Dark Tangos Read online

  Dozens of police encircled the demonstrators. The cops were in black uniforms, black billed caps, and orange bulletproof vests. Parked conspicuously nearby were black vans, police cruisers, and a flimsy-looking tank with a pair of machine guns mounted on the roof. The threat of violence was palpable and everything about the scene screamed that I was not in the US anymore. It had all the makings of one of those overseas bloodbath photos that would be everywhere for a couple of days and leave privileged white middle class US citizens like me feeling sickened and at the same time grateful to be a continent away from it.

  Don Güicho might have been watching a slow, elegantly played futbol match. He stood with his hands in the straps of his backpack and smiled and nodded and said, «Bien, bien.»

  As I had learned to do in the last few weeks, I made a quick estimate of my anxiety level. I surreptitiously found the pulse below my left thumb and counted the beats, a cognitive therapy trick I’d picked up on the Internet. I tried to sound casual as I said, «How dangerous is this?»

  «Not so much, I think. The government is on their side in this. They would like nothing better than for Lopez to suddenly show up, alive and well. This makes everybody look bad. The cops will let them work off their anger and keep anybody from getting hurt.»

  «You think López is dead?»

  «Of course he is. The junior officers from Etchecolatz’s day are the ones in charge now. I’m sure he’s got connections still. Maybe they even found a green Falcon to pick him up with.»

  Green Falcons—supplied to the government by the Ford Motor Company—were the vehicles of choice for the euphemistically named grupos de tarea, the “task groups” who did the actual kidnapping back in the seventies. It was part of the branding. Just the sight of a green Falcon in those days would clear the streets. The task group, usually in plain clothes, always heavily armed, would approach its victims in the street, in their apartments, at their jobs. The kidnappings took place in broad daylight, at suppertime, in the dead of night. The victims were immediately tied up or handcuffed, hooded, and dragged to the car. They were thrown on the floorboards and the car would scream away from the scene, a calculated process of disorientation that would culminate in the sadistic application of electric shock at the detention centers.

  «It’s hard to believe,» I said. «That it could happen again, after all these years.»

  «That’s what they’re saying.» Don Güicho pointed to the protesters. «For those of us who lived through it, this is our worst nightmare, that it could all start again. Because it never really ended for us. There was no justice, the guilty were left to walk the streets, you could look over some night and see the man who tortured you sitting at the next table at the café. There are all those tens of thousands of people who disappeared and we’ll never know what really happened to them. So the ones left behind can’t even mourn properly, can’t ever get past it.»

  I nodded, not wanting to say anything that might distract him. In all the time I’d spent in Buenos Aires, no one had ever volunteered anything about those days, and anyone I asked about it would quickly change the subject. It was Argentina’s Holocaust, literally unspeakable.

  «But the world is catching up to us, no?» he said. «They openly steal elections even in the United States now, and torture and terrorize civilians in Iraq. Where are the human rights in Russia and China? After Videla and the rest, we had Menem, who was even worse in some ways. So why not more kidnappings? López and now maybe this guy Suarez, too.»

  «Suarez?»

  Don Güicho shrugged. «There’s a guy named Marco Suarez that disappeared last week. He’s not like López, he wasn’t kidnapped and tortured during el Proceso. There’s nothing obvious to connect him to the dictatorship, so he didn’t make the news. The thing is, I heard from one of my contacts that he was on a list of witnesses for another trial, the trial of Emiliano Cesarino. Cesarino was an officer under Videla and he was the one in charge of coordinating the detention centers. So one night last week Suarez told his wife he was going out to get some oranges. Apparently he loved oranges, they made him think of the tropics. He never came home.»

  There was another roar from the crowd and I felt the sweat break on my forehead. «We should go,» I said. «We don’t want you to be late.»

  Don Güicho gave me a curious look and then nodded. We started walking again and I tried not to hurry. A line of cops stood at the edge of the sidewalk to keep people from blocking the street and we had to pass within a few feet of them. I felt their eyes on me, profiling me as foreign, possibly trouble.

