Send people immediately… I’ll wait here for you… Agreed… Step on it…
Lascano returns at a fast clip to Miranda’s house but keeps walking past it at least a few yards. Everything remains calm. One of the cops stands guard, next to the Falcon, the other two are still sitting inside. He sits down on the front steps of an Italian-style house. Lascano doesn’t have to wait long. Two squad cars, blasting their sirens, enter the alleyway in the wrong direction and two others block the other end of the street. The car doors open and twelve uniformed police officers get out, their pistols, machine guns and rifles drawn, and crouch down behind their cars. The inspector, talking through a megaphone, orders the men in Flores’s car to come out with their hands up. They register a moment of shock and confusion. The order is repeated through the megaphone. Several neighbours look out their windows. The shutters over the window in Miranda’s house open and Susana looks out. Flores and the other cop descend from the Falcon and slowly lift their arms over their heads. Flores shouts that they are policemen. In response, they’re told to get on the ground face down. They look at each other: they have no choice but to obey. Lascano stands up. A news van from Channel Nine arrives and brakes abruptly. Susana opens the front door, looking sick with worry. A reporter walks up to her, straightening out his tie and fixing his hair. A cameraman follows behind, shooting the scene. The uniformed officers, their fingers on their triggers, cautiously approach the men on the ground. Susana walks to the corner and tries to see who the men are. A sergeant goes up to her and takes her by the arm; she shakes him off with an indignant gesture. Flores is already standing up, angrily brushing off his suit. The inspector desperately tries to explain. Lascano smiles. Susana turns on her heels and heads for her front door, where her son has appeared. Flores seems about to levitate from rage; he motions to his men; they get in the Falcon and leave. The inspector guestures to the squad cars to let him through. Relieved, the twelve policemen return to their squad cars and leave. The reporter pats his hair into place as the cameraman returns to the van and sits down in the back seat. Lascano turns to look at Miranda’s house. Leaning against the door frame, Susana, still and serious, is watching him. Perro slowly crosses the street toward her.
Mrs Miranda, I am… I know exactly who you are.
Her interruption was abrupt and bitter. Lascano opens his arms in a conciliatory gesture; she starts to close the door.
Wait. What do you want, Lascano? I’m the one who organized this whole to-do. What are you saying, that I should give you a medal? Listen to me for a second, please. I’m listening. I concocted this whole thing to stop them from kidnapping you, your son or both of you. What are you talking about? I was watching your house when I saw Flores and the other two in the alley. Who’s Flores? Ask your husband when you see him. Those guys are after the money Mole stole. And they wouldn’t think twice about using any means to get it. And you, what’s your game? You just happened to be walking through the neighbourhood? No, I’m looking for your husband. He doesn’t come here, get that through your head. That’s fine, please allow me to give you some advice. Is it absolutely necessary? I think so. Out with it. Leave your house for a few days, those people are very dangerous and you can be sure they’ll be back. Thank you, I’ll keep it in mind.
The woman shuts the door in his face. Lascano feels a sharp stab in his chest and can’t breathe. He stumbles, his head knocks against the door and he falls to the ground. Susana opens the door and sees him crumpled up at her feet. Fernando looks at him, frightened, and bends down to help him up.
Are you okay?
Perro loosens his tie and feels the air beginning to flow back into his lungs. He’s drenched in sweat. Susana disappears and an instant later returns with a glass of water and a wicker chair. Lascano rejects the chair and accepts the water. He takes tiny sips. His breath is still laboured but he’s starting to recover.
Are you better? Yes, it’s passing, I apologize. Would you like me to call a doctor? No, it’s not necessary. Are you sure?
He nods. His vision has cleared up.
Don’t take lightly what I told you. Those people are dangerous. It’s okay, don’t worry. Another thing. What? Tell your husband what happened and that I’m looking for him. He knows he’ll be safe with me. If he gets in touch with me I’ll tell him. Good. Do as I say, get out of here now.
