The octogenarian took the paper in lace-sheathed fingers and clasped it to her breast without reading it.
“Are you Irene’s husband?”
“No, I am her lover,” Francisco replied.
“All the better! Then I can tell you. Irene is like a bird, she has no sense of permanence.”
“I have enough for two,” Francisco said, laughing.
Then she agreed to give him three cassettes she had hidden in a beaded evening bag. Irene was never able to say why she had entrusted the tapes to the actress. She had acted on a generous impulse. She had no way of knowing that there would be an attempt against her life, or that her house and office would be searched for the tapes, but she suspected their value as evidence. She had given them to the actress to make her an accomplice in something that was not yet a mystery, and to give some meaning to her life. It was a spontaneous gesture, like so many of the things she had done for the residents of the home, the equivalent of celebrating nonexistent birthdays, organizing games, inventing theater performances, giving presents, and writing letters from imaginary family members. One night she had visited Josefina Bianchi and found her melancholy, murmuring that she would rather be dead, since no one loved her or needed her. Her health had deteriorated during the winter months and, seeing herself frail and worn, she fell into frequent depressions, although her good sense and memory had never failed. Irene wanted to do something to divert her from her loneliness and to pique her interest in other things; she had given her the tapes, emphasizing their importance, and asked her to hide them. The elderly actress was enchanted with her mission. She had dried her tears and promised to stay alive and healthy in order to help Irene. She thought she was guarding an amorous secret. Thus, what had begun as a game had ended by fulfilling a purpose, and the tapes were protected not only from the curiosity of Beatriz Alcántara, but from seizure by the police.
“Tell Irene to come. She promised she would help me when it was my time to die,” said Josefina Bianchi.
“It isn’t time yet. You can live a long time, you’re strong and healthy.”
“My dear boy, I have lived like a lady, and I want to die like one. I feel a little tired. I need Irene.”
“She can’t come now.”
“What I hate about old age is that no one respects us. They treat us as if we were spoiled children. I lived my life as I wanted. I had everything. Why would you deprive me of a dignified death?”
Francisco kissed Josefina’s hands with affection and respect. As he left, he saw the residents in the garden, attended by their nurses, feeble, lonely in their wheelchairs, with their wool shawls and their mean little possessions, deaf, almost blind, mummified, barely alive, remote from the present, from reality. He walked closer to say goodbye. The Colonel, tinfoil medals pinned to his chest, was, as always, saluting the nation’s flag that waved for his eyes alone. The poorest widow in the land was clutching to her bosom a tin box that contained some miserable treasure. The hemiplegic, from force of habit, was still watching for the mail, although in his heart he had from the beginning suspected that Irene was inventing answers to make his life happy, while he, in turn, pretended to believe her compassionate lies in order not to disappoint her. Without Irene, he had no dreams left to dream.
A melancholy old man stopped Francisco at the door. “Tell me, now that they’re opening up graves, do you think we might hear something of my son or his wife or their baby?”
Francisco Leal did not know how to answer him, and he fled that world of pathetic ancients.
* * *
The tapes recorded by Irene Beltrán contained her conversations with Digna and Pradelio Ranquileo, Sergeant Faustino Rivera, and Evangelina Flores.
“Take them to the Cardinal to use at the trial against the guardsmen,” she said to Francisco.
“Your voice is on them, Irene. If they identify you, it will be your death sentence.”
“They’re going to kill me, anyway, if they can. You must give them the tapes.”
“First we have to get you somewhere safe.”
“Then call Mario, because I’m leaving here this very evening.”
At nightfall the cosmetician appeared carrying his famous case; he locked himself in the hospital room with Irene and Francisco, where he proceeded to cut and change the color of their hair, modify the arch of their eyebrows, try different makeups, eyeglasses, mustaches—all the artifices of his profession—until he had converted them into different people. Irene and Francisco looked at each other: strangers, amazed, not recognizing themselves or one another beneath their masks. They smiled, incredulous, thinking that with these new faces they would have to learn to love each other all over again.