  «You seem different from last year,» Don Güicho said. «More nervous or something.»

  There were a lot of things I hadn’t told Don Güicho. This was not the time to start. «Things are different now,» I said. «I’m separated, I’m not on vacation anymore.»

  «You shouldn’t think of it that way. Now you’re on vacation all the time.»

  «Tell that to my boss,» I said. The police were behind us, the crowd noises fading. The moment had passed and I felt the coolness of the sweat drying on my forehead.

  «Speaking of your job,» Don Güicho said, «did you know that Suarez worked for your company?»

  «For Universal? You’re kidding me.»

  «No, he was there most of his life. He used to be a handyman, you know, change the light bulbs, fix a broken chair. He was smart, taught himself how to work on computers. He was supposed to retire, but he liked the work and he was still there until he…disappeared.»

  It made me feel strangely vulnerable that Isabel and Bahadur and the developers under me had been touched so directly by the cold, dead hand of the dictatorship. As sad and obvious as the sentiment was, the personal connection made his disappearance more real and more disturbing.

  «They really think Suarez was kidnapped? And murdered?»

  «The police say no. But my friends? My friends think yes.»

  Don Güicho had never been specific about who his friends were. I knew he leaned toward the left and that in Latin America the left was far more radical than what I was used to, generally meaning strong anti-US sentiment and socialist ideology.

  Don Güicho stopped in front of a shop window with the words «El Caburé» painted in the gaudy style of the souvenir plaques that were for sale on every street corner. It was both a transliteration of “cabaret” and the name of a famous tango. «Here we are,» he said.

  Inside, the place was not much larger than the shop where I’d had lunch. A tiny hardwood dance floor filled the back, leaving room for a few tables in the front and a bar down the left side. There was a man on the dance floor, dark and handsome, late thirties, wearing a charcoal pin-stripe suit over an open white shirt. He broke off the introductory tango lesson he’d been giving to an older woman with unrealistically yellow hair to greet Don Güicho. She seemed irked as the two men ignored her.

  «Beto, this is Miguel Autrillo,» Don Güicho said. «He was a student of mine a long time ago, but now I should be studying with him.»

  «Never,» Autrillo said. «You’re the maestro.» He recognized me as a foreigner and so shook my hand rather than embracing me. «A pleasure. Where are you from?»

  «Igualmente. I’m from the US.»

  He switched to English. “Really? I thought maybe Paris or Rio.”

  I acknowledged the compliment with a tilt of the head and a smile. He was impossibly charming.

  “I’m practicing my English because I want to tour the US next year. I have an agent setting up some dates now. I’ve tried for years to get Don Güicho to go, but he won’t learn English.”

  «Eeenglish,» Don Güicho smiled. «You can’t teach tango in Eeenglish.»

  «You can if you want to make money at it,» Autrillo said.

  I got out one of my business cards and on the back I wrote the email address of a tango instructor in Durham who put on a lot of workshops. «Tell him I recommended you.»

  Autrillo was effusively grateful and gave me his own card and finally b
egged off to return to his lesson.

  «Are you hungry?» Don Güicho asked me.

  I nodded. «My treat. Since you are doomed to poverty for your lack of Eeenglish.»

  Don Güicho ordered a hamburger and I got a plate of gnocchi. One of the consequences of the blancificación was the abundance of superb Italian food at most of the restaurants in the city, making it easy for me to be a vegetarian in a nation of beef eaters.

  When the food came, Don Güicho said, «Argentina has the best beef in the world. You’re crazy not to at least try it. How did you come by this eating disorder of yours?»

  «I quit eating meat when I was a kid.»

  «But why?» He was smiling, to excuse the rudeness. There was a side of Don Güicho that liked to tease, and it could be ruthless, like when he imitated me with my shoulders hunched and stiff.