17
Sitting in the chaise longue, on that small balcony he built with the wood left over from the house, and which has become the most coveted spot, Fuseli lets the Folha de Sao Paulo drop out of his hands. He takes off his reading glasses and waits for his eyes to adjust to the distance. Soon the beach comes into focus: his woman is lying on a beach towel watching little Victoria build a sand castle with Sebastiao, Leila’s son. The waves, the deserted islet and behind, el mato de la serra that ends just a few yards from the sea at a rugged path of black rocks. Rain clouds rush across the sky. The cachoeira roars above the road. The Brazilian cantiga Leila is humming in the kitchen reaches him through the window as does the scent of the palm oil she uses to make her famous moqueca de camarao. He thinks that life has gotten good in this place. This love he has found is not sewn with the cloth of great passion but has instead been patiently, laboriously embroidered with threads of solitude, stitched with needles of companionship and held together with hooks and eyes of saudades. A tolerant and peaceful love that asks no questions and makes no demands, whose roots are sunk deep in daily life, that has never pretended to be anything more than this day-to-day existence, known to be temporary without this ever creating resentment, and that always had one mission above and beyond all else: to give little Victoria the happiness that he and his woman had been denied. That said, he never stops missing Buenos Aires. It’s a feeling — definitely worthy of a tango — that embarrasses him. He was never drawn to tango music, except the tangos duros of Discepolo, Borges’s milongas or the reas sung by Rivero, but even these, he could take only in homeopathic doses. He thinks the self- congratulatory conceit of the lyrics lacks all trace of modesty. He deplores the facile sentimentalism, the cheap sensationalism and retrograde moralizing, and, to make matters even worse, these are precisely the qualities touted with such pride as its highest virtues. Now, however, he often feels a stab of nostalgia that sounds very much like a bandoneon.
News from Buenos Aires is ambiguous. Alfonsin issues an order for the military commanders to be prosecuted. That photograph of the generals in civilian court — charges against them being read out by a bureaucrat in a grey suit and a bearded young man, treated like common criminals — brought home the fact that this was the first, perhaps the only measure any government has ever taken that has made him happy. But, in the best tradition of the Radical Party, what it wrote with one hand it tried to erase with the other when it passed the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, an attempt to give impunity to subordinates for the brutal acts they committed with their own hands. As a consequence, nobody was satisfied, neither those demanding justice nor the carapintadas, the military officers who’d staged an uprising against the fledgling democracy. There are constant rumours and fears of uprisings, conspiracies, bad omens. The President insists the house is in order, but he himself must have a hard time believing it. Fuseli’s dreams of returning make him want to believe it to be true.
The sky bursts open, releasing a torrent of heavy rain over the jungle, the sea and the beach. His woman gets up, calls to the children, and the three walk slowly back to the house. Here the rain is not an event to take refuge from but rather a fact of life that flows out of the sky with perfect ease. Like darkness. In the tropics night doesn’t fall gently but rather pours onto the scene, like a gigantic bucketful of black water, and although it happens every day it never fails to surprise.
He looks up at the mato, thinks about the amount of life that swarms in among the roots of the sambambaias, that flies, crawls and camouflages itself, that imitates well-trained birds on the heliconias or that treads softly like the oncillas through the leaves of the bananeiras, as big as elephant ears. All that throbbing of pure animality, that urgency to live and reproduce, to kill and die, the entire framework of instincts, scents that mark out territories, eyes like beams, sweet or frenetic howling. All that restiveness drenched with rain. This hot land teeming with thousands of sounds, where our simian ancestors still swing from the branches that, according to Fuseli, we never should have left.
Return. To where? To what? If he returns he’ll have to deal with getting a job. He has a difficult time imagining himself standing in front of a dissecting table, poking around inside cadavers to find the key to their demise, clues that would lead to a possible culprit or free an innocent suspect. Here, he has carved out a niche for himself, a place the locals have generously made available to him. Patients of all kinds come to his clinic, for he is the only doctor in a town without a hospital. In this place he has discovered the joys and the sorrows of working