“Can you walk, Irene?” Mario asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You will have to walk without help. Come, darling, on your feet . . .”
Slowly, Irene got out of bed without any assistance from the two men. Mario removed her nightgown, choking back a gasp when he saw her bandage-swathed stomach and the red antiseptic stains on her breast and thighs. From his miraculous suitcase he extracted a roll of plastic foam shaped to simulate a pregnancy and secured it over her shoulders and between her legs, because she could not have borne the pain of having it tied around her waist. Then he dressed her in a pink maternity dress, placed low-heeled sandals on her feet, and, with a kiss for good luck, departed.
Irene and Francisco walked from the clinic without so much as a glance from any of the staff that had attended them during her illness. They crossed the street in front of the parked vehicle with the dark window glass, walked in leisurely fashion to the corner, and there climbed into Mario’s car.
“You will hide in my house until you can travel,” Mario instructed.
He drove them to his apartment, opened the brass-and-beveled-glass door, shooed away the Angora cats, ordered the dog to lie in a corner, and turned to greet them with a graceful bow, but before he could complete the gesture, Irene slipped to the rug without a sound. Francisco picked her up in his arms and followed their host to the room he had chosen, where a large bed with fine linen sheets welcomed the prostrate girl.
“You’re risking your life for us,” said Francisco.
“I’ll fix some coffee—we all need it,” Mario replied as he left the room.
Irene spent several days recovering her strength in the calm atmosphere of the apartment, while Mario and Francisco took turns caring for her. Mario tried to distract her with light reading, card games, and an interminable store of anecdotes: stories of the beauty salon, his love affairs, his travels, his suffering in the days when he was a nobody, the rejected son of a miner. When he saw that Irene liked the animals, he installed the huge black dog and the cats in her room, and changed the subject any time she spoke of Cleo, because he did not want her to know of Cleo’s sad death. He cooked special dishes for the convalescent, watched her while she slept, and helped Francisco change her dressings. He shut the apartment windows, closed the heavy drapes, removed the newspapers, and turned off the television, so she would not be perturbed by the disorder of the external world. When police sirens howled, helicopters zoomed overhead like prehistoric birds, saucepans clanged in the distance, or machine guns rattled, he turned up the volume of the music so she would not hear. He dissolved barbiturates in her soup, to assure her rest, and avoided mentioning in her presence the events that were convulsing the comic-opera peace of the dictatorship.
It was Mario who took Beatriz Alcántara the news that her daughter was no longer in the hospital. He had planned to explain to her that Irene had to leave the country if she was to stay alive, but with his first words he could see that Beatriz was incapable of dealing with the truth: Irene’s mother lived in an unreal world where any difficulty was annulled by decree. He decided to tell her that Irene and Francisco had left on a brief vacation—an unlikely story, given the state of the gir
l’s health—and the mother accepted this fiction because she was grasping at straws. Mario observed her unsympathetically, repelled by this egotistical, unfeeling woman who found refuge in the elegance of ritual and formalities, in the hermetically sealed living room where no whisper of discontent was allowed to enter. He imagined her on a raft with the feeble and forgotten old people in her care, adrift on a motionless sea. Like them, Beatriz lived divorced from reality; she had lost her place in the world. Her fragile security could collapse at any instant, buffeted by the wild hurricane of the new era. To him, this silk-and-suède-clad vision was distorted like a reflection in a fun-house mirror. He left without saying goodbye.
Faithful to her custom, Rosa had been standing outside the door listening. She signaled him to follow her to the kitchen.
“What’s happened to my little girl? Where is she?”
“She’s in danger. We must help her get away.”
“Out of the country?”
“Yes.”
“May God keep her and protect her! Will I ever see her again?”
“When the dictatorship falls, Irene will return.”
