, the sun shimmered and the air shattered into slivers of ice. They came to a point where a convoy of carts hauling sugar cane blocked the road. The officer guarding Emilia got out of the car to try and deal with the obstruction only to come back shaking his head. ‘There’s no way through,’ he said. ‘Two mules dropped dead in the road and there’s no one to move them. We’ll just have to drive round.’
He turned on the two-way radio and informed the checkpoint that they would be making a detour. The cane fields were deserted; the horizon veered from purple to a deep, ominous yellow. They drove along a crude dirt track, the car constantly getting stuck in potholes. Emilia no longer cared where she was being taken or when they would get there. She cared only about Simón. Over and over, at seemingly endless intervals, she asked the guard about him, but the man stared out at the eddying dust and did not answer. Maybe it was pointless to resist, Emilia thought, after all everyone else in the country had already given up. The military were the aristocracy of the spirit of Argentina, and that aristocracy was once more trooping out of its barracks to save the country. How many times had she heard her father recite ‘El discurso de Ayacucho’8, in the same antiquated bombastic tones as the national poet who had penned it? Written in 1924, it was a piece of rhetoric which every schoolchild was forced to learn by heart. Every word of it was burned into her brain and circled there still.
As night began to fall, they were forced to stop by a passing train. Slowly, clumsily, the train approached. On freight cars smooth as still water, corpses were being shipped as though they were merely cargo. Except for the three wagons behind the engine, the bodies were exposed to the elements, indifferent to the obscenity of death. The wagons at the front were shrouded in black plastic which billowed open in the wind to reveal a hand, a head, a leg. Ash from the stubble fields whirled around the freight cars in dark flecks: a host of dying butterflies.
It was almost dark when the first Ford Falcon arrived in the suburbs of Tucumán. The broad avenues were lit up; the facades of the houses gleamed as though freshly painted. In the freezing air, the city huddled in on itself. Cars moved slowly; people walked with heads bowed, hugging the walls. The stillness was so deliberate it seemed artificial. Across the boulevard that divided the north of the city from the south hung a banner showing a photograph of three strapping, dishevelled, thuggish young men and, underneath, the words: We will not allow the extremists to destroy the country. Help us eliminate them. A block further on was a poster with an illustration of a hard-working broom bearing the legend, in blue and white: Order and Cleanliness. Death to Subversion.
Order and Cleanliness was one of her father’s propaganda slogans for the government Emilia remembered. How many other slogans had he penned that she was not aware of? God, Country, Family she knew was his, though it belonged to everyone now.
She was taken to the police station where they fingerprinted her and made her sign a piece of paper admitting that Simón had rented the jeep. ‘Under instructions from the Automobile Club Argentina’ Emilia explained in a note at the bottom. Flanked by two guards, she was led down into a vast basement lined on both sides with a row of cells from which there came not the slightest sound. Emilia was locked up in the furthest cell. As soon as the guards left her, she lost all track of time. It took a long while for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. She could make out a cot bed bolted to the floor; in the corner was a bucket from which came the stench of geological strata of urine. The wall opposite was dizzyingly high, at least eight metres, and converged with the wall behind her meaning the cell was shaped like a pyramid. At some point, a guard passed a jug of water through the bars and she gulped it down in one breathless swallow. Her throat was dry, filled with sand and fear.