He shook his head at the monstrousness of it. “I am what you call ‘small potatoes’ compared to this one who would have killed millions. As Stalin did. And Mao.” He thumped his chest. “I, El Árabe, was never such a killer as these two Reds.”
It would have been a passionate attack on ideological extremism had El Árabe’s own hideous acts not been equally extreme, but I felt it prudent to say nothing about this.
“I gather that you know why we’ve come here,” I said.
El Árabe nodded, then looked at Loretta. “Leon told me about your brother. He said you believed he was perhaps going to write about me in his next book.”
“Perhaps,” Loretta said. “Just before he died, he took out a map of Argentina. He had even circled the name of this village.”
This information seemed not to surprise El Árabe in the least.
“As you see, I am not hard to find,” he said. “I hide from no one. I wish only that those Reds who now stink up the halls of Casa Rosada do not cross the border.” He pointed to an old hunting rifle that leaned against the far wall. “I would fight, but I have nothing but this—what do you call it?—this . . . popgun. Even so, they do not come. Even so, they fear me. Do you know why? Because I know their secrets, these men at Casa Rosada. I know they are not so holy as they say they are. They know my crimes because I have not hidden them. But I know the crimes they hide.”
He smiled in the way of one who could easily prove his point. “Guilt makes men tired and skinny.” He patted his full belly. “I have no such problem.”
A rattle of pots and pans came from the other room.
El Árabe shook his head. “It is hard to think with such commotion,” he said.
I glanced toward the kitchen, where I could see the woman stumbling about, her hands shaking violently.
“She probably has Parkinson’s disease,” I said. “Or something like it.”
El Árabe waved his hand; then his eyes shot over to Loretta. “Your brother had come to me before. Back in the old days. He was looking for a girl. He thought I might know where she was.” He stopped and stared at me sullenly and with such a sense of volcanic violence that I felt a cold streak of genuine fear.
Now he burst into a raucous laugh.
“See what I can do?” he asked. “An old man, and I can still fill a heart with fear.” He laughed again, a great, self-satisfied laugh that shook his belly violently. “With this look, too,” he said and seemed to clamp down upon me with his eyes, so that I felt like little more than a small animal in a steel trap. “This one could really shut them up. Even when they were screaming, it would shut them up.”
He laughed again, and quite suddenly his entire demeanor changed. It was as if a cloud had parted to reveal a wholly different person, one whose every aspect had been clothed in shadow but which now became clear in the light.
“Shall I speak French to you, my American friends?” he asked in perfect English. “Should I speak German?”
The transformation continued, and all the earlier features of his disguise fell away; he was no longer the slick-haired thug but was what he immediately claimed to be.
“Better that I should speak the Spanish of Castile,” he said, “for I am Spanish, and this peasant patois I speak to such a one as that wretch in the kitchen is not my native tongue.”
“I see,” I said quietly.
“As Julian knew, a great spy must be a spy from birth,” El Árabe said. “He must have played a role all his life.”
He was now as refined a worldling as could be imagined in any novel of intrigue. All his boorishness and vulgarity had simply dropped away like pieces of an old costume. Beneath it, there was no swagger, no bravado. I could almost imagine him in evening dress, having brandy and a cigar in the staterooms of Madrid, exactly the sort of suave foreign agent my father had dreamed of being.
“It takes intelligence to play a buffoon, and I fooled them all. Even Julian was fooled by my disguise. But those days are gone and there is no need for me to play this trick.” His laugh was no longer of the belly-jerking sort but was now the soft chuckle of a man in his club. “Julian. You have come to speak of Julian. What a naive young man he was, looking for this girl.” Now his laughter turned cold and mirthless. “He came to me because the Reds had sent him. They had told him I was in charge of many evil things, and so I perhaps might know of this missing girl.” He cocked his head and glanced from one side to the other. “Shall I tell you about your friend, your brother?” he asked. “He was looking for this girl, but shall I tell you what he found?”
Warily I nodded, and Loretta whispered, “Yes, tell us.”
And so he did.
29
At the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow is drained by the tale he has just related, emptied not of energy but of belief. It is as if the darkness he describes has dialed down the light in his soul.
So it seemed also with Loretta, at the close of El Árabe’s tale, and so it certainly was with me.
“Do you believe what he told us?” she asked a few minutes into our drive back to town. We had been facing the road in complete silence.
“Every word,” I answered.
She looked at me. “Why?”
“Because it fits,” I said.
I thought of a moment in The Secret Chamber, when La Meffraye stands on the ramparts at Machecoul, staring down at the thirty men that the Bishop of Nantes has sent to arrest her master. From that height she considers the crimes in which she was complicit, and their consequences, and she knows, absolutely, that she is bound for hell.
“Julian could see nothing but darkness after that,” I said softly, now thinking of how hideous it must have been for him, the scene he’d witnessed at El Sitio.
“I remember something I said earlier,” Loretta said. “That if Julian ever saw an atrocity, it would have unstrung him.”
“And it did,” I said.
Loretta clearly understood that something had also unstrung me as well.
“El Árabe’s last question,” she said.