“Give her this from me,” Rosa begged, handing him a small packet. “This is soil from her garden, to go with her wherever she goes. And please tell her that the forget-me-nots are in bloom. . . .”
* * *
José Leal went with Evangelina Flores to identify the remains of her father and brothers. Irene had told José about the girl, and asked him to help, because she was sure Evangelina would need his aid. As she did. In the courtyard of the Department of Criminal Investigation, on two long tables of rough wood, had been spread the contents of the yellow plastic bags: rotted clothing, bits and pieces of bones, clumps of hair, a rusted key, a comb . . . Evangelina Flores walked slowly past this terrible array, pointing in silence to every recognizable item: that blue sweater, that cracked shoe, that skull with the missing teeth. Three times she walked the length of the tables, painstakingly examining the contents, until she had found some trace of each of her family members, and was sure that all five were there and none was missing. Only the sweat moistening her blouse betrayed the effort every step cost. Beside her walked the priest, not daring to touch her, and two officials of the court, taking notes. Finally the girl read their statement, signed it with a firm hand, and strode from the courtyard with her head held high. Once in the street, and with the gate closed behind her, she was again, for an instant, a simple country girl. José Leal put his arms about her.
“Go ahead, child, cry—it will do you good,” he said to her.
“I will cry later, Father. But now I have things to do,” she replied and, rubbing away the tears with the back of her hand, she hurried off.
Two days later, she was summoned before the Military Tribunal to testify against the accused murderers. She was dressed in her work clothes and wearing a black armband, the one she had worn the day they opened Los Riscos mine and her intuition had told her the time had come to wear mourning. The trial was being held in a closed courtroom. No one—not her mother, José Leal, or the lawyer from the Vicariate assigned by the Cardinal—was allowed to accompany her. A soldier led the girl, alone, down a wide corridor, the sound of her footsteps echoing like a bell, to the chamber where the court was in session. The room was enormous and brightly lighted, with no adornment except a flag and an oil painting of the General displaying the Presidential sash across his chest.
Evangelina walked forward, without any sign of fear, until she stood before the dais where the officers of the court sat. She looked them directly in the eyes, one by one; then, unintimidated, in a clear voice and without changing a single detail, she repeated the story she had told Irene Beltrán. Unhesitatingly, she pointed to Lieutenant Juan de Dios Ramírez, and to each of the men who had participated in her family’s arrests, because through the years she had carried their likenesses engraved in fire on her memory.
“You may retire, citizen Flores. You shall remain at the disposition of this Tribunal, and you may not leave the city,” the Colonel instructed.
The same soldier who had led her in escorted Evangelina to the exit. José Leal was waiting outside, and together they started down the street. The priest realized that an automobile was following them and, as he had been prepared for this eventuality, he seized Evangelina by the arm and began to run, pushing and dragging her until they were lost in the crowd. They took refuge in the nearest church, and from there communicated with the Cardinal.
Evangelina Flores escaped the clutches of government repression and left the country under cover of the shadows of night. She had a mission to fulfill. In years to come, she left behind the peaceful fields where she had been born, and traveled throughout the world, denouncing the tragedy that had befallen her nation. She appeared before an assembly of the United Nations, in press conferences, on television, at congresses, universities—everywhere—speaking about the desaparecidos, to insure that the men, women, and children swallowed up by that violence would never be forgotten.
After the bodies of Los Riscos had been identified, their families asked to be allowed to claim them in order to provide them with a decent burial; their requests were refused for fear of public disturbances. The government had had enough upheaval. Then the relatives of those victims, and of the victims unearthed from other clandestine graves, crowded into the Cathedral, settled themselves before the main altar, and announced their intention to hold a hunger strike beginning that moment and lasting until their pleas were heard. They were no longer afraid and had no hesitation about placing their lives in jeopardy, though life was all they had left; everything else had been taken from them.
“What is all this damned uproar, Colonel?”
“They keep asking about their desaparecidos, General, sir.”