  «I was eight and my dog got hit by a car. It was bad, a lot of blood, and I saw the whole thing. That night my mother was cooking and I connected the meat in the kitchen with my dog and I told my mother I wasn’t going to eat it anymore. She thought it would just be for a day or two, but I never backed down. For a while I went on eating chicken and fish, but really, it was the same thing for me and I didn’t want to eat animals anymore.»

  «You were a sensitive kid.»

  «Yeah,» I said. «Sensitive.» His willingness to press opened the door for me to do the same. «So tell me. What was it like for you during el Proceso? You were never arrested, were you?»

  Don Güicho shook his head. «For most people, things were not that different. It was a very quiet, very serious time. Especially during the Videla years. He was a very strict Catholic, very religious, so there was this enforced morality. They banned Carnival, they banned dancing, including tango. People mostly stayed home.

  «There would be secret milongas, the information passed by word of mouth, and we would gather in a deserted building, in an inside room with no windows, late at night. For light we would only have flashlights and candles. Someone would bring a record player that worked on batteries, people would bring records, and we would dance. We would take turns keeping watch. Once the police came and I had to run down an alley carrying a phonograph. Somebody else had the speakers and somebody else had the records, all of us running in different directions.

  «We were all angry about it, and scared, but in a way it made the tango more…intense. Because it was at risk. That was when I really came to understand tango for the first time. The music is full of despair and yet you dance to it. To me that says everything.»

  *

  I was tired and left after we finished eating. On my way back to the apartment, I stopped at the locutorio down the street to call Sam. I had never seen Skype before this trip, though everyone in Buenos Aires seemed to know about it and all the computers had headsets. Sam had scoffed at my ignorance when I first brought it up, and now it was our standard mode of communication.

  “D!” he said when he made the connection. He claimed “D” was short for Dad, though I suspected it was “Dawg” in his head. He kept his dorm room dark and I could barely make him out in the square of video on the screen.

  “Studying hard, are we?”

  “D, if I’m not on the Internet, where am I going to find stuff to plagiarize for my papers?” He had been a beautiful child, getting Lauren’s looks with a masculine edge, and girls followed him around long before he was interested. He hadn’t lost the looks or the female interest now that he was nearly grown. He was the consolation for all the bad luck in my life. He’d never seemed unhappy for long stretches, had never gotten into serious trouble, had tried pot and ecstasy and not cared for them and told me so, had always hated cigarettes and never developed much of a taste for alcohol. It had always been music for him, piano early on and then guitar starting in high school. Now he was on his way to a music degree at Berklee in Boston.

  We talked for a while about his band and my job and then he said, “So, are you and Mom talking?” He’d been as hurt by our separation as I’d ever seen him and he refused to believe it was permanent.

  “In theory,” I said.

  “Which means you’re not, but if you had to, you could probably be civil?”

  “We haven’t been less than civil in any of this. We just don’t have a lot to say to each other at the moment.”

  “You could talk about how wonderful I am.”

  “Preaching to the converted.”

  “Call me this weekend?”

  “If I can track you down. I love you, Sam.”

  “You too, D. See ya.”

  *

  I got in at 11:30 and took a shower. The way I felt, there was no point in trying to sleep. I was able to put up a good front for Isabel and Don Güicho and the others, and most of the time I bought into it myself. Only sometimes, after a long day, did I sink into thoughts about the way I’d let everyone do what they wanted with me, let myself get hounded out of my marriage and my house and my stateside job and backed into this tiny apartment in a foreign city, left to fester, forgotten and alone in the middle of the night.

  By objective standards, maybe my marriage had not been ideal, but I’d been happy enough. I’d always been drawn to smart, powerful women, and if Lauren was a little cold, a little distracted, I accepted it as part of the package. We both had demanding jobs and we’d both been good about making time for Sam, if not for each other. As Sam needed less of us, I’d spent more time in the workshop and Lauren’s job had expanded to fill all the gaps.