With that simple reminder, I was there again, sitting on the veranda, listening to El Árabe. But now there was the added element of foreknowledge, and I found myself imagining as much as recalling his narrative, tasting the dust in the air, seeing the swirl of the dogs as they tore into each other, feeling the small droplets of blood that shot out from the ring, and hearing Julian’s voice over the roar of the crowd.
“That one is a killer.”
El Árabe turned to him. “American?”
Julian nodded, smiled. “A bankrupt one if I keep betting on the wrong dog.”
El Árabe grinned, pulled a red handkerchief from his pocket, and swabbed his bare chest. “Bet on John Wayne in the next match. With him you will get back your money.”
Julian laughed. “John Wayne, really?”
“He is my dog. I am big fan for John Wayne.” He swayed slightly and hitched his pants. “Howdy, Pilgrim,” he said, and offered his hand.
“Julian Wells,” Julian said as he took it.
“Where you are from?” El Árabe asked between swigs of beer.
“New York.”
El Árabe reached for a bottle, opened it, and thrust it toward him. “We drink to friendship, eh? America and Argentina.” He pounded his chest with his right fist. “Brothers.”
Julian took a long pull on the bottle. “Brothers,” he said.
They were two actors, I thought, playing out the scene in my mind: Julian, the naive American with a vague lust for adventure; El Árabe, the crude peasant infatuated with American cowboys. Encased in their roles, they acted their way through the next few hours, Julian betting on El Árabe’s dogs and almost always winning, so that as the evening deepened, his roll of cash grew thicker, a fact El Árabe was careful to notice because he needed Julian to think him not only a peasant buffoon, easily outwitted, but also a man who could no less easily be bribed.
“You got much money now, coño,” El Árabe cried ov
er the noise of the crowd. “You should be careful you don’t lose it.”
Julian laughed. “How would I lose it?”
“Not lose, maybe. Someone take it. Not everyone is a brother. Not in this bad place.”
Julian swayed slightly, as if drunk. “It doesn’t look so bad here.”
El Árabe wagged his finger. “Very bad. Very bad people in this place. You maybe not go back to Buenos Aires tonight.”
“I have to. I have no place to stay.”
“You stay with me. I protect you. Morning, you go back to Buenos Aires.” He threw his arm over Julian’s shoulder. “You safe with me. Brothers, no?”
Julian’s head lolled to the left. “Too much beer.”
El Árabe laughed. “We go home now,” he said.
I imagined them almost as comic characters in a melodrama, the tall young American and the squat little Argentine, a drunken Don Quixote and a malignant Sancho Panza struggling toward the old truck where El Árabe had already caged the few dogs that had survived the fights—“quick killers,” as he called the ones that emerged from their struggles with treatable rather than fatal wounds.
In the truck, Julian had fallen asleep, or pretended to, and I saw him slumped in the dusty darkness, his body jerking with the bump and sway of the road.
“Okay, we are home now,” El Árabe said. He opened the door and drew Julian out into the weedy driveway of his house. “You never sleep in hammock before, no? You like it. Very good. Stars. Cool air.”
Either passed out or feigning unconsciousness, Julian had slumped into the hammock that hung on the wide porch of El Árabe’s house, arisen groggily the next morning, reached for his money, and found it missing.
“I know what you look for,” El Árabe said with a loud laugh. “You think maybe I steal money from you, no?” He reached into the pocket of his soiled jeans and pulled out a roll of cash. “I keep it for you. We are brothers, no? We do not steal from each other.” He laughed again. “Maybe from others we steal, and maybe to others we do bad things, but I do nothing bad to Pilgrim, and Pilgrim, he does nothing bad to El Árabe.”
Thus was sealed a bond that deepened over the next few weeks as both Julian and El Árabe continued to perfect their roles, playing off each other with such skill that there were times when the subtext of deception seemed almost to disappear, nights of less drinking and more talk, which at last brought them each the long-sought moment.
“It’s all just a way of forgetting,” Julian said quietly. He took out a cigarette and lit it. “All this drinking.” He drew in a long breath and released it slowly. “It is because of a woman. She is missing.”
“You will find another,” El Árabe said. “You must think of something else.”
“I can’t.”
Then, in a sudden burst that El Árabe found either absolutely brilliant if meant to deceive him or absolutely stupid if it was real, Julian had revealed everything: how he had met Marisol, her work as a guide, how she had later disappeared, his long effort to find her, how he’d gone first to Casa Rosada, then to the Russians, who had set him up to meet El Árabe, all of it in a cataract of impassioned narrative that had finally impressed El Árabe in its anguished sincerity.
El Árabe remained silent for a time, then quite softly he said, “It is possible this one you spoke of, this missing woman, it is possible she is still alive, no?”
“No, it’s not possible,” Julian said. “We both know what happens to these women.”
“Not to all, maybe,” El Árabe said. “Maybe some of them are kept.”
“Kept?”
El Árabe shrugged. “To some men, it is a waste to kill such a woman,” he said. “Better to keep her for a while.”
Julian’s gaze glimmered with hope. “Keep her where?”
El Árabe smiled. “They are called ‘escuelitas.’” He offered Julian a look that could not have been mistaken. “Perhaps she is still at one of these places. Do you wish I look for her?”