“Tell them we don’t know whether they’re alive or dead.”
“And what shall we do about the hunger strikers, General, sir?”
“What we always do, Colonel—don’t bother me with all that horseshit.”
The police were prepared to drive the hunger strikers from the church with water cannon and tear gas, but the Cardinal, along with a number of persons who in a gesture of solidarity were also fasting, planted himself in the doorway while observers from the Red Cross, the Commission on Human Rights, and the international press photographed the scene. After three days the pressure became intolerable and the clamor from the streets penetrated the walls of the Presidential bunker. Much against his will, the General ordered the remains to be returned to their families. At the last moment, however, as the families were waiting with funeral wreaths and lighted candles, the hearses, acting on orders from above, changed their route and secretly drove in the rear gate of the cemetery, where the contents of the bags were dumped into a common grave. Only the body of Evangelina Ranquileo Sánchez, still undergoing autopsy in the Morgue, was recovered by her parents. She was taken to Father Cirilo’s parish, where she was given a modest burial. She at least had a grave, and never wanted for fresh flowers, because the local populace still had faith in her small miracles.
Los Riscos mine became a shrine. A seemingly endless chain of the faithful, José Leal at their head, made a pilgrimage there. They went on foot, chanting hymns and revolutionary slogans, carrying crosses, torches, and photographs of their dead. The next day the Army closed off the site with a high barbed-wire fence and an iron gate, but neither the fence nor the soldiers posted in nests of machine guns could stop the processions. Then they used dynamite charges to blast the mine from the face of the earth, hoping also to eliminate its memory from history.
Francisco and José Leal turned Irene’s tapes over to the Cardinal. They knew that Irene would be identified and arrested as soon as the tapes reached the hands of the Military Tribunal. They had to get her to safety as quickly as possible.
“How many days do you need to get away?” the prelate asked.
/> “It will be a week before she can walk unassisted.”
So they made their agreement. The Cardinal had the tapes copied, and exactly one week later he distributed the copies to members of the press and delivered the originals to the prosecutor. By the time the government attempted to destroy the evidence, it was already too late; the interviews had been published in the newspapers and had spread around the world, giving rise to a wave of unanimous repudiation. Abroad, the General’s name was ridiculed and his ambassadors were pelted with tomatoes and rotten eggs whenever they appeared in public. Intimidated by this outcry, the military court declared Lieutenant Juan de Dios Ramírez and the men of his command who had participated in the slaughter guilty of murder, based on their contradictory testimony, on laboratory evidence of the manner in which the deaths had occurred, and on Irene Beltrán’s tapes. Irene was summoned repeatedly to testify as the Political Police carried out sweeping, though unsuccessful, searches for her.
Satisfaction over the sentences lasted only a few hours, until the guilty were set free, delivered by a decree of amnesty improvised at the last possible moment. Popular fury was translated into street demonstrations so riotous that not even the police shock troops and Army heavy equipment could control the people who poured into the streets. At the construction site of the monument to the Saviors of the Nation an enormous pig was released, costumed in cockades, a Presidential sash, a dress uniform cape, and a general’s cap. The beast ran squealing through the throng, who spit on it, kicked it, and hurled insults at it before the eyes of irate soldiers who used every trick to intercept it in order to rescue the trampled sacred emblems; finally, amid screams, sticks, and howling sirens, they shot the beast. Nothing remained but the enormous humiliated carcass lying in a pool of black blood on which floated the insignia, the kepi, and the tyrant’s cape.
Lieutenant Ramírez was promoted to the rank of captain. He went about with great self-satisfaction and with an unruffled conscience until the day he heard that in the south a ravenous, ragged, wild-eyed giant was seen from time to time who was rumored to be looking for his sister’s murderer. No one there paid any attention to him; they considered him to be a madman. But the officer lost sleep thinking of the vengeance hanging over his head. There would be no peace for him as long as Pradelio Ranquileo drew a breath of life.