  Sex had been an infrequent occurrence for many years, but when Lauren did put it on her schedule, it was worth the wait. Her anatomical knowledge matched her complete lack of inhibitions, and on top of that she had a beautiful body that she maintained, like the expensive machine it was, in the hospital gym. As I stood there in my darkened kitchen, leaning out over the airshaft, I could picture that body, every square inch of it.

  I thought of the demonstration for Jorge Julio López and my political perspective was swamped in a tidal wave of pettiness and self-pity. Where was my justice? What exactly had I done to wind up here?

  I reached my hand up to my brow line, to push back my hair and ease the burning in my scalp that was one of my headache symptoms. I was careless, and a potted cactus that my landlady had left behind put a long scratch in my forearm.

  I lashed out at the pot and watched it sail off into the darkness of the airshaft, then make a satisfying crash on the cement floor 20 feet below. Immediately my downstairs neighbor’s dog began to bark furiously and lights came on and the patio door flew open.

  «Lo siento,» I called down to her. «I’m sorry. An accident.»

  She was in her sixties and lived with her daughter and three noisy grandchildren. She knelt by the mess I’d made. «The pot is broken,» she said, «but the plant is okay, I think. I will put it in a new pot for you tomorrow.»

  I wanted to tell her to throw the damned thing away, then I felt ashamed. «Thank you,» I said.

  «No, no, ¿por qué?»

  I retreated to the kitchen. Her kindness should have helped my mood. Instead I felt smothered, ineffective, and sour.

  The next day at work I asked Bahadur about Marco Suarez.

  “Sure I know him,” Bahadur said. “He does most of our IT. He’s kind of a tough guy, you know, lower class upbringing and all that. He didn’t go to college, he learned about computers on the job. He’s nice enough, if you play it straight with him. He’s got a desk in the corner of the hardware lab and he’s there pretty much every day, though he’s supposed to be retired. I haven’t seen him in a few days, I hope he’s okay…”

  “He was kidnapped,” I said.

  “What? Kidnapped?”

  “I heard he was on a witness list for the Emiliano Cesarino trial.”

  “No,” Bahadur said, “nobody told me. Where did you hear that?”

  “From somebody I trust.”

  I watched the anger come over him. It started in his eyes and ended up in his clenched
hands. He looked away until he had himself under control. “Bastards,” he said. “That’s the thing that makes you crazy. That there is no punishment. No justice. Human evil, it’s always been around. Only here it’s never punished.”

  *

  I had been waiting to go out dancing, mostly because of nerves. Without Lauren there, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to find anyone to dance with. The time had come to try.

  Thursday was the early milonga at El Beso, “the kiss,” a very traditional venue near El Congreso. It was on the second floor of a beautiful old building on Riobamba, a decent-sized dance space by local standards, with tiny, tightly packed tables on three sides. Single women sat on the side nearest the door, single men at right angles to them, couples on the far side of the dance floor. Invitations to dance were strictly by cabeceo, the tango tradition of eye contact followed by an inquiring tilt of the head from the leader. The follower then accepted with a nod or quickly looked away.

  On my first two tango expeditions to Buenos Aires, between the less than stellar technique I was able to show on the dance floor and my having Lauren with me, I never once met a stranger’s eyes at a milonga. Somehow every woman I looked at was looking somewhere else.

  The year before—at El Beso, in fact—my luck had finally changed. It was our last night out before coming back to the States. Lauren had complained that her feet hurt and we’d hardly danced. The crowd had thinned after 11:00 and suddenly I was looking into the eyes of a woman all the way across the floor. I inclined my head, she nodded, and I felt like I’d hit my number at roulette.

  The next challenge was passing muster. Tangos are played in sets of three or four and you are expected to dance the entire tanda with the same partner. If you don’t live up to the follower’s expectations and she doesn’t care about hurting your feelings, she will murmur a quiet «gracias» after the first tango and there is nothing to be done but nod graciously, escort her back to her table, and walk away. After that you might as well go home, as the chances of getting another cabeceo are virtually nonexistent.