Marcelo was trembling. This was no time to apologise; all the while he had felt he had not put a foot wrong, and now he discovered that his one mistake, the one which a whole lifetime would not suffice to excuse, was not to have heeded the infallible voice of his father-in-law.
‘It’s not just a few banks that are failing,’ Dupuy said, ‘the whole system is falling apart, foreign credit has dried up and now the country is being asked to pay its debts. Even if I wanted to — and I don’t want to, I can’t — how would it look if I asked for you to be thrown a lifeline when the Titanic is going down?’
Marcelo’s voice faltered; he felt on the brink of tears. ‘So what do you advise me to do?’
‘Leave the country. And before you go, think about how to preserve your good name. Though it pains me to say so, it is my grandson’s name too.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. I was going to ask for an audit, a financial inspection, but I don’t have time to doctor the figures and delete the fraudulent transactions. As soon as the auditors look at it, they’ll know my only way out is to get the state to cover my debts. I could speak to the comandantes, but if, as you say, the whole ship is going down, my hands are tied.’
‘Tied? You’ll be lucky not to have your hands cut off. The comandantes aren’t going to put themselves on the line for anyone. They’re gouging each other’s eyes out as it is. Will the books stand up to a slightly underhand audit?’
‘No. Anywhere they look there are papers implicating me.’
‘Papers,’ echoed Dupuy. He sat for a moment in silence. Marcelo feared his silences more than his poisonous tongue. ‘Paper is a perishable material. Are these papers scattered around the place?’
‘More so than I would like.’
‘How long would it take you to get them all in one place? You need to gather them together as if they were the bones you’re going to be confronted with at trial. There can’t be a single scrap, a stamp, a file missing.’
‘Twenty-four hours, thirty-six, I’m not sure. Maybe a little longer if the branches don’t move quickly.’
‘That’s a long time. You need to get your press office to issue a statement today saying that you are going to get your files in order so that the government can see that you have acted with complete rectitude. You need to denounce the damage being done to your business by these unfounded rumours. And you need to promise that, as soon as the audit is complete, you’ll pay back every last centavo. The statement needs to sound utterly sincere. Repeat that hypocritical Latin motto your bank uses: Fac recte. what’s the rest of it?’
‘I don’t understand, Dr Dupuy.’
Marcelito Echarri, who, as a student in Wharton, had solved the most complex theoretical equations, was completely at a loss. ‘If I ask for an audit, they’ll find enough evidence in half an hour to arrest me. I’d be better off leaving the country like you suggested. Chela and the baby will be fine, don’t worry.’
‘I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about me. You have dragged me and La República into this mess and you have to get us out. You can’t do it on your own, because in the state you’re in, you’re worthless. I’ll advise you. You and Chela and my grandson are going to disappear, but not yet.’
‘What should I do, Doctor? I’ll do whatever you say.’
‘Get your managers to gather all the paperwork together by tomorrow after you’ve issued your statement to the newspapers. Then announce that, while the audit is taking place, you are going to take a holiday with your wife and son. Choose your destination wisely. You might not be coming back.’
‘The papers will need to be handled by people we can trust. Don’t worry, I won’t forget anything.’
‘The way you’ve been recently, it’s impossible not to worry. Keep a close eye on the papers. I’ll send official vans to pick them up and drop them off at your bank’s head office. Nothing else is to be moved, not the furniture, not the paintings. When you lock up for the night, there will be an unforgettable fire.’
‘An accident? No one will believe it.’
‘It won’t be an accident, it will be an deliberate act of sabotage. An attack against you, against me, against the comandantes. Another terrorist attack by subversives. There won’t be anything left in the rubble.’
Two days later, on the radio from Miami, Marcelo Echarri declared that this atrocity (he used the word atrocity, everyone remembers that) had ruined him. All the money in the banks’ safes had been burned, he said, millions in bearer bonds, a Picasso harlequin, one of Francis Bacon’s cardinals, priceless, irreplaceable treasures. He had no doubt that subversive elements were responsible for the conflagration. ‘They have committed yet another crime against the country,’ he said, ‘against peaceful citizens and their savings.’
After this fleeting appearance, he vanished. The comandantes promised to mount an exhaustive investigation and track down the perpetrators wherever they were hiding. A few hours later, six suspects who had holed up in a warehouse on the docks were surprised by a naval patrol and died during the altercation. Marcelo moved with his family to the Bahamas, and when the last spark had died down, he moved to San Antonio, Texas, where he bought a luxury-car dealership and a house in the Dominion, the most expensive neighbourhood in the city. Chela phoned Emilia from Nassau to tell her she was pregnant again.
As usual on Saturday nights, Emilia does not feel like cooking and is preparing to order Japanese food from Sultan Wok or Megumi. Japanese food was an exotic concept back when she and Simón lived in Buenos Aires and she does not know whether he has tried it since, whether he likes it.
‘Why do you ask?’ her husband said. ‘I like what you like.’
Just as Emilia goes over to make the call, the phone rings. It is Nancy, worried because she has not heard from her for several days. She has decided to give back the file of newspaper clippings her friend gave her to organise. ‘I’ll bring it over,’ Nancy insists, ‘it’s all sorted.’
‘No. you can’t,’ Emilia says, ‘I’m going to be away for a couple of days.’
‘What about the file?’ Nancy is not about to give up.
‘Hang on to it. And stop bugging me.’ She doesn’t care when Nancy says she is offended. She’ll be back, she always comes back, she is a loyal, meek little puppy.
Simón is sitting at the drawing table and is sketching the outline of a map, an island. ‘I’ve been looking for this island for a long time,’ he says. ‘I find it, and when I try to pin down in space where it is, it slips through my fingers. Maybe that’s my mistake, maybe there is no place in space for it. I try to draw it differently. I put it down on paper and turn away for a minute, and when I look at it again, the island is gone. It has vanished.’
‘It must be situated in time, then,’ Emilia says, ‘and if it is, then sooner or later it will come back. Sooner and later are refuges in time.’
‘We’ve spent our lives making maps,’ says Simón, ‘and I still don’t know what they’re for. Sometimes I wonder if they’re not simply metaphors of the world. What do you think?’
‘Not metaphors, but maybe metamorphoses, like words or like the shadows we project. By the time a map has circumscribed reality, reality is already different. In the first geography lesson I ever took, the teacher told us that the principal purpose of maps is to stop people getting lost.’
‘The opposite of what your father wanted,’ says Simón. ‘Maps to make people lose their way, so they don’t know what day it is, what time it is, where those who still are, are. He would have liked you and me to draw maps in which people disappeared and became dust from nowhere.’