The Way Out

without anyone seeing him, the door downstairs was always open, and my room was at the top of the stairs. He sat there in the dark, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt as if he were someone else, different from the dapper young man who went to class in a suit and tie. We stayed there all night, drinking yerba mate and talking. He’d killed an officer. Why did he tell me that? He placed a Ballester–Molina pistol on the table, wrapped in a yellow flannel. He’d seen civil police in the train station, secret service types. He’d walked around the Gimnasia stadium to blend in with people; that Friday Gimnasia was playing River and his plan was to mingle in with the fans, but there was a great deal of surveillance at the field as well. He needed me to call a phone number and say that Santiaguito was fine and had left the hospital. Better do it from a public phone. I went down and walked to the service station on Calle 2 and dialed the number just as he’d told me, but no one answered. I bought some cold cuts and bread and went back to the boarding house. His hands shook as he lit his cigarettes. The officer was a black guy from El Chaco, from Corrientes, who knows. A foot soldier. He’d gotten separated from his formation and Nacho chanced upon him in a dead-end road. He was unarmed, one of the riot squad, he had the tin badge. “But what could I do,” said Nacho, “it was him or me.” Finally in the morning Nacho left, planning to walk to Los Hornos and get out that way. And he asked me to hold onto “that,” the revolver wrapped in yellow flannel. He supposed nothing could happen to him now, in the light of day. A while later, a girl, obviously disguised in a blonde wig and dark glasses, said she’d come to pick up Nacho’s book, and she took the gun. That’s what it meant to be on the periphery. Being part of the logistical support. They’d created the FAL, one of the first armed groups, and they took the detachment at Campo de Mayo some time later. I never saw him again, but I found out that the military had abducted and executed him fifteen years later.

Chapter Seven

Ida’s confrontation with Paul de Man when she was a graduate student at Berkeley had been legendary. She’d taken the floor during one of the master’s lectures with the precision of a serial killer, demonstrating to him that his reading of Conrad was simplistic and his references were very poorly chosen. The room in Wheeler Hall was packed when the proud young woman stood up and spoke to the European guru with conceited delight and lucid disdain. There was a euphoric silence. Nothing is more violent and brutal than the clash between rising figures and established professors: these confrontations have no fixed rules but are always fought to the death. De Man never came back from that, and it was his weakened position that made it possible, some time later, for an obscure Second World War historian to unearth articles from a Belgian newspaper in the forties showing that the man had been an anti-Semite.

“Doctor De Man,” she had said to him, and her diction made it sound like Doktor Del Mal, “your theory of irony in the novel is depoliticizing and extemporaneous.”

All said with a smile, and, according to some, she was wearing a sari that revealed she was naked underneath. The darkness of her pubic hair, soft and velvety and incredibly thick, provoked an immediate association with the title of the Conrad novel that had given rise to the discussion.

She had humiliated him, and the group of snobs and young scholars who adored De Man and Derrida hated her more than the plague and never forgave her for it. In fact, her first job after her doctorate was in the radical ghetto at the University of California in San Diego while Marcuse was there and Joseph Sommers and Fredric Jameson were teaching as well.

Maybe Ida had died while handling a bomb. Possibly while transporting it. According to Parker, they’d traced all the trips Ida had made over the last three years. She’d been to Iowa, to Colorado. She’d been to Idaho, she’d been to Chicago. Menéndez was operating under the certainty that it was a solo terrorist who had carried out the frenzied series of attacks, but he wasn’t ruling out the idea that someone was helping him. Had they ruled out the possibility that it was a woman? Parker stared at me and took a gulp of his orange juice. The abstemious detective. “There’s no case in criminal history of a woman being a serial killer,” he said. Or was I the one thinking about her within the framework of my own country, my memories of armed conflict? Women who went in and out of the underground world, who traveled secretly around the city with weapons and then returned home to go on with their everyday routines. In the end, she was a stranger, but why did I feel her so close to me? I’d invented her, perhaps, as I’ve done so many times before, only to later become disillusioned. These were the questions I was turning over as I walked aimlessly along the streets of town. I’d come to an area lined with trees, at the edge of the woods, and in a small square I saw a woman talking to a cat as it observed her from high up in a tree, licking its paws, indifferent. The woman was trying to make it come down. “I don’t want it to live a filthy street life,” she said. She was an older lady and had the slightly deranged look often seen in women who