“Yes.”
“And if I find her, do you wish to go to this place?”
“Yes,” Julian answered. “Yes, I want to go there.”
Time passed, and during that time Julian had revealed ever-deeper confidences. He had come to Argentina, he said, in search of a life’s work. Such had been his chief hunger when he came here, he told El Árabe, a furious need to do some great good work, a need his host had found both naive and comical. But Julian’s sincerity had won El Árabe over. He’d been a fool, but a lovable fool, a man who wanted to help the ones who live in the dust. More than anything, he now sought Marisol.
“Because you fuck her, no?” El Árabe asked. “Those little indigenes, they fuck hard and fast.”
“I never touched her.”
El Árabe laughed. “You think she is so innocent, this woman?” He drained the last beer of the evening. “Maybe not so innocent, my friend. If she was so innocent, she would not have disappeared.”
“No, she was absolutely innocent,” Julian insisted. “There was no reason for her to have been taken. She wasn’t involved in politics. All she wanted . . . and she said this to me . . . all she wanted was a fighting chance.”
“If this is so, I will find her for you,” El Árabe said.
It took him only a week to find the escuelita to which Marisol had been taken, and though she was no longer there, he felt certain that by talking to the commissar of the camp, he would be able to find her.
And he did.
“Okay, so we go there tomorrow,” El Árabe said.
“Where is it?” Julian asked,
“There is a dog farm on the pampas. They breed there the Dogo Córdoba. They have also a barn and stalls. This they have made into an escuelita.”
They left Buenos Aires the next morning, driving first along the wide boulevards, then out into the suburbs, and finally down a dirt road to a location El Árabe called El Sitio, which means only “the place.”
It was a farmhouse of sorts, though it was unclear whether it had once been occupied or whether it had been constructed only for its current purpose. Its windows were boarded up and left unpainted, which made the structure seem like an immense crate. It had a corrugated roof that was streaked with rust.
“They keep them here,” El Árabe said with a crude smile, “the ones they are educating.”
The heat inside this building was stifling, of course, and so, El Árabe explained with a wink and a grin, there was no need for the women to have clothes.
Julian remained in the truck, El Árabe said, while he went in search of the commissar, who was in a nearby shed where preparations for “the day’s lessons” were under way. Those preparations involved hooks and ropes and the fetching of the commissar’s favored whip, a chicotte, made of rhinoceros hide and imported from the Congo.
From his place inside the truck, Julian had a clear view of the farmhouse and the line of upright wooden poles, each fitted with handcuffs, that stood to the side of it, and toward which, while El Árabe discussed the whereabouts of Marisol with the commissar, a naked woman was pushed and shoved and prodded by two men in green uniforms, each wielding a chicotte.
I could only imagine Julian’s thoughts at that moment, how he must surely have realized that the same outrage had been committed upon Marisol. Naked and caked in her own filth, she must have been led to those same poles, cuffed and left to bake in the sun, while the men took their lunch break under the nearby trees. Like the woman he watched from the interior of El Árabe’s truck, Marisol must have waited as the minutes passed and the men leisurely smoked their cigarettes, then rose and came toward her, as these men now did toward this unknown woman, slapping their chicottes against their dusty brown boots and, as the whipping commenced, beginning to laugh.
The beating lasted for several minutes, El Árabe said, with long pauses during which the woman was left to hang in the sun. Through it all Julian sat in the stillness of the truck, staring through its dusty windows as the whips sang in the air, along with
the cries of the woman and the laughter of the men.
“She was covered in blood by the time I got back to the truck,” El Árabe told us. “She was hanging down so low her long hair almost touched the ground, and her back, legs, and arms were raw. The whips almost skinned her.”
But it was what El Árabe saw inside the truck that chilled the air around me as I listened. He had passed the bloody girl who slumped almost to the ground, her wounds now boiling in the noonday sun, and given the scene hardly any notice. He had, after all, attended many such sessions. Nor had he paid any mind to the second woman, also naked and filthy, who was at that very moment being led out by two other men. He had noticed the commissar strolling toward the broken-down corral, but that had had no interest for him, since he had already ascertained Marisol’s whereabouts. It was Julian, and only Julian, upon whom El Árabe, with an unexpected feeling, had fixed his attention.
“He was sitting exactly where I’d left him a half hour before,” El Árabe told us. “He said only, ‘Was this done to Marisol?’”
From the corner of my eye, I saw a terrible question form on Loretta’s lips. “Had it been?” she asked.
El Árabe nodded. “And worse,” he said. “But I did not tell this to Julian. I told him she was simply brought here and shot. It would have been a bad thing to tell him more than this. He was blaming himself. He was saying it was his fault she was dead. I could not tell him more. This would have made it worse for him. So I told him only that she was dead. ‘They dumped her,’ I said to him. ‘She is dust.’”
Julian had gone quiet, El Árabe told us.
“Pain can make men wail like women,” he said. “But in Julian, there was only silence. He was alive, but he was dead. I took him back to Buenos Aires. All the way, he did not speak. I left him at his hotel. He never came to me again.”